Actually, there's nothing in the program that requires stdio.h, though of course it's good form to #include it for when someone wants to add features to the program.
And you really should call exit(0), rather than using return. A sensible system will use the return value of main() as the exit status, but there have been systems (both unix and non-unix) where this doesn't happen.
To be truly paranoid, I might note that I've seen cases where exit() returned an error, and I had to add return(0) to handle that "can't happen" case.
It's amazing how many things can go wrong. I've long liked the theory that programming is a kind of computer game. When your program does its job correctly, you get a point. When something in the system can find a way to misinterpret what your code said so that it goes berserk, the system's designers get a point.
This is one of the more challenging games in existence. But we get paid well to play it.
But just presenting the "Hello, world!\n" program would probably just get a "Huh?" response from most readers. If you're going to stick your neck out and propose something so apparently trivial, you'd better also present a good argument justifying such a proposal, by explaining the problem being solved and why this program solves it.
In this case, it's sorta fun to explain why a trivial program is more significant than all the non-trivial approaches that you usually see to handling this problem.
In the original "C bible", Kernigan & Ritchie gave us the program:
main() {
printf("Hello, world!\n"); }
This is one of the most significant programs of all time, and I've used it repeatedly (in many languages) when working on either a new system, or one that is exhibiting baffling misbehaviors. As K&R pointed out, when you get this program to run, you have solved many of the most significant problems in getting any program to run:
1. You've managed to run an editor and create a file. (And that file is in a format that the compiler can read; a non-trivial problem on some systems.;-)
2. You've figured out how to run the compiler, feed it a source file, and link the output with the appropriate system library.
3. You've successfully told the system to run the compiled program, and also successfully got its output in a form that you can read it.
The advantage to this program is that it does all the above, and nothing else. So if it doesn't work, there's no confusion trying to figure out what in the program is screwed up. It's clear that you have a problem with the basic mechanics of creating a working program, and the problem isn't in your code.
I've also had some fun arguing that "Except for a few missing features, we have our program, and it works. Now what features do we need to add?" I've also been disappointed when nobody points out that the above program does have one significant bug that should be fixed first.
An interesting variant that I've presented in several projects that dealt with GUIs: A tcl/tk (wish) version of this is:
If tcl and tk are installed correctly, feeding this to the wish command will pop up a little window with a button labelled "Hello". When you click on it, it writes "Hello!" to the window where you ran the program.
It's interesting to challenge the developers to produce a program that does nothing but this, in whatever language the project leaders have decreed. It's amazing how much code this usually takes, and how long it takes to get it to work correctly.
I've seen many attempts to do this on Windows, generally with much grief and weeks of effort, with utterly different code resulting on nearly every new release. And after a year, I still haven't learned how to do this with Apple's GUI on OSX. (Of course, the usual explanation is that I'm an 1D10T.;-)
Actually, I usually do a somewhat longer wish example:
They control production, but they can't force the consumer to purchase what they've got.
Maybe not in a legal sense. But in a practical sense, they do exactly that in lots of small towns across the US. After all the other local retailers are bankrupt and shut down, you either buy from Wal-Mart, or you drive an hour or more to some other town that still has other businesses. In some areas, Wal-Mart is the only supplier of most goods within several hours' drive.
But this is an old story. It's what life was like everywhere, before transportation got fast and cheap in the more "developed" parts of the world. It's still the story in most of the under-developed areas. "If you want that, you'll have to buy from me at my price, because it'll take you several days to reach the next-closest supplier."
(A) given that it has not yet been established that there actually IS any long term warming due to green house gases or due to anything else for that matter (because nobody has measured it yet),...
To put it into some sort of perspective, I remember back in the 1950's, when I was a nerdy kid liviing in the Seattle area, something that I read about a number of times was a local climate anomaly: In that general area (roughly BC to Oregon), the mean annual temperature had been falling for most of the century. This is easy to measure in that area - just keep track of the termination lines of the glaciers.
The articles on this invariably mentioned the "well-documented" fact that in almost all of the world, temperatures had been slowly rising for the century or so that we actually had accurate records. At the time, the idea that this might be in part due to human (i.e., industrial) activity was a conjecture, for which "further research is necessary". But the warming was considered a fact, not a conjecture.
