I'm honestly not certain whether you're being serious or sarcastic. I hope the latter, because as a parody of religious thinking that was hilarious. "I saw a sexy underage girl, therefore God must exist," is not what I would call a good example of logical reasoning.
But in case you really were being serious, what other explanations have you considered? You've made an observation: there are things in the world that appear beautiful to you. You have suggested one explanation for that observation: they were all created by a supreme being who is an artist and "could not help but show a glimpse of His artistic skills." That is, I suppose, one possible explanation. But it certainly isn't the only one. So what other explanations have you considered? And then, how can you determine which of the possible explanations is correct?
To give just one example: perhaps beauty is not an intrinsic quality of an object. Perhaps, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and whether you find something beautiful is strictly a property of you, not of the thing itself. That's easy to test. If true, there should be lots of disagreement about what is beautiful. There should be things that you find beautiful but many other people don't; and likewise, things that some people find beautiful but you don't.
If you have an infinite barrel of marbles, you can't make a statement such as "10% of them are green".
You absolutely can. Let me give a simple example: the positive integers. That is, unquestionably, an infinite set. And it also is quite clear that precisely 10% of them are divisible by 10.
Mathematically, here's how we would describe it. Consider the set of integers from 1 to N. Let x(N) be the fraction of members in that set that are divisible by 10. It's quite easy to show that as N->infinity, x(N)->1/10.
This is exactly what happens when you conflate two unrelated things: revenue and incentives. There's no reason a particular type of spending should be linked to a particular tax. That just leads to making bad decisions.
You need money to pay for services. Fine. Pay for them out of the state's general budget. So now you have to decide how to fund that budget. A good default is an income or wealth based tax. Something where everyone pays what they can afford to pay. But in any case, you don't need a separate revenue source for every item in the budget.
Independent of that, you may want to create incentives to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. You want people to buy more efficient vehicles. You want them to consume less energy. You want them to put less wear on the roads. There are lots of ways to create those incentives. A gas tax. A tax on the purchase price of a car, based on the total distance it will be driven over its lifetime. Tolls. And so on. Decide what behaviors you want to encourage, then identify the best incentives to encourage them.
But these two decisions should be completely separate. The gas tax is there to encourage efficiency, not to produce revenue. Any money it does bring in should go directly toward decreasing income taxes. There's the question of how much money you need, and the question of what incentives you want to create, and they should never be linked together.
What's all this about "the left" and "the right"? You seem to have two images in your head of two groups that supposedly believe certain things. Unfortunately, they seem to have little in common with the actual beliefs of anyone I know.
Rather than assigning labels and talking about what imaginary groups like "the left" supposedly believe, how about sticking to the specific beliefs that specific people have actually expressed, and let everyone say for themselves what they do or don't believe.
Those hardware requirements aren't really that steep. Those GPUs currently cost under $350, so high end but not top-of-the-line. But it isn't supposed to be released until early next year. By then, new high end graphics cards will have been released, and these ones will be solidly mid-range. Also, the initial customers for this will be enthusiasts, the people who already have high end GPUs or don't mind spending a bit extra to get one. By the time this is really mainstream, even low end GPUs will likely be able to handle it.
Fortunately, these restrictions are all unenforcible. They're overruled by Article 6 of the US Constitution which states, "[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." But the fact that so many states tried, and that they've continued to leave these restrictions in their constitutions despite being completely unenforcible, is pretty shocking and disgusting.
1. A system for aerial delivery of items to a destination location, comprising: a plurality of unmanned aerial vehicles, each of the plurality of unmanned aerial vehicles configured to aerially transport items; an unmanned aerial vehicle management system, including: a processor; and a memory coupled to the processor and storing program instructions that when executed by the processor cause the processors to at least: receive a request to deliver an item to a destination location; and send to an unmanned aerial vehicle of the plurality of unmanned aerial vehicles, delivery parameters identifying a source location that includes the item and a destination location; wherein the unmanned aerial vehicle, in response to receiving the delivery parameters, is further configured to at least: navigate to the source location; engage the item located at the source location; navigate a navigation route to the destination location; and disengage the item.
