How could a shitty programmer write shitty code in a language that "forces people to write easily readable (and therefore maintainable) code"?
Either the magic power of python can imbue even the most inept programmer with the ability to write easily maintainable code or it can't. Do you need a whiteboard and some smelly markers to see what this thread is about?
And, from the same show, a bit about manned spaceflight...
He also made a speech about space. President Kennedy said, "By the end of this decade, I have decided to put a man on the surface of the Moon." At the same time, our Prime Minister in Britain, Sir Dingly Dang... You don't know anyway, do you? You have no idea! It was Sir Fritz Bunwalla. Engelbert Slaptyback, who was Prime Minister at the time, and he stood up and he said, "By the end of this decade, I have decided to put a man on the surface of the Earth!" And so he did. But it was kinda weird, 'cause we couldn't do the space race. We had no money, you know, rationing didn't stop 'til the year 2001! I still haven't even lived that long. But anyway, we just didn't have any money. So you were getting space rockets, testing them, sending a cat, dog, a fish, a monkey up into space. The fish was interesting! We didn't have enough money to put a man in a track suit up a ladder! I mean, I would've been there,
"Go man, go!"
"I'm going, I'm going! 'Ang on!"
"Just hang on to the ladder!"
"Hello, Swindon, I am here. Swindon, can you hear me?"
"Swindon here, we are monitoring you on our instruments at the moment, we've got you on a tuba." "There should be a bigger laugh for that joke, I think."
"Yeah, I can't quite understand it; I thought it was really funny. Swindon, a knackered, kind of Fresno town."
"They don't seem to be going for it."
"They're obviously bastards."
"Anyway, Swindon, I'm nearly at the Moon... actually, that's a bit of an understatement, that one.
"Have you got another big ladder, another bit of ladder? I don't think we're quite at the Moon yet, but I can see right over the top of the houses! Fantastic!"
Toxic chemicals? Don't they know that it's possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. Yes, its an excimer, frozen in its excited state.
It's a chemical laser but in solid, not gaseous, form. Put simply, in deference to you, Slashdot, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite. As soon as we apply a field we couple to a state, it is radiatively coupled to the ground state.
I figure we can extract at least 10 to the 21st photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter.
Example: You are counting the tens. 6 tens come out of the deck. You assume a count of -6, and lower your bet. I am hi/lo. I see those 6 tens come out, and then 12 low cards. I KNOW a count of +6, and raise my bet to take advantage of it. Guess who is coming out on top?
If your answer to this is anything other than "The house, of course", then it may be a good idea to let someone else hold all of your money next time you are so much as in the same state as a casino.
one thing that I continually hear from experienced journalists is that every article needs to have a story.
I am reminded of a time that I sat on a train next to a group of salesmen on their way out to a conference. For the whole trip they were having an animated discussion about how important high numbers were and how a truly great salesman wouldn't be afraid to put the squeeze on anyone, even his friends or family, to make a few extra sales.
Why was I reminded of this? Not because of the parallels between selling a used car to your grandmother and tricking people who don't care about science into reading about it, but because of a simple lesson that I learned a long time ago.
Even if a bunch of people earnestly believe in something and talk to you about it very loudly and excitedly, it isn't always right.
A group of hack screenwriters could tell you that your science journalism would sell better if it had more car chases and nudity in it, but that doesn't mean that that's the right thing to do either.
Why do so many structures in 'outer space' -- low gravity, three-dimensional space -- take on essentially two-dimensional forms? Consider rings around planets, planetary systems around stars, and galaxies, at least. They are all flat discs.
Try this some day. Take a bit of rope with a ball at the end of it. A tennis ball will do nicely. Bowling balls are just asking for trouble. Now hold the end of the rope and spin around as fast as you can. You now represent a planet, the tennis ball represents a part of a ring and the rope represents gravity. Try not to get dizzy and fall down. Falling down and throwing up doesn't represent anything in astronomy. That's engineering.
Notice that the ball spins in a more or less flat circle. Inertia carries it forwards and the rope pulls it towards you. There really isn't any force pushing it up or down, so it will naturally orbit in a flat plane.
Okay, whoopdie doo. I just told you that a circle is flat. What you're really asking is why millions of little rocks in a ring will all orbit in the same plane instead of going off and doing their own thing, each orbiting in slightly different directions forming a huge cloud.
