once you take land out of agricultural use, it is never used for agriculture again. By that I mean the growing of crops. Once a building is there, that's it. I've been on a ranch that's on top of a former town that even had its own post office. It's not even a ghost town anymore. It's a few bits of rust and glass underneath pastures, tanks, and traps.
True, few if any of those buildings had concrete foundations. But that's just a matter of time. Vegetation and weather will turn concrete into sand soon enough.
And when the railroad came through, my ancestors picked up their whole town and moved it about eight miles to the tracks. There is only one structure remaining of the old town, a church. The old town is now underneath pastures and the shop of a dude who can weld anything and makes trailers and barbecue rigs.
Buildings require maintenance. Else they will cease to be buildings, and the land can be used for agriculture.
If I wanted to read childish politics, I'd read a newspaper.
If I wanted to read childish comments on childish politics, I'd read the letters to editors of newspapers.
Though I'll probably never work on the particular problem of Our Topic, I do appreciate the opportunity to broaden my knowledge of numerical methods.
Lots of interesting links to click in a discussion like this. Software to download and play with. Brain cells to grow.
That's what *real* nerds do.
Nerds do not travel in herds. They do not subscribe to herd mentality. Real nerds do not endorse mob rule.
How can Slashdot be "News for Nerds" without threads like this? The obvious political leanings of the editors puts them squarely in the mob rule category, and they've brought on board the usual scum to enforce it.
There is even a Wackypedia entry on Pure Math. Yet a nearly a thousand comments were made about the article, by people who didn't know a damn thing about the topic!
I guess school have quit teaching math, pure or impure. That's the only thing that can explain the nearly complete ignorance displayed here on Slashdot.
We will know when Slashdot is over when it starts covering sports.
(line #0's spelling is an extremely little joke so I didn't think it warranted a smiley so I write this just to fend off the spelling Nazis. And I did not intend a pun on "squarely.")
Think about it. Why did the mountain come to Mohamed? Why did IBM go shopping for a floppy DOS?
A floppy DOS is a weekend project for IBM. They could have made a better PC-DOS than Microsoft ever has, at a lower price for themselves and their customers.
There is only one entity that could have forced IBM to make such a stupid decision, and that was the US Government.
I am of split mind regarding antitrust prosecution of Microsoft. I admit to enjoying the schadenfreude, "he who lives by antitrust dies by antitrust," yet I understand at some point the madness of antitrust must stop.
Because lawyers are lousy system architects! They are rarely learned in discrete logic; they are only taught pretzel logic.
brain dead anti-nuclear chicken little screaming that you will cause the death of all humanity Oh Michio! Michio! Time to let your mouth run! Kaku! Kaku! Time to talk out of your ass! Kaku! Caca! Theoretical media whore!
CFS has a considerable algorithmic and computational complexity Tenderize your steak, soak it in eggmilk, while it soaks get your breading ready, put the soaked steak in the breading, then into the frying pan.
The algorithm is straightforward, if a little labor-intensive.
I like cutting the steak into smaller pieces, so as to enjoy CFS as a finger food and increase the amount of breading. So computationally, it tends to leave grease and crumbs in my keyboard.
having faith that there really are fundamental phenomena such as market forces that can control society for the best It is the people who control the market forces, so you get people controlling themselves.
The eighteenth century French mathematicians who laid the mathematical foundations for what would become digital signal processing such as Fourier were the models upon which the concept of communists were founded. Marx was totally in awe of these intellectuals who demonstrated the intellectual courage Now you're in the realm of total horse shit.
Fourier worked for Napoleon, who made Fourier the Governor of Upper and Lower Egypt.
The French aintellectuals Marx admired were the muckraking scum like Rousseau, not the scientists like Lavoisier.
This is all on marxists.org, where you can read what Marx and Engels and Trotsky and so forth wrote. Quite amusing is Marx's claim he could learn Persian grammar in a weekend and master the language in a few weeks. Yeah, right.
"Persian is absolute child's play. Were it not for that damned Arabic alphabet in which every half dozen letters looks like every other half dozen and the vowels are not written, I would undertake to learn the entire grammar within 48 hours. [...] I have set myself a maximum of three weeks for Persian. [...]"
