I have to say, learning about other alphabets really makes me appreciate the English alphabet because it has fewer characters than many alphabets. The number of characters didn't matter much until machines that could reproduce written words became commonplace (typewriters, computers, etc.), but it's interesting how keyboards can drive the simplification of some alphabets. E.g. if it's simpler to type "oe" than find the "" character, you can guess what people choose to do (even though France’s culture and communication ministry doesn't approve).
Languages are always changing, and it's nice to see a force that simplifies them. If only there were some force that could drive English spelling reform...
...because betting is a tax on bullshit. If anything needs to be taxed in this country, it's bullshit.
That said, it doesn't look like anyone has changed their minds over these bets. Even the losers are ignoring the holes in their pockets. I guess we need more bets...
It's also interesting to know who is making the bets. I've always wondered who genuinely disbelieves global warming and who claims to be a skeptic for political (or other) reasons. I'm guessing those that make large bets are sincere.
Github also has enterprise customers that pay money for github's services. 1300 people signed the letter. Why do you assume that none of them are paying customers?
...but when I do, I find that AJAM is impartial, informative, and pretty dull.
I was on a delayed plane a few months ago, so they gave everyone free in-flight tv to keep us somewhat happier. I didn't have anything better to do, so I flipped back and forth between Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and AJAM. (Maybe Bloomberg too?) Anyhow, it was really clear that AJAM was covering more events and doing it in a very non-sensationalist way. I learned more for AJAM than from the rest of the channels combined.
Being non-sensationalist must be part of the reason AJAM folded. It's hard to make money on TV by simply telling people the facts. It's much easier to make money by scaremongering. (E.g. ebola will kill us all!)
Thankfully, written news is cheaper to produce, so you can still get good information in written form.
When I say that, I'm speaking in terms of building your own net worth. Renting a house doesn't do that, instead it adds to somebody else's net worth. Borrowing money and paying interest does the same thing.
You've clearly been successful, but don't ignore opportunity costs and luck. Your house may well have been a good investment, but on average, homes are poor financial investments (although they can be great lifestyle investments). It looks like the Dow Jones went up about 40% between 2011 and 2014, which is a lot more than average home prices increased over the same period. So paying rent on a cheap apartment and investing in stocks could have been a better investment. You may have been able to do better than stocks by borrowing money (getting a mortgage) and then investing the borrowed money (in a house), but realize that leveraged investments are riskier than regular investments. If you bought stocks in 2007, your money would have gone poof. If you bought a house in 2007, your house's value would have gone poof and you would still have owed money on it.
Your language makes it sound like the economy is a zero sum game: building someone else's net worth means destroying your own. That's simply not true. You know from your mortgage that borrowing can be a good investment. The problem is that many people don't know when an investment is bad.
There are definitely similarities between renting and borrowing money, but there are important differences. Borrowing money means a (often long-term) obligation that you can't simply walk away from; you have to pay off the debt. If you're renting, you can just walk away once your contact is up. In my case, I only need to give 30 days notice if I want to move out.
The analogy between rent and interest also has problems. Rent means constant payments over time with a fixed total price and no long-term ownership; if you have a one year contract at $1k a month, then you know that you will pay $12k over the length of the contact and you don't own anything at the end of the day.
Repeated borrowing (like in credit cards or loans to pay off loans) means the price is not fixed, in part because the duration of the loan(s) is not fixed. If you have $1k in credit card debt, that could mean paying $1k immediately or it could mean paying a lot more over time. The flip side is that you do get long-term ownership of whatever you buy with the borrowed money.
Mortgages (and fixed-term borrowing) are closer to renting, but you own the property once the mortgage is payed off. Given the tax incentives for mortgages in the US, mortgages can be a pretty good deal.
A few months ago, I was kind of shocked to see that my computer was downloading Ubuntu updates from an IPv6 address. I was vaguely aware that AT&T DSL had IPv6 turned on (I could see the setting in their stupid gateway), but I didn't know that it actually got used. I'm looking at iftop right now, and most of my connections seem to be IPv6. So, IPv6 does get used for generic internet communications.
While that's a cool fact, do you have any data to suggest that many horses can do this (and that mules can't)? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your example is an exception rather than the rule.
(I'm not responding to you in particular, but this seems like a relevant branch to post in.)
