From TOA: Brin included a more disturbing possibility: Nobody is on the air because something seeks and destroys everyone who broadcasts.
I have another alternative theory to explain why we have not received any signal: Every planet inhabited by intelligent life has considered the same possibility of the previous paragraph, so they are avoiding any kind of transmission just in case, to avoid potential detection.
That points to an interesting question... Given that the winners share the prize, and assuming the lottery numbers are truly random, a good (or less bad) strategy would be picking a set of numbers unlikely to be chosen by other people. Given that lottery ticket numbers are picked by people, and that is _not_ a random process (humans are lousy at generating random numbers), there are probably "optimal" picks in the sens that it is less likely to share them with somebody else (while having the same slim chance of winning),
Anybody knows about this? how would you pick your numbers (I guess real RNG would be quite fine, but I am guessing we can do better)
There are previous references, in anatomy books. You are probably using two adjustable (for focus, not zoom) liquid lenses to read this reply, unless you get a braille or aural representation of/.
Congratulations for inventing Eiffel, 20 years later, without good MI.
OK, the note above is a bit of a troll. But objectively, most of the interesting and cool features of D were in Eiffel (DbC, well implemented generics, garbage collection, fast); and I don't miss most of the features that D has "over" Eiffel (like static overloading instead of just dynamic one; I think static overloading is more a liability than an asset).
However, if D catches on and gets a larger community than Eiffel (which implies more tools and libraries) I may seriously consider using it.
Some extracts from class INTEGER (yes, INTEGERs are objects):
prefix "+": like Current -- Unary plus of `Current'. prefix "-": like Current -- Unary minus of `Current'. infix "/" (other: like Current): REAL -- Division by `other'. infix "//" (other: like Current): like Current -- Quotient of the euclidian division of `Current' by `other'. -- The corresponding remainder is given by infix "\\". -- -- See also infix "#//".
Essentially you can use as an operator name any of the predefined operator names (usual arithmetic, comparison, and, or, not), and some custom names which are any sequence of "operator symbols" (most non-blank non-alphanumeric symbols ) which is nont predefined: you cann not define "--" which starts a comment, nor "=" which has a default meaning. But you can use ">>" "===" , "||", "&|@@#~+^".
you could give it a try to Haskell (functional) or Eiffel (imperative OO), both allow you to define more-or-less arbitrary operators (not completely arbitrary to avoid messing up parsing).
A nation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation) has not geopolitical borders (you are thinking in a "state" or a "country"). A nation is a group of people with similar ethnic origins and cultural identity. For example, the mapuche are a group like that: they are not in a single country (You can find Mapuches in both Argentina and Chile), and neither of these countries are only populated by Mapuches.
Even more, if it works as it sounds (sending light around the hidden person/object) that means that no light is reaching inside the invisibility shell. So, whatever is inside that shell will be completely blind.
The transit method allows astronomers to determine a planet's mass and size. Astronomers use this information to deduce the planet's characteristics, such as its density.
They infer the density from the mass and size! I knew those astronomers were really damn smart!
(I'm not laughing at the astronomers. I am laughing at the silly article writers that praise the trivial part of the astronomer work instead of the really interesting things that the astronomers do).
It has a cross platform toolkit, using native look in Windows, Linux (GTK), and other Unices (Motif); I don't know about OS X. If you want to get into the guts of it, you can go through the abstract layer and work more closely to the native toolkit (at the expense of portability, obviously).
I tried it a little some time ago, not too much. But it seems to be as hassle free as you can get (which is not "100% hassle free").
No one notes it here, but besides the Eiffel Compiler (anyways, we have had a GPL eiffel compiler for about 10 years), the guys at Eiffel.com are releasing not just the compiler, but also one of the most complete IDEs you can find under a Free license.
It has a project editor, integrated debugger, including browsing the object structure in run time, a class browser, an integrated documentation generator, and you can write your designs in BON (a graphical notation, UML-style) and flip back and forth from diagrams to code seamlessly. You probably can compare it pretty well to Eclipse, but much lighter (it's written in Eiffel instead of Java).
Even if you are not planning to use Eiffel, I would love to see that GPL IDE being used for other languages...
The telecom monopoly is about to setup a broadband metering scheme. Internet access will cost AR$60 for 4GB of monthly download, and 15AR$ for each exceeding GB. If AR$ means nothing to you, think about it in terms of US dollars, the relation to average earnings is almost the same.
So racking up my 512Kb connection will cost me about 2500 AR$ (which costs me more or less the same effort as paying 2500USD costs an american)
Don't make the same mistake that "porteños" do; Argentina is not the same as Buenos Aires.
Here at Córdoba (the second biggest city), barter clubs never took off. I don't know if they still work at Bs. As., but never seen one in my short visits there.
It's true that government and police are mafias (but specially the police of Bs. As.)
