As mad as the world is right now, the strange fact is that it has never been more sane.
Man. That's an incredibly depressing thought.
SQL says what to do
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
there's a bigger gap between what the code says and what the code does
That's stated incorrectly. With SQL, the code says what to do, but it does not say how to do it. That's the difference between "normal" procedural code and languages like SQL.
Some people get advanced degrees and don't have kids.
How does that show that the fittest are surviving? To me, that's showing that the fittest are dying out.
don't expect any changes in the race to become visible any time soon... (not to mention it would take a few thousand generations to see much of any change at all)
I think you (and many many people) misunderstand the process by which evolution occurs. The survival of the fittest assumes that there's a harsh environment that the organisms must be fit for. During periods when there's not much environmental pressure to kill off a large number of individuals, there's not much evolutionary pressure. The strongest evolutionary pressure comes about when there's significant environmental change, or even more so when there's a catastrophe. That's when the strong have a much greater chance of surviving than the weak.
The environment we're optimizing for is changing pretty fast right now, so don't expect any changes
I think you've got that backwards. If the environment were NOT changing, then there would be no reason for us to adapt and evolve. If the environment IS changing, then we'll have to adapt to it.
But I'm not seeing this quick change in the environment that you're talking about. I suppose you could argue that we've significantly changed the environment through urbanization and deforestation. But that's really about us adapting the environment to us. So it's putting less evolutionary pressure on us, not more. The only significant environmental change I can see is global warming. I think the only adaptation we're going to have to do for that is to develop better air conditioning systems, and better means of protecting ourselves from extreme weather conditions.
But as I said, we're much more likely to face evolutionary pressure from random natural disasters than anything else.
Don't forget the War on Poverty that started back in 1964. We haven't heard much about it in the past few decades, so I guess poverty has been obliterated. On the positive side, I suppose that means that a "War on something" will eventually get forgotten. Even the War on Drugs has more or less been forgotten now. I can't wait until the War on Terror gets forgotten. I'm just a bit worried that it's much too effective for the government to let go so easily.
Another point I'd like to make is that the Constitution is pretty clear about declarations of war. Only Congress can declare war. And they have not done so since World War II, I believe. But any time someone mentions that we are at war, you should always point out that we cannot be at war, if Congress did not declare it.
Another good indication that we are not at war is that we are not acting like we're at war. We're not rationing anything. Most of us are not sacrificing much in our daily lives to ensure that we win the war. Heck, most of us don't even pay attention to events in Iraq on a daily basis. If we were at war, it would be much more in our daily conscience. The only thing our government is asking us to give up in the War on Terror is some of our freedoms, and a relatively few number of lives in Iraq. (Don't misunderstand me; I think we've lost too many people in Iraq. But if we were really fighting a war we had to win, a lot more people would be volunteering their lives to fight to win.)
The term Web 2.0 was coined because people started to notice a fundamental qualitative change in the nature of some of the newer web sites. (Although it should probably have been called Web 3.0, because the move from static to dynamic pages was an even bigger fundamental change.) So there was a legitimate need for the term.
The problem is that the term has a somewhat nebulous definition. (Partly because it's a qualitative change.) And people (especially journalists) like buzzwords. So people now like to throw the Web 2.0 moniker around without thinking how well it actually applies.
Social networking is a part of Web 2.0, but it's not all that's required to be Web 2.0. So the article and title should really be talking about social networking, not Web 2.0.
I would prefer to see advertising for products that interest me, as opposed to all the mindless drivel about things I would never buy. I mean, we're going to have advertising no matter what. Why not make it for stuff I might actually buy? That seems to be a win-win to me. I get to learn about stuff I can buy, and advertisers save money by targeting people who might actually buy their products and services.
Perhaps there might be a problem when advertisers start targeting me for Viagra, or some other product for some embarrassing condition I have. But as many others have pointed out, social networking is built upon user-contributed data. So if I don't want to tell people I have ED, I don't see how the advertisers would be able to figure it out. If they went and got my address from my doctor, then I would be concerned.
There have been plenty of ships that sunk with lots of people on board. The Sultana sank in the Mississippi River in 1865, killing 1700 of the 2400 onboard.
