Legal or not, we have them widely available on the streets at present. Legal or not, they will be available given sufficient demand (and there is sufficient demand). If they are illegal, they will be supplied by criminals with no legal controls. If they are legal, they will be supplied by corporations and regulated by law. The choice is not 'heroin or no heroin' -- that is pure illusion. The choice is 'heroin supplied by criminals or heroin supplied by regulated corporations'. So, are you pro-criminal, or pro-corporation?
People who argue that hard drugs should stay illegal only point to the harm they do, not the practical impossibility of stopping the illegal drug trade, which is at present a $300bn worldwide industry run by organised crime. Prohibition doesn't work, enforces the current status quo ($300bn organised crime industry with no safety regulation beyond the simple economic fact that dead people don't make good customers). Prohibition has no effect on the demand for chemical highs, and the desire for hard drugs. A fundamental rethink is needed, but hardly any politician would dare to undertake it. Thus we are stuck in this perpetual war, spending billions on ineffective enforcement, whilst billions are paid to organised crime for these drugs. It is not enough that an approach is 'morally right': it actually does need to be effective to be worth doing (and just making a token effort can be worse than doing nothing).
True random data has maximal information content (or close to that at least). Meaningful software does not. It may be incomprehesible, but it is not random in nature, and there will always be many points of view from which it is far from random. Find one of these, and you have a toehold into how it works.
Both the biological theories of evolution and the alternative ideas you hear flying around are massively oversimplified compared to how reality is. The basic principles of evolution are a mathematical consequence in many systems with feedback, for example dynamical systems. The idea that evolution happens should be a no-brainer to most rational people. The idea that our current understanding of the behaviour of systems that evolve over a long period of time is sufficient to explain our distant origins in any sufficiently detailed degree so as to be of practice use, however, is not so clear cut. The idea that the fine detail sufficient to make accurate experimental predictions in real world cases is beyond what we can comprehend is a natural idea given modern notions of information and complexity, but have more in common with the 'ineffability of God' type ideas you find in religious circles, rather than either the 'we can know, we shall know' sentiment once uttered by Hilbert before Godel threw a spanner into the works of his plan to make the foundations of mathematics provably rigorous, and also the 'we have this pretty theory and we like it, therefore we _do_ know' type attitudes that are become all too common amongst sciency types these days.
I believe in evolution, but I don't believe current science properly understands evolution, nor will they for some time, so I seriously doubt anything beyond 'evolution has been going on for a long time and contributes massively to how we are today'.
Religion is, and has always been, the main way humans self-organise and coordinate on a large scale. Modern civilisation has its advantages, but one drawback is that the rules are too numerous, can only really be understood by experts and is open to abuse by vested interests. Religion also has these shortcomings, but is generally much simpler in nature. We have a few thousand years of religious history to study how that part of human psychology works, and it is not surprising to see religious behaviour emerging naturally in secular aspects of life. (Fans following a football team are probably an excellent source of examples here.)
It's the subterranean alien control station through which, via the extreme illuminati, the governments of the US are controlled. The tinfoil hat brigade have been warning us for years, and now we have irrefutable evidence.
They're one of the best examples of good modern songwriting, so far as I am concerned. I don't listen casually, but when I want to explore what makes a good song, Beatles material is often what I look at first.
The copyright system was originally intended to provide a good balance between the rights of the public and those of the producer. The producers are the ones who make the money, and they've use this to lobby for the balance to shift in their favour. This is what happens when lobbying and campaign contributions are allowed in a democratic system: fairness goes out the window.
As we move more and more to a greed and market driven life, this sort of thing will happen. Music is of massive benefit to us all, especially the learning of an instrument and playing it with/to others. Finding a way to make music pay is necessary, but as we have seen in many other markets, when the highest quality of carefully hand-produced things is not required, often there is a computer/technology based solution that, whilst poorer in quality, suffices for what's needed.
When composing for adverts, for example, sample libraries with phrases recorded by live players are useful. Actually making a sampler-orchestra sound like a real one, however, is rather difficult. You can mask the differences with non-orchestral sounds (which also leads the listeners ear to regard the whole thing as studio produced, so not to reject the sound as cheap and artificial).
