Democracy cannot fight gravity, nor stop a 1/2km bolder travelling at Mach 33 coming down through the atmosphere.
Nor can democracy stop a thousand nuclear warheads. Come on, why would any nation with the technology to go to the moon and hurl rocks at us not just use nuclear weapons instead? They surely provide far more bang for the buck.
And what could the moon possibly do for an expansionist nation? Do you have any idea how much it costs to send 1kg to the moon? In human history, expansion has always been driven by quest for resources--whether those resources are wealth (Spain), land (America), natural resources (Japan), or whatever else. But how could the moon provide these things more efficiently than underutilized parts of Earth? I tell you what, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper for the Chinese to send people to shiver in Antarctica than on the moon, and they'd probably get more out of it.
No, we have nothing to fear from a Chinese base on the moon. Until we have the technology to make transport to and from the moon cheap, it's a useless pile of rock.
If mp3 is perceived as not having DRM, why not watermark the songs as they fly off the server so they can be tracked?
And suppose Apple does track down a person who downloaded an MP3 and shared it. What are they going to do, sue? The RIAA can afford the bad PR, but Apple is too smart for that.
I wish the announcement would be a bit more specific about the security fixes and who needs them. I don't use mod_dav or a threaded MPM, but do I still need to upgrade?
I think one of the problems with Madden is that it doesn't simulate the "hasn't practiced that play" problem.
An example: Michael Vick sat his rookie season in the NFL because he didn't know the plays well enough. But in the Madden game year (2002?) corresponding to that, many people I know would put him in manually, and kick ass with him. The fact that the real Vick didn't know the offense well enough didn't matter, because the human player had no trouble with "press X to pass to the slot receiver as he cuts". Another common example was playing Tim Dwight as the first WR for the Chargers; even though he didn't catch very well, he'd often leave the coverage in the dust.
What Madden needs to do is simulate the fact that certain players only know certain positions in certain plays. Want to play Tony Gonzalez as a wide receiver? Fine, but he'll run the wrong route occasionally, or fail to turn around for the ball when he's supposed to. Want to use Dante Culpepper as a running back? All right, but don't expect him to read his run blocking well, and be prepared to chase his fumbles.
Rather than simply stopping a human player from outsmarting the game, penalize him realistically.
By the way, did I ever mention how much slashdot's lameness filter blows? It really, really, really sucks. I hate it. Very much so. More characters per line please. Blah blah blah. Goddamnit, the solution is moderation, not pitiful attempts at automated filtering. How many fucking characters do I need in a line? Brevity is the soul of wit. Most people don't realize it, but that line is part of a sequence of dialogue that makes fun of people who give lots of advice and aphorisms like that without really having any wisdom to share.
Re:Nothing to see, move along
on
Is SARS From Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The worms survived Columbia because they were in a human-constructed container and they got lucky. Now if they were suggesting that viruses come down in the center of meteorites, that would be a plausible mechanism. But as far as I know, they're not. (And it wouldn't make much sense--viruses that have the same mechanisms (e.g. for RNA and its replication) as just about all other life on Earth, and are well-adapted to their hosts (the products of 4 billion years of evolution) and yet are of extraterrestrial origin. The chances are slim to none, with emphasis on none.)
Nothing to see, move along
on
Is SARS From Mars?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The scientists quoted in the article don't provide a shred of evidence. They argue that it is possible that the pathogen responsible for SARS fell out of the stratosphere. They don't have any evidence to suggest it actually happened. Furthermore, they can't show any examples of living things falling from that altitude and surviving, nor can they even really provide a mechanism by which such a thing might be possible.
We already have an explanation of where SARS and other viruses come from: mutations of other human diseases or mutations of similar animal diseases.
We already have an explanation for why many of these come from China: China has a large number of people in close proximity to farm animals, and most of these people do not have good sanitation. From the plague to influenza and even HIV, we can identify the animal links by which humans first became infected. These explanations have been tested and correctly predict future results: for example, immunologists look at pigs and ducks in Hong Kong when they decide which three strains of influenza the annual flu shots should protect against.
In contrast, a few British microbiologists are proposing that viruses fall from the stratosphere. It's certainly possible that they're right, but we're a long way from throwing out our current theories.
By that equivalence relation, shouldn't horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) be in the same partition (i.e. same species)? (Yes, I know male mules are sterile, but some rare female mules are fertile.)
Use proper OO so you don't have to create objects with data members that are irrelevant to the task you want
Buy more memory
Call System.gc() periodically (preferable after finishing with a batch of objects and before allocating the next batch)
Again, if you really need to have everything in memory at the same time, get more memory. Or just learn to trust your OS's memory manager to page for you.
