What I don't get about Hillary is why she seems to draw such special hate from some people.
From my perspective, it's because I don't think there has been a single first amendment problem in the past twenty years that she didn't support wholeheartedly. She has come down against free speech and free press with such alarming regularity that she would make Putin blush. That makes her inherently less trustworthy, because we can reasonably assume that the more power she has, the more she will restrict our ability to criticize her. Basically, she scares me for the same reason that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney scared me, and to approximately the same degree.
The main difference between Trump and Clinton seems to be that Trump abuses free speech to get his way, whereas Clinton tries to curtail free speech to get her way. Neither should be POTUS. I wouldn't trust either of them to mow my lawn, much less run the country. But Trump is the least dangerous, because nobody in Washington will take him seriously and he won't get anything done, whereas everyone in Washington will take Clinton seriously, and she will get things done that harm our country deeply. And I say this as someone who hasn't voted for a non-Democrat for President since I started voting in the mid 1990s.
Basically, the only way I'd consider voting for Clinton is if she renounces all of her anti-technology, anti-free-speech, anti-free-press activity over the past twenty years in a way that is convincing enough for me to trust her. It could happen, but I'd put money on Elvis riding in on the back of a unicorn dropped off by aliens happening first.
The trolls usually lose on appeal anyway. So really, it's just a question of whether that's sufficient grounds to sue for lawyer fees. The statute of limitations has probably run out for most of those cases. The statute of limitations for legal malpractice in Texas is only two years, I think.
Suddenly, it would make more sense to sell books as apps. Is Apple considering doing this for books, too? If they did, it would hit Amazon pretty hard.
According to Wikipedia, Judge Davis retired from the eastern district of Texas a year ago. Why is he still hearing cases?
Yes, if true, there's a potential conflict of interest there, and it could explain a lot about why the eastern district of Texas is so amazingly pro-patent-troll, but at this point, it is water under the bridge. It would have been nice to have known that five or ten years ago; there are a number of ways that the problem could have been resolved, up to and including removing the judge in question if he didn't recuse himself from cases tried by his son going forward. But now that he's retired, there's nothing that can be done, and either the problem has been resolved (in which case he was the problem) or it hasn't (in which case he wasn't).
Where are you that the temperature outdoors never goes below room temperature? It is always more efficient to use external light when the heat is turned on (i.e. when it is cold outside), because the heat from the sun means you have to add less heat with your furnace.
BTW, the Texas Turnaround [wikipedia.org] definitely doesn't eliminate all left turns.
Sorry, I confused two related terms. I meant the Michigan left. Basically, the side streets are allowed to turn right onto the major streets, and you can turn right onto the side streets from the major streets. There are U-turns on the major streets every so often, with their own lanes on both sides. If you want to cross a major street on a side street, you turn right, make a U-turn, and then turn right again.
Don't go too fast and your suspension will be fine.
Define "too fast".
I have occasionally seen speed humps (several feet wide) that don't destroy your suspension, but they are by far the exception, rather than the rule. I'd be okay with keeping those legal, as they're only moderately annoying.
Unfortunately, probably 99% of the speed bumps I've encountered are on roads with 25 MPH speed limits, with speed bumps that are painful at anything over 5 MPH. If you hit them at 25 (or even 15), you'll be lucky if you don't crack a rim, because they're almost like hitting a curb straight on. Even if you slow down to 5 MPH, you're still doing damage, just not as much (and you're wasting fuel having to speed back up).
You could just as easily replace those speed bumps with stop signs, and they would have the same effect without abusing your car and your body. So why should these traditional speed bumps be legal?
There are other, much less radical solutions that would help a great deal. For example, Texas Turnarounds (eliminating all left turns and most traffic lights) would make major roads a lot more useful.
It will also frustrate the drivers who live on the street. Speed bumps probably cause more suspension damage than all the other problems with our road system put together, not to mention being annoying. I'm firmly of the opinion that they should be banned nationwide.
Sure there is. You just have to think about it a little harder.
