As it happens I agree with you (if you look over my posting history you'll find many references to my vegetarianism), but, as it happens I also agree with the essential point of the parent poster.
A sport may be cruel, and yet still be a sport, with all the admirable things that are attendant upon sport. Bullfighting is barbarism, and yet it is, like it or not, a sport.
The problem with hunting over the internet is that it is just cruelty.
(Although I would posit that legimately hunting for food is another matter. I won't do it, but I don't fall into the trap of thinking of lions as "cruel" animals for seeking to continue living, and I respect people like Nugent far more than I do people who buy their meat but would blanche at killing an animal).
Notice that the dictionary does not identify it as slang? It's a variant pronunciation, which is a different kettle of fish (which is slang, see the difference?). Cockney rhymning schemes are slang. Cockney accents are not.
It's the same as route being pronounced either as "root" or "rout." Both are acceptable, but neither is slang.
Which I didn't actually know about "axe," so thank you for the link anyway. You learn something new every day, or at least I try to. I'm going to have to save this knowledge to spring on my pedantic, Masters in English from Harvard, ex-stepfather some day.
The fact that it is actually used in modern speech is no particular news to me though. I was born in East Harlem of New England parents.
It's quite possible, possibly even probable, but it's also been about 40 years since I first heard that joke.
It's one of those "natural" jokes that everyone comes up with, at least those of us in neighborhoods where people actually say "axe." Kinda like when the first mobile phone answering machine was announced 50 gajillion comedians (and some of us who just talk funny) responded with "I'm at home right now, but when I go out I'll get back to you."
How much do you suppose it would cost, using all the engineering prowess and modern technology America can bring to bear to build a stone wall from NYC to LA?
Now how much do you suppose it would cost doing it duplicating how the Chinese did it many, many years ago? No lawyers, no OSHA, no salaries of workers, thus not even much in the way of materials cost, no real estate costs, etc?
Well, a massive amount of money actually, but a far, far less massive amount than the massive amount required to do it our way.
An interesting part is that it would also take far less time, even without the aid of ground moving machines and power stone cutters. Lawyers eat time like you wouldn't believe.
I'm afraid this applies directly to the cost of building a particle accelerator. There's nothing magically special about a particle accelerator that puts it in another catagory from any other large engineering project. There's no extra charge because it's "science" project.
Hell, you could build a perfectly functional particle accelerator in your basement for vitually nil, if you're willing to regard your time and labor as being without cost. Not one you could use to look for the Higgs boson, admitedly, but one that would get you to Mars just as fast.
As would the computer you used to write your post with, as compared to a massive grid.
(I still don't know why i was modded as flamebait)
Mods on crack?
I wish every country would spend more money on science.
Whereas I would be perfectly happy if they simply spent what they do far more wisely. Newton's calculus and laws of gravitation and the Special Theory of Relativity were "spare time" projects developed at, effectively, no cost.
It's something to think about.
Simply adding more men and money doesn't necessarily mean any greater return at all. Mostly it's an employment project.
We our really polite at times before killing people.
This isn't done for the benefit of the people being bombed, so much as it is for the people being called upon to pay for the bombs.
The taxpayers get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that we blowed 'em up real good with love and compassion.
This isn't a strictly American thing, many countries have their own cultural variation on the theme. Japan promoted the invasion of China as an act of compassion for the Chinese heretic scum to the home market as well. It's a lot more fun to pay for a "Sword that bring life" than it is to pay for a "Sword that spits babies three at a time."
It's all just part of the bizzare mass psychology a nation must must be whipped up into to wage an aggressive war.
Linux's achilles heel is all its own strength, the kernel.
Oddly enough exactly the same is true of Windows. Engineering strengths always come at the expense of some weakness, just as glass is stronger than steel, but far more brittle.
Why is it that the snooty Linux gurus always pooh-pooh Linspire anyway?
Because it's a really lousy distro for Linux gurus on several levels. Even Linspire recommends Mandrake for "technical" users and Red Hat for servers.
