If you don't like it, get your Congressman or Senator to introduce a bill to repeal the 16th Amendment.
FWIW, it wouldn't be necessary to repeal the 16th ammendment. The entire tax code could be scrapped tomorrow with a simple majority-vote in Congress and a presidential signature.
Fuel is one of the smallest costs associated with launching things into space.
If you use a Kerosene / LOX rocket to put things into orbit, when sitting on the pad, your rocket will be about 93% fuel, 4% rocket and 3% payload. That fuel will be about 7 parts oxygen to one part kerosene. LOX is one of the cheapest industrial chemicals available, at something like a penny per kilogram. If you can burn Jet-A fuel in your rocket, it runs something like $US0.40 / kilogram.
So, for each kilogram of payload for your orbital rocket, you need about 32kg of fuel, which will consist of about 4kg of kerosene at $1.60, and 28 kg of LOX at about $0.28 -- for a total fuel cost-to-orbit of less than $2/kg.
There was progress made in the availability but not a lot made in sound quality. My friend has a VOIP phone and when he calls my landline it sounds like he's calling from the bottom of a bucket. Keeps dropping out too.
And ironically enough, that's where VoIP could shine -- imagine transmitting your voice with 128kbps MP3 encoding. It might not matter quite so much for personal use, but it would kick ass for speaker-phone teleconferencing.
In late 1998, I was working for a small company that decided to explore this new-fangled UML. A group of about 10 of us took a week-long course on it, and learned the basics of it. We decided, as a practice project, to re-implement one of our small subprojects with UML. We spent a few hours a week working on this.
When I left the company in April of 1999, we had made no signfigicant progress on the project.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah, medical research is a lot easier when you don't have the liability concern of having to compensate patients for things that go wrong, and you don't have those silly western 'ethics' about doing tests on humans before doing animal tests and being ridiculously sure it's safe.
Am I being demeaningly sarcastic, or wistfully jealous? I'm not sure.
I went and checked out this site on Tuesday afternoon, and it was already live. It was fairly easy and straightforward. My only complaint was that Experian had an absurdly short session timeout. Once my session timed out, I tried to log back in and got a message saying, "Our records show that you already got your report for this year. Come back next year. In the meantime, would you like to buy a copy of your report for $9?" So if you do go get your report, make sure that the first thing you do is go to the 'printable version' and print it.
While I did, you don't have to get your report from all three at the same time. You might be better off getting your report from one bureau every four months -- chances are, identity theft would show up on all three of them at about the same time.
While they did try to sell credit-monitoring services, they weren't especially obnoxious about it -- once I unchecked them, I was able to proceed and get the free report without much hassle.
Each bureau had its own security questions, and they're designed to be 'non-wallet' questions, like "What is the account number on your mortgage?", or "What is your monthly car loan payment?"
If you're paranoid, you can also find information on that web site about how to get your credit report by mail or telephone.
"Hello Kinko's Employee. I'd like you to print 500 copies of this here One-hundred dollar bill. You can just keep one of them to cover the cost."
They might do it. Shortly after the original GTA1 came out for the PC, I had made copies for friends. They were having trouble because they didn't have the maps. We agreed that we'd go down to Kinko's and get some nice 11x17 color copies made -- it'd cost them a couple of bucks, but cheaper than the game.
Turns out the maps were printed on 12x16 (A3?) or something weird like that. When I tried to use the self-serve copier, it was broken, so the helpful Kinko's guy offered to do it for me. When he questioned the propriety of copying these maps, I said it was OK because the game was designed to play multiplayer with only one copy (true!), and that's what we were planning to do. He had my friend sign the "I'm making a copy of copyrighted material" disclaimer and took the maps.
He came back a minute later and said that because they were 12x16 instead of 11x17, he wouldn't be able to make a complete copy of them. I said it was OK, that if he had to chop a bit off the edge, that would be fine. He walked back to make the copies.
I wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing, so it wasn't until it was already done that I realized that he had walked over to the paper cutter and literally chopped off a half inch on each side (of the original!) of the maps to make them fit into the copier.
Boo F*cking Hoo. Get out of my industry.
