Well, it's normal for news sources to carry retrospective feature on historical events -- in fact the article was clearly prompted by the BBC doing exactly that. Sometimes it happens on the anniversary of significant events like the Normandy Invasion; other times it's part of a thematic series -- as in this case.
It's actually a good thing for news sources to do this. It keeps the memory of historically significant events alive and ensures the news organization and its readership have some historical perspective. The cost is sometimes you have to skim over stuff you already know; but the alternative is for that knowledge to become ever less widely held.
Would it be bad if the BBC (or Slashdot) only had articles like this? Yep. Would it be bad if BBC never had articles like this? Yep. It follows that something in between these two extremes is optimal -- although of course not equally so for everyone.
Should you plan to get your work done in a limited time, or should you be prepared to work outside the allotted time?
Yes. Both.
Saying "this happens in the real world" is no excuse for not managing work properly. You have to be prepared for shit to happen, but you shouldn't allow shit to become your normal mode of operation.
You know language is really a remarkable instrument. It evolved for saying things like "Hand me a rock to hit this sabre-toothed tiger with," but is capable of asking questions like the ones we're discussing.
What I'm suggesting is that the question of the identity of indistinguishable things might possibly be bullshit, but not for the reasons you seem to think it is. Philosophers noodle about such matters not just to get answers, but to obtain better questions.
A better transporter question might be, "Suppose transporters killed me in the process of creating a perfect, living duplicate; should i care?" Differences in opinions on the identity of indiscernibles may well be no more than differences in terminology -- what we each mean by "identity". The very question may well presume an impossibility: a perfect duplicate. By that standard nobody's identity survives from one moment to the next.
You've got the wrong end of the stick if you're asking "How will this benefit Twitter?" The question should be "How will the benefit Jack Dorsey?"
The answer is right there in the summary: he's also the CEO of a credit card processing company that's just gotten into BitCoin. So the title of this article should be "Square CEO says bitcoin will be the world's only currency in ten years," and the summary should note that people believing this would be very good for Square.
I wouldn't be surprised if Dorsey picked up a bunch of Bitcoin before making the pronouncement. However if I were a Twitter stockholder I wouldn't be too happy about his using his Twitter notoriety this way.
High speed is speed in which things happen faster than you can react effectively to. So it depends on context.
This is something I tried to drill into my kids before they learned to drive: absolute speed is not a reasonable measure of safe speed. On a dry interstate around noon 90 mph would not be unsafe if other cars are traveling at that speed. If it is icy, 40 mph maybe too fast.
Anytime you cannot see the road surface ahead you need to slow down so you can react to something outside your vision. This could be because of fog, approaching a turn, a hill you can't see over.
In some ways it was more exciting back then, in other ways it's more exciting now.
In terms of what you can actually do, there's no comparison: today is much better. And a lot more is known about how to do things like testing and integrating large systems. But you don't so much stand on the shoulders of giants today as you do on great masses of talented but basically ordinary people. Back in the day if you didn't like the way a library worked you made your own routines. Today the volume of source required to produce the kind of applications we use today is so large you pretty much have to resign yourself to working around the mistakes of others.
The cyclist should have had wheel reflectors and front and back lights at a minimum, as well as reflective clothing.
This does not, however, mean the driver -- or should I say human attendant-- is not at fault as well for (apparently) texting. This kind of road is where you need to be especially alert because of the combination of poor lighting and high speed.
You are conflating digital signatures with encryption.
You would never encrypt anything with your private key; if you wanted to encrypt something for your own future use you'd use your public key like everyone else.
Many believe that tetraethyl lead is responsible for the rise in violent crime in the 70s and 80s, tracking the increase in cars and gasoline consumption in the post WW2 years. Likewise the drop in violent starting around 1990 was the effect of lead-free gas.
Other than the availability of safe, legal abortions, it's about the only factor anyone's come up with that explains the prevalence of the violent crime trend across countries and legal jurisdictions with very different philosophies with respect to crime. In the US the reduction parallels an increase in gun sales, but the same trend occurs in countries where gun sales are flat or have gone down.
