Well, I think you're ignoring that much of the benefit of IT comes from reducing clerical inefficiency. Without industry, there's not much inefficiency to reduce. Ordering from Amazon.com is kind of pointless when you don't have an airport. But you're right, the internet opens up opportunities in education if nothing else.
On food, you're out and out wrong. The main reason most third world countries have been unable to get a large benefit from agricultural exports is rich countries' greed. US and EU, take a bow. Essentially, the subsidies provided mean the government pays farmers in those countries to stay fat doing little and keep second and third world countries poor.
By your logic, the United Nations should start killing Iraqi men, women, and children until Sadam Hussein steps down. Hey, it would work. Once all the citizens are dead, Sadam will have no one to rule over, and will thus no longer have power.
No it isn't. Who is going to die from not getting they're email delivered? It's the difference between the picture of a thing, and a thing. I thought that would be abundantly clear to opponents of censorship.
Have you considered pushing it harder, eg, by putting it on SourceForge? What would be cool would be training it on a very large dataset indeed regularly; then all you would have to do is download the latest weighting tweak, which I presume is a tiny config file. Of course, as you say, the best thing would be to train it on your own inbox in times of low processor usage.
For the last year the only banner ad I've got on Deja News is some dodgy one about looking for jobs without your boss finding out. I don't know that they're making anywhere near that amount on banner ads. Jakob Neilsen has gone on and on about Yahoo! being the only company that makes a profit from banner ads... dejanews is a great service, but how will they make money, really?
It's only recently I've come to a decent appreciation of the distinction between the first and second world. If you're not a rich country, it doesn't mean you're poor either. This was brought home to me by a holiday in Thailand and Malaysia. In Thailand Internet cafe's are everywhere; and (peninsular) Malaysian cities have lots of nice new cars on the road. There are still parts of the country that are v. poor, and they can't afford a welfare state yet, even one as proportionally small as the US.
But they're not "savages in the jungle"... IANAE*, but I reckon if they keep their eye on the ball, Malaysia could be a rich country in the next 10-20 years...
Age: 22. So yes, you're correct that I did not live through the sixties. I'd claim that my feelings towards the decade were a touch more complex than simple hate; though I'll admit that there isn't much chance to see that in this review...
However, I don't know that you have to live through a decade as an adult to review/enjoy/flame books from it - otherwise no more school book reviews of _Huckleberry Finn_ could ever be written:)
PS Any further reading to suggest to enhance my understanding?
Lack of redundancy is dodgy. No argument. Contracts (especially on critical services) should include clauses about them, and knowledge of them should be widespread.
Market mechanisms thrive in a open, transparent environment. Without them you get nepotism and dodginess - eg, Victorian gas.. with them you get at least a semblance of an invisible hand...
therefore, as the only company around, they don't really need to be uber reliable, only decent. from their point of view, redundancy is probably only a cost which they can slash... capitalism strikes again
The problem isn't capitalism, it's quite the opposite: an ex-monopoly being inappropriately propped up by government ownership. This is an artifact of the lack of competition Telstra used to have, and the way it can still throw its huge bulk around in the.au market.
This is exactly the point. Why am I writing my own parser as a programmer when there is a superior, existing one? Why am I learning yet another file format as an administrator when it's just another tree style configuration file?
Yes, there will still be time spent on semantics - another way of saying that is "learning the system" - but my time is not wasted on syntax.
Hmm, The Economist is an authority on unmanned fighter planes but not the international space station... Of course the former article was positive while the latter was negative... I wonder if techno boosterism would have anything to do with this.
Guys, unless it's the Secretary-General of the UN mentioning slashdot, it's not a big deal anymore. The Economist has mentioned Slashdot. You're important, get used to it.
Larry Niven predicted this in his Known Space stories... he made it a reason for the puppeteers to leave the galaxy. Lousy puppeteers, with their two heads and their brain in their back...
"Formal methods" falls down because using them assumes that we can specify accurately and precisely what the system should do. And you have to do that specification up front. Such exacting up front specification poses more of a problem than iterative development by service packs and patches.
