You quoted almost my entire post except where I say
Yes, you must have the feedback and flexibility of input of a GUI to do this. However, for those millions of tasks that you do every day that don't require this flexibility, a gui is the wrong tool for the job. So your conclusion
they are both seperate tools and have their uses is just my conclusion rehashed with a defense of photoshop on top. Nicely done, you manage to be obnoxious for no reason whatsoever.
Finally, a proper editor isn't the CLI. Emacs and vim are proper editors. Notepad and Nano are for people who are too stupid to remember how to operate in Emacs or vim. (That is why nano puts the commands down in the bottom wasting space.)
Ctrl+click and drag is far faster and easier than anything that can be cooked up from the command line. False. Suppose you want to add a watermark to 50,000 image files. I can do it in less than a minute on the command line, how many weeks will it take you?
Perhaps you will say that you intend to do it with a macro or some freeware. That is fine, if you don't mind learning whatever macro language or searching around for some weird freeware program. That will shave down your effort to a few hours if you are lucky.
But what if we change the scenario to this: Add a watermark to every file uploaded to your ftp server before allowing it to be hosted on your web server? Good fucking luck with your macro language or finding freeware that does that.
Again, I can do this in less than a minute.
I grant you that some operations are more suited to a gui, such as photo manipulation. Yes, you must have the feedback and flexibility of input of a GUI to do this. However, for those millions of tasks that you do every day that don't require this flexibility, a gui is the wrong tool for the job.
Complaining about having to learn a CLI is false economy, just the same as the idiots who refuse to learn a real editor and instead use notepad or nano (pico). They are too lazy or stupid to spend a week learning something that will speed up everything else they do, and let them do things in a second they wouldn't even have considered otherwise.
Oh, and BTW: You're wrong. I'm technically inclined, and I hate the damned CLI. I'd much rather use something like Word/Excel macros or AppleScript (or Automator) to do batch processing on the rare occasions I need it because those technologies are actually easy to use. When I do need to use a GUI, I prefer DOS because DOS Batch files are a lot easier to write than Unix.sh files. And DOS can actually cope with spaces in filenames! *gasp*! I think this just about wraps up the discussion. You're 'technically inclined', and you hate command line. you prefer word macros. Dos batch files are a lot easier to write than unix.sh files. And DOS can cope with spaces in file names...
This is the classic case of 'talking out ones ass'. Word macros and dos batch files are easier *for you* because that is what you have been using. Therefore, you conclude without actually learning the other system at all, the system you randomly happened to learn is better. BTW, DOS batch files can only handle 8.3 filenames, no spaces OR lowercase letters are allowed. But to a 15 year old like you this probably seems like gibberish because you've never actually used DOS. You mean the cmd shell that comes with windows of course, which is similar but not the same.
My advice to you is to not talk shit all your life, and stop assuming you know better than everyone else just because you have written a word macro.
I thought you people lost these arguments in the late 80's. Really? You thought that the GUI won in the 80's? Which GUI was available then? And you think THAT was more powerful than CLI? You're an idiot.
Maybe that's a CLI for you, but for most people double-clicking on an icon, or even having something already done so you don't have to worry about it at all, is a lot easier. Really? You think the CLI is equivalent to double clicking on an icon? You realize that the CLI on a unix machine is an operating environment, right? It isn't just used to start GUI applications, most of the time spent on it is actually spent getting things done.
Let me put it this way, let's say you have a comma delimited file, file1, and you need to produce a file containing fields 2 and 3, sorted via field 2. How long does it take you to do this in Excel? a minute?
$ cut -f2,3 -d',' file1 | sort > newfile
3 seconds, no starting a program or using the mouse. Now, lets say I have 10,000 files and I need to do this to each of them. I guess you could whip up some kind of VBAscript to do this, it might take an hour, less if you use VBAscript all the time, (who would want to do that??).
Let's say the files have a csv extension.
$ for f in `ls -1 *.csv`; do echo Processing $f; cut -f2,3 -d',' $f | sort > processed/$f ; done
8 seconds for that one.
