No Documentation? You can download the entire text of Programming Ruby for crying out loud -- what more do you want? You just don't get this amount of free documentation in the Perl or Python worlds. Additionally, the Developer's guide is at least the fourth dead-tree Ruby book published, so it is clear that *somebody* is buying them.
As for buggy bindings, I haven't noticed that Ruby bindings are any more buggy than those of other languages.
Unfortunately, the careers page doesn't reveal any openings. Sigh, this is the sort of socially responsible project that so many aerospace companies were to turn to after the cold war ended.
Actually, Bombardier has been building subways and light rail systems for quite some time now -- they just didn't jump into it after the fall of communism.
Yes, idiots second-guessing you are annoying, and this even happens in the private sector -- it's happened to me -- but you have to understand why this second step is needed. Say your brother Joe owned a computer store. What would stop you from putting in requests for Joe's servers at inflated prices?
Because this time we really hear it from Bill's mouth. Before, I personally assumed that that the anti-GPL stance was just something MS's lawyers put into the EULAs. Not that I expected that Bill would embrace the GPL or anything, but I didn't realize that he was personally so worked up against it. But now we know that every line of GPL software we write is a pin in a metaphorical voodoo doll of Gates. Cool.
Humans are ill-suited for all sorts of things that we do every day. Scuba diving, mountain climbing, [...]
Yes, scuba diving and sending people into space, etc. are very interesting and perhaps to the romantically inclined, even noble, but the point here is "are they science?" They are not in and of themselves science -- they are just clever applications of engineering. At best they could conceivably be used as tools for asking a scientific question. But NASA's manned missions have shown little emphasis on science.
Actually, the Laws of Thermodynamics as primarily empirical and not theoretical. A simple creation of a magnetic monopole (never been done, but significantly not theoretically impossible) would provide an obvious way to generate work (and violate the 2nd law) if attached to a rotor on a current carrying axle.
I live in NYC and nothing turns my stomach more walking down the sidewalks is seeing a bike chained to a pole stripped everything attached with a bolt.
So, people getting shot, mugged, or raped wouldn't turn your stomach more? The NYC PD has its hands full with serious crimes.
I could never get all that fired up about thieves. They just steal stuff. Stuff is easily replaced.
Well, if you only own a couple hundred books or so, keeping track of them isn't hard. If you own thousands, having some system is needed. I have about as many bookshelves as I have wallspace, and even then books are stacked 2 or three deep on them.
According to the stats midway through the article, Bruno (presumably Rennisance philosopher Giordano Bruno) is searched for on Google more often than either Einstein or Freud. Now, I'm a bit fond of Il Nolano myself, but I rather thought he was rather obscure to people who haven't read Aegypt or Finnegan's Wake.
Personally I vastly prefer the X way to the MS way that I have to use at work (Win 2000). MS makes you type needless characters to get any pasting done -- it's slow and painful. I want to just select, point, click the way I can under X. If anything, I want a utility under Windows that can emulate this, rather than Linux apps that imitate the painful MS way.
I'm not really sure what you meant by the grid-size comment, since of course results are dependent on this.)
Really? Then what possible use are the results? The article talks a lot about a simulation that suggests that segregation is not due to racism but to simple emergent properties. If it turns out that this is a simple artifact due to the grid size, then the results are worse then useless -- they are actually harmful.
Not going faster than light (even in fiction)
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
Actually, popular SF like Star Trek and Star Wars does recognize the speed of light as the limit. In Star Trek, the whole point of the "warp" drive is to "warp" space-time in order to get somewhere quickly *without* going faster than c. In "Star Wars" ships make "hyperspace jumps" for similar reasons.
Well, it is, indirectly: if you don't like the price, you don't buy the product! If enough people do it, then the recording industry will "get it" and be forced to lower the price. If not enough people do it, then that's a sure sign that CDs are currently "priced to market". Supply and demand still determine price, and the current price of around $15 is what supply and demand have agreed upon.
