I'd say 1) is a perfect time to mention even a broken clock is right two times a day.
Argh. A stopped clock is right twice a day, assuming it's a conventional 12-hour clock.
A broken clock can be wrong all the time. For example, assuming a 12-hour dial clock, consider if both hands have come loose and are now pointing directly at the 6. That is not a valid representation of 12-hour time. For any given position of the hour hand, there is one and only one correct position of the minute hand.
The minute hand does not carry any addition information - it's simply helpful for obtaining a more-precise reading over a relatively imprecise analog channel (called "glancing at the clock").
Really, it's like some of the people who post here don't even care about technical specifications.
Some folks eat quinoa and twigs and still have risky acid reflux
Indeed. I have relatives in this position, more or less - careful attention to diet and regular exercise, but still chronic reflux. It's not always "lifestyle".
I, on the other hand, am somewhat less careful about diet (though I do eat a wide variety and probably hit all of the nutritional targets that have any actual evidence behind them), and while I do exercise it's decidedly irregular, but my weight and waist size haven't changed in a couple of decades and I don't think I've ever had so much as heartburn. Maybe it's genetics and epigenetics, maybe there's a microbiomic contribution... but it's not because I lead some ideal lifestyle. Just luck of the draw.
Writing is not for everyone and not everyone will gain even a modest benefit from learning [to write]. Furthermore this is shit that is better left to nobility.
At what historical moment was literacy the province of the nobility? I can't think of a historical culture where it wasn't either widespread (a modern phenomenon[1]) or largely confined to a clerical class. Who were most assuredly not "the nobility".
Your claim about mathematics is pretty specious too. While mathematical learning has a complex history in any culture I can think of, I can't think of a single historical instance where that particular claim was the dominant ideological stance on it.
Of course your overall argument is a pretty weak argument by analogy, even if we accept these claims. And as far as I can see, more people here are arguing that basic coding should be part of the required curriculum, just not a substitute for learning a natural language.
[1] Which means "a few centuries old" in some parts of the world, of course. Indeed one of the hallmarks of a middle class is its adoption of literacy and other information technologies.
I'm mystified by the idea that a horizon of as short as 30 years for massive job loss doesn't count as a pressing problem.
But ahead of that (and far ahead of the hand-wringing over GAI as existential threat), I'm concerned about the moral hazard presented by the increasing delegation of ethical choice to machines. That's happening now, indeed has been for a while, and products like autonomous cars will expand it greatly.
Delegating ethical choice is popular. Making ethical choices is expensive, both in terms of cognitive load and because they often involve deciding against immediate personal benefit.[1] And they're psychologically unpleasant, particularly when all the options have negative consequences (as in the Trolley Experiment) or where the decider can't find a Nash equilibrium.[2] So there are strong economic incentives to make those delegations.
And that has a number of unfortunate consequences. It erodes one of our most important functions as thinking creatures. By reducing opportunities to make such decisions in small matters, it eliminates a critical paideia that trains us in making them for momentous ones. It contributes to the gradual conversion of industrial society into an algorithmic Babylonian Lottery, where fewer and fewer people have any insight into how decisions are actually made.
More leisure time? Sounds like lotus-eating, if you ask me. A lot of people doing little of consequence and avoiding anything difficult.
[1] Assuming you make the choices that are generally preferred by a well-socialized majority in an environment of relative surplus. Antisocial behavior disorders, poor socialization, and resource scarcity all tend to influence ethical decisions toward selfish and anti-social ("I will pay to hurt you") options.
[2] Note Nash's Existence Theorem does not include all possible games. More importantly, real-world conflicts aren't always isomorphic to games where the players can find Nash equilibria, either because they're equivalent to a game that formally does not, or because not enough information is available to the players.
Dijkstra first used the phrase "GOTO considered harmful" in 1968
Not even then, actually. The title of the letter, as published in CACM, is "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"; and that title was added by the editor. I just skimmed through it again, and unless I missed it, he never even uses the word "harmful".
He does say that "go to" (boldface in the original) is "too primitive", and refers to its "undesirability" and "disastrous effects" and "(logical) superfluousness".[1]
But the passive construction "considered harmful" is, just as its most natural interpretation would have it, an indication that someone other than the writer considers it harmful. That someone was Dijkstra; and while he cites others in support of his position, it would have been rather unlike him to step back and crouch behind the passive voice. The man was a first-order curmudgeon, bless 'im.
