Except for the members of the House of Lords, which nobody votes for. If I had a Parliament like that and got to vote against it, I would.
The House of Lords is selected on merit by elected politicians, which is completely different from the US where key governement roles are selected on merit by an elected politician.
You are argue whether the selection is actually on merit rather than political considerations, but the situation is the same both sides of the atlantic.
There is no scientific reasoning behind [...] putting a monetary value on a human life. Sometimes what Dawkins calls reason is just a mask for his prejudice.
You are confusing science and reason.
Science has no need to put monetary value on anything unless money is a parameter in a particular experiment.
Reason says that you must put a monetary value on human life when spending money that can affect human life. The UK Health Service, for example, uses a figure of around $40K per year of human life in order to decide on the cost-effectiveness of various medical treatements, valuing an adult life at about $2-3M. Aid agencies will have a pretty good idea of how much it costs to save a life in various parts of the developing world because they have to deploy their limited resources in the way that saves the most lives.
In these situations refusing to put a monetary value on a human life is just illogical sentimentality.
You're projecting. You're trying to conflate what YOU would do with what some "other" would do. You are engaging in a common fundie tactic of pretending your own fault is that of your "enemy". You assume that atheists "give a fuck".
From one simple observation you claim to know how I behave and what I believe, and you accuse me of projecting?!
> What about non-religious people forcing their views onto you or other people?
This only manifests in preventing theocrats from running around like members of ISIS forcing their views on everyone else.
The facts do not support your argument, for example the situation in Ukraine is clearly not about theocrats. And the same is true of many (and arguably most) of the recent major conflicts in the world.
We have certain laws and founding ideals that are contrary to the theocrat mentality.
You do realise that those "laws and founding ideals" are an example of the government forcing their views onto other people?
An atheist says: You shouldn't because you can't prove it
Until the religious person can prove it, or even show a shred of evidence for it, it's nothing more than some bullshit delusional fantasy
No. Until the religious person can prove it, it remains unproven, like most things in life.
I don't give a shit what a religious person believes, until they start forcing their delusion onto me or other people
What about non-religious people forcing their views onto you or other people? Is this actually about religion or just about your desire for personal freedom?
When a relative dies, christians (etc.) cry That would be illogical. They should be happy, their relative has gone to heaven! And while it may take a couple of years, they'll be seeing that relative again, right? Then why the tears?
Is it illogical that parents cry when their children leave home?
Is it illogical that you cry when you break you arm?
Just because you don't understand a person's behaviour it doesn't mean that their behaviour is illogical.
There is absolutely no reason to expect a 64 bit architecture to be faster than a 32 bit architecture unless you are doing a lot of 64 bit operations, or need more than 4G of RAM.
Right in theory, wrong in practice. If the only change was the width of the registers then it would make little difference to performance, but both the leading 32-bit architectures also gained more registers and new instructions when moving to a 64-bit architecture. ARM, in particular, made a number of performance-increasing changes to the architecure such as the removal of condition codes from most instructions.
So in practice 64 bit code usually runs faster. But don't take my word for it, look at the benchmarks for A7 running in 32 mode vs 64 bit mode.
The Islamist nutties have no military to speak of. Their success is best described as "in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed is king". The beheading doesn't really scare me in any way. They are limited in their ability to act. They lack any kind of weaponry that reaches beyond the immediate area and they cannot spread their area of influence much more.
These "Islamist nutties" are an offshoot of the organisation that killed thousands of people in the US on 9/11
Sometimes, the appropriate answer to violence is more violence, directed at the people intent on killing people in the name of their ancient dead guy - they are behaving like rabid animals, and you don't reason with rabid animals, you put them down. And the Middle East will continue to be a genocidal pressure cooker until we understand this.
Israel has been doing this ever since it was created, and look how far that has got them. If overwhelming military might was the answer to peace in the Middle East then the Israel/Palestine problem would have been solved a long time ago.
In reality, using overwhelming military might in the middle east just creates an overwhelming amount of chaos.
More likely the result of things like this. But even Khalid Mashal said that he opposes Zionism, not Jews.
[...]
The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital[..]
Both sides are guilty in that conflict. But going back to the topic of this story, it is interesting to note that the Hamas "execution" of 18 civilians in Gaza didn't receive anything like the same coverage although it happend only a few days after the Foley murder.
That's what puzzles me to no end. Why would they want to show us how they behead someone?
To make use hate them? Our media accomplish that easily already, but thanks for the aid. To make us fear them? Why should I fear a bunch of religious lunatics somewhere off in lalaland? Hell, I'm more afraid of the religious loonies in the Bible belt! To show us they can do it? Any idiot can kill someone who can't defend himself, no big deal about that.
