Society has become too risk adverse to do anything as innovative and risky as the first moon landings.
No, society has become too prudent to squander gigantic sums of money on chest thumping displays of prowess and bravado when there are so many better ways to spend the money. When you knock Ali to the canvass once, you've proved something. When you get back into the ring for a rematch, you're just desperate to pay the rent.
I regard the human genome project, not the space program, as the most significant technological landmark I'll witness in my lifetime. Easily the upside of cracking the genetic code is a thousand times greater than any benefit from a collection of moon rocks, that apparently NASA doesn't even care enough about to provide secure inventory.
Anyway, this was obviously an ad produced by the Romney campaign, not the network.
In the psychology of advertising, what's completely obvious is swapped by what lies beneath. The surface brain will know the difference, the reptile in the voting booth will not.
Media is tasked with achieving balance. It's unrealistic to expect a network to achieve balance over every 30s subinterval.
As NBC, if Romney doesn't come to the table, I'd watermark a giant thumb's down outline onto all future Romney coverage.
No, it doesn't mean we dislike Romney, but we do dislike his tactic of lifting material in the guise of endorsement.
Of course it makes no economical sense to do that. That's because we're not trying to solve an economical problem.
You've completely failed to grasp the scale of the actions proposed. The large sums of money sloshing around in the middle mediate one form of harm (climate) against another (e.g. setback of the fight against world poverty). Decreasing world economic growth rate to mitigate environmental changes due to the carbon economy will have severe impacts on many populations, most likely the least fortunate.
At this scale, all problems are economic problems.
like doing levels on nightmare starting with a pistol
There was one level in particular that I struggled for hours to survive the first 5 to 15s. I think that level was about 3/4 the way through. You start in a large chamber with a double-wide set of doors that open onto a large area that is essentially a wide hallway wrapped around three sides of a large pool concealed with some modest trellis work. You're stuck in the middle of the long side with fireballs coming from every direction, several pink chicken drumsticks completely indifferent to pistol fire prowling nearby, and hordes of regulars to baste you with hot lead from all directions if you miss half a pivot. When you died, you were about -200 in health by the time your knees hit the ground. Even if you scored the instant kill out of the gate for the weapon drop, chances were slim you'd live to pick it up, much less lock and load.
The key for me was obtaining a mental state of unsentimental aggression bordering on contempt. If you tarried to dwell on your prowess for so much as a tenth of a second, the game earned its name. After hours and hours of seemingly little progress at all, I reached the point where I could survive the first 10s a little more than half the time.
Essentially you had to think of yourself as bringing a handgun to a knife fight: a couple of quick kills at close quarters was the only possible cover, as well as a significant boon: your adversaries were insects with guns. IFF was a million years down the road in their evolutionary future.
Things happened too fast to consciously play the angles. I think the cognitive adaptation was learning to hash every perceptible threat into precise buckets of 1/4 second duration and treating everything past the fifth bucket (1.25 seconds) as the distant future. Some other part of your brain was running the instruction prefetch decoder on threats 1 to 3 seconds into the future.
One had to transition from melee tactics to sniper tactics seamlessly after scoring the critical kills. How many times The Bride would be standing knee deep in corpses with heaving chest, then get pinked by a paper boy with a pen knife who ducked out from behind a column--game over. The initial mayhem was such an intense cognitive over-commit, the mind would pause to inhale after the flurry abated and some lone chump would take you down.
It was almost like the brain had to eject an empty clip in order to reload the next cognitive frame. Dying during the cognitive clip-change was the most F**** frustrating things of all time.
When I got past it, I never considered Doom hard again.
But the higher average level of Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is so glaringly obvious that I figure anyone who tries to argue otherwise is either engaged in intellectual con artistry or is ignorant or foolish.
Welcome to racially slanted IQ, goldbug, futurology hell. Your application shows merit, but fails to display elite OCD stamina. Please try again when your vigour suffices.
Yes, geeks and people who make the effort to think over issues have some stable opinions.
In the case of Google, had some stable opinions. In many ways the USSR brought out the worst in America. Now Facebook is doing the same to Google.
The underlying problem, I think, is that Google's advertising service doesn't have a strong market lock-in. If search shifts to local over night, Google is hosed. Social has more lock-in than search.
