Does anyone have ideas on how Ruby would fare vs. Python as a first language?
I've been meaning to learn both Python and Ruby, but haven't had
time for either yet. I've heard that Ruby is cleaner and more
elegantly object-oriented than Python, and so it seems like it might be better for
learning.
However, none of the Iraqui people... are being killed because of their political beliefs...
Correct. They are dying for one of a number reasons:
1. Directly fighting U.S. soldiers as part of the insurgency
2. Having the bad fortune of being near to or being mistaken for an
insurgent, or living in or near a house that gets bombed due to technical malfunction or bad intel.
3. Having the bad fortune to be ill in some manner that Iraq's current
health care system can't accomodate due to its continuing status as
having been decimated as a result of the U.S. invasion, and nowhere
near being restored yet.
So to sum it up: if you live under a totalitarian dictatorship, you can
guard against being killed by that government by keeping your mouth
shut. If you live in Iraq currently, you have no way to guard against
it, you must rely purely on your luck.
Also, I used to agree that a moon base wasn't that great of an idea - until I started reading about exactly why He3 fusion is so nice: you can contain it electrostatically, instead of magnetically like current fusion devices.
Huh?
There's no fundamental correspondence between the fuel used and the method used to contain it -- only that different fuels have different ignition temperatures. The magnetic-confinement methods currently being explored have difficulty getting up there in the temperature/pressure range, so they're restricted to the tritium-deuterim reaction, which is the easiest to get going (but spews lost of nasty high-energy neutrons).
But there's nothing about an alternative fuel that suddenly makes electrostatic a possibility. Electrostatic methods (e.g.
Hierch-Farnsworth
or
"focus fusion" are theoretically able to achieve much higher temperatures than magnetic confinement, and so can accomodate other fuels (as well as deuterium-tritium). I don't know the specifics of the He3 reaction, but from what I've seen it's the hydrogen-boron reaction that has the most promise, as it doesn't have any high-energy neutrons as products, and so is quite clean. And I think boron is a bit easier to come by than He3.:)
(A) no fixed copy of the altered version of the motion picture is created by such computer program or other technology;
Hmmm... and on the day this law goes into effect, the police show up at Disney's front door to confiscate all the editing equipment (original footge falling under the definition of "motion picture")...
This is the first time I've heard a really clear description of what the hell this Parliament stuff is about. I think I'm starting to get it.:) Thanks!
...the President gets the mystique of being a head of state and the power of head of government. In a parliamentary system, no one ever stops to say "he's the prime minister, so I'll stay behind him"...
Heh, so the U.S. President is more like the old King of England that we rebelled against than even the actual British Royalty is now!
And nowadays, it's including the role of Pope as well...
This is another example of the military trickle-down economy. Pump billions into defense, justify it with fear ("The enemy is everywhere"), then some of that cash will flow down to the national economy.
The interesting thing about military spending is this: since the final product
is destructive, rather than constructive, it's really an economic dead
end.
True, salaries paid to contractors, soldiers, etc. feed back into
the economy, but the actual activities performed do not. If a company
builds a truck for hauling cargo across the country, that product is
being leveraged to enable more economic activity. A truck that's used in
the invasion of Iraq is just burning fuel, from the U.S. economy's
perspective.
At best, money spend on the military prevents economic losses due to
attack from other countries. At worst, the destruction wrought -- even
just in training -- may well more than counteract the economic benefits of
the money the govt. pumps in. Of course, in actual war, those losses are
to *someone else*, so it's just the World that's losing in that case, not
the U.S.
China had been a lose collection of states controlled by war lords so the concept of a united country with rights over other parts is something post revolution and not relevant at all to Taiwan.
Uhhh... China has been under a centralized government for thousands of years; the "concept" of a united country is older there than virtually anywhere else.
China has every right to retake this "state in open rebellion". Much
like a Lincoln-led United States did with certain "states in open
rebellion" over a century ago.
Perhaps it would be even more instructive to look to China's own history. For
thousands of years, the Dynastic cycle has gone as follows: A new, strong
government comes to power after defeating the previous incumbents, due to
the ineptitude and corruption in the previous government, and also the
strategic genius and perhaps popular support of the leaders of the new one.
