No, you anonymous dumbfuck, it's a problem because the more people that have nuclear weapons, the more likely someone is to *use* them. And I'm sure you understand what is wrong with that.
Ok, so to make the implicit assumption that there's a lot more complexity of thought beneath his general statement, let's take his example: There's a problem with the turbine blades of the high pressure oxygen turbopump. He describes how the problem could be solved for example by changing the shape, which would have been easy to do before designing the engine but not afterwards. So this kind of weakens what you say about needing a design specification. Even if there was a design, how would you know about this problem before the engine was as a whole to be tested. Yes, you can find some problems by looking at materials and individual components, but testing the whole unit would flush out a significant number of problems that come from component interactions.
If I understand what you are saying though, it sounds like you agree with me - both the bottom-up and top-down approach are necessary in the real world. What are you suggesting that Feynman is saying? That they should "lean" towards bottom-up design? What would that mean in practice?
Isn't Feynman a physicist and not an engineer? His argument seems to have a lot of handwaving and no actual direct connections between his claims and how they will achieve results. Top-down or bottom-up design are both over-simplifications and will both result in difficulties. Top-down really boils down to looking at the whole of a system, and bottom-up really means looking at its parts. As the nature of human perception and thus reality is dualistic, both the whole and its parts must be considered in design. The best approach depends on the problem, and for sufficiently complex problems a fractal mix of top-down and bottom-up design with iterative prototyping is usually the way to go, instead of lazily leaning on a simplistic model.
Ah, so the examples were *strings*. He said *English*... big difference. If he just said strings to begin with, I would have understood what he was getting at... I thought the actual nouns in these strings were important and had some kind of meaning.
Yet another knee-jerk moderation from the Slashbots. Ok kids, this is not something to worry about in the future. It's already here. Just search google for "nanotech fish brains".
Thanks for the "plain" English, now again WTF are you talking about? I have no idea. Your comparisons in quotes make no sense. cat vs hat? big vs small? cat vs dog? What are these supposed to represent again?
Step back from the computer, take a breath, and relax for a moment. You have lost your perspective.
Environmental destruction, cancer, heart disease, war, terrorists, fascism, peak oil, illegal wiretapping, epidemics, your eventual and innevitable deatb, and buttons for reordering search plugins. One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong....
Moron: Don't buy the fucking phone then. There exist phones that have no camera. Buy one of them. How you got modded up is a mystery. How you could be upset by the percentage of phones that fit your criteria is mind-boggling. You can find phones that do what you want. It's not like there's a limited phone-space, and with each new phone your choice goes down. "Wonderful, they've released another model of VW bug, another freaking car I can't take offroading". That's not what it was meant for, dumbass.
Furthermore, is style even objectifiable? I don't believe there is some general standard on measuring style. I know that artists are categorized by similarities in their art (e.g. impressionism, cubism, etc.), but this is not a general measure that could be used to compare any two pieces of art. Even if someone or some group laid down measures of style (angularity, color palette, symbolic components, placement, etc ad infinitum), who would come up with the algorithm that, given these measures, could determine the percentage difference needed to deem the artwork a derivative? The creative space available to artists is virtually infinite. The nature of art is creation, of pushing boundries, and laying down measures of style is the antithesis of this: those stylistic measures would be immediately rendered irrelevant by some artist that would purposely step outside of them simply because they exist.
It seems rather strange that you track when your coworker is going to the bathroom, what bodily possessions he happens to have on him at the time, and how long he spends in the bathroom.
Are you sure that "my co-worker" is not a euphamism for "myself"???
It's likely that "he" is not a single individual. Various versions of the Dao De Jing have been found over time with different wordings and organizations. Also "lao" means "old", and "zi" means "master" or "person" or "son", so even if he did exist, this was likely not his name.
Anyway, I found the quote after all. It's from a translation by the poet Witter Bynner, who decided to take a more freeform approach to the text. Here's a page of comparisons, quite interesting:
Did Lao Tzu really say this? I've read the Dao De Jing a couple times and don't recall this quote, but it may be that I forgot, or that it was worded differently in my translation.
