> our universe is expanding due to some even bigger > geek having just poured hot coffee in our universal mug.
When you add more coffee to a mug, you are not changing the distance between individual molecules. You simply increase their number. If that were happening in the universe, you would see more stars appearing, or flurries of stars floating around. The distances between the stars would not increase, but would rather decrease because there is space between the stars to add more stars, which is not true in the coffee mug where water molecules take up all the space there is. The situation will change a little if the geek poured water into the mug. Then molecules comprising coffee (don't ask me what they are; I have no idea) would move apart by diffusion.
> your theory fails to take into account how some galaxies merge together
No it doesn't. Galaxies merge together when their trajectories cross. My hypothesis (not a theory) does not contradict movement of galaxies, their merging, stars orbiting each other, black holes merging, etc.
> converting things into black holes doesn't change the curvature of spacetime to any substantial degree > once you are more than a few Schwarzschild radii away
I wasn't implying that. Look back at the tablecloth analogy. With a small hole, the tablecloth is still flat on the table, but the edges are pulled inward anyway. Away from the hole the space is not stretched, but it is _moved_. So to test this hypothesis you could try to measure if Earth is moving away from the sun as time passes. The effect is probably quite small though.
> majority of stars will not form black holes, but rather white dwarfs. Just so that you know.
First, white dwarves burn out too, it just takes longer (~100 billion years). Second, burnt out stars will cruise through the universe and as time passes, it becomes more and more likely that they'll encounter a black hole. They'll orbit, and then eventually fall in if there is enough matter around to slow them down.
> Most students answer that the Earth would fall in.
Actually, the Earth will fall in eventually anyway because of collisions with space junk. As the speed decreases, so will the orbit. Replacing the sun with a black hole (of the same mass) will not change this either.
> It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much
It always amazes me when people who have spent so much time in our horrible education system (and it is pretty bad in all countries) are able to create good software or to think at all. In my experience, good minds stay good in spite of education rather then because of it.
Why are they ignoring the obvious (at least to me) possiblity that the universe oscillates around some optimal size. Imagine the universe as a rubber ball. Squeeze the ball and let it go. Every particle inside will immediately start moving away from the others at an accelerated pace, continuing to accelerate until passing the rest boundary, when it will start slowing down. What's causing the expansion? How about the reduction of space curvature? Imagine space as a tablecloth (ok, so I'm knee deep in analogies:) on a table with a hole in the middle. Place a heavy pitcher in the middle and the tablecloth will be pulled through the hole, pulling its edges closer together. This is what happens around a star according to general relativity theory. Now, the star is constantly radiating energy and losing mass, so the space is constantly uncurving. Because it is uncurving, it is expanding. When all the stars burn out, space will start collapsing again as energy falls into black holes. Then the black holes coalesce and make the big bang singularity, which explodes for some reason and everything starts all over again.
> I'm good and sick of this "lawyerocracy" we have here. I'd love to see a "geekocracy".
Surely, we must first point out the incalculable advantages of having a geekocracy. Our entire lives will be changed! Think of what will be different:
Everyone will have 10gbps broadband.
Knowledge of programming would be a prerequisite to high school graduation.
Taxes will be submitted online in handcoded XML format.
The legal system will be refactored to eliminate bloat, duplicate codes, and bugs, establishing the new SLS (Standard Legal System) worldwide.
It would be a fedral crime to stuff a geek into a locker (punishable by a year of sex deprivation)
Everyone would convert to the metric system.
The calendar would be revised to eliminate all those pesky 12 and 60 factors.
Everyone would start counting at 0.
Normal working hours will be shifted to 4pm-4am.
All products will be covered by GPL and would be available free of charge. If anyone wants to make money they would offer installation support, customization, or news services.
Pizza will become the new national food.
There would be endless debates on whether garbage collection is a good thing.
All wars will result in complete assimilation. No civilization can resist our hordes of fusion tanks and leviathans.
Killing monsters will become the national pastime.
The ruling elite would have to be periodically reelected due to their inability to reproduce. This ensures that the government stays democratic.
Natalie Portman will become the national symbol of hope. She will host the annual celebration of the national hot grits day.
It will be a basic human right to disassemble stuff.
Shorts and teeshirts will become formal attire.
Linus Torvalds will be the president of the world.
