Maybe aliens have already replaced him with a replica?... so he can help start the alien space invasion!... oh no!... This would also explain his sudden career change and it would also explain John Carmack's move into Aerospace!... see it explains a lot!... they are both aliens!
Maybe the Armadillo's are behind it!
No way, man. Garriot was possessed by an alien when he went up to the ISS (it's occupied entirely by aliens now). Carmack is still human, he's one of the few who knows the truth and is trying to boot-strap a space-militia to fight off the invasion!
I recall people freaking out when the human genome project revealed that Humans only have about 30,000 genes rather than the previous estimate of 150K.
It always seemed to me that measuring Human complexity based on the number of our genes is a little like judging a book by the number of words it contains. It completely ignores the fact that words have Meaning.
Uh, I remember when they discovered that too, and I don't recall any scientists "freaking out" because the low number of genes implied we had low "complexity". Instead, I remember them being very excited, because they already knew there are far more than 30,000 proteins generated from our DNA, meaning that the 1:1 gene:protein mapping theory had to be wrong, and the mechanism was far more complicated than previously thought.
This sounds to me like a continuation of the line of inquiry opened by that discovery years ago, where now they're gaining a better idea of how the genes really code for proteins. With the extremely interesting aspect that some of this is controlled by things not part of the DNA itself, yet which can still be inherited.
To (ab)use your analogy, if the human body is a work of literature then proteins are the words, and genes are characters. The number of words hasn't changed, it's just that before we thought the language was like Chinese, where a single character mapped to a single word. Now we realize it's more like English, where the interactions between characters create different words. Oh and now we've discovered that there's also punctuation like apostrophes and hyphens which can significantly alter the meaning of the resulting words.
I guess wha I was getting at was that if the guy was fired with cause and not illegally, then the ethics laws couldn't have been broken even if there was some benefit.
But that's obviously not true, because the ethics law does not specify that some other law needs to have been violated in order for the ethics law to have been violated. It is specifically designed to cover a situation where no other law was broken, yet the otherwise legal actions were taken for some personal gain. It would be rather pointless if you already had to have broken some other law with stiffer penalties to begin with.
The red light situation is inappropriate; the law already defines that as not being a traffic violation. Suppose instead you were a traffic commissioner, and you executed your perfectly legal authority to modify the traffic signal timings, and did it in a way that you could claim improved overall traffic flow, yet it also just happened to be in a way that specifically improved your commute to work and back. Further assume that there was a law which said such manipulations for personal gain are unethical. Certainly said law could have been violated in this case, especially if it appears as though the personal gain was more important than the practical justification. And in the specific case of Palin, this is what they believed happened. Yet at the same time, they didn't suggest any punishment, so I don't see how "We think you probably violated this ethics law, but oh well whatever" is making too much of it.
Personally, the way I see presidential politics anymore is that the president surrounds himself with what he thinks is experts and then basically parrots what they do and say. I think Palin would be a refreshing break from this where she wouldn't do what everyone tells her to do. I'm not sure that would set womens lib back or how she could,
Yeah, it'd sure be refreshing to have a leader who leads "from the gut" and doesn't listen to what all those people coming to them with "facts" and "educated opinions" say. The last thing we need is another Decider.
Anyway, that's not what makes me see her as a setback to women's rights. I personally consider reproductive rights to be a critical component of women's rights, and the gain that would be breaking the (2nd) highest glass ceiling (when it's already on the chopping block) would not result in a net win when the women who does it only does so by being ardently against that. Even if she would have no practical chance to change it. But that's just me!
That's not from any fancy suits, it's probably from steroids, the same reason athletic records of all kinds have been broken in recent years.
It's pretty much pointless to compare modern-day athletics to any historical records because of the extreme use of steroids now.
Yes, it's from fancy suits. They didn't just invent steroids for swimmers. They did just invent a new type of suit, and since it's invention records have been falling far faster than before. Before, some potentially-juiced-up swimmer would cream an old record. But in this past Olympics, we had races where half the field was well ahead of the world record that had been set only a year or two before. How often does the 4th place finisher beat the old world record? Nearly every short distance record was broken by someone wearing the new suit. Neither drugs nor swimming techniques got that much better in that time period. Suits did.
