That would be a really big concern for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light. Yes, that puny Mach 20 would really put a hurtin' on that.
This is Mach 20 around 15,000MPH. Low earth orbit objects travel around 16,000mph, and radio operators must account for doppler shift for anything in the FM band or higher. The higher the frequency, the more significant the doppler shift.
So, for example, pointing an FM radio at the ISS and expecting to set the radio on the ISS to the same frequency to communicate just won't work. We now have a non-orbital object that's just getting into that sort of range of speed.
They have probably forgotten about the doppler effect and are surprised it vanished from radio contact. Also: it's going Mach 20. You look up, go "HOLY SHIT!" while the earth shakes from the sonic boom, and wonder if you saw something flicker for 1/1000 of 1 second.
Re:Experiments performed only on 3 test subjects
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
The modifications this team made to the treatment had the potential to be high risk to the patient
... so?
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
Wait, what? This is unethical. LEGALLY unethical. It gets your MD license REVOKED.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
Hunger problems are political, social, and economic. If we feed and water a large portion of the world regularly, they become comfortable. Then we have expensive pets.
It's sad, but we really need the fear of suffering and death to move people. Greed destroys capitalism, laziness destroys socialism. Unfortunately, that means we need jobs for these people: we need to make them labor, and if they're useless then what?
At the same time, waste labor just exacerbates the problem. Destruction is not profit, after all. There may simply be too many people.
What abhors me is the complete waste of food on this planet. Stores throw out day-old bread, bagels, packaged expired foods, the like... some people willfully live by recovering this food from the trash for consumption, which I WTF at. Temperature test the meats, grab day-old bagels from the trash in bagel shops, bags of rice that get thrown out for some god damn reason, the works. This is completely wasteful and we could easily use this to feed the hungry.
Unfortunately, improving the efficiency of food production and distribution would eliminate this excess food waste. By doing so, we would eliminate the ability to support the hungry people of the world. Excess food production is wasteful, and supporting people who have no use (there is no labor for them, thus they are of no use) is very wasteful.
You see the problem, yes? On one side, we are being wasteful with a thing we should be making heavy use of, because it is needed. On the other, we are still being wasteful if we feed the hungry in the world; and if we correct that, we can no longer feed them. We need work for these people--real work, not "public works" that create an imaginary market out of a need for jobs but no need for the actual product of that market.
America should be able to support most of its own; Egypt or Ethiopia less so only because of development. I don't mean to say they should pave the desert and build high-rise buildings; I mean to say they need to develop an economy, even if it's of sheep traders and carpenters. That's where the real improvement is to be made: providing a working society that can support a culture, such that people can earn their way and produce something they may barter for their livelihood. Then we won't have to help them because they will have something we want, and we will have something they need.
Exactly why I have posted this on Slashdot... just in case it actually works, there's now non-critical awareness. 60 million views on Fox News would produce a better effect...
What about using ineffective Interceptor armor in favor of Dragonskin, which doesn't adequately provide Navy Level 3 protection despite failing one round in thousands into the same armor and deflecting grenade frag, whereas Interceptor's ceramic plates crack from the first hit and then deliver concentrated fire through the fault (3 bullets = 2 penetrations IF the other 2 hit the fault, quite likely in 3 shots of concentrated fire)?
What about spending billions of dollars to have an American company develop a tool the Israelies have had for a decade and are quite willing to sell us? A tank-mounted STS missile detection and repellant system, detects incoming RPG fire and shoots it down before it gets close enough to harm the infantry? It's 96% effective, and so the US military has rejected the technology in favor of running with no infantry defenses while paying another developer to build one that they say will be more effective.
What about the wholly inadequate training they give ground soldiers? I wouldn't want to go up against a military guy with a gun--which is what they use most of the time, admittedly--but only because firearms are rather effective in all situations. I could take a street thug with a gun if I absolutely had to, at close (melee) range; I would rather avoid this, but that is the main failure case for the gun. The other failure case is having no training, which means the guy across the street can't hit you except by luck. A weekend course in firearms self-defense makes people pretty effective.
And that's what you have for the military: Pretty effective troops that can aim and pull trigger just as well as any home gun non-enthusiast who had the brains to take a course in proper gun safety and firearms self-defense when he got his gun, just to make sure he's not a complete idiot waving a dangerous toy around. Marines I can take one on one in a fist fight and I have pretty minimal training.. they're fierce, that's for sure, but they're not ancient warriors in harmony with the way of battle or whatever voodoo bullshit. I've fought people like that; they can defeat me... they can defeat damn near anyone, for that matter.
