Some of us have spent most of our lives in school, and when we went out in the workforce, all we could find after 6 months of hardcore job seeking was a 6.75$ an hour job part time at Burger King.
I don't like that you first have to set up the expression, then get the match, then retrieve the match.
Don't get me wrong, when I write Java code and need to do things with strings I use regexes. In fact, I do not need to use any perl-like external libraries. Newer versions of Java support regular expressions as do Microsoft products.
All of the OO type languages, including Python, seem to treat regexes the same way with a regex expression that needs to be compiled seperately from the matching and the matches end up in a seperate place that needs to be accessed...yadda yadda. It is not torture but there are a couple of extra steps that do not make things more readble. If you see a regex in any of the languages, you know what is going to happen. Outside of Perl, there is just a bunch of extra code before and after the actual regex.
It is great that these things are available, but like I orginally said, Perl has some weird operators but all the things you do in Perl you can do in other languages, it just takes more syntax to get there. To use regexes in Java, you have to read through the library documentation and learn how to use the methods and understand the syntax. You have to do the same thing with Perl. Just becuase =~ looks stranger than = doesn't mean you went through less work learning it.
It is like there was no such thing as multiplication x. And someone figured out that if you add 2+2+2 3 times it gave you 6 . For whatever reason, they end up doing this a lot. They then wrote a function addManyTimes() and used that everywhere.
Would they be crazy to come up with an operator x and use that instead?
There are many computery things that are just as common as multiplication. When dealing with text files, the regex operations are actually more common. Perl just uses operators for very common computery things.
I had to learn a lot of operators in Comp Sci like AND, XOR in logic UNION, INTERSECTION in set theory PROJECTION, SELECTION, BOWTIE in relational agebra. Go look up a LaTex reference page to see all the crazy operators out there. When you have to do something over and over again operators are not a bad thing. Larry Wall et al. are just recognizing this and making them available in the language. You don't even have to use them. They are making most of the fuctions available as function calls also.
If you want a language that is readable and easily understandable, try reading COBOL code. It is very readable. Much more readable than Java. Try writing it sometime. You'll go nuts. You can take readability too far.
My Perl code had $big_long_descriptive_variale_names and #lots of comments
Other Perl coders laugh at me, but my code is readable. It does not have to look like line noise. The operators are easy for me to read and write and once people learn them, the code is easy to understand.
That is all one line in perl using the =~ operarator something like:
if $_=~/MYREGEX/{//do somthing }
You can use a named variable instead of the $_ so it is easier to read. If you have to do this sort of thing a lot it is much easier to read and follow in Perl.
Augustine was alive and wrote during the final decline of Rome. I am not saying he delayed the exit from the Dark Ages, I am saying he encouraged their arrival.
I AM a Catholic and I AM of Irish descent and I HAVE read "How the Irish Saved Civilization". I am not saying the Church is bad. In the centuries after Augustine and before Charlemagne the Irish actually managed to create some advances over the status quo but most of what was done was preservation not creation.
My major point was that many of the greatest achievements of Rome were political and organizational. Augustine said these things weren't important and weren't a concern of thoughtful men, in fact the City of Man was a futile and corrupt pursuit. I hear the same things echoed in the cries of Environmentalists. Man and his works are corrupt. Civilization is corrupt. The only difference is that instead of saying we should turn to God they say we should turn to Mother Nature and repent of our evil ways.
I think the people who talk like that are on the same kind of power trip. They are the ones "in the know". They are the ones who know what is important while everyone else who comes up with any ideas and tries to do something positive is just contributing to the problem as defined by them. All they can say is don't do this and stop doing that. They never actually come up with a way to feed people, transport goods or cure diseases. They just say we are doomed,doomed doomed.
That may be one interpretation but another way that "City of God" influenced people was to tell them that material things and spiritual things were seperate. Spiritual things were more important. We are better off taking care of our souls than the material things of the world.
I would agree that spiritual things are more important in the long run but material things like medicine, sanitation, and defense are important too. Augustine's influence, from my point of view, did as much to cause the decline of civilization as the Goths and Vandals.
Along the same lines, yes it is good to lower C02 emmissions and reduce the number of cows farting into the wind, but that does not mean we need to stop looking for ways to improve how we currently feed ourselves and produce energy. Even little efficiencies are helpful and are not to be criticized for "just extending the time we are dependent on fossil fuels" as some people say.
Rome had problems, that doesn't mean that thinking men should have all run off to monastaries and everyone else to become serfs on feudal estates. They should have stayed and thought up better solutions and fought respectively.
I feel the Global warming is important and the paralells I am drawing between the fall of Western civilization and this future and current crisis is not accidental. If the worst comes to pass there will be huge shifts in population and economic status. I do not think that this should mean we should all throw up our hands and give up now. I think people like those that came up with the propane idea should be encouraged and applauded.
Well, this was in an academic setting with generic pascal. I did not know enough then and remember less now, but two things would have been wrong with inc(a), at least according to me teachers at that time ( over 10 years ago).
