So, torture, followed by brainwashing. Repeat after me - "Cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed by the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, Amendment 8."
Or, with more accuracy and less hyperbole, stress followed by re-socialization. The GP is talking about a few months of high-stress conditions. The conditions need to be low-stress enough so that the convict can handle it for a few months, but finds it really unpleasant.
The issue you need to consider is, when does increasing unpleasantness cross the line into cruelty? When does stress become traumatic? Every experience changes you, but when does "changes you" become "warps you" or "breaks you?"
You have to understand that this partially depends on what aspect of life you are talking about. The measure of "cruelty" differs when comparing the workplace to a bar fight to a war. If you do not take that into account, or you end up calling something "cruel" when it is actually normal or even mild in that context.
I would never say that sort of high-stress treatment is anything less than cruel for an office worker; but for a soldier, it is normal, he suffered worse than that in basic training. You have to decide where a convict sits on that scale.
You are assuming the comment is intended for a tooltip. I could have easily applied that style of commenting to a local variable or case statement, or I could be using an IDE that doesn't have tooltips at all, like gvim or emacs. Even in a Visual Studio shop, you'll see a lot of devs that prefer gvim or emacs.
And this is not limited to comments. What about Java, Objective-C, Lisp, or Smalltalk code, where you often need to wrap arguments onto subsequent lines, but you have long names on the first line before you even get to the arguments?
The point is, you often need to align things deeply, and you aren't going to type 20-30 spaces to do it.
Until we get editors with line- or section-specific variable tab stops, and this information is preserved in the file, tabs should not be saved at all, or should always be saved as if they are 8 characters wide. You can use soft tabs through your editor, but the document needs to be saved with spaces.
And, yes, this means you may be reading a file with indentation that is less or more than you prefer. Suck it up, you are a professional for God's sake. If you must, selected a bunch of lines and hit shift-tab and tab to indent them "properly."
Best practice is to use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment.
That doesn't work so well.
class foobar {
const string<T> gibberish;// Here is a string that // gets filled with "ipsum" text. }
Now, what are you going to use to align the second line of the comment? 30 spaces? No, you will not. You will use several tabs. And thus, it gets screwed up.
Agreed that it shouldn't be the main form of interface with the computer, like in Minority Report. That would tire the hell out of me. However, in Avatar, they had a cool UI, where a dude just dragged his hand from the screen his working on, to his PADD like tablet computer. It was a very intuitive way of saying, "I want the data on this screen right now transferred to my portable computer here." It's not something you'd do often enough to tire you, and it's fast and intuitive.
I haven't seen Avatar, but that strikes me as pretty good interface. Sort of a "on the shelf" vs "in front of me" arrangement. Very intuitive. You use big gestures to get set up and occasionally thereafter, and detailed gestures more often in a more comfortable position. As applied to Minority Report, if he's waving his arms every which way, he's doing it wrong. Grab your stuff, slide it to the flat or inclined working area in front of you, one or two feet square, and do your business there.
i hereby nominate apple speculation as the most boring internet subculture
What are you talking about? The Apple rumor mill is a thrill-a-minute rollercoaster! You have plot twists, and arch-rivals, and espionage, and companies spilling the beans and facing Steve's vengeance...
So what is the energy that is moving about / creating the asymmetrical surfaces? In a vaccuum, gravity obviously exists, even if there is no energy being exchanged between two bodies.
As I understand this, there is no energy creating the surfaces; the surfaces are simply an abstraction of how much information is required to model the interior. But the universe seeks the lowest energy state and, equivalently, everything seeks to be modeled as simply as possible. One thing moves towards another because, in that way, it requires less information to be modeled; there are fewer possibilities involved (for example, possible locations) that must be representable.
But there's nothing actually causing the move. Instead, like how gasses diffuse because the atoms simply bounce away from each other, possibilities condense towards simpler descriptions because they are less likely to encompass more complex descriptions. It just so happens that there is a correlation between description complexity and area. Thus, the area between things tend to decrease. Thus, gravity.
I prefer to believe in a God whose only real requirement is that you be a "good person" and who would actually be pleased that humans are using their minds to figure out the world around them. After all, if we're not supposed to use our minds, what are they there for? To invent hymns, prayers, paintings of God's glory etc. (I say that as if I am anti-religious, but I'm not actually.)
A menu to choose a technology with which to make a phone call? That must be a definition of "seamless" with which I am unfamiliar. Sounds annoying to me.
