I'd thought that Spain might have bigger fish to fry... such as access to Scottish waters for their fishing boats. Fishing is about the only thing of any value to their economy right now, and they're in a serious financial funk, but they'll just throw away the access they get to Scottish waters on a whim, will they?
You overestimate the importance of that, and the number of people employed in fishing in Spain, and underestimate the number of other places that they can go fish (e.g., off western Africa). If you think that fishing will save your asses, whereas there's the counter-example of the trouble caused by the separatist movement would trigger in Catalonia, I suggest you should visit reality sometime. The government in Madrid does not want Scotland to go independent, and doesn't want things to go easily for Scotland if they do go independent, and this is entirely for their own selfish domestic political reasons.
There are quite a few where there's no enlargement, such as the Gall–Peters projection and the Mollweide projection. (Assuming "no enlargement" means "equal area". No; you won't get zero distortion maps. A spherical - well, approximate spherical - surface can't be flattened perfectly.)
Link please. While I'm happy to check math, computing it all from the raw data (which I don't know the locations of in the first place) is rather more effort than I've got time for.
I'm not a xenobiologist, but wouldn't a high-pressure hydrogen-rich atmosphere conceivably be home to organisms similar to those that live around deep sea volcanic vents?
We don't know. Right now, we have only one sample of the set "worlds with life" (I say "worlds" to not unfairly discriminate against moons) and our current technological capabilities can't really figure it out for many more worlds yet. Because of this, we do not have enough data to know how prevalent life is or what it really requires. We truly don't know, but at least we know we're really ignorant.
About the only things we can be sure of are that there's a lot of planets out there, that there's a really good chance that some will have conditions at least somewhat similar to earth, and that many of the ingredients for life as we know it are manufactured by cosmological processes involving dust and ice. Oh, and that the universe has a neverending capacity to surprise us.
Will we be going to war with/conquered by giant tubeworms?
Unless someone (either ourselves or the tubeworms) invents a way to travel significantly faster than light with practical levels of energy consumption, no. Even Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbour, is one hell of a long way away.
MIPS had some presence in network and set top boxes, but this is ending.
It's gone. The hotel I was staying in last week had all of its set-top boxes running Android. (Irritating when you switched the device on and had to wait while it booted, but that's not ARM's fault.)
Really, why would you trust a system where someone you dont know or trust is in charge of the private keys for the encryption?
Failing to secure your connections is just wilfully stupid. SSL is the best option we've got to avoid a whole range of attacks (it's far easier than the alternatives) but it does require correct implementations and careful selection of who to trust; SSL itself does not specify who to trust (and how can it? It's just a technical protocol for how to establish a secure channel over an insecure connection, typically implemented with TCP/IP).
Explicitly listing who to trust is best, but it's extremely hard to scale up (since you have to pre-share the keys). A web-of-trust scales better, but once someone makes a mistake (easily done) it all crumbles. Using a certificate authority scales much better, and isn't quite as brittle as a WoT, but it does rely on the CAs (especially the root CAs; non-roots are easier to discipline) being very highly trustworthy. Commercial pressures are unlikely to make limiting the scope of domains that any CA can issue for practical (and in any case, certificates are not tied to domains in general; that's a feature of some particular types of certificates only).
Every time someone suggests "oh we can't trust SSL" it is invariably because they don't know what it does and doesn't do, and because they think that there's only one kind of threat. That's incredibly wrong-headed and foolish.
Say someone runs a mail server which responds to known spam sources by slowing down to a character a second or so.
Should this be illegal?
If that is done by the email server, it's no problem. If it is done by the ISP by noting that you're accessing a particular IP address (e.g., 123.45.67.89) and port and deciding that they're going to slow that down Just Because, that's a problem.
What we want is conceptually simple: all customers' traffic to all addresses should have essentially the same priority unless the customer chooses to opt for a higher level of service (with the increased charges that implies). Or at the very least it should be the customer who gets to choose what sort of trade-offs they live with, and not the ISP deciding to hobble a third-party service's usability just because it happens to compete with a commercial offering by that ISP or their friends.
