Posts by jwenting

Animals have been around letting off methane for alot longer then humans have been around. So why is it that these things are all of a sudden supposedly having an impact on the earths climate?

for the same reason that CO2 emissions are suddenly having an impact when they never did before (the eruption of Mnt St Helens in 1980 for example put out more CO2 and other "greenhouse gasses" in a few hours than has humanity between roughly 1700 and 2005, and such eruptions happen on average several times a year)...
In other words, no reason at all :)

The problem with fuel cells is hydrogen.
Explosive, bulky, expensive to produce without access to dirt cheap electricity.

In fact at the moment most hydrogen gas is produced by chemical synthesis out of natural gas (a fossil fuel), producing tons of CO2 in the process.
Yet it's lauded as being "clean" for not producing CO2 when burned :)

Clinton was president for 8 years. It took another 2 to flush most of his appointees out of important offices and start bending his disaster policies around...
Some might argue that a lot of those policies are still in place to this day due to bureaucratic inertia.

I wonder why bumsfeld seems to think only "rich" people vote "conservative" (by which he probably means Republican, when most of the richest people in the world are hardline communists (many of whom got that rich by stealing from everyone else).

no, we're not going to open attachments. And we're not going to do your homework for you either.
We also can't guess at what your question in, as you're not asking any.

learning ho the compiler interprets things might help. Your "+ ++count" for example gets interpreted by the compiler as +++count, which isn't going to make much sense to it.

And learning Java might also help. Where are your import statements? Remember that Java is case sensitive. Remember you have to declare variables before using them.
Learn to interpret compiler errors (as well as runtime errors). Life's a lot easier that way.

you'll need to add a ButtonListener (or was that KeyListener...) to change for button presses.

not really. The Republicans just have failed to seal the breaches created by 10 years of Clintonism.
That's a major fault of theirs which cost them dearly in last year's elections and will cost them in next year's presidential elections. But they're not the cause of the problem, merely the cause of it not being handled properly.

You only make (real) money, if you know something not everyone else knows! The stock market is a good example of this.

yes, we make a lot of money selling stock market information to stock brokers :)

Wow, looks like South Africa is really on the leading edge of nuclear reactor design. Impressive! The price of electricity should soon be so low that you don't need to meter it any longer. Smooth operating hydrogen cars will crowd your streets, costing only a penny a mile to operate.

South Africa has ample access to Uranium for fuel, and not much in the way of oil and natural gas.
Due to the trade embargo that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s they were forced to look for alternatives to fossil fuels far more than anyone else, and they did.

Are you seriously blaming the Simpsons for causing a fear of meltdowns? If they anything they show how there are almost never meltdowns, despite the workers incompetence.

The original scare comes from the "peace" movement, who equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons. They didn't want nuclear weapons because nuclear weapons prevent the establishment of the communist world government (which they equate with "peace").
It was later picked up and expanded upon by the "environmental" movement, who don't want people to have access to energy. They want humanity to go extinct, or at the very least revert to the stone age.
Having access to an energy source that's not polluting destroys their argument of "conservation" to prevent pollution, so they can't have that.

As a result of those two groups working apart together there's been more damage done to world economies and science than at any time before in the history of the planet (except maybe Pol Pot but he was strictly regional).

Wolf, there's a trilogy with the first 3 books (the real ones IMO) out from Victor Golantz. ISBN 0576070706.
Paperback, about 910 pages.

you'll need to send the message as html, including the proper mime types for the message content.
JavaMail I think offers that, but I don't know how to activate it (I hate non-text email).

That error is a network error, not a database error.
Is your application generating so much network traffic it's clogging the pipeline to the database server maybe?

If it's a database error you're going to have an ORA-XXXXXX error number somewhere, which will most likely have something to do with trying to establish more simultaneous connections than your license allows.

As you state it only happens when you're retrieving massive amounts of data in bulk, it's almost certain that you're running out of bandwidth.
Either do batch retrievals and combine the results (Oracle has facilities for this) and/or increase your network's capabilities (we recently upgraded our network from 100Mbit to two 1Gbit lines for just that reason, the system could no longer handle the traffic).

best place for them... Short distribution lines means little in the way of transport line losses (which can cost as much as 30% of generated power).

And they're safe, and indeed usually far from cities (until maybe the city expands around them, can't blame the planners for that).

