What a washy interpretation. Clearly the liberal interpretation their because some people can't realize their isn't a god, even when he specifically doesn't like you.
There is a liberal washy interpretation, but this isn't it. There are some liberal Christians who seem to think that the Bible has something nice to say about homosexuality, which it doesn't.
There are some pretty historically-sound reasons for thinking that this is indeed what the two passages in Leviticus are about, not the least of which is that the point is made explicitly that these laws are condemning what those horrible surrounding nations do. Furthermore, "no guys getting it on with guys" is mentioned in the same breath as "don't sacrifice your children to Molech" (as if this was a serious problem amongst the Hebrews at the time). That is the context in which it was said.
Having said that, the usual liberal interpretation is that the people who wrote the Bible just didn't understand sexual orientation. Hell, nobody understood it until about a century ago. So applying even more historical context, the Bible actually has nothing to say about homosexuality, merely certain sexual activities.
Applying yet more context, you can even see why it may have made sense. Capital punishment made sense in an era before modern prisons. Slavery even made a certain amount of sense in the ancient world when you consider that it was an alternative to killing all of the able-bodied men in the town that you captured. You could argue that in an era before modern hygiene, prohibiting certain sexual practices made sense, too.
Having said all that, this isn't really a question of interpretation. It's a question of application. When the US Constitution says "we the people", it meant non-slave male landowners. Today, it's rightly applied to everyone, even though that's not what it meant in context.
To be fair, it is true that it is a "general perception", for a sufficiently broad definition of "general". The Australian is a Murdoch paper, which therefore has an interest in enforcing the perception that anyone not toeing the Murdoch line is in bed with the other side.
So on those small artificial benchmarks, I did take a look to see how Haskell/GHC fared compared with GCC and G++. I still don't see anywhere near a 90% performance hit reported anywhere there.
The kicker is that I'll bet that Ruby program would have still taken hours had it been written in hand-tuned C.
By the way, this raises another point which is that there's a dual fallacy that that old-school hackers sometimes indulge in. If your program is CPU bound and you need higher performance, the best thing you can do is write well-insulated modular code with carefully designed internal APIs from the beginning. That way, when you find the bottleneck, you can swap out the offending data structures or algorithms and swap in better ones, and everything else should just work.
Of course it does. Every programming task has to care about performance. What's changed is that the most important type of "performance" is different for every task. Most of us aren't doing large-scale numeric simulations.
If you're programming desktop GUI applications, responsiveness is usually more important than throughput. If you're programming mobile devices, battery efficiency is more important than any other consideration.
I think it was P.J. Plauger who pointed out that if the program to process the monthly payroll takes three months to run, it's useless.
What I think you meant to say is that for most programs, whether or not they meet their performance criteria is not limited by CPU cycles. That's certainly true. Most programming tasks can afford to spend some cycles if in return for correctness, programmer productivity or ease of maintenance.
I don't know where you got the 90% figure from. Nowhere, I suspect. The performance hit depends crucially on what you're doing. Most programs that you will write in your career are not CPU-bound.
You also have to weigh that against the fact that a program written in a higher-level language will often have subtly different behaviour. For example, the type system of a Haskell-like language may not let you avoid checking the error condition of some I/O operation where C would. So the C program might be faster than the high-level program, but it may also contain a bug which the high-level program doesn't.
The central point is correct, though. Using high-level languages is a tradeoff, and it's part of the job of the engineer to evaluate the tradeoff rationally.
If you read the story, you'll note that the COBOL programs in question have been around for three decades or so. Most programs which have been continuously used for 30 years tend to be pretty solid regardless of the language.
For city driving, you'd presumably get the usual benefits such as no need for idling at stop lights/signs, regenerative braking and so on. Those efficiencies over conventional fossil fuel vehicles shouldn't be ignored.
I'm shocked that nobody else queried what reducing the operating temperature by a factor of 10 means. Let's say the operating temperature was 470 Kelvin. The new operating temperature would, therefore, be 47K, or -226C. Reduce it by another factor of 2 or so and you could run it on liquid hydrogen.
The length of a genome is fixed, but the amount of data coming off a sequencer isn't. In the 80s, Sanger sequencing technology would produce 1000 bases or so slowly with essentially no errors very slowly and expensively. Modern machines give you 100 bases with some errors extremely quickly and cheaply. We've traded accuracy for volume and price. We now sample genomes with hundreds of times coverage knowing that there will be a lot of errors, and volume and read length is improving faster than accuracy.
