...the Big Bang theory was was proposed by a Catholic Priest.
I hadn't heard that before, can you link a source? I do know that atheists vehemently opposed that theory, because until then the accepted theory was the "solid state universe" that always existed and exists forever, and the big bang theory postulated that it had a beginning and will have an end.
The only magic that exists is David Copperfield trickery, and I say that as a Christian. Miracles aren't magic, they are occurrences with incredibly low probabilities (like several that have happened to me, including my surviving an "unsurvivable" auto wreck).
The bible doesn't contradict science, although many religious people unfortunately do.
How many languages have "functional programming features" without including the most important feature of functional programming: true determinism with immutable variables, hence easier testing and less debugging?
Certainly not Access, I hated that damned program. dBase, FoxPro, NOMAD were all easy to maintain, Access was a pain in the ass. It's one of the reasons I love being retired.
They are great for things like whipping up a quick program because you need some numbers and a quick report for this afternoon, but they fail when you have to use the resulting application on a day-to-day basis.
That wasn't my experience at all, except for Access. I wrote very large applications in dBase and FoxPro that I used for years.
One application I wrote for a Chicago hospital in Clipper (Clipper produced executables from xBase code) had been in use for six months when they had a problem; large amounts of data had gone missing.
I looked at both code and data and couldn't figure it out, but saw from a hidden entry date field that there was no data for a two month period. They gasped when I told them than and they immediately saw the cause of the problem -- that was when an intern was supposed to be entering data but obviously didn't and thought he or she could get away with it.
They used that application for a couple of years after that with nothing but praise for the app.
Take a look at evolution. Sexual reproduction has so many hurdles to jump through before a beneficial mutation could find a toehold. In asexual reproduction individuals can rapidly and radically adjust to the changing environment and pass on the beneficial mutations to the next generations.
The late writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov would have disagreed with you vehemently. Asimov held a PhD in biochemistry and did cancer research at Boston University.
The above linked short sci-fi story was originally titled "Playboy and the Slime God".
Worse is better is basically the KISS principle for software.
Huh? It seems the opposite of the KISS principle. Making my old code no longer work is hardly keeping it simple. Most modern, ugly web design is as confusing and complicated and bloated as they can make it.
I always followed the KISS principle, it's the easiest way to write bug-free code. Hard to write a buggy version of "hello, world".
It's always been that way. Fewer than 1% of Americans are illiterate, but something like 97% are aliterate. When I was in school, very few kids wore glasses; no computers or cell phones and the TV was across the room. Reading (or any other close up work) at a young age makes you nearsighted.
We had FoxPro 6 and Windows 98, when XP hit our desks, FoxPro no longer worked. They made me use (ugh!) MS Access.
So I have a few dozen Access apps when they "upgraded" to Office '03, and not a single one would run. Access had become a completely different program with completely different code and was completely incompatible with Access '98. I had to rewrite every God damned program!
OTOH the NOMAD mainframe databases seldom had glitches. I'd been a PC kind of guy, but NOMAD on the mainframe and Microsoft's stupid, anti-user bullshit started changing my mind.
Since when has slashdot ever been news? Its masthead may be "news for nerds" but its news is seldom very new. It's about seeing one's fellow nerds' views on that topic.
Plants don't need sunlight, they just need light. Scientists and engineers (Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it) who have been in space say they see nothing unrealistic about Andy Wier's The Martian. Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it. You can light your plants with electric lighting. The problem would be how to generate the electricity.
Well it was about remembering a photo so I'd say it's more about recall than learning
Indeed; I was always terrible at memorization, but when I learned a thing, I KNEW that thing. Memorizing Ohm's Law doesn't mean you know what it means. Understanding is far more than memorization.
My reaction was "well DUH!" as well. This is simply scientific confirmation of the obvious. Now, had the study stated that curiosity had no effect on learning, that would have been a startling finding.
But that's how science works; something that is blindingly obvious is often disproven. In this case it wasn't.
The shiny side of the foil needs to be on the outside of the hat. The problem here isn't government intervention, rather a lack of same. The problem is corporate sociopathy and lack of standards. The standards should have been set up before anybody started building equipment. Where government fell down was not mandating that. Not a surfeit of regulations but a lack of them.
And had there been a monopoly there would have been no compatibility problems, but would have caused worse problems.
