Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Mostly agree, so just responding to selected points:
To use a block it's not necessary to create an object and that's good for the performance, e. g. if you have to iterate very often over some collection.
I suspect that an iterator could reuse the same block without breaking the semantics, but in any case I'm not strongly motivated by perfomance in this context.
But there is an ambiguity because the first block could also be a hash constructor. I am not sure if it would be possible to solve that problem by changing the parser.
Easy. Hashes have "=>"; blocks don't.:)
You can choose between having to look up the variables everytime you want to know their scope or between seeing it easily and change every variable if you want to extract a method. I think to choose the latter is a good choice for a language where you don't usually program in a code browser.
I suspect my design/coding style leads to less concern with looking up the scope or storage class of variables than some other people's styles do. At least, I hear other people worring about it much more than I ever find myself worring about it.
One way to describe my style: I wear two hats. When I have the "tool maker" hat on, I know all about the scope, etc. because that's what I'm working on. I start from the metadata and work out. When I have the "tool user" hat on, I don't care about things like that, because I'm using the tool and not worrying about how it works inside.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. There are a lot of different thinking-styles out there. I worked in one shop where the style was to initial everything (e.g. identifiers of the form MQR.____) "to avoid name conflicts" and "so you always know who to talk to if it's broken"!
And if you had read my post, you would have noticed that I was making the same point you are, specifically that the headline and blurb were totatally absurd and unrelated to the research. To recap:
Someone did some research
Someone else posted an article on slashdot, totally misrepresenting the research.
I posted a comment, pointing out that the article on slashdot was an absurd misrepresentation of the research, and suggesting a better headline.
You replied to my comment, telling me to RTFA and quoting the research but completely missing my point, that the headline and blurb on slashdot were absurd and missed the point of the research.
Re-read my post. I didn't offer an "interpretation of the article" (which I did read before posting). I said that interpretation of the article and headline posted on slashdot (which, I might point out, someone else submitted to slashdot) was absurd. You may be right in thinking it was a "hook" to get people to read the article; I know such tactics are common in tabloid journalism and in movie adverts. That doesn't mean that it wasn't absurd.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Lisp is a very clean and elegant language
I used to think that, until I had to do some serious digging through X3J13.
IMHO, common lisp isn't all that clean (unless you are comparing it to something like C).
-- MarkusQ
Re:That's not what we mean by clean, friend.
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I'm a big fan of Ruby and its clean syntax too, but I think MarkusQ (and subsequent repliers) mistake what that means. Ruby's syntax is clean in that there isn't a lot of stuff in the syntax just to define statements, expressions, lists and whatnot.
You definition of "clean syntax" doesn't quite work the way you seem to think it does. Ruby does have a lot of stuff to define lists, etc. The fact that these things are optional doesn't mean they aren't there. That's why (rather than using your definition) we've been talking about the core / minimal syntax in terms of the smallest subset of the syntactic rules needed to use the full power of the language, rather than the fact that there are additional rules that let you write uncluttered programs.
Yes, you can write uncluttered programs in ruby. But this ability come at a cost, insofar as it requires a more cluttered syntax (lots of special case rules) to allow it. Having a simple syntax makes a language easier to learn, even if that syntax requires a bit of extra typing (think postscript). Having additional rules (shortcuts) to allow for less cluttered code can make programs written in the language easier to read and maintain (think ruby) but it can also lead to cryptic soup (think perl).
-- MarkusQ
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> * Blocks are litteraly a bag hung on the side. Needlessly ugly and limiting.
Why do you feel they are ugly? Ok, they are not real functions like scheme has them, but Ruby wants to be an object oriented language, so it's ok that they are (can be transformed to) objects.
I don't object to blocks being objects; I object to them being arbitrarily forced into a special-syntax-optional-singleton-parameter gheto. Why can't I define a method that takes two or more blocks (e.g. if/then/else) with the same syntax I use for methods that take a single block? Why can't I introspect the structure of a block? Why the duality with Proc objects? In short, why aren't blocks first class objects?
