When it comes to aiming, the linear velocity is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the angular velocity, a fact that anybody who has ever been involved in combat (or even anybody who has played just about any video game) can attest to.
Compare the following scenarios.
Scenario 1: You are standing fifty feet from a railroad track for a high speed train. You try to hit the engine with a baseball as it comes by at 150 miles per hour. You are unlikely to succeed.
Scenario 2: You are standing on the railroad track. You try to hit the engine as it comes straight at you at 150 miles per hour. A successful hit is almost inevitable... in more ways than one.... (Note: this scenario is inadvisable for obvious reasons.)
Indeed, you can trivially hit something that's coming straight at you (or nearly so) regardless of its speed—even if it is traveling at.9c, so long as you can see it in time to aim—because from a two-dimensional perspective, it is standing almost completely still, but getting bigger.
The same would be true for hitting an aircraft with a laser pointer. Standing beside the runway, it would be really hard. Standing at the end of the runway, it would be really easy. This isn't even basic high school physics. This is third-grade snowball fight physics.
(I'm guessing you meant that languages that consider whitespace as anything other than a token separator need to die)
I would think it should be corrected to "Languages that consider the quantity of whitespace to be syntactically significant need to die." Whitespace can be used as more than a token separator, particularly in strings and comments. Further, it is reasonable to distinguish between different visually distinct types of whitespace in some cases—treating a line break differently than a space, for example. However, the difference between one space and two should never result in a change in behavior, nor should the difference between two types of whitespace that both fall within the same directional class ever be taken into account (space versus tab, newline versus carriage return, etc.).
Curly braces also make it a heck of a lot easier to copy (or cut) and paste chunks of code. Just go to the opening curly brace and d%, and now you've just cut the entire block (ignoring any brace matching problems caused by braces in comments or strings). It's not nearly that easy without delimiters.
No, that does not make them worth less, because you can't (legally) make the copies. Besides, it was always pretty darn easy to make copies. They were lower quality copies, but that didn't mean that folks weren't passing around analog copies of stuff on tape decades ago.
The people who were going to copy content from others have always done so. The only thing computers did is make it so that one purchaser can fan out directly to a million people instead of most of the purchasers each fanning out to three or four, who in turn fanned out to three or four more, eventually fanning out to a million people. That and perfect copies instead of adding a little generation-loss noise. The net effect is still basically the same.
If anything makes digital content worth less, it's the fact that the creators can make and distribute those copies for less (the eBook vs. print problem). More precisely, if we perceive that we are getting less for our money (no physical product), we expect it to cost much less because we know that it isn't costing them anything to produce each copy.
Untrue. It makes copies trivial to make. That does not mean that the copies have no inherent value. Canned spaghetti and meatballs is trivial to make for dinner. That doesn't mean someone who is starving won't be grateful for it.
Essentially, what you're arguing is that the supply is infinite, and therefore the value is zero. That's only true if everyone ignores copyright to provide that infinite supply. Among people who actually respect the rights of creators to profit from their works, the supply is not infinite—the legitimate supply is very much finite—and thus copies of the content still have value.
More precisely, your argument can be logically reduced to saying that because some percentage of people break the law anyway, the law isn't serving any purpose and should be abolished so that everyone can violate it. That's a pretty big stretch.
Less than 1% of titles published ever become popular. 99% get one production run and that's it. Yes, there are a few books with a long tail, but it's very unusual on a per-title basis, though not on a per-sale basis (a large chunk (> 1/4 of book-sales are for books without copyright). Don't you think copyright should be adjusted for the norm, rather than the exception?
Except that this is only true because printing was historically done up front. With modern print-on-demand, the number of printings becomes a non-issue. I think you'll find that a much higher percentage of books will have a long tail in the eBook publishing world.
BTW cheap publishing + distribution is an argument against long copyright. If the cost of publishing is lower, you need less of a reward to get someone to risk publishing a work.
No, actually it's the reverse.
Because people know that the cost is less, they will be willing to pay less. We're already seeing a lot of this with eBooks on Kindle (a staggering 20% of the top-selling books are under a buck apiece).
Those high production costs represented a barrier to entry that kept the number of authors down. The cheaper it becomes to produce and distribute, the more people will decide to produce and distribute a work, and thus the more diluted the pool of content will become. As a result, there will be orders of magnitude more pieces of content competing for the same dollars.
Combine those two factors, and I think you'll find that the cheaper your production and distribution costs, the longer it takes to make any significant amount of money on a work. And although it would technically fulfill the first part of copyright's purpose—encouraging people to create and to make those creations available—it would fail to fulfill the second part—providing a limited monopoly for a sufficient amount of time to monetize the work so that its creators do not starve to death.
Lots of people use youtube. Google could get massive numbers of people hopping mad at the MAFIAA if they spin it right.
They don't have to spin it at all. All Google must do to ensure that this bill never sees the light of day is to send one letter, signed by its CEO, to every single member of Congress that says:
This bill requires a level of administrative overhead that is infeasible, both technically and financially. Therefore, if you pass this bill, Google will be forced to shut down access to YouTube for all connections originating within the United States and its territories.
Then follow up with a phone call to Al Franken and ask him to leak the memo to the press. Boom. This bill is dead on arrival. No senator or representative wants to be one of the ones who voted (on public record) to kill YouTube.
I think you'll find that those funds go disproportionately to community colleges, whereas people's impression of tuition costs tends to be largely based on the cost of four-year universities. I could be wrong.
Not everyone has a goal at 15, not everyone has a passion.
Worse. Lots of people have goals and passions at that age that are counterproductive, whether it's focusing on all the wrong things (sports over academics, for example) or choosing a career path that's a dead end.
If I had gone with the career path that I'd laid out at 15, I'd still be working for $25,000 per year in a small-town TV station somewhere, living hand to mouth, and running my own production company on the side for a few grand of extra income each month.
College is more than an equalizer. It's a broadener. It exposes you to other possible avenues for your life. If you happen to get lucky and pick the right one while you're still in high school, great. The majority of people don't—even very smart people—because they simply have not had the exposure to a wide enough range of subjects to make an informed decision.
