Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
Why does it take a lawyer's "paper" to bring "newsworthy attention" to ideas "laypeople" here on slashdot have been expounding for years?
Because the laypeople on/. are a small fraction of the population. When was the last time you heard a report on recent supreme court decisions when you weren't listening to NPR? Now how many people get their news from NPR?
Part of the problem is the masses and the news media. Things that affect the lives of many (or could, or that they could care about) go unreported on television becuase they're not good enough for the ratings.
And what people don't know about, they don't complain about.
So the real problem is that it is difficult to envision what different I/O flows an idiot or several idiots might actually use.
I admit, my comparison was not completely apples to apples. An OS and a user app have their own sets of unexpected inputs and timing.
User-inputs versus interrupts, multiple app threads versus multiple kernel threads, etc.
Perhaps what would make the application debugging easier is to have been able to grovel over a core file after getting the "Disk is full" error message. They spent a lot of time trying to recreate the problem, which is often a good way of chasing it down. But sometimes (like here, when a debugger changes the state) you just need a complete dump of where the system was at when things went south.
It's cold, but weight and insulative properties aren't strongly correlated. One of the best insulators in the world is AeroGel which is practically as light as air.
And from TFA, the structure they're talking about can withstand 220 km/h (140 mph) winds.
So I'd say it's pretty sturdy. Lightweight means less inertia which means it's easier to withstand some strong forces.
Which is funny to hear, because (history: I work for IBM on the AIX kernel) I've fixed a lot of bugs I can't see, via code inspection and knowing roughly what was happening when the system crashed.
I'm sure Word has a milti-million line codebase. But so does AIX. It's split into different components, and there's quite a few bugs where I know roughly which code must have been running. So stare at the code for a few hours envisioning different inputs/control flows, and eventually a case that's not accounted for properly will show itself.
A tidally locked orbit means the rotation period is the same as the revolution period. However, since the moon's orbit is slightly elliptical, it revolves faster and slower at various points of the orbit, in accordance with Kepler's laws of motion. So over the course of a 29.5 day lunar orbit, the earth will move slowly up and down in the sky.
I've found it quite interesting that the fundies (of all persuasions) have been very quiet about this issue.
Regarding extraterrestrial life, C.S. Lewis (among other things, an author of Christian allegory and theology) wrote about this a bit. In his opinion there were five possiblities:
There is no extraterrestrial life, we are special and strange.
There is extraterrestrial life, but it does not posess a soul and therefore has no need of a redeemer.
There is extraterrestrial life, it posesses a soul but is not sinful and therefore has no need of a redeemer.
There is extraterrestrial life, it posesses a soul and has had a visitation from a reedemer.
There is extraterrestrial life, it posesses a soul, and we are expected to spread the message about our redeemer.
So it's not like someone hasn't thought about the possibility before.
Re:Religion IS escapism
on
Game with God
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· Score: 2, Interesting
All religions I know of assume the existence of another, spiritual, universe that's truly important, compared to our material universe, which is considered more or less irrelevant.
As someone who is a practicing Christian (I practice because I'm not perfect at it yet), I will attempt to explain the different views of this I have seen.
Christians hold many views about a spiritual world. Some believe it is almost entirely different, and so what occurs here matters little. (This is a short time before an eternity in the kingdom of heaven.) Some don't really believe in it at all and believe the kingdom of God will be present here, either now or later, through the actions of believers and God.
For those who believe that there is a significantly different spiritual realm (a real life that this is just a foreword to), the view of "it doesn't matter much what happens here" also has several shades of meaning. For some, it means that, since the world will end "soon", there's no point in marrying or fighting against an occupation (see the letters of Paul for this kind of thing, though Paul seemed to believe it would happen any day now). Many see also that, since the end could be after our lifetime, we owe it to ourselves and others after us to ensure that there's an environment where people can be good to their neighbor, where justice and peace reign, where the things that get yuck on our souls are minimized.
In a nutshell, just among Christians there's a wide view on what it all means. When you start looking at other religions (Unitarianism and Paganism come to mind), despite the existence of God or gods, the point of life is to enrich the lives of our fellow humans.
Well, of course one starts out with as broad a claim base as possible. Doing otherwise does not make business sense.
But most patents go through several rounds of non-final rejections by the review board for overly broad claims. By the time they're issued, there's a resonable chance for most of them (please note the qualifiers) that the claims are valid.
When trying to invalidate a patent, there's several good ways:
Show the listed inventors are a subset or superset of the actual inventors.
Show that the patent does not describe the best method ("the preferred embodiment") for solving the given problem (many Japanese companies have trouble with this one in the American patent system).
Prior art
Issues regarding obviousness (hard to argue that one), or being implementable by someone of ordinary skill in the art within one year
Patents are actually often very specific, and a company that wishes to sue another for patent infringemnet will find out too late that theirs is so, and the defendent is in fact not infringing on their too-specific patent.
While I agree that buzzword-laden bestsellers may not be helpful, I disagree with the sentiment you express by "Good managers learn by common sense and OJT". Your statement implies to me that you believe there's no way to teach management. *Every* skill can be factored into repeatable, trainiable, learnable units and best practices. Else we wouldn't have universities.
