I see no sense in mistrusting one large organization that keeps your virtual goods, while trusting another organization with your material wealth. If you mistrust Google, shouldn't you keep all your money under the mattress or buried in the garden?
1. conquering the whole galaxy (via generation ships or von neumann machines or whatever) takes only a few million years 2. we're unlikely to be the absolute oldest civilization in the galaxy 3. we do not appear to have been conquered 4. the only feasible way to block conquest is a federation with a prime directive 5. the only way to hold a federation together is ftl 6. therefore ftl exists. qed.
The funny thing is that you were modded funny, but this argument is one of the best there is to explain the Fermi paradox.
Assuming intelligent races evolve independently all through the universe, what is the probability that a race without a highly evolved sense of ethics would have conquered and colonized our planet long ago?
I can see only two possible answers to the problem: either the probability of an intelligent species evolving is so extremely small that we are the first to appear in the known universe (or at least in our local galaxy cluster), or FTL exists and a prime directive is in effect.
Considering the amount of exo-solar planets being found, the number of planets seem very big. Considering our own planet system wasn't one of the first to appear, and that advanced animals already existed here 65 million years ago when they were wiped out by a freak accident, one should say that the probability of being the very first intelligent species doesn't seem to be that high.
Of course, there are other factors to consider. Maybe the moon was fundamental in the process of life arising, by keeping plate tectonics active, which causes a protective magnetic field to form in the earth. We don't know yet what factors are needed for life to exist, but at this time I wouldn't disregard the FTL + prime directive argument as just "funny".
The system burns methane that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere. Methane has a much higher greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, because it absorbs more infrared radiation, therefore converting methane to CO2 has a positive effect in reducing global warming, even if the total carbon amount released is the same.
I can't help wondering if some future HR ___hole will discover those photos and fire her.
Could be. But if that HR ___hole is consistent, s/he/it should be equally meticulous with everybody else, and fire everyone, because everyone has been at a party some day. Or else, s/he/it will dig stuff at random and fire somebody at random, at which point it doesn't really matter if the stuff came from the internet, from an old blog, from a health record, whatever.
A true asshole of a manager will fire someone because he eats a salad for lunch or because she drives a Pontiac, and invent some valid pretext for the firing. But, in the end, that manager will suffer because the team will be formed entirely by assholes and assholes cannot bring a profit for the company as consistently as a competent team will.
I have seen reports that smoking is correlated with a high incidence of cancer. I don't need to know exactly which way the causation goes before I avoid smoking.
"How much would these same people be buying if piracy were not an option?"
Perhaps more, perhaps less. I can't speak for those people, but I can speak for myself. I love music and films. I find myself buying less and less music and films, not because there's the piracy option, but because CDs and DVDs are so expensive.
I have always had the option to tape music from FM radio, with a quality that's good enough for me. But I didn't do it in the past, because I preferred to buy the records. For me, "piracy" was never an option, even if it has always been widely available. I have many old LPs that I haven't listened to in a decade or more, some of them I bought on a whim.
With CDs costing upwards of $30, price starts becoming an important factor restricting my option to buy. I want to be very sure that I like that music before I buy. I'm buying less and less music. I don't remember when I bought my last CD, it must have been a couple of years ago. And no, I didn't download any music in that time either.
If the RIAA realized that, no matter what they want to believe, so-called "piracy" *is* an option and started to price their product accordingly, their business would certainly improve.
employers are digging-up 10-15-20-year old posts or photos from the net, and using them as justification to not hire someone
Unless you were remarkably more stupid than everybody else, those old posts or photos will be much like everybody else's, and that employer will have a severe difficulty in finding *anyone* to hire.
The main difference between credit records, personal blogs, and health records is that you and nobody else was responsible for what you did in you personal and financial life. If you find it difficult to get credit or a job because you acted more stupid than average in the past, that's a problem you created for yourself. But health records are a different matter, they depend mostly on genes your ancestors gave you, it would be rather unfair if you were blamed for that.
