If someone can't afford to buy a router that's hundreds of dollars, at least look at MikroTik (routerboard) hardware. Similar price range without the brain dead functionality of the typical D-Link or Linksys.
Or if they get (or already have) a Linksys, installing dd-wrt turns it in to a pretty decent little box. That's been my personal preference over the last couple of years.
This would make an excellent in class calculation for a Geophysics lecture. Just how big a set neodymium magnets (one north, one south) would it take to override the earth's magnetic field? If installed, would the core actually align with it? How bad would it be if you installed them backwards?
Quick... someone find not just ONE magnetic monopole, but two!
.NET will automatically close file streams when the reader or writer is collected by the garbage collector or when the application exits. To test the problem you would need to use the lower level C++ APIs.
Hence crashing the app rather than exiting cleanly... I could confirm the file was NOT closed by trying to access it in another program (my text editor)
Re:The only question I have is
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Firefox 4 Beta 8 Up
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· Score: 3, Interesting
After reading your post I did a very quick test in.NET using System.IO.File.Open :
When opening a file as read only and failing to close it, there is no effect.
When opening a file as read/write and failing to close it, there is no effect.
When opening a file as read/write, writing a little bit and then failing to close it, the little bit that was written is all that remains.
Repeating the test with a FAT32 filesystem, I had the following results :
When opening a file as read only and failing to close it, there is no effect.
When opening a file as read/write and failing to close it, there is no effect.
When opening a file as read/write, writing a little bit and then failing to close it, the little bit that was written is all that remains
So, my tests showed the same results... I then tried System.IO.File.AppendAllText to append large amounts of data to an existing text file and deliberately crashing it before it finished.
Under NTFS, the file was zeroed. Under FAT32, the file contained the original data plus part of what I was writing (I assume up to the point that it had written when I crashed it).
Note that I can't say if this is a fair test since I don't know what underlying stuff.NET is actually calling, but it's the only dev environment I have on my Windows system (which is my work box)). However this test definitely shows a difference between NTFS and FAT32 in some circumstances. Not where I first expected, but definitely somewhere...
Perhaps it'd be fair to blame both NTFS *and* Firefox for this one - Mozilla could have found a better way to write the data after all (which they eventually did by switching to a database, but I get the feeling they could've achieved it more simply in a minor update beforehand)
They sound like the quintessential examples of folks who have a lot of book learning, but virtually no practical experience applying that knowledge. I'm guessing they were the type of students who only studied, and expected to gain the necessary experiences in the workplace. It doesn't help that the Asian education and social system encourages that mindset until one hits college. At least that's my own experience as a Korean American.
May I ask if your education was in Korea or America? Or did you get to experience both?
I'd be interested to know about some of the specifics that cause this kind of mindset.
A bit offtopic but I'm about to become a father, and I very strongly want my daughter to be a good self-learner (with strong critical thinking - I don't even want to blindly accept what *I* say as being true without verifying it herself) and will steer her as much as possible in this direction - by knowing the other side of the coin, it'd be good to know what I should try to avoid doing.
Thankyou for summing up my post so concisely... I do have a habit of rambling sorry!
Basically you hit the nail on the head regarding "education" vs "training". I would however take it a step further and say that for creative endeavours (such as software development) one also requires varying degrees of inter-disciplinary education.
In the realm of software development:
The "training" provides knowledge of "how to put the code together".
The "education" provides the ability to put the code together in ways that make sense.
The "inter-disciplinary education" provides the ability to put the code together in ways that make sense to the intended target, provides for future expandability, makes the code easy to document, and much more.
You may however simply have included this in your concept of "education" in general.
Regarding the "cultural predisposition" - I didn't want to go this far, since I really only have my anecdote to work with. It's commonly said that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", however I tend to disagree with this (one million anecdotes from a population of 5 million most certainly IS data!); so if you have a greater deal of experience with this in more than just one or two isolated cases, I'll definitely consider it may be cultural.
That is called history as well as we are a product of our past
While I don't disagree that we are a product of our past, that's why I included the word "personally". What happened in 1856 certainly affects who I am today - the science and technology I use, the lifestyle I have, the society I live in, and much more. However, I have no PERSONAL experiences of that time...
is identical to what I will personally experience in 2156.
That is called science fiction, after a while science fiction is simply fcition with funny woush sounds.
I will have no PERSONAL experiences of 2156, just as I had no personal experience of 1856. It's possible that my life will influence the science, technology, lifestyle and society of that time (unlikely a great deal, but in some minor ways it's at least possible)
So, I stand by my consideration that being dead is exactly like not having been born yet from a personal perspective, even if not a societal one.
This stereotype buys into the propaganda that the Asian countries want you to believe. Good job. Anyone that has actually worked with Asians knows they're nothing special. They often lack creative thought. They cheat, steal, lie, whatever, then act clueless about it when you call them on it.
While the parent most certainly is a troll, it does disturbingly raise what seems to be one valid point from my point of view. I am a programmer at a large multinational with our HQ in Japan. Our Japanese programming colleagues, while "technically" very good programmers (can write code that a university professor would praise for following some random formal style guide that he approved of), are in fact absolutely hopeless at creating good software. The code is well laid out, but the functions given have almost no thought put in to them beyond what the spec said. For example, the spec says "must do x, y, z" and "must work with equipment a, b, c" - so they do EXACTLY that... Despite that function "q" and equipment "d" would be trivial to implement, they don't. Despite that they could make function "x" look and feel the same across equipment "a", "b" and "c", instead it looks and feels different for each because internally the code is different so they make the UI around it match the internal structures instead of keeping it the same across the three to make it easier for the user. In short, it's crap design.