If I'd quit school early I could well have far more material wealth and a far better lifestyle but I could also be the guy who cleans one of your many, many swimming pools. I think the probability is skewed well towards the latter of those two options.
No, I expect the best to quit high school - it is a far worse time sink than college is.
That might have worked when computer companies were in their infancy. These days, you won't even get an interview if you didn't graduate high school. So basically, you're saying that you expect the best to jeopardize any chance of a career in pretty much any field in the hopes that maybe, just maybe that person will find the one company in a thousand that won't immediately slam the door in his or her face. No offense, but that's quite possibly the worst advice I've ever heard anyone give the youth of today, and I've heard some really bad advice over the years.
But I agree, it's difficult to pursue real math studies, or electronics, or physics, when some wank is telling you to make laps around the gym, or making you poke a football around for the benefit of the local merchants, or mis-explaining civics, the constitution, or giving you a watered down version of history.
Quite the opposite. Although I found high school to be moderately useful in terms of socializing, that was somewhat secondary. In high school, we had good English teachers who actually helped hone our writing skills. We had advanced math classes. We had advanced science classes. We learned foreign languages. We had musical ensembles and art. It was the first step towards broadening our areas of knowledge, followed by college, which took that to another level, offering an even wider range of courses in even more diverse areas.
It's the nine years leading up to high school that didn't teach me much. With the exception of junior high science, history, and algebra, you could probably condense everything you learn in grades K-8 into a year. The level of repetition is mind-boggling. A year on multiplication. A year on division. A year on fractions. Holy cow, that's tedious.
IMHO, one of the reasons I am well rounded is specifically because I didn't waste years in high school or college, but instead, actively chose learning paths that would accrue real, tangible benefits over time.
You can do that in college, too. You just have to be mature enough to do it. There are lots of great learning paths available in college. It's not the only way to do it, but it's a good way. Start by spending the money to take CLEP tests (and AP tests in high school) to get out of all the basic core classes. This allows you to focus on broadening your skills in the areas that you choose instead of the areas that someone else chooses. If you're in the honors program (and even if you aren't), take advantage of the lectures, etc. to learn about diverse subjects and cultures. And so on.
Then again, my view of college may have been skewed by having been in the honors program and having access to classes with my intellectual peers. It's quite possible that my opinion would have been much lower without that opportunity.
And I would add that most graduates (of anything) are not "well rounded", they are simply years behind the curve, educated to issues they really don't need to know, while being sadly misinformed about many others -- hence the average American's debt position, many misunderstandings of government, toxic nationalism, pitiful religious wankery, and so on.
Outside of maybe an honors political science class, those topics are usually not even covered in college. And most people won't go out of their way to learn about such esoteric subjects on their own. Thus, you would naturally expect people to be largely misinformed or underinformed about them. It has nothing to do with college or lack thereof and everything to do with the "I don't give a f*** about that" principle.:-) Maybe if you have a "current events" class, you might cover such things... but that would tend to cover the events that are current at that time, which hopefully won't be pressing is
Only on older satellites that don't need that power/fuel for a controlled deorbit. For most satellites, you'd ideally fire those thrusters at the right time to plant it in the ocean like they did with Mir, Skylab, etc.
AFAIK, current launch rules (at least in the U.S.) require that a satellite be designed to support a controlled deorbit unless the satellite is small enough to completely burn up on reentry. So eventually, this should cease to be a significant problem. It's just a shame that those rules weren't in place when these birds went up.
There really shouldn't be a need for a citation. There's a news story about state cuts to higher ed funding every few weeks. If you aren't aware that this has been happening, then you haven't been paying attention.
For example, here's an article about California's cuts for this budget year. This year marks the first year that University of California students pay more of their education cost than the state does.
When the UC system was created in the mid-1800s, it was designed to be tuition-free, with only minor incidental fees. (Indeed, the very definition of a public university is that most of the fees come not from tuition, but from the government.) Our country grew to technological superiority in large part because our government had the guts to make quality education free for everyone. It has only been within the past few decades that this has eroded.
Put another way, the folks equating the tuition increase with the availability of student loans have their cause and effect backwards. Those student loans became available because the cost of education had already risen from zero. If that were not the case—if a public education were nearly free as the designers of the system intended it to be—then loans would not have been necessary. Thus, clearly the loans were a reaction to the increasing tuition rather than its cause. Any insinuation to the contrary defies basic logic.
And every one of them could have been learned without college, and likely faster, in an environment where you were actually aimed at getting something concrete and useful accomplished.
Sure. Those things could have been learned on my own, in theory. I would strongly disagree with the "faster" part, however. To date, no one has found any means of learning that is as effective as having an actual flesh-and-bones professor there who says things like, "You all look puzzled. Maybe I should explain it a different way," who answers questions when things aren't completely clear, and who presents the material in small increments, giving you time for the information to settle in before giving you the next bit.
I can't emphasize the last part enough. The most important part of learning is not the presentation. It's the time in between. If you're trying to learn on the job in a work environment, you've got more pressing concerns than whether you fully grasped some subtlety of the material. And in five years, when you suddenly realize that those subtle points you failed to grasp caused a material error in your design that will now take two man years to fix, congratulations on learning yourself out of a job.
The fact of the matter is that people learn things better, more completely, when the learning is not driven by the desire to accomplish a particular task. Don't misunderstand me; having a series of small tasks to demonstrate some concept more concretely can provide additional motivation, and in many cases can give people additional insight and better understanding of the material. However, when that task becomes the primary motivation for learning (as is the case for workplace learning), the result almost invariably is that the learner learns exactly as much as is needed to get through the task, and no more. The result is invariably a lesser level of understanding.
The fact that you credit college for teaching you these things makes me ask: Why didn't you already know them???
If you honestly expect people to know that much stuff straight out of high school, then basically you're expecting every one of your employees to be complete nerds who have no extracurricular activities other than eating, breathing, sleeping, and coding. That's just not healthy, it's not normal, and I can't even fathom what kind of hellhole such a work environment would be like. Well-rounded people simply do not come out of high school with that level of understanding even today, and they sure as hell didn't fifteen years ago.
And right there you failed the job interview.
