Not everyone who believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value)
Huh? Why does NOT having a higher power deprive life of value? And if life has no value intrinsically, then why does a higher power "give" it any value at all?
Their email service was sub-par. They waited until Google innovated an AJAX interface (and then some) to try to innovate on their own, and they failed to create an interface that is as good.
They shut down their Yahoo Photos service, requiring users to move around their photos (or by default, lose them all).
and computer chess does break down to a search problem
Search of what? If you can find a game win/lose, then sure, its a simple search problem. But since the space is too large, you have to have good evaluators.
So it is a combination of a search and game state evaluation problem.
How can you surely know what's there, on any media?
Maybe the guys who burnt the CD thought they were burning clean binaries, but they too compiled their binaries with a compiler binary that they got from somewhere else.
Who says that the original compiler binary they used wasn't tainted and tainted everything from there on?
You could hide a trojan in the compiler, such that it compiles the seemingly innocent programs with trojans inserted.
Then, you could also hide the trojan in the compiler itself, such that when it compiles the innocent-seeming compiler itself, it inserts the trojan-insertion code into it.
Aren't we glad Bush was a great success? The greatest-ever national debt, renewed cold war and Guantanamo Bay.
Clinton dodged the draft? He also had sex with Monica Lewinsky! Those must be the relevant facts, because you seem to be ignoring the economic growth, peace and prosperity that Clinton has brought.
McCain and Palin want to institute the teaching of Creationism in science classes. Palin went to get immunity from witchcraft in a church. McCain admitted that he hasn't even read the 3-page bailout report. McCain also thinks Putin is the president of Germany, that Spain is in south America. McCain finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and lost five jets. McCain's team was until recently still being paid by lobbyists as he speaks against lobbying. McCain is against net neutrality. These candidates are ridiculous.
Obama plans to post all laws on the internet for days before signing them. He plans to get rid of lobbyists. He sounds intelligent. He did not vote for the Iraq war. And the list goes on.
Amazing you can find McCain supporters anywhere, let alone in Slahsdot.
At first, this made the impression that convincing hundreds of people would change the election result. Of course this is not true, because these hundreds are "key" people. You could convince 10,000 people to vote Gore, and Bush still would have been elected.
An interesting thing to compute/measure would be how many more random people had to vote for Gore before he had won the election. That's a more meaningful statistic. Because when you convince someone on the internet to vote, he's a "random" person.
Witness the current crisis, whose root cause is the concentration of power in Washington, D.C.
While that may be true, I have't seen much evidence that points that way. Also, I think there are smart financial experts who disagree with that.
Even if Washington control was a factor, it is definitely too simplistic an analysis to know whether or not Washington intervention is a good idea or not.
While I agree that the Unix security model is very far from ideal, and sudo'ing constantly sucks, there are some differences:
sudo remembers your password for the next 15 minutes, by default and does not ask again
Fewer operations actually require sudo'ing. UAC bothers me about far more things than Ubuntu wants sudo for
UAC is much finer-grained at the UI level, often requiring approval roughly per mouse click, whereas sudo is used to fire up a whole application - within which no approvals are required.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought ST was intentionally separate from IO, so as to allow having a less dangerous realm than IO to do work in. ST work can be wrapped in a pure interface, safely, while IO can't.
Where "cutTree 5" will cut the tree's branches to depth 5. In Python, or various other languages, you'd end up passing some "depth" variable to the recursion itself (in this case, generateGameTree), which would have to be decreased at each call. In a lazy language, the solution remains modular. You can re-use existing components like "cutTree" without having to write them yourself!
Modularity is the basis of programmer productivity, and laziness allows exciting new ways to actually achieve modularity.
Funny you should mention.readlines(), because if you use.xreadlines(), or the newer __iter__(), then you can just as easily treat the file as a potentially infinite list of lines, without worrying about resources, and yet get limited resources used:
for line in file:
This uses lazy-lists, or generators/iterators as they are called in Python. Python supports lazy lists, but Haskell supports lazy data structures in general (such as lazy trees, lazy tuples, etc).
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I don't understand. If god exists, and cares about puny mortals, why does that give them value?
Why does god and his cares have intrinsic value any more than life itself?
Not everyone who believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value)
Huh?
Why does NOT having a higher power deprive life of value?
And if life has no value intrinsically, then why does a higher power "give" it any value at all?
They've been incompetent for many years now.
Their email service was sub-par. They waited until Google innovated an AJAX interface (and then some) to try to innovate on their own, and they failed to create an interface that is as good.
They shut down their Yahoo Photos service, requiring users to move around their photos (or by default, lose them all).
Yahoo sucks.
Humans never make errors, as they are merely made by evolution, from the design up to the operation level.
Blame evolution :-)
In a moving car != driving
A compromised compiler can be maliciously modifying the compilation result of known programs (such as itself, a login program, etc).
But it cannot correctly modify programs in general. For that it would probably need to solve the Halting Problem.
