People with any degree of sexual maturity shouldn't be bothered by nudity of any kind. Seeing a penis doesn't magically make you gay--not even if it's a big, blue, radioactive one.
This is an excellent point and worth further exploration.
Human life is a very "fuzzy" experience. Our environment is always changing. The people we know are always changing. We simply can't rely on absolute, concrete processing because it would cripple us in our daily lives. Consider that you can still recognize a friend or family member when they wear different clothes, get a haircut, shave, and even if you haven't seen them in a long time. It might take you a moment to place them, depending on how much they've changed and how long it's been, but you'll still get that spark of recognition rather quickly. From your own perspective, it also doesn't take much thought--it tends to be fairly automatic. Our ability to recognize and correlate fuzzy patterns and map them to things we're already familiar with is pretty incredible and we understand it very poorly.
While we have computers that can do facial recognition, it's computationally intensive and still has a lot of flaws. We also recognize people based on more subtle cues, like posture and body language. I don't think computers have even begun to take that kind of holistic approach to quickly and accurately recognizing a person. On the other hand, if you give a computer a retina or a thumbprint to scan, it can do this to great accuracy and it's nearly impossible for a human to do it--again, because a retinal pattern or thumbprint is a very concrete, absolute, definitive mark that doesn't change much over time.
I think AI will be stuck in a rut as a science as long as it keeps trying to emulate human brain activity with equipment suited to digital computation. Its nature is just too different from our own brains, and at best it seems like we'll end up with simulations that can mimic the brains of small animals but not the complexity and power of a higher mammalian brain.
You mean people actually pay for ebooks with such errors?? What the fuck?
If I ever bought an ebook with such shoddy presentation I'd demand my money back. That's completely ridiculous, especially considering how many ebooks cost almost as much as the print edition.
Not all Christians are exclusionist lunatics, believe it or not. There are some very progressive Christian denominations (UCC, Disciples of Christ, etc.) that try not to exclude people, regardless of their beliefs.
Unfortunately, such denominations are shrinking in favor of more conservative Protestant movements. If you wonder why American Christians seem to be becoming more extreme, it's because they are. The moderates are leaving the Church entirely or gradually sliding into the more conservative sects. I'm not sure what's causing it, I just know the membership of "mainline" Protestant denominations is falling in the US, whereas the very conservative wings (Baptists, etc.) are swelling.
The root cause of our clusterfuck of a political system is money. People don't win elections unless they outspend their opponents, so they have to sell themselves to the highest bidder to get campaign funds. Once they're in office, it's time to pay the piper. American politics are dominated by special interests. Same reason real budget reform isn't happening: every little cut you make is going to piss off at least one of the monied interest groups that got you into office. What do you do? Cut things that benefit people who have no money, like public assistance programs. Poor people have no money and usually don't vote, so they're easy to fuck over.
Are you familiar with NewEgg? They're based in New Jersey. I live in New Jersey. Whenever I order something from them (and have it shipped in-state), I have to pay 7% sales tax. When I lived in Indiana, I did not have to pay sales tax when ordering from NewEgg.
This isn't a really hard thing to implement. If you're based in a single state, you only really have to worry about the sales tax laws of your own state. If someone from another state orders from you, don't collect sales tax. If they're in your state, collect it. Easy. What is that, like 2 lines of PHP?:-p
Things get murkier if you have a national (physical) presence, but then you are probably big enough to have lawyers to sort out such things.
This seems like the sort of design paradigm that would be useful in situations where you cannot afford any defects. Having to write the same code 3 different ways (or rather, write it 2 ways then write a test to verify it) at least permits automated consistency-checking without having to involve other people.
Sure, the time spent writing more code isn't free, however this can reduce time spent testing (by QAs), and might obviate code review by peers since the code already "reviews" itself.
One of the issues I commonly run into is code that doesn't do what was intended. The developer meant for it to work a certain way, but the code as implemented works slightly (or even markedly) differently. Even worse, there's often no documentation so you can't be sure what the developer intended.
This paradigm, if not completely eliminating the above problem, sounds as though it can go a long way toward addressing it. Even in the absence of documentation, the pre/post validation would tell you a lot about how the program is expected to function.
That said, I haven't done any design-by-contract, it just sounds very intriguing despite the additional coding it requires.