The author ties it all into a criticism of path dependence, the fairly obvious idea that once a particular option becomes entrenched, it can keep superior options from replacing it.
I think the objective is not to reach the absolute maximum, but a point where additional improvements are not significant. In computer science the simulated annealing method employs this principle. And the author's mention of studies on the cost/benefit ratio of retraining typers in Dvorak vs. giving them further training in QWERTY seems to corroborate this.
The myth that the article tries to debunk is that a particular market choice is dictated largely by luck, whoever comes first will dominate. This is true only for largely equivalent choices, where the difference between both is small. For instance, I saw a side by side comparison of Beta vs VHS once, with well maintained equipment for both technologies, and didn't see any advantage in Beta that would offset the difference in recording times. If there's a significant difference, the best option will prevail, even if the other one dominates the market at some time. The Ford model T once dominated the car market, but its peculiar pedal layout was never adopted by other manufacturers and Ford itself ended accepting the alternative user interface in the later model A.
I have considered adopting the Dvorak layout myself, with computers this is very easy. Even with typewriters this wouldn't be too difficult, as the article mentions, it would be just a matter of resoldering the types and keys. However, what would this accomplish? My greater problem is not typing text, but all the special symbols that computer programming needs. I ended by switching from Perl to Python, instead of from QWERTY do Dvorak.
If, instead of claiming that people are stealing their music, the RIAA would accept the simple fact that their product sucks, their marketing strategy sucks, their whole business plan sucks, then they could claim their problems are the result of the economic meltdown and get a few billion $$$ from Washington.
I had thought that that slogan was about accidents caused by drunk drivers, but now that you mention it, I see it can also lead to longer non-stop travel.
So whitespace block delineation is finally out, in favor of braces?
No, unfortunately they did the worst thing they could do in that respect. Nearly all the changes introduced will make longer lines of code. I think they are trying to make sure that you will need to use the line continuation backslash, which completely negates the advantages of whitespace formatting.
It seems that their definition of "clean syntax" is Java-like, rather than Perl-like. I never went to the extreme of playing "Perl Golf", but a concise syntax is one of the best ways to make readable code. I started using C rather than Pascal because of that. I switched from Perl to Python when I rewrote some Perl programs in Python and realized that, despite the somewhat longer code, Python was clearer to read. But I still miss the =~ regular expression match operator from Perl.
An optimal programming language should be well balanced. Not like APL, where a page of code can be resumed to a single character, but it's like learning to write in Chinese. Not like Java either, where you must write several pages of declarations before anything useful comes out. C is very close to the ideal, if you take the effort to understand how a computer works before you start to program. Perl is pretty good, if you resist the temptation to show off your ability. Python was almost there, the perfect compromise between readability and conciseness. Until 3.0, when they went astray...
There's no way an Intelligent Designer could think that
>>>print(format(10.0, "7.3g"))
10
is a clearer syntax than
>>> print '%7.3g' % 10.0
10
Of course, raw beginners don't know that % means format, but there was a time when I didn't know that / means division either. Will they deprecate all operators because they might confuse a beginner? I think there should be some reasonable limits to that everything-is-an-object thing.
It is, and has been for a long time, the Python Way to use English instead of cryptic characters
Up to a point, depending on how you define "cryptic". It would be perfectly possible to replace "a & b" with "a binary_and b", but would it be wise? The distinction between binary and logical operators that in the C language is done by the simple & vs. double && has been done in Python by using the English word "and" for the logical operation, while keeping the "&" character for the binary operation. From my experience in training people, this distinction between the logical and binary operations is a much bigger source of confusion than the string formatting operations.
The "%" operator is a perfect example of the point where a basic general principle can be turned into zealotry. For a beginner, it could take, perhaps, a few minutes to learn that "%" means "format". But from now on, for the rest of his life as a programmer he has to struggle with typing a six-character word instead of a single character.