That said, nothing about the suits seems to have come from studying shark skin in particular. They're about reducing drag via shape and ultrasonically welded seams, and increasing buoyancy with water repellent fabric. Shark scales don't enter the picture.
The OS hasn't done anything resembling giving "the process all the memory and CPU time it needs" since the DOS days. Most modern processes do all sorts of API calls and the OS is always in the background doing things like managing memory and multithreading.
In a modern OS, when you have a single processor-bound and memory-intensive task, memory management and multithreading are designed to reduce to a case where that task gets all the cpu and memory it needs. DOS just wasn't capable of handling anything more complicated, it doesn't mean nothing resembling that happens any more. The other tasks the OS is handling and the scheduling of those tasks should take a minuscule amount of CPU time, thus allowing one task to get more than 99% of the processor time.
In the case of Windows it's also checking to see if you've got any unused icons on your desktop so it can offer to hide them for you, making sure your copy is legit, monitoring your sound card to make sure it's not playing anything illegal, etc.
I can certainly see how in principle it's possible to bog your system down so much that scheduling between all these tasks and their individual run-times becomes a problem for running anything that wants as much processor as possible, and given how little I've touched the Windows world in recent years I don't have the basis to disagree with your sentiment. Let's just say that if this is the case, then they well and truly Fucked Up(tm).
The ethics laws said you can't do something to benefit yourself or people you know. Now if that was the case behind the firings, that would mean that the laws were violated and therefor the firing would be illegal.
And the committee found that to be the case, that she had violated the ethics law. Yet, as you note, that was not the purview of the investigation. When they say the firing was not illegal, that means with regard to the laws of interest to the investigation. Illegal in one context, not illegal in another, it isn't a contradiction.
That could very well be. I know a lot of people who didn't like her for a number of reasons ranging from her being a woman to the way she talked and everything in between.
It could be that my opinion of her was not significantly affected by some local Alaskan politics, and rather it's between her XY chromosome or her colloquialisms? Thanks. Frankly, it's what she said that turned me off. Between her stated stances on the issues, and her flagrant ignorance, I couldn't care less whether she abused power in Alaska, I don't want her to have any power in this country. And while I'd love to have a woman president (or VP), I'd rather not have it one who is bound and determined to set women's rights back two steps for the one step forward that her election would be.
Yeah, how could something be both legal and unethical? It is a mystery.
To be more precise, though, obviously the result is that the firing was legal with regard to Palin's powers and any laws specifically covering termination of employees, yet was not in compliance with a different law regarding ethics. See, the ethics law is a law unto itself, and does not require that some other law be broken. Since the first set of laws were not broken, and the latter law were outside the purview of the investigation and probably toothless to boot, no punishment was advised. That does not mean no ethics abuse occurred.
Though honestly that little sideshow meant very little to me. The Bush-like "I'll technically follow the letter of whatever laws I can be held accountable for while abusing them" is so bog-standard I didn't even blink, and was the least of reasons why I did not find her fit to be President.
I really wouldn't expect significantly different scores for something like an office suite or media encoding. Once the OS gives the process all the memory and CPU time it needs, that's basically it. Maybe for games where there could be significant differences in the DirectX flow, but not in general.
But as the article notes, throughput isn't everything. The "up front" speed and how long it takes for a button push to result in action is equally important if not more so. The responsiveness of applications is something an OS can have a significant impact on, and is probably the most important thing for making the computer -feel- fast, and thus giving a better user experience. Hell I've long considered responsiveness to be justification enough for dual-core processors even when a user isn't multi-tasking or running multi-threading apps. So if it's a good enough reason to get a whole second core, it's a good enough reason for an OS upgrade.
It does sound kinda cagey that they're making this one of the main reasons to get 7, rather than improving Vista. But whatever, it's all academic to me.
Naw, man. For one if the line's of any length worth cutting it's going to be quite tiring and time consuming and the whole point of the exercise is laziness and impatience. For two unless you're already Chuck Norris or Shaq a knife isn't exactly an overwhelming weapon, and if I get smacked down by some big line-dweller I'm going to jail for the stabbings, and they'll know I tried to cut in line. That's just humiliating.
