I've been wondering at something for quite some time that might be related to this discovery.
Why is it that animals that are "domesticated" or mostly live in close cooperation with human societies, like pigeons, develop highly variegated markings?
Think about it, cats, dogs, chickens, pigeons, cows, all of these exhibit wild variation in marking and coloration when they live with humans. Even humans themselves seem to have more variability when compared to other primates.
Perhaps human ecosystems and breeding have removed other pressures so the marking variations are more likely to express? I dunno. Just an observation. Any geneticists or evolutionary theorist out there have any ideas about this?
It seems that traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public.
While this may be true, I don't know what's scientific about a typical Doctor's diagnosis. It's just practice of an Art, based on experience. Typically, a Doctor will not setup an experiment and often, they won't even run any kind of instrumented test, they'll just ask you what symptoms you have, make some notes and make a diagnosis.
Or better yet, why do people write "alot", which isn't even a word!?
Maybe it's because allot is a word, which would sound close to the same as 'a lot' and you might see allot often.
While there's no word similar to alittle, I wonder if people often make the mistake to write "be little" when they mean "belittle"? I can't say that I've ever seen it, not to belittle anyone, but maybe someone smart enough to use belittle in a sentence correctly wouldn't make that mistake.
Of course, what do I know? I commit the crime of using it's when I mean its alot.
I really really enjoyed how Enterprise attempted to tie up what I saw were loose ends with regard to the Vulcans.
How do you explain the Vulcans? They apparently had space flight for a very long time (thousands of years?) - because of the existence of the Romulans which was lost to all memory. They are physically very robust (long lived, super strong, acute senses), extremely intelligent, highly focused, yet they were only marginally advanced from humans at the time of Cochrane? It just doesn't make sense.
Enterprise grapples with this head-on and satisfyingly, I think. Vulcans are unbelievably arrogant and not particularly curious all leading up to extreme calcification.
I also liked the "Enterprising" way they dealt with the tech they had at hand. I love the grappling hook and the annoying squeek in the Captain's floor.
But... it suffered with a lot of painful extended plotlines and bad writing. I only watched the first few years and then they kept moving it's time around in my market, I lost track of when it was on and didn't care anyway...
'if (!ptr)' instead of 'if (ptr==NULL)'. The reason someone might use the former code snippet is because they believe it would result in smaller machine code if the compiler does not do optimizations or is not smart enough to optimize the particular code snippet.
There are other reasons to use 'if (!ptr)' than optimization. Notational convenience. I'm not saying this is an overriding consideration, but it is a view of some, including some in authority.
Consider this from page 106 of The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition, by Kernighan and Ritchie:
/* strcpy: copy to to s; pointer version 3 */ void strcpy (char *s, char *t) { while (*s++ = *t++) ; }
Although this may seem cryptic at first sight, the notational convenience is considerable, and the idiom should be mastered, because you will see it frequently in C programs.
There is a lot of wisdom there. Most programmers, especially beginning programmers get stuck doing maintenance programming. Maintenance programmers should master this and a number of other C idioms. To any C programmer worth anything, 'if (!ptr)' should be immediately recognizable as equivalent to 'if (ptr == NULL)'.
While you might not see any advantage to using 'if (!ptr)', the notational convenience of the idiom becomes more apparent in code like:
for ( ptr = head ; ptr; ptr = ptr->next )
vs.
for ( ptr = head ; ptr != NULL; ptr = ptr->next )
I rather prefer the first. It's clear, it's less typing and there is less punctuation to parse. This is just an extension of the kind of thing you see with 'if (!ptr)'.
Of course, your milage may vary and there are arguments for and against different styles. I would discount the argument that it's not clear to beginning programmers, however. A programmer who doesn't understand this idiom completely has no business doing any serious work in this language.
I think the best argument against this shorthand is that spelling out 'ptr == NULL' makes it very clear that a pointer is being referenced here, vs a counter or character (not so important when the variable is named ptr, more persuasive if the variable was named stock_p or somesuch).
Also, at some point it becomes golf, seeing what you can do in the fewest characters. Golf should be discouraged for serious programming, but can be fun. I recall being impressed, many years ago, with:
a -= !!a;
Which would decrement 'a' until it was zero. Today, I would write this in the much clearer:
if ( a != 0 ) a--;
Which is not only much clearer, but is more efficient in the absence of optimization. However, I don't think that the optimization issues should usually get much consideration. Many others have said this already, so I won't repeat the arguments here.
Also, I'm pretty certain that the original WinNT was NOT developed on Alphas, but rather MIPS machines.
Cutler had left DEC for MS because his pet projects were cancelled (a new processor that was basically a 32 bit Alpha and a new OS). Alpha came a few years later and the WinNT work was being done in parallel with the initial Alpha development (at different companies).
