Hopefully, the bacteria won't be deemed a biological attack by the technologically advanced (yet extremely vengeful) inhabitants of whatever planet the rocket stage hits.
I wonder how much C4 could be stuffed inside a pigeon and it still remain capable of flight. Even if only a little, 50 pigeons would make a nice cluster bomb.
Actually, a nautical mile is 6076.1155 feet. This is very convenient, because it is about a minute of arc along a meridian of the Earth. Thus converting from nautical miles to a change of latitude on a nautical chart is easy and natural. Ok, but if you're going to throw in four decimal places, remember that it is an arc minute of latitude at the equator. It will be less accurate at higher latitudes since the earth isn't quite spherical.
Although I agree with you in essence, I find it odd to call someone "lazy" for doing more work...
Ok, I can see how that might seem odd. Laziness stands in contrast to motivation. And many programmers will be much more motivated to write their own code than to read someone else's, even if it takes longer for them to write it from scratch.
The real problem here comes from how much time it takes to really understand someone else's non-trivial code. A good coder, regardless of some mythical level of "laziness", needs to ask whether it will take longer to verify someone else's code, or to roll one from scratch.
I agree. That is the question that should be asked. The problem is that the answer tends to be easily biased toward rolling it from scratch.
Take something like a DCT. You can do the core calculations a million different ways, all with their own caveats and performance implications. You can do the overall whole as a set of functions, or recursively, or as a single function with a set of fairly unintelligible loops (or even as a wrapper to a known-good FFT). If the author of some code I wanted to use took a fairly novel approach to the problem, it might take me more time just to figure out how it works in general (nevermind actually verifying that it works correctly) than to write my own version.
Out of 10 hits on "DCT algorithm", you could probably eliminate the 5 horribly documented ones in about 2 minutes. Of the remaining 5, it probably wouldn't take much more than about 10 minutes to determine which ones aren't the algorithm you want and to estimate how long it would take to read/verify the one that looks like the best match.
Obviously, the utility of reusing code depends on how non-trivial it is to both read and write. Although, for some large code bases, you may be better of just running unit tests against the existing code that trying to dissect it first.
Oh, and wrt verifying the existing code - you would need to verify your own code too, right?
So what if a particular solution has been implemented before? Continuously writing code should keep people on their feet, and ready for when they have to respond to a unique situation, right?
Except that most people have jobs with deadlines. Besides, there's always more code to write. Even if I pull available code out of a repository, I'll still be continuously writing code. Furthermore, there's value in seeing how other people implement a solution because it is probably not exactly the way you would have implemented it and you just might learn something from their solution.
I'm not a coder, but my impression of the vast majority of coders is that they reinvent the wheel because they believe that everyone screwed up their wheel implementation and if no one is going to do it right, they should.
I've seen that happen numerous times but it is often just an excuse to cover the fact that they are too lazy to read and comprehend someone else's code.
The distinction between simulation and game is not as simple as you suggest. Just because Need for Speed allows cars to drive faster than real cars and doesn't use "real world physics" doesn't mean it is not a simulation. Does TOCA Touring car model the real world physics of compressible air flow around vehicles? Does it even approximate it using computation fluid dynamics? Probably not. Even if it does, it does so to a limited fidelity (i.e., less than "real world").
In reality, hardly any simulations use "real world physics" - they are almost all approximations. Many simulations attempt to model some aspects of the physical world (to varying levels of fidelity) and not others. In the U.S. Department of Defense, there is and entire process of Verification, Validation, & Accreditation (VV&A) that is used to assess whether a particular simulation 1) models what it claims, 2) models phenomena with sufficient accuracy for a type of problem, and 3) is suitable for a particular application. This process is used because it is insufficient to simply declare that something is or is not a simulation.
It sounds like they are talking about zero-point energy, the energy in the quantum vacuum. This has been known about by theoretical physicists for some time, and has even made it into popular science fiction. There is some debate, I believe, as to whether it is possible to extract this energy in a usable form, but its existence is hardly new.
Debate? What debate? Syndrome clearly demonstrated the practical application of zero-point energy while thrashing Mr. Incredible.
For that matter, most students in the US system are bad students. The way many lectures SHOULD work (especially in the sciences) is, you read the relevant section of the text before class, and then keep the text open while the teacher lectures and fills in the gaps in your understanding. In my experience TAing in the US, very few students have the discipline to actually prepare for lecture
I'm not a fan of lectures that methodically follow textbooks. The best teacher I had during college did two things that made all the difference:
He gave a short & easy quiz at the beginning of the class, based on the required teaching for that lecture. This encouraged everyone to actually do the reading.
He handed out copies of the notes for the entire lecture before the lecture started. This enabled all the students to focus on what was being taught rather than frantically transcribing lecture notes. And there was more than enough time to annotate HIS notes and still focus on the concepts being presented.
