Completely off topic quibble about your sig. If the purpose of the right to bear arms is really to prevent the government from becoming a dictatorship, shouldn't we be arguing about the right to own RPGs and laser-guided missiles, not the right to carry handguns into churches?
Well it really depends on how quickly the fish populations fall. Yes, if fish populations fall gradually, then price signal provided by supply costs will reduce fishing in time to save the species. However, that's not how things happen in real fisheries. Real fisheries (like the Grand Banks for cod) tend to collapse suddenly over a year or two - far too little time for the market to adjust.
Both as a user and a developer, I'd be okay with paying the cost of viruses and spamware if the benefit is a more open development environment without gatekeepers telling me what my app can and cannot do. But who am I to complain? I'm just a lowly Windows/Linux user.
Learning about Bubble Sort will also teach you how much better it can be than Quick Sort for certain applications. While Quick Sort is asymptotically faster, the difference between Bubble Sort and Quick Sort is negligible for small data sets (e.g n=100). Indeed, for very small data sets (e.g. n=10) Bubble Sort is better than Quick Sort because it has much less overhead.
The problem with your assertion is that, if IQ were some genetically defined constant, the population-wide IQ average would change very slowly over time. This is not the case. IQ scores everywhere have been going up pretty constantly over the past few decades as more and more people get access to proper education and nutrition.
Also, the failure of Africans to invent anything "significant" probably doesn't have anything to do with their racial heritage, and probably has more to do with their environment, as Guns, Germs, and Steel rightly points out.
The question is made more difficult by the fact that Stone-Age is not being used in the strict archaeological sense, but as a shorthand to describe any civilization where the level of technology available to the average person is more than a certain number of years behind ours. I would be willing to be that these "stone-age tribesmen" have access to smithing knowledge, which would instantly disqualify them from the strict definition of "stone-age".
Your point would be valid if the very technology you condemn did not provide material and financial advantages to those who have it, allowing them to unfairly take advantage of those who don't. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The vast amount of information on the Internet today allows people with Internet access to anticipate changing conditions and adapt to them much more quickly than those without. This "question box" is an effort to level the playing field, allowing the least advantaged to access some of the networks and power structures that we in the developed world take for granted.
Indeed, it is you who is displaying the condescension and paternalism. You are so wedded to your "noble savage" idea of the Global South that you're presuming for them that they'd be better off without this technology. After all, no one is forcing these villagers to use the question box. What's the harm in offering it to them and letting them decide whether its worth the effort or not?
X is freakin' awesome? Are you kidding me? Tell me, what kind of backwards logic makes the X server be the display and the X client be the application?
There's not really enough time to evolve another species to our level from scratch.
Well, perhaps not from scratch, but even the most massive of mass extinctions wouldn't destroy all life. There'd be plenty of bacteria, amoebas, and various other "simple" organisms around. Given that the majority of evolutionary time was spent developing these basic organisms, life would start out with a rather large head start as compared with starting from nothing.
A mere 95% extinction wouldn't be as bad, but if it's only 60-some-odd million years from now the next sentient species is going to have to make due with dramatically fewer energy reserves left on the planet to bootstrap its civilization.
Well, not necessarily. Fossil fuels aren't completely nonrenewable - they're just nonrenewable on any sort of human timescale. 60 million years is about the age of the coal and oil we're burning now. If there was a 95% extinction today, then the next sentient species would start out at with about the same amount of fossil fuel reserves that we had.
Given that his cell phone was turned off by AT&T (as a result of his alleged overage charge), I have a hard time believing AT&T got any money from Mr. Savage's tweets.
Besides, even if he had sent the tweets via cell phone, all 55,000 of his followers would have had to be 1) AT&T subscribers and 2) set up their Twitter accounts to receive Savage's updates via text messages and 3) paid for those text messages at the basic rate (not via some kind of unlimited usage plan). I don't know about you, but I find that to be a rather dubious scenario.
Well, just like the Ansari X Prize didn't cover the costs of developing and launching a suborbital rocket, the Netflix Prize isn't really meant to be a large enough prize to fully fund the development of a new recommendation algorithm. The purpose of the prize is to stimulate interest and get people started. The real reward will come when they turn their algorithm into commercialized software - the rewards from making such a thing applicable outside of Netflix could be large indeed.
