In fact, we've had an ad out for 3 months now looking for an entry-level embedded software engineer, and most new graduates can only code Java proficiently ! (and we're based in a city with a Uni which has top-5 CS and engineering programs)
So hire one of the grads from these top-5 schools and give him or her a couple of weeks to brush up on C. If the schools are really that good, your hire will be able to do that. And it beats leaving the position unfilled for another three months, doesn't it?
Because caffine initially "constricted" them in the first place, then you go into caffine withdrawl your capillaries start to go back to _normal_ (of which you would like to call "overdilation") you get your headache, and *boom*, caffine cures your headache... (call them tension headaches if you want, look up some unbiased research out there, there's plenty of it)
Yeah, you're right. Headaches are nothing more than caffeine or ibuprofen withdrawal symptoms. They're certainly never caused by stress, tension, hunger, physical activity, dietary factors, or anything else.
Yes, headache is a symptom of caffeine withdrawal. But that doesn't mean that headache is caused only by the absence of caffeine, or that taking a little caffeine to treat a headache is setting yourself up for a lifetime of dependency for headache avoidance. You really need to calm down.
The article says, "It can relieve headaches." Isn't that just plain obvious. Especially considering that the most common headache relieved by coffee is in fact caused by caffeine withdrawl.
Caffeine can relieve tension headaches, which have nothing to do with caffeine withdrawal. They're caused by overdilation of capillaries in your head, and caffeine (like ibuprofen) is a vasoconstrictor.
You're right, my bad. I guess they'll have to charge him with this subparagraph of the same law:
... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer...
Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as far as the law is concerned.
The guy is not a terrorist, but he should absolutely be charged under the "cyberterrorism" provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. If you read those provisions (Section 814), you'll see that they amend the US Code in a way that is perfectly reasonable and valid for combatting cyberterrorism. However, the acts proscribed need not be committed by terrorists to be harmful to society, so what the hell is wrong with charging him under this law?
If you look at the US Code as amended by the USA PATRIOT Act, you'll see exactly what he's being charged with:
Whoever intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage and by [such] conduct [causes] a threat to public health or safety... shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.
And it seems to me the punishment prescribed in section (c) for the crime above is reasonable and fitting:
The punishment for an offense under subsection (a) or (b) of this section is... except as provided in subparagraph (B),
a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in the case of an offense under subsection (a)(2), (a)(3), (a)(5)(A)(iii), or (a)(6) of this section which does not occur after a conviction for another offense under this section, or an attempt to commit an offense punishable under this subparagraph
In other words, the guy broke a bunch of computers in such a way that he endangered the public safety. If convicted, he gets a fine or up to a year in prison (or both). I fail to see what the problem with this is.
MIME isn't damage, MIME is a hack to fix the crippled SMTP message format. Maybe you are only interested in sending ASCII text messages-- and that's very hardcore of you and all-- but the rest of the world is interested in sending pictures, documents, text in languages other than English (well over a hundred, and you're fucking well right the "Standard" should support them), etc., and your underdeveloped message format just can't properly deal on its own. Maybe you should read up on the subject.
Text itself isn't a drawback-- XML is generally represented as text-- but a message format that is defined only for transmitting text just doesn't cut it now that we're out of Green Terminal Land and into the World Where People Use Computers to Do Stuff.
And you're missing the point of my remark about XML libraries. The problem is not that parsing email is hard, but that there's no standard for an internal representation of an email message, and if there was it would probably be completely non-interoperable with the rest of the world. XML has the DOM and SAX, among others. This means a whole world of functionality, in the form of libraries and technologies that understand XML via DOM or SAX, is available to the program author. You can transform the message into another format using XSLT, access and modify the message content and headers with XPointer, find references to and merge in external resources with XInclude, extend the message format using namespaces (thereby allowing anyone who doesn't care about your extension to safely ignore it), transform the message (with XSLT) into XHTML and provide rich formatting with CSS (both of which can be found in reusable libraries), and so on and so forth.