[1] Prolepsis: Dijkstra's "(logical)" here is meant to indicate that yes, he is perfectly aware that Von Neumann machines implement all branches with some form of "go to". That it must be available to the machine, and thus will typically be available in assembly language, does not mean it has to appear as an arbitrary branch construct in higher-level languages.
I suppose it could be the "ultimate device for a healthy lifestyle" in the sense that no device contributes significantly to a healthy lifestyle. The great majority of people who are going to behave in a healthy way do not do so because of any one particular object.
And, of course, there's a lot more to "a healthy lifestyle" than burning some arbitrary number of calories, as estimated by a fancy bracelet.
The charge time issue shouldn't be a problem once we get to 600+ mile ranges. That's enough time on the road to either into a hotel for the night, or at least have a relaxed dinner?
Not for me, it isn't. I need a car that will do 1000 miles a day, and I'm not waiting a couple of hours to refuel.
How often do you need to drive faster than that in a hurry but couldn't take an airplane?
Several times a year. The airport nearest my destination is four hours from it by car, and ticket prices are absurdly expensive.
How about we say that mathematics is accessible to "Anyone that has the intellectual facilities to master a spoken language" and who really tries?
That's still rubbish, without qualifying "mathematics" much more narrowly.
I'm pretty good with mathematics. I have a CS degree (among others). I was doing multiplication in preschool, calculus and recreational mathematics (some topology, number theory, that sort of thing) in high school. In college I did linear algebra, discrete mathematics including predicate calculus and group theory, lambda calculus, statistics - all the usual suspects. On my own I've worked through such things as category theory and algorithmic information theory. I've developed algorithms that required mathematical proofs. I regularly read academic papers with significant mathematical content.
But it doesn't take me long to find mathematical problems and discussions that force me to study them carefully and work through them on paper, and sometimes look up explanations, to understand them. That's true even in treatments intended for lay readers. Right now I'm working my way through Smullyan's Forever Undecided, which develops the Incompleteness Theorem using doxastic logic, and, man, it seems like every page I have to read paragraphs multiple times and try out degenerate cases on paper before I get what he's saying. Even for something simple like continued fractions I need to be feeling pretty alert and focused, or it just doesn't click.
I have a much easier time with mathematics than most of the people I personally know, but I have a few friends who are professional mathematicians (in academia or industry), and they fly circles around me. Simply much, much, much faster at picking up new formalizations and grasping their consequences.
There are vast realms of mathematics ("known" mathematics, for the Realists in the audience) which aren't accessible to me. It'd take me decades to learn an appreciable fraction of them. Some of them I probably can never understand, regardless of how much effort I put into it - and I'm good at that sort of effort. I'm a knowledge worker, after all, and I've earned multiple college degrees, in disparate subjects.
So claiming that some straightforward qualification indicates a person can "do" math is vacuous. It says nothing useful, because "mathematics" is a tremendously large domain of study (basically the study of all constructions which can be formed by extending some set of axioms using formal productions), and because that domain requires increasing intellectual capabilities as it expands. It might be true that anyone who can learn a natural language can learn arithmetic (though I wouldn't be shocked to learn of a counterexample); it might even be true that any such person can learn basic algebra of real numbers (though that's more dubious). But "mathematics" at large is accessible to only a small fraction of the population.
(And, of course, most of mathematics in a strict sense isn't accessible to anyone, because most of it is incompressible and large. Chaitin proved that thirty years ago.)
"not exactly mainstream?" Unless you're talking about real industries, like insurance, I suppose. Sure, Facebook and the like can get by with never-consistent kill-them-all-sort-them-later distributed farms of commodity PCs, but there are still some businesses which need a modicum of reliability in their data processing.
There are probably on the order of 10000 System z installations. Yes, that's a small number relative to x64, but it's still very much "mainstream", particularly when you look at how they're used.
In practice, System z machines these days are pretty much all running a bare-metal hypervisor (derived from IBM's VM OS, which was the first commercial virtual-machine OS) hosting various "LPARs" (logical partitions, i.e. virtual machines). The OSes in those LPARs - which may be zOS, zLinux, z/VM, z/VSE, TPF, and possibly others - will be "IPL'd" (rebooted) frequently or infrequently, to handle those configuration changes and patches that require it, depending on how the organization likes to schedule such things. The hardware itself and the hypervisor are likely to stay up for years at a time. Hardware upgrades are probably the most common reason for a hardware shutdown.
That said, z isn't a completely fault-tolerant architecture like Stratus or Tandem (now part of HPE). There are various fault-tolerant options for z machines, but I'm not aware of any configuration that's like Stratus' "open the cabinet and yank out a CPU card" level of tolerance.
