At least in older people, Telomerase is only present in gamete and cancerous cells (there is a small amount of the enzyme in younger people, I believe). What this means is that we have an effective way to target only the cancer (and gamete) cells by suppressing something that your somatic cells don't have the benefit of anyway. Since cancer cells divide much more quickly than normal cells, it stands to reason that their telomeres would erode very quickly without the presence of telomerase. Delivery could be systemic.
I think that the idea behind them is to turn little errors into big errors so that a "little" error to the program (loaded garbage data for an account balance, for example) becomes a big error before any harm is done. It is generally accepted that errors that halt execution are preferrable to logic errors, which seems to be the philosophy behind assert().
If an assertion can fail under normal circumstances in released code, assert is being misused. IMHO, the idea behind an assertion is to prevent violations of preconditions set down in the code from occurring. These preconditions do not cover runtime conditions, such as memory errors; that's the sort of thing that exception handling should be used for. An assertion indicates something that you are doing wrong rather than a problem with the environment.
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
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· Score: 1
I would argue that it does get a bit better in college and adulthood, especially if you manage to find like-minded people, which would explain the purpose of Mensa. After all, one of the easily recognizable purposes of lower education is to build a social network, whereas it is assumed that you are capable of forming your own connections without help by college. However, I do see your point: Among their nongifted peers, the gifted are eschewed and ridiculed. At best, they're barely tolerated. The only roles which they seem to be accepted in are those that demand intelligence: Those such as professor and tutor. Even then, you're always approached as a pedagogue, never a peer.
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 1
Smarter people set harder challenges for themselves than the rest of the population, then get disappointed when they fall short of those challenges. No matter how intelligent, I wonder if anyone is satisfied with his intelligence.
I agree that you don't need to be intelligent to accomplish something. You just need to be very determined or lucky.
I've heard that perfect pitch makes it difficult to transpose. I think the feeling that perfect pitch is a coveted ability is due to the 6 months or so required to develop good relative pitch... ear training isn't all that much fun, and people who don't have perfect pitch (like myself) probably feel that those with perfect pitch are "getting out of ear training for free".
The trick to emulating perfect pitch with relative is to memorize a reference tone (I used A 440Hz, but you can just as easily use another note) and hear other pitches as intervals between the reference tone.
The article cites special absences, such as maternity leaves, preventing women from keeping their skills up-to-date as the cause of women dropping out of IT. There are a number of flaws with this:
Women are underrepresented even on the college level, where not many of them are of the age where raising a child becomes a problem. Out of 80 Comp. Sci students in two sections of my freshman computer science class, 1 was female, and she dropped out after the first semester.
I understand that raising a child takes a lot of time, but surely there must be an hour or so a day to do some research and keep up-to-date on IT skills.
I doubt that "staying current" is as important as the article makes it out to be, anyway. Even knowing some new hot topics, I find myself using older technologies 90% of the time at work.
I think that the real cause of the female IT exodus is twofold: The first is that the money is no longer there. Fortunately, this means that IT candidates now are likely more dedicated. On the other hand, that means homogeneity... you only get those that are dedicated in the field, and that seems to consist almost entirely of males. Additionally, there is a social stigma associated with these sorts of fields... or, for that matter, demonstrating rational intelligence at all. Women are expected to be nurturers because that is what society expects of them, not because of any significant innate difference. Likewise, men are supposed to be the rational protectors and financial supporters. For a woman to defy what her peers may think of her in order to pursue the field that she really wants to is rare. Then again, how many male nurses do you know?
Though mentioned in the article, the power supply actually has a larger impact on noise than the article suggests. I upgraded my stock 350W power supply to a TruePower 430 and it literally halved the amount of noise that my system was generating.
If the program modifies the Windows kernel in such a way that it is undetectable, couldn't a simple boot CD (running something other than Windows) with a spyware scanner work? Sounds like a potential use of Knoppix, although I'm unaware of any anti-spyware programs for Linux (as spyware is not really a problem on Linux). Something like ClamAV but for spyware would be nice.
Good point, but we'd still destroy thousands of years of societal progress. Additionally, the amount of time it would take for intelligent life to reemerge from such an environment would be indefinite.
Even if Venus were somehow cooled, the magnetic field of the planet is not strong enough to protect us from solar radiation. The rotation of the planet would have to be sped up as well.
Also, diverting big asteroids into a planet may have some bad effects on the planet's orbit. We probably don't want that.
