Yes, having mom and dad and 2 children all submit ratings into a single profile will ruin recommendations for all 4 users, and there's no workaround for that.
"I didn't know about some arguably impressive stuff he had done" is hardly an apology for calling someone a crackpot and for spouting opinions without doing any research first, but I take it that's as close to an admission of wrongdoing as you're capable of, so I guess there's nothing else left to say.
anonymous coward was not me, but don't let that get in the way of your rant.
I have nothing to say about your "achievements" because my point was that you were sloppy in calling him a crackpot when you knew nothing about him other than some predictions which you probably read secondhand. Even when I pointed you to the Wikipedia page about him, you failed to read the page or acknowledge that he was not a crackpot.
What you'd have seen on that page if you had actually read it is that by the time Kurzweil was 20, he had won an international talent competition, been on TV to perform a piano piece composed by a computer he built, was recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search, had sold a company for half a million dollars (in 2006 dollars) plus royalties, and was working on a BS in Computer Science and Literature at MIT. After MIT, he had a long and successful career. Not exactly the bio of a crackpot.
My point stands: you were spouting off your misinformed opinion, and you continued to maintain your position that he was a crackpot even after I pointed you to a page that gave ample evidence that he was not.
When you grow up a little more, you'll learn not to be so overconfident and to have opinions about things that you know nothing about. And maybe you'll even learn to admit that you were wrong and apologize for calling someone a crackpot based on secondhand hearsay and without making any attempt at learning about the person before making the accusation.
And to be clear, I've written all of this not because I'm a fan of Kurzweil's (I'm not), but because your misinformed ranting needed to be called by someone. Slashdot should aim for a higher standard of discussion than an AOL chat room, and baseless opinions and sloppy thinking like yours don't help.
I'm no big fan of Kurzweil's. I disagree with a lot of what he says, and I think many of his predictions are silly and/or obvious. But I am still able to distinguish between Ray Kurzweil and an actual crackpot like Dr. Gene Ray, Cubic.
I'm guessing you were too lazy to take the time to do any research on what Kurzweil has done with his life before spouting off your opinions, because regardless of whether Kurzweil deserves a Nobel prize -- he does not, of course -- and regardless of whether he is right on all or most of his arguments about the future, he is not a crackpot.
On your side note of "making the future happen" rather than making predictions, here's a prediction I have for you: I predict that if we compared what you have actually made happen and what Kurzweil has made happen in his long career, we'd see that Kurzweil has done much more, and had done things of greater benefit to humanity, than have you.
Kurzwiel [sic] is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions
Have you checked out how many of his past wacky predictions have already come true? He's been making such predictions for decades now and has a pretty good success rate.
It was just down for me again at 15:08 PST (same "service unavailable" HTTP error), after it had been working again for a while, so they clearly have not completely resolved whatever the issues were.
I got this too, and I thought it was because I set up a little script that checked the homepage every 5 seconds to let me know when it came back up (because I wanted to purchase something today and get it ASAP).
I sent them an email to that address, and I had access again an hour later. I didn't get a response from them though, so I don't know if they did something to unblock my IP address or if it had nothing to do with my script and was just related to the outage.
With regard to encapsulation, you can define an incomplete struct and public functions for manipulating that type in the.h file, and put the complete definition of the struct and the public functions (as well as an other private functions you want) in the.c file (with the private functions being static). Clients will only be able to use the struct via the public functions you've defined, and will not have access to the internals (without major wizardry).
Where is the suddenoutbreakofcommonsense tag when you need it?
The parent is absolutely correct, and the grandparent's statements about Java are of the "stuff I heard on the internets"-variety.
The one thing you didn't mention is the "needing to be root" to install Java. This is false, too. You can install it as a plain user wherever you want.
On my platform (Linux) the JDK is installed in a single directory under/opt (it could be $HOME/opt or whatever) and is completely self-contained. I could move the directory anywhere on the filesystem, have as many different versions installed as I want, and everything would work fine if I updated the JAVA_HOME variable (which would generally be set in the script that launches the application).
I agree in principle, but think you're exaggerating.
A lot more than one person made boatloads of money from counting cards in the 70s and 80s, and it wasn't until after later that extensive multi-person evasion techniques were necessary. And the 'fix' you talk about is sometimes extremely difficult and/or costly to implement, so it will not be fixed as soon as it is known about.
In the long run, all techniques fail and we are all dead. In the short term, which varies from a time-scale of days to decades, not so much.
There's one minor problem with your suggestion: the Joe and Jane Sixpack will never vote for a "geek" when a "normal Joe" [in fact or appearance] is on the ticket as well.
Something like that, but obviously not so extensive as Safari. I much prefer a paper book next to me rather than having it take up screen space while I'm trying to do something related to the book, and I think many others have similar preferences too. Safari is pretty cool though, but sometimes I want the book itself.
I've always thought that this would be a great business idea for a tech-centric area like silicon valley: a private for-profit library-like system for borrowing flavor-of-the-month tech books, which usually go for $40-$50 a pop and which you seldom will read again.
