However it is the right of governments to decide what they make public and not.
Have free citizens who let themselves be governed really accepted to give their money to a group of people who don't have to tell the citizenry what they spend it on?
I bet my cousins would do some really great contracting work of an undisclosed nature for me. Send me a check, please.
We had to get up at seven o' clock the evening before to make our own skis out of wet cardboard while fighting of velociraptors with out hands tied behind our backs. Then we had to ski cross-country across snowy peaks and desert valleys to work more hours than our number system could even represent! And that's just before the lunch we didn't even get to eat.
I'd think that as zombies always come in hordes (Night of the Living Homeless &c), so they represent the mob of the working class. If vampires expose their skin to sunlight, they turn to dust, and likewise with the... "paperless administration work" of socialist governments.
Werewolves never use contraceptives or do abortions, but they do mate when they take a human form; just look at Oz and the red-haired sexy geeky wonderful Willow; *sigh*.
Where was I? Oh yeah, werewolves! They're clearly the republicans. And Libertarianism is so pie in the sky and alien to most Americans that we really, really have to try out plan A through plan H before jumping to Libertarianism.
If you can virtualize your desktop onto your cell phone, think about the possibilities. You're working at your desk and then you need to go on a trip to a different country. You "download" your desktop onto your cell phone/iPhone or whatever, and then you can keep working, and even maintain network connectivity.
Or I just pick up my laptop and put it in the bag. Now I have something with a trackpoint and a keyboard best operated by more than one finger. Oh, and it can also compile stuff reasonably fast, it can switch between applications and I can see more than four lines of code on the screen.
True, it doesn't last several days on a single battery charge. And it doesn't fit in my pocket. On the other hand, I don't run emacs and compiz on my phone these days; and the places where I only have the computer I can store in my pocket, yet want to do some computing, are rather limited.
The only benefit for me and my particular ways would be if I could sync my phone calendar with my oracle calendar at the university and my wyrd/remind calendar on my desktop and ~/todo.txt on my laptop. That'd be nice.
Other than that, I'm not sold yet. On the other hand, you said virtualization was the future, not the present;)
Cogito? I thought the whole porcelain/plumbing thing went out of fashion and everyone used straight git. And whenever you use git (which you do if you use the cogito frontend), there's of course a sha1sum.
So indeed Descartes was right: Cogito implies sum; if you use cogito, there's a sum. It's all adding up now...
How about ([012][0-9]|3[01])? That'd make it more readable. And why limit yourself to 18xx to 20xx just because there are some dates that don't exist as western society switched to the Gregorian calendar?
Btw, we didn't all do it at once. Oh yeah, great fun. Talk to Danes about 20th of February 1700, or to Frenchmen about 10th of October, 1582. You can watch the mayhem at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar.
Brief outline: Achievers want to win the game; they want all the bottles and poe souls, all 120 stars and an FC of all songs. Explorers want to know the game; they are the ones reverse engineering all the formulas describing hit probability, damage calculations, loot drop tables and so forth. Killers want to rule the game; they want to be able to kill everyone by whatever means. Socialisers just want to stay up all night and... just talk.
What you're describing is probably a mixed Killer/Achiever. Dominance and imposition is typical Killer; Superiority is also an Achiever thing--we all like to be best and what we like doing, so having the fastest Kessel run is appealing to the Achiever [although the main appeal is just having a good time].
For those of you who play(ed) magic and read Mark Rosewater's articles, you may know Timmy, Johnny and Spike. I'd be interesting to think about how much these three overlap or are independent from those four.
If I've learned anything from watching South Park, it's that instead of a bone marrow donor, you can just as well used highly concentrated cash shot directly into your veins!
Here's a guy who has single handedly changed my opinion of lawyers.
While he certainly is the prime example of fighting the good fight, and looks at bit lonesome, I wouldn't overlook the work of Eben Moglen. He's an excellent public speaker, and I remember seeing a video interview ('ish thing) where he talks about his past as a techie.
There's also Lawrence Lessig, who also shares some of the slashdot groupthink values. He's trying to change the world in a direction I'd like to see it go in. Maybe I want to go longer than him, but I still consider him a good guy and on my side.
Then there are the lawyers working for the EFF, and those talking at hacker cons. The name Cindy Cohen springs to mind.
Maybe they're not quite as much a superhero as Ray (he, not Cory, should be wearing a mask and cape:D), but they shouldn't be overlooked.
Being stressed, bashed, scarred, and abused is part of life.
True, and people should have some amount of thick skin. But...
When people stress others without caring for their well-being and (more importantly) without a valid reason and do so repeatedly, that's where it becomes chicanery and where I think it's reasonable to step in.
