Yes, Grace Hopper commented that the term was already in common use, which is why it was so amusing to find an actual bug. IIRC, at least one research has found written use of the term from back in the 1920s, so the origin of the term is likely even older than that...
The Washington Post makes money by publishing interesting articles written by individual writers. Individual writers make money by writing on topics that interest readers, often by doing nothing more than sharing their opinions on things, albeit eloquently expressed opinions. The problem with the question your asking is that there's an implied idea behind it that "The Washington Post" has opinions and an agenda. Your question is unanswerable because it's asking for the opinions and motives of a thing, which has none, rather than asking about the opinions and motives of the various people in question (which almost certainly differ). There are numerous reasons why that particular writer might endorse that (personally held beliefs), why the editors might publish it (increase readership, satisfy the writer who writes other things they like more and they don't want to reject the few things they don't, look like they encourage diversity of opinion, etc), all of which would combine to cause the publication to contain opinions that are contrary to the best interests of the publication, because the publication itself puts no thought into this at all, everything happens on an individual level, with each person making decisions to benefit themselves, not the publication.
So from what I read they structures found COULD assist organic life, but are not actual evidence of them.
That's one point of view.
There's a common myth that evidence speaks for itself. It doesn't. It just sits there on the lab table, incapable of speaking. Evidence also neither supports nor refutes any theory, these also being things evidence is incapable of doing unless the evidence is itself sentient. You're anthropomorphizing the evidence when you claim it supports or refutes a theory.
Now, various interpretations of the evidence can be used by scientists to support or refute theories. Insofar as some scientists interpret this evidence in such a way that it allows them to argue for ET-assisted biogenesis, it is evidence for that. Of course, some scientists will interpret it differently and then it won't be evidence for that.
All this is perfectly fine. Just don't make the mistake the quoted poster made, where you think there's a fact of the matter about whether this actually is or isn't evidence for one theory or another. Science doesn't work that way, that's just perpetuating a myth.
Ultimately, the triangles on the paper are really just printed as a bunch of dots.
Given that an ordinary printers can't print triangles, that is indeed how we normally fake it. Now, the question is, would his claims be credible if he actually was printing these shapes, not approximating them with a bunch of dots?
It seems that every "disproof" posted here starts by discarding half his claims, then proving it can't be done assuming he's only doing half of what he says he is doing.
This is still probably a scam, or he wouldn't be so tight-lipped about how he's doing it, he'd patent the process, simultaneously (a) publishing the details and (b) ensuring he makes a lot of money.
Did you read the article? It doesn't imply but oughtright says that it requires a specially developed scanner to read, so we know he's not using off-the-shelf hardware on that end. It seems unlikely he'd require a specially developed scanner to read the output of an off-the-shelf printer.
It's actually pretty obvious from the description that what he's trying to do would require specialized printing hardware. Now, whether he's actually done that, or just hidden a disk inside his special scanner, I don't know. The fact that he won't say how it's done stinks of scam. But all these numbers people are throwing around in this thread are just way off-base.
I remember when modems got beyond 300 baud, people started complaining about people who continued to use the term incorrectly. For example, people would call a 2400 bps modem a "2400 baud modem", but that was incorrect, since baud is signals per second, not bits per second, and faster modems got higher speeds by doing more than just using mode signals, but also by using more frequencies to get more bits per signal. IIRC, a 2400 bps modem was actually 600 baud, but 16 different frequency levels, so 4 bits per signal.
The guy who wrote the blog entry clearly is too clueless to judge the veracity of this claim. Not that the claim is believable, either, just some of this guy's objections aren't.
I'm sorry, but if they scammed you into working 75 hours a week through mere words, you're a patsy.
*sigh* Yes, I'm a patsy. Or I was for a 17 months. People, don't let this happen to you. Really. And don't start down the road of "it's only for a couple weeks". "Only until we're not so busy." Guess what -- they can make sure it's always busy, if you make sure they know they can squeeze that much work out of you. Before you know it, those exceptional circumstances are now the norm, and what was working above-and-beyond is now just expected, par for the course.