It is not as clear unless you are familiar with inc() what inc() does. a: = a+1; tells you exacly what is going on.
This lack of clarity arguement is the same that people use against Perl. Of course if you can't understand what inc() is doing, maybe you should not be programming. Similiar things arre said about obscure Perlisms..; if you can't understand them you shouldn't call yourself a programmer.
The other arguement is that if inc() is a call to a function then you have the overhead that involves. Of course, that is only if inc() is not part of the core language. I am not sure if it is.
If it is, then the difference between inc() and a++ is just syntax. In effect, Pascal has the same operator. Why not give Pascal all the operators of Perl then?
Like I was saying, you end up inventing the stuff that is already in Perl (if you are clever). If it is not part of the language spec then you just have to re-invent it at some other time or do it in a round about way. I think it is good to learn what Perl is trying to do even if you do not use it. It may help when programming in other languages.
(e.g. I learned how useful the shift operators are from Perl and sometimes use it in other languages).
Both your models are overly simplistic and overly pessimistic.
They are simplistic in thinking that a complex system with feedback loops (population, food supply, energy demands, energy supply) can be modeled with simple math functions.
They are overly pessimistic in thinking that just because there will be eventual difficulties humanity is doomed and there is nothing we can do, so we should stop trying.
Malthus believed that people were sex machines and as long as you fed people they would reproduce without limit until a population crash came about. The fact is that a rich gluttonous society like those in the West creates low birth rates. Most of Europe, Japan and a lot of the US have negative birth rates. The richer a society is the fewer kids they have.
Your tone, even if you did not intend it, gave the impression that the people who try to squeeze efficiencies out of current systems are doomed to failure and shouldn't bother trying. Yes, fossil fuels cannot last indefinitely and we should stop using them ASAP. But this same system can be used with any steam turbine system including Solar tower systems, biogas systems, and even fusion if it was ever made practical.
Maybe this system will lower the cost of energy produced by the method of focusing sunlight via mirrors on solar towers to produce steam. If this propane method could make the other system more efficient it will lower the price point where solar systems will be cheaper than current oil/natural gas plants (which are rising daily). Once it is cheaper to produce a watt by solar than by oil, the free market will start chipping away at fossil fuel methods.
You and Malthus sound defeatist and pessimistic. Innovation in any form should be applauded and encouraged.What I hear from some factions of the greens and environmentalists (not necessarily from you, but others that share your views on power plants) is a general attitude along the lines of, modern society/technology is evil, mankind is evil,the world is going to hell in a handbasket so there is no use doing anything about it. The only active thing they say is stop "sinning" by using technology and go back to eating roots and berries.
This sort of attitude was what led to the Dark Ages. St. Augustine wrote his "City of God" after Rome was sacked. He said the cities of men were corrupt and worthless and we should turn our back on them and think about the "City of God". If he instead wrote a book examining the social structure and economics of the Roman Empire and proposed innovative new ways to produce goods, generate tax revenue and supply an effective army, Europe would have avoided 1000 years of poverty and death.
If you were alive then you would have been standing right next to Augustus pointing out that the Gross Domestic Product of the Empire had been declining for many generations while the borders were expanding thus the Empire was doomed so it is right that people give up.
These constructs exist (or can exist with some work) in all languages even if there are no symbols for them.
I originally learned programming (formally) with Pascal. We were taught to increment a loop variable with a:=a+1;
When I learned C I thought the post increment operator was stupid and a waste, invented just so lazy programmers could save typing a few characters (a++ instead of the above). But anyone who uses pre and post increment operators knows it enables you to do some things in a nice compact way. You can do the same thing with Pascal but it takes more code and sometimes more complicated code.
I had similiar feelings about short-circuit operators and I tend not to use them. My code is longer because of that.
Have you ever tried using regular expressions in Java or Visual Basic? The Perl operators and syntax make using regexes and matching 1000 times simpler and easier to understand in Perl than those other languages if you ask me.
I think if you learned Perl and understood all the freaky operators you would actually learn techniques and distinctions that would probably help you in using other languages once you tanslated the ideas into their syntax. (Foreach in Perl is similiar to iterators in C++, at least I use them that way)
That being said I have been screwed over by the distinction betweeen the string and numeric comparison operators before.
With 31 moons/natural satellites thus far discovered orbiting Saturn, there should be a lot to keep us occupied. Anyone else excited...
Excited? Pictures of Phoebe? 31 moons?
When do they get pictures of Rachel? That would be some moon! I like that one better than Phoebe, at least to look at, but Phoebe is more entertaining to listen to. You can skip Ross, Joey and Chandler but take a few of Monica mooning while you're at it. That will get me excited:).
Anyone a Spiderman fan? He used to have Spidey Tracers (I think Batman had something similiar) that he used to throw at a retreating enemey so he could track them later. Sometimes he used to web them in place.
If this sticks to the target (my impression is that it does) you could shoot them at departing cars and such and track them from a distance.