What you are describing applies to aquisitions under the DFAR (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation). However, the military can also make aquisitions through the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation), which uses the "source of funds" test in a different way. Under the FAR, the government has unlimited rights to software (including source code) that is developed with mixed funds. So under the FAR, if your private company funded 70% of a software program and the government funded remaining 30%, the government still gets unlimited rights to the whole thing.
With both the FAR and the DFAR, there are subtleties regarding what constitutes a "minor modification", how you can segregate your code down to the "smallest practicable level", etc. If you ever develop software that may at some time in the future be modified with government funding, software rights issues should be considered when deciding how to segregate various components of the software. You may also want to consider being able to trace individual software mods to contracts (e.g., through tags in CVS commit messages).
Really, the whole 'artificial' thing is a red herring. It doesn't matter what the nanobot is made of. Organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, etc. Frankly, if you want to engineer some sort of nasty self-replicating human-killing thing, you're probably better off starting with something that already self-replicates and already interacts with biological reaction pathways. Just because you make the jump to silicon doesn't mean you suddenly get to break all the limits that are in place on the performance of biological stuff. You're likely to get a whole new set of limits right on top of that.
I don't think it has anything to do with breaking limits. I think having access to the NanoBot Developers Kit (NBDK) with a well-documented API will make it much easier to craft bot behavior than trying trying to mutate organic viruses to produce a desired behavior.
I take your point but I don't think your examples have the same magnitude of consequences as an equivalent nano/bio-tech disaster. A reactor meltdown is a disaster but it is regional. Some rogue killer robots don't worry me too much (yes, I've seen I, Robot, Terminator 1,2,3, etc.). When you are talking about nanobots that are replicating, evolving, and potentially viral (moving from human to human), the potential for a global pandemic is what concerns me. Instead of a computer virus spreading from computer to computer, you have a nanovirus spreading from person to person. Of course, if a computer virus worries me enough, I can always turn my computer off until an antivirus update is available.
Interesting. I wish I had mod points for you. The only part that I might mildly disagree with is
The heating of the water in the lower half of the moka builds up the pressure, until the steam is forced through the coffee,"...
The first thing that gets pushed up through the tube is the water (little to no steam). It is only after almost all the water is gone that the steam is forced through and that can be minimized by removing the pot from the stove early enough. But the water is very close to boiling temperature which, as you mention, is hotter than cafe machines.
Is Google liable for harvesting and publishing sensitive information? If neighbour's window wasn't closed, it doens't mean you can take his naked photo and put it on the website?
If a google search finds it then google is not publishing it; rather, google is simply providing a link to something that is already published. IANAL but, cacheing aside, all they are doing is providing a link to something that is already publicly accessible, so I don't see how they could be liable. The situation may be more complicated if the data were illegally published, later pulled from the web site, but remain in google's cache.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, you're implying that python is a scripting language whereas java is an OO development language. Why consider python [just] a scripting language instead of an OO development language? Are there OO features of java that are missing in python?
As of the last time I used java (a few years ago), python supported all the OO features that java did, plus others that it did not, such as true multiple inheritance, operator overloading, etc. The fact that python is convenient for scripting shouldn't discredit its utility for OO developement or relegate it to the status of a mere scripting language.
The promise of "write-once-run-anywhere" was pretty much dead. Not that I was even going for portability - I just wanted it to run on Linux. And I wanted to do it without having to download Beans, Java DynamicManagement, Java Metadata, ad nauseum.
Didn't they change it to "write-once-debug-everywhere"?
I simply offer it as a possibility. I'm neither claiming that I believe it to be true, nor that if it were true, it could be proven.
I agree that biological and algorithmic evolution are very different; however, I disagree with respect to goals. In biological evolution, even if the environment changes, the "goal" remains the same: reproduce. Changes in the environment may affect the fitness of particular population members, but the goal of reproducing to propagate the species remains the same.
Also, genetic algorithms do not require static environments. It's just a matter of how you structure the algorithm. Try a google search with the terms "genetic algorithm" and "nonstationary environment".
I'm in total agreement that simulating our molecular biology is a difficult task. Mapping particular alleles to physical characteristics and modeling how those characteristics determine our fitness in a dynamic environment is damn near impossible. Fortunately, the hyperintelligent gelatinous aliens that encoded our DNA are far more advanced than us.
Rather than having an encoded message, our DNA may be part of an attempt to solve a problem or answer a question. Genetic algorithms are currently used to solve complex problems by evolving random solutions in a way that mimics natural selection. While the problem solving technique is named for its similarity to the evolution of biological species, it's possible that the converse could also occur: a biological species is created for the purpose of carrying out an evolutionary problem solving task.
