Is java really worth developing for? I think it is great for its ease of programming and library support, but it's requirement of running on virtual machines leads to huge memory requirements for the simplest programs, and GC while nice, can lead to slow apps.
I would not recommend Java for small programs. But my company sells a scientific application that is written in Java. It handles large amounts of data and applies clustering algorithms that are computationally intensive. Compared with the sheer amounts of work that our own code is doing, the VM overhead is hardly noticeable. Our customer base is evenly split between academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Almost a third of our installs are on the Mac, and there's a few percent who are using Linux. The rest are running Windows.
Our leading competitor sells a Windows-only product. We have three times as much market share.
Why would anyone want to write a serious "enterprise" application in Java vs. say C++??
Again, history is a useful guide, and it shows that even during the steepest recessions, the majority of workers don't lose their jobs; instead, they get raises. Yes, even during the Great Depression, prices fell much faster than wages, so many workers actually saw an increase in their real income. From August 1929 to March 1932, factory workers still on the job saw their real income jump by an annualized rate of 4.3 percent, which was two and a half times the rate of increase they enjoyed during the Roaring '20s.
This is an interesting point, and forces me to reconsider that maybe the Great Depression wasn't as bad as everyone says it was! Sure, lots of people are out of a job right now, but if you weren't laid off this month, things are great because none of your laid off coworkers can afford milk and the stores have to lower the price, which increases your spending power! If you think about it, the economy is great! This month, anyway. I hope I'm not laid off next month.
Of course, things aren't as simple as they were in 1930. The economy has some problems it didn't have back then:
-massive consumer debt -trade deficits -increasing corporate reliance on previously inaccessible cheap overseas labor -a housing bubble -a huge federal deficit
The federal deficit is worthy of more attention than it's been getting. The government has rung up a deficit of $194 billion dollars in just the first five months of the 2003 budget year. In February alone we pulled out the Visa and racked up charges of $96.3 billion. A 10 year $1.35 trillion tax cut has to come from somewhere. The Bush Administration will politically leverage its wartime popularity surge to get another tax cut for People Wealthier Than You for $726 billion during a fucking liquidity crisis. At least the Senate lopped off $100 billion to pay for the war. Think about that. You could have six more wars and still have $26 billion of tax cuts left. I just hope these rich bastards who are getting all this money immediately invest it in ventures that put Americans to work! Although they're not stupid and will probably buy bonds with it.
According to Keynesian theory, unemployment and inflation are supposed to be mutually exclusive- each is supposed to prevent the other from happening. The disproof of that theory came during the 70s and was named stagflation. Things suck when everyone is out of work and milk still keeps costing more than it did last week. I hope the financial markets don't notice these Reagan-sized deficits anytime soon! All this unemployment might not count for much. At least the Fed can increase interest rates to control it, I guess, since they've pushed them down to artificially low levels in their futile attempts to reignite the boom. If you have a house be sure to refinance now while interest rates are so low, because they're going to go up.
I want to know why everyone is talking about a lopsided war with a tinpot Middle East dictator- this shit is the real news.
I find it disappointing the way so many people deny that Saddam Hussein is responsible not only for direct attacks on America, but also for atrocities in his own country that make Milosevic look like an angel.
Ummm... what "direct attacks on America"?
The standard for proof has sunk really low. Repeat something often enough now and it becomes true.
I know the war has some costs, and we may even lose a few American lives, but we will bring freedom to Iraq, and how can you put a price on that?
We will NOT bring freedom to Iraq- that much is certain. Unless you define "freedom" as "pro-American", which so many people do reflexively without a second thought. True democracy in Iraq would not give us results that we would like or tolerate. People there tend to vote for Islamist parties, and our outrageous behavior of late doesn't help. Starving people and dropping bombs on them won't make them vote for you.
The most we can hope for is something like another Saudi Arabia. Frankly one is enough.
Can you imagine a world with a peaceful Middle East? Our President can.
Wow, you've been exposed to a lot of propaganda. Are you listening to the baseless statements coming out of your mouth? A critical thinker just doesn't say things like that.