Having said that, while the length of a human genome is fixed, researchers would also like to assemble larger ones with less favourable repeat structures, such as plants. And then there's RNA transcripts, which add yet another layer of complexity (e.g. multiple isoforms, which are sometimes indistinguishable from read errors).
One of the known mechanisms by which pathogenic bacteria get resistance to antibiotics is by horizontal gene transfer from our own gut flora. Gut flora becomes resistant to antibiotics because the levels in our gastrointestinal tract is lower than in our bloodstream. Viruses and bacteriophages (which infect bacteria) then transfer plasmids between different species.
Yes, the press would do anything that will sell papers. On the other hand, the government would do anything that will get votes or cover their rears. One of the hardest lessons of the post-9/11 era, for those who hadn't learned it earlier, is that there is no such thing as "the good guys".
The legal case is not clear at all. FWIW, it wasn't clear that Daniel Ellsberg committed treason either, though we'll never know because his prosecution was so botched that it was never decided.
In fact, I strongly suspect that this will result in new case law on precisely what constitutes "treason".
Even if we were to assume your statements were 100% accurate, it STILL doesnt answer the question, "why release the other 99,000 documents?"
For the same reason why the other 4000 pages of the Pentagon Papers were released, I would imagine.
However, I think that you might be asking this question about the wrong person. A leaker/whistleblower is often not the best person to sift through the material that they have at their disposal and decide what is in the public interest to release and what isn't. That's the job of journalists.
For what it's worth, Manning isn't accused of releasing anything to the general public. He's accused of releasing material to a press agency (in this case Wikileaks). You should be asking the press why the other documents were released, not Manning (even assuming it was him who did it).
As that is neither a violation of oaths, nor military code, nor US law, I think the appropriate response is to determine who is at fault and hold them accountable through the normal democratic process.
The "normal democratic process", in this case, seems to be that nobody is condemned or punished for exercising an power which exceeds constitutional authority if the other side of politics might like to use that power themselves.
While all of the options for institutional recourse haven't yet been exhausted in this case, there are plenty of recent examples where they have been exhausted and essentially nobody was held accountable. Nobody, for example, will do hard time for the torture of prisoners. My hopes aren't high.
If you feel like corporations have power of you, just think of the mass exodus of customers from MySpace and NetFlix, once they stopped providing services in a way that customers liked.
In the case of internet access (which is, after all, what TFA is about), it is a basic utility. You can't really live in the modern world without it, and many areas have a monopoly (or effective cartel) on who provides that utility, and the economics are such that it is uneconomical for anyone else to enter that market.
In the case of myspace and Netflix, there was somewhere for disgruntled customers to go. Not everyone has that option by virtue of what postcode they happen to be in.
You can always move. But then, you can always move countries if you don't like your government.
This would explain the massive proliferation of companies whose sole business is murdering innocent civilians, right?
Massive proliferation? Well, it depends what you think of as "massive". Sole business? Of course not; there's no money in that.
Apart from those quibbles, that's an apt description of more than a few military contractors, natural resource corporations, and other industrial polluters. Admittedly, most of the deaths aren't happening in the US. And it's technically negligent homicide rather than murder, or at least it would be if multinational corporations didn't have clever legal (and not-exactly-legal) tricks to avoid charges in countries with less-finely-developed legal systems.
You're right that Ron Paul doesn't think it should be important (he does note in the video that asking him about evolution is an inappropriate question), but he also thinks that matters like educational standards should be more decentralised. We know what can all-too-often happen to science education when the curriculum is put in the hands of local politicians in certain parts of the USA. True, the fix is never more than a court case away, but those are time-consuming and expensive.
BTW, I never said I was an atheist. Or an American, for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the vast majority of everyone are nutters. Sturgeon's Revelation applies.
What a washy interpretation. Clearly the liberal interpretation their because some people can't realize their isn't a god, even when he specifically doesn't like you.
There is a liberal washy interpretation, but this isn't it. There are some liberal Christians who seem to think that the Bible has something nice to say about homosexuality, which it doesn't.
