chbarts
Oh yes, original sin. Wonderful. That makes sense. Can I buy some plenary indulgence from you, or is it a 'salvation by grace' thing now?
> They are representative of the state of the world in that we still allow them to go on.
The world once allowed the Black Plague and religions based on human sacrifice to 'go on', as you say. Darfur and North Korea are nothing compared to those.
OK, find me a duel and a bear-baiting match in America and I'll believe you. Otherwise you're just mindlessly cynical, like any number of other teenagers.
Right. Personal responsibility means companies must be held responsible if they don't follow ethical standards, something that goes strictly beyond obeying the law. Personal responsibility is thus the foundation of a free market.
Do you know about Metamath yet? It's something similar to what you want, but it's all in a single program as opposed to being web-based.
The same applies to chimps, and then recursively down the chain from other apes all the way to bacteria.
Wheel of morality, turn turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn.
By this argument, we should destroy all zoos and let the species in them die off. It's counter to all biological knowledge.
> Even if a sizable population of them were granted full human rights and a habitat, they would forever owe us their existence, and their debt to humans would hang over anything they achieve for themselves in terms of growth and survival.
So? How is that different from the debt you owe your parents?
> Our future generations will also treat them as an experiment gone awry, should they ever threaten the slightest human interest.
This happens to minority ethnic groups all the time. Look at the new Arizona immigration law.
> It's hard enough watching dying racial and linguistic minority groups; their last remaining few members made into coursework for "our" undergraduates.
So... trying to understand ourselves is morally wrong? It's horrible to preserve our dying ways as best we know how?
> Bringing back a Neanderthal is to kill him twice, after granting him a brief purposeless life for our own edutainment. Let them rest in peace.
This applies equally to the California condor and the panda. We should just let all endangered species rest in peace, I suppose.
So... it's edgy humor in the form of a terrifying practical joke? Maybe Andy Kaufman didn't die after all.
It's entirely possible to use the techniques in the book to, say, whip up a compiler in Ruby that turns an inconvenient data format into JSON. The real utility of doing this by hand in 2010 is, however, debatable.
Definitely the case. This comedy degradation happened to Garfield and Peanuts as well, and it hit Peanuts especially hard because, well, it's Schultz. He was doing genius work in the 1950s-1960s, refining a lot of the medium traits we now take for granted.
Both Garfield and Dilbert were a lot weirder in their early years, had larger casts, and more diverse settings. In one of the early Dilbert plotlines, he discovers dinosaurs hiding in his home after a computer model tells him they can't all be gone. Not exactly genius, but better than anything Adams is making now.
The decline of Peanuts was especially sad. Schultz was a trouper and did the work until he physically and mentally couldn't anymore, and the decline showed painfully. Buying the huge Fantagraphics collection might be beyond your budget, but if you get a chance to flip through it by all means do so.
The foregoing illustrates why The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were ended early. It also illustrates just how resistant to change newspaper readers are: The reason strips are allowed to sit and fester for decades when TV shows are off the air in a few seasons is due entirely to the fact papers will lose circulation if they cut the wrong strip.
The modern equivalent is denying your kids Internet access. According to a (somewhat) recent Variety article, the median age of TV viewership is 50.
(Yes, I do trust Variety to get entertainment news right.)
Right. Well, legalization will help that as it is, in fact, illegal for a legitimate company to sell some unknown poison when it is claiming to sell drugs of a given composition and purity. Also, meth labs as we now know them will become economically impossible if it's possible to get meth legally: They are the perfect, absolutely perfect example of the kind of high-risk/high-reward behavior that is only worthwhile if you have gigantic margins subsidized by the DEA and local police.
I agree.
> Some of the current drugs out there need to stay illegal. Not because they get you high, but because they are toxic.
OK, I'll replace 'toxic' with 'potentially more addictive and dangerous than weed, alcohol, and nicotine' (Tobacco is damned addictive but it doesn't seem to cause antisocial behaviors.), because otherwise what you said makes no damned sense.
Go back to the late 1800s: People could buy cocaine and opium over-the-counter at drugstores. Laudanum (also called tincture of opium), a common patent medicine, was made from 10% opium and 1% morphine dissolved in alcohol. This, too, was available over-the-counter. America was prosperous, growing, and certainly not universally addicted to drugs.
So, why do you think going back to that regime would be dangerous? What evidence do you have that contradicts my historical analysis?
Precisely the point: If the cartels come to intimidate grandma, she calls the police, because her operation is legal and the intimidation is not. The police, because her operation is legal, then go after the cartel and shut them down.
Additionally, contract laws and theft/burglary laws and so on work in grandma's favor, because the legal system is at least potentially on the side of her legal operation. This alone greatly reduces the need for violence.
Textbooks do seem to exist as if the Internet weren't usable, don't they? At most they seem to have a few URLs to the publisher's and author's websites. It's actually kind of sad, as if textbook authors didn't trust themselves to outdo what people can find online. Zed does not seem to have that problem.
Make this one option. The other option should be one HTML file per chapter (or subchapter, or thereabouts) for the people who want to use the browser's bookmark functionality to pick up where they left off.
> no headers and footers on every page
Footnotes, OTOH, are fine if you make them links in both directions (to the note and back to the body text). Both HTML and PDF can do this, and it makes it so much less of a pain in the ass to actually read the things when you know you won't get lost.
However, what are the odds of someone being able to make special-purpose machines to do everything COTS boxes are used for, and making those machines as fast, cheap, and reliable as COTS systems are now? Some things seem obvious (x-ray machines, lab machines) but accounting and record-keeping? Going back to adding machines and purely manual filing is not an option in a large hospital, especially if it has to maintain modern standards of patient care over a large patient population.
The other problem with this is that the NSA is paranoid, and paranoia doesn't necessarily move with the times. This relates back to the first thing: If it's cheap and safe to destroy drives, and you are storing secrets, why not? That does not mean you need to destroy drives, which is what this conversation is about.
Wearing a belt and suspenders does not mean belts are prone to failure.
Common usage, which you can see as easily as I can. For example, do news agencies typically use FBI or F.B.I.? Do they typically use UN or U.N.?
> That is, what is the evidence that current professional editors are on record as saying that the quoted advice is old-fashioned and not to be regarded?
You again misunderstand the role professional editors (and, by extension, style guides) fill. They enforce what's commonly known as a 'house style', which may be influential outside of a given 'house' (company or newsroom) but is not authoritative in any sense anywhere but that single location. Language is not defined by books: it is described by them.
> (This subthread started, after all, with an HN participant noting that editors were FOLLOWING the quoted rule.)
That comment was deleted before I got to it.
Maybe. Or maybe we'd just have locked on to CP/M-86 and Digital Research, which was just as tied to x86.
However, it's impossible to tell if someone like Gates would have risen to the top. Gary Kildall was not Bill Gates and, for that reason among others, Digital Research never became Microsoft. Corporate culture and philosophies matter.
No, it isn't. It is influential, not authoritative.
And, in this instance, it is outdated.
So should we punish people based on who happened to be in their class with them? That makes sense if you're picking cofounders or sports teammates or something else that probably doesn't really matter, but the entire point of school is to teach. It is not merely preparation for the job market, although some jobs still require a modicum of education. It is not a social club where you network your way into a startup. It is not a way to display your superior intelligence.
Schools are good or bad based on how well they teach material, not on how well they thin the herd or propel their students towards some illusory goal.