Imagining something and actually making it happen are two different things. I can imagine a world with candy cane trees, but that doesn't mean I actually have a coherent plan for making it happen! There are a lot of people with naive views that are in for a rude awakening before this is over. Wishful thinking is not good foreign policy.
Not being able to establish a client state doesn't mean your only recourse is complete neglect and stupid policy. Even as late as 2001 the Bush administration was showering $40 million on the Taliban as a reward for their crackdown on poppy production (part of our "War On Drugs").
Even though you call me a jackass I agree with your sentiment on Saudi Arabia. Unlike Iraq, you can make a legitimate argument that turning Saudi Arabia into a smoking crater would be in our own best interest.
Instead we are preparing to build Saudi Arabia II in Iraq- producing yet another oil exporting country with a repressive puppet government that secretly encourages its citizens to export terrorism and that we keep propped up at our own expense in order to keep the oil flowing. The propaganda about "bringing democracy to the region" is completely naive. If true democracy comes to Iraq the results would probably not be something we would like.
No, you are completely right. Those moves were also completely illogical. The Taliban took over Afghanistan because we foolishly lost interest in the country once we saw the Soviets were gone. It was also stupid to sell chemical and biological agents to Iraq because we saw him fighting with Iran.
The U.S. has proven time and again its tactical incompetence in its application of foreign policy in this region. But our foreign policy expertise has suddenly gotten really bad. Never before has merely demanding a logical case for war branded one as a "traitor". This war is a huge gift to Al Quaeda, who have apparently been recruiting like mad now that the conventional wisdom across the entire Arab world is that the U.S. is fighting a "war on Islam". Unfortunately, nobody has yet come up with an excuse for the war that is believed by anybody outside our own borders. Instead, we're content to come up with excuses that play well in the "red states". U.S. foreign policy has had inconsistencies since the fifties, but never before now have we acted so violently against our own self-interest for what are looking more and more like ideological reasons. I think you agree with me and didn't realize I was being sarcastic.
"You can support our troops without supporting the President." - Trent Lott during the Kosovo crisis
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
Those words were uttered by Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, the U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials in Nuremberg at the close of World War II. But what did he know? That was in 1945, when everyone was complacent and comfortable. After 9/11, "everything is different" or something. A logical foreign policy is apparently a luxury we can no longer afford.
Though I have to say I'm slightly puzzled by the consensus here that it is wrong not to pay for content and the 'victims' deserved all they get, but elsewhere on Slashdot there is outrage when action is taken against filesharers. When is copyright material not copyright material?
-P2P has noninfringing uses as has been pointed out. "Steal cable for free" filters do not (unless they are simply off-the-shelf coax parts being sold as such). -Slashdot does not speak with one voice. Many people post here. The individuals who express outrage over P2P crackdowns in other threads are not necessarily the ones giggling at this story. -P2P crackdowns are just depressing; they're yet another example of corporate dominance and control. This cable filter story, on the other hand, introduces the concepts of greed and gullibility. A little schadenfreude shouldn't be surprising.
If a company can collect frequent flyer miles from all its employees, it will keep careful track of them and make sure they're all redeemed. That "LOT of money" that could be saved would be coming out of the airline's hide. The airlines would probably just stop offering frequent flyer miles. They're pretty much a gimmick anyway.
Yeah, and after that, let's fund a billion dollar campaign to educate the world about the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and DNF.
Since nobody writes letters from Nigeria claiming to be the Tooth Fairy, I think that this second campaign of yours is a boondoggle. The Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy don't leave the borders of the country with upwards of 80 million a year either.
As much as we like to see a small number of incredibly stupid and greedy people suffer tremendously, it is still within the public interest that this get stopped.
And then there's the U.S., a basically free country, which has too many laws to count, and plenty of laws which contradict other laws, and many times more population.... It's the country most lived in and hated by vocal Slashdotters --
You're painting with a broad brush. I've never seen any "vocal Slashdotters" saying anything about "hating" their country.
most of the non-vocal probably disagree, with the vocal ones, but who can prove that, either way.
In other words, unless someone specifically says otherwise, their silence should be taken as agreement with you and your own opinions.
(I am not the typical vocal Slashdotter, when it comes to my views of the U.S. Perhaps, warts and all, I love my country more than most.)