On top of that, the code is often a mess when it comes to pointless cruft. They'll create things like a structure that contains a single bool, then always use this structure instead of a plain bool. Or worse, two DIFFERENT structures that each only contain a bool, and then spend time "casting" from one of these structures to the other. You might think they're planning on some kind of future expansion to these structures, but they never do. All of this, I have decided stems from a complete inability to be creative. They're great code monkeys, but no-one should make the mistake of confusing them with real developers.
This is purely anecdotal. I'm sure there are some great programmers from that part of the world. But in my company at least, I'm less than impressed with them. Especially since they're the "up stream" developers from myself and I find myself helping them more than the other way around...
Death is your own non-existence, which by definition it is impossible for you to experience.
I work on the method of thinking about what life was like (for me personally) before I was born. That's identical to death in my opinion. What I personally experienced in 1856 is identical to what I will personally experience in 2156.
Definitely a bit of weird thing to wrap your head around in terms of the "non-existence", but I feel it's a better comparison than the post you replied to talking about "peaceful silence".
I don't want to die, and nobody i've ever known isn't inherently shit scared of death.
I definitely don't want to die, but I'm not really "scared" of death. I would fight tooth and nail not to die, because I want to continue my life.
I have a 6 year old son. Tell me why I would not be scared of losing the chance to see him grow up?
Looking forward and imagining my daughter growing up without me is horrible and depressing. But I'm also aware that no matter how strongly I feel about it right now, I simply won't care after I'm dead for the very simple fact that *I* will not exist anymore. There'll be no "me" and therefore no way that I could care about anything, including my loved ones that I care so very much for right now. I certainly "fear for" the emotional pain that my daughter would feel without me, but I don't fear for myself, which I think is the kind of fear the other posters have been thinking of.
I'm definitely not "shit scared of death" in any way, shape or form.
Foundem, one of the sites that has complained publicly and to the European Commission, duplicates 79% of its website content from other sites
Interesting to read this from entity like Google that copies or 'generates' like 90% of its content from other sites.
Ah yes, but when you search for "xyz widget", you don't get a hit to Google's search page for "xyz widget" - that would of course be recursively redundant and pointless, but my point is that the only time you'll get Google's own stuff on search results is when it actually is non-duplicate data they're showing.
Well ye if they were 10 years old or so, sure. But at the moment, the kid will only just barely understand how to use a mouse and keyboard and navigate the machine at all. So why not just get him real silly putty instead?
You're not giving enough credit to the learning potential of 4 year olds. I got my first computer at 4 - an Apple ][+. Within a week, I was able to put a disk in and type the appropriate commands to determine what was on the disk and then how to start it. At 6, I was playing a game and asked my step-father, "Why is it when I press 'j" the man runs left, and when I press "k" he runs right? How does the computer know to do that?". So he showed me the source code (in Apple BASIC) and we changed the "i, j, k, m" keys to "e, s, d, x" (which was more comfortable for me as a left hander). After that, I was hooked to the idea of coding and kept modifying every Apple BASIC program I could find. Within a year, I was writing my own little games (mostly text adventures with lots of gosubs).
I see NO problem for a 4 year old to be given Blender and mess around a bit making blobs and other random looking shapes. Within a couple of years (assuming it held their interest), they'll be doing some pretty nice stuff.
Or the test is on the edge of what the engine considers eligible to be worth checking over for dead code, and adding no-ops as has been done pushes it far enough that it decides that it isn't worth the effort. That could still be considered incompetency, I suppose.
From my point of view, yes - I'd consider it incompetency.
Maybe I'm a little harsh in that regard, but as a developer myself that has written optimisation code for virtual platforms (i.e. Translating what looks like an interpreted language in to a compiled form with optimisations), I just can't accept that the engine would handle it that way. The first basic check is to literally strip everything "useless", THEN go ahead and figure out real optimisations. A statement such as "true;" or "return;" (with an implicit return immediately following it such as the end of the block) are both classic examples of things that would be stripped in the first round before any other checks are done.
I see everyone going on about how adding no-ops to the code causes it to fail to cheat/fail to be excised for deadness, but has anyone tried changing the signature in other ways? Removing/altering code inside the test instead of adding to it, and seeing whether that has any effect on the time taken?
That would definitely be an interesting exercise and sorry to say I haven't... currently at work (despite slacking off on Slashdot to write this reply), so I don't really have the time to do so. I might give it a go later though if no-one else replies to you before then to say they have done so.
The benchmark in question contains dead code; it does not return any values, and does not alter any global variables. The Microsoft vm may have just detected this, and skipped the dead code loop.
The real fix in this case is to alter the benchmark code, and make it do something more significant. In fact, if you read the article, that's how the engineer deduces that something is wrong; by adding a "return" to the function, and observing the change in benchmark times.
But that's exactly how I come to the conclusion of either "cheating " or "incompetence"... If their optimizer detects that it's dead code and thereby skips it, great. However it should also therefore detect it as dead code with the explicit return - the code is just as dead and should not be doing anything differently. Clearly with the difference in benchmark times, it's not being skipped in this case though. If that was deliberate on the part of the engineers at Microsoft ("When we see this EXACT code, we skip it"), that's cheating (or more precisely "gaming the test", but roughly the same thing). However if it was NOT deliberate on the part of those engineers, then they're completely and utterly incompetent at designing dead code detection.
