Yup. And not only can they not pronounce the L sound, but they aren't necessarily able to audibly distinguish between L's and R's either. This effect has been investigated in various early childhood studies which indicate that, early on, children can distinguish between these sounds, but as they learn the native language, they in fact *lose* this ability. And, of course, this effect isn't limited to the L/R problem. For example, in the case of Spanish, there is no distinction between the B/V phonemes. It's really quite fascinating, actually... the native language actually serves to mold the speech and hearing centres of the brain.
Bah. It's still a form of government which attempts to represent the will of the people. The electoral college does not do this. It's tyranny of the majority in every sense of the word... the majority of a state's population is used to represent the entire population, thus disregarding the will of everyone else. Yup, sounds like a great system to me!
Or, conversely, all those companies out there that have *your* personal information in *their* database can now claim copyright on information about *you*!
I've used a tripod-mounted Canon Powershot G2 3mp camera and taken 8 second exposures in pitch black when the stars are at their absolute best, all I've seen in the resulting images is the brightest of the stars and some CCD artifacts
Well, I never said you'd get an amazing panorama with the milky way clearly visible.:) For this, you probably need exposures in the order of minutes, and CCDs just aren't up to that yet. OTOH, from some surfing I've done, you can certainly produce some decent night-sky shots which show constellations and so forth...
As for my color camera having the same effective resolution equivalent to 1 mp, I just don't see how you figure that out,
Okay, I'll put it this way (my use of the word "resolution" may be slightly incorrect, here). A 4 megapixel camera has 4 million elements on the CCD. Of those 4 million elements, 1 million are filtered red, 1 million blue, and 2 million green, all arranged in a pretty pattern. When you take a picture, a given pixel in the final output image is generated by combining these four signals into one final output signal. So, a 4 megapixel colour CCD has less true resolution than a 4 megapixel B&W CCD (ie, it conveys less *true* information).
2) "the resolution of the cameras they've got up there sucks even more so"
This is quite wrong. Spirit's camera has a 1 megapixel CCD, which may seem small. But it's a 1 megapixel *B&W* CCD, meaning no filters. By contrast, the 4 megapixel CCD on your average camera has filters which are used to detect red, green, and blue (plus one extra green filter, I think). These four inputs are then combined to form the final output pixel. As a result, a 4 megapixel colour CCD (as they are produced today) has an effective resolution equivalent to a 1 megapixel B&W CCD. Moreover, most B&W CCDs have a much lower signal-to-noise ratio, meaning it can be kept open for longer exposures.
The combination of these factors is the reason why virtually all astrophotography-specific CCDs produced these days are 1) B&W, and 2) relatively small (comparatively speaking).
Someone needs to learn about how JIT compiling VMs work... A JIT-based JVM doesn't compile the bytecodes into machine code until it encounters them for the first time (hence "just in time"), and then it caches the results for reuse later. Doing anything else would be exceedingly stupid (you've already done the work to compile the bytecodes... why on earth wouldn't you reuse the results??).
Whoa, dude... that's almost like compiling the Java to machine code just in time for the CPU to execute it, and then reusing it later! Hey, you should totally write that up... you could call it "JIT", for Just In Time compiling! Yeah! This is a great idea! You're a genius!
Poor boy. Surrounded by people who have no self control. Many people enjoy alcohol, as well, but that doesn't make them alcoholics. Don't be closed minded. It's the enemy of wisdom.
Why do you think a federal approach would better serve your goal.
When I said "don't leave it up to the state", I didn't mean "leave it up to the feds" (that would be silly... the feds are even *less* likely to support a split-the-vote system than the states!). I was simply saying that every state should be required, by law, to split their electoral college votes according to the election results. It's called optimistic naivete.:)
Also, why would the two major political parties want a system that helped promote other parties and candidates.
