I believe your account is some popular fantasy and nothing more. I'd think that if you're an otherwise normal person with no genetic predispositions toward addictions, then if you take it once you'll suffer for 3-4 weeks and that's the end of it. If you're rational about it, it will be a hard time but by no means a downhill one-way no brakes experience, not at all. Having passed one of the baccalaureate exams at week 2 should give you at least one data point to consider.
Building stuff in space means you need to have an entire industrial base there. Everything, otherwise you will need to ship stuff from Earth. A remotely self-sufficient industrial base would require quite some energy simply to launch all that crap even to LEO, and don't get me started about designing and manufacturing all this space-worthy hardware in the first place.
By "quite some energy" I mean more energy that has been expended for propulsion in all rocket launches to date. Oh, duh, I mean to include both space launches and rocket weapons that stay close to the ground. Add to that all the energy the mankind has used so far to fly the jet planes, heck, any kind of a plane, including gains from the tailwinds. Yes, and then add all the energy we have used so far to propel cars and push trains and don't forget the ships. All that energy wouldn't be enough.
In fact, you'd still be an order of magnitude shy -- but just one order I'd think. Now you know the scale of the problem. Chemical rockets are a dead end. There's no point in developing an alternative propulsion technology in orbit, of course, it's waaaay cheaper to do it down here. So, until we have some alternate propulsion systems and truly reusable spacecraft, this is all a pipe dream. And that's being optimistic. A pessimist would say that due to politics we will never ever truly leave this rock, and when we realize it'd be a good thing to do, it'll be a couple centuries too late for that.
Do note that Space Shuttle wouldn't cut it even remotely close to being a truly reusable spacecraft. True reusability means something like turning around a modern jet. Do a walkaround, fuel it up, punch in the waypoints, fuel load, weights and loads, and off you go. Now listen to NASA audio from the Space Shuttle, from the moment they touch down. Be amazed how inefficient it all was. And that's just the audio after landing. Then watch some videos of how much effort it took to turn the damn thing around.
Of course this was not designed with any sort of usability in mind. The newsfeed, homepage, etc. includes dozens of useless entries for test and empty books etc. What were they thinking? It's just noise, and it's horrible.
If you want such a service to be usable, you need to present what people want, not everything. A random joe user that will visit such a site is most likely looking for books to read, not placeholders, and probably not work-in-progress that's not even properly started yet. You need some filters to choose between mostly-complete works (the default), work well underway, and everything else. The "everything else" category would be useful only if you're looking for a new project to jump into at an early stage, it's a waste of time and bandwidth otherwise.
There also should be a tagging system (a-la version control) -- if there is one, forgive me but I didn't find it. If you have a book you work on, you'd probably like to tag a particular revision as being "draft released for comment round 1", for example. Such tags would need to have a bunch of attributes, for example whether it's a draft, editing/corrector's version, a general release, or none of it (development/WIP tag).
Those are the things just off the top of my head. The idea behind the site is noble, the implementation as-is is akin to a bunch of middle-graders doing computer graphics without ever having heard of applied linear algebra. They don't know what the heck they are doing, pretty much -- they may be good coders, but they have never ever obviously thought of how will one use the damn thing. I'm not impressed.
I wish you weren't right, but right you are. 166 adults, haha. Anyway, I love the cut-off conclusion. What they say:
Among patients with acute rhinosinusitis, a 10-day course of amoxicillin compared with placebo did not reduce symptoms at day 3 of treatment.
What they meant to say: Among patients with acute rhinosinusitis, a 10-day course of amoxicillin compared with placebo did not reduce symptoms at day 3 of treatment. The symptoms were reduced at day 7 of treatment. Another important point: if the symptoms appear to be reduced at day 7, but not reduced at days 3 and 10, then you may wish to question the test you're using (SNOT-16 in their case), or your sample size. I wouldn't want my name on this paper with less than ~630 adults.
