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..they seem to be poor while the less honorable ones seem to profiting....

The same can be said of politicians and pretty much any other profession. Its sad when the less honorable are rewarded for being that way. Its sad when we the sheeple, continue to support their BS by doing business with them, buying their products (gas, oil, energy, current financial system, etc...) At what point does this gravitate toward Fascism from Capitalism...is debatable, with the debate being shaped by the media and talking points utterly controlled by those same not honorable 1%. Personally I think we are already there...Fascism.

In my mind Capitalism requires:

1. ~ livable wages, not just minimum wage...if In-N-Out Burger can pay $10.00 per hour to a high schooler getting his first job, what is the excuse for McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King, etc... They could but they do not want too. After all you want people to be able to afford to purchase your products, right. Ford understood this back in 1914, and he was far from a humanitarian:

   In 1914 the Ford Motor Company announced that it would henceforth pay eligible workers a minimum wage of $5 a day (compared to an average of $2.34 for the industry) and would reduce the work day from nine hours to eight, thereby converting the factory to a three-shift day.

2. ~ Healthy workers with 100% health care, its more than just a safety net, its required, if your workers are not healthy enough to work, they are not good to anyone, including themselves. And annual health costs of $18,365 - $24,965, ($8.83 – 12.00 per hour) is NOT affordable for anyone earning minimum wage. Don't think you are okay if you are working for someone else as you are paying close to 41% of your health care costs (medical care and perscriptions) which comes to $8,584 annually or $4.13 per hour. Still way too high. Regardless of who is in control, costs are only going to go up as the groups that could prevent that have been weakened by both political parties. Two-party system, what a joke...you have no choice.

   The current health care system of Dont get sick... if you get sick Die Quickly is woefully inadequate.

3. ~ Flexible work hours, not inflexible work hours where you do not just work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, but are considered less than perfect if you want to have time with your family instead of putting in 9, 10, or 11 hour days...unpaid hours at that. Get creative, instead of just 20% flex time, give your employees the options of working 3 X 12 hour days, 36 hours per week, get paid for 40 hours and have 4 days off. Just the savings in Gas to/from work commute alone would help your worker and their family. Might even bleed over into helping the economy both directly and indirectly.

   A month later Ford was made chief engineer at the main Detroit Edison Company plant with responsibility for maintaining electric service in the city 24 hours a day. Because he was on call at all times, he had no regular hours and could experiment to his heart's content.

4. ~ Ability for two non-professional incomes to afford the costs of a family, all expenses including money left over to invest and save for emergencies and retirement.
5. ~ Secure voting that is 100% verifiable in all city, county, state and

..they seem to be poor while the less honorable ones seem to profiting....

The same can be said of politicians and pretty much any other profession. Its sad when the less honorable are rewarded for being that way. Its sad when we the sheeple, continue to support their BS by doing business with them, buying their products (gas, oil, energy, current financial system, etc...) At what point does this gravitate toward Fascism from Capitalism...is debatable, with the debate being shaped by the media and talking points utterly controlled by those same not honorable 1%. Personally I think we are already there...Fascism.

In my mind Capitalism requires:

1. ~ livable wages, not just minimum wage...if In-N-Out Burger can pay $10.00 per hour to a high schooler getting his first job, what is the excuse for McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King, etc... They could but they do not want too. After all you want people to be able to afford to purchase your products, right. Ford understood this back in 1914, and he was far from a humanitarian:

   In 1914 the Ford Motor Company announced that it would henceforth pay eligible workers a minimum wage of $5 a day (compared to an average of $2.34 for the industry) and would reduce the work day from nine hours to eight, thereby converting the factory to a three-shift day.

2. ~ Healthy workers with 100% health care, its more than just a safety net, its required, if your workers are not healthy enough to work, they are not good to anyone, including themselves. And annual health costs of $18,365 - $24,965, ($8.83 – 12.00 per hour) is NOT affordable for anyone earning minimum wage. Don't think you are okay if you are working for someone else as you are paying close to 41% of your health care costs (medical care and perscriptions) which comes to $8,584 annually or $4.13 per hour. Still way too high. Regardless of who is in control, costs are only going to go up as the groups that could prevent that have been weakened by both political parties. Two-party system, what a joke...you have no choice.

   The current health care system of Dont get sick... if you get sick Die Quickly is woefully inadequate.

3. ~ Flexible work hours, not inflexible work hours where you do not just work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, but are considered less than perfect if you want to have time with your family instead of putting in 9, 10, or 11 hour days...unpaid hours at that. Get creative, instead of just 20% flex time, give your employees the options of working 3 X 12 hour days, 36 hours per week, get paid for 40 hours and have 4 days off. Just the savings in Gas to/from work commute alone would help your worker and their family. Might even bleed over into helping the economy both directly and indirectly.

   A month later Ford was made chief engineer at the main Detroit Edison Company plant with responsibility for maintaining electric service in the city 24 hours a day. Because he was on call at all times, he had no regular hours and could experiment to his heart's content.

4. ~ Ability for two non-professional incomes to afford the costs of a family, all expenses including money left over to invest and save for emergencies and retirement.
5. ~ Secure voting that is 100% verifiable in all city, county, state and

I suspect you'll like: http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

You know, I find that as I get older, I am able to avoid overengineering things a lot better than when I was twenty something

The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer.

The summary reminded me of this:
http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

But I can't say that I'm not Haskell "biased". After all I tasted "her". And this resembles the experience best:
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20070219/044101.html

> IIRC, the human brain fires off at like 200 mhz. That may not be 100% accurate, I cannot recall where I read that factoid and a quick Google search doesn't collaborate -- but ultimately the specific numbers don't matter.