There distro is clearly aimed at user who need to be told that:
"Linux is an "Operating System". .."
I strongly suspect that the people at Linspire would consider anyone who feels talked down to by putting "Operating System" in quotes is "technical" user who might be better served by using Mandrake.
There is also the issue of the company itself. While not outright evil it has a whiff of sulpher about it, and always has. Their website, while never outright lying, is rather smarmily disengenuous about just what Linux and Free/Open Source software is. In effect they have the appearance of catering to the ignorant Windows user in order to prey on them. They talk about the Linux "per user" license, rather than the free license. Their own license is refered to as "per family" which sounds somehow superior to a "per user" license distro like, oh, Debian, which they never mention, because then they'd have to point out that you just download that one free and get into the real issues of the Linux licenses. They also never mention that the distros they do compare Linspire to (and as noted even recommend to certain users) may have a freely downloadable version.
So, on the whole the product and the company are repulsive, not just to the Linux guru, but even to the merely Linux aware.
My impression is that it's probably a nifty little distro for the bubblegum popping receptionist who doesn't want to move from Windows because she'll get lost if the blue on an icon is a slightly different hue, but the average Linux guru, while he may find certain individual aspects of said receptionist rather attractive, is going to be repulsed by the entire package taken as a whole.
And so for Linspire.
That doesn't mean it's a Bad(tm) distro, just why a snooty Linux guru would pooh-pooh it.
If this RFID thing works to counter dumbass laws like this. ..
This RFID thing has absolutely no relationship to this law and can exert no pressure on it, in any direction.
How could you not be?
I believe it's called 'experience.' Yes, including that of being a parent.
It's interesting to note that state to state ( and even more especially country to country) there is wide disagreement in just what rights minors should have at what age (all localities seem to agree that the rights of minors come in stages and isn't simply a "you're a minor or you're not" issue. For instance, in my state, a 14 year old technically does not own his own money, but a 15 year old does. One is not a newborn until the age of 18 and then magically transformed, butterfly like, into an adult), but there is nearly universal agreement, across states and countries, that 16 year olds are free from legal coercion, other than those laws that also apply to adults.
erm, the students are affected by this, so i would welcome their responses.
So your use of swipe cards is a voluntary system? If the students staged a swipe card boycott your administrative response would be, "Oh, well, if you don't like them we won't use them anymore"?
I might also point out that the people affected by this might be a wider slice of the populace than you expect, like the fireman who loses his life trying to rescuse what turns out to be a loose RFID tag. All security measures that are ostensibly designed to protect also have equal capacity to destroy in this manner. Risk, like energy, is immutable. You can shift it, but you can't make it go away. There even comes a time when security measures bog the system so much it can no longer produce work, so there you are, still insecure on the whole, but at least you have the advantage of not getting anything for your risk to fall back on.
Every parent is also affected, of course. Many of the people who simply interact with the students are affected. The entire law enforcement community is affected. Anyone who holds to the Old Testament is affected, like, oh, say, Orthodox Jews (and do you tag them by tagging them against their religion, or do you tag them by excusing them. "Ok, everyone without a tag come to the locker room.") Of course if I'm not a Jew maybe I should just shut up because it doesn't affect me?
Sir, this sort of thing ends up affecting everyone.
. ..if you're not in the position to be affected by this, shut the hell up.....
You sir, represent the trackers.
Would you bother to ask the trackees, the ones actually most affected by this, how they feel about it, or would you 'explain' the benefits to them and tell any who objected because they 'didn't get it' to shut the hell up?
When I was in college we built the second most stable laser table in the world, for $700. Stanford had the most stable. Theirs cost over a million.
One of the problems that American science faces is the degree to which it relies on money where determination and ingenuity will often get the job done. This often results in no science getting done when the perception is that there isn't enough money to do any.
