Yes, OPEP has increased the venezuelan government's income PER UNIT OF OIL. Of course, given Chubby Chavez's actions with regards to the oil producers, Venezuela is producing so much less oil that the increase in price isn't making up for the decrease in oil to export. But you go on believing the stupidity.

The other part that keeps growing is the ear and they have been taking ear prints for a long time now. Usually they are taken from suspects after forensics has found an impression on something like a door or window.

http://www.bredbandskollen.se/ Tool to test your connection - No Java required Sweden Number One! Sweden Number One! Sweden Number One!

I dunno about that. The Smart Phones I'm currently looking at cost as much as one of the lower end laptops. And since I don't look at the subsidized prices, I get a fair representation of what they actually cost.

I'm looking at iPhone, Blackberry and Droids, and may look Palm.

Um, perhaps you need to think about what you're saying.

You might not be familiar with PHP, and thus unfamiliar with how it how it handles objects, but it's pretty easy to guess how a framework would return all records from a query if you know anything about PHP. It would return an array of arrays. Perhaps the repeated array is an associative array, perhaps it is column indexed and there's another command to get the associative ones.

You know, like the actual commands the language itself has, which I know because, heh, I'm a PHP programmer and know the language.

I'm uncertain why fetchAll needs an array object passed as a parameter, I have to mentally replace the question mark with "public", then assume the second parameter is an order-by parameter since I see the DESC.

fetchAll would need an array object passed as a parameter because you might want to use multiple WHERE clauses, which I, OTOH, have no idea how to do in the Ruby example. Likewise, I have no idea how to do a LIKE instead of an =, whereas I can see how to do that in the PHP command. Don't bitch because the PHP framework command is more powerful than the Ruby one.

Likewise, while you don't know the format of the fetchAll() function, um, you're unlikely to magically know the format of the Post object, either.

I can't guess what _model is, I don't know what blogs really represents

Presumably $this->_model is how you look up the database framework, in the framework. But your confusion is because these two pieces of code aren't identical. The Ruby appears to be inside some sort of object that is already linked to the blog table (You'll notice it doesn't reference what table it's using at all.), whereas the PHP code to to call a function on that object. (Which is why, as I said, it was insanely stupid to write a function to do that, instead of just calling the existing function.)

If the PHP was actually on the object, it would be calling the fetchAll function like $this->fetchAll(array('status = ?' => 'public'), 'created DESC');

I'd give an example of what the PHP is doing in Ruby, but I have no idea how to access objects like that.

I'm fairly certain @posts is a plural set/object of more Post objects, which represents a row in a database, where status is public, then ordered descending. I can probably iterate through it. As an outsider, I could read this, lookup the column names for the row and almost immediately start using it.

And I, as a PHP programmer, have NO IDEA what a 'Post object' is or does. You somehow know it represents 'rows in a database'. Well, good for you, but that's not actually very intuitive at all. That's language knowledge you have. If you asked random people what a Post object would do to a database, most would guess 'insert and/or update a record'.

In fact, looking at it, I think you're wrong, and Posts represents the table itself, which means that @posts almost certainly is not an array of them. (Which means, instead of being inside a table object like I said above, we're in a database object or possible Post is some global object, although that seems like a very stupid name. Also, why is it capitalized if it's a table name? I have no idea.)

I do not know if blog is iterable or if it's rows it has grabbed are even accessible. $records may be the result of some manipulation it performs on the query result. I just don't know, and that makes me uncomfortable.

Yes, not knowing the exact syntax of a language does result in several questions. Just like, you know, any language.

And I urge you to actually read the paragraphs above, and compare your words:

'I'm fairly certain @posts is a plural set/object of more Post objects' vs 'if it's rows it has grabbed are even accessible'

'I can probably iterate through it.' vs. 'I do not know if blog is iterable'

'fairly certain...status is public, then ordered descending' vs. 'may be the result of some manipulation it performs on the query result'

So, essentially, you don't know anything about either, but because you know how Ruby works generally, you feel more sure about your Ruby guesses?

Well, that's certainly entirely true, and a perfectly valid reason for you to use Ruby. If you're more comfortable with the language, go for it. But don't pretend that's some actual language difference.

That website doesn't say very much unless you cough up money. I'm happy that the only thing it got correct was which city I live in, and some IP adresses. It didn't even get my real name correct! Although it might have helped a bit that I don't live in the states.

