While the moral basis undoubtedly contributes I wouldn't underestimate the impact of fiscal policy. There's a reason why Republicans lose when they start spending money irresponsibly...
Yes, Reagan got crushed in '84 after all that irresponsible defence spending that ballooned the size of the government like never before. And then, after the Star Wars debacle, his planned successor in Bush Sr. was again crushed at the polls in '88. And even then they didn't learn their lessons, with Bush Jr. starting an unnecessary war in Iraq that cost billions. Naturally he was promptly heaved from office in 2004 as one would expect.
... but there was a reason it was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe it added too much of a somber tone, or maybe it was deemed redundant when vader later notes that skywalker had created a lightsaber.
I think it's easier to guess the reason than that -- when would the scene be inserted into the movie? It would have to be before Luke arrives at Jabba's since the lightsabre was already secreted away in R2-D2 by then. But of course that ruins the surprise and excitement at the Sarlac pit since you'll be expecting and looking for the lightsabre the whole time. The only other way to include the scene would be as a flashback, but that would be very odd, and possibly a little jarring. So, better to just leave it out altogether.
And had you bothered to use a language with suitable contract annotations that can be verified by a theorem prover (I'm thinking of Java with JML, or SPARK-Ada, or HasCASL here) you could catch a whole slew more errors (including various logic errors) with a theorem prover run (no harder than a compile step) and have a large amount of the unit tests you would have to write automatically generated, not to mention having far more complete documentation of your APIs as you go. You could save yourself vast amounts of time. And yet I seem to find few static type proponents who want to do this. They always answer with the same answer that dynamic type enthusiats give the static typers: "it's too much work". Of course it's a little more work, but you make up gains later... assuming your project is in a position to make those later gains. So perhaps, just perhaps, it depends on the project and you just happened upon some very poor usage of ruby. And perhaps you ought to spend some time learning JML or SPARK-Ada so you understand what proper static checking is and can use it in your projects to save yourself even more time.
So, kind of like Netscape/IE or practically every other app or feature that's ever been added to an OS.
Yes, just like that, except in a world where Netscape had to submit a copy of their browser to Microsoft for inspection prior to release, during which time MS stalled and started development of IE such that when Netscape finally hit the market IE was already developed and integrated into Windows.
The premise of intelligent design is that God wasn't able to create a universe in which everything happened automatically. instead, it argues that He created the universe, and then had to constantly meddle because He couldn't [do certain things]... by following the physical laws that He, Himself, made. This is utterly against my religion's conception of God, in which He does not make such mistakes.
Of course, this leads to some theological difficulties. A god who doesn't make mistakes that require after the fact correction and meddling is a god who doesn't need to incarnate himself in human to meddle and make things come out right. That tends to preclude being a Christian unless you're one of those Christians that denies the divinity of Christ (at which point I have to start asking what the point is again -- if you're holding up Christ as an ethical teacher I would point out that Gautama Siddharta was a better one).
It is possible, of course, to extract yourself from said difficulties with suitable excuses, but then similar excuses can be used to extract the creationists from their difficulties -- sure their excuses are more obvious bald-faced "wishing makes it so", but it's a matter of degree not kind.
A single dinosaur bone in Precambrian sandstone would disprove evolution quite nicely, or a bird fossil found in sediments that date from before the evolution of reptiles.
Sigh. No it wouldn't... just like the scores of oddities that exist in the fossil record that evolution has similarly chosen to explain away.
Yes, well, welcome to more nuanced philosophy of science than Popper as misinterpreted by idiots (to Popper's credit, he did manage to distill out a sufficiently robust idea that, even when regurgitated by Slashdotters, it still makes a fair amount of sense). If we instead go with Kuhn (as a slightly more modern take on philosophy of science than Popper) we see that, indeed, a single piece of evidence to the contrary is not going to overturn a theory; it will get explained away, or folded into the present understanding by some adjustments to the theory. It's only when a critical mass of such problems builds up (it must, after all, be enough evidence to provide significant counterweight to all the positive evidence in favour of a theory) that a theory will get refuted and a significant change in thinking will occur.
That doesn't make Popper's observation pointless -- if your theory isn't even in principle falsifiable then you clearly aren't doing science -- it just isn't a sufficient condition to be doing science. What you really need is a plausible possibility that it would be practical for a sufficient amount of counter-evidence to build up to overturn the theory. And evolution does meet this: it's just that there is so much positive evidence in favour of evolution -- so many things that match up so well -- that it is going to take enough counter-examples to show systemic problems. The few here and there (and they really are few and far between) that can be reasonably explained away ("polystrate" trees for example) just don't cut it. Find enough issues like that however, and evolution could certainly conceivably be overturned; it is going to take a lot of such evidence however.
