Some states hold that the constitution only authorizes the government to count the people. Which means you can not estimate the population. You can not apply corrections to the counted number based on statistics. Most of the under counted populations are undocumented migratory workers and minorities. So such corrections go towards the Democrats. So most Republicans advance that argument. But using cell phones would bias the sample towards slightly more affluent populations and might skew towards Republicans. So they might not be opposed to this.
When it comes to the second amendment, the founders allowed for all possible advances in technology and if one can make a nuclear tipped bazooka it can't be regulated or banned. As long as it can be carried by one person, it is constitutional. When it comes to census, no advancement in counting, estimating sciences are allowed to be used. How can you hold both view points at the same time? Easy, they are time traveling mind readers, they go back to 1776 and precisely understand what the founders meant, never mind what the wrote down, never mind how SCOTUS interprets it.
Normally I would be able to find equally absurd mutually exclusive contradictory view points held by Democrats to "balance" the posting and burnish my credentials as a "neutral" guy. But it is getting increasingly difficult. And I no longer care to be the "neutral" guy. And I have karma to burn.
Americans, do not give into class warfare arguments. You too have the right to buy sports franchises and write off billion dollars from your taxable income. You too have the right to create a SuperPAC and spend a million dollars to launch attack ads against the politicians who you don't like. Every one is equal before the law. And America has the best political system money can buy, let no one try to convince you otherwise.
But the descendants of the slashdotters would find that their prescient great grandpa has not only documented the format of the files, and a flash drive with a fully self contained OS, with a raspberry Pi computer, with all the necessary drivers and codecs and some plain text instructions on how to juice up the machine and the communication protocols. Only they will be able to retrieve information from this era.
Since historians work with whatever data is most prevalent, they would conclude this era was full of nerds who were pissed off when someone talks about optimizing the queues for ice in desert.
Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai
That many Gods and philosophies? They are Hindus now. Hindus who believe Shiva is the only God and all other gods are Shiva's manifestations would happily coexist and accept the Vishnu worshipers who do
sed -e 's/Shiva/Vishnu/g' shiva_theology > vishnu_theology
They can accept all of the above and jediism without any problems.
Infomercial for a code coverage tool?
on
Tetris Is Hard To Test
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Code coverage tool seems like a good idea from some theoretical stand point. But in practice number of code paths multiply rapidly and getting all the paths executed would involve unreasonably long time. Further rarely called procedures or rarely executed is just one class of problems. There are functions that will execute million times correctly and misbehave once in a million or once in a billion calls. For example I came across a bug in something so simple like calculating the centroid of a triangle. Absurdly simply code that adds the x, y, z coordinates of the vertices and divides by 3. That is all. In dealing with output of some CAD software, when the smallest angle of the triangle fell below 1.0e-08 radians, it returned a wrong value of the centroid. Typical sanity checks based on mathematical facts, like centroid of a triangle can never be outside the triangle will not work. The code that checks inside-or-outside of triangle is far more complex than the centroid code. The floating point truncation errors make this kind of sanity check useless. You can't even plot it on the screen and look at the centroid. OpenGL is implemented in single precision.
So at some point you reach a point of diminishing returns. It might not be worth making sure every line got tested when there are procedures that have a bug that happens in one in a billion calls. My philosophy is, "Perfection is the goal. Doing better than the last release is the shipping criterion".
Because any thing anyone does actively in their lifetime will be passed on to their off spring. Very early in the embryo development the cells that will end up in the gonads (testes and ovaries) get separated from the remaining cells. These "germ line" cells are the one that go to the next generation. All the modification one's body undergoes in one's lifetime, ends when that body dies. It does not go to the next generation. Lamarckian theory thought along these lines.
The behavioral trait changes can change the percentage of lizards spending time in higher branches. But it will not be genetic and there will be no trace of it in the genome, and the higher branch dwelling lizards would be able to interbreed with lower branch dwelling lizards. If they could detect changes in the genome, it is not an active strategy.
The change occurred at an astonishing pace: Within a few months, native lizards had begun shifting to higher perches, and over the course of 15 years and 20 generations, their toe pads had become larger, with more sticky scales on their feet.
This language confuses most non scientists and those not used to reading about evolution. The lizards did not convene a Supreme Soviet of Lizards and pass a resolution to shift to higher perches. The did not look at the evidence, pros and cons and decide, "yeah! sticky scales on the feet are a good idea. But Lizz Ard patented it. The survival of the species depends on it. So let us use eminent domain and make it public domain". Some lizards naturally like perching higher and other prefers perching lower and most do exactly what their parents did. The ones who liked higher perches survived more than the others, and their percentage in the population rose. Eventually only those who perched higher would be left alive.