I tried Lo but it wouldn't do full justification, so it was a no-go for me; I need to format printed books. Oo seems to work like any other Windows program, except it loses it's "last used files" list in the start menu whenever it's upgraded (they really need to fix that).
Overrated?? Asimov wrote over 500 books, both fiction and nonfiction. His stories were between the covers of all the science fiction magazines every month. And the trilogy you rate so poorly won a Hugo award (the most respected science fiction award there is, with the possible exception of the Nebula). He, Heinlein, and Clarke are are often considered to be the "Big Three" of science fiction authors.
Sheesh, judge the author of over 500 books on three. That's pathetic.
Oh, and in case you didn't figure it out, I've been a huge Asimov fan for fifty years (as well as Heinlein and Niven and most of the rest). I didn't care for Clarke, but I'd not call him unimpressive, I just didn't care for his style. If I cared for that style I'd probably love his work, but I don't.
Couldn't agree more. Not restoring the (useful) start menu for W8, even as an option, goes to show how much they really care about it's customers.
You're not their customer unless you're buying boxed sets of their OS and apps to install on your home brew machine. Acer, Dell, etc. are their customers. You didn't buy that OS from Microsoft, the OEM did. You bought it from him, and he's the one you should complain to.
I'm hoping W7 is it for me, but I'd said that XP was it; I've been mostly using Linux for a decade. Then about 3 years ago I bought this notebook and have been too lazy to install kubuntu (which I had on the older one that had been stolen). Despite its annoyances W7's still there.
Slashdot Mirror
People really did turn into pillars of salt?
People can be perceived to have been. Witnesses see what they see, never the entirety of what happens.
People can actually die for several days and then be reborn?
The raised dead weren't reborn, they woke up from a coma so deep that nobody at the time could tell it from death.
Virgin's [sic] can actually give birth?
It was thought that parthenogenesis was impossible in sharks, too, but a virgin shark gave birth a couple of years ago. BTW, are you a greengrocer?
No human is infallible.
Because nobody can understand something they don't want to understand.
We have not reached "fulfilment", or indeed any kind of end point to the journey.
And who is saying we have, except your burning straw man?
...the Big Bang theory was was proposed by a Catholic Priest.
I hadn't heard that before, can you link a source? I do know that atheists vehemently opposed that theory, because until then the accepted theory was the "solid state universe" that always existed and exists forever, and the big bang theory postulated that it had a beginning and will have an end.
The only magic that exists is David Copperfield trickery, and I say that as a Christian. Miracles aren't magic, they are occurrences with incredibly low probabilities (like several that have happened to me, including my surviving an "unsurvivable" auto wreck).
The bible doesn't contradict science, although many religious people unfortunately do.
Is there a difference between trolling and insanity? The guy's off his rocker, he might be this guy. I parodied those people in Nobots.
How many languages have "functional programming features" without including the most important feature of functional programming: true determinism with immutable variables, hence easier testing and less debugging?
Certainly not Access, I hated that damned program. dBase, FoxPro, NOMAD were all easy to maintain, Access was a pain in the ass. It's one of the reasons I love being retired.
FoxPro 8, back in the late '90s.
They are great for things like whipping up a quick program because you need some numbers and a quick report for this afternoon, but they fail when you have to use the resulting application on a day-to-day basis.
That wasn't my experience at all, except for Access. I wrote very large applications in dBase and FoxPro that I used for years.
One application I wrote for a Chicago hospital in Clipper (Clipper produced executables from xBase code) had been in use for six months when they had a problem; large amounts of data had gone missing.
I looked at both code and data and couldn't figure it out, but saw from a hidden entry date field that there was no data for a two month period. They gasped when I told them than and they immediately saw the cause of the problem -- that was when an intern was supposed to be entering data but obviously didn't and thought he or she could get away with it.
They used that application for a couple of years after that with nothing but praise for the app.
Take a look at evolution. Sexual reproduction has so many hurdles to jump through before a beneficial mutation could find a toehold. In asexual reproduction individuals can rapidly and radically adjust to the changing environment and pass on the beneficial mutations to the next generations.
The late writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov would have disagreed with you vehemently. Asimov held a PhD in biochemistry and did cancer research at Boston University.
The above linked short sci-fi story was originally titled "Playboy and the Slime God".
Worse is better is basically the KISS principle for software.