These are trivial examples, yes, but you would be shocked to learn how much processing is trivial once you start doing it in an environment that doesn't hold your and and change your diaper for you.
Using a CLI requires two things: the ability to read, and the ability to type (even if it's just hunt-and-peck typing). Actually it requires 3 things. Reading, typing, and a working knowledge of the syntax of the command line, precedence of commands, memorization of the 2 dozen or so commands you might use regularly, understanding of the help system to find commands you might need but rarely use, and so on.
Most people aren't smart enough to master this with out hours of formal training. So don't complain that most people don't use a CLI, most people don't use calculus either.
Had you taken two seconds to read the posts underneath, you would have seen the expanded discussion. Wrong again, jerk.
The posting you link to is talking about waste heat. Yes, the energy at the receiving end of electrical energy does convert that energy into waste heat or EM radiation. However, I was correcting your nonsense theory of how electricity is generated. You see, in your previous post, you said:
any escaped heat is wasted energy that could have been used for electricity. This means that in your head the heat is converted into electricity. This is false, and stupid. Heat cannot be converted to electricity. A temperature *difference* can be used to generate electricity. And to harness that difference you must release ALL of the heat generated. Therefore, rather than trying to prevent heat from escaping as in your nonsense, power plants have huge radiators to intentionally release as much heat as they can from their coolant.
So like I said, the opposite of what you say is reality, and what you say is nonsense.
First and foremost, any escaped heat is wasted energy that could have been used for electricity. So plants try to loose as little as possible. However, they do lose some, but nowhere near enough to have an impact on global conditions. Ok, you don't know what you're talking about even on a basic level. Every bit of energy released by any process eventually ends up as heat*, without exception. You happen to be correct that it won't effect global warming at it's current level of production, or for that matter greatly expanded production, but not because the plants avoid releasing it. But your reasoning is just above what you would find on school house rock, and just below what might be found in a 10th grade science textbook.
The crux of my point is that nuclear plants release ALL of the heat they produce, immediately. Electricity isn't produced by hoarding hot stuff, it is made by placing your generator so that it is in between the hot and the cold stuff. Every single process which generates electricity with a generator works by using a coolant which expands or contracts with temperature, and moving it around so that it gets hot, grows, and then gets cold and shrinks. The change in size forces the matter through a turbine or something like a turbine, which spins a magnet producing electricity in a coil (this is slightly simplified).
What did you think those big cooling towers were for? They are purely to cool down the water or sodium or whatever medium is being heated and cooled, so that it can be reinjected into the system and heated back up.
Holy Christ. I finally have an opportunity to yell at one of you people.
NO NO NO NO NO NO. At a 4 way stop you go in the order you arrive. If car A gets to the stop before car B, car A goes first. Period, fucking Period.
It doesn't matter which way you are turning or whether you are turning or any other thing in the world.
Please stop trying to kill me you stupid mother fucker.
I cannot count the number of times I've been turning left at a stop sign when the person across from me thinks that since they are going straight they have the right of way and they gun it and cut me off. It isn't a fucking green light, going straight doesn't give you the right of way.
What resistive heater is less than 100% efficient? Assuming you aren't shooting lasers into space your going to get neary 100% efficient heating with almost any electrical device. And even space lasers will be at least 98% efficient as space heaters.
So what does 100% efficient even mean in this context? That all the energy consumed by the system turns into heat? This is just the second law of thermodynamics.
Statements like this don't make any claim, it is just a long and roundabout way of pointing out what cannot possibly be avoided.
Using your CPU as a space heater is not a bad idea. It is 100% efficient.
Do you ever think you might not know everything? 100% Efficient doesn't mean anything in this context. If it means anything, then everything that exists is 100% efficient at producing heat, due to the second law of thermodynamics. However, you are not considering the fact that CPU's produce RF and other radiation which escapes from the system you are trying to heat, and thus to get that 100% efficency you would have to mean that it is 100% efficient at increasing the entropy of the universe.