Google has done much to admire. I'm still hoping this is just a phase. It's particularly galling to have to put up with all these Google+ changes designed to nobble Facebook, because I never gave a rat's ass about Facebook in the first place. I wish they would pat my cookies down, then denude my pages of all share and plus icons. Now I have two boy prostitutes pawing at me, instead of one. Don't you get it? You're not my thing.
For me it only counts to blame the leak on a plug-in if they tell me which plug-in to nuke. If I disable 15 plug-ins, it's not even the same browser by the time I'm done. Why do all these extension leaks persist? Because there's no feasible way to push a complaint into the right bug queue. Who is responsible for this sorry state of affairs? FF-core.
In my opinion, any lost memory not attributed to a specific culprit is a leak in Firefox, the product.
I'm thrilled with the progress they've made with FF-core, once they fessed up. And I'm looking forward to more of the same with the add-ons, too. No grudges here, so long as the truth is served.
FWIW, I participated heavily during the original FF 3 beta cycle. With fewer plug-ins than now, my browser was leaking at the rate of 300MB/day. Under a heavily laden 3.6.3 that's down to about 50MB/day. Livable, but I'm not dancing a jig in the streets.
But now I've got Unity to complain about, so this seems like small fish.
We live in a world where 8GB of RAM costs $50. I'm not sure how much I actually care whether Firefox uses 500MB vs. 2GB anymore.
When my FF 3.6.3 gets above 1GB of virtual memory, it becomes a sluggish pig on my 8GB system. Frequent half second pauses. Characters blurt out ten at a time when I'm typing into a simple web form. I've always assumed this was a GC gag of some kind with worse than linear scaling as memory fragments.
If it was using 2GB and never slowing down, I'd write it off as the cost of having a plug-in architecture. I have a lot of plug-ins. That's the whole point.
When people say "ultimately as fast as C++" they always mean "for the idiom/paradigm we wish to carry forward". There's no language out there "as fast as C++" across the board for everything you can write in C++.
The implied retort: Well of course not, nobody would invent such a stupid language from scratch, combining such a disgusting mishmash of paradigms.
C++ syntactic morass: tired underlying C++ conceptual model: pretty good, accounting for dog years Racial purity: MIA
What is basic computer literacy? That has change a lot over time.
Not really. You can teach essential lessons in deterministic complexity with cellular automata as simple as marbles in an egg carton, or black and white chips on a Go board. Rule 30 is accessible to a nine year old. Where does the complexity come from? Many children would benefit from encountering the missing link between the simplicity of the rule and the evolution of state it proscribes.
Where do you put the god funnel? Not so obvious after all. This exercise doesn't discredit creationism, but it does cast the worst proponents of creationism in an extremely harsh light. A skeptic is born.
Pretty bad. I didn't think it was anything new, and the writing style was a sloppier version of the Darwin awards, as I remember them from when I gave up on them six or eight years ago. (Some of the stories were less than properly verified.)
Intel instruction set architecture requires a lot of hardware to execute efficiently. That's the price we all pay for using an instruction set that is 3 decades behind the hardware it runs on.
You'd think three decades would be enough to dispel an inaccurate meme. The grotesque legacy instructions are mostly handled by microcode. Have you looked at how much die area that occupies relative to the rest of the CPU? The 286 was capable of executing the majority of the crappiest legacy instructions. That had 134,000 total. A quad core i7 has 731,000,000 transistors.
I could go down the list. The big problem with the Intel instruction set is that far too many transistors are active on every clock cycle, not that there is a lot of wasted die area.
There are presently 69 comments that show as +5 under my preferences. (Long ago I think I disabled the funny bonus since some moderators have a tau on fart jokes suitable for dating planetary origins.)
Not one of these premium insights mentions Christopher Hitchens, far and away the most outspoken critic of clerical terrorism, much of which originated in the Salmon Rushdie context, and since expanded.
Slowly I've been recruited by ugly world events to Hitch's analysis of fatwa fascism.
Hitch makes a point about Iran that their nuclear ambitions and their intransigence on democracy are inseparable: the nuclear card is a gambit to retain domestic political power.
In the same way, if top leadership endorses fatwa decrees, the general population is going to feel far greater inclination to break down doors and lay on a can of whup-ass over dissenting opinion.
That's the crux of a very important debate. If a plane low on fuel encounters some turbulence, does it vector around or take some licks? It could go pear shaped either way.
The worst possible outcome of squelching our petroleum dependence is a global pandemic of mushroom cloud chicken pox. The usual suspects: hubris, hatred, entrenched money, scheming underlings, and mercenary psychopaths. It's not out of the running against some of the worst foreseeable scenarios of global warming.