No, right there you failed the job interview. Even asking a question like that would result in me slamming the door in your face. It means that you are definitely not the sort of company that I would want to work for, as a company that wants only people who are so completely myopic about computing in the absence of all else cannot possibly survive. I'd give it three years. Tops.
It was possible for your parents and grandparents to do that because historically the states paid a large percentage of the cost of that education out of tax funds. Now that the states are paying a much smaller share of the cost of your education, that money has to come from somewhere, and by default, it comes from increased tuition. It's not the extra subsidies for the poor that brought the cost up, but rather the erosion of the subsidies for everyone else.
What programming theories did you learn in college that were applicable to a day to day job?
You're misunderstanding the purpose of college. The purpose of college is not to teach. The purpose of college is to provide an environment conducive to learning. If you're working while you're going to college, sure, you come out of it with a piece of paper, but you did not have the same opportunities to absorb new information that you would have had if you hadn't been trying to squeeze your college experience into the gaps between work shifts.
Case in point, the reason I have a job now can be tied directly to my extracurricular activities at college. Specifically, I was actively involved in programming mailing lists. I now work for the company that provided those lists, writing books about how to write software.
The easiest example I always see is source control. Most college grads have never used any type of source control management so this ends up being the first thing that has to be taught to a new grad.
Although I agree that colleges should probably teach this, you're misunderstanding the reason for doing so. The purpose of college is not to teach you technical skills. That's what a trade school is for. The reason people should learn a version control system (any version control system will do) is that it makes it easier to employ good coding practices without worrying about breaking something.
The reason colleges do not provide a broad background in the use of specific tools is that the tools change depending on your environment. I primarily use git. Your company might use Perforce. Another company might use RCS, CVS, Subversion, or any of a dozen others. Outside the context of teaching a more broadly applicable skill, knowing the details of a specific version control system is not likely to be helpful in the long run. Because the details vary widely from job to job, the right place to learn it is on the job.
By contrast, the big things I learned in college were good object-oriented-programming design models, database design and SQL, debugging, compiler design (I can't tell you how many parsers I've had to write, much to my amusement, thinking back at how certain I was that I would never need to write one), and a bit of security. Despite all of these ostensibly being well outside my job description, they've all been invaluable in doing my job.
It's not just the coursework, either. All that messing around on the campus UNIX box taught me shell scripting that eventually led me to Perl and PHP, which I've used on a number of occasions. And that foreign language links site I helped maintain taught me HTML, CSS, and CGI programming, which has saved my @$$ and those of the folks around me on many, many occasions. And the socket programming skills I picked up on the side while running an Internet "talker" has been invaluable as well.
College is not about learning basic coding skills. You can pick that up on your own. (I was already a passable coder by the time I entered college.) College is for providing the skills that turn a code monkey into an engineer, for providing enough time and resources for someone to learn outside the classroom, and for providing the opportunities that help students discover their own paths to meaningful careers after graduation. Every minute you spend during college doing menial work flipping burgers is a minute you could be spending doing something that you can actually learn from. And that is why college is so important—because everything you do has the potential to advance your future career someday—not just in the short term, but decades down the line.
I'm very acutely familiar with the idea behind patents. A patent covers a particular implementation. It does not cover all possible products that perform a particular task. If I have a patent on a pencil, that doesn't prevent you from getting a patent on and producing a pen.
Now that doesn't mean that I can't sue you for producing your pen, but it does mean that I should lose that suit. Of course, given that I also have a fair understanding of our judicial system, I'll acknowledge that this isn't guaranteed, but that doesn't mean such a suit isn't a violation of the intent and spirit of the patent system.
Two comments: first, tuition has grown far faster than inflation yet real estate, salaries, etc. have not. The implication is costs grew somewhere and we ought to be able to squeeze that cost back down.
I should point out that this is a useless metric. The primary reason for the increase in tuition is that the states have slashed their education spending. Thus, tuition is having to cover a progressively increasing amount of the operating costs of public universities. Similarly, Ivy league tuitions are increasing faster than inflation to keep out ahead of the state schools, as the cost of tuition plays a key role in their prestige.
So basically the argument comes down to whether it's fair for the cost of education to be distributed across the entire population or not. I would argue that the entire population benefits from a well-educated populace, and that although subsidies increase the cost of tuition by increasing availability, and thus increasing consumption, the assumption that this higher cost is bad is founded upon the flawed assumption that a good education is nonessential—a completely wrongheaded and dangerous mindset that threatens to dig our country even further into intellectual poverty. Allowed to continue unabated, eventually our nation will be so far behind the rest of the world that we'll be in an intellectual depression from which we can never recover.
Indeed, the sole reason that the dollars those students earn at their jobs are able to purchase as much as they do is that those dollars are built upon the increased education and overall value of the American worker. The money that the next generation earns will be worth more because of the money that this generation gets as subsidies, and on the whole, there is conservation of net wealth. Thus, the net effect of these subsidies is not truly taking money that could be used for other things, but rather represents a broad, general redistribution of wealth from those who amassed huge fortunes by standing on the intellectual shoulders of those who came before them to the people who have not yet had the opportunity to do so.
Now Republicans don't like that because they forget that with great power comes great responsibility. They forget that the rich did not amass their wealth on their own—that their wealth would not have been possible were it not for someone extending those handouts to them in one form or another, whether it was the construction of the roads that they used for transporting goods, the schools they attended, or the police that prevented looters from breaking into their bank and robbing them. Thus, they incorrectly assume that they should have no responsibility for continuing to pay a percentage of their income to support this once they have successfully become wealthy. Indeed, it is at that point that they owe the most back to the society that helped them get where they are today.
After a couple years, every university in the country will radically adjust their prices and cut waste in order to not cease to exist since no one will be able to afford the ridiculous cost anymore.
That's just laughable, and tells me that you have no freaking idea what's been going on in higher education for the past two decades. I've watched as the states have slashed and slashed the subsidies that they pay for in-state residents. As that budget shrinks, sure, they cut where they can, but any realistic cuts were made almost two decades ago back when they started slashing the subsidies. What remains are the unrealistic ones—the changes that would reduce the quality of the education you receive.
