Except that [wiki syntax is] much more unclear, shitty and limited than original XML.
Yes, but it's far simpler to write in wiki syntax. I know you don't necessarily agree, but my experience is that hardly anyone is able to write correct XML; they just don't bother to create well-formed documents (never mind validity). With wiki syntax, you can do a pretty good job of recovering something sensible out of virtually any character sequence.
Well, unless you have a complicated templating system like mediawiki's one. Writing good templates for anything other than the very simplest of substitutions is remarkably difficult; it's programming, not normal editing.
The bidi problem is not display - per the link I helpfully provided, it's editing.
But that's still a browser problem, not really a wiki problem (unless they're writing their own editor in Javascript or something equally boneheaded). You've got to delegate some problems to others, even if you know they're doing some stuff wrong, because there's just never enough time to do everything yourself.
"the template system started turning into an ugly programming language" - ah, any sufficiently complex system eventually evolves to contain a limited, broken version of Common Lisp.
This includes Common Lisp, which contains itself as a proper subset.
You know you're dealing with something from outside the solar system because within the solar system, the solar wind (hot, fast-moving plasma) blows all diffuse material out very rapidly. If there's a large amount of material out at the edge of where we believe the boundary to be between the domain dominated by solar wind and the domain dominated by the rest of the galaxy, and that material has a composition not seen within the solar system, we can have as a very strong guess that its extra-solar. Anything else really is much less probable.
Which isn't to say that it is of the same composition as the gas+dust cloud that formed the solar system. That's long gone and the solar system has moved a lot since then.
What's the difference between the US Department of Health and National Institute of Health (NIH)? I know the latter is part of the executive branch, but that'sit.
They're both executive branch. The NIH are formally a part of the DoH, and have responsibility for doing (and coordinating) research for the department. There are similar arrangements in other departments (the DoD has DARPA, the DoE fund a number of national labs, etc.) and it's not very remarkable. In general, it's useful for the departments to have research arms in order to both provide solid scientifically-based advice on policy, and to gently encourage everyone else to do research that benefits the nation as well as themselves.
The main problem with it is that it does not allow any learning on either side of the fence.
I'd express that differently: the main problem is that it assumes that the requirements can be (in practice) totally known before coding starts. The waterfall model works for things like houses and bridges, where the basic requirements are well understood by all, but software is more flexible and less understood. Having fast iterations with feedback — the core of Agile — works better for much software development because it helps everyone converge both requirements and the implementation.
Even if you are just stuck debugging someone else's code (90% of what I've done over the last year), the process of doing that 1,600 hours a year will really improve your skills.
It particularly helps if you're stuck with maintaining code that was written by you several years ago, because that might as well be another person. The only way to minimize the overall workload is to engineer stuff properly.
On topic though, who in their RIGHT MIND is EVER going to let an outside ID onto their secure servers?
That depends. Is it a known outside ID? Is there some kind of agreement to let them on (which would imply ensuring that people treat the authentication mechanisms carefully)? If not, then for sure don't let them on. But people trust outside IDs all the time, and the sky doesn't fall in.
If it's so plain-as-day that connecting all these devices is hurting the company, why are the users being blamed instead of making the financial case and having the suits approve a no-iDevice policy?
The CEO and the Chairman of the Board have iPhones and iPads. Quite possibly the CIO too. You won't persuade them that those things are truly harmful. You've already lost that argument. Give in with good grace and you'll look enormously better than if you have to be overridden (or dismissed and replaced in a down economy).
You might be able to argue that the device shouldn't be on the internal network and shouldn't have critical data on. That's much easier since it is a limited scope argument. You should also be aware that some businesses are switching over to use these sorts of things for critical systems, especially where they had a need for mobile comms before; they're replacing custom hardware with custom apps running on commodity hardware.
Any IT senior I've known who uses Apple doesn't stay in that position very long. Nor do they use their personal devices to set company policy. Yes I know the Dilbert myths, but in reality that doesn't happen. All I have to do is point out the cost of operating Apple products and whatever complaints the boss has disappears quickly.
