We've got tons of "basic research" which doesn't go anywhere. How often on this site do we hear about a new breakthrough in solar energy or batteries or cellulosic biofuel that ends up going nowhere? Perhaps we really do need more in the way of applied research and development; get one of these "breakthroughs" to actually do something.
And then there's physics, which in terms of basic research has spent decades trying to break the Standard Model with more and more powerful accelerators, and gotten zip for it; the Standard Model survives and we haven't gotten any useful applications for a very long time.
"Religion is the opiate of the masses" -- Karl Marx
When life sucks (which, face it, is most of the time for most people), religion provides a break from reality. Whether it's better for your brain to be disconnected from reality or to have to accept depressing reality without any cushion is a matter of debate.
When I think about the "dark future" of coal, I'm thinking about strip mines that dig into historic towns in Germany (oh, boo hoo, relocate the church and everyone get on with life, right?)
Pretty much.
To me, that's the whole problem with massive industry built on non-renewable resources. When the coal is just lying around on the surface of the desert, sure, pick it up and use it. But, that runs out - then we start digging for it in places that don't really matter, but those run out, and then we get a little closer to towns, streams that feed recreational lakes, and other places that you might rather not mine, but, hey, we need the coal, right?
You like electricity? How about heat? Air conditioning? Rapid transportation? How about food?
All of those things depend largely on "non-renewable resources". Coal, oil, and natural gas, mainly. Shut it all down, and we go back to a life primitive, brutish, and short.
Yes. And they've been teaching kids in the last 15-ish years that "thin skinned" is the only way to be. Don't stand up to bullies, don't defend yourself, let the authorities handle it for you. Oh and of course if you do stand up to defend yourself, it's all your fault automatically no matter what. Because "zero tolerance."
More than 15; at least 35. Of course, "let the authorities handle it for you" was a lie; the authorities would ignore you, punish you, or punish both parties if you did complain to them. Phrases like "it takes two to fight" were their mantra... but if you actually didn't fight back and just got beat up, they'd punish you for fighting anyway.
...are those connected directly to/dev/null. There was no "right way" (in the eyes of the US Government) for Snowden to do anything about these programs, because (again in the eyes of the US Government) these programs are perfectly fine.
To object to the way Snowden did things, suggesting there was a better, effective, way of doing it that he somehow overlooked, is pure disingenuousness on the part of President Obama.
First amendment: freedom of speech. Fifth Amendment: deprivation of liberty without due process Sixth Amendment: speedy and public trial by jury Eighth Amendment: excessive bail imposed
Sure, the government violates these rights often. Doesn't mean they aren't violations.
If Nixon could have put Woodward and Bernstein in prison, incommunicado, for the rest of his term, he'd never have been impeached.
Obama can only stop the pipeline crossing the border from Canada. If they want to build it from ND to the Gulf refineries he couldn't do anything about it.
Of course he could. It's interstate, so it wouldn't even be at all difficult.
But they should be building refineries in North Dakota,
Ha ha, build a refinery? In the US? With the EPA and every environmental group in the world standing in the way?
Anyway, you build a refinery and now you have to move the refined product, which means instead of moving one product, you have to move several. Could make a lot more sense to ship one product to where the shipping is easier.
Javascript. PHP. Java and every stinking overarchitected hole of a framework built on top of it. C++ and it's various internal metalanguages. Anything which has appeared on more than 10% of the print-it-out-and-its-good-for-toilet-paper job ads on Dice. All the functional languages, which exist mostly to make people who know them feel superior. Go, because we didn't like Algol-68 the first time around.
I think we should just go back to counting on our fingers. From that first abacus, we were doomed.
Some national corporations used to have a 10% salary premium for employees in New York City.
Unfortunately, the COL premium for living in NYC is more like 300% (over the US average), I shit you not. Only 200% or so in the outer boroughs or nearer parts of NJ.
How many actual scientific theories have been outright debunked. I don't count pseudoscientific bafflegab like phrenology or Ptolemaic cosmology as being science. I'm talking about out and out scientific theories posited under something approaching the methodological naturalism that evolved out of the Enlightenment.
Phlogiston. The luminiferous ether, as you mentioned. Einstein's local hidden variable theory. Several theories of optics. Lamarckian evolution (though epigenetics bears some resemblance). Plenty of theories concerning characteristics of Venus and Mars.
You can't use trademark to prevent people from referring to your product. If you are, in fact, installing Firefox on the machine, you can say so, no matter what their policies say. This is "nominative use".
But I think the bigger problem for them is They dynamically assign antennas. It's not like you're renting a specific antenna.
What difference does it make, as long as it's only one at a time? I rent one antenna for "The Real Housewives of New Jersey", and later I rent a different antenna for A Very Special Episode of "Law And Order: SVU"... exactly how does the changing of the antenna affect copyright?
