I'd think that it would be great for people who still have unreliable, slow, or expensive network connections. That might include home users who are still on flaky dialup, people who live in countries where dialup is still paid for by the minute, organizations that have overloaded connections, and the like. Many public schools, for instance, still don't have really good network connectivity, but they may have large numbers of students who want to read encyclopedia articles. It might be a lot easier for them to buy a couple of DVDs and install Wikipedia on several computers than to have students try to do everything on-line.
I think that a key issue is that not everything in our brains is handled the same way, so not all of it is equally easy to program. Conscious thought is essentially a software process running on the part of our brain that serves as a general-purpose computer. Our unconcious processes are essentially hardware processes running in parts of our brains that are specifically structured to do just that one thing. The fact that unconcious processes are run in hardware means that they're not subject to introspection. I suspect also that many of those processes are the kinds of things that are most efficiently done with custom hardware like DSPs rather than with general purpose CPUs.
Unfortunately for those who would use torture to get information, it's also a great way to get people who really don't know the answers to what you're asking to invent false information just to get you to stop.
Not that this argument necessarily applies to the case of torturing somebody to get his password. After all, it is both reasonable to believe that you know the password to your own account and possible to verify its accuracy by trying it.
It's not like a Swiss army knife; these combo phones are like a cheap, flimsy, tradeshow swag knockoff.
Sounds exactly like a Swiss army knife to me. It's really cool that a Swiss army knife can cram a bunch of gadgets into a compact form factor, but that comes at the cost of none of the gadgets doing a very good job. I have a real knife for when I want to cut things and a real toolbox for when I want to fix things. About the only thing that my Swiss army knife is good for is as a nicknack to keep my hands busy when I'm thinking.
This should be easy. The building is made of three components: an inner airtight layer, cloth, and concrete in the cloth. To make a door, you'd just have a section in which the inner layer wasn't covered by the cloth and concrete. You'd still be able to inflate the building, and when the concrete set you could cut through the uncovered inner layer with a knife to make a doorway.
The problem (as I see it) with TIMTOWTDI is that there are too many ways of doing some things, and these compound one another.
But that's really a separate issue. TIMTOWTDI isn't about the fact that there are lots of possible ways of coding a solution to a particular problem- that's true of any language. TIMTOWTDI is about Perl being non-orthogonal, i.e. built-in functions have overlapping capabilities.
To use an analogy, Perl has a larger vocabulary than other languages. Where a deliberately orthogonal language might have just one word meaning "of above average size" (big), Perl has several (big, huge, enormous, gigantic). That's annoying for people who are learning the language because they keep having to look words up in the dictionary, but it's great for accomplished speakers because they can say precisely in one word something that would require a whole phrase in another language.
At the same time, I wonder how true it is that Perl really has a huge vocabulary compared to other languages. Part of it is that Perl has builtin functions that are part of libraries in other languages. Is C really that much simpler than Perl if you include its standard libraries for things that are already built in to Perl, like IO, string manipulation, type manipulation, memory management, etc.?
There is a corresponding readability advantage to TIMTOWTDI, though. Frequently a second way of doing things is included specifically because it makes some particular problem easier. A function that lets you do in one like what otherwise would have taken ten does require you to learn a new function, but it also saves you from writing (and future coders from reading) nine lines of code every time you use it. That may hinder readability for the novice, but it enhances it for the expert. YMMV.
OTOH, newspapers sometimes publish material that is actually illegal to reveal, like classified government secrets. When a paper gets information like that, it tries to decide whether the newsworthiness of the information outweighs the legal danger of publishing it, and goes ahead and prints it if it is sufficiently newsworthy. Sometimes the paper is correct, as in the case of the Pentagon Papers, and sometimes it's wrong, as in the case of outing Valerie Plame, but in either case newspapers are perfectly happy to publish if they think it's a big enough scoop. Bloggers may have different standards of newsworthiness from newspapers, but they're making essentially the same kinds of decisions.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that all dubs are crap. I thought that the dub for Evangelion was perfectly watchable- Spike Spencer, who I haven't liked much in other roles did an excellent job as Shinji, for instance- and much of the work from Bang Zoom! seems to be first rate. I still prefer to watch the subs, but it's unfair to tar all dubs with the same brush.
