"I should note that Jimbo Wales ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years, has said "[F. A.] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.", and I can give dozens of more examples of where Wales's somewhat far out political biases lay."
LOL if you think Hayek is far out you've been living in a very special [1] world. Others [2] evidently disagree with you, oracular tone or not.
I've been coding for money for 41 years. I've done paradigm shifts from assembler to FORTRAN and COBOL, then Algol, thence to Pascal and C, had an unproductive affair on the side with LISP (really hard shift unless you can embed yourself in a live LISP culture, IMHO), thence to C++, picked up Perl & Python, currently working on growing a functional head using Erlang.
I'd already done the interpreted dance with UCSD Pascal, *and* the train-a-code-monkey dance with COBOL, so I just skipped Java.
I fundamentally didn't care whether or not Sun could survive MS, or not. Now we have MS with a (fully-export) standards-compliant C++, life is good. Thanks, Gosling and Sutter. Life is good.
Not knowing java is probably a somewhat expensive expression of taste. But it's *good* taste!
None, zero, zilch, zip of this continuing education was paid for by my employers of the moment, who had about as much loyalty to me as I had to them. A fact which I understood, accepted, and dealt with. Go ye and do likewise.
No, it's your *inherent* right. What the State can give, the State can take away. A state that prevents the exercise of inherent rights is a tyranny and should be overthrown[1].
"I have to say that there is also the Freedom of Religion in the US. People have the right to worship as they choose without being harassed."
Somebody peacefully expressing ideas you disagree with is not "harrassment", although you may "feel harrassed". Get over it.
Do you really want to have the feelings of group X given the force of law and enforced against you, someday soon? (If you're conservative, let X === liberals, and vice-versa...)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The right not to have Congress pass laws establishing or prohibititing religion has got nothing to do with how you feel about picketers outside your church. The first amendment constrains *Congress*, not the people.
Further, it seems to me that if I have the right to picket BoomBoomGenocide Corp, I have the right to picket even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, let alone Scientology. Wouldn't ruling otherwise constitute an "establishment" of religion?
IANAL, and if that matters, let's get us some torches and pitchforks...
-- phunctor Have *you* been touched by His Noodly Appendage?
For a century or so silver has been recycled out of photographic processes by putting steel wool filter in the drain. No moral superiority had to be expended in this recycling effort. Why? Because it makes sense.
Me, I demonstrate outside Italian restaurants, trying to get more respect for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. So far I haven't tried to enlist the coercive power of the state to assist me in this crusade, but it's only a matter of time.
We should think carefully before choosing, however passively, to be governed by the most passionate believers.
Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) marks the beginning of the European Age of Expansion and all that flowed from it. The next historical event of similar scale will in my view be the exploitation of asteroidal resources.
This is going to take continental-scale resources invested in present time in order to reap quasi-infinite rewards -- generations in the future. Unfortunately the effect of discounted cash flow accounting models and highly democratic political systems is to render this investment all but impossible in the West. China shows interesting signs of understanding all of the above.
Yabbut... the ISA gets turned into a plasma of pico-ops, which then dispatch, somewhat out of order, on the Real ISA (which changes from each "x86" to the next "x86"). It doesn't really matter how fugly the ISA *was* as long as the Real ISA is apt for keeping the ALUs well fed.
It's convenient to have a consistent interface layer, and the gate count cost of the translation is asymptotically zero. It makes writing good optimizing compilers for "generic x86" all but impossible, but fortunately the final levels of optimization are done in real time in the plasma processor. It's actually a pretty cool approach to squeezing as much parallelism as possible out of non-parallel code, given a transistor budget in the neighborhood of 1e8.
That's the OP's fervent opinion, and he proves it to his complete satisfaction by heartfelt repetition. Works for him, I guess, but it's not persuasive outside of the choirbox.
-- phunctor advocating for better rhetoric since 1967
In 1982 or so I was part of a team translating a metric buttload of METAPLAN (the bastard child of FORTRAN and assembly) into FORTRAN 77. By hand. The bug injection rate was horrendous, the code was diverging. The old code was the only spec and precise translation was proving to be beyond human capacity.
