Pedestrians move unpredictably. You slow down and say "coming up behind you" or "excuse me" or anything that'll let them know somebody is coming up behind them.
Oh no you don't, because if you do that, they look around and veer right into your path.
You will never get cyclists to turn their heads to look behind them or give signals before they change lanes or before they suddenly veer into the centre of the road because there is a parked car 600 yards ahead, but with proper training they might develop enough responsibility to use a mirror.
Signaling is dangerous. You have to take your hand off the handlebars and wave it around. That throws off your balance and your path tends to waver. And if the road has cracks or bumps, you could easily be forced to make a dangerous recovery. And it's not like it even helps much; if the driver isn't already keeping an eye on you, he's not going to notice you making a signal.
Looking around can be dangerous too. Usually, your ears keep you informed about cars behind you, but if you look around, you lose situational awareness of what's ahead of you, and that's where you need it. You know that alley ahead? While you glanced back over your shoulder, a car started pulling out of it. Situational awareness is absolutely critical. Your life depends on it. That isn't hyperbole.
The genome is shrinking because there is a selective advantage to a smaller genome when the environment is stable. Fewer errors can occur when copying for example.
I should think that the number of errors, proportionally, would be the same in smaller genomes and larger genomes, e.g., cosmic rays cause 1 transcription errors per 1000 bases regardless of whether the genome is 1 million bases or 10 million bases. The smaller genome of one organism would have fewer errors than the larger genome of another organism, but both would have similar numbers of errors in similarly-sized genes, and for such genes, there would be no selective advantage to being contained within a smaller or larger genome.
However, if a gene served the same purpose in the smaller and larger genome, but varied in form and size in proportion, I would expect that the smaller form would suffer fewer transcription errors and thus more easily resist the ravages of time than the larger form. This, I understand, is your position. However, I do not believe this to be the case. It seems more likely to me that genes are most often the exact size required for their function, and that extra bases that extend the length of the gene will result in malformed proteins or incomplete or derailed operational sequences, and thus genes of similar purpose are also of similar form and size between larger and smaller genomes.
In fact, I should give the selective advantage to larger genomes because of the possibility of multiple copies of important genes, which would ensure that damage to one gene may be compensated for by the continued function of another undamaged copy.
If there is a selective advantage to smaller genomes, it lies in two areas: fewer stretches of junk DNA, and lesser metabolic and logistical requirements. I place little importance on the former. The more we learn, the more it seems that very little DNA can truly be considered junk. However, the lesser latter burden may be significant. With fewer copies of genes, the cell needs less base construction material and can employ fewer transcription and activation proteins, enzymes, and RNA sequences, reserving more energy and material for other purposes; advantages further enabled by the smaller cell size possible with a smaller nucleus.
If you tread water, while swimming using arm-sculling, your arms are doing a slow motion version of roughly the same motions, with corrections, and for the same reasons, to maintain balance and position.
You say Carbon's a dirty word, I'll tell you what: you're right...it is dirty. Have you ever handled powdered carbon, aka graphite? All it does is dirty stuff up. That stuff's nasty. So I think it's appropriate that carbon is a dirty word...it's a dirty, dirty element.
Ooo, I love it when you talk like that, Carbon!
C'mere, baby, I want some of that dirty black elemental love!
That story freaked me out as a kid. It was like a 50's atomic horror movie come to life. I had a whole new respect for ants and frontiersmen from that day.
You will never change the government simply by choosing to live elsewhere; you will only help to firmly entrench that which you find objectionable because your emmigration increases slightly the proportion of the population you leave behind who agree with what you're walking out on.
True, but you are assuming the guy wants to change his government. If it is just where he happened to be born and doesn't have a hold on his heart, why should he care? Why not move and let the UK do its thing?
"You tell me college football, if you have possession of the ball and your knee touches the ground, the ball is down, whether or not the player was tackled. I give you a college football game, and the first time you try to kick a field goal, the ball is downed 7 yards behind the line of scrimmage because the holder's knee is touching the ground."
In American football, the runner takes the ball and runs. If he is tackled or body-blocked or whatever and his knee touches the ground, that's it for the play. Except. After a team scores, that team can try to get extra points by kicking the ball through the goal. So the guy with the ball kneels to hold the ball in place so the kicker can kick it --- and his knee is down, that's it for the play, and the team actually lost ground in the bargain, because they moved the ball away from the goal to kick it better -- right?
Good whiskey is difficult to make, in high demand, keeps well, and takes a very long time to make if you have only primitive equipment. (Consider the problem of seals in the still, and making pipes that don't leak lead.)
I don't know about the lead, but leave some fish out and that should lure away the seals.
