When we've had computers for 1000 years, then I'd be comfortable suggesting that we had reached the age of "modern" programming.
Huh? No matter what state anything is in at any time, it has reached the age of modern whateveritis. That's what the word means -- the current, present state of the whateveritis.
Reminds me of a pet peeve of my old anthropology professor, who complained about people going to the Amazon or whereever to study "primitive" cultures. You can only study modern cultures by observing living people. You need a time machine to study anyone from something other than a modern culture...
The repurposing of the past for contemporary use is post-modern
Really? I believe that's one of humanity's oldest traditions. Don't know of any culture or period of history where this wasn't extensively done. No one really cares about history save how they can use it towards their currently modern aims.
You're whole post revolved around the mistaken premise that a text has meaning. Meaning is something assigned to things by minds. Unless you think the text has a mind, then of course it has no meaning. The only meaning in the text is what meaning you put into it.
Of course, this makes you entirely correct, since you're putting nothing meaningful into the text, the text is indeed nothing but drivel.
[Hmmm... I think I could get published in one of these journals -- do they pay?]
if we destroy the remaining 5 continents, antarctica won't matter, the earth will be dead.
Err, no. If we annihilate all life on all continents, the Earth will be far from dead. In fact in the grand scheme of things, it won't even matter that much, as the vast majority of life on Earth is in the sea. Life on land is a small portion of the total, which only seems so important because, uh, well, that's the group we happen to be in. Really, though, as far as the health of the Earth goes, it doesn't really matter that much.
If you really want to destroy the Earth, destroy the life in the sea. If you did that, the land life would die out shortly thereafter (why, you ask? Well, say bye-bye to your oxygen atmosphere, generated almost entirely by microscopic sea-life).
Well, it's about as interesting as any of the "problems" in AI... what was it Dijkstra said? "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
Yes, computers play chess differently than people. Computers do a lot of things differently than people. This is what makes them useful. If they didn't, we'd just use people...
Spending time getting computers to do things their own way is much less a waste of time than trying to get computers to "think like people do". We already have people who can do that. Computers are useful precisely because they're different...
The most powerful chess computer in the world would still fail the Turing test - and if that test was carried out with infinite accuracy, no computer could ever pass.
I've seen humans fail a Turing test, so I'm not really sure what it's supposed to prove -- it's certainly not a valid measure of intelligence, consciousness, or anything like that.
I happen to run both Debian and Slack, so I'd have to say they're both good. But I run Debian on a dozen different boxes, whereas Slack has it's home on my old Toshiba laptop (T1950CT) and nowhere else, so I suppose I'd have to say I like Debian more. In fact, the laptop in question used to run Debian too. However, Woody killed it. I could actually use apt and/or dselect under Potato, and it worked. It technically still works under Woody, but instead of taking a few seconds, it takes about a half-hour as the system thrashes swap memory trying to deal with the package database. I don't know if it's merely the size of the package list (the number of packages in Debian doubled between Potato and Woody) or if the Woody versions are memory hogs, but in any case, my poor old 486 laptop just can't deal with it. The Slackware-current runs on it just fine...
Err, no. FreeBSD and NetBSD are both part of the BSD family, and thus do share a common codebase, but neither is, technically speaking, a fork of the other.
For those who haven't kept up on the soap opera...
Actually, Source Mage GNU/Linux is not, technically speaking, a fork of Sorcerer. It is the original. However, after the Lunar fork, the old leader of Sorcerer, Kyle Sallee, blew a fuse over having his distro forked and declared Sorcerer dead. The problem being, of course, Sorcerer, being an open source project, is not only open to forking, it can't be closed down simply because one guy has decided to take his toys and go home. The rest of the Sorcerer team said, "Hey, no it's not!" and continued maintaining the Sorcerer distro. Then Kyle decided to get back into the game, and called his own tree (now covered by a closed source license to prevent forking) Sorcerer. The original Sorcerer team then changed their name to Source Mage GNU/Linux to avoid confusion and emphasize their commitment to an open source licence, and they drew up a debianesqe social contract.
Phew! Anyhow, that's the Readers Digest version of the story. Thus, confusingly, the distro that was called Sorcerer is now called Source Mage, the distro now called Sorcerer is a fork by the old project leader away from the rest of the old Sorcerer team, and the distro called Lunar is the original fork that caused all this confusion to begin with.
Kyle is back running his own tree, apparently. The original tree he abandoned is now called Source Mage GNU/Linux (they changed the name to avoid confusion, after Kyle decided to jump back in again with his own tree).
Not really. I'm always scrupulous. Okay, almost always.:) In any case, I know the difference between being ethical and being legal, and I think the former is far more important. I always worry about being scrupulous, but I only worry about the legalities when a man in blue is watching...
Well, my I-Jam mp3 player doesn't understand OGG. It still understands MP3 just fine. I'm pretty glad I've spent months encoding MP3s, and I'll continue to do so. I'll do what I always do with stupid laws -- I'll ignore them unless a man in blue happens to be watching...
