"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." -- Abraham Maslow
If you think C is the talismanic ne plus ultra of programming, I really think you need to get out more. Learn C++ and the STL; see what processor-intensive stuff you can do trivially with it. Learn LISP and grok the lambda calculus and the beauty of functional programming. Learn Python and Perl and see the coolness of executable pseudocode.
If the only language you let yourself use is C, then you're limiting yourself in ways which aren't good for either your mind or your career. C is a good tool and one that ought to be in every hacker's toolbox--but just like you can't be an effective carpenter if all you have is a hammer, you aren't going to be an effective hacker if you keep on swinging C at problems which call for LISP, Smalltalk or SPARK solutions.
On the contrary--true fission bombs are fairly simple to make, and any decent university research library will possess the necessary information.
Actually making use of the information is what you need a physics degree for. It's one thing for the library to tell you about the critical mass of plutonium, and how it varies with density and shape. It's another thing for you to see that and think, "Ah! With a soccer-ball shaped collection of plastic explosives all detonated in unison, I could implode a subcritical mass into a critical mass!"...... and at that point, you have Fat Man.
This... constitutional [sic] protection specifies that no government under its jurisdiction can do blanket searches of papers and effects
Read the amendment. It says precisely what it says: the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against UNREASONABLE searches and seizures, shall not be violated.
The Constitution is absolutely silent on searches deemed reasonable. It says absolutely nothing one way or another.
There is a trait common to humanity--a desire to substitute wishes for truth. What you wish the Constitution to say, it doesn't say. If you want things to change, the only way to make them change is to first frankly acknowledge the way things are, and then to work towards getting them where you want them to be.
Warning: I am not a lawyer and I may be misremembering things.
In the dawn of the telecom era--early 20th century--the Supreme Court faced a tough decision: did people have a Fourth Amendment right to privacy in their phone conversations? This was, is, a surprisingly difficult question. The Amendment is not near-absolutist, as are the First, Second and Fifth; instead, it only protects from unreasonable search and seizure, where reasonableness is determined by the courts.
There is a long-standing legal principle which guides these decisions of reasonableness. If you have a reasonable expectation of privacy--for instance, if you're in your own home behind closed doors talking to a guest--then the government needs a warrant. If you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy--for instance, if you're talking on a city street--then the government doesn't.
At the time, telephone calls were all routed manually by operators, and operators would often listen in on phone conversations. This was known and accepted practice of the time. Therefore, the Court found that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy when talking on a telephone; therefore, no warrant was required.
This caused outrage in the public, and Congress quickly passed laws requiring that warrants be issued for wiretaps. So privacy on your phone calls is purely an act of Congress; it is not, and never has been, held to be a Constitutional right.
If Congress is the one who provides you with the protection of wiretap warrants, Congress can also revoke that protection at their discretion. Don't like it? Write Congress. I have.
But don't accuse the judiciary of abrogating their most fundamental duty, when the reality is you don't know the law surrounding wiretap warrants.
In many jurisdictions, murder-2 also covers "depraved indifference to human life resulting in death". For instance, if a nursing-home worker shows depraved indifference to the health of one of his/her charges, and that charge later dies, the worker can be charged with second-degree murder.
There is nothing in original constitution that says the election of the president requires a popular vote.
It's awful lucky, then, that I never said there was anything in the Constitution that said the election of the President requires a popular vote. I only said direct election of electors was (and is) permitted. I sure as hell didn't say it was proscribed.
One--my reference to "the common man or woman" was a reference to the original poster's comment. I'm fully aware of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Two--please reread my post, or check my response to Jensen above, where I point out the difference between something being permitted and something being proscribed. I think you're reading me as having said "popular elections of electors is proscribed", when I said "popular elections of electors is permitted".
Re: differentiation between a democracy and a republic--in 1789 there was a clear doctrinal difference between the two forms of government, but in the two centuries since the two have more or less become synonymous with each other in the common vernacular. Honestly, I don't care if you call the United States a democracy, a republic, a democratic republic, or a double bacon cheeseburger with fries. Just so long as you understand that we elect leaders who decide on our policy (or sometimes, elect people to elect leaders who decide on our policy), and that it was never the intention of the Founders to let the public opinion decide policy directly, I don't care what you call it.:)
Ah, you meant that, had they held that the common man was too uninformed and/or did not have sound enough judgement to elect a president, they would have actively and specifically denied the ability of the Legislatures to make the vote popular, but that they passively allowed the Legislatures to choose popular vote.
