Well, you are being sarcastic of course, but strictly speaking... you are right...
Are not huge efforts put into alternative input devices, which should be "more direct" - like brain-computer interfaces, eye-computer interfaces, body-motion-computer interfaces etc?
Yes, the computer should know what I want to do, and just do it. That's the whole point of this AI idea; if the computer can think itself (himself?), then you don't need to break everything up into step-by-step instructions.
As for electricity: it's just because we don't know how to put the needed energy into the computer otherwise, in a more convenient way. Well, if the computer had adequate AI and a little chemical plant inside, it could forage for energy, just like humans... or, previous generations dreamed of putting atomic batteries inside, which would go for thousands of years...
As a native: This is all true. Now, if you're learning German, please forget it again.
I believe the way we natives handle this is by associating each common phrase with the correct pattern, not by going through rules and lists of prepositions. So, if I want to express that we are going into something from outside, I recall the pattern "in [den Wald] (hinein)gehen". Walking around inside something is "im Wald (herum)gehen". So, you have bits of meaning, and associate them with language patterns, including the cases. When you learn a language, you have to memorize the patterns anyway ("how do I say XYZ?"). Just also memorize the suitable cases.
Oh, did I mention that in my native Austrian dialect, we don't have a dative at all?:-) Walking into the wood is "I geh an Woid (ei)" (Ich geh inn' Wald hinein). Walking around the wood is "I geh an Woid umanond" (Ich geh inn' Wald herum)...
stristr( $haystack, $needle ) for checking if one string is contained in another versus in_array( $needle, $haystack )
Netbeans, PHP support, Alt+Space. Problem solved:)
Generally, PHP all the way for me, without web frameworks or anything. Some things that I find helpful in PHP:
Heavily use the object-oriented features (e.g. use classes with static methods for lexical scoping).
Liberally add comments in the source code (makes the Netbeans autocompletion/help work nicely).
Make one central database access library in your project (based on PDO), and use that library throughout your project.
Define central configuration in a config.php file.
Separate presentation-oriented PHP files (to be treated as "templates") and back-end (which have a starting php tag at the beginning, and no ending tag throughout the file).
Use AJAJ (with JSON) if needed. Both PHP and Javascript can do it natively, and it's faster and much simpler than XML.
Consider REST-style interfaces if your project is big.
Use sane parameter semantics: POST parameters in forms, GET parameters only very rarely.
Use the PHP session to store context.
Do not trust user input; check string lengths, options, and run all inputs through regexes to validate the allowed characters. Put this string/number/option checking code into a separate backend library, and use that everywhere else.
The main problem with OpenPGP on mail for me is that due to the unique key per recipient, if you add more than one recipient or cc, you have to encrypt the mail for each and every one of them. If you add some attachments it's pretty sure that you will hit the maximum allowed mail size of some mail server along the way.
Uh, no. It's called "session keys". The content is encrypted with a random number (the session key), and this random number is in turn encrypted with the recipients' private keys. As the content is usually compressed too before encryption, the result may even be a smaller e-mail than without...
No, it is right. This is the fundamental issue. You as a hetero man feel that you like women and not men, therefore anybody who feels other is strange and perverse. You know, for me as a homo, it's exactly the other way round, that's how I'm wired, that's how god created me, if you like to put it this way. Why would god create me this way if he did not like it? He would be a hateful god indeed.
The real truth however is that sexuality is not as clearly defined as you think. In the late 19th century, the words for homo and hetero were invented, and after that time the world was neatly split into two parts. Or three if you count bisexuals. Or four, if you count trans people. Or five, if you count hermaphrodites. Or six, if you count people who only get off on smelly feet. Or seven, eight, nine, ten... it's all just words and concepts in our heads.
Please, could we ultimately drop this boring, pointless and annoying categorizing of sexuality and just accept people as they are, diverse and with different preferences?
And another apology to the apology. I re-read your post I commented at and saw that you were expressing yourself quite clearly, I was just confused from the previous posts. However, I hope that the posts are useful anyway, as I tried to state my process of thought.
After some meditation, I'd like to apologize. You are not a troll, I think you are just expressing yourself imprecisely.
From the probabilities given above, it's obvious that the probability in total that for two tosses, at least one of the two coins is a head is 75%.
So, if we only look at the cases where at least one coin is a head, what is the probability that both coins are head? It's of course 33% ! (of the 75% of the total, which is 25% of the total). I guess this was what you were aiming at.
To my knowledge, one of the major reasons for the lengthening of copyright terms in the US is that we needed to bring our laws in line with the copyright laws in Europe, and nothing is changing there.
Huh? They are telling us the same thing over here in Europe - to bring them in line with 'international' (US) standards!
