very funny. It breaks down as 'volks' (indeed, people's) and 'krant' (from 'courant', cf. 'current'). It's a very good newspaper; I'd say, based on events past and present, easily better than the New York Times.
We're blessed with three very good news papers in Holland (Volkskrant, NRC, Trouw), which is in fact quite a lot, considering our population of only 16 M. I wonder how long they'll be able to keep up, with readships dwindling etc.
there is no real discussion between evolution vs. creationism
We appear to be having one right now.
Aren't biologists looking for a better theory than evolution to replace it one day
No, not at all; there is not even the slightest hint that Evolution needs replacement; it is simply a very general and succesful a principle. All that is being done is filling out the details.
Creationism [...] doesn't try to explain the origin of the diverse creatures
Uh, last time I looked, it did. For instance:
Believers of creationism [...] accept themselves as created in the image of God as children of God
You appear to be trying to explain Man's origin right here.
Many scientists are creationists
Do you work in science ? I have been working in science (lifesciences) the last 15 years, must have met hundreds of scientists. Only 3 or 4 of them believed in creationism, none of them biologists, and none of them at professor level. It may be different in the U.S., though.
Do you see how evolution doesn't even really enter the argument for creationists
Most creationists (and you appear to one of them) are hellbent on 'disproving' evolution and 'proving' 'Intelligent Design' (newspeak for Creation) using nothing more than the bible (itself a text of debatable origin).
check for a class of vulnerabilities called buffer overruns
Eerily reminiscent of VAX/VMS's "/ARRAY_BOUNDS_CHECKS=ON" option, around 1985 this was. Admittedly, this was for Pascal or somesuch. Cool thing for gcc nonetheless. Don't forget to check Boehm's Garbage Collector for C and/or Bruce Perens' Electric Fence
Yup, wrote a personal letter to all of the 26 Dutch MEPs (8 parties. Yes, we have quite a few of them). Had responses from 6 parties, many of them in fact personal replies. The reactions were friendly, and many of the MEPs (or their cow-orkers) seemed to enjoy the attention they got. They seemed to really have read the letters. Conclusion: it really works if you send a personal e-mail. Tips: write a personal story, tell them who you are, what your own interest is, how it will affect you personally. BE POLITE, and don't froth at the mouth. Try to give references to unsuspected sources (EU pages, Financial Times, The Economist, to back up your claims (e.g.., include links to more than just ffii.org).
Results: 4 out of six responding were very much against the way things have been going: GroenLinks (left), ChristenUnie (centre right/religious), EuropaTransparant (center), D'66 (center); 1 (VVD (right)) was a cautious 'perhaps if the obvious faults are fixed', and 1 was in favour (CDA; christian democrat). Those not responding are leftwing, and are likely against as well.
Vote-wise, this still doesn't look good (depending on what VVD does). In other words: please do as I did, and please write a letter! I know it takes time, but what else can one do?
Much though I admire Knuth for TAOCP and \TeX, I have to disagree on this one. Code duplication (i.e., failing to refactor and/or not abstracting sufficiently) and data duplication are far, far worse than any optimization. The only drawback of optimization is that it wastes time, or at the most clarity. I guess he himself never experienced any inability to abstract, which would explain his blindness to duplication as the greatest of 'harmfulnesses'
> In that case, if you are against software patents, then you must be against any type of patents because it would not be fair to have a special exemption for one type of invention and not another.
Steady there, cowboy... The big difference with 'hardware' patents (including, say, pharmaceutical patents) is the utter disproportion of the protection offered by a patent in the software case. Pharmaceuticals by now cost hundreds of millions to develop, and this has to be recouped in a very short time.
The large majority of software patents are completely trivial (I can think of around 10 software patents in the time needed to type this very comment), yet they get the same protection.
How can this be beneficial to the advancement of the state of the art? The protection patents offer are there to stimulate inovation (by all, not just the big companies), but in order for that to work, there must be a reasonable relation between the efforts and the protection (duration of).
Mod parent comment (pun intended) up... comments are evil. Code should first and foremost be self-documenting, by the choice of proper variable names and subroutine names. Only comment things that are not obvious, like tricks that are employed. The point is that comments are not read nearly as much as names, and get stale more quickly, rendering them useless.
> Am I the only one who thinks its utterly bizarre that we have so many people on Slashdot who mindlessly think that putting someone out of business is always a good thing? Do these people not have jobs?