Forcing separation between the ownership of the physical network and the ownership of the virtual services offered over the physical connection... that makes a lot of sense. Let the virtualised service providers fight it out among themselves instead of tangling it all up in the natural monopoly business side of things that is physical networking.
Obscure or not, it's still a good counterexample to iTunes being "the worst POS software since Windows". Alas. It's also hardly unique. There are times when I hate this industry.
The primary problem with this assumption is that it assumes that "time" exists outside of the simulation.
I've written simulations in the past that allowed me to rewind time and try a different possible random outcome. It's not that hard, provided you can store the states, and the things inside the simulation (asynchronous logic gates) could not have detected that it happened. They always saw a legitimate consistent history. It's only from our position outside the simulation that you would know that time had been rewound and a different path taken. What's more, if I'd used a breadth-first search strategy for enumerating the simulation states, the time trace inside would've been completely different to that outside. In fact, due to peculiarities of the simulation code, time advancement didn't necessarily result in a new state and where you had the same state reachable by two paths, it's entirely possible for observed time to have actually gone backwards (though not really, depending on exactly what you could observe).
The point of this is that if you are in a simulation, you can assume nothing about the nature of time outside the simulation. It's totally unrelated. Any simulation worth the name is total; inconsistencies are either undetectable or "just the laws of nature". Which makes wondering whether we're in a simulation worthless; we won't be able to observe it. It's solipsistic silliness.
Maybe we are, and maybe we aren't. Without a way to find out, a way to get out, or a way to influence the outside in a way that's useful to us inside, what is the point of this speculation? It's practically equivalent to the philosophical position that it's all a dream, which is something that every culture seems to come with from time to time, and it's always a totally useless theory. It just doesn't lead anywhere; it's a logical dead end.
If you are going to write an article in the NYT, at least pick a subject that could lead to someone somewhere getting some sort of benefit. Well, beyond a paycheck for writing an article in the NYT...
When I was an undergraduate, the telescope a few miles away was listed in the phone book (remember those?) as the National Radio Astrology Observatory. Nobody really felt like correcting it.
Both Apache2 and GPL have a patent grant, and a patent retaliation clause in them.
But neither really protects against the trolls; trolls work on the principle of shaking you down with the threat of very expensive court action, and there's the risk of having the court decide against you anyway. If the court decides that the troll's patent is valid and applies, the license doesn't get you out of trouble except in the case that it's the troll's own code or that a transferrable license has actually been granted to whoever donated the code and the troll was trying to brush that little fact under the carpet.
There aren't any magical short cuts round legal problems. Just areas that are known to be thorny.
Let me expand on that. I've been hacking the Linux kernel, XNU, 'doze, POSIX user-level, games, javascript, sites, etc..., for ~15 years. In all that time there has only been one thing that has made code easier to read for me and those I work with, and that is elegant abstractions. It is actually exactly the same thing that turns a 3--4 page math proof into a 10--15 line proof (use Louisville's theorem instead of 17 pages of hard algebra to prove the fundamental theorem of algebra). Programming is all about choosing elegant abstractions that quickly and simply compose together to form short, modular programs.
You touch on a point there, but there's a key aspect of it that you didn't mention which is important. It's not just abstractions, though they're indeed very important; it's named abstractions ("Louisville's theorem"), so that you can work with just the outer parts of the abstraction without having to think about the details, and can communicate that to other people. Oh, and computers too.
Language (and by extension, text) is good for programming because it has been dealing with naming abstractions and sharing them with other people for tens of thousands of years. It works very well for describing computation now that we have formal language theory so that computers can at least partially understand what we're going on about. We're still learning what the best ways to do this sort of thing graphically are.
That's about as concise as it can possibly be, and still get the job done.
You could make it a little shorter: for(1..$i..100) is one necessary character shorter, as it doesn't force a space between variable name and in keyword. It's also a syntax that you'll sometimes see in mathematics. (I excluded unnecessary whitespace from the count to be as kind to your assertion as possible.)
