.if the satellites could NOT measure it more precisely, would they then be able to "cure" the problem? Because if X is true then fail, then that assumes that if X is false then don't fail.
A implies B is not necessarily equivalent to Not A implies Not B (though it is equivalent to Not B implies Not A).
So the proper logical nitpicking equivalent would be: "If the satellites can cure this fever, they cannot more preciesly measure this rise of the earth's temperature."
This assumes, of course, that you're speaking logically... if you're speaking rhetorically, as the speaker was in fact speaking, all bets are off.
So wait... you're saying there exists this country where Mathemeticians and Engineers -- "geeks", essentially -- are held in higher social esteem than businessmen, athletes, and entertainers?
A culture where geekhood beats money, athletic ability, and fame?
And this is where? Can I move there?
Are you sure you're not mistaking slashdot for a country?
(and then, as you know, the set of people just barely not interesting enough to be interested in is a curiously interesting phenomenon) and then when they came for the boring people, there was no one left to speak up.
However, I will never hesitate to use Fink as much as possible. I think for 90% of what gets installed the packages should be fine
90% of what gets installed when you use Fink has nothing to do with what you're installing.
I've given Fink a shot on a couple of occasions over the last two years, and every time I've invoked it, it's come up with false dependencies. X11 is not necessary to install, say, the Python interpreter, and there've been dependencies far more ridiculous than that.
I've had the same problem with the CPAN shell. RPMs, on the other hand, seemed to fail to install necessary things.
I build from source, then, simply because I don't trust the dependency handling from package managers. It's true that I have to pay more attention to such nonsense and would love to have it automated, but until I find a package manager that gets dependencies right, I'm going to have to do that anyway.
.. demonstrable negative effects, both in terms of increasing crime and causing social problems among participants.
That's not a slam dunk argument for its prohibition, of course (alcohol, for example, causes severe problems, but Prohibition simply didn't work), but it means that society can make a case for regulating or perhaps prohibition through government power.
Nobody goes into comp-sci for the money any more, like they did in the dotcom craze
One of the interesting things about the dot-com craze, though, was that you had English majors and other humanities and sundry graduates doing HTML (and sometimes more) programming. Not to mention graduates of various certification schools.
Not everybody who labors in the field of I/T studied CS... this isn't a guarantee that the I/T field is going to get less competetive. It means that the labor pool of the academically disciplined is going to shrink.
I'm a pretty serious amateur jazz musician, and I do a fair amount of composing and arranging for jazz ensembles of about 8-16 musicians...LilyPond is not intended for people like me. If you're less serious than I am, LilyPond is definitely not intended for you.
I'm not sure if LilyPond is for me yet, because I haven't used it, but during two years of composition classes at university and a couple of other years of occasional composition, I used Finale pretty frequently, and the criticisms of Finale the the developers of LilyPad had rang pretty true to me. It's easy to produce bad scores on Finale. It's very difficult to produce good ones. At some point, I gave up trying anything beyond basic note information and just started writing in everything else by hand after that was solid. It's not at all easy to produce good scores with Finale... I don't think it's even somewhat difficult, it's very difficult, so much so that I wouldn't be surprised if producing good scores in LilyPond were actually easier.
What, if you're running one application? I've got 512MB in my XP machine at work, and I've turned off all the snazzy effects and play-skool skins, and there are still times that my machine just suddenly decides to be completely unresponsive. This on a recent model Sony VAIO. I do tend to run back and forth between a lot of applications (Photoshop, Fireworks, Word, Excel, Thunderbird, Mozilla, IE, text editor, and when I'm feeling brave, Illustrator), but after a few days of uptime, even if I'm running only 2-3 of those, funny little things (like, selecting a drop-down menu) just start to crawl.
I'm suspecting it's something to do with disk performance, rather than memory, of course, but if I had 1-2 GB, maybe I wouldn't have to swap out so often.
I used to misunderstand this too. Then my sister became a Botanist, and I realized: Botanists take plants out of the ground, while Horticulturalists put them in.
(Botanists observe, collect, study, and hypothesize. Horticulturalists make things grow.)