I don't get why people think that it's not a real education unless you call malloc and free (or their equivalent in other languages). malloc and free are still automatic memory management because you're not implementing the details yourself. Yes, it's good to know how automatic memory management works, but calling simply malloc and free doesn't teach you that. Have you implemented your own memory management scheme from scratch? Unless the answer is 'yes', learning about memory management is something divorced from learning the language.
Complaining about automatic memory management is as silly as complaining about these newfangled languages like C with their automatic floating point arithmetic! CPUs didn't (and some still don't) have hardware floating point support, so floating point math was/is a software blackbox that gets used just like automatic memory management, but no one seems to complain about using the floating point black box.
Why? Because very few of us were brought up on languages without floating point support (I'm looking at you, FORTH), so we don't see floating point arithmetic as the black box that it is. However, many of us were brought up on languages without automatic memory management, so we can spot that black box.
Let's take the black-box problem to its, ahem, logical extreme: you're not a real programmer unless you can build your computer from scratch with NAND gates alone. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
Just let the kids have their automatic garbage collection, easy pointers, etc.
I see that they're hell-bent on watering down the computer science exams as much as possible. First they ax the AB exam (which had some real meat to it), and now they introduce a non-computer-science programming class. I'm not opposed to the test per se, but don't call it computer science. It sounds like something between a problem-solving challenge and weak vocational training. Again, that's not a bad thing, but call it what it is: AP Computer Literacy.
True, but it's not like regular videos are particularly protected on the internet either. I don't think that the polygons, gradients, etc. you'd be able to extract from a vector animation would be that useful for other animators; other animators can already copy the shapes and colors. What's valuable is the software and process that comes up with the shapes and their motion in the first place, and that's not part of the animation.
How is modern animation done? If it's done on computers in some sort of vector drawing format then, unless the drawings are really complicated, it seems a little silly to convert the (lossless) vector drawings to a (lossy) video in the first place. Surely modern computers can render 2D vector drawings in real time? I assume that the vector information can be stored relatively compactly.
FWIW, it sounds like some of the animation for My little pony is done with Flash, and much as I hate flash, a flash animation would surely would take less bandwith then a normal video, right?
Since the missions are independent of each other the sixth mission can have the same chance (50%) of success than the first one.
That's exactly what the GP is assuming! If each mission independently has 50% odds of success, then the probably of all of the succeeding is (0.5)^2=0.001953125, which is about 0.2%.
The Gambler's fallacy is something else entirely. In this case, the Gambler's fallacy would be: since we had such a long string of successes, we must be due for a failure. I.e. assuming that the true success rate is 50%, which is ridiculous, the probability for later mission must be less than 50% because the earlier missions had an above average success rate.
How on earth did this comment get modded +4 insightful?
As several posters have mentioned, the simplest way is to just use the heat to boil water. There reason you don't see giant water lines in existing reactors is that there's no point; they're experiments -- not powerplants.
Some years ago, I asked a plasma physics prof if there were other methods to get energy out of a reactor, and he said that there were -- at least in principle. Unfortunately, I don't recall the answer. There's a very large number of charged particles whizzing around in a reactor, so I can certainly believe there's some way to produce electricity more directly.
I corrected my comment about "distributed over the entire country" two minutes after I first posted.
The fact that 750 missiles were used to bring down 15 aircraft is interesting, but it doesn't change my conclusions. 15 planes is still 15 planes, and the missile system was a couple generations old at the time. See guestapoo's post (above) about how the missile systems were operated to avoid detection. If true, it's a knock on the B-52 that the north vietnamese hit a single B-52. A newer missile system could have made a world of difference.
B-52s did a fair amount of carpet bombing in Afghanistan not too long ago. The airforce definitely still practes carpet bombing, so it's not a bygone tactic that has been totally replaced by standoff weapons. (Yes, JDAMs aren't quite dumb bombs, but they sure aren't standoff weapons either.)
I agree that standoff weapons with a long enough range would help the B-52 stay out of harms way, but the US already has plenty of systems that can shoot standoff weapons: specially modified subs, regular subs, surface ships, other aircraft, and ground vehicles. Of those options, the B-52 is one of the least stealthy; China, Russia, etc. would sure see them coming.
I still don't see a good use for a B-52 against a modern military.
The A-10 is a well-designed, rugged plane. However, putting the engines back there doesn't make the plane invincible. A-10s have been shot down by surface-to-air missiles in the past, and missile designs are only improving while the A-10 is staying the same.
