It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.
In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
Why? Why does an attempted description have to state the source? This is analogous to someone saying I'm a 6'2" white guy, and replying, you don't know anything until you can tell me where he was born. Who cares? You aren't trying to describe my home town but my apearance.
As for a closed system, I'm not convinced that such a proof is possible or necessary. After all, how do you prove that two lines are in a plane? You take the dot product of them with the normal vector of the plane in question. Similarly it might be true that in order to prove our laws/find the source of them, you'd have to be able to construct something out side of them to compare them to. Otherwise at best you get a local view of things. And say you can prove the cause of them, what does it matter? Unless knowing the source of the laws allows you to get exact laws (eg, you know for certainty that the God of the bible exists and you can go to the bible for all answers), you still have to measure, do experiments etc, to find out what the laws are. In application, nothing might change too, because even if you know we are part of a multi-verse, the only laws that would be useful to us are the ones that are true in our local universe. Others might be interesting academically, but aren't necessary practically (by definition there is no way to pass between universes in a multiverse).
As for the whole faith because you assume that the universe can be explained rationally bit. It is similar to the reasoning that you are better off believing in God because if you are wrong you loose nothing but if you are right you gain everything (Pascal's wager). If scientists are wrong, then the universe is unordered and their search will be futile. But if they are right, then they have the chance to know how things work, and perhaps find useful stuff along the way. Ever here the saying "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different outcome"? This is that in reverse. It is only rational to continue to do the same thing you've done in the past if you liked the outcome the first time (in this case gained rational explanations of the things you observed).
I can have my own "patch Tuesday" every bloody week if I want. And you can live in the test lab for the entire month, because we all know you don't have any software to deploy/hardware to fix etc.
If you had proper testing procedures in place you'd know whether something would break or not and you wouldn't have to roll back. Not really an option in my case. I run a cancer centre's IT, we are linked to a hospital and they push the patches down (and have senior management rubber stamp the policy). At best, I can open a Sev 1 with them and tell them what broke and get them to remove it.
Also not a real option at all for a timely patching of systems. We have over 1100 software programs installed in the centre alone, and we are only ~1/5th the size of the hospital. Some of our users develop their own software (PhD's in physics) as well. There simply isn't time to see if each app works after a patch before deploying it, and the only real way for us to get access to the apps is to have it deployed. We have a standard image with windows and office on it, but other than that, some software requires different graphics cards, some requires you only have.Net 1 installed, while other apps need.Net 3 to work, some vendors will only let you run the app on a particular workstation model (FDA) etc. Our test lab would be the nearly the size of the hospital to have all the configurations out there.
The larger apps get tested before the push (PACS, scheduling, clinical assessment), but other than that the damage would be localized for the most part and/or relatively non-critical.
True you can't compare a new OS to an old OS. Vista to OS 10.4 or 10.5 should be reasonibly fair. As people have already said there is a bunch of open source stuff in the OS that Apple doesn't control, however, they chose to include it in their product so IMHO they own the bugs (if you don't like it then code your own functionality, or let the end user download it).
Microsoft has come up with the idea of "Patch Tuesday" to control the update process. While your systems might be vulnerable for an extra few days (30 at most in a worst case), you also gain better control over the scheduling of staff to test and deploy the patches. You don't have to go to their website every morning to see if something came out (or have some service that does, a la auto update or what ships with linux distros). Is it better? Well for the security paranoid, no. However, being an IT manager myself, I can appreciate a company trying to make things predicable as much as possible for me. If my site has autoupdate enabled, and things stop working the day after patch Tuesday, the first thing I'll do is roll back a box to the day before and see if things start working again. If so, push the roll back to everyone, then hit the test servers/workstations, and localize the patch problems, to the specific patch/app combo that is the issue. Much, much better than having random crap pushed at random times.
Interesting, it was recently that they added parallel support, around version 7.0 (currently at 7.5), anyways, any references to parallel support I've seen always used macro calls to tell it that that is the case. Perhaps some of the API's are core aware. Stuff like linear algebra routines should be (as they are stolen from LAPACK anyways). A lot of code people might thing is parallel because of the way that you call it, but that isn't necessarily the case. eg. x(1:10,:) = y (1:10,:) or something similar.