No one is advocating to replace "3 + 4" with "three plus four", so this Python Way to use English does have its limits. Oh, wait, let's not give them ideas for Python 4... I can see it now, operators are dirty, since everything-is-an-object. Let's have "plus", "minus", "divide", and "multiply" methods for number objects instead, that way the syntax is cleaner and we avoid those unholy binary operators.
Damn, dude, you might consider reading the shit that monster wrote before spouting such idiotic, insane nonsense
If that link you posted is authentic, considering that Luther very explicitly said that the only source of religious teaching is the Bible itself, one should only need to ask him "which part of 'thou shall not kill' you don't understand".
one quick Google search tells me that % format wasn't killed, just replaced with something better
That's true, if you define "better" as worse. Let's compare the examples from the link you posted:
Python 2:
>>> "I love %s, %s, and %s" % ("eggs", "bacon", "sausage") 'I love eggs, bacon, and sausage'
Python 3:
>>>"I love {0}, {1}, and {2}".format("eggs", "bacon", "sausage") 'I love eggs, bacon, and sausage'
How, exactly, is this an improvement? Besides being simpler, the old version had an advantage that's never mentioned by Python 3 apologists: it's closer to the C language format. One can copy directly the format strings, making it easier to migrate code from C to Python, something that one does a lot of time.
Python 2:
>>> print "%7.3g" % 10.0
10
Python 3:
>>>print(format(10.0, "7.3g"))
10
Count the needed keystrokes for each version. Sure, for someone who doesn't know that % means format, the new version is easier to understand, but you need to learn it only once. After you learn this operator, you need not be burdened by typing "format(... )" each time a simple % will do.
Sadly, the Python community seems to having been taken over by a bunch of CS theoreticians. They plan to drop the % format operator in Python 3.1 because it requires tuples or dictionaries? So what? WHY do tuples and dictionaries exist in Python, anyhow, if they cannot be used?
Python's value resides in its phenomenal ease of use, which makes code easier and faster to write and understand. Each and every one of the changes in Python 3 makes code longer to write. Go through the changes carefully, I did, and couldn't find a single change that would take less keystrokes to write the code in typical applications, except for some string-related stuff.
The only step forward I see in Python 3 is Unicode. Unicode is broken in Python 2, but less so in Python 3. It's broken in every other language I know, Unicode is broken, period. At least they are trying to make it work in Python 3, I must admit. But still it's too little to justify all the other steps backwards. I really can't understand how some very intelligent people could argue that
Sadly, the FOSS community seems to have forgotten a simple fact everybody knows: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
All I've seen on Python 3 seems like a step backwards for me. Kill the % format operator? WTF? Do you have an idea of how often one uses that operator? Multiply that by the time to write and/or read the new syntax vs. the old.
It was the =~ operator that kept me from switching from Perl to Python for some time, now they want to kill one feature that makes Python syntax so much better than all other languages. Sad, very sad.
I have this suggestion to people who want to improve anything: *add* as many new features you want, but keep the old ones intact. Then, very carefully, remove the old features that nobody uses anymore. Sure, this will lead to some bloat, but that's much better than making it unusable.
What is exactly this "terror" thing? Suppose an extended family of nine Norwegians board a plane and make comments about the relative safety of each seat. Will anybody have a feeling of terror upon hearing those comments? No.
People born in Norway don't fit the model people associate with terrorists. Norwegians are Lutherans and Martin Luther never told his followers to kill people who don't follow Martin Luther's teachings. No one who was born in Norway and raised the Norwegian way believes he will have seventy virgins to serve him in Paradise if he blows himself up killing infidels.
Sure, the *vast majority* of Muslims don't believe that bullshit either. It's a highly debatable matter if the teachings of Mohammed can be interpreted that way. But you don't see Muslims protesting against suicide terrorists. And that's the big problem with Islam.
Islamists are at a delicate point. I knows some people who are so-called "moderate" Islamists, they are much like "moderate" Christians, they interpret the teachings of their religion in a rational way. I'd rather be a friend of a moderate Islamist than a fundamentalist Christian.