No. I find a rocket launcher or an M60 works very well, or first the rocket launcher that can be tossed down quickly then followed up by the machine gun clears the line out with minimal fuss and muss. Well okay a lot of muss.
Namely, you can't write an infinitely long code and there is only a finite number of possible inputs. These aspects seemed to me to be glossed over too much, especially the part about inputs which should lead to conditional halting.
The code doesn't need to be infinitely long. The Turing Machine only sports an infinite amount of memory. However a real machine can easily have enough memory to make the results the same, for all practical purposes. The real machine does not have infinite processing power, and you don't have an infinite lifespan to wait for the answer. Also, in practice, there is no known algorithm that can tell if even a moderate sized program with moderate numbers of inputs will halt, other than the 'algorithm' of running the program and seeing what happens.
Furthermore, what is to stop you from assessing your code as you are writing it? Why not just test every possible combination of inputs on the code as it is being generated (making the appropriate assumptions so that this does not actually check every combination of inputs)? Whilst not feasible in practice for all scenarios, shouldn't this be possible in theory. I also note that most of the time I spend coding is idle time for the processor.
A single function which takes a single uint64_t as an argument, and which does not have any convenient limitations on legal inputs, is already infeasible to test for every input. It doesn't matter how much idle cpu time you have.
I am not knocking the logic of the halting problem, just how it is introduced as being this general statement that construction of such a program is theoretically impossible. Any human can tell whether or not the hello world programs which came before will halt or not halt after a casual glance. Why cannot a machine employ a simple finite state approach to yield a conditional solution (sometimes the actual answer maybe "unknown" in practice due to random numbers or any code which does not yield the same answer every time for the same inputs) for a possible-to-write program for which all the code is visible?
Of course you can tell if a trivially simple program halts. With the right formal verification techniques, you can even tell whether a moderately complex program works correctly. For just about anything interesting, the behavior is complicated enough that it cannot be simplified and the only way to determine what the logic actually does for a given input is to run it with that input. Formal verification fails at the point where the expected behavior of the program can only be truly codified by the actual code itself. This is the nature of the halting problem.
It's like the saying "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." Well this is the opposite. In this case there should, theoretically, be a large difference between theory and practice. Yet, in practice, the halting problem applies to the majority of interesting programs despite their finite memory size.
They only use formal verification on small and isolated functional units. Using formal verification to ensure your floating point multiplier is correct is one thing, a possible and highly useful thing, using it to verify that your load/store scheduler is correct is another, extremely not-happening thing.
Formal verification is useful. But the vast, vast majority of AMD and Intel's verification is done via directed tests, directed tests, and then some more directed tests.
Same thing with time scales. Seems like no one cares too much to keep their millions, billions, and trillions straight. Come on, folks, it'll only take you 30 seconds of research to avoid making your ancient galactic empire a thousand times older than the universe itself.
Oh, ha ha. Don't think I can't tell what you're so subtly referring to. Look, if L.Ron said the universe is over four quadrillion years old, then that's how old it is! He doesn't need to do "research" of the findings of your pitiful thetan-festooned "scientists", he discovered the truth himself!
I honestly think they need to stop teaching the halting problem to freshmen CS majors. They're just too inexperienced to understand that theory and practice are two different things.. so this whole "limits of computation" thing stifles their enthusiasm.
I suppose. Personally I find it very useful in explaining why, generally speaking, the only way to really know how a program will respond to certain inputs is to test it. Theory and practice are not all that far apart. In theory, the halting problem only states that there is no algorithm that can answer the halting question for all programs and inputs, given infinite resources and potentially infinite running time. In practice, no such algorithm exists for most programs and inputs on real machines.
It may stifle their enthusiasm, but it will at least explain why, for example, the only real way to test the control logic for your microprocessor is by writing lots and lots of tests and checking their output. I know that when I entered school I was hoping there was a "magical" (as in unknown to me) method of writing correct programs other than my previous hack->run->debug cycle, but the reality is that formal verification is only practical for a small subset of problems.
I tried the same thing, but the court dismissed my suit calling it a "pre-existing condition". WTF, I thought that was just something my health insurance did!
I've read your other posts. You think you're being subtle, but you're not. Sorry, but I'm in too good a mood celebrating yesterday's historic event to continue to have this discussion the way that you insist on framing it. You either appreciate this step towards the equality you claim MLK Day is all about to you, or you don't. Peace.
