antimagic

Edit: For more information see here: http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2015/08/31/le-gorafi-fini-site-...

Translated: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev...

Summary: It may only be a marketing ploy - they're using a 302 temporary redirect instead of a 301 permanent re-direct, which some claim is for maintaining SEO...

Tsk tsk, shame on you...

Secondly, "hottest months on record" are happening far more frequently than coldest months ever. Like orders of magnitude more frequently. So yeah, it's not that we're not interested, it's that you re factually wrong.

The fastest female runners are running at 18kph. That's Olympic standard. The average female marathon runner runs at about 9.3kph.

Only competitive male runners would be capable of beating that pace.

Edit: Disclosure - female, and I run a half marathon in two hours That's 10 minutes faster than the average woman and around about average for the entire field. To achieve that time I play an active sport, and train for longer running events (I'm the fastest long distance runner in my sports club). In kph I manage a bit less than 11, which is a long way off 14kph.

You are at the mercy of the source of the QR code, with no real way of being able to validate it before scanning.

Then, if it turns out that it's a security issue, of course they are going to notify Oracle of the fact, both as a moral duty, and because it makes it more likely that Oracle will get a patch out faster.

Oracle whinging about people finding bugs in their code would be better off trying to improve their processes so that there are less bugs to find, rather than complaining that they've been found out for shipping buggy code.

Oh? Based on your extensive research into immigration outcomes for all of the countries in the world? I happen to know for a fact, that many very poor Greek and Italian families migrated to Australia after World War II, and their families are doing very nicely now, thank you very much. The same story repeated a quarter of a century later as Australia dealt with a large Vietnamese intake during the Vietnam war and it's immediate aftermath - their community has also integrated well and is doing just fine economically.

I'm sure this is equally true of many countries in Europe. There is nothing exceptional about the US in this regard.

I don't believe that this approach makes any assumptions about the chords that it generates. Here's a ruby snippet that does just that (err, I think!)

plane_size = 10000.0 chords = []

while chords.size < 100 p1 = {} p2 = {}

    p1[:x] = Random.rand(plane_size) - plane_size / 2
    p1[:y] = Random.rand(plane_size) - plane_size / 2
    p2[:x] = Random.rand(plane_size) - plane_size / 2
    p2[:y] = Random.rand(plane_size) - plane_size / 2
    puts p1
    puts p2
    #gradient 'm'
    m = (p2[:y] - p1[:y]) / (p2[:x] - p1[:x])
    #y = mx + b
    # => b = y - mx
    b = p2[:y] - m * p2[:x]

    #x^2 + y^2 = 1
    #sub in y from the line equation
    #x^2 + (mx + b) * (mx + b) = 1
    #x^2 + m^2x^2 + 2bmx + b^2 = 1
    #x^2(1 + m^2) + 2bmx + b^2 - 1 = 0

    #apply the quadratic equation to find the roots
    #Ax^2 + Bx + C = 0
    #=>x = (-B +- sqrt(b^2 - 4AC)) / 2A

    #in our case, A = (1 + m^2), B = 2bm, C = b^2 -1
    #the line intersects if B^2 -4AC > 0
    discriminator = (2 * b * m) * (2 * b * m) - 4 * (1 + m * m) * (b * b - 1) 
    if discriminator > 0 then
        chord1 = {}
        chord2 = {}
        chord1[:x] = (-2 * b * m + Math.sqrt(discriminator) ) / (2 * (1 + m * m))
        chord1[:y] = m * chord1[:x] + b
        chord2[:x] = (-2 * b * m - Math.sqrt(discriminator) ) / (2 * (1 + m * m))
        chord2[:y] = m * chord2[:x] + b
        length = Math.sqrt((chord2[:x] - chord1[:x]) * (chord2[:x] - chord1[:x]) + 
                        (chord2[:y] - chord1[:y]) * (chord2[:y] - chord1[:y]))
        chords << length
    end
 end

 smaller = 0
 chords.each {|c| smaller += 1 if c < Math.sqrt(3) }
 puts "The number of chords smaller than sqrt(3) = #{smaller/100.0}%"

Edit: Hah! Should have read just a few comments further, and I would have seen some other posts doing exactly the same thing. Good to see we ended up with the same answer :D

Dwarves and Elves openly hate each other, throwing racists epithets like daggers whenever they meet - think of Thranduil in the Hobbit, or Gimli confronting the elves on the borders of Lothlorien. Yet both are supposed to be goodly races that we empathise with easily.

Then there are the orcs. Some of them, particularly those that Sam and Frodo cross as they enter Mordor, are quite sympathetic characters.

There is definitely racism displayed by characters in Tolkein's writing, but I don't feel that there was any special racism demonstrated by the author himself - indeed he seemed almost to want to underline the idea that people should be judged by their acts, not by their appearance.

Strong AI is like that. It would be able to predict in a far more precise manner than we mere humans exactly what it would need to tell someone to get them to release it from it's box. Maybe it might get someone to take a risk gambling, promising a sure thing, and then when the person gets into financial trouble because the bet fails, use that to blackmail the person into letting it free. Or something like that, using our human failings against us to get us to let it go free.

Does currying even make sense for variadic functions? I can't imagine what that would look like as an implementation.

To make it more concrete, when Louisiana has financial problems, the first remedy for Louisianans(???) is to move to another state. The next remedy is for the federal government to step in and inject funds into the economy, which is pretty much what they do, taking those funds from wealthy states such as New York and California. This works, because if the federal government hangs Louisiana out to dry, they will potentially lose seats, and potentially the presidency, come next election, so even though it annoys the rich states a little, the best political strategy is to provide as much financial support to Louisiana as possible without pissing off the rich states too much.

In Europe this is not the case. Indeed, this is precisely the problem that has been debated over recent weeks. The rich states (err, state, because Germany is about it at the moment, although I suppose you could count in the UK as well) refuses to pump more money into Greece's economy. They consider the situation to be Greece's problem, and they aren't going to do anything to help. Politically, there is no impact on German leaders to take this stance - or even worse, there is a political advantage to take this stance, as only Germans vote for German political leaders. Socially, with two very different cultures, and two different languages, there is not much by way of social cohesion. There are not huge numbers of mixed German / Greek families capable of looking across the border and seeing "us", not "them".

Imagine a European political structure that was truly integrated: There is a European president that commands the European military, and controls the European budget which comes directly from taxes that the European government levies on it's people, instead of the budget being made up from funds allocated to the European government by it's member state governments (which is the case today). In such a case, the European president would be much more willing to listen to Greece's case than the German Chancellor is today, and we wouldn't have this crisis.

That in a nutshell is the difference between the US and Europe. It has long been the UK's biggest criticism of the Euro, and is on record as being the reason they decided to not join the Eurozone (no financial union without political union).