The Chinese are very good at getting things done without a lot of money because lack of funds is their native enviroment. As an example, if you were stranded in the woods you would likely starve to death, because you couldn't find a place to buy food. A person raised in the woods simply eats. Reverse the situation though, put the woodsy guy in the city and he can still scrounge a meal or two completely on his own, without a dime in his pocket, because he doesn't think about needing money, he thinks about finding what he needs, so he goes about and finds it. If he has to go hungry a day or two he doesn't waste time fretting about not having money, he simply thinks of that as a normal part of life and continues looking for what he needs until he finds it.
Now let's apply the same idea to a technology race. I posit a bicycle race from NYC to LA. The two participants start with the clothes on their backs and ten bucks each seed capital. They're allowed to get more money, but they have to earn it on their own.
My neighbor, representing "Western" science, would solve the issue this way; he'd go out and get a job (50% of the procedes of which will go to supporting the job itself. One of the first things he's likely buy in this bicycle race is a car, then fancy clothes that are worthless while bicycling cross country, but that he needs to wear to work, etc.). When he has enough money he'll books on bicycling, maybe join a gym, order catalogs and start making his list of required equipment, then, when he as enough money, he'll but the stuff and after a year, maybe two, he'll set off in the actual bicycling.
Me, representing "Eastern" science will use the ten bucks to buy a couple of wrenches and a screw driver. I'll be on the road in a week, maybe two, scrounging what I need along the way (including a bit of work to have some money in my pocket). I'll be sipping a Pepsi on Venice Beach in a month, maybe two.
What's more, I'll already be a colonized native of Venice Beach, with a job and local connections, long before the other guy arrives and has to compete with me.
China can get to Mars first without spending much money, compared to us, and the first one to establish a base is the likely long term winner, no matter how "primitive" they are in their manner of doing it.
Hell, they could still beat us out on the moon, even though they're starting 40 years behind, because we went there first, but then abandoned it.
It's not the guy who plants the first flag on the mountaintop who wins. It's the guy who builds the first castle there. Once the mountain stronghold is built you just try and go knock him off the mountain.
Alternatively, the Chinese are doing things that everyone else did 40 years ago. They aren't pushing a single boundary, ANYWHERE.
The funny thing is that that's pretty much what the British were saying about America 40 or 50 years before that. 40 years is time enough for the whole world to change, but short enough for you to have to live in the end result.
Boundries are local affairs as well as global. To push the global boundries first you must push your own out to meet the global limits. ..then keep going.
Remember, before he started training for it Roger Bannister couldn't run a 4 minute mile either and lots of other runners were faster than he was.
He still got their first.
Don't you kid yourself, China is playing to win and they have everything they need to do so.
The premise of our research project is that programmers will have an easier job if their programming tasks are made more natural. By "natural," we mean "faithfully representing nature or life,"
It seems like a natural language to me, since, even if the Pythagorians are wrong, mathematics seems to be the natural language of the universe. Using mathematics as the language to model nature was perhaps the greatest breakthrough in science. Descarte's analytic geometry in particular moved the modeling of nature forward in one giagantic leap.
They like to call themselves computer "scientists" and "engineers," don't they? Maybe we should make sure they have the mathematical background that's supposed to go with those titles, instead of how to use a particular commercial product.
. . . which here implies it works in the way people expect.
People often expect some pretty unnaturally daft shit, frankly. Who was the first person to think that chicken guts modeled the behavior of their wife, and why, after trying it, did they think it actually worked? I don't want to program in chicken guts, thank you very much.
By "natural programming" we are aiming for the language and environment to work the way that nonprogrammers expect.
Ah! Now we're getting down to it. What they want is programming without education, the computer to be smarter than the person. Well, a computer is just a rock. It's very smart for a rock, but it's still just a rock. Ok, maybe computers are smarter than some people, but those people really shouldn't be programming. And please, someone hand them a pair of scissors and send them out jogging.
What the hell is with this current movement that holds that education is evil and things should just be made to be worked by the ignorant?
We've tried "natural" programming languages before. More than once. Do you know why we don't use them anymore? Because if you know what the hell you are doing they suck.