Perhaps. But this idealized market response is only one possible outcome. Another (frankly, more likely) is that the industry will claim that piracy and not overpricing caused the drop in demand. Then the music labels will demand government subsides, just like the hordes of surplus farmers that can't make a profit today do.
Machine learning (a subset of AI) is quite useful in a number of scientific fields. For example, in bioinformatics, gene prediction generally uses a neural net or Hidden Markov Model trained on a set of known genes. Similar technology is also used in speech and handwriting recognition.
Absolutely. No conspiracy needed. Just simply bringing the pork home to the voters, as any sucessful politician does. The film industry is a major employer in and around Burbank.
I particularly liked the fact that the vampire virus wasn't just referred to as a virus, but an arbovirus, an actual viral group that includes the agents of yellow fever and dengue. Somebody actually must have cracked open a virology textbook! Then again, arboviruses are transmitted by insects, a fact that wasn't used at all in the movie, so maybe they just liked the name.
Well, perhaps the best commentary track I've heard is Roger Ebert's "Dark City" commentary. It is far more interesting than the director's commentary track (also on the DVD). Commentaries can be genuine film scholarship -- they don't just have to be random trivia about making a movie. After listening to the commentary, I felt as if I've attended a film school lecture.
On the other hand, Joe Blow is not going to have the knowledge of both film and literature that Roger Ebert has, so maybe amateur commentaries aren't a great idea.
It is possible that the use of hand-held devices make one's own thumbs more dextrous, but that certainly doesn't cause a mutation, which is a genetic change. That would be Lamarkian inheritance of accquired characteristics. Both Slashdot and the article are using a completely incorrect term.
As an American who did a postdoctoral stint at Waterloo, I'm proud of UW's rating in the ACM contests. But like football games, I realize that that it has little to do with the worth of the university. Do you seriously believe that, for example, poorly funded Latin American and Eastern European universities are truly better than, for, example, Cal Tech? And yet that is what would be implied by taking the rankings seriously. Some schools are just really into the contests and have organized coaching and practice sessions, and other schools just don't care much.
Additionally, I'm always been amused by the Canadian ignorance of university tuition in the States. Sure private universities like MIT and Harvard cost a lot of money. But public universities are more or less as cheap as Canadian universties and still produce first class research. BSD UNIX was developed at UC-Berkeley. Mosaic (the ancestor of both Mozilla and IE) was developed at UIUC.
You are overlooking many organized and especially non-organized religions in your generalization.
They just are the same as the big guys but on a smaller scale. Even tiny Wiccan cults make money for somebody (for example the booksellers) or they wouldn't exist.
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released November 1985. It was announced in November 1983, clearly as a response to Apple's Macintosh OS.
More in response to the forgotten Apple Lisa which also used a GUI. The Mac didn't come out until early 1984 (hence the famous "down with Big Brother" Mac ad)
It's important to remember, too, that although we can model evolutionary processes like variation and selection in a computer system and produce the anticipated results, we can't thereby prove that evolution applies to life. (I happen to believe that it does, but I have to admit that we have yet to irrefutably prove it). All we're doing is nicely illustrating the theory.
But "illustrating the theory" is really everything that ever can be done in science. In math (and CS is really applied math, despite the name) things can be proved. In science, theories can never be proved because it is always possible that someone tomorrow could perform an experiment disproving the theory.
Re:Taxonomy isn't really very useful.
on
Every Species on Earth
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Molecular biology is where the action is at. Just looking at organisms and trying to classify them isn't really interesting or useful anymore
If taxonomy was just a classification scheme, like the Dewy Decimal System, you'd have a point. But good taxonomy is more than that -- it is a method for uncovering the evolutionary relationships between organisms and that is quite useful -- among other things, it allows virologists to know what virus strains would make good vaccines. And molecular biology has been a part of taxonomy ever since 1965 when Zuckerkandl and Pauling (yes, the two-time Nobelist Pauling) published the landmark paper "Molecules as Documents of Evolutionary History". Taxonomy of microbes and viruses is almost entirely molecular based today.