No, the military is a game of spending money, inadequately equipping troops, using overcomplicated fancy toys for a 0.1% advantage (computer controlled grenade launcher with a remote detonated projectile completely based on distance, time, velocity, altitude, or a combination of all thereof!... instead of a remote detonator button on the side, which you obviously have time to press if you can program the god damn thing)... and shitty training. And shitty planning. And ineffective management.
It is a large failure. But you should have known that when you saw them handle WW2, with the big plan of "Land the ship, open the gates, send troops running and screaming into bullet fire until the enemy runs out of bullets or we can use the dead bodies of our own soldiers to build a bullet stop."
The "Kinetic War" thing is a load of dingo's kidneys, too. The US cannot wage an effective war. The military machine is huge, but inefficient; we need a military 1/10 the size of ours, run on more advanced technology and with better planning.
I don't get why they bullshit about it though. I mean look at Google Chrome, tabs each being separate process, plug-ins being a zygote process, a single bar for search and awesomebar functions, and the new tab screen is godly. Mozilla copied the separate plug-ins and processes (failing at it for a couple years), has run Mozilla Labs stuff recently for the single bar and the new tab screen to mimic Google Chrome... it's even gotten rid of the menu bar in a mimicry of Google Chrome. Then they claim that other browsers are the ones copying... when they're years behind. Right.
Spending more of my waking hours in a building with an entire floor of developers I have to work directly with, I can competently say that my opinions of modern programmers stems from a tiny, tiny glimpse into the real world of programming.
Also, you seem to be intensely afraid of manual memory tracking, for reasons I can't fathom. at the worst I've used reference counting, which I find nice, but which has corner cases I specifically avoid. Python uses implicit reference counting. Some Java/.NET implementations use implicit reference counting, though mostly they use mark-and-sweep collectors. Besides the stop-the-world issues in many implementations, general garbage collection with mark-and-sweep algorithms has to run through all collection-managed memory: you'd better not use ANY swap, because it's going to get referenced repeatedly and cause disk thrashing.
Managed code has less of a problem, of course: the Mono Compacting Collector is fantastic (although it uses a stop-the-world model), because it minimizes the number of pages used. Compactors are really pretty excellent, even if they're not also collectors.
Manually managing memory has the advantages that you immediately get back any memory freed. Garbage collection has the advantage that you don't have to think. Reference counting has the advantage that you can programatically track the number of references to a piece of data, rather than explicitly making logical assumptions. In many, many cases, it's obvious when memory is no longer in use; there are few cases where it becomes difficult, and typically this is a result of improperly written code (monolith) rather than properly separated and segregated code (modular).
But I find it constantly funny how people sign a contract and then expect the other side (Amazon, Groupon, their bank,...) will prefere their interests before it's own.
It makes business sense to operate in such a way that you take a minor hit to immediate profits in order to ensure a balanced deal with your partners and your customers. In other words: you want to make an exchange of wealth that's advantageous for everyone. By doing so, you, as a business, become a desirable partner or a desirable vendor, attracting more business partners and more customers.
Should you make the ultimate sacrifice? Hell no. Should you give up that last 10% margin increase and profit $90 instead of $100 off each mark, just to make sure your customers are 80% happier? Hell yes, 80% happier means 80% more returning business and 80% more customer recommendations, which mean $90 each from 1800 people instead of $100 from 1000 people.
The agreement says amazon can lower the price of the app-- say, give a $10 app for $5--but your cut of the profits will never drop below 20% of your asking price (i.e. $2). Amazon came back and said, "We want to do a front page FREE promotion, but you get 0%. You won't get paid, but you'll get exposure. Do you want to do this?" and he said "YES!"
False dichotomy between the previous case and the later ones. It might surprise to some, there is people out there who understand the code and intelligently use automated tools for integrating it. We don't get paid to show off our l33t hax0r skills, but to intelligently use tools available for coding to our employer's benefit.
