I don't disagree with you, but based on what you said, what really killed the people wasn't the computer system. It was the blind trust placed in the computer system, which couldn't possibly be wrong because it's a computer, right? That's who should be held liable, whoever deployed the system without testing.
If anybody had actually tested the system before putting lives on the line (and how hard is it to get an ambulance driver doing what he does in the car, and someone in another car following the computer, and seeing who gets there first a few times?), they would have discovered the computers were useless.
(And I'd hazard a guess the computers were actually correct, if you updated them with true information about traffic density. I'd lay money they fed the computers the "idealized" traffic density the civil engineers designed for. Garbage in...)
It's OK to try this sort of thing, but you have to test it, not assume that just because you hired a high schooler and a college drop-out to put together a life-critical system, that it must be more right then your ambulance drivers merely because it's a "computer".
Well, for one thing, it was still laboring under the misimpression that the value of a product was completely determined by the price of the raw materials and the labor to make it. I didn't make that up out of whole cloth.
This is one of those things that sounds obvious... at least if you don't have a modern (and good!) education... but is a horrid way to run an economy. If I shovel dung and slowly and painfully shape it into a sculpture over the course of ten years, 17th century economic theory says that is one valueable piece of dung. Uh, no.
And of course nobody would have bought it, even so. Nevertheless, building the economy on the obviously false assumption is still more harmful, since you get a lot of businessmen making dumb decisions as a result, and that's not free. The economy pays the price.
Incidental to my point, it also of course doesn't have anything remotely resembling modern currency flexibility and their ideas of "investment" are actually comprehensible to mere mortals rather then the amazing, if flexible, edifice we have today.
It's not that I'm saying it's wrong, in the way I'd say Communism is wrong (and to be fair it was only proven wrong after it was tried), it's just that they were a long way from "right" yet, and trying to live today with the economic theory of the 17th century is a recipe for confusion and muddled thinking. Which is what started this whole thread in the first place, confusion and muddled thinking, probably brough on by an acute case of being young, inexperience, and not thoughtful.
If I knew how to effectively fight those bastards, I would!
The Communist countries are that-a-way --->
Seriously.
There is no such thing as a "fair price"; consult the relevant economics theory to learn why, which won't fit in a Slashdot post. If people are buying it, with a fair choice on a open market (and if anybody replies to this message as if I didn't include that clause I will mercilessly mock you), then the price is fair. No other definition makes sense.
The idea of the market value of an item being the cost of labor to produce it went out with the 17th century, and unless you want to return to a 17th century economy, I suggest that we leave that idea safely in the dust bin of history, where it belongs.
This isn't just a reply to hackstraw, it's a reply to all my repliers up to this point, except the SCO one.
All three of you show no understanding of economics, even the stuff that's been known since the eighteenth century.
Here's some hints, though I can hardly provide an entire education in a Slashdot posting:
Demand, supply, and price are all interrelated. You can't posulate a rising supply and a constant price. That's impossible.
The reason it's free right now has nothing to do with "already being used". It's because there's no demand for it right now. In fact, there's "negative" demand, in that there is a demand for services to take it away. Raise demand, and you'll raise price, and I guarentee you it'll shoot right up to be slightly more expensive then normal gasoline in short order, with only a very small supply. (It won't shoot past gasoline significantly because then people will just buy gas.) The supply will remain small, because thanks to the interference of gasoline, you can't support an infrastructure that produces the stuff with the explicit goal of using it as fuel. If you could, we would be doing it right now. Thus, logically, using simple economics, this can't get large.
You can't solve the energy problem by starting with "If I get free stuff...."
You also can't solve it with "If we ignore all laws of economics..."
This is a cute hack. This is not a sustainable source of energy and it never will be. Resist the Big Number Fallacy. Per-capita "production" of used oil is laughable, even if the absolute numbers look big; the energy demand numbers are even bigger, by a lot.
with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant
Nifty, but if we all went out and did this, the price would skyrocket. Hell, if only all the people who read this story on Slashdot went out and did this, the price would skyrocket.
All this story says is, "If you get free stuff, you can make other cheap stuff out of it." Regrettably, we're not solving any energy problems by starting with "If you get free stuff..."
(It's great the guy did this and I respect the hack that this embodies. But people shouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from this. All the cooking oil I've used so far this year (and I don't order many fried foods from restaurants so that's the majority of "my" share of oil) wouldn't hardly get me out of the city.)
do you prefer a theory of missing matter (hypothesis) or a theory of negative mass matter, wich can only be seen by it's gravitation field with our "positive" mass?
I prefer the truth. I've learned not to try to assume what the Universe is like in advance.
Implicit appeals to common sense, which is what your post boils down to, hold no attraction to me anymore. The universe has long since passed the "fucking strange" point, so I no longer have an instinctive, common-sense based revulsion of negative energy. If that's what fits the fact, then that's what fits the facts. So far, based on my admittedly-layman point of view (albeit with an understanding of mathematics), I agree with cosmology in general that that is the best theory to date... because every other theory seems to have "appeal to common sense" in it.
