Really. When you take one datum and put it together with another datum, you get data. Plural. You get this little detail of Latin grammar drilled into your forehead in first-year biology, and if you screw it up, it is graded more harshly than any other grammatical error.
I was going to post a silly "article is riddled with errors" comment that went on about how the original story was about Fish Jesus making peace with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that it was Pope Benedict XVI who was leaving Slashdot (in disgust), but that seemed maybe a bit much. Thank you for communicating the same point in a more direct manner.
It totally means just that. 23 million people have accidentally clicked on it, thinking there was something interesting. There is a clogged, cobweb-filled database with 23 million half-baked avatars made out of the default options. I've been there too, and for about as long. The active population is probably something closer to a few thousand, and Sony wishes it wasn't.
Among the delayed capabilities are adding Lambda expressions, or "closures," to Java for multicore programming,...
Lambda expressions are not closures, and neither enable parallelization. Yes, the Wikipedia articles for both are dense swamps, but couldn't you have at least tried to ask someone? Please?
That's a proposal that I just made here. No self-destruct system was included in the engineered T cells mentioned in the paper. However, it's not an uncommon concept in synthetic biology, and has been included in (for example) numerous iGEM projects. It is a fairly easy pathway to construct and implement.
The minimal mammalian self-destruct mechanism probably consists of a single gene that gets turned on in the presence of a foreign steroid hormone not normally present in the body, but doesn't cause an immune response. Steroid hormones are convenient in that they can pass through cellular membranes without transport, and can directly effect the activation of genes designed to respond to them (although another gene might be required to create an appropriate DNA-binding cofactor; I don't remember my endocrine lectures that well.) This single gene can then direct the cell to produce a protein, such as the peptide described in this paper, which causes T cells to perform self-lysis (to kill themselves, typically for the good of the body.) However, more blunt instruments can be used; directing a cell to very aggressively use up all of its metabolic energy producing something useless is a common mistake often made by inexperienced genetic engineers, and usually causes the cell to die due to resource exhaustion. Thus, adding this foreign hormone would trigger self-destruction of the engineered T cells.
There are other methods, too; one could, for example, make the engineered T cells look like invaders (by introducing an adapter protein that fuses with the original receptor and turns it into a foreign epitope.) The body would then eliminate these T cells just as they originally eliminated the cancerous B cells. This has the advantage of being applicable to the original test patient (since it doesn't require genetic engineering), but requires a lot of tricky pharmaceutical engineering to prevent the adapter drug from getting destroyed before it's bound.
Are you saying you're not? I thought everyone, regardless of how "fix our problems down here first"-oriented they may be, still hoped desperately for that dream. Simply by virtue of the amount of funding and energy it requires, a human species that can get into deep space and thrive there must be a well-off one.
As for ebooks: feel free to try tracking down a complete, new copy of Lehninger's Biochemistry.
In general, a lot of university libraries view loaning out textbooks as a "last resort" type of thing, for people studying for a test who forgot or lost theirs. You're allowed to check them out for a matter of hours. It's highly unlikely you could get the fines waived in such a situation.
Don't be quite so quick there—I'm Canadian. Sort of changes things.
Perhaps I was wrong in making any particular assumption about your own nation of origin, now that we're talking about anaemia and inferior alcoholic beverages—but honestly I still think your attitude is a corrosive one. The more apathetic people there are, the less gets done.
Every programming language has its preferred whitespace usage, most of which have significance. K&R, for example, insists that there is a space between control structures and their parenthesized arguments (as in: if (a > 1) [...]) but not between regular functions and their arguments (hence: printf("Hello world.\n");). These cues are still conceptually significant, as they reflect the difference in underlying meaning.
The same applies to punctuation in natural languages; using the modern Greek interpunct in Latin, for example, would generate confusion, because the Latin punctus was used to indicate breathing pauses, not genuinely grammatical breaks; the reverse of this is even worse, as it can create grammatically incorrect sentences. A convention that is familiar in one language can very easily be unpleasant when used in another, even if the intention is clear.
If you're really going to ignore the underlying causes of the decline of the US, though, you should probably give up on being cynical about its fate. That's called whining.