My immediate manager "didn't notice" when after consultations with him (which never happened) I spent a couple of months skunk-working a translator, MP2F77. Once it worked it could be sold to *his* manager. We knew it worked because the translated code worked. *That* feature also managed to sweeten the Customer enough to accept the change in project methodology.
The generated code wasn't real efficient but it had 10 years of Moore's Law to play with, so nobody cared. And it plus-or-minus-epsilon reproduced the previous behavior. We shipped 100% M2F77'd code.
"As for seawater extraction - where did that paticular gem come from and did the guy have more than an MBA?"
Google for uranium and seawater, grasshoppa...
Scathing dismissal based on poorly founded intuition? To make that work you have to *actually* be the smartest person in the room. And *damn* quick on your feet.
Avoid ad-hominem attacks, they detract more from your credibility than from your target's. At least, they should, unless you're addressing people with no training in analyzing and resisting rhetorical tricks. Hmm. That's just about everybody, anymore. Carry on.
1) Obtain foreign funding: KGB, Soros, PLA, Wahhabis, you know the drill. 2) Round up some useful idiots. 3) Print illiterut signs. 4) Compose mindless chant. 6) Ensure media camera angles and editing will keep all 71/72 of your protesters in the frame (with 3/12412 counter-protestors). (This is a gimme, you don't have to do anything. It's handled, dude or dudette!) 5) Let your well-reasoned position be heard! If you don't know what it is, those nice people at (1) above can help.
Seriously: hunt *my* head, I need the money! I wanna be a quant!
Of your chimp-eliminators, I only had to look up Shannon's limit. (I was familiar with the notion but didn't know its name.) The rest, I'm like.. "eh...".
I'm currently learning OCAML as the most performant FPL, C++ is gonna flake out when we get to bignum multicore architectures in just a couple of years. And I even took an option on what Black & Scholes did...
Sure, why not. In fact I encourage all my competitors to do just that!
In the meantime I'll continue with the old-fashioned paradigm based on skillful use of non-proprietary language features.
class raii{ public: raii(){};// resource allocation is initialization method(){}// code missing whole categories of bugs ~raii(){}// release resources here and profit! };
This seems to be so much harder than garbage^ collection...
in which the State already owns everything anyway, but allows you to pretend otherwise because that makes you work harder. If you have the bad taste to try to keep what you have created (because you "own" it, it's "yours", or some other mean-spirited excuse), the narrative of selfishness and greed gets trundled out. All standard stuff so far. But...
Ireland has been indulging in "harmful tax competition". That's why it makes sense to locate profitable activities in Ireland. And why Ireland has had exemplary economic growth.
The ability of states to confiscate wealth from particular businesses depends strongly on the relocatability of the business, as Maersk has offered to demonstrate. Google is another case in point.
With the disaster that is our education system, our economy is instantly and totally screwed when and if we hit the tipping point where the able foreign worker has someplace better to go. On that day we become incapable of maintaining a technical civilization. We only do it now by raiding the global brain pool.
Spain was once the foremost of nations. They sank under the weight of a political vice called "particularism". There were this-Spaniards and that-Spaniards arguing about their special rights and privileges, but there weren't enough just plain Spaniards to mind the store. Remind you of anyplace you live?
-- phunctor Execute a "graduate" from the "School" of Eddumicashun today. Replace him or her with a retired engineer carrying a taser and authorized to use it.
A sociopath is perfectly suited to transmit his genes through a population bottleneck. The anomalous persistence of these poorly adapted (to our cooperative times) eigenexpressions of the human genepool is due to the genetic amplification effect of such population bottlenecks.
Such people are dangerous and need to be restrained from hurting others. Except when things are seriously messed up. Then you want them for allies. Who knows, maybe he'll eat you last.
Blame as such really isn't relevant. It's like whining because there are sharks. Reality doesn't care *how* bad you feel about the necessity to kill the sociopath, lock him up, or bury your loved ones when he's done with them.
One essential aspect of a binding contract is a so-called "consideration", a mutual exchange of something of value. I don't quite see how a credit card charge of $0.00 could be considered something of value.
Really, Taco, if you're going to sell whatever cred you have together with access to our eyeballs, make sure you get a good price. You only get to spend the cred once.
Which one retrodicts Leif Ericsen finding grapes in Vinland?