Of course, you could also remove the parentheses, the for and the "look out computer, here comes a variable!!" glyph ($), but those are either drastic or facets of a more general shortening of the containing language.
What's funny is that the worst part of X11 is how badly it does exactly what it was designed to do - remote display - because it is so slow if the network has any latency (too many synchronous calls).
It does fine, provided you don't push lots of bitmaps back and forth between the server and the clients. I've used X11 over a 14400 dialup line, and it worked fine for everything except fancy client-side bitmap handling. No matter how bad you think X11 over a WAN is, it cannot possibly be as bad as using Framemaker over that modem. I also ran animated bitmaps with X11 over the transatlantic internet back in 1993. (If you were trying to do real work using that cable back then, I hereby apologize!)
Unfortunately, most modern app authors are unable to conceive of doing rendering on anything other than by pushing bitmaps back and forth, and that's never going to work very well without disgusting amounts of bandwidth and very low latency. But for all that, the actual basics of most apps remains about the same; they draw text and boxes and mostly-static pictures. We've just got to make more of that work be done not by XRender on the client but rather in the server using the higher-level instructions that programmers are actually using from their code.
OTOH, if someone's going to take the really crufty parts of X11 (Visuals and Colormaps, anyone?) out back with shotgun to put them out of their misery, I'm for it. (I'm guessing that someone will claim the ICCCM is one of these bits. That someone is an idiot. The ICCCM is largely fine provided you avoid the PRIMARY selection.)
wayland is a much better step up to modern display tech
That makes Wayland sound like some kind of alcohol dependence program for narcissists. Surely you can give an explanation of what it really is, and without so much boosterism?
they suffered from power cuts when the weather got too warm for the plants to operate
FWIW, that's a common problem to all types of thermal electricity generation. Coal, gas, nuclear, oil, all need a heat sink to work efficiently and that heat sink tends to be water. Lots of water. If the river you're drawing from runs very low, you've got to shut down. If you're drawing from the sea or a large lake, you won't have the problem, but that wasn't the case for those French power plants along the Loire during that year's drought...
Mixed generation is good, gives flexibility and different types have different downsides. (I live in an area where solar makes almost no sense at all because it's so cloudy; we make Seattle look bright and sunny. We also don't have anything like the air-conditioner load of cities like Phoenix or Miami.) Nuclear power can make sense; it's principal down-sides relate to decommissioning. Otherwise, its very much like coal, oil and gas in terms of constraints.
We are also not any better off since Carter was elected. Looks like those liberal policies sure fucked us over. When will socialism start to work? I feel like it could be any day now.
The policies are working fine! It's just your fault for not being a member of the 1%...
One of the most awesome things that the Eclipse people did was switch to a foundation built on OSGi after the first version. Eclipse is a showcase that showcase the power of a modular component framework.
The silly thing is that Eclipse is actually close to being the poster child for how not to do an application on top of OSGi. Equinox itself (the OSGi layer) is fine, but Eclipse effectively works very hard to not use the power it provides, instead doing its own weird things with class loaders that mean that you're stuck in a horrible limbo land where nothing quite works as you might hope.
No, bookmakers don't compute odds. They compute (and recompute) a number that will put 50% of the betting population on each side of the line. It has nothing to do with who is going to win.
Actually, they compute a number that balances obligations to pay out against the sums laid. They're in it for profit, not for a bit of fun, and they don't mind if it is profit from many little bets or a few big whales.
Javascript has the same dynamism as Python, why is Javascript still much faster?
I suspect it is because it is easier to identify a consistent low-level type interpretation — including clearly delineated points where you need to throw the code away and recompile — with Javascript than with Python. That's what you need to do a decent compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd thought that Spain might have bigger fish to fry... such as access to Scottish waters for their fishing boats. Fishing is about the only thing of any value to their economy right now, and they're in a serious financial funk, but they'll just throw away the access they get to Scottish waters on a whim, will they?
