I've been doing the splits on chairs and having coconuts dropped on my abs from increasing heights but I still can't catch tiny koi fish while I'm blindfolded. When do we learn the Art of Flipping Off Your Customers?
Oh. This is a library under straight GPL. You can't use it in non-GPL code. No wonder I hadn't heard of it before.
Thanks for the pointer, it's neat. I really like how my approach turned out; the STLport red-black tree is well done. Backporting it to C only took a couple hours.
"We used to have a joke in college, that the definition of a college man was somebody who couldn't count up to 70 without laughing." -- Don Knuth, after recommending a 69-bit processor design
When I get rich I'm going to take YC's approach and fund about 40 different girlfriends a year with a little money rather than just one with millions.
The economics have changed. With a recession looming, it will be less expensive than ever before to fund a girlfriend or mistress. They'll just be happy you're one of the few percent not worrying about getting his car repossessed! Sure, in the old days, you had to buy them a big shiny rock and take them jet-setting all over the globe. Now? Why, you can use open-source software and services like MySpace and Facebook to entertain them for free while you're gone with one of your other "investments". You can even hook up webcams all over the apartment to make sure they're not cheating on you while you're out cheating on them! Track them with Loopt and monitor their activities with Twitter.
You'll be sitting pretty while 95% of the people your age are stuck living at home because it's too expensive to move out and all the jobs pay minimum wage. There's never been a better time to win the Darwinian Game of Life while simultaneously investing in porn futures to exploit all the frustrated L^H... almost-winners!
In the near future, everyone alive will have an ancestor who founded a start-up.
"When I get rich I'm going to take YC's approach and fund about 40 different girlfriends a year with a little money rather than just one with millions."
portLAN...I added that comment to my Facebook page, it was just brilliant.
"Good" colleges are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the best students organized online and randomly picked some backwoods institution and applied there, it would instantly become the place to be. Meanwhile the previous top schools would be left with the second-stringers.
It bears repeating: out of the top 10 richest "U.S. Americans", 4 inherited it; of the six who didn't, one has a degree (Warren Buffett), and 5 are drop-outs: Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, and Michael Dell. Woz dropped out to start Apple (he went back to school only after he was done working there) and Jobs dropped out of Reed College here in Portland. (We're all very proud of him.)
As a devoted owner of three of them, I can tell you that you're quite wrong about that; cats are highly sensitive creatures, and have plenty of empathy. They're also amongst the most conscientiously polite creatures around; if one watches cats interact, there are precise and elaborate manners around interaction, and stepping out of line earns a claw in the nose regardless of hierarchy. (Indeed, one of my lads seems to be personally offended by feline rudeness.) I believe that the former traits lead directly to the latter - to be honest, sometimes I think felines have more highly evolved social interaction than humans.
Don't confuse prey-defeating behaviour with cruelty, either. Cats rely on their senses and have less-than-wonderful immune systems; getting bitten in the face by a mouse could potentially knock out their ability to successfully track their next prey for longer than they can survive without. The elaborate batting/playing is actually defensive behaviour - she needs that mouse to stop moving before she severs its spine.
++ Indeed, I believe that empathy varies inversely with preferred proximity, both between species and within them. Dogs are pack creatures, and the members of the pack will often treat each other abominably; the incidence of sociopathy in humans skyrockets in inner cities; sensitive beings tend to be more empathic, but also to be introspective, shy, reserved...
I'm landlord and feeder of (let me count...) 5 cats atm- it got as bad as 8 at some point. Actually one of them is much like a dog- that's why I specified I was talking about most cats.
Intricate etiquette and highly evolved social interaction don't imply empathy. Bees and ants have the former but AFAICT not the latter. I'm of the opinion that the adherence of cats to social rules comes from enough claws on the nose, rather than for any appreciation for the feelings of others.
You can be sensitive and not empathetic. You can feel very intensely about what is of selfish interest to you, while being mostly blind and deaf to the feelings of others. I think this the type of sensitivity that cats display.
Their behaviour to mice was never a factor in my opinion. Empathy for one's prey is not much of an evolutive advantage for any species, so I never expected that.
I see no contradiction in observing that the species which are most capable of empathy are just as capable of evil and cruelty. Indeed, I think the ability to feel/understand the pain you're inflicting on others is necessary for true cruelty (as opposed to instinctive viciousness, which can be explained in evolutionary terms, as you did).
You have a point in the grandparent post that cats are low maintenance. But then again, so are cacti, and they have a positive oxygen to CO2 contribution. :>
Low maintenance? Huh! sometimes they can be positively exhausting...
Anyway, I think we'll have to agree to differ here, since both of us appear to have have reached our conclusions through observation. All I will add is that I have no doubt that my love for my cats is reciprocated... you can draw your own conclusions about my objectivity thence. :)
Well, I pay for the board and lodging... but yes, strictly speaking, they own me. :) Seriously, the word that best encapsulates my relationship with them is probably "guardian".
