Taking this referenced paper as being on the mark, do look at their corrected temperature graph. One can't say that the recent warming has been unprecedented based on that graph, but you could claim that there's been nothing like it in 500 years.
It seems almost certain that this news will be welcomed by certain governments (US, Australia,...) as a good reason to dispute the need for CO2 emission controls. Yet they would still (IMO) be misguided. As evidenced by the hole in the ozone layer, human industrial activity can have significant long-term effects on the global environment. Given that we only have the one planet, it seems only good sense that we should be cautious when it comes to activity that has the potential to seriously change the environment.
The warming trend in the last 100 years may have very little to do with industrial emissions - but as yet we can't tell. That there is a correlation indicates we should err on the side of caution: if it is indeed a matter of causation, then we're essential pissing on our own future.
Regardless of quality of life issues, it makes sense as an economic one, when viewed in global terms. We will have to deal with the effects of climate change whether it be due to human activity or not, but if there is a significant component that we're responsible for, continuing in this behaviour is going to make a very large problem a great deal worse, with attendant very high costs to amerliorate it. It is risk management. Putting heads in the sand and saying that there's doubt about the link, does not make the risk of that link magically disappear. Even a 5% chance of the link being actual may be sufficient for a purely economic assessment to indicate that emissions should be sharply curbed.
If there were alternative policies being adopted by those governments against the Kyoto accords, then that would be an indication that their objections were based on more than short-term economic growth (or worse, given the somewhat incestuous relationships between governments and industry.) Yet Australia for example has not even managed to reduce its rate of growth of emissions (not the emission levels themselves!) to targets that had been set earlier.
If the Kyoto accords are not a step in the right direction, then the continuing increase of CO2 emissions is certainly not a preferable alternative.
That means calculations, such as working out the factors of prime numbers, which present problems for even the fastest supercomputers could be trivialized by a quantum computer.
Once they get prime numbers licked, they'll move on to the composite ones. To live in such heady times!
It's true that I had very little to do with enterprise stuff at the time that I was talking about, but back in 1992, I thought DLT was pretty much the high end, and it (I believe) was considerably slower than hard disks (and comparable with MO.)
This was before AIT an I think even before Exabyte's Mammoth tape drive was released.
Fujitsu have had this tech out for over two years. But sadly, outside of Japan, hardly anyone has heard about it.
MO, for me, is a story of 'if only'. MO storage has always beat the pants off of removable tape, Zip and Jazz, and CD-RW. It's only recently, with DVD-RAM, that MO had a true competitor.
MO has always been robust and (compared to other removable storage) quick. High end tapes have since eclipsed MO in write performance, but are still more fragile and certainly not random access.
MO has the advantage of standards too. There are a whole series of MO disc capacities, both in the 5.25" andd 3.5" formats, ranging from 230MB and smaller up to 5GB (in the large format.) But pretty much every drive can read discs from way back in the sub 300MB days, and write to discs from the previous 2 or 3 generations.
Watching such inferior technology as Zip and even floppies drive MO out of the market has been a form of geek torture. So why did it happen?
I think as always, it has been a combination of cost and marketing. Judging from the previous comments here, even among the/. crowd, MO is practically unknown. Fujitsu and other MO vendors seemed completely uninterested in marketing to the SOHO crowd. The media price has also been excessive. While good value (compared to Zip) in the dollars to MB ratio, it never was cheap enough to become a carefree purchase, like floppies or CD-Rs today are.
If we could do it all over again, I think MO should have been marketed like zip, and with the media manufacturers even selling below cost in order to get market penetration (and then reaping profits when they can take advantage of economies of scale.) Note that the first NeXT cube had an MO drive. At 600 MB per disc (300 per side), in 1988. With speeds comparable to a slow hard drive of the time for reading (and about twice as slow at writing.)
Being in Australia, there was no promotion at all for anything dreamcast related, so it was all a clean slate here... (I blame Ozisoft mainly.)
It seems to me that all the problems you identify with Space Channel 5 were addressed in the sequel. The game play is longer, it's harder, it's more interesting (though I didn't think the first one was actually boring.) There is quite a bit of replay value. All while keeping the same basic structure of the game.
I wonder if it is simply a case of learning from experience how to make a game along these lines, or instead if the first SC5 game was rushed out the door.
