Despite its popularity, few know that JavaScript is a very nice dynamic object-oriented general-purpose programming language. How can this be a secret? Why is this language so misunderstood?...
JavaScript's C-like syntax, including curly braces and the clunky for statement, makes it appear to be an ordinary procedural language. This is misleading because JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp or Scheme than with C or Java. It has arrays instead of lists and objects instead of property lists. Functions are first class. It has closures. You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens....
It also has some speculation on why the language is typecast in the manner it often is, some of the design errors, bad implementations / books / standards, and the amateur JavaScript-hugging non-programmers putting shiny things together for their webpage.
So, skimming the Google AJAX Search API example code pages, it looks like a big part of this is to attach Google's name and image to everything your web page or web app does with the data Google provides. Does that seem to anyone else like a fair assessment? If so, is it a fair practice?
Well, since Google is the one who aggregated it in the first place... and is paying for the processing power and bandwidth requirements that go along with that... what's unfair about the practice? (It's not like they're really preventing one from giving you similar data, or somehow stealing away value from any of the sites they've indexed, or...)
It needn't even be "non-AJAX". There are plenty of other possibilities for a web service API besides SOAP. The one I'm particularly well-acquainted with, and perhaps the biggest contender out there, is REST (REpresentational State Transfer). In particular, I recall one web developer howto-type site speaking about Amazon's SOAP-related services, and how most people don't use them, because they're an order of magnitude slower than most REST services.
You joke, of course, of course, but there are tools out there to detect when a bot is abusing your site and not following robots.txt. The usual technique is to hide a few links in your page, and also have these links blocked by robots.txt. When a user visits the link, they're banned from viewing the site. (Sometimes, a CAPTCHA-like utility for unblocking yourself is presented along with the 403 page, in the event that a particularly curious user manages to find the link and activate it manually.)
You're absolutely right that "if you don't want it on the public Web, don't put it there in the first place" -- but there are still times when you have a legitimate reason that you don't want a page indexed, downloaded, or otherwise visited by a robot. Dynamically generated content is one example reason; sometimes certain pages can be a big drain on your website, and you'd prefer not to have every spider in the world hitting them up every few minutes.
Let's take a fun legitimate site like, oh... Wikipedia:
# Folks get annoyed when VfD discussions end up the number 1 google hit for # their name. See bugzilla bug #4776 # en: Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/ Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_deletion/ Disallow :/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/ Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia%3AVotes_for_deletion/ Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia:Pages_for_deletion/ Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia%3APages_for_deletion/ Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/ Disallow :/wiki/Wikipedia%3AMiscellany_for_deletion/ Disall ow:/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellaneous_deletion/ Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia%3AMiscellaneous_deletion/ Disallo w:/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems Disallow:/wiki/Wikipedia%3ACopyright_problems
(They also disallow certain specially generated pages like Special:Random, and any of the pages which actually let you edit the site).
Nope. Neither does light does not move faster than the speed of light, just phase groups. These crests and troughs of the light are features of the wave, but not any sort of signal or material in and of themselves. It's just an abstraction. Think of it this way: if you had two people a light-year apart, and they both raised their hands into the air at the same time to do The Wave, would you say that they sent a signal faster than the speed of light? If you had a one-light-year-long string of lights, and you rigged them all so they turned on at the exact same moment (presumably using some sort of countdown), would you say they've sent a signal faster than the speed of light? (Have you, in fact, sent a signal with infinite speed?) No, you haven't. You've gotten an abstraction to move faster than the speed of light, but that's not really very interesting for physics.
Don't we wail about Newbies everywhere else? There could be a side benefit that only certain people "get it" and stay.
A benefit to you, perhaps, but a benefit to Linden Labs, who would like to make some $$$ off these people? A benefit to companies who might want to set up a "virtual presence" in Second Life somewhere? Maybe, but probably not.
For someone who just wants to experience things, unless you're incredibly social, you won't last in SL. For the creative types there's more of a stick.
