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All the "market cap" is this: stocks x price.

So its pretty much how much money you would need to buy the company/what the company is worth.

Intel is a MUCH bigger company than AMD. They have more plants, people, sales, etc. So all that capital is simply worth more.

More info here.

You do realize that Madison, Wisconsin was selected the "Best Place to Live" by Money Magazine? It generally shows up at the top of such charts (e.g.: Best Places to Live) Part of the reason these are the best places to live is that we have access to much of the same stuff as the city, but at lower cost. Yes, we've got StarBucks, Borders, Barnes & Noble, Malls, great ethnic foods, Marshall Fields, nice diner restaurants, technology stores coming out of the wazoo, etc., etc., etc.

The Sit 'n Spin was the source of many a vomit stain in my basement. Maybe I should make my own and relive the good ol' days...

Toys...enforce the notion that there is a difference between "work" and "play".

by encouraging your children to "play", you are psychologically destroying them

Uh, no Mr. Burns. Toys enable children to engage in imaginitive play (some toys better than others). And there most certainly needs to be a difference between work and play here. Like when the ankle biters are all shooting their toy guns at each other.

Toys are an artificial construct popularized by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations in the late 1800's.

But Mr. Burns, toys have been around a lot longer than the industrial tycoons that we so lazily use as scapegoats for society's ills.

I don't doubt you spend 40-60 hours a week on pure crap, but don't blame it on your exposure to toys.

(Hopefully AA/Al-Anon won't sue me.)

After many years of denial, recovery can begin when with one simple admission of being powerless over open-source -- for closed-sourcers and their friends and family.

Step 1
We admitted we were powerless over open source -- that our computer systems had become unmanageable.

When closed source begins to take control of a system, usually one of the first things to go is honesty. The closed-sourcer lies about how many bugs are in his or her software and those around them begin to cover for him as the problem progresses and they too become less than honest.

This cycle of lies and keeping secrets can go on for years and that in itself can create an atmosphere that actually causes the situation to deteriorate faster. Even the children get caught up in the lies. It's a family disease.

The family can become totally controlled by diseased thinking. Although the illusion of control may continue, their lives become unmanageable, because closed-source is really in control. It is cunning, baffling, and powerful.

But recovery for the entire family can begin when someone finally breaks the cycle of denial. That first step begins with admitting powerlessness. Finally being honest about the situation. How does that work?

Mr. Gates. Please. Please. Be honest and stop denying the situation.

The best solution is to not get involved with a company lik this in the first place. When you're going through the hiring process, talk to current employees and ask them what's good and bad about the company. If you're in the same situation I was in a few years ago, an evil corporation may come in and buy you out from a great employer. In those cases, you have to try your best to keep a positive attitude and make job searching a full time job. Most people that bitch about not being able to find a job, just aren't putting in a real effort. Posting your resume on monster.com and firing off resumes to job openings on dice.com is nothing more than a token effort. You have to act like a door to door life insurance salesman and do everything you can to land a better job. If you need to move to a bigger city, do it! Save up about 2 months of living expense money and move. Put most of your stuff in storage if it will help temporarily. Once you get to the city, spend the first month selling yourself like a pimp with an expensive crack habit. Hell, you could hit up managerial looking people at Starbucks if it will help. If you really can't land a job in that initial month, get any old night job to live off of and make finding another job your day job. If you still can't land anything, maybe you're in the wrong field or have some personality issues that employers are seeing. Applicants that shine through the rest because of their own drive to get their foot in the door already have a lead on the rest. If you're doing this to say, 100 companies at a time, at least one will pay off.

