"Time" is a direction of travel through a 4+ dimensional space in which "entropy" is increasing thus allowing us to "remember" things. The "Big Bang" didn't "occur" in a traditional sense of the word it's a point from which a comprehensible (or observable) set of rules started to apply to a direction of travel along the "time" axis for at least the 4 dimensions we call "spacetime".
Some of the biggest impacts we could make on our environment actually improve our standard of living overall. First off we need to build a more walking oriented infrastructure which would improve health and our sense of community this could be accomplished by orienting ourselves more towards city life and re-structuring suburbs for higher population density and greater walkability. Second we would need to re-purpose more rural land towards wilderness type environments to sequester carbon and consequently increase availability of backpacking, camping and other outdoor activities while reducing the impact we have on those environments by spreading it out and hopefully reducing it per area to the point where nature can cope with it.
I still say anyone who separates political ideals into only two groups is an idiot. In America there are probably close to a billion different political ideologies (yes I do happen to know the approximate population of America).
But every translation of the Bible is a divine translation and therefore must be perfect for all time. I mean it's really pretty easy to translate between three different languages and have the meaning come out the same. The original bible in Greek is obviously still correct even though the spoken language at the time was Aramaic and we have to trust the original translations to be accurate (New Testament). And of course the Old Testament is correct and doesn't wholesale rip off such ancient texts as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Nope the bible is perfect.
1. I don't have to 'believe in evolution'. It is a proven, scientific fact(despite the frequent and erroneous argument that it is 'only a theory').
It is only a theory only a Scientific Theory which means that it has passed a certain rigorous set of tests that say that it is accurate enough to use in the development of further theories. This is many orders of magnitude more rigorous than any religious belief (say 10^10 orders of magnitude).
P.S. I am mostly posting this to not use my mod points for evil.
Money is and always has been an idea not a real physical thing. Money represents value it is not value in and of itself. It represents the value that you have added to the world through your work and the physical goods that you produce.
Of course assuming you believe what I just said could you ever justify someone becoming a billionaire? Can any one person affect the world around them on that order of magnitude? I know that I've personally never seen it every person that has millions to billions of dollars has a huge team of people around them that support them and they skim some portion of that money off for themselves.
One thought process has evidence the other has logical inconsistencies. Logically with the world the way it is today there can be no "GOD" in the classical sense as the only thing that could fit the model of god is both Omniscient, and Omnipotent if we just refer to the Christian Bible we see "GOD" admitting to a mistake of knowledge which already says that this "GOD" is not Omniscient and we're not even going to go into the impossibility of Omnipotence (things like free will cannot exist with an Omnipotent Omniscient god and so on).
However we do have evidence that life CAN exist we see it every day, we understand to some extent how it forms from certain combinations of chemicals as experiments have been done which resulted in DNA (or RNA I can't remember which) being created in labs by simulating what we believe the environment to be on the early earth, we see the abundance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the universe, and at least trace amounts of a myriad of other elements, and our mathematical models, as primitive as they are, dictate that it is likely that life exists on some other planets. Therefore we are currently testing the hypothesis that life exists on other planets. Our methods are primitive and we have a vast search ahead of us but our models and current knowledge support the idea that life should exist on other planets because the sheer orders of magnitude we're dealing with indicate that 1:1 trillion probabilities are happening trillions of times per second.
Sometimes it is fun to feed the trolls
P.S. Stream of consciousness of some small fraction of the evidence on both sides not meant to be a complete argument.
"Starship infantry" would have been better, although given the book's purpose as pro-military propaganda it lacks that romantic haze required to blur away the pointless death and destruction such troops have always created when deployed outside their own borders.
I've never been quite clear as to whether it was pro-military propaganda or straight sarcasm. In reading many of Heinlein's other works I eventually started to believe that it might indeed be the latter. Either way Heinlein must have been a very interesting person (read crazy) possibly in a good way.
Science is the study of the rules of the universe. Invention is engineering so if any of the above were invented that would not be breakthrough science that would be breakthrough engineering excepting the stepping discs and the transfer booth which would need a 180* turnaround in our understanding of the universe to even be possible.
There is a damn good reason to take a Siesta in the desert it's literally too hot to work so the go take a nap and then work late. I'm sure this doesn't apply to all of Mexico but it's known for a reason and it's practiced for a good reason. It has nothing to do with how hard they work.