Re:This is the way it should be...
on
KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 1
I hated Subway for the longest time because I couldn't simply order a sub and get it like I could at Clark's. The fact of the matter was, I couldn't tell you what exactly was on my favorite subs from Clark's -- they were the experts, they made good subs, I ate them and liked them and didn't worry that much about what exactly was on them. It took me a long time to learn to order a sub from Subway that tasted half as good as a sub from Clark's. Learning to order from Subway essentially made me learn how to make a good sandwich myself. Which isn't a bad thing, but frankly I would have been very happy if there was some default selection I could have started from and just modified from there.
Just have him stand back from the line for ten people and see if he can come up with a sane default that would almost fit 25% of the people who order. He won't be able to do it.
Considering this is how most restraunts operate, I doubt very much your assertion is anywhere close to true. One could easily come up with a default selection that will satisfy 75% of customers, even if it doesn't match exactly what they'd order in a build-it-yourself situation, and easily make that over 95% if you allow one "hold the X" in the equation. Anyone who can't do this shouldn't be in the restarant business.
They (both of the Voyagers) are travelling at greater than solar escape velocity. So are Pioneer 10 and 11. None of them will orbit, all four are destined to never return to our solar system (unless we go out and retrieve them at some point)...
Hmmm. I know a lot of authors, especially series authors, write tons of material that never actually makes it into any book in the series. Backstory, stuff that happened to major characters in childhood or just long before the story begins, etc. I suspect it helps to contribute to a feeling that the characters didn't just pop into existence for this one story -- there's history and background, things about them you don't know, stuff that happened "off camera". I imagine a good movie also has a lot of this. I'm sure it isn't necessary, but it's probably helpful to do. Extra scenes that never make the movie serve the same function for movies that this extra, unpublished material serves for good novels...
OTOH, I know jack-didly-squat about movie making. But it seems a likely story...
What the parent post said was right... most companies and organizations that are large enough to have a legal dept. would require that anything and everything said by any employee to anyone else, with the possibility of it being publicly displayed, be reviewed by the lawyers.
Any company can request this from it's employees. But something has gone seriously wrong in any society where they can require it. Corporate image trumps free speech? Not in my book...
One thing is to talk to your friends about the good and bad things happening at your job. An entirely different thing is to publically make statements about it when you really have NO authority to do so.
I have the authority to talk to anyone I want about whatever I want in my spare time, barring other legal issues (disclosing intellectual property that isn't exclusively mine, for example). The fact that you think someone has to authorize my ability to freely share my opinions is quite disturbing. That anyone can make this kind of statement so freely without even questioning it shows just how bad things have gotten on the free speech front.
If you are working for someone, you need to be able to trust your employer, AND your employer needs to be able to trust you.
And today's example shows that this guy's employer didn't trust him. If I trust an employee, I don't care who he talks to, I know he's just going to tell people the truth, not spread a bunch of malicious lies about the company. So I have no reason to fear a trusted employee talking to the press. Unless there's something terribly bad about the truth, and I want to make sure the public doesn't know about it...
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? No matter what state anything is in at any time, it has reached the age of modern whateveritis. That's what the word means -- the current, present state of the whateveritis.
Reminds me of a pet peeve of my old anthropology professor, who complained about people going to the Amazon or whereever to study "primitive" cultures. You can only study modern cultures by observing living people. You need a time machine to study anyone from something other than a modern culture...
Really? I believe that's one of humanity's oldest traditions. Don't know of any culture or period of history where this wasn't extensively done. No one really cares about history save how they can use it towards their currently modern aims.
Of course, this makes you entirely correct, since you're putting nothing meaningful into the text, the text is indeed nothing but drivel.
[Hmmm... I think I could get published in one of these journals -- do they pay?]
Bah, once an idea is old enough to have been indexed by Google, it's already déclassé...
If you say you can visualize this, I believe you'd either be a liar or a god...
Err, no. If we annihilate all life on all continents, the Earth will be far from dead. In fact in the grand scheme of things, it won't even matter that much, as the vast majority of life on Earth is in the sea. Life on land is a small portion of the total, which only seems so important because, uh, well, that's the group we happen to be in. Really, though, as far as the health of the Earth goes, it doesn't really matter that much.
If you really want to destroy the Earth, destroy the life in the sea. If you did that, the land life would die out shortly thereafter (why, you ask? Well, say bye-bye to your oxygen atmosphere, generated almost entirely by microscopic sea-life).
Yeah, 83% is B grade at best. Unless we're being graded on a curve, that is...
Well, it's about as interesting as any of the "problems" in AI... what was it Dijkstra said? "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
Yes, computers play chess differently than people. Computers do a lot of things differently than people. This is what makes them useful. If they didn't, we'd just use people...
Spending time getting computers to do things their own way is much less a waste of time than trying to get computers to "think like people do". We already have people who can do that. Computers are useful precisely because they're different...
The most powerful chess computer in the world would still fail the Turing test - and if that test was carried out with infinite accuracy, no computer could ever pass.
