if you have to find out what you're going to write after you start writing it, there's something extremely wrong in your process
Yes. And most times, that wrong process is the only process. Unless the project has a decent budget to hire business analysts and build storyboards, the only way to get concrete answers out of the client is to build them something that is a wild guess as to what they want, and use that as a means to solicit better specs. Extreme programming even uses this as an integral part of the process by having the client sit down with you as you build it.
Furthermore, most software packages evolve in step with the problems they are attempting to solve. Your specs describe last month's problems, not next month's, but sure as shit your software is going to be used to solve next month's problems. Programmers call this scope creep. Users call it real life. They're both right.
Point taken, although formalized grammar systems state that the modifier noun in a noun-noun compound is practically equivalent to an adjective. English is famously (notoriously?) flexible about allowing you to retask words to new purposes without confusing your audience. (And the proof is that retask is not a word, but you probably didn't notice.) English has loose rules that allow us to convert most nouns to verbs, and most verbs to adjectives. Eg. "I installed the firewall on the network" -> "I firewalled the network" -> "I am firewalling the network now". You could also propose a bet that firewall can never be used as a verb or an adjective, and if the dictionary was your arbiter, you'd win. But if the reader/listener doesn't even flinch at these usages, then meaning was effortlessly communicated, and clearly there are more subtle grammar rules at work. The dictionary, after all, is a description, not a presciption. "Leverage" for instance, is only a noun according to my published dictionaries, but more current online dictionaries are starting to recognize its verbiness. (And no, verbiness is not a word, and probably will never be recognized as one by a dictionary, but there is meaning there, nevertheless.)
In the case of "fruit flies", the usual noun->verb->adjective conversion rules would require something like "fruiting flies" for it to be formally recognized as an adjective. But that middle verb step doesn't work for "fruit" for some subtle contextual reason, so this rule doesn't get used. Instead we just plunk the noun right down into the adjective position, unmodified, use it with the same rules as if it were an adjective, and it all just works.
Is fruit an adjective or a noun?
Is flies a noun or a verb?
Is like a verb or an adjective?
This requires some serious AI (or just plain I) to sort out. And that only gets you past the subject line. Now re-read each of the sentences in my opening paragraph, but literally this time. Each of them would choke a grammar checker, yet for most readers they will parse perfectly well within the context.
Easier just to pay attention in Grade 7 English class, as someone already pointed out.
The older WordStar keybindings had similar logic, except for navigation, not cut/paste. The WordStar bindings for E/S/D/X formed a navigation diamond from which various other operations derived. You could move anywhere in your document with your fingers never straying from a touch-typist's position. Apple discounted this approach because navigation in the future would be done with the mouse, so they moved the next-most-common features to the left hand. However, it's a poor tradeoff for power users who tend to evolve back to exclusive keyboard use after a while. Apple might not have anticipated that in the early design years.
Meanwhile there is emacs where C-b moves left, and C-f moves right, but the b key is to the right of the f key. Completely back-assward, and clearly designed by 2-fingered knobs who were neither typists nor power users (yes, RMS, I'm talking to you) but for whom "b for backward, f for forward" seemed eminently logical. (And I say that as a hardcore emacs user.)
Good lord, where does one even begin responding to such a high density of misconceptions?
The Nazi Brownshirts were founded in the 1920s specifically to beat the shit out of Communists, who had their own gangs that were organized to beat up Nazis. They positively reviled each other from the very beginning.
The Ribbentrop-Molotov "treaty" was a Machiavellian scheme to conquer the Soviet Union, not a "close alliance" between Nazis and Communists. To attack the USSR, however, you must first neutralize France (which would otherwise be sitting on your unprotect rear), but to neutralize France, you must first neutralize the USSR for similar reasons (these were obvious lessons from WWI). The non-aggression pact, which also conveniently wiped out Poland, was a brilliant solution to this catch-22.
Your "proof" that Stalin had no intention of attacking Germany is odd, since I know of no historian who promotes the theory that any such thing was on Stalin's mind. Stalin had his eye on the small states of Eastern Europe, and the pact with Germany, a traditional enemy, gave him the carte blanche he had been seeking for over 10 years to move in that direction.