So, what should that accomplish? I'm sitting here, puzzled, shrugging my shoulders with a "meh".
The video wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at other muslims in order to get them on their side. Millitant Islamic groups are full of factions and always fighting each other. Attacking a common enemy is a well-worn method of creating some level of unity. The biggest threat to IS comes from within, not from the US.
We find the video abhorrent, but some muslims will not, and they are the ones that IS are targetting with this video.
I wouldn't be surprised to see RAM chips with a part of the die dedicated to CPU/FPU/GPU functions.
The same package is already commonplace, but the same die is problematic because RAM processes are significantly different from CPU processes.
Eventually the concept of a "central" processing unit may give way to passive backplanes and various speed buses, perhaps with a relatively lightweight chip directing everything.
This is a very bad idea. Moving bits uses orders of magnitude more energy than computation, so you need to concentrate the computing behind multiple caches and move the data as little as possible. So the model will continue to be based around islands of high-performance computing connected by slow, expensive busses, but the "CPU" will contain many smaller parallel processors.
Another example, is the x86 architecture. Intel has been amazing in keeping it going, but eventually, moving to something like Itanium with 128+ registers for integer, 128+ for floating point, etc. might be how Moore's "law" keeps going.
More registers means more area and more power for little benefit (though that is not the reason that Itanium failed).
As for x86, it was displaced by ARM a long time ago as the most popular 32-bit architecture.
1. Disappear two Hamas members. 2. Kidnap and kill two Israelis and leave their bodies somewhere suggestive. 3. "Find" bodies. 4. Rejoice at pretext to decimate the population of Palestine and push the borders back further.
You really think that Israel would kill their own citizens and blame Hamas just so that they can grab some land that they pulled out of a few years ago?
I prefer the version where Israel is trying to stop the palestians attacking Israel and targetting civilians with rockets (which happens to be a war crime). In fact Israel's behaviour is best explained by them wanting peace and Hamas's behaviour is best explained by them wanting to destroy Israel. And by amazing coincidence that is exactly what the two side say they are trying to do.
Could have been worse? Python is a fantastic first language to learn how programming is done, especially in the context of getting another job done (Science, Math, etc.)
This is about Computer Science, not Science/Math, so you need a language that teaches the basic principles of languages and programming, not something that just "gets the job done".
Python lacks features that have been shown over the decades to be a good idea for creating solid, reliable codebases, such as strong typing and a class/library system that allows proper data hiding and abstraction.
This is another (non-anonymous) vote for Go (golang). Here are some reasons:
* Type Safety For any serious project type safety provides a massive boost to productivity and correctness. Go's type system is powerful but not too intrusive to more generic coding.
* Fast compilation Although it is not interpreted the language and package design allow very fast compilation so that it can be treated as a scripting language and compiled at run time.
* Good libraries There is a large and growing collecting of libraries, mainly focussed on web service applications but other areas are also supported. You can create a web server that handles multiple concurrent requests in a single page of code.
* Good package (module) support Go provides the ability to create packages with a certain amount of encapsulation and data hiding without it being a burden on development time.
* Built-in concurrency Language support for concurrent execution and synchronised communication makes it very easy to develop modular applications that support multiple activities.
* Clean Syntax Go code is easy to read and missing lots of fluff from other languages. The gofmt command tidies up code and makes it consistent throughout a project
* Built-in unit test framework Go makes it easy to check that you code does what it is supposed to
* Good performance Not quite up to C++ standards but faster than interpreted solutions
* Can generate JavaScript! There are at least two solutions for converting Go code to JavaScript, so you can can use one language for client and server code.
I also like the type system (interfaces) and other language features, but these are more a matter of taste.
Gosh science is so expensive. Let's shut it down so we can remain ignorant [] forever!
Science in cheap, Big Science is expensive. So, yes, let's shut down some of the expensive Big Science experiments and fund hundreds of other smaller experiments in a range of different fields. No so flashy, but much better value.
You know, there's a technology, at least as old as IP networks, that's multicast. If you couple it with a nice lack of DRM, you can reduce the required bandwith.
Even if you could build a workable internet-wide multicast streaming solution it would still not reduce the bandwidth to your phone. The same number of packets come over the air to your device whether they are multicast or unicast. The benefits of unicast are in the network infrastructure not the transmitters or receivers and, so far, these benefits have not been seen to outweigh the disadvantages.
The problem with a misinformed public is that they rapidly become the pitchfork and torch wielding public when it comes to public funding for science endeavors ("We don't need no moar money wasted on that thar space thingy!!!")