I can't but agree. If you're serious about developing applications for a mac, then going through the app store won't be a big deal. If you're not-so-serious, or if those are free software, then it doesn't matter much because the users can easily bypass the protection. It basically makes you jump through more hoops before you can shoot yourself in the foot, and that is -- apparently -- what regular, computer-illiterate users need.
Now don't get me wrong: I believe that it's essentially illiteracy that makes the users oblivious to the fact that they themselves install and deploy malware. We're in an age where to be a successful citizen, you must have a basic understanding of computer security and operation. Being "non-technical" is a non-excuse. It's like saying that one is "non-artsy" or "non-crafty" when refusing to learn to read and write. Just as reading, writing and basic math became indispensable tools for existence in today's society, while you could do just fine without them a mere 500 years ago, today you do need to know how to tell a frickin' malware from the real thing, at least in the most obvious cases. Not knowing that is, today, just as bad as not knowing how to read would have been 50 years ago.
That's like "open" industrial standards, like, um, CiP - common industrial protocol, developed by ODVA. It's "open" in the sense that if you pay them a couple thousand bucks and agree to all sorts of things, they'll politely let you read the freaking thing. Pretty steep for an "open" standard, if you ask me. And designed by a committe that must have had a couple armchair politicians included, because boy, did they overengineer that thing.
Google's revenue generating products consist of the service-providing application that runs on Google infrastructure: their data store, indexing, replication, load balancing, configuration/deployment, maintenance front-end, etc. Open sourcing a random Google service would be quite useless: without the infrastructure you couldn't even run the darn thing. You'd have to spend a lot of time implementing at least skeleton functionality of the various back-ends just to run it. And then it'd still be an unscalable hack that could serve thousands but that's it. So, even if Google did open source a couple of their services, it'd be useless code, but also the argument that it'd help out their competition is invalid: they'd need Google's hardware and software infrastructure to scale it for real-life use by the millions. Say, google open-sourcing gmail would not affect their revenue stream at all, but it sure would make people realize how much investment google has in their infrastructure. Because I'm pretty damn sure that gmail utilizes everything they've got in gmail, whether directly or indirectly: spam scanning, indexing, distributed and redundant datastore, whatever toolkits are used for the development of the front and back-end, authentication, context detection (for addresses, phone numbers, etc), pop, smtp and imap servers (likely their own), yada yada.
It's really impossible to properly audit or verify a spreadsheet.
What you mean to say, surely, is that such tools are absent from popular shipping office software suites. In general, though, it's bloody damn easy to do change tracking on a an XML-based spreadsheet file format, at least as far as ODS format is concerned. You need to whip up some XSLT or use an XML parser and write a script using it, but calling it impossible is just silly.\
I do agree that pretty much all spreadsheet users don't have a clue about any of it because it's not exposed, thus may just as well not exist -- thus your other points are valid and I couldn't agree more.
I have no clue what made you think that we "can't even accurately predict the paths of just three bodies in orbit", because that's just some fantasy. Not having a closed-form solution in what passes for standard continuous mathematical language does not mean we don't have a solution in general, because hey, we do, and people routinely use it. How the heck do you think they'd be able to do any sort of spacecraft trajectory planning, swingbys, etc. All of that requires multibody simulations, with relativistic corrections, even.
Coupling gravity with quantum theory is a whole different can of beans. If you have any suggestions, feel free to publish them. No one is suppressing your genius. </sarcasm>
This, exactly this, describes me as well. I don't have astigmatism (or at least it's not measurable using standard instruments), though. Blue/violet lights are used in some European railway signals and they just bother the heck out of me at night. I have the same kind of pain-but-without-pain discomfort when looking at black lights, even ones that have good visible light and IR filters and offer UV-only output.
Well, it has to do with the underlying technology: SSL, as it's normally applied, provides you with an unencrypted side channel that leaks information that you'd like kept private. To counter it would require sending a more-or-less fixed bandwidth SSL stream, padded with pseudorandom noise. That is a fundamental deficiency of SSL and many other cryptosystems that apply to interactive uses over the web: to keep everything private, it needs a fixed (and wasteful) bandwidth allocation.