Covering square miles with cheap reliable high-efficiency solar panels would (maybe) get us close, but we don't even have that. From 1 square meter you can maybe boil a glass of water, but you can't heat your house in winter, nor make cars or computers.
Hey, this sentence just hit me with an idea. Replace all the roads in the US with photovoltaic panels!
But, you might say..you can't drive on photovotaic panels! That's OK. To pay for this, everytime someone drives over one and breaks it, they have to pay double the cost of replacing it. That way you replace the broken one and pay to put a new one somewhere else. If all the roads had to be photovoltaic by law, drivers would have no choice.
An added advantage is that people would buy lighter cars in order not to break the road. Lighter cars==more fuel efficient.
To compensate people for the addded cost, you could provide free electricity to cars from the solar panels. You can have special cars that could tap into the power line that collects and transmits the electricity from the panels.
People who drive gas guzzlers would not get the benefit of the free electricty.
This is all a joke of course but do you know how much blacktop we have in the USA? Enough to change the climate around large cities like Atlanta. If someone could come up with a cheap paver that collected solar power and all parking lots used them we could be a long way toward getting rid of oil.
Did I list the existence of God as a question that can be answered by Science? No.
I listed questions like what causes people to need religions, which is a question about human behaviour and humanity. These are questions Science can answer. Having another intelligent species with a non-human culture would be a perfect scientific case study and their views on religion would also be helpful in understanding our views on religion (both pro and con)
If you use Science, or Religion as an excuse not to think then you are definitely not a Scienctist. Many people who dismiss religion say they are being modern and scientific when they are just being lazy and refusing to think. The doctor giving the interview is an example of a real scientist who graduated MIT,has a PhD and is a Jesuit. He probably has more raw intelligence than you and I put together. He can do effective science and have faith in God.
By the way I know the answer to one of your questions "How can you be a better person?": Don't call people idiots:)
It could be entirely possible that they wipe humanity out, and then, while digging through the rubble find a copy of the Bible, all get converted and we all end up in Heaven together after Judgement Day.
There is nothing in Christianity that says all Christians and their political institutions will stay intact until the end of the Universe, even if many governments past present and future say they are the instrument of God. Religion does not need US specifically.
Jesus said: "As long as 2 or 3 of you are gathered together in my name, I am there also". He did not specify species, only that they believe in him (sorry Him):)
The Vatican Astronomer in question has a Bachelor's and Master's from MIT and a Doctorate from the University of Arizona. He's definitely no dummy. Maybe Slashdot could interview him.
he studies meteorites. I wonder what research notes look like:
Observed high proportion of Carbon to Iron in meteor type X. Question: Why is this so? Answer: God made it that way.
And this is in the 'science' section. And it's nothing but a bunch of speculation about how to convert aliens to christianity. My head is about to explode.
This kind of attitude annoys me more than Fundamentalist (Christians,Muslims, fill in religion here). Science is NOT a religion itself. Science is a systematic way to satisfy curiosity about the world. There is a HUGE amount of raw material for Science in this subject:
Why do humans believe in religions? If aliens believe in a religion how does it differ from human religion? How is it the same? Does the makeup of the human mind/human developement/ human evolution/culture/ history/language explain human beliefs?
Do the differences in these things between aliens and humans change the way their views on religion/metaphysics have developed?
Anyone who thinks about the metaphysical/philisophical questions usually covered by religion and dismisses them saying SCIENCE! is just as closed minded and ignorant as fundimentalists who look at quasars and say BIBLE!
Science is a means of asking better and better questions about the world around us, including things we do not have the answers for. There are lots of good questions in this subject that could let us learn a lot about any other intelligences we may encouter and about ourselves once we have a basis for comparison.
I don't use eBay much. One or two times I used it and got less than expected results. A better ratings system might bring more repeat business to eBay.
The thought occurs that maybe a third party ratings service could be created, or maybe a Good-Housekeeping Seal of approval type deal.
The rater/seal giver would do a few things:
* Guarantee the identity of the seller and that the seller is doing business as one entity, not 50 different sellers which drop identities when too much bad feedback comes in.
* Interview previous customers to see why they gave good feedback/bad feedback. Tell details about the transaction such as slow shipment or deceptive product descriptions.
Of course this business could be corrupted ( as some say eBay is) to only put forth good feedback and encourage sales. To combat this, different levels of service/ seals could be offered: Gold, Silver, Bronze etc.
The higher level Gold Seals would come with a guarantee to resolve any difficulties. Since this would cost the guarantor/Seal Giver money they would only give it to risks that looked good, meaning actually performed well (or paid a huge amount of money to the seal giver, but why would the business bother?) The Seal would be renewed on a periodic basis forcing the sellers to maintain good behaviour.
Ebay itself could provide this service, but it would be more trustworthy if a third party did this.
The seller could put a little clickable graphic/link in their ads that brought them to a web site explaining the whole system.
The Seals could use PKI signing and authentication.
Of course, eBay or someone else may already be doing this. Like I said I don't use eBay alot.
Your post was very enlightening. I had a very vague idea of the information you presented but your description has made my understanding clearer.
