No, no whoosh today—you'll recall that Slashdot users made jokes about the LHC black hole thing, too. I even used the word "joke" in my post!
The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion. Eventually this causes a distrust in science to fester, and that's something we need to stand against if we're ever going to survive the next century. I'm generally fine with making young-earth creationism jokes (I've had more than a few myself) because people here are sufficiently well-informed to be able to recite the truth.
But after a certain point it gets worrying that the first response to "look, a glimpse into the ancient past!" is "quick, call CEDA!" What experience does Sparticus789 actually have with biology? If he(?) encounters someone who genuinely believes a George Romero-style outbreak could happen at any moment, what would he say to rebuff them? Would he even have the confidence to speak up? Enough parroting of a meme can kill knowledge of the truth, and at the very least, that must be guarded against. With biology this is particularly sensitive because most people know only a very little amount about it, and yet embracing or rejecting biological research stands to affect us immensely in the future.
So +1 for speaking up, but -1 for reducing that to "whoosh."
Personally, I say "OpenOffice" anyway when I mean LibreOffice. It has more currency with less technical people and those who never update, and only occasionally does it prompt a concerned stare when someone actually knows the distinction. Maybe we could just go back to calling it StarOffice?
I hope you got it at a discount, 'cause those things can't be used, and diseases can only attack things they co-evolve with. This water is 1.5 billion years old. Plants appeared on land only 1.2 billion years ago. Animals evolved less than 700 million years ago. Just like the with Lake Vostok article from a couple of months ago, all anyone does by making that joke is showing that a meme from bad science fiction is still alive. Please stop. You're hurting yourself. This is the biology equivalent of saying the LHC makes black holes.
Up to a point, I agree with you—I've even implemented some optimizations of Smith-Waterman myself, so I know how bad it can get. The thing is, to fully maximize the kinds of cheating that you typically see in demos, you usually have to sacrifice the flexibility of the algorithm itself. A lot of the genius in low-power C64 and Amiga demos comes from precalculating data and constraining the perspectives from which the image on screen is shown; they're illusions. While a demoscene programmer may be excellent at core optimization tasks, these abilities in particular would be go unused. (Metaphors about cutting raw meat with a bread knife come to mind.) It would be better to look for someone more dedicated to the job, especially if they have experience with parallel processing and high-performance computing.
Of course, that's not to say there aren't individuals interested in all three categories—graphics tricks, code optimization, and high-performance computing—but the aptitudes aren't correlated. Demosceners are motivated by a strong sense of community, the audacity of their medium, and the gratification of seeing their work in action (see documentary), which doesn't jive well with what computational biology offers.
...that being said, I'm a computational biologist, I'm pretty fond of the demoscene, and I hate BLAST; where do I sign?:)
And that's the trick. These people focus predominantly on mathematical approximations, extreme memory limitations, and knowing the ins-and-outs of the CPU itself, or the API they're using if it's a PC demo. All C64 demos are programmed in assembly. So while optimization is common to both fields, the level of detail is much too tight. In demo programming, effects are chosen because they optimize well. That doesn't fit with matrix programming or stats where accurately capturing an algorithm is the top priority—not just because mathematical approximations are undesirable, but because the complexity of many processes is the major bottleneck, and the operations themselves are simple and cannot be optimized through cheating.
Even if a demoscener did, for example, rewrite BLAST, the result would be completely unmaintainable, which is no good to anyone. It's much better to leave the optimization of scientific software to the compiler.
As a bioinformatician who's trying to give researchers better tools to identify disease, whose projects could also improve the lives of lots of folks: this is not that kind of programming. Demoscene programmers are generally hired by graphics companies and embedded systems development, where their formidable optimization abilities actually get put to use; those skills are not transferable to general high-performance computing. You'll have to keep hiring out of the general CS grad pool.
That was a rhetorical device, which I went to lengths to underline. Some might even go so far as to call it a joke. Should I be surprised you can't spell "deceit"?
Well, you're forgetting a couple of heads such as the DIA and the NRO, and (I suppose) the NGA, but actually I apologise for the insinuation—I consider it obvious that the DHS doesn't count simply because they get so much bad publicity. I generally agree with your description of them, although I think you give them too much credit. As far as enforcement goes, their job is done when The Bad Things are screwed up; their masters don't care if the job is clean or not.
