But, actually, it's not mm, it's MM. Since inverting the case usually means inverting the sense, that would be 400 million meters. Which would make it the largest unit of currency ever circulated in the US, and smaller only than the Ningi and Pu.
Since CS can only be taught in America on the removal of Microsoft, a 400 million meter long piece of paper makes sense. It should be plenty to completely wrap the key buildings. It will not be sufficient to wrap the ego of Bill Gates, who still "advises" the company.
Bad news/opinions spread faster than good. Bad news/opinions stay in the mind longer. Critical thinking is absent from the overwhelming majority. People don't think chronologically. Everyone is guilty of cognitive dissonance. People are less likely to hold good opinions of people they don't know. People will cling onto false beliefs even when shown their falseness.
Conclusion: The average will always be against you. By a spectacularly large margin.
Nobody has to decide what anything "means". The EU issued a very simple instruction - personal names cannot be used to search for outdated/false information. People who run businesses know part of the cost of business is that they'll be attacked. So long as they stick to the law, the attacks will fail. People complain and, in free countries, complain loudly on the Internet, TV and talk radio.
I don't like irrational complaints, but as there's nowhere rational to go, I have to deal with it. Google is bigger than me, and a good deal richer. (Rich megacorps with a reputation for evil getting defended on Slashdot for doing evil... Gone way downhill.) Why should I pity Google when they've the resources to deal with a few insignificant little gnat bites of complaints?
Ok, let's take an example that Americans might understand better, the No Fly List.
We know bad data is on the list. We know the list is searched by name and not by identity. We know this results in false positives.
That is, nonetheless, a database of opinions. It is the opinion of the person adding the name that it belongs there. It is the opinion of the airport or airline security that some individual is the individual named.
It is MY opinion that the moment some Joe Average Innocent gets hurt by this, that the right of others to hold opinions suddenly gets forgotten, that the right to fair and honest treatment suddenly emerges as more important.
There were actual cases, in the 70s and 80s of US banks declaring customers dead. The bank, as a legal person, is entitled to opinions, according to the Supreme Court (Hobby Lobby case).
It is MY opinion that had this affected someone you knew, had they lost their home, job, money, credit, insurance and licenses because of an opinion of a non-corporeal being, that that someone would hold some very strong opinions on opinions.
There have been cases in the US of people dying in hospitals (particularly the ER room) because staff held the opinion they should be ignored, duty of care be damned. Others died from neglect, because the hospital was of the opinion that the room was empty.
It is MY opinion that had this affected someone close to you, you'd be telling a cop, a lawyer, a reporter or all three precisely where the hospital could stick its opinions.
In other words, many Americans only believe in the right of opinions that don't affect them. As soon as an opinion actually matters, as soon as a view is of consequence to that person, truth takes precedence.
To me, that's bullshit. If something's broken, it's broken. You can't sensibly argue it's only broken when you're around. That's not freedom, that's ego.
This isn't about opinions, though. NOTHING the EU said dealt with opinions, save that it was LAWFUL to publish them. What the EU prohibited was OUTDATED opinions and FALSE data being searchable under a person's name. If you search for it any other way, you're legally entitled to the link and content. That is completely protected.
How Americans choose to resolve that is their business. But computers in the EU are under EU law, not American law, just at computers in America are under American law. You've no sovereignty in the EU and computers aren't embassies (although America has tried to argue that.) Which is why the recent ruling against Microsoft is wrong. Ownership of the physical machine is NOT, under EU law, ownership of the data.
If, however, you side with Google on who has control, then US judges are entitled to demand any data in the EU on any computers owned by Americans. Even if those Americans have no American presence, since the judge did NOT argue point of presence was what mattered, only nationality.
I do not, and will not, tolerate arguments based on simultaneously held opposing beliefs. Not from you, not even from me. Look at the nightmare scenarios, all of which have happened to real, innocent people. Look at Snowden's publications. Think about all the things that matter to you that rely on privacy. Then tell me, flat-out, that you cannot think of a single situation where the right to associate (not publish, there's no issue about publication, just explicit association) might possibly be trumped by your right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (as I believe someone once referred to it).
Hell, what was the American Revolution about? Not the right of King George to his madness, but the right of Americans not to be linked to it, surely.
The EU ruling does not require the information on a website to be deleted. Quite the opposite, it upheld the ruling against that by previous courts.
The EU ruling does not require Google to de-index the information. No, seriously, it doesn't.
What the EU ruling states, and this is made painfully clear by the court and also in the summary document, is that the link to the information not be coupled with the personal name. How Google chooses to implement that is Google's affair.
