Re:"I belong to Jesus" / "Jesus Loves You"
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 1
Hmm
Brazilian christianity is hardly something your average southern baptist is goign to feel comfortable with. In practise it's a mix of catholiscm and various african religons somewhat akin to voodoo
The simple reason they can do this though is they are increadibly fit sportsmen. The average international of premier division player runs over 17 miles in the course of a match.
America does seem to have a bit of a problem with it's corporate culture though. Enron, Xerox, WorldCom. It's a pity America's accounting and business practises are not up to European levels of honesty and integrity.
Several possible flood events that could have caused it, most probably the flooding of the Black sea or the Mediterranian, although the flooding North Sea Plain at the end of the ice age must have been pretty traumatic to people at the time.
I agree with many here. SQL-92 JOINS look good from a theoretical computer science type viewpoint, and indeed for joins on two or three tables they are pretty.
Trouble is when you have a complex database with a load of table decodes and your doing a complex set of joins on a dozen tables then deciphering a query written 6 months ago with SQL-92 syntax is hell. In effect SQL-92 just doesn't scale anywhere near as well as SQL-89.
So basically, IMHO global warming is nothing more than a disgusting human-interest story that I really don't care about unless it's directly affecting me, in which case i'll do what any reasonable human will do and move to higher ground instead of bitching about it.
So, when the whole population of Bangladesh is forced to move to higher ground, in all likelihood participating a (nuclear because of it's fellow muslim Pakistan) war in the process then it doesn't effect you? Not even as your pension dissapears as the stock markets collapse?
So when New York, Boston, London, Cape Town, Sidney and much else dissapear under the waves so killing the global economy it doesn't effect you? Not even as your pension dissapears as the stock markets collapse?
Snigger if you like, but remember what happened to the markets when a couple of skyscrapers collapsed last september.
And this higher ground your moving to? Same higher ground as everyone else is moving to? Where is it and why does nobody own it already?
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. If the world is disrupted by global warming, sea level rises or weather changes on anything but a minor scale it will impact on you, one way or another.
I only play CDs when working on my PC. I recently purchased the first Natalie Imbruglia CD, and was going to purchase the second when I found out it was copy protected - so I downloaded the mp3s and burnt a CD-R myself.
They directly, absolutly definatly, lost a sale because of copy protection.
I have an extensive mp3 collection (second HD installed for the purpose). Every time I've downloaded mp3's from a new artist I like I've ended up going and buying their back catalogue on CD. I prefer CDs to mp3. The more they copy protect the less likely I am to do this.
They directly, absolutly definatly, will loose sales from me because of copy protection.
I also buy second hand CDs from time to time to try out artists I'm not familiar with. Often I'll end up going and buying new CDs. If the price of second hand CDs increases I'll do this less often and download more mp3s
They directly, absolutly definatly, will loose sales from me because of their actions.
It's like they have a death wish. All the RIAA seem to want to do is prevent me spending money on their products.
I quite regularly work at a computer for 12 hours a day, sometimes more. A few years back I started to get occassional aches and pains, particularly in my fingers and wrists. However nowdays I rarely get anything, and I certainly don't work any less, for me the solution seemed to be...
1. Logitech trackerballs. I have two computers on my desk and I use a different type for each - one driven by my thumb and the other the symmetrical one using the index finger. Logitech are by far the best trackerballs - microsoft ones are ok and anything else is invariably crap. using a trackerball IMHO is the most important thing preventing a problem.
2. Split keyboards. I use these and find them comfortable, but of lesser importance than trackerballs.
3. Breaks. I'm fortunate and work from home, so no-one is looking over my shoulder. I always keep something else to do in the office or nearby - painting my sons models, go and sort out the plants - at the moment there's a rc model plane being built. I stop every hour or two and spend some time doing something else completely different.
Not a dead end job at all, but like everything in life you have to change and make use of experience. Specialization is for insects.
I still code for a living, but at 43 I run my own software design/development consultancy. I telecommute and half a dozen long-term clients who always are in need of *something*. They like me because I'm a highly capable technical geek and code monkey - but at the same time a geek who's been around business long enough that I can go in and talk to clients on a non-technical, business-aware level and do the analysis/design in terms that they understand.