Precisely.:)
I still think, however, that their failure to 'blacklist' choosing by popular vote hardly implicates them in thinking that such was a possible, and much less that they thought it was a reasonable, method of choosing.
Judging from what I've read of the Federalist Papers, I think the greatest strength of the Founders was that they openly acknowledged there would be other, better, ideas. Some of the State vs Federal distinction comes from this; it can be argued that States have as much autonomy as they do so that many different ideas can be explored simultaneously, and the successful ones can then be adopted either by the other states or at the Federal level. In that same vein... I think the reason why the Founders left the matter of elector selection up to the state legislatures is because the Founders honestly didn't have a good idea for how to do it, and figured they'd just give the problem to the individual states, on the theory that sooner or later someone would come up with a good solution and then it could be adopted nationwide.
I have very little to back that up, of course. But it seems reasonable.:)
That's the entire point of this Slashdot article: to ask questions about how people ought to be elected. Saying that people ought to be elected on a purely representational basis makes easily as much sense as saying that people ought to be elected on an EC basis, or indirectly via directly-elected legislators, or...
There is no clear-cut answer to the question you pose, despite its rhetorical nature. Which is probably Nature's way of saying it's a damn interesting question--because boring questions always have clear answers.
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all.
The Founders permitted a popular vote. As in, "each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct..." In other words, popular votes to determine electors are permissible; it's up to the individual states to decide precisely how their electors will be appointed. A legislature could decide that their electors would be appointed by random lottery and it'd still pass Constitutional muster.
There's a world of difference between something being permitted and something being proscribed. Popular votes to determine electors are permitted; but nothing is proscribed beyond "it will be determined by the state legislature".
I have no objection to being told I'm wrong, but I get a mite bit annoyed when the cause is really someone not reading what I write, as opposed to what they want me to have written.:)
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all. The Founders did think the electorate was ill-equipped to select Senators, and made special provisions in the Constitution for Senators to be elected by State legislatures as opposed to the people.
If what you're saying was right, we'd see the President selected the same way. No, the Electoral College exists because of a concern they had in those long-ago days, a concern which is still very valid today: a concern that with pure direct election of the President, metropolitan areas would overwhelm rural interests and we'd wind up with a government "by the cities, of the cities" instead of one which represented the whole nation. If we had direct popular election of the Presidency, do you think the President would ever care about what concerns citizens in Montana had?
Take a look at the county-by-county election returns from the 2000 campaign. It's an absolute sea of red, except for a few small blotches of blue up and down the coastlines and other small blotches in the Midwest.
County-by-county, it was a Bush blowout. Not even close. We hadn't seen a county-by-county blowout like that since Reagan sent Mondale packing in '84.
It was only in terms of pure popular vote that Gore nudged ahead. But, as it turns out, pure popular vote doesn't matter in Presidential elections. It's pure electoral vote that matters.
Not only that, but you could use Tetris as the foundation of a public-key cryptosystem. Knapsack algorithms are cool.:)
Not that I'm suggesting anyone do this for anything other than geek points, mind you. Knapsack algorithms are in disfavor (several kinds of knapsacks lend themselves well to cryptanalysis). But still, you could do it.:)
Wasn't a couple of years ago and it wasn't a woman. It was Dr. Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician, working in the 1940s. His work was never translated into English until Lorna Wing, in England, started translating his papers. Asperger's Syndrome was accepted into the DSM in the early 1990s.
And yes, I have Asperger's Syndrome.