I've seen humans fail a Turing test, so I'm not really sure what it's supposed to prove -- it's certainly not a valid measure of intelligence, consciousness, or anything like that.
I happen to run both Debian and Slack, so I'd have to say they're both good. But I run Debian on a dozen different boxes, whereas Slack has it's home on my old Toshiba laptop (T1950CT) and nowhere else, so I suppose I'd have to say I like Debian more. In fact, the laptop in question used to run Debian too. However, Woody killed it. I could actually use apt and/or dselect under Potato, and it worked. It technically still works under Woody, but instead of taking a few seconds, it takes about a half-hour as the system thrashes swap memory trying to deal with the package database. I don't know if it's merely the size of the package list (the number of packages in Debian doubled between Potato and Woody) or if the Woody versions are memory hogs, but in any case, my poor old 486 laptop just can't deal with it. The Slackware-current runs on it just fine...
See this page for a good family tree...
As for timeline, I believe both FreeBSD and NetBSD forked their own branches of the BSD tree in 1993...
This is all explained in Second Timaeus, alas the dialog appears to have been lost...
Not really. It is a falacy, though...
My Kernighan & Ritchie C book gets a lot of use and it's only ~280 pages. Large does not espessially mean better.
Indeed. K&R is probably the best book in existence for learning C, precisely because of its lack of excessive and distracting crud...
Actually, Source Mage GNU/Linux is not, technically speaking, a fork of Sorcerer. It is the original. However, after the Lunar fork, the old leader of Sorcerer, Kyle Sallee, blew a fuse over having his distro forked and declared Sorcerer dead. The problem being, of course, Sorcerer, being an open source project, is not only open to forking, it can't be closed down simply because one guy has decided to take his toys and go home. The rest of the Sorcerer team said, "Hey, no it's not!" and continued maintaining the Sorcerer distro. Then Kyle decided to get back into the game, and called his own tree (now covered by a closed source license to prevent forking) Sorcerer. The original Sorcerer team then changed their name to Source Mage GNU/Linux to avoid confusion and emphasize their commitment to an open source licence, and they drew up a debianesqe social contract.
Phew! Anyhow, that's the Readers Digest version of the story. Thus, confusingly, the distro that was called Sorcerer is now called Source Mage, the distro now called Sorcerer is a fork by the old project leader away from the rest of the old Sorcerer team, and the distro called Lunar is the original fork that caused all this confusion to begin with.
And now you have the rest of the story... :)
Kyle is back running his own tree, apparently. The original tree he abandoned is now called Source Mage GNU/Linux (they changed the name to avoid confusion, after Kyle decided to jump back in again with his own tree).
That's actually more or less how it works. You'll notice it's only an 89MB ISO...
... being scrupulous would be paralyzing.
Not really. I'm always scrupulous. Okay, almost always. :) In any case, I know the difference between being ethical and being legal, and I think the former is far more important. I always worry about being scrupulous, but I only worry about the legalities when a man in blue is watching...
Well, my I-Jam mp3 player doesn't understand OGG. It still understands MP3 just fine. I'm pretty glad I've spent months encoding MP3s, and I'll continue to do so. I'll do what I always do with stupid laws -- I'll ignore them unless a man in blue happens to be watching...
Just have him stand back from the line for ten people and see if he can come up with a sane default that would almost fit 25% of the people who order. He won't be able to do it.
Considering this is how most restraunts operate, I doubt very much your assertion is anywhere close to true. One could easily come up with a default selection that will satisfy 75% of customers, even if it doesn't match exactly what they'd order in a build-it-yourself situation, and easily make that over 95% if you allow one "hold the X" in the equation. Anyone who can't do this shouldn't be in the restarant business.
They (both of the Voyagers) are travelling at greater than solar escape velocity. So are Pioneer 10 and 11. None of them will orbit, all four are destined to never return to our solar system (unless we go out and retrieve them at some point)...
Actually, if you're going SI, go all the way. Interstellar distances should be stated in petameters, exameters, or the like...
Umm, where? I don't see Times New Roman anywhere on this site. Perhaps you should check your browser settings...
OTOH, I know jack-didly-squat about movie making. But it seems a likely story...
Any company can request this from it's employees. But something has gone seriously wrong in any society where they can require it. Corporate image trumps free speech? Not in my book...
I have the authority to talk to anyone I want about whatever I want in my spare time, barring other legal issues (disclosing intellectual property that isn't exclusively mine, for example). The fact that you think someone has to authorize my ability to freely share my opinions is quite disturbing. That anyone can make this kind of statement so freely without even questioning it shows just how bad things have gotten on the free speech front.
If you are working for someone, you need to be able to trust your employer, AND your employer needs to be able to trust you.
And today's example shows that this guy's employer didn't trust him. If I trust an employee, I don't care who he talks to, I know he's just going to tell people the truth, not spread a bunch of malicious lies about the company. So I have no reason to fear a trusted employee talking to the press. Unless there's something terribly bad about the truth, and I want to make sure the public doesn't know about it...
Oh no! That was supposed to be -r, NOT -h! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!!!