it would be valuable to know if a civilization thinks Jerry Lewis is funny.
Well, we already know that he was evicted from his homeworld and wound up here. Cruel since we don't have much in the way of off-world lift to reciprocate.
It's not genetic. It's how your brain changes as you grow up.
There are people who learn tonal languages as an adult successfully. I didn't have a problem doing this with Cantonese.
Why can some adults do this while many can't? FWIW, I scored 100% on a foreign language aptitude test in middle school; I'm also pretty good with understanding musical relationships by ear, and that's something I learned in the 8-14 age, so possibly relevant.
Yes, you can use programs to translate your pinyin into the characters and vice-versa, but how practical is that on the streets of Beijing?
I bet smartphones will handle this particular task effectively in the next decade. To me, verbal communication is going to be much harder to replace with a device than something like "Goggles" to read signs and menus.
Nokia has been the #1 phone manufacturer. Huh. I must get too much of my news from Slashdot.
(my first phone was a TDMA Nokia and it was a beast - practically unbreakable with good speakers and microphone; how I miss the quality of those days).
Re:I used it. Once.
on
Perl Turns 25
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What I found in using Perl was that no two Perl programmers could read each others code.
That's silly. I'm just a medium-grade Perl jockey and I read and understand other projects' code. I find bugs and submit patches.
Perl doesn't force good style on you, but if you follow the guides of Perl Best Practices and check yourslelf with Perl Critic you're going to produce code that most programmers can follow.
Some people aren't comfortable with 'enough rope to hang yourself', which is fine. Others think that forced indentation is the answer to good code style (I think semantic analysis is better). There are lots of options.
Couldn't it? Would it be possible, at least in theory, to compile CPAN modules to a binary format that could be linked to other programming languages? Is there any reason that CPAN couldn't be turned into something more like a shared library?
Yes, this is part of the perl6 effort. There are ports of all the other scripting languages to the ParrotVM being written for perl6. Once that's worked out you can write a module in Ruby, run it from Python - it doesn't matter. Use the best tool for the job (which is often the one you're most comfortable with).
Pick something you love, or an itch you're dying to scratch. If it's a passion you'll stick with it.
Then pick a language that fits the niche that you're working in. If you're gluing unix bits together that's one thing, if you're going to be pushing out a big web app, that's another, and if you're making meatspace things go "Bing" then that's a third.
As you said, an hour a day is a great way to get yourself to be serious about it.
Ding! ding! ding! Kimber, in my case. I can't hit shit with a glock.
That's fantastic. It was surprising to me at first how different each brand can be. I guess we've all got different paws and different brains wired to 'em.
I am not opposed to forcing would-be gun owners to qualify with a weapon similar to the one they're going to purchase
One of our local gun stores used to do that. They had an old warehouse space that they set up as a range and would allow purchasers to try out a few models to see what was going to be the right fit for them (and also to give them a good sense of who was buying this - the buyer's right to buy doesn't obligate the seller to sell). Anyway, the EPA shut them down for potential lead exposure, so now it's just cash&carry, hope&pray.
This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters.
But then when your SSD fails you have to throw out your hard drive too. It just so happens I'm here because Mushkin just sent me a "prove that you own the drive with the lifetime warranty" mail for the 60GB Chronos drive that was in my server and I'm procrastinating looking up the invoice.;)
Software handles this well. Windows has it built-in and Linux has several options.
I use flashcache (from Facebook) and ZFS (zfsonlinux project). bcache is also in-progress being integrated into the md stack.
ZFS:
zpool create tank/dev/sda3
zpool add tank cache/dev/sdb1
zpool add tank log/dev/sdb2
zpool attach tank/dev/sdb2/dev/sdc2
(read cache and mirrored write cache on mountpoint/tank )
It just so happens that I specified my Thinkpad with Centrino wireless so the mSATA bay was available and I put a 120GB drive in there and it's really a beautiful thing. I haven't done the measurements, but flashcache in front of/home should cut down on the power usage, besides being a nice speed boost. For me, $1/GB was the magic number to make it worthwhile. Oh, and hey, if anybody wants to help with the implementation of/etc/cachetab, hop on the list!