Bull. People who write hard to figure out code do so with pretty much equal ease in any language. People who write easy to read and maintain code again do so pretty much equally well in any language. Reason being, the skills used to write maintainable code have nothing at all whatsoever to do with the programming language. "Elegant syntax" of the language? Gimme a break. Elegant code is elegant code, regardless of the language syntax. Elegance has do to with the underlying idea expressed, not the syntax of the language.
Oh, and Python has lousy syntax, but that's just a personal opinion on my part, not in any way an objective fact. My personal preferences on syntax don't apply to anyone but me. Nor do yours.
It should be noted that this is a DARPA project, and NASA really had nothing to do with this test. The big NASA logo on the side is left-over from before NASA dropped the project and it was transfered to DARPA (i.e. the military).
Make a change because you think you're a better storyteller than JRR - no way.
JRR was good for his time, but most popular fantasy authors today are a lot better. JRR occupies a particular place in the history of the genre which has made him monumental, but as a storyteller, he was good, but not that good. Most authors I read today are much better.
"Real life" is just nucleons and electrons flying around one another according to a few simple laws.
The only reason anything is important is because we choose to attach importance to it. Whether it's a group of protons and electrons or ones and zeroes makes no real difference. If you think otherwise, you have a rather fantastical view of what's "real". (Your error is not in thinking that those ones and zeroes aren't "real" in the sense you mean it, but that you think anything else larger than a subatomic particle is. You're promoting one abstraction as being less abstract than the other, when in fact it's not -- it's every bit as much an invented construct in your mind, occuring no place in "reality" outside your mind.)
I ask because some dumbshit who worked there before I did left some screwed up code behind that failed at least twice a year because he mistakenly assumed days are always 86400 seconds long. Now, you're confused about the number of days in a year, not seconds in a day, but you're making the same error: assuming it's a constant, which it isn't.
Accurately representing and manipulating time is one of the trickiest programming tasks that confront most programmers, made so tricky by the fact that most of them don't recognize how complex the problem really is.
Citations are still required, even for the work of Government officials.
Especially so. It's always important to know the source of your information to evaluate potential bias, and particularly when the source has a long track-record of fudging the truth for self-serving purposes.
Once we master genetic engineering, our species is going to split in at least a thousand different ways, and I'm probably being too conservative by several orders of magnitude.
Eventually they'll be more species of humans than species of beetles.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I do know that the financial and legal definition of "tangible" has nothing to do with an items ability to be touched. Rather, it has to do its ability to be converted into cash. Your accounts receivable on your books are a tangible asset, although they correspond to no physical item -- it's just money you're owed. Essentially, anything that has a readily verifiable market value is a "tangible" asset in the financial sense of the word.
International cooperation is easy when no one sees a profit in the near future. But if someday comes where we're competing for resources in space, say bye-bye to cooperation.
Although it would certainly "fix" India's overpopulation problem,
Actually, it probably wouldn't. It'd be like the millions of Chinese that died during the Cultural Revolution. Tragic, but didn't seriously dent the population of China. Pakistan doesn't have enough firepower to dent India's population significantly. They can only kill people by the millions, not by any relatively significant numbers.
I think everybody else still has stuff to worry about. What about fallout? What about nuclear winter? Couldn't those easily have worldwide effect?
No. At least, not a very significant worldwide effect. The simultaneous detonation of every nuclear weapon in both India and Pakistan's arsenals would be far less capable of causing a "nuclear winter" than your average volcano. The fallout would be measurable by scientists around the world, but people not in the general area of these countries would be unlikely to be negatively impacted to a serious degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Err... the edges are shared, so there are less than 30. I'm trying to figure out the exact number but my maths is too stale.
No, the exact number would in fact be 30. The edges are indeed shared, which is why there are less than 60 (5 * 12) edges.
The button in question does exactly what you want in both of those cases.
Yes, Grace Hopper commented that the term was already in common use, which is why it was so amusing to find an actual bug. IIRC, at least one research has found written use of the term from back in the 1920s, so the origin of the term is likely even older than that...
