“OK, this God created me. It’s a perfect God that knows everything; can do anything. And somehow it got messed up, and it’s my fault. So he had to send his son to die for me to fix it. And he does. And now I’m supposed to beat myself to death the rest of my life over it. It makes no sense to me. Don’t you think a God could come up with a better plan than that?”
“What kind of personality; what kind of being is this that had to create these other beings to worship and tell him how wonderful he is? That makes no sense, if this God is all-knowing and all-wise and all-wonderful. I can’t comprehend that that’s what kind of person God is.”
“Every church I’ve been in preached that the Jonah in the Whale story is literally true. And I’ve never believed that. You mean to tell me a human was in the belly of that whale? For three days? And then the whale spit him out on the shoreline? And, of course, their convenient logic is, ‘Well, God can do anything.’”
“Well, I think most Christians have to be in a state of denial to read the Bible and believe it. Because there are so many contradicting stories. You’re encouraged to be violent on one page, and you’re encouraged to give sacrificial love on another page. You’re encouraged to bash a baby’s head on one page, and there’s other pages that say, you know, give your brother your fair share of everything you have if they ask for it.”
“But if God was going to reveal himself to us, don’t you think it would be in a way that we wouldn’t question? ...I mean, if I was wanting to have...people teach about the Bible...I would probably make sure they knew I existed. ...I mean, I wouldn’t send them mysterious notes, encrypted in a way that it took a linguist to figure out.”
Thus, the commonsense view of invention that served as our starting point reverses the usual roles of invention and need. It also overstates the importance of rare geniuses, such as Watt and Edison. That "heroic theory of invention," as it is termed, is encouraged by patent law, because an applicant for a patent must prove the novelty of the invention submitted. Inventors thereby have a financial incentive to denigrate or ignore previous work. From a patent lawyer's perspective, the ideal invention is one that arises without any precursors, like Athene springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.
In reality, even for the most famous and apparently decisive modern inventions, neglected precursors lurked behind the bald claim that "X invented Y." For instance, we are regularly told, "James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769," supposedly inspired by watching steam rise from a tea-kettle's spout. Unfortunately for this splendid fiction, Watt actually got the idea for his particular steam engine while repairing a model of Thomas Newcomen's steam engine, which Newcomen had invented 57 years earlier and of which over a hundred had been manufactured in England by the time of Watt's repair work. Newcomen's engine, in turn, followed the steam engine that the Englishman Thomas Savery patented in 1698, which followed the steam engine that the Frenchman Denis Papin designed (but did not build) around 1680, which in turn had precursors in the ideas of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens and others. All this is not to deny that Watt greatly improved Newcomen's engine (by incorporating a separate steam condenser and a double-acting cylinder), just as Newcomen had greatly improved Savery's.
We do not have option to sell any unit without operating system as per policy.
d = dict( (k, func(k)) for k in keylist)s = set(word for line in f for word in line.split())Hey, good evening,We'll see what they say! I might just buy the laptop anyway, not agree to the Windows EULA, and then go through the hullabaloo to refund it.
I'd love to purchase a ThinkPad X200. I haven't found the option on your website, though, for how I can buy one without Windows? Could you point me to that link?
I'm simply not going to use Windows; I would install Linux on it as soon as I get the machine anyway, and I don't want to pay for software I won't use.
So if you can sell me a ThinkPad with no Windows, that would be fantastic, and I'll be really happy and gladly give you money and say nice things about your company.
Thanks very much!
--
-- Alex Rudnick
pnorm and qnorm.pnorm is what you use if you have a z-score and you want the probability that a value in the distribution would come up as less than that score. This is equivalent to looking up probability values in the "z" tables in the back of your stats book. pnorm(0) gives you 0.5, since half of all values are going to have a value less than 0.qnorm does the inverse -- you give it a probability and it gives you back the z-score below which that much of the probability mass lies. So if you give it 0.5, it gives you back 0.you@computer:~/project$ goto Foo.java
you@computer:~/project/src/com/foocorp/whatever/path/to$ vim Foo.javalocate or find or your IDE, or just manually sifting for it.nm-system-settings.conf.
scala-library.jar sits (expand out the "Scala Library" container in your project) and copy it into the project's war/WEB-INF/lib.GreetingServiceImpl.java and delete it.package gwtscalademo.server
import gwtscalademo.client.GreetingService
import com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet
class GreetingServiceImpl
extends RemoteServiceServlet
with GreetingService {
def greetServer(input:String):String = {
return "Hello from Scala, " + input + "!"
}
}implements, in Scala we say with. As I understand it, this means that Java interfaces get mapped onto Scala traits. Hip!bash: ./my-script.py: /usr/bin/env: bad interpreter: Permission deniedif (stacks = []) (output [])output didn't output to if in astep
[if (stacks = [] ) (output [] )]def myIf(tf, truecode, falsecode):
code = {True : truecode, False : falsecode}
return eval(code[tf])
>>> myIf(0 == 1, "'it was ' + 'true'", "'it was not true'.upper()")
'IT WAS NOT TRUE'
>>> myIf(0 == 0, "'it was ' + 'true'", "'it was not true'.upper()")
'it was true'
(require srfi/n) to load up the nth SRFI; they're numbered. Particularly, I've been playing with the extended libraries for lists, strings, and hash tables.describe, which prints out what the system knows about a given object -- if it's a function with a docstring, the docstring will be in there. Also potentially useful: disassemble. Give it a function; it does what it sounds like!
