There are really two things to consider when using template languages like PHP and ColdFusion:
1) Is the rapid development style worth the processing overhead and system-independence?
2) Are you prepared to take the extra time to make the code clean after said rapid development?
Granted, any language can be misused to create horrible code, but with rapid development with template languages, you have to be careful not to let the ease and simplicity of the language lull you into poor programming. However, you do not need to use extra "stuff" to accomplish this specifically, if you are careful to code your data access modules separate from the presentation logic in the first place, which is just good programming style in general.
Just wanted to throw my $0.02 on NSO organization. I think that with the school system the way it is, and the serious problems we seem to be having teaching basic science to people, this is one of the most worthy causes you can easily contribute to if you care about sciences and education. Plus, its *fun* as a judge to see what people come up with.
For me personally, it was something that a geek could excel in and interactively work with others and enjoy versus just sitting with the book. Plus, I love tinkering and doing practical engineering (one event I loved was called "Mystery Build" where you had a box full of random string, wood, paper, etc. and they had you build a cantilever or something when you got there).
35 medals over 4 years, 3 of them at the National Level (you *have* to see the Rube Goldberg devices they have up there). Some of the best fun I ever had with school (plus, you got to go on cool trips to Chicago and DC).
This is a very fair point, and I have been both a judge and a participant, and parental help was a big part of it, and brought a lot of families together (especially with me and my dad, who don't relate very well outside of building and planning things).
I think you are also not taking into account that most of the events are information recall, and problem solving on paper: not just engineering events like the balsa tower and egg drop. Parents can do very little to help there, except help their kids learn. Few kids should need help with reading information.
The thing that really is bad, however, is when the *teachers* interfere too much in the competition. As unfair as it is for parents to give too much help, it is even more unfair with the teachers, since my school had several PhD's teaching, as opposed to the public school system.
The real answer is that if the kid really wanted to, he could seek help from others if his parents/schoolteachers were not satisfactory.
The naked egg drop is a twist on the old "drop the egg from a window inside a padded thing and see if it lasts" schtik. In this, the thing you build sits on the floor, and you drop the egg "naked" and see how high you can drop it from and it still not crack when it lands in your device. Our team won several years ago simply using *extremely* fine sand in a box;-).
I find [y]talk to be more difficult to communicate with vs. IM. The ability for both of you to type messages at once and interrupt each other can be very counter-productive and distracting (... no, you... etc.). AIM forces messages into discrete pacakages, which kills somewhat the RT aspect of it, but typing is not RT anyway;-).
AHAHAHAHAH! That's funny! Are you that naive? The government does not have "strict enumerated powers"... they gain new power all the time, to the detriment of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the individual. That is what governments do: gain more power and more control. I will agree with you that our gov't is more socialist than capitalist... although our *economy* is still capitalist. With bills like this though, the economy will become socialistic as well. Monopolies will be the norm, all operated under the graces of Washington. You don't think businesses control Washington? If politicians think they can get away with it, they will pass any law that someone that gives them money asks them to. Studies have shown that as long as the economy is doing well, they think the government is doing well: ergo to help business helps the economy, which keeps people happy. Plus, politicians need money to mount campaigns, and they get *far* more from business that individuals or SIGs. Technically, the people have the ultimate power, not the government, and even now the individuals rights are being trampled to the advantage of big business. It is *entirely* within Congress' power to enact this legislation... they created the Anti-Trust Laws, and they can rescind it. I can understand why people with smaller minds can hold your view of the American government...
Unfortunately ignorance of the law is no excuse, nor are "But everyone does it!" and "This is a stupid law" excuses. I am all for civil disobedience, but you gotta accept the consequences.
However, there are laws specifically exempting minors from some laws or lessening their liability due to the fact that they are not in a position to understand the law. The court would throw out the 12-year-olds case if it ever got there... now the parents are a different issue.
It is *your* responsibility entirely to ensure that you are following the law, no one else's.
I think this is a shitty state of affairs w.r.t. music and copyrights, but quit trying to pass the blame to other people. There is too much of an attitude in America that nothing is your fault, and you are not responsible for anything.