It's not quite that simple, but 4000 pixels seems to be about right. Film doesn't have an absolute spacial frequency limit; it just records less and less contrast as the spacial frequency increases. Given a negative height of 18mm, 4000 pixels would give about 220 p/mm. Assuming you want double the spacial frequency, that would let you scan to 110 cycles/mm, a frequency at which most color movie camera film has essentially no contrast. Most of those films have a MTF of well under 50% at 50 cycles/mm. Black and white film has higher spatial resolution, but even there 100 cycles/mm is pushing it. And both of those are for the best modern film, so older versions may well have less resolution. That means that 4000 pixels per frame height is almost certainly overkill, though there's no particular reason not to overkill it if you have the technical resources to do so.
If I was a malicious coder, why would I want to spend time writing code that would only attack the 10% of computer users not running windows in the first place?
To get a bigger slice of a smaller pie. Worm authors aren't just writing the things as a form of random vandalism; they're writing them to set up botnets that they can use for other nefarious purposes. The huge volume of Windows malware means that there's serious competetion for infectable hosts. A successful Linux or OSX worm would have the whole field to itself, which would make up for the smaller number of infectable hosts.
Now, I know those definitions are techincally correct, but who thinks these ideas are easily applicable?
They're not intended to be easily applicable; they're intended to be as precise as possible. Even if it's very difficult to make the precise measurements so that it's only possible in a few labs, it's better to have the base definition be as tightly nailed down as possible. After making the hyperprecise technical definition, it's possible to make easier to use but less precise derived measurements that most people will use in practice. And, FWIW, in the case of the kilogram the new definition is almost certainly going to be easier to use than the old one, because it will actually be repeatable.
So define it as a different volume of liquid water at water's triple point. The triple point specifies a temperature and pressure based on the physical properties of water, which eliminates your objection. The Kelvin temperature scale is already defined using the triple point of water, so there shouldn't be any problem using it in another basic definition. A more practical problem is that we simply don't have the technology to build a container whose volume is as precise as we'd like the standard for the kilogram to be.
The ink was being used as a security marker and the business model of the company producing the hardware required that people buy three times as many disposables as they would if they let the cartridge run dry. The hardware company wasn't in the business of making print cartridges, so couldn't change the fill levels, so the only choice they had was to have the ink level indicator stop printing after a certain volume had been used.
So let me see if I have this right: the company that made the hardware depended on people buying lots of ink cartridges, but it didn't actually make the cartridges or have enough pull with the company that did make them to redesign them with a lower capacity? How in hell did that happen?
Seeing the word "God" repeated through out the Declaration of Independance and the Constitution may cause you to think that - because, of course, no other religions call their higher power just plain old "God".
Actually, I don't see "God" repeated throughout the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The word "God" appears exactly once in the Declaration of Independence (in the phrase "Nature and Nature's God") and zero times in the Constitution. If anything, I'd say that makes "God" conspicuous by its absence.
That may keep Google from scanning his library, but it doesn't mean that his library can't benefit from Google. If BFN scans its own library and puts it in a publically accessible web site, then Google will spider it and add it to their existing set of web pages. And I'm pretty sure that Google wouldn't say no if a library offered to let it add a few million volumes to its existing set of scanned books, either.
Besides what is a French person doing complaining about things like this? The French are the biggest language snobs on the planet.
It seems to me that this kind of complaint is exactly what you'd expect from a language snob. The French are always upset when things are done first in English because they think that everything should be done in French first.
Maybe this is nitpicking, but could we please go back to saying "citizens" instead of "consumers?"