Then time passes, and the inheritors of that power become complacent and
lazy, until a new force comes along to repeat the cycle.
The revolution that threw out the last official Emperor was one such
event; the Communist revolution was the next.
Taiwan just hasn't caught up with the times yet.:)
Though seriously, it makes sense for Taiwan to eventually reunify with
China, for both their benefits. But it's also definitely in Taiwan's interest
to delay this, until China's government becomes sufficiently democratic,
or at least can be trusted not to dick around with them too much. Both such processes -- democratization and renunification -- must be
allowed to happen in their own good time. And it's best for the U.S. to stay out of it, except to use its influence on Taiwan to keep the situation calm.
If you're wondering about why, even though I maintain it's inevitable, China shouldn't be in any special hurry for democratization -- just look at the recent U.S. election results, and remember a few things about China: (1) They have 800 million "country folk", with little awareness of the outside world, who would easily be swayed by a charismatic leader, no matter the agenda; and (2) they have a demonstrated capability of succumbing to nationwide madness (i.e. the Cultural Revolution). The Communist Party aren't the only ones in China who are afraid to rock the boat.
a rich man's initial metric is 1000000. His metric improves by 1000, giving a new metric of 1001000 improvment =.1%
Now, 99 poor men have an initial metric of 1. each one gets a 100% improvment to get a metric of 2.
Ahh, that's where the disagreement comes in -- you're basically saying a rich man's quality of life is somehow directly proportional (or nearly so) to the money he has. Your opponent in this argument (and also I) would argue that it's much much more a matter of what you actually can do in your life, what your daily routines are like, etc.
The rich person's lifestyle is not significantly changed when he buys the 2nd jet -- he still goes to the big parties, he still has a house big enough to require hired help to maintain, and, yes, he may still put in 14-hour days at the office. The difference, as you mentioned, is that he can do an extra favor for a friend here and there.
The poor person in our example goes from a lifestyle of chronic job searches, wondering if he'll be able to give his family enough food or pay the rent this month, etc., to being far more certain about these things. He can enjoy some TV or conversation in the evening instead of pouring over the want ads. He can look at his children and not have to worry as much about whether he can provide for them. This stuff is HUGE.
So your math needs correcting. Lets use a scale of 0 to 100 points. This is an absolute scale, not percentages based on, essentially, wealth, like you used. The rich guy's lifestile goes from 98.0 to 98.1; the poor guy's goes from maybe 10 to 40. The equations are now:
Rich guy improves: (98.1+99*10) / (98.0+99*10) = 1.00009
i.e. an average improvement of.009% for society as a whole.
Poor guy improves: (98.0+99*40) / (98.0+99*10) = 3.73
You're making the assumption that Bush won't make a successful attempt at doing what Nixon was toying with, before his fall - namely, repealing the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.
I guessing there are enough Red states to take care of that pesky "ratification" process...
But of course, even if he didn't do that, there's always Jeb.
I put it squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic party that they lost. All that talk, all that supposed Rock the Vote and similar campaigns, ad campaigns, moveon.org...
Actually, the Democratic party really did get out the vote. The specific example I heard was in Ohio -- all the Democratic Party operatives met their targets in achieving voter turnout.
It's just that the Republicans did even better. Handing out leaflets in churches is apparently very effective. So is lying.
You picked a candidate without a backbone...
Kerry's biggest problem wasn't a lack of backbone -- remember this is the guy who voluntarily went into hot combat zones in Vietnam -- it was a lack of ability in generating sound bites, and a lack of ability in telling the really good lies. He was also missing an evil campaign-genius on the scale of Karl Rove.
But more fundamentally, I think the Democratic Party lost the Idiot Vote when it started to engage in more-responsible fiscal policy. The people who reflexively voted Democratic suddenly didn't see a big difference between the two parties in economic matters, so they fell back to Religion as a disambiguator.