Half a century later, this only qualifies as conjecture in political circles. There is abundant scientific data now, and there have been a great many articles not just saying what the temperature change has been, but also what fraction is attributable to human activities.
Of course, these articles, if they are really scientific, will include error bars on their numbers. To politicians, an error bar means "The scientists don't really know what the number is." To scientists, an error bar means that the writer isn't trying to hoodwink the reader. (It also helps establish that you're a scientist and not a politician.;-)
One of the curious sources of warming that has been measured is the methane output of cattle. Methane is, of course, a strong "greenhouse gas". But the numbers show that cattle account for less than half the methane in the atmosphere, and most of the rest was a mystery until last year. Then some entomologists reported that they'd found the other major source: termites. You might not believe how many of those little critters are living on the planet now. There's some evidence that their numbers are increasing, but the numbers on this are not good (to my knowledge).
Anyway, the one thing that the scientists and politicians agree on is that further research is needed. (But then, scientists always say that.;-)
Oh, and the glaciers in the Pacific Northwest stopped growing back in the 60's and 70's. They've been retreating rapidly since then, like everywhere else in the world. The general explanation for the half century of cooling in the area seems to be that the Japanese current got stronger and moved a bit closer to shore. But this might be a conjecture; I don't recall reading anything that gave good evidence on the topic.
Yup. The linguists usually call this BVE (Black Vernacular English), or sometimes BVA (Black Vernacular American) and classify it as one of the four main North-American dialects of English. It's interesting because it's primarily a social dialect rather than regional like the other three. Linguists also like it because of its radical differences from the other North-American dialects.
A big fuss has been made over this dialect, for social and political reasons. But linguists like to consider themselves scientists, so they mostly ignore such subjective (and sometimes moralistic and/or racist) attitudes. BVE under any name is linguistically significant and quite worthy of study.
Of course, linguists would say the same of Navajo, Chinook, Hawaiian, and Cajun French. Linguistic interest and political/social importance aren't particularly related.
Yeah, and I've seen linguists who object to the term "General American" for the predominant dialect, on the grounds that Canadian English is a subdialect of the same dialect. You see the abbreviation GNA (General North American) in some linguistics texts, instead of the more common GA.
Of course, the same thing happens in print. Some fonts turn these sets of letters into glyphs that don't quite reflect or rotate into each other. But this doesn't help the 5-year-olds much, since it's really an example of another problem: the many different forms of the same letter in different fonts and scripts.
Another sort of problem that is nearly unique to our Roman alphabet: The pairs "cl" and "rn" can look like "d" and "m" in a lot of fonts and scripts. So "clear" can be nearly indistinguishable from "dear". I've seen cases where it was difficult to decide whether they meant "modern" or "modem". This is similar to the problems in Hebrew with the nearly-identical letters.
But if you want a really nightmarish writing system, take a look at Arabic. OTOH, it can be really pretty.;-)
Face it, people don't give two flying fucks about being educated in computer know-how. They want to flip the switch and have it work.
No, they don't. If they did, they would never buy anything from Microsoft. They'd all be buying Macs.
And don't try to claim that they're ignorant of Windows' user hostility. Jokes about the difficulty of making computers do anything right are part of the general culture. And people with even the slightest bit of computer awareness are always aware of Apple. I've overhead many forms of this exchange:
Person1: I hate my fuckin' computer; it never works right. Person2: Hmm... I never seem to have problems like you're having. Person1: Yeah, but you use a Macintosh. Person2: <shrug/>
No, there's a simple reason they buy the most user-hostile computers: marketing. They buy it because they've been told over and over that it's the only computer that people ever buy. And this happens because Microsoft has an advertising budget larger than the total operating budget of all those zillions of little computer companies like Apple or Sun or whoever.
Also, they don't want to be thought of as nerds, which is how they think of Mac users.
We might observe that most American-made dictionaries have long called themselves a "Dictionary of the American Language", not English.
Linguistically, of course, American is a dialect of English. But there is general recognition that "English" properly refers to the dialects spoken in England.
Then there are the Aussies who insist that they speak Strine, not English.;-)
I'd imagine that the learning problems are similar in all three.
In a similar vein, I had a linguistics prof in college (a couple decades ago, so this isn't a new idea) who was involved in a study comparing the reading problems of children in the US and Israel. One of the points of interest was dyslexia.