>* The typographic hungarian notation ($ for globals, capitals for constants, etc)
Hungarian notation encodes the type of a variable into the variable name. In Ruby the sigils are used to show the scope of the variables.
Hungarian notation (as the term is generaly used) encodes metadata into the variable name. Type, class, scope, storage class, etc. are all metadata. None of them should be duct-taped on to variable names (IMHO) because it obscures the intent of the code with a clutter of details about the means.
You can see at one glance that @@foo is class variable, @bar is an instance variable and $baz is a global variable. I found this to be very useful while refactoring code.
Sure, and I can imagine cases where it would be handy to have a language require that every variable reference includes a comma seperated list of the line numbers of each reaching assignment. It sure would make it easy to spot uninitialized variables, for example. But in general, it would make the code harder to read and maintain.
More to the point, in ruby I'd like to be able to change the scope or storage class of an object reference without having to rename it.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, but it has *loads* less parentheses than scheme.:)
If they bother you too much, try writing a little pre-processor (you can do it in about 20 lines of lex/yacc or so) that takes code with sailent structure (python style indentation) and spits it out with the parens?
-- MarkusQ
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
*laugh*
I should have read your post before responding to __past__; I could have mostly said "see RevAaron's comment."
The main point on which I disagree with you is that method calls are actually a small part of C++ & perl syntax. Control structures, expressions, etc. are all distinct (and ad hoc), because the types they opperate on (booleans, integers, etc.) are not objects. Conversely, in ruby everything is an object, and (if you want to) you can skip the sugar and write code that only passes messages to objects. This isn't as obvious as it is in (say) smalltalk, but it's at least true in ruby, whereas it's not in c++ or perl.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I just thought of two even better examples of (syntactically) clean languages: both forth and prolog have very clean basic syntax.
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I just don't like it when a language designer decides which ones he personally likes and includes them, without a possibility for users to create their own.
Agreed. I'm not saying ruby is perfect, just that I like it slightly more than python and a lot more than perl. Its syntax isn't as clean as, say postscript, smalltalk, or scheme, but it's much better than bash, c++ or vb. Maybe somewhere around common lisp?
My biggest gripes:
Blocks are litteraly a bag hung on the side. Needlessly ugly and limiting.
The typographic hungarian notation ($ for globals, capitals for constants, etc)
The premptive binding of literals to built in classes.
The perl compatibility frosting.
It's still my scripting language of choice though.
-- MarkusQ
Manned space flight has achieved nothing of note since Apollo. Nothing scientific, nothing cultural, nothing economic. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Agreed again. You forgot "ziltch" and "the big goose egg" but otherwise I agree withyou completely. I mean, here we keep sending these people into a mind bogglingly enourmous repository of natural resources, with more much energy, gold, iron, hydrocarbons, you name it than humanity has used in its entire existance just floating around for the taking, and they don't even bring us back a lousy t-shirt.
Who needs 'em, that's what I say! We should just stay right here and focus on killing each other to gain control over the little bit that we've already got instead of chaising after pie-in-the-sky. Do you realize how many bombs we could have bought with the money we waisted on that stupid manned space program? Heck, we could own the place!
And don't give me any of that nonsense about the dinosaurs. I mean, look how long they lasted without a space program! We've probably got lots of time left right here! Besides, if we all stay home (work from home, shop from home, socialize from home, explore from home, you name it) like I was saying in my previous post, we can conserve a lot so we probably won't run out of anything important for a long long long time.
The X Prize just encourages the believe that manned space flight is a worthwhile end in itself. It isn't.
You are so right. For that matter, we should start phasing out comercial air travel. It uses enormous amounts of fuel, causes occasional spectacular loss of life, and to what end? The vast majority of people who travel anywhere by air go right back to where they came from within a month or so. What little real good is accomplished by maned air travel could just as well (and much more safely and cheaply) be handled by phone and parcel post.