You overestimate the importance of that, and the number of people employed in fishing in Spain, and underestimate the number of other places that they can go fish (e.g., off western Africa). If you think that fishing will save your asses, whereas there's the counter-example of the trouble caused by the separatist movement would trigger in Catalonia, I suggest you should visit reality sometime. The government in Madrid does not want Scotland to go independent, and doesn't want things to go easily for Scotland if they do go independent, and this is entirely for their own selfish domestic political reasons.
There are quite a few where there's no enlargement, such as the Gall–Peters projection and the Mollweide projection. (Assuming "no enlargement" means "equal area". No; you won't get zero distortion maps. A spherical - well, approximate spherical - surface can't be flattened perfectly.)
Check the math. This is not actually true.
Link please. While I'm happy to check math, computing it all from the raw data (which I don't know the locations of in the first place) is rather more effort than I've got time for.
I'm not a xenobiologist, but wouldn't a high-pressure hydrogen-rich atmosphere conceivably be home to organisms similar to those that live around deep sea volcanic vents?
We don't know. Right now, we have only one sample of the set "worlds with life" (I say "worlds" to not unfairly discriminate against moons) and our current technological capabilities can't really figure it out for many more worlds yet. Because of this, we do not have enough data to know how prevalent life is or what it really requires. We truly don't know, but at least we know we're really ignorant.
About the only things we can be sure of are that there's a lot of planets out there, that there's a really good chance that some will have conditions at least somewhat similar to earth, and that many of the ingredients for life as we know it are manufactured by cosmological processes involving dust and ice. Oh, and that the universe has a neverending capacity to surprise us.
Will we be going to war with/conquered by giant tubeworms?
Unless someone (either ourselves or the tubeworms) invents a way to travel significantly faster than light with practical levels of energy consumption, no. Even Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbour, is one hell of a long way away.
MIPS had some presence in network and set top boxes, but this is ending.
It's gone. The hotel I was staying in last week had all of its set-top boxes running Android. (Irritating when you switched the device on and had to wait while it booted, but that's not ARM's fault.)
Really, why would you trust a system where someone you dont know or trust is in charge of the private keys for the encryption?
Failing to secure your connections is just wilfully stupid. SSL is the best option we've got to avoid a whole range of attacks (it's far easier than the alternatives) but it does require correct implementations and careful selection of who to trust; SSL itself does not specify who to trust (and how can it? It's just a technical protocol for how to establish a secure channel over an insecure connection, typically implemented with TCP/IP).
Explicitly listing who to trust is best, but it's extremely hard to scale up (since you have to pre-share the keys). A web-of-trust scales better, but once someone makes a mistake (easily done) it all crumbles. Using a certificate authority scales much better, and isn't quite as brittle as a WoT, but it does rely on the CAs (especially the root CAs; non-roots are easier to discipline) being very highly trustworthy. Commercial pressures are unlikely to make limiting the scope of domains that any CA can issue for practical (and in any case, certificates are not tied to domains in general; that's a feature of some particular types of certificates only).
Every time someone suggests "oh we can't trust SSL" it is invariably because they don't know what it does and doesn't do, and because they think that there's only one kind of threat. That's incredibly wrong-headed and foolish.
Say someone runs a mail server which responds to known spam sources by slowing down to a character a second or so.
Should this be illegal?
If that is done by the email server, it's no problem. If it is done by the ISP by noting that you're accessing a particular IP address (e.g., 123.45.67.89) and port and deciding that they're going to slow that down Just Because, that's a problem.
What we want is conceptually simple: all customers' traffic to all addresses should have essentially the same priority unless the customer chooses to opt for a higher level of service (with the increased charges that implies). Or at the very least it should be the customer who gets to choose what sort of trade-offs they live with, and not the ISP deciding to hobble a third-party service's usability just because it happens to compete with a commercial offering by that ISP or their friends.