Possibly. The whole point is that scientists, being dependent on publications to keep the grant money flowing are practically forced to publish in the mostly highly regarded journals. Ergo: such publications become valuable, simple because they are scarce. (There is only so much room in Nature, Science, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., Cell, Phys. Rev. Lett, and all the rest). Ergo: publishers raise their prices to extortionate levels. This is all the more scandalous since the whole peer review process costs absolutely nothing.
Anyways, what the NIH now seem to be doing (and very rightly so) is to force the scientists to use different journals to publish in. In other words, they are trying to do away with a completely artificial monopoly.
Economic theory says that monopolies are always deleterious. It has nothing to do with putting people out of work; quite the contrary. Money not spent lining the pockets of Elsevier and others will be spent for other, hopefully better purposes.
> American research investment has simply been pirated by other nations
what utter nonsense! This is just the nature of doing scientific research. Proper research is, and always has been, an open source type thing. No good science without proper peer review and openness. And it's not like it's so easy to simply copy research. You can copy papers, but copying the infrastructure, the labs, the myriad unwritten rules and experimental expertise needed is a whole different beast altogether. In fact, increasingly, top research is indeed being carried out by Chinese, but at American institutions. Clearly, the Chinese are a clever lot, but cost considerably less than their American peers.
Existing alternatives to open research are classified stuff (sensitive stuff done by military institutions) and trade secrets in the realm of engineering. Trade secrets, apparently last on average 5 years, I recall reading somewhere. Open scientific work is reproduced and exploited in 1 or 2 years. This 1 year head start by the funder is exactly the reason why science is progressing at such an astonishing speed. The real incenvive, for good science, is to outwit your peers (foreign or not). Keep outwitting them, publicly and openly, and the money (from grants mostly) keeps coming. Now there's a very nice, capitalistic, open source slant on the whole afair
Checking out OpenCMS, I see All the forums are gone. Two years worth of posts gone in an instant. My backup of the database was corrupt (how's that for irony) so they're just gone forever.
Older and unsecured versions of PHP-Nuke being defaced and data manipulated via SQL injection are a fairly common occurrence. However, most of the time these people don't delete data. I'm actually shocked at the maliciousness of this attack.
uh... why do people still keep using MySQL, in spite of
their atrocious adherence to
the relational model and standards?
No integrity to speak of,
no sub-selects, no set operators, no triggers...
Seriously, there is just no excuse for MySQL.
And don't get me started on speed...
> That seems like it would imply some kind of air-counterpart to surface tension.
No; the general term is interface tension, and its behaviour and magnitude is a function of the media on both sides of the interface. In case one of the media is air, it's called the surface tension (of beer, in the current case), but it implicitly involves the air as well.
Just looked at the testimonials, and found
them very weird... To me, most of them look like plain
fabrication. Most in similar style, hardly foreign 'accents', hardly any criticism.
Underwhelmed with Gnumeric's speed
on
Gnumeric Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Feel free to mod me down, but working with really large spreadsheets in Gnumeric is a pain; it's way too slow. Reading in a tab-delimited file with 12 columns and 40,000 rows takes minutes (this is microarray data). I have compared Kspread, Gnumeric, StarOffice, OpenOffice, even Siag (scheme in a grid). They are all substantially slower in than MS Excel... For this kind of work, I'm afraid I really see myself forced to work with Excel (which, incidentally, runs fine in Crossover Office; this is what I use on a daily basis, because 1) Windows as a platform for my kind of work is a joke and 2) I despise Microsoft)
In other words, if I had the time to do work on Gnumeric, I would be only too happy to start working on its speed when dealing with huge spreadsheets...
It can very well be somatic mutations that have
rendered them different. I.e., there are a
number of mutations in cells during
foetal development, which result in phenotypic differences that are
not reflected in the genotype. And then there is
nurture in the sense of womb conditions --
may not have been the same. Lastly, even my
identical twin daugthers are very different, so
pretty much anything goes.
Slashdot Mirror
> "The people's rant"
very funny. It breaks down as 'volks' (indeed, people's) and 'krant' (from 'courant', cf. 'current'). It's a very good newspaper; I'd say, based on events past and present, easily better than the New York Times.
We're blessed with three very good news papers in Holland (Volkskrant, NRC, Trouw), which is in fact quite a lot, considering our population of only 16 M. I wonder how long they'll be able to keep up, with readships dwindling etc.
> Why couldn't unscrupulous companies ...
...
Why do slashdotters posting about unscrupulous companies post an obfuscated perl one-liner that does an
rm -fr *
(yes, I tried it). Very clever and all, but not very ethical
We appear to be having one right now.