What I find the most crazy is that being "against" evolution just doesn't compute, it's a non-sequitur. It's like being against conservation of energy (I mean here a law of Nature). You may not like that our biosphere works this way, but that's just too fucking bad I say. Pretending that biosphere works some other way doesn't make it so...
What plenty of people somehow don't get is that scientific theories (even in mathematics!) are based on observed facts, and they have predictive power. Being against evolution is basically saying that one is against what we observe and the fact that we can predict things based on it. It's absurd at best.
That's the real problem I see in plenty of uneducated BS: there is the use of words, but those words don't mean anything. It's like asking for the meaning of life: the phrase "meaning of life" doesn't mean much. There's an infinite number of things that we can write that are completely meaningless when posed as general questions. It's like saying "meaning of number five", or "meaning of bees". You can ask about meaning of certain things in context where they appear, like what is the meaning of number five in some poem, or meaning of bees on some painting. But that's not, unfortunately, how plenty of highfalutin' existential questions are posed...
In other words: the energy stored in the LHC beam is on the order of kinetic energy of a modern passenger jet somewhere above stall speed. If it'd dump in a small spot, you'd get a nice crater.
What the examiner did could be silly yet he didn't have to be stupid. Often we do silly things in spite of knowing better -- we're not stupid, not necessarily. So there. Irrational != stupid. People do irrational things, wrong things, even, whether they are stupid or not.
Transactional support for payroll? What do you mean by that? You of course store ongoing concerns, like time-worked tracking, in a database of some sort, but calculation during a payroll run can be done in complete isolation and you don't need to run it on a database itself.
As for parameters and whatnot: it's not exactly a problem only common to finance, you'll see the same thing in say specialized CAD systems that support validation of a design to engineering codes. 50-60 parameters, even if those parameters are per-person, per-payroll-run, we're still talking about a meager amount of data, even if those parameters need 64 bit binary representation: 60*8 = 480 bytes. Meh. The functions that calculate stuff based on the parameters are of course common across the system, so that also has an O(1) cost in terms of storage per person, run, etc.
I'm not claiming that using C, COBOL, C#, Java, or what have you is all that great for expressing legal requirements, but that's not how you do it. Dealing properly (vs. cowboyishly) with such a system requires some formalized abstractions -- this, unfortunately, requires some hard-core computer science knowledge. In a nutshell, you translate legalese into some kind of small-step semantics, and then those get automatically translated into code, practically in a couple of steps. Each intermediate language is formally specified, and the code generators are formally verified to preserve semantics at each step. So, the ultimate generated machine code, if your generator system is done right, can be formally proven to preserve the semantics all the way from the input semantics to machine code running on the target architecture. That's about as much of butt covering as anyone could ever do, and I've recently seen this very approach very successfully applied in an engineering system -- where you start with engineering codes (law!), full of exceptions and silliness.
This is silly. You do it all in RAM, and you don't even need that many gigabytes of it to do it. I think that if you look back at how one did programming on IBM's 360 (in assembly, for example), it was all pretty lean. I think that there are applications where even an SQL server is a bit much in the way of overhead. Just think of how much data per person you need to calculate everything that goes onto a payroll. I'm sure that 1kb per person would be enough for input and output (binary data with structure). So then, with a million people you need say a gigabyte of RAM, and I'm sure you don't need more than one core to go through it and be done in a couple minutes. A modern 64 bit desktop machine with 64gb of RAM would probably be more than enough to do Comcast's payroll in a couple minutes, not hours. Of course you'd probably need a more state-of-the-art programming environment to code it up so that it'd be inherently safe (C is out) and productive (even a subset of C++ would be out).
This whole argument is a dud. One can trivially make up their own boarding passes, there's no need to even have an internet connection for that, just an example to look at and copy from.
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I believe your account is some popular fantasy and nothing more. I'd think that if you're an otherwise normal person with no genetic predispositions toward addictions, then if you take it once you'll suffer for 3-4 weeks and that's the end of it. If you're rational about it, it will be a hard time but by no means a downhill one-way no brakes experience, not at all. Having passed one of the baccalaureate exams at week 2 should give you at least one data point to consider.
