>>That's why we pre-program responses, so that we don't need to take that much time to come to an answer. >>Or why a religion ultra-pro pacifist as Christianism ended up supporting crusaders, or wars.
Really? Pope Urban made the decision in less than 500ms? That's impressive. He had "crusade!" pre-programmed, even though there hadn't been a crusade before?
>>As I see the law (I'm British, but it seems pretty much the same in most places) you have the right to defend yourself - >>you have to obey the law while doing so, but there is no requirement to wait on the police.
Shame that in England, defending yourself and obeying the law are contradictory. It pisses me off when I read about an old WWII vet pulling a gun on a house robber and getting arrested for it.
At most genetics contributes a minor influence to people's behaviors -- the "God Gene" had a 1% increase in a behavior that was sorta-kinda related to belief in stuff you can't see.
But you wouldn't recognize that from the media howling that they discovered the gene that causes people to believe in God.
Was just at a MATLAB seminar yesterday Phrosty, and it has reasonably transparent support for embarassingly parallel and data-parallel operations. For other stuff, it just falls back to MPI (using some lightweight wrappers around it which mainly just take care of counting how large the arrays you're sending are).
I think it might be worth a slashdot poll to see how many programmers have experience working with threads or MPI. My guess is a lot higher than 1%, especially given how prevalent Java is these days. Numbers of people proficient with MPI or PVM could be pretty low, but that's normally the bar to say that you work in high performance computing.
Sigh, I wish Slashdot used my summary when I submitted this.
Blizzard is claiming he violates copyright because he copies WOW into RAM. This is huge, way beyond just another story about Blizzard beating up a small guy -- if this case is determined for Blizzard, a whole brand new vista of copyright infringement will be opened up.
Wait, I'm so confused. I thought cell phones and other wireless devices emitted invisible pilot killing waves, so deadly that we must turn off all devices upon takeoff and landing, and put them into "pilot safe" mode when in flight?
I find it interesting myself, especially since nature seems to exhibit symmetry nearly everywhere else.
However, my understanding of it is that there's a rather large asymmetry between the amount of energy needed to create a matter particle vs. a much higher number to create an antimatter particle. Not the 1% they were talking about, but something like an order of magnitude more free energy. Hence the free energy ended up mainly creating bosonic matter.
I'm not saying that people don't all perform a moral calculus, but religion definitely plays a major part of a person's moral calculus, which is a point that just flies right over Dawkins' head. There are a number of times in my life where I'd have acted differently if I'd been atheist/Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Whatever. As I said, he really doesn't have a very firm grasp at all on religion and what it means, and so he ends up just sounding stupid whenever he talks about it, especially when he tries his hand at theology.
Science needs to talk about science and not portray all Christians as fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists.
When I looked into the numbers, Fundies only make up 20% of Christians in America, and they're more common in America than elsewhere. Some people say the numbers are as high as 40%... it depends in part what criteria you use, but the fact of the matter is that when so many scientifically minded people on Slashdot can't figure out the difference between two different populations of people (fundamentalists vs non-fundamentalists) you have to wonder how rational they really are.
Could you give an example of one these "lame" attacks? He seems to be quite capable of explaining exactly what the problems with theism are, and why theists are incorrect about certain matters. He doesn't just shout "HURR RELIGION IS DUMB! HURF DURF!".
At one speech I heard him give, he said that religion doesn't actually change people's behaviors. That people will do whatever they do regardless of religion.
And yes, this is about as dumb a statement as they get, in my opinion. Not even looking at the huge number of cases where religion made a real difference in a person's decision making process, the very fact we're having this discussion is that scientists are complaining that certain denominations of theists are less receptive to science than other groups.
That, and if you listen to his hackneyed view of Christian theology, it's pretty clear he really doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to religion.
Most schemes offer unhygenic macros these days alongside the hygenic ones.
I don't know about straight C, but there's OpenC++ for writing syntactic transforms to C++, and OpenJava which does the same for Java. Not sure how up to date they are these days. Thing is, all the extra syntax they have to support makes lisp and scheme macros look simple. There's bolt-on macros for C that I've seen people use before. You essentially feed your.c files through the macro processor before running gcc on it, and it works reasonably well.