There is absolutely nothing there that hasn't been discussed thousands of times before and been a staple of science fiction for decades. But if this gets approved, no one but Amazon will be allowed to do this, just as it's becoming technologically feasible.
Remember, every claim in a patent is like a little patent in itself. Whatever else is contained in the patent, anything that matches all the features of any single claim is infringing. And there's nothing in that claim that's original or innovative in any way. Actually building a drone delivery network will require solving a lot of hard technological problems, and some of those solutions might legitimately be patentable. But this has nothing to do with that.
Actually, it's even worse than that. Here's the last paragraph of the application:
From the foregoing, it will be appreciated that, although specific implementations have been described herein for purposes of illustration, various modifications may be made without deviating from the spirit and scope of the appended claims and the elements recited therein. In addition, while certain aspects are presented below in certain claim forms, the inventors contemplate the various aspects in any available claim form. For example, while only some aspects may currently be recited as being embodied in a computer readable storage medium, other aspects may likewise be so embodied. Various modifications and changes may be made as would be obvious to a person skilled in the art having the benefit of this disclosure. It is intended to embrace all such modifications and changes and, accordingly, the above description to be regarded in an illustrative rather than a restrictive sense.
So the incredibly general claims should be interpreted even more generally. They're basically claiming complete ownership of the concept of delivering things with drones, including "all such modifications and changes" that anyone might reasonably think of.
No, he did not present a single per capita comparison.
Ummm... How does, "The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste," not count as a per-capita comparison? Of course, you then blindly dismiss it by saying, "And who cares about Kolkata, that was probably chosen because it is uniquely low." The 14 million people who live there certainly care. And no, it was not chosen for being uniquely low. Take a look at the graphs in the paper. You'll see there is only one outlier in the whole set of cities, and that is New York. And yes, I did follow the link to check the paper before I posted. Because I actually believe in doing my research before posting. (See my signature quote, which in case you hadn't realized is meant ironically, and is appropriate to a distressing fraction of posts on Slashdot.)
Did you read the article? He repeatedly points out how bad NYC is on a per-capita basis, not just absolute. To quote just a few examples:
"The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,”
The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste.
Yes, NYC is one of the most visited cities in the world. So are Tokyo, Paris, and London, all of which use less energy and produce far less waste. That doesn't explain it.
'A lot of working scientists assume that if it's published, it's right,' he says. 'This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.'
Ummm... they do? Like, who? Not a single one I know.
If a result is published, I assume (as do most other scientists) that means very little until it's been reproduced, and even then I remain quite skeptical until it's stood the test of time. I assume many published results will turn out to be wrong. That's just the nature of science. Every paper is a work in progress, a snapshot of someone's research at one moment. And that's fine.
So 39% were successfully reproduced, and another 24% came close? I'd call that pretty good, especially in psychology where you're studying an incredibly complex system (the human brain) while trying to sort out hundreds of interacting factors.
On the bright side, it's a great way to show off the idiocy of the DMCA to a whole new set of people. There's a big segment of the population who couldn't care less about copyright or DRM--but tell them they can't maintain their own car anymore, and they'll suddenly get very upset.
"Low income housing" does not mean slums. It generally just means housing that costs less than a certain fraction of the median housing cost in the area. Given that this is Marin, most of the people living in this development will probably be very solidly middle class.
Also, vandalism, crime, etc. are generally problems that appear when you have absentee landlords who don't care about keeping up the property and don't do anything to evict problem tenants. That's unlikely to be the case here. I expect Lucas will just pay a company to manage the property for him, and they'll do a fine job of keeping things running.
Flow is another keyboard designed along similar lines, though it's optimized for slightly different criteria: fast text entry rather than low error rate. It takes a while to get used to, but you really can type a lot faster with it.
Exactly. It isn't really a full featured collections framework. It's more a set of low level primitives that you're expected to use to implement the higher level functions that every other collections framework provides out of the box. And of course, the functions you write will be different from the ones every other programmer writes: different names, different behavior.