Huh? It seems the opposite of the KISS principle. Making my old code no longer work is hardly keeping it simple. Most modern, ugly web design is as confusing and complicated and bloated as they can make it.
I always followed the KISS principle, it's the easiest way to write bug-free code. Hard to write a buggy version of "hello, world".
This guy is an idiot.
I certainly don't disagree there.
It's always been that way. Fewer than 1% of Americans are illiterate, but something like 97% are aliterate. When I was in school, very few kids wore glasses; no computers or cell phones and the TV was across the room. Reading (or any other close up work) at a young age makes you nearsighted.
We had FoxPro 6 and Windows 98, when XP hit our desks, FoxPro no longer worked. They made me use (ugh!) MS Access.
So I have a few dozen Access apps when they "upgraded" to Office '03, and not a single one would run. Access had become a completely different program with completely different code and was completely incompatible with Access '98. I had to rewrite every God damned program!
OTOH the NOMAD mainframe databases seldom had glitches. I'd been a PC kind of guy, but NOMAD on the mainframe and Microsoft's stupid, anti-user bullshit started changing my mind.
Since when has slashdot ever been news? Its masthead may be "news for nerds" but its news is seldom very new. It's about seeing one's fellow nerds' views on that topic.
Almost every tech site on the planet has that story and you pick the National Enquirer styled tech site?
Tsk, tsk. The submitter should be ashamed. The Register has shown itself to be completely untrustworthy.
Plants don't need sunlight, they just need light. Scientists and engineers (Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it) who have been in space say they see nothing unrealistic about Andy Wier's The Martian. Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it. You can light your plants with electric lighting. The problem would be how to generate the electricity.
Well it was about remembering a photo so I'd say it's more about recall than learning
Indeed; I was always terrible at memorization, but when I learned a thing, I KNEW that thing. Memorizing Ohm's Law doesn't mean you know what it means. Understanding is far more than memorization.
My reaction was "well DUH!" as well. This is simply scientific confirmation of the obvious. Now, had the study stated that curiosity had no effect on learning, that would have been a startling finding.
But that's how science works; something that is blindingly obvious is often disproven. In this case it wasn't.
The shiny side of the foil needs to be on the outside of the hat. The problem here isn't government intervention, rather a lack of same. The problem is corporate sociopathy and lack of standards. The standards should have been set up before anybody started building equipment. Where government fell down was not mandating that. Not a surfeit of regulations but a lack of them.
And had there been a monopoly there would have been no compatibility problems, but would have caused worse problems.
I tried Lo but it wouldn't do full justification, so it was a no-go for me; I need to format printed books. Oo seems to work like any other Windows program, except it loses it's "last used files" list in the start menu whenever it's upgraded (they really need to fix that).
Overrated?? Asimov wrote over 500 books, both fiction and nonfiction. His stories were between the covers of all the science fiction magazines every month. And the trilogy you rate so poorly won a Hugo award (the most respected science fiction award there is, with the possible exception of the Nebula). He, Heinlein, and Clarke are are often considered to be the "Big Three" of science fiction authors.
Sheesh, judge the author of over 500 books on three. That's pathetic.
Oh, and in case you didn't figure it out, I've been a huge Asimov fan for fifty years (as well as Heinlein and Niven and most of the rest). I didn't care for Clarke, but I'd not call him unimpressive, I just didn't care for his style. If I cared for that style I'd probably love his work, but I don't.
Couldn't agree more. Not restoring the (useful) start menu for W8, even as an option, goes to show how much they really care about it's customers.
You're not their customer unless you're buying boxed sets of their OS and apps to install on your home brew machine. Acer, Dell, etc. are their customers. You didn't buy that OS from Microsoft, the OEM did. You bought it from him, and he's the one you should complain to.
I'm hoping W7 is it for me, but I'd said that XP was it; I've been mostly using Linux for a decade. Then about 3 years ago I bought this notebook and have been too lazy to install kubuntu (which I had on the older one that had been stolen). Despite its annoyances W7's still there.
From the time I got Windows 7, and I could just press "start" type the first few characters of the program name and launch it
And then open the file you want to work on. Meanwhile, using the Start Menu, two clicks and your document is open inside the app.
Your method is extremely problematic with something like GIMP that has little or no keyboard use.
Don't like Start? Don't use it. But just because I don't have a use for something doesn't mean it should be abolished.