No, it's not. The only way to get oil to explode is to vaporize it, mix it with air in the exact right concentration, and then set it on fire - and forget the movies, a cigarette is not going to do it; your car needs a spark of 20,000+ volts for reliable inginiton, and it's using a near-optimal concentration of fuel vapor, and that's easily-burning gasoline vapor, not crude oil.
OK. Earth is larger than us, but we were able to learn quite a bit about it long before we even discovered all the continents.
We did. There's still a lot we don't know about it, because we don't have other earths to experiment with and compare the results. For example, is global warming caused by human activity, Sun's activity, some natural to Earth cycle, or alien heat rays softening us up for the invasion?
There's no hard requirement 'to be outside' of something.
Yes, there is. How are you going to isolate the influence of various variables if you can't perform different experiments and compare the results?
I hate the formatting language here.
I hate it too, but it's simply easier to tell what is quoted text and what is not if you use blockquote rather than quotes.
That is a question to which an answer will never be found. Never. I'm not being pessimistic, it's simply that to discover the answer, one has to be able to manipulate the system from outside of it. The known universe is 8.79829142 x10^26 meters in diameter. We're about 1.5 x10^0 meters.
And top quark is about 10^-24 meters in width. Yet we can detect and make experiments on it.
Yes, because it's smaller than us, so we can easily look at it from the outside. We can't look at the known universe from the outside, because it would take billions of years to travel outside of it even at the speed of light and ignoring its expansion.
As an agnostic I naively thought I wouldn't have to deal with the debate.
You don't. No one and nothing is forcing you to. You can simply stop reading right here and not deal with it anymore. Or did you mean "have to" as in "I have to correct this fool, because otherwise he wouldn't know of my mental superiority"?
Seriously, why are you posting if you don't want to get involved?
The assumption was that the Christians would continue being Christians, and insisting that their holy book was the right holy book. In which case they would never figure out that the Buddhists were right, and would in fact spend all of eternity in that cycle.
This is an absurd assumption. Either the Christian in question doesn't remember that he used to be a Christian in his past life upon reincarnation, in which case there's no reason why his having once been a Christian would influence his changes of being one again, or he does, in which case he knows he's been reincarnated and will have to do one Hell of a mental cartwheel to still continue believing in Christian doctrine. And even if he did, one would think that, after a few hundred reincarnations, even the worst fundie would start wondering if their God is trying to tell them something.
Of course, this assumes that being a fundamentalist Christian isn't conductive to maintaining a moral standard that's karmically conductive to being reborn in circumstances that lead you to become a fundamentalist Christian again. Whether that's an insult or praise is left as an exercise for the reader.
In fact, as long as there is more than one religion in the world, there are potentially many gods, who, once you die, will send you straight to hell for not believing in them.
Minor nitpick: this potential is completely unaffected by the existence or nonexistence of religion. However, I find it very unlikely that any being could simultaneously be both egomaniacal enough to do such a thing, yet have sufficient self-control to not kill me for calling him3#,;2%NO CARRIER
Would you say that National Socialism had nothing to do with the Holocaust?
Now that you mention it... yes. Nazi Party was a fringe group of nasty people until Hitler was made the leader, and Hitler was an antisemitist and a nasty man long before he encountered Nazi ideology. All the lead nazis were the same: very un-well individuals who were willing to do anything for the sake of power. That they were eventually caught in their own web of lies does not change the fact that they spun it, and thus it reflects their evil, not the other way around.
The Nazi ideology was designed to appeal to German masses and allow them to be controlled. It was simply a tool; it is no more the reason to Holocaust than any other murder weapon is the cause of murder. By the same token, those who adhere to Nazi idology nowadays do so because they find the ideology a good match for their own evil. The ideology didn't make them evil, they were evil first and thus found the ideology appealing.
Nazi ideology, repugnant as it may be, is not to blame for its followers actions. At the absolute worst, it might serve as a convenient excuse for an evil actions, but then agian, any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Erm, I'm a social democrat to the left of most people in Europe.
Then you should know that there are communistic parties in all European countries, and also that they don't go around murdering people in the name of communism.