So I get a bit concerned when scientists with all the intellectual subtlety of Pascal's wager run around telling us the sky is falling. And no, it doesn't improve their subtlety to point out that the most vocal opposition comes from contemptible, self-serving dunderheads. Yeah, we knew that already.
They all hate Bj(slashcode fuckup)rn Lomborg in much the same way the string theorists hate Peter Woit. My perspective is that scientists have essentially no training on the side of the debate where we determine the best course of action. Economists, as dismal as this sounds, have better foundations.
The game of science is to describe reality, not formulate policy. I can tolerate some cheerleading for urgency. It's normal to have some wise men around muttering "this could end badly" and even raising a clenched fist or two. I don't mind them speaking up as concerned citizens of spaceship earth. But I do mind them hammering on the risk analysis side of Lomborg's position because he sucks at science, and even if he does suck at science, that's no reason to exclude him from the risk side of the debate. Many excellent scientists suck at risk and I welcome their participation in sharing what they know and confronting what they don't.
Scientists tend to start with the elitist view that correct science is the starting point for entering the debate. Nothing else of importance in this world seems to work that way. And that's often a good thing, because science is most reliable after the consensus matures for 50 to 100 years. Premature consensus is the mother of all knee-jerk overreactions.
And before someone pipes up with the precautionary claptrap, the precautionary principle applied to geopolitical stability suggests we don't tamper with the world's tenuous social order with the right-thinking alacrity of Armageddon.
Yeah, I know, when there's a possibility that life as we know it is hanging in the balance, we're right back to Pascal's wager. That's a cheesy way out. One way or another we're going to have to accept some stretch marks on "life as we know it".
This is neither the book nor the review I would have written.
My book would have started:
WTF is the Khronos Group? Good question. It sure sounds like one of those faux "we really do talk to each other while going our own separate ways" PR initiatives of the African UNIX warlord alliance of so many bland bodies from ages ago whose names we can no longer recall.
When you've just made a half billion dollar blunder as photogenic as smoking towers—having brazenly flaunted persistent criticism from your past superiors concerning your grand-standing character flaw, now immortalized in a black box of no possible Gingrichian evasion—I think even for a person of normal heroism, the urge to slink into a dark lifeboat might be nearly insurmountable whatever your official duty.
Call it PTSD: post-traumatic shame disorder. I wonder how well the hero's hat fits over top of donkey's ears.
A borderline case concerns the Gimli Glider, which earned the pilots both a court marshal and a medal.
Following Air Canada's internal investigation, Captain Pearson was demoted for six months, and First Officer Quintal was suspended for two weeks. Three maintenance workers were also suspended. Nevertheless, in 1985 the pilots were awarded the first ever (slashcode fuckup) Internationale Diploma for Outstanding Airmanship.
These pilots weren't showboating to cause the accident. I'm sure that helped when heroic measures were called for.
It's his hour of dithering over the evacuation order when no-one else had the authority that's really going to cook his goose. I bet his inner dialog during this hour sounded a lot like Humbert Humbert desperately seeking distance from a psychological reality to heinous to confront.
Do you know there are fewer jobs for lawyers every year?
Never heard of the business cycle, have you? For every action, there's a counter-action. I'm not certain precisely which shell the pea is hiding under, but one of these legislative initiatives should soon have you rebinding your F11 key to proclaim:
Do you know there are more jobs for lawyers every year?
Extrapolative summation is one of the worst cherry-picking tactics around. The summation is often shouted loudest around the point of inflection. Furthermore, this is a distraction. Counting lawyers is not the governing variable here. I think this is covert segue back into macroeconomic levernomics. The vacuous poles are always quick to boil any issue down to an employment statistic. The left counts workers, the right counts government workers. I'm not getting sucked into counting lawyers unless it's an Angry Birds expansion pack.
Back when Windows NT first came out (and later the Pentium Pro) neither Microsoft nor Intel had much credibility in the workstation/server space. These were pretty big transitions, much like Boeing designing a new airframe, and by the standards of big enterprise normally applied to these things, both projects hit it out of the park.
