Ma*roon" (?), n. [Written also marroon.] [F. marron, abbrev. fr. Sp. cimarron wild, unruly, from cima the summit of a mountain; hence, negro cimarron, a runaway negro that lives in the mountains.]
In the West Indies and Guiana, a fugitive slave, or a free negro, living in the mountains.
I could see how that word might have taken on the meaning you describe. I'm still curious about where it's used in that way.
"Actually used the product" on a local drive or even a single file server is meaningless, as others have pointed out. Do you know what the word "enterprise" means?
Google has raised advertising to such a fine art, that now their competitors advertise their products for them. Or maybe Microsoft is just good at that, after all it was Microsoft's Halloween memos that turned many people on to Linux.
Our developers transitioned to Subversion about 6 months ago
Transitioned? Sounds like you've contracted a pretty severe case of management-speak. Been leveraging one too many paradigm-shifting synergies, perhaps? The word you're looking for is "switched". As an antidote, I recommend playing Bullshit Bingo at your next meeting.
You're right about the rational analysis, but terrorism is primarily a psychological threat. So the question we really need to ask is, how worried are people that their plane (or their loved ones' plane) might get shot down from the ground near an airport, and will a system like this allay those fears?
Unfortunately, I doubt anyone can answer those questions, because no-one has actually studied it.
There are hundreds of guys fitting that description who hang around the Cambridge universities (MIT, Harvard...) I'm never sure if they're geniuses or homeless, but you can usually tell by asking them a question about Lisp. Not always, though - those homeless Lisp weenies are the worst!
there's some reason to believe that many of the venerable institutions that help children were founded by pedophiles. [...] it looks like pedophiles must step up once again in their role as protectors of children.
Apparently your rich fantasy life extends beyond dreaming about abusing helpless victims.
"What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million? That's what I'm here to find out."
IOW, that was a teaser, transformed into an ideal troll for an endlessly gullible, non-TFA-reading Slashdot audience. And just to complete the loop, the end result of this is to drive up ad revenue on Slashdot. Gotta love those virtuous circles!
I didn't mean to say that all grammar rules are selectively enforced pet peeves. I said "many of", perhaps that was an overstatement - but here's a list of Seven Outdated Rules You Can Ignore, for example, which were the kind of thing I was thinking of.
That page makes reference to something I've observed myself: that many English teachers (and grammar nazis) are inclined to push rules that are no longer relevant, that amount to pet peeves or just things that they were taught and have never unlearned.
In the broader sense, I don't like the idea of language being so malleable and so non-codified that people 100 years from now wouldn't be able to understand a book written today.
I'm not talking about anything that would have such an effect. But language does change over time, and people should pay more attention to what the current rules are, rather than what they were when their fifth grade teacher's fifth grade teacher was growing up.
My guess is they probably can't. The idea of using a high-level language as an intermediate compiler target seems to require a mental leap for many people - they hear it's generating C, and they immediately assume that means it's meant to be read and worked on by humans. The parallels to assembler don't seem to register without an explanation.
surely the best way to speed it up is to compile it straight to object code...
Absolutely not. It takes an enormous amount of effort to compete with the native code generation of good C or C++ compilers - and much of that effort has to be repeated for every platform you target.
Many language implementations for less mainstream languages compile through C, treating it as a "portable assembler", and leveraging all the work that's been done to optimize C compilation. This is even done for some high-end languages used e.g. in aerospace - Airbus jets run on a lot of generated C code, for example. C++ is less commonly used for this purpose, but if you know what you're doing, it's no slower than C.
c++ has to be compiled and just adds an intermediate step which will make things harder to debug...
Quite the opposite, having the intermediate step be in a higher level language tends to be very useful for debugging. You don't need to debug your C++ compiler these days, so if there's something that requires you to look at the generated output, you'd usually have to look no further than the C++.
The main disadvantage of using C or C++ as compile targets is that your compiler then depends on some other compiler, and can't work all by itself. Also, for some less standard languages, such as functional languages like Haskell and Scheme, C and C++ aren't such a good fit - but people still work around that and compile them through C in many cases anyway, for the reasons I've mentioned.
You're still missing the point. The sibling response to yours put it best: "It desperately pleads for mercy the question, why are such well educated and technical people incredibly anal?"