Even worse, if 100% efficient is by definition the best you can do, how do you explain heat pumps? They move heat from one place to another, and thus are more than 100% efficient according to your criteria. Yes, they are moving heat, and that is different. I'm pointing this out so you know that it is a VERY bad idea to heat anything using electric resistance, because it is so inefficent per unit of heat.
(energy in 1 gallon of gasoline * 16 gallons * efficiency of most cars) / ('reasonable' voltage * 'reasonable' amperage) = 12 minutes.
That is to say:
You could fill your tank without being rediculous at all, although at much higher energy levels than you would have at your house. At your house you could safely draw:
if you had a special outlet installed in your garage. (this is about the same as a big AC unit) and so you could recharge each night.
Moving things around we get: (((220 volts) * 60 amperes) * (10.94 hours) * (.11 U.S. dollars)) / (1 000 * (watt * hour)) = 15.88488 U.S. dollars
So you could recharge this thing for about 15 dollars a night, assuming you completely discharge it. Since you can reasonably charge it yourself you can either buy electricity cheaply near a power plant or if you are the only one around with one of these cars you can just charge it yourself. Good deal, safe buy.
This assumes 100% efficiency, so scale it up by 1/efficiency to get a more accurate number. As long as efficiency is more than about 40% it is cheaper than gasoline. And of course it pollutes less (or at worse if you have coal it pollutes somewhere else, which is better for 99% of people, who don't live next to an old coal plant).
Finally, the complexity of an electric car is much much much less than a gasoline car. No exhaust, no belts, no cooling system (except for the electric ac), no transmission really, no power steering or brake fluids, no oil, etc etc.
A washing machine and an electrical generator are about equivilent in complexity to an electic car and a gas powered car respectively. With an electric car you can expect to repair it every few years for about 400 dollars a pop, just like a washing machine breaks every few years for about 60 dollars a pop ($5 if you repair it yourself, or about $30 for the electric car). Electrical generators are complicated and break down all the time, and are expensive to buy and maintain, just like gas cars.
Plus electric cars will be much lighter, as much as 40%. That directly leads to efficiency. Plus with no engine, instead of wasted space you get an extra trunk, or the car company can redesign the car drastically (assuming batteries/whatever are arranged along the floor of the car for optimal low center of gravity).
Finally, the only limit to the HP of an electric car is the size of the motor(s), and so you could have anywhere between 200 and 800 HP in a standard car.
But before you voice your disagreement, figure out exactly why he thinks his way will work, because odds are it will.
"Will work" isn't a binary value. Lots of things work, but also cause constant problems. A Yugo will work for transportation, excepting when it breaks down and doesn't. A 500,000 line perl script written by someone who doesn't know that there are such things as arrays or strings, who doesn't understand file locking, will work if you work enough kinks out. A radio which has a poorly designed antenna (perhaps made of nails in boards), where you can barely make out the announcer over the buzzing and hissing 'works'. But in these examples, 'work' == get job done, and usually you can do better than that. The 500,000 line perl script produces the desired output, but what if you have to make a change? No, you can't do that without repeating the entire work the kinks out process because of the numerous unaccounted for side effects. So it doesn't 'work' if you require anything above absolute basic 'get the job done' functionality (such as the ability to make changes, or to enjoy music in the case of the radio), and if you can point out anything that just requires that basic functionality I will be glad to point out where you are short sighted and stupid.
And then it caused impedance issues which you didn't even know existed!
But it worked as far as you know, right?
I mean, all those equations and stuff don't matter, it's just wires. If they connect then everything is fine. Did you ever wonder though, why does an EE degree take 4 years to get when you can just hammer some nails?
Re:The writer, I believe, is not religious
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Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Why did you post this? Why point out there religion?
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
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Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
C isn't simple, and in fact lisp is pretty simple.
