Not an issue, as the average rates of naturally occurring isotopes in the universe is already known (hence the non-integer masses in periodic tables).
Just a small nitpick: that's not the only reason for non-integer masses in periodic tables. When neutrons and protons come together in an atom nucleus, their mass change, and a corresponding amount of energy (E=m*c^2) is released or absorbed. For example, while the atomic mass of Carbon-12 is 12, the atomic mass of Hydrogen-1 (only one proton) is a little over 1.
In effect, that's how nuclear bombs work: when the nucleus of an atom of plutonium breaks up, the mass of the resulting pieces is less than the mass of the original nucleus; the difference is released as radiation and heat.
[...] how this is any different than having two billiard balls, one is red and one is blue.
Exactly! That's the question everybody should ask when they hear about "spooky action", but for some reason, I have rarely seen it asked.
The answer is: there's a difference that can be seen in the thought experiment proposed by Einstein and some other people, which is explained in this Wikipedia article: EPR paradox.
However, when I first read this article, I didn't understand any of it, because it assumes lots of knowledge about Physics. I finally understood it when I read this lecture. It starts by showing how to mathematically represent a quantum state (e.g., spin) and in the last section it answers exactly your question.
No, look: the GPL is the only thing preventing the whoever wrote the GPL software(*) from suing Microsoft for selling the vouchers -- even though it's not MS itself distributing the software. So, if MS sells vouchers, it is bound by the GPL.
Clearly, Microsoft doesn't want this -- that's why they stopped selling them. The question, now, is whether the vouchers already sold will force them to oblige the GPL in the future.
(*) Or FSF, if whoever wrote the software assigned copyright to them.
Why is it so important for Mickey Mouse to become public domain? Or more importantly any Brittney Spears song?
Noting that Shakespeare's plays, in his time, were about as regarded as today's sitcoms, one could imagine a similar question when William Shakespeare was alive: Why is it so important for Hamlet to become public domain?
And yet, just as one single example, without Shakespeare's works in public domain it wouldn't be possible for Neil Gaiman to write a Sandman story borrowing from "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which in absolutely no way harms Shakespeare or his descendants.
(Yes, I know Hamlet has nothing to do with A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the first is more famous and looked better in the question:-))
The GPL equivalent for music would be giving it away with the sheet music, and allowing others to redistribute it or modify it as they pleased, so long as they also distributed the modified sheet music with it. Would you be happy with a "music license" like that?
Sure, why not? (We are assuming, of course, that in this new world it would be common and easy to copy a sheet music, as it is with source code). Also, the "GPL equivalent" would not force you to distribute the music sheet with every binary copy you distribute, but you would have to make it available to anyone who wants it.
(Also note the parallel here, what if you only modify the binary/mp3 and not the code/sheet? Do you have to create code/sheet to match your modified binary/mp3 and distribute that, too?)
This is where your analogy breaks, because a music sheet is a bad analogy for source code. For example: if you change a song, a good musician could reproduce your changes just by hearing you play it a few times, without having you write him/her a modified music sheet. In contrast, a programmer couldn't generally write the source code to a program just by seeing its binary code, except with lots of time and reverse engineering. (If it wasn't so inconvenient to do that, there would be no reason for the GPL in the first place.)
I *think* it's moderated down simply because it's wrong.
As it has already been pointed out, Firefox renders exactly the same on Windows and Linux (I know it because I use Linux at work, and the only reason to check something on Windows is to test for IE compatibility).
"Poke one subatomic-particle and the other one instantly changes spin!"
No, it's more like "Poke one sub-atomic particle and the spin of the other one is instantly defined".
I recommend for anyone trying to understand this to read about Bell's Inequalities. I found the Wikipedia article on it very confusing (actually, it's good for getting the big picture, but the explanation of the details assumes vast prior knowledge). I finally understood it reading this:
It's a little heavy on the math (well, just a little bit of linear algebra), and starts from the very beginning. In the end of the lecture (section 5) it has an experiment that shows how this "spooky action" works. Be warned that it has a couple of typos in some equations -- but if you follow closely from the beginning, they're not hard to spot.
To get a real explanation about quantum teleportation (which seems to be what the article is about), see the section 1.1 of this one:
No, but they could very easily put the update on newly released discs (...)
