"You don't work at this stuff at all, you just spew bullshit like lantern up there"

The nature of information/disinformation: Mostly bullshit-It's your job to find the kernel-All information is either true, false, or meaningless.

So climate change isn't a scientific fact, it's human egocentrism? That sounds like a conclusion that started from a concept with a kernel of truth, and was made ridiculous by taking it to it's logical extension.

This reminds me of the difference between an optimist and pessimist.

Lock a pessimist in a room full of "manure" and they will cry, cry, cry.

Lock an optimist in a room full of "manure", come back later, and you will find them happily digging through the crap with their bare hands. "With all this shit, there must be a pony in here somewhere!"

What's really funny about this is I hadn't realized you had come out of the sock puppet closet, chingalingachogchog. I was just honestly and pessimistically responded to the pile!

I need to unleash my inner optimist!


>> ^chingalera:

Damn, see?! Here I am thinkin' alla time that my less-than-clever observations have a kernel of truth embedded in the of manure.

Damn, see?! Here I am thinkin' alla time that my less-than-clever observations have a kernel of truth embedded in the of manure. Your GF Sluice, sounded to me like she had a sense of humor about herself even though ego wouldn't let her enjoy the "her" from the past's, letter she wrote. Hell, that's a natural response for anyone....(have you ever read some of the shit hatched from the mind behind the pen that others have saved??

I have a few ranting letters that I ain't too proud of that others have saved for ammunition or I-told-you-so's. You have to remind others and yourself that the person who wrote that is dynamic and chaotic....NOT static.

Fundamentally people's personalities/temperaments don't change much after maybe 12 years old and loved ones tend to remember you as you were.

Your GF read a reminder of the little girl who is still lurking there....maybe it scared her or pissed her off-Ego baby, it's a motherfucker!!

Since the inception of the sarcasm button I don't think I recall seeing anyone use it....It's akin to a utensil in the kitchen drawer you see every time you open it, but never use.

Personally, I like to think that I can be the sweetest asshole on the block...cause I KNOW I'll never be able stop with the asshole!!!

(especially if I went completely sober!)

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

Interesting video, but comparing lines of code in Linux to lines of text in the Iliad? That utterly retarded


Agreed. I can only attribute that to their trying to provide a layman understanding of the kernel's massive source... I guess.

Oops. Thought I had been more clear than that in my previous explanation. In fact on rereading it I'm fairly convinced that I was. I'll restate my position in different terms to maybe clear up the confusion.

I suspect the kernel of our misunderstanding lies in your previous post. Thank you for helping me to crystallize my view.
"Liberals love to try to have thier rhetorical cake and eat it too. I do nothing but point out the naked, blatant obviousness of it. Obama directly uses religion for purely political reasons, but the neolibs have dutifully taken thier so-called "indignation" about the wall of seperation and tucked it away. "

A-Obama uses religion for political reasons.
B-Santorum would implement policy for religious reasons.

I don't think I can make it much more clear than that. I would immensely prefer that religion be mishandled in the pursuit of politics, than the country be mishandled in the pursuit of religion. If that means I'm a hypocrite, than I proudly am.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