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I graduated in 1998 with a degree in Computer Science from an unremarkable state college. I've worked several different jobs since then, from small companies that you've never heard of to companies that have their own icons on Slashdot.
Without false modesty, I am an excellent programmer. In The Mythical Man Month, Brooks claimed that the productivity difference between a good programmer and a bad one can be 10:1. I am that 10. Don't take my word for it, ask my boss who gave me a 10% raise a couple of months ago, and has promised me (yeah, not worth the paper it's written on, I know) another 10% in six months. Every programmer I've ever worked with has agreed that I'm competent and skilled.
I can count on one hand the number of weeks I've worked more that 40 hours. One was because we were implementing a large enterprise-class system at a customer factory, and we all were putting in 15-hour days to get it working. That week is the only unpaid overtime I've ever worked. I once had a job where working 45-50 hours a week was standard, but I never worked more than 40. At my annual review, the boss said, "I wouldn't mind seeing you work more hours, but you're productive enough that it's no big deal." The other overtimes I've worked were at jobs where I was paid hourly, and thus got time-and-a-half. My only complaint about those is that I haven't had more of them.
My job has always been to put out high-quality code, and I've always delivered. My projects are always on time, have clean code, and have well-documented build procedures. I don't screw around with making my code compact, and rarely optimize for speed -- my goals are ease of writing, ease of debugging, and ease of understanding. Because of that, I can dust off code that I wrote years ago and quickly find and fix bugs in it.
Unfortunately, programming as an industry attracts lots of people who barely know what they're doing. They've learned to fake it and to stumble through it enough that they can put out unstable, bug-ridden projects that vaguely correspond to the initial spec. For example, the project that I'm working on now had a nasty bug buried in it when I first took over. The guy before me had been tracking it for three weeks. He'd worked with others, and had written up lots of pretty documents explaining what he'd done to try to find it. He was convinced it was in one of our partners' projects. I sat down on my first day there, started looking at this new, unfamiliar project, and found it within an hour.
That guy corrupted my project so badly that it took me six months just to clean it up -- things like code downloaded from the Internet, the copyright removed, and his name put in its place. This was in a commercial product that literally ships millions of copies every year, and it could have left the company open to a *huge* liability. Once I had the project cleaned up, it was smaller, built faster, and was much more stable.
People like this guy are what makes Software Engineering a joke among real engineers. He flew by the seat of his pants constantly, never *understanding* what he was doing. Had he not been an hourly employee like me, I am sure that he would have been working lots of extra hours, trying to make his productivity look a little better. After all, if I'm ten times the programmer you are, you can change that ratio to 5:1 by simply working 80 hours per week.
[Stupid submit button next to the preview button...] This proposal would allow countries to emit as much CO2 as they wanted, as long as it was reabsorbed by forests or whatever before it left their borders. There would be some practical considerations -- would we really need to ring, say, Greenland or the Northern 90% of Canada with sensors?
I couldn't find a list of countries and their border lengths, but I did find a list of areas. If you assume that each country is a square, and thus that it's border is sqrt(area) * 4, and you put a sensor every 10km, the total number of sensors becomes 50,000 -- and they're much simpler than, say, cell phone towers.
On a side note, the US already easily meets this standard of emitting no net CO2, so this proposal would never pass.
Accept it. The United States is not going to sign a CO2 reducing treaty anything like Kyoto. Why? The Kyoto treaty requires that all developed nations reduce their CO2 emissions to 92% of their 1990 levels. That's an odd algorithm to use to select the safe level. Why was it used? Europe and the American Europhiles who negotiated this treaty chose that date deliberately. By 1990, the United States had done a *lot* of pollution-mitigating things (Keep in mind that that year the US celebrated *20 years* of Earth Day). However, by 1990, Europe was an environmental mess. Horrible emissions around the continent, most of them in the former Communist half, meant that Europe still had lots of 'easy' things to do to clean up its CO2 picture. Combine that with a Russia whose population has been in steady decline ever since then, and meeting the 92%-of-1990 becomes relatively trivial for Europe. Also, at the rates things are going, it won't take long until the 'developing' world is putting out as much CO2 as anywhere else in the world. Here's an alternative: No nation is allowed to release any carbon dioxide. This could be implemented with a series of sensors around the world, measuring local CO2 patterns and wind patterns. These sensors, controlled by the UN would constantly measure the flow of CO2 around the world. If, for example, the air flowing into Portugal averages 207 ppm CO2 and the air flowing out of Portgual averages 230 ppm CO2, some sort of combined UN military force would implement an oil blockade, bomb factories, or do whatever else was necessary to get Portugal into compliance. (No offense to the Portuguese -- I'm just using them as an example, and I have no idea what their CO2 emissions are like.)