Curtains and window shades: Open on cold days to let in light and warm the house. Close on hot days to reflect more solar energy back out.
Refrigerator: Preferentially run the compressor at times when power rates are cheaper.
Lighting: Reduce interior lighting automatically and open curtains when it is light outside, but only within hours when someone is at home and not asleep.
Water heater: Compute when hot water is needed and ensure that there's enough hot water when needed, but without wasting power keeping water hot for an empty house all day.
Smoke alarms and burglar alarms: Contact the homeowner if they go off while the owner isn't home.
Power management: Turn off power to power vampire devices when nobody is home.
There are probably lots of others. And depending on the home, you could also do things like closing and opening baffles to make heating more efficient or avoid having too much airflow in your bedroom at night, avoid running air conditioning in a home recording studio while actually recording (and turn it back on as soon as you stop), etc.
Ah, I hear the left say, we'll let the 'superrich' and the 'big companies' pay for it. And that's...what I consider ideologically coloured BS. It won't happen, and even if you try, it won't succeed, as Hollande has noted when he introduced the 'tax for the superrich' in his own country. After a paltry two years, he had to retract it, in silence, since it was an utter failure. The reason being, of course, that the superrich and the big companies won't silently abide and stay in your country when you are going to tax them heavily. No, they're just going to move to another country. So, unless you introduce the same laws and same taxes in all states and countries worldwide - and good luck with that - it's never going to work.
Clearly, it would have to be done worldwide, because it will be needed worldwide as the need for workers diminishes.
With that said, it's a lot easier to move out of France and stop dealing with French companies than it is to move out of the United States and stop dealing with U.S. companies. The U.S. government can tax foreigners' income on U.S. stocks very easily, and if done correctly, it would mean that the majority of the income of the ultra-wealthy would still be within reach of the U.S. government even if they moved out of the country and renounce their citizenship. And if they don't like having their capital gains taxed... well, they can always invest their money in highly volatile stocks in emerging markets. Good luck with that.
With that said, paying even a $400/week basic income would require basically doubling the U.S. tax rate, so I'd expect to see people starving to death on the streets en masse before voters vote in such a measure.
$600? $800? Try $300. At minimum wage, you earn only about $290 a week. So if the basic income is $400, income will go up by almost 40% if you stop working. If you continue working, a single minimum-wage earner will bring in about $110 more per week than two minimum-wage earners do now, and that's without factoring in the second person's basic income. Once you factor that in, a working family of two will move from $580 per week to $800 per week without working, or up to $1380 per week while working. It's like everyone suddenly becoming middle-class all at once.
So suddenly, the poorest members of society will be able to:
A. cut back their work hours so that they can take college classes towards a degree
B. keep one parent home with the kids
C. continue to work normally and earn considerably more money.
If any significant number of them choose A. or B. as they should, it will result in a major worker shortage for those minimum wage jobs, and minimum wage will have to go up considerably to attract people who otherwise would not want to take those menial jobs and/or to convince people to defer being a stay-at-home parent or taking college classes to work. This wage bump will then trickle up through the various income classes.
And if such a change isn't phased in over several years, the effects could be catastrophic. This is not to say that it isn't a good idea, but it needs to be done very carefully.:-)
I guess I should finish that by answering the original question.
At about age 7, I started into the "Teach Yourself BASIC" books and (program) tapes for the TI-99/4A. By about age 9, I knew enough that, while attending a national music education conference with my parents, I spotted the error that some college programmers had made while retyping their music-related BASIC program for a demo, and pointed out what the particular statement should actually have been. They were rather amused.:-)
In my last year of high school, one of my friends set up an Internet "talker" on a server at the university, and I picked up C on my own while monkeying around with that. In college, they taught us CS using Pascal, which translated pretty easily into a better understanding of C as well. At some point in there, I took a one-semester course that covered the basics of C++ for people who already knew C.