Slashdot Mirror
No Documentation? You can download the entire text of Programming Ruby for crying out loud -- what more do you want? You just don't get this amount of free documentation in the Perl or Python worlds. Additionally, the Developer's guide is at least the fourth dead-tree Ruby book published, so it is clear that *somebody* is buying them. As for buggy bindings, I haven't noticed that Ruby bindings are any more buggy than those of other languages.
Not flat desolation like you see in the Plains States.
The Plains States may be flat, and even boring, but they are certainly not desolate -- they are filled with farms and small towns for crying out loud.
Unfortunately, the careers page doesn't reveal any openings. Sigh, this is the sort of socially responsible project that so many aerospace companies were to turn to after the cold war ended.
Actually, Bombardier has been building subways and light rail systems for quite some time now -- they just didn't jump into it after the fall of communism.
Yes, idiots second-guessing you are annoying, and this even happens in the private sector -- it's happened to me -- but you have to understand why this second step is needed. Say your brother Joe owned a computer store. What would stop you from putting in requests for Joe's servers at inflated prices?
Because this time we really hear it from Bill's mouth. Before, I personally assumed that that the anti-GPL stance was just something MS's lawyers put into the EULAs. Not that I expected that Bill would embrace the GPL or anything, but I didn't realize that he was personally so worked up against it. But now we know that every line of GPL software we write is a pin in a metaphorical voodoo doll of Gates. Cool.
Humans are ill-suited for all sorts of things that we do every day. Scuba diving, mountain climbing, [...]
Yes, scuba diving and sending people into space, etc. are very interesting and perhaps to the romantically inclined, even noble, but the point here is "are they science?" They are not in and of themselves science -- they are just clever applications of engineering. At best they could conceivably be used as tools for asking a scientific question. But NASA's manned missions have shown little emphasis on science.
Actually, the Laws of Thermodynamics as primarily empirical and not theoretical. A simple creation of a magnetic monopole (never been done, but significantly not theoretically impossible) would provide an obvious way to generate work (and violate the 2nd law) if attached to a rotor on a current carrying axle.
I live in NYC and nothing turns my stomach more walking down the sidewalks is seeing a bike chained to a pole stripped everything attached with a bolt.
So, people getting shot, mugged, or raped wouldn't turn your stomach more? The NYC PD has its hands full with serious crimes.
I could never get all that fired up about thieves. They just steal stuff. Stuff is easily replaced.
Well, if you only own a couple hundred books or so, keeping track of them isn't hard. If you own thousands, having some system is needed. I have about as many bookshelves as I have wallspace, and even then books are stacked 2 or three deep on them.
According to the stats midway through the article, Bruno (presumably Rennisance philosopher Giordano Bruno) is searched for on Google more often than either Einstein or Freud. Now, I'm a bit fond of Il Nolano myself, but I rather thought he was rather obscure to people who haven't read Aegypt or Finnegan's Wake.
Try out ephPod -- in its latest version, it surpasses Xplay easily -- you can even get headlines synced to your iPod.
Personally I vastly prefer the X way to the MS way that I have to use at work (Win 2000). MS makes you type needless characters to get any pasting done -- it's slow and painful. I want to just select, point, click the way I can under X. If anything, I want a utility under Windows that can emulate this, rather than Linux apps that imitate the painful MS way.
I'm not really sure what you meant by the grid-size comment, since of course results are dependent on this.)
Really? Then what possible use are the results? The article talks a lot about a simulation that suggests that segregation is not due to racism but to simple emergent properties. If it turns out that this is a simple artifact due to the grid size, then the results are worse then useless -- they are actually harmful.
Actually, popular SF like Star Trek and Star Wars does recognize the speed of light as the limit. In Star Trek, the whole point of the "warp" drive is to "warp" space-time in order to get somewhere quickly *without* going faster than c. In "Star Wars" ships make "hyperspace jumps" for similar reasons.
Well, it is, indirectly: if you don't like the price, you don't buy the product! If enough people do it, then the recording industry will "get it" and be forced to lower the price. If not enough people do it, then that's a sure sign that CDs are currently "priced to market". Supply and demand still determine price, and the current price of around $15 is what supply and demand have agreed upon.