Unlike the socialists (or communists, if you prefer) in the USSR, the Nazis saw the world in terms of racial struggle, not class struggle. They also had no problem working with (and making rich) various private industrialists (also known as capitalists) rather than nationalizing their industries. The fact that Nazi is an abbreviation for National Socialist should be taken about as seriously as the formal name of communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic. Trendy political labels (and nothing was trendier than socialism in the 1930s) are misused and redefined by people everywhere, as evidenced by your inventive definition of capitalism as "a system where everyone takes care of himself."
The ][ platform wasn't opened up to cloning. [...] Why was no such cleverness pulled with the Apple ][ platform?
I owned two Apple ][ clones in the early '80s, produced by some Taiwanese manufacturer. I got my first programming job writing dBase II aps on an Apple clone with a giant 12" platter 5 MB hard disk. My friends bought Apple ][ clones, except for one early adopter who had a real Apple, and a Commodore dweeb. Apple clones were everywhere - they were cheap, ubiquitous, and probably illegal in the U.S.A., if you've never even heard of them.
even if Linux gained a champion on the order of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, someone with marketing and business sense in addition to coding skills, there would always be a minority disliking the decisions that this leader makes.
I don't see the problem - the whole point of free software is to disagree with the decisions the leader makes, and then reconfigure to suit your particular tics and psychoses. I think many Linux users would relish the opportunity to disagree with finished, polished software, instead of merely being dissatisfied with almost-finished, beta-quality software.
Phase and state are synonymous in this context, as explained in the article I linked to:
Phases are sometimes called states of matter, but this term can lead to confusion with thermodynamic states. For example, two gases maintained at different pressures are in different thermodynamic states, but the same "state of matter".
The OP refers to solid, liquid, and gas, as the other "states", so they're clearly using it in the phase sense, not the thermodynamic sense. Besides, there an infinite number of thermodynamic states, so the statement would be completely nonsensical if that's what they meant.
god is, by defenition, outside of the scope of science
By which definition? According to the only published definition accepted by practicing Christians, God is an entity that sets bushes on fire, parts seas, and issues clearly-stated orders for whole cities to be put to the sword. It all sounds perfectly within the scope of science to me, and if these ID folks can shed any light on why this crazy shit doesn't seem to happen any more, I for one would be interested to know.
Garuda (as referenced) is a Hindu god, not a Buddhist one, and Hinduism certainly has worship of various minor deities. Buddhists on the other hand generally do not worship deities, although certain flavours of the religion recognize supernatural enlightened beings - including ones called Garuda, but in the Buddhist context, this is a race, not a god. The best western analogy would be angels.
Buddhism is sometimes described as "non-theistic", but since the "a-" in "athiesm" means "without-", the difference between non-theism and a-theism is pretty darned subtle.
Verging on flamebait, but I'd mod it as insightful...
Americans seem to love sports where nothing happens. Football has a lot of standing around while the clock is running. Baseball is even worse - football at least celebrates its moments of high action, but baseballs' great feats are all ones where nothing of interest to spectators happens. Imagine a sport where a "perfect game" is one that you could sleep through and not miss a damn thing. Even a home run involves precious little action--and yet it's guaranteed to make the evening highlights!
And it's not just Americans. The British are even worse! British football (okay, soccer) pretends to have more action since there is actually movement on the field for 90 whole minutes, but when you actually distill it down to the highlights, it's clear that almost nothing happens. And cricket - all the excitement of baseball, except the games last several days.
The French once had the right idea with fencing - a couple of guys having at it with swords seems like a good recipe for spectator fun, but for some reason that dropped off the radar. Now their idea of fun is the Tour de France - ie. waiting for hours on a god-forsaken country road for a glimpse of--oh shit! there they go!--and then fighting the crowds for hours trying to get home.
The Japanese, like the French, once had a thing for sports where two guys beat the tar out of each other. But with all the salt throwing and whatnot, specators there eventually turned to baseball for some action, so they clearly lost their way...
I give points to the Canadians for fast-paced, violent games like hockey and lacrosse. On the other hand, the dirty secret of Canadian sport is that the most popular game in the country is curling, so the broken noses and missing teeth is all just an elaborate charade. Ditto for the Aussies and their Aussie rules football--it's just a decoy for the fact that they're all actually playing cricket.
