All right, patience out. Listen, idiot. A 10k text file would be a 'longish' binary number of 10,000 bytes lined end to end, or a number in BASE 2^10,000 = BASE 199(three thousand zeros). Think about it like this.
You're saying a 10k file can be represented as two numbers in base 32,640. Two 32640's means 32640*32640 = 1,065,369,600, about one billion. Ok, a lot of 10k files. 10k is about ten pages of text, give or take. (That helped inspire the original measure.) If ANY 10k can be stored in that one billion, that means there are ONLY one billion POSSIBLE ten pages, otherwise it'd overlap and you wouldn't know which one you wanted, right? So you're saying there are only one billion possible ten pages of book. How many books do you think there are in the world? Even if there were only a billion and they all had only ten pages, you'd still lose, because you'd have to account for different combinations (and this word is glad to be used properly for once around here) of those ten pages. Impossible. This means, you are incorrect.
But let's get more detailed since you feel compelled to argue. Besides, that last example feels kind of stiff.
Increase the number of colors possible from 2 to 16. There are 120 different ways to paint the inside of this box. It still represents a single digit, but that is now a digit in base 120.[1]
When the number of possible colors increases to 256, the number system of this digit becomes base 32,640. There are that many different ways to choose 2 colors from a set of 256 colors.
Right, guy, and -- here's where you're not paying attention -- a single 8-bit byte is a base-256 number, because it can represent any number from 0 to 255. A 16 bit is base 65536, because you can store any number from 0 to 65535 in 16 bits. The guy above me hit on this, and he's right, too, I just can't leave this alone, as we've all provided a perfectly rational response which you've thrown to the wind with the classical approach of someone who doesn't understand what they're talking about, gets called on it, and sticks their fingers in their ears.
Think about this, also: no matter WHAT you do with a 3x3 matrix, PERIOD, I can represent it as 9 pixels, and have room left over, unless you've used every possible combination of each individual pixel, in which case they are equal. It doesn't matter which pixel is foreground vs background, or how many color patterns there are, or what shapes you draw or if you take a tarot reading, you can't represent more than the things used to make the image represent. You can. not. do. it. It's called information theory, and believe it or not it's had a lot of work done on it by people who actually did know what they were doing, and they've had the same little 'observations' as you, discredited them, and left them behind, years and years ago.
Summary: You CAN NOT EVER store 10k as '2 digits base 32640.' Let me hit this one last time just in case you don't get it. A 15-bit number can store up to 32768 values, so it is base 32768, close to your number. You're saying you can store 10k in less than two fifteen bit numbers -- or saying you can put TEN THOUSAND bytes in less than TWO bytes. Gosh, everyone else just missed it all these years, huh? Silly scientists. When will they ever figure it out? People like you give science a bad name by not understanding anything about the work that goes into what we have.
If what you're saying was true, wouldn't it be easier to just encode two dots, rather than in a 3x3 matrix? Dot 1 for color, dot 2 for color? Same result. All that other rotation hullabaloo is less efficient than just putting one more dot, since we're talking about upper bounds. If you're using 256 colors, that's the same as one byte. (1 byte = 0-255, 256 states.) So you're talking about a byte, and then another byte. Two bytes, or a 16 bit integer. EVERYTHING you've said about this 256 select 2 garbage applies to 16 bit integers, without exception.
Let's for sake of simplicity consider just one 3x3 matrix, and surely you can agree the rest of the concepts for the full sheet will follow.
We say: 3x3x256, a byte is 256, so 3x3 bytes, so 9 bytes (using 256 color). You're saying 3,329,280 combinations per 3x3. As a little experiment, let's see how many 'combinations' 9 bytes can hold, or the highest number you can count to with nine bytes, which is 9x8 or 72 bits: 2^72 is 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696. So with our nine bytes we could hold every single combination that you postulated per matrix FOUR QUADRILLION TIMES just by assigning it a unique number. Your 'innovative' technique does nothing but waste space in a ratio of 4,000,000,000,000 to 1.
Now, the mistake you're making: bits don't store 'combinations', they store states. In order to increase the number of states you have to DOUBLE the number of combinations. A single bit has two combinations: 0 and 1. Two bits has four combinations: 00, 01, 10, 11. Three bits has eight combinations: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111. And so on. That's why people have been repeatingly telling you to take the log and not just use the number. Combinations do not equal bits and do not equal storage space.