Curtailing their activity would mean calming the sabre-rattlers at those agencies and within the executive branch, though, so don't hold your breath. It's not easy to convince bureaucratic careerists haunted by failure that their face-saving actions are immoral. In fact, that may be the hardest thing in the universe. You generally have to wait for them to die off and be replaced with people who have more relativist outlooks—and if Gorbachev's career in the Soviet Union is any indicator, that'll probably be another sixty years or so. Perhaps most tragic is that these people will never stand trial for what they have done to the world.
Actually, it is news, but you have to dig for it a little—Rainmeter must have been updated with a rootkit that hides how much CPU it uses. This rootkit is so effective that it no longer outperforms iTunes in its ability to devour system resources.
I've often wondered why TSA seems so unresponsive to the American public, and this book offered me a plausible explanation. Hawley seems to view TSA almost exclusively as a weapon in the US war against Al Qaeda. When TSA implements policies that seem crazy or ineffective to the rest of us, it doesn't use outside opinions to judge the effectiveness of its policies. Instead it uses information gathered from the intelligence community unavailable to outsiders. A policy change is considered effective if Al Qaeda reacts in a desirable way. For example, if a TSA operation deploys VIPR teams at public transportation centers and suspected Al Qaeda operatives leave the US afterwards, the operation is considered successful.
Which, really, is despicable and absurd all on its own.
But it does lend a lot of strength to the theory that all strange law enforcement actions of agencies created by or in the spirit of the PATRIOT Act are actually direct responses to some form of undesired activity.
You may be excited and horrified to know that the common language of Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin, does something similar. The horrifying part is that it's a creole based mostly on English—and they mark the past tense with the particle "pinis" after the verb (literally a mispronunciation of "finish".) Many, many languages fit under this isolating scheme, and many of them drop or reduce the value of copulas contextually as a result, although they're also pernicious users of auxiliary (helping) verbs.
Conlangs actually can get quite academic. There are several journals devoted exclusively to Tolkien's languages, and they discuss precisely this sort of thing.
I think it's just good old-fashioned bureaucratic daftness that causes it. Sort of like everyone's favourite Babbage quotation, only with more self-congratulation for reducing costs. The other plausible answer is an antisocial "not my problem" attitude, but those rarely even consider public welfare.
I think you're giving them too much credit. The DHS, like the TSA, is a very stimulus-driven organism. More likely they discovered some suspicious activity was utilizing Dwolla with Bitcoin, and decided to break the link between the two. The intelligence community in the US generally avoids bad PR as long as possible.
That's not an unreasonable construct for a language that has lost the verb in everyday use. In many languages the progressive aspect is denoted by a modification of the copula; if the verb later disappeared, it could till be used on its own as an archaism. In most languages, as long as the audience understands what is being said, you can say just about anything. It's only in modernity that we've tried to standardise our habits.
That's top-notch thinking, there, Catskul! You'll be mid-level management in no time.
Somewhat more seriously, 29.34% of all deaths in 2002 were caused by cardiovascular disease, making it by far the biggest killer. Traffic accidents account for 2.09% of deaths, and skin cancers were a measly 0.12%. (Cancers overall were 12.49%.)
That just means the translation was a little creative. There are several natural languages with no 'being' verb. Even if Okrand (not Okuna!) didn't provide a way of discussing existence in his dictionary, it's silly to think there's no way of doing so in a widely-used language.
I see where the problem is now. No, the term "brony" is much more inclusive than you appear to think. As it was first used inside the group, it does not have the pejorative connotations of "trekkie." Most self-labelled bronies are merely avid fans. This survey breaks it down. Only 16% agreed with the statement "[MLP] is my number one priority, all that I can think about."
For a lot of people in the MLP fandom, it is the only exposure they have had to New Sincerity. It provides a much-needed respite from the negativity of day-to-day life, as well as that of mainstream (and counterculture) media. This is why so many of them are so dedicated to the community (and how this charity came to be.) It doesn't really require obsession or fetishism to maintain critical mass.
Then say that before you start talking about fanaticism. Your first two posts were extremely dismissive and did not convey awareness of a vocal minority.
Every subculture has people like that, and in all of them, they are the minority. I suppose you also assume that all furries are fursuiters, all gays march in pride parades, all trekkies own Bat'leths or Spock ears, and everyone who has ever liked a Star Wars film writes "Jedi" when the census comes knocking? You really need to stop diagnosing people with stereotypes. People aren't as crazy as you think.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no whoosh today—you'll recall that Slashdot users made jokes about the LHC black hole thing, too. I even used the word "joke" in my post!
The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion. Eventually this causes a distrust in science to fester, and that's something we need to stand against if we're ever going to survive the next century. I'm generally fine with making young-earth creationism jokes (I've had more than a few myself) because people here are sufficiently well-informed to be able to recite the truth.