The Washington Post makes money by publishing interesting articles written by individual writers. Individual writers make money by writing on topics that interest readers, often by doing nothing more than sharing their opinions on things, albeit eloquently expressed opinions. The problem with the question your asking is that there's an implied idea behind it that "The Washington Post" has opinions and an agenda. Your question is unanswerable because it's asking for the opinions and motives of a thing, which has none, rather than asking about the opinions and motives of the various people in question (which almost certainly differ). There are numerous reasons why that particular writer might endorse that (personally held beliefs), why the editors might publish it (increase readership, satisfy the writer who writes other things they like more and they don't want to reject the few things they don't, look like they encourage diversity of opinion, etc), all of which would combine to cause the publication to contain opinions that are contrary to the best interests of the publication, because the publication itself puts no thought into this at all, everything happens on an individual level, with each person making decisions to benefit themselves, not the publication.
So from what I read they structures found COULD assist organic life, but are not actual evidence of them.
That's one point of view.
There's a common myth that evidence speaks for itself. It doesn't. It just sits there on the lab table, incapable of speaking. Evidence also neither supports nor refutes any theory, these also being things evidence is incapable of doing unless the evidence is itself sentient. You're anthropomorphizing the evidence when you claim it supports or refutes a theory.
Now, various interpretations of the evidence can be used by scientists to support or refute theories. Insofar as some scientists interpret this evidence in such a way that it allows them to argue for ET-assisted biogenesis, it is evidence for that. Of course, some scientists will interpret it differently and then it won't be evidence for that.
All this is perfectly fine. Just don't make the mistake the quoted poster made, where you think there's a fact of the matter about whether this actually is or isn't evidence for one theory or another. Science doesn't work that way, that's just perpetuating a myth.
Ultimately, the triangles on the paper are really just printed as a bunch of dots.
Given that an ordinary printers can't print triangles, that is indeed how we normally fake it. Now, the question is, would his claims be credible if he actually was printing these shapes, not approximating them with a bunch of dots?
It seems that every "disproof" posted here starts by discarding half his claims, then proving it can't be done assuming he's only doing half of what he says he is doing.
This is still probably a scam, or he wouldn't be so tight-lipped about how he's doing it, he'd patent the process, simultaneously (a) publishing the details and (b) ensuring he makes a lot of money.
Did you read the article? It doesn't imply but oughtright says that it requires a specially developed scanner to read, so we know he's not using off-the-shelf hardware on that end. It seems unlikely he'd require a specially developed scanner to read the output of an off-the-shelf printer.
It's actually pretty obvious from the description that what he's trying to do would require specialized printing hardware. Now, whether he's actually done that, or just hidden a disk inside his special scanner, I don't know. The fact that he won't say how it's done stinks of scam. But all these numbers people are throwing around in this thread are just way off-base.
I remember when modems got beyond 300 baud, people started complaining about people who continued to use the term incorrectly. For example, people would call a 2400 bps modem a "2400 baud modem", but that was incorrect, since baud is signals per second, not bits per second, and faster modems got higher speeds by doing more than just using mode signals, but also by using more frequencies to get more bits per signal. IIRC, a 2400 bps modem was actually 600 baud, but 16 different frequency levels, so 4 bits per signal.
The guy who wrote the blog entry clearly is too clueless to judge the veracity of this claim. Not that the claim is believable, either, just some of this guy's objections aren't.
I'm sorry, but if they scammed you into working 75 hours a week through mere words, you're a patsy.
*sigh* Yes, I'm a patsy. Or I was for a 17 months. People, don't let this happen to you. Really. And don't start down the road of "it's only for a couple weeks". "Only until we're not so busy." Guess what -- they can make sure it's always busy, if you make sure they know they can squeeze that much work out of you. Before you know it, those exceptional circumstances are now the norm, and what was working above-and-beyond is now just expected, par for the course.
You have to stop it before it starts.
