You could make a very good case that turning a designer's drawing of a pattern for woven fabric into a set of Jacquard Loom cards was an act of programming. The Jacquard loom had no computational capability, and in particular had no capability for a logical branch in it's actions.
Typical Feminism, and these days, Typical Slashdot.
Oi, dumbfuck!
Submitter here. I spent the thick end of an hour composing the original summary (somewhat edited now), checking, selecting and linking to relevant sources. I even considered dropping a mail to the manager of Plan-28 to send him a heads-up in the event of his servers getting Slashdottted (but decided against it as I didn't know if the submission would get to the front page).
And then you don't have the plain common decency to actually read the fucking thing.
You are a fuckwit. No wonder you haven't got the metaphorical balls to put your name to your idiocy.
They had scanners for digitising images and transmitting them by mechanised Morse code in... the 1870s or 1880s, IIRC.
Underestimating people has a very long history of getting things wrong. We might not be able to "re-run the experiment", but we do have a good number of examples of the ease of underestimating strangers.
Closer to a full century than a half century. Babbage was trying to get this working in the 1840s, not the 1890s (though the quality of mass-production wasn't up to the task then).
Exactly what it always has been since the Montgolfier brothers : telecommunications.
OK, slight exaggeration with the Montgolfier brothers. Their aircraft took off about a decade before the first telecommunications networks were developed.
Moving bits between points 'A' and 'B' is always going to be greener than moving meatbags between points 'A' and 'B.'
Can someone explain to us folks who have already graduated high school why the world needs another messaging that is capable of sending photos and why the fuck does it needs trophies?
It's a way of showing how difficult it is to distinguish your sex organs from those of another gender. Or species.
I'm surprised that I got this far down the thread before I saw this comment. It would seem to me to be the3 obvious thing to do. DENY microsoft.com, possibly ALLOW knowledgebase.microsoft.com (or whatever their wiki/ help page is called)... that should fix it.
Or maybe I'm missing something. I don't do windows myself any more.
A few years ago I stopped at a gas station that had cranked their pumps down so slow it didn't trigger the auto shutoff.
This whole section of the thread is showing precisely why it's over a decade since I saw a pump which had a latch on the trigger.
To spell it out - you put the nozzle in the tank, depress the trigger, and hold it there. And hold it while it delivers fuel. When you release the trigger, delivery stops. There is no latch. Pumping fuel while the vehicle is unattended is not a possibility. That whole class of mishaps has been engineered out of existence.
How is this not something that already has regulations? Sure, this may be happening at greater volumes, but AAA and tow trucks and the lot have been delivering gas for ages!
I don't know the mish-mash of laws that exist in the US, but in the UK (and I think in the rest of Europe), the "permitted container" for emergency / reserve fuel is either a 5l plastic container, or a metal one of up to 25l ( 1 or 5 gallons ; something different in USian measures).
Transfer of fuel is significantly hazardous. The stuff is flammable, by definition, and most versions produce heavy vapours that travel surprising (to the person who hasn't had to control fires) distances along the ground. There are reasons that the pump motors are tightly sealed, that the relays and control circuits are in explosion-proof junction boxes, etc.
No, it's not beyond the wit of man to solve these issues. But it is something that is easy to get wrong. Which is why there are regulations, and regulatory authorities.
Very, very few species live longer than a few tens of millions of years. So, there is no reason to expect humanity to last much longer. In fact, it would be fairly optimistic to even hope for just a few tens of millions of years for the species.
Some caveats : Many people will point at the coelacanth as a long-lived species. The present species (genus Latimeria) has no known close fossil relatives until you get back to the mid-Cretaceous (about 100 million years ago, genus Macropoma). The genera are related, but not particularly closely - compare dogs and bears, for example. The longest-lived genus I can think of is Lingula, a brachiopod genus with a fossil record from the Cambrian (500 million years ago) to the present. Those two are extreme examples though. And we'll just not get into the discussion over morphological versus reproductive species, but it's a real discussion.
Or, alternatively to ChunderDownUnder's backpacking example... the phone goes at 03:00 that one of your colleagues has been taken unwell at work, and you're needed to replace them ; 10:00 you're getting your arm perforated with the appropriate vaccinations. 15:00 you're on a connecting flight ; 19:00, you're on an intercontinental flight ; 10:00 next day you're navigating a foreign city and you've just discovered that they don't use GSM but some strange other phone system, so you've got nothing but a couple of print outs of contact information.
I always wondered if a dick-print could be used to unlock an iPhone.
Two and a bit days since you posted this. Have you carried out the relevant experiment? (I don't have, and am unlikely ever to have, an iPhone, or any other iDevice).
Your description of the deuterostome nervous system is inaccurate. The central nervous system (composed of brain, optic nerves and retinas, spinal cord and... I think that's it) is developmentally distinct from the peripheral nervous system (everything else - motor and sensory nerves). They form from different layers of tissue in the embryo. Yes, the CNS is significantly larger than just the brain, but it's not the entire nervous system.
