You mention graphical editing, which I don't perceive as the same as graphical programming. Graphical programming is dragging and dropping objects, functions, and conditions in a sequence and getting a result. Graphical editing makes syntax checking easy for text based code. I don't know very many programmers that work regularly without a graphical editor. Even when they build on the command line.. Hell, Nedit is pretty old and well suited for just that task. In other words, I don't see the editor being used as the big difference when people discuss graphical vs. text based programming. I'm not sure we will ever agree on an editor for coding. Hell, I still meet and discuss Emacs vs. VI.
Textual syntax does have its limitations. Many language designers strive to make their languages at most context-sensitive, but that can only take you so far. The semantics of variable naming and lookup require another layer on top of syntax to complete the description.
All languages have limitations. This is why TFA really makes no sense to me. The computer does not understand graphic vs. text, the computer understands binary instruction. Languages allow _us_ easier ways of telling a computer what to do. Languages are translators, and all translators are imperfect.
A graphical language tries to do way more translation than text, it has to do so. That does not make them better, or worse. I think the big thing is that the text based compilers bring a person closer to the native language of computers, so people tend to understand more at a lower level. Does not mean a person has to understand things at that level, but it sure does not hurt.
I agree with the meat of your statement. At the same time, what gets neglected in these debates is that the Government "should" have a small role in the industry. Primarily, making sure that the drugs being sold are safe.
That "safe" has a few meanings, such as ensuring there are no materials in the drugs that should not be there. Ensuring that the drugs contain what they are supposed to contain, and that the levels are correct. Legally today, our supposedly "controlled" environment can get away with giving you 80% of what they are supposed to give you. They can put trace levels of mercury into vaccines too, so our "controlled" environment is not doing so well.
Point being, yes there should not be this nasty monopoly. Further, there should be more law suits for false advertising against drug agencies, and many people should be in jail for releasing dangerous drugs without advising the public to the dangers (Guardasil).
Our "Government" is failing on all accounts. Not the agents fault mind you, but the agencies fault.
For a while not, the Olympics has been nothing but a money making and redistribution system. When I was a kid, we had amateur athletes that worked hard for their few minutes of fame. The money for them came after their competitions, so it was a bit less corrupt. Sure, we had steroids back then and people were getting busted. At least they tried to give a sense of fair play back then.
Today's Olympics is like watching any other televised sport (NBA/NFL/Baseball). It's a sham to make money. Most participants do have some natural talent, but anything that makes TV is well.. treated differently. Athletes are "trained", "fed", given exceptional medical care, and pampered for the spotlight. Their sponsors abuse them to make money, media outlets do the same, and Governments use them for clout (see how much money we spent on _our_ athletes!).
I'm sure part of my bias is becoming older and more cynical. Not that much though, because we have an internet that lets us compare today to the 70s and see the difference. Pro Hockey players are what make the Olympic teams today, and Pro basket ball players, and Professional skaters are what's on the ice. The US claims to have done this because others do, which may or may not be true. Two wrongs won't bring back the original spirit of the games however.
Sure, I love car analogies! Consider you and two friends need to travel to work. There are two cars at the curb for you to choose from, and you need to drive 15 miles to work. One is a plain looking Jeep, simple paint job and nothing fancy. The stereo works, but the sound system is factory default. You see the gas tank is at half, the tires look good and it starts right up when you turn the key.
The other car has a really cool paint job, perfectly match molding colors. The metallic flakes under the 85 coats of gloss are sweet! The massive stereo system would be visible to people in the space station! The car happens to be missing 3 wheels, the windshield is gone, and two of the doors won't open or close. For giggles you turn the key and it starts, but with no rear wheels you are not going to be driving very fast (it's front wheel drive).
I'm pretty sure people are not irate about the lack of bells and whistles people have asked for. The concern is that fundamental required functionality is broken. It is stated that 25% of the non-registered users are being funneled to the Beta site. Really? So all of those people see a broken implementation and may never come back after they see the site is simply broken.
Sure, they will see some comments from the regulars about it being broken, but they won't understand it. A new visitor is not going to figure out how to get to classic from the broken beta site. They are going to say "wow, it's broken and people are pissed. I'm not coming back here again."
Again, we are talking about basic things that are require to function, like thread links that people are angry about. These either exist or don't, and should not be RE-implemented incrementally (re-implemented because they already exist in Classic).
I'm picturing the NYPD implementation of Google Glass to be extremely buggy. It will have a tendency to shut off right before almost every arrest, and break much more frequently too. I'm not sure if things have improved under the new mayor or not. I'm a skeptic, and corrupt agencies tend to remain corrupt until somehow the house gets cleaned.