So, what proof do we have that Microsoft actually cheated?
As other posters have pointed out, it's either "cheating" or "utter incompetence as developers". Either case doesn't look good for them, but honestly were I in their shoes, I'd PREFER the slack of being called a cheater than the alternative...
I think it's typically assumed that if you know how to program, you ought to be able to interact with a standard relational database. There's almost no prospects out there for someone who does SQL and nothing else...
Depends on the kind of work you do... I was never "formally taught" any programming. I spent my younger years coding stuff up for BBSs, writing a few games, etc etc. Then later, when I started my own company, I did a bit of network level coding (mostly in C and C++). Later, I was working for a company doing telephone based support for field technicians (mostly for network/print/scan type questions) and found that I could seriously reduce the support workload by coding up a few apps that would help them do their jobs a bit more effectively and with less chance of error. Throughout all of this, I never touched a relational database at all. More recently (a bit over 3 years ago) I moved country but stayed with the same company and am now in charge of software development and support for our company's API and related SDK. I haven't specifically done any serious relational database work, but I have at least poked my fingers in to them (picking it up was extremely trivial, but I'd be the first to say that I am NOT the go to guy when it comes to writing optimal queries!).
Well, I was told (and never followed up to confirm) that one of the passport application is if you've ever smoked pot and if you answer yes, it's an automatic rejection. I'm about to confirm that, but if it is true, I will not be able to legally get a passport.
While I also can't confirm or deny it, to me that just sounds ridiculous. Having smoked pot is something that a very large percentage of the US population has done (including more than one president in recent history apparently). I highly doubt that it would affect your ability to get a passport.
One of the other replies (from interval1066) said that felons can't get passports, which while also dubious sounding is at least slightly more imaginable - Khyber's answer to him however seems to refute that.
Basically, unless you're a wanted criminal or being officially detained in some way (such as "currently under order not to leave the state due to an ongoing criminal investigation"), I doubt there's anything that'll stop you getting a passport.
Just to add to that, the standard form appears to be this one and everything on it is very standard. No questions about a criminal history or activities. I don't doubt they'd perform all the necessary checks if they are relevant, but they don't appear to ask you directly about them.
I would rather trade being able to leave the country (which I cannot legally do unless I lie on my passport application) then put up with intrusive scanning.
Out of interest, if I may ask, why are you not allowed to leave the country legally? I've never heard of such a thing...
(I searched for small (under 700 sqft) 1 bedroom, in high rise)
Of course, then there's the matter of deciding what's "small"... 700 square feet = 65 square metres. I currently live in a 1 bedroom apartment with my girlfriend here in Hannover, Germany, and we've got about 60 square metres (645 square feet) which is quite comfortable for the both of us. Living alone before I met her, I had a 45 square metre place (485 square feet) that was more than adequate.
We're expecting our first child in April though, so are now looking for somewhere significantly larger.
I'm aware that people in some other places are used to MUCH larger places. I myself grew up in southern NZ, where the concept of renting anything less than a complete 3 bedroom house never would have crossed my mind - even as a single guy who couldn't possibly have used all that space. It's just a matter of adjusting, and now I really don't know what I'd do with somewhere larger if we weren't having this child.
Hell, when your traveling between nations your in legal terms outside of all law...
Not true. You are subject to the jurisdiction of the nation of registry of your craft.
Ah, but of course you can always travel by non-registered craft (while entering or exiting a country's borders in such a craft may be illegal (depending on the laws of the land in question), there's nothing stopping you getting off your "<country> registered boat" on to "unregistered boat" once in the open ocean)
Hell Pizza may suck on the security front (as evidenced by this story), but I have to say they make the best pizza I've ever had, anywhere... and that's a fairly ringing endorsement since I've eaten pizza on pretty much every continent on earth (including classic Italian pizza in Italy, New York pizza in New York, and so on).
It's also worth pointing out that while their security may suck, their web design is pretty awesome... Just playing with the cute little devils on their website
is a great time filler while you wait for your delivery.
Europe has just had the coldest winter in 50 years.
Followed by the hottest July on record for an insanely long time also...
I really wish people would stop thinking "Global Warming" simply means it gets warmer everywhere, evenly... it doesn't, never has, and never will.
if you can explain in a non emotional way sticking purely to the facts and data that i can look at myself, why CO2 has become the driver behind climate rather then the sun and water vapor, you'd convince me.
Simply that it's a bigger system surrounding a chaotic system* (that is, weather). Chaotic systems are a pain since we can't truly model them due to the insane complexity and number of factors. A tiny push from any thing can drastically alter it. The sun DOES affect the climate more than CO2. Water vapor DOES affect the climate more than CO2. But historical evidence points towards these things in their natural cycles causing warming and cooling over much longer time periods than what we're currently seeing. CO2 appears to be causing a very rapid change in the climate, kind of like the effect in a greenhouse (see where that old analogy comes from?)
* Note that I don't actually believe that there is anything too complex to model theoretically... practically certainly, but I doubt the climate of one planet even stretches that far given technology way ahead of our own.