Hebrew and English turn out to be rather different in this regard. The main differences are: Hebrew has no pairs of letters that are the same except for rotation or reflection, while English has a lot of them. Thus the b/d/p/q set shows a single form that occurs in four different orientations. Also, Hebrew has no upper/lower-case distinction, which is also a source of confusion in English. (It does have a print/script distinction, which presents the same sort of problem, to a lesser degree.)
OTOH, Hebrew has a number of letters that differ in only tiny details. Let's see if/. can handle Hebrew letters://, . (Hmm... That doesn't look too good when I hit Review. Oh, well.;-) What would be a serif in English is a distinguishing part of some Hebrew letters.
Anyway, comparing reading problems in different writing systems is an old source of research funding. There's a fair amount of literature on the topic.
It's possible that the fish could be producing those ticks with other parts of their bodies. The significant discovery was that the ticks were produced anally.
Scientists sometimes come up with really wonderful observations.
Yeah, but if you miss the Daily Show, you miss one of the few TV shows that's actually informative about American politics.
(I hardly watch any TV at all, actually, and most of what I watch is the Comedy Channel. There's hardly anything else that has any real information content. The last time I watched more than an hour in one day was Sep 11, 2001.;-)
Yeah, and it's too bad that ComedyCentral.com has such screwed-up HTML that on a wide range of systems and browsers, you can't watch most of the videos.
For example, my Mac PowerBook now has 8 browsers installed, and none of them is successful at showing more that 5% to 10% of their video clips. My linux box has 5 browsers, and about the same rate of success. We even have a Windows box in our house, so I can test to see if it's another example of a web site that's designed to only work with IE on Windows. Nope; the failure rate there is about the same.
It's not bad video files. When I can find the actual URL for a clip, I can feed it to either Real Player or WMP (the only formats they seem to use), and it always works just fine.
I've seen a number of discussions of this in several newsgroups. The general explanation seems to be simply that the HTML is so insanely bizarre that it's surprising that any browser can handle it correctly. I've dug into a few of their pages, and I'd agree with this summary.
One thing that's funny is that the latest Real Player comes with its own browser. It works pretty well for every site I've tried except for ComedyCentral.com.
I wonder if there's any way we can prevail on them to provide a page that just lists the clips with simple descriptions, and has a plain hyperlink to each clip? If they'd do this, their online viewership would probably go way up.
I've dug around a bit in their web site, looking for an email address so I could send them some questions about the problem. But so far, I haven't found any sort of "user feedback" link. They have a reference to a discussion page, but it just contains a notice that it doesn't work.
So I guess we're just limited to watching Jon Stewart on TV. Around here, it comes on at 11 pm. Those of us with things to do in the evenings (political meetings, technical meetings, gigs, whatever) find that this cuts seriously into our Daily Show fixes...
My question is: is there anything Microsoft can do that we won't question?
Of course not. And it's not just Microsoft; we should question anything from any source. Microsoft is merely the worst of a bad lot.
Note that the concept of Open Source could be re-phrased as "The source must be available so that users can criticise it and ask questions about it." So, yes, we also question Open Source Software. Often and publicly.
Anyone who accepts someone else's products without question is either a fool or is on the take.
Given Microsoft's history, we have special reasons to question everything they do. And the only reasonable attitude is skepticism. Maybe they're being honest with us this time. But I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
George Bush recently garbled an important old saying, that starts with "Fool me once,...." Anyone know the rest of it? (Of course, George's mangled version is more entertaining.;-)
Well, usually the fluids wouldn't be considered a "part" of a pump. But in this case, the actual pump consists of oscillations in the fluid, while the solid-phase components are merely the "case" that contains the pump. So it would seem reasonable to list the fluid (or more specifically the wave fronts in the fluid) as the "parts" of the pump.
Yeah, I know; it's "Picky, picky." But the history of science and engineering is full of examples where the detailed definitions of the terms are very important to full understanding.
OTOH, we're talking about a media report here, so I suppose one can't expect precise terminology.
The vibe here tends to be anti-copyright, but is it so anti-copyright that we even think it's ok for a store to make a profit off musicians that never get paid?
Time to once again mention that, unless your recording sells at least 1.5 million copies, you won't get paid. At least, this is the situation with "industry standard" recording-industry contracts.