Matlab isn't that smart, you still have to tell it that the for loop is parallizable for example. I might be wrong but I don't think Java or C# do either. Their frameworks/VM's supply API's to do multi-threading you simply call into them for the support that you need. C has had pthreads for a long time (since it was standardized?), for some reason the C++ committee's never agreed on an implementation.
There is a great talk by Bjarne Stroustrup (http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/C++0x%20-%20An%20Overview.html) about the new version of C++ coming out and some of the difficulties getting things added. Essentially, if a new feature will only help 100,000 developers, it isn't important enough to be implemented. With such a huge developer community all the "little" things get left for non-standard API implementations, only big, almost everyone will find useful features get added. That is probably why this version or the next of C++ probably will get a standard tread library, because almost everyone has access to a multicore system. Oh yeah, also, and it sucks, anyone with a few thousand dollars to waste can get added to the committee, but most people don't care enough to go get their feature implemented for that much money (you also have the travel/time off to attend the meetings) except big business, so guess who runs the show (I don't expect anyone to be suprised).
The linked to wikipedia article only mentions trademarks. Also it says that the claimant has to prove that "the trademark owner's mark is distinctive or famous". Maybe they could prove the distinctive part, but by definition a small personal business is very rarely famous. What is distinctive anyways? I have a friend that since he was a kid has owned a software company called Ibycus Software. Is a greek mythology character "distinctive" enough? Surely other people have thought to use this name, maybe not in software but still.
People that do "cyber squatting" in this manner are similar to pawn shop brokers IMHO. You couldn't pay the bills to keep the lights on, they moved in on the name, and if you want your stuff back you better pay up. If you don't like it pay your bills. Bare in mind too that the squatter does take a risk too if the name is a small enough niche then the market to sell it to is small. The one company that has an interest in the domain name has just gone out of business, not exactly a risk free investment IMHO.
With a basic blackberry "sort of". You can set it so that high priority emails cause your phone to beep or vibrate, but there isn't any distinguishing between the sources of calls, at least with mine. A lot of the stuff you ask for would be nice. You do have a bunch of profiles to choose from (and they are editable), so assuming you remember to change the profile when going to a meeting you can have it so it will only vibrate, or will be silent or whatever.
At least at my work I get very few high priority emails (~1 a week), so if you were to let it be known that if they really need to get ahold of you during a meeting to send a high priority email then you could have that set to vibrate or ring.
As for my two cents about the parent post: I don't mind my blackberry. I'm the sole IT guy for a cancer centre and I'd rather know somethings blown up than get into work and find out patients haven't been being treated because a system was down. Also, I can often be out of the office working with an individual PC when something acts up, again better to be able to get right on it then have everyone else not be able to work because I'm tinkering with something. My boss is very leniant and respectful of my time and worth, if I spend an hour answering emails the night before I can show up later the next day or take it as over time, or paid 1.5 time live. No questions asked.
Your right with the acceleration math. I'm not sure if planes slow down at anywhere near the rate that they takeoff at. Now probably a big part of that is getting the plane of the ground quicker = smaller runways, but I wonder if there is a physical limitation too? Eg. the engine can't thrust backwards, so you have to use drag, but perhaps the planes wings and control surfaces aren't build to handle the 1.25 the planes weight safely (1 for gravity, 0.25 for the acceleration factor), especially since the 0.25 would mostly be against control surfaces.
Heat, exactly, at 5+ mach you are at approximately the re-entry speed of the space shuttle (once it has hit the "real atmosphere) so you need to be built like one to survive the heat.
Also, no doubt time will be saved for long flights, but turning a 2hr hop into a 10 min hop really wouldn't be that useful. You still have to slow down on both sides (which should take considerably longer with a faster plane) wait in turn for a position to take off and land, and have all the normal flight overhead of getting there early and getting your luggage and stuff. That is what did the Concord in, it just simply wasn't worth halfing your flight time which translates into about a 20% savings for short flights, at a price several times that of a normal plane.
