Posts by Stephen Judd
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"Positive Reinforcement may well work for dogs but I would love to see someone try this on the local cats"
My friend Bill successfully trained the family cat to jump from one stool to another through a hoop, a la the classic circus lion trick in miniature. Positive reinforcement with titbits was his only technique.
That same cat has now taught her kittens.
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David, you gotta say it in the name of God, or the bowels of Christ or something, otherwise it doesn't work.
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What I am eating is not cake.
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Rich: there are a few options.
1. Some programs are simply compiled without shared libraries, but statically linked. Hey, disk is cheap.
2. More commonly, Linux applications use a sneaky system relying on symbolic links in the filesystem. In essence you have multiple versions of libfoo, with their version numbers as part of their names, and a link in the filesystem from a generic name to the latest one. Programs that need a specific version can ask for it if they need it. So your program can ask for libfoo.so.2, and actually get libfoo.2.15. If your program needs libfoo.2.14, it can install it, and ask for it when it needs it. There is no actual library called libfoo.so.2 on your system, only versioned ones, with a link to the latest one for programs which don't care. (The naming and linking is a bit more complicated than that. I'm glossing over it).
3. In practice, because most programs on Linux come with source, they can always be tweaked and recompiled against new libraries. You probably wouldn't do that, but the people who work on your Linux distribution do. It's not like the Windows world where you get some piece of software and it won't work (or worse the installer clobbers your existing DLLs and other things then don't work) and you have to plead with the author (if you can find them) to re-release a binary version.
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Hey Lex, how's Japan?
I had an all-Ubuntu environment at home but bought a Mac mini for my partner. She loves it. Everything does indeed just work. Almost everything just worked with Ubuntu, and I still mostly use that environment myself, but it was too much to ask her to do her own research to resolve obscure issues with video codecs etc. I like having bash and friends on OSX, that's for sure.
There is quite a difference in GUI behaviour which could be annoying at first.
Biggest downside: any applications that were not installed at the outset are probably not free (as in freedom or as in cost). There is a lot of free (libre) software ported to OSX but it's often not very well integrated into the platform, thus losing you the "it just works" user experience that you bought it for in the first place. So if you are used to typing apt-get install superfoo every time you take a fancy to try something new you'll find the Mac rather sadly limited. The garden is beautiful but it is walled.
It is quite liberating in a bizarro sort of way to have a proprietary box in the house. When things go wrong in Linux land somehow it's always my fault, but if there's a problem at the Mac -- well, what would I know? Please contact the manufacturer :)
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My main point is that we should not believe the doom and gloom merchants because they are invariably wrong.
Then I don't follow you. If a prediction says "X will happen if nothing is done", and someone DOES do something, and then X doesn't happen, then we can't draw any conclusions about the validity of the original prediction. All the examples you cited were cases where states did take action. Therefore, they are not evidence that doom and gloom merchants are inevitably wrong.
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the end was nigh with Y2K and Sars and Bird-Flu, etc. Sure, these things were problems but they were not, and have not (yet!), been nearly as serious as some predicted.
But people did things precisely to prevent them becoming serious.
I know there is an element of the old elephant powder joke here, but these examples don't really support your case.
There is also a precautionary principle at work there, namely that we do things about risks where the probability is less than certain because the consequences are severe enough to warrant it. You seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't do anything about preventing future problems and should just wait until they have happened.
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Nominally, Rob, it isn't tax-free. If you trade anything for income - from apples to shares to houses - you are supposed to pay tax on that income.
However most people who are in the business of trading property don't declare that income, and IRD doesn't go after them.
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Which reminds me of a lecturer from the School of Education at Waikato who started out researching how prostitutes educate one another, did indeed become a receptionist (purely for research) and is now a professional dominatrix in Sydney, which I think that is probably more fun than teaching ungrateful undergraduates,
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"makes final down-payment on cabin in woods"
I can't resist nit-picking, Che. By definition a down-payment is the first one you make... unless you paid in one go, a final down-payment is oxymoronic.