I'm not agreeing with the air force that we should get rid of the A-10s, but there's a fair amount of myth that surrounds the aircraft, and not all the myths are true. If the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan had man-portable surface-to-air missiles and knew how to use them, then there would be A-10 losses. Probably not a lot, but it might dispel the notion that the A-10s are magically invincible.
we didn't have weapons that could take out those *14* missile batteries. We had dumb bombs
No, the US had the AGM-78, which was a second-generation anti-radiation missile (i.e. a missile that homes in on radar emitters). By the time of Operation Linebacker I & II, the US had guided ordnance that was recognizably modern (e.g. laser guided bombs) and were used to great effect (example).
OTOH, we have bombed other countries since Vietnam that did have modern air defenses... Balkans
As far as I can tell, the Serbian milatary was usingS-125 surface to air missiles. The S-125 dates to 1961, so it's barely more modern than the S-75 used in Vietnam. It looks like Iraq was using S-125s too along with the slightly newer 2K12, which dates to 1970.
So no, we haven't bombed a single country with modern air defenses since at least the Korean war. The closest we got was in Vietnam. In Serbia it was a 38-year-old-system. In the Gulf war it was a 21-year-old system.
Standoff weapons would probably help, but given air defense systems with a 250 mi range (like the S-300s Iran bought), the B-52s would have to stay pretty far away, and fighter aircraft could still be a problem.
I think that launching standoff weapons from a stealthy ship makes more sense (unless the target is too far from shore). There's a reason the USN is ripping out the ICBM tubes from some submarines and replacing them with the capacity to launch up to 154 cruise missiles.
It's not clear that the B-52 was much used for its original design purpose either. The B-52 was introduced in 1955 and the S-75 was introduced in 1957. The USSR also had a lot more fighter aircraft that North Vietnam. The bombers will not always get through, and it's not clear that enough B-52s would reach their targets to be effective. There's a reason the US moved its nuclear focus to ballistic missiles.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say, learning about other alphabets really makes me appreciate the English alphabet because it has fewer characters than many alphabets. The number of characters didn't matter much until machines that could reproduce written words became commonplace (typewriters, computers, etc.), but it's interesting how keyboards can drive the simplification of some alphabets. E.g. if it's simpler to type "oe" than find the "" character, you can guess what people choose to do (even though France’s culture and communication ministry doesn't approve).
Languages are always changing, and it's nice to see a force that simplifies them. If only there were some force that could drive English spelling reform...
...because betting is a tax on bullshit. If anything needs to be taxed in this country, it's bullshit.
That said, it doesn't look like anyone has changed their minds over these bets. Even the losers are ignoring the holes in their pockets. I guess we need more bets...
It's also interesting to know who is making the bets. I've always wondered who genuinely disbelieves global warming and who claims to be a skeptic for political (or other) reasons. I'm guessing those that make large bets are sincere.
Github also has enterprise customers that pay money for github's services. 1300 people signed the letter. Why do you assume that none of them are paying customers?
They look basically the same. It turns out that marijuana doesn't turn your brain into a fried egg. Who knew?
...but when I do, I find that AJAM is impartial, informative, and pretty dull.
I was on a delayed plane a few months ago, so they gave everyone free in-flight tv to keep us somewhat happier. I didn't have anything better to do, so I flipped back and forth between Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and AJAM. (Maybe Bloomberg too?) Anyhow, it was really clear that AJAM was covering more events and doing it in a very non-sensationalist way. I learned more for AJAM than from the rest of the channels combined.
Being non-sensationalist must be part of the reason AJAM folded. It's hard to make money on TV by simply telling people the facts. It's much easier to make money by scaremongering. (E.g. ebola will kill us all!)
Thankfully, written news is cheaper to produce, so you can still get good information in written form.
When I say that, I'm speaking in terms of building your own net worth. Renting a house doesn't do that, instead it adds to somebody else's net worth. Borrowing money and paying interest does the same thing.
You've clearly been successful, but don't ignore opportunity costs and luck. Your house may well have been a good investment, but on average, homes are poor financial investments (although they can be great lifestyle investments). It looks like the Dow Jones went up about 40% between 2011 and 2014, which is a lot more than average home prices increased over the same period. So paying rent on a cheap apartment and investing in stocks could have been a better investment. You may have been able to do better than stocks by borrowing money (getting a mortgage) and then investing the borrowed money (in a house), but realize that leveraged investments are riskier than regular investments. If you bought stocks in 2007, your money would have gone poof. If you bought a house in 2007, your house's value would have gone poof and you would still have owed money on it.