If memory serves, the initial WinNT kernel development was done on MIPS machines.
I'll go out on a limb and say it's the MAIN reason people get interested in things. There's an economic system designed around that, maybe you've heard of it.
Exactly. And the lesson is that people are perfectly happy with that system, until it goes against their own self-interest. Then, it seems, they want to change the rules. Doesn't this seem unfair, even immoral, to you?
That doesn't mean that the making it happen at the expense of other people isn't a problem.
It's a problem for some and a boon for others.
One of the basic premises of free markets is that nobody is "making it happen". The unseen hand is directing this movement of labor toward the lowest cost available. This is thought to gain advantages of efficiency. Certainly, economies where the government tries to direct everything have been proven to be very inefficient and ultimately in noone's best interest. Oops! There I go, calling you a "commie".
Now, I would agree that "Free" markets are an unknown ideal and we've found it necessary (or perhaps we've just deemed it necessary) to interfere in a number of ways. However, I don't think interfering with the economy for the self-interest of one group at the expense of another is justifiable.
It shouldn't have been waved away then, either. PA is STILL dealing from the effects of having basically it's entire local economy leave the country.
Were you complaining about trampling on people's lives to make money when it was the steel industry? If self interest has suddenly gotten you interested in the "problems" of globalization, then I think there's an important lesson to be learned, but you're probably just waving that lesson away.
...so just hand-waving and saying "it'll all turn out okay, and if it doesn't you deserved it" is pretty immoral.
Sure, it's hurt PA, but it's helped people in other places. Do those people who might have starved under your "moral" economics "deserve" that?
The human cost is real and it's not something that should be waved away, even if it does make economic sense.
There is a human cost, but there are advantages to having products produced as cheaply as possible. I never heard white collar people standing up for steel or auto workers when the costs of automobiles were kept so low. Similarly, if your mp3 players are programmed by Chinese or Indian programmers and offer lots of features at a low price, who wins?
Face it, this is just what it feels like to live in the real world.
Now, if we could just make upper management feel some of this outsourcing pain, then everyone would be participating in the new economy.
In your field, have there been stories about abuses by organizations? I've heard (on Slashdot, anyway) that the FBI was very powerful in the 30s and the 50s/50s.
What are you saying, that the FBI was very powerful in the 30s and then half (50/50) of the rest of the time?
While this will be great for a lot of artists I question the motive. I doubt that Eliot Spitzer is doing this for artists. I'm sure New York state will benefit from the interest revenue from "hold[ing] these monies. It won't hurt his career to have his name in the paper either.
You know, he does work for the state of NY, after all.
In any case, these royalties should benefit either the copyright holder or, failing that, the state and not these distribution companies. So, this is a good thing.
The people grant all copyrights for the advancement of art. Clearly, the RIAA members have shown contempt for advancement of anything except their own profits. We have to make sure they don't benefit from their "inability" to find the artist.
IANAL, but I think any GIMP developer who did 'volunteer to donate a percentage of' anything might lose their right to distribute the GIMP under the GPL.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Note the phrase "conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise)..."
By agreeing to "donate" to a patent holder, you might be endangering your rights to distribute under the GPL.
I couldn't agree more, except the part about being too young to be married, I think we wait too long to get married these days, but that's for another comment.
Stress is a good thing. Without it, we wouldn't perfrom.
Check out some ways to deal creatively with Stress. Get a creative hobby, cook, exercise, find a fun recreational activity you can enjoy with your wife (yes, that, but other than that, too!), meditate.
Was Ryan a great pitcher? No. Was he a spectacular pitcher who belongs in the HOF? Absolutely. Just don't confuse him with Cy Young, Walter Johnson, or even Roger Clemens.
Who was comparing him to any of those pitchers?
You were comparing him unfavorably to Schilling and I disagreed.
I don't think most experts are that impressed by win/loss record as that has so much to do with the teams around you. Note the relative lack of HOFers on the career W/L% list, for example. Note also Schilling is missing from this list.
For Ryan's long career, he played on a lot of mediocre teams.
To his credit, Ryan does have some great records to be proud of. Like, hits allowed, innings pitched and Hits allowed/9IP. The book is still being written on Schilling, but will he hold any carreer records in any category when it's done?
I disagree. Ryan is better than Schilling lifetime in many important statistics like ERA and SO. I could see a claim that Schilling at his best was as good as Ryan at his best (although Ryan's 1.69 ERA season of '81 is hard to beat), but you can't credibly claim that Schilling is a much better pitcher than Ryan.