Assuming it could be made affordable, it could cause problems too. If there was less time involved in flying the amount of travel being done (especially for business) could drastically increase. Our airports can barely handle the load they currently have, so if the airplane was available in large numbers, it could still be years before the infrastructure would be available to support it.
They'd think when they monitor you format your harddrive in a couple weeks, lol.
Seriously though, your voice might get heard more if they see the problems you have with the product. Installing a VM system and spending all day using the distro of your choice probably would send a strong message.
There is huge extensiblity features in VS. Everything that VS does is available as an API that you can develop to and plugin to VS. There is over 650 companies making there own compilers that plug into VS, some complete with syntax highlighting and IntelliSense. Your right about the idea of caching the comments, probably doable as you can append to that file as you code more so it stays current.
Emacs is my editor of choice on a UNIX or Linux environment, but I still like to call the compiler from command line (not sure why, just the way I do things:).
My thought exactly. Lets assume they mean more of a society science, or social science in that the society is contributing to science. I'm sorry all you SETI@home loving people but it isn't "citizen science" in the sense that you have a claim on the science. You didn't help develop the algorithms, test the model etc etc. You are nothing but someone donating a high powered calculator. The calculator has no claim on the scientific results, nor do you.
That said, you can feel good that you have contributed something akin to donating to cancer research, but you have no claim on the science itself, other than in a "made possible by" kind of way.
I've done computational physics work as an undergrad, about 90% of the time was programming, only about 10% of the time was physics (actually seeing if the computational results matched what theory predicts, formulating models etc). I was one of the researchers and I'd still say I had little claim on scientific inovation (though I'm primary author on several publications). It is kind of the nature of the problems I guess, interesting problems require so much computing power that most of your time is spent waiting for data. With more resources available most researchers will end up modelling bigger problems and still will be waiting long periods of time for data.
Hmm more mutations surviving. Thanks to healthcare that is the case. We are simpily better able to keep someone alive, and perhaps care more than in the past about the rights of the deformed/abnormal. Not sure if it helps the species to allow in many cases the weak to use more resources than the average strong get but mah, I guess that is what I'd do if it was my kid.
I think MS would probably have a better time with it, presumably they already know how to code "freeze panes", and they already have the concept of regions in their IDE. The problem is doing stuff like this dynamically hoggs a lot of resources. I hear people gripe about how long VS takes to load, but when you think about it, it is pulling your code out of source control, loading a GUI viewer and several text pages, scanning all the referenced code to fill in IntelliSense, etc etc, it isn't as simple as loading it in emacs, so there is an overhead. VS is a big beast but it gets the job done (I find it hard to live without IntelliSense now, though I can hack comfortably in VI emacs or even notepad for a couple thousand lines without too much trouble (assuming I'm not interfacing with a bunch of other peoples code that I really could use the help on).
Wouldn't it be nice if there was an IDE that would allow you to turn on and off comments? Sort of like VS's regions. It would be nice if you had options like, no comments, all comments, only header comments, etc. I agree sometimes you need a lot of comments because the code is doing something really isoteric, and sometimes you want the comments out of the way so you can fit the block on your screen rather than having to remember where you are in the code.
Yet another interesting feature I'd like in an IDE. Something similar to Excel's freeze panes but dynamic. So it fallows the start of the block, so at the top of the screen you'll have:
if (blah == run_some_crazy_spagetti) {
It would make my life so much easier. The closest think I've seen is emacs status bar that will show }// if (blah). I think it makes more sense for the user to look in the intuitive direction (up) for the help on what block they are in not, up and if they don't see it then down.
Do you think MS is the only company to do things like this? Heck the media industry has been signing exclusive contracts with artists for several decades now. MS has bet big on the HD-DVD format and doesn't want to be stuck with their console and their download services being "obsoleted" (not really the term because both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are current gen technologies, but you get the picture). If your Coke you sign exclusive contracts with restuarants so they don't serve Pepsi, if your Ford you sign exclusive contracts with Dealerships so they don't sell new GM's too, etc etc.