And no, it's certainly not "mild autism". It's full-blown autism, just phenomenally high-functioning autism. I could list all the ways in which AS isn't mild, but I'd be here for a week and I'd get profoundly depressed and I don't need that.:)
My brother is a programmer, so I thought it was rather interesting. (and yes I do think my nephew (who is now 6) is quite a little genius. He could read some words at two but couldn't talk. A few months in speech therapy fixed that. He bypassed kids books by age four and has been reading encyclopedia style books on anything to do with fish, bugs, snakes or animals of any kind. At 6 he can tell you what an estuary is, knows everything about anything that lives in the deep sea, will gladly explain about any 'aquatic animals' found in a zoo, including their eating and 'reproductive' habits and sound out words like carnivorous'. His hero is Steve Erwin, Crocodile Hunter, of course.
Sounds a lot like me--the fascination with words, the great difficulties with speaking to the point where I required speech therapy, the genius-level knowledge of a narrow field (in his case, biology; in my case, math).
Of course, I'm autistic.
What you've just described could very easily be Asperger's Syndrome, which is the absolute top end of the autistic spectrum. The hyperlexia, eidetic memory and incredible intellectual ability within a narrow field ought to be warning signs. I'm certainly not saying "he has AS"--I'm no psychologist--but it's something you may wish to be attentive to. If he has intense trouble socializing with others of his age group, it may not just be because he's smart (which is burdensome enough); it may be because he's autistic.
It's certainly nothing to panic over. Just something you may wish to keep in mind.:)
Friedman and Felleisen, The Little LISPer and The Seasoned LISPer. Also available as The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer, and The Little MLer and The Seasoned MLer.
All are absolutely first-rate books.
At this point, it's vapor.
on
Java For BeOS
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Remember--a year ago, maybe eighteen months, Be promised its users that the J2SDK for Be was done. They basically committed themselves to a pact signed in the blood of their unborn children that J2SDK would be in people's hands by that year's end.
Never happened. And up until the day Be folded, they kept on claiming J2SDK was on track and wasn't delayed.
If BeUnited wants me to believe J2SDK is going to be released for BeOS, the way to do it is simple. Release it.
Until then... no offense to the BeUnited guys. But like the song goes, "won't be fooled again."
Told them that for $5,000, I'd be happy to tell them.
One sheet of color laser printing: $1.00 One blank CD-R: $0.25 Knowing what to do: $4,998.75
I never heard back from them. The CEO (who was later convicted of felony fraud, so keep in mind he's not at all a reliable source) says they were interested in paying me the $5K, but wanted a fairly obnoxious NDA and noncompetition agreement first--and given that we were sort of in the same marketplace, the NDA/noncompete was a dealbreaker.
In 2000, I was working for a startup e-publishing venture. As such, we had the usual lemmings coming to us and saying that if we'd just license their whizbang technology we could never lose a single text to those "internet-based piracy groups". Since I was the only employee with experience in crypto and security, I was invited to sit in on the sales pitches these guys made to our executives. (Our executives were mostly Marketing guys, but the CEO was technically an engineer. In a striking show of how weird start-ups could be, the Marketing guys actually listened to Engineering and the `engineer' CEO not only couldn't write a line of code, but got convicted of felony fraud...)
One Canadian firm showed up with a dog-and-pony show involving a CD-ROM with a "protected" picture of a sailboat. They claimed that the image was watermarked and whenever anyone tried to copy the image, the OS would recognize the copymark and refuse to copy it. Not only that, but the image was in a special proprietary format, so nobody could even view the image until they installed the DRM software. They were obviously very pleased with their offering.
At that point I took the CD-ROM they were showing us and excused myself for a few minutes. I went into one of the back offices and threw it into a Win32 machine. Installed the DRM software, loaded up the image. Beautiful picture of a sailboat. Tried to copy it. Couldn't. Screenshot? Disabled. But they'd let me print it out...... So I printed it out on the company's high-quality color laser and scanned it back in as a.JPG. Burned the new image to a CD-ROM and walked back to the sales pitch. Gave them both CD-ROMs and told them, "thank you for coming down, but I believe we'll go with another vendor." Total time: less than five minutes.
Now for the real punchline:
That DRM solution racked up $12.6 million in sales for their firm in the 1999-2000 fiscal year. Almost all of that was profit, given how minimal their development costs were. That's $12.6 million dollars for a DRM system that wouldn't even stop a twelve-year-old.
This is what I think a lot of us here are overlooking. There's a tremendous amount of money to be made in the field. Palladium, if it goes through, absolutely regardless of whether it works or not, will be a cash cow for Microsoft the likes of which they can't imagine.