You're assuming that the IT senior can tell the rest of the organization what to do. That's most certainly not universally true; some organizations (i.e., all the universities I know) devolve budgets in such a way that central IT has very little power in this area, and great heterogeneity results. Servers are usually Linux, but with a smattering of other platforms, desktops are mostly Windows, and laptops are dominated by OSX though with a fair number of Windows and Linux installations too. (Laptops are important in the university sector because so many people have to travel for work.)
The real key to success in this mess is to ensure that all important services aren't locked to particular platforms; having interfaces that conform to standards (what a great many people have long been arguing for) makes this (relatively) easy.
The universe is totally non-linear. Chaotic, in a mathematical sense. Even knowing everything about the rules (the domain that scientists really focus on) doesn't help, since establishing the exact state at any particular time requires stupid amounts of precision. And that's even without considering quantum effects. The universe is not about to get boring. (Heck, people are still interested in Mandelbrot set images, and that's a perfectly knowable system as it only really exists platonically.)
So even if the mumbo jumbo you are saying is really true, I will stick with science.
What's even better, if the mumbo-jumbo really truly works, you can apply the scientific method to it and regularize what's going on until you end up with a precisely understood system driven by proper hypotheses and models. For example, chemistry grew out of the mumbo-jumbo of alchemy. The reason why science isn't applied to the vast majority of belief-ridden bull-crap is (almost certainly) that the mumbo-jumbo does not work at all.
I say "almost certainly" above because the possibility remains open that it actually does work and that it has just not been investigated yet. Of course, if that's true then there's an opportunity for some enterprising soul to apply the scientific method and found a whole new science, which pretty much guarantees long lasting fame. They'd have professors boring undergraduates about them for centuries!
I'm divided between wanting to point out that your examples were American, and that this is a Dutch case... and being too lazy^Hbusy to confirm that the same precedents exist in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands is a country that uses a pure statute law system (in common with many other European countries, but different from the US and the UK); precedents are technically not relevant as each case is supposed to be judged from the law as written. However, arguments as presented before a court can be looked at for their persuasive power, especially when those are from the relevant supreme court, even though they have to be reevaluated in terms of the facts of the case every time.
Legal systems: amazingly complex in subtle ways, even more so than programming languages.
We can still win without getting to Alpha Centari... All we have to do is eliminate all our competitors.
I always viewed getting to Alpha Centauri as the start of the game. The real issue is whether you can beat everyone to the Cloning Vats and the Telepathic Matrix, because that's one of the key "you guys might as well give up now" combos as it supercharges any late-game strategy. Shard Copters were another favorite (can't remember which size of reactor).
As of December 2011, the attempted fraud amounts total approximately $23 million; the actual victim losses are approximately $6 million.
$23 million in attempted fraud up until Dec 2011 seems like peanuts to me.
Actual fraud of $6M isn't peanuts; people go to prison for a lot less. Sure, there might be even bigger fish about as well, but that doesn't make it any less important to pursue this case. Letting scum get away with it encourages them to commit greater villainy.
Inevitably it stores all its data on some PC that has no backups of any kind sitting in the lab.
If you're unlucky, they've used some kind of odd hardware connector that requires a bizarre OCX running on Win98 in order to work at all (and no, it never worked on anything more recent). If you're building a fancy instrument, please make its on-the-wire protocol be either standardized or simple enough that its trivial to reverse engineer. Like that, the kit can be kept working throughout its life with only minimal fuss rather than needing another million or two to be spent on a replacement just because of a stupid data connector.
With an exaflop computer, simulating the human brain is looking like it might be possible.
It's looking like it's going to be rather more complex than that. Human brains use lots of power (for a biological system) and they do that not by being able to switch circuits very rapidly, but rather by being massively parallel. How to map that into silicon is going to be really challenging because it will require a totally different approach to the current ones; dealing with failures of individual components will be really a large part of the problem. To what extent will the power consumption itself prove an issue? Nobody really knows until it happens; we have no idea if we'll think of a way to get around the problem. There's also the matter of the correct level of simulation. Do we need to model chemical reactions? (That would be computationally expensive.) Can we model using discrete logic synapse-equivalents? A low-enough level of simulation will assuredly allow us to model a brain with enough processing, but can we do it with enough less that we can do real-time processing without stupid levels of power consumption? I have absolutely no idea there. (It wouldn't be a perfect simulation, but it would be nice if we didn't need a perfect sim as that would be far more practical.)