But let us not forget that the value of music can't be measured in dollars or pounds.
Basically, it should be for Zavvi to arrange collection, and pay the costs: demanding that the recipients of the mistake arrange delivery back to Zavvi is where I think they are out of order.
In a level playing field, you'd be able to have faith and non-faith schools both with support and see which is the better. Groups like the BHA seem to be campaigning for schools to be exclusively non-faith, based only on idealism without paying any attention to whether or not faith plays a functional role in learning and living (regardless of objective truth, which may seem like heresy to some, but it is an angle that needs serious consideration, since many things in everyday life and modern science are known to work, and work well, but for reasons that nobody understands).
There is a dire need to understand how faith functions in a persons life.
You can't argue with people who don't think things through or listen to reason. Christian fundies are one such class of people, aggressive atheists like Dawkins are another. When slanging matches start, it's a little like watching Jeremy Kyle or Jerry Springer...
Though she missed the issue of reliability. There's a reason certain mission critical setups don't run simple micros. And supercomputers that use Xeon and suchlike are more than just micros in how they link things together. But apart from those situations, yes, she was right: now micros dominate.
The thing I hope to see explored is using such a chip with discrete graphics. The ability for the on-chip GPU to access the same memory will allow some things to be optimised (but possibly not all graphics). I imagine in future we'll see a repeat of what happened with FPU coprocessors in the late 80s onwards: (this is a rough picture, and you are advised to look up the precise details if you're interested)
1. The 386 had a discrete FPU, called the 387 2. The 486 integrated the FPU, and all subsequent x86 processors did the same. 3. Certain common FPU operations began to be implemented on CPU with special instructions (SSE etc) 4. Certain common FPU operations began to be implemented on discrete accelerator chips (GPUs). 5. GPUs started being placed first in the same package as the CPU, then subsequently more closely integrated.
I imagine in the not too distant future that GPU functionality will be as integrated with CPUs as FPUs are now, with external discrete GPUs, possibly with lightweight general purpose CPUs to manage things, available for uses (such as gaming) where built-in GPUs are not enough.
Arts should never be done for the money. The music industry, especially modern pop, is surely proof if it were needed. Once making money becomes the priority, music is produced according to patterns of what makes money, and this destroys genuine artistic expression. Too many genres with potential are laid waste to once they become popular and big money gets involved. I'd be happy to see the music industry move away from 'record selling' as its primary product to being a distribution system (like Spotify) and creating alternative means to funnel money to artists to support them, and perhaps so that fewer artists get rich but more can make a living. Greed for money created the music industry boom, greed for free or cheap music is what will bring it down. Having greed in charge is, in general, the biggest failing of the modern western world.
the problem is that the medical model is nowhere effective at understanding, diagnosing and treating mental disorders as the physical medicine disciplines. already many people get diagnosed and forced onto a drug therapy route, which doesn't treat the disorder, inhibits their learning, awareness and motivation to the point that they become unable to seek out effective avenues, and the psychiatrists just up or change the drugs and ignore their ineffectiveness. people get trapped in a life of legally enforced drug dependence that benefits only pharmaceutical companies. people who make suggestions like in the article believe that the medical model and standard therapies are more effective than they are. people will.get unwell, forced to take treatments that don't work for the rest of their lives, and just be a drain on the taxpayer, being unable to work, and being able to do little other than blowing their state benefits on tobacco and alcohol. the people who make such suggestions have no experience of actually being a mental patient, nor how ineffective typical medical treatment is. this is the unfortunate reality of mental health, where successful recovery happens in spite of the system, not because of it, and successful methods that are not profitable to pharmaceutical giants are seriously underfunded even when reported in the literature. end rant. sent from a mobile, so apologies for typos.
If you run a prng and reject any combination with less than 4 distinct digits, you're likely to have a combination in a small number of attempts, most usually 1. Calculate the likelihood of a prng producing ten combinations in a row that have less than 4 distinct digits. (For an 8 digit code it's say, 1/10000 or about that, and decreases by a factor of sqrt(10) for each additional digit, something like that).
