"Truth" is always the produce of a social process. Peer reviews for scientific journals, "professional regard" (your words) for professionnaly edited encyclopedia, public review for Wikipedia. As an indirect receiver of information, you can't say that one kind of "truth" is absolute (the scientist who did the actual discovery or reproduced the experience can probably), you can only discuss what kind of social process is more likely to result in information matching facts and actual occurences.
You may not like the social process that produces wikipedia, but it has been shown multiple times not to result in more factual errors than found in professional encyclopedia, at least for subjects which can be checked against facts and are not in themselves matters of opinion (as would be the case for JFK's assassination by the way, as no one seems to know who has the definitive facts on this issue).
> I know, it's anathema to free-market idealists, but the end result is... better, cheaper service.
No it's not, the end result is a state run monopoly, usually not so nice do deal with. Competition is good which is why there are regulations against unfair trading resulting in competitor death.
One reason may be that Python's startup time is an order of magnitude slower that a shell's, and sometimes it does matter, even for scripts of much more than 10 lines.
The probability of any randomly selected Muslim being desperate to blow up a plane full of people is trivially similar to the probability of any randomly selected Hasidic Jew/Quaker/Pastafarian/Botanist/whatever being desperate to blow up a plane full of people.
Independantly of any consequence that should be drawn or not from the fact, this probability, estimated on past events (number of occurrence/total number of events) is not "trivially similar", it is hugely higher.
I own a Sony prs-505 (e-ink) and a Nokia 770 (backlit pda-like), and the Sony only has one thing for it: you can read it in full daylight. Otherwise the Nokia is better on all points: faster page switches, internet access, no need for an external light when reading in the bed (appreciated by spouse), more compact and probably stronger, open-source better reading software and less need for format conversions. The Sony screen certainly looks nicer but I don't find it makes a big difference in actual use.
> Sarkozy is talking sense here. Do law enforcement the old fashioned way -
> by finding ^^^ and punishing ^^^ Fixed for you and missing from the law: "judging"
> the people actually breaking the law. Yeah.
The right way to handle this situation is to unbundle the training. This way, the consumer can buy the boat at the cheapest, then purchase whatever amount of training they need (possibly none if they are experienced). Prices and quality for the training will also be subject to competition. Consumer wins on all points.
I agree that calling it a catastrophe is pushing it. But people are complaining not just because they had to wait but because the queues can't be explained by the high turnout. They put one machine in places where there had been 4 voting booths previously. And voting with the machine is *not* faster. The problem with this is that some people probably just gave up (which had no effect on overall turnout *this time* because the machines are still sort of experimental and installed in few places).
I'll just translate the last phrase from the article: A 20 h 45, les derniers électeurs du bureau 5 font encore la queue derrière la grille. Les derniers ne verront pas le soleil se coucher. At 8 45 PM [poll supposedly closed at 8], the last voters from poll place 5 are still queuing behind the closed doors. The last ones will not see the sun set.
If you have a Trojan on your computer you are going to lose your secrets anyway, because, surprise, your private key is probably stored on the disk drive, and you use the keyboard to type passwords, etc. etc. Could someone explain how a local attack can be big news ?
Of course, reading my own definition, this would justify Afghans and Iraqis seeking to expel the Americans and the British, just as it justified the French Resistance in WW2, and the American Colonists in the 1770s.
And the natives from north america struggling against the colonists who were to become the champions of freedom and anti-colonialism just a little later. Americans have a slight tendancy to forget that they are themselves colonial people who invaded and populated a foreign country. Is success really a justification for everything, are the only bad colonialists those who were finally expelled by the colonized?
Perception is reality, and if your customers don't experience quality in your product throughout, they may conclude there is lack of quality everywhere. A visual bug seen by all your customers might do more damage to your program's reputation than a rarely occurring crashing bug.
Mind your icons, not your buffer overflows. Great! Will exploits follow the Vista guidelines too ?
> (One of the funniest Unix debacles I experienced was debugging a groups application -- they were moving files around and losing all but one each processing cycle... turned out they were remote copying from one Unix that had 14 (or more, can't remember) char limit on file names to an old SunOS system that allowed only 11. The remote copy that moved files from one system to the other for subsequent processing did so without complaint, the receiving side silently truncated the incoming files -- which were identical in name through 11 chars... essentially copying the incoming files over and over again on top of the same file... Sigh and sheesh!)
