As an independent whose political beliefs have been picked from a variety of sources both left and right, I have to say that both Obama and Clinton seem pretty close to the center - with Clinton being holding a number of ideas that are definitely more right than left. McCain seemed to be solidly right-center a while back, but in this process (and from maybe a year and a half back when he was clearly setting himself up for this) he's been moving much further right - unhappily (for me) he's been seeming to pick all the worst beliefs of the right wing to glom onto.
Oh well. Another election of one sold-his-soul-to-the-idiots vs another.
There was also a full page ad in yesterdays (dead tree) New York Times saying the same kind of thing. Too bad we can't arrange for the Times to do a story on this and arrange it to be on the facing page from the USAF's next ad.
Is it Wikipedia's place to be a forum for news reporting and political social change?
Wikipedia's place? While Wikipedia as a bunch of servers may belong to the Wikimedia foundation, Wikipedia as content belongs to its readers and to its editors. The content provided by these people is what they agree (with whatever mechanisms) it is. No more, no less. The question is rather like those proposed by./ readers who wonder if "Slashdot" is not being inconsistent when there are multiple, often contradictory, opinions offered - by slashdot users - on various topics (patents, copyright... ).
How about something like "Remove this vile calumny or we'll..." :
1. Remove Wikipedia's DNS entry in Italy. (See recent Wikileaks problems.)
2. Publish (in Italy at least) routing information that redirects Wikipedia requests to a black hole. (See recent You Tube problems.)
I think the Mayor's goal may not include preventing random residents of (say) Nevada from reading about his (alleged) corruption (after all, what does he care about what someone in Vegas thinks?), but probably does include preventing people in Italy from doing the same.
You know, I was with you all the way up until you limited your comments to George the second.
This has been in practice well before Bush or any George was in power in the US.
But then your THIRD intarweb thingy would become a haven for THIRD intarweb criminals. I therefore DEMAND a fourth intarweb tube thingy! We must do it. Just Think Of the Children!
OK. I'm confused. For the prius 11gal/ton-mile seems way off. I work it as : 45 mile/gallon -> 1/45 gallon/mile. divide that by 0.25 tons to get 4/45 gallon/ton-mile, right? Or 0.088 gal/ton-mile?
Or is this wrong (no coffee yet this AM)? Is there another way to do this that gives the numbers you cite.
Given the reports of the value of the intelligence before the Iraq war, and the continuing reports of bad intelligence about other areas, it may not be unreasonable to assume that most of the intelligence gathering by the CIA is indeed being run by psychic agents. The satellite they just shot down - it contained a very highly instrumented dowsing rod.
Sounds almost like a comedy film plot - go into the CIA and see women with crystal balls (probably wearing trench coats), levitating tables, windowless rooms with velvet covered tables for tarot readings.
Didn't Opera respond to this with something that made all the MSN pages into Swedish Chef talk? It was probably the most popular download Opera ever provided for a few days.
Makes you wonder what will happen if Microsoft acquires Yahoo.
Re:Why not S-expressions?
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Sure, you can build a different text representation for XML as sexps. But if it represents the same thing, it doesn't much matter.
Imagine that you do so, and you can write a function P that takes xml into sexps and a function Q that takes it back. If Q(P(xml-stuff)) == xml-stuff and P(Q(sexps)) == sexps, then they both do the same thing and you can effectively use either syntax. So you use the syntax you want and convert when you need to. Of course, if either equality doesn't work, then one syntax makes it possible to express something that the other does not - and then the semantics differ. So now it becomes, not a question of using XML, but using a representation that is closer to the semantics your application needs.
And that is one of the abiding lessons of computing - trying to mash semantics into a language/representation that doesn't fit well is a pain and generally a good way to waste time and effort.
It seems likely though that whatever the real price, they'll charge that and then quite a bit more. First to make a profit and second to protect their interests in media. I'd not be surprised to see them price it so downloading media from their system is significantly cheaper than from other providers - but still enough to make a nice profit.
I watched the internet grow over the years and found the increasing commercial usage both exciting and frightening - it seems quite possible that combined commercial and governmental interests are working hard to make the internet a substantially less interesting place. We'll see.
Why would they have to code for new amino acids? Wouldn't it be just as likely that they'd provide alternate codings for the amino acids already present? Or that they'd be just ignored? Or that they'd stop protein synthesis when encountered? If they reliably coded as errors, it might be convenient to stop expression of proteins that are detrimental, or to stop reproduction in viruses or the like.
I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the students in my CS program have never heard of pre/post conditions and how to chain them together to think about how a program works. Or loop invariants. They're clearly using them (because they can get their programs to run) but don't understand them - and understanding how pre and post conditions chain together is probably the most essential tool in your brains for writing good code.
One of the biggest disappointments to me about Java was that it did not support Eiffel (Sather...) style pre/post conditions and class invariants. Then Microsoft could have won me over big time to C# by including nice (and nicely syntactic) language support for them, but they didn't do that either. Asserts are ok, but not as easy/elegant.