You use XML, you get all of the above essentially for free. You go with some application-specific grammar, and you can either limit your email to plaintext or you can reinvent all of those wheels. But I know how much you reet haxorz hate usability and interoperability... maybe we can hook you all up with some nice teletypes.
Ok, here's the thing about XML databases: You don't use them to store your data just for the hell of it. You use them to store data that you're passing around as XML documents anyway.
You can either spend a ridiculous amount of effort mapping your XML structures into an RDB schema (and back), or you can let the DB do that for you. An XMLDB is useful for the same reason that XML itself is useful: You can avoid reinventing the wheel, and you get the bonus of having a really good wheel already supplied for you.
In theory, anyway. XMLDBs are still a very young technology, so they've got their issues. Give it a little time.
I wish you would learn something about existing mail standards before you say something so stupid. Email is primarily a simple text format, my HTML/word document/virus packed mailbox not withstanding. I am not surprised M$ would want to further polute the standards but why would you?
I wish you would learn something about existing mail standards-- like their colossal drawbacks. SMTP is entirely "a simple text format", and that's one of its biggest problems. We have all kinds of lame hacks for mailing binaries around and handling attachments. Nearly everyone who writes a mail client writes a mail parser and a composer. Not just a formatter, or presentation-level stuff-- basic goddamn parsing and composition.
You don't seriously believe that any format that is newline-dot-newline-delimited is a good one, do you? SMTP is a relic, all the way down to the message format. I hope to god someone eventually succeeds in dislodging it.
Off topic, but I'm eating troll bait anyway: You do know that the only reason we're trying to keep China from getting nukes is because in a conventional war, they'd kick our ass, right? Talk about 200 million americans being shocked and awed that they're not divinely special.
You do know that China's had nuclear weapons for forty years, right?
I'm also a student at Georgia Tech. The selling of the book store to Barnes & Noble happened fairly recently, and just last year they moved the store from roughly the center of campus across the interstate (into "Tech Square", a highly-commercialized annex of Georgia Tech).
If your school is considering selling their book store to Barnes & Noble-- and this is common-- put up a fight.
The GaTech book store was pretty shoddy as it was, but when B&N took over it went straight to hell-- not only are the books still overpriced, but the stock dropped to almost nothing. We now have a large, brand new B&N store that's probably four times the size of our original book store, but which has maybe half the shelf space devoted to textbooks that the original did. Used books are nearly nonexistent on the shelves-- I found one when I went at the beginning of this semester, and it was literally unbound and ruined-- and selling at $15 less than new. They hadn't even heard of one of my classes-- a technical writing class that almost everyone at Tech has to take-- and had no shelf space for it.
We've been sold out and screwed beyond belief in this fiasco-- don't let your school do the same to you.
For students at GaTech: if you need your books fast, go over across North to Engineer's. If you can wait a week or two, order from half.com or the like.
I call bullshit on your "heavy fine" comment. I followed the links in your journal to the IRS ruling and the GOA page, and I read the McConnell v. FEC ruling mentioned by the GOA page.
The IRS ruling you mention does nothing but allow the IRS to tax the activities of a 501 non-profit when it runs ads directly intended to influence an election. It sets forth in very explicit terms all of the conditions under which a non-profit may, under IRS rules, run political or issue ads, and they all seem very reasonable to me. The whole thing amounts to "Gun Owners of America can't run ads explicitly promoting a candidate for office". It's actually a bit less restrictive than that, even.
Page 5 of the ruling explicitly allows such groups to urge their members or the public to communicate with a legislator under the following conditions:
d) The communication identifies the candidate solely as a government official who is in a position to act on the public policy issue in connection with the specific event (such as a legislator who is eligible to vote on the legislation);
How is that at all unreasonable? GOA is supposed to be supporting gun rights-- if it wants to support Senator Bob, it can damn well play under the same rules other political parties do, instead of hiding behind its status as an "issue group" to gain special advantage. And that's all this ruling says.