No it doesn't. Formal methods are a means of assuring what is built is what is specified, ie, verification. Ensuring the specification of a system fits with requirements, ie, validation, is still critical. Formal methods help in this primarily by clarifying in the designer's mind exactly what they are building. As you imply, the problems that software solves are difficult problems, and building a solution often inspires the client to new ideas and requirements. There is nothing wrong with this, iterative, style of evolution. But not writing the payroll model right because it was vaguely described in natural language is a different matter.
Web addresses in mail at hotmail are helpfully translated into hyperlinks. The link is redirected via a hotmail server, I presume so they can track what sites users visit and sell the information. My guess is it would be pretty useless in all but aggregated format, however, as many hotmail addresses are spam filters for people's real accounts or identities.
If God wanted intelligent life to be near to us we would of noticed the species by now.
But God put plenty of other species right here on Earth that we haven't even bothered to notice yet! It seems every other week hitherto undiscovered species are found.
We take this task too lightly, since it was the very first undertaking given to mankind in the Bible. There was a few other things we weren't to do - don't eat this, don't do that etc, but naming comes first in the list of task to do. I don't think it's overstating it to say that exploring and observing His creation is a noble and holy task that the current generation does its best to ignore.
That bet's too easy. I'm willing to assume life exists and pay 10 shiny new silver dollars to the first taker if we discover creationists on other planets. Debates as to whether extra-terrestrial creationists (ETCs) comprise off-Earth intelligence are can be left to more insightful brains than mine.:)
Odds on you're talking about Peter Singer, materialist utilitarian philosopher. He wrote the very influential book "Animal Rights".
You're probably right that his presence and advocacy has resulted in stronger laws. But the I think that animal rights legislation is a bit quiet at the moment; lobbyists focus on public campaigns against organisations. For instance, the constant lobbying against places like Vet faculties at universities because they assume all research must involve horrible torture being done to cute puppies, and not that all experiments have to be approved by braces of ethics committees.
But Singer's at a US uni (Princeton?) at the moment anyway...
Yes, most industrialised societies are far removed from the concept of death, such that it shocks them to even consider it. Yes, we should have it clear in our mind that eating meat intrinsically involves death.
No, those deaths do not involve the routine doling out of unnecessary pain. In fact, trouble is gone to to make it as quick and painless as possible. Do you honestly think over a hundred years of animal rights activism has done nothing?
The original poster seems to be under this misapprehension too. If he works at an animal shelter he should know that it's possible to kill without, or minimising, pain. If you believe people shouldn't kill animals well and good, but don't mix it up with dated rhetoric painting honest workers in slaughterhouses as vicious torturers. It's the same as the Draze test, which is still being brought up in Australia as a reason to stop all experimentation on animals even though it has been banned for over a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Here.
On food, you're out and out wrong. The main reason most third world countries have been unable to get a large benefit from agricultural exports is rich countries' greed. US and EU, take a bow. Essentially, the subsidies provided mean the government pays farmers in those countries to stay fat doing little and keep second and third world countries poor.
People are still innovating with the mediums of movable type and oil paint. Drawing breath should not be mistaken for peaking out.
No it isn't. Who is going to die from not getting they're email delivered? It's the difference between the picture of a thing, and a thing. I thought that would be abundantly clear to opponents of censorship.
Have you considered pushing it harder, eg, by putting it on SourceForge? What would be cool would be training it on a very large dataset indeed regularly; then all you would have to do is download the latest weighting tweak, which I presume is a tiny config file. Of course, as you say, the best thing would be to train it on your own inbox in times of low processor usage.
For the last year the only banner ad I've got on Deja News is some dodgy one about looking for jobs without your boss finding out. I don't know that they're making anywhere near that amount on banner ads. Jakob Neilsen has gone on and on about Yahoo! being the only company that makes a profit from banner ads ... dejanews is a great service, but how will they make money, really?
But they're not "savages in the jungle" ... IANAE*, but I reckon if they keep their eye on the ball, Malaysia could be a rich country in the next 10-20 years ...
* I Am Not An Economist
if X == "Microsoft" : then return 1 ; else return 0
However, I don't know that you have to live through a decade as an adult to review/enjoy/flame books from it - otherwise no more school book reviews of _Huckleberry Finn_ could ever be written :)
PS Any further reading to suggest to enhance my understanding?