We will start to see different versions of Java. People will start to think that the MS version of Java is the actual "real" Java and get mad when someone writes a Java program using Sun's version of Java.
Hmmm... no, you do that, you ruin the hash, and so the document doesn't match up with it, and so the machine stops. The idea I think the poster had was that the id/hash combo is the key that lets you do anything with the document -- if it doesn't match up, then the copier shuts down.
Livschitz's observation about how programmers work in metaphors, while mathematicians work in pure syntax
It's an interesting thought, but it's not necessarily true at all. Mathematics is metaphors, even though they're often very abstract. But it's more like working with somebody else's codebase, most of the time. Unless you're striking out and creating your own formal system, you are working with metaphors that someone else has come up with (and rather abstract ones at that).
The good news is that most mathemeticians have an aesthetic where they try to make things... as clean and orthogonal as possible.
The bad news is that terseness is also one of the aesthetics.:)
A few years ago I was student teaching (for those who've never done it, that's a pretty big time of stress, because you're essentially learning the ropes of a more-than-full-time job while not getting paid a thing and, in fact, having to pay tuition. So combine no income and no time and going back to high school. Fabulous). When my birthday came around, my girlfriend came and picked me up as soon as classes were out, pulled me away from the stuff I probably would have been doing, and we just went walking in the hills for a few hours, and then to dinner. I did have to be back at parent teacher conferences that night, but those few hours were remarkably refreshing. Just time. It's a great gift.
And therein lies the opportunity for Americans. It's inevitable that certain things - fabrication, maintenance, testing, upgrades, and other routine knowledge work - will be done overseas. But that leaves plenty for us to do. After all, before these Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined and invented.
But if you want to invent something, you need time to throw at it. Usually more than a bit. And that's not usually a commodity when you suddenly find that the only jobs available to you are those that pay so little you have to give extra time to make ends meet.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" "In the long run, we're all dead" - Keynes
No matter how true the rosy big picture may be, the devil is still in the details for those suffering from the change. If there are things we can do to make the transitionless volatile, why not do them?
That data somehow ends up in the hands of the Mormon church. They then start punishing members for things like buying coffee in stores, renting porn, not tithing a full 10%, and going to R rated movies.
Nothing like a little Mormon conspiracy theory to liven up a thread.
If They(TM) really wanted to punish members for not paying a full tithe, it'd be easy: at the year end, when they ask you to give a report on your tithing status (and they do), all they'd have to do is require documentation on your earnings, like the IRS does. If you didn't deliver, you'd be subject to church disciplinary action: suspension from participating in various ordinances, disfellowship, excommunication, or something like that.
But you know what they actually do?
They ask you. That's it. And you even have to take the initiative to schedule the meeting to be asked. If you don't do it, no one chases you down. If you do come to the meeting, and they ask you if you pay a full 10%, and you say no, the worst case scenario is that they might suspend your temple attendance privileges. Might. Or you might simply receive a short admonishment to reap the blessings of tithing by paying a full 10%.
Mormons are taught to support the Government. It will take quite a bit to get them to really fight against such a draconian intrusion into their lives. They tend to gravitate to authoritarianism as it is.
There's also, however, an inherent cultural mistrust of the state, going back to a time when the state was often the enemy -- not to mention extra-governmental agencies. There's a bit of Mormon folklore about that says something to the effect there will come a time when Mormons make a key effort to saving the constitution.
Not to say the authoritarian elements aren't there -- if you do want to poke an anthole, for example, it is interesting to go to a Sunday School meeting and talk about civil disobedience. But the distancing from commentary about resisting bad laws is more distancing of the church itself from political concerns than it is an encouragement to follow the government lockstep -- the church sees itself as an agent of change for individual characters, not as a political mover, and tries to keep things that way.
I've spoken as if I were a somewhat distanced observer, which isn't true -- I'm a member and definitely have my judgements influenced by that. But the parent comments had the wiff of someone with a grudge that hasn't observed closely enough to see how things actually work most of the time, so I thought I'd chime in FWIW.
