Clearly, the devil is in the details. Everything you said is correct and I am aware of these subtleties, but chose what I thought to be a reasonable simplification sufficiently detailed to make my point.
I don't believe my simplification was misleading, however, since your (a) and (b) fit neatly inside my (a), and your (c), while always a danger, was purposefully excluded when I eliminated statistical anomalies. In retrospect, I probably should have made it clearer in my (a) that causation could go either way.
There are a couple of phrases that are pet peeves of mine because people throw them around without really understanding them.
"Correlation does not imply causation" is, strictly speaking, true, but is often used to refute an argument rather than point out a possible questionable premise of an argument (if you don't understand the difference, don't use this phrase). Correlation by itself does not imply causation, but if the correlation is not a statistical anomaly, it implies either (a) causation or (b) common cause. Therefore it does not refute the argument so much as it says that "maybe the conclusion is wrong, but I can't say for sure without further information".
My other pet peeve phrase is "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" which is misleading at best. A more correct statement would be "Absence of evidence before reasonable investigation is not evidence of absence". Once a reasonable search for evidence has been made, especially if said evidence should be reasonably detectable by currently available methods, then an absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.
I've given up being peeved by "begs the question". People are going to use that phrase wrong and no amount of education will help this.
When you're used to hating something in one context, it's very easy to hate it in another.
Understanding the difference between 2 contexts and then reevaluating whether your position makes sense in the new context isn't something that people are naturally inclined to do unless it comes back to bite them in the ass. Then sometimes they learn.
Actually, the Hawking radiation doesn't come from inside the black hole.
When a particle/anti-particle pair tunnels into existence at the edge of a black hole, for some reason, the anti-particle tunnels into existence inside the black hole and is immediately annihilated by an already existing particle in the black hole (thus reducing the mass of the black hole by one particle's worth). The particle that tunneled into existence outside the black hole spins off and is referred to as "Hawking Radiation".
I've used Linux as my desktop since 1996. I still need to resort to using a windows machine periodically, but that's not the fault of Linux in my eyes, it's the fault of stupid management decisions that require me to use specific windows-only software (usually implemented as an ActiveX component) even though there are perfectly suitable Linux software solutions to the same problems.
That said, 5 years ago I probably resorted to using a Windows machine to do something at work once or twice a week. Now it's once or twice every 6 months.
In my 6 years of schooling, the only time I had to turn something in in Word format was for a course where the assignment was to write up our first resume.
It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.
MS Office isn't even 99.9999% compatible with it's previous versions, so by your definition, it's not worth using...and yet you clearly think it is worth using.
It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.
"completely useless" is clearly too strong a description. The people in our org who are constantly transferring documents between other orgs don't use MSOffice. They use MSOffice AND Openoffice.org AND Word Perfect AND...anything else they need to open. I've heard them comment that OOO will sometimes do a better job than MSOffice at opening old Word or Excel documents.
And yeah I've heard the whole "just keep one copy around in case" argument and it does not hold water in a business. People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable.
If you think your people are being 100% utilized, either you're misinformed or nobody wants to work for you (or both). 3 minutes out of a day gets lost in the noise of the work day. Do you allow your workers to take "potty breaks" during the day or only on their lunch hour?
You're correct that the lack of whitespace in front of the loop body would cause problems in python since the loop body is longer than one line.
The question is, is this how you would want that code to look? No indentation at all? It's hideous!
Without braces and the missing "else" token, it would be very hard to know what this code was meant to do and fix it if it were broken (in the absence of the descriptive comment). Meaningful whitespace would make it easier to read.
Portage now will remove blocking packages if it notices that a new package fills the same dependency. I don't know when that happened, but I haven't had to manually resolve a block situation for several months now.
As to configuration options, the only options I'm aware of that there aren't use flags for is prefix and related. However, if you're unhappy with the use flags available to you, you can create your own ebuild and put it in your local overlay.