Now, if you were Microsoft and you had an interest in tracking malicious code, would you create something like the virus writer's polymorphic engine that produced different code from machine to machine?
The differences could act like a watermark or fingerprint to make the source traceable without impacting performance. If they had something like Intel's planned (but discarded) serial number on all CPU's they could incorporate that. Even though they do not have that, there are other possible numbers that could combine to create a unique id.
Visual C++ serial number, MAC address, Windows OS Serial Number etc. This could be encoded into an exe, not as an explicit value but as a pattern of differences. You listed various differeces produced by various compilers but what if a single compiler would produce a unique pattern of variations in compiled code depending on what computer it found itself on. Such a compiler could be used to, at the very least, confirm the source of the code once the perpetrator who had produced it had been caught.
As far as turning snitch, I could not. I was raised in NYC and have an Irish background. Neither culture likes stoolies or informants:)
But if I was a virus writer I would not talk either. From this point on most virus writers should keep a low profile. That in itself will probably impact both their motivation for writing code (can't brag) and their ability to improve their code (no direct sharing of code and techniques).
The article mentions that Microsoft used some technical means to confirm the informants' information but the informants did not use technical means to identify the guy. This leads to some questions:
Does Microsoft somehow bug your code if you use MS products to produce it? If I remember correctly some of the Word macro viruses had an ID number somewhere inside them that let MS identify the copy of Word that originally produced the virus.
Is such a serial number/product ID what MS used to confirm the informant's information? It would not necessarily need to be a number. Deliberate variations in the code produced by a compiler from one machine to the next could be used as a fingerprint.
Barring that, was there some other technical means that could have been used to locate the author?
If I wanted to be a Anti-Virus Bounty hunter is my best bet learning to decompile code or to hang around on IRC chat channels and either encourage other users to write viruses so I can turn them in later, or make friends with real virus writers so I can turn them in?
Maybe a piece of reference code can be made available on a website and people can compile it on a range of machines and MS compilers. The resulting code can be compared and to see if the machine/compiler pair can be identified from the executable. If two machines with the same OS and developement tools create code with slight differences I would begin to worry if I were a virus writer.
Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?
If the cost of the hardware came down too much, you might notice that you are paying a huge chunk of the price to Microsoft. Keep the cost of the hardware high and Microsoft's cut gets lost in the static.
I find it very hard to believe that USA or any other country is losing something important if those new innovations and patents are not made there.
Actually they do lose. That is why all these companies fight over intelectual property and why the Patent Office lets idiots patent obvious things. If the US holds all the patents on a process, a company in another country(that respects IP rights) can be made to pay fees to the patent holder to license the technology. Even better (for the US) is that the foreign company can be refused the right to use the process. This can be used for leverage to negotiate for things beneficial to the US such as access to foreign IP, changes in foreign company policy, trade policy, and at the very least forcing the company to open an office here in the US to handle legal problems raised by IP ownership.
If all the IP is invented elsewhere, the other countries get to use these tactics against the US. If the balance is 50/50 then they cancel out. For the US to dominate it needs a major percentage of the intellectual property available. When the distribution of IP becomes more equitable the US will lose its edge in deals and negotiations. The US standard of living will not grow as fast as it used to and it may decline (at the very least it will decline relative to the rest of the world).
I agree with everything the parent says but at the same time:
Re: Google vs. Microsoft Part of a stock's worth/price is growth potential. Younger companies are usually riskier but usually have more room to grow. A given dollar amount of a young company's stock has more potential growth than a mature stock like MS. MS might give you steady X% growth over the 5 year while a young company might deliver 10X% growth in the same period. Of course the younger company may go belly up. That is the risk part of the price. Higher risk usually=higher returns. If you want high rates of growth you need to manage the risk that comes with it.
In short Google, being younger than MS has more room to grow than MS, so price per share could be potentially higher.
Re: business model
Google seems to have figured out how to manage a large network cheaply and provide a service to the public that the public wants. They are trying to extend this expertise to e-Mail. An equivalent network of MS machines would be much harder to manage. Google may, in the future provide more such services or provide raw computing power as a utility to other businesses. Many companies talk about providing large amount of computing power on demand in the future, Google does it now. Applying this ability to new areas and services may be an area of future growth.
Growth=rise in value of stock (and value is what counts, not a bubble in price).
The hype will make Google's price jump in the short term. After things calm down, Google might be a good place for long term investment. Besides, you can't touch a hot IPO on opening day unless you have connections (unless the SEC has cleaned up a lot of the abuses that occured in the 90's)
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us have spent most of our lives in school, and when we went out in the workforce, all we could find after 6 months of hardcore job seeking was a 6.75$ an hour job part time at Burger King.
Haha you suck
That is jusr so wrong...but I laughed anyway.
I don't like that you first have to set up the expression, then get the match, then retrieve the match.
Don't get me wrong, when I write Java code and need to do things with strings I use regexes. In fact, I do not need to use any perl-like external libraries. Newer versions of Java support regular expressions as do Microsoft products.
