I think that was a bad analogy. Here's a different one:
Say that you buy a video game for your computer, and apply a patch from some website that makes you invincible in the game. You do this, despite a warning on the packaging that patching the game with patches not distributed by the game publisher could ruin your installation. Still, everything is working fine...
Then, a couple months later, the game publisher releases a patch that fixes bugs and updates the interface for the game. You download and apply the patch to your hacked copy of the game, and (surprise!) the game crashes and burns, since some of the patched areas overlapped.
Settlements on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system would be perfectly fine as a solution to the short-term problem of us destroying ourselves, or of some Earth-local disaster. It was this type of event that I was referring to in my original post.
Regardless, if we sustained a settlement push that would net us some colonies on Mars in the near (100 years) future, we'd surely be out of the solar system before the next cosmic disaster hits it. And sure, the whole galaxy is yet another basket; but the bigger the basket, the greater our chances of survival.
The human race's problem right now is that we have all our eggs in one basket; namely, Earth. If something terrible were to happen to our planet, the entire human race could be wiped out, forever.
It seems obvious to me that we need to spread out. In an age where a nation (or even a well-funded doomsday cult) could conceivably make the planet humanly uninhabitable through the use of nuclear weapons, the settlement of other worlds seems paramount. And it's only going to get easier to destroy the planet; as technology progresses and procedures get simplified, costs invariably come down for building any piece of technology.
I seriously believe that the fate of the human race will depend on one question: can we get colonies on other planets before we destroy our own?
This is very different from officers looking at plates. The key difference is that *all* the license plates are scanned, and *all* of them go into a database with their gps information. So anyone with access to the database can search for whatever license plate they want.
If you can't come up with a million scenarios where this could be very bad (cop says "My wife is at a divorce lawyer? I'm gonna kill that b*tch!"), then you don't have a very good imagination. This program should be stopped, if only for the possible abuses.
I have two things to say:
First, (117/2=58.49999) is not a math error, it is a precision error, one that exists on all personal computers, and nearly all computers in general. Usually, calculators judiciously round the numbers that they display to you to prevent you from seeing these things.
Second, I think you are not being quite truthful. I remember when MacOSX was first released, the shipped calculator didn't round the output to its display, and you were likely to get results like those you mentioned. However, that was fixed long ago. I double-checked it myself, both the Apple-supplied calculators installed on my Intel iMac give 117/2=58.5
no, the gp is right. H didn't say provable, he said disprovable. Huge difference. Evolution is probably not provable, but it is disprovable. This is also why creationism is not science: it is not disprovable (once an omnipotent God is in the picture, any disproof can be refuted).
Which only goes to prove: if you know something about computers, one way or the other, you'll stop paying for software.
I've come to the point where I consider paying for multimedia and software an altruistic act. I'll pay for software or music if I feel I should support whoever is getting that money. So I still pay for some shareware, and purchase content from the artists. But that's pretty much it.
The first hyping of nanotechnology focus primarily on nano-scale robots, describing how they could do anything, from curing disease to terraforming planets. Many people still have this fixation on just that part of nanotech, even though it is unlikely to appear any time soon.
Er, parent post isn't offtopic. He's referring to the firefly episode "Trash", wherein a heist is pulled off by dumping a valuable object in the trash to avoid it setting off alarms on the way out. The valuable item is then retrieved from the trash bin before it makes it to the dump.
Insightful? Good grief; someone misunderstands a word, turns it into a politics discussion, and gets modded insightful. Amazing. I especially like how he thinks the founding fathers were conservative. Haven't heard one like *that* in a while.
First point: "liberal" has more meanings than just "Democrat". It's use in the grandparent post was to refer to the fairly liberal (generous, ample, unlimited (see http://answers.com/liberal) qualities of the MIT license. A conservative license is more like a corporate license; "conservative" means "restrained; cautious, moderate; favoring traditional values; preservative" (see http://answers.com/conservative). A restrained license? doesn't sound very like liberty to me.
Second point: The founding fathers were conservative? Please describe for me how they were cautious? Or restrained? They certainly didn't favor traditional values; no, they were revolutionaries, who rebelled strongly and bravely against the traditional governments of Kings and Lords. They favored ":maximizing each individuals rights and minimizing the role of the state" in their lives. They "believed in free will", and the fundamental right of a person to have the opportunity to create their own place in history. This, by definition (see http://answers.com/libertarian) makes them libertarian, not conservative or liberal.
Sorry for the off-topic second point, but not replying to things like that are impossible.
I may be mistaken, I believe it's something like this:
Trojan horses masquerade as something you want to click on, then deliver their payload, possibly sending out a new generation of itself to your friends via email.