That's how it was designed to work and, in my experience, it works quite well.
Have you ever tried using Python? What you've done above would be perfectly fine in Python.
Python only enforces consistent indenting at the beginning of the statement. All of your spread out lines are fine since the whitespace is within a statement. All your parameters to Product() are clearly not new statements since they're in parenthesis, so python wouldn't complain at all. If they weren't inside parenthesis (or brackets), then Python couldn't be sure that they weren't new statements unless you ended the previous line with a '\'.
Have you got an example of white-space formatting that would actually cause problems in Python?
Theoretically possible for the Mac to be a carrier, but if the windows boxes all have protection, then there's no need for the Mac to have that crapware installed.
If our information security department ever decides I need to install crap like that on my Linux machine, I'll fight it all the way up to the senior VP.
And that's exactly why the only computer game I keep coming back to (for the last 20 years) is nethack. I've read all the spoilers and strategy discussions, but it's always a challenge to apply what I know to the game. It's never impossible, but the difficulty scales faster than your character's abilities.
Just watch. Once IE's market share hits 50%, suddenly Microsoft will start playing ball. The search revenue from all the IE users who don't bother to change the default search is too nice to simply give up.
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Clearly, the devil is in the details. Everything you said is correct and I am aware of these subtleties, but chose what I thought to be a reasonable simplification sufficiently detailed to make my point.
I don't believe my simplification was misleading, however, since your (a) and (b) fit neatly inside my (a), and your (c), while always a danger, was purposefully excluded when I eliminated statistical anomalies. In retrospect, I probably should have made it clearer in my (a) that causation could go either way.
Thanks for pointing that out.
There are a couple of phrases that are pet peeves of mine because people throw them around without really understanding them.
"Correlation does not imply causation" is, strictly speaking, true, but is often used to refute an argument rather than point out a possible questionable premise of an argument (if you don't understand the difference, don't use this phrase). Correlation by itself does not imply causation, but if the correlation is not a statistical anomaly, it implies either (a) causation or (b) common cause. Therefore it does not refute the argument so much as it says that "maybe the conclusion is wrong, but I can't say for sure without further information".
My other pet peeve phrase is "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" which is misleading at best. A more correct statement would be "Absence of evidence before reasonable investigation is not evidence of absence". Once a reasonable search for evidence has been made, especially if said evidence should be reasonably detectable by currently available methods, then an absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.
I've given up being peeved by "begs the question". People are going to use that phrase wrong and no amount of education will help this.
When you're used to hating something in one context, it's very easy to hate it in another.
Understanding the difference between 2 contexts and then reevaluating whether your position makes sense in the new context isn't something that people are naturally inclined to do unless it comes back to bite them in the ass. Then sometimes they learn.
The disadvantage is that algae and plants don't have the energy density that oil and nuclear have.
The surface area of ponds that would be required to replace a single reactor or oil pump is sobering.
Bio fuels are a dead end. There is not enough arable land in the world to allow us to fill our gas tanks and our stomachs.
Which is why there is so much interest in bio fuels that can be derived from sea water and non-arable land.
There is no dead end, although bio fuels by themselves won't likely scale up sufficiently to meet all our demand.
Actually, the Hawking radiation doesn't come from inside the black hole.
When a particle/anti-particle pair tunnels into existence at the edge of a black hole, for some reason, the anti-particle tunnels into existence inside the black hole and is immediately annihilated by an already existing particle in the black hole (thus reducing the mass of the black hole by one particle's worth). The particle that tunneled into existence outside the black hole spins off and is referred to as "Hawking Radiation".
The wikipedia article is excellent.
I've used Linux as my desktop since 1996. I still need to resort to using a windows machine periodically, but that's not the fault of Linux in my eyes, it's the fault of stupid management decisions that require me to use specific windows-only software (usually implemented as an ActiveX component) even though there are perfectly suitable Linux software solutions to the same problems.
