Brings to mind the Platypus which uses electricity to locate prey.
You know, every time someone says anything about a platypus, I find myself thinking "WTF?".
Egg laying mammal, with a bill, fur, a tail like a beaver, poisonous venom in a foot spike... and now electrolocation.
I swear, it really is the most bizarre of critters I can imagine. If there is a god, and he did create everything... the platypus was created immediately after a heavy dose of mescaline or something! It's like a collection of spare parts.
Presumably the person/animal the OP was referring to is called a gayling because it's parents were gay.
So, if both of your parents are assholes, would you be an asshole-ling? If they're morons, would you be a moron-ling? That really is just a stupid (and made up) distinction.
Hell, if TFA is accurate, with a DNA sample, someone could make the love child of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Does that make either of them gay? Does that tangibly change the nomenclature of combining, oh, Harvey Firestein and Richard Simmons?
I would argue it's just looking to perpetuate some bigotry.
I'm not trying to be offensive to anyone -- I'm just saying that such a procedure has the potential to clear up the whole nature/nurture debate in the case of homosexuality.
How is that going to clear anything up?
The nature/nurture debate is a false dichotomy -- it's not all nature, and it's not all nurture. Hell, even if you're born gay, is it genetic, or just a trick of the wiring in your brain partly caused by chemical conditions in the womb? It's more likely a combination of all of them, and then there's probably other factors. It's just that some people refuse to believe that homosexuality is a natural occurrence.
Humans are massively complex critters, and it's not like a computer program -- it doesn't generate the same results consistently from the same starting point. People simply are gay, or not... or any number of points in between.
The only people who want to prove/disprove the nature/nurture debate are trying to support their agenda and either say that homosexuality is a choice, and therefore a sin -- or that it isn't a choice, and therefore god made them that way, and it can't be a sin. The debate serves no real purpose.
I bet if you made children from two gay men, two straight men, and one of each -- you'd find you can't make heads or tails out of it. It's way too complex to pigeon hole it into "the children of gays would all be gay".
Eve was created from Adam's rib which was a 1 Father, 0 mother scenario.
Technically then, it's 1 Brother, isn't it? Adam can't be Eve's Father -- it's more like a twin, isn't it? And, I've never been really clear on who Cain and Abel might have married.
You mean, rather than using his screwdriver as a generic magic wand that does whatever is most needed to get out of a plot contortion at that particular moment, seemingly telepathically? Yes, that would be much preferable.
It has controls on it... and, seriously, it beats Tachyon Pulses or Wesley Crusher.
Well, many people feel that the tokens camelCase and CamelCase should never be allowed to refer to different symbols...
Well, I've just always programmed in languages that are case sensitive... C, C++, C#, Java... the few I've bumped into that are case insensitive are scripting languages.
I guess I just learned that CAMEL, Camel, CaMel and camel are all different literals. It doesn't rely on an interpreter to say "oh, you meant this, I'll ignore it". I'm used to a compiler saying "I have no idea what camEl is".
And, from experience, I'd rather have camel case than that whole "Hungarian Notation" which more or less made variables pointlessly hard to read.
Guess it depends on what you learned with, but I find case-insensitive brings its own problems. ASCII provided us with a lexical sort ordering (for good or for ill), and throwing that away isn't always a good thing.
Oracle is gonna offer a "top to bottom" IBM style stack, with a custom SPARC chip and a stripped down Solaris both optimized for running an Oracle DB with high throughput.
But, they're effectively ruining SPARC as a viable platform for anything other than an Oracle DB.
From Oracle's position, it is good business. But, for everybody who has invested in Sun hardware, Oracle is more or less driving those companies to another platform, because suddenly those machines aren't really good for anything else.
I have NO doubts that in three years or less Oracle will be THE DB to run in large and small enterprises, with a custom setup that will be easy to deploy and have incredible throughput. So where is the bad?
Where is the bad?? Good god, you mean beside the bloated support contracts and needing 3-4x as many machines to do something as before? In my experience (limited, I admit), an Oracle install wants a small fleet of machines to do even a fairly smallish install of something.
I know in Windows the PrintScreen key puts a snapshot of the screen on the clipboard, but there are plenty of better ways to get a snapshot, so I can't say I've used it more than 2 or 3 times since 1995.
Wow, you're lucky. I've used it to write documentation, file bug reports, all sorts of things.
I do sometimes use a screen capture tool when it's available, but if you're on a locked-down server trying to collect information to send to a vendor for a support ticket, Print Screen is often the only way you can do this.
I've probably used the Print Screen several thousand times since 1995.
Well, Europe was always free to standardise on its own default 7 bit encoding. But aren't we all glad they didn't? It would have made dealing with foreign keyboards and computers so much more difficult for us all and really slowed development down.