Problem is, he did too good of a job. Presumably, the bureaucrats who saw it shit bricks and wondered how someone with a clue got involved in a public works project.
Mind your own business, Citizen! Let the professionals handle this!
A 56k dialup modem has a maximum throughput of 53,300 bits per second (due to POTS limitations, I believe). Multiply that out by the number of minutes and hours in a day, then by 30 days, and you get roughly 17 gigabytes. Shave a bit off for network overhead (of which there is always a fair amount) and 14GB is not at all unreasonable.
This would require the connection to be active 24/7, obviously, and receiving data the whole time.
Again, it isn't about whether they are still in use, but whether they still exist in any form. Medieval torture devices are certainly still around: as movie props and museum pieces.
They won't pass along any of it because they're not likely to get an appreciable portion of that sum from the defendant. Do you really think the average spammer has $360M stashed away somewhere?
The best teachers are quite often the ones nobody likes. In fact, I didn't even like the best teacher I ever had. She was a stodgy old German lady with a thick accent that taught me in fourth grade, but she did three things for me that no teacher before or since came close to:
1. She recognized that I was having genuine difficulties learning and paying attention and she suggested my parents see a doctor. Out of that I got ADD and Tourette's diagnoses. I'm not medicated for them now but they're much easier to cope with, knowing what they are. 2. The school got a grant for 20 TRS-80 computers and none of the other teachers wanted them, so she took the whole batch and taught us all how to type. 3. She noticed my interest in programming and had me teach the other students a bit about it. Did a lot for my confidence and pride, of which I had just about zero at the time.
That said, she was very cold and strict and a lot of the parents didn't like her because she was so standoffish. She was a great teacher, though, even if it wasn't appreciated.
I think your error is in assuming these things occur by stupidity rather than by design. The less user-friendly a car's maintenance is, the more likely it is you'll have to take it to the dealer to get it fixed, which is a boon to the dealer. Dealers may not make a lot of money on the original vehicle sale but they make a killing on service. I don't think it's a coincidence that today's cars are designed to facilitate the profit motives of dealers. I must be a cynic.
One would think that's the kind of problem that'd be addressed in the R&D phase, well before prototype. Automotive engineers aren't idiots, generally speaking.
Oh, but you "asked" for it when you didn't bother to uncheck the "Yes, install Skype Toolbar!" button during installation. Never mind that it's checked by default and most people just click "Next" until the thing is finished...
I don't know why the reviewer says the statement "Drupal will not run on most inexpensive hosting plans" is untrue. It's good advice for anyone intending to use Drupal. It is a heavy bit of software and uses a substantial amount of resources, more than most shared hosting plans will let you get away with. I run Drupal on a VPS and it works fine there. It is definitely not recommended for anyone on a shared hosting service. Get more than a handful of concurrent users and you'll most likely get booted for using too many resources.
What a lousy comparison. The peripherals are "required" for some games because the game was designed to be experienced with the proper hardware and a standard controller is inadequate. This is not at all like requiring a serial key, which adds no value or enhanced experience to the player.
You're comparing vehicles, which are basically an essential part of every day life, to a video game console--which is, to put it bluntly, nothing more than a luxury item.
Sony (and any console maker) can do this for as long as it's practical and enforceable. The console model has worked this way pretty much since it's inception. If people want an open gaming platform, that's what PCs are. Pick up some commodity hardware, load up a free OS and some open source game libraries, and have at it.
That said, I don't think Sony has any right to prevent people from running their own software on a console they paid for. They have a much better case for preventing commercial distribution of "unapproved" software, though. It is a legal case rather than a technological one.
In all fairness, the hardware being locked down is not just to thwart Joe Gamer from doing what he wants with his hardware. It's also to keep game companies from bypassing Sony and distributing their software without paying licensing fees. Sony doesn't make a lot of money off of each PS3 sale (and initially they lost money), so those fees for licenses and dev kits are an essential component of the console business model.
Console manufacturers don't get into that business to make money from console sales, they do it to make money off of each game sale, which is a far bigger revenue stream. Consoles themselves are often loss leaders.
Slashdot Mirror
People with any degree of sexual maturity shouldn't be bothered by nudity of any kind. Seeing a penis doesn't magically make you gay--not even if it's a big, blue, radioactive one.
This is an excellent point and worth further exploration.