Worms spread over a network by finding vulnerable computers and taking them over. That computer is now a base for the next generation.
Viruses spread by embedding themselves in your normal applications. When you launch an infected program, it proceeds to infect everything else. There may be an incubation period, allowing it to spread before it hoses your computer.
Which would make trojan horses and worms the same, except with trojans exploiting a meatware vulnerability instead of a software bug.
The fact that you freely admitted to what you've been doing and freely admitted that you are doing so with the full knowledge that it is wrong, and you are doing this without posting as AC speaks volumes...
The question of "right" vs "wrong" requires a moral or ethical judgment on a topic, which is unrelated to the question of "legal" vs "illegal". I think it is obvious that the poster doesn't feel he is doing anything wrong in these illegal actions.
One other thing... If it is considered "American" to break a few small laws, then it is only fair to allow companies and law-enforcement to do the same... So its okay if a politican takes a little kickback in exchange for his hard work... Its okay if a governor hands a huge project to his best buddy without a public bidding process.
Moral issues, once again. Or perhaps ethics. There is a considerable overlap between ethics, morals, and law, but that doesn't mean they are equivalent.
I'm surprised that I didn't see Textile mentioned here. It's a simple, yet fairly powerful human readable markup language. Examples: You can make a span of text *bold by using asterisks,* or _italic by enclosing it in underscores._ * bulleted lists * are easy * to make... |Here's a table cell|and another|one more| |another|row|here|
There are many other styles; and simple ways to mark spans with styles and classes (for html output).
For more information, examples, and a live demo, look at http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/
You are correct, regexes are full-fledged objects in Ruby. In the Ruby interactive interpreter (">>" is me, "=>" is the interpreter):
>>/foo|bar/.match("this foo that").to_s # the matched string => "foo" >> %r(/etc/hosts|/bin/sh).class # returns the object's class => Regexp >> a =/(foo)bar/m # stores it in a variable =>/(foo)bar/m >>/test#{a}test/i # embed it using #{} (string interpolation) =>/test(?m-ix:(foo)bar)test/i
Usually the %r syntax is used to make the regex clearer, like when you don't want to have to escape a bunch of slashes. Similar to Perl, anything can be a delimiter, so you can pick what looks best in the situation.
>> # an array of regexen! >> [ %r(foo/bar), %r:(foo/bar):, %r_(:foo/:bar)_ ] => [/foo\/bar/,/(foo\/bar)/,/(:foo\/:bar)/]
After learning Perl, I went looking for a language with a clearer syntax. At first I looked at Python, and the only reason I didn't stick with it was that I like being able to use regex literals. So I guess it's a matter of taste.
Ruby is the first programming language I've used where I can actually write an entire script and have it work the first time. Not always, but fairly often. I've heard similar things (about Python) from my Python friends. To me, that is the most important aspect of a language, since debugging bugs me:)
It has some of them. But their use is mostly discouraged... the ugliness of the $s and @@s are supposed to keep people from using them:) Also, there are many excellent constructs built in to replace them. Take Perl's regex match variables, for instance. Here is an example of a Ruby way of using regex matching, where you can collect "MatchData" objects from a match:
(note that '#' starts a comment, and => (value) in an end-of-line comment is showing the resulting value of an expression.)
You can collect as many matches as you want before you process them. There are no freaky, hard to remember variable names that you need to remember. You can still do it the Perlish way if you want to, but a lot of that stuff has been slowly made less desirable to use. I wouldn't be surprised (or upset) if they disappeared altogether in the future.
Then again, there may be the exact same thing in Python, and you're wondering why it's special. Since I went to Ruby straight from Perl, I wouldn't know.
(The code was pulled directly from online docs, so I'm not pretending I wrote it:)
or even better: encode the actual url to redirect through Google's servers. A clicked link is a vote for that link. An ignored link isn't counted as a vote against, it just doesn't get a score that round.
I can think of many times when I searched for something (ie. dog breed long hair) and sifted through a few pages of perfectly good matches until I found the one that best fit what I had in mind, simply because I didn't know exactly what I wanted until I saw it (an article, perhaps, about the Australian Wooly Mastiff). So, sometimes clicking next just means that you didn't narrow your search enough, possibly because you didn't know to.
I'm not sure I follow... a glance at ruby's docs implies that it uses good 'ol IEEE 754 standard floating point numbers, and it calls them... "Float"s. Another look shows that the "BigDecimal" library/module/thingy actually uses decimal arithmetic. So I'm uncertain what you are criticizing...
