Again with all these conspiracy theories about Western involvement in Ukraine. The thing about conspiracy theories is that they never hold up when you apply common sense.
There is only one major nation for which the situation in Ukraine is of critical importance: Russia. If EU membership led to a flood of Gean, French, and British investment in Ukrainian oil production, Russia would no longer have a monopoly on oil exports to the rest of Europe. This would be a disaster for the Russian oil oligarchs that keep Putin in power. From the perspective of EU businessmen, however, it matters little whether they invest in Ukraine or Russia. Meanwhile, the average American probably wouldn't even be able to point Ukraine out on a map.
So who has the vested interest in interfering in Ukrainian politics? Moreover, who has a history of interfering in Ukrainian politics? That's right, Russia. Are you forgetting that the KGB tried to assassinate Yushchenko in 2014? Of course Russia and their lackey Yanukovych claimed that Yushchenko poisoined and nearly killed himself to win sympathy from voters, because that is something that a sane person would do. (Note the heavy sarcasm.)
So no, the protests in Kiev were not engineered by the CIA; they were grassroots. Just because you read it on RIA Novosti, doesn't make it true.
Unarmed protesters getting shot and killed by government police is a "violent overthrow of the government"? Your utterly warped "memory" of events is disgusting. As far as this conspiracy theory about US involvement, find me one person in Kiev who acknowledges the presence of CIA. I doubt you will find a single one, but there are dozens of rebel leaders in Donetsk who are proud to say that they have KGB handlers.
If you're one of the select few that are so wealthy that you own enough stock to be able to vote out an unpopular CEO (or block a grassroots shareholder movement to do the same), you're either the CEO or his yachting buddy.
Yes, and liberals such as myself contend that marriage is a human right. If tolerance means allowing gay individuals to have human rights, then they must have the right to marriage.
You're missing the point. If Macy's sells a shirt for 50 USD and decides to keep those 50 USD in the bank, are they "speculating on the value of the dollar." Technically yes, but that certainly isn't how Macy's is thinking about it. The USD is is stable enough that holding onto USD is not considered speculation or investment. It is considered saving. That's what it means to be a currency. Until Bitcoin can also act as a medium of savings rather than a medium of speculation and investment, it will not truly be a currency.
Geez, this is the most idiotic comment I've seen on Slashdot all day, and that's saying something. You couldn't be bothered to do a 30 second web search before implying that Apollo had no benefits?
Examples from those links: improved dialysis machines, credit card swipes, army field rations, improved building insulation, low recoil/shock rubber, cordless household appliances, cheaper Teflon and Velcro, asbestos-free fire proof textiles, better industrial lubricant, exercise equipment improvents used by pro sports teams, a great deal of insight into how the moons and planets formed, many rocket technology advances used in today's ICBMs and missile defense systems, etc., etc., etc.
Please, next time do five minutes of research before you post something so bonehead with so much conviction.
You seriously think the DoD never spent recruiting money on comic books and movies? I'm guessing you never heard of GI Joe then? OrTop Gun? Should we send every kid who likes GI Joe and Top Gun off to Gaza? I liked playing with toy GI Joe fighter jets when I was young. Should my parents have taken me to Kosovo? No, videogames are not any different from movies comics an television. This is just another example of the age old phenomenon of an older generation being afraid of the culture of the younger generation because they don't understand it.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. There have been Chinese and Vietnamese Fields Medalists in the past, but until now there has never been a female Fields Medalist. There has also never been an African Fields Medalist. Both of these are indicators of serious issues. First, sub-Saharan Africa has a total lack of access to higher education (with the exception of South Africa), and second, cultural pressures often dissuade women from pursuing STEM fields in Western nations and prevent them from entering higher education entirely in certain non-Western nations.
You could dismiss these concerns as activism, but that's terribly tunnel-visioned. Every African and every women who for some reason or another has missed out on the opportunity to study STEM is another mind that could potentially have been another Euler or Gauss but was denied the chance. Unless women are intrinsically less adept at math (which I personally do not believe is the case), we've been missing out on half the world's great mathematicians. Could you imagine how different the earth would be today if we had two Fermats, two Euclids, two Poincares? How much knowledge have we lost for the lack of women in math and science? This isn't about "leaving math and science alone" from activism. This is about untapping all the math and science talent that has been hidden away for hundreds of years.