"X is impossible a priori, so it must be Y" is not science.
Slashdot has been considered a "weblog" for as long as the word has been around.
It certainly started out as one, and remains firmly in the weblog format: Snippets of news or something, posted frequently and in inverse chronological order.
It also has public comments, like thousands of other weblogs. It's just that the comments section happens to be bigger then average, but there are other weblogs that often reach into the hundreds of comments.
Weblogs aren't just "journals", by any stretch of the imagination. The link I give as my homepage is my "weblog" and the last time I had a "journal-style" entry was on my birthday two years ago.
If Slashdot isn't a weblog, then nothing is.
Alternatively, at what point since it started did it cease to be a weblog? The only major difference between Slashdot's second week of operation and now is the comment load; the format is the same, the news is the same, the stupid comments by the editors are the same.
If you're gun averse for one reason or another but still want to benefit, though, it's probably a good solution, along with carrying a real-but-unloaded gun. (The best replica is the real thing.) Doesn't bother me any; 90% of the time it still sends a serious wake-up call to our hopefully-would-be criminal.
(In other words, no Tragedy of the Commons here, you're not free-riding on the "real" carriers or reducing their effectiveness. If we all carried guns but nobody knew which were real things would still be very interesting for criminals.)
There is a possibility of "antimatter" with antigravity property.
FYI, in English (since you reference a French site), "antimatter" is charge-reversed matter. It still has positive mass and therefore, standard positive gravity.
You're looking for word(/phrase) "negative mass".
Note that negative mass emits a negative gravity field and therefore repulses everything, though; based on your haphazard explanation it's not clear if you're trying to claim negative mass would emit a gravitational field that attracts other negative mass.
That's just a nomenclature point. Here's a criticism: Every theory I've ever seen like that focuses in on how their exotic theory could explain something, but then completely fails to draw out the rest of the conclusions of that exotic matter. For instance, see the discussion on Exotic Matter in Wikipedia. Negative mass may explain some things, but it would also produce a boatload of other effects which we haven't seen.
Stronger typing does not automatically solve this particular issue. Look at, for example, C.
C is not strongly typed. It pretends it is but it isn't.
So yes, certain applications of strong typing lead to a potential way to trick the language into allowing you to perform the two different operations of string and numeric comparison with only a single operator.
This, almost by defition, is bypassing the type system. Here there be dragons....
However you have unfortunately in doing so introduced ambiguity into your definition of equality. ...yep, there's one of them.
Perl gets this by default because it has the exact ambiguity you describe. Which side are you arguing for again?
However this then brings up the question of what happens if for some reason you want to do a numeric compare between two string objects. You have to somehow do a conversion to a different object type. Perhaps this is a bit clumsy.
Of course it's clumsy, it's a clumsy thing to want to do. The only language I know where conversion is something worth calling "clumsy" is Java. (Java is a damned clumsy language and is not a good one to study to learn about good syntax.) In most of the ones I can think of it's as simple as "int(a) == int(b)". You also get type protection if "a" isn't actually an "int" at all. Perl silently coerces "oiewjgew" into 0.
I think this is a good one: there are already far too many situations where an operator or function in Perl behaves in different ways depending on minor details of the context, we do not need another.
No, this is another. If you use == on a number, it works correctly. If you use it on a string, it first silently coerces it to a number. That's different behavior.
You need to expand your language horizons. For one thing, I'm not attacking Perl, I'm explaining it. If it looks like an attack, it's your lack of understanding of my explanation, not an attack. Perl will give you a very fuzzy idea of what "typing" is. It's OK for the language, but it hasn't helped you understand what "typing" is when other people talk about it. I recommend Haskell or OCaml. (Python might be OK too, but that's probably still not the best place to learn about typing.)
Perl is almost unique among the "real" languages for this peculiar context-sensitivity of strings vs. numbers, for good or for ill. As a result, as good as it can be to use sometimes, it's a really, really bad place to try to learn programming concepts. (Of course, that's typically true somewhere for any language, which is why expanding your horizons is necessary.)
However, if rather than literals those had been variables-- maybe taken from user input-- that would have been no such indicators.
Here is where your argument falls down. Proof by construction: There are a large number of languages of every variety that still manage to have types for that input.
Your argument is more accurately described as:
"Perl actively tries to avoid giving types to strings and numbers, and as a result of this desire to not distinguish between the two, the onus is on the programmer to do so. That's how the language solves this problem that other languages solve through stronger typing."
At this point, one can then go on and debate whether or not this is a good thing, but don't pretend that Perl has no choice. It had all kinds of choice and deliberately chose this system, most likely for backwards programmer compatibility with awk and its other predecessors.
