If time flows, at what rate does it flow? Clearly to say time flow makes no sense since a flow is a rate of change and it's silly to put time in the numerator when rate-of-change implies time in the denominator
Block time is such an old idea and seemsthe only sensible way to view things. From that standpoint, there is no flow of time and time's arrow is due to the fact that entropy increases in one direction along time's dimension (because of the combination of (i) high-entropy states are more likely than low ones, and (ii) entropy happens to be very low at the Big Bang end). The perception of the flow of time is then simply due to the obvious case that memory formation in the brain corresponds with entropy increase. In this view, causality is meaningless and you have correlation instead, and one doesn't have to worry about causality violations of FTL.
You are wrong, because if neutrinos are tachyonic, they have imaginary mass and would travel faster through a gravity field (such as Earth's in this experiment) than through the vacuum of space.
If neutrinos are tachyonic and with imaginary mass, they could move faster through a gravitational field (the Earth's) in this experiment than in the vacuum of space between 1987A and us.
If neutrinos are tachyonic, they have imaginary mass and would traverse gravity fields (such as the Earth's gravity in this experiment) faster than vacuum.
ARM's relaxed/weak memory consistency model is not an issue for non-concurrent programming since the compiler takes care of you. But when you're making parallel programs and you're concerned with performance and using lock-free algorithms, ARM is a nightmare in trying to figure out the appropriate memory barriers yet not overuse it and kill performance. X86 has much more limited reordering and even there it takes some serious thought in making sure your lock-free code is correct.
Support for multithreading is right there, what are you talking about? std::thread, std::mutex, std::atomic, etc. They're clean and simple, and it was a breeze for me to implement the classes from scratch for my Visual C++ projects (luckily gcc already has those and most other C++0x addtitions). I avoid boost in part exactly because of the issue you mentioned, and in part because of bloat. Using boost is a choice the programmer makes when he should be aware that in general the language standards will not mirror it, despite taking ideas from it--there was never made a promise by the committee to do so!
With your logic, you might as well criticize current mechanical engineering because the formulas used to compute the safety margins of a bridge's construction are too complex, why don't we just round the numbers here and guesstimate over there, and it's just as good but we saved time.
The language's complexity is one of necessity not Rube Goldberianism, and you cannot fault it that becoming an expert is difficult and requires a lot of effort, and that many people simply cannot become experts in it. Neither can everyone become a rocket scientist. If you don't need C++, don't use it, but don't critique those that choose it for particular tasks--and if you're an expert, it is suitable for almost any programming task due to its flexibility in programming paradigms and huge range of possible levels of abstraction. In the hands of a master, it has no competitor.
Exactly. Smart pointers do better than garbage collection since they allow one to i) control reclamation much more flexibly (especially if using custom allocators and deleters), and ii) handle many types of resources other than memory; smart pointers is just the ligical completion of the RAII principle, really. Java GC is like an automatic transmission--you move the lever to select D and press the gas. And D is for "Dummy".
The space travel incentive is a long-term one, and working exactly to ameliorate the biggest danger of communications technology--the more highly integrated the world is, the more we stand and _fall_ together. Without colonizing other worlds, where the speed of light presents a fundamental barrier to high integration (and interdependency), there is no redundancy. It is the equivalent of a biosphere with huge lack of biodiversity, where a single disaster may wipe every life out because there is not sufficient variety that would allow some species to be fit in the new environmental conditions. In terms of humans, of course, one ought to be far more concerned about man-made than natural disasters, and technology is an enabler of ever bigger human-made disasters to be created by an ever smaller group of people.
Things would have been better because we would have pushed other avenues of science and technology more, such as space exploration and so on, rather than concentrate on the geeky and _inwards-looking_ pursuit of computers (and ultimately merging our brains with machines and living in virtual realities at the expense of real reality and outwards exploration). And I'm saying this as a computer scientists.