Another issue is that it seems that embodiment is crucial for getting the kind of intelligence we have. Minds seem to need bodies, at least as far as we understand it from biological systems (our working examples). I find this a fascinating development of neuroscience, and wonder whether substituting a robot body would work as well (I guess we could use wireless to keep the two parts physically separate, which would reduce power management complexity). But would that interaction help or hinder individual research efforts? Damned if I know the answer there.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest for 450,000 years. There's been a steep rise since the 1950s, from 315ppm to 370ppm (parts per million). And, in case the WSJ has forgotten, we can't breathe CO2. Too little and too much oxygen will kill us. Too much CO2 would eventually lead to too little oxygen, among other things.
Oxygen levels are around 209,500 ppm. That is, around a thousand times higher than CO2 levels (well, that order of magnitude). We won't need to worry about conversion to CO2 suffocating us for a very long time indeed. Get hysterical about something else please, something with at least some grounding in reality.
My solution for this would be a public network of papers, where everybody can publish, read and 'sign' those papers. If you agree with a paper, you put your signature under it and the worth of this paper goes up. As your 'worth' goes up your signature also gains in weight, when signing other papers. Every paper gets a comment section, where reviews can be written and errors pointed out.
The problem with that is that you have to persuade other people — tenured professors, associate professors, funding agencies, etc. — that it's worth buying into your system. Once they buy in, it will work fine (modulo teething problems, of course). But if people don't believe that it counts towards your academic career, it most certainly doesn't count. Maybe that doesn't matter so much for someone with a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize as they've already shown that they merit tenure (or equivalent) anywhere in the world, but for someone earlier in their career it matters hugely.
People want to publish in top rank journals because that's how they show they are doing top ranked work. Competition is ferocious (if usually polite).
Xray wavelengths are very tiny. The only light with a smaller wavelength is gamma ray emissions.
Actually, there's a huge overlap. It would be more accurate to say that it's called X-rays if it is from a synthetic source and gamma rays if it is from a natural source. The most common nearby natural source is transitions in unstable nuclei. Of course, those high-energy short-wavelength photons don't care what they came from; it's not like they're labelled or anything like that...
Holland keeps its third place but loses a whole 9 points (US lost 14), the only reason we are still 3rd is because everyone started from a worse positin but it is hardly good.
It seems that the scoring system was changed; calibrating from last year to this is going to be very difficult indeed. OTOH, if the majority of countries are staying at roughly the same level, that indicates that the scores are at least consistent in their purpose (to detect press freedom or its lack).
Re:What does the hell does NP Hard mean?
on
Pac-Man Is NP-Hard
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· Score: 2
We think P and NP-complete are different, which would mean NP-Complete and NP-Hard are the same (IIRC).
There are many problems that are wholly outside polynomial complexity (used to work with some, years ago, and they were brutes even with a Top-500 supercomputer of the day). That means that NP-Hard must not be just NP-Complete; there's got to be higher levels in there.
I also hated the ultra-fiddly tape storage, where you had to have the volume and tone adjusted just right to get those weird black bars that showed the program was loading or saving correctly.
I never had any trouble, but that was because I had a really cheap and nasty tape recorder without any fancy auto-level circuitry that would try to make the data "sound nicer" (hah!). Wasn't nice to use for playing anything to listen to, but was perfect as a cheap-ass storage device.
Too bad the line didn't continue into modern days.
The successor was the QL (based on the Motorola 64k IIRC, instead of the Z-80 of the older machines), but that basically failed. Too expensive for the market, and not nearly enough of the software that people wanted (games). In some senses, the real successors to the Speccy were consoles and the PC, depending on how much money you had and whether you were just playing games or were determined to write software as well.
