If the first book had been as bad as the last book
Well, the 1st book was unoriginal, badly written in the stylistic sense, dull, relied on characters acting illogically and hidden information which had no reason to be hidden until it was suddenly produced to move the plot along. I passed most of this off as being an effect of it being written for kids and finished the book, but as an adult I had no inclination to wade through another 6 books of that level of writing. I've only dropped in here to see if people thought that it pay-off was worth the effort. It seems generally not.
"Jaap van den Herik, editor of the International Computer Games Journal, calls the achievement "a truly significant advance in artificial intelligence".
Indeed. The guy is clearly just another AI-jerk trying to drum up grant money for deadend research projects. Total waste of time, electricity, and money.
It may seem unfair at times, but it's better than the alternatives.
Err.. No, it isn't. At least, unrestrained capitalism (which is as based on fairytale notions as communism) is not better than the alternative forms of capitalism.
that $45.00 a month I pay covers a lot of things with good lawyers all over the country.
$45 EVERY MONTH!? Holy shit! What a waste of money. Maybe a better system would be to control the lawyers so that people don't have to live in fear of this sort of crap. Talk about a fucked up country.
These are all alternative theories of how you might avoid blame/liability for the act, and in filing or responding to lawsuits, this practice is known as alternative pleading.
And is immoral and corrupt, just like the rest of the legal system.
There's no hope for you, then. Although I do agree that anyone who would go to this much bother to ruin something for other people really is a pathetic cunt.
HP1 was dreadful and so I never bothered with the rest of the series but I wouldn't do something as low as this.
Essentially, there can be only two options as to the who has the right to select the values to be instilled in children: it's either the state or the parents.
In a democracy the only winner of that argument can be the state. We band together into societies and form democracies precicely in order to determin which values are shared and popular enough to be made into law - ie, what the state is to stand for. Private education of the sort you are talking about attacks that by instilling anti-social values.
But the fact remains that parents who believe in the ID voodoo have the right to have their children educated with an ID curriculum, as long as the children remain minors.
Child abuse is not a right normally allowed to parents "as long as the children remain minors". I have no problem withholding the right to indoctrinate them with lies as a similar abuse too.
In a sane society, there is no controversy, since parents control the values being instilled in their children.
Any democratic society can, and should, be able to say that certain values are so beyond the pale that they are not allowed to be instilled in children even by parents.
Which is why you should reject state controlled values and support school-voucher programs.
We all have a democratic duty to create and support shared social values and to empower and require the state to uphold them.
Some branches offer great low mortgage rates - but you have to have great credit score to get it.
No: you have to not have a terrible credit rating and all branches offer the same range of rates.
Some branches offer horrible non-fixed APR interest-only mortgages - but anyone can get them.
Again, such mortgages are available at every branch of every lender as long as you're not basically blacklisted as the most extreme credit risk. I know it sounds unlikely but the current housing boom is distorting things. But even in more normal times the only thing that would change is that your credit rating would not have to be quite so bad to be refused, but you still won't be offered a different rate.
See how your credit rating DOES impact what kind of rate you get?
Now certainly on something like an auto loan, your credit score impacts the interest rate you're offered there, doesn't it?
I just talked to a friend of mine who's in charge of risk management in one of the larger banks here. He says that varying interest by credit rating is something they only do for businesses and the same applies to most lenders, including car loans. You either get the money at the standard rate or you're turned down; there's nothing in between.
So you're saying that in Britain, your credit score won't impact the interest rate you receive? I did not know that. Can you point to a law or ruling that guarantees this?
It might impact your chance of getting a mortgage if it's really, really bad. But house prices where I live have doubled in 5 years so the banks are happy to lend to anyone buying a house - 100% interest-only mortgages given to 19-21 year olds with no or poor credit history are not uncommon as a result. The lenders have nothing to lose in the current market. Once the crash comes they will simply not lend so much to so many.
Interest rates are posted in detail in every bank and building society branch and make no mention of variance due to credit rating, only the possibility of refusal. As such, trying to vary would run into misleading-advertising legislation if nothing else. I'm 42 and I've never heard of anyone ever being offered a different rate because of their credit rating, although my parents were once turned down because they were self-employed (that's going back 35 years, however).