Microsoft's mindset at the time was embrace and extend. Let me translate that for you. If someone someday designs a sex android the way Microsoft designed software in the 1990s, it will come equiped with six vaginas. When you get it home, you'll soon discover it came equipped with six shallow / crusty vaginas. Check list compatible, for the PHB. Every vagina under the sun. That was the whole point of Windows NT. When organizations procured software, the first question was "does it have enough vaginas?" Sold, to the man with the bulging eyebrows!
Twelve years later, the auction has moved on. Time to remove all those extra vaginas. A lot has changed since then in seek to fetch ratios. All things considered, NTFS had a pretty good run.
What is significant about the bakery algorithm is that it implements mutual exclusion without relying on any lower-level mutual exclusion.... I don't know how many people realize how remarkable this algorithm is. Perhaps the person who realized it better than anyone is Anatol Holt, a former colleague at Massachusetts Computer Associates. When I showed him the algorithm and its proof and pointed out its amazing property, he was shocked. He refused to believe it could be true. He could find nothing wrong with my proof, but he was certain there must be a flaw. He left that night determined to find it. I don't know when he finally reconciled himself to the algorithm's correctness.... For a couple of years after my discovery of the bakery algorithm, everything I learned about concurrency came from studying it.
The problem with the bakery algorithm is its assumption that you have unbounded integers.
From Lamport's comment about "On Self-stabilizing Systems":
The note contains the intriguing sentence: "There is a complicated modified version of the bakery algorithm in which the values of all variables are bounded." I never wrote down that version, and I'm not sure what I had in mind. But I think I was thinking of roughly the following modification...
A distributed ratcheting attack against the backery algorithm is very interesting to nerds in the know. Someday I'd like to sue someone who interrupted me with a nuisance phone call for the value of what I was just about to write down. Lamport could argue for 8 figures.
These are trends of the last 42 years... If things keep going this way for another 100 years...
If fatman had remained supercritical for another microsecond, it would have consumed all the available plutonium and starved to death.
Unless you think the majority of baby boomers are going to live to see their sesquicentennial birthdays, the population pyramid will have a sleek new look 100 years from now. There aren't any predictions I've seen that world population will evolve for another 100 years at rates comparable to the last fifty. National debt structure is subordinate to world population structure. Even for goldbugs and other kooks.
Praesent non lectus magna, a sagittis nunc. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nulla egestas purus in leo vestibulum in tempor ligula pulvinar. Etiam eros ante, congue a faucibus et, tincidunt sit amet metus. Phasellus eu quam malesuada arcu molestie posuere in malesuada elit. Pellentesque odio nibh, tincidunt at pulvinar nec, congue in risus. Nullam ac orci eros, a convallis risus.
The space program is big and impressive and you can pick up chicks by sneaking them into the JPL and letting them steer the Mars rovers. However, the entirety of the space program, IMHO, is bupkis in significance compared with sequencing the human genome and the era of proteomics now unfolding. Stagnation my ass.
In a terrorist society, only psychopaths commit crimes, of which there are plenty, as the society conspires to drive them to it.
What drives me nuts about this story is the tacit concession to escalationism. If you shoot at someone and later they stumble over your corpse, you can't say you didn't have it coming.
C++ is doing very badly on the long-term trends - that's not merely a product of templates, it would seem to me that it indicates something more serious.
How the heck did you factor templates out of the equation? I am not a member of the Order of the Crystal Ball. Please enlighten me. For the last seven years, C++ has frequently crisscrossed 10% (of what, one wonders) most recently about six months ago if I skimmed the chart correctly. It's a small uptick shy of steady state.
I don't think C++ really should have become as popular as it once was. I'm sure it was supplanted in many cases for languages better suited to task, with automatic instead of standard transmissions, as the automatic transmissions improved over time. C++ is best used where the constraints on the acceptable solution are more severe than constraints of available talent. Scaling out Google or Facebook are good examples. Even there, C++ is best applied selectively. Or if you already have the skills, there are a lot of computations where C++ is easy enough to code and nearly impossible to beat.
I would say that the education cost of C++ mastery is just too much for most coders. Few people working on the hardest problems give much thought to education cost, however, if the lever rocks your world. I've never seen templates as being conceptually difficult. The problem has always been the diagnostics. It would have been nice to have something like concepts, or perhaps the vastly improved Clang diagnostics will mitigate matters enough.
I'm mostly using R these days and calling out to C++ where I get the most bang for my buck.