All of the OO type languages, including Python, seem to treat regexes the same way with a regex expression that needs to be compiled seperately from the matching and the matches end up in a seperate place that needs to be accessed...yadda yadda. It is not torture but there are a couple of extra steps that do not make things more readble. If you see a regex in any of the languages, you know what is going to happen. Outside of Perl, there is just a bunch of extra code before and after the actual regex.
It is great that these things are available, but like I orginally said, Perl has some weird operators but all the things you do in Perl you can do in other languages, it just takes more syntax to get there. To use regexes in Java, you have to read through the library documentation and learn how to use the methods and understand the syntax. You have to do the same thing with Perl. Just becuase =~ looks stranger than = doesn't mean you went through less work learning it.
It is like there was no such thing as multiplication x. And someone figured out that if you add 2+2+2 3 times it gave you 6 . For whatever reason, they end up doing this a lot. They then wrote a function addManyTimes() and used that everywhere.
Would they be crazy to come up with an operator x and use that instead?
There are many computery things that are just as common as multiplication. When dealing with text files, the regex operations are actually more common. Perl just uses operators for very common computery things.
I had to learn a lot of operators in Comp Sci like AND, XOR in logic UNION, INTERSECTION in set theory PROJECTION, SELECTION, BOWTIE in relational agebra. Go look up a LaTex reference page to see all the crazy operators out there. When you have to do something over and over again operators are not a bad thing. Larry Wall et al. are just recognizing this and making them available in the language. You don't even have to use them. They are making most of the fuctions available as function calls also.
If you want a language that is readable and easily understandable, try reading COBOL code. It is very readable. Much more readable than Java. Try writing it sometime. You'll go nuts. You can take readability too far.
My Perl code had $big_long_descriptive_variale_names and #lots of comments
Other Perl coders laugh at me, but my code is readable. It does not have to look like line noise. The operators are easy for me to read and write and once people learn them, the code is easy to understand.
That is all one line in perl using the =~ operarator
//do somthing
something like:
if $_=~/MYREGEX/{
}
You can use a named variable instead of the $_ so it is easier to read. If you have to do this sort of thing a lot it is much easier to read and follow in Perl.
Augustine was alive and wrote during the final decline of Rome. I am not saying he delayed the exit from the Dark Ages, I am saying he encouraged their arrival.
I AM a Catholic and I AM of Irish descent and I HAVE read "How the Irish Saved Civilization". I am not saying the Church is bad. In the centuries after Augustine and before Charlemagne the Irish actually managed to create some advances over the status quo but most of what was done was preservation not creation.
My major point was that many of the greatest achievements of Rome were political and organizational. Augustine said these things weren't important and weren't a concern of thoughtful men, in fact the City of Man was a futile and corrupt pursuit. I hear the same things echoed in the cries of Environmentalists. Man and his works are corrupt. Civilization is corrupt. The only difference is that instead of saying we should turn to God they say we should turn to Mother Nature and repent of our evil ways.
I think the people who talk like that are on the same kind of power trip. They are the ones "in the know". They are the ones who know what is important while everyone else who comes up with any ideas and tries to do something positive is just contributing to the problem as defined by them. All they can say is don't do this and stop doing that. They never actually come up with a way to feed people, transport goods or cure diseases. They just say we are doomed,doomed doomed.
Well that's all I have to say about that.
Ta Ta
See, I knew you and Augustine would get along :)
That may be one interpretation but another way that "City of God" influenced people was to tell them that material things and spiritual things were seperate. Spiritual things were more important. We are better off taking care of our souls than the material things of the world.
I would agree that spiritual things are more important in the long run but material things like medicine, sanitation, and defense are important too. Augustine's influence, from my point of view, did as much to cause the decline of civilization as the Goths and Vandals.
Along the same lines, yes it is good to lower C02 emmissions and reduce the number of cows farting into the wind, but that does not mean we need to stop looking for ways to improve how we currently feed ourselves and produce energy. Even little efficiencies are helpful and are not to be criticized for "just extending the time we are dependent on fossil fuels" as some people say.
Rome had problems, that doesn't mean that thinking men should have all run off to monastaries and everyone else to become serfs on feudal estates. They should have stayed and thought up better solutions and fought respectively.
I feel the Global warming is important and the paralells I am drawing between the fall of Western civilization and this future and current crisis is not accidental. If the worst comes to pass there will be huge shifts in population and economic status. I do not think that this should mean we should all throw up our hands and give up now. I think people like those that came up with the propane idea should be encouraged and applauded.
Well, this was in an academic setting with generic pascal. I did not know enough then and remember less now, but two things would have been wrong with inc(a), at least according to me teachers at that time ( over 10 years ago).
It is not as clear unless you are familiar with inc() what inc() does. a: = a+1; tells you exacly what is going on.
This lack of clarity arguement is the same that people use against Perl. Of course if you can't understand what inc() is doing, maybe you should not be programming. Similiar things arre said about obscure Perlisms..; if you can't understand them you shouldn't call yourself a programmer.