The worst case scenario does not predict that the temperature will rise 1F. The worst case scenario predicts that the temperature will rise exponentially due to positive feedback, well beyond the temperature at which life on earth can survive (this is called the "runaway greenhouse" if you want to find out more about that theory). This theory doesn't have too much creditability yet, since there are so many variables that affect the earth's climate, but you did ask for the worst-case scenario.
The worst case scenario that a reasonable percentage of scientists believe is going to happen in about a century is a rise of the mean temperature of around 10C (18F). This will have a bunch of ramifications, most of which I doubt we have even realized yet.
And in a hundred years, the world economy will be how many thousand times larger? We'll be able to blink and create superstructures that today's engineers and architects can't even dream about. We'll have cities with thousands of times the populations, bustling with millions of times the economy.
As society gets bigger, it's going to require more energy. Unless we look to energy sources that involve less greenhouse gas emission, the problem is only going to get worse. No matter how much easier it will become to manage the problem (and I doubt it will; the greenhouse effect was first attributed to atmospheric gasses in the mid-19th century by Fourier, and it's no easier to manage now than it was then), there's still the matter of actually doing something about it!
If you want to give users the ability to install extensions into the firefox directory, you can just chmod it. Ditto for any directories you may want to allow users to install into. If you want to install stuff using your user account, but don't want to set permissions, use sudo. In Windows, you have cacls. The methods exist for you to allow users to install software, but they all require some setup, as they should. An OS that allows users to install things to any directory they choose out of the box wouldn't be particularly secure.
This particular asteroid is not big enough to cause problems on a global scale. On the other hand, it could probably destroy a large city or create a tsunami, so it isn't something to shrug off either.
If the source to the app were open, not only could the government programmers look at the source, but so could anyone else who wished to. On the other hand, with closed-source software the scenario that you've described could take place, since the vendor basically controls who can see the code and under what circumstances. (Or was this your point and I misunderstood what you posted?)
I don't think there's any shortage of people paranoid enough to want to see every bit of source that the government codes:)
That was my first reaction, but then I realized that the voting machines may be keeping more data than simple votes. Who knows what information about the votes and/or voters the machine is storing?
I'm not going to argue the details of the Kyoto protocol; it's like arguing over the implementation of a class. What is important about Kyoto is its goal. If Kyoto is ineffective and costs the US jobs, why doesn't someone (whose voice will be heard) propose a better approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions? We need to do something about global warming instead of arguing indefinitely over details. Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.
I just found out that LCDs are capable of burn-in (the hard way). If you plan on displaying a static image on the window for long periods of time, you might want to blank the screen every so often.
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At least in older people, Telomerase is only present in gamete and cancerous cells (there is a small amount of the enzyme in younger people, I believe). What this means is that we have an effective way to target only the cancer (and gamete) cells by suppressing something that your somatic cells don't have the benefit of anyway. Since cancer cells divide much more quickly than normal cells, it stands to reason that their telomeres would erode very quickly without the presence of telomerase. Delivery could be systemic.
I think that the idea behind them is to turn little errors into big errors so that a "little" error to the program (loaded garbage data for an account balance, for example) becomes a big error before any harm is done. It is generally accepted that errors that halt execution are preferrable to logic errors, which seems to be the philosophy behind assert().
If an assertion can fail under normal circumstances in released code, assert is being misused. IMHO, the idea behind an assertion is to prevent violations of preconditions set down in the code from occurring. These preconditions do not cover runtime conditions, such as memory errors; that's the sort of thing that exception handling should be used for. An assertion indicates something that you are doing wrong rather than a problem with the environment.
I would argue that it does get a bit better in college and adulthood, especially if you manage to find like-minded people, which would explain the purpose of Mensa. After all, one of the easily recognizable purposes of lower education is to build a social network, whereas it is assumed that you are capable of forming your own connections without help by college. However, I do see your point: Among their nongifted peers, the gifted are eschewed and ridiculed. At best, they're barely tolerated. The only roles which they seem to be accepted in are those that demand intelligence: Those such as professor and tutor. Even then, you're always approached as a pedagogue, never a peer.
I agree that you don't need to be intelligent to accomplish something. You just need to be very determined or lucky.
The trick to emulating perfect pitch with relative is to memorize a reference tone (I used A 440Hz, but you can just as easily use another note) and hear other pitches as intervals between the reference tone.