I believe that the United States has one of the best medical systems in the world. It's reasonably priced and the practicioners are everywhere. You can get a basic checkup for around $30-$40. More serious things like broken bones might cost you $100 or $200. Even things like cancer treatments run around $5000. While that's a lot, it's still within the financial reach of a creditworthy minimum wage earner.
For example, a couple of years ago a member of my family woke up one Sunday morning with horrible pain in her joints. She could barely move. I took her to the emergency room. We walked in without an appointment (I actually carried her), signed in, and she was seen in about 10 minutes. They gave her a couple of shots and some pills to take over the next few days. She was fine by that afternoon. Total cost? $120. I paid it out of my own pocket.
Not only is it cheap, effective, and readily available, it also warms the heart of this libertarian. It's almost completely private, people generally pay for service from their own pocket at the time of service. "Insurance" is rare and when it does exist, only covers the most extreme cases. Government doesn't regulate it any more than it regulates any other business. Prices are set by the free market. While government buys the occasional service from the system, it does so as just another purchaser, buying only a tiny fraction of the output, certainly not enough to significantly distort the market.
There's only one problem with this amazing medical system: It's only available to animals. The human system is much much worse.
However, the American veterinary system shows that you can have a private, for-profit, cheap, and efficient health-care system.
Then why not do something about it? If you're afraid of suffering Iraq's fate, build a military strong enough to deter the United States, or at least make it impractical to invade. Like say, Taiwan vs. China, or North Korea vs. Everybody.
If you honestly believe that Bush was the next Hitler, and the US a threat to your country, why not work to deter that threat? After all, madmen don't listen to reason and we all know that Bush isn't interested in peaceful dialog.
However, there is an expectation of privacy; you don't think a librarian would run to the feds to tell them if you read one book too many about Stalin.
Yeah, it sucks. But...
If you don't want the government to know that you're reading books about Stalin, don't walk into a government-owned building and ask a government employee if you can borrow books about Stalin.
I was working at a company that does hardware testing in the USA (110 V electricity). I neeeded to test something with USB 2.0, and none of the computers in my little test area had it. I asked around, and somebody else had one. As I carried it back to my area, I noticed that it was a Compaq model 1234.uk (or something like that).
I plugged it in, the little green light came on, the fan spun up, and I noticed the '220V' sticker right next to the power socket. So, I promptly yanked the plug and hoped that nothing bad had happened. After a second, I shrugged, figuring that putting in half the power it was expecting probably wouldn't do anything.
I walked out and found a 110 -> 220 transformer. I plugged it in and plugged the computer into it. Again, the light came on, the fan spun up, and...
POW!
Suddenly, it was very quiet, because everybody quiets down when they hear a loud noise. It was especially quiet because all of the computers in the room were now shut off. A second later, I hear someone in the next room over ask, "Hey, did your computer just shut off?".
At this point, people are looking at me, because I was the source of the noise. I promptly (and of course, futilely) yanked the cord again.
About this time, I noticed that the power supply didn't have a 110 <-> 220 slider like most of them do. I looked more carefully, and found it. It was set to 110. I had missed it the first time because it was CONCEALED UNDER THE '220V' STICKER!
It turned out that the room I was in was almost overloaded, and that computer blowing out was enough to do it in. We rerouted some extension cords and all was well.
Yes, that's a real search. Try it from your Google toolbar if you don't believe me. As of the morning of 10-31-03, the results are completely work-safe.
