What would be a safer low-level systems language than C? I'd love to see one, preferably, one with a LOT less undefined behavior, but still within 2-3x the performance of C, and with the ability to call C or C++ libraries when necessary. I'm not looking for a fully managed environment like Java or.NET, or a higher level language like Python or Ruby. Definitely *not* looking for C++ either . . . I know one can write safer code in it but one can also, quite by accident, write very unsafe code in it as well. Maybe something like D?
I do not believe you understood the GP. The suffering in suffocation results from buildup of carbon dioxide, not the absence of oxygen. As far as we can tell or reasonably surmise, that would not happen in a room filled with pure nitrogen.
Anyone can be trained to hit a target tens of meters away. And there are typically several shooters, not one. I would guess that having several rounds tear through the heart would result in fairly rapid unconsciousness and death. (Disclaimer: I do not believe states should have the power to execute people. That power should belong to victims and their families, and only after something much closer to a fair trial than most people on death row in the U.S. initially receive.)
LA certainly is car-centric as are most U.S. cities, but to say it does not have an extensive train system is a misconception. That was true for many unfortunate decades, but you probably aren't aware of the significant buildout that began about a decade ago and is still ongoing. According to the linked article, LACMTA runs the country's second largest light-rail system, ninth-largest heavy rail (subway) system, and also has commuter rail, Amtrak, and a great bus system that is very well-used and extensive by U.S. standards.
Your choice of Cleveland as a comparison is similarly unfortunate. I live and work in/near Cleveland, which has one heavy rail line, serving primarily industrial areas, with only a single downtown station. It has two light rail lines as well, both serving the suburb of Shaker Heights (they were an integral part of its design) but also sharing that same single downtown station, and a bus rapid transit line, which is nice, but definitely not comparable to rail. I like Cleveland's transit system, and its main flaw is not that there aren't more trains, but that there aren't more buses. But comparable to any of the others I mentioned, or to any city in Europe or China of comparable significance? Definitely not.
It's worse than you think. Transit in NYC is by far the best we have in the U.S., with only Chicago, Washington, Boston, LA, and at most a handful of other cities having anything that would be recognizable in the rest of the world as a metro system at all. Most parts of the Cleveland, Ohio area where I live do not have any public transportation at all, and even within city limits many places are served only by a bus running once every hour during the day, and not at all at night or weekends. For people who can afford to drive, transportation in the U.S. is great, but for anyone else, it sucks universes through nanotubes.
Mexico is several times the size of the U.S. both in area and population. It has a vast nuclear arsenal, which it has used in the past and threatened to use again. Its "drug war" has turned our border cities into war zones. Its spying programs monitor every form of communication anywhere in the world. It has military bases in hundreds of other countries and is engaged in ongoing military operations in at least a dozen of them (that we know of). Truly Mexico is a menace not only to us but to the entire world, and we are completely justified in spying on them . . . . oh, wait . . .
your new, more market-oriented, and therefore over time more competitive, better quality, and less expensive health care overlords. And wish we could have some true, market-based reforms here in the U.S. too, like, for example, eliminating systemic impediments to the expansion of supply of healthcare products, services, and professionals.
Goodbye, Medicare. Goodbye, Social Security. Goodbye, foodstamps and welfare and section 8.
Some of us would welcome a return to a society based on rule of law, personal responsibility, and voluntary charity, in spite of the temporary upheaval that we do realize would occur during the transition.
Hmm. I think I may experience something similar. I sometimes go 3-4 days without being able to sleep, which is very disturbing and makes it extremely difficult to function. But often when I am trying to sleep but unable to, I experience near-dreamlike states, sort of like intense daydreaming, but with the occasional awareness of being awake and of anything else that might be going on. I have "both sets of stimuli" as you put it. I can get up and go to the bathroom without interrupting it. These *also* happen during the day. I can prevent them with great difficulty at times when it's vital to do so (while driving, cooking, taking care of kids) but if I'm at work with little to do and just staring at a screen, it's almost impossible. People interpret it as "sleeping with his eyes open." I can't really "direct" these dreamlike states even though I'm aware of them. (I am sometimes aware of being in an actual, sleeping dream, and can't direct those either. I tend to wake up if I try.) But here is the difference: this state is nowhere near sufficient to enable me to function. It's probably better than if it didn't exist at all, but it isn't, for me anyway, close to being a substitute for real sleep. I have severe problems with short-term memory, coordination, concentration, and cognition. All of these improve during periods when I'm able to sleep occasionally and worsen during periods when I can't.