Well, unfortunately, Asia did need to come up with their own character encodings. I'm also not convinced that a lot of European countries didn't have to sort out all sorts of problems. I seem to recall Microsoft also had to work pretty hard to build their own ways of providing international character encodings (Windows Code Pages) before Unicode was adopted as a standard.
I have no doubt that the people who built it were simply doing what they needed and it didn't occur to them that 50 years later we'd still be using it. And I seriously doubt it was nationalism -- they just didn't deal with these characters.
It's got precious little to do with ASCII. The problem arises because to this day way too much software assumes that people do not use characters with codes greater than 127.
Ummmm... except that, by definition, that is a legacy of ASCII. Character 127 was the highest you could have in ASCII without getting into the realm of escape chars -- that's what 8-bit clean means, and why UTF-8 was constructed in such a way as to directly be backwards compatible with it. For literally decades, ASCII was what we used, and nobody really thought out how to handle "exotic" characters.
Of course you are free to wrap your self in an american flag, flip the rest of the world a bird and tell it to go screw it self, but when the rest of the world constitutes a significant portion of your customers that might be a bad idea... unless you like to loose money.
Nice screed, but I'm not American, and I'm not even defending it. I said nobody is worried about the Vikings as the OP said -- it was a joke.
I'm perfectly aware of the fact that historically North American biases still exist in a lot of computing, and that getting everybody to properly support Unicode is a god thing (as there are loads of applications which will simply fail to properly handle them). I've had no end of professional headaches as I discover that some program simply can't properly handle anything more than simple ASCII.
But, if you think these limitations aren't a legacy of ASCII, you're woefully mistaken.
Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them?
If you're doing any significant data entry, both caps lock and num lock get used quite a bit. Most keyboards have the SysRq key on the same key as the Print Screen, which gets used all of the time.
I used to have to use scroll-lock back in the old tty days before we had scrollbars, but honestly I've not used it in a long time. Same thing for Pause/Break, but I bet there are people who use mainframe terminal software that still need them.
Function keys used to be integral to a lot of software, and you'd actually get templates that went over the keyboard -- I haven't seen any in a long time. But things like Wordperfect and specialized software made crazy use of them.
The problem is, there are a lot of very good, historical reasons why those keys are there in the first place, and just because you don't use them, doesn't mean they're not in widespread usage. Removing them could leave your keyboard as essentially useless for many things.
I am of the opinion that changing the keyboard layout just because you can is a horrible idea. Having seen Sun keyboards over the years which randomly move around keys, or even modern HP keyboards which are bordering on insane -- leave the damn 101-key layout in place, and don't fsck with it.
I assume this bit is from a Slashdot posting and not Google:
According to Google, this will improve the quality of the comments, because people will not be able to write all in capital letters. I'm not a fan of the caps lock key myself. I never use it, so it can go to hell, for all I'm concerned. But taking away choice from people is not good, especially when this is not going to improve the quality of comments.
Attention people -- keyboards are use for more than posting comments.
In all fairness though, I'd say there are too many mobile apps on many platforms that are really just a media redistribution app for a single media business, which is what this is. Having a native app that displays articles and images fetched from the internet seems a little contrived when there is a web browser built into the device.
Well, the native apps are generally much better rendered and laid out, and work better -- they can also make use of the better interface, as well as do better caching and using local resources (which you don't seem to think happens with these apps).
The problem with using the web for every interface for everything, is all of those really nice fat-client GUIs we used to have before were better than the web -- which sent us back into the dark ages. A friend of mine use to say that the web put user-interface design back by a decade -- and that was 15 years ago. I'm not convinced we've caught up yet in some cases.
I'm glad we're finally moving away from "everything is a web page", because, quite frankly, the user experience has generally been crap. Heck, some web sites still render poorly on small mobile devices. There have been advances in web-based GUIs, but generally speaking, it's a limited, lowest-common denominator kind of interface.
If you've never seen the difference between just another web page and a native app, you're missing out on something. The native app an be made so much better than the web page.
I believe it's because historically things like kidnapping and extortion used to be readily conducted across state lines and made it almost impossible to track down and police due to jurisdictional challenges.
When the FBI and others decided that they were going to go after kidnapping with a vengeance, that was one mechanism they had available to them. The phone and mail system allowed them to hone in on the method of transmission.
This wasn't case of "Hey, let's expand the commerce clause just for fun", this was a case of trying to prosecute real and very serious crimes.
He didn't take a picture of her home, he found it on street view.
Which demonstrated that he actually took steps that would lead someone to reasonably conclude that he both could, and would, act on his threats.
If the person on the receiving end of the threat reasonably believes you will carry it out, you have committed assault. If you do this across state lines, you have turned it into a Federal offense.
I suspect this guy is going to be on the receiving end of a world of hurt.
After reading this law...I have to ask myself, does ANYONE do this often? Is this really a problem that required a law?