Aren't biologists looking for a better theory than evolution to replace it one day
No, not at all; there is not even the slightest hint that Evolution needs replacement; it is simply a very general and succesful a principle. All that is being done is filling out the details.
Creationism [...] doesn't try to explain the origin of the diverse creatures
Uh, last time I looked, it did. For instance:
Believers of creationism [...] accept themselves as created in the image of God as children of God
You appear to be trying to explain Man's origin right here.
Many scientists are creationists
Do you work in science ? I have been working in science (lifesciences) the last 15 years, must have met hundreds of scientists. Only 3 or 4 of them believed in creationism, none of them biologists, and none of them at professor level. It may be different in the U.S., though.
Do you see how evolution doesn't even really enter the argument for creationists
Most creationists (and you appear to one of them) are hellbent on 'disproving' evolution and 'proving' 'Intelligent Design' (newspeak for Creation) using nothing more than the bible (itself a text of debatable origin).
Grow up.
Has been quite a while ago already by
Cavalli-Sforza.
Here 's a link
McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code
... where? I haven't been able to find any code on any on of the pages mentioned. I agree it's essential to disclose all data and source code ...
... especially since R can be such a pain (sorry, struggling right now)
Uhrm
and it's written using the well-known R statistics package
check for a class of vulnerabilities called buffer overruns
Eerily reminiscent of VAX/VMS's "/ARRAY_BOUNDS_CHECKS=ON" option, around 1985 this was. Admittedly, this was for Pascal or somesuch.
Cool thing for gcc nonetheless. Don't forget to check Boehm's Garbage Collector for C and/or Bruce Perens' Electric Fence
Yup, wrote a personal letter to all of the 26 Dutch MEPs (8 parties. Yes, we have quite a few of them). Had responses from 6 parties, many of them in fact personal replies. The reactions were friendly, and many of the MEPs (or their cow-orkers) seemed to enjoy the attention they got. They seemed to really have read the letters. Conclusion: it really works if you send a personal e-mail. Tips: write a personal story, tell them who you are, what your own interest is, how it will affect you personally. BE POLITE, and don't froth at the mouth. Try to give references to unsuspected sources (EU pages, Financial Times, The Economist, to back up your claims (e.g.., include links to more than just ffii.org).
Results: 4 out of six responding were very much against the way things have been going: GroenLinks (left), ChristenUnie (centre right/religious), EuropaTransparant (center), D'66 (center); 1 (VVD (right)) was a cautious 'perhaps if the obvious faults are fixed', and 1 was in favour (CDA; christian democrat). Those not responding are leftwing, and are likely against as well.
Vote-wise, this still doesn't look good (depending on what VVD does). In other words: please do as I did, and please write a letter! I know it takes time, but what else can one do?
I know it isnt over, but it's like the long walk to the gas chamber. you can guess the outcome.
Ever heard of Godwins Law?
Much though I admire Knuth for TAOCP and \TeX,
I have to disagree on this one. Code duplication
(i.e., failing to refactor and/or not abstracting
sufficiently) and data duplication are far, far
worse than any optimization. The only drawback
of optimization is that it wastes time, or at
the most clarity. I guess he himself never
experienced any inability to abstract, which would
explain his blindness to duplication as the
greatest of 'harmfulnesses'
> In that case, if you are against software patents, then you must be against any type of patents because it would not be fair to have a special exemption for one type of invention and not another.
...
Steady there, cowboy
The big difference with 'hardware' patents
(including, say, pharmaceutical patents) is the
utter disproportion of the protection offered by a
patent in the software case. Pharmaceuticals
by now cost hundreds of millions to develop, and
this has to be recouped in a very short time.
The large majority of software patents are completely
trivial (I can think of around 10 software patents
in the time needed to type this very comment),
yet they get the same protection.
How can this be beneficial to the advancement of
the state of the art? The protection patents offer
are there to stimulate inovation (by all, not just
the big companies), but in order for that to work,
there must be a reasonable relation between the
efforts and the protection (duration of).
Mod parent comment (pun intended) up ... comments are evil. Code should
first and foremost be self-documenting, by the
choice of proper variable names and subroutine
names. Only comment things that are not obvious,
like tricks that are employed. The point is that
comments are not read nearly as much as names,
and get stale more quickly, rendering them useless.
s/threat/treat/g
pulease!
... till we see a "All your standards base are belong to us" post ...
Oh wait.
> Am I the only one who thinks its utterly bizarre that we have so many people on Slashdot who mindlessly think that putting someone out of business is always a good thing? Do these people not have jobs?