While I once liked Java as a first language, I now see that what is taught in Java books and classes is stuff like what a class is, how inheritance works, how exceptions work - often before they cover arrays. Too often, what is being taught is not how to program (whatever that is and however you teach it) but how to use java - a different beast entirely.
And in 1984 or so (don't remember exactly) I worked for a company (long since defunct) that was working on online games, including solitaire. I suspect there is quite a bit of prior art around.
Odd. I thought at some point that the post had the link to the http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060160053.html patent itself in it. But the "a" tag doesn't seem to be working for me. myminicity madness counteraction?
For sheer weirdness, a patent in the field of new-age-therapy pretty much can't be beat.
Two whole claims:
1. A psychological development system comprising triangulation, categorization and interpretation.
2. A psychological development system comprising evaluating at least three things in at least three ways in at least three levels that is repeated at least three times.
And the rest of the patent is worth reading for amusement as well. There is even an "illustration of a Venn Diagram". And what on earth is meant by "Numbers have historically been seen as unreal templates of creation".
The odd part is that the patent holder (Mary Swenson) was (last summer at least) suing someone over this.
But does the legalese really apply reasonable to those user licensing agreements that say that the site owns your content "throughout the universe". Does the copyright registration apply at the time a signal from earth could arrive at (say) the Small Magellanic Cloud? Or do they (as lawyers) think it applies from "now"? Talk about copyright for a "limited time"!
You've not used "benefit" in the same sense in both cases. "That which is to my personal, direct profit" is not equivalent to, "that which makes me feel good". I can feel good about all manner of things that have no direct profit to myself.
But what do you mean by profit? If you mean only economic, it seems quite a narrow definition indeed. It seems quite reasonable to suppose that most of what humans do they do to make themselves feel good one way or another. This includes things that are pretty basic to survival, for just one instance, food tastes good (and it seems quite probable that there is an evolutionary basis for that).
So, why do people try to acquire economic benefits? In part, there is the survival aspect, but added to that, more money can mean more ability to obtain things that make you feel good (though the "feeling good" part does not always follow).
I suspect (but am neither a philosopher, nor a psychologist, nor an evolutionary biologist) that "feeling good" is really one of the basic goals of any living (not necessarily human here) being. If you can feel good without a personal economic benefit, that is all to the good, is it not? (It even seems to underly more than a few bits of most major religions. At the extreme "heaven" is just the ultimate in "feeling good" - and it is reputed to last for quite a long time.)
Slashdot Mirror
As an independent whose political beliefs have been picked from a variety of sources both left and right, I have to say that both Obama and Clinton seem pretty close to the center - with Clinton being holding a number of ideas that are definitely more right than left. McCain seemed to be solidly right-center a while back, but in this process (and from maybe a year and a half back when he was clearly setting himself up for this) he's been moving much further right - unhappily (for me) he's been seeming to pick all the worst beliefs of the right wing to glom onto.
Oh well. Another election of one sold-his-soul-to-the-idiots vs another.
There was also a full page ad in yesterdays (dead tree) New York Times saying the same kind of thing. Too bad we can't arrange for the Times to do a story on this and arrange it to be on the facing page from the USAF's next ad.
Wikipedia's place? While Wikipedia as a bunch of servers may belong to the Wikimedia foundation, Wikipedia as content belongs to its readers and to its editors. The content provided by these people is what they agree (with whatever mechanisms) it is. No more, no less. The question is rather like those proposed by ./ readers who wonder if "Slashdot" is not being inconsistent when there are multiple, often contradictory, opinions offered - by slashdot users - on various topics (patents, copyright... ).
How about something like "Remove this vile calumny or we'll ..." :
1. Remove Wikipedia's DNS entry in Italy. (See recent Wikileaks problems.)
2. Publish (in Italy at least) routing information that redirects Wikipedia requests to a black hole. (See recent You Tube problems.)
I think the Mayor's goal may not include preventing random residents of (say) Nevada from reading about his (alleged) corruption (after all, what does he care about what someone in Vegas thinks?), but probably does include preventing people in Italy from doing the same.
I thought he meant George the Second of England.
"And we'll get everyone to move to, um, lets call it Chia Earth by offering them free T-shirts!"
"Gosh Brain, this plan will really work."
Best comment in this whole discussion. Would that I had mod points.
But then your THIRD intarweb thingy would become a haven for THIRD intarweb criminals. I therefore DEMAND a fourth intarweb tube thingy! We must do it. Just Think Of the Children!
OK. I'm confused. For the prius 11gal/ton-mile seems way off. I work it as : 45 mile/gallon -> 1/45 gallon/mile. divide that by 0.25 tons to get 4/45 gallon/ton-mile, right? Or 0.088 gal/ton-mile?
Or is this wrong (no coffee yet this AM)? Is there another way to do this that gives the numbers you cite.
Given the reports of the value of the intelligence before the Iraq war, and the continuing reports of bad intelligence about other areas, it may not be unreasonable to assume that most of the intelligence gathering by the CIA is indeed being run by psychic agents. The satellite they just shot down - it contained a very highly instrumented dowsing rod.