The Statute of Anne is ultimately at the heart of this, because this is where ownership of information is first taken out of the hands of corporations and guilds, and placed squarely in the hands of individuals. The Data Protection Act, which stemmed from (again) corporations claiming ownership of information belonging to others - but this time often getting it wrong with life-threatening consequences, was in many ways a repeat of that battle.
In the case of the DPA, the stakes were higher. Computer glitches and operator errors declaring living people to be dead spread from computer to computer like an incurable cancer. With no redress, even if it meant your bank account was closed, insurance got cancelled and house repossessed. Even if you got a company to fix the data, it would merely get reinfected. Politically aligned "vetting" companies were making a fortune selling bogus information to prospective employers, ensuring only ideologically approved candidates would get hired.
I don't think people remember those days.
European privacy rules are intended to transfer rights to individuals, as per Statute of Anne, and attempt to prevent malign, inaccurate data from harming said individual. So far, so good. I'm amazed at the number of libertarians who are opposed to individuals having rights. The more they oppose such a notion, the more I'm inclined to believe the philosophy suspect. If core elements can be ignored when convenient, they're not especially core.
The EU laws and ruling might not be perfect, in fact I don't believe for a moment they are. But I reject the idea that a corporation has more rights than a person.
Some time back, when I argued that freedom of the collective could not be neglected in pursuit of freedom of the individual, there was much opposition. Mostly along the lives that collectives have no physical reality. I fully expect these to be the people most opposed to the EU ruling, on the grounds that collectives (because that's what a corporation is) have freedoms.
In other words, I believe people prefer cognitive dissonance to having self-consistent beliefs or to admitting error. Much better to split the mind than debug an ideology. Microsoft would be proud.
I'd love to see a sane, rational discussion on the issue. Particularly with experts in IT security as part of it, as they're the experts in handling the conflict between access needs and access controls, and between risks vs benefits, especially on historical data which may include flawed data.
Very true. A wholly free market is actually quite toxic, as a certain Adam Smith noted. Especially when it's dishonest.
In-app purchases are the return of micropayments, but for virtual goods less valuable than Second Life real estate. It is, of course, entirely fair for companies to sell such products and for customers to buy them, but the control system is poor, virtual goods have an amazingly high failure rate for delivery, and prices are often in the small print.
Functionality comes at a price. Complexity introduces bugs by necessity, reduces performance and increases memory footprint.
Below some given threshold, adding complexity is fine. The reduction in wasted time/money exceeds the increase in overheads. Above that threshold, the reverse is true.
As with all systems, for any given variable, the plot of efficiency vs complexity follows the standard S curve. Memorize this curve, it will save you much grief. The aggregate will be more complex because the variables have inter-dependencies and unique characteristics. You need to resolve to orthogonal components if you want to do anything useful.
Since nobody can be bothered to do that much maths, it becomes a simple question - do you get anything out of using them?
For me, the answer is usually no. There are no editors out there that handle more than a small fraction of the languages I use. Several critical languages use specialized formatting rules and it is a syntax error to not follow them. It would be nice to actually have an editor remember the rules for me, but formatting editors prettify code. The notion of languages having rules is beyond them.
Most code editors I've used also insist on adding truly ugly dummy code. And by "ugly", I mean I would demote a first year student by a year for writing such crap.
Maintainer convenience is not a factor I allow in mitigation. NetBeans and Eclipse score poorly. Eclipse doubly so, as I've seen it suffer seizures when updating purportedly compatible extensions. If I can write code faster by chiselling it into rock than typing it into an editor, the editor's coding isn't being written for the benefit of users. If portability and compatibility are claimed, I expect that claim to be true or rescinded. Transactions, including updates, should be bulletproof - which may include rollbacks for the irretrievably mangled.
Good code isn't the problem. Good code is never a problem. Finding good coders IS a problem, finding good coders who can work together is almost impossible. (Ergo, Linux is the byproduct of alien experiments on the brains of Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, coinciding with a freak quantum entanglement with Dread Cthulhu in a parallel universe.)
The Internet is not powered by experiments on humans. Not even in the DARPA days.
No, websites do NOT experiment on users. Users may experiment on websites, if there's customization, but the rules for good design have not changed either in the past 30 years or the past 3,000. And, to judge from how humans organized carvings and paintings, not the past 30,000 either.
To say that websites experiment on people is tripe. Mouldy tripe. Websites may offer experimental views, surveys on what works, log analysis, etc, but these are statistical experiments on depersonalized aggregate data. Not people.