I didn't say that Stalin and Pol Pot killed people because they were communists, I said they killed people because they were radical communists. This is not nit picking, saying the 9/11 Hijackers killed people because they were radical Islamists is not the same thing as saying they killed people because they were Muslims.
One might draw from this the conclusion that it's the willingness to kill in the name of your belief system that's the problem, not said system itself.
If you want to point out that being radical communists wasn't the only thing that lead Stalin and Pol Pot to kill people, go ahead.
No, I'm saying that communism had absolutely nothing to do with either Stalin or Pol Pot killing people. They simply used it to whip their followers to a frenzy; they may or may not have belief it to be a good economic system themselves.
But if you want to absolve communism entirely of the role the ideology played in some of histories worst excesses I remain to be convinced.
You pointed out yourself that this kind of behaviour is in line with what non-communistic evil people have done. In fact it's in line with what every evil tyrant in human history has done. Communistic dictators are no better or worse than non-communistic ones, so the logical conclusion is that they being communists was irrelevant.
And in any case, either absolving or condemning communism would require quite a bit of anthropomorphization. We don't live in Discworld, you know:).
The question when we assign blame to ideologies is did the ideology lead the the unpleasant actions.
Really? Because, based on my experience, we assign blame to ideologies based on whether we happen to like or dislike said ideology.
Pol Pot and Stalin and so on didn't kill people because they were atheists. They killed people because they were radical communists, and communists need to have a look at their ideology and ask themselves why every time communists get sweeping powers they do such unpleasant things.
This here being a good example of what I mean.
Stalin and Pol Pot didn't kill people because they were atheists, and they didn't kill people because they were communists. They killed people because they were evil, power-hungry dictators, and killing people both helped them cement their power and an opportunity to use it. However, you dislike communism, so you're trying to attribute their evil to their communistic political leaning; you don't dislike atheism, so you don't try to attribute their evil to their atheist tendencies. A religious person would likely attribute it to their atheism.
There have been numerous left-leaning governments who came to power in a peacful and democratic way and continued to conduct in such a way. There have also been numerous revolutionaries who came to power through a bloody civil war and continued bloodletting it once they seized power; some of these tyrants are left- and some right-leaning.
The thing is, you can't just refuse to give a hungry child food...
Why not?
Because if there are starving people around and you have excess resources, the rest of us will force you to share, at gunpoint if necessary. And you will post a bitter libertarian rant about how your precious property rights have been violated by taxes, rather than feed the wolves in the forest after being kicked out of your tribe, like your kind were dealth with in past times.
..AT&T...YOU are harmful and contrary to the fundamental principles of Capitalism!
The Principle of Capitalism: use the money you have to make more.
That capitalists might voluntarily limit themselves to moral or even legal ways is simply a myth invented by the likes of Rand and then perpetrated by the robber barons who's image it helps improve. Comcast, Enron and BP are the true face of Capitalism, and the faster you understand that the faster we can make the huge corrective turn towards left we should had done a long time ago. Otherwise, watch things get worse as the pack of wolves deregulation has unleashed keeps on tearing the society apart.
This map at first glance appears to be decidedly western individuals only.
Well, perhaps you might list some important non-Western scientists from the last 500 years which the map covers who are missing from it, so that they might be added in?
After all, how long do you think it would take for George W Bush, given a microphone, a recorder, and no prompt, to say something so stupid that it would alienate his supporters? I give it less than a day.
8 years wasn't enough to alienate some of his supporters. 4 years wasn't enough to alienate enough of them to keep him from continuing his disastrous presidency for 4 years further. Why do you think a day would do so?
Not that any other political group is any better. More and more it seems to me that people simply pick an ideology that appeals to them, then vote for whoever claims to represent that ideology without paying any attention to what he's actually doing. Not that that's a particularly surprising development, given that people already treated politics like a religious argument where anyone who disagrees must do so because they're evil or stupid or both.
Sometimes I wonder if my fellow humans are really sapient beings at all. They often behave as if they completely lacked any ability for insight or self-reflection, and were mere mindless, if clever, sheep. Yes, sheep; so since I'm capable of said meta-mental capaibilities, and they're not, I must be the shepherd and usher in the glorious new age based on my superior principles! Bow down before me as I begin to rule the world!