I think you only aquire the people skills with age and experience - particularly so for technical people who's natural bent usually isn't towards that kind of thing at all. Indeed a few grey hairs seem to be positively helpful as your average manager doesn't like being in a position where they think they might look stupid to a kid who's young enough to be their children.
So my advice for longevity as a coder is to broaden out - get as much experience of all aspects of business and beyond as you can. Being pure cubical-fodder past the age of 30 isn't viable - but then who'd want to do just that anyway?
Where to look for aliens - the galactic tourist
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
Let's, just for fun, assume that there are such things as aliens with FTL ships but they are not making official contact for some inscrutable reason - too much else to do, we're in a galactic nature reserve, not invented warp yet - that kind of thing;-)
So what do we have here on earth that *would* tempt your galactic tourist to come looking at us. Especially as they can proberly get a better pan-galactic gargle blaster in the Rigil system?
The answer has to be a total solar eclipse. Even if the Rare Earth hypothesis is correct in that all life-bearing planets have large moons, the chances of the moon being exactly the same apparent size as the sun so as to produce a total solar eclipse as we see them is vanishingly small. Even on earth the window is only a hundred thousand years or so wide because the earth-moon distance changes over time. We are fantastically lucky to be around at a time when there are such things as solar eclipses in the way we see them. Throw in all the atmospheric and biosphere changes seen in an eclipse and we may well be worth a mention in the galactic 'lonely planet' guide.
So the best place to look for aliens would be in a nice remote spot under the path of totality.
The article is incorrect because it is just too america-centrered. There are already more european internet users online than americans, by 2004 although americans will still be an important part of the web they will be a small, albeit important, minority.
To assume that american laws will totally control the internet in the EU, Russia, Japan, Australia, Africa, China (which will probably use linux as their standard OS anyway) and anywhere else beyond your shores is the cultural arrogance of breathtaking proportions
The scottish univeristy I used to work in used forths (for *nix - Forth, Clyde etc.) and rivers (for windows - Tay, Earn etc.). Look at any country with a northern coastline and there's hundreds to choose from.
My own network mainly uses Munros (scottish mountains), but my laptops - of which there's always going to be only a few - use pagan sabbats and other festivals.
Personally I disagree with the people who say you should use a purerly functional scheme. IMHO I've always found 'meaningful' names to good memory aides.
I'm totally fluent in C, C++ and Delphi, but where I have the choice I always reach for delphi by preference. It can do 99% of everything you can do in C++, the 1% it can't generally being obscure stuff that you don't need in most projects - and I find code development far faster, main because delphi tends to stop you writing errors in the first place. You milage may vary of course but I'd estimate for me it takes about 20-30% less time to debug a delphi project than C++.
The second killer feature of delphi for me is also the availability of many thousand of additional components for every conceivable function in freeware to fully commercial versions. Most also come with full source code - not Open Source, but pretty damm close.
Finally if you really need C++ code for anything then C++ Builder compiles to the same intermediate code as Delphi and from V4 onwards it's been reasonably easy to combine the two - either directly linking an object file or by the more traditional dll route. Both C++Builder and Delphi can happily debug inside a dll running from a project created in the opposite language.
It's true that the original pascal was severaly restricted, but Borland's version is now so far removed from that that it really hardly counts as the same language.
I'm totally fluent in C, C++ and Delphi, but where I have the choice I always reach for delphi by preference. It can do 99% of everything you can do in C++, the 1% it can't generally being obscure stuff that you don't need in most projects - and I find code development far faster, main because delphi tends to stop you writing errors in the first place. You milage may vary of course but I'd estimate for me it takes about 20-30% less time to debug a delphi project than C++.
Also I've found the Delphi IDE to be rock solid from version 4 onwards.
The second killer feature of delphi for me is also the availability of many thousand of additional components for every conceivable function in freeware to fully commercial versions. Most also come with full source code - not Open Source, but pretty damm close.
What, like crytals? Entropy only applies to a closed system. The earth isn't (clue: that big yellow thing in the sky helps things along)
I'm still shaking this can with springs and gears in it hoping for that random chance of a watch to come out of it. And waiting on those monkeys to randomly type up a novel or even just a silly comic strip.
