That's a decade earlier than I first heard it said of him by, I think, Anthony Tobias at a languages symposium in Auatralia. His version was "someone who can be called by name or by value".
There are probably many/.ers who have no idea what call by name means so here is a potted description.
In Algol 60, parameters could be passed by value or by name. Pass by name made subroutines look like macros, so the semantics were obvious - just textual substitution.
Call by name was achieved by generating a thunk for a parameter - a piece of code that evaluated the parameter each time you needed it. This is the origin of the workd thunk, that has since been purloined for things that are clearly not thunks.
With call by name you could pass in an element of an array (a[i] say) and have the element change by changing the value of the global i inside the routine. This was called Jensen's device.
(Thus ends this lecture from programming languages 201)
Yes - but your error rate (measured per hour rather than per piece) goes way down.
I grew up in a warm climate so I used to find 70F to cold. It used to really annoy me when I was in the US and Hotels would be on cool cycle so I could not get the room up to a comfortable temperature.
Now I have lived in a cooler climate for a number of years I find 70F very pleasant. So I think the best tempreture varies depending on the climate you live in.
People do dress differently but in addition I think you acclimatise - anybody have data on that?
You could put the pusher satelite at one of the stable Lagrange points.
Another worry is - what do earth's and interplanetary mag fields do to this beam? As well as the aiming problem, I expect a bunch of X-rays get given off. Can one reliably protect the space craft from these?
Indeed. And in fact Shuttle has to go slow while in the atmosphere to limit aerodynamic loading.
The faster you get off the ground the less fuel you use. This is easy to see - imagine a rocket that just hovered a few feet off the ground. So this and the limits due to aerodynamic load means you want to get high fast.
One nit-pick. F=ma does not really work here because you are not launching from an Inertial Frame.
I did a live radio spot once and had thought before about turning off my cell, but thought "don't be silly, no-one will call". Of course in the middle I get a phone call - AND when I got back to it later it turned out to be a wrong number.
A small number add value. Some of the independents:
Have regular performances by less well known musicians.
Play new music, or important but not well known early music (eg a few months ago when I entered my local independent record store they had on "Here come the warm jets")
Have knowledgable and enthusiastic staff who can help with selections.
Have a range of difficult to find titles, including new titles by relatively obscure artists and archival material from historically important artists.
Such stores are rare, are doing something important, deserve to be successful, and are worth helping to preserve by shopping there. You are right about most music retailers, but not all. Check out the independents in your town, see if you can find one that is adding value, and shop there.
After all, the majority of the net stores are adding no value - they are much more like the high street no-value-added megachains than they are like the engaged independent store.
What about wire fraud? That has been used to close down a lot of scams that otherwise were not covered by specific Federal laws or juristiction. Is there anything that exempts the Internet from this law?
I ask this as a serious question - I don't know whether or not the wire fraud law applies to the Internet.
Some of the text suggests they required Rackspace in the US to hand over the drives in England.
They probably do have authority to do that. The demand is being made to a US entity on US soil.
It does get interesting if the demand cannot be complied with without violating European and/or British law. This might be the case here as European laws prohibit exporting data bases to countries lacking adequate privacy law, such as the US. So by making those disks available to the FBI, Rackspace could be violating European privacy laws. It would depend upon what was on them and also whether those laws contain exceptions to cover these cases.
There is (or used to be) a law in Britain making it illegal to assist the US in attempts to enforce their laws on British territory (ie to claim extra-territorality (sp?) ). I doubt that that applies in this case.
In practice that will have to be decided in court. The defendent would have to successfully argue that they had made a bonified effort to gain consent. Putting the language on page 8 in one point Cyrillic is unlikely to succeed as a defense.
1) Roughly what percent of your music collection is unauthorized files from P2P like Kazaa, FTP, etc.?
0%
2) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc?
0%
3) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music?
0%
4) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs?
I have RIPS of some vinyls, don't bother ripping CDs.
5) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs?
I have 1 such - the Ramones first CD but I have since found a legal copy.
What are you missing?
How about compilations of tracks from diverse CDs given to you by fellow musicians so you can learn parts. I have several of these - I tend not to keep them once I have stopped using them for study purposes.
Lets see a fundamentalist Atheist would have to be someone who insisted on disbelieving everything in the Bible but still believed it was God's verbatim words.
Or something. What I am thinking cannot be said.
I tried one on the potted catnip and all I got was high pitched yowling.
What do you do if your aspidistra only likes Kenny G?
Seriously though folks, even if the plant does not have any resonances in the audible range, the fact that it is distributed in space limits the frequency response. From a bush a foot across, say, anything above 1Khz is going to be greatly reduced by the waves coming off different parts of the bush tending to cancel out.
Seems to me that this idea goes in the same bin as putting a jet engine on a pig to disprove the old proverb.