The other arguement is that if inc() is a call to a function then you have the overhead that involves. Of course, that is only if inc() is not part of the core language. I am not sure if it is.
If it is, then the difference between inc() and a++ is just syntax. In effect, Pascal has the same operator. Why not give Pascal all the operators of Perl then?
Like I was saying, you end up inventing the stuff that is already in Perl (if you are clever). If it is not part of the language spec then you just have to re-invent it at some other time or do it in a round about way. I think it is good to learn what Perl is trying to do even if you do not use it. It may help when programming in other languages.
(e.g. I learned how useful the shift operators are from Perl and sometimes use it in other languages).
Both you and Malthus made two mistakes:
Both your models are overly simplistic and overly pessimistic.
They are simplistic in thinking that a complex system with feedback loops (population, food supply, energy demands, energy supply) can be modeled with simple math functions.
They are overly pessimistic in thinking that just because there will be eventual difficulties humanity is doomed and there is nothing we can do, so we should stop trying.
Malthus believed that people were sex machines and as long as you fed people they would reproduce without limit until a population crash came about.
The fact is that a rich gluttonous society like those in the West creates low birth rates. Most of Europe, Japan and a lot of the US have negative birth rates. The richer a society is the fewer kids they have.
Your tone, even if you did not intend it, gave the impression that the people who try to squeeze efficiencies out of current systems are doomed to failure and shouldn't bother trying. Yes, fossil fuels cannot last indefinitely and we should stop using them ASAP. But this same system can be used with any steam turbine system including Solar tower systems, biogas systems, and even fusion if it was ever made practical.
Maybe this system will lower the cost of energy produced by the method of focusing sunlight via mirrors on solar towers to produce steam. If this propane method could make the other system more efficient it will lower the price point where solar systems will be cheaper than current oil/natural gas plants (which are rising daily). Once it is cheaper to produce a watt by solar than by oil, the free market will start chipping away at fossil fuel methods.
You and Malthus sound defeatist and pessimistic. Innovation in any form should be applauded and encouraged.What I hear from some factions of the greens and environmentalists (not necessarily from you, but others that share your views on power plants) is a general attitude along the lines of, modern society/technology is evil, mankind is evil,the world is going to hell in a handbasket so there is no use doing anything about it. The only active thing they say is stop "sinning" by using technology and go back to eating roots and berries.
This sort of attitude was what led to the Dark Ages. St. Augustine wrote his "City of God" after Rome was sacked. He said the cities of men were corrupt and worthless and we should turn our back on them and think about the "City of God". If he instead wrote a book examining the social structure and economics of the Roman Empire and proposed innovative new ways to produce goods, generate tax revenue and supply an effective army, Europe would have avoided 1000 years of poverty and death.
If you were alive then you would have been standing right next to Augustus pointing out that the Gross Domestic Product of the Empire had been declining for many generations while the borders were expanding thus the Empire was doomed so it is right that people give up.
These constructs exist (or can exist with some work) in all languages even if there are no symbols for them.
I originally learned programming (formally) with Pascal. We were taught to increment a loop variable with a:=a+1;
When I learned C I thought the post increment operator was stupid and a waste, invented just so lazy programmers could save typing a few characters (a++ instead of the above). But anyone who uses pre and post increment operators knows it enables you to do some things in a nice compact way. You can do the same thing with Pascal but it takes more code and sometimes more complicated code.
I had similiar feelings about short-circuit operators and I tend not to use them. My code is longer because of that.
Have you ever tried using regular expressions in Java or Visual Basic? The Perl operators and syntax make using regexes and matching 1000 times simpler and easier to understand in Perl than those other languages if you ask me.
I think if you learned Perl and understood all the freaky operators you would actually learn techniques and distinctions that would probably help you in using other languages once you tanslated the ideas into their syntax. (Foreach in Perl is similiar to iterators in C++, at least I use them that way)
That being said I have been screwed over by the distinction betweeen the string and numeric comparison operators before.
With 31 moons/natural satellites thus far discovered orbiting Saturn, there should be a lot to keep us occupied. Anyone else excited...
:).
Excited? Pictures of Phoebe? 31 moons?
When do they get pictures of Rachel? That would be some moon! I like that one better than Phoebe, at least to look at, but Phoebe is more entertaining to listen to. You can skip Ross, Joey and Chandler but take a few of Monica mooning while you're at it. That will get me excited
Thus in the long run a logarithmic decrease cannot overcome an exponential increase.
Michael.
Hey Mike, you miss-spelt your name. It is supposed to read M.A.L.T.H.U.S.
Anyone a Spiderman fan? He used to have Spidey Tracers (I think Batman had something similiar) that he used to throw at a retreating enemey so he could track them later. Sometimes he used to web them in place.
If this sticks to the target (my impression is that it does) you could shoot them at departing cars and such and track them from a distance.
Covering square miles with cheap reliable high-efficiency solar panels would (maybe) get us close, but we don't even have that. From 1 square meter you can maybe boil a glass of water, but you can't heat your house in winter, nor make cars or computers.