Walking is more efficient than a car... the human process for digesting food and producing energy is more efficient than any internal combustion engine. Taking a car is *faster*, and so are computers, but you trade-off flexibility (being able to scramble over boulders, say). I agree with you in principle, but the reason we use things is not that they are more efficient in general, it's that they are faster with the trade-off of generality.
I am usually of the same opinion, but for this movie, there is a good reason to have the extended editions and the extras on the disc... it would be *impossible* to fully develop the plot and subtleties of LotR to even reasonable standards within the 9 hours of the normal film. This is PJ's way of giving more to the fans of the book (which he is also). These scenes were cut simply because of time constraints, not because they sucked. Try watching the extended edition of "The Abyss" sometime as another example of a film that was shortened by time. In many ways, this is the exact opposite of what you claim, they are correcting and making up for the fact that they tried to make too much money by making the films shorter and more palatable to a theatre audience, rather than achieving their full vision.
A friend of mine works for Coke here in ATL, and there is an absolute rule of no Pepsi products, schwag, ads, or anything else in the building, I shit you not. You can certainly bring Taco Bell food and the like, but if it says Pepsi on it, your in some trouble.
If you want a real radio station that plays music that I gaurantee 90% of you have never heard, tune in WREK, Georgia Tech's radio station here (they also have a 7-day archive). The stuff it plays is so out there that, at least for me, I *have* to listen to it because it is so different. This is what all radio stations should aspire to, since it fulfills I think what the real purpose of radio stations should be these days... exposing people to new music (and I mean *new*). It demonstrates just how much music is out there that no one gets to hear.
You are correct, sir. The main method for dating rocks and minerals is K-Ar dating, which measures the decay of a very long-lived potassium isotope. The only problem is that accuracy is very hard to achieve with this. I think the amount of error with this method is in the several millions of years, and useless for measurements on the human time scale. But we can tell how old moon rocks and the like are...
As far as I can tell, they used straight systems with no tweaking or modification. This includes "turning on" RAID. The other boxes come configured with *hardware* RAID that is already turned on. Nice try. Please, I have done research on the product. I don't think they are toys, they just look like one...;-). It's a joke, don't be so testy.
Wow, way to make the headline inaccessible to anyone without a huge interest in biology... Basically MacKinnon solved the folding of extremely hard to study protiens in the cell membrane that allow ions into the cell. The cell membrane is non-polar (oily), while water is polar. These proteins exist so water, metal ions, etc. can get into the cell. What makes these protiens so hard to study is that when you try to remove them from the cell membrane to study them they turn inside out! The polar inside of the protein (which lets the polar stuff in) is attracted to the water, while the non-polar outside, normally attracted to the cell membrane, gets folded up to the inside (never knew a molecule could turn inside out before...).
This kind of research has huge applications to medicine, since most drugs/poisons/anything not fatty have to enter the cell through these pores. I am wondering whether he used distributed or parallel protien folding simulations for some of his work... X-ray crystallography on globular protiens usually yields poor results (it is hard to get the X-rays to diffract to show the inner channel structure) compared to crystalline/regular protiens.
Anyone who says evolution is a scientifically proven fact knows the definition of evolution. Darwins theory was that natural selection and evolution, often misnamed the "Theory of Evolution", explained speciation and the variety of similar life. This theory has been extended by other theories, such as genetic drift, the founder phenomenon, and several theories about population dynamics to compreshensively provide theories about how the fact of evolution leads to speciation. Evolution is an event that happens all the time... read up on pepper moths in London sometime (quick summary, they changed colors during industrial revolution to match blackened trees). Natural selection is a fact. These two facts were put together to form "Darwin's Theory That Speciation and Diversity Are Caused by Natural Selection and Evolution", which unfortunately is just abbreviated to "Darwin's Theory of Evolution." I can't prove this theory and neither can you... and I encourage you to think freely and come up with your own explanations, whatever. But if you are going to debate with people about things, it is usually a pre-requisite that you know the language and meaning of the terms you are using.
No, that just means that when you compile your uber-high level language into machine code or translate it to C, whatever, to get your machine running, you have less of an idea as to what is actually going on. Now your problem is with the VM/translator/whathaveyou. The Java VM and the Perl interpreter never have bugs... nope, never. You are just shifting the problem from one domain to another.
