Then, I think that Wikis would make a wonderful forum for developing legislation.
It's a nice idea until someone sneaks in an amendment that would never pass on the floor.
Personally, my dream application for legislation is legislative diffs and versioning for the US Code. Have you ever tried to read a piece of legislation like the Patriot Act which is over 90% changes of words and phrases here and there throughout the US Code? (Add bioweapons & chemical weapons to this law about nuclear weapons, etc.) I only got about 15-20% of the way through the bill before giving up because I got tired of going back and forth to the US Code.
I want the ability to click on a section of a law and see what it does to the rest of the US Code in context with all other surrounding changes. You'd see the original text and the new text with modifications in a different color. Much like most GUI SCM tools, you'd be able to click arrows to go to the next diff.
This functionality would also be great for amendments to bills so that you could see the changes cascade through the bill into the relevant laws. I (and I'm sure a great many lawyers) would seriously pay thousands of dollars for an application which could read in a bill, identify modifications to the US Code, and intelligently mark up changes without human intervention and manual tagging. This would be a killer app for any Congressman, lobbyist, watchdog group, or lawyer.
I was thinking the same thing. In the old kids game, you ran around saying, "Bang!" and "missing" a lot. The good guys were the only ones allowed to shoot and win, and the bad guys played out losing with child-like melodrama. Only the cops would win, and then you'd switch sides so that you could be the good guys and win.
This game's a little nastier with no clear morality, actual graphic death, and a glorification of the "thug life." I'm not sure that I'd support a ban on it, but no one can really sanely offer that this is good, clean, kid-friendly fun.
I'm pretty sure that CmdrTaco starts out at an unmoderated 3. I'm not sure why none of the other editors seem to (which I could be wrong about). I think they all should get an auto-3 because the few times they do comment are usually about something important.
My suggestion is to add a line after the "Posted by" comment with the date & time that the article was promoted so that it's clear that it was posted at one time and promoted at another. Also, I'd finagle the promotion algorithm to be slightly dependent on overall moderation or unique users to avoid trolls abusing the system or promoting an article that has become filled with nothing but flamebait about abortion, intelligent design, or people trying to curry favor by flaming about SCO or whoever's up on the wall for the latest Three Minute Hate.
As for the dupe criers, many frequently search for and post links to the previous articles (which would reveal that they were wrong), and those who falsely cry "dupe" (and some who truthfully do so) frequently get bathed in Offtopic & Redundant mods. The problem would mostly be self-correcting. If anything, false positives might drive down the number of cries of "dupe" over time due to uncertainty.
To be honest, I hadn't even thought about the confusion until it was pointed out, and I'm sort of a user interface nazi. Now that it's been mentioned, it kind of looks life a set of top comments to the article, but I think it's really easy from the context to figure out what it is.
Personally, I really like the new feature. It's a great addition to the site, and I look forward to seeing the new redesign. Is it being done partially to address the complaints some people have about the site not conforming to certain web standards?
Let me jar your head loose from your ass with this 2x4... *whack* (hey, I even used 'loose' correctly...)
I'm so proud for you.
"Jar" is the only thing you've mentioned that can be used as a verb outside of the context of applying the noun's meaning as an action. "I was jarred by the scene I saw." Of course, JAR isn't meant that way since it's an abbreviation of something different. "Beaned" comes from old slang for a person's head. In any case, none of the words the original AC were talking about were being used as verbs, all that could have their origins as nouns, and at least one of the words (Apple) can't be used as a verb at all. Your "great revelation" is nonsense.
As is common also in the English language is the usage of words in a vernacular fashion, which takes root usually as part of a specialized jargon for a given domain area or topic, so your complaint may be applicable to the usage of English in general, but in this area maybe not so germane.
Really!? No kidding!? Why that's almost exactly what I was arguing.
"Archive" and "program" are words adapted from their original meanings. All computer terms that have gained any traction down the to word "computer" are either adaptations of existing words, acronyms, or corporate trademarks and servicemarks. They were "real-life" words too. In my opinion, "Apple," "Sun," and "Bean" are all a far sight better than Intel 80286 and IBM 3270 or Athlon and Opteron if you ask me.