-Lucas

The best solution is to not get involved with a company lik this in the first place. When you're going through the hiring process, talk to current employees and ask them what's good and bad about the company. If you're in the same situation I was in a few years ago, an evil corporation may come in and buy you out from a great employer. In those cases, you have to try your best to keep a positive attitude and make job searching a full time job. Most people that bitch about not being able to find a job, just aren't putting in a real effort. Posting your resume on monster.com and firing off resumes to job openings on dice.com is nothing more than a token effort. You have to act like a door to door life insurance salesman and do everything you can to land a better job. If you need to move to a bigger city, do it! Save up about 2 months of living expense money and move. Put most of your stuff in storage if it will help temporarily. Once you get to the city, spend the first month selling yourself like a pimp with an expensive crack habit. Hell, you could hit up managerial looking people at Starbucks if it will help. If you really can't land a job in that initial month, get any old night job to live off of and make finding another job your day job. If you still can't land anything, maybe you're in the wrong field or have some personality issues that employers are seeing. Applicants that shine through the rest because of their own drive to get their foot in the door already have a lead on the rest. If you're doing this to say, 100 companies at a time, at least one will pay off.

-Lucas

Not to take away what those women achieved, but Grace Hopper was programming computers two years before ENIAC came along. Indeed, she had a major hand in producing the COBOL language.

Look at automobiles for instance. Are the cars today fundamentally different from the cars made a hundred years ago??

yes.

also known as: cars 100 years ago were not powered by internal combustion. that was made viable later than 1904, although the technology was actually only an adaptation of steam power.

I found a paper about the 20 hydrogen myths (pdf format). It tells a lot about the Hindemburg, and other urban legends related to hydrogen.

Anyway, having pressurized hydrogen in your car is _NOT_ what the latest technology advancements are about. It's about hydrogen cells. And nanotechnology provides a way of storing hydrogen in solid media under low pressures.

For more info, check out nanoapex news and search the topic "nanoenergy".

(Note to editors:
Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, moderate this post as 'insightful'!)

Grr... Why is the submit button so close tbe preview button.

There is also Biodiesel which would be quite adept at moving our vehicles in a more eco-friendly manner.

The major problem that I have seen mentioned about biodiesel is the fertilizer used to grow corn (or other oily crop) is usually derived from natural gas.

This problem could be mitigated by using different farming techniques and finding alternative sources of fertilizer.

Designing city spaces in such a way to take advantage of more efficient machines could have a much greater impact:

Assume a baseline of the Volkswagen Passat TDI which gets approximately 38 MPG from diesel fuel, which would be comparable to the mileage from biodiesel.

A 180 pound person will use about 120 calories per mile walking at 4.5 miles per hour. That is the number of calories in one Tablespoon of corn oil, the main constituent of biodiesel. Considering there are 256 teaspoons per gallon, that comes up with an efficiency of 256 miles per gallon of corn oil, or greater than six times the efficiency of the Passat TDI (which is a fairly efficient vehicle already.)

The human body can also use much more tasty fuels than drinking pure corn oil, although they might have lower energy densities and higer prices. Additionaly, walking places will actually bring the efficiency up as weight goes down! Other side effects would be reduced stress, lower health and auto insurance premiums, strengthened immune system, and a body that is not repulsive to the opposite sex.

If the commuter needs higher speeds, they can get on a bicycle and increase their speed while actually increasing efficiency to about 912 miles per gallon at 15 miles per hour, nearly thirty times the efficiency of that Passat.

Okay, I've convinced myself. I'm gonna go put on some shoes and take a walk now.

There is also Biodiesel which would be quite adept at moving our vehicles in a more eco-friendly manner.

The major problem that I have seen mentioned about biodiesel is the fertilizer used to grow the corn (or other oily crop) is usually derived from natural gas.

This problem could be mitigated by using different farming techniques and finding alternative sources of fertilizer.

Or even designing city spaces in such a way to take advantage of more efficient machines. We'll assume a baseline of the Volkswagen Passat TDI"> which gets approximately 38 MPG from diesel fuel, which would be comparable to the mileage from biodiesel.

A 180 pound person will use about walking at 4.5 miles per hour. That is the number of calories in one Tablespoon of corn oil, the main constituent of biodiesel. Considering there are 256 teaspoons per gallon, that comes up with an efficiency of 256 miles per gallon of corn oil. The human body can also use much more tasty fuels than drinking pure corn oil, although they might have lower energy densities and higer prices. And then walking places will actually bring the efficiency up as weight goes down!

Very true, the skin was the main culprit. Check this link for info.

I just had a bit of a google. According to this DVDs have a lifetime of 30-50 years.