Erm... I don't think it would accomplish anything. Any method of "updating" from a disc used by the player can be used by anyone to obtain the new keys, if a person has the (old) player keys.
Re:Because you'll end up at Lisp.
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Lisp is the same way. Everything's a list, or an AST to use your perspective. Yay, hooray. But it doesn't let you group things, it doesn't let you collect, isolate, and distinguish concepts. It's a mass of words and parens.
Erm... You should learn about Lisp.
Lisp is as much a mass of words and parens as Java (or any other mainstream language) is a mass of words and punctuation.
Common Lisp (as some other Lisp dialects) lets you group concepts and express the same things (classes, objects, functions, closures, etc.) as newer languages.
Here's a good definition of emulator: It enables code written using it to run natively on non-Microsoft platforms.
Which WINE doesn't, in general: it only works in the i386. Power PC, Sparc, ARM, etc. are all out.
So, when people say WINE is not an emulator, it's because it is less than an emulator. It only works with programs that can run natively in the host processor, providing only the required libraries.
On [this] world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. (...)"
- Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"
Notice that the version 2 of GPL already contains a clause (2 c) in a similar line: it doesn't allow you to remove messages printed at startup by an interactive program "that reads commands". It it largely dated, because not so many programs today "read commands" interactively.
So, in effect, it looks like what people are trying to do is to bring the original intentions of the GPL to the era of web applications.
[...] why would you surrender your secret information and void its value?
People already do this by sharing their code via GPL (which, as was already pointed out, is only necessary because copyright exists in the first place).
The point is that the value added to source code because it's free is not the *only* possible value to be attributed to source code. Companies pay for customized solutions and support.
Actually, it's really not. Take a look at this comparison between different CGI modules for Apache: PHP actually outdoes Perl here.
You should read the text of your own link instead of only watching the pictures. The results are (according to your link): FastCGI (1st), mod_perl (2nd), PHP (3rd).
[...]
> * PHP doesn't scale.
Now THIS is something I can definitely refute. [...]
From the conclusions of the same benchmark you linked:
The results of PHP were not what we expected. Being exposed to the hype that rules on the Internet about PHP, we expected it to be at least at the second place. It did not scale well (see BENCH4) and exhausted system processing power when it run, leaving it unusable. [...]
People who never *really* use closures to do serious programming are quick to dismiss them as a just superfluous convenience. It's like dismissing object orientation as just a convenient way to group together functions that manipulate some data structure.
While (in a very strict sense) true, this view misses the whole way of thinking that these concepts -- closures and object orientation (just examples, by the way) -- introduce and suggest.
You can do it in Lisp, and I don't know why these people don't.
In this simple example, it can be argued that a macro is an overkill (however, as it's available, I don't see why not use it). However, for more complicated examples, macros do *really* make code more readable, and using them is a huge time saver. If you excuse my saying so (I feel so dirty saying this, but it illustrates the point well): for a heavy macro user, using macros is a bit like going from ancient BASIC (where all you had was GOSUB) to its newer incarnations, where you can properly define and call functions.
And saying RMS wants to protect moral freedoms seems circular, given RMS's moral foundation is that what increases freedom is moral, and what decreases freedom is immoral.
Well, he *does* want to protect freedom. I don't see how this argument is circular, I'm just stating his position. His sense of morals may be different from yours, but his position is consistent.
Being a self-centered hypocrite doesn't make RMS a bad person, it just makes him human. I know that according to the/. groupthink saying so makes me a troll, but I couldn't care less.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I have never seen or heard RMS say anything that makes him an hypocrite, do you have examples? (I will not argue about him being self-centered, and I don't see how that's relevant)
The F/OSS "movement" isn't about a coherenet moral philosphy, no matter how much anyone would like it to be. It's about sharing code, no more, no less. Make it a metaphor for life if you want, but code isn't life.
For you, and (apparently) the OSS movement, (only) code is what matters. For the FSF and many other people, the philosophy is also important.
(...)
The GPL itself limits my freedom.
I am not free to modify and redistribute a GPL'd program without distributing the source as well.
(...)
The GPL only limits your freedom to do something that is morally wrong (according to RMS's thinking). In his views, your objection is equivalent to: "Criminal law limits my freedom. I am not free to kill anyone I want."