At anyrate, SC5 Part 2 was one of my favourite games for the Dreamcast; I'm afraid that Mizuguchi leaving will mean it will be a long time before we see another similarly great combination of fun and innovation coming out of Sega. Actually, that's overstating the case. Can't really claim that Crazy Taxi or JSR weren't innovative. Still though, it seems important that there's someone pushing the envelope... backed by serious resources so they have a decent chance of pulling it off.
Re:Darwinia is quite good . . .
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Blind Lake
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Must say that I thought Darwinia was a terrible disappointment. Fantastic set-up, and even the twist was interesting, but then... it just got silly. Incomprehensibe character motivations, illogical extrapolations from the premises, and worst of all, the abandonment of all the interesting story shoots from the beginning of the book.
I enjoyed the first half of Darwinia, but the second half made me hate it.
This is my biggest problem with desktop Linux! I'm really hoping the openi18n-im project will turn things around, but that's still very much under development if I understand correctly.
I would love to see something where I could easily switch input methods globally for my X session, which then talked to application which in turn interpreted the input characters appropriately for their own character sets as appropriate/possible.
Or possibly more realistic: input methods that all do the unicode thing, and applications that are all unicode aware, or can accept unicode-encoded input and transform it into the native character encoding.
On the application front, vim seems to have it down pat. xterm's unicode suppport seems pretty good too. If you can get past the input method problem, just about all the gnome apps seem to work well with unicode.
I'm really surprised that no linux distro seems to be going out of its way to address this issue. It really seems that this one is something Windows has had sorted for a few years now, and is one of the very few things I prefer about that environment.
One can make a distinction though between rules that we consciously apply, and rules which may govern our consciousness.
To misappropriate the opening phrase of the dao de jing, "the path which can be followed is not the eternal path; the name which can be named is not the eternal name". Interpreting this in the light of a symbolic computation model of the mind, one could say that there are rules which govern our nature, but they are not rules that are consciously followable, and that any attempt to codify them at a conscious level will by nature be inadequate.
Which is interesting given the topic: the translation software that works so well seems to be the one which does not rely upon explicit rules. Instead the rules come unbidden through statistical modelling. Indeed, how much difference is there between "yes" and "no" (cf. verse 20)? We can't explicitly say, but it seems that this translator may do a better job without such explicit rules.
I've heard of information theoretical and epistemological interpretations of the dao de jing. That one can do so probably points to one of the reasons why it is such a classic, and has survived so.
Have to say also though that there are a whole bunch of extremely free translations out there too:)
It does pose the question: what constitutes understanding? Is there any externally observable difference between a particularly good token manipulator and a translator who understands the material?
It could be that understanding is having a suitably sophisticated token processing system (plus sufficient data), or at least be isomorphic to it.
Like 'could care less', and 'would of done', to people who actually grew up speaking a more sane version of Engligh, these gross misuses sound grating and wrong. They make the speaker (writer) look uneducated or somewhat illiterate.
If you're perfectly happy sounding normal among your peers, but like an uneducated yokel among the greater population, then keep using the phrase as you do now.
If you'd prefer not to sound ignorant to a significant portion of the population, consider adjusting your usage.
It's not a matter of being elitist, it's a matter of (1) clarity and (2) making a good impression. Just because you hang out with people who also misuse the phrase doesn't make it any less of a problem when you associate with people who use it correctly.
The reason why some people make a big deal about it is that if this ignorant usage becomes sufficiently widespread to become universally accepted, then we all as English speakers have lost a useful distinction, and we would all then have to use more awkward and complicated language to make clear our intention. Just as it is now nearly impossible to make a distinction between 'uninterested' and 'disinterested' in general writing, if 'begs the question' is misused by a greater and greater number of people, eventually it will be completely indistinguishable from 'raises the question', and we will have lost part of the expressive power of the language.
When people insist on the ill-informed usage, it's as though they're saying that they simply don't care about the language as long as it doesn't affect themselves directly. Just like environmental polluters. That's why it is so aggravating to people who care.
I mean, it is now a whale, now that the biotechnology-media complex has declared it to be. But what else could they really do when one of the slaves of the Old Ones turns up dead on the beach?
It is said that the complex and the conspiracy are there to protect humanity from knowledge that is too dangerous, too terrible, to be known. That one can not understand our true place in the world and its history while remaining the least bit sane.
