it says no "unreasonable searches and seizures" then lays out conditions for when a warrant makes it reasonable but doesn't explicitly say that is the only way
It doesn't have to, because that's what a warrant is: authorization to use special police powers, i.e. anything a normal citizen wouldn't have the right to do without any special authorization. By definition, in the absence of a warrant, no search or seizure of property has been legally authorized. If it were possible to legally perform a search or to seize property without a warrant then the 4th amendment's restrictions relating to probable cause and requiring specific declaration of the place to be searched and the items to be seized would be completely meaningless, rendering the 4th amendment null and void.
Remember it is designed for thin clients, so the screen, keyboard and the rendering happens on the client. It is the application that is the server.
On the contrary, while it may run on a system called a "thin client", the X server, which runs on the side with the display and input devices, is the server, and the applications are the clients. Moreover, this client/server distinction in X11 makes perfect sense from several points of view. The X server listens for incoming connections, while applications establish connections to the X server. The X server also holds the resources (the display and input devices) which the clients need to use. Finally, the X server is relatively long-lived, while most clients are transient. The only part that throws people is that the X server is generally running on the machine close to the user, while the clients (applications) may be running on a system far away; however, that is perhaps the least relevant criteria from an architectural standpoint.
Not if they are using OpenGL or XRender for compositing. Qt does do it own 2D rendering by default in Qt5, but only if you are not using OpenGL rendering.
OpenGL rendering is done in the client, unless you're using AIGLX, which is no longer commonplace. Each client communicates with the graphics hardware independently and shares the buffer containing the final render with the X server. AIGLX also suffers from the problem I mentioned before, that it requires sending all the textures and other input data to the server, which can easily be larger than the rendered frame. XRender is indeed done on the server, but offers a limited set of drawing operations.
The current X architecture actually looks remarkably like Wayland, except with several unnecessary levels of indirection and a mandatory (but obsolete and essentially unused) core rendering protocol that complicates the server and inhibits some major optimizations.
something on the display server (in X11 the client) is likely to be in GPU memory, and something on the application (in X11 the server) is definately in CPU memory
This is completely wrong. First, in X11, X is the server and the application is the client. Second, modern X11 applications do their own hardware-accelerated rendering in GPU memory and pass the rendered image to the X server for compositing, so the client/server memory distinction you're positing doesn't exist. Neither does "network transparency" in any meaningful sense; the extensions which allow efficient local rendering, like XShm and DRI2, aren't available over the network, so application can either use a completely different rendering path, forfeiting transparency, or get horrible performance due to the complete lack of image compression in the X protocol and the fact that inputs to the rendering process (particularly things like textures) are often much larger than the differences in the output from frame to frame. Rendering with local hardware acceleration and sending the results over the network in the form of compressed video, a la VNC, RDP, XPRA, and the plans for remote Wayland, is much more efficient, and actually transparent to the application.
The problem with a deflationary currency is that it discourages investment. If your currency is deflating by, say, 1% per annum, you can, without any risk at all, increase the buying power of your money just by sitting on it.
Which is, in fact, a form of investment. By sitting on your money you are reducing the effective supply, which raises the purchasing power of everyone else's money. Essentially, you've loaned the value of your savings out to everyone else holding that currency; the increase in value is your interest on that loan. It's rather like investing in an index fund, but even more diversified.
Given a fixed money supply, the rate of deflation is equivalent to the rate of growth of the economy. Any investment that can't produce a enough of a return to pay positive interest on top of the deflation rate is less productive than the average. It is better—for the individual investor and the economy as a whole—to "hoard" the currency, and thus invest indirectly in the overall economy, than to put money into such an investment and bring down the average.
The Constitution is pretty clear that "unreasonable searches" cannot be performed "without probable cause".
Actually, what the Constitution is rather clear on is that unreasonable searches cannot be performed, period:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,...
Probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, is required to show that the proposed use of special police powers is reasonable before a warrant can be issued, i.e. before any search can be legally authorized. The warrant must also be specific, so a broad warrant like "all searches within 100 miles of the border are presumed reasonable" is in violation of the amendment.
... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Once the contract is signed, you have a debt for that amount.
Not necessarily. It really depends on who goes first. The contract isn't likely to say that you both owe each other a debt; it will say that you owe payment for goods or services delivered, or that they owe you goods or services for payment delivered. You can only resort to legal tender in lieu of the agreed-upon payment in the former case.
Of course, if you do agree to pay one way and then use legal tender laws force someone to accept a different form of payment than you both agreed to, that obviously makes you a liar and a thief. The fact that cash is legal tender doesn't make it right, it just means that your victim has no legal recourse.
And the site you use to convert your dollars to bitcoin will be illegal. What then?
Then you buy trade goods with USD, and sell them for BTC. You could also exchange BTC in person (http://www.localbitcoins.com/, http://www.bitcoin-otc.com/), or even arrange to get paid directly in BTC. The exchanges are merely a convenience; they're not essential for Bitcoin to function.
All debts have to be denominated in USD in the US, I'm sure most countries have similar rules in place. Which means that it's likely to remain legal forever to take payment in BTC, but you can't refuse to take USD in some form as payment.... Which is why I'm a bit curious how MS and the others get around skirting the issue by making you buy points and purchasing things with points.
As you said yourself, legal tender rules only apply to debts. If you provide goods or services on credit then you must accept USD as an alternative to whatever the customer actually agreed to as the form of payment. If you insist on payment up front, however, then there is no debt and you are under no obligation to accept USD. The point systems you allude to operate on a pre-pay basis.
The optimal amount is the amount where spending an additional dollar brings less than a dollar in economic benefits. Only when you can prove we're past that point will you be able to truthfully claim that we have a spending problem.
Your standard of evidence is backward. It's always safer to assume that spending is just consumption, not investment, unless there is evidence to support the position that it produces more in economic benefits (net present value, of course) than it costs. Those who claim that additional spending will result in a positive ROI are the ones with something to prove.
This is an impossible task, of course, as economic benefit is not something you can aggregate and measure across individuals in a non-voluntary system. Voluntary trade may not result in an ideal allocation of resource, but no non-voluntary system can objectively be said to produce a better allocation—just one more in line with the preferences of the few specific individuals in charge.
Except if you call liberitarians anarchists, then they want the rule of law and its society's job to ensure there is one - at least I don't hear much of private vigilante services as an option.
It sounds like you haven't been listening very closely. Privately-funded defense is the only option consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle. Any "libertarian" who speaks of it being "society's job" to do anything is entertaining a contradiction.
(To be fair, you would have to look beyond the U.S. Libertarian Party to get an idea of what consistent libertarianism looks like; but then, the LP's goal is achieve political influence, which is basically the opposite of everything they supposedly stand for, so there are limits to how consistent they can be.)
Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
Or maybe most of us will be the robot owners, either directly or as shareholders in the corporations that own the robots.
To make that work, however, we'll need to reverse this alarming trend of increasingly penalizing those whose parents left them more in the way of capital than the capacity for manual labor. Otherwise, each generation has to start over from scratch with increasingly worthless "seed capital".
If you treat the Internet as a bad neighborhood, which you have no way of avoiding between your house and the mall, NAT is the gated neighborhood you live in to keep the unsavory inhabitants of that bad neighborhood away from your pristine lawn and Lexus in the driveway.
A firewall is like a gated neighborhood. NAT is like a minimum-security "gated" community where anyone can open the gate (NAT traversal) but your house address is meaningless to anyone outside, so no one can send you mail unless you first enter into a complicated forwarding arrangement with your neighborhood post office. It's an extremely inconvenient form of obscurity, not real protection from unwanted traffic.