Since you're coming at it fresh, you might consider typing on a Dvorak keyboard. I've typed on one for about seven years. While it's not significantly faster than a QWERTY, it is *far* more comfortable. I was up to about 80 WPM on a QWERTY when I stopped using it seven years ago, and can now do 100 on a Dvorak, which I might be doing on a QWERTY anyway. But, when you look at me typing on a Dvorak, I don't look like I'm typing that fast, because my fingers are barely moving compared to a QWERTY typer at the same speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard this about France before, that they don't have a US-style credit report system; What are mortgage rates like there, compared to the US?
FWIW, it wouldn't be necessary to repeal the 16th ammendment. The entire tax code could be scrapped tomorrow with a simple majority-vote in Congress and a presidential signature.
Fuel is one of the smallest costs associated with launching things into space.
If you use a Kerosene / LOX rocket to put things into orbit, when sitting on the pad, your rocket will be about 93% fuel, 4% rocket and 3% payload. That fuel will be about 7 parts oxygen to one part kerosene. LOX is one of the cheapest industrial chemicals available, at something like a penny per kilogram. If you can burn Jet-A fuel in your rocket, it runs something like $US0.40 / kilogram.
So, for each kilogram of payload for your orbital rocket, you need about 32kg of fuel, which will consist of about 4kg of kerosene at $1.60, and 28 kg of LOX at about $0.28 -- for a total fuel cost-to-orbit of less than $2/kg.
And ironically enough, that's where VoIP could shine -- imagine transmitting your voice with 128kbps MP3 encoding. It might not matter quite so much for personal use, but it would kick ass for speaker-phone teleconferencing.
In late 1998, I was working for a small company that decided to explore this new-fangled UML. A group of about 10 of us took a week-long course on it, and learned the basics of it. We decided, as a practice project, to re-implement one of our small subprojects with UML. We spent a few hours a week working on this.
When I left the company in April of 1999, we had made no signfigicant progress on the project.
Also, don't forget that SpaceShipOne was also "A Paul G. Allen Project".
No they couldn't have.
Am I being demeaningly sarcastic, or wistfully jealous? I'm not sure.
While I did, you don't have to get your report from all three at the same time. You might be better off getting your report from one bureau every four months -- chances are, identity theft would show up on all three of them at about the same time.
While they did try to sell credit-monitoring services, they weren't especially obnoxious about it -- once I unchecked them, I was able to proceed and get the free report without much hassle.
Each bureau had its own security questions, and they're designed to be 'non-wallet' questions, like "What is the account number on your mortgage?", or "What is your monthly car loan payment?"
If you're paranoid, you can also find information on that web site about how to get your credit report by mail or telephone.
Yeah -- I haven't watched Jeopardy! in a while, though I watched tonight's on the Ken-loses rumors. Most. Annoying. Product Placement. Ever.
They might do it. Shortly after the original GTA1 came out for the PC, I had made copies for friends. They were having trouble because they didn't have the maps. We agreed that we'd go down to Kinko's and get some nice 11x17 color copies made -- it'd cost them a couple of bucks, but cheaper than the game.
Turns out the maps were printed on 12x16 (A3?) or something weird like that. When I tried to use the self-serve copier, it was broken, so the helpful Kinko's guy offered to do it for me. When he questioned the propriety of copying these maps, I said it was OK because the game was designed to play multiplayer with only one copy (true!), and that's what we were planning to do. He had my friend sign the "I'm making a copy of copyrighted material" disclaimer and took the maps.
He came back a minute later and said that because they were 12x16 instead of 11x17, he wouldn't be able to make a complete copy of them. I said it was OK, that if he had to chop a bit off the edge, that would be fine. He walked back to make the copies.
I wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing, so it wasn't until it was already done that I realized that he had walked over to the paper cutter and literally chopped off a half inch on each side (of the original!) of the maps to make them fit into the copier.
Without false modesty, I am an excellent programmer. In The Mythical Man Month, Brooks claimed that the productivity difference between a good programmer and a bad one can be 10:1. I am that 10. Don't take my word for it, ask my boss who gave me a 10% raise a couple of months ago, and has promised me (yeah, not worth the paper it's written on, I know) another 10% in six months. Every programmer I've ever worked with has agreed that I'm competent and skilled.