Are you still spinning that ball around? Good. Now, pick up another one in your other hand and start spinning it as well. Chances are that both balls are spinning at the same speed at opposite ends of the same circle, so everything is fine. Here's where the demonstration gets a bit tricky. You need to unhinge your arms so that you can spin both balls at different angles and slightly different speeds. Since I don't want you to need to undergo major surgery in the name of physics I'll just skip to the ending and tell you what would happen if you could do that.
The balls are going to hit each other. It may not happen right away, but if you have objects moving in intersecting orbits it _will_ happen. If you had a few million balls all spinning around at different angles you would have a better representation of the rings we're talking about with a lot more collisions, but that requires a whole lot of rope and we don't have that much.
Now we can get back to the original question. Why do all these rocks form flat rings? I could tell you that that's the only way that they won't hit each other, but that doesn't answer the question of how they got there. Suppose that you took about a million little rocks and put them all in random orbits around a planet. At the start they would form a spherical cloud around it -- A ha! A three dimensional structure, just like you were asking for. But the question is "How long can it last?"
All of those rocks are going to start hitting each other, and every time they do they're going to transfer momentum. With enough objects traveling in enough different orbits that's going to happen a _lot_. Do you want to know how much? Look up at the moon some time and count the craters. Back when the solar system was young and not quite so flat, things were smashing into one another all the time. Every time they collided they scrupulously obeyed the law of conservation of momentum and shifted into different directions. Eventually the total momentum of that spherical cloud started to average out and more and more rocks found themselves orbiting in the same flat plane. Why did that happen? Simply because those were the ones that got hit less. Like your friend the astrophysicist said, "That's the way the math works out". It's all about averages, and when you're dealing with millions of rocks smacking into one another over billions of years, that's what matters.
But if we're dealing with _averages_ and _statistics_, why is everything so perfectly flat? Why are all of the planets, moons and rings all in the same plane, and why do all of the billions of stars in the Galaxy move in the same flat orbits?
The simple answers to those questions are "It's not", "They don't" and "That doesn't happen". While the planets all move in
There may be a valid argument for saying that ndiswrapper can't be GPL'd, but this isn't it.
You're absolutely right. Nobody is arguing about the license under which ndiswrapper is distributed.
In the article Linus is arguing about whether or not ndiswrapper, which is designed for the sole purpose of linking proprietary binary-only modules with the kernel should be treated as though it were itself a proprietary, binary-only module. The exact technical details start to get ignored as the conversation continues, but the concept is still the same.
The claim isn't that a cow isn't a mammal because it eats grass, it's that you can't keep calling a hamburger bun "a vegetarian meal" once you put a beef patty and two strips of bacon onto it.
Or, failing that, some kind of Bill of Rights or something, which requires that a defendant be presented with all of the evidence being used against him or her.
Why is is that in the USA only Criminal proceedings are held to reasonable standards of fairness while "civil" cases are all about which side can screw the other guy faster?
What's to be jealous of? The tech probably thought to himself "Hey, someone scribbled all over his case. Oh well, if it was anything important he wouldn't have sent it here. Time to follow standard procedure, break out the alcohol and scrub it down just like we do with every other case that comes in here. *scrub scrub* Next case... Looks like this one has mysterious stains on it. Time for a new pair of gloves..."
Don't worry, it's quite understandable that the associated trauma of stabbing forks into your eyes after watching Star Trek V would lead to some memory loss. It can also lead to strange feelings of nostalga for the first Star Trek movie and an overwhelming but inexplicable desire for something called a "marsh melon".
"I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb." Thomas A Edison (not withstanding the debate over TAE and invention of light bulbs)
I guess that if you were on the other side of that debate then the quote would be "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 underlings who have failed me for the last time."
Some online observers are speculating that auto-complete is to blame, but this has not been confirmed.
As I tried to explain to one of the Three Letter Acronyms of our company this morning, "Auto-Complete" is not to blame. "Not Paying Attention" is to blame. If you can't be bothered to look at who you are sending stuff like this to, then please step back from the computer and have someone else handle complicated things like email for you.
Surely if you are doing billion dollar deals then you can afford to hire someone capable of working a keyboard without embarrassing him or herself.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, when your palm-flower turns black on Lastday you can report to a sleepshop to do your duty.
How could a shitty programmer write shitty code in a language that "forces people to write easily readable (and therefore maintainable) code"?