Memory management is something that can be taught pretty quickly. It boils down to always knowing who owns what, same as the real world.
And just like in real world, what is simple in theory can require volumes of legalese, hordes of lawyers, months of time, and a gun-wielding authority to solve in practice;(.
And that's assuming that the program has been well-defined to start with. Not all of them are, nor can all of them be. Requirements change midway, and maybe what you were doing was experimental to begin with. Maybe the design plan itself was suitably complex for it to be possible for different people to interpret it differently. All of these problems are solvable, but solving them takes time and energy, so why not use a solution that takes care of the problem automatically whenever possible?
they don't do enough of it to make it second nature, but after a while it's like riding a bicycle.
You take off the training wheels, get overconfident, and crash horribly ?-)
Good analogy:).
However, my beef with java isn't with memory allocation, but with the way that the language was dumbed down. Every mathematical operator is overloaded in Java, but coders aren't allowed to do the same.
Operator overloading really isn't feasible unless you add the requirement that every piece of code using a template or other overloadable entity must be recompiled every time said template chances. The alternative might be to solve overloading at runtime, but that of course slows both JIT and interpreter down.
Enums and structs are gone, because programmers can't be trusted with them - make them wrap it in an object and and eliminate bugs (didn't work...)
Newer Java versions have enums.
All these show a disdain for the learning skills of programmers. We're not dummies, and we should be given tools that are MORE, not less, expressive.
I hate to point this out, but the average programmer is a dummy, and even the non-dummy ones still make stupid mistakes. The world is full of buggy programs that bear testament to this. And most of those bugs have to do with memory management, because it is a simple yet tedious task where any mistake or lapse of attention will likely results in a disaster sooner or later.
Like it or not, there is a reason why managed languages are gaining favour.
Frequently-accessed code is optimized. That optimized code is saved - otherwise it would have to be re-interpreted. Where do you think it saves it - in Neverland? You might not call it a cache - yuo may prefer the term lookup table, or whatever.
So, do you call the executable file a C++ compiler spits out a cache? What if you run it before it has a chance to leave the disk cache?
A smarter way to do it would be to replace the un-optimized code directly, but that would lead to problems with size when the optimized version doesn't fit in the same space.
Is there a point in storing raw bytecode sequentially? It would make more sense to keep it in a tree - storing each function as a separate leaf, for example - and replace them one by one as the compilation proceeds. In fact, you could keep both the original bytecode and the new compiled version in separate leaves.
Want to try it without a cache?
Want to explain what any of this has to do with your earlier statement:
However, this also often prevents your code from fitting into the L1 cache, so it's going to run slower. After all, the JIT still has to do a lookup into it's own opcode cache each time.
JIT stores the machine code it produces in a continuous memory region, just as if it had been pre-compiled into a file and loaded from there. The only way your statement makes any sense is if you don't understand this, and are imagining some kind of hashtable with virtual machine opcodes as keys and native code snippets as values.
However, your real beef with Java seems to be that it allows normal people to write programs, rather than requiring Manly Men Manually Managing Memory. Oh, and you also think that pointer arithmetic makes algorithms fundamentally different. Troll on, bro:).
If they don't work in IT, they only need to learn how to use a mouse and keyboard.
Bullshit. Like it or not, computers are everywhere, and will only become more ubiquitous in the future. Programming is th art of making them do what you want; if you can program, you can make them obey you, if you can't, you can't. Therefore you should learn to program, whether or not you plan on being a professional programmer. Otherwise you'll be helpless and at the mercy of those who can.
Did you not realize that BASIC qualifies as 'low level' under your definition of direct memory referencing I guess its PEEK and POKE for the win, eh?
BASIC is low level. The original linenumber-BASIC with GOTO as flow control is pretty much exact fit to assembly with some command renames (GOTO rather than jmp, etc).
I know that the JIT caches native opcodes. However, this also often prevents your code from fitting into the L1 cache, so it's going to run slower. After all, the JIT still has to do a lookup into it's own opcode cache each time. It's not magic pixie dust.
