Larry Wall of Perl: "Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one. " - From the Perl Man Pages
Come on, that statement is in the man pages! The context of that quote already limits its applicability considerably. "anything", within the context of a shell means very little (not that shells aren't very powerful, but you guys know what I mean). Also, comparing the man pages to the way automobiles are being marketed is kind of silly. It's such an horrible analogy, I'm not even sure where to begin.
Yukihiro Matsumoto of Ruby: "Why should you switch to Ruby? If you are happy with Perl or Python, you don't have to. But if you do feel there must be a better language, Ruby may be your language of choice." and then "I believe people want to express themselves when they program. They don't want to fight with the language. Programming languages must feel natural to programmers."
Nice job quoting him out of sequence, and implying that his response regarding his guiding philosophy is even relevant to the question that's posed to him about switching. And also, nice job omitting the phrase "I tried to..." from his guiding philosophy. Since such a qualifier implies personal doubt that he even achieved such a goal, that doubt was endangered your thesis, so kudos removing it -- that makes his response (that you've already completely distorted by quoting out of sequence, and quoted from a totally different question then the one you've put before it) sound even more absolute.
Stewart: Did you have a guiding philosophy when designing Ruby?
Matz: Yes, it's called the "principle of least surprise." I believe people want to express themselves when they program. They don't want to fight with the language. Programming languages must feel natural to programmers. I tried to make people enjoy programming and concentrate on the fun and creative part of programming when they use Ruby.
[...]
Stewart: Why should someone already familiar with Perl or Python switch to Ruby?
Matz: Why should you switch to Ruby? If you are happy with Perl or Python, you don't have to. But if you do feel there must be a better language, Ruby may be your language of choice. Learning a new language is harmless. It gives you new ideas and insights. You don't have to switch, just learn and try it. You may find yourself comfortable enough with Ruby to decide to switch to it.
What if it's a hundred monkeys? A million monkeys? A billion?
Then you'd probably have enough dead monkeys to open up your own chain restaurant. Thankfully, fried monkey brain and fried monkey toes are still a delicacy in some parts of the world.
I've just spoken to American Express Australia and have been told that I have no grounds to dispute this. Apparently, digitally distributed content is considered a service and not a product, so the same protections don't apply.
If you have no grounds to dispute this, then you have no grounds to keep on paying for the continued American Express service. Never accept legal counsel from a customer representative, it's not like he's on your side anyway. Repeat your request. Escalate the issue. Put it in writing. Repeat that cycle over and over again. Use any and every tool at your disposal.
Making it expensive enough for American Express to do business with that company, that should be your objective.
The Segway "FAIL" is just another example of the dangers of overhyping a product before it gets to the market.
The problem here wasn't that there was hype, it was that the inventor himself believed his own hype. Self-deception happens to all of us. It just happened a little more spectacularly with this guy.
No, the true FAIL was that none of the Defcon attendees took pictures of the people servicing the ATM. For security reasons that's the new rule, if you see an ATM being serviced -- you have to take your cell phone and take a picture of whomever is doing the servicing.
Your movie theater will burn to the ground when it catches fire because the FD will not enter a building where there are known radio problems.
They actually didn't do that during 9/11. They went in knowing that they had radio problems.
That being said in Canada, there seems to be some firefighters who refuse to go on calls due to safety concerns. To save you on reading, here is a comment from a fireman's wife responding to the story. Her response is quite sensible actually -- see the part which I emphasized below in bold:
I think what people are missing is that these firefighters who have excercised their rights are doing nothing out of the ordinary. This is a right that can and is excercised by any worker who feels they are being exposed to an unsafe work environment. Would you want your loved one going off to a job where the employer did not provide adequate protection against injury.
The HRM Fire Service is the employer here. They are obligated to ensure the safety of their workers, and they feel that they have done this by issuing a new policy that states that 4 firefighters must be on scene before they enter a fire.
However, what the Union and the Firefighters are saying, is that by having to wait for multiple vehicles to respond in order to have the 4 person compliment in order to enter a fire, they are unable to perform their job. Their job being the protection of the lives and property of residents of the HRM. The delays in being able to enter the fire will potentially cost lives and untold dollars in damages.