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Mere flag waving doesn't make you a patriot.
The JMP instruction is implemented at "runtime" during RNA splicing
Whoops, I should have said that JMP is implemented at compile time... during a preprocessing step that is receiving input from copies of the program that have already been compiled and that are running, as well as other programs running in the system.
Both lawsuits mentioned are real lawsuits. Both have probably cost McDonald's a profitable quarter or two. Both have have probably made a Big Mac for me 10 cents higher.
Are you out of your mind? Or are you just innumerate?
The fat guy's lawsuit I'll grant was stupid. In the other one, the plaintiff had originally asked McDonald's to cover her medical expenses (initially $11000, later $20000) to replace the skin on her crotch. McDonald's offered $800, so she went to court.
A mediator recommended settling for $225,000. McDonald's refused and it went to trial. A jury reduced the award to $160,000 because of the woman's own contributory negligence- she spilled it on herself.
But the jury was inflamed by the "Fight Club" style cost benefit analysis that McDonald's had done. If you serve the coffee so hot that nobody can taste it, you can buy a cheap and inferior grade of beans. McDonald's had calculated that the cost of settling the inevitable lawsuits from severe burns would not offset the savings made from buying crap coffee. And they had ignored 700 prior incidents of people getting burned. Establishments that serve hot coffee don't usually get requests from burn centers to lower the temperature of the coffee. That should be taken as a sign that something is wrong.
For punitive damages, the jury's verdict was two days worth of profits on sales of coffee. This turned out to be $2.7 million. On appeal the judge lowered the award to $480,000, and it was finally settled for an undisclosed amount.
So the total damages for McDonald's (including attorney fees) was probably on the order of a few hours worth of lost profits on their coffee. I doubt that this incident "cost McDonald's a profitable quarter". Nor did it result in you having to fork over ten extra cents for a Big Mac to shove into your face, so stop feeling sorry for yourself.
I give no sympathy to the stupid. You don't hold coffee between your legs in a moving car.
The car was stationary. She wasn't even the driver.
It was later discovered, for your records, that the old woman who burned her cooch, was the sister in law to the owner of a small coffee chain in the area where she lived. This illustrates the point of competing through litigation.
Wow, that's brilliantly diabolical.
Step 1: Cover your legs and genitals with third degree burns requiring extensive skin grafts Step 2:.... Step 3: Profit!
Maybe not with/* and */, but I've seen people use #ifdef and #endif to implement a lot of stuff in C/C++.
It seems nature also works this way, with a heavy reliance on preprocessing (transcription) hacks that modify the code itself before it's "compiled" into protein form. Heavy reliance on the C preprocessor can make your C code about as hard to read as DNA.
Err, what about jumping backwards? Don't tell me that's just future copies of the sequence... because without conditional branches it doesn't seem all that usefull to me.
There's lots of conditional branching.
Sexual differentiation in Drosophila is regulated by a protein called sex-lethal or sxl. During embryological development in females, a repressor protein binds to a splicing signal at the start of one of the middle exons in sxl, hiding it from the spliceosomes. This prevents the exon from making it into the finished mRNA after the other exons are spliced together (the exon gets junked along with the two introns on either end of it). The repressor protein is not present in males and so they create an mRNA strand for sxl that includes the exon- the presence of which renders the finished protein inactive.
So this is sort of like a conditional jump, or an #ifdef at the very least, that controls sexual differentiation during embryological development.
