"we did not train participants on what each line of syntax actually did in the computer programs. Instead, participants attempted to derive the meaning of the computer code on their own."
They were not trained. They were just shown code samples with no explanation. The code samples had 1-letter variable names and no comments. The Perl sample uses $_[0} for getting the first sub argument instead of shift, and "for ($i = $a; $i = $b; $i++)" to do a for loop instead of "foreach $i ($a.. $b)", so it is deliberately obfuscated Perl.
Yet another ridiculous summary. The study wasn't which language was better, it was in which language can first-time users write a program more accurately. My guess is that Cobol would beat any of the three - it is designed from the ground up to be readable.
This sounds like one of those brilliant ideas on paper, but one that will prove infinitely harder in reality. Re-use satelites, great idea, good luck doing it though.
I have a closet full of old PC components and will never use most of them -- and those were designed to be interchangeable commodity parts. What are the chances that you can take a solar panel off an old satellite and use it for something? Did they standardize on micro-USB connectors? nope. Common voltage? nope. Standard mounting bracket? nope.
What other heavy items might be useful? batteries, telescopes, radios. Still less likely than my old PC parts.
The only chance this has is taking new parts up and repairing existing satellites using remote controlled or autonomous robots. Humans don't have a vehicle capable of getting to GEO. That might save a little of the cost of building and launching a whole new satellite if the robot can be reused for many missions.
The only precedent I can think of is the Hubble repair mission. On that one they found the bolts required much higher torque than they expected. I remember one of the astronauts called the Car Talk guys to ask about it. I don't think a robot would be able to pull out a cell phone.
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
You are assuming that what was stolen was technical. Schmidt was on the Apple board during the creation of iPhone. He became intimately familiar with the process of developing and marketing a smartphone*. I imagine Jobs was more interested in destroying Schmidt than a chunk of metal and plastic.
* At the time we called them smartphones, now we just call them phones.
One additional idea that has been explored is for the newer, faster ship to overtake the original and re-power it to go fast the rest of the way.
The problem is the delta-V between the first ship and the second, much-faster ship. It might not be practical to slow down, retrofit the first ship, speed up again and leave enough fuel for both ships to stop at the end of the journey.
Also, it seems unlikely for an interstellar mission to carry live humans. G-limits, radiation limits and life support requirements suggest it would be better to carry the equipment needed to grow humans at the destination rather than carry them for the trip. Just wake up the robots and start the process about 20 years before arrival during the deceleration phase. That means you don't care how long it takes.
If your motor control is going at 45 you should probably get checked for ALS. Either that or you're using Windows and forgot to disable the "helpful" mouse features like "Enhance pointer precision".
Yeah - as far as places to put massive numbers of people, space and the bottom of the ocean are unrealistic. Whether people will ever reach other colonizable planets may depend on our definition of "people". I suspect that may change over the 500 year range mentioned in the article.
You may have lost money on it, but somebody gained. Currency speculation has been around a long time. Most currencies aren't as volatile because there is a government making a monetary policy to control it. Bitcoin is a real opportunity for speculators.
I've also had customers end up on the blacklist incorrectly for reasons as innocuous as some 3rd party contracted inexperienced low-level techie ticked the wrong box on their Exchange management interface when trying to fix an unrelated problem.
Good. People who leave open relays are exactly the people I don't want to get mail from.
I'm pretty keyed into the patent issues since I've both generated patents for the place I work and had to defend my work from patent infringement claims. I don't see how preventing patent sales or assignments would improve things for inventors, it would reduce our value to companies.
[Large Company who I won't name] has a team of lawyers who make money by licensing patents. What this means is that they first send you a sternly written letter that you are infringing and requesting a meeting. You review their vaguely worded patent that has little to do with your product, and a lot to do with the fact that they have pursued this claim with other folks in the past, always successfully. You and your lawyer sit down across the table and eventually come to an agreement where they license you the patent in exchange for a percentage of the profits from the product. For a high-tech product this may work out to be 2-3% of what it cost to develop the product. If we had our own patent portfolio like the big guys, we would have fired back a countersuit. Since we're small, its just the cost of doing business. We factor it in. As far as I'm concerned its just another tax.