Of course, these statistics aside, Ryan's No Hitter record combined with his longevity near the top make him a shoe-in for the HOF, things that Schilling will find hard to match. Ryan was a shoe-in, though, so Schilling could get in, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that animals that are "domesticated" or mostly live in close cooperation with human societies, like pigeons, develop highly variegated markings?
Think about it, cats, dogs, chickens, pigeons, cows, all of these exhibit wild variation in marking and coloration when they live with humans. Even humans themselves seem to have more variability when compared to other primates.
Perhaps human ecosystems and breeding have removed other pressures so the marking variations are more likely to express? I dunno. Just an observation. Any geneticists or evolutionary theorist out there have any ideas about this?
Well, not counting the dupes, of course.
I take it you are denigrating what are known as Cognitive Therapies here. Were you aware that one study has shown that at least as effective as drugs in the treatment of severe depression?
While this may be true, I don't know what's scientific about a typical Doctor's diagnosis. It's just practice of an Art, based on experience. Typically, a Doctor will not setup an experiment and often, they won't even run any kind of instrumented test, they'll just ask you what symptoms you have, make some notes and make a diagnosis.
Maybe it's because allot is a word, which would sound close to the same as 'a lot' and you might see allot often.
While there's no word similar to alittle, I wonder if people often make the mistake to write "be little" when they mean "belittle"? I can't say that I've ever seen it, not to belittle anyone, but maybe someone smart enough to use belittle in a sentence correctly wouldn't make that mistake.
Of course, what do I know? I commit the crime of using it's when I mean its alot.
How do you explain the Vulcans? They apparently had space flight for a very long time (thousands of years?) - because of the existence of the Romulans which was lost to all memory. They are physically very robust (long lived, super strong, acute senses), extremely intelligent, highly focused, yet they were only marginally advanced from humans at the time of Cochrane? It just doesn't make sense.
Enterprise grapples with this head-on and satisfyingly, I think. Vulcans are unbelievably arrogant and not particularly curious all leading up to extreme calcification.
I also liked the "Enterprising" way they dealt with the tech they had at hand. I love the grappling hook and the annoying squeek in the Captain's floor.
But... it suffered with a lot of painful extended plotlines and bad writing. I only watched the first few years and then they kept moving it's time around in my market, I lost track of when it was on and didn't care anyway...
I wonder about that "walk-out" though. These "Core Developers" are all part of the JBoss Community still, right?
Also, there hasn't been any news from the Core Developers since 2003, when they walked out.
Meanwhile, Marc Fleury and JBoss appears to be doing well.
And when you're done with that you could move on to E and F....
Oh, so that's what happened. Do you know when the plan to revive him?
Of course it will. The LA Times is just trying to discredit "Internet Media".
- 'if (!ptr)' instead of 'if (ptr==NULL)'. The reason someone might use the former code snippet is because they believe it would result in smaller machine code if the compiler does not do optimizations or is not smart enough to optimize the particular code snippet.
There are other reasons to use 'if (!ptr)' than optimization. Notational convenience. I'm not saying this is an overriding consideration, but it is a view of some, including some in authority.Consider this from page 106 of The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition, by Kernighan and Ritchie:
There is a lot of wisdom there. Most programmers, especially beginning programmers get stuck doing maintenance programming. Maintenance programmers should master this and a number of other C idioms. To any C programmer worth anything, 'if (!ptr)' should be immediately recognizable as equivalent to 'if (ptr == NULL)'.
While you might not see any advantage to using 'if (!ptr)', the notational convenience of the idiom becomes more apparent in code like:
vs.I rather prefer the first. It's clear, it's less typing and there is less punctuation to parse. This is just an extension of the kind of thing you see with 'if (!ptr)'.
Of course, your milage may vary and there are arguments for and against different styles. I would discount the argument that it's not clear to beginning programmers, however. A programmer who doesn't understand this idiom completely has no business doing any serious work in this language.
I think the best argument against this shorthand is that spelling out 'ptr == NULL' makes it very clear that a pointer is being referenced here, vs a counter or character (not so important when the variable is named ptr, more persuasive if the variable was named stock_p or somesuch).
Also, at some point it becomes golf, seeing what you can do in the fewest characters. Golf should be discouraged for serious programming, but can be fun. I recall being impressed, many years ago, with:
Which would decrement 'a' until it was zero. Today, I would write this in the much clearer:Which is not only much clearer, but is more efficient in the absence of optimization. However, I don't think that the optimization issues should usually get much consideration. Many others have said this already, so I won't repeat the arguments here.Cutler had left DEC for MS because his pet projects were cancelled (a new processor that was basically a 32 bit Alpha and a new OS). Alpha came a few years later and the WinNT work was being done in parallel with the initial Alpha development (at different companies).