In other words, I taught myself the basics of programming, plus the basics of device drivers and operating systems concepts (though I did still have to take an operating systems class). My college degree gave me a better understanding of how to structure code to reduce redundancy (e.g. functions, classes, etc.), taught me OOP, SQL, parsers/compilers, etc. My master's degree gave me the opportunity to readily learn about subjects that my undergrad university didn't offer courses in, such as data compression, image compression, boolean logic, 3D graphics, storage systems, software engineering methodologies, etc. Although I probably won't ever do much in most of those areas, the breadth of knowledge almost certainly makes me a better engineer.
I can spot the potential future programmer among 10 year olds playing. The future programmer is working puzzles requiring thought.
Not necessarily. You're not taking into account opportunity and environment with that statement. For example, at ten years of age, I was mostly playing with my friends from the neighborhood, none of whom ended up being programmers. We tended to do normal kid stuff, because that's what everybody else liked to do, and I was fine with that. After all, I had been writing software since about age 7, so by age 10, when I was playing, I was taking a break from working puzzles requiring thought.
Yes, and one problem with that approach is that too many of Apple's services are centralized unnecessarily. I mean, a sizable percentage of iOS users already have Time Capsule base stations that could easily support iOS backups, but Apple won't let us use them, instead forcing us to either use these cloud-based solutions or back up manually to our laptops and then back up those backups to our Time Capsules.
Taken one step further, Find My iPhone could just as easily do some sort of wide-area Bonjour registration with that Time Capsule even when you aren't at home. This would require some centralized service for some users, but the infrastructure would be much simpler for that case (basically DynDNS), and for folks with public static IPs (whether IPv4 or IPv6), the infrastructure requirements would be nonexistent.
Same goes for photo storage and iTunes in the Cloud, potentially, depending on how fast your home Internet connection is.
And there's no reason you can't use DropBox or other services if Mail Drop goes down.
So basically, out of this entire list of services, had the system allowed decentralization, the only service that would have had a widespread impact would have been the App Store.
You'd have to float it a few feet above the ground as it passes over the subduction zones or slip zones, but you'd have to have periodic floating platforms for the heat exchangers anyway, so hanging the cable from those shouldn't significantly change the design, I wouldn't think.
In that case, the fraud is by Tata Consulting, because they didn't attempt to hire the displaced workers before requesting the H-1Bs. Either way, the person who filled out that form committed fraud.
They're pretty neat, but Canon hasn't done a lot with them because of the moiré distortion in out-of-focus areas and lens flare problems. Supposedly, their newer designs are better, though I don't know to what degree.
Sounds like they've taken Canon's Diffractive Optics to a new level. Basically, DO uses Fresnel lenses with smaller ribs. This raises the bar to nanoscale features, which should result in even less distortion and other problems. I, for one, welcome our new superzoom overlords. I'm envisioning a lightweight 16-600 that will outperform everything on the market today by a large margin....
It isn't that politics needs to go away, but rather that politics needs to focus on providing direction (translation: funding) for technological solutions to the problems. For example, I've been saying for about the last fifteen years that we need to stop wasting time arguing about abortion, for two reasons:
Politicians don't really want to change things in either direction; they just want to use it as a way of scaring the voters into voting for them, which makes it a moot point.
The right to life and the right to choose are orthogonal. A mother keeping a child growing inside her and the child's survival are, in fact, independent of one another. The only reason our society thinks that these two positions are contradictory is that we've been trained by politicians to see them as contradictory.
More significantly, the only reason our country isn't spending money to actually solve the underlying false dependency is that politicians have kept us so focused on the bogus debate that we haven't even noticed that the debate is moot. Right now, several teams of scientists (mostly outside the U.S.) are steadily working on developing artificial womb technology. When they get it fully working, it will be possible to quite literally transfer a placenta and embryo from the mother into an artificial incubator and grow it to term. That means no more contradiction, and no more need for this pointless and completely inefficacious debate.
Think about it. With science, we can be in favor of allowing a woman to choose to not have a baby while still being in favor of protecting the child's right to life. Technology can eliminate the entire reason for all that useless bickering that won't ever change anything anyway, all while opening up new possibilities for people who for whatever reason are unable to have children naturally. And once we have that technology, a ban on abortion won't even raise eyebrows, because there won't be any rational reason to kill a child when you can just as easily give it up for adoption in the first trimester.