Analytic Geometry for everybody, Ken Iverson for President and Free APL.
The cockroaches stood on a hill Looking out over the ruins of a once great civilization Each with the same thought in his little mind "Damn, they sure made good chocolate chip cookies."
Well, maybe, but only if they start broadcasting our TV from Mars.
And replace the 18 inch dishes with 5 meter telescopes. Hey, I might even sign up for the deal with that one.
If they could target each individual customer to within even a 6ft diameter, neighbors won't be able to leech subscribers signals even if they could decrypt it.
It's called "cable."
. ..they'll get their eventually.
In their wet dreams. Millions, let alone hundreds of millions, of individual tight beams from orbit just ain't gonna happen. It's more than cost prohibitive, it's daft.
Well, they had originally gotten together intending to take the world's largest digital picture of a girl, but the plan fell through when it turned out that none of them knew one.
Well, if the Pythagorians are right I'm looking out my window at the largest digital picture in the universe right now. I laugh at your 10 gigs as I contemplate an image that requires all of the fundamental particles to store, and that's before we even get into the issues of storage media geometry.
The problem does not arise when you look up things you know about. It arises when you look up things you don't know about, which is the raison d'etre of an encyclopedia.
Yes, he's in the encylopedia business, but then the Britannica is well noted for knowing its business. Wikis still have some trouble along that score, they haven't entirely figured out what encyclopedia means.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the pig cute?
KFG
As it happens I agree with you (if you look over my posting history you'll find many references to my vegetarianism), but, as it happens I also agree with the essential point of the parent poster.
A sport may be cruel, and yet still be a sport, with all the admirable things that are attendant upon sport. Bullfighting is barbarism, and yet it is, like it or not, a sport.
The problem with hunting over the internet is that it is just cruelty.
(Although I would posit that legimately hunting for food is another matter. I won't do it, but I don't fall into the trap of thinking of lions as "cruel" animals for seeking to continue living, and I respect people like Nugent far more than I do people who buy their meat but would blanche at killing an animal).
KFG
Notice that the dictionary does not identify it as slang? It's a variant pronunciation, which is a different kettle of fish (which is slang, see the difference?). Cockney rhymning schemes are slang. Cockney accents are not.
It's the same as route being pronounced either as "root" or "rout." Both are acceptable, but neither is slang.
Which I didn't actually know about "axe," so thank you for the link anyway. You learn something new every day, or at least I try to. I'm going to have to save this knowledge to spring on my pedantic, Masters in English from Harvard, ex-stepfather some day.
The fact that it is actually used in modern speech is no particular news to me though. I was born in East Harlem of New England parents.
KFG
It's quite possible, possibly even probable, but it's also been about 40 years since I first heard that joke.
It's one of those "natural" jokes that everyone comes up with, at least those of us in neighborhoods where people actually say "axe." Kinda like when the first mobile phone answering machine was announced 50 gajillion comedians (and some of us who just talk funny) responded with "I'm at home right now, but when I go out I'll get back to you."
KFG
"Nerd" is slang. Computer nerds often talk in nothing but slang, which noncomputer nerds often find maddening.
"Axe" for "ask" isn't slang, it's just "fucked up," which is slang.
KFG
Certain things can't.
How much do you suppose it would cost, using all the engineering prowess and modern technology America can bring to bear to build a stone wall from NYC to LA?
Now how much do you suppose it would cost doing it duplicating how the Chinese did it many, many years ago? No lawyers, no OSHA, no salaries of workers, thus not even much in the way of materials cost, no real estate costs, etc?
Well, a massive amount of money actually, but a far, far less massive amount than the massive amount required to do it our way.
An interesting part is that it would also take far less time, even without the aid of ground moving machines and power stone cutters. Lawyers eat time like you wouldn't believe.
I'm afraid this applies directly to the cost of building a particle accelerator. There's nothing magically special about a particle accelerator that puts it in another catagory from any other large engineering project. There's no extra charge because it's "science" project.
