Most peole believe that the grain of salt is the antidote to the mistruth. The true meaning is lost in the mists of time so you might be right or they might be.
"It's fitting that you've been looking for the origin of this phrase "forever," because "with a grain of salt" has been around nearly that long. It's actually a translation of the Latin phrase "cum grano salis." There seems to be a bit of a debate about the significance of the Latin phrase, however. Etymologist Christine Ammer traces it to Pompey's discovery, recorded by Pliny in 77 A.D., of an antidote to poison which had to be taken with a small amount of salt to be effective. Everyone else seems to bypass that explanation and trace "with a grain of salt" to the dinner table, where a dash of salt can often make uninspired cooking more palatable. "With a grain of salt" first appeared in English in 1647, and has been in constant use since then. The amount of salt metaphorically needed to make an unlikely statement acceptable often varies from a few grains to a few pounds. With all the flapdoodle being thrust at us these days, I'm surprised there isn't a national salt shortage."
My mom bought a new laptop from Dell recently, and she asked me to drive up and configure it for her, which I did. What I did was to use Windows' "Set Program Access and Defaults" to use Firefox as the default browser, and completely removed IE altogether from menus, the desktop, etc. by telling the configuration program to not allow access to it.
The problem with doing this is that you are cutting these people off from the many sites coded for IE. I use Firefox 95% of the time but I keep an IE around for sites that balk. Often it helps.
In other words, McHenry was doing his job. Namely, the checking of spelling, grammar, and text flow, on the generally rational basis that a single person cannot reasonably be expected to be able to verify the truth, falsity, or indeterminacy of every fact in the encyclopedia.
First, you misunderstand his job. The editor in chief of an encyclopedia is no more a copy-editor than the Secretary-General of the United Nations is a secretary. It is just a title for the person responsible for the overall quality of the encyclopedia. Of course he neither copy-edits nor fact-checks every article. He probably does not even skim every article.
Second, even if his job were really to copy-edit, how would it be his job to poke holes in Wikipedia? His job is to improve the quality of his publication, not attack others. He may have a human right to do so but it is certainly not what he is paid to do (at least according to your definition of his job!).
If you were McHenry's boss, on what other basis would you grade the performance of your editor in chief?
Based on the text's perception of authority and completeness because ultimately it is those that sell encyclopedias. Good grammar and accurate facts are both means to that end.
I'm not eager for government to jump in but I'm eager for state government to butt out of muncipal government's business. It is for the citizens of each municipality to decide for themselves.
Yes, you could hook up more rails but the rails encode a more sophsticated program (states in the state machine) rather than a simply larger data store (the Turing machine's tape).
If you wanted to impose a few million dollars of restrictions upon society, the compelling reasons you mentioned would probably be good enough. But when you want to impose several trillion dollars worth of restrictions, the rules are a little different, it's kneejerk to make demands like "the sky is falling, lets regulate now and figure it out later". It fact, it is not only kneejerk, it is almost a sure sign that there is some very insincere political motives pushing it behind the scenes.
This is why the two sides can never agree. There are many of us who think that a few trillion dollars worth of cost is small potatoes (measured in single digit GDP percentages) compared to the economic and moral risk of radically changing the atmosphere of the only planet on which we can reside. If you have high blood pressure the doctor does not wait until he is sure you have ill effects before he prescribes expensive drugs. When he sees that your body is operating outside of normal tolerances he works to bring it back to its normal state in case working outside of normal tolerances will cause your death (which seems likely but is not assured by any means).
If we don't know what will happen when we pack megatons of extra CO2 into our atmosphere then hell yes, it is worth a couple of years -- or decades -- of GDP growth to get back to normal levels of CO2 concentration.
Furthermore, I was shocked to hear that President Bush does not share your "moderate" view that it would be worth reducing GDP on the order of millions of dollars to reduce the risk of wrecking the planet. Bush "strongly opposes any treaty or policy that would cause the loss of a single American job." That's an astonishing abrogation of reason and responsibility.
What about the crazy American paranoia around drugs? That's more of a governmental thing than a populace thing but the populace lets the government get away with it.