You are correct that HTML is not strictly XML. Just like XML is not SGML, etc. However, XML is a *superset* of html. Any XML browser actually should be able to parse HTML just fine. My question is why would you want to make web-pages in XML? Without the semantic meaning for the tags that are programmed in the browser to render said XML on screen, its pretty useless. What, you wanna tell the browser how to render your XML tags... fine, but then why are you using XML if you can just tell the browser exactly what you want anyway? HTML is nothing but a subset of XML with (sometimes) well-defined semantic, graphical meaning. So in a way, HTML is XML. You are right, but for the wrong reason;-).
Technically, he only mentioned Germans, not Nazis or Hitler. And he did not use it to argue or to compare something to out of malice. I wouldn't invoke Godwin's law here. Now if he said "These amphibious cars are the destruction of society... you know who else had them right? The Nazis!" then we might have an issue. Or maybe my sarcasm detectors just out of batteries... (goes to find battery tester).
Has anyone ever stopped to think that there is no TOE? And not just that, that there is no valid description of possible universes either? Theoretical physicists are playing mathematical games to find the TOE, but are having lots of trouble. The TOE should produce all the physical constants from its principles, right? What if the TOE has constants? Worse, what if someone proved a Godel or Turing like theorem that says something to the effect of "There is no theory that can describe everything, because there will be at least one (universe|force|particle|whatever) that does exist, but cannot be described." This is the most likely outcome I think.
At best I think that if we find a TOE it will have extremely poor predictive value because it will be so generic that it tells us not too much more about our universe than we already know, and simply give physicists new universes to wank around in. Not to say we shouldn't research this... ya never know where you might find useful stuff.
The classification of rocks he is speaking of here are called tektites, and are like little drops of colored glass. They are found in only cetain areas of the world, Antarctica being the predominant location. Just a little tidbit for today.
Slashdot Mirror
There are really two things to consider when using template languages like PHP and ColdFusion:
1) Is the rapid development style worth the processing overhead and system-independence?
2) Are you prepared to take the extra time to make the code clean after said rapid development?
Granted, any language can be misused to create horrible code, but with rapid development with template languages, you have to be careful not to let the ease and simplicity of the language lull you into poor programming. However, you do not need to use extra "stuff" to accomplish this specifically, if you are careful to code your data access modules separate from the presentation logic in the first place, which is just good programming style in general.
Just wanted to throw my $0.02 on NSO organization. I think that with the school system the way it is, and the serious problems we seem to be having teaching basic science to people, this is one of the most worthy causes you can easily contribute to if you care about sciences and education. Plus, its *fun* as a judge to see what people come up with.
For me personally, it was something that a geek could excel in and interactively work with others and enjoy versus just sitting with the book. Plus, I love tinkering and doing practical engineering (one event I loved was called "Mystery Build" where you had a box full of random string, wood, paper, etc. and they had you build a cantilever or something when you got there).
35 medals over 4 years, 3 of them at the National Level (you *have* to see the Rube Goldberg devices they have up there). Some of the best fun I ever had with school (plus, you got to go on cool trips to Chicago and DC).
This is a very fair point, and I have been both a judge and a participant, and parental help was a big part of it, and brought a lot of families together (especially with me and my dad, who don't relate very well outside of building and planning things).
I think you are also not taking into account that most of the events are information recall, and problem solving on paper: not just engineering events like the balsa tower and egg drop. Parents can do very little to help there, except help their kids learn. Few kids should need help with reading information.
The thing that really is bad, however, is when the *teachers* interfere too much in the competition. As unfair as it is for parents to give too much help, it is even more unfair with the teachers, since my school had several PhD's teaching, as opposed to the public school system.
The real answer is that if the kid really wanted to, he could seek help from others if his parents/schoolteachers were not satisfactory.
The naked egg drop is a twist on the old "drop the egg from a window inside a padded thing and see if it lasts" schtik. In this, the thing you build sits on the floor, and you drop the egg "naked" and see how high you can drop it from and it still not crack when it lands in your device. Our team won several years ago simply using *extremely* fine sand in a box ;-).