Your freedom must not be absolute, because that would limit the freedom of others. What RMS wants is a way protect the freedom that every person should morally have, not the freedom to do anything you want.
Lua was designed from the start to be embedded in other programs (although not specifically games, as the article says). It is tiny (less than 100kb), and written in strict ANSI C (so it is *very* portable and can run on any game console). It is also very easy to extend both with the host language (be it C, C++ or Java) and Lua itself. Recently, it has gained a very nice JIT compiler (still in alpha) for the x86, with other platforms to come.
Python, although nice, was not designed for this kind of use. It is huge (when compared to Lua), and requires a non-trivial amount of work to embed it on other applications. Also, it contains a lot of stuff in its core that may not be suitable for games (file I/O and things like that).
It looks to me like you're describing anarchy (but I might be wrong).
This "true" democracy you describe looks very good to me a priori (I'm not being sarcastic now), but I don't see how this could work.
A quick example, mentioned before: if 51% of the people voted to ostracize blacks, should they then move to another place to create a new government? Is it even possible (not to mention practical) to move millions of people that have nothing in common except some vague characteristic (the color of the skin) to live somewhere else and create a new government and society?
rue democracy would mean that minorities would be separate governments
<sarcasm> Right. Because people naturally separate themselves into big, homogeneous, stereotyped groups called "minorities". Being homogeneous, these groups do not contain people with different opinions: all blacks have all opinions about every issue; the same apply to women, gays, etc. </sarcasm>
If what you say is taken literally, every person should be their own government.
Truly, the only people who deserve a complete helping of blame are the hackers. [...]
Interesting. Does he also blame "the burglars" for "costing us billions of dollars" to secure our homes against them? For "placing their desire for fun ahead everyone on earth's desire for peace and right to privacy"?
It's very easy (and stupid) to blame problems like these in a poorly-defined class of people. It achieves nothing. It would be far more productive to analyse what exactly makes it possible, easy and acceptable for people to "hack" -- in the sense that most people doing it wouldn't consider to be thieves (I believe), but are happy to invade other people's computers.
But the additions mentioned in this article are not "additional types, values, objects, properties, and functions". They're new reserved words, like "for" and "if".
On the contrary, the additions mentioned in this article are simply additional methods (a method in javascript is simply a property that contains a function).
For example, see the documentation for the new forEach()method:
Slashdot Mirror
Just a small nitpick: that's not the only reason for non-integer masses in periodic tables. When neutrons and protons come together in an atom nucleus, their mass change, and a corresponding amount of energy (E=m*c^2) is released or absorbed. For example, while the atomic mass of Carbon-12 is 12, the atomic mass of Hydrogen-1 (only one proton) is a little over 1.
In effect, that's how nuclear bombs work: when the nucleus of an atom of plutonium breaks up, the mass of the resulting pieces is less than the mass of the original nucleus; the difference is released as radiation and heat.
Exactly! That's the question everybody should ask when they hear about "spooky action", but for some reason, I have rarely seen it asked.
The answer is: there's a difference that can be seen in the thought experiment proposed by Einstein and some other people, which is explained in this Wikipedia article: EPR paradox.
However, when I first read this article, I didn't understand any of it, because it assumes lots of knowledge about Physics. I finally understood it when I read this lecture. It starts by showing how to mathematically represent a quantum state (e.g., spin) and in the last section it answers exactly your question.
No, look: the GPL is the only thing preventing the whoever wrote the GPL software(*) from suing Microsoft for selling the vouchers -- even though it's not MS itself distributing the software. So, if MS sells vouchers, it is bound by the GPL.
Clearly, Microsoft doesn't want this -- that's why they stopped selling them. The question, now, is whether the vouchers already sold will force them to oblige the GPL in the future.
(*) Or FSF, if whoever wrote the software assigned copyright to them.
Noting that Shakespeare's plays, in his time, were about as regarded as today's sitcoms, one could imagine a similar question when William Shakespeare was alive: Why is it so important for Hamlet to become public domain?
And yet, just as one single example, without Shakespeare's works in public domain it wouldn't be possible for Neil Gaiman to write a Sandman story borrowing from "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which in absolutely no way harms Shakespeare or his descendants.