No, he said, Abstinence is guaranteed to be effective (implied: in the prevention of AIDS) -- and it's NOT guaranteed to be effective, because it doesn't affect all forms of AIDS transmission. That is the point that I suspect that was trying to be made. Regardless of political standpoint of either party it's a simply incorrect statement, and, indeed, if anything reinforces the statement before it, because AIDS -can't- be controlled on a personal level by personal behavioral factors -- one's environment and society is always a risk.
A way to put out fires would be more useful than a high-horse "oh, let's just not have fires" attitude if liver transplants caused fires randomly when performed by people without access to all of the technology that we have access to AND STILL SOMETIMES DON'T USE.
That kind of holier-than-thou thinking could apply to almost any medical problem. "If people with the flu would stay inside we wouldn't need flu medication; it wouldn't spread." "If people wouldn't break bones we wouldn't need a means of setting them."
To the originally quoted post: grow up, get your head out of your ass, and start worrying about helping people instead of looking down your nose at them thinking they're going to "respect" you for your ability to "stick to your morals," or, in reality, be a total jerk. I'm all for morals. I'm also all for helping people who are doing the best they can.
To the person I'm replying to, sorry, got carried away, I guess.
Really, this doesn't seem all that revolutionary -- Symantec, like McAfee, like any other company serious in the business, ALREADY offers an integrated suite of tools (Internet Security) and no matter the advancement of interplay and integration I have a hard time believing that Genesis will come across to the average user as being so much more. Wait and see, I guess.
I tested exceptionally well in my youth. I've been accused of faking test results, of grand improbable conspiracies, and of outright lying, throughout my life, due simply to high IQ scores and strong, immediate competence.
In my field I often encounter scenarios exactly like the one you describe. Hell, in everyday life I encounter scenarios of great similarity. They ask, I explain, they bullshit, I counter, they leave.
I worked in retail -- consumer tech sales, mostly. (Running two registers implies an interesting physical layout of your store.) I've put sales numbers through the roof. You're right; it is psychology. Which is something that can be grasped and understood. Numbers through the roof, et al.
People don't listen to me; I encounter almost exactly the same discrimination you describe. People react very, very poorly when I am right. I branch out of my field to help people with questions; but invariably they discriminate against me, once proven being correct.
I am white.
Given that the data files are unsigned, freely modifiable, and given MS's history of exploits in pure data (and MS-made code-data hybrid) formats, it seems likely a buffer exploit will be relatively easy to insert into the datastream. Heck, given the Windows-autolaunch mentality it wouldn't suprise me if you could just replace the video file with an executable by the same name. *grin*
The screen is "shiny and reflective" because it uses, I'm sure, the same frontload prism that all the new "XBRITE" and "TruBrite" and "BrightView" etc. screens use; it gathers the TFT's light and throws it all forward, reducing scatter = increasing brightness. The problem with this is it creates glare because of the reflective surface of the prismatic layer. Also, it tends to wash out blacks. I'd be willing to bet that if you took this monitor and set it next to something with good, well-known deep black (L90D+ is my choice) you'd see an immediate, obvious difference. As I'm sure you realize on reflection, "getting glare" does not mean it has unusually deep blacks, just that it has an unusually glare-prone screen;).
This seems, well, inane to me. An example cited in the story is a guy with a handheld that using it can recall what he was doing x years ago, the weather, etc., but without it "couldn't remember his daughter's telephone number."
Surely this is a sign of worse memories? Horse crap.
People who remembered phone numbers twenty years ago remembered only because they needed to. Easier for some, harder for others, the only reason that number would stick around was through repetition and the hassle of having to look it up. The space that memory occupied has been replaced with basic knowledge of how to operate a cellphone or PDA, and that's a good thing.
I say as we move away from the compile-time lookup table model as a species and towards the live database backend model we improve. We are -not- the best devices yet for strict storage and recollection of facts under easy search criteria. We -are-, however, the best pattern recognition and data assosiation and intuition devices this planet has yet seen, and we should take advantage of that by clearing out the lookup tables and replacing them with dynamic interface routines.
