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User: belmolis

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  1. what will they tell their stockholders? on Telco Appeals Minnesota City's Fiber-Optic Win · · Score: 1

    I'm curious as to what the telco is going to tell its stockholders when the city completes its system and they are stuck with all the unused infrastructure that they have built in an effort to skip ahead of the city? Spending a whole lot of money on a project that won't make any money is usually not considered a recommendation for management.

  2. quoting hell on PHP Gets Namespace Separators, With a Twist · · Score: 1

    This sounds like a terrible idea to me. It will produce quoting hell for anybody using a form of Unix or Unix-inspired tools on the code. I've worked with flat databases with tagged fields where the field separator is line-initial backslash, and this is such a pain in the neck that the first thing I usually do is convert it to something else.

  3. Re:It's a slippery slope... on Every Email In UK To Be Monitored · · Score: 2

    Who knows? If they do, that would be a new program and would be much more objectionable. But that isn't what they are proposing now, fortunately.

  4. This article is misleading on Every Email In UK To Be Monitored · · Score: 5, Informative

    In a carnivore-on-steroids programme, as all vestiges of communication privacy are stripped away,

    This is quite misleading. According to the linked article, the program will only log traffic information, not message content. This may not be good, but it is a far cry from stripping away "all vestiges of communication privacy", and it means that it is not comparable to Carnivore, which actually would log message content.

  5. Re:My $0.02 ECD on 6 Languages You Wish the Boss Let You Use · · Score: 1

    The problem you describe is hardly inherent in Tcl. It's a result of inadequate testing and failure to use the available tools. There are very good IDEs, syntax checkers, and other tools for Tcl. There are even byte-compilers (used mainly for obfuscation - Tcl parsing is fast enough that there isn't much of a speed advantage to compilation.)

  6. Re:Language Independent! on 6 Languages You Wish the Boss Let You Use · · Score: 1

    Prolog is not an imperative language; it's the opposite: declarative.

  7. Re:Hmmm. on Banjo Used In Brain Surgery · · Score: 1

    I've seen this done quite a few times during stereotaxic surgery for Parkinson's disease by the late Dr. Hirotaro Narabayashi in Tokyo. This involved destruction of cells in the ventro-lateral nucleus of the thalamus. A stereotaxic apparatus is used in combination with X-ray and listening to the output of a recording electrode to drive an electrode into the correct location. When that location is found, the drive is locked and the recording electrode replaced by an RF power electrode. The patient remains awake throughout the procedure. The only anaesthesia necessary is a a little novocaine injected into the scalp before cutting the burr hole for the electrode. There is no need to remove a large chunk of the skull.

    The results are really dramatic. The patient will be lying there with constant tremor in an arm. You turn on the burning electrode for a second, and the tremor stops, in the great majority of patients, forever. It is really remarkable to see.

  8. Re:Computer languages evolve like natural language on 10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting · · Score: 1

    No, my point is that the grammars you mentioned are not formal grammars as you seem to think. Europeans only started serious work on formal grammars in the mid-twentieth century.

  9. Re:Computer languages evolve like natural language on 10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting · · Score: 1

    Panini's grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, is quite different from the European grammars mentioned. It is a true generative grammar, consisting of a set of rules in a formal language that generate all and only the grammatical sentences of Sanskrit. Nothing like it was created in the West until Chomsky's work on generative grammar. Even now, Panini's grammar is more detailed and comprehensive than most formal grammars of natural languages.

  10. Re:Pure scripting: Lua on 10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting · · Score: 1

    Lua is widely used in games, but isn't Tcl more extensively used in embedded devices?

  11. Re:Well, this raises an interesting question... on Oregon Judge Says RIAA Made 'Honest Mistake,' Allows Subpoena · · Score: 2, Informative

    Six federal judges have been impeached and removed from office, the most recent of them being Alcee Hastings.

  12. Re:String f**k up on Python 2.6 to Smooth the Way for 3.0, Coming Next Month · · Score: 4, Informative

    In fact I am better informed than you are. When not compiled to use UCS-4, Python uses what is properly called UCS-2, with half-baked extensions for treating it as UTF-16. Certain functions know about surrogate pairs, such as those that convert between UTF-8 and the internal representation. However, such basic functions as len do not know about surrogate pairs. Try giving a character outside the BMP as the argument to len. It will return 2, not 1.

  13. Re:String f**k up on Python 2.6 to Smooth the Way for 3.0, Coming Next Month · · Score: 4, Informative

    Python does not use UTF-16 strings; it uses UCS-2 strings. The difference is that in UCS-2, every character is represented by exactly two bytes, while in UTF-16, some characters, those outside Plane 0, are represented by two "surrogate" pairs, totaling four bytes. UCS-2 does not provide any representation for characters outside the BMP. In other words, UCS-2 is a straightforward fixed length encoding, while UTF-16 is a more complex variable-length encoding.

    Python can in fact use either of two internal representations for text: UCS-2 or UTF-32 = UCS-4. If you give the option --enable-unicode=ucs4 to configure when building Python, you will get a Python that supports all of Unicode rather than just the BMP.

  14. Re:What I have to say... on IOC Trademarks Part of Canadian National Anthem · · Score: 1

    The Olympic Peninsula is in the United States so Canadian law does not apply.