One other thing. I know that my husband, sister and all other firefighters I know would be unable to standby and watch a structure burn with anyone inside while waiting for the required # of firefighters to arrive before they can begin a rescue effort. However, according to the HRM policy, if they do not abide by the policy and begin the rescue effort before they have the required 4 FF, then they can be disciplined with loss of wages or loss of job. And, God forbid, if they were to lose their life - their life insurance would be void. All for doing their job, a job that all firefighters do willingly and with pride.
This is about safety. Safety of all Firefighters and the residents of the HRM. Period.
I work at a Law School. If my building full of lawyers couldn't figure an angle to make this work, I'm pretty sure it isn't going to work.
By having so many tenured lawyers, I'm afraid your school is over-optimized to make sure things never work. Having a lawyer is like having a boat anchor. Having one is good, it could even be considered safer, but having a boatload full of them may make sure you ship sink to the bottom of the sea.
Now I'm not saying that you can't find the occasional lawyer who won't mind flaunting the laws, and doing things by the seat of his pants, just for the sake of getting things done, but in a law school setting where things are ruled by committees, egos, and consensus, I'll bet that this is the last institution on earth that's going to do anything risky.
Apparently, the news clipping service would have been fine if it had just emailed the eleven word clippings, published them on the web, and/or published them on paper that's designed to self-destruct itself. Their point seems to be that copyright doesn't seem to apply when text is "transient".
The ruling doesn't specifically mention the workarounds of using invisible ink, writing things on your hand, using a etch-a-sketch, and/or making temporary snow angels, but those "transient" writing techniques certainly haven't been ruled out by the European High Court as of yet -- so keep your fingers crossed on those -- the result is very hopeful.
...OR you're paying low level government employees way too much. Last I checked that the latter has never been the case. When's the last time you heard someone say "I'll get a nice cozy government job - it pays a lot better"?
It entirely depends on who you hang out with. For *some* people, blue collar union jobs within *some* governments pay a lot better (also, those jobs carry many more benefits like good insurance, a pension plan, job security, and 2.5 times the overtime).
This is usually not advertised, so unless you're best friends/family with toll booth collectors, cops, prison guards, janitors, etc. that have government jobs protected by strong unions -- you're certainly not going to hear about how much they make.
That said, this statement from the referenced article: "survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence" seems evolutionarily extremely suspect.
It should be suspect. The AI Developer is not talking about intelligence. He's talking about *Artificial* Intelligence. And it's within that context of wanting to create man-made intelligence that you should consider his desire to study the "intelligence" of living systems.
A typical AI developer doesn't want to hear about AI in the anthropomorphic sense, that's a topic best treated by science-fiction writers, philosophers, young AI newbies, and television pundits. A typical AI developer on the other hand is usually concerned with much more immediate, simpler, practical, and discrete problems. In other words, a typical AI developer, if he wants results -- has to resign himself to looking for the low hanging fruits first and foremost. And its within that context that everything he says should be judged.
There is no problem with that, and may be that's the point.
Let's be really pedantic about cookies, let's waste all our time discussing them, all the while the government (with the help of the private sector) is silently trying to archive, index, and search through all our private emails, private phone conversations, web browsing logs (and search terms), phone graph relationships, travel plans, medical drug and mental health information, dna relationships, and/or anti-war political affiliations.
And let's not worry about the fact that all the low level city cops (at least in San Francisco) routinely do background checks and get private medical information for any random woman they're interested in dating (without any oversight, without any official reason, and without any logging that they've even accessed that information in the first place).
Let's talk about cookies instead and let's keep on explaining what cookies mean (because here on slashdot, I'm sure that no one knows what cookies are) -- ignoring all the other ways our privacy is being violated over and over again -- without even us knowing.
In another surprise study, scientists found not wearing shoes is actually healthier than wearing them. Same reason (atrophy of the supporting ligaments and connective tissues). They also found most shoes are so poorly-designed they actually damage the foot.
Yeah, I'm not surprised with that one. I have a friend who's a podiatrist. He says that the overwhelming majority of his clients are women, they all wear shoes that are too small for them, and they keep on destroying/deforming their feet because of this stupid idea -- that women who wear small shoes are beautiful.