Whether that distinction is actually useful in trying to get the two systems to bind from one "CNS donor" and one "periphery donor", is another question.
DDT use in controversial because it is harmful to birds
DDT use and manufacture has been banned because it is a "bioaccumulator" (it increases in concentration in predators which eat insects containing sub-lethal doses of it, and increases further in predators which eat those predators...) ; one effect of this was severe damage to bird populations - particularly raptors.
Malaria was endemic in Italy and southern Greece within living memory. Diseases with appropriate symptoms were endemic in Frane and even southern Britain in the Georgian and Regency periods.
You really need to learn some history. The "Industrial Age" started depending on who you ask with the development of mining water pumps in the 1730s, the start of canal construction (to move coal and other goods from mining areas to industrial areas) at about the same time, or the development of iron smelting using coal or coke instead of charcoal (abount 1710). 1850 was one of the slumps when the industrial age slipped back a little.
and as it happened, most of the key people in this field were German
Hmmm, there certainly were some Germans. But "most"? Off the top of my head, there was de Broglie (French), Bohr (Danish), Planck (German), Heisenberg (German), Compton (American), Einstein (Swiss, most of the time), Schroedinger (Austrian), Born (German), von Neumann (Hungarian), Dirac (English), Pauli (Austrian), [list continues]. Certainly there were plenty of German speakers in the development, but probably not even a majority.
In any case, if this were true, why would this be an excuse to do anything other than learn sufficient German? I'm doing exactly that at the moment, though for family reasons not QM reasons.
anyone who challenges the status quo - legally, peacefully and legitimately
The two sides of that description are mutualy contradictory. "Challenging the status quo" has neve been "legal" or "legitimate." At least, not in the view of the status quo, who are the only people whose opinion matters. (Again, in the veiw of the status quo.)
Either way, it's creepy to spy on other people's kids outside of the school hours they are responsible for them.
Probably. But the school considers themselves responsible for the child 24 hours a day.
Put yourself in their position - if a parent puts you in loco parentis over their children, and you don't report the bruises that you see of the beatings they received at a time you weren't in loco parentis, then surely you deserve jail, public torture, then lifetime monitoring as a sex offender if you don't report your suspicions. Even if you don't actually have suspicions, you're culpable for not being suspicious enough.
The schools authority does not extend to my network or my living room.
No, it extends to any place the child visits, and any network they connect to. How else could they protect the child from potential abusers. (The large majority of child abusers are family members.)
A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self aware entity which arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos.
It's another variant of the problem of infinite universes or multiverses - if it can happen, it will. And once it has happened then the likelihood of anything "interesting" (define "interesting") happening spontaneously is lower than of the same event being simulated (or, arguably, stimulated) by the "brain".
Like panspermia, it's a not-impossibility, but it's also a dead end of an argument. Like "goddidit."
Microsoft sold a minuscule 2.3 million Lumia phones last quarter,
If by "sold" you include "dispose of at approximately 1/10th of the cost of building the damned things."
The wife was given one by her daughter a few months ago. Camera is OK. WiFi works (an improvement on the previous phone). It has... a mapping app which we found could give directions after a few weeks. Oh, and Skype (so the wife can talk to her mother abroad).
What else would you want from a phone? Particularly if you've got a proper SatNav in the car as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You could make a very good case that turning a designer's drawing of a pattern for woven fabric into a set of Jacquard Loom cards was an act of programming. The Jacquard loom had no computational capability, and in particular had no capability for a logical branch in it's actions.
Oi, dumbfuck!
Submitter here. I spent the thick end of an hour composing the original summary (somewhat edited now), checking, selecting and linking to relevant sources. I even considered dropping a mail to the manager of Plan-28 to send him a heads-up in the event of his servers getting Slashdottted (but decided against it as I didn't know if the submission would get to the front page).
And then you don't have the plain common decency to actually read the fucking thing.
You are a fuckwit. No wonder you haven't got the metaphorical balls to put your name to your idiocy.
Underestimating people has a very long history of getting things wrong. We might not be able to "re-run the experiment", but we do have a good number of examples of the ease of underestimating strangers.
Closer to a full century than a half century. Babbage was trying to get this working in the 1840s, not the 1890s (though the quality of mass-production wasn't up to the task then).
OK, slight exaggeration with the Montgolfier brothers. Their aircraft took off about a decade before the first telecommunications networks were developed.
Moving bits between points 'A' and 'B' is always going to be greener than moving meatbags between points 'A' and 'B.'
It's a way of showing how difficult it is to distinguish your sex organs from those of another gender. Or species.
Or maybe I'm missing something. I don't do windows myself any more.
Do you hear that sound? It's the sound of a thousand sales executives and marketing PHBs slashing their wrists in despair.
It's a start.
We did away with this whole family of hazards - and pump attendants - before I learned to drive (in my 20s, in the 1980s).
This whole section of the thread is showing precisely why it's over a decade since I saw a pump which had a latch on the trigger.