If you are completely crippled by your tools not being available, you are not "intelligently using tools available." Many developers are baffled by things like memory management or reference counting, and want the language to figure out when memory is no longer in use and garbage collect it because they simply can't wrap their head around the idea of tracking data; many others sit down and design a program before writing spaghetti code, and occasionally cause implementation bugs. While you can be competent and write in Java, you can also turn white at the mention of C (and immediately confuse it with C++) and use Java to simulate knowing what in the hell you're doing.
All tools are like this. If you use them as a crutch, you will be glued to the tool, and probably come out incompetent. Some of us never liked the crutches. I don't like tap shifters and prefer a clutched manual transmission, and I -hate- automatics (having driven automatic only for 7 years before learning to drive a clutch, I think I'm qualified to comment on my preference against them). Some people drive automatics well; other people are constantly doing the ass dance on the brakes and gas, driving inefficiently and dangerously, following too close, burning up their brakes, etc. These people can't handle a clutch because they don't know how to drive in the first place, and driving on a stick will prove a completely confusing challenge. I have an uncle like that, and while he's mastered not stalling his car by braking too god damn much, he also burns clutches out in 10,000 miles.
Tools are tools. If you can't live without a certain tool, you are blind and don't understand the task you're doing. Building houses with hammers and nails is slow and sucky; building a house with power drills and screws or with nail guns is excellent, takes a day or so for a good team (yeah, it can be done), but in a pinch you can spend a few weeks or months hammering together a big 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house with primitive hand tools. It is the same with other tools--some tools facilitate complex and blindingly fast work, while others simply add convenience but can be discarded by those who favor a different method.
I will also argue, and there is plenty of evidence of it, that, unless you are an absolute genius, if you can completely map the code out in your brain, the complexity (not necessarily the size) of that code is trivial, or small-sized at best. Some languages (say Ruby or Python) are better than others (Java, C++) for helping the developer write more succinct, mentally-manageable code. But beyond a certain size and complexity, independently of whether it is systems or application development, one simply cannot claim to mentally map the code (unless you are the owner of a module and you are actively maintaining it.)
I put a lot of time into the design of programs, so much so that I actually enjoy designing more than actually programming. At a high level, it is possible to determine a lot of the problems you'll face (mostly data management between business logic modules), and then come up with strategies for making everything work together. It is this that you work on first, such that the complex portion becomes little bits of "tell it to do this, it works." In short, separate tasks that can be separated even if they make no logical sense to separate: sure, I'll only do X and Y when doing X, Y, and Z, but why should I make X and Y one giant, complicated, confusing operation when I can make it one small, streamlined operation or--failing that--two operations that are easy to understand separately?
I use a 420W spin drier for 3 minutes to dry my clothes. It's equivalent to the spin cycle on your washing machine, but at 3600RPM. Old designs were 600RPM and new washing machines spin at 900RPM. Polyester comes out wearable, cotton less so. Put your wool garments in a mesh bag to avoid extrusion. Most everything can hang dry in an hour, or tumble dry in 10 minutes.
If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the stored energy in the battery can be released in the daytime when electricity costs are higher.
Let's try this again...
If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the power demand at night drastically increases above and beyond the power demand during the day, bringing the grid to its knees and driving up night time prices.
This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long.
They don't want to be locked into a low level architecture. What if they had Android/MIPS? I would have gone with ECMA standard CIL, which you can put C# or VB.NET or Java or C on top of by using a compiler with CIL as a target. Java tends to accept... well, just Java. Maybe LLVM instead of CIL...
Some of us juggle all that stuff in our heads and have a complete map of our code, which becomes difficult to track when we have to deal with automagic shit or go make amendments or deletions from one side or the other. Others write bits of business logic and string it together, and hope it works; often these people rely on development environments to take care of some of the stringing together.
Dialogue and critical thinking are valuable gifts we share as sentient beings. Freedom of belief and freedom of expression are valuable rights we cherish in our democracy. Hatred and violent threats, however, are neither valuable nor right. In recent years, Jetsunma and KPC have been threatened repeatedly and made the target of hateful, homophobic and misogynistic epithets.These threats were reported to law enforcement and, following a full investigation conducted by FBI and U.S. Department of Justice, federal criminal charges were filed in the case of United States v. William Cassidy, 8:11-cr-00091 and he has been charged with cyberstalking.
There is a fine, fine line... it's very difficult to get close to without distorting it. Even if this is the correct course of action in this case, the fact that that course has to be followed spells trouble for the future, where less serious offenses may be attacked in the same way.
