"In the 1990s, I noticed children's shows were changing: Nobody died and after the battle, everybody got up and went home"
--That can depend on the culture, For example, at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Festival I saw Tiger in Blossom, a lovely show for children by a Korean company: at the end of the show two of the characters in the story die.
There are good reasons for learning Latin (the \Aeneid for example), but I'm not convinced that it helps you appreciate English any better than learning any other language.
An email from Alan Kay on 23 July 2003 replying to a question from Stefan Ram about the term "object oriented programming": note that Kay's reply does not include inheritance or polymorphism as essential parts of OOP. (He does include encapsulation. I leave it to readers to decide if he's also including data abstraction.)
...
I wanted to get rid of data.
...
I didn't like the way Simula I or Simula 67 did inheritance (though I thought Nygaard and Dahl were just tremendous thinkers and designers). So I decided to leave out inheritance as a built-in feature until I understood it better.
...
(I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing.)
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.
That statement definitely needs a citation of evidence: if true it implies that the first ever language was more complicated than any later languages, which strikes me as unlikely.
I'm an agnostic on this, but try replacing "curly quotes" by "open and close brackets" and "simple straight quotes" by any single character: say "|" (pipe symbol). In other words, if your argument is correct for quote marks it should also be correct for brackets. Personally I think I prefer a different symbol for opening and closing brackets: why should quotes be different?
It might be censorship if the "Great American Novel" is quite well written and "a publisher" refuses to publish it; then again, it might just not fit with their general publishing ethos. But if it's lousily written, then a (reasonable) rejection on those grounds isn't censorship, merely good judgment, and whether the publisher agrees or disagrees with the novel's social/political views is irrelevant.
From the first linked article:
... Criticism continues from some quarters about working practices, but Amazon general manager Paul Ashraf insists that the company cares about its staff -- and is disappointed by the perception some people have of the business.
"I think from my point of view we're a global brand, so that brings headlines in relation to what people think about Amazon and this place," he told The Courier. "From my point of view I try to focus on what's within my control. I focus very heavily, especially in peak times, on associate experience.... It's hard work at this time of year, of course it is.... We just focus on customer obsession, making sure we deliver the customer promises. Whatever we've promised a customer in terms of what's going to be delivered, we make sure that it is processed and shipped on time.
While we're doing that, we make sure we keep people here safe, so it's all about safety first, and make sure that from an associate experience point of view we try and have as much fun as possible. We had DJs on every floor on Black Friday, we had tombolas, we had raffles that people get free entry into -- it's all about keeping associates safe and having fun."
...
Would you deign to give us reasons why you think the UK has "essentially banned pornography"? I don't know what your tastes in pornography are, but if you spent a few days in the UK you might be - ahem - "pleasantly surprised".
Hah! Crooked Hillary only won the popular vote because of tens of millions of illegal votes and the support of pinko commie liberals who are traitors and shouldn't have a vote. Donald really won by a landslide: 90%, maybe even 95%. Trump! Make America great again! (Or something like that.)
"The Democrats continue to yammer on about gun control despite a HUGE portion of the population being against gun control (yep, I said it - the polls the liberals like to say showing the opposite are BS, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out a majority are actually NOT on their side)"
You say you don't like polls, but anyway here's some trends contradicting you. Gallup Why not give us some evidence for your assertion?
"It was the Germans who rolled their tanks all over Europe."
That was, including some hiatuses, in September.1939 to some time in 1942. From early 1944 to April.1945 Soviet combined arms - with a substantial component of tanks - rolled all over Eastern Europe, while the USA and UK and other allies were doing the same in Western Europe.
But to agree with your implied conclusion, and to address the post you were responding to, whether the current Russian armed forces could successfully roll all over Europe is at best debatable.
"History also tells us that there is a strong correlation between military power and economic success"
Well, correlation is not necessarily causation. I suggest that economic success enables military power. Do you have a good example of military power causing subsequent long-term economic success?
"First off the "Great War" was WWI and that wasn't started by Germany"
A Slashdot post is not the appropriate place for an in-depth analysis of the causes of WW1, but even without buying fully into the thesis of Fritz Fischer, at the least Germany bore a large responsibility for WW1 starting.