:set paste:set nopasteIn this paper we propose a novel method for learning a Mahalanobis distance measure to be used in the KNN classification algorithm. The algorithm directly maximizes a stochastic variant of the leave-one-out KNN score on the training set. It can also learn a low-dimensional lin- ear embedding of labeled data that can be used for data visualization and fast classification. Unlike other methods, our classification model is non-parametric, making no assumptions about the shape of the class distributions or the boundaries between them. The performance of the method is demonstrated on several data sets, both for metric learning and linear dimensionality reduction.This is a very common, general problem for machine learning -- you want to build a classifier, and you think you might like to use K Nearest Neighbors; it's dead simple, and a lot of the time, it gets the job done. No complicated models to train up -- if you want to classify an instance (ooh, here's an animal -- is it a kitty?), you just find the k most similar instances in your bank of examples and let them vote it out. Four of the five most-similar things in your example set are kitties? Alright, we'll call the new one a kitty. You have to tune k as a parameter to work well with your dataset, of course, and you can get slightly more sophisticated by introducing weighted voting -- things that are less similar to the instance you're trying to classify are considered less important.
As we make the push to handle Java 1.5 features in GWT (it's about time!) I'm having flashbacks to undergraduate Compilers. Perhaps this is unsurprising, considering what I'm working on. Part of the difficulty in the problem is that whether you're talking about types in the code that constitutes the compiler itself, types in the code that the user is going to put in, or types in the output code... we use the same word. Oh my. (much worse, I suppose, is the code you get with the Appel book, where half of the words on the screen are helpfully "ty" or "typ". Jebus.)On the plane back from San Francisco to Atlanta, I read Thomas and Hunt's Pragmatic Unit Testing. It's a very quick read, about 120 pages plus appendices. And while it's very light, it has what seems like a lot of helpful advice for good design and development practice. To be honest, I've never done much unit testing in the past, thinking "oh, that's what those corporate software engineer guys do -- pssh." But! It turns out that these days, I am a corporate software engineer, and anyway one should always be looking out for new ways to hack more effectively.
There's a bunch of important principles to take away from Pragmatic Unit Testing. The one that stuck with me the most, though, is that when designing and writing code, you've got to think: "how am I going to test this?". The significance of this is not just "oh man, I'm going to have to write a unit test for my method"; it gets back to that generally-understood but oft-ignored idea that every logical unit of your code really wants to be its own method, a modular thing that you can use separately -- because you're going to have to use that same calculation again somewhere else. And Don't Repeat Yourself.
For example: if you have a method that calculates how to do something and then does it (say with a call to another library), maybe you want to make that two methods: the calculation and then a call to that calculation coupled with the library call. This will be easier to test -- you're not really interested in testing a third-party library, just your own calculations -- and as a happy side-effect, your code is now cleaner and more reusable!
Similarly, separating out the backend code from the GUI (two of the things that get my hackles up the most in this life are terms "business logic" and "MVC") lets you properly test the Stuff That Does Stuff on its own. One example in the book hit particularly close to home -- a small GUI application where all the caculations and I/O happened mixed in with the Swing code.
That example, and in fact the whole book, brought on flashbacks to a project I'd worked on recently. One of my friends and I (and he's one of the sharpest guys I know) inherited a fairly involved program and ended up sinking months trying to fix it up. This system suffered from pretty much every pitfall in the book: random silently-caught exceptions, real work happening mixed in with the GUI code, needlessly long, opaque, nigh-untestable (let alone "tested") methods, repetition all over the place. Worse! It was built by a guy who'd supposedly specialized in software engineering -- and he did pretty much everything that Thomaas and Hunt warn against! Not a pleasant situation. I'm sure you can relate.
Of course, I knew at the time that this was atrocious code. But now maybe I'll be a bit more principled in my development, working with a lean towards easy testability. Unit testing will probably be a good discipline to get into.
On the other hand, I've been reading about (and writing a bit of) Haskell. All this murky business of setting up and tearing down state, "proving" to yourself that each function does what you think it does "for the boundary cases" -- it all relies on the idea that you're going to be able to predict where you're going to make the bugs (by heuristic, habits, and mnemonics). And if you're smart enough to predict where the bugs are going to pop up, it seems like there's something better you could do to keep them from being introduced at all. In ML for the Working Programmer, L.C. Paulson suggests that a mark of the professional in the future will be writing functionally (in ML). The modularity practices seem like the Right Thing, useful for the functional programmer as well as the OO, but if your code could be formally verified, how much more confident would you be that it was correct for the general case? Simple testing is nothing like a proper proof.
But who ever writes proof-carrying code?
The first finder of any error in my books receives $2.56; significant suggestions are also worth $0.32 each. If you are really a careful reader, you may be able to recoup more than the cost of the books this way.
However, people who have read the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves should not expect a reward for criticizing the ways in which I use commas. Punctuation is extremely important to me, but I insist on doing it my own way.
_filedir '?(e|j|w)ar'After some fiddling, I change that one line to " _filedir '?(ear|jar|war|zip)' ". And it works! For reference, that the _filedir function looks like this. It's painfully obvious to everyone what this does, yes?