Too bad we in DC don't get any representation in Congress though:(
Dude, you live in DC -- you could probably hang a sign out your apartment window and get your ideas better represented in congress than most of the rest of us!
Imagine it -- Tom Daschle is walking down the street, munching on a doughnut, when he looks up at your sign and has a revelation -- "Oh, the DMCA wasn't such a good idea! Better go fix that..."
I think the best thing is to actually keep Electoral College, but for
states to start allocating them proportionally to candidates based on the
# of votes each gets. And keep it in whole numbers -- none of this funny business of using fractional electors (which would be about the same as direct elections).
This is best because it still preserves the two things the E.C. is good
for: (1) preventing low-population states from becoming completely irrelevant,
and (2) maintaining the U.S. as a federation of states, rather than as
one big homogenous population.
The overrepresentation due to (1) isn't
really so bad -- if you take a look at an
Electoral-vote-based cartogram of the U.S., the minimum-size
states are still pretty small.
Reason (2) is still a good idea because having stronger States means
better local control -- and more power for you, as an individual, to have
an effect on many of the matters that affect your life directly. If we
just had direct national elections, the individuality of States become
less relevant to a degree. There could also be other consequences that
we haven't thought of -- I think this is one case where maintaining the
tradition is the safest thing.
So then that leaves just the one adjustment to make: the
proportional allocation. This would solve one of the big problems we've
seen in this election, that states that are comfortably predicted to go
for one candidate or another get neglected. And people also get discouraged from voting because they think it won't matter. The E.C. already fixes these problems for small states; those of us in the "solid" states need
something too!
Also, this would have a better chance of letting 3rd parties into the
process. Yes, a threshold would have to be passed, but in a big state
like California or Texas, there's a good chance that a third party could get several E.C. votes.
Of course, there's at least one thing in the way of making this actually
happen. Since it's up to each State to decide how to allocate its votes,
this can't be just done all at once at the federal level. But the
parties in control of states like California or Texas certainly aren't
going to make such a change by themselves -- why would they want to give
away almost half their votes, with no guarantee of reciprocation from the
other side?
So that's the solution: guarantee the reciprocation in the wording of
the law/referendum/whatever that changes the alloction to proportional. For
example, California could pass a referendum that includes a statement
like "This will not go into effect until the following states also
allocate their electors proportionally, or have a similar law that would
gurantee this once the new allocation has gone into effect in California:
Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee,... ".
Excellent example. I'll be including this in my repertoire of arguments in the future.
Here's another one: the existence of chimeras. In such a case, you have two fully-fertilized eggs, each with its own distincitve genome, sharing the womb. In "normal" circumstances, they would develop into fraternal twins. But once in a great while, for reasons still unknown (perhaps simple geometry?), very early in the process, the two bundles of cells get mixed up with one another, and wind up forming a single person. Different parts of his or her body have different genomes, as if they came from two different people, but it's still just one person.
So what has happened to the two original "unborn people"? Did they die? And where did the new "unborn person" really come from? And is he or she responsible for the deaths of the other two?
I disagree with you completely on your first two items, but others have already made my points, and quite well.
I do however agree very much with your last paragraph, and on this:
Marriage is not the business of the government; it is the business of citizens alone and as a law it is not only unnecessary, it is dangerous and alienating.
When I got married, somewhere along the line (maybe when I was signing the papers, or just at some random point), I had the sudden feeling of the State reaching in to my personal life. It didn't feel right. It was disconcerting, and yes, indeed, alienating.
... Maybe with a little more time and a little more pressure we could've gotten more help, a better plan, and a more united America behind the invasion. But because of the desert heat coming in, we had to go in in March.
If we had given it a little more time, the UN guys would've started reporting that they thought Iraq had no weapons at all, which means there would have been no invasion at all. At least, no invasion with any hint of legality.
Clearly, the rush was due to the fact that the weapons inspectors were starting to
see that there were no WMDs. The weather couldn't have been more than a minor factor. Note that we still had lots of troops in there fighting an insurgency, all through that summer and the next.