A better read though, is this which is an article about who to best go about long term storage on CDRs.

It includes the tip, amongst a load of others, that the top of CDR's is far more fragile and needs to be treated with great care.

That is a good point, the traditional voting day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday of Novemeber. The day was choosen for reasons that aren't relevant anymore.

More Info on the History

Let them eat flour. --Marie Antoinette

That's not right either, she said brioche.

Failing that, check autism.about.com for links to sites detailing therapies involving heavy metal detox. Autism Today also has some stuff on the subject.

I see nothing from the "major" medical and psychiatric sites, though. Most of the stuff seems to be from "alternative" medical sites. Now, that doesn't make it incorrect - medical sites are notoriously slow at picking up new ideas. (The recommended practices for preventing the spread of SARS were largely the recommended practices from Florence Nightingale's medical text!)

On the flip-side, it does mean that it's not necessarily clinically proven. For example, Oregon has some severely contaminated rivers, especially mercury contamination, but it's not known as a hot-spot for autism the way California is.

I'd like to see some peer-reviewed research on this. (Particularly if there's anything that could mean I can quit the damn meds for Aspergers. That stuff's not cheap!) But I'm not risking what's left of my brain on unproven guesswork.

Wikipedia has 202, IANA has 247
Guess we could do a diff on the official 193 coutries and investigate why they're claiming to be countries. My guess is there's 10 - 50 major scammers out there who've registered countries just to claim benefits from the UN ;)

The poster is talkign about the original DIVX format sold by Circuit City, not "DivX ;-)".

http://hometheater.about.com/library/weekly/aa0621 99.htm

Maybe you should go find the section in the treaty that says "China and India can produce as much polution as they like".

Jesus...

Kyoto doesn't apply to developing nations like India and China.

Maybe you could start learning about the subject before you form an opinion?

I think this hits it on the head - Images isn't updated very often. Check out, for example, pictures of the toddler who was rescued from a well a week ago. A regular Google search for Jermere McMillan photo returns 117 results, the first of which has a picture. An image search for Jermere McMillan returns no result. Although it's hard to imagine what the Bush administration's angle is on supressing that picture.

Even more clearly that this is not a sinister Bush /Rove plot: Ashley Faulkner is a girl whose mother died on September 11, 2001. There is a recently famous picture of George Bush giving Ashley a hug that a Bush-friendly 527 made into a political ad. This picture has been known about for some time; the picture was taken at the beginning of May and was reported on at the time. It's certainly had time to propagate through the net: A google search for Ashley Faulkner Bush photo returns 4290 results, the first few of which all include the picture. A Google image search for Ashley Faulkner Bush returns no images. Explain to me again how propagating this image would be "Politcally Undesirable" for the Bush administration.

Rob just speculating this is government malfeasance is ridiculous. There is no evidence to support his positiona and no evidence to even suggest it. Slashdot should post a conspicious retraction to this groundless acusation. The story here isn't "Bush represses Google," it's "Google's image index isn't updated very often." Stick to reporting the news, please, not your tired conspiracy theories!

Wouldn't that be the George W. Bush of software executives? He has ruined many businesses.

Al Gore helped fund ARPA "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

Let them eat discs!

BT isn't a P2P protocol, it's a file distribution protocol. Geez I hate when the mainstream press tries to report on tech.

Morans!

A lot of smaller countries tend to have population densities that are noticeably highter than in the US. The higher density makes new technologies (like wireless) easier to deploy because more people can take advantage of the service, distributing the overhead cost over a greater number of people. The following list was copied from here.

Population density of the continents:

* North America - 32 people/mi2
* South America - 73 people/mi2
* Europe - 134 people/mi2
* Asia - 203 people/mi2
* Africa - 65 people/mi2
* Australia and Oceania - 9 people/mi2

Countries with large surface areas like the US also tend to have population hotspots (like New York and Los Angeles) mixed with relatively low-pop-density areas like Nebraska and Montana.

>>>"Military draft stealing away the lives of an entire generation of young Americans (and then some)? YOUR FAULT."

>>Draft? Hate to tell you this, but the draft was the democrats idea, and now it's certainly not going to come to pass.