> only two of those business models actually include writing open source code.
You know what this means, though: you write the code, and somebody else gets the profit. Is it any wonder Open Source is so popular? It lets everyone live off the geeks for free. Most geeks are just interested in writing code (and good code, mind you, not some boring database screens for those customization scenarios) and are not likely to actively pursue any of the mentioned strategies. They don't even have enough time to try, working the day job all day and hacking OSS all night.
> once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as > a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in > the correct column.
Although this makes more entries, the end result is correct. In fact, GNUCash (http://www.gnucash.org) does this for ALL your entries, and calls it double-booking or something. Maybe they just need to upgrade to the latest build?
> you need to make sure that only one photon leaves the laser at any given moment
Speaking of that, I have not yet heard a good explanation of how they determined that it was just one photon. Given the extremely fine grain of quantization, how can you possibly distinguish between one photon and two just by looking at the laser's energy consumption? What else could you be looking at? You can't measure it's size because it is too small. You can't measure it's mass since it has none. Shouldn't someone consider these things before betting the entire universe on this single experiment?
> That article fails to address the point that their > costs associated with developing and maintaining > IP (Intellectual Property for the uninitiated) > will also drop to near $0.
Think of how the stock market will see this: your company just lost 85% of its assets, but has also cut spending on IT infrastructure. Considering that the maintenance of proprietary software is probably much less than 85% of the total value of all assets, the result is still a very large drop in company value. And you know that means that this company's stock will crash, and it will crash hard. When that happens, I don't want to be in your shoes when you try to console your boss about not having to pay for those copies of Windows any more.
If you are working on OSS, quality of the result is more important than the readability of the code. That's because if you application sucks, nobody will want to improve it. They'll just start from scratch, saying "what moron wrote this? I bet there isn't a single line of good code in there."
> what if you had 'x->foo()'? You have to know the type of variable 'x'.
Sure. The compiler needs to know it too, so all the necessary headers will already be included.
> This is not a simple search/replace operation, unless you can > do type analysis with a regex (you can't).
If you intend to write your tool entirely in regex, good luck to you. You already need some type analysis to match types to variables for field extraction. Parsing type declarations is not that difficult and then you just maintain a type tree and look things up when you need them. Really, if you have ever write a compiler, you'll discover that it is one of the simpler parts of the project.
> Someone will write an application/patch/work-around > that deactivates their ads without effecting the service.
Look, all you have to do is put duck tape over the area where their annoying ads pop up. Sure you'll lose some screen space, but without all that distraction you'll actually get some work done. Duck tape rules!
> How comfortable are people using an automated > solution for refactoring
It is not possible to automate (as in "without any human intervention") refactoring because it requires understanding how the entire project works. Any tools you create may help, but they do not obviate the need for thinking and redesigning, the two tasks the computer is incapable of doing.
> What if there is B::foo() as well? what if B::foo() is used in A?
B::foo() is a completely separate function from A::foo() and should not be renamed. It is easy to tell which one A wants to call because the call method would differ (b->foo() as opposed to foo()).
> A::foo() has "myLocal", and so has A::bar(). Upon > refactoring, should "myLocal" be replaced within > with the new field in A::bar() as well?
No. myLocal in bar() is used for a different purpose from the one in foo(). There is no way to automatically determine when bar() should be using the new field too or how. Therefore, both variables have to be extracted separately.
> A::Global is made a field. But A::foo() has a > local variable Global defined as well.
First of all, it is good practice to have different naming conventions, separating your globals, member variables, and locals. A common method of doing this is by using prefixes (g_ for global, m_ for member, none for local). In your example, extraction of A::Global should not be allowed without a rename.
> I don't really know if it performs all this > validation. I sure hope it does,
While automatic checking for the above problems is nice, it is not something one should have to rely on. Refactoring can be done without any tools at all. No matter what fancy search-n-replace macros you define, you still have to think.
> more likely to get a godless hippy than a bible basher.
A godless hippy and a bible basher both have one thing in common - lack of a mind. Where the latter believes the universe is ruled by an invisible supreme entity and is thus beyond his control or understanding, the former accepts that the universe is beyond his control or understanding as his basic premise. The result is the same.