Perl isn't "autoboxing"; that's a technical term that means that you take simple C++ or Java style scalars and automatically wrap them in an object. Perl is dynamically "looking at" the object as either a number or a string, depending on context; thus, to the programmer, every string is also a number (albiet usually 0) and every number is also a string.
Take up nomenclature with the writers of the show. (Who do as good a job as you could possibly expect from a television science-fiction weekly, but are certainly not invulnerable. Besides, I wouldn't be surprised they deliberately chose the name Asgard knowing it's not quite right, simply because there's a lot of people like me who connected Asgard to Norse mythology right away, but wouldn't have recognized Aesir at all, or spelled it correctly after hearing it.)
What happens to these massive space structures when a 3 inch rock or space junk going at hyperspeed punches through them.
Two or more three inch holes neatly punched through whatever happens to be in their way. What do you think?
If I were building a space station I wouldn't be building windows, I would be thinking submarine with a thick hide.
Do the math. (Warning, requires materials science.) You really can't build anything large enough to guarentee anything can't get through in space.
Eh, I was going to take the rest of you post apart but it's just not worth it. You have a Hollywood education (including such noted science education films as Alien Resurrection, apparently, and that common-sense-that-isn't-true idea that money is some sort of zero-sum game). News flash: This isn't Hollywood. If you're so interested in this subject, why not learn some real science? (And maybe economics.)
So, the only "significant weapons" that exist are WMDs?
Like I asked someone else, do you even stop to think about your arguments before you make them? A little less knee-jerking, a little more thought is in order.
There couldn't possibly be another reason to prevent the UN weapons inspectors from having carte blanche access to secure facilities in Iraq, right?
Oh, I can't wait until the left starts spouting this en masse. "Iraq shouldn't have cooperated with the inspectors! They were American shills!" or something.
As for punishing "violations of UN resolutions" shouldn't the UN be responsible for that?
A stupid counterarguement. Yes, yes they should. Maybe if they did enforce them instead of running like cowards at every chance this all wouldn't have happened. Instead they passed impotent resolution after impotent resolution while the world goes to hell.
You anti-American vitriol is all politically correct and stuff, but in your zeal to be negative, you aren't leaving any actual alternatives that America could have taken that makes any sense. The UN ought to enforce its own resolutions, but damn it, how dare you enforce those resolutions? (Who do you think "the UN" is, anyhow, militarily?)
As has been clearly demonstrated recently in Iraq...
Indeed; incompetent politics can start wars as well as prevent them.
If Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs, all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war. He'd still be alive, running the country, and killing whoever he pleased, whenever he pleased.
Instead, he let his ego get in the way of his politics, he fought the inspecters tooth and nail, and it ended up running his regime into the ground.
(There's some more to the story then that, such as how stupid it is to run a "shoot the messenger" regime if you actually want to survive, but that outline is true.)
Incompetent politics can definately start wars.
(Oh, you were trying to blame the current President? Maybe if he'd actually started this war that would make sense, but since there is an unbroken string of broken UN resolutions dating back to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, I'd say it makes just as much sense to call this a continuation of that, Saddam's Greatest Mistake. Not saying Bush is blameless, just saying that if you want to point at one person who's utterly incompetent politics for over a decade started this war, it's much, much more rational to point at Saddam. One little thing he had to do to remove any pretense, and his ego wouldn't let him do it.)
Here's a little test for you. Create a four gigabyte file on your hard drive.
time dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile ibs=1K count=4M
On my lil' laptop here, well, I gave up after the first gig, which took 8 minutes.
Now, on your monstrous machine you could probably do better, but we're talking hard drives here, not CPUs; even if you have four disks RAIDed together for maximal 4x throughput (no redundency) that are each four times faster then my drive, the full 4 gig swap partition still takes a minimum of two entire minutes, and I wouldn't be surprised that you don't have quite that good of a setup (that's massive file-server quality).
That is the fastest you could possibly fill up that amount of space in. In reality, it'll be a lot slower, because you never fill it up linearly.
On a modern hard drive, I don't see how 4GB of swap could ever help anybody. If you have to routinely fill that space, you've already lost.
I would be interested to find out how deeply into swap you're willing to still be using the computer. I would be very unsurprised, even with your ideal setup for swapping, if you ever go deeper then a gig. (And I'm being generous; my instincts are saying 256MB-512MB.)
But teleportation is another impossible thing we've conquered through a basic discovery in quantum physics.
You're entitled to your opinion so I won't jump on the rest of your post like I kind of want to.
However, note that teleportation in the conventional sense remains impossible. AFAIK, to date, only single photons have been "teleported" (actually, their quantum state was transferred which still doesn't match most people's mental model; there was still a photon on one end and a photon on the other), and the way in which it was done strongly indicates the impossibility of teleporting anything macroscopic... or for that matter, microscopic. In theory, it's just an "engineering problem"; in reality it's an insurmountable one.
Teleportation, as most people use the word, is more unlikely seeming now then it was fifty years ago. Which brings me to the other nit I'll pick...
