Although surely the Kessler syndrome would be a bigger issue at higher orbits...? Isn't there some atmospheric drag at LEO that means that not even space junk is forever?
Maybe this is a PR exercise so people don't panic when he restarts test flights for Virgin Galactic -- remember, a lot of people felt the loss of two lives was unacceptable because it was in pioneering joy-rides for rich people. If Virgin Galactic's next round of test flights are marketed as "learning how 2 get free interwebz to the wurld!!!" then he won't be in for quite so much criticism. And then any tourist flights will be raising money for said free interwebz.
Well, you can't get global coverage with towers. Those towers would be vulnerable to scrap merchants. The towers would also make local infrastructure companies uncompetitive, and would kill local entrepreneurship, hence the economy.
If Branson genuinely wishes to make life better for people, satellites are a brilliant way of doing it without squelching local economic development. It will get people access to the internet cheaply and relatively easily, but as satellite communications typically suffer horrendous lag, Skype won't be a viable alternative to a mobile phone (en_US: cell phone), and the local infrastructure can continue to develop on the back of voice calls. It also means a reduced bottleneck for the cell phone companies -- in many parts of the world, copper theft is such a problem that the backbone is wireless too, and that means loss of bandwidth. There will also be a market for premium internet services that give better response time than waiting from an answer from heaven. OK, maybe it'll reduce the incentive to develop some of the infrastructure further from urban areas, but there will always be areas that suffer because of that.
At the abstract level, I understand why people have trouble with the idea that whitespace is significant in Python (I'm one of them). But after using it for a few years now, I've realized that if you don't indent your code the same way in Python as you would in any other language anyway, you're almost certainly doing something wrong.
Yes -- if your code in C etc is not indented for human readability, then it is open to misinterpretation. This is true.
On a conceptual level, Python's whitespace is a mess, though, because it breaks code encapsulation. Consider this:
In C, each block knows nothing about its nesting level. It is a block: it knows its namespace, and it knows its contents. It does not need to know anything more than this, so we don't tell it anything more than this.
With sematic whitespace, however, the level of nesting of blocks is made explicit, and therefore the code knows about the outside environment.
The problem with this becomes apparent when copying and pasting code, as you probably aren't pasting at the same level.
But OK, Python doesn't actually explicitly state the nesting level, as a level is at least two spaces or one tab, but can in theory be as long as you like. So the code doesn't actually know its nesting level after all -- it only has knowledge of the maximum depth that it might be nested at. It's not one thing or the other, and it's clearly a hack to sort the cut-and-paste problem, on the assumption that the most sensible use of cut-and-paste in coding is abstracting from in-line code to procedures (and hence should always result in a drop in nesting depth, hence the superfluous spacing being OK).
But here's the thing... do we really need plaintext editors at all? Who among us doesn't use at the very least an editor with syntax highlighting? So why having leading whitespace characters in code at all? Tracking code nesting is a trivially easy problem, so why not let the computer do it for you? Whenever I say this, people object to being tied to specific editors, but it's such a tiny detail that you could add it into a well-written code editor in no time at all, and it's so lightweight you could even add it to vi to run on embedded systems with negligible impact on the memory footprint.
And what's with Uber claiming to be an app company? That's like Microsoft claiming to be a hardware company - while true, it's but just a small part of their business unless Uber the App company is a separated entity from Uber the transportation provider.
It's along the same lines as YouTube claiming to be a dumb channel in order to get safe harbour protections. Truth doesn't come into it.
Exactly. It's a bribe. It's not hugely valuable data (the city could get almost as much useful data from taxi firms really) but because the city officials don't really understand magical mystical computers, it seem like some kind of golden egg.
Because despite what one would reasonably expect, most developers are actually shockingly incompetent.
Or rather hacking culture celebrates stupid kludges as creative solutions. Even back in the 1980s, programmers were using "undocumented opcodes" in processors to optimise their programs. These were basically accidental side-effects of design and manufacture that activated combinations of logic used for other opcodes, but as they weren't part of the spec, you couldn't guarantee they weren't going to work on the next version.
"Always still to the API" is boring, but the only way to get yourself some degree of future-proofing.
It isn't stupid to believe what you see. If you're tripping and you don't know you're tripping, it seems extreeeeeeeemely real. Heck, when I was about 10 or 12, I had a dream where my Action Man was alive. It was so real that the next day I was convinced it was true, even though I was really old enough to know better...
Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet; you are a plague and we are the cure."
That may be true of modern, technologically advanced humans. Those humans that have lived in primitive tribes for hundreds/thousands of years haven't harmed the environment much.
Which is why there are still ancient megaherbivores on aboriginal lands in Australia, right? Or by "modern, technologically advanced humans" do you mean any people who can built boats?