IMO, an optimal type system does not contain every type anyone anywhere might need at any time. It does contain the primitives from which developers can construct their own. Do I need a 36-bit "word" type? No, but if I did, I know how to construct one, in any of the statically typed languages I know. A Roman Numeral type? Same. I do not expect a language to be burdened, at least in the core language or standard libraries themselves, with either of these types, so long as I can construct them out of what the core language/libraries *do* contain. In most modern languages, which are Unicode-aware, the very concept of what constitutes a "character" is somewhat complex, but that complexity is buried in the implementation of a String or similar class. And the String class already does a superset of what you are asking. It will store a single character. (Or zero characters, or multiple characters). A subclass of String could trivially be designed to hold one, exactly one and only one, and still be Unicode-aware. Or, if you don't care about Unicode, and define "character" as simply a character representation of an unsigned 8 bit byte, then, notwithstanding Java's unfortunate exclusion of unsigned char/short/int/long types, you still can construct a class that will do what you want. Now I can't promise optimal C-like efficiency in either case. If you truly do need that, well, my Java may be too rusty to help you in detail, but I'm guessing there are multiple good approaches. Including just writing it in C and using JNI or whatever the modern equivalent is today. I sympathize with your frustration over Java lacking some of what even I would consider basic primitive (unsigned) types, and I happen to prefer C# over Java for that among other reasons, but Java's popularity and widespread use across virtually every niche and industry segment all suggest that there are ways to work around and/or through it.
I don't know that they can survive there oudoors, but indoors, they probably can and do live everyplace humans do, because any indoor temperature that we would find survivable, they would too.
Libertarian here, not Republican. I dislike Republicans and Democracts about equally. ACA is a disaster for several reasons, but the one that really cannot be argued or dismissed as mere partisan ranting is that it does nothing to fix the underlying problem of why health care costs so much here. It is because supply of health care products and services is artificially, deliberately, and dramatically restricted so as to protect the incomes and profits of doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and other powerful interests. The best ACA can do is to shift this high cost around, no doubt rewarding some and punishing others. It will remain high regardless, though, because what we really need, and still will not get, are: (a) more and thus less expensive doctors; (b) more and therefore less expensive hospital capacity; (c) more and therefore less expensive medical supplies; and (d) more and therefore less expensive drugs. All from competing providers, who are allowed to advertise about their costs, success rates, reputations, and so forth. And all without arbitrary limits.
You could not have lived 46 years in Alaska. Only cockroaches could survive there that long.:)
My point of course was not that you would be unfamiliar with the range of climates within Alaska, but that its enormous size makes blanket generalizations somewhat difficult to make correctly.
If you live in Alaska you should know that it is a big state with widely varying climates. While Nome is colder than Edmonton, Juneau is warmer (Wikipedia says Juneau's daily mean of 5.58C is warmer than Edmonton's at 4.2C.) Sitka is much warmer still.
My eyes started to do the same thing a few years back, after a mild head injury. I did have them checked out, and the doctors explained that some variance in color perception between individual eyes is normal, although mine was, at the time, substantially worse than normal. They could not find anything physiologically wrong, and gradually, over the next couple years, my color perception returned to normal. I would get this checked out, because there are potentially serious though treatable conditions that could cause it, such as glaucoma or persistent bleeding into the fluid in the eyeball. However, it's also very possible that it's completely normal. Only one way to find out.
It's always been possible to use metal hydrides to, in effect, store and release hydrogen relatively safely. I'm guessing this is another attempt to do the same thing. The problem is economics. Even when stored this way, hydrogen simply does not have the volume density to compete with other forms of energy storage. It is a promising technology that may ultimately prove useful if cheap liquid fuels actually do run out, but until then I have to be a little skeptical.