Educators aren't willing to compromise the quality of education to save a buck, and as a result, for the past several rounds of state subsidy cuts, every time the state has taken more money out, the cost of education has gone up proportionally. There are no more cuts that can usefully be made when most of the operating costs are teacher salaries and benefits (which are still usually below industry norms), and when the rest is going into building maintenance, which you can only defer for so long before it comes back to bite you.
Sure, in theory, you might be able to cut out some administrative positions, but the administrators are the ones in charge, and they'll never decide to cut themselves, which means that you cannot possibly achieve any cuts that do not gravely impact the quality of education unless you start by replacing all of the leadership from the top down. It's like trying to kill cancer by starving the patient. The cancer is still going to take all the energy it needs, so the only real effect is that the patient won't get the energy that he or she needs. You have to start by cutting it out, then go from there.
More to the point, nearly every single recent cut in government subsidies to higher education has resulted in a tuition increase. You'd have to be completely naïve to believe that the next such cut will miraculously cause tuition to drop. The only effect that cuts to federal student loans will have is that the poorest students will be unable to attend. That means that there will be fewer students paying tuition.
The problem is that students still have to be able to get all of the classes they need to graduate within any given four-year period. That means you'll still need roughly the same set of classes, which means that you can't cut faculty except possibly in certain general classes like freshman English composition (which are mostly taught by poorly paid part-time adjunct instructors anyway, and thus have almost no real impact on the bottom line).
Because, faculty have to get paid by the class/hour, not by the student count (the alternative would be absurd), this means that you'll have roughly the same total operating cost divided by fewer people paying those costs. In other words, guaranteed higher cost. Anyone who says otherwise is simply delusional.
Now I will admit that making college less affordable might cause improvements in the breadth of our K-12 education offerings to compensate, but to do so requires bringing in more people at that level, so you're really just shifting the costs around into a program where all the costs are borne by the state instead of only part of the cost, which clearly increases the use of public funds, not decreases it. Also, there are a lot more K-12 schools, so increasing the quality of education at that level is a lot more expensive than increasing the quality of education at the state college level.
I should emphasize that all of this is fairly basic math, coupled with a fairly basic understanding of the history of the program in question. It's downright scary that Ron Paul is so utterly clueless about the things he wants to cut and the effect that it will have, as that tells me that he hasn't bothered to do even a few minutes of actual research on the subject. That's the absolute last kind of person we need as our next President.
So what you're saying is that no one else is allowed to produce a Round-Up-resistant crop?
The only way to develop a resistant crop without genetic engineering is to hit your crop with Round-Up and see which plants die. Thus, experimentally killing off your crops is a valid way to develop a Round-Up-resistant strain. Different plants will have different levels of resistance. Cross-breed the plants that lived, and you'll get crops that are progressively more and more resistant.
In effect, if Round-Up won that battle, unless they proved that the farmer was aware that a neighbor was using a patented Round-Up-resistant strain, the court ruling effectively says that Monsanto has a right not only to their particular gene sequence, but every possible Round-Up-resistant strain, regardless of how it was derived. That's just not what the law says, so either the farmer's lawyers were incompetent or the judge was crooked. You pretty much can't have it any other way.
They go against child porn sites because they are immoral (at least from the perspective of the vast majority).
On the other hand, to play devil's advocate here, the primary purpose of a representative democracy—the government style that most of us in the western world hold dear—as opposed to a direct democracy is to prevent tyranny of the majority. The fact that something is seen as wrong by the majority does not inherently mean that something should be prevented, much less that it must be.
You're going to need a stronger argument than "the majority consider it immoral". The majority considered homosexuality immoral just a couple of decades ago. The majority considered having whites and blacks eat at the same table to be immoral not long before that. So to argue that attacking someone for immorality is okay in general requires arguing for segregation and gay bashing. Your criteria are way, way too loose here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that child porn is a good thing. I'm just saying that if you're going to argue that vigilanteism is acceptable, you need to come up with a much better argument than the presumption of harm to children. You need to prove that the people attacked by the vigilantes (including the users whose names were revealed) caused or planned to cause harm to children, at an absolute minimum, and that they were beyond the reach of legitimate law enforcement, and that not acting would have caused or greatly increased the risk of immediate harm.
The most common maintenance cost (your oil change) is basically a sunk cost. You have to get your oil changed periodically even if you don't drive the car. Unless you're driving an insane number of miles, chances are you're changing a couple of times per year, whether you drive it or not.
Many repair costs also have more to do with the age of the vehicle than anything else. Plastic parts get brittle with time, electronics fail as capacitors dry out, etc. Yes, some of it has to do with mileage, but there's a lot more that doesn't. The parts that wear out with use mostly fall into the "maintenance" category—belts, tires, brakes—but those aren't the bulk of the operating cost of a vehicle by any stretch of the imagination. I guess when you hit a couple of hundred thousand miles and your rings need to be replaced, maybe the mileage starts to be a major factor, but by that point, you're usually ready to junk it anyway.
Similarly, insurance costs usually have only a couple of tiers, in my experience, at least around here. It's usually below 7,500 miles per year, and above. So unless your change in driving habits happens to push you to one side of that threshold or the other, you're not going to save anything, hence the reason that I described car insurance as largely a sunk cost.
KindleGen (at least in the shipping version, v1.2) is great as long as you don't mind 90% of your CSS going away in ways that are utterly mind-blowingly awful looking.
When generating content for Kindle for my novel, I have to produce a whole separate set of HTML source content with dozens of differences between that and proper EPUB (including a fair number of tags that aren't even legal in EPUB, but are the only way to get KindleGen to behave).
The short list is that:
Right margins don't work.
Width and min-width CSS don't work (but the HTML width attribute does).
IIRC, padding doesn't work at all.
The blockquote tag only indents for a single paragraph unless you close and reopen it.
CSS class attributes with more than one class don't work. (Only the last one is used, IIRC.)
Most CSS selectors that contain multiple tags with some symbol in between them are incorrectly treated in such a way that the rule applies to both classes.
Font styles are completely nonexistent. You can't even do something as basic as specifying that parts of the content should be serif and parts should be sans-serif.