I'm with the Buddhists in that hate and violent speech is neither valuable nor right; however, I feel that some protection for expression of these things is valuable. I also feel that continued hate speech can become a threat and cause emotional distress. This means that the right to say something horrible and hateful is important, but also that being too loud about it is harmful. There is a tipping point where it becomes a serious social problem and such individuals must be made to cease their behavior, both because of the emotional harm and because they eventually incite others to hate and violence; finding that point is hard and the very act of acting on such harmful speech actually damages society by making it less tolerant and more likely to act on lesser threats that should be left alone.
A society filled with people who have the courage to speak out against others for their hateful speech has a valuable asset. Standing up for people you don't know who are being attacked for reasons you have no connection to and thus have no vested interest in brings a calm, a feeling of security in community. It binds society together against its own internal threats, and prevents those engaged in hateful speech from binding together hateful and violent gangs. This is also a protected speech that is eroded when the need to deal with hateful speech by force occurs: we lose our freedoms both to do wrong and to stand against the wrong that is done by others.
Remember this when you see problems that aren't any of your business, and when you wonder if you should speak up on things you have no need or vested interest in getting involved with.
They are just about the most boring technology we have today. They will not revolutionize anything..
They already have. Surgery (by modeling from MRI scans to get a better look before surgery), surgical replacement (custom-made joint replacements), product design testing and visualization (i.e. make a shoe or a skateboard; I've considered using one to make the plastic housing for a particular bicycle light), architectural modeling (quick and easy way to go from the CAD design to a model: much less time and labor).
Biotech has focused on using similar techniques to construct organs and such from tissues, with limited success. Forensics has found the use of image analysis software helpful: one can scan a bunch of pieces of a fragmented object and have the computer emit a physical model of the original undamaged object.
Also note that each time a thing is destroyed, society loses its value. Of course, if you can melt down the broken plastic cup as fresh feed stock, then the cost of remaking it is extremely low... but then we get into soviet methods....
Slashdot Mirror
Also: it's going Mach 20.
That would be a really big concern for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light. Yes, that puny Mach 20 would really put a hurtin' on that.
This is Mach 20 around 15,000MPH. Low earth orbit objects travel around 16,000mph, and radio operators must account for doppler shift for anything in the FM band or higher. The higher the frequency, the more significant the doppler shift.
So, for example, pointing an FM radio at the ISS and expecting to set the radio on the ISS to the same frequency to communicate just won't work. We now have a non-orbital object that's just getting into that sort of range of speed.
You've never been lost until you've been lost at mach 20.
They have probably forgotten about the doppler effect and are surprised it vanished from radio contact. Also: it's going Mach 20. You look up, go "HOLY SHIT!" while the earth shakes from the sonic boom, and wonder if you saw something flicker for 1/1000 of 1 second.
The modifications this team made to the treatment had the potential to be high risk to the patient
Wait, what? This is unethical. LEGALLY unethical. It gets your MD license REVOKED.
Hunger problems are political, social, and economic. If we feed and water a large portion of the world regularly, they become comfortable. Then we have expensive pets.
It's sad, but we really need the fear of suffering and death to move people. Greed destroys capitalism, laziness destroys socialism. Unfortunately, that means we need jobs for these people: we need to make them labor, and if they're useless then what?
At the same time, waste labor just exacerbates the problem. Destruction is not profit, after all. There may simply be too many people.
What abhors me is the complete waste of food on this planet. Stores throw out day-old bread, bagels, packaged expired foods, the like... some people willfully live by recovering this food from the trash for consumption, which I WTF at. Temperature test the meats, grab day-old bagels from the trash in bagel shops, bags of rice that get thrown out for some god damn reason, the works. This is completely wasteful and we could easily use this to feed the hungry.
Unfortunately, improving the efficiency of food production and distribution would eliminate this excess food waste. By doing so, we would eliminate the ability to support the hungry people of the world. Excess food production is wasteful, and supporting people who have no use (there is no labor for them, thus they are of no use) is very wasteful.
You see the problem, yes? On one side, we are being wasteful with a thing we should be making heavy use of, because it is needed. On the other, we are still being wasteful if we feed the hungry in the world; and if we correct that, we can no longer feed them. We need work for these people--real work, not "public works" that create an imaginary market out of a need for jobs but no need for the actual product of that market.