They'd have been better off paying off the student debt, rather than medical bills. But the last time I suggested that non-dischargeable debt should be a higher priority, I was told that was fraud and would end them up in jail. So say Slashdot legal experts.
Yeah, I'm guessing said Slashdot legal experts have no student debt attributable to law school, and not because they paid their own way through either.
Highest priority goes to taxes, but that's probably not an issue. Next, rent or mortgage, because if you don't pay you don't have a place to live. But yeah, unless the hospital is going to repo that kidney, they can get in line behind student debt.
Besides 4 year schools are not the causing this problem. It's for profit schools are that the problem. It's places like University of Phoenix and Devry that are solely responsible.
Certainly not. The for-profit schools are a response to the free money available, and part of the problem. But the cause isn't the schools, it's the free money. Even if you made all the for-profit schools go away, the problem would be the same size, just the price of the traditional schools would go up even more.
You can prove a program correct, but it's an exercise in academic wankery; it's at least as difficult and error-prone to prove a program correct as it is to write it in the first place.
Most embedded code is terrible, and the programmers themselves are completely full of themselves.
Certainly most embedded code is terrible. I've worked on systems from the smallest to the largest (4K ROM + 128 bytes RAM to Google-scale) and it turns out that MOST code is terrible. There was one embedded project I worked on where most of the code was a horrible mess... and then there was this one little module that was beautiful. And not by appplication of any rules like "no function pointers"; no, it was just written by someone (not me) who knew how to do software design. I'd heard he was a pain to work with and wouldn't let anyone touch his code base... probably true, but I bet it was because he didn't want the rest of the idiots trashing his code.
Still. Recursion in an embedded system? That's a red flag. If you're going to go through the trouble of managing the stack depth so it's always safe, it's probably just as easy and more efficient to do an iterative algorithm or one with an explicit stack.
Dynamic allocation isn't quite as bad; you can do it, but you either have to be very careful it can't fail, or you have to make allocation failures result in acceptable though degraded behavior. Theoretically that's always true, in practice most programs on larger machines just assume they've got as much memory as they want and fail hard if they can't allocate.
Shucks! I've always wanted to be one of the scumbag bankers that set up this grand system we have! [sarcasm off]
No, no, the scumbag bankers get waivers, pardons, etc. The people who get fired for having a misdemeanor theft conviction are tellers, customer service reps, etc.
No, of course not. They wouldn't want us damaging the cave ecosystems.
Reducing carbon dioxide emissions means getting power from sources such as the sun, and improving energy efficiency. It means moving into the high-tech 21st century, not back to low-tech times.
Yeah, yeah, always these clean power sources over the next horizon. Sure. As soon as someone comes up with one which scales, environmentalist find a way to oppose it, from bird carnage to reducing the albedo of the planet. It makes more sense politically to build more coal plants; at least the dangers are known enough that environmentalists can't wait until things are in process, and then pull an entirely novel (and unlikely) hazard out of their asses and demand another 10-year delay.
It's what we need to do anyway, because no matter how much we'd like them to, fossil fuels will run out some day.
The SUN will run out "some day"; that's no reason to prevent its use now.
Slashdot Mirror
_A Mathematician's Apology_ was by G.H. Hardy, not Hilbert.
We've got tons of "basic research" which doesn't go anywhere. How often on this site do we hear about a new breakthrough in solar energy or batteries or cellulosic biofuel that ends up going nowhere? Perhaps we really do need more in the way of applied research and development; get one of these "breakthroughs" to actually do something.
And then there's physics, which in terms of basic research has spent decades trying to break the Standard Model with more and more powerful accelerators, and gotten zip for it; the Standard Model survives and we haven't gotten any useful applications for a very long time.
"Religion is the opiate of the masses" -- Karl Marx
When life sucks (which, face it, is most of the time for most people), religion provides a break from reality. Whether it's better for your brain to be disconnected from reality or to have to accept depressing reality without any cushion is a matter of debate.
Pretty much.
You like electricity? How about heat? Air conditioning? Rapid transportation? How about food?
All of those things depend largely on "non-renewable resources". Coal, oil, and natural gas, mainly. Shut it all down, and we go back to a life primitive, brutish, and short.
Apple II disassembly used to be a go-to for this kind of thing.
More than 15; at least 35. Of course, "let the authorities handle it for you" was a lie; the authorities would ignore you, punish you, or punish both parties if you did complain to them. Phrases like "it takes two to fight" were their mantra... but if you actually didn't fight back and just got beat up, they'd punish you for fighting anyway.
...are those connected directly to /dev/null. There was no "right way" (in the eyes of the US Government) for Snowden to do anything about these programs, because (again in the eyes of the US Government) these programs are perfectly fine.