The whole point of a licence is to expand the word using to multiple pages of opaque and possibly bothersome legal text. They aren't avoiding the foreign code, just the license that governs it. If the foreign code cared about being used for any possible purpose, it would have a more permissive license in the first place. Glossary of English: permissive => more uses are possible. None of the above changes when prefixed by "just".
if it weren't for
This sentiment is usually continued with "a nail", but I understand you're riffing on a theme here, not making precise claims.
FreeBSD is not trying to kill the GPL ecosystem, which plays an important function in securing broad freedoms. FreeBSD is trying to become a parallel ecosystem which serves different interests and different purposes.
From your side what you have to argue here is that the inherent virtue of the GPL is made possible solely by it being the only game in town, and that anything which treads on GPL exclusiveness is an attack on the GPL itself. I'm personally quite happy to regard freedom as a spectrum rather than an absorbing boundary. What matters to me is the continuity of the gradient, so that things that want to be free can swim happily in that direction.
BTW, is it the lakes or the oceans that Stallman wishes to drain? Obviously you can't have both, one might contaminate the other.
Slashdot Mirror
No, society has become too prudent to squander gigantic sums of money on chest thumping displays of prowess and bravado when there are so many better ways to spend the money. When you knock Ali to the canvass once, you've proved something. When you get back into the ring for a rematch, you're just desperate to pay the rent.
I regard the human genome project, not the space program, as the most significant technological landmark I'll witness in my lifetime. Easily the upside of cracking the genetic code is a thousand times greater than any benefit from a collection of moon rocks, that apparently NASA doesn't even care enough about to provide secure inventory.
In the psychology of advertising, what's completely obvious is swapped by what lies beneath. The surface brain will know the difference, the reptile in the voting booth will not.
Media is tasked with achieving balance. It's unrealistic to expect a network to achieve balance over every 30s subinterval.
As NBC, if Romney doesn't come to the table, I'd watermark a giant thumb's down outline onto all future Romney coverage.
No, it doesn't mean we dislike Romney, but we do dislike his tactic of lifting material in the guise of endorsement.
You've completely failed to grasp the scale of the actions proposed. The large sums of money sloshing around in the middle mediate one form of harm (climate) against another (e.g. setback of the fight against world poverty). Decreasing world economic growth rate to mitigate environmental changes due to the carbon economy will have severe impacts on many populations, most likely the least fortunate.
At this scale, all problems are economic problems.
There was one level in particular that I struggled for hours to survive the first 5 to 15s. I think that level was about 3/4 the way through. You start in a large chamber with a double-wide set of doors that open onto a large area that is essentially a wide hallway wrapped around three sides of a large pool concealed with some modest trellis work. You're stuck in the middle of the long side with fireballs coming from every direction, several pink chicken drumsticks completely indifferent to pistol fire prowling nearby, and hordes of regulars to baste you with hot lead from all directions if you miss half a pivot. When you died, you were about -200 in health by the time your knees hit the ground. Even if you scored the instant kill out of the gate for the weapon drop, chances were slim you'd live to pick it up, much less lock and load.
The key for me was obtaining a mental state of unsentimental aggression bordering on contempt. If you tarried to dwell on your prowess for so much as a tenth of a second, the game earned its name. After hours and hours of seemingly little progress at all, I reached the point where I could survive the first 10s a little more than half the time.
Essentially you had to think of yourself as bringing a handgun to a knife fight: a couple of quick kills at close quarters was the only possible cover, as well as a significant boon: your adversaries were insects with guns. IFF was a million years down the road in their evolutionary future.
Things happened too fast to consciously play the angles. I think the cognitive adaptation was learning to hash every perceptible threat into precise buckets of 1/4 second duration and treating everything past the fifth bucket (1.25 seconds) as the distant future. Some other part of your brain was running the instruction prefetch decoder on threats 1 to 3 seconds into the future.
One had to transition from melee tactics to sniper tactics seamlessly after scoring the critical kills. How many times The Bride would be standing knee deep in corpses with heaving chest, then get pinked by a paper boy with a pen knife who ducked out from behind a column--game over. The initial mayhem was such an intense cognitive over-commit, the mind would pause to inhale after the flurry abated and some lone chump would take you down.
It was almost like the brain had to eject an empty clip in order to reload the next cognitive frame. Dying during the cognitive clip-change was the most F**** frustrating things of all time.
When I got past it, I never considered Doom hard again.
I just had an eidetic flashback to something I fled an hour ago.