I find [y]talk to be more difficult to communicate with vs. IM. The ability for both of you to type messages at once and interrupt each other can be very counter-productive and distracting (... no, you ... etc.). AIM forces messages into discrete pacakages, which kills somewhat the RT aspect of it, but typing is not RT anyway ;-).
AHAHAHAHAH! That's funny! Are you that naive? The government does not have "strict enumerated powers"... they gain new power all the time, to the detriment of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the individual. That is what governments do: gain more power and more control. I will agree with you that our gov't is more socialist than capitalist... although our *economy* is still capitalist. With bills like this though, the economy will become socialistic as well. Monopolies will be the norm, all operated under the graces of Washington. You don't think businesses control Washington? If politicians think they can get away with it, they will pass any law that someone that gives them money asks them to. Studies have shown that as long as the economy is doing well, they think the government is doing well: ergo to help business helps the economy, which keeps people happy. Plus, politicians need money to mount campaigns, and they get *far* more from business that individuals or SIGs. Technically, the people have the ultimate power, not the government, and even now the individuals rights are being trampled to the advantage of big business. It is *entirely* within Congress' power to enact this legislation... they created the Anti-Trust Laws, and they can rescind it. I can understand why people with smaller minds can hold your view of the American government...
Unfortunately ignorance of the law is no excuse, nor are "But everyone does it!" and "This is a stupid law" excuses. I am all for civil disobedience, but you gotta accept the consequences.
However, there are laws specifically exempting minors from some laws or lessening their liability due to the fact that they are not in a position to understand the law. The court would throw out the 12-year-olds case if it ever got there... now the parents are a different issue.
It is *your* responsibility entirely to ensure that you are following the law, no one else's.
I think this is a shitty state of affairs w.r.t. music and copyrights, but quit trying to pass the blame to other people. There is too much of an attitude in America that nothing is your fault, and you are not responsible for anything.
Walking is more efficient than a car... the human process for digesting food and producing energy is more efficient than any internal combustion engine. Taking a car is *faster*, and so are computers, but you trade-off flexibility (being able to scramble over boulders, say). I agree with you in principle, but the reason we use things is not that they are more efficient in general, it's that they are faster with the trade-off of generality.
I am usually of the same opinion, but for this movie, there is a good reason to have the extended editions and the extras on the disc... it would be *impossible* to fully develop the plot and subtleties of LotR to even reasonable standards within the 9 hours of the normal film. This is PJ's way of giving more to the fans of the book (which he is also). These scenes were cut simply because of time constraints, not because they sucked. Try watching the extended edition of "The Abyss" sometime as another example of a film that was shortened by time. In many ways, this is the exact opposite of what you claim, they are correcting and making up for the fact that they tried to make too much money by making the films shorter and more palatable to a theatre audience, rather than achieving their full vision.
Wrong.
A friend of mine works for Coke here in ATL, and there is an absolute rule of no Pepsi products, schwag, ads, or anything else in the building, I shit you not. You can certainly bring Taco Bell food and the like, but if it says Pepsi on it, your in some trouble.
If you want a real radio station that plays music that I gaurantee 90% of you have never heard, tune in WREK, Georgia Tech's radio station here (they also have a 7-day archive). The stuff it plays is so out there that, at least for me, I *have* to listen to it because it is so different. This is what all radio stations should aspire to, since it fulfills I think what the real purpose of radio stations should be these days... exposing people to new music (and I mean *new*). It demonstrates just how much music is out there that no one gets to hear.
You are correct, sir. The main method for dating rocks and minerals is K-Ar dating, which measures the decay of a very long-lived potassium isotope. The only problem is that accuracy is very hard to achieve with this. I think the amount of error with this method is in the several millions of years, and useless for measurements on the human time scale. But we can tell how old moon rocks and the like are...
As far as I can tell, they used straight systems with no tweaking or modification. This includes "turning on" RAID. The other boxes come configured with *hardware* RAID that is already turned on. Nice try. Please, I have done research on the product. I don't think they are toys, they just look like one... ;-). It's a joke, don't be so testy.
Maybe because they only tested systems you could get from distributors? AFAIK, no Macintoy G5 comes with RAID from Apple...