""ukraine" is an imaginary country cobbled up during USSR era. It will fall apart of natural causes and go back to Russia."
You might be right about Ukraine rejoining Russia. (My guess is it probably won't.) But you're completely wrong about its origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well, I too think very little of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, but where does your "in reality only about 18% of eligible voters voted to leave" come from?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... the UK (etc) turnout was 72.2%, of which 51.9% voted to leave and 48.1% (including me) voted to remain. Put another way, of the eligible voters about 37.5% voted to leave, 34.7% voted to remain, and 27.8% did not vote.
I have a memory of an Ancient Greece Olympic Games wrestler who immediately after achieving the winning fall (submission, whatever) deliberately let his opponent choke him to death so that he (the dead wrestler) would achieve immortality as an undefeated champion. Or something like that.
My memory may be fallible, because I can't find a citation. But this is close:
Arrhichion won the Pankration, an empty-hand submission sport blending boxing and wrestling with scarcely any rules, at the 52nd and 53rd Olympiads (572 BCE and 568 BCE, respectively). His fatal fight [564 BCE] was described by the geographer Pausanias and by Philostratus the Younger. According to Pausanias:
For when he was contending for the wild olive with the last remaining competitor, whoever he was, the latter got a grip first, and held Arrhachion, hugging him with his legs, and at the same time he squeezed his neck with his hands. Arrhachion dislocated his opponent's toe, but expired owing to suffocation; but he who suffocated Arrhachion was forced to give in at the same time because of the pain in his toe. The Eleans crowned and proclaimed victor the corpse of Arrhachion.
Philostratus of Athens writes in his Gymnasticus that Arrichion's failure to submit to his opponent was the result of his trainer, Eryxias, shouting to him, "What a noble epitaph, 'He was never defeated at Olympia.'
"if... the exponentiation was rendered by formatting the exponent in superscript"
In the 1980s I was working in insurance, specifically actuarial work which for historical reasons has many functions written with subscripts and superscripts. I considered, but didn't try implementing, a language which used up to three lines for a statement: a middle line for the basic statement, an optional lower line for subscripts, and an optional upper line for superscripts.
Recently, quite by chance, I discovered that a 1970s language HAL/S, designed for the Space Shuttle, had actually implemented that.
"he hasn't committed any crime in the UK, and so can't be arrested for anything, let alone extradited"
Are you sure about that? Suppose Joe Criminal is a UK citizen who (allegedly) physically robs a bank in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and "flees" to London, which is where he now resides. Are you really saying that if the US authorities have substantial evidence that Joe did commit the robbery he can't be extradited?
"There are certainly improvements (>1 million rows in Excel"
Encouraging people to use a spreadsheet for large amounts of data (or anything else!) is *not* an improvement!
To extend your jest a little further, while it's appealing to consider whether Jeremy Clarkson might make a better Foreign Secretary than Boris Johnson, I think Theresa May's idea was to appoint campaigners for UK exit from the EU to the three major positions for leading exit negotiations and preparations to reduce the chance that if things go wrong the campaigners for exit will try to claim that it's the fault of those of us who voted for the UK to remain in the EU. (Whether that will actually work if things do go wrong is another question.)
That being the case, Jeremy Clarkson is ruled out for the job of Foreign Secretary: much to my surprise, Jeremy Clarkson was, apparently, in favour of the UK remaining in the EU. I'm linking to the
Daily Mail" rather than to a more reputable newspaper, because it was gung-ho for UK exit from the EU, and if it could have found a way to spin that Clarkson favoured UK exit it would probably have done so. Which means that, surprising as it may seem, Jeremy Clarkson is in favour of a United States of Europe.
"Radar is used to watch for an attack. It is purely defensive."
No, it isnt. For example H2S was an airborne radio system used by the Royal Air Force in World War 2 (and afterwards) to identify targets on the ground for night and all-weather bombing.
More from that Wikipedia page:
... Multiple gunshot suicides are rare, but possible. In one study of 138 gunshot suicides, 5 (3.6%) involved two shots to the head, the first of which missed the brain. A suicide with 4 gunshots to the head has been reported....
which is a useful statistic.
Slashdot Mirror
"In the 1990s, I noticed children's shows were changing: Nobody died and after the battle, everybody got up and went home"
--That can depend on the culture, For example, at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Festival I saw Tiger in Blossom, a lovely show for children by a Korean company: at the end of the show two of the characters in the story die.