Human life is a very "fuzzy" experience. Our environment is always changing. The people we know are always changing. We simply can't rely on absolute, concrete processing because it would cripple us in our daily lives. Consider that you can still recognize a friend or family member when they wear different clothes, get a haircut, shave, and even if you haven't seen them in a long time. It might take you a moment to place them, depending on how much they've changed and how long it's been, but you'll still get that spark of recognition rather quickly. From your own perspective, it also doesn't take much thought--it tends to be fairly automatic. Our ability to recognize and correlate fuzzy patterns and map them to things we're already familiar with is pretty incredible and we understand it very poorly.
While we have computers that can do facial recognition, it's computationally intensive and still has a lot of flaws. We also recognize people based on more subtle cues, like posture and body language. I don't think computers have even begun to take that kind of holistic approach to quickly and accurately recognizing a person. On the other hand, if you give a computer a retina or a thumbprint to scan, it can do this to great accuracy and it's nearly impossible for a human to do it--again, because a retinal pattern or thumbprint is a very concrete, absolute, definitive mark that doesn't change much over time.
I think AI will be stuck in a rut as a science as long as it keeps trying to emulate human brain activity with equipment suited to digital computation. Its nature is just too different from our own brains, and at best it seems like we'll end up with simulations that can mimic the brains of small animals but not the complexity and power of a higher mammalian brain.
You mean people actually pay for ebooks with such errors?? What the fuck?
If I ever bought an ebook with such shoddy presentation I'd demand my money back. That's completely ridiculous, especially considering how many ebooks cost almost as much as the print edition.
I guess you give enough of one to post a reply, eh?
Twitter is still "edgy," I guess. Facebook is for grandmas and high schoolers. Or something.
Not all Christians are exclusionist lunatics, believe it or not. There are some very progressive Christian denominations (UCC, Disciples of Christ, etc.) that try not to exclude people, regardless of their beliefs.
Unfortunately, such denominations are shrinking in favor of more conservative Protestant movements. If you wonder why American Christians seem to be becoming more extreme, it's because they are. The moderates are leaving the Church entirely or gradually sliding into the more conservative sects. I'm not sure what's causing it, I just know the membership of "mainline" Protestant denominations is falling in the US, whereas the very conservative wings (Baptists, etc.) are swelling.
Sounds almost like a BeagleBoard, though that might be overkill compared to what you described.
The root cause of our clusterfuck of a political system is money. People don't win elections unless they outspend their opponents, so they have to sell themselves to the highest bidder to get campaign funds. Once they're in office, it's time to pay the piper. American politics are dominated by special interests. Same reason real budget reform isn't happening: every little cut you make is going to piss off at least one of the monied interest groups that got you into office. What do you do? Cut things that benefit people who have no money, like public assistance programs. Poor people have no money and usually don't vote, so they're easy to fuck over.
Are you familiar with NewEgg? They're based in New Jersey. I live in New Jersey. Whenever I order something from them (and have it shipped in-state), I have to pay 7% sales tax. When I lived in Indiana, I did not have to pay sales tax when ordering from NewEgg.
This isn't a really hard thing to implement. If you're based in a single state, you only really have to worry about the sales tax laws of your own state. If someone from another state orders from you, don't collect sales tax. If they're in your state, collect it. Easy. What is that, like 2 lines of PHP? :-p
Things get murkier if you have a national (physical) presence, but then you are probably big enough to have lawyers to sort out such things.
This seems like the sort of design paradigm that would be useful in situations where you cannot afford any defects. Having to write the same code 3 different ways (or rather, write it 2 ways then write a test to verify it) at least permits automated consistency-checking without having to involve other people.
Sure, the time spent writing more code isn't free, however this can reduce time spent testing (by QAs), and might obviate code review by peers since the code already "reviews" itself.
One of the issues I commonly run into is code that doesn't do what was intended. The developer meant for it to work a certain way, but the code as implemented works slightly (or even markedly) differently. Even worse, there's often no documentation so you can't be sure what the developer intended.
This paradigm, if not completely eliminating the above problem, sounds as though it can go a long way toward addressing it. Even in the absence of documentation, the pre/post validation would tell you a lot about how the program is expected to function.
That said, I haven't done any design-by-contract, it just sounds very intriguing despite the additional coding it requires.
That just means the exosuit should be wired directly to the brain, bypassing all those silly, fallible muscles!