My reasoning is that by being a reservoir of selfishness, you have the potential to pass this perspective on to others (or, alternatively, induce it in them through your treatment of them.) This in turn reinforces the same selfishly competitive behaviour amongst the general population, and ultimately reinforces that attitude in people with the power to influence others. Think of it as an extended version of the golden rule. While you might make the case that your contribution is extremely small, the argument cannot be made that such an attitude is constructive, or even neutral, unless you truly believe that how you behave affects no one in your country.
With regards to punctuation, the colon and semicolon are grouped with the preceding word for the sake of making reading less ambiguous; they are a form of terminator. It is not my opinion that there is an inherent aesthetic reason for grouping them thus, but a matter of very well-established historical convention. Choosing to deny this convention is, in itself, a form of illiteracy, as it demonstrates an imperfect grasp of the reasons for the convention, which is, again, not arbitrary. Tying things back to our original point of discussion, this is a much graver shortcoming in one's literacy than ignorance of comparatively obscure Middle English verb forms. (Also, you just ended a question with a period.)
Yep. It's amazing how little e-mail has changed since it was invented in the mid-sixties. (Incidentally, that link also reveals to the young computer history student that unsolicited mass mailings date to 1971, and unsolicited commercial mass mailings date to 1978. Feel free to pick which one is spammier in your mind.)
It's Slashvertisement Lite, wherein the primary developer (Chris Dance, I believe) of an open source project tries to conceal the fact that he or she is trying to get attention for their work. This usage has cropped up once or twice before. This is comparable to many modern television advertisements, which have a dreadfully low chance of actually getting you to buy anything, and are much more focused on playing the longer, deeper game of making you remember the name. (Which, in this case, is PaperCut.) It's there, just not quite as obvious.
I encourage you not to split infinitives, as well, even if Microsoft insists that a single word is acceptable. However, I think that particular piece of linguistic style is best considered deprecated at this point. Personally, I find that placing adverbs (or adverbial clauses) after the "to" helps tie the structure together, and that not doing so often feel stilted; though I suppose, in longer constructs, it can complicate easy comprehension by leaving the reader hanging and potentially creating the dreaded "garden path" sentence. Such is life.
In larger software development environments, it is common for many contributing programmers to work on a single copy of the project's source code at the same time (typically through a mechanism called source control.) As a matter of etiquette, developers are expected to test their code before contributing it back to the master copy. If the master copy fails to compile, typically due to an error in coding, then it is said that the build has been broken, and that the developer who contributed the bad code broke the build.
An article posted on Slashdot in 2004 suggested that software teams keep a red lava lamp in their server room, and have it turn on whenever a broken build is discovered. The reason for picking a lava lamp in particular is because it can take several minutes for the wax to warm up enough for the bubbles to reach the top of the oil: the article's authors proposed using this delay as a period in which the build could be fixed without inspiring a greater breach of decorum, and hence invoking the ire of the rest of the development team.
This summary, by contrast, is a slashvertisement for a different solution to the same problem, wherein foam projectiles are launched at the offending developer. It attempts to conceal its absurd premises by referencing a past incident in which a similar idea was suggested, thereby hoping to capitalise on an in-joke as a means of creating something more acceptable as a cultural object of Slashdot's community; however, the submitter most likely just did a search for something he or she could exploit to provide padding.
That all being said, you should probably get used to being expected to read embedded links in order to garner a cohesive understanding of the relevant context for something written on the Web. Most people don't have the communication skills necessary to clearly and accurately introduce context in a compact space, and in lieu of this ability, it is highly preferable to have a reference to the original subject matter (or at least a more primary resource) than to be left with mere hearsay or no context whatsoever. This is one of the greatest ways the Internet has changed how people communicate, and while it has its annoying side effects at times (especially dead links) it does more good than harm.
Students' accomplishments aren't expected to exceed the greatness of their predecessors' accomplishments. Institutions and educators who demand such almost universally create academics with morals loosened by the pressure to succeed.