It's a half truth because that boon (countering depletion) comes at cost, requiring a greater amount of cropland
Sorry, even if it comes at a (quite hypothetical, IMO) cost, it does counter soil deterioriation, which was my argument. There is no half-truth in this. Perhaps you meant that I only told one side of the argument?
Of course the rotations cited above only produce soybeans for part of the cycle - so you have to consider the economic and enviromental impacts/costs/benefits of the other parts.
Yes, but useful products are also produced during the other parts of the cycle.
I think this is all skewed reasoning. Fertilizers are not made from oil, at least not all kinds of them (manure:-). Trucks and tractors do run on oil, but they can be run on the 'farmed' oil. The facility will run on electricity or heat, which can be made from all kinds of energy sources. So, no, it's not taking oil and turning it into soybeans, even if farming is done as an industrialized process.
One must not forget that plants in essence take sunlight and process and store this energy.
Yes, and mining for ore and minerals to produce the materials for wind turbines and solar collectors (and cars and buildings and...) also can and does destroy the environment. Do you honestly advocate that farming is bad because some contries destroy themselves by mining for fertilizer?
Farming, done the right way, is *not* grossly destructive to the ground. There are regions here in Europe that have been farmed for several thousands of years, and they are still very fertile. Plants do suck nutritients from the ground, but also from the air and solved in the water (minerals); good farming practices such as crop rotation let the soil recover in-between crops.
Of course, every climate and region has different soil. Directly transferring the techniques from soils in mild climate zones to those in the rainforest or sahel zone has proven very destructive. But with the right techniques, it seems that even rainforest soil can stay fertile (and the reason for forest destruction is that people keep on moving and burning down more forest because the soil becomes infertile over time).
So, your argument that oils from farm crops are not viable as fuel because they destroy the soil is flawed. And solar collectors and wind turbines are not the catch-all either and have their own problems. A mix of all these technologies seems to be the way to go.
Then, a big chain decides to take over the ice cone market. It sells them 9 cents apiece; they can do that because they get the material for 5 cents only, as they buy the supplies in large quantities. The 25 and 15 cent vendors go out of business.
When the chain has the monopoly on ice cream cones, it gradually rises the price to 50 cents. The consumers moan, but they want ice cream, so they pay. Profit!
The free market is a double-edged sword. When healthy, it fosters competition and increase of production efficiency. When perverted, it creates monoculture.
That said, the commie system of "the state is your mother and your father; it does everything for you" doesn't work either. It leads to stagnation, when people don't really have incentive to take action on their own. That is why we Old Europeans are so crazy about the "social market economy" thing.
Actually, every time some tourist would take the sign, an exact duplicate would appear in its place.
There is a fundamental difference between the 'real' and the digital world - in the real world, copies are bounded by resources and costs. In the digital world, only information (= ideas, abstract concepts) is copied around, which costs about zero.
DRM for libraries its probably more legitimate, but nevertheless an artificial limitation.
What about sending out small atomic particles that decay in the right distance? The problem would be to find something that only decays to photons, not other harmful radiation (gamma radiation etc.)
Actually, professional Debian support is available from a number of consultants; pleasesee http://www.debian.org/consultants/ . So, if you need someone to throw money at and point fingers to, and who organises kernel hacking parties, you could get one from there.
Also, RedHat has many more important customers who are paying it; your support requests will be one of many other high-priority tasks, and the chances of fixing aren't too high either.
No reason to get pissed. I am just slightly amused, as a European, that the oh-so-advanced US has petty coverage problems with their cellphones. It seems to me that the real innovations in this sector happen first in Japan and the Southeast Asian countries, then in Europe, and then (maybe) in the US...
Whilst I have no doubt that other file format would be a good thing, don't forget that by supporting OGG and FLAC you're really only going after the small percentage of users that would use this format (compared to MP3).
In my opinion, not the OGG or FLAC formats are the problem for Joe Sixpack, but how to deal with them. You need to explain to them how to use those files, "for Dummies".
Make a selection page for download, or a question mark, where you boldly explain that OGG and FLAC are higher-quality formats, and how to (easily!) install plugins for them for Media player, Real Player etc. Leave MP3 VBR around 192 kBps as the default download format, which is listed first. (And, by the way, add a non-VBR type for those bad old MP3 disc players).
Actually, a lot of the cost is that of the switch and the re-training. I suspect that in 5, 10 years, when the next technology switch is to be done, the price for keeping Linux will be ridiculously low. One has to keep in mind that "long term" usually means just some five years maximum in this area.
I also suspect that no such complete technology switch will have to be done - Upgrades are much more smooth with Linux. Take Debian or RedHat - you can upgrade just the software when a new release comes out, and keep everything in place; most things will still work afterwards, and no re-configuration is necessary...
Slashdot Mirror
Vorarlbergers (and some German tribes) would use -le, but most Austrians would more likely use -al :)
Well, you are being sarcastic of course, but strictly speaking... you are right...
