Comment Obligatory - Magnets! (Score 1) 37
F*****g magnets! How do they work?
The alternatives are a drunken stepdad who throws up all over you at random intervals and hit on your friends (Windows), or a pervy uncle who lurks in bushes outside of bathrooms and places spy cameras all over the house (Android). No thanks.
Apple is the chain-smoking control freak mom. Yeah she's a bit too strict, and sometimes she lashes out at the neighbors. But at least she's not trying to ruin your life. It's the only sane choice.
Then you've got linux, the fussy hyperactive 5 year old nephew. He'll say yes to anything you wanna do. But he's got no focus and constantly bugs you with a million tangential questions ("you wanna run amarok? cool! did you check
And Microsoft fails utterly. It's not like W11 won't work. It's just that it gets in the way.
Let's test that theory...
Yep, checks out.
Says the guy confusing terrible hack with good idea.
Should block demarcators be visible? Why yes - python has them. It's called whitespace, and it's perfectly visible. Different blocks start in different columns. Very easy to spot.
Should a language have two visible block demarcators? No, that's silly. Redundancy creates confusion. Brace and whitespace should not both be allowed to demarcate blocks. Likewise, spaces and tabs should not both be allowed. Python avoids this with -tt to prevent mixing spaces and tabs, though why it's not enabled by default is a facepalm mystery.
Should a language use different block demarcators for humans and machines (compiler / parser / interpreter)? Absolutely not! That's the worst of all worlds. Machine will interpret blocks one way, while humans could interpret them completely different. Talk about a recipe for disaster. Hey guess which languages do exactly this? Hint: not python.
The only knock against whitespace is silly programmers expecting to cut and paste code directly from whitespace-munching systems like the web. Get over that silly notion and the whole damn problem goes away.
This is just one trivial example amongst thousands, but if you type the word "chrome" into Google you'll get 6 pages of ads for their products and barely any mention of the actual material chrome.
Words can mean more than one thing and having easily accessible choices that let you pick the meaning of a search term for more detailed results would be an easy thing to do... if Google cared.
You clearly don't know what "first to file" means and if you knew anything about the AIA you would know that the new rules for prior art under first to file actually make it *harder* to overcome prior art vs. the old system because in the old system you could swear behind legitimate prior art by a time period of up to one year if you had records proving that you had reduced the invention to practice prior to the publication date of the prior art. The swearing behind action doesn't exist anymore except in the narrow situation where somebody misappropriates information from the inventor and publishes it.
Unlike a lot of environmentalists it looks like he actually wanted practical solutions to pollution problems:
http://www.jameslovelock.org/n...
Back when Slashdot wasn't a uniparty echo chamber this initiative would have been met with overwhelming support and post after post of "corporations aren't people".
2022 Slashdot though....
Now if Jack had engaged in a boycott campaign against those exact same games of being part of the male patriarchy for not having enough BIPOC trans representation... then he'd be called a hero today [assuming he died his hair blue and identified as non-binary at least].
It's math not maths. "Maths" is based on faulty grammar and only came into use around 1911. Sorry British people, you're wrong.
The castigation usually goes: "Mathematics is plural, so maths needs its -s." It's a logic based on a false (AmE) premise/(BrE often) premiss. Just because there's an -s at the end of mathematics doesn't mean it's plural. The suffix -s is homonymous.
Mathematics doesn't work with numbers because it's not a countable noun, it's a mass noun. That is, it does not take plural marking because it is not the kind of thing one can or does count. Similar examples (without the confusing -s) on the end are cinnamon and boredom. Note that you don't talk of putting *cinnamons in your food (unless you're making the point that they are different types of cinnamon--which is a different matter), nor does one suffer *boredoms if the boredom happened at different times. Cinnamon and boredom are treated as masses with undistinguishable (or at least not-worth-distinguishing), and therefore uncountable, parts. If we want to make such words countable, we have to use another noun to do so: two teaspoons of cinnamon, three episodes of boredom. Similarly, you can have three theories of mathematics or three mathematics classes, but not *three mathematics.
Now, some of you will say that Mathematics please me is what you'd say. This is the effect of the folk-belief that mathematics is plural; it has started to change how people use the word. We see the same kind of language-change due to misapprehension of the -s suffix in the short form maths. Math is the older form--the OED has examples back to 1847, but examples of maths only from 1911.
Faster / more efficient / higher quality always wins out, right? Look how Betamax beat VHS. Blu ray beat streaming. OS/2 beat Win95. Digital cameras beat cell phones. Oops.
Modern web is way past "good enough". 5ms latency instead of 500ms, who cares? Machine gets a little slow from browser load, put more RAM in the sucker. Much cheaper to throw hardware at the problem than develop a completely new "optimized" software stack full of bugs, security holes, unknown failure modes, lack of documentation, no support base, etc, etc.
This is a solution in search of a problem. Never going to displace the current "good enough" infrastructure. Why would anyone want a whole set of unknown problems? Only for very very niche markets like high-frequency trading*.
* illustrative example only. HFT doesn't use web browsers. Please route all other hypertechnical, smarty-pants objections to
"The community distribution Arch Linux has up to now required you to manually install it by entering a whole lot of scary commands in a terminal. "
Uh... the old "hard" Arch install is a piece of cake compared to even what the "easy" distros were like back in the day. On top of that it lets you actually customize your installation far far more than what a cookie-cutter Ubuntu-flavor-of-the-week lets you do.
The Linux world has certainly not been immune from being dumbed-down when installing Arch is suddenly "scary" to do.
Racism requires the belief that one race is better than others. Can an algorithm believe something?
False. Racism is not a belief. It's discrimination based on race. Discrimination measures outcomes, not beliefs.
Unequal outcomes for different races is prima facie evidence of discrimination. This can be rebutted if other causal factors explain the outcomes - for instance, maybe the algorithm really has trouble with blue bonnets, and blue bonnets are more often worn by some races than others in the sample set.
Once disparate treatment of different races is identified, the algorithm is immediately suspect and deemed racist. The burden then shifts to the algorithm provider to give a credible alternate explanation, if there is one. Until an alternate explanation has been tested and validated, the algorithm should be considered inappropriate and removed from service.
This is how allegations of racism work in the legal world. It applies to algorithms the same as any other actions.
If only Kamala Harris had won the election this never would have happened! I can't wait for Trump to finally be impeached and removed from office!
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