The drive to be so selfishly hypercompetitive is primarily responsible for the decline of the United States. If you were a CEO or a high-ranking politician, your preoccupation with your own job security, "keeping up", and success—combined with your disdain for the future—would probably have already outsourced either your job or the jobs of your colleagues. Thank you for clearly establishing that you belong to the "problem" column and not the "solution" column. I always find it refreshing to hear Americans say things to the effect of "after I die, the world doesn't matter." It's such a fantastic reminder that apparently successful, intelligent people can still bring about the end of civilization if they try hard enough. You don't have to pass that viewpoint on to children in order to be a sociopath, you just have to believe it.
Also—would it be considered a cheap shot if I point out that people haven't put spaces before colons and semicolons for well over a hundred years, and that when they did, they generally followed them with a wider space? I believe not living up to such a basic criterion of the definition of literacy (proper use of punctuation) makes you somewhat hypocritical. This is especially the case if you make the "it's easier to read" argument, since one's reading skill is defined by comfort with the complicated and difficult.
I've been through all of those articles before, and I'm afraid you're just fantasizing. Reverse engineering is a process of implementing what you see, turning it on, and hunting for the differences in design that explain the resulting differences in behaviour. While all sorts of incredible emergent properties do exist, the idea of someone getting the grant to wire up a trillion-CPU machine without an extremely good idea of what will happen is preposterous—and ridiculously risky. The same kind of blind optimism is why classical AI (1970-85) never delivered on its promised miracles. You can't just throw dice into the wind.
That works up to a point—although in the life sciences, the textbook industry pounds out new editions as quickly as it can, making torrents perpetually dated and page numbers dangerously useless. Of course, living away from campus only nullifies the library accessibility further... (than it already is, because the courses are crazy-huge. Blegh.)
Strangely, you can consider yourself... lucky to have been able to scrape things together without spending money. I've become an expert in exotic imports instead.
That is sarcasm. As a seasoned victim of textbook companies, I can promise you that textbook companies view anything like this as the development of open-source competition. Even courses that they don't sell books for are a problem, since every course adds momentum to the open courseware movement.
Let me know how that works out for you, as a social animal. I really hope you don't pass that viewpoint on to your biological/academic/corporate successors.
Slashdot Mirror
Really. When you take one datum and put it together with another datum, you get data. Plural. You get this little detail of Latin grammar drilled into your forehead in first-year biology, and if you screw it up, it is graded more harshly than any other grammatical error.
I was going to post a silly "article is riddled with errors" comment that went on about how the original story was about Fish Jesus making peace with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that it was Pope Benedict XVI who was leaving Slashdot (in disgust), but that seemed maybe a bit much. Thank you for communicating the same point in a more direct manner.
It totally means just that. 23 million people have accidentally clicked on it, thinking there was something interesting. There is a clogged, cobweb-filled database with 23 million half-baked avatars made out of the default options. I've been there too, and for about as long. The active population is probably something closer to a few thousand, and Sony wishes it wasn't.
Among the delayed capabilities are adding Lambda expressions, or "closures," to Java for multicore programming, ...
Lambda expressions are not closures, and neither enable parallelization. Yes, the Wikipedia articles for both are dense swamps, but couldn't you have at least tried to ask someone? Please?
That's a proposal that I just made here. No self-destruct system was included in the engineered T cells mentioned in the paper. However, it's not an uncommon concept in synthetic biology, and has been included in (for example) numerous iGEM projects. It is a fairly easy pathway to construct and implement.
The minimal mammalian self-destruct mechanism probably consists of a single gene that gets turned on in the presence of a foreign steroid hormone not normally present in the body, but doesn't cause an immune response. Steroid hormones are convenient in that they can pass through cellular membranes without transport, and can directly effect the activation of genes designed to respond to them (although another gene might be required to create an appropriate DNA-binding cofactor; I don't remember my endocrine lectures that well.) This single gene can then direct the cell to produce a protein, such as the peptide described in this paper, which causes T cells to perform self-lysis (to kill themselves, typically for the good of the body.) However, more blunt instruments can be used; directing a cell to very aggressively use up all of its metabolic energy producing something useless is a common mistake often made by inexperienced genetic engineers, and usually causes the cell to die due to resource exhaustion. Thus, adding this foreign hormone would trigger self-destruction of the engineered T cells.
