don't see any reason to believe that North Korea or Iran will be exceptions. They'll rattle their nuclear sabres to enhance their influence in their respective regions. They'll hold them up as a deterrent to attack by their enemies. But they won't just start popping nukes because they have them.
I would agree with him about Iran. They seem to be pretty stable and well developed. I doubt they'd start slinging nukes around because they've got plenty to lose. Furthermore, the populace has become increasingly dissatisfied with the existing government's heavy-handed policy.
North Korea, on the other hand, has nothing to lose. They're thoroughly isolated and starving. Their government has trapped itself in a Catch-22 where any rapproachment with the outside world would lead to their loss of power, at best, and their heads at worst. I suspect that when they do get their weapons, they'll start blackmailing Japan (and later, America) with them - and they won't be joking. Even without the nukes, they've got enough artillery trained on South Korea to kill hundreds of thousands within minutes.
So what is our government doing? Stepping lightly around North Korea and threatening Iran. The exact opposite of what they should be doing.
Can't nanotubes be constructed in such a way as to be metal or semiconductor? If so, couldn't a little chemistry theoretically tweak these into comprising both a diode and the antenna?
Of course regular photovoltaics are just diodes anyway.
I was really interested in lumeloid (as well as another energy storage technology Marks was working on called Quensor which claimed to be rechargable with near-gasoline like energy density) but it's become evident that the research has been largely dropped. It's kind of a shame, but the market for very-high-efficiency solar cells (and very high capacity batteries) isn't going to go away anytime soon, so someone is bound to make a breakthrough someday.
While I can see value to public sidewalks, the problem is where do you stop?
While I can see value to private homes, the problem is where do you stop?
Ideological purity - pretty much of any variety - has this funny tendency of ruining people's lives in the service of abstract notions that claim to make them better. One wonders if air travel would have ever gotten off the ground if libertarians were in charge.
Over 600 Libertarians are serving in public office -- more than all other third parties combined.
a) Could you elaborate on "public office" - seeing as how statistics can be manipulated by choosing which ones to report.
b) Considering that the number of Libertarians in public office are so few even after decades of existence, and your chance of getting elected president are nil, do you see a future for the Libertarian Party?
Personally I'm all for cleaning up effects (like the transparencies and the wampa), and don't even mind adding in deleted scenes like the one with Han and Jabba in the first movie (although I thought it was better without, makes his appearance in ROTJ better).
Hell, Greedo can even shoot first for all I care. Compared to all those cops with walkie-talkies in ET, it's a minor alteration.
But I'll be damned if I'll ever accept that tacky musical number "Jedi Rocks" in Jabba's palace in ROTJ.
Last year saw the launch of LiberalHearts.com (http://www.liberalhearts.com), which grabbed headlines for its contest in which a woman won a date with Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (news - web sites), a bachelor.
I would like to see more states follow the Maine/Nebraska method of allocating electors, though (by Congressional district, and the extra 2 go to whoever wins the state overall). Screw that. Just put it to the popular vote.
The electoral system exists purely to elect the president. It may have made sense before the telegraph, but it's completely superfluous in the modern era. Frankly it's a waste of money and undemocratic.
So what if the popular vote would completely change the dynamics of elections. It won't even necessarily change the whole city/country dynamic. Not every city votes the same way, and there's nothing stopping someone from campaigning to the rural vote.
So what if small states lose their overrepresentation. They'll still have it in the Senate and House. How about the current underrepresentation of people in populous states? How is that fair? What about all the people who would vote differently from the solid majority in their state, but never even bother because their vote couldn't possibly change. Electing the president by popular vote will increase voter turnout by giving those millions of people a stake in the election. It will force anyone who wants to be elected president to devote time and energy and policy towards the populace as a whole and as individuals, not just the swing states.
So submit posts for politics in your country. Nobody's stopping you. If you're from anywhere with a decent sized population there are probably other slashdotters from your region who will want to talk about it. We Americans might even be interested to peek in on how it works in other nations.