Would it become a racist holiday if whites became the minority?... When does celebrating a figure based on race become taboo?
No, it would become no more racist than celebrating the birth of the slave-owning nation of the U.S.A. on July 4th is racist.
And we don't celebrate MLK "based on race", but based on his actions, and his actions to promote freedom will never, in retrospect, be changed.
If as you so obviously fear a black majority begins to oppress white people, and white people need a civil rights leader to protect them, then both that leader and MLK Jr. will properly be remembered as champions for freedom and equality. Please understand this.
I know this is flamebait, but why "God bless America" when the segregation was allowed until so recently?
God bless America, because it changed, and we've come so far so quickly!
That's what this is about, the promise of America, which is that it aims for the highest of ideals which have never been reality, yet the change towards those ideals is real.
You can compare to other nations who didn't have these problems. You can complain that the change did not happen miraculously overnight, but instead took place in small, slow, reasonable increments over several centuries. You can say that we merely elected a man, a man who cannot and will not change everything, and who by his mere election doesn't resolve all the racial problems in our country.
That's all true, yet doesn't alter the fact that change has happened, in the past, and today, and will certainly happen in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe aliens have already replaced him with a replica? ... so he can help start the alien space invasion!... oh no!... This would also explain his sudden career change and it would also explain John Carmack's move into Aerospace!... see it explains a lot! ... they are both aliens!
Maybe the Armadillo's are behind it!
No way, man. Garriot was possessed by an alien when he went up to the ISS (it's occupied entirely by aliens now). Carmack is still human, he's one of the few who knows the truth and is trying to boot-strap a space-militia to fight off the invasion!
And, uh, In Vas Flam!
Is that the spell? Damnit, all this time I've been casting In Vas Flan, which has entirely different, albeit delicious, results.
The Force is everywhere, just as Yoda said. The ability for a sentient being to manipulate the Force comes only via midichlorians.
There's your explanation.
And yes, it's still retarded. Best to pretend that never happened.
I recall people freaking out when the human genome project revealed that Humans only have about 30,000 genes rather than the previous estimate of 150K.
It always seemed to me that measuring Human complexity based on the number of our genes is a little like judging a book by the number of words it contains. It completely ignores the fact that words have Meaning.
Uh, I remember when they discovered that too, and I don't recall any scientists "freaking out" because the low number of genes implied we had low "complexity". Instead, I remember them being very excited, because they already knew there are far more than 30,000 proteins generated from our DNA, meaning that the 1:1 gene:protein mapping theory had to be wrong, and the mechanism was far more complicated than previously thought.
This sounds to me like a continuation of the line of inquiry opened by that discovery years ago, where now they're gaining a better idea of how the genes really code for proteins. With the extremely interesting aspect that some of this is controlled by things not part of the DNA itself, yet which can still be inherited.
To (ab)use your analogy, if the human body is a work of literature then proteins are the words, and genes are characters. The number of words hasn't changed, it's just that before we thought the language was like Chinese, where a single character mapped to a single word. Now we realize it's more like English, where the interactions between characters create different words. Oh and now we've discovered that there's also punctuation like apostrophes and hyphens which can significantly alter the meaning of the resulting words.
I could look down, even from a podium, and read a message while continuing whatever
Geeze, I'm used to presentations where the audience is bored and desperate for distractions, but even the presenter? Those must have been fun times.
I guess wha I was getting at was that if the guy was fired with cause and not illegally, then the ethics laws couldn't have been broken even if there was some benefit.
But that's obviously not true, because the ethics law does not specify that some other law needs to have been violated in order for the ethics law to have been violated. It is specifically designed to cover a situation where no other law was broken, yet the otherwise legal actions were taken for some personal gain. It would be rather pointless if you already had to have broken some other law with stiffer penalties to begin with.
The red light situation is inappropriate; the law already defines that as not being a traffic violation. Suppose instead you were a traffic commissioner, and you executed your perfectly legal authority to modify the traffic signal timings, and did it in a way that you could claim improved overall traffic flow, yet it also just happened to be in a way that specifically improved your commute to work and back. Further assume that there was a law which said such manipulations for personal gain are unethical. Certainly said law could have been violated in this case, especially if it appears as though the personal gain was more important than the practical justification. And in the specific case of Palin, this is what they believed happened. Yet at the same time, they didn't suggest any punishment, so I don't see how "We think you probably violated this ethics law, but oh well whatever" is making too much of it.