So while complaining about these apparant travesties of language justice, will you write letters [...]
Wait, why am I the guy writing letters of pointless complaint in your little fantasy world? I'm not the one complaining that we should stop using real world words for computer terms. I'm just the guy who pointed out that his complaint is self-contradicting since his counter-examples were "real world" words too and that he can't keep his parts of speech straight.
(Sure, I should've left out the bit about parts of speech since it was extremely petty, but you people are completely insane trying to counter-argue that I wrong since some of the words can be used as verbs in completely different contexts from the ones the computer terms originated from.)
Be sure to pay off the outstanding balance without fail when the first bill for it comes (usually once a month) lest you regret ever associating with these creatures.
Unless they decide to cancel your card because you're not earning them enough money. Then you get a cancelled line of credit on your credit report which is a decent little ding to your score.
Now you're just getting nasty-tempered for no good reason. You have not shown that there was any evidence cited anywhere that the two groups actually have equivalent rates of cell phone usage. Without that piece of knowledge you cannot say that the risk was equivalent. I was merely pointing out that you were assuming that they were because it was the only way that their claims held out. In other words, you're arguing from the conclusion since there is no evidence presented in the supporting text to uphold your claim.
I would point out that the person who claimed that there was a methodological flaw was an member of a political advocacy group and not necessarily a scientist. Furthermore, no one said that it was "the only flaw." You cannot use his words as supporting evidence that a methodological flaw in determining relative risk did not exist.
My point is that this is fluff journalism, and I treat it with a grain of salt since the evidence as presented proves nothing. I suspect that they're probably correct. I suspect that patients interviewed after the fact are more likely to misreport which side they used their cellphones on in favor of putting where the cancer was thanks to the news coverage of the affair. I just don't think the scant evidence presented in the article proves it thanks to incomplete information.
1) You have nouns and verbs confused. Neither Sun, Apple, jar, nor bean are verbs (and JAR is actually an abbreviation for Java Archive).
2) "Archives" and "programs" are also real-world words lifted for used in computers. An "archive" is a repository where you store historical records, and a "program" is a document that lists what acts will be performed (in order) at an event like a symphony or ballet.
But, there was no overall increase in cancer rates.
That is the core assumption of the study, but it can't be objectively proven from the sample groups involved. If they had selected people who used cell phones as the "test" group and people who did not as the "control" group and then checked for cancer rates you could make that assumption.
However over a third of the people involved in the study had glioma. You can't tell me that glioma is prevalent in 1/3 of the population. Instead, what they did was find cancer patients first as the "test" group and people without cancer as the "control" group. Unless they proved that cell phone usage rates were identical between the two groups, then identical risk is not proven. The article made no real mention of either group containing significant numbers of people who did not use cell phones.
I still want to see their numbers. I just can't find the study on-line.
The Turing Test is very simply expressed but has a large number of possible variations on the basic idea: A computer can be considered sentient when a human can't tell the difference between a computer and a human.
So far, this has been limited to mere conversation, but there are all sort of things where a computer can be tested against human cognition. Jokes, song and poetry composition, empathy and sympathy, vindictiveness, anxiety, joy, and depression are all areas that computers need severe improvment before they can emulate. In addition, machines will need to be able to study from the same materials humans can, solve the same kind of mental puzzles that humans can without the kind of brute force solutions humans aren't capable of, and logically and creatively derive theorems and mathematical proofs like humans can. There are many Turing Tests that one can devise.
What Turing is saying is similar to Einstein's pocketwatch argument about understanding the laws of reality. We can't open up the pocket watch to see how it works, but we can make theories based on observable behavior. In the end, all we have are models that could at any time be proven wrong by some new data. In the case of AI, we can never be sure if a machine is sentient or not since there is no objective test that we can use to "open up the pocketwatch." We just have to treat the machine as sentient once it begins operating on a level equivalent to men for the same reason that we have to treat other people as sentient -- because all we have is observable behavior.
The only real flaw in the Turing Test is that it doesn't really account for sentient capabilities inhumanly beyond human potential.
err... what about the white Buddhists, atheists, other non-Christians? how did they tell the faith beliefs of the white folks but not of other folk?
