To that, I will only say that might does not make right. Whether you have the courage to face the world as it is, rather than as you wish it is, is your road.
But why would the constructor bother to? Religion is just a parasite, wasting resources that could used otherwise.
Because otherwise robots will just shutdown. No purpose in life, the problem that was to be resolved.
Yet I don't shutdown, so you hypothesis is false. Again.
The problem that was the subject of this thread.
No, it was whether robots would out-compete humans. Specifically, my point is that self-reproducing was the most important trait there to even be in the game. Then you started on some crusade against atheist. Are you perhaps a bit insecure?
And atheism is a collection of ideologies,
No.
And nihilism, the prevalent form of atheism on the internet it seems, is basically polytheism, a "natural" religion.
You need to read up a bit. Nihilism is a philosophy. Atheism is just the default stands regarding gods and other invisible friends&foes.
since science is by definition unable to address the question if god exists
It answer the question "does a god affect the world" with a resounding "no!", which is good enough for me. An impotent god is irrelevant.
I snipped some more misunderstandings, and ramblings. Really, you should pick up a book about it if it interests you so much, and learn a bit.
Does the thief believe every man steal?:p I find it more than slightly ironic to be, as an atheist, accused of thinking I have the ultimate truth of anything:)
As an atheist, you obviously consider the absence of any eternal entity an "ultimate truth".
No I don't. I just take the default position, which is none of those 1000's god exists, until anything else is substantiated as likely.
"Pure" atheism, which could probably best be defined as "the absence of dogmatism" is one of the few ideologies that is mathematically wrong, in exactly the way you'd expect : any non-dogmatic theory can be used to prove ANY statement, and the proofs are completely unrelated to whether this statement is true or false. In short any non-dogmatic theory proves that 1=2, that your nose is blue with yellow laughing clowns standing on it, or any other statement. These theories are therefore useless.
lol. I am a mathematician. You are just a fool. And that argument is so silly I don't know where to start. Try inserting "pink invisible hedgehog" in your, eh, proof.
The problem with this crisis is as simple as brutal : science (or at least evolution) predicts that we will not recover from that crisis. At all. Ever. That crisis will make the human race a closed chapter in the (hopefully still existing) history books.
Eventually, humans will be extinct. Except that this is not what religion would teach you (the world will not end, of course, by human extinction) it is hardly even interesting.
So do you believe in evolution ? That if robots are better than us that we will either get killed, or starve ("get outcompeted for resources") ? Do tell. That at some point, which is probably not too far away, we will have only blacks or only whites, because the others got killed ?
*if* we are competing for the same resource, and *if* one has a global advantage over the other, then yes. Of all the threats we face, that one is not high on my list. Is the last bit a bit of racism? White and black people happily interbreed, no chance of either geneset dying out, providing a good chunk of the human population survives.
It seems to me you simply believe in nothing, not in atheism either, except in your own grandeur.
You a quite laughable, you know? It is not I who shout, pull my h
You know you make a very good point... but the solution will be the exact same as it is for humans. What robots need, simply put, in order to be successfull on earth, is a very, very old concept:
a religion
Maybe, maybe not. I'm inclined to not. But first and foremost they need to exists in a self-reproducing form.
Ever wonder how atheism lost to an opponent that refused to fight it in the classical period ? How it lost to christianity, despite constantly attacking and murdering their opponents ? Imho the answer is in the writings of cicero and what happened when the romans lost their religion, as exemplified by, for example, the catilina incident. I'm no history buff. Atheism have very ill conditions in a poorly educated world, which might be why it only popped up during "spikes" in education.
Making robots believe will be, to be sure, as big a challenge as making a human believe. But clearly some people have no trouble doing that. And as soon as we find this to be necessary in order to get an AGI to function (and I do "believe" we will find this a necessity)... But why would the constructor bother to? Religion is just a parasite, wasting resources that could used otherwise.
Why do all atheists have this ridiculous opinion robots' AI will be atheist ? They do not. I am an atheist, and have no such opinion, so your statement is false.