I do worry about the government being able to ban whatever it wants. But a game about raping 12-year-olds? I have a hard time defending that. Maybe, as with that one quote, it means that I don't really believe in freedom of speech.
But you know what? I guess I'm okay with that.
You don't have to defend it. Just take live-and-let-live attitude. Different strokes for different folks, kind of thing.
Your example of wanting to murder your boss doesn't get you off the hook. Normal people don't fantasize about murder OR rape.
Like you know. You may not have those fantasies, and only I know if I do, but neither of us knows what anybody else fantasizes about, unless they tell us. Only the Shadow knows.
That said, the murder-your-boss fantasy shows up in enough fiction and movies that I think "normal" people do have them, if you include those one standard deviation away as "normal."
OK, but what's the deal with the demon-tentacles?!
I heard it was because they can't show penises, but tentacles that look exactly like penises, except maybe with weird colors and spines and pulsating, are okay. Plus the Japanese are just strange.
Well, if an application is written to use threads, then it is both parallel and concurrent, in that the threads could be run on different cores/processors/whatever if they are available.
So you haven't heard of any games or other applications written to be parallel? If they are threaded, they are written to be parallel.
But who says interstellar flight or alien races would use technology, what if it simply were biological? or what if what we describe as communication has no meaning to them at all?
Peter Watts wrote a book called Blindsight. The aliens involved...well, they were psychologically unlike us in profound ways. In the words of one review, "...for all their astonishing pattern recognition and processing ability, they are not conscious. They lack a sense of self or a cogito to do the ergo summing." Basically, intelligent reflexes. Very weird.
...then truly comprehend how small, short-lived, and insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things. That kind of realization will humble anyone, no matter how smart they are.
A language may enforce limitations on the compiler that may block it from further optimisation.
C is a good example of this, sort of. The problem is that C is missing some limitations that would allow better optimization. My God — they've made a thousand C compilers over the decades. Can you imagine how optimized-to-hell-and-gone it would be, if it could be?
Slashdot Mirror
Pedestrians move unpredictably.
You slow down and say "coming up behind you" or "excuse me" or anything that'll let them know somebody is coming up behind them.
Oh no you don't, because if you do that, they look around and veer right into your path.
Signaling is dangerous. You have to take your hand off the handlebars and wave it around. That throws off your balance and your path tends to waver. And if the road has cracks or bumps, you could easily be forced to make a dangerous recovery. And it's not like it even helps much; if the driver isn't already keeping an eye on you, he's not going to notice you making a signal.
Looking around can be dangerous too. Usually, your ears keep you informed about cars behind you, but if you look around, you lose situational awareness of what's ahead of you, and that's where you need it. You know that alley ahead? While you glanced back over your shoulder, a car started pulling out of it. Situational awareness is absolutely critical. Your life depends on it. That isn't hyperbole.
Every person on Earth should be allowed, and encouraged, to create web pages. I hate this elitist crap.
Have you even seen MySpace?
All that background music...and the blinking...the horrible blinking...
The genome is shrinking because there is a selective advantage to a smaller genome when the environment is stable. Fewer errors can occur when copying for example.
I should think that the number of errors, proportionally, would be the same in smaller genomes and larger genomes, e.g., cosmic rays cause 1 transcription errors per 1000 bases regardless of whether the genome is 1 million bases or 10 million bases. The smaller genome of one organism would have fewer errors than the larger genome of another organism, but both would have similar numbers of errors in similarly-sized genes, and for such genes, there would be no selective advantage to being contained within a smaller or larger genome.
However, if a gene served the same purpose in the smaller and larger genome, but varied in form and size in proportion, I would expect that the smaller form would suffer fewer transcription errors and thus more easily resist the ravages of time than the larger form. This, I understand, is your position. However, I do not believe this to be the case. It seems more likely to me that genes are most often the exact size required for their function, and that extra bases that extend the length of the gene will result in malformed proteins or incomplete or derailed operational sequences, and thus genes of similar purpose are also of similar form and size between larger and smaller genomes.
In fact, I should give the selective advantage to larger genomes because of the possibility of multiple copies of important genes, which would ensure that damage to one gene may be compensated for by the continued function of another undamaged copy.
If there is a selective advantage to smaller genomes, it lies in two areas: fewer stretches of junk DNA, and lesser metabolic and logistical requirements. I place little importance on the former. The more we learn, the more it seems that very little DNA can truly be considered junk. However, the lesser latter burden may be significant. With fewer copies of genes, the cell needs less base construction material and can employ fewer transcription and activation proteins, enzymes, and RNA sequences, reserving more energy and material for other purposes; advantages further enabled by the smaller cell size possible with a smaller nucleus.