Hell, you could build a perfectly functional particle accelerator in your basement for vitually nil, if you're willing to regard your time and labor as being without cost. Not one you could use to look for the Higgs boson, admitedly, but one that would get you to Mars just as fast.
As would the computer you used to write your post with, as compared to a massive grid.
(I still don't know why i was modded as flamebait)
Mods on crack?
I wish every country would spend more money on science.
Whereas I would be perfectly happy if they simply spent what they do far more wisely. Newton's calculus and laws of gravitation and the Special Theory of Relativity were "spare time" projects developed at, effectively, no cost.
It's something to think about.
Simply adding more men and money doesn't necessarily mean any greater return at all. Mostly it's an employment project.
KFG
We our really polite at times before killing people.
This isn't done for the benefit of the people being bombed, so much as it is for the people being called upon to pay for the bombs.
The taxpayers get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that we blowed 'em up real good with love and compassion.
This isn't a strictly American thing, many countries have their own cultural variation on the theme. Japan promoted the invasion of China as an act of compassion for the Chinese heretic scum to the home market as well. It's a lot more fun to pay for a "Sword that bring life" than it is to pay for a "Sword that spits babies three at a time."
It's all just part of the bizzare mass psychology a nation must must be whipped up into to wage an aggressive war.
KFG
KFG
But then what will we use the Palace Of Westminster for?
KFG
Linux's achilles heel is all its own strength, the kernel.
Oddly enough exactly the same is true of Windows. Engineering strengths always come at the expense of some weakness, just as glass is stronger than steel, but far more brittle.
KFG
Why is it that the snooty Linux gurus always pooh-pooh Linspire anyway?
."
Because it's a really lousy distro for Linux gurus on several levels. Even Linspire recommends Mandrake for "technical" users and Red Hat for servers.
There distro is clearly aimed at user who need to be told that:
"Linux is an "Operating System". .
I strongly suspect that the people at Linspire would consider anyone who feels talked down to by putting "Operating System" in quotes is "technical" user who might be better served by using Mandrake.
There is also the issue of the company itself. While not outright evil it has a whiff of sulpher about it, and always has. Their website, while never outright lying, is rather smarmily disengenuous about just what Linux and Free/Open Source software is. In effect they have the appearance of catering to the ignorant Windows user in order to prey on them. They talk about the Linux "per user" license, rather than the free license. Their own license is refered to as "per family" which sounds somehow superior to a "per user" license distro like, oh, Debian, which they never mention, because then they'd have to point out that you just download that one free and get into the real issues of the Linux licenses. They also never mention that the distros they do compare Linspire to (and as noted even recommend to certain users) may have a freely downloadable version.
So, on the whole the product and the company are repulsive, not just to the Linux guru, but even to the merely Linux aware.
My impression is that it's probably a nifty little distro for the bubblegum popping receptionist who doesn't want to move from Windows because she'll get lost if the blue on an icon is a slightly different hue, but the average Linux guru, while he may find certain individual aspects of said receptionist rather attractive, is going to be repulsed by the entire package taken as a whole.
And so for Linspire.
That doesn't mean it's a Bad(tm) distro, just why a snooty Linux guru would pooh-pooh it.
KFG
It is important to push emotions aside and keep things in perspective.
Indeed.
KFG
Consumers are rebeling at paying $15 for a BTO. . .
Hey, they're just takin' care of business, every day. Takin' care of business, every way.
Everybody, sing! Yeah, baby!
KFG
If this RFID thing works to counter dumbass laws like this. . .
This RFID thing has absolutely no relationship to this law and can exert no pressure on it, in any direction.
How could you not be?
I believe it's called 'experience.' Yes, including that of being a parent.
It's interesting to note that state to state ( and even more especially country to country) there is wide disagreement in just what rights minors should have at what age (all localities seem to agree that the rights of minors come in stages and isn't simply a "you're a minor or you're not" issue. For instance, in my state, a 14 year old technically does not own his own money, but a 15 year old does. One is not a newborn until the age of 18 and then magically transformed, butterfly like, into an adult), but there is nearly universal agreement, across states and countries, that 16 year olds are free from legal coercion, other than those laws that also apply to adults.