Again, naivete. I like democracy. The American system has flaws which make it less democratic. The correct solution is to split electoral college votes, in order to better reflect the opinions of the general public. However, this will never happen... but pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking is always fun.:)
It's also interesting in that, obviously, the framers of the constitution didn't fully think through the implications of the electoral college. Otherwise, if they truly wanted democracy, they wouldn't have left the vote-splitting issue open for state-level implementation... they would have simply mandated vote-splitting and moved on. This is an excellent example of how the constitution, while an impressive document, is NOT flawless!
it would already be implemented in approximately 50% of the states.
Wrong. Well, sort of. There would never be federal support for this, so talking about state support is a moot point. Politicians will never, in general, support vote-splitting, unless they're in the minority party, in which case it won't matter anyway. Of course, politicians are supposed to reflect the opinions of their constituents, but we all know how that works (can we say "DMCA"?) Moreover, on this issue, the voters who support the majority party have no reason to favour vote splitting, since that means their party could get voted out. So, the status quo remains, due to tyranny of the majority.
Sounds like a good reason to *not* leave that decision up to the state. The government that's currently in power and has the majority is going to favor a winner-takes-all approach, because it favors their party. Big surprise. And I think it's pretty clear that such an approach is, generally speaking, less democratic than the vote-splitting approach, as it less accurately represents the will of the voting public. So, why not just enforce the more democratic approach?
And, BTW, yes, I think state autonomy should take a back seat on this issue. The ability for a nation to select it's president in a fair, democractic manner seems more important than a petty power struggle between state and federal governments. After all, the state/federal split exists to ensure that regions are able to govern themselves effectively, thus representing the values of the local population. However, because of this winner-takes-all approach, the minority opinion in these regions is quashed, thus defeating the purpose of the state/fed split.
Can we say "pedantic"? Geez, how is this interesting? No, there is no such thing as an unlimited energy source. Duh. But, from the point of view of the average person, the supply of He3 on the moon is virtually unlimited... as in, there's enough to keep us going for a couple thousand years... long enough to find another, even better energy source. And this is all assuming that the scientists actually said that... it's quite likely that the AP reporter is simply paraphrasing, and what they actually said was quite a bit different.
Man, there's plenty of things wrong with the article, to be sure (like, fusion being currently infeasible), but you picked what is probably the least important one.
Simply don't mix tabs and spaces for indentation. Even naive editors don't have a problem with this.
Hah! You haven't mixed, say, Vi and Emacs, the two most common editors out there, have you? Depending on the editor settings, Emacs will use spaces, and Vi will always use Tabs. Hell, I haven't done *that* much Python development (relative to other languages I know), and even I have encountered the broken-tabs problem.
When indentation is the lexical level information, obviously you have to adjust it while you write the code.
This is true, it is partly a matter of adaptation. So, I will concede the point.
However, there remains the problem that code can be incorrect, but not necessarily *appear* incorrect (to the developer), since there's no visual markers (other than whitespace) to indicate where the blocks *should* have been. Therefore, if something does get out of place for some reason (and yes, I've had this happen), it isn't always immediately obvious that something's amiss.
The problems with significant whitespace has nothing to do with the benefits of code formatting. Everyone knows that proper block indentation improves readability. However, whitespace significance is *incredibly* annoying if things like tabs break (if you've ever edited a Makefile with a naive editor, you'll know *exactly* what I'm talking about, here).
Moreover, it can also make an editor really irritating to use. Case in point, I type this code:
if (condition):
blah
if (condition2): <-- wrong lexical level!
blah
This is Emacs' idea of indenting things. Because there aren't block delimiters, Emacs has no idea that I really want the second "if" statement to be at the same lexical level as the first. Consequently, I'm forced to backspace in order to get things to come out correctly. Plus if I try to auto-indent this code, it's quite possible that it could get it wrong, because there's no way to unabiguously determine the intended scope of the statements in a block.
Perl is great for UNIX scripting, but once you pass a certain point, it begins getting unwieldy (IMHO).
I think this depends a lot on 1) the application and 2) the chosen architecture. I've written some rather largish Perl projects (well, not that large... ~8000 lines) with little difficulty. It really just depends on the choice of design and how well Perl's language features match that design.