To object to the way Snowden did things, suggesting there was a better, effective, way of doing it that he somehow overlooked, is pure disingenuousness on the part of President Obama.
What did they do, threaten to charge his mother with more crimes if he demanded his right to a speedy trial?
First amendment: freedom of speech.
Fifth Amendment: deprivation of liberty without due process
Sixth Amendment: speedy and public trial by jury
Eighth Amendment: excessive bail imposed
Sure, the government violates these rights often. Doesn't mean they aren't violations.
If Nixon could have put Woodward and Bernstein in prison, incommunicado, for the rest of his term, he'd never have been impeached.
Of course he could. It's interstate, so it wouldn't even be at all difficult.
Ha ha, build a refinery? In the US? With the EPA and every environmental group in the world standing in the way?
Anyway, you build a refinery and now you have to move the refined product, which means instead of moving one product, you have to move several. Could make a lot more sense to ship one product to where the shipping is easier.
Javascript. PHP. Java and every stinking overarchitected hole of a framework built on top of it. C++ and it's various internal metalanguages. Anything which has appeared on more than 10% of the print-it-out-and-its-good-for-toilet-paper job ads on Dice. All the functional languages, which exist mostly to make people who know them feel superior. Go, because we didn't like Algol-68 the first time around.
I think we should just go back to counting on our fingers. From that first abacus, we were doomed.
Unfortunately, the COL premium for living in NYC is more like 300% (over the US average), I shit you not. Only 200% or so in the outer boroughs or nearer parts of NJ.
If you understand and accept General Relativity, you know what gravity is. Unfortunately GR is a bitch to understand.
Phlogiston. The luminiferous ether, as you mentioned. Einstein's local hidden variable theory. Several theories of optics. Lamarckian evolution (though epigenetics bears some resemblance). Plenty of theories concerning characteristics of Venus and Mars.
You can't use trademark to prevent people from referring to your product. If you are, in fact, installing Firefox on the machine, you can say so, no matter what their policies say. This is "nominative use".
What difference does it make, as long as it's only one at a time? I rent one antenna for "The Real Housewives of New Jersey", and later I rent a different antenna for A Very Special Episode of "Law And Order: SVU"... exactly how does the changing of the antenna affect copyright?
Yeah, I'm guessing said Slashdot legal experts have no student debt attributable to law school, and not because they paid their own way through either.
Highest priority goes to taxes, but that's probably not an issue. Next, rent or mortgage, because if you don't pay you don't have a place to live. But yeah, unless the hospital is going to repo that kidney, they can get in line behind student debt.
The Democrats support a vicious cycle of poverty, terrorism, and welfare.
Certainly not. The for-profit schools are a response to the free money available, and part of the problem. But the cause isn't the schools, it's the free money. Even if you made all the for-profit schools go away, the problem would be the same size, just the price of the traditional schools would go up even more.
If it had been the TSA, someone with a vaguely similar name would still be in jail.
You can prove a program correct, but it's an exercise in academic wankery; it's at least as difficult and error-prone to prove a program correct as it is to write it in the first place.
Certainly most embedded code is terrible. I've worked on systems from the smallest to the largest (4K ROM + 128 bytes RAM to Google-scale) and it turns out that MOST code is terrible. There was one embedded project I worked on where most of the code was a horrible mess... and then there was this one little module that was beautiful. And not by appplication of any rules like "no function pointers"; no, it was just written by someone (not me) who knew how to do software design. I'd heard he was a pain to work with and wouldn't let anyone touch his code base... probably true, but I bet it was because he didn't want the rest of the idiots trashing his code.
Still. Recursion in an embedded system? That's a red flag. If you're going to go through the trouble of managing the stack depth so it's always safe, it's probably just as easy and more efficient to do an iterative algorithm or one with an explicit stack.
Dynamic allocation isn't quite as bad; you can do it, but you either have to be very careful it can't fail, or you have to make allocation failures result in acceptable though degraded behavior. Theoretically that's always true, in practice most programs on larger machines just assume they've got as much memory as they want and fail hard if they can't allocate.
I managed to get my impersonation of a 16-year-old girl into the training set.
No, no, the scumbag bankers get waivers, pardons, etc. The people who get fired for having a misdemeanor theft conviction are tellers, customer service reps, etc.
No, of course not. They wouldn't want us damaging the cave ecosystems.
Yeah, yeah, always these clean power sources over the next horizon. Sure. As soon as someone comes up with one which scales, environmentalist find a way to oppose it, from bird carnage to reducing the albedo of the planet. It makes more sense politically to build more coal plants; at least the dangers are known enough that environmentalists can't wait until things are in process, and then pull an entirely novel (and unlikely) hazard out of their asses and demand another 10-year delay.
The SUN will run out "some day"; that's no reason to prevent its use now.