And interestingly, for the job specified ("life-critical real-time" software), C is not the proper tool for the job. It lacks real safety (the type system is weak and somewhat sloppy), and doesn't exactly have good threading support. A much better tool would be Ada, or even SPARK-Ada, which really shines in safety-critical and real time software (indeed, real time and embedded software is where Ada remains a major player, and SPARK-Ada, with its rigour and proof tools, is the stand out when it comes to safety-critical or high reliability software).
Do you think it's harder to do in other languages? I can't say for Japanese, but I can assure you that there are far more Anglicisms in Russian than there are Russisms in English.
I can speak for Japanese, and I can assure you it is positively filled with borrowed words from English. Sometimes they get collapsed down in the process and are not immediately obviously traceable back to the source, but they are there. How many words in English are borrowed from Japanese?
I actually think that perl is the best programming language ever designed.
Wait, perl was designed?! I thought it was just semi-randomly accumulated as a wobbly glutinous blob, with a bit of natural selection going on to determine which of the many different ways of doing things are the most commonly used. Designed is far too strong a word.
There seems to be some viking farms being uncovered in Greenland. Yup, the glaciers are melting and in the process exposing abandoned farms. Hmm. Seems to me that if there were farms where there's currently glaciers, that would imply it being much warmer in the past.
Do you actually have a cite for this, because it would be significant news to me -- not the fact that there were Norse farms in Greenland, but that there are Norse farms that are only now being uncovered by retreating glaciers. You see, as far as I know (and I've had an ongoing interest in the Norse settlements in Greenland) all the settlements that were ever mentioned in historical records have been accounted for -- the Eastern and Western settlements. For some time no-one quite believed in the Eastern settlement, until they eventually found it, not quite where people were expecting. So, two settlements known from records, two settlements found. Are either of those settlements under ice? It seems Google maps and satellite photos can come to out aid. Consider these Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
Obviously not "under ice", but rather sitting in what are nice green pastures (the benefits of being situated in fjords). So can you tell me where the newly discovered settlements that are being revealed by retreating glaciers are to be found?
This should not be underestimated. If you haven't actually had the opportunity to play with an OLPC you may not understand how remarkably rugged they are. Yes they are a little heavy compared to nice slim laptops, but they are very solidly built and can take quite a beating without worry. The fact that they are waterproof and lack moving parts (hence less damage from falls etc.) is just icing.
So every time the government needs to replace a number of desktops, it also has to consider replacing the entire IT infrastructure?
No; read the case. The government can have specific constraints in its bid if it has a documented study showing why those are reasonable and necessary constraints. It has to consider replacing the entire IT infrastructure every five years or so (in case the situation changes -- new versions of Windows, new versions of Linux distros etc.), and based on the results of that, it can do what was recommended with regard to replacing desktops in the interim.
This is a dangerous line of logic to go down. The entity directly responsible for the crime shoulders all of the blame (unless there are conspirators, etc.). Enablers, direct and indirect, can't reasonably count. The connections become too tenuous, too difficult to trace and too intertwined with other issues. I pay a guy to do my roof who likes to eat apples harvested by the guy who uses faulty ladders. Am I at fault? After all, I should have checked out where my contractor was getting his apples from so that none of my money paid to him ended up going to the crooked apply farmer.
But you should take responsibility for such things (apparently). You see in a paerfect libertarian world you would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and start checking the internet and newspapers for any and all scraps of information about companies you may purchase products from. Perhaps your fruit suppliers are now using unethical labour practices (it's up to you the consumer to police that and stop buying from them of course). Perhaps its been found that your lunch meat supplier is occasionally a little lax in their packaging plants and there is potentially contaminated meat out there (we can't give the government powers to regulate that sort of thing). You'll probably also have to check in on any and all processed foods you might want to buy -- it's not like they will publish their ingredients (or if they do, there's no reason to assume they aren't just lying) -- who knows, maybe your favourite brand of peanut butter has realised that lacing their product with opium for that extra addictive quality really helps sales.
Of course you can't just do a casual read to find these things out; large companies with plenty of money can run effective disinformation campaigns in the mainstream media, or otherwise cover up such incidents. You'll have to dig deep through pages of personal consumer reports, spot and ignore the paid industry shills, and so on.