This is one of the common complaints about C++. It leads everyone to basically create their own personal language, and then it's hard to work on any other person's code because you first have to learn the non-standard language they've created.
You can do the same thing in other languages too. Just about every collections framework includes something equivalent to find(). But very often you don't want to access the element, just check whether it's present. So for that common situation, they provide a concise, easily readable way to do it.
That won't work, for a few reasons. First, strlen() expects a char* as its argument, not a std::string. You need to write strlen(s.c_str()). But what are you gaining from using strlen? It's simpler to write s.size(). Second, you're dereferencing the null at the end of the string. You really wanted to write s[s.size()-t.size()] == t. Oops, but that's still not correct! It contains a very subtle error. If t happens to be longer than s, you'll be trying to access s with a negative index, which could lead to a (nondeterministic, of course!) segfault.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just write s.endsWith(t)? Why the @#$% do the C++ designers refuse to add methods for all these standard functions that every other language provides?
Thank you, you just illustrated my point beautifully.:) You're right, instead of "s.rfind(t) == s.size()-t.size()" you could write "!s.empty() && (*s.rbegin())==t". And instead of "c.find(e) != c.end()" you could write "std::count(c.begin(), c.end(), e)>0". That's just so much clearer than "s.endsWith(t)" or "c.contains(e)". STL gives you lots of convoluted, hard to read ways of solving trivial problems. That makes your code even harder to read. Because not only is it obfuscated to begin with, but there isn't even a single "standard" way to do anything, so every person's code looks different.
You can argue about whether C++ is a horrible language (I lean toward "yes") in itself, but the libraries are what really push it over the edge. STL is hands down the worst collections framework I've ever encountered. Consider just a few examples of how you do some common operations with it, compared to doing the same things in Java and Python.
2. Check whether a collection c contains an element e.
Java: c.contains(e) Python: e in c C++: c.find(e) != c.end()
3. Split a string s into tokens based on whitespace.
Java: s.split() Python: s.split() C++:... do you really want to know? Ok, check out http://stackoverflow.com/quest.... There you will find dozens of proposed solutions (many of them quite indecipherable), along with lots of debate about which one is best. The top voted solution has a comment on it (with several hundred votes) saying that it's a bad solution and you shouldn't use it.
Doing even really basic, common operations with STL requires way too much work and produces absurd, hard to read code.
That's why when scientists talk about arctic sea ice, they almost always talk about the minimum extent at the peak of the summer melt. That's basically a measure of how much of the multi-year ice is still left, a good indicator of long term trends. The peak amount in the middle of the winter is mostly irrelevant, as you point out.
Antarctic sea ice is completely different. There is almost no multi-year ice (the south pole being in the middle of a continent, and thus far from anywhere that sea ice could form), so the summer minimum is essentially zero. Instead they talk about the winter maximum, but that has little to do with long term changes and everything to do with current conditions in that particular year.
I'm going to do something very foolish and imagine that you actually believe what you're saying, that you're not just being a troll, and that you actually think the data supports your conclusions. And now I'm going to explain why you're wrong, indulging in the fantasy that you'll listen with an open mind and, once you realize your mistake, freely acknowledge it. Prove me right. Or wrong. Your choice.
Also, ignore the arctic ice that's been increasing for three years,
Three years? Three years is random noise. The climate consists of steady, long term trends with lots of short term fluctuations superimposed on top of them. Take artic ice, for example. It shrinks every summer and grows every winter. There are lots of factors that affect the summer minimum: wind patterns, ocean currents, etc. A few years ago, lots of factors converged to give an exceptionally low minimum. It hasn't matched that since; but it's come close, and has remained far below anything seen until just a decade ago.
Here's a graph showing sea ice for almost 40 years: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_i.... Yes, it fluctuates up and down from year to year. But look at that and tell me it shows anything other than fluctuations around a steady decreasing trend that remains upbroken.