Is that where you start out dissolving one baby per unit of inert carrier fluid
Highly inefficient. Research has shown that simply dunking the baby in the fluid leaves behind a quantity of baby molecules, and fewer dilution steps are then necessary to produce the desired power.
Sadly, many parents don't realize that this baby-dunked fluid can be used in this productive homeopathic fashion, which gives us the saying about "throwing out the bathwater with the baby". In homeopathic households, they throw out just the baby.
Not as such, because the placebo effect, by definition, can't depend on the particular placebo administered.
Instead, if there's a consistent, statistically significant placebo effect for a given condition, we can say that administering a placebo is an effective treatment (to some extent) for that condition.[1] So placebo X doesn't itself get promoted to medicine, but placebos in general can have medicinal effect.
Of course this means that "alternative" treatments, including magic water, can act as medicine. But the effect has nothing to do with the supernatural or nonsensical theories offered by practitioners,[2] and is usually highly patient-specific, unpredictable, and not very productive (i.e. it usually has little useful effect in terms of prolonging or improving life).
There's a large body of work on the epistemology of empirical science in general and of medicine in particular. While most of that falls under philosophy, and the rest is in effect meta-science (i.e. how to conduct science so that it's scientific), much of it is actually quite rigorous. Questions like yours have received a good deal of attention. Sometimes the purveyors of pseudoscience like to pretend that these sorts of questions undermine scientific epistemology, but they're just displaying their own ignorance, or being disingenuous.
[1] Or, more likely, for one or more of its symptoms; if the condition isn't purely psychosomatic, the placebo effect is probably only symptomatic. Of course, we know that for many physical ailments the patient's quality of life and state of mind can have a significant effect on the body's immune response and other healing factors, so sometimes that will have positive effects on the underlying cause as well. To the extent that such effects are measurable in a methodologically-sound manner, they fall under the aegis of scientific medicine as well.
[2] Or more precisely, those theories have no real explanatory or predictive power, and no advantage over random explanations. And since the epistemological protocols used to concoct them (making shit up and telling a story about it that's attractive to some audience) are arbitrary, they lack confirmability as well.
Ok, so let's continue with that logic. If someone first jabs them with a pin then they will have no problem with someone stabbing them with a knife because they've been "inoculated" against stabbing.
That's just silly. You cure stabbing wounds by pricking the victim with a pin afterward.
"Tonight on Homeopathic ER: Doug shoots gunshot victim with tiny gun!"
Damn it, now I want to see that show made.
And on a related note: Shouldn't proponents of homeopathy cure disbelievers by going around arguing against it? Just a very little, of course. Maybe just chanting one syllable of an opposing argument.
Similarly jarring is "This asteroid is estimated to be between 15-32.8 feet". It seems fairly clear that estimates that are so loose don't have a tenth of a foot precision.
But thank goodness the author wrote "between 15-32.8 feet", so we didn't think the object was -17.8 feet. (In... diameter? Who knows?)
I think Shark Bite (and other push-fit PEX connectors[1]) are great in accessible locations, and I don't think they're too expensive to use for home projects. Of course opinions will differ on that.
But I also have two brands of PEX clamp-ring tools (Nibco and some older style that just uses plain copper rings - the brand name escapes me now), which I use for anything that's going to be hard to get to. Maybe Shark Bite will last forever, but the permanent connectors make me sleep better at night.
I agree that while the clamp-ring tools are a bit of an initial outlay, but they're easy to use and the fittings are a lot cheaper. Just make sure you don't run out of rings when you're nearly done with a project on a Sunday afternoon.
[1] Except the plastic (CPVC) valves, which are basically worthless after a few months. All the brands I've used just seize up. I've learned my lesson and now always use decent brass valves, which are also available in push-fit and clamp-ring styles.
I doubt very much you are allowed to do your or gas, electrical or plumbing.
Doubt all you want, but in the US jurisdictions I've owned homes in, homeowners can do all of those things to their own property. You're required to get a permit before the work and an inspection afterward - though resources for enforcing those things are limited.
In the US, you can do your own lead-paint abatement. You can install a home generator and transfer switch. You can put in an in-ground (or in-home) heated pool.
I've done gas, supply and drain plumbing, electrical, mechanical, rough and finish carpentry, masonry, flooring, and finishes in my homes. Never roofed one, or done major excavation, but that's about all that comes to mind. And the people who owned them before me did the same - often displaying a rather more cavalier attitude toward the work. (Half the circuits running into the electrical panel in this house don't have entrance clamps. The upstairs bathroom's sink drain line was unvented. And so on.)