Apparently the minimum penalty is $750 and max is 125k per song, ~9k is pretty good by those options. The problem is calculating actual damages, they are somewhere between 0 and a lot:) If there is already 1k people sharing a file, you adding your copy to the share pool probably doesn't effect the outcome, those wanting an illegial copy can already get one, and at a fast download rate. If you are the first person to share, then you are making available something that wasn't before, so one could argue each copy that is available after that is because of you and say a legal download is.99 cents, then the calculation is simple for what your damages are. The problem is multiple people could rip the song and start sharing it, whos to say you are the source? I guess the bottom line is, if you don't want to risk being sued, then purchase your music legally and don't file share it.
Actually it depends how close you are to the antenna. Inverse square only applies for point charge/currents. For an infinite wire (which an attenna is approximately if you are close enough to it), the field strength actually goes as 1/r not 1/r^2. Still as you say wifi isn't that close to your head usually, and is about 1/10th the output anyways.
Exactly. I own several hundred dollars worth of tech books. I keep them in my office for reference, and to loan coworkers if they need it for their project. Without an assigned space your stuff at best won't be readily accessible, unless you move it every day, and at worst won't be safe.
Why does a $10/hr factory worker get "plenty of space" to work, and a $50/hr techie get a little pidgeon hole where they are uncomfortable all day. I refuse to work for a company that won't give me an office. I need space, and need to be able to play my music or use my phone on speaker, and I need to be left alone, or my work day will be unproductive. You can either spend 5k a year paying for space for me, or spend 50k a year on salary where I wasn't working at 100% you choose:)
Good for you, glad things worked out well for you. Most people should be able to afford insurance, but some people will be born uninsurable. Case in point my mother, a bunch of medical issues, that not only required a half dozen surguries, but has kept her out of work for about 3/4 of her "working" life. Among other things, she is mostly deaf, kind of makes it hard to learn, or do any of even the typical work from home stuff. Yeah, get a computer and learn works for you, but not everyone is either intelligent enough (at least in that way), or lucky enough to have had their problems when the internet/elearning was an option.
Would you rather the poor person acquire the money illegally? You might not have made any mistakes in your life, but I know a lot of people that have had periods where they screwed up, got addicted to a drug, or teenage pregnancy etc etc, and wouldn't have been able to pay for insurance for that period. They wouldn't be insurable after the fact, and literally could have been forced down the road of finding illegal means to get themselves treated. I've never stole in my life, but if I was sick and going to die if I didn't get 10k (and actually was still physically able to do it), damn right I'd car jack you for the money.
Anyways, would you have them die rather than inconvience the rich to assist them with their treatment? How much is the poor person that gets healthy and starts being able to be a productive citizen (and pay taxes) worth? I suspect their taxes over the remainder of their life time on the average will be greater than the cost of the treatment. Socialized healthcare removes the dramatic effects of a stupid choice, or dumb luck from ruining or ending lives.
Also, bare in mind that even though your insurance policy says you are covered in case of X, that doesn't mean they won't find a way to deny your claim if X will cost them more to treat than to go to court if you sue. Think of all the bureaucracy needed in an insurance based society, you have people selling you the insurance, you have the claims guys, you have all the business analysts and stuff that try to make the clinics profitable. You have all these professial and highly educated people focused on the production of money rather than the treatment of the health problems. While government has its wastes, rarely will they blow as much money as a corporation will on an ad compaign for new business for example.
That's funny, neither do USians that chose to buy health insurance. If you choose not to buy health insurance that is "your" choice. I believe in freedom of choice unlike most of the people that use that tag line. The problem is not everyone can afford health insurance. Or say you can now but are out of work for 6 months. Your payments have lapsed and in the mean time you got diagnosed with something, you'll end up hearing "sorry we don't want you back unless you pay X" or "we don't want you back at any rate".