Yet for all the concern ascribed to them, they do seem to make quite large monetary profits from their studies of the biological artifacts of the Earth's ancient and hidden history. These secretive leaders of the world, with their ill-gotten power derived from ancient secrets -- are they our saviours or merely powerful hypocrites, blind perhaps in their self-assuredness and over-confidence?
Besides, do you think it's really fish in those fish fingers? Hmm!
From my experience tutoring early-level University maths, it really seems that the overwhelming majority of people are capable of learning and understanding this level of mathematics, and it's not at all clear that the few remaining lacked capability rather than simply lacked sufficient motivation. (This is not to brush them off - maths can be really hard!)
Almost every time it comes up in conversation that I'm working as a mathematician, I hear phrases such as: "oh, I was never any good at maths", or "I hated maths in highschool", or similar. But when I take the time to explain conceptually the sorts of things I'm dealing with, they typically can get some sort of feel for what's going on, inasmuch as I can communicate what I understand myself.
When I was in highschool and primary school, mathematics was in fact almost uniformly taught really badly. Rote memorisation, ill-explained rules, and arbitrary problems were the rule. The concept of proof, fundamental to mathematics and certainly crucial to passing a University maths course, is never introduced let alone explained properly. It seems only the self-motivated students really get anything out of these maths courses.
Further, there seems to be a huge gap between highschool level maths texts, which when not outright wrong, generally do a poor job of explaining anything conceptually, and university level texts, which usually preusme that the reader has already mastered the basics and has a fairly firm notion of what constitutes a proof and logical reasoning.
So it's not surprising that many people have problems with maths, as one can blame the teaching approaches and books to a large degree. The proof comes when tutoring students who want to learn (or at least pass their course) but haven't got the basics down -- these students, almost without exception, have been able to pass their course and even gain an interest in mathematics given approriate guidence and help.
In all likelihood, the original poster is capable of discrete mathematics.
The use of techniques such as genetic programming can produce programs that perform some task using a method that humankind (up to that point) was not aware of.
Genetic programming (loosely speaking) simulates a population of programs that undergo a process of evolution, with those programs which seem to do the best at the task more likely to survive to the next generation. As such, it can be applied to problems where we can easily evaluate how good a heuristic is, but not necessarily know how to construct such a heuristic.
Genetic programming is: genetic algorithms applied to making programs themselves. I get the impression that the field is still far from mature - it's still more theoretical computer science/applied mathematics than engineering. But it's only a matter of time!
Genuinely curious: doesn't a switch statement suffer from a similar trade-off?
If the switch statement is implemented with a jump table, then that table too must be in cache. If it doesn't use a jump table, but has a series of test/branches, then a missed branch prediction will also give a really nasty performance hit.
Would it be the case that a jump table is more likely to be in the code cache than a lookup table is to be in the data cache?
What I do personally is use rcs on the TeX files for maths papers as they're being passed around and amended.
Other authors may or may not use rcs. The beauty of it all is that it doesn't matter: as soon as I receive a new version, I can check it in, or incorporate my own changes, and have a record of every version of the document that has been circulated electronically among the authors.
I imagine a similar solution using cvs or subversion would work fine for multi-file documents.
The key point, again, is that it doesn't matter so much what the other authors do. There needn't be a single solution for everybody, although I imagine webdav and subversion would be kind of cute.
The problem: broken text editors that don't respect line breaks, but instead freely reformat paragraphs. This is a problem not only for diffs, but also for TeX comments ('%' marks the rest of the line as a comment.) The only solution to this, sadly, is to encourage people to use an editor which is not broken in this way. Given that it can munge TeX comments, it's a good thing to change regardless.
The moral justification (or lack thereof) cannot be based on the difference in delivery system! And to claim so is outrageous.
I think I was claiming that just because one party's behaviour is not labelled terrorism by some, that the other party's terrorism is no less terrorism.
I have no real knowledge of what went on in Belgrade, or even in WWII, with regards to motivations, casualties and the like. But if indeed it is at is appears -- that indiscriminate killing of civilians was practiced with the aim to inspire terror -- then it's certainly terrorism in my book, and calling it otherwise would be hypocritical.
As my last sentence in the earlier post stated, there doesn't have to be a good guy (non-terrorist) in these matters.
... but the impoverished occupied Palistinian nation's response is "terrorism"?