Easy. Judaism, Islam, and Sihkism are the last three major world religions to have a distinctive dress code to separate the faithful from the unfaithful. Orthodox Jews have very distinctive clothing, and most Russian Jews are Orthodox Jews (if I recall correctly).
My major problem with this, is that I'd like to see how they came up with the idea of the drop in cancer rates. There are multiple ways to figure this, and some of them are flawed.
Did they separate out the cancer inflicted people and see if the same proportion of people who already had cancer in one side of the head had cancer in the other side of the head as everyone in the general populace would have cancer in that side of the head? If so, that seem correct.
If not, then it seems like you're trying to say that people who win the lottery once are less likely to win the lottery again since the aggregate probability of winning the lottery twice is less than of winning it once. I mean, brain cancer is pretty rare, so "double" brain cancer is likely to be even rarer. If they didn't properly isolate the two events, then they'd get a biased result.
Given the rarity of "double" brain cancer, I'd like to know what their sample size is of people that had it. Given that only 17000 people die of brain cancer in America per year, they can't have had more than a handful of people that met the requirement. A couple more or less patients could've changed their results dramatically.
Well, BellSouth does offer 6 Mbps/512 Kbps for $46.95 (before taxes), but I don't really have a need for that high of a speed as long as my overall throughput gets me my torrents. Speakeasy, on the otherhand offer 6 Mbps/768 Kbps for a somewhat outrageous $105 before taxes. Their lowest end plan is good enough for me and still affordable, so they're who I'm going with.
Cable in my area offers a max of 6 Mbps/768 Mbps service for a more reasonable price, but you can't use it to its fullest capability 24/7 or they'll kick you out as a customer and fine you. Forget that.
I'm currently looking at Speakeasy since they offer DSL without a voice line in the Atlanta area -- a feat which I had thought was impossible due to the fact that EarthLink can't offer it.
I'm currently paying $42/month for 1.5/256 DSL + $30 for local services (with all the bells & whistles since getting only caller ID would save me a whole whopping $2). Going with Speakeasy's lowest plan gives me 1.5/384 for $60 (after taxes), and I'm just going to take the remaining $10 and increase my cell phone plan to about 25 hours of time per month which is more than I'll ever use.
Speakeasy also offers VoIP (for about $27), but I think I'll save money with the cell phone plan. Their faster DSL services are significantly more expensive than BellSouth, but all I care about is reasonable upload capacities and the ability to max out that upload capacity 24/7. (I'm a heavy BitTorrent user and can't go to cable as a result.) I'm currently recommending to all of my friends to take a look at it.
Oh, and I'm making damn sure that BellSouth knows WHY I'm switching. I've told the tech I asked my current speeds from, I plan on telling the tech I will talk to when it's time to cancel my service, and I plan on writing a letter to the company to make sure they understand that I will not tolerate this sort of extortion and that I'm encouraging friends and family to pursue other options.
Maybe you should read more about the coltan trade before you laugh off people dying for metals used in high-tech goods. Tantalum is widely used in electrolytic capacitors, and illegal trade in it has helped fuel warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo back before a ceasefire was brokered in 2003.
Fortunately, a lot of companies did what was right and boycotted the trade during the war, but the native people today are still being exploited to mine the material (and many other precious minerals) with little material benefit to themselves and their families.
One of my insider mining newsletters that I subscribe to just mentioned how zinc might end up being the most rare material in the coming years.
At least we won't run out of carbon anytime soon. I seriously don't think that running out of copper will be that big of a problem. If anything, it'll give a boost to the kind of long nanotube synthesis that we need to a space elevator.
Communications networks will be silicon or wireless. Power networks will be carbon.
Truthfully I think spelling/grammar are part of the larger problem of 'meta' discussion on Slashdot.
Meta-discussion is not the problem. A certain amount of off-topic discussion is a sign of a healthy, thriving community that has common interests beyond what is tacked up on the board as a talking point of the day. Treating off-topic but unoffensive dialog as counterproductive helps degrade a community. (On the other hand, a community that has degenerated to not having a topic anymore is much worse.)
Meta-discussion that comes from anger is the problem. The anger comes from what many in the community perceive to be a lack of respect for the user base by the Slashdot editorial staff.