This is complete rubbish, you know. JIT means that the runtime environment includes a compiler, which complaisn the program to machine code as it is being run. This has disadvantages - the compiler naturally takes some time to run, and increases runtime size - and advantages: the JIT compiler can inline library routines, and profile and recompile performance-critical parts of the program as it's being run. However, the resulting compiled program is no different than if the compilation had been done beforehand; the machine code is simply never saved to a disk.
So no, JIT - of Java or anything else - doesn't cache native opcodes, it compiles parts of the program into native code that can be run without emulation, just like any other compiler. And JIT pretty much is magical pixie dust:). Seriously, try running something like pcsx2 (Playstation 2 emulator) on a modern PC and turning JIT on and off.
And, like an incomplete antibiotics therapy, it gives the botnet's herder a clue -- that he needs to move to more resilient techniques instead of relying on fixed, easy to remove, servers.
So... why do they? Wouldn't it make more sense to make the whole thing entirely decentralized, with each bot keeping the addresses of a dozen or so other bots, and broadcasting any incoming commands (that pass the signature check, of course) to them? The bot herder simply runs a bot in his own machine, and injects any commands he wants to.
You could even embed commands in spam itself, and have bots monitor incoming e-mail for them. And naturally bot-to-bot communication would need to randomly include an address of a bot you're connected to, to keep the network from degrading. Initial join of new bot nodes could happen either through those spam messages, or, if the bot directly infects another machine, by simply contacting the other botnode.
Botnet authors need to start taking more pride in their work, rather than using the easy but fragile solutions out of laziness.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not. The only way to get oil to explode is to vaporize it, mix it with air in the exact right concentration, and then set it on fire - and forget the movies, a cigarette is not going to do it; your car needs a spark of 20,000+ volts for reliable inginiton, and it's using a near-optimal concentration of fuel vapor, and that's easily-burning gasoline vapor, not crude oil.
Something is very wrong here.
We did. There's still a lot we don't know about it, because we don't have other earths to experiment with and compare the results. For example, is global warming caused by human activity, Sun's activity, some natural to Earth cycle, or alien heat rays softening us up for the invasion?
Yes, there is. How are you going to isolate the influence of various variables if you can't perform different experiments and compare the results?
I hate it too, but it's simply easier to tell what is quoted text and what is not if you use blockquote rather than quotes.
Yes, because it's smaller than us, so we can easily look at it from the outside. We can't look at the known universe from the outside, because it would take billions of years to travel outside of it even at the speed of light and ignoring its expansion.
Also, learn to use blockquote.
You don't. No one and nothing is forcing you to. You can simply stop reading right here and not deal with it anymore. Or did you mean "have to" as in "I have to correct this fool, because otherwise he wouldn't know of my mental superiority"?
Seriously, why are you posting if you don't want to get involved?
This is an absurd assumption. Either the Christian in question doesn't remember that he used to be a Christian in his past life upon reincarnation, in which case there's no reason why his having once been a Christian would influence his changes of being one again, or he does, in which case he knows he's been reincarnated and will have to do one Hell of a mental cartwheel to still continue believing in Christian doctrine. And even if he did, one would think that, after a few hundred reincarnations, even the worst fundie would start wondering if their God is trying to tell them something.
Of course, this assumes that being a fundamentalist Christian isn't conductive to maintaining a moral standard that's karmically conductive to being reborn in circumstances that lead you to become a fundamentalist Christian again. Whether that's an insult or praise is left as an exercise for the reader.
Neither will anyone else. Never has, never will. Perhaps you misspelled vodka?
Hey, this entire article is about an epic troll by Hawkings, so :)...
Minor nitpick: this potential is completely unaffected by the existence or nonexistence of religion. However, I find it very unlikely that any being could simultaneously be both egomaniacal enough to do such a thing, yet have sufficient self-control to not kill me for calling him3#,;2%NO CARRIER
Now that you mention it... yes. Nazi Party was a fringe group of nasty people until Hitler was made the leader, and Hitler was an antisemitist and a nasty man long before he encountered Nazi ideology. All the lead nazis were the same: very un-well individuals who were willing to do anything for the sake of power. That they were eventually caught in their own web of lies does not change the fact that they spun it, and thus it reflects their evil, not the other way around.