I found it for you: It was Lord Camden speaking about Donaldson v. Beckett. The full case proceedings can be found at http://www.copyrighthistory.co.... Lord Camden's commentary is quite long, so I won't copy/paste it here, but you can find it on the linked page if you search for "Lord Camden spoke as follows"
I know you're trying to point out a supposed grammatical mistake, but yes, the Economist did exist in 1860. A quick Google search suggests that it was in print since 1843.
Look, I don't understand how many times I have to explain this. In Python 1 / 2 is not equal to 1.0 / 2.0, and you are pretending that this has something to do with transitivity. It. Does. Not.
If a=b and c=d then it follows that a/c=a/d
No, it doesn't. Just because it is true when dealing with real numbers in traditional mathematics, doesn't mean it is true in other scenarios. The phenomenon where a=b and c=d implies a/c = a/d, is called substitution, not transitivity, as any damn middle school level text can explain to you: http://hotmath.com/hotmath_hel.... The Python division operation is different from the standard mathematical division operation in that it is not satisfy the substitution property of equality. This has nothing to do with transitivity. Admit it. At this point you are either too boneheaded to understand the difference between division and equality or too stubborn to admit that your are wrong. Whatever the case may be, I'm not going to needlessly expend the energy to argue with you anymore.
No, you didn't take great pains to point anything out. If you did, you would have said, "and this next example has nothing to do with transitivity, but..." The first half of your post has nothing to do with transitivity either, which I just explained in my response to your other post.
Look, you are trying to build an argument with a wall of cards, but it simply isn't going to work.
You just told me a/c == a/d and a/d == b/d implies a/c == b/d. That would be an example of transitivity, I grant you that. The problem is that in the example you have, a/c != a/d:
>>> A = 1
>>> C = 2
>>> B = 1.0
>>> D = 2.0
>>> A / C
0
>>> A / D
0.5
>>> A / C == A / D
False
So if a/c != a/d, why in the world would a/d == b/d implies a/c == b/d? Again, don't say "but a/c == a/d in mathematics" because that has nothing to do with transitivity. I never said that a problem with PHP is that division operations don't give you the same result that they would in pure mathematics. I said one problem is that PHP isn't transitive.
And the second half of your post has nothing to do with transitivity either. In fact, Python is quite transitive in this case:
>> 1/3 == 1/2
True
>> 1/3 == 1/4
True
>> 1/4 == 1/2
True
>> 4/3 == 1/2
False
>> 4/3 == 1/4
False
>> 1/4 == 4/3
False
It seems that you don't understand what transitivity is. Transitivity means that A == B and B == C implies A == C. What you've shown is A == D and B == E does not imply A / D == B / E. Where the hell is the A == B statement? There is none. Instead you are essentially saying A / A is not always equal B / B, which has nothing to do with transitivity. (BTW, this is true even in pure mathematics if A == 0 or B == 0.) Nice try, though.
As Patman64 already said, it seems that you are the one that is laughably ignorant. PHP and JavaScript are the exception to the rule.
Try this in Python:
>>> "0" == "0000"
False
Try this in Ruby
irb(main):001:0> "12" + 2
TypeError: no implicit conversion of Fixnum into String
from (irb):1:in `+'
from (irb):1
from/bin/irb:12:in `'
Try this in Lua
> print(null == 0)
false
It's not as if PHP's hidden casting saves you any effort either. If I actually wanted to compare a string to an int in any of those other languages, it's absurdly simple:
I've read ManiacDan's "hardly" rebuttal, and frankly speaking, it is garbage. Here is my rebuttal to the rebuttal:
Predictable - The author states that it's the language's responsibility to be understood by everyone who uses it, rather than the builder's responsibility to understand their tools.