The inuit are able to eat fried whale meat fried in blubber nonchalantly because those who could not handle that much cholesterol died out ages ago. Lactose intolerant toddlers died out en mass some 8000 years ago in western europe. That is why humans should try to stick their "ethnic ancestor" foods. [begin personal rant] Indian Indians (not American Indians) went through so many cycles of feast and famine. Only those who had the ability store fat in the times of plenty survived the lean times. When they get F-1 visa, then green card then citizenship and melt into the melting pot guzzling beer, eating pizza, their genomes are still gearing up for the next famine that could be just round the corner. Heart disease and diabetes is rampant among the immigrants from historically impoverished ethnic groups are very very susceptible to diseases of the plenty. Your body evolved to eat what your grandpa and his grandpa ate. If they eschewed bacon, stay clear of bacon. If they ate rice and lentils and ate samosa and jamoons only on festival feasts, you would do well to do the same. Stop ordering dessert in every meal and pigging out in the 9$ lunch buffet with unlimited mango lassi at India Palace. [end rant]
It is fascinating to see it from evolutionary perspective. But evolution has been used by every one with a perverse agenda to justify their ulterior motives most scientists steer well clear of explaining it in simple terms. They hide it in obscurantist journal papers with very dry commentary.
Speed of evolution should be measured in generations, not years. Species that produce vast quantities of off spring will evolve faster and adapt better. There is nothing unusual or unknown about it. The mosquitoes inside the New York subways are a different species than the ones above ground. The speciation completed very quickly.
The "ring species" are basically speciation events in progress. All it takes is one catastrophe, a disease or volcanic eruption or an invasive predator species introduction, that interrupts one of the breeding in one of the islands, and there will be two species. And this is what most anti-evolution folks don't get. No, a chimpanzee did not suddenly gave birth to a human. Population of the ancestor species split into two, and one evolved to become human and the other became chimpanzee. And the split need not be geographic. Changes in mate preferences, internal body temperature, food preferences, etc can lead to breeding isolation that could lead to speciation.
Still it is nice to see evidence being presented in a species much higher than mosquitoes.
3500$ per hour of stolen wages? per week? per employee? what the hell is wrong with our system? This is a slap in the wrist, and a clear permission to employers to violate all labor standards. They CEO's lunch tab could be more than this...
I don't blame you, politicians, especially the Republicans have gone so far out, it is nearly impossible to parody them by exaggerating anything they say or do. No wonder Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are reduce playing back their footage unmodified and make faces.
I have failed miserably looks like. Even adding the bit about railway rolling stock did not help. Well, that is the problem when you speak with a tongue in the cheek. You end up chewing your own tongue.
11 million people, 24/7/365 etc works out to 96.360 billion citizen-hours per year. Assuming these 40 million calls all happened this year and each call took place one full hour each, it works out to a load factor of 0.04%. In other words citizens are NOT calling 911, 99.96% of their time. Since most 911 calls do not last an hour the load factor is even lower than that. This is how over built and inefficient government services are.
If a private railroad owns rolling stock that would occupy, say 10 miles of track, but actually owns 2000 miles of track, it is no skin off your nose. Your taxes are not funding it. But if the government is running that railroad, we should restrict the total track length owned by the government to the actual track required by those rail cars and not an inch more.
That is how we reduce the size of the government, reduce deficits and reduce taxes. When will America see the logic here?
Then you need to solve the free loader problem. Businesses can join together, chip in money to promote tourism to their region for example. But the free loaders who refuse to chip will still get to enjoy the benefits. Only on projects where the benefit can not be gained by people who did not participate in the investment you could use this funding model.
Constitution has given the government the power to tax the population for any reason, without even specifying a reason. As long as the total benefit, direct and indirect, due to governement, due to its mere existence, its action and inaction, matches the total taxes paid by a reasonably large cross section of the population, shut up and pay your taxes. And thank the government for existing.
Even if you throw the scumbags out of office the contracts they have signed is still valid. If we could prove criminal collusion then we can set the entire contract null and void.
... laughing all the way to the bank. All these companies that contract with municipalities add very careful clauses into their contract. Whether it is the incompetence of the city managers/lawyers/politicians or whether they are actively colluding with the companies is a matter of debate. But the side clauses will make people's blood boil when they come to know of them.