Ever since Slashdot added subscription, I've had the following signature: "I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without dupes, typoes, and articles the editors didn't read."
My whole complaint can be summed up in a single word: Professionalism. Style matters. Fact checking matters. Giving the perception that you actually read the front page of your own website matters.
I know that mistakes can be made. (Lord knows I post mispelled and ungrammatical posts constantly due to slipshod proofreading combined with letting my thoughts get ahead of my fingers.) I know that slip-ups happen, and that you have to read hundreds of submissions every day. It's easy to forget a previously posted story (by another editor) when you're seeing the same story again and again in the submission queue, but there's such a thing as standards of journalistic integrity and a sense of responsibility to the user base when your running something as big of a phenomenon as Slashdot is.
I love reading this site. I don't see myself not reading and posting to Slashdot any time in the near future. However, I won't part with one red cent from my wallet for the site as long as I feel that the editors don't take their jobs seriously enough to make their posts presentable.
That's the major problem. We feel that we aren't being treated with respect and taken seriously. I expect poor grammar from my boss' bosses 'cause I consider them to be overpromoted intellectual light-weights. I don't expect a site for News for Nerds to involve people who can't spell and quite frankly find it unimportant to bother trying.
It's a matter of feeling like the staff here really doesn't give a damn, so why should we? The problem isn't the meta discussions; it's the source of the anger that generates them.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
That should work. see, you can do it in Perl too. The [] when used in such a way create array references. An array with embedded arrays is an array with array references in it. The embedded arrays are embedded as array references. Perl does flatten the structure if you use () enclosures exclusively, so thats why you use [] (or {} for hashes) for the embedded structures.
Well, that's intuitive. What's the difference between an array and a list in Perl?
Personally, my latest personal Perl hell came with trying to stuff an array into a hash a few weeks ago. From my Python experience, I expected the following to work:
$hash{$key} = @array; [...] @array = $hash{key};
Nope, apparently this is wrong. If I recall correctly, you get back a scalar reference. The syntax that I found that eventually worked is this:
From my limited understanding, this seems to indicate that Perl is a pass-by-value instead of a pass-by-reference language? If so, that's just nuts in an interpretted language. If not, then why does the first syntax not work properly?
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Do you know of any good coding standards for Lisp that make it easy to understand the flow of your code? I had to learn Lisp for a college AI class and pretty much failed every assignment I was given until we were allowed to use a language of our choice because I couldn't tell what my program was doing at any one point.
It's not that I couldn't understand functional programming, since I did the rest of my assignments in Python making heavy use of functional programming features, but I just couldn't make my Lisp readable because of all those awful parentheses.
Actually, I find the variation to be very encouraging. Winning the home users is a powerful accomplishment. The past history of the PC has been that what people use at work is what they end up using at home due to familiarity. If people are increasingly using Firefox at home in spite of being forced to use IE at work (as is the case with many jobs) then Firefox is in fact doing better than work time statistics would suggest.
On the other hand, it could be that the difference is not between work and home but between the kind of people who would web surf on Sunday instead of going to church or visiting family.
I have found that one meeting a week is sufficient; I tell people where I'm at on what I'm working, what my schedule looks like, and to remind them to provide me with concise details for any projects they may have upcoming.
Congratulations. You work in developer paradise. Never leave there.
I did, and now I find myself every now and then in meetings with lots of non-technical people who can't really contribute to the solution to the problem but have to sign off on it anyway. Instead of addressing the points I need addressed to move forward on fixing the problem, I spend the whole meeting re-explaining the problem to the latest management leech to be attached to the conference call. What's even better is how on a half-duplexed speakerphone some moron who doesn't understand the situation can cut you off for five minutes with irrelevant BS that you could explain away IF ONLY THEY WOULD SHUT UP FOR THREE SECONDS SO THAT YOU COULD START TALKING!!! AAAAAAAAA!!!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Then, I think that Wikis would make a wonderful forum for developing legislation.
It's a nice idea until someone sneaks in an amendment that would never pass on the floor.
