I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure computers are landing airplanes with the pilots overseeing the process.
There's not many obstacles to avoid up in the air.
It's possible that you've missed the significance of the word "landing".
There is nothing of significance for joce640k to overlook. Collision avoidance in an environment full of moving road vehicles (and sometimes pedestrians) is a far harder problem than putting an airplane on the right point on the surface with the right velocity, even when you account for other air traffic around airfields.
Several commentators have said that reviews are better than comments, but this is no argument against commenting, as they are complementary and synergistic activities. I have found in practice that reviews without prior documentation are almost worthless, and generally not cost-effective.
1) Having the author write down an explanation of her code saves the time of half a dozen reviewers trying to figure it out. This, alone, is justification enough for pre-review documenting.
2) The alternative, having the author try to improvise an explanation in a review meeting, and have the reviewers follow along, leads to incorrect assumptions going overlooked or unchallenged, and may degenerate into confusion.
3) As others have pointed out, the author is likely to find some errors as a result of documenting the reasoning behind her work, leading to fewer failed reviews, and consequently, fewer repeats.
4) If the reviewers don't fully understand the whys and what-ifs of the code being reviewed, the exercise degenerates into a search for coding standards violations.
5) Comments, if both relevant and correct, save a lot of time in future whenever that code needs to be understood. While this is not the most important case where this matters, it includes when reviewing changes to that code, and any other work where its correctness is conditional on the prior code. Having the commented code and other documentation being part of reviews helps meet the relevant and correct criteria.
Explaining your work by writing it down is fine, but if noone reads what you have written, it isn't as useful anymore. Hence, it is not the documentation part but rather the reviewing part that helps.
My experience is that when I write out an argument, I quite often notice weaknesses, incompleteness or outright errors that had not occurred to me before, so writing it down is very useful even if no-one else reads it. This is particularly true for nontrivial arguments that have several cases, lemmas etc.
Based on what I have seen of other peoples' work, there are quite a few people for who this is so. In short, writing it down forces you to review and allows you to handle complexity.
Apologies if this has been said before, but it's worth repeating: if you value the objectivity and research of the best of the 'old' journalism, consider subscribing to an organization that still practices it.
Trust a theologian to prefer fanciful ideas which conform to his a priori prejudices, over an alternative which better explains the observations in the light of what is already known. Given Haught's actual engagement in the debate, and his prior endorsement of recording it, it strains one's credibility to believe that he is embarrassed to be caught swatting at gnats. A simple common-sense understanding of human nature, and a shave by William of Ockham (there's a rational theologian for you, at least for one brief moment) leaves embarrassment at being outwitted as the most plausible explanation for his stance, by a wide margin.
Of course, it is not entirely plausible that you put much weight in the gnat argument, either. Rather, it looks like a contrived excuse for you to make snide remarks about atheists, just as your first suggestion looks like a contrived excuse for making snide remarks about Catholics. You should note that if it wasn't for a host of theologians using deceitful methods in an attempt to suppress real science, there wouldn't be anyone, neither scientists nor atheists, talking about the issue. The creationism/evolution debate, for rational minds, was settled in the nineteenth century.
Apologies if this has already been said, but Rabel's 'Gaines Center for the Humanities' gets funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That's who to complain to, especially if you think Rabel's threat of legal action is way out of line.
Just because an example was given, it does not mean that the issue collapses to that one point. Man Eating Duck is correct to say that it depends on what you want to do.
I would be interested to know on what grounds they justify that regulation. It being in the UK, I would guess it is a publicly-funded institution, right?
Tweaking essays to meet some sort of formula isn't learning and any institution which regards formulaic submissions as desirable demeans the notion of critical thought.
Agreed, and note that there have recently been articles in the NY Times and elsewhere questioning the value of higher education, showing that many students don't learn much, and pointing out that a first degree is increasingly seen as insufficient qualification for even entry-level positions. Coincidence? I don't think so. Many schools have debased their product by pandering to the I-paid-for-it-I-deserve-it and the I-got-the-right-answer-what-matters-it-how crowds. The biggest losers here are the students who have learned something, and who now find their achievement implicitly questioned.
It used to be that, with a map, I could find little-used alternative routes around highway congestion. Some of those routes are themselves now becoming congested, and I suspect much of the extra traffic is GPS-directed.
It's a lot easier with modern devices, but functioning electronics have been fired from guns at least since the proximity fuzes of WWII - and these used vacuum tubes!
A degree of hysteresis in a decision-making process, when selecting between discrete alternatives, protects against chronic flip-flopping when the choice is not clear-cut. Therefore, it should be no surprise that biological systems display this property.
It's generally better to start a project from "I want to accomplish [x], so what do I
need?" rather than "I have [x], so what can I accomplish with it?"
Your's is an engineer's answer. Innovators, on the other hand, tend to be driven more by the
question "What can we do?" than by "What do we need?", as in Faraday's answer to "What use is
electricity?": '"What use is a new-born baby?" The history of technology is full of examples
where the major benefits were not even imagined before the technology became available.