Also, the poor tend to be much more likely to get sick, and these are the same ones that can't afford health insurance. In the US style system you end up with the HMO determining where you get treated. Their doctors have incentives to keep the insurance companies costs down, if for no other reason than job security, but often because they get incentives for low claim rates. In a social healthcare system, the doctor determines the treatment needed, the patient gets treated and all tax payers cover the cost of the treatment. Hence you will find very few people in other first world countries with untreated illnesses. The one exception, at least here in Ontario, is for some stupid reason dental care isn't covered under health insurance, so sometimes people with bad teeth will suffer threw it because they can't afford to get it fixed.
While he does a bit of sensationalizing, you should see Micheal Moore's Sicko. No the rest of the developed world doesn't suffer from worst healthcare, the US is in the 30's on the top countries for healthcare. Every other first world country is ahead, and a bunch of 2nd and 3rd world countries too. This is straight from the UN.
Healthcare workers get paid pretty well in these countries, the thing is cost isn't the deciding factor before treatment is given, the patient doesn't see the bill so they aren't going to have to chose between their house and their health.
Stuff like that comes up in family history usually. If someone has it in your family history, then the insurance company requests further info/tests before they will insure you. The insurance company I worked for only required a saliva sample to be sent back with the application, they claimed they could screen for most major diseases from that, not sure if they were doing genetic, or just looking for abnormal things (like you say your a non-smoker but you have smoke in your saliva kind of things).
Insurance applications, and possibly governing laws would have to change for the information to be used. I seem to recall in my life license course that it wasn't an allowed question. All the documents I've seen stated to effect "have you been diagnosed with" followed by several pages of diseases, they might even have a catch all, or some other serious desease? But they can't say "are you a high risk of developing...", that is what the physical and the family history questions are for, and bottom line is that is why they hire actuaries, they can tell you if you are more or less likely to go mental and jump off a bridge if you are native living in Texas, or chinese living in Alaska. You can have all the genes for altmeizers but you can still answer no honestly, because you haven't been diagnosed with it yet. Bare in mind too, a disposition to something doesn't mean it will ever express itself, also you can have a disease but if you have a second condition that will kill you sooner who cares?
I work in healthcare and see patients fairly regularly that are say 87 with serious lung and heart problems, and they also have a slow growing tumor, the end result is if the doctor thinks you have 1 year to live due to the heart condition, and it will take 4 years for you to die of the tumor, they'll tell you so, and the cancer treatment will be handled as a low priority optional procedure, not a radical, we are trying to save this persons life treatment. There is a lot of reasons a patient might say no to the treatment, etc. it will cause complications but they aren't currently in pain from the cancer, or they want to travel and don't want to be stuck going in and out of a hospital for a few weeks, I guess in the US you could add the cost of the procedure, but in the rest of the developed world that isn't an issue.
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In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
Why? Why does an attempted description have to state the source? This is analogous to someone saying I'm a 6'2" white guy, and replying, you don't know anything until you can tell me where he was born. Who cares? You aren't trying to describe my home town but my apearance.As for a closed system, I'm not convinced that such a proof is possible or necessary. After all, how do you prove that two lines are in a plane? You take the dot product of them with the normal vector of the plane in question. Similarly it might be true that in order to prove our laws/find the source of them, you'd have to be able to construct something out side of them to compare them to. Otherwise at best you get a local view of things. And say you can prove the cause of them, what does it matter? Unless knowing the source of the laws allows you to get exact laws (eg, you know for certainty that the God of the bible exists and you can go to the bible for all answers), you still have to measure, do experiments etc, to find out what the laws are. In application, nothing might change too, because even if you know we are part of a multi-verse, the only laws that would be useful to us are the ones that are true in our local universe. Others might be interesting academically, but aren't necessary practically (by definition there is no way to pass between universes in a multiverse).
As for the whole faith because you assume that the universe can be explained rationally bit. It is similar to the reasoning that you are better off believing in God because if you are wrong you loose nothing but if you are right you gain everything (Pascal's wager). If scientists are wrong, then the universe is unordered and their search will be futile. But if they are right, then they have the chance to know how things work, and perhaps find useful stuff along the way. Ever here the saying "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different outcome"? This is that in reverse. It is only rational to continue to do the same thing you've done in the past if you liked the outcome the first time (in this case gained rational explanations of the things you observed).