I'm as paranoid as the next guy about obscure executive-branch rules and regulations, but maybe you ought to actually read the stuff your gun club is getting its panties in a twist about (specifically, pages 4 and 5 of the IRS ruling, in this instance) before going off half-cocked on these conspiracy theories.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Women who are into computers and technology find this all the time. I had a classmate in my graduate program start "testing" me when I said that I was a computer geek.
I hate to break it to you, but computer geeks of college age generally tend to do this to each other, irrespective of sex. The constant attempts by geeks to start pissing contests is probably the most annoying thing about being a computer science major, in my experience. I'm a guy. (While we're on the subject, the attempts so many geeks make to define every social interaction in terms of computer dorkdom is a very close second.) Fortunately, people seem to either grow out of that behavior or get relegated to some dank cubicle where nobody has to deal with them, so it all works out for the rest of us shortly after they leave college.
Why did men always pay for dates? Because they generally make more money
Are you sure? I always assumed it was because men typically invited women on dates. If you offer an invitation, you don't place the burden of fulfilling it on the invitee-- this is true of all invitations, as far as I know. As for why men typically invited women on dates, I suspect it has something fundamentally to do with the respective roles of the sexes in procreation, same as it does for most animals. I'm glad we're getting past that, though.
Why did men open doors for women?
Gave 'em a chance to check out the women's asses.
Seriously, though, idunno. I hold doors open for anyone following me closely, and whether I go through the door before or after them depends generally on the logistics of the thing. It has nothing to do with vestiges of chivalry, or adapting sex-biased behavior to a more general politeness-- I've just always thought it rude to pretend someone isn't there, and holding a door open is just one of those small gestures that acknowledges that those around you are as good as you are.
If you read the statement, you'll see that they're not "approving" sales of the glofish. They're saying exactly what you are-- the glofish aren't in the FDA's bailiwick.
Because tropical aquarium fish are not used for food purposes...
The article does not say that the government upgraded from Microsoft Office. It says that they upgraded from an earlier version of the same software:
The Ministry of Commerce, the Foreign Ministry and the National Security Bureau and other governmwent departments had upgraded to WPS Office2003
from an earlier version developed by domestic software maker Kingsoft Co, the People's Daily newspaper reported.
The big story seems to be that "it was the first large-scale software upgrade in government offices," which is really just not very interesting.
What's rude is sitting in a 200-person echo chamber of a lecture hall and clacking away on your loud-ass keyboard. It doesn't matter whether it's your voice or your typing... if I can't follow the prof because of your noise, you're robbing me of my tuition and time.
Perhaps not having his relatives arrested for crimes committed 20 years ago and in another province! This article would make me rather wary about giving DNA samples even if I was innocent of the crime in question.
Really? If one of my relatives had committed the kind of crime for which they collect DNA evidence, even 20 years ago and in another province, I would want that relative to face trial. Why wouldn't you? Personal embarrassment at the relation?
Where were *you* on the night of Nov. 30, 1983? We have DNA evidence linking you or a close relative to a crime committed that night. What's your alabi?
Don't need one. If the police can't establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the perpetrator was me (and not possibly, say, a close relative), they lose. Who's going to bring a prosecution solely on the evidence that someone in the defendant's family committed the crime? Any half-competent judge would throw that out before it ever even got to trial.
This reminds us of a problem with DNA testing: it can't distinguish identical twins or clones.
So what? It's not like you can't ask one or two more questions after the DNA test results get back: "Does he have a twin or a clone? Are his parents closely related?" Or how about, beforehand, "do we have any reason to test this guy at all?" What are the odds that all evidence, including DNA evidence, would point to the wrong person, and that it couldn't be determined that the evidence doesn't point to a twin or a clone of the suspect?
DNA testing is a powerful investigative tool, and is very useful for verifying the conclusions of an investigation. Nobody's said that it replaces investigation.
You're basically arguing that DNA evidence might not be as reliable as we think it is. Well, fingerprints might also not be as reliable as we think they are. Sure are working out okay so far, though, aren't they?
yeah, the cops are clearly evil
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Twist on DNA Privacy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The wrongful conviction of these men cannot be assigned to anything but the insincerity of the police and prosecuters in seeking out the real perpetrator. If they had the dna evidence that they believed would lead to the murderer, how can they justify convicting men whose dna did not match that evidence.