The big problem with Islam, IMHO, is that the moderate Islamists are so reluctant to make a stand against the fundamentalists. You won't find any Christian who's afraid to criticize David Koresh or Jim Jones, but how many Islamists are ready to make a critical comment about Mohammed Atta?
That's the big problem with Islam, there's a small but significant minority that accepts the more radical interpretation of their religion. And that's something that causes terror in people....
Slashdot Mirror
One could argue that humans are Evolution's way to create code.
I see no sense in mistrusting one large organization that keeps your virtual goods, while trusting another organization with your material wealth. If you mistrust Google, shouldn't you keep all your money under the mattress or buried in the garden?
The funny thing is that you were modded funny, but this argument is one of the best there is to explain the Fermi paradox.
Assuming intelligent races evolve independently all through the universe, what is the probability that a race without a highly evolved sense of ethics would have conquered and colonized our planet long ago?
I can see only two possible answers to the problem: either the probability of an intelligent species evolving is so extremely small that we are the first to appear in the known universe (or at least in our local galaxy cluster), or FTL exists and a prime directive is in effect.
Considering the amount of exo-solar planets being found, the number of planets seem very big. Considering our own planet system wasn't one of the first to appear, and that advanced animals already existed here 65 million years ago when they were wiped out by a freak accident, one should say that the probability of being the very first intelligent species doesn't seem to be that high.
Of course, there are other factors to consider. Maybe the moon was fundamental in the process of life arising, by keeping plate tectonics active, which causes a protective magnetic field to form in the earth. We don't know yet what factors are needed for life to exist, but at this time I wouldn't disregard the FTL + prime directive argument as just "funny".
The system burns methane that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere. Methane has a much higher greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, because it absorbs more infrared radiation, therefore converting methane to CO2 has a positive effect in reducing global warming, even if the total carbon amount released is the same.
Could be. But if that HR ___hole is consistent, s/he/it should be equally meticulous with everybody else, and fire everyone, because everyone has been at a party some day. Or else, s/he/it will dig stuff at random and fire somebody at random, at which point it doesn't really matter if the stuff came from the internet, from an old blog, from a health record, whatever.
A true asshole of a manager will fire someone because he eats a salad for lunch or because she drives a Pontiac, and invent some valid pretext for the firing. But, in the end, that manager will suffer because the team will be formed entirely by assholes and assholes cannot bring a profit for the company as consistently as a competent team will.
Ask this guy instead.
Hmmm, let's see, perhaps the US government outspends all other governments? Or do you think public service is cushier everywhere else?
I have seen reports that smoking is correlated with a high incidence of cancer. I don't need to know exactly which way the causation goes before I avoid smoking.
Perhaps more, perhaps less. I can't speak for those people, but I can speak for myself. I love music and films. I find myself buying less and less music and films, not because there's the piracy option, but because CDs and DVDs are so expensive.
I have always had the option to tape music from FM radio, with a quality that's good enough for me. But I didn't do it in the past, because I preferred to buy the records. For me, "piracy" was never an option, even if it has always been widely available. I have many old LPs that I haven't listened to in a decade or more, some of them I bought on a whim.
With CDs costing upwards of $30, price starts becoming an important factor restricting my option to buy. I want to be very sure that I like that music before I buy. I'm buying less and less music. I don't remember when I bought my last CD, it must have been a couple of years ago. And no, I didn't download any music in that time either.
If the RIAA realized that, no matter what they want to believe, so-called "piracy" *is* an option and started to price their product accordingly, their business would certainly improve.
Unless you were remarkably more stupid than everybody else, those old posts or photos will be much like everybody else's, and that employer will have a severe difficulty in finding *anyone* to hire.
The main difference between credit records, personal blogs, and health records is that you and nobody else was responsible for what you did in you personal and financial life. If you find it difficult to get credit or a job because you acted more stupid than average in the past, that's a problem you created for yourself. But health records are a different matter, they depend mostly on genes your ancestors gave you, it would be rather unfair if you were blamed for that.