All Unix systems I ever worked with (since 1986, version 7) had at least 14 characters file names.
SunOS3 (around 1985) was using the Berkeley FFS and this had long file names (255 chars I think).
I don't know about SunOS 1 and 2 but I don't think that these have ever been very common, and in any case, they quite probably supported 14 character file names as this was the original Unix standard. So there was probably some other problem involved...
> Women just tend to become more and more picky with whom they mate. > And while things like good eye sight become less important, other > things take their place. Things like having lots of money, social > skills/social network, an athletic body, cooking skills and so on.
It's not whom mates with whom which is important. The decisive factor is how many children you have. To know how selection is at work today, you have to correlate 'number of children' with the other factors. While it is quite probable that 'rich people' or 'athletic bodies' mate more, it remains to be seen if they have more children in the end, the two things being more or less independant thanks to contraception.
One of the most common causes of crashes for C/C++ applications is quite obviously memory management (bad allocs/deallocs, overflows, etc.)
You can get very much more secure in this area if you use STL tools as much as possible, and let strings and containers handle the memory allocation issues.
You gain a lot of time, more readable code, and also faster one in most cases because the STL algorithms are so highly optimized (I've more or less renounced trying to outsmart the STL with hand-crafted code...)
Reducing the number of explicit 'new' calls in the program is, in my experience a significant factor in stability.
MySQL, for example, is STL-based, and I think this is one of the reasons why it has been extremely stable since the beginning (at a time when it was not obvious to make this choice because of compiler issues).
Another positive aspect is that, because containers are so easy to use, you don't hesitate doing complicated data management tasks that might seem undauntable when hand-coded. On this aspect, this makes C++ closer to interpreted languages with, for example, ready-made associative arrays and automatic memory management.
Well, between the copyright madness and the private copy tax that we're paying on all blank media, I really can't see why I should feel bad about downloading copyrighted material.
So, as we don't seem to have a democratic way to vote against this, let's go protest it on emule...
For your information, in France as elsewhere, the fermentation phase of wine brewing is done in large containers (inox or wood or cement vats).
The wine is only transferred to casks when the fermentation is done.
The period while the wine stays in casks is called elevage (can't remember the english term), and aims at refining the wine taste before bottling (this can last up to a few years). Not all wines go through a cask elevage.
There are a few cases of fermentation in casks, but they are truely the exception.
"France gets over 75% of their power from cheap nuclear energy"
This is wrong. France gets 75/80% of its ELECTRICAL power from nuclear. Very different. Nuclear is actually relatively marginal in the overall balance.
And we're not monkeys by the way, though I do like cheese.
This is wrong. France generates about 80% of its electrical power from nuclear.
Electrical power is 20-40% of total power consumption, depending how you count.
This means that nuclear is actually a relatively small factor (15-30%) in the whole equation. France is heavily dependant on fossil fuels, like everybody else. The ambiguity is carefully maintained by EDF, the power company and main nuclear lobby. You only ever hear that 80% of electricity comes from nuclear plants.
Another interesting fact about nuclear power is that the reserves in natural uranium are not forecast to last much longer than fossil fuels at the current production level. Meaning that we simply cannot replace fossil fuels with conventional nuclear plants, the resources would not last long. I think that fast breeder reactors would overcome this but some people think that they are not a great idea either.
Source for the figures: French CEA (Commissariat a l'energie Atomique) report on energy, 2003. CEA is not really a nuclear power opponent...
I was strongly in favor of nuclear power before coming across these numbers. Now, I'm just perplex, we really don't seem to have any solution whatsoever to the power generation problem.
Apparently, the virus is modified in 2 different ways:
- It will only reproduce in cancer cells: it would be "preferably" replication-restricted to cancer cells.
- It is better at killing cells (overexpress an adenovirus death protein) = it's not the cold it's the plague.
There is not much in the article that explains that the 2 modifications are inseparable.
So what happens if this very contagious virous mutates to get rid of the cancer-link but keep the enhanced cell-killing ability ?
I would like to be very sure that this has been well taken care of, but, nothing in the article says so.
As quite usual when reading a genetic engineering article, I'm more scared than thrilled.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because "stupid consumer shit" was there looong before WiFi ?