I can count on one hand the number of weeks I've worked more that 40 hours. One was because we were implementing a large enterprise-class system at a customer factory, and we all were putting in 15-hour days to get it working. That week is the only unpaid overtime I've ever worked. I once had a job where working 45-50 hours a week was standard, but I never worked more than 40. At my annual review, the boss said, "I wouldn't mind seeing you work more hours, but you're productive enough that it's no big deal." The other overtimes I've worked were at jobs where I was paid hourly, and thus got time-and-a-half. My only complaint about those is that I haven't had more of them.
My job has always been to put out high-quality code, and I've always delivered. My projects are always on time, have clean code, and have well-documented build procedures. I don't screw around with making my code compact, and rarely optimize for speed -- my goals are ease of writing, ease of debugging, and ease of understanding. Because of that, I can dust off code that I wrote years ago and quickly find and fix bugs in it.
Unfortunately, programming as an industry attracts lots of people who barely know what they're doing. They've learned to fake it and to stumble through it enough that they can put out unstable, bug-ridden projects that vaguely correspond to the initial spec. For example, the project that I'm working on now had a nasty bug buried in it when I first took over. The guy before me had been tracking it for three weeks. He'd worked with others, and had written up lots of pretty documents explaining what he'd done to try to find it. He was convinced it was in one of our partners' projects. I sat down on my first day there, started looking at this new, unfamiliar project, and found it within an hour.
That guy corrupted my project so badly that it took me six months just to clean it up -- things like code downloaded from the Internet, the copyright removed, and his name put in its place. This was in a commercial product that literally ships millions of copies every year, and it could have left the company open to a *huge* liability. Once I had the project cleaned up, it was smaller, built faster, and was much more stable.
People like this guy are what makes Software Engineering a joke among real engineers. He flew by the seat of his pants constantly, never *understanding* what he was doing. Had he not been an hourly employee like me, I am sure that he would have been working lots of extra hours, trying to make his productivity look a little better. After all, if I'm ten times the programmer you are, you can change that ratio to 5:1 by simply working 80 hours per week.
(private message)DJBSPM(/private message)
[Stupid submit button next to the preview button...]
This proposal would allow countries to emit as much CO2 as they wanted, as long as it was reabsorbed by forests or whatever before it left their borders. There would be some practical considerations -- would we really need to ring, say, Greenland or the Northern 90% of Canada with sensors?
I couldn't find a list of countries and their border lengths, but I did find a list of areas. If you assume that each country is a square, and thus that it's border is sqrt(area) * 4, and you put a sensor every 10km, the total number of sensors becomes 50,000 -- and they're much simpler than, say, cell phone towers.
On a side note, the US already easily meets this standard of emitting no net CO2, so this proposal would never pass.
Accept it. The United States is not going to sign a CO2 reducing treaty anything like Kyoto. Why?
The Kyoto treaty requires that all developed nations reduce their CO2 emissions to 92% of their 1990 levels. That's an odd algorithm to use to select the safe level. Why was it used?
Europe and the American Europhiles who negotiated this treaty chose that date deliberately. By 1990, the United States had done a *lot* of pollution-mitigating things (Keep in mind that that year the US celebrated *20 years* of Earth Day). However, by 1990, Europe was an environmental mess. Horrible emissions around the continent, most of them in the former Communist half, meant that Europe still had lots of 'easy' things to do to clean up its CO2 picture. Combine that with a Russia whose population has been in steady decline ever since then, and meeting the 92%-of-1990 becomes relatively trivial for Europe.
Also, at the rates things are going, it won't take long until the 'developing' world is putting out as much CO2 as anywhere else in the world.
Here's an alternative: No nation is allowed to release any carbon dioxide.