Advances in DNA technology finally led police to Gafoor more than a decade on.
Outside court, South Wales Police Detective Chief Superintendent Wynne Phillips said: "Clearly, there is some work to do now in terms of looking back at the original trial."
That evidence emerged after detectives launched a new inquiry following an independent review of the case.
A painstaking examination of the flat found a fresh DNA sample under layers of paint on a skirting board.
What it sounds like to me is that they screwed up in the original prosecution and managed to obtain a wrongful conviction. But they apparently had enough evidence to convict in a trial-- the police didn't just throw them in jail and call it a day, it must have really looked to them and a jury like they had the right guys. Later on someone reviewed the case and indicated that the convictions may have been wrong, and the police went hunting in a 15-year-old crime scene and discovered new evidence by scraping the paint off the walls. This is no half-assed attempt at appeasing some lawyer. The police were obviously extremely interested in seeing justice done, more so than maintaining appearances about a supposedly closed case. Afterward, they publicly admitted they had made a severe error and launched an investigation into their own investigation! How in the hell can you read that article and then accuse the police and prosecutors of "insincerity in seeking out the real perpetrator"?
I'm a *nix user, and I've been using zip over tar as much as possible for years now. Why? Two words: RANDOM ACCESS.
You can stick with the tape archiver if you want. You'll have the pleasure of waiting for your massive single file to finish decompressing, so you can then sequentially search the resulting decompressed archive for the files you actually wanted.
In the meantime, I'll be plucking decompressed files right out of the middle of my zip archives, in a fraction of the time.
Incidentally, if you're so anal about your compression ratio, why not compress with a good compressor (like bzip2) and archive with a good archiver (like zip)?
Another strategy, that I'll be using myself shortly, is to join the Apple Developer Connection (for about $100) as a student and then use their hardware seeding program, which gives you about 10-20% off your first hardware purchase with them.
Hate to poop on your parade, but I don't think you will be using that strategy.
NOTE: Please note that
the ADC Student Program Membership does NOT include access to the ADC Seeding Program, Technical Support, or the ADC Compatibility Labs. If you require these program benefits, we encourage you to consider joining the ADC Select Program which may better suit your needs.
With networked components, this is only true if you maintain the entire network.
For instance, if you ditch the OS on your PC that allows you to take advantage of certain functions on your handheld, your handheld has effectively lost functionality without itself failing.
With the continuing growth in the importance of interconnectedness to the devices and systems we use every day, your statement is quickly becoming less generally true.
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So hire one of the grads from these top-5 schools and give him or her a couple of weeks to brush up on C. If the schools are really that good, your hire will be able to do that. And it beats leaving the position unfilled for another three months, doesn't it?
Were you impotent when you were ingesting caffeine?
Yeah, you're right. Headaches are nothing more than caffeine or ibuprofen withdrawal symptoms. They're certainly never caused by stress, tension, hunger, physical activity, dietary factors, or anything else.
Yes, headache is a symptom of caffeine withdrawal. But that doesn't mean that headache is caused only by the absence of caffeine, or that taking a little caffeine to treat a headache is setting yourself up for a lifetime of dependency for headache avoidance. You really need to calm down.
Caffeine can relieve tension headaches, which have nothing to do with caffeine withdrawal. They're caused by overdilation of capillaries in your head, and caffeine (like ibuprofen) is a vasoconstrictor.
You're right, my bad. I guess they'll have to charge him with this subparagraph of the same law:
Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as far as the law is concerned.
If you look at the US Code as amended by the USA PATRIOT Act, you'll see exactly what he's being charged with:
And it seems to me the punishment prescribed in section (c) for the crime above is reasonable and fitting:
In other words, the guy broke a bunch of computers in such a way that he endangered the public safety. If convicted, he gets a fine or up to a year in prison (or both). I fail to see what the problem with this is.