If your recording sells under a million copies, you'll usually end up in debt to the recording company. So maybe this store was actually helping the musicians, by selling the recordings in such a way that they wouldn't put the musicians in debt to the store.;-)
Actually, it's quite likely they were. I've seen it mentioned in passing by assorted "IAAL" types that if you don't have prior written permission to perform a copyrighted work, your performance is probably illegal. The concept of "mechanical royalty" has been invented to legalize such things, but there are a few reasons this might not apply. One is that the intent of this concept was to legalize broadcasts of recorded works, not live performances. And how many performers actually pay such royalties? I know my gang of (mostly very amateur;-) musical friends don't. Now, it possible that if you play in a bar or such public place, the management may have paid the annual license. That protects the place's owners from a complicity charge, but it doesn't actually protect the performers, who are the ones committing the illegal act, unless every one of them has also paid the annual license fee.
The only safe way to perform a copyrighted work is to have handy a signed letter of permission from the copyright holder (or agent).
Actually, there's another way: Only perform works that are well out of copyright. Of course, if you look into the "Happy Birthday" story, you'll find that this can be difficult. Works more than a century old may still be copyrighted.
Oh, well; in general the copyright laws are rather fscked up these days, and getting fsckeder by the month. It's not too surprising to hear of some judge raising a lonely voice and asking for some sanity. We can trust he'll be overturned on appeal.
I mean, how are fluid oscillations not "moving parts".
OK; I understand what they're trying to say, and I also understand that this is hardly news (since the basic idea has been around for a couple of centuries).
But the phrase "moving parts" seems like sometime really in need of replacement by something that's a bit less misleading. The functional parts of this pump are quite definitely moving.
It doesn't matter if most of the volunteers are computer illiterates. In fact, it helps a lot if they are. All it really takes is one knowledgeable "volunteer" per critical precinct, and a few minutes with the machine. Preferably alone, of course, but if there are a number of the "illiterates" present, that's probably ok, as they won't understand what's being done.
(d) that has been marked in more than one circle at the right of the candidates' names;
So if I'm counting votes in a Canadian election, I can bias the vote by simply keeping a #2 pencil in my shirt pocket, and adding an extra X or two when some silly voter voted for the wrong candidate.
(That's how it's done in the US in places that still use paper ballots.;-)
(Now if we used "acceptance" voting, this would be much less of a problem - though it would still be a minor problem.)
[W]ho in their right mind would write a national voting system in Microsoft Access?!?
Ooh, ooh; an easy one!
Answer: People working for a company that makes voting equipment, and whose CEO recently promised in writing that he would deliver Ohio to Bush in the next election.
It's looking more and more like he wasn't joking, and yes, he meant it in exactly the way it sounded.
Unix is a creation of the west, AT&T, and was "opened up" by UC Berkeley.
Yeah, and the Internet was developed mostly with funds from the US Defense Department. Funny how people everywhere are ignoring that and adopting it despite its evil origins. Actually, the story is a bit similar to unix, since the actual development was done in a lot of universities and companies. The military took the code and cloned it, but left the public version behind, and it's that version that became the public Internet.
Apologies to Muslims, I don't know the term for your dietary rules.
The term is "halal" (with a few variant transliterations). The rules are nearly identical to the Jewish kosher laws, with a few differences from centuries of different religious interpretation. There are a number of food suppliers in the US that are certified under both the kosher and halal laws. Only the most rabid fundamentalists (Muslim or Jewish) would be offended by your confusing them.
And, of course, even if you don't believe in these laws, you still might buy the food because of its high quality. I even know a number of Muslims that buy Hebrew National hot dogs, because they like them and trust the maker to not contaminate them.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting? Where's the "funny" moderation here?
Nearly 20 years ago, RMS wrote a nice parody of what the AC was talking about. See his man(1) page for the GNUecho command.
Needless to say, GNUecho's source would also be far too big for this contest.
Now would someone please add a "funny" mod to the parent?
Actually, there's nothing in the program that requires stdio.h, though of course it's good form to #include it for when someone wants to add features to the program.
And you really should call exit(0), rather than using return. A sensible system will use the return value of main() as the exit status, but there have been systems (both unix and non-unix) where this doesn't happen.