The real question isn't whether or not a Second Life user "gets it", it's a question of whether those who "get it" are numerous and interesting enough for real-world companies to consider a Second Life presence... or for Linden Labs will be able to remain financially solvent. I have more doubts about these issues.
many things in life acquire a logic explanation using this axiom: banks want your property, bureaucracy wants your time.
WTF does a bank want with my property? Don't let's be silly. Banks want your money, not your property. They are, in fact, willing to pay you for your money (this is called "interest" on your savings account or CD). They're also willing to sell you money, at a slight markup, so as to obtain more money; this is known as a "loan".
But your property? If you've got a foreclosure on your mortgage, the bank isn't going to be too happy about it. They don't want this big old lump of property sitting around- a house that needs maintenance, property taxes to pay, stuff like that - and it isn't earning them that much income just sitting there. A loan, now, that earns them income. So how are they going to turn property into money? They're probably going to sell it for a sizeable amount less than its market value, and get back some of their money so they can loan it out again.
64-bit is good for the Linux server market... not looking so good for the desktop. You can get an Opteron-powered box for a decent price, all the big distros will support it, and you can usually run some sort of "32-bit compatibility layer" in case you've got some precompiled stuff you need to have work. A few years ago, I was having some problems getting certain programs to work with 64-bit support (Swish-E, specifically) but everything seems to be better now. So you can go ahead and add the 8 gigabytes of RAM to your database server with nothing to fear.
There was a television special once - you know the kind, Discovery Channel or TLC or some such - on some fireworks experts. They were putting together a big display, something like the Washington, DC 4th of July fireworks, to be accompanied with some fancy-schmancy concert. After all the choreography business, and setting up the pyrotechnics, they wired it back to a control panel.
Now, this control panel wasn't actually your typical doohickey with buttons. It had a rows upon rows of exposed metal contacts (little stubs of wire sticking up vertically), and the guy in charge would activate them, one at a time, by touching them to a little hand-held device that I assume was wired up to the ignition current. I think he even had sheet music.
At first I wondered, "how disappointingly low-tech". But consider: you're dealing with pyrotechnics here. If it just takes a little current to ignite the high explosives, then you really don't want to hook everything up to an electrical circuit, microcontroller, electronics, any of that business. You keep the circuit open, until you're ready to close it. And if something goes terribly wrong, you really, really don't want anything to keep igniting rockets until you push a button to turn it off. You want to be able to just stop.
In summary, hands-free control is just not the way to go when dealing with pyrotechnics.
On that topic, it also has to do whether you're from a Protestant tradition that subscribes to a doctrine of "sola scriptura" (i.e. the Bible is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth). Catholics, the Orthodox churches, and a subset of Protestants do not, and temper their understanding of Truth with other sources (in particular, for the Catholics and Orthodox, their ~2000 years of tradition, but also some post-Scriptural revelations which are not treated in the same light as the Bible, but nevertheless recognized, including even some modern-era reports of apparitions, particularly of the Blessed Virgin Mary...)
Then there's the question about the old testament Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books, which the Catholics sometimes say the Protestants deliberately left out of the Bible for self-serving purposes (and which the Protestants sometimes say the Catholics left in, or even invented, just to keep people under their thumb), the whole mess about which apparently stems from some issues regarding whether to use the Hebrew books of the old testament (and the Hebrews had their own little reform about the Scriptures regarding which were actually available to them in the original Hebrew, I think it was) or include some of the books that Augustine accepted.
And then, of course, there are fun New Testament apocrypha- the Gnostic gospels, the contents of which figure in The DaVinci Code - though I'm not aware of any major sect which takes them as scripture. And on that note, there's the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who have their own set of books of the Bible (I think they're in a 'testament' of their own, but I'm not entirely sure), an extension that most would find spurious.