Accepting the Big Bang as scientific fact doesn't necessarily mean that you think that Big Bang research should be publicly funded. And it is arguable that the public visibility of these large science projects draws funding away from smaller, more valuable efforts. We are going to make many more interesting discoveries by spending millions on 1000 widely different projects than spending billions on just one narrowly-focussed project.
And just to be more contentious I would point out that the Space program is engineering, not science, and people don't have a problem with engineering because they can see that it works.
If you read a lot of his stories, they are about communist societies.
Most of his societies were based on benevolent Scientocracy: a small group of wise and powerful scientists ran the society for the benefit of the rest of the population. Look at the end of the Foundation series in particular, in which a highly secretive organisation called the Second Foundation was controlling and manipulating the whole of society with no form of accountability whatsoever.
I read a lot of Asimov as a teenager but stopped liking his writing when I realised just how much he was promoting right-wing authoritarian government rather than any real form of democracy or even accountability.
I must have been reading a different article. The one I read had working Fusion reactors, cars that float above the ground, Cubic TVs, windowless underground houses, no electic cords, colonies on the moon and automatic cooking machines in every kitchen.
But the article has absolutely no mention of mobile devices which seems, to me, to be a massive failure of foresight.
There is nothing wrong with writing correct code, but I would not use gcc warnings as a way of defining what is and is not correct code. In fact code that generates a warning is (by definition) correct, otherwise it would generate an error.
There is a problem with using "-Werror" because you cannot predict what code is going to generate warnings in future versions of the compiler or with different processor architectures. This may not be an issue for personal projects, but it can be a real pain when used on a large, long-running code base.
Slashdot Mirror
They vote for members of the Parliament in London
Except for the members of the House of Lords, which nobody votes for. If I had a Parliament like that and got to vote against it, I would.
The House of Lords is selected on merit by elected politicians, which is completely different from the US where key governement roles are selected on merit by an elected politician.
You are argue whether the selection is actually on merit rather than political considerations, but the situation is the same both sides of the atlantic.
There is no scientific reasoning behind [...] putting a monetary value on a human life. Sometimes what Dawkins calls reason is just a mask for his prejudice.
You are confusing science and reason.
Science has no need to put monetary value on anything unless money is a parameter in a particular experiment.
Reason says that you must put a monetary value on human life when spending money that can affect human life. The UK Health Service, for example, uses a figure of around $40K per year of human life in order to decide on the cost-effectiveness of various medical treatements, valuing an adult life at about $2-3M. Aid agencies will have a pretty good idea of how much it costs to save a life in various parts of the developing world because they have to deploy their limited resources in the way that saves the most lives.
In these situations refusing to put a monetary value on a human life is just illogical sentimentality.
You're projecting. You're trying to conflate what YOU would do with what some "other" would do. You are engaging in a common fundie tactic of pretending your own fault is that of your "enemy". You assume that atheists "give a fuck".
From one simple observation you claim to know how I behave and what I believe, and you accuse me of projecting?!
> What about non-religious people forcing their views onto you or other people?
This only manifests in preventing theocrats from running around like members of ISIS forcing their views on everyone else.
The facts do not support your argument, for example the situation in Ukraine is clearly not about theocrats. And the same is true of many (and arguably most) of the recent major conflicts in the world.
We have certain laws and founding ideals that are contrary to the theocrat mentality.
You do realise that those "laws and founding ideals" are an example of the government forcing their views onto other people?
A religious person says: There is a God.
An atheist says: Prove it.
In practice it often goes like this:
A religious person says: I believe in God.
An atheist says: You shouldn't because you can't prove it
Until the religious person can prove it, or even show a shred of evidence for it, it's nothing more than some bullshit delusional fantasy
No. Until the religious person can prove it, it remains unproven, like most things in life.
I don't give a shit what a religious person believes, until they start forcing their delusion onto me or other people
What about non-religious people forcing their views onto you or other people? Is this actually about religion or just about your desire for personal freedom?
When a relative dies, christians (etc.) cry That would be illogical. They should be happy, their relative has gone to heaven! And while it may take a couple of years, they'll be seeing that relative again, right? Then why the tears?
Is it illogical that parents cry when their children leave home?
Is it illogical that you cry when you break you arm?
Just because you don't understand a person's behaviour it doesn't mean that their behaviour is illogical.
There is absolutely no reason to expect a 64 bit architecture to be faster than a 32 bit architecture unless you are doing a lot of 64 bit operations, or need more than 4G of RAM.