Microsoft knows that Palladium doesn't have to work. They just have to make people believe that it'll work--which explains all the Palladium PR blitz as of late.
There are two possibilities here. Either general relativity is a correct description of the effects of relative velocity on the interval (0, c), or general relativity is a correct description of the effects of relative velocity on the interval (0, c]. Nobody's quite sure which--both sides have their partisans, but there's an appalling lack of physical evidence all around. If the former, then yes, anything with mass which travels at c basically turns into a pumpkin. If the latter, then we don't know what happens, because at that point we're beyond relativity's ability to describe things.
Even if the former is correct, there are still ways to get around the c barrier. For instance, treat c as a singularity in the complex-mathematical sense and integrate around it. This is a really cute mathematical solution to the lightspeed barrier; unfortunately, to implement it would require that we have some way of imparting imaginary velocity, which at the present time we have no idea how to do.
Short version--nobody knows what happens if/when an object hits c. Makes for some real interesting theorizations, though.:)
In the article it said quarks travel at around ninety percent of the speed of light. So, tell you what, let's compute just how much more massive those quarks are. Fire up your LISP interpreter. We're taking a trip into Mathemagicland.
In LISP notation... (defun relativistic-mass (m v) (/ m (sqrt (- 1 (/ (* v v) 1)))))
(relativistic-mass 1.9) 2.294157
... So as you can tell, relativity tells us that at ninety percent of c, an object is only going to have two and a quarter times its normal mass. I don't see how you come up with the notion that "if the quarks are traveling relativistically, then the proton's mass must be near-infinite, thus quarks aren't traveling relativistically". If anything, your science is just as much junk as the USA Today article you're blasting.
A related question: a proton doesn't even have a distinct location, so how can it have a shape? The answer is to change what you think "shape" means. When quantum physicists talk about the shape of a proton or an electron or what-have-you, they're actually talking about a probability distribution.
Let's take a very simple probability distribution. (Real physicists will take great umbrage at how I'm simplifying things--so just let me defend myself by saying this is a gross simplification.) Let's say that the proton has a 95% chance of existing within X distance of a given point in space (i.e., within X along all three direction axis). That probability distribution is spherical; the region of 95% probability is spherical in area.
Let's say the proton has a 95% chance of existing within X distance along the x axis, Y distance along the y axis and Z distance along the z axis. Suddenly, you no longer have a spherical probability distribution; the probability distribution is longer along one axis than another.
In the case of the proton, the "shape" of the proton is ovoidal.
Remember, pretty much all of your observations about the macro universe are totally inapplicable at the quantum level. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't apply at the micro level like it does on the macro. So before you say "it can't have a shape"... make sure that you're not trying to apply your macro concept of "shape" to the micro.
... In the last interview I saw with him (this was probably a year and a half ago), he said that he has never said one word about his sex life/preference because (a) it's boring, (b) it's nobody's business, (c) it's his privacy, and (d) did he mention it was boring?
So in the interests of fairness... you can't say he's a rampant homosexual. Because we don't know one way or another and he wants to keep us in the dark.
I actually respect that position an awful lot. Nowadays, saying my sex life is none of your goddamned business is a hell of a lot more daring and principled a position than, say, publically acknowledging you like to use date-rape drugs on marmosets.
Not really. The rule of thumb is that a pattern spreads one inch per linear yard of travel. (The rule is off, but it's a useful approximation.) At ten yards, the pattern's only about ten inches across. Aim for someone's center of mass and the pattern will stay confined to their torso.
Most gunfights between armed individuals take place well within ten yards, according to the most recent FBI crime reports.
Sometime ask the Second Chance company for one of their demonstration videos. You can see the founder of the Second Chance corporation put on a Second Chance armorvest and then take multiple 7.62mm armor-piercing rounds to the chest.
Given that the 7.62mm is just about the most powerful round anyone is likely to encounter, I have to say you're full of crap. Even a 12-gauge shotgun offers less momentum and kinetic energy.