I was indeed referring to the fresh ones... truffles are basically kind of fungus that grows directly on trees and other plants and looks like more of a "lump" than a mushroom. They tend to be better than the mushrooms when it comes to psilocybin vs unwanted other stuff.
In the Netherlands, you can only buy fresh ones, as dried constitutes "processing a narcotic" and it then becomes illegal. In their fresh form, they're legal and sold over the counter in "smart shops". (as an odd side note, they're technically MORE legal than pot, which the Netherlands tends to be famous for... this is because pot falls in to a weird gray area, whereas the truffles don't)
That's why in my post I did clarify exactly "theory of evolution", which is not elastic at all. It's a precise and defined thing and there should be no confusion as to what is meant by it.
If the world and everything in it is a product of time and chance, then it specifically contradicts the Bible.
This is true. The belief of my friends, girlfriend and step-father is that God created the universe through the big bang which he crafted in such a way as to bring about the existence of Earth and development of life on it. Regarding the whole "garden of Eden" story, they generally consider it to be more metaphorical than literal.
Anyone who does not believe in God, can offer no explanation for what exists, other than time and chance.
Just as a minor point, there are other religions that also purport to offer an explanation other than time and chance... but basically yes I'll agree with this point. As an atheist, I can't offer you an explanation for what exists. I can explain how it behaves now that it does exist, but the actual "creation" moment (if there ever was one) is something that I simply don't know.
Of course, the important thing is that I'm quite happy not knowing this right now. It's something that does interest me greatly and if we ever can find answers to it, I'll be certain to be reading as much as I can about it (as I've already read everything I can about the hypothetical "brane collisions" that some M-Theory proponents suggest as a possibility, and other ideas). I don't accept any of these ideas as necessarily true, but they do seem on the balance of probabilities to be more likely than a God being.
Only a belief in God can offer purpose and meaning for your life.
"Meaning", I'll agree with, but "purpose" I'll disagree with. My personal purpose in life is to learn as much as I can and enjoy myself as much as I can. Why do you think it has to have some kind of meaning from the universe's perspective? Sure, it'd be nice to be that important, but doesn't it seem a little arrogant to assume your life must be of some kind of significance on that kind of scale? From a human perspective, your life can and probably does have significance, but only to other humans and maybe some domesticated animals. If our planet and everyone on it blinked out of existence tomorrow, the universe would barely notice.
Suppose someone gives you a gift, a package. You open it and find a beautiful but complicated device or appliance. Is your first thought to determine when or how it was made? Probably not. Foremost, you would like to know who gave it to you and why.
Not untrue, but this isn't an argument for God, it's an argument for blind faith.
I'd dearly LOVE to believe in the Christian faith. I'd love to think that my soul will live forever and that by following the ways of Christ which are clearly laid out in the Bible that I could do so in peace and happiness. I'd love to think that the universe and all its wonders are there for me and my fellow man given to us by a loving God. All of this would be extremely comforting and a huge burden lifted from my shoulders. But just being wonderful and comforting is no reason for me to believe it's true. It'd be wonderful to believe that next week I'll be given a billion dollars by a rich relative I didn't know I have, but I don't believe that's going to happen either.
God gave you the gift of life and wants you to operate this life correctly in his beautiful, complex universe. Doesn't it stand to reason that he would have included an instruction manual? I believe this instruction manual is the Bible, a very unique book. In it he tells you not only how to operate this thing called life, but also why he gave this life to you in the first place.
It's not a shamanic vision quest, it's just entertainment, though some of it might be emotionally or intellectually enlightening about how my head works.
Interesting and a little sad for you that you say that, as I use psychedelics both for the fun and for the insight they give. I find that as I can remember everything with crystal clarity, I can make use of some of the flashes of insight I had and massage them in to more sensible and coherent thoughts once the trip is over. I do this fairly regularly and would say it's a rare trip that I don't learn something new. I can most definitely say that I wouldn't be as good as my job (software developer) had I never taken them.
There are some drugs out there that trigger the neurotransmitters that help you decide that what you're seeing is real as opposed to your imagination. It's been a while since I saw that talk, and the speaker didn't provide printed copies for the conference, but I vaguely remember that it was DMT or peyote or something in that direction; haven't tried the stuff myself.
Hmmm, not sure. My preferred substance is LSD, as when pure, it's the most direct hallucinogen without the influences of other effects. DMT is a bit "speedy" in general (it feels like both a hallucinogen and stimulant) and peyote makes me feel a little ill. Psilocybin tends to be my "second choice", but only because I can just drive 3 hours, cross the border (in to the Netherlands) and then walk in to a smart shop to buy it rather than having to deal with some shady drug dealer. I dislike the taste of the truffles intensely though which puts me in not such a good mood right at the start and that can taint the whole trip if I don't do my best to get the taste out of my mouth and put it out of my mind before the trip begins.
Under high doses of any of them, I've certainly been unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, and also experienced total ego-loss (loss of sense of self) on several occasions, but I've never been in a situation where I truly believed in the reality of something that wasn't. Probably the closest I've had to that would be having a deep and clear understanding of the idea that the world is just your perception of it, and that reality is therefore somewhat malleable to oneself. Sure the universe almost certainly DOES have an absolute truth that is separate to our views of it, but to an individual reality is that what the mind makes of it for the most part. This gave me an interesting appreciation for the truly insane. Side note on that: Just because you don't believe there's a car hurtling towards you at high speed, it'll still either kill or seriously injure you when it hits, so there are definitely things in the "real world" that are not purely affected by how we perceive it. I was aiming more along the lines of things that have a mental but non-physical effect such as conversation, images, emotional state, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone can't afford to buy a router that's hundreds of dollars, at least look at MikroTik (routerboard) hardware. Similar price range without the brain dead functionality of the typical D-Link or Linksys.