Next time, can we have someone talented to "fight the good fight"? I meant, it's nice that he tried and all (I suppose), but let's face it: he was a total failure.
So you're assuming that these market conditions are going to persist when you decide to buy a house?
No, actually I'm hoping/expecting that the market is going to crash soon. Then I'll buy a house.
Furthermore, a non-existent credit history is going to impact the interest rate you receive on your mortgage.
Not in Britain it won't. If it did I would have a very good chance of suing the bank that tried it, although in reality I'd just go to one of the 100 or so other mortgage lenders.
You'll never get a mortgage without a credit history.
This is not the case in the UK and especially Northern Ireland. Obviously, if you've got a history of BAD debt then there might be trouble, but not much. Our banks and building societies simply don't care so long as property values are going up 15% to 50% per year; they'll just repossess and make much more than their costs back at auction. This will not last, but it is the case at the moment. When it changes there are going to be banks going to the wall, but long term planning always goes out the window in a boom of any kind, gold, houses, or tulips.
Also, with so much money being lent, no lender would dare vary their rate by credit history. The market's too competitive.
However, you are right in saying that LaTeX is for the lazy (and sloppy, IMHO); plain TeX all the way!
How do you suppose you'll get a mortgage without a preexisting credit history?
Well, duh, I guess they might just take the house as collateral. Banks are giving out 100% interest-only mortgages to students over here at the moment. As long as prices are rising no one cares about your credit rating when it comes to mortgages, unless you have a really, really bad one.
These days credit is more and more important. If you don't have it, many places won't give you a chance to get it because you have no credit record.
The funny thing is, I don't want it. Credit is really just newspeak for "debt". The only debt I ever want to have, and I don't really want it very much, is a mortgage. Credit cards are useful occassionally - my fiancee and I use hers maybe three times a year - but I'd much rather use my debit card. Aside from anything else, my debit card doesn't pretend to be giving me something.
As for borrowing: get a loan from a bank. Borrowing on a credit card is madness, interest-wise.
HTML, or some other derivative of SGML, such as XML. See HTML DTD.
XML is junk and undeserving of the attention of any serious programmer. Badly designed with goals that could all be achieved by much older and well established methods in a more efficient way. Total garbage. It should be left out some winter night to die.
The DOCTYPE directive is an SGML construct; HTML (up through version 4) is an SGML application, and the DOCTYPE directive is (one method) used to indicate to SGML tools how they should process a given document.
I'll grant you that this is one of the basic design mistakes in HTML - it should never have been SGML, but it's a mistake easily fixed in the way I suggested above.
Web browsers are expected to handle a variety of SGML- and XML-derived
Maybe by you; I prefer my web browser to handle HTML and only HTML (+CSS) and do it well. I don't want the developers to waste any time whatsoever on SGML or goddamned XML coding. It has no interest to me or to 99.999% of web users. Just drop it.
including things like RSS and Atom feeds and SVG images,
RSS is a joke and SVG can be handled by a plugin that is written for SVG - a much better division of development time.
as well as arbitrary XML with XSL stylesheets defining display.
XML is just plain shit designed by idiots who can't handle BNF. Bin it.
Web browsers are not the only types of applications which process these types of documents.
Well, if they saw a tag at the top that said "HTML v4" and the programmers had a nice BNF for HTML 4 then everyone would be happy.
Unrelated to these concerns, most web browsers (including all of the "popular" ones) are able to switch from a backwards-compatible "quirks mode"
A pointless exercise in the extreme. Buggy rendering should be eliminated as quickly as possible and not brought back. If your site won't display then fix it.
the switch is accomplished by looking at the DOCTYPE directive
The HTML tag could be used for that too if you wanted to go down that route, which you shouldn't.
XML DTDs are a nightmare and next to useless for implimentation (as opposed to testing and parsing).
So, on the whole, using the DOCTYPE directive as is conventional in SGML (or the XML prolog as is conventional in XML) is a good thing and helps make lots of stuff work better.
It makes a lot of badly designed standards limp along and keep the sort of second-rate and superannuated programmers that sit on these committees in a job. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to handle ghastly, over complicated, inefficient XML-based file formats that achieve nothing of any value.