There are good reasons for learning Latin (the \Aeneid for example), but I'm not convinced that it helps you appreciate English any better than learning any other language.
An email from Alan Kay on 23 July 2003 replying to a question from Stefan Ram about the term "object oriented programming": note that Kay's reply does not include inheritance or polymorphism as essential parts of OOP. (He does include encapsulation. I leave it to readers to decide if he's also including data abstraction.)
...
I wanted to get rid of data.
...
I didn't like the way Simula I or Simula 67 did inheritance (though I thought Nygaard and Dahl were just tremendous thinkers and designers). So I decided to leave out inheritance as a built-in feature until I understood it better.
...
(I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing.)
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.
--Here is a more detailed history of Smalltalk by Alan Kay.
That statement definitely needs a citation of evidence: if true it implies that the first ever language was more complicated than any later languages, which strikes me as unlikely.
I'm an agnostic on this, but try replacing "curly quotes" by "open and close brackets" and "simple straight quotes" by any single character: say "|" (pipe symbol). In other words, if your argument is correct for quote marks it should also be correct for brackets. Personally I think I prefer a different symbol for opening and closing brackets: why should quotes be different?
It might be censorship if the "Great American Novel" is quite well written and "a publisher" refuses to publish it; then again, it might just not fit with their general publishing ethos. But if it's lousily written, then a (reasonable) rejection on those grounds isn't censorship, merely good judgment, and whether the publisher agrees or disagrees with the novel's social/political views is irrelevant.
From the first linked article: ... It's hard work at this time of year, of course it is. ... We just focus on customer obsession, making sure we deliver the customer promises. Whatever we've promised a customer in terms of what's going to be delivered, we make sure that it is processed and shipped on time.
...
... Criticism continues from some quarters about working practices, but Amazon general manager Paul Ashraf insists that the company cares about its staff -- and is disappointed by the perception some people have of the business.
"I think from my point of view we're a global brand, so that brings headlines in relation to what people think about Amazon and this place," he told The Courier. "From my point of view I try to focus on what's within my control. I focus very heavily, especially in peak times, on associate experience.
While we're doing that, we make sure we keep people here safe, so it's all about safety first, and make sure that from an associate experience point of view we try and have as much fun as possible. We had DJs on every floor on Black Friday, we had tombolas, we had raffles that people get free entry into -- it's all about keeping associates safe and having fun."
Would you deign to give us reasons why you think the UK has "essentially banned pornography"? I don't know what your tastes in pornography are, but if you spent a few days in the UK you might be - ahem - "pleasantly surprised".
Hah! Crooked Hillary only won the popular vote because of tens of millions of illegal votes and the support of pinko commie liberals who are traitors and shouldn't have a vote. Donald really won by a landslide: 90%, maybe even 95%. Trump! Make America great again! (Or something like that.)
"The Democrats continue to yammer on about gun control despite a HUGE portion of the population being against gun control (yep, I said it - the polls the liberals like to say showing the opposite are BS, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out a majority are actually NOT on their side)"
You say you don't like polls, but anyway here's some trends contradicting you. Gallup
Why not give us some evidence for your assertion?
"It was the Germans who rolled their tanks all over Europe."
That was, including some hiatuses, in September.1939 to some time in 1942. From early 1944 to April.1945 Soviet combined arms - with a substantial component of tanks - rolled all over Eastern Europe, while the USA and UK and other allies were doing the same in Western Europe.
But to agree with your implied conclusion, and to address the post you were responding to, whether the current Russian armed forces could successfully roll all over Europe is at best debatable.
"History also tells us that there is a strong correlation between military power and economic success"
Well, correlation is not necessarily causation. I suggest that economic success enables military power. Do you have a good example of military power causing subsequent long-term economic success?
"First off the "Great War" was WWI and that wasn't started by Germany"
A Slashdot post is not the appropriate place for an in-depth analysis of the causes of WW1, but even without buying fully into the thesis of Fritz Fischer, at the least Germany bore a large responsibility for WW1 starting.
""ukraine" is an imaginary country cobbled up during USSR era. It will fall apart of natural causes and go back to Russia."