His full name is Steve Chuck Norris
I think the objective is not to reach the absolute maximum, but a point where additional improvements are not significant. In computer science the simulated annealing method employs this principle. And the author's mention of studies on the cost/benefit ratio of retraining typers in Dvorak vs. giving them further training in QWERTY seems to corroborate this.
The myth that the article tries to debunk is that a particular market choice is dictated largely by luck, whoever comes first will dominate. This is true only for largely equivalent choices, where the difference between both is small. For instance, I saw a side by side comparison of Beta vs VHS once, with well maintained equipment for both technologies, and didn't see any advantage in Beta that would offset the difference in recording times. If there's a significant difference, the best option will prevail, even if the other one dominates the market at some time. The Ford model T once dominated the car market, but its peculiar pedal layout was never adopted by other manufacturers and Ford itself ended accepting the alternative user interface in the later model A.
I have considered adopting the Dvorak layout myself, with computers this is very easy. Even with typewriters this wouldn't be too difficult, as the article mentions, it would be just a matter of resoldering the types and keys. However, what would this accomplish? My greater problem is not typing text, but all the special symbols that computer programming needs. I ended by switching from Perl to Python, instead of from QWERTY do Dvorak.
Haven't you heard it? You can buy pre-sliced bread. And this innovation is considered so good that it has been used as a standard for comparing other inventions
If, instead of claiming that people are stealing their music, the RIAA would accept the simple fact that their product sucks, their marketing strategy sucks, their whole business plan sucks, then they could claim their problems are the result of the economic meltdown and get a few billion $$$ from Washington.
Nah, they just need to claim it's "oxygen-free carbon" and audiophiles will pay whatever the price is to get it.
I had thought that that slogan was about accidents caused by drunk drivers, but now that you mention it, I see it can also lead to longer non-stop travel.
Correlation does not mean causation. I guess I've been playing too many video games
Perhaps the sentence "Warning: causation does not mean correlation" should be written into some congressmens' heads
No, unfortunately they did the worst thing they could do in that respect. Nearly all the changes introduced will make longer lines of code. I think they are trying to make sure that you will need to use the line continuation backslash, which completely negates the advantages of whitespace formatting.
It seems that their definition of "clean syntax" is Java-like, rather than Perl-like. I never went to the extreme of playing "Perl Golf", but a concise syntax is one of the best ways to make readable code. I started using C rather than Pascal because of that. I switched from Perl to Python when I rewrote some Perl programs in Python and realized that, despite the somewhat longer code, Python was clearer to read. But I still miss the =~ regular expression match operator from Perl.
An optimal programming language should be well balanced. Not like APL, where a page of code can be resumed to a single character, but it's like learning to write in Chinese. Not like Java either, where you must write several pages of declarations before anything useful comes out. C is very close to the ideal, if you take the effort to understand how a computer works before you start to program. Perl is pretty good, if you resist the temptation to show off your ability. Python was almost there, the perfect compromise between readability and conciseness. Until 3.0, when they went astray...
I love Python. I hate Py3k.
There's no way an Intelligent Designer could think that
is a clearer syntax than
Of course, raw beginners don't know that % means format, but there was a time when I didn't know that / means division either. Will they deprecate all operators because they might confuse a beginner? I think there should be some reasonable limits to that everything-is-an-object thing.
Up to a point, depending on how you define "cryptic". It would be perfectly possible to replace "a & b" with "a binary_and b", but would it be wise? The distinction between binary and logical operators that in the C language is done by the simple & vs. double && has been done in Python by using the English word "and" for the logical operation, while keeping the "&" character for the binary operation. From my experience in training people, this distinction between the logical and binary operations is a much bigger source of confusion than the string formatting operations.
The "%" operator is a perfect example of the point where a basic general principle can be turned into zealotry. For a beginner, it could take, perhaps, a few minutes to learn that "%" means "format". But from now on, for the rest of his life as a programmer he has to struggle with typing a six-character word instead of a single character.