From On The Evolution Of Ashkenazi Jewish Intelligence
Welcome to racially slanted IQ, goldbug, futurology hell. Your application shows merit, but fails to display elite OCD stamina. Please try again when your vigour suffices.
In the case of Google, had some stable opinions. In many ways the USSR brought out the worst in America. Now Facebook is doing the same to Google.
The underlying problem, I think, is that Google's advertising service doesn't have a strong market lock-in. If search shifts to local over night, Google is hosed. Social has more lock-in than search.
Google has done much to admire. I'm still hoping this is just a phase. It's particularly galling to have to put up with all these Google+ changes designed to nobble Facebook, because I never gave a rat's ass about Facebook in the first place. I wish they would pat my cookies down, then denude my pages of all share and plus icons. Now I have two boy prostitutes pawing at me, instead of one. Don't you get it? You're not my thing.
For me it only counts to blame the leak on a plug-in if they tell me which plug-in to nuke. If I disable 15 plug-ins, it's not even the same browser by the time I'm done. Why do all these extension leaks persist? Because there's no feasible way to push a complaint into the right bug queue. Who is responsible for this sorry state of affairs? FF-core.
In my opinion, any lost memory not attributed to a specific culprit is a leak in Firefox, the product.
I'm thrilled with the progress they've made with FF-core, once they fessed up. And I'm looking forward to more of the same with the add-ons, too. No grudges here, so long as the truth is served.
FWIW, I participated heavily during the original FF 3 beta cycle. With fewer plug-ins than now, my browser was leaking at the rate of 300MB/day. Under a heavily laden 3.6.3 that's down to about 50MB/day. Livable, but I'm not dancing a jig in the streets.
But now I've got Unity to complain about, so this seems like small fish.
When my FF 3.6.3 gets above 1GB of virtual memory, it becomes a sluggish pig on my 8GB system. Frequent half second pauses. Characters blurt out ten at a time when I'm typing into a simple web form. I've always assumed this was a GC gag of some kind with worse than linear scaling as memory fragments.
If it was using 2GB and never slowing down, I'd write it off as the cost of having a plug-in architecture. I have a lot of plug-ins. That's the whole point.
When people say "ultimately as fast as C++" they always mean "for the idiom/paradigm we wish to carry forward". There's no language out there "as fast as C++" across the board for everything you can write in C++.
The implied retort: Well of course not, nobody would invent such a stupid language from scratch, combining such a disgusting mishmash of paradigms.
C++ syntactic morass: tired
underlying C++ conceptual model: pretty good, accounting for dog years
Racial purity: MIA
Survival's Ick Factor
At the end of the day, C++ keeps us united.
Not really. You can teach essential lessons in deterministic complexity with cellular automata as simple as marbles in an egg carton, or black and white chips on a Go board. Rule 30 is accessible to a nine year old. Where does the complexity come from? Many children would benefit from encountering the missing link between the simplicity of the rule and the evolution of state it proscribes.
Where do you put the god funnel? Not so obvious after all. This exercise doesn't discredit creationism, but it does cast the worst proponents of creationism in an extremely harsh light. A skeptic is born.
Pretty bad. I didn't think it was anything new, and the writing style was a sloppier version of the Darwin awards, as I remember them from when I gave up on them six or eight years ago. (Some of the stories were less than properly verified.)
You'd think three decades would be enough to dispel an inaccurate meme. The grotesque legacy instructions are mostly handled by microcode. Have you looked at how much die area that occupies relative to the rest of the CPU? The 286 was capable of executing the majority of the crappiest legacy instructions. That had 134,000 total. A quad core i7 has 731,000,000 transistors.
I could go down the list. The big problem with the Intel instruction set is that far too many transistors are active on every clock cycle, not that there is a lot of wasted die area.
There are presently 69 comments that show as +5 under my preferences. (Long ago I think I disabled the funny bonus since some moderators have a tau on fart jokes suitable for dating planetary origins.)
Not one of these premium insights mentions Christopher Hitchens, far and away the most outspoken critic of clerical terrorism, much of which originated in the Salmon Rushdie context, and since expanded.
Slowly I've been recruited by ugly world events to Hitch's analysis of fatwa fascism.
Hitch makes a point about Iran that their nuclear ambitions and their intransigence on democracy are inseparable: the nuclear card is a gambit to retain domestic political power.
In the same way, if top leadership endorses fatwa decrees, the general population is going to feel far greater inclination to break down doors and lay on a can of whup-ass over dissenting opinion.