Sad to see Fort Wayne die. But as one who moved from Fort Wayne to Nebraska, you dunno what you're talking about. Nebraska's far worse Bible Belt country. Buncha non-thinking idiots.

My personal favorite: "A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists" by T. Grim in Oikos From the Abstract: .... I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality) ... leisure time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and citation biases.

PC Perspective may have broken the End User Licensing Agreement, a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and probably annoyed OnLive to no end when the site borrowed someone's beta account for a detailed write-up on the performance of the service, but with the testing done far outside the beta's supported area, the write-up has caused no small amount of controversy.

The final, production version of OnLive promises to adapt to your Internet connection and location every time you connect, but for now each beta account is linked to a single OnLive location, configured to your ISP and the client you're using. "If you change any of these factors, OnLive Beta may not even run, or if it does, the lag and/or graphics performance may render games unplayable," the company explains. "OnLive will try to detect these conditions and warn you, but when you are using OnLive in a different location, you are not providing us with usable test data." The fact that Ryan Shrout was outside that area means, according to OnLive, there was no possibly way to give him a good experience. "The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1,000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay ('ping' time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games." It's also a matter of optimization for your particular situation. "Your Beta account will only connect to the data center it was originally assigned to. So, if you are assigned to our West Coast data center and then try your Beta account from the Midwest or East Coast, you'll find the lag impaired to the point where most games are unplayable. And, depending on how your Beta account was configured for the characteristics of your home ISP, you may see degraded image quality or controller/mouse performance on a different ISP."

We heard from many beta testers after our story went live, but few were willing to speak on the record... for the obvious reasons. One user did agree to give us his take on the service, provided we keep his anonymity.

From the Ars article.
Seems like the Ars article mentioned it and specified that their comments was from ONE beta tester.

The tongue has specific receptors on the tongue, collected together in taste buds, that detect sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (and, maybe, fat). That is the sensation that is, scientifically, correctly called taste.

It's complicated because what most people call taste, isn't purely taste. A large part (most even) of what most people call taste, is actually smell and then there are other trigeminal sensations such as texture, temperature, etc.

The whole sensory gestalt of popping something into your mouth is hugely complex and not completely understood.

It was because Turing was too honest for his own good. He chose to tell the police about it. He did have social problems, possibly being on the autistic spectrum.

For another encryption example, look at how windows and linux implement user password hashing...

Linux takes the plaintext password via an input channel (ssh, telnet, gdm, local console etc), passes it to PAM which loads the corresponding password from the shadow file, encrypts the user input with the same algorithm and salt, and compares the output. The backend (pam, encryption cipher) can be changed without affecting how the frontend, making it easy to use a different encryption algorithm as increases in computing power, or discovery of cryptographic flaws, renders the old ones insecure.

Windows, in a somewhat misguided attempt to prevent plain texts being sent over the network, effectively uses the encrypted hash (yes its more complicated than that, but the general idea is that only the hash ever gets used and the password isnt sent in the clear - unix solves this at a different layer by using encryption of the plaintext password such as ssh)... Because of this, the hashing algorithm is difficult to change. Older windows used lanman which is laughably weak, while modern windows uses ntlm by default which is somewhat stronger but not great... However, modern windows still has lanman support for compatibility reasons, and until vista/2008 it was still enabled by default. If they change the hashing algorithm, then they will still have to retain the old ones for quite some time in order to have compatibility, and also change the protocols to handle a third possible algorithm.
The fact that you can use the hash without cracking it first is also a design flaw, this isn't possible on unix or anything else i'm aware of.

Yes, but there are infringement proceedings against some member states because they don't apply the directive, there are other constitutional courts which rejected it, so a simple recast of the directive is required by the Commission anyway because the directive is wrecked.

ACTA certainly deserves more attention but there are other FTA with such provisions as well.

Not at all! We invented it:
The metric system, including the metre, was first fully described by Englishman John Wilkins in 1668 in a treatise presented to the Royal Society, some 120 years before the French adopted the system.
Wikipedia

Whoops, A should have 1's across the bottom (thanks for catching that). I didn't ask why we would learn how to do it this way when adding a matrix is easier, but some techniques we learned were useful for speeding up the computation of large matrices, so its probably a computer science question, not a math one.