Experiments on people, especially without consent, is vulgar and wrong. It also doesn't help the website, because knowing what happens doesn't tell you why. Early experiments in AI are littered with extraordinarily bad results for this reason. Assuming you know why, assuming you can casually sketch in the cause merely by knowing one specific effect, is insanity.
Look, I will spell it out to these guys. Stop playing Sherlock Holmes, you only end up looking like Lestrade. Sir Conan Doyle's fictional hero used recursive subdivision, a technique Real Geeks use all the time for everything from decision trees to searching lists. Isolating single factors isn't subdivision because there isn't a single ordered space to subdivide. Scientists mask, yes, but only when dealing with single ordered spaces, and only AFTER producing a hypothesis. And if it involves research on humans, also after filling out a bloody great load of paperwork.
I flat-out refuse to use any website tainted with such puerile nonsense, insofar as I know it to have occurred. No matter how valuable that site may have been, it cannot remain valuable if it is driven by pseudoscience. There's also the matter of respect. If you don't respect me, why should I store any data with you? I can probably do better than most sites out there over a coffee break, so what's in it for me? What's so valuable that I should tolerate being second-class? It had better be damn good.
I'll take a temporary hit on what I can do, if it safeguards my absolute, unconditional control over my virtual persona. And temporary is all it would ever be. There's very little that's truly exclusive and even less that's exclusive and interesting.
The same is true of all users. We don't need any specific website, websites need us. We dictate our own limits, we dictate what safeguards are minimal, we dictate how far a site owner can go. Websites serve their users. They exist only to serve. And unlike with a certain elite class in the Dune series, that's actually true and enforceable.
Nothing is objectively known about the airliner. Everything, from Ukrainian air traffic control ordering the plane to descend to a dangerous altitude to who detected what, is all supposition and hearsay at this point.
It is my personal suspicion that the Ukrainian authorities were hoping for an accident of this sort and were intent on placing a civilian airliner in as dangerous a position as possible. Whether that was the case for this specific airliner on this specific flight is unclear.
And I'd argue that Korean Airlines 007 is a better example for this reason. The US had been using civilian airliners for spying on Russia for some time and doctored the evidence to remove Russian pilots radioing warnings to the aircraft in order to make the incident more incriminating than it was. Whether that flight was used for spying, was shadowed by such an aircraft, or merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all becomes incidental. The accident was inevitable and the US government of the time was guilty of ensuring civilians would someday die for the benefit of military intelligence. It was merely a matter of which plane would be blown out of the sky and when.
In this case, the Ukranian authorities deliberately downplayed the risk of missile attacks on overflying aircraft and deliberately worked to place aircraft in the most dangerous air corridors that the airlines would permit. That is indisputable. Their opponents were known to be firing on aircraft and had shot several down. When your time to respond is measured in milliseconds, the nearest aircraft identification guide is mere hours away, to paraphrase what Americans often say about cops.
An accident was inevitable. The separatists weren't interested in avoiding one, the Ukrainian authorities certainly weren't. It was merely who would die for someone else's ideals. Whether or not this aircraft was deliberately placed in the path of a SAM battery is unimportant.
Both sides are therefore guilty. Both sides deserve blame.
It's testable, it's measurable, it's repeatable, it's capable of prediction. it's either the simplest model that meets these requirements AND produces correct predictions, OR it is not.
Therefore it is science.
Maths is a science, for the reasons given in the first line. Science is a mathematical system, because ultimately there is nothing there, just numbers. (See: Spinons and other quasiparticles.)
There are many multiverse theories and they can all be tested.
Many Worlds: The theory that there are no real "probability waves" in QM, merely overlapping realities that diverge at the time the "waveform" collapses.
This is an easy one. Entangled particles operate using the same physics as wormholes. If one of the entangled pair is accelerated to relativistic velocities, say in a particle accelerator, they will not exist in the same relative timeframe. It would seem to follow that if Many Worlds is correct, one of the particles will be entangled with multiple instances of the other particle, which would imply that every state would be seen at the same time. If the options are left spin and right spin, you'd see an aggregate state of no spin even if no spin isn't a physical possibility. And seeing something that doesn't exist either means you're in a Phineas and Ferb cartoon or Many Worlds is correct.
Foam Universe: This is the sort described in the article.
Yes, impact studies are possible, but they're only meaningful if you have enough data and you can't possibly know if you do. You're better off trying to make a universe, preferably a very small one with a quantum black hole at the throat of the bridge linking this universe to that one. What you will observe is energy apparently vanishing, not existing in any form - mass included, then reappearing as the bridge completely collapses.
Orange Slice Universe: This conjectures that multiple, semi-independent, universes formed out of the same big bang and will eventually converge in a big crunch.