I think it was mainly used in scientific codes when the number of dimensions of an array weren't known, and people didn't want to write N copies of the same function. You'd pass the dimension in at compile-time, and it would spit out the code for that dimensionality.
Kind of ugly, but C doesn't handle it very well otherwise.
Not directly perhaps, but they frequently did not wear uniforms and hid among civilians, putting them at risk. At the very least, that made them "unlawful combatants" by modern terminology. Also, the boatload of tea dumped into Boston harbour was hardly a military target. Actually, one of the main reason's that the Continental Army did so poorly was that Washington insisted on the army playing by the rules of the grand armies of Europe. The Americans had already shown they could do amazingly well against the best troops the British had at Lexington and Concord by sniping them from the woods from cover (you know, like modern tactics), but Washington wanted America to be recognized as a nation, and so he made Americans stand and die in a line just like European armies... and lost 66% of his engagements because the American army didn't have the same training.
You're right, the Sons of Liberty (which were a bunch of hooligans, mainly) and the Boston Tea Party were kinda sorta like terrorism. But there's a big difference between dumping tea (which the Americans considered a threat to their embargo) and blowing up a bunch of schoolchildren (of your own country) with bombs in order to make a point.
Well, I guess we no longer need to argue back and forth over the "slippery slope" of giving the government access to stuff it shouldn't have access to.
The case is closed - the government will abuse any power it has access to.
As Bruce Schneider says, what we do not need is security at the expense of liberty and privacy - we need liberty, security, *and* privacy.
You aren't wrong about the police review system being totally incestuous. Policemen will never give each other a fair review unless there's a tremendous amount of outside pressure applied to the department.
One of my dad's friends was a guy named Sam Knott. On my 9th birthday, his 20 year old daughter was pulled over by a CHP officer named Craig Peyer, then raped and killed by a bridge overpass.
The real sticking point for Sam was that the CHP has received a ton of complaints about the guy's aggressive and threatening personality. Not only did they not even bother to investigate any of them, they didn't even have a system for tracking them. They all went into a filing cabinet and ignored. Sam investigated the black hole of police accountability, and really didn't like what he found, and crusaded tirelessly for the next 20 years to reform the system. He showed up at city hall meetings, befriended politicians, antagonized police chiefs that were desperate to preserve their above-the-law status, and got the bridge where she was killed renamed after her (it's a couple miles from my house). He got the laws changed, too.
He died from a heart attack in 2000 while cleaning up the bridge where his daughter was killed.
There's countless other examples of police being never held accountable - you can watch videos on Youtube of some black guys trying to file complaint reports, and being dismissed or turned away. Hell, my dad was held at gunpoint by a Texas Ranger because he didn't think he should have to fill out his SSN on the speeding ticket he got (for doing 70 on the highway). When we called to complain, they said, yeah, he's been having some psychological issues. Kind of an understatement - the guy turned purple with rage when my dad just questioned if he could be asked for his SSN, and they guy drew his gun and threatened to throw him in jail for the night.
But Texas still let him go on patrol -- he was just having "some issues".
So yeah, sites like ratemycop which provide even a totally unofficial level of police accountability should desperately be encouraged. In fact, something like this should be mandated to be part of every department's internal affairs office.
The saddest bit of the whole thing is that there's no wikipedia article on either Sam or Cara Knott, even though he was tremendously influential and the stories got a lot of press. I guess having one's daughter murdered by an evil cop and having the father crusade and win systematic change isn't as notable as a pokemon character.
You forget that on top of of the US being the biggest donor in absolute dollars, we also have the highest per-capita charity rate, something like an order of magnitude higher than England and other European countries.
Charity is kind of like people voluntarily taxing themselves to help out people they'll never meet. Kind of shoots a hole in the ugly American myth, but there you go.
It's more like a telegraph company or the Pony Express demanding money from the citizenry so that they can stay in business.
The sad news for the RIAA is that businesses do sometimes go out of business, and especially often do when their business model is outdated.