Now, which side is it with the superficial, oversimplified, delusionally grandiose, and downright murderous analyses?
The Left killed hundreds of millions during the 20th Century. A Libertarian knows this, Leftists deny it.
If you had tried to build a Christian church in Tibet before the Chinese invaded I doubt that you would have stayed out of jail long enough to finish it. Well, a really long time ago, you could build Nestorian Christian churches in Tibetan territory.
Yet in predominantly Christian Countries Buddhist Temples exists with little interference. That they do - today.
At the time Nestorians were in Tibet, do you think these Christians could have built Nestorian Churches in Catholic countries?
I do not know what became of the Nestorianism in Tibet. Cursory googling gives me the impression that Islam wiped it out and the rest of its folk were absorbed into the Tibetan religions. Maybe there was some blood in the absorption. Will do further research, may not report here. Currently at http://www.oxuscom.com/Nestorian_Christianity_in_C A.pdf and having a blast.
I'll have to check in to the Berzin Archives to read the Islamic side of the issue (humor intended).
Besides, I've only met two or three Christians, and don't think there has ever been a predominantly Christian nation, only nominally Christian ones. I have met thousands of Christians-in-name-only ("Chrinos?"). For whom Christianity is just a "Get Out of Jail, Free" card, so they have permission from The Creator of the Universe to act like complete shitheads because they're preforgiven. Further, when people think they're following orders from the Creator of the Universe, there is no end to the evil they can accomplish. Amen.
none Christian faiths but so hostile towards Christian faiths I was confirmed Calvinist, but I'm feeling much better now.
Speaking for myself, I try to have no faith. "Show, don't tell." In this, I find Tibetan Buddhism's superstitions (prayer flags!) to be at best, quaint. Most humans enjoy their superstitions (I still keep a horseshoe for fun) so those features are for them not me.
However, the core of the Buddha's achievement, His Enlightenment, is an experiment that any sentient being can attempt to reproduce. It is a testable thing. Indeed, the Buddha said to test the teachings as if you were buying gold (using touchstones reagents and specific gravity I suppose;-) and in this He is warning against blind faith.
(Personally I am still constructing the experimental apparatus. Due to strong Pudgalavadin tendencies I am leaving out the atman-smasher.)
Dali Lama, while he presents himself as a force for enlightenment, is really the head figure for what you might term the upper class of Tibet Thanks for the Chinese Communist Party line on Tibetan history. I'm sure we've all forgotten Marxist cant about class struggle.
Since you're the expert on upper classes, maybe you can answer "yes" or "no" to a question I have about Tibetan nobility -- were the Licchavis from Persian Nishapur?
And by the way, it's "Dalai," a Turkic word for "Ocean" or "Oceanic" or some such. "Lama" of course is the Tibetan word for "guru," which you know is Sanskrit for "heavy" and is cognate to English "gravity" (I like to call it "guruvity") and other weighty things. The history of how a high lama became temporal ruler of a Central Asian country is, as you know, quite fascinating.
What I like is when the Sanskrit names start showing up in the Mongol royal houses. Schweet!
the impovorished state in which the peasants live I don't know how far the teachings of Baden-Powell penetrated Central Asia, but let's pretend it's a fact and try to imagine the plight of Tibetan Boy Scouts....
Tenderfoot must start a fire. At 5000m ASL. This thought experiment should produce some sympathy for those impoverished by lack of oxygen!
Look, I'm not Gelug and I'm not trying to convert you. I'm partial to Nyingma, Bön, and read much Rime material myself. But the Chinese takeover of Tibet was one of the cruelest acts of the 20th Century and finding the ChiCom Party Line has put me on a righteous tear.
Modernization is the process by which today's "poor" live better than kings of centuries past. So yes, it's good China is modernizing Tibet a little. They could have done it at far less human cost. I mean, if my native Texas can modernize in the space of the few decades I've been alive, Tibet could certainly have done it or be well on the way by now. It's a mineral treasure house (hey, isn't that the Chinese name for Tibet?) just like Texas.