Well, from the perspective of a long-time Perl developer, Python has a certain elegance in it's language design (apart from using whitespace as syntax;) that some other languages lack (in fact, it reminds me of Smalltalk in many ways, for this very reason). It has taken many of the features from various object oriented, functional languages, and scripting languages, and tied it up in a nice, clean, consistent little package.
OTOH, Perl as a language is unbelievably flexible and convenient to work with, but it's most definitely a more "hackish" language, in that it's grown more than it's been designed. As such, it's definitely more of a developer's language (ie, has many of the features which, while not necessarily incredibly elegant, are *really* convenient) than a theorist's language.
So, then, why pick one over the other? Frankly, in the end, I suspect it's just personal preference (or predjudice).
This may be true for, say, the English department, but it isn't universal. In the Computing Science program at the U of A, AFAIK, they claim copyright over any code you produce. I know this because one of my co-workers attempted to use some of the code he produced while at school in a commercial product and got in trouble with the U.
LOL! Okay, that's pretty damned funny, considering I pulled the whole "stapler" thing out thinking that it was a sufficiently different product. Pretty amazing, that the Coke marketing machine, though...
Incidentally, here's a quote from cyber.law.harvard.edu on the topic:
"To be more specific, the use of a trademark in connection with the sale of a good constitutes infringement if it is likely to cause consumer confusion as to the source of those goods or as to the sponsorship or approval of such goods. In deciding whether consumers are likely to be confused, the courts will typically look to a number of factors, including: (1) the strength of the mark; (2) the proximity of the goods; (3) the similarity of the marks; (4) evidence of actual confusion; (5) the similarity of marketing channels used; (6) the degree of caution exercised by the typical purchaser; (7) the defendant's intent."
According to that site, my example of Coca-Cola might be a poor one, as the strength of the mark and the defendant's intent would probably take precidence over the other conditions.
Someone's confused. Trademark law includes a concept referred to as "likelihood of confusion", which determines if the use of a given trademark is, in fact, infringing. For example, if I produced a soda and called it Coca-Cola, there is a great chance that someone might confuse my product for a product produced by the Coca-Cola company. However, if I product, say, a stapler with the name Coca-Cola, this may not, in fact, be an infringing use, since there is a low "likelihood of confusion".
Hence, your example of the term "playmate" "being blatantly infringed by makers of toys, playground equipment, and publishers of elementary-education books and materials" is not realistic, as no court would ever convict a playground equipment manufacturer with trademark infringment in such a case.
... doing a survey of the population of Internet users is more than a little selective. I'd guess Internet users are probably also better educated and more affluent. Does that mean the Internet *made* them more educated and affluent? No. It means more educated, affluent people use the Internet. The same goes here. *shrug*
Err, you're missing the point. I said *nothing* about a "water-needing lifeform". I said this: 1) In order for life to form, a liquid is a great advantage, as it allows materials to freely interact (and react). 2) Said liquid should be a good solvent, such that it can dissolve the materials necessary to form life (so that they can freely react). Water happens to fit the bill *really* nicely. The other properties of water (nice liquid state temps, etc) just happen to make it an even better medium in which life can form.
Now, granted, these are not hard requirements for the formation of life. However, they significantly increase the chances of life forming in the first place.
Well, it's a pretty good theory. Why? Because water, as a univeral solvent, provides a really convenient medium for life to form in. After all, there needs to be some way for the various compounds which help form life (hydrocarbons, minerals, energy, etc) to come together. Water is particularly well suited to this job. Lots of materials are soluble in it, it's has decent freezing and boiling points, it has the unique property of being less dense in it's solid state (allowing life to form *beneath* a frozen surface, something not possible with most other liquids), it provides a source of hydrogen (necessary for forming organic compounds)...
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. And not only can they not pronounce the L sound, but they aren't necessarily able to audibly distinguish between L's and R's either. This effect has been investigated in various early childhood studies which indicate that, early on, children can distinguish between these sounds, but as they learn the native language, they in fact *lose* this ability. And, of course, this effect isn't limited to the L/R problem. For example, in the case of Spanish, there is no distinction between the B/V phonemes. It's really quite fascinating, actually... the native language actually serves to mold the speech and hearing centres of the brain.