(Yes, I know Hamlet has nothing to do with A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the first is more famous and looked better in the question :-))
Sure, why not? (We are assuming, of course, that in this new world it would be common and easy to copy a sheet music, as it is with source code). Also, the "GPL equivalent" would not force you to distribute the music sheet with every binary copy you distribute, but you would have to make it available to anyone who wants it.
This is where your analogy breaks, because a music sheet is a bad analogy for source code. For example: if you change a song, a good musician could reproduce your changes just by hearing you play it a few times, without having you write him/her a modified music sheet. In contrast, a programmer couldn't generally write the source code to a program just by seeing its binary code, except with lots of time and reverse engineering. (If it wasn't so inconvenient to do that, there would be no reason for the GPL in the first place.)
I *think* it's moderated down simply because it's wrong.
As it has already been pointed out, Firefox renders exactly the same on Windows and Linux (I know it because I use Linux at work, and the only reason to check something on Windows is to test for IE compatibility).
No, it's more like "Poke one sub-atomic particle and the spin of the other one is instantly defined".
I recommend for anyone trying to understand this to read about Bell's Inequalities. I found the Wikipedia article on it very confusing (actually, it's good for getting the big picture, but the explanation of the details assumes vast prior knowledge). I finally understood it reading this:
It's a little heavy on the math (well, just a little bit of linear algebra), and starts from the very beginning. In the end of the lecture (section 5) it has an experiment that shows how this "spooky action" works. Be warned that it has a couple of typos in some equations -- but if you follow closely from the beginning, they're not hard to spot.
To get a real explanation about quantum teleportation (which seems to be what the article is about), see the section 1.1 of this one:
But that requires a little more math (tensor products).
These both seem to be part of this quantum computing course:
Heh, I think it's very cool, too...
If I'm not mistaken, it's right up to the 82nd decimal place...
No, but they could very easily put the update on newly released discs (...)
Erm... I don't think it would accomplish anything. Any method of "updating" from a disc used by the player can be used by anyone to obtain the new keys, if a person has the (old) player keys.
"Yes, P = NP if N = 1"
Or if P=0.
(sorry about ruining the joke :-))
Lisp is the same way. Everything's a list, or an AST to use your perspective. Yay, hooray. But it doesn't let you group things, it doesn't let you collect, isolate, and distinguish concepts. It's a mass of words and parens.
Erm... You should learn about Lisp.
Lisp is as much a mass of words and parens as Java (or any other mainstream language) is a mass of words and punctuation.
Common Lisp (as some other Lisp dialects) lets you group concepts and express the same things (classes, objects, functions, closures, etc.) as newer languages.
Here's a good definition of emulator: It enables code written using it to run natively on non-Microsoft platforms.
Which WINE doesn't, in general: it only works in the i386. Power PC, Sparc, ARM, etc. are all out.
So, when people say WINE is not an emulator, it's because it is less than an emulator. It only works with programs that can run natively in the host processor, providing only the required libraries.
Sorry, I can't resist:
On [this] world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. (...)"
- Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"
Exactly.
Notice that the version 2 of GPL already contains a clause (2 c) in a similar line: it doesn't allow you to remove messages printed at startup by an interactive program "that reads commands". It it largely dated, because not so many programs today "read commands" interactively.
So, in effect, it looks like what people are trying to do is to bring the original intentions of the GPL to the era of web applications.
[...] why would you surrender your secret information and void its value?
People already do this by sharing their code via GPL (which, as was already pointed out, is only necessary because copyright exists in the first place).
The point is that the value added to source code because it's free is not the *only* possible value to be attributed to source code. Companies pay for customized solutions and support.
What do you mean? From the exact same dictionary you pointed to:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=kernal
> * PHP is slow.
Actually, it's really not. Take a look at this comparison between different CGI modules for Apache: PHP actually outdoes Perl here.
You should read the text of your own link instead of only watching the pictures. The results are (according to your link): FastCGI (1st), mod_perl (2nd), PHP (3rd).
[...]
> * PHP doesn't scale.
Now THIS is something I can definitely refute. [...]
From the conclusions of the same benchmark you linked:
The results of PHP were not what we expected. Being exposed to the hype that rules on the Internet about PHP, we expected it to be at least at the second place. It did not scale well (see BENCH4) and exhausted system processing power when it run, leaving it unusable. [...]
