PaulAJ

29 ms·

241.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Terry Pratchett often described what he did as "craft"
242.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Answer: yes.
243.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
17th Century language geeks thought that English should be more like Latin, so they banned split infinitives. 21st Century language geeks think that English should be more like Klingon, so they ban the verb "to be".
244.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Does this mean that any other US citizen could file essentially the same case with their local court? Even if only some of them succeed, it would mean that the NSA is legally required to manage a long list of individual exclusions, and that
245.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Actually, yes it is. Putting in extra terms you can't read until after committing yourself is not legal, so the EULA would not be enforceable. In some cases where the software is bundled with the hardware you can only reject the EULA b
246.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
In common law systems (including the UK and US) a contract is a "meeting of minds" (that is, you and I both agree on the terms). The writing merely makes clear what has been agreed, but if one side has been tricked then its still
247.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
And meanwhile the government is saying that Edward Snowden should have used official whistleblowing avenues instead of going public.
248.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
No way could it be just a couple of software engineers. The engine is a system, and its the engine that has to pass the emissions tests. So that means the whole engine development team had to be in on it, including their technical managemen
249.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
This mistake is fixed in Haskell.
250.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
I haven't used tagsoup, but I believe that is the point; it was designed to let you scrape data from badly formed HTML you got from somewhere else, rather than helpfully pointing out the broken tags.
251.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
I thought that entropy solved this problem: your "weakly" random numbers from the thermometer might have, say, 1.3 bits of entropy for every reading. So you assemble 100 readings and that gives you 130 bits of randomness, which yo
252.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Sounds good, but how much CO2 production do those precursors imply? I've seen too many over-enthusiastic write-ups for bio-solar technologies that don't include the carbon cost of the inputs. Of course if the answer is "not m
253.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
This whole thing is a straw man. I don't think I have ever heard an opponent of religion suggest that medieval Christians were stupid for believing in a flat Earth. It is also no news to anyone interested in the issues that belief in a
254.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Some experiments suggest that if D=n^2 then the expected number of collisions is close to 0.5, and converges on 0.5 as D tends to infinity. So if D is large then collisions will be a problem when n approaches sqrt(D).
255.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Also, any imperative algorithm can be translated into a functional algorithm with, at most, O(log n) increase in complexity, and usually with none.
256.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
You don't hire Simon Marlow to hack PHP.
257.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
This is a continuation of sumptuary laws ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law ), which were laws regulating what you could wear depending on your social class. The supposed logic behind these laws was always to
258.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
No, he said that these things "can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties." That is not the same thing as sa
259.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
If you Google for "what is my ip?" then Google will tell you. If it looks like "12.34.56.78" (known as "dotted quad") then your computer is using IPv4. If it looks like "FE80:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:
260.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
I know its a side point, but I gather that smokers actually cost the UK NHS less than non-smokers, because smokers tend to die younger and faster than non-smokers. The people who cost the NHS a lot are the healthy, clean living people who s
261.
by PaulAJ 11y ago
Note how Curtis Green was raided: they delivered some drugs, then searched his house on the grounds that he was in possession of drugs. This is a standard US Postal Inspectors tactic: it was used many years ago (see http://totse.
262.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
I've always wondered: does the NRA (or a majority of its supporters) believe that Americans have the right to buy a surface to air heat seeking missile and then hang around with it under the departure path of a major airport? If so, th
263.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Its not difficult. The author has a stream of data (random bytes for crypto keys) which needs to be consumed in different bits of the program at different times. The traditional ways are either a global variable holding the current state of
264.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
America has systematically stripped judges of their authority to make judgements. This was done partly to ramp up sentencing due to fear of crime, and partly to make justice more even-handed. The latter is not an unreasonable goal; skin col
265.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Its part of the Unicode standard. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence for details. (OK, so "required" might be overstating it; you are perfectly free to write a program that doesn't conf
266.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Its not an AI issue, just a small matter of having lots of rules. Moreover this is not just an issue for non-Western languages: the character â (lower case "a" with a circumflex) can be represented either as a single code-point U+
267.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
I agree its the subtle stuff that is a problem. I've sometimes said things along the lines of "Sorry Jane, what were you saying just now?" after Jane has just been talked over. I'm not sure how much it helps though, and
268.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
I can't see that this is down to fundamental attribution error. That is the fallacy of assuming that because someone acts in a particular way, its because they are always that way, or that its because they are a member of a group that
269.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Thanks for pointing this out; I've never heard that idea before. But I don't think it holds water. The ability to talk and invent happens across our whole species regardless of recreational drug use. That means the explanations ar
270.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
You could use Haskell's type system to make it type safe. In fact Galois have done pretty much that in Ivory http://ivorylang.org/

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