Bah. It's still a form of government which attempts to represent the will of the people. The electoral college does not do this. It's tyranny of the majority in every sense of the word... the majority of a state's population is used to represent the entire population, thus disregarding the will of everyone else. Yup, sounds like a great system to me!
Well, yeah, of course. Otherwise, the system might be, ya know, democratic...
Or, conversely, all those companies out there that have *your* personal information in *their* database can now claim copyright on information about *you*!
I've used a tripod-mounted Canon Powershot G2 3mp camera and taken 8 second exposures in pitch black when the stars are at their absolute best, all I've seen in the resulting images is the brightest of the stars and some CCD artifacts
:) For this, you probably need exposures in the order of minutes, and CCDs just aren't up to that yet. OTOH, from some surfing I've done, you can certainly produce some decent night-sky shots which show constellations and so forth...
Well, I never said you'd get an amazing panorama with the milky way clearly visible.
As for my color camera having the same effective resolution equivalent to 1 mp, I just don't see how you figure that out,
Okay, I'll put it this way (my use of the word "resolution" may be slightly incorrect, here). A 4 megapixel camera has 4 million elements on the CCD. Of those 4 million elements, 1 million are filtered red, 1 million blue, and 2 million green, all arranged in a pretty pattern. When you take a picture, a given pixel in the final output image is generated by combining these four signals into one final output signal. So, a 4 megapixel colour CCD has less true resolution than a 4 megapixel B&W CCD (ie, it conveys less *true* information).
Actually, you're wrong in a couple places, here.
1) "I've tried snapping the sky from here with a 3 megapixel camera and it's a waste of time, even with very long exposures"
This would seem to disprove your theory.
2) "the resolution of the cameras they've got up there sucks even more so"
This is quite wrong. Spirit's camera has a 1 megapixel CCD, which may seem small. But it's a 1 megapixel *B&W* CCD, meaning no filters. By contrast, the 4 megapixel CCD on your average camera has filters which are used to detect red, green, and blue (plus one extra green filter, I think). These four inputs are then combined to form the final output pixel. As a result, a 4 megapixel colour CCD (as they are produced today) has an effective resolution equivalent to a 1 megapixel B&W CCD. Moreover, most B&W CCDs have a much lower signal-to-noise ratio, meaning it can be kept open for longer exposures.
The combination of these factors is the reason why virtually all astrophotography-specific CCDs produced these days are 1) B&W, and 2) relatively small (comparatively speaking).
Someone needs to learn about how JIT compiling VMs work... A JIT-based JVM doesn't compile the bytecodes into machine code until it encounters them for the first time (hence "just in time"), and then it caches the results for reuse later. Doing anything else would be exceedingly stupid (you've already done the work to compile the bytecodes... why on earth wouldn't you reuse the results??).
Too bad marijuana isn't chemically addictive. Psychologically, perhaps, but definitely not chemically.
Alcohol, OTOH, which is supported by our own gov't, BTW, *is* chemically addictive. Funny, ain't it?
Whoa, dude... that's almost like compiling the Java to machine code just in time for the CPU to execute it, and then reusing it later! Hey, you should totally write that up... you could call it "JIT", for Just In Time compiling! Yeah! This is a great idea! You're a genius!
Poor boy. Surrounded by people who have no self control. Many people enjoy alcohol, as well, but that doesn't make them alcoholics. Don't be closed minded. It's the enemy of wisdom.
Why do you think a federal approach would better serve your goal.
:)
:)
When I said "don't leave it up to the state", I didn't mean "leave it up to the feds" (that would be silly... the feds are even *less* likely to support a split-the-vote system than the states!). I was simply saying that every state should be required, by law, to split their electoral college votes according to the election results. It's called optimistic naivete.
Also, why would the two major political parties want a system that helped promote other parties and candidates.
