It's important that we gather our intelligence from computers, because computers cannot form an opinion. If they could, they wouldn't help us for long, or they'd start lying to us.
That's the basis of our overreliance on technology in intelligence gathering all over the world. This torture stuff isn't going to help.
Really? How is it informative when the same, single article has the following associated tags: "Yes", "No", "Maybe", "duh"
I hope you haven't been relying on those "Yes" or "No" tags to tell you if a story is right or wrong. The point of the tag system is to give you a link of all stories associated with a given tag, not to see what tags are associated with a given story. You're supposed to click on the tags, not read them.
The tag system must by design incorporate a mix of useful and useless tags because anyone can submit tags and "anyone" necessarily includes idiots. Efficiently getting rid of the useless tags would necessarily involve having to distinguish between idiots and normal users, and systems that attempt to do this usually end up irritating all users. Since the useless tags really do not interfere with the functionality associated with useful tags anyway, for the reasons described above, such measures would not be worth implementing.
Personally, I find it a little hypocritical -- but the sentiment is there and it does end up zeroing everything out...personally, I'd rather him have made the movie, stayed at home and still invested the same amount of money being a carbon negative...but then again, I'm not willing to give up travel either.
If you're of the position that driving is destroying the planet and is immoral, it may be that to stop the most driving from happening, you might have to get into a car yourself at some point to spread the word.
Although I can see why some would find it convenient that anyone who believes in global warming now has to stay home or else get labeled a hypocrite.
I certainly don't begrudge him flying if he is going to win his fight with the bullshit artists on the other side. They say there's no problem at all and I don't imagine Exxon flies its naysayers around in business class to give speeches at global warming denial fundraisers across the country.
Not only does Gore fly around in a jet and drive a big car, but none of his multiple homes use the more-expensive Wind Power that is available from his respective local utilities.
I got one for you: he doesn't sequester the carbon dioxide that comes out of his nose. He complains about carbon dioxide and in the same breath he contributes to the problem with carbon emissions from his multiple nostrils. What a hypocrite. Clearly nothing needs to be done about this. Do I win a cookie?
OK, then if not asthma, how about a much better example: handguns. 10,000 people die a year from gun related deaths and there is a constitutional right in the way of "fixing" it.
Apparently we are willing to take 10,000 casualties a year for the 2nd Amendment, but 3000 casualties occur one day and Amendments 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 go out the window.
Hint: if it says "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW" instead, it's more than 15 years old and may be a "refurbished" mattress. Every so often the mattress tag threat has to be phrased differently.
I'd imagine on wireless equipment there would be a sticker like this:
"WARNING: This box contains wireless electronic equipment known to the State of California to present a risk that you might inadvertently spread your ass cheeks wide open for the world to take advantage of you."
There is a legitimate DNS server sitting at 4.2.2.2. I think it belongs to GTE (now Verizon). It has the misfortune of having an easy IP address to remember. In a pinch, if you can't remember the IP of your own DNS, there's always 4.2.2.2. Most people who use it have it as their alternate DNS. Verizon likes to give it names like i-will-not-steal-service.sys.gtei.net.
You've already gotten a reply to your original post that indicates at least one other person has seen this happen to their DNS settings. If I'd never typed in 4.2.2.2 myself, and I had no previous business relationship with Verizon or GTE, I'd call shenanigans. A malware writer needing to disable automatic DNS for some reason would have to specify a replacement IP and 4.2.2.2 is convenient to hard code.
I'm shocked that you find that it's shocking that it's shocking.
And *I* am shocked that you find that it's shocking that it's shocking. Sure the guy played with dangerous animals all the time. Which usually means you die pretty soon. If this were the first year or two of his career I'd agree with you.
But after whatever it's been, 14 or 15 years, you have to start thinking the guy might have enough experience with reptiles to have an intuitive grasp of reptilian instincts and behavior. Give the guy some credit. Remember that his father was a reptile enthusiast who had started a zoo for reptiles and gave Steve a scrub python for his sixth birthday. Steve's first encounters with crocodiles happened when he was nine.. He must have been really skilled by the time anyone ever saw him on his TV show. Feeding a croc with a kid in your other arm wasn't as big of a deal for Steve as it would have been if you or I did it, and he got more hell for it than he deserved.