There's been a single meltdown in 65 years of building and operating nuclear powerstations (60 or so years if you don't count the experimental reactors of the Manhattan project).
And that one was a reactor design which has not been used in the west since the 1940s, and was outdated in the east by the 1970s as well (though still being built in countries that don't take safety seriously like Syria and North Korea).

Modern reactor designs are inherently safe. A runaway reaction will cause an environment in which the reaction dies out and the core stays cool.

Not on top, the side of it.

you get the meaning... A direct hit, not a near miss.

Why did this reporter with CNN first report "NO EVIDENCE OF A PLANE HAVING CRASHED NEAR THE PENTAGON"?? (On 9-11-2001)

There's no evidence of a crash NEAR the Pentagon because the darn jet landed right on top of the place...

no, the French are hot air generators, not nuclear powerplants.

Previous company I worked for had a different policy.
The sourcecode of the current production versions (so those versions customers were actually using) was deposited with an attorney.
The contract specified that customers would get the sourcecode if we went out of business or for other reasons were incapable of performing maintenance and expansion.
The clause of course did not apply if the contract between us and the customer was cancelled by customer or by us for reasons like non-payment.

That way we retained control over the source while at the same time the customers had security in the knowledge they would get it if we went out of business.
It also gave us security to know that even if we lost everything in both our datacenters we'd still have access to at sources of at least one version no more than a few months old.

running bots is a violation of the TOS of most game servers. Battle.NET AFAIK is no exception.

good. The XML APIs take some getting used to, but they're quite powerful once you get to know them.

I am sure someone cut corners with such a large costly project. Maybe there is a well orchestrated cover-up. My question is, how did Osama know about it? Well, he was in the building business.

there did not need to be any corner cutting and Osama did not have to know about it.
The required strength of the buildings was public knowledge.
They'd been designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 on arrival to a New York airport crashing into them, with nearly empty fueltanks (an accidental crash after a long flight).
The aircraft used were heavier and had nearly full fueltanks.
The resulting impact was more severe, the resulting fire hotter and lasting longer.

The substandard fire insulation on the support beams of the building (poor maintenance rather than poor construction, the stuff had been improperly replaced at some point) hardly mattered, correct application would merely have delayed the inevitable by a few minutes.

Maybe those islands just simply sank. Isn't that's what is happening to Venice.

They did. It's what happens to coral islands over time. The weight of the island gets to be too much and it slowly collapses in on itself.
Evidence for this happening in the past has been found all over the Pacific, but of course the greenies aren't going to tell you that.

Just like they're not going to tell you that the energy output of the sun has increased so much that the planet should have gotten warmer at a greater rate than it actually has, that Mars has indeed gotten warmer at a greater rate than the earth (and that it's been postulated that that increased solar output is to blame for that).

Nor are they going to tell you that the climate of this here dirtball has been going through warm and cold cycles for billions of years, and that the cold cycles usually last far far longer than the warm ones, nor that we're currently in such a warm cycle and at the latter stages of one, in a period that's historically marked by highly unstable climate conditions.

no. Not only are those online "petitions" completely idiotic, they're also ineffective and usually serve only as a means for crooks to harvest email addresses to sell to spammers.
And I've no clue (nor am I interested) in who that person is supposed to be/have been/will be, and I'm not about to want to have a law named after some random dead person. If we start that way, where would it end? There are enough useless laws introduced already without having to make one for everyone who dies...

Is there a lawsuit against the poor construction of the towers?

We're talking about the US here. I'd almost start to believe in conspiracy theories if there were NO lawsuit...

I think one Clinton is enough, and wish we would have set the rule with Bush too!

And with Kennedy...

I am not quite sure why US presidents always have such simple sounding (mostly English) names?

most voters can't remember a name if it contains more than 2 syllables...

I did the honours for you ;)

You should rather ask what valid arguments they have made :)
Gore flunked on science in highschool and hasn't gotten any better at it ever since...

Gore in fact doesn't use any arguments whatsoever, no science at all. It's all FUD in a white labcoat.

http://ultimateglobalwarmingchallenge.com/

http://antigreen.blogspot.com/

couldn't tell, never visited them.
I have read several of Schildt's books though, and they're indeed riddled with errors and misconceptions.
If you can recognise those the rest is rather nice, but inexperienced people looking to them for learning can't recognise those errors.
In his big Java tome he for example quite blatantly says that Java uses pass by reference for objects, which is in direct contradiction to reality as described clearly in the language specification. As a C++ programmer himself Schildt doesn't realise the difference between pass by reference and passing a reference by value it seems...

you're rather old to start in the field, especially on the technical level.
If I were you I'd try for things like business analyst instead, it's easier for older people to get (and hold on to) jobs there. It also pays better (despite being less skilled work (well, business analysts consider programming unskilled labour)).