Either the magic power of python can imbue even the most inept programmer with the ability to write easily maintainable code or it can't. Do you need a whiteboard and some smelly markers to see what this thread is about?
And, from the same show, a bit about manned spaceflight...
He also made a speech about space. President Kennedy said, "By the end of this decade, I have decided to put a man on the surface of the Moon." At the same time, our Prime Minister in Britain, Sir Dingly Dang... You don't know anyway, do you? You have no idea! It was Sir Fritz Bunwalla. Engelbert Slaptyback, who was Prime Minister at the time, and he stood up and he said, "By the end of this decade, I have decided to put a man on the surface of the Earth!" And so he did. But it was kinda weird, 'cause we couldn't do the space race. We had no money, you know, rationing didn't stop 'til the year 2001! I still haven't even lived that long. But anyway, we just didn't have any money. So you were getting space rockets, testing them, sending a cat, dog, a fish, a monkey up into space. The fish was interesting! We didn't have enough money to put a man in a track suit up a ladder! I mean, I would've been there,
"Go man, go!"
"I'm going, I'm going! 'Ang on!"
"Just hang on to the ladder!"
"Hello, Swindon, I am here. Swindon, can you hear me?"
"Swindon here, we are monitoring you on our instruments at the moment, we've got you on a tuba." "There should be a bigger laugh for that joke, I think."
"Yeah, I can't quite understand it; I thought it was really funny. Swindon, a knackered, kind of Fresno town."
"They don't seem to be going for it."
"They're obviously bastards."
"Anyway, Swindon, I'm nearly at the Moon... actually, that's a bit of an understatement, that one.
"Have you got another big ladder, another bit of ladder? I don't think we're quite at the Moon yet, but I can see right over the top of the houses! Fantastic!"
Among other things that would be a clear violation of the first, tenth and one hundred and eighty ninth rules of acquisition.
Toxic chemicals? Don't they know that it's possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. Yes, its an excimer, frozen in its excited state.
It's a chemical laser but in solid, not gaseous, form. Put simply, in deference to you, Slashdot, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite. As soon as we apply a field we couple to a state, it is radiatively coupled to the ground state.
I figure we can extract at least 10 to the 21st photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter.
If your answer to this is anything other than "The house, of course", then it may be a good idea to let someone else hold all of your money next time you are so much as in the same state as a casino.
Isn't that sort of thing blatantly illegal under the DMCA?
I am reminded of a time that I sat on a train next to a group of salesmen on their way out to a conference. For the whole trip they were having an animated discussion about how important high numbers were and how a truly great salesman wouldn't be afraid to put the squeeze on anyone, even his friends or family, to make a few extra sales.
Why was I reminded of this? Not because of the parallels between selling a used car to your grandmother and tricking people who don't care about science into reading about it, but because of a simple lesson that I learned a long time ago.
Even if a bunch of people earnestly believe in something and talk to you about it very loudly and excitedly, it isn't always right.
A group of hack screenwriters could tell you that your science journalism would sell better if it had more car chases and nudity in it, but that doesn't mean that that's the right thing to do either.
Try this some day. Take a bit of rope with a ball at the end of it. A tennis ball will do nicely. Bowling balls are just asking for trouble. Now hold the end of the rope and spin around as fast as you can. You now represent a planet, the tennis ball represents a part of a ring and the rope represents gravity. Try not to get dizzy and fall down. Falling down and throwing up doesn't represent anything in astronomy. That's engineering.
Notice that the ball spins in a more or less flat circle. Inertia carries it forwards and the rope pulls it towards you. There really isn't any force pushing it up or down, so it will naturally orbit in a flat plane.
Okay, whoopdie doo. I just told you that a circle is flat. What you're really asking is why millions of little rocks in a ring will all orbit in the same plane instead of going off and doing their own thing, each orbiting in slightly different directions forming a huge cloud.
Are you still spinning that ball around? Good. Now, pick up another one in your other hand and start spinning it as well. Chances are that both balls are spinning at the same speed at opposite ends of the same circle, so everything is fine. Here's where the demonstration gets a bit tricky. You need to unhinge your arms so that you can spin both balls at different angles and slightly different speeds. Since I don't want you to need to undergo major surgery in the name of physics I'll just skip to the ending and tell you what would happen if you could do that.
The balls are going to hit each other. It may not happen right away, but if you have objects moving in intersecting orbits it _will_ happen. If you had a few million balls all spinning around at different angles you would have a better representation of the rings we're talking about with a lot more collisions, but that requires a whole lot of rope and we don't have that much.