Re:Downloaded and loved
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Try SWIG, or PyRex, or Boost Python I started with SWIG, and eventually decided it was easier to just write my one function myself instead of trying to learn all the ins and outs of swig. I didn't discover pyrex 'til later, and haven't really looked into boost.
compiled to byte code and then executed in a VM Then I'd prefer that it not require a VM. If you think it's to slow because it's not native the same goes for Java and C#. Correct. to point out that saying "it's too slow" without qualification is an old, tired, and disproven argument The inner loop of my program as written in python was too slow for my purposes, therefore I rewrote it in c. Possibly I could have sped things up using some of the tricks I used to get around the lack of dicts in c to speed up the python problem as well - maybe I'll try it sometime, but I'm pretty much done with that program.
For the record, I think that saying "It's fast enough with modern machines" is a patently untrue argument that I hear far too often with less efficiently executed/compiled languages (Haskell for instance); a program may not be performance-demanding, but it will still be using system resources that are frequently in short supply.
what SPECIFICALLY are you talking about That if I want to put a python program on a different computer than my own I have to either a) ensure that python and the necessary modules are already installed and are of the correct versions or b) install python of the correct version and necessary modules (often not an option) or c) make a distribution that includes all necessary modules, up to and including the standard ones, via freeze or bundlebuilder or py2exe.
That last option is not bad - it allows you to make single executable binaries/apps. I was under the impression it worked somewhat differently from that based on prior versions.
By computationally expensive, I mean analyzing many genomes for repetitions, and recording their frequency by distance and length, over a hundred times each. Hence the need for the inner loop to be as fast as possible, as most genomes took a about a day to process even with my c routine - when it was written in python they would have taken over a week each.
typing What I meant to say was compile-time rather than run-time type-checking, i.e. there's no way to declare what type an argument should be and have inconsistencies be caught before you run.
Re:Python Compiler
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 2, Informative
there's py2exe... but that's just an executable with the python interpreter and all necessary modules and code included, IIRC.
Re:Downloaded and loved
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've been programming pretty much exclusively in python lately - but as my programs have become more advanced the downsides are becoming more obvious. I ended up writing a python extension in C (painful when you've been programming in python). Specifically, you can't compile python - and interpreted it's just too slow for anything computationally expensive. Also you have to load the interpreter, (or embed w/extra modules) it's slow and uses more memory than it should.
PyObjC is a start, but the little differences in how things are implemented between Python and Objective C makes using it a bit difficult to learn. Plus it's mac-only. Pyrex looks interesting but I've yet to try it. PyPy seems to have been in development forever.
For starters, I think the distutils module needs an option to produce a package/binary that is runnable on any similar machine whether python is installed or not.
Python is amenable to a variety of programming styles, is very readable, has well developed libraries, and is quick to write. But I've found myself wanting more than it can deliver, in terms of raw speed and number-crunching power, and even occasionally the need for typing and assignment by reference. I hope they find some way to deliver it someday, or make a language that retains the ease and efficiency of python but is also compilable.
Perot came from a populist-centrist approach with a slight-right bias. He was an active philanthropist and has been especially praised for his attention to education. He researched and offered refreshingly new solutions for many domestic issues. He was breathtakingly energetic - part of his downfall but also his appeal. I knew many democrats that were very interested in Perot. Of course it didn't help that he was so eccentric that he actually dropped out and rejoined the race. It seemed flaky and ruined his chances. He probably should have started out by running for Lt. Governor of Texas instead of president, but I guess he thought to big for that.
While the Republicans may have lost more votes to him than the Democrats in his first campaign, they both lost votes. He received not a single electoral vote. But he really did give them both a run for their money.
Nader, on the other hand, seems like just a grouch, and comes from a way-left angle. Not a whole lot of republican votes swinging his way. Any third candidate is by definition a challenge to the two party-system, but Perot is the only one in recent times to really stood a chance. For sure Nader never will.