Note that BBM and BB data service in general have the option of one to be one's own operator, by setting up your own BES server (and RIM now offers a free version of the server software). This way RIM doesn't know your encryption keys and can't turn them over to Whichever Federal Agency. If you don't want to use it because, say, you don't want to bother with running a separate machine, there are plenty of reasonably priced overseas BES services. The real issue of course is that convenience trumps security and privacy for the average consumer.
LOL. Oh well, I guess it's inevitable that all the insects come out when the weather gets warm and start buzzing around my ears and my slashdot. Republicans sure are irrational, reactionary shite, but so Obama remains the best Republican president yet.
Investors don't need to worry about the downgrade; bondholders do. Bondholders are not investors--they are lenders. Why is this so hard to grasp for the average slashdotter?
The fuckers burned to the ground should be the ones that listened to these agencies and took their word as gospel, rather than overcoming their laziness and appela to authority tendencies and doing their own research and thinking. Too much to ask in this day and age, apparently, as further exemplified by about every post on this article I've responded to.
Plus, why would a country worry about debt enumerated in a currency of which it is the monopoly issuer? This is not a country in the unfortunate situation of not being its own sovereign currency issuer, such as those poor bastards that have accepted the Euro as their currency and thus given up one of the most powerful tools of macroeconomic control. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory The concept of debt on a macroeconomic scale has nothing to do with debt as applied to non-sovereign entities, and trying to make analogies is quaint and logically invalid. It just shows you have not the slightest idea of the things you speak of, and is the sort of antiquated perception and thinking on the side of politicians that has contributed to the policy failures leading to the current mess.
I'm not denying climate change, and neither is the Conservative government; we accept that man may be contributing to warming. You completely missed the point of my post: warming is a good thing if you're in Canada. If someone else denies it to the US congress, that benefits Canada, whether it's detrimental to someone else is a separate issue. One has to look out for one's own first: consider for example, if you have to make a decision that weighs the well-being of your family versus the well-being of a group of strangers, which way would you go? A country is like an extended family--the two things are different points on a hierarchy of "belongs to", and within any group, those on the inside w.r.t. the individual are the overriding concern.
Coincidentally, one can easily be a conservative and a supporter of science. I'm a life-long atheist and materialist/positivist, yet I voted for the right at all three levels of government ever since Chretien showed that the Libtards are a bunch of cretins. It seems the majority of the population realized just as much. As for the NDP, if it walks pinko and talks pinko... Having been born in an Eastern European country that was communist at the time, I know better.
Or, in this case, can have positive consequences depending on where you live. Canada for example is expected to have significant benefits from global warming over the rest of this century, due to things like the opening of the northwest passage allowing new shipping lanes in the arctic and exploiting the arctic's natural resources, as well as (what is more important in the longer term) an increase in arable land due to melting of the permafrost which raises the country's capacity for farming as well as livable land for development. Last year a US geographer claimed the resulting economic boost will make Canada a major power. http://m.io9.com/5631708/how-canada-will-become-a-superpower-making-the-northern-rim-the-envy-of-the-world So as a Canadian it would be unpatriotic of me not to cheer on this guy lying to the US congress if that leads to increased global warming and thus helps my people.
Well it's not as big of a deal since congress is full of liars (or was that lawyers, can't tell the difference) anyways. It's like sitting in a sewer and adding to it.
It's unfortunate that a library as bloated and weakly optimized as SDL is becoming a "standard". I started using it a few years back and then, after I was not happy with the performance, I looked at the source and noticed gems such as, under Windows the fact that SDL_SemWait() was always calling WaitForSingleObject() (which is every time a kernel call with huge switching overhead) and had no atomic read-write-modify fast-path. I'm reminded of a comment on gamedev.net by someone that "SDL killed my parents" and it struck a note of harmony with me despite the overdramatization. Look, if one is writing for games, one should be striving for efficiency. SDL is too big and tries to do everything; jack of all trades and master of none. For example, instead of using an SDL event queue, you should be using a lock-free, cache-optimized queue such as https://sourceforge.net/projects/mc-fastflow/ Similar points go for other areas of the framework. The best policy is to find the best libraries to use for each domain within your project. Here's a fantastic highly optimized math library for games, for example: http://www.cmldev.net/ For some areas, it may even make sense to roll your own, such as writing custom synchronization primitives which can beat what's provided by the OS/threading libraries: see http://locklessinc.com/articles/
1. While only a couple of hundred of people were participating in physical action (fights, arson, destruction), thousands of others of us in the crowd were cheering them on. Why? Because it was fun and exciting to be caught up in the mob's energy.