There is only one real danger coming from GM food: the irrefutable proof of human capacity to tinker with life, the God-like power that religious fanatics are so afraid to admit to be attainable. Mediocrity hates achievement of any kind, and that hatred, the hatred of what is the best within us, is the root of all evil propagated by those who refuse to make the choice that makes such achievement possible: the choice to think.
Slashdot Mirror
> our universe is expanding due to some even bigger
> geek having just poured hot coffee in our universal mug.
When you add more coffee to a mug, you are not changing the distance between individual molecules. You simply increase their number. If that were happening in the universe, you would see more stars appearing, or flurries of stars floating around. The distances between the stars would not increase, but would rather decrease because there is space between the stars to add more stars, which is not true in the coffee mug where water molecules take up all the space there is. The situation will change a little if the geek poured water into the mug. Then molecules comprising coffee (don't ask me what they are; I have no idea) would move apart by diffusion.
> your theory fails to take into account how some galaxies merge together
No it doesn't. Galaxies merge together when their trajectories cross. My hypothesis (not a theory) does not contradict movement of galaxies, their merging, stars orbiting each other, black holes merging, etc.
> Because observations do not support it.
Could you please point out the observations that contradict my hypothesis?
> converting things into black holes doesn't change the curvature of spacetime to any substantial degree
> once you are more than a few Schwarzschild radii away
I wasn't implying that. Look back at the tablecloth analogy. With a small hole, the tablecloth is still flat on the table, but the edges are pulled inward anyway. Away from the hole the space is not stretched, but it is _moved_. So to test this hypothesis you could try to measure if Earth is moving away from the sun as time passes. The effect is probably quite small though.
> majority of stars will not form black holes, but rather white dwarfs. Just so that you know.
First, white dwarves burn out too, it just takes longer (~100 billion years). Second, burnt out stars will cruise through the universe and as time passes, it becomes more and more likely that they'll encounter a black hole. They'll orbit, and then eventually fall in if there is enough matter around to slow them down.
> Most students answer that the Earth would fall in.
Actually, the Earth will fall in eventually anyway because of collisions with space junk. As the speed decreases, so will the orbit. Replacing the sun with a black hole (of the same mass) will not change this either.
> digital oscilloscope (designing both hardware and software)
Nah, he's a pampered geek. Most of us still use analog. No fancy menus, just turn a knob if you want to change anything.
> It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much
It always amazes me when people who have spent so much time in our horrible education system (and it is pretty bad in all countries) are able to create good software or to think at all. In my experience, good minds stay good in spite of education rather then because of it.
Why are they ignoring the obvious (at least to me) possiblity that the universe oscillates around some optimal size. Imagine the universe as a rubber ball. Squeeze the ball and let it go. Every particle inside will immediately start moving away from the others at an accelerated pace, continuing to accelerate until passing the rest boundary, when it will start slowing down. What's causing the expansion? How about the reduction of space curvature? Imagine space as a tablecloth (ok, so I'm knee deep in analogies :) on a table with a hole in the middle. Place a heavy pitcher in the middle and the tablecloth will be pulled through the hole, pulling its edges closer together. This is what happens around a star according to general relativity theory. Now, the star is constantly radiating energy and losing mass, so the space is constantly uncurving. Because it is uncurving, it is expanding. When all the stars burn out, space will start collapsing again as energy falls into black holes. Then the black holes coalesce and make the big bang singularity, which explodes for some reason and everything starts all over again.
> concepts in mathematical papers are not patented
> and nobody is ever charged for using them.
Uh, that's because nobody ever uses them.
Surely, we must first point out the incalculable advantages of having a geekocracy. Our entire lives will be changed! Think of what will be different:
Let me guess: it want the gold medal in the high jump category?
> only two of those business models actually include writing open source code.
You know what this means, though: you write the code, and somebody else gets the profit. Is it any wonder Open Source is so popular? It lets everyone live off the geeks for free. Most geeks are just interested in writing code (and good code, mind you, not some boring database screens for those customization scenarios) and are not likely to actively pursue any of the mentioned strategies. They don't even have enough time to try, working the day job all day and hacking OSS all night.
> once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as
> a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in
> the correct column.
Although this makes more entries, the end result is correct. In fact, GNUCash (http://www.gnucash.org) does this for ALL your entries, and calls it double-booking or something. Maybe they just need to upgrade to the latest build?