I once read about a book describing how to extend this method to more people while still ensuring a fair division. In fact, there's a Wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_division
Hm, no, I don't think static mines would blind you, but they would certainly blind your opponent. See, they'd be white noise mines, but not random white noise, algorithmic white noise. Think channel-hopping in WiFi, or millisecond windows in various frequency bands that only you know the schedule to, like Vinge's bobble battles.
No. You notice how he cleaned up around the minute hand? Specifically, how he cleaned the juncture between the minute hand and hour hand? If the hour hand were in a different position, he wouldn't have been able to do that and keep the illusion.
Stock markets do not allow for equal access to information. That inequality seriously skews any game theory in favor of the well connected.
I'd guess that the same is true for the bacteria. Information will diffuse out chemically; they won't all know something at the same time. Of course, statistically, it probably doesn't matter, since the first movers among the bacteria world aren't going to be first by much. They'll all decide things more-or-less at the same time, by happenstance.
Tony Stark got the mandatory supernatural-durability upgrade that all heroes get even if they supposedly have no supernatural abilities. He survived crashing into the desert in his original suit which had zero padding and would have actually made the landing far more deadly, and then survived rocketing full speed and spine-first into the ceiling.
Hey, if Indiana Jones can survive being flung a mile by an atomic bomb inside an old Frigidaire, Tony Stark can survive all that.
Somalia doesn't really have a functional government. Somali pirates are operating in a power vaccuum and will go away once it gets filled.
I think it's more likely that the pirates will become the functional government. They seem to be in a good position to do so. They've got manpower, weapons, cash, people are flocking to their banners, and they're getting very very organized.
Slashdot Mirror
So, torture, followed by brainwashing. Repeat after me - "Cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed by the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, Amendment 8."
Or, with more accuracy and less hyperbole, stress followed by re-socialization. The GP is talking about a few months of high-stress conditions. The conditions need to be low-stress enough so that the convict can handle it for a few months, but finds it really unpleasant.
The issue you need to consider is, when does increasing unpleasantness cross the line into cruelty? When does stress become traumatic? Every experience changes you, but when does "changes you" become "warps you" or "breaks you?"
You have to understand that this partially depends on what aspect of life you are talking about. The measure of "cruelty" differs when comparing the workplace to a bar fight to a war. If you do not take that into account, or you end up calling something "cruel" when it is actually normal or even mild in that context.
I would never say that sort of high-stress treatment is anything less than cruel for an office worker; but for a soldier, it is normal, he suffered worse than that in basic training. You have to decide where a convict sits on that scale.
You are assuming the comment is intended for a tooltip. I could have easily applied that style of commenting to a local variable or case statement, or I could be using an IDE that doesn't have tooltips at all, like gvim or emacs. Even in a Visual Studio shop, you'll see a lot of devs that prefer gvim or emacs.
And this is not limited to comments. What about Java, Objective-C, Lisp, or Smalltalk code, where you often need to wrap arguments onto subsequent lines, but you have long names on the first line before you even get to the arguments?
The point is, you often need to align things deeply, and you aren't going to type 20-30 spaces to do it.
Until we get editors with line- or section-specific variable tab stops, and this information is preserved in the file, tabs should not be saved at all, or should always be saved as if they are 8 characters wide. You can use soft tabs through your editor, but the document needs to be saved with spaces.
And, yes, this means you may be reading a file with indentation that is less or more than you prefer. Suck it up, you are a professional for God's sake. If you must, selected a bunch of lines and hit shift-tab and tab to indent them "properly."
Best practice is to use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment.
That doesn't work so well.
class foobar { // Here is a string that
// gets filled with "ipsum" text.
const string<T> gibberish;
}
Now, what are you going to use to align the second line of the comment? 30 spaces? No, you will not. You will use several tabs. And thus, it gets screwed up.
I haven't seen Avatar, but that strikes me as pretty good interface. Sort of a "on the shelf" vs "in front of me" arrangement. Very intuitive. You use big gestures to get set up and occasionally thereafter, and detailed gestures more often in a more comfortable position. As applied to Minority Report, if he's waving his arms every which way, he's doing it wrong. Grab your stuff, slide it to the flat or inclined working area in front of you, one or two feet square, and do your business there.
i hereby nominate apple speculation as the most boring internet subculture
What are you talking about? The Apple rumor mill is a thrill-a-minute rollercoaster! You have plot twists, and arch-rivals, and espionage, and companies spilling the beans and facing Steve's vengeance...
am a 15 year old girl who's parents have gone away for the weekend.
