cnnsucks's comments

House sparrows (and purple finches) are actually being crowded out by the house finch across North America. The house finch competes aggressively for nesting sites. But it's a pretty little bird so I don't expect any anti-house finch sites to pop up.

That's just normal bird stuff. Lots of different birds do that.

I have a feeder I put about two pounds of seed in a day. Doves, red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, house finches and house sparrows all get their share. The sparrows aren't "swarming" anyone out. If anything the red-winged blackbirds are the bullies.

I have a bird house with a pair of sparrows. About 20" above that is a nest of breeding Robins that like a spot on the underside of my deck. The sparrows have never messed with the Robin nest in any way. There are eastern bluebirds nearby and the sparrows have caused no trouble for them either, despite the suitability of the house.

This "HOSP" hate is misplaced. Please don't hate on these birds. There are a couple pages on the Internet about the awful depredations of the terrible HOSP and so hating on them has become a fad.

This could be down to older fathers having more basements, garages and tools. There are fewer degrees of freedom when you live in a drywall and carpet apartment.

>> Why would there be any need for a contingency plan?

That question is probably best put the person that wrote the statement and mentioned that it was under discussion: Christian Decker. He is a published block chain researcher and may have a good answer for you.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7935 http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23... http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/7e4a7f3f2991784786037285f4876... http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/848064fa2e80f88a57aef43d7d595...

>> the space moves incredibly fast

What can you cite that demonstrates any change in the merge situation during the last 4 years?

The accepted answer from a Bitcoin researcher sums up the merge problem pretty well; "As for the merge, this is still being discussed and we do not have a good contingency plan."

Okay.

Read code written by others. In the case of C there is a large base of high quality open source code you can study. C is a simple language that is used for large scale, complex work so a vast amount of convention and idiom has developed. Those conventions vary from one code base to the next, but you'll find many commonalities and have no difficulty adapting once you've had enough exposure.

Reading working code is crucial; man page examples and language books won't expose you to enough real world usage. Programmers use the preprocessor. They do subtle and effort-saving things with enums and typedefs and designing a good struct is crucial.

Some well-thought-of C code bases include postfix, nginx, APR and lighttpd. After you've seen enough C you can just glance at a page of C code from across the room and know whether it's likely to be crap or not.

Externalization is highly desirable to _all_ interests. The interest of manufacturers is self evident. The interest of environmentalists has a level of indirection; without the frictionless externalization available to manufacturers the process of feathering our domestic environmental regulatory nest that has been cruising along mostly unimpeded for decades now would face a great deal more scrutiny and resistance.

As it is many domestic manufacturers are mostly indifferent to the regulatory state; they have no problem with the US evolving into a giant national park because they have a perfectly good alternative.

This isn't some abstract concept. As recently a the 2016 election I recall video ricocheting around the right wing echo chamber of Trump opponents at Portland protests pointing out that the last thing they want to see are those 'dirty factories' operating in the US again, employing deplorables. Every single one of them was armed with one or more Asian made portable computers, but that sort of hypocrisy never registers.

>> Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren't measured in these cases because they're useful or relevant. They're measured because they're easy to measure.

We've evolved our senses around the signal components the pay off the best: the "easy" ones. Thus it isn't surprising that "subjective quality is mostly correlated with linear (spectral) attributes instead of non-linear (distortion) metrics," a claim supported by peer reviewed papers that have vastly greater credibility than you and your anecdotal vitriol.

"It's a pretty common criticism of GDP."

...with no more veracity than your hypothetical. You don't understand what GDP measures. You've allowed yourself to believe that the economists involved are naive. You are correct, however, that this sort of bad thinking is common. Very common.

That's true, but it doesn't salvage your argument. Your accounting fiction isn't a 'service' for the purposes of GDP.

The premise itself is fiction. The P in GDP doesn't stand for exchange or transaction. It stands for "Product." It measures the net amount of new wealth, not how many times existing wealth is transferred among parties. If I sing you a song and you pay me $1 million dollars and this process continues back and forth, the net amount of value when we stop is still $1 million and the net change to GDP is zero.

People indulge a lot of strange and wrong ideas about economics and, not surprisingly, those bad ideas are typically well aligned with their preferred world views.

>> I am not an economist but I suspect China's debt might not be such a big problem....until it is

I'm not an economist either, but I have a working memory, and I can remember being warned about Chinese debt in the early aughts. The debt has grown, weathered a global 'great' recession and the warnings continue...

The Chinese bubble is still being inflated. Chinese debt won't matter until that bubble pops. There is no evidence that the bubble is about to pop; GDP growth has been north of 6% since Clinton's first term and that rate of growth has, if anything, become more stable recently. There is still plenty of Western industry that is ripe for evacuation to Asia, and China -- for all it's changes and growth -- is still appealing for this purpose; they've kept their regulatory apparatus at bay and there are still another 500-ish million Chinese peasants to keep wages in check.

It's still too early for the inevitable snap back. It will happen, but there is some time yet.

Mental gymnastics.

Good thing MAD worked.

"A kid that believes that he is inherently naughty"

Occasional negative feedback doesn't create an inherent self-image.

"It is not even actionable command"

These are children, not puppies; children are perfectly capable of associating being called "naughty" with specific behavior.

You have very extreme views regarding children.

Because your "5 minutes" is pure bullshit and your engineer knows it.

Your engineer knows that if she writes your "5 minute" query without careful analysis, peer review and documentation and the query ever produces a questionable result --- whether it was anticipated by your requirements or not --- it's your engineers ass; you'll throw your engineer under the bus _instantly_.

Your engineer knows that if she writes your "5 minute" query and it produces any actual value you'll be back the next day with a "5 minute" enhancement. Anything you ask for that might matter the next day has to be built to be maintained by others because if she happens to take the day off when you show up and demand a revision to your "5 minute" wonder query and there is nothing for the other engineers to go on (revision controlled work, documentation, etc.) then that's her ass; she knows you won't stand up for her.

Your engineer didn't just fall out of the boat and is in no hurry to obligate herself to take responsibility for your adhoc miracle queries and the questions that will emerge when you go waving the output under everyone's nose, and she knows that's exactly what you'll do with it. Your little query is your view of the world and that view is highly unlikely to survive the first bit of scrutiny that's applied by anyone other than yourself, much less the second.

Broken home, broken kids. I know that antagonizes a lot of people, some of whom found their role as parents incompatible with their preferred lifestyle... The truth is a bitch.

The 5 commissioners of the FCC are appointed by the President of the United States. The commission may not have more than 3 members from the same political party. Effectively this means the FCC is dominated by the party of whomever is elected President.