Nobody was even talking about FDR. He's been dead for almost sixty years. I guess you're saying we can't even make a passing reference to what the current living president is doing today without first enumerating to your satisfaction all the sins of every dead Democratic president in the nation's history.
People like you just propagate ignorance for self-serving interest in justifying your own ideology of rightness.
Why do dittoheads always start their insults with "People like you"?
>Does she? And does it trump the guy's Constitutional right to free speech? >Where in the Constitution is your right to privacy codified, and what are the precise words? Contrast this with precise and clear unequivocal grant of the right to speech, and then explain how this ruling will stand up to judicial review.
I didn't write this- my wife wrote it in an earlier post two weeks ago. But it looks like it will fit here.
The right to privacy was originally a right derived from Common Law. We all have heard the expression "An Englishman's home is his Castle." This was the rough summary of the right to privacy enjoyed by freemen in England. Of course, it was an ideal, and was not perfectly executed in practice, but the same could be said of much that goes on in this country.
In the US, much of our law is based on a combination of British Common Law, Statutory, and Constitutional law. And, once a statute is written that enumerates what was previously common law, the statutory meaning takes precedence. For instance, under Common Law, all that is required for a conspiracy conviction is evidence of a plan. You don't need to take any steps to enact the plan to be found guilty. But Statutory Conspiracy requires a plan, plus an act in furtherance of that plan, such as contacting someone to help, or buying a supply. This change was made in an attempt to avoid the concept of "thought crimes." But, if you have the misfortune of living in a state that does not have a statute defining Conspiracy, you are STILL subject to the common law "plan = conspiracy" standard.
The right to privacy was one of those unspoken, but widely accepted theories of British Common Law. But with the publication and ratification of the US Constitution, many areas of Common Law became statutory. Nowadays, the right to privacy is a statutory one, carved out of the intersection of individual rights derived from the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th ammendments. For instance, the 5th ammendment gives you the right not to self-incriminate, the 4th gives you protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the 14th and 6th amendments insure that you have due process rights (although this seems to fly over the head of the Bush Administration). In the middle of the 20th century, the USSC began to interpret the nexus of these rights as creating an area of individual activity that should be free from government interference. Some of the more famous cases, Griswold v. Connecticut and progeny, Roe v. Wade and progeny, found that while the right to privacy was not enumerated, it was implied, in the same way that if you say "I consult with my attorney Monday through Sunday," you have implied that you also talk to your attorney Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.
First Amendment concerns have previously been found insufficient to justify terroristic threats. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Nuremberg Files did not enjoy First Amendment protections in listing the names and addresses of doctors on the Internet. A court in April ruled that burning crosses does not enjoy First Amendment protections either. And of course, First Amendment concerns may sometimes conflict with property rights (as in the case of spam). There is no right that is absolute and that trumps all others. You have to consider the situation.
I don't know what's going on with Streisand, since the story doesn't seem to mention her at all. But it seems to me that you're insisting she has no right to privacy because you don't like her. But if she has no right to privacy, neither do you.
You're right- concrete cures most effectively between 50 and 75 degrees F. At higher temperatures the reaction slows down, hence the long predicted curing time. Oh well. That show came on while I was doing other things and I merely overheard it. Actually it isn't bad considering Discovery's typical production values. No psychics or wormholes.
No, the concrete in the interior of Hoover is not done curing, and it will not finish curing until sometime in the middle of this century. The curing time was calculated when they built the dam and the heat buildup was foreseen to be a problem. It structurally weakens the dam and may even cause failure.
They fixed it by laying metal radiator tubes through the concrete at regular intervals. The dam is essentially a giant concrete radiator. They run water through those tubes, and it carries away the heat from deep within the mass of concrete. The dam's temperature is fairly easy to regulate this way.
The rumor you hear sometimes of workers being buried in the concrete as they died is just an urban legend. People did die building Hoover dam, but the builders of the dam would never have allowed a human body to be buried in the concrete. That would have introduced structural weaknesses in the dam.
Since the dam holds so much potential in the roadblock to china's industrial and economical future (seriously - power-outages are worse there than CA) - I wouldn't call it an "show of pride."
Been in CA for two years and have seen only two power outages. Both were during storms and each lasted less than a half-hour.
Your statement "power-outages are worse there than CA" doesn't tell me a whole lot.
Except that dams aren't "cool" anymore. You can make an exception once in a while for a really well built and executed dam, like the Hoover dam. But for the most part dams are considered representative of an outmoded philosophy that the environment is something that should be "improved". We do still build dams in some cases, but we don't automatically equate their construction with "progress" anymore. (Same for swamps. We used to drain swamps as soon as we came across them- we don't do that anymore.)
That philosophy hasn't spread to China, where badmouthing this dam can get you arrested. It's politically untouchable. China is essentially throwing an adolescent temper tantrum and trying to convince the world that they're not a Third World nation by building the biggest, most destructive water project imaginable. You should see pictures of some of the areas they're flooding. It's as if we decided to flood the Grand Canyon to prove what badasses we are.
They're not only submerging archaeological sites. They're putting entire cities underwater. They're going to have to dynamite the tops of skyscrapers so that they don't sink the ships! Toxic waste dumps, landfills, it's all getting submerged. You are witnessing the creation of the largest open sewer that the world has ever seen. In fact this will be the first open sewer that astronauts will be able to see from space. This will be quite impressive. Not to mention the forced migration of a million people. Yeah, this isn't Third World behavior. "Technological prowess" speaks for itself!
