And yes, for someone who knows Scheme, your layout makes more sense. But the GP in particular said the parentheses turned him off - I'm just demonstrating that as far as the control structures, the parentheses in a Lisp-family language are essentially the same as other braces and the conventional indentation in an Algol-family language. It's just the GP's familiarity with indentation that makes him prefer that to parentheses.
But Scheme looks like one of the many programming languages developed for parsers and compilers, instead of for the people. Programming languages should be easy to read for humans too.
"Easy to read" and "Easy to write" are two entirely different things. Take the example of getting the 2nd element of the list 1, 3, 5, 7.
AppleScript is going to be something like "the second element of {1, 3, 5, 7}." Easy enough to read. 11:18: syntax error: Expected class name but found identifier. (-2741) Let's try "the second item of {1, 3, 5, 7}". 3
So how was I supposed to know that the English word "item" works but the equally English word "element" doesn't?
Now let's try Lisp/Scheme: "(cadr (list 1 3 5 7))". I know that works, because that's practically the only way to write it. (The other ways are fully equivalent.) 3
To someone who's never seen Lisp or Scheme, "cadr" makes no sense. But there are only a few keywords like that in Scheme. And as far as syntax, the (almost) only special characters in Scheme are the two parentheses, and the space of course. You won't have to worry if a list uses braces or curly brackets. If a pointer-to-a-pointer-to-a-class uses *ptr->fn() or (*ptr)->fn() or (*ptr->fn)(). Whether a "char const *" has its address or value constant. Why "display dialog 'foo'" "button returned of the result" works but "button returned of display dialog 'foo'" doesn't. Whether it's "display dialog" or "show dialog", "button returned" or "button pressed". If you're allowed to use another indentation style without messing up your code.
It's very difficult in Scheme to write something you don't mean. That's why the parentheses are there. And if you indent approximately every parenthesis (except for, say, small math), it isn't that bad. Take this, for example. Let a, b, and c be numbers, and plus-or-minus be either + or -, depending on which result you want.
(define (quadratic-result a b c plus-or-minus)
(/ (plus-or-minus
(- b)
(sqrt (- (* b b) (4 a c)))
)
(* 2 a)
) )
Admittedly a little harder to read, but there's no way I messed up precedence, thanks to the prefix (Polish) notation and parentheses. Now if I had glomped the whole thing together as (/ (+ (- b) (sqrt (- (* b b) (4 a c))))), then yes, the parentheses would be a problem. But not properly indented like they are.
Put it this way - if Google's board turned rabid tomorrow, how much damage could it do?
Far less damage than if Coca-Cola's board, GM's board, Virgin's board, and the boards several other companies that have established charitable arms turned rabid. For every/.er that loves Google without considering the alternatives is a/.er that hates Google without considering whom else to hate.
Sure it seems like it might be a relatively decent publication, but: a) It is a religious publication which includes religious sections
I'm assuming your opposition to mentions of religion is your belief that are closed-minded, and therefore you don't want to read any section of a newspaper with religious parts.
AMEN... they give this shitcock free blog traffic about once a week, and all he does is plaigarize other peoples' blogs.
What!?
There is no link to his blog in the submission (other than his own name, and everyone else links to themselves like that too). I think that was the condition that they allowed Roland stories - he links to the actual articles now, not his own blog.
And if you complain that the summary is plagiarizing other blogs...isn't that what every summary is supposed to do?
The comment I was responding to claimed that instead of the US arresting these guys, the US could have blocked the website. They were only arrested because they didn't block the website to the US and they set foot on US soil. Which meant the only thing the US could do was arrest them.
Apparently Xanga has been doing exactly what any rational person would do in the face of a pointless law: ignoring it completely.
Apparently you have never been part of a large organization that has faced a lawsuit.
Xanga should have at least have the common sense to reject registrations under 13. If it's a pointless law, put something subversive but legal like "Please enter a birth date before 1993." Civil disobedience is fine for individuals who can go to jail and then write a book about it. It's not good corporate policy though.
I just want to comment that indeed Dr. Sadoway's lectures from past years arestill available online. Yet he still teaches, and students show up to these lectures, and we know what topics (>95%) are unchanged from last year. I think there is something to be said for the tradition of showing up for lectures.
However, the recitation instructors are merely TAs, undergrads or grad students that report to the professor. They are not "experts" in any sense, other than having passed the course with a good grade and having trained to be TAs.
MIT in fact has a system called OpenCourseWare where they post video lectures, course notes, assignments (with solutions), and exams (with solutions) for as many tests as they can. I used the website to test out of both introductory physics (at MIT!), even though my previous experience was just high school physics with no mention of calculus. I gained by learning the information ahead of time and being able to take other classes. MIT gained by teaching one of its students even more material, for no extra cost to them (Dr. Lewin anyway made lectures and tests in 1999, and they're electronically copiable for essentially free). However, for some classes, I wouldn't feel confident trying to cram an OpenCourseWare lecture and I would rather take the class itself - even if OCW were available.