Whether we're talking about schoolyard bullies or corporate dragnet litigation, there should be some way of stopping chicanery. Lawsuits are not like an abusive spouse: you can't just divorce it.
Looked at the Skinnerian way, when people harass you, we need you to have some way of punishing them. Otherwise, as symes said (http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1022819&cid=25690283), you become stressed out with bad effects to your health.
Shame me for using anecdotal evidence all you want; I know what ten years of near-constant bullying can do to you. When you feel universally hated and persecuted, you don't have the most fertile ground for developing social skills; what you do have is fertile grounds for developing social anxiety.
When on top of the endless bullying your cries for help go unanswered, you learn that you can't rely on anyone when you're in need, that no one cares about your well-being, and that people in practice have the right to mistreat you however they want.
I do not want to be expected to tell my children that "this is a part of life".
because a printer problem affecting the entire office means no one can work.
I did part-time programming for a company for a year, recently. I never used the printer.
Even if your current task requires the printer, you can probably work on a future task, or a related task, or on organizing the tasks that are coming down the pipe. Or you can talk with your coworkers; share information and ideas, teach each other skills and tricks.
There are always ways in which you can make yourself valuable for your company. Some work better than others, of course, but there's no reason to busy-wait for the printer if you can move on and poll just every once in a while.
While I like the Insightful moderation, I really don't think my post deserves it unless the mod wanted to karma-hack.
Interpreting legalese is not as simple as looking up the words in a dictionary.
For starters, you need to look in a legal dictionary. When the law uses words, it seldomly uses them in the same way everyone else uses those same words.
Secondly, you need context to interpret the words in. Reading a law in the books is one thing; seeing how it plays out in the courts is a different thing. When laws contradict, which ones win? The human rights declaration (which I suspect has been codified in laws or at least has parallels in many laws) says that you're free to own property, but you're also guaranteed an education. How can you be provided with an education if the government can't tax you? As a simpler example, everyone is allowed to practice religion as they see fit, but that doesn't give them the right to perform human sacrifice [assuming killing someone is illegal even when consented].
Thirdly, the words might mean something completely different in practice than what it says in the legal dictionary. I'm told that when the danish constitution says "King", it very often in practice means the prime minister and/or the government. I'm not sure how you're to know when it means what, but law students apparently do know.
There are real numbers that no turing machine can handle.
A number is computable if there is a turing machine that on input z outputs digit number z of that number [you pick the base, the turing machine is constructed according to the base you pick].
If a computational formalism starts out by allowing any real number into the mix, it raises the question: how do you input Chaitin's constant?
You can either conclude that the model can't be realised because it would take infinite time and/or space to represent Chaitin's constant, or that something is completely wrong.
If Chaitin's constant can be finitely represented, you can (probably) construct a halting decider from it, but those are proven to not exist, so the mathematical foundation contains contradictions. See the discussion of Gödel's theorem(s) for all that wackiness:)
Whenever you download a bunch of code and want to dip your feet in it, it helps getting a good overview.
To that end, ecb-mode can be greatly helpful. It displays navigable directory trees, a list of all symbols defined in your current file, a list of recently visited files, and a compile window. Double-click anything to jump to it, quite nice to use. The symbol list is really neat; I've thrown C, python and makefiles at it, much to my satisfaction. Haskell support is a bit rudimentary, but still very useful. It says it handles perl and TeX specially [they can't be parsed without being partially executed]. I don't know how well.
If you just want to follow symbols around, use etags [use it anyways]. Run etags in your source root (zsh% etags **/*.[ch]), cursor-over a symbol, press M-. to jump to it.
Slashdot Mirror
However it is the right of governments to decide what they make public and not.
Have free citizens who let themselves be governed really accepted to give their money to a group of people who don't have to tell the citizenry what they spend it on?
I bet my cousins would do some really great contracting work of an undisclosed nature for me. Send me a check, please.
Skis? You were lucky!
We had to get up at seven o' clock the evening before to make our own skis out of wet cardboard while fighting of velociraptors with out hands tied behind our backs. Then we had to ski cross-country across snowy peaks and desert valleys to work more hours than our number system could even represent! And that's just before the lunch we didn't even get to eat.
You're talking a guy who watches Mythbusters to ogle at the lovely sexy Kari with her red hair and vegetarianism.
And I listen to the Skeptics' guide to the Universe (http://www.theskepticsguide.org) to hear the voice of the sexy veggie hippie chick Rebecca.
What OS do you think I'm going to prefer? ;)
Honestly, how would you replace him/her/it with a shell script that performed that badly?
cat firehose.fifo | while read article; do
yes "$(cat "$article")" >> frontpage.fifo &
done
I'm such a nerd.