Ummm.... if you and I are in the same room, and you threaten to injure me, it's an illegal act and in most jurisdictions counts as assault and you can be charged for it. See, if someone reasonably believes you have made a threat against them, you have committed a crime.
In the case of interstate commerce, communicating a threat across state lines or internationally, you have now turned it into a federal crime.
Or..are the Feds just now trying to make any law for anything, and stick commerce in it, so they can try to enforce something?
I'm pretty sure the cited law has been on the books for a long time.
Are you laboring under the belief that it is perfectly legal to go around making threats against people? The interstate commerce parts is to mostly make sure that things like organized crime don't send a threatening letter to someone in another state and be able to act with impunity -- the Feds take such things really seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, every time someone says anything about a platypus, I find myself thinking "WTF?".
Egg laying mammal, with a bill, fur, a tail like a beaver, poisonous venom in a foot spike ... and now electrolocation.
I swear, it really is the most bizarre of critters I can imagine. If there is a god, and he did create everything ... the platypus was created immediately after a heavy dose of mescaline or something! It's like a collection of spare parts.
So, if both of your parents are assholes, would you be an asshole-ling? If they're morons, would you be a moron-ling? That really is just a stupid (and made up) distinction.
Hell, if TFA is accurate, with a DNA sample, someone could make the love child of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Does that make either of them gay? Does that tangibly change the nomenclature of combining, oh, Harvey Firestein and Richard Simmons?
I would argue it's just looking to perpetuate some bigotry.
How is that going to clear anything up?
The nature/nurture debate is a false dichotomy -- it's not all nature, and it's not all nurture. Hell, even if you're born gay, is it genetic, or just a trick of the wiring in your brain partly caused by chemical conditions in the womb? It's more likely a combination of all of them, and then there's probably other factors. It's just that some people refuse to believe that homosexuality is a natural occurrence.
Humans are massively complex critters, and it's not like a computer program -- it doesn't generate the same results consistently from the same starting point. People simply are gay, or not ... or any number of points in between.
The only people who want to prove/disprove the nature/nurture debate are trying to support their agenda and either say that homosexuality is a choice, and therefore a sin -- or that it isn't a choice, and therefore god made them that way, and it can't be a sin. The debate serves no real purpose.
I bet if you made children from two gay men, two straight men, and one of each -- you'd find you can't make heads or tails out of it. It's way too complex to pigeon hole it into "the children of gays would all be gay".
Technically then, it's 1 Brother, isn't it? Adam can't be Eve's Father -- it's more like a twin, isn't it? And, I've never been really clear on who Cain and Abel might have married.
It's all very confusing.
Who has sonic.
Oh, there's lots of things that it wasn't "necessary" to invent that didn't already exist. Unfortunately, we can't uninvent them.
But, it's a robot. A machine. What's the issue? He took a tool to a machine to disable it.
Embrace the horror, my friend. It never goes away. ;-)
It has controls on it ... and, seriously, it beats Tachyon Pulses or Wesley Crusher.
Well, I've just always programmed in languages that are case sensitive ... C, C++, C#, Java ... the few I've bumped into that are case insensitive are scripting languages.
I guess I just learned that CAMEL, Camel, CaMel and camel are all different literals. It doesn't rely on an interpreter to say "oh, you meant this, I'll ignore it". I'm used to a compiler saying "I have no idea what camEl is".
And, from experience, I'd rather have camel case than that whole "Hungarian Notation" which more or less made variables pointlessly hard to read.
Guess it depends on what you learned with, but I find case-insensitive brings its own problems. ASCII provided us with a lexical sort ordering (for good or for ill), and throwing that away isn't always a good thing.
We'd need to know what direction it's traveling in in both space and time.
The Doctor used the sonic screwdriver because it couldn't be used as a weapon to kill or maim.
Just sayin'. :-P
Just fire up one of these babies.
Problem solved.
Oh, someone please post a link to this ... I'm suddenly intrigued by this.
But, they're effectively ruining SPARC as a viable platform for anything other than an Oracle DB.
From Oracle's position, it is good business. But, for everybody who has invested in Sun hardware, Oracle is more or less driving those companies to another platform, because suddenly those machines aren't really good for anything else.
Where is the bad?? Good god, you mean beside the bloated support contracts and needing 3-4x as many machines to do something as before? In my experience (limited, I admit), an Oracle install wants a small fleet of machines to do even a fairly smallish install of something.
I think you misspelled "cold".
Aww, have some cheese and herring -- that should cheer you up.
And say hi to Brett Favre for me. ;-)
Wow, you're lucky. I've used it to write documentation, file bug reports, all sorts of things.
I do sometimes use a screen capture tool when it's available, but if you're on a locked-down server trying to collect information to send to a vendor for a support ticket, Print Screen is often the only way you can do this.