The peso is doing reasonably fine, for being 3 times devaluated. 15 years ago we lived a 10000 times devaluation in 3 years, so this is softer:).
And the difference in uses (like the 1cm distance, which, again is accentuated in Bs. As.) has nothing to do with the sense of privacy. We do have that, thanks. And now, the media is making the fuss about this that it should do.
FYI, broadband services here in Argentina range from 256Kbps to 1Mbps...
In June there will be upgrades to 512Kbps-2Mbps (i.e, bw duplication). This favour of the Telecom monopoly comes together with severe metered access (you can download up to 4GB, after that prices go to hell... think about thousand dollars if you keep downloading continously). Until now, all broadband was unmetered.
Our LUG server (at Cordoba, Aegentina) runs a Pentium 200 MMX, with 64MB de RAM. It serves a static apache website, a dozen mailing lists through GNU/Mailman, mail for some of us, and a big FTP site (40+60+27GB hard disks).
It's a little strained but runs fine.
At the local installfest (this time, and at previous event_ there was a wide range of hardware. Some people have an old computer (Pentium I) they don't use anymore, and come to see if they can make it useful with Linux. Some people bring a new 2Ghz+ computer and want to dual-boot with Windows XP. The rest of the people cover the middle range quite evenly.
Most computers here are custom boxes assembled from components (CPU, motherboard, HD,...) by small computer stores here. Big computer manufacturers (Dell, Compaq, HP) ahve little presence here, and have much higher prices. There are recently some big retailers (supermarkets, like Walmart) now selling computers assembled by bigger local companies. But hardware and peripherals varies a lot; you can still find parallel port printers along with USB ones, for example.
We installed mostly Mandrake 10.1 . It's a great distro for newbies, and helps them a lot to get closer to Linux. Besides it does a quite good job detecting hardware, newer and older. It might be a litle overtaxing for smaller systems (specially with less than 128MB of RAM), so we installed a cutted down version of Debian Sarge there.
For the second time in 12 installfests (in 6 years), all participants left the event with a system with a working Linux. hardware support has improved a lot progressively. In 1999, almost 50% of the people had difficulties making it work.
WHY did it have to be the DNA of a T-Rex? Why couldn't it have been a nice herbivore, like a stegosaurus, or even better, one of those little chicken-sized dinos?
Perhaps the "Oh, it doesn't fit inside the copter, we'll have to crack it open", wasn't helpful for Mary when applied to chicken sized bones;-)
Slashdot Mirror
/me registers .localhost and .localdomain
Perhaps not for you and me, but as long as people in decision-making positions consider "ISO standard" as relevant, it is automatically relevant.
Traveling to the past, of course.
From TOA: Brin included a more disturbing possibility: Nobody is on the air because something seeks and destroys everyone who broadcasts.
I have another alternative theory to explain why we have not received any signal: Every planet inhabited by intelligent life has considered the same possibility of the previous paragraph, so they are avoiding any kind of transmission just in case, to avoid potential detection.
That points to an interesting question... Given that the winners share the prize, and assuming the lottery numbers are truly random, a good (or less bad) strategy would be picking a set of numbers unlikely to be chosen by other people. Given that lottery ticket numbers are picked by people, and that is _not_ a random process (humans are lousy at generating random numbers), there are probably "optimal" picks in the sens that it is less likely to share them with somebody else (while having the same slim chance of winning),
Anybody knows about this? how would you pick your numbers (I guess real RNG would be quite fine, but I am guessing we can do better)
You ignorant fool. It is a Jupiter moon that our astronomers discovered.
Even if I love that quote, I am still embarrased to recognize it
There are previous references, in anatomy books. You are probably using two adjustable (for focus, not zoom) liquid lenses to read this reply, unless you get a braille or aural representation of /.
He said Ecuador, not Bolivia
Congratulations for inventing Eiffel, 20 years later, without good MI.
OK, the note above is a bit of a troll. But objectively, most of the interesting and cool features of D were in Eiffel (DbC, well implemented generics, garbage collection, fast); and I don't miss most of the features that D has "over" Eiffel (like static overloading instead of just dynamic one; I think static overloading is more a liability than an asset).
However, if D catches on and gets a larger community than Eiffel (which implies more tools and libraries) I may seriously consider using it.
you could give it a try to Haskell (functional) or Eiffel (imperative OO), both allow you to define more-or-less arbitrary operators (not completely arbitrary to avoid messing up parsing).
A nation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation) has not geopolitical borders (you are thinking in a "state" or a "country"). A nation is a group of people with similar ethnic origins and cultural identity. For example, the mapuche are a group like that: they are not in a single country (You can find Mapuches in both Argentina and Chile), and neither of these countries are only populated by Mapuches.
Even more, if it works as it sounds (sending light around the hidden person/object) that means that no light is reaching inside the invisibility shell. So, whatever is inside that shell will be completely blind.