No need to be a jerk. The poster's meaning was clear enough. "Has anyone built a mechanical (non-electronic) computer which has the capacity to deal with an arbitrary amount of simulated tape and therefore run arbitrary computer programs up to the limits of the tape available at any particular time." If we all spent our times being as literal as you are, computer science would be quite impoverished. "No need to discuss Turing machines in CS class because Turing machines and computers are totally different things: one depends on infinite tape and the other on finite hard disks. Computer languages can therefore never be Turing-complete." It's a pet peeeve of mine and a way for pedants to try to sound "profound and knowledgable."
You're trying to be clever but I hope you do know that having a "finite number of states" is not in and of itself a definition of a FSM.
You could use your general purpose computer as a finite state machine but it would be an enormous waste of power. Let's imagine for a second that you take your computer with its 4GB of RAM and 100GB of hard disk and invent state names for every possible state. You then write a program in terms of transitions between these states (this is what FSMs do, after all). Now you go to someone else's computer with a little bit less RAM. You cannot repesent as many states now so you must decide which of your named states are least important: like dropping functionality from a program by throwing away functions.
On the other hand, if you think of your computer as a Turing machine and think of the hard disk as a tape then you can run the same program on computers with different amounts of "tape" and the programs will just use the amount of tape that they need.
It is demonstrably the case that a finite state machine cannot be programmed to run a JVM or a Python interpreter. For that you need something that is Turing-complete.
The bottom line is that the right to keep and bear arms is directly linked to the right to free speech (which most of us cherish).
Not in any practical sense. Do you really think that the army is afraid of the citizenry because of their weaponry? The idea is crazy. The thing that protects you is the same thing that protects Australians, Canadians, Brits, the French, the South Africans etc. You have a military that has a culture of deference to civilian leadership and civilian leadership with a tradition of deference to the electorate. Not guns.
As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
In order to prevent someone else from getting a patent on this it would be sufficient to publish the algorithm. After it is published it is no longer "novel". This is much cheaper than patenting.
The other great thing about floppies is how much more convenient they were to work with from a user point of view. Totally random access reads and writes, just like a hard drive.
I've asked you a relatively simple question: does the federal government have the right to build roads? Does it have the right to buy land for federal parks? Did it have the right to buy Lousiana and Alaska? Does it have the right to put up monuments such as the Vietnam monument?
if yes, where are these rights described in the constitution? If no, how are they different than social security?
Furthermore, what do you think the world "welfare" means here: "Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;"
According to my dictionary, welfare means:
"1. Health, happiness, and good fortune; well-being.
2. Prosperity."
Anyone who believes that the Constitution serves to *limit* a potentially infinite government has clearly never taken the time to read it.
I thought that everyone AGREED that the constitution serves to limit the government. You are the first to say that we are talking out of our butt to say so.
But the constitution doesn't limit the "infiniteness" of the government. That's meaningless. The constitution serves to limit the ability of the government to trample on the rights of the citizens. Can you tell me what constitutional right social security tramples? And out of curiousity, do other government programs like public education and the road system and the ports similarly trample constitutional rights? Do you really think that the founding fathers believed that government should not have the right to tax people and build roads?
In the preamble to the constitution you will see that one of its goals is to "promote the general Welfare." (which of course is not welfare in its modern sense but still, the well-being of the populace) The constititution is designed to describe the structure and limits of the government. If it doesn't limit the government from providing social security then it allows it. Given that the majority of the population wishes that social security exist and it infringes on no individual's rights (you do not have a right to avoid paying taxes), your argument that it is unconstitutional is quite weak.
The article is about how PCs themselves are becoming concurrent processing devices thanks to hypertheading and multicore. This is the way that the chip designers are taking advantage of additional circuits. Cranking up CPU speed is not as easy anymore.
VB has really terrible exception handling which DOES make it hard to write reliable code. It also has pathetic data structures which makes it difficult to write efficient code.
I'm curious how the top-most council will be composed? Will bioethicists be there? People representing various religions? Environmentalists? Who decides what is a "discipline?"
Who will adjudicate differences of opinion between the electrical engineers and the chemists? An elected representative for all scientists? And who will adjudicate between the scientists and the military? An elected representative for all citizens? Like....a congressman?