It's really hard for me to take lists like this seriously when they say things placing them squarely outside the domain of the things they speak of. They (CNet) said in the StarCraft description, for instance, that the single player campaign and overall gameplay were so compelling that people would often play through the campaign three times just to experience it from the perspective of the three different races, and that's flat out wrong. The campaign taken as a whole was composed of three chapters, told one per race, and covering distinctly different timelines of story event. Any one of those three chapters (and hence races) would have told little story and made no sense.
Maybe I'm just nitpicking. But it bothers me, because anyone familiar with the game at all would immediately spot such an error, and it really takes credence away from anything they have to say on other games the reader may not have heard about. (I've heard of all of them, but hey, we may not all be so lucky.)
Also, it's a little haphazard to call Quake with it's brown-pallette hack one of the "best looking games ever," or credit it with the birth of the 'classic' keyboard-mouse FPS combo; that immediately says WASD to me, and Quake I was still in the era of "hold down this key to mouselook".
Hello,
I am Captain Rengis of the STARSHIP VOYAGER. This is a Matter of Utmost Urgency. We have an Opening on our ship and would like to invite you to Join. We Will pay a Sign On Bonus of FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. Unfortunately Due to Laws in your Country we need Your Assistance in getting you Out of the Country and cannot cover all Legal Fees on our own. Please Reply very soon on this URGENT MATTER.
I think BASIC would be a perfect choice, and not because it's an easy to learn language. Hear me out.
I learned to program in BASIC in my early youth. A lot of people think BASIC ruins you for programming; I think it ruins people who don't want to program for programming. Personally, upon quickly learning BASIC, and just as quickly running up against the limitations it imposes on performance, structure, and flexibility, it forged and tempered my resolve to learn a real language. Now I'm a quite competent programmer.
Let her give it a shot. Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code isn't named what it's named for poetic reasons...
It's seldom my place to reply in this fashion, but this is an excellent post, worthy of publication, let alone positive moderation. Anyone who scrolled past it due to its length, go read it!
Oh yeah, that reminds me. I drive a Ford, and anyone should, since they're the most economical, reliable, and efficient cars. Of course, I've never owned, driven, reviewed, read about, or looked at any other kind of car.
I agree that it's difficult to get by on poverty-line income. It's worth pointing out, however, that in north Georgia at least, McDonalds (and most unskilled jobs) pay minimum wagw -- 5.15 hourly -- which if you work full time without holiday the whole year yeilds less than 11k and takes home more like 7k -- 600 monthly, at best. That's a tough income to sustain yourself on. Copmletely apart from that, this is more prone to region, but the McDonald's around here don't guarantee a full-time position -- one week you might have 40 hours, the next week 15.
I work a menial labor job third shift making $8/hour so I can support myself through college, and it would be uncomfortable without a roommate.
For my sixth birthday, my mother picked up a TRS-80 for me at a yardsale. This was in '89. She didn't know how to hook it up to the TV, let alone get something going in basic. With it came a brief book of BASIC programs that would run on said machine.
It took me about two months to be able to write a program outside book specs, and another month before I could write something to approximate doing something I was told. My mom got me an actual computer a year later, and by the time I was ten I wrote a few games in C that in retrospect were ahead of their time. (A raycasting algorithm and something damn like a BST line-of-sight before I'd ever heard of Wolfenstein or Doom.) My mom was amazed.
I hold she shouldn't have been. I didn't do anything besides learn a new language...something children are notoriously good at. I hold that if a six year old can learn english, he/she can learn BASIC, and if someone can learn BASIC, they can learn C. Maybe it's just the way I look at things.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Let's break this down.
One to the second power is one. (Good enough.)
Negative one to the second power is one. (Also ok.)
One to the second power is equal to negative one to the second power. (Fair enough.)
And this is where it beaks down. For in moving from there to one is equal to negative one, you have made the assumption that the square root of one squared is equal to the square root of negative one squared, which isn't one at all.
i != 1, math is saved.
(Sorry, bored.)
With respect, there are a couple of issues to consider here. Allow me to touch on the most important -- it's quite plausible that people could realistically not win the lottery at all on a weekly basis. For instance, assuming the Georgia Lottery is 5 numbers with 49 choices (correct, I believe, but assuming so for example) then the odds of obtaining a winning result are 1 in 282,475,249. With an estimated Georgia population of 9 million (approximately correct as per census) that means that every person in the state, infant or elderly or illiterate or what have you, would have to buy 31 and a third tickets to guarantee a win. And that is in a very populous state.