You might be right about Ukraine rejoining Russia. (My guess is it probably won't.) But you're completely wrong about its origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well, I too think very little of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, but where does your "in reality only about 18% of eligible voters voted to leave" come from?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... the UK (etc) turnout was 72.2%, of which 51.9% voted to leave and 48.1% (including me) voted to remain. Put another way, of the eligible voters about 37.5% voted to leave, 34.7% voted to remain, and 27.8% did not vote.
Where is Milo Minderbender when you need him! (Would Donald Trump be an acceptable substitute?)
I have a memory of an Ancient Greece Olympic Games wrestler who immediately after achieving the winning fall (submission, whatever) deliberately let his opponent choke him to death so that he (the dead wrestler) would achieve immortality as an undefeated champion. Or something like that.
My memory may be fallible, because I can't find a citation. But this is close:
Arrhichion won the Pankration, an empty-hand submission sport blending boxing and wrestling with scarcely any rules, at the 52nd and 53rd Olympiads (572 BCE and 568 BCE, respectively). His fatal fight [564 BCE] was described by the geographer Pausanias and by Philostratus the Younger. According to Pausanias:
For when he was contending for the wild olive with the last remaining competitor, whoever he was, the latter got a grip first, and held Arrhachion, hugging him with his legs, and at the same time he squeezed his neck with his hands. Arrhachion dislocated his opponent's toe, but expired owing to suffocation; but he who suffocated Arrhachion was forced to give in at the same time because of the pain in his toe. The Eleans crowned and proclaimed victor the corpse of Arrhachion.
Philostratus of Athens writes in his Gymnasticus that Arrichion's failure to submit to his opponent was the result of his trainer, Eryxias, shouting to him, "What a noble epitaph, 'He was never defeated at Olympia.'
"if ... the exponentiation was rendered by formatting the exponent in superscript"
In the 1980s I was working in insurance, specifically actuarial work which for historical reasons has many functions written with subscripts and superscripts. I considered, but didn't try implementing, a language which used up to three lines for a statement: a middle line for the basic statement, an optional lower line for subscripts, and an optional upper line for superscripts.
Recently, quite by chance, I discovered that a 1970s language HAL/S, designed for the Space Shuttle, had actually implemented that.
"he hasn't committed any crime in the UK, and so can't be arrested for anything, let alone extradited"
Are you sure about that? Suppose Joe Criminal is a UK citizen who (allegedly) physically robs a bank in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and "flees" to London, which is where he now resides. Are you really saying that if the US authorities have substantial evidence that Joe did commit the robbery he can't be extradited?
"There are certainly improvements (>1 million rows in Excel"
Encouraging people to use a spreadsheet for large amounts of data (or anything else!) is *not* an improvement!
Don't you mean "somdomite"?
To extend your jest a little further, while it's appealing to consider whether Jeremy Clarkson might make a better Foreign Secretary than Boris Johnson, I think Theresa May's idea was to appoint campaigners for UK exit from the EU to the three major positions for leading exit negotiations and preparations to reduce the chance that if things go wrong the campaigners for exit will try to claim that it's the fault of those of us who voted for the UK to remain in the EU. (Whether that will actually work if things do go wrong is another question.)
That being the case, Jeremy Clarkson is ruled out for the job of Foreign Secretary: much to my surprise, Jeremy Clarkson was, apparently, in favour of the UK remaining in the EU. I'm linking to the Daily Mail" rather than to a more reputable newspaper, because it was gung-ho for UK exit from the EU, and if it could have found a way to spin that Clarkson favoured UK exit it would probably have done so. Which means that, surprising as it may seem, Jeremy Clarkson is in favour of a United States of Europe.
"Radar is used to watch for an attack. It is purely defensive."
No, it isnt. For example H2S was an airborne radio system used by the Royal Air Force in World War 2 (and afterwards) to identify targets on the ground for night and all-weather bombing.
I've posted in this thread, so I can't moderate this. But it deserves a 5!
More from that Wikipedia page:
... Multiple gunshot suicides are rare, but possible. In one study of 138 gunshot suicides, 5 (3.6%) involved two shots to the head, the first of which missed the brain. A suicide with 4 gunshots to the head has been reported. ...
which is a useful statistic.