Slashdot Mirror
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." -- Abraham Maslow
If you think C is the talismanic ne plus ultra of programming, I really think you need to get out more. Learn C++ and the STL; see what processor-intensive stuff you can do trivially with it. Learn LISP and grok the lambda calculus and the beauty of functional programming. Learn Python and Perl and see the coolness of executable pseudocode.
If the only language you let yourself use is C, then you're limiting yourself in ways which aren't good for either your mind or your career. C is a good tool and one that ought to be in every hacker's toolbox--but just like you can't be an effective carpenter if all you have is a hammer, you aren't going to be an effective hacker if you keep on swinging C at problems which call for LISP, Smalltalk or SPARK solutions.
On the contrary--true fission bombs are fairly simple to make, and any decent university research library will possess the necessary information.
... and at that point, you have Fat Man.
Actually making use of the information is what you need a physics degree for. It's one thing for the library to tell you about the critical mass of plutonium, and how it varies with density and shape. It's another thing for you to see that and think, "Ah! With a soccer-ball shaped collection of plastic explosives all detonated in unison, I could implode a subcritical mass into a critical mass!"...
This ... constitutional [sic] protection specifies that no government under its jurisdiction can do blanket searches of papers and effects
Read the amendment. It says precisely what it says: the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against UNREASONABLE searches and seizures, shall not be violated.
The Constitution is absolutely silent on searches deemed reasonable. It says absolutely nothing one way or another.
There is a trait common to humanity--a desire to substitute wishes for truth. What you wish the Constitution to say, it doesn't say. If you want things to change, the only way to make them change is to first frankly acknowledge the way things are, and then to work towards getting them where you want them to be.
Warning: I am not a lawyer and I may be misremembering things.
In the dawn of the telecom era--early 20th century--the Supreme Court faced a tough decision: did people have a Fourth Amendment right to privacy in their phone conversations? This was, is, a surprisingly difficult question. The Amendment is not near-absolutist, as are the First, Second and Fifth; instead, it only protects from unreasonable search and seizure, where reasonableness is determined by the courts.
There is a long-standing legal principle which guides these decisions of reasonableness. If you have a reasonable expectation of privacy--for instance, if you're in your own home behind closed doors talking to a guest--then the government needs a warrant. If you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy--for instance, if you're talking on a city street--then the government doesn't.
At the time, telephone calls were all routed manually by operators, and operators would often listen in on phone conversations. This was known and accepted practice of the time. Therefore, the Court found that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy when talking on a telephone; therefore, no warrant was required.
This caused outrage in the public, and Congress quickly passed laws requiring that warrants be issued for wiretaps. So privacy on your phone calls is purely an act of Congress; it is not, and never has been, held to be a Constitutional right.
If Congress is the one who provides you with the protection of wiretap warrants, Congress can also revoke that protection at their discretion. Don't like it? Write Congress. I have.
But don't accuse the judiciary of abrogating their most fundamental duty, when the reality is you don't know the law surrounding wiretap warrants.
Antiviral drugs do exist--look into Amantadine, which is commonly prescribed nowadays for influenza.
In many jurisdictions, murder-2 also covers "depraved indifference to human life resulting in death". For instance, if a nursing-home worker shows depraved indifference to the health of one of his/her charges, and that charge later dies, the worker can be charged with second-degree murder.
There is nothing in original constitution that says the election of the president requires a popular vote.
It's awful lucky, then, that I never said there was anything in the Constitution that said the election of the President requires a popular vote. I only said direct election of electors was (and is) permitted. I sure as hell didn't say it was proscribed.
One--my reference to "the common man or woman" was a reference to the original poster's comment. I'm fully aware of the Nineteenth Amendment.
:)
Two--please reread my post, or check my response to Jensen above, where I point out the difference between something being permitted and something being proscribed. I think you're reading me as having said "popular elections of electors is proscribed", when I said "popular elections of electors is permitted".
Re: differentiation between a democracy and a republic--in 1789 there was a clear doctrinal difference between the two forms of government, but in the two centuries since the two have more or less become synonymous with each other in the common vernacular. Honestly, I don't care if you call the United States a democracy, a republic, a democratic republic, or a double bacon cheeseburger with fries. Just so long as you understand that we elect leaders who decide on our policy (or sometimes, elect people to elect leaders who decide on our policy), and that it was never the intention of the Founders to let the public opinion decide policy directly, I don't care what you call it.