The only reason that artists don't get money from AllofMP3.com is that the record companies won't accept the royalty payments. Because if they did, they'd be admitting that AllofMP3.com is legitimate.
I wouldn't expect channel bonding to significantly improve latency. I'd be surprised if you got more than 10% improvement, unless you are bandwidth-limited.
How many of you think OJ killed his wife? But he was never proven guilty, thus he must be innocent under "innocent until proven guilty".
Innocent under the law does not imply innocent of the crime.
I think the problem with the OJ case and other similar cases is that it's pretty obvious to most people that the crime was committed. But a rich person is often able to hire high-paid lawyers to confuse the situation enough to obscure the facts that would otherwise have been obvious. Thus, there's a real problem in that justice is not blind to the wealth and power of the defendent.
There are also many (more) cases where the poor are wrongly convicted of crimes because they can't afford a good lawyer. But those cases get much less media attention.
I think many (most?) people can stand for a system that will let 10 criminals go in order to save 1 innocent man from being sentenced to a long jail term, or the death penalty. But I think people are less likely to stand for a system in which justice can be bought.
I think a lot of people (including perhaps the courts) mis-interpret what "Freedom of the Press" means. We tend to think of "the press" as a group of people who write newspaper articles. But if you read the 1st Amendment carefully, everything it lists are actions. So "the press" actually means the act of reporting, publishing, and printing -- i.e. journalism, not journalists.
Maybe there should be a site to allow anonymous reporting of vulnerabilities. This way people could do the right thing without having to worry about the repurcussions.
You could have some sort of secret key to verify that you were the original submitor, if you later wanted recognition for the report. (I imagine a PGP signature of a secret text would be sufficient to allow validation, without any chance of determining who posted until they came forward.)
Many wikis solve this problem by locking the page when someone is editing it. My wiki of choice (dokuwiki) also has a time-out on locks, so if you don't save or preview (which restarts the lock timer) within that time, your lock expires, and someone else may edit the page.
True, locking the page is not as elegant a solution, but it's a lot simpler to implement.
I wonder how a multi-user editor handles 2 people editing the same character in a line. I'd suspect that some of them would actually implement locking on a per-line basis. The last one I saw showed each user's current line in a highlighted color. I wonder if that was also used to indicate that you couldn't edit that line.
I don't see how you'd reach such a conclusion. At the very least, he is saying that the spirit of the law needs to be considered. This is not at all unusual; judges even go so far as to research the arguments of the legislature when they were constructing a law.
More to the point, the judge is saying that the law says that a plaintiff must have sufficient standing to proceed with a case. In this case, he found that the plaintiff did not have such sufficient standing, as he had not claimed any harm pertinent under the law.
The only technical difficulties of the GPL (that I can think of) are the parts about "source code" and "object code". And source code is defined well enough in the license text.
I thought the GPL also mentioned "linking", but apparently that's just in the LGPL. Still, an understanding of linking would be helpful to determine what is and what is not a derived work, at least in respect to system libraries.
Licenses can screw over those that accept the license by taking away rights they would have had, had they not agreed to the license. The GPL doesn't take away any rights -- it merely adds rights, as long as you follow certain requirements.
For example, there is no legal restriction on using a copyrighted work, or reselling it (assuming you are reselling the original, and have made no copies). But most commercial software licenses take those rights away. The GPL does not take those rights away.
I think what pisses off the Slashdot crowd is trying to take advantage of the benefits of the GPL (distribution) without adhering to the requirements. That was never the intention of the GPL. The restictions of the GPL are mainly there to keep people from restricting other people's rights. So it is clearly the intention of the GPL to not allow that. (This is the main difference between the GPL and the BSD license.) It's not the distribution that pisses us off -- it's the restriction of people's rights, and taking advantage of our gifts to the community without following the simple rules we require to do so.
Um. I think you're half right. It might be legal for MS and Sony to agree to give away game systems. But it would be illegal for them to do so in order to put Nintendo out of business. It's also not clear whether it would be OK for them to get together to agree on giving game systems away for free -- the ruling only speaks to the parties using a common license that agrees to give stuff away for free.
Slashdot Mirror
As mad as the world is right now, the strange fact is that it has never been more sane.
Man. That's an incredibly depressing thought.
there's a bigger gap between what the code says and what the code does
That's stated incorrectly. With SQL, the code says what to do, but it does not say how to do it. That's the difference between "normal" procedural code and languages like SQL.