The 2nd Amendment recognizes the right, it doesn't create it. The entire Bill of Rights exists only to clarify the intent of the Constitution proper, to guard against the possibility of misinterpretation (deliberate or otherwise). Repealing the 2nd Amendment wouldn't negate the fact that one has the natural right to defend oneself, from individual attackers or a tyrannical government—such as one trying to confiscate private property, including weapons, without just cause.
Elections are meant to indicate a preference, not a rejection.
I think this is part of the problem. Selecting the one candidate with the largest constituency is inherently divisive, and tends to encourage extremes. I would prefer that the winner was the least rejected candidate, the one which is acceptable (if not actually preferred) to the most voters.
My voting scheme would focus exclusively on negative votes. Given N candidates, each voter get N-1 negative votes which they can allocate as they wish (no fractional votes). They can vote once against all but one candidate, or place all their votes against a single particularly despised candidate, or anything in between. The candidate with the fewest negative votes wins.
I'll admit that I've seen some cases like that myself. In the absence of a decent abstraction boundary, there's no point in breaking a function up such that you still need to know the inner details of several parts to understand any of them. The point is to abstract away the details, not just split the code up to avoid exceeding some arbitrary line count. However, I would still say that it's possible to write most programs, readably, in terms of functions averaging less than 20-30 lines each.
(I routinely work with a legacy codebase consisting of many 100-plus-line C functions, so I apologize if my own frustrations are showing through...)
The value of something is exactly what you're willing to pay for it. Saying that something is needed is just another way of saying that its value is greater than any potential cost. The idea that "the value doesn't matter" is nonsense. This entire thread is about nothing but value; whether you realize it or not, you're saying that the value of these materials is greater than the cost of going to space to mine them.
Those inline comments are good (when done properly) when trying to quickly grok through a large codebase.... a one liner generalizing a 9 or 10 line block of code means 9 or 10 lines of code you can skim over.
Agreed, but often those 9 or 10 lines could be refactored into a separate function, which would allow the inline comments to be replaced with function-level documentation. The general rule is to break up functions at no more than twice that size, where feasible.
It depends on how well structured the code is. If the functions are small and simple, then the function-level comments should be sufficient in most cases. It's OK to rely on a function doing what the comments claim it should do while reading higher-level code. I don't expect people to review the code for strcpy() every time it's used.
On the other hand, if you're reviewing code with large, monolithic functions, it may need some comments inside the function (roughly where the function boundaries should be) to help readers keep track of what's going on. I would still look at such comments with a measure of distrust, however, since you don't have the benefit of each part being reviewed and tested in isolation.
Descriptive function and variable names are also a form of commenting, and one which is much more effective when combined with tightly-scoped variables and small, single-purpose functions.
I imagine one of the first things a programmer learns about reading code, if they're going to be any good at it, is to skip over the inline comments. Reading them will only prejudice your interpretation of the code in favor of the original authors expectations, preventing you from seeing what the code is actually doing.
Comments are useful when you come across a block of code you can't otherwise understand, but the rest of the time they tend to either duplicate information which is already in the code, or confuse matters by being vague, misleading, or just plain wrong.
High-level documentation of modules and functions is invaluable, of course, but those comments should be in a block of their own, or even a separate file, and not be mixed in with the rest of the code.
The Second Amendment, however, is... literal except that "militia" really means "individuals."
At the time, the "militia" consisted of practically every able-bodied male of military age, so "individuals" is essentially literal. That aside, however, the right itself has little to do with the militia:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." is obviously just an introductory clause, explaining (in part) why the amendment was written. The actual right is in the second half, which clearly refers to "the right of the people", not "the right of the militia". Honestly, sometimes it seems like the pro-gun-control crowd does their reasoning by looking only at key words like "militia" without considering the grammatical context.
The only way any weapons ban could possibly be considered constitutional under a fair reading of the amendment would be if an argument could be made that the weapons being banned are not "Arms" in the original sense.