"Truth" is always the produce of a social process. Peer reviews for scientific journals, "professional regard" (your words) for professionnaly edited encyclopedia, public review for Wikipedia. As an indirect receiver of information, you can't say that one kind of "truth" is absolute (the scientist who did the actual discovery or reproduced the experience can probably), you can only discuss what kind of social process is more likely to result in information matching facts and actual occurences.
You may not like the social process that produces wikipedia, but it has been shown multiple times not to result in more factual errors than found in professional encyclopedia, at least for subjects which can be checked against facts and are not in themselves matters of opinion (as would be the case for JFK's assassination by the way, as no one seems to know who has the definitive facts on this issue).
> I know, it's anathema to free-market idealists, but the end result is... better, cheaper service.
No it's not, the end result is a state run monopoly, usually not so nice do deal with. Competition is good which is why there are regulations against unfair trading resulting in competitor death.
One reason may be that Python's startup time is an order of magnitude slower that a shell's, and sometimes it does matter, even for scripts of much more than 10 lines.
Independantly of any consequence that should be drawn or not from the fact, this probability, estimated on past events (number of occurrence/total number of events) is not "trivially similar", it is hugely higher.
I own a Sony prs-505 (e-ink) and a Nokia 770 (backlit pda-like), and the Sony only has one thing for it: you can read it in full daylight. Otherwise the Nokia is better on all points: faster page switches, internet access, no need for an external light when reading in the bed (appreciated by spouse), more compact and probably stronger, open-source better reading software and less need for format conversions. The Sony screen certainly looks nicer but I don't find it makes a big difference in actual use.
> Sarkozy is talking sense here. Do law enforcement the old fashioned way -
> by finding ^^^ and punishing
^^^ Fixed for you and missing from the law: "judging"
> the people actually breaking the law.
Yeah.
Macintosh ?
The right way to handle this situation is to unbundle the training. This way, the consumer can buy the boat at the cheapest, then purchase whatever amount of training they need (possibly none if they are experienced). Prices and quality for the training will also be subject to competition. Consumer wins on all points.
I agree that calling it a catastrophe is pushing it. But people are complaining not just because they had to wait but because the queues can't be explained by the high turnout. They put one machine in places where there had been 4 voting booths previously. And voting with the machine is *not* faster. The problem with this is that some people probably just gave up (which had no effect on overall turnout *this time* because the machines are still sort of experimental and installed in few places).
No mainstream media. Yeah Right.3 6-900258@51-898967,0.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-823448,
It's not the parties who polled badly which complain, it's the electors. I am a Sarkosy elector (polled nice, thanks), and I can tell you I'm not happy with the queuing.
I'll just translate the last phrase from the article:
A 20 h 45, les derniers électeurs du bureau 5 font encore la queue derrière la grille. Les derniers ne verront pas le soleil se coucher.
At 8 45 PM [poll supposedly closed at 8], the last voters from poll place 5 are still queuing behind the closed doors. The last ones will not see the sun set.
Yes, not novel either. Unix kernel 'struct buf's have been on multiple lists for the last 30 years or so :)
If you have a Trojan on your computer you are going to lose your secrets anyway, because, surprise, your private key is probably stored on the disk drive, and you use the keyboard to type passwords, etc. etc. Could someone explain how a local attack can be big news ?
And the natives from north america struggling against the colonists who were to become the champions of freedom and anti-colonialism just a little later. Americans have a slight tendancy to forget that they are themselves colonial people who invaded and populated a foreign country. Is success really a justification for everything, are the only bad colonialists those who were finally expelled by the colonized?
From the article:
Mind your icons, not your buffer overflows. Great! Will exploits follow the Vista guidelines too ?
> (One of the funniest Unix debacles I experienced was debugging a groups application -- they were moving files around and losing all but one each processing cycle... turned out they were remote copying from one Unix that had 14 (or more, can't remember) char limit on file names to an old SunOS system that allowed only 11. The remote copy that moved files from one system to the other for subsequent processing did so without complaint, the receiving side silently truncated the incoming files -- which were identical in name through 11 chars... essentially copying the incoming files over and over again on top of the same file... Sigh and sheesh!)
...
All Unix systems I ever worked with (since 1986, version 7) had at least 14 characters file names.
SunOS3 (around 1985) was using the Berkeley FFS and this had long file names (255 chars I think).