Once assimilated you'll find a lot of the second or third generations being just as lazy as any other native.
I would like to see a feasibility analysis done of a small scale research manufacturing module for the ISS with provisions for harvesting space debris for raw materials. If this worked out one might be able to bootstrap the enterprise with lesser inputs from Earth possibly making the project feasible. The research done in said module would likely have impact on earth manufacturing.
You cannot prove that parallel lines do not intersect purely by using geometry. You cannot prove 1+1=2 using math. The former is treated as an axiom, a statement that is intuitively assumed to be true in further proofs. The latter is a definition of terms - given what 1, 2, addition and equality are defined as, the statement is true.
The former is not treated as an axiom it is an axiom and as such it cannot be proven in any system. The latter can indeed be proven if you step outside of the bounds of algebra (which is a field of mathematics that covers addition) and into the bounds of set theory where we have a definition for 1 and a definition for 2 and a definition for the process of addition and using those three definitions we can indeed prove that 1 + 1 = 2. In algebra we would define the addition of our system such that 1 + 1 = 2 at which point it is treated as an axiom. To be clear there are systems where 1 + 1 != 2 (boolean algebra) but we can assume you knew that and were specifically discussing integer arithmetic.
At least in the USA utility companies while often technically not public are basically public entities and denying citizens a right to electricity (in the USA it's actually mandatory for the most part) would probably violate their charter. Now I understand that the GP may be from a different country with different laws but here at least that would be a violation of basic liberties.
Just an addition a book is typically on the order of tens of thousands of sentences why on earth would I remember a single sentence? Hell to remember the specific sentence that they chose to use would be a 1/10000 chance without perfect eidetic memory. So many things wrong with even thinking of this study it makes my brain want to explode.
Well I was going to post almost exactly this but I couldn't have worded it as well. I have hundreds of books in my brain but I don't remember a single sentence from most of them but I could usually give you a meaningful summary just from the name of the book (series excluded they tend to blend into a single summary to me).
As for "Save data... set...", that's an excellent example of what I could consider a bad comment, even if the code still agreed with it. If the saving process involves several lines then sure "Save data..." might make a good section header, but "set..." is going into exactly the wrong kind of detail - it's the sort of thing that's hopefully apparent from reading the code, is prone to change with the implementation details, and tells you absolutely nothing about *why* it is being marked dirty in the first place, which depending on context may be non-obvious information.
I might have a better impression of comments if I had ever seen a good one but the code base I work in now is clean enough that they're often unnecessary but conspicuously absent when needed.
You go ahead and just read the code then - I can read five words a LOT faster than five lines of code, and the code only tells you *what* is being done, not *why*. A brief statement of intent can save you a lot of work reverse-engineering the code to extract it's purpose.
I find about 20-30 lines of code per function/method to be about right with descriptive naming you can gather the why from the context and the how from the code. It also allows you to skim the code for function names which if properly descriptive can be guessed at least approximately without prior knowledge. If your code goes above that 20-30 lines (for a good reason they do exist) then comments become more useful as delimiters. I am quite sure there are times my advice is not applicable but for most cases (50% + some epsilon > 0) refactoring would be the better option.
Ugly code is still obviously where most of the comments live, precisely because you (err, I mean the *next* guy, obviously) probably will need help understanding *what* is being done. For the same reason those comments tend to be the least helpful over time unless everyone who modifies the code is really anal about updating the comments to reflect their code changes.
Sad fact is that every time I've wanted to see a comment in code there wasn't one and almost every comment I've ever seen in code referred to code that was no longer there or was in fact wrong (Save data to database set isDirty flag to true WTF???).
Comments are for poorly written (possibly due to compiler restraints or legacy code) or highly optimized code. Without either of those it should already read easily without the comments.
"and of course are also facing severe population shortages"
It will be a long time before Japan faces population shortages... Their population is about half that of the US and they're all crammed into the area of California.
Slashdot Mirror
"Time" is a direction of travel through a 4+ dimensional space in which "entropy" is increasing thus allowing us to "remember" things. The "Big Bang" didn't "occur" in a traditional sense of the word it's a point from which a comprehensible (or observable) set of rules started to apply to a direction of travel along the "time" axis for at least the 4 dimensions we call "spacetime".
