Think Logically

The great thing is, this XKCD strip is relevant to all Slashdot inflammatory threads!

If there was absolutely no copyright or patents, the moment someone low in the food chain comes up with something, he can't do anything with it without risking losing it forever. What the hell incentive does he have to anything with it?

Exactly the same incentives that people had to create in the thousands of years before copyright and patents existed? "Intellectual property" doesn't protect the author of creative works, who may very well create it and keep it secret or limited to a small audience. The advances in arts and skills were kept to the small circle of one's guild so that it wouldn't be copied by competition, and industrial espionage was what advanced industries as a whole.

The argument that stopping IP will stop creativity because it won't protect the author is fallacious. Authors have many ways to benefit from their work other than selling copies, even when technology allows copies to be made for free. The only purpose of IP laws should be to benefit society at large so that new content is shared by default, instead of hidden under secrecy and benefit only the authors. The current IP rules that avoid the possibility of freely sharing content once it has been made available to the public, that is what makes no goddamn sense.

They know they believe in an Omnipotent God. They have no need to defend Him. (...) That tells me all I need to know about the "equivalence" between Islam and Christianity.

Yeah, because at no point in history Christianity has killed people because of blasphemy and heresy.</sarcasm>

If any, it only says about their relative grade of maturity as somewhat civilized religions, and the long due need for a renaissance in Islam. Which won't happen if people trying to make it happen get ridiculed over and over.

Magic is a form of speech, the literal transliteration of thoughts into the real world; and thought is well known to create unsolvable paradoxes. With magic, you could create a barber who shaves those who don't shave themselves, and ask him to shave in the morning.

The examples you give are still technological effects that could be accomplished through physical gadgets. But magic *could* be inconsistent with the laws of physics. You could put two pigeons plus another two pigeons into a hat, and get not four but one rabbit out from it.

You wouldn't use a Turing machine to model the minimum energy need of calculations, as they are woefully inefficient; in the same way that you wouldn't model addition representing the naturals through the Successor function.

The Turing machine was (is) a reasonably good tool to create proofs for the existence (or nonexistence) of computations, as it provides a quite simple and general computation model, easy to work symbolically with. But near the minimum use of resources, it isn't.

The problem is when the "links right in the intro" form a loop and none of the articles gives a sensible explanation of the field, only unintuitive formal definitions with no practical application.

I don't know about you, but today I feel powerful.

There *îs* a card for changing the colors in the text, and the guy's using it (and a second one to change creature type). The card modification is thus done according to the rules.

In fact, almost any magic effect in MtG is a change in the initial rules, so that's Magic for you

Maybe you can't "learn abstract mathematical ideas" from intuitive descriptions, but 99% of the public don't need to explore all the implications of mathematical ideas. Frankly, the attitude that "everybody should know as much of my art as I do" is quite elitist.

Intuitive descriptions will help the rest of us to a) communicate with the expert who actually understand the implications and b) apply them to real life problems without the need to have a whole understanding. People consulting an encyclopedia don't want full understanding, otherwise they'd be looking a course instead.

What a Wikipedia mathematical article should contain is:
1- who developed the concept, when it happened, and to which problems it was applied at first.
2- in what fields it is applied nowadays, and what benefits it provides.
3- basic intuitive explanations.
4- links to references with the mathematical formal definitions.

You know, encyclopedic content. Unfortunately, few people writing mathematical articles at Wikipedia want to develop them for a *general* public as they're supposed to be.

I think he mentioned revision control because the diffs showing how the code logic has changed should also include the diffs of updated comments to reflect those changes. Commit time is the best point to ensure that all accepted changes have been properly documented.

A guy above said that their team treats incorrect comments as a bug, and they're right in that approach. The whole point of high-level languages is to communicate with the programmer as well as with the machine; if the source code contains inconsistent instructions for the human and the computer, the program's current internal logic is flawed. Even if the binary executes without errors, changed the code won't be smooth because of those contradictions.

While the school of 'weave' and 'tangle' from literate programming proved to be too heavyweight to be practical, the future of comments is not to ignore them, but to better integrate with the IDE. Documentation generators like Javadoc or Doxygen were a big hit because they simplified building rich sets of deep, easy-to-navigate comments. Also coding features like design-by-contract and unit testing can be thought as forms of executable comments - they don't contribute to the program business logic, but they tell the programmers about its inner stable structure.

Programmers ignore comments not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's hard to do well. As tools for engineering comments along with code get better, we'll find programmers using them more and more during the early programming stages instead of an afterthought.

Where are mod points when you need them?

better idea... If it's going to be about sex, let's make it about sex.

I'd certainly watch that olympic discipline...

Entire app=web page. This one doesn't require more complexity than that, nor needs more resources.

Beware of the Grammar Huguenots.