You'll probably be done with that around midday -- presuming you do it every morning to keep up to date and are fairly practiced and know where to hunt down the right information. Now it's time to work on the second order issues: are companies you wish to buy from aiding, funding, abetting, or buying from any companies you have deemed unethical, or inappropriate to support? This is, of course, a bigger task again. Not only do you have the problems tracking down information as before, you have an order of magnitude more companies to work through, and complex supply chains (which you can be sure will use all sorts of subsiaries, front companies, and other misdirections) to dig through. If you're lucky you might get done all of that before midnight.
That leaves you just enough time to go to bed safe in the knowledge that you are using the money you no longer have the time to earn to make informed consumer choices buying products that you no longer have the time to purchase. And even better, you get to do it all again tomorrow.
Since most businesses run Microsoft servers, and use Exchange for email, it should be easy for a Microsoft phone to rule the business space... Put specialized phone management capabilities in their server-side tools to make the IT department happy (right now, IT usually detests supporting iPhones).
The Microsoft of old would have done that and more -- added a variety of extensions to Exchange that only work with Microsoft phones; 'accidentally' broken things with exchange updates that break or significantly degrade performance for iPhones and Blackberries (sure, people will complain to the IT department, but what are you going to do, switch from Exchange?), etc. etc.
Current day Microsoft has been slapped around enough by the EU over antitrust issues that they don't dare pull that sort of shit anymore. Free MS from their anti-trust shackles, however, and they would very quickly move in a dominate the phone market if they cared to.
...The terrifying alternative, of course, being that Wall Street has discovered a way to create a literally infinite quantity of money, and a year from now, the only way to tell who is richer than whom will be by comparing the size of two transfinite ordinals.
But surely a quantity of money will be cardinal nor ordinal? That will certainly raise interesting questions with regard to the continuum hypothesis. I also wonder if they accept large inaccessible cardinals. Perhaps there is a practical use for Grothendieck universes after all...
Re:Meandering story not going anywhere
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I gave up on "lost", it seemed to be a meandering plot with hints but no resolutions.
I gave up around the season one/season two transition when it became clear that the writers didn't have any resolutions to their mysteries: instead of resolving anything they would distract with some other "bigger" mystery instead. It quickly became littered with loose plot threads that were clearly never going to be resolved. I am unsurprised to learn that the writers apparently painted themselves into a corner and took the "it was all a dream" style Deus ex Machina to dig themselves out. Of course that still doesn't resolve the dozens of minor plot mysteries they left scattered along the way, but I guess they hope people have forgotten about them.
For around five years now the Mac has been free of viruses and malware. So who has been more wrong, the person who rightfully believes the platform is free of malware or the person who thinks if something may someday have malware it is eqivilent to having it?
I think the issue is more about the difference between "free from malware" and "invulnerable to malware". The former is true, the latter is not, yet there a re a great many Mac users who are quite sure that the latter is true. That's not a problem now, but it could be, especially if that attitude is fostered. Promoting a virtue (the mac is free of malware) is not the same as promoting ignorance (the mac is invulnerable to malware).
It still drives me up the wall how much cash I blew for my undergraduate CS degree. Looking at what I "learned" from my classes and what I taught myself in that period of time, I would have been much better off to have saved the $80K I spent on schooling and self taught.
Sounds like you picked the wrong major, or the wrong school, or both. I can't imagine self instruction for all the material I learned at university -- and I've had plenty of opportunity since leaving, having to try and pick up some different fields via self instruction, to see what its like. Yes, it can be done, but its an uphill struggle, and I would really appreciate a course from a knowledgeable instructor... but then I majored in mathematics, and wasn't looking at my education as job training.
If you know Java, pointers in C will be black magic to you.
Not really. I think some people want to believe that so they can feel smug, but it simply isn't true. Take me as an example. I did some programming in BASIC when I was very young, and eventually dabbled in a little bit of C, but never got as far as pointers -- but I didn't have much need for programming, so I didn't bother to learn. Then for my Master's thesis I finally needed to do some programming, so I learned a language properly; sadly that language was Maple (which was appropriate for the software I needed to write, but not useful as a way of getting back to programming). From there I ended up needing more programming as I moved through various jobs. I learned perl, then picked up Delphi, then a little VB, then python; after than I had to give myself a crash course in Java, after which I learned Eiffel and Ada for my own interest as well as dabbling in a variety of other languages (including lisp, ML, and Scala). After that I finally ended up with a job where I needed to go back to C. So, were pointers black magic to me, having never learned them and with that sorry mix of languages as my background? Not in the least. It was all very obvious and straightforward and never presented any difficulties because I had a solid enough grasp of how programming languages in general worked. There's nothing fancy about "being close to the metal", it's just a different level of abstraction.