The Nazi ideology was designed to appeal to German masses and allow them to be controlled. It was simply a tool; it is no more the reason to Holocaust than any other murder weapon is the cause of murder. By the same token, those who adhere to Nazi idology nowadays do so because they find the ideology a good match for their own evil. The ideology didn't make them evil, they were evil first and thus found the ideology appealing.
Nazi ideology, repugnant as it may be, is not to blame for its followers actions. At the absolute worst, it might serve as a convenient excuse for an evil actions, but then agian, any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Then you should know that there are communistic parties in all European countries, and also that they don't go around murdering people in the name of communism.
One might draw from this the conclusion that it's the willingness to kill in the name of your belief system that's the problem, not said system itself.
No, I'm saying that communism had absolutely nothing to do with either Stalin or Pol Pot killing people. They simply used it to whip their followers to a frenzy; they may or may not have belief it to be a good economic system themselves.
You pointed out yourself that this kind of behaviour is in line with what non-communistic evil people have done. In fact it's in line with what every evil tyrant in human history has done. Communistic dictators are no better or worse than non-communistic ones, so the logical conclusion is that they being communists was irrelevant.
And in any case, either absolving or condemning communism would require quite a bit of anthropomorphization. We don't live in Discworld, you know :).
Really? Because, based on my experience, we assign blame to ideologies based on whether we happen to like or dislike said ideology.
This here being a good example of what I mean.
Stalin and Pol Pot didn't kill people because they were atheists, and they didn't kill people because they were communists. They killed people because they were evil, power-hungry dictators, and killing people both helped them cement their power and an opportunity to use it. However, you dislike communism, so you're trying to attribute their evil to their communistic political leaning; you don't dislike atheism, so you don't try to attribute their evil to their atheist tendencies. A religious person would likely attribute it to their atheism.
There have been numerous left-leaning governments who came to power in a peacful and democratic way and continued to conduct in such a way. There have also been numerous revolutionaries who came to power through a bloody civil war and continued bloodletting it once they seized power; some of these tyrants are left- and some right-leaning.
Because if there are starving people around and you have excess resources, the rest of us will force you to share, at gunpoint if necessary. And you will post a bitter libertarian rant about how your precious property rights have been violated by taxes, rather than feed the wolves in the forest after being kicked out of your tribe, like your kind were dealth with in past times.
Damn psycho.
The Principle of Capitalism: use the money you have to make more.
That capitalists might voluntarily limit themselves to moral or even legal ways is simply a myth invented by the likes of Rand and then perpetrated by the robber barons who's image it helps improve. Comcast, Enron and BP are the true face of Capitalism, and the faster you understand that the faster we can make the huge corrective turn towards left we should had done a long time ago. Otherwise, watch things get worse as the pack of wolves deregulation has unleashed keeps on tearing the society apart.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
Nah, the real message is: "SVG, learn to love it."
Seriously, what kind of moron uses a bitmap for something like this?
Who is arguing it? Have they showed any evidence that she had significant - or any - influence?
Well, perhaps you might list some important non-Western scientists from the last 500 years which the map covers who are missing from it, so that they might be added in?
Besides, as a quick test, at least Jagadish Chandra Bose, Andrey Kolmogorov and Min Chueh Chang seem to have made it in.
8 years wasn't enough to alienate some of his supporters. 4 years wasn't enough to alienate enough of them to keep him from continuing his disastrous presidency for 4 years further. Why do you think a day would do so?
Not that any other political group is any better. More and more it seems to me that people simply pick an ideology that appeals to them, then vote for whoever claims to represent that ideology without paying any attention to what he's actually doing. Not that that's a particularly surprising development, given that people already treated politics like a religious argument where anyone who disagrees must do so because they're evil or stupid or both.
Sometimes I wonder if my fellow humans are really sapient beings at all. They often behave as if they completely lacked any ability for insight or self-reflection, and were mere mindless, if clever, sheep. Yes, sheep; so since I'm capable of said meta-mental capaibilities, and they're not, I must be the shepherd and usher in the glorious new age based on my superior principles! Bow down before me as I begin to rule the world!