I don't know about SunOS 1 and 2 but I don't think that these have ever been very common, and in any case, they quite probably supported 14 character file names as this was the original Unix standard. So there was probably some other problem involved
> Women just tend to become more and more picky with whom they mate.
> And while things like good eye sight become less important, other
> things take their place. Things like having lots of money, social
> skills/social network, an athletic body, cooking skills and so on.
It's not whom mates with whom which is important. The decisive factor is how many children you have. To know how selection is at work today, you have to correlate 'number of children' with the other factors. While it is quite probable that 'rich people' or 'athletic bodies' mate more, it remains to be seen if they have more children in the end, the two things being more or less independant thanks to contraception.
One of the most common causes of crashes for C/C++ applications is quite obviously memory management (bad allocs/deallocs, overflows, etc.)
You can get very much more secure in this area if you use STL tools as much as possible, and let strings and containers handle the memory allocation issues.
You gain a lot of time, more readable code, and also faster one in most cases because the STL algorithms are so highly optimized (I've more or less renounced trying to outsmart the STL with hand-crafted code...)
Reducing the number of explicit 'new' calls in the program is, in my experience a significant factor in stability.
MySQL, for example, is STL-based, and I think this is one of the reasons why it has been extremely stable since the beginning (at a time when it was not obvious to make this choice because of compiler issues).
Another positive aspect is that, because containers are so easy to use, you don't hesitate doing complicated data management tasks that might seem undauntable when hand-coded. On this aspect, this makes C++ closer to interpreted languages with, for example, ready-made associative arrays and automatic memory management.
JF
There would be no open-source projects without gcc.
Well, between the copyright madness and the private copy tax that we're paying on all blank media, I really can't see why I should feel bad about downloading copyrighted material.
So, as we don't seem to have a democratic way to vote against this, let's go protest it on emule...
For your information, in France as elsewhere, the fermentation phase of wine brewing is done in large containers (inox or wood or cement vats).
The wine is only transferred to casks when the fermentation is done.
The period while the wine stays in casks is called elevage (can't remember the english term), and aims at refining the wine taste before bottling (this can last up to a few years). Not all wines go through a cask elevage.
There are a few cases of fermentation in casks, but they are truely the exception.
"France gets over 75% of their power from cheap nuclear energy"
This is wrong. France gets 75/80% of its ELECTRICAL power from nuclear. Very different. Nuclear is actually relatively marginal in the overall balance.
And we're not monkeys by the way, though I do like cheese.
This is wrong. France generates about 80% of its electrical power from nuclear.
Electrical power is 20-40% of total power consumption, depending how you count.
This means that nuclear is actually a relatively small factor (15-30%) in the whole equation. France is heavily dependant on fossil fuels, like everybody else. The ambiguity is carefully maintained by EDF, the power company and main nuclear lobby. You only ever hear that 80% of electricity comes from nuclear plants.
Another interesting fact about nuclear power is that the reserves in natural uranium are not forecast to last much longer than fossil fuels at the current production level. Meaning that we simply cannot replace fossil fuels with conventional nuclear plants, the resources would not last long. I think that fast breeder reactors would overcome this but some people think that they are not a great idea either.
Source for the figures: French CEA (Commissariat a l'energie Atomique) report on energy, 2003. CEA is not really a nuclear power opponent...
I was strongly in favor of nuclear power before coming across these numbers. Now, I'm just perplex, we really don't seem to have any solution whatsoever to the power generation problem.
Apparently, the virus is modified in 2 different ways:
- It will only reproduce in cancer cells: it would be "preferably" replication-restricted to cancer cells.
- It is better at killing cells (overexpress an adenovirus death protein) = it's not the cold it's the plague.
There is not much in the article that explains that the 2 modifications are inseparable.
So what happens if this very contagious virous mutates to get rid of the cancer-link but keep the enhanced cell-killing ability ?
I would like to be very sure that this has been well taken care of, but, nothing in the article says so.
As quite usual when reading a genetic engineering article, I'm more scared than thrilled.
Good cooling does not only allow overclocking. It also (and mainly) improves the life expectancy for the processor.
The probability of failure increases a lot with temperature, and the effect becomes notable at relatively low temperature values (50-60 C).
See for example http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~kw/papers/thermal.pdf
but there are certainly many other references.