And don't even get me started about human travel in automobiles. What lunitic thought that up? Why more people don't telecommute is beyond me. Heck, you can even get your groceries delivered. What do you need to go out for? To get gas for your car? Bah!
Now, some people will say I'm going too far, but I don't see why anyone wants to leave there own house, let alone their home planet! What's so interesting out there, anyway? Meeting people? Heck, that's what the internet is for. Intertainment? Same deal. In fact, name one thing that you think you can only get by leaving your house and I bet I can find it for you on the internet in under fifteen minutes!
Space? Phooie I say! Download some good games and get over it.
-- QsukraM
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
it had the same
conceptual structure as Python, but the cryptic syntax of perl
I'm not sure what language you looked at, but it doesn't sound like ruby.
Ruby is a deeply object oriented in the tradition of smalltalk; python is a superfically object oriented language more in the tradition of C++ or object pascal. Until recently, for example, you could not derive your own classes from the built in classes.
The basic syntax of ruby is very clean (a fact which is somewhat obscured by the "syntactic sugar" provided for some commonly used features (such as operators) and the provision of aliases for some global objects that are intended to ease the transition from perl). The basic syntax is:
where object, method_name, and the arguments can all objects and can be given by named constants, literals, variables, or expressions (method calls). The only thing I really miss from python is the indentation (or rather, not having to explicitly delimit blocks, since I indent that way even when I don't have to).
Meaning that if the water has a pH of 7 then we should be expecting something closer H1.999O.
No, we should expect to find a mix of H2O, H, and OH. In any macroscopic volume the ratio between H & O should be 2, not 1.999 or even 1.9999999. The pH shouldn't even enter into it (if the H+'s collectively wandered a macroscopic distance from the OH-'s, water would be incredibly dangerous).
Remember, they were looking at the H's & O's via p + n & p + e scattering.
The Studios may at any time revise these Terms and Conditions by updating this posting. You are bound by any such revisions and should therefore periodically visit this page to review the then current Terms and Conditions to which you are bound.
They could revise the terms at any time and I'd be bound to them!
Yikes!
I'd better take their advice and periodically go back and get a fresh copy of their terms. What do you think...is every 100ms is periodic enough? Of course, if they could change them at any time I might miss a short lived change. Maybe I'd better check back every 10ms.
All the interesting problems will have been solved *in that area* and so the hackers will move on to new areas.
With all due respect, I think you are seriously underestimating something--maybe the nature of hackers, maybe the nature of problems--if you believe that it is possible to solve "all the interesting problems" in any field of human endevour whatsoever.
For example, if you look at any ancient "problem space" you will find people still devoting their lives attacking problems that they find interesting in the true hackerly spirit. Fire? Lots of active research, both professional and amature. Ditto agriculture. What about dealing with the other gender? Animal husbandry / wildlife management? Or just looking at the stars? I personally know serveral people who are still trying to get to the bottom of knots! If anything, the number of interesting problems in an area goes up with time.
Can you name even one area where all the interesting problems have been solved--keeping in mind that it only has to be interesting to the hackers that are working on it, even if 99.99% of humanity thinks it's as dull as dirt (yet another subject that we haven't come close to exhausting, even though it's as old as the hills)?
Bah! The interpretation given this research is absurd. If I invented a new machine to count the legs on cows, and my machine said that typical cows had three legs each, what would we conclude? That we'd been wrong about cows all these years, or that my machine wasn't working quite the way I'd expected it to?
In the present case, a better headline would have been something like "Unexpected effect hides some protons in neutron & electron scattering experements."
All I know is that one of their installation slide shows offered a whole slew of (sometimes mutually contradictory) explanations of where the name came from. That may well have been among them, but I have no idea if it's the one true reason(tm).
In the dying days of the "fuzzy bunny slipper era" (late 1970's) there were an enormous number of in-jokes and goofy conventions floating around. One was to insert a real word (such as "penguin" or "plover") that would not normally be used in the context (mostly technical documentation) to mark sections that needed to be revistied / finished before release. There were all sorts of games that you could play with spelling dictionaries, etc. to make use of this.