I guess what I'm saying is that there is more we don't know than we do know,
Yes, but what we do know increasingly keeps making the probability of ever having certain things continue to recede. More knowlege isn't bringing us closer, it's showing us the uncrossable chasm in increasing detail.
Sure, maybe there's this little string flung across it somewhere, but we've searched more and more of it and we keep finding no such string. Eventually, you have to conclude that it either isn't there, or even if it is, it's so delicate as to be useless.
It's a case of the infinity fallacy: "If we knew an infinite amount of stuff, we'd know how to do X." (A similar argument is often made for "a really, really lot".) But that's a fallacy; an infinite set can still not contain certain elements. The infinite set of all odd numbers does not contain 2, no matter how many of them you examine. To me, it's looking more and more like "how to travel FTL" or "macroscopic teleportation" or a number of other sci-fi concepts ("science-fiction forcefields" (as opposed to the real things, of course, which are entirely different), "time travel" (again in the science fiction senses)) simply isn't in the set of things you can know about the universe, so looking harder isn't going to help. We've been looking harder, and we haven't found any meaningful loopholes to date. The number of places those things can hide is shrinking.
(After all, we're not searching the entire set of knowlege about the universe, which you seem to imply; the fact that I don't know the weather on a planet on the other side of the galaxy does nothing to make FTL possible. The vast sum of knowlege is entirely irrelevant. We're searching a rather narrow domain, and we're running out of places to look.)
The only problem with this idea is that it requires at least several other impossible things, so don't hold your breath. You need:
Amounts of energy comparable to the entire output of the Sun. (And the corresponding efficient equipment to handle it without your spaceship suddenly resembling a sun.) Probably impossible (remember, this energy generation has to fit inside the bubble; even if we could do it in general we could never fit it in a spaceship.)
The ability to directly control gravity, with, to date, absolutely no evidence that it is possible with anything other then black-hole-sized quantities of mass... and black holes still are just general suckers, you can't direct their gravity like you'd need to.
Negative mass. Much hypothesized, probably impossible in macroscopic amounts. (It's one of the more possible out of this list, but that's not saying much.) You need this for the negative gravity needed to stabalize these spacewarps; it's impossible to build a stable field with any sort of hole in the middle out of pure attractive, inverse-square based fields. (Actually, it's impossible with inverse-square fields in general; you have to have a matter shield in the mix if you want a hole (a charged hollow sphere has a hole on the inside of the sphere), but what shields against gravity?)
The ability to control all of this not just "in general", but extremely tightly, to create a high distortion outside of the ship without utterly destroying the inside of the ship with gravity fields or tides in the millions of Gs range or more.
A thing that requires multiple other most-likely impossible things is itself impossible, even if you can sort of make the math work.
(Am I absolutely sure such space warping can't be used for travel? Technically, no. Then again, I'm not absolutely sure that when I drop this apple, it will fall to the ground, either; there's an ever so small chance that it won't, even under conventional QM as I understand it. But unless something really strange opens up at the string theory level, with as I said, no reason with current evidence to believe that it will, you're not getting any of this. You're welcome, as so many Slashbots are wont to do, to post an angry reply saying "How do you know this is impossible? We broke the speed of sound, didn't we?" (Which itself betrays a serious misunderstanding of history, reason why left as an exercise for the reader.) But be aware, the evidence is on my side; FTL has reached the point where we need something magical to make it work, and I don't hold my breath waiting for magic.)
Sort of contradictory, no? To paraphrase, First he says it's very hard to lift code from elsewhere. Then he says, But some people do it all the time.
Yes, people are often very contradictory when you add your own pre-conceived opinions to what they said.
In this case, you added your own preconcieved opinion that "Nobody ever does anything hard with software, ever." In fact, even then it's not enough to create a logical contradiction:
Software that isn't designed to be movable is hard to move.
Software that is easy to move can be so moved relatively easily.
Companies frequently use free software in commercial products.
To get a full-on contradiction you also need to add "Companies use software that wasn't designed to move" (i.e., non-library code). (Although this one at least has the virtue of being true.)
I know you added that opinion because of the conclusions you came to, even if you're not conciously aware you did it yourself. Would you say the phrase "Sometimes people do hard things." is logically contradictory? If not, you need to rethink your position.
Generally, when you think you've found a contradiction, it helps to simplify the argument and make sure you didn't sneak any axioms in from your own preconceived notion. I'd say about a quarter of my aggreived postings get aborted when I discover the criticism I had is irrelevant. It's a very human thing to do, and one must always be on guard for it.
(On those rare occasions I don't do this, I tend to get my ass handed to me in a reply... like this.)
Slashdot Mirror
It couldn't. People died.
I don't disagree with you, but based on what you said, what really killed the people wasn't the computer system. It was the blind trust placed in the computer system, which couldn't possibly be wrong because it's a computer, right? That's who should be held liable, whoever deployed the system without testing.