Then there are ones like the cursor patent on the X-or operation. I got hit with that one back in the 80's when I designed a display controller. Its tough to blame the trolls if the PTO hands out a patent on a well-known mathematical operation see claim 11. It didn't matter to me whether it was the original inventor or someone who had bought the patent. The problem was not that the patent had been sold, it was that it was granted in the first place.
If you have a static IP and control over your DNS you can run your own mail server and do whatever you want. If you are on a cable modem and your ISP controls your domain, then you aren't really on the internet, are you? Just drink the kool-aid. Personally, I've never used my ISP's email service.
In any case, spamhaus lists are mostly automated. The data they use to list you might be supplied by your own ISP who are running the spamtraps and supplying the lists of dynamic addresses that aren't supposed to send mail.
When you see a whole ISP blocked, it isn't some arbitrary decision. I managed a server on XO, which had huge spam infestations at the time, and never had an email blocked. To get into ROKSO, you have to be actively moving spammers around to get around the blocks, and putting innocent victims on the blocked IPs so they will get unblocked. Don't forget that ISPs make money from spammers and it costs them money to block spam. The bad ones have no love of spamhaus.
Oh - and the email domains that I manage all filter on zen.spamhaus.org and I have no problems with what they block.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember monospaced fonts. Punch cards with FORTRAN used them. Remington typewriters used them too.
"we did not train participants on what each line of syntax actually did in the computer programs. Instead, participants attempted to derive the meaning of the computer code on their own."
They were not trained. They were just shown code samples with no explanation. The code samples had 1-letter variable names and no comments. The Perl sample uses $_[0} for getting the first sub argument instead of shift, and "for ($i = $a; $i = $b; $i++)" to do a for loop instead of "foreach $i ($a .. $b)", so it is deliberately obfuscated Perl.
In a productivity study of experienced users, perl & python were best and C++ worst in both time to finish and lines of code.
http://www.connellybarnes.com/documents/language_productivity.pdf
Yet another ridiculous summary. The study wasn't which language was better, it was in which language can first-time users write a program more accurately. My guess is that Cobol would beat any of the three - it is designed from the ground up to be readable.
I think unshred is the next menu selection after uncrop.
Whereas powered legs were demonstrated in "The Wrong Trousers" in 1993.
Actually, they kinda suck at science, except for the simple fact that they test things and trust their evidence.
I'd like to see them do a little more of the math, then test their math against their evidence, too.
Given a choice between a show where people are doing math and a show where people are blowing up trailers with RPGS, I'll take the lattter.
What happened to the bill gates borg icon?
It was assimilated.
Your head is in the sand, I think. Here's a land use chart for Iowa, tell me how its only 1% developed.
http://extension.agron.iastate.edu/soils/CLU_tables.html
This sounds like one of those brilliant ideas on paper, but one that will prove infinitely harder in reality. Re-use satelites, great idea, good luck doing it though.
I have a closet full of old PC components and will never use most of them -- and those were designed to be interchangeable commodity parts. What are the chances that you can take a solar panel off an old satellite and use it for something? Did they standardize on micro-USB connectors? nope. Common voltage? nope. Standard mounting bracket? nope.
What other heavy items might be useful? batteries, telescopes, radios. Still less likely than my old PC parts.
The only chance this has is taking new parts up and repairing existing satellites using remote controlled or autonomous robots. Humans don't have a vehicle capable of getting to GEO. That might save a little of the cost of building and launching a whole new satellite if the robot can be reused for many missions.
The only precedent I can think of is the Hubble repair mission. On that one they found the bolts required much higher torque than they expected. I remember one of the astronauts called the Car Talk guys to ask about it. I don't think a robot would be able to pull out a cell phone.
Sir Walter Raleigh died of a throat ailment.
Yes. Its usually better to use the back of the phone. I usually miss if I use the end, and I've never hit a bee with the antenna.
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
You are assuming that what was stolen was technical. Schmidt was on the Apple board during the creation of iPhone. He became intimately familiar with the process of developing and marketing a smartphone*. I imagine Jobs was more interested in destroying Schmidt than a chunk of metal and plastic.