MIME isn't damage, MIME is a hack to fix the crippled SMTP message format. Maybe you are only interested in sending ASCII text messages-- and that's very hardcore of you and all-- but the rest of the world is interested in sending pictures, documents, text in languages other than English (well over a hundred, and you're fucking well right the "Standard" should support them), etc., and your underdeveloped message format just can't properly deal on its own. Maybe you should read up on the subject.
Text itself isn't a drawback-- XML is generally represented as text-- but a message format that is defined only for transmitting text just doesn't cut it now that we're out of Green Terminal Land and into the World Where People Use Computers to Do Stuff.
And you're missing the point of my remark about XML libraries. The problem is not that parsing email is hard, but that there's no standard for an internal representation of an email message, and if there was it would probably be completely non-interoperable with the rest of the world. XML has the DOM and SAX, among others. This means a whole world of functionality, in the form of libraries and technologies that understand XML via DOM or SAX, is available to the program author. You can transform the message into another format using XSLT, access and modify the message content and headers with XPointer, find references to and merge in external resources with XInclude, extend the message format using namespaces (thereby allowing anyone who doesn't care about your extension to safely ignore it), transform the message (with XSLT) into XHTML and provide rich formatting with CSS (both of which can be found in reusable libraries), and so on and so forth.
You use XML, you get all of the above essentially for free. You go with some application-specific grammar, and you can either limit your email to plaintext or you can reinvent all of those wheels. But I know how much you reet haxorz hate usability and interoperability... maybe we can hook you all up with some nice teletypes.
You can either spend a ridiculous amount of effort mapping your XML structures into an RDB schema (and back), or you can let the DB do that for you. An XMLDB is useful for the same reason that XML itself is useful: You can avoid reinventing the wheel, and you get the bonus of having a really good wheel already supplied for you.
In theory, anyway. XMLDBs are still a very young technology, so they've got their issues. Give it a little time.
I wish you would learn something about existing mail standards-- like their colossal drawbacks. SMTP is entirely "a simple text format", and that's one of its biggest problems. We have all kinds of lame hacks for mailing binaries around and handling attachments. Nearly everyone who writes a mail client writes a mail parser and a composer. Not just a formatter, or presentation-level stuff-- basic goddamn parsing and composition.
You don't seriously believe that any format that is newline-dot-newline-delimited is a good one, do you? SMTP is a relic, all the way down to the message format. I hope to god someone eventually succeeds in dislodging it.
You do know that China's had nuclear weapons for forty years, right?
If your school is considering selling their book store to Barnes & Noble-- and this is common-- put up a fight.
The GaTech book store was pretty shoddy as it was, but when B&N took over it went straight to hell-- not only are the books still overpriced, but the stock dropped to almost nothing. We now have a large, brand new B&N store that's probably four times the size of our original book store, but which has maybe half the shelf space devoted to textbooks that the original did. Used books are nearly nonexistent on the shelves-- I found one when I went at the beginning of this semester, and it was literally unbound and ruined-- and selling at $15 less than new. They hadn't even heard of one of my classes-- a technical writing class that almost everyone at Tech has to take-- and had no shelf space for it.
We've been sold out and screwed beyond belief in this fiasco-- don't let your school do the same to you.
For students at GaTech: if you need your books fast, go over across North to Engineer's. If you can wait a week or two, order from half.com or the like.
Sure would be nice if they'd fix (for free) my G4 powerbook with the self-breaking firewire port, though.
The IRS ruling you mention does nothing but allow the IRS to tax the activities of a 501 non-profit when it runs ads directly intended to influence an election. It sets forth in very explicit terms all of the conditions under which a non-profit may, under IRS rules, run political or issue ads, and they all seem very reasonable to me. The whole thing amounts to "Gun Owners of America can't run ads explicitly promoting a candidate for office". It's actually a bit less restrictive than that, even.