You're looking at it the wrong way. They don't care if you have a bomb/gun/knife in an airport, they care if you have a bomb/gun/knife and then get on a plane and it goes airborne. Then (despite the metal door) they think the plane will fly into something important.
And, fortunately for us, private airplanes could never crash into a building. Why, since they're not screened at all, the terr-ists would never think of trying to use them. Also fortuante, no terr-ists are willing to risk getting caught at a TSA booth, despite a 65% chance of getting through.
In real life I have the right to call myself whatever I want as long as I'm not trying to defraud anyone and screw you for saying I shouldn't have that right online.
Of course you do, but you don't have a right to use Facebook's services.
yeah, if you're an accomplished shooter and pistol grip is second nature. For people who don't practice enough or have a heavy trigger, it might be easy to not hit a 6" target at 20'.
Part of their product is a directory service. They're also trying to wade into commerce. They also have third-party authentication services through OAuth. For those three things, real names are usually required. No doubt hey have other products in the works - some of their new offering might require real names.
Additionally, anonymous people tend to act like jackasses online, so their costs are bound to be higher.
I'm curious (really) if German ecommerce sites have to accept nicknames along with credit card numbers (and deal with chargebacks if there's fraud).
I do not own a handgun, and I never will. There are not safe, especially around kids (I have two), and would be less effective than a rifle in almost any defensive scenario.
Lots of things aren't safe around kids if you don't train them properly. For example, swimming pools are nine times more dangerous than firearms for accidental deaths among children (note to all: check the CDC database for yourself).
In the US, approximately 125 children die each year from handgun accidents. Anywhere between 10,800 and 240,000 homicides are prevented by people carrying handguns (the low end of the range is for people who will admit to a federal agent that they used a firearm to diffuse a violent crime, the high end includes 'mere mentions' of a firearm and criminal-on-criminal gun use but strictly from a "victim's" perspective; also that 1 in 100 violent crimes turn into a homicide - see FBI data).
If you are going to use a rifle at close quarters with other people in the house; please use appropriate ammo and night sights. A short shotgun with a tight choke and home defense rounds (good pattern, will not penetrate 1/2" drywall) might be more appropriate. Remember, these things usually happen at night. But even a short shotgun can be hard to swing in a small house. I realize handguns require a higher degree of concentration to achieve accuracy, so there are downsides.
If you want to argue that the freedom to have guns as a hobby, or for the illusionary purpose of self defence, is worth this many deads, feel free to argue as such. But don't hide from the facts.
Guns make killing a hell of a lot easier. And if you make it easier to get guns, you end up with more killing.
The surest and most proven way to have millions and millions (and millions... ) of killings is to ban guns. Just ask the survivors of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Uruguay, Turkey, Germany, Guatemala where disarmament lead directly to mass murder. II
The ability to resist a tyrannical government is the reason for the second amendment - not hunting, target shooting, or home-defense (though they are inherent uses of the right). Domicide was a leading cause of death in the 20th Century.
Australia banned automatic rifles after several mass shootings and since then, they have had none.
yeah, their mass murderers just switched to arson for the largest mass-killing in Australia's history since then. Much better, right?
They did however, see a large spike in violent crime after the 1997 ban. Go ahead and look at the stats on their government's statistics website. For some reason they're not publishing any data after 2007, though - I wonder why.
So, basically, there was competent competition, and Dell's me-toosim wasn't cutting it.
Which is a perfectly valid business decision. Dell does really well selling to shops who are "Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft" and they can get better margins by going into markets with little competition and/or few comparison shoppers.
Slashdot Mirror
it would be valuable to know if a civilization thinks Jerry Lewis is funny.
Well, we already know that he was evicted from his homeworld and wound up here. Cruel since we don't have much in the way of off-world lift to reciprocate.
Plus the Andorians live right next to them and we all know what they are like.
Indeed. Where's the sign-up list?
It's not genetic. It's how your brain changes as you grow up.
There are people who learn tonal languages as an adult successfully. I didn't have a problem doing this with Cantonese.