I think that the real cause of the female IT exodus is twofold: The first is that the money is no longer there. Fortunately, this means that IT candidates now are likely more dedicated. On the other hand, that means homogeneity... you only get those that are dedicated in the field, and that seems to consist almost entirely of males. Additionally, there is a social stigma associated with these sorts of fields... or, for that matter, demonstrating rational intelligence at all. Women are expected to be nurturers because that is what society expects of them, not because of any significant innate difference. Likewise, men are supposed to be the rational protectors and financial supporters. For a woman to defy what her peers may think of her in order to pursue the field that she really wants to is rare. Then again, how many male nurses do you know?
I have yet to see a popup manage to get past a hosts file entry :)
On the other hand, if the popups are coming from the same site that you're browsing, that isn't possible.
Though mentioned in the article, the power supply actually has a larger impact on noise than the article suggests. I upgraded my stock 350W power supply to a TruePower 430 and it literally halved the amount of noise that my system was generating.
If the program modifies the Windows kernel in such a way that it is undetectable, couldn't a simple boot CD (running something other than Windows) with a spyware scanner work? Sounds like a potential use of Knoppix, although I'm unaware of any anti-spyware programs for Linux (as spyware is not really a problem on Linux). Something like ClamAV but for spyware would be nice.
Good point, but we'd still destroy thousands of years of societal progress. Additionally, the amount of time it would take for intelligent life to reemerge from such an environment would be indefinite.
Even if Venus were somehow cooled, the magnetic field of the planet is not strong enough to protect us from solar radiation. The rotation of the planet would have to be sped up as well.
Also, diverting big asteroids into a planet may have some bad effects on the planet's orbit. We probably don't want that.
Mars is a better candidate.
The worst case scenario does not predict that the temperature will rise 1F. The worst case scenario predicts that the temperature will rise exponentially due to positive feedback, well beyond the temperature at which life on earth can survive (this is called the "runaway greenhouse" if you want to find out more about that theory). This theory doesn't have too much creditability yet, since there are so many variables that affect the earth's climate, but you did ask for the worst-case scenario.
The worst case scenario that a reasonable percentage of scientists believe is going to happen in about a century is a rise of the mean temperature of around 10C (18F). This will have a bunch of ramifications, most of which I doubt we have even realized yet.
As society gets bigger, it's going to require more energy. Unless we look to energy sources that involve less greenhouse gas emission, the problem is only going to get worse. No matter how much easier it will become to manage the problem (and I doubt it will; the greenhouse effect was first attributed to atmospheric gasses in the mid-19th century by Fourier, and it's no easier to manage now than it was then), there's still the matter of actually doing something about it!*Spoiler*
Beowulf doesn't die beating up Grendel's mother, he dies beating up a dragon that threatens his kingdom many years later.
If you want to give users the ability to install extensions into the firefox directory, you can just chmod it. Ditto for any directories you may want to allow users to install into. If you want to install stuff using your user account, but don't want to set permissions, use sudo. In Windows, you have cacls. The methods exist for you to allow users to install software, but they all require some setup, as they should. An OS that allows users to install things to any directory they choose out of the box wouldn't be particularly secure.
This particular asteroid is not big enough to cause problems on a global scale. On the other hand, it could probably destroy a large city or create a tsunami, so it isn't something to shrug off either.
If the source to the app were open, not only could the government programmers look at the source, but so could anyone else who wished to. On the other hand, with closed-source software the scenario that you've described could take place, since the vendor basically controls who can see the code and under what circumstances. (Or was this your point and I misunderstood what you posted?)
:)
I don't think there's any shortage of people paranoid enough to want to see every bit of source that the government codes
Though not as bad as CO2, water vapor is also a greenhouse gas.
That was my first reaction, but then I realized that the voting machines may be keeping more data than simple votes. Who knows what information about the votes and/or voters the machine is storing?
I'm not going to argue the details of the Kyoto protocol; it's like arguing over the implementation of a class. What is important about Kyoto is its goal. If Kyoto is ineffective and costs the US jobs, why doesn't someone (whose voice will be heard) propose a better approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions? We need to do something about global warming instead of arguing indefinitely over details. Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.
There are a number of user-friendly configuration tools for iptables. FireStarter is the first one that comes to mind, though there are others.
Best is an ambiguous word. Are they talking about code quality, readability, usefulness, adherence to the open source definition, ...?
I just found out that LCDs are capable of burn-in (the hard way). If you plan on displaying a static image on the window for long periods of time, you might want to blank the screen every so often.