Anti-Semitism is racism. That is unacceptable.
Anti-Religious sentiments are critical of a mode of thought, so acceptable.
'Muslim' is not a race. 'Jew' is used as a racial epithet, even though it is also a description of people who follow the Jewish faith.
Anti-Semitism is in a great many ways a misnomer, and a label of convenience. "The heinous thought crime" Maurice Sinet committed was to comment that Jean Sarkozy was planning to convert to Judaism in order to marry a millionaire heiress, and follow up with what translates as "he'll go far in life, that lad". People read into that that all sorts, including the suggestion that the French business world was controlled by Jews. What I read into that is the suggestion that Sarkozy was willing to compromise his beliefs (or even lie about them -- some people convert for appearances' sake only) in order to get what he wants.
Now even if you do read anti-Semitism into that, is there any justification for calling it racism in this instance? Clearly Jean Sarkozy was never going to undergo gene therapy in order to become a member of the Jewish "race". Maurice Sinet cannot, therefore, have been legitimately accused of racism.
Furthermore, how can "Jewish" be a race when some Jews bear racist attitudes to other Jews? The Sephardim (the North African Jewish people descended mostly from the Iberian Jews exiled at the of the Islamic occupation of Spain) are subject to prejudice and discrimination in Israel.
Many other things that are decried as "anti-Semitic" are political commentary in opposition to the actions of the State of Israel. What makes this even more ridiculous is that many of the worst actions that Israel commits are targeted at a semitic people who speak a semitic language. How is it anti-Semitic for me to raise my voice in support of the Palestinians?
The label "anti-Semitism" blends and confuses all these things -- race, religion and politics -- so that the religion and the politics can misappropriate the protection that we rightly give racial minorities.
...he was shouted down for anti-semitism, and there was a huge cry for apologies.
Yeah? But, who died as a result? Where was the slaughter?
There's a bug fucking difference -- you're just too obtuse to acknowledge it.
When little Johnny calls little Terry a "son-of-a-bitch" in the playground, and Terry beats him up for it, they both get called in to the headmaster's office. Terry says "he started it", and the teacher tells him that's no excuse for that sort of behaviour. But Johnny gets in trouble too, because you can't justify an insult by the reaction you get after the fact.
The same goes here, but even more so. You cannot say that the act of insulting Muslims is justified by the fact that a tiny minority of Muslims react violently.
Moving on...
Look at the thread history, and you'll see that I was responding to a claim that Islam is uniquely off-limits, and I was trying to demonstrate that this was not the case. One of the reasons the reaction to perceived slights against Islam is so strong is that some sections of the western press are persistent in repeating the insults and totally unrepentant about the offence caused.
This is completely the opposite of any perceived slights against Israel and/or Judaism, where apologies are immediate and jobs are often lost. Repentance is total.
My point is that Islam is not off-limits, and it is far more socially acceptable to criticise Muslims publically than Jews.
Mockery and criticism are different things. There is a lot of criticism of Islam in the press. That's par for the course. Mockery is a dangerous tool, and better avoided than used. CH's last round of Muhammad pictures were "satirising" the offence caused by a delibarate troll (the Innocence of Muslims trailer) by... offending.
Freedom to practice your chosen religion was one of the most fundamental principles of the US constitution. The US is a secular state not because the founding fathers were atheists (they weren't) but because they recognised that religious bigotry and intolerance was the biggest threat to the unity of the country (outside of being re-invaded by the King's forces).
As others have said, Islam is criticised more than any other religion (even Scientology!). Islam is insulted more than any other religion. When Gerald Scarfe, the artist behind the award-winning artwork to Pink Floyd's The Wall, drew a cartoon depicting Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall on the bodies of Palestinians, he was shouted down for anti-semitism, and there was a huge cry for apologies. Don't go trying to claim Muslims are getting better treatment than others.
Political protest isn't limited? Do you know how many restrictions have been applied to the right to assembly and protest so far this century? Do you remember the kettling and brutal assualt of non-protesters who happened to be in the wrong part of London? And then the latest laws banning organised protest groups from any and all public campaigning in the run-up to an election? Or what about recent revelations about undercover police offers being paid to infiltrate peaceful protest groups and attempting to incite them to violent action, while sh*gging women under false pretences? Talk about sleep-walking into a police state....
Slashdot Mirror
Although surely the Kessler syndrome would be a bigger issue at higher orbits...? Isn't there some atmospheric drag at LEO that means that not even space junk is forever?