Also not a real option at all for a timely patching of systems. We have over 1100 software programs installed in the centre alone, and we are only ~1/5th the size of the hospital. Some of our users develop their own software (PhD's in physics) as well. There simply isn't time to see if each app works after a patch before deploying it, and the only real way for us to get access to the apps is to have it deployed. We have a standard image with windows and office on it, but other than that, some software requires different graphics cards, some requires you only have .Net 1 installed, while other apps need .Net 3 to work, some vendors will only let you run the app on a particular workstation model (FDA) etc. Our test lab would be the nearly the size of the hospital to have all the configurations out there.
The larger apps get tested before the push (PACS, scheduling, clinical assessment), but other than that the damage would be localized for the most part and/or relatively non-critical.
Microsoft has come up with the idea of "Patch Tuesday" to control the update process. While your systems might be vulnerable for an extra few days (30 at most in a worst case), you also gain better control over the scheduling of staff to test and deploy the patches. You don't have to go to their website every morning to see if something came out (or have some service that does, a la auto update or what ships with linux distros). Is it better? Well for the security paranoid, no. However, being an IT manager myself, I can appreciate a company trying to make things predicable as much as possible for me. If my site has autoupdate enabled, and things stop working the day after patch Tuesday, the first thing I'll do is roll back a box to the day before and see if things start working again. If so, push the roll back to everyone, then hit the test servers/workstations, and localize the patch problems, to the specific patch/app combo that is the issue. Much, much better than having random crap pushed at random times.
Interesting, it was recently that they added parallel support, around version 7.0 (currently at 7.5), anyways, any references to parallel support I've seen always used macro calls to tell it that that is the case. Perhaps some of the API's are core aware. Stuff like linear algebra routines should be (as they are stolen from LAPACK anyways). A lot of code people might thing is parallel because of the way that you call it, but that isn't necessarily the case. eg. x(1:10, :) = y (1:10, :) or something similar.
There is a great talk by Bjarne Stroustrup (http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/C++0x%20-%20An%20Overview.html) about the new version of C++ coming out and some of the difficulties getting things added. Essentially, if a new feature will only help 100,000 developers, it isn't important enough to be implemented. With such a huge developer community all the "little" things get left for non-standard API implementations, only big, almost everyone will find useful features get added. That is probably why this version or the next of C++ probably will get a standard tread library, because almost everyone has access to a multicore system. Oh yeah, also, and it sucks, anyone with a few thousand dollars to waste can get added to the committee, but most people don't care enough to go get their feature implemented for that much money (you also have the travel/time off to attend the meetings) except big business, so guess who runs the show (I don't expect anyone to be suprised).
People that do "cyber squatting" in this manner are similar to pawn shop brokers IMHO. You couldn't pay the bills to keep the lights on, they moved in on the name, and if you want your stuff back you better pay up. If you don't like it pay your bills. Bare in mind too that the squatter does take a risk too if the name is a small enough niche then the market to sell it to is small. The one company that has an interest in the domain name has just gone out of business, not exactly a risk free investment IMHO.
At least at my work I get very few high priority emails (~1 a week), so if you were to let it be known that if they really need to get ahold of you during a meeting to send a high priority email then you could have that set to vibrate or ring.
As for my two cents about the parent post: I don't mind my blackberry. I'm the sole IT guy for a cancer centre and I'd rather know somethings blown up than get into work and find out patients haven't been being treated because a system was down. Also, I can often be out of the office working with an individual PC when something acts up, again better to be able to get right on it then have everyone else not be able to work because I'm tinkering with something. My boss is very leniant and respectful of my time and worth, if I spend an hour answering emails the night before I can show up later the next day or take it as over time, or paid 1.5 time live. No questions asked.
Your right with the acceleration math. I'm not sure if planes slow down at anywhere near the rate that they takeoff at. Now probably a big part of that is getting the plane of the ground quicker = smaller runways, but I wonder if there is a physical limitation too? Eg. the engine can't thrust backwards, so you have to use drag, but perhaps the planes wings and control surfaces aren't build to handle the 1.25 the planes weight safely (1 for gravity, 0.25 for the acceleration factor), especially since the 0.25 would mostly be against control surfaces.
