Selection, operating on any given population (in the absence of a continuous source of fresh genetic diversity in the form of, say, random mutation), will tend to reduce the genetic diversity of the population in response to any given environmental stress. Given time and successive random environmental stresses, this will tend to drive the population to extinction.
Unless of course God sits in the background, manually fucking with his designs to make them work.
Actually, I can see that this might explain the flatfish.
It's a circular suspension bridge. Come up with a good basic design, and you could prefabricate and mass-produce it. If only the hippies would let us build Orion-type lifters...
> There is growing demand for boards to undergo a formal evaluation process, to assess both the performance of each individual board member and how they work together as a group
Fuck, that would be a world first. And now for the politicians...
It's an interesting idea. The sticking point is the fact that it requires someone with a great deal of emotional insight and patience to administer the feedback. If it were translated into a mass-market counselling context, it could get a little ugly. I think it's the right solution, given the right circumstances and the right people, but the prospect of it being incorporated into someone's grab-bag of shamanistic panaceas is kind of frightening.
> The argument that people who leave open tribute pages should expect to be trolled is the sort of sociopathic nonsense we can expect from geeks.
No, it's the sort of sociopathic nonsense we can expect from borderline or actual sociopaths, or those people who lack the maturity and social awareness to think through the drivel that issues from any available orifice.
One of my exes had a prostate problem which resisted a number of attempts to clear via antibiotics. It was only when I tried giving him zinc supplements that the problem went away. I tend to look at the human body as a complex system with a spread of resource and maintenance needs. It's no panacea, but it does seem that the engineering/systems viewpoint is missing from the repertoire of tools provided by a medical education.
Um, if you stood in the middle of a large, ornately decorated room, and called upon the spirit of Fairy Bojangles to modify the weather as you see fit, would you *expect* there to be any measurable response? Seriously?
Yes, you *cannot* disprove God. This is obvious to *anyone* capable of basic thought. But what's your point?
Why not make a big, open-plan, solar-mirror-powered plasma recycling station? Place it in solar orbit, ionise the waste, and separate it using the same principles that you'd use to create a mass spectrometer. This way, you'd get a stockpile of pure elements from your waste.
If the average retiree were a financially secure multimillionaire, the relative value of being a multimillionaire would be drastically reduced, and the cost of any goods and services of interest to that demographic would go up through the roof relative to the buying power of the rest of the population. Sounds like an awesome plan.
As a matter of interest, years ago, I found a vinyl record in my library that contained a number of basic tests for audio quality. The test that most interested me was a phase check. Two audio samples were presented, one of which was incorrectly phased because the recording cable polarity was deliverately wrong for one of the channels. It sounded crazy, because I knew enough at the time to know that I was dealing with an AC signal. So why should polarity matter? The difference in signal quality was quite clear, and demonstrated that my father had wired up the speakers incorrectly, because the stereo image of the incorrectly phased sample was definitely clearer and easier to place than the correctly phased one. Once the error was corrected, his very low quality audio system (A Pye Black Box), sounded appreciably better.
It turns out that signal phase is really crucial to the way that one's brain builds a 3-dimensional map of the audio signals it receives from the ears. If you think about it, that's not so surprising.
The biggest problem with MP3 encodings, according to an audio engineer friend, is that they don't do a good job of preserving phase information.
Slashdot Mirror
Stupid Sexy Flanders...
> I should have been a cabinet maker...
I'm a care worker now. I used to write C++.
At times, I'm still glad to be British.
> peaks
piques
Cue applications that polymorph and cue the use to change his/her behavior according to learned profiles.
Selection, operating on any given population (in the absence of a continuous source of fresh genetic diversity in the form of, say, random mutation), will tend to reduce the genetic diversity of the population in response to any given environmental stress. Given time and successive random environmental stresses, this will tend to drive the population to extinction.
Unless of course God sits in the background, manually fucking with his designs to make them work.
Actually, I can see that this might explain the flatfish.
And the human retina.