It's certainly not the case that Steve got incredibly lucky a thousand times in a row and finally rolled snake eyes on his 1001st animal encounter. After his first couple dozen encounters he should have been relatively skilled. He only needed to be moderately lucky each time, like a guy driving through traffic to work. This particular accident was obscenely unlucky, and it had to wait for a day with really crappy luck for Steve.
Note that he was killed by a stingray, not a reptile, in a freak accident with a barb in his chest. WTF Steve? That's no way for a crocodile hunter to kick it.
It is not very clear to me how you can associate the risk of asthma related deaths to the deaths of those in WTC incident.
The AC gave you a pretty good reply. Here is my two cents.
You obviously can't associate the two. They have nothing to do with each other. But you can compare them as risks. Terrorism doesn't kill even half as many Americans per year as does asthma.
Asthma kills between 5000 and 6000 Americans per year. If some politician came on the scene and declared a "War on Asthma", and demanded that we all have telescreens installed in our houses so that the police can see if we are wheezing or collecting dandelions, we'd rightly think he was nuts. (Except for those of us "with nothing to hide".)
Asthma attacks do not tend to occur all on the same day in a spectacular display of some sort, and the allergens that trigger asthma attacks are not usually released on purpose by somebody. If they were, our demands for justice might cloud our risk assessment.
So our government's response to 9/11 should have been to not do anything except perhaps apologize to the Islamic community for placing our skyscrapers in the paths of the airliners they hijacked?
What exactly should the government be doing? Waiting patiently for the next attack?
You're confusing two things- the demands of justice in response to such an attack, and what a logical response to such an attack should be.
Justice is a compelling motive for a strong reaction, but that reaction should then be just itself. Removing every American's privacy rights is unjust. This is what is not sinking into people's skulls.
What would a logical response to the attack be, if you were wanting to minimize loss of American life? Well it certainly wouldn't be this.
Since asthma killed more people in 2001 than died in 9/11, I would suggest that we should lose as many or fewer of our rights as Americans, than we do in our reaction to asthma.
A lot of people object when I make this argument, but other than ad hominem attacks nobody ever refutes it or explains why it's wrong.
I fly all the time, and I live in one of the blue states most likely to be affected by terrorism, but I do not worry about terrorism at all because I am not stupid. In fact it's clearly the people least likely to be affected by terrorism who are clamoring for our rights to be taken away because of it.
I realize that asthma is not as politically exploitable as terrorism, and the American press fixates on it whenever the JonBenet story dies down, but the alarmism of the press is one reason why Americans are incapable of correctly assessing risk.
Quick note: in theory that might be true, but then in theory if this happened on a regular basis, everyone would concentrate EVEN MORE on getting elected, and do EVEN LESS for the people once they got in, because they'd know that re-election was unlikely if not impossible -- even if they did a good job.
Only if you exchange one ridiculous extreme for the other. There is a 98% reelection rate for incumbents, but there's no reason it has to be 2% either.
I would guess they must have twenty-five or fifty hackers, and the chief hacking officer has his own office- special, with glass. You know, like they have in the movies- guys coming in all the time with research projects that they're doing, getting his advice, and rushing off to do more hacking, people coming in and out all the time.
Does this mean we should call the brain the Brain/Thalamus? It's unfair to give the entire package precedence over the kernel, as one is useless without the other.
I used to study neuroscience. The thalamus is a HUGE bank of relay switches in the brain- all these trunk cables go into it from all over. Basically anything you're paying attention to involves some circuit going through the thalamus, and the way the thalamus works is what limits your ability to focus on multiple things at once. Once something becomes rote- like QWERTY typing or good guitar playing- the thalamus is no longer involved.
I have epilepsy- really bad seizures- and my brain gets really messed up on restarts because it regains function piece by piece. Occasionally I'll be totally conscious (forming some long term memories again), and watching stuff come back online- I can hear, then I can see, then I can recognize things I see, etc. There are intermediate states where I can see but not recognize things. The seizures start in the right temporal lobe, so the right hemisphere is completely screwed up, but if my left brain works I can compensate with higher functions. Usually I'm looking for water fountains because my head is really hot and sweaty after a seizure. I'll find a water fountain and think, is this a water fountain? Well it has a stream of stuff that looks drinkable... it has a thing coming out the side that you can turn... it MUST be a water fountain! I almost pissed on my wife's chair once after somehow figuring it was a toilet. But without thalamic activity I'd never be able to patch right brain functions and send sensory information to the forebrain from the left side. If I'm able to pay attention to something at all, then there is some thalamic function. Recognizing it is a different task.