Maybe this is a PR exercise so people don't panic when he restarts test flights for Virgin Galactic -- remember, a lot of people felt the loss of two lives was unacceptable because it was in pioneering joy-rides for rich people. If Virgin Galactic's next round of test flights are marketed as "learning how 2 get free interwebz to the wurld!!!" then he won't be in for quite so much criticism. And then any tourist flights will be raising money for said free interwebz.
Well, you can't get global coverage with towers. Those towers would be vulnerable to scrap merchants. The towers would also make local infrastructure companies uncompetitive, and would kill local entrepreneurship, hence the economy.
If Branson genuinely wishes to make life better for people, satellites are a brilliant way of doing it without squelching local economic development. It will get people access to the internet cheaply and relatively easily, but as satellite communications typically suffer horrendous lag, Skype won't be a viable alternative to a mobile phone (en_US: cell phone), and the local infrastructure can continue to develop on the back of voice calls. It also means a reduced bottleneck for the cell phone companies -- in many parts of the world, copper theft is such a problem that the backbone is wireless too, and that means loss of bandwidth. There will also be a market for premium internet services that give better response time than waiting from an answer from heaven. OK, maybe it'll reduce the incentive to develop some of the infrastructure further from urban areas, but there will always be areas that suffer because of that.
At the abstract level, I understand why people have trouble with the idea that whitespace is significant in Python (I'm one of them). But after using it for a few years now, I've realized that if you don't indent your code the same way in Python as you would in any other language anyway, you're almost certainly doing something wrong.
Yes -- if your code in C etc is not indented for human readability, then it is open to misinterpretation. This is true.
On a conceptual level, Python's whitespace is a mess, though, because it breaks code encapsulation. Consider this:
In C, each block knows nothing about its nesting level. It is a block: it knows its namespace, and it knows its contents. It does not need to know anything more than this, so we don't tell it anything more than this.
With sematic whitespace, however, the level of nesting of blocks is made explicit, and therefore the code knows about the outside environment.
The problem with this becomes apparent when copying and pasting code, as you probably aren't pasting at the same level.
But OK, Python doesn't actually explicitly state the nesting level, as a level is at least two spaces or one tab, but can in theory be as long as you like. So the code doesn't actually know its nesting level after all -- it only has knowledge of the maximum depth that it might be nested at. It's not one thing or the other, and it's clearly a hack to sort the cut-and-paste problem, on the assumption that the most sensible use of cut-and-paste in coding is abstracting from in-line code to procedures (and hence should always result in a drop in nesting depth, hence the superfluous spacing being OK).
But here's the thing... do we really need plaintext editors at all? Who among us doesn't use at the very least an editor with syntax highlighting? So why having leading whitespace characters in code at all? Tracking code nesting is a trivially easy problem, so why not let the computer do it for you? Whenever I say this, people object to being tied to specific editors, but it's such a tiny detail that you could add it into a well-written code editor in no time at all, and it's so lightweight you could even add it to vi to run on embedded systems with negligible impact on the memory footprint.
Tangerines is itself a racist term as it is often applied indiscriminately to clementines and mandarins. Please rename your society, and your fruit.
They don't have a "right to not be offended" in France. If you don't like it don't go there.
Are you sure...?
And what's with Uber claiming to be an app company? That's like Microsoft claiming to be a hardware company - while true, it's but just a small part of their business unless Uber the App company is a separated entity from Uber the transportation provider.
It's along the same lines as YouTube claiming to be a dumb channel in order to get safe harbour protections. Truth doesn't come into it.
Good point. They should be chasing all the cities Uber targets to make a name for themselves....
Exactly. It's a bribe. It's not hugely valuable data (the city could get almost as much useful data from taxi firms really) but because the city officials don't really understand magical mystical computers, it seem like some kind of golden egg.
Because despite what one would reasonably expect, most developers are actually shockingly incompetent.
Or rather hacking culture celebrates stupid kludges as creative solutions. Even back in the 1980s, programmers were using "undocumented opcodes" in processors to optimise their programs. These were basically accidental side-effects of design and manufacture that activated combinations of logic used for other opcodes, but as they weren't part of the spec, you couldn't guarantee they weren't going to work on the next version.
"Always still to the API" is boring, but the only way to get yourself some degree of future-proofing.
It isn't stupid to believe what you see. If you're tripping and you don't know you're tripping, it seems extreeeeeeeemely real. Heck, when I was about 10 or 12, I had a dream where my Action Man was alive. It was so real that the next day I was convinced it was true, even though I was really old enough to know better...
Actually, these aren't viruses at all, but fragments of exploded Thetan souls....
I hope you're not trying to imply that an orangutang is a monkey. That's wrong, and it's completely racist.
That may be true of modern, technologically advanced humans. Those humans that have lived in primitive tribes for hundreds/thousands of years haven't harmed the environment much.
