This paragraph is a repetition of two concepts from separate paragraphs above, almost verbatim.
This paragraph is a repetition of the other two concepts from the same paragraphs, literally verbatim.
This paragraph is three of the four concepts repeated in a quote from the subject of the article, or someone just like him, or someone just like me, with a weasely emphasis like "it's very likely that..." added somewhere.
These paragraphs exist because nobody edits anything on the Internet, but the website requires a minimum word count to qualify an article for posting, to avoid devolving into a series of pages with a single sentence of content and 20 ads, with the belief that people will notice a low word-count but it will take them months to realize the number of facts is exactly the same.
But that's all of the stages, filtered through varying levels of scientific ability, which dilutes as it goes down the pyramid of scientific ability from those at the pointy top end with plenty (the scientist who wrote the paper) to those at the broad base with none (i.e., the nightly news).
Modern journalism is all about taking a simple fact and putting it in breathless form, because modern journalism is all about attracting eyeballs, because attracting eyeballs is marketable to advertisers.
It didn't used to be this way. TV news and "reputable" print journalism were somewhat devoid of this behavior until the 80s. Then USA Today happened, starting the slow tabloidification of all print outlets, which accelerated in the late 90s as they got desperate to compete for readership with online media. Also in the 80s, the advent of "Happy Talk" news started to convince local TV station managers away from integrity and towards showmanship in their news departments. Finally came Fox News to scourge the network news business.
This is the sort of stuff that journalism types learn by watching. You could give them four years of indoctrination in Cronkite and Murrow, and 90% of them would come out as Nancy Grace, and the other 10% would work on Nightline for a year then quit to run a Starbucks and write a blog. Science journalists are journalism types like the rest.
Film at 11.
(Okay, it's not film, and you can DL it from YouTube any time.)
I don't even think that's the point. The point is the use of the ad verecundiam quote to pretend that something innocuous or unlikely is valuable or likely. It can all be true, but the implicit or explicit invitation to extrapolate a scientifically verified mote into some sort of technological revolution is sleazy journalism.
it might help if there were an explicit tag in the Firehose for "not the best link", instead of the ambiguous "not the best" to catch all of the possibilities
it also might help if the/. editors actually acted as editors, selecting what's "news" based on content instead of what's "popular" based on voting in the Firehose...
ironing board, which, ironically, no one on Slashdot has ever seen.
That's not ironic; I have seen an ironing board. That's not ironic, either. What'd be ironic is if there was an ironing board in my office right now.
But if I was like many slashdotters in that I, the laundry room, and the ironing board were sharing my parents' basement, that wouldn't be ironic. It would just be sad.
This is where I mock you for posting as an AC and contradict everything in your post, knowing you'll have to manually scroll to find it again and probably won't bother.
£4800 is in the price range for my next bicycle. Below about $4500 the quality drops like a rock.
Value comes from both utility and perception.
If your life works with a £60 bicycle you wouldn't consider a Segway. You wouldn't consider a £70 bicycle, either.
Most people with a choice of both will find situations where a Segway works for them that the bicycle doesn't, but will likely not find situations where a bicycle works for them and a Segway doesn't. Segways do steep hills and 10-20 mile rides out of the box. Fat people on bicycles don't.
Before you can build a wall, you have to imagine someone walking over the imaginary line at the edge of your yard.
Or you can figure out that a wall would have been useful after they come into your yard, but then it's too late.
See, most taxpayers understand that we pay taxes to prevent the crime, we don't wait until it happens and then rail that the government isn't doing anything about it.
If you lost your balance (due to vertigo upon seeing the dropoff) near the cliff and leaned forward instead of back, then the segway would have killed you.
Personally, I think this is going to turn out to be what happened.
As to who's to blame... the Seqway isn't intuitive. You have to learn the muscle memory and you have to practice coupling it to situational awareness in order to get the machine to go where you want. If you are suddenly in a new situation -- something the randomness of rugged terrain does to you constantly -- it would be easy for your neuromuscular system to make an unexpected adjustment. You might as well be throwing control-system darts. Add vertigo, which is a condition where the neuromuscular system is misinterpreting and misapplying the information available to it, and you could continue to apply the wrong force. I.e., drunken control-system darts.
He'd have had to have trained under safe conditions (ropes, nets, etc.) in that configuration of ridge, cliff height, and lighting to learn how to use it near the edge of a cliff, and therefore take the Segway out of the blame equation. The rule for the thing should be never to ride it in a more dangerous situation than you've been trained to ride it in.
Treat error cases as normal input in your use-case design.
Design your code to handle the spectrum of error cases.
Then nobody will be confused.
Your mere estimation of the "balance" will relegate your customers to having to do work around your failure to include their use-case in your estimation. You guarantee that simply by making the estimation and orphaning certain cases. At some point, your code will be sold to someone who wants to use that case. It's likely nobody selling it will have a clue that there are caveats buried in the details, because if you didn't want to code something to handle it in a graceful and informative way, you probably didn't want to write a long list of caveats in the documentation (which turns out to be harder anyway because you have to deal with all the use-cases where people don't understand what you wrote even if it's crystal clear, because not everyone understands everyone; at least you know how the computer will behave if you write and test the code).