The problem is that in a country like the US most of the poor and disenfranchised have no one to blame but themselves. Every child is afforded a free and public education.
The basic point is a good start and those facts are one of the things that make America a good country and make our upward mobility what they are.
There's more than a few problems with assuming that means those who are poor have no one to blame but themselves, though.
The IT industry bust is a pretty classic example. At the beginning of the 90's, almost no one would have warned you -- certainly no one warned me -- that software or I/T jobs might ever reach a point where not only was there an oversaturated market in the US but that many of the jobs would be shipped overseas. Lots of people made educational decisions -- ones that almost anyone would have said were sound -- based on projections that software I/T was a complete growth field, one that would need more labor than we could supply for decades to come.
Clearly not the case.
I'm speaking as a person who's been lucky to ride out the worst, lucky enough to have personal connections to acquaintances with a growing business that had open roles I could adapt to (even though it's meant working a lot of 12-16 hour days), lucky (in some ways) that I didn't have to worry about supporting a family while my bank account drained and I had to rely on the help of others.
But lots of people in society make exactly these kinds of decisions about their futures based on information of similar quality. Many of them don't adapt so readily. Many of them don't get the breaks I got.
Our society is great about providing first chances. Second chances -- which just about everyone needs unless they're dealt a first hand that's all but proof from following disasters -- we're not so good at, and generally leave to luck. It's not an easy problem to solve, but the first step has to be recognizing that while laziness and spurned opportunity can lead a person to a bad economic position, they're not the only path there . Many of the poor are guilty of nothing worse than imperfect foresight.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the machines forgot what theories Newton came up with
Well, that's how flight works, right? You fall and conveniently are distracted and forget to hit the earth.
.if the satellites could NOT measure it more precisely, would they then be able to "cure" the problem? Because if X is true then fail, then that assumes that if X is false then don't fail.
A implies B is not necessarily equivalent to Not A implies Not B (though it is equivalent to Not B implies Not A).
So the proper logical nitpicking equivalent would be: "If the satellites can cure this fever, they cannot more preciesly measure this rise of the earth's temperature."
This assumes, of course, that you're speaking logically... if you're speaking rhetorically, as the speaker was in fact speaking, all bets are off.
So wait... you're saying there exists this country where Mathemeticians and Engineers -- "geeks", essentially -- are held in higher social esteem than businessmen, athletes, and entertainers?
A culture where geekhood beats money, athletic ability, and fame?
And this is where? Can I move there?
Are you sure you're not mistaking slashdot for a country?
(and then, as you know, the set of people just barely not interesting enough to be interested in is a curiously interesting phenomenon) and then when they came for the boring people, there was no one left to speak up.
Would that be spweading Fudd?
Would You Like Drugs in Your Rice?
No, I'd just like her to testify for the damn 9/11 commission already.
However, I will never hesitate to use Fink as much as possible. I think for 90% of what gets installed the packages should be fine
90% of what gets installed when you use Fink has nothing to do with what you're installing.
I've given Fink a shot on a couple of occasions over the last two years, and every time I've invoked it, it's come up with false dependencies. X11 is not necessary to install, say, the Python interpreter, and there've been dependencies far more ridiculous than that.
I've had the same problem with the CPAN shell. RPMs, on the other hand, seemed to fail to install necessary things.
I build from source, then, simply because I don't trust the dependency handling from package managers. It's true that I have to pay more attention to such nonsense and would love to have it automated, but until I find a package manager that gets dependencies right, I'm going to have to do that anyway.
.. demonstrable negative effects, both in terms of increasing crime and causing social problems among participants.
That's not a slam dunk argument for its prohibition, of course (alcohol, for example, causes severe problems, but Prohibition simply didn't work), but it means that society can make a case for regulating or perhaps prohibition through government power.
Nobody goes into comp-sci for the money any more, like they did in the dotcom craze
One of the interesting things about the dot-com craze, though, was that you had English majors and other humanities and sundry graduates doing HTML (and sometimes more) programming. Not to mention graduates of various certification schools.
Not everybody who labors in the field of I/T studied CS... this isn't a guarantee that the I/T field is going to get less competetive. It means that the labor pool of the academically disciplined is going to shrink.
