It is simply not possible to write about something in a neutral way.
[... ]
However, I don't think this has ever been a problem untill it became a sort of myth that there is actually something caled a neutral point of view. This, I think the whole idea is quite recent and arrived with modern newspapers.
The idea may have been around for a bit longer
than that. One would hope that judges and
courts would
take a neutral point of view when trying to
decide criminal or civil matters. Similarly
with anyone else who has to decide things on
behalf of others (lawmakers, arbitrators,
negotiators, parents, regulatory bodies).
Ultimately, I think a neutral point of view
is something that we talk about not because
it exists but because it would be so
useful if it did exist. What's more because
it is so useful, in practical terms it could
be useful to try to approximate it as closely
as possible. (Sometimes you have to make
decisions, and acknowledging that viewpoints
vary is fine, but you have to pick a viewpoint
and go with it for the purposes of making
the decision.)
On the other hand, it still
isn't helpful to act as if there really is
such a thing as a totally
neutral point of view, even though it can be
easy to want to assume that there is.
Also, for what it's worth, there is a school
of thought that says that if you are making
a decision, your work is never done until
there are no longer separate viewpoints.
For example, I believe that in matters of
church government, the Quakers do not make
a decision until all the involved parties
come to a consensus. They explicitly avoid
reaching a decision while there is still a
contingent that disagrees but is outnumbered.
In their particular case, I believe they do
it that way to avoid disunity and strife
and also because they believe there is one
right answer that God wants them to discover.
But the point is, there is at least one group
in the world which believes that it should
always be possible to achieve convergence
and no longer have differing viewpoints.
(On a side note, you've got to realize that
these people are operating under the assumption
that they will have to get along with each
other for eternity, so it's worthwhile invest
the effort into really resolving things
rather than overriding the minority.)
But when I tried Python, it just worked, flawlessly. I've never had an issue because of indentation. The language works, it's easy to write, and programs are easier to read due to the lack of excess symbols. The syntax is very clean and readable.
I agree that Python's elimination
of brackets for code blocks does reduce
the number of symbols. However, I look at
it the exact opposite way: their removal
doesn't make the code more readable because
excess has been trimmed; instead, their
removal makes it less readable because
useful visual
cues have been taken away.
To me, Python's removal of
the brackets for code blocks
is really more about making the syntax look
cleaner
than it is about making it more
useful. Sometimes
simplifying and removing redundant elements
in order to reduce clutter and
improve aesthetics is
fundamentally at odds with usability.
Also, as someone else mentioned, using
only whitespace to indicate blocks makes
it difficult to have consistent intermediate
stages when you are changing the struct of
a block of code. Want to move a significant
chunk of existing code inside an if statement? In
a language that uses braces (or even "endif"),
you put the markers in place and then fix
the indentation. If you screw up the
indentation (by missing a line here or there)
in the process, the structure is not lost
because it's captured in the markers. It's
much easier to change two lines correctly
than it is to change N lines correctly.
With a traditional language, indentation
errors result in bad style, but with Python,
they change the semantics of your program.
It seems like this would make the task of
editing Python source unnecessarily difficult.
That kind of brittleness
seems like a high price to pay in order
to eliminate the clutter of brackets.
It's a shame too, because Python seems like
a language with a lot of potential if it
weren't hamstrung by the decision to take a
radical stand on a syntactic issue that
doesn't even stand to accomplish much even if
a "victory" is won, especially considering
that it has essentially nothing to do with
the real purpose of the language as far as
I can tell. To be honest, as an outsider
to Python, it's a little off-putting since
it makes me wonder if the language designers
have any other linguistic axes to grind
that are going to result in other painful
things for those who use the language.
This isn't just a new ISP. More importantly, this technology will allow the Texas' power corporations to monitor their power grid and be alerted immediately in the case of failures. Additionally, this technology could be used to take meter readings and remotely disable power to non-paying customers.
Well, it's not the same thing as broadband, but
I live in Texas (Austin, specifically), and the
electric company has already been doing these
things for several years. About three years
ago, they came and replaced my meter with a
digital one that can be read remotely. I don't
know if it can shut off power remotely, but it
certainly seems possible.
Also, they are a utility that sees its peak usage
in the hot part of the day in the summer, and
since peak usage largely determines how much
generating capacity you have to build, they've
instituted a program where they give customers a
free smart thermostat. The thermostat
communicates with the home office, and when
demand is very high, the
electric company can tell the thermostat to
cycle off 1/3 of the time during the hottest
part of the day. Supposedly, this only happens
like 5 days a year, and only for a few hours,
but it reduces their need to build power plants,
so it's worth it for them to give out a free
thermostat. Also, the thermostat is programmable,
so you can set it to raise the temperature
while you're at work and so on, which makes it
a good deal for customers.
Furthermore, the LCRA (Lower Colorado River
Authority) has a big fiberoptic loop that
they use for communications. I believe they
provide bandwidth to others, but the primary
purpose of their network, as I understand it,
is to allow them to control and maintain
their equipment.
Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I happen to
live almost right under high-tension power
lines coming from Mansfield Dam, and they wreak havoc with everything
wireless in my apartment. My wireless mouse
is jumpy, people can't hear me on the cordless
telephone, etc. I switched from a 900 MHz
cordless phone to a 5.8 GHz cordless phone to
try and escape the interference, but no
improvement. I tried using a remote controlled
toy that works in a friend's house, but even
it won't work in my apartment.