Ok, I lucked out I guess. My first experience using IRC as a support tool was with Firefox. I was building an extension and having several difficulties. I could not find the answers to several problems in message boards and documentation because I was trying to do things that hadn't been done before. Posting to message boards didn't make sense, because I was at the beginning of working through my problem. I needed to have a discussion with someone, not fire a few rounds back and forth over the course of a few weeks. I'm sure you've experienced it in email, where you go back and forth a dozen times clarifying something that would have been understoond within 5 minutes if you spoke to someone in person. Anyway, a kindly soul helped me out quite a bit on one of the channels. I suspect if he (she?) wasn't around, my words my have fallen on deaf ears (blind eyes?), and my experience might have been similar to the grandparent poster. But it was not, and I was immensely satisfied with my experience.
It's this sort of situation where the bullshit of software regulation is flushed out into the open. People are arguing whether the graphics driver should be considered as linked into the system or whether it sits on top like an application. In the case of the latter, there are no legal rammifications. But the distinction here is false. The line between library and application is drawn for sake of organization and comprehension, but is not real. Software is software, code is data, applications are libraries, libraries are applications. Legislating at the code level doesn't make sense, and will never make sense.
* It's not about the number of pixels, it's about the lense and camera design * I just want a PHONE that is a PHONE goddammit * blah blah blah
For those who believe humans have free will, slashdot provides plenty of evidence to the contrary. I think I've seen these same posts modded up in a dozen different stories about camera phones. It reminds of the dilbert cartoon where the most overused phrase is how "swimming is the best form of exercise".
Looking at declassified technologies developed decades ago, you can see technology that was "impossible" at the time was actually in existance. I wouldn't be surprised if there exist microbots the size of a flea that can fly around somewhat clumsily and send images or videos back to a receiver.
Apparently you don't have one either. Anyone with a GF wouldn't spend valuable moments of their life flushing out wheather some other random slashdotter has a GF or not.
To all the igornant moderators that marked this bit of uninformed sarcasm as insightful, I can tell you as someone who HAS moved to China, and has lived in Beijing for one year, that everything is actually quite customer oriented and personal here. You never have to talk to a machine on the phone, the person behind the counter ignores everyone else until finished dealing with you, everything is anonymous (gas, electric, phone, etc through smart cards), you can negotiate prices, and storefronts are generally realistic embodiments of customer needs, i.e. a simple counters with products, instead of disneylands designed by corporate offices. You usually don't have to deal with an anonymous beaurocracy that treats you like a number when you need service. At the retail level everything is pretty much unregulated, so the system is quite efficient. It's quite amazing and strange that things in the supposedly free-market USA are quite the opposite.
As someone who HAS moved to China, and has lived in Beijing for one year, I can tell you first hand that everything is customer oriented and personal here. You never have to talk to a machine on the phone, the person behind the counter ignores everyone else until you are dealt with, everything is anonymous (gas, electric, phone, etc through smart cards), you can negotiate prices, and storefronts are generally realistic embodiments of customer needs, i.e. a few simple counters with products, instead of disneylands designed by corporate offices. You usually never have to deal with an anonymous beaurocracy that treats you like a number when you need service. It's quite amazing and strange that things in the supposedly free USA are quite the opposite.
I stopped working at a computer for 8 months. I realize this may be incomprehensible to those of you who are married to your computers, literally, as in "until death do us part", i.e. you don't forsee yourself ever being away from a computer for an extended period of time until you die.
Anyway, I got a programming contract, and started sitting at the computer for long hours. I'd been excersizing pretty intensely before this mind you, so I was quite fit. After a couple weeks of work, my intensitines are going nuts and I throw my neck out! I can feel the vertebrae rubbing against each other, so I'm guessing a disc slipped a bit. I contemplated the possibilty of suicide if I had to live with that pain forever. But it finally healed, and I re-learned proper posture at the desk, and I'm fine now.
Moral of this story? Going from physically healthy to sitting at a desk all day ALSO requires that your body adjust to the change.
Can someone explain to me why this is not a problem with regular GET and POST requests? What is special about AJAX that introduces new security problems? Or is this just a chance to write an article using the latest buzzword?
Slashdot Mirror
No, you anonymous dumbfuck, it's a problem because the more people that have nuclear weapons, the more likely someone is to *use* them. And I'm sure you understand what is wrong with that.