OHAI! How do you feel about robes...and wizard hats?
OK. But now how do I get the crayon markings off my Kindle screen, so I can turn the page?
You turn it upside down and shake it. The surface is specially treated so that wax does not adhere.
Just because the math works doesn't mean it's true
Once again, a relevant XKCD comic appears that very day.
How does he do it? Is it magic? Is he like Merlin, living backwards through time?
So what is the energy that is moving about / creating the asymmetrical surfaces? In a vaccuum, gravity obviously exists, even if there is no energy being exchanged between two bodies.
As I understand this, there is no energy creating the surfaces; the surfaces are simply an abstraction of how much information is required to model the interior. But the universe seeks the lowest energy state and, equivalently, everything seeks to be modeled as simply as possible. One thing moves towards another because, in that way, it requires less information to be modeled; there are fewer possibilities involved (for example, possible locations) that must be representable.
But there's nothing actually causing the move. Instead, like how gasses diffuse because the atoms simply bounce away from each other, possibilities condense towards simpler descriptions because they are less likely to encompass more complex descriptions. It just so happens that there is a correlation between description complexity and area. Thus, the area between things tend to decrease. Thus, gravity.
I prefer to believe in a God whose only real requirement is that you be a "good person" and who would actually be pleased that humans are using their minds to figure out the world around them. After all, if we're not supposed to use our minds, what are they there for?
To invent hymns, prayers, paintings of God's glory etc. (I say that as if I am anti-religious, but I'm not actually.)
Why should I be bothered that someone might find my nudity appealing?
Yeah. I'm a sexy beast; sure, it's a burden, but why should I want to deprive others?
So you're interested more interested in the love hotel business, huh?
I'd suggest Logo, but the poster said he wanted a language to lead into C/C++, and Logo will lead into a good language instead. :-)
Has anyone told xkcd about this?
Considering only reptiles -- and their forebears and descendents -- deliver venom with fangs, I'd say "once."
Also spiders. Insects. And fanged, venomous mammals known as Solenodons.
A menu to choose a technology with which to make a phone call? That must be a definition of "seamless" with which I am unfamiliar. Sounds annoying to me.
Mum's rule: "One cuts, the other chooses"
I once read about a book describing how to extend this method to more people while still ensuring a fair division. In fact, there's a Wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_division
Hm, no, I don't think static mines would blind you, but they would certainly blind your opponent. See, they'd be white noise mines, but not random white noise, algorithmic white noise. Think channel-hopping in WiFi, or millisecond windows in various frequency bands that only you know the schedule to, like Vinge's bobble battles.
No. It will be glaringly obvious to any Mac user that this is NOT a native app.
1 hour... he only needed to do it for 1 hour.
No. You notice how he cleaned up around the minute hand? Specifically, how he cleaned the juncture between the minute hand and hour hand? If the hour hand were in a different position, he wouldn't have been able to do that and keep the illusion.
Wait, isn't sucking at multitasking already multitasking, right there?
*ducks
*head explodes
Yep. See what happened there? That's what happens when you multitask too much. Your head explodes. Seen it happen a million times.
Stock markets do not allow for equal access to information.
That inequality seriously skews any game theory in favor of the well connected.
I'd guess that the same is true for the bacteria. Information will diffuse out chemically; they won't all know something at the same time. Of course, statistically, it probably doesn't matter, since the first movers among the bacteria world aren't going to be first by much. They'll all decide things more-or-less at the same time, by happenstance.
Tony Stark got the mandatory supernatural-durability upgrade that all heroes get even if they supposedly have no supernatural abilities. He survived crashing into the desert in his original suit which had zero padding and would have actually made the landing far more deadly, and then survived rocketing full speed and spine-first into the ceiling.
Hey, if Indiana Jones can survive being flung a mile by an atomic bomb inside an old Frigidaire, Tony Stark can survive all that.
I wonder if this is related to migraine, which can be triggered by similar events as those raising blood pressure
Oh, that's an interesting idea! Mod up.
I think it's more likely that the pirates will become the functional government. They seem to be in a good position to do so. They've got manpower, weapons, cash, people are flocking to their banners, and they're getting very very organized.