Lisp isn't used because it wasn't standardized until the late 80's, it uses much more memory than C (though it is almost as fast as C++) and most programmers until recently have learned to program Unix and not Lisp machines. Also, MS doesn't have a lisp implementation so that means that if you don't go to a research university you won't see anything but MS (little podunk colleges are notorious for teaching 'how to program Microsoft'. Any college with a class in Visual Basic should have it's accreditation revoked.)
Finally C gives easy hooks into the OS, which isn't the same at all with Lisp, although you can do anything you can do with C it isn't Lispy to do so.
Finally, C is good enough. If you really want to wonder about languages, ask why Perl is used for anything. Perl sucks.
Keep making excuses though. This could turn into a fun game! How much can tepples rationalize in one thread...
I'm glad my kids play nintendo all day and never go outside, there's crack dealers out there and it's dangerous! I can't afford to move! Oh, it's basically cheaper to live everywhere but where I actually live? But I *bike* everywhere, so it is impossible to move away from the city.
Preview: My job is nearby, so it would be logically impossible to live anywhere but in the crack infested whoredome.
Why don't you just admit it isn't as bad as you made it out to be?
Please don't feel obligated to take this post personally if in your estimation it does not apply to you in reality. I have only your post to base my post on, and you invite reply by posting on a public forum.
Instead of justifying and rationalizing ('safer' neighborhoods have pedo's,etc) why not raise your children in an environment where it is not total shit? Is it too much to ask for you to sacrifice whatever small advantage you gain from living in Oakland so that your children can play ball and run around?
I understand that you live there for "some reason"TM, but you might want to consider moving the hell out. Of course, if you don't mind the crack dealers and prostitutes, maybe your kids will grow up used to them as well. After all, when venturing into a park, it is normal to have a paranoid fear of drug addicts, and before going down the slide most people instinctively know from childhood to check for used needles or sleeping crackheads (or crack head turds).
Of course you no doubt live in a wealthier neighborhood, which consists of larger and more expensive houses with crack dealers in front.
This is an attempt to attack what I said by attacking something that I didn't say.
But you're right. Planning would be better. An abortion is not a form of birth control, it is the option that is left when you have already made the mistake.
The GP was basically saying "It isn't fair, that woman have to get abortions!" Well, there it is an avoidable situation, no one is making you get pregnant (in most cases). Once you have put yourself in a situation it isn't fair to complain about your options. I support choice, but not because it is some kind of right. The questions are whether a fetus is a person (I find this to be a stretch) and whether abortion is very harmful (it doesn't seem to be). In this case it would be an overreach for the government to try to regulate it away. If the fetus were a person or if abortion caused other harm, then I would rethink my position.
In the same way no one is forcing men to father children. Once they have done so, complaining about how the state makes you pay for them is absurd.
Ohio already treats men like shit, especially fathers,...
I think you mean "men who have a child but are not married to the mother", since otherwise the state does not tend to get involved. However, I'm sure you can see the solution, although it has to be applied before the problem in this case. This is called 'planning'. One thing you should plan to do is not have sex with women and therefore producing children, unless you mean it. If the state then has to treat fathers in this situation poorly to exact a reasonable percentage of the outstanding (and legally mandated) child support, well then you'll excuse me if I don't cry for these fathers too much.
Now, as far as accusing men of sex crimes to get sole custody, a few widely publicized prison sentences for perjury would correct this situation quickly. And don't forget to charge the lawyers involved as well, since they are almost certainly prompting their clients to do this. In fact, just send a few lawyers to state pound-you-in-the-ass prison and most problems of this sort would go away overnight.
I'm not sure about this. There are Safari, IE, Firefox, and Opera, (and Konqueror). I don't know of any other major graphical browsers (I'm sure you aren't counting text based browsers!). Of the 4, 2 (3) pass the test. The two that don't pass are IE and Firefox, the crappiest of the browsers listed. Konqueror is a free browser, and it's engine, khtml, is also the basis for Safari. Opera is free to use but not open source. Opera is available on almost all OS's, Konqueror is available wherever KDE is available, Safari is available on OSX. So no matter what OS you are on you can get a decent browser. If you are on a decent OS (Linux, OSX, BSD) you can get a Good broser (safari or konqueror).