Most likely the camera companies have minimum guarantee payments, will not let changes to traffic lights and timings that would reduce both accidents and fines etc. There was the fiasco with parking spaces, that makes it impossible for Chicago to create more parking spaces without paying the private company for their "loss of revenue". The private bridge owner of the bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Canada is suing to block the building of any new bridge. When turnpike operations are sold to such private companies, they have clauses preventing the improvement of alternative roads owned by the state or city that would divert traffic away from the turnpike.
The great American rip-off is the private companies taking over tax funded infrastructure and then preventing improvements to alternatives, and extracting rent. I think the only way to stop them is to sue such companies for criminal conduct and bad faith and have the original contract declared null and void. Two bit politicians coming into office for a single two year term should not be able to burden all the citizens for eternity to such contracts.
It was called Timex DataLink. Released around 1995 or so. You set up the calender, contacts etc in the PC and click on "send to watch" menu item. The CRT monitor will flash horizontal bars. You just hold the watch up in front of the monitor to receive the data.
It sort of worked. But it was too much of a pain but it worked when I tried. Eventually I stopped updating the data and carried around long obsolete phone numbers, addresses etc for a long time. It had super good battery life. Lasted 12 years or so. Then I went back to a simple Casio GShock.
Yeah, I saw it too. What bummed me out was that, they did have some fighter planes of the X-wing class. They saved their elite flying squadrons and used these poor saps as cannon fodder.
I am not very sure about that. Wiki says.303 Enfield is being phased out. May be being replaced by a 7.62 mm caliber weapon. It could be a NATO weapon, India buys from both NATO and Warsaw pact. Does crazy things like adding magic-matra missiles (NATO) on to MIG-21 or MIG-23. How they got the missiles' target acquisition radar with Russian cockpit displays and the target selection pointer I have no idea.
They are very common in India, and I assume in all of British Commonwealth. Local police have them but usually do not carry them around regularly. A typical police station would have about six of them very visible but locked by a strip of metal. All the police station scenes in Bollywood movies would have them. The National Cadet Corps, a high school student training program, would culminate with the training to use these rifles. We get to fire at most 10 rounds as the right of passage to get the "C" certificate if I remember right.
To imagine the same weapon used so heavily in the tropics, mud and monsoon being noted for its reliability in Arctic conditions is amazing. But this is a very simple basic weapon. Even India is phasing them out, apparently.
Look at the supported phones of 2014 X3. Phones supported in AT&T not supported in T-mobile! What the hell? Why would the carrier make a difference to blue tooth? Google Nexus not supported. Google Nexus is supposed to be the reference implementation of Android. It probably tests only iPhone. Have you tried feeding it home made mp3 files?
The auto makers are mostly work with very long life cycles. Vehicles typically get used for 10 to 15 years, especially for well built luxury vehicles. Model life cycles are long too. They are not used to the fast changing world of electronics and entertainment systems. My friend driving Mercedes hates its navigation system. He often uses google maps on his iphone. My BMW balks at playing old mp3 file created by ripping CDs in WinAmp back in 2000. Every other music player and computer will play those files, BMW alone will keep crashing its music file system and resetting itself. BMW's support of bluetooth is abysmal. My 2006 Prius links without any issue any cell phone via blue tooth. Have you seen how small BMW's approved list of cell phones is? The damned thing would not even support Nexus4 or Nexus5. And if I pair it with an "unapproved" model, somehow it forgets the supported models too. Theoretically it can maintain connections to four phones simultaneously and auto switch on incoming calls. But in practice it is extremely poorly done.
Why wouldn't they just provide a simple docking station, allow the docked device access to the car speakers and stay away from building their own navigation and music players? They still think they can hold their customers up for ransom by demanding 1800$ for an integrated navigation system or 1200$ for the music player. No, just put in good speakers and allow us to bring our own devices into the car.
The lack of imagination of the auto makers is astounding. WiFi is what 15 years old? iPod is 10 years old? Why didn't they build a car with WiFi that will connect to your home, down load daily news, weather, traffic reports into the hard disk 10 years ago? After missing the boat then, now they are coming up with walled gardens of WiFi, memory storage in the car etc.
I did not know I have a microbial lab on top of my refrigerator! I kept throwing out old boxes of cheerios!
Cheerios are very good baby sitters too. Empty a small portion of them in the tray of the high chair and the infants will have hours of fun picking them one at time and inspecting them individually and find their mouth with their tiny hands by trial and error.
Slashdot Mirror
Al-queda opposes beer, free or not, and free speech.
