It is not a problem of doing calculus. It is a creativity and purpose thing. There are no machines which are creative and as long as we do not fully understand what "I" is we will not be able to build such machine. Purpose is another thing which cannot determined by logic. Because in the end we are all dead and the universe becomes a totally chaotic space with a merely distributed energy structure or it collapses. Either way in the end all information is lost.
And when we find a way to continue indefinitely where is the sense of existing at all? There is none logic argumentation for that so there is no logic in purpose. Purpose is however, the driving force of all human doing.
Those who design the robots. Our economy improves productivity every year by something between 2-5% in some countries this is even higher. When you assume an average improvement of 3% every year than after 24 years we can produce twice as much. Which implies that we have to consume twice as much. At least in Western countries with a leveled population growth. So the question is, can you use, eat, etc. twice as much in 2 years?
Calling someone and idiot is not opinion it is an insult. It is even then an insult when you say: In my opinion you are and idiot. And the same applies to that person.
Invade a country and kill their people, based on BS "evidence" - NO PROBLEM !
I strongly disagree. However, governments have done this.
Bomb the shit out of a city because you don't like the leader - NO PROBLEM !
I strongly disagree. However, governments have done this.
Shoot dead a stranger because he runs for a train - NO PROBLEM !
I strongly disagree. However, policemen made that mistake.
But parody a dead chick and your somehow "evil" ? The world has become a fucked-up place with no REAL sense of what matters and what doesn't.
Yes you have acted badly and therefor you get punished. That is how a constitutional state works. And that's where we all agreed to in our lovely democracies.
The first situations describe government behavior, which is an can be violent and not acceptable to you and me. However, we all elected them and we didn't cry out loud (or loud enough) to stop them doing that bull shit. And because there is now world constitution which is protected by some institution they can do what ever the want.
There are some rules which govern international affairs, but they are not that strong as a constitution in a Western democracy.
The third situation was based on an error in judgment of a policeman (if I recall the situation correctly). I hope he gets punished and processed by the laws of his country.
Remember: Just because other fools do foolish things, you are not less foolish when you act alike. And the same applies to vocabulary e.g. murderer, thief etc.
You say that anonymity brings out the real nature of people is only true in some cases and that it is overestimated. However, then you say that people would act the same IRL when they can get away with it. This implies either immunity or anonymity in real life. So there is no real difference. It is only a difference in communication technology.
However, I agree that a virtual identity can be as important to an individual as the "primary" identity. Therefor he or she protects that virtual identity and does not fool around. While others give a shit...
Insulting someone in public is illegal. Defamation, talking bad about dead people with the intent to disgrace such a person is illegal. And all these things have been illegal for a long time. This is backed by human rights. Lately people have started to use this Internet thing which provides us with the capability to do all things in public we normal did at home. And I guess that is what trolls do when they troll. They think they are in a private context. However, in reality they are in the middle of a crowd.
It is like crying out loud in the Bronx of the 1970 "All Niggers are pigs". This is definitely impolite by an extreme and it is wrong. However, there is still a difference in telling this everybody or just saying it to yourself or your close friends. As in that example: Such comment could have harsh consequences in the public. While at home or with your friends they most likely would say that you are an idiot and that you should reconsider that statement.
So in the end it is correct to punish someone who insults people. Even though I would prefer if they would do something good. Let them do community service e.g. cleaning up the parks. Help elderly people etc.
The Linux kernel is a piece of good crafted code in comparison with most desktop projects. This is mainly due to working community processes which Gnome or Freedesktop.org lack. Before someone marks this as flamebait. There is and was a lot of bad communication between parts of the Gnome community e.g. between Ubuntu and Gnome, between users of Gnome and the GnomeShell team etc. And arguments like: "It is open source take it or leave it" where send out, which is nonsense as software is not only designed by the programmers and designers, but also shaped by user needs. So the feedback of users is important. That's why Ubuntu became so popular in the beginning. Lately that changed a bit and therefore their loosing user base.