As an utterly inexperienced programmer, you're not going to make 50K a year. In fact you'd likely be happy to make 30.
But things are different depending on where you are, salaries vary wildly with geographic location (but of course so does cost of living, and in many areas the two are related).

Your experience as a trucker can also help you if you do decide to go to the analysis side of the game and focus your job searching primarilly on companies doing business in the trucking (or general logistics) industry.
You know the lingo, you're already a domain expert (to some degree), which gives you an edge there over snotnosed kids competing with you who're just out of school.
In the non-technical side of things age can also work as an advantage, you'll spend more time dealing with managers and end users, people who tend to look on age as a sign of experience and trustworthiness rather than (as happens a lot on the technical side) as a sign that you're getting old and will soon drop dead (or at the very least obsolete and should be replaced …

DirectX is extremely large and is created as a library in a way that's not what most people are experienced with.
The programming paradigms used are not familiar to many people, so they have to cope with learning more than one thing at the same time.
If you're also not experienced with the programming language you're trying to use, and/or with animation/simulation/AI/whatever you're trying to use DirectX for you're in big trouble.
Most humans can learn one new skill at a time, some can learn two new skills at once, but hardly anyone can pick up all the new skills they need to acquire if they're trying to learn everything needed to write a game using DX all at the same time.

So take baby steps.
First learn your programming language.
Then learn to use that to make small programs that use each of the skills you're going to need to write that game on its own, without bothering with DirectX for now.
Then learn to use DirectX without bothering to write that entire game, just focus on learning the library on its own.
Only when you have done all that should you start putting those skills together. And don't try to put them all together at the same time. Again partition it, use combinations of first two, then three or more skills together.

It's a long process, but that's the only way to truly master things.

those multiplatform APIs however are non-standard and hard to use.
Their licenses are also often such that you don't want to use them (forcing your application into GPL for example, or extremely expensive).
There's also no standard.

Yeah, IMHO the express editions are almost exactly the full ones except for the lack of some things relating to databases, deployment, source control and mobile development

They also lack documentation, can't be easily (if at all) extended, etc. etc.
The full product is well worth paying for if you're going to use Visual Studio for non-trivial tasks.

hey, I dislike Steve Jobs. That's enough reason to dislike Apple (using the same logic kids use to "hate" Microsoft).
But I'm pragmatic. They make SOME nice stuff, shame it's so overpriced though ;)

The perfect solution is summary execution of anyone helping them knowingly...
As it is nobody gets punished for helping or being an illegal immigrant, so lots of people give them all kinds of things.

They get jobs (the few illegals that want to work that is, most just want to get easy money from crime) because they're cheaper than citizens or legal guest workers.
They get free healthcare because hospitals aren't allowed to deny help to them (stupid of course, by law in many places hospitals are allowed to treat illegals for free at the expense of paying customers).
They get free education for their kids for the same reason.

Effectively the government makes it pay to be an illegal alien. They don't pay taxes, don't pay for healthcare, education, or pretty much anything else, and they can have decent incomes without fear of reprisals.

The perfect solution is to set an example of a good number of them. Load them on board some C-130s, fly out a thousand miles over the Pacific, and dump them overboard without life jackets.
Film the entire thing and air it on public TV in Mexico and the US.
Give the rest of them a stern warning. Leave the country in 24 hours or face the same treatment.
12 hours later crack down hard on anyone sheltering or helping them, and set them all to build that wall at the Mexican border. But make that …

That's because in the UK (as in many other countries) universities get paid a fixed price by the government for each student they have, irrespective of results.
If they get paid based on real results to government specified tests they'd be more careful as to whom they admit.

It's the same here, but the entry requirements are high enough that most are never allowed to enter (several years more pre-university schooling than most kids get, at a higher level with more difficult tests).
As a result those kids that do make it are usually reasonably well motivated.

if your teacher requires it you should do it. But also remember that if you ever do that kind of commenting when you write something as a professional you will get angry looks and likely told to strip it all out again.

hmm, Herb Schildt is not an author usually recommended when it comes to Java.
In fact it's usually recommended to stay as far away from his books as possible ;)

The Sun Java tutorial has a decent (though overly simplified) section on Swing. For more detailed coverage get the Swing book Apress publishes (or the older one from O'Reilly which misses some of the newer stuff).