Page 5 of the ruling explicitly allows such groups to urge their members or the public to communicate with a legislator under the following conditions:
How is that at all unreasonable? GOA is supposed to be supporting gun rights-- if it wants to support Senator Bob, it can damn well play under the same rules other political parties do, instead of hiding behind its status as an "issue group" to gain special advantage. And that's all this ruling says.I'm as paranoid as the next guy about obscure executive-branch rules and regulations, but maybe you ought to actually read the stuff your gun club is getting its panties in a twist about (specifically, pages 4 and 5 of the IRS ruling, in this instance) before going off half-cocked on these conspiracy theories.
I hate to break it to you, but computer geeks of college age generally tend to do this to each other, irrespective of sex. The constant attempts by geeks to start pissing contests is probably the most annoying thing about being a computer science major, in my experience. I'm a guy. (While we're on the subject, the attempts so many geeks make to define every social interaction in terms of computer dorkdom is a very close second.) Fortunately, people seem to either grow out of that behavior or get relegated to some dank cubicle where nobody has to deal with them, so it all works out for the rest of us shortly after they leave college.
Why did men always pay for dates? Because they generally make more money
Are you sure? I always assumed it was because men typically invited women on dates. If you offer an invitation, you don't place the burden of fulfilling it on the invitee-- this is true of all invitations, as far as I know. As for why men typically invited women on dates, I suspect it has something fundamentally to do with the respective roles of the sexes in procreation, same as it does for most animals. I'm glad we're getting past that, though.
Why did men open doors for women?
Gave 'em a chance to check out the women's asses.
Seriously, though, idunno. I hold doors open for anyone following me closely, and whether I go through the door before or after them depends generally on the logistics of the thing. It has nothing to do with vestiges of chivalry, or adapting sex-biased behavior to a more general politeness-- I've just always thought it rude to pretend someone isn't there, and holding a door open is just one of those small gestures that acknowledges that those around you are as good as you are.
Go read the site. It's a coordinated effort between California and New York.
What's rude is sitting in a 200-person echo chamber of a lecture hall and clacking away on your loud-ass keyboard. It doesn't matter whether it's your voice or your typing... if I can't follow the prof because of your noise, you're robbing me of my tuition and time.
Really? If one of my relatives had committed the kind of crime for which they collect DNA evidence, even 20 years ago and in another province, I would want that relative to face trial. Why wouldn't you? Personal embarrassment at the relation?
Where were *you* on the night of Nov. 30, 1983? We have DNA evidence linking you or a close relative to a crime committed that night. What's your alabi?
Don't need one. If the police can't establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the perpetrator was me (and not possibly, say, a close relative), they lose. Who's going to bring a prosecution solely on the evidence that someone in the defendant's family committed the crime? Any half-competent judge would throw that out before it ever even got to trial.
So what? It's not like you can't ask one or two more questions after the DNA test results get back: "Does he have a twin or a clone? Are his parents closely related?" Or how about, beforehand, "do we have any reason to test this guy at all?" What are the odds that all evidence, including DNA evidence, would point to the wrong person, and that it couldn't be determined that the evidence doesn't point to a twin or a clone of the suspect?
DNA testing is a powerful investigative tool, and is very useful for verifying the conclusions of an investigation. Nobody's said that it replaces investigation.
You're basically arguing that DNA evidence might not be as reliable as we think it is. Well, fingerprints might also not be as reliable as we think they are. Sure are working out okay so far, though, aren't they?
It means "I am talking out of my ass". I've never understood the strange abbreviation-- maybe "IANAL" is from the Latin?
You can stick with the tape archiver if you want. You'll have the pleasure of waiting for your massive single file to finish decompressing, so you can then sequentially search the resulting decompressed archive for the files you actually wanted.
In the meantime, I'll be plucking decompressed files right out of the middle of my zip archives, in a fraction of the time.
Incidentally, if you're so anal about your compression ratio, why not compress with a good compressor (like bzip2) and archive with a good archiver (like zip)?
Hate to poop on your parade, but I don't think you will be using that strategy.
I found this hereFor instance, if you ditch the OS on your PC that allows you to take advantage of certain functions on your handheld, your handheld has effectively lost functionality without itself failing.
With the continuing growth in the importance of interconnectedness to the devices and systems we use every day, your statement is quickly becoming less generally true.