(And I'll acknowledge the hate speech coming from certain areas of the Religious Right, but please note that it is possible to be religious and right-wing and nevertheless not part of The Religious Right. thankees.:D)
Legit? As long as it sounds good, I don't much care if you did it on a sitar, a violin, an electric guitar, a hammer dulcimer, a turntable, kazoo, jew's harp, or an electrotheremin.
That said, there's precious little I've heard from "turntable artists" that sounds good. (And as long as we're talking "anything goes in art", I also object to Duchamp's Fountain, and assert that Roy Lichtenstein was a talentless hack!)
Does it really sound like the public is being served by the private media?
Assuming that all you say is true and assigning nothing but the most impeccable validity
and universal utliity to the study in question, I suppose that while your points do indicate
that the public is served by (the news segments of) public media, they do not necessarily
indicate that the public is not served by the private media (which is useful for more than
simply news) or that the public is better served by public media overall than private media
overall, and it makes no mention of the possible effects that private media's existence may
be having on public media (after all, in soviet Russia, there was nothing but public media,
and we saw how well that turned out...)
So, if you're trying to suggest something ridiculous like "private media must end", then I
laugh at you; if you're trying to make a stand for the utility of public media in an age when
many have turned away from it and some might call for it to end, you've done okay; and if
you're just trying to vent about Bush+WMDs, well, I've seen better.
Now, I wonder what sort of relative comparisons one could make between Fox News, CBS, NPR/PBS, and...
some of those high-profile blogs like The Daily Kos. You'd really need to search for a variety
of "misperceptions", though.
Blah, forget that, install a true Star Trek classic: EGATrek. Plot? PLOT? We don't need no stinkin' plot! The Klingons are invading, and it's your job to blow 'em up, in spectacular 16-color 640x350 EGA graphics. THAT'S your Plot. (Just make sure that you get the one with the real names, and not the stupid "Mongols/Vandals" version. This page has a link.)
"I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." -- Al Gore When George W Bush over-represented the factual presentation of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (dealing with the crisis of rising terrorism), and when Congress passed legislation authorizing a variety of potentially intrusive measures (with an efficacy that's debatable, at best), people got upset.
When Gore and others (generally Democrats) play up the threats posed by global warming, and if a Democratic Congress/White House passes excessively restrictive legislation on climate-related matters with questionable efficacy, it's mostly a different set of people who are liable to get upset.
"Before Columbus, everyone knew the world was flat; "
At the time of Columbus it was widely believed that the world was round. The ancient Greeks even calculated the size (to a fair degree of accuracy). It is a myth to suggest that it was widely believed in Europe in 1492 that the earth was flat. In the 20th century, everyone knew that before Columbus, people thought the world was flat.
I don't buy the "crippling economies" argument. Making the changes, whether needed or not, will not destroy the economy it will only force money to change hands.
If the government made everyone put a useless $5000 McBoover device on your exhaust, that's nothing, right? Just money changing hands from people with cars to people who make McBoover devices. It's not like that $5000 could have been put towards anything else that you found useful, like, oh... a new computer, or an HDTV, or that premium organic coffee, or sending your kid to a nicer college, or laser eye surgery so you don't need glasses, or a vacation in Hawaii, or your retirement fund...
When money changes hands, that means different things get done by different people. (Society manufactures McBoover devices instead of computers.)
If we undertake any sort of massive effort to restructure things in an effort to stave off climate change, we are implicitly not expending that effort in order to perform a plethora of other activities which society views as useful. And if climate change is not as big a deal as it's cracked up to be, society has effectively wasted that effort and gained nothing from it.
You called Wikipedia 'wik'. Wik is actually the name of a user on Wikipedia... a banned user, as a matter of fact. (And somewhat controversial in his day.) But even more than that, even when people call it 'Wiki', it's roughly analogous to calling The New York Times 'Newspaper': "Oh, hey, did you see that cool article in Newspaper the other day?" Wiki is a variety of software. There were wikis before Wikipedia.