Your language makes it sound like the economy is a zero sum game: building someone else's net worth means destroying your own. That's simply not true. You know from your mortgage that borrowing can be a good investment. The problem is that many people don't know when an investment is bad.
There are definitely similarities between renting and borrowing money, but there are important differences. Borrowing money means a (often long-term) obligation that you can't simply walk away from; you have to pay off the debt. If you're renting, you can just walk away once your contact is up. In my case, I only need to give 30 days notice if I want to move out.
The analogy between rent and interest also has problems. Rent means constant payments over time with a fixed total price and no long-term ownership; if you have a one year contract at $1k a month, then you know that you will pay $12k over the length of the contact and you don't own anything at the end of the day.
Repeated borrowing (like in credit cards or loans to pay off loans) means the price is not fixed, in part because the duration of the loan(s) is not fixed. If you have $1k in credit card debt, that could mean paying $1k immediately or it could mean paying a lot more over time. The flip side is that you do get long-term ownership of whatever you buy with the borrowed money.
Mortgages (and fixed-term borrowing) are closer to renting, but you own the property once the mortgage is payed off. Given the tax incentives for mortgages in the US, mortgages can be a pretty good deal.
A few months ago, I was kind of shocked to see that my computer was downloading Ubuntu updates from an IPv6 address. I was vaguely aware that AT&T DSL had IPv6 turned on (I could see the setting in their stupid gateway), but I didn't know that it actually got used. I'm looking at iftop right now, and most of my connections seem to be IPv6. So, IPv6 does get used for generic internet communications.
A horse has.
FTFY.
While that's a cool fact, do you have any data to suggest that many horses can do this (and that mules can't)? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your example is an exception rather than the rule.
A fool and his privacy are soon parted.
It's not too hard to find the post that the IRS agent found:
https://bitcointalk.org/index....
If interested, please send your answers to the following questions to rossulbricht at gmail dot com
In fact, it the post was simply there. It didn't have to be preserved in another poster's response.
I leave that as an exercise to the reader to find the posts where altoid (Ulbricht) promoted the Slik Road.
But never mind the facts; I'm sure the FBI just faked the post...
(I'm not responding to you in particular, but this seems like a relevant branch to post in.)
I don't get why people think that it's not a real education unless you call malloc and free (or their equivalent in other languages). malloc and free are still automatic memory management because you're not implementing the details yourself. Yes, it's good to know how automatic memory management works, but calling simply malloc and free doesn't teach you that. Have you implemented your own memory management scheme from scratch? Unless the answer is 'yes', learning about memory management is something divorced from learning the language.
Complaining about automatic memory management is as silly as complaining about these newfangled languages like C with their automatic floating point arithmetic! CPUs didn't (and some still don't) have hardware floating point support, so floating point math was/is a software blackbox that gets used just like automatic memory management, but no one seems to complain about using the floating point black box.
Why? Because very few of us were brought up on languages without floating point support (I'm looking at you, FORTH), so we don't see floating point arithmetic as the black box that it is. However, many of us were brought up on languages without automatic memory management, so we can spot that black box.
Let's take the black-box problem to its, ahem, logical extreme: you're not a real programmer unless you can build your computer from scratch with NAND gates alone. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
Just let the kids have their automatic garbage collection, easy pointers, etc.
I see that they're hell-bent on watering down the computer science exams as much as possible. First they ax the AB exam (which had some real meat to it), and now they introduce a non-computer-science programming class. I'm not opposed to the test per se, but don't call it computer science. It sounds like something between a problem-solving challenge and weak vocational training. Again, that's not a bad thing, but call it what it is: AP Computer Literacy.
True, but it's not like regular videos are particularly protected on the internet either. I don't think that the polygons, gradients, etc. you'd be able to extract from a vector animation would be that useful for other animators; other animators can already copy the shapes and colors. What's valuable is the software and process that comes up with the shapes and their motion in the first place, and that's not part of the animation.
How is modern animation done? If it's done on computers in some sort of vector drawing format then, unless the drawings are really complicated, it seems a little silly to convert the (lossless) vector drawings to a (lossy) video in the first place. Surely modern computers can render 2D vector drawings in real time? I assume that the vector information can be stored relatively compactly.
FWIW, it sounds like some of the animation for My little pony is done with Flash, and much as I hate flash, a flash animation would surely would take less bandwith then a normal video, right?
