Toki Pona is indeed a very interesting language. On the other side, Mandrin, the language spoken by over a billion people, also as a relatively small set of basic words, where "new" words are created by putting together the basic words. An interesting fact is that some basic words have no longer any meaning in themselves and only occur in combinations with other basic words. I have been living with a Mandrin native speaking lady for over ten years and have become aware of the effects this has had on her way of expressing herself in English.
I remember that Dr. G. Edward Griffin, the author of "World Without Cancer : The Story of Vitamin B17", has been claiming for a long time that stem cells are at the core of cancer, and that vitamine B17 is very effective in helping the body stop stem cells from going wild and causing cancer.
I have followed the debate around vitamine B17, but so far have not come to a conclusion whether it is real or a hoax.
What about installing a device to eject garbage in the direction of the earth, so that they will be burned in the atmosphere as this would also help the ISS to maintain altitude. I realize that the effect would be minimal, but yet all small things might help. Anyway ejecting materials towards is always better than just let them float away.
Just like AI has been promissing us real AI for many decades, the idea of producing information systems by combining building blocks still has not become a reality yet. The whole SOA hype is just one of the many "build systems from components" hypes. My experience with building information systems by combining separate applications (and that is how most informations systems are build in practice) is that these systems often crumble to pieces due to mismatching data models. I sometimes get the idea that data modeling is one of least used methods for building information systems. I wonder why.
As there are so many parameters that a celestrical body can have, any definition of what is a planet and what is not, is highly arbitrary and thus unscientific and based on emotional considerations. And because of this, there will always be large groups of people who will reject any such definition. Especially, because it will all be wheter Pluto should be called a planet or not.
I think the most logical thing would be to consider "planet" a part of the name of a celestrical body, just like we do with "ocean" and "sea", and not use it as a classification word.
Do you really have no idea while it is like this. Could it be that those politicians are supported by companies more than by the people? What would happen if you make negative statements about your employer? Would you not risk the change of being fired. If you have a system where politicians depend on "external" funding, would it than not be strange that they listen to those that pay them (either directly or indirectly)?
Yes, I also wonder this. If you define 'intellectually curious' by being interested in popular science, you might come close. I have to say that I find most 'popular science' articles totally boring with respect to my intellectual curiosity. They usually answer zero of the questions that come to my mind when I have read the introduction.
First of all this seems not very novel to me. They already aquired a patent for this technology int he U.K. in 2004. I am far more impressed by the abilities of the eyeQ system by Mobileye, a intergrated camera with processor being able to perform complex image processing. It would not surprise me, if the eyeQ could do this job as well. The image processor is RISC based, and although it only runs as 120 Mhrz its computing power is theoretical equivalent of an Intel Pentium IV processor, running at 4Ghz clock rate. Its architecture somehow resembles that of the Cell processor.
The first computer I wrote some programs on was a Cyber main frame (using NOS/BE). I wrote programs in Algol 60, Fortran and Lisp. That was in 1978. The first home computer I wrote programs on was an Acorn Atom. It Basic language included operators for peek and pook and had a builtin assembler.
Some scientist have pointed out that this is caused by persistent high pressure systems above central Europe and that these persistent high pressure systems are the result of viewer depressions. And that there a fewer depressions because the temperatures in the polar region are higher and that there is thus less energy available to drive these depressions.
The climate is far to complex to assume that a global increase of temperature simply means that the average monthly temperatures go up with the same amouth of degrees everywhere on the planet. It is just the problem of these local effects that are having the greatest influence. Here in the Netherlands some birds are getting extinct because spring starts two weeks earlier, which causes these birds to arrive just two weeks later for having the maximum of food available for their off-spring.
Maybe they could set up a porn-site where you have to 'pay' by judging an image. It seems that this technique is used a lot by cyber-criminals for surpassing the "human-only" test that are used during registration to prevent robots from registering. These test consist of text messages that are easy to read by humans but not by computers. It is a very smart idea to use humans (horny men, in this case) for performing a simple "computational" task.
I wonder if this idea can be extended. Using humans to perform computational tasks sounds to be a very interesting business model.