Perhaps you are overlooking something?
KFG
. . .not the sixteen year olds. Has it ever been otherwise?
Yes, it has always been otherwise. Try sending a truant officer or a policeman after a wayward 16 year old, even as the 16 year old's parent.
You'll find you can't do it.
KFG
erm, the students are affected by this, so i would welcome their responses.
So your use of swipe cards is a voluntary system? If the students staged a swipe card boycott your administrative response would be, "Oh, well, if you don't like them we won't use them anymore"?
I might also point out that the people affected by this might be a wider slice of the populace than you expect, like the fireman who loses his life trying to rescuse what turns out to be a loose RFID tag. All security measures that are ostensibly designed to protect also have equal capacity to destroy in this manner. Risk, like energy, is immutable. You can shift it, but you can't make it go away. There even comes a time when security measures bog the system so much it can no longer produce work, so there you are, still insecure on the whole, but at least you have the advantage of not getting anything for your risk to fall back on.
Every parent is also affected, of course. Many of the people who simply interact with the students are affected. The entire law enforcement community is affected. Anyone who holds to the Old Testament is affected, like, oh, say, Orthodox Jews (and do you tag them by tagging them against their religion, or do you tag them by excusing them. "Ok, everyone without a tag come to the locker room.") Of course if I'm not a Jew maybe I should just shut up because it doesn't affect me?
Sir, this sort of thing ends up affecting everyone.
KFG
. . .if you're not in the position to be affected by this, shut the hell up.....
You sir, represent the trackers.
Would you bother to ask the trackees, the ones actually most affected by this, how they feel about it, or would you 'explain' the benefits to them and tell any who objected because they 'didn't get it' to shut the hell up?
KFG
When I was in college we built the second most stable laser table in the world, for $700. Stanford had the most stable. Theirs cost over a million.
One of the problems that American science faces is the degree to which it relies on money where determination and ingenuity will often get the job done. This often results in no science getting done when the perception is that there isn't enough money to do any.
The Chinese are very good at getting things done without a lot of money because lack of funds is their native enviroment. As an example, if you were stranded in the woods you would likely starve to death, because you couldn't find a place to buy food. A person raised in the woods simply eats. Reverse the situation though, put the woodsy guy in the city and he can still scrounge a meal or two completely on his own, without a dime in his pocket, because he doesn't think about needing money, he thinks about finding what he needs, so he goes about and finds it. If he has to go hungry a day or two he doesn't waste time fretting about not having money, he simply thinks of that as a normal part of life and continues looking for what he needs until he finds it.
Now let's apply the same idea to a technology race. I posit a bicycle race from NYC to LA. The two participants start with the clothes on their backs and ten bucks each seed capital. They're allowed to get more money, but they have to earn it on their own.
My neighbor, representing "Western" science, would solve the issue this way; he'd go out and get a job (50% of the procedes of which will go to supporting the job itself. One of the first things he's likely buy in this bicycle race is a car, then fancy clothes that are worthless while bicycling cross country, but that he needs to wear to work, etc.). When he has enough money he'll books on bicycling, maybe join a gym, order catalogs and start making his list of required equipment, then, when he as enough money, he'll but the stuff and after a year, maybe two, he'll set off in the actual bicycling.
Me, representing "Eastern" science will use the ten bucks to buy a couple of wrenches and a screw driver. I'll be on the road in a week, maybe two, scrounging what I need along the way (including a bit of work to have some money in my pocket). I'll be sipping a Pepsi on Venice Beach in a month, maybe two.
What's more, I'll already be a colonized native of Venice Beach, with a job and local connections, long before the other guy arrives and has to compete with me.
China can get to Mars first without spending much money, compared to us, and the first one to establish a base is the likely long term winner, no matter how "primitive" they are in their manner of doing it.