Also, no doubt time will be saved for long flights, but turning a 2hr hop into a 10 min hop really wouldn't be that useful. You still have to slow down on both sides (which should take considerably longer with a faster plane) wait in turn for a position to take off and land, and have all the normal flight overhead of getting there early and getting your luggage and stuff. That is what did the Concord in, it just simply wasn't worth halfing your flight time which translates into about a 20% savings for short flights, at a price several times that of a normal plane.
Assuming it could be made affordable, it could cause problems too. If there was less time involved in flying the amount of travel being done (especially for business) could drastically increase. Our airports can barely handle the load they currently have, so if the airplane was available in large numbers, it could still be years before the infrastructure would be available to support it.
Seriously though, your voice might get heard more if they see the problems you have with the product. Installing a VM system and spending all day using the distro of your choice probably would send a strong message.
Emacs is my editor of choice on a UNIX or Linux environment, but I still like to call the compiler from command line (not sure why, just the way I do things :).
That said, you can feel good that you have contributed something akin to donating to cancer research, but you have no claim on the science itself, other than in a "made possible by" kind of way.
I've done computational physics work as an undergrad, about 90% of the time was programming, only about 10% of the time was physics (actually seeing if the computational results matched what theory predicts, formulating models etc). I was one of the researchers and I'd still say I had little claim on scientific inovation (though I'm primary author on several publications). It is kind of the nature of the problems I guess, interesting problems require so much computing power that most of your time is spent waiting for data. With more resources available most researchers will end up modelling bigger problems and still will be waiting long periods of time for data.
Hmm more mutations surviving. Thanks to healthcare that is the case. We are simpily better able to keep someone alive, and perhaps care more than in the past about the rights of the deformed/abnormal. Not sure if it helps the species to allow in many cases the weak to use more resources than the average strong get but mah, I guess that is what I'd do if it was my kid.
I think MS would probably have a better time with it, presumably they already know how to code "freeze panes", and they already have the concept of regions in their IDE. The problem is doing stuff like this dynamically hoggs a lot of resources. I hear people gripe about how long VS takes to load, but when you think about it, it is pulling your code out of source control, loading a GUI viewer and several text pages, scanning all the referenced code to fill in IntelliSense, etc etc, it isn't as simple as loading it in emacs, so there is an overhead. VS is a big beast but it gets the job done (I find it hard to live without IntelliSense now, though I can hack comfortably in VI emacs or even notepad for a couple thousand lines without too much trouble (assuming I'm not interfacing with a bunch of other peoples code that I really could use the help on).
Yet another interesting feature I'd like in an IDE. Something similar to Excel's freeze panes but dynamic. So it fallows the start of the block, so at the top of the screen you'll have:
if (blah == run_some_crazy_spagetti) {
It would make my life so much easier. The closest think I've seen is emacs status bar that will show } // if (blah). I think it makes more sense for the user to look in the intuitive direction (up) for the help on what block they are in not, up and if they don't see it then down.
Do you think MS is the only company to do things like this? Heck the media industry has been signing exclusive contracts with artists for several decades now. MS has bet big on the HD-DVD format and doesn't want to be stuck with their console and their download services being "obsoleted" (not really the term because both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are current gen technologies, but you get the picture). If your Coke you sign exclusive contracts with restuarants so they don't serve Pepsi, if your Ford you sign exclusive contracts with Dealerships so they don't sell new GM's too, etc etc.
Apparently the minimum penalty is $750 and max is 125k per song, ~9k is pretty good by those options. The problem is calculating actual damages, they are somewhere between 0 and a lot :) If there is already 1k people sharing a file, you adding your copy to the share pool probably doesn't effect the outcome, those wanting an illegial copy can already get one, and at a fast download rate. If you are the first person to share, then you are making available something that wasn't before, so one could argue each copy that is available after that is because of you and say a legal download is .99 cents, then the calculation is simple for what your damages are. The problem is multiple people could rip the song and start sharing it, whos to say you are the source? I guess the bottom line is, if you don't want to risk being sued, then purchase your music legally and don't file share it.