I have a hopefully coherent thread written here which could be a point of discussion assuming enough people want it on the front page as a stand alone article.
I got the nag today and went to the beta site, it's horrible. I don't like Slashdot on the Mobile phone for the same reason I dislike the Beta site. It's horrible to navigate compared to classic and wastes too much space.
If you want to push that gunk to the main page, at least leave this one as "classic.slashdot.com" so we can choose the best interface for us.
Well, my comment was sarcasm more than reality but it would not be hard for them to tell who is obese. The UK has way more cameras watching the public than the US, complete with facial recognition. It would not be hard to also have a "body" recognition where you could have the computer label someone "fatty".
Of course that does not match what we were told in TFA, which is that people will volunteer to receive these texts. I'm just pointing out that it would not be hard based on the current UK government hardware, software, and methods to at least guess someone was obese and automatically sign them up for these texts..
At work and home I behave differently. At home, I am like you and don't block ads. This has impact on how I perceive sites ad gives me bias on whether or not I'll go back and read more from a site. At work, I run ad blocking and no-script. I visit sites at lunch that surprise me with how much advertising they have hidden on the page.
What I find interesting is that the sites with the most advertising seem to also have the biggest amounts of bullshit and/or propaganda on them. CNN is the Provda of the US and has tons of links to ads, google-apis, Google analysis, etc.. infowars and naturalnews have just as much and are what I would consider "fringe" sites for various reasons. I skim both sets of articles on occasion, but take what each site says with a grain of salt (and toss a few grains over my shoulder because I looked).
While I won't discount that many people hold that opinion I will point out that the opinion is immoral and unproductive to society. We see this repeated through history, over and over. Socrates had it right, but we keep repeating the same mistakes. Mostly because people are greedy and seek for themselves, not progress society.
My point was that framing the argument is folly, because the sides simply don't exist. You may already realize this, but why would you continue ot propagate such a big lie? The sides don't exist, and don't change the laws being proposed.
What on earth makes you think this is "Republicans" other than someone's rhetoric trying to get you to believe in a false dichotomy? Seriously, wake up and see what's been happening. These two sides claim to be different, but what they _do_ does not match their rhetoric.
You remind me of those people trying to put Obama on throne and denying all of the lies that we can show he laid out. While claiming to want transparency he has had his administration prosecute whistle blowers like no other President in history. While claiming to want an end to the Middle East wars, he has been banging the war drum against Syria, trying to convince Karzai that they need to renew our troops in Afghanistan, and all the while funding and training Al Qada in Africa and Syria. After claiming State rights to allow medical marijuana, look at the rash of arrests in CA under his administration. These few things are _easy_ to investigate and see that he is a liar. Not a little bit, but about nearly everything. He bold face lied aboutt the NSA back in May when Snowden leaks first came out. It's habitual lying, and has nothing to do with him being a "Democrat", or "Black", or "Muslim/Christian (which ever he is claiming to be today).
Both sides are lying to you! The answer is to get people on ballots that are NOT politicians and in someone's pocket for every single office. People of high morals, and familiar with the middle class and not the upper crust that does not give a shit about the majority of our society.
The "active" sites shows no such growth trend, in fact it shows IIS declining. NginX is the only web server showing growth, and even this is misleading. Most of our use for NginX is does not make Apache go away. We use NginX as a front end reverse proxy that talks to Apache back ends. NginX is good at a few things, but nowhere near as robust as Apache.
This is just another case of pulling only the statistics you want to color a lie.
Facebook counts the profiles of persons no longer on the planet, people that have created a page and not been there since, and people that have tried to "quit" their site for as long as I can remember. When people want something to look a certain way, they hire statisticians to make it look that way.
There was a report last year that Facebook had 1.2 billion people signed on, which is laughable. The largest populations in the world (India and China) do not have a majority that can use the internet, hundreds of millions in other countries are banned from this (most of Africa and the Middle East), and other people just don't give a shit (majority of Eastern Europe).
I'm pretty sure another report near the same time claimed that 50% of the accounts on FB were not people at all. Some of that 50% were companies, and a big chunk went to sock puppets, trolls, and scams.
I'm guessing that is why FB decided to try and make themselves look "good", but people are still going to leave. If you are not a security minded old codger like me, FB is no longer "hip" and "cool".
This is not a mandate, this is a training that people receive. We could have all the social media accounts we wanted when I worked for the DOD. We received weekly broadcasts reminding us not to put information regarding our jobs on those sites for our own safety.