Let's look at something even more convincing: world wide temperatures. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist.... Look at those graphs, and then tell me they show anything other than short term fluctuations on a long term warming trending that has been in place for the last century.
Ignore Niagara falls that has frozen over two years in a row and ignore all the record cold around the country.
Wrong! There has not been record cold "around the country". Believe me, the whole western half of the country has been getting record heat, as has most of the planet. Here's a map showing it: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/.... Those are the difference between Jan. 2015 temperatures and historical (1981-2010) average temperatures. The red areas are hotter than average. The blue areas are colder than average. Yes, there's a small blue patch over the eastern US. But overall there's a lot more red than blue.
This is why scientists tend to prefer the term "climate change" to "global warming". Yes, the globe is warming up, but that doesn't mean everything is exactly the same, just uniformly warmer. Some times and places are a lot warmer. Others are only a little warmer. Others are actually cooler. Wind patterns are changing. Ocean currents are changing. Precipitation patterns are changing. Sea level is rising. Permafrost it melting. The climate is changing.
And if you want to know precisely how global warming is causing unusually cold weather in the eastern US, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P....
Ignore the fact NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis in 2010
Sorry, but that is just BS. You linking to a story about how fungi help to hold onto carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere, and somehow translated that into "NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis". No. I don't know what you think that article actually meant, but I can assure you that isn't what it meant. (OK, I see you also linked to that Register piece that totally misrepresented the conclusions of that study. The Register is a notorious denialist website. Believe me, the scientists who actually did the work would not agree with the conclusions they're trying to draw from it.)
No one has "falsified the CO2 hypothesis". In fact, it was recently proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, by actually directly measuring the incoming and outgoing radiation, showing that the CO2 abso
Never take requirements too literally. I've done a fair amount of hiring, and been involved in writing job descriptions of this sort. If it says, "Requires 5 years C++ experience", what we really mean is, "Requires C++ proficiency typical of someone who has been doing it for several years." If you've only been doing it for 3 years but your skills are solid, that's good enough. It's also kind of a wish list. If it lists four required skills, that means we'd really like someone with all four skills. But if the best candidate only has three of them, that's not a deal breaker. A competent person can pick up the last one fairly quickly.
If you think you can do the job, don't let "requirements" prevent you from applying.
Thanks, and I like you too. Now can we be polite to each other?:)
> Fair Use is decided on a case-by-case basis using these guidelines and the principles behind them.
This is at best a pretty severe distortion. You make it sound like every court starts from scratch, considering the case as if no similar case had ever been considered before. That's far from the truth. In fact, there's a huge body of case law on the subject, including a whole bunch of supreme court decisions establishing what does or doesn't count as fair use. Sure, there are occasionally new corner cases involving particular combinations of factors that haven't been considered before. But that's pretty rare, and this particular case isn't anything like that. And contrary to what you say, a work that "scores highly" on all four criteria is clearly, unambiguously fair use. The courts settled that long ago. The ambiguities are in cases that do well on some criteria and badly on others.
> But in actuality, fair use of copyrighted material isn't even the issue here - it's the use of trademarked material.
Yes, trademark is a completely different subject. But that isn't what the poster was talking about, and I was replying to what he said.
This is a complete distortion of why telecom companies are regulated. There's only limited space on utility poles and in conduits under streets. There's only finite radio spectrum available. Those are limited, publicly owned resources. Whoever controls them has a monopoly on them, by definition. It simply isn't possible for arbitrarily many companies to run their own fiber along those poles or use that spectrum. So we pick just a few companies to give monopolies to, then regulate them to make sure they behave responsibly.
But search engines? Social networks? You've got tons to choose from, and new ones are started all the time. If Google and Facebook are the most popular, it's not because they have exclusive use of a finite, publicly owned resource.
Slashdot Mirror
(giggle)
I'm honestly not certain whether you're being serious or sarcastic. I hope the latter, because as a parody of religious thinking that was hilarious. "I saw a sexy underage girl, therefore God must exist," is not what I would call a good example of logical reasoning.