The ability to form long term memories comes later and is a more distributed gradual process as areas of the cortex recover. I was in this cubicle working once... doing simple stuff like cleaning up someone's crappy code... then I started doing more mentally intense work, and I turned around after an hour or two and noticed my cubicle was a mess. Everyone said, "you had a seizure a few hours ago, don't you remember?"
Recently my brain has been passing through a metastable fugue state after really nasty seizures where I have partial function, but it's not me yet- it's like someone else. I answer yes/no questions completely differently, I don't recognize my wife, I fight with people if they get in my way, and I don't know where I'm going but I'm going somewhere, sometimes out the door. Usually no new memories are being formed; I have to go by what people tell me afterward. Apparently I'm getting better at fooling people in the fugue state because my speech in the fugue is starting to almost sound normal even though I have only partial brain function. One of these days I'm going to regain consciousness in jail.
Yeah I didn't see it right on first glance either. I saw "India" and "laptops". I thought for a second this was going to be about those $100 WiFi laptops where you turn the crank, actually. But I'm sure those of you from Indiana are familiar with your state getting confused with India, and vice versa.
There is an art to Wikipedia abuse. If someone cites a Wikipedia article in some argument they're making, you can always just go to Wikipedia and edit the page so that they're wrong. But that's what a novice Wikipedia vandal does.
A pro knows to edit the article in a very subtle way, so that it looks like the person has poor reading comprehension. Let's say the person cites a Wikipedia article with a sentence like this, in order to support the argument that Colbert is a Democrat.
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Democrat.[12][13]
A novice might change it to this (correctly preserving footnote superscripts, which thankfully do not need to be relocated here from elsewhere in the article):
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Republican.[12][13]
It makes the person appear to be wrong- and the vandalism is obvious. That's like swapping Eurasia for Eastasia. There's no way he could have misread that.
But change it to this
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert has even been described as a Democrat.[12][13]
and the person looks not only wrong, but plausibly wrong because it looks like he can't read. That's what makes successful Wikipedia vandalism an art.
That's definitely not true, we can observe lots of galaxies who appear - according to their red shift - to travel faster than light.
You can get superluminal recession velocities only if you incorrectly consider the sum of all sources of red shift as entirely due to the Doppler component, and you then naively calculate the speed required for this observed "Doppler" red shift.
Cosmological red shift is totally different from Doppler red shift. In the earth's reference frame, the photon receives its Doppler red shift immediately, when it's emitted from the surface of a remote source. It receives its gravitational red shift (usually negligible) a moment later as it climbs out of that source's gravitational field. Then the cosmological red shift builds over billions of years as space expands and the photon wavelength expands with it.
Are you employed as a J2EE programmer, by any chance ?
Yeah, but I could have never written that straight through. I just began with the "naive implementation" and started cramming patterns into it. Plus I needlessly referred to concrete classes via interfaces wherever possible like you're supposed to. (Otherwise I might be tempted to stray outside the bounds of the interface and use implementation specific features.) Singleton and Factory were both no brainers. Strategy, though, was what really turned the program flow into a mess.
I initially posted it in a BS slashdot comment but this code actually became famous. It's all over the web. It appeared in one of the Patterns books as a warning of what not to do. I got a free copy from the author after I found this code in his online draft. There are also C# versions around if you need a Hello World in your Microsoft shop.
I hope to improve my Hello World in the next versions with even more patterns. Ones I'm looking at include Mediator, Proxy or Bridge, and Decorator (maybe to replace "." with "!" at the end of strings or something obnoxious like that, so I can name an interface "Excitable"). There may possibly be room for Visitor and a few others. Command and/or Interpreter would be nice but Interpreter might require a significant amount of code- using a library is unacceptable in a project like this one. Although that code then might need some more PATTERNS to help it out because otherwise it's hard to think of stuff that these patterns should be used for except for earlier infrastructure to implement previous patterns! (This would make the Hello World similar to projects I have seen in real life.) Maybe a stack- I'll push a Noun onto it ("World") and an Interjection ("Hello") that knows how to modify a Noun operand. Then I'll feed the stack to the Interpreter which will generate a MessageBody. That would really make a nice mess of things. If things get too complicated I'll have to jam a Facade in there somewhere.