Forcing separation between the ownership of the physical network and the ownership of the virtual services offered over the physical connection... that makes a lot of sense. Let the virtualised service providers fight it out among themselves instead of tangling it all up in the natural monopoly business side of things that is physical networking.
Nobody has to use Samsung Kies.
Obscure or not, it's still a good counterexample to iTunes being "the worst POS software since Windows". Alas. It's also hardly unique. There are times when I hate this industry.
The primary problem with this assumption is that it assumes that "time" exists outside of the simulation.
I've written simulations in the past that allowed me to rewind time and try a different possible random outcome. It's not that hard, provided you can store the states, and the things inside the simulation (asynchronous logic gates) could not have detected that it happened. They always saw a legitimate consistent history. It's only from our position outside the simulation that you would know that time had been rewound and a different path taken. What's more, if I'd used a breadth-first search strategy for enumerating the simulation states, the time trace inside would've been completely different to that outside. In fact, due to peculiarities of the simulation code, time advancement didn't necessarily result in a new state and where you had the same state reachable by two paths, it's entirely possible for observed time to have actually gone backwards (though not really, depending on exactly what you could observe).
The point of this is that if you are in a simulation, you can assume nothing about the nature of time outside the simulation. It's totally unrelated. Any simulation worth the name is total; inconsistencies are either undetectable or "just the laws of nature". Which makes wondering whether we're in a simulation worthless; we won't be able to observe it. It's solipsistic silliness.
Maybe we are, and maybe we aren't. Without a way to find out, a way to get out, or a way to influence the outside in a way that's useful to us inside, what is the point of this speculation? It's practically equivalent to the philosophical position that it's all a dream, which is something that every culture seems to come with from time to time, and it's always a totally useless theory. It just doesn't lead anywhere; it's a logical dead end.
If you are going to write an article in the NYT, at least pick a subject that could lead to someone somewhere getting some sort of benefit. Well, beyond a paycheck for writing an article in the NYT...
these food terrorist companies that are causing serious damage to out health and economy
They can't be terrorists! They make donations to the Republican party.
When I was an undergraduate, the telescope a few miles away was listed in the phone book (remember those?) as the National Radio Astrology Observatory. Nobody really felt like correcting it.
Just needed a fsck and it was then in /lost+found
Both Apache2 and GPL have a patent grant, and a patent retaliation clause in them.
But neither really protects against the trolls; trolls work on the principle of shaking you down with the threat of very expensive court action, and there's the risk of having the court decide against you anyway. If the court decides that the troll's patent is valid and applies, the license doesn't get you out of trouble except in the case that it's the troll's own code or that a transferrable license has actually been granted to whoever donated the code and the troll was trying to brush that little fact under the carpet.
There aren't any magical short cuts round legal problems. Just areas that are known to be thorny.
Let me expand on that. I've been hacking the Linux kernel, XNU, 'doze, POSIX user-level, games, javascript, sites, etc..., for ~15 years. In all that time there has only been one thing that has made code easier to read for me and those I work with, and that is elegant abstractions. It is actually exactly the same thing that turns a 3--4 page math proof into a 10--15 line proof (use Louisville's theorem instead of 17 pages of hard algebra to prove the fundamental theorem of algebra). Programming is all about choosing elegant abstractions that quickly and simply compose together to form short, modular programs.
You touch on a point there, but there's a key aspect of it that you didn't mention which is important. It's not just abstractions, though they're indeed very important; it's named abstractions ("Louisville's theorem"), so that you can work with just the outer parts of the abstraction without having to think about the details, and can communicate that to other people. Oh, and computers too.
Language (and by extension, text) is good for programming because it has been dealing with naming abstractions and sharing them with other people for tens of thousands of years. It works very well for describing computation now that we have formal language theory so that computers can at least partially understand what we're going on about. We're still learning what the best ways to do this sort of thing graphically are.
Consider iterating with a counter:
for $i in ( 1..100 )
That's about as concise as it can possibly be, and still get the job done.