And if you can't do it on-time and under budget, you shouldn't have bid that low. And if you don't want to let someone else write the bad code, you're just saying you're willing to chisel the market to make a buck.
Again, you have to multiply by the counts. Every act with every child on those DVDs is a single count. One knife and one 7-11 with no injuries is one count of aggravated robbery. So if it's 3 years per count for CP, the first guy gets 20x3 years. The second guy gets 1x7, and I bet the 7 was pled down from 15+ and the first guy had a shitty lawyer who didn't know he could plead down to probation for a first offense for simple possession.
You're right, there are witch hunts, but you won't get the system fixed by using the wrong math to inflate your complaint. It just gives the witch-hunters an excuse to ignore further complaints.
I'm surprised I don't know this, but I wonder what happens to the patent once you lose a case; can the judge invalidate it completely if he decides it's just wrong? Certainly you could never press the case against anyone making whatever the guy you just sued was making, but it's unlikely anyone would, so you could still sue people who are making slightly different things.
As for the shell company bankruptcy thing, that's a major flaw in corporate law, IMO. If the owners of corporations were more on the hook personally for their companies' actions, corporations overall would have a better reputation overall.
I'm not sure why you'd say that. The fact that exceptional conditions exist and are documented does not justify using assert.
As I said, 99% of people (and by people I mean software coders) don't know how to use assert properly. So in the coding standards I write it says don't use them at all; if you think you need an assert, what you really need is something that alleviates the problem you perceive will occur if you don't trap that unexpected return value or validate your inputs or break that non-converging loop. This is an embedded system, probably a high-reliability, safety-critical embedded system, and telling the user you're crapping out unexpectedly and they should call customer service is, I repeat, not an option.
Slashdot Mirror
This paragraph is a repetition of two concepts from separate paragraphs above, almost verbatim.
This paragraph is a repetition of the other two concepts from the same paragraphs, literally verbatim.
This paragraph is three of the four concepts repeated in a quote from the subject of the article, or someone just like him, or someone just like me, with a weasely emphasis like "it's very likely that..." added somewhere.
These paragraphs exist because nobody edits anything on the Internet, but the website requires a minimum word count to qualify an article for posting, to avoid devolving into a series of pages with a single sentence of content and 20 ads, with the belief that people will notice a low word-count but it will take them months to realize the number of facts is exactly the same.
But that's all of the stages, filtered through varying levels of scientific ability, which dilutes as it goes down the pyramid of scientific ability from those at the pointy top end with plenty (the scientist who wrote the paper) to those at the broad base with none (i.e., the nightly news).
Modern journalism is all about taking a simple fact and putting it in breathless form, because modern journalism is all about attracting eyeballs, because attracting eyeballs is marketable to advertisers.
It didn't used to be this way. TV news and "reputable" print journalism were somewhat devoid of this behavior until the 80s. Then USA Today happened, starting the slow tabloidification of all print outlets, which accelerated in the late 90s as they got desperate to compete for readership with online media. Also in the 80s, the advent of "Happy Talk" news started to convince local TV station managers away from integrity and towards showmanship in their news departments. Finally came Fox News to scourge the network news business.
This is the sort of stuff that journalism types learn by watching. You could give them four years of indoctrination in Cronkite and Murrow, and 90% of them would come out as Nancy Grace, and the other 10% would work on Nightline for a year then quit to run a Starbucks and write a blog. Science journalists are journalism types like the rest.
Film at 11.
(Okay, it's not film, and you can DL it from YouTube any time.)
I don't even think that's the point. The point is the use of the ad verecundiam quote to pretend that something innocuous or unlikely is valuable or likely. It can all be true, but the implicit or explicit invitation to extrapolate a scientifically verified mote into some sort of technological revolution is sleazy journalism.
it might help if there were an explicit tag in the Firehose for "not the best link", instead of the ambiguous "not the best" to catch all of the possibilities
it also might help if the /. editors actually acted as editors, selecting what's "news" based on content instead of what's "popular" based on voting in the Firehose...
Reply noting the irony of making a grammar correction while making a grammar mistake.
That happens often enough that I'm surprised it's not in either the DSM or a Google search algorithm.
ironing board, which, ironically, no one on Slashdot has ever seen.
That's not ironic; I have seen an ironing board. That's not ironic, either. What'd be ironic is if there was an ironing board in my office right now.
But if I was like many slashdotters in that I, the laundry room, and the ironing board were sharing my parents' basement, that wouldn't be ironic. It would just be sad.
This is where I mock you for posting as an AC and contradict everything in your post, knowing you'll have to manually scroll to find it again and probably won't bother.
Here's where I blame it on political events from the past, as far back as Roman times or as recently as what's on my blog.
£4800 is in the price range for my next bicycle. Below about $4500 the quality drops like a rock.
Value comes from both utility and perception.
If your life works with a £60 bicycle you wouldn't consider a Segway. You wouldn't consider a £70 bicycle, either.