It's friday, so I get into work early, before lunch even. The phone rings. Shit! I turn the page on the excuse sheet. "SOLAR FLARES" stares out at me. I'd better read up on that. Two minutes later I'm ready to answer the phone. "Hello?" I say. "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET YOU ALL MORNING?!" I hate it when they shout at me early in the morning. It always puts me in a bad mood. You know what I mean. "Ah, yes. Well, there's been some solar activity this morning, it always disrupts electronics..." I say, sweet as a sugar pie. "Huh? But I could get through to my friends?!" "Yes, that's entirely possible, solar activity is very unpredictable in it's effects. Why last week, we had some files just dissappear from a guys account while he was working on it!" "Really?" "Straight Up! Hey, do you want me to check your account?" "Yes please, I've got some important stuff in there!" "Ok, what's your username..." He tells me. Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun. At point blank range. In the head. (Do I really need to tell you the clicky clicky bit?.. I think not) "How many files are in your account?" I ask "Um, well there should be about 20 in my thesis writeup, 10 or so with the data for it, and another 20 or so in a book that I'm writing" "Hmmm. Well, I think we caught it just in time. You've still got 2 files left....cshrc and.login" "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaggggggggghhhh !" He sobs into the receiver a bit - it really turns my stomach. "What can I do?" he sniffs "Ok, do you have any of your stuff backed up on floppy?" "Some, but it's weeks old!" I fire up the bulk eraser. "Ok" I say "How about I come out and load all that data onto your account pronto so you can get some work done?" "That'd be great, but it's all at home" he wimpers. "I spose I'll just load it all in myself tonight" "Sure. But remember what I said, solar flares are bad for disks and machines. Protect your disks from solar activity to prevent them losing their data" "How do I do that? Wrap them in tin-foil?" "NO! TIN FOIL'S THE WORST THING! YOU KNOW WHAT TIN FOIL DOES IN A MICROWAVE DON'T YOU?!" "Yes.." "Then don't use it. There's only one thing that protects disks from solar activity.." "What's that?" "MAGNETS! Wrap your disks up in a pillow case with lots of magnets - Solar Flares hate that" "Wow! Thanks" "No worries at all..." Shit I'm good!
The JMP instruction is implemented at "runtime" during RNA splicing, and is AAGGU or CAGGU. The end of the actual coding sequence is the AG, and the GU is the start of the intron. 20 to 50 bases upstream of the end of the intron there is a special branch sequence CUPuAPy (where Pu==A or G, and Py==C or U) that must be present for the spliceosome complex to latch onto. The actual end of the intron occurs at the location of a "CAGG" sequence where the last G is part of the next exon, and this is where it makes the second cut before splicing.
So it isn't a real "JMP", it's more like/* and */.
In rare cases (e.g., HIV genes), the splicing signal sequences are duplicated and spelled slightly wrong, so that the spliceosomes cut the pre-mRNA at nondeterministic places resulting in a number of alternatively spliced mRNAs. And in some cases a splicing signal can be masked by a regulatory protein so that the intron gets into the coding sequence. This would be the closest analogy to a conditional jump that I can think of.
Re:Improve and go on until a third accident
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 1
Hey, despite the fact that fourteen lives have so far been lost in two shuttle accidents, it's still a whole lot safer than driving your car on a "lives lost per mile travelled" basis.
The orbital speed of the shuttle is over 17000 mph. In a little over a week, the shuttle travels 3 million miles. Even if every single shuttle crashed on reentry like this one did, resulting in the death of the entire crew (7 people), that would mean 7 deaths per 3,000,000 passenger-miles or only 230 deaths per 100 million, which is an absurdly high figure and should tell you that deaths per mile is an inappropriate and misleading statistic to use in this comparison.
But let's go with it for a minute, just to see what the numbers are. Let's conservatively assume that only one percent of shuttle flights end with the deaths of everyone onboard. (This is being generous- the failure rate is slightly higher than this.) That's about 42,800,000 passenger-miles per fatality, or 2.3 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles. Which is pretty good compared to automobile travel, right?
According to the government, in the year 2000, there were 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. (The deaths per passenger mile are not given, although they should be similar.)
Therefore, even in terms of "lives lost per mile travelled", the shuttle is still not as safe as a car! Incredible!
Slashdot Mirror
Why the heck would anyone use printf for hello world?
Because Kernighan and Ritchie did, I guess.
Is java really worth developing for? I think it is great for its ease of programming and library support, but it's requirement of running on virtual machines leads to huge memory requirements for the simplest programs, and GC while nice, can lead to slow apps.
I would not recommend Java for small programs. But my company sells a scientific application that is written in Java. It handles large amounts of data and applies clustering algorithms that are computationally intensive. Compared with the sheer amounts of work that our own code is doing, the VM overhead is hardly noticeable. Our customer base is evenly split between academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Almost a third of our installs are on the Mac, and there's a few percent who are using Linux. The rest are running Windows.