For instructional purposes, I imagine it is much easier on the student to speak of decimal numbers than to launch into an explanation of binary, much less the true nature of floats. I can grok it, and you (presumably) can grok it, but that's due to long-term exposure. This is obviously aimed at being a lightweight text, not one that gets into the mucky internals. there are plenty of those around, but this is the first programming tutorial that I would feel comfortable giving to someone who is just interested in learning to program as a novice.
probably... but it also could be referencing any of the myriad of self-help books with similar titles: amazon search: zen art zen and the art of making a living zen and the art of writing zen and the art of managing up zen and the art of archery zen and the art of falling in love zen and the art of cooking zen and the art of stand up comedy...
I kinda like the titles better than "... for dummies"
Slashdot Mirror
I think that was a bad analogy. Here's a different one:
Say that you buy a video game for your computer, and apply a patch from some website that makes you invincible in the game. You do this, despite a warning on the packaging that patching the game with patches not distributed by the game publisher could ruin your installation. Still, everything is working fine...
Then, a couple months later, the game publisher releases a patch that fixes bugs and updates the interface for the game. You download and apply the patch to your hacked copy of the game, and (surprise!) the game crashes and burns, since some of the patched areas overlapped.
Who's fault is this? Yours, or the publisher's?
Settlements on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system would be perfectly fine as a solution to the short-term problem of us destroying ourselves, or of some Earth-local disaster. It was this type of event that I was referring to in my original post. Regardless, if we sustained a settlement push that would net us some colonies on Mars in the near (100 years) future, we'd surely be out of the solar system before the next cosmic disaster hits it. And sure, the whole galaxy is yet another basket; but the bigger the basket, the greater our chances of survival.
The human race's problem right now is that we have all our eggs in one basket; namely, Earth. If something terrible were to happen to our planet, the entire human race could be wiped out, forever.
It seems obvious to me that we need to spread out. In an age where a nation (or even a well-funded doomsday cult) could conceivably make the planet humanly uninhabitable through the use of nuclear weapons, the settlement of other worlds seems paramount. And it's only going to get easier to destroy the planet; as technology progresses and procedures get simplified, costs invariably come down for building any piece of technology.
I seriously believe that the fate of the human race will depend on one question: can we get colonies on other planets before we destroy our own?
This is very different from officers looking at plates. The key difference is that *all* the license plates are scanned, and *all* of them go into a database with their gps information. So anyone with access to the database can search for whatever license plate they want. If you can't come up with a million scenarios where this could be very bad (cop says "My wife is at a divorce lawyer? I'm gonna kill that b*tch!"), then you don't have a very good imagination. This program should be stopped, if only for the possible abuses.
I have two things to say: First, (117/2=58.49999) is not a math error, it is a precision error, one that exists on all personal computers, and nearly all computers in general. Usually, calculators judiciously round the numbers that they display to you to prevent you from seeing these things. Second, I think you are not being quite truthful. I remember when MacOSX was first released, the shipped calculator didn't round the output to its display, and you were likely to get results like those you mentioned. However, that was fixed long ago. I double-checked it myself, both the Apple-supplied calculators installed on my Intel iMac give 117/2=58.5
You hear that sound? That's the sound of all the anti-trust lawyers drooling.
no, the gp is right. H didn't say provable, he said disprovable. Huge difference. Evolution is probably not provable, but it is disprovable. This is also why creationism is not science: it is not disprovable (once an omnipotent God is in the picture, any disproof can be refuted).
I've come to the point where I consider paying for multimedia and software an altruistic act. I'll pay for software or music if I feel I should support whoever is getting that money. So I still pay for some shareware, and purchase content from the artists. But that's pretty much it.
Perhaps off that rock it got hung up on, or out of that patch of fine sand it's wheels got stuck in.
The first hyping of nanotechnology focus primarily on nano-scale robots, describing how they could do anything, from curing disease to terraforming planets. Many people still have this fixation on just that part of nanotech, even though it is unlikely to appear any time soon.
Er, parent post isn't offtopic. He's referring to the firefly episode "Trash", wherein a heist is pulled off by dumping a valuable object in the trash to avoid it setting off alarms on the way out. The valuable item is then retrieved from the trash bin before it makes it to the dump.
Okay, a politics "exponunciation" :P
:)
You're right, I used the term "discussion" too "liberally"
"Quotes", too, I "think".
Insightful? Good grief; someone misunderstands a word, turns it into a politics discussion, and gets modded insightful. Amazing. I especially like how he thinks the founding fathers were conservative. Haven't heard one like *that* in a while.
First point: "liberal" has more meanings than just "Democrat". It's use in the grandparent post was to refer to the fairly liberal (generous, ample, unlimited (see http://answers.com/liberal) qualities of the MIT license. A conservative license is more like a corporate license; "conservative" means "restrained; cautious, moderate; favoring traditional values; preservative" (see http://answers.com/conservative). A restrained license? doesn't sound very like liberty to me.