One of these days a terrorist will pull out a lighter on a plane. He will take off his hat, revealing a wick attached to his head. He'll light it, and then his whole body will explode and they won't let any people OR lighters on a plane ever again.
Seriously, by the time they get to the airport it's too late unless we know they're coming. It is much, much easier to foil these plots the way other countries do it, by using police work, and getting them before they show up. Just look at the ineffective strategy we've implemented. It's basically a spam filter that you walk through, where they make sure you're not one of yesterday's terrorists. It won't catch any of today's, until tomorrow. Its real purpose is to annoy you, make you feel safe after being annoyed, and make you feel that terrorism is a bigger problem than it is. This is insane. Terrorism isn't even one of the top ten problems we face as a nation. I bet our airport security checkpoint insanity alone probably does more damage to our economy than terrorism itself ever will on a per-capita and per-year basis.
Something has to be done to startle everybody and make them realize how stupid this is. Maybe I'll become a Buddhist monk and pour gasoline all over myself at an airport gate to protest in a defiant act of self-immolation. (I'll just fly to Canada to have my 3rd degree burns treated.) How hard is it to go Buddhist? Where do they sell those orange robe outfits they wear? Can they be ordered online? I'd better do something because I have a flight from the UK in September. Or someone'd better do something. This is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
It's important that we gather our intelligence from computers, because computers cannot form an opinion. If they could, they wouldn't help us for long, or they'd start lying to us.
That's the basis of our overreliance on technology in intelligence gathering all over the world. This torture stuff isn't going to help.
Really? How is it informative when the same, single article has the following associated tags: "Yes", "No", "Maybe", "duh"
I hope you haven't been relying on those "Yes" or "No" tags to tell you if a story is right or wrong. The point of the tag system is to give you a link of all stories associated with a given tag, not to see what tags are associated with a given story. You're supposed to click on the tags, not read them.
The tag system must by design incorporate a mix of useful and useless tags because anyone can submit tags and "anyone" necessarily includes idiots. Efficiently getting rid of the useless tags would necessarily involve having to distinguish between idiots and normal users, and systems that attempt to do this usually end up irritating all users. Since the useless tags really do not interfere with the functionality associated with useful tags anyway, for the reasons described above, such measures would not be worth implementing.
"No net carbon atoms were oxidized in the making of this film"
Personally, I find it a little hypocritical -- but the sentiment is there and it does end up zeroing everything out...personally, I'd rather him have made the movie, stayed at home and still invested the same amount of money being a carbon negative...but then again, I'm not willing to give up travel either.
If you're of the position that driving is destroying the planet and is immoral, it may be that to stop the most driving from happening, you might have to get into a car yourself at some point to spread the word.
Although I can see why some would find it convenient that anyone who believes in global warming now has to stay home or else get labeled a hypocrite.
I certainly don't begrudge him flying if he is going to win his fight with the bullshit artists on the other side. They say there's no problem at all and I don't imagine Exxon flies its naysayers around in business class to give speeches at global warming denial fundraisers across the country.
Not only does Gore fly around in a jet and drive a big car, but none of his multiple homes use the more-expensive Wind Power that is available from his respective local utilities.
I got one for you: he doesn't sequester the carbon dioxide that comes out of his nose. He complains about carbon dioxide and in the same breath he contributes to the problem with carbon emissions from his multiple nostrils. What a hypocrite. Clearly nothing needs to be done about this. Do I win a cookie?
OK, then if not asthma, how about a much better example: handguns.
10,000 people die a year from gun related deaths and there is a constitutional right in the way of "fixing" it.
Apparently we are willing to take 10,000 casualties a year for the 2nd Amendment, but 3000 casualties occur one day and Amendments 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 go out the window.
Hint: if it says "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW" instead, it's more than 15 years old and may be a "refurbished" mattress. Every so often the mattress tag threat has to be phrased differently.
I'd imagine on wireless equipment there would be a sticker like this:
"WARNING: This box contains wireless electronic equipment known to the State of California to present a risk that you might inadvertently spread your ass cheeks wide open for the world to take advantage of you."