...What?
Because they have nice kneecaps, and don't want anything bad to happen to them?
And just like in real world, what is simple in theory can require volumes of legalese, hordes of lawyers, months of time, and a gun-wielding authority to solve in practice ;(.
And that's assuming that the program has been well-defined to start with. Not all of them are, nor can all of them be. Requirements change midway, and maybe what you were doing was experimental to begin with. Maybe the design plan itself was suitably complex for it to be possible for different people to interpret it differently. All of these problems are solvable, but solving them takes time and energy, so why not use a solution that takes care of the problem automatically whenever possible?
You take off the training wheels, get overconfident, and crash horribly ?-)
Good analogy :).
Operator overloading really isn't feasible unless you add the requirement that every piece of code using a template or other overloadable entity must be recompiled every time said template chances. The alternative might be to solve overloading at runtime, but that of course slows both JIT and interpreter down.
Newer Java versions have enums.
I hate to point this out, but the average programmer is a dummy, and even the non-dummy ones still make stupid mistakes. The world is full of buggy programs that bear testament to this. And most of those bugs have to do with memory management, because it is a simple yet tedious task where any mistake or lapse of attention will likely results in a disaster sooner or later.
Like it or not, there is a reason why managed languages are gaining favour.
So, do you call the executable file a C++ compiler spits out a cache? What if you run it before it has a chance to leave the disk cache?
Is there a point in storing raw bytecode sequentially? It would make more sense to keep it in a tree - storing each function as a separate leaf, for example - and replace them one by one as the compilation proceeds. In fact, you could keep both the original bytecode and the new compiled version in separate leaves.
Want to explain what any of this has to do with your earlier statement:
JIT stores the machine code it produces in a continuous memory region, just as if it had been pre-compiled into a file and loaded from there. The only way your statement makes any sense is if you don't understand this, and are imagining some kind of hashtable with virtual machine opcodes as keys and native code snippets as values.
However, your real beef with Java seems to be that it allows normal people to write programs, rather than requiring Manly Men Manually Managing Memory. Oh, and you also think that pointer arithmetic makes algorithms fundamentally different. Troll on, bro :).
Bullshit. Like it or not, computers are everywhere, and will only become more ubiquitous in the future. Programming is th art of making them do what you want; if you can program, you can make them obey you, if you can't, you can't. Therefore you should learn to program, whether or not you plan on being a professional programmer. Otherwise you'll be helpless and at the mercy of those who can.
How do you suggest I backup a 1.5 terabyte hard drive?
BASIC is low level. The original linenumber-BASIC with GOTO as flow control is pretty much exact fit to assembly with some command renames (GOTO rather than jmp, etc).
This is complete rubbish, you know. JIT means that the runtime environment includes a compiler, which complaisn the program to machine code as it is being run. This has disadvantages - the compiler naturally takes some time to run, and increases runtime size - and advantages: the JIT compiler can inline library routines, and profile and recompile performance-critical parts of the program as it's being run. However, the resulting compiled program is no different than if the compilation had been done beforehand; the machine code is simply never saved to a disk.
So no, JIT - of Java or anything else - doesn't cache native opcodes, it compiles parts of the program into native code that can be run without emulation, just like any other compiler. And JIT pretty much is magical pixie dust :). Seriously, try running something like pcsx2 (Playstation 2 emulator) on a modern PC and turning JIT on and off.
So... why do they? Wouldn't it make more sense to make the whole thing entirely decentralized, with each bot keeping the addresses of a dozen or so other bots, and broadcasting any incoming commands (that pass the signature check, of course) to them? The bot herder simply runs a bot in his own machine, and injects any commands he wants to.
You could even embed commands in spam itself, and have bots monitor incoming e-mail for them. And naturally bot-to-bot communication would need to randomly include an address of a bot you're connected to, to keep the network from degrading. Initial join of new bot nodes could happen either through those spam messages, or, if the bot directly infects another machine, by simply contacting the other botnode.
Botnet authors need to start taking more pride in their work, rather than using the easy but fragile solutions out of laziness.