Sounds like the world is richer by a few trains then...
Why is that so bad?
What Python features broke for you between minor releases?
I find it pretty hard to believe any Python user would actually switch to Perl, and stick to it.
You sir, are probably making this story up :-)
and computer chess does break down to a search problem
Search of what? If you can find a game win/lose, then sure, its a simple search problem. But since the space is too large, you have to have good evaluators.
So it is a combination of a search and game state evaluation problem.
How can you surely know what's there, on any media?
Maybe the guys who burnt the CD thought they were burning clean binaries, but they too compiled their binaries with a compiler binary that they got from somewhere else.
Who says that the original compiler binary they used wasn't tainted and tainted everything from there on?
And even then, they are not safe!
You could hide a trojan in the compiler, such that it compiles the seemingly innocent programs with trojans inserted.
Then, you could also hide the trojan in the compiler itself, such that when it compiles the innocent-seeming compiler itself, it inserts the trojan-insertion code into it.
Not really. By digging oil out of the ground, we're moving a huge amount of Carbon up to the surface.
By removing it from the air and storing it, we're merely restoring the situation that existed before oil was dug up.
The ratio seems to be 1 to 40,000.
If you need to plant billions of trees (consider the amount of land required, too...), then you would only need to build 10,000's of these machines.
There is a limited pool of money
The pool of money is limited, but only by the level of debt. NASA could simply burrow some more :-)
Aren't we glad Bush was a great success? The greatest-ever national debt, renewed cold war and Guantanamo Bay.
Clinton dodged the draft? He also had sex with Monica Lewinsky! Those must be the relevant facts, because you seem to be ignoring the economic growth, peace and prosperity that Clinton has brought.
McCain and Palin want to institute the teaching of Creationism in science classes. Palin went to get immunity from witchcraft in a church. McCain admitted that he hasn't even read the 3-page bailout report. McCain also thinks Putin is the president of Germany, that Spain is in south America. McCain finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and lost five jets. McCain's team was until recently still being paid by lobbyists as he speaks against lobbying. McCain is against net neutrality. These candidates are ridiculous.
Obama plans to post all laws on the internet for days before signing them. He plans to get rid of lobbyists. He sounds intelligent. He did not vote for the Iraq war. And the list goes on.
Amazing you can find McCain supporters anywhere, let alone in Slahsdot.
At first, this made the impression that convincing hundreds of people would change the election result. Of course this is not true, because these hundreds are "key" people. You could convince 10,000 people to vote Gore, and Bush still would have been elected.
An interesting thing to compute/measure would be how many more random people had to vote for Gore before he had won the election. That's a more meaningful statistic. Because when you convince someone on the internet to vote, he's a "random" person.
The only way not to "support Obama" is to swallow McCain's lies and absurdities whole.
Pretty much every message from McCain was a lie.
Fox News puts large text labels, and not even humorously, saying: "Obama and Biden - Osama Bin Laden -- Cooincidence?"
Is this "presenting both sides" too?
We're deliberately choosing the wrong answer - the wrong candidate - based on something other than the facts.
Its called Fox News.
Witness the current crisis, whose root cause is the concentration of power in Washington, D.C.
While that may be true, I have't seen much evidence that points that way. Also, I think there are smart financial experts who disagree with that.
Even if Washington control was a factor, it is definitely too simplistic an analysis to know whether or not Washington intervention is a good idea or not.
While I agree that the Unix security model is very far from ideal, and sudo'ing constantly sucks, there are some differences:
As always:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ladder_to_Heaven
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought ST was intentionally separate from IO, so as to allow having a less dangerous realm than IO to do work in. ST work can be wrapped in a pure interface, safely, while IO can't.
Python generators are extremely popular. They are basically "lazy lists" or "infinite streams" for Python.
If you look for uses of generators in Python, you'll find them quite popular, and thus, probably pretty useful.
How exactly can you write the code to "do lazy evaluation" in these languages?
Lets look at a practical example (taken from the old and famous Why Functional Programming Matters article).
Lets say you're implementing the alphabeta algorithm. In a lazy language, you can say something like:
solution = alphabeta . cutTree 5 . fmap gameValue . generateGameTree initialState
Where "cutTree 5" will cut the tree's branches to depth 5. In Python, or various other languages, you'd end up passing some "depth" variable to the recursion itself (in this case, generateGameTree), which would have to be decreased at each call. In a lazy language, the solution remains modular. You can re-use existing components like "cutTree" without having to write them yourself!
Modularity is the basis of programmer productivity, and laziness allows exciting new ways to actually achieve modularity.
Funny you should mention .readlines(), because if you use .xreadlines(), or the newer __iter__(), then you can just as easily treat the file as a potentially infinite list of lines, without worrying about resources, and yet get limited resources used:
for line in file:
This uses lazy-lists, or generators/iterators as they are called in Python. Python supports lazy lists, but Haskell supports lazy data structures in general (such as lazy trees, lazy tuples, etc).