One thing about developing a bad reputation like this is that afterward you are completely dependent on the charity of others to help sort it out. That's the way it should be. If you see someone else doing the exact opposite of what you did, there is some hope that you might understand the consequences of your own actions repent from them. Of course, finding someone in the position to help you out, with the heart to do so, can be really tough. I don't like they idea that we should atomically give people a second change once they've done something like this. I feel like they will look back and draw the wrong conclusion, then they will end up repeating their offense for sure. You see this a lot when a spouse is unfaithful and the other graciously forgives them.
On the other hand, if we didn't waste so much on fancy houses and nice cars and things like that, there might be more room for the kind of loving charity that really could have made a difference here (although he was living on a friends couch, so he was already better off than many who do not turn to crime, in terms of material wealth).
Butler served an 18-month prison term for the crime and fell on hard times after his 2002 release, he said in a sentencing memorandum filed Thursday. "I was homeless, staying on a friends couch. I couldn't get work," he wrote. In desperation, he turned again to cybercrime."
Well yeah, that makes sense, seeing as it worked so well the first time. ..
This complaint always bugs me. Why? People can't multitask! So the only things you could possibly want multi-tasking for is things that can run in the background, like downloading files and playing music. But wait! The iPhone can do those things in the background. So what is the complaint? This is a completely linguistic argument left over from the days when not being able to switch back and fourth between programs was a significant burden. But these leftover memes from yesteryear are not relevant on the operating systems and hardware that exist today.
Also, I have a huge problem with people saying that the iPad will be locked down and "DRM riddled". No one has said that the iPad will be locked down, and there is no reason to believe that you won't be able to install whatever you want on it. Even if that were the case, it's not like it's hard to unlock an iPhone, so this is not a serious impairment to anyone who knows what they are doing (and I would submit that someone who is not knowledgeable enough to jail-break and unlock an iPhone should also probably not be installing their own linux variant on the device).
I don't know what you mean when you say it's underpowered, because it seems like it's perfectly capable of doing everything Apple says it can do. So the correct word may be correctly powered. It doesn't make sense to make a device as powerful as possible when another chip may consume less power and be cheaper to include. You wouldn't call a sub-compact underpowered simply because it lacks a 6 liter engine, would you?
From a documentation standpoint, I have never found descriptive variable names to be good enough. The problem is that while the programmer may have a good idea what he means when we chooses a name, and indeed that name may make a lot of sense if you already have a good understanding of how the code works, someone new who is unfamiliar with the program will not understand it because they do not know how the code works. In the mean time, it's a lot of work to track back through intermediate variables (especially if the code has been reworked a lot) to figure out what they do and where they come from.
As far as debugging goes, I will usually add variables at critical points, and then remove them once the code is working. I don't know if that's any slower, but it works for me.
Not without variables, but without unnecessary ones. For example, someone might write:
int a;
int b;
int c;
int d;
int e;
int f;
int g;
a = dropBox1.Value;
b = dropBox2.Value;
c = dropBox3.Value;
d = dropBox4.Value;
e = a + b;
f = c + d;
g = e * f;
result.Value = g;
The only way to learn the code is to work with it. Simply reading through it won't help, you have to go try to change things and see what works and what doesn't.
The main thing that bothers me when working with other peoples code is the sheer number of variables they use. I tend not to declare a new variable unless it is absolutely necessary (and in object oriented programming variables other than pointers are almost never necessary). It seems like code written this way is easier to read and understand (and significantly smaller). This is slashdot, so there are a lot of other programmers out there. Am I off base here? What do you think about intermediate variables that are not strictly necessary?
Speaking of that, has anyone actually confirmed that the iPad will need to be jail-broken to run apps that aren't from the app store? You know, the reason iPhones need to be jail broken is because they are tied to ATTs network and ATT doesn't want to be bogged down trying to support people who messed up their phones by installing bad software on them. Is there actually any good reason to believe this may be the case for iPad? Apple doesn't lock down their desktop computers.
Once multitouch interfaces begin to replace the archaic desktop metaphor, Apple will be in a much better position to move into the enterprise market since they will be the major company pushing the technology.
That could also be said of Apple's R&D spending. For a company that is in the business of writing software, Microsoft seems to know almost nothing about it.
One observed that “making an AGI capable of doing powerful and creative thinking is probably easier than making one that imitates the many, complex behaviors of a human mind — many of which would actually be hindrances when it comes to creating Nobel-quality science.” He observed “humans tend to have minds that bore easily, wander away from a given mental task, and that care about things such as sexual attraction, all which would probably impede scientific ability, rather that promote it.” To successfully emulate a human, a computer might have to disguise many of its abilities, masquerading as being less intelligent — in certain ways — than it actually was. There is no compelling reason to spend time and money developing this capacity in a computer.