Personally, the way I see presidential politics anymore is that the president surrounds himself with what he thinks is experts and then basically parrots what they do and say. I think Palin would be a refreshing break from this where she wouldn't do what everyone tells her to do. I'm not sure that would set womens lib back or how she could,
Yeah, it'd sure be refreshing to have a leader who leads "from the gut" and doesn't listen to what all those people coming to them with "facts" and "educated opinions" say. The last thing we need is another Decider.
Anyway, that's not what makes me see her as a setback to women's rights. I personally consider reproductive rights to be a critical component of women's rights, and the gain that would be breaking the (2nd) highest glass ceiling (when it's already on the chopping block) would not result in a net win when the women who does it only does so by being ardently against that. Even if she would have no practical chance to change it. But that's just me!
That's not from any fancy suits, it's probably from steroids, the same reason athletic records of all kinds have been broken in recent years.
It's pretty much pointless to compare modern-day athletics to any historical records because of the extreme use of steroids now.
Yes, it's from fancy suits. They didn't just invent steroids for swimmers. They did just invent a new type of suit, and since it's invention records have been falling far faster than before. Before, some potentially-juiced-up swimmer would cream an old record. But in this past Olympics, we had races where half the field was well ahead of the world record that had been set only a year or two before. How often does the 4th place finisher beat the old world record? Nearly every short distance record was broken by someone wearing the new suit. Neither drugs nor swimming techniques got that much better in that time period. Suits did.
That said, nothing about the suits seems to have come from studying shark skin in particular. They're about reducing drag via shape and ultrasonically welded seams, and increasing buoyancy with water repellent fabric. Shark scales don't enter the picture.
The OS hasn't done anything resembling giving "the process all the memory and CPU time it needs" since the DOS days. Most modern processes do all sorts of API calls and the OS is always in the background doing things like managing memory and multithreading.
In a modern OS, when you have a single processor-bound and memory-intensive task, memory management and multithreading are designed to reduce to a case where that task gets all the cpu and memory it needs. DOS just wasn't capable of handling anything more complicated, it doesn't mean nothing resembling that happens any more. The other tasks the OS is handling and the scheduling of those tasks should take a minuscule amount of CPU time, thus allowing one task to get more than 99% of the processor time.
In the case of Windows it's also checking to see if you've got any unused icons on your desktop so it can offer to hide them for you, making sure your copy is legit, monitoring your sound card to make sure it's not playing anything illegal, etc.
I can certainly see how in principle it's possible to bog your system down so much that scheduling between all these tasks and their individual run-times becomes a problem for running anything that wants as much processor as possible, and given how little I've touched the Windows world in recent years I don't have the basis to disagree with your sentiment. Let's just say that if this is the case, then they well and truly Fucked Up(tm).
The ethics laws said you can't do something to benefit yourself or people you know. Now if that was the case behind the firings, that would mean that the laws were violated and therefor the firing would be illegal.
And the committee found that to be the case, that she had violated the ethics law. Yet, as you note, that was not the purview of the investigation. When they say the firing was not illegal, that means with regard to the laws of interest to the investigation. Illegal in one context, not illegal in another, it isn't a contradiction.
That could very well be. I know a lot of people who didn't like her for a number of reasons ranging from her being a woman to the way she talked and everything in between.
It could be that my opinion of her was not significantly affected by some local Alaskan politics, and rather it's between her XY chromosome or her colloquialisms? Thanks. Frankly, it's what she said that turned me off. Between her stated stances on the issues, and her flagrant ignorance, I couldn't care less whether she abused power in Alaska, I don't want her to have any power in this country. And while I'd love to have a woman president (or VP), I'd rather not have it one who is bound and determined to set women's rights back two steps for the one step forward that her election would be.
Yeah, how could something be both legal and unethical? It is a mystery.