The government shouldn't be in the business of keeping failing industries on life support (with the possible exception of those critical to the nation, such as defense contractors and airlines... MAYBE.)
Out of curiosity, what does your development environment on the cell look like? Can you run apps on a PS3 without having to go through a vetting procedure?
I used to work at the supercomputer center in San Diego, and think it would be neat to play around with writing some stuff for my PS3. The folding@home app makes me nostalgic for when I used to work with grid apps.
Getting exact numbers on fundamentalists is kind of difficult, as it depends on what sort of beliefs it takes to be classified as a fundamentalist.
Here's some numbers I could find -- Mainline Protestants (members of the National Council of Churches in Christ): 46,829,961 (66.6%) Conservative/fundamentalist Protestants (nonmembers of the National Council of Churches in Christ): 23,405,099 (33.3%) (But not all Conservative Protestants are fundamentalist.)
Protestants make up 63% of American Christians, so that puts the percentage of fundamentalists at around 21% of all Christians in America.
But if you read Slashdot, atheists would have it that all Christians are fundamentalists (and if they tell you they're not, they're just pretending)...
My argument is that "proven wrong" is poor word choice. It implies we thought something was perfectly true and complete, but figured out it was entirely false and threw the whole thing out like the garbage it was.
It IS proven wrong. If a rocketship flies by at 0.5c and tries to accelerate up to 1.5c, Newtonian physics says it takes X amount of force over Y seconds to do so. But this is completely wrong, as the ship will only accelerate up to 0.9c or so and *gain apparent mass*, which is a completely different result.
Slashdot Mirror
>>That's why we pre-program responses, so that we don't need to take that much time to come to an answer.
>>Or why a religion ultra-pro pacifist as Christianism ended up supporting crusaders, or wars.
Really? Pope Urban made the decision in less than 500ms? That's impressive. He had "crusade!" pre-programmed, even though there hadn't been a crusade before?
Nifty.
Not really very historical though.
>>As I see the law (I'm British, but it seems pretty much the same in most places) you have the right to defend yourself -
>>you have to obey the law while doing so, but there is no requirement to wait on the police.
Shame that in England, defending yourself and obeying the law are contradictory. It pisses me off when I read about an old WWII vet pulling a gun on a house robber and getting arrested for it.
It's not just sending RSTs, it's sending a SYN/ACK back to the initial SYN, pretending the host is live.
I find that to be very troubling.
Thank you!
At most genetics contributes a minor influence to people's behaviors -- the "God Gene" had a 1% increase in a behavior that was sorta-kinda related to belief in stuff you can't see.
But you wouldn't recognize that from the media howling that they discovered the gene that causes people to believe in God.
Seriously, Gamespy already did this like 13 years ago.
Was just at a MATLAB seminar yesterday Phrosty, and it has reasonably transparent support for embarassingly parallel and data-parallel operations. For other stuff, it just falls back to MPI (using some lightweight wrappers around it which mainly just take care of counting how large the arrays you're sending are).
I think it might be worth a slashdot poll to see how many programmers have experience working with threads or MPI. My guess is a lot higher than 1%, especially given how prevalent Java is these days. Numbers of people proficient with MPI or PVM could be pretty low, but that's normally the bar to say that you work in high performance computing.
Sigh, I wish Slashdot used my summary when I submitted this.
Blizzard is claiming he violates copyright because he copies WOW into RAM. This is huge, way beyond just another story about Blizzard beating up a small guy -- if this case is determined for Blizzard, a whole brand new vista of copyright infringement will be opened up.
Wait, I'm so confused. I thought cell phones and other wireless devices emitted invisible pilot killing waves, so deadly that we must turn off all devices upon takeoff and landing, and put them into "pilot safe" mode when in flight?
I saw a documentary on it here:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/30
Oh, I guess that frequency-hopping signals really aren't that bad.
I find it interesting myself, especially since nature seems to exhibit symmetry nearly everywhere else.
However, my understanding of it is that there's a rather large asymmetry between the amount of energy needed to create a matter particle vs. a much higher number to create an antimatter particle. Not the 1% they were talking about, but something like an order of magnitude more free energy. Hence the free energy ended up mainly creating bosonic matter.