>Which time Sparky?? Draft is how you get people >to serve in a war nobody believes in. Perhaps >if you get your head out of your ass and look >at how many people are not re-enlisting and how >few are enlisting, you might get a clue about >how Bush will get people to serve for his ever >expanding war for oil/wealth/power watever.

It seems like that would be common sense and you certainly hear it enough to think it's true but it looks like it just isn't the case.

Military Numbers are rising
Military re-enlistment rates exceeding Pentagon goals
Are you going to be drafted?

is just like George Bush, it's all about FEAR

Just in case somebody doesn't get it: http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/historical/a/jfk_ berliner.htm and also http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedi a/i/ic/ich_bin_ein_berliner.html

Not the least revolutionary change was the astounding drop in newsprint prices that advances in papermaking technology afforded - newsprint prices that were 28 cents per pound in 1864 had plunged to two cents or less per pound by 1897. -- ConservATree

Industry history can be found at Freedom Foundation's Newseum, the Museum of Printing Boston/N.Andover (disclosure: my name appears on that site less often now than in the past), APHA and similar.

(See other postings for the well-known use of yellow ink in certain cartoons which lent the name to the editorial style of those papers.)

We remember the Lusitania specifically because it had nothing to do with the US entry into WWI.

The Lusitania was sunk in 1915, the US entered WWI in 1918. What precipited US entry was the Zimmerman telegram. For details, I cannot recommend highly enough the late Barbara Tuchman's (IMHO, the US' finest historian and a superb writer) 'The Zimmerman Telegram' Ballentine 1966.

That poor SOB isn't going to do shit for the economy.

Incentives are what matter (reducing capital gains taxes), not pocket money.

http://economics.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm? site=http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2003/ Wesburytaxcuts.html

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa121 800a.htm

Actually there are several different officials on the field, one of which is an umpire.

You can use the innards from those carved-up pumpkins to make pumpkin pie. You can find a batch of recipes via Yahoo! Search.

- obviously doesn't like me
- has murdered thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands
- has had desires for WMD his entire life
- flaunts UN inspections
- is Islamic
- waves a gun in the air berating western countries
- pretends he has what he doesn't for show purposes
- you name it, he did it

Paranoia? About what? Adulterated candy? People still believe this crap? Hoaxes for the most part, and when true- often it's family members.

But don't take my word for it.

The link on Moore's website is for the book "Culure of Fear- Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things" by Barry Glassner. Highly recommended, and it attacks both the right and left politicians, and the right and left media, for ignoring the real issues facing our country, and whipping up hysteria.

Nader has been a celebrity lawyer ever since the Corvair thing back in the 60's. His book, Unsafe at Any Speed, was a bestseller. He followed it up with so many consumer advocate style lawsuits that he was already established as newsworthy when he decided to run for office. I don't think he was ever been out of the public eye.

This is not one of those McDonalds Hot coffee lawsuits

True. It is less McDonald's coffee and more Chevrolet Corvair. It's about selling a knowingly faulty product.

So far I have found the law authorizing Treasury Agents in protection details to arrest people with no warrant, only "reasonable grounds", which is a lower standard for arrest than by regular police. Perhaps I was misinformed about an exaggerated "license to kill" - in which case thanks for reducing my ignorance. It also gave me occasion to learn that under Clinton, divorced presidential spouses are entitled to protection until some other remarriage/death event occurs. I expect that I will never use any of this info again, except perhaps in posting to Slashdot :).

I suspect that even if Jesus Christ came out of the sky escorted by angels playing harps and trumpets, and said "I support John Kerry", 50% of republicans would still say "bah, liberal messiah bias" and vote Bush anyway.

... you could buy an oilrig and set up your own prinipality fron which to thumb your nose at the world. Although international reckognition might be a problem.

It is blocked from Norway. Besides, Netcraft confirms: GWBush is dying. ;-)

This reminds me of another yet-unmentioned theory:

GMF could be responsible!

Well, the claw thing is kinda a contreversial thing.

Look up the term power factor. This system has a power factor of 14.5/14.8 = 0.98, which is surprisingly good for a computer, IIRC.

