Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:God, not this again. (Score 1) 292

"Science is not done by straw poll, so the views of most (uneducated, I might add) people is unimportant. What matters is that physicists and mathematicians ..."

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Regarding your simplistic definition of existence, ask yourself, does a person exist after they die ?

Comment Re:God, not this again. (Score 1) 292

Look, this is very simple. We don't even know if THIS universe is a computer simulation. (See arXiv for constraints.) If this universe is a simulation, it is by definition a cyberspace. If cyberspace does not exist, then no law governing anything within this universe is possible.

Since laws governing this universe are possible, one of the statements in that chain must be false. The one most likely to be false is that cyberspace does not exist.

I think most people would say the most likely statment to be false is "this universe is a simulation"

Also, define exist please.

Comment Re:Kids (Score 1) 393

"I really hope you don't mind some faceless organization dealing with your bouts of dementia and incontinence."

People spend much of their life planning and working so they can have a happy and graceful death, they dont try to have a happy life.

Comment Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score 1) 476

C has an advantage in corner cases due to the flexibility of its lower level.

So if there is a need to use two separate abstraction layers, then a 'hand rolled' version might be able to find savings that a compiler wouldn't look for as its treating them separately for external reasons.

But like i said initially, the benefits only get less meaningful with time.

Programmer/team preference is way more important than any real technical difference between C and C++

Comment Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score 1) 476

I say C++ is slower than C because; as more abstraction is placed between the programmer and the hardware, it gets more difficult for the compiler to achieve the same quality of code.

C++ is Object Oriented, to do OO requires more abstraction, OO is used to make problems easier for Humans to understand, not to make it easier for hardware.

Comment Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score 1) 476

C is and will always will be more efficient with hardware than C++ (for equally skilled programmers). Its also true that hardware resources will only become cheaper, so that advantage becomes less and less meaningful.

A lot of older programmers value hardware efficiency more the programmer efficiency, and younger programmers dont see the value in that.

Comment Re:Excellent. (Score 1) 234

organization's main goal is to break US Law, then you don't get to do business with US-Based Financial Firms.

Prisoners are allowed to own a business while in prison.

Are you sure the intent of a corporation can be used to ban their operation in the US ?

e.g Would someone associated with the mafia (but not charged) be banned from running a legitimate buisness ?

Comment Re:no chance (Score 1) 192

"None of the major parties are going to give high preferences to this new party"

Do you remember the ALP (center left) preferencing Family First, a right wing christian fundamentalist party before the greens. Parties do really weird things with preferences.

Its very naive to think you can predict who will win the last senate seat, DLP won a senate seat with a 1.9% primary vote.

Comment Re:Best of luck (Score 2) 192

Australia has always had trouble standing up for itself, it used to hide behind Britain, now it hides behind US.

Yes there have been protests, but both major political parties are very similar on "national security", and neither have shown him any respect, despite significant popular support amongst voters.

There used to be a minor center party (Australian Democrats) with a slogan "Keep the bastards honest" which did pretty good for a while, but lost the ground in the center to the major parties. If wikileaks can revive that niche they could win votes from the major parties rather than taking votes from the Greens.

Some big politcal names will write him off straight away, but they embarrassingly just dont understand what hes about, or the demographic that supports him.

He is a chance for a big protest vote, his undoing may be the need to compromise to get things done in politics.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell

Working...