If anybody had actually tested the system before putting lives on the line (and how hard is it to get an ambulance driver doing what he does in the car, and someone in another car following the computer, and seeing who gets there first a few times?), they would have discovered the computers were useless.
(And I'd hazard a guess the computers were actually correct, if you updated them with true information about traffic density. I'd lay money they fed the computers the "idealized" traffic density the civil engineers designed for. Garbage in...)
It's OK to try this sort of thing, but you have to test it, not assume that just because you hired a high schooler and a college drop-out to put together a life-critical system, that it must be more right then your ambulance drivers merely because it's a "computer".
Well, for one thing, it was still laboring under the misimpression that the value of a product was completely determined by the price of the raw materials and the labor to make it. I didn't make that up out of whole cloth.
This is one of those things that sounds obvious... at least if you don't have a modern (and good!) education... but is a horrid way to run an economy. If I shovel dung and slowly and painfully shape it into a sculpture over the course of ten years, 17th century economic theory says that is one valueable piece of dung. Uh, no.
And of course nobody would have bought it, even so. Nevertheless, building the economy on the obviously false assumption is still more harmful, since you get a lot of businessmen making dumb decisions as a result, and that's not free. The economy pays the price.
Incidental to my point, it also of course doesn't have anything remotely resembling modern currency flexibility and their ideas of "investment" are actually comprehensible to mere mortals rather then the amazing, if flexible, edifice we have today.
It's not that I'm saying it's wrong, in the way I'd say Communism is wrong (and to be fair it was only proven wrong after it was tried), it's just that they were a long way from "right" yet, and trying to live today with the economic theory of the 17th century is a recipe for confusion and muddled thinking. Which is what started this whole thread in the first place, confusion and muddled thinking, probably brough on by an acute case of being young, inexperience, and not thoughtful.
If I knew how to effectively fight those bastards, I would!
The Communist countries are that-a-way --->
Seriously.
There is no such thing as a "fair price"; consult the relevant economics theory to learn why, which won't fit in a Slashdot post. If people are buying it, with a fair choice on a open market (and if anybody replies to this message as if I didn't include that clause I will mercilessly mock you), then the price is fair. No other definition makes sense.
The idea of the market value of an item being the cost of labor to produce it went out with the 17th century, and unless you want to return to a 17th century economy, I suggest that we leave that idea safely in the dust bin of history, where it belongs.
All three of you show no understanding of economics, even the stuff that's been known since the eighteenth century.
Here's some hints, though I can hardly provide an entire education in a Slashdot posting:
- Demand, supply, and price are all interrelated. You can't posulate a rising supply and a constant price. That's impossible.
- The reason it's free right now has nothing to do with "already being used". It's because there's no demand for it right now. In fact, there's "negative" demand, in that there is a demand for services to take it away. Raise demand, and you'll raise price, and I guarentee you it'll shoot right up to be slightly more expensive then normal gasoline in short order, with only a very small supply. (It won't shoot past gasoline significantly because then people will just buy gas.) The supply will remain small, because thanks to the interference of gasoline, you can't support an infrastructure that produces the stuff with the explicit goal of using it as fuel. If you could, we would be doing it right now. Thus, logically, using simple economics, this can't get large.
You can't solve the energy problem by starting with "If I get free stuff...."You also can't solve it with "If we ignore all laws of economics..."
This is a cute hack. This is not a sustainable source of energy and it never will be. Resist the Big Number Fallacy. Per-capita "production" of used oil is laughable, even if the absolute numbers look big; the energy demand numbers are even bigger, by a lot.
with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant
Nifty, but if we all went out and did this, the price would skyrocket. Hell, if only all the people who read this story on Slashdot went out and did this, the price would skyrocket.
All this story says is, "If you get free stuff, you can make other cheap stuff out of it." Regrettably, we're not solving any energy problems by starting with "If you get free stuff..."
(It's great the guy did this and I respect the hack that this embodies. But people shouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from this. All the cooking oil I've used so far this year (and I don't order many fried foods from restaurants so that's the majority of "my" share of oil) wouldn't hardly get me out of the city.)
do you prefer a theory of missing matter (hypothesis) or a theory of negative mass matter, wich can only be seen by it's gravitation field with our "positive" mass?
I prefer the truth. I've learned not to try to assume what the Universe is like in advance.
Implicit appeals to common sense, which is what your post boils down to, hold no attraction to me anymore. The universe has long since passed the "fucking strange" point, so I no longer have an instinctive, common-sense based revulsion of negative energy. If that's what fits the fact, then that's what fits the facts. So far, based on my admittedly-layman point of view (albeit with an understanding of mathematics), I agree with cosmology in general that that is the best theory to date... because every other theory seems to have "appeal to common sense" in it.
"X is impossible a priori, so it must be Y" is not science.
Slashdot has been considered a "weblog" for as long as the word has been around.