Basically, you should assume that you'll have to rewrite all your content to have exactly one CSS style for each paragraph or other block-level element, selected programmatically based on how you want it to behave. So if you want something to happen only on the first paragraph after a section heading in the appendices, you're going to end up with classes like " class='firstParagraphAfterSectionHeadingInAppendix' " or similar for those paragraphs.
I spent less than a day getting content working in a properly standards-compliant browser (including writing the code to translate it from XML), a couple more hours working around minor layout bugs on Nook, and around a week getting Kindle to look even remotely palatable. That's for somebody who writes parsers as part of his day job. I mean, don't get me wrong, I spent several weeks pounding on LaTeX for PDF output, so the Kindle experience was by no means the most horrible part of the process, but it was way up there.
Put bluntly, KindleGen isn't the answer. At best, it's the first 10% of the answer. The rest, you get to code yourself. That's why pretty much everybody I've ever encountered who has attempted to format an eBook for Kindle has pretty much come out the other side with a whole new vocabulary of swear words.:-D
Topaz isn't based on HTML. From what I've read, it basically consists of a series of glyphs and information about their placement on the page—more like PDF than HTML.
That's both technically true and so completely misleading that it is effectively a bald-faced lie. Here are some facts:
The "one or two exceptions" includes the U.S. multi-person dose of seasonal flu shots to this day (Source: CDC.
These days, about 43% of U.S. adults get the flu shot (source: USA Today)
I can't find any reputable source to indicate what percentage of people get their flu shots from a multi-dose (thimerosal-laden) container. However, several anti-vaccine sites say 90%, and I'm inclined to suspect that this is in the ballpark given that in many years of getting flu shots from multiple sources, I've never seen a single-dose container.
Thus, more than a third of U.S. adults get a shot containing thimerosal in any given year. That's about ninety million people. Admittedly, that's only about 2% of the adults on the planet, but again, that's 2% every year.
The CDC is working to try to eliminate thimerosal from the flu vaccine, but it hasn't happened yet, and probably won't happen for several more years (at least).
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to aiming, the linear velocity is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the angular velocity, a fact that anybody who has ever been involved in combat (or even anybody who has played just about any video game) can attest to.
Compare the following scenarios.
Scenario 1: You are standing fifty feet from a railroad track for a high speed train. You try to hit the engine with a baseball as it comes by at 150 miles per hour. You are unlikely to succeed.
Scenario 2: You are standing on the railroad track. You try to hit the engine as it comes straight at you at 150 miles per hour. A successful hit is almost inevitable... in more ways than one.... (Note: this scenario is inadvisable for obvious reasons.)
Indeed, you can trivially hit something that's coming straight at you (or nearly so) regardless of its speed—even if it is traveling at .9c, so long as you can see it in time to aim—because from a two-dimensional perspective, it is standing almost completely still, but getting bigger.
The same would be true for hitting an aircraft with a laser pointer. Standing beside the runway, it would be really hard. Standing at the end of the runway, it would be really easy. This isn't even basic high school physics. This is third-grade snowball fight physics.
I would think it should be corrected to "Languages that consider the quantity of whitespace to be syntactically significant need to die." Whitespace can be used as more than a token separator, particularly in strings and comments. Further, it is reasonable to distinguish between different visually distinct types of whitespace in some cases—treating a line break differently than a space, for example. However, the difference between one space and two should never result in a change in behavior, nor should the difference between two types of whitespace that both fall within the same directional class ever be taken into account (space versus tab, newline versus carriage return, etc.).
Curly braces also make it a heck of a lot easier to copy (or cut) and paste chunks of code. Just go to the opening curly brace and d%, and now you've just cut the entire block (ignoring any brace matching problems caused by braces in comments or strings). It's not nearly that easy without delimiters.
A.K.A. K's law.
No, that does not make them worth less, because you can't (legally) make the copies. Besides, it was always pretty darn easy to make copies. They were lower quality copies, but that didn't mean that folks weren't passing around analog copies of stuff on tape decades ago.
The people who were going to copy content from others have always done so. The only thing computers did is make it so that one purchaser can fan out directly to a million people instead of most of the purchasers each fanning out to three or four, who in turn fanned out to three or four more, eventually fanning out to a million people. That and perfect copies instead of adding a little generation-loss noise. The net effect is still basically the same.
If anything makes digital content worth less, it's the fact that the creators can make and distribute those copies for less (the eBook vs. print problem). More precisely, if we perceive that we are getting less for our money (no physical product), we expect it to cost much less because we know that it isn't costing them anything to produce each copy.
Will you take off every zig?
Untrue. It makes copies trivial to make. That does not mean that the copies have no inherent value. Canned spaghetti and meatballs is trivial to make for dinner. That doesn't mean someone who is starving won't be grateful for it.
Essentially, what you're arguing is that the supply is infinite, and therefore the value is zero. That's only true if everyone ignores copyright to provide that infinite supply. Among people who actually respect the rights of creators to profit from their works, the supply is not infinite—the legitimate supply is very much finite—and thus copies of the content still have value.
More precisely, your argument can be logically reduced to saying that because some percentage of people break the law anyway, the law isn't serving any purpose and should be abolished so that everyone can violate it. That's a pretty big stretch.
Except that this is only true because printing was historically done up front. With modern print-on-demand, the number of printings becomes a non-issue. I think you'll find that a much higher percentage of books will have a long tail in the eBook publishing world.
No, actually it's the reverse.
Combine those two factors, and I think you'll find that the cheaper your production and distribution costs, the longer it takes to make any significant amount of money on a work. And although it would technically fulfill the first part of copyright's purpose—encouraging people to create and to make those creations available—it would fail to fulfill the second part—providing a limited monopoly for a sufficient amount of time to monetize the work so that its creators do not starve to death.
They don't have to spin it at all. All Google must do to ensure that this bill never sees the light of day is to send one letter, signed by its CEO, to every single member of Congress that says:
Then follow up with a phone call to Al Franken and ask him to leak the memo to the press. Boom. This bill is dead on arrival. No senator or representative wants to be one of the ones who voted (on public record) to kill YouTube.
I think you'll find that those funds go disproportionately to community colleges, whereas people's impression of tuition costs tends to be largely based on the cost of four-year universities. I could be wrong.