Personally, my dream application for legislation is legislative diffs and versioning for the US Code. Have you ever tried to read a piece of legislation like the Patriot Act which is over 90% changes of words and phrases here and there throughout the US Code? (Add bioweapons & chemical weapons to this law about nuclear weapons, etc.) I only got about 15-20% of the way through the bill before giving up because I got tired of going back and forth to the US Code.
I want the ability to click on a section of a law and see what it does to the rest of the US Code in context with all other surrounding changes. You'd see the original text and the new text with modifications in a different color. Much like most GUI SCM tools, you'd be able to click arrows to go to the next diff.
This functionality would also be great for amendments to bills so that you could see the changes cascade through the bill into the relevant laws. I (and I'm sure a great many lawyers) would seriously pay thousands of dollars for an application which could read in a bill, identify modifications to the US Code, and intelligently mark up changes without human intervention and manual tagging. This would be a killer app for any Congressman, lobbyist, watchdog group, or lawyer.
I was thinking the same thing. In the old kids game, you ran around saying, "Bang!" and "missing" a lot. The good guys were the only ones allowed to shoot and win, and the bad guys played out losing with child-like melodrama. Only the cops would win, and then you'd switch sides so that you could be the good guys and win.
This game's a little nastier with no clear morality, actual graphic death, and a glorification of the "thug life." I'm not sure that I'd support a ban on it, but no one can really sanely offer that this is good, clean, kid-friendly fun.
I'm pretty sure that CmdrTaco starts out at an unmoderated 3. I'm not sure why none of the other editors seem to (which I could be wrong about). I think they all should get an auto-3 because the few times they do comment are usually about something important.
My suggestion is to add a line after the "Posted by" comment with the date & time that the article was promoted so that it's clear that it was posted at one time and promoted at another. Also, I'd finagle the promotion algorithm to be slightly dependent on overall moderation or unique users to avoid trolls abusing the system or promoting an article that has become filled with nothing but flamebait about abortion, intelligent design, or people trying to curry favor by flaming about SCO or whoever's up on the wall for the latest Three Minute Hate.
As for the dupe criers, many frequently search for and post links to the previous articles (which would reveal that they were wrong), and those who falsely cry "dupe" (and some who truthfully do so) frequently get bathed in Offtopic & Redundant mods. The problem would mostly be self-correcting. If anything, false positives might drive down the number of cries of "dupe" over time due to uncertainty.
To be honest, I hadn't even thought about the confusion until it was pointed out, and I'm sort of a user interface nazi. Now that it's been mentioned, it kind of looks life a set of top comments to the article, but I think it's really easy from the context to figure out what it is.
Personally, I really like the new feature. It's a great addition to the site, and I look forward to seeing the new redesign. Is it being done partially to address the complaints some people have about the site not conforming to certain web standards?
Let me jar your head loose from your ass with this 2x4... *whack* (hey, I even used 'loose' correctly...)
I'm so proud for you.
"Jar" is the only thing you've mentioned that can be used as a verb outside of the context of applying the noun's meaning as an action. "I was jarred by the scene I saw." Of course, JAR isn't meant that way since it's an abbreviation of something different. "Beaned" comes from old slang for a person's head. In any case, none of the words the original AC were talking about were being used as verbs, all that could have their origins as nouns, and at least one of the words (Apple) can't be used as a verb at all. Your "great revelation" is nonsense.
As is common also in the English language is the usage of words in a vernacular fashion, which takes root usually as part of a specialized jargon for a given domain area or topic, so your complaint may be applicable to the usage of English in general, but in this area maybe not so germane.
Really!? No kidding!? Why that's almost exactly what I was arguing.
"Archive" and "program" are words adapted from their original meanings. All computer terms that have gained any traction down the to word "computer" are either adaptations of existing words, acronyms, or corporate trademarks and servicemarks. They were "real-life" words too. In my opinion, "Apple," "Sun," and "Bean" are all a far sight better than Intel 80286 and IBM 3270 or Athlon and Opteron if you ask me.
So while complaining about these apparant travesties of language justice, will you write letters [...]
Wait, why am I the guy writing letters of pointless complaint in your little fantasy world? I'm not the one complaining that we should stop using real world words for computer terms. I'm just the guy who pointed out that his complaint is self-contradicting since his counter-examples were "real world" words too and that he can't keep his parts of speech straight.