The trap that nerds seem to most often fall into is trying to project technical definitions too widely, and that's precisely what's happening here. No-one, including myself who has university training in logic, cares that the term "begs the question" has a specific technical meaning as a logical fallacy. Language is context-dependent - the term "polymorphism" has a rather different meaning to a C++ programmer and a Haskell programmer, and both will tell you you're a dumbass for using it the other way. Both are wrong, both are simply exhibiting tunnel vision.
Another trap that many people fall into is not recognizing that many of the grammatical rules they learned as children were just anal teachers trying to perpetuate their pet peeves, and don't actually apply in the modern world. Relax, look around you, and try learning English as she is spoke!
Your pet peeve is either wrong, or needs to be explained better. The OP used the term "first world" correctly, and it has nothing to do with "Old World" or "New World" except in the sense that it has "world" in it. Unless you're 70+ years old, in which case you can think of it as another newfangled term the young'uns are using lately (where "lately" means "any time after 1950").
You are more accurate talking about Hancock, who does nothing but write about work like Bauval's, and tie together stories tested only for plausibility. Bauval is an archaelogist
If that's the case, then where is Bauval's scientific work published? I'd appreciate a pointer. It's certainly not in any of the books coauthored with Hancock or Gilbert.
One important missing ingredient, if one wishes to take Bauval's work as science, is positive peer review. A related suspicious factor is that real scientists don't release their scientific work primarily via popular books and videos with lurid titles. It doesn't help that Bauval is not a trained archaeologist, or even trained as a scientist in some other discipline (being a construction engineer doesn't quite qualify one as a scientist).
This is work designed for a commercial purpose, designed to appeal to a particular type of target audience, one which you apparently belong to. If Bauval is truly serious about having his work accepted as science, then he screwed up badly in collaborating with people like Hancock and Gilbert in publishing pop speculation about heretofore unknown ancient alien civilizations which left behind no direct evidence of their existence. That stuff's great fun in movies like Stargate or the Fifth Element, but it shouldn't be confused with reality.
who deduced that there were other pyramids and predicted their discovered locations, combining data, hypothesis, theory, prediction and failable tests - which didn't fail.
Other pyramids? Could you point me to evidence of this, other than claims by Bauval or his colleagues?
I don't know why people are so insistent on discarding these clearly coherent theories about these monuments, proven by testing their predictions. That stubborn refusal to update one's model that fit only the previous data to accomodate the new data is clearly antiscientific.
That's pretty amusing - I'm starting to wonder if this is a really complex troll. Anyway, the reason Bauval's conjectures are discarded is because they don't stand up to even minor scrutiny.
It's a big stretch to call Bauval's work theories in a scientific sense. His arguments are designed to persuade people with little other knowledge of the subject, by providing a one-sided argument which carefully leads the reader down what appears to be a single possible path, using selectively presented facts (and non-facts).
If you're really serious about this, take the book of your choice and really analyze it critically, by writing out a summary of the chains of reasoning, assessing the strength of the links in those chains, and considering what's not being presented. Unfortunately, to get a good sense of the latter requires outside research, which is where laypeople often experience a problem. In this case, Paul Jordan's "Riddles of the Sphinx" might help. But in general, the problems that a layperson experiences in contextualizing a hypothesis is one of the big reasons that science needs peer review.
The ability to detect and recognize patterns is an important factor in human intelligence. However, equally important is the ability to recognize when a perceived pattern can't support the interpretation being given to it. Let's assume that there's some correlation between the arrangement of certain pyramids and certain stars. I agree that's quite plausible - but it doesn't get you to any of the rest of Bauval's speculation, because he hasn't even presented, in a scientifically verifiable fashion, the details of the correlation between the Orion's belt stars and the pyramids. All he did was make a claim about the correlation, which didn't stand up to scrutiny.
Saying "Bauval produces science" is a bit like saying "CmdrTaco produces journalism" (no offense to Rob). Science is only science, and only provides a better picture of the world, if it follows the scientific method - which means that you need more than speculation, conjecture, over-eager pattern recognition, and selective sifting and presentation of the facts. Bauval's work is barely a step removed from the wonderful conspiracy theories one sees in novels like Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", Wilson's "Illuminatus Trilogy", and the latest mass market equivalent, the Da Vinci Code. The only difference is that the latter are all intended as fiction, and aren't pretending to be factual. But if you're capable of recognizing that those novels are fiction, based purely on the theories they present, then you should be capable of doing the same with Bauval.