Appropriate terms for Wikipedia include Wikipedia (but please not WikiPedia - or do you say SlashDot, MicroSoft, ComPuter, and such?), something like "the 'pedia", or possibly "the wiki" (in contexts where it is clear Wikipedia is the one in question - of course, there are thousands of other wikis). And if you're REALLY stressed for typing speed, how about calling it 'WP'?
but to drive 20 miles each way a day to work by yourself in a Ford 'Explosion' SUV ought to be a capital crime.
I realize you're exaggerating, but I'm going to call you on it anyway.
A capital crime. Would you prefer they should lose their head the old-fashioned "capital" way with the executioner, or maybe the guillotine, or perhaps a hanging? Or should they be sent to the electric chair? Ought we be humane and destroy them with a lethal injection? There's probably a lot of them; perhaps we can take a cue from the Germans and construct some gas chambers (oh! haha, a pun!) or dig some mass graves and have some soldiers blast them with machine guns.
I have a list of ways we could do it; we have lots of choices! If you want to have some community involvement in this process, you could have SUV drivers stoned, like some countries with Islamic law do to women who have been raped (those promiscuous sluts!). Anyone want to have them drawn and quartered? Boiled in oil? Keel-hauled? AHA! I think I have it! Crushing by elephant!
Thank you for your two moments of perspective on the matter of 'capital punishment'. We now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting. What were we talking about again - cars?
I'm going to go out on a limb and express a certain level of agreement with the original sentiment, if not the original statement - though a spider is indeed a small animal, things would be a lot more interesting if they were levitating something on the scale of a kitten or puppy - which is sort of what the initial headline seemed to say. Teeny little bugs occupy a different sort of cognitive space from "small animals" for most people. Say "Acoustic levitation works on insects" or "bugs" or "bugs and tiny fish" or something, and people get a better idea of what's happened.
China would kick our ass so hard we wouldn't know what happened, yes, that is even if we use NUKES.
You forgot about the Pacific Ocean. How exactly is this horde supposed to swim the Pacific to get over here to the US to "kick our ass"? Or do you think they'll be launching the rocks like ICBMs?
Even in a more realistic scenario, one of the most glaring problems with China's military is actually getting it to the fight, and with a few well-placed strikes (nuclear or conventional) to their naval forces, the problem would be even worse. (Of course, you can be sure that China is aware of this, and working to counter it...)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since Google is the one who aggregated it in the first place... and is paying for the processing power and bandwidth requirements that go along with that... what's unfair about the practice? (It's not like they're really preventing one from giving you similar data, or somehow stealing away value from any of the sites they've indexed, or...)
It needn't even be "non-AJAX". There are plenty of other possibilities for a web service API besides SOAP. The one I'm particularly well-acquainted with, and perhaps the biggest contender out there, is REST (REpresentational State Transfer). In particular, I recall one web developer howto-type site speaking about Amazon's SOAP-related services, and how most people don't use them, because they're an order of magnitude slower than most REST services.
You joke, of course, of course, but there are tools out there to detect when a bot is abusing your site and not following robots.txt. The usual technique is to hide a few links in your page, and also have these links blocked by robots.txt. When a user visits the link, they're banned from viewing the site. (Sometimes, a CAPTCHA-like utility for unblocking yourself is presented along with the 403 page, in the event that a particularly curious user manages to find the link and activate it manually.)
Let's take a fun legitimate site like, oh... Wikipedia:
(They also disallow certain specially generated pages like Special:Random, and any of the pages which actually let you edit the site).Let's see, what are some other sites? Ooh. Take a look at Slashdot's robots.txt! (disallows a variety of fun pages.) Microsoft's? How about whitehouse.gov? Google?
A benefit to you, perhaps, but a benefit to Linden Labs, who would like to make some $$$ off these people? A benefit to companies who might want to set up a "virtual presence" in Second Life somewhere? Maybe, but probably not.