There are other methods, too; one could, for example, make the engineered T cells look like invaders (by introducing an adapter protein that fuses with the original receptor and turns it into a foreign epitope.) The body would then eliminate these T cells just as they originally eliminated the cancerous B cells. This has the advantage of being applicable to the original test patient (since it doesn't require genetic engineering), but requires a lot of tricky pharmaceutical engineering to prevent the adapter drug from getting destroyed before it's bound.
They were removed by the Pre-Crime Division as punishment for replying to yourself.
Are you saying you're not? I thought everyone, regardless of how "fix our problems down here first"-oriented they may be, still hoped desperately for that dream. Simply by virtue of the amount of funding and energy it requires, a human species that can get into deep space and thrive there must be a well-off one.
As long as no one's drink gets knocked over, that's all that matters!
As for ebooks: feel free to try tracking down a complete, new copy of Lehninger's Biochemistry.
In general, a lot of university libraries view loaning out textbooks as a "last resort" type of thing, for people studying for a test who forgot or lost theirs. You're allowed to check them out for a matter of hours. It's highly unlikely you could get the fines waived in such a situation.
Don't be quite so quick there—I'm Canadian. Sort of changes things.
Perhaps I was wrong in making any particular assumption about your own nation of origin, now that we're talking about anaemia and inferior alcoholic beverages—but honestly I still think your attitude is a corrosive one. The more apathetic people there are, the less gets done.
Every programming language has its preferred whitespace usage, most of which have significance. K&R, for example, insists that there is a space between control structures and their parenthesized arguments (as in: if (a > 1) [...]) but not between regular functions and their arguments (hence: printf("Hello world.\n");). These cues are still conceptually significant, as they reflect the difference in underlying meaning.
The same applies to punctuation in natural languages; using the modern Greek interpunct in Latin, for example, would generate confusion, because the Latin punctus was used to indicate breathing pauses, not genuinely grammatical breaks; the reverse of this is even worse, as it can create grammatically incorrect sentences. A convention that is familiar in one language can very easily be unpleasant when used in another, even if the intention is clear.
If you're really going to ignore the underlying causes of the decline of the US, though, you should probably give up on being cynical about its fate. That's called whining.
My reasoning is that by being a reservoir of selfishness, you have the potential to pass this perspective on to others (or, alternatively, induce it in them through your treatment of them.) This in turn reinforces the same selfishly competitive behaviour amongst the general population, and ultimately reinforces that attitude in people with the power to influence others. Think of it as an extended version of the golden rule. While you might make the case that your contribution is extremely small, the argument cannot be made that such an attitude is constructive, or even neutral, unless you truly believe that how you behave affects no one in your country.
With regards to punctuation, the colon and semicolon are grouped with the preceding word for the sake of making reading less ambiguous; they are a form of terminator. It is not my opinion that there is an inherent aesthetic reason for grouping them thus, but a matter of very well-established historical convention. Choosing to deny this convention is, in itself, a form of illiteracy, as it demonstrates an imperfect grasp of the reasons for the convention, which is, again, not arbitrary. Tying things back to our original point of discussion, this is a much graver shortcoming in one's literacy than ignorance of comparatively obscure Middle English verb forms. (Also, you just ended a question with a period.)
Yep. It's amazing how little e-mail has changed since it was invented in the mid-sixties. (Incidentally, that link also reveals to the young computer history student that unsolicited mass mailings date to 1971, and unsolicited commercial mass mailings date to 1978. Feel free to pick which one is spammier in your mind.)
It's Slashvertisement Lite, wherein the primary developer (Chris Dance, I believe) of an open source project tries to conceal the fact that he or she is trying to get attention for their work. This usage has cropped up once or twice before. This is comparable to many modern television advertisements, which have a dreadfully low chance of actually getting you to buy anything, and are much more focused on playing the longer, deeper game of making you remember the name. (Which, in this case, is PaperCut.) It's there, just not quite as obvious.
I think that's illegal.
I encourage you not to split infinitives, as well, even if Microsoft insists that a single word is acceptable. However, I think that particular piece of linguistic style is best considered deprecated at this point. Personally, I find that placing adverbs (or adverbial clauses) after the "to" helps tie the structure together, and that not doing so often feel stilted; though I suppose, in longer constructs, it can complicate easy comprehension by leaving the reader hanging and potentially creating the dreaded "garden path" sentence. Such is life.