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Except that [wiki syntax is] much more unclear, shitty and limited than original XML.
Yes, but it's far simpler to write in wiki syntax. I know you don't necessarily agree, but my experience is that hardly anyone is able to write correct XML; they just don't bother to create well-formed documents (never mind validity). With wiki syntax, you can do a pretty good job of recovering something sensible out of virtually any character sequence.
Well, unless you have a complicated templating system like mediawiki's one. Writing good templates for anything other than the very simplest of substitutions is remarkably difficult; it's programming, not normal editing.
The bidi problem is not display - per the link I helpfully provided, it's editing.
But that's still a browser problem, not really a wiki problem (unless they're writing their own editor in Javascript or something equally boneheaded). You've got to delegate some problems to others, even if you know they're doing some stuff wrong, because there's just never enough time to do everything yourself.
"the template system started turning into an ugly programming language" - ah, any sufficiently complex system eventually evolves to contain a limited, broken version of Common Lisp.
This includes Common Lisp, which contains itself as a proper subset.
You know you're dealing with something from outside the solar system because within the solar system, the solar wind (hot, fast-moving plasma) blows all diffuse material out very rapidly. If there's a large amount of material out at the edge of where we believe the boundary to be between the domain dominated by solar wind and the domain dominated by the rest of the galaxy, and that material has a composition not seen within the solar system, we can have as a very strong guess that its extra-solar. Anything else really is much less probable.
Which isn't to say that it is of the same composition as the gas+dust cloud that formed the solar system. That's long gone and the solar system has moved a lot since then.
What's the difference between the US Department of Health and National Institute of Health (NIH)? I know the latter is part of the executive branch, but that'sit.
They're both executive branch. The NIH are formally a part of the DoH, and have responsibility for doing (and coordinating) research for the department. There are similar arrangements in other departments (the DoD has DARPA, the DoE fund a number of national labs, etc.) and it's not very remarkable. In general, it's useful for the departments to have research arms in order to both provide solid scientifically-based advice on policy, and to gently encourage everyone else to do research that benefits the nation as well as themselves.
Agreed, I prefer to call myself a Software Alchemist.
As opposed to an Open Sourceror?
The main problem with it is that it does not allow any learning on either side of the fence.
I'd express that differently: the main problem is that it assumes that the requirements can be (in practice) totally known before coding starts. The waterfall model works for things like houses and bridges, where the basic requirements are well understood by all, but software is more flexible and less understood. Having fast iterations with feedback — the core of Agile — works better for much software development because it helps everyone converge both requirements and the implementation.
Even if you are just stuck debugging someone else's code (90% of what I've done over the last year), the process of doing that 1,600 hours a year will really improve your skills.
It particularly helps if you're stuck with maintaining code that was written by you several years ago, because that might as well be another person. The only way to minimize the overall workload is to engineer stuff properly.
On topic though, who in their RIGHT MIND is EVER going to let an outside ID onto their secure servers?
That depends. Is it a known outside ID? Is there some kind of agreement to let them on (which would imply ensuring that people treat the authentication mechanisms carefully)? If not, then for sure don't let them on. But people trust outside IDs all the time, and the sky doesn't fall in.
If it's so plain-as-day that connecting all these devices is hurting the company, why are the users being blamed instead of making the financial case and having the suits approve a no-iDevice policy?
The CEO and the Chairman of the Board have iPhones and iPads. Quite possibly the CIO too. You won't persuade them that those things are truly harmful. You've already lost that argument. Give in with good grace and you'll look enormously better than if you have to be overridden (or dismissed and replaced in a down economy).
You might be able to argue that the device shouldn't be on the internal network and shouldn't have critical data on. That's much easier since it is a limited scope argument. You should also be aware that some businesses are switching over to use these sorts of things for critical systems, especially where they had a need for mobile comms before; they're replacing custom hardware with custom apps running on commodity hardware.
Any IT senior I've known who uses Apple doesn't stay in that position very long. Nor do they use their personal devices to set company policy. Yes I know the Dilbert myths, but in reality that doesn't happen. All I have to do is point out the cost of operating Apple products and whatever complaints the boss has disappears quickly.