But your property? If you've got a foreclosure on your mortgage, the bank isn't going to be too happy about it. They don't want this big old lump of property sitting around- a house that needs maintenance, property taxes to pay, stuff like that - and it isn't earning them that much income just sitting there. A loan, now, that earns them income. So how are they going to turn property into money? They're probably going to sell it for a sizeable amount less than its market value, and get back some of their money so they can loan it out again.
64-bit is good for the Linux server market ... not looking so good for the desktop. You can get an Opteron-powered box for a decent price, all the big distros will support it, and you can usually run some sort of "32-bit compatibility layer" in case you've got some precompiled stuff you need to have work. A few years ago, I was having some problems getting certain programs to work with 64-bit support (Swish-E, specifically) but everything seems to be better now. So you can go ahead and add the 8 gigabytes of RAM to your database server with nothing to fear.
There was a television special once - you know the kind, Discovery Channel or TLC or some such - on some fireworks experts. They were putting together a big display, something like the Washington, DC 4th of July fireworks, to be accompanied with some fancy-schmancy concert. After all the choreography business, and setting up the pyrotechnics, they wired it back to a control panel.
Now, this control panel wasn't actually your typical doohickey with buttons. It had a rows upon rows of exposed metal contacts (little stubs of wire sticking up vertically), and the guy in charge would activate them, one at a time, by touching them to a little hand-held device that I assume was wired up to the ignition current. I think he even had sheet music.
At first I wondered, "how disappointingly low-tech". But consider: you're dealing with pyrotechnics here. If it just takes a little current to ignite the high explosives, then you really don't want to hook everything up to an electrical circuit, microcontroller, electronics, any of that business. You keep the circuit open, until you're ready to close it. And if something goes terribly wrong, you really, really don't want anything to keep igniting rockets until you push a button to turn it off. You want to be able to just stop.
In summary, hands-free control is just not the way to go when dealing with pyrotechnics.
Then there's the question about the old testament Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books, which the Catholics sometimes say the Protestants deliberately left out of the Bible for self-serving purposes (and which the Protestants sometimes say the Catholics left in, or even invented, just to keep people under their thumb), the whole mess about which apparently stems from some issues regarding whether to use the Hebrew books of the old testament (and the Hebrews had their own little reform about the Scriptures regarding which were actually available to them in the original Hebrew, I think it was) or include some of the books that Augustine accepted.
And then, of course, there are fun New Testament apocrypha- the Gnostic gospels, the contents of which figure in The DaVinci Code - though I'm not aware of any major sect which takes them as scripture. And on that note, there's the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who have their own set of books of the Bible (I think they're in a 'testament' of their own, but I'm not entirely sure), an extension that most would find spurious.
(And I'll acknowledge the hate speech coming from certain areas of the Religious Right, but please note that it is possible to be religious and right-wing and nevertheless not part of The Religious Right. thankees. :D)
I think it's more like the:
<html><body><h1>HTML page</h1>
<? echo("<p>Hello!</p>"); ?>
<% Response.write("<p>foo</p>"); %>
</body></html>
embedded-code-via-fancy-tag business.
(And, well, so much for logic/presentation separation...)
That said, there's precious little I've heard from "turntable artists" that sounds good. (And as long as we're talking "anything goes in art", I also object to Duchamp's Fountain, and assert that Roy Lichtenstein was a talentless hack!)
So, if you're trying to suggest something ridiculous like "private media must end", then I laugh at you; if you're trying to make a stand for the utility of public media in an age when many have turned away from it and some might call for it to end, you've done okay; and if you're just trying to vent about Bush+WMDs, well, I've seen better.
Now, I wonder what sort of relative comparisons one could make between Fox News, CBS, NPR/PBS, and... some of those high-profile blogs like The Daily Kos. You'd really need to search for a variety of "misperceptions", though.
Blah, forget that, install a true Star Trek classic: EGATrek. Plot? PLOT? We don't need no stinkin' plot! The Klingons are invading, and it's your job to blow 'em up, in spectacular 16-color 640x350 EGA graphics. THAT'S your Plot. (Just make sure that you get the one with the real names, and not the stupid "Mongols/Vandals" version. This page has a link.)