But after a certain point it gets worrying that the first response to "look, a glimpse into the ancient past!" is "quick, call CEDA!" What experience does Sparticus789 actually have with biology? If he(?) encounters someone who genuinely believes a George Romero-style outbreak could happen at any moment, what would he say to rebuff them? Would he even have the confidence to speak up? Enough parroting of a meme can kill knowledge of the truth, and at the very least, that must be guarded against. With biology this is particularly sensitive because most people know only a very little amount about it, and yet embracing or rejecting biological research stands to affect us immensely in the future.
So +1 for speaking up, but -1 for reducing that to "whoosh."
Nuh-uh! It was in Nature so it must be true!
Personally, I say "OpenOffice" anyway when I mean LibreOffice. It has more currency with less technical people and those who never update, and only occasionally does it prompt a concerned stare when someone actually knows the distinction. Maybe we could just go back to calling it StarOffice?
You are dead to me, ArcadeMan. Dead to me.
Perhaps you are not familiar with how old the joint actually is?
I hope you got it at a discount, 'cause those things can't be used, and diseases can only attack things they co-evolve with. This water is 1.5 billion years old. Plants appeared on land only 1.2 billion years ago. Animals evolved less than 700 million years ago. Just like the with Lake Vostok article from a couple of months ago, all anyone does by making that joke is showing that a meme from bad science fiction is still alive. Please stop. You're hurting yourself. This is the biology equivalent of saying the LHC makes black holes.
By all means, feel free to point out anything specific; I apologise if I've misconstrued anything.
Up to a point, I agree with you—I've even implemented some optimizations of Smith-Waterman myself, so I know how bad it can get. The thing is, to fully maximize the kinds of cheating that you typically see in demos, you usually have to sacrifice the flexibility of the algorithm itself. A lot of the genius in low-power C64 and Amiga demos comes from precalculating data and constraining the perspectives from which the image on screen is shown; they're illusions. While a demoscene programmer may be excellent at core optimization tasks, these abilities in particular would be go unused. (Metaphors about cutting raw meat with a bread knife come to mind.) It would be better to look for someone more dedicated to the job, especially if they have experience with parallel processing and high-performance computing.
Of course, that's not to say there aren't individuals interested in all three categories—graphics tricks, code optimization, and high-performance computing—but the aptitudes aren't correlated. Demosceners are motivated by a strong sense of community, the audacity of their medium, and the gratification of seeing their work in action (see documentary), which doesn't jive well with what computational biology offers.
...that being said, I'm a computational biologist, I'm pretty fond of the demoscene, and I hate BLAST; where do I sign? :)
Which ones constitute acceptable use [...]
And that's the trick. These people focus predominantly on mathematical approximations, extreme memory limitations, and knowing the ins-and-outs of the CPU itself, or the API they're using if it's a PC demo. All C64 demos are programmed in assembly. So while optimization is common to both fields, the level of detail is much too tight. In demo programming, effects are chosen because they optimize well. That doesn't fit with matrix programming or stats where accurately capturing an algorithm is the top priority—not just because mathematical approximations are undesirable, but because the complexity of many processes is the major bottleneck, and the operations themselves are simple and cannot be optimized through cheating.
Even if a demoscener did, for example, rewrite BLAST, the result would be completely unmaintainable, which is no good to anyone. It's much better to leave the optimization of scientific software to the compiler.
As a bioinformatician who's trying to give researchers better tools to identify disease, whose projects could also improve the lives of lots of folks: this is not that kind of programming. Demoscene programmers are generally hired by graphics companies and embedded systems development, where their formidable optimization abilities actually get put to use; those skills are not transferable to general high-performance computing. You'll have to keep hiring out of the general CS grad pool.
That was a rhetorical device, which I went to lengths to underline. Some might even go so far as to call it a joke. Should I be surprised you can't spell "deceit"?
Well, you're forgetting a couple of heads such as the DIA and the NRO, and (I suppose) the NGA, but actually I apologise for the insinuation—I consider it obvious that the DHS doesn't count simply because they get so much bad publicity. I generally agree with your description of them, although I think you give them too much credit. As far as enforcement goes, their job is done when The Bad Things are screwed up; their masters don't care if the job is clean or not.