Our leading competitor sells a Windows-only product. We have three times as much market share.
Why would anyone want to write a serious "enterprise" application in Java vs. say C++??
Because C++ sucks.
printf allocates money. Use fprintf directed to stderr, which doesn't buffer output. :-)
That's interesting. Who gets the money?
Of course fprintf() will be illegal soon since nobody can make any money off of it.
This is really just more anti-Microsoft Slashdot FUD. After all, this only affects programs that allocate memory.
Programmers can easily work around this bug by returning right after printf("Hello World") finishes.
A meteorite the size of the Library of Congress exploded in the atmosphere. Small documents have been landing everywhere.
Again, history is a useful guide, and it shows that even during the steepest recessions, the majority of workers don't lose their jobs; instead, they get raises. Yes, even during the Great Depression, prices fell much faster than wages, so many workers actually saw an increase in their real income. From August 1929 to March 1932, factory workers still on the job saw their real income jump by an annualized rate of 4.3 percent, which was two and a half times the rate of increase they enjoyed during the Roaring '20s.
This is an interesting point, and forces me to reconsider that maybe the Great Depression wasn't as bad as everyone says it was! Sure, lots of people are out of a job right now, but if you weren't laid off this month, things are great because none of your laid off coworkers can afford milk and the stores have to lower the price, which increases your spending power! If you think about it, the economy is great! This month, anyway. I hope I'm not laid off next month.
Of course, things aren't as simple as they were in 1930. The economy has some problems it didn't have back then:
-massive consumer debt
-trade deficits
-increasing corporate reliance on previously inaccessible cheap overseas labor
-a housing bubble
-a huge federal deficit
The federal deficit is worthy of more attention than it's been getting. The government has rung up a deficit of $194 billion dollars in just the first five months of the 2003 budget year. In February alone we pulled out the Visa and racked up charges of $96.3 billion. A 10 year $1.35 trillion tax cut has to come from somewhere. The Bush Administration will politically leverage its wartime popularity surge to get another tax cut for People Wealthier Than You for $726 billion during a fucking liquidity crisis. At least the Senate lopped off $100 billion to pay for the war. Think about that. You could have six more wars and still have $26 billion of tax cuts left. I just hope these rich bastards who are getting all this money immediately invest it in ventures that put Americans to work! Although they're not stupid and will probably buy bonds with it.
According to Keynesian theory, unemployment and inflation are supposed to be mutually exclusive- each is supposed to prevent the other from happening. The disproof of that theory came during the 70s and was named stagflation. Things suck when everyone is out of work and milk still keeps costing more than it did last week. I hope the financial markets don't notice these Reagan-sized deficits anytime soon! All this unemployment might not count for much. At least the Fed can increase interest rates to control it, I guess, since they've pushed them down to artificially low levels in their futile attempts to reignite the boom. If you have a house be sure to refinance now while interest rates are so low, because they're going to go up.
I want to know why everyone is talking about a lopsided war with a tinpot Middle East dictator- this shit is the real news.
I find it disappointing the way so many people deny that Saddam Hussein is responsible not only for direct attacks on America, but also for atrocities in his own country that make Milosevic look like an angel.
Ummm... what "direct attacks on America"?
The standard for proof has sunk really low. Repeat something often enough now and it becomes true.
I know the war has some costs, and we may even lose a few American lives, but we will bring freedom to Iraq, and how can you put a price on that?
We will NOT bring freedom to Iraq- that much is certain. Unless you define "freedom" as "pro-American", which so many people do reflexively without a second thought. True democracy in Iraq would not give us results that we would like or tolerate. People there tend to vote for Islamist parties, and our outrageous behavior of late doesn't help. Starving people and dropping bombs on them won't make them vote for you.
The most we can hope for is something like another Saudi Arabia. Frankly one is enough.
Can you imagine a world with a peaceful Middle East? Our President can.
Wow, you've been exposed to a lot of propaganda. Are you listening to the baseless statements coming out of your mouth? A critical thinker just doesn't say things like that.
Imagining something and actually making it happen are two different things. I can imagine a world with candy cane trees, but that doesn't mean I actually have a coherent plan for making it happen! There are a lot of people with naive views that are in for a rude awakening before this is over. Wishful thinking is not good foreign policy.