You could make it a little shorter: for(1..$i..100) is one necessary character shorter, as it doesn't force a space between variable name and in keyword. It's also a syntax that you'll sometimes see in mathematics. (I excluded unnecessary whitespace from the count to be as kind to your assertion as possible.)
Of course, you could also remove the parentheses, the for and the "look out computer, here comes a variable!!" glyph ($), but those are either drastic or facets of a more general shortening of the containing language.
Na, it's someone who designs websites for morons
This is not inconsistent with being for the mobile version.
What's funny is that the worst part of X11 is how badly it does exactly what it was designed to do - remote display - because it is so slow if the network has any latency (too many synchronous calls).
It does fine, provided you don't push lots of bitmaps back and forth between the server and the clients. I've used X11 over a 14400 dialup line, and it worked fine for everything except fancy client-side bitmap handling. No matter how bad you think X11 over a WAN is, it cannot possibly be as bad as using Framemaker over that modem. I also ran animated bitmaps with X11 over the transatlantic internet back in 1993. (If you were trying to do real work using that cable back then, I hereby apologize!)
Unfortunately, most modern app authors are unable to conceive of doing rendering on anything other than by pushing bitmaps back and forth, and that's never going to work very well without disgusting amounts of bandwidth and very low latency. But for all that, the actual basics of most apps remains about the same; they draw text and boxes and mostly-static pictures. We've just got to make more of that work be done not by XRender on the client but rather in the server using the higher-level instructions that programmers are actually using from their code.
OTOH, if someone's going to take the really crufty parts of X11 (Visuals and Colormaps, anyone?) out back with shotgun to put them out of their misery, I'm for it. (I'm guessing that someone will claim the ICCCM is one of these bits. That someone is an idiot. The ICCCM is largely fine provided you avoid the PRIMARY selection.)
wayland is a much better step up to modern display tech
That makes Wayland sound like some kind of alcohol dependence program for narcissists. Surely you can give an explanation of what it really is, and without so much boosterism?
they suffered from power cuts when the weather got too warm for the plants to operate
FWIW, that's a common problem to all types of thermal electricity generation. Coal, gas, nuclear, oil, all need a heat sink to work efficiently and that heat sink tends to be water. Lots of water. If the river you're drawing from runs very low, you've got to shut down. If you're drawing from the sea or a large lake, you won't have the problem, but that wasn't the case for those French power plants along the Loire during that year's drought...
Mixed generation is good, gives flexibility and different types have different downsides. (I live in an area where solar makes almost no sense at all because it's so cloudy; we make Seattle look bright and sunny. We also don't have anything like the air-conditioner load of cities like Phoenix or Miami.) Nuclear power can make sense; it's principal down-sides relate to decommissioning. Otherwise, its very much like coal, oil and gas in terms of constraints.
We are also not any better off since Carter was elected. Looks like those liberal policies sure fucked us over. When will socialism start to work? I feel like it could be any day now.
The policies are working fine! It's just your fault for not being a member of the 1%...
LAW enforcement and judicial are above the law
You're doing it wrong.
One of the most awesome things that the Eclipse people did was switch to a foundation built on OSGi after the first version.
Eclipse is a showcase that showcase the power of a modular component framework.
The silly thing is that Eclipse is actually close to being the poster child for how not to do an application on top of OSGi. Equinox itself (the OSGi layer) is fine, but Eclipse effectively works very hard to not use the power it provides, instead doing its own weird things with class loaders that mean that you're stuck in a horrible limbo land where nothing quite works as you might hope.
No, bookmakers don't compute odds. They compute (and recompute) a number that will put 50% of the betting population on each side of the line. It has nothing to do with who is going to win.
Actually, they compute a number that balances obligations to pay out against the sums laid. They're in it for profit, not for a bit of fun, and they don't mind if it is profit from many little bets or a few big whales.
Javascript has the same dynamism as Python, why is Javascript still much faster?
I suspect it is because it is easier to identify a consistent low-level type interpretation — including clearly delineated points where you need to throw the code away and recompile — with Javascript than with Python. That's what you need to do a decent compiler.