I certainly agree, though -- Bush is responsible for this mess. From the lack of planning for the occupation, to the pressuring of the CIA to only provide the "right" kind of WMD evidence, to the decision to go in. But for me, this is only the easiest-to-shout-about reason why this man does not deserve a second term.
This "research" into popular ignorance is what political science has sunk to. "Ignorant Bush supporters more ignorant than ignorant Kerry supporters." What does this contribute to political discussion? NOTHING....
Do you honestly believe that every single one of Kerry's supporters is voracious news hound and super-informed political junkie,...
No, what this report indicates is that fewer of the "super-informed political junkies" are going for Bush than for Kerry. That says something.
...it's quite likely the math will bear this out(but I'm too lazy to do this math).
No need; conceptually it's easy enough: each of the aCD moledules gets bent out of shape by the heat, thus exposing more sites for hydrogen bonds to form, allowing the solidification to occurr. Since these molecules are capable of snapping back into the previous shape when cooled, they are therefore storing energy. And so the solid is still in a higher-energy state than the liquid.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been meaning to learn both Python and Ruby, but haven't had time for either yet. I've heard that Ruby is cleaner and more elegantly object-oriented than Python, and so it seems like it might be better for learning.
Any opinions?
It's free (unless you decide to subscribe to help keep it alive), and you can shut off one of the fake emails if it starts sending you spam.
Correct. They are dying for one of a number reasons:
So to sum it up: if you live under a totalitarian dictatorship, you can guard against being killed by that government by keeping your mouth shut. If you live in Iraq currently, you have no way to guard against it, you must rely purely on your luck.So what's the difference again?
Huh?
There's no fundamental correspondence between the fuel used and the method used to contain it -- only that different fuels have different ignition temperatures. The magnetic-confinement methods currently being explored have difficulty getting up there in the temperature/pressure range, so they're restricted to the tritium-deuterim reaction, which is the easiest to get going (but spews lost of nasty high-energy neutrons).
But there's nothing about an alternative fuel that suddenly makes electrostatic a possibility. Electrostatic methods (e.g. Hierch-Farnsworth or "focus fusion" are theoretically able to achieve much higher temperatures than magnetic confinement, and so can accomodate other fuels (as well as deuterium-tritium). I don't know the specifics of the He3 reaction, but from what I've seen it's the hydrogen-boron reaction that has the most promise, as it doesn't have any high-energy neutrons as products, and so is quite clean. And I think boron is a bit easier to come by than He3. :)
- Doug
Hmmm... and on the day this law goes into effect, the police show up at Disney's front door to confiscate all the editing equipment (original footge falling under the definition of "motion picture")...
Ye shall reap what ye sow...
2. Buy 2 bean burritos.
3. Walk home.
4. Wait 8-16 hours.
5. Energy in the form of gas.
6. Sell gas to power company.
7. Taco Bell uses the energy to cook 2 bean burritos.
8. Go to step 2.
Ahh... the Circle of Life.
Heh, so the U.S. President is more like the old King of England that we rebelled against than even the actual British Royalty is now!
And nowadays, it's including the role of Pope as well...
The interesting thing about military spending is this: since the final product is destructive, rather than constructive, it's really an economic dead end.
True, salaries paid to contractors, soldiers, etc. feed back into the economy, but the actual activities performed do not. If a company builds a truck for hauling cargo across the country, that product is being leveraged to enable more economic activity. A truck that's used in the invasion of Iraq is just burning fuel, from the U.S. economy's perspective.
At best, money spend on the military prevents economic losses due to attack from other countries. At worst, the destruction wrought -- even just in training -- may well more than counteract the economic benefits of the money the govt. pumps in. Of course, in actual war, those losses are to *someone else*, so it's just the World that's losing in that case, not the U.S.
Uhhh... China has been under a centralized government for thousands of years; the "concept" of a united country is older there than virtually anywhere else.
Perhaps it would be even more instructive to look to China's own history. For thousands of years, the Dynastic cycle has gone as follows: A new, strong government comes to power after defeating the previous incumbents, due to the ineptitude and corruption in the previous government, and also the strategic genius and perhaps popular support of the leaders of the new one. Then time passes, and the inheritors of that power become complacent and lazy, until a new force comes along to repeat the cycle.