That is propaganda and was completely ridiculous when the first 'scientist' thought it up. It's about as smart as the 'Greenland isn't really green' argument. We all know that, but there are settlements that are still under ice that weren't during the MWP.
Really? You wouldn't happend to have any reference at all for that would you? The settlements under ice that is... there were Norse settlements on Greenland, and the historical records spoke of an Eastern and a Western settlement. For some time no-one quite believed in the Eastern settlement, until they eventually found it, not quite where people were expecting. So, two settlements known from records, two settlements found. Are either of those settlements under ice? It seems Google maps and satellite photos can come to out aid. Consider these Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
Obviously not "under ice", but rather sitting in what are nice green pastures (the benefits of being situated in fjords). So, the question remains -- what of these mysterious settlements that are still "under ice"? How do we know they're there? Certainly no historical records of any kind mention anything other than the Eastern and Western settlements, which as we saw are clearly far from "under ice". No one has found settlements under ice that I'm aware of. So please... enlighten me, I want to know about these under ice settlements.
I wonder how you would react if the House of Commons were to say that the e-mails are undeniable proof that global warming is a scam.
Well at that point I would be inclined to actually take a look at the emails in detail myself, hopefully in conjunction with the report which would highlight the glaring points. The house of commons didn't say that, however, so until something new actually turns up I will continue to view this whole debacle as the storm in a teacup that it appears to be.
Ever since my daughter was able to speak, I've been playing games and doing things that help to "feel" math, not just know math facts.
I expect that will advance her mathematics no end. Quite some time ago I wrote about the difference between mathematics and facts about mathematics: the former is important, the latter is largely all that gets taught. It's like teaching history by simply making kids do nothing memorise names and dates -- sure they can regurgitate facts well, but they have no idea what any of it means, and hence have little chance dealing with history as a more advanced subject later (and yes, I know that history is indeed taught this badly in many places). Unfortunately it takes someone who actually has a feel for and deeper understanding of mathematics to do more than mindlessly teach rote facts from a textbook, and the sort of people who have that understanding are not the sort of people who tend to go in for elementary school teaching.
My wife and I recently had our first child. There were mistakes during the epidural phase which required another one to be done about 8 hours after we arrived. Due to this we wanted to see an itemized bill and what we received was right in line with what all the horror stories tell you
My wife and I recently had our first child. It was a long and difficult labour that eventually resulted in a Cesarean section and post-partum hospital stay. We didn't receive an itemized bill, but then we didn't need one -- we live in Canada and and so everything was covered under the provincial health plan: we showed them my wife's health card when we arrived and never gave a second thought to it after that.
Now, instead of having a public option--which will just push this burden on to the people while "insuring" those who are currently uninsured, the government should have made it clear that this type of overcharging and clearly obtuse billing charges are unacceptable. But no, instead we're going to pass a bill which costs a trillion dollars (of money which we don't already have) and then it's going to do very little to fix the real problems inherent in the health care industry.
We don't really have obtuse billing and overcharging since the government can (as the single payer) reign it in very easily -- they have a very strong negotiating position. So yes, my wife and I do pay for health insurance (it's right there in our provincial taxes as an extra levy), but it's not that much compared to what my brother, who lived in the US for some time, was paying, and the government can easily hold overcharging in check. Perhaps a public option isn't such a bad plan after all?
It's really all about classifying shapes. For two dimensional things this is pretty easy, at least as far as the topology goes: you need to know the curvature and "how many holes does it have" and that's it -- this is the whole topologist not knowing a coffee cup from a donut since they both have one hole and hence can be deformed one into the other (note that this is two dimensional because we are considering the 2-dimensional surface on the donut and coffee cup). In dimensions higher than two things start getting trickier because more bizarre configurations become possible. Perelman's work, which actually goes toward proving the rather more far reaching Geometrization Conjecture (due to Thurston), essentially lays out how you can classify all the different (from a topological point of view) shapes of things in three dimensions and higher.
What are the implications? Well, one reasonable question is: what is the topology of the universe like; what shape is the universe? Since the universe is a three dimensional manifold that turns out to be tricky. Perelman's work lays out the groundwork to be able to answer such a question.
Slashdot Mirror
While the moral basis undoubtedly contributes I wouldn't underestimate the impact of fiscal policy. There's a reason why Republicans lose when they start spending money irresponsibly ...
Yes, Reagan got crushed in '84 after all that irresponsible defence spending that ballooned the size of the government like never before. And then, after the Star Wars debacle, his planned successor in Bush Sr. was again crushed at the polls in '88. And even then they didn't learn their lessons, with Bush Jr. starting an unnecessary war in Iraq that cost billions. Naturally he was promptly heaved from office in 2004 as one would expect.
