Which is just silly. The i tag just means "italics". While it can make sense to redefine the "em" tag (e.g. it is quite common to have emphasized text inside italic text to be non-italic; or you might make all emphasized text red), it absolutely silly to redefine i.
Last time I checked, taking advantage of someone's enjoyment of their work by not paying them is called exploitation. How about, if because you like to program, your employer decided not to pay you.
You missed the point. The original poster claimed that he writes only for profit and not for our amusement. And that is an attitude which is very likely to produce the sort of work you would have to pay me that I read it.
If I were an employer and would think about hiring a programmer, one of the most important considerations would be if the candidate likes programming. I certainly would prefer one who likes programming, but lacks specific knowledge to someone who knows everything I need, but only programs in order to get money.
With proportional representation the party leaders choose who represent you and you have no way to say no to a scummy person.
Not necessarily. For example, the Bavarian communal elections have a representational system where you can vote for single people as well as a list. That way you can explicitly vote for people even at the very end of the list, who wouldn't have had a chance to get in otherwise.
I'm not so sure. First, I think patents don't provide an incentive to invent. People don't invent in order to get patents, they invent in order to get solutions to problems. What patents are supposed top do is to make those inventions public knowledge, and enable other people to build upon them.
However, I'm doubtful that even this part works well. Say a company has made an invention, and now has to decide whether to patent it or keep it secret. Now if the invention is non-obvious enough that you don't expect anyone to re-invent it until the end of the patent protection, you certainly won't patent it. It would only give you disadvantages: Short term, because you'd pay patent fees for a protection which secrecy would give you for free, and long term because after the protection period ends, your idea is in the wild, while with secrecy there's a chance you can protect it much longer.
Therefore you will patent only inventions which are
either obvious enough that someone else might re-invent it during the patent-protection period,
or if it is very hard to keep secret.
In both cases, the knowledge would have become public knowledge anyway.
The big bang is originally just a result of General Relativity, together with the observed fact of the expansion of the universe. If you put it into the equations, you find that at some time in the past, you get a singularity, that is, a point where the theory fails. Since the theory fails at that point, it cannot make any statepents about that point. Now if you assume that time is exactly what this theory describes, this means that time cannot be continue backwards through this point because actually the theory can't describe it. However, that assumption is not correct. We already know that General Relativity is only a good description of time away of the Planck scale. So if you define big bang as exactly what General Relativity describes, then the answer is simple: For that definition there was no big bang, because the theory doesn't apply in that regime.
Now, when we speak about big bang today, we are actually speaking about a the expansion of the universe from a very small early state. That part is already well-established and experimentally well-tested. What happened at the time when the size of the universe was of the order of the Planck length, we don't know, because we don't yet have a well-tested theory of quantum gravitation. Therefore we simply cannot tell for sure if there was a time before big bang or not, or whether the question even makes sense.
However, even for the "pure GR big bang" I take issue at the claim that "time began at the big bang". General relativity describes the "GR universe" up to the initial singularity. The singularity itself isn't part of what the theory describes. That is, it describes times which are arbitrary close to the singularity, but it does not describe the "time zero". Therefore for any point in time (or rather in spacetime) GR describes, there's a point in the past of it. Therefore there strictly speaking was no beginning. Every single event did have a past. That's not a contradiction to the fact that there's only finite time before that event. Think of the positive numbers: Every positive number has a finite distance to zero (heck, the number is it's distance to zero), but for every positive number, there's another positive number even closer to zero. There's just no "beginning of positive numbers" - the positive numbers have an infimum, but not a minimum. And the same is true for the "pure GR big bang": While all space time points described by GR in a big bang solution are only a finite time after big bang, there's no time point at big bang. So in some sense, even in the pure GR there wasn't a beginning of time; the big bang never happened, but there's only an after the big bang; it's just that this after can get arbitrarily close to the big bang (remember, GR is still a classical theory, all variables are continuous). Therefore the big bang singularity had neither cause nor effect, because it isn't itself part of the space time. It only exists as a property of the "later" events. It's a limit, not a point in time or spacetime.
Why have the Europeans achieved so much for humanity, yet the Africans have achieved so little?
Actually the Africans achieved a lot at the time the Europeans were hunting witches. Later the Europeans discovered and built upon that African knowledge.
Of course the Africans also built upon prior knowledge. Part of that came from Europe, mostly Greece, some other came from Asia. But were it not for the Africans, even most of the old European knowledge would have been lost in the middle ages.