Well it seems like I haven't had mod points in forever anyway... but when I did have them I used them. Yes I'm counting on others to do my analysis for me (at the top level anyway), yes I'm missing gems, no moderators are not always fair. But so what? That's part of the process. It's collaborative. I don't have to read every post, I don't have to look upon every gem (many look pretty much the same anyway). If felt like I HAD to read and rate every post on slashdot, I'd probably not read them at all or just stick to the articles.
Oddly, that rule does not apply to regular films... I'm really not clear on why this rule exists at all, except maybe to prevent documentaries made for television from competing - having started on TV and then upon success a limited run in theaters to qualify. Even then that seems rather unnecessary.
Well, it's not the only inexplicable/stupid thing about the Oscars.
... is having to carefully budget how many copies she makes over the year. In other words, teachers barely have enough money for paper.
Books used by kids daily don't last long. Many do require revision. Buildings need to be maintained. Supplies need to be purchased. Staff needs to be paid. The ever-increasing population demands more and bigger schools. Classes are too large and there aren't enough teachers or space to allow for smaller ones, or enough money to afford them or teachers to teach them anyway. Never mind the fact that teachers have terrible wages and so-so benefits, much less than other jobs with an equivalent degree of education command.
So genius, did you consider the fact that the reason schools are always asking for money might be because they are already starving for funds? Never enough money for education my ass. I've yet to see a public school that even comes close to having enough money, and I've lived in some pretty rich cities.
All posts are not equal, and I'm not going to waste my time reading all of them. I think the current system works reasonably well. Here's how it seems to work:
Early top-level topics are quickly modded up if they're any good. Most of these were pretty obvious to begin with and thus it's mainly a matter of who got to them first. These become the base of all discussions on that particular topic - you skim all of these top level posts to determine which aspects you want to pursue, and click through them to get to the child topics. The process then repeats itself with the next level by people actively interested in the discussion, and so forth. Also, there are enough people with enough time searching for less accessible posts and modding them into noticability.
In other words, there is a semi-heirarchic approach to which posts I read and which I don't. Anything really good will be caught and modded up to 4 or 5, provided it was posted early enough. Which is fine by me. I don't really care about everything that's out there, I just want to read a few decent posts.
That's an interesting point about Karma, but I'm not sure how a slashdot article would work without it. The whole system depends on good comments getting modded up and stupid ones down. Perhaps we need some sort of dummy moderation message that doesn't affect score, but does allow people to register their agreement/disagreement with the opinions of the statement. Of course that might necessitate reconsideration of the existing Troll, Overrated, Underrated, and Flamebait tags.
I've been asking for this section for a while. News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters doesn't just mean tech stuff. For sure people have been trying to talk politics on many an occasion. Here's hoping this section incorporates significant current events as well. For instance, even slashdot covered the trade center bombings, but at the time they happened politics was a minor concern - disseminating news of the event being the primary one.
While they're at it, they should make a general "Entertainment" section as well to let all you fanboys rant and rave about your favorite series (yay Farscape) without having to subject everyone to things few people care about (boo Firefly). Only the really big shows need to make the front page, but that doesn't mean there aren't other things people want to cover.
Can anyone think of any other sections that should be added? I feel like I'm forgetting one that I thought of before...
Any instructions on how to set one of these up? Sounds like the only improvement necessary was a hookup to the car battery. Duh! Also, don't phones these days have GPS or something like it built in, that locates the phone based on triangulation with cell towers? If you used that you could do away with the GPS unit altogether, and just need a motion switch to trigger a program on the phone that texts the location - or just make it transmit at intervals.
Not all Windows Media Player 9 files will play on Windows Media Player 9 for OS X, never mind AVI files using WMP codecs. And they make it as difficult as possible for you to know that.
Exactly. 5 is actually getting into the range where artifacts really start becoming visible. It's a common issue on regular movies which are more than 2hrs long as well.
Slashdot Mirror
don't see any reason to believe that North Korea or Iran will be exceptions. They'll rattle their nuclear sabres to enhance their influence in their respective regions. They'll hold them up as a deterrent to attack by their enemies. But they won't just start popping nukes because they have them.