"Not allowed" implies that there is some sort of regulation in place preventing people from having a social media account which is untrue.
Thanks for the citations, I wish they gave details on what they were testing for but we can hope they get it right. Considering that thousands of scientists are against this and not just the "eco-wacko" people I think there is more to the story. Considering that doing things for money is a normal operation, it's always wise to be suspicious.
Why is this modded informative, as is any pro government decision post in the thread? Every questioning post, or anti-government decision post is modded down.
It's not just me that says "this is potentially very harmful", read TFA and see what those thousands of scientists said! Most of them claim it _is_ harmful, they don't even claim "potential" like I did.
Claiming "it's just seabed" means that you never bothered to do any study on the subject, because it's not just sand that's being pulled up. It's sand mixed with runoff from fertilizer, petroleum that has drained into the ocean, chemicals, human waste, etc.. which is concentrated in this "seabed". You know, the same stuff that causes "Ocean Dead Zones" if you care to do even 5 minutes of research on the subject.
If you look at ocean dead zones and look at where this port is, you see something very interesting. The material from this dead zone is what's being moved out toward the barrier reef. I'm pretty sure they are not planning to put this nasty shit into nice neat Ziplock baggies before dumping it, which means that everything (seabed plus pollutants) will disperse, and as numerous scientists have said 25Km is not enough distance to protect the reef.
The build up from fertilizer, human waste, and chemical dumping/spilling, _are_ called toxins and are known to be 'toxic'. All of those things are what accumulate near shorelines, and cause the massive ocean dead zones.
I did not read anything in TFA claiming they were processing the materials to clean it, care to cite your source? You claim it's only "silt sand and clay" but if that was true why would they have to process it? Biologists have been clamoring about for decades about how bad the impact of runoff is and, and we have huge dead zones near shores because of the toxic materials that end up there and build up there. That seabed near shore that you are trying to claim is just "seabed" is going to be full of petroleum as well as fertilizers because it's the existing port being expanded.
ps. Good to see that the sock puppet accounts got mod points today.
Slashdot Mirror
You mention graphical editing, which I don't perceive as the same as graphical programming. Graphical programming is dragging and dropping objects, functions, and conditions in a sequence and getting a result. Graphical editing makes syntax checking easy for text based code. I don't know very many programmers that work regularly without a graphical editor. Even when they build on the command line.. Hell, Nedit is pretty old and well suited for just that task. In other words, I don't see the editor being used as the big difference when people discuss graphical vs. text based programming. I'm not sure we will ever agree on an editor for coding. Hell, I still meet and discuss Emacs vs. VI.
Textual syntax does have its limitations. Many language designers strive to make their languages at most context-sensitive, but that can only take you so far. The semantics of variable naming and lookup require another layer on top of syntax to complete the description.
All languages have limitations. This is why TFA really makes no sense to me. The computer does not understand graphic vs. text, the computer understands binary instruction. Languages allow _us_ easier ways of telling a computer what to do. Languages are translators, and all translators are imperfect.
A graphical language tries to do way more translation than text, it has to do so. That does not make them better, or worse. I think the big thing is that the text based compilers bring a person closer to the native language of computers, so people tend to understand more at a lower level. Does not mean a person has to understand things at that level, but it sure does not hurt.
I agree with the meat of your statement. At the same time, what gets neglected in these debates is that the Government "should" have a small role in the industry. Primarily, making sure that the drugs being sold are safe.
That "safe" has a few meanings, such as ensuring there are no materials in the drugs that should not be there. Ensuring that the drugs contain what they are supposed to contain, and that the levels are correct. Legally today, our supposedly "controlled" environment can get away with giving you 80% of what they are supposed to give you. They can put trace levels of mercury into vaccines too, so our "controlled" environment is not doing so well.
Point being, yes there should not be this nasty monopoly. Further, there should be more law suits for false advertising against drug agencies, and many people should be in jail for releasing dangerous drugs without advising the public to the dangers (Guardasil).
Our "Government" is failing on all accounts. Not the agents fault mind you, but the agencies fault.
For a while not, the Olympics has been nothing but a money making and redistribution system. When I was a kid, we had amateur athletes that worked hard for their few minutes of fame. The money for them came after their competitions, so it was a bit less corrupt. Sure, we had steroids back then and people were getting busted. At least they tried to give a sense of fair play back then.