... but there was a reason it was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe it added too much of a somber tone, or maybe it was deemed redundant when vader later notes that skywalker had created a lightsaber.
I think it's easier to guess the reason than that -- when would the scene be inserted into the movie? It would have to be before Luke arrives at Jabba's since the lightsabre was already secreted away in R2-D2 by then. But of course that ruins the surprise and excitement at the Sarlac pit since you'll be expecting and looking for the lightsabre the whole time. The only other way to include the scene would be as a flashback, but that would be very odd, and possibly a little jarring. So, better to just leave it out altogether.
And had you bothered to use a language with suitable contract annotations that can be verified by a theorem prover (I'm thinking of Java with JML, or SPARK-Ada, or HasCASL here) you could catch a whole slew more errors (including various logic errors) with a theorem prover run (no harder than a compile step) and have a large amount of the unit tests you would have to write automatically generated, not to mention having far more complete documentation of your APIs as you go. You could save yourself vast amounts of time. And yet I seem to find few static type proponents who want to do this. They always answer with the same answer that dynamic type enthusiats give the static typers: "it's too much work". Of course it's a little more work, but you make up gains later ... assuming your project is in a position to make those later gains. So perhaps, just perhaps, it depends on the project and you just happened upon some very poor usage of ruby. And perhaps you ought to spend some time learning JML or SPARK-Ada so you understand what proper static checking is and can use it in your projects to save yourself even more time.
So, kind of like Netscape/IE or practically every other app or feature that's ever been added to an OS.
Yes, just like that, except in a world where Netscape had to submit a copy of their browser to Microsoft for inspection prior to release, during which time MS stalled and started development of IE such that when Netscape finally hit the market IE was already developed and integrated into Windows.
The premise of intelligent design is that God wasn't able to create a universe in which everything happened automatically. instead, it argues that He created the universe, and then had to constantly meddle because He couldn't [do certain things] ... by following the physical laws that He, Himself, made. This is utterly against my religion's conception of God, in which He does not make such mistakes.
Of course, this leads to some theological difficulties. A god who doesn't make mistakes that require after the fact correction and meddling is a god who doesn't need to incarnate himself in human to meddle and make things come out right. That tends to preclude being a Christian unless you're one of those Christians that denies the divinity of Christ (at which point I have to start asking what the point is again -- if you're holding up Christ as an ethical teacher I would point out that Gautama Siddharta was a better one).
It is possible, of course, to extract yourself from said difficulties with suitable excuses, but then similar excuses can be used to extract the creationists from their difficulties -- sure their excuses are more obvious bald-faced "wishing makes it so", but it's a matter of degree not kind.
A single dinosaur bone in Precambrian sandstone would disprove evolution quite nicely, or a bird fossil found in sediments that date from before the evolution of reptiles.
Sigh. No it wouldn't... just like the scores of oddities that exist in the fossil record that evolution has similarly chosen to explain away.
Yes, well, welcome to more nuanced philosophy of science than Popper as misinterpreted by idiots (to Popper's credit, he did manage to distill out a sufficiently robust idea that, even when regurgitated by Slashdotters, it still makes a fair amount of sense). If we instead go with Kuhn (as a slightly more modern take on philosophy of science than Popper) we see that, indeed, a single piece of evidence to the contrary is not going to overturn a theory; it will get explained away, or folded into the present understanding by some adjustments to the theory. It's only when a critical mass of such problems builds up (it must, after all, be enough evidence to provide significant counterweight to all the positive evidence in favour of a theory) that a theory will get refuted and a significant change in thinking will occur.
That doesn't make Popper's observation pointless -- if your theory isn't even in principle falsifiable then you clearly aren't doing science -- it just isn't a sufficient condition to be doing science. What you really need is a plausible possibility that it would be practical for a sufficient amount of counter-evidence to build up to overturn the theory. And evolution does meet this: it's just that there is so much positive evidence in favour of evolution -- so many things that match up so well -- that it is going to take enough counter-examples to show systemic problems. The few here and there (and they really are few and far between) that can be reasonably explained away ("polystrate" trees for example) just don't cut it. Find enough issues like that however, and evolution could certainly conceivably be overturned; it is going to take a lot of such evidence however.
The key is to pick the proper tool for the job.