Actually, it's a conscious and deliberate choice by companies to exploit the natural tendency to be overly skeptical of change and overly accepting of the status quo. Yes, society is refractory when it comes to change, but it is not infinitely refractory. Without the calculated deceptions for companies profiting from the status quo, society would adapt to new information more quickly.
You know, I still grind my teeth when people use "broadband" to mean "high bandwidth". But that's the way with words that are new to people; they inflate them with hot air until they're just a pretentious way of saying something simple.
Yeah. I bought a chemistry set for my kids, but going through the instructions I realize that by removing anything that could be dangerous from the set what they had left was just boring.
Well, it might not be the stuff that blew up they're worried about. I'm guessing he probably didn't confine himself to one explosive, or even explosives per se, so he probably had quite a collection of interesting reagents lying around.
As a pharmacy student he'd be familiar with PETN, which has similar medical applications to nitroglycerin. I'm not sure though why it would require abandoning the building and most of its contents.
Depends on what kinds of explosives he was playing with. If he was making mercury fulminate, yeah, you could well turn your whole building into a superfund site.
However if that were case, they wouldn't be able to just burn the building down. So I'm guessing he was messing some kind of unstable organic compound. The kinds of monitoring equipment they put out (there was a press release so people wouldn't be alarmed by the strange bits of equipment lying around) indicates they were looking for vocs.
You don't really understand the chem geek's mindset.
When I was in engineering school I knew a guy who got suspended when his roommate turned him in for making explosives. He also made drugs -- not to use or to sell, but just for the thrill of making things he was forbidden to have.
Part of the young hacker's mindset is "It's OK if I do this thing that is against the rules because I'm smarter than the people for whom the rule was made." Come to think of it, that's a pretty commonplace attitude among young people for a lot of dangerous things.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's normal for news sources to carry retrospective feature on historical events -- in fact the article was clearly prompted by the BBC doing exactly that. Sometimes it happens on the anniversary of significant events like the Normandy Invasion; other times it's part of a thematic series -- as in this case.
It's actually a good thing for news sources to do this. It keeps the memory of historically significant events alive and ensures the news organization and its readership have some historical perspective. The cost is sometimes you have to skim over stuff you already know; but the alternative is for that knowledge to become ever less widely held.
Would it be bad if the BBC (or Slashdot) only had articles like this? Yep. Would it be bad if BBC never had articles like this? Yep. It follows that something in between these two extremes is optimal -- although of course not equally so for everyone.
Should you plan to get your work done in a limited time, or should you be prepared to work outside the allotted time?
Yes. Both.
Saying "this happens in the real world" is no excuse for not managing work properly. You have to be prepared for shit to happen, but you shouldn't allow shit to become your normal mode of operation.
You know language is really a remarkable instrument. It evolved for saying things like "Hand me a rock to hit this sabre-toothed tiger with," but is capable of asking questions like the ones we're discussing.
What I'm suggesting is that the question of the identity of indistinguishable things might possibly be bullshit, but not for the reasons you seem to think it is. Philosophers noodle about such matters not just to get answers, but to obtain better questions.
A better transporter question might be, "Suppose transporters killed me in the process of creating a perfect, living duplicate; should i care?" Differences in opinions on the identity of indiscernibles may well be no more than differences in terminology -- what we each mean by "identity". The very question may well presume an impossibility: a perfect duplicate. By that standard nobody's identity survives from one moment to the next.
Why does that sound so familiar?
Oh, wait. I'm a software developer.
Its market valuation dropped 75 billion dollars.
You've got the wrong end of the stick if you're asking "How will this benefit Twitter?" The question should be "How will the benefit Jack Dorsey?"
The answer is right there in the summary: he's also the CEO of a credit card processing company that's just gotten into BitCoin. So the title of this article should be "Square CEO says bitcoin will be the world's only currency in ten years," and the summary should note that people believing this would be very good for Square.
I wouldn't be surprised if Dorsey picked up a bunch of Bitcoin before making the pronouncement. However if I were a Twitter stockholder I wouldn't be too happy about his using his Twitter notoriety this way.
High speed is speed in which things happen faster than you can react effectively to. So it depends on context.