Oh, and the panda.
If you make fun of Jesus, people whine at you like little bitches.
It's a circular suspension bridge. Come up with a good basic design, and you could prefabricate and mass-produce it. If only the hippies would let us build Orion-type lifters...
> There is growing demand for boards to undergo a formal evaluation process, to assess both the performance of each individual board member and how they work together as a group
Fuck, that would be a world first. And now for the politicians...
It's an interesting idea. The sticking point is the fact that it requires someone with a great deal of emotional insight and patience to administer the feedback. If it were translated into a mass-market counselling context, it could get a little ugly. I think it's the right solution, given the right circumstances and the right people, but the prospect of it being incorporated into someone's grab-bag of shamanistic panaceas is kind of frightening.
> The argument that people who leave open tribute pages should expect to be trolled is the sort of sociopathic nonsense we can expect from geeks.
No, it's the sort of sociopathic nonsense we can expect from borderline or actual sociopaths, or those people who lack the maturity and social awareness to think through the drivel that issues from any available orifice.
Before issuing said drivel...
One of my exes had a prostate problem which resisted a number of attempts to clear via antibiotics. It was only when I tried giving him zinc supplements that the problem went away. I tend to look at the human body as a complex system with a spread of resource and maintenance needs. It's no panacea, but it does seem that the engineering/systems viewpoint is missing from the repertoire of tools provided by a medical education.
Please don't breed. It'll make Darwin cry.
An asteroid impact event has the potential to kill billions and end technological civilisation on this planet.
Risk analysis.
Um, if you stood in the middle of a large, ornately decorated room, and called upon the spirit of Fairy Bojangles to modify the weather as you see fit, would you *expect* there to be any measurable response? Seriously?
Yes, you *cannot* disprove God. This is obvious to *anyone* capable of basic thought. But what's your point?
pfft.
Why not make a big, open-plan, solar-mirror-powered plasma recycling station? Place it in solar orbit, ionise the waste, and separate it using the same principles that you'd use to create a mass spectrometer. This way, you'd get a stockpile of pure elements from your waste.
> SI units are self-consistent, while imperial measurements are not.
Actually, jbengt gave you the reason.
This link has a tabular description of the differences between sh & a small raft of other shells, including bash. Bash syntax is very similar similar to sh, but there are a few gotchas, which I'm too long out of the game to remember.
Truly, there are waaaaay more old men with wood than pervs who want them. Though I suppose it's a bone to the sex workers.
FTFY
So you're saying that the only way to deal with companies that change the rules as they see fit, is to follow those rules slavishly, ad infinitum?
Yeah, that'll fly.
Maybe the right thing to do, then, is to kill everyone on the basis of the small but real chance that anyone can do bad things.
If the average retiree were a financially secure multimillionaire, the relative value of being a multimillionaire would be drastically reduced, and the cost of any goods and services of interest to that demographic would go up through the roof relative to the buying power of the rest of the population. Sounds like an awesome plan.
The programmers of Space Wars wrote the code using OO polymorphic techniques. What have you done that makes your opinion worth not ignoring?
As a matter of interest, years ago, I found a vinyl record in my library that contained a number of basic tests for audio quality. The test that most interested me was a phase check. Two audio samples were presented, one of which was incorrectly phased because the recording cable polarity was deliverately wrong for one of the channels. It sounded crazy, because I knew enough at the time to know that I was dealing with an AC signal. So why should polarity matter? The difference in signal quality was quite clear, and demonstrated that my father had wired up the speakers incorrectly, because the stereo image of the incorrectly phased sample was definitely clearer and easier to place than the correctly phased one. Once the error was corrected, his very low quality audio system (A Pye Black Box), sounded appreciably better.
It turns out that signal phase is really crucial to the way that one's brain builds a 3-dimensional map of the audio signals it receives from the ears. If you think about it, that's not so surprising.
The biggest problem with MP3 encodings, according to an audio engineer friend, is that they don't do a good job of preserving phase information.