The ABE process using clostridia of various sorts has been used since 1916. My understanding was not that the process was patented, but that it wasn't particularly cost-effective given current gas and oil prices. Have there been new developments that Wikipedia doesn't know about?
You are correct that the economics of HFCS contribute to its use in tons of places where it is highly inappropriate. However, there are additional problems most people are not aware of. (a) Unbound fructose is metabolized exclusively in the liver, which is not designed to do so in large amounts. Fatty liver, a condition similar to cirrhosis, is the usual result. (Regular sugar, which is fructose bound to glucose, produces this same effect, but to a smaller degree because it involves different metabolic pathways.) (b) Measurable amounts of heavy metal contaminants, typically from the strong alkalis used in its manufacture, frequently exist in the finished product. (c) The enzymes (amylase and one other, I can't recall) used in its manufacture also are present in the finished product, and can have the unfortunate effect of continuing to convert dietary starches into fructose in the digestive tract.
I've just read at least 3 comments to the effect that migrating the DB from Access to SQL Server will be easier than to, say, PostgreSQL. I would respectfully disagree. This might be true if you did not need schema changes or normalization. There are tools to make that specific use case effortless. However, you *will* need to normalize and make schema changes. Thus, there is going to be some custom coding and/or ETL work involved, regardless of which DB backend you choose. So why not spend the few minutes necessary to support standard SQL, which every decent backend is going to understand, and then choose the backend based on its own merits since the "automated migration" tools are not going to help much anyway?
Rhoticism is of course the main difference, but "work" can rhyme with "ork" in some dialects (West Virginia, Pittsburgh), "uck" (New England), "oik" (New Jersey) and "ark" (Appalachians).
Slashdot Mirror
What would be a safer low-level systems language than C? I'd love to see one, preferably, one with a LOT less undefined behavior, but still within 2-3x the performance of C, and with the ability to call C or C++ libraries when necessary. I'm not looking for a fully managed environment like Java or .NET, or a higher level language like Python or Ruby. Definitely *not* looking for C++ either . . . I know one can write safer code in it but one can also, quite by accident, write very unsafe code in it as well. Maybe something like D?
Very. It's a highly rare substance. It's not like air was made up of 78% of it or anything ridiculous like that.
I do not believe you understood the GP. The suffering in suffocation results from buildup of carbon dioxide, not the absence of oxygen. As far as we can tell or reasonably surmise, that would not happen in a room filled with pure nitrogen.
Anyone can be trained to hit a target tens of meters away. And there are typically several shooters, not one. I would guess that having several rounds tear through the heart would result in fairly rapid unconsciousness and death. (Disclaimer: I do not believe states should have the power to execute people. That power should belong to victims and their families, and only after something much closer to a fair trial than most people on death row in the U.S. initially receive.)
LA certainly is car-centric as are most U.S. cities, but to say it does not have an extensive train system is a misconception. That was true for many unfortunate decades, but you probably aren't aware of the significant buildout that began about a decade ago and is still ongoing. According to the linked article, LACMTA runs the country's second largest light-rail system, ninth-largest heavy rail (subway) system, and also has commuter rail, Amtrak, and a great bus system that is very well-used and extensive by U.S. standards.
Your choice of Cleveland as a comparison is similarly unfortunate. I live and work in/near Cleveland, which has one heavy rail line, serving primarily industrial areas, with only a single downtown station. It has two light rail lines as well, both serving the suburb of Shaker Heights (they were an integral part of its design) but also sharing that same single downtown station, and a bus rapid transit line, which is nice, but definitely not comparable to rail. I like Cleveland's transit system, and its main flaw is not that there aren't more trains, but that there aren't more buses. But comparable to any of the others I mentioned, or to any city in Europe or China of comparable significance? Definitely not.