Which one retrodicts the Maunder minimum?
My point is that the past has examples of climate variation comparable to present climate variation. These past variations cannot reasonably be considered anthropogenic. The argument that the current variation must be anthropogenic because GCMs can be tuned to predict it from human inputs is weakened by the GCMs' inability to model these past variations. In this light the GCMs look (to me) like a conclusions -> assumptions -> simulation -> conclusions shell game. And I don't even own any Exxon stock.
"Predictions are not based on just extrapolating a past trend, you know. They also involve modeling the physical processes involved in climate. You can't just point to some part of a time series where there was a variation from the normal and claim it is inherently unpredictable. On the basis of time series analysis alone, it would be. On the basis of physics, it's a different matter."
OK, do a physics experiment to prove the significance of anthropogenic global warming. Oh. You can't do that? You have a simulation instead? And why should I believe your simulation? What if it doesn't model all the physical processes involved? What if it models them incorrectly? How can you possibly validate it? I know! Let's feed it with some past conditions and see if it can predict what we already know happened next! Oh... it gets that wrong? But this time, just coincidentally with a Kyoto treaty that targets the developed world and exempts the undeveloped world, it works. It's got physics. So, although it fails to retrodict the past, I should surrender to Chinese and Indian economic hegemony immediately anyway instead of waiting for them to overtake us normally... It's got physics.
That's OK, I've got a devil-mask here that keeps me safe from witches. I understand. If only more people did.
Slashdot Mirror
"I should note that Jimbo Wales ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years, has said "[F. A.] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.", and I can give dozens of more examples of where Wales's somewhat far out political biases lay."
d 0411b&L=ads-l&P=35139 74/press.html
LOL if you think Hayek is far out you've been living in a very special [1] world. Others [2] evidently disagree with you, oracular tone or not.
[1] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=in
[2] nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1
--
phunctor
"Useful idiots - gotta love 'em!" V.I Ulianov.
I've been coding for money for 41 years. I've done paradigm shifts from assembler to FORTRAN and COBOL, then Algol, thence to Pascal and C, had an unproductive affair on the side with LISP (really hard shift unless you can embed yourself in a live LISP culture, IMHO), thence to C++, picked up Perl & Python, currently working on growing a functional head using Erlang.
I'd already done the interpreted dance with UCSD Pascal, *and* the train-a-code-monkey dance with COBOL, so I just skipped Java.
I fundamentally didn't care whether or not Sun could survive MS, or not. Now we have MS with a (fully-export) standards-compliant C++, life is good. Thanks, Gosling and Sutter. Life is good.
Not knowing java is probably a somewhat expensive expression of taste. But it's *good* taste!
None, zero, zilch, zip of this continuing education was paid for by my employers of the moment, who had about as much loyalty to me as I had to them. A fact which I understood, accepted, and dealt with. Go ye and do likewise.
--
phunctor
"Isn't it my state-given right..."
No, it's your *inherent* right. What the State can give, the State can take away. A state that prevents the exercise of inherent rights is a tyranny and should be overthrown[1].
--
phunctor
[1] Hancock, J et al, 1776.
"I have to say that there is also the Freedom of Religion in the US. People have the right to worship as they choose without being harassed."
Somebody peacefully expressing ideas you disagree with is not "harrassment", although you may "feel harrassed". Get over it.
Do you really want to have the feelings of group X given the force of law and enforced against you, someday soon? (If you're conservative, let X === liberals, and vice-versa...)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The right not to have Congress pass laws establishing or prohibititing religion has got nothing to do with how you feel about picketers outside your church. The first amendment constrains *Congress*, not the people.
Further, it seems to me that if I have the right to picket BoomBoomGenocide Corp, I have the right to picket even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, let alone Scientology. Wouldn't ruling otherwise constitute an "establishment" of religion?
IANAL, and if that matters, let's get us some torches and pitchforks...
--
phunctor
Have *you* been touched by His Noodly Appendage?
For a century or so silver has been recycled out of photographic processes by putting steel wool filter in the drain. No moral superiority had to be expended in this recycling effort. Why? Because it makes sense.
Me, I demonstrate outside Italian restaurants, trying to get more respect for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. So far I haven't tried to enlist the coercive power of the state to assist me in this crusade, but it's only a matter of time.