It certainly started out as one, and remains firmly in the weblog format: Snippets of news or something, posted frequently and in inverse chronological order.
It also has public comments, like thousands of other weblogs. It's just that the comments section happens to be bigger then average, but there are other weblogs that often reach into the hundreds of comments.
Weblogs aren't just "journals", by any stretch of the imagination. The link I give as my homepage is my "weblog" and the last time I had a "journal-style" entry was on my birthday two years ago.
If Slashdot isn't a weblog, then nothing is.
Alternatively, at what point since it started did it cease to be a weblog? The only major difference between Slashdot's second week of operation and now is the comment load; the format is the same, the news is the same, the stupid comments by the editors are the same.
So why carry a gun? Just carry a replica.
For the other 10% of the time.
If you're gun averse for one reason or another but still want to benefit, though, it's probably a good solution, along with carrying a real-but-unloaded gun. (The best replica is the real thing.) Doesn't bother me any; 90% of the time it still sends a serious wake-up call to our hopefully-would-be criminal.
(In other words, no Tragedy of the Commons here, you're not free-riding on the "real" carriers or reducing their effectiveness. If we all carried guns but nobody knew which were real things would still be very interesting for criminals.)
Whoops, whack my third paragraph. Wikipedia says it all better and probably more accurately.
There is a possibility of "antimatter" with antigravity property.
FYI, in English (since you reference a French site), "antimatter" is charge-reversed matter. It still has positive mass and therefore, standard positive gravity.
You're looking for word(/phrase) "negative mass".
Note that negative mass emits a negative gravity field and therefore repulses everything, though; based on your haphazard explanation it's not clear if you're trying to claim negative mass would emit a gravitational field that attracts other negative mass.
That's just a nomenclature point. Here's a criticism: Every theory I've ever seen like that focuses in on how their exotic theory could explain something, but then completely fails to draw out the rest of the conclusions of that exotic matter. For instance, see the discussion on Exotic Matter in Wikipedia. Negative mass may explain some things, but it would also produce a boatload of other effects which we haven't seen.
Dark energy, in my mind, remains a better theory.
Stronger typing does not automatically solve this particular issue. Look at, for example, C.
...yep, there's one of them.
C is not strongly typed. It pretends it is but it isn't.
So yes, certain applications of strong typing lead to a potential way to trick the language into allowing you to perform the two different operations of string and numeric comparison with only a single operator.
This, almost by defition, is bypassing the type system. Here there be dragons....
However you have unfortunately in doing so introduced ambiguity into your definition of equality.
Perl gets this by default because it has the exact ambiguity you describe. Which side are you arguing for again?
However this then brings up the question of what happens if for some reason you want to do a numeric compare between two string objects. You have to somehow do a conversion to a different object type. Perhaps this is a bit clumsy.
Of course it's clumsy, it's a clumsy thing to want to do. The only language I know where conversion is something worth calling "clumsy" is Java. (Java is a damned clumsy language and is not a good one to study to learn about good syntax.) In most of the ones I can think of it's as simple as "int(a) == int(b)". You also get type protection if "a" isn't actually an "int" at all. Perl silently coerces "oiewjgew" into 0.
I think this is a good one: there are already far too many situations where an operator or function in Perl behaves in different ways depending on minor details of the context, we do not need another.
No, this is another. If you use == on a number, it works correctly. If you use it on a string, it first silently coerces it to a number. That's different behavior.
You need to expand your language horizons. For one thing, I'm not attacking Perl, I'm explaining it. If it looks like an attack, it's your lack of understanding of my explanation, not an attack. Perl will give you a very fuzzy idea of what "typing" is. It's OK for the language, but it hasn't helped you understand what "typing" is when other people talk about it. I recommend Haskell or OCaml. (Python might be OK too, but that's probably still not the best place to learn about typing.)
Perl is almost unique among the "real" languages for this peculiar context-sensitivity of strings vs. numbers, for good or for ill. As a result, as good as it can be to use sometimes, it's a really, really bad place to try to learn programming concepts. (Of course, that's typically true somewhere for any language, which is why expanding your horizons is necessary.)
However, if rather than literals those had been variables-- maybe taken from user input-- that would have been no such indicators.
Here is where your argument falls down. Proof by construction: There are a large number of languages of every variety that still manage to have types for that input.
Your argument is more accurately described as:
"Perl actively tries to avoid giving types to strings and numbers, and as a result of this desire to not distinguish between the two, the onus is on the programmer to do so. That's how the language solves this problem that other languages solve through stronger typing."
At this point, one can then go on and debate whether or not this is a good thing, but don't pretend that Perl has no choice. It had all kinds of choice and deliberately chose this system, most likely for backwards programmer compatibility with awk and its other predecessors.
Perl isn't "autoboxing"; that's a technical term that means that you take simple C++ or Java style scalars and automatically wrap them in an object. Perl is dynamically "looking at" the object as either a number or a string, depending on context; thus, to the programmer, every string is also a number (albiet usually 0) and every number is also a string.
