Those CFLs are *mercury free*, right? And that electric car isn't going to be charged from a coal plan, is it?
If you trashed the CFLs, the amount of mercury released would be less than the mercury released by coal-fired plants to power the equivalent in incandescent lights.
And CFLs can - and should be - recycled, so no mercury is released except for the occasional broken bulb. If you break one, you just take some simple precautions to clean up. They have about 1/100th of the mercury in a old thermometer, the type everyone had in their house not very long ago.
Environmentally, mercury in CFLs is a very very small issue.
And an electric car powered by a coal-fired generating plant still emits much less pollution than a gasoline car.
Serious question: should the inability to prove or disprove a theory automatically preclude it?
It precludes it from being a scientific theory, yes. If you want to use the word "theory" in some other sense, you ought to be very clear about that.
Thus, although I may have proof of it myself, I have no ability to share that proof. Does that make it invalid?
Subjective insights are all well and good, but are not useful guides to the objective world. If you have a personal experience of Jesus's love, no one can tell you that what goes on inside your own heart and head is not invalid - but that applies equally to your neighbor's experience of Krishna's love, and the guy across the street's experience of perceiving that all five skandhas are empty, and the girl at the checkout counter's deep and abiding experience of Bob Dobbs as her short duration personal savior.
If any of you were to take those personal experiences as being informative about biology, cosmology, history, chemistry, physics, engineering, economics, or anything outside your own subjective experience, that's not valid.
I fear for a society that forces the prominent persons of intellect to be limited to any particular school of thought
To be a person of intellect means to accept intellectual rigor and discipline, to carefully consider the foundations of ideas. Certain schools of thought are not compatible with intellectual rigor; to accept them marks one as not a person of intellect. Intelligent design is such a concept. It has no intellectual merit.
The point is intelligent design basically agrees with evolution but suggests that someone kick started it.
No, it doesn't. Intelligent design postulates a designer who does much more than "kick starts" it, one that intelligently guides the process to an end it desires.
If you want to discuss such a ludicrous idea in a sociology, history, or philosophy class, great. But it's not a scientific theory, and has no explanatory power.
Why the immediate assumption that newspaper owners are right-wing?
Any publicly traded corporation is right-wing - in favor of the interests of investors - by definition. Many - most? - newspapers are owned by publicly traded corporations.
The only way a corporation can be left-wing - in favor of the interests of workers - is if it is worker-owned, or owned by a private group with leftist political leanings.
Traditionally, NULL pointer exceptions have not been fruitful ground for this because, well, a NULL pointer is NULL -- there's nothing on the other end of the pointer for the unsuspecting program to read or execute
Anyone who assumes this has never done cross-platform work. You don't know what's on the other end of NULL; you're only guaranteed that you can tell a NULL pointer from any other other pointer.
I've always worked under the assumption that my code might someday be ported to an architecture where NULL pointed to the routines involving the launch of nuclear missiles...
This is not the first NULL pointer exploit, not by a long shot. Not to say it's not very clever and all, but the "OMG! Not checking pointers for NULL is dangerous?!?! Who knew?!" reaction is frightening. Anyone who doesn't know that checking pointers for NULL is necessary, should please delete any C or C++ compilers on their machine.
if I ever have something go wrong with my senses (go blind, deaf, etc) or body (paralyzed, etc) and I attempt to change the world to fit me at the expense of others, I'd like to be forcibly euthenized.
You are, right now, attempting to change the world (changing policies and attitudes regarding the disabled) to fit you preferences at the the expense of others.
So I'll dispatch that euthanasia team now, shall I?
I'm very strongly of the opinion that as soon as any group starts dragging down the rest of society they need to be purged.
Anyone who thinks it's more important to slightly reduce spam than to make reasonable technical accommodations that allow more people to fully participate in society and the economy, is dragging down the rest of society.
Trust me, I know several disabled people who are making much more of a contribution than you are.
The usual excuse for that is that they want a link -- for aesthetic purposes, to put in an email, etc.
If a link works better for interface purposes, Javascript event handlers let you do a POST by clicking a link. I've done that where I needed to pass some login information via a POST to what should have otherwise been a GET. (Yes, it should really be done by cookies or by a session ID in the URL, but that wasn't practical in this case for historical reasons.)