Now we can get back to the original question. Why do all these rocks form flat rings? I could tell you that that's the only way that they won't hit each other, but that doesn't answer the question of how they got there. Suppose that you took about a million little rocks and put them all in random orbits around a planet. At the start they would form a spherical cloud around it -- A ha! A three dimensional structure, just like you were asking for. But the question is "How long can it last?"
All of those rocks are going to start hitting each other, and every time they do they're going to transfer momentum. With enough objects traveling in enough different orbits that's going to happen a _lot_. Do you want to know how much? Look up at the moon some time and count the craters. Back when the solar system was young and not quite so flat, things were smashing into one another all the time. Every time they collided they scrupulously obeyed the law of conservation of momentum and shifted into different directions. Eventually the total momentum of that spherical cloud started to average out and more and more rocks found themselves orbiting in the same flat plane. Why did that happen? Simply because those were the ones that got hit less. Like your friend the astrophysicist said, "That's the way the math works out". It's all about averages, and when you're dealing with millions of rocks smacking into one another over billions of years, that's what matters.
But if we're dealing with _averages_ and _statistics_, why is everything so perfectly flat? Why are all of the planets, moons and rings all in the same plane, and why do all of the billions of stars in the Galaxy move in the same flat orbits?
The simple answers to those questions are "It's not", "They don't" and "That doesn't happen". While the planets all move in
You're absolutely right. Nobody is arguing about the license under which ndiswrapper is distributed.
In the article Linus is arguing about whether or not ndiswrapper, which is designed for the sole purpose of linking proprietary binary-only modules with the kernel should be treated as though it were itself a proprietary, binary-only module. The exact technical details start to get ignored as the conversation continues, but the concept is still the same.
You may want to read this discussion of module licensing from l-k to get some idea of just what really is being discussed.
The claim isn't that a cow isn't a mammal because it eats grass, it's that you can't keep calling a hamburger bun "a vegetarian meal" once you put a beef patty and two strips of bacon onto it.
Or, failing that, some kind of Bill of Rights or something, which requires that a defendant be presented with all of the evidence being used against him or her.
Why is is that in the USA only Criminal proceedings are held to reasonable standards of fairness while "civil" cases are all about which side can screw the other guy faster?
What's to be jealous of? The tech probably thought to himself "Hey, someone scribbled all over his case. Oh well, if it was anything important he wouldn't have sent it here. Time to follow standard procedure, break out the alcohol and scrub it down just like we do with every other case that comes in here. *scrub scrub* Next case... Looks like this one has mysterious stains on it. Time for a new pair of gloves..."
Of course what he really meant was "I'll get $15K for saying who you are. You pay me $5K and then I'll have $20K in total."
The fact that the first response to "John Locke" was Lost and not Second Treatise on Civil Government or An Essay Concerning Human Understanding really shouldn't surprise me nearly as much as it does.
In the words of the great philosophers The Human Ton and Handy, "Come on, people! Read a book!"
Nah. It will just respond "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER".
You'll have to wait a little while for a Multivac capable of answering that one.
Then perhaps World of Warcraft isn't the game for you.
Really? Then who was "Naughtius Maximus"?
Don't worry, it's quite understandable that the associated trauma of stabbing forks into your eyes after watching Star Trek V would lead to some memory loss. It can also lead to strange feelings of nostalga for the first Star Trek movie and an overwhelming but inexplicable desire for something called a "marsh melon".
Don't worry, it will all pass soon.
o/~ Proud cascade keep on rollin'... o/~
I guess that if you were on the other side of that debate then the quote would be "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 underlings who have failed me for the last time."
And those were the biggest hats he could find!
As I tried to explain to one of the Three Letter Acronyms of our company this morning, "Auto-Complete" is not to blame. "Not Paying Attention" is to blame. If you can't be bothered to look at who you are sending stuff like this to, then please step back from the computer and have someone else handle complicated things like email for you.
Surely if you are doing billion dollar deals then you can afford to hire someone capable of working a keyboard without embarrassing him or herself.
Yeah, that is at least three more than is usually considered a fair sample around here.
I still think that calling this the Happy Harry Hard-On edition of Ubuntu would have been a much better move.
As absolutely fascinating as this... um... almost sounds, I'm still going to have to Just Say No to Silverfish.