True interpreted languages are slow. When you write a script for bash, it's read in line-by-line and parsed each time you run the script. (But it's also slow because you typically are creating lots of different processes, which is why being interpreted is the last performance problem you should worry about in shell scripting.)
Java is not interpreted. Java is compiled. Whether the format to which it is compiled is native for your processor or not is an entirely different question. Java (similar to Perl under mod_perl or other schemes) emulates an idealized Java processor, but it does not interpret it. This is much faster that interpreting a language.
Those of you who used the first PowerPC-based Macs have experienced the difference. Almost all the applications you ran were compiled for m68k, but Apple had a software m68k emulator that ran them several orders of magnitude faster than if your 601 had been interpreting the C (or often Pascal) sources.
The reasons languages like BASIC or Perl (regardless of whether they are interpreted or compiled/emulated) tend to be slower than languages like C and Java are:
their interpreters/compilers tend to suck at optimizations compared to, say, a good C compiler; and
they hide at the language or library level many things which make programming faster but bloat the code path (e.g. using dynamically sized arrays even when the programmer knows how much he'd like to allocate).
When a mathematician is in grad school or fresh out of it, she wants to publish as much as humanly possible, because having a 15 page CV helps one get tenure at a good university. So just about any thought she has that adds a tiny bit to the sum knowledge of humanity, she'll send to a journal. This is not to say she's not doing good work, just that she's publishing early and often. But that's what the tenure granting committees look for, so what else should she do?
But when she gets older, she can settle down and try to tackle harder and more time-consuming problems--that's one of the reasons for the tenure system, after all. So she may not look as productive, but she's contributing her time to mathematics in just as important a way as she did when she was younger. Also, her experience will allow her to supervise research more effectively, and she'll find that her time is well spent supervising a number of graduate students, giving them advice and help in their research.
On another note, remember that the vast majority of professional mathematicians will never solve a famous problem. And yes, every young mathematician tries to solve the Riemann hypothesis, but as he grows older he learns to spend less time on problems on which he's unlikely to make progress. There are exceptions to this, like Andrew Wiles. (And personally, if I had been on his post-tenure review committees during those 7 years, I'd have wanted to know what he was doing to justify a salary: mathematicians very rarely keep their work secret like that.) But while a mathematician in his 20s may be encouraged to try long-unsolved problems, he tends to grow out of it unless he's brilliant enough to have success with it.
Because it's ugly. It's yet another place to look for variables passed into your script, you have to worry about which functions work from the command line and which don't, and so on. Yes you can do it, as I said, but it's a hack on a language designed to run in a CGI environment.
I said language features, as in actual syntax, not just functions. I know about both of those, and they're clumsy compared to the way other languages do that stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
And after the reentry, it will be considerably warmer as well.
Nor can democracy stop a thousand nuclear warheads. Come on, why would any nation with the technology to go to the moon and hurl rocks at us not just use nuclear weapons instead? They surely provide far more bang for the buck.
And what could the moon possibly do for an expansionist nation? Do you have any idea how much it costs to send 1kg to the moon? In human history, expansion has always been driven by quest for resources--whether those resources are wealth (Spain), land (America), natural resources (Japan), or whatever else. But how could the moon provide these things more efficiently than underutilized parts of Earth? I tell you what, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper for the Chinese to send people to shiver in Antarctica than on the moon, and they'd probably get more out of it.
No, we have nothing to fear from a Chinese base on the moon. Until we have the technology to make transport to and from the moon cheap, it's a useless pile of rock.
But with the distance he had to travel, the delivery boy will expect a good tip...
It used to be called the Department of War actually.
I wish the announcement would be a bit more specific about the security fixes and who needs them. I don't use mod_dav or a threaded MPM, but do I still need to upgrade?
I think one of the problems with Madden is that it doesn't simulate the "hasn't practiced that play" problem.
An example: Michael Vick sat his rookie season in the NFL because he didn't know the plays well enough. But in the Madden game year (2002?) corresponding to that, many people I know would put him in manually, and kick ass with him. The fact that the real Vick didn't know the offense well enough didn't matter, because the human player had no trouble with "press X to pass to the slot receiver as he cuts". Another common example was playing Tim Dwight as the first WR for the Chargers; even though he didn't catch very well, he'd often leave the coverage in the dust.
What Madden needs to do is simulate the fact that certain players only know certain positions in certain plays. Want to play Tony Gonzalez as a wide receiver? Fine, but he'll run the wrong route occasionally, or fail to turn around for the ball when he's supposed to. Want to use Dante Culpepper as a running back? All right, but don't expect him to read his run blocking well, and be prepared to chase his fumbles.
Rather than simply stopping a human player from outsmarting the game, penalize him realistically.
Or $50 for a used one.
If I can't read /., the terrorists have already won!
True, but it makes me wonder why we don't see more diseases coming out of the former USSR--12 timezones worth of biodiversity.