I applaud your interest in C, but stay awake in class.
The double equals sign is in fact a conditional operator, and the single equals sign is in fact an assignment operator, but the != is by no means a single equals sign. It is correct as stated, read simply "not equals". Also, he is not assigning a string. He is assigning a hex value 0xFFFFFFFF. By prepending a value with 0x you are stating that the attached sequence should be interpreted as a series of hex characters -- 0-9 and A-F. If you haven't learned about hexadecimal yet, you soon will. Perservere.
Sorry, no dice.
Focal points? Well, you can look at a wide array of math constructs that 'move' faster than the speed of light. That doesn't really mean anything. As for the laser, again, sorry, no go. After you sweep your laser, even assuming you had some way of measuring the photons that hit the moon and even further assuming the photons encountered zero refraction, you wouldn't see any kind of dot at all. You would at best see a band of dispersed photons flitting across the moon, with one side getting there slightly before the other. There would be no dot, and you certainly wouldn't see some laser point sweeping across the moon at fantastic velocity. Which would in no way imply faster than light travel, mind you. Think of it as squrting a water gun and suddenly swinging it in an arc. You have a wave of water sweeping forward, slightly offset to one side.
First, allow me to apologize for my cavalier use of copyright. As the entire western american civilization pointed out, I misused the term 'copyright' where I should have used 'patent'. My only excuse is it being a single-digit hour of the morning.
Second, I would like to address an aditional point: If one does copyri-- patent a gene sequence, is it a patent applying to that sequence only as a part of the entire DNA from which it was extracted? Or instead is it a standalone, patented work? What then if someone attempts to copyright a sequence containing that sequence? And what of the source of the sequence -- is a sequence identical to the original but obtained from, say, a spider monkey still a violation? IANAL, and there are more issues than I have addressed, but it seems the legal ramifications of this are severe.
I am exceedingly uncomfortable with someone patenting something existing as an intrinsic trait of my own body -- it is akin (perhaps identical, if one follows the logic) to patenting my voice, or my hair color.
This brings up again the interesting debate on whether information can be copyrighted by the one whom merely discovered the information, regardless of the fact that the information existed to begin with. Personally, I feel that human DNA is rather obviously public domain...otherwise one is forced to consider the ludicrous situation of one being forbidden to sequence one's own DNA, lest a copyrighted segment result. This is akin to being forbidden to read a CD because the code contained therin is copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
You're saying a 10k file can be represented as two numbers in base 32,640. Two 32640's means 32640*32640 = 1,065,369,600, about one billion. Ok, a lot of 10k files. 10k is about ten pages of text, give or take. (That helped inspire the original measure.) If ANY 10k can be stored in that one billion, that means there are ONLY one billion POSSIBLE ten pages, otherwise it'd overlap and you wouldn't know which one you wanted, right? So you're saying there are only one billion possible ten pages of book. How many books do you think there are in the world? Even if there were only a billion and they all had only ten pages, you'd still lose, because you'd have to account for different combinations (and this word is glad to be used properly for once around here) of those ten pages. Impossible. This means, you are incorrect.
But let's get more detailed since you feel compelled to argue. Besides, that last example feels kind of stiff. Right, guy, and -- here's where you're not paying attention -- a single 8-bit byte is a base-256 number, because it can represent any number from 0 to 255. A 16 bit is base 65536, because you can store any number from 0 to 65535 in 16 bits. The guy above me hit on this, and he's right, too, I just can't leave this alone, as we've all provided a perfectly rational response which you've thrown to the wind with the classical approach of someone who doesn't understand what they're talking about, gets called on it, and sticks their fingers in their ears.
Think about this, also: no matter WHAT you do with a 3x3 matrix, PERIOD, I can represent it as 9 pixels, and have room left over, unless you've used every possible combination of each individual pixel, in which case they are equal. It doesn't matter which pixel is foreground vs background, or how many color patterns there are, or what shapes you draw or if you take a tarot reading, you can't represent more than the things used to make the image represent. You can. not. do. it. It's called information theory, and believe it or not it's had a lot of work done on it by people who actually did know what they were doing, and they've had the same little 'observations' as you, discredited them, and left them behind, years and years ago.
