I used Rational Rose for a month building UML diagrams for a client who wanted a me-too dot.com back in 2000. (Thank God they ran out of money like everyone else- they were clueless as hell and couldn't come up with a spec to save their lives.)
There were so many bugs and "bleeding-edge" features in Rose that looked cool but that weren't usable because of bugs. Printing was the worst. I repeatedly tried to print diagrams on all kinds of printers with no success. Each diagram came out the size of a postage stamp at the top left corner of each sheet of paper. It also liked to print out tons of blank sheets with a "page m of n" footer at the bottom. If you need lots of scrap paper it's a great product. We joked that Rational and the paper industry were in cahoots together.
They will not find simple repetition. That would mean that pi = p/q for two ints p and q and we know for a fact that pi is not only irrational (there is no p and q) but that it's transcendental (not the root of any polynomial with integer coefficients).
However, that doesn't mean they won't find a pattern. It isn't known whether pi is a normal number. A normal number is an irrational number where each digit 0-9 occurs 1/10 of the time, each pair of digits 00-99 occurs 1/100 of the time, etc. Pi is believed to be a normal number because it looks like one, but nobody has proven it.
A normal number may or may not occur in a predictable sequence. For example, this is the Champernowne constant:
0.12345678910111213141516171819202122232425.....
This is irrational and transendental and still there's an obvious pattern.
This is the Copeland-Erdos constant, which is like the Champernowne constant except you only use primes:
0.235711131719232931374143475359616771737983...
The Thue constant is an example of an irrational, transcendental number that is not normal. The nth digit is 1 if n is not divisible by 3 and is the complement of the (n/3)-th bit if n is divisible by 3. This is what it looks like in base 2:
0.110110111110110111110110110110110111110110... (and in base 10: 0.85909979685470310490357250...)
Try writing that as a fraction.
It's possible that on the way to the trillionth digit of pi they might find that something weird happens, like there's no digits except 0 and 9 after a certain point, but I doubt it.
What is the part you don't understand in "Concept programming is the idea that application concepts should be reflected in program code" ? That's much less than 5000 words.
And it's a meaningless statement that tells me nothing. Most modern middle-level and high-level programming languages make it possible to reflect application concepts in program code. Even an old despised language like COBOL (which was designed from the ground up to be readable by PHBs) satisfies your definition of "concept programming". And it's more difficult to pull off, but even C code can have this property.
I think what you're maybe trying to say is that program code should only reflect application concepts and nothing else (such as the other stuff that creeps in regarding types, memory allocations, etc.) This is probably the biggest part of a programming language's "personality"- whether it is low-level and best suited to working in the machine domain, or high-level and good for working within an abstract domain. No language seems to do both well, although most at least try.
But think about what you're doing. You're telling a computer how an application should behave in order to interact with some problem domain that is completely foreign to it. Doesn't it make sense to use a language that lets you specify behaviors in both domains? It's nice to do programming entirely in terms of the application's own semantics, but at some point somebody or something has to generate the machine instructions. If I'm using a language that wants me to forget the underlying machine details, I might write some pretty weird programs. At the very least, I'm putting a lot of trust in the behavior of the compiler.
The war on disease is being fought everyday by larger numbers of people than are in the military. Funny how you over look that fact to push your self righteous liberal agenda.
Somehow I think heart disease and cancer will prove harder to vanquish than say, Iraq.
Microsoft can obsolete DOS, but as of yet they haven't introduced a replacement that can get a machine on the network with a single floppy disk.
Their most likely solution: phase out the floppy drive. Intel and Microsoft have both been following Apple's lead (as usual) and pressuring OEMs to phase out the floppy. Soon the squiggles on ancient Greek ruins will be more readable than the floppies you're using today.
The issue is not whether "corporations have rights"; as a matter of law they do. That's pretty clear.
Here are the correct questions to ask in this case:
Does commercial speech enjoy the same level of First Amendment protection that applies to other forms of speech, such as political speech?
Does Verizon's intended use of its consumers' private data constitute an example of commercial speech, or political speech?
The answer to the first question is no. Commercial speech does not enjoy the same status as other forms of speech. Hence we have legislative restrictions on it. TV spots for pharmaceutical drugs have to mention the diarrhea, vomiting, rash, etc. Joe Camel cannot appear prominently in childrens' magazines, nor can any cigarette advertising appear on TV anymore. Newspaper advertisements designed to look like genuine articles have to prominently display the word "ADVERTISEMENT". Anti-spam legislation is beginning to appear in a few states. Nobody (successfully) raises First Amendment challenges to any of these laws because the question was settled long ago in case law. If it's commercial speech, then the First Amendment issues are a moot point.