It doesn't matter that this universe would expand forever, left to its own devices, because the total mass is the total mass of all the slices. Although they are semi-independent, they interact at the universe-to-universe level. In this scheme, because there's a single entity (albeit partitioned), leptons cannot have just any of the theoretical states. The state space must also be partitioned. Ergo, if you can't create a state for an electron (for example) that it should be able to take, this type of multiverse must exist.
Membrane-based Universe: This postulates that universes are at an interface between a membrane and something else, such as another membrane.
However, membranes intersecting with the universe are supposed to be how leptons are formed, in this theory. The intersection will be governed by the topology of the membranes involved (including the one the universe resides on), which means that lepton behaviour must vary from locality to locality, since the nature of the intersections cannot vary such as to perfectly mirror variations in the shape of the membrane the universe is on. Therefore, all you need to do is demonstrate a result that is perfectly repeatable anywhere on Earth but not, say, at the edge of the solar system.
Not everyone "gets" that advertising is needed. In fact, click-through revenue is so miniscule that it would be more cost-effective to not saturate the Internet with ads, or indeed have ads on the Internet at all. The Internet had no advertising at all until two Utah lawyers invented spam and made a fortune promoting their book on Internet advertising. That was around 5 years after the Internet was privatized.
Almost no site I give a damn about relies on advertising. As advertising on a site goes up, the time I spend there goes down. When in England, I watch BBC almost exclusively, ITV stuff is relegated to whenever it comes out on DVD. That has been the case for much of my life. When moving to the US, I abandoned television entirely simply because of the adverts.
Linux is one of the top Operating Systems and gained almost all of that reputation and awesomeness before IBM started their TV ads.
So if products don't need advertising, the Internet doesn't need advertising and users hate advertising, then who the hell is this "everyone" who "understands" the need?
Not really. The eye mixes colours in order to see them, it's full-spectrum. Digital cameras are not.
The obvious enhancement would be to develop ink and paper that create the visual illusion of RGB on some solid background but which show up on CCD devices as dots of random colours everywhere. Ideally, saying something rude when examined as a stereogram.
No, you're not getting into a discussion because after googling you found it's not speculation at all and you'd hate to lose an argument with someone whose UID is so short he was probably there.
Humans nearly died out entirely from hunger and thirst, it was visionaries that led them out of a dying region of Africa into Asia, by a route that appeared to defy reason to any non-visionary of the time.
Pre-humans nearly had their brains the size of a grapefruit and wired backwards. It was visionaries who developed fire, 2.5 million years ago, providing the much-needed nutrition that allowed us to avoid the same fate as every other lineage of hominid.
Visionaries allowed the Norse to split quartz in a way that permitted them to track the sun even in cloudy skies and well into twilight, giving them greater access to the seas, trade and food than any other society of that time.
Visionaries developed cities to handle the logistics of the brewing and baking industries, again counter to any "obvious" logic that farming and hunting were how you got food.
Visionaries are the reason you can post stuff on the Internet, and why persecuted minorities around the world can have a voice and education.
So don't tell a visionary that he is defying your common sense. His work may have implications for society that you cannot imagine simply because he has the imagination and you don't. That does not mean that it will have such an implication or that he does have that extra imagination. It simply means that visionaries have a track record of saving people from starvation.
What about normal people? Those are usually the ones who manufacture conditions suitable for mass starvation. They're the ones who create nothing but buy the rights to sue to oblivion those who do. They're the ones who have allowed security holes to develop in critical infrastructure, like nuclear power stations, and then place said infrastructure on the public Internet where anybody can play with it. They're the ones who deny Global Warming and have endangered all life on this planet.
At this point in history, we'd be better off if the normal people were rounded up, put on some nowhere continent, and left to rot at their own hands. This would also solve much of the operpopulation crisis, as they're also the ones that breed morons like rabbits. If they choose to become civilized, they're free to do so. That would be helpful, in fact. But as long as they remain normal (read: proto-human), their fate is their lookout but they've no business making it everyone else's fate too.
Go sit in a corner! Thou shalt never bring those two words in close proximity, for should they ever come in contact, the reaction could destroy reality as we know it!
Slashdot Mirror
Very small.
But, actually, it's not mm, it's MM. Since inverting the case usually means inverting the sense, that would be 400 million meters. Which would make it the largest unit of currency ever circulated in the US, and smaller only than the Ningi and Pu.
Since CS can only be taught in America on the removal of Microsoft, a 400 million meter long piece of paper makes sense. It should be plenty to completely wrap the key buildings. It will not be sufficient to wrap the ego of Bill Gates, who still "advises" the company.