And interestingly, for the job specified ("life-critical real-time" software), C is not the proper tool for the job. It lacks real safety (the type system is weak and somewhat sloppy), and doesn't exactly have good threading support. A much better tool would be Ada, or even SPARK-Ada, which really shines in safety-critical and real time software (indeed, real time and embedded software is where Ada remains a major player, and SPARK-Ada, with its rigour and proof tools, is the stand out when it comes to safety-critical or high reliability software).
Do you think it's harder to do in other languages? I can't say for Japanese, but I can assure you that there are far more Anglicisms in Russian than there are Russisms in English.
I can speak for Japanese, and I can assure you it is positively filled with borrowed words from English. Sometimes they get collapsed down in the process and are not immediately obviously traceable back to the source, but they are there. How many words in English are borrowed from Japanese?
I actually think that perl is the best programming language ever designed.
Wait, perl was designed?! I thought it was just semi-randomly accumulated as a wobbly glutinous blob, with a bit of natural selection going on to determine which of the many different ways of doing things are the most commonly used. Designed is far too strong a word.
There seems to be some viking farms being uncovered in Greenland. Yup, the glaciers are melting and in the process exposing abandoned farms. Hmm. Seems to me that if there were farms where there's currently glaciers, that would imply it being much warmer in the past.
Do you actually have a cite for this, because it would be significant news to me -- not the fact that there were Norse farms in Greenland, but that there are Norse farms that are only now being uncovered by retreating glaciers. You see, as far as I know (and I've had an ongoing interest in the Norse settlements in Greenland) all the settlements that were ever mentioned in historical records have been accounted for -- the Eastern and Western settlements. For some time no-one quite believed in the Eastern settlement, until they eventually found it, not quite where people were expecting. So, two settlements known from records, two settlements found. Are either of those settlements under ice? It seems Google maps and satellite photos can come to out aid. Consider these Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
Eastern settlement area, and Eastern settlment map
Western settlement area, and Western settlement map.
Just for reference, here is a zoom of the area of the Brattahlid and Gardar farms (two of the largest/richest farms), and a zoom of the Sandnes farm area from the Western settlement.
Want more? How abut on the ground photos of the ruins?
Gardar ruins
Bratthlid ruins
Hvalsey church
Obviously not "under ice", but rather sitting in what are nice green pastures (the benefits of being situated in fjords). So can you tell me where the newly discovered settlements that are being revealed by retreating glaciers are to be found?
E) Durable as hell.
This should not be underestimated. If you haven't actually had the opportunity to play with an OLPC you may not understand how remarkably rugged they are. Yes they are a little heavy compared to nice slim laptops, but they are very solidly built and can take quite a beating without worry. The fact that they are waterproof and lack moving parts (hence less damage from falls etc.) is just icing.
So every time the government needs to replace a number of desktops, it also has to consider replacing the entire IT infrastructure?
No; read the case. The government can have specific constraints in its bid if it has a documented study showing why those are reasonable and necessary constraints. It has to consider replacing the entire IT infrastructure every five years or so (in case the situation changes -- new versions of Windows, new versions of Linux distros etc.), and based on the results of that, it can do what was recommended with regard to replacing desktops in the interim.
This is a dangerous line of logic to go down. The entity directly responsible for the crime shoulders all of the blame (unless there are conspirators, etc.). Enablers, direct and indirect, can't reasonably count. The connections become too tenuous, too difficult to trace and too intertwined with other issues. I pay a guy to do my roof who likes to eat apples harvested by the guy who uses faulty ladders. Am I at fault? After all, I should have checked out where my contractor was getting his apples from so that none of my money paid to him ended up going to the crooked apply farmer.
But you should take responsibility for such things (apparently). You see in a paerfect libertarian world you would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and start checking the internet and newspapers for any and all scraps of information about companies you may purchase products from. Perhaps your fruit suppliers are now using unethical labour practices (it's up to you the consumer to police that and stop buying from them of course). Perhaps its been found that your lunch meat supplier is occasionally a little lax in their packaging plants and there is potentially contaminated meat out there (we can't give the government powers to regulate that sort of thing). You'll probably also have to check in on any and all processed foods you might want to buy -- it's not like they will publish their ingredients (or if they do, there's no reason to assume they aren't just lying) -- who knows, maybe your favourite brand of peanut butter has realised that lacing their product with opium for that extra addictive quality really helps sales.
Of course you can't just do a casual read to find these things out; large companies with plenty of money can run effective disinformation campaigns in the mainstream media, or otherwise cover up such incidents. You'll have to dig deep through pages of personal consumer reports, spot and ignore the paid industry shills, and so on.