As for the big international events, you have the World Cup (but I've already dissed soccer), Formula 1 (will somebody please pass somebody else? Anyone? Please!???), and the Olympics (which is gradually being taken over by judged sports in which the competitors wear sequins).
Face, people around the world don't much like watching sports, so the successful spectator sports are ones that you don't really have to watch. The real point is to sit around with your buddies for a couple of hours, and drink a few beers. If sports were really that interesting to watch, you'd stay sober and tell your buddies to fuck off 'cuz you're busy.
And most people who just want to drink a beer, drink Bud Light. And, just to stretch the analogy a little further, real beer drinkers will scoff at them, drink infintiely better beers, and wonder how the masses manage to stomach such awful piss.
Microsoft...hmmm what can we say... they did settle the land and run on cheap hardware.
Er, not really. Microsoft ran on IBM hardware, which was not cheap. You can thank Compaq and people like Albert Clark for commoditizing the PC, not Microsoft. Microsoft got lucky in that they were the default OS on expensive hardware at the time it got commoditized by other innovators.
Not necessarily; there are many shades of lack of belief.
Agnostics declare that the existence of god is unknown (or even unknowable) to us. However, they may still accept that the question is meaningful and does have an answer -- just that faith is an inadequate method of arriving at that answer, and there are no other methods known to us.
"Hard atheists" meanwhile agree with agnostics that the question is meaningful and does have an answer. But they believe that the answer is a definite no, there is no god.
So-called "soft atheists" on the other hand reject the question itself as not having meaning. The answer is neither yes nor no, but something closer to mu. They have a complete absense of belief in the matter, not an active DISbelief.
Then you have the religious atheists such as Buddhists, who may devoutly believe in a complex spiritualism and mysticism, but for whom that world view does not include an entity that westerners would recognize as a god. These atheists are like the soft atheists in that the question of god is meaningless to them (since the supposed answers that god provides are provided to them through other means), but on the other hand, it isn't quite correct to characterise them as "without belief".
Which part is their property? The network that was paid for with massive public subsidies? The lines that are strung up on public lands? The telecom empires that were built upon government-granted monopolies?
Because we want our economics to grow rather then stagnat?
More accurately, we want our quality of life to grow, and this is partly connected to wealth, which is partly connected to economics. However, note that economics is two steps removed from quality of life, and they don't necessarily go hand in hand. The classic example is a widget factory that dumps its pollution into the river, causing cancer and environmental damage. Now, the widgets are sold for $X, and the environmental cleanup costs $Y and the cancer treatments cost $Z. The total benefit to the economy is the money that gets spent, ie. $(X+Y+Z), but the benefit to quality of life is clearly $(X-Y-Z).
According to this summary of launching costs (PDF), the cost per pound to orbit on these Russian ICBMs is shockingly low -- $211 per pound. The nearest competitor in small launch vehicles costs $3313 per pound. I guess you get what you pay for.
Your long-term plan is patently silly: build launch facilities on the moon, to launch stuff from the Earth. How do you propose to get your cargo up to the moon so you can launch it cheaply? Whether you are sending astronauts or probes for exploration, colony ships to establish settlements, or supply ships for existing colonies, your cargo is mostly coming from Earth, and it is simply idiotic to dump it on the moon part way out.
Unless you are proposing to establish an entire productive civilization on the moon, with a multi-trillion-dollar GDP, which can manufacture the millions of tons of cheap goods that are needed throughout the solar system. Then your plan might work. But it's going to cost a lot more than you think. Plus, I think Mars and the asteroid belt will be able to out-compete you.
Reading more books is a good idea, but they should not be Arthur C. Clarke novels. Education helps, but not in rocket science - mine is in astrophysics, but trust me, it's not pertinent. Business sense is what is required (and apparently missing) in this discussion.
The basic premise is that it costs too much to launch from Earth, so you're going to launch millions of tons from Earth so that you don't have to launch from Earth any more. You pay what it takes to launch millions of tons from Earth -- thereby creating a multi-trillion dollar Earth-based commercial launch industry, driving down the cost per pound to space substantially*. In other words, your seed capital is used to finance your competitors and invalidate your business premise.