Why, did the U.N. pass a resolution denouncing the U.S. action to enforce resolution 1441? No, member states just grumbled impotently. It would have been nice for Powell if he'd gotten a war resolution out of his presentation, but the real purpose of the presentation was to go through the motions. The reality is that most of the U.N. is perfectly happy to have the U.S. act as an out-of-control enforcement arm, as long as member states (a) don't have to pay too much for it and (b) have plausible deniability. Realpolitik at its best.
As for Americans, I suspect a lot of those in favor of the war didn't believe in Iraq as a serious threat, but were quite happy to see U.S. power asserted in a major way in response to 9/11. Afghanistan was too minor. Think of the U.S. response to being attacked as being similar to what The Incredible Hulk would do. You hurt Hulk, Hulk mad, Hulk smash, Hulk scare enemies.
Of course, people don't admit such things on TV, especially if they're not consciously admitting it to themselves. So they'll just patriotically repeat the administration-supplied lines about WMD, Al Quaeda connections, etc. That's a big reason why all the factual arguments about the non-existence of WMD weren't nearly as effective as one might have imagined they'd be, both before and after the war. It's not just the Bush administration that had ulterior motives for the Iraq war: many Americans did, too, just not the same motives. The WMD excuses worked just as well for both camps.
The Colin Powell rhetorical device worked on the United Nations, didn't it?
But seriously, the point is that Graham's essay wasn't about the superiority of U.S. universities. It was about the reasons for its dominance in fostering innovative startup companies. Even its dominance in that area was assumed, not argued for. No valid, relevant argument was omitted re universities.
Many people have objected to the way in which Graham chose to make the point about universities, but no-one has effectively disputed the point: to do that, it's not sufficient to simply point to a surfeit of allegedly great or admired European universities, you'd also have to explain why the presence of those universities doesn't lead to major startup activity. Of course, there are other reasons, some of which Graham touched on, but the reality is that [some aspect(s) of] the quality of U.S. universities probably does have a lot to do with the profusion of startups in the U.S.
In short, people are complaining because they dislike the way the facts were presented, and because the rhetorical device gave the illusion of a weakness in the argument, not because they dispute the facts.
Graham went to Harvard himself, and Harvard tops a lot of lists, so I'm guessing it would be one. MIT is also high on most lists. Stanford and UC Berkeley are obvious ones in the Silicon Valley area. All of these are in the list of top ten universities in the world by "research impact" (see link below), along with Caltech, UCSF, UCSD, and Princeton.
I think the biggest reason for the U.S. advantage in this area is well captured here - I'll quote the most relevant bit, but see the page for more context:
...the pre-eminence of the English language in modern academia, especially in scientific and technological research, which allows English-speaking institutions to attract some of the best students and researchers from around the world, as well as publish more easily in leading international science journals, many of which are written in English and are rarely translated in their entirety into other languages. The highest-ranked universities in the United States also tend to have the greatest financial resources of any such institutions in the world.
The U.S. has the largest native English-speaking market in the world, and that alone is a major factor for its universities.
How do you figure "nothing whatsoever" to do with startups? The "number of citations per faculty member" has a lot to do with where the real new ideas are being created, which has an obvious connection to startups.
Since you seem to have an affinity for overstatement: the rest are just copycats.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, thanks. So it's 60-year old slang burned into the brains of the Bugs Bunny generation.
What country/age group etc. does this separate word exist in? Never seen it. Any references?
A maroon who has abused his laptop battery? I can never tell whether people who misspell "moron" are being deliciously ironic...
"Actually used the product" on a local drive or even a single file server is meaningless, as others have pointed out. Do you know what the word "enterprise" means?
Google has raised advertising to such a fine art, that now their competitors advertise their products for them. Or maybe Microsoft is just good at that, after all it was Microsoft's Halloween memos that turned many people on to Linux.
Transitioned? Sounds like you've contracted a pretty severe case of management-speak. Been leveraging one too many paradigm-shifting synergies, perhaps? The word you're looking for is "switched". As an antidote, I recommend playing Bullshit Bingo at your next meeting.
But thanks for the link to Subversive! :)
You're right about the rational analysis, but terrorism is primarily a psychological threat. So the question we really need to ask is, how worried are people that their plane (or their loved ones' plane) might get shot down from the ground near an airport, and will a system like this allay those fears? Unfortunately, I doubt anyone can answer those questions, because no-one has actually studied it.
