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asanagi

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Even if Japan had made a bomb in time, by 1945, they had barely any navy or air force left to deploy it. By then, the fantastically inept IJN leadership had squandered all their best assets in strategic blunders. The only way they could have used the thing would be to drop it on themselves.

What a fascinating paper! Although I know the speed of light is finite and have considered many of the implications of relativity, I never thought of the effects on the apparent occultation of two celestial bodies at significant distances from one another relative to the observer. The moon's transit between Earth and Mars would not appear reciprocally the same to observers on both planets. Obvious in retrospect, but the layman does not tend to consider relativistic effects in this kind of simple geometric reasoning.

There's enough distance between us and the Moon that if you had a flashlight bright enough, you could easily perceive the delay between switching it on and seeing the Moon's surface brighten, as the light made the return trip. Something to think about next time you look up at the Moon and wonder about its scale and distance.

Why I am pro-GPL 11 years ago

You're striking at the core of the issue here.

In RMS's ideal version of the world, there is no distinction: every "user" is also a "developer". The freedom guaranteed by the GPL enables society to reach a state in which every individual is not merely a consumer of solutions, but a producer. In this vision, we all cooperate to solve problems together because solving problems in the world makes the world better for everyone.

In reality, problem-solving ability (the intersection of the cognitive ability, skill set, drive, and opportunity to solve problems) is a limited resource. There are problem solvers and there are sheep, a configuration that results in a natural kind of economy. "Corporate" with all its lawyers and sales hucksters, i.e. persons not directly engaged in the work of solving problems, are a necessary demon. They connect problem solvers with users that have problems to solve. Users, for their part, exist to give us their money as a reward for the work of solving their problems.

Whether to support the GPL is really a moral decision about which world you believe in. Do you solve problems to make the world a better place, or to make more money for yourself? I personally wish RMS' vision would come true even though I don't believe it's possible. There are natural limitations to problem-solving ability other than the psychological effects of the capitalist environment on those who grow up in it. Still. When you really dig to the bottom of opposition to the GPL, you always find one thing, and one thing only. Money. "ME".

You have to understand, most people are born with a conscience. It takes a long time and concerted effort to erase it. The doublethink and cognitive dissonance on display here is the end result of that process.

These corporations literally employ child psychologists to study the exact rate of white flashes and scene changes in a television spot that grabs their attention and will not release it. Our children are not on a level playing field with PHD educated adult psychologists. Marketers and salespeople will defend this practice. They don't see anything wrong with it.

P.S. I don't wear sunglasses or any article of clothing with a brand, drink coke or pepsi, and I eat the raisin bran I do because it comes in a bag instead of a bag inside a paper box. Mentally rejecting advertising has had the most positive impact on my physical and emotional health of anything I've ever done.

Nuking Kyoto would have been an irredeemable loss to humanity; anyone who has ever been there would surely understand this. The city is concentrated with ancient wonders and cultural vibrance of the highest order. Not to mention that the indelible injury to the national psychology of Japan would have been magnitudes greater.

It's astounding to me that the decision to destroy it would come down to just a few men on a war council. Thank God that Stimson prevailed.

I think language and symbology is at the core of why they are so impenetrable.

One major sin is taking new concepts and ideas and putting the primary discoverer's name on them. Such names yield no clue as to the interpretation or application of the idea itself.

Another problem is the symbols used in certain mathematical texts. Everyone who uses them treats them like they're universally understood, but in reality the syntax and meaning of the symbols can and frequently are recycled and reused across disciplines and even theories in the same discipline. You have to be close to the 'in-group'. Like reading other people's code where operators have been overloaded, it's like learning a new language every time you want to dig into a cool new maths paper.

I don't actually have any good solutions to these problems. I would guess there are lots of lessons to be learned from the history of Chinese characters, though. They have thousands of unambiguous symbols which _can_ be learned by non-natives and which _do_ give an appreciable degree of cross-lingual intelligibility among languages that use them.

It's like you're seeing into a machine's imagination. Look at the 8th-layer images of the pitcher, or the gorillas with improved prior, for instance. They're very close to layout sketches an artist might use to block out a painting or photograph before beginning the work.

Unreal. Strong AI is not as far off as we think. 15 years. Maybe 20.

I think we'll enter a paradigm where R+D costs will drive the price of successive generations of CPUs back up to the level of the early '90s or even before. We're near the end of the road scaling down the same designs with improved photolithography techniques. Eventually, we'll find a new dimension to optimize on, and then rapidly progress in that direction, which will lower prices again.

Encryption doesn't just protect your message in transit. It also positively identifies you as a sender.

This way, the feds not only get the contents of your searches, but they can positively prove that you are the one that initiated the search, so they can lock up "subversives" that much more easily.

Secondly, you're saying that, as soon as Communism becomes an option (but only then), you'd rather die than serve the royal family.

Well, maybe. Supposing there's some information contained in option C, or the mere availability of option C, that reveals to you the futility of option A.