Are you truly that delusional about your ideas being the ultimate truth for everybody ? Does the thief believe every man steal?:p I find it more than slightly ironic to be, as an atheist, accused of thinking I have the ultimate truth of anything:)
It's actually worse for robots than for humans : humans don't really have a creator, a robot's AI WILL have a creator, and why do you think robot's will treat him(/her) any different from how humans do their ("potentially imaginary") creator ?
I am making no such claim.
A robot's creator will not, at all, be imaginary, and will probably have many opinions that could easily be given the status of divine law by the created.
Or they could just kill their creator, for all I know. Do you have a point here?
If such opinions include "you should kill all infidels" like islam does,
Most religions have that in they texts, somewhere.
we will have a big problem, especially if we proceed to kill or imprison said creator, or if he manages to kill himself in some way. Possibly. Let us take that crisis when and if it presents itself.
I'm not against atheists. But I do find that superiority complex so many of them display on the internet to be a bit irritating, and over the top. Everybody knows atheism will be selected out in the long term. Deal with it.
You say that, and think that *atheist* have a superiority complex? I stand amazed.
Well, Charles Darwin had a certain opinion about that didn't he ? And oh, whether it involves war, like in the movies, or merely... "being outcompeted for resources" (starving)... personally I'd prefer war. It hurts but at least it's interesting. The end result is the same either way.
I'm always amazed at human arrogance --- it is simply colossal:) Being intelligent is a bonus for survival, I'd say, nothing more. Many, many species have no intelligence worth mentioning (say, grass) and yet is vastly more successful in the Darwin game by most metrics. On the other hand, being intelligent does not automatically mean a robot would have the drive or desire to breed, or even the means to. Which would leave them in a pretty poor position in the Darwins game against humans.
Somehow, the teachers that teach evolution never gets that point across:)
I'm not saying that science class should use the Bible as a text book, but at least explain where evolution falls short. It is not all encompassing and does not explain everything. There are holes in the theory.
What holes would that be? The theory is quite well supported, to the best of my knowledge. Speak, or forever be silent!;)
You see, that is the problem with intelligent design. It is a fake theory, much like the Rorschach test. Both have a lot of supporters for various reasons, but that does not make it anything but wishful thinking when the evidence is against it. As it is, and overwhelmingly so in the case of supernatural explanations.
As for school kids, it is wise only to teach the mainstream theories so as not to overwhelm them. They have a lot to learn in a relatively short span, and it would not do to waste it with fringe theories. If the children later choose to specialize in the field, then by all means teach them any fringe theory they are willing to learn. But not before then.
And I agree modding down because you disagree is very silly and counterproductive. I would personally never do that. (I didn't read you original comment, so it might have been modded down for other reasons, of course).
No, I don't agree. Mosquitos needed to develop specialized feet, a reproductive system that uses blood, an anticoagulating agent and dispersal system, and a big needle nose all at once. Why all at once? The big needle nose, e.g. must be useful for flower-nectar gathering, too, so that was likely already developed. The anticoagulating system isn't strictly necessary, it just makes it more efficient (I don't believe you find the system in ticks, e.g.). And don't tell me that specialized feet are strictly necessary, either. The reproductive system could likely make use of other protein sources, too. And so forth. And I am not even a specialists; I have seen of much harder "irreducible complexity" candidates --- and been told how they evolved. One trick is that sometimes something evolved not by adding something, but taking away something.
Any of those seperately and they'd be dead. You are assuming that just because you can't see how this could evolve gradually, it can't. That is not the case.
And how do you do gender co-dependent traits slowly? The very first animal to ever use sexual reporduction had to have very specific, matching, complicated male and female mutations within the same generation. If just one mutated, it'd be unable to reproduce without a counterpart. I'd assume that you start out with identical organism that can produce common offspring, and then gradually work on differentiation from there. There is a wikipedia section on this, if you want to know more.
I was hoping they'd try to explain multi-mutation dependent animals like the moquitos
I am no expert, but I'd think that multiple, advantageous mutations would be very unlikely. So for my money, mosquitis are not multi-mutation dependent.
and how codependent opposite gender traits evolved simultaneously.
The usual way, slowly and a bit at a time. Without a specific example it is hard to see why you'd think this is even a problem? Obviously, at any given time, the trait had to be advantageous for that geneset.