Problem is, Chinese peasants are still poor, and I mean really poor not American "poor." China can only improve the plight of Tibet's poor to the level of its own poor, which is no different at all.
So it's the same Communist crap all over again. The ruling class is replaced with a new, improved ruling class, plus all the murder and book burning that made Communism so appealing to 20th-Century aintellectuals. The plight of the poor is reduced by the simple expedient of killing them.
(I'm using the New Chinese Ruling Class's own adjective for themselves, "Communist," despite the fact they're "Communist on the outside, Legalist on the inside." Which fact bolsters my cynicism regarding the "new improved ruling class.")
Too bad Tibet wasn't in the north of the fractious Mexican Empire, but good thing Texas isn't in Central Asia. We would feel cold and small in that place.
I do concede that the Chinese takeover is a fait accompli. And I wholeheartedly wish Tibet to be a free country. Given the fait, and my wish, the obvious way to free Tibet is to free Peking (Wade-Giles intended, as homage to the legitimate government of China).
(Hey, that's a totally different fest of flames. I'm gonna go drink coffee now.)
When I was growing up, there was a theory that at the center of the Earth is a natural fission pile heating the place up. Makes the continents move.
The experiments of the time, however, did not detect the expected number of neutrinos from that direction. (It was known from human reactors that fission spits neutrinos.)
Now that we know neutrinos have a tiny mass, and are therefore not moving at the speed of light, and therefore they experience time, and therefore they can and do oscillate ---
Do these findings at all bring new life to the Nuke at the Center of the Earth theory?
Just think, if we traded a never ending war for NASA, how much money we would save and get space flight too? Just like NASA tech spins off into consumer goodies, acts of terrorism cause economic tsunamis in consumer space. Oh and they kill people too.
We've been some 2176 days since a terrorist attack on the mainland.
It's a big, big interconnected world, in which exists asymmetrical warfare and a news media that recruits for the terrorists.
So by not funding the war, we will probably lose money and nobody will care about space flight.
Insurance premiums will rise to cover the direct financial losses, oh and that dead citizens problem, since some people have life insurance. The gubmint will have to rescue incompetent airlines again. Whole companies of people will go out of business too, no matter where the government sticks its visible foot. And so on. Quite aside from the corpse issue, a successful terrorist attack on the United States mainland will economically affect almost everybody on the planet (*) and a few above it.
"Tears don't flow the same in space."
This war may well be less expensive than the alternative, lay-back-and-enjoy it posture.
[* the terrorists are shooting themselves in their shadowy feet. Imagine their ultimate victory. Where then would they get the explosives and refined metal to continue their glorious culture, when there is no civilization left to make them? Terrorism is less sustainable than any greed-driven evil multinational corporate globalist bogeyman ("Halliburton! Squawk! Halliburton! Want a cracker!") could ever be.]
I used to be the editor in chief of an alt-weekly in Wichita, Kansas. We can tell.
Of course, it's circulation and popularity has dropped like a rock[....] (An editor of a high school paper taught me to always check them 'postrophes.)
Bin Laden started using personal envoys instead of Sat phones after it was leaked that we can track the sat phone calls. Leaked to the world at large by the Los Angeles Times on September 7, 1998.
We do not know if the LA Times leaked, intentionally or not, the information to bin Laden before publishing the story.
In any case, it seems bin Laden quit using his phone within two weeks of the LA Times article.
And it seems that the Clinton Administration's prosecutors mentioned the monitoring during the trial of the 1993 WTC bombers.
But it wasn't until the time frame of the LA Times article that bin Laden quit using his sat phone.
When I was in high school I spent an afternoon once in a recording studio and these guys did this one part of a song over and over and over. It was driving me nuts because it sounded exactly the same every single time (to me). I once watched Baf X of Hidden Agenda mix the 10-second reverberation fadeout at the end of an acoustic guitar piece for over an hour.
There's an invisible line between mastering and madness....
From the article,
McConnell also revealed that fewer than 100 people inside the United States are monitored under FISA warrants. From the submission,
He also claims that only 100 Americans are under surveilance The submitter assumed, or purposely misinterpreted, "100 people inside the United States" to mean "100 Americans." The first is a sloppy mistake, the second is a deliberate lie.