A poorly made or installed hot water service can blow up and destroy the home as well as neighbours properties putting all surrounding neighbours at risk.
Sure. And an unattended candle can start a house fire that spreads to other houses. We don't actually outlaw everything that might possibly cause a problem for someone.
Perhaps the US would be a better place if licenses were required to do any non-cosmetic work on a home. Personally, I have to say that's pretty far down on my list of the things we need to change around here. Drop me an email when civil rights are strongly protected for everyone and we're no longer embroiled in unending wars and I'll let you know if it's noticeably closer to the top.
If I had an x86 emulator that ran under zLinux, I could run Hercules under Cygwin under WINE under Linux under x86 emulation under zLinux on a System z. Then I'd really have something.
I think I last used WINE around 1995. It worked for a few things. Since then I've gone to running the preinstalled Windows as host OS and running Linux in a VM, because I'm too lazy to back up the Windows installation and switch to booting Linux as the host. But as Win7 goes out of support I'll probably switch back to native-Linux machines, at least for personal use, and then it might be worth checking WINE out again.
Only the poorly educated say 'learnt' in the US (it's 'learned') here, but using a 't' for past tense is a legitimate British grammar construct.
I don't know when I've seen such a glide from prescriptivism to descriptivism in a single (albeit compound) sentence before. Perhaps in Bryson's book on English. (As a professional crank, Bryson's good at freely mixing fact and opinion.)
In any case, DARE[1] shows some regional use of "learnt" in the US, and I dare say[2] that you'd have a difficult time demonstrating that every such use was by someone who is "poorly educated" by any reasonable standard.
Certainly use of the -t suffix has been declining on this continent for more than a century, though in English as a whole the trend is not so clear. And it's not just the past-tense inflection of verbs, as the rarity of "whilst" in this country shows.[3]
[1] The Dictionary of American Regional English, the unassuming name for a mammoth project to catalog regional differences in English usage in the US.
[2] Heh.
[3] Etymologically "whilst" is "whiles" + -t, where -t is still in effect a suffix indicating the past tense. But "whilst", a synonym for "while", is pretty much always used grammatically an adverb, even if etymologically it's the simple past tense of "to while" (as in "while away the time"). All this thanks to the eagerness with which English users move words among parts of speech.
That said, you do need to learn new things. Modern C++ shouldn't use bare pointers anywhere and should create objects with std::make_shared or std::make_unique. The addition of std::variant, std::optional, and std::any in C++17 clean up a lot of code.
Amen to that. In my experience, the biggest problems with C++ are the vast amount of poor old code, and the large number of C++ programmers who are still using the constructs that were necessary before C++98 - often mixed and matched with newer approaches, so large codebases get increasingly stovepiped.
Green-field C++ using a modern variant (even C++98 / C++03) can be very clean and elegant. But when I look at C++ sources, whether it's proprietary commercial stuff or open source, it's usually pretty awful.
Yes. The past couple of Democrat presidents, and the Federal executive branch under them, have not been particularly keen on supporting civil liberties in a number of areas. That was frequently noted by civil-rights groups and other observers at least as far back as Clinton's first term; I remember a quote from the ACLU in Harper's in run up to the '96 election, noting that a continued Clinton administration might be just as bad as a Dole one, from their point of view.
The Democratic Party has in recent decades been strongly supported by, and correspondingly gracious to, the entertainment industry. That's no secret either.
You needn't be a supporter of the Republican Party, or a right-winger, or anything of the sort to acknowledge that. My political opinions tend leftward and I nearly always end up voting Democrat, but I'm under no illusion that Clinton or Obama were great friends of freedom of expression (or a number of other leftist or progressive causes). And pretending otherwise does Democrats no favors.
But when it'll cook a meal, see it delivered to the table, even see that the dishes are washed... yeah, that's going to be a fine day
Hurrah for laziness.
As long as I'm physically capable of doing those things, I'll be doing them for myself (or sharing them with family members and friends). Performing mundane tasks for yourself is part of living. A life spent in idleness is not a life I care to experience.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say 1) is a perfect time to mention even a broken clock is right two times a day.
Argh. A stopped clock is right twice a day, assuming it's a conventional 12-hour clock.
A broken clock can be wrong all the time. For example, assuming a 12-hour dial clock, consider if both hands have come loose and are now pointing directly at the 6. That is not a valid representation of 12-hour time. For any given position of the hour hand, there is one and only one correct position of the minute hand.
