I'd find that much easier to read. I'm also confused by your free(b); statement. How can that ever be reached given the preceeding return 0;? Also, on a personal side-note, I hate - with a passion - code which omits braces for one-line if blocks. Two extra characters are not going to ruin anyone, but they do make the code much clearer at first glance. But yeah, personal preference, I guess.
(...) the world would find itself in a much worse position if we stopped dieing and clearing the way for younger generations.
Well, that's the thing, we won't stop dying - we'll only stop dying of old age. There's still plenty of accidents and murders to keep the population under control. Also, I'm pretty sure that if you could actually have eternal life, you'll get bored of it eventually and will top yourself given that nature's no longer doing the job for you. And I'll bet that would happen before your 200th birthday.
I'd like to enjoy a longer lifespan than I would otherwise expect
I guess not all long lives are the same - having the body of a 20 year old for 100 years instead of, well, one is one thing, having the body of a 150 year old who would normally have died 80 years ago for 100 years is quite another. So be careful what you wish for when you ask for longer lifespans. Make sure you read the fine print first:)
One of the things mentioned in TFA is König's feelSpace belt, a belt which gives you information about which direction North is. A lecture he gave about it at the Neuro IT summer school in 2005 is actually available here. It's from two years ago, granted, but still reasonably interesting.
I will never believe that an advanced race can travel all the way across the inconceivable distance between stars, and be dumb enough to crash.
I'm with you on the entire alien-free-planet-to-date argument, but you may want to reconsider that particular belief. Travelling distances between stars is a completely different thing from landing on a planet and this includes the mechanics involved. You may be incredibly fast in a vacuum but perhaps you've never encountered Earth-like gravity before or this Nitrogen floating around in the atmosphere so much. Looks harmless enough, but what do you know, it just happens to set the primary coil reactor on fire and corrode the entire fusion circuitboard in a matter of seconds, what an awkward time to find this out. Or maybe you just have no idea to compensate for 10 times the gravitational pull of your own home planet, maybe simply because your landing thrusters have nto been designed with that in mind. Either way, crash boom.
Basically you assume two things in your belief: (1) familiarity with the Earth environment and experience therein and (2) total absence of mechanical/electrical/whatever failures. Neither is a given.
I disagree. To learn a language you have to know what its strengths and weaknesses are, which approaches work well, which don't. You could get that knowledge from just playing around, but it'd be a lot quicker if you read a book that tells you. Especially if you know another language, a list of the crucial differences is very much required. If not you end up writing things in the style of one language that really should be expressed differently.
Example: C programmer in Matlab. Task: Take two vectors of same length, for every i smaller than length, multiply the ith element of the first with the ith element of the second vector.
Results:
Just playing around, as you suggest: function y = multiply_vectors(a, b)
y = zeros(size(a));
for i = 1:length(a)
y(i) = a(i)*b(i);
end end
Doing it the proper (Matlab) way: y = a.*b;
It's a simple and therefore unlikely example, granted, but there are many such differences between programming languages. Just playing around doesn't easily allow to find them because, technically, the code works. It just doesn't work efficiently. That said, once you know how to deal with the language, by all means, screw around. A lot.
This sounds a lot like... *drumroll* blind faith to me.
We don't have any idea how the Universe came into existence, so there is no way we'll know the answer. However, we may choose to believe in one. The difference between a scientist like Hawking saying he believes in something relevant to his field and a religious man saying he believes in something is that the scientist makes up his belief based on his best interpretation and understanding of what he does know whereas the religious, well, you know, if some dude several thousand years ago said it, it must be true and don't you dare deny it. So as far as blind faiths go, the scientist's is a lot more informed.
Why would you go out backpacking and drown out the sounds of nature with your ipod?
On top of Mount Everest, sound of nature: swshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. On top of Mount Everest, listening to decent metal. Like Falkenbach or Thyrfing or whatever does it for you: Awesome. Nature does not by itself provide theme songs;)
I do agree with you though. Shouldn't be using it 24/7.
Kellogg and Wolff came to their conclusion by studying Australia, where several states extended daylight-saving time (DST for short) by two months in 2000 to accommodate the Olympic Games in Sydney that year. [...] In fact, the two said, shifting Australians' clocks led to a tiny increase in power use.
So they're not exactly making it up and while you may think it's not logical, it does appear to be true. Whether the results apply to the US in the same way remains to be seen, of course.
IAAN (I am a neuroscientist, yeah you knew that already) and, as they Physicist already explained, you are in fact describing electrical currents. So I agree with the other two neuroscientists, saying that the electrical models we have are wrong is just BS.