Or if they get (or already have) a Linksys, installing dd-wrt turns it in to a pretty decent little box. That's been my personal preference over the last couple of years.
This would make an excellent in class calculation for a Geophysics lecture. Just how big a set neodymium magnets (one north, one south) would it take to override the earth's magnetic field? If installed, would the core actually align with it? How bad would it be if you installed them backwards?
Quick... someone find not just ONE magnetic monopole, but two!
.NET will automatically close file streams when the reader or writer is collected by the garbage collector or when the application exits. To test the problem you would need to use the lower level C++ APIs.
Hence crashing the app rather than exiting cleanly... I could confirm the file was NOT closed by trying to access it in another program (my text editor)
After reading your post I did a very quick test in .NET using System.IO.File.Open :
Repeating the test with a FAT32 filesystem, I had the following results :
So, my tests showed the same results... I then tried System.IO.File.AppendAllText to append large amounts of data to an existing text file and deliberately crashing it before it finished.
Under NTFS, the file was zeroed. Under FAT32, the file contained the original data plus part of what I was writing (I assume up to the point that it had written when I crashed it).
Note that I can't say if this is a fair test since I don't know what underlying stuff .NET is actually calling, but it's the only dev environment I have on my Windows system (which is my work box)). However this test definitely shows a difference between NTFS and FAT32 in some circumstances. Not where I first expected, but definitely somewhere...
Perhaps it'd be fair to blame both NTFS *and* Firefox for this one - Mozilla could have found a better way to write the data after all (which they eventually did by switching to a database, but I get the feeling they could've achieved it more simply in a minor update beforehand)
They sound like the quintessential examples of folks who have a lot of book learning, but virtually no practical experience applying that knowledge. I'm guessing they were the type of students who only studied, and expected to gain the necessary experiences in the workplace. It doesn't help that the Asian education and social system encourages that mindset until one hits college. At least that's my own experience as a Korean American.
May I ask if your education was in Korea or America? Or did you get to experience both?
I'd be interested to know about some of the specifics that cause this kind of mindset.
A bit offtopic but I'm about to become a father, and I very strongly want my daughter to be a good self-learner (with strong critical thinking - I don't even want to blindly accept what *I* say as being true without verifying it herself) and will steer her as much as possible in this direction - by knowing the other side of the coin, it'd be good to know what I should try to avoid doing.
Thankyou for summing up my post so concisely... I do have a habit of rambling sorry!
Basically you hit the nail on the head regarding "education" vs "training". I would however take it a step further and say that for creative endeavours (such as software development) one also requires varying degrees of inter-disciplinary education.
In the realm of software development:
The "training" provides knowledge of "how to put the code together".
The "education" provides the ability to put the code together in ways that make sense.
The "inter-disciplinary education" provides the ability to put the code together in ways that make sense to the intended target, provides for future expandability, makes the code easy to document, and much more.
You may however simply have included this in your concept of "education" in general.
Regarding the "cultural predisposition" - I didn't want to go this far, since I really only have my anecdote to work with. It's commonly said that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", however I tend to disagree with this (one million anecdotes from a population of 5 million most certainly IS data!); so if you have a greater deal of experience with this in more than just one or two isolated cases, I'll definitely consider it may be cultural.
What I personally experienced in 1856
That is called history as well as we are a product of our past
While I don't disagree that we are a product of our past, that's why I included the word "personally". What happened in 1856 certainly affects who I am today - the science and technology I use, the lifestyle I have, the society I live in, and much more. However, I have no PERSONAL experiences of that time...
is identical to what I will personally experience in 2156.
That is called science fiction, after a while science fiction is simply fcition with funny woush sounds.
I will have no PERSONAL experiences of 2156, just as I had no personal experience of 1856. It's possible that my life will influence the science, technology, lifestyle and society of that time (unlikely a great deal, but in some minor ways it's at least possible)
So, I stand by my consideration that being dead is exactly like not having been born yet from a personal perspective, even if not a societal one.
This stereotype buys into the propaganda that the Asian countries want you to believe. Good job. Anyone that has actually worked with Asians knows they're nothing special. They often lack creative thought. They cheat, steal, lie, whatever, then act clueless about it when you call them on it.
While the parent most certainly is a troll, it does disturbingly raise what seems to be one valid point from my point of view. I am a programmer at a large multinational with our HQ in Japan. Our Japanese programming colleagues, while "technically" very good programmers (can write code that a university professor would praise for following some random formal style guide that he approved of), are in fact absolutely hopeless at creating good software.
The code is well laid out, but the functions given have almost no thought put in to them beyond what the spec said. For example, the spec says "must do x, y, z" and "must work with equipment a, b, c" - so they do EXACTLY that...
Despite that function "q" and equipment "d" would be trivial to implement, they don't.
Despite that they could make function "x" look and feel the same across equipment "a", "b" and "c", instead it looks and feels different for each because internally the code is different so they make the UI around it match the internal structures instead of keeping it the same across the three to make it easier for the user.
In short, it's crap design.