That's the crux of a very important debate. If a plane low on fuel encounters some turbulence, does it vector around or take some licks? It could go pear shaped either way.
The worst possible outcome of squelching our petroleum dependence is a global pandemic of mushroom cloud chicken pox. The usual suspects: hubris, hatred, entrenched money, scheming underlings, and mercenary psychopaths. It's not out of the running against some of the worst foreseeable scenarios of global warming.
So I get a bit concerned when scientists with all the intellectual subtlety of Pascal's wager run around telling us the sky is falling. And no, it doesn't improve their subtlety to point out that the most vocal opposition comes from contemptible, self-serving dunderheads. Yeah, we knew that already.
They all hate Bj(slashcode fuckup)rn Lomborg in much the same way the string theorists hate Peter Woit. My perspective is that scientists have essentially no training on the side of the debate where we determine the best course of action. Economists, as dismal as this sounds, have better foundations.
The game of science is to describe reality, not formulate policy. I can tolerate some cheerleading for urgency. It's normal to have some wise men around muttering "this could end badly" and even raising a clenched fist or two. I don't mind them speaking up as concerned citizens of spaceship earth. But I do mind them hammering on the risk analysis side of Lomborg's position because he sucks at science, and even if he does suck at science, that's no reason to exclude him from the risk side of the debate. Many excellent scientists suck at risk and I welcome their participation in sharing what they know and confronting what they don't.
Scientists tend to start with the elitist view that correct science is the starting point for entering the debate. Nothing else of importance in this world seems to work that way. And that's often a good thing, because science is most reliable after the consensus matures for 50 to 100 years. Premature consensus is the mother of all knee-jerk overreactions.
And before someone pipes up with the precautionary claptrap, the precautionary principle applied to geopolitical stability suggests we don't tamper with the world's tenuous social order with the right-thinking alacrity of Armageddon.
Yeah, I know, when there's a possibility that life as we know it is hanging in the balance, we're right back to Pascal's wager. That's a cheesy way out. One way or another we're going to have to accept some stretch marks on "life as we know it".
Dinosaur tastes a lot like chicken.
This is neither the book nor the review I would have written.
My book would have started:
Circling threat
My caption: With the new hipwader hull, Joe had the whole OpenCL stack right at his fingertips.
When you've just made a half billion dollar blunder as photogenic as smoking towers—having brazenly flaunted persistent criticism from your past superiors concerning your grand-standing character flaw, now immortalized in a black box of no possible Gingrichian evasion—I think even for a person of normal heroism, the urge to slink into a dark lifeboat might be nearly insurmountable whatever your official duty.
Call it PTSD: post-traumatic shame disorder. I wonder how well the hero's hat fits over top of donkey's ears.
A borderline case concerns the Gimli Glider, which earned the pilots both a court marshal and a medal.
These pilots weren't showboating to cause the accident. I'm sure that helped when heroic measures were called for.
It's his hour of dithering over the evacuation order when no-one else had the authority that's really going to cook his goose. I bet his inner dialog during this hour sounded a lot like Humbert Humbert desperately seeking distance from a psychological reality to heinous to confront.
Never heard of the business cycle, have you? For every action, there's a counter-action. I'm not certain precisely which shell the pea is hiding under, but one of these legislative initiatives should soon have you rebinding your F11 key to proclaim:
Extrapolative summation is one of the worst cherry-picking tactics around. The summation is often shouted loudest around the point of inflection. Furthermore, this is a distraction. Counting lawyers is not the governing variable here. I think this is covert segue back into macroeconomic levernomics. The vacuous poles are always quick to boil any issue down to an employment statistic. The left counts workers, the right counts government workers. I'm not getting sucked into counting lawyers unless it's an Angry Birds expansion pack.
Back when Windows NT first came out (and later the Pentium Pro) neither Microsoft nor Intel had much credibility in the workstation/server space. These were pretty big transitions, much like Boeing designing a new airframe, and by the standards of big enterprise normally applied to these things, both projects hit it out of the park.
Microsoft's mindset at the time was embrace and extend. Let me translate that for you. If someone someday designs a sex android the way Microsoft designed software in the 1990s, it will come equiped with six vaginas. When you get it home, you'll soon discover it came equipped with six shallow / crusty vaginas. Check list compatible, for the PHB. Every vagina under the sun. That was the whole point of Windows NT. When organizations procured software, the first question was "does it have enough vaginas?" Sold, to the man with the bulging eyebrows!
