509 karma · joined March 11, 2009
It also never really makes the case that the Human Genome Project was in jeopardy, much less that Perl saved it.
Interesting article, but crap headline.
I thought the book (website: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/) contained a good discussion of Rationality vs. Intelligence, which ended up coloring my views on AI in general.
Worth the read if you're into that. (And for those who may not know: it's a textbook, and very code intensive. Not for general consumption.)
"Yet most people who are really good at sports are rich."
Laymen's writeup: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227075.700-cone-of-s...
My guess would have been that they were excited about Scala before they wrote the book.
I think the joke is that Dickens is known for being extra wordy as an author, and to make a "tinyurl" service using his works would be... ludicrous. =)
That's a good start, but you also want it to be structured in a way that requires some thought (or just in 3+ normal form). Have someone ask for a report out of it (or come up with as many reports as you can).
I wish I had a suggestion for such a data set. Microsoft's famous case is Northwind, but I don't know where you might find it (without having searched just now).
I don't believe you.
Evidence: "California /is/ losing money..."
I'm glad you pointed out that NewEgg "has to collect sales tax. At the margin people choose Amazon..." and everything else you said.
I'm just disappointed that you didn't see the obvious: California is the problem, not the businesses. They can tax and tax and tax - but they'll continue to be addressing symptoms instead of problems.
I was under the impression Amazon had warehouses that end up delivering in most states, since I (thought I) pay tax on purchases in my state. The point is, it's not just Amazon. Amazon is a minor part of it. They're talking about causing anyone who advertises on a California website to be a California taxpayer.
That's ridiculous. I'm sure I must be considered as one of the top few percent of people who pay attention to news. What happens with advertisers who are less in-tune with intra-state events? What happens with people who buy ads through an ad agency who puts their ads on California websites? What happens to direct buyers who don't know any better?
Do you see what I mean now by unwilling and unknowing?
And let's forget about the US Constitution. One comment here put it as "clear." It's not quite as clear as saying "the US govt has power to tax interstate commerce," but anyone I've known as a constitutional "scholar" agrees with that:
The original constitution- article 1, section 8, says the US Congress has the duty and right:
"To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; "
Then later they mention that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Most people forget about that 10th amendment (and the 9th as well!)
You see, the power of regulating commerce among the several states was delegated by the Constitution to the United States. It's not up to California.
"Really, this needs a national solution..."
No, it doesn't. California charges an income AND sales tax. Plenty of states do fine without an income tax. Plenty of states do fine without a sales tax that over-reaches authority.
This is absurdity asked by a government who has no apparent concept of reality with the rest of the world.
No, it really doesn't sound reasonable when you look at it on any medium. This is incredibly unreasonable.
Even if we accept that California should be allowed to force companies to collect tax that operate physically within its border, to attempt to force that status upon unwilling or unknowing companies that aren't anywhere near its jurisdiction is ridiculous.
California is not losing money due to this practice. That's like saying a mobster is losing money because he's not collecting "protection money" from people who live a thousand miles outside his territory.
And let me also say they should call this a buying tax, not a sales tax. That much is evident based on who the collector is.
I ask because $10k seems ridiculously small: if I had 4 people saving in my team, we could get $10k together in a month or two.
I think the words were poorly chosen. I understand the main point, which IMO supports your assertion. But knowing the habits of people surfing the web, I can certainly understand how it doesn't appear that way to everyone.
Needless to say, I don't.
For one, there is a large difference between the spaghetti code that can result from liberal and injudicious goto usage vs. whatever you might encounter by using "for" instead of ".each"
In the goto case - we use it all the time under different names with special circumstances: method calls, loops, breaks, nexts, etc.
In the case of for vs. each - it depends. In some cases you may indeed be iterating over the contents of some object in particular. But what if you are iterating over the contents of two disparate objects? Should we use ".each" on one and keep a separate counter for the other?
And then, there are those times when you actually want the variables in the loop to be available outside the scope of the loop, as I mentioned in the previous comment. It might not be standard, but it does happen. One instance is where you are letting doing evals on variables introduced by the objects in the loop. That just can't happen with the .each call, and you need the "for" loop to do it.
And I would add, even if it were possible to keep track of that in a block we pass to #each, I would rather not do so because of the psychological implications of doing so. If I want to iterate over two disparate objects, I need a way of expressing that, and the "for" loop is it.
But don't send it at the time we specify - send it out plus or minus two minutes and some change. There's nothing lamer than saying to yourself "Wow, what a nice email about 'thoughts you had today.' It came at midnight - wow, you sure were up late! Oh wait, it came at 12:00:00. What a douchebag."
Well, there is something lamer: if you are the douchebag.
As for "Make Me Dinner" I read recently about doing on one of the "frugal" blogs that Lifehacker quotes from a lot about doing something like that. I can't recall if there was a website for it.
When looking for the actual post, I didn't find it, but I did find another one that I thought might make a nice website, (and which I was going to look for next), along the same lines of your question: the Swapluck (instead of pot-luck) http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/04/04/start-a-swapluc...
Either way, there is at least one case where the custom block iterator doesn't cover the usage of "for" - where you need the variables outside the scope of the loop.
What about the argument that perhaps the author was not clever enough to devise an algorithm which solves the problem he stated?
Perhaps when I read the papers I will be enlightened?