Not being able to establish a client state doesn't mean your only recourse is complete neglect and stupid policy. Even as late as 2001 the Bush administration was showering $40 million on the Taliban as a reward for their crackdown on poppy production (part of our "War On Drugs").
Even though you call me a jackass I agree with your sentiment on Saudi Arabia. Unlike Iraq, you can make a legitimate argument that turning Saudi Arabia into a smoking crater would be in our own best interest.
Instead we are preparing to build Saudi Arabia II in Iraq- producing yet another oil exporting country with a repressive puppet government that secretly encourages its citizens to export terrorism and that we keep propped up at our own expense in order to keep the oil flowing. The propaganda about "bringing democracy to the region" is completely naive. If true democracy comes to Iraq the results would probably not be something we would like.
No, you are completely right. Those moves were also completely illogical. The Taliban took over Afghanistan because we foolishly lost interest in the country once we saw the Soviets were gone. It was also stupid to sell chemical and biological agents to Iraq because we saw him fighting with Iran.
The U.S. has proven time and again its tactical incompetence in its application of foreign policy in this region. But our foreign policy expertise has suddenly gotten really bad. Never before has merely demanding a logical case for war branded one as a "traitor". This war is a huge gift to Al Quaeda, who have apparently been recruiting like mad now that the conventional wisdom across the entire Arab world is that the U.S. is fighting a "war on Islam". Unfortunately, nobody has yet come up with an excuse for the war that is believed by anybody outside our own borders. Instead, we're content to come up with excuses that play well in the "red states". U.S. foreign policy has had inconsistencies since the fifties, but never before now have we acted so violently against our own self-interest for what are looking more and more like ideological reasons. I think you agree with me and didn't realize I was being sarcastic.
"You can support our troops without supporting the President." - Trent Lott during the Kosovo crisis
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
Those words were uttered by Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, the U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials in Nuremberg at the close of World War II. But what did he know? That was in 1945, when everyone was complacent and comfortable. After 9/11, "everything is different" or something. A logical foreign policy is apparently a luxury we can no longer afford.
Though I have to say I'm slightly puzzled by the consensus here that it is wrong not to pay for content and the 'victims' deserved all they get, but elsewhere on Slashdot there is outrage when action is taken against filesharers. When is copyright material not copyright material?
-P2P has noninfringing uses as has been pointed out. "Steal cable for free" filters do not (unless they are simply off-the-shelf coax parts being sold as such).
-Slashdot does not speak with one voice. Many people post here. The individuals who express outrage over P2P crackdowns in other threads are not necessarily the ones giggling at this story.
-P2P crackdowns are just depressing; they're yet another example of corporate dominance and control. This cable filter story, on the other hand, introduces the concepts of greed and gullibility. A little schadenfreude shouldn't be surprising.
Well, there is a monthly "features" mail that i get on my hotmail account from "staff@hotmail.com" that
cannot be blocked
cannot be marked as "junk mail"
cannot be forwarded ( say to "abuse" at hotmail.com)
does not specify how i can stop recieving it
You forgot:
is the single email message most frequently imitated/forged by hotmail spammers
If a company can collect frequent flyer miles from all its employees, it will keep careful track of them and make sure they're all redeemed. That "LOT of money" that could be saved would be coming out of the airline's hide. The airlines would probably just stop offering frequent flyer miles. They're pretty much a gimmick anyway.
Yeah, and after that, let's fund a billion dollar campaign to educate the world about the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and DNF.
Since nobody writes letters from Nigeria claiming to be the Tooth Fairy, I think that this second campaign of yours is a boondoggle. The Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy don't leave the borders of the country with upwards of 80 million a year either.
As much as we like to see a small number of incredibly stupid and greedy people suffer tremendously, it is still within the public interest that this get stopped.
And then there's the U.S., a basically free country, which has too many laws to count, and plenty of laws which contradict other laws, and many times more population.... It's the country most lived in and hated by vocal Slashdotters --
You're painting with a broad brush. I've never seen any "vocal Slashdotters" saying anything about "hating" their country.
most of the non-vocal probably disagree, with the vocal ones, but who can prove that, either way.
