Actually, it's not beneficial for large numbers of single men, who necessarily have no wife at all (for each man with two wives, there is one with none, since the sex ratio in humans is very close to 1:1). There is also some evidence that having large numbers of single men contributes to violence (this should come as no surprise). Hence, polygamy probably contributes to violence.
Yeah, but the single men are not Alpha Males and are less likely to risk violence. They probably just whine about shit on the internet, learn Perl, put on weight and grow neckbeards.
It's a Charlie story too. NVidia and Charlie hate each other and NVidia have tried as much as possible to cut access to Charlie.
So I think this story is more likely Charlie tormenting them than something he got from his NVidia sources. Because he doesn't have any NVidia sources, that's the source of the dispute.
Maybe he just bought a put option on their stock which he can cash in once the market realises they have no chip and their share price drops, or maybe he's trying to force them to agree to a peace treaty where he will write less rabidly negative stories in return for being granted interviews.
I knew this chick who got her boyfriend's password by looking over his shoulder. She used it well after their relationship ended, out of some mix of jealousy, spite, and hope that they'd be together again. She would make letters from other girls disappear, know when to make inconvenient calls/appearances, and whatever else it is that a manipulative, batshit insane, ex-girlfriend does. It was pretty funny. Point is, I suspect most breaches of passwords are of this sort of nature rather than really sensitive commercial stuff, so it's all lulz and it's all good.
She virtualised his life? That is so cool! Dude, do you have her phone number?
>lack of a manager's ability to accurately identify what a good metric is
All stakeholders, regardless of the nature of the business, respond to one "metric", universally:
Their personal wealth increased as a result of employing you.
That's very naive. The company may theoretically work like that, but most middle managers have a different and much more complex set of metrics. Like avoiding blame for failures, taking credit for successes and trying to increase the size of the empire by hiring more people and keeping the important people in their team happy. Or trying to get promoted, or a whole variety of things.
Of course they can't disagree with the making money metric, but if you look at their behavior it isn't something they value very highly most of the time.
As with sites that use Flash, your site can detect whether the IE user has the plugin and the browser can prompt the user to install it if it is not present. You can't prod users to change browsers, but experience has shown that users can be prodded into installing a plugin if it is required to use a site.
Actually since we're talking about IE here, you could deploy the plug in as a signed ActiveX control. Then IE will prompt people and install automatically if they agree. That's how people get Flash.
Ha. But while the jocks drive their nice cars and play gold on office time, the nerd builds his huge operating system-funded empire, and most likely, the jock will be using that operating system.
So, what's the difference between "taste and sportsmanship" and political correctness?
I'm not trying to be clever here, I actually do want to know.
Taste and sportsmanship is a personally, subjective thing. Political correctness is something that you try to force everyone else to follow.
I think there's a scale of crazy - at the low end of it, it's quite legitimate to laugh at people. But beyond some level it just doesn't seem funny anymore. Basically it's too easy because these people can't really think, argue or defend themselves, hence the analogy with tripping up blind people. It's not funny, and is actually rather sickening to watch.
In fact the best objection to places like/b/ and Encyclopedia Dramatica is that they don't get this rule - they thing it's quite ok to torment people that have quite obvious mental health issues.
Sane people behaving like pretentious twats are quite ok to torment in my book, but schizophrenics for example are not. Now I've no intention of trying to force anyone else to observe this rule (unlike the PC brigade who try to get people banned or fired) but I will point out that it's not funny or particularly clever when they break it.
Actually if the PC crowd only argued on a level playing field for their rules, I'd have no problem with them.
Oh no!/. has offended a whiny, oversensitive commissar of the politically correct!
He/she has ridden in on his/her redoubtable white steed to defend the honor of some random crazy person from the internet! Hail and godspeed hero crusader!
Give me a break.
That's not the point. In much the same way it's not cool to kick over wheel chairs or trip the blind it's also not cool to troll mad people or laugh at their ravings in public.
It's really a question of taste and sportsmanship, not political correctness.
Communist regimes have tended to cheat more ruthlessly because they have a far greater ability to hide information. Also the state's performance is important for propaganda and athletes are very much under the control of their trainers. They have also been much more willing to damage athlete's health.
Andreas Krieger says his body changed soon after he began taking what coaches said were vitamins.
Now, the former sports star looks disdainfully at the awards, dismissing them as "doping medals" and honors that turned a woman into a man.
Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women's shot-put champion, became Andreas Krieger after a sex-change operation in 1997. He says he had been fed so many steroids by his coaches without his knowledge that physical and emotional problems began.
The young woman's physique changed drastically, as did her feelings. "I felt much more attracted to women and just felt like a man. But I knew I was not lesbian," Krieger told CNN.
Her coaches said they were giving her vitamin pills, but they were actually feeding her Oral-Turinabol anabolic steroids.
Krieger is among an estimated 10,000 East German athletes thought to have been given performance-enhancing drugs to help build their country into a sports powerhouse.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the German Democratic Republic was one of the most successful Olympic Games nations. But after the fall of Soviet Communism, it was revealed just how much steroids were fueling the medal machine. Sports leaders, including Manfred Ewald, the head of East Germany's National Olympic Committee from 1973 until 1990, were convicted in the doping programs.
Individuals can dope themselves up in open societies too of course, but the system isn't complicit in the same way.
http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2008/08/hack-olympics.html 1. Google's cached copy of the spreadsheet does not contain Hexin's age record, and Baidu's does. This does not necessarily imply that Google allowed its data to be rewritten by Chinese censors, but the possibility does present itself. 2. From the minute I pressed the publish button on this blog, the clock is ticking until Hexin's true age is wiped out of the Baidu cache forever. It is up to you, the folks reading this blog, to take your own screenshots and notarize them by publishing them. If you put a link in the comments section, I'll post it.
Hmm, that reminds me of something
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.(pp. 34-35 1984 by George Orwell)
Totalitarian societies will always have memory holes to destroy documents with politically inconvenient facts in them, and armies of minions writing replacement documents without those facts. But it's very, very sad to see Google seemingly cooperating in this process.
I took a screenshot of the age in the Baidu cache -
for (1..5){
nasty_break();
print "$_ ";
}
sub nasty_break {
$_ = 5;
# do something with $_
}
You probably expect this code to print:
1 2 3 4 5
but instead you get:
5 5 5 5 5
Why? Because nasty_break() modifies $_ without localizing it first. The fix is to add local():
local $_ = 5;
Ugh, so variables are not local by default. I also don't like the way it has magic globals with odd names like $_ and $\
It all seems like the language was designed so you could do something clever in an incomprehensible way in a.sig, rather than for building large systems.
Mind you I worked on a Perl project with some other people who came from a C background and the code was very readable. But the version of Perl we used didn't have prototypes for example, and doing C like things like structures was done with pack.
It's good for text processing of course, but I still think it's obscurantist rather than legitimately complicated. I actually find string processing in C (or better C++ with a decent string class) far more readable than a non trivial bunch of regexps - it's more verbose of course.
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html This safer version of "chop" removes any trailing string that corresponds to the current value of $/ (also known as $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the English module). It returns the total number of characters removed from all its arguments. It's often used to remove the newline from the end of an input record when you're worried that the final record may be missing its newline. When in paragraph mode ($/ = "" ), it removes all trailing newlines from the string. When in slurp mode ($/ = undef ) or fixed-length record mode ($/ is a reference to an integer or the like, see perlvar) chomp() won't remove anything. If VARIABLE is omitted, it chomps $_ . Example:
And the batteries in these iPods? "Made In Japan". Glad to see they take their own QA so seriously.
I'd be very surprised at that. Most of the exploding batteries/faulty capacitors I've read about before were made in China. It's a combination of the fact that they are very cheaply made and China is a corruption addled autocracy where whistle blowers are very unsafe and corrupt bosses are very safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Still touting the insane idea that the media is not a right-wing mouthpiece? How cute.
Yeah, I hate the way the media have manufactured this McCainmania, portraying him as almost the Messiah and so on whilst giving no coverage to Obama.
Language is just a tool.
Sadly that's oftem true of the programmer too.
And 5.25 inches is 12cm when you're travelling at 43% of light speed.
Do not run, tasty humans!
Hal Porter, is that you?
Go back to your hugbox!
My Wife's best Friend moved in with us for a while and that did reflect my reality.
Dear Penthouse....
Actually, it's not beneficial for large numbers of single men, who necessarily have no wife at all (for each man with two wives, there is one with none, since the sex ratio in humans is very close to 1:1). There is also some evidence that having large numbers of single men contributes to violence (this should come as no surprise). Hence, polygamy probably contributes to violence.