Right in theory, wrong in practice. If the only change was the width of the registers then it would make little difference to performance, but both the leading 32-bit architectures also gained more registers and new instructions when moving to a 64-bit architecture. ARM, in particular, made a number of performance-increasing changes to the architecure such as the removal of condition codes from most instructions.
So in practice 64 bit code usually runs faster. But don't take my word for it, look at the benchmarks for A7 running in 32 mode vs 64 bit mode.
The Islamist nutties have no military to speak of. Their success is best described as "in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed is king". The beheading doesn't really scare me in any way. They are limited in their ability to act. They lack any kind of weaponry that reaches beyond the immediate area and they cannot spread their area of influence much more.
These "Islamist nutties" are an offshoot of the organisation that killed thousands of people in the US on 9/11
Sometimes, the appropriate answer to violence is more violence, directed at the people intent on killing people in the name of their ancient dead guy - they are behaving like rabid animals, and you don't reason with rabid animals, you put them down. And the Middle East will continue to be a genocidal pressure cooker until we understand this.
Israel has been doing this ever since it was created, and look how far that has got them. If overwhelming military might was the answer to peace in the Middle East then the Israel/Palestine problem would have been solved a long time ago.
In reality, using overwhelming military might in the middle east just creates an overwhelming amount of chaos.
More likely the result of things like this. But even Khalid Mashal said that he opposes Zionism, not Jews.
[...]
The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital[..]
Both sides are guilty in that conflict. But going back to the topic of this story, it is interesting to note that the Hamas "execution" of 18 civilians in Gaza didn't receive anything like the same coverage although it happend only a few days after the Foley murder.
That's what puzzles me to no end. Why would they want to show us how they behead someone?
To make use hate them? Our media accomplish that easily already, but thanks for the aid.
To make us fear them? Why should I fear a bunch of religious lunatics somewhere off in lalaland? Hell, I'm more afraid of the religious loonies in the Bible belt!
To show us they can do it? Any idiot can kill someone who can't defend himself, no big deal about that.
So, what should that accomplish? I'm sitting here, puzzled, shrugging my shoulders with a "meh".
The video wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at other muslims in order to get them on their side. Millitant Islamic groups are full of factions and always fighting each other. Attacking a common enemy is a well-worn method of creating some level of unity. The biggest threat to IS comes from within, not from the US.
We find the video abhorrent, but some muslims will not, and they are the ones that IS are targetting with this video.
I wouldn't be surprised to see RAM chips with a part of the die dedicated to CPU/FPU/GPU functions.
The same package is already commonplace, but the same die is problematic because RAM processes are significantly different from CPU processes.
Eventually the concept of a "central" processing unit may give way to passive backplanes and various speed buses, perhaps with a relatively lightweight chip directing everything.
This is a very bad idea. Moving bits uses orders of magnitude more energy than computation, so you need to concentrate the computing behind multiple caches and move the data as little as possible. So the model will continue to be based around islands of high-performance computing connected by slow, expensive busses, but the "CPU" will contain many smaller parallel processors.
Another example, is the x86 architecture. Intel has been amazing in keeping it going, but eventually, moving to something like Itanium with 128+ registers for integer, 128+ for floating point, etc. might be how Moore's "law" keeps going.
More registers means more area and more power for little benefit (though that is not the reason that Itanium failed).
As for x86, it was displaced by ARM a long time ago as the most popular 32-bit architecture.
1. Disappear two Hamas members.
2. Kidnap and kill two Israelis and leave their bodies somewhere suggestive.
3. "Find" bodies.
4. Rejoice at pretext to decimate the population of Palestine and push the borders back further.
You really think that Israel would kill their own citizens and blame Hamas just so that they can grab some land that they pulled out of a few years ago?
I prefer the version where Israel is trying to stop the palestians attacking Israel and targetting civilians with rockets (which happens to be a war crime). In fact Israel's behaviour is best explained by them wanting peace and Hamas's behaviour is best explained by them wanting to destroy Israel. And by amazing coincidence that is exactly what the two side say they are trying to do.
Could have been worse? Python is a fantastic first language to learn how programming is done, especially in the context of getting another job done (Science, Math, etc.)
This is about Computer Science, not Science/Math, so you need a language that teaches the basic principles of languages and programming, not something that just "gets the job done".
Python lacks features that have been shown over the decades to be a good idea for creating solid, reliable codebases, such as strong typing and a class/library system that allows proper data hiding and abstraction.
I used X10 at College and I still have a reel of tape labelled "X11.3 Tape 14/11/88"
I also have multiple shirts from speaking at X Window System Technical Conferences and I contributed one of the standard X11 extensions.