You know, it's difficult to believe that people still use this old chestnut. If we had to create life by random chance in the way you imply then yes, you would be correct.
a) ensuring that the mutated creature can reproduce, either through asexual or hermaphrodidic reproduction (most likely) or through an identical mutation in another member of the species of the opposite gender happening within the fertile lifetime of the first member, and in the same general location (Note that these can't be identical twins in a non-hermaphroditic species because you need opposite-gendered pairs to reproduce)
That would be a problem if it were required, but as it is it's total fantasy. The new gene complex may be dominent (probably is by definition) so will be passed on to 3/4 of it's offspring. Or even if it's recessive it could happily spread to critical mass.
b) ensuring that many genes together would randomly mutate (the leg-suppressing ones), showing no evidence in the phenotype, only to be revealed at a later point in time by the single control gene's mutation.
Err what? Why is this a problem? Evolution generally *is* slow. The neat thing about control genes is you don't need that many changes to make to macro changes. Given large numbers of individual and large amounts of time you would expect unlikely events to occur. If the chances of a series of mutations is one in a million million, given a million individuals with a life span of a few weeks (like a shrimp) and a million years then it's not unlikely to occur - it's a virtual certainty that it will occur - and lots of times too.
Easy. If say the ancestor of a shrimp has 20 pairs of legs, but a mutation with 3 pairs of legs could swim just as well, then the 3 pairs of legs mutation will have a selective advantage because the shrimp needs less energy and resources to keep itself alive and reproduce. It hence would tend to be selected for over the 20 pair original.
You'll notice of course that the 3 pair shrimp could be less well adapted to whatever the niche of the 20 leg pair shrimp was and still out-compete the 20 pair shrimp just so long as the advantage of needing less resources and reproduces faster outweighs whatever advantage the 20 pair shrimp has an an individual
Lots of variations you can play on this one - the above assumes that to 20 and 3 leg pair shrimp continue to live in exactly the same ecological niche - which ain't necessarily so
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm
Brazilian christianity is hardly something your average southern baptist is goign to feel comfortable with. In practise it's a mix of catholiscm and various african religons somewhat akin to voodoo
Yes they are drug tested
The simple reason they can do this though is they are increadibly fit sportsmen. The average international of premier division player runs over 17 miles in the course of a match.
Jaw hits desk
This guy just hasn't the faintest idea of what he's on about.
America does seem to have a bit of a problem with it's corporate culture though. Enron, Xerox, WorldCom. It's a pity America's accounting and business practises are not up to European levels of honesty and integrity.
i think not
What do you expect? That's what hollywood tells them to think.
Several possible flood events that could have caused it, most probably the flooding of the Black sea or the Mediterranian, although the flooding North Sea Plain at the end of the ice age must have been pretty traumatic to people at the time.
I agree with many here. SQL-92 JOINS look good from a theoretical computer science type viewpoint, and indeed for joins on two or three tables they are pretty.
Trouble is when you have a complex database with a load of table decodes and your doing a complex set of joins on a dozen tables then deciphering a query written 6 months ago with SQL-92 syntax is hell. In effect SQL-92 just doesn't scale anywhere near as well as SQL-89.
If you believe what this appears to say your company is going to have one hell of a problem wih unmaintainable software further down the line.
So, when the whole population of Bangladesh is forced to move to higher ground, in all likelihood participating a (nuclear because of it's fellow muslim Pakistan) war in the process then it doesn't effect you? Not even as your pension dissapears as the stock markets collapse?
So when New York, Boston, London, Cape Town, Sidney and much else dissapear under the waves so killing the global economy it doesn't effect you? Not even as your pension dissapears as the stock markets collapse?
Snigger if you like, but remember what happened to the markets when a couple of skyscrapers collapsed last september.
And this higher ground your moving to? Same higher ground as everyone else is moving to? Where is it and why does nobody own it already?
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. If the world is disrupted by global warming, sea level rises or weather changes on anything but a minor scale it will impact on you, one way or another.
I only play CDs when working on my PC. I recently purchased the first Natalie Imbruglia CD, and was going to purchase the second when I found out it was copy protected - so I downloaded the mp3s and burnt a CD-R myself.
They directly, absolutly definatly, lost a sale because of copy protection.