Bombing of civilians who have nothing to do with the issue was terrorism when the IRA did it, and it's terrorism when Hamas do it. Being impoverished doesn't make random mass murder with the intent to cause terror any less of a terrorist act, you know.
It's perfectly possible for neither side to have the moral highground.
Why do so many people just spout off with absolutely no clue? Being ignorant is one thing, but speaking with such an air of authority while being founded in such ignorance... it's terrible.
Sadly, it also reinforces the negative stereotypes of US citizens (even if in fact, the parent commenter isn't one.) Perhaps neksys was just trolling?
At anyrate: the Egyptian government is not a theocracy. There is no perceived Divine Right to Leadership given that the government is democratically elected, and that religiously based parties are unconstitutional.
The decision has nothing to do with a fear it will shake the population's belief in God, and much more to do with feeling that the screening of the film will stir up trouble that really doesn't need to be stirred.
Forgive me for asking, but why SHOULD they care? Diablo 2 has been out for three years and the expansion has been out for two.
Nothing to forgive... of course they're not obliged to care (though it'd be nice of course.) If they don't care, but claim that they do in press releases, then it is a bit hypocritical, which is generally regarded as a bad thing.
Regarding the rest of your comment though, Blizzard really haven't done much at all for the game since since 2001. While they claim to be addressing the problem of cheaters, this claim is belied by their actions. To reiterate: very occasional account purges are not a very effective way of dealing with the problems of Battle Net.
With the exception of the new features in the 1.10 patch, Blizzard do seem to have done the bare minimum possible to keep Diablo II running on Battle Net. Given they're still selling the game, making a profit on it etc. while touting the secure on-line play as a feature, it really does seem reasonable that they should be obliged to do exactly that. Again, while it would be nice if they did more, this is all we can really expect. Oh, save they they did promise regular new runewords, craft recipes and the like that never did eventuate.
The 1.10 patch stuff though, I concede, has been taking resources that Blizzard didn't have to commit. Until the recent round of QA testing, it seems they've had one employee working on it for the last 18 months. In absolute terms this is a non-trivial amount of money, but it does sort of pale in comparision to the ongoing profits Blizzard are making in new sales. No judgement from me here on this issue.
In short: if they cared as much as they claimed to, there would be regular patching of security problems with the game, and the cloned and bugged wreckage of the online economy would never have been an issue. They would have also followed through on their promises of game maintenance (eg, runewords etc.) Conclusion: they're less committed than they claim.
The last major patch, 1.09 was released on the 20th of August. So, there is some small exaggeration in my statement, but close enough, surely. Perhaps I should have said 'nearly 2 years'.
On the 9th of December, the very much minor patch to the patch, 1.09d, was released, and this was the last patch of any sort for Diablo II from Blizzard.
I still can't see why they couldn't have gone through and deleted duplicated or 'bugged' items on the servers automatically. Give each item a unique id; every night check to see if the unique id turns up in more than one inventory; delete all but one.
The fact that they haven't conjures up various conspiracy theories, or (in my opinion the more likely option) demonstrates that they really don't care that much about the problem despite their press releases.
Further, the two years without a patch, despite the myriad insecurities brought to light, gives further evidence of a lack of caring. Again, despite their PR face. While this new 1.10 patch which will rejuvenate the game and all will be most welcome (presuming it ever comes), this in no way precluded security fix patches in the interim.
Patching and server-side item clean-ups would have been much more effective and much more welcome than the rare and irregular account purging that they seem to engage in instead.
I ran Gnome on a Cyrix 120/ 64MB RAM machine. It was occasionally sluggish, but very far from unusable. What was a problem, was mozilla and/or netscape. Being such memory hogs, they were indeed pretty much unusable untill I upgraded to 96MB, whereupon they behaved tolerably. Personally I think this says more about the code quality of Netscape than the capacity of linux generally.
On the other hand, I was not running OpenOffice -- all my text work was emacs and LaTeX.
At one point I was also running Windows 98 on this machine: I found it painfully slow, though IE certainly ran more quickly than netscape did.
One of the reasons why Windows felt slower, was the way the window management was organised. Even when I upgraded the machine to a K6-3/400 with 256MB, most things felt faster under Linux with Gnome, than with Windows 2000 (which was what I was then using on that machine.) The key thing was that to move a window out of the way, the application controlling the window had to do the work. If it was slow, not paying attention, etc., then it felt like I was working on a desk covered in dried sticky syrup. That and strange scroll-wheel scrolling behaviour made the whole experience very unpleasant.