A program of the form int[] f() { int[] a; do { a = ArrayOfRandomInts(lessthan=10,count=8); } while(DistinctDigitCount(a,lessthan=4); return a; }
is not guaranteed to halt in any given finite time, but will with probability rapidly approaching 1 as the time limit increases.
The best example to be aware of in the UK Lotto, referred to here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/240734.stm
"The remarkable draw on 14 November 1995 when 133 tickets shared the £16 million jackpot prize is a clear example of the effects the team had deduced.
The winning numbers were 7, 17, 23, 32, 38, 42 and 48, all of which lie in central columns of the ticket, and the players won only £120,000 each. The average number of jackpot winners is five and the average amount won is £2 million."
This illustrates the difference picking common combinations can make. Once a presenter told you how much you'd win if you did the 1-2-3-4-5-6 thing: only a few thousand! (While only a small minority have this 'clever' thought, it's enough to elevate the number of entries with 1-2-3-4-5-6 to significantly more than a typical combination.)
The basic Unix approach is almost universal, both Linux and Windows using a bash command line, and just about everything but Windows being built on a Unix style base. That approach has stood the test of time in the face of new bright ideas. Likewise, I would say Windows 2000 prior to the XP bubblegum theme was pretty much the desktop+start button approach done right. The 2D array of icons of iOS and Android will, I imagine again be seen as a long term successful design. The problem is that big business is desperate to find the 'next big thing' to try to monopolise and own it to maximise their bottom line.
Abandoning old ideas as 'dated' is a mark of the 'planned obselescence' business model that much of modern industry has adopted: effectively moving from the 'buy stuff' model to the 'rent stuff and surrender control' model, that is good for business, bad for consumers, but easy to force if government regulation doesn't stop this market degeneracy.
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Legal or not, we have them widely available on the streets at present.
Legal or not, they will be available given sufficient demand (and there is sufficient demand).
If they are illegal, they will be supplied by criminals with no legal controls.
If they are legal, they will be supplied by corporations and regulated by law.
The choice is not 'heroin or no heroin' -- that is pure illusion.
The choice is 'heroin supplied by criminals or heroin supplied by regulated corporations'.
So, are you pro-criminal, or pro-corporation?
People who argue that hard drugs should stay illegal only point to the harm they do, not the practical impossibility of stopping the illegal drug trade, which is at present a $300bn worldwide industry run by organised crime. Prohibition doesn't work, enforces the current status quo ($300bn organised crime industry with no safety regulation beyond the simple economic fact that dead people don't make good customers). Prohibition has no effect on the demand for chemical highs, and the desire for hard drugs. A fundamental rethink is needed, but hardly any politician would dare to undertake it. Thus we are stuck in this perpetual war, spending billions on ineffective enforcement, whilst billions are paid to organised crime for these drugs. It is not enough that an approach is 'morally right': it actually does need to be effective to be worth doing (and just making a token effort can be worse than doing nothing).
If people over rely on these apps, and their smartphone runs out of battery, what then?
True random data has maximal information content (or close to that at least). Meaningful software does not. It may be incomprehesible, but it is not random in nature, and there will always be many points of view from which it is far from random. Find one of these, and you have a toehold into how it works.
Both the biological theories of evolution and the alternative ideas you hear flying around are massively oversimplified compared to how reality is. The basic principles of evolution are a mathematical consequence in many systems with feedback, for example dynamical systems. The idea that evolution happens should be a no-brainer to most rational people. The idea that our current understanding of the behaviour of systems that evolve over a long period of time is sufficient to explain our distant origins in any sufficiently detailed degree so as to be of practice use, however, is not so clear cut. The idea that the fine detail sufficient to make accurate experimental predictions in real world cases is beyond what we can comprehend is a natural idea given modern notions of information and complexity, but have more in common with the 'ineffability of God' type ideas you find in religious circles, rather than either the 'we can know, we shall know' sentiment once uttered by Hilbert before Godel threw a spanner into the works of his plan to make the foundations of mathematics provably rigorous, and also the 'we have this pretty theory and we like it, therefore we _do_ know' type attitudes that are become all too common amongst sciency types these days.