I have an extensive mp3 collection (second HD installed for the purpose). Every time I've downloaded mp3's from a new artist I like I've ended up going and buying their back catalogue on CD. I prefer CDs to mp3. The more they copy protect the less likely I am to do this.
They directly, absolutly definatly, will loose sales from me because of copy protection.
I also buy second hand CDs from time to time to try out artists I'm not familiar with. Often I'll end up going and buying new CDs. If the price of second hand CDs increases I'll do this less often and download more mp3s
They directly, absolutly definatly, will loose sales from me because of their actions.
It's like they have a death wish. All the RIAA seem to want to do is prevent me spending money on their products.
Actually I think you'd find that if Ken Livingstone had taken over as MP there's no way anything like this would get implemented.
I quite regularly work at a computer for 12 hours a day, sometimes more. A few years back I started to get occassional aches and pains, particularly in my fingers and wrists. However nowdays I rarely get anything, and I certainly don't work any less, for me the solution seemed to be...
1. Logitech trackerballs. I have two computers on my desk and I use a different type for each - one driven by my thumb and the other the symmetrical one using the index finger. Logitech are by far the best trackerballs - microsoft ones are ok and anything else is invariably crap. using a trackerball IMHO is the most important thing preventing a problem.
2. Split keyboards. I use these and find them comfortable, but of lesser importance than trackerballs.
3. Breaks. I'm fortunate and work from home, so no-one is looking over my shoulder. I always keep something else to do in the office or nearby - painting my sons models, go and sort out the plants - at the moment there's a rc model plane being built. I stop every hour or two and spend some time doing something else completely different.
"They'd really have to come up with some low gravity refined products that are REALLY worth something to make this economically feasible"
Unlike the USA, China doesn't have to make the project turn a profit, they just need the political will to do it.
Not a dead end job at all, but like everything in life you have to change and make use of experience. Specialization is for insects.
I still code for a living, but at 43 I run my own software design/development consultancy. I telecommute and half a dozen long-term clients who always are in need of *something*. They like me because I'm a highly capable technical geek and code monkey - but at the same time a geek who's been around business long enough that I can go in and talk to clients on a non-technical, business-aware level and do the analysis/design in terms that they understand.
I think you only aquire the people skills with age and experience - particularly so for technical people who's natural bent usually isn't towards that kind of thing at all. Indeed a few grey hairs seem to be positively helpful as your average manager doesn't like being in a position where they think they might look stupid to a kid who's young enough to be their children.
So my advice for longevity as a coder is to broaden out - get as much experience of all aspects of business and beyond as you can. Being pure cubical-fodder past the age of 30 isn't viable - but then who'd want to do just that anyway?
Let's, just for fun, assume that there are such things as aliens with FTL ships but they are not making official contact for some inscrutable reason - too much else to do, we're in a galactic nature reserve, not invented warp yet - that kind of thing ;-)
So what do we have here on earth that *would* tempt your galactic tourist to come looking at us. Especially as they can proberly get a better pan-galactic gargle blaster in the Rigil system?
The answer has to be a total solar eclipse. Even if the Rare Earth hypothesis is correct in that all life-bearing planets have large moons, the chances of the moon being exactly the same apparent size as the sun so as to produce a total solar eclipse as we see them is vanishingly small. Even on earth the window is only a hundred thousand years or so wide because the earth-moon distance changes over time. We are fantastically lucky to be around at a time when there are such things as solar eclipses in the way we see them. Throw in all the atmospheric and biosphere changes seen in an eclipse and we may well be worth a mention in the galactic 'lonely planet' guide.
So the best place to look for aliens would be in a nice remote spot under the path of totality.
The article is incorrect because it is just too america-centrered. There are already more european internet users online than americans, by 2004 although americans will still be an important part of the web they will be a small, albeit important, minority.
To assume that american laws will totally control the internet in the EU, Russia, Japan, Australia, Africa, China (which will probably use linux as their standard OS anyway) and anywhere else beyond your shores is the cultural arrogance of breathtaking proportions
The scottish univeristy I used to work in used forths (for *nix - Forth, Clyde etc.) and rivers (for windows - Tay, Earn etc.). Look at any country with a northern coastline and there's hundreds to choose from.
My own network mainly uses Munros (scottish mountains), but my laptops - of which there's always going to be only a few - use pagan sabbats and other festivals.