My wife viewed this and asked why in the world someone would make that. I had to explain that we geeks get a kick out of doing stuff like this, just for the sake of doing it.
I'm afraid I agree with your wife. I don't see the point of doing this either.
I mean, if you could figure out a way to send TCP/IP packets using this device, you could write up an RFC and do something really cool. (Like TCP/IP via pigeon, which is very popular with the ladies.) But I don't see how you could possibly assemble and transmit a data packet with this device. It looks like all it does is keep beer cold.
It doesn't seem so "mindnumbingly obvious" to most people who post here though. That was my point.
It doesn't even matter if it's "mindnumbingly obvious" to the average member of the public. Most people are aware that radio sucks compared to even a few years ago, but not many know why. When asked "would you be in favor of all radio and TV stations being owned by a single monopoly or a small oligopoly of partnered corporations", most people answer strongly in the negative even though they don't know the names of the lobbying organizations that are pushing for this. Demanding that the average citizen be familiar with the RIAA and MPAA, and that they be in opposition to them specifically, is an unreasonable requirement. Lobbying organizations certainly don't advertise their existence to the general public. They don't want to be "mindnumbingly obvious".
And you aren't recognizing the damage that a nonfunctioning media can do to a democracy. When there are only several TV stations and newspapers in a given market, and they're all owned by the same guy who's decided he hates one candidate and wants the other one to win, the election is reduced to something with mere ceremonial value.
For a prime example of how media consolidation harms democracy, look at the FCC vote tomorrow. There is practically no public support for further media consolidation, and yet nobody seems to know about the coming FCC action on Monday. I haven't seen anything about it on TV, in the newspaper, on radio, anywhere. The only places you see people talking about these issues are sites like this one. You can take that in two ways. Either Slashdot is just full of weirdos who like to complain, or there has been an organized media blackout on a public policy issue where the media holds a conflict of interest.
Clearly you've jumped to the conclusion that we're just a bunch of whiners. After all, you don't see anyone talking about this on TV!
Also, if you buy a CVD and expect it work in your DVD player, then tough luck.
"C" and "D" are next to each other on the keyboard, and any reasonable person should be able to figure out it was a typo.
When your rhetoric descends to pointing out typos in other people's posts, it's a sign you've been trounced and have already lost the argument. You might as well mention Hitler. I might point out that your subject line mentions the "RIIA", which is ironic considering your argument that many people are unfamiliar with the RIAA so it must not be a big deal.
I read recently that there is a prion disease where you suffer months of insomnia before dying a slow, agonizing death from neural degeneration. So make sure you bookmark that link. If you ever get that disease, you'll want to print out some OMG standards documents and force yourself to read them. It could save your life someday.
Can you imagine if each pharmaceutical company had their own means of presenting information as well?
Funny you should mention this. I'm right in the middle of implementing an OMG standard for describing a certain type of research experiment. Certain journals are starting to tell pharmaceutical companies and universities (our customers) that they won't accept any scientific paper unless the experimental writeup is accompanied with a file in format X, this XML format, so that they can keep the document on record. So our product has to support export and import of this file type. Fine. Standards are good.
Except for this one. It is bloated and labyrinthine. Millions of lines of XML cruft are needlessly repeated- the files are huge (90% XML syntax, only 10% actual stuff). Given any type of information in such an experiment, this standard gives you six different places to put it. Certain fields must be populated with standard values ("ontologies") defined by OMG. Except OMG hasn't gotten around to actually defining what these standard values are, and so people are just making stuff up in the meantime. There are pages and pages of class diagrams, and finding the one or two relevant classes in each one is like a Where's Waldo game. All the rest are fluff.
Certain dialects of the standard are already forming- as in "format X as produced by software from company Y", "format X as produced by hardware from company Z", etc. This is what happens when a standard is bloated- it fragments into less flexible de facto standards. While it's easy to parse a dialect, parsing the format in its general form looks like it will be as hard as parsing a natural language such as English (I don't mean the low level XML parsing, I mean interpreting the bloat into something useful). And in fact, there are several places where the standard gives up and just tells you to put English descriptions of things in certain places. This is an artifact of its origin- it was originally developed by one particular company in the field, and it's essentially an XML serialization of an abstracted UML diagram of the internal data types they use in their own products. If they're weak in a certain area, such as normalization procedures, the standard simply falls back on English text descriptions. If they're strong in an area, that's where the cruft comes in.
Yes, standards are good, but poor standards are horrible.
Pennies are hard to get rid of, both personally and nationally. Every so often the idea of eliminating pennies comes up and all these people come out of the woodwork to defend the penny. You would think they were taking "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance, they get so worked up. There is even a lobbying group devoted to keeping the penny- Americans for Common Cents. Not surprisingly, it is backed by zinc companies.
They aren't easy to get rid of. Vending machines won't take them. In fact there's hardly any coin-operated device that accepts pennies. Spending them is awkward. You can discreetly leave piles of them on a restaurant table as a tip, but that's probably not a good idea if you ever plan on eating there again. A penny in reality is worth a little less than its face value, because of the inconvenience they present in large numbers.
I found a good way to get rid of them. Use them to buy gasoline! You have to count them beforehand. If you have 163 pennies, just pump $11.63 or $16.63 of gas into the car, then go in, put a ten and maybe a five down, and then take all those little pennies out of your pocket and slam them down onto the counter. What's the guy going to say? They're legal tender. And they're just asking for it when they advertise prices that end in 9/10 of a cent. Usually the dude just eyeballs the pile, takes your word for it, and scoops them into the register.