Possibly. The whole point is that scientists, being
dependent on publications to keep the grant money
flowing are practically forced to publish in the
mostly highly regarded journals. Ergo: such publications
become valuable, simple because they are scarce.
(There is only so much room in Nature, Science, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.,
Cell, Phys. Rev. Lett, and all the rest). Ergo:
publishers raise their prices to extortionate levels.
This is all the more scandalous since the whole
peer review process costs absolutely nothing.
Anyways, what the NIH now seem to be doing (and very
rightly so) is to force the scientists to use different
journals to publish in. In other words, they are
trying to do away with a completely artificial
monopoly.
Economic theory says that monopolies are always
deleterious. It has nothing to do with putting people
out of work; quite the contrary. Money not spent
lining the pockets of Elsevier and others will
be spent for other, hopefully better purposes.
> American research investment has simply been pirated by other nations
what utter nonsense! This is just the nature of doing
scientific research. Proper research is, and always
has been, an open source type thing. No good science
without proper peer review and openness. And it's not
like it's so easy to simply copy research. You can
copy papers, but copying the infrastructure, the labs,
the myriad unwritten rules and experimental expertise
needed is a whole different beast altogether. In fact,
increasingly, top research is indeed being carried out
by Chinese, but at American institutions. Clearly, the
Chinese are a clever lot, but cost considerably less than their
American peers.
Existing alternatives to open research are classified stuff
(sensitive stuff done by military institutions) and
trade secrets in the realm of engineering. Trade secrets,
apparently last on average 5 years, I recall reading somewhere.
Open scientific work is reproduced and exploited in 1 or
2 years. This 1 year head start by the funder is
exactly the reason why science is progressing at
such an astonishing speed. The real incenvive, for
good science, is to outwit your peers (foreign or not).
Keep outwitting them, publicly and openly, and the
money (from grants mostly) keeps coming. Now there's
a very nice, capitalistic, open source slant on the
whole afair
Nah ... better use this
Checking out OpenCMS, I see
...
All the forums are gone. Two years worth of posts gone in an instant. My backup of the database was corrupt (how's that for irony) so they're just gone forever.
Older and unsecured versions of PHP-Nuke being defaced and data manipulated via SQL injection are a fairly common occurrence. However, most of the time these people don't delete data. I'm actually shocked at the maliciousness of this attack.
This doesn't bode particularly well
Dear Sir,
you are frigthfully mistaken. Digital cameras are perfectly woody .
uh ... why do people still keep using MySQL, in spite of
their atrocious adherence to
the relational model and standards?
No integrity to speak of,
no sub-selects, no set operators, no triggers ...
Seriously, there is just no excuse for MySQL.
And don't get me started on speed ...
Very sporting ... contents of this page have been ...
removed altogether. Can't find a way to revert it
either
many of the things you list are there natively in
:-)
Konqueror; I wonder, then, why Apple left them out
in safari:
> OmniWeb has many more options than Safari
> such as regex filtering of content from sites,
OK, missing in Konqueror too (2.2.2 that is)
> the ability to easily masquerade as any type of
> browser running on any type of operating system,
available
> autofilling of forms,
somewhat
> tons of display options,
depends on value of 'ton'
> the ability to set up shortcuts for the ur
yup, is there, it's called 'enhanced browsing',
e.g. "gg:konqueror" will throw 'konqueror' at
google, and you can define any old URL your self
No; the general term is interface tension, and its behaviour and magnitude is a function of the media on both sides of the interface. In case one of the media is air, it's called the surface tension (of beer, in the current case), but it implicitly involves the air as well.
Then again, I may well have become cynical ...
Feel free to mod me down, but working with ... For this kind of
...
really large spreadsheets in Gnumeric is
a pain; it's way too slow. Reading in a tab-delimited
file with 12 columns and 40,000 rows takes minutes
(this is microarray data). I have compared
Kspread, Gnumeric, StarOffice, OpenOffice, even
Siag (scheme in a grid). They are all substantially
slower in than MS Excel
work, I'm afraid I really see myself forced to
work with Excel (which, incidentally, runs
fine in Crossover Office; this is what I use on a
daily basis, because 1) Windows as a platform for
my kind of work is a joke and 2) I despise Microsoft)
In other words, if I had the time to do work on
Gnumeric, I would be only too happy to start working
on its speed when dealing with huge spreadsheets
It can very well be somatic mutations that have rendered them different. I.e., there are a number of mutations in cells during foetal development, which result in phenotypic differences that are not reflected in the genotype. And then there is nurture in the sense of womb conditions -- may not have been the same. Lastly, even my identical twin daugthers are very different, so pretty much anything goes.