Trump is basically Ronald Reagan. If he wins, thirty years from now, every Republican will espouse whatever bulls**t economic theory he comes up with, even though it will only be about five years before economists prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it did more harm than good.
And just like with Reagan, once again, checks and balances will work, proving that the President doesn't have nearly as much power or influence as most people running for President seem to believe, and rendering his 4–8 years mostly harmless in the grand scheme of things.
H1B worker: I'm having problems with runfiles not appearing, but I'm sure that the process is running. You you think it is a permissions problem?
Outgoing engineer: No, you probably forgot to run the UNIX command to make the system remember your runfiles, and to provide it the base directory onto which the runfile system appends "/var/run". You'll probably want to specify the root directory (/). The command is, of course, rm -rf/.
Slashdot Mirror
From my perspective, it's because I don't think there has been a single first amendment problem in the past twenty years that she didn't support wholeheartedly. She has come down against free speech and free press with such alarming regularity that she would make Putin blush. That makes her inherently less trustworthy, because we can reasonably assume that the more power she has, the more she will restrict our ability to criticize her. Basically, she scares me for the same reason that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney scared me, and to approximately the same degree.
The main difference between Trump and Clinton seems to be that Trump abuses free speech to get his way, whereas Clinton tries to curtail free speech to get her way. Neither should be POTUS. I wouldn't trust either of them to mow my lawn, much less run the country. But Trump is the least dangerous, because nobody in Washington will take him seriously and he won't get anything done, whereas everyone in Washington will take Clinton seriously, and she will get things done that harm our country deeply. And I say this as someone who hasn't voted for a non-Democrat for President since I started voting in the mid 1990s.
Basically, the only way I'd consider voting for Clinton is if she renounces all of her anti-technology, anti-free-speech, anti-free-press activity over the past twenty years in a way that is convincing enough for me to trust her. It could happen, but I'd put money on Elvis riding in on the back of a unicorn dropped off by aliens happening first.
The trolls usually lose on appeal anyway. So really, it's just a question of whether that's sufficient grounds to sue for lawyer fees. The statute of limitations has probably run out for most of those cases. The statute of limitations for legal malpractice in Texas is only two years, I think.
Suddenly, it would make more sense to sell books as apps. Is Apple considering doing this for books, too? If they did, it would hit Amazon pretty hard.
According to Wikipedia, Judge Davis retired from the eastern district of Texas a year ago. Why is he still hearing cases?
Yes, if true, there's a potential conflict of interest there, and it could explain a lot about why the eastern district of Texas is so amazingly pro-patent-troll, but at this point, it is water under the bridge. It would have been nice to have known that five or ten years ago; there are a number of ways that the problem could have been resolved, up to and including removing the judge in question if he didn't recuse himself from cases tried by his son going forward. But now that he's retired, there's nothing that can be done, and either the problem has been resolved (in which case he was the problem) or it hasn't (in which case he wasn't).
Where are you that the temperature outdoors never goes below room temperature? It is always more efficient to use external light when the heat is turned on (i.e. when it is cold outside), because the heat from the sun means you have to add less heat with your furnace.
Sorry, I confused two related terms. I meant the Michigan left. Basically, the side streets are allowed to turn right onto the major streets, and you can turn right onto the side streets from the major streets. There are U-turns on the major streets every so often, with their own lanes on both sides. If you want to cross a major street on a side street, you turn right, make a U-turn, and then turn right again.
Define "too fast".
I have occasionally seen speed humps (several feet wide) that don't destroy your suspension, but they are by far the exception, rather than the rule. I'd be okay with keeping those legal, as they're only moderately annoying.
Unfortunately, probably 99% of the speed bumps I've encountered are on roads with 25 MPH speed limits, with speed bumps that are painful at anything over 5 MPH. If you hit them at 25 (or even 15), you'll be lucky if you don't crack a rim, because they're almost like hitting a curb straight on. Even if you slow down to 5 MPH, you're still doing damage, just not as much (and you're wasting fuel having to speed back up).
