Hydro does this very easily. You put exactly enough water through the gates to match demand, and leave the rest to back up behind the dam for later use. Too much water? Just overflow a little, bypassing the generators.
Have you ever tried $X - > member (where $X is an instantiated class object?)
That's not whitespace around operators. That's replacing one operator with two (minus and greater than). Of course that'll make a difference, but my point was that whitespace around the operator currently doesn't and shouldn't in the future. Don't misconstrue it. To be clear, the reason meaningless whitespace around operators is is that both of the following work the same way:
Now, though, you're proposing that namespaces shouldn't be allowed to have the same name as any variable, class or constant. Are you mad? You realise that name conflict resolution is what namespaces are for, right? Yet you want to make it the case that if I'm using a Date namespace, I can never have a variable or class called date/Date? That's crazy.
The "just make sure your names are memorable, distinctive, and you're good to go" rule is what PHP currently has, with class names for instance. And it's the problem that namespaces are designed to solve, not make worse.
require both operands meet the lexical conventions of a variable or string constant, for it to be interpreted as a concatenation
Yeah? By string constant, I assume you mean string literal? But you can also concatenate numeric literals. And class constants. And regular constants.
And by the time you've got those cases, ($a.two . $a.one) is ambiguous, regardless of how good your parser is. Oh, unless you want to make whitespace around operators meaningful, which is, frankly, horrible.
Japan? You mean a country where one party has been in government since 1955, except a couple of years in the early '90s?
A multi-party system is better in theory, and in practice. It reduces disproportionality of election outcomes, and it increases diversity of choice for voters. It forces governments to make concessions and collaborate with their coalition partners, and adds a further check to the unbridled misuse of power (while, generally, retaining strong decision-making at the executive level).
I've heard the stability argument for two-party systems before. Of course, what you refer to as "toppling" is a government losing it's majority. Personally, I think when a government loses its mandate to rule it should "topple" — stability be damned.
But, realistically, such instability just doesn't happen that often in multi-party systems; nobody wants to be the person who brought down or destabilised the government, because voters have little tolerance for it. And minority governments often hobble along to the next election if it isn't far away — usually opposition parties (the majority) are happy to concede that much (and they know they have their boot on the government's throat regardless).
Sure, allegiances change. But the promise of power is, uh, powerful — it's usually more than enough of an incentive for the factions in a coalition government to stick it out, co-operate, reach compromises, form a consensus, debate, discuss, etc. All good things, really.
You could always listen in to Radio New Zealand (Warning: Windows Media, YMMV) on the hour to find out. Then you'd be able to type their names in. I, of course, being a New Zealand, can't.
Oh, and rather hilariously, their names are available on teletext.
I'm living in New Zealand. They were on the 6 o'clock news. Footage of them in court, no less. Damned if I can remember their names, though, and they won't be available in print until tomorrow's newspapers come out. (Damn lack of an evening paper.)
The 14 year old was having a birthday party for his friend, who had just turned 15. According to police, the accused thought the residence was a tinny house, staged a robbery that went wrong, and the whole thing ended up with the 14 year old having his head smashed in by a claw hammer.
Unaffordable housing doesn't make a mortgage crisis. Nor does a high interest rate. In fact, all it leads to is a housing market bust (high interest rate equals less people buying houses, equals house prices dropping), which is exactly what we're seeing. That "eight years salary" figure is dropping steadily, week on week.
Sure, it'll be a while before affordability comes down, because debt is curbed by the interest rate. But it will come down. There's no sense being Chicken Little now.
And don't get me started on the idiotic "no nuclear power here" meme started in the '80s.
I didn't mention nuclear power. You did. And I was at least trying to give an economic justification for what I said (successful or not), as opposed to just flashing 80s slogans around.
Firstly, we don't have mortgage crisis. We've had a few high-risk property investment companies collapsing, sure. But it's a long way from a crisis yet. And to compare our woes with what the US is experiencing is to really underestimate their situation.
As for our "third world" power generation, two thirds of our power is generated from renewable sources (mostly hydro and geothermal). Which means, sure, we have times (like now) when the water in our hydro lakes is getting a little low, and we have to conserve. On the other hand, it means that we're that much less reliant on oil, a power source that's going to become more expensive, rapidly.
Oh, and the rise of youth crime is a myth. A pervasive one, sure. But in reality, crime rates have been falling for twelve years now, and youth crime as a percentage of offending has stayed steady across the same period. Combine that with an increasing population (which you'd expect to see raise per-capita crime rates), and the rise of cellphones and associated crime reporting levels, and we're looking pretty damn low on crime at the moment.
At the risk of extending this rather off-topic fork, I feel its important to correct a mis-truth in the above.
Mason, the "ear-flick" father, was prosecuted for two counts of assault. He didn't get "a warning put on his police record", he was actually charged. The charges were in relation to both his sons, who were aged two and four. Neither charge was for an ear flick.
Mason is innocent, of course, unless he's been proven guilty. But perhaps you should think twice before only listening to one account of what he did to his children. It is, after all, the court's job to decide the matter.
Cheaper said than done. Plenty of hardware in and connected to my current PC isn't certified on any distribution of GNU/Linux or *BSD; in fact, some components (such as a Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner) are known to be unsupported.
Yes, because you clearly need a flatbed scanner to test website rendering. And because, obviously, hardware must be "certified" for it to work. Without certification, my hard drive refuses to spin; it has a grossly inflated sense of itself.
For people who use a web site to sell something, this may be viable, but until web development becomes my profession, I cannot afford to rip out half of my PC and purchase new hardware just to test web sites in IE 6.
Yes, because it's not like you can have more than one operating system installed at once. Of course you can't. And if you want to use Linux you actually have to physically rip parts out of your PC - because if Linux detects even one unsupported piece of hardware, it has a fit and decides to just give up on the whole thing. Uhuh. That makes a lot of sense.
Instead, I would need to use another method recommended by cbart387.
Which requires an operating system that you have to purchase for a non-trivial amount. Truly, cheaper said than done.
Look, if you want to criticise this method for being too much of a hassle for anyone not running Linux already, fine. (Although it's still likely to be easier than using virtualization as suggested by the OP.) If you want to criticise it for (legally, but not actually) needing a valid Microsoft product key, albeit one for something (very, very cheap) like NT4 or W95, fine. But, instead, you chose to wrongly criticise one of the only advantages it has; it's nominally free, right down to the OS.
Screw HTML and CSS standards compliance; the only thing I'm holding out for is sweet, sweet 24-bit PNG support. No more stupid matte colours, and no spending ages getting fiddly non-square image shapes to layer onto complex backgrounds nicely. Plus: 'glass' background effects. Hoo-fucking-rah.
The sooner Microsoft push this update on everyone, the better. After all, it's not like I use IE - why should I care whether people want the update or not?
That's possibly true, but that's not what I was saying. Perhaps because of the ambiguity of "transfer", perhaps because you're getting the implication the wrong way round (I'm saying non-transfer -> dualist, not dualist -> non-transfer).
You're right that a dualist might think the new brain connects to the old mind, and that way consciousness is preserved. Or, a dualist might not think that; they might think that a teleport would sever the tie to the old mind. Neither view is what I was talking about.
What I was saying is that a materialist would think that consciousness is transferred along with the brain. Because, to a materialist, there is no part of what we call consciousness that is immaterial. Thus, it's absurd to think consciousness isn't transferred along with the brain, unless you're not a materialist.
Good luck getting a person overseas to fix a physical problem. Or even diagnose it (who monitors the monitoring system?). Network operators are less susceptible to outsourcing than programmers, you know.
Yep. The best part truly would be the respect. You think a Writer's strike is bad? Imagine a network administrator strike. The results would be catastrophic. And fun to watch (for anyone not affected).
Yep, it does - in all cases I've seen. Probably because (I'm pretty sure) Flash doesn't provide you with plain sockets; you can only offload requests to the browser, where they're logged in Firebug.
Forget "power" ripping tools; they all seem to just come down to a regex through the source, pre-set for a given handful of sites. So, they break as soon as a site updates their page layout, and just plain don't work on other, more obscure, sites.
The best way I've found is to just open up Firebug to the 'Net' tab (looks like this), and look for the biggest request listed. This works because the browser has to make the request for the video at some point, even if that request is obfuscated in the source, occurs in Javascript, doesn't end in.flv, and so on. From there, it's just a right-click, and "Copy Location".
[...] in an attempt to communicate to someone my understanding of U-Boat warfare in the Great War, I draw a single line four hundred feet long. Now, I can understand my line perfectly, but no one else will ever be able to. Does the information exist?
I agree with you on realistic, pragmatic grounds - for all intents and purposes the information is gone. But since we both seem to be putting forth unlikely, unrealistic scenarios to establish our points, allow me one more: it is possible that someone else will be able to decode your understanding from the 400ft line. In fact, there are an infinite number of possible decoding mechanisms that will convert between your linear account and an ordinary English account.
So, where's the information? Is it more in the decoding/encoding process than the output? Sure. So, perhaps we should consider the whole "system" of information processing? I don't know.
I see what you mean, but I think I just stated my case badly. So, allow me to restate my position in response to your objection. I don't want to use this funky "knols" notation, so let me just put it generally.
Your original claim (and let me know if I can't attribute it to you) was that the knowledge inherent in a text is lessened where that text doesn't effectively communicate.
My original point was that effective communication is a lot less rigid a constraint than you might think. People are endowed with remarkable and complex pragmatics that allow us to read through more errors in both grammar and spelling. For the vast majority of such errors, we don't even notice them, and they don't make communication any less efficient. Even when a text is very error ridden, while the communication may be less efficient, it's still very effective: the meaning makes it through.
But leaving that behind, there's a much bigger problem with your claim. Presumably you'd grant that information is information, regardless of anyone knowing it. The height of Mt Everest, were it not known, would still be a piece of information. And (if we could stick to "justified true belief") as soon as someone has a good reason to believe that (true) information, it's knowledge. Well, if we allow this premise, then your claim is shown to be inappropriately subjective, as follows:
Consider a text of Ancient Greek. Presumably, you wouldn't be able to read such a text - the information transmitted would be zero. But that doesn't mean it is devoid of information. And it doesn't mean that it couldn't produce knowledge in someone else (a classics scholar, for example).
The same goes for a page of apparent gibberish, that looks slightly like English. While you might not be able to make it out, it may just be that someone has spent their entire life sending SMS text messages, and can read it as fast as you can properly formed English. It's egocentric to claim that the fact the information in the text is withheld from you means there is no such information.
So, not only is proper spelling and grammar not necessary for the transmission of information, it's doesn't actually have any affect at all on what information a text contains. Feel free to tell me that "proper" English was good enough for Jesus Christ though.
Not only is there Britain and India, there's also Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the rest of the commonwealth - potentially 1.9 billion people! (Although, parts of Canada, I understand, have swapped to the American usage).
Slashdot Mirror
Hydro does this very easily. You put exactly enough water through the gates to match demand, and leave the rest to back up behind the dam for later use. Too much water? Just overflow a little, bypassing the generators.
You do realise every single MP for National voted for the Copyright Reform Bill, right? You realise that they strongly support section 92A, right?
That's not whitespace around operators. That's replacing one operator with two (minus and greater than). Of course that'll make a difference, but my point was that whitespace around the operator currently doesn't and shouldn't in the future. Don't misconstrue it. To be clear, the reason meaningless whitespace around operators is is that both of the following work the same way:
Now, though, you're proposing that namespaces shouldn't be allowed to have the same name as any variable, class or constant. Are you mad? You realise that name conflict resolution is what namespaces are for, right? Yet you want to make it the case that if I'm using a Date namespace, I can never have a variable or class called date/Date? That's crazy.
The "just make sure your names are memorable, distinctive, and you're good to go" rule is what PHP currently has, with class names for instance. And it's the problem that namespaces are designed to solve, not make worse.
Yeah? By string constant, I assume you mean string literal? But you can also concatenate numeric literals. And class constants. And regular constants.
And by the time you've got those cases, ($a.two . $a.one) is ambiguous, regardless of how good your parser is. Oh, unless you want to make whitespace around operators meaningful, which is, frankly, horrible.
Japan? You mean a country where one party has been in government since 1955, except a couple of years in the early '90s?
A multi-party system is better in theory, and in practice. It reduces disproportionality of election outcomes, and it increases diversity of choice for voters. It forces governments to make concessions and collaborate with their coalition partners, and adds a further check to the unbridled misuse of power (while, generally, retaining strong decision-making at the executive level).
I've heard the stability argument for two-party systems before. Of course, what you refer to as "toppling" is a government losing it's majority. Personally, I think when a government loses its mandate to rule it should "topple" — stability be damned.
But, realistically, such instability just doesn't happen that often in multi-party systems; nobody wants to be the person who brought down or destabilised the government, because voters have little tolerance for it. And minority governments often hobble along to the next election if it isn't far away — usually opposition parties (the majority) are happy to concede that much (and they know they have their boot on the government's throat regardless).
Sure, allegiances change. But the promise of power is, uh, powerful — it's usually more than enough of an incentive for the factions in a coalition government to stick it out, co-operate, reach compromises, form a consensus, debate, discuss, etc. All good things, really.
You could always listen in to Radio New Zealand (Warning: Windows Media, YMMV) on the hour to find out. Then you'd be able to type their names in. I, of course, being a New Zealand, can't.
Oh, and rather hilariously, their names are available on teletext.
I'm living in New Zealand. They were on the 6 o'clock news. Footage of them in court, no less. Damned if I can remember their names, though, and they won't be available in print until tomorrow's newspapers come out. (Damn lack of an evening paper.)
The 14 year old was having a birthday party for his friend, who had just turned 15. According to police, the accused thought the residence was a tinny house, staged a robbery that went wrong, and the whole thing ended up with the 14 year old having his head smashed in by a claw hammer.
Unaffordable housing doesn't make a mortgage crisis. Nor does a high interest rate. In fact, all it leads to is a housing market bust (high interest rate equals less people buying houses, equals house prices dropping), which is exactly what we're seeing. That "eight years salary" figure is dropping steadily, week on week.
Sure, it'll be a while before affordability comes down, because debt is curbed by the interest rate. But it will come down. There's no sense being Chicken Little now.
I didn't mention nuclear power. You did. And I was at least trying to give an economic justification for what I said (successful or not), as opposed to just flashing 80s slogans around.
Firstly, we don't have mortgage crisis. We've had a few high-risk property investment companies collapsing, sure. But it's a long way from a crisis yet. And to compare our woes with what the US is experiencing is to really underestimate their situation.
As for our "third world" power generation, two thirds of our power is generated from renewable sources (mostly hydro and geothermal). Which means, sure, we have times (like now) when the water in our hydro lakes is getting a little low, and we have to conserve. On the other hand, it means that we're that much less reliant on oil, a power source that's going to become more expensive, rapidly.
Oh, and the rise of youth crime is a myth. A pervasive one, sure. But in reality, crime rates have been falling for twelve years now, and youth crime as a percentage of offending has stayed steady across the same period. Combine that with an increasing population (which you'd expect to see raise per-capita crime rates), and the rise of cellphones and associated crime reporting levels, and we're looking pretty damn low on crime at the moment.
Mason, the "ear-flick" father, was prosecuted for two counts of assault. He didn't get "a warning put on his police record", he was actually charged. The charges were in relation to both his sons, who were aged two and four. Neither charge was for an ear flick.
Mason is innocent, of course, unless he's been proven guilty. But perhaps you should think twice before only listening to one account of what he did to his children. It is, after all, the court's job to decide the matter.
Yep. And it's an appeal to authority in any case, which really doesn't make sense in the context of something as subjective as music.
No, it wouldn't. WPA cares about the actual disk hardware and the volume serial number, neither of which should be affected by a partition resize.
Yes, it does.
I think we'd all like to throttle some of the people on Youtube.
Yes, because you clearly need a flatbed scanner to test website rendering. And because, obviously, hardware must be "certified" for it to work. Without certification, my hard drive refuses to spin; it has a grossly inflated sense of itself.
Yes, because it's not like you can have more than one operating system installed at once. Of course you can't. And if you want to use Linux you actually have to physically rip parts out of your PC - because if Linux detects even one unsupported piece of hardware, it has a fit and decides to just give up on the whole thing. Uhuh. That makes a lot of sense.
Which requires an operating system that you have to purchase for a non-trivial amount. Truly, cheaper said than done.
Look, if you want to criticise this method for being too much of a hassle for anyone not running Linux already, fine. (Although it's still likely to be easier than using virtualization as suggested by the OP.) If you want to criticise it for (legally, but not actually) needing a valid Microsoft product key, albeit one for something (very, very cheap) like NT4 or W95, fine. But, instead, you chose to wrongly criticise one of the only advantages it has; it's nominally free, right down to the OS.
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
Voila. Side-by-side installation of multiple Internet Explorer versions, for free.
Screw HTML and CSS standards compliance; the only thing I'm holding out for is sweet, sweet 24-bit PNG support. No more stupid matte colours, and no spending ages getting fiddly non-square image shapes to layer onto complex backgrounds nicely. Plus: 'glass' background effects. Hoo-fucking-rah.
The sooner Microsoft push this update on everyone, the better. After all, it's not like I use IE - why should I care whether people want the update or not?
That's possibly true, but that's not what I was saying. Perhaps because of the ambiguity of "transfer", perhaps because you're getting the implication the wrong way round (I'm saying non-transfer -> dualist, not dualist -> non-transfer).
You're right that a dualist might think the new brain connects to the old mind, and that way consciousness is preserved. Or, a dualist might not think that; they might think that a teleport would sever the tie to the old mind. Neither view is what I was talking about.
What I was saying is that a materialist would think that consciousness is transferred along with the brain. Because, to a materialist, there is no part of what we call consciousness that is immaterial. Thus, it's absurd to think consciousness isn't transferred along with the brain, unless you're not a materialist.
No, it's absurd to think that it doesn't, unless you're a dualist. In which case you're beyond help anyway.
Good luck getting a person overseas to fix a physical problem. Or even diagnose it (who monitors the monitoring system?). Network operators are less susceptible to outsourcing than programmers, you know.
Yep. The best part truly would be the respect. You think a Writer's strike is bad? Imagine a network administrator strike. The results would be catastrophic. And fun to watch (for anyone not affected).
Yep, it does - in all cases I've seen. Probably because (I'm pretty sure) Flash doesn't provide you with plain sockets; you can only offload requests to the browser, where they're logged in Firebug.
Forget "power" ripping tools; they all seem to just come down to a regex through the source, pre-set for a given handful of sites. So, they break as soon as a site updates their page layout, and just plain don't work on other, more obscure, sites.
The best way I've found is to just open up Firebug to the 'Net' tab (looks like this), and look for the biggest request listed. This works because the browser has to make the request for the video at some point, even if that request is obfuscated in the source, occurs in Javascript, doesn't end in .flv, and so on. From there, it's just a right-click, and "Copy Location".
Interesting
I agree with you on realistic, pragmatic grounds - for all intents and purposes the information is gone. But since we both seem to be putting forth unlikely, unrealistic scenarios to establish our points, allow me one more: it is possible that someone else will be able to decode your understanding from the 400ft line. In fact, there are an infinite number of possible decoding mechanisms that will convert between your linear account and an ordinary English account.
So, where's the information? Is it more in the decoding/encoding process than the output? Sure. So, perhaps we should consider the whole "system" of information processing? I don't know.
I see what you mean, but I think I just stated my case badly. So, allow me to restate my position in response to your objection. I don't want to use this funky "knols" notation, so let me just put it generally.
Your original claim (and let me know if I can't attribute it to you) was that the knowledge inherent in a text is lessened where that text doesn't effectively communicate.
My original point was that effective communication is a lot less rigid a constraint than you might think. People are endowed with remarkable and complex pragmatics that allow us to read through more errors in both grammar and spelling. For the vast majority of such errors, we don't even notice them, and they don't make communication any less efficient. Even when a text is very error ridden, while the communication may be less efficient, it's still very effective: the meaning makes it through.
But leaving that behind, there's a much bigger problem with your claim. Presumably you'd grant that information is information, regardless of anyone knowing it. The height of Mt Everest, were it not known, would still be a piece of information. And (if we could stick to "justified true belief") as soon as someone has a good reason to believe that (true) information, it's knowledge. Well, if we allow this premise, then your claim is shown to be inappropriately subjective, as follows:
Consider a text of Ancient Greek. Presumably, you wouldn't be able to read such a text - the information transmitted would be zero. But that doesn't mean it is devoid of information. And it doesn't mean that it couldn't produce knowledge in someone else (a classics scholar, for example).
The same goes for a page of apparent gibberish, that looks slightly like English. While you might not be able to make it out, it may just be that someone has spent their entire life sending SMS text messages, and can read it as fast as you can properly formed English. It's egocentric to claim that the fact the information in the text is withheld from you means there is no such information.
So, not only is proper spelling and grammar not necessary for the transmission of information, it's doesn't actually have any affect at all on what information a text contains. Feel free to tell me that "proper" English was good enough for Jesus Christ though.
Not only is there Britain and India, there's also Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the rest of the commonwealth - potentially 1.9 billion people! (Although, parts of Canada, I understand, have swapped to the American usage).