Are not huge efforts put into alternative input devices, which should be "more direct" - like brain-computer interfaces, eye-computer interfaces, body-motion-computer interfaces etc?
Yes, the computer should know what I want to do, and just do it. That's the whole point of this AI idea; if the computer can think itself (himself?), then you don't need to break everything up into step-by-step instructions.
As for electricity: it's just because we don't know how to put the needed energy into the computer otherwise, in a more convenient way. Well, if the computer had adequate AI and a little chemical plant inside, it could forage for energy, just like humans... or, previous generations dreamed of putting atomic batteries inside, which would go for thousands of years...
As a native: This is all true. Now, if you're learning German, please forget it again.
I believe the way we natives handle this is by associating each common phrase with the correct pattern, not by going through rules and lists of prepositions. So, if I want to express that we are going into something from outside, I recall the pattern "in [den Wald] (hinein)gehen". Walking around inside something is "im Wald (herum)gehen". So, you have bits of meaning, and associate them with language patterns, including the cases. When you learn a language, you have to memorize the patterns anyway ("how do I say XYZ?"). Just also memorize the suitable cases.
Oh, did I mention that in my native Austrian dialect, we don't have a dative at all? :-) Walking into the wood is "I geh an Woid (ei)" (Ich geh inn' Wald hinein). Walking around the wood is "I geh an Woid umanond" (Ich geh inn' Wald herum)...
"flauschig". I think it's a nice word, focuses more on the tactile than the visual. :)
stristr( $haystack, $needle ) for checking if one string is contained in another versus in_array( $needle, $haystack )
Netbeans, PHP support, Alt+Space. Problem solved :)
Generally, PHP all the way for me, without web frameworks or anything. Some things that I find helpful in PHP:
pedantic, but you mean the recipients public keys, no?
Eh, sorry, of course!
The main problem with OpenPGP on mail for me is that due to the unique key per recipient, if you add more than one recipient or cc, you have to encrypt the mail for each and every one of them. If you add some attachments it's pretty sure that you will hit the maximum allowed mail size of some mail server along the way.
Uh, no. It's called "session keys". The content is encrypted with a random number (the session key), and this random number is in turn encrypted with the recipients' private keys. As the content is usually compressed too before encryption, the result may even be a smaller e-mail than without...
> While it is true that homosexuality is wrong
No, it is right. This is the fundamental issue. You as a hetero man feel that you like women and not men, therefore anybody who feels other is strange and perverse. You know, for me as a homo, it's exactly the other way round, that's how I'm wired, that's how god created me, if you like to put it this way. Why would god create me this way if he did not like it? He would be a hateful god indeed.
The real truth however is that sexuality is not as clearly defined as you think. In the late 19th century, the words for homo and hetero were invented, and after that time the world was neatly split into two parts. Or three if you count bisexuals. Or four, if you count trans people. Or five, if you count hermaphrodites. Or six, if you count people who only get off on smelly feet. Or seven, eight, nine, ten... it's all just words and concepts in our heads.
Please, could we ultimately drop this boring, pointless and annoying categorizing of sexuality and just accept people as they are, diverse and with different preferences?
And another apology to the apology. I re-read your post I commented at and saw that you were expressing yourself quite clearly, I was just confused from the previous posts.
However, I hope that the posts are useful anyway, as I tried to state my process of thought.
After some meditation, I'd like to apologize. You are not a troll, I think you are just expressing yourself imprecisely.
From the probabilities given above, it's obvious that the probability in total that for two tosses, at least one of the two coins is a head is 75%.
So, if we only look at the cases where at least one coin is a head, what is the probability that both coins are head? It's of course 33% ! (of the 75% of the total, which is 25% of the total). I guess this was what you were aiming at.
You, Sir, are a troll. Here, have some food.
Assumed you have fair coins, then the chance that a toss of a coin is head or tail is exactly 50 % or 1/2, no?
So, if I toss 2 coins, then I have the following probabilities:
p_HH = 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4
p_HT = p_TH = 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4
p_TT = 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4
So, basically, each of the four outcomes of the two-coin experiment has an equal chance of occurring, at 25%.
My assumption is that you don't have fair coins, if you actually flipped coins in reality. Most aren't, I seem to have heard.
To my knowledge, one of the major reasons for the lengthening of copyright terms in the US is that we needed to bring our laws in line with the copyright laws in Europe, and nothing is changing there.
Huh? They are telling us the same thing over here in Europe - to bring them in line with 'international' (US) standards!
As to the efficiency of it, see the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_ Revolution#Four-field_crop_rotation. In essence, you have three years of (different) potentially human-consumable food and one year of animal fodder. Moreover, our target is not to produce human food, but soybeans and similar stuff that can be made into oil.