Ok, so to make the implicit assumption that there's a lot more complexity of thought beneath his general statement, let's take his example: There's a problem with the turbine blades of the high pressure oxygen turbopump. He describes how the problem could be solved for example by changing the shape, which would have been easy to do before designing the engine but not afterwards. So this kind of weakens what you say about needing a design specification. Even if there was a design, how would you know about this problem before the engine was as a whole to be tested. Yes, you can find some problems by looking at materials and individual components, but testing the whole unit would flush out a significant number of problems that come from component interactions.
If I understand what you are saying though, it sounds like you agree with me - both the bottom-up and top-down approach are necessary in the real world. What are you suggesting that Feynman is saying? That they should "lean" towards bottom-up design? What would that mean in practice?
LS
That has to be one of the fucking funniest things I've seen in months! I'm still giggling
Isn't Feynman a physicist and not an engineer? His argument seems to have a lot of handwaving and no actual direct connections between his claims and how they will achieve results. Top-down or bottom-up design are both over-simplifications and will both result in difficulties. Top-down really boils down to looking at the whole of a system, and bottom-up really means looking at its parts. As the nature of human perception and thus reality is dualistic, both the whole and its parts must be considered in design. The best approach depends on the problem, and for sufficiently complex problems a fractal mix of top-down and bottom-up design with iterative prototyping is usually the way to go, instead of lazily leaning on a simplistic model.
LS
Ah, so the examples were *strings*. He said *English*... big difference. If he just said strings to begin with, I would have understood what he was getting at... I thought the actual nouns in these strings were important and had some kind of meaning.
Yet another knee-jerk moderation from the Slashbots. Ok kids, this is not something to worry about in the future. It's already here. Just search google for "nanotech fish brains".
LS
Thanks for the "plain" English, now again WTF are you talking about? I have no idea. Your comparisons in quotes make no sense. cat vs hat? big vs small? cat vs dog? What are these supposed to represent again?
Step back from the computer, take a breath, and relax for a moment. You have lost your perspective.
Environmental destruction, cancer, heart disease, war, terrorists, fascism, peak oil, illegal wiretapping, epidemics, your eventual and innevitable deatb, and buttons for reordering search plugins. One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong....
Moron: Don't buy the fucking phone then. There exist phones that have no camera. Buy one of them. How you got modded up is a mystery. How you could be upset by the percentage of phones that fit your criteria is mind-boggling. You can find phones that do what you want. It's not like there's a limited phone-space, and with each new phone your choice goes down. "Wonderful, they've released another model of VW bug, another freaking car I can't take offroading". That's not what it was meant for, dumbass.
Furthermore, is style even objectifiable? I don't believe there is some general standard on measuring style. I know that artists are categorized by similarities in their art (e.g. impressionism, cubism, etc.), but this is not a general measure that could be used to compare any two pieces of art. Even if someone or some group laid down measures of style (angularity, color palette, symbolic components, placement, etc ad infinitum), who would come up with the algorithm that, given these measures, could determine the percentage difference needed to deem the artwork a derivative? The creative space available to artists is virtually infinite. The nature of art is creation, of pushing boundries, and laying down measures of style is the antithesis of this: those stylistic measures would be immediately rendered irrelevant by some artist that would purposely step outside of them simply because they exist.
LS
It seems rather strange that you track when your coworker is going to the bathroom, what bodily possessions he happens to have on him at the time, and how long he spends in the bathroom.
Are you sure that "my co-worker" is not a euphamism for "myself"???
If these scientists are not careful, they could start a chain reaction and convert ALL of cyberspace into one big blackhole!!
It's likely that "he" is not a single individual. Various versions of the Dao De Jing have been found over time with different wordings and organizations. Also "lao" means "old", and "zi" means "master" or "person" or "son", so even if he did exist, this was likely not his name.
Anyway, I found the quote after all. It's from a translation by the poet Witter Bynner, who decided to take a more freeform approach to the text. Here's a page of comparisons, quite interesting:
http://wayist.org/ttc%20compared/chap02.htm#4
LS
What is is the was of what shall be. ~ Lao Tzu
Did Lao Tzu really say this? I've read the Dao De Jing a couple times and don't recall this quote, but it may be that I forgot, or that it was worded differently in my translation.