2. This event has been hugely overhyped. While I feel sorry for the people who got hurt, the overall damage is not that much--a few torched cars, a couple dozen broken windows, a hot dog cart that got dragged into an alley, and looting that I am certain amounts to less than $1000 in goods (I saw all the major break-ins: The Bay, London Drugs, Sears, Chapters, and the failed Future Shop attempt, and the amount of goods flowing out was minimal--this was far more about show than theft). On the plus side, it was more excitement than this boring city has seen since the olympics, and I've lived here nearly a decade. Maybe one day Vancouver will grow up and lose the weird combination of small town mentality and unjustified snobbishness and get a decent culture and quality entertainment, but for the time being the riot is at least a blot of color on an otherwise dull and lackluster city.
3. The cops' attempts to charge their horses into the crowd as means of dispersal was laughable, since each time the crowd simply moved to a new area--with new facades to destroy. VPDs best aint the brightest, apparently. How about this proposal to truly motivate the force to actually protect other people's property: dock their salaries proportionately to the damage that they failed to prevent. I bet in the next riot there will be virtually no successful vandalism.
Fortran was matched by C++ shortly after template metaprogramming was discovered. You get the niceties of operator overloading and such without the previously implied performance overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
If time flows, at what rate does it flow? Clearly to say time flow makes no sense since a flow is a rate of change and it's silly to put time in the numerator when rate-of-change implies time in the denominator
Block time is such an old idea and seemsthe only sensible way to view things. From that standpoint, there is no flow of time and time's arrow is due to the fact that entropy increases in one direction along time's dimension (because of the combination of (i) high-entropy states are more likely than low ones, and (ii) entropy happens to be very low at the Big Bang end). The perception of the flow of time is then simply due to the obvious case that memory formation in the brain corresponds with entropy increase. In this view, causality is meaningless and you have correlation instead, and one doesn't have to worry about causality violations of FTL.
You are wrong, because if neutrinos are tachyonic, they have imaginary mass and would travel faster through a gravity field (such as Earth's in this experiment) than through the vacuum of space.
If neutrinos are tachyonic and with imaginary mass, they could move faster through a gravitational field (the Earth's) in this experiment than in the vacuum of space between 1987A and us.
If neutrinos are tachyonic, they have imaginary mass and would traverse gravity fields (such as the Earth's gravity in this experiment) faster than vacuum.
Neutronium is still compressible. It's just the strong nuclear force pushing back at you, but it's not some sort of absolute solid.
You missed rock.
ARM's relaxed/weak memory consistency model is not an issue for non-concurrent programming since the compiler takes care of you. But when you're making parallel programs and you're concerned with performance and using lock-free algorithms, ARM is a nightmare in trying to figure out the appropriate memory barriers yet not overuse it and kill performance. X86 has much more limited reordering and even there it takes some serious thought in making sure your lock-free code is correct.
Support for multithreading is right there, what are you talking about? std::thread, std::mutex, std::atomic, etc. They're clean and simple, and it was a breeze for me to implement the classes from scratch for my Visual C++ projects (luckily gcc already has those and most other C++0x addtitions). I avoid boost in part exactly because of the issue you mentioned, and in part because of bloat. Using boost is a choice the programmer makes when he should be aware that in general the language standards will not mirror it, despite taking ideas from it--there was never made a promise by the committee to do so!
With your logic, you might as well criticize current mechanical engineering because the formulas used to compute the safety margins of a bridge's construction are too complex, why don't we just round the numbers here and guesstimate over there, and it's just as good but we saved time.