People think expiration dates on medicines are like the dates you see on milk. When milk passes its expiration date, it is bad, period. I used to work in a generic pharmaceutical company under the domain of the FDA. After working in that lab, I lost all respect for expiration dates on pharmaceuticals. I almost never throw away medicine just because it's expired. This is what an expiration date really means:
A sample is kept from each lot of a drug that's shipped. It's put in a box and kept in a closet somewhere at the drug company. This is mandated by the FDA. Once every three months, someone goes into the closet, takes some out, performs an assay (for bismuth or whatever), and makes sure the stuff still contains between 90% and 110% of the label claim for its active ingredient. They keep doing this until the expiration date passes. Once it hits the expiration date, they're allowed to go into that closet and throw the stuff away. The testing protocol may vary from product to product but the idea is the same. If a bottle of medicine has expired, all it means is that nobody is doing periodic tests on that lot anymore. For most drugs, the assay percentage will remain stable forever afterwards. A few will decay over time. Pepto-Bismol is certainly OK to use unless the pink sugary crap it's in looks or smells suspicious, or if 10^19 years have passed by (don't use Pepto-Bismol that old because it contains thallium).
We sold a generic version of Pepto-Bismol at this company. They called it "Pink Bismuth". (They were real creative with their ripoff names- "Miconazole 7" for "Monistat 7", "Vision Vite" for "Opti-Vite", etc.) I remember doing some raw material tests and assays on the active ingredient, bismuth subgallate. It's an off-white powder. If I had only known it was radioactive...
My dad had a copy of Lange's Handbook of Chemistry that was published back in the sixties. I distinctly remember seeing that it listed the half life of Bi-209 as 2x10^23 years. That was only four orders of magnitude too long.
In principle there are no stable nuclei heavier than iron 56. If you have a nucleus with atomic number A and atomic weight X, and you add up the binding energy of that nucleus, and compare it to the sum of the binding energies of an alpha particle and of a daughter nucleus with atomic number A-2 and atomic weight X-4, you will find that alpha decay is at least a little energetically favorable for many nuclei heavier than iron.
If alpha decay is energetically favorable for a nucleus, then that nucleus is not stable. Alpha decay is a barrier tunneling process. If there's a potential energy drop on the other side of the barrier, the barrier will get tunneled through by an enterprising alpha particle eventually. It's just a matter of how long it will take- which is determined by the barrier width and the magnitude of the potential energy difference. The only reason many elements (iodine, gold, mercury, lead, etc.) are considered stable by human beings is that their decays have never been observed- because they are difficult to observe within human time scales. You might have to set up your experiment and wait for years, maybe centuries, before you see a decay. A bottle of mercury might contain two alpha decays per century. Is mercury stable? Not really, but for all practical purposes it is. It's all in the eye of the beholder.
So it seems someone has caught bismuth in the act. Does this mean lead is now the heaviest stable nucleus? No, absolutely not. Lead has some advantages over bismuth- even numbers of neutrons and protons, etc. Pb-208 will definitely have a longer half life than Bi-209. Determining the half life of Pb 208 is going to be hard. But quantitative differences aside, the only real difference between lead and bismuth is that bismuth got caught!
We were given a detector pen to use on 20s or higher that turns brown on real money, black on most everything else. When the new bills came out in the late 90s, we were specifically instructed to check for that color-shifting ink in addition to that pen.
If I'm not mistaken that "pen" is a felt tip marker with an iodine solution. The paper used for real money is known to contain no starch, so when you smear the pen across real money all you see is a faint brown smear from the iodine itself.
Counterfeit money, on the other hand, is presumed to contain lots of starch. Starch and iodine undergo a special chemical reaction that's one of those little quirks of nature. The I2 molecules have *just* the right diameter to fit inside the helix of a starch polymer perfectly. They immediately slide in there and the resulting starch-iodine complex has a strong inky black color so powerful that it's easy to see even if trace amounts of starch are present.
Of course, this presumes that counterfeiters are stupid, cheap, pay no attention to detail, and buy low-quality paper containing starch. As a general rule, counterfeiting is a crime that attracts very anal-retentive people. I would imagine that a counterfeiter would pay more attention to his choice of paper than a laid-off dot-com worker printing resumes. It probably isn't too hard to find paper that doesn't contain any starch, and testing for it is a piece of cake because those stupid pens are sold all over the place. I bet every counterfeiter on the planet has one.
Still, the pen is common because people want to believe they can buy a magicical item that detects counterfeit money. If you're a counterfeiter and you can't fool an iodine pen, you should consider going into another line of crime.
java is a worthless joke, a play-pretend half attempt at platform independence. there is no such thing as a java binary. java is not compiled. it is an interpreted language that runs specially compressed source code. there is no virtual machine. JRE is a glorified GWBASIC platform. java is the worst thing to happen to programming in ages.
There is no such thing as bytecode. These "registers" are lies. There is no runtime stack. The javac executable is really a wrapper around gzip. This "JVM" is a fabrication concocted by the infidel authors of GWBASIC and does not exist. These cowards have no morals. I blame Al-Jazeera- they are marketing for Sun. God will roast their stomachs in hell. They are not in control of anything- they don't even control their own code! Be assured, our CPUs are safe and protected from compressed interpreted source code. We have placed their threads in a quagmire from which they can never emerge unless they throw an exception. Java is a snake and we will cut it in pieces!
I hate spam but I'll fight for your right to send it.