"Red hat" (as in "you have the red hat") used to mean you were suck with some chore (often making or defending a descision that required a lot of conscensus building but ultimately didn't matter, such as what to call a product internally or where to have lunch). One place I worked even had some red baseball caps they threw around (litterally) to pass the buck. I think other places used pumpkins or rubber ducks for the same purpose. (In one company I head of the role was "chairman of the yellow panel"--meaning you and a half dozen rubber ducks had to do it.)
Beginning Friday, July 25, every major exhibitor in the country will donate time to play daily trailers on all screens in more than 5,000 theaters across the United States.
Hasn't anyone read Abby Hoffman (a.k.a Free)? This one aspect sinks
their whole campaign. How? Simple.
When you are in a theater...
...and the anti-piracy ad comes on...
...boo.
It shouldn't take too many people doing it (if they are a little persistant) to reach a critical mass where it becomes the thing to do
(tm) when the ad comes on.
The take home message will be the exact opposite of what the MPAA wants it to be; people will think jeeze, I'm not alone--lots of other people excercise their fair use rights too!
back when she was first around there was a genuine fear that right wing extremists would control the balance of power in Australia
IIRC, it wasn't too long after that that there started being genuine fear among the right wing extremists that they would be represented on the international stage by her.
Nothing discredits a political party as soundly as getting a vocal, bungling nit-wit into a high visability position and letting them speak their mind (cf G. W. Bush, g. Ashcroft, etc.). You might as well paint a big target on your idiology or wear a sign saying "kick me" (Do you remember Pauline Pantsdown?)
If Pauline Hanson (assuming she's still around--people like her never seem to go away) responds to this in any way, I hope someone down under posts her comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly agree, so just responding to selected points:
To use a block it's not necessary to create an object and that's good for the performance, e. g. if you have to iterate very often over some collection.
I suspect that an iterator could reuse the same block without breaking the semantics, but in any case I'm not strongly motivated by perfomance in this context.
But there is an ambiguity because the first block could also be a hash constructor. I am not sure if it would be possible to solve that problem by changing the parser.
Easy. Hashes have "=>"; blocks don't. :)
You can choose between having to look up the variables everytime you want to know their scope or between seeing it easily and change every variable if you want to extract a method. I think to choose the latter is a good choice for a language where you don't usually program in a code browser.
I suspect my design/coding style leads to less concern with looking up the scope or storage class of variables than some other people's styles do. At least, I hear other people worring about it much more than I ever find myself worring about it.
One way to describe my style: I wear two hats. When I have the "tool maker" hat on, I know all about the scope, etc. because that's what I'm working on. I start from the metadata and work out. When I have the "tool user" hat on, I don't care about things like that, because I'm using the tool and not worrying about how it works inside.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. There are a lot of different thinking-styles out there. I worked in one shop where the style was to initial everything (e.g. identifiers of the form MQR.____) "to avoid name conflicts" and "so you always know who to talk to if it's broken"!
And if you had read my post, you would have noticed that I was making the same point you are, specifically that the headline and blurb were totatally absurd and unrelated to the research. To recap:
- Someone did some research
- Someone else posted an article on slashdot, totally misrepresenting the research.
- I posted a comment, pointing out that the article on slashdot was an absurd misrepresentation of the research, and suggesting a better headline.
- You replied to my comment, telling me to RTFA and quoting the research but completely missing my point, that the headline and blurb on slashdot were absurd and missed the point of the research.
- I posted this clarification.
-- MarkusQRe-read my post. I didn't offer an "interpretation of the article" (which I did read before posting). I said that interpretation of the article and headline posted on slashdot (which, I might point out, someone else submitted to slashdot) was absurd. You may be right in thinking it was a "hook" to get people to read the article; I know such tactics are common in tabloid journalism and in movie adverts. That doesn't mean that it wasn't absurd.
-- MarkusQ
Lisp is a very clean and elegant language
I used to think that, until I had to do some serious digging through X3J13.