Those were the days...
This is another (non-anonymous) vote for Go (golang). Here are some reasons:
* Type Safety
For any serious project type safety provides a massive boost to productivity and correctness. Go's type system is powerful but not too intrusive to more generic coding.
* Fast compilation
Although it is not interpreted the language and package design allow very fast compilation so that it can be treated as a scripting language and compiled at run time.
* Good libraries
There is a large and growing collecting of libraries, mainly focussed on web service applications but other areas are also supported. You can create a web server that handles multiple concurrent requests in a single page of code.
* Good package (module) support
Go provides the ability to create packages with a certain amount of encapsulation and data hiding without it being a burden on development time.
* Built-in concurrency
Language support for concurrent execution and synchronised communication makes it very easy to develop modular applications that support multiple activities.
* Clean Syntax
Go code is easy to read and missing lots of fluff from other languages. The gofmt command tidies up code and makes it consistent throughout a project
* Built-in unit test framework
Go makes it easy to check that you code does what it is supposed to
* Good performance
Not quite up to C++ standards but faster than interpreted solutions
* Can generate JavaScript!
There are at least two solutions for converting Go code to JavaScript, so you can can use one language for client and server code.
I also like the type system (interfaces) and other language features, but these are more a matter of taste.
Gosh science is so expensive. Let's shut it down so we can remain ignorant [] forever!
Science in cheap, Big Science is expensive. So, yes, let's shut down some of the expensive Big Science experiments and fund hundreds of other smaller experiments in a range of different fields. No so flashy, but much better value.
Most people against marijuana have tried it with no ill effects.
Interesting theory, but I'm not convinced it is backed by evidence.
I have not tried it (unless you count passive smoking!) but I am against marijuana because I have seen the ill effect it had on someone else.
[Late to the tablet game]...and desperately attempting to avoid irrelevance.
Sounds like Intel, except that they lost nearly $1B into the mobile market over last three months not a palty $300M in 9 months.
You know, there's a technology, at least as old as IP networks, that's multicast. If you couple it with a nice lack of DRM, you can reduce the required bandwith.
Even if you could build a workable internet-wide multicast streaming solution it would still not reduce the bandwidth to your phone. The same number of packets come over the air to your device whether they are multicast or unicast. The benefits of unicast are in the network infrastructure not the transmitters or receivers and, so far, these benefits have not been seen to outweigh the disadvantages.
The problem with a misinformed public is that they rapidly become the pitchfork and torch wielding public when it comes to public funding for science endeavors ("We don't need no moar money wasted on that thar space thingy!!!")
Accepting the Big Bang as scientific fact doesn't necessarily mean that you think that Big Bang research should be publicly funded. And it is arguable that the public visibility of these large science projects draws funding away from smaller, more valuable efforts. We are going to make many more interesting discoveries by spending millions on 1000 widely different projects than spending billions on just one narrowly-focussed project.
And just to be more contentious I would point out that the Space program is engineering, not science, and people don't have a problem with engineering because they can see that it works.
AC obviously confused Warcraft with WoW.
Or the AC knew that you could play Warcraft without the disc.
He said Warcraft. Not World of Warcraft. Noob.
Warcarft III (at least) could be made to run without a disc by copying all the data files into the install directory.
If you read a lot of his stories, they are about communist societies.
Most of his societies were based on benevolent Scientocracy: a small group of wise and powerful scientists ran the society for the benefit of the rest of the population. Look at the end of the Foundation series in particular, in which a highly secretive organisation called the Second Foundation was controlling and manipulating the whole of society with no form of accountability whatsoever.
I read a lot of Asimov as a teenager but stopped liking his writing when I realised just how much he was promoting right-wing authoritarian government rather than any real form of democracy or even accountability.
The science and technology are amazingly accurate
I must have been reading a different article. The one I read had working Fusion reactors, cars that float above the ground, Cubic TVs, windowless underground houses, no electic cords, colonies on the moon and automatic cooking machines in every kitchen.
But the article has absolutely no mention of mobile devices which seems, to me, to be a massive failure of foresight.
All my code is compiled with
-Wall -Werror -pedantic
What is the problem writing correct code?
There is nothing wrong with writing correct code, but I would not use gcc warnings as a way of defining what is and is not correct code. In fact code that generates a warning is (by definition) correct, otherwise it would generate an error.
There is a problem with using "-Werror" because you cannot predict what code is going to generate warnings in future versions of the compiler or with different processor architectures. This may not be an issue for personal projects, but it can be a real pain when used on a large, long-running code base.