And the answer to the second question should be obvious to anyone, unless they're being paid by Verizon to pretend they're too stupid to recognize that this is an example of commercial speech.
which is why the word "Nazi" is a german acronymn for the "National Socialist Workers Party"
The "National Socialist" name was propagandistic, dumbass. The Nazis needed all the political leverage they could get in the twenties. Hitler figured people would be dumb enough to fall for this, and he was right. In fact people still fall for it even today.
It's like the "Recording Industry Artists of America". Don't believe everything you read.
Hey, lets all "Ask William Shatner" why I don't yet have a subspace communicator built into the badge on my sweatshirt.
Hahaha, I can just imagine Kirk slapping on that thing and getting spammed. "Boost your subspace communicator signal!" "Dilithium herbal crystals!" "Barely legal teenaged green chicks!"
"Captain's log, stardate 10.25.2... We are going to beam down to the planet's surface, to meet the late Mr. Mogubutu's brother and transfer the funds from the dead ambassador's bank account to my own."
Re:Is that why spam in my Hotmail account has drop
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Same here. The spam noise level on Hotmail is so intense that instead of checking individual items to delete, it's easier to set your hotmail preferences to display only 25 emails at a time, and then when checking mail just always click on the "check all" box to tag EVERYTHING for deletion. Then quickly scan down the list and maybe uncheck the one piece of email that is worth reading. I've saved my index finger from carpal tunnel this way.
Anyway, I used to plow through at LEAST three screenfuls of garbage at a time this way on Hotmail, but in the past few days, I've been doing only one screenload and getting all of it. So maybe something has happened.
Of course, it's going to come back very soon, so don't get too used to this. It's strange how we've sort of come full circle from being an agricultural economy and shoveling horseshit all day, to having an industrial revolution, and then computers, and worldwide computer networks, and after all this we end up still having to shovel mountains of horseshit around on a daily basis.
Evolution happens over millenia, not in the course of a petri dish while Hal the Scientist watches.
Evolution happens over generations, not millenia! A millenium may have 50 human generations. For bacteria, 50 generations takes about 24 hours.
Lets put it this way. During our lifetime nothing has evolved. Some things have mutated, and mutation is part of evolution, but mutation is not evolution.
If you think antibiotic resistance (mutation + natural selection) is not an example of evolution then you are seriously mistaken.
Those of you hopping up and down about this should calm down. This is not a big story.
This copy of the Principia was one of the first edition copies. First editions are crap. They have all the errors and misspellings, and they come out with nicer editions afterward that make you feel stupid for not waiting a little longer. Just look at all those first edition "Lord of the Rings" DVDs that are now for sale on Ebay. Newton probably filled his "Principia Director's Cut" with at least 30 pages of extra stuff for those Renaissance astronomers who were willing to wait and pay a little extra for the famous "apple scene".
Second, you have to remember that the book really isn't that good. While Newton was trying to describe concepts such as planetary motion and orbital dynamics that usually involve calculus, the only branch of mathematics well known at the time was Euclidean geometry. So the Principia is dumbed down to the level of his contemporary boneheads- and it suffers greatly for it. For example, here is a section cut and pasted from the Principia (the author has been dead since 1727 so this is probably still safe):
PROPOSITION XI. PROBLEM VI. If a body revolves in an ellipsis; it is required to find the law of the centripetal force tending to the focus of the ellipsis.
Let S be the focus of the ellipsis. Draw SP cutting the diameter DK of the ellipsis in E, and the ordinate Qv in x; and complete the parallelogram QxPR. It is evident that EP is equal to the greater semi-axis AC: for drawing HI from the other focus H of the ellipsis parallel to EC, because CS, CH are equal, ES, EI will be also equal; so that EP is the half sum of PS, PI, that is (because of the parallels HI, PR, and the equal angles IPR, HPZ), of PS, PH, which taken together, are equal to the whole axis 2AC. Draw QT perpendicular to SP, and putting L for the principal latus rectum of the ellipsis (or for 2BC^2/AC), we shall have L QR to L Pv as QR to Pv, that is, as PE or AC to PC; and L Pv to GvP as L to Gv; and GvP to Qv^2 as PC^2 to CD^2; and by (Corol. 2, Lem. VII) the points Q and P coinciding, Qv^2 is to Qx^2 in the ratio of equality; and Qx^2 or Qv^2 is to QT^2 as EP^2 to PF^2, that is, as CA^2 to PF^2, or (by Lem. XII) as CD^2 to CB^2. And compounding all those ratios together, we shall have LQR to QT^2 as ACLPC^2CD^2, or 2CB^2PC^2CD^2 to PCGvCD^2CB^2, or as, 2PC to Gv. But the points Q and P coinciding, 2PC and Gr are equal. And therefore the quantities LQR and QT^2, proportional to these, will be also equal. Let those equals be drawn into SP2/QR, and LSP^2 will become equal to SP^2 QT^2 / QR. And therefore (by Corol. 1 and 5, Prop. VI) the centripetal force is reciprocally as LSP2, that is, reciprocally in the duplicate ratio of the distance SP. Q.E.D.