I guess this is just a matter of what one is used to; the use of a separate window manager has its own set of comprimises that don't bug me, but do really annoy some people.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking this referenced paper as being on the mark, do look at their corrected temperature graph. One can't say that the recent warming has been unprecedented based on that graph, but you could claim that there's been nothing like it in 500 years.
...) as a good reason to dispute the need for CO2 emission controls. Yet they would still (IMO) be misguided. As evidenced by the hole in the ozone layer, human industrial activity can have significant long-term effects on the global environment. Given that we only have the one planet, it seems only good sense that we should be cautious when it comes to activity that has the potential to seriously change the environment.
It seems almost certain that this news will be welcomed by certain governments (US, Australia,
The warming trend in the last 100 years may have very little to do with industrial emissions - but as yet we can't tell. That there is a correlation indicates we should err on the side of caution: if it is indeed a matter of causation, then we're essential pissing on our own future.
Regardless of quality of life issues, it makes sense as an economic one, when viewed in global terms. We will have to deal with the effects of climate change whether it be due to human activity or not, but if there is a significant component that we're responsible for, continuing in this behaviour is going to make a very large problem a great deal worse, with attendant very high costs to amerliorate it. It is risk management. Putting heads in the sand and saying that there's doubt about the link, does not make the risk of that link magically disappear. Even a 5% chance of the link being actual may be sufficient for a purely economic assessment to indicate that emissions should be sharply curbed.
If there were alternative policies being adopted by those governments against the Kyoto accords, then that would be an indication that their objections were based on more than short-term economic growth (or worse, given the somewhat incestuous relationships between governments and industry.) Yet Australia for example has not even managed to reduce its rate of growth of emissions (not the emission levels themselves!) to targets that had been set earlier.
If the Kyoto accords are not a step in the right direction, then the continuing increase of CO2 emissions is certainly not a preferable alternative.
From the article,
Once they get prime numbers licked, they'll move on to the composite ones. To live in such heady times!
It's true that I had very little to do with enterprise stuff at the time that I was talking about, but back in 1992, I thought DLT was pretty much the high end, and it (I believe) was considerably slower than hard disks (and comparable with MO.)
This was before AIT an I think even before Exabyte's Mammoth tape drive was released.
Was there fast tape tech then?
Fujitsu have had this tech out for over two years. But sadly, outside of Japan, hardly anyone has heard about it.
/. crowd, MO is practically unknown. Fujitsu and other MO vendors seemed completely uninterested in marketing to the SOHO crowd. The media price has also been excessive. While good value (compared to Zip) in the dollars to MB ratio, it never was cheap enough to become a carefree purchase, like floppies or CD-Rs today are.
MO, for me, is a story of 'if only'. MO storage has always beat the pants off of removable tape, Zip and Jazz, and CD-RW. It's only recently, with DVD-RAM, that MO had a true competitor.
MO has always been robust and (compared to other removable storage) quick. High end tapes have since eclipsed MO in write performance, but are still more fragile and certainly not random access.
MO has the advantage of standards too. There are a whole series of MO disc capacities, both in the 5.25" andd 3.5" formats, ranging from 230MB and smaller up to 5GB (in the large format.) But pretty much every drive can read discs from way back in the sub 300MB days, and write to discs from the previous 2 or 3 generations.
Watching such inferior technology as Zip and even floppies drive MO out of the market has been a form of geek torture. So why did it happen?
I think as always, it has been a combination of cost and marketing. Judging from the previous comments here, even among the
If we could do it all over again, I think MO should have been marketed like zip, and with the media manufacturers even selling below cost in order to get market penetration (and then reaping profits when they can take advantage of economies of scale.) Note that the first NeXT cube had an MO drive. At 600 MB per disc (300 per side), in 1988. With speeds comparable to a slow hard drive of the time for reading (and about twice as slow at writing.)
Sad, so sad.
You know, pencils are really cheap.
Amazing notebooks, it's true.
Unfortunately go-l seems to be all a hoax.
But a pretty good one.
Being in Australia, there was no promotion at all for anything dreamcast related, so it was all a clean slate here ... (I blame Ozisoft mainly.)
... backed by serious resources so they have a decent chance of pulling it off.