I've probably used the Print Screen several thousand times since 1995.
Well, unfortunately, Asia did need to come up with their own character encodings. I'm also not convinced that a lot of European countries didn't have to sort out all sorts of problems. I seem to recall Microsoft also had to work pretty hard to build their own ways of providing international character encodings (Windows Code Pages) before Unicode was adopted as a standard.
I have no doubt that the people who built it were simply doing what they needed and it didn't occur to them that 50 years later we'd still be using it. And I seriously doubt it was nationalism -- they just didn't deal with these characters.
Ummmm ... except that, by definition, that is a legacy of ASCII. Character 127 was the highest you could have in ASCII without getting into the realm of escape chars -- that's what 8-bit clean means, and why UTF-8 was constructed in such a way as to directly be backwards compatible with it. For literally decades, ASCII was what we used, and nobody really thought out how to handle "exotic" characters.
Nice screed, but I'm not American, and I'm not even defending it. I said nobody is worried about the Vikings as the OP said -- it was a joke.
I'm perfectly aware of the fact that historically North American biases still exist in a lot of computing, and that getting everybody to properly support Unicode is a god thing (as there are loads of applications which will simply fail to properly handle them). I've had no end of professional headaches as I discover that some program simply can't properly handle anything more than simple ASCII.
But, if you think these limitations aren't a legacy of ASCII, you're woefully mistaken.
Well, the A in ASCII does stand for American, so I don't think anybody is worried about the Vikings.
Wait, there are case insensitive programming languages? Really?
That's almost as stupid as a case-insensitive file system.
If you're doing any significant data entry, both caps lock and num lock get used quite a bit. Most keyboards have the SysRq key on the same key as the Print Screen, which gets used all of the time.
I used to have to use scroll-lock back in the old tty days before we had scrollbars, but honestly I've not used it in a long time. Same thing for Pause/Break, but I bet there are people who use mainframe terminal software that still need them.
Function keys used to be integral to a lot of software, and you'd actually get templates that went over the keyboard -- I haven't seen any in a long time. But things like Wordperfect and specialized software made crazy use of them.
The problem is, there are a lot of very good, historical reasons why those keys are there in the first place, and just because you don't use them, doesn't mean they're not in widespread usage. Removing them could leave your keyboard as essentially useless for many things.
I am of the opinion that changing the keyboard layout just because you can is a horrible idea. Having seen Sun keyboards over the years which randomly move around keys, or even modern HP keyboards which are bordering on insane -- leave the damn 101-key layout in place, and don't fsck with it.
I assume this bit is from a Slashdot posting and not Google:
Attention people -- keyboards are use for more than posting comments.
What the hell kind of drivel is this?
Well, the native apps are generally much better rendered and laid out, and work better -- they can also make use of the better interface, as well as do better caching and using local resources (which you don't seem to think happens with these apps).
The problem with using the web for every interface for everything, is all of those really nice fat-client GUIs we used to have before were better than the web -- which sent us back into the dark ages. A friend of mine use to say that the web put user-interface design back by a decade -- and that was 15 years ago. I'm not convinced we've caught up yet in some cases.
I'm glad we're finally moving away from "everything is a web page", because, quite frankly, the user experience has generally been crap. Heck, some web sites still render poorly on small mobile devices. There have been advances in web-based GUIs, but generally speaking, it's a limited, lowest-common denominator kind of interface.
If you've never seen the difference between just another web page and a native app, you're missing out on something. The native app an be made so much better than the web page.
I believe it's because historically things like kidnapping and extortion used to be readily conducted across state lines and made it almost impossible to track down and police due to jurisdictional challenges.
When the FBI and others decided that they were going to go after kidnapping with a vengeance, that was one mechanism they had available to them. The phone and mail system allowed them to hone in on the method of transmission.
This wasn't case of "Hey, let's expand the commerce clause just for fun", this was a case of trying to prosecute real and very serious crimes.
Which demonstrated that he actually took steps that would lead someone to reasonably conclude that he both could, and would, act on his threats.
If the person on the receiving end of the threat reasonably believes you will carry it out, you have committed assault. If you do this across state lines, you have turned it into a Federal offense.
I suspect this guy is going to be on the receiving end of a world of hurt.
Ummm .... if you and I are in the same room, and you threaten to injure me, it's an illegal act and in most jurisdictions counts as assault and you can be charged for it. See, if someone reasonably believes you have made a threat against them, you have committed a crime.
In the case of interstate commerce, communicating a threat across state lines or internationally, you have now turned it into a federal crime.
I'm pretty sure the cited law has been on the books for a long time.
Are you laboring under the belief that it is perfectly legal to go around making threats against people? The interstate commerce parts is to mostly make sure that things like organized crime don't send a threatening letter to someone in another state and be able to act with impunity -- the Feds take such things really seriously.