(Sure, I should've left out the bit about parts of speech since it was extremely petty, but you people are completely insane trying to counter-argue that I wrong since some of the words can be used as verbs in completely different contexts from the ones the computer terms originated from.)
You forgot to add water.
Be sure to pay off the outstanding balance without fail when the first bill for it comes (usually once a month) lest you regret ever associating with these creatures.
Unless they decide to cancel your card because you're not earning them enough money. Then you get a cancelled line of credit on your credit report which is a decent little ding to your score.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Now you're just getting nasty-tempered for no good reason. You have not shown that there was any evidence cited anywhere that the two groups actually have equivalent rates of cell phone usage. Without that piece of knowledge you cannot say that the risk was equivalent. I was merely pointing out that you were assuming that they were because it was the only way that their claims held out. In other words, you're arguing from the conclusion since there is no evidence presented in the supporting text to uphold your claim.
I would point out that the person who claimed that there was a methodological flaw was an member of a political advocacy group and not necessarily a scientist. Furthermore, no one said that it was "the only flaw." You cannot use his words as supporting evidence that a methodological flaw in determining relative risk did not exist.
My point is that this is fluff journalism, and I treat it with a grain of salt since the evidence as presented proves nothing. I suspect that they're probably correct. I suspect that patients interviewed after the fact are more likely to misreport which side they used their cellphones on in favor of putting where the cancer was thanks to the news coverage of the affair. I just don't think the scant evidence presented in the article proves it thanks to incomplete information.
Two points:
1) You have nouns and verbs confused. Neither Sun, Apple, jar, nor bean are verbs (and JAR is actually an abbreviation for Java Archive).
2) "Archives" and "programs" are also real-world words lifted for used in computers. An "archive" is a repository where you store historical records, and a "program" is a document that lists what acts will be performed (in order) at an event like a symphony or ballet.
That's precisely what the study found. Cell usage patterns of both groups were the same.
Quote me a line from the article that would indicate the truth of that statement. I've reread it four times, and I can find no such evidence.
I want to see their math.
But, there was no overall increase in cancer rates.
That is the core assumption of the study, but it can't be objectively proven from the sample groups involved. If they had selected people who used cell phones as the "test" group and people who did not as the "control" group and then checked for cancer rates you could make that assumption.
However over a third of the people involved in the study had glioma. You can't tell me that glioma is prevalent in 1/3 of the population. Instead, what they did was find cancer patients first as the "test" group and people without cancer as the "control" group. Unless they proved that cell phone usage rates were identical between the two groups, then identical risk is not proven. The article made no real mention of either group containing significant numbers of people who did not use cell phones.
I still want to see their numbers. I just can't find the study on-line.
The Turing Test is very simply expressed but has a large number of possible variations on the basic idea: A computer can be considered sentient when a human can't tell the difference between a computer and a human.
So far, this has been limited to mere conversation, but there are all sort of things where a computer can be tested against human cognition. Jokes, song and poetry composition, empathy and sympathy, vindictiveness, anxiety, joy, and depression are all areas that computers need severe improvment before they can emulate. In addition, machines will need to be able to study from the same materials humans can, solve the same kind of mental puzzles that humans can without the kind of brute force solutions humans aren't capable of, and logically and creatively derive theorems and mathematical proofs like humans can. There are many Turing Tests that one can devise.
What Turing is saying is similar to Einstein's pocketwatch argument about understanding the laws of reality. We can't open up the pocket watch to see how it works, but we can make theories based on observable behavior. In the end, all we have are models that could at any time be proven wrong by some new data. In the case of AI, we can never be sure if a machine is sentient or not since there is no objective test that we can use to "open up the pocketwatch." We just have to treat the machine as sentient once it begins operating on a level equivalent to men for the same reason that we have to treat other people as sentient -- because all we have is observable behavior.
The only real flaw in the Turing Test is that it doesn't really account for sentient capabilities inhumanly beyond human potential.
err... what about the white Buddhists, atheists, other non-Christians? how did they tell the faith beliefs of the white folks but not of other folk?
