... where "ultimate" means "last". If you assume "last = best" (and thus "ultimate" = "awesome", as is common) then "penultimate" is "the next best thing". None too shabby, especially in situations where "ultimate" is assumed to be unachievable. (Example: assume there is a concept of an "ultimate weapon", which no weapon can match. That concept is itself unachievable. The penultimate weapon, then, is the next-best-thing, the most awesome weapon that actually exists; it will lose its standing as the penultimate weapon when a better one is devised.)
Indeed. You'd think they'd be more sensitive to how annoying it is to use their own search service for things like "sql server..." or "word..." or "reporting services..." -- any time a company names their product after its most obvious use or category, it plays havoc with search results, and not in a good, profitable way. Name your products something unique. We don't necessarily need to go back to the days of Language-o-matic or Go-lux or what-have-you... but something unique, at least? You've got the tools to determine what *is* unique pretty easily...
That's a shame, I was briefly happy to see someone else realize that in the default scenario, without laws outlining proper procedures and punishments for various crimes, criminals aren't safe from society at all -- we'll mob them, tear them apart, even for small offenses. There are always more of us than criminals, we're the majority, we have the power; laws are always about protecting the minority from the majority, which would otherwise win by default. Criminals are safer in that they are told ahead of time what punishments to expect for their crimes -- unlike reaching your hand into the cookie jar only to discover that the punishment is death (sorry, no signs posted, too lazy) -- and we, their peers, restrict *ourselves* from doling out whatever punishment we feel is appropriate in the heat of the moment.
The watermark could be a modification of the text itself -- simple seemingly-randomized misspellings, word-order change that preserves the meaning, etc. In order to find those, you'd have to compare your copy, word-for-word, with everyone else's to extract the "root" document, which also means everyone would know what you were up to.
I = V/r, but r is zero, so I is NaN. If V is zero by your math, and I is indeterminate by mine, and P=VI, then the wattage is zero * NaN ? That's not the same as 5GW. Or P=VI=IIR=zero, which is also different from 5GW.
Planets are spheres. They don't get distorted by viewing angle.
The Earth is 7,926 mi in diameter at the equator, but 7,901 mi wide pole-to-pole. Viewed from above a pole, it would look like a circle, while from the plane of the solar system, it looks like an ellipse, and you'll get a different diameter measurement depending on the slice you take. I would assume that any spinning quasi-sphere of material will actually be a geoid, including the sun.
Tried that. Failed to stick well enough, ripped off when even moderately close to magnetic metals. Maybe my skin's just sub-par. Problem with putting something around it to hold it on (like a bandage): that restricts its movements relative to your skin, spreads out the effect over a larger area, there's less to feel. Implanting seems much more effective, mechanically.
Finding/crafting a word to fit a situation, I agree, is a "useless exercise in semantics". In this case, they were moving forward -- using or abusing the commonly-understood definition of life while making a claim concerning their achievements: if there weren't something special & coveted about the "alive" status, it wouldn't have been part of the claim. It's a bit like money: worthless paper, yet worth a lot under the right circumstances.
So the question becomes: why do we care if it's alive or not? What property of labeling it "life" makes it so much more important, useful, difficult, etc.? And is *that* aspect of "life" true, in this particular case? If we decide that it's important for reasons that are only a subset of life in general (active metabolism isn't required, for example), then we don't care if it's alive or not per se, we care about that one important/useful/difficult property, and that's much easier to argue over.
Well, that, and you just implied that the Wikipedia page on "Definition" is, itself, the definition of definition. And any of us can change the definition of definition. Semantics FTW!
Oh? Just the other day, we were talking about how much cell division is like fork(): it's not just the pure code that's forked, but the state of all globals and open file descriptors, too. There's more to reproduction than just our DNA, there's all that "running VM" stuff going on, too: an infected cell that reproduces is likely to result in two infected cells, even if that's not part of the cell's normal DNA; a cell with a chemical imbalance will likely pass that on to its new sibling. Some cloning methods rely on injecting one cell's DNA into another -- like running a program in both a test and production environment, care should be taken to think about the whole situation when diagnosing problems, not just the DNA/code itself. See? More similarities.
Comparing & contrasting (via "like") is not the same as saying the two are the same (via "equals"). Commonalities, when they can be found, are informative because (most) humans have the power of inductive reasoning. You're welcome to point out the important differences so we can avoid coming to undue conclusions in one or the other field.
Among younsters, perhaps. I hardly ever carry more than a couple bucks with me -- enough for a soda. But it feels like everyone over sixty goes around with twenties or hundreds on them, either so they can easily spoil the grandkids, or go to the casino after dinner. Maybe they use it as a crude form of budgeting. Or maybe grandma's a druggie.