I guess like someone feels like an idiot for giving that guy tenue, eh? They could have just video taped him once and used those tapes every year since, and saved a bunch of money.
Most professors in good schools are there for research, not for teaching. Besides, he does far more than just lecture - he chooses the homework and writes the test, he works with the TAs to see what he needs to cover, he keeps abreast of changes in the field and slightly changes his lecture each year, he sees how students are doing on the tests and restructures his class based on that, etc.
Heck, hiring someone to run a video tape of the lecture and then pause it to encourage student discussions would probably have better learning outcomes than terrorizing people from asking questions.
Terrorizing people asking questions? You're not supposed to ask questions in lecture and everyone knows that. The person who's hired to encourage student discussions is the recitation instructor. Did you not see the entire part of my post about how this only works if you have recitations that are mostly or entirely question-and-answer sessions with no teaching?
I was talking to Dr. Sadoway at MIT about exactly this the other day. If you raise your hand in lecture, he'll throw you out. But recitations (1 hour, 2 or 3 times a week, with a TA, in classroom-sized instead of lecture hall-sized groups) are entirely Q&A sessions. He posts videos of the lecture and doesn't care if you don't show up - there's no interaction anyway, and so many people show up that he doesn't feel the loss of students. He said one student would use the video lectures entirely, because those allow pausing and rewinding the difficult parts.
If you're talking about a class that's taught somewhat interactively, then this may not work. But if you're talking about a large one-way lecture, go ahead and post the lectures immediately. There's no harm to the learning process at all, if you're going to be sitting for an hour and watching the professor talk anyway.
he term Ethics has been redefined by corporate america. It is not about morality, or taking the ethically correct action.
Actually it's been redefined by the courts and government oversight (which I'm not decrying; they're useful, but this is how they work). It's impossible to sue someone for bad moral character. It's very possible to sue someone for misusing assets. "Ethics", as corporate America uses it, is those actions that give a result that comes from ethical actions. If the original action itself isn't ethical, something like Occam's Razor prevents an outside observer from knowing that and complaining.
To shut up the people who say "the US doesn't have a right to nukes." Did God say "Do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Nuclear Research?" The US had a natural, intrinsic right to research the technology and to keep the benefits of it.
The capitalism thing was an extreme example. I'm not advocating it. But the US has more claim to nukes than any other country - and if the Germans have more claim to jets and ballistic missiles, so be it.
Mao Zedong justified it: power comes from the barrel of a gun -- or the silo of a nuke, as it may be.
Besides, the US was the first country to develop usable nuclear technology. If this were the private sector, the way IP law works, the US would be the only country with nukes.
Which brings us back to the original point. If emotion can play a role in dating, how do you know that emotions + hormones won't overpower the best training and trust you can give your kids? And even if you don't care about your kids losing their virginity during teenage, there's always the practical risk of pregnancy and STDs. Even with protection. The best-laid (no pun intended) plans, as they say. It's possible to trust your kids to know what's right without entirely trusting them to do what's right.
Besides, "do I trust this person", although not directly an emotional question, is an analysis of the emotional factors affecting the other person. I wouldn't trust Alan Greenspan to invest a nickel of my money if I couldn't trust him to actually go and invest it, regardless of how well he understands the market. Same here - you should know that teenaged kids are going to have certain desires, regardless of whether you want them to and even whether they want themselves to.
Irrelevant. "Falling in Love" isn't a decision, and it is actually the realm of emotion - not to realm of decision making and logic.
Very relevant. Falling in love itself is, of course, emotion. Acting upon it (asking her out, getting in a relationship, whatever else) is clearly a decision. I saw in another post that you're getting married sometime soon. Did you go through a spreadsheet of potential mates and identify the optimum one? Or did love have anything to do with it? If the latter, as I suspect, then you made a very important life decision rooted in emotion.
I just expect people to be able to make rational decisions despite their emotions - all my friends are capable of doing so, and my children will be taught to be capable of doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. He was such an evil person that he signed up for the Hitler Youth and then skipped out on it!
:-D
Who knows what lurks in his heart if the Hitler Youth wasn't evil enough for him?
Ah, sorry. Yes, I missed the operator there.
And yes, for someone who knows Scheme, your layout makes more sense. But the GP in particular said the parentheses turned him off - I'm just demonstrating that as far as the control structures, the parentheses in a Lisp-family language are essentially the same as other braces and the conventional indentation in an Algol-family language. It's just the GP's familiarity with indentation that makes him prefer that to parentheses.