Ah, you meant that, had they held that the common man was too uninformed and/or did not have sound enough judgement to elect a president, they would have actively and specifically denied the ability of the Legislatures to make the vote popular, but that they passively allowed the Legislatures to choose popular vote.
:)
:)
Precisely.
I still think, however, that their failure to 'blacklist' choosing by popular vote hardly implicates them in thinking that such was a possible, and much less that they thought it was a reasonable, method of choosing.
Judging from what I've read of the Federalist Papers, I think the greatest strength of the Founders was that they openly acknowledged there would be other, better, ideas. Some of the State vs Federal distinction comes from this; it can be argued that States have as much autonomy as they do so that many different ideas can be explored simultaneously, and the successful ones can then be adopted either by the other states or at the Federal level. In that same vein... I think the reason why the Founders left the matter of elector selection up to the state legislatures is because the Founders honestly didn't have a good idea for how to do it, and figured they'd just give the problem to the individual states, on the theory that sooner or later someone would come up with a good solution and then it could be adopted nationwide.
I have very little to back that up, of course. But it seems reasonable.
Isn't that how someone should be elected?
That's the entire point of this Slashdot article: to ask questions about how people ought to be elected. Saying that people ought to be elected on a purely representational basis makes easily as much sense as saying that people ought to be elected on an EC basis, or indirectly via directly-elected legislators, or...
There is no clear-cut answer to the question you pose, despite its rhetorical nature. Which is probably Nature's way of saying it's a damn interesting question--because boring questions always have clear answers.
What I said:
:)
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all.
The Founders permitted a popular vote. As in, "each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct..." In other words, popular votes to determine electors are permissible; it's up to the individual states to decide precisely how their electors will be appointed. A legislature could decide that their electors would be appointed by random lottery and it'd still pass Constitutional muster.
There's a world of difference between something being permitted and something being proscribed. Popular votes to determine electors are permitted; but nothing is proscribed beyond "it will be determined by the state legislature".
I have no objection to being told I'm wrong, but I get a mite bit annoyed when the cause is really someone not reading what I write, as opposed to what they want me to have written.
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all. The Founders did think the electorate was ill-equipped to select Senators, and made special provisions in the Constitution for Senators to be elected by State legislatures as opposed to the people.
If what you're saying was right, we'd see the President selected the same way. No, the Electoral College exists because of a concern they had in those long-ago days, a concern which is still very valid today: a concern that with pure direct election of the President, metropolitan areas would overwhelm rural interests and we'd wind up with a government "by the cities, of the cities" instead of one which represented the whole nation. If we had direct popular election of the Presidency, do you think the President would ever care about what concerns citizens in Montana had?
Take a look at the county-by-county election returns from the 2000 campaign. It's an absolute sea of red, except for a few small blotches of blue up and down the coastlines and other small blotches in the Midwest.
County-by-county, it was a Bush blowout. Not even close. We hadn't seen a county-by-county blowout like that since Reagan sent Mondale packing in '84.
It was only in terms of pure popular vote that Gore nudged ahead. But, as it turns out, pure popular vote doesn't matter in Presidential elections. It's pure electoral vote that matters.
Not only that, but you could use Tetris as the foundation of a public-key cryptosystem. Knapsack algorithms are cool. :)
:)
Not that I'm suggesting anyone do this for anything other than geek points, mind you. Knapsack algorithms are in disfavor (several kinds of knapsacks lend themselves well to cryptanalysis). But still, you could do it.
Wasn't a couple of years ago and it wasn't a woman. It was Dr. Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician, working in the 1940s. His work was never translated into English until Lorna Wing, in England, started translating his papers. Asperger's Syndrome was accepted into the DSM in the early 1990s.
:)
And yes, I have Asperger's Syndrome.
And no, it's certainly not "mild autism". It's full-blown autism, just phenomenally high-functioning autism. I could list all the ways in which AS isn't mild, but I'd be here for a week and I'd get profoundly depressed and I don't need that.