The problem with preprocessing is that you never can establish a reliable relation between the interface definition (.h files) and the compiled code (.exe or.dll), because the compiler does not know which.h files where used after preprocessing has taken place. And I hope you realize that the used of #defines in one.h file can change the definition of classes in another.h file. So, even in a collection of.cpp files that compile into a library or executable, it is possible to introduce "bugs" due to miss-alignment of member variables that are very hard to find. Preprocessing as it is done in C (and C++) is simply bad. But I guess that most people don't realize it, because they have become used to it.
As for the preprocessor issue you describe; it's type-safety.
I think you haven't understood the issue. Preprocessing is exactly not sufficient to assure type-safety. It has happened often enough (especially in large project with many include paths) that the wrong version of a certain.h file was included to produce a mismatch between to.dll files that would lead to mysterious crashes due to member variables being align differently.
This is because the.dll file does not contain any information of.h files being used during the compilation. And I hope you can change the "effect" of an.h file by defines in other.h files. So, one would have to examine the preprocessed files to determine whether the interfaces would match. The evil of preprocessing is that you lose all kind of information that is essential for the kind of type-safety that you would like to have in an environment where you make use of libraries.
And this problem is not specific to DLL files on MS Windows, but also occurs on other platforms where shared libraries are in use and the libraries do not contain an explicit interface definition that can be validated. (And we all know that a simple version number is not sufficient for interface validation.)
The art of making a programming language lies in giving it just enough features to make everything possible that you want without making thing possible that you want. I feel that at the moment C++ already allows to much "wierd" things that you do not really need in practice. I am affraid that adding new features and new language constructs only will make things worse, not better.
I also have come to realize that if there is one bad thing in C++ than it is this preprocessing which it inherited from C. Especially in a large project the trouble of including the right files and linking against the matching libraries becomes a pain in the ass. In this respect I would like C++ be more like Java (or TurboPascal for the matter) where interface declarations and compiled code are unified. At the moment moving around code from one DLL to another is a lot of work, while in my perception, it could have been completely transparent from the users point of view.
I do realize that keeping backwards compatibility was one of the design features of C++, and that it also determined the success of C. But as many C++ tools are now able to make use of precompiled headers, it seems that the problem should be able to be done away with.
The returning spaceship could dock with the space station and transfer men and cargo to the shuttle for safe landing. But that's only saves the weight of a single heat shield.
A returning space ship would also need to brake before it could dock with a space station because it is very likely that it will approach earth at a much higher speed than the speed at which space station turns around the world. And for braking (outside the atmosphere) requires fuel. And that is not even taking into account the fact that the orbit of the approaching space station needs to be "aligned". Extra fuel might be needed for this as well.
Why not ethanol or methane? Both have been used as an alternative fuel for cars. They are much easier to handle then hydrogen, and if I am not mistaken, there are many ways to synthesize these.
We have plenty of energy, and will do for many millenia.
The problem is not about the availability of energy, but the ability to exploit that energy in an efficient way. With fossile fuels we have to put in about 1 unit of energy to get 30 units back. But with many alternative sources of energy the numbers are quite different. Often it is more like putting in 1 unit of energy, and getting back only 1.5 unit over an extended period of time. In some cases we even haven't reached the break-even point. Often alternative sources of energy are only used, because governments are subsidizing them. The true story is that many sources of alternative energy are more like batteries than real sources of energy.
Yes, really funny, and we are not even getting close to 0.7% of the population being jailed, as in the United States of America. But yes, in the United States you can get in jail for some years if you accidently let a friend stay over for one night who was caught the next day with some drugs in his pocket (and if you do not have the resources to find a good layer).
If I understood it correctly, this is not about storing information. It is only about telling which organisations store information about a certain child. This will be based on the personal number that each Dutch person receives.
There are strict rules with respect to which organisation are allowed to exchange information, and in many cases parents have to give written permission. I often had to sign such forms when dealing with various child health organisations and individuals.
In the past year, several times children have died because of molest, when several authorities where aware of things going wrong. In some cases ten or more different organisations where involved with a family but not knowing about each other. After the child died, it was realized that the life of the child could have been saved, if the organisations had been aware of eachother.
Switching to a different medium does not mean that less energy is used. Most energy in the world comes from fossile sources. The fact is that the production of hydrogen is not very energy efficient.