Peaker, the problem is that you want to say:
Exactly.
People who never *really* use closures to do serious programming are quick to dismiss them as a just superfluous convenience. It's like dismissing object orientation as just a convenient way to group together functions that manipulate some data structure.
While (in a very strict sense) true, this view misses the whole way of thinking that these concepts -- closures and object orientation (just examples, by the way) -- introduce and suggest.
You can do it in Lisp, and I don't know why these people don't.
In this simple example, it can be argued that a macro is an overkill (however, as it's available, I don't see why not use it). However, for more complicated examples, macros do *really* make code more readable, and using them is a huge time saver. If you excuse my saying so (I feel so dirty saying this, but it illustrates the point well): for a heavy macro user, using macros is a bit like going from ancient BASIC (where all you had was GOSUB) to its newer incarnations, where you can properly define and call functions.
And saying RMS wants to protect moral freedoms seems circular, given RMS's moral foundation is that what increases freedom is moral, and what decreases freedom is immoral.
Well, he *does* want to protect freedom. I don't see how this argument is circular, I'm just stating his position. His sense of morals may be different from yours, but his position is consistent.
Being a self-centered hypocrite doesn't make RMS a bad person, it just makes him human. I know that according to the /. groupthink saying so makes me a troll, but I couldn't care less.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I have never seen or heard RMS say anything that makes him an hypocrite, do you have examples? (I will not argue about him being self-centered, and I don't see how that's relevant)
The F/OSS "movement" isn't about a coherenet moral philosphy, no matter how much anyone would like it to be. It's about sharing code, no more, no less. Make it a metaphor for life if you want, but code isn't life.
For you, and (apparently) the OSS movement, (only) code is what matters. For the FSF and many other people, the philosophy is also important.
The GPL only limits your freedom to do something that is morally wrong (according to RMS's thinking). In his views, your objection is equivalent to: "Criminal law limits my freedom. I am not free to kill anyone I want."
Your freedom must not be absolute, because that would limit the freedom of others. What RMS wants is a way protect the freedom that every person should morally have, not the freedom to do anything you want.
Lua was designed from the start to be embedded in other programs (although not specifically games, as the article says). It is tiny (less than 100kb), and written in strict ANSI C (so it is *very* portable and can run on any game console). It is also very easy to extend both with the host language (be it C, C++ or Java) and Lua itself. Recently, it has gained a very nice JIT compiler (still in alpha) for the x86, with other platforms to come.
Python, although nice, was not designed for this kind of use. It is huge (when compared to Lua), and requires a non-trivial amount of work to embed it on other applications. Also, it contains a lot of stuff in its core that may not be suitable for games (file I/O and things like that).
It looks to me like you're describing anarchy (but I might be wrong).
This "true" democracy you describe looks very good to me a priori (I'm not being sarcastic now), but I don't see how this could work.
A quick example, mentioned before: if 51% of the people voted to ostracize blacks, should they then move to another place to create a new government? Is it even possible (not to mention practical) to move millions of people that have nothing in common except some vague characteristic (the color of the skin) to live somewhere else and create a new government and society?
rue democracy would mean that minorities would be separate governments
<sarcasm>
Right. Because people naturally separate themselves into big, homogeneous, stereotyped groups called "minorities". Being homogeneous, these groups do not contain people with different opinions: all blacks have all opinions about every issue; the same apply to women, gays, etc.
</sarcasm>
If what you say is taken literally, every person should be their own government.
Interesting. Does he also blame "the burglars" for "costing us billions of dollars" to secure our homes against them? For "placing their desire for fun ahead everyone on earth's desire for peace and right to privacy"?
It's very easy (and stupid) to blame problems like these in a poorly-defined class of people. It achieves nothing. It would be far more productive to analyse what exactly makes it possible, easy and acceptable for people to "hack" -- in the sense that most people doing it wouldn't consider to be thieves (I believe), but are happy to invade other people's computers.
On the contrary, the additions mentioned in this article are simply additional methods (a method in javascript is simply a property that contains a function).
For example, see the documentation for the new forEach() method :
http://developer-test.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_Jav aScript_1.5_Reference:Objects:Array:forEach
The additions are not reserved words.