If you tread water, while swimming using arm-sculling, your arms are doing a slow motion version of roughly the same motions, with corrections, and for the same reasons, to maintain balance and position.
I can't tread water, you insensitive clod!
You say Carbon's a dirty word, I'll tell you what: you're right...it is dirty. Have you ever handled powdered carbon, aka graphite? All it does is dirty stuff up. That stuff's nasty. So I think it's appropriate that carbon is a dirty word...it's a dirty, dirty element.
Ooo, I love it when you talk like that, Carbon!
C'mere, baby, I want some of that dirty black elemental love!
That story freaked me out as a kid. It was like a 50's atomic horror movie come to life. I had a whole new respect for ants and frontiersmen from that day.
And using it as a phone was laughable. It felt like holding a banana to your head.
Sidetalkin'!
You will never change the government simply by choosing to live elsewhere; you will only help to firmly entrench that which you find objectionable because your emmigration increases slightly the proportion of the population you leave behind who agree with what you're walking out on.
True, but you are assuming the guy wants to change his government. If it is just where he happened to be born and doesn't have a hold on his heart, why should he care? Why not move and let the UK do its thing?
Mormonism is why there are so many scams in Utah. Mormons trust Mormons. Mormons aren't all trustworthy.
In American football, the runner takes the ball and runs. If he is tackled or body-blocked or whatever and his knee touches the ground, that's it for the play. Except. After a team scores, that team can try to get extra points by kicking the ball through the goal. So the guy with the ball kneels to hold the ball in place so the kicker can kick it --- and his knee is down, that's it for the play, and the team actually lost ground in the bargain, because they moved the ball away from the goal to kick it better -- right?
Reminds me of the UESC Marathon emblem. Or a little bit like the mark of Tzeentch.
I don't know about the lead, but leave some fish out and that should lure away the seals.
What you are describing as parallel is simply more concurrent. You don't need a separate word. It just confuses people.
I do worry about the government being able to ban whatever it wants. But a game about raping 12-year-olds? I have a hard time defending that. Maybe, as with that one quote, it means that I don't really believe in freedom of speech.
But you know what? I guess I'm okay with that.
You don't have to defend it. Just take live-and-let-live attitude. Different strokes for different folks, kind of thing.
Your example of wanting to murder your boss doesn't get you off the hook. Normal people don't fantasize about murder OR rape.
Like you know. You may not have those fantasies, and only I know if I do, but neither of us knows what anybody else fantasizes about, unless they tell us. Only the Shadow knows.
That said, the murder-your-boss fantasy shows up in enough fiction and movies that I think "normal" people do have them, if you include those one standard deviation away as "normal."
OK, but what's the deal with the demon-tentacles?!
I heard it was because they can't show penises, but tentacles that look exactly like penises, except maybe with weird colors and spines and pulsating, are okay. Plus the Japanese are just strange.
Well, if an application is written to use threads, then it is both parallel and concurrent, in that the threads could be run on different cores/processors/whatever if they are available.
So you haven't heard of any games or other applications written to be parallel? If they are threaded, they are written to be parallel.
"I didn't make a friend, but I did demonstrate my moral and intellectual superiority."
"Yes, by completely misrepresenting who you are."
"Do you know another way for me to prove either of those things?"
"Point taken."
http://basicinstructions.net/?p=1082
Maybe not comparing to themselves, but dolphins do show some interest in humans.
This is true.
But who says interstellar flight or alien races would use technology, what if it simply were biological? or what if what we describe as communication has no meaning to them at all?
Peter Watts wrote a book called Blindsight. The aliens involved...well, they were psychologically unlike us in profound ways. In the words of one review, "...for all their astonishing pattern recognition and processing ability, they are not conscious. They lack a sense of self or a cogito to do the ergo summing." Basically, intelligent reflexes. Very weird.
nuke em from orbit, thats the only way to be sure... oh wait that would be us presumably...
Hm. If we did put the nervous in aliens, I think I'd like to see some of their fiction about us. Would probably be as funny as hell.
but what about the majority of slashdot _writers_?
They don't use Microsoft or Linux. The monkeys all have Remington typewriters, and we feed them bananas, Jolt cola, and yesterday's pizza.
...then truly comprehend how small, short-lived, and insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things. That kind of realization will humble anyone, no matter how smart they are.
Except me. And Zaphod Beeblebrox.
A language may enforce limitations on the compiler that may block it from further optimisation.
C is a good example of this, sort of. The problem is that C is missing some limitations that would allow better optimization. My God — they've made a thousand C compilers over the decades. Can you imagine how optimized-to-hell-and-gone it would be, if it could be?