Of course, it is never possible to defend oneself against all possible disasters. But knowing that the leeves where only build to resist a category 3 hurricane, and the area is known to encounter stronger category hurricanes once every so many years, one would expect that solid evacuation plans would have been available. I was surprised to see that some of the road that could be used for evacuation where not entirely above the water level. Luckily, it seems that less people died then forcasted.
The canal that connects Rotterdam to the North Sea has a storm surge system that is fully automatic, because it was considered that an autoamtic system would be more reliable to judge when it should close than humans. Extensive formal validation (using Z) was used to prove the correctness of all parts of the automatic system controlling this storm surge system. Maybe such a system for determining when a city such as New Orleans has to be evacuated should be developed. When Katherina crossed Florida there was already in increased risk that it could hit New Orleans as a above catergory 3 huricane.
Slashdot Mirror
Toki Pona is indeed a very interesting language. On the other side, Mandrin, the language spoken by over a billion people, also as a relatively small set of basic words, where "new" words are created by putting together the basic words. An interesting fact is that some basic words have no longer any meaning in themselves and only occur in combinations with other basic words. I have been living with a Mandrin native speaking lady for over ten years and have become aware of the effects this has had on her way of expressing herself in English.
It does not even contain the actual decripting code, but simply calls some system routines.
I remember that Dr. G. Edward Griffin, the author of "World Without Cancer : The Story of Vitamin B17", has been claiming for a long time that stem cells are at the core of cancer, and that vitamine B17 is very effective in helping the body stop stem cells from going wild and causing cancer. I have followed the debate around vitamine B17, but so far have not come to a conclusion whether it is real or a hoax.
What about installing a device to eject garbage in the direction of the earth, so that they will be burned in the atmosphere as this would also help the ISS to maintain altitude. I realize that the effect would be minimal, but yet all small things might help. Anyway ejecting materials towards is always better than just let them float away.
Just like AI has been promissing us real AI for many decades, the idea of producing information systems by combining building blocks still has not become a reality yet. The whole SOA hype is just one of the many "build systems from components" hypes. My experience with building information systems by combining separate applications (and that is how most informations systems are build in practice) is that these systems often crumble to pieces due to mismatching data models. I sometimes get the idea that data modeling is one of least used methods for building information systems. I wonder why.
I think the most logical thing would be to consider "planet" a part of the name of a celestrical body, just like we do with "ocean" and "sea", and not use it as a classification word.
Do you really have no idea while it is like this. Could it be that those politicians are supported by companies more than by the people? What would happen if you make negative statements about your employer? Would you not risk the change of being fired. If you have a system where politicians depend on "external" funding, would it than not be strange that they listen to those that pay them (either directly or indirectly)?
Yes, I also wonder this. If you define 'intellectually curious' by being interested in popular science, you might come close. I have to say that I find most 'popular science' articles totally boring with respect to my intellectual curiosity. They usually answer zero of the questions that come to my mind when I have read the introduction.
First of all this seems not very novel to me. They already aquired a patent for this technology int he U.K. in 2004. I am far more impressed by the abilities of the eyeQ system by Mobileye, a intergrated camera with processor being able to perform complex image processing. It would not surprise me, if the eyeQ could do this job as well. The image processor is RISC based, and although it only runs as 120 Mhrz its computing power is theoretical equivalent of an Intel Pentium IV processor, running at 4Ghz clock rate. Its architecture somehow resembles that of the Cell processor.
I remember that I got this idea 30 years ago, when writing a science fiction story. Interesting to see that it becomes reality now.
The first computer I wrote some programs on was a Cyber main frame (using NOS/BE). I wrote programs in Algol 60, Fortran and Lisp. That was in 1978. The first home computer I wrote programs on was an Acorn Atom. It Basic language included operators for peek and pook and had a builtin assembler.
The climate is far to complex to assume that a global increase of temperature simply means that the average monthly temperatures go up with the same amouth of degrees everywhere on the planet. It is just the problem of these local effects that are having the greatest influence. Here in the Netherlands some birds are getting extinct because spring starts two weeks earlier, which causes these birds to arrive just two weeks later for having the maximum of food available for their off-spring.