Hey, this sentence just hit me with an idea. Replace all the roads in the US with photovoltaic panels!
But, you might say..you can't drive on photovotaic panels! That's OK. To pay for this, everytime someone drives over one and breaks it, they have to pay double the cost of replacing it. That way you replace the broken one and pay to put a new one somewhere else. If all the roads had to be photovoltaic by law, drivers would have no choice.
An added advantage is that people would buy lighter cars in order not to break the road. Lighter cars==more fuel efficient.
To compensate people for the addded cost, you could provide free electricity to cars from the solar panels. You can have special cars that could tap into the power line that collects and transmits the electricity from the panels.
People who drive gas guzzlers would not get the benefit of the free electricty.
This is all a joke of course but do you know how much blacktop we have in the USA? Enough to change the climate around large cities like Atlanta. If someone could come up with a cheap paver that collected solar power and all parking lots used them we could be a long way toward getting rid of oil.
4) Watch as a few people wake up and realize that the voting public is not completely stupid and full of sheep.
Not me! I'm full of sheep mmmmmmmm gotta love mutton!
Duh, what's a software patent.
Did I list the existence of God as a question that can be answered by Science?
:)
No.
I listed questions like what causes people to need religions, which is a question about human behaviour and humanity. These are questions Science can answer. Having another intelligent species with a non-human culture would be a perfect scientific case study and their views on religion would also be helpful in understanding our views on religion (both pro and con)
If you use Science, or Religion as an excuse not to think then you are definitely not a Scienctist. Many people who dismiss religion say they are being modern and scientific when they are just being lazy and refusing to think. The doctor giving the interview is an example of a real scientist who graduated MIT,has a PhD and is a Jesuit. He probably has more raw intelligence than you and I put together. He can do effective science and have faith in God.
By the way I know the answer to one of your questions "How can you be a better person?": Don't call people idiots
It could be entirely possible that they wipe humanity out, and then, while digging through the rubble find a copy of the Bible, all get converted and we all end up in Heaven together after Judgement Day.
:)
There is nothing in Christianity that says all Christians and their political institutions will stay intact until the end of the Universe, even if many governments past present and future say they are the instrument of God. Religion does not need US specifically.
Jesus said: "As long as 2 or 3 of you are gathered together in my name, I am there also". He did not specify species, only that they believe in him (sorry Him)
The Vatican Astronomer in question has a Bachelor's and Master's from MIT and a Doctorate from the University of Arizona. He's definitely no dummy. Maybe Slashdot could interview him.
he studies meteorites. I wonder what research notes look like:
Observed high proportion of Carbon to Iron in meteor type X.
Question: Why is this so?
Answer: God made it that way.
Next question...
And this is in the 'science' section.
And it's nothing but a bunch of speculation about how to convert aliens to christianity.
My head is about to explode.
This kind of attitude annoys me more than Fundamentalist (Christians,Muslims, fill in religion here). Science is NOT a religion itself. Science is a systematic way to satisfy curiosity about the world. There is a HUGE amount of raw material for Science in this subject:
Why do humans believe in religions?
If aliens believe in a religion how does it differ from human religion? How is it the same?
Does the makeup of the
human mind/human developement/
human evolution/culture/
history/language explain human beliefs?
Do the differences in these things between aliens and humans change the way their views on religion/metaphysics have developed?
Anyone who thinks about the metaphysical/philisophical questions usually covered by religion and dismisses them saying SCIENCE! is just as closed minded and ignorant as fundimentalists who look at quasars and say BIBLE!
Science is a means of asking better and better questions about the world around us, including things we do not have the answers for. There are lots of good questions in this subject that could let us learn a lot about any other intelligences we may encouter and about ourselves once we have a basis for comparison.
We can't communicate with dolphins because we have no common frames of reference of any sort.
How about this for subjects of conversation:
"Sushi is good."
"Tuna is Yummi."
"Those SeaWorld shows are annoying and degrading"
It is actually a module for Perl to let you write Perl in Latin:
Perl in Latin
I guess it was intended as a toy but it could be used as a model for other languages.
I don't use eBay much. One or two times I used it and got less than expected results. A better ratings system might bring more repeat business to eBay.
/bad feedback. Tell details about the transaction such as slow shipment or deceptive product descriptions.
The thought occurs that maybe a third party ratings service could be created, or maybe a Good-Housekeeping Seal of approval type deal.
The rater/seal giver would do a few things:
* Guarantee the identity of the seller and that the seller is doing business as one entity, not 50 different sellers which drop identities when too much bad feedback comes in.
* Interview previous customers to see why they gave good feedback
Of course this business could be corrupted ( as some say eBay is) to only put forth good feedback and encourage sales. To combat this, different levels of service/ seals could be offered: Gold, Silver, Bronze etc.
The higher level Gold Seals would come with a guarantee to resolve any difficulties. Since this would cost the guarantor/Seal Giver money they would only give it to risks that looked good, meaning actually performed well (or paid a huge amount of money to the seal giver, but why would the business bother?) The Seal would be renewed on a periodic basis forcing the sellers to maintain good behaviour.