America should be able to support most of its own; Egypt or Ethiopia less so only because of development. I don't mean to say they should pave the desert and build high-rise buildings; I mean to say they need to develop an economy, even if it's of sheep traders and carpenters. That's where the real improvement is to be made: providing a working society that can support a culture, such that people can earn their way and produce something they may barter for their livelihood. Then we won't have to help them because they will have something we want, and we will have something they need.
Exactly why I have posted this on Slashdot ... just in case it actually works, there's now non-critical awareness. 60 million views on Fox News would produce a better effect...
Two fairly important adjectives that were for some reason
Omitted for reasons of Farkism and hilarious commentary.
What about using ineffective Interceptor armor in favor of Dragonskin, which doesn't adequately provide Navy Level 3 protection despite failing one round in thousands into the same armor and deflecting grenade frag, whereas Interceptor's ceramic plates crack from the first hit and then deliver concentrated fire through the fault (3 bullets = 2 penetrations IF the other 2 hit the fault, quite likely in 3 shots of concentrated fire)?
What about spending billions of dollars to have an American company develop a tool the Israelies have had for a decade and are quite willing to sell us? A tank-mounted STS missile detection and repellant system, detects incoming RPG fire and shoots it down before it gets close enough to harm the infantry? It's 96% effective, and so the US military has rejected the technology in favor of running with no infantry defenses while paying another developer to build one that they say will be more effective.
What about the wholly inadequate training they give ground soldiers? I wouldn't want to go up against a military guy with a gun--which is what they use most of the time, admittedly--but only because firearms are rather effective in all situations. I could take a street thug with a gun if I absolutely had to, at close (melee) range; I would rather avoid this, but that is the main failure case for the gun. The other failure case is having no training, which means the guy across the street can't hit you except by luck. A weekend course in firearms self-defense makes people pretty effective.
And that's what you have for the military: Pretty effective troops that can aim and pull trigger just as well as any home gun non-enthusiast who had the brains to take a course in proper gun safety and firearms self-defense when he got his gun, just to make sure he's not a complete idiot waving a dangerous toy around. Marines I can take one on one in a fist fight and I have pretty minimal training.. they're fierce, that's for sure, but they're not ancient warriors in harmony with the way of battle or whatever voodoo bullshit. I've fought people like that; they can defeat me... they can defeat damn near anyone, for that matter.
No, the military is a game of spending money, inadequately equipping troops, using overcomplicated fancy toys for a 0.1% advantage (computer controlled grenade launcher with a remote detonated projectile completely based on distance, time, velocity, altitude, or a combination of all thereof! ... instead of a remote detonator button on the side, which you obviously have time to press if you can program the god damn thing)... and shitty training. And shitty planning. And ineffective management.
It is a large failure. But you should have known that when you saw them handle WW2, with the big plan of "Land the ship, open the gates, send troops running and screaming into bullet fire until the enemy runs out of bullets or we can use the dead bodies of our own soldiers to build a bullet stop."
The "Kinetic War" thing is a load of dingo's kidneys, too. The US cannot wage an effective war. The military machine is huge, but inefficient; we need a military 1/10 the size of ours, run on more advanced technology and with better planning.
I don't get why they bullshit about it though. I mean look at Google Chrome, tabs each being separate process, plug-ins being a zygote process, a single bar for search and awesomebar functions, and the new tab screen is godly. Mozilla copied the separate plug-ins and processes (failing at it for a couple years), has run Mozilla Labs stuff recently for the single bar and the new tab screen to mimic Google Chrome... it's even gotten rid of the menu bar in a mimicry of Google Chrome. Then they claim that other browsers are the ones copying... when they're years behind. Right.
Spending more of my waking hours in a building with an entire floor of developers I have to work directly with, I can competently say that my opinions of modern programmers stems from a tiny, tiny glimpse into the real world of programming.
Also, you seem to be intensely afraid of manual memory tracking, for reasons I can't fathom. at the worst I've used reference counting, which I find nice, but which has corner cases I specifically avoid. Python uses implicit reference counting. Some Java/.NET implementations use implicit reference counting, though mostly they use mark-and-sweep collectors. Besides the stop-the-world issues in many implementations, general garbage collection with mark-and-sweep algorithms has to run through all collection-managed memory: you'd better not use ANY swap, because it's going to get referenced repeatedly and cause disk thrashing.
