Maybe if you went to more than two places in the US you'd get a different picture.
2,237 karma · joined July 19, 2014
Things We Actually Did:
Mercury delay lines were tubes full of mercury we sent vibrations through. Those vibrations would reflect around and get detected and read out later. This wasn't, technically, random-access, but it was memory.
Williams-Kilburn tubes were CRTs with long-persistence phosphor, the exact opposite of what display CRTs used, and metal plates on the front to allow the contents of memory to be read out. You could have two identical CRTs, one with the plate to use as RAM and one built into the display panel so the operators could see the contents of RAM in real time.
Core memory was tiny little ceramic ferrite doughnuts woven into complicated metal grids which would change how they were magnetized in response to a sufficient current; their state could be read back out non-destructively, and core was, in fact, nonvolatile. The core modules were woven by hand by women working with microscopes and very steady hands.
Being able to make usable amounts of memory out of components we can just etch into silicon was an amazing advance. Nothing short of revolutionary, really; computers as we know them would be flatly impossible without cheap, plentiful RAM.
That's the point: How do you "sufficiently define" the word involved here?
Also, how do you "sufficiently define" the word 'ethical'?
Plenty of people understand IPA.
> No, "car as in character" is still.
It's still completely incomprehensible unless you know which vowel sound is meant, which is the whole point of this sub-thread.
It does if you use IPA.
This "'foo' as in 'bar'" stuff is worse than useless most of the time, as you've just been shown.
It's /kɛər/, as you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English
And, for the record, I have the Mary-marry-merry merger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...
They got bought out. That presumably made them money.
How is that not a proper business?
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-1-is-sugar-real...
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...
One of the best-known numbers in biology came about due to a similar confusion over significant figures:
> The first systematic measurements of human body temperature were performed by the German physician Carl Wunderlich. In 1861 he measured the temperatures of one million healthy individuals (a sample size that seems too large to be believed). The average value was reported as 37 degrees celsius. When converted this value becomes 98.6 degreed fahrenheit. So what's the problem? Wunderlich's value has only two significant figures while the converted value has three. The last digit (the "point six" at the end) should be regarded with great suspicion. Wunderlich's converted value should really be stated as "ninety eight point something" if one is being honest.
Actually, if one is being honest and respecting the usual rules, it should be stated as 99°F; that is, rounded to two significant figures.
(And, of course, we're not that simple: Core body temperature rises and falls naturally due to a number of factors even when we're completely healthy, so any single number as "the" healthy body temperature is, strictly, incorrect.)
It was, back a long time ago, but the natural philosophers fell away as more technical knowledge came to be required to advance the field.
> What is mathematics/computer-science? modern philosophy!
Not really, no. It doesn't provide any guidance for life and it doesn't grapple with any of the big questions, even to say they're meaningless. It isn't philosophy as anyone defines the term.
> The holy grail of computer-science is artificial intelligence!
That's the "holy grail" of one sub-field, maybe. Not the whole field by a long shot.
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing
of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur
of this life.
-- Albert Camus
Yes, which is why the volatile qualifier exists: It makes modifying specific variables a side-effect, which then cannot be optimized away.
This isn't about traffic analysis, it's about social expectations and social norms. If privacy is the default, the social norm is to be private, and to expect privacy. That's important.