Findings by researchers:
Bad news/opinions spread faster than good.
Bad news/opinions stay in the mind longer.
Critical thinking is absent from the overwhelming majority.
People don't think chronologically.
Everyone is guilty of cognitive dissonance.
People are less likely to hold good opinions of people they don't know.
People will cling onto false beliefs even when shown their falseness.
Conclusion: The average will always be against you. By a spectacularly large margin.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t...
Nobody has to decide what anything "means". The EU issued a very simple instruction - personal names cannot be used to search for outdated/false information. People who run businesses know part of the cost of business is that they'll be attacked. So long as they stick to the law, the attacks will fail. People complain and, in free countries, complain loudly on the Internet, TV and talk radio.
I don't like irrational complaints, but as there's nowhere rational to go, I have to deal with it. Google is bigger than me, and a good deal richer. (Rich megacorps with a reputation for evil getting defended on Slashdot for doing evil... Gone way downhill.) Why should I pity Google when they've the resources to deal with a few insignificant little gnat bites of complaints?
Ok, let's take an example that Americans might understand better, the No Fly List.
We know bad data is on the list. We know the list is searched by name and not by identity. We know this results in false positives.
That is, nonetheless, a database of opinions. It is the opinion of the person adding the name that it belongs there. It is the opinion of the airport or airline security that some individual is the individual named.
It is MY opinion that the moment some Joe Average Innocent gets hurt by this, that the right of others to hold opinions suddenly gets forgotten, that the right to fair and honest treatment suddenly emerges as more important.
There were actual cases, in the 70s and 80s of US banks declaring customers dead. The bank, as a legal person, is entitled to opinions, according to the Supreme Court (Hobby Lobby case).
It is MY opinion that had this affected someone you knew, had they lost their home, job, money, credit, insurance and licenses because of an opinion of a non-corporeal being, that that someone would hold some very strong opinions on opinions.
There have been cases in the US of people dying in hospitals (particularly the ER room) because staff held the opinion they should be ignored, duty of care be damned. Others died from neglect, because the hospital was of the opinion that the room was empty.
It is MY opinion that had this affected someone close to you, you'd be telling a cop, a lawyer, a reporter or all three precisely where the hospital could stick its opinions.
In other words, many Americans only believe in the right of opinions that don't affect them. As soon as an opinion actually matters, as soon as a view is of consequence to that person, truth takes precedence.
To me, that's bullshit. If something's broken, it's broken. You can't sensibly argue it's only broken when you're around. That's not freedom, that's ego.
This isn't about opinions, though. NOTHING the EU said dealt with opinions, save that it was LAWFUL to publish them. What the EU prohibited was OUTDATED opinions and FALSE data being searchable under a person's name. If you search for it any other way, you're legally entitled to the link and content. That is completely protected.
How Americans choose to resolve that is their business. But computers in the EU are under EU law, not American law, just at computers in America are under American law. You've no sovereignty in the EU and computers aren't embassies (although America has tried to argue that.) Which is why the recent ruling against Microsoft is wrong. Ownership of the physical machine is NOT, under EU law, ownership of the data.
If, however, you side with Google on who has control, then US judges are entitled to demand any data in the EU on any computers owned by Americans. Even if those Americans have no American presence, since the judge did NOT argue point of presence was what mattered, only nationality.
I do not, and will not, tolerate arguments based on simultaneously held opposing beliefs. Not from you, not even from me. Look at the nightmare scenarios, all of which have happened to real, innocent people. Look at Snowden's publications. Think about all the things that matter to you that rely on privacy. Then tell me, flat-out, that you cannot think of a single situation where the right to associate (not publish, there's no issue about publication, just explicit association) might possibly be trumped by your right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (as I believe someone once referred to it).
Hell, what was the American Revolution about? Not the right of King George to his madness, but the right of Americans not to be linked to it, surely.
The EU ruling does not require the information on a website to be deleted. Quite the opposite, it upheld the ruling against that by previous courts.
The EU ruling does not require Google to de-index the information. No, seriously, it doesn't.
What the EU ruling states, and this is made painfully clear by the court and also in the summary document, is that the link to the information not be coupled with the personal name. How Google chooses to implement that is Google's affair.
The Statute of Anne is ultimately at the heart of this, because this is where ownership of information is first taken out of the hands of corporations and guilds, and placed squarely in the hands of individuals. The Data Protection Act, which stemmed from (again) corporations claiming ownership of information belonging to others - but this time often getting it wrong with life-threatening consequences, was in many ways a repeat of that battle.