In other words, unless someone specifically says otherwise, their silence should be taken as agreement with you and your own opinions.
(I am not the typical vocal Slashdotter, when it comes to my views of the U.S. Perhaps, warts and all, I love my country more than most.)
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Mere flag waving doesn't make you a patriot.
The JMP instruction is implemented at "runtime" during RNA splicing
Whoops, I should have said that JMP is implemented at compile time... during a preprocessing step that is receiving input from copies of the program that have already been compiled and that are running, as well as other programs running in the system.
Both lawsuits mentioned are real lawsuits. Both have probably cost McDonald's a profitable quarter or two. Both have have probably made a Big Mac for me 10 cents higher.
....
Are you out of your mind? Or are you just innumerate?
The fat guy's lawsuit I'll grant was stupid. In the other one, the plaintiff had originally asked McDonald's to cover her medical expenses (initially $11000, later $20000) to replace the skin on her crotch. McDonald's offered $800, so she went to court.
A mediator recommended settling for $225,000. McDonald's refused and it went to trial. A jury reduced the award to $160,000 because of the woman's own contributory negligence- she spilled it on herself.
But the jury was inflamed by the "Fight Club" style cost benefit analysis that McDonald's had done. If you serve the coffee so hot that nobody can taste it, you can buy a cheap and inferior grade of beans. McDonald's had calculated that the cost of settling the inevitable lawsuits from severe burns would not offset the savings made from buying crap coffee. And they had ignored 700 prior incidents of people getting burned. Establishments that serve hot coffee don't usually get requests from burn centers to lower the temperature of the coffee. That should be taken as a sign that something is wrong.
For punitive damages, the jury's verdict was two days worth of profits on sales of coffee. This turned out to be $2.7 million. On appeal the judge lowered the award to $480,000, and it was finally settled for an undisclosed amount.
So the total damages for McDonald's (including attorney fees) was probably on the order of a few hours worth of lost profits on their coffee. I doubt that this incident "cost McDonald's a profitable quarter". Nor did it result in you having to fork over ten extra cents for a Big Mac to shove into your face, so stop feeling sorry for yourself.
I give no sympathy to the stupid. You don't hold coffee between your legs in a moving car.
The car was stationary. She wasn't even the driver.
It was later discovered, for your records, that the old woman who burned her cooch, was the sister in law to the owner of a small coffee chain in the area where she lived. This illustrates the point of competing through litigation.
Wow, that's brilliantly diabolical.
Step 1: Cover your legs and genitals with third degree burns requiring extensive skin grafts
Step 2:
Step 3: Profit!
Maybe not with /* and */, but I've seen people use #ifdef and #endif to implement a lot of stuff in C/C++.
It seems nature also works this way, with a heavy reliance on preprocessing (transcription) hacks that modify the code itself before it's "compiled" into protein form. Heavy reliance on the C preprocessor can make your C code about as hard to read as DNA.
Err, what about jumping backwards? Don't tell me that's just future copies of the sequence... because without conditional branches it doesn't seem all that usefull to me.
There's lots of conditional branching.
Sexual differentiation in Drosophila is regulated by a protein called sex-lethal or sxl. During embryological development in females, a repressor protein binds to a splicing signal at the start of one of the middle exons in sxl, hiding it from the spliceosomes. This prevents the exon from making it into the finished mRNA after the other exons are spliced together (the exon gets junked along with the two introns on either end of it).
The repressor protein is not present in males and so they create an mRNA strand for sxl that includes the exon- the presence of which renders the finished protein inactive.
So this is sort of like a conditional jump, or an #ifdef at the very least, that controls sexual differentiation during embryological development.
BOFH Episode 6
.cshrc and .login"h !"
It's friday, so I get into work early, before lunch even. The phone rings. Shit!
I turn the page on the excuse sheet. "SOLAR FLARES" stares out at me. I'd better read up on that. Two minutes later I'm ready to answer the phone.
"Hello?" I say.
"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET YOU ALL MORNING?!"
I hate it when they shout at me early in the morning. It always puts me in a bad mood. You know what I mean.