Some people get advanced degrees and don't have kids.
... (not to mention it would take a few thousand generations to see much of any change at all)
How does that show that the fittest are surviving? To me, that's showing that the fittest are dying out.
don't expect any changes in the race to become visible any time soon
I think you (and many many people) misunderstand the process by which evolution occurs. The survival of the fittest assumes that there's a harsh environment that the organisms must be fit for. During periods when there's not much environmental pressure to kill off a large number of individuals, there's not much evolutionary pressure. The strongest evolutionary pressure comes about when there's significant environmental change, or even more so when there's a catastrophe. That's when the strong have a much greater chance of surviving than the weak.
The environment we're optimizing for is changing pretty fast right now, so don't expect any changes
I think you've got that backwards. If the environment were NOT changing, then there would be no reason for us to adapt and evolve. If the environment IS changing, then we'll have to adapt to it.
But I'm not seeing this quick change in the environment that you're talking about. I suppose you could argue that we've significantly changed the environment through urbanization and deforestation. But that's really about us adapting the environment to us. So it's putting less evolutionary pressure on us, not more. The only significant environmental change I can see is global warming. I think the only adaptation we're going to have to do for that is to develop better air conditioning systems, and better means of protecting ourselves from extreme weather conditions.
But as I said, we're much more likely to face evolutionary pressure from random natural disasters than anything else.
Don't forget the War on Poverty that started back in 1964. We haven't heard much about it in the past few decades, so I guess poverty has been obliterated. On the positive side, I suppose that means that a "War on something" will eventually get forgotten. Even the War on Drugs has more or less been forgotten now. I can't wait until the War on Terror gets forgotten. I'm just a bit worried that it's much too effective for the government to let go so easily.
Another point I'd like to make is that the Constitution is pretty clear about declarations of war. Only Congress can declare war. And they have not done so since World War II, I believe. But any time someone mentions that we are at war, you should always point out that we cannot be at war, if Congress did not declare it.
Another good indication that we are not at war is that we are not acting like we're at war. We're not rationing anything. Most of us are not sacrificing much in our daily lives to ensure that we win the war. Heck, most of us don't even pay attention to events in Iraq on a daily basis. If we were at war, it would be much more in our daily conscience. The only thing our government is asking us to give up in the War on Terror is some of our freedoms, and a relatively few number of lives in Iraq. (Don't misunderstand me; I think we've lost too many people in Iraq. But if we were really fighting a war we had to win, a lot more people would be volunteering their lives to fight to win.)
The term Web 2.0 was coined because people started to notice a fundamental qualitative change in the nature of some of the newer web sites. (Although it should probably have been called Web 3.0, because the move from static to dynamic pages was an even bigger fundamental change.) So there was a legitimate need for the term.
The problem is that the term has a somewhat nebulous definition. (Partly because it's a qualitative change.) And people (especially journalists) like buzzwords. So people now like to throw the Web 2.0 moniker around without thinking how well it actually applies.
Social networking is a part of Web 2.0, but it's not all that's required to be Web 2.0. So the article and title should really be talking about social networking, not Web 2.0.
I would prefer to see advertising for products that interest me, as opposed to all the mindless drivel about things I would never buy. I mean, we're going to have advertising no matter what. Why not make it for stuff I might actually buy? That seems to be a win-win to me. I get to learn about stuff I can buy, and advertisers save money by targeting people who might actually buy their products and services.
Perhaps there might be a problem when advertisers start targeting me for Viagra, or some other product for some embarrassing condition I have. But as many others have pointed out, social networking is built upon user-contributed data. So if I don't want to tell people I have ED, I don't see how the advertisers would be able to figure it out. If they went and got my address from my doctor, then I would be concerned.
Lynx OS?
There have been plenty of ships that sunk with lots of people on board. The Sultana sank in the Mississippi River in 1865, killing 1700 of the 2400 onboard.
Actually, the single best way to catch bad guys is to arrest everyone and put them in jail. Collecting evidence against everyone is only second best.
To phrase it more properly, the RIAA is hindering the WTO from allowing Russia to join. (In Soviet Russia reference unintentional.)