This kind of thinking is one of the major things standing in the way of AGI. The complex behaviors of the human mind are what leads to intelligence, they do not detract from it. Our ability to uncover the previously unknown workings of a system comes from our ability to abstract aspects of unrelated experiences and apply/attempt to apply them to the new situation. This can not be achieved by a single-minded number crunching machine, but instead evolves out of an adaptable human being as he goes about his daily life.
Sexual attraction, and other emotional desires, are what drive humans beings to make scientific advancements, build bridges, grow food. How could that be a hindrance to the process? It drives the process.
Finally, the assertion that an AGI would need to mask it's amazing intellect to pass as human is silly. When was the last time you read a particularly insightful comment and concluded that it was written by a computer? When did you notice that the spelling and punctuation in a comment was too perfect? People see that and they don't think anything of it.
It seems like we don't really know enough about what goes into "intelligence" to make these kind of estimates.
It's not like building a hundred miles of road where you can say "we've completed 50 miles in one year so in another we will be done with the project", not that that produces spot-on estimates either, but at least there is an actual mathematical calculation that goes into the estimate. No one knows what pitfalls will get in the way or what new advancements will be made.
Iran's telecommunications agency announced that it would be suspending Google's email services permanently, saying it would roll out its own national email service.
I think it may be a better to roll out the replacement before blocking Google.
Here is a relevant comment that will help explain the situation.
Predetermined "special" holidays take all the fun out of life. I am much more a fan of spontaneous gestures of kindness and random get-togethers. Expecting things leads to stress and/or disappointment. Being genuinely and pleasantly surprised by things makes me happy.
P.S. I would never dump someone to avoid a holiday, that is cold.
Which claim are you calling bullshit on? It's easy to live on $10,000 (as long as you don't have a car and you live with roommates) and it is certainly easy to pay $25,000 in taxes, as long as you make about $75,000 a year.
I was never under the impression that you were supporting me, that's why I saw fit to contradict you. But this little discussion does fit into the larger discussion. Many people see biased moderation as bullying and want to see Slashdot do something about the problem, but despite the meta-moderation system, many good comments get moderated down by people with opposing viewpoints.
You can imagine that as someone who is not shy to express christian views here on Slashdot, I see my fair share of this. However, because I know how to write well, and I conduct myself politely, my karma is actually excellent. The same is true of my real life. If people go around slandering me or gossiping about me, my spotless reputation discredits them. When people aim to make themselves my enemy, my reasonable nature corrects them.
When I was in Junior High School, I didn't realize this. When a bully would pick on me, I would basically fuck him up, and even if I got beat up in the process other bullies would leave me alone because they thought I was crazy (I am probably crazy). But it was social suicide, be because everyone else thought I was crazy too and people would avoid me. Learning social skills has been a much better solution.
Either way, punishing billies has never been a good solution. If you want to teach them a lesson, you have to do it yourself. The faculty can't always be there to watch your back, and even if they could they rarely hold the students who get bullied in high enough regard to step in and defend them anyway.
Honestly, I couldn't care less what you think of my christian ethics.
Are you seriously trying to use the "climates change through the natural course of events therefor man's activities can not change the climate" argument?
As far as I know there is not scientific evidence discrediting this hypotheses to the point where your comment is justified.
Wow. Mars is getting warmer and there are no men on Mars. Ergo, the full extent of global warming on Earth has nothing to do with man.
Again, that is a hypothesis that a sane individual might put forth to explain the observation. I don't believe that has been discredited either.
Do you or do you not believe that a 3,000 page set of documents written by hundreds of people quoting from thousands of authors and tens of thousands of research papers can be invalidated by a handful of errors?
Yes, finding several major errors makes the entire document suspect. Especially given the amount of time and money that went into it. The errors that have been found are inexcusable.
It doesn't have any launch failures under it's belt, but during one of the launches the second stage cut out early, leaving the satellite in a lower orbit than planned.
By comparison, the entire Delta IV has 11 launches with 1 partial failure (the entire Delta series has 300 launches with a 95% success rate).
In any case the vehicles that NASA has to chose from are the Atlas III with 18/19 successful launches, the Delta IV with 10/11 successful launches, and the Falcon 9 with 0/0 successful launches.
That's nothing, the guys at Myth-busters lit a match by shooting a bullet that just barely grazed the top of it. I'd like to see someone do that shooting from the hip!