On top of that, the code is often a mess when it comes to pointless cruft. They'll create things like a structure that contains a single bool, then always use this structure instead of a plain bool. Or worse, two DIFFERENT structures that each only contain a bool, and then spend time "casting" from one of these structures to the other. You might think they're planning on some kind of future expansion to these structures, but they never do.
All of this, I have decided stems from a complete inability to be creative.
They're great code monkeys, but no-one should make the mistake of confusing them with real developers.
This is purely anecdotal. I'm sure there are some great programmers from that part of the world. But in my company at least, I'm less than impressed with them. Especially since they're the "up stream" developers from myself and I find myself helping them more than the other way around...
Death is your own non-existence, which by definition it is impossible for you to experience.
I work on the method of thinking about what life was like (for me personally) before I was born. That's identical to death in my opinion. What I personally experienced in 1856 is identical to what I will personally experience in 2156.
Definitely a bit of weird thing to wrap your head around in terms of the "non-existence", but I feel it's a better comparison than the post you replied to talking about "peaceful silence".
I don't want to die, and nobody i've ever known isn't inherently shit scared of death.
I definitely don't want to die, but I'm not really "scared" of death. I would fight tooth and nail not to die, because I want to continue my life.
I have a 6 year old son. Tell me why I would not be scared of losing the chance to see him grow up?
Looking forward and imagining my daughter growing up without me is horrible and depressing. But I'm also aware that no matter how strongly I feel about it right now, I simply won't care after I'm dead for the very simple fact that *I* will not exist anymore. There'll be no "me" and therefore no way that I could care about anything, including my loved ones that I care so very much for right now. I certainly "fear for" the emotional pain that my daughter would feel without me, but I don't fear for myself, which I think is the kind of fear the other posters have been thinking of.
I'm definitely not "shit scared of death" in any way, shape or form.
Foundem, one of the sites that has complained publicly and to the European Commission, duplicates 79% of its website content from other sites
Interesting to read this from entity like Google that copies or 'generates' like 90% of its content from other sites.
Ah yes, but when you search for "xyz widget", you don't get a hit to Google's search page for "xyz widget" - that would of course be recursively redundant and pointless, but my point is that the only time you'll get Google's own stuff on search results is when it actually is non-duplicate data they're showing.
Well ye if they were 10 years old or so, sure. But at the moment, the kid will only just barely understand how to use a mouse and keyboard and navigate the machine at all. So why not just get him real silly putty instead?
You're not giving enough credit to the learning potential of 4 year olds. I got my first computer at 4 - an Apple ][+. Within a week, I was able to put a disk in and type the appropriate commands to determine what was on the disk and then how to start it.
At 6, I was playing a game and asked my step-father, "Why is it when I press 'j" the man runs left, and when I press "k" he runs right? How does the computer know to do that?". So he showed me the source code (in Apple BASIC) and we changed the "i, j, k, m" keys to "e, s, d, x" (which was more comfortable for me as a left hander). After that, I was hooked to the idea of coding and kept modifying every Apple BASIC program I could find. Within a year, I was writing my own little games (mostly text adventures with lots of gosubs).
I see NO problem for a 4 year old to be given Blender and mess around a bit making blobs and other random looking shapes. Within a couple of years (assuming it held their interest), they'll be doing some pretty nice stuff.
Or the test is on the edge of what the engine considers eligible to be worth checking over for dead code, and adding no-ops as has been done pushes it far enough that it decides that it isn't worth the effort. That could still be considered incompetency, I suppose.
From my point of view, yes - I'd consider it incompetency.
Maybe I'm a little harsh in that regard, but as a developer myself that has written optimisation code for virtual platforms (i.e. Translating what looks like an interpreted language in to a compiled form with optimisations), I just can't accept that the engine would handle it that way. The first basic check is to literally strip everything "useless", THEN go ahead and figure out real optimisations. A statement such as "true;" or "return;" (with an implicit return immediately following it such as the end of the block) are both classic examples of things that would be stripped in the first round before any other checks are done.
I see everyone going on about how adding no-ops to the code causes it to fail to cheat/fail to be excised for deadness, but has anyone tried changing the signature in other ways? Removing/altering code inside the test instead of adding to it, and seeing whether that has any effect on the time taken?
That would definitely be an interesting exercise and sorry to say I haven't... currently at work (despite slacking off on Slashdot to write this reply), so I don't really have the time to do so. I might give it a go later though if no-one else replies to you before then to say they have done so.
Actually, there is a third option.
Not that I can see...
The benchmark in question contains dead code; it does not return any values, and does not alter any global variables. The Microsoft vm may have just detected this, and skipped the dead code loop.
The real fix in this case is to alter the benchmark code, and make it do something more significant. In fact, if you read the article, that's how the engineer deduces that something is wrong; by adding a "return" to the function, and observing the change in benchmark times.
But that's exactly how I come to the conclusion of either "cheating " or "incompetence"... If their optimizer detects that it's dead code and thereby skips it, great. However it should also therefore detect it as dead code with the explicit return - the code is just as dead and should not be doing anything differently. Clearly with the difference in benchmark times, it's not being skipped in this case though. If that was deliberate on the part of the engineers at Microsoft ("When we see this EXACT code, we skip it"), that's cheating (or more precisely "gaming the test", but roughly the same thing). However if it was NOT deliberate on the part of those engineers, then they're completely and utterly incompetent at designing dead code detection.