It seems to me that all the problems you identify with Space Channel 5 were addressed in the sequel. The game play is longer, it's harder, it's more interesting (though I didn't think the first one was actually boring.) There is quite a bit of replay value. All while keeping the same basic structure of the game.
I wonder if it is simply a case of learning from experience how to make a game along these lines, or instead if the first SC5 game was rushed out the door.
At anyrate, SC5 Part 2 was one of my favourite games for the Dreamcast; I'm afraid that Mizuguchi leaving will mean it will be a long time before we see another similarly great combination of fun and innovation coming out of Sega.
Actually, that's overstating the case. Can't really claim that Crazy Taxi or JSR weren't innovative. Still though, it seems important that there's someone pushing the envelope
Must say that I thought Darwinia was a terrible disappointment. Fantastic set-up, and even the twist was interesting, but then ... it just got silly. Incomprehensibe character motivations, illogical extrapolations from the premises, and worst of all, the abandonment of all the interesting story shoots from the beginning of the book.
I enjoyed the first half of Darwinia, but the second half made me hate it.
This is my biggest problem with desktop Linux! I'm really hoping the openi18n-im project will turn things around, but that's still very much under development if I understand correctly.
I would love to see something where I could easily switch input methods globally for my X session, which then talked to application which in turn interpreted the input characters appropriately for their own character sets as appropriate/possible.
Or possibly more realistic: input methods that all do the unicode thing, and applications that are all unicode aware, or can accept unicode-encoded input and transform it into the native character encoding.
On the application front, vim seems to have it down pat. xterm's unicode suppport seems pretty good too. If you can get past the input method problem, just about all the gnome apps seem to work well with unicode.
I'm really surprised that no linux distro seems to be going out of its way to address this issue. It really seems that this one is something Windows has had sorted for a few years now, and is one of the very few things I prefer about that environment.
One can make a distinction though between rules that we consciously apply, and rules which may govern our consciousness.
:)
To misappropriate the opening phrase of the dao de jing, "the path which can be followed is not the eternal path; the name which can be named is not the eternal name". Interpreting this in the light of a symbolic computation model of the mind, one could say that there are rules which govern our nature, but they are not rules that are consciously followable, and that any attempt to codify them at a conscious level will by nature be inadequate.
Which is interesting given the topic: the translation software that works so well seems to be the one which does not rely upon explicit rules. Instead the rules come unbidden through statistical modelling. Indeed, how much difference is there between "yes" and "no" (cf. verse 20)? We can't explicitly say, but it seems that this translator may do a better job without such explicit rules.
I've heard of information theoretical and epistemological interpretations of the dao de jing. That one can do so probably points to one of the reasons why it is such a classic, and has survived so.
Have to say also though that there are a whole bunch of extremely free translations out there too
It does pose the question: what constitutes understanding? Is there any externally observable difference between a particularly good token manipulator and a translator who understands the material?
It could be that understanding is having a suitably sophisticated token processing system (plus sufficient data), or at least be isomorphic to it.
Like 'could care less', and 'would of done', to people who actually grew up speaking a more sane version of Engligh, these gross misuses sound grating and wrong. They make the speaker (writer) look uneducated or somewhat illiterate.
If you're perfectly happy sounding normal among your peers, but like an uneducated yokel among the greater population, then keep using the phrase as you do now.
If you'd prefer not to sound ignorant to a significant portion of the population, consider adjusting your usage.
It's not a matter of being elitist, it's a matter of (1) clarity and (2) making a good impression. Just because you hang out with people who also misuse the phrase doesn't make it any less of a problem when you associate with people who use it correctly.
The reason why some people make a big deal about it is that if this ignorant usage becomes sufficiently widespread to become universally accepted, then we all as English speakers have lost a useful distinction, and we would all then have to use more awkward and complicated language to make clear our intention. Just as it is now nearly impossible to make a distinction between 'uninterested' and 'disinterested' in general writing, if 'begs the question' is misused by a greater and greater number of people, eventually it will be completely indistinguishable from 'raises the question', and we will have lost part of the expressive power of the language.
When people insist on the ill-informed usage, it's as though they're saying that they simply don't care about the language as long as it doesn't affect themselves directly. Just like environmental polluters. That's why it is so aggravating to people who care.
Clearly, it wasn't a whale.
I mean, it is now a whale, now that the biotechnology-media complex has declared it to be. But what else could they really do when one of the slaves of the Old Ones turns up dead on the beach?