Why can some adults do this while many can't? FWIW, I scored 100% on a foreign language aptitude test in middle school; I'm also pretty good with understanding musical relationships by ear, and that's something I learned in the 8-14 age, so possibly relevant.
Excellent post, but:
Yes, you can use programs to translate your pinyin into the characters and vice-versa, but how practical is that on the streets of Beijing?
I bet smartphones will handle this particular task effectively in the next decade. To me, verbal communication is going to be much harder to replace with a device than something like "Goggles" to read signs and menus.
Nokia has been the #1 phone manufacturer. Huh. I must get too much of my news from Slashdot.
(my first phone was a TDMA Nokia and it was a beast - practically unbreakable with good speakers and microphone; how I miss the quality of those days).
What I found in using Perl was that no two Perl programmers could read each others code.
That's silly. I'm just a medium-grade Perl jockey and I read and understand other projects' code. I find bugs and submit patches.
Perl doesn't force good style on you, but if you follow the guides of Perl Best Practices and check yourslelf with Perl Critic you're going to produce code that most programmers can follow.
Some people aren't comfortable with 'enough rope to hang yourself', which is fine. Others think that forced indentation is the answer to good code style (I think semantic analysis is better). There are lots of options.
Couldn't it? Would it be possible, at least in theory, to compile CPAN modules to a binary format that could be linked to other programming languages? Is there any reason that CPAN couldn't be turned into something more like a shared library?
Yes, this is part of the perl6 effort. There are ports of all the other scripting languages to the ParrotVM being written for perl6. Once that's worked out you can write a module in Ruby, run it from Python - it doesn't matter. Use the best tool for the job (which is often the one you're most comfortable with).
Pick something you love, or an itch you're dying to scratch. If it's a passion you'll stick with it.
Then pick a language that fits the niche that you're working in. If you're gluing unix bits together that's one thing, if you're going to be pushing out a big web app, that's another, and if you're making meatspace things go "Bing" then that's a third.
As you said, an hour a day is a great way to get yourself to be serious about it.
Ding! ding! ding! Kimber, in my case. I can't hit shit with a glock.
That's fantastic. It was surprising to me at first how different each brand can be. I guess we've all got different paws and different brains wired to 'em.
I am not opposed to forcing would-be gun owners to qualify with a weapon similar to the one they're going to purchase
One of our local gun stores used to do that. They had an old warehouse space that they set up as a range and would allow purchasers to try out a few models to see what was going to be the right fit for them (and also to give them a good sense of who was buying this - the buyer's right to buy doesn't obligate the seller to sell). Anyway, the EPA shut them down for potential lead exposure, so now it's just cash&carry, hope&pray.
Do we just not give a fuck about conflict of interest anymore?
'Anymore' suggests that things used to be different. "The good old days" is a myth.
That is the kind of corruption one would expect in a third world tinpot dictatorship.
Don't believe the propaganda. Every government that's ever existed on Earth has been corrupt, to one degree or another.
This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters.
But then when your SSD fails you have to throw out your hard drive too. It just so happens I'm here because Mushkin just sent me a "prove that you own the drive with the lifetime warranty" mail for the 60GB Chronos drive that was in my server and I'm procrastinating looking up the invoice. ;)
Software handles this well. Windows has it built-in and Linux has several options.
I use flashcache (from Facebook) and ZFS (zfsonlinux project). bcache is also in-progress being integrated into the md stack.
ZFS:
(read cache and mirrored write cache on mountpoint /tank )
Flashcache:
It just so happens that I specified my Thinkpad with Centrino wireless so the mSATA bay was available and I put a 120GB drive in there and it's really a beautiful thing. I haven't done the measurements, but flashcache in front of /home should cut down on the power usage, besides being a nice speed boost. For me, $1/GB was the magic number to make it worthwhile. Oh, and hey, if anybody wants to help with the implementation of /etc/cachetab, hop on the list!
Particles are waves, and waves are particles.
And fermions are not bosons.
You're looking at it the wrong way. They don't care if you have a bomb/gun/knife in an airport, they care if you have a bomb/gun/knife and then get on a plane and it goes airborne. Then (despite the metal door) they think the plane will fly into something important.