I'd never really considered how all those verification links we send in e-mail break the rule about GET/POST semantics and side effect and idempotency. Maybe it's worth more deep thought. But if it's doing sometime more complicated and significant than confirming an action, the link should take the user to a page that verifies "Do you really want to do this?", and that page should do a POST.
Nonsense. First, as the Republican Party has shown, spending is no longer tied to taxes. You just borrow money.
Second, spending has little correlation with repression. You could make enormous cuts in the budget for social services, scientific research, foreign military adventures, and still direct all remaining spending to oppression.
A dictatorship can be run on the cheap. North Korea's national budget is $30.9 billion, at 23.3 million people that's about $1,330 per person. The U.S. federal budget of $2.90 trillion, with 301 million people, is $9,634 per person. (There are also state and local taxes in the U.S., and some local spending in North Korea, but I think not enough to change the comparison here.)
Third, "tax cuts" are an action taken by the state, and so cannot be in revolution against it.
How is this different than getting your prints taken when your arrested?
Several reasons. My prints tell you nothing about me. Nor do they tell you anything about my family. But DNA tells you not just my medical information, it tells you my family's.
But most importantly, taking my prints doesn't actually take anything from me. Taking my prints does not involve a medical procedure that removes part of my flesh.
It doesn't matter that it's only micrograms. My body is mine. I can't see an armed agent of the state forcing a collection instrument into my body as anything but a crime akin to rape.
I'm not a Christian, but I always kind of liked Jesus's reply when asked about taxes: render onto Caesar what is Caesar's, and onto God what is God's. My body does not belong to Caesar, and I don't intent to render any part of it onto him.
Want DNA samples? Get a warrant, search my house, pick up hair and skin from my bed. Or heck, sterilize a cell, arrest me, put me in the cell, and pick up hair and skin samples from that. They're no longer part of my body, I don't care. (Don't care about the samples themselves. I care very much that you get a warrant, have probable cause, all that good stuff.)
But the sovereignty of the state ends at my skin. I would not cooperate with any such collection - and I reserve the right to forcibly resist such an assault, up to and including the use of lethal force. Yes, it's that important: I believe one would be justified in killing in self-defense rather than submitting to this. (I'm not saying one should do so; I'm not saying I would do so. But I'm saying it would be justified. Put me on a jury in a case where someone resisting the collection of such a sample killed his assailant, and I'd vote to acquit.)
I've also wondered about piss-poor how spelling and good programming co-exist.
You mean, "about how piss-poor spelling and good programming co-exist?":-):-):-)
(I will undoubtedly now make a grammar or spelling error of my own.)
It's a good question. Maybe it's related to the way compilers/interpreters will just spit out code with such low-level errors in it, whereas there's still no grammar and spelling checker as good as handing your writing to a human proof-reader.
But when I talk about writing coherent English, I don't mean free of typos. I can forgive those. (Confusing your/you're or their/there/they're does grate - but even though I understand the difference, sometimes it gets lost between the forebrain and the typing fingers.) It's the people who can't put any useful information in writing - and therefore pack their writing with a whole bunch of useless information - who I find disturbing.
I think a Lib. Arts degree has great merit, but the submitter has a much better chance of getting a good education at a highly-rated technical school.
One is apt to get a equally good or better education at at liberal arts school, but might get better training at a technical school. An education consists not just in mastering a body of knowledge - how to program in language X - but in learning the skills of critical thinking, and how to learn, organize, and communicate knowledge.
All else being equal, I'd be quite likely hire a liberal arts school graduate. If nothing else they're likely to be able to write coherent English, a skill often sadly lacking in CS graduates. One thing that Dijkstra got right: "Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer."
I went to a big state school - the University of Maryland, College Park - with a good CS program and a fairly strong general studies requirement. Of course I use the general principles that I learned in my CS classes; but on the other hand I get more use on the job out of the principles I learned in elective classes in philosophy, psychology, theatre, and so on, than I do out of the specifics I studied in CS classes. I haven't programmed anything in Pascal or LISP in a long time, but understanding the notions of subtext and inner monologue from acting helps me understand what my boss *really* wants. Lessons learned in a "Logic and the English Language" philosophy class help me write better documentation. A class in the economics of social issues taught me about external costs, which is a useful notion in any field.
And of course I get more use out of my non-CS classes in the rest of my life. Through round-about ways, piano and acting classes got me into playing guitar and writing poetry, and these sometimes *get* *me* *girls*. So there you go.:-)
By "narrow technical" skill I mean computer science.