Buying them is expensive, and used book stores generally won't buy used tech books at all, because they are so quickly obsolete, which makes it doubly painful to buy such books when most of them are 90% fluff and 10% content.
Yeah, the UC Library is awesome. It's also available to UC alumni, so to all the current UC students: you have 3 years after you graduate to get a lifetime membership in the alumni association for $500. After that, it's $750, which is still a good deal for a lifetime of being able to use the UC Berkeley library (and other UC libraries too). I pretty much always have about 20 books checked out from the library, and that $500 is the best $500 I ever spent. I use it far more than I did when I was a student.
I assume other university libraries have similar arrangements for alumni, so if you're the sort of person who is likely to want to read a lot of stuff that university libraries are great for (I use cal's library primarily for math and comp sci), don't forget about your school library.
This depends on your library. I used to live in silicon valley, and the San Jose library system had a great catalog with many new books, including tech books. I used a bookmarklet that would automatically take me to my library's webpage for a book I was viewing on Amazon, and I could then request it be delivered to my local library. When it was ready for pickup, they'd send me an email. It doesn't get much easier than that, and I'd say at least 75% of the flavor of the month-type books I was looking for (e.g., Freakonomics, Blink, Stumbling on Happiness, God is Not Great) were in the system and available (they bought many copies of these sorts of books). They even had a highly recommended but hard to find book on C that I had been looking for (Pointers on C).
So I'd say it really depends where you live, what kind of people live there, and how much the library caters to the tastes of its local residents.
I don't believe as you say that "science is full of uncertainty", but even if that were the case, it would not follow that every article relating to science must therefore be low-quality crap. The criticism was not that there was uncertainty in the article, but that it was utterly devoid of content.
Hmmm, your response has nothing to do with my post, the gist of which was that ScienceDaily is a very poor quality Science-related website that Slashdot should avoid linking to.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I could have sworn that this was a reply to the grandparent post and not the parent post.
Yes, having mom and dad and 2 children all submit ratings into a single profile will ruin recommendations for all 4 users, and there's no workaround for that.
There will also be a big spike in memberships as a result, which is always good on paper at least.
Next year's marketing will be touting their amazing 20% increase in memberships last year as a result of their outstanding customer satisfaction.
"I didn't know about some arguably impressive stuff he had done" is hardly an apology for calling someone a crackpot and for spouting opinions without doing any research first, but I take it that's as close to an admission of wrongdoing as you're capable of, so I guess there's nothing else left to say.
anonymous coward was not me, but don't let that get in the way of your rant.
I have nothing to say about your "achievements" because my point was that you were sloppy in calling him a crackpot when you knew nothing about him other than some predictions which you probably read secondhand. Even when I pointed you to the Wikipedia page about him, you failed to read the page or acknowledge that he was not a crackpot.
What you'd have seen on that page if you had actually read it is that by the time Kurzweil was 20, he had won an international talent competition, been on TV to perform a piano piece composed by a computer he built, was recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search, had sold a company for half a million dollars (in 2006 dollars) plus royalties, and was working on a BS in Computer Science and Literature at MIT. After MIT, he had a long and successful career. Not exactly the bio of a crackpot.
My point stands: you were spouting off your misinformed opinion, and you continued to maintain your position that he was a crackpot even after I pointed you to a page that gave ample evidence that he was not.
When you grow up a little more, you'll learn not to be so overconfident and to have opinions about things that you know nothing about. And maybe you'll even learn to admit that you were wrong and apologize for calling someone a crackpot based on secondhand hearsay and without making any attempt at learning about the person before making the accusation.
And to be clear, I've written all of this not because I'm a fan of Kurzweil's (I'm not), but because your misinformed ranting needed to be called by someone. Slashdot should aim for a higher standard of discussion than an AOL chat room, and baseless opinions and sloppy thinking like yours don't help.
I'm no big fan of Kurzweil's. I disagree with a lot of what he says, and I think many of his predictions are silly and/or obvious. But I am still able to distinguish between Ray Kurzweil and an actual crackpot like Dr. Gene Ray, Cubic.
I'm guessing you were too lazy to take the time to do any research on what Kurzweil has done with his life before spouting off your opinions, because regardless of whether Kurzweil deserves a Nobel prize -- he does not, of course -- and regardless of whether he is right on all or most of his arguments about the future, he is not a crackpot.
On your side note of "making the future happen" rather than making predictions, here's a prediction I have for you: I predict that if we compared what you have actually made happen and what Kurzweil has made happen in his long career, we'd see that Kurzweil has done much more, and had done things of greater benefit to humanity, than have you.
Kurzwiel [sic] is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions
Have you checked out how many of his past wacky predictions have already come true? He's been making such predictions for decades now and has a pretty good success rate.
Right you are! I haven't used frames since about 2000 and didn't think to check the frameset DTD.
Thanks for the correction.