A perversion of "I disagree with what you say but I'll fight for your right to say it." Spam is commercial speech and as such is undeserving of such allegiance. This has been well established by court precedent in the USA- commercial speech does not enjoy the same First Amendment protections as noncommercial (political) speech. Even if it were political speech, the way it's delivered can matter as well. You can't run around with a can of spray paint before an election and put political graffiti all over buildings, for example.
I don't want the government making laws about Internet content. Its just a bad idea. Tomorrow they might make a law against something you do.
There are two conflicting memes I see a lot concerning crime, legislation, and the Internet:
- Crimes involving the Internet are extra serious and require additional punishment and more savage sentences. - Anything done on the Internet should be completely legal and unrestricted no matter what.
The first is fueled by simple post-9/11-style ignorance and fear. The second is based on an understandable fear of technically illiterate Senators introducing legislation written by corporate lobbyists. Yet in principle both are equally invalid because they fail to recognize that the Internet is a part of the real world and not some sort of alternate universe that requires a completely separate framework of crazy rules.
Another related meme, common in industry, and illustrative of the same point:
- Introducing the Internet into a business process renders it patentable.
Why does the Internet have this strange effect on people? There is nothing magical about the Internet that makes our ordinary common sense suddenly inapplicable. (You need a little bit of education, more than the average lawmaker has, but that should be it.) Some people simply cannot behave themselves. There is no valid reason that the social and legal principles we've developed for dealing with criminals in the real world shouldn't also work well on the Internet- which after all is merely a part of the real world. There are technical issues involved with catching troublemakers on the Internet that have no counterpart in "real life", but real life has its own set of technical issues that don't exist on the Internet.
If you can't behave yourself and screw things up for the general public, you should be punished. The fact that you're using TCP/IP at some point is irrelevant. It doesn't mean your activities should be branded as "cyberterrorism" deserving a doubled or tripled sentence, nor does it mean that anything goes.
(DISCLAIMER: I didn't write this myself- we were having an email conversation about F# today at work, and this is what our CEO had to say about it. I got his permission to repost his email here but he insisted on editing a few comments disparaging to Microsoft because he wants to encourage them to keep working on it.) --snip--
F# seems to be based very closely upon ocaml, which was the language that I used for day to day work before Java.
I think ocaml is a fantastic language, although, like everything, it had a few significant problems five years ago:
- obscure [ F# could fix this ]
- not as many libraries as a mainstream language [ F# could fix this. ]
- not great module support - if module A depends on B, then B cannot depend on A.
Disclaimer: everything I say comes from personal, but old, experience, and a cursory look at the F# web site.
Interesting properties of ocaml:
1) Functions are first class objects. E.g..
let add x y = x+y;
let add3 = add 3;
print (add3 4);
-> 7
2) Polymorphism works well. So you could define a function that takes an array of objects x and a function that maps x to y, and produce an array of objects y. Eg
let a = [| 5,6,7 |]// an array of integers
print (Array.map add3 a)
-> [| 8,9,10 |]
3) Type checking is strong, compile time, and usually implicit. All types in the examples above are deduced correctly. Disadvantage: You can't have operator overloading, even for the plus sign... so + means integer addition, and +. means double addition.
4) You can return multiple values from a function
let cis t = (cos t,sin t);
let (ct,st) = cis (PI/. 2.0);
print ct;
-> 0.0
5) Variables are final by default, but can explicitly be made not-final. There are also control structures that make many things that one does in Java by changing variables simpler. This can make debugging simpler, but takes a while to get used to.
6) There is some very powerful pattern matching code - imagine a more powerful case where you could say
int x;
Point y
switch (x,y) {
case 7,null: do this
case 4,Point(3,?) : do that
case x,Point(y,x) : print y
default:
}
[ Actually, there is no direct concept of null, but that is not the point. ]
I particularly liked ocaml as it allowed imperative features, had GC and exceptions, and had a very good compiler that produced fast code. I was very impressed by the French academic group that made it and supported it.
[ Note examples are not valid ocaml - they are ocaml features with a javaified syntax to make them easier to explain, and besides, I have not used the language for years. ]
The current F# implementation does not sound very efficient for a variety of reasons. It is also not nicely polymorphic in the same way that ocaml is. This defeats a lot of the point of it. They need support for generics in the VM for these to work well. There is a different group at MS research working on this - I would be delighted if both the F# project and the generics project make it into the mainstream.
It is not clear how well the ML view of types will match up with the C# view of types. ML programming feels different to Java programming, and this could make the.NET library matching clumsy. But if they could make it work, then that could get rid of two of the biggest perceived issues that have prevented widespread adoption of ocaml.
--snip--
Re:"Don't Ask At Startup" Broken?
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 1
Hey, some ads work! I've clicked lots of ads on Google and a few times found really useful stuff.
In fact, when educated, most people will use their powers for good, not evil..:)
Exactly. Most virus code is horribly written. If we're going to have malicious self-replicating code running on our machines, we should demand high quality code that doesn't crash. So many virus writers can't code their way out of a paper bag.
I demand my viruses to be written by CS graduates. If you don't at least have a CS degree, I won't click on the attachment.
Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), one of the up-and-coming little neoconservative darlings of the Republican party, made this abundantly clear in an interview with the AP several weeks ago. Nobody took much note of what he said regarding privacy, because it was viewed by the press as a "gay" issue since he picked on them specifically. But he was essentially saying that if you did have a right to privacy, government would be powerless to regulate certain behavior, such as you having sex with your dog. Apparently this is a big problem in Pennsylvania and having to tolerate it would be too high of a price to pay for privacy.