Come to think of it, I wonder if they aren't
already running some kind of high-speed data
transmissions over these power lines.
Infact, Bill Gates, who had a lot to do with the success of the modern PC revolution has helped hundreds of millions of people get jobs that made them trillions of dollars.
He may have been involved, but I don't think it's
fair to assume that he was an essential part of it.
Basically every product Microsoft has ever made
is expendable in the sense that its niche could
easily have been filled by a competitor's
product had the MS product not existed. If
Windows hadn't existed, we'd be using OS/2 or
maybe the Macintosh. Or maybe DESQview would
have evolved a GUI. If Word hadn't been created,
we'd probably still be using WordPerfect.
Microsoft has not been a major source of
original ideas, so the opportunity to create
commercially successful products would have
still existed, and someone would've jumped in
and made those product.
The real question is this: if you went back and
erased Bill Gates and Microsoft from history,
what would we have ended up with? I think it's
extremely unlikely that we would be lacking
any of the software we have today. We
still would have personal computers with similar
software, but we would just be buying it from a
different vendor. Someone would have taken
Microsoft's place. The question is, would they
have done a better or worse job? That
is what Bill Gates' contribution should be
judged by.
Unless you can honestly claim to give a larger percentage of your salary to charity than bill gates has, then I encourage you to please enjoy a hearty slice of shut the hell up.
Bill Gates could donate 99.9% of his
money to charity and still be filthy rich,
not wanting for any physical need or desire.
If I were to donate 99.9% of my salary
to charity, I would be left with less
than $50 per year.
Therefore, comparing percentages donated
is not really fair. Bill Gates can afford
to donate a much higher percentage of his
money to chartiy precisely because
he has lots of it. Money is not a scarce
resource for Bill Gates.
this is essentially a means by which electricty can be derived from the same energy that drives your vehicle. However... isn't this energy that would just be wasted, anyway? This thing doesn't exactly slow down your car. It's not like it's sucking power right out of your engine.
If it isn't sucking power out of your engine and
it doesn't slow down your car, then where is
the energy coming from? It's not like having
cars drive over ramps in the road makes
the Energy Fairy happy and she gives an energy
bonus to the universe every time it happens.
The energy wouldn't be produced if the car didn't
drive over the ramp and move the ramp,
so therefore the energy
is coming from the car.
This is kinetic energy combined with the force of gravity and the weight of your car, energies that would just be wasted and poured into the ground otherwise.
If it were kinetic energy, then it would be
slowing down your car, because the kinetic
energy of an object is a function of its
velocity. If
the velocity doesn't change, the kinetic
energy doesn't change, and there is no transfer
of energy. But, you just said that it doesn't
slow down your car. Which is correct?
energy that is essentially being wasted can be recaptured and used to power lights and signs for several intersections without placing any load on the local power grid.
That is true, but the energy wasted in a car
is all going to heat and to friction (friction
against
the road and against the air). So, the energy
that is being wasted cannot be recaptured
with a ramp.
Higher traffic translates directly into greater energy gains.
You mean that higher traffic translates directly
into greater energy transfers from cars
into this system. And it also results in
greater energy loss, since cars already waste
more of the energy as heat than electric power
generating plants do. So you could say that
higher traffic translates directly into great
inefficiency.
Now let's think about even more heavily traveled roadways, like those in New York City or LA. 10 kilowatts per panel times a few thousand automobiles a day, that's megawatts and megawatts of power being generated every day.
Do you actually know what a watt is? You cannot
just multiply watts in that manner,
because a watt is a measure
of the power being generated at any instantaneous
moment. Your reasoning here
is like saying "imagine if we
had a 100 watt light and lots of people switched
it off and on all day long -- eventually it
would be producing millions of watts of light,
and it would be so bright you couldn't even
look at it without damaging your eyes".
This is hardly ripping off the taxpayer, either, if a comparatively small expense saves a ton more money.
Nope, it's not ripping off the taxpayer. It's
ripping off the motorist whose costs will
increase by more than the amount the city
saves.
What will the desktop interface of the future
look like? It will look just about how it does
right now because GUI innovation is basically
dead.
Yeah, people are making GUIs look less clunky by
adding transparency and other effects like that,
but overall they aren't really doing anything
different.
Windows is currently
99.9999% the same GUI as it was with
Windows 95, except with better skins. The Mac
has the Dock, but that was around in 1990 or
so with the NeXT. Linux GUIs like KDE and Gnome
are mainly content with copying Windows. (The
motivation is to give people something they're
familiar with, and that's worthwhile, but it's
still not innovative.)
And yeah, I can think of a few counterexamples.
For instance, on the Mac, an app's Dock icon will
go bouncy to get your attention instead of
stealing focus like in most other GUIs. And
mouses now have scroll wheels, which is useful.
But these are the two biggest true user interface
innovations I can think of in the last 5-ish years.
And they're clearly evolutionary and pretty minor.
On the other hand, I now have an LCD with 21.3"
viewable. It was cheaper than the 17" CRT (15.9"
viewable) that I bought before it. That's made
more difference in my desktop experience than
any of the other stuff. If the trend continues,
it could make an even more significant difference.
I wonder if they will offer a steam whistle as an option to replace the car's horn.
It certainly would get the attention of the person in front of you preening themselves in their rearview mirror!
Not me. I want a horn that makes noise at
a higher
frequency. Specifically, I want one that plays
a chord composed four notes: 850 MHz, 900 MHz,
1800 MHz, and 1900 MHz. As for the timbre, it
is a car horn, so something grating is
in order to really get their attention.
Perhaps white noise centered around
the note's frequency would be good.
The source of ignition in a Diesel Engine is the pressure in the cylinder, and the pressure is uniform throughout the chamber, ensuring uniform combustion and uniform expansion of the cylinder. You can get away with building cylinders, say, 1 m in diameter.
Someone should tell the design community that every user can't read every point size or font face well on their computer. This becomes increasingly important now that LCDs have such tiny native resolutions. Large ones can came native at 1400x1050 now
Nope, large ones come native at 2560x1600. Medium ones
have resolutions like 1600x1200 (like my
Samsung 213T, which was only about $550)
or 1920x1200.
I do agree with you about artists, though.
Once I worked as an AIX admin at a site that
was porting some software from the Mac to
AIX, and one of the graphic designers filed
a request for help with screen resolution.
So, I went over to her office to see how I
could help her, and her question was
essentially, "What is the DPI of an RS/6000?".
My answer was, essentially, "You shouldn't
be asking me. You should be asking
the X server." But, they wanted me to
give them a single number that they could
assume would hold basically true for all
RS/6000 systems.
The worst part is, after I explained that
there was no such number, they essentially
said, "Yeah, we know, but it's much simpler
if we just assume there is." Which is true.
It is simpler. But that doesn't mean it's
correct...
PalmOS is a dead platform as far as phones are concerned. The treo 700 uses Windows.
All of us third-party apps developers who sell
Palm OS software got a little annoyed when
that happened. But, they did send out a special
message to all registered developers saying they
aren't abandoning Palm OS (although that
could be a total lie), and more importantly,
there are rumors floating around that there
will be a cheap Palm OS based phone coming
out next. Cheap, meaning that it's not $599
like the Treo 650 is (unless you sign up for
new service). Which would be nice.
seems like semi-recently that there were grumblings of the palm os moving over to a linux kernel in a future os release.
Yes. The current shipping version of Palm OS is
5.x. They wrote Palm OS 6.0 and 6.1 and based that
on their own custom kernel, but thus far no real
devices have shipped with it, although they did
release a simulator for it to developers.
Right now, they are working on creating another
new version of the operating system that's based
on a Linux kernel instead. This is a smart move
because a lot of work has gone into the Linux
kernel and it is used a lot in embedded
devices already and so has drivers and other
support for embedded devices. They have been
working on this new Palm OS with Linux kernel
for at least a year, possibly more. I have no
idea when it will come out, but it's more than
a rumor, and it's not as if they've just started
work either.
there are some real morons at the university level wasting money that could be going to a WORTHY project.
This reminds me of the study a few years back when the attempted to discover why hot pizza burns the roof of your mouth.
That is stupid. Everybody knows that,
in practical terms, this problem was already
solved
nearly 20 years
ago when Walter "Gib" Gibson (a/k/a John Cusack)
laid out the solution in his famous paper.
Maybe children do this because they have been
trained to be able to conform. Or perhaps
humans are even biologically better at
conforming to social standards. Could be
because of better impulse
control or something.
As much as I,
an individualist, hate to admit it, sometimes
conformity can make a group function more
efficiently and can be useful trait.
So perhaps this behavior shows that humans
are not dumber than but instead are more socially
capable than chimps.
500 is a little low. DirecTV outsourced this to another company, that company could have hundred of people manning the phones. The typical telmarketing call doesn't last that long, so once could easily exceed that 500 mark by lunch time. The point? That could very easily be a simple abberation in how strictly they follow the rules.
OK, sure, it could easily be sloppiness rather
than true bad intentions. But so what?
The mistakes they
make cost money. If they receive 500 complaints,
and if we assume it takes each person 15 minutes
to figure out how to make a complaint and
fill out the form, that's 125 hours of time
wasted. And that doesn't count the people who
were called but who didn't bother to make a
complaint.
The organization violating the Do Not Call
List is by definition a for-profit organization
(since non-profits are exempt), so why shouldn't
they have to pay? Even if only 500 people are
called who shouldn't be, they're wasting hundreds
of hours of people's time, and they should be
penalized for that.
By the way, it's not as if it's that hard to figure
out how to comply. If you have a whole team of
people making outbound calls, then you clearly
had to set up a bunch of infrastructure for them
already, because you need to have lots of desks
with phones. So it shouldn't be that hard to
make sure you are paying attention to the Do Not
Call List.
For what it's worth, I think the government should
base the decision of whether to pursue a set of
complaints mainly on whether they'd be spending
more for enforcement than they are collecting
in fines.
And they should add
some dithering too, so that there is no set number
of calls below which a telemarketer knows
they won't see consequences. For example,
organizations with 1000 complaints are
always investigated, ones with 500 have a
50% chance of being investigated, 250 complaints
means you have a 25% chance, etc.
Also, not every investigation would result in
punishment. If the company can give a good
reason why it was totally an honest mistake,
then that's OK. For example, maybe they
accidentally loaded an outdated copy of the
list into their dialing system. In that
case, they shouldn't be penalized.
For this reason, I would like to make the US Government and the various Internet providers a special deal. I will set up IPv6 for them, with full one-year warranty, for a mere $15 billion, paid in advance. If this sounds satisfactory, just mail me the keys to the server rooms and passwords for the servers and routers, and I'll get started.
You also need keys to all the offices where
there are desktop machines that have static
IP addresses. Or any desktop machine that
can't be automatically remotely reconfigured
to use IPv6. Hey, speaking of that, is someone
in some dark corner still using Windows 98 or
Mac OS 9 for something important? Probably.
Do those support IPv6?
Oh, and by the way, what about the downtime of
the servers as they are restarted? And do you
think you'll be able to complete that firmware
upgrade on the Cisco router and reconfigure
the router with no downtime? If not, how are
you going to ensure that the entire network
being down doesn't cost the organization money?
I'll issue my usual challenge to the IPv6-fans: If you love IPv6 so much, cut yourself off from IPv4 completely. Don't use an IPv4 address. Don't access IPv4 sites. That's what has to happen for IPv6 to be a reality. If you're running IPv6 on top of or alongside IPv4, you haven't "switched over" yet. You're just goofing around with some nonstandard network protocol.
This could be pretty feasible with network
address translation. It's very similar in concept
to using a private IPv4 address such as one
from the
192.168.0.0 network. Just as
the outside world doesn't
care that you are using addresses that aren't
publicly-routable, the outside world won't care
if you are using addresses that can't even
be represented with IPv4.
In fact, if the software to do this is available,
that might be a good idea for a home wireless
network. It would certainly prevent some
unauthorized people
from trying to hop on your network...
... IPv6 doesn't embed the IPv4 address space and everybody has to buy a new IP and have all domains with TWO different IPs to make the transition possible?
Huh? RFC 4038 says this:
IPv4 packets going to
IPv6 applications on a dual-stack node reach their destination
because their addresses are mapped by using IPv4-mapped IPv6
addresses: the IPv6 address::FFFF:x.y.z.w represents the IPv4
address x.y.z.w.
This seems to imply that IPv6 does contain
the address space of IPv4.
Of course, for it to be useful,
eventually people will have to start using
other addresses that are not part of IPv4.
But no protocol
design can get around that problem.
Instead of a complex hybrid why not a new language ? Half the opinions about Ajax is that it's not worth all the effort. Too complex.
That's what everyone said about object-oriented
programming in about 1990. They said it was
too much work, or that it was nothing really
all that new, and you could do the same stuff
in C if you wanted to.
To some extent they were right, but I think in
some cases, that was just a way of saying
"it's new and I don't want to learn it".
...would people be equally outraged if the Religious Studies Chair at a religious school, let's say BYU, were to badmouth atheism?
No, because that college's stated purpose is to
promote the LDS religion. However, the guy in
this story teaches at Kansas University, which
is a state school, which is therefore
supposed to be
impartial and neutral about religious matters.
Being a secular institution is not the same
thing as being an atheistic institution.
When a whole nation is dedicating itself to anti-Islamism, while Christianism is fucking it up the ass (how's that for "poorly-worded"?), it's only fair that in a state like Kansas, made infamous worldwide by that ludicrous anti-science christianism, scientists would have an anti-Christianism sentiment
I don't think it's accurate that the whole nation
is anti-Islam. After 9/11, sales of books about
Islam skyrocketed in the US because people wanted
to understand the religion that this came out of.
Yeah, there are people who have called Islam
stuff like "a violent religion", and there are
people who do hate all Muslims. But there are
also a LOT of people in the US who have a much
greater awareness about Islam now than they
did 5 years ago.
Heck, even George W. Bush seems to acknowledge
that Islam shouldn't be blamed for terrorism
and seems to feel a need to, as a leader, take
a stand against hatred against Muslims. He's
said, for example, this:
Some of the comments that
have been uttered about Islam do not reflect
the sentiments of my government or the sentiments
of most Americans. Islam, as practiced by the
vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion,
a religion that respects others. Ours is a
country based upon tolerance and we welcome
people of all faiths in America.
I think we can all agree that George W. Bush is
toward the conservative end of the spectrum. If
even he seems to feel compelled to go on record
opposing hate against Muslims, it doesn't seem
reasonable to think that anti-Islamism is anything
like mainstream in the US.
And yes, you can argue that Bush only says that
kind of stuff because he needs to say it to look
good. But even if that's true, then it still
means that there is public
pressure to make statements
condeming hatred of Islam, which has implications
about where most Americans stand on the subject.
(If the whole nation did hate Islam, there would
be no public pressure to make statements like
that.)
I applaud the guy for having the courage to recognize ID for what it is, a (weak) philosophical argument, not science. But as head of a religious studies department, attacking a given faith is just unprofessional.
I agree completely. When I took an anthropology
class in college, the teacher went to extreme
lengths to emphasize that the goal of anthropology
was to understand other cultures, not to
make value judgements about them.
One would think that religious studies (at least
at a secular, and therefore theoretically
impartial, university) would have the same goal.
In fact, because of the controversial nature of
religion, one would think that avoiding value
judgements would be one of the most obvious
ground rules. But this guy seemed to totally
miss that point. And it seems so
obvious that it makes me wonder whether he has
any sense at all in general. Would it be reasonable
for a Christian professor to advocate Christian
beliefs in a religious studies course at a
secular university? Absolutely not. So I don't
see why it's reasonable for someone with other
beliefs to advocate for them.
You talk to your student advisors? That's what you pay your tuition for.
That doesn't mean they're anything other than
completely worthless.
I went to school at the
University of Texas, and I dropped out and then
came back 7 years later after working in the
computer industry for the whole time.
During the intervening time, they had changed
the number of the intro computer science class
(CS was my major) from CS304P to CS307, and
they changed the language from Pascal to
Scheme or Haskell (depending on the section).
Even though I had originally tested
out of the original
intro class and the class after that
and had gone on to take several other CS
classes and do well in them before dropping
out, the advisor that I talked to in the CS
department still insisted that I needed
to take the new intro class.
I explained that I was quite confident
I could handle picking up where I left off in
the program instead of starting at the beginning.
She countered that if I didn't take the intro
class, I would "miss out on important concepts
like recursion". I assured her that I was
well-acquainted with recursion already, etc.,
etc., but she wouldn't budge.
Luckily, rather than giving in to the urge to
set her straight using a very loud and unfriendly
tone of voice,
I retained my composure, and we worked out a
plan where I would register for the intro class,
then on the first day consult the professor and
let him make a determination whether the class
was necessary for me or not. If the professor
decided I didn't need the intro class, then I
would take an additional upper-division CS
elective as a substitute.
(And, this isn't
the point of the story, but on the first day,
they agreed, and I switched to the appropriate
class. Then I took the Compilers class as
one of my upper-division electives, which was
tough but an excellent experience.)
Anyway, the point is this: had I been younger
and more naive or for other reasons believed
that the
advisor knew what they are talking about,
I probably would have wasted a semester taking
that class and put myself a semester behind.
That would've cost me a great deal of money
since I was paying for my own school and
living mostly off my savings, and it would've
served no purpose at all.
So, my advice to most any college student is
that you should never assume that a department
advisor knows what they're talking about or
has even made an effort to understand what your
situation is or determine what is best for you.
They do often have insight or knowledge
into what the rules are and how the department
works, and you should take advantage of that
information. Sometimes they also have good
advice based on experience. (Like "never
take class X and class Y in the same semester"
or something of that nature.)
But don't ever assume that what they
say is automatically the best course of
action for you.
I looked at the screen shot, and it appears the tabs
let you switch between e-mails. That's interesting,
but not NEARLY as useful (for me)
as it would be if you could
have tabs open to either mail folders or mail accounts.
Right now I have three accounts that I actively
read with the same instance of FireFox, and if I
could switch between then with tabs, that would
make life nicer. One of the accounts has normal
messages going into the inbox and, via filters,
messages from
two developer mailing lists going into two
other folders. It would be really neat to have
a tab for the inbox and one for each of the
two mailing list folders. It'd be even better
if the tab could show how many unread messages
were in that folder.
Anyone who wants to view pornography or 'other adult material' (details not specified) must apply to their ISP to be given access to it.
They have applied to be given access to it.
They did so when they signed up for Internet
access. Internet access means you are able
to connect to any computer on the Internet that
you want to, just like when you get a phone and
you expect to be able to call anyone you want to.
Something much closer to reasonable, at least for
protecting the freedom to communicate as people
see fit, would be to require ISPs to implement
some sort of filtering capability
and require them to ask
new customers whether they want the filtering
on or off, with no default setting allowed.
Then the customer's preferences are made clear
from day one. It would be a stupid burden for
ISPs, but at least it wouldn't stifle free
communication.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea may have been around for a bit longer than that. One would hope that judges and courts would take a neutral point of view when trying to decide criminal or civil matters. Similarly with anyone else who has to decide things on behalf of others (lawmakers, arbitrators, negotiators, parents, regulatory bodies).
Ultimately, I think a neutral point of view is something that we talk about not because it exists but because it would be so useful if it did exist. What's more because it is so useful, in practical terms it could be useful to try to approximate it as closely as possible. (Sometimes you have to make decisions, and acknowledging that viewpoints vary is fine, but you have to pick a viewpoint and go with it for the purposes of making the decision.)
On the other hand, it still isn't helpful to act as if there really is such a thing as a totally neutral point of view, even though it can be easy to want to assume that there is.
Also, for what it's worth, there is a school of thought that says that if you are making a decision, your work is never done until there are no longer separate viewpoints. For example, I believe that in matters of church government, the Quakers do not make a decision until all the involved parties come to a consensus. They explicitly avoid reaching a decision while there is still a contingent that disagrees but is outnumbered. In their particular case, I believe they do it that way to avoid disunity and strife and also because they believe there is one right answer that God wants them to discover. But the point is, there is at least one group in the world which believes that it should always be possible to achieve convergence and no longer have differing viewpoints. (On a side note, you've got to realize that these people are operating under the assumption that they will have to get along with each other for eternity, so it's worthwhile invest the effort into really resolving things rather than overriding the minority.)
I agree that Python's elimination of brackets for code blocks does reduce the number of symbols. However, I look at it the exact opposite way: their removal doesn't make the code more readable because excess has been trimmed; instead, their removal makes it less readable because useful visual cues have been taken away.
To me, Python's removal of the brackets for code blocks is really more about making the syntax look cleaner than it is about making it more useful. Sometimes simplifying and removing redundant elements in order to reduce clutter and improve aesthetics is fundamentally at odds with usability.
Also, as someone else mentioned, using only whitespace to indicate blocks makes it difficult to have consistent intermediate stages when you are changing the struct of a block of code. Want to move a significant chunk of existing code inside an if statement? In a language that uses braces (or even "endif"), you put the markers in place and then fix the indentation. If you screw up the indentation (by missing a line here or there) in the process, the structure is not lost because it's captured in the markers. It's much easier to change two lines correctly than it is to change N lines correctly. With a traditional language, indentation errors result in bad style, but with Python, they change the semantics of your program. It seems like this would make the task of editing Python source unnecessarily difficult. That kind of brittleness seems like a high price to pay in order to eliminate the clutter of brackets.
It's a shame too, because Python seems like a language with a lot of potential if it weren't hamstrung by the decision to take a radical stand on a syntactic issue that doesn't even stand to accomplish much even if a "victory" is won, especially considering that it has essentially nothing to do with the real purpose of the language as far as I can tell. To be honest, as an outsider to Python, it's a little off-putting since it makes me wonder if the language designers have any other linguistic axes to grind that are going to result in other painful things for those who use the language.
Well, it's not the same thing as broadband, but I live in Texas (Austin, specifically), and the electric company has already been doing these things for several years. About three years ago, they came and replaced my meter with a digital one that can be read remotely. I don't know if it can shut off power remotely, but it certainly seems possible.
Also, they are a utility that sees its peak usage in the hot part of the day in the summer, and since peak usage largely determines how much generating capacity you have to build, they've instituted a program where they give customers a free smart thermostat. The thermostat communicates with the home office, and when demand is very high, the electric company can tell the thermostat to cycle off 1/3 of the time during the hottest part of the day. Supposedly, this only happens like 5 days a year, and only for a few hours, but it reduces their need to build power plants, so it's worth it for them to give out a free thermostat. Also, the thermostat is programmable, so you can set it to raise the temperature while you're at work and so on, which makes it a good deal for customers.
Furthermore, the LCRA (Lower Colorado River Authority) has a big fiberoptic loop that they use for communications. I believe they provide bandwidth to others, but the primary purpose of their network, as I understand it, is to allow them to control and maintain their equipment.
Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I happen to live almost right under high-tension power lines coming from Mansfield Dam, and they wreak havoc with everything wireless in my apartment. My wireless mouse is jumpy, people can't hear me on the cordless telephone, etc. I switched from a 900 MHz cordless phone to a 5.8 GHz cordless phone to try and escape the interference, but no improvement. I tried using a remote controlled toy that works in a friend's house, but even it won't work in my apartment. Come to think of it, I wonder if they aren't already running some kind of high-speed data transmissions over these power lines.
He may have been involved, but I don't think it's fair to assume that he was an essential part of it. Basically every product Microsoft has ever made is expendable in the sense that its niche could easily have been filled by a competitor's product had the MS product not existed. If Windows hadn't existed, we'd be using OS/2 or maybe the Macintosh. Or maybe DESQview would have evolved a GUI. If Word hadn't been created, we'd probably still be using WordPerfect. Microsoft has not been a major source of original ideas, so the opportunity to create commercially successful products would have still existed, and someone would've jumped in and made those product.
The real question is this: if you went back and erased Bill Gates and Microsoft from history, what would we have ended up with? I think it's extremely unlikely that we would be lacking any of the software we have today. We still would have personal computers with similar software, but we would just be buying it from a different vendor. Someone would have taken Microsoft's place. The question is, would they have done a better or worse job? That is what Bill Gates' contribution should be judged by.
Bill Gates could donate 99.9% of his money to charity and still be filthy rich, not wanting for any physical need or desire. If I were to donate 99.9% of my salary to charity, I would be left with less than $50 per year.
Therefore, comparing percentages donated is not really fair. Bill Gates can afford to donate a much higher percentage of his money to chartiy precisely because he has lots of it. Money is not a scarce resource for Bill Gates.
If it isn't sucking power out of your engine and it doesn't slow down your car, then where is the energy coming from? It's not like having cars drive over ramps in the road makes the Energy Fairy happy and she gives an energy bonus to the universe every time it happens. The energy wouldn't be produced if the car didn't drive over the ramp and move the ramp, so therefore the energy is coming from the car.
If it were kinetic energy, then it would be slowing down your car, because the kinetic energy of an object is a function of its velocity. If the velocity doesn't change, the kinetic energy doesn't change, and there is no transfer of energy. But, you just said that it doesn't slow down your car. Which is correct?
That is true, but the energy wasted in a car is all going to heat and to friction (friction against the road and against the air). So, the energy that is being wasted cannot be recaptured with a ramp.
You mean that higher traffic translates directly into greater energy transfers from cars into this system. And it also results in greater energy loss, since cars already waste more of the energy as heat than electric power generating plants do. So you could say that higher traffic translates directly into great inefficiency.
Do you actually know what a watt is? You cannot just multiply watts in that manner, because a watt is a measure of the power being generated at any instantaneous moment. Your reasoning here is like saying "imagine if we had a 100 watt light and lots of people switched it off and on all day long -- eventually it would be producing millions of watts of light, and it would be so bright you couldn't even look at it without damaging your eyes".
Nope, it's not ripping off the taxpayer. It's ripping off the motorist whose costs will increase by more than the amount the city saves.
What will the desktop interface of the future look like? It will look just about how it does right now because GUI innovation is basically dead. Yeah, people are making GUIs look less clunky by adding transparency and other effects like that, but overall they aren't really doing anything different.
Windows is currently 99.9999% the same GUI as it was with Windows 95, except with better skins. The Mac has the Dock, but that was around in 1990 or so with the NeXT. Linux GUIs like KDE and Gnome are mainly content with copying Windows. (The motivation is to give people something they're familiar with, and that's worthwhile, but it's still not innovative.)
And yeah, I can think of a few counterexamples. For instance, on the Mac, an app's Dock icon will go bouncy to get your attention instead of stealing focus like in most other GUIs. And mouses now have scroll wheels, which is useful. But these are the two biggest true user interface innovations I can think of in the last 5-ish years. And they're clearly evolutionary and pretty minor.
On the other hand, I now have an LCD with 21.3" viewable. It was cheaper than the 17" CRT (15.9" viewable) that I bought before it. That's made more difference in my desktop experience than any of the other stuff. If the trend continues, it could make an even more significant difference.
Not me. I want a horn that makes noise at a higher frequency. Specifically, I want one that plays a chord composed four notes: 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, and 1900 MHz. As for the timbre, it is a car horn, so something grating is in order to really get their attention. Perhaps white noise centered around the note's frequency would be good.
Apparently you are right.
(What I want to know is, what do they use as a starter and a fuel pump for this thing?)
Nope, large ones come native at 2560x1600. Medium ones have resolutions like 1600x1200 (like my Samsung 213T, which was only about $550) or 1920x1200.
I do agree with you about artists, though. Once I worked as an AIX admin at a site that was porting some software from the Mac to AIX, and one of the graphic designers filed a request for help with screen resolution. So, I went over to her office to see how I could help her, and her question was essentially, "What is the DPI of an RS/6000?". My answer was, essentially, "You shouldn't be asking me. You should be asking the X server." But, they wanted me to give them a single number that they could assume would hold basically true for all RS/6000 systems.
The worst part is, after I explained that there was no such number, they essentially said, "Yeah, we know, but it's much simpler if we just assume there is." Which is true. It is simpler. But that doesn't mean it's correct...
All of us third-party apps developers who sell Palm OS software got a little annoyed when that happened. But, they did send out a special message to all registered developers saying they aren't abandoning Palm OS (although that could be a total lie), and more importantly, there are rumors floating around that there will be a cheap Palm OS based phone coming out next. Cheap, meaning that it's not $599 like the Treo 650 is (unless you sign up for new service). Which would be nice.
Yes. The current shipping version of Palm OS is 5.x. They wrote Palm OS 6.0 and 6.1 and based that on their own custom kernel, but thus far no real devices have shipped with it, although they did release a simulator for it to developers.
Right now, they are working on creating another new version of the operating system that's based on a Linux kernel instead. This is a smart move because a lot of work has gone into the Linux kernel and it is used a lot in embedded devices already and so has drivers and other support for embedded devices. They have been working on this new Palm OS with Linux kernel for at least a year, possibly more. I have no idea when it will come out, but it's more than a rumor, and it's not as if they've just started work either.
That is stupid. Everybody knows that, in practical terms, this problem was already solved nearly 20 years ago when Walter "Gib" Gibson (a/k/a John Cusack) laid out the solution in his famous paper.
Maybe children do this because they have been trained to be able to conform. Or perhaps humans are even biologically better at conforming to social standards. Could be because of better impulse control or something.
As much as I, an individualist, hate to admit it, sometimes conformity can make a group function more efficiently and can be useful trait.
So perhaps this behavior shows that humans are not dumber than but instead are more socially capable than chimps.
OK, sure, it could easily be sloppiness rather than true bad intentions. But so what? The mistakes they make cost money. If they receive 500 complaints, and if we assume it takes each person 15 minutes to figure out how to make a complaint and fill out the form, that's 125 hours of time wasted. And that doesn't count the people who were called but who didn't bother to make a complaint.
The organization violating the Do Not Call List is by definition a for-profit organization (since non-profits are exempt), so why shouldn't they have to pay? Even if only 500 people are called who shouldn't be, they're wasting hundreds of hours of people's time, and they should be penalized for that.
By the way, it's not as if it's that hard to figure out how to comply. If you have a whole team of people making outbound calls, then you clearly had to set up a bunch of infrastructure for them already, because you need to have lots of desks with phones. So it shouldn't be that hard to make sure you are paying attention to the Do Not Call List.
For what it's worth, I think the government should base the decision of whether to pursue a set of complaints mainly on whether they'd be spending more for enforcement than they are collecting in fines. And they should add some dithering too, so that there is no set number of calls below which a telemarketer knows they won't see consequences. For example, organizations with 1000 complaints are always investigated, ones with 500 have a 50% chance of being investigated, 250 complaints means you have a 25% chance, etc.
Also, not every investigation would result in punishment. If the company can give a good reason why it was totally an honest mistake, then that's OK. For example, maybe they accidentally loaded an outdated copy of the list into their dialing system. In that case, they shouldn't be penalized.
You also need keys to all the offices where there are desktop machines that have static IP addresses. Or any desktop machine that can't be automatically remotely reconfigured to use IPv6. Hey, speaking of that, is someone in some dark corner still using Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 for something important? Probably. Do those support IPv6?
Oh, and by the way, what about the downtime of the servers as they are restarted? And do you think you'll be able to complete that firmware upgrade on the Cisco router and reconfigure the router with no downtime? If not, how are you going to ensure that the entire network being down doesn't cost the organization money?
This could be pretty feasible with network address translation. It's very similar in concept to using a private IPv4 address such as one from the 192.168.0.0 network. Just as the outside world doesn't care that you are using addresses that aren't publicly-routable, the outside world won't care if you are using addresses that can't even be represented with IPv4.
In fact, if the software to do this is available, that might be a good idea for a home wireless network. It would certainly prevent some unauthorized people from trying to hop on your network...
Huh? RFC 4038 says this:
This seems to imply that IPv6 does contain the address space of IPv4.
Of course, for it to be useful, eventually people will have to start using other addresses that are not part of IPv4. But no protocol design can get around that problem.
That's what everyone said about object-oriented programming in about 1990. They said it was too much work, or that it was nothing really all that new, and you could do the same stuff in C if you wanted to.
To some extent they were right, but I think in some cases, that was just a way of saying "it's new and I don't want to learn it".
No, because that college's stated purpose is to promote the LDS religion. However, the guy in this story teaches at Kansas University, which is a state school, which is therefore supposed to be impartial and neutral about religious matters.
Being a secular institution is not the same thing as being an atheistic institution.
I don't think it's accurate that the whole nation is anti-Islam. After 9/11, sales of books about Islam skyrocketed in the US because people wanted to understand the religion that this came out of. Yeah, there are people who have called Islam stuff like "a violent religion", and there are people who do hate all Muslims. But there are also a LOT of people in the US who have a much greater awareness about Islam now than they did 5 years ago.
Heck, even George W. Bush seems to acknowledge that Islam shouldn't be blamed for terrorism and seems to feel a need to, as a leader, take a stand against hatred against Muslims. He's said, for example, this:
I think we can all agree that George W. Bush is toward the conservative end of the spectrum. If even he seems to feel compelled to go on record opposing hate against Muslims, it doesn't seem reasonable to think that anti-Islamism is anything like mainstream in the US.
And yes, you can argue that Bush only says that kind of stuff because he needs to say it to look good. But even if that's true, then it still means that there is public pressure to make statements condeming hatred of Islam, which has implications about where most Americans stand on the subject. (If the whole nation did hate Islam, there would be no public pressure to make statements like that.)
I agree completely. When I took an anthropology class in college, the teacher went to extreme lengths to emphasize that the goal of anthropology was to understand other cultures, not to make value judgements about them.
One would think that religious studies (at least at a secular, and therefore theoretically impartial, university) would have the same goal. In fact, because of the controversial nature of religion, one would think that avoiding value judgements would be one of the most obvious ground rules. But this guy seemed to totally miss that point. And it seems so obvious that it makes me wonder whether he has any sense at all in general. Would it be reasonable for a Christian professor to advocate Christian beliefs in a religious studies course at a secular university? Absolutely not. So I don't see why it's reasonable for someone with other beliefs to advocate for them.
That doesn't mean they're anything other than completely worthless.
I went to school at the University of Texas, and I dropped out and then came back 7 years later after working in the computer industry for the whole time. During the intervening time, they had changed the number of the intro computer science class (CS was my major) from CS304P to CS307, and they changed the language from Pascal to Scheme or Haskell (depending on the section). Even though I had originally tested out of the original intro class and the class after that and had gone on to take several other CS classes and do well in them before dropping out, the advisor that I talked to in the CS department still insisted that I needed to take the new intro class.
I explained that I was quite confident I could handle picking up where I left off in the program instead of starting at the beginning. She countered that if I didn't take the intro class, I would "miss out on important concepts like recursion". I assured her that I was well-acquainted with recursion already, etc., etc., but she wouldn't budge.
Luckily, rather than giving in to the urge to set her straight using a very loud and unfriendly tone of voice, I retained my composure, and we worked out a plan where I would register for the intro class, then on the first day consult the professor and let him make a determination whether the class was necessary for me or not. If the professor decided I didn't need the intro class, then I would take an additional upper-division CS elective as a substitute. (And, this isn't the point of the story, but on the first day, they agreed, and I switched to the appropriate class. Then I took the Compilers class as one of my upper-division electives, which was tough but an excellent experience.)
Anyway, the point is this: had I been younger and more naive or for other reasons believed that the advisor knew what they are talking about, I probably would have wasted a semester taking that class and put myself a semester behind. That would've cost me a great deal of money since I was paying for my own school and living mostly off my savings, and it would've served no purpose at all.
So, my advice to most any college student is that you should never assume that a department advisor knows what they're talking about or has even made an effort to understand what your situation is or determine what is best for you. They do often have insight or knowledge into what the rules are and how the department works, and you should take advantage of that information. Sometimes they also have good advice based on experience. (Like "never take class X and class Y in the same semester" or something of that nature.) But don't ever assume that what they say is automatically the best course of action for you.
I looked at the screen shot, and it appears the tabs let you switch between e-mails. That's interesting, but not NEARLY as useful (for me) as it would be if you could have tabs open to either mail folders or mail accounts.
Right now I have three accounts that I actively read with the same instance of FireFox, and if I could switch between then with tabs, that would make life nicer. One of the accounts has normal messages going into the inbox and, via filters, messages from two developer mailing lists going into two other folders. It would be really neat to have a tab for the inbox and one for each of the two mailing list folders. It'd be even better if the tab could show how many unread messages were in that folder.
From the article:
They have applied to be given access to it. They did so when they signed up for Internet access. Internet access means you are able to connect to any computer on the Internet that you want to, just like when you get a phone and you expect to be able to call anyone you want to.
Something much closer to reasonable, at least for protecting the freedom to communicate as people see fit, would be to require ISPs to implement some sort of filtering capability and require them to ask new customers whether they want the filtering on or off, with no default setting allowed. Then the customer's preferences are made clear from day one. It would be a stupid burden for ISPs, but at least it wouldn't stifle free communication.