Easy. Judaism, Islam, and Sihkism are the last three major world religions to have a distinctive dress code to separate the faithful from the unfaithful. Orthodox Jews have very distinctive clothing, and most Russian Jews are Orthodox Jews (if I recall correctly).
My major problem with this, is that I'd like to see how they came up with the idea of the drop in cancer rates. There are multiple ways to figure this, and some of them are flawed.
Did they separate out the cancer inflicted people and see if the same proportion of people who already had cancer in one side of the head had cancer in the other side of the head as everyone in the general populace would have cancer in that side of the head? If so, that seem correct.
If not, then it seems like you're trying to say that people who win the lottery once are less likely to win the lottery again since the aggregate probability of winning the lottery twice is less than of winning it once. I mean, brain cancer is pretty rare, so "double" brain cancer is likely to be even rarer. If they didn't properly isolate the two events, then they'd get a biased result.
Given the rarity of "double" brain cancer, I'd like to know what their sample size is of people that had it. Given that only 17000 people die of brain cancer in America per year, they can't have had more than a handful of people that met the requirement. A couple more or less patients could've changed their results dramatically.
Well, BellSouth does offer 6 Mbps/512 Kbps for $46.95 (before taxes), but I don't really have a need for that high of a speed as long as my overall throughput gets me my torrents. Speakeasy, on the otherhand offer 6 Mbps/768 Kbps for a somewhat outrageous $105 before taxes. Their lowest end plan is good enough for me and still affordable, so they're who I'm going with.
Cable in my area offers a max of 6 Mbps/768 Mbps service for a more reasonable price, but you can't use it to its fullest capability 24/7 or they'll kick you out as a customer and fine you. Forget that.
What've you got in France right now?
I'm currently looking at Speakeasy since they offer DSL without a voice line in the Atlanta area -- a feat which I had thought was impossible due to the fact that EarthLink can't offer it.
I'm currently paying $42/month for 1.5/256 DSL + $30 for local services (with all the bells & whistles since getting only caller ID would save me a whole whopping $2). Going with Speakeasy's lowest plan gives me 1.5/384 for $60 (after taxes), and I'm just going to take the remaining $10 and increase my cell phone plan to about 25 hours of time per month which is more than I'll ever use.
Speakeasy also offers VoIP (for about $27), but I think I'll save money with the cell phone plan. Their faster DSL services are significantly more expensive than BellSouth, but all I care about is reasonable upload capacities and the ability to max out that upload capacity 24/7. (I'm a heavy BitTorrent user and can't go to cable as a result.) I'm currently recommending to all of my friends to take a look at it.
Oh, and I'm making damn sure that BellSouth knows WHY I'm switching. I've told the tech I asked my current speeds from, I plan on telling the tech I will talk to when it's time to cancel my service, and I plan on writing a letter to the company to make sure they understand that I will not tolerate this sort of extortion and that I'm encouraging friends and family to pursue other options.
People die everyday over Cat5e.
*cough*
Maybe you should read more about the coltan trade before you laugh off people dying for metals used in high-tech goods. Tantalum is widely used in electrolytic capacitors, and illegal trade in it has helped fuel warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo back before a ceasefire was brokered in 2003.
Fortunately, a lot of companies did what was right and boycotted the trade during the war, but the native people today are still being exploited to mine the material (and many other precious minerals) with little material benefit to themselves and their families.
One of my insider mining newsletters that I subscribe to just mentioned how zinc might end up being the most rare material in the coming years.
At least we won't run out of carbon anytime soon. I seriously don't think that running out of copper will be that big of a problem. If anything, it'll give a boost to the kind of long nanotube synthesis that we need to a space elevator.
Communications networks will be silicon or wireless. Power networks will be carbon.
Truthfully I think spelling/grammar are part of the larger problem of 'meta' discussion on Slashdot.
Meta-discussion is not the problem. A certain amount of off-topic discussion is a sign of a healthy, thriving community that has common interests beyond what is tacked up on the board as a talking point of the day. Treating off-topic but unoffensive dialog as counterproductive helps degrade a community. (On the other hand, a community that has degenerated to not having a topic anymore is much worse.)
Meta-discussion that comes from anger is the problem. The anger comes from what many in the community perceive to be a lack of respect for the user base by the Slashdot editorial staff.