To be truly paranoid, I might note that I've seen cases where exit() returned an error, and I had to add return(0) to handle that "can't happen" case.
It's amazing how many things can go wrong. I've long liked the theory that programming is a kind of computer game. When your program does its job correctly, you get a point. When something in the system can find a way to misinterpret what your code said so that it goes berserk, the system's designers get a point.
This is one of the more challenging games in existence. But we get paid well to play it.
Heh, heh; yeah.
But just presenting the "Hello, world!\n" program would probably just get a "Huh?" response from most readers. If you're going to stick your neck out and propose something so apparently trivial, you'd better also present a good argument justifying such a proposal, by explaining the problem being solved and why this program solves it.
In this case, it's sorta fun to explain why a trivial program is more significant than all the non-trivial approaches that you usually see to handling this problem.
In the original "C bible", Kernigan & Ritchie gave us the program:
;-)
.h -text "Hello" -command {puts "Hello!"} .h
;-)
.h -text Hello -command {puts "Hello!"} .x -text Quit -command exit .h .x
main() {
printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
This is one of the most significant programs of all time, and I've used it repeatedly (in many languages) when working on either a new system, or one that is exhibiting baffling misbehaviors. As K&R pointed out, when you get this program to run, you have solved many of the most significant problems in getting any program to run:
1. You've managed to run an editor and create a file. (And that file is in a format that the compiler can read; a non-trivial problem on some systems.
2. You've figured out how to run the compiler, feed it a source file, and link the output with the appropriate system library.
3. You've successfully told the system to run the compiled program, and also successfully got its output in a form that you can read it.
The advantage to this program is that it does all the above, and nothing else. So if it doesn't work, there's no confusion trying to figure out what in the program is screwed up. It's clear that you have a problem with the basic mechanics of creating a working program, and the problem isn't in your code.
I've also had some fun arguing that "Except for a few missing features, we have our program, and it works. Now what features do we need to add?" I've also been disappointed when nobody points out that the above program does have one significant bug that should be fixed first.
An interesting variant that I've presented in several projects that dealt with GUIs: A tcl/tk (wish) version of this is:
button
pack
If tcl and tk are installed correctly, feeding this to the wish command will pop up a little window with a button labelled "Hello". When you click on it, it writes "Hello!" to the window where you ran the program.
It's interesting to challenge the developers to produce a program that does nothing but this, in whatever language the project leaders have decreed. It's amazing how much code this usually takes, and how long it takes to get it to work correctly.
I've seen many attempts to do this on Windows, generally with much grief and weeks of effort, with utterly different code resulting on nearly every new release. And after a year, I still haven't learned how to do this with Apple's GUI on OSX. (Of course, the usual explanation is that I'm an 1D10T.
Actually, I usually do a somewhat longer wish example:
button
button
pack
This solves the problem that with some GUIs, using the "X" widget on the window border destroys the window but doesn't tell the app to exit.
They control production, but they can't force the consumer to purchase what they've got.
Maybe not in a legal sense. But in a practical sense, they do exactly that in lots of small towns across the US. After all the other local retailers are bankrupt and shut down, you either buy from Wal-Mart, or you drive an hour or more to some other town that still has other businesses. In some areas, Wal-Mart is the only supplier of most goods within several hours' drive.
But this is an old story. It's what life was like everywhere, before transportation got fast and cheap in the more "developed" parts of the world. It's still the story in most of the under-developed areas. "If you want that, you'll have to buy from me at my price, because it'll take you several days to reach the next-closest supplier."
(A) given that it has not yet been established that there actually IS any long term warming due to green house gases or due to anything else for that matter (because nobody has measured it yet), ...
;-)
;-)
To put it into some sort of perspective, I remember back in the 1950's, when I was a nerdy kid liviing in the Seattle area, something that I read about a number of times was a local climate anomaly: In that general area (roughly BC to Oregon), the mean annual temperature had been falling for most of the century. This is easy to measure in that area - just keep track of the termination lines of the glaciers.
The articles on this invariably mentioned the "well-documented" fact that in almost all of the world, temperatures had been slowly rising for the century or so that we actually had accurate records. At the time, the idea that this might be in part due to human (i.e., industrial) activity was a conjecture, for which "further research is necessary". But the warming was considered a fact, not a conjecture.