Computer science is in no way narrow. In its breadth it touches not just on several fields of mathematics, but also on engineering practice, psychology, biology, linguistics, electronics, and literary composition.
Nor is it merely a skill. It is an entire body of knowledge.
If by "narrow technical skill" you meant computer science, you either do not understand computer science at all, or you lack the skills to express yourself accurately using the English language - one of the primary requirements for success as a software developer. Perhaps more liberal arts classes would have helped.
So much software sucks very badly because too many people are ill educated in the Software Engineering side of it. Not because not enough people study the history of war on the side.
Studying Sun Tzu will teach much about the organization of large projects. Think that's not relevant to software engineering? (For instance, "Too frequent rewards signify that the enemy is at the end of his resources; too many punishments betray a condition of dire distress." Anyone live through a project like this?)
If you want to be conscious of security issues when designing and implementing your software - and I hope you do - studying the history of war becomes even more important.
National Security Letters are awful because they are so secretive, and the fact that they don't need probable cause makes them constitutionally suspect.
Forget probable cause, the fact that the violate the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech makes them constitutionally invalid.
And if the federal government isn't going to respect that right, it's about time to start exercising the right that backs it up, the one guaranteed under the Second Amendment.
My hope is that our military and intelligence community career employees will be a firewall against a greater slide into tyranny. You guys are the "militia" that's mentioned in our Bill of Rights.
The founders' plan was that we'd all be citizen-soldiers, competent to defend the nation against invasion but without a standing army to drain our resources and threaten liberty.
It's ironic that service in an instition whose very existence the founders opposed, is now seen as some sort of patriotic behavior.
Much as I love xkcd, Randall got that one wrong. Every statement in mathematics is based on a big pile of agreed-upon assumptions and definitions. A perfect universal truth would not rest on axioms; you sure won't find it in mathematics.
Some narrow technical skill is EXACTLY what will get you the big money in software, and what will get you hired over and over.
For a couple of years. Then your narrow technical skill is outdated, no longer fashionable; then what?
But studying arts/humanities alongside? Waste of time.
The belief among so many in the field that learning disciplined critical thinking skills is "a waste of time", is probably the primary reason why so much software sucks so very, very, very badly.
The difference between nuclear and solar is that nuclear by itself can solve all our power needs
Not with nuclear fission as we know it. With the once-through cycle, there's only fuel for a few decades. Reprocesssing and breeding means plutonium sources all over the place; Google the news for "Iran" to see the problems with that.
Fusion and accelerator-driven technologies using thorium have potential, but uranium fission is a dead end.
Slashdot Mirror
If you trashed the CFLs, the amount of mercury released would be less than the mercury released by coal-fired plants to power the equivalent in incandescent lights.
And CFLs can - and should be - recycled, so no mercury is released except for the occasional broken bulb. If you break one, you just take some simple precautions to clean up. They have about 1/100th of the mercury in a old thermometer, the type everyone had in their house not very long ago.
Environmentally, mercury in CFLs is a very very small issue.
And an electric car powered by a coal-fired generating plant still emits much less pollution than a gasoline car.
So what's your point?
That's "inanimate carbon rod", you insensitive clod!
In Rod We Trust.
Er, obviously that should be "is not valid". (Or "is invalid".)
It precludes it from being a scientific theory, yes. If you want to use the word "theory" in some other sense, you ought to be very clear about that.
Subjective insights are all well and good, but are not useful guides to the objective world. If you have a personal experience of Jesus's love, no one can tell you that what goes on inside your own heart and head is not invalid - but that applies equally to your neighbor's experience of Krishna's love, and the guy across the street's experience of perceiving that all five skandhas are empty, and the girl at the checkout counter's deep and abiding experience of Bob Dobbs as her short duration personal savior.
If any of you were to take those personal experiences as being informative about biology, cosmology, history, chemistry, physics, engineering, economics, or anything outside your own subjective experience, that's not valid.
To be a person of intellect means to accept intellectual rigor and discipline, to carefully consider the foundations of ideas. Certain schools of thought are not compatible with intellectual rigor; to accept them marks one as not a person of intellect. Intelligent design is such a concept. It has no intellectual merit.
No, it doesn't. Intelligent design postulates a designer who does much more than "kick starts" it, one that intelligently guides the process to an end it desires.