In other words, your preferences aren't necessarily transitive because the availability or unavailability of particular options are themselves a little information payload that could influence the decision.

North Koreans have used (걔산기) (Gyaesongi)

Which sounds exactly like Japanese 計算機 (Keisanki) meaning calculator, so why bother eliminating the Chinese writing if you are going to leave the Chinese loaned vocabulary in? Now you're just left with a huge swath of the vocabulary where the roots have become indistinct and impermeable since you eliminated the orthographic clues from the writing. Replacing it with English loanwords seems doubly hare-brained since there's no context for association to learn them with!

All this angst among the Eastern Asian nations over language-historical events that happened a thousand years ago. I bet the Chinese feel real dumb now that they obliterated their own orthographic heritage just in time for computers to come in and make mastery of the written character redundant.

You don't see us fretting over whether we should eliminate the Greek roots or Phoenician lettering from English.

I didn't really read the article, I just Ctrl-F'd for "Japan". Japanese is among the healthiest food cultures in the world, if you go by obesity prevalence and life expectancy, and one I happen to know very well.

Predictably, the author mentions something about "sushi and soy sauce" because that's the only thing he cared to learn about.

Forgive me a short anecdote. About ten years ago to the day, I was backpacking around Kyushu with a friend of mine. One afternoon we had grown particularly thirsty, and when we happened upon a farm with cows we sought the owner to see if there was any milk. She was extraordinarily gracious and invited us into her home. They had milk, of course, but far more interesting to me was the 90+ year old grandmother of the house, who was just about to arrive from picking a kind of wild vegetable that grew everywhere and happened to be in season that week. When she entered the house and saw the two of us, she presented us with the crop and kowtowed such that her face, knees, and hands were all on the floor, to honor us. Remarkably spry for a 90 year old.

In Japan there is a time and a season for every ingredient. We (Americans) go to the supermarket every week and expect the same boring vegetables because we have no idea how to make dinner unless it's tomatoes, onions, and broccoli, if we are even making our own food at all. If those things aren't in season we have them shipped from other countries. In reality the food we need is all around us, or at least it is in places the environment hasn't been completely destroyed. Industrial food will never lead us to the kind of richness of variety and sensitivity to season you will find in Japan, or France, or almost anywhere that isn't the USA really.

Yes, industrial factory food makes life 'easier' for us, but does it really make life better? We like to eat our chicken without contemplating the fact that all our animals are spending their entire lives in an abattoir.

Take a look at what actual food looks like (it's not sushi and soy sauce): https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%89%B2%E7%83%B9%E6%96%99%...

Here's a python script for the simple machine and a 9 instruction solution program. It won't work if the addends are zero. The 0 case can be handled by checking for 0 and jumping ahead of the increment loop.

  class VM(object):
  	memory = []
  	ip = 0
  	while len(memory) < 1000:
  		memory.append(0)
  	memory[0] = 3
  	memory[1] = 4

  def z(idx):
  	VM.memory[idx] = 0
  	VM.ip += 1

  def i(idx):
  	VM.memory[idx] += 1
  	VM.ip += 1

  def j(idx, cmp, goto):
	if VM.memory[idx] == VM.memory[cmp]:
		VM.ip += 1

  else:
		VM.ip = goto

  program = (
	(z, (2,)),		#0 INITIALIZE USED MEMORY
	(z, (3,)),		#1
	(z, (4,)),		#2
	(i, (2,)),		#3 BEGIN LOOP, INCREMENT m[2]
	(i, (3,)),		#4 INCREMENT m[3]
	(j, (3, 0, 3)),	#5 LOOP UNTIL memory[3] == memory[0]
	(i, (2,)),		#6 SIM.
	(i, (4,)),		#7
	(j, (4, 1, 6))	#8
)
  def run():
	while VM.ip < len(program):
		func, args = program[VM.ip]
		func(*args)

  run()
  print VM.memory[2]

Haha, yeah, let's treat and prevent all the conditions that cause us to die, except all the conditions that cause us to die.

I used to read Ars Technica. A few years ago, it was sold to a new owner. Then, slowly, a creeping change slunk into the content like a snake. Try a game of social justice bingo: check Ars every morning and count the number of days in the month there ISN'T an article on the front page about misogyny or kiddie porn. It used to be a website about tech. A damn good one, too.

Dear tech media: I'm a programmer. I work in a small shop that serves a niche market. We employ more females than males. When I go to work, it's to do my job; to count references and check my pointer math, not to check what genitalia my coworkers, who half the time aren't even in the same office as me, are equipped with. STOP BEATING ME OVER THE HEAD WITH THIS SHIT.

Ask my former manager, who is a woman, whether she preferred to work with the male employees or the female ones. She'll tell you the office women were a constant headache and had to be constantly babied and supplicated to.

There was a time you could go on to tech websites and just read about tech. Who is profiting from the incessant beating of the misogyny drum? Not women techies who show up to work and do their damn jobs like the rest of us.