No, he means the Asgard of Stargate: SG-1.
Take up nomenclature with the writers of the show. (Who do as good a job as you could possibly expect from a television science-fiction weekly, but are certainly not invulnerable. Besides, I wouldn't be surprised they deliberately chose the name Asgard knowing it's not quite right, simply because there's a lot of people like me who connected Asgard to Norse mythology right away, but wouldn't have recognized Aesir at all, or spelled it correctly after hearing it.)
What happens to these massive space structures when a 3 inch rock or space junk going at hyperspeed punches through them.
Two or more three inch holes neatly punched through whatever happens to be in their way. What do you think?
If I were building a space station I wouldn't be building windows, I would be thinking submarine with a thick hide.
Do the math. (Warning, requires materials science.) You really can't build anything large enough to guarentee anything can't get through in space.
Eh, I was going to take the rest of you post apart but it's just not worth it. You have a Hollywood education (including such noted science education films as Alien Resurrection, apparently, and that common-sense-that-isn't-true idea that money is some sort of zero-sum game). News flash: This isn't Hollywood. If you're so interested in this subject, why not learn some real science? (And maybe economics.)
three times larger than his country would just sit idly by and ignore the undefended neighbour
So, the only way they could defend themselves was with weapons of mass destruction?
Do you even stop to think about your arguments before you make them?
So, the only "significant weapons" that exist are WMDs?
Like I asked someone else, do you even stop to think about your arguments before you make them? A little less knee-jerking, a little more thought is in order.
There couldn't possibly be another reason to prevent the UN weapons inspectors from having carte blanche access to secure facilities in Iraq, right?
Oh, I can't wait until the left starts spouting this en masse. "Iraq shouldn't have cooperated with the inspectors! They were American shills!" or something.
As for punishing "violations of UN resolutions" shouldn't the UN be responsible for that?
A stupid counterarguement. Yes, yes they should. Maybe if they did enforce them instead of running like cowards at every chance this all wouldn't have happened. Instead they passed impotent resolution after impotent resolution while the world goes to hell.
You anti-American vitriol is all politically correct and stuff, but in your zeal to be negative, you aren't leaving any actual alternatives that America could have taken that makes any sense. The UN ought to enforce its own resolutions, but damn it, how dare you enforce those resolutions? (Who do you think "the UN" is, anyhow, militarily?)
As has been clearly demonstrated recently in Iraq...
Indeed; incompetent politics can start wars as well as prevent them.
If Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs, all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war. He'd still be alive, running the country, and killing whoever he pleased, whenever he pleased.
Instead, he let his ego get in the way of his politics, he fought the inspecters tooth and nail, and it ended up running his regime into the ground.
(There's some more to the story then that, such as how stupid it is to run a "shoot the messenger" regime if you actually want to survive, but that outline is true.)
Incompetent politics can definately start wars.
(Oh, you were trying to blame the current President? Maybe if he'd actually started this war that would make sense, but since there is an unbroken string of broken UN resolutions dating back to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, I'd say it makes just as much sense to call this a continuation of that, Saddam's Greatest Mistake. Not saying Bush is blameless, just saying that if you want to point at one person who's utterly incompetent politics for over a decade started this war, it's much, much more rational to point at Saddam. One little thing he had to do to remove any pretense, and his ego wouldn't let him do it.)
Isn't there a "+1, Funny Ignorance" mod around here somewhere?
+ 4GB
Here's a little test for you. Create a four gigabyte file on your hard drive.
time dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile ibs=1K count=4M
On my lil' laptop here, well, I gave up after the first gig, which took 8 minutes.
Now, on your monstrous machine you could probably do better, but we're talking hard drives here, not CPUs; even if you have four disks RAIDed together for maximal 4x throughput (no redundency) that are each four times faster then my drive, the full 4 gig swap partition still takes a minimum of two entire minutes, and I wouldn't be surprised that you don't have quite that good of a setup (that's massive file-server quality).
That is the fastest you could possibly fill up that amount of space in. In reality, it'll be a lot slower, because you never fill it up linearly.
On a modern hard drive, I don't see how 4GB of swap could ever help anybody. If you have to routinely fill that space, you've already lost.
I would be interested to find out how deeply into swap you're willing to still be using the computer. I would be very unsurprised, even with your ideal setup for swapping, if you ever go deeper then a gig. (And I'm being generous; my instincts are saying 256MB-512MB.)
But teleportation is another impossible thing we've conquered through a basic discovery in quantum physics.
You're entitled to your opinion so I won't jump on the rest of your post like I kind of want to.
However, note that teleportation in the conventional sense remains impossible. AFAIK, to date, only single photons have been "teleported" (actually, their quantum state was transferred which still doesn't match most people's mental model; there was still a photon on one end and a photon on the other), and the way in which it was done strongly indicates the impossibility of teleporting anything macroscopic... or for that matter, microscopic. In theory, it's just an "engineering problem"; in reality it's an insurmountable one.