The minute hand does not carry any addition information - it's simply helpful for obtaining a more-precise reading over a relatively imprecise analog channel (called "glancing at the clock").
Really, it's like some of the people who post here don't even care about technical specifications.
Some folks eat quinoa and twigs and still have risky acid reflux
Indeed. I have relatives in this position, more or less - careful attention to diet and regular exercise, but still chronic reflux. It's not always "lifestyle".
I, on the other hand, am somewhat less careful about diet (though I do eat a wide variety and probably hit all of the nutritional targets that have any actual evidence behind them), and while I do exercise it's decidedly irregular, but my weight and waist size haven't changed in a couple of decades and I don't think I've ever had so much as heartburn. Maybe it's genetics and epigenetics, maybe there's a microbiomic contribution ... but it's not because I lead some ideal lifestyle. Just luck of the draw.
Writing is not for everyone and not everyone will gain even a modest benefit from learning [to write]. Furthermore this is shit that is better left to nobility.
At what historical moment was literacy the province of the nobility? I can't think of a historical culture where it wasn't either widespread (a modern phenomenon[1]) or largely confined to a clerical class. Who were most assuredly not "the nobility".
Your claim about mathematics is pretty specious too. While mathematical learning has a complex history in any culture I can think of, I can't think of a single historical instance where that particular claim was the dominant ideological stance on it.
Of course your overall argument is a pretty weak argument by analogy, even if we accept these claims. And as far as I can see, more people here are arguing that basic coding should be part of the required curriculum, just not a substitute for learning a natural language.
[1] Which means "a few centuries old" in some parts of the world, of course. Indeed one of the hallmarks of a middle class is its adoption of literacy and other information technologies.
I'm mystified by the idea that a horizon of as short as 30 years for massive job loss doesn't count as a pressing problem.
But ahead of that (and far ahead of the hand-wringing over GAI as existential threat), I'm concerned about the moral hazard presented by the increasing delegation of ethical choice to machines. That's happening now, indeed has been for a while, and products like autonomous cars will expand it greatly.
Delegating ethical choice is popular. Making ethical choices is expensive, both in terms of cognitive load and because they often involve deciding against immediate personal benefit.[1] And they're psychologically unpleasant, particularly when all the options have negative consequences (as in the Trolley Experiment) or where the decider can't find a Nash equilibrium.[2] So there are strong economic incentives to make those delegations.
And that has a number of unfortunate consequences. It erodes one of our most important functions as thinking creatures. By reducing opportunities to make such decisions in small matters, it eliminates a critical paideia that trains us in making them for momentous ones. It contributes to the gradual conversion of industrial society into an algorithmic Babylonian Lottery, where fewer and fewer people have any insight into how decisions are actually made.
More leisure time? Sounds like lotus-eating, if you ask me. A lot of people doing little of consequence and avoiding anything difficult.
[1] Assuming you make the choices that are generally preferred by a well-socialized majority in an environment of relative surplus. Antisocial behavior disorders, poor socialization, and resource scarcity all tend to influence ethical decisions toward selfish and anti-social ("I will pay to hurt you") options.
[2] Note Nash's Existence Theorem does not include all possible games. More importantly, real-world conflicts aren't always isomorphic to games where the players can find Nash equilibria, either because they're equivalent to a game that formally does not, or because not enough information is available to the players.
There's also a link between eating red meat and deaths caused by falling from ladders
Yes. It's so important to wash your greasy hands after a meal.
Dijkstra first used the phrase "GOTO considered harmful" in 1968
Not even then, actually. The title of the letter, as published in CACM, is "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"; and that title was added by the editor. I just skimmed through it again, and unless I missed it, he never even uses the word "harmful".
He does say that "go to" (boldface in the original) is "too primitive", and refers to its "undesirability" and "disastrous effects" and "(logical) superfluousness".[1]
But the passive construction "considered harmful" is, just as its most natural interpretation would have it, an indication that someone other than the writer considers it harmful. That someone was Dijkstra; and while he cites others in support of his position, it would have been rather unlike him to step back and crouch behind the passive voice. The man was a first-order curmudgeon, bless 'im.
[1] Prolepsis: Dijkstra's "(logical)" here is meant to indicate that yes, he is perfectly aware that Von Neumann machines implement all branches with some form of "go to". That it must be available to the machine, and thus will typically be available in assembly language, does not mean it has to appear as an arbitrary branch construct in higher-level languages.