No, that's a strawman. The the criticism is that languages should facilitate productivity by acting intuitively whenever possible. Language design is to an extent a user interface design for developers. And the number one principle of user interface design is anything that doesn't act the way the user expects it to is broken. (Just ask Joel Spolsky.)
Let's use a little analogy: When you hire an handyman to work on your house, you expect him to know his tools like the back of his hand. You have a choice of two handymen. The first owns a Python powerdrill that has three settings: slow, medium, and fast. The second owns a PHP powerdrill that has twenty-seven different modes. The first mode is very-slow- counterclockwise-drywall-pneumatic, the second mode is medium-slow-clockwise-hardwood-electric, and so on. Which handyman is going to be able to finish the product more quickly. Well, it depends. If the Python handyman doesn't know the basics of Python, he'll do much worse than PHP handyman. But if the PHP handyman and the Python handyman are both equally competent, the Python handyman will be three times faster: because the Python drill is so much simpler, the Python handyman will be able to a lot of his work purely on instinct, but the PHP handyman will have to employ his full cognitive capacity even for the simplest tasks.
Consistent
ManiacDan concedes this point, so I won't write on it here.
Concise - He makes statements about "boilerplate" a number of times, but never defines the term or tells us what he's talking about. PHP is very concise. It includes time-saving functions like usort(), file_get_contents(), and other functions which in C++ would take pages of code.
I am a diehard C++ fan, but even I'll admit that calling a language "concise" because it's less verbose than C++ is laughable. Would you call a slug a sprinter because it is faster than a snail? I mean seriously, what is this nonsense? A language is concise because it has a built in sort function? I could write a sort function in assembler and reuse it in all my subsequent programs, but that doesn't make assembler concise. You want something concise? How about something like Python's list comprehensions? How about a null-coalescing operator a-la C# or Ruby? How about using Ruby style blocks for iterating and callbacks? How about C++-style RAII or Java-style "finally" for avoiding tons of if-else statements to release resources after an exception?
He lists error-checking as boilerplate. I don't know how Python handles it, but generally as a programmer I'd like to know if a file operation failed.
Oh, now it makes sense. The only way someone would defend the mire of if-elseif-else error checking in PHP would be if they were ignorant of a better way.
Reliable - This, again, is him assuming that it's the language's responsibility to be understood, rather than his responsibility to understand it. He goes into what he considers "gotcha" events later in the article, but (spoiler alert) they all stem from his fundamental understanding of the language.
No, ManiacDan, he understands the == statement perfectly, as you can tell from his meticulous list of instances when == is not transitive. In fact, he understands it so well that he knows that it is complete BS. A web language needs an eye for security, but only in the mother of all of web-languages PHP can you compare two password hashes using "==" and have the result be "true" even if the hashes are different. But we should use "===", you say! Great. Now tell me how easy it is to h
The difference is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't a secret. Here we have Russia pretending to be neutral while shelling a foreign country. This kind of defeats the whole narrative Putin has been selling of the Ukranian government trying to suppress a grassroots independence movement that has absolutely nothing to do with Russia.
Oh god, someone has fed you such a backwards picture of the story. Let me give you a highly abridged recent history of Ukraine:
In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, who has always been buddy-buddy with Putin, ran for President against Viktor Yushchenko. He wanted closer relations with Russia wheras Yushchenko wanted closer relations with the EU. Yushchenko was poisoned in the middle of the campaign and nearly died. He was left permanently disfigured. He also claimed that it was the KGB that tried to assassinate him.
Yanukovych won the election initially, but the Ukranian Supreme Court overturned the election results because of widespread fraud and voter intimidation. In the new elections, Yushchenko won despite still being seriously ill from the poisoning.
In 2010 Yanukovych ran for president and narrowly won, defeating a candidate from Yushchenko's party: Yulia Tymoshenko. Yulia Tymoshenko became PM (in Ukraine, the PM is second in command to the President, but they can be from opposing parties), and since the elections were so closer, she and her minority party still had a lot of power. When they made moves to advance the integration process with the EU, Yanukovych charged Tymoshenko with several counts of corruption. She was found guilty and imprisoned. The Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both claim that the charges were trumped up and were political in nature. Just a couple of years later, in 2013, Yanukovych had finally gathered enough of his own party members in Parliament and cancelled the EU integration process entirely.