Wow, way to make the headline inaccessible to anyone without a huge interest in biology... Basically MacKinnon solved the folding of extremely hard to study protiens in the cell membrane that allow ions into the cell. The cell membrane is non-polar (oily), while water is polar. These proteins exist so water, metal ions, etc. can get into the cell. What makes these protiens so hard to study is that when you try to remove them from the cell membrane to study them they turn inside out! The polar inside of the protein (which lets the polar stuff in) is attracted to the water, while the non-polar outside, normally attracted to the cell membrane, gets folded up to the inside (never knew a molecule could turn inside out before...).
This kind of research has huge applications to medicine, since most drugs/poisons/anything not fatty have to enter the cell through these pores. I am wondering whether he used distributed or parallel protien folding simulations for some of his work... X-ray crystallography on globular protiens usually yields poor results (it is hard to get the X-rays to diffract to show the inner channel structure) compared to crystalline/regular protiens.
Anyone who says evolution is a scientifically proven fact knows the definition of evolution. Darwins theory was that natural selection and evolution, often misnamed the "Theory of Evolution", explained speciation and the variety of similar life. This theory has been extended by other theories, such as genetic drift, the founder phenomenon, and several theories about population dynamics to compreshensively provide theories about how the fact of evolution leads to speciation. Evolution is an event that happens all the time... read up on pepper moths in London sometime (quick summary, they changed colors during industrial revolution to match blackened trees). Natural selection is a fact. These two facts were put together to form "Darwin's Theory That Speciation and Diversity Are Caused by Natural Selection and Evolution", which unfortunately is just abbreviated to "Darwin's Theory of Evolution." I can't prove this theory and neither can you... and I encourage you to think freely and come up with your own explanations, whatever. But if you are going to debate with people about things, it is usually a pre-requisite that you know the language and meaning of the terms you are using.
No, that just means that when you compile your uber-high level language into machine code or translate it to C, whatever, to get your machine running, you have less of an idea as to what is actually going on. Now your problem is with the VM/translator/whathaveyou. The Java VM and the Perl interpreter never have bugs... nope, never. You are just shifting the problem from one domain to another.
You are correct that HTML is not strictly XML. Just like XML is not SGML, etc. However, XML is a *superset* of html. Any XML browser actually should be able to parse HTML just fine. My question is why would you want to make web-pages in XML? Without the semantic meaning for the tags that are programmed in the browser to render said XML on screen, its pretty useless. What, you wanna tell the browser how to render your XML tags... fine, but then why are you using XML if you can just tell the browser exactly what you want anyway? HTML is nothing but a subset of XML with (sometimes) well-defined semantic, graphical meaning. So in a way, HTML is XML. You are right, but for the wrong reason ;-).
Technically, he only mentioned Germans, not Nazis or Hitler. And he did not use it to argue or to compare something to out of malice. I wouldn't invoke Godwin's law here. Now if he said "These amphibious cars are the destruction of society... you know who else had them right? The Nazis!" then we might have an issue. Or maybe my sarcasm detectors just out of batteries... (goes to find battery tester).
Has anyone ever stopped to think that there is no TOE? And not just that, that there is no valid description of possible universes either? Theoretical physicists are playing mathematical games to find the TOE, but are having lots of trouble. The TOE should produce all the physical constants from its principles, right? What if the TOE has constants? Worse, what if someone proved a Godel or Turing like theorem that says something to the effect of "There is no theory that can describe everything, because there will be at least one (universe|force|particle|whatever) that does exist, but cannot be described." This is the most likely outcome I think.
At best I think that if we find a TOE it will have extremely poor predictive value because it will be so generic that it tells us not too much more about our universe than we already know, and simply give physicists new universes to wank around in. Not to say we shouldn't research this... ya never know where you might find useful stuff.
Moderate this up! Thanks Atheist, I was thinking of getting it but did not have the money!
Congratulations, you just supported his statement. That's exactly what he means. Why can't we just accept the differences?
James A. Garfield
you know, your e-mail address would run faster if you used tail recursion.
The classification of rocks he is speaking of here are called tektites, and are like little drops of colored glass. They are found in only cetain areas of the world, Antarctica being the predominant location. Just a little tidbit for today.