Again, naivete. I like democracy. The American system has flaws which make it less democratic. The correct solution is to split electoral college votes, in order to better reflect the opinions of the general public. However, this will never happen... but pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking is always fun.
It's also interesting in that, obviously, the framers of the constitution didn't fully think through the implications of the electoral college. Otherwise, if they truly wanted democracy, they wouldn't have left the vote-splitting issue open for state-level implementation... they would have simply mandated vote-splitting and moved on. This is an excellent example of how the constitution, while an impressive document, is NOT flawless!
it would already be implemented in approximately 50% of the states.
Wrong. Well, sort of. There would never be federal support for this, so talking about state support is a moot point. Politicians will never, in general, support vote-splitting, unless they're in the minority party, in which case it won't matter anyway. Of course, politicians are supposed to reflect the opinions of their constituents, but we all know how that works (can we say "DMCA"?) Moreover, on this issue, the voters who support the majority party have no reason to favour vote splitting, since that means their party could get voted out. So, the status quo remains, due to tyranny of the majority.
Sounds like a good reason to *not* leave that decision up to the state. The government that's currently in power and has the majority is going to favor a winner-takes-all approach, because it favors their party. Big surprise. And I think it's pretty clear that such an approach is, generally speaking, less democratic than the vote-splitting approach, as it less accurately represents the will of the voting public. So, why not just enforce the more democratic approach?
And, BTW, yes, I think state autonomy should take a back seat on this issue. The ability for a nation to select it's president in a fair, democractic manner seems more important than a petty power struggle between state and federal governments. After all, the state/federal split exists to ensure that regions are able to govern themselves effectively, thus representing the values of the local population. However, because of this winner-takes-all approach, the minority opinion in these regions is quashed, thus defeating the purpose of the state/fed split.
Can we say "pedantic"? Geez, how is this interesting? No, there is no such thing as an unlimited energy source. Duh. But, from the point of view of the average person, the supply of He3 on the moon is virtually unlimited... as in, there's enough to keep us going for a couple thousand years... long enough to find another, even better energy source. And this is all assuming that the scientists actually said that... it's quite likely that the AP reporter is simply paraphrasing, and what they actually said was quite a bit different.
Man, there's plenty of things wrong with the article, to be sure (like, fusion being currently infeasible), but you picked what is probably the least important one.
Simply don't mix tabs and spaces for indentation. Even naive editors don't have a problem with this.
Hah! You haven't mixed, say, Vi and Emacs, the two most common editors out there, have you? Depending on the editor settings, Emacs will use spaces, and Vi will always use Tabs. Hell, I haven't done *that* much Python development (relative to other languages I know), and even I have encountered the broken-tabs problem.
When indentation is the lexical level information, obviously you have to adjust it while you write the code.
This is true, it is partly a matter of adaptation. So, I will concede the point.
However, there remains the problem that code can be incorrect, but not necessarily *appear* incorrect (to the developer), since there's no visual markers (other than whitespace) to indicate where the blocks *should* have been. Therefore, if something does get out of place for some reason (and yes, I've had this happen), it isn't always immediately obvious that something's amiss.
The problems with significant whitespace has nothing to do with the benefits of code formatting. Everyone knows that proper block indentation improves readability. However, whitespace significance is *incredibly* annoying if things like tabs break (if you've ever edited a Makefile with a naive editor, you'll know *exactly* what I'm talking about, here).
Moreover, it can also make an editor really irritating to use. Case in point, I type this code:
if (condition):
blah
if (condition2): <-- wrong lexical level!
blah
This is Emacs' idea of indenting things. Because there aren't block delimiters, Emacs has no idea that I really want the second "if" statement to be at the same lexical level as the first. Consequently, I'm forced to backspace in order to get things to come out correctly. Plus if I try to auto-indent this code, it's quite possible that it could get it wrong, because there's no way to unabiguously determine the intended scope of the statements in a block.
Perl is great for UNIX scripting, but once you pass a certain point, it begins getting unwieldy (IMHO).