This is what sparked the protests in Ukraine: repeated attempts of the pro-Russian faction to use undemocratic means to defeat the pro-EU faction.
Slashdot Mirror
Again with all these conspiracy theories about Western involvement in Ukraine. The thing about conspiracy theories is that they never hold up when you apply common sense.
There is only one major nation for which the situation in Ukraine is of critical importance: Russia. If EU membership led to a flood of Gean, French, and British investment in Ukrainian oil production, Russia would no longer have a monopoly on oil exports to the rest of Europe. This would be a disaster for the Russian oil oligarchs that keep Putin in power. From the perspective of EU businessmen, however, it matters little whether they invest in Ukraine or Russia. Meanwhile, the average American probably wouldn't even be able to point Ukraine out on a map.
So who has the vested interest in interfering in Ukrainian politics? Moreover, who has a history of interfering in Ukrainian politics? That's right, Russia. Are you forgetting that the KGB tried to assassinate Yushchenko in 2014? Of course Russia and their lackey Yanukovych claimed that Yushchenko poisoined and nearly killed himself to win sympathy from voters, because that is something that a sane person would do. (Note the heavy sarcasm.)
So no, the protests in Kiev were not engineered by the CIA; they were grassroots. Just because you read it on RIA Novosti, doesn't make it true.
Unarmed protesters getting shot and killed by government police is a "violent overthrow of the government"? Your utterly warped "memory" of events is disgusting. As far as this conspiracy theory about US involvement, find me one person in Kiev who acknowledges the presence of CIA. I doubt you will find a single one, but there are dozens of rebel leaders in Donetsk who are proud to say that they have KGB handlers.
If you're one of the select few that are so wealthy that you own enough stock to be able to vote out an unpopular CEO (or block a grassroots shareholder movement to do the same), you're either the CEO or his yachting buddy.
Yes, and liberals such as myself contend that marriage is a human right. If tolerance means allowing gay individuals to have human rights, then they must have the right to marriage.
Sorry, replied to the wrong person.
You're missing the point. If Macy's sells a shirt for 50 USD and decides to keep those 50 USD in the bank, are they "speculating on the value of the dollar." Technically yes, but that certainly isn't how Macy's is thinking about it. The USD is is stable enough that holding onto USD is not considered speculation or investment. It is considered saving. That's what it means to be a currency. Until Bitcoin can also act as a medium of savings rather than a medium of speculation and investment, it will not truly be a currency.
If this was really about latency, Apple could have kept the servers in Japan or South Korea.
Two words: Smoot-Hawley Tarrif.
Geez, this is the most idiotic comment I've seen on Slashdot all day, and that's saying something. You couldn't be bothered to do a 30 second web search before implying that Apollo had no benefits?
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
http://m.computerworld.com/s/a...
http://www.the-scientist.com/?...
http://www.consumerreports.org...
Examples from those links: improved dialysis machines, credit card swipes, army field rations, improved building insulation, low recoil/shock rubber, cordless household appliances, cheaper Teflon and Velcro, asbestos-free fire proof textiles, better industrial lubricant, exercise equipment improvents used by pro sports teams, a great deal of insight into how the moons and planets formed, many rocket technology advances used in today's ICBMs and missile defense systems, etc., etc., etc.
Please, next time do five minutes of research before you post something so bonehead with so much conviction.
You seriously think the DoD never spent recruiting money on comic books and movies? I'm guessing you never heard of GI Joe then? OrTop Gun? Should we send every kid who likes GI Joe and Top Gun off to Gaza? I liked playing with toy GI Joe fighter jets when I was young. Should my parents have taken me to Kosovo? No, videogames are not any different from movies comics an television. This is just another example of the age old phenomenon of an older generation being afraid of the culture of the younger generation because they don't understand it.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. There have been Chinese and Vietnamese Fields Medalists in the past, but until now there has never been a female Fields Medalist. There has also never been an African Fields Medalist. Both of these are indicators of serious issues. First, sub-Saharan Africa has a total lack of access to higher education (with the exception of South Africa), and second, cultural pressures often dissuade women from pursuing STEM fields in Western nations and prevent them from entering higher education entirely in certain non-Western nations.