I suppose it could be the "ultimate device for a healthy lifestyle" in the sense that no device contributes significantly to a healthy lifestyle. The great majority of people who are going to behave in a healthy way do not do so because of any one particular object.
And, of course, there's a lot more to "a healthy lifestyle" than burning some arbitrary number of calories, as estimated by a fancy bracelet.
Especially on echo chambers like \.
Huh? I looked at backslashdot.org, and didn't see anything about it.
The charge time issue shouldn't be a problem once we get to 600+ mile ranges. That's enough time on the road to either into a hotel for the night, or at least have a relaxed dinner?
Not for me, it isn't. I need a car that will do 1000 miles a day, and I'm not waiting a couple of hours to refuel.
How often do you need to drive faster than that in a hurry but couldn't take an airplane?
Several times a year. The airport nearest my destination is four hours from it by car, and ticket prices are absurdly expensive.
But thanks for asking.
How about we say that mathematics is accessible to "Anyone that has the intellectual facilities to master a spoken language" and who really tries?
That's still rubbish, without qualifying "mathematics" much more narrowly.
I'm pretty good with mathematics. I have a CS degree (among others). I was doing multiplication in preschool, calculus and recreational mathematics (some topology, number theory, that sort of thing) in high school. In college I did linear algebra, discrete mathematics including predicate calculus and group theory, lambda calculus, statistics - all the usual suspects. On my own I've worked through such things as category theory and algorithmic information theory. I've developed algorithms that required mathematical proofs. I regularly read academic papers with significant mathematical content.
But it doesn't take me long to find mathematical problems and discussions that force me to study them carefully and work through them on paper, and sometimes look up explanations, to understand them. That's true even in treatments intended for lay readers. Right now I'm working my way through Smullyan's Forever Undecided, which develops the Incompleteness Theorem using doxastic logic, and, man, it seems like every page I have to read paragraphs multiple times and try out degenerate cases on paper before I get what he's saying. Even for something simple like continued fractions I need to be feeling pretty alert and focused, or it just doesn't click.
I have a much easier time with mathematics than most of the people I personally know, but I have a few friends who are professional mathematicians (in academia or industry), and they fly circles around me. Simply much, much, much faster at picking up new formalizations and grasping their consequences.
There are vast realms of mathematics ("known" mathematics, for the Realists in the audience) which aren't accessible to me. It'd take me decades to learn an appreciable fraction of them. Some of them I probably can never understand, regardless of how much effort I put into it - and I'm good at that sort of effort. I'm a knowledge worker, after all, and I've earned multiple college degrees, in disparate subjects.
So claiming that some straightforward qualification indicates a person can "do" math is vacuous. It says nothing useful, because "mathematics" is a tremendously large domain of study (basically the study of all constructions which can be formed by extending some set of axioms using formal productions), and because that domain requires increasing intellectual capabilities as it expands. It might be true that anyone who can learn a natural language can learn arithmetic (though I wouldn't be shocked to learn of a counterexample); it might even be true that any such person can learn basic algebra of real numbers (though that's more dubious). But "mathematics" at large is accessible to only a small fraction of the population.
(And, of course, most of mathematics in a strict sense isn't accessible to anyone, because most of it is incompressible and large. Chaitin proved that thirty years ago.)
Did that axe you're grinding belong to your grandfather?
Who can say? I used the axe to chop the ship apart and built a temple with a golden pavilion from the timber.
"not exactly mainstream?" Unless you're talking about real industries, like insurance, I suppose. Sure, Facebook and the like can get by with never-consistent kill-them-all-sort-them-later distributed farms of commodity PCs, but there are still some businesses which need a modicum of reliability in their data processing.
There are probably on the order of 10000 System z installations. Yes, that's a small number relative to x64, but it's still very much "mainstream", particularly when you look at how they're used.
In practice, System z machines these days are pretty much all running a bare-metal hypervisor (derived from IBM's VM OS, which was the first commercial virtual-machine OS) hosting various "LPARs" (logical partitions, i.e. virtual machines). The OSes in those LPARs - which may be zOS, zLinux, z/VM, z/VSE, TPF, and possibly others - will be "IPL'd" (rebooted) frequently or infrequently, to handle those configuration changes and patches that require it, depending on how the organization likes to schedule such things. The hardware itself and the hypervisor are likely to stay up for years at a time. Hardware upgrades are probably the most common reason for a hardware shutdown.
That said, z isn't a completely fault-tolerant architecture like Stratus or Tandem (now part of HPE). There are various fault-tolerant options for z machines, but I'm not aware of any configuration that's like Stratus' "open the cabinet and yank out a CPU card" level of tolerance.