Sounds almost like a comedy film plot - go into the CIA and see women with crystal balls (probably wearing trench coats), levitating tables, windowless rooms with velvet covered tables for tarot readings.
Simple, it is a design prize, not an engineering one.
Or, if we were being a bit more cynical, it is a prize for aspiring patent reviewers.
Didn't Opera respond to this with something that made all the MSN pages into Swedish Chef talk? It was probably the most popular download Opera ever provided for a few days.
Makes you wonder what will happen if Microsoft acquires Yahoo.
Sure, you can build a different text representation for XML as sexps. But if it represents the same thing, it doesn't much matter.
Imagine that you do so, and you can write a function P that takes xml into sexps and a function Q that takes it back. If Q(P(xml-stuff)) == xml-stuff and P(Q(sexps)) == sexps, then they both do the same thing and you can effectively use either syntax. So you use the syntax you want and convert when you need to. Of course, if either equality doesn't work, then one syntax makes it possible to express something that the other does not - and then the semantics differ. So now it becomes, not a question of using XML, but using a representation that is closer to the semantics your application needs.
And that is one of the abiding lessons of computing - trying to mash semantics into a language/representation that doesn't fit well is a pain and generally a good way to waste time and effort.
It seems likely though that whatever the real price, they'll charge that and then quite a bit more. First to make a profit and second to protect their interests in media. I'd not be surprised to see them price it so downloading media from their system is significantly cheaper than from other providers - but still enough to make a nice profit.
I watched the internet grow over the years and found the increasing commercial usage both exciting and frightening - it seems quite possible that combined commercial and governmental interests are working hard to make the internet a substantially less interesting place. We'll see.
The word for today is idiom .
Why would they have to code for new amino acids? Wouldn't it be just as likely that they'd provide alternate codings for the amino acids already present? Or that they'd be just ignored? Or that they'd stop protein synthesis when encountered? If they reliably coded as errors, it might be convenient to stop expression of proteins that are detrimental, or to stop reproduction in viruses or the like.
So the taxpayers should pay? And making the examiners pay is not likely to work well either.
I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the students in my CS program have never heard of pre/post conditions and how to chain them together to think about how a program works. Or loop invariants. They're clearly using them (because they can get their programs to run) but don't understand them - and understanding how pre and post conditions chain together is probably the most essential tool in your brains for writing good code.
One of the biggest disappointments to me about Java was that it did not support Eiffel (Sather...) style pre/post conditions and class invariants. Then Microsoft could have won me over big time to C# by including nice (and nicely syntactic) language support for them, but they didn't do that either. Asserts are ok, but not as easy/elegant.
While I once liked Java as a first language, I now see that what is taught in Java books and classes is stuff like what a class is, how inheritance works, how exceptions work - often before they cover arrays. Too often, what is being taught is not how to program (whatever that is and however you teach it) but how to use java - a different beast entirely.
And in 1984 or so (don't remember exactly) I worked for a company (long since defunct) that was working on online games, including solitaire. I suspect there is quite a bit of prior art around.
Odd. I thought at some point that the post had the link to the http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060160053.html patent itself in it. But the "a" tag doesn't seem to be working for me. myminicity madness counteraction?
For sheer weirdness, a patent in the field of new-age-therapy pretty much can't be beat.
Two whole claims :
1. A psychological development system comprising triangulation, categorization and interpretation.2. A psychological development system comprising evaluating at least three things in at least three ways in at least three levels that is repeated at least three times.
And the rest of the patent is worth reading for amusement as well. There is even an "illustration of a Venn Diagram". And what on earth is meant by "Numbers have historically been seen as unreal templates of creation".
The odd part is that the patent holder (Mary Swenson) was (last summer at least) suing someone over this.
But always remember :
Guns don't kill people, physics kills people Perhaps we should outlaw physics. Or physics textbooks - which might be quite popular?But does the legalese really apply reasonable to those user licensing agreements that say that the site owns your content "throughout the universe". Does the copyright registration apply at the time a signal from earth could arrive at (say) the Small Magellanic Cloud? Or do they (as lawyers) think it applies from "now"? Talk about copyright for a "limited time"!
Not only confusing legaleze, but physics.
But what do you mean by profit? If you mean only economic, it seems quite a narrow definition indeed. It seems quite reasonable to suppose that most of what humans do they do to make themselves feel good one way or another. This includes things that are pretty basic to survival, for just one instance, food tastes good (and it seems quite probable that there is an evolutionary basis for that).
So, why do people try to acquire economic benefits? In part, there is the survival aspect, but added to that, more money can mean more ability to obtain things that make you feel good (though the "feeling good" part does not always follow).
I suspect (but am neither a philosopher, nor a psychologist, nor an evolutionary biologist) that "feeling good" is really one of the basic goals of any living (not necessarily human here) being. If you can feel good without a personal economic benefit, that is all to the good, is it not? (It even seems to underly more than a few bits of most major religions. At the extreme "heaven" is just the ultimate in "feeling good" - and it is reputed to last for quite a long time.)