There are some pretty historically-sound reasons for thinking that this is indeed what the two passages in Leviticus are about, not the least of which is that the point is made explicitly that these laws are condemning what those horrible surrounding nations do. Furthermore, "no guys getting it on with guys" is mentioned in the same breath as "don't sacrifice your children to Molech" (as if this was a serious problem amongst the Hebrews at the time). That is the context in which it was said.
Having said that, the usual liberal interpretation is that the people who wrote the Bible just didn't understand sexual orientation. Hell, nobody understood it until about a century ago. So applying even more historical context, the Bible actually has nothing to say about homosexuality, merely certain sexual activities.
Applying yet more context, you can even see why it may have made sense. Capital punishment made sense in an era before modern prisons. Slavery even made a certain amount of sense in the ancient world when you consider that it was an alternative to killing all of the able-bodied men in the town that you captured. You could argue that in an era before modern hygiene, prohibiting certain sexual practices made sense, too.
Having said all that, this isn't really a question of interpretation. It's a question of application. When the US Constitution says "we the people", it meant non-slave male landowners. Today, it's rightly applied to everyone, even though that's not what it meant in context.
To be fair, it is true that it is a "general perception", for a sufficiently broad definition of "general". The Australian is a Murdoch paper, which therefore has an interest in enforcing the perception that anyone not toeing the Murdoch line is in bed with the other side.
So on those small artificial benchmarks, I did take a look to see how Haskell/GHC fared compared with GCC and G++. I still don't see anywhere near a 90% performance hit reported anywhere there.
The kicker is that I'll bet that Ruby program would have still taken hours had it been written in hand-tuned C.
By the way, this raises another point which is that there's a dual fallacy that that old-school hackers sometimes indulge in. If your program is CPU bound and you need higher performance, the best thing you can do is write well-insulated modular code with carefully designed internal APIs from the beginning. That way, when you find the bottleneck, you can swap out the offending data structures or algorithms and swap in better ones, and everything else should just work.
You have never used FORTRAN + MPI, I take it.
Performance doesn't matter any more.
Of course it does. Every programming task has to care about performance. What's changed is that the most important type of "performance" is different for every task. Most of us aren't doing large-scale numeric simulations.
If you're programming desktop GUI applications, responsiveness is usually more important than throughput. If you're programming mobile devices, battery efficiency is more important than any other consideration.
I think it was P.J. Plauger who pointed out that if the program to process the monthly payroll takes three months to run, it's useless.
What I think you meant to say is that for most programs, whether or not they meet their performance criteria is not limited by CPU cycles. That's certainly true. Most programming tasks can afford to spend some cycles if in return for correctness, programmer productivity or ease of maintenance.
I don't know where you got the 90% figure from. Nowhere, I suspect. The performance hit depends crucially on what you're doing. Most programs that you will write in your career are not CPU-bound.
You also have to weigh that against the fact that a program written in a higher-level language will often have subtly different behaviour. For example, the type system of a Haskell-like language may not let you avoid checking the error condition of some I/O operation where C would. So the C program might be faster than the high-level program, but it may also contain a bug which the high-level program doesn't.
The central point is correct, though. Using high-level languages is a tradeoff, and it's part of the job of the engineer to evaluate the tradeoff rationally.
If you read the story, you'll note that the COBOL programs in question have been around for three decades or so. Most programs which have been continuously used for 30 years tend to be pretty solid regardless of the language.
For city driving, you'd presumably get the usual benefits such as no need for idling at stop lights/signs, regenerative braking and so on. Those efficiencies over conventional fossil fuel vehicles shouldn't be ignored.
I'm shocked that nobody else queried what reducing the operating temperature by a factor of 10 means. Let's say the operating temperature was 470 Kelvin. The new operating temperature would, therefore, be 47K, or -226C. Reduce it by another factor of 2 or so and you could run it on liquid hydrogen.
If you don't use the same framework as everyone else, you'll be working alone.
The same could be said of IDEs, programming languages, or operating system APIs. And just as in those cases, it's half-true at best.
The length of a genome is fixed, but the amount of data coming off a sequencer isn't. In the 80s, Sanger sequencing technology would produce 1000 bases or so slowly with essentially no errors very slowly and expensively. Modern machines give you 100 bases with some errors extremely quickly and cheaply. We've traded accuracy for volume and price. We now sample genomes with hundreds of times coverage knowing that there will be a lot of errors, and volume and read length is improving faster than accuracy.