Building stuff in space means you need to have an entire industrial base there. Everything, otherwise you will need to ship stuff from Earth. A remotely self-sufficient industrial base would require quite some energy simply to launch all that crap even to LEO, and don't get me started about designing and manufacturing all this space-worthy hardware in the first place.
By "quite some energy" I mean more energy that has been expended for propulsion in all rocket launches to date. Oh, duh, I mean to include both space launches and rocket weapons that stay close to the ground. Add to that all the energy the mankind has used so far to fly the jet planes, heck, any kind of a plane, including gains from the tailwinds. Yes, and then add all the energy we have used so far to propel cars and push trains and don't forget the ships. All that energy wouldn't be enough.
In fact, you'd still be an order of magnitude shy -- but just one order I'd think. Now you know the scale of the problem. Chemical rockets are a dead end. There's no point in developing an alternative propulsion technology in orbit, of course, it's waaaay cheaper to do it down here. So, until we have some alternate propulsion systems and truly reusable spacecraft, this is all a pipe dream. And that's being optimistic. A pessimist would say that due to politics we will never ever truly leave this rock, and when we realize it'd be a good thing to do, it'll be a couple centuries too late for that.
Do note that Space Shuttle wouldn't cut it even remotely close to being a truly reusable spacecraft. True reusability means something like turning around a modern jet. Do a walkaround, fuel it up, punch in the waypoints, fuel load, weights and loads, and off you go. Now listen to NASA audio from the Space Shuttle, from the moment they touch down. Be amazed how inefficient it all was. And that's just the audio after landing. Then watch some videos of how much effort it took to turn the damn thing around.
Of course this was not designed with any sort of usability in mind. The newsfeed, homepage, etc. includes dozens of useless entries for test and empty books etc. What were they thinking? It's just noise, and it's horrible.
If you want such a service to be usable, you need to present what people want, not everything. A random joe user that will visit such a site is most likely looking for books to read, not placeholders, and probably not work-in-progress that's not even properly started yet. You need some filters to choose between mostly-complete works (the default), work well underway, and everything else. The "everything else" category would be useful only if you're looking for a new project to jump into at an early stage, it's a waste of time and bandwidth otherwise.
There also should be a tagging system (a-la version control) -- if there is one, forgive me but I didn't find it. If you have a book you work on, you'd probably like to tag a particular revision as being "draft released for comment round 1", for example. Such tags would need to have a bunch of attributes, for example whether it's a draft, editing/corrector's version, a general release, or none of it (development/WIP tag).
Those are the things just off the top of my head. The idea behind the site is noble, the implementation as-is is akin to a bunch of middle-graders doing computer graphics without ever having heard of applied linear algebra. They don't know what the heck they are doing, pretty much -- they may be good coders, but they have never ever obviously thought of how will one use the damn thing. I'm not impressed.
I wish you weren't right, but right you are. 166 adults, haha. Anyway, I love the cut-off conclusion. What they say:
Among patients with acute rhinosinusitis, a 10-day course of amoxicillin compared with placebo did not reduce symptoms at day 3 of treatment.
What they meant to say: Among patients with acute rhinosinusitis, a 10-day course of amoxicillin compared with placebo did not reduce symptoms at day 3 of treatment. The symptoms were reduced at day 7 of treatment. Another important point: if the symptoms appear to be reduced at day 7, but not reduced at days 3 and 10, then you may wish to question the test you're using (SNOT-16 in their case), or your sample size. I wouldn't want my name on this paper with less than ~630 adults.
I can't but agree. If you're serious about developing applications for a mac, then going through the app store won't be a big deal. If you're not-so-serious, or if those are free software, then it doesn't matter much because the users can easily bypass the protection. It basically makes you jump through more hoops before you can shoot yourself in the foot, and that is -- apparently -- what regular, computer-illiterate users need.