But let's be kind and say that your investors are too dim to notice this flaw in your plan, and you actually get your moon launch facility built. Now, what will you launch, and where will these payloads be coming from? Think carefully before answering this. You need to put hundreds of millions of tons of something into space to make your scheme pay for itself, and that something has to come from somewhere, and your moon facility only makes launch systems. Hint: you better not be launching anything that originates on Earth, or I'm going to make a lot of fun of you.
Am I really the only one who sees problems with this scheme? If this is your idea of real investment stay out of business, and please, please stay out of the space industry. There's a dozen real ways to spend a few hundred trillion bucks on space colonization that actually make sense, but this isn't one of them.
* Bear in mind that current cost to LEO is typically about $10K/lb but as low as $211/lb to LEO, if you know how to shop around.
the true purpose of a moon base would be to mine materials from the Moon itself that could be used in the construction of spacecraft which can neither be built nor launched from the surface of the earth, due to the High Gravity Well
So let me get this straight: you propose to lift thousands of tons of exploration equipment to the moon, along with a bunch of geologists who have to find good stuff to mine, and then lift tens of thousands of tons of mining and mineral processing equipment to the moon, along with a bunch of miners and engineers to dig the good stuff up, then lift thousands more tons of transportation equipment, so that the mined materials can be brought together somewhere for processing, then lift thousands more tons of manufacturing equipment to the moon along with more engineers so that we can build a launch facility, then lift tens of thousands of tons of water and food to all these poor guys and girls who are probably getting really hungry by now, and then lift thousands more tons of computers, electronics, and other advanced components that even your crazy plan doesn't foresee building on the moon, so that the engineers and astronauts actually have the tools to build and fly these lunar spacecraft. Do I have your plan approximately correct?
And you say the primary purpose of this plan is to avoid launching stuff out of Earth's gravity well?
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Yes. And most times, that wrong process is the only process. Unless the project has a decent budget to hire business analysts and build storyboards, the only way to get concrete answers out of the client is to build them something that is a wild guess as to what they want, and use that as a means to solicit better specs. Extreme programming even uses this as an integral part of the process by having the client sit down with you as you build it.
Furthermore, most software packages evolve in step with the problems they are attempting to solve. Your specs describe last month's problems, not next month's, but sure as shit your software is going to be used to solve next month's problems. Programmers call this scope creep. Users call it real life. They're both right.
In the case of "fruit flies", the usual noun->verb->adjective conversion rules would require something like "fruiting flies" for it to be formally recognized as an adjective. But that middle verb step doesn't work for "fruit" for some subtle contextual reason, so this rule doesn't get used. Instead we just plunk the noun right down into the adjective position, unmodified, use it with the same rules as if it were an adjective, and it all just works.
This requires some serious AI (or just plain I) to sort out. And that only gets you past the subject line. Now re-read each of the sentences in my opening paragraph, but literally this time. Each of them would choke a grammar checker, yet for most readers they will parse perfectly well within the context.
Easier just to pay attention in Grade 7 English class, as someone already pointed out.
Meanwhile there is emacs where C-b moves left, and C-f moves right, but the b key is to the right of the f key. Completely back-assward, and clearly designed by 2-fingered knobs who were neither typists nor power users (yes, RMS, I'm talking to you) but for whom "b for backward, f for forward" seemed eminently logical. (And I say that as a hardcore emacs user.)
The Nazi Brownshirts were founded in the 1920s specifically to beat the shit out of Communists, who had their own gangs that were organized to beat up Nazis. They positively reviled each other from the very beginning.
The Ribbentrop-Molotov "treaty" was a Machiavellian scheme to conquer the Soviet Union, not a "close alliance" between Nazis and Communists. To attack the USSR, however, you must first neutralize France (which would otherwise be sitting on your unprotect rear), but to neutralize France, you must first neutralize the USSR for similar reasons (these were obvious lessons from WWI). The non-aggression pact, which also conveniently wiped out Poland, was a brilliant solution to this catch-22.
Your "proof" that Stalin had no intention of attacking Germany is odd, since I know of no historian who promotes the theory that any such thing was on Stalin's mind. Stalin had his eye on the small states of Eastern Europe, and the pact with Germany, a traditional enemy, gave him the carte blanche he had been seeking for over 10 years to move in that direction.
