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cdavoren

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Sorry, but this a very limited description of the disease. Alzheimer's, like all dementias, is a disease of the brain, not "just memory". It comes with a whole suite of symptoms and difficulties that are experienced directly by the patient, including depression, irritability, aphasias, and often physical limitations in advanced cases.

Long-term memory loss dominates public perception of the disease, but as anyone who works with dementia can tell you, most of the time it is as distressing for the patient as it is for the family.

Well, not everyone has the opportunity or desire to be employed by one of the "big guys". The programming equivalent of fixing someone's plumbing is not going to change the world, but it lets you pay the bills, have a family, enjoy your [other] hobbies, etc. Even if it is a choice, it's as much about lifestyle as anything else.

I think this post is aimed at those people.

This is a great idea. Unfortunately, I think I remember one of my electronics lecturers at uni telling us that generally communication/feedback with power supplies is dangerous because you introduce the possibility of unexpected power surges propagating in the other direction. It's apparently very hard/expensive to have both communication and protection against this. I'd love for someone to correct me, especially as this might not apply to the newer designs.

That's a fair interpretation. I'd be more comfortable if this difference were reflected in the documentation - it could at least state that if no previous quote is found, the next quote on the line will be used.

It looks like the 'i(' motion has special meaning in Vim - it corresponds to the previous unmatched '(' to the next matched ')'. Type 'help motion.txt' and look for i(.

Edit: Actually, the description for i" implies that its behaviour should be the same. Which one works correctly, I wonder?

As I understand it, both of these refer to the "cracker" definition; one is the "illegal hacker", the other is closer to "security consultant" with a hands-on connotation. "Hacker" in the Linus sense is totally different.

I think the problem is fundamentally one of economics. Research is good, but you have to decide how much money to allocate to it. In order to decide, you need a metric for performance. Really, only scientists are qualified to judge whether the results of other scientists are worth anything, so currently the only metric we really have is publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Ultimately, therefore, that's where the incentives end up.

When a more appropriate way of quantifying research output and its benefits is found, hopefully a beneficial change in culture will trickle down into the academic trenches.

Yes it is. Often it's not for nefarious reasons - it happens a lot where I work because we use data from collaborators that is unpublished, and it's considered unethical to jump over them by releasing code or results based on it.

Of course, the problem is that it can sometimes take years to get large datasets published and this means that the code gathers dust and gets forgotten in the meantime. By contrast, the papers and results aren't, because those are the things by which academic careers are measured.

I would personally support a wholesale change in culture in this area. Code and data/results/conclusions are not as inseparable as most scientists would like to believe, and often should be published as a unit. There has been push in this direction for a while in the engineering sciences, but other informatics disciplines like biology lag badly in this respect.

This is backed up by medical knowledge. It has been repeatedly shown that metabolism varies very little between people when corrected for body mass. What does vary considerably is appetite, and this is the major contributor to body weight.