Actually it depends how close you are to the antenna. Inverse square only applies for point charge/currents. For an infinite wire (which an attenna is approximately if you are close enough to it), the field strength actually goes as 1/r not 1/r^2. Still as you say wifi isn't that close to your head usually, and is about 1/10th the output anyways.
Why does a $10/hr factory worker get "plenty of space" to work, and a $50/hr techie get a little pidgeon hole where they are uncomfortable all day. I refuse to work for a company that won't give me an office. I need space, and need to be able to play my music or use my phone on speaker, and I need to be left alone, or my work day will be unproductive. You can either spend 5k a year paying for space for me, or spend 50k a year on salary where I wasn't working at 100% you choose :)
Good for you, glad things worked out well for you. Most people should be able to afford insurance, but some people will be born uninsurable. Case in point my mother, a bunch of medical issues, that not only required a half dozen surguries, but has kept her out of work for about 3/4 of her "working" life. Among other things, she is mostly deaf, kind of makes it hard to learn, or do any of even the typical work from home stuff. Yeah, get a computer and learn works for you, but not everyone is either intelligent enough (at least in that way), or lucky enough to have had their problems when the internet/elearning was an option.
Anyways, would you have them die rather than inconvience the rich to assist them with their treatment? How much is the poor person that gets healthy and starts being able to be a productive citizen (and pay taxes) worth? I suspect their taxes over the remainder of their life time on the average will be greater than the cost of the treatment. Socialized healthcare removes the dramatic effects of a stupid choice, or dumb luck from ruining or ending lives.
Also, bare in mind that even though your insurance policy says you are covered in case of X, that doesn't mean they won't find a way to deny your claim if X will cost them more to treat than to go to court if you sue. Think of all the bureaucracy needed in an insurance based society, you have people selling you the insurance, you have the claims guys, you have all the business analysts and stuff that try to make the clinics profitable. You have all these professial and highly educated people focused on the production of money rather than the treatment of the health problems. While government has its wastes, rarely will they blow as much money as a corporation will on an ad compaign for new business for example.
Also, the poor tend to be much more likely to get sick, and these are the same ones that can't afford health insurance. In the US style system you end up with the HMO determining where you get treated. Their doctors have incentives to keep the insurance companies costs down, if for no other reason than job security, but often because they get incentives for low claim rates. In a social healthcare system, the doctor determines the treatment needed, the patient gets treated and all tax payers cover the cost of the treatment. Hence you will find very few people in other first world countries with untreated illnesses. The one exception, at least here in Ontario, is for some stupid reason dental care isn't covered under health insurance, so sometimes people with bad teeth will suffer threw it because they can't afford to get it fixed.
Healthcare workers get paid pretty well in these countries, the thing is cost isn't the deciding factor before treatment is given, the patient doesn't see the bill so they aren't going to have to chose between their house and their health.
Stuff like that comes up in family history usually. If someone has it in your family history, then the insurance company requests further info/tests before they will insure you. The insurance company I worked for only required a saliva sample to be sent back with the application, they claimed they could screen for most major diseases from that, not sure if they were doing genetic, or just looking for abnormal things (like you say your a non-smoker but you have smoke in your saliva kind of things).
I work in healthcare and see patients fairly regularly that are say 87 with serious lung and heart problems, and they also have a slow growing tumor, the end result is if the doctor thinks you have 1 year to live due to the heart condition, and it will take 4 years for you to die of the tumor, they'll tell you so, and the cancer treatment will be handled as a low priority optional procedure, not a radical, we are trying to save this persons life treatment. There is a lot of reasons a patient might say no to the treatment, etc. it will cause complications but they aren't currently in pain from the cancer, or they want to travel and don't want to be stuck going in and out of a hospital for a few weeks, I guess in the US you could add the cost of the procedure, but in the rest of the developed world that isn't an issue.