I do something very similar.
It's called a database.
No, it isn't a database. It doesn't support queries or allow for the insertion or modification of data. A true statement would be that the sort functions of database management and query programs are usually closer in flexibility to msort than are stand-alone sort utilities.
This is a variant of RadixSort, which is well known to be faster than any comparison sort such as MergeSort. The problem with non-comparison sorts is that as such they are restricted to sorting items representable a unstructured bit fields, which means, essentially, integers. A large part of the time, the real problem in sorting is (a) extracting the fields that you want to use as keys (since it is not generally the case that you want to sort on the entire record) and (b) arranging for each pair of records to compare as you need them to, which involves both recognizing the internal structure of keys (consider the case of dates) and imposing suitable weights for the individual components. In other words, in many situations the bulk of the code and time are devoted to parsing and transformation of records. So long as you are not using a really bad algorithm, the time devoted to the sort itself is likely to be a small percentage of the total time.
For example, I have written a sort utility that differs from most others in its ability to parse the input into records and records into fields and in the transformations it can apply so as to use unusual sort orders and sort on things like dates, month names, and numbers in non-Western number systems. It was originally written for alphabetizing dictionaries of "exotic" languages.
It is frequently the case that the time devoted to the actual sort is less than 1% of the run time.
In sum, non-comparison sorts have a niche but are of limited utility because they get their speed from making use of additional information that is only available for a limited set of datatypes. For the great majority of applications, only comparison sorts are flexible enough to be of use.
Traditional fluorescent lights have to be avoided in some laboratories because they emit a lot of RF energy that interferes with instruments. Does anyone know whether compact fluorescents pose the same problem?
To think the deaf people can't learn both is insulting.
No, its a recognition of a fact. Except when immersed in a language at an early age, people are not that great at learning languages. When you add to that the fact that those who are profoundly congenitally deaf can't hear English, it isn't at all surprising that it should be difficult to learn. How well deaf people know English varies enormously. Some are quite comfortable, others are not.
Then how do deaf people function in a work capacity if they can not read?
Some deaf people function just fine, but in fact deaf people tend to be underemployed.
That is, relative to hearing people with comparable intelligence etc., they have lower-paying, less interesting jobs and a harder time obtaining and keeping jobs.
But note also that it is a lot easier to learn to read another language than to write it. That means that a deaf person who has no difficulty handling a job that requires reading English may still not be real comfortable writing English.
No, because the idea is to evaluate the ideas and arguments, not the person who puts them forward. The argument that Crichton can't be right about gene patents and wrong about environmental issues is based on the ad hominem fallacy.
The idea that text messaging is always an easy alternative for deaf people is
actually not the case. It is easy in the sense that typing and reading are unaffected by the inability to hear, but text messages are in the written form of some oral language, such as English. For people whose hearing is profoundly impaired from birth, English or whatever the local oral language may be, is a foreign language. In the US, many congenitally deaf people have ASL as their native language. They learn English to varying extents, but it is a foreign language whose structure is very different from that of ASL. The grammatical differences between English and ASL, even controlling for modality, are huge. Thus, depending on the individual's history of deafness and control of English, text messaging may be a difficult and awkward matter of using a foreign language one does not know very well. Many deaf people will feel much more comfortable if they can sign than if they have to use text messaging.
If the gun registry were sending people out to every little community that would no doubt be quite expensive, but as far as I know they have not done that. I live in northern British Columbia and have a lot of contact with people on reserves and I haven't heard of this. I wonder if what you heard about wasn't a proposal that got shot down rather than something that actually happened? One reason both that I think I would have heard about it if it had happened and that it might have been shot down is that sending registrars to reserves would have been very controversial in the native community because, independent of the other issues about the registry, most native organizations have taken the position that they have an aboriginal right to own and use guns that would be infringed by requiring them to register.
The reason that there has been such strong resistance to the gun registry is that it includes long guns, rifles and shotguns, which play very little role in crime. Possession of handguns is very limited here. Target shooters and collectors can get licenses for them, with tight controls. Otherwise, for all practical purposes no one other than a police officer can possess a handgun.
And where do you get the idea that the gun registry has been so expensive because of the resistance to it? There's no connection, except for the fact that if there weren't such resistance more people would register and the registry would be even more overwhelmed.
Nonsense. If you were actually familiar with the Skeptical Enquirer, you'd know (a) that they don't just rebut some fixed set of stock issues but deal with new points and papers as they come up and (b) that most of the people who write for it do not have jobs that depend on "the orthodoxy" being true. If they didn't publish a critique of the paper the OP suggested they critique, it is probably because they didn't find someone who would do it. It's not as if they have a paid staff who can be assigned articles like that. And volunteers won't turn up for every such assignment. That's partly because they don't have the time - doing a careful critique of a paper like that can be a big job - and partly because a lot of people, rightly or wrongly, don't consider it worthwhile to critique what they consider fringe work.