"Ah, yes. Well, there's been some solar activity this morning, it always disrupts electronics..." I say, sweet as a sugar pie.
"Huh? But I could get through to my friends?!"
"Yes, that's entirely possible, solar activity is very unpredictable in it's effects. Why last week, we had some files just dissappear from a guys account while he was working on it!"
"Really?"
"Straight Up! Hey, do you want me to check your account?"
"Yes please, I've got some important stuff in there!"
"Ok, what's your username..."
He tells me. Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun. At point blank range. In the head.
(Do I really need to tell you the clicky clicky bit?.. I think not)
"How many files are in your account?" I ask
"Um, well there should be about 20 in my thesis writeup, 10 or so with the data for it, and another 20 or so in a book that I'm writing"
"Hmmm. Well, I think we caught it just in time. You've still got 2 files left...
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaggggggggghhh
He sobs into the receiver a bit - it really turns my stomach.
"What can I do?" he sniffs
"Ok, do you have any of your stuff backed up on floppy?"
"Some, but it's weeks old!"
I fire up the bulk eraser.
"Ok" I say "How about I come out and load all that data onto your account pronto so you can get some work done?"
"That'd be great, but it's all at home" he wimpers. "I spose I'll just load it all in myself tonight"
"Sure. But remember what I said, solar flares are bad for disks and machines. Protect your disks from solar activity to prevent them losing their data"
"How do I do that? Wrap them in tin-foil?"
"NO! TIN FOIL'S THE WORST THING! YOU KNOW WHAT TIN FOIL DOES IN A MICROWAVE DON'T YOU?!"
"Yes.."
"Then don't use it. There's only one thing that protects disks from solar activity.."
"What's that?"
"MAGNETS! Wrap your disks up in a pillow case with lots of magnets - Solar Flares hate that"
"Wow! Thanks"
"No worries at all..."
Shit I'm good!
I work at a bioinformatics software company.
Although I'd like to pretend that I have to know this stuff for my job, I just did a Google search.
Source: http://www.web-books.com/MoBio/Free/Ch5A4.htm
how do they make "JMP" instructions in DNA?
/* and */.
The JMP instruction is implemented at "runtime" during RNA splicing, and is AAGGU or CAGGU. The end of the actual coding sequence is the AG, and the GU is the start of the intron.
20 to 50 bases upstream of the end of the intron there is a special branch sequence CUPuAPy (where Pu==A or G, and Py==C or U) that must be present for the spliceosome complex to latch onto. The actual end of the intron occurs at the location of a "CAGG" sequence where the last G is part of the next exon, and this is where it makes the second cut before splicing.
So it isn't a real "JMP", it's more like
In rare cases (e.g., HIV genes), the splicing signal sequences are duplicated and spelled slightly wrong, so that the spliceosomes cut the pre-mRNA at nondeterministic places resulting in a number of alternatively spliced mRNAs. And in some cases a splicing signal can be masked by a regulatory protein so that the intron gets into the coding sequence. This would be the closest analogy to a conditional jump that I can think of.
Hey, despite the fact that fourteen lives have so far been lost in two shuttle accidents, it's still a whole lot safer than driving your car on a "lives lost per mile travelled" basis.
The orbital speed of the shuttle is over 17000 mph. In a little over a week, the shuttle travels 3 million miles. Even if every single shuttle crashed on reentry like this one did, resulting in the death of the entire crew (7 people), that would mean 7 deaths per 3,000,000 passenger-miles or only 230 deaths per 100 million, which is an absurdly high figure and should tell you that deaths per mile is an inappropriate and misleading statistic to use in this comparison.
But let's go with it for a minute, just to see what the numbers are. Let's conservatively assume that only one percent of shuttle flights end with the deaths of everyone onboard. (This is being generous- the failure rate is slightly higher than this.) That's about 42,800,000 passenger-miles per fatality, or 2.3 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles. Which is pretty good compared to automobile travel, right?
According to the government, in the year 2000, there were 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. (The deaths per passenger mile are not given, although they should be similar.)
Therefore, even in terms of "lives lost per mile travelled", the shuttle is still not as safe as a car! Incredible!
The hottest place in the solar system used to be the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor in Princeton, New Jersey.