Not to ruin the joke, but BODY isn't optional: try the following in the W3C validator:
<html>
<head><title>Not Valid</title></head>
<!-- <body><p>Uncomment this line to make it valid.</p></body> -->
</html>
It was just down for me again at 15:08 PST (same "service unavailable" HTTP error), after it had been working again for a while, so they clearly have not completely resolved whatever the issues were.
I got this too, and I thought it was because I set up a little script that checked the homepage every 5 seconds to let me know when it came back up (because I wanted to purchase something today and get it ASAP).
I sent them an email to that address, and I had access again an hour later. I didn't get a response from them though, so I don't know if they did something to unblock my IP address or if it had nothing to do with my script and was just related to the outage.
With regard to encapsulation, you can define an incomplete struct and public functions for manipulating that type in the .h file, and put the complete definition of the struct and the public functions (as well as an other private functions you want) in the .c file (with the private functions being static). Clients will only be able to use the struct via the public functions you've defined, and will not have access to the internals (without major wizardry).
The following page illustrates the technique: http://tinobox.org/wordpress/?p=3
Where is the suddenoutbreakofcommonsense tag when you need it?
The parent is absolutely correct, and the grandparent's statements about Java are of the "stuff I heard on the internets"-variety.
The one thing you didn't mention is the "needing to be root" to install Java. This is false, too. You can install it as a plain user wherever you want.
On my platform (Linux) the JDK is installed in a single directory under /opt (it could be $HOME/opt or whatever) and is completely self-contained. I could move the directory anywhere on the filesystem, have as many different versions installed as I want, and everything would work fine if I updated the JAVA_HOME variable (which would generally be set in the script that launches the application).
Indeed, and it doesn't stop there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)#Future_standards_directions
C is continuing to improve.
I agree in principle, but think you're exaggerating.
A lot more than one person made boatloads of money from counting cards in the 70s and 80s, and it wasn't until after later that extensive multi-person evasion techniques were necessary. And the 'fix' you talk about is sometimes extremely difficult and/or costly to implement, so it will not be fixed as soon as it is known about.
In the long run, all techniques fail and we are all dead. In the short term, which varies from a time-scale of days to decades, not so much.
Just that at 6:4 odds you can make a lot of money quickly on a 'hot' table.
Except that there's no such thing as a 'hot' table.
No more so than tossing 5 heads in a row means that you all of a sudden have a 'hot' coin.
Maybe you mean that as a figure of speech, but it's an extremely misleading one that idiots everywhere believe in to their peril.
There is no way to beat the house in the long term.
Paraphrasing Keynes: in the long term, we're all dead.
So what? If it works for a while, good enough.
There's one minor problem with your suggestion: the Joe and Jane Sixpack will never vote for a "geek" when a "normal Joe" [in fact or appearance] is on the ticket as well.
Something like that, but obviously not so extensive as Safari. I much prefer a paper book next to me rather than having it take up screen space while I'm trying to do something related to the book, and I think many others have similar preferences too. Safari is pretty cool though, but sometimes I want the book itself.
I've always thought that this would be a great business idea for a tech-centric area like silicon valley: a private for-profit library-like system for borrowing flavor-of-the-month tech books, which usually go for $40-$50 a pop and which you seldom will read again.
Buying them is expensive, and used book stores generally won't buy used tech books at all, because they are so quickly obsolete, which makes it doubly painful to buy such books when most of them are 90% fluff and 10% content.
Yeah, the UC Library is awesome. It's also available to UC alumni, so to all the current UC students: you have 3 years after you graduate to get a lifetime membership in the alumni association for $500. After that, it's $750, which is still a good deal for a lifetime of being able to use the UC Berkeley library (and other UC libraries too). I pretty much always have about 20 books checked out from the library, and that $500 is the best $500 I ever spent. I use it far more than I did when I was a student.
I assume other university libraries have similar arrangements for alumni, so if you're the sort of person who is likely to want to read a lot of stuff that university libraries are great for (I use cal's library primarily for math and comp sci), don't forget about your school library.
This depends on your library. I used to live in silicon valley, and the San Jose library system had a great catalog with many new books, including tech books. I used a bookmarklet that would automatically take me to my library's webpage for a book I was viewing on Amazon, and I could then request it be delivered to my local library. When it was ready for pickup, they'd send me an email. It doesn't get much easier than that, and I'd say at least 75% of the flavor of the month-type books I was looking for (e.g., Freakonomics, Blink, Stumbling on Happiness, God is Not Great) were in the system and available (they bought many copies of these sorts of books). They even had a highly recommended but hard to find book on C that I had been looking for (Pointers on C).
So I'd say it really depends where you live, what kind of people live there, and how much the library caters to the tastes of its local residents.
Oh, and an article could quite easily meet my (not exceptionally high) quality standards: http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=08-x5.
I don't believe as you say that "science is full of uncertainty", but even if that were the case, it would not follow that every article relating to science must therefore be low-quality crap. The criticism was not that there was uncertainty in the article, but that it was utterly devoid of content.
Hmmm, your response has nothing to do with my post, the gist of which was that ScienceDaily is a very poor quality Science-related website that Slashdot should avoid linking to.