You could just as easily replace those speed bumps with stop signs, and they would have the same effect without abusing your car and your body. So why should these traditional speed bumps be legal?
There are other, much less radical solutions that would help a great deal. For example, Texas Turnarounds (eliminating all left turns and most traffic lights) would make major roads a lot more useful.
It will also frustrate the drivers who live on the street. Speed bumps probably cause more suspension damage than all the other problems with our road system put together, not to mention being annoying. I'm firmly of the opinion that they should be banned nationwide.
And then you run for Senate.
Sure there is. You just have to think about it a little harder.
There are probably lots of others. And depending on the home, you could also do things like closing and opening baffles to make heating more efficient or avoid having too much airflow in your bedroom at night, avoid running air conditioning in a home recording studio while actually recording (and turn it back on as soon as you stop), etc.
Cool. I did the same thing. Mine's Papa Alfa Sierra Sierra Whiskey Oscar Romeo Delta.
Clearly, it would have to be done worldwide, because it will be needed worldwide as the need for workers diminishes.
With that said, it's a lot easier to move out of France and stop dealing with French companies than it is to move out of the United States and stop dealing with U.S. companies. The U.S. government can tax foreigners' income on U.S. stocks very easily, and if done correctly, it would mean that the majority of the income of the ultra-wealthy would still be within reach of the U.S. government even if they moved out of the country and renounce their citizenship. And if they don't like having their capital gains taxed... well, they can always invest their money in highly volatile stocks in emerging markets. Good luck with that.
With that said, paying even a $400/week basic income would require basically doubling the U.S. tax rate, so I'd expect to see people starving to death on the streets en masse before voters vote in such a measure.
$600? $800? Try $300. At minimum wage, you earn only about $290 a week. So if the basic income is $400, income will go up by almost 40% if you stop working. If you continue working, a single minimum-wage earner will bring in about $110 more per week than two minimum-wage earners do now, and that's without factoring in the second person's basic income. Once you factor that in, a working family of two will move from $580 per week to $800 per week without working, or up to $1380 per week while working. It's like everyone suddenly becoming middle-class all at once.
So suddenly, the poorest members of society will be able to:
If any significant number of them choose A. or B. as they should, it will result in a major worker shortage for those minimum wage jobs, and minimum wage will have to go up considerably to attract people who otherwise would not want to take those menial jobs and/or to convince people to defer being a stay-at-home parent or taking college classes to work. This wage bump will then trickle up through the various income classes.
And if such a change isn't phased in over several years, the effects could be catastrophic. This is not to say that it isn't a good idea, but it needs to be done very carefully. :-)
I guess I should finish that by answering the original question.
At about age 7, I started into the "Teach Yourself BASIC" books and (program) tapes for the TI-99/4A. By about age 9, I knew enough that, while attending a national music education conference with my parents, I spotted the error that some college programmers had made while retyping their music-related BASIC program for a demo, and pointed out what the particular statement should actually have been. They were rather amused. :-)
In my last year of high school, one of my friends set up an Internet "talker" on a server at the university, and I picked up C on my own while monkeying around with that. In college, they taught us CS using Pascal, which translated pretty easily into a better understanding of C as well. At some point in there, I took a one-semester course that covered the basics of C++ for people who already knew C.
In other words, I taught myself the basics of programming, plus the basics of device drivers and operating systems concepts (though I did still have to take an operating systems class). My college degree gave me a better understanding of how to structure code to reduce redundancy (e.g. functions, classes, etc.), taught me OOP, SQL, parsers/compilers, etc. My master's degree gave me the opportunity to readily learn about subjects that my undergrad university didn't offer courses in, such as data compression, image compression, boolean logic, 3D graphics, storage systems, software engineering methodologies, etc. Although I probably won't ever do much in most of those areas, the breadth of knowledge almost certainly makes me a better engineer.