You're assuming that the IT senior can tell the rest of the organization what to do. That's most certainly not universally true; some organizations (i.e., all the universities I know) devolve budgets in such a way that central IT has very little power in this area, and great heterogeneity results. Servers are usually Linux, but with a smattering of other platforms, desktops are mostly Windows, and laptops are dominated by OSX though with a fair number of Windows and Linux installations too. (Laptops are important in the university sector because so many people have to travel for work.)
The real key to success in this mess is to ensure that all important services aren't locked to particular platforms; having interfaces that conform to standards (what a great many people have long been arguing for) makes this (relatively) easy.
The universe would be boring. Next question?
The universe is totally non-linear. Chaotic, in a mathematical sense. Even knowing everything about the rules (the domain that scientists really focus on) doesn't help, since establishing the exact state at any particular time requires stupid amounts of precision. And that's even without considering quantum effects. The universe is not about to get boring. (Heck, people are still interested in Mandelbrot set images, and that's a perfectly knowable system as it only really exists platonically.)
So even if the mumbo jumbo you are saying is really true, I will stick with science.
What's even better, if the mumbo-jumbo really truly works, you can apply the scientific method to it and regularize what's going on until you end up with a precisely understood system driven by proper hypotheses and models. For example, chemistry grew out of the mumbo-jumbo of alchemy. The reason why science isn't applied to the vast majority of belief-ridden bull-crap is (almost certainly) that the mumbo-jumbo does not work at all.
I say "almost certainly" above because the possibility remains open that it actually does work and that it has just not been investigated yet. Of course, if that's true then there's an opportunity for some enterprising soul to apply the scientific method and found a whole new science, which pretty much guarantees long lasting fame. They'd have professors boring undergraduates about them for centuries!
I'm divided between wanting to point out that your examples were American, and that this is a Dutch case... and being too lazy^Hbusy to confirm that the same precedents exist in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands is a country that uses a pure statute law system (in common with many other European countries, but different from the US and the UK); precedents are technically not relevant as each case is supposed to be judged from the law as written. However, arguments as presented before a court can be looked at for their persuasive power, especially when those are from the relevant supreme court, even though they have to be reevaluated in terms of the facts of the case every time.
Legal systems: amazingly complex in subtle ways, even more so than programming languages.
We can still win without getting to Alpha Centari... All we have to do is eliminate all our competitors.
I always viewed getting to Alpha Centauri as the start of the game. The real issue is whether you can beat everyone to the Cloning Vats and the Telepathic Matrix, because that's one of the key "you guys might as well give up now" combos as it supercharges any late-game strategy. Shard Copters were another favorite (can't remember which size of reactor).
As of December 2011, the attempted fraud amounts total approximately $23 million; the actual victim losses are approximately $6 million.
$23 million in attempted fraud up until Dec 2011 seems like peanuts to me.
Actual fraud of $6M isn't peanuts; people go to prison for a lot less. Sure, there might be even bigger fish about as well, but that doesn't make it any less important to pursue this case. Letting scum get away with it encourages them to commit greater villainy.
Inevitably it stores all its data on some PC that has no backups of any kind sitting in the lab.
If you're unlucky, they've used some kind of odd hardware connector that requires a bizarre OCX running on Win98 in order to work at all (and no, it never worked on anything more recent). If you're building a fancy instrument, please make its on-the-wire protocol be either standardized or simple enough that its trivial to reverse engineer. Like that, the kit can be kept working throughout its life with only minimal fuss rather than needing another million or two to be spent on a replacement just because of a stupid data connector.
With an exaflop computer, simulating the human brain is looking like it might be possible.