There are many people inside the United States who are not Americans. The communications laws (IIRC from my work and play in the industry) use the broadly expansive category "US persons" which means anybody physically in the country.
There are green card holders and other legitimate workers, resident aliens of all kinds, and illegal aliens, just to name a few.
Other non-American inside the USA include students, tourists, and Democrats.
Slashdot Mirror
True, few if any of those buildings had concrete foundations. But that's just a matter of time. Vegetation and weather will turn concrete into sand soon enough.
And when the railroad came through, my ancestors picked up their whole town and moved it about eight miles to the tracks. There is only one structure remaining of the old town, a church. The old town is now underneath pastures and the shop of a dude who can weld anything and makes trailers and barbecue rigs.
Buildings require maintenance. Else they will cease to be buildings, and the land can be used for agriculture.
Hear, here!
If I wanted to read childish politics, I'd read a newspaper.
If I wanted to read childish comments on childish politics, I'd read the letters to editors of newspapers.
Though I'll probably never work on the particular problem of Our Topic, I do appreciate the opportunity to broaden my knowledge of numerical methods.
Lots of interesting links to click in a discussion like this. Software to download and play with. Brain cells to grow.
That's what *real* nerds do.
Nerds do not travel in herds. They do not subscribe to herd mentality. Real nerds do not endorse mob rule.
How can Slashdot be "News for Nerds" without threads like this? The obvious political leanings of the editors puts them squarely in the mob rule category, and they've brought on board the usual scum to enforce it.
As evidence of the de-nerdification of Slashdot, I refer to Forget Math to Become a Great Computer Scientist?, wherein but a few contributors to the discussion even knew what Pure Mathematics is.
There is even a Wackypedia entry on Pure Math. Yet a nearly a thousand comments were made about the article, by people who didn't know a damn thing about the topic!
I recommend Hardy's book for freshmen. Nearly a century old.
I guess school have quit teaching math, pure or impure. That's the only thing that can explain the nearly complete ignorance displayed here on Slashdot.
We will know when Slashdot is over when it starts covering sports.
(line #0's spelling is an extremely little joke so I didn't think it warranted a smiley so I write this just to fend off the spelling Nazis. And I did not intend a pun on "squarely.")
I was forming such a clear mental picture of a comcast violating a statue. Too bad I can't draw.
"Equal temperament is equally unfair to all keys."
Microsoft's monopoly is perhaps the best exemplar of the evil of antitrust.
It is the result of the US DoJ's antitrust persecution of IBM. http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/1980.htm
Think about it. Why did the mountain come to Mohamed? Why did IBM go shopping for a floppy DOS?
A floppy DOS is a weekend project for IBM. They could have made a better PC-DOS than Microsoft ever has, at a lower price for themselves and their customers.
There is only one entity that could have forced IBM to make such a stupid decision, and that was the US Government.
I am of split mind regarding antitrust prosecution of Microsoft. I admit to enjoying the schadenfreude, "he who lives by antitrust dies by antitrust," yet I understand at some point the madness of antitrust must stop.
Because lawyers are lousy system architects! They are rarely learned in discrete logic; they are only taught pretzel logic.
Kaku! Kaku! Time to talk out of your ass!
Kaku! Caca! Theoretical media whore!
The algorithm is straightforward, if a little labor-intensive.
I like cutting the steak into smaller pieces, so as to enjoy CFS as a finger food and increase the amount of breading. So computationally, it tends to leave grease and crumbs in my keyboard.
Fourier worked for Napoleon, who made Fourier the Governor of Upper and Lower Egypt.
The French aintellectuals Marx admired were the muckraking scum like Rousseau, not the scientists like Lavoisier.
This is all on marxists.org, where you can read what Marx and Engels and Trotsky and so forth wrote. Quite amusing is Marx's claim he could learn Persian grammar in a weekend and master the language in a few weeks. Yeah, right.