The revolution that threw out the last official Emperor was one such event; the Communist revolution was the next.
Taiwan just hasn't caught up with the times yet. :)
Though seriously, it makes sense for Taiwan to eventually reunify with China, for both their benefits. But it's also definitely in Taiwan's interest to delay this, until China's government becomes sufficiently democratic, or at least can be trusted not to dick around with them too much. Both such processes -- democratization and renunification -- must be allowed to happen in their own good time. And it's best for the U.S. to stay out of it, except to use its influence on Taiwan to keep the situation calm.
If you're wondering about why, even though I maintain it's inevitable, China shouldn't be in any special hurry for democratization -- just look at the recent U.S. election results, and remember a few things about China: (1) They have 800 million "country folk", with little awareness of the outside world, who would easily be swayed by a charismatic leader, no matter the agenda; and (2) they have a demonstrated capability of succumbing to nationwide madness (i.e. the Cultural Revolution). The Communist Party aren't the only ones in China who are afraid to rock the boat.
Now, 99 poor men have an initial metric of 1. each one gets a 100% improvment to get a metric of 2.
Ahh, that's where the disagreement comes in -- you're basically saying a rich man's quality of life is somehow directly proportional (or nearly so) to the money he has. Your opponent in this argument (and also I) would argue that it's much much more a matter of what you actually can do in your life, what your daily routines are like, etc.
The rich person's lifestyle is not significantly changed when he buys the 2nd jet -- he still goes to the big parties, he still has a house big enough to require hired help to maintain, and, yes, he may still put in 14-hour days at the office. The difference, as you mentioned, is that he can do an extra favor for a friend here and there.
The poor person in our example goes from a lifestyle of chronic job searches, wondering if he'll be able to give his family enough food or pay the rent this month, etc., to being far more certain about these things. He can enjoy some TV or conversation in the evening instead of pouring over the want ads. He can look at his children and not have to worry as much about whether he can provide for them. This stuff is HUGE.
So your math needs correcting. Lets use a scale of 0 to 100 points. This is an absolute scale, not percentages based on, essentially, wealth, like you used. The rich guy's lifestile goes from 98.0 to 98.1; the poor guy's goes from maybe 10 to 40. The equations are now:
i.e. an average improvement ofI guessing there are enough Red states to take care of that pesky "ratification" process...
But of course, even if he didn't do that, there's always Jeb.
That probably really is their plan, actually.
Actually, the Democratic party really did get out the vote. The specific example I heard was in Ohio -- all the Democratic Party operatives met their targets in achieving voter turnout.
It's just that the Republicans did even better. Handing out leaflets in churches is apparently very effective. So is lying.
You picked a candidate without a backbone...
Kerry's biggest problem wasn't a lack of backbone -- remember this is the guy who voluntarily went into hot combat zones in Vietnam -- it was a lack of ability in generating sound bites, and a lack of ability in telling the really good lies. He was also missing an evil campaign-genius on the scale of Karl Rove.
But more fundamentally, I think the Democratic Party lost the Idiot Vote when it started to engage in more-responsible fiscal policy. The people who reflexively voted Democratic suddenly didn't see a big difference between the two parties in economic matters, so they fell back to Religion as a disambiguator.
Me neither.
<sigh>
Oh, you un-silly person you. :)
p.s. I hope I can change my sig soon.
Dude, you live in DC -- you could probably hang a sign out your apartment window and get your ideas better represented in congress than most of the rest of us!
Imagine it -- Tom Daschle is walking down the street, munching on a doughnut, when he looks up at your sign and has a revelation -- "Oh, the DMCA wasn't such a good idea! Better go fix that..."
This is best because it still preserves the two things the E.C. is good for: (1) preventing low-population states from becoming completely irrelevant, and (2) maintaining the U.S. as a federation of states, rather than as one big homogenous population.
The overrepresentation due to (1) isn't really so bad -- if you take a look at an Electoral-vote-based cartogram of the U.S., the minimum-size states are still pretty small.