This is something I tried to drill into my kids before they learned to drive: absolute speed is not a reasonable measure of safe speed. On a dry interstate around noon 90 mph would not be unsafe if other cars are traveling at that speed. If it is icy, 40 mph maybe too fast.
Anytime you cannot see the road surface ahead you need to slow down so you can react to something outside your vision. This could be because of fog, approaching a turn, a hill you can't see over.
In some ways it was more exciting back then, in other ways it's more exciting now.
In terms of what you can actually do, there's no comparison: today is much better. And a lot more is known about how to do things like testing and integrating large systems. But you don't so much stand on the shoulders of giants today as you do on great masses of talented but basically ordinary people. Back in the day if you didn't like the way a library worked you made your own routines. Today the volume of source required to produce the kind of applications we use today is so large you pretty much have to resign yourself to working around the mistakes of others.
The cyclist should have had wheel reflectors and front and back lights at a minimum, as well as reflective clothing.
This does not, however, mean the driver -- or should I say human attendant-- is not at fault as well for (apparently) texting. This kind of road is where you need to be especially alert because of the combination of poor lighting and high speed.
You are conflating digital signatures with encryption.
You would never encrypt anything with your private key; if you wanted to encrypt something for your own future use you'd use your public key like everyone else.
Many believe that tetraethyl lead is responsible for the rise in violent crime in the 70s and 80s, tracking the increase in cars and gasoline consumption in the post WW2 years. Likewise the drop in violent starting around 1990 was the effect of lead-free gas.
Other than the availability of safe, legal abortions, it's about the only factor anyone's come up with that explains the prevalence of the violent crime trend across countries and legal jurisdictions with very different philosophies with respect to crime. In the US the reduction parallels an increase in gun sales, but the same trend occurs in countries where gun sales are flat or have gone down.
Actually, it's a conscious and deliberate choice by companies to exploit the natural tendency to be overly skeptical of change and overly accepting of the status quo. Yes, society is refractory when it comes to change, but it is not infinitely refractory. Without the calculated deceptions for companies profiting from the status quo, society would adapt to new information more quickly.
You know, I still grind my teeth when people use "broadband" to mean "high bandwidth". But that's the way with words that are new to people; they inflate them with hot air until they're just a pretentious way of saying something simple.
That's the optimistic view.
We're entering the Age of Bullshit.
Yeah. I bought a chemistry set for my kids, but going through the instructions I realize that by removing anything that could be dangerous from the set what they had left was just boring.
Well, it might not be the stuff that blew up they're worried about. I'm guessing he probably didn't confine himself to one explosive, or even explosives per se, so he probably had quite a collection of interesting reagents lying around.
As a pharmacy student he'd be familiar with PETN, which has similar medical applications to nitroglycerin. I'm not sure though why it would require abandoning the building and most of its contents.
Depends on what kinds of explosives he was playing with. If he was making mercury fulminate, yeah, you could well turn your whole building into a superfund site.
However if that were case, they wouldn't be able to just burn the building down. So I'm guessing he was messing some kind of unstable organic compound. The kinds of monitoring equipment they put out (there was a press release so people wouldn't be alarmed by the strange bits of equipment lying around) indicates they were looking for vocs.
You don't really understand the chem geek's mindset.
When I was in engineering school I knew a guy who got suspended when his roommate turned him in for making explosives. He also made drugs -- not to use or to sell, but just for the thrill of making things he was forbidden to have.
Part of the young hacker's mindset is "It's OK if I do this thing that is against the rules because I'm smarter than the people for whom the rule was made." Come to think of it, that's a pretty commonplace attitude among young people for a lot of dangerous things.
Oh, I'm sure vim is a better editor than emacs, in the exact same sense that a claw hammer is a better tool than a sledgehammer.
I guess that's settled.
Well, sure if you *know* that's going to happen. That's the trick to planning anything, isn't it? Knowing what's going to happen in the future.
No problem, as long as I get to choose the precision with which I specify the location.
-- Mr. Engineer
p.s. -- "the Earth"
Well, because the road was a major artery and shutting it down for weeks would cause huge disruptions -- much less shutting it down for months.