There are plenty of valid criticisms you can bring to the HH model. It cannot account for all observations (there was a paper in Nature recently exactly to this point) and after all, when you try to model primate cells with HH dynamics, you are in effect comparing your monkey with a giant squid! It has tbh always amazed me how well that worked at all. So if you're going to say, HH is inadequate, that's fair. If you are going to say that non-electrical pathways for transmitting information exist alongside the known electrical currents, that's also fair and you have my complete attention. But you can't just say that nerves don't use electricity, that just labels you as someone trying to be sensationalist. Besides, if you could prove this beyond reasonable doubt, you should and would send the paper to Nature.
Then again, this is my reaction to the/. summary above. I'd imagine the actual paper makes a more sensible argument, but I'm not going to read that before monday, so...
Ok, I think I can guess the Powerpoint Slide that led to these letters:
1. Get postal addresses of students accross the U.S. via their University 2. Send them pre-lawsuit letters 3. Wait for a fraction of the students to take up the discount offer 4. PROFIT!!
Note the absence of both an ??? and an "prove that the individual is infringing copyright" steps.
Good to see people in the field questioning 'breakthroughs'.
Well, have there been any peer reviewed papers published in journals with good reputation? If not, we have here the number one sign of bogus science: The discoverer pitches his claim directly to the media and questioning is the only reasonable attitude. For me, they lost it when they announced that the presentation was going to be remote, that the actual machine would not be in the room where the presentation was held. Yeah, so you haven't actually got one, have you? Cheers and see ya.
Professional Hitman Mr Smith is flogging a survey that claims 7 out 10 people he has checked have a lack of police protection posing a medium- to high-level risk of getting them murdered. The police's go-to security guy, Mr Doe, says that percentage is 'sensationalist nonsense' -- and he's willing to back that judgment with $1,000 of his own money. In fact Mr Doe will pay up if Mr Smith can whack 3 of 10 people chosen at random from his survey list."
Each open-source magazine hands total editorial control to the readers, allowing them to read, write, edit, and dictate the editorial feel for each topic.
What a fantastic idea. I'm looking forward to seeing the evolution of an article through time:
Original: A recent study further supports the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 1: A recent study further contradicts the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 2: A recent study further supports (sod off creationists) the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 3: A recent study further contradicts (f*ck U & UR ape mother, evolutionist!!) the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 4: A recent study further -CHEAP VIAGRA, call 0800 LURV ACTION now!!!!- the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
People can have very strong feelings when it comes to opinions and allowing them to edit opinion pieces is just asking for a flamefest.
You obviously missed the news that to celebrate and deepen the French-British relationship, names of cities on either side of the channel are changed to contain one half of the French and one half of the English name - hence Edimbourg + Edinburgh = Edimburgh
Of course you will not notice this in the name of every city. Londres + London for instance still gives London:)
Lucky you. I was watching Star Trek First Contact in the living room and fifteen minutes after Picard told the Enterprise computer to initiate the self-destruct protocol, my laptop exploded!
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Microsoft will invalidate XP keys for their WGA check (because they'll certainly still work to install the media) if you upgrade that installation of XP to Vista? Has anyone actually tried it?
Nope. And the clause itself is nothing new, as said even on the link provided in the summary - XP had the exact same one. But hey, it sounds shocking and just the thing Evil(tm) Micro$oft would do, so it must be true.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Slashdot Mirror
Err, ok, maybe I am just missing something fundamental here, but why do you need the gotos? Why not just something like:
int allocstuff(void) {
int return_val = 0;
char *a = malloc(100);
if (!a) {
return_val = -1;
} else {
char *b = malloc(100);
if (!b) {
free(a);
return_val = -1;
}
}
return return_val;
}
I'd find that much easier to read. I'm also confused by your free(b); statement. How can that ever be reached given the preceeding return 0;? Also, on a personal side-note, I hate - with a passion - code which omits braces for one-line if blocks. Two extra characters are not going to ruin anyone, but they do make the code much clearer at first glance. But yeah, personal preference, I guess.
One of the things mentioned in TFA is König's feelSpace belt, a belt which gives you information about which direction North is. A lecture he gave about it at the Neuro IT summer school in 2005 is actually available here. It's from two years ago, granted, but still reasonably interesting.
Basically you assume two things in your belief: (1) familiarity with the Earth environment and experience therein and (2) total absence of mechanical/electrical/whatever failures. Neither is a given.