When it comes to the second amendment, the founders allowed for all possible advances in technology and if one can make a nuclear tipped bazooka it can't be regulated or banned. As long as it can be carried by one person, it is constitutional. When it comes to census, no advancement in counting, estimating sciences are allowed to be used. How can you hold both view points at the same time? Easy, they are time traveling mind readers, they go back to 1776 and precisely understand what the founders meant, never mind what the wrote down, never mind how SCOTUS interprets it.
Normally I would be able to find equally absurd mutually exclusive contradictory view points held by Democrats to "balance" the posting and burnish my credentials as a "neutral" guy. But it is getting increasingly difficult. And I no longer care to be the "neutral" guy. And I have karma to burn.
Americans, do not give into class warfare arguments. You too have the right to buy sports franchises and write off billion dollars from your taxable income. You too have the right to create a SuperPAC and spend a million dollars to launch attack ads against the politicians who you don't like. Every one is equal before the law. And America has the best political system money can buy, let no one try to convince you otherwise.
Since historians work with whatever data is most prevalent, they would conclude this era was full of nerds who were pissed off when someone talks about optimizing the queues for ice in desert.
Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai
That many Gods and philosophies? They are Hindus now. Hindus who believe Shiva is the only God and all other gods are Shiva's manifestations would happily coexist and accept the Vishnu worshipers who do
sed -e 's/Shiva/Vishnu/g' shiva_theology > vishnu_theology They can accept all of the above and jediism without any problems.
So at some point you reach a point of diminishing returns. It might not be worth making sure every line got tested when there are procedures that have a bug that happens in one in a billion calls. My philosophy is, "Perfection is the goal. Doing better than the last release is the shipping criterion".
Obviously you know more than I do about evolution and this paper. Thanks for the feedback.
How do you know it was not an "active" strategy?
Because any thing anyone does actively in their lifetime will be passed on to their off spring. Very early in the embryo development the cells that will end up in the gonads (testes and ovaries) get separated from the remaining cells. These "germ line" cells are the one that go to the next generation. All the modification one's body undergoes in one's lifetime, ends when that body dies. It does not go to the next generation. Lamarckian theory thought along these lines.
The behavioral trait changes can change the percentage of lizards spending time in higher branches. But it will not be genetic and there will be no trace of it in the genome, and the higher branch dwelling lizards would be able to interbreed with lower branch dwelling lizards. If they could detect changes in the genome, it is not an active strategy.
The change occurred at an astonishing pace: Within a few months, native lizards had begun shifting to higher perches, and over the course of 15 years and 20 generations, their toe pads had become larger, with more sticky scales on their feet.
This language confuses most non scientists and those not used to reading about evolution. The lizards did not convene a Supreme Soviet of Lizards and pass a resolution to shift to higher perches. The did not look at the evidence, pros and cons and decide, "yeah! sticky scales on the feet are a good idea. But Lizz Ard patented it. The survival of the species depends on it. So let us use eminent domain and make it public domain". Some lizards naturally like perching higher and other prefers perching lower and most do exactly what their parents did. The ones who liked higher perches survived more than the others, and their percentage in the population rose. Eventually only those who perched higher would be left alive.
The inuit are able to eat fried whale meat fried in blubber nonchalantly because those who could not handle that much cholesterol died out ages ago. Lactose intolerant toddlers died out en mass some 8000 years ago in western europe. That is why humans should try to stick their "ethnic ancestor" foods. [begin personal rant] Indian Indians (not American Indians) went through so many cycles of feast and famine. Only those who had the ability store fat in the times of plenty survived the lean times. When they get F-1 visa, then green card then citizenship and melt into the melting pot guzzling beer, eating pizza, their genomes are still gearing up for the next famine that could be just round the corner. Heart disease and diabetes is rampant among the immigrants from historically impoverished ethnic groups are very very susceptible to diseases of the plenty. Your body evolved to eat what your grandpa and his grandpa ate. If they eschewed bacon, stay clear of bacon. If they ate rice and lentils and ate samosa and jamoons only on festival feasts, you would do well to do the same. Stop ordering dessert in every meal and pigging out in the 9$ lunch buffet with unlimited mango lassi at India Palace. [end rant]
It is fascinating to see it from evolutionary perspective. But evolution has been used by every one with a perverse agenda to justify their ulterior motives most scientists steer well clear of explaining it in simple terms. They hide it in obscurantist journal papers with very dry commentary.
The "ring species" are basically speciation events in progress. All it takes is one catastrophe, a disease or volcanic eruption or an invasive predator species introduction, that interrupts one of the breeding in one of the islands, and there will be two species. And this is what most anti-evolution folks don't get. No, a chimpanzee did not suddenly gave birth to a human. Population of the ancestor species split into two, and one evolved to become human and the other became chimpanzee. And the split need not be geographic. Changes in mate preferences, internal body temperature, food preferences, etc can lead to breeding isolation that could lead to speciation.