I would agree with him about Iran. They seem to be pretty stable and well developed. I doubt they'd start slinging nukes around because they've got plenty to lose. Furthermore, the populace has become increasingly dissatisfied with the existing government's heavy-handed policy.
North Korea, on the other hand, has nothing to lose. They're thoroughly isolated and starving. Their government has trapped itself in a Catch-22 where any rapproachment with the outside world would lead to their loss of power, at best, and their heads at worst. I suspect that when they do get their weapons, they'll start blackmailing Japan (and later, America) with them - and they won't be joking. Even without the nukes, they've got enough artillery trained on South Korea to kill hundreds of thousands within minutes.
So what is our government doing? Stepping lightly around North Korea and threatening Iran. The exact opposite of what they should be doing.
Can't nanotubes be constructed in such a way as to be metal or semiconductor? If so, couldn't a little chemistry theoretically tweak these into comprising both a diode and the antenna?
Of course regular photovoltaics are just diodes anyway.
I was really interested in lumeloid (as well as another energy storage technology Marks was working on called Quensor which claimed to be rechargable with near-gasoline like energy density) but it's become evident that the research has been largely dropped. It's kind of a shame, but the market for very-high-efficiency solar cells (and very high capacity batteries) isn't going to go away anytime soon, so someone is bound to make a breakthrough someday.
With the major gone, can Bateau stop the carnage?
Sure he can, with Togusa doing all the legwork. While everyone else in Section 9 is off kicking ass and tailing people, he's solving the case.
While I can see value to public sidewalks, the problem is where do you stop?
While I can see value to private homes, the problem is where do you stop?
Ideological purity - pretty much of any variety - has this funny tendency of ruining people's lives in the service of abstract notions that claim to make them better. One wonders if air travel would have ever gotten off the ground if libertarians were in charge.
Over 600 Libertarians are serving in public office -- more than all other third parties combined.
a) Could you elaborate on "public office" - seeing as how statistics can be manipulated by choosing which ones to report.
b) Considering that the number of Libertarians in public office are so few even after decades of existence, and your chance of getting elected president are nil, do you see a future for the Libertarian Party?
Personally I'm all for cleaning up effects (like the transparencies and the wampa), and don't even mind adding in deleted scenes like the one with Han and Jabba in the first movie (although I thought it was better without, makes his appearance in ROTJ better).
Hell, Greedo can even shoot first for all I care. Compared to all those cops with walkie-talkies in ET, it's a minor alteration.
But I'll be damned if I'll ever accept that tacky musical number "Jedi Rocks" in Jabba's palace in ROTJ.
And I must have missed this one when it happened:
Last year saw the launch of LiberalHearts.com (http://www.liberalhearts.com), which grabbed headlines for its contest in which a woman won a date with Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (news - web sites), a bachelor.
Led by John Hlinko, one of the people behind the liberal group MoveOn.org (http://www.moveon.org), ActForLove's motto is "Take Action. Get Action."
Priceless!
I would like to see more states follow the Maine/Nebraska method of allocating electors, though (by Congressional district, and the extra 2 go to whoever wins the state overall).
Screw that. Just put it to the popular vote.
The electoral system exists purely to elect the president. It may have made sense before the telegraph, but it's completely superfluous in the modern era. Frankly it's a waste of money and undemocratic.
So what if the popular vote would completely change the dynamics of elections. It won't even necessarily change the whole city/country dynamic. Not every city votes the same way, and there's nothing stopping someone from campaigning to the rural vote.
So what if small states lose their overrepresentation. They'll still have it in the Senate and House. How about the current underrepresentation of people in populous states? How is that fair? What about all the people who would vote differently from the solid majority in their state, but never even bother because their vote couldn't possibly change. Electing the president by popular vote will increase voter turnout by giving those millions of people a stake in the election. It will force anyone who wants to be elected president to devote time and energy and policy towards the populace as a whole and as individuals, not just the swing states.
So submit posts for politics in your country. Nobody's stopping you. If you're from anywhere with a decent sized population there are probably other slashdotters from your region who will want to talk about it. We Americans might even be interested to peek in on how it works in other nations.