Actually, "residents" would probably be more accurate in this case than "citizens", because the laws apply to everyone who lives in California. Noncitizens (including illegal aliens, IIRC) get the same protections as citizens. Given California's large immigrant population that's a not-so-minor point.
That type of processing is frequently called "embarrasingly parallel", and it's far more common than you seem to think. I think that 3D rendering and web serving that doesn't require writing to a database can all be handled this way. There are also many categories of scientific data processing- think SETI@home- that work this way. The real reason that this kind of SMP isn't interesting is because it's so easy that you don't need fancy hardware like 64-way servers to take advantage of it. It can be farmed out to clusters of cheap PCs, or even distributed over the network to volunteers.
But Mozilla/Firefox evolved from Netscape which has been around since the very early days as well.
Not really. The Mozilla developers decided that the old Netscape codebase was so awful that they threw most of it away and started over from scratch. That's part of the reason that Mozilla took so long to reach 1.0, but also explains why it's developing so much faster than IE today.
This is not correct if your OS supports confinement.
It depends on what kind of program the bad guy is convincing you to run. If it's an operating system- and Microsoft is very worried about bad guys named Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds convincing people to run non-Microsoft OSes on their computers- then what Microsoft says is absolutely correct. Microsoft is thus very interested in creating hardware that will protect users from being able to install GNU/Linux.
You're wrong. The only mention of Congress publishing anything is:
Article 1, Section 5. 3. Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House, on any question, shall, at the desire of one-fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.
So Congress does have the power to declare that some things are secret and refuse to publish them. It's right there in the Constitution.
After they got the news that the US had the bomb (the war was over by then) they seriously sat together and figured out how things were working correctly withing a few days (they did not have anything to prevent anymore and basically could focus on science again)
Of course building a bomb from scratch is orders of magnitude more difficult than observing a bomb and figuring out how it works. It's the classic difference between designing and bringing to market a new product and reverse-engineering it. The scientists studying the properties of the actual bomb were able to avoid all of the pitfalls and blind alleys that the original developers had to pursue. They weren't producing engineering diagrams for an actual functioning bomb, either, just a theoretical understanding of how a bomb could work. They also didn't have to build a whole nuclear industry to produce the required bomb-making materials, which historically was by far the most expensive and time-consuming part of the Manhattan Project.
Economics is not a science because there are no experiments to prove its hypotheses, unlike medicen which does it as much as possible.
There are two problems with this argument:
It is possible to perform economic experiments. I've participated (as a subject) in microeconomic experiments. The experimenters would present us with a designed trading setup and test to see how we behaved; they ensured that we behaved rationally by giving cash payouts tied to our economic success in the experimental system. Those kinds of experiments put much of microeconomics on a sound scientific footing.
If lack of experiments prevents something from being a science, then you can scratch fields like Astronomy and Paleontology off the list of sciences. Those fields are sciences, though, because it doesn't really matter whether you're studying results of planned experiments or pre-existing events. If it's possible to isolate factors and compare their significance, it's possible to test hypotheses, and that's the true test of science. That is possible in economics- it's possible to study the impact of taxes by comparing different American states with different tax codes, for instance- so economics counts as a science.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd think that it would be great for people who still have unreliable, slow, or expensive network connections. That might include home users who are still on flaky dialup, people who live in countries where dialup is still paid for by the minute, organizations that have overloaded connections, and the like. Many public schools, for instance, still don't have really good network connectivity, but they may have large numbers of students who want to read encyclopedia articles. It might be a lot easier for them to buy a couple of DVDs and install Wikipedia on several computers than to have students try to do everything on-line.
I think that a key issue is that not everything in our brains is handled the same way, so not all of it is equally easy to program. Conscious thought is essentially a software process running on the part of our brain that serves as a general-purpose computer. Our unconcious processes are essentially hardware processes running in parts of our brains that are specifically structured to do just that one thing. The fact that unconcious processes are run in hardware means that they're not subject to introspection. I suspect also that many of those processes are the kinds of things that are most efficiently done with custom hardware like DSPs rather than with general purpose CPUs.