I believe in evolution, but I don't believe current science properly understands evolution, nor will they for some time, so I seriously doubt anything beyond 'evolution has been going on for a long time and contributes massively to how we are today'.
Religion is, and has always been, the main way humans self-organise and coordinate on a large scale. Modern civilisation has its advantages, but one drawback is that the rules are too numerous, can only really be understood by experts and is open to abuse by vested interests. Religion also has these shortcomings, but is generally much simpler in nature. We have a few thousand years of religious history to study how that part of human psychology works, and it is not surprising to see religious behaviour emerging naturally in secular aspects of life. (Fans following a football team are probably an excellent source of examples here.)
h can be thought of as an aspiration instruction (i.e. breath out whilst saying the next vowel), rather than a consonant.
People called foxes vermin and hunted them with a pack of dogs.
Now people call other people names and hunt them with a pack of other humans.
Aside from that, the basic drive is the same. It's a relic from our caveman days, so far as I'm concerned.
It's the subterranean alien control station through which, via the extreme illuminati, the governments of the US are controlled. The tinfoil hat brigade have been warning us for years, and now we have irrefutable evidence.
They're one of the best examples of good modern songwriting, so far as I am concerned. I don't listen casually, but when I want to explore what makes a good song, Beatles material is often what I look at first.
The copyright system was originally intended to provide a good balance between the rights of the public and those of the producer. The producers are the ones who make the money, and they've use this to lobby for the balance to shift in their favour. This is what happens when lobbying and campaign contributions are allowed in a democratic system: fairness goes out the window.
Maybe a human biology expert can tell me, but how exactly does one infer drug consumption from DNA?
As we move more and more to a greed and market driven life, this sort of thing will happen. Music is of massive benefit to us all, especially the learning of an instrument and playing it with/to others. Finding a way to make music pay is necessary, but as we have seen in many other markets, when the highest quality of carefully hand-produced things is not required, often there is a computer/technology based solution that, whilst poorer in quality, suffices for what's needed.
When composing for adverts, for example, sample libraries with phrases recorded by live players are useful. Actually making a sampler-orchestra sound like a real one, however, is rather difficult. You can mask the differences with non-orchestral sounds (which also leads the listeners ear to regard the whole thing as studio produced, so not to reject the sound as cheap and artificial).
But let us not forget that the value of music can't be measured in dollars or pounds.
Basically, it should be for Zavvi to arrange collection, and pay the costs: demanding that the recipients of the mistake arrange delivery back to Zavvi is where I think they are out of order.
In a level playing field, you'd be able to have faith and non-faith schools both with support and see which is the better. Groups like the BHA seem to be campaigning for schools to be exclusively non-faith, based only on idealism without paying any attention to whether or not faith plays a functional role in learning and living (regardless of objective truth, which may seem like heresy to some, but it is an angle that needs serious consideration, since many things in everyday life and modern science are known to work, and work well, but for reasons that nobody understands).
There is a dire need to understand how faith functions in a persons life.
You can't argue with people who don't think things through or listen to reason. Christian fundies are one such class of people, aggressive atheists like Dawkins are another. When slanging matches start, it's a little like watching Jeremy Kyle or Jerry Springer...
Though she missed the issue of reliability. There's a reason certain mission critical setups don't run simple micros. And supercomputers that use Xeon and suchlike are more than just micros in how they link things together. But apart from those situations, yes, she was right: now micros dominate.
it looks like you're eating a doughnut...
The thing I hope to see explored is using such a chip with discrete graphics. The ability for the on-chip GPU to access the same memory will allow some things to be optimised (but possibly not all graphics). I imagine in future we'll see a repeat of what happened with FPU coprocessors in the late 80s onwards: (this is a rough picture, and you are advised to look up the precise details if you're interested)
1. The 386 had a discrete FPU, called the 387
2. The 486 integrated the FPU, and all subsequent x86 processors did the same.
3. Certain common FPU operations began to be implemented on CPU with special instructions (SSE etc)
4. Certain common FPU operations began to be implemented on discrete accelerator chips (GPUs).
5. GPUs started being placed first in the same package as the CPU, then subsequently more closely integrated.
I imagine in the not too distant future that GPU functionality will be as integrated with CPUs as FPUs are now, with external discrete
GPUs, possibly with lightweight general purpose CPUs to manage things, available for uses (such as gaming) where built-in GPUs are
not enough.