To be more precise, though, obviously the result is that the firing was legal with regard to Palin's powers and any laws specifically covering termination of employees, yet was not in compliance with a different law regarding ethics. See, the ethics law is a law unto itself, and does not require that some other law be broken. Since the first set of laws were not broken, and the latter law were outside the purview of the investigation and probably toothless to boot, no punishment was advised. That does not mean no ethics abuse occurred.
Though honestly that little sideshow meant very little to me. The Bush-like "I'll technically follow the letter of whatever laws I can be held accountable for while abusing them" is so bog-standard I didn't even blink, and was the least of reasons why I did not find her fit to be President.
I really wouldn't expect significantly different scores for something like an office suite or media encoding. Once the OS gives the process all the memory and CPU time it needs, that's basically it. Maybe for games where there could be significant differences in the DirectX flow, but not in general.
But as the article notes, throughput isn't everything. The "up front" speed and how long it takes for a button push to result in action is equally important if not more so. The responsiveness of applications is something an OS can have a significant impact on, and is probably the most important thing for making the computer -feel- fast, and thus giving a better user experience. Hell I've long considered responsiveness to be justification enough for dual-core processors even when a user isn't multi-tasking or running multi-threading apps. So if it's a good enough reason to get a whole second core, it's a good enough reason for an OS upgrade.
It does sound kinda cagey that they're making this one of the main reasons to get 7, rather than improving Vista. But whatever, it's all academic to me.
Depends. Do you murder with a knife?
Naw, man. For one if the line's of any length worth cutting it's going to be quite tiring and time consuming and the whole point of the exercise is laziness and impatience. For two unless you're already Chuck Norris or Shaq a knife isn't exactly an overwhelming weapon, and if I get smacked down by some big line-dweller I'm going to jail for the stabbings, and they'll know I tried to cut in line. That's just humiliating.
No. I find a rocket launcher or an M60 works very well, or first the rocket launcher that can be tossed down quickly then followed up by the machine gun clears the line out with minimal fuss and muss. Well okay a lot of muss.
Murder everyone else in line.
You may get caught for the murders, but no one will ever know you cut in line.
Namely, you can't write an infinitely long code and there is only a finite number of possible inputs. These aspects seemed to me to be glossed over too much, especially the part about inputs which should lead to conditional halting.
The code doesn't need to be infinitely long. The Turing Machine only sports an infinite amount of memory. However a real machine can easily have enough memory to make the results the same, for all practical purposes. The real machine does not have infinite processing power, and you don't have an infinite lifespan to wait for the answer. Also, in practice, there is no known algorithm that can tell if even a moderate sized program with moderate numbers of inputs will halt, other than the 'algorithm' of running the program and seeing what happens.
Furthermore, what is to stop you from assessing your code as you are writing it? Why not just test every possible combination of inputs on the code as it is being generated (making the appropriate assumptions so that this does not actually check every combination of inputs)? Whilst not feasible in practice for all scenarios, shouldn't this be possible in theory. I also note that most of the time I spend coding is idle time for the processor.
A single function which takes a single uint64_t as an argument, and which does not have any convenient limitations on legal inputs, is already infeasible to test for every input. It doesn't matter how much idle cpu time you have.
I am not knocking the logic of the halting problem, just how it is introduced as being this general statement that construction of such a program is theoretically impossible. Any human can tell whether or not the hello world programs which came before will halt or not halt after a casual glance. Why cannot a machine employ a simple finite state approach to yield a conditional solution (sometimes the actual answer maybe "unknown" in practice due to random numbers or any code which does not yield the same answer every time for the same inputs) for a possible-to-write program for which all the code is visible?
Of course you can tell if a trivially simple program halts. With the right formal verification techniques, you can even tell whether a moderately complex program works correctly. For just about anything interesting, the behavior is complicated enough that it cannot be simplified and the only way to determine what the logic actually does for a given input is to run it with that input. Formal verification fails at the point where the expected behavior of the program can only be truly codified by the actual code itself. This is the nature of the halting problem.
It's like the saying "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." Well this is the opposite. In this case there should, theoretically, be a large difference between theory and practice. Yet, in practice, the halting problem applies to the majority of interesting programs despite their finite memory size.
They only use formal verification on small and isolated functional units. Using formal verification to ensure your floating point multiplier is correct is one thing, a possible and highly useful thing, using it to verify that your load/store scheduler is correct is another, extremely not-happening thing.