More freedom comes from getting the government the fuck out of things it has no business in, not giving it more things to get involved in. Enforce physical property rights? Check. Do other things? Hell no.
You seem to value physical property rights above everything else. I personally value other rights, such as the right to live, or the right to not be owned, much higher (and yes, the latter is a restriction of property rights) and would rather prefer that the government protects those, too. Indeed, if I had the choice between a country which absolutely protects my property, but everyone may kill or enslave me, and a country where my life and freedom is protected, but I cannot own anything, I definitely would chose the latter. Which doesn't mean I don't value physical property rights. It's just that they are by far not the most important rights.
Yes. It's an operating system running on a virtual PC running on a Java virtual machine running on a PC emulated by the Matrix. But the reality the Matrix is running in is itself just a virtual reality created by a Holodeck of a simulated spaceship.
But actually, there is a bottom. The bottom is a self-emulating virtual machine.
At least in C an C++ this optimization would not be allowed (some compilers might do it anyway, though). Optimizations are not allowed to modify the observable behaviour (which essentially means I/O and reads/writes from volatile variables). That's known as the as-if rule (the program must behave as if it followed the rules exactly).
In C++, there are some exceptions where optimizations are allowed even if they change the observable behaviour, but they are only concerned with copy constructors, not with floating point math.
And yes, volatile reads and writes can be reordered (think of two threads attempting to write to a volatile variable; the compiler has no ability to say which write comes first, it is entirely runtime and machine dependent.
Multithreading isn't part of the C specification. Volatile accesses may not be reordered in a single thread. Example:
int i; int j; volatile int vi; volatile int vj;
i=1; j=2; vi=3; vj=4;
The compiler is free to change the order of the i and j assignments, or even move the assignments of i and/or j to after the assignments of vi and vj. However the compiler may not issue the write to vj after the write to vi (that's important f.ex. in device drivers; vi and vj might actually be memory-mapped I/O ports, and writing to vi might trigger some action which changes the meaning of writing vj).
Oh, so new software takes too long to build because of lengthy manual optimization?
Yes. That's why most manuals are not very optimized. So the next time you think a manual is close to useless, don't complain. It's in order to save you time in the building process.
Slashdot Mirror
Select a shorter time period, and you'll get a nice FF3.5 line starting to rise at the end of June.
Given that it's a teen ... does that mean the SIIA creates child porn? :-)
Well, if copying the purse also includes copying the money inside, you're counterfeiting money.
Moral: If you copy software, make sure you can make good tattoos.
Which is just silly. The i tag just means "italics". While it can make sense to redefine the "em" tag (e.g. it is quite common to have emphasized text inside italic text to be non-italic; or you might make all emphasized text red), it absolutely silly to redefine i.
Actually, if your services are free to the customer, in order to undercut you your competitors will have to pay his customers for using his service.
I thought it was already common knowledge that pirates fight global warming. :-)
You missed the point. The original poster claimed that he writes only for profit and not for our amusement. And that is an attitude which is very likely to produce the sort of work you would have to pay me that I read it.
If I were an employer and would think about hiring a programmer, one of the most important considerations would be if the candidate likes programming. I certainly would prefer one who likes programming, but lacks specific knowledge to someone who knows everything I need, but only programs in order to get money.
Not necessarily. For example, the Bavarian communal elections have a representational system where you can vote for single people as well as a list. That way you can explicitly vote for people even at the very end of the list, who wouldn't have had a chance to get in otherwise.
Independents can make up their own list.
I'm not so sure. First, I think patents don't provide an incentive to invent. People don't invent in order to get patents, they invent in order to get solutions to problems. What patents are supposed top do is to make those inventions public knowledge, and enable other people to build upon them.
However, I'm doubtful that even this part works well. Say a company has made an invention, and now has to decide whether to patent it or keep it secret. Now if the invention is non-obvious enough that you don't expect anyone to re-invent it until the end of the patent protection, you certainly won't patent it. It would only give you disadvantages: Short term, because you'd pay patent fees for a protection which secrecy would give you for free, and long term because after the protection period ends, your idea is in the wild, while with secrecy there's a chance you can protect it much longer.
Therefore you will patent only inventions which are
In both cases, the knowledge would have become public knowledge anyway.