The doctype tag tells the browser what sort of document to expect - HTML, XML, FREDSNEWDOCTYPE etc.
Yeah, right. It's a web browser, if it's not expecting HTML then it needs fixed. The mime-type is already there to indicate other document types are being served. It's just more XML wank.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the 1st book was unoriginal, badly written in the stylistic sense, dull, relied on characters acting illogically and hidden information which had no reason to be hidden until it was suddenly produced to move the plot along. I passed most of this off as being an effect of it being written for kids and finished the book, but as an adult I had no inclination to wade through another 6 books of that level of writing. I've only dropped in here to see if people thought that it pay-off was worth the effort. It seems generally not.
Teenagers shallow and faddish. Details at 11.
700 watt hours ~= 2.5 mega-joules; 400 watt hours~= 1.4MJ . I'm not sure when "watt hours" became the standard unit of energy.
Indeed. The guy is clearly just another AI-jerk trying to drum up grant money for deadend research projects. Total waste of time, electricity, and money.
TWW
Err.. No, it isn't. At least, unrestrained capitalism (which is as based on fairytale notions as communism) is not better than the alternative forms of capitalism.
TWW
$45 EVERY MONTH!? Holy shit! What a waste of money. Maybe a better system would be to control the lawyers so that people don't have to live in fear of this sort of crap. Talk about a fucked up country.
And is immoral and corrupt, just like the rest of the legal system.
TWW
SUID does not have to set id to root; my printing scripts are all setuid to "lp"; my mail servers are suid to "mail". This is a good thing.
TWW
There's no hope for you, then. Although I do agree that anyone who would go to this much bother to ruin something for other people really is a pathetic cunt.
HP1 was dreadful and so I never bothered with the rest of the series but I wouldn't do something as low as this.
TWW
An operating system controls access to the hardware. Linux is an example.
Gentoo, Red Hat etc are application suites. Bash is not part of an operating system, it is an application, just like Inkscape or Word, or Emacs
TWW
You should be.
I Dont feel sorry for some European nations (Im not even going to name them) despite the fact people die waiting to see a doctor there
Yeah, America's health system is an inspiration to us all. Especially if we're lawyers.
TWW
This is the most incoherent text I've seen on /. for ages. But I'm glad to know that you're sure about it.
In a democracy the only winner of that argument can be the state. We band together into societies and form democracies precicely in order to determin which values are shared and popular enough to be made into law - ie, what the state is to stand for. Private education of the sort you are talking about attacks that by instilling anti-social values.
But the fact remains that parents who believe in the ID voodoo have the right to have their children educated with an ID curriculum, as long as the children remain minors.
Child abuse is not a right normally allowed to parents "as long as the children remain minors". I have no problem withholding the right to indoctrinate them with lies as a similar abuse too.
In a sane society, there is no controversy, since parents control the values being instilled in their children.
Any democratic society can, and should, be able to say that certain values are so beyond the pale that they are not allowed to be instilled in children even by parents.
Which is why you should reject state controlled values and support school-voucher programs.
We all have a democratic duty to create and support shared social values and to empower and require the state to uphold them.
TWW
That's (great) news to me. Where's the definition of the Flash binary format posted?
TWW
No: you have to not have a terrible credit rating and all branches offer the same range of rates.
Some branches offer horrible non-fixed APR interest-only mortgages - but anyone can get them.
Again, such mortgages are available at every branch of every lender as long as you're not basically blacklisted as the most extreme credit risk. I know it sounds unlikely but the current housing boom is distorting things. But even in more normal times the only thing that would change is that your credit rating would not have to be quite so bad to be refused, but you still won't be offered a different rate.
See how your credit rating DOES impact what kind of rate you get?
No.
TWW
I just talked to a friend of mine who's in charge of risk management in one of the larger banks here. He says that varying interest by credit rating is something they only do for businesses and the same applies to most lenders, including car loans. You either get the money at the standard rate or you're turned down; there's nothing in between.
So now you know!
TWW
It might impact your chance of getting a mortgage if it's really, really bad. But house prices where I live have doubled in 5 years so the banks are happy to lend to anyone buying a house - 100% interest-only mortgages given to 19-21 year olds with no or poor credit history are not uncommon as a result. The lenders have nothing to lose in the current market. Once the crash comes they will simply not lend so much to so many.