You could dismiss these concerns as activism, but that's terribly tunnel-visioned. Every African and every women who for some reason or another has missed out on the opportunity to study STEM is another mind that could potentially have been another Euler or Gauss but was denied the chance. Unless women are intrinsically less adept at math (which I personally do not believe is the case), we've been missing out on half the world's great mathematicians. Could you imagine how different the earth would be today if we had two Fermats, two Euclids, two Poincares? How much knowledge have we lost for the lack of women in math and science? This isn't about "leaving math and science alone" from activism. This is about untapping all the math and science talent that has been hidden away for hundreds of years.
I found it for you: It was Lord Camden speaking about Donaldson v. Beckett. The full case proceedings can be found at http://www.copyrighthistory.co.... Lord Camden's commentary is quite long, so I won't copy/paste it here, but you can find it on the linked page if you search for "Lord Camden spoke as follows"
I know you're trying to point out a supposed grammatical mistake, but yes, the Economist did exist in 1860. A quick Google search suggests that it was in print since 1843.
If a=b and c=d then it follows that a/c=a/d
No, it doesn't. Just because it is true when dealing with real numbers in traditional mathematics, doesn't mean it is true in other scenarios. The phenomenon where a=b and c=d implies a/c = a/d, is called substitution, not transitivity, as any damn middle school level text can explain to you: http://hotmath.com/hotmath_hel.... The Python division operation is different from the standard mathematical division operation in that it is not satisfy the substitution property of equality. This has nothing to do with transitivity. Admit it. At this point you are either too boneheaded to understand the difference between division and equality or too stubborn to admit that your are wrong. Whatever the case may be, I'm not going to needlessly expend the energy to argue with you anymore.
No, you didn't take great pains to point anything out. If you did, you would have said, "and this next example has nothing to do with transitivity, but..." The first half of your post has nothing to do with transitivity either, which I just explained in my response to your other post.
Look, you are trying to build an argument with a wall of cards, but it simply isn't going to work.
You just told me a/c == a/d and a/d == b/d implies a/c == b/d. That would be an example of transitivity, I grant you that. The problem is that in the example you have, a/c != a/d:
>>> A = 1
>>> C = 2
>>> B = 1.0
>>> D = 2.0
>>> A / C
0
>>> A / D
0.5
>>> A / C == A / D
False
So if a/c != a/d, why in the world would a/d == b/d implies a/c == b/d? Again, don't say "but a/c == a/d in mathematics" because that has nothing to do with transitivity. I never said that a problem with PHP is that division operations don't give you the same result that they would in pure mathematics. I said one problem is that PHP isn't transitive.
And the second half of your post has nothing to do with transitivity either. In fact, Python is quite transitive in this case: >> 1/3 == 1/2
True
>> 1/3 == 1/4
True
>> 1/4 == 1/2
True >> 4/3 == 1/2
False
>> 4/3 == 1/4
False
>> 1/4 == 4/3
False
It seems that you don't understand what transitivity is. Transitivity means that A == B and B == C implies A == C. What you've shown is A == D and B == E does not imply A / D == B / E. Where the hell is the A == B statement? There is none. Instead you are essentially saying A / A is not always equal B / B, which has nothing to do with transitivity. (BTW, this is true even in pure mathematics if A == 0 or B == 0.) Nice try, though.
Okay, give one example in Python, Ruby, or Lua where the == operator is intransitive.
Try this in Ruby
Try this in Lua
It's not as if PHP's hidden casting saves you any effort either. If I actually wanted to compare a string to an int in any of those other languages, it's absurdly simple:
Python:
Ruby:
Lua:
What? I'm not defending PHP. I just wrote a two page long post ripping apart a defense of PHP!