Unlike the socialists (or communists, if you prefer) in the USSR, the Nazis saw the world in terms of racial struggle, not class struggle. They also had no problem working with (and making rich) various private industrialists (also known as capitalists) rather than nationalizing their industries. The fact that Nazi is an abbreviation for National Socialist should be taken about as seriously as the formal name of communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic. Trendy political labels (and nothing was trendier than socialism in the 1930s) are misused and redefined by people everywhere, as evidenced by your inventive definition of capitalism as "a system where everyone takes care of himself."
I owned two Apple ][ clones in the early '80s, produced by some Taiwanese manufacturer. I got my first programming job writing dBase II aps on an Apple clone with a giant 12" platter 5 MB hard disk. My friends bought Apple ][ clones, except for one early adopter who had a real Apple, and a Commodore dweeb. Apple clones were everywhere - they were cheap, ubiquitous, and probably illegal in the U.S.A., if you've never even heard of them.
I don't see the problem - the whole point of free software is to disagree with the decisions the leader makes, and then reconfigure to suit your particular tics and psychoses. I think many Linux users would relish the opportunity to disagree with finished, polished software, instead of merely being dissatisfied with almost-finished, beta-quality software.
Make that "one of at over a dozen known phases of matter" , not "one of the four phases".
By which definition? According to the only published definition accepted by practicing Christians, God is an entity that sets bushes on fire, parts seas, and issues clearly-stated orders for whole cities to be put to the sword. It all sounds perfectly within the scope of science to me, and if these ID folks can shed any light on why this crazy shit doesn't seem to happen any more, I for one would be interested to know.
Buddhism is sometimes described as "non-theistic", but since the "a-" in "athiesm" means "without-", the difference between non-theism and a-theism is pretty darned subtle.
Um, Buddhists are atheists.
Americans seem to love sports where nothing happens. Football has a lot of standing around while the clock is running. Baseball is even worse - football at least celebrates its moments of high action, but baseballs' great feats are all ones where nothing of interest to spectators happens. Imagine a sport where a "perfect game" is one that you could sleep through and not miss a damn thing. Even a home run involves precious little action--and yet it's guaranteed to make the evening highlights!
And it's not just Americans. The British are even worse! British football (okay, soccer) pretends to have more action since there is actually movement on the field for 90 whole minutes, but when you actually distill it down to the highlights, it's clear that almost nothing happens. And cricket - all the excitement of baseball, except the games last several days.
The French once had the right idea with fencing - a couple of guys having at it with swords seems like a good recipe for spectator fun, but for some reason that dropped off the radar. Now their idea of fun is the Tour de France - ie. waiting for hours on a god-forsaken country road for a glimpse of--oh shit! there they go!--and then fighting the crowds for hours trying to get home.
The Japanese, like the French, once had a thing for sports where two guys beat the tar out of each other. But with all the salt throwing and whatnot, specators there eventually turned to baseball for some action, so they clearly lost their way...
I give points to the Canadians for fast-paced, violent games like hockey and lacrosse. On the other hand, the dirty secret of Canadian sport is that the most popular game in the country is curling, so the broken noses and missing teeth is all just an elaborate charade. Ditto for the Aussies and their Aussie rules football--it's just a decoy for the fact that they're all actually playing cricket.
As for the big international events, you have the World Cup (but I've already dissed soccer), Formula 1 (will somebody please pass somebody else? Anyone? Please!???), and the Olympics (which is gradually being taken over by judged sports in which the competitors wear sequins).
Face, people around the world don't much like watching sports, so the successful spectator sports are ones that you don't really have to watch. The real point is to sit around with your buddies for a couple of hours, and drink a few beers. If sports were really that interesting to watch, you'd stay sober and tell your buddies to fuck off 'cuz you're busy.
And most people who just want to drink a beer, drink Bud Light. And, just to stretch the analogy a little further, real beer drinkers will scoff at them, drink infintiely better beers, and wonder how the masses manage to stomach such awful piss.
Best pun of the day. Better, even, if it was unintentional.
Er, not really. Microsoft ran on IBM hardware, which was not cheap. You can thank Compaq and people like Albert Clark for commoditizing the PC, not Microsoft. Microsoft got lucky in that they were the default OS on expensive hardware at the time it got commoditized by other innovators.