It's worse than you think. Transit in NYC is by far the best we have in the U.S., with only Chicago, Washington, Boston, LA, and at most a handful of other cities having anything that would be recognizable in the rest of the world as a metro system at all. Most parts of the Cleveland, Ohio area where I live do not have any public transportation at all, and even within city limits many places are served only by a bus running once every hour during the day, and not at all at night or weekends. For people who can afford to drive, transportation in the U.S. is great, but for anyone else, it sucks universes through nanotubes.
Mexico is several times the size of the U.S. both in area and population. It has a vast nuclear arsenal, which it has used in the past and threatened to use again. Its "drug war" has turned our border cities into war zones. Its spying programs monitor every form of communication anywhere in the world. It has military bases in hundreds of other countries and is engaged in ongoing military operations in at least a dozen of them (that we know of). Truly Mexico is a menace not only to us but to the entire world, and we are completely justified in spying on them . . . . oh, wait . . .
your new, more market-oriented, and therefore over time more competitive, better quality, and less expensive health care overlords. And wish we could have some true, market-based reforms here in the U.S. too, like, for example, eliminating systemic impediments to the expansion of supply of healthcare products, services, and professionals.
Goodbye, Medicare. Goodbye, Social Security. Goodbye, foodstamps and welfare and section 8.
Some of us would welcome a return to a society based on rule of law, personal responsibility, and voluntary charity, in spite of the temporary upheaval that we do realize would occur during the transition.
True, but if it's not reproducible, it's not science. That's a big part of the article's point.
Hmm. I think I may experience something similar. I sometimes go 3-4 days without being able to sleep, which is very disturbing and makes it extremely difficult to function. But often when I am trying to sleep but unable to, I experience near-dreamlike states, sort of like intense daydreaming, but with the occasional awareness of being awake and of anything else that might be going on. I have "both sets of stimuli" as you put it. I can get up and go to the bathroom without interrupting it. These *also* happen during the day. I can prevent them with great difficulty at times when it's vital to do so (while driving, cooking, taking care of kids) but if I'm at work with little to do and just staring at a screen, it's almost impossible. People interpret it as "sleeping with his eyes open." I can't really "direct" these dreamlike states even though I'm aware of them. (I am sometimes aware of being in an actual, sleeping dream, and can't direct those either. I tend to wake up if I try.) But here is the difference: this state is nowhere near sufficient to enable me to function. It's probably better than if it didn't exist at all, but it isn't, for me anyway, close to being a substitute for real sleep. I have severe problems with short-term memory, coordination, concentration, and cognition. All of these improve during periods when I'm able to sleep occasionally and worsen during periods when I can't.
IMO, an optimal type system does not contain every type anyone anywhere might need at any time. It does contain the primitives from which developers can construct their own. Do I need a 36-bit "word" type? No, but if I did, I know how to construct one, in any of the statically typed languages I know. A Roman Numeral type? Same. I do not expect a language to be burdened, at least in the core language or standard libraries themselves, with either of these types, so long as I can construct them out of what the core language/libraries *do* contain. In most modern languages, which are Unicode-aware, the very concept of what constitutes a "character" is somewhat complex, but that complexity is buried in the implementation of a String or similar class. And the String class already does a superset of what you are asking. It will store a single character. (Or zero characters, or multiple characters). A subclass of String could trivially be designed to hold one, exactly one and only one, and still be Unicode-aware. Or, if you don't care about Unicode, and define "character" as simply a character representation of an unsigned 8 bit byte, then, notwithstanding Java's unfortunate exclusion of unsigned char/short/int/long types, you still can construct a class that will do what you want. Now I can't promise optimal C-like efficiency in either case. If you truly do need that, well, my Java may be too rusty to help you in detail, but I'm guessing there are multiple good approaches. Including just writing it in C and using JNI or whatever the modern equivalent is today. I sympathize with your frustration over Java lacking some of what even I would consider basic primitive (unsigned) types, and I happen to prefer C# over Java for that among other reasons, but Java's popularity and widespread use across virtually every niche and industry segment all suggest that there are ways to work around and/or through it.
I don't know that they can survive there oudoors, but indoors, they probably can and do live everyplace humans do, because any indoor temperature that we would find survivable, they would too.