When Gore and others (generally Democrats) play up the threats posed by global warming, and if a Democratic Congress/White House passes excessively restrictive legislation on climate-related matters with questionable efficacy, it's mostly a different set of people who are liable to get upset.
At the time of Columbus it was widely believed that the world was round. The ancient Greeks even calculated the size (to a fair degree of accuracy). It is a myth to suggest that it was widely believed in Europe in 1492 that the earth was flat. In the 20th century, everyone knew that before Columbus, people thought the world was flat.
Oh, the irony.
When money changes hands, that means different things get done by different people. (Society manufactures McBoover devices instead of computers.) If we undertake any sort of massive effort to restructure things in an effort to stave off climate change, we are implicitly not expending that effort in order to perform a plethora of other activities which society views as useful. And if climate change is not as big a deal as it's cracked up to be, society has effectively wasted that effort and gained nothing from it.
Anyway, next thing to do is teach equivalent techniques to PHP programmers. You, too, can learn the wonders of the HTTP specification!
A shooting star is not a star, is not a star at all.
A shooting star's a meteor that's heading for a fall.
A shooting star is not a star, why does it shine so bright?
The friction as it falls through air produces heat and light.
A shooting star, or meteor, whichever name you like.
The minute it comes down to Earth it's called a meteorite.
What is a shooting star? (.mp3)
in Space Songs from Ballads for the age of Science by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer.
Part of the Singing Science collection.
You called Wikipedia 'wik'. Wik is actually the name of a user on Wikipedia... a banned user, as a matter of fact. (And somewhat controversial in his day.) But even more than that, even when people call it 'Wiki', it's roughly analogous to calling The New York Times 'Newspaper': "Oh, hey, did you see that cool article in Newspaper the other day?" Wiki is a variety of software. There were wikis before Wikipedia.
Appropriate terms for Wikipedia include Wikipedia (but please not WikiPedia - or do you say SlashDot, MicroSoft, ComPuter, and such?), something like "the 'pedia", or possibly "the wiki" (in contexts where it is clear Wikipedia is the one in question - of course, there are thousands of other wikis). And if you're REALLY stressed for typing speed, how about calling it 'WP'?
-- grumbling for the day is done.
I realize you're exaggerating, but I'm going to call you on it anyway.
A capital crime. Would you prefer they should lose their head the old-fashioned "capital" way with the executioner, or maybe the guillotine, or perhaps a hanging? Or should they be sent to the electric chair? Ought we be humane and destroy them with a lethal injection? There's probably a lot of them; perhaps we can take a cue from the Germans and construct some gas chambers (oh! haha, a pun!) or dig some mass graves and have some soldiers blast them with machine guns.
I have a list of ways we could do it; we have lots of choices! If you want to have some community involvement in this process, you could have SUV drivers stoned, like some countries with Islamic law do to women who have been raped (those promiscuous sluts!). Anyone want to have them drawn and quartered? Boiled in oil? Keel-hauled? AHA! I think I have it! Crushing by elephant!
Thank you for your two moments of perspective on the matter of 'capital punishment'. We now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting. What were we talking about again - cars?
I'm going to go out on a limb and express a certain level of agreement with the original sentiment, if not the original statement - though a spider is indeed a small animal, things would be a lot more interesting if they were levitating something on the scale of a kitten or puppy - which is sort of what the initial headline seemed to say. Teeny little bugs occupy a different sort of cognitive space from "small animals" for most people. Say "Acoustic levitation works on insects" or "bugs" or "bugs and tiny fish" or something, and people get a better idea of what's happened.
Even in a more realistic scenario, one of the most glaring problems with China's military is actually getting it to the fight, and with a few well-placed strikes (nuclear or conventional) to their naval forces, the problem would be even worse. (Of course, you can be sure that China is aware of this, and working to counter it...)
The Chinese are not Zerglings.