Everybody is concentrating on how offensive this is, but there is another issue. Isn't this all perfectly obvious? How can this be patentable? Finding out if people are paying attention by quizzing them on what they were supposed to be watching is an old schoolteacher trick. As far as I can see from skimming the patent application there is nothing remotely innovative in the technology they use to do this.
I don't agree. It should be up to the consumer to decide whether or not to buy a new plane. He shouldn't have to buy one just because the manufacturer wants to make more money. Nobody is asking the company to provide support indefinitely - we're just talking about the detailed specs.
Yes, but copyrights take too long to expire, at least in these aircraft cases.
The virtue of requiring period re-registration with a fee is that you can allow
a relatively long copyright period if the owner finds the copyright valuable
enough to keep it up, but that once the owner decides it isn't worth it, it lapses.
This would eliminate the gap that results in orphan works, where a publisher
loses interest in the work but the copyright runs on and on for decades
afterward. If you've got a plane whose manufacturer has gone out of business or
dropped support for that line, you want the maintenance information now, not
ten or twenty years from now.
I think that the point is that if the manufacturers had to periodically re-register their data and pay a fee to do so, the data would tend to become publicly available when the
manufacturers no longer had an interest in it. As it is, it stays secret indefinitely.
I don't think so. Rent-a-cops don't have any greater police power than an ordinary citizen, so they have no authority to order you around on public property, but the situation you are talking about is different. You are trying to enter PRIVATE property, whose owners are entitled to control who enters and how their property is used. Just as you have the right to use such force as is necessary to prevent an unwanted person from entering your home or business, so Walmart, via its guards, has the right to exclude you from their premises if you do not comply with their conditions. Walmart may tell its guards to let such things go because they want to avoid lawsuits over excessive force and so forth, but they have every right, without police power, to control who enters.
This is true if the project is still incomplete or if it depends on other projects that are constantly changing. There are, however, projects that are complete and have had the bugs worked out. They may be updated only when someone finds a bug or something breaks because of a change in something they depend on. In such cases, no activity for months at a time is not a danger sign.
I've got projects like that myself. Take my color picker. Okay, it isn't Linux or Apache, but it does what it was intended to do and has no known bugs. At some point I might add a feature or a translation, but unless something comes up, there is no need to do anything to it. The fact that the last release was nine months ago doesn't mean that it has been abandoned or that anything is wrong with it.
How about Tcl/TK, with the ActiveState IDE and development kit, or one of the several FOSS IDEs? I don't see why this would be any harder than Visual Basic, the language is nicer. The language itself is free, and you can get some pretty good tools for free, or buy the commercial ones for not all that much.
You're right that minor changes don't make a work a different work and therefore don't provide an escape from infringement of copyright. However, the dance in question is only 22 steps long. It doesn't take that much of a deviation to make it a different dance.
So, in all probability, either the creator is really nitpicking about people doing his dance incorrectly, or what they are doing is different enough to make it a different dance. But it is an open question as to exactly how much of a difference it takes to be a distinct work.
A government can indeed engage in terrorism, which is a good point since some governments try to play semantic games and either deny that they are terrorists on the grounds that government forces cannot be terrorists or call people soldiers engaged in legitimate military action terrorists simply because they are non-governmental. Collateral damage is not, in and of itself, terrorism or a war crime. The test in international law is whether the legitimate military objective justifies the collateral damage. One is required to use the approach that minimizes collateral damage. In cases in which one side uses civilians as shields, if the military objective is sufficiently important the other side may have no choice but to kill civilians. In this case, it is the side that uses civilians as a shield that has committed a war crime.
Training another country's personnel in torture is certainly evil but is borderline as terrorism because torture isn't usually considered a sort of military activity. Insofar as the torture is publicized and so used to terrorize the population, it arguably should be considered a kind of terrorism.
No. "freedom fighters" become terrorists when they target civilians rather than military targets. If the Kashmiris were fighting the Indian Army, one might or might not agree with the their goal, but they would be soldiers. When they set off bombs in public places, they become criminals.
If people are not doing the correct steps, they are not violating his copyright. He may have a trademark case, since the owner of a trademark can compel people not to use his trademark incorrectly, but if his complaint is inaccuracy he has no copyright case.
This trick wouldn't work. He has no obligation or need to respond. If he owns the copyright, unless and until he issues you a license, you're out of luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Very informative. I'd have a hard time voting for someone with a Microsoft site.
