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  1. Re:How do you get an inverter? on Japanese Researchers Create A Crab-Based Computer · · Score: 1

    No need for special element, their AND gate is basically a 2-to-4 decoder (without 0 output line) - it has (NOT a AND b), (a AND b) and (a AND NOT b) outputs.

    Just send a synchronized stream of crabs (damn, that's a nice combination of words) down one input and use corresponding output as NOT.

  2. Re:Here we go again... on The Ugly Underbelly of Coder Culture · · Score: 1

    We should just forbid any communications on non-work related themes. All communication should be done in text form or using a speech synthesizer to avoid possibility of others made feel unwelcome by your voice - may be it's your accent (hispanic, southern american or Queen's English, or any other), creepy heavy breathing or unpleasant lisp.

    We should also prohibit any personal contact, lest somebody gets offended by someone's appearance or manners. Everyone should work in a completely isolated personal space, leave and arrive at work separately.

    This way we'll create completely unbiased, gender-, race- and culture- neutral environment, equally (un)welcoming for everyone.

  3. Re:Have you ever been to a Ruby conference? on The Ugly Underbelly of Coder Culture · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because there's difference between coding style and significant whitespace.

    // Somebody pasted a few lines, but didn't reindent last line.
    // Still correct syntax, still does the same, Reindent All fixes the formatting and everybody's happy.
      if (x) {
        statement1
        statement2
      statement3
    }
     
    # Somebody pasted a few lines, but didn't reindent last line.
    # Still correct syntax, statement3 errorneously executes every time, IDE doesn't help (it could reindent _when pasting_, not after the fact). Have fun debugging!
      if x:
        statement1
        statement2
      statement3

  4. Re:What About Machine Language and Assembly? on Oracle and Google Spar Over Whether Programming Languages Can Be Copyrighted · · Score: 2

    First, your BNF example is lame because it describes only grammar of a language - but grammar alone doesn't make a language and there's no standard notations for all the rest of what makes a language.

    Second, yes, language expressed in these forms is an expression of idea. That is, you can copyright a BNF description of grammar, and even specification of your language, but they're _expressions of idea of a language_, but not the language itself.

    Saying that copyright on specification is copyright on the language is like saying copyright on a book is copyright on its plot.

  5. Re:Nothing new on Companies More Likely To Outsource Than Train IT Employees · · Score: 1

    But of course they have to be paid more now that they work more efficiently and provide more skills to the company.

    The proper solution would be a kind of subsidized loan on the training - send them to study, raise the pay and then recover the training costs from the wages.

    Want to jump ship? Return the loan. Gonna stay with us after the loan ends? Great, enjoy your raised pay.

  6. Re:Must be Lisp under the hood on LastCalc Is Open Sourced · · Score: 1

    Capital letters mean variables, evaluation is by rewriting and pattern matching.

    Seems like it's trying to substitute every mention of Factorial for "if (Number

    factorial Number = if (Number <=1 ) then 1 else (Number * factorial (Number -1))

    this works

    As well as this:

    Number! = if (Number <=1 ) then 1 else (Number * (Number -1)!)
     
    5!

    You can even write something like "X plus Y minus Z = X+Y-Z" and ask it for "5 plus 4 minus 9"

  7. Re:Real world microkernels? on MINIX 3.2 Released With Some Major Changes · · Score: 1

    They do. Filesystems and device drivers are on the kernel side in monolithic OSes, FUSE/CUPS/SANE/graphics drivers with minimal kernel mode parts/etc. muddy the difference.

    It's easy to declare an OS as microkernel or _not_ microkernel, but "monolithic" is pretty much meaningless term, unless you just define anything non-microkernel to be monolithic.

  8. Re:Real world microkernels? on MINIX 3.2 Released With Some Major Changes · · Score: 2

    Here's one real-world microkernel OS, for example.

    Though most real-world is neither pure micro- nor pure macro-kernel, Win NT, OS X and Linux are stuck somewhere inbetween with varying degree of user-space/kernel-space separation.

