There is literally too much content and most of it looks awful.

I took a look Amazon's kindle unlimited this afternoon and what I saw were an incredible number of science fiction authors that I never heard of, pushing out what the blurbs and titles made look like bad romance novels in space.

The functions of the editor and publisher are just missing from this mish mash. If you look at paper publishing it's a large financial commitment to publish and market any given book and most would never pay back the investment. Hence publishers to market the works and editors to select quality material were immensely valuable and helped make certain that if an authors work was published it had a better than random submission chance of earning back it's costs.

Now the cost to "Publsish" as an e-book is minimal and much of what would never have been published in the past is flooding all over the place. So you have lots of "Authors" self publishing and not making money. This really shouldn't come as a shocker. The problem is there are so many of them they overwhelm everything else. If I read correctly Kindle Unlimited has 600,000 titles. It's just numbers but there really just aren't enough people in the world to see that most of those authors make a living from being published there.

Niklaus Wirth really was a genius when it came to language design. His languages are the most readable I have ever worked with. For fun this weekend I decided to teach myself python and I keep going WTF were they thinking ?* Not to put Python down it seems very well executed, but it just seems to make design choices just for the sake of being different.

*APL, IMNSHO is still the all time champion of being a write only language

I suppose set theory, and propositional calculus/boolean algebra don't count as math either ?

The man was acquitted of the charges. You would hope that his innocence would be the overwhelming message not what the government failed to prove.

I see why you went AC for this reply. I'd suggest actually reading the blog post, it's worse than the flaws I pointed out and it's little more than pointless navel gazing. It's a shame so much crap like it has been making it as slashdot stories lately. I have to guess somebody is using multiple dummy accounts to promote stories through the firehose.

Where are these stories coming from ? What's next water is wet ?

You may have a legitimate debate over which is more precise math or particular programming languages but has anyone ever argued a human language is more specific ? I'd love to see people program without understanding the propositional calculus. No strike that I may have actually seen that and it wasn't pretty. Comedy aside, anyone who has ever tried to write a parser understands just how non concrete natural languages are. Something like 90% of your effort is devoted to disambiguation of natural languages.

Does this guy actually have evidence of anyone seriously making the point he is refuting ? I mean it's trivial take a look at poetry and mathematics and programming languages can't even start to deal with the abstract concepts involved.

Haven't we been here before ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

of biological systems to mutation more than anything else. Without mutation you will just see the permutations of the existing genome try to fill the ecological space with those best suited to particular niches taking up residence there. The lizards for example the best suited fro tree climbing/feeding take up residence in the trees and breed new generations with an ever more narrow slice of the original colonizers genome.

The beneficial mutations that introduce new genes are were you get changes and would seem to be nearly impossible to predict in detail. You could hypothesize that a bacterial would eventually mutate to utilize an available food source, if not in any great detail the exact method.

The rest just seems to be usual determinism. Does it really take that much to predict that if you breed horse in pens with 3 foot ceilings and keep them in them all the time, in a few generations you are going to get short horses ?

A much more elegant architecture than x86. Still have to give Intel credit their manufacturing prowess gave them the edge.

Not to beat a dead horse but drag is a force not a unit of power or energy and the amount of power needed to overcome drag is proportional to the cube of velocity not its square. While the force from drag is important in terms of the design of the train and the materials used in it's construction, it's the power requirement that is the determining factor for the engine spec.

Not at all depressed. If the EU wants to fund vanity projects good on them. Having the U.S. not build the SSC was a pretty joyous moment, If we could only get NASA to not build expensive rockets that are horribly uneconomical like the upcoming SLS, and maybe farm that out to private companies that would be even better.