> Otherwise I can't recommend it -- the book is gibberish if you can't follow the math.
I wonder if this is worse than the science popularizations (esp in physics) that are gibberish because they contain no math.
I know I treat a physics book that does not have at least one equation a page with deep suspicion.
One of my favorite physics books is Misner Wheeler and Thorne's "Gravitation". Not only is it full of math, but you can use it experimentally as a gravitational field generator.
There's a much older story in which the sphere is preventing man from getting out altogether. I don't remember the author (perhaps someone of the vintage of Fred Saberhagen(sp?)) and could not find it in 5 minutes googling.
Actually the part that is really egregious is the claim that they have a good faith belief.
Probably they are pumping these things out via a bot. A human would surely have asked "how come its so small". Seems to me there's a clear case that they do not believe this in good faith.
Assuming they sent this via email, they are perhaps infringing under wirefraud provisions. In English juristictions there is an offence along the lines of "using a telephone service to the annoyance of another subscriber" which could apply nicely here if there is a US equivalent.
What's really puzzling is the totally bogus "the planet would have to be rotating 40 times as fast as earth" claim.
Earth rotates in just under 24 hours. Forty times that is 36 minutes. That's something in low orbit.
So what we have is an earth size planet with a fusion plant in low orbit!
Now we all recognize immediately that this claim (fusion plant in low orbit) is clearly not justified by the available data. My point is that the above claim in the article is, if anything, even less justified by the data currently available.
To put it another way, just because you are denying the existance of little green men, doesn't mean you are not a crackpot.
Bad managers also waste a lot of time. I have seen an incompetent manager "hurry" a project along by calling hour plus status meetings daily and have 50% of the team's efforts go into status reports instead of real work.
Good managers make it clear what needs to be done, make sure the team have the knowledge and infrastructure they need to do the job, and then prevents upper management getting in the way with interruptions and changes.
A very nice point. However I am not sure it works. Some of the earth's own mass is shielded so the orbit is slightly larger than it ought to be, so the gravitational pull on the sun side is slightly lower and that on the shielded side slightly higher than it should be. This will at least reduce any effect.
I see no discussion in the article of the fact that the moon distorts the space around it so that when it is between us and the sun we are slightly further away from the sun than when it is not in line. This effect has to be incredibly small but it appears the allais effect, if it exists at all, is quite small, so perhaps this is the cause. Somebody should at least calculate it out.
I have seen this theory that they mention about gravity being less effective when weak. The usually more reliable Scientific American allowed an article on it to sneak in some months ago.
Its a very silly idea because it breaks the principle of equivalence - you can now tell if you are in an elevator or a gravitational field by bringing a mass close to a test mass to almost cancel out the field and observing whether or not you see the weak gravity effect.
This in turn means physics is not covariant and that there are preferred frames of reference. So its not a "small adjustment" but a total do-over of physics.
Classical gravitation has trouble with the three body problem but if you really want to get into difficulties, study quantum field theory - there you are already in trouble with no bodies at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooops - that should be Jeffrey Tobias
There are probably many /.ers who have no idea what call by name means so here is a potted description.
In Algol 60, parameters could be passed by value or by name. Pass by name made subroutines look like macros, so the semantics were obvious - just textual substitution.
Call by name was achieved by generating a thunk for a parameter - a piece of code that evaluated the parameter each time you needed it. This is the origin of the workd thunk, that has since been purloined for things that are clearly not thunks.
With call by name you could pass in an element of an array (a[i] say) and have the element change by changing the value of the global i inside the routine. This was called Jensen's device.
(Thus ends this lecture from programming languages 201)
I grew up in a warm climate so I used to find 70F to cold. It used to really annoy me when I was in the US and Hotels would be on cool cycle so I could not get the room up to a comfortable temperature.
Now I have lived in a cooler climate for a number of years I find 70F very pleasant. So I think the best tempreture varies depending on the climate you live in.
People do dress differently but in addition I think you acclimatise - anybody have data on that?
Another worry is - what do earth's and interplanetary mag fields do to this beam? As well as the aiming problem, I expect a bunch of X-rays get given off. Can one reliably protect the space craft from these?
The faster you get off the ground the less fuel you use. This is easy to see - imagine a rocket that just hovered a few feet off the ground. So this and the limits due to aerodynamic load means you want to get high fast.
One nit-pick. F=ma does not really work here because you are not launching from an Inertial Frame.
Talk about those who the Gods wish to destroy!
Have regular performances by less well known musicians.
Play new music, or important but not well known early music (eg a few months ago when I entered my local independent record store they had on "Here come the warm jets")
Have knowledgable and enthusiastic staff who can help with selections.
Have a range of difficult to find titles, including new titles by relatively obscure artists and archival material from historically important artists.