  9. Re:No comparison whatsoever on Spanish Company Tests 'Right To Be Forgotten' Against Google · · Score: 1

    > why is one place saddled with search engine results that are negative and another not?

    Because one place is famous for bad thing happening there and another is not. Searching for Jane Q. Celebrity will turn up her personal site first, as she's famous by herself, but searching for brutally murdered John Smith will turn up news reports, not his facebook page.

    Your definition of "relevance" is strange. If most people looking for "Nuremberg" or "Bhopal" are interested in trials and chemical plant disaster, filling top page with tourist spots would be irrelevant.

  10. Re:No comparison whatsoever on Spanish Company Tests 'Right To Be Forgotten' Against Google · · Score: 2

    Great post, except top result for "camping alfaques" is "Alfaques Camping - Apartamentos - Camping www.alfaques.com/" both on Google and Bing and they are just ticked off by image search feature showing unpleasant pictures.

    But why get constrained by boring reality, when you can rant instead?

  11. Re:This is unacceptable! on 4 UK Urban Explorers Face Orders Not To Talk With Each Other For 10 Years · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > why not call them 'burglars'?

    Better yet, call them "terrorists" and the public will immediately see how bad and wrong they are.

    After all, nomenclature, not what someone actually did, is what really matters.

  12. Re:"Not a major overhaul"? on Stroustrup Reveals What's New In C++ 11 · · Score: 1

    You don't need "all the new syntax" to start using C++11, many of most useful additions are already in all major compilers and have been there since the times when C++11 was known as C++0x and C++ TR1. Current GCC is missing only a few features.

  13. Re:I call bullshit... on Tetris In 140 Bytes · · Score: 1

    ... because they're pretending that the many tens of thousands of lines of code in the OS and libraries don't count ...
    ... because they're pretending that the many tens of thousands of lines of HDL code in the processor don't count ...

    True demoscener builds his own CPU out of transistors and resistors. Some suggest that using logic gates ICs is acceptable, but they're wimps.

  14. Re:Somewhat Misleading on Tetris In 140 Bytes · · Score: 4, Informative

    Almost kilobyte? Yep, not very impressive considering what people build in 1 kB of Javascript.

    Not to mention all the cool things people stuff in 512 byte intros for demo parties.

  15. Re:Just another Con Man on James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation · · Score: 1

    Isn't testing all those people "I'll have to look into that"?

  16. Re:"a fraudulent religious organization" on James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation · · Score: 1

    The fanatical athiests spending money to put anti-religion messages on busses and billboards

    And religious fanatics spending money to put religious and anti-atheistic messages on buses and billboards are perfectly okay.

    are they spending any feeding the poor? If so, I've never heard of it.

    Because you're blind and deaf, probably.

    How many athiests are against vengeance? How many are for doing good to those who harm you?

    I don't know, probably not less than same amongst christians. Some christians are pretty vicious. Some are barely hiding their schadenfreude behind "Ha! That's God's punishment for you" when disasters strike - instead of, you know, helping victims as Christ would do. Sure, you could argue that those who don't follow these tenets vehemently are not true christians, but then you could also argue there were only thirteen true christians at all, or may be even just one.

    PS: Oh, and by the way, the word is "a-the-ist", from negative prefix "a-" and "theos". I'm not sure what an "athiest" is, probably superlative form of "athy" - as in athy, athier, athiest, but it is a sure sign of illiteracy.

  17. Re:Just another Con Man on James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation · · Score: 1

    Just don't forget to win small prises in many different lotteries, or else you'll get people suspicious with all the jackpots you grab.

    Someone should get all the results of all the lotteries, do some statistics and find them psychics who get ahead with unfair advantage.

  18. Re:James Randi is a fake! on James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation · · Score: 2

    AFAIK, the test conditions are negotiated, which means that dowser thought he can find running water in those conditions.

    And if dowsers indeed just follow the landscape clues - there is no need to research deeper, those clues are already in all survival guides. Teaching dowsing then would be no more useful than teaching to cross roads as "flip a coin, if it's tails and no cars are close - run across" instead of teaching to look at traffic lights.