If you actually believe (Obama) is setting laws based on his belief in Jesus, based on that link, you're an imbecile... What Santorum said was on a whole other level of idiocy.
Ding! This proved my whole point. Of course the liberal, leftist, progressives don't have a problem when when Obama uses religion to make a point. But when a conservative mentions religion to make a point, well it's "a whole other level of idiocy". It is a study of hypocrisy in at its purest, most basic level - and also a fine example of just how people allow political partisanship to annihilate thier own intellectual credibility.
Liberals love to try to have thier rhetorical cake and eat it too. I do nothing but point out the naked, blatant obviousness of it. Obama directly uses religion for purely political reasons, but the neolibs have dutifully taken thier so-called "indignation" about the wall of seperation and tucked it away.
Either you believe in the wall of seperation absolutely, or you don't. Me - I have no problem with political figures who have religious faith. Obama can say Jesus is driving his tax policy, tell churches to vote for him, and bow on his knees in front of crazy fundie kook preachers, and I'm OK with it. Progressives don't have a problem with Obama's blatant use of religion either. I'm just pointing out (rather smugly) the hypocrisy of liberal outrage when Santorum does nothing but mention he disagrees with the progressive re-interpretation of Jefferson's statement. Denying such clear-cut hypocrisy fools no one except those who are already "lost" in the mental sense.
And that's what I think has happend to leftists, really. After a certain point, some people become so invested in a particular position that they will agree with any snake-oil liar who says the sky is pink and the moon is cheese as long as that person parrots the right lines at them. Such is the case with the neolib Videosift progressives who see no problem when Obama uses religion to push his agendas, but then shrivel up like a vampire next to garlic when any conservative even mentions the word 'faith'.
Such linguistic gesticulation fools no one. Liberals should at least be honest and admit that they're just trying to have it both ways here. That would at least give them some degree of honesty, even if they aren't fair.

I think he was referring to Lamarckism - the idea the the acquired traits of an individual were passed on to their offspring (ie. the stretching of a giraffe's neck to reach higher branches caused it's neck to lengthen, which passed to the offspring resulting in longer and longer necks.)

After Darwin, Lamarckism lost ground continuously. It has only been in the last 50 years or so that we have begun to have hints that there is a small kernel of truth in it as evidenced by epigenetic phenomena.>> ^carneval:

>> ^L0cky:
The idea that the changes you make to your body will be passed on is a very old one, but since Darwin it's been pretty much ridiculed. For it to come back is pretty big stuff.

I don't think that it's been really ridiculed, epigenetic phenomena are accepted in the scientific community as very real, testable changes to the DNA and DNA packaging structures (histone acetylation/deacetylation, histone methylation, DNA methylation, etc).

>> ^grinter:

Taking control of the drone sounds pretty unlikely.. but I wonder if there is a kernel of truth to this. Maybe they just jammed it's guidance signal, autopilot kicked in, and when it ran out of fuel it glided to a, relatively, gentle landing?


I would take a wild guess that those things are designed to go kaboom if there is even the slightest hint of malfunction (malfunction meaning ANY undesired event). The interesting part was the fact that the CIA lead on that perhaps that exact sequence of events didn't quite occur correctly maybe.

Also yes, that is a fake airplane... The drones are MUCH bigger than that piece of crap, paper-mâché high school project. For example this is a bomber drone that is brand new, it's 65 to a possible 90 feet across (BTW, in the video you can see that they label it as the RQ-170, which is what I linked to)... Like I said it's a bomber, it needs to be pretty big. So unless the CIA has a stealth version that is 3/4 the size of the bomber, they are full of crap. I think what the CIA was worried about is maybe that the entirety of the drone wasn't destroyed leaving possible tidbits behind like it's stealth mesh and other composites to be reverse engineered--I think TDS had a bit on this a few days ago.

-Second Part
I did look around some more and there are some US officials taking this very seriously, so maybe they do in fact have their 45~ft drone. If you read at the bottom of the RQ-170 on Wikipedia (I linked it above), it has been updated with much more current information. So it may indeed be a small coup for the Iranian Military indirectly, as it seems to be a navigational flight error. Which asks the question: where the hell is it's self-destruction switch; are they really that stupid?

Taking control of the drone sounds pretty unlikely.. but I wonder if there is a kernel of truth to this. Maybe they just jammed it's guidance signal, autopilot kicked in, and when it ran out of fuel it glided to a, relatively, gentle landing?

A lot of the features people seem to think would improve C are the features that would completely defeat the purpose of the language. Adding object-oriented features would add overhead (and OO features can be imitated through coding techniques anyway). Adding exception handling adds HUGE overhead. Adding garbage collection, like Java? Ridiculous amount of overhead. Methods for catching dangling references: more overhead. Pretty much anything you do add is going to degrade the language for its specific purpose.