I read "What about Kolmogorov" and instantly thought about how I could write a shortest possible program that outputs your post.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity)
We'll have to wake them up then, won't we?
We live in a time of extreme opinions.
If you believe that you're the stupidest person in the history of the universe.
If you don't believe it you're the stupidest person in the history of the universe.
Who cares if we find out that you people at Microsoft haven't done any real work since 1990... we ALREADY KNOW THAT.
Nah, their consumer OSes have seen the addition of memory protection. Beore then, Microsoft did some real doesn't-work.
...says someone who still no doubt expects to get paid for HIS job [...] take the fruits of other peoples work for free.
Canonical pays money to developers in return for them making the software better. The software that they give away.
Consider that for a while.
Really?
I'd think that as zombies always come in hordes (Night of the Living Homeless &c), so they represent the mob of the working class. If vampires expose their skin to sunlight, they turn to dust, and likewise with the... "paperless administration work" of socialist governments.
Werewolves never use contraceptives or do abortions, but they do mate when they take a human form; just look at Oz and the red-haired sexy geeky wonderful Willow; *sigh*.
Where was I? Oh yeah, werewolves! They're clearly the republicans. And Libertarianism is so pie in the sky and alien to most Americans that we really, really have to try out plan A through plan H before jumping to Libertarianism.
If you can virtualize your desktop onto your cell phone, think about the possibilities. You're working at your desk and then you need to go on a trip to a different country. You "download" your desktop onto your cell phone/iPhone or whatever, and then you can keep working, and even maintain network connectivity.
Or I just pick up my laptop and put it in the bag. Now I have something with a trackpoint and a keyboard best operated by more than one finger. Oh, and it can also compile stuff reasonably fast, it can switch between applications and I can see more than four lines of code on the screen.
True, it doesn't last several days on a single battery charge. And it doesn't fit in my pocket. On the other hand, I don't run emacs and compiz on my phone these days; and the places where I only have the computer I can store in my pocket, yet want to do some computing, are rather limited.
The only benefit for me and my particular ways would be if I could sync my phone calendar with my oracle calendar at the university and my wyrd/remind calendar on my desktop and ~/todo.txt on my laptop. That'd be nice.
Other than that, I'm not sold yet. On the other hand, you said virtualization was the future, not the present ;)
Cogito.Ergo.Sum()
Cogito? I thought the whole porcelain/plumbing thing went out of fashion and everyone used straight git. And whenever you use git (which you do if you use the cogito frontend), there's of course a sha1sum.
So indeed Descartes was right: Cogito implies sum; if you use cogito, there's a sum. It's all adding up now...
^((18|19|20)\d\d)-(0[1-9]|1[012])-(0[1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-9]|3[01])$
How about ([012][0-9]|3[01])? That'd make it more readable. And why limit yourself to 18xx to 20xx just because there are some dates that don't exist as western society switched to the Gregorian calendar?
Btw, we didn't all do it at once. Oh yeah, great fun. Talk to Danes about 20th of February 1700, or to Frenchmen about 10th of October, 1582. You can watch the mayhem at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar.
Time is fun :)
ISO Date (19th to 21st century only)
^((18|19|20)\d\d)-(0[1-9]|1[012])-(0[1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-9]|3[01])$
This regexp is ISO certified. The certificate is valid until 2009-02-31.
Part of the allure of MMORPGs is the accumulation of wealth and the feeling of dominance and superiority.
Have a look at Richard Batle's four player personality types (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test).
Brief outline: Achievers want to win the game; they want all the bottles and poe souls, all 120 stars and an FC of all songs. Explorers want to know the game; they are the ones reverse engineering all the formulas describing hit probability, damage calculations, loot drop tables and so forth. Killers want to rule the game; they want to be able to kill everyone by whatever means. Socialisers just want to stay up all night and... just talk.
What you're describing is probably a mixed Killer/Achiever. Dominance and imposition is typical Killer; Superiority is also an Achiever thing--we all like to be best and what we like doing, so having the fastest Kessel run is appealing to the Achiever [although the main appeal is just having a good time].
For those of you who play(ed) magic and read Mark Rosewater's articles, you may know Timmy, Johnny and Spike. I'd be interesting to think about how much these three overlap or are independent from those four.
</edge-wise>
I'm sure that we can all point to some "feature/bugs" that irritate us personally.
Ooh, Ooh, I got one! They collect all my search history [bad], so they can provide better targeted adwords [really bad] to my ad blocker!
You forgot "2.0"
If I've learned anything from watching South Park, it's that instead of a bone marrow donor, you can just as well used highly concentrated cash shot directly into your veins!
(12.01, Tonsil Trouble)
Here's a guy who has single handedly changed my opinion of lawyers.
