Malaysian government ministers have recently been required to enroll in special yoga classes where they learn to bend their heads forward an incredible 270 degrees.
In case you didn't notice, my post was constructed entirely out of banned in Pakistan words, of which "looser" was a prominently featured example, whereas "loser" was not. I'm perfectly aware of the difference between "looser" use of language in artistic license, and "loser" posts by speling polis posers.
It saddens me that you also probably missed how my post **simply incredibly cleverly and deviously** spaced out the letters in the banned words to avoid filters.:-(
. I'm going to take out a patent on Claim 1. Executing logic and probability calculations in a computing machine, Claim 2. Representing objects or aspects of reality, and in particular physical objects in spatiotemporal situation-types using binary numeric symbols. and Claim 3. Applying the logic and probability calculations of claim 1. to the symbolic representations o claim 2 in order to have the computing machine discover significant associations between physical objects of different types in different stereotypical recurring situation types.
That should cover all questions about milk and other comestibles.
And I'm going to license it royalty free in perpetuity, because otherwise I would be embarrassed at patenting such an obvious use of Turing / Von Neumann / Babbage's technology.
You have the arrogance to think you even remotely know what you're talking about and have the right to be able to call b*llsh*t. After you've published your first paper in a climate-science related discipline I'll reconsider my opinion, you insufferably pretentious poser.
The scientists, even in their worst imaginings, weren't expecting the stunning level of willful ignorance of consequences, and the sheer magntitude of selfish @ssh0lishness which we collectively have displayed in our consumption increase pattern.
Also, they had to tone it down because their political masters wanted a cover-up of the scale of the problem, so the editorial committee of IPCC low-balled the severity in their reporting.
Grid-scale storage will be very helpful, yes, but super-conducting very-long-distance transmission could also be used (if it can be developed), to shunt power from sunny to cloudy or dark regions of a (super) continent or from windy to calm regions.
No. the real crises we are causing (deforestation, species and ecosystem loss, ocean acidification, likely methane release) are much worse than most "promotions" are currently mentioning. as they say: If you're not concerned, you're not paying attention.
I'm curious, do you you have a magic number of people below which democracy does work?
with representatives directly elected by the people of the world, divided into roughly equal population chunks.
This United Nations crap is so half-measures. I'm sick of it. I'd pay taxes to a real and democratic world government capable of addressing global environmental issues effectively, and capable of reigning in the current power of multi-national corporations to trample over local laws or to buy US congresspeople.
Believing (claiming to believe for political purposes I should say, because no one with an IQ above their shoe size could actually believe) that background cycles mean there couldn't be an additional significant forcing effect on the system is just so f**king dumb.
That's like saying there's no such thing as inner loops because, look, there's this outer loop in the program. Or like saying: The Earth can't possibly be rotating around the Sun, because look, the Moon is rotating around the Earth, and the Earth rotates every day.
Such a mind-bogglingly simpleton view of the behaviour of complex systems really does stagger the imagination, and saddens me about the human condition. "...Then we're stupid and we'll die!" - to quote a frightened replicant from Blade Runner
Remember to keep some of your cash money available to eat as salad and use as kindling when the current system crashes under its own weight and mismanagement.
You forgot the "1%" who are profiting massively by continuing the current destructive system and fighting both knowledge and change.
I calculated recently that there is at least 1000 times as much money at stake on the side of the oil industry and its closest directly dependent sectors (who would be inconvenienced/disrupted by energy system change) as there is posslble scientific funds/book selling funds at stake on "the other side".
When you understand the orders of magnitude, you start to understand the real picture of who is pushing disinformation and with what resources.
Especially its common-lisp descendant with - full multiple inheritance with decorator semantics if desired - all-argument-runtime-type multi-method dispatch - variadic functions with keyword or final-list argument - multiple-return-argument functions
When it came out, common lisp was lightyears ahead of any other programming languages, and it is still more simple and elegant and powerful than almost all.
One of its most important features is its lack of giving syntactic precedence to any particular types or operations. Other programming languages (makers of) seem to believe that computers are mainly about doing arithmetic, so they privilege the syntax for arithmetic operations (infix, special operator symbols). This sends a message that whatever other data types and operations you care to define (having only method call syntax to work with) are inherently second-class and awkward. LISP says all datatypes and all operations on them are equal in the eyes of the language and should be seen so in the eyes of the programmers. This is a powerful and liberating attitude which aids in the creation of first-class domain-specific languages (more accurately, function and datatype collections) within LISP.
Another extremely important feature was its concise syntax for switches (cond,and,or expressions) and its convention of "return a sensible value indicating success, or nil meaning failure or end-of-the-line." This led to very concise intuitive expression of recursive solutions to problems.