But in case you really were being serious, what other explanations have you considered? You've made an observation: there are things in the world that appear beautiful to you. You have suggested one explanation for that observation: they were all created by a supreme being who is an artist and "could not help but show a glimpse of His artistic skills." That is, I suppose, one possible explanation. But it certainly isn't the only one. So what other explanations have you considered? And then, how can you determine which of the possible explanations is correct?
To give just one example: perhaps beauty is not an intrinsic quality of an object. Perhaps, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and whether you find something beautiful is strictly a property of you, not of the thing itself. That's easy to test. If true, there should be lots of disagreement about what is beautiful. There should be things that you find beautiful but many other people don't; and likewise, things that some people find beautiful but you don't.
Care to conduct that experiment?
If you have an infinite barrel of marbles, you can't make a statement such as "10% of them are green".
You absolutely can. Let me give a simple example: the positive integers. That is, unquestionably, an infinite set. And it also is quite clear that precisely 10% of them are divisible by 10.
Mathematically, here's how we would describe it. Consider the set of integers from 1 to N. Let x(N) be the fraction of members in that set that are divisible by 10. It's quite easy to show that as N->infinity, x(N)->1/10.
This is exactly what happens when you conflate two unrelated things: revenue and incentives. There's no reason a particular type of spending should be linked to a particular tax. That just leads to making bad decisions.
You need money to pay for services. Fine. Pay for them out of the state's general budget. So now you have to decide how to fund that budget. A good default is an income or wealth based tax. Something where everyone pays what they can afford to pay. But in any case, you don't need a separate revenue source for every item in the budget.
Independent of that, you may want to create incentives to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. You want people to buy more efficient vehicles. You want them to consume less energy. You want them to put less wear on the roads. There are lots of ways to create those incentives. A gas tax. A tax on the purchase price of a car, based on the total distance it will be driven over its lifetime. Tolls. And so on. Decide what behaviors you want to encourage, then identify the best incentives to encourage them.
But these two decisions should be completely separate. The gas tax is there to encourage efficiency, not to produce revenue. Any money it does bring in should go directly toward decreasing income taxes. There's the question of how much money you need, and the question of what incentives you want to create, and they should never be linked together.
What's all this about "the left" and "the right"? You seem to have two images in your head of two groups that supposedly believe certain things. Unfortunately, they seem to have little in common with the actual beliefs of anyone I know.
Rather than assigning labels and talking about what imaginary groups like "the left" supposedly believe, how about sticking to the specific beliefs that specific people have actually expressed, and let everyone say for themselves what they do or don't believe.
Those hardware requirements aren't really that steep. Those GPUs currently cost under $350, so high end but not top-of-the-line. But it isn't supposed to be released until early next year. By then, new high end graphics cards will have been released, and these ones will be solidly mid-range. Also, the initial customers for this will be enthusiasts, the people who already have high end GPUs or don't mind spending a bit extra to get one. By the time this is really mainstream, even low end GPUs will likely be able to handle it.
Fortunately, these restrictions are all unenforcible. They're overruled by Article 6 of the US Constitution which states, "[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." But the fact that so many states tried, and that they've continued to leave these restrictions in their constitutions despite being completely unenforcible, is pretty shocking and disgusting.
Now we know the real reason they skipped Windows 9 and went right to 10. Is there anything they don't copy from Apple?
Here is Claim 1 from the patent application:
1. A system for aerial delivery of items to a destination location, comprising: a plurality of unmanned aerial vehicles, each of the plurality of unmanned aerial vehicles configured to aerially transport items; an unmanned aerial vehicle management system, including: a processor; and a memory coupled to the processor and storing program instructions that when executed by the processor cause the processors to at least: receive a request to deliver an item to a destination location; and send to an unmanned aerial vehicle of the plurality of unmanned aerial vehicles, delivery parameters identifying a source location that includes the item and a destination location; wherein the unmanned aerial vehicle, in response to receiving the delivery parameters, is further configured to at least: navigate to the source location; engage the item located at the source location; navigate a navigation route to the destination location; and disengage the item.