If you want to discuss such a ludicrous idea in a sociology, history, or philosophy class, great. But it's not a scientific theory, and has no explanatory power.
Uh, since when? Seems to me he's been on the wrong side of most issues since at least his days in the Nixon administration. He continues to be a Nixon apologist, so delusional that he holds the reporters who uncovered Watergate responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
What, you really think if there were no TV ads for cars, computers, and the like, no one would buy them?
Ah, Demolition Man - not a good movie, but there's a good movie in there trying to get out. Sort of like The Running Man.
Any publicly traded corporation is right-wing - in favor of the interests of investors - by definition. Many - most? - newspapers are owned by publicly traded corporations.
The only way a corporation can be left-wing - in favor of the interests of workers - is if it is worker-owned, or owned by a private group with leftist political leanings.
Anyone who assumes this has never done cross-platform work. You don't know what's on the other end of NULL; you're only guaranteed that you can tell a NULL pointer from any other other pointer.
I've always worked under the assumption that my code might someday be ported to an architecture where NULL pointed to the routines involving the launch of nuclear missiles...
This is not the first NULL pointer exploit, not by a long shot. Not to say it's not very clever and all, but the "OMG! Not checking pointers for NULL is dangerous?!?! Who knew?!" reaction is frightening. Anyone who doesn't know that checking pointers for NULL is necessary, should please delete any C or C++ compilers on their machine.
You are, right now, attempting to change the world (changing policies and attitudes regarding the disabled) to fit you preferences at the the expense of others.
So I'll dispatch that euthanasia team now, shall I?
Anyone who thinks it's more important to slightly reduce spam than to make reasonable technical accommodations that allow more people to fully participate in society and the economy, is dragging down the rest of society.
Trust me, I know several disabled people who are making much more of a contribution than you are.
If a link works better for interface purposes, Javascript event handlers let you do a POST by clicking a link. I've done that where I needed to pass some login information via a POST to what should have otherwise been a GET. (Yes, it should really be done by cookies or by a session ID in the URL, but that wasn't practical in this case for historical reasons.)
I'd never really considered how all those verification links we send in e-mail break the rule about GET/POST semantics and side effect and idempotency. Maybe it's worth more deep thought. But if it's doing sometime more complicated and significant than confirming an action, the link should take the user to a page that verifies "Do you really want to do this?", and that page should do a POST.
You cannot steal that which is freely offered.
Nonsense. First, as the Republican Party has shown, spending is no longer tied to taxes. You just borrow money.
Second, spending has little correlation with repression. You could make enormous cuts in the budget for social services, scientific research, foreign military adventures, and still direct all remaining spending to oppression.
A dictatorship can be run on the cheap. North Korea's national budget is $30.9 billion, at 23.3 million people that's about $1,330 per person. The U.S. federal budget of $2.90 trillion, with 301 million people, is $9,634 per person. (There are also state and local taxes in the U.S., and some local spending in North Korea, but I think not enough to change the comparison here.)
Third, "tax cuts" are an action taken by the state, and so cannot be in revolution against it.
Several reasons. My prints tell you nothing about me. Nor do they tell you anything about my family. But DNA tells you not just my medical information, it tells you my family's.
But most importantly, taking my prints doesn't actually take anything from me. Taking my prints does not involve a medical procedure that removes part of my flesh.
It doesn't matter that it's only micrograms. My body is mine. I can't see an armed agent of the state forcing a collection instrument into my body as anything but a crime akin to rape.
I'm not a Christian, but I always kind of liked Jesus's reply when asked about taxes: render onto Caesar what is Caesar's, and onto God what is God's. My body does not belong to Caesar, and I don't intent to render any part of it onto him.
Want DNA samples? Get a warrant, search my house, pick up hair and skin from my bed. Or heck, sterilize a cell, arrest me, put me in the cell, and pick up hair and skin samples from that. They're no longer part of my body, I don't care. (Don't care about the samples themselves. I care very much that you get a warrant, have probable cause, all that good stuff.)
But the sovereignty of the state ends at my skin. I would not cooperate with any such collection - and I reserve the right to forcibly resist such an assault, up to and including the use of lethal force. Yes, it's that important: I believe one would be justified in killing in self-defense rather than submitting to this. (I'm not saying one should do so; I'm not saying I would do so. But I'm saying it would be justified. Put me on a jury in a case where someone resisting the collection of such a sample killed his assailant, and I'd vote to acquit.)