In the case of the DPA, the stakes were higher. Computer glitches and operator errors declaring living people to be dead spread from computer to computer like an incurable cancer. With no redress, even if it meant your bank account was closed, insurance got cancelled and house repossessed. Even if you got a company to fix the data, it would merely get reinfected. Politically aligned "vetting" companies were making a fortune selling bogus information to prospective employers, ensuring only ideologically approved candidates would get hired.
I don't think people remember those days.
European privacy rules are intended to transfer rights to individuals, as per Statute of Anne, and attempt to prevent malign, inaccurate data from harming said individual. So far, so good. I'm amazed at the number of libertarians who are opposed to individuals having rights. The more they oppose such a notion, the more I'm inclined to believe the philosophy suspect. If core elements can be ignored when convenient, they're not especially core.
The EU laws and ruling might not be perfect, in fact I don't believe for a moment they are. But I reject the idea that a corporation has more rights than a person.
Some time back, when I argued that freedom of the collective could not be neglected in pursuit of freedom of the individual, there was much opposition. Mostly along the lives that collectives have no physical reality. I fully expect these to be the people most opposed to the EU ruling, on the grounds that collectives (because that's what a corporation is) have freedoms.
In other words, I believe people prefer cognitive dissonance to having self-consistent beliefs or to admitting error. Much better to split the mind than debug an ideology. Microsoft would be proud.
I'd love to see a sane, rational discussion on the issue. Particularly with experts in IT security as part of it, as they're the experts in handling the conflict between access needs and access controls, and between risks vs benefits, especially on historical data which may include flawed data.
Very true. A wholly free market is actually quite toxic, as a certain Adam Smith noted. Especially when it's dishonest.
In-app purchases are the return of micropayments, but for virtual goods less valuable than Second Life real estate. It is, of course, entirely fair for companies to sell such products and for customers to buy them, but the control system is poor, virtual goods have an amazingly high failure rate for delivery, and prices are often in the small print.
Have you seen Linus' opinion of recent GCCs? My web browser melted from the heat.
Sigh. Emacs is an operating system with text editing facilities.
Functionality comes at a price. Complexity introduces bugs by necessity, reduces performance and increases memory footprint.
Below some given threshold, adding complexity is fine. The reduction in wasted time/money exceeds the increase in overheads. Above that threshold, the reverse is true.
As with all systems, for any given variable, the plot of efficiency vs complexity follows the standard S curve. Memorize this curve, it will save you much grief. The aggregate will be more complex because the variables have inter-dependencies and unique characteristics. You need to resolve to orthogonal components if you want to do anything useful.
Since nobody can be bothered to do that much maths, it becomes a simple question - do you get anything out of using them?
For me, the answer is usually no. There are no editors out there that handle more than a small fraction of the languages I use. Several critical languages use specialized formatting rules and it is a syntax error to not follow them. It would be nice to actually have an editor remember the rules for me, but formatting editors prettify code. The notion of languages having rules is beyond them.
Most code editors I've used also insist on adding truly ugly dummy code. And by "ugly", I mean I would demote a first year student by a year for writing such crap.
Maintainer convenience is not a factor I allow in mitigation. NetBeans and Eclipse score poorly. Eclipse doubly so, as I've seen it suffer seizures when updating purportedly compatible extensions. If I can write code faster by chiselling it into rock than typing it into an editor, the editor's coding isn't being written for the benefit of users. If portability and compatibility are claimed, I expect that claim to be true or rescinded. Transactions, including updates, should be bulletproof - which may include rollbacks for the irretrievably mangled.
Good code isn't the problem. Good code is never a problem. Finding good coders IS a problem, finding good coders who can work together is almost impossible. (Ergo, Linux is the byproduct of alien experiments on the brains of Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, coinciding with a freak quantum entanglement with Dread Cthulhu in a parallel universe.)
If it did, the quality of the pictures would be better.
The Internet is not powered by experiments on humans. Not even in the DARPA days.
No, websites do NOT experiment on users. Users may experiment on websites, if there's customization, but the rules for good design have not changed either in the past 30 years or the past 3,000. And, to judge from how humans organized carvings and paintings, not the past 30,000 either.
To say that websites experiment on people is tripe. Mouldy tripe. Websites may offer experimental views, surveys on what works, log analysis, etc, but these are statistical experiments on depersonalized aggregate data. Not people.
Experiments on people, especially without consent, is vulgar and wrong. It also doesn't help the website, because knowing what happens doesn't tell you why. Early experiments in AI are littered with extraordinarily bad results for this reason. Assuming you know why, assuming you can casually sketch in the cause merely by knowing one specific effect, is insanity.