And seriously, if you can't handle parentheses, and learn to use indentation properly and religiously to make the meaning clear, you really shouldn't be programming at all.
Yeah. What the hell is up with getting rid of labs?
Doesn't Google know that they maintain the interest and loyalty of lots of smart thought leaders (who act as Google evangelists, otherwise known as a free sales force) and those people think google labs exemplifies both Google's capacity for way-ahead innovation, and Google's progressive development and customer engagement philosophy.
"...and displays these conditions of entry in a place visible to the entrant, the entrant is taken to have agreed to those conditions"
Now if I conducted a statistically valid survey of entrants to the mall and found that only 0.2 % of them recalled having seen the posted "conditions of entry", and that none could accurately recall any particular condition, could I make a case that the contract was not valid because it relied on a false model of human perception, attention, comprehension etc. and as such the notion that the mall entrants had "agreed" (which is a willful act, requiring, as a precondition, awareness of what is to be agreed to) is fallacious.
Could the same argument be made to invalidate click-to-agree-to-terms licenses when entering website areas, downloading content, etc. because it can be establishes that almost everybody "just quickly clicks" to get on with what they are focussed on doing, without comprehending the legal text (which we could show takes a minimum of 5 minutes to do in any meaningful sense.) Because "nothing ever happens" people just habitually treat it as nothing but another click (routine control action) needed to complete their task. So again, no agreement has really been reached, because of the overwhelmingly likely lack of comprehension of what is to be agreed to.
Finally, given that demographics are shifting to a large bulge of elderly people in Western countries whose eyesight is degrading, can I basically get all "fine print" legal clause thrown out because we can demonstrate that they are not in practice readable, hence not comprehensible, hence not agreeable nor agreed.
I would point out that Albert Einstein (patent clerk), Isaac Newton, "Newton's private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the subsequent two years saw the development of his theories on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation." and Charles Darwin were all amateur researchers at the time they developed their major scientific breakthroughs.
Also, kudos for insulting me based on a complete misreading of what I said about how to pay for it.
You are assuming that you don't want to fix the bug in both the current release (as a minor bug-fix release) and in the current head branch.
Modern dvcs's should make it easy in general to apply the fix to both. If it is something more major than a bug fix, it needs to wait to the next major release, where one would expect to see new features and design changes.
That being said, it is simpler to only be working on one current version all the time, but the reason major releases used to take so long was that that was how long it took to get major design changes and new features specified, designed, developed and qa'd. With shorter major release cycles I can only assume that there are going to be fewer major new features or major design changes. That's fine for a very mature product that everyone is basically happy with I guess. Not so great for the early life of a software product, where major revision may be needed. For example, I sincerely doubt that the transition from FF 3.6,7,8 to FF 4 could have been conceived executed and tested in the typical 5 to 6 or 6 to 7 release timeframe.
Pretty sure I've developed a few large pieces of software in my 20+ years in the industry, but I take more pride in the small pieces of software.
Think about evaluating software vs bridge building in terms of failure risk:
Some factors: 1. The number of novel components (e.g. a software procedure which has likely not been written before). 2. The number of novel pair-wise interactions between components, whether the components are novel or not.
I would venture that on this sort of metric, the average 2-year software project is probably running somewhere like 100,000 to one more inherently risk-prone than the average 2-year bridge project.
So the cost of "fault insurance" that would need to be passed through to the customer would be on the order of "a gravel truck to a pebble" more than that needed for the bridge project.
Any restriction on this is a despicable attack on the advancement of science.
Current journal paywalls ought to be against the law. They ensure that only academia at the richest institutions have full access to other scientists' work.
Academics at poorer institutions, here and around the world, and amateur researchers who may be just as intelligent as the established, are shut out. It is an outrageous and unjustifiable situation.
We need a different economic model to pay for the service of editing and coordinating peer review. Maybe that cost ought to be covered by a journal submission fee. Hardcopy publication is now officially not needed, nor should we be paying hardcopy publishing companies just for the right to view the online published information. That's rubbish, and it's harmful to the progress of knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
Malaysian government ministers have recently been required to enroll in special yoga classes where they learn to bend their heads forward an incredible 270 degrees.
In case you didn't notice, my post was constructed entirely out of banned in Pakistan words, of which "looser" was a prominently featured example, whereas "loser" was not. I'm perfectly aware of the difference between "looser" use of language in artistic license, and "loser" posts by speling polis posers.