The language's complexity is one of necessity not Rube Goldberianism, and you cannot fault it that becoming an expert is difficult and requires a lot of effort, and that many people simply cannot become experts in it. Neither can everyone become a rocket scientist. If you don't need C++, don't use it, but don't critique those that choose it for particular tasks--and if you're an expert, it is suitable for almost any programming task due to its flexibility in programming paradigms and huge range of possible levels of abstraction. In the hands of a master, it has no competitor.
Exactly. Smart pointers do better than garbage collection since they allow one to i) control reclamation much more flexibly (especially if using custom allocators and deleters), and ii) handle many types of resources other than memory; smart pointers is just the ligical completion of the RAII principle, really. Java GC is like an automatic transmission--you move the lever to select D and press the gas. And D is for "Dummy".
The space travel incentive is a long-term one, and working exactly to ameliorate the biggest danger of communications technology--the more highly integrated the world is, the more we stand and _fall_ together. Without colonizing other worlds, where the speed of light presents a fundamental barrier to high integration (and interdependency), there is no redundancy. It is the equivalent of a biosphere with huge lack of biodiversity, where a single disaster may wipe every life out because there is not sufficient variety that would allow some species to be fit in the new environmental conditions. In terms of humans, of course, one ought to be far more concerned about man-made than natural disasters, and technology is an enabler of ever bigger human-made disasters to be created by an ever smaller group of people.
Things would have been better because we would have pushed other avenues of science and technology more, such as space exploration and so on, rather than concentrate on the geeky and _inwards-looking_ pursuit of computers (and ultimately merging our brains with machines and living in virtual realities at the expense of real reality and outwards exploration). And I'm saying this as a computer scientists.
Note that BBM and BB data service in general have the option of one to be one's own operator, by setting up your own BES server (and RIM now offers a free version of the server software). This way RIM doesn't know your encryption keys and can't turn them over to Whichever Federal Agency. If you don't want to use it because, say, you don't want to bother with running a separate machine, there are plenty of reasonably priced overseas BES services. The real issue of course is that convenience trumps security and privacy for the average consumer.
LOL. Oh well, I guess it's inevitable that all the insects come out when the weather gets warm and start buzzing around my ears and my slashdot.
Republicans sure are irrational, reactionary shite, but so Obama remains the best Republican president yet.
You're overplaying the inflation thing. The MMT people are gonna crucify you.
Investors don't need to worry about the downgrade; bondholders do. Bondholders are not investors--they are lenders. Why is this so hard to grasp for the average slashdotter?
The fuckers burned to the ground should be the ones that listened to these agencies and took their word as gospel, rather than overcoming their laziness and appela to authority tendencies and doing their own research and thinking. Too much to ask in this day and age, apparently, as further exemplified by about every post on this article I've responded to.
you can't keep spending more than you take in without it coming back to bite you
Your post has committed the cardinal sin of economics ignorance, the fallacy of composition: http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2009/08/teaching-fallacy-of-composition-federal.html
Plus, why would a country worry about debt enumerated in a currency of which it is the monopoly issuer? This is not a country in the unfortunate situation of not being its own sovereign currency issuer, such as those poor bastards that have accepted the Euro as their currency and thus given up one of the most powerful tools of macroeconomic control. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
The concept of debt on a macroeconomic scale has nothing to do with debt as applied to non-sovereign entities, and trying to make analogies is quaint and logically invalid. It just shows you have not the slightest idea of the things you speak of, and is the sort of antiquated perception and thinking on the side of politicians that has contributed to the policy failures leading to the current mess.
I guess Allen Hamilton will really be hitting the Booz!
I'm not denying climate change, and neither is the Conservative government; we accept that man may be contributing to warming. You completely missed the point of my post: warming is a good thing if you're in Canada. If someone else denies it to the US congress, that benefits Canada, whether it's detrimental to someone else is a separate issue. One has to look out for one's own first: consider for example, if you have to make a decision that weighs the well-being of your family versus the well-being of a group of strangers, which way would you go? A country is like an extended family--the two things are different points on a hierarchy of "belongs to", and within any group, those on the inside w.r.t. the individual are the overriding concern.