My brother is a programmer, so I thought it was rather interesting. (and yes I do think my nephew (who is now 6) is quite a little genius. He could read some words at two but couldn't talk. A few months in speech therapy fixed that. He bypassed kids books by age four and has been reading encyclopedia style books on anything to do with fish, bugs, snakes or animals of any kind. At 6 he can tell you what an estuary is, knows everything about anything that lives in the deep sea, will gladly explain about any 'aquatic animals' found in a zoo, including their eating and 'reproductive' habits and sound out words like carnivorous'. His hero is Steve Erwin, Crocodile Hunter, of course.
:)
Sounds a lot like me--the fascination with words, the great difficulties with speaking to the point where I required speech therapy, the genius-level knowledge of a narrow field (in his case, biology; in my case, math).
Of course, I'm autistic.
What you've just described could very easily be Asperger's Syndrome, which is the absolute top end of the autistic spectrum. The hyperlexia, eidetic memory and incredible intellectual ability within a narrow field ought to be warning signs. I'm certainly not saying "he has AS"--I'm no psychologist--but it's something you may wish to be attentive to. If he has intense trouble socializing with others of his age group, it may not just be because he's smart (which is burdensome enough); it may be because he's autistic.
It's certainly nothing to panic over. Just something you may wish to keep in mind.
Friedman and Felleisen, The Little LISPer and The Seasoned LISPer. Also available as The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer, and The Little MLer and The Seasoned MLer.
All are absolutely first-rate books.
Remember--a year ago, maybe eighteen months, Be promised its users that the J2SDK for Be was done. They basically committed themselves to a pact signed in the blood of their unborn children that J2SDK would be in people's hands by that year's end.
Never happened. And up until the day Be folded, they kept on claiming J2SDK was on track and wasn't delayed.
If BeUnited wants me to believe J2SDK is going to be released for BeOS, the way to do it is simple. Release it.
Until then... no offense to the BeUnited guys. But like the song goes, "won't be fooled again."
Told them that for $5,000, I'd be happy to tell them.
One sheet of color laser printing: $1.00
One blank CD-R: $0.25
Knowing what to do: $4,998.75
I never heard back from them. The CEO (who was later convicted of felony fraud, so keep in mind he's not at all a reliable source) says they were interested in paying me the $5K, but wanted a fairly obnoxious NDA and noncompetition agreement first--and given that we were sort of in the same marketplace, the NDA/noncompete was a dealbreaker.
In 2000, I was working for a startup e-publishing venture. As such, we had the usual lemmings coming to us and saying that if we'd just license their whizbang technology we could never lose a single text to those "internet-based piracy groups". Since I was the only employee with experience in crypto and security, I was invited to sit in on the sales pitches these guys made to our executives. (Our executives were mostly Marketing guys, but the CEO was technically an engineer. In a striking show of how weird start-ups could be, the Marketing guys actually listened to Engineering and the `engineer' CEO not only couldn't write a line of code, but got convicted of felony fraud...)
... So I printed it out on the company's high-quality color laser and scanned it back in as a .JPG. Burned the new image to a CD-ROM and walked back to the sales pitch. Gave them both CD-ROMs and told them, "thank you for coming down, but I believe we'll go with another vendor." Total time: less than five minutes.
One Canadian firm showed up with a dog-and-pony show involving a CD-ROM with a "protected" picture of a sailboat. They claimed that the image was watermarked and whenever anyone tried to copy the image, the OS would recognize the copymark and refuse to copy it. Not only that, but the image was in a special proprietary format, so nobody could even view the image until they installed the DRM software. They were obviously very pleased with their offering.
At that point I took the CD-ROM they were showing us and excused myself for a few minutes. I went into one of the back offices and threw it into a Win32 machine. Installed the DRM software, loaded up the image. Beautiful picture of a sailboat. Tried to copy it. Couldn't. Screenshot? Disabled. But they'd let me print it out...
Now for the real punchline:
That DRM solution racked up $12.6 million in sales for their firm in the 1999-2000 fiscal year. Almost all of that was profit, given how minimal their development costs were. That's $12.6 million dollars for a DRM system that wouldn't even stop a twelve-year-old.