Now don't get me wrong: I believe that it's essentially illiteracy that makes the users oblivious to the fact that they themselves install and deploy malware. We're in an age where to be a successful citizen, you must have a basic understanding of computer security and operation. Being "non-technical" is a non-excuse. It's like saying that one is "non-artsy" or "non-crafty" when refusing to learn to read and write. Just as reading, writing and basic math became indispensable tools for existence in today's society, while you could do just fine without them a mere 500 years ago, today you do need to know how to tell a frickin' malware from the real thing, at least in the most obvious cases. Not knowing that is, today, just as bad as not knowing how to read would have been 50 years ago.
That's like "open" industrial standards, like, um, CiP - common industrial protocol, developed by ODVA. It's "open" in the sense that if you pay them a couple thousand bucks and agree to all sorts of things, they'll politely let you read the freaking thing. Pretty steep for an "open" standard, if you ask me. And designed by a committe that must have had a couple armchair politicians included, because boy, did they overengineer that thing.
Google's revenue generating products consist of the service-providing application that runs on Google infrastructure: their data store, indexing, replication, load balancing, configuration/deployment, maintenance front-end, etc. Open sourcing a random Google service would be quite useless: without the infrastructure you couldn't even run the darn thing. You'd have to spend a lot of time implementing at least skeleton functionality of the various back-ends just to run it. And then it'd still be an unscalable hack that could serve thousands but that's it. So, even if Google did open source a couple of their services, it'd be useless code, but also the argument that it'd help out their competition is invalid: they'd need Google's hardware and software infrastructure to scale it for real-life use by the millions. Say, google open-sourcing gmail would not affect their revenue stream at all, but it sure would make people realize how much investment google has in their infrastructure. Because I'm pretty damn sure that gmail utilizes everything they've got in gmail, whether directly or indirectly: spam scanning, indexing, distributed and redundant datastore, whatever toolkits are used for the development of the front and back-end, authentication, context detection (for addresses, phone numbers, etc), pop, smtp and imap servers (likely their own), yada yada.
That's all I needed to know. :)
-- your friendly bugtracker cop
+1 insightful
It's Canada. You'll probably need a demolition permit to tear them down ;)
Have you filed a bug?
It's really impossible to properly audit or verify a spreadsheet.
What you mean to say, surely, is that such tools are absent from popular shipping office software suites. In general, though, it's bloody damn easy to do change tracking on a an XML-based spreadsheet file format, at least as far as ODS format is concerned. You need to whip up some XSLT or use an XML parser and write a script using it, but calling it impossible is just silly.\
I do agree that pretty much all spreadsheet users don't have a clue about any of it because it's not exposed, thus may just as well not exist -- thus your other points are valid and I couldn't agree more.
It's not thinking, it is, hmm, I don't know what it is. Seems like stupor to me more than anything else.
I have no clue what made you think that we "can't even accurately predict the paths of just three bodies in orbit", because that's just some fantasy. Not having a closed-form solution in what passes for standard continuous mathematical language does not mean we don't have a solution in general, because hey, we do, and people routinely use it. How the heck do you think they'd be able to do any sort of spacecraft trajectory planning, swingbys, etc. All of that requires multibody simulations, with relativistic corrections, even.
Coupling gravity with quantum theory is a whole different can of beans. If you have any suggestions, feel free to publish them. No one is suppressing your genius. </sarcasm>
This, exactly this, describes me as well. I don't have astigmatism (or at least it's not measurable using standard instruments), though. Blue/violet lights are used in some European railway signals and they just bother the heck out of me at night. I have the same kind of pain-but-without-pain discomfort when looking at black lights, even ones that have good visible light and IR filters and offer UV-only output.
Well, it has to do with the underlying technology: SSL, as it's normally applied, provides you with an unencrypted side channel that leaks information that you'd like kept private. To counter it would require sending a more-or-less fixed bandwidth SSL stream, padded with pseudorandom noise. That is a fundamental deficiency of SSL and many other cryptosystems that apply to interactive uses over the web: to keep everything private, it needs a fixed (and wasteful) bandwidth allocation.