Coincidentally, one can easily be a conservative and a supporter of science. I'm a life-long atheist and materialist/positivist, yet I voted for the right at all three levels of government ever since Chretien showed that the Libtards are a bunch of cretins. It seems the majority of the population realized just as much. As for the NDP, if it walks pinko and talks pinko... Having been born in an Eastern European country that was communist at the time, I know better.
Or, in this case, can have positive consequences depending on where you live. Canada for example is expected to have significant benefits from global warming over the rest of this century, due to things like the opening of the northwest passage allowing new shipping lanes in the arctic and exploiting the arctic's natural resources, as well as (what is more important in the longer term) an increase in arable land due to melting of the permafrost which raises the country's capacity for farming as well as livable land for development. Last year a US geographer claimed the resulting economic boost will make Canada a major power. http://m.io9.com/5631708/how-canada-will-become-a-superpower-making-the-northern-rim-the-envy-of-the-world So as a Canadian it would be unpatriotic of me not to cheer on this guy lying to the US congress if that leads to increased global warming and thus helps my people.
Well it's not as big of a deal since congress is full of liars (or was that lawyers, can't tell the difference) anyways. It's like sitting in a sewer and adding to it.
It's unfortunate that a library as bloated and weakly optimized as SDL is becoming a "standard". I started using it a few years back and then, after I was not happy with the performance, I looked at the source and noticed gems such as, under Windows the fact that SDL_SemWait() was always calling WaitForSingleObject() (which is every time a kernel call with huge switching overhead) and had no atomic read-write-modify fast-path. I'm reminded of a comment on gamedev.net by someone that "SDL killed my parents" and it struck a note of harmony with me despite the overdramatization. Look, if one is writing for games, one should be striving for efficiency. SDL is too big and tries to do everything; jack of all trades and master of none. For example, instead of using an SDL event queue, you should be using a lock-free, cache-optimized queue such as https://sourceforge.net/projects/mc-fastflow/ Similar points go for other areas of the framework. The best policy is to find the best libraries to use for each domain within your project. Here's a fantastic highly optimized math library for games, for example: http://www.cmldev.net/ For some areas, it may even make sense to roll your own, such as writing custom synchronization primitives which can beat what's provided by the OS/threading libraries: see http://locklessinc.com/articles/
I have the following observations:
1. While only a couple of hundred of people were participating in physical action (fights, arson, destruction), thousands of others of us in the crowd were cheering them on. Why? Because it was fun and exciting to be caught up in the mob's energy.
2. This event has been hugely overhyped. While I feel sorry for the people who got hurt, the overall damage is not that much--a few torched cars, a couple dozen broken windows, a hot dog cart that got dragged into an alley, and looting that I am certain amounts to less than $1000 in goods (I saw all the major break-ins: The Bay, London Drugs, Sears, Chapters, and the failed Future Shop attempt, and the amount of goods flowing out was minimal--this was far more about show than theft). On the plus side, it was more excitement than this boring city has seen since the olympics, and I've lived here nearly a decade. Maybe one day Vancouver will grow up and lose the weird combination of small town mentality and unjustified snobbishness and get a decent culture and quality entertainment, but for the time being the riot is at least a blot of color on an otherwise dull and lackluster city.
3. The cops' attempts to charge their horses into the crowd as means of dispersal was laughable, since each time the crowd simply moved to a new area--with new facades to destroy. VPDs best aint the brightest, apparently. How about this proposal to truly motivate the force to actually protect other people's property: dock their salaries proportionately to the damage that they failed to prevent. I bet in the next riot there will be virtually no successful vandalism.
Fortran was matched by C++ shortly after template metaprogramming was discovered. You get the niceties of operator overloading and such without the previously implied performance overhead.