Look at it another way: this just means that 80% of terrestrial life and 95% of marine life are completely useless.
> you need to make sure that only one photon leaves the laser at any given moment
Speaking of that, I have not yet heard a good explanation of how they determined that it was just one photon. Given the extremely fine grain of quantization, how can you possibly distinguish between one photon and two just by looking at the laser's energy consumption? What else could you be looking at? You can't measure it's size because it is too small. You can't measure it's mass since it has none. Shouldn't someone consider these things before betting the entire universe on this single experiment?
> That article fails to address the point that their
> costs associated with developing and maintaining
> IP (Intellectual Property for the uninitiated)
> will also drop to near $0.
Think of how the stock market will see this: your company just lost 85% of its assets, but has also cut spending on IT infrastructure. Considering that the maintenance of proprietary software is probably much less than 85% of the total value of all assets, the result is still a very large drop in company value. And you know that means that this company's stock will crash, and it will crash hard. When that happens, I don't want to be in your shoes when you try to console your boss about not having to pay for those copies of Windows any more.
If you are working on OSS, quality of the result is more important than the readability of the code. That's because if you application sucks, nobody will want to improve it. They'll just start from scratch, saying "what moron wrote this? I bet there isn't a single line of good code in there."
> GPU to the other side of the board to allow a much larger heatsink?
This will also help with the watercooling hose layout. It's pretty hard to hook up a waterblock between two cards and keep the hoses from collapsing.
> what if you had 'x->foo()'? You have to know the type of variable 'x'.
Sure. The compiler needs to know it too, so all the necessary headers will already be included.
> This is not a simple search/replace operation, unless you can
> do type analysis with a regex (you can't).
If you intend to write your tool entirely in regex, good luck to you. You already need some type analysis to match types to variables for field extraction. Parsing type declarations is not that difficult and then you just maintain a type tree and look things up when you need them. Really, if you have ever write a compiler, you'll discover that it is one of the simpler parts of the project.
> Someone will write an application/patch/work-around
> that deactivates their ads without effecting the service.
Look, all you have to do is put duck tape over the area where their annoying ads pop up. Sure you'll lose some screen space, but without all that distraction you'll actually get some work done. Duck tape rules!
> How comfortable are people using an automated
> solution for refactoring
It is not possible to automate (as in "without any human intervention") refactoring because it requires understanding how the entire project works. Any tools you create may help, but they do not obviate the need for thinking and redesigning, the two tasks the computer is incapable of doing.
> What if there is B::foo() as well? what if B::foo() is used in A?
B::foo() is a completely separate function from A::foo() and should not be renamed. It is easy to tell which one A wants to call because the call method would differ (b->foo() as opposed to foo()).
> A::foo() has "myLocal", and so has A::bar(). Upon
> refactoring, should "myLocal" be replaced within
> with the new field in A::bar() as well?
No. myLocal in bar() is used for a different purpose from the one in foo(). There is no way to automatically determine when bar() should be using the new field too or how. Therefore, both variables have to be extracted separately.
> A::Global is made a field. But A::foo() has a
> local variable Global defined as well.
First of all, it is good practice to have different naming conventions, separating your globals, member variables, and locals. A common method of doing this is by using prefixes (g_ for global, m_ for member, none for local). In your example, extraction of A::Global should not be allowed without a rename.
> I don't really know if it performs all this
> validation. I sure hope it does,
While automatic checking for the above problems is nice, it is not something one should have to rely on. Refactoring can be done without any tools at all. No matter what fancy search-n-replace macros you define, you still have to think.
> more likely to get a godless hippy than a bible basher.
A godless hippy and a bible basher both have one thing in common - lack of a mind. Where the latter believes the universe is ruled by an invisible supreme entity and is thus beyond his control or understanding, the former accepts that the universe is beyond his control or understanding as his basic premise. The result is the same.
> what happends when somone flys over canadian air
> space and around the blimps?
Nothing. We trust the Russians too.
Two words: Kon Tiki
There is only one real danger coming from GM food: the irrefutable proof of human capacity to tinker with life, the God-like power that religious fanatics are so afraid to admit to be attainable. Mediocrity hates achievement of any kind, and that hatred, the hatred of what is the best within us, is the root of all evil propagated by those who refuse to make the choice that makes such achievement possible: the choice to think.