Where did I say that the percentage spread of questions we get here is the same as the percentage spread of students who are motivated and willing to learn against those who are not?
I hope greatly that the majority of students never need to post questions here or elsewhere, or if they do aren't recognised as students because of the nature and style of their postings.

Given the students I encountered as a student, that would be the reality of the situation, but of course that's over a decade ago and things may have changed.
If your experience tells you that only 20% of students in courses leading up to a BSc are motivated to learn the skills they're being taught that's to me exceedingly shocking.
In my days that other 80% would have washed out in the first year, or more likely never even gotten admitted to the study because they'd have washed out in lower education.

I love Apple pie... Just hearing the word makes me want to bake one :)

given the questions asked by schoolkids here and elsewhere you have to wonder about that "proof that you have a rather good knowledge of the language".
99% at least are of the "do my homework for me because I'm too lazy to learn anything" kind or at least the "I'm utterly clueless about even the extreme basics and too lazy too do some learning" kind.
If that's enough to get kids through school I'd say that classes are an indication of a lack of knowledge...

First you get a NodeList containing all "Item" elements:

NodeList items = doc.getElementsByTagName("Item");

You iterate over that retrieving the NodeList of "Category" elements for each:

NodeList categories = item.getElementsByTagName("Category");

You'll have to cast the Node instances you get from the NodeList to Element to do this, but that's alright, they're really Elements anyway.

Element item = (Element) items.item(i);

NodeList has a getLength() method to find out how many items it contains.

There's no need for the getElementsByTagNameNR method you (I suppose) wrote at all, the standard DOM functionality will get you everything you want.
You don't declare any specific number of Strings anywhere, just create a Collection of them.
If you really want to store everything for later printing (instead of printing stuff as you find it), use a Map<String, Collection<String>> containing the Item id as keys and Collections of Categories as values.
That way you can handle any size data at any time.

There's no need for arrays here at all, using them only confuses things (it often does, unless you're talking fixed length data of a nature that dictates it, in which case it's often known at compile time or program startup how large the array is going to get).

Swing indeed. And before that AWT (which is still at the back of Swing in the non-visual area).
There's nothing like that for C++. Each compiler and platform has its own user interface libraries, and often a plethora of them, some of which work only on some platforms and libraries and others on others.

the crazy long line in the winner method

Start by splitting that line into fragments you can understand.
As the error says, you can't perform boolean operations on something that's not a boolean.
You're (it says, and I trust that it's right) comparing Strings with booleans there, which is not allowed.
In no small part that's no doubt because you wrote that entire crazy long line without giving thought to operator precedence rules, causing comparisons to happen that you are not aware of (and likely never intended).

Use code tags to preserve formatting of your code...
Don't use comments to tell yourself what a closing brace closes, that should be obvious from the indentation of the code.
Don't use comments to comment the blatantly obvious. In fact the only comments in your class that should remain are the ones in the class header comment block.
Observe the official Sun coding style guidelines when writing code. It's industry standard and makes it much easier to read.

Now to your question, you cannot cast an array of String to an array of boolean. They're unrelated types.
You'll have to go through each String in that String array, determine whether it represents true or false, and set the corresponding element in the boolean array accordingly.

NodeList nl = doc.getElementsByTagName("Category");

That's where you go wrong.
Instead of retrieving the nodes "Category" from the document root, get them from each "Item" node in turn (and handle them before continuing to the next "Item" node of course).

huh? What have you been sniffing? Let me tell you something kid, in the real world the vast majority of wished do NOT come true (unless maybe you're an extreme masochist who only wishes for bad things to happen to him).

I vote discman.

have one of those as well (well, not a My First Sony but a Philips). Nice, but rather shaky so not too suitable for biking.
And bulky of course.

you guys use flickr?

Not me. I'm moderator at a competing site (smaller but IMO nicer), and apart from that run my own server as well.
I also don't put everything I shoot online, but only a very small selection. Flickr therefore isn't really suitable, it looks more like a place to dump the content of your camphone ;)

iPod. I've no tape cassettes left to put in my walkman (which is also quite a lot larger than my iPod).

hey, another photographer!