Teleportation, as most people use the word, is more unlikely seeming now then it was fifty years ago. Which brings me to the other nit I'll pick...
I guess what I'm saying is that there is more we don't know than we do know,
Yes, but what we do know increasingly keeps making the probability of ever having certain things continue to recede. More knowlege isn't bringing us closer, it's showing us the uncrossable chasm in increasing detail.
Sure, maybe there's this little string flung across it somewhere, but we've searched more and more of it and we keep finding no such string. Eventually, you have to conclude that it either isn't there, or even if it is, it's so delicate as to be useless.
It's a case of the infinity fallacy: "If we knew an infinite amount of stuff, we'd know how to do X." (A similar argument is often made for "a really, really lot".) But that's a fallacy; an infinite set can still not contain certain elements. The infinite set of all odd numbers does not contain 2, no matter how many of them you examine. To me, it's looking more and more like "how to travel FTL" or "macroscopic teleportation" or a number of other sci-fi concepts ("science-fiction forcefields" (as opposed to the real things, of course, which are entirely different), "time travel" (again in the science fiction senses)) simply isn't in the set of things you can know about the universe, so looking harder isn't going to help. We've been looking harder, and we haven't found any meaningful loopholes to date. The number of places those things can hide is shrinking.
(After all, we're not searching the entire set of knowlege about the universe, which you seem to imply; the fact that I don't know the weather on a planet on the other side of the galaxy does nothing to make FTL possible. The vast sum of knowlege is entirely irrelevant. We're searching a rather narrow domain, and we're running out of places to look.)
- Amounts of energy comparable to the entire output of the Sun. (And the corresponding efficient equipment to handle it without your spaceship suddenly resembling a sun.) Probably impossible (remember, this energy generation has to fit inside the bubble; even if we could do it in general we could never fit it in a spaceship.)
- The ability to directly control gravity, with, to date, absolutely no evidence that it is possible with anything other then black-hole-sized quantities of mass... and black holes still are just general suckers, you can't direct their gravity like you'd need to.
- Negative mass. Much hypothesized, probably impossible in macroscopic amounts. (It's one of the more possible out of this list, but that's not saying much.) You need this for the negative gravity needed to stabalize these spacewarps; it's impossible to build a stable field with any sort of hole in the middle out of pure attractive, inverse-square based fields. (Actually, it's impossible with inverse-square fields in general; you have to have a matter shield in the mix if you want a hole (a charged hollow sphere has a hole on the inside of the sphere), but what shields against gravity?)
- The ability to control all of this not just "in general", but extremely tightly, to create a high distortion outside of the ship without utterly destroying the inside of the ship with gravity fields or tides in the millions of Gs range or more.
A thing that requires multiple other most-likely impossible things is itself impossible, even if you can sort of make the math work.(Am I absolutely sure such space warping can't be used for travel? Technically, no. Then again, I'm not absolutely sure that when I drop this apple, it will fall to the ground, either; there's an ever so small chance that it won't, even under conventional QM as I understand it. But unless something really strange opens up at the string theory level, with as I said, no reason with current evidence to believe that it will, you're not getting any of this. You're welcome, as so many Slashbots are wont to do, to post an angry reply saying "How do you know this is impossible? We broke the speed of sound, didn't we?" (Which itself betrays a serious misunderstanding of history, reason why left as an exercise for the reader.) But be aware, the evidence is on my side; FTL has reached the point where we need something magical to make it work, and I don't hold my breath waiting for magic.)
Heh.
"Dear Ken:
Science.
Sincerely, Intelligent People."
Unless he's one of those incomptetent people who have no idea how incomptetent they really are
Ah, time to trot out one of my favorite links:
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessment - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134
An entertaining read.
Yes, people are often very contradictory when you add your own pre-conceived opinions to what they said.
In this case, you added your own preconcieved opinion that "Nobody ever does anything hard with software, ever." In fact, even then it's not enough to create a logical contradiction:
- Software that isn't designed to be movable is hard to move.
- Software that is easy to move can be so moved relatively easily.
- Companies frequently use free software in commercial products.
To get a full-on contradiction you also need to add "Companies use software that wasn't designed to move" (i.e., non-library code). (Although this one at least has the virtue of being true.)I know you added that opinion because of the conclusions you came to, even if you're not conciously aware you did it yourself. Would you say the phrase "Sometimes people do hard things." is logically contradictory? If not, you need to rethink your position.
Generally, when you think you've found a contradiction, it helps to simplify the argument and make sure you didn't sneak any axioms in from your own preconceived notion. I'd say about a quarter of my aggreived postings get aborted when I discover the criticism I had is irrelevant. It's a very human thing to do, and one must always be on guard for it.
(On those rare occasions I don't do this, I tend to get my ass handed to me in a reply... like this.)