Wow. Is this what it takes to get any sort of response from Geocities?
I set up a Geocities page in 1997. After they were bought by Yahoo, my password stopped working and I haven't been able to delete the page in years- which sucks because it's embarrassing to have a page with the digging man GIF in 2003. Geocities is unresponsive. I guess the solution is to release a worm that checks to see if the page is still there!
Does anybody have a copy of Fizzer? I have to edit one of its resource strings and post that baby on KaZaa.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody was even talking about FDR. He's been dead for almost sixty years. I guess you're saying we can't even make a passing reference to what the current living president is doing today without first enumerating to your satisfaction all the sins of every dead Democratic president in the nation's history.
People like you just propagate ignorance for self-serving interest in justifying your own ideology of rightness.
Why do dittoheads always start their insults with "People like you"?
">15 Gauss"? You probably mean 1.5 Tesla, or 15000 Gauss. Refrigerator magnets have field strengths of several hundred Gauss.
>Does she? And does it trump the guy's Constitutional right to free speech?
>Where in the Constitution is your right to privacy codified, and what are the precise words? Contrast this with precise and clear unequivocal grant of the right to speech, and then explain how this ruling will stand up to judicial review.
I didn't write this- my wife wrote it in an earlier post two weeks ago. But it looks like it will fit here.
First Amendment concerns have previously been found insufficient to justify terroristic threats. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Nuremberg Files did not enjoy First Amendment protections in listing the names and addresses of doctors on the Internet. A court in April ruled that burning crosses does not enjoy First Amendment protections either. And of course, First Amendment concerns may sometimes conflict with property rights (as in the case of spam). There is no right that is absolute and that trumps all others. You have to consider the situation.
I don't know what's going on with Streisand, since the story doesn't seem to mention her at all. But it seems to me that you're insisting she has no right to privacy because you don't like her. But if she has no right to privacy, neither do you.
My attention span doesn't last long enough for me to write a play. But maybe I can collate my Slashdot posts into a musical.
You're right- concrete cures most effectively between 50 and 75 degrees F. At higher temperatures the reaction slows down, hence the long predicted curing time.
Oh well. That show came on while I was doing other things and I merely overheard it. Actually it isn't bad considering Discovery's typical production values. No psychics or wormholes.
No, the concrete in the interior of Hoover is not done curing, and it will not finish curing until sometime in the middle of this century. The curing time was calculated when they built the dam and the heat buildup was foreseen to be a problem. It structurally weakens the dam and may even cause failure.
They fixed it by laying metal radiator tubes through the concrete at regular intervals. The dam is essentially a giant concrete radiator. They run water through those tubes, and it carries away the heat from deep within the mass of concrete. The dam's temperature is fairly easy to regulate this way.
The rumor you hear sometimes of workers being buried in the concrete as they died is just an urban legend. People did die building Hoover dam, but the builders of the dam would never have allowed a human body to be buried in the concrete. That would have introduced structural weaknesses in the dam.
Since the dam holds so much potential in the roadblock to china's industrial and economical future (seriously - power-outages are worse there than CA) - I wouldn't call it an "show of pride."
Been in CA for two years and have seen only two power outages. Both were during storms and each lasted less than a half-hour.
Your statement "power-outages are worse there than CA" doesn't tell me a whole lot.
Except that dams aren't "cool" anymore. You can make an exception once in a while for a really well built and executed dam, like the Hoover dam. But for the most part dams are considered representative of an outmoded philosophy that the environment is something that should be "improved". We do still build dams in some cases, but we don't automatically equate their construction with "progress" anymore. (Same for swamps. We used to drain swamps as soon as we came across them- we don't do that anymore.)
That philosophy hasn't spread to China, where badmouthing this dam can get you arrested. It's politically untouchable. China is essentially throwing an adolescent temper tantrum and trying to convince the world that they're not a Third World nation by building the biggest, most destructive water project imaginable. You should see pictures of some of the areas they're flooding. It's as if we decided to flood the Grand Canyon to prove what badasses we are.
They're not only submerging archaeological sites. They're putting entire cities underwater. They're going to have to dynamite the tops of skyscrapers so that they don't sink the ships! Toxic waste dumps, landfills, it's all getting submerged. You are witnessing the creation of the largest open sewer that the world has ever seen. In fact this will be the first open sewer that astronauts will be able to see from space. This will be quite impressive. Not to mention the forced migration of a million people. Yeah, this isn't Third World behavior. "Technological prowess" speaks for itself!
If any ships can make it there without crashing their hulls on the tops of submerged skyscrapers!
That is going to be some really disgusting water.
That's an interesting link. So the parent wasn't mocking a typo after all! I guess I owe him an apology on that point.
My wife viewed this and asked why in the world someone would make that. I had to explain that we geeks get a kick out of doing stuff like this, just for the sake of doing it.
I'm afraid I agree with your wife. I don't see the point of doing this either.
I mean, if you could figure out a way to send TCP/IP packets using this device, you could write up an RFC and do something really cool. (Like TCP/IP via pigeon, which is very popular with the ladies.) But I don't see how you could possibly assemble and transmit a data packet with this device. It looks like all it does is keep beer cold.
It doesn't seem so "mindnumbingly obvious" to most people who post here though. That was my point.