No, that's a strawman. The the criticism is that languages should facilitate productivity by acting intuitively whenever possible. Language design is to an extent a user interface design for developers. And the number one principle of user interface design is anything that doesn't act the way the user expects it to is broken. (Just ask Joel Spolsky.)
Let's use a little analogy: When you hire an handyman to work on your house, you expect him to know his tools like the back of his hand. You have a choice of two handymen. The first owns a Python powerdrill that has three settings: slow, medium, and fast. The second owns a PHP powerdrill that has twenty-seven different modes. The first mode is very-slow- counterclockwise-drywall-pneumatic, the second mode is medium-slow-clockwise-hardwood-electric, and so on. Which handyman is going to be able to finish the product more quickly. Well, it depends. If the Python handyman doesn't know the basics of Python, he'll do much worse than PHP handyman. But if the PHP handyman and the Python handyman are both equally competent, the Python handyman will be three times faster: because the Python drill is so much simpler, the Python handyman will be able to a lot of his work purely on instinct, but the PHP handyman will have to employ his full cognitive capacity even for the simplest tasks.
ManiacDan concedes this point, so I won't write on it here.
I am a diehard C++ fan, but even I'll admit that calling a language "concise" because it's less verbose than C++ is laughable. Would you call a slug a sprinter because it is faster than a snail? I mean seriously, what is this nonsense? A language is concise because it has a built in sort function? I could write a sort function in assembler and reuse it in all my subsequent programs, but that doesn't make assembler concise. You want something concise? How about something like Python's list comprehensions? How about a null-coalescing operator a-la C# or Ruby? How about using Ruby style blocks for iterating and callbacks? How about C++-style RAII or Java-style "finally" for avoiding tons of if-else statements to release resources after an exception?
Oh, now it makes sense. The only way someone would defend the mire of if-elseif-else error checking in PHP would be if they were ignorant of a better way.
No, ManiacDan, he understands the == statement perfectly, as you can tell from his meticulous list of instances when == is not transitive. In fact, he understands it so well that he knows that it is complete BS. A web language needs an eye for security, but only in the mother of all of web-languages PHP can you compare two password hashes using "==" and have the result be "true" even if the hashes are different. But we should use "===", you say! Great. Now tell me how easy it is to h
following a series of surprise visits to Redmond's offices in cities across China on Monday
While I understand that this is metonymy, it's confusing as hell because at first read "Redmond's offices" == "Microsoft's offices in Redmond."
The difference is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't a secret. Here we have Russia pretending to be neutral while shelling a foreign country. This kind of defeats the whole narrative Putin has been selling of the Ukranian government trying to suppress a grassroots independence movement that has absolutely nothing to do with Russia.
Oh god, someone has fed you such a backwards picture of the story. Let me give you a highly abridged recent history of Ukraine:
In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, who has always been buddy-buddy with Putin, ran for President against Viktor Yushchenko. He wanted closer relations with Russia wheras Yushchenko wanted closer relations with the EU. Yushchenko was poisoned in the middle of the campaign and nearly died. He was left permanently disfigured. He also claimed that it was the KGB that tried to assassinate him.
Yanukovych won the election initially, but the Ukranian Supreme Court overturned the election results because of widespread fraud and voter intimidation. In the new elections, Yushchenko won despite still being seriously ill from the poisoning.
In 2010 Yanukovych ran for president and narrowly won, defeating a candidate from Yushchenko's party: Yulia Tymoshenko. Yulia Tymoshenko became PM (in Ukraine, the PM is second in command to the President, but they can be from opposing parties), and since the elections were so closer, she and her minority party still had a lot of power. When they made moves to advance the integration process with the EU, Yanukovych charged Tymoshenko with several counts of corruption. She was found guilty and imprisoned. The Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both claim that the charges were trumped up and were political in nature. Just a couple of years later, in 2013, Yanukovych had finally gathered enough of his own party members in Parliament and cancelled the EU integration process entirely.
This is what sparked the protests in Ukraine: repeated attempts of the pro-Russian faction to use undemocratic means to defeat the pro-EU faction.