Managed code has less of a problem, of course: the Mono Compacting Collector is fantastic (although it uses a stop-the-world model), because it minimizes the number of pages used. Compactors are really pretty excellent, even if they're not also collectors.
Manually managing memory has the advantages that you immediately get back any memory freed. Garbage collection has the advantage that you don't have to think. Reference counting has the advantage that you can programatically track the number of references to a piece of data, rather than explicitly making logical assumptions. In many, many cases, it's obvious when memory is no longer in use; there are few cases where it becomes difficult, and typically this is a result of improperly written code (monolith) rather than properly separated and segregated code (modular).
But I find it constantly funny how people sign a contract and then expect the other side (Amazon, Groupon, their bank, ...) will prefere their interests before it's own.
It makes business sense to operate in such a way that you take a minor hit to immediate profits in order to ensure a balanced deal with your partners and your customers. In other words: you want to make an exchange of wealth that's advantageous for everyone. By doing so, you, as a business, become a desirable partner or a desirable vendor, attracting more business partners and more customers.
Should you make the ultimate sacrifice? Hell no. Should you give up that last 10% margin increase and profit $90 instead of $100 off each mark, just to make sure your customers are 80% happier? Hell yes, 80% happier means 80% more returning business and 80% more customer recommendations, which mean $90 each from 1800 people instead of $100 from 1000 people.
The agreement says amazon can lower the price of the app-- say, give a $10 app for $5--but your cut of the profits will never drop below 20% of your asking price (i.e. $2). Amazon came back and said, "We want to do a front page FREE promotion, but you get 0%. You won't get paid, but you'll get exposure. Do you want to do this?" and he said "YES!"
False dichotomy between the previous case and the later ones. It might surprise to some, there is people out there who understand the code and intelligently use automated tools for integrating it. We don't get paid to show off our l33t hax0r skills, but to intelligently use tools available for coding to our employer's benefit.
If you are completely crippled by your tools not being available, you are not "intelligently using tools available." Many developers are baffled by things like memory management or reference counting, and want the language to figure out when memory is no longer in use and garbage collect it because they simply can't wrap their head around the idea of tracking data; many others sit down and design a program before writing spaghetti code, and occasionally cause implementation bugs. While you can be competent and write in Java, you can also turn white at the mention of C (and immediately confuse it with C++) and use Java to simulate knowing what in the hell you're doing.
All tools are like this. If you use them as a crutch, you will be glued to the tool, and probably come out incompetent. Some of us never liked the crutches. I don't like tap shifters and prefer a clutched manual transmission, and I -hate- automatics (having driven automatic only for 7 years before learning to drive a clutch, I think I'm qualified to comment on my preference against them). Some people drive automatics well; other people are constantly doing the ass dance on the brakes and gas, driving inefficiently and dangerously, following too close, burning up their brakes, etc. These people can't handle a clutch because they don't know how to drive in the first place, and driving on a stick will prove a completely confusing challenge. I have an uncle like that, and while he's mastered not stalling his car by braking too god damn much, he also burns clutches out in 10,000 miles.
Tools are tools. If you can't live without a certain tool, you are blind and don't understand the task you're doing. Building houses with hammers and nails is slow and sucky; building a house with power drills and screws or with nail guns is excellent, takes a day or so for a good team (yeah, it can be done), but in a pinch you can spend a few weeks or months hammering together a big 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house with primitive hand tools. It is the same with other tools--some tools facilitate complex and blindingly fast work, while others simply add convenience but can be discarded by those who favor a different method.
I will also argue, and there is plenty of evidence of it, that, unless you are an absolute genius, if you can completely map the code out in your brain, the complexity (not necessarily the size) of that code is trivial, or small-sized at best. Some languages (say Ruby or Python) are better than others (Java, C++) for helping the developer write more succinct, mentally-manageable code. But beyond a certain size and complexity, independently of whether it is systems or application development, one simply cannot claim to mentally map the code (unless you are the owner of a module and you are actively maintaining it.)
I put a lot of time into the design of programs, so much so that I actually enjoy designing more than actually programming. At a high level, it is possible to determine a lot of the problems you'll face (mostly data management between business logic modules), and then come up with strategies for making everything work together. It is this that you work on first, such that the complex portion becomes little bits of "tell it to do this, it works." In short, separate tasks that can be separated even if they make no logical sense to separate: sure, I'll only do X and Y when doing X, Y, and Z, but why should I make X and Y one giant, complicated, confusing operation when I can make it one small, streamlined operation or--failing that--two operations that are easy to understand separately?