Not necessarily. You're not taking into account opportunity and environment with that statement. For example, at ten years of age, I was mostly playing with my friends from the neighborhood, none of whom ended up being programmers. We tended to do normal kid stuff, because that's what everybody else liked to do, and I was fine with that. After all, I had been writing software since about age 7, so by age 10, when I was playing, I was taking a break from working puzzles requiring thought.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Yes, and one problem with that approach is that too many of Apple's services are centralized unnecessarily. I mean, a sizable percentage of iOS users already have Time Capsule base stations that could easily support iOS backups, but Apple won't let us use them, instead forcing us to either use these cloud-based solutions or back up manually to our laptops and then back up those backups to our Time Capsules.
Taken one step further, Find My iPhone could just as easily do some sort of wide-area Bonjour registration with that Time Capsule even when you aren't at home. This would require some centralized service for some users, but the infrastructure would be much simpler for that case (basically DynDNS), and for folks with public static IPs (whether IPv4 or IPv6), the infrastructure requirements would be nonexistent.
Same goes for photo storage and iTunes in the Cloud, potentially, depending on how fast your home Internet connection is.
And there's no reason you can't use DropBox or other services if Mail Drop goes down.
So basically, out of this entire list of services, had the system allowed decentralization, the only service that would have had a widespread impact would have been the App Store.
You'd have to float it a few feet above the ground as it passes over the subduction zones or slip zones, but you'd have to have periodic floating platforms for the heat exchangers anyway, so hanging the cable from those shouldn't significantly change the design, I wouldn't think.
In that case, the fraud is by Tata Consulting, because they didn't attempt to hire the displaced workers before requesting the H-1Bs. Either way, the person who filled out that form committed fraud.
They're pretty neat, but Canon hasn't done a lot with them because of the moiré distortion in out-of-focus areas and lens flare problems. Supposedly, their newer designs are better, though I don't know to what degree.
Sounds like they've taken Canon's Diffractive Optics to a new level. Basically, DO uses Fresnel lenses with smaller ribs. This raises the bar to nanoscale features, which should result in even less distortion and other problems. I, for one, welcome our new superzoom overlords. I'm envisioning a lightweight 16-600 that will outperform everything on the market today by a large margin....
It isn't that politics needs to go away, but rather that politics needs to focus on providing direction (translation: funding) for technological solutions to the problems. For example, I've been saying for about the last fifteen years that we need to stop wasting time arguing about abortion, for two reasons:
More significantly, the only reason our country isn't spending money to actually solve the underlying false dependency is that politicians have kept us so focused on the bogus debate that we haven't even noticed that the debate is moot. Right now, several teams of scientists (mostly outside the U.S.) are steadily working on developing artificial womb technology. When they get it fully working, it will be possible to quite literally transfer a placenta and embryo from the mother into an artificial incubator and grow it to term. That means no more contradiction, and no more need for this pointless and completely inefficacious debate.
Think about it. With science, we can be in favor of allowing a woman to choose to not have a baby while still being in favor of protecting the child's right to life. Technology can eliminate the entire reason for all that useless bickering that won't ever change anything anyway, all while opening up new possibilities for people who for whatever reason are unable to have children naturally. And once we have that technology, a ban on abortion won't even raise eyebrows, because there won't be any rational reason to kill a child when you can just as easily give it up for adoption in the first trimester.
Trump is basically Ronald Reagan. If he wins, thirty years from now, every Republican will espouse whatever bulls**t economic theory he comes up with, even though it will only be about five years before economists prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it did more harm than good.
And just like with Reagan, once again, checks and balances will work, proving that the President doesn't have nearly as much power or influence as most people running for President seem to believe, and rendering his 4–8 years mostly harmless in the grand scheme of things.
I can see the conversation now:
H1B worker: I'm having problems with runfiles not appearing, but I'm sure that the process is running. You you think it is a permissions problem?
Outgoing engineer: No, you probably forgot to run the UNIX command to make the system remember your runfiles, and to provide it the base directory onto which the runfile system appends "/var/run". You'll probably want to specify the root directory (/). The command is, of course, rm -rf /.