Reason (2) is still a good idea because having stronger States means better local control -- and more power for you, as an individual, to have an effect on many of the matters that affect your life directly. If we just had direct national elections, the individuality of States become less relevant to a degree. There could also be other consequences that we haven't thought of -- I think this is one case where maintaining the tradition is the safest thing.
So then that leaves just the one adjustment to make: the proportional allocation. This would solve one of the big problems we've seen in this election, that states that are comfortably predicted to go for one candidate or another get neglected. And people also get discouraged from voting because they think it won't matter. The E.C. already fixes these problems for small states; those of us in the "solid" states need something too!
Also, this would have a better chance of letting 3rd parties into the process. Yes, a threshold would have to be passed, but in a big state like California or Texas, there's a good chance that a third party could get several E.C. votes.
Of course, there's at least one thing in the way of making this actually happen. Since it's up to each State to decide how to allocate its votes, this can't be just done all at once at the federal level. But the parties in control of states like California or Texas certainly aren't going to make such a change by themselves -- why would they want to give away almost half their votes, with no guarantee of reciprocation from the other side?
So that's the solution: guarantee the reciprocation in the wording of the law/referendum/whatever that changes the alloction to proportional. For example, California could pass a referendum that includes a statement like "This will not go into effect until the following states also allocate their electors proportionally, or have a similar law that would gurantee this once the new allocation has gone into effect in California: Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, ... ".
Excellent example. I'll be including this in my repertoire of arguments in the future.
Here's another one: the existence of chimeras. In such a case, you have two fully-fertilized eggs, each with its own distincitve genome, sharing the womb. In "normal" circumstances, they would develop into fraternal twins. But once in a great while, for reasons still unknown (perhaps simple geometry?), very early in the process, the two bundles of cells get mixed up with one another, and wind up forming a single person. Different parts of his or her body have different genomes, as if they came from two different people, but it's still just one person.
So what has happened to the two original "unborn people"? Did they die? And where did the new "unborn person" really come from? And is he or she responsible for the deaths of the other two?
I do however agree very much with your last paragraph, and on this:
Marriage is not the business of the government; it is the business of citizens alone and as a law it is not only unnecessary, it is dangerous and alienating.
When I got married, somewhere along the line (maybe when I was signing the papers, or just at some random point), I had the sudden feeling of the State reaching in to my personal life. It didn't feel right. It was disconcerting, and yes, indeed, alienating.
No no, the web site is perfectly on-message.
It's the facts that are off-message. Best hide them.
You're both missing the Phillipines and Russia:
I'd tend to doubt that South Korea likes Bush -- he's made the N. Korea problem much worse, through a combination of neglect and arrogant naivete.If we had given it a little more time, the UN guys would've started reporting that they thought Iraq had no weapons at all, which means there would have been no invasion at all. At least, no invasion with any hint of legality.
Clearly, the rush was due to the fact that the weapons inspectors were starting to see that there were no WMDs. The weather couldn't have been more than a minor factor. Note that we still had lots of troops in there fighting an insurgency, all through that summer and the next.
I certainly agree, though -- Bush is responsible for this mess. From the lack of planning for the occupation, to the pressuring of the CIA to only provide the "right" kind of WMD evidence, to the decision to go in. But for me, this is only the easiest-to-shout-about reason why this man does not deserve a second term.
Do you honestly believe that every single one of Kerry's supporters is voracious news hound and super-informed political junkie, ...
No, what this report indicates is that fewer of the "super-informed political junkies" are going for Bush than for Kerry. That says something.
No need; conceptually it's easy enough: each of the aCD moledules gets bent out of shape by the heat, thus exposing more sites for hydrogen bonds to form, allowing the solidification to occurr. Since these molecules are capable of snapping back into the previous shape when cooled, they are therefore storing energy. And so the solid is still in a higher-energy state than the liquid.
That argument might hold some water if Bush's "hard line" wasn't pointing in the exact directon that is most beneficial for Al Qaeda:
All they had to do was prick us with a needle (in the form of a few 747's); Bush took care of the rest.Hence my sig: