Rapes in India: about 37,000 per year for a country of 1.26 BILLION. Press reports it as a rape every 20 min. Rapes in US: 1,200,000 per year for a country the fourth of India according to CDC. No one talks about it. Obviously, BOTH are under-reporting. If you take a large country as India or China, every measure will be automatically large. Talking absolute numbers rather than per capita adjusted numbers is either dumb or malicious journalism. During the Delhi rape coverage, not one newspaper I read talked about per capita rates.
Let's be realistic. For a poor country, the rights of women in India are no worse than similar poor countries. At least in India, the public holds large protests over rape. Don't see that much elsewhere.
You are entirely looking at India with US legal system lenses. In India, the political system is not dominated by lawyers i.e. the politicians don't have a legal background as much as they do in US. Public prosecutors don't routinely run for elections and hence have an interest in promoting themselves as "tough on crime". AFAIK, terrifying the defendant with disproportionate punitive threats and forcing him/her into a plea deal is not an issue in India. There, the problems are more around the legal process taking simply too long due to inadequately funded institutions, outdated laws and generally a less agile system (poorer country), rather than an overzealous application.
That said, both India *and US* do have arbitrary application of law - due to different reasons and cause different sets of problems. Corruption is of course more in India, as you would expect in any country with its per capita income. Yet, I'd say that far... far more people are put in prison in US due to arbitrary application of law than in India, even though the due process is said to be much better in US.
All this is pointless hyperventilating by people who understand little about India. India is one the LEAST punitive countries in the world. It does not believe that putting people in the prison is a solution for anything – even for things most of us would agree that people should be put into prison for. India’s incarceration rate is 33 (one of the lowest in the world) per 100,000 US incarceration rate is 698 (highest incarceration rate in the world, if you ignore Seychelles) per 100,000 Have you ever heard of anyone put in prison in India for downloading a file? The law has been around since 1957. I am not even sure if for-profit bootleggers who sell media in India have been in prison for more than a few weeks. This is just some tech-ignorant government bureaucrat getting carried away. If a 0.01% of Indians tweet about it, the warning will be edited to something realistic. This has been the pattern about most India alarmist articles on Slashdot.
If you think not letting Apple open a few stores, unless they sell a few goods from India in return, is comparable to the utter and complete destruction of an entire civilization's economic status in the world during the colonial era, in the guise of free (which it was not) markets, you are completely unread of world history outside the western perspective, if not the remnants of the cold-war era propaganda perspective, that too in a rather shallow sense. This has nothing to do with Trump or whatever is his message. I am talking history, and its consequences on policy, not pandering politics and demagogues. Read at least one book on the devastation of colonialism and force-imposed free trade on India. Until you do, you won't get this. Yes, I can hear myself talk; not sure you can.
You are ignoring the fact that India was colonized and used as nothing but as a market for centuries and sucked dry. Those scars will take a long while to heal and those are lessons not easily forgotten. The word "Free Trade" has a different meaning to an Indian (as well as to those who also endured the Opium Wars and the Black Ships incident in their history). They had completely different experiences with it in their history. This is a rational strategy from those experiences.
Likewise the idea of protectionism has cold war era connotations in US; not so in India. It was a necessarily strategy for India to protect itself from neo-colonialism when its capacity to compete was never allowed to mature. India started rolling back these defenses (which naturally hold back growth - security vs. speed) gradually once it felt its industries and services are maturing and have a chance to actually compete in a free market. But that is a gradual process rather than a binary choice.
> Why should the people of one country be privileged over the people of any other? Just because they were born there?
That said, I generally agree with the sentiment. But even the majority in US don't agree with that.
This is a simple general rule: When someone merely points to the expert consensus (with respect to any mainstream science), without any innovation, they do not need to be challenged on their personal expertise. People who do refute an expert consensus are those who need to be challenged on their expertise and are asked to submit their evidence to peer review.
I don't need to be a biologist to say that evolution is real. If I say it isn't, THEN my credentials come into question.
There are logical fallacies here. If we can simulate something in "some" way, we do not necessarily have to assume that we will eventually end up with perfect simulations, even with infinite time. Or that ever growing size of simulations will have to necessarily culminate in universe scale simulations. This optimism is along the idea of Victorian assumptions of progress or along the lines of Cartesian optimism before it was tempered with Lockean empiricism. There will usually be previously unanticipated hard stops... like the speed of light.
Tyson is obviously a master of his subject and I am not a physicist and I don't understand these simulation theories in their native form. But this summary makes it sound like we are getting ahead of ourselves with assumptions.
The goal of a syntax is to, first and foremost, promote human readability. Python philosophy is to discourage clever code. Many, like myself, find consistent indentation and low character noise to be more readable. If you don't, that's fine. It is a preference. If you like complete flexibility, go with Lisp (or Hy in Python), since its minimal syntax gives maximal power of expression - we all should, if it was all about power. But we don't. I prefer reading Python than Lisp, most of the time. We all like a balance between a helpful syntax and maximal expressive power. Where we individually draw the line differs.
> Everyone formats their code but forcing it makes for a less powerful language, so why do such idiocy?
It's not idiocy; it was clever and it was a well-considered choice. We already indent anyway. So why not codify that into syntactic rules, thereby making the language more clean to read? Python tries to get rid of needless punctuation. We write single line expressions/statements most of the time. So Python (and many others) makes them the default by making the semi-colon optional and instead provides a back-slash if you want multi-line code.
I used/tried every major modern language. I find Python to be the simplest and cleanest to read (many functional languages do a good job as well). That's a preference of course. I like Boo over C# because it has a Python-like indentation syntax. YMMV.
Nimrod, Delight, Converge and Cobra are other lesser known programming languages that use indentation syntax. Haskell uses it to some degree.
When I first saw Python and indentation syntax some 15 years ago, I thought: How clever... and immediately got used to it. Some don't and never get over it. Some get the same feeling with Lisp, but I didn't, even though I acknowledge the arguments. It's a preference.
I think everyone learns quickly to pay attention to indentation settings in Python. I make sure that mine converts tabs to spaces and that tabs are always visible so that there is no trip up when editing code from other people. I use autoformat a lot in languages like Java but don't in Python. So I never ran into that problem. Since one does frequent runs with Python code, my editor just saves whenever I hit run. So I never needed a separate timed (if that is what you meant) autosave.
> And to tie it all together, the.Net Runtime is a natural evolution of VBRUNxx.DLL
The.Net runtime was a complete break from VBRUNxx.DLL. Most VB6 users felt as much and many refused to move for a long time. C# did have a strong Delphi influence since Anders Hejlsberg is/was the architect of both.
Wrong? You mean the ISP YOU subscribed gave you that service. The town I am in has about 17 small ISPs. And no, the bandwidth is always steady as promised. The only thing in common is that throttling is indeed to 512 kbps for the low-end plan, but that is definitely after 30GB - I checked with vnstat.
The top plan is 30mbps at $15. Throttles to 3 mbps after 100GB.
A month ago, I checked the BSNL plans in India; BSNL is the state owned telecom entity (vs. Airtel and Idea which are private entities). There were many interesting plans.
This is the most interesting frugal plan I found - 500 MB for $1.50, expires in 12 months. The plans are quite flexible. The $1.50 plan gets you 1 GB, if the expiry date is set to 1 month instead. There is one for 25 cents - gets you 80 MB with 2 day expiry. You can buy these plans at the counter of many small stores in a minute - Pay the money and tell them your mobile number. They just dial in the refill.
Cable Internet starts at $8 for 2 mbps with bandwidth throttling after 30 GB. Cable TV costs $3. So Internet video is less attractive. Netflix recently launched, but perhaps won't catch on since it costs about the same as US.
So yeah, Facebook wasn't doing much and Internet and critical service access is already very affordable for anyone who can buy a smartphone at $50. Given that this is still a developing country, the enthusiastic online activism for network neutrality was interesting to watch - saying no to short term free stuff, in interest of long term ideals.
OK then. I stand corrected. I really appreciate you taking the time. I was recalling from a conference/podcast from some years ago where an MS rep was speaking on how surprised all the Python folks were at a Python conference at the very idea of code-completion for Python. But it was unfair for me to talk of it as if it was an official pitch because I have seen no docs to that claims. That ticked me off then. Perhaps it was just one rep speaking off the cuff.
I will take a look at the tooling again. Back then, I was comparing it to PyDev and WingIDE (with much earlier and more basic use of code completion use dating back to PythonWin IDE and SPE). These days, I am on Spyder (for better IPython integration for interactive work, than for code-completion) and PyCharm. I haven't given a look at MS tools for Python in at least 5 years.
So why has no one mentioned RStudio yet? We just seem to be talking R. This is pretty much a clone of RStudio so far, with *slightly* better code-completion. MS tools for open languages rarely give anything I can't get elsewhere, just the same stuff over their own tooling. I remember them pitching Python tools as if they invented the first IDE with code-completion for Python while I had been using tools with equivalent functionality for 10 years prior.
I stopped disliking Java since 1.5. People can use Scala and Groovy if Java bothers them so much and still benefit from the ecosystem. They should work on Android as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Rapes in India: about 37,000 per year for a country of 1.26 BILLION. Press reports it as a rape every 20 min.
Rapes in US: 1,200,000 per year for a country the fourth of India according to CDC. No one talks about it.
Obviously, BOTH are under-reporting.
If you take a large country as India or China, every measure will be automatically large. Talking absolute numbers rather than per capita adjusted numbers is either dumb or malicious journalism. During the Delhi rape coverage, not one newspaper I read talked about per capita rates.
Let's be realistic. For a poor country, the rights of women in India are no worse than similar poor countries. At least in India, the public holds large protests over rape. Don't see that much elsewhere.
You are entirely looking at India with US legal system lenses. In India, the political system is not dominated by lawyers i.e. the politicians don't have a legal background as much as they do in US. Public prosecutors don't routinely run for elections and hence have an interest in promoting themselves as "tough on crime". AFAIK, terrifying the defendant with disproportionate punitive threats and forcing him/her into a plea deal is not an issue in India. There, the problems are more around the legal process taking simply too long due to inadequately funded institutions, outdated laws and generally a less agile system (poorer country), rather than an overzealous application.
That said, both India *and US* do have arbitrary application of law - due to different reasons and cause different sets of problems. Corruption is of course more in India, as you would expect in any country with its per capita income. Yet, I'd say that far... far more people are put in prison in US due to arbitrary application of law than in India, even though the due process is said to be much better in US.
All this is pointless hyperventilating by people who understand little about India.
India is one the LEAST punitive countries in the world. It does not believe that putting people in the prison is a solution for anything – even for things most of us would agree that people should be put into prison for.
India’s incarceration rate is 33 (one of the lowest in the world) per 100,000
US incarceration rate is 698 (highest incarceration rate in the world, if you ignore Seychelles) per 100,000
Have you ever heard of anyone put in prison in India for downloading a file? The law has been around since 1957. I am not even sure if for-profit bootleggers who sell media in India have been in prison for more than a few weeks. This is just some tech-ignorant government bureaucrat getting carried away. If a 0.01% of Indians tweet about it, the warning will be edited to something realistic. This has been the pattern about most India alarmist articles on Slashdot.
Already there. Cheapest mobile data plan in India is $0.1.
http://www.bsnl.in/opencms/bsn...
If you think not letting Apple open a few stores, unless they sell a few goods from India in return, is comparable to the utter and complete destruction of an entire civilization's economic status in the world during the colonial era, in the guise of free (which it was not) markets, you are completely unread of world history outside the western perspective, if not the remnants of the cold-war era propaganda perspective, that too in a rather shallow sense. This has nothing to do with Trump or whatever is his message. I am talking history, and its consequences on policy, not pandering politics and demagogues. Read at least one book on the devastation of colonialism and force-imposed free trade on India. Until you do, you won't get this. Yes, I can hear myself talk; not sure you can.
You are ignoring the fact that India was colonized and used as nothing but as a market for centuries and sucked dry. Those scars will take a long while to heal and those are lessons not easily forgotten. The word "Free Trade" has a different meaning to an Indian (as well as to those who also endured the Opium Wars and the Black Ships incident in their history). They had completely different experiences with it in their history. This is a rational strategy from those experiences.
Likewise the idea of protectionism has cold war era connotations in US; not so in India. It was a necessarily strategy for India to protect itself from neo-colonialism when its capacity to compete was never allowed to mature. India started rolling back these defenses (which naturally hold back growth - security vs. speed) gradually once it felt its industries and services are maturing and have a chance to actually compete in a free market. But that is a gradual process rather than a binary choice.
> Why should the people of one country be privileged over the people of any other? Just because they were born there?
That said, I generally agree with the sentiment. But even the majority in US don't agree with that.
https://xkcd.com/384/
This is a simple general rule: When someone merely points to the expert consensus (with respect to any mainstream science), without any innovation, they do not need to be challenged on their personal expertise. People who do refute an expert consensus are those who need to be challenged on their expertise and are asked to submit their evidence to peer review.
I don't need to be a biologist to say that evolution is real. If I say it isn't, THEN my credentials come into question.
Great quote. A comprehensive exploration of the topic is in: Nothing to Hide by Daniel J. Solove, a legal scholar.
Husbands.
There are logical fallacies here. If we can simulate something in "some" way, we do not necessarily have to assume that we will eventually end up with perfect simulations, even with infinite time. Or that ever growing size of simulations will have to necessarily culminate in universe scale simulations. This optimism is along the idea of Victorian assumptions of progress or along the lines of Cartesian optimism before it was tempered with Lockean empiricism. There will usually be previously unanticipated hard stops... like the speed of light.
Tyson is obviously a master of his subject and I am not a physicist and I don't understand these simulation theories in their native form. But this summary makes it sound like we are getting ahead of ourselves with assumptions.
To some extent, sure. But the medium is the message
As explored in Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Massage
Yes, its the standard argument. But densely populated areas in US like New York still don't seem to have the same Internet value as Japan.
> Indentation weakens the language.
The goal of a syntax is to, first and foremost, promote human readability. Python philosophy is to discourage clever code. Many, like myself, find consistent indentation and low character noise to be more readable. If you don't, that's fine. It is a preference. If you like complete flexibility, go with Lisp (or Hy in Python), since its minimal syntax gives maximal power of expression - we all should, if it was all about power. But we don't. I prefer reading Python than Lisp, most of the time. We all like a balance between a helpful syntax and maximal expressive power. Where we individually draw the line differs.
> Everyone formats their code but forcing it makes for a less powerful language, so why do such idiocy?
It's not idiocy; it was clever and it was a well-considered choice. We already indent anyway. So why not codify that into syntactic rules, thereby making the language more clean to read? Python tries to get rid of needless punctuation. We write single line expressions/statements most of the time. So Python (and many others) makes them the default by making the semi-colon optional and instead provides a back-slash if you want multi-line code.
I used/tried every major modern language. I find Python to be the simplest and cleanest to read (many functional languages do a good job as well). That's a preference of course. I like Boo over C# because it has a Python-like indentation syntax. YMMV.
Nimrod, Delight, Converge and Cobra are other lesser known programming languages that use indentation syntax. Haskell uses it to some degree.
When I first saw Python and indentation syntax some 15 years ago, I thought: How clever... and immediately got used to it. Some don't and never get over it. Some get the same feeling with Lisp, but I didn't, even though I acknowledge the arguments. It's a preference.