If memory serves, the initial WinNT kernel development was done on MIPS machines.
As Matt himself points out in one of the "Life in Hell" strips/books, Groening rhymes with complaining.
- I'll go out on a limb and say it's the MAIN reason people get interested in things. There's an economic system designed around that, maybe you've heard of it.
Exactly. And the lesson is that people are perfectly happy with that system, until it goes against their own self-interest. Then, it seems, they want to change the rules. Doesn't this seem unfair, even immoral, to you?- That doesn't mean that the making it happen at the expense of other people isn't a problem.
It's a problem for some and a boon for others.One of the basic premises of free markets is that nobody is "making it happen". The unseen hand is directing this movement of labor toward the lowest cost available. This is thought to gain advantages of efficiency. Certainly, economies where the government tries to direct everything have been proven to be very inefficient and ultimately in noone's best interest. Oops! There I go, calling you a "commie".
Now, I would agree that "Free" markets are an unknown ideal and we've found it necessary (or perhaps we've just deemed it necessary) to interfere in a number of ways. However, I don't think interfering with the economy for the self-interest of one group at the expense of another is justifiable.
- It shouldn't have been waved away then, either. PA is STILL dealing from the effects of having basically it's entire local economy leave the country.
Were you complaining about trampling on people's lives to make money when it was the steel industry? If self interest has suddenly gotten you interested in the "problems" of globalization, then I think there's an important lesson to be learned, but you're probably just waving that lesson away.Sure, it's hurt PA, but it's helped people in other places. Do those people who might have starved under your "moral" economics "deserve" that?
- The human cost is real and it's not something that should be waved away, even if it does make economic sense.
There is a human cost, but there are advantages to having products produced as cheaply as possible. I never heard white collar people standing up for steel or auto workers when the costs of automobiles were kept so low. Similarly, if your mp3 players are programmed by Chinese or Indian programmers and offer lots of features at a low price, who wins?Face it, this is just what it feels like to live in the real world.
Now, if we could just make upper management feel some of this outsourcing pain, then everyone would be participating in the new economy.
- In your field, have there been stories about abuses by organizations? I've heard (on Slashdot, anyway) that the FBI was very powerful in the 30s and the 50s/50s.
What are you saying, that the FBI was very powerful in the 30s and then half (50/50) of the rest of the time?- While this will be great for a lot of artists I question the motive. I doubt that Eliot Spitzer is doing this for artists. I'm sure New York state will benefit from the interest revenue from "hold[ing] these monies. It won't hurt his career to have his name in the paper either.
You know, he does work for the state of NY, after all.In any case, these royalties should benefit either the copyright holder or, failing that, the state and not these distribution companies. So, this is a good thing.
The people grant all copyrights for the advancement of art. Clearly, the RIAA members have shown contempt for advancement of anything except their own profits. We have to make sure they don't benefit from their "inability" to find the artist.
The FSF encourages people to assign their copyrights to the FSF, has nobody who contributed to the GIMP done this?
I imagine that at least one of the copyright holder for parts of the GIMP is the FSF.
Good luck!
From the GPL:
Note the phrase "conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise)..."
By agreeing to "donate" to a patent holder, you might be endangering your rights to distribute under the GPL.
Stress is a good thing. Without it, we wouldn't perfrom.
Check out some ways to deal creatively with Stress. Get a creative hobby, cook, exercise, find a fun recreational activity you can enjoy with your wife (yes, that, but other than that, too!), meditate.
Good luck.
- "You know what marriage is? Find a woman you hate and buy her a house."
I don't know if Steven Seagal said it first, but:Who was comparing him to any of those pitchers? You were comparing him unfavorably to Schilling and I disagreed.
I don't think most experts are that impressed by win/loss record as that has so much to do with the teams around you. Note the relative lack of HOFers on the career W/L% list, for example. Note also Schilling is missing from this list.
For Ryan's long career, he played on a lot of mediocre teams.
To his credit, Ryan does have some great records to be proud of. Like, hits allowed, innings pitched and Hits allowed/9IP. The book is still being written on Schilling, but will he hold any carreer records in any category when it's done?
- And Schilling's a much better pitcher than Ryan.
I disagree. Ryan is better than Schilling lifetime in many important statistics like ERA and SO. I could see a claim that Schilling at his best was as good as Ryan at his best (although Ryan's 1.69 ERA season of '81 is hard to beat), but you can't credibly claim that Schilling is a much better pitcher than Ryan.Of course, these statistics aside, Ryan's No Hitter record combined with his longevity near the top make him a shoe-in for the HOF, things that Schilling will find hard to match. Ryan was a shoe-in, though, so Schilling could get in, too.