I also understand that no amount of classroom learning is enough; actual experience is needed. But that experienec is much more immediately useful when one has a solid thoretical and intellectual understanding to build upon. Management should be no different from engineering here.
You could just as easily say that you don't trust programmers with a copy of K&R and Harbison&Steele; they should learn by common sense and OJT.
I read Discover for fun articles about technology and science research. I read Sojourners for liberal Christian articles one peace, etc. I also get Vegetarian Times, and the newsletters/magazines from Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Sierra Club, and the Nature Conservancy.
The only thing I always read cover-to-cover is Discover.
I was a TA for the early years of Resolve, and took a precursor class in ADA.
The point of the Resolve keywords was to document some of the things that SPARK wants documented, like the use of variables. The Resolve folks also wanted pre/post conditions specified in comments in a formal language, as SPARK does. The difference, as I can see it, is that SPARK has a tool that analyzes the contract, whereas Resolve used humans to prove the code met the contract.
Cheers,
Matt
Slashdot Mirror
Because the laypeople on /. are a small fraction of the population. When was the last time you heard a report on recent supreme court decisions when you weren't listening to NPR? Now how many people get their news from NPR?
Part of the problem is the masses and the news media. Things that affect the lives of many (or could, or that they could care about) go unreported on television becuase they're not good enough for the ratings.
And what people don't know about, they don't complain about.
Cheers, Matt
I admit, my comparison was not completely apples to apples. An OS and a user app have their own sets of unexpected inputs and timing.
User-inputs versus interrupts, multiple app threads versus multiple kernel threads, etc.
Perhaps what would make the application debugging easier is to have been able to grovel over a core file after getting the "Disk is full" error message. They spent a lot of time trying to recreate the problem, which is often a good way of chasing it down. But sometimes (like here, when a debugger changes the state) you just need a complete dump of where the system was at when things went south.
Cheers, Matt
And from TFA, the structure they're talking about can withstand 220 km/h (140 mph) winds.
So I'd say it's pretty sturdy. Lightweight means less inertia which means it's easier to withstand some strong forces.
Cheers, Matt
I'm sure Word has a milti-million line codebase. But so does AIX. It's split into different components, and there's quite a few bugs where I know roughly which code must have been running. So stare at the code for a few hours envisioning different inputs/control flows, and eventually a case that's not accounted for properly will show itself.
Bah. Amateurs.
Cheers, Matt
So you work for Nintendo, then?
Cheers, Matt
Cheers, Matt
Regarding extraterrestrial life, C.S. Lewis (among other things, an author of Christian allegory and theology) wrote about this a bit. In his opinion there were five possiblities:
So it's not like someone hasn't thought about the possibility before.
As someone who is a practicing Christian (I practice because I'm not perfect at it yet), I will attempt to explain the different views of this I have seen.
Christians hold many views about a spiritual world. Some believe it is almost entirely different, and so what occurs here matters little. (This is a short time before an eternity in the kingdom of heaven.) Some don't really believe in it at all and believe the kingdom of God will be present here, either now or later, through the actions of believers and God.
For those who believe that there is a significantly different spiritual realm (a real life that this is just a foreword to), the view of "it doesn't matter much what happens here" also has several shades of meaning. For some, it means that, since the world will end "soon", there's no point in marrying or fighting against an occupation (see the letters of Paul for this kind of thing, though Paul seemed to believe it would happen any day now). Many see also that, since the end could be after our lifetime, we owe it to ourselves and others after us to ensure that there's an environment where people can be good to their neighbor, where justice and peace reign, where the things that get yuck on our souls are minimized.
In a nutshell, just among Christians there's a wide view on what it all means. When you start looking at other religions (Unitarianism and Paganism come to mind), despite the existence of God or gods, the point of life is to enrich the lives of our fellow humans.
Cheers, Matt
But most patents go through several rounds of non-final rejections by the review board for overly broad claims. By the time they're issued, there's a resonable chance for most of them (please note the qualifiers) that the claims are valid.
When trying to invalidate a patent, there's several good ways:
Patents are actually often very specific, and a company that wishes to sue another for patent infringemnet will find out too late that theirs is so, and the defendent is in fact not infringing on their too-specific patent.
Cheers, Matt
I also understand that no amount of classroom learning is enough; actual experience is needed. But that experienec is much more immediately useful when one has a solid thoretical and intellectual understanding to build upon. Management should be no different from engineering here.
You could just as easily say that you don't trust programmers with a copy of K&R and Harbison&Steele; they should learn by common sense and OJT.
Cheers, Matt
The only thing I always read cover-to-cover is Discover.
Dear lord, can't you at least use chmod -R a+rX so that non-executables don't get that silly * next to the name in a directory listing? Sheesh.
The point of the Resolve keywords was to document some of the things that SPARK wants documented, like the use of variables. The Resolve folks also wanted pre/post conditions specified in comments in a formal language, as SPARK does. The difference, as I can see it, is that SPARK has a tool that analyzes the contract, whereas Resolve used humans to prove the code met the contract. Cheers, Matt