I know I'm posting too late for anyone to read my comment, but for what it's worth the USPTO may be saying that they submitter put the papers into the fax machine literally upside-down, so that the USPTO received blank pages. If I received this return fax, that's what I'd assume it means. I used to work in a copy shop, and sometimes people would send us blank faxes so I'd send out a letter similar to this asking them to resend the fax after turning the pages over.
I'm okay with it, this isn't the first time I've been modded down unfairly.
I have to admit, the comments I'm getting from this one truly are baffling. It's like they haven't read my comment. But it's such a short comment. They didn't even bother to pretend to address my comment. They literally just repeated the responses I was criticizing. What do they expect me to say?
Slashdot Mirror
One thing about developing a bad reputation like this is that afterward you are completely dependent on the charity of others to help sort it out. That's the way it should be. If you see someone else doing the exact opposite of what you did, there is some hope that you might understand the consequences of your own actions repent from them. Of course, finding someone in the position to help you out, with the heart to do so, can be really tough. I don't like they idea that we should atomically give people a second change once they've done something like this. I feel like they will look back and draw the wrong conclusion, then they will end up repeating their offense for sure. You see this a lot when a spouse is unfaithful and the other graciously forgives them.
On the other hand, if we didn't waste so much on fancy houses and nice cars and things like that, there might be more room for the kind of loving charity that really could have made a difference here (although he was living on a friends couch, so he was already better off than many who do not turn to crime, in terms of material wealth).
Well yeah, that makes sense, seeing as it worked so well the first time. . .
This complaint always bugs me. Why? People can't multitask! So the only things you could possibly want multi-tasking for is things that can run in the background, like downloading files and playing music. But wait! The iPhone can do those things in the background. So what is the complaint? This is a completely linguistic argument left over from the days when not being able to switch back and fourth between programs was a significant burden. But these leftover memes from yesteryear are not relevant on the operating systems and hardware that exist today.
Also, I have a huge problem with people saying that the iPad will be locked down and "DRM riddled". No one has said that the iPad will be locked down, and there is no reason to believe that you won't be able to install whatever you want on it. Even if that were the case, it's not like it's hard to unlock an iPhone, so this is not a serious impairment to anyone who knows what they are doing (and I would submit that someone who is not knowledgeable enough to jail-break and unlock an iPhone should also probably not be installing their own linux variant on the device).
I don't know what you mean when you say it's underpowered, because it seems like it's perfectly capable of doing everything Apple says it can do. So the correct word may be correctly powered. It doesn't make sense to make a device as powerful as possible when another chip may consume less power and be cheaper to include. You wouldn't call a sub-compact underpowered simply because it lacks a 6 liter engine, would you?
From a documentation standpoint, I have never found descriptive variable names to be good enough. The problem is that while the programmer may have a good idea what he means when we chooses a name, and indeed that name may make a lot of sense if you already have a good understanding of how the code works, someone new who is unfamiliar with the program will not understand it because they do not know how the code works. In the mean time, it's a lot of work to track back through intermediate variables (especially if the code has been reworked a lot) to figure out what they do and where they come from.
As far as debugging goes, I will usually add variables at critical points, and then remove them once the code is working. I don't know if that's any slower, but it works for me.
Not without variables, but without unnecessary ones. For example, someone might write:
int a;
int b;
int c;
int d;
int e;
int f;
int g;
a = dropBox1.Value;
b = dropBox2.Value;
c = dropBox3.Value;
d = dropBox4.Value;
e = a + b;
f = c + d;
g = e * f;
result.Value = g;
While I would write:
result.Value = ( dropBox1.Value + dropBox2.Value ) * ( dropBox3.Value + dropBox4.Value );
I said pointers are variables. . .
That's what "other than" means.
The only way to learn the code is to work with it. Simply reading through it won't help, you have to go try to change things and see what works and what doesn't.
The main thing that bothers me when working with other peoples code is the sheer number of variables they use. I tend not to declare a new variable unless it is absolutely necessary (and in object oriented programming variables other than pointers are almost never necessary). It seems like code written this way is easier to read and understand (and significantly smaller). This is slashdot, so there are a lot of other programmers out there. Am I off base here? What do you think about intermediate variables that are not strictly necessary?
Ever heard of the AppleTV?
Speaking of that, has anyone actually confirmed that the iPad will need to be jail-broken to run apps that aren't from the app store? You know, the reason iPhones need to be jail broken is because they are tied to ATTs network and ATT doesn't want to be bogged down trying to support people who messed up their phones by installing bad software on them. Is there actually any good reason to believe this may be the case for iPad? Apple doesn't lock down their desktop computers.
Once multitouch interfaces begin to replace the archaic desktop metaphor, Apple will be in a much better position to move into the enterprise market since they will be the major company pushing the technology.