Um. According to Tolkien, the plural of "dwarf", as rendered in modern English, should be "dwarrow" or "dwarrows" (probably via OE dweor3as).
A Hitler youth who never showed up to their meetings on time would only make a good Antichrist in Spaceballs.
"Easy to read" and "Easy to write" are two entirely different things. Take the example of getting the 2nd element of the list 1, 3, 5, 7.
AppleScript is going to be something like "the second element of {1, 3, 5, 7}." Easy enough to read.
11:18: syntax error: Expected class name but found identifier. (-2741)
Let's try "the second item of {1, 3, 5, 7}".
3
So how was I supposed to know that the English word "item" works but the equally English word "element" doesn't?
Now let's try Lisp/Scheme: "(cadr (list 1 3 5 7))". I know that works, because that's practically the only way to write it. (The other ways are fully equivalent.)
3
To someone who's never seen Lisp or Scheme, "cadr" makes no sense. But there are only a few keywords like that in Scheme. And as far as syntax, the (almost) only special characters in Scheme are the two parentheses, and the space of course. You won't have to worry if a list uses braces or curly brackets. If a pointer-to-a-pointer-to-a-class uses *ptr->fn() or (*ptr)->fn() or (*ptr->fn)(). Whether a "char const *" has its address or value constant. Why "display dialog 'foo'" "button returned of the result" works but "button returned of display dialog 'foo'" doesn't. Whether it's "display dialog" or "show dialog", "button returned" or "button pressed". If you're allowed to use another indentation style without messing up your code.
It's very difficult in Scheme to write something you don't mean. That's why the parentheses are there. And if you indent approximately every parenthesis (except for, say, small math), it isn't that bad. Take this, for example. Let a, b, and c be numbers, and plus-or-minus be either + or -, depending on which result you want.Admittedly a little harder to read, but there's no way I messed up precedence, thanks to the prefix (Polish) notation and parentheses. Now if I had glomped the whole thing together as (/ (+ (- b) (sqrt (- (* b b) (4 a c))))), then yes, the parentheses would be a problem. But not properly indented like they are.
Put it this way - if Google's board turned rabid tomorrow, how much damage could it do?
/.er that loves Google without considering the alternatives is a /.er that hates Google without considering whom else to hate.
Far less damage than if Coca-Cola's board, GM's board, Virgin's board, and the boards several other companies that have established charitable arms turned rabid. For every
Sure it seems like it might be a relatively decent publication, but:
a) It is a religious publication which includes religious sections
I'm assuming your opposition to mentions of religion is your belief that are closed-minded, and therefore you don't want to read any section of a newspaper with religious parts.
There's the oxymoron.
AMEN... they give this shitcock free blog traffic about once a week, and all he does is plaigarize other peoples' blogs.
What!?
There is no link to his blog in the submission (other than his own name, and everyone else links to themselves like that too). I think that was the condition that they allowed Roland stories - he links to the actual articles now, not his own blog.
And if you complain that the summary is plagiarizing other blogs...isn't that what every summary is supposed to do?
Exactly, which is why they got arrested.
The comment I was responding to claimed that instead of the US arresting these guys, the US could have blocked the website. They were only arrested because they didn't block the website to the US and they set foot on US soil. Which meant the only thing the US could do was arrest them.
WHEREAS ALL they NEED to do and HAD to do is to bar all access from u.s. to that u.k. site ?
Here are four words, in increasing order of why that utterly won't work.
1) Network Neutrality
2) Common Carrier
3) Private Enterprise
4) World-Wide Web
There is no way for the US government to legally and effectively block one website from the United States.
Apparently Xanga has been doing exactly what any rational person would do in the face of a pointless law: ignoring it completely.
Apparently you have never been part of a large organization that has faced a lawsuit.
Xanga should have at least have the common sense to reject registrations under 13. If it's a pointless law, put something subversive but legal like "Please enter a birth date before 1993." Civil disobedience is fine for individuals who can go to jail and then write a book about it. It's not good corporate policy though.
I just want to comment that indeed Dr. Sadoway's lectures from past years are still available online. Yet he still teaches, and students show up to these lectures, and we know what topics (>95%) are unchanged from last year. I think there is something to be said for the tradition of showing up for lectures.
However, the recitation instructors are merely TAs, undergrads or grad students that report to the professor. They are not "experts" in any sense, other than having passed the course with a good grade and having trained to be TAs.
MIT in fact has a system called OpenCourseWare where they post video lectures, course notes, assignments (with solutions), and exams (with solutions) for as many tests as they can. I used the website to test out of both introductory physics (at MIT!), even though my previous experience was just high school physics with no mention of calculus. I gained by learning the information ahead of time and being able to take other classes. MIT gained by teaching one of its students even more material, for no extra cost to them (Dr. Lewin anyway made lectures and tests in 1999, and they're electronically copiable for essentially free). However, for some classes, I wouldn't feel confident trying to cram an OpenCourseWare lecture and I would rather take the class itself - even if OCW were available.