Once we fully understand our DNA and have sufficient computing resources, we might be able to simulate our own evolution to answer the question without having to wait for the solution to evolve biologically. Considering the amount of time it takes to evolve biologically, I hope it turns out to be true that there's no such thing as a dumb question!
Actually, staring into a dark corner doesn't make you eyes adjust. BEING in the dark corner makes your eyes adjust.
As far as stupid story driven programming goes: what do you expect? It's a story driven game. I suppose you could mod it to make it more realistic. Add lights, IR, & EO to every weapon. Then get rid of all those zombies and monsters. That's just rediculous. Now that I think about it, what do we need marines for anyway? The sentries should be more than enough. Plus, you should expect an automated security system that would easily seal off problem areas (you'd need that capability for pressure leaks anyway).
Once all those major issues are fixed, the only think left to figure out is why anyone would actually want to buy the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully, the bacteria won't be deemed a biological attack by the technologically advanced (yet extremely vengeful) inhabitants of whatever planet the rocket stage hits.
I wonder how much C4 could be stuffed inside a pigeon and it still remain capable of flight. Even if only a little, 50 pigeons would make a nice cluster bomb.
Ok, I can see how that might seem odd. Laziness stands in contrast to motivation. And many programmers will be much more motivated to write their own code than to read someone else's, even if it takes longer for them to write it from scratch.
The real problem here comes from how much time it takes to really understand someone else's non-trivial code. A good coder, regardless of some mythical level of "laziness", needs to ask whether it will take longer to verify someone else's code, or to roll one from scratch.I agree. That is the question that should be asked. The problem is that the answer tends to be easily biased toward rolling it from scratch.
Take something like a DCT. You can do the core calculations a million different ways, all with their own caveats and performance implications. You can do the overall whole as a set of functions, or recursively, or as a single function with a set of fairly unintelligible loops (or even as a wrapper to a known-good FFT). If the author of some code I wanted to use took a fairly novel approach to the problem, it might take me more time just to figure out how it works in general (nevermind actually verifying that it works correctly) than to write my own version.Out of 10 hits on "DCT algorithm", you could probably eliminate the 5 horribly documented ones in about 2 minutes. Of the remaining 5, it probably wouldn't take much more than about 10 minutes to determine which ones aren't the algorithm you want and to estimate how long it would take to read/verify the one that looks like the best match.
Obviously, the utility of reusing code depends on how non-trivial it is to both read and write. Although, for some large code bases, you may be better of just running unit tests against the existing code that trying to dissect it first.
Oh, and wrt verifying the existing code - you would need to verify your own code too, right?
Except that most people have jobs with deadlines. Besides, there's always more code to write. Even if I pull available code out of a repository, I'll still be continuously writing code. Furthermore, there's value in seeing how other people implement a solution because it is probably not exactly the way you would have implemented it and you just might learn something from their solution.
I've seen that happen numerous times but it is often just an excuse to cover the fact that they are too lazy to read and comprehend someone else's code.
I'm not sure why we need the anti-IUD technology. Are we trying to impregnate women with some kind of sperm cannon mounted on the mini-tank?
The distinction between simulation and game is not as simple as you suggest. Just because Need for Speed allows cars to drive faster than real cars and doesn't use "real world physics" doesn't mean it is not a simulation. Does TOCA Touring car model the real world physics of compressible air flow around vehicles? Does it even approximate it using computation fluid dynamics? Probably not. Even if it does, it does so to a limited fidelity (i.e., less than "real world").
In reality, hardly any simulations use "real world physics" - they are almost all approximations. Many simulations attempt to model some aspects of the physical world (to varying levels of fidelity) and not others. In the U.S. Department of Defense, there is and entire process of Verification, Validation, & Accreditation (VV&A) that is used to assess whether a particular simulation 1) models what it claims, 2) models phenomena with sufficient accuracy for a type of problem, and 3) is suitable for a particular application. This process is used because it is insufficient to simply declare that something is or is not a simulation.
Maybe one of them was a typo for cosmogonist.
Debate? What debate? Syndrome clearly demonstrated the practical application of zero-point energy while thrashing Mr. Incredible.
What you are describing applies to aquisitions under the DFAR (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation). However, the military can also make aquisitions through the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation), which uses the "source of funds" test in a different way. Under the FAR, the government has unlimited rights to software (including source code) that is developed with mixed funds. So under the FAR, if your private company funded 70% of a software program and the government funded remaining 30%, the government still gets unlimited rights to the whole thing.
With both the FAR and the DFAR, there are subtleties regarding what constitutes a "minor modification", how you can segregate your code down to the "smallest practicable level", etc. If you ever develop software that may at some time in the future be modified with government funding, software rights issues should be considered when deciding how to segregate various components of the software. You may also want to consider being able to trace individual software mods to contracts (e.g., through tags in CVS commit messages).