Some of the biggest impacts we could make on our environment actually improve our standard of living overall. First off we need to build a more walking oriented infrastructure which would improve health and our sense of community this could be accomplished by orienting ourselves more towards city life and re-structuring suburbs for higher population density and greater walkability. Second we would need to re-purpose more rural land towards wilderness type environments to sequester carbon and consequently increase availability of backpacking, camping and other outdoor activities while reducing the impact we have on those environments by spreading it out and hopefully reducing it per area to the point where nature can cope with it.
I still say anyone who separates political ideals into only two groups is an idiot. In America there are probably close to a billion different political ideologies (yes I do happen to know the approximate population of America).
But every translation of the Bible is a divine translation and therefore must be perfect for all time. I mean it's really pretty easy to translate between three different languages and have the meaning come out the same. The original bible in Greek is obviously still correct even though the spoken language at the time was Aramaic and we have to trust the original translations to be accurate (New Testament). And of course the Old Testament is correct and doesn't wholesale rip off such ancient texts as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Nope the bible is perfect.
1. I don't have to 'believe in evolution'. It is a proven, scientific fact(despite the frequent and erroneous argument that it is 'only a theory').
It is only a theory only a Scientific Theory which means that it has passed a certain rigorous set of tests that say that it is accurate enough to use in the development of further theories. This is many orders of magnitude more rigorous than any religious belief (say 10^10 orders of magnitude).
P.S. I am mostly posting this to not use my mod points for evil.
Money is and always has been an idea not a real physical thing. Money represents value it is not value in and of itself. It represents the value that you have added to the world through your work and the physical goods that you produce.
Of course assuming you believe what I just said could you ever justify someone becoming a billionaire? Can any one person affect the world around them on that order of magnitude? I know that I've personally never seen it every person that has millions to billions of dollars has a huge team of people around them that support them and they skim some portion of that money off for themselves.
Doesn't change the fact that you weren't addressing the original post.
So who is registering "itsjustonesandzeros.com" so we can replace wikileaks with it? I mean it's just ones and zeros...
One thought process has evidence the other has logical inconsistencies. Logically with the world the way it is today there can be no "GOD" in the classical sense as the only thing that could fit the model of god is both Omniscient, and Omnipotent if we just refer to the Christian Bible we see "GOD" admitting to a mistake of knowledge which already says that this "GOD" is not Omniscient and we're not even going to go into the impossibility of Omnipotence (things like free will cannot exist with an Omnipotent Omniscient god and so on).
However we do have evidence that life CAN exist we see it every day, we understand to some extent how it forms from certain combinations of chemicals as experiments have been done which resulted in DNA (or RNA I can't remember which) being created in labs by simulating what we believe the environment to be on the early earth, we see the abundance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the universe, and at least trace amounts of a myriad of other elements, and our mathematical models, as primitive as they are, dictate that it is likely that life exists on some other planets. Therefore we are currently testing the hypothesis that life exists on other planets. Our methods are primitive and we have a vast search ahead of us but our models and current knowledge support the idea that life should exist on other planets because the sheer orders of magnitude we're dealing with indicate that 1:1 trillion probabilities are happening trillions of times per second.
Sometimes it is fun to feed the trolls
P.S. Stream of consciousness of some small fraction of the evidence on both sides not meant to be a complete argument.
"Starship infantry" would have been better, although given the book's purpose as pro-military propaganda it lacks that romantic haze required to blur away the pointless death and destruction such troops have always created when deployed outside their own borders.
I've never been quite clear as to whether it was pro-military propaganda or straight sarcasm. In reading many of Heinlein's other works I eventually started to believe that it might indeed be the latter. Either way Heinlein must have been a very interesting person (read crazy) possibly in a good way.
No one said anything about solar wind this post was about using the magnetic field of the sun to push the earth out.
Science is the study of the rules of the universe. Invention is engineering so if any of the above were invented that would not be breakthrough science that would be breakthrough engineering excepting the stepping discs and the transfer booth which would need a 180* turnaround in our understanding of the universe to even be possible.
I'm waiting for the days of 55" touchscreens with virtual keyboards as standup workstations.
There is a damn good reason to take a Siesta in the desert it's literally too hot to work so the go take a nap and then work late. I'm sure this doesn't apply to all of Mexico but it's known for a reason and it's practiced for a good reason. It has nothing to do with how hard they work.
Once assimilated you'll find a lot of the second or third generations being just as lazy as any other native.
I would like to see a feasibility analysis done of a small scale research manufacturing module for the ISS with provisions for harvesting space debris for raw materials. If this worked out one might be able to bootstrap the enterprise with lesser inputs from Earth possibly making the project feasible. The research done in said module would likely have impact on earth manufacturing.
You cannot prove that parallel lines do not intersect purely by using geometry. You cannot prove 1+1=2 using math. The former is treated as an axiom, a statement that is intuitively assumed to be true in further proofs. The latter is a definition of terms - given what 1, 2, addition and equality are defined as, the statement is true.
The former is not treated as an axiom it is an axiom and as such it cannot be proven in any system. The latter can indeed be proven if you step outside of the bounds of algebra (which is a field of mathematics that covers addition) and into the bounds of set theory where we have a definition for 1 and a definition for 2 and a definition for the process of addition and using those three definitions we can indeed prove that 1 + 1 = 2. In algebra we would define the addition of our system such that 1 + 1 = 2 at which point it is treated as an axiom. To be clear there are systems where 1 + 1 != 2 (boolean algebra) but we can assume you knew that and were specifically discussing integer arithmetic.
At least in the USA utility companies while often technically not public are basically public entities and denying citizens a right to electricity (in the USA it's actually mandatory for the most part) would probably violate their charter. Now I understand that the GP may be from a different country with different laws but here at least that would be a violation of basic liberties.
Just an addition a book is typically on the order of tens of thousands of sentences why on earth would I remember a single sentence? Hell to remember the specific sentence that they chose to use would be a 1/10000 chance without perfect eidetic memory. So many things wrong with even thinking of this study it makes my brain want to explode.
Well I was going to post almost exactly this but I couldn't have worded it as well. I have hundreds of books in my brain but I don't remember a single sentence from most of them but I could usually give you a meaningful summary just from the name of the book (series excluded they tend to blend into a single summary to me).
As for "Save data ... set...", that's an excellent example of what I could consider a bad comment, even if the code still agreed with it. If the saving process involves several lines then sure "Save data..." might make a good section header, but "set..." is going into exactly the wrong kind of detail - it's the sort of thing that's hopefully apparent from reading the code, is prone to change with the implementation details, and tells you absolutely nothing about *why* it is being marked dirty in the first place, which depending on context may be non-obvious information.
I might have a better impression of comments if I had ever seen a good one but the code base I work in now is clean enough that they're often unnecessary but conspicuously absent when needed.
You go ahead and just read the code then - I can read five words a LOT faster than five lines of code, and the code only tells you *what* is being done, not *why*. A brief statement of intent can save you a lot of work reverse-engineering the code to extract it's purpose.
I find about 20-30 lines of code per function/method to be about right with descriptive naming you can gather the why from the context and the how from the code. It also allows you to skim the code for function names which if properly descriptive can be guessed at least approximately without prior knowledge. If your code goes above that 20-30 lines (for a good reason they do exist) then comments become more useful as delimiters. I am quite sure there are times my advice is not applicable but for most cases (50% + some epsilon > 0) refactoring would be the better option.
Ugly code is still obviously where most of the comments live, precisely because you (err, I mean the *next* guy, obviously) probably will need help understanding *what* is being done. For the same reason those comments tend to be the least helpful over time unless everyone who modifies the code is really anal about updating the comments to reflect their code changes.
Sad fact is that every time I've wanted to see a comment in code there wasn't one and almost every comment I've ever seen in code referred to code that was no longer there or was in fact wrong (Save data to database set isDirty flag to true WTF???).
Comments are for poorly written (possibly due to compiler restraints or legacy code) or highly optimized code. Without either of those it should already read easily without the comments.
That's why we have a police force. It's called civilization.
And the police are going to protect you? That's not their job and it never will be they're there to clean up the mess after you're already dead.
"somehow boiling water at a rapid boil cooks faster than a moderate one,"
What makes you think it doesn't?
"and of course are also facing severe population shortages"
It will be a long time before Japan faces population shortages... Their population is about half that of the US and they're all crammed into the area of California.