Half a century later, this only qualifies as conjecture in political circles. There is abundant scientific data now, and there have been a great many articles not just saying what the temperature change has been, but also what fraction is attributable to human activities.
Of course, these articles, if they are really scientific, will include error bars on their numbers. To politicians, an error bar means "The scientists don't really know what the number is." To scientists, an error bar means that the writer isn't trying to hoodwink the reader. (It also helps establish that you're a scientist and not a politician.
One of the curious sources of warming that has been measured is the methane output of cattle. Methane is, of course, a strong "greenhouse gas". But the numbers show that cattle account for less than half the methane in the atmosphere, and most of the rest was a mystery until last year. Then some entomologists reported that they'd found the other major source: termites. You might not believe how many of those little critters are living on the planet now. There's some evidence that their numbers are increasing, but the numbers on this are not good (to my knowledge).
Anyway, the one thing that the scientists and politicians agree on is that further research is needed. (But then, scientists always say that.
Oh, and the glaciers in the Pacific Northwest stopped growing back in the 60's and 70's. They've been retreating rapidly since then, like everywhere else in the world. The general explanation for the half century of cooling in the area seems to be that the Japanese current got stronger and moved a bit closer to shore. But this might be a conjecture; I don't recall reading anything that gave good evidence on the topic.
And what about ebonics?
Yup. The linguists usually call this BVE (Black Vernacular English), or sometimes BVA (Black Vernacular American) and classify it as one of the four main North-American dialects of English. It's interesting because it's primarily a social dialect rather than regional like the other three. Linguists also like it because of its radical differences from the other North-American dialects.
A big fuss has been made over this dialect, for social and political reasons. But linguists like to consider themselves scientists, so they mostly ignore such subjective (and sometimes moralistic and/or racist) attitudes. BVE under any name is linguistically significant and quite worthy of study.
Of course, linguists would say the same of Navajo, Chinook, Hawaiian, and Cajun French. Linguistic interest and political/social importance aren't particularly related.
Yeah, and I've seen linguists who object to the term "General American" for the predominant dialect, on the grounds that Canadian English is a subdialect of the same dialect. You see the abbreviation GNA (General North American) in some linguistics texts, instead of the more common GA.
Heh. I hope you get a few "funny" mods.
;-)
Of course, the same thing happens in print. Some fonts turn these sets of letters into glyphs that don't quite reflect or rotate into each other. But this doesn't help the 5-year-olds much, since it's really an example of another problem: the many different forms of the same letter in different fonts and scripts.
Another sort of problem that is nearly unique to our Roman alphabet: The pairs "cl" and "rn" can look like "d" and "m" in a lot of fonts and scripts. So "clear" can be nearly indistinguishable from "dear". I've seen cases where it was difficult to decide whether they meant "modern" or "modem". This is similar to the problems in Hebrew with the nearly-identical letters.
But if you want a really nightmarish writing system, take a look at Arabic. OTOH, it can be really pretty.
Face it, people don't give two flying fucks about being educated in computer know-how. They want to flip the switch and have it work.
... I never seem to have problems like you're having.
No, they don't. If they did, they would never buy anything from Microsoft. They'd all be buying Macs.
And don't try to claim that they're ignorant of Windows' user hostility. Jokes about the difficulty of making computers do anything right are part of the general culture. And people with even the slightest bit of computer awareness are always aware of Apple. I've overhead many forms of this exchange:
Person1: I hate my fuckin' computer; it never works right.
Person2: Hmm
Person1: Yeah, but you use a Macintosh.
Person2: <shrug/>
No, there's a simple reason they buy the most user-hostile computers: marketing. They buy it because they've been told over and over that it's the only computer that people ever buy. And this happens because Microsoft has an advertising budget larger than the total operating budget of all those zillions of little computer companies like Apple or Sun or whoever.
Also, they don't want to be thought of as nerds, which is how they think of Mac users.
We might observe that most American-made dictionaries have long called themselves a "Dictionary of the American Language", not English.
;-)
Linguistically, of course, American is a dialect of English. But there is general recognition that "English" properly refers to the dialects spoken in England.
Then there are the Aussies who insist that they speak Strine, not English.
I'd imagine that the learning problems are similar in all three.