I guess like someone feels like an idiot for giving that guy tenue, eh? They could have just video taped him once and used those tapes every year since, and saved a bunch of money.
Most professors in good schools are there for research, not for teaching. Besides, he does far more than just lecture - he chooses the homework and writes the test, he works with the TAs to see what he needs to cover, he keeps abreast of changes in the field and slightly changes his lecture each year, he sees how students are doing on the tests and restructures his class based on that, etc.
Heck, hiring someone to run a video tape of the lecture and then pause it to encourage student discussions would probably have better learning outcomes than terrorizing people from asking questions.
Terrorizing people asking questions? You're not supposed to ask questions in lecture and everyone knows that. The person who's hired to encourage student discussions is the recitation instructor. Did you not see the entire part of my post about how this only works if you have recitations that are mostly or entirely question-and-answer sessions with no teaching?
Questions? At lecture?
I was talking to Dr. Sadoway at MIT about exactly this the other day. If you raise your hand in lecture, he'll throw you out. But recitations (1 hour, 2 or 3 times a week, with a TA, in classroom-sized instead of lecture hall-sized groups) are entirely Q&A sessions. He posts videos of the lecture and doesn't care if you don't show up - there's no interaction anyway, and so many people show up that he doesn't feel the loss of students. He said one student would use the video lectures entirely, because those allow pausing and rewinding the difficult parts.
If you're talking about a class that's taught somewhat interactively, then this may not work. But if you're talking about a large one-way lecture, go ahead and post the lectures immediately. There's no harm to the learning process at all, if you're going to be sitting for an hour and watching the professor talk anyway.
If you have a suable Chinese branch with arrestable employees located in China, then yes.
he term Ethics has been redefined by corporate america. It is not about morality, or taking the ethically correct action.
Actually it's been redefined by the courts and government oversight (which I'm not decrying; they're useful, but this is how they work). It's impossible to sue someone for bad moral character. It's very possible to sue someone for misusing assets. "Ethics", as corporate America uses it, is those actions that give a result that comes from ethical actions. If the original action itself isn't ethical, something like Occam's Razor prevents an outside observer from knowing that and complaining.
Any attempt to circumnavigate these features
And this, my friends, is why we should stop calling it piracy.
To shut up the people who say "the US doesn't have a right to nukes." Did God say "Do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Nuclear Research?" The US had a natural, intrinsic right to research the technology and to keep the benefits of it.
The capitalism thing was an extreme example. I'm not advocating it. But the US has more claim to nukes than any other country - and if the Germans have more claim to jets and ballistic missiles, so be it.
Mao Zedong justified it: power comes from the barrel of a gun -- or the silo of a nuke, as it may be.
Besides, the US was the first country to develop usable nuclear technology. If this were the private sector, the way IP law works, the US would be the only country with nukes.
Or you can just go here. There's an extra / at the end of the posted URL.
And the WMD thing is from an old meme.
Good idea, except your new network stack interface has to be a driver. So this won't help any Linux or Mac gaming....oh. Never mind then.
(Yes, this was posted with Safari. I don't have as much as Solitaire on here.)
Which brings us back to the original point. If emotion can play a role in dating, how do you know that emotions + hormones won't overpower the best training and trust you can give your kids? And even if you don't care about your kids losing their virginity during teenage, there's always the practical risk of pregnancy and STDs. Even with protection. The best-laid (no pun intended) plans, as they say. It's possible to trust your kids to know what's right without entirely trusting them to do what's right.
Besides, "do I trust this person", although not directly an emotional question, is an analysis of the emotional factors affecting the other person. I wouldn't trust Alan Greenspan to invest a nickel of my money if I couldn't trust him to actually go and invest it, regardless of how well he understands the market. Same here - you should know that teenaged kids are going to have certain desires, regardless of whether you want them to and even whether they want themselves to.
Irrelevant. "Falling in Love" isn't a decision, and it is actually the realm of emotion - not to realm of decision making and logic.
Very relevant. Falling in love itself is, of course, emotion. Acting upon it (asking her out, getting in a relationship, whatever else) is clearly a decision. I saw in another post that you're getting married sometime soon. Did you go through a spreadsheet of potential mates and identify the optimum one? Or did love have anything to do with it? If the latter, as I suspect, then you made a very important life decision rooted in emotion.
You, sir, are a genius.
I just expect people to be able to make rational decisions despite their emotions - all my friends are capable of doing so, and my children will be taught to be capable of doing so.
Have you never fallen in love?