We should think carefully before choosing, however passively, to be governed by the most passionate believers.
--
phunctor
FSM!
Ho ho ho!
That Gaia b****
Has got to go!
Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) marks the beginning of the European Age of Expansion and all that flowed from it. The next historical event of similar scale will in my view be the exploitation of asteroidal resources.
This is going to take continental-scale resources invested in present time in order to reap quasi-infinite rewards -- generations in the future. Unfortunately the effect of discounted cash flow accounting models and highly democratic political systems is to render this investment all but impossible in the West. China shows interesting signs of understanding all of the above.
--
phunctor
Yabbut... the ISA gets turned into a plasma of pico-ops, which then dispatch, somewhat out of order, on the Real ISA (which changes from each "x86" to the next "x86"). It doesn't really matter how fugly the ISA *was* as long as the Real ISA is apt for keeping the ALUs well fed.
It's convenient to have a consistent interface layer, and the gate count cost of the translation is asymptotically zero. It makes writing good optimizing compilers for "generic x86" all but impossible, but fortunately the final levels of optimization are done in real time in the plasma processor. It's actually a pretty cool approach to squeezing as much parallelism as possible out of non-parallel code, given a transistor budget in the neighborhood of 1e8.
--
phunctor
+/- epsilon on the details...
That's the OP's fervent opinion, and he proves it to his complete satisfaction by heartfelt repetition. Works for him, I guess, but it's not persuasive outside of the choirbox.
--
phunctor
advocating for better rhetoric since 1967
Gaak. None so blind... I meant the bastard child of COBOL and assembly. Yeah, it was *that* bad..
--
phunctor
In 1982 or so I was part of a team translating a metric buttload of METAPLAN (the bastard child of FORTRAN and assembly) into FORTRAN 77. By hand. The bug injection rate was horrendous, the code was diverging. The old code was the only spec and precise translation was proving to be beyond human capacity.
My immediate manager "didn't notice" when after consultations with him (which never happened) I spent a couple of months skunk-working a translator, MP2F77. Once it worked it could be sold to *his* manager. We knew it worked because the translated code worked. *That* feature also managed to sweeten the Customer enough to accept the change in project methodology.
The generated code wasn't real efficient but it had 10 years of Moore's Law to play with, so nobody cared. And it plus-or-minus-epsilon reproduced the previous behavior. We shipped 100% M2F77'd code.
--
phunctor
"As for seawater extraction - where did that paticular gem come from and did the guy have more than an MBA?"
Google for uranium and seawater, grasshoppa...
Scathing dismissal based on poorly founded intuition? To make that work you have to *actually* be the smartest person in the room. And *damn* quick on your feet.
Avoid ad-hominem attacks, they detract more from your credibility than from your target's. At least, they should, unless you're addressing people with no training in analyzing and resisting rhetorical tricks. Hmm. That's just about everybody, anymore. Carry on.
--
phunctor
1) Obtain foreign funding: KGB, Soros, PLA, Wahhabis, you know the drill.
2) Round up some useful idiots.
3) Print illiterut signs.
4) Compose mindless chant.
6) Ensure media camera angles and editing will keep all 71/72 of your protesters in the frame (with 3/12412 counter-protestors). (This is a gimme, you don't have to do anything. It's handled, dude or dudette!)
5) Let your well-reasoned position be heard! If you don't know what it is, those nice people at (1) above can help.
--
phunctor
Seriously: hunt *my* head, I need the money! I wanna be a quant!
.. "eh...".
Of your chimp-eliminators, I only had to look up Shannon's limit. (I was familiar with the notion but didn't know its name.) The rest, I'm like
I'm currently learning OCAML as the most performant FPL, C++ is gonna flake out when we get to bignum multicore architectures in just a couple of years. And I even took an option on what Black & Scholes did...
--
phunctor@yahoo.com, pimp mee! pimp meeee!
this space left intentionally blank
Sure, why not. In fact I encourage all my competitors to do just that!
// resource allocation is initialization // code missing whole categories of bugs // release resources here and profit!
In the meantime I'll continue with the old-fashioned paradigm based on skillful use of non-proprietary language features.
class raii{
public:
raii(){};
method(){}
~raii(){}
};
This seems to be so much harder than garbage^ collection...