Please avoid the use of the term "victimless crime" when talking about fraud, theft, or copyright violation. It muddies the waters for true victimless crimes -- personal drug use, consensual sex work, communist ideals, etc.
Point 3 is misleading. Yes, pilots could purchase them, and you might not want to go to the trouble of uniquely identifying every pilot, but that's not the same as pilots being able to transmit as a controller! It'd be possible to use public keys to identify known-good control towers, and only distribute keys to those towers after proper investigation, rescind keys if they get out into the wild, etc. Pilots need to know that the control tower really is a control tower -- it's not quite as important the other way around. As long as a light indicates "you're hearing the voice of a real, authorized controller", you can ignore messages when that light isn't on. For that matter, you could auto-exclude them. Like auto-muting advertising.
We've managed to encrypt and authenticate large chunks of the internet without assigning unique IDs to every internet user. We can do this too. Not that this is the only hurdle. Your other points stand. It's still a huge challenge.
... if that means that megacorps also can't go around buying up dozens of extra domain names for no really good reason -- one for every special deal they ever offer, every product, every movie they put out, every... whatever, then sure. You get what you get, and that's it. But that's not going to happen.
Trademarks are essentially local. Two companies can even operate under the same name, as long as they're not getting in each others' way, creating confusion -- by being in the same market (by product or area). There's paperwork (and treaties) involved in making those trademarks global. What would make more sense is to get rid of the.com and.gov TLD's and replace those with.co.us and.gov.us . If another country wants to have whitehouse.gov.jp, then fine, let them have it. We have ours. We're not competing on the international scene for the name "whitehouse". (There are many whitehouses, by the way.) If TLDs are aligned with trademark-assignment organizations, we can avoid some (but not all) the weirdness.
Misspellings: how many products are named with cute misspellings? Who's to say that those are intended to be malicious? If you require someone to have a product first, you'll see CocaCola buying every variant of their name, and preventing anyone from ever naming their product C0k3C0l4, even if they might have initially. So you can grandfather in misspellings, but you then section off a whole range of possibilities just because?
Aligning with trademark organizations presents problems for small businesses and personal users, who have no real interest in having a globally unique name, but could use a locally unique one. Maybe no product is involved. Other than DNS, you'd have no reason to deal with trademarks. Why should you? The system we have now essentially says "fine, get your DNS name, but if a trademark holder comes along later, we'll screw you" which isn't fair, but does provide a "rule" (ICANN ruling) for determining priority.
Taking away TLDs just makes it easier for squatters to sign up for names, especially if you automate the detection of misspellings and assign them all to an existing holder. You can kiss creative DNS names goodbye.
Others can probably clean up and add to my arguments, but the point is... please reconsider. Ridding ourselves of TLDs doesn't help things. Maybe something else would... but not that.
I'm noticing that several responses are about the cancer risk -- but cancer is only one possible outcome of damaged DNA. There are lots of other possible issues with having (effectively) randomly-mutated cells all over your body. All of them now have the potential to be generating proteins they shouldn't be, or failing to produce those they should. A whole host of genetic diseases come up then, with each part of your body potentially having a different one, and as they reproduce (now that they're not self-destructing) they propagate those errors within the body. You could have a lower cancer rate, because most of the mutations don't result in cancer, but still have a whole host of other problems.
Just don't forget to *also* search on google (or any other engine,) to make sure the bing link isn't for $(original_price + discount) - discount... you know, kinda like the "savings" you get from your health insurance?
Funny, I constantly find myself wishing Office 2k7 had some form of command-line with tab-completion and -suggestion so I could find the commands they hid in random ribbon pages as either a large, small, or worded entry, in a popup screen somewhere, or just outright hid (ugh.)
And regardless, can you trust the build based on that source code? ACM Classic: Reflections on Trusting Trust (about the need for a bootstrap compiler, and the concern that this compiler might be infiltrated.)
Two of you make the point that low-value listings wouldn't attract realtors, but remember that these statistics come from an MLS, which aggregates data from licensed real estate agents -- it most likely wouldn't contain for-sale-by-owner listings. That kind of muddies the waters.
Slashdot Mirror
... where "ultimate" means "last". If you assume "last = best" (and thus "ultimate" = "awesome", as is common) then "penultimate" is "the next best thing". None too shabby, especially in situations where "ultimate" is assumed to be unachievable. (Example: assume there is a concept of an "ultimate weapon", which no weapon can match. That concept is itself unachievable. The penultimate weapon, then, is the next-best-thing, the most awesome weapon that actually exists; it will lose its standing as the penultimate weapon when a better one is devised.)