I think everyone learns quickly to pay attention to indentation settings in Python. I make sure that mine converts tabs to spaces and that tabs are always visible so that there is no trip up when editing code from other people. I use autoformat a lot in languages like Java but don't in Python. So I never ran into that problem. Since one does frequent runs with Python code, my editor just saves whenever I hit run. So I never needed a separate timed (if that is what you meant) autosave.
> And to tie it all together, the .Net Runtime is a natural evolution of VBRUNxx.DLL
The .Net runtime was a complete break from VBRUNxx.DLL. Most VB6 users felt as much and many refused to move for a long time.
C# did have a strong Delphi influence since Anders Hejlsberg is/was the architect of both.
> And python has this issue with obligatory indentation.
For Python fans, indentation is a feature, not an issue. Either you like it or you don't. I like it myself.
Actually, I checked just now, and the same ISP now offers upto 10mbps (same cap) at $8. Prices vary by location for the same ISP.
Wrong? You mean the ISP YOU subscribed gave you that service.
The town I am in has about 17 small ISPs. And no, the bandwidth is always steady as promised. The only thing in common is that throttling is indeed to 512 kbps for the low-end plan, but that is definitely after 30GB - I checked with vnstat.
The top plan is 30mbps at $15. Throttles to 3 mbps after 100GB.
A month ago, I checked the BSNL plans in India; BSNL is the state owned telecom entity (vs. Airtel and Idea which are private entities). There were many interesting plans.
This is the most interesting frugal plan I found - 500 MB for $1.50, expires in 12 months.
The plans are quite flexible. The $1.50 plan gets you 1 GB, if the expiry date is set to 1 month instead.
There is one for 25 cents - gets you 80 MB with 2 day expiry. You can buy these plans at the counter of many small stores in a minute - Pay the money and tell them your mobile number. They just dial in the refill.
Here is a page with somewhat different plans.
http://www.bsnlteleservices.co...
The cheapest plan here costs just a dime.
Cable Internet starts at $8 for 2 mbps with bandwidth throttling after 30 GB.
Cable TV costs $3. So Internet video is less attractive. Netflix recently launched, but perhaps won't catch on since it costs about the same as US.
So yeah, Facebook wasn't doing much and Internet and critical service access is already very affordable for anyone who can buy a smartphone at $50. Given that this is still a developing country, the enthusiastic online activism for network neutrality was interesting to watch - saying no to short term free stuff, in interest of long term ideals.
Never mind - Just found out 355/113 is also a well known approximation.
Pi already has a well known approximation - 22/7 (1 in 800).
Wait!!! Are you quoting fictional characters from video games?!
OK then. I stand corrected. I really appreciate you taking the time. I was recalling from a conference/podcast from some years ago where an MS rep was speaking on how surprised all the Python folks were at a Python conference at the very idea of code-completion for Python. But it was unfair for me to talk of it as if it was an official pitch because I have seen no docs to that claims. That ticked me off then. Perhaps it was just one rep speaking off the cuff.
I will take a look at the tooling again. Back then, I was comparing it to PyDev and WingIDE (with much earlier and more basic use of code completion use dating back to PythonWin IDE and SPE). These days, I am on Spyder (for better IPython integration for interactive work, than for code-completion) and PyCharm. I haven't given a look at MS tools for Python in at least 5 years.
So why has no one mentioned RStudio yet? We just seem to be talking R. This is pretty much a clone of RStudio so far, with *slightly* better code-completion. MS tools for open languages rarely give anything I can't get elsewhere, just the same stuff over their own tooling. I remember them pitching Python tools as if they invented the first IDE with code-completion for Python while I had been using tools with equivalent functionality for 10 years prior.
I stopped disliking Java since 1.5. People can use Scala and Groovy if Java bothers them so much and still benefit from the ecosystem. They should work on Android as well.