But I guess they're conveniently ignoring those as usual.
I am not an expert, but I find it rather easy questions to address. Don't you agree?
[line numbers]
I didn't say you couldn't do it. But it requires installation of a plugin for something that basic, and it doesn't really work that well.
Don't you mean "installation of a plugin for something that BASIC"?
(Seriously, why waste 3--4 columns on line numbers?
You only care about them when the compiler whines, and then you have
a command to go to line n, you have a line number in the status bar,
and the option to set things up so you can jump to errors.)
Of course it is a matter of preference. However, I use them all the time, to sort-of remember where functions are in a file, to judge when a function or file has become too big, and so forth. And I only waste 3 columns, which really isn't much on the modern, wid e-screen monitor. Vertical space is another matter, and Kate is nice in that most of the space that traditional had to be taken from the vertical space (like file switching) can be taken from the horizontal instead. Not the menu, though it can be disabled.
Regarding Emacs the point was that even though it was my favorite editor for many years, and the indenting was nearly perfect, it had too many things it just didn't do very effectively. Another small matter that annoyed me was that the rectangle cuts&pastes were non-visual. That made it difficult to use especially when you were cutting whitespace. Then there is the small but significant matter that Emacs is very hard to embed, where as Kate is very easy, so I can get Kate almost everywhere but not Emacs.
Um. A bit of a rant there, I am afraid. In any case, an editor is a personal thing and I cannot see why we can't all use our own preference. If only someone would sit down and agree on a modeline specification, it wouldn't matter at all.
Know about shader programs? Those are compiled by a JIT compiler in the driver, at runtime. If nVidia or ATi believes that they have a better compiler that implements some optimizations that the other's doesn't, that could make them very reluctant to release the code.
It's not really a JIT compiler (at least in opengl). Just a compiler.(Well, technically, they are free to implement a JIT compiler, but that would be silly when they have the opportunity to make a real compiler instead).
It is a part of the driver, though. Compilers are, however, something that we have a lot of in the opensource world, so I have no fears there.
I didn't say you couldn't do it. But it requires installation of a plugin for something that basic, and it doesn't really work that well. Or at least, didn't when I finally gave up on emacs. From the wiki you linked, someone have made something better, so it might be better now.
Silly argument in any case. Kate is a much better editor than either vim (stateful editor? No thanks!) or emacs (ever tried to get line numbers on that thing?)
I know, let's have an article with an animated burning US flag. You mean like this? Not animated, I know, but I think that is a technicality. If it was practical to have inline movies, I'm sure it would be.
It's funny. Oh wait.. that'll be censored by Pro US groups. Apparently not.
ell you what I'll put the 9/11 video to music and put that on there. That's funny too. Sure, go ahead. You'll have to find a relevant article to post it to, of course.
Get real. Life is a compromise - what's easier.. grossly offending about 22% of the world's population or taking down a couple of pictures? I would be offended if wikipedia starte censoring appropriate pictures in articles. And far from all muslims regard pictures of Mo as offending. So it is obviously easier to offend people than to avoid it. Not that it matters.
Censorship exists *everywhere* and there's no point in getting pissy when it happens to not agree with your worldview. So does corruption, murder and rape. That does not mean we should roll over and accept it.
Thats a myth. Do you have proof that Muslims drew the danish cartoons? I rather think he was referring to some of the other pictures, those in the article in particular.
Hmmm... when I was young, I was taught that the diameter of a (bounded) set S in a metric space was the maximum (well, supremum) of the distances between any two elements in S. Seem a much simpler definition to me.(And wikipedia mentions this one, too)
They were Open source to begin with(with the exception of their windows port) they just went to GPLv3. They probably opened the windows source because they knew someone would probalby just fork off and port the gpled linux code over to windows anyway.
The windows port has also been GPL since 4.0, so that part is old news. The only change seems to be upgrading (;)) from v2 to v3.
Why, yes it is obvious (map::erase() invalidates all iterators in the map, as it should say right in the documentation for erase()), but what is more, this is quite common --- e.g. Java also has this behaviour. Why do you think erase() returns an iterator... for fun?
Now, C++ is complicated. C++ is powerful. Java is simple. Java is weak (and as of 1.5 throws type information out, for which I will not forgive it until it has been fixed!). There is a pattern there.
Now, what I wouldn't give for a language that has a simple syntax (lalr, e.g.) support for useful, common stuff such as lambdas, closures, static+dynamic polymorphism, types-independent-of-inheritance, not dependent on a VM, statically typed, provides operator overloading, preferably for arbitrary operators, classes/objects, full multiple inheritance and a few more items I probably forgot. I mean, how hard can it be really? It must be harder than it looks. C++ has much of that, but there is little sport in finding places where it missing out... give it a new syntax, completely divorce types from inheritance, and give us a lambda... and we will be getting there. More operating overloading would be nice... operator.= is on the top of my list:)
However, the problem is that he uses Matlab. Perhaps he could get better performance using Octave with Atlas optimization, but in the end, only compiling in C with assembly language optimization will guarantee the best results. I have heard from several people that Matlab has problems when the data sets become large. Well, looking at the price list, switching to octave should buy him a good deal more hardware, even if the performance is the same:)
Well of course, but you might have to brew it yourself, unless you can find someone to brew it for you. The recipe is here: free beer
Personally, I plan to try it out sometime 2008.
Agnosticism is the ability to admit you don't have enough evidence to make an informed decision about the origin of the universe.
Relax, it's a joke:p
Agnostic-theism is saying that we don't have enough evidence to make an informed decision about a creator God that listens to prayers and perform miracles. In general, agnosticism is just refusing to take a stand in something we do not have enough knowledge about. In the first sense, I think that the agnostics are nuts (:p ), in the second, many people are agnostic including nearly all atheists.
You sound like someone who thinks they have the slightest clue to exactly how the end result will be rendered. This is probably the most common fallacy in web design, and probably the reason why most web sites are designed so atrociously. A common symptom is a web page that only takes up the middle bit of the page, or font sizes specified in pixel sizes. Those web designers fail to take into account
screen DPI
viewer eye sight
viewer distance to monitor
browser differences
font rendering engine differences
user preferences
The best thing to do is to trust that most browsers are not setup by users. Insteadl, they are setup by some distribution or vendor, which probably went to some pain to choose the default serif, sans serif, italic and monospace font to be sensible, well rendered and available. In some cases they might even have made sure that they got the font size reasonable, though this aspect is almost impossible without user interaction (see e.g. viewer eye sight and distance to monitor). So leave the main text to the default for the browser, and scale the rest around that. Then apply all the other good design principles you have and like (such as no more than 2 menus, avoid tabs in tabs, never more than 10 or so items in one page and so on and on), and the page will turn out alright. Then make a specific stylesheet for IE users, making the necessary adjustment I believe is necessary there.
Now, most web designers do not do that. Which is why I tend to use font zoom a lot, and have this bit in my user stylesheet:
I like the top bar and separate window bar at the bottom. That is very easy to setup yourself in KDE, if you please, Just right-click the panel, add an extra panel and move the stuff you need around. Personally, I think one taskbar wastes too much screen space, so mine is hidden by default. I have yet to find anything to use a 2nd for:)
Thus, Wind/Solar can't really be used as EITHER base or "Variable" load. ALL of the output of either Solar or Wind energy must be matched by other variable load sources, so that when the wind isn't blowing and/or the sun not shining, the system as a whole can preserve its integrity. And this is the part that nobody discusses.
Nobody discusses? It is discussed pretty much every time wind and solar is brought up:) Still, an excellent post, but there is a couple of factors you have overlooked:
One is weather forecasts. It is perfectly reasonable to predict the wind and solar power output for the next few hours. Thus, if you get a period where significant parts of UK enjoys no wind and fog, UK would have hours notice to start up those coal power plants, or bring on line an extra nuclear reactor or two. This is quite unlike the power spikes that e.g. gas turbines handle so well, which are quite unpredictable. However, you are right that you need to increase the amount of variable power potential regardless.
The other is fuel cells (or perhaps another tech will turn out to be the holy grail, but fuel cells looks well under way). As hydrogen can be transported in the gas line along with methane (at least, in DK the pipes are made to able to do this), surplus wind power can be stored and used to alleviate some of the worst spikes, thus reducing the need for gas turbines.
Slashdot Mirror
[snipped senseless garbage]
To that, I will only say that might does not make right. Whether you have the courage to face the world as it is, rather than as you wish it is, is your road.
But why would the constructor bother to? Religion is just a parasite, wasting resources that could used otherwise.
Because otherwise robots will just shutdown. No purpose in life, the problem that was to be resolved.
Yet I don't shutdown, so you hypothesis is false. Again.
The problem that was the subject of this thread.
No, it was whether robots would out-compete humans. Specifically, my point is that self-reproducing was the most important trait there to even be in the game. Then you started on some crusade against atheist. Are you perhaps a bit insecure?
And atheism is a collection of ideologies,
No.
And nihilism, the prevalent form of atheism on the internet it seems, is basically polytheism, a "natural" religion.
You need to read up a bit. Nihilism is a philosophy. Atheism is just the default stands regarding gods and other invisible friends&foes.
since science is by definition unable to address the question if god exists
It answer the question "does a god affect the world" with a resounding "no!", which is good enough for me. An impotent god is irrelevant.
I snipped some more misunderstandings, and ramblings. Really, you should pick up a book about it if it interests you so much, and learn a bit.
Does the thief believe every man steal? :p I find it more than slightly ironic to be, as an atheist, accused of thinking I have the ultimate truth of anything :)
As an atheist, you obviously consider the absence of any eternal entity an "ultimate truth".
No I don't. I just take the default position, which is none of those 1000's god exists, until anything else is substantiated as likely.
"Pure" atheism, which could probably best be defined as "the absence of dogmatism" is one of the few ideologies that is mathematically wrong, in exactly the way you'd expect : any non-dogmatic theory can be used to prove ANY statement, and the proofs are completely unrelated to whether this statement is true or false. In short any non-dogmatic theory proves that 1=2, that your nose is blue with yellow laughing clowns standing on it, or any other statement. These theories are therefore useless.
lol. I am a mathematician. You are just a fool. And that argument is so silly I don't know where to start. Try inserting "pink invisible hedgehog" in your, eh, proof.
The problem with this crisis is as simple as brutal : science (or at least evolution) predicts that we will not recover from that crisis. At all. Ever. That crisis will make the human race a closed chapter in the (hopefully still existing) history books.
Eventually, humans will be extinct. Except that this is not what religion would teach you (the world will not end, of course, by human extinction) it is hardly even interesting.
So do you believe in evolution ? That if robots are better than us that we will either get killed, or starve ("get outcompeted for resources") ? Do tell. That at some point, which is probably not too far away, we will have only blacks or only whites, because the others got killed ?
*if* we are competing for the same resource, and *if* one has a global advantage over the other, then yes. Of all the threats we face, that one is not high on my list. Is the last bit a bit of racism? White and black people happily interbreed, no chance of either geneset dying out, providing a good chunk of the human population survives.
It seems to me you simply believe in nothing, not in atheism either, except in your own grandeur.
You a quite laughable, you know? It is not I who shout, pull my h
a religion
Maybe, maybe not. I'm inclined to not. But first and foremost they need to exists in a self-reproducing form.
Ever wonder how atheism lost to an opponent that refused to fight it in the classical period ? How it lost to christianity, despite constantly attacking and murdering their opponents ? Imho the answer is in the writings of cicero and what happened when the romans lost their religion, as exemplified by, for example, the catilina incident. I'm no history buff. Atheism have very ill conditions in a poorly educated world, which might be why it only popped up during "spikes" in education. Making robots believe will be, to be sure, as big a challenge as making a human believe. But clearly some people have no trouble doing that. And as soon as we find this to be necessary in order to get an AGI to function (and I do "believe" we will find this a necessity)I am making no such claim.
A robot's creator will not, at all, be imaginary, and will probably have many opinions that could easily be given the status of divine law by the created.Or they could just kill their creator, for all I know. Do you have a point here?
If such opinions include "you should kill all infidels" like islam does,Most religions have that in they texts, somewhere.
we will have a big problem, especially if we proceed to kill or imprison said creator, or if he manages to kill himself in some way. Possibly. Let us take that crisis when and if it presents itself. I'm not against atheists. But I do find that superiority complex so many of them display on the internet to be a bit irritating, and over the top. Everybody knows atheism will be selected out in the long term. Deal with it.You say that, and think that *atheist* have a superiority complex? I stand amazed.
See, now, you are chopping lumber with an axe :)
Doesn't have to be a robot, either. However, the robots would have to compete with humans. Could be interesting!
I'm always amazed at human arrogance --- it is simply colossal :) Being intelligent is a bonus for survival, I'd say, nothing more. Many, many species have no intelligence worth mentioning (say, grass) and yet is vastly more successful in the Darwin game by most metrics. On the other hand, being intelligent does not automatically mean a robot would have the drive or desire to breed, or even the means to. Which would leave them in a pretty poor position in the Darwins game against humans.
Somehow, the teachers that teach evolution never gets that point across :)
What holes would that be? The theory is quite well supported, to the best of my knowledge. Speak, or forever be silent! ;)
You see, that is the problem with intelligent design. It is a fake theory, much like the Rorschach test. Both have a lot of supporters for various reasons, but that does not make it anything but wishful thinking when the evidence is against it. As it is, and overwhelmingly so in the case of supernatural explanations.
As for school kids, it is wise only to teach the mainstream theories so as not to overwhelm them. They have a lot to learn in a relatively short span, and it would not do to waste it with fringe theories. If the children later choose to specialize in the field, then by all means teach them any fringe theory they are willing to learn. But not before then.
And I agree modding down because you disagree is very silly and counterproductive. I would personally never do that. (I didn't read you original comment, so it might have been modded down for other reasons, of course).
I am no expert, but I'd think that multiple, advantageous mutations would be very unlikely. So for my money, mosquitis are not multi-mutation dependent.
and how codependent opposite gender traits evolved simultaneously.The usual way, slowly and a bit at a time. Without a specific example it is hard to see why you'd think this is even a problem? Obviously, at any given time, the trait had to be advantageous for that geneset.
But I guess they're conveniently ignoring those as usual.I am not an expert, but I find it rather easy questions to address. Don't you agree?
Don't you mean "installation of a plugin for something that BASIC"?
(Seriously, why waste 3--4 columns on line numbers? You only care about them when the compiler whines, and then you have a command to go to line n, you have a line number in the status bar, and the option to set things up so you can jump to errors.)
Of course it is a matter of preference. However, I use them all the time, to sort-of remember where functions are in a file, to judge when a function or file has become too big, and so forth. And I only waste 3 columns, which really isn't much on the modern, wid e-screen monitor. Vertical space is another matter, and Kate is nice in that most of the space that traditional had to be taken from the vertical space (like file switching) can be taken from the horizontal instead. Not the menu, though it can be disabled.
Regarding Emacs the point was that even though it was my favorite editor for many years, and the indenting was nearly perfect, it had too many things it just didn't do very effectively. Another small matter that annoyed me was that the rectangle cuts&pastes were non-visual. That made it difficult to use especially when you were cutting whitespace. Then there is the small but significant matter that Emacs is very hard to embed, where as Kate is very easy, so I can get Kate almost everywhere but not Emacs.
Um. A bit of a rant there, I am afraid. In any case, an editor is a personal thing and I cannot see why we can't all use our own preference. If only someone would sit down and agree on a modeline specification, it wouldn't matter at all.
It's not really a JIT compiler (at least in opengl). Just a compiler.(Well, technically, they are free to implement a JIT compiler, but that would be silly when they have the opportunity to make a real compiler instead).
It is a part of the driver, though. Compilers are, however, something that we have a lot of in the opensource world, so I have no fears there.
I didn't say you couldn't do it. But it requires installation of a plugin for something that basic, and it doesn't really work that well. Or at least, didn't when I finally gave up on emacs. From the wiki you linked, someone have made something better, so it might be better now.
Ok, I admit that was funny.