You'll probably be done with that around midday -- presuming you do it every morning to keep up to date and are fairly practiced and know where to hunt down the right information. Now it's time to work on the second order issues: are companies you wish to buy from aiding, funding, abetting, or buying from any companies you have deemed unethical, or inappropriate to support? This is, of course, a bigger task again. Not only do you have the problems tracking down information as before, you have an order of magnitude more companies to work through, and complex supply chains (which you can be sure will use all sorts of subsiaries, front companies, and other misdirections) to dig through. If you're lucky you might get done all of that before midnight.
That leaves you just enough time to go to bed safe in the knowledge that you are using the money you no longer have the time to earn to make informed consumer choices buying products that you no longer have the time to purchase. And even better, you get to do it all again tomorrow.
Since most businesses run Microsoft servers, and use Exchange for email, it should be easy for a Microsoft phone to rule the business space ... Put specialized phone management capabilities in their server-side tools to make the IT department happy (right now, IT usually detests supporting iPhones).
The Microsoft of old would have done that and more -- added a variety of extensions to Exchange that only work with Microsoft phones; 'accidentally' broken things with exchange updates that break or significantly degrade performance for iPhones and Blackberries (sure, people will complain to the IT department, but what are you going to do, switch from Exchange?), etc. etc.
Current day Microsoft has been slapped around enough by the EU over antitrust issues that they don't dare pull that sort of shit anymore. Free MS from their anti-trust shackles, however, and they would very quickly move in a dominate the phone market if they cared to.
...The terrifying alternative, of course, being that Wall Street has discovered a way to create a literally infinite quantity of money, and a year from now, the only way to tell who is richer than whom will be by comparing the size of two transfinite ordinals.
But surely a quantity of money will be cardinal nor ordinal? That will certainly raise interesting questions with regard to the continuum hypothesis. I also wonder if they accept large inaccessible cardinals. Perhaps there is a practical use for Grothendieck universes after all ...
I gave up on "lost", it seemed to be a meandering plot with hints but no resolutions.
I gave up around the season one/season two transition when it became clear that the writers didn't have any resolutions to their mysteries: instead of resolving anything they would distract with some other "bigger" mystery instead. It quickly became littered with loose plot threads that were clearly never going to be resolved. I am unsurprised to learn that the writers apparently painted themselves into a corner and took the "it was all a dream" style Deus ex Machina to dig themselves out. Of course that still doesn't resolve the dozens of minor plot mysteries they left scattered along the way, but I guess they hope people have forgotten about them.
For around five years now the Mac has been free of viruses and malware. So who has been more wrong, the person who rightfully believes the platform is free of malware or the person who thinks if something may someday have malware it is eqivilent to having it?
I think the issue is more about the difference between "free from malware" and "invulnerable to malware". The former is true, the latter is not, yet there a re a great many Mac users who are quite sure that the latter is true. That's not a problem now, but it could be, especially if that attitude is fostered. Promoting a virtue (the mac is free of malware) is not the same as promoting ignorance (the mac is invulnerable to malware).
It still drives me up the wall how much cash I blew for my undergraduate CS degree. Looking at what I "learned" from my classes and what I taught myself in that period of time, I would have been much better off to have saved the $80K I spent on schooling and self taught.
Sounds like you picked the wrong major, or the wrong school, or both. I can't imagine self instruction for all the material I learned at university -- and I've had plenty of opportunity since leaving, having to try and pick up some different fields via self instruction, to see what its like. Yes, it can be done, but its an uphill struggle, and I would really appreciate a course from a knowledgeable instructor ... but then I majored in mathematics, and wasn't looking at my education as job training.
If you know Java, pointers in C will be black magic to you.
Not really. I think some people want to believe that so they can feel smug, but it simply isn't true. Take me as an example. I did some programming in BASIC when I was very young, and eventually dabbled in a little bit of C, but never got as far as pointers -- but I didn't have much need for programming, so I didn't bother to learn. Then for my Master's thesis I finally needed to do some programming, so I learned a language properly; sadly that language was Maple (which was appropriate for the software I needed to write, but not useful as a way of getting back to programming). From there I ended up needing more programming as I moved through various jobs. I learned perl, then picked up Delphi, then a little VB, then python; after than I had to give myself a crash course in Java, after which I learned Eiffel and Ada for my own interest as well as dabbling in a variety of other languages (including lisp, ML, and Scala). After that I finally ended up with a job where I needed to go back to C. So, were pointers black magic to me, having never learned them and with that sorry mix of languages as my background? Not in the least. It was all very obvious and straightforward and never presented any difficulties because I had a solid enough grasp of how programming languages in general worked. There's nothing fancy about "being close to the metal", it's just a different level of abstraction.