It is said that the complex and the conspiracy are there to protect humanity from knowledge that is too dangerous, too terrible, to be known. That one can not understand our true place in the world and its history while remaining the least bit sane.
Yet for all the concern ascribed to them, they do seem to make quite large monetary profits from their studies of the biological artifacts of the Earth's ancient and hidden history. These secretive leaders of the world, with their ill-gotten power derived from ancient secrets -- are they our saviours or merely powerful hypocrites, blind perhaps in their self-assuredness and over-confidence?
Besides, do you think it's really fish in those fish fingers? Hmm!
From my experience tutoring early-level University maths, it really seems that the overwhelming majority of people are capable of learning and understanding this level of mathematics, and it's not at all clear that the few remaining lacked capability rather than simply lacked sufficient motivation. (This is not to brush them off - maths can be really hard!)
Almost every time it comes up in conversation that I'm working as a mathematician, I hear phrases such as: "oh, I was never any good at maths", or "I hated maths in highschool", or similar. But when I take the time to explain conceptually the sorts of things I'm dealing with, they typically can get some sort of feel for what's going on, inasmuch as I can communicate what I understand myself.
When I was in highschool and primary school, mathematics was in fact almost uniformly taught really badly. Rote memorisation, ill-explained rules, and arbitrary problems were the rule. The concept of proof, fundamental to mathematics and certainly crucial to passing a University maths course, is never introduced let alone explained properly. It seems only the self-motivated students really get anything out of these maths courses.
Further, there seems to be a huge gap between highschool level maths texts, which when not outright wrong, generally do a poor job of explaining anything conceptually, and university level texts, which usually preusme that the reader has already mastered the basics and has a fairly firm notion of what constitutes a proof and logical reasoning.
So it's not surprising that many people have problems with maths, as one can blame the teaching approaches and books to a large degree. The proof comes when tutoring students who want to learn (or at least pass their course) but haven't got the basics down -- these students, almost without exception, have been able to pass their course and even gain an interest in mathematics given approriate guidence and help.
In all likelihood, the original poster is capable of discrete mathematics.
The use of techniques such as genetic programming can produce programs that perform some task using a method that humankind (up to that point) was not aware of.
Genetic programming (loosely speaking) simulates a population of programs that undergo a process of evolution, with those programs which seem to do the best at the task more likely to survive to the next generation. As such, it can be applied to problems where we can easily evaluate how good a heuristic is, but not necessarily know how to construct such a heuristic.
Genetic programming is: genetic algorithms applied to making programs themselves. I get the impression that the field is still far from mature - it's still more theoretical computer science/applied mathematics than engineering. But it's only a matter of time!
Genuinely curious: doesn't a switch statement suffer from a similar trade-off?
If the switch statement is implemented with a jump table, then that table too must be in cache. If it doesn't use a jump table, but has a series of test/branches, then a missed branch prediction will also give a really nasty performance hit.
Would it be the case that a jump table is more likely to be in the code cache than a lookup table is to be in the data cache?
What I do personally is use rcs on the TeX files for maths papers as they're being passed around and amended.
Other authors may or may not use rcs. The beauty of it all is that it doesn't matter: as soon as I receive a new version, I can check it in, or incorporate my own changes, and have a record of every version of the document that has been circulated electronically among the authors.
I imagine a similar solution using cvs or subversion would work fine for multi-file documents.
The key point, again, is that it doesn't matter so much what the other authors do. There needn't be a single solution for everybody, although I imagine webdav and subversion would be kind of cute.
The problem: broken text editors that don't respect line breaks, but instead freely reformat paragraphs. This is a problem not only for diffs, but also for TeX comments ('%' marks the rest of the line as a comment.) The only solution to this, sadly, is to encourage people to use an editor which is not broken in this way. Given that it can munge TeX comments, it's a good thing to change regardless.
I think I was claiming that just because one party's behaviour is not labelled terrorism by some, that the other party's terrorism is no less terrorism.
I have no real knowledge of what went on in Belgrade, or even in WWII, with regards to motivations, casualties and the like. But if indeed it is at is appears -- that indiscriminate killing of civilians was practiced with the aim to inspire terror -- then it's certainly terrorism in my book, and calling it otherwise would be hypocritical.
As my last sentence in the earlier post stated, there doesn't have to be a good guy (non-terrorist) in these matters.