Ok, I lucked out I guess. My first experience using IRC as a support tool was with Firefox. I was building an extension and having several difficulties. I could not find the answers to several problems in message boards and documentation because I was trying to do things that hadn't been done before. Posting to message boards didn't make sense, because I was at the beginning of working through my problem. I needed to have a discussion with someone, not fire a few rounds back and forth over the course of a few weeks. I'm sure you've experienced it in email, where you go back and forth a dozen times clarifying something that would have been understoond within 5 minutes if you spoke to someone in person. Anyway, a kindly soul helped me out quite a bit on one of the channels. I suspect if he (she?) wasn't around, my words my have fallen on deaf ears (blind eyes?), and my experience might have been similar to the grandparent poster. But it was not, and I was immensely satisfied with my experience.
LS
It's this sort of situation where the bullshit of software regulation is flushed out into the open. People are arguing whether the graphics driver should be considered as linked into the system or whether it sits on top like an application. In the case of the latter, there are no legal rammifications. But the distinction here is false. The line between library and application is drawn for sake of organization and comprehension, but is not real. Software is software, code is data, applications are libraries, libraries are applications. Legislating at the code level doesn't make sense, and will never make sense.
LS
Pot does have a hangover. Sometimes you feel fuzzy and lazy for a few days afterwards...
* It's not about the number of pixels, it's about the lense and camera design
* I just want a PHONE that is a PHONE goddammit
* blah blah blah
For those who believe humans have free will, slashdot provides plenty of evidence to the contrary. I think I've seen these same posts modded up in a dozen different stories about camera phones. It reminds of the dilbert cartoon where the most overused phrase is how "swimming is the best form of exercise".
LS
Looking at declassified technologies developed decades ago, you can see technology that was "impossible" at the time was actually in existance. I wouldn't be surprised if there exist microbots the size of a flea that can fly around somewhat clumsily and send images or videos back to a receiver.
LS
Apparently you don't have one either. Anyone with a GF wouldn't spend valuable moments of their life flushing out wheather some other random slashdotter has a GF or not.
To all the igornant moderators that marked this bit of uninformed sarcasm as insightful, I can tell you as someone who HAS moved to China, and has lived in Beijing for one year, that everything is actually quite customer oriented and personal here. You never have to talk to a machine on the phone, the person behind the counter ignores everyone else until finished dealing with you, everything is anonymous (gas, electric, phone, etc through smart cards), you can negotiate prices, and storefronts are generally realistic embodiments of customer needs, i.e. a simple counters with products, instead of disneylands designed by corporate offices. You usually don't have to deal with an anonymous beaurocracy that treats you like a number when you need service. At the retail level everything is pretty much unregulated, so the system is quite efficient. It's quite amazing and strange that things in the supposedly free-market USA are quite the opposite.
As someone who HAS moved to China, and has lived in Beijing for one year, I can tell you first hand that everything is customer oriented and personal here. You never have to talk to a machine on the phone, the person behind the counter ignores everyone else until you are dealt with, everything is anonymous (gas, electric, phone, etc through smart cards), you can negotiate prices, and storefronts are generally realistic embodiments of customer needs, i.e. a few simple counters with products, instead of disneylands designed by corporate offices. You usually never have to deal with an anonymous beaurocracy that treats you like a number when you need service. It's quite amazing and strange that things in the supposedly free USA are quite the opposite.
I stopped working at a computer for 8 months. I realize this may be incomprehensible to those of you who are married to your computers, literally, as in "until death do us part", i.e. you don't forsee yourself ever being away from a computer for an extended period of time until you die.
Anyway, I got a programming contract, and started sitting at the computer for long hours. I'd been excersizing pretty intensely before this mind you, so I was quite fit. After a couple weeks of work, my intensitines are going nuts and I throw my neck out! I can feel the vertebrae rubbing against each other, so I'm guessing a disc slipped a bit. I contemplated the possibilty of suicide if I had to live with that pain forever. But it finally healed, and I re-learned proper posture at the desk, and I'm fine now.
Moral of this story? Going from physically healthy to sitting at a desk all day ALSO requires that your body adjust to the change.
LS
Can someone explain to me why this is not a problem with regular GET and POST requests? What is special about AJAX that introduces new security problems? Or is this just a chance to write an article using the latest buzzword?
Unfortunately the moderation is true. I dated a pastor's daughter once, and let's just say that there were consequences.