Formal verification is useful. But the vast, vast majority of AMD and Intel's verification is done via directed tests, directed tests, and then some more directed tests.
Same thing with time scales. Seems like no one cares too much to keep their millions, billions, and trillions straight. Come on, folks, it'll only take you 30 seconds of research to avoid making your ancient galactic empire a thousand times older than the universe itself.
Oh, ha ha. Don't think I can't tell what you're so subtly referring to. Look, if L.Ron said the universe is over four quadrillion years old, then that's how old it is! He doesn't need to do "research" of the findings of your pitiful thetan-festooned "scientists", he discovered the truth himself!
I honestly think they need to stop teaching the halting problem to freshmen CS majors. They're just too inexperienced to understand that theory and practice are two different things.. so this whole "limits of computation" thing stifles their enthusiasm.
I suppose. Personally I find it very useful in explaining why, generally speaking, the only way to really know how a program will respond to certain inputs is to test it. Theory and practice are not all that far apart. In theory, the halting problem only states that there is no algorithm that can answer the halting question for all programs and inputs, given infinite resources and potentially infinite running time. In practice, no such algorithm exists for most programs and inputs on real machines.
It may stifle their enthusiasm, but it will at least explain why, for example, the only real way to test the control logic for your microprocessor is by writing lots and lots of tests and checking their output. I know that when I entered school I was hoping there was a "magical" (as in unknown to me) method of writing correct programs other than my previous hack->run->debug cycle, but the reality is that formal verification is only practical for a small subset of problems.
My bet is someone trying to get a leg up in their Fantasy U.S. Elections league.
I've had it with these mother fucking ostriches on this motherfucking Popemobile!
In general usage, it's definition seems to be "a generic expletive stronger than damn but not as funny as mongolian cluster fuck".
I thought that sounded odd so I looked it up in my Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, and fuck me running, that's definition #3.
I tried the same thing, but the court dismissed my suit calling it a "pre-existing condition". WTF, I thought that was just something my health insurance did!
"Seriously, the guy is delusional. Insane. A nutter. Crazy. Over the rainbow. Bars in the window. Truly gone fishing. Out to lunch.
He's apeshit mad, barmy, batty, berserk, bonkers, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, daft, delirious, demented, deranged, dingy, dippy, erratic, flaky, flipped, flipped out, freaked out, fruity, idiotic, kooky, lunatic, mad, maniacal, mental, moonstruck, nutty as fruitcake, of unsound mind, out of his tree, psycho, he's round the bend, a schizo, a screwball, he has a screw loose, silly, touched, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged, unzipped, wacky."
"This... is an ex-sane person!"
Sorry, I couldn't help but read your whole post in the voice of John Cleese, and then I just had to finish it.
I've read your other posts. You think you're being subtle, but you're not. Sorry, but I'm in too good a mood celebrating yesterday's historic event to continue to have this discussion the way that you insist on framing it. You either appreciate this step towards the equality you claim MLK Day is all about to you, or you don't. Peace.
Would it become a racist holiday if whites became the minority? ... When does celebrating a figure based on race become taboo?
No, it would become no more racist than celebrating the birth of the slave-owning nation of the U.S.A. on July 4th is racist.
And we don't celebrate MLK "based on race", but based on his actions, and his actions to promote freedom will never, in retrospect, be changed.
If as you so obviously fear a black majority begins to oppress white people, and white people need a civil rights leader to protect them, then both that leader and MLK Jr. will properly be remembered as champions for freedom and equality. Please understand this.
I know this is flamebait, but why "God bless America" when the segregation was allowed until so recently?
God bless America, because it changed, and we've come so far so quickly!
That's what this is about, the promise of America, which is that it aims for the highest of ideals which have never been reality, yet the change towards those ideals is real.
You can compare to other nations who didn't have these problems. You can complain that the change did not happen miraculously overnight, but instead took place in small, slow, reasonable increments over several centuries. You can say that we merely elected a man, a man who cannot and will not change everything, and who by his mere election doesn't resolve all the racial problems in our country.
That's all true, yet doesn't alter the fact that change has happened, in the past, and today, and will certainly happen in the future.
God bless America.