Although Clinton's site isn't bad in terms of general site design, I am (negatively) struck by the fact that there is no "Issues" menu or section.
No, it isn't a database. It doesn't support queries or allow for the insertion or modification of data. A true statement would be that the sort functions of database management and query programs are usually closer in flexibility to msort than are stand-alone sort utilities.
This is a variant of RadixSort, which is well known to be faster than any comparison sort such as MergeSort. The problem with non-comparison sorts is that as such they are restricted to sorting items representable a unstructured bit fields, which means, essentially, integers. A large part of the time, the real problem in sorting is (a) extracting the fields that you want to use as keys (since it is not generally the case that you want to sort on the entire record) and (b) arranging for each pair of records to compare as you need them to, which involves both recognizing the internal structure of keys (consider the case of dates) and imposing suitable weights for the individual components. In other words, in many situations the bulk of the code and time are devoted to parsing and transformation of records. So long as you are not using a really bad algorithm, the time devoted to the sort itself is likely to be a small percentage of the total time.
For example, I have written a sort utility that differs from most others in its ability to parse the input into records and records into fields and in the transformations it can apply so as to use unusual sort orders and sort on things like dates, month names, and numbers in non-Western number systems. It was originally written for alphabetizing dictionaries of "exotic" languages. It is frequently the case that the time devoted to the actual sort is less than 1% of the run time.
In sum, non-comparison sorts have a niche but are of limited utility because they get their speed from making use of additional information that is only available for a limited set of datatypes. For the great majority of applications, only comparison sorts are flexible enough to be of use.
Traditional fluorescent lights have to be avoided in some laboratories because they emit a lot of RF energy that interferes with instruments. Does anyone know whether compact fluorescents pose the same problem?
No, its a recognition of a fact. Except when immersed in a language at an early age, people are not that great at learning languages. When you add to that the fact that those who are profoundly congenitally deaf can't hear English, it isn't at all surprising that it should be difficult to learn. How well deaf people know English varies enormously. Some are quite comfortable, others are not.
Some deaf people function just fine, but in fact deaf people tend to be underemployed. That is, relative to hearing people with comparable intelligence etc., they have lower-paying, less interesting jobs and a harder time obtaining and keeping jobs. But note also that it is a lot easier to learn to read another language than to write it. That means that a deaf person who has no difficulty handling a job that requires reading English may still not be real comfortable writing English.
No, because the idea is to evaluate the ideas and arguments, not the person who puts them forward. The argument that Crichton can't be right about gene patents and wrong about environmental issues is based on the ad hominem fallacy.
The idea that text messaging is always an easy alternative for deaf people is actually not the case. It is easy in the sense that typing and reading are unaffected by the inability to hear, but text messages are in the written form of some oral language, such as English. For people whose hearing is profoundly impaired from birth, English or whatever the local oral language may be, is a foreign language. In the US, many congenitally deaf people have ASL as their native language. They learn English to varying extents, but it is a foreign language whose structure is very different from that of ASL. The grammatical differences between English and ASL, even controlling for modality, are huge. Thus, depending on the individual's history of deafness and control of English, text messaging may be a difficult and awkward matter of using a foreign language one does not know very well. Many deaf people will feel much more comfortable if they can sign than if they have to use text messaging.
If the gun registry were sending people out to every little community that would no doubt be quite expensive, but as far as I know they have not done that. I live in northern British Columbia and have a lot of contact with people on reserves and I haven't heard of this. I wonder if what you heard about wasn't a proposal that got shot down rather than something that actually happened? One reason both that I think I would have heard about it if it had happened and that it might have been shot down is that sending registrars to reserves would have been very controversial in the native community because, independent of the other issues about the registry, most native organizations have taken the position that they have an aboriginal right to own and use guns that would be infringed by requiring them to register.
The reason that there has been such strong resistance to the gun registry is that it includes long guns, rifles and shotguns, which play very little role in crime. Possession of handguns is very limited here. Target shooters and collectors can get licenses for them, with tight controls. Otherwise, for all practical purposes no one other than a police officer can possess a handgun.
And where do you get the idea that the gun registry has been so expensive because of the resistance to it? There's no connection, except for the fact that if there weren't such resistance more people would register and the registry would be even more overwhelmed.
Nonsense. If you were actually familiar with the Skeptical Enquirer, you'd know (a) that they don't just rebut some fixed set of stock issues but deal with new points and papers as they come up and (b) that most of the people who write for it do not have jobs that depend on "the orthodoxy" being true. If they didn't publish a critique of the paper the OP suggested they critique, it is probably because they didn't find someone who would do it. It's not as if they have a paid staff who can be assigned articles like that. And volunteers won't turn up for every such assignment. That's partly because they don't have the time - doing a careful critique of a paper like that can be a big job - and partly because a lot of people, rightly or wrongly, don't consider it worthwhile to critique what they consider fringe work.