Worse. Lots of people have goals and passions at that age that are counterproductive, whether it's focusing on all the wrong things (sports over academics, for example) or choosing a career path that's a dead end.
If I had gone with the career path that I'd laid out at 15, I'd still be working for $25,000 per year in a small-town TV station somewhere, living hand to mouth, and running my own production company on the side for a few grand of extra income each month.
College is more than an equalizer. It's a broadener. It exposes you to other possible avenues for your life. If you happen to get lucky and pick the right one while you're still in high school, great. The majority of people don't—even very smart people—because they simply have not had the exposure to a wide enough range of subjects to make an informed decision.
Yup.
That might have worked when computer companies were in their infancy. These days, you won't even get an interview if you didn't graduate high school. So basically, you're saying that you expect the best to jeopardize any chance of a career in pretty much any field in the hopes that maybe, just maybe that person will find the one company in a thousand that won't immediately slam the door in his or her face. No offense, but that's quite possibly the worst advice I've ever heard anyone give the youth of today, and I've heard some really bad advice over the years.
Quite the opposite. Although I found high school to be moderately useful in terms of socializing, that was somewhat secondary. In high school, we had good English teachers who actually helped hone our writing skills. We had advanced math classes. We had advanced science classes. We learned foreign languages. We had musical ensembles and art. It was the first step towards broadening our areas of knowledge, followed by college, which took that to another level, offering an even wider range of courses in even more diverse areas.
It's the nine years leading up to high school that didn't teach me much. With the exception of junior high science, history, and algebra, you could probably condense everything you learn in grades K-8 into a year. The level of repetition is mind-boggling. A year on multiplication. A year on division. A year on fractions. Holy cow, that's tedious.
You can do that in college, too. You just have to be mature enough to do it. There are lots of great learning paths available in college. It's not the only way to do it, but it's a good way. Start by spending the money to take CLEP tests (and AP tests in high school) to get out of all the basic core classes. This allows you to focus on broadening your skills in the areas that you choose instead of the areas that someone else chooses. If you're in the honors program (and even if you aren't), take advantage of the lectures, etc. to learn about diverse subjects and cultures. And so on.
Then again, my view of college may have been skewed by having been in the honors program and having access to classes with my intellectual peers. It's quite possible that my opinion would have been much lower without that opportunity.
Outside of maybe an honors political science class, those topics are usually not even covered in college. And most people won't go out of their way to learn about such esoteric subjects on their own. Thus, you would naturally expect people to be largely misinformed or underinformed about them. It has nothing to do with college or lack thereof and everything to do with the "I don't give a f*** about that" principle. :-) Maybe if you have a "current events" class, you might cover such things... but that would tend to cover the events that are current at that time, which hopefully won't be pressing is
Only on older satellites that don't need that power/fuel for a controlled deorbit. For most satellites, you'd ideally fire those thrusters at the right time to plant it in the ocean like they did with Mir, Skylab, etc.
AFAIK, current launch rules (at least in the U.S.) require that a satellite be designed to support a controlled deorbit unless the satellite is small enough to completely burn up on reentry. So eventually, this should cease to be a significant problem. It's just a shame that those rules weren't in place when these birds went up.
There really shouldn't be a need for a citation. There's a news story about state cuts to higher ed funding every few weeks. If you aren't aware that this has been happening, then you haven't been paying attention.
For example, here's an article about California's cuts for this budget year. This year marks the first year that University of California students pay more of their education cost than the state does.
When the UC system was created in the mid-1800s, it was designed to be tuition-free, with only minor incidental fees. (Indeed, the very definition of a public university is that most of the fees come not from tuition, but from the government.) Our country grew to technological superiority in large part because our government had the guts to make quality education free for everyone. It has only been within the past few decades that this has eroded.
Put another way, the folks equating the tuition increase with the availability of student loans have their cause and effect backwards. Those student loans became available because the cost of education had already risen from zero. If that were not the case—if a public education were nearly free as the designers of the system intended it to be—then loans would not have been necessary. Thus, clearly the loans were a reaction to the increasing tuition rather than its cause. Any insinuation to the contrary defies basic logic.
Sure. Those things could have been learned on my own, in theory. I would strongly disagree with the "faster" part, however. To date, no one has found any means of learning that is as effective as having an actual flesh-and-bones professor there who says things like, "You all look puzzled. Maybe I should explain it a different way," who answers questions when things aren't completely clear, and who presents the material in small increments, giving you time for the information to settle in before giving you the next bit.
I can't emphasize the last part enough. The most important part of learning is not the presentation. It's the time in between. If you're trying to learn on the job in a work environment, you've got more pressing concerns than whether you fully grasped some subtlety of the material. And in five years, when you suddenly realize that those subtle points you failed to grasp caused a material error in your design that will now take two man years to fix, congratulations on learning yourself out of a job.
The fact of the matter is that people learn things better, more completely, when the learning is not driven by the desire to accomplish a particular task. Don't misunderstand me; having a series of small tasks to demonstrate some concept more concretely can provide additional motivation, and in many cases can give people additional insight and better understanding of the material. However, when that task becomes the primary motivation for learning (as is the case for workplace learning), the result almost invariably is that the learner learns exactly as much as is needed to get through the task, and no more. The result is invariably a lesser level of understanding.
If you honestly expect people to know that much stuff straight out of high school, then basically you're expecting every one of your employees to be complete nerds who have no extracurricular activities other than eating, breathing, sleeping, and coding. That's just not healthy, it's not normal, and I can't even fathom what kind of hellhole such a work environment would be like. Well-rounded people simply do not come out of high school with that level of understanding even today, and they sure as hell didn't fifteen years ago.
No, right there you failed the job interview. Even asking a question like that would result in me slamming the door in your face. It means that you are definitely not the sort of company that I would want to work for, as a company that wants only people who are so completely myopic about computing in the absence of all else cannot possibly survive. I'd give it three years. Tops.
It was possible for your parents and grandparents to do that because historically the states paid a large percentage of the cost of that education out of tax funds. Now that the states are paying a much smaller share of the cost of your education, that money has to come from somewhere, and by default, it comes from increased tuition. It's not the extra subsidies for the poor that brought the cost up, but rather the erosion of the subsidies for everyone else.