--
phunctor
Available for $0.01 + postage, used, via Amazon.
What if evolutionary fitness were determined retroactively? First the admirable life, then the many children?
--
phunctor
It seemed to me that his conclusions preceded his questions. By about 400 years. Obscurantist special pleading at its finest.
--
phunctor
"Eppur si muove"
Innie or outie? -- phunctor
in which the State already owns everything anyway, but allows you to pretend otherwise because that makes you work harder. If you have the bad taste to try to keep what you have created (because you "own" it, it's "yours", or some other mean-spirited excuse), the narrative of selfishness and greed gets trundled out. All standard stuff so far. But...
Ireland has been indulging in "harmful tax competition". That's why it makes sense to locate profitable activities in Ireland. And why Ireland has had exemplary economic growth.
The ability of states to confiscate wealth from particular businesses depends strongly on the relocatability of the business, as Maersk has offered to demonstrate. Google is another case in point.
--
phunctor
With the disaster that is our education system, our economy is instantly and totally screwed when and if we hit the tipping point where the able foreign worker has someplace better to go. On that day we become incapable of maintaining a technical civilization. We only do it now by raiding the global brain pool.
Spain was once the foremost of nations. They sank under the weight of a political vice called "particularism". There were this-Spaniards and that-Spaniards arguing about their special rights and privileges, but there weren't enough just plain Spaniards to mind the store. Remind you of anyplace you live?
--
phunctor
Execute a "graduate" from the "School" of Eddumicashun today.
Replace him or her with a retired engineer carrying a taser and authorized to use it.
A sociopath is perfectly suited to transmit his genes through a population bottleneck. The anomalous persistence of these poorly adapted (to our cooperative times) eigenexpressions of the human genepool is due to the genetic amplification effect of such population bottlenecks.
Such people are dangerous and need to be restrained from hurting others. Except when things are seriously messed up. Then you want them for allies. Who knows, maybe he'll eat you last.
Blame as such really isn't relevant. It's like whining because there are sharks. Reality doesn't care *how* bad you feel about the necessity to kill the sociopath, lock him up, or bury your loved ones when he's done with them.
--
phunctor
One essential aspect of a binding contract is a so-called "consideration", a mutual exchange of something of value. I don't quite see how a credit card charge of $0.00 could be considered something of value.
t _law.html
http://www.expertlaw.com/library/business/contrac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
Really, Taco, if you're going to sell whatever cred you have together with access to our eyeballs, make sure you get a good price. You only get to spend the cred once.
--
phunctor
: GCMs do not "get the past wrong" :
Which one retrodicts Leif Ericsen finding grapes in Vinland?
Which one retrodicts the Maunder minimum?
My point is that the past has examples of climate variation comparable to present climate variation. These past variations cannot reasonably be considered anthropogenic. The argument that the current variation must be anthropogenic because GCMs can be tuned to predict it from human inputs is weakened by the GCMs' inability to model these past variations. In this light the GCMs look (to me) like a conclusions -> assumptions -> simulation -> conclusions shell game. And I don't even own any Exxon stock.
--
phunctor
"Predictions are not based on just extrapolating a past trend, you know. They also involve modeling the physical processes involved in climate. You can't just point to some part of a time series where there was a variation from the normal and claim it is inherently unpredictable. On the basis of time series analysis alone, it would be. On the basis of physics, it's a different matter."
OK, do a physics experiment to prove the significance of anthropogenic global warming. Oh. You can't do that? You have a simulation instead? And why should I believe your simulation? What if it doesn't model all the physical processes involved? What if it models them incorrectly? How can you possibly validate it? I know! Let's feed it with some past conditions and see if it can predict what we already know happened next! Oh... it gets that wrong? But this time, just coincidentally with a Kyoto treaty that targets the developed world and exempts the undeveloped world, it works. It's got physics. So, although it fails to retrodict the past, I should surrender to Chinese and Indian economic hegemony immediately anyway instead of waiting for them to overtake us normally... It's got physics.
That's OK, I've got a devil-mask here that keeps me safe from witches. I understand. If only more people did.
--
phunctor backs away slowly