I'm a pretty serious amateur jazz musician, and I do a fair amount of composing and arranging for jazz ensembles of about 8-16 musicians...LilyPond is not intended for people like me. If you're less serious than I am, LilyPond is definitely not intended for you.
I'm not sure if LilyPond is for me yet, because I haven't used it, but during two years of composition classes at university and a couple of other years of occasional composition, I used Finale pretty frequently, and the criticisms of Finale the the developers of LilyPad had rang pretty true to me. It's easy to produce bad scores on Finale. It's very difficult to produce good ones. At some point, I gave up trying anything beyond basic note information and just started writing in everything else by hand after that was solid. It's not at all easy to produce good scores with Finale... I don't think it's even somewhat difficult, it's very difficult, so much so that I wouldn't be surprised if producing good scores in LilyPond were actually easier.
XP is tolerable with 128
What, if you're running one application? I've got 512MB in my XP machine at work, and I've turned off all the snazzy effects and play-skool skins, and there are still times that my machine just suddenly decides to be completely unresponsive. This on a recent model Sony VAIO. I do tend to run back and forth between a lot of applications (Photoshop, Fireworks, Word, Excel, Thunderbird, Mozilla, IE, text editor, and when I'm feeling brave, Illustrator), but after a few days of uptime, even if I'm running only 2-3 of those, funny little things (like, selecting a drop-down menu) just start to crawl.
I'm suspecting it's something to do with disk performance, rather than memory, of course, but if I had 1-2 GB, maybe I wouldn't have to swap out so often.
whereas ubergeeks wore equipmemnt that recorded EVERYTHING, w/ the hopes that someone would want to buy a peice of their data.
Or of a corporation that records everything, in hopes that someone will want to buy a piece of someone's data.
I used to misunderstand this too. Then my sister became a Botanist, and I realized: Botanists take plants out of the ground, while Horticulturalists put them in.
(Botanists observe, collect, study, and hypothesize. Horticulturalists make things grow.)
It is not illegal to view it. It is illegal to download it.
My understanding is that it's illegal to distribute it. Receipt would not be violation, right?
We will start to see different versions of Java. People will start to think that the MS version of Java is the actual "real" Java and get mad when someone writes a Java program using Sun's version of Java.
Didn't this already happen?
Hmmm... no, you do that, you ruin the hash, and so the document doesn't match up with it, and so the machine stops. The idea I think the poster had was that the id/hash combo is the key that lets you do anything with the document -- if it doesn't match up, then the copier shuts down.
Livschitz's observation about how programmers work in metaphors, while mathematicians work in pure syntax
:)
It's an interesting thought, but it's not necessarily true at all. Mathematics is metaphors, even though they're often very abstract. But it's more like working with somebody else's codebase, most of the time. Unless you're striking out and creating your own formal system, you are working with metaphors that someone else has come up with (and rather abstract ones at that).
The good news is that most mathemeticians have an aesthetic where they try to make things... as clean and orthogonal as possible.
The bad news is that terseness is also one of the aesthetics.
A few years ago I was student teaching (for those who've never done it, that's a pretty big time of stress, because you're essentially learning the ropes of a more-than-full-time job while not getting paid a thing and, in fact, having to pay tuition. So combine no income and no time and going back to high school. Fabulous). When my birthday came around, my girlfriend came and picked me up as soon as classes were out, pulled me away from the stuff I probably would have been doing, and we just went walking in the hills for a few hours, and then to dinner. I did have to be back at parent teacher conferences that night, but those few hours were remarkably refreshing. Just time. It's a great gift.
And therein lies the opportunity for Americans. It's inevitable that certain things - fabrication, maintenance, testing, upgrades, and other routine knowledge work - will be done overseas. But that leaves plenty for us to do. After all, before these Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined and invented.
But if you want to invent something, you need time to throw at it. Usually more than a bit. And that's not usually a commodity when you suddenly find that the only jobs available to you are those that pay so little you have to give extra time to make ends meet.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
"In the long run, we're all dead" - Keynes
No matter how true the rosy big picture may be, the devil is still in the details for those suffering from the change. If there are things we can do to make the transitionless volatile, why not do them?