Not that this argument necessarily applies to the case of torturing somebody to get his password. After all, it is both reasonable to believe that you know the password to your own account and possible to verify its accuracy by trying it.
Sounds exactly like a Swiss army knife to me. It's really cool that a Swiss army knife can cram a bunch of gadgets into a compact form factor, but that comes at the cost of none of the gadgets doing a very good job. I have a real knife for when I want to cut things and a real toolbox for when I want to fix things. About the only thing that my Swiss army knife is good for is as a nicknack to keep my hands busy when I'm thinking.
That's why so many techies have started wearing utility belts. They give you a lot of space to hang all your various gadgets.
This should be easy. The building is made of three components: an inner airtight layer, cloth, and concrete in the cloth. To make a door, you'd just have a section in which the inner layer wasn't covered by the cloth and concrete. You'd still be able to inflate the building, and when the concrete set you could cut through the uncovered inner layer with a knife to make a doorway.
But that's really a separate issue. TIMTOWTDI isn't about the fact that there are lots of possible ways of coding a solution to a particular problem- that's true of any language. TIMTOWTDI is about Perl being non-orthogonal, i.e. built-in functions have overlapping capabilities.
To use an analogy, Perl has a larger vocabulary than other languages. Where a deliberately orthogonal language might have just one word meaning "of above average size" (big), Perl has several (big, huge, enormous, gigantic). That's annoying for people who are learning the language because they keep having to look words up in the dictionary, but it's great for accomplished speakers because they can say precisely in one word something that would require a whole phrase in another language.
At the same time, I wonder how true it is that Perl really has a huge vocabulary compared to other languages. Part of it is that Perl has builtin functions that are part of libraries in other languages. Is C really that much simpler than Perl if you include its standard libraries for things that are already built in to Perl, like IO, string manipulation, type manipulation, memory management, etc.?
There is a corresponding readability advantage to TIMTOWTDI, though. Frequently a second way of doing things is included specifically because it makes some particular problem easier. A function that lets you do in one like what otherwise would have taken ten does require you to learn a new function, but it also saves you from writing (and future coders from reading) nine lines of code every time you use it. That may hinder readability for the novice, but it enhances it for the expert. YMMV.
OTOH, newspapers sometimes publish material that is actually illegal to reveal, like classified government secrets. When a paper gets information like that, it tries to decide whether the newsworthiness of the information outweighs the legal danger of publishing it, and goes ahead and prints it if it is sufficiently newsworthy. Sometimes the paper is correct, as in the case of the Pentagon Papers, and sometimes it's wrong, as in the case of outing Valerie Plame, but in either case newspapers are perfectly happy to publish if they think it's a big enough scoop. Bloggers may have different standards of newsworthiness from newspapers, but they're making essentially the same kinds of decisions.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that all dubs are crap. I thought that the dub for Evangelion was perfectly watchable- Spike Spencer, who I haven't liked much in other roles did an excellent job as Shinji, for instance- and much of the work from Bang Zoom! seems to be first rate. I still prefer to watch the subs, but it's unfair to tar all dubs with the same brush.
It's not quite that simple, but 4000 pixels seems to be about right. Film doesn't have an absolute spacial frequency limit; it just records less and less contrast as the spacial frequency increases. Given a negative height of 18mm, 4000 pixels would give about 220 p/mm. Assuming you want double the spacial frequency, that would let you scan to 110 cycles/mm, a frequency at which most color movie camera film has essentially no contrast. Most of those films have a MTF of well under 50% at 50 cycles/mm. Black and white film has higher spatial resolution, but even there 100 cycles/mm is pushing it. And both of those are for the best modern film, so older versions may well have less resolution. That means that 4000 pixels per frame height is almost certainly overkill, though there's no particular reason not to overkill it if you have the technical resources to do so.