"Persian is absolute child's play. Were it not for that damned Arabic alphabet in which every half dozen letters looks like every other half dozen and the vowels are not written, I would undertake to learn the entire grammar within 48 hours. [...] I have set myself a maximum of three weeks for Persian. [...]"
Now, which side is it with the superficial, oversimplified, delusionally grandiose, and downright murderous analyses?
The Left killed hundreds of millions during the 20th Century. A Libertarian knows this, Leftists deny it.
At the time Nestorians were in Tibet, do you think these Christians could have built Nestorian Churches in Catholic countries?
I do not know what became of the Nestorianism in Tibet. Cursory googling gives me the impression that Islam wiped it out and the rest of its folk were absorbed into the Tibetan religions. Maybe there was some blood in the absorption. Will do further research, may not report here. Currently at http://www.oxuscom.com/Nestorian_Christianity_in_
I'll have to check in to the Berzin Archives to read the Islamic side of the issue (humor intended).
Besides, I've only met two or three Christians, and don't think there has ever been a predominantly Christian nation, only nominally Christian ones. I have met thousands of Christians-in-name-only ("Chrinos?"). For whom Christianity is just a "Get Out of Jail, Free" card, so they have permission from The Creator of the Universe to act like complete shitheads because they're preforgiven. Further, when people think they're following orders from the Creator of the Universe, there is no end to the evil they can accomplish. Amen. none Christian faiths but so hostile towards Christian faiths I was confirmed Calvinist, but I'm feeling much better now.
Speaking for myself, I try to have no faith. "Show, don't tell." In this, I find Tibetan Buddhism's superstitions (prayer flags!) to be at best, quaint. Most humans enjoy their superstitions (I still keep a horseshoe for fun) so those features are for them not me.
However, the core of the Buddha's achievement, His Enlightenment, is an experiment that any sentient being can attempt to reproduce. It is a testable thing. Indeed, the Buddha said to test the teachings as if you were buying gold (using touchstones reagents and specific gravity I suppose
(Personally I am still constructing the experimental apparatus. Due to strong Pudgalavadin tendencies I am leaving out the atman-smasher.)
Since you're the expert on upper classes, maybe you can answer "yes" or "no" to a question I have about Tibetan nobility -- were the Licchavis from Persian Nishapur?
And by the way, it's "Dalai," a Turkic word for "Ocean" or "Oceanic" or some such. "Lama" of course is the Tibetan word for "guru," which you know is Sanskrit for "heavy" and is cognate to English "gravity" (I like to call it "guruvity") and other weighty things. The history of how a high lama became temporal ruler of a Central Asian country is, as you know, quite fascinating.
What I like is when the Sanskrit names start showing up in the Mongol royal houses. Schweet! the impovorished state in which the peasants live I don't know how far the teachings of Baden-Powell penetrated Central Asia, but let's pretend it's a fact and try to imagine the plight of Tibetan Boy Scouts....
Tenderfoot must start a fire. At 5000m ASL. This thought experiment should produce some sympathy for those impoverished by lack of oxygen!
Look, I'm not Gelug and I'm not trying to convert you. I'm partial to Nyingma, Bön, and read much Rime material myself. But the Chinese takeover of Tibet was one of the cruelest acts of the 20th Century and finding the ChiCom Party Line has put me on a righteous tear.
Modernization is the process by which today's "poor" live better than kings of centuries past. So yes, it's good China is modernizing Tibet a little. They could have done it at far less human cost. I mean, if my native Texas can modernize in the space of the few decades I've been alive, Tibet could certainly have done it or be well on the way by now. It's a mineral treasure house (hey, isn't that the Chinese name for Tibet?) just like Texas.
Problem is, Chinese peasants are still poor, and I mean really poor not American "poor." China can only improve the plight of Tibet's poor to the level of its own poor, which is no different at all.
So it's the same Communist crap all over again. The ruling class is replaced with a new, improved ruling class, plus all the murder and book burning that made Communism so appealing to 20th-Century aintellectuals. The plight of the poor is reduced by the simple expedient of killing them.
(I'm using the New Chinese Ruling Class's own adjective for themselves, "Communist," despite the fact they're "Communist on the outside, Legalist on the inside." Which fact bolsters my cynicism regarding the "new improved ruling class.")