In a similar vein, I had a linguistics prof in college (a couple decades ago, so this isn't a new idea) who was involved in a study comparing the reading problems of children in the US and Israel. One of the points of interest was dyslexia.
/. can handle Hebrew letters: //, . (Hmm ... That doesn't look too good when I hit Review. Oh, well. ;-) What would be a serif in English is a distinguishing part of some Hebrew letters.
Hebrew and English turn out to be rather different in this regard. The main differences are: Hebrew has no pairs of letters that are the same except for rotation or reflection, while English has a lot of them. Thus the b/d/p/q set shows a single form that occurs in four different orientations. Also, Hebrew has no upper/lower-case distinction, which is also a source of confusion in English. (It does have a print/script distinction, which presents the same sort of problem, to a lesser degree.)
OTOH, Hebrew has a number of letters that differ in only tiny details. Let's see if
Anyway, comparing reading problems in different writing systems is an old source of research funding. There's a fair amount of literature on the topic.
I believe the correct term is 'fast, repetitive ticks' (or, um, 'FRTs')
Actually, it's "fast, anal, repetetive ticks" (FARTs).
It's possible that the fish could be producing those ticks with other parts of their bodies. The significant discovery was that the ticks were produced anally.
Scientists sometimes come up with really wonderful observations.
Yeah, but if you miss the Daily Show, you miss one of the few TV shows that's actually informative about American politics.
;-)
(I hardly watch any TV at all, actually, and most of what I watch is the Comedy Channel. There's hardly anything else that has any real information content. The last time I watched more than an hour in one day was Sep 11, 2001.
... but that's what the 'net for, info.
...
Yeah, and it's too bad that ComedyCentral.com has such screwed-up HTML that on a wide range of systems and browsers, you can't watch most of the videos.
For example, my Mac PowerBook now has 8 browsers installed, and none of them is successful at showing more that 5% to 10% of their video clips. My linux box has 5 browsers, and about the same rate of success. We even have a Windows box in our house, so I can test to see if it's another example of a web site that's designed to only work with IE on Windows. Nope; the failure rate there is about the same.
It's not bad video files. When I can find the actual URL for a clip, I can feed it to either Real Player or WMP (the only formats they seem to use), and it always works just fine.
I've seen a number of discussions of this in several newsgroups. The general explanation seems to be simply that the HTML is so insanely bizarre that it's surprising that any browser can handle it correctly. I've dug into a few of their pages, and I'd agree with this summary.
One thing that's funny is that the latest Real Player comes with its own browser. It works pretty well for every site I've tried except for ComedyCentral.com.
I wonder if there's any way we can prevail on them to provide a page that just lists the clips with simple descriptions, and has a plain hyperlink to each clip? If they'd do this, their online viewership would probably go way up.
I've dug around a bit in their web site, looking for an email address so I could send them some questions about the problem. But so far, I haven't found any sort of "user feedback" link. They have a reference to a discussion page, but it just contains a notice that it doesn't work.
So I guess we're just limited to watching Jon Stewart on TV. Around here, it comes on at 11 pm. Those of us with things to do in the evenings (political meetings, technical meetings, gigs, whatever) find that this cuts seriously into our Daily Show fixes
My question is: is there anything Microsoft can do that we won't question?
...." Anyone know the rest of it? (Of course, George's mangled version is more entertaining. ;-)
Of course not. And it's not just Microsoft; we should question anything from any source. Microsoft is merely the worst of a bad lot.
Note that the concept of Open Source could be re-phrased as "The source must be available so that users can criticise it and ask questions about it." So, yes, we also question Open Source Software. Often and publicly.
Anyone who accepts someone else's products without question is either a fool or is on the take.
Given Microsoft's history, we have special reasons to question everything they do. And the only reasonable attitude is skepticism. Maybe they're being honest with us this time. But I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
George Bush recently garbled an important old saying, that starts with "Fool me once,
That reminds me of something ... Hmm, wonder what it could be ... Oh, yes; I know -
... ... ...
/. this should end with "... PROFIT!" ;-)
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you win.
-- M. K. Gandhi
(I suppose that on
Well, usually the fluids wouldn't be considered a "part" of a pump. But in this case, the actual pump consists of oscillations in the fluid, while the solid-phase components are merely the "case" that contains the pump. So it would seem reasonable to list the fluid (or more specifically the wave fronts in the fluid) as the "parts" of the pump.