    The only useful form of dowsing would find water regardless of landscape and artificial/natural streams.

    P.S.: Oh, and how repeatable/successful was that "seemed to work"? Did you always hit a spring or was it "close enough, let's try again"?

  19. Re:James Randi is a fake! on James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation · · Score: 2

    Then grab your rod and go get that megabuck, incidentally giving credibility to dowsing and a new question for biologists to solve. Words are cheap.

    Oh, and if you missed that, the dowser mention that started this thread is of "(unable to) detect running water 15 feet below " variety.

  20. Re:Legitimate businessmen? on James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation · · Score: 1

    fraud n. Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain.

    So, whether someone preaching is fraudulent depends on does he/she believe it and does he/she gain anything from it.

    Go dive in a thesaurus for "Show me the evidence"

  21. Re:Just another Con Man on James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation · · Score: 1

    What. You start talking about "strawman" while building a strawman to knock down. Did "pseudoskeptics" bite you or something?

    It's not "negation of claim", it's "negative claim", or claim of absence that is hard/impossible to prove.

    For example:

    You claim to exist. The negation of that is that you don't exist therefore you are making an extraordinary claim and I am not. So prove to me you exist...

    Easily proven, I can come over to your house and knock you on the head.

    Now to prove that I _don't_ exist you'd have to visit every single person on the Earth and ensure that he is not me -and you still won't get definite proof, because some people are hiding or missing. Most importanly, I'm actually right behind your shoulder all this time and quickly walk when you turn around.

    Of course there are negative claims that are easy to prove, like "there are no million dollar bills in my pocket", but those have a) small enough search space, and b) specific test for positives.

    Claims of some specific property in _some_ humans are not provable as negatives in general case just due to sheer number of humans on this planet, but easily provable as positives - just show at least one human with that property. That's what Randi does, looks for positive proof.

  22. Re:Maybe... on Is Santorum's "Google Problem" a Google Problem? · · Score: 1

    You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

    The word you're looking for is "arbitrary" or somewhere near that in thesaurus.

    Impartial is "treating everyone the same way, unbiased". As long as same rules and metrics apply to all sites, it is impartial. If ratio for your site is (say) 1:20 and you get ranked down, but return to previous rating after working on your content to make it 1:16, it is impartial. If the search engine devs promptly change the ratio to 1:15, and then when you go to 1:10 they drop it to 1:9, they might be not impartial and biased against you - if it's causation, not correlation, of course.

  23. Re:Maybe... on Is Santorum's "Google Problem" a Google Problem? · · Score: 1

    I don't quite follow the first part of your post.

    Link farms are ranked down by search engines using some arbitrary impartial metrics - number of outgoing/incoming links, their relations etc. etc. etc., spreadingsantorum.com is ranked up as relevant using some different arbitrary impartial metrics - number of mentions, incoming links, user clicks, etc etc etc. What does "created and maintained by humans" have to do with that?

    It will stop being impartial only if/when they decide to add 'if (query == "santorum") results.match("spreadingsantorum.com").rating -= /* or += just to be evil */ 9e9' to their algorithm.

  24. Re:Blame Apple 100% on Apple Launches New Legal Attack On Samsung · · Score: 1

    Contacts icon are only similar in idea, "notebook with silhouette of a head", actual design style is very different.

    On a side note, Samsung's UI severely lack common style, even in the launch bar there's this out-of-place-ish messaging icon. They sure should steal the idea of style guidelines from Apple next.

  25. Re:Blame Apple 100% on Apple Launches New Legal Attack On Samsung · · Score: 1

    LOL, did you actually look at the photo you posted?

    Green phone is not "just one example", it's "_the_ one example", the only other icon where you could argue the similarity is Music.

    And "the way UI is presented" is the all apps menu, which is quite different from the home screen.

    Did you actually use both phones? Android is quite different from iOS, I assure you.

    It's funny how you say "elements combined together" after posting a pic where all "elements" are different, except for "simply black rectangular phone with rounded corners", phone icon and speaker slit.