IMHO, common lisp isn't all that clean (unless you are comparing it to something like C).
-- MarkusQ
I'm a big fan of Ruby and its clean syntax too, but I think MarkusQ (and subsequent repliers) mistake what that means. Ruby's syntax is clean in that there isn't a lot of stuff in the syntax just to define statements, expressions, lists and whatnot.
You definition of "clean syntax" doesn't quite work the way you seem to think it does. Ruby does have a lot of stuff to define lists, etc. The fact that these things are optional doesn't mean they aren't there. That's why (rather than using your definition) we've been talking about the core / minimal syntax in terms of the smallest subset of the syntactic rules needed to use the full power of the language, rather than the fact that there are additional rules that let you write uncluttered programs.
Yes, you can write uncluttered programs in ruby. But this ability come at a cost, insofar as it requires a more cluttered syntax (lots of special case rules) to allow it. Having a simple syntax makes a language easier to learn, even if that syntax requires a bit of extra typing (think postscript). Having additional rules (shortcuts) to allow for less cluttered code can make programs written in the language easier to read and maintain (think ruby) but it can also lead to cryptic soup (think perl).
-- MarkusQ
> * Blocks are litteraly a bag hung on the side. Needlessly ugly and limiting.
Why do you feel they are ugly? Ok, they are not real functions like scheme has them, but Ruby wants to be an object oriented language, so it's ok that they are (can be transformed to) objects.
I don't object to blocks being objects; I object to them being arbitrarily forced into a special-syntax-optional-singleton-parameter gheto. Why can't I define a method that takes two or more blocks (e.g. if/then/else) with the same syntax I use for methods that take a single block? Why can't I introspect the structure of a block? Why the duality with Proc objects? In short, why aren't blocks first class objects?
>* The typographic hungarian notation ($ for globals, capitals for constants, etc)
Hungarian notation encodes the type of a variable into the variable name. In Ruby the sigils are used to show the scope of the variables.
Hungarian notation (as the term is generaly used) encodes metadata into the variable name. Type, class, scope, storage class, etc. are all metadata. None of them should be duct-taped on to variable names (IMHO) because it obscures the intent of the code with a clutter of details about the means.
You can see at one glance that @@foo is class variable, @bar is an instance variable and $baz is a global variable. I found this to be very useful while refactoring code.
Sure, and I can imagine cases where it would be handy to have a language require that every variable reference includes a comma seperated list of the line numbers of each reaching assignment. It sure would make it easy to spot uninitialized variables, for example. But in general, it would make the code harder to read and maintain.
More to the point, in ruby I'd like to be able to change the scope or storage class of an object reference without having to rename it.
-- MarkusQ
Yes, but it has *loads* less parentheses than scheme.
If they bother you too much, try writing a little pre-processor (you can do it in about 20 lines of lex/yacc or so) that takes code with sailent structure (python style indentation) and spits it out with the parens?
-- MarkusQ
*laugh*
I should have read your post before responding to __past__; I could have mostly said "see RevAaron's comment."
The main point on which I disagree with you is that method calls are actually a small part of C++ & perl syntax. Control structures, expressions, etc. are all distinct (and ad hoc), because the types they opperate on (booleans, integers, etc.) are not objects. Conversely, in ruby everything is an object, and (if you want to) you can skip the sugar and write code that only passes messages to objects. This isn't as obvious as it is in (say) smalltalk, but it's at least true in ruby, whereas it's not in c++ or perl.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I just thought of two even better examples of (syntactically) clean languages: both forth and prolog have very clean basic syntax.
Agreed. I'm not saying ruby is perfect, just that I like it slightly more than python and a lot more than perl. Its syntax isn't as clean as, say postscript, smalltalk, or scheme, but it's much better than bash, c++ or vb. Maybe somewhere around common lisp?
My biggest gripes:
- Blocks are litteraly a bag hung on the side. Needlessly ugly and limiting.
- The typographic hungarian notation ($ for globals, capitals for constants, etc)
- The premptive binding of literals to built in classes.