Summary: You CAN NOT EVER store 10k as '2 digits base 32640.' Let me hit this one last time just in case you don't get it. A 15-bit number can store up to 32768 values, so it is base 32768, close to your number. You're saying you can store 10k in less than two fifteen bit numbers -- or saying you can put TEN THOUSAND bytes in less than TWO bytes. Gosh, everyone else just missed it all these years, huh? Silly scientists. When will they ever figure it out? People like you give science a bad name by not understanding anything about the work that goes into what we have.
If what you're saying was true, wouldn't it be easier to just encode two dots, rather than in a 3x3 matrix? Dot 1 for color, dot 2 for color? Same result. All that other rotation hullabaloo is less efficient than just putting one more dot, since we're talking about upper bounds. If you're using 256 colors, that's the same as one byte. (1 byte = 0-255, 256 states.) So you're talking about a byte, and then another byte. Two bytes, or a 16 bit integer. EVERYTHING you've said about this 256 select 2 garbage applies to 16 bit integers, without exception.
Let's for sake of simplicity consider just one 3x3 matrix, and surely you can agree the rest of the concepts for the full sheet will follow.
We say: 3x3x256, a byte is 256, so 3x3 bytes, so 9 bytes (using 256 color). You're saying 3,329,280 combinations per 3x3. As a little experiment, let's see how many 'combinations' 9 bytes can hold, or the highest number you can count to with nine bytes, which is 9x8 or 72 bits: 2^72 is 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696. So with our nine bytes we could hold every single combination that you postulated per matrix FOUR QUADRILLION TIMES just by assigning it a unique number. Your 'innovative' technique does nothing but waste space in a ratio of 4,000,000,000,000 to 1.
Now, the mistake you're making: bits don't store 'combinations', they store states. In order to increase the number of states you have to DOUBLE the number of combinations. A single bit has two combinations: 0 and 1. Two bits has four combinations: 00, 01, 10, 11. Three bits has eight combinations: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111. And so on. That's why people have been repeatingly telling you to take the log and not just use the number. Combinations do not equal bits and do not equal storage space.
No mods playing this game? This is the most hilarious post ever.
No, he said, Abstinence is guaranteed to be effective (implied: in the prevention of AIDS) -- and it's NOT guaranteed to be effective, because it doesn't affect all forms of AIDS transmission. That is the point that I suspect that was trying to be made. Regardless of political standpoint of either party it's a simply incorrect statement, and, indeed, if anything reinforces the statement before it, because AIDS -can't- be controlled on a personal level by personal behavioral factors -- one's environment and society is always a risk.
A way to put out fires would be more useful than a high-horse "oh, let's just not have fires" attitude if liver transplants caused fires randomly when performed by people without access to all of the technology that we have access to AND STILL SOMETIMES DON'T USE.
That kind of holier-than-thou thinking could apply to almost any medical problem. "If people with the flu would stay inside we wouldn't need flu medication; it wouldn't spread." "If people wouldn't break bones we wouldn't need a means of setting them."
To the originally quoted post: grow up, get your head out of your ass, and start worrying about helping people instead of looking down your nose at them thinking they're going to "respect" you for your ability to "stick to your morals," or, in reality, be a total jerk. I'm all for morals. I'm also all for helping people who are doing the best they can.
To the person I'm replying to, sorry, got carried away, I guess.
Really, this doesn't seem all that revolutionary -- Symantec, like McAfee, like any other company serious in the business, ALREADY offers an integrated suite of tools (Internet Security) and no matter the advancement of interplay and integration I have a hard time believing that Genesis will come across to the average user as being so much more. Wait and see, I guess.
I tested exceptionally well in my youth. I've been accused of faking test results, of grand improbable conspiracies, and of outright lying, throughout my life, due simply to high IQ scores and strong, immediate competence. In my field I often encounter scenarios exactly like the one you describe. Hell, in everyday life I encounter scenarios of great similarity. They ask, I explain, they bullshit, I counter, they leave. I worked in retail -- consumer tech sales, mostly. (Running two registers implies an interesting physical layout of your store.) I've put sales numbers through the roof. You're right; it is psychology. Which is something that can be grasped and understood. Numbers through the roof, et al. People don't listen to me; I encounter almost exactly the same discrimination you describe. People react very, very poorly when I am right. I branch out of my field to help people with questions; but invariably they discriminate against me, once proven being correct. I am white.