Libertarian here, not Republican. I dislike Republicans and Democracts about equally. ACA is a disaster for several reasons, but the one that really cannot be argued or dismissed as mere partisan ranting is that it does nothing to fix the underlying problem of why health care costs so much here. It is because supply of health care products and services is artificially, deliberately, and dramatically restricted so as to protect the incomes and profits of doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and other powerful interests. The best ACA can do is to shift this high cost around, no doubt rewarding some and punishing others. It will remain high regardless, though, because what we really need, and still will not get, are: (a) more and thus less expensive doctors; (b) more and therefore less expensive hospital capacity; (c) more and therefore less expensive medical supplies; and (d) more and therefore less expensive drugs. All from competing providers, who are allowed to advertise about their costs, success rates, reputations, and so forth. And all without arbitrary limits.
You could not have lived 46 years in Alaska. Only cockroaches could survive there that long. :)
My point of course was not that you would be unfamiliar with the range of climates within Alaska, but that its enormous size makes blanket generalizations somewhat difficult to make correctly.
If you live in Alaska you should know that it is a big state with widely varying climates. While Nome is colder than Edmonton, Juneau is warmer (Wikipedia says Juneau's daily mean of 5.58C is warmer than Edmonton's at 4.2C.) Sitka is much warmer still.
My eyes started to do the same thing a few years back, after a mild head injury. I did have them checked out, and the doctors explained that some variance in color perception between individual eyes is normal, although mine was, at the time, substantially worse than normal. They could not find anything physiologically wrong, and gradually, over the next couple years, my color perception returned to normal. I would get this checked out, because there are potentially serious though treatable conditions that could cause it, such as glaucoma or persistent bleeding into the fluid in the eyeball. However, it's also very possible that it's completely normal. Only one way to find out.
It's always been possible to use metal hydrides to, in effect, store and release hydrogen relatively safely. I'm guessing this is another attempt to do the same thing. The problem is economics. Even when stored this way, hydrogen simply does not have the volume density to compete with other forms of energy storage. It is a promising technology that may ultimately prove useful if cheap liquid fuels actually do run out, but until then I have to be a little skeptical.
Ah. That would explain it. One more case of patents doing the exact opposite of promoting the common good. :(
The ABE process using clostridia of various sorts has been used since 1916. My understanding was not that the process was patented, but that it wasn't particularly cost-effective given current gas and oil prices. Have there been new developments that Wikipedia doesn't know about?
You are correct that the economics of HFCS contribute to its use in tons of places where it is highly inappropriate. However, there are additional problems most people are not aware of. (a) Unbound fructose is metabolized exclusively in the liver, which is not designed to do so in large amounts. Fatty liver, a condition similar to cirrhosis, is the usual result. (Regular sugar, which is fructose bound to glucose, produces this same effect, but to a smaller degree because it involves different metabolic pathways.) (b) Measurable amounts of heavy metal contaminants, typically from the strong alkalis used in its manufacture, frequently exist in the finished product. (c) The enzymes (amylase and one other, I can't recall) used in its manufacture also are present in the finished product, and can have the unfortunate effect of continuing to convert dietary starches into fructose in the digestive tract.
I've just read at least 3 comments to the effect that migrating the DB from Access to SQL Server will be easier than to, say, PostgreSQL. I would respectfully disagree. This might be true if you did not need schema changes or normalization. There are tools to make that specific use case effortless. However, you *will* need to normalize and make schema changes. Thus, there is going to be some custom coding and/or ETL work involved, regardless of which DB backend you choose. So why not spend the few minutes necessary to support standard SQL, which every decent backend is going to understand, and then choose the backend based on its own merits since the "automated migration" tools are not going to help much anyway?
Rhoticism is of course the main difference, but "work" can rhyme with "ork" in some dialects (West Virginia, Pittsburgh), "uck" (New England), "oik" (New Jersey) and "ark" (Appalachians).
The pronunciations of work, horse, and sport vary dramatically across different regions of the U.S.
Damn, dude. That sucks. I'll be driving forever! :(