Everybody is concentrating on how offensive this is, but there is another issue. Isn't this all perfectly obvious? How can this be patentable? Finding out if people are paying attention by quizzing them on what they were supposed to be watching is an old schoolteacher trick. As far as I can see from skimming the patent application there is nothing remotely innovative in the technology they use to do this.
I don't agree. It should be up to the consumer to decide whether or not to buy a new plane. He shouldn't have to buy one just because the manufacturer wants to make more money. Nobody is asking the company to provide support indefinitely - we're just talking about the detailed specs.
Yes, but copyrights take too long to expire, at least in these aircraft cases. The virtue of requiring period re-registration with a fee is that you can allow a relatively long copyright period if the owner finds the copyright valuable enough to keep it up, but that once the owner decides it isn't worth it, it lapses. This would eliminate the gap that results in orphan works, where a publisher loses interest in the work but the copyright runs on and on for decades afterward. If you've got a plane whose manufacturer has gone out of business or dropped support for that line, you want the maintenance information now, not ten or twenty years from now.
I think that the point is that if the manufacturers had to periodically re-register their data and pay a fee to do so, the data would tend to become publicly available when the manufacturers no longer had an interest in it. As it is, it stays secret indefinitely.
I don't think so. Rent-a-cops don't have any greater police power than an ordinary citizen, so they have no authority to order you around on public property, but the situation you are talking about is different. You are trying to enter PRIVATE property, whose owners are entitled to control who enters and how their property is used. Just as you have the right to use such force as is necessary to prevent an unwanted person from entering your home or business, so Walmart, via its guards, has the right to exclude you from their premises if you do not comply with their conditions. Walmart may tell its guards to let such things go because they want to avoid lawsuits over excessive force and so forth, but they have every right, without police power, to control who enters.
This is true if the project is still incomplete or if it depends on other projects that are constantly changing. There are, however, projects that are complete and have had the bugs worked out. They may be updated only when someone finds a bug or something breaks because of a change in something they depend on. In such cases, no activity for months at a time is not a danger sign. I've got projects like that myself. Take my color picker. Okay, it isn't Linux or Apache, but it does what it was intended to do and has no known bugs. At some point I might add a feature or a translation, but unless something comes up, there is no need to do anything to it. The fact that the last release was nine months ago doesn't mean that it has been abandoned or that anything is wrong with it.
How about Tcl/TK, with the ActiveState IDE and development kit, or one of the several FOSS IDEs? I don't see why this would be any harder than Visual Basic, the language is nicer. The language itself is free, and you can get some pretty good tools for free, or buy the commercial ones for not all that much.
You're right that minor changes don't make a work a different work and therefore don't provide an escape from infringement of copyright. However, the dance in question is only 22 steps long. It doesn't take that much of a deviation to make it a different dance. So, in all probability, either the creator is really nitpicking about people doing his dance incorrectly, or what they are doing is different enough to make it a different dance. But it is an open question as to exactly how much of a difference it takes to be a distinct work.
Titles are not subject to copyright.
A government can indeed engage in terrorism, which is a good point since some governments try to play semantic games and either deny that they are terrorists on the grounds that government forces cannot be terrorists or call people soldiers engaged in legitimate military action terrorists simply because they are non-governmental. Collateral damage is not, in and of itself, terrorism or a war crime. The test in international law is whether the legitimate military objective justifies the collateral damage. One is required to use the approach that minimizes collateral damage. In cases in which one side uses civilians as shields, if the military objective is sufficiently important the other side may have no choice but to kill civilians. In this case, it is the side that uses civilians as a shield that has committed a war crime.
Training another country's personnel in torture is certainly evil but is borderline as terrorism because torture isn't usually considered a sort of military activity. Insofar as the torture is publicized and so used to terrorize the population, it arguably should be considered a kind of terrorism.
No. "freedom fighters" become terrorists when they target civilians rather than military targets. If the Kashmiris were fighting the Indian Army, one might or might not agree with the their goal, but they would be soldiers. When they set off bombs in public places, they become criminals.
If people are not doing the correct steps, they are not violating his copyright. He may have a trademark case, since the owner of a trademark can compel people not to use his trademark incorrectly, but if his complaint is inaccuracy he has no copyright case.
This trick wouldn't work. He has no obligation or need to respond. If he owns the copyright, unless and until he issues you a license, you're out of luck.
Right, if you want to retain the newbie's perspective you need to learn PHP instead of C++. :)