There is a legitimate DNS server sitting at 4.2.2.2. I think it belongs to GTE (now Verizon). It has the misfortune of having an easy IP address to remember. In a pinch, if you can't remember the IP of your own DNS, there's always 4.2.2.2. Most people who use it have it as their alternate DNS. Verizon likes to give it names like i-will-not-steal-service.sys.gtei.net.
You've already gotten a reply to your original post that indicates at least one other person has seen this happen to their DNS settings. If I'd never typed in 4.2.2.2 myself, and I had no previous business relationship with Verizon or GTE, I'd call shenanigans. A malware writer needing to disable automatic DNS for some reason would have to specify a replacement IP and 4.2.2.2 is convenient to hard code.
I'm shocked that you find that it's shocking that it's shocking.
And *I* am shocked that you find that it's shocking that it's shocking. Sure the guy played with dangerous animals all the time. Which usually means you die pretty soon. If this were the first year or two of his career I'd agree with you.
But after whatever it's been, 14 or 15 years, you have to start thinking the guy might have enough experience with reptiles to have an intuitive grasp of reptilian instincts and behavior. Give the guy some credit. Remember that his father was a reptile enthusiast who had started a zoo for reptiles and gave Steve a scrub python for his sixth birthday. Steve's first encounters with crocodiles happened when he was nine.. He must have been really skilled by the time anyone ever saw him on his TV show. Feeding a croc with a kid in your other arm wasn't as big of a deal for Steve as it would have been if you or I did it, and he got more hell for it than he deserved.
It's certainly not the case that Steve got incredibly lucky a thousand times in a row and finally rolled snake eyes on his 1001st animal encounter. After his first couple dozen encounters he should have been relatively skilled. He only needed to be moderately lucky each time, like a guy driving through traffic to work. This particular accident was obscenely unlucky, and it had to wait for a day with really crappy luck for Steve.
Note that he was killed by a stingray, not a reptile, in a freak accident with a barb in his chest. WTF Steve? That's no way for a crocodile hunter to kick it.
Well, it's shocking to think that the guy is no longer with us, and on top of that, it's shocking that it's shocking.
It is not very clear to me how you can associate the risk of asthma related deaths to the deaths of those in WTC incident.
The AC gave you a pretty good reply. Here is my two cents.
You obviously can't associate the two. They have nothing to do with each other. But you can compare them as risks. Terrorism doesn't kill even half as many Americans per year as does asthma.
Asthma kills between 5000 and 6000 Americans per year. If some politician came on the scene and declared a "War on Asthma", and demanded that we all have telescreens installed in our houses so that the police can see if we are wheezing or collecting dandelions, we'd rightly think he was nuts. (Except for those of us "with nothing to hide".)
Asthma attacks do not tend to occur all on the same day in a spectacular display of some sort, and the allergens that trigger asthma attacks are not usually released on purpose by somebody. If they were, our demands for justice might cloud our risk assessment.
So our government's response to 9/11 should have been to not do anything except perhaps apologize to the Islamic community for placing our skyscrapers in the paths of the airliners they hijacked?
What exactly should the government be doing? Waiting patiently for the next attack?
You're confusing two things- the demands of justice in response to such an attack, and what a logical response to such an attack should be.
Justice is a compelling motive for a strong reaction, but that reaction should then be just itself. Removing every American's privacy rights is unjust. This is what is not sinking into people's skulls.
What would a logical response to the attack be, if you were wanting to minimize loss of American life? Well it certainly wouldn't be this.
Since asthma killed more people in 2001 than died in 9/11, I would suggest that we should lose as many or fewer of our rights as Americans, than we do in our reaction to asthma.
A lot of people object when I make this argument, but other than ad hominem attacks nobody ever refutes it or explains why it's wrong.
I fly all the time, and I live in one of the blue states most likely to be affected by terrorism, but I do not worry about terrorism at all because I am not stupid. In fact it's clearly the people least likely to be affected by terrorism who are clamoring for our rights to be taken away because of it.
I realize that asthma is not as politically exploitable as terrorism, and the American press fixates on it whenever the JonBenet story dies down, but the alarmism of the press is one reason why Americans are incapable of correctly assessing risk.
Quick note: in theory that might be true, but then in theory if this happened on a regular basis, everyone would concentrate EVEN MORE on getting elected, and do EVEN LESS for the people once they got in, because they'd know that re-election was unlikely if not impossible -- even if they did a good job.