You're misunderstanding the purpose of college. The purpose of college is not to teach. The purpose of college is to provide an environment conducive to learning. If you're working while you're going to college, sure, you come out of it with a piece of paper, but you did not have the same opportunities to absorb new information that you would have had if you hadn't been trying to squeeze your college experience into the gaps between work shifts.
Case in point, the reason I have a job now can be tied directly to my extracurricular activities at college. Specifically, I was actively involved in programming mailing lists. I now work for the company that provided those lists, writing books about how to write software.
Although I agree that colleges should probably teach this, you're misunderstanding the reason for doing so. The purpose of college is not to teach you technical skills. That's what a trade school is for. The reason people should learn a version control system (any version control system will do) is that it makes it easier to employ good coding practices without worrying about breaking something.
The reason colleges do not provide a broad background in the use of specific tools is that the tools change depending on your environment. I primarily use git. Your company might use Perforce. Another company might use RCS, CVS, Subversion, or any of a dozen others. Outside the context of teaching a more broadly applicable skill, knowing the details of a specific version control system is not likely to be helpful in the long run. Because the details vary widely from job to job, the right place to learn it is on the job.
By contrast, the big things I learned in college were good object-oriented-programming design models, database design and SQL, debugging, compiler design (I can't tell you how many parsers I've had to write, much to my amusement, thinking back at how certain I was that I would never need to write one), and a bit of security. Despite all of these ostensibly being well outside my job description, they've all been invaluable in doing my job.
It's not just the coursework, either. All that messing around on the campus UNIX box taught me shell scripting that eventually led me to Perl and PHP, which I've used on a number of occasions. And that foreign language links site I helped maintain taught me HTML, CSS, and CGI programming, which has saved my @$$ and those of the folks around me on many, many occasions. And the socket programming skills I picked up on the side while running an Internet "talker" has been invaluable as well.
College is not about learning basic coding skills. You can pick that up on your own. (I was already a passable coder by the time I entered college.) College is for providing the skills that turn a code monkey into an engineer, for providing enough time and resources for someone to learn outside the classroom, and for providing the opportunities that help students discover their own paths to meaningful careers after graduation. Every minute you spend during college doing menial work flipping burgers is a minute you could be spending doing something that you can actually learn from. And that is why college is so important—because everything you do has the potential to advance your future career someday—not just in the short term, but decades down the line.
I'm very acutely familiar with the idea behind patents. A patent covers a particular implementation. It does not cover all possible products that perform a particular task. If I have a patent on a pencil, that doesn't prevent you from getting a patent on and producing a pen.
Now that doesn't mean that I can't sue you for producing your pen, but it does mean that I should lose that suit. Of course, given that I also have a fair understanding of our judicial system, I'll acknowledge that this isn't guaranteed, but that doesn't mean such a suit isn't a violation of the intent and spirit of the patent system.
I should point out that this is a useless metric. The primary reason for the increase in tuition is that the states have slashed their education spending. Thus, tuition is having to cover a progressively increasing amount of the operating costs of public universities. Similarly, Ivy league tuitions are increasing faster than inflation to keep out ahead of the state schools, as the cost of tuition plays a key role in their prestige.
So basically the argument comes down to whether it's fair for the cost of education to be distributed across the entire population or not. I would argue that the entire population benefits from a well-educated populace, and that although subsidies increase the cost of tuition by increasing availability, and thus increasing consumption, the assumption that this higher cost is bad is founded upon the flawed assumption that a good education is nonessential—a completely wrongheaded and dangerous mindset that threatens to dig our country even further into intellectual poverty. Allowed to continue unabated, eventually our nation will be so far behind the rest of the world that we'll be in an intellectual depression from which we can never recover.
Indeed, the sole reason that the dollars those students earn at their jobs are able to purchase as much as they do is that those dollars are built upon the increased education and overall value of the American worker. The money that the next generation earns will be worth more because of the money that this generation gets as subsidies, and on the whole, there is conservation of net wealth. Thus, the net effect of these subsidies is not truly taking money that could be used for other things, but rather represents a broad, general redistribution of wealth from those who amassed huge fortunes by standing on the intellectual shoulders of those who came before them to the people who have not yet had the opportunity to do so.
Now Republicans don't like that because they forget that with great power comes great responsibility. They forget that the rich did not amass their wealth on their own—that their wealth would not have been possible were it not for someone extending those handouts to them in one form or another, whether it was the construction of the roads that they used for transporting goods, the schools they attended, or the police that prevented looters from breaking into their bank and robbing them. Thus, they incorrectly assume that they should have no responsibility for continuing to pay a percentage of their income to support this once they have successfully become wealthy. Indeed, it is at that point that they owe the most back to the society that helped them get where they are today.
That's just laughable, and tells me that you have no freaking idea what's been going on in higher education for the past two decades. I've watched as the states have slashed and slashed the subsidies that they pay for in-state residents. As that budget shrinks, sure, they cut where they can, but any realistic cuts were made almost two decades ago back when they started slashing the subsidies. What remains are the unrealistic ones—the changes that would reduce the quality of the education you receive.
Educators aren't willing to compromise the quality of education to save a buck, and as a result, for the past several rounds of state subsidy cuts, every time the state has taken more money out, the cost of education has gone up proportionally. There are no more cuts that can usefully be made when most of the operating costs are teacher salaries and benefits (which are still usually below industry norms), and when the rest is going into building maintenance, which you can only defer for so long before it comes back to bite you.
Sure, in theory, you might be able to cut out some administrative positions, but the administrators are the ones in charge, and they'll never decide to cut themselves, which means that you cannot possibly achieve any cuts that do not gravely impact the quality of education unless you start by replacing all of the leadership from the top down. It's like trying to kill cancer by starving the patient. The cancer is still going to take all the energy it needs, so the only real effect is that the patient won't get the energy that he or she needs. You have to start by cutting it out, then go from there.