It's perfectly possible for neither side to have the moral highground.
The problem of overly-long IPv6 addresses has already been, um, addressed.
You may be interested in perusing RFC 1924, "A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses", from April 1996.
Why do so many people just spout off with absolutely no clue? Being ignorant is one thing, but speaking with such an air of authority while being founded in such ignorance ... it's terrible.
Sadly, it also reinforces the negative stereotypes of US citizens (even if in fact, the parent commenter isn't one.) Perhaps neksys was just trolling?
At anyrate: the Egyptian government is not a theocracy. There is no perceived Divine Right to Leadership given that the government is democratically elected, and that religiously based parties are unconstitutional.
The decision has nothing to do with a fear it will shake the population's belief in God, and much more to do with feeling that the screening of the film will stir up trouble that really doesn't need to be stirred.
Regarding the rest of your comment though, Blizzard really haven't done much at all for the game since since 2001. While they claim to be addressing the problem of cheaters, this claim is belied by their actions. To reiterate: very occasional account purges are not a very effective way of dealing with the problems of Battle Net.
With the exception of the new features in the 1.10 patch, Blizzard do seem to have done the bare minimum possible to keep Diablo II running on Battle Net. Given they're still selling the game, making a profit on it etc. while touting the secure on-line play as a feature, it really does seem reasonable that they should be obliged to do exactly that. Again, while it would be nice if they did more, this is all we can really expect. Oh, save they they did promise regular new runewords, craft recipes and the like that never did eventuate.
The 1.10 patch stuff though, I concede, has been taking resources that Blizzard didn't have to commit. Until the recent round of QA testing, it seems they've had one employee working on it for the last 18 months. In absolute terms this is a non-trivial amount of money, but it does sort of pale in comparision to the ongoing profits Blizzard are making in new sales. No judgement from me here on this issue.
In short: if they cared as much as they claimed to, there would be regular patching of security problems with the game, and the cloned and bugged wreckage of the online economy would never have been an issue. They would have also followed through on their promises of game maintenance (eg, runewords etc.) Conclusion: they're less committed than they claim.
The last major patch, 1.09 was released on the 20th of August. So, there is some small exaggeration in my statement, but close enough, surely. Perhaps I should have said 'nearly 2 years'.
On the 9th of December, the very much minor patch to the patch, 1.09d, was released, and this was the last patch of any sort for Diablo II from Blizzard.
Source: Blizzard Timeline.
I still can't see why they couldn't have gone through and deleted duplicated or 'bugged' items on the servers automatically. Give each item a unique id; every night check to see if the unique id turns up in more than one inventory; delete all but one.
The fact that they haven't conjures up various conspiracy theories, or (in my opinion the more likely option) demonstrates that they really don't care that much about the problem despite their press releases.
Further, the two years without a patch, despite the myriad insecurities brought to light, gives further evidence of a lack of caring. Again, despite their PR face. While this new 1.10 patch which will rejuvenate the game and all will be most welcome (presuming it ever comes), this in no way precluded security fix patches in the interim.
Patching and server-side item clean-ups would have been much more effective and much more welcome than the rare and irregular account purging that they seem to engage in instead.
I ran Gnome on a Cyrix 120/ 64MB RAM machine. It was occasionally sluggish, but very far from unusable. What was a problem, was mozilla and/or netscape. Being such memory hogs, they were indeed pretty much unusable untill I upgraded to 96MB, whereupon they behaved tolerably. Personally I think this says more about the code quality of Netscape than the capacity of linux generally.
On the other hand, I was not running OpenOffice -- all my text work was emacs and LaTeX.
At one point I was also running Windows 98 on this machine: I found it painfully slow, though IE certainly ran more quickly than netscape did.
One of the reasons why Windows felt slower, was the way the window management was organised. Even when I upgraded the machine to a K6-3/400 with 256MB, most things felt faster under Linux with Gnome, than with Windows 2000 (which was what I was then using on that machine.) The key thing was that to move a window out of the way, the application controlling the window had to do the work. If it was slow, not paying attention, etc., then it felt like I was working on a desk covered in dried sticky syrup. That and strange scroll-wheel scrolling behaviour made the whole experience very unpleasant.
I guess this is just a matter of what one is used to; the use of a separate window manager has its own set of comprimises that don't bug me, but do really annoy some people.