Indeed. You'd think they'd be more sensitive to how annoying it is to use their own search service for things like "sql server ..." or "word ..." or "reporting services ..." -- any time a company names their product after its most obvious use or category, it plays havoc with search results, and not in a good, profitable way. Name your products something unique. We don't necessarily need to go back to the days of Language-o-matic or Go-lux or what-have-you ... but something unique, at least? You've got the tools to determine what *is* unique pretty easily ...
I meant "keeping society safe from criminals"
That's a shame, I was briefly happy to see someone else realize that in the default scenario, without laws outlining proper procedures and punishments for various crimes, criminals aren't safe from society at all -- we'll mob them, tear them apart, even for small offenses. There are always more of us than criminals, we're the majority, we have the power; laws are always about protecting the minority from the majority, which would otherwise win by default. Criminals are safer in that they are told ahead of time what punishments to expect for their crimes -- unlike reaching your hand into the cookie jar only to discover that the punishment is death (sorry, no signs posted, too lazy) -- and we, their peers, restrict *ourselves* from doling out whatever punishment we feel is appropriate in the heat of the moment.
The watermark could be a modification of the text itself -- simple seemingly-randomized misspellings, word-order change that preserves the meaning, etc. In order to find those, you'd have to compare your copy, word-for-word, with everyone else's to extract the "root" document, which also means everyone would know what you were up to.
I = V/r, but r is zero, so I is NaN. If V is zero by your math, and I is indeterminate by mine, and P=VI, then the wattage is zero * NaN ? That's not the same as 5GW. Or P=VI=IIR=zero, which is also different from 5GW.
Planets are spheres. They don't get distorted by viewing angle.
The Earth is 7,926 mi in diameter at the equator, but 7,901 mi wide pole-to-pole. Viewed from above a pole, it would look like a circle, while from the plane of the solar system, it looks like an ellipse, and you'll get a different diameter measurement depending on the slice you take. I would assume that any spinning quasi-sphere of material will actually be a geoid, including the sun.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
The anecdote is false, though that doesn't necessarily invalidate your point. But we should probably find a better way to convey it.
I remember a similar graphic from when I was a kid, in the front of a national geographic atlas. I wonder if this was an intentional knock-off?
http://www.jointquest.com/jointquest-old/NationalGeographicTheUniverseMap.jpg
iFilter for OpenOffice documents: http://www.ifiltershop.com/staroffice-openoffice-ifilter.html ($300, I think.)
Tried that. Failed to stick well enough, ripped off when even moderately close to magnetic metals. Maybe my skin's just sub-par. Problem with putting something around it to hold it on (like a bandage): that restricts its movements relative to your skin, spreads out the effect over a larger area, there's less to feel. Implanting seems much more effective, mechanically.
Finding/crafting a word to fit a situation, I agree, is a "useless exercise in semantics". In this case, they were moving forward -- using or abusing the commonly-understood definition of life while making a claim concerning their achievements: if there weren't something special & coveted about the "alive" status, it wouldn't have been part of the claim. It's a bit like money: worthless paper, yet worth a lot under the right circumstances.
So the question becomes: why do we care if it's alive or not? What property of labeling it "life" makes it so much more important, useful, difficult, etc.? And is *that* aspect of "life" true, in this particular case? If we decide that it's important for reasons that are only a subset of life in general (active metabolism isn't required, for example), then we don't care if it's alive or not per se, we care about that one important/useful/difficult property, and that's much easier to argue over.
Well, that, and you just implied that the Wikipedia page on "Definition" is, itself, the definition of definition. And any of us can change the definition of definition. Semantics FTW!
Oh? Just the other day, we were talking about how much cell division is like fork(): it's not just the pure code that's forked, but the state of all globals and open file descriptors, too. There's more to reproduction than just our DNA, there's all that "running VM" stuff going on, too: an infected cell that reproduces is likely to result in two infected cells, even if that's not part of the cell's normal DNA; a cell with a chemical imbalance will likely pass that on to its new sibling. Some cloning methods rely on injecting one cell's DNA into another -- like running a program in both a test and production environment, care should be taken to think about the whole situation when diagnosing problems, not just the DNA/code itself. See? More similarities.
Comparing & contrasting (via "like") is not the same as saying the two are the same (via "equals"). Commonalities, when they can be found, are informative because (most) humans have the power of inductive reasoning. You're welcome to point out the important differences so we can avoid coming to undue conclusions in one or the other field.
Wikipedia also has an interesting article on semantics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics .
Please stop saying "[just|merely|only|nothing but] semantics" in common language, as they are anything but insignificant, by definition.