Which is why there are still ancient megaherbivores on aboriginal lands in Australia, right? Or by "modern, technologically advanced humans" do you mean any people who can built boats?
Indeed. I suspect this specimen is immune to these virsuses.
The bad news is that they skipped 9, which was scheduled to be a good one....
Your "first post" shipped late, much like many of the advertised features of Microsoft operating systems.
Anti-Semitism is racism. That is unacceptable. Anti-Religious sentiments are critical of a mode of thought, so acceptable.
'Muslim' is not a race. 'Jew' is used as a racial epithet, even though it is also a description of people who follow the Jewish faith.
Anti-Semitism is in a great many ways a misnomer, and a label of convenience. "The heinous thought crime" Maurice Sinet committed was to comment that Jean Sarkozy was planning to convert to Judaism in order to marry a millionaire heiress, and follow up with what translates as "he'll go far in life, that lad". People read into that that all sorts, including the suggestion that the French business world was controlled by Jews. What I read into that is the suggestion that Sarkozy was willing to compromise his beliefs (or even lie about them -- some people convert for appearances' sake only) in order to get what he wants.
Now even if you do read anti-Semitism into that, is there any justification for calling it racism in this instance? Clearly Jean Sarkozy was never going to undergo gene therapy in order to become a member of the Jewish "race". Maurice Sinet cannot, therefore, have been legitimately accused of racism.
Furthermore, how can "Jewish" be a race when some Jews bear racist attitudes to other Jews? The Sephardim (the North African Jewish people descended mostly from the Iberian Jews exiled at the of the Islamic occupation of Spain) are subject to prejudice and discrimination in Israel.
Many other things that are decried as "anti-Semitic" are political commentary in opposition to the actions of the State of Israel. What makes this even more ridiculous is that many of the worst actions that Israel commits are targeted at a semitic people who speak a semitic language. How is it anti-Semitic for me to raise my voice in support of the Palestinians?
The label "anti-Semitism" blends and confuses all these things -- race, religion and politics -- so that the religion and the politics can misappropriate the protection that we rightly give racial minorities.
Yeah? But, who died as a result? Where was the slaughter? There's a bug fucking difference -- you're just too obtuse to acknowledge it.
When little Johnny calls little Terry a "son-of-a-bitch" in the playground, and Terry beats him up for it, they both get called in to the headmaster's office. Terry says "he started it", and the teacher tells him that's no excuse for that sort of behaviour. But Johnny gets in trouble too, because you can't justify an insult by the reaction you get after the fact.
The same goes here, but even more so. You cannot say that the act of insulting Muslims is justified by the fact that a tiny minority of Muslims react violently.
Moving on...
Look at the thread history, and you'll see that I was responding to a claim that Islam is uniquely off-limits, and I was trying to demonstrate that this was not the case. One of the reasons the reaction to perceived slights against Islam is so strong is that some sections of the western press are persistent in repeating the insults and totally unrepentant about the offence caused.
This is completely the opposite of any perceived slights against Israel and/or Judaism, where apologies are immediate and jobs are often lost. Repentance is total.
My point is that Islam is not off-limits, and it is far more socially acceptable to criticise Muslims publically than Jews.
Mockery and criticism are different things. There is a lot of criticism of Islam in the press. That's par for the course. Mockery is a dangerous tool, and better avoided than used. CH's last round of Muhammad pictures were "satirising" the offence caused by a delibarate troll (the Innocence of Muslims trailer) by... offending.
Freedom to practice your chosen religion was one of the most fundamental principles of the US constitution. The US is a secular state not because the founding fathers were atheists (they weren't) but because they recognised that religious bigotry and intolerance was the biggest threat to the unity of the country (outside of being re-invaded by the King's forces).
*Sigh*. I look forward to the day when Coursera runs An Introduction to Sarcasm for Americans...
As others have said, Islam is criticised more than any other religion (even Scientology!). Islam is insulted more than any other religion. When Gerald Scarfe, the artist behind the award-winning artwork to Pink Floyd's The Wall, drew a cartoon depicting Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall on the bodies of Palestinians, he was shouted down for anti-semitism, and there was a huge cry for apologies. Don't go trying to claim Muslims are getting better treatment than others.
Political protest isn't limited? Do you know how many restrictions have been applied to the right to assembly and protest so far this century? Do you remember the kettling and brutal assualt of non-protesters who happened to be in the wrong part of London? And then the latest laws banning organised protest groups from any and all public campaigning in the run-up to an election? Or what about recent revelations about undercover police offers being paid to infiltrate peaceful protest groups and attempting to incite them to violent action, while sh*gging women under false pretences? Talk about sleep-walking into a police state....
ac stalking/harassing/libelling... well, look who's talking.