Still it is nice to see evidence being presented in a species much higher than mosquitoes.
3500$ per hour of stolen wages? per week? per employee? what the hell is wrong with our system? This is a slap in the wrist, and a clear permission to employers to violate all labor standards. They CEO's lunch tab could be more than this...
I don't blame you, politicians, especially the Republicans have gone so far out, it is nearly impossible to parody them by exaggerating anything they say or do. No wonder Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are reduce playing back their footage unmodified and make faces.
The radicalized Brits returning home would be free radicals, right? Aren't free radicals good for your health or something?
I have failed miserably looks like. Even adding the bit about railway rolling stock did not help. Well, that is the problem when you speak with a tongue in the cheek. You end up chewing your own tongue.
If a private railroad owns rolling stock that would occupy, say 10 miles of track, but actually owns 2000 miles of track, it is no skin off your nose. Your taxes are not funding it. But if the government is running that railroad, we should restrict the total track length owned by the government to the actual track required by those rail cars and not an inch more.
That is how we reduce the size of the government, reduce deficits and reduce taxes. When will America see the logic here?
Constitution has given the government the power to tax the population for any reason, without even specifying a reason. As long as the total benefit, direct and indirect, due to governement, due to its mere existence, its action and inaction, matches the total taxes paid by a reasonably large cross section of the population, shut up and pay your taxes. And thank the government for existing.
Even if you throw the scumbags out of office the contracts they have signed is still valid. If we could prove criminal collusion then we can set the entire contract null and void.
Most likely the camera companies have minimum guarantee payments, will not let changes to traffic lights and timings that would reduce both accidents and fines etc. There was the fiasco with parking spaces, that makes it impossible for Chicago to create more parking spaces without paying the private company for their "loss of revenue". The private bridge owner of the bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Canada is suing to block the building of any new bridge. When turnpike operations are sold to such private companies, they have clauses preventing the improvement of alternative roads owned by the state or city that would divert traffic away from the turnpike.
The great American rip-off is the private companies taking over tax funded infrastructure and then preventing improvements to alternatives, and extracting rent. I think the only way to stop them is to sue such companies for criminal conduct and bad faith and have the original contract declared null and void. Two bit politicians coming into office for a single two year term should not be able to burden all the citizens for eternity to such contracts.
It sort of worked. But it was too much of a pain but it worked when I tried. Eventually I stopped updating the data and carried around long obsolete phone numbers, addresses etc for a long time. It had super good battery life. Lasted 12 years or so. Then I went back to a simple Casio GShock.
Yeah, I saw it too. What bummed me out was that, they did have some fighter planes of the X-wing class. They saved their elite flying squadrons and used these poor saps as cannon fodder.
I am not very sure about that. Wiki says .303 Enfield is being phased out. May be being replaced by a 7.62 mm caliber weapon. It could be a NATO weapon, India buys from both NATO and Warsaw pact. Does crazy things like adding magic-matra missiles (NATO) on to MIG-21 or MIG-23. How they got the missiles' target acquisition radar with Russian cockpit displays and the target selection pointer I have no idea.
To imagine the same weapon used so heavily in the tropics, mud and monsoon being noted for its reliability in Arctic conditions is amazing. But this is a very simple basic weapon. Even India is phasing them out, apparently.
Look at the supported phones of 2014 X3. Phones supported in AT&T not supported in T-mobile! What the hell? Why would the carrier make a difference to blue tooth? Google Nexus not supported. Google Nexus is supposed to be the reference implementation of Android. It probably tests only iPhone. Have you tried feeding it home made mp3 files?
Why wouldn't they just provide a simple docking station, allow the docked device access to the car speakers and stay away from building their own navigation and music players? They still think they can hold their customers up for ransom by demanding 1800$ for an integrated navigation system or 1200$ for the music player. No, just put in good speakers and allow us to bring our own devices into the car.
The lack of imagination of the auto makers is astounding. WiFi is what 15 years old? iPod is 10 years old? Why didn't they build a car with WiFi that will connect to your home, down load daily news, weather, traffic reports into the hard disk 10 years ago? After missing the boat then, now they are coming up with walled gardens of WiFi, memory storage in the car etc.
Cheerios are very good baby sitters too. Empty a small portion of them in the tray of the high chair and the infants will have hours of fun picking them one at time and inspecting them individually and find their mouth with their tiny hands by trial and error.