Holy crap! And you should see the pictures! Can you imagine it in Latin, too! Whoever stole this book is going to be sorry. You'd have to be a crazy person to want to steal this book, or to bid on it if it shows up on Ebay. I think we can assume that the remaining copies of this first edition Principia aren't going to walk anytime soon.
Explaining concepts for a wide audience using insufficiently advanced math is a very difficult trick to pull off. Feynman did a reasonably good job of it in QED. But seriously, would you rather read a book by Feynman or Newton? Feynman also wrote books that told you how to pick up bar chicks. Newton wrote his books in Latin and died a virgin. Before Feynman died he made history by breaking a piece of rubber on national TV. Newton's career, on the other hand, ended at the mint where he spent the rest of his life hanging counterfeiters. Both of these guys were really smart. But which one do you think did a better job at writing books for people with a limited attention span?
Third, the theories are wrong. They look good at first, and seem to explain most phenomena very well. But if you kick the tires and look at more accurate measurements, you start noticing things don't quite match up right. The perihelion of Mercury precesses, when Newton claims it shouldn't. And while F = GMm/r^2 gives good numbers for everyday work such as hurling probes at high speed into Mars, it's wrong. The equation is just wrong; it gives wrong answers! They're usually close but they're always wrong. The very first equation they teach you in high school physics is another one that Newton came up with, F=ma, and F=ma is wrong too! F starts to get bigger faster than a at high speeds! They have F=dp/dt, and that equation works with relativity, so why don't they indoctrinate kids' heads with that one? Probably because it uses Leibniz notation, and Newton hated Leibniz. And high school physics even today is under the thrall of Newton.
Did ye never hear of response expiries or page expiries or cache expiries etc etc...
Well duh, yeah I did, jackass. I was including a standard boilerplate of HTTP response headers to turn off page caching, and they worked with all proxies I tested, except this one from MS. I was sending "no cache" headers until I was blue in the face. Like I said, the aggressive caching turned out to be immune to everything except characters changing near the beginning of the URL- which to me indicates that someone was allocating a fixed array that they figured was big enough to hold any reasonable URL that could possibly exist. If the URL itself is different and you get a cached page anyway, then the proxy is a POS no matter what the HTTP pragmas are. End of story.
Remind me not to hire you ehh?
A simple "did you try setting your HTTP headers?" would have made your point. Rudeness is not a desirable trait in a supervisor- although I somehow doubt you're making any hiring decisions anyway.
The Second Law prohibits the transfer of useful work from a high entropy source (heat) into a low entropy source (an electric current).
So the steam turbines at the (nuclear or coal fired) power station aren't powering that computer you're posting from? I guess we all must live near hydroelectric stations then.
the java class that dealt with the downloads was a single process shared by all users!
Single process? Most Java server apps are single process and multithreaded. I think what you mean is that there was a single instance of that java class that multiple download threads were going through. Even that is OK if you stick to using local variables, but it sounds like someone was using instance variables which are seen by all threads.
I had a problem (back in 1999) with a customer who was behind a Microsoft proxy. To get around inappropriate caching by proxy servers, I would append a random parameter to each link URL (some junk like "&xyzzy=52526210") so that nobody would be requesting the same URL twice. So nobody should get an inappropriately cached page, right? Then people started complaining. User A would log in and start clicking around, and then User B would also log in. One click later, and User B would see an inappropriate page- with all the private details of User A! But we couldn't debug it on our side, because the last thing our server heard from User B was his login POST request. WTF?
You would think a proxy server would store the entire URL of a served page, or at least a hash of the entire URL. It turned out that Microsoft was allocating a fixed length array of 50 characters to store each URL in their cache table, so if there were no differences in the first 50 characters of the URL, the proxy would serve a cached version of the page- as if all the stuff in the rest of the URL wasn't important.
I moved the random parameter so it appeared in the first 50 characters and that fixed the problem.
Comic Book Guy: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere. Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow. [The download is interrupted by a banner ad for the "Internet King", with a little picture of Homer wearing a crown.] Hey, what the? Huh, the Internet King. I wonder if he can provide faster nudity.
[Scene changes to Homer's office]
Homer: Welcome to the internet my friend, how can I help you?
Comic Book Guy: I'm interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud Internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring Ethernet LAN configuration?
Homer:[long pause] Can I have some money now?