There is only one remaining excuse to run Windows for the apologists. And that excuse is that you are writing windows software. OSX is a good choice if you aren't poor, and Linux is a pretty good choice if you are poor. Of course, if you are stupid or adverse to learning you are probably unable to afford Apple products, and by hypothesis too mentally lazy to learn enough Unix to get around in a BSD/Linux environment. So have fun with your virii and lack of functionality.
It is just a dumb idea, that's all I'm saying. It would only be practical if sending a ship to jupiter and back, and maintaining all these space stations, etcetc, could be done for less energy than just taking the base components and producing them artificially. With regular nuclear power (nothing sci-fi) I assure you that you can MANUFACTURE methane for less money than this scheme of Pournelle's. Manufacture methane from it's base atomic constituents. Plus you could use CO2 from the atmosphere as one of your ingredients, thus taking excess carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it into plastics instead of releasing net carbon.
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You quoted almost my entire post except where I say Yes, you must have the feedback and flexibility of input of a GUI to do this. However, for those millions of tasks that you do every day that don't require this flexibility, a gui is the wrong tool for the job. So your conclusion they are both seperate tools and have their uses is just my conclusion rehashed with a defense of photoshop on top. Nicely done, you manage to be obnoxious for no reason whatsoever.
Finally, a proper editor isn't the CLI. Emacs and vim are proper editors. Notepad and Nano are for people who are too stupid to remember how to operate in Emacs or vim. (That is why nano puts the commands down in the bottom wasting space.)
I have a quick question. You quote God in your sig... Who did god say this too? I think it is something more like:
'God is dead' - Nietzsche
-silence-
Perhaps you will say that you intend to do it with a macro or some freeware. That is fine, if you don't mind learning whatever macro language or searching around for some weird freeware program. That will shave down your effort to a few hours if you are lucky.
But what if we change the scenario to this: Add a watermark to every file uploaded to your ftp server before allowing it to be hosted on your web server? Good fucking luck with your macro language or finding freeware that does that.
Again, I can do this in less than a minute.
I grant you that some operations are more suited to a gui, such as photo manipulation. Yes, you must have the feedback and flexibility of input of a GUI to do this. However, for those millions of tasks that you do every day that don't require this flexibility, a gui is the wrong tool for the job.
Complaining about having to learn a CLI is false economy, just the same as the idiots who refuse to learn a real editor and instead use notepad or nano (pico). They are too lazy or stupid to spend a week learning something that will speed up everything else they do, and let them do things in a second they wouldn't even have considered otherwise.
This is the classic case of 'talking out ones ass'. Word macros and dos batch files are easier *for you* because that is what you have been using. Therefore, you conclude without actually learning the other system at all, the system you randomly happened to learn is better. BTW, DOS batch files can only handle 8.3 filenames, no spaces OR lowercase letters are allowed. But to a 15 year old like you this probably seems like gibberish because you've never actually used DOS. You mean the cmd shell that comes with windows of course, which is similar but not the same.
My advice to you is to not talk shit all your life, and stop assuming you know better than everyone else just because you have written a word macro.
Let me put it this way, let's say you have a comma delimited file, file1, and you need to produce a file containing fields 2 and 3, sorted via field 2. How long does it take you to do this in Excel? a minute?
$ cut -f2,3 -d',' file1 | sort > newfile
3 seconds, no starting a program or using the mouse. Now, lets say I have 10,000 files and I need to do this to each of them. I guess you could whip up some kind of VBAscript to do this, it might take an hour, less if you use VBAscript all the time, (who would want to do that??).
Let's say the files have a csv extension.
$ for f in `ls -1 *.csv`; do echo Processing $f; cut -f2,3 -d',' $f | sort > processed/$f ; done
8 seconds for that one.
These are trivial examples, yes, but you would be shocked to learn how much processing is trivial once you start doing it in an environment that doesn't hold your and and change your diaper for you.