Perhaps. But this idealized market response is only one possible outcome. Another (frankly, more likely) is that the industry will claim that piracy and not overpricing caused the drop in demand. Then the music labels will demand government subsides, just like the hordes of surplus farmers that can't make a profit today do.
Machine learning (a subset of AI) is quite useful in a number of scientific fields. For example, in bioinformatics, gene prediction generally uses a neural net or Hidden Markov Model trained on a set of known genes. Similar technology is also used in speech and handwriting recognition.
Absolutely. No conspiracy needed. Just simply bringing the pork home to the voters, as any sucessful politician does. The film industry is a major employer in and around Burbank.
I particularly liked the fact that the vampire virus wasn't just referred to as a virus, but an arbovirus, an actual viral group that includes the agents of yellow fever and dengue. Somebody actually must have cracked open a virology textbook! Then again, arboviruses are transmitted by insects, a fact that wasn't used at all in the movie, so maybe they just liked the name.
Well, perhaps the best commentary track I've heard is Roger Ebert's "Dark City" commentary. It is far more interesting than the director's commentary track (also on the DVD). Commentaries can be genuine film scholarship -- they don't just have to be random trivia about making a movie. After listening to the commentary, I felt as if I've attended a film school lecture.
On the other hand, Joe Blow is not going to have the knowledge of both film and literature that Roger Ebert has, so maybe amateur commentaries aren't a great idea.
It is possible that the use of hand-held devices make one's own thumbs more dextrous, but that certainly doesn't cause a mutation, which is a genetic change. That would be Lamarkian inheritance of accquired characteristics. Both Slashdot and the article are using a completely incorrect term.
As an American who did a postdoctoral stint at Waterloo, I'm proud of UW's rating in the ACM contests. But like football games, I realize that that it has little to do with the worth of the university. Do you seriously believe that, for example, poorly funded Latin American and Eastern European universities are truly better than, for, example, Cal Tech? And yet that is what would be implied by taking the rankings seriously. Some schools are just really into the contests and have organized coaching and practice sessions, and other schools just don't care much.
Additionally, I'm always been amused by the Canadian ignorance of university tuition in the States. Sure private universities like MIT and Harvard cost a lot of money. But public universities are more or less as cheap as Canadian universties and still produce first class research. BSD UNIX was developed at UC-Berkeley. Mosaic (the ancestor of both Mozilla and IE) was developed at UIUC.
You are overlooking many organized and especially non-organized religions in your generalization.
They just are the same as the big guys but on a smaller scale. Even tiny Wiccan cults make money for somebody (for example the booksellers) or they wouldn't exist.
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released November 1985. It was announced in November 1983, clearly as a response to Apple's Macintosh OS.
More in response to the forgotten Apple Lisa which also used a GUI. The Mac didn't come out until early 1984 (hence the famous "down with Big Brother" Mac ad)
It's important to remember, too, that although we can model evolutionary processes like variation and selection in a computer system and produce the anticipated results, we can't thereby prove that evolution applies to life. (I happen to believe that it does, but I have to admit that we have yet to irrefutably prove it). All we're doing is nicely illustrating the theory.
But "illustrating the theory" is really everything that ever can be done in science. In math (and CS is really applied math, despite the name) things can be proved. In science, theories can never be proved because it is always possible that someone tomorrow could perform an experiment disproving the theory.
Molecular biology is where the action is at. Just looking at organisms and trying to classify them isn't really interesting or useful anymore
If taxonomy was just a classification scheme, like the Dewy Decimal System, you'd have a point. But good taxonomy is more than that -- it is a method for uncovering the evolutionary relationships between organisms and that is quite useful -- among other things, it allows virologists to know what virus strains would make good vaccines. And molecular biology has been a part of taxonomy ever since 1965 when Zuckerkandl and Pauling (yes, the two-time Nobelist Pauling) published the landmark paper "Molecules as Documents of Evolutionary History". Taxonomy of microbes and viruses is almost entirely molecular based today.