So you see, Homer ran a very typical Internet company. The only thing notable about it was the very untypical way it ended (for a dot-com, that is), with Bill Gates showing up in person to trash Homer's office. But you have to give the Simpson's writers credit. This was written in 1998 and back then nobody knew that an Internet company needs to turn a profit to survive.
"domain error: forces on balls too great"
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Gdk-ERROR **: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad file descriptor) on X server:0.0. attraction: domain error: forces on balls too great
Not that it's exactly on topic, but here are links to a few other pictures of Windows error messages and bluescreens from the same site that I thought were funny.
You mean it's impossible to write an endlessly recursive loop in ASP? I guess I must have missed the fanfare when Microsoft solved the halting problem.
For the last 420,000 years, atmospheric CO2 concentration has remained in a semistable equilibrium, between 180 and 280 ppm. Since 1750 the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has risen to 367 ppm. That's a global change.
If we wanted to raise or lower sea level by a meter, could we do it? Can we stop a hurricane from destroying Lousiana, or cause some flooding to occur in northwestern Mexico that needs it? No.
I guess you're saying the planet can't be getting hotter because we can't steer hurricanes around? Our lack of fine grained control over weather events doesn't somehow imply that we have no influence over climate in general.
I do have epilepsy, although it is not sensitive to strobe lights. Unless the protection scheme being used here causes a flickering in the range of 8-15 Hz (which may be possible), there should be no problem for strobe-sensitive epileptics. Bad fluorescent lighting can flicker within that range, and there are plenty of other natural strobe sources, like sunsets behind picket fences.
The most common artificial sources are things like Japanese cartoons and TV commercials. Advertisers especially love to use strobe effects. I was subscribed to an epilepsy mailing list a few years ago when some car commercial came out that used them gratuitously. It gave several list members seizures every time it came on. One of them had to quickly turn off the TV every commercial break because this commercial would leave her writhing on the floor every time.
They wrote a letter to the company, and got back a reply that basically said "Gee, that's a shame, but there aren't enough of you to really matter, and our research has shown that people are more likely to buy SUVs if they see strobe lights."
Over here, there is no such thing as punitive damages. One can only sue for real and quantifyable damage. [stuff deleted] The result? There are no cases in my countries legal history, of people sueing because they spilled hot coffee on their leg, tried to dry a poodle in the microwave, or any of that sort of idiocy.
The McDonald's case is a bad example- do a Google search. When people talk about tort reform they always trot out this overhyped example, as if there are no better ones to use.
That lady was originally willing to settle for $20,000 to cover medical expenses for the skin grafts, because she was broke and couldn't afford the medical bills. McDonald's made a counteroffer of $800 and refused to admit any responsibility or to adjust their thermostats. A mediator recommended settling for $225,000, but McDonald's refused and went to trial. What inflamed the jury was the fact that McDonald's had done a risk-benefit analysis on this issue. Several hundred people had gotten burned by the coffee, and at least one burn center had requested that McDonald's turn its coffee down. But overheating the coffee improved the aroma and allowed the use of a cheaper, inferior grade of beans. (When the coffee is burning your mouth you can't taste it.) McDonald's had concluded that the risk from settling the occasional suit would not offset the profits they would make from higher sales.
It also didn't help McDonald's that they were caught lying about this and the existence of the other claims in court. The jury set compensatory damages at $200,000 minus $40,000 for the lady's own contributory negligence, and then added the cost of two days' of coffee sales- which turned out to be $2.7 million. A judge lowered that to $480,000 and it was finally settled for an undisclosed amount.
The poodle in the microwave appears to be an urban legend. Maybe you can provide a link to a believable reference. But to me this looks like you've got issues with stupid old ladies.
Be warned that the media is extremely willing to overhype anecdotes of individuals abusing their rights to sue corporations. In fact those cases get pounced upon, like when that fat guy brought that moronic suit against fast food restaurants for making him fat. We got saturation coverage of that case. But these things go both ways. Abuses of the legal system by litigious corporations against individuals (and other corporations) are just as frequent, but they don't receive as much media attention, nor are they presented as evidence that the system is broken and in need of legislative reform.
I've used the JAR with no problems. If you use Limewire you should really run the JAR version because all the crap is in the installers. Stuff like that is difficult to write in Java anyway. Which is probably why they're so mentally disconnected from it- after all it isn't in their code.
There is a link for it on Limewire's site somewhere. Just go there and look for downloads for "operating system - other".
Set up a JRE on your computer first so you can download the JAR only.
Will someone read the goddamn article for once? I blockquote:
[blockquote deleted]
It is clearly a DRM issue. (Score:4, Insightful) my ass.
I think it's funny that you talked about people not reading the article, and then you blockquote a couple lines from it- and this gets you modded you up as "5, Informative".