So, what proof do we have that Microsoft actually cheated?
As other posters have pointed out, it's either "cheating" or "utter incompetence as developers". Either case doesn't look good for them, but honestly were I in their shoes, I'd PREFER the slack of being called a cheater than the alternative...
I think it's typically assumed that if you know how to program, you ought to be able to interact with a standard relational database. There's almost no prospects out there for someone who does SQL and nothing else...
Depends on the kind of work you do... I was never "formally taught" any programming. I spent my younger years coding stuff up for BBSs, writing a few games, etc etc. Then later, when I started my own company, I did a bit of network level coding (mostly in C and C++). Later, I was working for a company doing telephone based support for field technicians (mostly for network/print/scan type questions) and found that I could seriously reduce the support workload by coding up a few apps that would help them do their jobs a bit more effectively and with less chance of error.
Throughout all of this, I never touched a relational database at all. More recently (a bit over 3 years ago) I moved country but stayed with the same company and am now in charge of software development and support for our company's API and related SDK. I haven't specifically done any serious relational database work, but I have at least poked my fingers in to them (picking it up was extremely trivial, but I'd be the first to say that I am NOT the go to guy when it comes to writing optimal queries!).
Well, I was told (and never followed up to confirm) that one of the passport application is if you've ever smoked pot and if you answer yes, it's an automatic rejection. I'm about to confirm that, but if it is true, I will not be able to legally get a passport.
While I also can't confirm or deny it, to me that just sounds ridiculous. Having smoked pot is something that a very large percentage of the US population has done (including more than one president in recent history apparently). I highly doubt that it would affect your ability to get a passport.
One of the other replies (from interval1066) said that felons can't get passports, which while also dubious sounding is at least slightly more imaginable - Khyber's answer to him however seems to refute that.
Basically, unless you're a wanted criminal or being officially detained in some way (such as "currently under order not to leave the state due to an ongoing criminal investigation"), I doubt there's anything that'll stop you getting a passport.
Just to add to that, the standard form appears to be this one and everything on it is very standard. No questions about a criminal history or activities. I don't doubt they'd perform all the necessary checks if they are relevant, but they don't appear to ask you directly about them.
I would rather trade being able to leave the country (which I cannot legally do unless I lie on my passport application) then put up with intrusive scanning.
Out of interest, if I may ask, why are you not allowed to leave the country legally? I've never heard of such a thing...
(I searched for small (under 700 sqft) 1 bedroom, in high rise)
Of course, then there's the matter of deciding what's "small"... 700 square feet = 65 square metres. I currently live in a 1 bedroom apartment with my girlfriend here in Hannover, Germany, and we've got about 60 square metres (645 square feet) which is quite comfortable for the both of us. Living alone before I met her, I had a 45 square metre place (485 square feet) that was more than adequate.
We're expecting our first child in April though, so are now looking for somewhere significantly larger.
I'm aware that people in some other places are used to MUCH larger places. I myself grew up in southern NZ, where the concept of renting anything less than a complete 3 bedroom house never would have crossed my mind - even as a single guy who couldn't possibly have used all that space. It's just a matter of adjusting, and now I really don't know what I'd do with somewhere larger if we weren't having this child.
Not true. You are subject to the jurisdiction of the nation of registry of your craft.
Ah, but of course you can always travel by non-registered craft (while entering or exiting a country's borders in such a craft may be illegal (depending on the laws of the land in question), there's nothing stopping you getting off your "<country> registered boat" on to "unregistered boat" once in the open ocean)
Hell Pizza may suck on the security front (as evidenced by this story), but I have to say they make the best pizza I've ever had, anywhere... and that's a fairly ringing endorsement since I've eaten pizza on pretty much every continent on earth (including classic Italian pizza in Italy, New York pizza in New York, and so on).
It's also worth pointing out that while their security may suck, their web design is pretty awesome... Just playing with the cute little devils on their website
is a great time filler while you wait for your delivery.
Europe has just had the coldest winter in 50 years.
Followed by the hottest July on record for an insanely long time also...
I really wish people would stop thinking "Global Warming" simply means it gets warmer everywhere, evenly... it doesn't, never has, and never will.
if you can explain in a non emotional way sticking purely to the facts and data that i can look at myself, why CO2 has become the driver behind climate rather then the sun and water vapor, you'd convince me.
Simply that it's a bigger system surrounding a chaotic system* (that is, weather). Chaotic systems are a pain since we can't truly model them due to the insane complexity and number of factors. A tiny push from any thing can drastically alter it. The sun DOES affect the climate more than CO2. Water vapor DOES affect the climate more than CO2. But historical evidence points towards these things in their natural cycles causing warming and cooling over much longer time periods than what we're currently seeing. CO2 appears to be causing a very rapid change in the climate, kind of like the effect in a greenhouse (see where that old analogy comes from?)
* Note that I don't actually believe that there is anything too complex to model theoretically... practically certainly, but I doubt the climate of one planet even stretches that far given technology way ahead of our own.
I was indeed referring to the fresh ones... truffles are basically kind of fungus that grows directly on trees and other plants and looks like more of a "lump" than a mushroom. They tend to be better than the mushrooms when it comes to psilocybin vs unwanted other stuff.