Agnostics declare that the existence of god is unknown (or even unknowable) to us. However, they may still accept that the question is meaningful and does have an answer -- just that faith is an inadequate method of arriving at that answer, and there are no other methods known to us.
"Hard atheists" meanwhile agree with agnostics that the question is meaningful and does have an answer. But they believe that the answer is a definite no, there is no god.
So-called "soft atheists" on the other hand reject the question itself as not having meaning. The answer is neither yes nor no, but something closer to mu. They have a complete absense of belief in the matter, not an active DISbelief.
Then you have the religious atheists such as Buddhists, who may devoutly believe in a complex spiritualism and mysticism, but for whom that world view does not include an entity that westerners would recognize as a god. These atheists are like the soft atheists in that the question of god is meaningless to them (since the supposed answers that god provides are provided to them through other means), but on the other hand, it isn't quite correct to characterise them as "without belief".
The shuttle main booster is LH2-LOX, which makes water... so basically NASA agrees with you.
Which part is their property? The network that was paid for with massive public subsidies? The lines that are strung up on public lands? The telecom empires that were built upon government-granted monopolies?
As would be expected of the 31st Grand Master of the Priory of Sion.
More accurately, we want our quality of life to grow, and this is partly connected to wealth, which is partly connected to economics. However, note that economics is two steps removed from quality of life, and they don't necessarily go hand in hand. The classic example is a widget factory that dumps its pollution into the river, causing cancer and environmental damage. Now, the widgets are sold for $X, and the environmental cleanup costs $Y and the cancer treatments cost $Z. The total benefit to the economy is the money that gets spent, ie. $(X+Y+Z), but the benefit to quality of life is clearly $(X-Y-Z).
According to this summary of launching costs (PDF), the cost per pound to orbit on these Russian ICBMs is shockingly low -- $211 per pound. The nearest competitor in small launch vehicles costs $3313 per pound. I guess you get what you pay for.
Unless you are proposing to establish an entire productive civilization on the moon, with a multi-trillion-dollar GDP, which can manufacture the millions of tons of cheap goods that are needed throughout the solar system. Then your plan might work. But it's going to cost a lot more than you think. Plus, I think Mars and the asteroid belt will be able to out-compete you.
Boob, indeed.
The basic premise is that it costs too much to launch from Earth, so you're going to launch millions of tons from Earth so that you don't have to launch from Earth any more. You pay what it takes to launch millions of tons from Earth -- thereby creating a multi-trillion dollar Earth-based commercial launch industry, driving down the cost per pound to space substantially*. In other words, your seed capital is used to finance your competitors and invalidate your business premise.
But let's be kind and say that your investors are too dim to notice this flaw in your plan, and you actually get your moon launch facility built. Now, what will you launch, and where will these payloads be coming from? Think carefully before answering this. You need to put hundreds of millions of tons of something into space to make your scheme pay for itself, and that something has to come from somewhere, and your moon facility only makes launch systems. Hint: you better not be launching anything that originates on Earth, or I'm going to make a lot of fun of you.
Am I really the only one who sees problems with this scheme? If this is your idea of real investment stay out of business, and please, please stay out of the space industry. There's a dozen real ways to spend a few hundred trillion bucks on space colonization that actually make sense, but this isn't one of them.
* Bear in mind that current cost to LEO is typically about $10K/lb but as low as $211/lb to LEO, if you know how to shop around.
So let me get this straight: you propose to lift thousands of tons of exploration equipment to the moon, along with a bunch of geologists who have to find good stuff to mine, and then lift tens of thousands of tons of mining and mineral processing equipment to the moon, along with a bunch of miners and engineers to dig the good stuff up, then lift thousands more tons of transportation equipment, so that the mined materials can be brought together somewhere for processing, then lift thousands more tons of manufacturing equipment to the moon along with more engineers so that we can build a launch facility, then lift tens of thousands of tons of water and food to all these poor guys and girls who are probably getting really hungry by now, and then lift thousands more tons of computers, electronics, and other advanced components that even your crazy plan doesn't foresee building on the moon, so that the engineers and astronauts actually have the tools to build and fly these lunar spacecraft. Do I have your plan approximately correct?
And you say the primary purpose of this plan is to avoid launching stuff out of Earth's gravity well?