Most people aren't smart enough to master this with out hours of formal training. So don't complain that most people don't use a CLI, most people don't use calculus either.
You say 'we' like you had some part in it. You didn't, so stop bitching.
The posting you link to is talking about waste heat. Yes, the energy at the receiving end of electrical energy does convert that energy into waste heat or EM radiation. However, I was correcting your nonsense theory of how electricity is generated. You see, in your previous post, you said: any escaped heat is wasted energy that could have been used for electricity. This means that in your head the heat is converted into electricity. This is false, and stupid. Heat cannot be converted to electricity. A temperature *difference* can be used to generate electricity. And to harness that difference you must release ALL of the heat generated. Therefore, rather than trying to prevent heat from escaping as in your nonsense, power plants have huge radiators to intentionally release as much heat as they can from their coolant.
So like I said, the opposite of what you say is reality, and what you say is nonsense.
The crux of my point is that nuclear plants release ALL of the heat they produce, immediately. Electricity isn't produced by hoarding hot stuff, it is made by placing your generator so that it is in between the hot and the cold stuff. Every single process which generates electricity with a generator works by using a coolant which expands or contracts with temperature, and moving it around so that it gets hot, grows, and then gets cold and shrinks. The change in size forces the matter through a turbine or something like a turbine, which spins a magnet producing electricity in a coil (this is slightly simplified).
What did you think those big cooling towers were for? They are purely to cool down the water or sodium or whatever medium is being heated and cooled, so that it can be reinjected into the system and heated back up.
They evolved.
Holy Christ. I finally have an opportunity to yell at one of you people.
NO NO NO NO NO NO. At a 4 way stop you go in the order you arrive. If car A gets to the stop before car B, car A goes first. Period, fucking Period.
It doesn't matter which way you are turning or whether you are turning or any other thing in the world.
Please stop trying to kill me you stupid mother fucker.
I cannot count the number of times I've been turning left at a stop sign when the person across from me thinks that since they are going straight they have the right of way and they gun it and cut me off. It isn't a fucking green light, going straight doesn't give you the right of way.
Learn to drive!
Except here where we live... Reality.
There is more on earth than is accounted for in your stupid political theories.
What resistive heater is less than 100% efficient? Assuming you aren't shooting lasers into space your going to get neary 100% efficient heating with almost any electrical device. And even space lasers will be at least 98% efficient as space heaters.
So what does 100% efficient even mean in this context? That all the energy consumed by the system turns into heat? This is just the second law of thermodynamics.
Statements like this don't make any claim, it is just a long and roundabout way of pointing out what cannot possibly be avoided.
Do you ever think you might not know everything? 100% Efficient doesn't mean anything in this context. If it means anything, then everything that exists is 100% efficient at producing heat, due to the second law of thermodynamics. However, you are not considering the fact that CPU's produce RF and other radiation which escapes from the system you are trying to heat, and thus to get that 100% efficency you would have to mean that it is 100% efficient at increasing the entropy of the universe.
Even worse, if 100% efficient is by definition the best you can do, how do you explain heat pumps? They move heat from one place to another, and thus are more than 100% efficient according to your criteria. Yes, they are moving heat, and that is different. I'm pointing this out so you know that it is a VERY bad idea to heat anything using electric resistance, because it is so inefficent per unit of heat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency
(1.3 * (10 ** 8) joules * 16 * .25) / ((12 000 volts) * 60 amperes) = 12.037037 minutes
.25 / (220volts * 60amps) = 10.9427609 hours
That is to say:
(energy in 1 gallon of gasoline * 16 gallons * efficiency of most cars) / ('reasonable' voltage * 'reasonable' amperage) = 12 minutes.
That is to say:
You could fill your tank without being rediculous at all, although at much higher energy levels than you would have at your house. At your house you could safely draw:
1.3 * 10**8 joules * 16 *
if you had a special outlet installed in your garage. (this is about the same as a big AC unit) and so you could recharge each night.