No one is advocating to replace "3 + 4" with "three plus four", so this Python Way to use English does have its limits. Oh, wait, let's not give them ideas for Python 4... I can see it now, operators are dirty, since everything-is-an-object. Let's have "plus", "minus", "divide", and "multiply" methods for number objects instead, that way the syntax is cleaner and we avoid those unholy binary operators.
According to the plan "it will be deprecated in Python 3.1 and removed from the language at some later time"
If that link you posted is authentic, considering that Luther very explicitly said that the only source of religious teaching is the Bible itself, one should only need to ask him "which part of 'thou shall not kill' you don't understand".
That's true, if you define "better" as worse. Let's compare the examples from the link you posted:
Python 2:
Python 3:
How, exactly, is this an improvement?
Besides being simpler, the old version had an advantage that's never mentioned by Python 3 apologists: it's closer to the C language format. One can copy directly the format strings, making it easier to migrate code from C to Python, something that one does a lot of time.
Python 2:
Python 3:
Count the needed keystrokes for each version. Sure, for someone who doesn't know that % means format, the new version is easier to understand, but you need to learn it only once. After you learn this operator, you need not be burdened by typing "format( ... )" each time a simple % will do.
Sadly, the Python community seems to having been taken over by a bunch of CS theoreticians. They plan to drop the % format operator in Python 3.1 because it requires tuples or dictionaries? So what? WHY do tuples and dictionaries exist in Python, anyhow, if they cannot be used?
Python's value resides in its phenomenal ease of use, which makes code easier and faster to write and understand. Each and every one of the changes in Python 3 makes code longer to write. Go through the changes carefully, I did, and couldn't find a single change that would take less keystrokes to write the code in typical applications, except for some string-related stuff.
The only step forward I see in Python 3 is Unicode. Unicode is broken in Python 2, but less so in Python 3. It's broken in every other language I know, Unicode is broken, period. At least they are trying to make it work in Python 3, I must admit. But still it's too little to justify all the other steps backwards. I really can't understand how some very intelligent people could argue that
is in any way "simpler" or "cleaner syntax" then
Sadly, the FOSS community seems to have forgotten a simple fact everybody knows: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
All I've seen on Python 3 seems like a step backwards for me. Kill the % format operator? WTF? Do you have an idea of how often one uses that operator? Multiply that by the time to write and/or read the new syntax vs. the old.
It was the =~ operator that kept me from switching from Perl to Python for some time, now they want to kill one feature that makes Python syntax so much better than all other languages. Sad, very sad.
I have this suggestion to people who want to improve anything: *add* as many new features you want, but keep the old ones intact. Then, very carefully, remove the old features that nobody uses anymore. Sure, this will lead to some bloat, but that's much better than making it unusable.
What is exactly this "terror" thing? Suppose an extended family of nine Norwegians board a plane and make comments about the relative safety of each seat. Will anybody have a feeling of terror upon hearing those comments? No.
People born in Norway don't fit the model people associate with terrorists. Norwegians are Lutherans and Martin Luther never told his followers to kill people who don't follow Martin Luther's teachings. No one who was born in Norway and raised the Norwegian way believes he will have seventy virgins to serve him in Paradise if he blows himself up killing infidels.
Sure, the *vast majority* of Muslims don't believe that bullshit either. It's a highly debatable matter if the teachings of Mohammed can be interpreted that way. But you don't see Muslims protesting against suicide terrorists. And that's the big problem with Islam.
Islamists are at a delicate point. I knows some people who are so-called "moderate" Islamists, they are much like "moderate" Christians, they interpret the teachings of their religion in a rational way. I'd rather be a friend of a moderate Islamist than a fundamentalist Christian.
The big problem with Islam, IMHO, is that the moderate Islamists are so reluctant to make a stand against the fundamentalists. You won't find any Christian who's afraid to criticize David Koresh or Jim Jones, but how many Islamists are ready to make a critical comment about Mohammed Atta?
That's the big problem with Islam, there's a small but significant minority that accepts the more radical interpretation of their religion. And that's something that causes terror in people....