It's only a matter of time before someone posts the obligatory "I, for one, welcome our miniature robotic overlords."
Yes, but I, for one, welcome our posting-about-miniature-robotic-overlords overlords.
That data somehow ends up in the hands of the Mormon church. They then start punishing members for things like buying coffee in stores, renting porn, not tithing a full 10%, and going to R rated movies.
Nothing like a little Mormon conspiracy theory to liven up a thread.
If They(TM) really wanted to punish members for not paying a full tithe, it'd be easy: at the year end, when they ask you to give a report on your tithing status (and they do), all they'd have to do is require documentation on your earnings, like the IRS does. If you didn't deliver, you'd be subject to church disciplinary action: suspension from participating in various ordinances, disfellowship, excommunication, or something like that.
But you know what they actually do?
They ask you. That's it. And you even have to take the initiative to schedule the meeting to be asked. If you don't do it, no one chases you down. If you do come to the meeting, and they ask you if you pay a full 10%, and you say no, the worst case scenario is that they might suspend your temple attendance privileges. Might. Or you might simply receive a short admonishment to reap the blessings of tithing by paying a full 10%.
Mormons are taught to support the Government. It will take quite a bit to get them to really fight against such a draconian intrusion into their lives. They tend to gravitate to authoritarianism as it is.
There's also, however, an inherent cultural mistrust of the state, going back to a time when the state was often the enemy -- not to mention extra-governmental agencies. There's a bit of Mormon folklore about that says something to the effect there will come a time when Mormons make a key effort to saving the constitution.
Not to say the authoritarian elements aren't there -- if you do want to poke an anthole, for example, it is interesting to go to a Sunday School meeting and talk about civil disobedience. But the distancing from commentary about resisting bad laws is more distancing of the church itself from political concerns than it is an encouragement to follow the government lockstep -- the church sees itself as an agent of change for individual characters, not as a political mover, and tries to keep things that way.
I've spoken as if I were a somewhat distanced observer, which isn't true -- I'm a member and definitely have my judgements influenced by that. But the parent comments had the wiff of someone with a grudge that hasn't observed closely enough to see how things actually work most of the time, so I thought I'd chime in FWIW.
The problem is that in a country like the US most of the poor and disenfranchised have no one to blame but themselves. Every child is afforded a free and public education.
The basic point is a good start and those facts are one of the things that make America a good country and make our upward mobility what they are.
There's more than a few problems with assuming that means those who are poor have no one to blame but themselves, though.
The IT industry bust is a pretty classic example. At the beginning of the 90's, almost no one would have warned you -- certainly no one warned me -- that software or I/T jobs might ever reach a point where not only was there an oversaturated market in the US but that many of the jobs would be shipped overseas. Lots of people made educational decisions -- ones that almost anyone would have said were sound -- based on projections that software I/T was a complete growth field, one that would need more labor than we could supply for decades to come.
Clearly not the case.
I'm speaking as a person who's been lucky to ride out the worst, lucky enough to have personal connections to acquaintances with a growing business that had open roles I could adapt to (even though it's meant working a lot of 12-16 hour days), lucky (in some ways) that I didn't have to worry about supporting a family while my bank account drained and I had to rely on the help of others.
But lots of people in society make exactly these kinds of decisions about their futures based on information of similar quality. Many of them don't adapt so readily. Many of them don't get the breaks I got.
Our society is great about providing first chances. Second chances -- which just about everyone needs unless they're dealt a first hand that's all but proof from following disasters -- we're not so good at, and generally leave to luck. It's not an easy problem to solve, but the first step has to be recognizing that while laziness and spurned opportunity can lead a person to a bad economic position, they're not the only path there . Many of the poor are guilty of nothing worse than imperfect foresight.
non-compatible e-mail systems, incompatible HTML/XML markup, integrated browsers
And I know just the company to do it.
I'd be waiting to mug their sanitation guys with that kind of stuff being thrown away. Bet there's perfectly good G3/G4's going soon.