It's looking like it's going to be rather more complex than that. Human brains use lots of power (for a biological system) and they do that not by being able to switch circuits very rapidly, but rather by being massively parallel. How to map that into silicon is going to be really challenging because it will require a totally different approach to the current ones; dealing with failures of individual components will be really a large part of the problem. To what extent will the power consumption itself prove an issue? Nobody really knows until it happens; we have no idea if we'll think of a way to get around the problem. There's also the matter of the correct level of simulation. Do we need to model chemical reactions? (That would be computationally expensive.) Can we model using discrete logic synapse-equivalents? A low-enough level of simulation will assuredly allow us to model a brain with enough processing, but can we do it with enough less that we can do real-time processing without stupid levels of power consumption? I have absolutely no idea there. (It wouldn't be a perfect simulation, but it would be nice if we didn't need a perfect sim as that would be far more practical.)
Another issue is that it seems that embodiment is crucial for getting the kind of intelligence we have. Minds seem to need bodies, at least as far as we understand it from biological systems (our working examples). I find this a fascinating development of neuroscience, and wonder whether substituting a robot body would work as well (I guess we could use wireless to keep the two parts physically separate, which would reduce power management complexity). But would that interaction help or hinder individual research efforts? Damned if I know the answer there.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest for 450,000 years. There's been a steep rise since the 1950s, from 315ppm to 370ppm (parts per million). And, in case the WSJ has forgotten, we can't breathe CO2. Too little and too much oxygen will kill us. Too much CO2 would eventually lead to too little oxygen, among other things.
Oxygen levels are around 209,500 ppm. That is, around a thousand times higher than CO2 levels (well, that order of magnitude). We won't need to worry about conversion to CO2 suffocating us for a very long time indeed. Get hysterical about something else please, something with at least some grounding in reality.
My solution for this would be a public network of papers, where everybody can publish, read and 'sign' those papers. If you agree with a paper, you put your signature under it and the worth of this paper goes up. As your 'worth' goes up your signature also gains in weight, when signing other papers. Every paper gets a comment section, where reviews can be written and errors pointed out.
The problem with that is that you have to persuade other people — tenured professors, associate professors, funding agencies, etc. — that it's worth buying into your system. Once they buy in, it will work fine (modulo teething problems, of course). But if people don't believe that it counts towards your academic career, it most certainly doesn't count. Maybe that doesn't matter so much for someone with a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize as they've already shown that they merit tenure (or equivalent) anywhere in the world, but for someone earlier in their career it matters hugely.
People want to publish in top rank journals because that's how they show they are doing top ranked work. Competition is ferocious (if usually polite).
Xray wavelengths are very tiny. The only light with a smaller wavelength is gamma ray emissions.
Actually, there's a huge overlap. It would be more accurate to say that it's called X-rays if it is from a synthetic source and gamma rays if it is from a natural source. The most common nearby natural source is transitions in unstable nuclei. Of course, those high-energy short-wavelength photons don't care what they came from; it's not like they're labelled or anything like that...
Holland keeps its third place but loses a whole 9 points (US lost 14), the only reason we are still 3rd is because everyone started from a worse positin but it is hardly good.
It seems that the scoring system was changed; calibrating from last year to this is going to be very difficult indeed. OTOH, if the majority of countries are staying at roughly the same level, that indicates that the scores are at least consistent in their purpose (to detect press freedom or its lack).
We think P and NP-complete are different, which would mean NP-Complete and NP-Hard are the same (IIRC).
There are many problems that are wholly outside polynomial complexity (used to work with some, years ago, and they were brutes even with a Top-500 supercomputer of the day). That means that NP-Hard must not be just NP-Complete; there's got to be higher levels in there.
I also hated the ultra-fiddly tape storage, where you had to have the volume and tone adjusted just right to get those weird black bars that showed the program was loading or saving correctly.
I never had any trouble, but that was because I had a really cheap and nasty tape recorder without any fancy auto-level circuitry that would try to make the data "sound nicer" (hah!). Wasn't nice to use for playing anything to listen to, but was perfect as a cheap-ass storage device.
Too bad the line didn't continue into modern days.
The successor was the QL (based on the Motorola 64k IIRC, instead of the Z-80 of the older machines), but that basically failed. Too expensive for the market, and not nearly enough of the software that people wanted (games). In some senses, the real successors to the Speccy were consoles and the PC, depending on how much money you had and whether you were just playing games or were determined to write software as well.