The U.S. Constitution does not adequately define "arms". When it was adopted, "arms" included muzzle-loaded muskets and pistols, swords, knives, bows with arrows, and spears. However, a common- law definition would be "light infantry weapons which can be carried and used, together with ammunition, by a single militiaman, functionally equivalent to those commonly used by infantrymen in land warfare." That certainly includes modern rifles and handguns, full-auto machine guns and shotguns, grenade and grenade launchers, flares, smoke, tear gas, incendiary rounds, and anti-tank weapons... —Constitution Society
My guess is that the scientists probably imported at least several Kb of already-functional code into the fish genome to produce the marginal change in the protein production.
I see your guess and raise you actual science. What they did, from the article, was take a gene the fish already possessed and multiply it. The fish already produces this protein, but with fewer copies of the gene. Increasing the number of copies, and thus the amount of protein produced, resulted in autopods.
Saying that the genetics are similar because the effect is similar...
I didn't say that. We already know that the genetics are similar, because we've sequenced the DNA of a number of organisms and determined that they're really very similar, even when the organisms appear quite different. Plants and animals, for example, share far more DNA than one would naively expect. What I said was that the fact that a small change in the expression of certain proteins changes the development of the fins to something much closer to hands is consistent with common descent. It shows how small changes over time could have changed fins (or fin-precursors) into hands. That this actually occurred requires other evidence, which we have from a variety of sources.
Code similarity is far from a "constraint." Libraries, modularity, and code reuse are the bread-and-butter of effective and efficient programming.
No argument there, but where is the modularity in DNA? Where are the boundaries between the libraries and the rest of the organism? Code reuse is possible because we carefully avoid making every piece interact with every other piece. We deliberately restrict the ability for small changes in one are to have global effects on the rest of the program, preferring to create small, self-contained modules with well-defined interfaces. DNA is just the opposite: a single huge parallel program, with patches layered on top of patches, and no organizing structure to be found anywhere. What it most resembles (for obvious reasons) is the output of a genetic algorithm, the difference being that genetic algorithms are configured with fitness functions to achieve specific goals, while natural selection has no goal apart from the survival of the genes.
On a related note - Hey, let's make this an argument about religion on a tech news site, right where arguments about religion belong! Again....
You're the one that brought up religion. Up till now, we were discussing common descent ("evolution") and Intelligent Design, a term invented specifically to avoid the religious connotations of Creationism. However, you're probably correct that it's more honest to classify ID as religion rather than science.
First, they didn't actually manage to grow hands. The closest they were able to achieve was "autopods", a precursor somewhere between hands and fins. The cause of this difference was a transplanted mouse gene which increased the production of a certain protein involved in selection and development of different kinds of tissue.
The real lesson from this is that small changes in DNA can have large effects on physiology. A bit more of a certain protein at the right point in development and you get autopods instead of fins. A few other minor changes and you might even get something approaching real hands.
It isn't that fish have unused DNA lying around which can be "activated" to produce hands; rather, the genetic codes for fins and hands are very similar, perhaps differing by just a couple of mutations. This similarity is evidence in favor of common descent. Why would a "designer" put in the effort to make the DNA so similar? No doubt, if our own experience as designers is anything to go by, it would be far easier to achieve ideal fins and ideal hands without that constraint. Hands and fins differentiated only by the presence of a few specific proteins is perfectly consistent, however, with inherited genetic traits and natural selection.
Bitcoin just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it. At some point the recipient organization needs to convert Bitcoin back into currency in order to make use of it.
In this case, moving the problem is a solution. The recipient organization does need to exchange Bitcoin back into some local currency (at least for now; more items are becoming available on the direct Bitcoin market all the time), but that exchange can take place in a different jurisdiction than the donor's, one with a friendlier relationship to the organization, and without involving VISA and its arbitrary rules.