Since the missions are independent of each other the sixth mission can have the same chance (50%) of success than the first one.
That's exactly what the GP is assuming! If each mission independently has 50% odds of success, then the probably of all of the succeeding is (0.5)^2=0.001953125, which is about 0.2%.
The Gambler's fallacy is something else entirely. In this case, the Gambler's fallacy would be: since we had such a long string of successes, we must be due for a failure. I.e. assuming that the true success rate is 50%, which is ridiculous, the probability for later mission must be less than 50% because the earlier missions had an above average success rate.
How on earth did this comment get modded +4 insightful?
I should have wikied before I posted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As several posters have mentioned, the simplest way is to just use the heat to boil water. There reason you don't see giant water lines in existing reactors is that there's no point; they're experiments -- not powerplants.
Some years ago, I asked a plasma physics prof if there were other methods to get energy out of a reactor, and he said that there were -- at least in principle. Unfortunately, I don't recall the answer. There's a very large number of charged particles whizzing around in a reactor, so I can certainly believe there's some way to produce electricity more directly.
I corrected my comment about "distributed over the entire country" two minutes after I first posted.
The fact that 750 missiles were used to bring down 15 aircraft is interesting, but it doesn't change my conclusions. 15 planes is still 15 planes, and the missile system was a couple generations old at the time. See guestapoo's post (above) about how the missile systems were operated to avoid detection. If true, it's a knock on the B-52 that the north vietnamese hit a single B-52. A newer missile system could have made a world of difference.
B-52s did a fair amount of carpet bombing in Afghanistan not too long ago. The airforce definitely still practes carpet bombing, so it's not a bygone tactic that has been totally replaced by standoff weapons. (Yes, JDAMs aren't quite dumb bombs, but they sure aren't standoff weapons either.)
I agree that standoff weapons with a long enough range would help the B-52 stay out of harms way, but the US already has plenty of systems that can shoot standoff weapons: specially modified subs, regular subs, surface ships, other aircraft, and ground vehicles. Of those options, the B-52 is one of the least stealthy; China, Russia, etc. would sure see them coming.
I still don't see a good use for a B-52 against a modern military.
Yay! The US is buying 5000 silver bullets! Nothing could possibly go wrong!
It looks like the Serbs also had 2K12s, in which case their air defense system had components that were only 29 years old.
The A-10 is a well-designed, rugged plane. However, putting the engines back there doesn't make the plane invincible. A-10s have been shot down by surface-to-air missiles in the past, and missile designs are only improving while the A-10 is staying the same.
I'm not agreeing with the air force that we should get rid of the A-10s, but there's a fair amount of myth that surrounds the aircraft, and not all the myths are true. If the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan had man-portable surface-to-air missiles and knew how to use them, then there would be A-10 losses. Probably not a lot, but it might dispel the notion that the A-10s are magically invincible.
we didn't have weapons that could take out those *14* missile batteries. We had dumb bombs
No, the US had the AGM-78, which was a second-generation anti-radiation missile (i.e. a missile that homes in on radar emitters). By the time of Operation Linebacker I & II, the US had guided ordnance that was recognizably modern (e.g. laser guided bombs) and were used to great effect (example).
OTOH, we have bombed other countries since Vietnam that did have modern air defenses... Balkans
As far as I can tell, the Serbian milatary was using S-125 surface to air missiles. The S-125 dates to 1961, so it's barely more modern than the S-75 used in Vietnam. It looks like Iraq was using S-125s too along with the slightly newer 2K12, which dates to 1970.
So no, we haven't bombed a single country with modern air defenses since at least the Korean war. The closest we got was in Vietnam. In Serbia it was a 38-year-old-system. In the Gulf war it was a 21-year-old system.
Standoff weapons would probably help, but given air defense systems with a 250 mi range (like the S-300s Iran bought), the B-52s would have to stay pretty far away, and fighter aircraft could still be a problem.
I think that launching standoff weapons from a stealthy ship makes more sense (unless the target is too far from shore). There's a reason the USN is ripping out the ICBM tubes from some submarines and replacing them with the capacity to launch up to 154 cruise missiles.
It's not clear that the B-52 was much used for its original design purpose either. The B-52 was introduced in 1955 and the S-75 was introduced in 1957. The USSR also had a lot more fighter aircraft that North Vietnam. The bombers will not always get through, and it's not clear that enough B-52s would reach their targets to be effective. There's a reason the US moved its nuclear focus to ballistic missiles.