That is propaganda and was completely ridiculous when the first 'scientist' thought it up. It's about as smart as the 'Greenland isn't really green' argument. We all know that, but there are settlements that are still under ice that weren't during the MWP.
Really? You wouldn't happend to have any reference at all for that would you? The settlements under ice that is ... there were Norse settlements on Greenland, and the historical records spoke of an Eastern and a Western settlement. For some time no-one quite believed in the Eastern settlement, until they eventually found it, not quite where people were expecting. So, two settlements known from records, two settlements found. Are either of those settlements under ice? It seems Google maps and satellite photos can come to out aid. Consider these Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
Eastern settlement area, and Eastern settlment map
Western settlement area, and Western settlement map.
Just for reference, here is a zoom of the area of the Brattahlid and Gardar farms (two of the largest/richest farms), and a zoom of the Sandnes farm area from the Western settlement.
Want more? How abut on the ground photos of the ruins?
Gardar ruins
Bratthlid ruins
Hvalsey church
Obviously not "under ice", but rather sitting in what are nice green pastures (the benefits of being situated in fjords). So, the question remains -- what of these mysterious settlements that are still "under ice"? How do we know they're there? Certainly no historical records of any kind mention anything other than the Eastern and Western settlements, which as we saw are clearly far from "under ice". No one has found settlements under ice that I'm aware of. So please ... enlighten me, I want to know about these under ice settlements.
I wonder how you would react if the House of Commons were to say that the e-mails are undeniable proof that global warming is a scam.
Well at that point I would be inclined to actually take a look at the emails in detail myself, hopefully in conjunction with the report which would highlight the glaring points. The house of commons didn't say that, however, so until something new actually turns up I will continue to view this whole debacle as the storm in a teacup that it appears to be.
Ever since my daughter was able to speak, I've been playing games and doing things that help to "feel" math, not just know math facts.
I expect that will advance her mathematics no end. Quite some time ago I wrote about the difference between mathematics and facts about mathematics : the former is important, the latter is largely all that gets taught. It's like teaching history by simply making kids do nothing memorise names and dates -- sure they can regurgitate facts well, but they have no idea what any of it means, and hence have little chance dealing with history as a more advanced subject later (and yes, I know that history is indeed taught this badly in many places). Unfortunately it takes someone who actually has a feel for and deeper understanding of mathematics to do more than mindlessly teach rote facts from a textbook, and the sort of people who have that understanding are not the sort of people who tend to go in for elementary school teaching.
We took the public hospital option and spent money on a doula instead -- now that was money well spent.
My wife and I recently had our first child. There were mistakes during the epidural phase which required another one to be done about 8 hours after we arrived. Due to this we wanted to see an itemized bill and what we received was right in line with what all the horror stories tell you
My wife and I recently had our first child. It was a long and difficult labour that eventually resulted in a Cesarean section and post-partum hospital stay. We didn't receive an itemized bill, but then we didn't need one -- we live in Canada and and so everything was covered under the provincial health plan: we showed them my wife's health card when we arrived and never gave a second thought to it after that.
Now, instead of having a public option--which will just push this burden on to the people while "insuring" those who are currently uninsured, the government should have made it clear that this type of overcharging and clearly obtuse billing charges are unacceptable. But no, instead we're going to pass a bill which costs a trillion dollars (of money which we don't already have) and then it's going to do very little to fix the real problems inherent in the health care industry.
We don't really have obtuse billing and overcharging since the government can (as the single payer) reign it in very easily -- they have a very strong negotiating position. So yes, my wife and I do pay for health insurance (it's right there in our provincial taxes as an extra levy), but it's not that much compared to what my brother, who lived in the US for some time, was paying, and the government can easily hold overcharging in check. Perhaps a public option isn't such a bad plan after all?
It's really all about classifying shapes. For two dimensional things this is pretty easy, at least as far as the topology goes: you need to know the curvature and "how many holes does it have" and that's it -- this is the whole topologist not knowing a coffee cup from a donut since they both have one hole and hence can be deformed one into the other (note that this is two dimensional because we are considering the 2-dimensional surface on the donut and coffee cup). In dimensions higher than two things start getting trickier because more bizarre configurations become possible. Perelman's work, which actually goes toward proving the rather more far reaching Geometrization Conjecture (due to Thurston), essentially lays out how you can classify all the different (from a topological point of view) shapes of things in three dimensions and higher.
What are the implications? Well, one reasonable question is: what is the topology of the universe like; what shape is the universe? Since the universe is a three dimensional manifold that turns out to be tricky. Perelman's work lays out the groundwork to be able to answer such a question.