Is that where you start out dissolving one baby per unit of inert carrier fluid
Highly inefficient. Research has shown that simply dunking the baby in the fluid leaves behind a quantity of baby molecules, and fewer dilution steps are then necessary to produce the desired power.
Sadly, many parents don't realize that this baby-dunked fluid can be used in this productive homeopathic fashion, which gives us the saying about "throwing out the bathwater with the baby". In homeopathic households, they throw out just the baby.
He's a homeopathic father of 8, I'm sure his surviving child will turn out just fine.
What kind of homeopath would be satisfied with an 8X dilution?
If a placebo works, does it become a medicine?
Not as such, because the placebo effect, by definition, can't depend on the particular placebo administered.
Instead, if there's a consistent, statistically significant placebo effect for a given condition, we can say that administering a placebo is an effective treatment (to some extent) for that condition.[1] So placebo X doesn't itself get promoted to medicine, but placebos in general can have medicinal effect.
Of course this means that "alternative" treatments, including magic water, can act as medicine. But the effect has nothing to do with the supernatural or nonsensical theories offered by practitioners,[2] and is usually highly patient-specific, unpredictable, and not very productive (i.e. it usually has little useful effect in terms of prolonging or improving life).
There's a large body of work on the epistemology of empirical science in general and of medicine in particular. While most of that falls under philosophy, and the rest is in effect meta-science (i.e. how to conduct science so that it's scientific), much of it is actually quite rigorous. Questions like yours have received a good deal of attention. Sometimes the purveyors of pseudoscience like to pretend that these sorts of questions undermine scientific epistemology, but they're just displaying their own ignorance, or being disingenuous.
[1] Or, more likely, for one or more of its symptoms; if the condition isn't purely psychosomatic, the placebo effect is probably only symptomatic. Of course, we know that for many physical ailments the patient's quality of life and state of mind can have a significant effect on the body's immune response and other healing factors, so sometimes that will have positive effects on the underlying cause as well. To the extent that such effects are measurable in a methodologically-sound manner, they fall under the aegis of scientific medicine as well.
[2] Or more precisely, those theories have no real explanatory or predictive power, and no advantage over random explanations. And since the epistemological protocols used to concoct them (making shit up and telling a story about it that's attractive to some audience) are arbitrary, they lack confirmability as well.
Ok, so let's continue with that logic. If someone first jabs them with a pin then they will have no problem with someone stabbing them with a knife because they've been "inoculated" against stabbing.
That's just silly. You cure stabbing wounds by pricking the victim with a pin afterward.
"Tonight on Homeopathic ER: Doug shoots gunshot victim with tiny gun!"
Damn it, now I want to see that show made.
And on a related note: Shouldn't proponents of homeopathy cure disbelievers by going around arguing against it? Just a very little, of course. Maybe just chanting one syllable of an opposing argument.
Similarly jarring is "This asteroid is estimated to be between 15-32.8 feet". It seems fairly clear that estimates that are so loose don't have a tenth of a foot precision.
But thank goodness the author wrote "between 15-32.8 feet", so we didn't think the object was -17.8 feet. (In ... diameter? Who knows?)
I think Shark Bite (and other push-fit PEX connectors[1]) are great in accessible locations, and I don't think they're too expensive to use for home projects. Of course opinions will differ on that.
But I also have two brands of PEX clamp-ring tools (Nibco and some older style that just uses plain copper rings - the brand name escapes me now), which I use for anything that's going to be hard to get to. Maybe Shark Bite will last forever, but the permanent connectors make me sleep better at night.
I agree that while the clamp-ring tools are a bit of an initial outlay, but they're easy to use and the fittings are a lot cheaper. Just make sure you don't run out of rings when you're nearly done with a project on a Sunday afternoon.
[1] Except the plastic (CPVC) valves, which are basically worthless after a few months. All the brands I've used just seize up. I've learned my lesson and now always use decent brass valves, which are also available in push-fit and clamp-ring styles.
I doubt very much you are allowed to do your or gas, electrical or plumbing.
Doubt all you want, but in the US jurisdictions I've owned homes in, homeowners can do all of those things to their own property. You're required to get a permit before the work and an inspection afterward - though resources for enforcing those things are limited.
In the US, you can do your own lead-paint abatement. You can install a home generator and transfer switch. You can put in an in-ground (or in-home) heated pool.