Moving things around we get:
(((220 volts) * 60 amperes) * (10.94 hours) * (.11 U.S. dollars)) / (1 000 * (watt * hour)) = 15.88488 U.S. dollars
So you could recharge this thing for about 15 dollars a night, assuming you completely discharge it. Since you can reasonably charge it yourself you can either buy electricity cheaply near a power plant or if you are the only one around with one of these cars you can just charge it yourself. Good deal, safe buy.
This assumes 100% efficiency, so scale it up by 1/efficiency to get a more accurate number. As long as efficiency is more than about 40% it is cheaper than gasoline. And of course it pollutes less (or at worse if you have coal it pollutes somewhere else, which is better for 99% of people, who don't live next to an old coal plant).
Finally, the complexity of an electric car is much much much less than a gasoline car. No exhaust, no belts, no cooling system (except for the electric ac), no transmission really, no power steering or brake fluids, no oil, etc etc.
A washing machine and an electrical generator are about equivilent in complexity to an electic car and a gas powered car respectively. With an electric car you can expect to repair it every few years for about 400 dollars a pop, just like a washing machine breaks every few years for about 60 dollars a pop ($5 if you repair it yourself, or about $30 for the electric car). Electrical generators are complicated and break down all the time, and are expensive to buy and maintain, just like gas cars.
Plus electric cars will be much lighter, as much as 40%. That directly leads to efficiency. Plus with no engine, instead of wasted space you get an extra trunk, or the car company can redesign the car drastically (assuming batteries/whatever are arranged along the floor of the car for optimal low center of gravity).
Finally, the only limit to the HP of an electric car is the size of the motor(s), and so you could have anywhere between 200 and 800 HP in a standard car.
Where do I sign up?
"Will work" isn't a binary value. Lots of things work, but also cause constant problems. A Yugo will work for transportation, excepting when it breaks down and doesn't. A 500,000 line perl script written by someone who doesn't know that there are such things as arrays or strings, who doesn't understand file locking, will work if you work enough kinks out. A radio which has a poorly designed antenna (perhaps made of nails in boards), where you can barely make out the announcer over the buzzing and hissing 'works'. But in these examples, 'work' == get job done, and usually you can do better than that. The 500,000 line perl script produces the desired output, but what if you have to make a change? No, you can't do that without repeating the entire work the kinks out process because of the numerous unaccounted for side effects. So it doesn't 'work' if you require anything above absolute basic 'get the job done' functionality (such as the ability to make changes, or to enjoy music in the case of the radio), and if you can point out anything that just requires that basic functionality I will be glad to point out where you are short sighted and stupid.
And then it caused impedance issues which you didn't even know existed!
But it worked as far as you know, right?
I mean, all those equations and stuff don't matter, it's just wires. If they connect then everything is fine. Did you ever wonder though, why does an EE degree take 4 years to get when you can just hammer some nails?
Why did you post this? Why point out there religion?
C isn't simple, and in fact lisp is pretty simple.
Lisp isn't used because it wasn't standardized until the late 80's, it uses much more memory than C (though it is almost as fast as C++) and most programmers until recently have learned to program Unix and not Lisp machines. Also, MS doesn't have a lisp implementation so that means that if you don't go to a research university you won't see anything but MS (little podunk colleges are notorious for teaching 'how to program Microsoft'. Any college with a class in Visual Basic should have it's accreditation revoked.)
Finally C gives easy hooks into the OS, which isn't the same at all with Lisp, although you can do anything you can do with C it isn't Lispy to do so.
Finally, C is good enough. If you really want to wonder about languages, ask why Perl is used for anything. Perl sucks.
Keep making excuses though. This could turn into a fun game! How much can tepples rationalize in one thread...
I'm glad my kids play nintendo all day and never go outside, there's crack dealers out there and it's dangerous!
I can't afford to move! Oh, it's basically cheaper to live everywhere but where I actually live?
But I *bike* everywhere, so it is impossible to move away from the city.
Preview: My job is nearby, so it would be logically impossible to live anywhere but in the crack infested whoredome.