I liked C# 3.5 all right, but 4th Edition has already made it obsolete.
I'm not saying that people don't all perform a moral calculus, but religion definitely plays a major part of a person's moral calculus, which is a point that just flies right over Dawkins' head. There are a number of times in my life where I'd have acted differently if I'd been atheist/Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Whatever. As I said, he really doesn't have a very firm grasp at all on religion and what it means, and so he ends up just sounding stupid whenever he talks about it, especially when he tries his hand at theology.
Science needs to talk about science and not portray all Christians as fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists.
When I looked into the numbers, Fundies only make up 20% of Christians in America, and they're more common in America than elsewhere. Some people say the numbers are as high as 40%... it depends in part what criteria you use, but the fact of the matter is that when so many scientifically minded people on Slashdot can't figure out the difference between two different populations of people (fundamentalists vs non-fundamentalists) you have to wonder how rational they really are.
Could you give an example of one these "lame" attacks? He seems to be quite capable of explaining exactly what the problems with theism are, and why theists are incorrect about certain matters. He doesn't just shout "HURR RELIGION IS DUMB! HURF DURF!".
At one speech I heard him give, he said that religion doesn't actually change people's behaviors. That people will do whatever they do regardless of religion.
And yes, this is about as dumb a statement as they get, in my opinion. Not even looking at the huge number of cases where religion made a real difference in a person's decision making process, the very fact we're having this discussion is that scientists are complaining that certain denominations of theists are less receptive to science than other groups.
That, and if you listen to his hackneyed view of Christian theology, it's pretty clear he really doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to religion.
>>smart people like Gore and Dawkins
You sorta kinda just lost all your credibility right there.
Most schemes offer unhygenic macros these days alongside the hygenic ones.
.c files through the macro processor before running gcc on it, and it works reasonably well.
I don't know about straight C, but there's OpenC++ for writing syntactic transforms to C++, and OpenJava which does the same for Java. Not sure how up to date they are these days. Thing is, all the extra syntax they have to support makes lisp and scheme macros look simple.
There's bolt-on macros for C that I've seen people use before. You essentially feed your
I think it was mainly used in scientific codes when the number of dimensions of an array weren't known, and people didn't want to write N copies of the same function. You'd pass the dimension in at compile-time, and it would spit out the code for that dimensionality.
Kind of ugly, but C doesn't handle it very well otherwise.
Not directly perhaps, but they frequently did not wear uniforms and hid among civilians, putting them at risk. At the very least, that made them "unlawful combatants" by modern terminology. Also, the boatload of tea dumped into Boston harbour was hardly a military target.
Actually, one of the main reason's that the Continental Army did so poorly was that Washington insisted on the army playing by the rules of the grand armies of Europe. The Americans had already shown they could do amazingly well against the best troops the British had at Lexington and Concord by sniping them from the woods from cover (you know, like modern tactics), but Washington wanted America to be recognized as a nation, and so he made Americans stand and die in a line just like European armies... and lost 66% of his engagements because the American army didn't have the same training.
You're right, the Sons of Liberty (which were a bunch of hooligans, mainly) and the Boston Tea Party were kinda sorta like terrorism. But there's a big difference between dumping tea (which the Americans considered a threat to their embargo) and blowing up a bunch of schoolchildren (of your own country) with bombs in order to make a point.
Well, I guess we no longer need to argue back and forth over the "slippery slope" of giving the government access to stuff it shouldn't have access to.
The case is closed - the government will abuse any power it has access to.
As Bruce Schneider says, what we do not need is security at the expense of liberty and privacy - we need liberty, security, *and* privacy.
You aren't wrong about the police review system being totally incestuous. Policemen will never give each other a fair review unless there's a tremendous amount of outside pressure applied to the department.
One of my dad's friends was a guy named Sam Knott. On my 9th birthday, his 20 year old daughter was pulled over by a CHP officer named Craig Peyer, then raped and killed by a bridge overpass.