This site is fairly helpful and appears to be reasonably reliable (the numbers I checked matched those on wikipedia) http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs449/brain.html it suggests a neuron can fire at 100 Hz. Like you said, the specific numbers aren't that important but I'd thought I'd jump in after noting you were wrong by about 6 orders of magnitude ;)

Assuming 10^11 neurons, each running at 100 Hz, that means a maximum of 10^13 'signals' per second. Suppose we have a model of a brain with each neuron, and it takes 1000 clock cycles to process a single 'signal' from a single neuron, that would mean we need a machine performing 10^16 operations per second (= a mere 10 pHz). Since the brain is pretty parallel this shouldn't be too hard to accomplish in the next decade or two. What remains is finding out how the neurons are organised, just simulating 10^11 neurons dropped in a bucket at random is unlikely to produce useful output.

You're right about the density of code; but that's a property of the programmer,, not the language.

I just hope they bought processors made after 1995. http://www.willamette.edu/~mjaneba/pentprob.html

I am thinking that it wasn't a Microsoft product at the root of this problem. When were the original NASA calculation done? I am betting int he mid 90's when the Pentium was first being implemented. Remember the floating point process issue? I bet thats it. http://www.willamette.edu/~mjaneba/pentprob.html

Of course there is! Just do the calculations on an Intel Pentium processor. After all, being the first processors to come up with a solution to dividing by zero, you're sure to find the number your looking for.

There are some high range displays (at least in research facilities) giving you a larger dynamic per color than the 256 scales of traditional 24 bit images, so the lack of "true colors" mentioned in the article might be solved by conventional technology.

You're right that primary colors aren't a phenomenon of physics, but rather of physiology. We can fake the human sensor into seeing the other wavelengths by independently stimulating the red, green, and blue sensors, each of which has a frequency response range. We could reproduce all colors if we can independently stimulate each sensor. Unfortunately, the frequency responses overlap, so we can't really indepedently stimulate each sensor. Here's a nice experiment that shows the problem. In order to reproduce all colors with only three light generators, we need to produce negative light... which doesn't make any sense. So, we pick three colors that do good enough and approximate it.

The problem that tends to be addressed by research displays is that of dynamic range - how bright the colors are, not how true they are. Traditional monitors have a very small brightness range - some are poor with dark stuff, and all are awful for bright scenes. So, outdoor scenes require a very bright monitor to reproduce. The research displays can produce much brighter colors - in fact one claimed you might need to wear sunglasses if cranked up. As you might imagine, there are a lot of problems with heat and all that.

The one part of the spectrum that these high dynamic range displays can be better at is reproducing violet. Since red and green overlap blue a little, to reproduce a good violet, you need to shift the blue pixel toward violet. However, if you do this, since we have a low response to violet, you need a very bright violet to still be able to produce blue, which isn't practical for normal displays.

AMD has a unique opportunity to do the right thing: offering to replace all the defective chips. If AMD does the right thing, then it will only help AMD in its litigation against Intel and in various attempts to increase marketshare. After all, would you not prefer to buy from a reputable company instead of a dishonest, shifty company?

AMD has a unique opportunity to do the right thing: offering to replace all the defective chips. If AMD does the right thing, then it will only help AMD in its litigation against Intel and in various attempts to increase marketshare. After all, would you not prefer to buy from a reputable company instead of a dishonest, shifty company?

Sorry, that sounds a little too much like a bug Intel claimed would only affect someone once every 27,000 years when it turns out it would hit some folks every 24 days on average. I think I'll stick with AMD.

I'm a research scientist. At one point Intel made a chip with a flawed FPU. They eventually admitted it. After much harassment, they said they would be willing to replace the defective CPUs for certain people, if *Intel* thought that person really needed the accuracy. I don't need Intel to decide for me how accurate my results should be. That was the day Intel lost all credibility for me as a company treats their customers right. The most certainly have NOT always produced top quality. Long live AMD.

Well, it's not Hello World, but here is the factorial function presented as The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer

I think Intel's least favorite simple equation is:

4195835.0 / 3145727.0 < 1.3338

Here
are
a
few
articles to refresh your memory.

Perhaps the Matrix is just running on old Pentiums?

They've got a whole course online! FOR FREE!

I think it's true with anime, too -- the growing popularity over the past few years has made a number of anime pop up which, honestly, aren't all that worthy, to reference the Miyazaki quote.

"Apple's doing the right thing, roughly."

I'm sorry, but supporting your users only *after* they file a class-action lawsuit against you is nowhere close to the right thing. If Apple and Jobs wanted to do the right thing, maybe I wouldn't be browsing /. while I wait for everyone at the office to leave so I can take down and rebuild our OSX server because the system prefs pane simply vanished. Poof, gone. Maybe I wouldn't have a feeling of dread in my stomach every time a student comes to me and tells me that iMovie has crashed and their semester project will no longer open. Maybe I wouldn't have to train lab assistants in how to use ASR to re-image our OSX stations when they could be helping users with their projects instead. Maybe I wouldn't spend time documenting problems with hugely popular software like iDVD because Apple just isn't saying anything about it.

And lastly, maybe I wouldn't have any basis for my complaining if Apple would simply acknowledge that there are problems and listen to what their own users trying to tell them!

What Apple is doing isn't right, but it's the first step toward correcting a wrong.

Such non-transferable license agreements will never stand up in court.
Reselling licensed software is no different than transfering ownership of a legally purchased music CD.
Last time I looked, second-hand record shops have been alive and well for decades.

US Court says buyers can unbundle EULA-covered software.

Also take a look at this very well argued thesis on the same issue. Same paper in HTML format

The The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (found on the great Lambda the Ultimate blog on functional programming) features a dozen funny Haskell functions to implement factorial. The most elegant implemenation, though, is by the "Tenured Professor":

fac n = product [1..n]

I'd like to give that baby a Gnome!