Having said that, while the length of a human genome is fixed, researchers would also like to assemble larger ones with less favourable repeat structures, such as plants. And then there's RNA transcripts, which add yet another layer of complexity (e.g. multiple isoforms, which are sometimes indistinguishable from read errors).
One of the known mechanisms by which pathogenic bacteria get resistance to antibiotics is by horizontal gene transfer from our own gut flora. Gut flora becomes resistant to antibiotics because the levels in our gastrointestinal tract is lower than in our bloodstream. Viruses and bacteriophages (which infect bacteria) then transfer plasmids between different species.
This is Slashdot. We generally don't care about sport, but we're always up for a meta-argument.
Yes, the press would do anything that will sell papers. On the other hand, the government would do anything that will get votes or cover their rears. One of the hardest lessons of the post-9/11 era, for those who hadn't learned it earlier, is that there is no such thing as "the good guys".
The legal case is not clear at all. FWIW, it wasn't clear that Daniel Ellsberg committed treason either, though we'll never know because his prosecution was so botched that it was never decided.
In fact, I strongly suspect that this will result in new case law on precisely what constitutes "treason".
Please give an example of one assassination of an informer caused by the release of the cables.
Even if we were to assume your statements were 100% accurate, it STILL doesnt answer the question, "why release the other 99,000 documents?"
For the same reason why the other 4000 pages of the Pentagon Papers were released, I would imagine.
However, I think that you might be asking this question about the wrong person. A leaker/whistleblower is often not the best person to sift through the material that they have at their disposal and decide what is in the public interest to release and what isn't. That's the job of journalists.
For what it's worth, Manning isn't accused of releasing anything to the general public. He's accused of releasing material to a press agency (in this case Wikileaks). You should be asking the press why the other documents were released, not Manning (even assuming it was him who did it).
As that is neither a violation of oaths, nor military code, nor US law, I think the appropriate response is to determine who is at fault and hold them accountable through the normal democratic process.
The "normal democratic process", in this case, seems to be that nobody is condemned or punished for exercising an power which exceeds constitutional authority if the other side of politics might like to use that power themselves.
While all of the options for institutional recourse haven't yet been exhausted in this case, there are plenty of recent examples where they have been exhausted and essentially nobody was held accountable. Nobody, for example, will do hard time for the torture of prisoners. My hopes aren't high.
If you feel like corporations have power of you, just think of the mass exodus of customers from MySpace and NetFlix, once they stopped providing services in a way that customers liked.
In the case of internet access (which is, after all, what TFA is about), it is a basic utility. You can't really live in the modern world without it, and many areas have a monopoly (or effective cartel) on who provides that utility, and the economics are such that it is uneconomical for anyone else to enter that market.
In the case of myspace and Netflix, there was somewhere for disgruntled customers to go. Not everyone has that option by virtue of what postcode they happen to be in.
You can always move. But then, you can always move countries if you don't like your government.
This would explain the massive proliferation of companies whose sole business is murdering innocent civilians, right?
Massive proliferation? Well, it depends what you think of as "massive". Sole business? Of course not; there's no money in that.
Apart from those quibbles, that's an apt description of more than a few military contractors, natural resource corporations, and other industrial polluters. Admittedly, most of the deaths aren't happening in the US. And it's technically negligent homicide rather than murder, or at least it would be if multinational corporations didn't have clever legal (and not-exactly-legal) tricks to avoid charges in countries with less-finely-developed legal systems.
Mist, actually. Steam, which is water in its gas state, is invisible. The bit that you can see is actually an aerosol of water in its liquid state.
The mixture is often referred to as "wet steam", but it's the wet bit that you can see, not the steam bit.
He doesn't nominate 6000 years (many YECers don't), but here's one example video.
You're right that Ron Paul doesn't think it should be important (he does note in the video that asking him about evolution is an inappropriate question), but he also thinks that matters like educational standards should be more decentralised. We know what can all-too-often happen to science education when the curriculum is put in the hands of local politicians in certain parts of the USA. True, the fix is never more than a court case away, but those are time-consuming and expensive.
BTW, I never said I was an atheist. Or an American, for that matter.
I was going to suggest Frank Luntz for similar reasons.