This is not an easy point for me to admit, because I am by temperament more of an engineer than
an innovator.
The university's statement (referenced by the article) is remarkably poorly written, especially given its source. Consider, for example, the first paragraph under the heading 'Academic Programs', which begins thus: "Rebasing does not mean, exclusively, looking at the programs we will have. And, those we will no longer have."
Because if you have a decent shell and you know how to program, half of what you do involves writing little programs for tasks that the GUI designer either did not anticipate, or could not support without incorporating a programming language. Most people who know how to use CLIs use GUIs for the jobs the latter do well, but users who cannot program have no idea of what they are missing from not being able to use the CLI effectively.
The MS-DOS command line is excluded here, by the above caveat of a 'decent shell'. Trying to do anything useful in a DOS box makes one realize just how clever the creators of Unix were. Fortunately, there is Cygwin...
I am not saying that it is not obvious, I am saying that people do not get it, anyway - more precisely, they don't get the implications of the fact, and they do not draw the connection to their own lives. Maybe more people would, if middle and high school humainities education tackled more relevant issues, and some of them might then become more interested in technology and/or policies that are favorable to technological development.
If the people of the developed world knew more of history and geography, they might realize that the lifestyle they enjoy is due to their societies' mastery of technology, and that it is not an entitlement. People of the developing world, for whom this issue is more clearly germane, can see that this is so.
Re:real science (climate or weather?)
on
Bastardi's Wager
·
· Score: 1
He's making a 10-year prediction. I think that'd be more "climate" than "weather".
In general, I think you would be right, but the issue here is anthropogenic climate change (Bastardi's own quotes make it clear that this is the issue on his mind.) In this context, ten years is short-term. It is quite possible that, after ten years, Bastardi will be proved right on the bet while being even more clearly wrong on the big issue. This bet, therefore, is a piece of theater, a distraction intended to get some attention. Not that there is anything wrong with that, so long as no oil-interests-owned politician uses it in another hyperbolically irrational attack on knowledge...
The Western view seems to be moving towards one in which a degree, with a high GPA, is an entitlement earned by paying tuition, and instructors who upset their students by resisting this change are not helping their careers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure computers are landing airplanes with the pilots overseeing the process.
There's not many obstacles to avoid up in the air.
It's possible that you've missed the significance of the word "landing".
There is nothing of significance for joce640k to overlook. Collision avoidance in an environment full of moving road vehicles (and sometimes pedestrians) is a far harder problem than putting an airplane on the right point on the surface with the right velocity, even when you account for other air traffic around airfields.
Pointing out that it is not quite the same as drunk driving is an argument for what, exactly?
Whatever the youth are interested in will be demonized.
As texting while driving is clearly dangerous, this is irrelevant.
The ability to prove exactly how the guy was goofing off is supposed to invoke moral outrage in me.
No, it is the act of putting others in grave danger for no good reason that is considered immoral.
Several commentators have said that reviews are better than comments, but this is no argument against commenting, as they are complementary and synergistic activities. I have found in practice that reviews without prior documentation are almost worthless, and generally not cost-effective.
1) Having the author write down an explanation of her code saves the time of half a dozen reviewers trying to figure it out. This, alone, is justification enough for pre-review documenting.
2) The alternative, having the author try to improvise an explanation in a review meeting, and have the reviewers follow along, leads to incorrect assumptions going overlooked or unchallenged, and may degenerate into confusion.
3) As others have pointed out, the author is likely to find some errors as a result of documenting the reasoning behind her work, leading to fewer failed reviews, and consequently, fewer repeats.
4) If the reviewers don't fully understand the whys and what-ifs of the code being reviewed, the exercise degenerates into a search for coding standards violations.
5) Comments, if both relevant and correct, save a lot of time in future whenever that code needs to be understood. While this is not the most important case where this matters, it includes when reviewing changes to that code, and any other work where its correctness is conditional on the prior code. Having the commented code and other documentation being part of reviews helps meet the relevant and correct criteria.
Explaining your work by writing it down is fine, but if noone reads what you have written, it isn't as useful anymore. Hence, it is not the documentation part but rather the reviewing part that helps.
My experience is that when I write out an argument, I quite often notice weaknesses, incompleteness or outright errors that had not occurred to me before, so writing it down is very useful even if no-one else reads it. This is particularly true for nontrivial arguments that have several cases, lemmas etc. Based on what I have seen of other peoples' work, there are quite a few people for who this is so. In short, writing it down forces you to review and allows you to handle complexity.
Apologies if this has been said before, but it's worth repeating: if you value the objectivity and research of the best of the 'old' journalism, consider subscribing to an organization that still practices it.