Of course, IANAF (I Am Not A Farmer :-P), so there are probably much more effective methods nowadays.
I think this is all skewed reasoning. Fertilizers are not made from oil, at least not all kinds of them (manure :-). Trucks and tractors do run on oil, but they can be run on the 'farmed' oil. The facility will run on electricity or heat, which can be made from all kinds of energy sources. So, no, it's not taking oil and turning it into soybeans, even if farming is done as an industrialized process.
One must not forget that plants in essence take sunlight and process and store this energy.
Yes, and mining for ore and minerals to produce the materials for wind turbines and solar collectors (and cars and buildings and ...) also can and does destroy the environment. Do you honestly advocate that farming is bad because some contries destroy themselves by mining for fertilizer?
Farming, done the right way, is *not* grossly destructive to the ground. There are regions here in Europe that have been farmed for several thousands of years, and they are still very fertile. Plants do suck nutritients from the ground, but also from the air and solved in the water (minerals); good farming practices such as crop rotation let the soil recover in-between crops.
Of course, every climate and region has different soil. Directly transferring the techniques from soils in mild climate zones to those in the rainforest or sahel zone has proven very destructive. But with the right techniques, it seems that even rainforest soil can stay fertile (and the reason for forest destruction is that people keep on moving and burning down more forest because the soil becomes infertile over time).
So, your argument that oils from farm crops are not viable as fuel because they destroy the soil is flawed. And solar collectors and wind turbines are not the catch-all either and have their own problems. A mix of all these technologies seems to be the way to go.
You mean, applications of neuroevolution for games? Seems the hot topic du jour. Finally, bots with complex, non-deterministic, evolved behaviour...!
The University of Texas did this: http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/keyword?neuroevolution , game at http://nerogame.org/ . First you train your bots, then you test them in battle.
Then, a big chain decides to take over the ice cone market. It sells them 9 cents apiece; they can do that because they get the material for 5 cents only, as they buy the supplies in large quantities. The 25 and 15 cent vendors go out of business.
When the chain has the monopoly on ice cream cones, it gradually rises the price to 50 cents. The consumers moan, but they want ice cream, so they pay. Profit!
The free market is a double-edged sword. When healthy, it fosters competition and increase of production efficiency. When perverted, it creates monoculture.
That said, the commie system of "the state is your mother and your father; it does everything for you" doesn't work either. It leads to stagnation, when people don't really have incentive to take action on their own. That is why we Old Europeans are so crazy about the "social market economy" thing.
Actually, every time some tourist would take the sign, an exact duplicate would appear in its place.
There is a fundamental difference between the 'real' and the digital world - in the real world, copies are bounded by resources and costs. In the digital world, only information (= ideas, abstract concepts) is copied around, which costs about zero.
DRM for libraries its probably more legitimate, but nevertheless an artificial limitation.
What about sending out small atomic particles that decay in the right distance? The problem would be to find something that only decays to photons, not other harmful radiation (gamma radiation etc.)
Actually, professional Debian support is available from a number of consultants; pleasesee http://www.debian.org/consultants/ . So, if you need someone to throw money at and point fingers to, and who organises kernel hacking parties, you could get one from there.
Also, RedHat has many more important customers who are paying it; your support requests will be one of many other high-priority tasks, and the chances of fixing aren't too high either.
No reason to get pissed. I am just slightly amused, as a European, that the oh-so-advanced US has petty coverage problems with their cellphones. It seems to me that the real innovations in this sector happen first in Japan and the Southeast Asian countries, then in Europe, and then (maybe) in the US...
Whilst I have no doubt that other file format would be a good thing, don't forget that by supporting OGG and FLAC you're really only going after the small percentage of users that would use this format (compared to MP3).
In my opinion, not the OGG or FLAC formats are the problem for Joe Sixpack, but how to deal with them. You need to explain to them how to use those files, "for Dummies".
Make a selection page for download, or a question mark, where you boldly explain that OGG and FLAC are higher-quality formats, and how to (easily!) install plugins for them for Media player, Real Player etc. Leave MP3 VBR around 192 kBps as the default download format, which is listed first. (And, by the way, add a non-VBR type for those bad old MP3 disc players).
Actually, a lot of the cost is that of the switch and the re-training. I suspect that in 5, 10 years, when the next technology switch is to be done, the price for keeping Linux will be ridiculously low. One has to keep in mind that "long term" usually means just some five years maximum in this area.
.
I also suspect that no such complete technology switch will have to be done - Upgrades are much more smooth with Linux. Take Debian or RedHat - you can upgrade just the software when a new release comes out, and keep everything in place; most things will still work afterwards, and no re-configuration is necessary...
By the way, the details of Unilogs study can be found at
the city of Munich's website ; unfortunately it's in German. But you can try to babelfish the summary at the Heise news site