I've done gas, supply and drain plumbing, electrical, mechanical, rough and finish carpentry, masonry, flooring, and finishes in my homes. Never roofed one, or done major excavation, but that's about all that comes to mind. And the people who owned them before me did the same - often displaying a rather more cavalier attitude toward the work. (Half the circuits running into the electrical panel in this house don't have entrance clamps. The upstairs bathroom's sink drain line was unvented. And so on.)
A poorly made or installed hot water service can blow up and destroy the home as well as neighbours properties putting all surrounding neighbours at risk.
Sure. And an unattended candle can start a house fire that spreads to other houses. We don't actually outlaw everything that might possibly cause a problem for someone.
Perhaps the US would be a better place if licenses were required to do any non-cosmetic work on a home. Personally, I have to say that's pretty far down on my list of the things we need to change around here. Drop me an email when civil rights are strongly protected for everyone and we're no longer embroiled in unending wars and I'll let you know if it's noticeably closer to the top.
I hear it runs Cygwin [winehq.org] so there's that.
Yeah, but will it run Hercules under Cygwin under WINE under Linux?
If I had an x86 emulator that ran under zLinux, I could run Hercules under Cygwin under WINE under Linux under x86 emulation under zLinux on a System z. Then I'd really have something.
I think I last used WINE around 1995. It worked for a few things. Since then I've gone to running the preinstalled Windows as host OS and running Linux in a VM, because I'm too lazy to back up the Windows installation and switch to booting Linux as the host. But as Win7 goes out of support I'll probably switch back to native-Linux machines, at least for personal use, and then it might be worth checking WINE out again.
Only the poorly educated say 'learnt' in the US (it's 'learned') here, but using a 't' for past tense is a legitimate British grammar construct.
I don't know when I've seen such a glide from prescriptivism to descriptivism in a single (albeit compound) sentence before. Perhaps in Bryson's book on English. (As a professional crank, Bryson's good at freely mixing fact and opinion.)
In any case, DARE[1] shows some regional use of "learnt" in the US, and I dare say[2] that you'd have a difficult time demonstrating that every such use was by someone who is "poorly educated" by any reasonable standard.
Certainly use of the -t suffix has been declining on this continent for more than a century, though in English as a whole the trend is not so clear. And it's not just the past-tense inflection of verbs, as the rarity of "whilst" in this country shows.[3]
[1] The Dictionary of American Regional English, the unassuming name for a mammoth project to catalog regional differences in English usage in the US.
[2] Heh.
[3] Etymologically "whilst" is "whiles" + -t, where -t is still in effect a suffix indicating the past tense. But "whilst", a synonym for "while", is pretty much always used grammatically an adverb, even if etymologically it's the simple past tense of "to while" (as in "while away the time"). All this thanks to the eagerness with which English users move words among parts of speech.
That said, you do need to learn new things. Modern C++ shouldn't use bare pointers anywhere and should create objects with std::make_shared or std::make_unique. The addition of std::variant, std::optional, and std::any in C++17 clean up a lot of code.
Amen to that. In my experience, the biggest problems with C++ are the vast amount of poor old code, and the large number of C++ programmers who are still using the constructs that were necessary before C++98 - often mixed and matched with newer approaches, so large codebases get increasingly stovepiped.
Green-field C++ using a modern variant (even C++98 / C++03) can be very clean and elegant. But when I look at C++ sources, whether it's proprietary commercial stuff or open source, it's usually pretty awful.
Bill Clinton, a DEMOCRAT, signed it into law.
Yes. The past couple of Democrat presidents, and the Federal executive branch under them, have not been particularly keen on supporting civil liberties in a number of areas. That was frequently noted by civil-rights groups and other observers at least as far back as Clinton's first term; I remember a quote from the ACLU in Harper's in run up to the '96 election, noting that a continued Clinton administration might be just as bad as a Dole one, from their point of view.
The Democratic Party has in recent decades been strongly supported by, and correspondingly gracious to, the entertainment industry. That's no secret either.
You needn't be a supporter of the Republican Party, or a right-winger, or anything of the sort to acknowledge that. My political opinions tend leftward and I nearly always end up voting Democrat, but I'm under no illusion that Clinton or Obama were great friends of freedom of expression (or a number of other leftist or progressive causes). And pretending otherwise does Democrats no favors.
But when it'll cook a meal, see it delivered to the table, even see that the dishes are washed... yeah, that's going to be a fine day
Hurrah for laziness.
As long as I'm physically capable of doing those things, I'll be doing them for myself (or sharing them with family members and friends). Performing mundane tasks for yourself is part of living. A life spent in idleness is not a life I care to experience.