Look, I will spell it out to these guys. Stop playing Sherlock Holmes, you only end up looking like Lestrade. Sir Conan Doyle's fictional hero used recursive subdivision, a technique Real Geeks use all the time for everything from decision trees to searching lists. Isolating single factors isn't subdivision because there isn't a single ordered space to subdivide. Scientists mask, yes, but only when dealing with single ordered spaces, and only AFTER producing a hypothesis. And if it involves research on humans, also after filling out a bloody great load of paperwork.
I flat-out refuse to use any website tainted with such puerile nonsense, insofar as I know it to have occurred. No matter how valuable that site may have been, it cannot remain valuable if it is driven by pseudoscience. There's also the matter of respect. If you don't respect me, why should I store any data with you? I can probably do better than most sites out there over a coffee break, so what's in it for me? What's so valuable that I should tolerate being second-class? It had better be damn good.
I'll take a temporary hit on what I can do, if it safeguards my absolute, unconditional control over my virtual persona. And temporary is all it would ever be. There's very little that's truly exclusive and even less that's exclusive and interesting.
The same is true of all users. We don't need any specific website, websites need us. We dictate our own limits, we dictate what safeguards are minimal, we dictate how far a site owner can go. Websites serve their users. They exist only to serve. And unlike with a certain elite class in the Dune series, that's actually true and enforceable.
Everyone covers up mistakes. Everyone reveals everyone else's mistakes.
The San are pretty much where they were when humanity evolved.
Nothing is objectively known about the airliner. Everything, from Ukrainian air traffic control ordering the plane to descend to a dangerous altitude to who detected what, is all supposition and hearsay at this point.
It is my personal suspicion that the Ukrainian authorities were hoping for an accident of this sort and were intent on placing a civilian airliner in as dangerous a position as possible. Whether that was the case for this specific airliner on this specific flight is unclear.
And I'd argue that Korean Airlines 007 is a better example for this reason. The US had been using civilian airliners for spying on Russia for some time and doctored the evidence to remove Russian pilots radioing warnings to the aircraft in order to make the incident more incriminating than it was. Whether that flight was used for spying, was shadowed by such an aircraft, or merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all becomes incidental. The accident was inevitable and the US government of the time was guilty of ensuring civilians would someday die for the benefit of military intelligence. It was merely a matter of which plane would be blown out of the sky and when.
In this case, the Ukranian authorities deliberately downplayed the risk of missile attacks on overflying aircraft and deliberately worked to place aircraft in the most dangerous air corridors that the airlines would permit. That is indisputable. Their opponents were known to be firing on aircraft and had shot several down. When your time to respond is measured in milliseconds, the nearest aircraft identification guide is mere hours away, to paraphrase what Americans often say about cops.
An accident was inevitable. The separatists weren't interested in avoiding one, the Ukrainian authorities certainly weren't. It was merely who would die for someone else's ideals. Whether or not this aircraft was deliberately placed in the path of a SAM battery is unimportant.
Both sides are therefore guilty. Both sides deserve blame.
Wrong multiverse theory. And, indeed, wrong experiment. In fact, the wrongitudinal level of your post is so extreme that it should really be on K5.
It's testable, it's measurable, it's repeatable, it's capable of prediction. it's either the simplest model that meets these requirements AND produces correct predictions, OR it is not.
Therefore it is science.
Maths is a science, for the reasons given in the first line. Science is a mathematical system, because ultimately there is nothing there, just numbers. (See: Spinons and other quasiparticles.)
There are many multiverse theories and they can all be tested.
Many Worlds: The theory that there are no real "probability waves" in QM, merely overlapping realities that diverge at the time the "waveform" collapses.
This is an easy one. Entangled particles operate using the same physics as wormholes. If one of the entangled pair is accelerated to relativistic velocities, say in a particle accelerator, they will not exist in the same relative timeframe. It would seem to follow that if Many Worlds is correct, one of the particles will be entangled with multiple instances of the other particle, which would imply that every state would be seen at the same time. If the options are left spin and right spin, you'd see an aggregate state of no spin even if no spin isn't a physical possibility. And seeing something that doesn't exist either means you're in a Phineas and Ferb cartoon or Many Worlds is correct.
Foam Universe: This is the sort described in the article.
Yes, impact studies are possible, but they're only meaningful if you have enough data and you can't possibly know if you do. You're better off trying to make a universe, preferably a very small one with a quantum black hole at the throat of the bridge linking this universe to that one. What you will observe is energy apparently vanishing, not existing in any form - mass included, then reappearing as the bridge completely collapses.
Orange Slice Universe: This conjectures that multiple, semi-independent, universes formed out of the same big bang and will eventually converge in a big crunch.