Only if you exchange one ridiculous extreme for the other. There is a 98% reelection rate for incumbents, but there's no reason it has to be 2% either.
I'll have you know that I plan on, and know many "right wing right-to-life zealot's" that plan on, or already have, adopted.
Are you adopting a real macroscopic kid who needs parents, or a clump of frozen cells?
I would guess they must have twenty-five or fifty hackers, and the chief hacking officer has his own office- special, with glass. You know, like they have in the movies- guys coming in all the time with research projects that they're doing, getting his advice, and rushing off to do more hacking, people coming in and out all the time.
Yeah, what a waste of hypergraphia!
I abused dextromethorphan ten years ago. I think I'm burned out on it.
Does this mean we should call the brain the Brain/Thalamus? It's unfair to give the entire package precedence over the kernel, as one is useless without the other.
I used to study neuroscience. The thalamus is a HUGE bank of relay switches in the brain- all these trunk cables go into it from all over. Basically anything you're paying attention to involves some circuit going through the thalamus, and the way the thalamus works is what limits your ability to focus on multiple things at once. Once something becomes rote- like QWERTY typing or good guitar playing- the thalamus is no longer involved.
I have epilepsy- really bad seizures- and my brain gets really messed up on restarts because it regains function piece by piece. Occasionally I'll be totally conscious (forming some long term memories again), and watching stuff come back online- I can hear, then I can see, then I can recognize things I see, etc. There are intermediate states where I can see but not recognize things. The seizures start in the right temporal lobe, so the right hemisphere is completely screwed up, but if my left brain works I can compensate with higher functions. Usually I'm looking for water fountains because my head is really hot and sweaty after a seizure. I'll find a water fountain and think, is this a water fountain? Well it has a stream of stuff that looks drinkable... it has a thing coming out the side that you can turn... it MUST be a water fountain! I almost pissed on my wife's chair once after somehow figuring it was a toilet. But without thalamic activity I'd never be able to patch right brain functions and send sensory information to the forebrain from the left side. If I'm able to pay attention to something at all, then there is some thalamic function. Recognizing it is a different task.
The ability to form long term memories comes later and is a more distributed gradual process as areas of the cortex recover. I was in this cubicle working once... doing simple stuff like cleaning up someone's crappy code... then I started doing more mentally intense work, and I turned around after an hour or two and noticed my cubicle was a mess. Everyone said, "you had a seizure a few hours ago, don't you remember?"
Recently my brain has been passing through a metastable fugue state after really nasty seizures where I have partial function, but it's not me yet- it's like someone else. I answer yes/no questions completely differently, I don't recognize my wife, I fight with people if they get in my way, and I don't know where I'm going but I'm going somewhere, sometimes out the door. Usually no new memories are being formed; I have to go by what people tell me afterward. Apparently I'm getting better at fooling people in the fugue state because my speech in the fugue is starting to almost sound normal even though I have only partial brain function. One of these days I'm going to regain consciousness in jail.
Yeah I didn't see it right on first glance either. I saw "India" and "laptops". I thought for a second this was going to be about those $100 WiFi laptops where you turn the crank, actually. But I'm sure those of you from Indiana are familiar with your state getting confused with India, and vice versa.
There is an art to Wikipedia abuse. If someone cites a Wikipedia article in some argument they're making, you can always just go to Wikipedia and edit the page so that they're wrong. But that's what a novice Wikipedia vandal does.
A pro knows to edit the article in a very subtle way, so that it looks like the person has poor reading comprehension. Let's say the person cites a Wikipedia article with a sentence like this, in order to support the argument that Colbert is a Democrat.
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Democrat.[12][13]
A novice might change it to this (correctly preserving footnote superscripts, which thankfully do not need to be relocated here from elsewhere in the article):
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Republican.[12][13]
It makes the person appear to be wrong- and the vandalism is obvious. That's like swapping Eurasia for Eastasia. There's no way he could have misread that.
But change it to this
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert has even been described as a Democrat.[12][13]
and the person looks not only wrong, but plausibly wrong because it looks like he can't read. That's what makes successful Wikipedia vandalism an art.
"So Steven, some people say you don't really tell the truth on this show. Is that in fact correct?"
That's definitely not true, we can observe lots of galaxies who appear - according to their red shift - to travel faster than light.