The real sticking point for Sam was that the CHP has received a ton of complaints about the guy's aggressive and threatening personality. Not only did they not even bother to investigate any of them, they didn't even have a system for tracking them. They all went into a filing cabinet and ignored. Sam investigated the black hole of police accountability, and really didn't like what he found, and crusaded tirelessly for the next 20 years to reform the system. He showed up at city hall meetings, befriended politicians, antagonized police chiefs that were desperate to preserve their above-the-law status, and got the bridge where she was killed renamed after her (it's a couple miles from my house). He got the laws changed, too.
He died from a heart attack in 2000 while cleaning up the bridge where his daughter was killed.
There's countless other examples of police being never held accountable - you can watch videos on Youtube of some black guys trying to file complaint reports, and being dismissed or turned away. Hell, my dad was held at gunpoint by a Texas Ranger because he didn't think he should have to fill out his SSN on the speeding ticket he got (for doing 70 on the highway). When we called to complain, they said, yeah, he's been having some psychological issues. Kind of an understatement - the guy turned purple with rage when my dad just questioned if he could be asked for his SSN, and they guy drew his gun and threatened to throw him in jail for the night.
But Texas still let him go on patrol -- he was just having "some issues".
So yeah, sites like ratemycop which provide even a totally unofficial level of police accountability should desperately be encouraged. In fact, something like this should be mandated to be part of every department's internal affairs office.
The saddest bit of the whole thing is that there's no wikipedia article on either Sam or Cara Knott, even though he was tremendously influential and the stories got a lot of press. I guess having one's daughter murdered by an evil cop and having the father crusade and win systematic change isn't as notable as a pokemon character.
http://www.sandiegomagazine.com/media/San-Diego-Magazine/February-2004/The-Killer-Cop/index.php?cp=1&si=0#artanc
You forget that on top of of the US being the biggest donor in absolute dollars, we also have the highest per-capita charity rate, something like an order of magnitude higher than England and other European countries.
Charity is kind of like people voluntarily taxing themselves to help out people they'll never meet. Kind of shoots a hole in the ugly American myth, but there you go.
It's more like a telegraph company or the Pony Express demanding money from the citizenry so that they can stay in business.
The sad news for the RIAA is that businesses do sometimes go out of business, and especially often do when their business model is outdated.
The government shouldn't be in the business of keeping failing industries on life support (with the possible exception of those critical to the nation, such as defense contractors and airlines... MAYBE.)
Out of curiosity, what does your development environment on the cell look like? Can you run apps on a PS3 without having to go through a vetting procedure?
I used to work at the supercomputer center in San Diego, and think it would be neat to play around with writing some stuff for my PS3. The folding@home app makes me nostalgic for when I used to work with grid apps.
>>Likewise, the governor of New York is being called to resign because he allegedly saw a hooker.
You mean Eliot Spitzer, the guy the NYT called Eliot Ness, for his uncanny knowledge and ability to crack down on prostitution rings oh wait
You can't edit articles on yourself - it's against Wikipedia policy on autobiography.
Yes, this is both serious and a bit tongue-in-cheek. =)
Getting exact numbers on fundamentalists is kind of difficult, as it depends on what sort of beliefs it takes to be classified as a fundamentalist.
Here's some numbers I could find --
Mainline Protestants (members of the National Council of Churches in Christ): 46,829,961 (66.6%)
Conservative/fundamentalist Protestants (nonmembers of the National Council of Churches in Christ): 23,405,099 (33.3%)
(But not all Conservative Protestants are fundamentalist.)
Protestants make up 63% of American Christians, so that puts the percentage of fundamentalists at around 21% of all Christians in America.
But if you read Slashdot, atheists would have it that all Christians are fundamentalists (and if they tell you they're not, they're just pretending)...
My argument is that "proven wrong" is poor word choice. It implies we thought something was perfectly true and complete, but figured out it was entirely false and threw the whole thing out like the garbage it was.
It IS proven wrong. If a rocketship flies by at 0.5c and tries to accelerate up to 1.5c, Newtonian physics says it takes X amount of force over Y seconds to do so. But this is completely wrong, as the ship will only accelerate up to 0.9c or so and *gain apparent mass*, which is a completely different result.