Too bad Tibet wasn't in the north of the fractious Mexican Empire, but good thing Texas isn't in Central Asia. We would feel cold and small in that place.
I do concede that the Chinese takeover is a fait accompli. And I wholeheartedly wish Tibet to be a free country. Given the fait, and my wish, the obvious way to free Tibet is to free Peking (Wade-Giles intended, as homage to the legitimate government of China).
(Hey, that's a totally different fest of flames. I'm gonna go drink coffee now.)
When I was growing up, there was a theory that at the center of the Earth is a natural fission pile heating the place up. Makes the continents move.
The experiments of the time, however, did not detect the expected number of neutrinos from that direction. (It was known from human reactors that fission spits neutrinos.)
Now that we know neutrinos have a tiny mass, and are therefore not moving at the speed of light, and therefore they experience time, and therefore they can and do oscillate ---
Do these findings at all bring new life to the Nuke at the Center of the Earth theory?
I already heard this on hate radio last Friday!
Though it was pronounced "new-try-noes" so maybe that was about a different particle.
We've been some 2176 days since a terrorist attack on the mainland.
It's a big, big interconnected world, in which exists asymmetrical warfare and a news media that recruits for the terrorists.
So by not funding the war, we will probably lose money and nobody will care about space flight.
Insurance premiums will rise to cover the direct financial losses, oh and that dead citizens problem, since some people have life insurance. The gubmint will have to rescue incompetent airlines again. Whole companies of people will go out of business too, no matter where the government sticks its visible foot. And so on. Quite aside from the corpse issue, a successful terrorist attack on the United States mainland will economically affect almost everybody on the planet (*) and a few above it.
"Tears don't flow the same in space."
This war may well be less expensive than the alternative, lay-back-and-enjoy it posture.
[* the terrorists are shooting themselves in their shadowy feet. Imagine their ultimate victory. Where then would they get the explosives and refined metal to continue their glorious culture, when there is no civilization left to make them? Terrorism is less sustainable than any greed-driven evil multinational corporate globalist bogeyman ("Halliburton! Squawk! Halliburton! Want a cracker!") could ever be.]
Often attributed to Voltaire is the notion, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Self-censoring Opus shows us exactly how seriously the MSM takes that notion.
We do not know if the LA Times leaked, intentionally or not, the information to bin Laden before publishing the story.
In any case, it seems bin Laden quit using his phone within two weeks of the LA Times article.
And it seems that the Clinton Administration's prosecutors mentioned the monitoring during the trial of the 1993 WTC bombers.
But it wasn't until the time frame of the LA Times article that bin Laden quit using his sat phone.
[....]
What's this guy smoking? He is smoking his job.
Imagine that you have his job. And imagine that you take it seriously.
Working against you, from your point of view, is a very leaky organization - Congress.
As part of your job, you must talk to people like Reyes (D-Texas) and Leahy (D-Vermont) and Specter (D-Rino).
People who would disclose secrets regarding sources and methods, just to get a vote.
There's an invisible line between mastering and madness....
There are many people inside the United States who are not Americans. The communications laws (IIRC from my work and play in the industry) use the broadly expansive category "US persons" which means anybody physically in the country.
There are green card holders and other legitimate workers, resident aliens of all kinds, and illegal aliens, just to name a few.
Other non-American inside the USA include students, tourists, and Democrats.
Flash sucks and so do the people who use it!
The label on my Zest "Aqua Pure" does not list triclosan.
It does list sodium chloride, which is a mixture of two poisonous elements!
We're so screwed.
Does going digital mean missing music? No.
But writing for a modern daily means picking the most sensational quotes, and maybe even changing their context. The reader will never know.
Journalists distort more than that sweet orange Boss pedal!
Very, extremely unfortunately, many science schools will not graduate Republicans or Libertarians.
So we have several generations of Democrat "scientists" who really do care more about politics than anything else.
We will know the engineering schools have gone Lysenko when bridges start collapsing.
I'd rather have the Australian voting system.
All presidential debates will be conducted in Strine!