Among younsters, perhaps. I hardly ever carry more than a couple bucks with me -- enough for a soda. But it feels like everyone over sixty goes around with twenties or hundreds on them, either so they can easily spoil the grandkids, or go to the casino after dinner. Maybe they use it as a crude form of budgeting. Or maybe grandma's a druggie.
Please avoid the use of the term "victimless crime" when talking about fraud, theft, or copyright violation. It muddies the waters for true victimless crimes -- personal drug use, consensual sex work, communist ideals, etc.
Point 3 is misleading. Yes, pilots could purchase them, and you might not want to go to the trouble of uniquely identifying every pilot, but that's not the same as pilots being able to transmit as a controller! It'd be possible to use public keys to identify known-good control towers, and only distribute keys to those towers after proper investigation, rescind keys if they get out into the wild, etc. Pilots need to know that the control tower really is a control tower -- it's not quite as important the other way around. As long as a light indicates "you're hearing the voice of a real, authorized controller", you can ignore messages when that light isn't on. For that matter, you could auto-exclude them. Like auto-muting advertising.
We've managed to encrypt and authenticate large chunks of the internet without assigning unique IDs to every internet user. We can do this too. Not that this is the only hurdle. Your other points stand. It's still a huge challenge.
... if that means that megacorps also can't go around buying up dozens of extra domain names for no really good reason -- one for every special deal they ever offer, every product, every movie they put out, every ... whatever, then sure. You get what you get, and that's it. But that's not going to happen.
Trademarks are essentially local. Two companies can even operate under the same name, as long as they're not getting in each others' way, creating confusion -- by being in the same market (by product or area). There's paperwork (and treaties) involved in making those trademarks global. What would make more sense is to get rid of the .com and .gov TLD's and replace those with .co.us and .gov.us . If another country wants to have whitehouse.gov.jp, then fine, let them have it. We have ours. We're not competing on the international scene for the name "whitehouse". (There are many whitehouses, by the way.) If TLDs are aligned with trademark-assignment organizations, we can avoid some (but not all) the weirdness.
Misspellings: how many products are named with cute misspellings? Who's to say that those are intended to be malicious? If you require someone to have a product first, you'll see CocaCola buying every variant of their name, and preventing anyone from ever naming their product C0k3C0l4, even if they might have initially. So you can grandfather in misspellings, but you then section off a whole range of possibilities just because?
Aligning with trademark organizations presents problems for small businesses and personal users, who have no real interest in having a globally unique name, but could use a locally unique one. Maybe no product is involved. Other than DNS, you'd have no reason to deal with trademarks. Why should you? The system we have now essentially says "fine, get your DNS name, but if a trademark holder comes along later, we'll screw you" which isn't fair, but does provide a "rule" (ICANN ruling) for determining priority.
Taking away TLDs just makes it easier for squatters to sign up for names, especially if you automate the detection of misspellings and assign them all to an existing holder. You can kiss creative DNS names goodbye.
Others can probably clean up and add to my arguments, but the point is ... please reconsider. Ridding ourselves of TLDs doesn't help things. Maybe something else would ... but not that.
I'm noticing that several responses are about the cancer risk -- but cancer is only one possible outcome of damaged DNA. There are lots of other possible issues with having (effectively) randomly-mutated cells all over your body. All of them now have the potential to be generating proteins they shouldn't be, or failing to produce those they should. A whole host of genetic diseases come up then, with each part of your body potentially having a different one, and as they reproduce (now that they're not self-destructing) they propagate those errors within the body. You could have a lower cancer rate, because most of the mutations don't result in cancer, but still have a whole host of other problems.
Just don't forget to *also* search on google (or any other engine,) to make sure the bing link isn't for $(original_price + discount) - discount ... you know, kinda like the "savings" you get from your health insurance?
Is recursion tautology, or is tautology recursion? Is a stateless, parameter-less, unbounded recursion even recursion at all?
Funny, I constantly find myself wishing Office 2k7 had some form of command-line with tab-completion and -suggestion so I could find the commands they hid in random ribbon pages as either a large, small, or worded entry, in a popup screen somewhere, or just outright hid (ugh.)
And regardless, can you trust the build based on that source code? ACM Classic: Reflections on Trusting Trust (about the need for a bootstrap compiler, and the concern that this compiler might be infiltrated.)
Oracle (the company) buys Sun, Sun backs OpenOffice.org, Oracle provides database solutions, this is a database error ... thus the irony.
Two of you make the point that low-value listings wouldn't attract realtors, but remember that these statistics come from an MLS, which aggregates data from licensed real estate agents -- it most likely wouldn't contain for-sale-by-owner listings. That kind of muddies the waters.