Given that the data files are unsigned, freely modifiable, and given MS's history of exploits in pure data (and MS-made code-data hybrid) formats, it seems likely a buffer exploit will be relatively easy to insert into the datastream. Heck, given the Windows-autolaunch mentality it wouldn't suprise me if you could just replace the video file with an executable by the same name. *grin*
The screen is "shiny and reflective" because it uses, I'm sure, the same frontload prism that all the new "XBRITE" and "TruBrite" and "BrightView" etc. screens use; it gathers the TFT's light and throws it all forward, reducing scatter = increasing brightness. The problem with this is it creates glare because of the reflective surface of the prismatic layer. Also, it tends to wash out blacks. I'd be willing to bet that if you took this monitor and set it next to something with good, well-known deep black (L90D+ is my choice) you'd see an immediate, obvious difference. As I'm sure you realize on reflection, "getting glare" does not mean it has unusually deep blacks, just that it has an unusually glare-prone screen ;).
This seems, well, inane to me. An example cited in the story is a guy with a handheld that using it can recall what he was doing x years ago, the weather, etc., but without it "couldn't remember his daughter's telephone number."
Surely this is a sign of worse memories? Horse crap.
People who remembered phone numbers twenty years ago remembered only because they needed to. Easier for some, harder for others, the only reason that number would stick around was through repetition and the hassle of having to look it up. The space that memory occupied has been replaced with basic knowledge of how to operate a cellphone or PDA, and that's a good thing.
I say as we move away from the compile-time lookup table model as a species and towards the live database backend model we improve. We are -not- the best devices yet for strict storage and recollection of facts under easy search criteria. We -are-, however, the best pattern recognition and data assosiation and intuition devices this planet has yet seen, and we should take advantage of that by clearing out the lookup tables and replacing them with dynamic interface routines.
It's really hard for me to take lists like this seriously when they say things placing them squarely outside the domain of the things they speak of. They (CNet) said in the StarCraft description, for instance, that the single player campaign and overall gameplay were so compelling that people would often play through the campaign three times just to experience it from the perspective of the three different races, and that's flat out wrong. The campaign taken as a whole was composed of three chapters, told one per race, and covering distinctly different timelines of story event. Any one of those three chapters (and hence races) would have told little story and made no sense.
Maybe I'm just nitpicking. But it bothers me, because anyone familiar with the game at all would immediately spot such an error, and it really takes credence away from anything they have to say on other games the reader may not have heard about. (I've heard of all of them, but hey, we may not all be so lucky.)
Also, it's a little haphazard to call Quake with it's brown-pallette hack one of the "best looking games ever," or credit it with the birth of the 'classic' keyboard-mouse FPS combo; that immediately says WASD to me, and Quake I was still in the era of "hold down this key to mouselook".
Hello, I am Captain Rengis of the STARSHIP VOYAGER. This is a Matter of Utmost Urgency. We have an Opening on our ship and would like to invite you to Join. We Will pay a Sign On Bonus of FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. Unfortunately Due to Laws in your Country we need Your Assistance in getting you Out of the Country and cannot cover all Legal Fees on our own. Please Reply very soon on this URGENT MATTER.
I think BASIC would be a perfect choice, and not because it's an easy to learn language. Hear me out.
I learned to program in BASIC in my early youth. A lot of people think BASIC ruins you for programming; I think it ruins people who don't want to program for programming. Personally, upon quickly learning BASIC, and just as quickly running up against the limitations it imposes on performance, structure, and flexibility, it forged and tempered my resolve to learn a real language. Now I'm a quite competent programmer.
Let her give it a shot. Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code isn't named what it's named for poetic reasons...
It's seldom my place to reply in this fashion, but this is an excellent post, worthy of publication, let alone positive moderation. Anyone who scrolled past it due to its length, go read it!
Oh yeah, that reminds me. I drive a Ford, and anyone should, since they're the most economical, reliable, and efficient cars. Of course, I've never owned, driven, reviewed, read about, or looked at any other kind of car.
I agree that it's difficult to get by on poverty-line income. It's worth pointing out, however, that in north Georgia at least, McDonalds (and most unskilled jobs) pay minimum wagw -- 5.15 hourly -- which if you work full time without holiday the whole year yeilds less than 11k and takes home more like 7k -- 600 monthly, at best. That's a tough income to sustain yourself on. Copmletely apart from that, this is more prone to region, but the McDonald's around here don't guarantee a full-time position -- one week you might have 40 hours, the next week 15. I work a menial labor job third shift making $8/hour so I can support myself through college, and it would be uncomfortable without a roommate.