To get a bigger slice of a smaller pie. Worm authors aren't just writing the things as a form of random vandalism; they're writing them to set up botnets that they can use for other nefarious purposes. The huge volume of Windows malware means that there's serious competetion for infectable hosts. A successful Linux or OSX worm would have the whole field to itself, which would make up for the smaller number of infectable hosts.
They're not intended to be easily applicable; they're intended to be as precise as possible. Even if it's very difficult to make the precise measurements so that it's only possible in a few labs, it's better to have the base definition be as tightly nailed down as possible. After making the hyperprecise technical definition, it's possible to make easier to use but less precise derived measurements that most people will use in practice. And, FWIW, in the case of the kilogram the new definition is almost certainly going to be easier to use than the old one, because it will actually be repeatable.
So define it as a different volume of liquid water at water's triple point. The triple point specifies a temperature and pressure based on the physical properties of water, which eliminates your objection. The Kelvin temperature scale is already defined using the triple point of water, so there shouldn't be any problem using it in another basic definition. A more practical problem is that we simply don't have the technology to build a container whose volume is as precise as we'd like the standard for the kilogram to be.
So let me see if I have this right: the company that made the hardware depended on people buying lots of ink cartridges, but it didn't actually make the cartridges or have enough pull with the company that did make them to redesign them with a lower capacity? How in hell did that happen?
Actually, I don't see "God" repeated throughout the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The word "God" appears exactly once in the Declaration of Independence (in the phrase "Nature and Nature's God") and zero times in the Constitution. If anything, I'd say that makes "God" conspicuous by its absence.
That may keep Google from scanning his library, but it doesn't mean that his library can't benefit from Google. If BFN scans its own library and puts it in a publically accessible web site, then Google will spider it and add it to their existing set of web pages. And I'm pretty sure that Google wouldn't say no if a library offered to let it add a few million volumes to its existing set of scanned books, either.
It seems to me that this kind of complaint is exactly what you'd expect from a language snob. The French are always upset when things are done first in English because they think that everything should be done in French first.
Actually, "residents" would probably be more accurate in this case than "citizens", because the laws apply to everyone who lives in California. Noncitizens (including illegal aliens, IIRC) get the same protections as citizens. Given California's large immigrant population that's a not-so-minor point.
That type of processing is frequently called "embarrasingly parallel", and it's far more common than you seem to think. I think that 3D rendering and web serving that doesn't require writing to a database can all be handled this way. There are also many categories of scientific data processing- think SETI@home- that work this way. The real reason that this kind of SMP isn't interesting is because it's so easy that you don't need fancy hardware like 64-way servers to take advantage of it. It can be farmed out to clusters of cheap PCs, or even distributed over the network to volunteers.
Not really. The Mozilla developers decided that the old Netscape codebase was so awful that they threw most of it away and started over from scratch. That's part of the reason that Mozilla took so long to reach 1.0, but also explains why it's developing so much faster than IE today.
It depends on what kind of program the bad guy is convincing you to run. If it's an operating system- and Microsoft is very worried about bad guys named Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds convincing people to run non-Microsoft OSes on their computers- then what Microsoft says is absolutely correct. Microsoft is thus very interested in creating hardware that will protect users from being able to install GNU/Linux.
You're wrong. The only mention of Congress publishing anything is:
So Congress does have the power to declare that some things are secret and refuse to publish them. It's right there in the Constitution.
Of course building a bomb from scratch is orders of magnitude more difficult than observing a bomb and figuring out how it works. It's the classic difference between designing and bringing to market a new product and reverse-engineering it. The scientists studying the properties of the actual bomb were able to avoid all of the pitfalls and blind alleys that the original developers had to pursue. They weren't producing engineering diagrams for an actual functioning bomb, either, just a theoretical understanding of how a bomb could work. They also didn't have to build a whole nuclear industry to produce the required bomb-making materials, which historically was by far the most expensive and time-consuming part of the Manhattan Project.
There are two problems with this argument: