That can't be right. The universe is about 14,000 megaparsecs in radius, even if we were at the exact center that would have things traveling outward at 1.04E9 m/s or 3.46c. I'm reasonably certain they're not claiming FTL on this one so... Is it actually 74.3 m/s instead of 74.3 km/s? Or is there something else going on here?
There are several things we can expect to have in common with *any*evolved intelligent life we will encounter, because the selective advantages they provide apply to any environment in which they would have evolved.
That includes porn.
As a member of an advanced xenological monitoring and listening post team studying your world, I can attest that your Rule 34 is, indeed, universal. Right up to and including holo-stims of an anthropomorphic galaxy with disproportionately large... equipment... mounting and having its way with a galactic super-cluster.
He's making a joke about the movie "Eraser" where the bad guys were armed with "portable railguns" (at one point die governator is shooting one from each hand) that somehow can fire rounds accelerated to a tenth or so of the speed of light, can fire multiple times per second, for several minutes, without reloading/recharging, that knock someone back 50 feet on impact, and yet somehow there's virtually no recoil for the use of said device.
Yes, but if you're using something like a railgun projectile then there's no direct explosive force on impact. There's a conversion from KE --> Heat and the concordant explosions coming from secondary reactions. If you fire a land-based railgun bolt at a ship that has even half-assed working radar, they can be a few hundred meters away as your chunk of metal goes splash instead of boom. There may be some waves but the ship would be far from out of commission.
We really need to rethink our definition of "minor child". In this day and age, the age of majority is far too low. We need to up that to 25 for any and all important decisions. Driving, voting, gambling, drinking, ability to enter into contracts - bam, you get it all at 25. It made sense to set the age to 13 when you already knew everything you needed to at 8 years old and you probably wouldn't live to see 30. But nowadays when you basically need a college education for a well paying job (meaning your education doesn't finish until 21-22) and living in a very information-centric society, I think we need to reconsider our age limits.
This isn't to say that 25 year old people don't do stupid stuff too, but at least by then your impulse control is fully developed and you *should* know better.
Here's a hint - most people have two hands. While one hand holds the phone and manipulates it, the other hand is free to handle the servicing of the naughty bits. See, bacteria don't magically jump from the naughty bits hand to the phone hand, so the phone doesn't get the naughty bits germs all over it.
This. We do the same thing in our environment. Devs have almost total control over the dev systems, we have an easy means to refresh/wipe out said systems if and when the devs screw it up, and when it's ready for actual users to test the business analysts (working closely with the devs) ship it over to QA for client testing. If the clients approve it then a formal request is drafted for operations to install it in production. The has drastically reduced the number of errors that slip into production (though they do still happen). Errors in QA are significantly reduced, and errors in Dev (very common) are easy to erase and start over again.
If you let devs install directly into production, there will be many, *many* errors that they miss and you better hope you have good backups.
Seriously? Every time someone bumps into me I check my pockets and bags to make sure nothing's missing or unusual.
I got into that habit living in Las Vegas for a few years. Wallet goes in the front pocket, any "accidental" bump or jostle prompts a pocket check (even, or perhaps especially if it's a little kid because scumbags can use them as distractions).
You laugh, but C for dummies vol. 1 & 2 were how I first learned to program. The breakdown of pointers in vol. 2 was worth the price of admission. When I did get to college and took formal courses on the subject, the foundation of the "for dummies" books actually gave me a major leg up on the theory and I basically coasted through all of the programming courses.
Until I got to 8086 assembly. That curriculum was put together by Satan.
There's something else that's a significant barrier for most people: Pretty much every successful programmer will tell you about their first lesson when trying to write some small programs, and their discovery that no matter how hard they tried, their first efforts always had bugs. They quickly discovered that this was a permanent part of programming, accepted it, and studied debugging techniques.
Adding to this: you are correct 90% of programming is actually debugging what you've written. The handful of times that complex code I've written worked 100% right the first time almost took longer because I had to completely convince myself that there wasn't some hidden bug somewhere. It actually slightly freaks out a good programmer when something works correctly with no debugging because it's so ingrained that debugging needs to be done.
There's some extra steps they don't tell you about in setting up Ubuntu 12.04:
After logging in to Unity press ctrl-alt-F1 Log in to the command prompt Run: sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback gnome-panel gnome-shell Run: sudo/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -s gnome-classic Reboot your computer
The majority of computer users are not creators and never will be.
This is generally true for home users (minus school-work as the major exception). However Windows 8 with its consumer-centered model completely ignores enterprise users. Windows 8 is absolutely not designed with the enterprise in mind from what I've seen so far.
More to the point from a corporate perspective if I log on as Administrator (or some admin user) and install something, it shows up on my Metro interface (so far so good), but if I log out and have the user log in, it's missing from theirs. So...newly installed programs have to be searched for and pinned *by each user of the computer* in order for them to get access to it. This is outright unacceptable in an enterprise environment.
The sad thing is I actually like it otherwise, a lot of things are more streamlined and improved, task manager has taken a quantum leap forward in usefulness, ribbon on explorer isn't as obnoxious as I feared, and it generally boots faster and runs smoother. But the basic interface is just terrible. I gimped a "lite start menu" in by playing around with toolbar settings and using the folder that was the "All Users" start menu in Win7 just to have access to a straightforward programs list. But this is hardly ideal.
Windows 8 seems to be strictly a home-user/single-user/tablet OS. It's a nightmare for enterprises. We'll probably stick with Windows 7 unless Windows 9 or a service pack fixes a lot of the egregious flaws.
If we're going to argue immaturity while the persons body is well capable of the act then the brain doesn't finish maturing until 25.
Additionally it might slow down this rash of two under 18 parents with a kid all of a sudden.
I would support this. I'm not sure how you would stop all of the under 25 year old people from having sex, but if there was like some brain switch that would make people not want sex at all until 25 years of age, I think that would be a very good thing. You grow up, you go to college (if desired) and when you're reasonably settled in you start exploring relations with the opposite sex. On the whole we as a society would be way more productive. Ah well, I can dream.
which says that life starts at fertilization and guarantees that life full protection under the law which of course has the effect of making women who miscarry guilty of murder.
That's ignorant. Murder requires intent. It would have the (likely unintended) consequence of making a whole group of women guilty of negligent homicide if they knew or should have known that their actions could lead to miscarriage, or infliction of grievous bodily harm to every mother of an fetal alcohol syndrome baby, but a murder charge could not conceivably be leveled against a woman who miscarries any more than it could be leveled against a person who's child died of cancer.
I'm sure there are many things to hate about such a law, but let's at least be realistic about attacking it.
Rape is rather different though in that in the difficult cases both victim and perpetrator are of similar socio-economic backgrounds, and it is easy to imagine a situation in which consent would be given whether it was or not.
In cases of fraud it is far more likely that the incident under dispute is the only conceivable reason that the two parties came together. Similarly in robbery. Similarly in cases where rape is easier to prove.
You do run into similar difficulties when fraud is committed by one friend against another - they both come off as similarly credible. It's just that you run into it a lot more often with rape charges since so many are committed by an acquaintance or someone in a similar social circle. It's not that the victim is less credible, it's that both victim and perpetrator come off as equally credible, making the case extraordinarily difficult to prosecute because who do you believe?
I'm not a lawyer, but is it considered "attempting to escape" if you just pop the cuffs and sit there? For me personally I get claustrophobic when confined like that. I wouldn't be terribly bothered being arrested as such, but the cuffs would really irritate me. What if you popped them off and sat politely in the car? Would that still run afoul of this section?
And boolean algebra. I would argue that if you don't have a fundamental understanding of boolean algebra then you really have no business coding (at least, anything serious).
The great thing about combinatorics is how deceptively simple it is. Honestly I think it should be a require high school course. At least the parts that I took in combinatorics 1 in college, maybe stretch it to a year long junior level high school course. Cover counting, permutations, combinations, n-choose-k, and all that other neat stuff. I never did understand why it required calculus in college though, nothing in there is fundamentally rooted in calculus (maybe some background in infinite series helps...some...for the notation?) but it teaches you to think kind of sideways to the way normal math works and really helps with a lot of real-world applications.
Look you really can't compare the gay rights movement to the civil rights movement of the 60's. They're just too wildly different. Black people were being routinely *executed* often with the full approval of local law enforcement. Segregation was rampant. Kids, and I mean under ten years old were made to feel worthless because of the color of their skin.
People were willing to *die* to put an end to the horrendous oppression they were suffering. How many gay people have gone through even a tenth of what the average black person went through 50-60 years ago? How many of these protesters have been so oppressed that they would be willing to risk death to make the necessary changes?
No. The tenuous connection about marriage is insulting to the men and women who sacrificed so much for the freedoms finally given in the civil rights movement. Trying to hitch the gay rights wagon along for the ride is just sickening. By all means, stand up for what you believe in, but make your own movement and stop trying to co-opt one that meant so much to so many.
Slashdot Mirror
That can't be right. The universe is about 14,000 megaparsecs in radius, even if we were at the exact center that would have things traveling outward at 1.04E9 m/s or 3.46c. I'm reasonably certain they're not claiming FTL on this one so... Is it actually 74.3 m/s instead of 74.3 km/s? Or is there something else going on here?
There are several things we can expect to have in common with *any*evolved intelligent life we will encounter, because the selective advantages they provide apply to any environment in which they would have evolved.
That includes porn.
As a member of an advanced xenological monitoring and listening post team studying your world, I can attest that your Rule 34 is, indeed, universal. Right up to and including holo-stims of an anthropomorphic galaxy with disproportionately large ... equipment ... mounting and having its way with a galactic super-cluster.
He's making a joke about the movie "Eraser" where the bad guys were armed with "portable railguns" (at one point die governator is shooting one from each hand) that somehow can fire rounds accelerated to a tenth or so of the speed of light, can fire multiple times per second, for several minutes, without reloading/recharging, that knock someone back 50 feet on impact, and yet somehow there's virtually no recoil for the use of said device.
Yes, but if you're using something like a railgun projectile then there's no direct explosive force on impact. There's a conversion from KE --> Heat and the concordant explosions coming from secondary reactions. If you fire a land-based railgun bolt at a ship that has even half-assed working radar, they can be a few hundred meters away as your chunk of metal goes splash instead of boom. There may be some waves but the ship would be far from out of commission.
We really need to rethink our definition of "minor child". In this day and age, the age of majority is far too low. We need to up that to 25 for any and all important decisions. Driving, voting, gambling, drinking, ability to enter into contracts - bam, you get it all at 25. It made sense to set the age to 13 when you already knew everything you needed to at 8 years old and you probably wouldn't live to see 30. But nowadays when you basically need a college education for a well paying job (meaning your education doesn't finish until 21-22) and living in a very information-centric society, I think we need to reconsider our age limits.
This isn't to say that 25 year old people don't do stupid stuff too, but at least by then your impulse control is fully developed and you *should* know better.
Here's a hint - most people have two hands. While one hand holds the phone and manipulates it, the other hand is free to handle the servicing of the naughty bits. See, bacteria don't magically jump from the naughty bits hand to the phone hand, so the phone doesn't get the naughty bits germs all over it.
This. We do the same thing in our environment. Devs have almost total control over the dev systems, we have an easy means to refresh/wipe out said systems if and when the devs screw it up, and when it's ready for actual users to test the business analysts (working closely with the devs) ship it over to QA for client testing. If the clients approve it then a formal request is drafted for operations to install it in production. The has drastically reduced the number of errors that slip into production (though they do still happen). Errors in QA are significantly reduced, and errors in Dev (very common) are easy to erase and start over again.
If you let devs install directly into production, there will be many, *many* errors that they miss and you better hope you have good backups.
Must suck for identical twins separated at birth.
Seriously? Every time someone bumps into me I check my pockets and bags to make sure nothing's missing or unusual.
I got into that habit living in Las Vegas for a few years. Wallet goes in the front pocket, any "accidental" bump or jostle prompts a pocket check (even, or perhaps especially if it's a little kid because scumbags can use them as distractions).
You laugh, but C for dummies vol. 1 & 2 were how I first learned to program. The breakdown of pointers in vol. 2 was worth the price of admission. When I did get to college and took formal courses on the subject, the foundation of the "for dummies" books actually gave me a major leg up on the theory and I basically coasted through all of the programming courses.
Until I got to 8086 assembly. That curriculum was put together by Satan.
There's something else that's a significant barrier for most people: Pretty much every successful programmer will tell you about their first lesson when trying to write some small programs, and their discovery that no matter how hard they tried, their first efforts always had bugs. They quickly discovered that this was a permanent part of programming, accepted it, and studied debugging techniques.
Adding to this: you are correct 90% of programming is actually debugging what you've written. The handful of times that complex code I've written worked 100% right the first time almost took longer because I had to completely convince myself that there wasn't some hidden bug somewhere. It actually slightly freaks out a good programmer when something works correctly with no debugging because it's so ingrained that debugging needs to be done.
Perhaps it was being taught by the Principality of Sealand though I would've expected their English skills to be better...
There's some extra steps they don't tell you about in setting up Ubuntu 12.04:
/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -s gnome-classic
After logging in to Unity press ctrl-alt-F1
Log in to the command prompt
Run: sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback gnome-panel gnome-shell
Run: sudo
Reboot your computer
The majority of computer users are not creators and never will be.
This is generally true for home users (minus school-work as the major exception). However Windows 8 with its consumer-centered model completely ignores enterprise users. Windows 8 is absolutely not designed with the enterprise in mind from what I've seen so far.
More to the point from a corporate perspective if I log on as Administrator (or some admin user) and install something, it shows up on my Metro interface (so far so good), but if I log out and have the user log in, it's missing from theirs. So...newly installed programs have to be searched for and pinned *by each user of the computer* in order for them to get access to it. This is outright unacceptable in an enterprise environment.
The sad thing is I actually like it otherwise, a lot of things are more streamlined and improved, task manager has taken a quantum leap forward in usefulness, ribbon on explorer isn't as obnoxious as I feared, and it generally boots faster and runs smoother. But the basic interface is just terrible. I gimped a "lite start menu" in by playing around with toolbar settings and using the folder that was the "All Users" start menu in Win7 just to have access to a straightforward programs list. But this is hardly ideal.
Windows 8 seems to be strictly a home-user/single-user/tablet OS. It's a nightmare for enterprises. We'll probably stick with Windows 7 unless Windows 9 or a service pack fixes a lot of the egregious flaws.
If we're going to argue immaturity while the persons body is well capable of the act then the brain doesn't finish maturing until 25.
Additionally it might slow down this rash of two under 18 parents with a kid all of a sudden.
I would support this. I'm not sure how you would stop all of the under 25 year old people from having sex, but if there was like some brain switch that would make people not want sex at all until 25 years of age, I think that would be a very good thing. You grow up, you go to college (if desired) and when you're reasonably settled in you start exploring relations with the opposite sex. On the whole we as a society would be way more productive. Ah well, I can dream.
which says that life starts at fertilization and guarantees that life full protection under the law which of course has the effect of making women who miscarry guilty of murder.
That's ignorant. Murder requires intent. It would have the (likely unintended) consequence of making a whole group of women guilty of negligent homicide if they knew or should have known that their actions could lead to miscarriage, or infliction of grievous bodily harm to every mother of an fetal alcohol syndrome baby, but a murder charge could not conceivably be leveled against a woman who miscarries any more than it could be leveled against a person who's child died of cancer.
I'm sure there are many things to hate about such a law, but let's at least be realistic about attacking it.
Rape is rather different though in that in the difficult cases both victim and perpetrator are of similar socio-economic backgrounds, and it is easy to imagine a situation in which consent would be given whether it was or not.
In cases of fraud it is far more likely that the incident under dispute is the only conceivable reason that the two parties came together. Similarly in robbery. Similarly in cases where rape is easier to prove.
You do run into similar difficulties when fraud is committed by one friend against another - they both come off as similarly credible. It's just that you run into it a lot more often with rape charges since so many are committed by an acquaintance or someone in a similar social circle. It's not that the victim is less credible, it's that both victim and perpetrator come off as equally credible, making the case extraordinarily difficult to prosecute because who do you believe?
I'm not a lawyer, but is it considered "attempting to escape" if you just pop the cuffs and sit there? For me personally I get claustrophobic when confined like that. I wouldn't be terribly bothered being arrested as such, but the cuffs would really irritate me. What if you popped them off and sat politely in the car? Would that still run afoul of this section?
Makes me think of this XKCD
Impressive. I think this is the first time I've heard anyone threaten to storm an embassy. I haven't even seen the Chinese do this.
See Saigon, circa April 1975 for the classic example of this actually being done.
And boolean algebra. I would argue that if you don't have a fundamental understanding of boolean algebra then you really have no business coding (at least, anything serious).
The great thing about combinatorics is how deceptively simple it is. Honestly I think it should be a require high school course. At least the parts that I took in combinatorics 1 in college, maybe stretch it to a year long junior level high school course. Cover counting, permutations, combinations, n-choose-k, and all that other neat stuff. I never did understand why it required calculus in college though, nothing in there is fundamentally rooted in calculus (maybe some background in infinite series helps...some...for the notation?) but it teaches you to think kind of sideways to the way normal math works and really helps with a lot of real-world applications.
Programming changes the way you think.
At least until some Brandy shows you a pic of Snowcrash and then you don't think at all...
Look you really can't compare the gay rights movement to the civil rights movement of the 60's. They're just too wildly different. Black people were being routinely *executed* often with the full approval of local law enforcement. Segregation was rampant. Kids, and I mean under ten years old were made to feel worthless because of the color of their skin.
People were willing to *die* to put an end to the horrendous oppression they were suffering. How many gay people have gone through even a tenth of what the average black person went through 50-60 years ago? How many of these protesters have been so oppressed that they would be willing to risk death to make the necessary changes?
No. The tenuous connection about marriage is insulting to the men and women who sacrificed so much for the freedoms finally given in the civil rights movement. Trying to hitch the gay rights wagon along for the ride is just sickening. By all means, stand up for what you believe in, but make your own movement and stop trying to co-opt one that meant so much to so many.