The parent post has finally made this whole business of defense boondoggles click in my brain. Thanks, kahei!
There are hundreds of guys fitting that description who hang around the Cambridge universities (MIT, Harvard...) I'm never sure if they're geniuses or homeless, but you can usually tell by asking them a question about Lisp. Not always, though - those homeless Lisp weenies are the worst!
The tunnel was supposed to go to Holland, but they ran out of cast-iron steel.
Quoting from the end of TFA's intro:
"What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million? That's what I'm here to find out."
IOW, that was a teaser, transformed into an ideal troll for an endlessly gullible, non-TFA-reading Slashdot audience. And just to complete the loop, the end result of this is to drive up ad revenue on Slashdot. Gotta love those virtuous circles!
That page makes reference to something I've observed myself: that many English teachers (and grammar nazis) are inclined to push rules that are no longer relevant, that amount to pet peeves or just things that they were taught and have never unlearned.
I'm not talking about anything that would have such an effect. But language does change over time, and people should pay more attention to what the current rules are, rather than what they were when their fifth grade teacher's fifth grade teacher was growing up.
Many language implementations for less mainstream languages compile through C, treating it as a "portable assembler", and leveraging all the work that's been done to optimize C compilation. This is even done for some high-end languages used e.g. in aerospace - Airbus jets run on a lot of generated C code, for example. C++ is less commonly used for this purpose, but if you know what you're doing, it's no slower than C.
Quite the opposite, having the intermediate step be in a higher level language tends to be very useful for debugging. You don't need to debug your C++ compiler these days, so if there's something that requires you to look at the generated output, you'd usually have to look no further than the C++.
The main disadvantage of using C or C++ as compile targets is that your compiler then depends on some other compiler, and can't work all by itself. Also, for some less standard languages, such as functional languages like Haskell and Scheme, C and C++ aren't such a good fit - but people still work around that and compile them through C in many cases anyway, for the reasons I've mentioned.
You're still missing the point. The sibling response to yours put it best: "It desperately pleads for mercy the question, why are such well educated and technical people incredibly anal?"
The trap that nerds seem to most often fall into is trying to project technical definitions too widely, and that's precisely what's happening here. No-one, including myself who has university training in logic, cares that the term "begs the question" has a specific technical meaning as a logical fallacy. Language is context-dependent - the term "polymorphism" has a rather different meaning to a C++ programmer and a Haskell programmer, and both will tell you you're a dumbass for using it the other way. Both are wrong, both are simply exhibiting tunnel vision.
Another trap that many people fall into is not recognizing that many of the grammatical rules they learned as children were just anal teachers trying to perpetuate their pet peeves, and don't actually apply in the modern world. Relax, look around you, and try learning English as she is spoke!
Your pet peeve is either wrong, or needs to be explained better. The OP used the term "first world" correctly, and it has nothing to do with "Old World" or "New World" except in the sense that it has "world" in it. Unless you're 70+ years old, in which case you can think of it as another newfangled term the young'uns are using lately (where "lately" means "any time after 1950").
One important missing ingredient, if one wishes to take Bauval's work as science, is positive peer review. A related suspicious factor is that real scientists don't release their scientific work primarily via popular books and videos with lurid titles. It doesn't help that Bauval is not a trained archaeologist, or even trained as a scientist in some other discipline (being a construction engineer doesn't quite qualify one as a scientist).
This is work designed for a commercial purpose, designed to appeal to a particular type of target audience, one which you apparently belong to. If Bauval is truly serious about having his work accepted as science, then he screwed up badly in collaborating with people like Hancock and Gilbert in publishing pop speculation about heretofore unknown ancient alien civilizations which left behind no direct evidence of their existence. That stuff's great fun in movies like Stargate or the Fifth Element, but it shouldn't be confused with reality.
Other pyramids? Could you point me to evidence of this, other than claims by Bauval or his colleagues?
That's pretty amusing - I'm starting to wonder if this is a really complex troll. Anyway, the reason Bauval's conjectures are discarded is because they don't stand up to even minor scrutiny.
It's a big stretch to call Bauval's work theories in a scientific sense. His arguments are designed to persuade people with little other knowledge of the subject, by providing a one-sided argument which carefully leads the reader down what appears to be a single possible path, using selectively presented facts (and non-facts).