* At the time we called them smartphones, now we just call them phones.
Unless the dealer is buying your "secondhand" items knowing full well that they don't want them to be traced.
One additional idea that has been explored is for the newer, faster ship to overtake the original and re-power it to go fast the rest of the way.
The problem is the delta-V between the first ship and the second, much-faster ship. It might not be practical to slow down, retrofit the first ship, speed up again and leave enough fuel for both ships to stop at the end of the journey.
Also, it seems unlikely for an interstellar mission to carry live humans. G-limits, radiation limits and life support requirements suggest it would be better to carry the equipment needed to grow humans at the destination rather than carry them for the trip. Just wake up the robots and start the process about 20 years before arrival during the deceleration phase. That means you don't care how long it takes.
Dell beat you to it.
If your motor control is going at 45 you should probably get checked for ALS. Either that or you're using Windows and forgot to disable the "helpful" mouse features like "Enhance pointer precision".
We could name it, oh, Las Vegas.
Yeah - as far as places to put massive numbers of people, space and the bottom of the ocean are unrealistic. Whether people will ever reach other colonizable planets may depend on our definition of "people". I suspect that may change over the 500 year range mentioned in the article.
Or maybe the $10 microwave detector so when they get an alarm they start shooting at the truckload of equipment outside their house.
Although the truck is disguised, you can tell they're there when they put the giant piece of film up on the other side of the house.
These effects include increasing the uptake of glucose...
That's it. I'm suing the government for my obesity.
You may have lost money on it, but somebody gained. Currency speculation has been around a long time. Most currencies aren't as volatile because there is a government making a monetary policy to control it. Bitcoin is a real opportunity for speculators.
I've also had customers end up on the blacklist incorrectly for reasons as innocuous as some 3rd party contracted inexperienced low-level techie ticked the wrong box on their Exchange management interface when trying to fix an unrelated problem.
Good. People who leave open relays are exactly the people I don't want to get mail from.
I'm pretty keyed into the patent issues since I've both generated patents for the place I work and had to defend my work from patent infringement claims. I don't see how preventing patent sales or assignments would improve things for inventors, it would reduce our value to companies.
[Large Company who I won't name] has a team of lawyers who make money by licensing patents. What this means is that they first send you a sternly written letter that you are infringing and requesting a meeting. You review their vaguely worded patent that has little to do with your product, and a lot to do with the fact that they have pursued this claim with other folks in the past, always successfully. You and your lawyer sit down across the table and eventually come to an agreement where they license you the patent in exchange for a percentage of the profits from the product. For a high-tech product this may work out to be 2-3% of what it cost to develop the product. If we had our own patent portfolio like the big guys, we would have fired back a countersuit. Since we're small, its just the cost of doing business. We factor it in. As far as I'm concerned its just another tax.
Then there are ones like the cursor patent on the X-or operation. I got hit with that one back in the 80's when I designed a display controller. Its tough to blame the trolls if the PTO hands out a patent on a well-known mathematical operation see claim 11. It didn't matter to me whether it was the original inventor or someone who had bought the patent. The problem was not that the patent had been sold, it was that it was granted in the first place.
If you have a static IP and control over your DNS you can run your own mail server and do whatever you want. If you are on a cable modem and your ISP controls your domain, then you aren't really on the internet, are you? Just drink the kool-aid. Personally, I've never used my ISP's email service.
In any case, spamhaus lists are mostly automated. The data they use to list you might be supplied by your own ISP who are running the spamtraps and supplying the lists of dynamic addresses that aren't supposed to send mail.
When you see a whole ISP blocked, it isn't some arbitrary decision. I managed a server on XO, which had huge spam infestations at the time, and never had an email blocked. To get into ROKSO, you have to be actively moving spammers around to get around the blocks, and putting innocent victims on the blocked IPs so they will get unblocked. Don't forget that ISPs make money from spammers and it costs them money to block spam. The bad ones have no love of spamhaus.
Oh - and the email domains that I manage all filter on zen.spamhaus.org and I have no problems with what they block.