However, there are projects with a good community model such as the Linux kernel (even if Linus is sometimes a little harsh). The Apache projects seems to have a good process too and Apache HTTP is a smaller project so it might be a good starting point.
The best thing right not to help the desktop FOSS community would be real community building. There are some efforts with common conferences from Gnome and KDE, but there are still big issues for users to be heard by the developers. So help building community processes is even more important than coding.
Yes. I admit. I only read the summary. And the summary sounded like something we have read on/. a couple of times over the past years. So I thought. Not again! And wrote in a rush a response which I cannot correct after sending. Definitely a missing feature;-).
However, I read the article afterwards and find the idea now quite interesting. It is still nothing new about each component in the system. As they use brake energy and they use flywheels for short term energy preservation. Even though the combination of such a system in a subway rail system is new and therefore it is good that they reported this idea. Maybe the energy loss is less than with capacitors or batteries. It can definitely used more often than batteries with their very limited recharge cycles.
So in short: I am sorry posting such crap in the first place.
Indeed. When you are the bast hacker of all, but you are not able to understand other people, you cannot bring all your genius on the road. This is like a car (I hate car analogies) with a really fat engine but without wheels. Even though best systems are developed in teams. Therefore people skills are very important. Therefore we had a course in soft skills at university.;-)
If you use a MSc in CS only for programming, then it was a waste of time. The same is true to some degree also for BSc of CS. However, an untrained person with just a programming in X handbook can never compete on the skill level with a BSc in CS. At least if the university was anything worth it.
As a BSc you know: - Some math: at least some basic graph theory, linear algebra, analysis - Some theoretical CS: turing machines, automata, grammars at least C3 and regular grammars, my-recursion - One or two programming languages which you used in different courses (e.g. Java and Prolog/Scheme etc.) - Basic principals of operating system design, databases, and UML (even though nobody uses it for real work;-)) - A few pointers in the direction of software engineering - A few pointers to the topic programming paradigms.
And therefor you should easily outperform an handbook X reader.
My first book on programming was the CPC 464 programming handbook, which only explained all Basic commands. Later I learned Z80 assembler and Commodore Basic. Then I learned Pascal with a Turbo Pascal handbook from the library. That book told me to use pointers for dynamic memory usage. And I learned about paging. And then I learned a little bit of C with K&Rs book.
However, the biggest boost (approx. 200% at least) in improving programming skills came from my first semester in computer science. We had a lecture called Programming with 2 2 hour lectures a week and 2 hour exercise course. We learned about all known programming pattern and how to use them in different languages. Our professor was a big Scheme fan, so most of his examples where in Scheme. But functional programming was very influential for me. It changed my way to code in Pascal and C.
Ah yes and I learned to use libraries.;-) Something you do not, when you are on a DOS machine.
I did. I had no money. And when I would go back today and tell me to by those damn stocks. My past self would say: "With what you moron?" If I could go back, I would ask all those girls out, which I didn't the last time.
When they would have electric trains, then they could introduce the braking energy into the electric system of the overhead line which can then be used to power other trains. However, this might be difficult with freight trains, as the freight cars do not have a connection to the electric system.
The idea is to generate energy from decelerating a train. This is done in modern electric trains all over the place not only subways or trams. SO this is and old idea. The "new" thing is the storage on board instead of introducing the energy in the electric system. However, why should a train carry around heavy batteries, which consume extra energy to be accelerated when the train can provide energy for other trains which apparently accelerate at the time when another decelerate? There is no real logic in it. Even more the batteries are expensive, they use seldom materials to produce them, and they are toxic waste afterwards. In total it is cleverer to manage trains effectively or have that many trains running on the grid, that the introduction of electricity and the consumption appear smoother due to the many start and stop incidents.
Over all. This idea is again rubbish. Even though other manufacturer provide "packages" with this technology already in action. Still makes the idea second choice.
Modern web-based applications use AJAX and therefore JavaScript in combination with DOM models of HTML and SVG to model user interfaces. This could be a nice design concept as the UI runs on another machine than the core of the application. However, it would be best when the DOM manipulation language would be designed with more safety in mind. I visited a week ago a symposium where someone was explaining all the goodies of JavaScript. And honestly they are cool as in you can do a lot of stuff and need not to write a lot of code. However, each construct leads to unsafe code when you are not constraining yourself with coding conventions. In combination they result in pure horror as you cannot see what really happens, you need to execute it.
A functional language like scheme or lisp can be much safer as they do not have state. Even though they might be more difficult to master. For UI concerns the language should be split in three. a) Field evaluation b) Triggers/actions meaning: sending requests and getting answers. You could even restrict reactions by specifying protocols. e.g.: send getCityList(searchTerm) {
on ListOfCityNames do some-dom-modification
default do some-other-dom-modification } c) DOM modifications triggered by answers or other incoming messages
The same applies to GNU applications. A specialized language for these applications or at least a functional language using an application as a framework and source for an internal DSL is a good thing. And therefore Guile is a good thing. However, many people do their stuff in other languages which are unsafe and danger and which have a fucked up grammar, but it is what they can. So they won't switch to a ((())) language, which produces a lot of headaches due to the ((())) stuff.
I live in North Germany, 54 20 North, 10 8 East which is more to the north than Winnipeg and a little south of Calgary. So we have long days in summer and short days in winter. And DST has never helped by anything. It just costs a lot and people need weeks to adjust. If you have kids, you will observe that one day before the switch, they are awake before the "time" in the morning and the next day they are almost an hour late.
In short DST sucks. Why should anyone have jet lag every 6 month? It is just ridiculous.
Most people live in one place or state. They meet locally, the work locally, they eat locally. For them 12:00 means noon. and 24:00 means midnight. If you have a cross country meeting on the phone, you just accept the event invitation and it is displayed in your time zone adopted to your sense of time, while your colleague in another country sees the same appointment recoded to his time zone.
Removing time zones is an idea such as using something like a "star date". The easiest time format is an 64 bit integer counting since one reference day. However, it is totally unhandy. Therefor we use years, month, days, hours etc. and need to add extra days and seconds occasionally. Time zones fall in the same category. They help to adjust time to the locality of people. Even though the world appears global now, people are not. They live in their context and need time for their contexts.
BTW: Some tried to "fix" time and introduce a metric form for hours, minutes and seconds. He failed.
It is good when you stay in control. However, many people are more controlled and overwhelmed by the technology they have. So I guess we can agree on that: You, me, everybody has to know how technology works and has to stay in control of it.
The example: Automatic trading software shows, that we can create systems we, as humans, cannot understand and predict their behavior. This is why we talk about the market as it were an entity with its own will.
When you do nothing, really nothing you die three years earlier than the couch potato next to you who exercises 92 minutes a week. This can easily be achieved by walking fast to the pizza place 10 minutes away instead of calling for delivery.;-)
Is China really able to deliver to the ISS? I know they have some taikonauts in space in a sojus-like craft. But the big question is: Can they guarantee delivery? And can they dock?
The article is not against technology, but it is showing that we are losing capabilities and culture and freedom when everything is controlled by machines. Every time a computer or machine eases our life we also lose a skill to do this very task. In the end this can make us so dependent on all those tools. While to some degree this might be a good choice and bring more comfort in other cases this will make us lazy. And when you do not use your body it will degenerate and if you do not use your brain it will degenerate too. In the end you buy what Amazon tells you without the ability to reflect your actions. In the stock markets we already reached this level. Broker talk about the market as if it were a being. Even though it is just a large number of automatic stock broker systems which create that erratic behavior.
They had a lot of bad luck lately. Losing at least three launches this year. I hope they get back on track soon. Who else could transport new people up and down to the ISS. Freight can be done by ESA's ATV, but human space flight is right now Russia only.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a saying (which loosely translates to): When the boor can't swim, then it is the swimsuit's fault.
It is not a problem of doing calculus. It is a creativity and purpose thing. There are no machines which are creative and as long as we do not fully understand what "I" is we will not be able to build such machine. Purpose is another thing which cannot determined by logic. Because in the end we are all dead and the universe becomes a totally chaotic space with a merely distributed energy structure or it collapses. Either way in the end all information is lost.
And when we find a way to continue indefinitely where is the sense of existing at all? There is none logic argumentation for that so there is no logic in purpose. Purpose is however, the driving force of all human doing.
Those who design the robots. Our economy improves productivity every year by something between 2-5% in some countries this is even higher. When you assume an average improvement of 3% every year than after 24 years we can produce twice as much. Which implies that we have to consume twice as much. At least in Western countries with a leveled population growth. So the question is, can you use, eat, etc. twice as much in 2 years?
This is law in most Western democracies (when not in all). It is backed by human rights (see human rights declaration for more details).
Calling someone and idiot is not opinion it is an insult. It is even then an insult when you say: In my opinion you are and idiot. And the same applies to that person.
Invade a country and kill their people, based on BS "evidence" - NO PROBLEM !
I strongly disagree. However, governments have done this.
Bomb the shit out of a city because you don't like the leader - NO PROBLEM !
I strongly disagree. However, governments have done this.
Shoot dead a stranger because he runs for a train - NO PROBLEM !
I strongly disagree. However, policemen made that mistake.
But parody a dead chick and your somehow "evil" ?
The world has become a fucked-up place with no REAL sense of what matters and what doesn't.
Yes you have acted badly and therefor you get punished. That is how a constitutional state works. And that's where we all agreed to in our lovely democracies.
The first situations describe government behavior, which is an can be violent and not acceptable to you and me. However, we all elected them and we didn't cry out loud (or loud enough) to stop them doing that bull shit. And because there is now world constitution which is protected by some institution they can do what ever the want.
There are some rules which govern international affairs, but they are not that strong as a constitution in a Western democracy.
The third situation was based on an error in judgment of a policeman (if I recall the situation correctly). I hope he gets punished and processed by the laws of his country.
Remember: Just because other fools do foolish things, you are not less foolish when you act alike. And the same applies to vocabulary e.g. murderer, thief etc.
You say that anonymity brings out the real nature of people is only true in some cases and that it is overestimated. However, then you say that people would act the same IRL when they can get away with it. This implies either immunity or anonymity in real life. So there is no real difference. It is only a difference in communication technology.
However, I agree that a virtual identity can be as important to an individual as the "primary" identity. Therefor he or she protects that virtual identity and does not fool around. While others give a shit...
Insulting someone in public is illegal. Defamation, talking bad about dead people with the intent to disgrace such a person is illegal. And all these things have been illegal for a long time. This is backed by human rights. Lately people have started to use this Internet thing which provides us with the capability to do all things in public we normal did at home. And I guess that is what trolls do when they troll. They think they are in a private context. However, in reality they are in the middle of a crowd.
It is like crying out loud in the Bronx of the 1970 "All Niggers are pigs". This is definitely impolite by an extreme and it is wrong. However, there is still a difference in telling this everybody or just saying it to yourself or your close friends. As in that example: Such comment could have harsh consequences in the public. While at home or with your friends they most likely would say that you are an idiot and that you should reconsider that statement.
So in the end it is correct to punish someone who insults people. Even though I would prefer if they would do something good. Let them do community service e.g. cleaning up the parks. Help elderly people etc.
I agree. The Android platform is also interesting and a possible starting place.
The Linux kernel is a piece of good crafted code in comparison with most desktop projects. This is mainly due to working community processes which Gnome or Freedesktop.org lack. Before someone marks this as flamebait. There is and was a lot of bad communication between parts of the Gnome community e.g. between Ubuntu and Gnome, between users of Gnome and the GnomeShell team etc. And arguments like: "It is open source take it or leave it" where send out, which is nonsense as software is not only designed by the programmers and designers, but also shaped by user needs. So the feedback of users is important. That's why Ubuntu became so popular in the beginning. Lately that changed a bit and therefore their loosing user base.
However, there are projects with a good community model such as the Linux kernel (even if Linus is sometimes a little harsh). The Apache projects seems to have a good process too and Apache HTTP is a smaller project so it might be a good starting point.
The best thing right not to help the desktop FOSS community would be real community building. There are some efforts with common conferences from Gnome and KDE, but there are still big issues for users to be heard by the developers. So help building community processes is even more important than coding.
Yes. I admit. I only read the summary. And the summary sounded like something we have read on /. a couple of times over the past years. So I thought. Not again! And wrote in a rush a response which I cannot correct after sending. Definitely a missing feature ;-).
However, I read the article afterwards and find the idea now quite interesting. It is still nothing new about each component in the system. As they use brake energy and they use flywheels for short term energy preservation. Even though the combination of such a system in a subway rail system is new and therefore it is good that they reported this idea. Maybe the energy loss is less than with capacitors or batteries. It can definitely used more often than batteries with their very limited recharge cycles.
So in short: I am sorry posting such crap in the first place.
Indeed. When you are the bast hacker of all, but you are not able to understand other people, you cannot bring all your genius on the road. This is like a car (I hate car analogies) with a really fat engine but without wheels. Even though best systems are developed in teams. Therefore people skills are very important. Therefore we had a course in soft skills at university. ;-)
If you use a MSc in CS only for programming, then it was a waste of time. The same is true to some degree also for BSc of CS. However, an untrained person with just a programming in X handbook can never compete on the skill level with a BSc in CS. At least if the university was anything worth it.
As a BSc you know: ;-))
- Some math: at least some basic graph theory, linear algebra, analysis
- Some theoretical CS: turing machines, automata, grammars at least C3 and regular grammars, my-recursion
- One or two programming languages which you used in different courses (e.g. Java and Prolog/Scheme etc.)
- Basic principals of operating system design, databases, and UML (even though nobody uses it for real work
- A few pointers in the direction of software engineering
- A few pointers to the topic programming paradigms.
And therefor you should easily outperform an handbook X reader.
My first book on programming was the CPC 464 programming handbook, which only explained all Basic commands. Later I learned Z80 assembler and Commodore Basic. Then I learned Pascal with a Turbo Pascal handbook from the library. That book told me to use pointers for dynamic memory usage. And I learned about paging. And then I learned a little bit of C with K&Rs book.
However, the biggest boost (approx. 200% at least) in improving programming skills came from my first semester in computer science. We had a lecture called Programming with 2 2 hour lectures a week and 2 hour exercise course. We learned about all known programming pattern and how to use them in different languages. Our professor was a big Scheme fan, so most of his examples where in Scheme. But functional programming was very influential for me. It changed my way to code in Pascal and C.
Ah yes and I learned to use libraries. ;-) Something you do not, when you are on a DOS machine.
I did. I had no money. And when I would go back today and tell me to by those damn stocks. My past self would say: "With what you moron?" If I could go back, I would ask all those girls out, which I didn't the last time.
When they would have electric trains, then they could introduce the braking energy into the electric system of the overhead line which can then be used to power other trains. However, this might be difficult with freight trains, as the freight cars do not have a connection to the electric system.
The idea is to generate energy from decelerating a train. This is done in modern electric trains all over the place not only subways or trams. SO this is and old idea. The "new" thing is the storage on board instead of introducing the energy in the electric system. However, why should a train carry around heavy batteries, which consume extra energy to be accelerated when the train can provide energy for other trains which apparently accelerate at the time when another decelerate? There is no real logic in it. Even more the batteries are expensive, they use seldom materials to produce them, and they are toxic waste afterwards. In total it is cleverer to manage trains effectively or have that many trains running on the grid, that the introduction of electricity and the consumption appear smoother due to the many start and stop incidents.
Over all. This idea is again rubbish. Even though other manufacturer provide "packages" with this technology already in action. Still makes the idea second choice.