To spell it out - you put the nozzle in the tank, depress the trigger, and hold it there. And hold it while it delivers fuel. When you release the trigger, delivery stops. There is no latch. Pumping fuel while the vehicle is unattended is not a possibility. That whole class of mishaps has been engineered out of existence.
I don't know the mish-mash of laws that exist in the US, but in the UK (and I think in the rest of Europe), the "permitted container" for emergency / reserve fuel is either a 5l plastic container, or a metal one of up to 25l ( 1 or 5 gallons ; something different in USian measures).
Transfer of fuel is significantly hazardous. The stuff is flammable, by definition, and most versions produce heavy vapours that travel surprising (to the person who hasn't had to control fires) distances along the ground. There are reasons that the pump motors are tightly sealed, that the relays and control circuits are in explosion-proof junction boxes, etc.
No, it's not beyond the wit of man to solve these issues. But it is something that is easy to get wrong. Which is why there are regulations, and regulatory authorities.
Some caveats : Many people will point at the coelacanth as a long-lived species. The present species (genus Latimeria) has no known close fossil relatives until you get back to the mid-Cretaceous (about 100 million years ago, genus Macropoma). The genera are related, but not particularly closely - compare dogs and bears, for example. The longest-lived genus I can think of is Lingula, a brachiopod genus with a fossil record from the Cambrian (500 million years ago) to the present. Those two are extreme examples though. And we'll just not get into the discussion over morphological versus reproductive species, but it's a real discussion.
It's called "the chauffeur".
Signed - 1904
Or, alternatively to ChunderDownUnder's backpacking example ... the phone goes at 03:00 that one of your colleagues has been taken unwell at work, and you're needed to replace them ; 10:00 you're getting your arm perforated with the appropriate vaccinations. 15:00 you're on a connecting flight ; 19:00, you're on an intercontinental flight ; 10:00 next day you're navigating a foreign city and you've just discovered that they don't use GSM but some strange other phone system, so you've got nothing but a couple of print outs of contact information.
Two and a bit days since you posted this. Have you carried out the relevant experiment? (I don't have, and am unlikely ever to have, an iPhone, or any other iDevice).
Whether that distinction is actually useful in trying to get the two systems to bind from one "CNS donor" and one "periphery donor", is another question.
DDT use and manufacture has been banned because it is a "bioaccumulator" (it increases in concentration in predators which eat insects containing sub-lethal doses of it, and increases further in predators which eat those predators ...) ; one effect of this was severe damage to bird populations - particularly raptors.
So, I'm told, do Australia and New Zealand. This is not a good discriminator.
Malaria was endemic in Italy and southern Greece within living memory. Diseases with appropriate symptoms were endemic in Frane and even southern Britain in the Georgian and Regency periods.
You really need to learn some history. The "Industrial Age" started depending on who you ask with the development of mining water pumps in the 1730s, the start of canal construction (to move coal and other goods from mining areas to industrial areas) at about the same time, or the development of iron smelting using coal or coke instead of charcoal (abount 1710). 1850 was one of the slumps when the industrial age slipped back a little.
Hmmm, there certainly were some Germans. But "most"? Off the top of my head, there was de Broglie (French), Bohr (Danish), Planck (German), Heisenberg (German), Compton (American), Einstein (Swiss, most of the time), Schroedinger (Austrian), Born (German), von Neumann (Hungarian), Dirac (English), Pauli (Austrian), [list continues]. Certainly there were plenty of German speakers in the development, but probably not even a majority.
In any case, if this were true, why would this be an excuse to do anything other than learn sufficient German? I'm doing exactly that at the moment, though for family reasons not QM reasons.
The two sides of that description are mutualy contradictory. "Challenging the status quo" has neve been "legal" or "legitimate." At least, not in the view of the status quo, who are the only people whose opinion matters. (Again, in the veiw of the status quo.)
Probably. But the school considers themselves responsible for the child 24 hours a day.
Put yourself in their position - if a parent puts you in loco parentis over their children, and you don't report the bruises that you see of the beatings they received at a time you weren't in loco parentis, then surely you deserve jail, public torture, then lifetime monitoring as a sex offender if you don't report your suspicions. Even if you don't actually have suspicions, you're culpable for not being suspicious enough.
No, it extends to any place the child visits, and any network they connect to. How else could they protect the child from potential abusers. (The large majority of child abusers are family members.)
It's another variant of the problem of infinite universes or multiverses - if it can happen, it will. And once it has happened then the likelihood of anything "interesting" (define "interesting") happening spontaneously is lower than of the same event being simulated (or, arguably, stimulated) by the "brain".
Like panspermia, it's a not-impossibility, but it's also a dead end of an argument. Like "goddidit."
If by "sold" you include "dispose of at approximately 1/10th of the cost of building the damned things."
The wife was given one by her daughter a few months ago. Camera is OK. WiFi works (an improvement on the previous phone). It has ... a mapping app which we found could give directions after a few weeks. Oh, and Skype (so the wife can talk to her mother abroad).
What else would you want from a phone? Particularly if you've got a proper SatNav in the car as well.