There is absolutely nothing there that hasn't been discussed thousands of times before and been a staple of science fiction for decades. But if this gets approved, no one but Amazon will be allowed to do this, just as it's becoming technologically feasible.
Remember, every claim in a patent is like a little patent in itself. Whatever else is contained in the patent, anything that matches all the features of any single claim is infringing. And there's nothing in that claim that's original or innovative in any way. Actually building a drone delivery network will require solving a lot of hard technological problems, and some of those solutions might legitimately be patentable. But this has nothing to do with that.
Actually, it's even worse than that. Here's the last paragraph of the application:
From the foregoing, it will be appreciated that, although specific implementations have been described herein for purposes of illustration, various modifications may be made without deviating from the spirit and scope of the appended claims and the elements recited therein. In addition, while certain aspects are presented below in certain claim forms, the inventors contemplate the various aspects in any available claim form. For example, while only some aspects may currently be recited as being embodied in a computer readable storage medium, other aspects may likewise be so embodied. Various modifications and changes may be made as would be obvious to a person skilled in the art having the benefit of this disclosure. It is intended to embrace all such modifications and changes and, accordingly, the above description to be regarded in an illustrative rather than a restrictive sense.
So the incredibly general claims should be interpreted even more generally. They're basically claiming complete ownership of the concept of delivering things with drones, including "all such modifications and changes" that anyone might reasonably think of.
And while you are at it, tell me how the data was collected that provided an apples to apples comparison.
No problem. There's a link to the paper right there in the summary.
No, he did not present a single per capita comparison.
Ummm... How does, "The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste," not count as a per-capita comparison? Of course, you then blindly dismiss it by saying, "And who cares about Kolkata, that was probably chosen because it is uniquely low." The 14 million people who live there certainly care. And no, it was not chosen for being uniquely low. Take a look at the graphs in the paper. You'll see there is only one outlier in the whole set of cities, and that is New York. And yes, I did follow the link to check the paper before I posted. Because I actually believe in doing my research before posting. (See my signature quote, which in case you hadn't realized is meant ironically, and is appropriate to a distressing fraction of posts on Slashdot.)
Did you read the article? He repeatedly points out how bad NYC is on a per-capita basis, not just absolute. To quote just a few examples:
"The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,”
The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste.
Yes, NYC is one of the most visited cities in the world. So are Tokyo, Paris, and London, all of which use less energy and produce far less waste. That doesn't explain it.
'A lot of working scientists assume that if it's published, it's right,' he says. 'This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.'
Ummm... they do? Like, who? Not a single one I know.
If a result is published, I assume (as do most other scientists) that means very little until it's been reproduced, and even then I remain quite skeptical until it's stood the test of time. I assume many published results will turn out to be wrong. That's just the nature of science. Every paper is a work in progress, a snapshot of someone's research at one moment. And that's fine.
So 39% were successfully reproduced, and another 24% came close? I'd call that pretty good, especially in psychology where you're studying an incredibly complex system (the human brain) while trying to sort out hundreds of interacting factors.
On the bright side, it's a great way to show off the idiocy of the DMCA to a whole new set of people. There's a big segment of the population who couldn't care less about copyright or DRM--but tell them they can't maintain their own car anymore, and they'll suddenly get very upset.
"Low income housing" does not mean slums. It generally just means housing that costs less than a certain fraction of the median housing cost in the area. Given that this is Marin, most of the people living in this development will probably be very solidly middle class.
Also, vandalism, crime, etc. are generally problems that appear when you have absentee landlords who don't care about keeping up the property and don't do anything to evict problem tenants. That's unlikely to be the case here. I expect Lucas will just pay a company to manage the property for him, and they'll do a fine job of keeping things running.
Flow is another keyboard designed along similar lines, though it's optimized for slightly different criteria: fast text entry rather than low error rate. It takes a while to get used to, but you really can type a lot faster with it.
Exactly. It isn't really a full featured collections framework. It's more a set of low level primitives that you're expected to use to implement the higher level functions that every other collections framework provides out of the box. And of course, the functions you write will be different from the ones every other programmer writes: different names, different behavior.
