bianco

What has all the fuss about the most pseudo scientist of the last decade to do with interesting news here?

Is it only because he is -- very handicapped?

Living in Europe, the scene here is very contradicting: most handicapped people here are 'asked' (more-or-less) to be helped to die soon -- you know, costs etc... (just like with Hitler, only in a more-modern version...)

Parallel Universes?

Could anybody here please bring some credible experience from this field? You know, just like the Christians, who are able to report even daily experiences (see Medjugorje).

I never ever heard of anything less proven than parallel universes in my whole lifetime.

I would really be interested in his first experience after death...

Will he be able to find a way to communicate to us?

That would be really ingenious, because all of the rest is only opinion, and opinions are all and always questionable...

You sure!!

Sexy sells? OK, but why stop there? You can get more and faster with a bank robbery.

I don't understand you people.

Following all kinds of human intercommunication, I'd say that this percentage only reflects the equivalent of really important communication on the positive side, and trash twitter (of our everyday life) on the other one.

"Fail" is the wrong term. The sincere love between a "male" and a "female" human being (if I name them "man" and "woman", maybe you won't understand, would you?) isn't considered a value anymore...

If it were some business, we would care much much more, and this says it all about current priorities in "modern" society.

Future generations will write about current society: "They destroyed themselves by starting to hate, inside of the most atomic value in human society: The Family..."

It is the wrong question:

There are lots of possible candidates for it, but communism ruined it all in China.

Anyway, left are:

1) Africa (don't underestimate it, it could grow much faster than any other country, iff it only could free itself from all those nasty colonialism consequences...)

2) Europe, united with all of its parts (and I mean especially the eastern ones)

3) Middle East + India; may seem strange (to some of you), but there you can find the top of the top of human-brewn Culture -- no other region on earth can beat this.

America, you have to "die" (read: take the last place on earth for some decade), because it was you trashing whole world in this financial disaster. This is not popular, so you people will not agree -- the same as children never agree when it comes to take some bitter medicine...

You got it all wrong: native English folks should be forbidden to vote on this comment.

Anyway, believe me or not: you English ones are certainly the most ignorant in culture anyways; all of non english folks around the world would agree on this...

The English language is certainly one of the most flexible ones, on the positive side, and one of loosest ones, on the negative side.

In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself.

So, it would certainly be very exciting to have e.g. a perfect programming language, expressing itself in say Arabic or Hebrew; but, on the other side, computers and real intelligence (or: AI and Real Human Intelligence) are so far away from each other, that it really doesn't matter how 'stupid' the programming-language-language is...

HN is slow lately because PG is a dreamer and too much tied to personal and insignificant taste details (which never combine with a greater user base):

HN should have been written in CL.

;)

ECL (a mature, stable Lisp which compiles to C) uses it.

Time only needs a beginning, it doesn't need and end.

Nobody can prove the Big Bang theory without-a-doubt: we only could rise theories against it, or bring facts against it, but it will stay an unproven theory forever, very similar to math theories: you can't prove them without-a-doubt, you only can give it credit currently, and because there hasn't been found any counter example yet.

And how would you try to express something which is outside of our own possible experience? Sure, you could say "eternal present" or something; doesn't seem to sound much better...

Never mind, I hate Haskell. And since I'm too lazy to learn it, I'll hate it maybe forever...

There is a theory that we only do exist because there is an entity outside of time which 'thinks' us continuously.

What the future will bring us: nobody knows, there has never been anything really similar in history...

The causes are very simple to describe: our (temporary) so successful economic system didn't follow many moral rules. And now we are all (the responsible and non) forced to pay for that (silly) mistake.

You may not agree with me, but I'm convinced that this will be the summary of our current situation, reviewed in about 50 years.

Sure, because all of technology and all of science don't really feed our soul: so, our souls grow thinner and thinner, and our heads feel more and more overweight.

It's like eating straw all day long: at the end you are full of nothing (really important).

Gmail is down?

Now I'm not sure if up-vote or down-vote...

...will there be a life after Google?

(...and will it be eternal?)

What american car industry needs is european or japanese or korean spirit. Any of the mentioned industries invested much more in development than the american one, which slept for too long (at least the big ones).

This was the conclusion of someone I talked to, working in that exact industry.

A color has the color we see because it absorbs all the other colors and only reflects the seen one.

So it's the same soup either way.

There is macroevolution (molecule-to-man theory) and microevolution (no increase in complexity and no new species).

And then there is natural selection, which decreases the amount of variation of a species.

It's very important to keep different things separate.

I have a dumb question: how can a theory stop?

The base of ten is the most natural one (if I remember well, we all have about 10 fingers), and it is the most important one.

Remember that math is only of use if it can be applied to real world problems. Other bases than 10 are only interesting for computing machines, but even there the result have to be human readable (again base 10), otherwise nobody would be able to understand.

I see the base 10 as the only really important base to us humans (machines may have different preferences...).

Since I'm no cryptography specialist, I always use the only really secure method (sure it can't be applied everywhere):

My keys are unique and of the same length as the data.

In my experience, OO is a good thing when you are able to imagine the 'objects' in some real-life representation (like GUI elements which are generally represented as 3 dimensional physical objects). Otherwise OO tends to be too abstract to help you, and already gets in your way.

This is very simple to prove: give a group of experienced coders the same 2 problems to solve: one taken from a real world object, and the other purely theoretic; both to realize in OO. This experiment would show that the real world object problem is solved in a similar manner, and the theoretic one in all different ways...

And yes, I use OO, but only with the libraries written in OO style, and never in my own code.

Identity is not the problem. And identity is always strong, and has to be strong to be able to achieve great things.

We are all very vulnerable when it comes to things that are rooted deeply in our own live (read: soul). So we behave quite aggressively when someone touches these things -- especially when we have been hurt there (and who hasn't been hurt in our violent times?).

If anybody is telling me that I should keep something small, and this thing is positive by its nature (like identity), then I already know that it's wrong from the beginning, and that the real problem hasn't been discovered yet.

So, keep searching!