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Mod parent up! I was also going to mention the CookieMan (Gersterner) example but he has done it better than I could have.
Fine, but are you really ready to sacrifice your mother's ability to get to her bank account to the Gods of Web Standards?
Most peole believe that the grain of salt is the antidote to the mistruth. The true meaning is lost in the mists of time so you might be right or they might be.
According to Word detective:
My mom bought a new laptop from Dell recently, and she asked me to drive up and configure it for her, which I did. What I did was to use Windows' "Set Program Access and Defaults" to use Firefox as the default browser, and completely removed IE altogether from menus, the desktop, etc. by telling the configuration program to not allow access to it.
The problem with doing this is that you are cutting these people off from the many sites coded for IE. I use Firefox 95% of the time but I keep an IE around for sites that balk. Often it helps.
In other words, McHenry was doing his job. Namely, the checking of spelling, grammar, and text flow, on the generally rational basis that a single person cannot reasonably be expected to be able to verify the truth, falsity, or indeterminacy of every fact in the encyclopedia.
First, you misunderstand his job. The editor in chief of an encyclopedia is no more a copy-editor than the Secretary-General of the United Nations is a secretary. It is just a title for the person responsible for the overall quality of the encyclopedia. Of course he neither copy-edits nor fact-checks every article. He probably does not even skim every article.
Second, even if his job were really to copy-edit, how would it be his job to poke holes in Wikipedia? His job is to improve the quality of his publication, not attack others. He may have a human right to do so but it is certainly not what he is paid to do (at least according to your definition of his job!).
If you were McHenry's boss, on what other basis would you grade the performance of your editor in chief?
Based on the text's perception of authority and completeness because ultimately it is those that sell encyclopedias. Good grammar and accurate facts are both means to that end.
I'm not eager for government to jump in but I'm eager for state government to butt out of muncipal government's business. It is for the citizens of each municipality to decide for themselves.
Yes, you could hook up more rails but the rails encode a more sophsticated program (states in the state machine) rather than a simply larger data store (the Turing machine's tape).
If you wanted to impose a few million dollars of restrictions upon society, the compelling reasons you mentioned would probably be good enough. But when you want to impose several trillion dollars worth of restrictions, the rules are a little different, it's kneejerk to make demands like "the sky is falling, lets regulate now and figure it out later". It fact, it is not only kneejerk, it is almost a sure sign that there is some very insincere political motives pushing it behind the scenes.
This is why the two sides can never agree. There are many of us who think that a few trillion dollars worth of cost is small potatoes (measured in single digit GDP percentages) compared to the economic and moral risk of radically changing the atmosphere of the only planet on which we can reside. If you have high blood pressure the doctor does not wait until he is sure you have ill effects before he prescribes expensive drugs. When he sees that your body is operating outside of normal tolerances he works to bring it back to its normal state in case working outside of normal tolerances will cause your death (which seems likely but is not assured by any means).
If we don't know what will happen when we pack megatons of extra CO2 into our atmosphere then hell yes, it is worth a couple of years -- or decades -- of GDP growth to get back to normal levels of CO2 concentration.
Furthermore, I was shocked to hear that President Bush does not share your "moderate" view that it would be worth reducing GDP on the order of millions of dollars to reduce the risk of wrecking the planet. Bush "strongly opposes any treaty or policy that would cause the loss of a single American job." That's an astonishing abrogation of reason and responsibility.
What about the crazy American paranoia around drugs? That's more of a governmental thing than a populace thing but the populace lets the government get away with it.
No need to be a jerk. The poster's meaning was clear enough. "Has anyone built a mechanical (non-electronic) computer which has the capacity to deal with an arbitrary amount of simulated tape and therefore run arbitrary computer programs up to the limits of the tape available at any particular time." If we all spent our times being as literal as you are, computer science would be quite impoverished. "No need to discuss Turing machines in CS class because Turing machines and computers are totally different things: one depends on infinite tape and the other on finite hard disks. Computer languages can therefore never be Turing-complete." It's a pet peeeve of mine and a way for pedants to try to sound "profound and knowledgable."