To be fair, though, that's not really an attack against the cryptographic protocol, so much as it is an attack based on traffic analysis between the host and the server. Of course, any application implementing this protocol would have to take these things into consideration, but the existence of flaws such as these doesn't necessarily point out an inherent flaw in the cryptosystem itself.
The summary is wrong. A Privacy Homomorphism allows third parties to compute calculations on the data on your behalf without decrypting either the input or the output. In other words, the cloud provider could, for example, total up your sales data without ever decrypting the individual sale information or the final total. The encrypted final total would then be given to you, and you would decrypt it to learn what it was.
At no point does a third party have access to a decrypted form of your data.
I guess it just goes to show that Paul Graham doesn't know very many great programmers. Either that, or his definition of 'great' is screwed up.
Great programmers use the right tool for the job. Whether that tool is Lisp, Python, Java, or even COBOL doesn't matter. The way I see it, Mr. Graham's constant advocacy of Lisp as the be-all and end-all of programming environments is no better than any other language zealotry. Yes, Lisp has its place. So does Java. A truly great programmer would have the task dictate the language, not the other way around.
Sometimes PHP novices attempt to make their code "cleaner" by copying predefined variables to variables with shorter names. What this actually results in is doubled memory consumption, and therefore, slow scripts.
It seems to me that this is a flaw in the PHP interpreter, not the PHP programmer. The way I see it, the interpreter should be lazily copying data in this case. In other words, the "copy" should be a pointer to the original variable until the script calls for the copy to be changed. At that point the variable should be copied and changed. I believe this is how Python handles assignments, and I'm surprised that PHP does not do it the same way.
The problem with gzip compression (in this case) is that its not lossy. All of the "unnecessary" things that you have (e.g. the unneeded closing tags on some elements) will still be there when you decompress the transmitted data. I think the grandparent wants a compression algorithm that's "intelligently lossy"; in other words, smart enough to strip off all the unneeded data (comments, extra tags, etc.) and then gzip the result for additional savings.
Yeah, ICBMs are pretty predictable, but, as the grandparent points out, intercepting something coming in at near-orbital velocity is hard even when you know where its going to be. And, of course, this is ignoring MIRVs, decoys, etc.
As I understood it, Windows 95 had cooperative multitasking. In other words the currently running process had to handle an interrupt in order to allow the OS to switch tasks. The OS could not force a process to the background, and so it wasn't considered "true" multi-tasking by purists.
Of course it'd be preferable to have a government department responsible for this sort of thing. The problem is, the need for large quantities of bodyguards was one of the many things that were not anticipated before the war. Therefore, in my opinion, using private security contractors like Blackwater is acceptable until we can get such an agency up and running.
Any if they *choose* to go back into a war zone - not under the flag of their government but under a private army then it doesn't have anything to do with body armour (or patriotism) at all.
Not necessarily. While I'm not trying to defend Blackwater (especially with regard to their conduct toward civilians), I do think there is a role for having specialized guards for diplomats and dignitaries. The U.S. Army doesn't train all that much for such a role, so companies like Blackwater get called on to fill the gap.
I suppose it depends on what you consider to be "good use". I personally get at least 4.5 hours of use out of my Toshiba A305 while coding and web browsing. Good thing, too, since I'm often not able to find a free power outlet while I'm at school.
If for some reason the Apple laptop battery did swell and cause the system to fail, I'm not sure what the issue would be - you'd get a new laptop.
Well, assuming the laptop was still under warranty, of course. If the laptop wasn't under warranty he'd have had to pay for a brand new laptop, rather than simply purchasing a replacement battery from eBay or something.
Personally, that's one of the things I dislike about the Macintosh UI. I feel that application commands should be associated to the application window, not fixed in a global location. The global menu bar should have global commands, like launching or switching applications. I think the Gnome UI does a better job of this than the OSX UI.
I think he's commenting on the fact that many Windows programs put "essential" commands in the context menu, which is "invisible" until a user right-clicks to bring it up.
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Completely off topic quibble about your sig. If the purpose of the right to bear arms is really to prevent the government from becoming a dictatorship, shouldn't we be arguing about the right to own RPGs and laser-guided missiles, not the right to carry handguns into churches?
Well it really depends on how quickly the fish populations fall. Yes, if fish populations fall gradually, then price signal provided by supply costs will reduce fishing in time to save the species. However, that's not how things happen in real fisheries. Real fisheries (like the Grand Banks for cod) tend to collapse suddenly over a year or two - far too little time for the market to adjust.
Both as a user and a developer, I'd be okay with paying the cost of viruses and spamware if the benefit is a more open development environment without gatekeepers telling me what my app can and cannot do. But who am I to complain? I'm just a lowly Windows/Linux user.
Learning about Bubble Sort will also teach you how much better it can be than Quick Sort for certain applications. While Quick Sort is asymptotically faster, the difference between Bubble Sort and Quick Sort is negligible for small data sets (e.g n=100). Indeed, for very small data sets (e.g. n=10) Bubble Sort is better than Quick Sort because it has much less overhead.
The problem with your assertion is that, if IQ were some genetically defined constant, the population-wide IQ average would change very slowly over time. This is not the case. IQ scores everywhere have been going up pretty constantly over the past few decades as more and more people get access to proper education and nutrition.
Also, the failure of Africans to invent anything "significant" probably doesn't have anything to do with their racial heritage, and probably has more to do with their environment, as Guns, Germs, and Steel rightly points out.
The question is made more difficult by the fact that Stone-Age is not being used in the strict archaeological sense, but as a shorthand to describe any civilization where the level of technology available to the average person is more than a certain number of years behind ours. I would be willing to be that these "stone-age tribesmen" have access to smithing knowledge, which would instantly disqualify them from the strict definition of "stone-age".
Your point would be valid if the very technology you condemn did not provide material and financial advantages to those who have it, allowing them to unfairly take advantage of those who don't. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The vast amount of information on the Internet today allows people with Internet access to anticipate changing conditions and adapt to them much more quickly than those without. This "question box" is an effort to level the playing field, allowing the least advantaged to access some of the networks and power structures that we in the developed world take for granted.
Indeed, it is you who is displaying the condescension and paternalism. You are so wedded to your "noble savage" idea of the Global South that you're presuming for them that they'd be better off without this technology. After all, no one is forcing these villagers to use the question box. What's the harm in offering it to them and letting them decide whether its worth the effort or not?
X is freakin' awesome? Are you kidding me? Tell me, what kind of backwards logic makes the X server be the display and the X client be the application?
There's not really enough time to evolve another species to our level from scratch.
Well, perhaps not from scratch, but even the most massive of mass extinctions wouldn't destroy all life. There'd be plenty of bacteria, amoebas, and various other "simple" organisms around. Given that the majority of evolutionary time was spent developing these basic organisms, life would start out with a rather large head start as compared with starting from nothing.
A mere 95% extinction wouldn't be as bad, but if it's only 60-some-odd million years from now the next sentient species is going to have to make due with dramatically fewer energy reserves left on the planet to bootstrap its civilization.
Well, not necessarily. Fossil fuels aren't completely nonrenewable - they're just nonrenewable on any sort of human timescale. 60 million years is about the age of the coal and oil we're burning now. If there was a 95% extinction today, then the next sentient species would start out at with about the same amount of fossil fuel reserves that we had.
Given that his cell phone was turned off by AT&T (as a result of his alleged overage charge), I have a hard time believing AT&T got any money from Mr. Savage's tweets.
Besides, even if he had sent the tweets via cell phone, all 55,000 of his followers would have had to be 1) AT&T subscribers and 2) set up their Twitter accounts to receive Savage's updates via text messages and 3) paid for those text messages at the basic rate (not via some kind of unlimited usage plan). I don't know about you, but I find that to be a rather dubious scenario.
Well, just like the Ansari X Prize didn't cover the costs of developing and launching a suborbital rocket, the Netflix Prize isn't really meant to be a large enough prize to fully fund the development of a new recommendation algorithm. The purpose of the prize is to stimulate interest and get people started. The real reward will come when they turn their algorithm into commercialized software - the rewards from making such a thing applicable outside of Netflix could be large indeed.
To be fair, though, that's not really an attack against the cryptographic protocol, so much as it is an attack based on traffic analysis between the host and the server. Of course, any application implementing this protocol would have to take these things into consideration, but the existence of flaws such as these doesn't necessarily point out an inherent flaw in the cryptosystem itself.
The summary is wrong. A Privacy Homomorphism allows third parties to compute calculations on the data on your behalf without decrypting either the input or the output. In other words, the cloud provider could, for example, total up your sales data without ever decrypting the individual sale information or the final total. The encrypted final total would then be given to you, and you would decrypt it to learn what it was.
At no point does a third party have access to a decrypted form of your data.
I guess it just goes to show that Paul Graham doesn't know very many great programmers. Either that, or his definition of 'great' is screwed up.
Great programmers use the right tool for the job. Whether that tool is Lisp, Python, Java, or even COBOL doesn't matter. The way I see it, Mr. Graham's constant advocacy of Lisp as the be-all and end-all of programming environments is no better than any other language zealotry. Yes, Lisp has its place. So does Java. A truly great programmer would have the task dictate the language, not the other way around.
From TFA:
Sometimes PHP novices attempt to make their code "cleaner" by copying predefined variables to variables with shorter names. What this actually results in is doubled memory consumption, and therefore, slow scripts.
It seems to me that this is a flaw in the PHP interpreter, not the PHP programmer. The way I see it, the interpreter should be lazily copying data in this case. In other words, the "copy" should be a pointer to the original variable until the script calls for the copy to be changed. At that point the variable should be copied and changed. I believe this is how Python handles assignments, and I'm surprised that PHP does not do it the same way.
The problem with gzip compression (in this case) is that its not lossy. All of the "unnecessary" things that you have (e.g. the unneeded closing tags on some elements) will still be there when you decompress the transmitted data. I think the grandparent wants a compression algorithm that's "intelligently lossy"; in other words, smart enough to strip off all the unneeded data (comments, extra tags, etc.) and then gzip the result for additional savings.
Yeah, ICBMs are pretty predictable, but, as the grandparent points out, intercepting something coming in at near-orbital velocity is hard even when you know where its going to be. And, of course, this is ignoring MIRVs, decoys, etc.
As I understood it, Windows 95 had cooperative multitasking. In other words the currently running process had to handle an interrupt in order to allow the OS to switch tasks. The OS could not force a process to the background, and so it wasn't considered "true" multi-tasking by purists.
Of course it'd be preferable to have a government department responsible for this sort of thing. The problem is, the need for large quantities of bodyguards was one of the many things that were not anticipated before the war. Therefore, in my opinion, using private security contractors like Blackwater is acceptable until we can get such an agency up and running.
Any if they *choose* to go back into a war zone - not under the flag of their government but under a private army then it doesn't have anything to do with body armour (or patriotism) at all.
Not necessarily. While I'm not trying to defend Blackwater (especially with regard to their conduct toward civilians), I do think there is a role for having specialized guards for diplomats and dignitaries. The U.S. Army doesn't train all that much for such a role, so companies like Blackwater get called on to fill the gap.
I suppose it depends on what you consider to be "good use". I personally get at least 4.5 hours of use out of my Toshiba A305 while coding and web browsing. Good thing, too, since I'm often not able to find a free power outlet while I'm at school.
If for some reason the Apple laptop battery did swell and cause the system to fail, I'm not sure what the issue would be - you'd get a new laptop.
Well, assuming the laptop was still under warranty, of course. If the laptop wasn't under warranty he'd have had to pay for a brand new laptop, rather than simply purchasing a replacement battery from eBay or something.
As opposed to leaving a huge social engineering hole by saying, "Hello, Internal Helpdesk? I'm , and I'd like my password reset. Thanks!"
Personally, that's one of the things I dislike about the Macintosh UI. I feel that application commands should be associated to the application window, not fixed in a global location. The global menu bar should have global commands, like launching or switching applications. I think the Gnome UI does a better job of this than the OSX UI.
I think he's commenting on the fact that many Windows programs put "essential" commands in the context menu, which is "invisible" until a user right-clicks to bring it up.