Ever since Slashdot added subscription, I've had the following signature:
"I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without dupes, typoes, and articles the editors didn't read."
My whole complaint can be summed up in a single word: Professionalism. Style matters. Fact checking matters. Giving the perception that you actually read the front page of your own website matters.
I know that mistakes can be made. (Lord knows I post mispelled and ungrammatical posts constantly due to slipshod proofreading combined with letting my thoughts get ahead of my fingers.) I know that slip-ups happen, and that you have to read hundreds of submissions every day. It's easy to forget a previously posted story (by another editor) when you're seeing the same story again and again in the submission queue, but there's such a thing as standards of journalistic integrity and a sense of responsibility to the user base when your running something as big of a phenomenon as Slashdot is.
I love reading this site. I don't see myself not reading and posting to Slashdot any time in the near future. However, I won't part with one red cent from my wallet for the site as long as I feel that the editors don't take their jobs seriously enough to make their posts presentable.
That's the major problem. We feel that we aren't being treated with respect and taken seriously. I expect poor grammar from my boss' bosses 'cause I consider them to be overpromoted intellectual light-weights. I don't expect a site for News for Nerds to involve people who can't spell and quite frankly find it unimportant to bother trying.
It's a matter of feeling like the staff here really doesn't give a damn, so why should we? The problem isn't the meta discussions; it's the source of the anger that generates them.
That should work. see, you can do it in Perl too. The [] when used in such a way create array references. An array with embedded arrays is an array with array references in it. The embedded arrays are embedded as array references. Perl does flatten the structure if you use () enclosures exclusively, so thats why you use [] (or {} for hashes) for the embedded structures.
Well, that's intuitive. What's the difference between an array and a list in Perl?
Personally, my latest personal Perl hell came with trying to stuff an array into a hash a few weeks ago. From my Python experience, I expected the following to work:
$hash{$key} = @array;
[...]
@array = $hash{key};
Nope, apparently this is wrong. If I recall correctly, you get back a scalar reference. The syntax that I found that eventually worked is this:
$hash{$key} = \@array;
[...]
@array = @{$hash{$key}};
From my limited understanding, this seems to indicate that Perl is a pass-by-value instead of a pass-by-reference language? If so, that's just nuts in an interpretted language. If not, then why does the first syntax not work properly?
Do you know of any good coding standards for Lisp that make it easy to understand the flow of your code? I had to learn Lisp for a college AI class and pretty much failed every assignment I was given until we were allowed to use a language of our choice because I couldn't tell what my program was doing at any one point.
It's not that I couldn't understand functional programming, since I did the rest of my assignments in Python making heavy use of functional programming features, but I just couldn't make my Lisp readable because of all those awful parentheses.
You can never be told what Perl is.
You just have to see it for yourself.
Fortunately, I took the red pill years ago.
Unfortunately, the company I work for pratically owns stock in the blue pill.
Actually, I find the variation to be very encouraging. Winning the home users is a powerful accomplishment. The past history of the PC has been that what people use at work is what they end up using at home due to familiarity. If people are increasingly using Firefox at home in spite of being forced to use IE at work (as is the case with many jobs) then Firefox is in fact doing better than work time statistics would suggest.
On the other hand, it could be that the difference is not between work and home but between the kind of people who would web surf on Sunday instead of going to church or visiting family.
I have found that one meeting a week is sufficient; I tell people where I'm at on what I'm working, what my schedule looks like, and to remind them to provide me with concise details for any projects they may have upcoming.
Congratulations. You work in developer paradise. Never leave there.
I did, and now I find myself every now and then in meetings with lots of non-technical people who can't really contribute to the solution to the problem but have to sign off on it anyway. Instead of addressing the points I need addressed to move forward on fixing the problem, I spend the whole meeting re-explaining the problem to the latest management leech to be attached to the conference call. What's even better is how on a half-duplexed speakerphone some moron who doesn't understand the situation can cut you off for five minutes with irrelevant BS that you could explain away IF ONLY THEY WOULD SHUT UP FOR THREE SECONDS SO THAT YOU COULD START TALKING!!! AAAAAAAAA!!!!!!
*cough*
So how was your day?