The question is not vacuous and in fact someone has created a mechanical Turing machine.
You're trying to be clever but I hope you do know that having a "finite number of states" is not in and of itself a definition of a FSM.
You could use your general purpose computer as a finite state machine but it would be an enormous waste of power. Let's imagine for a second that you take your computer with its 4GB of RAM and 100GB of hard disk and invent state names for every possible state. You then write a program in terms of transitions between these states (this is what FSMs do, after all). Now you go to someone else's computer with a little bit less RAM. You cannot repesent as many states now so you must decide which of your named states are least important: like dropping functionality from a program by throwing away functions.
On the other hand, if you think of your computer as a Turing machine and think of the hard disk as a tape then you can run the same program on computers with different amounts of "tape" and the programs will just use the amount of tape that they need.
It is demonstrably the case that a finite state machine cannot be programmed to run a JVM or a Python interpreter. For that you need something that is Turing-complete.
The bottom line is that the right to keep and bear arms is directly linked to the right to free speech (which most of us cherish).
Not in any practical sense. Do you really think that the army is afraid of the citizenry because of their weaponry? The idea is crazy. The thing that protects you is the same thing that protects Australians, Canadians, Brits, the French, the South Africans etc. You have a military that has a culture of deference to civilian leadership and civilian leadership with a tradition of deference to the electorate. Not guns.
Does anybody remember Kevin Kelly's All Species Foundation? Within the last month or so the website has gone down.
As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
In order to prevent someone else from getting a patent on this it would be sufficient to publish the algorithm. After it is published it is no longer "novel". This is much cheaper than patenting.
The other great thing about floppies is how much more convenient they were to work with from a user point of view. Totally random access reads and writes, just like a hard drive.
Can you provide evidence for the claim that Apple is supporting the OASIS OpenDocument format?
I've asked you a relatively simple question: does the federal government have the right to build roads? Does it have the right to buy land for federal parks? Did it have the right to buy Lousiana and Alaska? Does it have the right to put up monuments such as the Vietnam monument?
if yes, where are these rights described in the constitution? If no, how are they different than social security?
Furthermore, what do you think the world "welfare" means here: "Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;" According to my dictionary, welfare means: "1. Health, happiness, and good fortune; well-being. 2. Prosperity."
Anyone who believes that the Constitution serves to *limit* a potentially infinite government has clearly never taken the time to read it.
I thought that everyone AGREED that the constitution serves to limit the government. You are the first to say that we are talking out of our butt to say so.
But the constitution doesn't limit the "infiniteness" of the government. That's meaningless. The constitution serves to limit the ability of the government to trample on the rights of the citizens. Can you tell me what constitutional right social security tramples? And out of curiousity, do other government programs like public education and the road system and the ports similarly trample constitutional rights? Do you really think that the founding fathers believed that government should not have the right to tax people and build roads?
Providing a service is not a "power". Taxation is the "power" and it is explicitly allowed by the constitution.
In the preamble to the constitution you will see that one of its goals is to "promote the general Welfare." (which of course is not welfare in its modern sense but still, the well-being of the populace) The constititution is designed to describe the structure and limits of the government. If it doesn't limit the government from providing social security then it allows it. Given that the majority of the population wishes that social security exist and it infringes on no individual's rights (you do not have a right to avoid paying taxes), your argument that it is unconstitutional is quite weak.
The article is about how PCs themselves are becoming concurrent processing devices thanks to hypertheading and multicore. This is the way that the chip designers are taking advantage of additional circuits. Cranking up CPU speed is not as easy anymore.
VB has really terrible exception handling which DOES make it hard to write reliable code. It also has pathetic data structures which makes it difficult to write efficient code.
I'm curious how the top-most council will be composed? Will bioethicists be there? People representing various religions? Environmentalists? Who decides what is a "discipline?"
Who will adjudicate differences of opinion between the electrical engineers and the chemists? An elected representative for all scientists? And who will adjudicate between the scientists and the military? An elected representative for all citizens? Like....a congressman?
If thinking beings are probabalistic rather than deterministic automatons they are still automatons. Physics does not care.