This is one of the common complaints about C++. It leads everyone to basically create their own personal language, and then it's hard to work on any other person's code because you first have to learn the non-standard language they've created.
You can do the same thing in other languages too. Just about every collections framework includes something equivalent to find(). But very often you don't want to access the element, just check whether it's present. So for that common situation, they provide a concise, easily readable way to do it.
That won't work, for a few reasons. First, strlen() expects a char* as its argument, not a std::string. You need to write strlen(s.c_str()). But what are you gaining from using strlen? It's simpler to write s.size(). Second, you're dereferencing the null at the end of the string. You really wanted to write s[s.size()-t.size()] == t. Oops, but that's still not correct! It contains a very subtle error. If t happens to be longer than s, you'll be trying to access s with a negative index, which could lead to a (nondeterministic, of course!) segfault.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just write s.endsWith(t)? Why the @#$% do the C++ designers refuse to add methods for all these standard functions that every other language provides?
Thank you, you just illustrated my point beautifully. :) You're right, instead of "s.rfind(t) == s.size()-t.size()" you could write "!s.empty() && (*s.rbegin())==t". And instead of "c.find(e) != c.end()" you could write "std::count(c.begin(), c.end(), e)>0". That's just so much clearer than "s.endsWith(t)" or "c.contains(e)". STL gives you lots of convoluted, hard to read ways of solving trivial problems. That makes your code even harder to read. Because not only is it obfuscated to begin with, but there isn't even a single "standard" way to do anything, so every person's code looks different.
You can argue about whether C++ is a horrible language (I lean toward "yes") in itself, but the libraries are what really push it over the edge. STL is hands down the worst collections framework I've ever encountered. Consider just a few examples of how you do some common operations with it, compared to doing the same things in Java and Python.
1. Check whether a string s ends with a suffix t.
Java: s.endsWith(t)
Python: s.endswith(t)
C++: s.rfind(t) == s.size()-t.size()
2. Check whether a collection c contains an element e.
Java: c.contains(e)
Python: e in c
C++: c.find(e) != c.end()
3. Split a string s into tokens based on whitespace.
Java: s.split() ... do you really want to know? Ok, check out http://stackoverflow.com/quest.... There you will find dozens of proposed solutions (many of them quite indecipherable), along with lots of debate about which one is best. The top voted solution has a comment on it (with several hundred votes) saying that it's a bad solution and you shouldn't use it.
Python: s.split()
C++:
Doing even really basic, common operations with STL requires way too much work and produces absurd, hard to read code.
That's why when scientists talk about arctic sea ice, they almost always talk about the minimum extent at the peak of the summer melt. That's basically a measure of how much of the multi-year ice is still left, a good indicator of long term trends. The peak amount in the middle of the winter is mostly irrelevant, as you point out.
Antarctic sea ice is completely different. There is almost no multi-year ice (the south pole being in the middle of a continent, and thus far from anywhere that sea ice could form), so the summer minimum is essentially zero. Instead they talk about the winter maximum, but that has little to do with long term changes and everything to do with current conditions in that particular year.
I'm going to do something very foolish and imagine that you actually believe what you're saying, that you're not just being a troll, and that you actually think the data supports your conclusions. And now I'm going to explain why you're wrong, indulging in the fantasy that you'll listen with an open mind and, once you realize your mistake, freely acknowledge it. Prove me right. Or wrong. Your choice.
Also, ignore the arctic ice that's been increasing for three years,
Three years? Three years is random noise. The climate consists of steady, long term trends with lots of short term fluctuations superimposed on top of them. Take artic ice, for example. It shrinks every summer and grows every winter. There are lots of factors that affect the summer minimum: wind patterns, ocean currents, etc. A few years ago, lots of factors converged to give an exceptionally low minimum. It hasn't matched that since; but it's come close, and has remained far below anything seen until just a decade ago.