Slashdot Mirror
I used Rational Rose for a month building UML diagrams for a client who wanted a me-too dot.com back in 2000. (Thank God they ran out of money like everyone else- they were clueless as hell and couldn't come up with a spec to save their lives.)
There were so many bugs and "bleeding-edge" features in Rose that looked cool but that weren't usable because of bugs. Printing was the worst. I repeatedly tried to print diagrams on all kinds of printers with no success. Each diagram came out the size of a postage stamp at the top left corner of each sheet of paper. It also liked to print out tons of blank sheets with a "page m of n" footer at the bottom. If you need lots of scrap paper it's a great product. We joked that Rational and the paper industry were in cahoots together.
They will not find simple repetition. That would mean that pi = p/q for two ints p and q and we know for a fact that pi is not only irrational (there is no p and q) but that it's transcendental (not the root of any polynomial with integer coefficients).
.
However, that doesn't mean they won't find a pattern. It isn't known whether pi is a normal number. A normal number is an irrational number where each digit 0-9 occurs 1/10 of the time, each pair of digits 00-99 occurs 1/100 of the time, etc. Pi is believed to be a normal number because it looks like one, but nobody has proven it.
A normal number may or may not occur in a predictable sequence. For example, this is the Champernowne constant:
0.12345678910111213141516171819202122232425....
This is irrational and transendental and still there's an obvious pattern.
This is the Copeland-Erdos constant, which is like the Champernowne constant except you only use primes:
0.235711131719232931374143475359616771737983...
The Thue constant is an example of an irrational, transcendental number that is not normal. The nth digit is 1 if n is not divisible by 3 and is the complement of the (n/3)-th bit if n is divisible by 3. This is what it looks like in base 2:
0.110110111110110111110110110110110111110110...
(and in base 10: 0.85909979685470310490357250...)
Try writing that as a fraction.
It's possible that on the way to the trillionth digit of pi they might find that something weird happens, like there's no digits except 0 and 9 after a certain point, but I doubt it.
Yeah, that was my point.
What is the part you don't understand in "Concept programming is the idea that application concepts should be reflected in program code" ? That's much less than 5000 words.
And it's a meaningless statement that tells me nothing. Most modern middle-level and high-level programming languages make it possible to reflect application concepts in program code. Even an old despised language like COBOL (which was designed from the ground up to be readable by PHBs) satisfies your definition of "concept programming". And it's more difficult to pull off, but even C code can have this property.
I think what you're maybe trying to say is that program code should only reflect application concepts and nothing else (such as the other stuff that creeps in regarding types, memory allocations, etc.) This is probably the biggest part of a programming language's "personality"- whether it is low-level and best suited to working in the machine domain, or high-level and good for working within an abstract domain. No language seems to do both well, although most at least try.
But think about what you're doing. You're telling a computer how an application should behave in order to interact with some problem domain that is completely foreign to it. Doesn't it make sense to use a language that lets you specify behaviors in both domains? It's nice to do programming entirely in terms of the application's own semantics, but at some point somebody or something has to generate the machine instructions. If I'm using a language that wants me to forget the underlying machine details, I might write some pretty weird programs. At the very least, I'm putting a lot of trust in the behavior of the compiler.
The war on disease is being fought everyday by larger numbers of people than are in the military. Funny how you over look that fact to push your self righteous liberal agenda.
Somehow I think heart disease and cancer will prove harder to vanquish than say, Iraq.
Yeah right, your story is complete BS.
.. how can a peice of circuit board make it into her meal?
It makes no sense
Many ways. For example, it could be carried by a swallow.
Microsoft can obsolete DOS, but as of yet they haven't introduced a replacement that can get a machine on the network with a single floppy disk.
Their most likely solution: phase out the floppy drive. Intel and Microsoft have both been following Apple's lead (as usual) and pressuring OEMs to phase out the floppy. Soon the squiggles on ancient Greek ruins will be more readable than the floppies you're using today.
The issue is not whether "corporations have rights"; as a matter of law they do. That's pretty clear.
Here are the correct questions to ask in this case:
The answer to the first question is no. Commercial speech does not enjoy the same status as other forms of speech. Hence we have legislative restrictions on it. TV spots for pharmaceutical drugs have to mention the diarrhea, vomiting, rash, etc. Joe Camel cannot appear prominently in childrens' magazines, nor can any cigarette advertising appear on TV anymore. Newspaper advertisements designed to look like genuine articles have to prominently display the word "ADVERTISEMENT". Anti-spam legislation is beginning to appear in a few states. Nobody (successfully) raises First Amendment challenges to any of these laws because the question was settled long ago in case law. If it's commercial speech, then the First Amendment issues are a moot point.