This is what I think a lot of us here are overlooking. There's a tremendous amount of money to be made in the field. Palladium, if it goes through, absolutely regardless of whether it works or not, will be a cash cow for Microsoft the likes of which they can't imagine.
Microsoft knows that Palladium doesn't have to work. They just have to make people believe that it'll work--which explains all the Palladium PR blitz as of late.
you'd get a buttload of infinities. So....?
:)
There are two possibilities here. Either general relativity is a correct description of the effects of relative velocity on the interval (0, c), or general relativity is a correct description of the effects of relative velocity on the interval (0, c]. Nobody's quite sure which--both sides have their partisans, but there's an appalling lack of physical evidence all around. If the former, then yes, anything with mass which travels at c basically turns into a pumpkin. If the latter, then we don't know what happens, because at that point we're beyond relativity's ability to describe things.
Even if the former is correct, there are still ways to get around the c barrier. For instance, treat c as a singularity in the complex-mathematical sense and integrate around it. This is a really cute mathematical solution to the lightspeed barrier; unfortunately, to implement it would require that we have some way of imparting imaginary velocity, which at the present time we have no idea how to do.
Short version--nobody knows what happens if/when an object hits c. Makes for some real interesting theorizations, though.
In the article it said quarks travel at around ninety percent of the speed of light. So, tell you what, let's compute just how much more massive those quarks are. Fire up your LISP interpreter. We're taking a trip into Mathemagicland.
.9)
In LISP notation...
(defun relativistic-mass (m v) (/ m (sqrt (- 1 (/ (* v v) 1)))))
(relativistic-mass 1
2.294157
... So as you can tell, relativity tells us that at ninety percent of c, an object is only going to have two and a quarter times its normal mass. I don't see how you come up with the notion that "if the quarks are traveling relativistically, then the proton's mass must be near-infinite, thus quarks aren't traveling relativistically". If anything, your science is just as much junk as the USA Today article you're blasting.
A related question: a proton doesn't even have a distinct location, so how can it have a shape? The answer is to change what you think "shape" means. When quantum physicists talk about the shape of a proton or an electron or what-have-you, they're actually talking about a probability distribution.
Let's take a very simple probability distribution. (Real physicists will take great umbrage at how I'm simplifying things--so just let me defend myself by saying this is a gross simplification.) Let's say that the proton has a 95% chance of existing within X distance of a given point in space (i.e., within X along all three direction axis). That probability distribution is spherical; the region of 95% probability is spherical in area.
Let's say the proton has a 95% chance of existing within X distance along the x axis, Y distance along the y axis and Z distance along the z axis. Suddenly, you no longer have a spherical probability distribution; the probability distribution is longer along one axis than another.
In the case of the proton, the "shape" of the proton is ovoidal.
Remember, pretty much all of your observations about the macro universe are totally inapplicable at the quantum level. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't apply at the micro level like it does on the macro. So before you say "it can't have a shape"... make sure that you're not trying to apply your macro concept of "shape" to the micro.
... In the last interview I saw with him (this was probably a year and a half ago), he said that he has never said one word about his sex life/preference because (a) it's boring, (b) it's nobody's business, (c) it's his privacy, and (d) did he mention it was boring?
So in the interests of fairness... you can't say he's a rampant homosexual. Because we don't know one way or another and he wants to keep us in the dark.
I actually respect that position an awful lot. Nowadays, saying my sex life is none of your goddamned business is a hell of a lot more daring and principled a position than, say, publically acknowledging you like to use date-rape drugs on marmosets.
Not really. The rule of thumb is that a pattern spreads one inch per linear yard of travel. (The rule is off, but it's a useful approximation.) At ten yards, the pattern's only about ten inches across. Aim for someone's center of mass and the pattern will stay confined to their torso.
Most gunfights between armed individuals take place well within ten yards, according to the most recent FBI crime reports.
Err... no.
Sometime ask the Second Chance company for one of their demonstration videos. You can see the founder of the Second Chance corporation put on a Second Chance armorvest and then take multiple 7.62mm armor-piercing rounds to the chest.
Given that the 7.62mm is just about the most powerful round anyone is likely to encounter, I have to say you're full of crap. Even a 12-gauge shotgun offers less momentum and kinetic energy.