Hey--how did you find the source of my program!?
By the way, did I ever mention how much slashdot's lameness filter blows? It really, really, really sucks. I hate it. Very much so. More characters per line please. Blah blah blah. Goddamnit, the solution is moderation, not pitiful attempts at automated filtering. How many fucking characters do I need in a line? Brevity is the soul of wit. Most people don't realize it, but that line is part of a sequence of dialogue that makes fun of people who give lots of advice and aphorisms like that without really having any wisdom to share.
The worms survived Columbia because they were in a human-constructed container and they got lucky. Now if they were suggesting that viruses come down in the center of meteorites, that would be a plausible mechanism. But as far as I know, they're not. (And it wouldn't make much sense--viruses that have the same mechanisms (e.g. for RNA and its replication) as just about all other life on Earth, and are well-adapted to their hosts (the products of 4 billion years of evolution) and yet are of extraterrestrial origin. The chances are slim to none, with emphasis on none.)
The scientists quoted in the article don't provide a shred of evidence. They argue that it is possible that the pathogen responsible for SARS fell out of the stratosphere. They don't have any evidence to suggest it actually happened. Furthermore, they can't show any examples of living things falling from that altitude and surviving, nor can they even really provide a mechanism by which such a thing might be possible.
We already have an explanation of where SARS and other viruses come from: mutations of other human diseases or mutations of similar animal diseases. We already have an explanation for why many of these come from China: China has a large number of people in close proximity to farm animals, and most of these people do not have good sanitation. From the plague to influenza and even HIV, we can identify the animal links by which humans first became infected. These explanations have been tested and correctly predict future results: for example, immunologists look at pigs and ducks in Hong Kong when they decide which three strains of influenza the annual flu shots should protect against.
In contrast, a few British microbiologists are proposing that viruses fall from the stratosphere. It's certainly possible that they're right, but we're a long way from throwing out our current theories.
By that equivalence relation, shouldn't horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) be in the same partition (i.e. same species)? (Yes, I know male mules are sterile, but some rare female mules are fertile.)
Again, if you really need to have everything in memory at the same time, get more memory. Or just learn to trust your OS's memory manager to page for you.
Wrong answer, but thanks for playing.
True interpreted languages are slow. When you write a script for bash, it's read in line-by-line and parsed each time you run the script. (But it's also slow because you typically are creating lots of different processes, which is why being interpreted is the last performance problem you should worry about in shell scripting.)
Java is not interpreted. Java is compiled. Whether the format to which it is compiled is native for your processor or not is an entirely different question. Java (similar to Perl under mod_perl or other schemes) emulates an idealized Java processor, but it does not interpret it. This is much faster that interpreting a language.
Those of you who used the first PowerPC-based Macs have experienced the difference. Almost all the applications you ran were compiled for m68k, but Apple had a software m68k emulator that ran them several orders of magnitude faster than if your 601 had been interpreting the C (or often Pascal) sources.
The reasons languages like BASIC or Perl (regardless of whether they are interpreted or compiled/emulated) tend to be slower than languages like C and Java are:
When a mathematician is in grad school or fresh out of it, she wants to publish as much as humanly possible, because having a 15 page CV helps one get tenure at a good university. So just about any thought she has that adds a tiny bit to the sum knowledge of humanity, she'll send to a journal. This is not to say she's not doing good work, just that she's publishing early and often. But that's what the tenure granting committees look for, so what else should she do?
But when she gets older, she can settle down and try to tackle harder and more time-consuming problems--that's one of the reasons for the tenure system, after all. So she may not look as productive, but she's contributing her time to mathematics in just as important a way as she did when she was younger. Also, her experience will allow her to supervise research more effectively, and she'll find that her time is well spent supervising a number of graduate students, giving them advice and help in their research.
On another note, remember that the vast majority of professional mathematicians will never solve a famous problem. And yes, every young mathematician tries to solve the Riemann hypothesis, but as he grows older he learns to spend less time on problems on which he's unlikely to make progress. There are exceptions to this, like Andrew Wiles. (And personally, if I had been on his post-tenure review committees during those 7 years, I'd have wanted to know what he was doing to justify a salary: mathematicians very rarely keep their work secret like that.) But while a mathematician in his 20s may be encouraged to try long-unsolved problems, he tends to grow out of it unless he's brilliant enough to have success with it.
Abel's great discoveries were made towards the end of his life and hence career...
Because it's ugly. It's yet another place to look for variables passed into your script, you have to worry about which functions work from the command line and which don't, and so on. Yes you can do it, as I said, but it's a hack on a language designed to run in a CGI environment.
I said language features, as in actual syntax, not just functions. I know about both of those, and they're clumsy compared to the way other languages do that stuff.