Comment Lifetime has been great (Score 1) 278
I bought about ten CFLs in 2007, two of them failed.
Two years ago I started buying LEDs. I have half a dozen of these, none of which have failed.
I bought about ten CFLs in 2007, two of them failed.
Two years ago I started buying LEDs. I have half a dozen of these, none of which have failed.
The only bad programmers I've ever encountered, are programmers that are inconsiderate.
Those who do not consider that the purpose of a computing language is to communicate with other developers, not just the computer. That's really the main common-factor I've found among "bad programmers". It's a skill, that can be learned, but it's an emotional skill. Some people can be very intelligent, brilliant even, and still not want to learn that one crucial skill.
yes
This is a generic problem with media reports of medical results. No understanding of the statistics.
Add in the lack of repeatability of many studies (for example just about anything claiming bad effects from low doses of bisphenol-A has proven to not be repeatable) and outright fraud (Wakefield) or attempts to push the data using questionable statistics (Séralini) and you have a giant problem with media and medical research results.
To put things in perspective - the old owners had plants in 5 different states. Each of the other plants consistently lost money. Our plant consistently MADE MONEY, despite mismanagement. Quarter after quarter, the accountants posted profits from our plant. In effect, we carried four other money losing plants for years. The owners could never bring themselves to unload the money losers, instead taking the profits we earned to shore up the other plants. They followed that policy until bankruptcy put them out of the game completely.
Were any of those plants making key inputs for yours? If they were, and it wasn't practical to consolidate that function, then closing them down would have crippled you. Which individual plants make money is one thing, but where there's internal transfer of items between units of the business, the value attached to those items is fairly nominal in practice; it's the overall business that really makes the profit or the loss.
Or maybe they're just incompetent fucks. That could be true too. Hard to say without the full facts, but the fact that bankruptcy hit is strongly indicative.
WE don't lack the will.
We lack the power.
The ones with the power lack the will (or desire) - because their power depends on control of generation of energy through resources they control; namely fossil fuels. They're not going to give up that power while they have it. Not voluntarily.
The reason thorium never hurt anybody, is because it is complete fantasy. Nobody has ever built one that has demonstrated any degree of industrial reliability and usefulness. Thorium is up there with Fusion, as far as being a demonstrated technology.
A masters in computer science program means taking about 10 three credit courses to get the degree. That means learning potentially 10 different languages. Which 10 would you choose? Which of those 10 are a must to learn, which would be merely advantageous to know?
Take at least one OO language (Java's fussy and bureaucratic, but its a pretty good example of the breed and is likely to be useful after you get your masters), at least one functional language (probably Haskell these days), at least one declarative language (Prolog or SQL), and don't just learn programming languages. You also need to learn about data, about data structures, about algorithms and their analysis, about parsing and compilation, and about concurrency; these are all independent of any programming language.
But computing is well served by not just learning about computing. If you have time, learn about math, stats and logic too, and learn how to communicate your ideas effectively; you'll never get far if you can't communicate with other people well.
The default 'package' access is rarely used.
Huh. I use it quite a bit when implementing an API. (You hardly need to use public at all inside interfaces.)
And by booboo I naturally mean something along the lines of
if(target->ThreatRating == ThreatRating::American) { target->Kill(); }
I'd guess something like:
if(target->ThreatRating = ThreatRating::Trrist) { target->Kill(); }
Let that be a lesson to you: Trrist must evaluate to 0, for humanity's sake!
If hardware isn't the problem, then it must be an algorithmic one. So, why can't an algorithm be discovered that is a breakthrough?
The problem is that it requires a true breakthrough, and there's no way to predict when that will happen. It also doesn't help that we don't really know what intelligence really is; all we've got is lots of things it isn't. I suspect that when someone cracks it, there'll be lots of people going "Is that all?! Anyone could have got that." and they'd be right, except that nobody did and it involves something both trivial and non-obvious. It might also require a lot of parallel processing, which we're still learning how to do well.
As we don't have any handy breakthroughs right now, we should instead study how brains really work and how to make computers do useful things (including stuff like "understanding" speech, "understanding" written natural language, drive cars safely, etc.) Those might or might not make the breakthrough easier, but they'll have other benefits along the way so they're still right to do.
If I want to strongly encrypt a cooking recipe that I email to my grandmother, then it is my business and my business alone.
And your grandmother's business too, assuming you want actually communicate that cooking recipe to her.
... basically, what American Colonists were rebelling against in the first place. . . then adopted.
The other crap in the lines is noise. It's insane to imagine that you could reliably extract any reliable information from it.
Given the cost overruns and the fact the schedule has been already pushed out 20 years any sane person would question what is going on here.
I'm in favor of government funded R&D but this one stinks of gross mismanagement big time.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.