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Wow, way to not link to a study, but rather a Smithsonian blog talking about a Wordpress blog talking about a study. You clearly love your primary sources!

FYI, the study is just one of many. The study itself cites others, including:

20,000 birds/yr (Sovacool, 2012)
10,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2001 and Manville, 2005)
20,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2005)
440,000 (Manville, 2009)
573,000 (Smallwood, 2013).

The latter two include lattice towers, which are largely being decommissioned as unsafe to birds.

But hey, having varied numbers clearly means that if you can find a blog linking to another blog linking to a study that shows high numbers (among many different studies), then clearly the GP is "plain wrong", right?

And yes, even if we go with your choice study's mean of 234,012 annual bird deaths, that's still orders of magnitude less than many other types of human activities.

I've been playing a bit with GOGS. It has most of the things that I like about GitHub, but can be hosted locally.

Newton looked at the spectrum and saw that it contained six distinct colours to the human eye: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. But his alchemist beliefs considered 7 to be a magic number and so wanted the spectrum to have seven colours. He decided that purple should be split into indigo and violet to reflect this, but didn't split any of the others (even where the difference is at least as pronounced) because it contradicted his mystical thinking.

If even Newton 'One of the smartest men to ever live' couldn't manage to keep his science separate from his mysticism, what hope do you think other religious people have?

Code runs. It continues to run. And, over time, the requirements change. Maintenance is adapting the code to the new requirements. If you don't understand why this is important, then I can only assume that no one is using code that you've written.

I have serious fears that we're facing an unduly high risk of a major wind spill here. :(

No, sorry. A compiler is, in theoretical terms, a partial application of an interpreter to a program. In practical terms, a compiler transforms the input into some other form, which is then executed, whereas an interpreter executes the input directly. JIT compilation is still compilation. A just-in-time compiler is the term given to compilers that produce their output just before it is executed, as opposed to ahead-of-time (AoT) compilers, which produce it all up front, even if some paths are never executed.

There's some complication, because most environments that do JIT compilation also include interpreters that gather profiling information to incorporate into the JIT compiled code and to improve startup times. JavaScript implementations, in particular, often spend a reasonable amount of time in the interpreter because most web pages contain a load of JavaScript that's only run one or two times and the time taken to compile it is more than the time saved to execute it. Some have multiple compilers - JavaScriptCore from the WebKit project has an interpreter and three different JIT compilers that have different points in the space between compilation time and execution time - they'll recompile hot paths multiple times as they're executed more, with more optimisation each time. The key difference between the interpreter and compilers here is that the compilers are each invoked once on a segment of code and it's then executed without involving the compiler. The interpreter is involved every time the bytecode is run. It reads a bytecode and then jumps to the segment of interpreter code that executes it and then returns. The compiler takes a sequence of bytecodes, generates a fragment of native code to execute them, and then this fragment is combined with other fragments to produce a running program.

The shader compilers in drivers, however, are not JIT compilers. They are AoT compilers that are invoked at load time - often at install time. They don't compile the code just before it's run, they typically compile it once and cache the result for multiple invocations of the program. Some drivers (Windows and Android come to mind) have a mechanism that allows you to do the compilation at install time. Unlike most JIT environments, graphics drivers don't tend to use run-time profiling for optimisation, the bytecode exists solely for the purpose of providing an ISA-neutral distribution format.

Ugh, trust MS to fuck up a reasonable UI choice. On OS X, by default, it only happens for programs and requires you to close the dialog and then bring up the context menu for the program while holding a modifier key. You don't know how to do it unless you've actually read all of the way to the end of the dialog, so it generally protects people.

There are some interesting corner cases though, such as shell scripts. The file manager doesn't know if the thing that you tell it to open a shell script with is a text editor or a script interpreter, so may warn spuriously.

Actually, there's nothing to it. Gets about 85 miles to the gallon. Virtually no exhaust smoke, unless I overfeed it with two stroke oil. This particular moped would probably pass emissions in California.

You don't have to hide the extensions in order to make the GUI not change them. Just prevent the user from editing that part of the filename.

Because it violates the standard definition of "refactoring".

Refactoring is about changing the structure of the code, and not the algorithms used within the code. The goal is typically to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, and (frequently) to improve testability.

Replacing an algorithm with a better algorithm isn't "refactoring", it's "rewriting".

Taking your giant brute-force method and breaking it into smaller parts in a cohesive unit (source file, class, package, etc.) with lowered coupling (perhaps by genericizing previously tightly-coupled bits), in such a way that the individual units have a smaller testing surface -- but is otherwise the same algorithm -- then you've refactored the code, by definition.

Yaz

You are describing some sort of standard for magic cookies. This could easily be merged with the existing use of magic cookies.

There is however somewhat of a standard now: the first 4 bytes are a 4-letter code for the file type. Lots of image formats, in particular, use this.

Unix-like has stupid warts too, try creating a file named "-r" in a directory full of important sub-folders then delete it.

  % rm -- -r

Pretty much. The user double clicks the icon and answers "No" and doesn't get to see jiggly bits. So the user double clicks the icon again and says "Yes" this time.

No, and get a load of that poor fucker's middle name. If my parents gave me a name like that, I'd set shit on fire, too.

No, more like that.

We hate ACs because AC is mostly used for trolling.

All you need to get a slashdot account is a throwaway email address.

If you have an account, then you become accountable: we can tell whether what you say today matches what you said yesterday. Absent that, we have every reason to believe that you are just some malicious asshole.

...and it's lucky I didn't expect it from you, or I might be upset now.