Today's Olympics is like watching any other televised sport (NBA/NFL/Baseball). It's a sham to make money. Most participants do have some natural talent, but anything that makes TV is well.. treated differently. Athletes are "trained", "fed", given exceptional medical care, and pampered for the spotlight. Their sponsors abuse them to make money, media outlets do the same, and Governments use them for clout (see how much money we spent on _our_ athletes!).
I'm sure part of my bias is becoming older and more cynical. Not that much though, because we have an internet that lets us compare today to the 70s and see the difference. Pro Hockey players are what make the Olympic teams today, and Pro basket ball players, and Professional skaters are what's on the ice. The US claims to have done this because others do, which may or may not be true. Two wrongs won't bring back the original spirit of the games however.
Sure, I love car analogies! Consider you and two friends need to travel to work. There are two cars at the curb for you to choose from, and you need to drive 15 miles to work. One is a plain looking Jeep, simple paint job and nothing fancy. The stereo works, but the sound system is factory default. You see the gas tank is at half, the tires look good and it starts right up when you turn the key.
The other car has a really cool paint job, perfectly match molding colors. The metallic flakes under the 85 coats of gloss are sweet! The massive stereo system would be visible to people in the space station! The car happens to be missing 3 wheels, the windshield is gone, and two of the doors won't open or close. For giggles you turn the key and it starts, but with no rear wheels you are not going to be driving very fast (it's front wheel drive).
Which vehicle do you take to work?
I submitted my first post yesterday, but have not yet received the votes to make the front page. Feel free to get this up on the main page.
I'm pretty sure people are not irate about the lack of bells and whistles people have asked for. The concern is that fundamental required functionality is broken. It is stated that 25% of the non-registered users are being funneled to the Beta site. Really? So all of those people see a broken implementation and may never come back after they see the site is simply broken.
Sure, they will see some comments from the regulars about it being broken, but they won't understand it. A new visitor is not going to figure out how to get to classic from the broken beta site. They are going to say "wow, it's broken and people are pissed. I'm not coming back here again."
Again, we are talking about basic things that are require to function, like thread links that people are angry about. These either exist or don't, and should not be RE-implemented incrementally (re-implemented because they already exist in Classic).
I'm picturing the NYPD implementation of Google Glass to be extremely buggy. It will have a tendency to shut off right before almost every arrest, and break much more frequently too. I'm not sure if things have improved under the new mayor or not. I'm a skeptic, and corrupt agencies tend to remain corrupt until somehow the house gets cleaned.
I have a hopefully coherent thread written here which could be a point of discussion assuming enough people want it on the front page as a stand alone article.
I got the nag today and went to the beta site, it's horrible. I don't like Slashdot on the Mobile phone for the same reason I dislike the Beta site. It's horrible to navigate compared to classic and wastes too much space.
If you want to push that gunk to the main page, at least leave this one as "classic.slashdot.com" so we can choose the best interface for us.
Well, my comment was sarcasm more than reality but it would not be hard for them to tell who is obese. The UK has way more cameras watching the public than the US, complete with facial recognition. It would not be hard to also have a "body" recognition where you could have the computer label someone "fatty".
Of course that does not match what we were told in TFA, which is that people will volunteer to receive these texts. I'm just pointing out that it would not be hard based on the current UK government hardware, software, and methods to at least guess someone was obese and automatically sign them up for these texts..
At work and home I behave differently. At home, I am like you and don't block ads. This has impact on how I perceive sites ad gives me bias on whether or not I'll go back and read more from a site. At work, I run ad blocking and no-script. I visit sites at lunch that surprise me with how much advertising they have hidden on the page.
What I find interesting is that the sites with the most advertising seem to also have the biggest amounts of bullshit and/or propaganda on them. CNN is the Provda of the US and has tons of links to ads, google-apis, Google analysis, etc.. infowars and naturalnews have just as much and are what I would consider "fringe" sites for various reasons. I skim both sets of articles on occasion, but take what each site says with a grain of salt (and toss a few grains over my shoulder because I looked).
As long as you have a TMI in the average range you should be happy no matter what your BMI.
Duh, that is the secondary purpose for the texts.
While I won't discount that many people hold that opinion I will point out that the opinion is immoral and unproductive to society. We see this repeated through history, over and over. Socrates had it right, but we keep repeating the same mistakes. Mostly because people are greedy and seek for themselves, not progress society.
My point was that framing the argument is folly, because the sides simply don't exist. You may already realize this, but why would you continue ot propagate such a big lie? The sides don't exist, and don't change the laws being proposed.