Twelve years later, the auction has moved on. Time to remove all those extra vaginas. A lot has changed since then in seek to fetch ratios. All things considered, NTFS had a pretty good run.
This has the smell of Lamport's bakery algorithm.
The problem with the bakery algorithm is its assumption that you have unbounded integers.
From Lamport's comment about "On Self-stabilizing Systems":
A distributed ratcheting attack against the backery algorithm is very interesting to nerds in the know. Someday I'd like to sue someone who interrupted me with a nuisance phone call for the value of what I was just about to write down. Lamport could argue for 8 figures.
If fatman had remained supercritical for another microsecond, it would have consumed all the available plutonium and starved to death.
Unless you think the majority of baby boomers are going to live to see their sesquicentennial birthdays, the population pyramid will have a sleek new look 100 years from now. There aren't any predictions I've seen that world population will evolve for another 100 years at rates comparable to the last fifty. National debt structure is subordinate to world population structure. Even for goldbugs and other kooks.
The subject in self-reply says it all.
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I was not a fan of Cowen's arguments in two episodes of Econtalk, but there was a lot about his TED talk Be suspicious of stories that I really liked.
The first was that overuse of the good vs evil story mode lowers your IQ by ten points.
The second was that over-reliance on the story "we need to get tough with ..." is nearly as bad.
Here's Cowen being an idiot:
Cowen on the Great Stagnation
And here's the rebuttal, fresh off the press:
Ion Proton sequencer decodes DNA fast and on the cheap
The space program is big and impressive and you can pick up chicks by sneaking them into the JPL and letting them steer the Mars rovers. However, the entirety of the space program, IMHO, is bupkis in significance compared with sequencing the human genome and the era of proteomics now unfolding. Stagnation my ass.
In a terrorist society, only psychopaths commit crimes, of which there are plenty, as the society conspires to drive them to it.
What drives me nuts about this story is the tacit concession to escalationism. If you shoot at someone and later they stumble over your corpse, you can't say you didn't have it coming.
Urination = Disrespect
Bullets = Terminal Contempt
The urine perps should be disciplined, no question, but it's hardly legitimate fodder to order another cargo ship of Chinese machetes.
How the heck did you factor templates out of the equation? I am not a member of the Order of the Crystal Ball. Please enlighten me. For the last seven years, C++ has frequently crisscrossed 10% (of what, one wonders) most recently about six months ago if I skimmed the chart correctly. It's a small uptick shy of steady state.
I don't think C++ really should have become as popular as it once was. I'm sure it was supplanted in many cases for languages better suited to task, with automatic instead of standard transmissions, as the automatic transmissions improved over time. C++ is best used where the constraints on the acceptable solution are more severe than constraints of available talent. Scaling out Google or Facebook are good examples. Even there, C++ is best applied selectively. Or if you already have the skills, there are a lot of computations where C++ is easy enough to code and nearly impossible to beat.
I would say that the education cost of C++ mastery is just too much for most coders. Few people working on the hardest problems give much thought to education cost, however, if the lever rocks your world. I've never seen templates as being conceptually difficult. The problem has always been the diagnostics. It would have been nice to have something like concepts, or perhaps the vastly improved Clang diagnostics will mitigate matters enough.
I'm mostly using R these days and calling out to C++ where I get the most bang for my buck.
The whole point of a licence is to expand the word using to multiple pages of opaque and possibly bothersome legal text. They aren't avoiding the foreign code, just the license that governs it. If the foreign code cared about being used for any possible purpose, it would have a more permissive license in the first place. Glossary of English: permissive => more uses are possible. None of the above changes when prefixed by "just".
This sentiment is usually continued with "a nail", but I understand you're riffing on a theme here, not making precise claims.
FreeBSD is not trying to kill the GPL ecosystem, which plays an important function in securing broad freedoms. FreeBSD is trying to become a parallel ecosystem which serves different interests and different purposes.
From your side what you have to argue here is that the inherent virtue of the GPL is made possible solely by it being the only game in town, and that anything which treads on GPL exclusiveness is an attack on the GPL itself. I'm personally quite happy to regard freedom as a spectrum rather than an absorbing boundary. What matters to me is the continuity of the gradient, so that things that want to be free can swim happily in that direction.
BTW, is it the lakes or the oceans that Stallman wishes to drain? Obviously you can't have both, one might contaminate the other.