It doesn't even matter if it's "mindnumbingly obvious" to the average member of the public. Most people are aware that radio sucks compared to even a few years ago, but not many know why. When asked "would you be in favor of all radio and TV stations being owned by a single monopoly or a small oligopoly of partnered corporations", most people answer strongly in the negative even though they don't know the names of the lobbying organizations that are pushing for this. Demanding that the average citizen be familiar with the RIAA and MPAA, and that they be in opposition to them specifically, is an unreasonable requirement. Lobbying organizations certainly don't advertise their existence to the general public. They don't want to be "mindnumbingly obvious".
And you aren't recognizing the damage that a nonfunctioning media can do to a democracy. When there are only several TV stations and newspapers in a given market, and they're all owned by the same guy who's decided he hates one candidate and wants the other one to win, the election is reduced to something with mere ceremonial value.
For a prime example of how media consolidation harms democracy, look at the FCC vote tomorrow. There is practically no public support for further media consolidation, and yet nobody seems to know about the coming FCC action on Monday. I haven't seen anything about it on TV, in the newspaper, on radio, anywhere. The only places you see people talking about these issues are sites like this one. You can take that in two ways. Either Slashdot is just full of weirdos who like to complain, or there has been an organized media blackout on a public policy issue where the media holds a conflict of interest.
Clearly you've jumped to the conclusion that we're just a bunch of whiners. After all, you don't see anyone talking about this on TV!
Also, if you buy a CVD and expect it work in your DVD player, then tough luck.
"C" and "D" are next to each other on the keyboard, and any reasonable person should be able to figure out it was a typo.
When your rhetoric descends to pointing out typos in other people's posts, it's a sign you've been trounced and have already lost the argument. You might as well mention Hitler. I might point out that your subject line mentions the "RIIA", which is ironic considering your argument that many people are unfamiliar with the RIAA so it must not be a big deal.
No, it stands for Object Management Group (the people who came up with CORBA).
I read recently that there is a prion disease where you suffer months of insomnia before dying a slow, agonizing death from neural degeneration. So make sure you bookmark that link. If you ever get that disease, you'll want to print out some OMG standards documents and force yourself to read them. It could save your life someday.
Can you imagine if each pharmaceutical company had their own means of presenting information as well?
Funny you should mention this. I'm right in the middle of implementing an OMG standard for describing a certain type of research experiment. Certain journals are starting to tell pharmaceutical companies and universities (our customers) that they won't accept any scientific paper unless the experimental writeup is accompanied with a file in format X, this XML format, so that they can keep the document on record. So our product has to support export and import of this file type. Fine. Standards are good.
Except for this one. It is bloated and labyrinthine. Millions of lines of XML cruft are needlessly repeated- the files are huge (90% XML syntax, only 10% actual stuff). Given any type of information in such an experiment, this standard gives you six different places to put it. Certain fields must be populated with standard values ("ontologies") defined by OMG. Except OMG hasn't gotten around to actually defining what these standard values are, and so people are just making stuff up in the meantime. There are pages and pages of class diagrams, and finding the one or two relevant classes in each one is like a Where's Waldo game. All the rest are fluff.
Certain dialects of the standard are already forming- as in "format X as produced by software from company Y", "format X as produced by hardware from company Z", etc. This is what happens when a standard is bloated- it fragments into less flexible de facto standards. While it's easy to parse a dialect, parsing the format in its general form looks like it will be as hard as parsing a natural language such as English (I don't mean the low level XML parsing, I mean interpreting the bloat into something useful). And in fact, there are several places where the standard gives up and just tells you to put English descriptions of things in certain places. This is an artifact of its origin- it was originally developed by one particular company in the field, and it's essentially an XML serialization of an abstracted UML diagram of the internal data types they use in their own products. If they're weak in a certain area, such as normalization procedures, the standard simply falls back on English text descriptions. If they're strong in an area, that's where the cruft comes in.
Yes, standards are good, but poor standards are horrible.
Pennies are hard to get rid of, both personally and nationally. Every so often the idea of eliminating pennies comes up and all these people come out of the woodwork to defend the penny. You would think they were taking "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance, they get so worked up. There is even a lobbying group devoted to keeping the penny- Americans for Common Cents. Not surprisingly, it is backed by zinc companies.
They aren't easy to get rid of. Vending machines won't take them. In fact there's hardly any coin-operated device that accepts pennies. Spending them is awkward. You can discreetly leave piles of them on a restaurant table as a tip, but that's probably not a good idea if you ever plan on eating there again. A penny in reality is worth a little less than its face value, because of the inconvenience they present in large numbers.
I found a good way to get rid of them. Use them to buy gasoline! You have to count them beforehand. If you have 163 pennies, just pump $11.63 or $16.63 of gas into the car, then go in, put a ten and maybe a five down, and then take all those little pennies out of your pocket and slam them down onto the counter. What's the guy going to say? They're legal tender. And they're just asking for it when they advertise prices that end in 9/10 of a cent. Usually the dude just eyeballs the pile, takes your word for it, and scoops them into the register.