Now if you can afford to handle some of that overhead, you have C++ as an alternative, which was made to introduce some of those extra features, yet still maintain its speed. And this is what many projects do. The Linux kernel needs to be as fast and efficient as possible, and so it uses C. On the other hand, there are desktop environments like KDE that use C++ instead to take advantage of those extra features and aren't as concerned with raw speed considering the environment they run in. And this continues all the way up to higher level languages.

As for insecurities and bugs, there is no reason to blame the language. Even in the hands of a good programmer, any language is a liability. Java is the perfect example, due to its enormous adoption in the early 2000s. There are TONS of Java programs out there that are insecure, buggy, and error-prone, and yet one of the goals of the language was to minimize this. Is it easier to make these mistakes in C? Of course! But it's nonetheless a necessity in the programming world.

Just take a look at the Linux kernel. It's written ENTIRELY in C, and yet it's certainly more stable and secure than the Windows kernel, which is a combination of C and C++. (And go ahead and suggest to Linus Torvalds that it should be switched to C++ or some other "more modern" language. He'll give you a nice 10 page essay on why you're wrong.)

Oh, to add to that, most of the drivers written for your computer are written in C.

The point is that C is most definitely NOT past its prime, and in fact due to the embedded systems industry, it's getting a resurgence.

>> ^schlub:

You also have to consider that many, many newer languages have their roots in C. And many share the same (or similar) syntax since C is used as their model (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, Perl, D, etc...). But, I definitely disagree that C is past its prime. It is still used everywhere, not just embedded programming. It's used for drivers, OS kernels, windows apps, shell apps, compilers, interpreters, windowed desktop managers, etc, etc, etc... It's not great for RAD though, that's for sure!
C rullz!!


Yes, it's still used everywhere. No, that's not a good thing. 99% of the time you read about some security vulnerability being patched, there'll be a C buffer overrun there.

Is it still a useful tool? Absolutely. When you get down to the really low level stuff, it's everywhere and the reason it's everywhere is because it's so trivial to write a compiler for. But for the majority of people, there's simply no reason to use it and yet many still do, hence we have security issues, applications that leak memory and painters algorithms everywhere.

Writing a program in C is like preparing a meal with fugu. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, you can have a great meal, but get it wrong and you poison your guests.

You also have to consider that many, many newer languages have their roots in C. And many share the same (or similar) syntax since C is used as their model (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, Perl, D, etc...). But, I definitely disagree that C is past its prime. It is still used everywhere, not just embedded programming. It's used for drivers, OS kernels, windows apps, shell apps, compilers, interpreters, windowed desktop managers, etc, etc, etc... It's not great for RAD though, that's for sure!

C rullz!!

Embedded programming is currently one of the biggest programming fields out there. Add to that any sort of low level system programming (such as the Linux kernel), and you'll see there's a reason why it sees so much use to this day. It's certainly not an easy language to use, but if you want results in those fields, you use it.
>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^chtierna:
From Wiki:
"C (pronounced like the letter C) is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973..."
... and still going strong. That says it all.

That's unfortunately true. No disrespect to dmr; C was a great language for it's time, and tonnes of great things were achieved with it, but it's well past it's use by date for most tasks.
Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.
That said, dmr was one of computer sciences true innovators, and will be missed.

Gee, watching this really makes me nervous hoping an democrat gets elected in 2012. I don't want to imagine what it would be like if a souless, two-faced idealouge made it into the whitehous.... He already did? Promised change and delivered turd cupcakes you say? They're figuatively licking a corn kernel out of their own asshole in the false belief it's a tasty fresh ear of corn you say? Well sir, I contest that Americans aren't so messianic they would imbue their [liars] with such lofty attributes that this behaviour was out of the question.