Arts should never be done for the money. The music industry, especially modern pop, is surely proof if it were needed. Once making money becomes the priority, music is produced according to patterns of what makes money, and this destroys genuine artistic expression. Too many genres with potential are laid waste to once they become popular and big money gets involved. I'd be happy to see the music industry move away from 'record selling' as its primary product to being a distribution system (like Spotify) and creating alternative means to funnel money to artists to support them, and perhaps so that fewer artists get rich but more can make a living. Greed for money created the music industry boom, greed for free or cheap music is what will bring it down. Having greed in charge is, in general, the biggest failing of the modern western world.
the problem is that the medical model is nowhere effective at understanding, diagnosing and treating mental disorders as the physical medicine disciplines. already many people get diagnosed and forced onto a drug therapy route, which doesn't treat the disorder, inhibits their learning, awareness and motivation to the point that they become unable to seek out effective avenues, and the psychiatrists just up or change the drugs and ignore their ineffectiveness. people get trapped in a life of legally enforced drug dependence that benefits only pharmaceutical companies. people who make suggestions like in the article believe that the medical model and standard therapies are more effective than they are. people will.get unwell, forced to take treatments that don't work for the rest of their lives, and just be a drain on the taxpayer, being unable to work, and being able to do little other than blowing their state benefits on tobacco and alcohol. the people who make such suggestions have no experience of actually being a mental patient, nor how ineffective typical medical treatment is. this is the unfortunate reality of mental health, where successful recovery happens in spite of the system, not because of it, and successful methods that are not profitable to pharmaceutical giants are seriously underfunded even when reported in the literature. end rant. sent from a mobile, so apologies for typos.
If you run a prng and reject any combination with less than 4 distinct digits, you're likely to have a combination in a small number of attempts, most usually 1. Calculate the likelihood of a prng producing ten combinations in a row that have less than 4 distinct digits. (For an 8 digit code it's say, 1/10000 or about that, and decreases by a factor of sqrt(10) for each additional digit, something like that).
A program of the form
int[] f() {
int[] a;
do {
a = ArrayOfRandomInts(lessthan=10,count=8);
} while(DistinctDigitCount(a,lessthan=4);
return a;
}
is not guaranteed to halt in any given finite time, but will with probability rapidly approaching 1 as the time limit increases.
The best example to be aware of in the UK Lotto, referred to here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/240734.stm
"The remarkable draw on 14 November 1995 when 133 tickets shared the £16 million jackpot prize is a clear example of the effects the team had deduced.
The winning numbers were 7, 17, 23, 32, 38, 42 and 48, all of which lie in central columns of the ticket, and the players won only £120,000 each. The average number of jackpot winners is five and the average amount won is £2 million."
This illustrates the difference picking common combinations can make. Once a presenter told you how much you'd win if you did the 1-2-3-4-5-6 thing: only a few thousand! (While only a small minority have this 'clever' thought, it's enough to elevate the number of entries with 1-2-3-4-5-6 to significantly more than a typical combination.)
I wonder if anybody's done a python wm that you control through the scripting language? Or a forth wm?
The basic Unix approach is almost universal, both Linux and Windows using a bash command line, and just about everything but Windows being built on a Unix style base. That approach has stood the test of time in the face of new bright ideas. Likewise, I would say Windows 2000 prior to the XP bubblegum theme was pretty much the desktop+start button approach done right. The 2D array of icons of iOS and Android will, I imagine again be seen as a long term successful design. The problem is that big business is desperate to find the 'next big thing' to try to monopolise and own it to maximise their bottom line.
Abandoning old ideas as 'dated' is a mark of the 'planned obselescence' business model that much of modern industry has adopted: effectively moving from the 'buy stuff' model to the 'rent stuff and surrender control' model, that is good for business, bad for consumers, but easy to force if government regulation doesn't stop this market degeneracy.