That could also be said of Apple's R&D spending. For a company that is in the business of writing software, Microsoft seems to know almost nothing about it.
This kind of thinking is one of the major things standing in the way of AGI. The complex behaviors of the human mind are what leads to intelligence, they do not detract from it. Our ability to uncover the previously unknown workings of a system comes from our ability to abstract aspects of unrelated experiences and apply/attempt to apply them to the new situation. This can not be achieved by a single-minded number crunching machine, but instead evolves out of an adaptable human being as he goes about his daily life.
Sexual attraction, and other emotional desires, are what drive humans beings to make scientific advancements, build bridges, grow food. How could that be a hindrance to the process? It drives the process.
Finally, the assertion that an AGI would need to mask it's amazing intellect to pass as human is silly. When was the last time you read a particularly insightful comment and concluded that it was written by a computer? When did you notice that the spelling and punctuation in a comment was too perfect? People see that and they don't think anything of it.
It seems like we don't really know enough about what goes into "intelligence" to make these kind of estimates.
It's not like building a hundred miles of road where you can say "we've completed 50 miles in one year so in another we will be done with the project", not that that produces spot-on estimates either, but at least there is an actual mathematical calculation that goes into the estimate. No one knows what pitfalls will get in the way or what new advancements will be made.
I think it may be a better to roll out the replacement before blocking Google.
Here is a relevant comment that will help explain the situation.
Predetermined "special" holidays take all the fun out of life. I am much more a fan of spontaneous gestures of kindness and random get-togethers. Expecting things leads to stress and/or disappointment. Being genuinely and pleasantly surprised by things makes me happy.
P.S. I would never dump someone to avoid a holiday, that is cold.
No worries.
Which claim are you calling bullshit on? It's easy to live on $10,000 (as long as you don't have a car and you live with roommates) and it is certainly easy to pay $25,000 in taxes, as long as you make about $75,000 a year.
I was never under the impression that you were supporting me, that's why I saw fit to contradict you. But this little discussion does fit into the larger discussion. Many people see biased moderation as bullying and want to see Slashdot do something about the problem, but despite the meta-moderation system, many good comments get moderated down by people with opposing viewpoints.
You can imagine that as someone who is not shy to express christian views here on Slashdot, I see my fair share of this. However, because I know how to write well, and I conduct myself politely, my karma is actually excellent. The same is true of my real life. If people go around slandering me or gossiping about me, my spotless reputation discredits them. When people aim to make themselves my enemy, my reasonable nature corrects them.
When I was in Junior High School, I didn't realize this. When a bully would pick on me, I would basically fuck him up, and even if I got beat up in the process other bullies would leave me alone because they thought I was crazy (I am probably crazy). But it was social suicide, be because everyone else thought I was crazy too and people would avoid me. Learning social skills has been a much better solution.
Either way, punishing billies has never been a good solution. If you want to teach them a lesson, you have to do it yourself. The faculty can't always be there to watch your back, and even if they could they rarely hold the students who get bullied in high enough regard to step in and defend them anyway.
Honestly, I couldn't care less what you think of my christian ethics.
Good day, Sir.
As far as I know there is not scientific evidence discrediting this hypotheses to the point where your comment is justified.
Again, that is a hypothesis that a sane individual might put forth to explain the observation. I don't believe that has been discredited either.
Yes, finding several major errors makes the entire document suspect. Especially given the amount of time and money that went into it. The errors that have been found are inexcusable.
The correct spelling is "trillions", not "billions".
It doesn't have any launch failures under it's belt, but during one of the launches the second stage cut out early, leaving the satellite in a lower orbit than planned.
By comparison, the entire Delta IV has 11 launches with 1 partial failure (the entire Delta series has 300 launches with a 95% success rate).
In any case the vehicles that NASA has to chose from are the Atlas III with 18/19 successful launches, the Delta IV with 10/11 successful launches, and the Falcon 9 with 0/0 successful launches.
That's nothing, the guys at Myth-busters lit a match by shooting a bullet that just barely grazed the top of it. I'd like to see someone do that shooting from the hip!
I know I'm posting too late for anyone to read my comment, but for what it's worth the USPTO may be saying that they submitter put the papers into the fax machine literally upside-down, so that the USPTO received blank pages. If I received this return fax, that's what I'd assume it means. I used to work in a copy shop, and sometimes people would send us blank faxes so I'd send out a letter similar to this asking them to resend the fax after turning the pages over.
I'm okay with it, this isn't the first time I've been modded down unfairly.
I have to admit, the comments I'm getting from this one truly are baffling. It's like they haven't read my comment. But it's such a short comment. They didn't even bother to pretend to address my comment. They literally just repeated the responses I was criticizing. What do they expect me to say?