I think this depends a lot on 1) the application and 2) the chosen architecture. I've written some rather largish Perl projects (well, not that large... ~8000 lines) with little difficulty. It really just depends on the choice of design and how well Perl's language features match that design.
Well, from the perspective of a long-time Perl developer, Python has a certain elegance in it's language design (apart from using whitespace as syntax ;) that some other languages lack (in fact, it reminds me of Smalltalk in many ways, for this very reason). It has taken many of the features from various object oriented, functional languages, and scripting languages, and tied it up in a nice, clean, consistent little package.
OTOH, Perl as a language is unbelievably flexible and convenient to work with, but it's most definitely a more "hackish" language, in that it's grown more than it's been designed. As such, it's definitely more of a developer's language (ie, has many of the features which, while not necessarily incredibly elegant, are *really* convenient) than a theorist's language.
So, then, why pick one over the other? Frankly, in the end, I suspect it's just personal preference (or predjudice).
This may be true for, say, the English department, but it isn't universal. In the Computing Science program at the U of A, AFAIK, they claim copyright over any code you produce. I know this because one of my co-workers attempted to use some of the code he produced while at school in a commercial product and got in trouble with the U.
LOL! Okay, that's pretty damned funny, considering I pulled the whole "stapler" thing out thinking that it was a sufficiently different product. Pretty amazing, that the Coke marketing machine, though...
Incidentally, here's a quote from cyber.law.harvard.edu on the topic:
"To be more specific, the use of a trademark in connection with the sale of a good constitutes infringement if it is likely to cause consumer confusion as to the source of those goods or as to the sponsorship or approval of such goods. In deciding whether consumers are likely to be confused, the courts will typically look to a number of factors, including: (1) the strength of the mark; (2) the proximity of the goods; (3) the similarity of the marks; (4) evidence of actual confusion; (5) the similarity of marketing channels used; (6) the degree of caution exercised by the typical purchaser; (7) the defendant's intent."
This is from here.
According to that site, my example of Coca-Cola might be a poor one, as the strength of the mark and the defendant's intent would probably take precidence over the other conditions.
Someone's confused. Trademark law includes a concept referred to as "likelihood of confusion", which determines if the use of a given trademark is, in fact, infringing. For example, if I produced a soda and called it Coca-Cola, there is a great chance that someone might confuse my product for a product produced by the Coca-Cola company. However, if I product, say, a stapler with the name Coca-Cola, this may not, in fact, be an infringing use, since there is a low "likelihood of confusion".
Hence, your example of the term "playmate" "being blatantly infringed by makers of toys, playground equipment, and publishers of elementary-education books and materials" is not realistic, as no court would ever convict a playground equipment manufacturer with trademark infringment in such a case.
How on earth did that get modded as a troll? It's true, for Christ sake!
... doing a survey of the population of Internet users is more than a little selective. I'd guess Internet users are probably also better educated and more affluent. Does that mean the Internet *made* them more educated and affluent? No. It means more educated, affluent people use the Internet. The same goes here. *shrug*
Err, you're missing the point. I said *nothing* about a "water-needing lifeform". I said this: 1) In order for life to form, a liquid is a great advantage, as it allows materials to freely interact (and react). 2) Said liquid should be a good solvent, such that it can dissolve the materials necessary to form life (so that they can freely react). Water happens to fit the bill *really* nicely. The other properties of water (nice liquid state temps, etc) just happen to make it an even better medium in which life can form.
Now, granted, these are not hard requirements for the formation of life. However, they significantly increase the chances of life forming in the first place.
Why do we feel like all life *needs* water?
Well, it's a pretty good theory. Why? Because water, as a univeral solvent, provides a really convenient medium for life to form in. After all, there needs to be some way for the various compounds which help form life (hydrocarbons, minerals, energy, etc) to come together. Water is particularly well suited to this job. Lots of materials are soluble in it, it's has decent freezing and boiling points, it has the unique property of being less dense in it's solid state (allowing life to form *beneath* a frozen surface, something not possible with most other liquids), it provides a source of hydrogen (necessary for forming organic compounds)...