And before I forget: Sokath, his eyes uncovered.
In larger software development environments, it is common for many contributing programmers to work on a single copy of the project's source code at the same time (typically through a mechanism called source control.) As a matter of etiquette, developers are expected to test their code before contributing it back to the master copy. If the master copy fails to compile, typically due to an error in coding, then it is said that the build has been broken, and that the developer who contributed the bad code broke the build.
An article posted on Slashdot in 2004 suggested that software teams keep a red lava lamp in their server room, and have it turn on whenever a broken build is discovered. The reason for picking a lava lamp in particular is because it can take several minutes for the wax to warm up enough for the bubbles to reach the top of the oil: the article's authors proposed using this delay as a period in which the build could be fixed without inspiring a greater breach of decorum, and hence invoking the ire of the rest of the development team.
This summary, by contrast, is a slashvertisement for a different solution to the same problem, wherein foam projectiles are launched at the offending developer. It attempts to conceal its absurd premises by referencing a past incident in which a similar idea was suggested, thereby hoping to capitalise on an in-joke as a means of creating something more acceptable as a cultural object of Slashdot's community; however, the submitter most likely just did a search for something he or she could exploit to provide padding.
That all being said, you should probably get used to being expected to read embedded links in order to garner a cohesive understanding of the relevant context for something written on the Web. Most people don't have the communication skills necessary to clearly and accurately introduce context in a compact space, and in lieu of this ability, it is highly preferable to have a reference to the original subject matter (or at least a more primary resource) than to be left with mere hearsay or no context whatsoever. This is one of the greatest ways the Internet has changed how people communicate, and while it has its annoying side effects at times (especially dead links) it does more good than harm.
Your best option, sadly, is to hope they die off.
Students' accomplishments aren't expected to exceed the greatness of their predecessors' accomplishments. Institutions and educators who demand such almost universally create academics with morals loosened by the pressure to succeed.
The drive to be so selfishly hypercompetitive is primarily responsible for the decline of the United States. If you were a CEO or a high-ranking politician, your preoccupation with your own job security, "keeping up", and success—combined with your disdain for the future—would probably have already outsourced either your job or the jobs of your colleagues. Thank you for clearly establishing that you belong to the "problem" column and not the "solution" column. I always find it refreshing to hear Americans say things to the effect of "after I die, the world doesn't matter." It's such a fantastic reminder that apparently successful, intelligent people can still bring about the end of civilization if they try hard enough. You don't have to pass that viewpoint on to children in order to be a sociopath, you just have to believe it.
Also—would it be considered a cheap shot if I point out that people haven't put spaces before colons and semicolons for well over a hundred years, and that when they did, they generally followed them with a wider space? I believe not living up to such a basic criterion of the definition of literacy (proper use of punctuation) makes you somewhat hypocritical. This is especially the case if you make the "it's easier to read" argument, since one's reading skill is defined by comfort with the complicated and difficult.
I take it you've never heard of magnesium? There are plenty of inorganic combustibles.
I've been through all of those articles before, and I'm afraid you're just fantasizing. Reverse engineering is a process of implementing what you see, turning it on, and hunting for the differences in design that explain the resulting differences in behaviour. While all sorts of incredible emergent properties do exist, the idea of someone getting the grant to wire up a trillion-CPU machine without an extremely good idea of what will happen is preposterous—and ridiculously risky. The same kind of blind optimism is why classical AI (1970-85) never delivered on its promised miracles. You can't just throw dice into the wind.
That works up to a point—although in the life sciences, the textbook industry pounds out new editions as quickly as it can, making torrents perpetually dated and page numbers dangerously useless. Of course, living away from campus only nullifies the library accessibility further... (than it already is, because the courses are crazy-huge. Blegh.)
Strangely, you can consider yourself... lucky to have been able to scrape things together without spending money. I've become an expert in exotic imports instead.
That is sarcasm. As a seasoned victim of textbook companies, I can promise you that textbook companies view anything like this as the development of open-source competition. Even courses that they don't sell books for are a problem, since every course adds momentum to the open courseware movement.
Let me know how that works out for you, as a social animal. I really hope you don't pass that viewpoint on to your biological/academic/corporate successors.