I wonder if this idea can be extended. Using humans to perform computational tasks sounds to be a very interesting business model.
The problem with preprocessing is that you never can establish a reliable relation between the interface definition (.h files) and the compiled code (.exe or .dll), because the compiler does not know which .h files where used after preprocessing has taken place. And I hope you realize that the used of #defines in one .h file can change the definition of classes in another .h file. So, even in a collection of .cpp files that compile into a library or executable, it is possible to introduce "bugs" due to miss-alignment of member variables that are very hard to find. Preprocessing as it is done in C (and C++) is simply bad. But I guess that most people don't realize it, because they have become used to it.
This is because the .dll file does not contain any information of .h files being used during the compilation. And I hope you can change the "effect" of an .h file by defines in other .h files. So, one would have to examine the preprocessed files to determine whether the interfaces would match. The evil of preprocessing is that you lose all kind of information that is essential for the kind of type-safety that you would like to have in an environment where you make use of libraries.
And this problem is not specific to DLL files on MS Windows, but also occurs on other platforms where shared libraries are in use and the libraries do not contain an explicit interface definition that can be validated. (And we all know that a simple version number is not sufficient for interface validation.)
I also have come to realize that if there is one bad thing in C++ than it is this preprocessing which it inherited from C. Especially in a large project the trouble of including the right files and linking against the matching libraries becomes a pain in the ass. In this respect I would like C++ be more like Java (or TurboPascal for the matter) where interface declarations and compiled code are unified. At the moment moving around code from one DLL to another is a lot of work, while in my perception, it could have been completely transparent from the users point of view.
I do realize that keeping backwards compatibility was one of the design features of C++, and that it also determined the success of C. But as many C++ tools are now able to make use of precompiled headers, it seems that the problem should be able to be done away with.
A returning space ship would also need to brake before it could dock with a space station because it is very likely that it will approach earth at a much higher speed than the speed at which space station turns around the world. And for braking (outside the atmosphere) requires fuel. And that is not even taking into account the fact that the orbit of the approaching space station needs to be "aligned". Extra fuel might be needed for this as well.
Are you sure? I thought that x[y] should be interpretted as *(x+y*sizeof(x[0])). So it is only true when sizeof(x[0]) == 1.
Why not ethanol or methane? Both have been used as an alternative fuel for cars. They are much easier to handle then hydrogen, and if I am not mistaken, there are many ways to synthesize these.
The problem is not about the availability of energy, but the ability to exploit that energy in an efficient way. With fossile fuels we have to put in about 1 unit of energy to get 30 units back. But with many alternative sources of energy the numbers are quite different. Often it is more like putting in 1 unit of energy, and getting back only 1.5 unit over an extended period of time. In some cases we even haven't reached the break-even point. Often alternative sources of energy are only used, because governments are subsidizing them. The true story is that many sources of alternative energy are more like batteries than real sources of energy.
Yes, really funny, and we are not even getting close to 0.7% of the population being jailed, as in the United States of America. But yes, in the United States you can get in jail for some years if you accidently let a friend stay over for one night who was caught the next day with some drugs in his pocket (and if you do not have the resources to find a good layer).
There are strict rules with respect to which organisation are allowed to exchange information, and in many cases parents have to give written permission. I often had to sign such forms when dealing with various child health organisations and individuals.
In the past year, several times children have died because of molest, when several authorities where aware of things going wrong. In some cases ten or more different organisations where involved with a family but not knowing about each other. After the child died, it was realized that the life of the child could have been saved, if the organisations had been aware of eachother.
Switching to a different medium does not mean that less energy is used. Most energy in the world comes from fossile sources. The fact is that the production of hydrogen is not very energy efficient.
The canal that connects Rotterdam to the North Sea has a storm surge system that is fully automatic, because it was considered that an autoamtic system would be more reliable to judge when it should close than humans. Extensive formal validation (using Z) was used to prove the correctness of all parts of the automatic system controlling this storm surge system. Maybe such a system for determining when a city such as New Orleans has to be evacuated should be developed. When Katherina crossed Florida there was already in increased risk that it could hit New Orleans as a above catergory 3 huricane.