- The perl compatibility frosting.
It's still my scripting language of choice though. -- MarkusQnot irony, stupidity.
Agreed!
Manned space flight has achieved nothing of note since Apollo. Nothing scientific, nothing cultural, nothing economic. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Agreed again. You forgot "ziltch" and "the big goose egg" but otherwise I agree withyou completely. I mean, here we keep sending these people into a mind bogglingly enourmous repository of natural resources, with more much energy, gold, iron, hydrocarbons, you name it than humanity has used in its entire existance just floating around for the taking, and they don't even bring us back a lousy t-shirt.
Who needs 'em, that's what I say! We should just stay right here and focus on killing each other to gain control over the little bit that we've already got instead of chaising after pie-in-the-sky. Do you realize how many bombs we could have bought with the money we waisted on that stupid manned space program? Heck, we could own the place!
And don't give me any of that nonsense about the dinosaurs. I mean, look how long they lasted without a space program! We've probably got lots of time left right here! Besides, if we all stay home (work from home, shop from home, socialize from home, explore from home, you name it) like I was saying in my previous post, we can conserve a lot so we probably won't run out of anything important for a long long long time.
Do we think alike, or what!
-- QsukraM
The X Prize just encourages the believe that manned space flight is a worthwhile end in itself. It isn't.
You are so right. For that matter, we should start phasing out comercial air travel. It uses enormous amounts of fuel, causes occasional spectacular loss of life, and to what end? The vast majority of people who travel anywhere by air go right back to where they came from within a month or so. What little real good is accomplished by maned air travel could just as well (and much more safely and cheaply) be handled by phone and parcel post.
And don't even get me started about human travel in automobiles. What lunitic thought that up? Why more people don't telecommute is beyond me. Heck, you can even get your groceries delivered. What do you need to go out for? To get gas for your car? Bah!
Now, some people will say I'm going too far, but I don't see why anyone wants to leave there own house, let alone their home planet! What's so interesting out there, anyway? Meeting people? Heck, that's what the internet is for. Intertainment? Same deal. In fact, name one thing that you think you can only get by leaving your house and I bet I can find it for you on the internet in under fifteen minutes!
Space? Phooie I say! Download some good games and get over it.
-- QsukraM
it had the same conceptual structure as Python, but the cryptic syntax of perl
I'm not sure what language you looked at, but it doesn't sound like ruby.
- Ruby is a deeply object oriented in the tradition of smalltalk; python is a superfically object oriented language more in the tradition of C++ or object pascal. Until recently, for example, you could not derive your own classes from the built in classes.
- The basic syntax of ruby is very clean (a fact which is somewhat obscured by the "syntactic sugar" provided for some commonly used features (such as operators) and the provision of aliases for some global objects that are intended to ease the transition from perl). The basic syntax is:
where object, method_name, and the arguments can all objects and can be given by named constants, literals, variables, or expressions (method calls). The only thing I really miss from python is the indentation (or rather, not having to explicitly delimit blocks, since I indent that way even when I don't have to).
-- MarkusQMeaning that if the water has a pH of 7 then we should be expecting something closer H1.999O.
No, we should expect to find a mix of H2O, H, and OH. In any macroscopic volume the ratio between H & O should be 2, not 1.999 or even 1.9999999. The pH shouldn't even enter into it (if the H+'s collectively wandered a macroscopic distance from the OH-'s, water would be incredibly dangerous).
Remember, they were looking at the H's & O's via p + n & p + e scattering.
-- MarkusQ
The Studios may at any time revise these Terms and Conditions by updating this posting. You are bound by any such revisions and should therefore periodically visit this page to review the then current Terms and Conditions to which you are bound.
They could revise the terms at any time and I'd be bound to them!
Yikes!
I'd better take their advice and periodically go back and get a fresh copy of their terms. What do you think...is every 100ms is periodic enough? Of course, if they could change them at any time I might miss a short lived change. Maybe I'd better check back every 10ms.