And the answer to the second question should be obvious to anyone, unless they're being paid by Verizon to pretend they're too stupid to recognize that this is an example of commercial speech.
which is why the word "Nazi" is a german acronymn for the "National Socialist Workers Party"
The "National Socialist" name was propagandistic, dumbass. The Nazis needed all the political leverage they could get in the twenties. Hitler figured people would be dumb enough to fall for this, and he was right. In fact people still fall for it even today.
It's like the "Recording Industry Artists of America". Don't believe everything you read.
Hey, lets all "Ask William Shatner" why I don't yet have a subspace communicator built into the badge on my sweatshirt.
Hahaha, I can just imagine Kirk slapping on that thing and getting spammed.
"Boost your subspace communicator signal!"
"Dilithium herbal crystals!"
"Barely legal teenaged green chicks!"
"Captain's log, stardate 10.25.2... We are going to beam down to the planet's surface, to meet the late Mr. Mogubutu's brother and transfer the funds from the dead ambassador's bank account to my own."
Same here. The spam noise level on Hotmail is so intense that instead of checking individual items to delete, it's easier to set your hotmail preferences to display only 25 emails at a time, and then when checking mail just always click on the "check all" box to tag EVERYTHING for deletion. Then quickly scan down the list and maybe uncheck the one piece of email that is worth reading. I've saved my index finger from carpal tunnel this way.
Anyway, I used to plow through at LEAST three screenfuls of garbage at a time this way on Hotmail, but in the past few days, I've been doing only one screenload and getting all of it. So maybe something has happened.
Of course, it's going to come back very soon, so don't get too used to this. It's strange how we've sort of come full circle from being an agricultural economy and shoveling horseshit all day, to having an industrial revolution, and then computers, and worldwide computer networks, and after all this we end up still having to shovel mountains of horseshit around on a daily basis.
Evolution happens over millenia, not in the course of a petri dish while Hal the Scientist watches.
Evolution happens over generations, not millenia! A millenium may have 50 human generations. For bacteria, 50 generations takes about 24 hours.
Lets put it this way. During our lifetime nothing has evolved. Some things have mutated, and mutation is part of evolution, but mutation is not evolution.
If you think antibiotic resistance (mutation + natural selection) is not an example of evolution then you are seriously mistaken.
Those of you hopping up and down about this should calm down. This is not a big story.
This copy of the Principia was one of the first edition copies. First editions are crap. They have all the errors and misspellings, and they come out with nicer editions afterward that make you feel stupid for not waiting a little longer. Just look at all those first edition "Lord of the Rings" DVDs that are now for sale on Ebay. Newton probably filled his "Principia Director's Cut" with at least 30 pages of extra stuff for those Renaissance astronomers who were willing to wait and pay a little extra for the famous "apple scene".
Second, you have to remember that the book really isn't that good. While Newton was trying to describe concepts such as planetary motion and orbital dynamics that usually involve calculus, the only branch of mathematics well known at the time was Euclidean geometry. So the Principia is dumbed down to the level of his contemporary boneheads- and it suffers greatly for it. For example, here is a section cut and pasted from the Principia (the author has been dead since 1727 so this is probably still safe):
PROPOSITION XI. PROBLEM VI.
If a body revolves in an ellipsis; it is required to find the law of the centripetal force tending to the focus of the ellipsis.
Let S be the focus of the ellipsis. Draw SP cutting the diameter DK of the ellipsis in E, and the ordinate Qv in x; and complete the parallelogram QxPR. It is evident that EP is equal to the greater semi-axis AC: for drawing HI from the other focus H of the ellipsis parallel to EC, because CS, CH are equal, ES, EI will be also equal; so that EP is the half sum of PS, PI, that is (because of the parallels HI, PR, and the equal angles IPR, HPZ), of PS, PH, which taken together, are equal to the whole axis 2AC. Draw QT perpendicular to SP, and putting L for the principal latus rectum of the ellipsis (or for 2BC^2/AC), we shall have L QR to L Pv as QR to Pv, that is, as PE or AC to PC; and L Pv to GvP as L to Gv; and GvP to Qv^2 as PC^2 to CD^2; and by (Corol. 2, Lem. VII) the points Q and P coinciding, Qv^2 is to Qx^2 in the ratio of equality; and Qx^2 or Qv^2 is to QT^2 as EP^2 to PF^2, that is, as CA^2 to PF^2, or (by Lem. XII) as CD^2 to CB^2. And compounding all those ratios together, we shall have LQR to QT^2 as ACLPC^2CD^2, or 2CB^2PC^2CD^2 to PCGvCD^2CB^2, or as, 2PC to Gv. But the points Q and P coinciding, 2PC and Gr are equal. And therefore the quantities LQR and QT^2, proportional to these, will be also equal. Let those equals be drawn into SP2/QR, and LSP^2 will become equal to SP^2 QT^2 / QR. And therefore (by Corol. 1 and 5, Prop. VI) the centripetal force is reciprocally as LSP2, that is, reciprocally in the duplicate ratio of the distance SP. Q.E.D.