You mean, "about how piss-poor spelling and good programming co-exist?" :-) :-) :-)
(I will undoubtedly now make a grammar or spelling error of my own.)
It's a good question. Maybe it's related to the way compilers/interpreters will just spit out code with such low-level errors in it, whereas there's still no grammar and spelling checker as good as handing your writing to a human proof-reader.
But when I talk about writing coherent English, I don't mean free of typos. I can forgive those. (Confusing your/you're or their/there/they're does grate - but even though I understand the difference, sometimes it gets lost between the forebrain and the typing fingers.) It's the people who can't put any useful information in writing - and therefore pack their writing with a whole bunch of useless information - who I find disturbing.
D'oh. Should've seen that myself. Thanks.
Just need some sort of shaft passer on the pole to let the cable through. :-)
Hmm. Why do you need to unwrap the cable every few weeks?
One is apt to get a equally good or better education at at liberal arts school, but might get better training at a technical school. An education consists not just in mastering a body of knowledge - how to program in language X - but in learning the skills of critical thinking, and how to learn, organize, and communicate knowledge.
All else being equal, I'd be quite likely hire a liberal arts school graduate. If nothing else they're likely to be able to write coherent English, a skill often sadly lacking in CS graduates. One thing that Dijkstra got right: "Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer."
I went to a big state school - the University of Maryland, College Park - with a good CS program and a fairly strong general studies requirement. Of course I use the general principles that I learned in my CS classes; but on the other hand I get more use on the job out of the principles I learned in elective classes in philosophy, psychology, theatre, and so on, than I do out of the specifics I studied in CS classes. I haven't programmed anything in Pascal or LISP in a long time, but understanding the notions of subtext and inner monologue from acting helps me understand what my boss *really* wants. Lessons learned in a "Logic and the English Language" philosophy class help me write better documentation. A class in the economics of social issues taught me about external costs, which is a useful notion in any field.
And of course I get more use out of my non-CS classes in the rest of my life. Through round-about ways, piano and acting classes got me into playing guitar and writing poetry, and these sometimes *get* *me* *girls*. So there you go. :-)
Computer science is in no way narrow. In its breadth it touches not just on several fields of mathematics, but also on engineering practice, psychology, biology, linguistics, electronics, and literary composition.
Nor is it merely a skill. It is an entire body of knowledge.
If by "narrow technical skill" you meant computer science, you either do not understand computer science at all, or you lack the skills to express yourself accurately using the English language - one of the primary requirements for success as a software developer. Perhaps more liberal arts classes would have helped.
Studying Sun Tzu will teach much about the organization of large projects. Think that's not relevant to software engineering? (For instance, "Too frequent rewards signify that the enemy is at the end of his resources; too many punishments betray a condition of dire distress." Anyone live through a project like this?)
If you want to be conscious of security issues when designing and implementing your software - and I hope you do - studying the history of war becomes even more important.
Forget probable cause, the fact that the violate the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech makes them constitutionally invalid.
And if the federal government isn't going to respect that right, it's about time to start exercising the right that backs it up, the one guaranteed under the Second Amendment.
Uh, no. The militia is ordinary citizens; under federal law, it's "all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and...under 45". The professional military is the polar opposite of the militia.
The founders' plan was that we'd all be citizen-soldiers, competent to defend the nation against invasion but without a standing army to drain our resources and threaten liberty.
It's ironic that service in an instition whose very existence the founders opposed, is now seen as some sort of patriotic behavior.
Much as I love xkcd, Randall got that one wrong. Every statement in mathematics is based on a big pile of agreed-upon assumptions and definitions. A perfect universal truth would not rest on axioms; you sure won't find it in mathematics.
For a couple of years. Then your narrow technical skill is outdated, no longer fashionable; then what?
The belief among so many in the field that learning disciplined critical thinking skills is "a waste of time", is probably the primary reason why so much software sucks so very, very, very badly.
Not with nuclear fission as we know it. With the once-through cycle, there's only fuel for a few decades. Reprocesssing and breeding means plutonium sources all over the place; Google the news for "Iran" to see the problems with that.
Fusion and accelerator-driven technologies using thorium have potential, but uranium fission is a dead end.