-- MarkusQ
All the interesting problems will have been solved *in that area* and so the hackers will move on to new areas.
With all due respect, I think you are seriously underestimating something--maybe the nature of hackers, maybe the nature of problems--if you believe that it is possible to solve "all the interesting problems" in any field of human endevour whatsoever.
For example, if you look at any ancient "problem space" you will find people still devoting their lives attacking problems that they find interesting in the true hackerly spirit. Fire? Lots of active research, both professional and amature. Ditto agriculture. What about dealing with the other gender? Animal husbandry / wildlife management? Or just looking at the stars? I personally know serveral people who are still trying to get to the bottom of knots! If anything, the number of interesting problems in an area goes up with time.
Can you name even one area where all the interesting problems have been solved--keeping in mind that it only has to be interesting to the hackers that are working on it, even if 99.99% of humanity thinks it's as dull as dirt (yet another subject that we haven't come close to exhausting, even though it's as old as the hills)?
-- MarkusQ
Bah! The interpretation given this research is absurd. If I invented a new machine to count the legs on cows, and my machine said that typical cows had three legs each, what would we conclude? That we'd been wrong about cows all these years, or that my machine wasn't working quite the way I'd expected it to?
In the present case, a better headline would have been something like "Unexpected effect hides some protons in neutron & electron scattering experements."
-- MarkusQ
All I know is that one of their installation slide shows offered a whole slew of (sometimes mutually contradictory) explanations of where the name came from. That may well have been among them, but I have no idea if it's the one true reason(tm).
-- MarkusQ
In the dying days of the "fuzzy bunny slipper era" (late 1970's) there were an enormous number of in-jokes and goofy conventions floating around. One was to insert a real word (such as "penguin" or "plover") that would not normally be used in the context (mostly technical documentation) to mark sections that needed to be revistied / finished before release. There were all sorts of games that you could play with spelling dictionaries, etc. to make use of this.
"Red hat" (as in "you have the red hat") used to mean you were suck with some chore (often making or defending a descision that required a lot of conscensus building but ultimately didn't matter, such as what to call a product internally or where to have lunch). One place I worked even had some red baseball caps they threw around (litterally) to pass the buck. I think other places used pumpkins or rubber ducks for the same purpose. (In one company I head of the role was "chairman of the yellow panel"--meaning you and a half dozen rubber ducks had to do it.)
Damn, now I feel old.
-- MarkusQ
I'm sorry, but mentioning Pauline Hanson in a thread about embarrassing government is hardly "offtopic."
-- MarkusQ
Beginning Friday, July 25, every major exhibitor in the country will donate time to play daily trailers on all screens in more than 5,000 theaters across the United States.
Hasn't anyone read Abby Hoffman (a.k.a Free)? This one aspect sinks their whole campaign. How? Simple.
When you are in a theater...
It shouldn't take too many people doing it (if they are a little persistant) to reach a critical mass where it becomes the thing to do (tm) when the ad comes on.
The take home message will be the exact opposite of what the MPAA wants it to be; people will think jeeze, I'm not alone--lots of other people excercise their fair use rights too!
-- MarkusQ
back when she was first around there was a genuine fear that right wing extremists would control the balance of power in Australia
IIRC, it wasn't too long after that that there started being genuine fear among the right wing extremists that they would be represented on the international stage by her.
Nothing discredits a political party as soundly as getting a vocal, bungling nit-wit into a high visability position and letting them speak their mind (cf G. W. Bush, g. Ashcroft, etc.). You might as well paint a big target on your idiology or wear a sign saying "kick me" (Do you remember Pauline Pantsdown?)
-- MarkusQ
Yes!
Thanks, you made my day!
-- MarkusQ
If Pauline Hanson (assuming she's still around--people like her never seem to go away) responds to this in any way, I hope someone down under posts her comments.
I haven't had a good laugh in a while.
-- MarkusQ
*laugh*
Sorry, no mod-points at the moment.
-- MarkusQ
Thanks, I'll look into that.
-- MarkusQ