Here's a graph showing sea ice for almost 40 years: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_i.... Yes, it fluctuates up and down from year to year. But look at that and tell me it shows anything other than fluctuations around a steady decreasing trend that remains upbroken.
Let's look at something even more convincing: world wide temperatures. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist.... Look at those graphs, and then tell me they show anything other than short term fluctuations on a long term warming trending that has been in place for the last century.
Ignore Niagara falls that has frozen over two years in a row and ignore all the record cold around the country.
Wrong! There has not been record cold "around the country". Believe me, the whole western half of the country has been getting record heat, as has most of the planet. Here's a map showing it: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/.... Those are the difference between Jan. 2015 temperatures and historical (1981-2010) average temperatures. The red areas are hotter than average. The blue areas are colder than average. Yes, there's a small blue patch over the eastern US. But overall there's a lot more red than blue.
This is why scientists tend to prefer the term "climate change" to "global warming". Yes, the globe is warming up, but that doesn't mean everything is exactly the same, just uniformly warmer. Some times and places are a lot warmer. Others are only a little warmer. Others are actually cooler. Wind patterns are changing. Ocean currents are changing. Precipitation patterns are changing. Sea level is rising. Permafrost it melting. The climate is changing.
And if you want to know precisely how global warming is causing unusually cold weather in the eastern US, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P....
Ignore the fact NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis in 2010
Sorry, but that is just BS. You linking to a story about how fungi help to hold onto carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere, and somehow translated that into "NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis". No. I don't know what you think that article actually meant, but I can assure you that isn't what it meant. (OK, I see you also linked to that Register piece that totally misrepresented the conclusions of that study. The Register is a notorious denialist website. Believe me, the scientists who actually did the work would not agree with the conclusions they're trying to draw from it.)
No one has "falsified the CO2 hypothesis". In fact, it was recently proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, by actually directly measuring the incoming and outgoing radiation, showing that the CO2 abso
Never take requirements too literally. I've done a fair amount of hiring, and been involved in writing job descriptions of this sort. If it says, "Requires 5 years C++ experience", what we really mean is, "Requires C++ proficiency typical of someone who has been doing it for several years." If you've only been doing it for 3 years but your skills are solid, that's good enough. It's also kind of a wish list. If it lists four required skills, that means we'd really like someone with all four skills. But if the best candidate only has three of them, that's not a deal breaker. A competent person can pick up the last one fairly quickly.
If you think you can do the job, don't let "requirements" prevent you from applying.
> Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?
Here you go, just as you asked for!
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
Did you do that on purpose? ;)
> Honestly? Neither do you.
Thanks, and I like you too. Now can we be polite to each other? :)
> Fair Use is decided on a case-by-case basis using these guidelines and the principles behind them.
This is at best a pretty severe distortion. You make it sound like every court starts from scratch, considering the case as if no similar case had ever been considered before. That's far from the truth. In fact, there's a huge body of case law on the subject, including a whole bunch of supreme court decisions establishing what does or doesn't count as fair use. Sure, there are occasionally new corner cases involving particular combinations of factors that haven't been considered before. But that's pretty rare, and this particular case isn't anything like that. And contrary to what you say, a work that "scores highly" on all four criteria is clearly, unambiguously fair use. The courts settled that long ago. The ambiguities are in cases that do well on some criteria and badly on others.
> But in actuality, fair use of copyrighted material isn't even the issue here - it's the use of trademarked material.
Yes, trademark is a completely different subject. But that isn't what the poster was talking about, and I was replying to what he said.
This is a complete distortion of why telecom companies are regulated. There's only limited space on utility poles and in conduits under streets. There's only finite radio spectrum available. Those are limited, publicly owned resources. Whoever controls them has a monopoly on them, by definition. It simply isn't possible for arbitrarily many companies to run their own fiber along those poles or use that spectrum. So we pick just a few companies to give monopolies to, then regulate them to make sure they behave responsibly.
But search engines? Social networks? You've got tons to choose from, and new ones are started all the time. If Google and Facebook are the most popular, it's not because they have exclusive use of a finite, publicly owned resource.