Such stores are rare, are doing something important, deserve to be successful, and are worth helping to preserve by shopping there. You are right about most music retailers, but not all. Check out the independents in your town, see if you can find one that is adding value, and shop there.
After all, the majority of the net stores are adding no value - they are much more like the high street no-value-added megachains than they are like the engaged independent store.
I ask this as a serious question - I don't know whether or not the wire fraud law applies to the Internet.
They probably do have authority to do that. The demand is being made to a US entity on US soil.
It does get interesting if the demand cannot be complied with without violating European and/or British law. This might be the case here as European laws prohibit exporting data bases to countries lacking adequate privacy law, such as the US. So by making those disks available to the FBI, Rackspace could be violating European privacy laws. It would depend upon what was on them and also whether those laws contain exceptions to cover these cases.
There is (or used to be) a law in Britain making it illegal to assist the US in attempts to enforce their laws on British territory (ie to claim extra-territorality (sp?) ). I doubt that that applies in this case.
In practice that will have to be decided in court. The defendent would have to successfully argue that they had made a bonified effort to gain consent. Putting the language on page 8 in one point Cyrillic is unlikely to succeed as a defense.
0%
2) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc?
0%
3) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music?
0%
4) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs?
I have RIPS of some vinyls, don't bother ripping CDs.
5) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs?
I have 1 such - the Ramones first CD but I have since found a legal copy.
What are you missing?
How about compilations of tracks from diverse CDs given to you by fellow musicians so you can learn parts. I have several of these - I tend not to keep them once I have stopped using them for study purposes.
Lets see a fundamentalist Atheist would have to be someone who insisted on disbelieving everything in the Bible but still believed it was God's verbatim words. Or something. What I am thinking cannot be said.
What do you do if your aspidistra only likes Kenny G?
Seriously though folks, even if the plant does not have any resonances in the audible range, the fact that it is distributed in space limits the frequency response. From a bush a foot across, say, anything above 1Khz is going to be greatly reduced by the waves coming off different parts of the bush tending to cancel out.
Seems to me that this idea goes in the same bin as putting a jet engine on a pig to disprove the old proverb.
I wonder if this is worse than the science popularizations (esp in physics) that are gibberish because they contain no math.
I know I treat a physics book that does not have at least one equation a page with deep suspicion.
One of my favorite physics books is Misner Wheeler and Thorne's "Gravitation". Not only is it full of math, but you can use it experimentally as a gravitational field generator.
There's a much older story in which the sphere is preventing man from getting out altogether. I don't remember the author (perhaps someone of the vintage of Fred Saberhagen(sp?)) and could not find it in 5 minutes googling.
Dana, I wish I had thought of that.
So I still can't open it up, say "beam me up Scotty" and have anything interesting happen.
I just tested this. I showed my collection of old floppies a CD I had just burned and they all got up and bolted.
Probably they are pumping these things out via a bot. A human would surely have asked "how come its so small". Seems to me there's a clear case that they do not believe this in good faith.
Assuming they sent this via email, they are perhaps infringing under wirefraud provisions. In English juristictions there is an offence along the lines of "using a telephone service to the annoyance of another subscriber" which could apply nicely here if there is a US equivalent.
Earth rotates in just under 24 hours. Forty times that is 36 minutes. That's something in low orbit.
So what we have is an earth size planet with a fusion plant in low orbit!
Now we all recognize immediately that this claim (fusion plant in low orbit) is clearly not justified by the available data. My point is that the above claim in the article is, if anything, even less justified by the data currently available.
To put it another way, just because you are denying the existance of little green men, doesn't mean you are not a crackpot.
Good managers make it clear what needs to be done, make sure the team have the knowledge and infrastructure they need to do the job, and then prevents upper management getting in the way with interruptions and changes.
I bet its less energy than was used to grow the marginal food they eat to produce that energy. Can anyone do that math?
All I could pick up was two guys broadcasting on some sports talk radio station. What's worse, seems the virus also gives you sound!
I see no discussion in the article of the fact that the moon distorts the space around it so that when it is between us and the sun we are slightly further away from the sun than when it is not in line. This effect has to be incredibly small but it appears the allais effect, if it exists at all, is quite small, so perhaps this is the cause. Somebody should at least calculate it out.
I have seen this theory that they mention about gravity being less effective when weak. The usually more reliable Scientific American allowed an article on it to sneak in some months ago.
Its a very silly idea because it breaks the principle of equivalence - you can now tell if you are in an elevator or a gravitational field by bringing a mass close to a test mass to almost cancel out the field and observing whether or not you see the weak gravity effect.
This in turn means physics is not covariant and that there are preferred frames of reference. So its not a "small adjustment" but a total do-over of physics.
Classical gravitation has trouble with the three body problem but if you really want to get into difficulties, study quantum field theory - there you are already in trouble with no bodies at all.