The big bang is originally just a result of General Relativity, together with the observed fact of the expansion of the universe. If you put it into the equations, you find that at some time in the past, you get a singularity, that is, a point where the theory fails. Since the theory fails at that point, it cannot make any statepents about that point. Now if you assume that time is exactly what this theory describes, this means that time cannot be continue backwards through this point because actually the theory can't describe it. However, that assumption is not correct. We already know that General Relativity is only a good description of time away of the Planck scale. So if you define big bang as exactly what General Relativity describes, then the answer is simple: For that definition there was no big bang, because the theory doesn't apply in that regime.
Now, when we speak about big bang today, we are actually speaking about a the expansion of the universe from a very small early state. That part is already well-established and experimentally well-tested. What happened at the time when the size of the universe was of the order of the Planck length, we don't know, because we don't yet have a well-tested theory of quantum gravitation. Therefore we simply cannot tell for sure if there was a time before big bang or not, or whether the question even makes sense.
However, even for the "pure GR big bang" I take issue at the claim that "time began at the big bang". General relativity describes the "GR universe" up to the initial singularity. The singularity itself isn't part of what the theory describes. That is, it describes times which are arbitrary close to the singularity, but it does not describe the "time zero". Therefore for any point in time (or rather in spacetime) GR describes, there's a point in the past of it. Therefore there strictly speaking was no beginning. Every single event did have a past. That's not a contradiction to the fact that there's only finite time before that event. Think of the positive numbers: Every positive number has a finite distance to zero (heck, the number is it's distance to zero), but for every positive number, there's another positive number even closer to zero. There's just no "beginning of positive numbers" - the positive numbers have an infimum, but not a minimum. And the same is true for the "pure GR big bang": While all space time points described by GR in a big bang solution are only a finite time after big bang, there's no time point at big bang. So in some sense, even in the pure GR there wasn't a beginning of time; the big bang never happened, but there's only an after the big bang; it's just that this after can get arbitrarily close to the big bang (remember, GR is still a classical theory, all variables are continuous). Therefore the big bang singularity had neither cause nor effect, because it isn't itself part of the space time. It only exists as a property of the "later" events. It's a limit, not a point in time or spacetime.
You seem to value physical property rights above everything else. I personally value other rights, such as the right to live, or the right to not be owned, much higher (and yes, the latter is a restriction of property rights) and would rather prefer that the government protects those, too. Indeed, if I had the choice between a country which absolutely protects my property, but everyone may kill or enslave me, and a country where my life and freedom is protected, but I cannot own anything, I definitely would chose the latter. Which doesn't mean I don't value physical property rights. It's just that they are by far not the most important rights.
Are you sure that an old-fashioned network wouldn't be sufficient for your needs?
So to them a book is nothing more than a marketing instrument.
But actually, there is a bottom. The bottom is a self-emulating virtual machine.
What, no turtles? :(
The self-emulating virtual machine is written in Logo. So yes, there are turtles.
Yes. It's an operating system running on a virtual PC running on a Java virtual machine running on a PC emulated by the Matrix. But the reality the Matrix is running in is itself just a virtual reality created by a Holodeck of a simulated spaceship.
But actually, there is a bottom. The bottom is a self-emulating virtual machine.
But it's mutually recursive (x86 -> JVM -> x86). The only mutually recursice acronym I know is HURD.
I guess you wrote <insert high level language here> without replacing < and > with < and >
At least in C an C++ this optimization would not be allowed (some compilers might do it anyway, though). Optimizations are not allowed to modify the observable behaviour (which essentially means I/O and reads/writes from volatile variables). That's known as the as-if rule (the program must behave as if it followed the rules exactly).
In C++, there are some exceptions where optimizations are allowed even if they change the observable behaviour, but they are only concerned with copy constructors, not with floating point math.
Multithreading isn't part of the C specification. Volatile accesses may not be reordered in a single thread. Example:
The compiler is free to change the order of the i and j assignments, or even move the assignments of i and/or j to after the assignments of vi and vj. However the compiler may not issue the write to vj after the write to vi (that's important f.ex. in device drivers; vi and vj might actually be memory-mapped I/O ports, and writing to vi might trigger some action which changes the meaning of writing vj).
If you ask hin in december, he certainly will opt for the quality product in february. :-)
Yes. That's why most manuals are not very optimized. So the next time you think a manual is close to useless, don't complain. It's in order to save you time in the building process.
Oh, and I thought it was economic depression and a schizophrenic financial system ... :-)
No, what they mean is: Current tuna tastes excellent. Power tuna will merely taste good.