While he certainly is the prime example of fighting the good fight, and looks at bit lonesome, I wouldn't overlook the work of Eben Moglen. He's an excellent public speaker, and I remember seeing a video interview ('ish thing) where he talks about his past as a techie.
There's also Lawrence Lessig, who also shares some of the slashdot groupthink values. He's trying to change the world in a direction I'd like to see it go in. Maybe I want to go longer than him, but I still consider him a good guy and on my side.
Then there are the lawyers working for the EFF, and those talking at hacker cons. The name Cindy Cohen springs to mind.
Maybe they're not quite as much a superhero as Ray (he, not Cory, should be wearing a mask and cape :D), but they shouldn't be overlooked.
Being stressed, bashed, scarred, and abused is part of life.
True, and people should have some amount of thick skin. But...
When people stress others without caring for their well-being and (more importantly) without a valid reason and do so repeatedly, that's where it becomes chicanery and where I think it's reasonable to step in.
Whether we're talking about schoolyard bullies or corporate dragnet litigation, there should be some way of stopping chicanery. Lawsuits are not like an abusive spouse: you can't just divorce it.
Looked at the Skinnerian way, when people harass you, we need you to have some way of punishing them. Otherwise, as symes said (http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1022819&cid=25690283), you become stressed out with bad effects to your health.
Shame me for using anecdotal evidence all you want; I know what ten years of near-constant bullying can do to you. When you feel universally hated and persecuted, you don't have the most fertile ground for developing social skills; what you do have is fertile grounds for developing social anxiety.
When on top of the endless bullying your cries for help go unanswered, you learn that you can't rely on anyone when you're in need, that no one cares about your well-being, and that people in practice have the right to mistreat you however they want.
I do not want to be expected to tell my children that "this is a part of life".
because a printer problem affecting the entire office means no one can work.
I did part-time programming for a company for a year, recently. I never used the printer.
Even if your current task requires the printer, you can probably work on a future task, or a related task, or on organizing the tasks that are coming down the pipe. Or you can talk with your coworkers; share information and ideas, teach each other skills and tricks.
There are always ways in which you can make yourself valuable for your company. Some work better than others, of course, but there's no reason to busy-wait for the printer if you can move on and poll just every once in a while.
While I like the Insightful moderation, I really don't think my post deserves it unless the mod wanted to karma-hack.
Interpreting legalese is not as simple as looking up the words in a dictionary.
For starters, you need to look in a legal dictionary. When the law uses words, it seldomly uses them in the same way everyone else uses those same words.
Secondly, you need context to interpret the words in. Reading a law in the books is one thing; seeing how it plays out in the courts is a different thing. When laws contradict, which ones win? The human rights declaration (which I suspect has been codified in laws or at least has parallels in many laws) says that you're free to own property, but you're also guaranteed an education. How can you be provided with an education if the government can't tax you? As a simpler example, everyone is allowed to practice religion as they see fit, but that doesn't give them the right to perform human sacrifice [assuming killing someone is illegal even when consented].
Thirdly, the words might mean something completely different in practice than what it says in the legal dictionary. I'm told that when the danish constitution says "King", it very often in practice means the prime minister and/or the government. I'm not sure how you're to know when it means what, but law students apparently do know.
There are real numbers that no turing machine can handle.
A number is computable if there is a turing machine that on input z outputs digit number z of that number [you pick the base, the turing machine is constructed according to the base you pick].
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant for an example of an uncomputable number.
If a computational formalism starts out by allowing any real number into the mix, it raises the question: how do you input Chaitin's constant?
You can either conclude that the model can't be realised because it would take infinite time and/or space to represent Chaitin's constant, or that something is completely wrong.
If Chaitin's constant can be finitely represented, you can (probably) construct a halting decider from it, but those are proven to not exist, so the mathematical foundation contains contradictions. See the discussion of Gödel's theorem(s) for all that wackiness :)
Most new plans from Professor Chaos will simply be met with "Shampoo did it".
Whenever you download a bunch of code and want to dip your feet in it, it helps getting a good overview.
To that end, ecb-mode can be greatly helpful. It displays navigable directory trees, a list of all symbols defined in your current file, a list of recently visited files, and a compile window. Double-click anything to jump to it, quite nice to use. The symbol list is really neat; I've thrown C, python and makefiles at it, much to my satisfaction. Haskell support is a bit rudimentary, but still very useful. It says it handles perl and TeX specially [they can't be parsed without being partially executed]. I don't know how well.
If you just want to follow symbols around, use etags [use it anyways]. Run etags in your source root (zsh% etags **/*.[ch]), cursor-over a symbol, press M-. to jump to it.