For my sixth birthday, my mother picked up a TRS-80 for me at a yardsale. This was in '89. She didn't know how to hook it up to the TV, let alone get something going in basic. With it came a brief book of BASIC programs that would run on said machine. It took me about two months to be able to write a program outside book specs, and another month before I could write something to approximate doing something I was told. My mom got me an actual computer a year later, and by the time I was ten I wrote a few games in C that in retrospect were ahead of their time. (A raycasting algorithm and something damn like a BST line-of-sight before I'd ever heard of Wolfenstein or Doom.) My mom was amazed. I hold she shouldn't have been. I didn't do anything besides learn a new language...something children are notoriously good at. I hold that if a six year old can learn english, he/she can learn BASIC, and if someone can learn BASIC, they can learn C. Maybe it's just the way I look at things.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0. Let's break this down. One to the second power is one. (Good enough.) Negative one to the second power is one. (Also ok.) One to the second power is equal to negative one to the second power. (Fair enough.) And this is where it beaks down. For in moving from there to one is equal to negative one, you have made the assumption that the square root of one squared is equal to the square root of negative one squared, which isn't one at all. i != 1, math is saved. (Sorry, bored.)
With respect, there are a couple of issues to consider here. Allow me to touch on the most important -- it's quite plausible that people could realistically not win the lottery at all on a weekly basis. For instance, assuming the Georgia Lottery is 5 numbers with 49 choices (correct, I believe, but assuming so for example) then the odds of obtaining a winning result are 1 in 282,475,249. With an estimated Georgia population of 9 million (approximately correct as per census) that means that every person in the state, infant or elderly or illiterate or what have you, would have to buy 31 and a third tickets to guarantee a win. And that is in a very populous state.
I applaud your interest in C, but stay awake in class.
The double equals sign is in fact a conditional operator, and the single equals sign is in fact an assignment operator, but the != is by no means a single equals sign. It is correct as stated, read simply "not equals".
Also, he is not assigning a string. He is assigning a hex value 0xFFFFFFFF. By prepending a value with 0x you are stating that the attached sequence should be interpreted as a series of hex characters -- 0-9 and A-F. If you haven't learned about hexadecimal yet, you soon will. Perservere.
Sorry, no dice. Focal points? Well, you can look at a wide array of math constructs that 'move' faster than the speed of light. That doesn't really mean anything. As for the laser, again, sorry, no go. After you sweep your laser, even assuming you had some way of measuring the photons that hit the moon and even further assuming the photons encountered zero refraction, you wouldn't see any kind of dot at all. You would at best see a band of dispersed photons flitting across the moon, with one side getting there slightly before the other. There would be no dot, and you certainly wouldn't see some laser point sweeping across the moon at fantastic velocity. Which would in no way imply faster than light travel, mind you. Think of it as squrting a water gun and suddenly swinging it in an arc. You have a wave of water sweeping forward, slightly offset to one side.
First, allow me to apologize for my cavalier use of copyright. As the entire western american civilization pointed out, I misused the term 'copyright' where I should have used 'patent'. My only excuse is it being a single-digit hour of the morning. Second, I would like to address an aditional point: If one does copyri-- patent a gene sequence, is it a patent applying to that sequence only as a part of the entire DNA from which it was extracted? Or instead is it a standalone, patented work? What then if someone attempts to copyright a sequence containing that sequence? And what of the source of the sequence -- is a sequence identical to the original but obtained from, say, a spider monkey still a violation? IANAL, and there are more issues than I have addressed, but it seems the legal ramifications of this are severe. I am exceedingly uncomfortable with someone patenting something existing as an intrinsic trait of my own body -- it is akin (perhaps identical, if one follows the logic) to patenting my voice, or my hair color.
This brings up again the interesting debate on whether information can be copyrighted by the one whom merely discovered the information, regardless of the fact that the information existed to begin with. Personally, I feel that human DNA is rather obviously public domain...otherwise one is forced to consider the ludicrous situation of one being forbidden to sequence one's own DNA, lest a copyrighted segment result. This is akin to being forbidden to read a CD because the code contained therin is copyright.