Silly argument in any case. Kate is a much better editor than either vim (stateful editor? No thanks!) or emacs (ever tried to get line numbers on that thing?)
Runs and hides
Hmmm... when I was young, I was taught that the diameter of a (bounded) set S in a metric space was the maximum (well, supremum) of the distances between any two elements in S. Seem a much simpler definition to me.(And wikipedia mentions this one, too)
It's too early it appears. GPLv3 was simply added as an additional license. So GPLv2 still applies, if you wish,
The windows port has also been GPL since 4.0, so that part is old news. The only change seems to be upgrading (;)) from v2 to v3.
Why, yes it is obvious (map::erase() invalidates all iterators in the map, as it should say right in the documentation for erase()), but what is more, this is quite common --- e.g. Java also has this behaviour. Why do you think erase() returns an iterator... for fun?
Now, C++ is complicated. C++ is powerful. Java is simple. Java is weak (and as of 1.5 throws type information out, for which I will not forgive it until it has been fixed!). There is a pattern there.
Now, what I wouldn't give for a language that has a simple syntax (lalr, e.g.) support for useful, common stuff such as lambdas, closures, static+dynamic polymorphism, types-independent-of-inheritance, not dependent on a VM, statically typed, provides operator overloading, preferably for arbitrary operators, classes/objects, full multiple inheritance and a few more items I probably forgot. I mean, how hard can it be really? It must be harder than it looks. C++ has much of that, but there is little sport in finding places where it missing out... give it a new syntax, completely divorce types from inheritance, and give us a lambda... and we will be getting there. More operating overloading would be nice... operator.= is on the top of my list :)
Well of course, but you might have to brew it yourself, unless you can find someone to brew it for you. The recipe is here: free beer Personally, I plan to try it out sometime 2008.
Relax, it's a joke :p
Agnostic-theism is saying that we don't have enough evidence to make an informed decision about a creator God that listens to prayers and perform miracles. In general, agnosticism is just refusing to take a stand in something we do not have enough knowledge about. In the first sense, I think that the agnostics are nuts ( :p ), in the second, many people are agnostic including nearly all atheists.
You sound like someone who thinks they have the slightest clue to exactly how the end result will be rendered. This is probably the most common fallacy in web design, and probably the reason why most web sites are designed so atrociously. A common symptom is a web page that only takes up the middle bit of the page, or font sizes specified in pixel sizes. Those web designers fail to take into account
The best thing to do is to trust that most browsers are not setup by users. Insteadl, they are setup by some distribution or vendor, which probably went to some pain to choose the default serif, sans serif, italic and monospace font to be sensible, well rendered and available. In some cases they might even have made sure that they got the font size reasonable, though this aspect is almost impossible without user interaction (see e.g. viewer eye sight and distance to monitor). So leave the main text to the default for the browser, and scale the rest around that. Then apply all the other good design principles you have and like (such as no more than 2 menus, avoid tabs in tabs, never more than 10 or so items in one page and so on and on), and the page will turn out alright. Then make a specific stylesheet for IE users, making the necessary adjustment I believe is necessary there.
Now, most web designers do not do that. Which is why I tend to use font zoom a lot, and have this bit in my user stylesheet:
It might not be perfect, but it makes many pages a lot more readable --- and better-looking, too.Nobody discusses? It is discussed pretty much every time wind and solar is brought up :) Still, an excellent post, but there is a couple of factors you have overlooked:
One is weather forecasts. It is perfectly reasonable to predict the wind and solar power output for the next few hours. Thus, if you get a period where significant parts of UK enjoys no wind and fog, UK would have hours notice to start up those coal power plants, or bring on line an extra nuclear reactor or two. This is quite unlike the power spikes that e.g. gas turbines handle so well, which are quite unpredictable. However, you are right that you need to increase the amount of variable power potential regardless.
The other is fuel cells (or perhaps another tech will turn out to be the holy grail, but fuel cells looks well under way). As hydrogen can be transported in the gas line along with methane (at least, in DK the pipes are made to able to do this), surplus wind power can be stored and used to alleviate some of the worst spikes, thus reducing the need for gas turbines.