The only reason that artists don't get money from AllofMP3.com is that the record companies won't accept the royalty payments. Because if they did, they'd be admitting that AllofMP3.com is legitimate.
Or here and here.
Or it could mean that we've been here so long, we remember what's under the pile of shit.
I wouldn't expect channel bonding to significantly improve latency. I'd be surprised if you got more than 10% improvement, unless you are bandwidth-limited.
How many of you think OJ killed his wife? But he was never proven guilty, thus he must be innocent under "innocent until proven guilty".
Innocent under the law does not imply innocent of the crime.
I think the problem with the OJ case and other similar cases is that it's pretty obvious to most people that the crime was committed. But a rich person is often able to hire high-paid lawyers to confuse the situation enough to obscure the facts that would otherwise have been obvious. Thus, there's a real problem in that justice is not blind to the wealth and power of the defendent.
There are also many (more) cases where the poor are wrongly convicted of crimes because they can't afford a good lawyer. But those cases get much less media attention.
I think many (most?) people can stand for a system that will let 10 criminals go in order to save 1 innocent man from being sentenced to a long jail term, or the death penalty. But I think people are less likely to stand for a system in which justice can be bought.
You could probably have reported that to the judge, and he would have declared a mis-trial.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
I think a lot of people (including perhaps the courts) mis-interpret what "Freedom of the Press" means. We tend to think of "the press" as a group of people who write newspaper articles. But if you read the 1st Amendment carefully, everything it lists are actions. So "the press" actually means the act of reporting, publishing, and printing -- i.e. journalism, not journalists.
Maybe there should be a site to allow anonymous reporting of vulnerabilities. This way people could do the right thing without having to worry about the repurcussions.
You could have some sort of secret key to verify that you were the original submitor, if you later wanted recognition for the report. (I imagine a PGP signature of a secret text would be sufficient to allow validation, without any chance of determining who posted until they came forward.)
Many wikis solve this problem by locking the page when someone is editing it. My wiki of choice (dokuwiki) also has a time-out on locks, so if you don't save or preview (which restarts the lock timer) within that time, your lock expires, and someone else may edit the page.
True, locking the page is not as elegant a solution, but it's a lot simpler to implement.
I wonder how a multi-user editor handles 2 people editing the same character in a line. I'd suspect that some of them would actually implement locking on a per-line basis. The last one I saw showed each user's current line in a highlighted color. I wonder if that was also used to indicate that you couldn't edit that line.
I don't see how you'd reach such a conclusion. At the very least, he is saying that the spirit of the law needs to be considered. This is not at all unusual; judges even go so far as to research the arguments of the legislature when they were constructing a law.
More to the point, the judge is saying that the law says that a plaintiff must have sufficient standing to proceed with a case. In this case, he found that the plaintiff did not have such sufficient standing, as he had not claimed any harm pertinent under the law.
The only technical difficulties of the GPL (that I can think of) are the parts about "source code" and "object code". And source code is defined well enough in the license text.
I thought the GPL also mentioned "linking", but apparently that's just in the LGPL. Still, an understanding of linking would be helpful to determine what is and what is not a derived work, at least in respect to system libraries.
Licenses can screw over those that accept the license by taking away rights they would have had, had they not agreed to the license. The GPL doesn't take away any rights -- it merely adds rights, as long as you follow certain requirements.
For example, there is no legal restriction on using a copyrighted work, or reselling it (assuming you are reselling the original, and have made no copies). But most commercial software licenses take those rights away. The GPL does not take those rights away.
I think what pisses off the Slashdot crowd is trying to take advantage of the benefits of the GPL (distribution) without adhering to the requirements. That was never the intention of the GPL. The restictions of the GPL are mainly there to keep people from restricting other people's rights. So it is clearly the intention of the GPL to not allow that. (This is the main difference between the GPL and the BSD license.) It's not the distribution that pisses us off -- it's the restriction of people's rights, and taking advantage of our gifts to the community without following the simple rules we require to do so.
Um. I think you're half right. It might be legal for MS and Sony to agree to give away game systems. But it would be illegal for them to do so in order to put Nintendo out of business. It's also not clear whether it would be OK for them to get together to agree on giving game systems away for free -- the ruling only speaks to the parties using a common license that agrees to give stuff away for free.