People think expiration dates on medicines are like the dates you see on milk. When milk passes its expiration date, it is bad, period. I used to work in a generic pharmaceutical company under the domain of the FDA. After working in that lab, I lost all respect for expiration dates on pharmaceuticals. I almost never throw away medicine just because it's expired. This is what an expiration date really means:
A sample is kept from each lot of a drug that's shipped. It's put in a box and kept in a closet somewhere at the drug company. This is mandated by the FDA. Once every three months, someone goes into the closet, takes some out, performs an assay (for bismuth or whatever), and makes sure the stuff still contains between 90% and 110% of the label claim for its active ingredient. They keep doing this until the expiration date passes. Once it hits the expiration date, they're allowed to go into that closet and throw the stuff away. The testing protocol may vary from product to product but the idea is the same. If a bottle of medicine has expired, all it means is that nobody is doing periodic tests on that lot anymore. For most drugs, the assay percentage will remain stable forever afterwards. A few will decay over time. Pepto-Bismol is certainly OK to use unless the pink sugary crap it's in looks or smells suspicious, or if 10^19 years have passed by (don't use Pepto-Bismol that old because it contains thallium).
We sold a generic version of Pepto-Bismol at this company. They called it "Pink Bismuth". (They were real creative with their ripoff names- "Miconazole 7" for "Monistat 7", "Vision Vite" for "Opti-Vite", etc.) I remember doing some raw material tests and assays on the active ingredient, bismuth subgallate. It's an off-white powder. If I had only known it was radioactive...
My dad had a copy of Lange's Handbook of Chemistry that was published back in the sixties. I distinctly remember seeing that it listed the half life of Bi-209 as 2x10^23 years. That was only four orders of magnitude too long.
In principle there are no stable nuclei heavier than iron 56. If you have a nucleus with atomic number A and atomic weight X, and you add up the binding energy of that nucleus, and compare it to the sum of the binding energies of an alpha particle and of a daughter nucleus with atomic number A-2 and atomic weight X-4, you will find that alpha decay is at least a little energetically favorable for many nuclei heavier than iron.
If alpha decay is energetically favorable for a nucleus, then that nucleus is not stable. Alpha decay is a barrier tunneling process. If there's a potential energy drop on the other side of the barrier, the barrier will get tunneled through by an enterprising alpha particle eventually. It's just a matter of how long it will take- which is determined by the barrier width and the magnitude of the potential energy difference. The only reason many elements (iodine, gold, mercury, lead, etc.) are considered stable by human beings is that their decays have never been observed- because they are difficult to observe within human time scales. You might have to set up your experiment and wait for years, maybe centuries, before you see a decay. A bottle of mercury might contain two alpha decays per century. Is mercury stable? Not really, but for all practical purposes it is. It's all in the eye of the beholder.
So it seems someone has caught bismuth in the act. Does this mean lead is now the heaviest stable nucleus? No, absolutely not. Lead has some advantages over bismuth- even numbers of neutrons and protons, etc. Pb-208 will definitely have a longer half life than Bi-209. Determining the half life of Pb 208 is going to be hard. But quantitative differences aside, the only real difference between lead and bismuth is that bismuth got caught!
We were given a detector pen to use on 20s or higher that turns brown on real money, black on most everything else. When the new bills came out in the late 90s, we were specifically instructed to check for that color-shifting ink in addition to that pen.
If I'm not mistaken that "pen" is a felt tip marker with an iodine solution. The paper used for real money is known to contain no starch, so when you smear the pen across real money all you see is a faint brown smear from the iodine itself.
Counterfeit money, on the other hand, is presumed to contain lots of starch. Starch and iodine undergo a special chemical reaction that's one of those little quirks of nature. The I2 molecules have *just* the right diameter to fit inside the helix of a starch polymer perfectly. They immediately slide in there and the resulting starch-iodine complex has a strong inky black color so powerful that it's easy to see even if trace amounts of starch are present.
Of course, this presumes that counterfeiters are stupid, cheap, pay no attention to detail, and buy low-quality paper containing starch. As a general rule, counterfeiting is a crime that attracts very anal-retentive people. I would imagine that a counterfeiter would pay more attention to his choice of paper than a laid-off dot-com worker printing resumes. It probably isn't too hard to find paper that doesn't contain any starch, and testing for it is a piece of cake because those stupid pens are sold all over the place. I bet every counterfeiter on the planet has one.
Still, the pen is common because people want to believe they can buy a magicical item that detects counterfeit money. If you're a counterfeiter and you can't fool an iodine pen, you should consider going into another line of crime.
java is a worthless joke, a play-pretend half attempt at platform independence. there is no such thing as a java binary. java is not compiled. it is an interpreted language that runs specially compressed source code. there is no virtual machine. JRE is a glorified GWBASIC platform. java is the worst thing to happen to programming in ages.
There is no such thing as bytecode. These "registers" are lies. There is no runtime stack. The javac executable is really a wrapper around gzip. This "JVM" is a fabrication concocted by the infidel authors of GWBASIC and does not exist. These cowards have no morals. I blame Al-Jazeera- they are marketing for Sun. God will roast their stomachs in hell. They are not in control of anything- they don't even control their own code! Be assured, our CPUs are safe and protected from compressed interpreted source code. We have placed their threads in a quagmire from which they can never emerge unless they throw an exception. Java is a snake and we will cut it in pieces!
I hate spam but I'll fight for your right to send it.
A perversion of "I disagree with what you say but I'll fight for your right to say it." Spam is commercial speech and as such is undeserving of such allegiance. This has been well established by court precedent in the USA- commercial speech does not enjoy the same First Amendment protections as noncommercial (political) speech. Even if it were political speech, the way it's delivered can matter as well. You can't run around with a can of spray paint before an election and put political graffiti all over buildings, for example.
I don't want the government making laws about Internet content. Its just a bad idea. Tomorrow they might make a law against something you do.
There are two conflicting memes I see a lot concerning crime, legislation, and the Internet:
- Crimes involving the Internet are extra serious and require additional punishment and more savage sentences.
- Anything done on the Internet should be completely legal and unrestricted no matter what.
The first is fueled by simple post-9/11-style ignorance and fear. The second is based on an understandable fear of technically illiterate Senators introducing legislation written by corporate lobbyists. Yet in principle both are equally invalid because they fail to recognize that the Internet is a part of the real world and not some sort of alternate universe that requires a completely separate framework of crazy rules.
Another related meme, common in industry, and illustrative of the same point:
- Introducing the Internet into a business process renders it patentable.
Why does the Internet have this strange effect on people? There is nothing magical about the Internet that makes our ordinary common sense suddenly inapplicable. (You need a little bit of education, more than the average lawmaker has, but that should be it.) Some people simply cannot behave themselves. There is no valid reason that the social and legal principles we've developed for dealing with criminals in the real world shouldn't also work well on the Internet- which after all is merely a part of the real world. There are technical issues involved with catching troublemakers on the Internet that have no counterpart in "real life", but real life has its own set of technical issues that don't exist on the Internet.
If you can't behave yourself and screw things up for the general public, you should be punished. The fact that you're using TCP/IP at some point is irrelevant. It doesn't mean your activities should be branded as "cyberterrorism" deserving a doubled or tripled sentence, nor does it mean that anything goes.
(DISCLAIMER: I didn't write this myself- we were having an email conversation about F# today at work, and this is what our CEO had to say about it. I got his permission to repost his email here but he insisted on editing a few comments disparaging to Microsoft because he wants to encourage them to keep working on it.)
// an array of integers
/. 2.0);
.NET library matching clumsy. But if they could make it work, then that could get rid of two of the biggest perceived issues that have prevented widespread adoption of ocaml.
--snip--
F# seems to be based very closely upon ocaml, which was the language that I used for day to day work before Java.
I think ocaml is a fantastic language, although, like everything, it had a few significant problems five years ago:
- obscure [ F# could fix this ]
- not as many libraries as a mainstream language [ F# could fix this. ]
- not great module support - if module A depends on B, then B cannot depend on A.
Disclaimer: everything I say comes from personal, but old, experience, and a cursory look at the F# web site.
Interesting properties of ocaml:
1) Functions are first class objects. E.g..
let add x y = x+y;
let add3 = add 3;
print (add3 4);
-> 7
2) Polymorphism works well. So you could define a function that takes an array of objects x and a function that maps x to y, and produce an array of objects y. Eg
let a = [| 5,6,7 |]
print (Array.map add3 a)
-> [| 8,9,10 |]
3) Type checking is strong, compile time, and usually implicit. All types in the examples above are deduced correctly. Disadvantage: You can't have operator overloading, even for the plus sign... so + means integer addition, and +. means double addition.
4) You can return multiple values from a function
let cis t = (cos t,sin t);
let (ct,st) = cis (PI
print ct;
-> 0.0
5) Variables are final by default, but can explicitly be made not-final. There are also control structures that make many things that one does in Java by changing variables simpler. This can make debugging simpler, but takes a while to get used to.
6) There is some very powerful pattern matching code - imagine a more powerful case where you could say
int x;
Point y
switch (x,y) {
case 7,null: do this
case 4,Point(3,?) : do that
case x,Point(y,x) : print y
default:
}
[ Actually, there is no direct concept of null, but that is not the point. ]
I particularly liked ocaml as it allowed imperative features, had GC and exceptions, and had a very good compiler that produced fast code. I was very impressed by the French academic group that made it and supported it.
[ Note examples are not valid ocaml - they are ocaml features with a javaified syntax to make them easier to explain, and besides, I have not used the language for years. ]
The current F# implementation does not sound very efficient for a variety of reasons. It is also not nicely polymorphic in the same way that ocaml is. This defeats a lot of the point of it. They need support for generics in the VM for these to work well. There is a different group at MS research working on this - I would be delighted if both the F# project and the generics project make it into the mainstream.
It is not clear how well the ML view of types will match up with the C# view of types. ML programming feels different to Java programming, and this could make the
--snip--
Hey, some ads work! I've clicked lots of ads on Google and a few times found really useful stuff.
Like the eight sponsored links here.
In fact, when educated, most people will use their powers for good, not evil.. :)
Exactly. Most virus code is horribly written. If we're going to have malicious self-replicating code running on our machines, we should demand high quality code that doesn't crash. So many virus writers can't code their way out of a paper bag.
I demand my viruses to be written by CS graduates. If you don't at least have a CS degree, I won't click on the attachment.
You never had a right to privacy.
Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), one of the up-and-coming little neoconservative darlings of the Republican party, made this abundantly clear in an interview with the AP several weeks ago. Nobody took much note of what he said regarding privacy, because it was viewed by the press as a "gay" issue since he picked on them specifically. But he was essentially saying that if you did have a right to privacy, government would be powerless to regulate certain behavior, such as you having sex with your dog. Apparently this is a big problem in Pennsylvania and having to tolerate it would be too high of a price to pay for privacy.
No privacy for you!
Wow. Is this what it takes to get any sort of response from Geocities?
I set up a Geocities page in 1997. After they were bought by Yahoo, my password stopped working and I haven't been able to delete the page in years- which sucks because it's embarrassing to have a page with the digging man GIF in 2003. Geocities is unresponsive. I guess the solution is to release a worm that checks to see if the page is still there!
Does anybody have a copy of Fizzer? I have to edit one of its resource strings and post that baby on KaZaa.