Interest rates are posted in detail in every bank and building society branch and make no mention of variance due to credit rating, only the possibility of refusal. As such, trying to vary would run into misleading-advertising legislation if nothing else. I'm 42 and I've never heard of anyone ever being offered a different rate because of their credit rating, although my parents were once turned down because they were self-employed (that's going back 35 years, however).
TWW
TWW
No, actually I'm hoping/expecting that the market is going to crash soon. Then I'll buy a house.
Furthermore, a non-existent credit history is going to impact the interest rate you receive on your mortgage.
Not in Britain it won't. If it did I would have a very good chance of suing the bank that tried it, although in reality I'd just go to one of the 100 or so other mortgage lenders.
TWW
This is not the case in the UK and especially Northern Ireland. Obviously, if you've got a history of BAD debt then there might be trouble, but not much. Our banks and building societies simply don't care so long as property values are going up 15% to 50% per year; they'll just repossess and make much more than their costs back at auction. This will not last, but it is the case at the moment. When it changes there are going to be banks going to the wall, but long term planning always goes out the window in a boom of any kind, gold, houses, or tulips.
Also, with so much money being lent, no lender would dare vary their rate by credit history. The market's too competitive.
However, you are right in saying that LaTeX is for the lazy (and sloppy, IMHO); plain TeX all the way!
TWW
Well, duh, I guess they might just take the house as collateral. Banks are giving out 100% interest-only mortgages to students over here at the moment. As long as prices are rising no one cares about your credit rating when it comes to mortgages, unless you have a really, really bad one.
The funny thing is, I don't want it. Credit is really just newspeak for "debt". The only debt I ever want to have, and I don't really want it very much, is a mortgage. Credit cards are useful occassionally - my fiancee and I use hers maybe three times a year - but I'd much rather use my debit card. Aside from anything else, my debit card doesn't pretend to be giving me something.
As for borrowing: get a loan from a bank. Borrowing on a credit card is madness, interest-wise.
TWW
XML is junk and undeserving of the attention of any serious programmer. Badly designed with goals that could all be achieved by much older and well established methods in a more efficient way. Total garbage. It should be left out some winter night to die.
TWW
I'll grant you that this is one of the basic design mistakes in HTML - it should never have been SGML, but it's a mistake easily fixed in the way I suggested above.
Web browsers are expected to handle a variety of SGML- and XML-derived
Maybe by you; I prefer my web browser to handle HTML and only HTML (+CSS) and do it well. I don't want the developers to waste any time whatsoever on SGML or goddamned XML coding. It has no interest to me or to 99.999% of web users. Just drop it.
including things like RSS and Atom feeds and SVG images,
RSS is a joke and SVG can be handled by a plugin that is written for SVG - a much better division of development time.
as well as arbitrary XML with XSL stylesheets defining display.
XML is just plain shit designed by idiots who can't handle BNF. Bin it.
Web browsers are not the only types of applications which process these types of documents.
Well, if they saw a tag at the top that said "HTML v4" and the programmers had a nice BNF for HTML 4 then everyone would be happy.
Unrelated to these concerns, most web browsers (including all of the "popular" ones) are able to switch from a backwards-compatible "quirks mode"
A pointless exercise in the extreme. Buggy rendering should be eliminated as quickly as possible and not brought back. If your site won't display then fix it.
the switch is accomplished by looking at the DOCTYPE directive
The HTML tag could be used for that too if you wanted to go down that route, which you shouldn't.
XML DTDs are a nightmare and next to useless for implimentation (as opposed to testing and parsing).
So, on the whole, using the DOCTYPE directive as is conventional in SGML (or the XML prolog as is conventional in XML) is a good thing and helps make lots of stuff work better.
It makes a lot of badly designed standards limp along and keep the sort of second-rate and superannuated programmers that sit on these committees in a job. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to handle ghastly, over complicated, inefficient XML-based file formats that achieve nothing of any value.
TWW
Yeah, right. It's a web browser, if it's not expecting HTML then it needs fixed. The mime-type is already there to indicate other document types are being served. It's just more XML wank.
TWW