It saddens me that you also probably missed how my post **simply incredibly cleverly and deviously** spaced out the letters in the banned words to avoid filters. :-(
to Pakistan government on this one is
g o t o h e l l a n d f o r n i c a t e you l o o s e r i d i o t s
. I'm going to take out a patent on Claim 1. Executing logic and probability calculations in a computing machine,
Claim 2. Representing objects or aspects of reality, and in particular physical objects in spatiotemporal situation-types using binary numeric symbols. and
Claim 3. Applying the logic and probability calculations of claim 1. to the symbolic representations o claim 2 in order to have the computing machine discover significant associations between physical objects of different types in different stereotypical recurring situation types.
That should cover all questions about milk and other comestibles.
And I'm going to license it royalty free in perpetuity, because otherwise I would be embarrassed at patenting such an obvious use of Turing / Von Neumann / Babbage's technology.
You have the arrogance to think you even remotely know what you're talking about and have the right to be able to call b*llsh*t.
After you've published your first paper in a climate-science related discipline I'll reconsider my opinion, you insufferably pretentious poser.
The scientists, even in their worst imaginings, weren't expecting the stunning level of willful ignorance of consequences, and the sheer magntitude of selfish @ssh0lishness which we collectively have displayed in our consumption increase pattern.
Also, they had to tone it down because their political masters wanted a cover-up of the scale of the problem, so the editorial committee of IPCC low-balled the severity in their reporting.
Grid-scale storage will be very helpful, yes, but super-conducting very-long-distance transmission could also be used (if it can be developed), to shunt power from sunny to cloudy or dark regions of a (super) continent or from windy to calm regions.
...A national policy both practical and fun!
after Palestine vote.
I thought I'd been living in a bad dream and woken up to a rational and just world.
But no....
No. the real crises we are causing (deforestation, species and ecosystem loss, ocean acidification, likely methane release) are much worse than most "promotions" are currently mentioning. as they say: If you're not concerned, you're not paying attention.
I'm curious, do you you have a magic number of people below which democracy does work?
with representatives directly elected by the people of the world, divided into roughly equal population chunks.
This United Nations crap is so half-measures. I'm sick of it. I'd pay taxes to a real and democratic world government
capable of addressing global environmental issues effectively, and capable of reigning in the current power of
multi-national corporations to trample over local laws or to buy US congresspeople.
How can I put this.....
MORON.
Believing (claiming to believe for political purposes I should say, because no one with an IQ above their shoe size could actually believe) that background cycles mean there couldn't be an additional significant forcing effect on the system is just so f**king dumb.
That's like saying there's no such thing as inner loops because, look, there's this outer loop in the program. Or like saying: The Earth can't possibly be rotating around the Sun, because look, the Moon is rotating around the Earth, and the Earth rotates every day.
Such a mind-bogglingly simpleton view of the behaviour of complex systems really does stagger the imagination, and saddens me about the human condition. "...Then we're stupid and we'll die!" - to quote a frightened replicant from Blade Runner
Remember to keep some of your cash money available to eat as salad and use as kindling when the current system crashes under its own weight and mismanagement.
You forgot the "1%" who are profiting massively by continuing the current destructive system and fighting both knowledge and change.
I calculated recently that there is at least 1000 times as much money at stake on the side of the oil industry and its closest directly dependent sectors (who would be inconvenienced/disrupted by energy system change) as there is posslble scientific funds/book selling funds at stake on "the other side".
When you understand the orders of magnitude, you start to understand the real picture of who is pushing disinformation and with what resources.
Especially its common-lisp descendant with
- full multiple inheritance with decorator semantics if desired
- all-argument-runtime-type multi-method dispatch
- variadic functions with keyword or final-list argument
- multiple-return-argument functions
When it came out, common lisp was lightyears ahead of any other programming languages, and it is still
more simple and elegant and powerful than almost all.
One of its most important features is its lack of giving syntactic precedence to any particular types or operations.
Other programming languages (makers of) seem to believe that computers are mainly about doing arithmetic, so they privilege
the syntax for arithmetic operations (infix, special operator symbols). This sends a message that whatever other
data types and operations you care to define (having only method call syntax to work with) are inherently second-class
and awkward. LISP says all datatypes and all operations on them are equal in the eyes of the language and should be
seen so in the eyes of the programmers. This is a powerful and liberating attitude which aids in the creation of first-class
domain-specific languages (more accurately, function and datatype collections) within LISP.
Another extremely important feature was its concise syntax for switches (cond,and,or expressions) and its convention of
"return a sensible value indicating success, or nil meaning failure or end-of-the-line." This led to very concise intuitive
expression of recursive solutions to problems.
And seriously, if you can't handle parentheses, and learn to use indentation properly and religiously to make the meaning clear,
you really shouldn't be programming at all.
Yeah. What the hell is up with getting rid of labs?
Doesn't Google know that they maintain the interest and loyalty of lots of smart thought leaders (who act as Google evangelists, otherwise known as a free sales force) and those people think google labs exemplifies both Google's capacity for way-ahead innovation, and Google's progressive development and customer engagement philosophy.