Personally I disagree with the people who say you should use a purerly functional scheme. IMHO I've always found 'meaningful' names to good memory aides.
Ahh, then you should read the Culture novels by Ian M Banks.
Some of the best sf/space opera produced in recent years, and the future is deepest, deepest red.
They already are millionaires - they became so when /. was brought out.
Charging is just pure greed.
Delphi is worth more than a look.
I'm totally fluent in C, C++ and Delphi, but where I have the choice I always reach for delphi by preference. It can do 99% of everything you can do in C++, the 1% it can't generally being obscure stuff that you don't need in most projects - and I find code development far faster, main because delphi tends to stop you writing errors in the first place. You milage may vary of course but I'd estimate for me it takes about 20-30% less time to debug a delphi project than C++.
The second killer feature of delphi for me is also the availability of many thousand of additional components for every conceivable function in freeware to fully commercial versions. Most also come with full source code - not Open Source, but pretty damm close.
Finally if you really need C++ code for anything then C++ Builder compiles to the same intermediate code as Delphi and from V4 onwards it's been reasonably easy to combine the two - either directly linking an object file or by the more traditional dll route. Both C++Builder and Delphi can happily debug inside a dll running from a project created in the opposite language.
It's true that the original pascal was severaly restricted, but Borland's version is now so far removed from that that it really hardly counts as the same language.
I'm totally fluent in C, C++ and Delphi, but where I have the choice I always reach for delphi by preference. It can do 99% of everything you can do in C++, the 1% it can't generally being obscure stuff that you don't need in most projects - and I find code development far faster, main because delphi tends to stop you writing errors in the first place. You milage may vary of course but I'd estimate for me it takes about 20-30% less time to debug a delphi project than C++.
Also I've found the Delphi IDE to be rock solid from version 4 onwards.
The second killer feature of delphi for me is also the availability of many thousand of additional components for every conceivable function in freeware to fully commercial versions. Most also come with full source code - not Open Source, but pretty damm close.
What, like crytals? Entropy only applies to a closed system. The earth isn't (clue: that big yellow thing in the sky helps things along)
I'm still shaking this can with springs and gears in it hoping for that random chance of a watch to come out of it. And waiting on those monkeys to randomly type up a novel or even just a silly comic strip.
You know, it's difficult to believe that people still use this old chestnut. If we had to create life by random chance in the way you imply then yes, you would be correct.
But we don't, it simply doesn't work like that.
a) ensuring that the mutated creature can reproduce, either through asexual or hermaphrodidic reproduction (most likely) or through an identical mutation in another member of the species of the opposite gender happening within the fertile lifetime of the first member, and in the same general location (Note that these can't be identical twins in a non-hermaphroditic species because you need opposite-gendered pairs to reproduce)
That would be a problem if it were required, but as it is it's total fantasy. The new gene complex may be dominent (probably is by definition) so will be passed on to 3/4 of it's offspring. Or even if it's recessive it could happily spread to critical mass.
b) ensuring that many genes together would randomly mutate (the leg-suppressing ones), showing no evidence in the phenotype, only to be revealed at a later point in time by the single control gene's mutation.
Err what? Why is this a problem? Evolution generally *is* slow. The neat thing about control genes is you don't need that many changes to make to macro changes. Given large numbers of individual and large amounts of time you would expect unlikely events to occur. If the chances of a series of mutations is one in a million million, given a million individuals with a life span of a few weeks (like a shrimp) and a million years then it's not unlikely to occur - it's a virtual certainty that it will occur - and lots of times too.
Easy. If say the ancestor of a shrimp has 20 pairs of legs, but a mutation with 3 pairs of legs could swim just as well, then the 3 pairs of legs mutation will have a selective advantage because the shrimp needs less energy and resources to keep itself alive and reproduce. It hence would tend to be selected for over the 20 pair original.
You'll notice of course that the 3 pair shrimp could be less well adapted to whatever the niche of the 20 leg pair shrimp was and still out-compete the 20 pair shrimp just so long as the advantage of needing less resources and reproduces faster outweighs whatever advantage the 20 pair shrimp has an an individual
Lots of variations you can play on this one - the above assumes that to 20 and 3 leg pair shrimp continue to live in exactly the same ecological niche - which ain't necessarily so