Slashdot Mirror
it says no "unreasonable searches and seizures" then lays out conditions for when a warrant makes it reasonable but doesn't explicitly say that is the only way
It doesn't have to, because that's what a warrant is: authorization to use special police powers, i.e. anything a normal citizen wouldn't have the right to do without any special authorization. By definition, in the absence of a warrant, no search or seizure of property has been legally authorized. If it were possible to legally perform a search or to seize property without a warrant then the 4th amendment's restrictions relating to probable cause and requiring specific declaration of the place to be searched and the items to be seized would be completely meaningless, rendering the 4th amendment null and void.
Remember it is designed for thin clients, so the screen, keyboard and the rendering happens on the client. It is the application that is the server.
On the contrary, while it may run on a system called a "thin client", the X server, which runs on the side with the display and input devices, is the server, and the applications are the clients. Moreover, this client/server distinction in X11 makes perfect sense from several points of view. The X server listens for incoming connections, while applications establish connections to the X server. The X server also holds the resources (the display and input devices) which the clients need to use. Finally, the X server is relatively long-lived, while most clients are transient. The only part that throws people is that the X server is generally running on the machine close to the user, while the clients (applications) may be running on a system far away; however, that is perhaps the least relevant criteria from an architectural standpoint.
Not if they are using OpenGL or XRender for compositing. Qt does do it own 2D rendering by default in Qt5, but only if you are not using OpenGL rendering.
OpenGL rendering is done in the client, unless you're using AIGLX, which is no longer commonplace. Each client communicates with the graphics hardware independently and shares the buffer containing the final render with the X server. AIGLX also suffers from the problem I mentioned before, that it requires sending all the textures and other input data to the server, which can easily be larger than the rendered frame. XRender is indeed done on the server, but offers a limited set of drawing operations.
The current X architecture actually looks remarkably like Wayland, except with several unnecessary levels of indirection and a mandatory (but obsolete and essentially unused) core rendering protocol that complicates the server and inhibits some major optimizations.
something on the display server (in X11 the client) is likely to be in GPU memory, and something on the application (in X11 the server) is definately in CPU memory
This is completely wrong. First, in X11, X is the server and the application is the client. Second, modern X11 applications do their own hardware-accelerated rendering in GPU memory and pass the rendered image to the X server for compositing, so the client/server memory distinction you're positing doesn't exist. Neither does "network transparency" in any meaningful sense; the extensions which allow efficient local rendering, like XShm and DRI2, aren't available over the network, so application can either use a completely different rendering path, forfeiting transparency, or get horrible performance due to the complete lack of image compression in the X protocol and the fact that inputs to the rendering process (particularly things like textures) are often much larger than the differences in the output from frame to frame. Rendering with local hardware acceleration and sending the results over the network in the form of compressed video, a la VNC, RDP, XPRA, and the plans for remote Wayland, is much more efficient, and actually transparent to the application.
The problem with a deflationary currency is that it discourages investment. If your currency is deflating by, say, 1% per annum, you can, without any risk at all, increase the buying power of your money just by sitting on it.
Which is, in fact, a form of investment. By sitting on your money you are reducing the effective supply, which raises the purchasing power of everyone else's money. Essentially, you've loaned the value of your savings out to everyone else holding that currency; the increase in value is your interest on that loan. It's rather like investing in an index fund, but even more diversified.
Given a fixed money supply, the rate of deflation is equivalent to the rate of growth of the economy. Any investment that can't produce a enough of a return to pay positive interest on top of the deflation rate is less productive than the average. It is better—for the individual investor and the economy as a whole—to "hoard" the currency, and thus invest indirectly in the overall economy, than to put money into such an investment and bring down the average.
The Constitution is pretty clear that "unreasonable searches" cannot be performed "without probable cause".
Actually, what the Constitution is rather clear on is that unreasonable searches cannot be performed, period:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, ...
Probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, is required to show that the proposed use of special police powers is reasonable before a warrant can be issued, i.e. before any search can be legally authorized. The warrant must also be specific, so a broad warrant like "all searches within 100 miles of the border are presumed reasonable" is in violation of the amendment.
... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Once the contract is signed, you have a debt for that amount.
Not necessarily. It really depends on who goes first. The contract isn't likely to say that you both owe each other a debt; it will say that you owe payment for goods or services delivered, or that they owe you goods or services for payment delivered. You can only resort to legal tender in lieu of the agreed-upon payment in the former case.
Of course, if you do agree to pay one way and then use legal tender laws force someone to accept a different form of payment than you both agreed to, that obviously makes you a liar and a thief. The fact that cash is legal tender doesn't make it right, it just means that your victim has no legal recourse.
And the site you use to convert your dollars to bitcoin will be illegal. What then?
Then you buy trade goods with USD, and sell them for BTC. You could also exchange BTC in person (http://www.localbitcoins.com/, http://www.bitcoin-otc.com/), or even arrange to get paid directly in BTC. The exchanges are merely a convenience; they're not essential for Bitcoin to function.
All debts have to be denominated in USD in the US, I'm sure most countries have similar rules in place. Which means that it's likely to remain legal forever to take payment in BTC, but you can't refuse to take USD in some form as payment.... Which is why I'm a bit curious how MS and the others get around skirting the issue by making you buy points and purchasing things with points.
As you said yourself, legal tender rules only apply to debts. If you provide goods or services on credit then you must accept USD as an alternative to whatever the customer actually agreed to as the form of payment. If you insist on payment up front, however, then there is no debt and you are under no obligation to accept USD. The point systems you allude to operate on a pre-pay basis.
The optimal amount is the amount where spending an additional dollar brings less than a dollar in economic benefits. Only when you can prove we're past that point will you be able to truthfully claim that we have a spending problem.
Your standard of evidence is backward. It's always safer to assume that spending is just consumption, not investment, unless there is evidence to support the position that it produces more in economic benefits (net present value, of course) than it costs. Those who claim that additional spending will result in a positive ROI are the ones with something to prove.
This is an impossible task, of course, as economic benefit is not something you can aggregate and measure across individuals in a non-voluntary system. Voluntary trade may not result in an ideal allocation of resource, but no non-voluntary system can objectively be said to produce a better allocation—just one more in line with the preferences of the few specific individuals in charge.
Except if you call liberitarians anarchists, then they want the rule of law and its society's job to ensure there is one - at least I don't hear much of private vigilante services as an option.
It sounds like you haven't been listening very closely. Privately-funded defense is the only option consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle. Any "libertarian" who speaks of it being "society's job" to do anything is entertaining a contradiction.
(To be fair, you would have to look beyond the U.S. Libertarian Party to get an idea of what consistent libertarianism looks like; but then, the LP's goal is achieve political influence, which is basically the opposite of everything they supposedly stand for, so there are limits to how consistent they can be.)
Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
Or maybe most of us will be the robot owners, either directly or as shareholders in the corporations that own the robots.
To make that work, however, we'll need to reverse this alarming trend of increasingly penalizing those whose parents left them more in the way of capital than the capacity for manual labor. Otherwise, each generation has to start over from scratch with increasingly worthless "seed capital".
If you treat the Internet as a bad neighborhood, which you have no way of avoiding between your house and the mall, NAT is the gated neighborhood you live in to keep the unsavory inhabitants of that bad neighborhood away from your pristine lawn and Lexus in the driveway.
A firewall is like a gated neighborhood. NAT is like a minimum-security "gated" community where anyone can open the gate (NAT traversal) but your house address is meaningless to anyone outside, so no one can send you mail unless you first enter into a complicated forwarding arrangement with your neighborhood post office. It's an extremely inconvenient form of obscurity, not real protection from unwanted traffic.