Why don't you just admit it isn't as bad as you made it out to be?
Please don't feel obligated to take this post personally if in your estimation it does not apply to you in reality. I have only your post to base my post on, and you invite reply by posting on a public forum.
Instead of justifying and rationalizing ('safer' neighborhoods have pedo's,etc) why not raise your children in an environment where it is not total shit? Is it too much to ask for you to sacrifice whatever small advantage you gain from living in Oakland so that your children can play ball and run around?
I understand that you live there for "some reason"TM, but you might want to consider moving the hell out. Of course, if you don't mind the crack dealers and prostitutes, maybe your kids will grow up used to them as well. After all, when venturing into a park, it is normal to have a paranoid fear of drug addicts, and before going down the slide most people instinctively know from childhood to check for used needles or sleeping crackheads (or crack head turds).
Of course you no doubt live in a wealthier neighborhood, which consists of larger and more expensive houses with crack dealers in front.
This is an attempt to attack what I said by attacking something that I didn't say.
But you're right. Planning would be better. An abortion is not a form of birth control, it is the option that is left when you have already made the mistake.
The GP was basically saying "It isn't fair, that woman have to get abortions!" Well, there it is an avoidable situation, no one is making you get pregnant (in most cases). Once you have put yourself in a situation it isn't fair to complain about your options. I support choice, but not because it is some kind of right. The questions are whether a fetus is a person (I find this to be a stretch) and whether abortion is very harmful (it doesn't seem to be). In this case it would be an overreach for the government to try to regulate it away. If the fetus were a person or if abortion caused other harm, then I would rethink my position.
In the same way no one is forcing men to father children. Once they have done so, complaining about how the state makes you pay for them is absurd.
I think you mean "men who have a child but are not married to the mother", since otherwise the state does not tend to get involved. However, I'm sure you can see the solution, although it has to be applied before the problem in this case. This is called 'planning'. One thing you should plan to do is not have sex with women and therefore producing children, unless you mean it. If the state then has to treat fathers in this situation poorly to exact a reasonable percentage of the outstanding (and legally mandated) child support, well then you'll excuse me if I don't cry for these fathers too much.
Now, as far as accusing men of sex crimes to get sole custody, a few widely publicized prison sentences for perjury would correct this situation quickly. And don't forget to charge the lawyers involved as well, since they are almost certainly prompting their clients to do this. In fact, just send a few lawyers to state pound-you-in-the-ass prison and most problems of this sort would go away overnight.
I'm not sure about this. There are Safari, IE, Firefox, and Opera, (and Konqueror). I don't know of any other major graphical browsers (I'm sure you aren't counting text based browsers!). Of the 4, 2 (3) pass the test. The two that don't pass are IE and Firefox, the crappiest of the browsers listed. Konqueror is a free browser, and it's engine, khtml, is also the basis for Safari. Opera is free to use but not open source. Opera is available on almost all OS's, Konqueror is available wherever KDE is available, Safari is available on OSX. So no matter what OS you are on you can get a decent browser. If you are on a decent OS (Linux, OSX, BSD) you can get a Good broser (safari or konqueror).
There is only one remaining excuse to run Windows for the apologists. And that excuse is that you are writing windows software. OSX is a good choice if you aren't poor, and Linux is a pretty good choice if you are poor. Of course, if you are stupid or adverse to learning you are probably unable to afford Apple products, and by hypothesis too mentally lazy to learn enough Unix to get around in a BSD/Linux environment. So have fun with your virii and lack of functionality.
It is just a dumb idea, that's all I'm saying. It would only be practical if sending a ship to jupiter and back, and maintaining all these space stations, etcetc, could be done for less energy than just taking the base components and producing them artificially. With regular nuclear power (nothing sci-fi) I assure you that you can MANUFACTURE methane for less money than this scheme of Pournelle's. Manufacture methane from it's base atomic constituents. Plus you could use CO2 from the atmosphere as one of your ingredients, thus taking excess carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it into plastics instead of releasing net carbon.