He also said that women who have given birth are supposed to have wider feet, because the same hormone that preps the body for the kid to go through also happens to affect the elasticity of the rest of their entire bone structure.
I have about three decades of National Geographic that I can submit to dispute those studies
I don't know much about anatomy either way, but I think you'd need to factor in breast-feeding, age of the woman, the number of babies breast-fed, the number of years each child was breast-fed, at the very least.
And again, I don't know much about this stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were still many other factors to consider...
But some scientific societies consider this a form of competitive pre-publication, particularly in biosciences where commercial speed is important.
This is insane. I don't go to Bioscience conferences, but the conferences I go to usually ask that as many people as possible in the audience videotape, tweet, and blog about their event. It's not competitive pre-publication. It's free advertising. And if you do it constantly enough, people start sending you free full passes for their conferences, and plenty of free books to review.
I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.
Host your own google wave server. They've released under the Apache license. And if you want the guarantee that no one ever hacks into it, cut it off from the internet, build yourself your own panic room, and store your desktop computer and your wave server into it.
This is just like email, or an intranet application. There is nothing that says that it has to connect to google, or even connect to the outside world. It can work internally just as well.
At least 16, if you go back 3,000 to 4,000 years back (I think). Vedic Mathematics is actually a lot like functional programming. Also, in the 17th century, the term 'computer' used to refer to the human being performing the actual calculations (for calculating the trajectory of cannon balls for example).
Variable collisions is actually quite problematic when you're doing mental math. That's what Vedic Math solves for you. It gives you all the algorithms necessary to do math in your head, so that you just have one single number to remember at a time (which is what makes the feat even possible in the first place).
For most U.S. citizens, "on crack" is not vague at all, and is a common enough expression that its usage really doesn't say anything at all about the author to the readers.
Just to clarify, I didn't mean to say that the author was "on crack", but I do stand by my statement that the language we use to describe something can say a lot about ourselves. If that second part offends you, I certainly don't have a problem with that (although, I could have certainly been more diplomatic about my comment, that's true).
As to the rest of your post, tl;dr. I honestly don't give a shit about Google Wave. I didn't care about blogs when they came out, I didn't care about myspace, I don't care about facebook, and I don't care about twitter. I have IRC, various IM clients, a couple forums, and my cell phone to communicate with friends. I don't feel the need to narcissistically post every day to day event of my life for all the world to see unfiltered (or through a filter that tries to create a false sense of my personality). The new generation of web users seems to just want to shout "LOOK AT ME!" over and over again until someone finally looks. It's depressing.
Perhaps, the word 'wave' might be communicating the wrong connotations to you. Google wave has nothing to do with waving to others. And the part that I said about Twitter is more about the cutesy-cheesy names, Google wave has nothing to do with Twitter (although, I'm sure someone has probably written a bot posting his waves to Twitter, becoming just another Twitter client is not Google Wave's primary aim). Google wave is more like email, or more like private wiki pages. It will definitely be used publicly, but most of it will be done privately between individuals -- just like email is done -- and for serious reasons (at least, as much as email is currently being used for serious reasons) -- and not for social networking -- nor for any facebook/fake-friendly types of reasons (I'm actually with you on that).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you read the parent wrong. The parent wasn't talking of an actual fork, as one monolithic piece of software.
Whoooooosh...! -- Paraphrasing the paraphraser.
Confiscating a photo of satellite dishes, that's what I'd call pretty hard core.
Larry Wall of Perl: "Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one. " - From the Perl Man Pages
Come on, that statement is in the man pages! The context of that quote already limits its applicability considerably. "anything", within the context of a shell means very little (not that shells aren't very powerful, but you guys know what I mean). Also, comparing the man pages to the way automobiles are being marketed is kind of silly. It's such an horrible analogy, I'm not even sure where to begin.
Yukihiro Matsumoto of Ruby: "Why should you switch to Ruby? If you are happy with Perl or Python, you don't have to. But if you do feel there must be a better language, Ruby may be your language of choice." and then "I believe people want to express themselves when they program. They don't want to fight with the language. Programming languages must feel natural to programmers."
Nice job quoting him out of sequence, and implying that his response regarding his guiding philosophy is even relevant to the question that's posed to him about switching. And also, nice job omitting the phrase "I tried to..." from his guiding philosophy. Since such a qualifier implies personal doubt that he even achieved such a goal, that doubt was endangered your thesis, so kudos removing it -- that makes his response (that you've already completely distorted by quoting out of sequence, and quoted from a totally different question then the one you've put before it) sound even more absolute.
Stewart: Did you have a guiding philosophy when designing Ruby?
Matz: Yes, it's called the "principle of least surprise." I believe people want to express themselves when they program. They don't want to fight with the language. Programming languages must feel natural to programmers. I tried to make people enjoy programming and concentrate on the fun and creative part of programming when they use Ruby.
[...]
Stewart: Why should someone already familiar with Perl or Python switch to Ruby?
Matz: Why should you switch to Ruby? If you are happy with Perl or Python, you don't have to. But if you do feel there must be a better language, Ruby may be your language of choice. Learning a new language is harmless. It gives you new ideas and insights. You don't have to switch, just learn and try it. You may find yourself comfortable enough with Ruby to decide to switch to it.
What if it's a hundred monkeys? A million monkeys? A billion?
Then you'd probably have enough dead monkeys to open up your own chain restaurant. Thankfully, fried monkey brain and fried monkey toes are still a delicacy in some parts of the world.
I've just spoken to American Express Australia and have been told that I have no grounds to dispute this. Apparently, digitally distributed content is considered a service and not a product, so the same protections don't apply.
If you have no grounds to dispute this, then you have no grounds to keep on paying for the continued American Express service. Never accept legal counsel from a customer representative, it's not like he's on your side anyway. Repeat your request. Escalate the issue. Put it in writing. Repeat that cycle over and over again. Use any and every tool at your disposal.
Making it expensive enough for American Express to do business with that company, that should be your objective.
Sweden, may be.
No, Sweden has vikings. This is way too close to the mongols metaphor for my tastes.
The Segway "FAIL" is just another example of the dangers of overhyping a product before it gets to the market.
The problem here wasn't that there was hype, it was that the inventor himself believed his own hype. Self-deception happens to all of us. It just happened a little more spectacularly with this guy.
No, the true FAIL was that none of the Defcon attendees took pictures of the people servicing the ATM. For security reasons that's the new rule, if you see an ATM being serviced -- you have to take your cell phone and take a picture of whomever is doing the servicing.
They actually didn't do that during 9/11. They went in knowing that they had radio problems.
That being said in Canada, there seems to be some firefighters who refuse to go on calls due to safety concerns. To save you on reading, here is a comment from a fireman's wife responding to the story. Her response is quite sensible actually -- see the part which I emphasized below in bold:
By having so many tenured lawyers, I'm afraid your school is over-optimized to make sure things never work. Having a lawyer is like having a boat anchor. Having one is good, it could even be considered safer, but having a boatload full of them may make sure you ship sink to the bottom of the sea.
Now I'm not saying that you can't find the occasional lawyer who won't mind flaunting the laws, and doing things by the seat of his pants, just for the sake of getting things done, but in a law school setting where things are ruled by committees, egos, and consensus, I'll bet that this is the last institution on earth that's going to do anything risky.
Apparently, the news clipping service would have been fine if it had just emailed the eleven word clippings, published them on the web, and/or published them on paper that's designed to self-destruct itself. Their point seems to be that copyright doesn't seem to apply when text is "transient".
The ruling doesn't specifically mention the workarounds of using invisible ink, writing things on your hand, using a etch-a-sketch, and/or making temporary snow angels, but those "transient" writing techniques certainly haven't been ruled out by the European High Court as of yet -- so keep your fingers crossed on those -- the result is very hopeful.
It entirely depends on who you hang out with. For *some* people, blue collar union jobs within *some* governments pay a lot better (also, those jobs carry many more benefits like good insurance, a pension plan, job security, and 2.5 times the overtime).
This is usually not advertised, so unless you're best friends/family with toll booth collectors, cops, prison guards, janitors, etc. that have government jobs protected by strong unions -- you're certainly not going to hear about how much they make.
It should be suspect. The AI Developer is not talking about intelligence. He's talking about *Artificial* Intelligence. And it's within that context of wanting to create man-made intelligence that you should consider his desire to study the "intelligence" of living systems.
A typical AI developer doesn't want to hear about AI in the anthropomorphic sense, that's a topic best treated by science-fiction writers, philosophers, young AI newbies, and television pundits. A typical AI developer on the other hand is usually concerned with much more immediate, simpler, practical, and discrete problems. In other words, a typical AI developer, if he wants results -- has to resign himself to looking for the low hanging fruits first and foremost. And its within that context that everything he says should be judged.
Sarah Palin?? Is that you?
There is no problem with that, and may be that's the point.
Let's be really pedantic about cookies, let's waste all our time discussing them, all the while the government (with the help of the private sector) is silently trying to archive, index, and search through all our private emails, private phone conversations, web browsing logs (and search terms), phone graph relationships, travel plans, medical drug and mental health information, dna relationships, and/or anti-war political affiliations.
And let's not worry about the fact that all the low level city cops (at least in San Francisco) routinely do background checks and get private medical information for any random woman they're interested in dating (without any oversight, without any official reason, and without any logging that they've even accessed that information in the first place).
Let's talk about cookies instead and let's keep on explaining what cookies mean (because here on slashdot, I'm sure that no one knows what cookies are) -- ignoring all the other ways our privacy is being violated over and over again -- without even us knowing.
Yeah, I'm not surprised with that one. I have a friend who's a podiatrist. He says that the overwhelming majority of his clients are women, they all wear shoes that are too small for them, and they keep on destroying/deforming their feet because of this stupid idea -- that women who wear small shoes are beautiful.
He also said that women who have given birth are supposed to have wider feet, because the same hormone that preps the body for the kid to go through also happens to affect the elasticity of the rest of their entire bone structure.
I don't know much about anatomy either way, but I think you'd need to factor in breast-feeding, age of the woman, the number of babies breast-fed, the number of years each child was breast-fed, at the very least.
And again, I don't know much about this stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were still many other factors to consider...
This is insane. I don't go to Bioscience conferences, but the conferences I go to usually ask that as many people as possible in the audience videotape, tweet, and blog about their event. It's not competitive pre-publication. It's free advertising. And if you do it constantly enough, people start sending you free full passes for their conferences, and plenty of free books to review.
May be they could replace our Slashdot editors instead?
But Amazon is, that's what makes this article suspect.
Host your own google wave server. They've released under the Apache license. And if you want the guarantee that no one ever hacks into it, cut it off from the internet, build yourself your own panic room, and store your desktop computer and your wave server into it.
This is just like email, or an intranet application. There is nothing that says that it has to connect to google, or even connect to the outside world. It can work internally just as well.
At least 16, if you go back 3,000 to 4,000 years back (I think). Vedic Mathematics is actually a lot like functional programming. Also, in the 17th century, the term 'computer' used to refer to the human being performing the actual calculations (for calculating the trajectory of cannon balls for example).
Variable collisions is actually quite problematic when you're doing mental math. That's what Vedic Math solves for you. It gives you all the algorithms necessary to do math in your head, so that you just have one single number to remember at a time (which is what makes the feat even possible in the first place).
Just to clarify, I didn't mean to say that the author was "on crack", but I do stand by my statement that the language we use to describe something can say a lot about ourselves. If that second part offends you, I certainly don't have a problem with that (although, I could have certainly been more diplomatic about my comment, that's true).
Perhaps, the word 'wave' might be communicating the wrong connotations to you. Google wave has nothing to do with waving to others. And the part that I said about Twitter is more about the cutesy-cheesy names, Google wave has nothing to do with Twitter (although, I'm sure someone has probably written a bot posting his waves to Twitter, becoming just another Twitter client is not Google Wave's primary aim). Google wave is more like email, or more like private wiki pages. It will definitely be used publicly, but most of it will be done privately between individuals -- just like email is done -- and for serious reasons (at least, as much as email is currently being used for serious reasons) -- and not for social networking -- nor for any facebook/fake-friendly types of reasons (I'm actually with you on that).