More to the point, nearly every single recent cut in government subsidies to higher education has resulted in a tuition increase. You'd have to be completely naïve to believe that the next such cut will miraculously cause tuition to drop. The only effect that cuts to federal student loans will have is that the poorest students will be unable to attend. That means that there will be fewer students paying tuition.
The problem is that students still have to be able to get all of the classes they need to graduate within any given four-year period. That means you'll still need roughly the same set of classes, which means that you can't cut faculty except possibly in certain general classes like freshman English composition (which are mostly taught by poorly paid part-time adjunct instructors anyway, and thus have almost no real impact on the bottom line).
Because, faculty have to get paid by the class/hour, not by the student count (the alternative would be absurd), this means that you'll have roughly the same total operating cost divided by fewer people paying those costs. In other words, guaranteed higher cost. Anyone who says otherwise is simply delusional.
Now I will admit that making college less affordable might cause improvements in the breadth of our K-12 education offerings to compensate, but to do so requires bringing in more people at that level, so you're really just shifting the costs around into a program where all the costs are borne by the state instead of only part of the cost, which clearly increases the use of public funds, not decreases it. Also, there are a lot more K-12 schools, so increasing the quality of education at that level is a lot more expensive than increasing the quality of education at the state college level.
I should emphasize that all of this is fairly basic math, coupled with a fairly basic understanding of the history of the program in question. It's downright scary that Ron Paul is so utterly clueless about the things he wants to cut and the effect that it will have, as that tells me that he hasn't bothered to do even a few minutes of actual research on the subject. That's the absolute last kind of person we need as our next President.
So what you're saying is that no one else is allowed to produce a Round-Up-resistant crop?
The only way to develop a resistant crop without genetic engineering is to hit your crop with Round-Up and see which plants die. Thus, experimentally killing off your crops is a valid way to develop a Round-Up-resistant strain. Different plants will have different levels of resistance. Cross-breed the plants that lived, and you'll get crops that are progressively more and more resistant.
In effect, if Round-Up won that battle, unless they proved that the farmer was aware that a neighbor was using a patented Round-Up-resistant strain, the court ruling effectively says that Monsanto has a right not only to their particular gene sequence, but every possible Round-Up-resistant strain, regardless of how it was derived. That's just not what the law says, so either the farmer's lawyers were incompetent or the judge was crooked. You pretty much can't have it any other way.
On the other hand, to play devil's advocate here, the primary purpose of a representative democracy—the government style that most of us in the western world hold dear—as opposed to a direct democracy is to prevent tyranny of the majority. The fact that something is seen as wrong by the majority does not inherently mean that something should be prevented, much less that it must be.
You're going to need a stronger argument than "the majority consider it immoral". The majority considered homosexuality immoral just a couple of decades ago. The majority considered having whites and blacks eat at the same table to be immoral not long before that. So to argue that attacking someone for immorality is okay in general requires arguing for segregation and gay bashing. Your criteria are way, way too loose here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that child porn is a good thing. I'm just saying that if you're going to argue that vigilanteism is acceptable, you need to come up with a much better argument than the presumption of harm to children. You need to prove that the people attacked by the vigilantes (including the users whose names were revealed) caused or planned to cause harm to children, at an absolute minimum, and that they were beyond the reach of legitimate law enforcement, and that not acting would have caused or greatly increased the risk of immediate harm.
The most common maintenance cost (your oil change) is basically a sunk cost. You have to get your oil changed periodically even if you don't drive the car. Unless you're driving an insane number of miles, chances are you're changing a couple of times per year, whether you drive it or not.
Many repair costs also have more to do with the age of the vehicle than anything else. Plastic parts get brittle with time, electronics fail as capacitors dry out, etc. Yes, some of it has to do with mileage, but there's a lot more that doesn't. The parts that wear out with use mostly fall into the "maintenance" category—belts, tires, brakes—but those aren't the bulk of the operating cost of a vehicle by any stretch of the imagination. I guess when you hit a couple of hundred thousand miles and your rings need to be replaced, maybe the mileage starts to be a major factor, but by that point, you're usually ready to junk it anyway.
Similarly, insurance costs usually have only a couple of tiers, in my experience, at least around here. It's usually below 7,500 miles per year, and above. So unless your change in driving habits happens to push you to one side of that threshold or the other, you're not going to save anything, hence the reason that I described car insurance as largely a sunk cost.
KindleGen (at least in the shipping version, v1.2) is great as long as you don't mind 90% of your CSS going away in ways that are utterly mind-blowingly awful looking.
When generating content for Kindle for my novel, I have to produce a whole separate set of HTML source content with dozens of differences between that and proper EPUB (including a fair number of tags that aren't even legal in EPUB, but are the only way to get KindleGen to behave).
The short list is that:
Basically, you should assume that you'll have to rewrite all your content to have exactly one CSS style for each paragraph or other block-level element, selected programmatically based on how you want it to behave. So if you want something to happen only on the first paragraph after a section heading in the appendices, you're going to end up with classes like " class='firstParagraphAfterSectionHeadingInAppendix' " or similar for those paragraphs.
I spent less than a day getting content working in a properly standards-compliant browser (including writing the code to translate it from XML), a couple more hours working around minor layout bugs on Nook, and around a week getting Kindle to look even remotely palatable. That's for somebody who writes parsers as part of his day job. I mean, don't get me wrong, I spent several weeks pounding on LaTeX for PDF output, so the Kindle experience was by no means the most horrible part of the process, but it was way up there.
Put bluntly, KindleGen isn't the answer. At best, it's the first 10% of the answer. The rest, you get to code yourself. That's why pretty much everybody I've ever encountered who has attempted to format an eBook for Kindle has pretty much come out the other side with a whole new vocabulary of swear words. :-D
Topaz isn't based on HTML. From what I've read, it basically consists of a series of glyphs and information about their placement on the page—more like PDF than HTML.
That's both technically true and so completely misleading that it is effectively a bald-faced lie. Here are some facts:
Thus, more than a third of U.S. adults get a shot containing thimerosal in any given year. That's about ninety million people. Admittedly, that's only about 2% of the adults on the planet, but again, that's 2% every year.
The CDC is working to try to eliminate thimerosal from the flu vaccine, but it hasn't happened yet, and probably won't happen for several more years (at least).