Second point: The founding fathers were conservative? Please describe for me how they were cautious? Or restrained? They certainly didn't favor traditional values; no, they were revolutionaries, who rebelled strongly and bravely against the traditional governments of Kings and Lords. They favored ":maximizing each individuals rights and minimizing the role of the state" in their lives. They "believed in free will", and the fundamental right of a person to have the opportunity to create their own place in history. This, by definition (see http://answers.com/libertarian) makes them libertarian, not conservative or liberal.
Sorry for the off-topic second point, but not replying to things like that are impossible.
- Trojan horses masquerade as something you want to click on, then deliver their payload, possibly sending out a new generation of itself to your friends via email.
- Worms spread over a network by finding vulnerable computers and taking them over. That computer is now a base for the next generation.
- Viruses spread by embedding themselves in your normal applications. When you launch an infected program, it proceeds to infect everything else. There may be an incubation period, allowing it to spread before it hoses your computer.
Which would make trojan horses and worms the same, except with trojans exploiting a meatware vulnerability instead of a software bug.Still a bad title, but no, it's not a virus. It's a trojan horse, for the very reasons you mentioned.
The question of "right" vs "wrong" requires a moral or ethical judgment on a topic, which is unrelated to the question of "legal" vs "illegal". I think it is obvious that the poster doesn't feel he is doing anything wrong in these illegal actions.
One other thing... If it is considered "American" to break a few small laws, then it is only fair to allow companies and law-enforcement to do the same... So its okay if a politican takes a little kickback in exchange for his hard work... Its okay if a governor hands a huge project to his best buddy without a public bidding process.
Moral issues, once again. Or perhaps ethics. There is a considerable overlap between ethics, morals, and law, but that doesn't mean they are equivalent.
OTOH, the help view is remarkably heinous. The way it mangles the text is extraordinarily un helpful.
I'm surprised that I didn't see Textile mentioned here. It's a simple, yet fairly powerful human readable markup language. Examples:
You can make a span of text *bold by using asterisks,* or _italic by enclosing it in underscores._
* bulleted lists
* are easy
* to make...
|Here's a table cell|and another|one more|
|another|row|here|
There are many other styles; and simple ways to mark spans with styles and classes (for html output).
For more information, examples, and a live demo, look at http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/
Ruby is the first programming language I've used where I can actually write an entire script and have it work the first time. Not always, but fairly often. I've heard similar things (about Python) from my Python friends. To me, that is the most important aspect of a language, since debugging bugs me :)
(note that '#' starts a comment, and => (value) in an end-of-line comment is showing the resulting value of an expression.)
You can collect as many matches as you want before you process them. There are no freaky, hard to remember variable names that you need to remember. You can still do it the Perlish way if you want to, but a lot of that stuff has been slowly made less desirable to use. I wouldn't be surprised (or upset) if they disappeared altogether in the future.
Then again, there may be the exact same thing in Python, and you're wondering why it's special. Since I went to Ruby straight from Perl, I wouldn't know.
(The code was pulled directly from online docs, so I'm not pretending I wrote it :)
or even better: encode the actual url to redirect through Google's servers. A clicked link is a vote for that link. An ignored link isn't counted as a vote against, it just doesn't get a score that round.
I can think of many times when I searched for something (ie. dog breed long hair) and sifted through a few pages of perfectly good matches until I found the one that best fit what I had in mind, simply because I didn't know exactly what I wanted until I saw it (an article, perhaps, about the Australian Wooly Mastiff). So, sometimes clicking next just means that you didn't narrow your search enough, possibly because you didn't know to.
I'm not sure I follow... a glance at ruby's docs implies that it uses good 'ol IEEE 754 standard floating point numbers, and it calls them... "Float"s. Another look shows that the "BigDecimal" library /module/thingy actually uses decimal arithmetic. So I'm uncertain what you are criticizing...
For instructional purposes, I imagine it is much easier on the student to speak of decimal numbers than to launch into an explanation of binary, much less the true nature of floats. I can grok it, and you (presumably) can grok it, but that's due to long-term exposure. This is obviously aimed at being a lightweight text, not one that gets into the mucky internals. there are plenty of those around, but this is the first programming tutorial that I would feel comfortable giving to someone who is just interested in learning to program as a novice.
probably... ...
but it also could be referencing any of the myriad of self-help books with similar titles:
amazon search: zen art
zen and the art of making a living
zen and the art of writing
zen and the art of managing up
zen and the art of archery
zen and the art of falling in love
zen and the art of cooking
zen and the art of stand up comedy
I kinda like the titles better than "... for dummies"