This is a DUMB DUMB DUMB edge-losing move!
ps. labs appears to be gone already.
"...and displays these conditions of entry in a place visible to the entrant, the entrant is taken to have agreed to those conditions"
Now if I conducted a statistically valid survey of entrants to the mall and found that only 0.2 % of them recalled having seen the
posted "conditions of entry", and that none could accurately recall any particular condition, could I make a case that
the contract was not valid because it relied on a false model of human perception, attention, comprehension etc. and as
such the notion that the mall entrants had "agreed" (which is a willful act, requiring, as a precondition, awareness of what is to be agreed to)
is fallacious.
Could the same argument be made to invalidate click-to-agree-to-terms licenses when entering website areas, downloading
content, etc. because it can be establishes that almost everybody "just quickly clicks" to get on with what they are focussed on
doing, without comprehending the legal text (which we could show takes a minimum of 5 minutes to do in any meaningful sense.)
Because "nothing ever happens" people just habitually treat it as nothing but another click (routine control action) needed to
complete their task. So again, no agreement has really been reached, because of the overwhelmingly likely lack of
comprehension of what is to be agreed to.
Finally, given that demographics are shifting to a large bulge of elderly people in Western countries whose eyesight is degrading,
can I basically get all "fine print" legal clause thrown out because we can demonstrate that they are not in practice
readable, hence not comprehensible, hence not agreeable nor agreed.
Or (thinks) "Little do you know I'm also streaming live video of this little encounter with my BCVC (baseball cap video camera)."
What if I agree to photoshop out everything surrounding my kid who I was taking the picture of.
If that photo can still be banned, does it mean they own the air and light in between me and my little one?
Or do they only own the floor, walls, ceilings etc of the mall and images/objects on those?
WHUMMFF! Sound of security guard fist hitting non-compliant jaw.
I would point out that Albert Einstein (patent clerk),
Isaac Newton, "Newton's private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the subsequent two years saw the development of his theories on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation."
and Charles Darwin were all amateur researchers at the time they developed their major scientific breakthroughs.
Also, kudos for insulting me based on a complete misreading of what I said about how to pay for it.
You are assuming that you don't want to fix the bug in both the current release (as a minor bug-fix release) and in the current head branch.
Modern dvcs's should make it easy in general to apply the fix to both.
If it is something more major than a bug fix, it needs to wait to the next major release, where one would expect to see new features and design changes.
That being said, it is simpler to only be working on one current version all the time, but the reason major releases used to take so long was that that
was how long it took to get major design changes and new features specified, designed, developed and qa'd. With shorter major release cycles I can
only assume that there are going to be fewer major new features or major design changes. That's fine for a very mature product that everyone
is basically happy with I guess. Not so great for the early life of a software product, where major revision may be needed. For example, I sincerely
doubt that the transition from FF 3.6,7,8 to FF 4 could have been conceived executed and tested in the typical 5 to 6 or 6 to 7 release timeframe.
Pretty sure I've developed a few large pieces of software in my 20+ years in the industry, but I take more pride in the small pieces of software.
Think about evaluating software vs bridge building in terms of failure risk:
Some factors:
1. The number of novel components (e.g. a software procedure which has likely not been written before).
2. The number of novel pair-wise interactions between components, whether the components are novel or not.
I would venture that on this sort of metric, the average 2-year software project is probably running somewhere
like 100,000 to one more inherently risk-prone than the average 2-year bridge project.
So the cost of "fault insurance" that would need to be passed through to the customer would be on the
order of "a gravel truck to a pebble" more than that needed for the bridge project.
in yet another science and technology field.
However, there is no reason to fear. The military technology budget is largely unscathed.
(with proper attribution)
Any restriction on this is a despicable attack on the advancement of science.
Current journal paywalls ought to be against the law. They ensure that only academia
at the richest institutions have full access to other scientists' work.
Academics at poorer institutions, here and around the world, and amateur researchers
who may be just as intelligent as the established, are shut out. It is an outrageous
and unjustifiable situation.
We need a different economic model to pay for the service of editing and coordinating
peer review. Maybe that cost ought to be covered by a journal submission fee.
Hardcopy publication is now officially not needed, nor should we be paying hardcopy publishing
companies just for the right to view the online published information. That's rubbish, and
it's harmful to the progress of knowledge.
Hear Hear!
Better metrics might be:
BT/Y: Breakthroughs per year (hope for at least 0.5)
QPI/Y: Qualitative Process Improvements per year (hope for 1 or 2)
LOCA/M: Lines of code avoided per month by refactoring or selecting appropriate available libraries).