Just practice with a hot dog first or you'll rip your dick off.
Problem is, he did too good of a job. Presumably, the bureaucrats who saw it shit bricks and wondered how someone with a clue got involved in a public works project.
Mind your own business, Citizen! Let the professionals handle this!
Cool
I see what you did there.
A 56k dialup modem has a maximum throughput of 53,300 bits per second (due to POTS limitations, I believe). Multiply that out by the number of minutes and hours in a day, then by 30 days, and you get roughly 17 gigabytes. Shave a bit off for network overhead (of which there is always a fair amount) and 14GB is not at all unreasonable.
This would require the connection to be active 24/7, obviously, and receiving data the whole time.
Again, it isn't about whether they are still in use, but whether they still exist in any form. Medieval torture devices are certainly still around: as movie props and museum pieces.
Well, no, probably not. Just that Facebook's unlikely to see much (if any) of the money in the first place, so it's a bit of a moot issue.
They won't pass along any of it because they're not likely to get an appreciable portion of that sum from the defendant. Do you really think the average spammer has $360M stashed away somewhere?
The best teachers are quite often the ones nobody likes. In fact, I didn't even like the best teacher I ever had. She was a stodgy old German lady with a thick accent that taught me in fourth grade, but she did three things for me that no teacher before or since came close to:
1. She recognized that I was having genuine difficulties learning and paying attention and she suggested my parents see a doctor. Out of that I got ADD and Tourette's diagnoses. I'm not medicated for them now but they're much easier to cope with, knowing what they are.
2. The school got a grant for 20 TRS-80 computers and none of the other teachers wanted them, so she took the whole batch and taught us all how to type.
3. She noticed my interest in programming and had me teach the other students a bit about it. Did a lot for my confidence and pride, of which I had just about zero at the time.
That said, she was very cold and strict and a lot of the parents didn't like her because she was so standoffish. She was a great teacher, though, even if it wasn't appreciated.
I think your error is in assuming these things occur by stupidity rather than by design. The less user-friendly a car's maintenance is, the more likely it is you'll have to take it to the dealer to get it fixed, which is a boon to the dealer. Dealers may not make a lot of money on the original vehicle sale but they make a killing on service. I don't think it's a coincidence that today's cars are designed to facilitate the profit motives of dealers. I must be a cynic.
One would think that's the kind of problem that'd be addressed in the R&D phase, well before prototype. Automotive engineers aren't idiots, generally speaking.
Oh, but you "asked" for it when you didn't bother to uncheck the "Yes, install Skype Toolbar!" button during installation. Never mind that it's checked by default and most people just click "Next" until the thing is finished...
I don't know why the reviewer says the statement "Drupal will not run on most inexpensive hosting plans" is untrue. It's good advice for anyone intending to use Drupal. It is a heavy bit of software and uses a substantial amount of resources, more than most shared hosting plans will let you get away with. I run Drupal on a VPS and it works fine there. It is definitely not recommended for anyone on a shared hosting service. Get more than a handful of concurrent users and you'll most likely get booted for using too many resources.
What a lousy comparison. The peripherals are "required" for some games because the game was designed to be experienced with the proper hardware and a standard controller is inadequate. This is not at all like requiring a serial key, which adds no value or enhanced experience to the player.
You're comparing vehicles, which are basically an essential part of every day life, to a video game console--which is, to put it bluntly, nothing more than a luxury item.
Sony (and any console maker) can do this for as long as it's practical and enforceable. The console model has worked this way pretty much since it's inception. If people want an open gaming platform, that's what PCs are. Pick up some commodity hardware, load up a free OS and some open source game libraries, and have at it.
That said, I don't think Sony has any right to prevent people from running their own software on a console they paid for. They have a much better case for preventing commercial distribution of "unapproved" software, though. It is a legal case rather than a technological one.
In all fairness, the hardware being locked down is not just to thwart Joe Gamer from doing what he wants with his hardware. It's also to keep game companies from bypassing Sony and distributing their software without paying licensing fees. Sony doesn't make a lot of money off of each PS3 sale (and initially they lost money), so those fees for licenses and dev kits are an essential component of the console business model.
Console manufacturers don't get into that business to make money from console sales, they do it to make money off of each game sale, which is a far bigger revenue stream. Consoles themselves are often loss leaders.