Yeah, but the single men are not Alpha Males and are less likely to risk violence. They probably just whine about shit on the internet, learn Perl, put on weight and grow neckbeards.
It's a Charlie story too. NVidia and Charlie hate each other and NVidia have tried as much as possible to cut access to Charlie.
So I think this story is more likely Charlie tormenting them than something he got from his NVidia sources. Because he doesn't have any NVidia sources, that's the source of the dispute.
Maybe he just bought a put option on their stock which he can cash in once the market realises they have no chip and their share price drops, or maybe he's trying to force them to agree to a peace treaty where he will write less rabidly negative stories in return for being granted interviews.
I knew this chick who got her boyfriend's password by looking over his shoulder. She used it well after their relationship ended, out of some mix of jealousy, spite, and hope that they'd be together again. She would make letters from other girls disappear, know when to make inconvenient calls/appearances, and whatever else it is that a manipulative, batshit insane, ex-girlfriend does. It was pretty funny. Point is, I suspect most breaches of passwords are of this sort of nature rather than really sensitive commercial stuff, so it's all lulz and it's all good.
She virtualised his life? That is so cool! Dude, do you have her phone number?
You still wear you All Your Base T shirt don't you?
I believe he was ranting. Try it sometime, it releases fuckloads of stress.
>lack of a manager's ability to accurately identify what a good metric is
All stakeholders, regardless of the nature of the business, respond to one "metric", universally:
Their personal wealth increased as a result of employing you.
That's very naive. The company may theoretically work like that, but most middle managers have a different and much more complex set of metrics. Like avoiding blame for failures, taking credit for successes and trying to increase the size of the empire by hiring more people and keeping the important people in their team happy. Or trying to get promoted, or a whole variety of things.
Of course they can't disagree with the making money metric, but if you look at their behavior it isn't something they value very highly most of the time.
As with sites that use Flash, your site can detect whether the IE user has the plugin and the browser can prompt the user to install it if it is not present. You can't prod users to change browsers, but experience has shown that users can be prodded into installing a plugin if it is required to use a site.
Actually since we're talking about IE here, you could deploy the plug in as a signed ActiveX control. Then IE will prompt people and install automatically if they agree. That's how people get Flash.
Ha. But while the jocks drive their nice cars and play gold on office time, the nerd builds his huge operating system-funded empire, and most likely, the jock will be using that operating system.
This is why slashdot hates Bill Gates.
So, what's the difference between "taste and sportsmanship" and political correctness?
I'm not trying to be clever here, I actually do want to know.
Taste and sportsmanship is a personally, subjective thing. Political correctness is something that you try to force everyone else to follow.
I think there's a scale of crazy - at the low end of it, it's quite legitimate to laugh at people. But beyond some level it just doesn't seem funny anymore. Basically it's too easy because these people can't really think, argue or defend themselves, hence the analogy with tripping up blind people. It's not funny, and is actually rather sickening to watch.
In fact the best objection to places like /b/ and Encyclopedia Dramatica is that they don't get this rule - they thing it's quite ok to torment people that have quite obvious mental health issues.
Sane people behaving like pretentious twats are quite ok to torment in my book, but schizophrenics for example are not. Now I've no intention of trying to force anyone else to observe this rule (unlike the PC brigade who try to get people banned or fired) but I will point out that it's not funny or particularly clever when they break it.
Actually if the PC crowd only argued on a level playing field for their rules, I'd have no problem with them.
That's not the point. In much the same way it's not cool to kick over wheel chairs or trip the blind it's also not cool to troll mad people or laugh at their ravings in public.
It's really a question of taste and sportsmanship, not political correctness.
Communist regimes have tended to cheat more ruthlessly because they have a far greater ability to hide information. Also the state's performance is important for propaganda and athletes are very much under the control of their trainers. They have also been much more willing to damage athlete's health.
E.g.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/08/11/sexchange.athlete/index.html
BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- Heidi Krieger proved herself one of the world's top athletes in the 1980s, winning medal after medal in the shot put for East Germany.
Andreas Krieger says his body changed soon after he began taking what coaches said were vitamins.
Now, the former sports star looks disdainfully at the awards, dismissing them as "doping medals" and honors that turned a woman into a man.
Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women's shot-put champion, became Andreas Krieger after a sex-change operation in 1997. He says he had been fed so many steroids by his coaches without his knowledge that physical and emotional problems began.
The young woman's physique changed drastically, as did her feelings. "I felt much more attracted to women and just felt like a man. But I knew I was not lesbian," Krieger told CNN.
Her coaches said they were giving her vitamin pills, but they were actually feeding her Oral-Turinabol anabolic steroids.
Krieger is among an estimated 10,000 East German athletes thought to have been given performance-enhancing drugs to help build their country into a sports powerhouse.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the German Democratic Republic was one of the most successful Olympic Games nations. But after the fall of Soviet Communism, it was revealed just how much steroids were fueling the medal machine. Sports leaders, including Manfred Ewald, the head of East Germany's National Olympic Committee from 1973 until 1990, were convicted in the doping programs.
Individuals can dope themselves up in open societies too of course, but the system isn't complicit in the same way.
Sadly not, in post Soviet Russia the pony "gets" you.
Unlike "Do no Evil" Google.
http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2008/08/hack-olympics.html
1. Google's cached copy of the spreadsheet does not contain Hexin's age record, and Baidu's does. This does not necessarily imply that Google allowed its data to be rewritten by Chinese censors, but the possibility does present itself.
2. From the minute I pressed the publish button on this blog, the clock is ticking until Hexin's true age is wiped out of the Baidu cache forever. It is up to you, the folks reading this blog, to take your own screenshots and notarize them by publishing them. If you put a link in the comments section, I'll post it.
Hmm, that reminds me of something
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.(pp. 34-35 1984 by George Orwell)
Totalitarian societies will always have memory holes to destroy documents with politically inconvenient facts in them, and armies of minions writing replacement documents without those facts. But it's very, very sad to see Google seemingly cooperating in this process.
I took a screenshot of the age in the Baidu cache -
http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/2111/199411bw0.png
Skynet became self-aware on August 6, 1997.
Oops, we forgot its birthday this year again. I really hope it won't make a big deal about it.
That depends, would you consider killing every single human on Earth a big deal?
Leave him alone! He's self aware and it probably took him ages to peck out the characters on his keyboard.
As a fellow magpie I understand his point perfectly.
I don't think Perl is complicated. But it has some horrible bits of misdesign.
E.g.
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html
for (1..5){
nasty_break();
print "$_ ";
}
sub nasty_break {
$_ = 5;
# do something with $_
}
You probably expect this code to print:
1 2 3 4 5
but instead you get:
5 5 5 5 5
Why? Because nasty_break() modifies $_ without localizing it first. The fix is to add local():
local $_ = 5;
Ugh, so variables are not local by default. I also don't like the way it has magic globals with odd names like $_ and $\
It all seems like the language was designed so you could do something clever in an incomprehensible way in a .sig, rather than for building large systems.
Mind you I worked on a Perl project with some other people who came from a C background and the code was very readable. But the version of Perl we used didn't have prototypes for example, and doing C like things like structures was done with pack.
It's good for text processing of course, but I still think it's obscurantist rather than legitimately complicated. I actually find string processing in C (or better C++ with a decent string class) far more readable than a non trivial bunch of regexps - it's more verbose of course.
chomp is not ambiguous. RTFM and stop crying.
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html
This safer version of "chop" removes any trailing string that corresponds to the current value of $/ (also known as $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the English module). It returns the total number of characters removed from all its arguments. It's often used to remove the newline from the end of an input record when you're worried that the final record may be missing its newline. When in paragraph mode ($/ = "" ), it removes all trailing newlines from the string. When in slurp mode ($/ = undef ) or fixed-length record mode ($/ is a reference to an integer or the like, see perlvar) chomp() won't remove anything. If VARIABLE is omitted, it chomps $_ . Example:
If anything I'm crying harder after reading that.
Yeah, I hate Perl and corporate types too.
Come to think of it, I'm not also hate people that hate Perl or corporate types. And I hate people who hate people that hate
STACK OVERFLOW
Japan demands...something or other.
And the batteries in these iPods? "Made In Japan". Glad to see they take their own QA so seriously.
I'd be very surprised at that. Most of the exploding batteries/faulty capacitors I've read about before were made in China. It's a combination of the fact that they are very cheaply made and China is a corruption addled autocracy where whistle blowers are very unsafe and corrupt bosses are very safe.