From The Economist.
Market mechanisms thrive in a open, transparent environment. Without them you get nepotism and dodginess - eg, Victorian gas .. with them you get at least a semblance of an invisible hand ...
The problem isn't capitalism, it's quite the opposite: an ex-monopoly being inappropriately propped up by government ownership. This is an artifact of the lack of competition Telstra used to have, and the way it can still throw its huge bulk around in the .au market.
This is exactly the point. Why am I writing my own parser as a programmer when there is a superior, existing one? Why am I learning yet another file format as an administrator when it's just another tree style configuration file?
Yes, there will still be time spent on semantics - another way of saying that is "learning the system" - but my time is not wasted on syntax.
Hmm, The Economist is an authority on unmanned fighter planes but not the international space station ... Of course the former article was positive while the latter was negative ... I wonder if techno boosterism would have anything to do with this.
Guys, unless it's the Secretary-General of the UN mentioning slashdot, it's not a big deal anymore. The Economist has mentioned Slashdot. You're important, get used to it.
Though clever, this piece relied too much on one joke. Sentences were also long and unwieldy at times.
If this image moves you, so will the book.
I hate being told how I will or do feel. I think the review could have used another draft - or one less.
(Widespread use of caffeine explained a lot about the 20th century.)
-- Greg Egan, _Distress_
Larry Niven predicted this in his Known Space stories ... he made it a reason for the puppeteers to leave the galaxy. Lousy puppeteers, with their two heads and their brain in their back ...
No it doesn't. Formal methods are a means of assuring what is built is what is specified, ie, verification. Ensuring the specification of a system fits with requirements, ie, validation, is still critical. Formal methods help in this primarily by clarifying in the designer's mind exactly what they are building. As you imply, the problems that software solves are difficult problems, and building a solution often inspires the client to new ideas and requirements. There is nothing wrong with this, iterative, style of evolution. But not writing the payroll model right because it was vaguely described in natural language is a different matter.
Web addresses in mail at hotmail are helpfully translated into hyperlinks. The link is redirected via a hotmail server, I presume so they can track what sites users visit and sell the information. My guess is it would be pretty useless in all but aggregated format, however, as many hotmail addresses are spam filters for people's real accounts or identities.
But God put plenty of other species right here on Earth that we haven't even bothered to notice yet! It seems every other week hitherto undiscovered species are found.
We take this task too lightly, since it was the very first undertaking given to mankind in the Bible. There was a few other things we weren't to do - don't eat this, don't do that etc, but naming comes first in the list of task to do. I don't think it's overstating it to say that exploring and observing His creation is a noble and holy task that the current generation does its best to ignore.
That bet's too easy. I'm willing to assume life exists and pay 10 shiny new silver dollars to the first taker if we discover creationists on other planets. Debates as to whether extra-terrestrial creationists (ETCs) comprise off-Earth intelligence are can be left to more insightful brains than mine. :)
You're probably right that his presence and advocacy has resulted in stronger laws. But the I think that animal rights legislation is a bit quiet at the moment; lobbyists focus on public campaigns against organisations. For instance, the constant lobbying against places like Vet faculties at universities because they assume all research must involve horrible torture being done to cute puppies, and not that all experiments have to be approved by braces of ethics committees.
But Singer's at a US uni (Princeton?) at the moment anyway ...
Yes, most industrialised societies are far removed from the concept of death, such that it shocks them to even consider it. Yes, we should have it clear in our mind that eating meat intrinsically involves death.
No, those deaths do not involve the routine doling out of unnecessary pain. In fact, trouble is gone to to make it as quick and painless as possible. Do you honestly think over a hundred years of animal rights activism has done nothing?
The original poster seems to be under this misapprehension too. If he works at an animal shelter he should know that it's possible to kill without, or minimising, pain. If you believe people shouldn't kill animals well and good, but don't mix it up with dated rhetoric painting honest workers in slaughterhouses as vicious torturers. It's the same as the Draze test, which is still being brought up in Australia as a reason to stop all experimentation on animals even though it has been banned for over a decade.