In the Netherlands, you can only buy fresh ones, as dried constitutes "processing a narcotic" and it then becomes illegal. In their fresh form, they're legal and sold over the counter in "smart shops". (as an odd side note, they're technically MORE legal than pot, which the Netherlands tends to be famous for... this is because pot falls in to a weird gray area, whereas the truffles don't)
The word evolution is a very elastic word.
That's why in my post I did clarify exactly "theory of evolution", which is not elastic at all. It's a precise and defined thing and there should be no confusion as to what is meant by it.
If the world and everything in it is a product of time and chance, then it specifically contradicts the Bible.
This is true. The belief of my friends, girlfriend and step-father is that God created the universe through the big bang which he crafted in such a way as to bring about the existence of Earth and development of life on it. Regarding the whole "garden of Eden" story, they generally consider it to be more metaphorical than literal.
Anyone who does not believe in God, can offer no explanation for what exists, other than time and chance.
Just as a minor point, there are other religions that also purport to offer an explanation other than time and chance... but basically yes I'll agree with this point. As an atheist, I can't offer you an explanation for what exists. I can explain how it behaves now that it does exist, but the actual "creation" moment (if there ever was one) is something that I simply don't know.
Of course, the important thing is that I'm quite happy not knowing this right now. It's something that does interest me greatly and if we ever can find answers to it, I'll be certain to be reading as much as I can about it (as I've already read everything I can about the hypothetical "brane collisions" that some M-Theory proponents suggest as a possibility, and other ideas). I don't accept any of these ideas as necessarily true, but they do seem on the balance of probabilities to be more likely than a God being.
Only a belief in God can offer purpose and meaning for your life.
"Meaning", I'll agree with, but "purpose" I'll disagree with. My personal purpose in life is to learn as much as I can and enjoy myself as much as I can. Why do you think it has to have some kind of meaning from the universe's perspective? Sure, it'd be nice to be that important, but doesn't it seem a little arrogant to assume your life must be of some kind of significance on that kind of scale? From a human perspective, your life can and probably does have significance, but only to other humans and maybe some domesticated animals. If our planet and everyone on it blinked out of existence tomorrow, the universe would barely notice.
Suppose someone gives you a gift, a package. You open it and find a beautiful but complicated device or appliance. Is your first thought to determine when or how it was made? Probably not. Foremost, you would like to know who gave it to you and why.
Not untrue, but this isn't an argument for God, it's an argument for blind faith.
I'd dearly LOVE to believe in the Christian faith. I'd love to think that my soul will live forever and that by following the ways of Christ which are clearly laid out in the Bible that I could do so in peace and happiness. I'd love to think that the universe and all its wonders are there for me and my fellow man given to us by a loving God. All of this would be extremely comforting and a huge burden lifted from my shoulders. But just being wonderful and comforting is no reason for me to believe it's true. It'd be wonderful to believe that next week I'll be given a billion dollars by a rich relative I didn't know I have, but I don't believe that's going to happen either.
God gave you the gift of life and wants you to operate this life correctly in his beautiful, complex universe. Doesn't it stand to reason that he would have included an instruction manual? I believe this instruction manual is the Bible, a very unique book. In it he tells you not only how to operate this thing called life, but also why he gave this life to you in the first place.
The Bible isn't that unique. Many of the stories
It's not a shamanic vision quest, it's just entertainment, though some of it might be emotionally or intellectually enlightening about how my head works.
Interesting and a little sad for you that you say that, as I use psychedelics both for the fun and for the insight they give. I find that as I can remember everything with crystal clarity, I can make use of some of the flashes of insight I had and massage them in to more sensible and coherent thoughts once the trip is over. I do this fairly regularly and would say it's a rare trip that I don't learn something new. I can most definitely say that I wouldn't be as good as my job (software developer) had I never taken them.
There are some drugs out there that trigger the neurotransmitters that help you decide that what you're seeing is real as opposed to your imagination. It's been a while since I saw that talk, and the speaker didn't provide printed copies for the conference, but I vaguely remember that it was DMT or peyote or something in that direction; haven't tried the stuff myself.
Hmmm, not sure. My preferred substance is LSD, as when pure, it's the most direct hallucinogen without the influences of other effects. DMT is a bit "speedy" in general (it feels like both a hallucinogen and stimulant) and peyote makes me feel a little ill. Psilocybin tends to be my "second choice", but only because I can just drive 3 hours, cross the border (in to the Netherlands) and then walk in to a smart shop to buy it rather than having to deal with some shady drug dealer. I dislike the taste of the truffles intensely though which puts me in not such a good mood right at the start and that can taint the whole trip if I don't do my best to get the taste out of my mouth and put it out of my mind before the trip begins.
Under high doses of any of them, I've certainly been unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, and also experienced total ego-loss (loss of sense of self) on several occasions, but I've never been in a situation where I truly believed in the reality of something that wasn't. Probably the closest I've had to that would be having a deep and clear understanding of the idea that the world is just your perception of it, and that reality is therefore somewhat malleable to oneself. Sure the universe almost certainly DOES have an absolute truth that is separate to our views of it, but to an individual reality is that what the mind makes of it for the most part. This gave me an interesting appreciation for the truly insane.
Side note on that: Just because you don't believe there's a car hurtling towards you at high speed, it'll still either kill or seriously injure you when it hits, so there are definitely things in the "real world" that are not purely affected by how we perceive it. I was aiming more along the lines of things that have a mental but non-physical effect such as conversation, images, emotional state, etc.