Hell, they could still beat us out on the moon, even though they're starting 40 years behind, because we went there first, but then abandoned it.
It's not the guy who plants the first flag on the mountaintop who wins. It's the guy who builds the first castle there. Once the mountain stronghold is built you just try and go knock him off the mountain.
KFG
Alternatively, the Chinese are doing things that everyone else did 40 years ago. They aren't pushing a single boundary, ANYWHERE.
.then keep going.
The funny thing is that that's pretty much what the British were saying about America 40 or 50 years before that. 40 years is time enough for the whole world to change, but short enough for you to have to live in the end result.
Boundries are local affairs as well as global. To push the global boundries first you must push your own out to meet the global limits. .
Remember, before he started training for it Roger Bannister couldn't run a 4 minute mile either and lots of other runners were faster than he was.
He still got their first.
Don't you kid yourself, China is playing to win and they have everything they need to do so.
KFG
I want to know when I can buy a copy of the NYT and see my name.
The day after your indictment, of course.
KFG
Oddly enough, so does my computer.
The premise of our research project is that programmers will have an easier job if their programming tasks are made more natural. By "natural," we mean "faithfully representing nature or life,"
It seems like a natural language to me, since, even if the Pythagorians are wrong, mathematics seems to be the natural language of the universe. Using mathematics as the language to model nature was perhaps the greatest breakthrough in science. Descarte's analytic geometry in particular moved the modeling of nature forward in one giagantic leap.
They like to call themselves computer "scientists" and "engineers," don't they? Maybe we should make sure they have the mathematical background that's supposed to go with those titles, instead of how to use a particular commercial product.
. . . which here implies it works in the way people expect.
People often expect some pretty unnaturally daft shit, frankly. Who was the first person to think that chicken guts modeled the behavior of their wife, and why, after trying it, did they think it actually worked? I don't want to program in chicken guts, thank you very much.
By "natural programming" we are aiming for the language and environment to work the way that nonprogrammers expect.
Ah! Now we're getting down to it. What they want is programming without education, the computer to be smarter than the person. Well, a computer is just a rock. It's very smart for a rock, but it's still just a rock. Ok, maybe computers are smarter than some people, but those people really shouldn't be programming. And please, someone hand them a pair of scissors and send them out jogging.
What the hell is with this current movement that holds that education is evil and things should just be made to be worked by the ignorant?
We've tried "natural" programming languages before. More than once. Do you know why we don't use them anymore? Because if you know what the hell you are doing they suck.
Analytic Geometry for everybody, Ken Iverson for President and Free APL.
KFG
After WWIII
The cockroaches stood on a hill
Looking out over the ruins of a once great civilization
Each with the same thought in his little mind
"Damn, they sure made good chocolate chip cookies."
--Arthur Clayton Crafsee
KFG
Well, maybe, but only if they start broadcasting our TV from Mars.
.they'll get their eventually.
And replace the 18 inch dishes with 5 meter telescopes. Hey, I might even sign up for the deal with that one.
If they could target each individual customer to within even a 6ft diameter, neighbors won't be able to leech subscribers signals even if they could decrypt it.
It's called "cable."
. .
In their wet dreams. Millions, let alone hundreds of millions, of individual tight beams from orbit just ain't gonna happen. It's more than cost prohibitive, it's daft.
KFG
Well, they had originally gotten together intending to take the world's largest digital picture of a girl, but the plan fell through when it turned out that none of them knew one.
KFG
Well, if the Pythagorians are right I'm looking out my window at the largest digital picture in the universe right now. I laugh at your 10 gigs as I contemplate an image that requires all of the fundamental particles to store, and that's before we even get into the issues of storage media geometry.
Scrolling seems to be a bit of an issue though.
KFG
The problem does not arise when you look up things you know about. It arises when you look up things you don't know about, which is the raison d'etre of an encyclopedia.
Yes, he's in the encylopedia business, but then the Britannica is well noted for knowing its business. Wikis still have some trouble along that score, they haven't entirely figured out what encyclopedia means.
KFG