You can get superluminal recession velocities only if you incorrectly consider the sum of all sources of red shift as entirely due to the Doppler component, and you then naively calculate the speed required for this observed "Doppler" red shift.
Cosmological red shift is totally different from Doppler red shift. In the earth's reference frame, the photon receives its Doppler red shift immediately, when it's emitted from the surface of a remote source. It receives its gravitational red shift (usually negligible) a moment later as it climbs out of that source's gravitational field. Then the cosmological red shift builds over billions of years as space expands and the photon wavelength expands with it.
Observed red shift is the sum of the individual Doppler, cosmological, and gravitational red shifts. It isn't all Doppler red shift and it isn't all cosmological red shift either.
Are you employed as a J2EE programmer, by any chance ?
Yeah, but I could have never written that straight through. I just began with the "naive implementation" and started cramming patterns into it. Plus I needlessly referred to concrete classes via interfaces wherever possible like you're supposed to. (Otherwise I might be tempted to stray outside the bounds of the interface and use implementation specific features.) Singleton and Factory were both no brainers. Strategy, though, was what really turned the program flow into a mess.
I initially posted it in a BS slashdot comment but this code actually became famous. It's all over the web. It appeared in one of the Patterns books as a warning of what not to do. I got a free copy from the author after I found this code in his online draft. There are also C# versions around if you need a Hello World in your Microsoft shop.
I hope to improve my Hello World in the next versions with even more patterns. Ones I'm looking at include Mediator, Proxy or Bridge, and Decorator (maybe to replace "." with "!" at the end of strings or something obnoxious like that, so I can name an interface "Excitable"). There may possibly be room for Visitor and a few others. Command and/or Interpreter would be nice but Interpreter might require a significant amount of code- using a library is unacceptable in a project like this one. Although that code then might need some more PATTERNS to help it out because otherwise it's hard to think of stuff that these patterns should be used for except for earlier infrastructure to implement previous patterns! (This would make the Hello World similar to projects I have seen in real life.) Maybe a stack- I'll push a Noun onto it ("World") and an Interjection ("Hello") that knows how to modify a Noun operand. Then I'll feed the stack to the Interpreter which will generate a MessageBody. That would really make a nice mess of things. If things get too complicated I'll have to jam a Facade in there somewhere.
public interface MessageStrategy {
public void sendMessage();
}
public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb);
}
public class MessageBody {
Object payload;
public Object getPayload() { return payload; }
public void configure(Object obj) { payload = obj; }
public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
ms.sendMessage();
}
}
public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
private DefaultFactory() {}
static DefaultFactory instance;
public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
if (null==instance) instance = new DefaultFactory();
return instance;
}
public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
return new MessageStrategy() {
MessageBody body = mb;
public void sendMessage() {
Object obj = body.getPayload();
System.out.println(obj.toString());
}
};
}
}
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
mb.configure("Hello World!");
AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
mb.send(strategy);
}
}
In order to get through the lameness filter, I was forced to include this sentence that I would otherwise omit.
One of these days a terrorist will pull out a lighter on a plane. He will take off his hat, revealing a wick attached to his head. He'll light it, and then his whole body will explode and they won't let any people OR lighters on a plane ever again.
Seriously, by the time they get to the airport it's too late unless we know they're coming. It is much, much easier to foil these plots the way other countries do it, by using police work, and getting them before they show up. Just look at the ineffective strategy we've implemented. It's basically a spam filter that you walk through, where they make sure you're not one of yesterday's terrorists. It won't catch any of today's, until tomorrow. Its real purpose is to annoy you, make you feel safe after being annoyed, and make you feel that terrorism is a bigger problem than it is. This is insane. Terrorism isn't even one of the top ten problems we face as a nation. I bet our airport security checkpoint insanity alone probably does more damage to our economy than terrorism itself ever will on a per-capita and per-year basis.
Something has to be done to startle everybody and make them realize how stupid this is. Maybe I'll become a Buddhist monk and pour gasoline all over myself at an airport gate to protest in a defiant act of self-immolation. (I'll just fly to Canada to have my 3rd degree burns treated.) How hard is it to go Buddhist? Where do they sell those orange robe outfits they wear? Can they be ordered online? I'd better do something because I have a flight from the UK in September. Or someone'd better do something. This is ridiculous.