If you're really serious about this, take the book of your choice and really analyze it critically, by writing out a summary of the chains of reasoning, assessing the strength of the links in those chains, and considering what's not being presented. Unfortunately, to get a good sense of the latter requires outside research, which is where laypeople often experience a problem. In this case, Paul Jordan's "Riddles of the Sphinx" might help. But in general, the problems that a layperson experiences in contextualizing a hypothesis is one of the big reasons that science needs peer review.
The ability to detect and recognize patterns is an important factor in human intelligence. However, equally important is the ability to recognize when a perceived pattern can't support the interpretation being given to it. Let's assume that there's some correlation between the arrangement of certain pyramids and certain stars. I agree that's quite plausible - but it doesn't get you to any of the rest of Bauval's speculation, because he hasn't even presented, in a scientifically verifiable fashion, the details of the correlation between the Orion's belt stars and the pyramids. All he did was make a claim about the correlation, which didn't stand up to scrutiny.
Saying "Bauval produces science" is a bit like saying "CmdrTaco produces journalism" (no offense to Rob). Science is only science, and only provides a better picture of the world, if it follows the scientific method - which means that you need more than speculation, conjecture, over-eager pattern recognition, and selective sifting and presentation of the facts. Bauval's work is barely a step removed from the wonderful conspiracy theories one sees in novels like Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", Wilson's "Illuminatus Trilogy", and the latest mass market equivalent, the Da Vinci Code. The only difference is that the latter are all intended as fiction, and aren't pretending to be factual. But if you're capable of recognizing that those novels are fiction, based purely on the theories they present, then you should be capable of doing the same with Bauval.
Why, did the U.N. pass a resolution denouncing the U.S. action to enforce resolution 1441? No, member states just grumbled impotently. It would have been nice for Powell if he'd gotten a war resolution out of his presentation, but the real purpose of the presentation was to go through the motions. The reality is that most of the U.N. is perfectly happy to have the U.S. act as an out-of-control enforcement arm, as long as member states (a) don't have to pay too much for it and (b) have plausible deniability. Realpolitik at its best.
As for Americans, I suspect a lot of those in favor of the war didn't believe in Iraq as a serious threat, but were quite happy to see U.S. power asserted in a major way in response to 9/11. Afghanistan was too minor. Think of the U.S. response to being attacked as being similar to what The Incredible Hulk would do. You hurt Hulk, Hulk mad, Hulk smash, Hulk scare enemies.
Of course, people don't admit such things on TV, especially if they're not consciously admitting it to themselves. So they'll just patriotically repeat the administration-supplied lines about WMD, Al Quaeda connections, etc. That's a big reason why all the factual arguments about the non-existence of WMD weren't nearly as effective as one might have imagined they'd be, both before and after the war. It's not just the Bush administration that had ulterior motives for the Iraq war: many Americans did, too, just not the same motives. The WMD excuses worked just as well for both camps.
The Colin Powell rhetorical device worked on the United Nations, didn't it?
But seriously, the point is that Graham's essay wasn't about the superiority of U.S. universities. It was about the reasons for its dominance in fostering innovative startup companies. Even its dominance in that area was assumed, not argued for. No valid, relevant argument was omitted re universities.
Many people have objected to the way in which Graham chose to make the point about universities, but no-one has effectively disputed the point: to do that, it's not sufficient to simply point to a surfeit of allegedly great or admired European universities, you'd also have to explain why the presence of those universities doesn't lead to major startup activity. Of course, there are other reasons, some of which Graham touched on, but the reality is that [some aspect(s) of] the quality of U.S. universities probably does have a lot to do with the profusion of startups in the U.S.
In short, people are complaining because they dislike the way the facts were presented, and because the rhetorical device gave the illusion of a weakness in the argument, not because they dispute the facts.
I think the biggest reason for the U.S. advantage in this area is well captured here - I'll quote the most relevant bit, but see the page for more context:
The U.S. has the largest native English-speaking market in the world, and that alone is a major factor for its universities.
How do you figure "nothing whatsoever" to do with startups? The "number of citations per faculty member" has a lot to do with where the real new ideas are being created, which has an obvious connection to startups.
Since you seem to have an affinity for overstatement: the rest are just copycats.