Ebay itself could provide this service, but it would be more trustworthy if a third party did this.
The seller could put a little clickable graphic/link in their ads that brought them to a web site explaining the whole system.
The Seals could use PKI signing and authentication.
Of course, eBay or someone else may already be doing this. Like I said I don't use eBay alot.
Your post was very enlightening. I had a very vague idea of the information you presented but your description has made my understanding clearer.
:)
Now, if you were Microsoft and you had an interest in tracking malicious code, would you create something like the virus writer's polymorphic engine that produced different code from machine to machine?
The differences could act like a watermark or fingerprint to make the source traceable without impacting performance. If they had something like Intel's planned (but discarded) serial number on all CPU's they could incorporate that. Even though they do not have that, there are other possible numbers that could combine to create a unique id.
Visual C++ serial number, MAC address, Windows OS Serial Number etc. This could be encoded into an exe, not as an explicit value but as a pattern of differences. You listed various differeces produced by various compilers but what if a single compiler would produce a unique pattern of variations in compiled code depending on what computer it found itself on. Such a compiler could be used to, at the very least, confirm the source of the code once the perpetrator who had produced it had been caught.
As far as turning snitch, I could not. I was raised in NYC and have an Irish background. Neither culture likes stoolies or informants
But if I was a virus writer I would not talk either. From this point on most virus writers should keep a low profile. That in itself will probably impact both their motivation for writing code (can't brag) and their ability to improve their code (no direct sharing of code and techniques).
OK, I want some of that dough.
The article mentions that Microsoft used some technical means to confirm the informants' information but the informants did not use technical means to identify the guy. This leads to some questions:
Does Microsoft somehow bug your code if you use MS products to produce it? If I remember correctly some of the Word macro viruses had an ID number somewhere inside them that let MS identify the copy of Word that originally produced the virus.
Is such a serial number/product ID what MS used to confirm the informant's information?
It would not necessarily need to be a number. Deliberate variations in the code produced by a compiler from one machine to the next could be used as a fingerprint.
Barring that, was there some other technical means that could have been used to locate the author?
If I wanted to be a Anti-Virus Bounty hunter is my best bet learning to decompile code or to hang around on IRC chat channels and either encourage other users to write viruses so I can turn them in later, or make friends with real virus writers so I can turn them in?
Maybe a piece of reference code can be made available on a website and people can compile it on a range of machines and MS compilers. The resulting code can be compared and to see if the machine/compiler pair can be identified from the executable. If two machines with the same OS and developement tools create code with slight differences I would begin to worry if I were a virus writer.
Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?
If the cost of the hardware came down too much, you might notice that you are paying a huge chunk of the price to Microsoft. Keep the cost of the hardware high and Microsoft's cut gets lost in the static.
I find it very hard to believe that USA or any other country is losing something important if those new innovations and patents are not made there.
Actually they do lose. That is why all these companies fight over intelectual property and why the Patent Office lets idiots patent obvious things. If the US holds all the patents on a process, a company in another country(that respects IP rights) can be made to pay fees to the patent holder to license the technology. Even better (for the US) is that the foreign company can be refused the right to use the process. This can be used for leverage to negotiate for things beneficial to the US such as access to foreign IP, changes in foreign company policy, trade policy, and at the very least forcing the company to open an office here in the US to handle legal problems raised by IP ownership.
If all the IP is invented elsewhere, the other countries get to use these tactics against the US. If the balance is 50/50 then they cancel out. For the US to dominate it needs a major percentage of the intellectual property available. When the distribution of IP becomes more equitable the US will lose its edge in deals and negotiations. The US standard of living will not grow as fast as it used to and it may decline (at the very least it will decline relative to the rest of the world).
I agree with everything the parent says but at the same time:
Re: Google vs. Microsoft
Part of a stock's worth/price is growth potential. Younger companies are usually riskier but usually have more room to grow. A given dollar amount of a young company's stock has more potential growth than a mature stock like MS. MS might give you steady X% growth over the 5 year while a young company might deliver 10X% growth in the same period. Of course the younger company may go belly up. That is the risk part of the price. Higher risk usually=higher returns. If you want high rates of growth you need to manage the risk that comes with it.
In short Google, being younger than MS has more room to grow than MS, so price per share could be potentially higher.
Re: business model
Google seems to have figured out how to manage a large network cheaply and provide a service to the public that the public wants. They are trying to extend this expertise to e-Mail. An equivalent network of MS machines would be much harder to manage. Google may, in the future provide more such services or provide raw computing power as a utility to other businesses. Many companies talk about providing large amount of computing power on demand in the future, Google does it now. Applying this ability to new areas and services may be an area of future growth.
Growth=rise in value of stock (and value is what counts, not a bubble in price).
The hype will make Google's price jump in the short term. After things calm down, Google might be a good place for long term investment. Besides, you can't touch a hot IPO on opening day unless you have connections (unless the SEC has cleaned up a lot of the abuses that occured in the 90's)