Yeah, I know; it's "Picky, picky." But the history of science and engineering is full of examples where the detailed definitions of the terms are very important to full understanding.
OTOH, we're talking about a media report here, so I suppose one can't expect precise terminology.
The vibe here tends to be anti-copyright, but is it so anti-copyright that we even think it's ok for a store to make a profit off musicians that never get paid?
;-)
Time to once again mention that, unless your recording sells at least 1.5 million copies, you won't get paid. At least, this is the situation with "industry standard" recording-industry contracts.
If your recording sells under a million copies, you'll usually end up in debt to the recording company. So maybe this store was actually helping the musicians, by selling the recordings in such a way that they wouldn't put the musicians in debt to the store.
So the performances were illegal?
;-) musical friends don't. Now, it possible that if you play in a bar or such public place, the management may have paid the annual license. That protects the place's owners from a complicity charge, but it doesn't actually protect the performers, who are the ones committing the illegal act, unless every one of them has also paid the annual license fee.
Actually, it's quite likely they were. I've seen it mentioned in passing by assorted "IAAL" types that if you don't have prior written permission to perform a copyrighted work, your performance is probably illegal. The concept of "mechanical royalty" has been invented to legalize such things, but there are a few reasons this might not apply. One is that the intent of this concept was to legalize broadcasts of recorded works, not live performances. And how many performers actually pay such royalties? I know my gang of (mostly very amateur
The only safe way to perform a copyrighted work is to have handy a signed letter of permission from the copyright holder (or agent).
Actually, there's another way: Only perform works that are well out of copyright. Of course, if you look into the "Happy Birthday" story, you'll find that this can be difficult. Works more than a century old may still be copyrighted.
Oh, well; in general the copyright laws are rather fscked up these days, and getting fsckeder by the month. It's not too surprising to hear of some judge raising a lonely voice and asking for some sanity. We can trust he'll be overturned on appeal.
I mean, how are fluid oscillations not "moving parts".
OK; I understand what they're trying to say, and I also understand that this is hardly news (since the basic idea has been around for a couple of centuries).
But the phrase "moving parts" seems like sometime really in need of replacement by something that's a bit less misleading. The functional parts of this pump are quite definitely moving.
It doesn't matter if most of the volunteers are computer illiterates. In fact, it helps a lot if they are. All it really takes is one knowledgeable "volunteer" per critical precinct, and a few minutes with the machine. Preferably alone, of course, but if there are a number of the "illiterates" present, that's probably ok, as they won't understand what's being done.
(d) that has been marked in more than one circle at the right of the candidates' names;
;-)
So if I'm counting votes in a Canadian election, I can bias the vote by simply keeping a #2 pencil in my shirt pocket, and adding an extra X or two when some silly voter voted for the wrong candidate.
(That's how it's done in the US in places that still use paper ballots.
(Now if we used "acceptance" voting, this would be much less of a problem - though it would still be a minor problem.)
[W]ho in their right mind would write a national voting system in Microsoft Access?!?
Ooh, ooh; an easy one!
Answer: People working for a company that makes voting equipment, and whose CEO recently promised in writing that he would deliver Ohio to Bush in the next election.
It's looking more and more like he wasn't joking, and yes, he meant it in exactly the way it sounded.
Unix is a creation of the west, AT&T, and was "opened up" by UC Berkeley.
Yeah, and the Internet was developed mostly with funds from the US Defense Department. Funny how people everywhere are ignoring that and adopting it despite its evil origins. Actually, the story is a bit similar to unix, since the actual development was done in a lot of universities and companies. The military took the code and cloned it, but left the public version behind, and it's that version that became the public Internet.
Apologies to Muslims, I don't know the term for your dietary rules.
The term is "halal" (with a few variant transliterations). The rules are nearly identical to the Jewish kosher laws, with a few differences from centuries of different religious interpretation. There are a number of food suppliers in the US that are certified under both the kosher and halal laws. Only the most rabid fundamentalists (Muslim or Jewish) would be offended by your confusing them.
And, of course, even if you don't believe in these laws, you still might buy the food because of its high quality. I even know a number of Muslims that buy Hebrew National hot dogs, because they like them and trust the maker to not contaminate them.