{wrinkles brow} Not sure if I'm utterly missing the joke here, but there already has been Star Wars Stratego. Heck, it's been out long enough that it landed in Kroger's $5 section. Pretty decent game, at that. There's standard Stratego and there's also a version where some of the named pieces get special powers along the lines of added movement or being able to reveal an enemy piece without attacking.

• The Beastie Boys!
• David Byrne!
• And others! [cue spinning montage of the Beastie Boys and David Byrne, nods to Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con]

  • Be still my beating heart!

Sounds like an idea for an upcoming MythBusters episode.

Next time on MythBusters: Adam visits the dentist and gets an implant with a timy tracking device. The team then tries various ways to block or disable the chip. Will tinfoil in Adam's hat do the trick, or will Jamie's more radical plan to alter a microwave oven be successful!? Tune in next week!

Heh, didn't they hint about putting a poodle in a microwave once?

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/legends/bl-p oodle.htm

A friend of a friend had a grandmother who was a little bit "dotty." One day, Grandma had just bathed her miniature poodle, Pierre, and was about to towel-dry him when the phone rang. It was her daughter, reminding her that they had arranged to meet for lunch a half hour earlier. Grandma apologized for being late and said she'd be there as quickly as she could.

As she began towel-drying Pierre, it dawned on her that there was a quicker way to do it: the microwave. So she put her beloved pet inside the oven, set the dial to "defrost" and switched it on.

A half a minute later, as Grandma was donning her coat to leave, she heard a muffled explosion in the kitchen.

Pierre the poodle was no more.

Herman Munster needs to be consulted right away on this.
Then, we need to see what Lilly Munster has to say!

Correct. But that is today. Software development in twenty years will likely look very different.

Will it? It doesn't look that different today than it did 20 years ago. There are some new concepts (OOP, AOP, etc), we have RAD's, but in the end it's still programmers and designers thinking of new algorithms, debugging stuff, and integrating everything into a stable and usable whole.

Consider: None of these arguments is, well, novel - they have thirty years of dust on them. They were all made regarding biotech, too.

I doubt it. Did anyone ever claim the biotech industry is a "cottage industry"? (see the last paragraph) That you barely need any investments to start a new biotech company? That everything underlying biotech innovations in pure maths? That biotech patents pave the way for patents on business methods? That biotech patents could be used to prevent publications of new biotech techniques and not just their use? (program claims) That biotech is pervasive throughout all economic sectors going from grocery shops to space stations, and as such is an "enabling technology" of which hindrances have very broad reaches?

Fortunately, those arguments were declined. Obviously, the predicted cataclysm has not materialized. Today, our biotech industry is basically causing a golden age of medicine - we're creating far more disease cures, far faster, than ever before in history.

To be fair, I've never followed the biotech patent situation. So I just searched for "biotech patents" on Google. The fourth link contains several links which seem to show the controversy is still far from settled. So does the sixth and the eighth. There are of course other views as well (such as the tenth link), but claiming everything is happy happy joy joy with no downsides seems just a tad misleading.

There's also a bit about it in the recent FTC report on patents and innovation. They note that the fact that biotech includes quite a bit of consequential innovation (as opposed to traditional pharmaceuticals) causes some problems. You are presumably aware of the fact that software development is almost nothing but consequential innovation (and lots of reuse as well). The solution proposed by the panel members regarding biotech is what is currently already done in the software world: extensive cross licensing. Of course, you need a lot of patents to be able to join that game.

The industry will become more selective about filing software patents. It must, since absurdities like patents on hash tables will never be useful to anyone. Even large companies cannot afford to throw away vast sums of money on patent portfolios that are not enforceable.

Of course they are useful for those companies! They are strategic assets, used as trading cards or litigation tokens. Enforceability is generally not even a concern, as many small companies can simply not afford the litigation costs (if you have the choice between a $50,000 license or a $2,000,000 lawsuit, what do you pick?)

By approximately 2020, we will have an incredibly well-documented record of the state of software development - both in the form of 50 years of programming journals, and in the form of all previously-filed software patent applications.

And there will be tons more of programming legacy which is not documented in this way at all, but just available as source code (which is also a publication, given that source code