Try SWIG, or PyRex, or Boost Python
I started with SWIG, and eventually decided it was easier to just write my one function myself instead of trying to learn all the ins and outs of swig. I didn't discover pyrex 'til later, and haven't really looked into boost.
compiled to byte code and then executed in a VM
Then I'd prefer that it not require a VM.
If you think it's to slow because it's not native the same goes for Java and C#.
Correct.
to point out that saying "it's too slow" without qualification is an old, tired, and disproven argument
The inner loop of my program as written in python was too slow for my purposes, therefore I rewrote it in c. Possibly I could have sped things up using some of the tricks I used to get around the lack of dicts in c to speed up the python problem as well - maybe I'll try it sometime, but I'm pretty much done with that program.
For the record, I think that saying "It's fast enough with modern machines" is a patently untrue argument that I hear far too often with less efficiently executed/compiled languages (Haskell for instance); a program may not be performance-demanding, but it will still be using system resources that are frequently in short supply.
what SPECIFICALLY are you talking about
That if I want to put a python program on a different computer than my own I have to either a) ensure that python and the necessary modules are already installed and are of the correct versions or b) install python of the correct version and necessary modules (often not an option) or c) make a distribution that includes all necessary modules, up to and including the standard ones, via freeze or bundlebuilder or py2exe.
That last option is not bad - it allows you to make single executable binaries/apps. I was under the impression it worked somewhat differently from that based on prior versions.
By computationally expensive, I mean analyzing many genomes for repetitions, and recording their frequency by distance and length, over a hundred times each. Hence the need for the inner loop to be as fast as possible, as most genomes took a about a day to process even with my c routine - when it was written in python they would have taken over a week each.
typing
What I meant to say was compile-time rather than run-time type-checking, i.e. there's no way to declare what type an argument should be and have inconsistencies be caught before you run.
there's py2exe... but that's just an executable with the python interpreter and all necessary modules and code included, IIRC.
I've been programming pretty much exclusively in python lately - but as my programs have become more advanced the downsides are becoming more obvious. I ended up writing a python extension in C (painful when you've been programming in python). Specifically, you can't compile python - and interpreted it's just too slow for anything computationally expensive. Also you have to load the interpreter, (or embed w/extra modules) it's slow and uses more memory than it should.
PyObjC is a start, but the little differences in how things are implemented between Python and Objective C makes using it a bit difficult to learn. Plus it's mac-only. Pyrex looks interesting but I've yet to try it. PyPy seems to have been in development forever.
For starters, I think the distutils module needs an option to produce a package/binary that is runnable on any similar machine whether python is installed or not.
Python is amenable to a variety of programming styles, is very readable, has well developed libraries, and is quick to write. But I've found myself wanting more than it can deliver, in terms of raw speed and number-crunching power, and even occasionally the need for typing and assignment by reference. I hope they find some way to deliver it someday, or make a language that retains the ease and efficiency of python but is also compilable.
Not to mention Fox "News".
Perot came from a populist-centrist approach with a slight-right bias. He was an active philanthropist and has been especially praised for his attention to education. He researched and offered refreshingly new solutions for many domestic issues. He was breathtakingly energetic - part of his downfall but also his appeal. I knew many democrats that were very interested in Perot. Of course it didn't help that he was so eccentric that he actually dropped out and rejoined the race. It seemed flaky and ruined his chances. He probably should have started out by running for Lt. Governor of Texas instead of president, but I guess he thought to big for that.
While the Republicans may have lost more votes to him than the Democrats in his first campaign, they both lost votes. He received not a single electoral vote. But he really did give them both a run for their money.
Nader, on the other hand, seems like just a grouch, and comes from a way-left angle. Not a whole lot of republican votes swinging his way. Any third candidate is by definition a challenge to the two party-system, but Perot is the only one in recent times to really stood a chance. For sure Nader never will.