Holy crap! And you should see the pictures! Can you imagine it in Latin, too! Whoever stole this book is going to be sorry. You'd have to be a crazy person to want to steal this book, or to bid on it if it shows up on Ebay. I think we can assume that the remaining copies of this first edition Principia aren't going to walk anytime soon.
Explaining concepts for a wide audience using insufficiently advanced math is a very difficult trick to pull off. Feynman did a reasonably good job of it in QED. But seriously, would you rather read a book by Feynman or Newton? Feynman also wrote books that told you how to pick up bar chicks. Newton wrote his books in Latin and died a virgin. Before Feynman died he made history by breaking a piece of rubber on national TV. Newton's career, on the other hand, ended at the mint where he spent the rest of his life hanging counterfeiters. Both of these guys were really smart. But which one do you think did a better job at writing books for people with a limited attention span?
Third, the theories are wrong. They look good at first, and seem to explain most phenomena very well. But if you kick the tires and look at more accurate measurements, you start noticing things don't quite match up right. The perihelion of Mercury precesses, when Newton claims it shouldn't. And while F = GMm/r^2 gives good numbers for everyday work such as hurling probes at high speed into Mars, it's wrong. The equation is just wrong; it gives wrong answers! They're usually close but they're always wrong. The very first equation they teach you in high school physics is another one that Newton came up with, F=ma, and F=ma is wrong too! F starts to get bigger faster than a at high speeds! They have F=dp/dt, and that equation works with relativity, so why don't they indoctrinate kids' heads with that one? Probably because it uses Leibniz notation, and Newton hated Leibniz. And high school physics even today is under the thrall of Newton.
...how can Congress get away with banning pot?
Maybe they'll argue that the smoke from a joint floats up into the air and crosses state lines.
It makes at least as much sense as Bush vs. Gore.
Did ye never hear of response expiries or page expiries or cache expiries etc etc...
Well duh, yeah I did, jackass. I was including a standard boilerplate of HTTP response headers to turn off page caching, and they worked with all proxies I tested, except this one from MS. I was sending "no cache" headers until I was blue in the face. Like I said, the aggressive caching turned out to be immune to everything except characters changing near the beginning of the URL- which to me indicates that someone was allocating a fixed array that they figured was big enough to hold any reasonable URL that could possibly exist. If the URL itself is different and you get a cached page anyway, then the proxy is a POS no matter what the HTTP pragmas are. End of story.
Remind me not to hire you ehh?
A simple "did you try setting your HTTP headers?" would have made your point. Rudeness is not a desirable trait in a supervisor- although I somehow doubt you're making any hiring decisions anyway.
The Second Law prohibits the transfer of useful work from a high entropy source (heat) into a low entropy source (an electric current).
So the steam turbines at the (nuclear or coal fired) power station aren't powering that computer you're posting from? I guess we all must live near hydroelectric stations then.
the java class that dealt with the downloads was a single process shared by all users!
Single process? Most Java server apps are single process and multithreaded. I think what you mean is that there was a single instance of that java class that multiple download threads were going through. Even that is OK if you stick to using local variables, but it sounds like someone was using instance variables which are seen by all threads.
I had a problem (back in 1999) with a customer who was behind a Microsoft proxy. To get around inappropriate caching by proxy servers, I would append a random parameter to each link URL (some junk like "&xyzzy=52526210") so that nobody would be requesting the same URL twice. So nobody should get an inappropriately cached page, right? Then people started complaining. User A would log in and start clicking around, and then User B would also log in. One click later, and User B would see an inappropriate page- with all the private details of User A! But we couldn't debug it on our side, because the last thing our server heard from User B was his login POST request. WTF?
You would think a proxy server would store the entire URL of a served page, or at least a hash of the entire URL. It turned out that Microsoft was allocating a fixed length array of 50 characters to store each URL in their cache table, so if there were no differences in the first 50 characters of the URL, the proxy would serve a cached version of the page- as if all the stuff in the rest of the URL wasn't important.
I moved the random parameter so it appeared in the first 50 characters and that fixed the problem.
The Internet King episode aired in February 1998.
Comic Book Guy: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere. Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow. [The download is interrupted by a banner ad for the "Internet King", with a little picture of Homer wearing a crown.] Hey, what the? Huh, the Internet King. I wonder if he can provide faster nudity.
[Scene changes to Homer's office]
Homer: Welcome to the internet my friend, how can I help you?
Comic Book Guy: I'm interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud Internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring Ethernet LAN configuration?
Homer: [long pause] Can I have some money now?