It doesn't matter that this universe would expand forever, left to its own devices, because the total mass is the total mass of all the slices. Although they are semi-independent, they interact at the universe-to-universe level. In this scheme, because there's a single entity (albeit partitioned), leptons cannot have just any of the theoretical states. The state space must also be partitioned. Ergo, if you can't create a state for an electron (for example) that it should be able to take, this type of multiverse must exist.
Membrane-based Universe: This postulates that universes are at an interface between a membrane and something else, such as another membrane.
However, membranes intersecting with the universe are supposed to be how leptons are formed, in this theory. The intersection will be governed by the topology of the membranes involved (including the one the universe resides on), which means that lepton behaviour must vary from locality to locality, since the nature of the intersections cannot vary such as to perfectly mirror variations in the shape of the membrane the universe is on. Therefore, all you need to do is demonstrate a result that is perfectly repeatable anywhere on Earth but not, say, at the edge of the solar system.
Not everyone "gets" that advertising is needed. In fact, click-through revenue is so miniscule that it would be more cost-effective to not saturate the Internet with ads, or indeed have ads on the Internet at all. The Internet had no advertising at all until two Utah lawyers invented spam and made a fortune promoting their book on Internet advertising. That was around 5 years after the Internet was privatized.
Almost no site I give a damn about relies on advertising. As advertising on a site goes up, the time I spend there goes down. When in England, I watch BBC almost exclusively, ITV stuff is relegated to whenever it comes out on DVD. That has been the case for much of my life. When moving to the US, I abandoned television entirely simply because of the adverts.
Linux is one of the top Operating Systems and gained almost all of that reputation and awesomeness before IBM started their TV ads.
So if products don't need advertising, the Internet doesn't need advertising and users hate advertising, then who the hell is this "everyone" who "understands" the need?
Not really. The eye mixes colours in order to see them, it's full-spectrum. Digital cameras are not.
The obvious enhancement would be to develop ink and paper that create the visual illusion of RGB on some solid background but which show up on CCD devices as dots of random colours everywhere. Ideally, saying something rude when examined as a stereogram.
No, you're not getting into a discussion because after googling you found it's not speculation at all and you'd hate to lose an argument with someone whose UID is so short he was probably there.
Sorry, SELECT statements don't work on UIDs of four digits or less.
I am the One True God of..... ummm..... damn, what's that word for when you can't remember something?
How does the native support look on the official IPv6 compliance tests at TAHI?
Not everyone wants DHCP at home, when router advertisements and automatic addressing are as good or better. How does this look?
Does the router support Mobile IP?
Are there any disabled kernel options relating to the protocol?
How does it fare on IPv6 NAT?
Humans nearly died out entirely from hunger and thirst, it was visionaries that led them out of a dying region of Africa into Asia, by a route that appeared to defy reason to any non-visionary of the time.
Pre-humans nearly had their brains the size of a grapefruit and wired backwards. It was visionaries who developed fire, 2.5 million years ago, providing the much-needed nutrition that allowed us to avoid the same fate as every other lineage of hominid.
Visionaries allowed the Norse to split quartz in a way that permitted them to track the sun even in cloudy skies and well into twilight, giving them greater access to the seas, trade and food than any other society of that time.
Visionaries developed cities to handle the logistics of the brewing and baking industries, again counter to any "obvious" logic that farming and hunting were how you got food.
Visionaries are the reason you can post stuff on the Internet, and why persecuted minorities around the world can have a voice and education.
So don't tell a visionary that he is defying your common sense. His work may have implications for society that you cannot imagine simply because he has the imagination and you don't. That does not mean that it will have such an implication or that he does have that extra imagination. It simply means that visionaries have a track record of saving people from starvation.
What about normal people? Those are usually the ones who manufacture conditions suitable for mass starvation. They're the ones who create nothing but buy the rights to sue to oblivion those who do. They're the ones who have allowed security holes to develop in critical infrastructure, like nuclear power stations, and then place said infrastructure on the public Internet where anybody can play with it. They're the ones who deny Global Warming and have endangered all life on this planet.
At this point in history, we'd be better off if the normal people were rounded up, put on some nowhere continent, and left to rot at their own hands. This would also solve much of the operpopulation crisis, as they're also the ones that breed morons like rabbits. If they choose to become civilized, they're free to do so. That would be helpful, in fact. But as long as they remain normal (read: proto-human), their fate is their lookout but they've no business making it everyone else's fate too.
Go sit in a corner! Thou shalt never bring those two words in close proximity, for should they ever come in contact, the reaction could destroy reality as we know it!