And, fortunately for us, private airplanes could never crash into a building. Why, since they're not screened at all, the terr-ists would never think of trying to use them. Also fortuante, no terr-ists are willing to risk getting caught at a TSA booth, despite a 65% chance of getting through.
I admire your creativity, but for normal mortals:
Q: What's your mother's maiden name?
A: qU$%3HHr28k4
OK, that makes me somewhat dependant on LastPass, but that's a somewhat smaller risk than outlined in TFS.
People need to quit repeating that myth.
Scientists say, "Myth confirmed."
Many dickheads are quite happy to be a mong under their own name.
This is also true.
In real life I have the right to call myself whatever I want as long as I'm not trying to defraud anyone and screw you for saying I shouldn't have that right online.
Of course you do, but you don't have a right to use Facebook's services.
yeah, if you're an accomplished shooter and pistol grip is second nature. For people who don't practice enough or have a heavy trigger, it might be easy to not hit a 6" target at 20'.
I don't get why Facebook is so against it?
Part of their product is a directory service. They're also trying to wade into commerce. They also have third-party authentication services through OAuth. For those three things, real names are usually required. No doubt hey have other products in the works - some of their new offering might require real names.
Additionally, anonymous people tend to act like jackasses online, so their costs are bound to be higher.
I'm curious (really) if German ecommerce sites have to accept nicknames along with credit card numbers (and deal with chargebacks if there's fraud).
I do not own a handgun, and I never will. There are not safe, especially around kids (I have two), and would be less effective than a rifle in almost any defensive scenario.
Lots of things aren't safe around kids if you don't train them properly. For example, swimming pools are nine times more dangerous than firearms for accidental deaths among children (note to all: check the CDC database for yourself).
In the US, approximately 125 children die each year from handgun accidents. Anywhere between 10,800 and 240,000 homicides are prevented by people carrying handguns (the low end of the range is for people who will admit to a federal agent that they used a firearm to diffuse a violent crime, the high end includes 'mere mentions' of a firearm and criminal-on-criminal gun use but strictly from a "victim's" perspective; also that 1 in 100 violent crimes turn into a homicide - see FBI data).
If you are going to use a rifle at close quarters with other people in the house; please use appropriate ammo and night sights. A short shotgun with a tight choke and home defense rounds (good pattern, will not penetrate 1/2" drywall) might be more appropriate. Remember, these things usually happen at night. But even a short shotgun can be hard to swing in a small house. I realize handguns require a higher degree of concentration to achieve accuracy, so there are downsides.
If you want to argue that the freedom to have guns as a hobby, or for the illusionary purpose of self defence, is worth this many deads, feel free to argue as such. But don't hide from the facts.
Guns make killing a hell of a lot easier. And if you make it easier to get guns, you end up with more killing.
The surest and most proven way to have millions and millions (and millions ... ) of killings is to ban guns. Just ask the survivors of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Uruguay, Turkey, Germany, Guatemala where disarmament lead directly to mass murder. II
The ability to resist a tyrannical government is the reason for the second amendment - not hunting, target shooting, or home-defense (though they are inherent uses of the right). Domicide was a leading cause of death in the 20th Century.
Australia banned automatic rifles after several mass shootings and since then, they have had none.
yeah, their mass murderers just switched to arson for the largest mass-killing in Australia's history since then. Much better, right?
They did however, see a large spike in violent crime after the 1997 ban. Go ahead and look at the stats on their government's statistics website. For some reason they're not publishing any data after 2007, though - I wonder why.
Sure, it's just the little thing that you can't do as much damage armed with only a knife as with a handful of semi-automatics...
Quite so. They found this out the hard way in Cambodia, Uruguay, China, Turkey, Germany, the Soviet Union and Guatemala.
Millions and millions of times.
So, basically, there was competent competition, and Dell's me-toosim wasn't cutting it.
Which is a perfectly valid business decision. Dell does really well selling to shops who are "Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft" and they can get better margins by going into markets with little competition and/or few comparison shoppers.