The transit method allows astronomers to determine a planet's mass and size. Astronomers use this information to deduce the planet's characteristics, such as its density.
They infer the density from the mass and size! I knew those astronomers were really damn smart!
(I'm not laughing at the astronomers. I am laughing at the silly article writers that praise the trivial part of the astronomer work instead of the really interesting things that the astronomers do).
It has a cross platform toolkit, using native look in Windows, Linux (GTK), and other Unices (Motif); I don't know about OS X. If you want to get into the guts of it, you can go through the abstract layer and work more closely to the native toolkit (at the expense of portability, obviously).
I tried it a little some time ago, not too much. But it seems to be as hassle free as you can get (which is not "100% hassle free").
No one notes it here, but besides the Eiffel Compiler (anyways, we have had a GPL eiffel compiler for about 10 years), the guys at Eiffel.com are releasing not just the compiler, but also one of the most complete IDEs you can find under a Free license.
It has a project editor, integrated debugger, including browsing the object structure in run time, a class browser, an integrated documentation generator, and you can write your designs in BON (a graphical notation, UML-style) and flip back and forth from diagrams to code seamlessly. You probably can compare it pretty well to Eclipse, but much lighter (it's written in Eiffel instead of Java).
Even if you are not planning to use Eiffel, I would love to see that GPL IDE being used for other languages...
http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1994/
That is a Nobel prize for a mathematician (The nobel prize is in economics). John Nash, for his work in game theory and its application to economy
Never, EVER, underestimate human stupidity.
If you still are underestimating it, work for a couple of days at a tech support line, and come back.
That would have worked until some time ago.
The telecom monopoly is about to setup a broadband metering scheme. Internet access will cost AR$60 for 4GB of monthly download, and 15AR$ for each exceeding GB. If AR$ means nothing to you, think about it in terms of US dollars, the relation to average earnings is almost the same.
So racking up my 512Kb connection will cost me about 2500 AR$ (which costs me more or less the same effort as paying 2500USD costs an american)
Don't make the same mistake that "porteños" do; Argentina is not the same as Buenos Aires.
Here at Córdoba (the second biggest city), barter clubs never took off. I don't know if they still work at Bs. As., but never seen one in my short visits there.
It's true that government and police are mafias (but specially the police of Bs. As.)
The peso is doing reasonably fine, for being 3 times devaluated. 15 years ago we lived a 10000 times devaluation in 3 years, so this is softer :).
And the difference in uses (like the 1cm distance, which, again is accentuated in Bs. As.) has nothing to do with the sense of privacy. We do have that, thanks. And now, the media is making the fuss about this that it should do.
FYI, broadband services here in Argentina range from 256Kbps to 1Mbps...
In June there will be upgrades to 512Kbps-2Mbps (i.e, bw duplication). This favour of the Telecom monopoly comes together with severe metered access (you can download up to 4GB, after that prices go to hell... think about thousand dollars if you keep downloading continously). Until now, all broadband was unmetered.
Our LUG server (at Cordoba, Aegentina) runs a Pentium 200 MMX, with 64MB de RAM. It serves a static apache website, a dozen mailing lists through GNU/Mailman, mail for some of us, and a big FTP site (40+60+27GB hard disks).
It's a little strained but runs fine.
At the local installfest (this time, and at previous event_ there was a wide range of hardware. Some people have an old computer (Pentium I) they don't use anymore, and come to see if they can make it useful with Linux. Some people bring a new 2Ghz+ computer and want to dual-boot with Windows XP. The rest of the people cover the middle range quite evenly.
Most computers here are custom boxes assembled from components (CPU, motherboard, HD, ...) by small computer stores here. Big computer manufacturers (Dell, Compaq, HP) ahve little presence here, and have much higher prices. There are recently some big retailers (supermarkets, like Walmart) now selling computers assembled by bigger local companies. But hardware and peripherals varies a lot; you can still find parallel port printers along with USB ones, for example.
We installed mostly Mandrake 10.1 . It's a great distro for newbies, and helps them a lot to get closer to Linux. Besides it does a quite good job detecting hardware, newer and older. It might be a litle overtaxing for smaller systems (specially with less than 128MB of RAM), so we installed a cutted down version of Debian Sarge there.
For the second time in 12 installfests (in 6 years), all participants left the event with a system with a working Linux. hardware support has improved a lot progressively. In 1999, almost 50% of the people had difficulties making it work.
WHY did it have to be the DNA of a T-Rex? Why couldn't it have been a nice herbivore, like a stegosaurus, or even better, one of those little chicken-sized dinos?
Perhaps the "Oh, it doesn't fit inside the copter, we'll have to crack it open", wasn't helpful for Mary when applied to chicken sized bones ;-)
That's because you used a Red Hat. You could have had better luck if you had bought him a Fedora.