Well it seems like I haven't had mod points in forever anyway... but when I did have them I used them. Yes I'm counting on others to do my analysis for me (at the top level anyway), yes I'm missing gems, no moderators are not always fair. But so what? That's part of the process. It's collaborative. I don't have to read every post, I don't have to look upon every gem (many look pretty much the same anyway). If felt like I HAD to read and rate every post on slashdot, I'd probably not read them at all or just stick to the articles.
Oddly, that rule does not apply to regular films... I'm really not clear on why this rule exists at all, except maybe to prevent documentaries made for television from competing - having started on TV and then upon success a limited run in theaters to qualify. Even then that seems rather unnecessary.
Well, it's not the only inexplicable/stupid thing about the Oscars.
... is having to carefully budget how many copies she makes over the year. In other words, teachers barely have enough money for paper.
Books used by kids daily don't last long. Many do require revision. Buildings need to be maintained. Supplies need to be purchased. Staff needs to be paid. The ever-increasing population demands more and bigger schools. Classes are too large and there aren't enough teachers or space to allow for smaller ones, or enough money to afford them or teachers to teach them anyway. Never mind the fact that teachers have terrible wages and so-so benefits, much less than other jobs with an equivalent degree of education command.
So genius, did you consider the fact that the reason schools are always asking for money might be because they are already starving for funds? Never enough money for education my ass. I've yet to see a public school that even comes close to having enough money, and I've lived in some pretty rich cities.
All posts are not equal, and I'm not going to waste my time reading all of them. I think the current system works reasonably well. Here's how it seems to work:
Early top-level topics are quickly modded up if they're any good. Most of these were pretty obvious to begin with and thus it's mainly a matter of who got to them first. These become the base of all discussions on that particular topic - you skim all of these top level posts to determine which aspects you want to pursue, and click through them to get to the child topics. The process then repeats itself with the next level by people actively interested in the discussion, and so forth. Also, there are enough people with enough time searching for less accessible posts and modding them into noticability.
In other words, there is a semi-heirarchic approach to which posts I read and which I don't. Anything really good will be caught and modded up to 4 or 5, provided it was posted early enough. Which is fine by me. I don't really care about everything that's out there, I just want to read a few decent posts.
+2 Libertarian Asshole
-50 Lobbyist
-50 Politician
+50 Hot Chick
+1 Geeky
+0 You are so wrong!
-0 You are so right!
That's an interesting point about Karma, but I'm not sure how a slashdot article would work without it. The whole system depends on good comments getting modded up and stupid ones down. Perhaps we need some sort of dummy moderation message that doesn't affect score, but does allow people to register their agreement/disagreement with the opinions of the statement. Of course that might necessitate reconsideration of the existing Troll, Overrated, Underrated, and Flamebait tags.
I've been asking for this section for a while. News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters doesn't just mean tech stuff. For sure people have been trying to talk politics on many an occasion. Here's hoping this section incorporates significant current events as well. For instance, even slashdot covered the trade center bombings, but at the time they happened politics was a minor concern - disseminating news of the event being the primary one.
While they're at it, they should make a general "Entertainment" section as well to let all you fanboys rant and rave about your favorite series (yay Farscape) without having to subject everyone to things few people care about (boo Firefly). Only the really big shows need to make the front page, but that doesn't mean there aren't other things people want to cover.
Can anyone think of any other sections that should be added? I feel like I'm forgetting one that I thought of before...
Any instructions on how to set one of these up? Sounds like the only improvement necessary was a hookup to the car battery. Duh! Also, don't phones these days have GPS or something like it built in, that locates the phone based on triangulation with cell towers? If you used that you could do away with the GPS unit altogether, and just need a motion switch to trigger a program on the phone that texts the location - or just make it transmit at intervals.
WMP10 is not available for OS X/Mac.
Not all Windows Media Player 9 files will play on Windows Media Player 9 for OS X, never mind AVI files using WMP codecs. And they make it as difficult as possible for you to know that.
Deuterium is not radioactive.
Exactly. 5 is actually getting into the range where artifacts really start becoming visible. It's a common issue on regular movies which are more than 2hrs long as well.