Modern web-based applications use AJAX and therefore JavaScript in combination with DOM models of HTML and SVG to model user interfaces. This could be a nice design concept as the UI runs on another machine than the core of the application. However, it would be best when the DOM manipulation language would be designed with more safety in mind. I visited a week ago a symposium where someone was explaining all the goodies of JavaScript. And honestly they are cool as in you can do a lot of stuff and need not to write a lot of code. However, each construct leads to unsafe code when you are not constraining yourself with coding conventions. In combination they result in pure horror as you cannot see what really happens, you need to execute it.
A functional language like scheme or lisp can be much safer as they do not have state. Even though they might be more difficult to master. For UI concerns the language should be split in three.
a) Field evaluation
b) Triggers/actions meaning: sending requests and getting answers. You could even restrict reactions by specifying protocols. e.g.:
send getCityList(searchTerm) {
on ListOfCityNames do some-dom-modification
default do some-other-dom-modification
}
c) DOM modifications triggered by answers or other incoming messages
The same applies to GNU applications. A specialized language for these applications or at least a functional language using an application as a framework and source for an internal DSL is a good thing. And therefore Guile is a good thing. However, many people do their stuff in other languages which are unsafe and danger and which have a fucked up grammar, but it is what they can. So they won't switch to a ((())) language, which produces a lot of headaches due to the ((())) stuff.
I live in North Germany, 54 20 North, 10 8 East which is more to the north than Winnipeg and a little south of Calgary. So we have long days in summer and short days in winter. And DST has never helped by anything. It just costs a lot and people need weeks to adjust. If you have kids, you will observe that one day before the switch, they are awake before the "time" in the morning and the next day they are almost an hour late.
In short DST sucks. Why should anyone have jet lag every 6 month? It is just ridiculous.
Most people live in one place or state. They meet locally, the work locally, they eat locally. For them 12:00 means noon. and 24:00 means midnight. If you have a cross country meeting on the phone, you just accept the event invitation and it is displayed in your time zone adopted to your sense of time, while your colleague in another country sees the same appointment recoded to his time zone.
Removing time zones is an idea such as using something like a "star date". The easiest time format is an 64 bit integer counting since one reference day. However, it is totally unhandy. Therefor we use years, month, days, hours etc. and need to add extra days and seconds occasionally. Time zones fall in the same category. They help to adjust time to the locality of people. Even though the world appears global now, people are not. They live in their context and need time for their contexts.
BTW: Some tried to "fix" time and introduce a metric form for hours, minutes and seconds. He failed.
It is good when you stay in control. However, many people are more controlled and overwhelmed by the technology they have. So I guess we can agree on that: You, me, everybody has to know how technology works and has to stay in control of it.
The example: Automatic trading software shows, that we can create systems we, as humans, cannot understand and predict their behavior. This is why we talk about the market as it were an entity with its own will.
When you do nothing, really nothing you die three years earlier than the couch potato next to you who exercises 92 minutes a week. This can easily be achieved by walking fast to the pizza place 10 minutes away instead of calling for delivery. ;-)
Is China really able to deliver to the ISS? I know they have some taikonauts in space in a sojus-like craft. But the big question is: Can they guarantee delivery? And can they dock?
But, yes they can do manned spaceflight.
The article is not against technology, but it is showing that we are losing capabilities and culture and freedom when everything is controlled by machines. Every time a computer or machine eases our life we also lose a skill to do this very task. In the end this can make us so dependent on all those tools. While to some degree this might be a good choice and bring more comfort in other cases this will make us lazy. And when you do not use your body it will degenerate and if you do not use your brain it will degenerate too. In the end you buy what Amazon tells you without the ability to reflect your actions. In the stock markets we already reached this level. Broker talk about the market as if it were a being. Even though it is just a large number of automatic stock broker systems which create that erratic behavior.
They had a lot of bad luck lately. Losing at least three launches this year. I hope they get back on track soon. Who else could transport new people up and down to the ISS. Freight can be done by ESA's ATV, but human space flight is right now Russia only.