What on earth makes you think this is "Republicans" other than someone's rhetoric trying to get you to believe in a false dichotomy? Seriously, wake up and see what's been happening. These two sides claim to be different, but what they _do_ does not match their rhetoric.
You remind me of those people trying to put Obama on throne and denying all of the lies that we can show he laid out. While claiming to want transparency he has had his administration prosecute whistle blowers like no other President in history. While claiming to want an end to the Middle East wars, he has been banging the war drum against Syria, trying to convince Karzai that they need to renew our troops in Afghanistan, and all the while funding and training Al Qada in Africa and Syria. After claiming State rights to allow medical marijuana, look at the rash of arrests in CA under his administration. These few things are _easy_ to investigate and see that he is a liar. Not a little bit, but about nearly everything. He bold face lied aboutt the NSA back in May when Snowden leaks first came out. It's habitual lying, and has nothing to do with him being a "Democrat", or "Black", or "Muslim/Christian (which ever he is claiming to be today).
Both sides are lying to you! The answer is to get people on ballots that are NOT politicians and in someone's pocket for every single office. People of high morals, and familiar with the middle class and not the upper crust that does not give a shit about the majority of our society.
The "active" sites shows no such growth trend, in fact it shows IIS declining. NginX is the only web server showing growth, and even this is misleading. Most of our use for NginX is does not make Apache go away. We use NginX as a front end reverse proxy that talks to Apache back ends. NginX is good at a few things, but nowhere near as robust as Apache.
This is just another case of pulling only the statistics you want to color a lie.
Facebook counts the profiles of persons no longer on the planet, people that have created a page and not been there since, and people that have tried to "quit" their site for as long as I can remember. When people want something to look a certain way, they hire statisticians to make it look that way.
There was a report last year that Facebook had 1.2 billion people signed on, which is laughable. The largest populations in the world (India and China) do not have a majority that can use the internet, hundreds of millions in other countries are banned from this (most of Africa and the Middle East), and other people just don't give a shit (majority of Eastern Europe).
I'm pretty sure another report near the same time claimed that 50% of the accounts on FB were not people at all. Some of that 50% were companies, and a big chunk went to sock puppets, trolls, and scams.
I'm guessing that is why FB decided to try and make themselves look "good", but people are still going to leave. If you are not a security minded old codger like me, FB is no longer "hip" and "cool".
They never said "human" years vs. "dog" or "cat" years did they?
This is not a mandate, this is a training that people receive. We could have all the social media accounts we wanted when I worked for the DOD. We received weekly broadcasts reminding us not to put information regarding our jobs on those sites for our own safety.
"Not allowed" implies that there is some sort of regulation in place preventing people from having a social media account which is untrue.
Thanks for the citations, I wish they gave details on what they were testing for but we can hope they get it right. Considering that thousands of scientists are against this and not just the "eco-wacko" people I think there is more to the story. Considering that doing things for money is a normal operation, it's always wise to be suspicious.
Why is this modded informative, as is any pro government decision post in the thread? Every questioning post, or anti-government decision post is modded down.
It's not just me that says "this is potentially very harmful", read TFA and see what those thousands of scientists said! Most of them claim it _is_ harmful, they don't even claim "potential" like I did.
Claiming "it's just seabed" means that you never bothered to do any study on the subject, because it's not just sand that's being pulled up. It's sand mixed with runoff from fertilizer, petroleum that has drained into the ocean, chemicals, human waste, etc.. which is concentrated in this "seabed". You know, the same stuff that causes "Ocean Dead Zones" if you care to do even 5 minutes of research on the subject.
If you look at ocean dead zones and look at where this port is, you see something very interesting. The material from this dead zone is what's being moved out toward the barrier reef. I'm pretty sure they are not planning to put this nasty shit into nice neat Ziplock baggies before dumping it, which means that everything (seabed plus pollutants) will disperse, and as numerous scientists have said 25Km is not enough distance to protect the reef.
The build up from fertilizer, human waste, and chemical dumping/spilling, _are_ called toxins and are known to be 'toxic'. All of those things are what accumulate near shorelines, and cause the massive ocean dead zones.
I did not read anything in TFA claiming they were processing the materials to clean it, care to cite your source? You claim it's only "silt sand and clay" but if that was true why would they have to process it? Biologists have been clamoring about for decades about how bad the impact of runoff is and, and we have huge dead zones near shores because of the toxic materials that end up there and build up there. That seabed near shore that you are trying to claim is just "seabed" is going to be full of petroleum as well as fertilizers because it's the existing port being expanded.
ps. Good to see that the sock puppet accounts got mod points today.