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Comment Re:It's about social status... (Score 1) 836

You're giving E.T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics" (almost undoubtedly your source) entirely too much credit. While a fun read, it is not a serious work of historical scholarship; rather it is targeted at a popular audience. Bell's sources on the subject of Cantor are mainly Cantor's own letters; with regard to Kronecker's alleged attacks on Cantor, much of those those letters are directly contradicted by published transcripts of Kronecker's lectures.

Certainly it is true that some of "the smart people" may have not understood Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers; Kronecker, however, surely did, and Poincare did as well. What they objected to was the use of "number" -- a term which at the time had a radically different precise mathematical meaning than it does today -- to describe such constructions.

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New Law Will Require Camera Phones To "Click" 1235

An anonymous reader writes "A new bill is being introduced called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, which would require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the phone's camera. It would also prohibit such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone."

Comment Re:Color me perplexed. (Score 1) 1475

I guess Google has finally decided to ditch their "don't be evil" slogan: there's nothing more evil than trying to overturn the will of the people after a democratic vote. The people have spoken. Google should live with it.

If "the people" (meaning 50% of the minority of the population that actually turned out to vote) passed a ballot initiative that condemned you to death, would you accept their judgement?

Comment Re:He is Mormon. He was in my Mormon congregation. (Score 1) 1475

I understand that you might see the LDS Church's views as hateful. We can agree to disagree and that is why this country is great.

No, we can't.

Using the ballot proposition system to take explicitly take rights away from a minority group, when those rights pose no risk to anyone else's rights and are allowed to the majority is wrong, unethical, and of questionable legality.

Funding groups that want to do so, on the basis of delusions in which an imaginary man in the sky tells you that said minority group is evil, is hateful at best, but probably more aptly described as psychopathic or paranoid-delusional.

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The Zen of SOA Screenshot-sm 219

Alex Roussekov writes "The book "Zen of SOA" by Tom Termini introduces an original view to the challenging world of SOA. He refers to the Zen philosophy as a "therapeutic device" helping SOA practitioners to get rid of prejudices and opinions in order to apply a clear mind-set based on real-life experiences and the application of technology knowledge. Each chapter of the book is prefaced by Zen Truism that the author suggests to "revisit, reflect on it longer, and see if you are able to establish a truth from the narrative, as well as from your own experiences." In fact, the book is about a SOA Blueprint outlining a methodology for building a successful SOA strategy. The target audience is C-level Executives, IT Managers and Enterprise Architects undertaking or intending to undertake adoption of SOA throughout their organizations. I strongly recommend the book to all SOA practitioners involved in implementation of SOA." Read below for the rest of Alexander's review.

Comment Re:Show me some example code (Score 1) 382

as always, one should use the level of abstraction that one feels comfortable with to deal with the specific "algorithmic needs", no?

Of course. But one shouldn't pretend that this makes the language one has chosen somehow better suited to the task than the language another person would choose, even if their solution looks unintelligible to you. It just means that you don't understand the way the other person did it.

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