This could be implemented with a series of sensors around the world, measuring local CO2 patterns and wind patterns. These sensors, controlled by the UN would constantly measure the flow of CO2 around the world. If, for example, the air flowing into Portugal averages 207 ppm CO2 and the air flowing out of Portgual averages 230 ppm CO2, some sort of combined UN military force would implement an oil blockade, bomb factories, or do whatever else was necessary to get Portugal into compliance. (No offense to the Portuguese -- I'm just using them as an example, and I have no idea what their CO2 emissions are like.)
GTA for me has the distinction of being the last MS-DOS game I ever bought.
For example, a couple of years ago a member of my family woke up one Sunday morning with horrible pain in her joints. She could barely move. I took her to the emergency room. We walked in without an appointment (I actually carried her), signed in, and she was seen in about 10 minutes. They gave her a couple of shots and some pills to take over the next few days. She was fine by that afternoon. Total cost? $120. I paid it out of my own pocket.
Not only is it cheap, effective, and readily available, it also warms the heart of this libertarian. It's almost completely private, people generally pay for service from their own pocket at the time of service. "Insurance" is rare and when it does exist, only covers the most extreme cases. Government doesn't regulate it any more than it regulates any other business. Prices are set by the free market. While government buys the occasional service from the system, it does so as just another purchaser, buying only a tiny fraction of the output, certainly not enough to significantly distort the market.
There's only one problem with this amazing medical system: It's only available to animals. The human system is much much worse.
However, the American veterinary system shows that you can have a private, for-profit, cheap, and efficient health-care system.
Keep in mind also Al Gore's definition of 'millionaire' when Bill Clinton was planning to tax them back in 1992. Paraphrased, it was...
Then why not do something about it? If you're afraid of suffering Iraq's fate, build a military strong enough to deter the United States, or at least make it impractical to invade. Like say, Taiwan vs. China, or North Korea vs. Everybody.
If you honestly believe that Bush was the next Hitler, and the US a threat to your country, why not work to deter that threat? After all, madmen don't listen to reason and we all know that Bush isn't interested in peaceful dialog.
Do you think that the people who couldn't figure out the infamous 'butterfly ballot' would be able to understand a preferential voting system?
Not really. Have you checked the price of ink cartridges lately?
We can't change its name to be a 'space bridge'. If we did, we couldn't have the same hilarious jokes in every Slashdot article about elevator music.
Won't somebody please think of the hilarious Slashdot jokes?
Yeah, it sucks. But...
If you don't want the government to know that you're reading books about Stalin, don't walk into a government-owned building and ask a government employee if you can borrow books about Stalin.
I plugged it in, the little green light came on, the fan spun up, and I noticed the '220V' sticker right next to the power socket. So, I promptly yanked the plug and hoped that nothing bad had happened. After a second, I shrugged, figuring that putting in half the power it was expecting probably wouldn't do anything.
I walked out and found a 110 -> 220 transformer. I plugged it in and plugged the computer into it. Again, the light came on, the fan spun up, and...
POW!
Suddenly, it was very quiet, because everybody quiets down when they hear a loud noise. It was especially quiet because all of the computers in the room were now shut off. A second later, I hear someone in the next room over ask, "Hey, did your computer just shut off?".
At this point, people are looking at me, because I was the source of the noise. I promptly (and of course, futilely) yanked the cord again.
About this time, I noticed that the power supply didn't have a 110 <-> 220 slider like most of them do. I looked more carefully, and found it. It was set to 110. I had missed it the first time because it was CONCEALED UNDER THE '220V' STICKER!
It turned out that the room I was in was almost overloaded, and that computer blowing out was enough to do it in. We rerouted some extension cords and all was well.
Why would anyone use Google? It can't even find porn on the Internet.
Yes, that's a real search. Try it from your Google toolbar if you don't believe me. As of the morning of 10-31-03, the results are completely work-safe.
Since you're coming at it fresh, you might consider typing on a Dvorak keyboard. I've typed on one for about seven years. While it's not significantly faster than a QWERTY, it is *far* more comfortable. I was up to about 80 WPM on a QWERTY when I stopped using it seven years ago, and can now do 100 on a Dvorak, which I might be doing on a QWERTY anyway. But, when you look at me typing on a Dvorak, I don't look like I'm typing that fast, because my fingers are barely moving compared to a QWERTY typer at the same speed.