  15. Re:Explanation neccisary on Thomson Reuters Sues Over Open-Source Endnote-Alike Zotero · · Score: 1

    No, I don't think there is anything quite like that. The closest they come is that you can tag an entry with keywords for search, and many citation managers allow you to include the abstract or even the the actual article.

  16. Re:Explanation neccisary on Thomson Reuters Sues Over Open-Source Endnote-Alike Zotero · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you're a scholar you need to cite your sources when you write, in a variety of formats, and you also need to learn about publications in the areas you work on. A citation manager helps you do this. The core of a citation manager is a bibliographic database. Each record corresponds to one journal article, book, technical report, or publication. Each record contains information about the author or authors, title, name of the journal, volume, number, pages, etc. A citation manager also contains import tools of two sorts. One kind allows you to import bibliographic information in bulk, so that you can incorporate bibliographies that other people have prepared. The other kind extracts information from other single citations. Suppose that you are reading a journal article on-line and that it references something that you should look up. The input tool will let you select the on-line citation and assist you in entering it into your database.

    The other major function of a citation manager is formatting, which is what is at issue here. Different publications require bibliographic information to be formatted differently. For example, some put journal names in italics, while others use a normal slat. Some put the year of publication in parentheses, others set it off with periods. Some put the journal volume number in bold face. You might have something like:

    Watson, James D. and Francis Crick (1953) "Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," Nature 171:737-38

    or

    Watson, James D. and Francis Crick. 1953. "Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Nature 171.737-38

    Instead of having to manually format each bibliographic entry, the citation manager keeps the information in a format-free abstract representation (that is, each piece of information in a separate field) and lets you choose the format in which to export references for use in your paper. In order to do this, it needs to have a specification of the style used by the publication for which you are writing, where each style contains information like "journal volume number appears in bold face" and "year of publication is surrounded by parentheses". EndNote has a collection of several thousand such style files, which are in its own proprietary format. Zotero currently has a much smaller collection of style files, which are in its open XML-based format. EndNote is claiming that Zotero has breached a contractual prohibition against reverse-engineering their software in order to create a tool for converting style files from EndNote's format to Zotero's.

  17. why a jury trial? on Thomson Reuters Sues Over Open-Source Endnote-Alike Zotero · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder why Thomson is demanding a jury trial in a technical case like this. Surely they don't expect a company like theirs to come off as a particularly sympathetic victim. Juries tend to find cases like this confusing. I would think that I would prefer trial before a judge. Or is the idea that their case is so bad their only hope is to confuse a jury?

  18. Re:3 cheers for Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption · · Score: 1

    I think that there is a difference between having judges with specialized expertise and having judges do a lot of their own investigation. The latter is tricky because the judge may not get a balanced view and may not have the expertise to interpret what he or she reads or observes. Having judges with specialized expertise makes perfect sense, and to a limited extent already happens. There are specialized courts, like Tax Court, whose judges are required to have expertise in tax law, and the Board of Patent Appeals and Inferences, which in spite of its name is an Article I court, whose members are expected to have specialized knowledge of patents.The members of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears a large percentage of patent cases, usually come from a background as patent attorneys and therefore have expertise both in patent law and engineering.

    There is also a certain amount of informal reference to a judge's areas of expertise in the assignment of cases. Still, I agree that it would be good to have judges certified as having expertise in, e.g., physical science or accounting or whatever.

  19. Re:3 cheers for Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption · · Score: 1

    Also, note that the judge doesn't have to do all of the scut work in a case like the Microsoft case. It isn't as if she is reading the Microsoft docs and figuring out whether they are sufficient to let her write code: she reads reports from experts. That doesn't mean that she and other judges don't have to work hard, but they do have ways of reducing the load.

  20. Re:So let them. on Review of Discovery Institute's Evolution Textbook · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The reason they don't teach what you say is because it is false. It simply isn't true that evolution is "a broken, flailing ship being tossed from its course every five years" or that evolution is popular because it appeals to atheists. You have to know something about evolutionary biology to understand why the former is false, but to see that the latter is false you need only realize that there are far fewer atheists than people who accept evolution and that many non-atheists, including most Jews, Catholics, and mainline Protestants, accept evolution.

    Incidentally, it is quite possible to believe in god without believing in the literal truth of Genesis. Numerous people outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition do. And on the other hand, evolution is hardly necessary to discredit literal belief in Genesis. Genesis isn't even internally consistent.

  21. Re:At least it does something for secular educatio on Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions · · Score: 1

    I suppose they could have special taxis for women, with a driver and two older women as chaperones. Of course, that wouldn't leave much room for passengers.

    Seriously, though, my understanding is that Saudis are also expected to attend a great many family social events: not only weddings and funerals and so forth as in other countries but audiences and various other things.

  22. Re:At least it does something for secular educatio on Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions · · Score: 1

    What I've heard from Saudis who have returned to Saudi Arabia after grad school abroad is that it is almost impossible to do much research because their family obligations are so time-consuming.

  23. Re:from TFA on Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions · · Score: 2, Informative

    Oops, I think I wasn't clear. I meant the Saudi University. In Egypt, there are women.

  24. Re:from TFA on Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions · · Score: 2, Informative

    You forgot to mention the really crucial point: there are no women.

  25. Re:Unbeknownst to many on Naphthalene Found In Outer Space · · Score: 3, Funny

    The next thing they'll find is that that region is where all the defunct spaceships are kept.