What I find the most crazy is that being "against" evolution just doesn't compute, it's a non-sequitur. It's like being against conservation of energy (I mean here a law of Nature). You may not like that our biosphere works this way, but that's just too fucking bad I say. Pretending that biosphere works some other way doesn't make it so...
What plenty of people somehow don't get is that scientific theories (even in mathematics!) are based on observed facts, and they have predictive power. Being against evolution is basically saying that one is against what we observe and the fact that we can predict things based on it. It's absurd at best.
That's the real problem I see in plenty of uneducated BS: there is the use of words, but those words don't mean anything. It's like asking for the meaning of life: the phrase "meaning of life" doesn't mean much. There's an infinite number of things that we can write that are completely meaningless when posed as general questions. It's like saying "meaning of number five", or "meaning of bees". You can ask about meaning of certain things in context where they appear, like what is the meaning of number five in some poem, or meaning of bees on some painting. But that's not, unfortunately, how plenty of highfalutin' existential questions are posed...
In other words: the energy stored in the LHC beam is on the order of kinetic energy of a modern passenger jet somewhere above stall speed. If it'd dump in a small spot, you'd get a nice crater.
Yeah, but good luck when you get hit by a billion of these ;)
What the examiner did could be silly yet he didn't have to be stupid. Often we do silly things in spite of knowing better -- we're not stupid, not necessarily. So there. Irrational != stupid. People do irrational things, wrong things, even, whether they are stupid or not.
Transactional support for payroll? What do you mean by that? You of course store ongoing concerns, like time-worked tracking, in a database of some sort, but calculation during a payroll run can be done in complete isolation and you don't need to run it on a database itself.
As for parameters and whatnot: it's not exactly a problem only common to finance, you'll see the same thing in say specialized CAD systems that support validation of a design to engineering codes. 50-60 parameters, even if those parameters are per-person, per-payroll-run, we're still talking about a meager amount of data, even if those parameters need 64 bit binary representation: 60*8 = 480 bytes. Meh. The functions that calculate stuff based on the parameters are of course common across the system, so that also has an O(1) cost in terms of storage per person, run, etc.
I'm not claiming that using C, COBOL, C#, Java, or what have you is all that great for expressing legal requirements, but that's not how you do it. Dealing properly (vs. cowboyishly) with such a system requires some formalized abstractions -- this, unfortunately, requires some hard-core computer science knowledge. In a nutshell, you translate legalese into some kind of small-step semantics, and then those get automatically translated into code, practically in a couple of steps. Each intermediate language is formally specified, and the code generators are formally verified to preserve semantics at each step. So, the ultimate generated machine code, if your generator system is done right, can be formally proven to preserve the semantics all the way from the input semantics to machine code running on the target architecture. That's about as much of butt covering as anyone could ever do, and I've recently seen this very approach very successfully applied in an engineering system -- where you start with engineering codes (law!), full of exceptions and silliness.
This is silly. You do it all in RAM, and you don't even need that many gigabytes of it to do it. I think that if you look back at how one did programming on IBM's 360 (in assembly, for example), it was all pretty lean. I think that there are applications where even an SQL server is a bit much in the way of overhead. Just think of how much data per person you need to calculate everything that goes onto a payroll. I'm sure that 1kb per person would be enough for input and output (binary data with structure). So then, with a million people you need say a gigabyte of RAM, and I'm sure you don't need more than one core to go through it and be done in a couple minutes. A modern 64 bit desktop machine with 64gb of RAM would probably be more than enough to do Comcast's payroll in a couple minutes, not hours. Of course you'd probably need a more state-of-the-art programming environment to code it up so that it'd be inherently safe (C is out) and productive (even a subset of C++ would be out).
You need hydrocarbons to make all those solar thingies, unfortunately.
Except that to set up such conversion, you'd almost have to deplete the hydrocarbon bootstrap we happen to have :)
This whole argument is a dud. One can trivially make up their own boarding passes, there's no need to even have an internet connection for that, just an example to look at and copy from.