The 2nd Amendment recognizes the right, it doesn't create it. The entire Bill of Rights exists only to clarify the intent of the Constitution proper, to guard against the possibility of misinterpretation (deliberate or otherwise). Repealing the 2nd Amendment wouldn't negate the fact that one has the natural right to defend oneself, from individual attackers or a tyrannical government—such as one trying to confiscate private property, including weapons, without just cause.
Elections are meant to indicate a preference, not a rejection.
I think this is part of the problem. Selecting the one candidate with the largest constituency is inherently divisive, and tends to encourage extremes. I would prefer that the winner was the least rejected candidate, the one which is acceptable (if not actually preferred) to the most voters.
My voting scheme would focus exclusively on negative votes. Given N candidates, each voter get N-1 negative votes which they can allocate as they wish (no fractional votes). They can vote once against all but one candidate, or place all their votes against a single particularly despised candidate, or anything in between. The candidate with the fewest negative votes wins.
I'll admit that I've seen some cases like that myself. In the absence of a decent abstraction boundary, there's no point in breaking a function up such that you still need to know the inner details of several parts to understand any of them. The point is to abstract away the details, not just split the code up to avoid exceeding some arbitrary line count. However, I would still say that it's possible to write most programs, readably, in terms of functions averaging less than 20-30 lines each.
(I routinely work with a legacy codebase consisting of many 100-plus-line C functions, so I apologize if my own frustrations are showing through...)
The value of something is exactly what you're willing to pay for it. Saying that something is needed is just another way of saying that its value is greater than any potential cost. The idea that "the value doesn't matter" is nonsense. This entire thread is about nothing but value; whether you realize it or not, you're saying that the value of these materials is greater than the cost of going to space to mine them.
Those inline comments are good (when done properly) when trying to quickly grok through a large codebase. ... a one liner generalizing a 9 or 10 line block of code means 9 or 10 lines of code you can skim over.
Agreed, but often those 9 or 10 lines could be refactored into a separate function, which would allow the inline comments to be replaced with function-level documentation. The general rule is to break up functions at no more than twice that size, where feasible.
It depends on how well structured the code is. If the functions are small and simple, then the function-level comments should be sufficient in most cases. It's OK to rely on a function doing what the comments claim it should do while reading higher-level code. I don't expect people to review the code for strcpy() every time it's used.
On the other hand, if you're reviewing code with large, monolithic functions, it may need some comments inside the function (roughly where the function boundaries should be) to help readers keep track of what's going on. I would still look at such comments with a measure of distrust, however, since you don't have the benefit of each part being reviewed and tested in isolation.
Descriptive function and variable names are also a form of commenting, and one which is much more effective when combined with tightly-scoped variables and small, single-purpose functions.
I imagine one of the first things a programmer learns about reading code, if they're going to be any good at it, is to skip over the inline comments. Reading them will only prejudice your interpretation of the code in favor of the original authors expectations, preventing you from seeing what the code is actually doing.
Comments are useful when you come across a block of code you can't otherwise understand, but the rest of the time they tend to either duplicate information which is already in the code, or confuse matters by being vague, misleading, or just plain wrong.
High-level documentation of modules and functions is invaluable, of course, but those comments should be in a block of their own, or even a separate file, and not be mixed in with the rest of the code.
The Second Amendment, however, is ... literal except that "militia" really means "individuals."
At the time, the "militia" consisted of practically every able-bodied male of military age, so "individuals" is essentially literal. That aside, however, the right itself has little to do with the militia:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." is obviously just an introductory clause, explaining (in part) why the amendment was written. The actual right is in the second half, which clearly refers to "the right of the people", not "the right of the militia". Honestly, sometimes it seems like the pro-gun-control crowd does their reasoning by looking only at key words like "militia" without considering the grammatical context.
The only way any weapons ban could possibly be considered constitutional under a fair reading of the amendment would be if an argument could be made that the weapons being banned are not "Arms" in the original sense.