Curtailing their activity would mean calming the sabre-rattlers at those agencies and within the executive branch, though, so don't hold your breath. It's not easy to convince bureaucratic careerists haunted by failure that their face-saving actions are immoral. In fact, that may be the hardest thing in the universe. You generally have to wait for them to die off and be replaced with people who have more relativist outlooks—and if Gorbachev's career in the Soviet Union is any indicator, that'll probably be another sixty years or so. Perhaps most tragic is that these people will never stand trial for what they have done to the world.
Actually, it is news, but you have to dig for it a little—Rainmeter must have been updated with a rootkit that hides how much CPU it uses. This rootkit is so effective that it no longer outperforms iTunes in its ability to devour system resources.
All anyone needs to know:
I've often wondered why TSA seems so unresponsive to the American public, and this book offered me a plausible explanation. Hawley seems to view TSA almost exclusively as a weapon in the US war against Al Qaeda. When TSA implements policies that seem crazy or ineffective to the rest of us, it doesn't use outside opinions to judge the effectiveness of its policies. Instead it uses information gathered from the intelligence community unavailable to outsiders. A policy change is considered effective if Al Qaeda reacts in a desirable way. For example, if a TSA operation deploys VIPR teams at public transportation centers and suspected Al Qaeda operatives leave the US afterwards, the operation is considered successful.
(From here.)
Which, really, is despicable and absurd all on its own.
But it does lend a lot of strength to the theory that all strange law enforcement actions of agencies created by or in the spirit of the PATRIOT Act are actually direct responses to some form of undesired activity.
You may be excited and horrified to know that the common language of Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin, does something similar. The horrifying part is that it's a creole based mostly on English—and they mark the past tense with the particle "pinis" after the verb (literally a mispronunciation of "finish".) Many, many languages fit under this isolating scheme, and many of them drop or reduce the value of copulas contextually as a result, although they're also pernicious users of auxiliary (helping) verbs.
Conlangs actually can get quite academic. There are several journals devoted exclusively to Tolkien's languages, and they discuss precisely this sort of thing.
I think it's just good old-fashioned bureaucratic daftness that causes it. Sort of like everyone's favourite Babbage quotation, only with more self-congratulation for reducing costs. The other plausible answer is an antisocial "not my problem" attitude, but those rarely even consider public welfare.
I think you're giving them too much credit. The DHS, like the TSA, is a very stimulus-driven organism. More likely they discovered some suspicious activity was utilizing Dwolla with Bitcoin, and decided to break the link between the two. The intelligence community in the US generally avoids bad PR as long as possible.
That's not an unreasonable construct for a language that has lost the verb in everyday use. In many languages the progressive aspect is denoted by a modification of the copula; if the verb later disappeared, it could till be used on its own as an archaism. In most languages, as long as the audience understands what is being said, you can say just about anything. It's only in modernity that we've tried to standardise our habits.
That's top-notch thinking, there, Catskul! You'll be mid-level management in no time.
Somewhat more seriously, 29.34% of all deaths in 2002 were caused by cardiovascular disease, making it by far the biggest killer. Traffic accidents account for 2.09% of deaths, and skin cancers were a measly 0.12%. (Cancers overall were 12.49%.)
Almost there! Try adding 1, so that the maximum value of sense_of_humor isn't 0. I assume german_heritage is already in the range [0,1].
That just means the translation was a little creative. There are several natural languages with no 'being' verb. Even if Okrand (not Okuna!) didn't provide a way of discussing existence in his dictionary, it's silly to think there's no way of doing so in a widely-used language.
I see where the problem is now. No, the term "brony" is much more inclusive than you appear to think. As it was first used inside the group, it does not have the pejorative connotations of "trekkie." Most self-labelled bronies are merely avid fans. This survey breaks it down. Only 16% agreed with the statement "[MLP] is my number one priority, all that I can think about."
For a lot of people in the MLP fandom, it is the only exposure they have had to New Sincerity. It provides a much-needed respite from the negativity of day-to-day life, as well as that of mainstream (and counterculture) media. This is why so many of them are so dedicated to the community (and how this charity came to be.) It doesn't really require obsession or fetishism to maintain critical mass.
Then say that before you start talking about fanaticism. Your first two posts were extremely dismissive and did not convey awareness of a vocal minority.
Every subculture has people like that, and in all of them, they are the minority. I suppose you also assume that all furries are fursuiters, all gays march in pride parades, all trekkies own Bat'leths or Spock ears, and everyone who has ever liked a Star Wars film writes "Jedi" when the census comes knocking? You really need to stop diagnosing people with stereotypes. People aren't as crazy as you think.
Indeed, Libertarians tend not to be very big on pragmatism or learning from history.