Trust a theologian to prefer fanciful ideas which conform to his a priori prejudices, over an alternative which better explains the observations in the light of what is already known. Given Haught's actual engagement in the debate, and his prior endorsement of recording it, it strains one's credibility to believe that he is embarrassed to be caught swatting at gnats. A simple common-sense understanding of human nature, and a shave by William of Ockham (there's a rational theologian for you, at least for one brief moment) leaves embarrassment at being outwitted as the most plausible explanation for his stance, by a wide margin. Of course, it is not entirely plausible that you put much weight in the gnat argument, either. Rather, it looks like a contrived excuse for you to make snide remarks about atheists, just as your first suggestion looks like a contrived excuse for making snide remarks about Catholics. You should note that if it wasn't for a host of theologians using deceitful methods in an attempt to suppress real science, there wouldn't be anyone, neither scientists nor atheists, talking about the issue. The creationism/evolution debate, for rational minds, was settled in the nineteenth century.
Apologies if this has already been said, but Rabel's 'Gaines Center for the Humanities' gets funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That's who to complain to, especially if you think Rabel's threat of legal action is way out of line.
Given the ' funny' posts above, this definitely deserves 'witty'.
Just because an example was given, it does not mean that the issue collapses to that one point. Man Eating Duck is correct to say that it depends on what you want to do.
The quoted uncertainty, ~90min, is about enough for one complete orbit, depending on its eccentricity.
I would be interested to know on what grounds they justify that regulation. It being in the UK, I would guess it is a publicly-funded institution, right?
Tweaking essays to meet some sort of formula isn't learning and any institution which regards formulaic submissions as desirable demeans the notion of critical thought.
Agreed, and note that there have recently been articles in the NY Times and elsewhere questioning the value of higher education, showing that many students don't learn much, and pointing out that a first degree is increasingly seen as insufficient qualification for even entry-level positions. Coincidence? I don't think so. Many schools have debased their product by pandering to the I-paid-for-it-I-deserve-it and the I-got-the-right-answer-what-matters-it-how crowds. The biggest losers here are the students who have learned something, and who now find their achievement implicitly questioned.
I don't need to understand math in order to understand that a baseball hit up at an angle will follow a parabolic trajectory to the earth.
To understand that it follows a parabola, and not some other curve, you need some math.
It used to be that, with a map, I could find little-used alternative routes around highway congestion. Some of those routes are themselves now becoming congested, and I suspect much of the extra traffic is GPS-directed.
It's a lot easier with modern devices, but functioning electronics have been fired from guns at least since the proximity fuzes of WWII - and these used vacuum tubes!
A degree of hysteresis in a decision-making process, when selecting between discrete alternatives, protects against chronic flip-flopping when the choice is not clear-cut. Therefore, it should be no surprise that biological systems display this property.
...Or so I thought, until I saw the netting in the closeups.
It's generally better to start a project from "I want to accomplish [x], so what do I need?" rather than "I have [x], so what can I accomplish with it?"
Your's is an engineer's answer. Innovators, on the other hand, tend to be driven more by the question "What can we do?" than by "What do we need?", as in Faraday's answer to "What use is electricity?": '"What use is a new-born baby?" The history of technology is full of examples where the major benefits were not even imagined before the technology became available.
This is not an easy point for me to admit, because I am by temperament more of an engineer than an innovator.
The university's statement (referenced by the article) is remarkably poorly written, especially given its source. Consider, for example, the first paragraph under the heading 'Academic Programs', which begins thus: "Rebasing does not mean, exclusively, looking at the programs we will have. And, those we will no longer have."
Because if you have a decent shell and you know how to program, half of what you do involves writing little programs for tasks that the GUI designer either did not anticipate, or could not support without incorporating a programming language. Most people who know how to use CLIs use GUIs for the jobs the latter do well, but users who cannot program have no idea of what they are missing from not being able to use the CLI effectively.
The MS-DOS command line is excluded here, by the above caveat of a 'decent shell'. Trying to do anything useful in a DOS box makes one realize just how clever the creators of Unix were. Fortunately, there is Cygwin...
I am not saying that it is not obvious, I am saying that people do not get it, anyway - more precisely, they don't get the implications of the fact, and they do not draw the connection to their own lives. Maybe more people would, if middle and high school humainities education tackled more relevant issues, and some of them might then become more interested in technology and/or policies that are favorable to technological development.
If the people of the developed world knew more of history and geography, they might realize that the lifestyle they enjoy is due to their societies' mastery of technology, and that it is not an entitlement. People of the developing world, for whom this issue is more clearly germane, can see that this is so.
He's making a 10-year prediction. I think that'd be more "climate" than "weather".
In general, I think you would be right, but the issue here is anthropogenic climate change (Bastardi's own quotes make it clear that this is the issue on his mind.) In this context, ten years is short-term. It is quite possible that, after ten years, Bastardi will be proved right on the bet while being even more clearly wrong on the big issue. This bet, therefore, is a piece of theater, a distraction intended to get some attention. Not that there is anything wrong with that, so long as no oil-interests-owned politician uses it in another hyperbolically irrational attack on knowledge...
The Western view seems to be moving towards one in which a degree, with a high GPA, is an entitlement earned by paying tuition, and instructors who upset their students by resisting this change are not helping their careers.