Some cats hunt and other don't because their mother needs to teach them that skill. All cats are born wanting to chase little moving things. It's the mom that needs to bring back prey and teach them the bite-neck-and-whip-it kill method they use. The difference between a hunting cat and a non-hunting cat is being taught by another one. We have had many vicious, animal-killing, *fixed* cats.

20g, so that's 4 nickels according to how an old roommate weed dealer calibrated his scale.

Sure, AC. Sure.

...

We believe you, really! It was your, uh, "roommate" with the side-biz.

Unfortunately, it's "greater". The code is greater than 100 lines. There are more than 100 lines in it. If you're talking about the lines, there's more. If you're talking about the container itself, it is greater.

I'd like to see atheist (sic) shout "Dawkins!" when they stub their toe.

Yeah... because atheists regard Dawkins like Christians regard God.

Dawkins is not the atheist God, fella. He's more like our C.S. Lewis.

I just want to point out that in the U.S., ex post facto laws aren't allowed. It's in Article 1 of the Constitution. Been there from the beginning. You can trust the FDIC as much as you can trust anyone with your money.

Are you American?

Disclaimer: I am, too. Also flattered about our independent nature. Also undeniably American because I'm flattered by that.

No.

They are saying that *culture* is what decides the results to these tests, and not inherent characteristics. Their entire point is that in these couple small tests the results differed everywhere. These "couple small tests" are tests we have traditionally held to be universal. We assume, for example, that in the same circumstances the $100-problem the author described people would universally settle on offering a "fair" 50/50 trade. People didn't expect that "fairness" was subjective even in something as perfectly quantifiable as cash. People didn't expect that "fair" is not something universally aspired-towards. People didn't expect that being "fair" to some cultures is a gift with a heavier burden than the gift itself.

What you concluded... yes, that's bullshit. The author had a good point, AND your post about the different reactions demonstrates that you came to the same conclusion, too.

No. One of the two did it wrong. If they produce the exact same result, proc usage, runtime, AND effort to create, they'd be the same functions.

Besides, the infallible coder could just name off binary digits, all the while perfectly confident that it will work.

I've heard it's simply the amount of time from one noteworthy person to another in the family tree.

I.e.: ____ lived 300 years means it was 300 years between ______ and someone worth mentioning. For 300 years they were the clan/tribe/house of ______, after which the next guy on the tree did something important enough that his descendants considered themselves the clan/tribe/house of that guy instead.

No, it's not. Today's supercomputers are thousands upon thousands times faster than those of decades past but are NOT taking up thousands of times more space or electricity.

Hopper is 16,000 nodes and two Pflops. Cray can't just make 10 of them, put 'em together, and consider the order filled. Efficiency is a LOT of the challenge in making the world's fastest computers.

And?

10 years ago I was very much the functioning adult I am today. I got a bit better at living.

10 years ago my brother couldn't wipe his own ass. He got a lot better at living.

I fail to see how being an older project makes it a better one. Take OOo when it's as old as Office was in 2007 and see if it has some staying power.

I can't quote directly while at work, but I recall a TED talk mentioning that humans and the animals we raise (chickens, cats, dogs, sheep, cattle, etc.) now represent 98% of the world's terrestrial, vertebrate animals by mass. There's far more individual creatures in the wild than in domestication, but by weight we have overwhelmed the system.

IOW, the world is essentially running to support us. That's overpopulation. In the struggle to survive against nature, we're the first creatures to have essentially won.

What do you base that on? Humanity may have overpopulated Calcutta, or Sao Paulo. We haven't overpopulated Wyoming.

Overpopulation isn't just about space to put people. Think about the food you eat and products you consume. The space required to support you is far, far larger than the area of your apartment.

Good God... a programmable robot?! He's only seven, little nerdlets.

Seriously, who here became a techie because their parents did this sort of stuff? I can see trying to shove computer programming to a child that only recently learned to spell as the sort of experience that convinces them NOT to take up computers as a hobby.

If he wants to know how computers work and not treat them like magic objects, then get him something. In the meantime, keep the magic alive and get him a soccerball.

To break the system, you need two taps on the wire, some distance apart. Now you get to see the sums of the signals from each end, but with different time shifts between them due to propagation delay. With that data, you can separate out what's coming from each end. This allows recovering the original signals. From Wikipedia on the Kish cypher, just cut the signal during resistor switches. Or, more practically, note that recording noise accurately takes more time than switching the resistors would.

It could be that cell phones do increase the chance of brain cancer, but these other factors counteract it. To accurately determine whether or not cell phones affect brain cancer rates you need to control all the other variables.

This is an abuse of the "correlation is not causation" principle. This study is showing the LACK of causation, not causation.

Lack of correlation is strong evidence of lack of causation, even if the contrapositive isn't necessarily true. The parent post said that looking at the lack of pirates and global warming happening would be more accurate to the topic if you said that there was a lack of pirates and a lack of, say, a lack of global warming. Lack of correlation is also "evidence". It *could* be that cell phones increase brain cancer AND something else is counteracting it, but we have NO reason to suspect that. By the same reasoning, it could be that the lack of pirates is causing a rise in toe fungus... but smurfs eat it off our feet at night and are counteracting it. However, what would make you think pirates cause toe fungus?

Applying that to this situation, if there is a lack of correlation between cell phones and brain cancer, what reason would we have to suspect that there IS a correlation, but that it's being suppressed by something else? Until we have some sort of positive evidence of this, there's no more reason to suppose that than there is to just suppose that it doesn't cause brain cancer in the first place.

IOW, a HUGE rise in the frequency of cell phone use compared with hardly any rise in brain cancer is indeed good evidence that one isn't causing the other.