Bull. People who write hard to figure out code do so with pretty much equal ease in any language. People who write easy to read and maintain code again do so pretty much equally well in any language. Reason being, the skills used to write maintainable code have nothing at all whatsoever to do with the programming language. "Elegant syntax" of the language? Gimme a break. Elegant code is elegant code, regardless of the language syntax. Elegance has do to with the underlying idea expressed, not the syntax of the language.
Oh, and Python has lousy syntax, but that's just a personal opinion on my part, not in any way an objective fact. My personal preferences on syntax don't apply to anyone but me. Nor do yours.
It should be noted that this is a DARPA project, and NASA really had nothing to do with this test. The big NASA logo on the side is left-over from before NASA dropped the project and it was transfered to DARPA (i.e. the military).
Make a change because you think you're a better storyteller than JRR - no way.
JRR was good for his time, but most popular fantasy authors today are a lot better. JRR occupies a particular place in the history of the genre which has made him monumental, but as a storyteller, he was good, but not that good. Most authors I read today are much better.
"Real life" is just nucleons and electrons flying around one another according to a few simple laws.
The only reason anything is important is because we choose to attach importance to it. Whether it's a group of protons and electrons or ones and zeroes makes no real difference. If you think otherwise, you have a rather fantastical view of what's "real". (Your error is not in thinking that those ones and zeroes aren't "real" in the sense you mean it, but that you think anything else larger than a subatomic particle is. You're promoting one abstraction as being less abstract than the other, when in fact it's not -- it's every bit as much an invented construct in your mind, occuring no place in "reality" outside your mind.)
Second Life was inspired by Snow Crash.
This is true, but it's also actually a bit of an understatement. SL is Philip Rosedale's attempt to bring the Metaverse to life.
It would be, if that were true, but since it's not...
Depends on the quality of the schematics... :p
Did you used to work for my company?
I ask because some dumbshit who worked there before I did left some screwed up code behind that failed at least twice a year because he mistakenly assumed days are always 86400 seconds long. Now, you're confused about the number of days in a year, not seconds in a day, but you're making the same error: assuming it's a constant, which it isn't.
Accurately representing and manipulating time is one of the trickiest programming tasks that confront most programmers, made so tricky by the fact that most of them don't recognize how complex the problem really is.
Citations are still required, even for the work of Government officials.
Especially so. It's always important to know the source of your information to evaluate potential bias, and particularly when the source has a long track-record of fudging the truth for self-serving purposes.
Once we master genetic engineering, our species is going to split in at least a thousand different ways, and I'm probably being too conservative by several orders of magnitude. Eventually they'll be more species of humans than species of beetles.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I do know that the financial and legal definition of "tangible" has nothing to do with an items ability to be touched. Rather, it has to do its ability to be converted into cash. Your accounts receivable on your books are a tangible asset, although they correspond to no physical item -- it's just money you're owed. Essentially, anything that has a readily verifiable market value is a "tangible" asset in the financial sense of the word.
Of course, any disagreement about what's beyond the event horizon is a philosophical disagreement, not a scientific one. :)
International cooperation is easy when no one sees a profit in the near future. But if someday comes where we're competing for resources in space, say bye-bye to cooperation.
Although it would certainly "fix" India's overpopulation problem,
Actually, it probably wouldn't. It'd be like the millions of Chinese that died during the Cultural Revolution. Tragic, but didn't seriously dent the population of China. Pakistan doesn't have enough firepower to dent India's population significantly. They can only kill people by the millions, not by any relatively significant numbers.
I think everybody else still has stuff to worry about. What about fallout? What about nuclear winter? Couldn't those easily have worldwide effect?
No. At least, not a very significant worldwide effect. The simultaneous detonation of every nuclear weapon in both India and Pakistan's arsenals would be far less capable of causing a "nuclear winter" than your average volcano. The fallout would be measurable by scientists around the world, but people not in the general area of these countries would be unlikely to be negatively impacted to a serious degree.
For what it's worth, I use a Mac laptop almost daily, but I don't own one -- it belongs to my employer, as do all the other Macs we use at work.
The quote I remember is, "Brits think a hundred miles is a long way, Americans think a hundred years is a long time."