One thing I do when bore
I use a 420W spin drier for 3 minutes to dry my clothes. It's equivalent to the spin cycle on your washing machine, but at 3600RPM. Old designs were 600RPM and new washing machines spin at 900RPM. Polyester comes out wearable, cotton less so. Put your wool garments in a mesh bag to avoid extrusion. Most everything can hang dry in an hour, or tumble dry in 10 minutes.
Yes but why does it take as much energy as it takes to run your house for 2 days just to drive your all-electric car a few miles?
If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the stored energy in the battery can be released in the daytime when electricity costs are higher.
Let's try this again...
If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the power demand at night drastically increases above and beyond the power demand during the day, bringing the grid to its knees and driving up night time prices.
This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long.
They don't want to be locked into a low level architecture. What if they had Android/MIPS? I would have gone with ECMA standard CIL, which you can put C# or VB.NET or Java or C on top of by using a compiler with CIL as a target. Java tends to accept... well, just Java. Maybe LLVM instead of CIL...
Some of us juggle all that stuff in our heads and have a complete map of our code, which becomes difficult to track when we have to deal with automagic shit or go make amendments or deletions from one side or the other. Others write bits of business logic and string it together, and hope it works; often these people rely on development environments to take care of some of the stringing together.
You mean like this?
Dialogue and critical thinking are valuable gifts we share as sentient beings. Freedom of belief and freedom of expression are valuable rights we cherish in our democracy. Hatred and violent threats, however, are neither valuable nor right. In recent years, Jetsunma and KPC have been threatened repeatedly and made the target of hateful, homophobic and misogynistic epithets.These threats were reported to law enforcement and, following a full investigation conducted by FBI and U.S. Department of Justice, federal criminal charges were filed in the case of United States v. William Cassidy, 8:11-cr-00091 and he has been charged with cyberstalking.
http://www.tibetanbuddhistaltar.org/2011/06/united-states-v-william-cassidy-811-cr-00091/
There is a fine, fine line... it's very difficult to get close to without distorting it. Even if this is the correct course of action in this case, the fact that that course has to be followed spells trouble for the future, where less serious offenses may be attacked in the same way.
I'm with the Buddhists in that hate and violent speech is neither valuable nor right; however, I feel that some protection for expression of these things is valuable. I also feel that continued hate speech can become a threat and cause emotional distress. This means that the right to say something horrible and hateful is important, but also that being too loud about it is harmful. There is a tipping point where it becomes a serious social problem and such individuals must be made to cease their behavior, both because of the emotional harm and because they eventually incite others to hate and violence; finding that point is hard and the very act of acting on such harmful speech actually damages society by making it less tolerant and more likely to act on lesser threats that should be left alone.
A society filled with people who have the courage to speak out against others for their hateful speech has a valuable asset. Standing up for people you don't know who are being attacked for reasons you have no connection to and thus have no vested interest in brings a calm, a feeling of security in community. It binds society together against its own internal threats, and prevents those engaged in hateful speech from binding together hateful and violent gangs. This is also a protected speech that is eroded when the need to deal with hateful speech by force occurs: we lose our freedoms both to do wrong and to stand against the wrong that is done by others.
Remember this when you see problems that aren't any of your business, and when you wonder if you should speak up on things you have no need or vested interest in getting involved with.
They are just about the most boring technology we have today. They will not revolutionize anything..
They already have. Surgery (by modeling from MRI scans to get a better look before surgery), surgical replacement (custom-made joint replacements), product design testing and visualization (i.e. make a shoe or a skateboard; I've considered using one to make the plastic housing for a particular bicycle light), architectural modeling (quick and easy way to go from the CAD design to a model: much less time and labor).
Biotech has focused on using similar techniques to construct organs and such from tissues, with limited success. Forensics has found the use of image analysis software helpful: one can scan a bunch of pieces of a fragmented object and have the computer emit a physical model of the original undamaged object.
Also note that each time a thing is destroyed, society loses its value. Of course, if you can melt down the broken plastic cup as fresh feed stock, then the cost of remaking it is extremely low... but then we get into soviet methods ....