I don't think it has anything to do with breaking limits. I think having access to the NanoBot Developers Kit (NBDK) with a well-documented API will make it much easier to craft bot behavior than trying trying to mutate organic viruses to produce a desired behavior.
I take your point but I don't think your examples have the same magnitude of consequences as an equivalent nano/bio-tech disaster. A reactor meltdown is a disaster but it is regional. Some rogue killer robots don't worry me too much (yes, I've seen I, Robot, Terminator 1,2,3, etc.). When you are talking about nanobots that are replicating, evolving, and potentially viral (moving from human to human), the potential for a global pandemic is what concerns me. Instead of a computer virus spreading from computer to computer, you have a nanovirus spreading from person to person. Of course, if a computer virus worries me enough, I can always turn my computer off until an antivirus update is available.
Interesting. I wish I had mod points for you. The only part that I might mildly disagree with is
The heating of the water in the lower half of the moka builds up the pressure, until the steam is forced through the coffee,"...
The first thing that gets pushed up through the tube is the water (little to no steam). It is only after almost all the water is gone that the steam is forced through and that can be minimized by removing the pot from the stove early enough. But the water is very close to boiling temperature which, as you mention, is hotter than cafe machines.
Reminds me of a Vonnegut novel (Breakfast of Champions, I think) that talks about a race of Martians that communicate by farting and tap dancing.
It does not. Worse though (for me) is that it does not index/search Mozilla mail folders.
On a related note: Sales of slide rules have seen a dramatic decrease over the last 40 years.
Is Google liable for harvesting and publishing sensitive information? If neighbour's window wasn't closed, it doens't mean you can take his naked photo and put it on the website?
If a google search finds it then google is not publishing it; rather, google is simply providing a link to something that is already published. IANAL but, cacheing aside, all they are doing is providing a link to something that is already publicly accessible, so I don't see how they could be liable. The situation may be more complicated if the data were illegally published, later pulled from the web site, but remain in google's cache.I think there was a similar /. article a while back. Do a google search for "googledorks" to find out what additional kinds of data are accessible.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, you're implying that python is a scripting language whereas java is an OO development language. Why consider python [just] a scripting language instead of an OO development language? Are there OO features of java that are missing in python?
As of the last time I used java (a few years ago), python supported all the OO features that java did, plus others that it did not, such as true multiple inheritance, operator overloading, etc. The fact that python is convenient for scripting shouldn't discredit its utility for OO developement or relegate it to the status of a mere scripting language.
Didn't they change it to "write-once-debug-everywhere"?
I simply offer it as a possibility. I'm neither claiming that I believe it to be true, nor that if it were true, it could be proven.
I agree that biological and algorithmic evolution are very different; however, I disagree with respect to goals. In biological evolution, even if the environment changes, the "goal" remains the same: reproduce. Changes in the environment may affect the fitness of particular population members, but the goal of reproducing to propagate the species remains the same.
Also, genetic algorithms do not require static environments. It's just a matter of how you structure the algorithm. Try a google search with the terms "genetic algorithm" and "nonstationary environment".
I'm in total agreement that simulating our molecular biology is a difficult task. Mapping particular alleles to physical characteristics and modeling how those characteristics determine our fitness in a dynamic environment is damn near impossible. Fortunately, the hyperintelligent gelatinous aliens that encoded our DNA are far more advanced than us.
Rather than having an encoded message, our DNA may be part of an attempt to solve a problem or answer a question. Genetic algorithms are currently used to solve complex problems by evolving random solutions in a way that mimics natural selection. While the problem solving technique is named for its similarity to the evolution of biological species, it's possible that the converse could also occur: a biological species is created for the purpose of carrying out an evolutionary problem solving task.
Once we fully understand our DNA and have sufficient computing resources, we might be able to simulate our own evolution to answer the question without having to wait for the solution to evolve biologically. Considering the amount of time it takes to evolve biologically, I hope it turns out to be true that there's no such thing as a dumb question!
Actually, staring into a dark corner doesn't make you eyes adjust. BEING in the dark corner makes your eyes adjust.
As far as stupid story driven programming goes: what do you expect? It's a story driven game. I suppose you could mod it to make it more realistic. Add lights, IR, & EO to every weapon. Then get rid of all those zombies and monsters. That's just rediculous. Now that I think about it, what do we need marines for anyway? The sentries should be more than enough. Plus, you should expect an automated security system that would easily seal off problem areas (you'd need that capability for pressure leaks anyway).
Once all those major issues are fixed, the only think left to figure out is why anyone would actually want to buy the game.