So you see, Homer ran a very typical Internet company. The only thing notable about it was the very untypical way it ended (for a dot-com, that is), with Bill Gates showing up in person to trash Homer's office. But you have to give the Simpson's writers credit. This was written in 1998 and back then nobody knew that an Internet company needs to turn a profit to survive.
Gdk-ERROR **: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad file descriptor) on X server :0.0.
attraction: domain error: forces on balls too great
Here is a screenshot.
Not that it's exactly on topic, but here are links to a few other pictures of Windows error messages and bluescreens from the same site that I thought were funny.
You mean it's impossible to write an endlessly recursive loop in ASP? I guess I must have missed the fanfare when Microsoft solved the halting problem.
All your examples are local or regional.
For the last 420,000 years, atmospheric CO2 concentration has remained in a semistable equilibrium, between 180 and 280 ppm. Since 1750 the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has risen to 367 ppm. That's a global change.
If we wanted to raise or lower sea level by a meter, could we do it? Can we stop a hurricane from destroying Lousiana, or cause some flooding to occur in northwestern Mexico that needs it? No.
I guess you're saying the planet can't be getting hotter because we can't steer hurricanes around? Our lack of fine grained control over weather events doesn't somehow imply that we have no influence over climate in general.
I do have epilepsy, although it is not sensitive to strobe lights. Unless the protection scheme being used here causes a flickering in the range of 8-15 Hz (which may be possible), there should be no problem for strobe-sensitive epileptics. Bad fluorescent lighting can flicker within that range, and there are plenty of other natural strobe sources, like sunsets behind picket fences.
The most common artificial sources are things like Japanese cartoons and TV commercials. Advertisers especially love to use strobe effects. I was subscribed to an epilepsy mailing list a few years ago when some car commercial came out that used them gratuitously. It gave several list members seizures every time it came on. One of them had to quickly turn off the TV every commercial break because this commercial would leave her writhing on the floor every time.
They wrote a letter to the company, and got back a reply that basically said "Gee, that's a shame, but there aren't enough of you to really matter, and our research has shown that people are more likely to buy SUVs if they see strobe lights."
Over here, there is no such thing as punitive damages. One can only sue for real and quantifyable damage. [stuff deleted] The result? There are no cases in my countries legal history, of people sueing because they spilled hot coffee on their leg, tried to dry a poodle in the microwave, or any of that sort of idiocy.
The McDonald's case is a bad example- do a Google search. When people talk about tort reform they always trot out this overhyped example, as if there are no better ones to use.
That lady was originally willing to settle for $20,000 to cover medical expenses for the skin grafts, because she was broke and couldn't afford the medical bills. McDonald's made a counteroffer of $800 and refused to admit any responsibility or to adjust their thermostats. A mediator recommended settling for $225,000, but McDonald's refused and went to trial.
What inflamed the jury was the fact that McDonald's had done a risk-benefit analysis on this issue. Several hundred people had gotten burned by the coffee, and at least one burn center had requested that McDonald's turn its coffee down. But overheating the coffee improved the aroma and allowed the use of a cheaper, inferior grade of beans. (When the coffee is burning your mouth you can't taste it.) McDonald's had concluded that the risk from settling the occasional suit would not offset the profits they would make from higher sales.
It also didn't help McDonald's that they were caught lying about this and the existence of the other claims in court. The jury set compensatory damages at $200,000 minus $40,000 for the lady's own contributory negligence, and then added the cost of two days' of coffee sales- which turned out to be $2.7 million. A judge lowered that to $480,000 and it was finally settled for an undisclosed amount.
The poodle in the microwave appears to be an urban legend. Maybe you can provide a link to a believable reference. But to me this looks like you've got issues with stupid old ladies.
Be warned that the media is extremely willing to overhype anecdotes of individuals abusing their rights to sue corporations. In fact those cases get pounced upon, like when that fat guy brought that moronic suit against fast food restaurants for making him fat. We got saturation coverage of that case. But these things go both ways. Abuses of the legal system by litigious corporations against individuals (and other corporations) are just as frequent, but they don't receive as much media attention, nor are they presented as evidence that the system is broken and in need of legislative reform.
I've used the JAR with no problems. If you use Limewire you should really run the JAR version because all the crap is in the installers. Stuff like that is difficult to write in Java anyway. Which is probably why they're so mentally disconnected from it- after all it isn't in their code.
There is a link for it on Limewire's site somewhere. Just go there and look for downloads for "operating system - other".
Set up a JRE on your computer first so you can download the JAR only.
Will someone read the goddamn article for once? I blockquote:
[blockquote deleted]
It is clearly a DRM issue. (Score:4, Insightful) my ass.
I think it's funny that you talked about people not reading the article, and then you blockquote a couple lines from it- and this gets you modded you up as "5, Informative".