That said, 5 years ago I probably resorted to using a Windows machine to do something at work once or twice a week. Now it's once or twice every 6 months.
This is an improvement :)
Are there any FF plugins that currently do that?
As long as chrome prevents someone from switching *back* to IE, haven't we gained something?
Hmmm...what would it take to recharge my 1.2v and 3.7v rechargeable batteries off the 45v phone line?
So the power's out, so I have no interference at my end when I send, but if the power isn't out at the receiver, how will they hear my transmission?
In my 6 years of schooling, the only time I had to turn something in in Word format was for a course where the assignment was to write up our first resume.
It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.
MS Office isn't even 99.9999% compatible with it's previous versions, so by your definition, it's not worth using...and yet you clearly think it is worth using.
It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.
"completely useless" is clearly too strong a description. The people in our org who are constantly transferring documents between other orgs don't use MSOffice. They use MSOffice AND Openoffice.org AND Word Perfect AND...anything else they need to open. I've heard them comment that OOO will sometimes do a better job than MSOffice at opening old Word or Excel documents.
And yeah I've heard the whole "just keep one copy around in case" argument and it does not hold water in a business. People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable.
If you think your people are being 100% utilized, either you're misinformed or nobody wants to work for you (or both). 3 minutes out of a day gets lost in the noise of the work day. Do you allow your workers to take "potty breaks" during the day or only on their lunch hour?
You're correct that the lack of whitespace in front of the loop body would cause problems in python since the loop body is longer than one line.
The question is, is this how you would want that code to look? No indentation at all? It's hideous!
Without braces and the missing "else" token, it would be very hard to know what this code was meant to do and fix it if it were broken (in the absence of the descriptive comment). Meaningful whitespace would make it easier to read.
How would Open Solaris save them money over using Linux?
Portage now will remove blocking packages if it notices that a new package fills the same dependency. I don't know when that happened, but I haven't had to manually resolve a block situation for several months now.
As to configuration options, the only options I'm aware of that there aren't use flags for is prefix and related. However, if you're unhappy with the use flags available to you, you can create your own ebuild and put it in your local overlay.
That's how it was designed to work and, in my experience, it works quite well.
What evil do you see in Google's actions?
Seriously, what am I missing?
I'm a happy Gentoo user.
What "Shit" are you referring to?
Have you ever tried using Python? What you've done above would be perfectly fine in Python.
Python only enforces consistent indenting at the beginning of the statement. All of your spread out lines are fine since the whitespace is within a statement. All your parameters to Product() are clearly not new statements since they're in parenthesis, so python wouldn't complain at all. If they weren't inside parenthesis (or brackets), then Python couldn't be sure that they weren't new statements unless you ended the previous line with a '\'.
Have you got an example of white-space formatting that would actually cause problems in Python?
Please post an example of code you've written in your language of choice.
If you're like 99% of the decent programmers out there, whitespace is already meaningful in your code. Python simply makes it explicit.
Theoretically possible for the Mac to be a carrier, but if the windows boxes all have protection, then there's no need for the Mac to have that crapware installed.
If our information security department ever decides I need to install crap like that on my Linux machine, I'll fight it all the way up to the senior VP.
There are several classless tabletop systems.
GURPs is probably the most visible example, but the Heroes system and Fudge are both classless. The pre-D20 call of cthulu was also classless.
Fudge is my current favorite since it's so simple and resistant to rules-lawyering.
And that's exactly why the only computer game I keep coming back to (for the last 20 years) is nethack. I've read all the spoilers and strategy discussions, but it's always a challenge to apply what I know to the game. It's never impossible, but the difficulty scales faster than your character's abilities.
Maybe some day I'll win...
Just watch. Once IE's market share hits 50%, suddenly Microsoft will start playing ball. The search revenue from all the IE users who don't bother to change the default search is too nice to simply give up.
I believe this is by design.
Dumping it from one database and loading it into the other will always work, and, I believe, is the recommended procedure.