The U.S. Constitution does not adequately define "arms". When it was adopted, "arms" included muzzle-loaded muskets and pistols, swords, knives, bows with arrows, and spears. However, a common- law definition would be "light infantry weapons which can be carried and used, together with ammunition, by a single militiaman, functionally equivalent to those commonly used by infantrymen in land warfare." That certainly includes modern rifles and handguns, full-auto machine guns and shotguns, grenade and grenade launchers, flares, smoke, tear gas, incendiary rounds, and anti-tank weapons... —Constitution Society
My guess is that the scientists probably imported at least several Kb of already-functional code into the fish genome to produce the marginal change in the protein production.
I see your guess and raise you actual science. What they did, from the article, was take a gene the fish already possessed and multiply it. The fish already produces this protein, but with fewer copies of the gene. Increasing the number of copies, and thus the amount of protein produced, resulted in autopods.
Saying that the genetics are similar because the effect is similar...
I didn't say that. We already know that the genetics are similar, because we've sequenced the DNA of a number of organisms and determined that they're really very similar, even when the organisms appear quite different. Plants and animals, for example, share far more DNA than one would naively expect. What I said was that the fact that a small change in the expression of certain proteins changes the development of the fins to something much closer to hands is consistent with common descent. It shows how small changes over time could have changed fins (or fin-precursors) into hands. That this actually occurred requires other evidence, which we have from a variety of sources.
Code similarity is far from a "constraint." Libraries, modularity, and code reuse are the bread-and-butter of effective and efficient programming.
No argument there, but where is the modularity in DNA? Where are the boundaries between the libraries and the rest of the organism? Code reuse is possible because we carefully avoid making every piece interact with every other piece. We deliberately restrict the ability for small changes in one are to have global effects on the rest of the program, preferring to create small, self-contained modules with well-defined interfaces. DNA is just the opposite: a single huge parallel program, with patches layered on top of patches, and no organizing structure to be found anywhere. What it most resembles (for obvious reasons) is the output of a genetic algorithm, the difference being that genetic algorithms are configured with fitness functions to achieve specific goals, while natural selection has no goal apart from the survival of the genes.
On a related note - Hey, let's make this an argument about religion on a tech news site, right where arguments about religion belong! Again....
You're the one that brought up religion. Up till now, we were discussing common descent ("evolution") and Intelligent Design, a term invented specifically to avoid the religious connotations of Creationism. However, you're probably correct that it's more honest to classify ID as religion rather than science.
First, they didn't actually manage to grow hands. The closest they were able to achieve was "autopods", a precursor somewhere between hands and fins. The cause of this difference was a transplanted mouse gene which increased the production of a certain protein involved in selection and development of different kinds of tissue.
The real lesson from this is that small changes in DNA can have large effects on physiology. A bit more of a certain protein at the right point in development and you get autopods instead of fins. A few other minor changes and you might even get something approaching real hands.
It isn't that fish have unused DNA lying around which can be "activated" to produce hands; rather, the genetic codes for fins and hands are very similar, perhaps differing by just a couple of mutations. This similarity is evidence in favor of common descent. Why would a "designer" put in the effort to make the DNA so similar? No doubt, if our own experience as designers is anything to go by, it would be far easier to achieve ideal fins and ideal hands without that constraint. Hands and fins differentiated only by the presence of a few specific proteins is perfectly consistent, however, with inherited genetic traits and natural selection.
Bitcoin just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it. At some point the recipient organization needs to convert Bitcoin back into currency in order to make use of it.
In this case, moving the problem is a solution. The recipient organization does need to exchange Bitcoin back into some local currency (at least for now; more items are becoming available on the direct Bitcoin market all the time), but that exchange can take place in a different jurisdiction than the donor's, one with a friendlier relationship to the organization, and without involving VISA and its arbitrary rules.
No, I'm saying that the original code was:
But I suspect you already knew that.
No, it's a definition for array element 14, thus "[14] = ...". There's a newline missing in the comment after "#ifdef CONFIG_EXYNOS_MEM".