Most people with a choice of both will find situations where a Segway works for them that the bicycle doesn't, but will likely not find situations where a bicycle works for them and a Segway doesn't. Segways do steep hills and 10-20 mile rides out of the box. Fat people on bicycles don't.
Most people get the point after being arrested. Others after being jailed for a few days.
It's when when you're releasing violent, repeat, or crazy offenders for budgetary reasons you know your legislature is missing the point.
(*whoosh*)
Before you can build a wall, you have to imagine someone walking over the imaginary line at the edge of your yard.
Or you can figure out that a wall would have been useful after they come into your yard, but then it's too late.
See, most taxpayers understand that we pay taxes to prevent the crime, we don't wait until it happens and then rail that the government isn't doing anything about it.
Interesting. They have pictures of the place he may have landed, but none of the place he may have fallen from.
If you lost your balance (due to vertigo upon seeing the dropoff) near the cliff and leaned forward instead of back, then the segway would have killed you.
Personally, I think this is going to turn out to be what happened.
As to who's to blame... the Seqway isn't intuitive. You have to learn the muscle memory and you have to practice coupling it to situational awareness in order to get the machine to go where you want. If you are suddenly in a new situation -- something the randomness of rugged terrain does to you constantly -- it would be easy for your neuromuscular system to make an unexpected adjustment. You might as well be throwing control-system darts. Add vertigo, which is a condition where the neuromuscular system is misinterpreting and misapplying the information available to it, and you could continue to apply the wrong force. I.e., drunken control-system darts.
He'd have had to have trained under safe conditions (ropes, nets, etc.) in that configuration of ridge, cliff height, and lighting to learn how to use it near the edge of a cliff, and therefore take the Segway out of the blame equation. The rule for the thing should be never to ride it in a more dangerous situation than you've been trained to ride it in.
In the US, the pavement is the road and the thing pedestrians use is a sidewalk.
give it a kickstand
and they're a lot cheaper.
Priced a nice bicycle lately?
If he was riding it out there because he thought hiking out there would kill him...
He said Kamen's biggest invention was the insulin pump.
I don't see a value judgment there. Just a clarification.
I also think Segways are bigger than insulin pumps.
Parse that as you will.
Treat error cases as normal input in your use-case design.
Design your code to handle the spectrum of error cases.
Then nobody will be confused.
Your mere estimation of the "balance" will relegate your customers to having to do work around your failure to include their use-case in your estimation. You guarantee that simply by making the estimation and orphaning certain cases. At some point, your code will be sold to someone who wants to use that case. It's likely nobody selling it will have a clue that there are caveats buried in the details, because if you didn't want to code something to handle it in a graceful and informative way, you probably didn't want to write a long list of caveats in the documentation (which turns out to be harder anyway because you have to deal with all the use-cases where people don't understand what you wrote even if it's crystal clear, because not everyone understands everyone; at least you know how the computer will behave if you write and test the code).
And if you can't do it on-time and under budget, you shouldn't have bid that low. And if you don't want to let someone else write the bad code, you're just saying you're willing to chisel the market to make a buck.
If they modify it and reduce its reliability, then that's their problem, not mine.
If they examine it and find I've left it vulnerable, then that's my problem, not theirs.
Again, you have to multiply by the counts. Every act with every child on those DVDs is a single count. One knife and one 7-11 with no injuries is one count of aggravated robbery. So if it's 3 years per count for CP, the first guy gets 20x3 years. The second guy gets 1x7, and I bet the 7 was pled down from 15+ and the first guy had a shitty lawyer who didn't know he could plead down to probation for a first offense for simple possession.
You're right, there are witch hunts, but you won't get the system fixed by using the wrong math to inflate your complaint. It just gives the witch-hunters an excuse to ignore further complaints.
Why would I have assumed anyone posting to /. was posting from GB? Especially when two of the three items he listed were gun crimes?
I could have been wrong, but I didn't make an irrational guess.
When you got to my statement about the noose, maybe you should have re-read both posts as American-oriented, not just mine.
I'm surprised I don't know this, but I wonder what happens to the patent once you lose a case; can the judge invalidate it completely if he decides it's just wrong? Certainly you could never press the case against anyone making whatever the guy you just sued was making, but it's unlikely anyone would, so you could still sue people who are making slightly different things.
As for the shell company bankruptcy thing, that's a major flaw in corporate law, IMO. If the owners of corporations were more on the hook personally for their companies' actions, corporations overall would have a better reputation overall.
I'm not sure why you'd say that. The fact that exceptional conditions exist and are documented does not justify using assert.
As I said, 99% of people (and by people I mean software coders) don't know how to use assert properly. So in the coding standards I write it says don't use them at all; if you think you need an assert, what you really need is something that alleviates the problem you perceive will occur if you don't trap that unexpected return value or validate your inputs or break that non-converging loop. This is an embedded system, probably a high-reliability, safety-critical embedded system, and telling the user you're crapping out unexpectedly and they should call customer service is, I repeat, not an option.