I disagree. To learn a language you have to know what its strengths and weaknesses are, which approaches work well, which don't. You could get that knowledge from just playing around, but it'd be a lot quicker if you read a book that tells you. Especially if you know another language, a list of the crucial differences is very much required. If not you end up writing things in the style of one language that really should be expressed differently.
Example: C programmer in Matlab. Task: Take two vectors of same length, for every i smaller than length, multiply the ith element of the first with the ith element of the second vector.
Results:
Just playing around, as you suggest:
function y = multiply_vectors(a, b)
y = zeros(size(a));
for i = 1:length(a)
y(i) = a(i)*b(i);
end
end
Doing it the proper (Matlab) way:
y = a.*b;
It's a simple and therefore unlikely example, granted, but there are many such differences between programming languages. Just playing around doesn't easily allow to find them because, technically, the code works. It just doesn't work efficiently. That said, once you know how to deal with the language, by all means, screw around. A lot.
On top of Mount Everest, sound of nature: swshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
On top of Mount Everest, listening to decent metal. Like Falkenbach or Thyrfing or whatever does it for you: Awesome.
Nature does not by itself provide theme songs
I do agree with you though. Shouldn't be using it 24/7.
So they're not exactly making it up and while you may think it's not logical, it does appear to be true. Whether the results apply to the US in the same way remains to be seen, of course.
IAAN (I am a neuroscientist, yeah you knew that already) and, as they Physicist already explained, you are in fact describing electrical currents. So I agree with the other two neuroscientists, saying that the electrical models we have are wrong is just BS.
/. summary above. I'd imagine the actual paper makes a more sensible argument, but I'm not going to read that before monday, so...
There are plenty of valid criticisms you can bring to the HH model. It cannot account for all observations (there was a paper in Nature recently exactly to this point) and after all, when you try to model primate cells with HH dynamics, you are in effect comparing your monkey with a giant squid! It has tbh always amazed me how well that worked at all. So if you're going to say, HH is inadequate, that's fair. If you are going to say that non-electrical pathways for transmitting information exist alongside the known electrical currents, that's also fair and you have my complete attention. But you can't just say that nerves don't use electricity, that just labels you as someone trying to be sensationalist. Besides, if you could prove this beyond reasonable doubt, you should and would send the paper to Nature.
Then again, this is my reaction to the
Ok, I think I can guess the Powerpoint Slide that led to these letters:
1. Get postal addresses of students accross the U.S. via their University
2. Send them pre-lawsuit letters
3. Wait for a fraction of the students to take up the discount offer
4. PROFIT!!
Note the absence of both an ??? and an "prove that the individual is infringing copyright" steps.
The answer is Rockbox. Which you could easily have found on Google, even if your search query had just been alternative ipod firmware :)
And here's the related recent entry at a Worth1000 contest :)
Professional Hitman Mr Smith is flogging a survey that claims 7 out 10 people he has checked have a lack of police protection posing a medium- to high-level risk of getting them murdered. The police's go-to security guy, Mr Doe, says that percentage is 'sensationalist nonsense' -- and he's willing to back that judgment with $1,000 of his own money. In fact Mr Doe will pay up if Mr Smith can whack 3 of 10 people chosen at random from his survey list."
Original:
A recent study further supports the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 1:
A recent study further contradicts the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 2:
A recent study further supports (sod off creationists) the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 3:
A recent study further contradicts (f*ck U & UR ape mother, evolutionist!!) the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 4:
A recent study further -CHEAP VIAGRA, call 0800 LURV ACTION now!!!!- the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
People can have very strong feelings when it comes to opinions and allowing them to edit opinion pieces is just asking for a flamefest.
I do. And then I sit down naked in the snow and castigate myself with a 9-tail as a punishment for these impure thoughts.
:)
Having said that, today is a good day to find out if that head of IT you never liked anyway has telnet enabled on one of his Solaris machines
You obviously missed the news that to celebrate and deepen the French-British relationship, names of cities on either side of the channel are changed to contain one half of the French and one half of the English name - hence Edimbourg + Edinburgh = Edimburgh
:)
:)
Of course you will not notice this in the name of every city. Londres + London for instance still gives London
Lucky you. I was watching Star Trek First Contact in the living room and fifteen minutes after Picard told the Enterprise computer to initiate the self-destruct protocol, my laptop exploded!
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
- Obtain a good enough understanding of space-time to create wormholes to any destination you want.
- Make a list of all destinations you are aware of.
- Send a probe to all of them, evaluate each destination and scan for more destinations from there.
- Go to step 2.
Space ships are just such a small-planet-with-water way of thinking.