Try the Sony Ericsson T68i. I purchased one from ebay last year. Its an older phone, but has the "right" feature set for me.
It has bluetooth, no camera, *very* basic pda features -- calander, phonebook, alarms, color screen (not touch, which i prefer, t9 is great!)
I'm very happy with it.
What's more, it's tri-band (eg works in US, europe and most places in the world -- i actually purchased a SIM while in europe and had a "local" number) and it's network unlocked (eg my phone isn't locked to a network provider). I don't use my phone a bunch, so I just purchased a pay-as-you-go SIM from cingular and my average monthly cost is about US$15.
Search on ebay for "Sony Ericsson T68i unlocked"
I purchased mine for about US$100.
One warning however: check the GSM coverage, GSM fequencies, and plans of various providers before commiting to any phone.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water
on
Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think most libertarian minded people would agree that artificial barriers to entry into segments in society are a BadThing (eg like the guilds of old). The idea that amateurs would be excluded from science, music, medicine, or any field just because they don't belong to a group goes against the grain of modern free society. So I agree with the author in spirit.
That said, however, I disagree with the author on most points because the article assumes that such artificial barriers exist across most of society. IMHO, for the most part, they do not. In the case of science and medicine -- these are *very* hard and critical professions -- the barriers to entering these professions are not artificial; they are nessecary. I for one don't want a doctor-on-the-weekends treatmenting me. Likewise, I don't think most people can train themselves to research and develope nano-technology. I'm not saying that most people can't go into such fields if they choose, it just requires a life-long commitment. Nor am I implying that one needs to pay huge $$$ to pursue such a career -- many of the state funded universities offer the same opportunies as the ivy leage schools.
Being a "smoker" is not a state of being, its a habit, an action. Therefore you are not being discriminated against as a person if you are not allowed to smoke in certian places -- it would be different if, say, the sign said "No Smokers Allowed" instead of "No Smoking" Its no different than laws preventing me from strutting around nude, or laws that require me to wear shoes when I go into a resturant.
As a Barefooter I'm Sooo discriminated against. Bitch Bitch.
Quick! contact your representative. We need new legislation to protect us from the evil coffee companies. Start a commission. Contact the lawyers. Better yet *tax* coffee (didn't WA attempt this?) -- a sin tax will help prevent addiction and will fund posh jobs for buddies of legislators and crappy public service announcements about the *dangers* of caffeine.
and live in Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz mountians just north of Santa Cruz). The driving is mixed (50% city, 50% highway). I, like many others (there are sites out there where people graph their milage) get about 46-47 mpg on average. The high epa rating was ~50 mpg, which puts me at 97%, and I don't drive like an old lady either.
My guess would be that either something is wrong with this guy's car, or (more likely), he drives way too fast. You aren't going to get anything near epa rating if you're driving 80mph, regardless of the car.
On driving too fast, it might be that he doesn't realize how fast he's going (I always had Fords, which are *loud* and when I got my Prius I was always speeding because the car is so quiet and smooth)
Why so much FUD about hybrids lately? I've noticed a knee-jerk recation from so many people when I tell them I own a hybrid ("oh, you have to plug it in" or "I heard they are really slow" -- all bull by the way). The Prius is just a very well engineered car and I've very happy with it.
"We're moving closer and closer to the disposable car," says Dan Bailey, an executive vice president at Carstar, the largest auto-body repair franchise in the United States.
well duh! of course the auto repair industry is unhappy about this. I'm sure they aren't happy about any loss of business, whether it be to dealers or just better quality cars that don't need as much maintinence. Good riddance I say. Doesn't anyone remember when you could only expect 100-150k miles out of a car? How about severe body rust after only a few years (I live near the coast). How about all the independant repair shops that just rip people off (seems to have gotten better since the 80s).
Also, so airbags are expensive? What's their point? Should we do away with them? I suppose it would be better if the teen didn't walk away from the accident -- yep, that would've been worth 30K. This reminds me of people that buy used or crappy 3rd world climbing equipment to save a few bucks.
No thank you. I'll take my *advanced* car that requires a specially trained tech to work on...even if it is more expensive, at least it'll be fixed correctly. The tech can at least run the diagnostics checks and has training on common problems, etc. The independent shops just take wild guesses and start replacing things.
We haven't had cable for ~2 years. We still have a small TV (by todays standards) and watch movies (netflix) and old simpsons episodes, but on average this ends up being 1 hr a day (one movie every couple days).
The the remaining free time I climb, brew beer, read, clean, etc.
Not trying to be self-righteous, but now that I think about it....how did I *ever* have the time to watch +3 hrs a day of TV?
Seriously, try disconnecting the cable for a year. Its hard for the first 6 months, but then you lose all interested in the current programming (I have no idea what's playing and don't care). Get your news on line or on the radio in the car.
My wife and I haven't had "TV" for 3 years. We fall into the 18-35 range. We gave it up because there where 200 chanels of pure crap and our time is worth way too much to watch 2+ hrs a day.
Assuming that I can even find 2+ hours of programming that I actually enjoy, the cost in time for the commercials isn't worth it. I figure my time is worth about $50 an hour. A conservative guess of 5 min of commercials per 30 min * 4 (or 2hrs/day) = 20min/day of commercials * 7 = 2.3hrs/week * 4 = 9.2hrs/month = $460/month just in commercial time. No thanks!!!
Besides the value of my time just to watch commercials, my impression from occasioally viewing elsewhere is that the programming is getting worse: pseudo-science shows (please! how many mummie shows can Discovory air?), too many commercials (last time I watched MTV I swear there were more comercials than content), crappy reality shows, arrggg! I don't even like watching sports any more (would rather *go* and see it live).
Its a TV exec's worse nightmare: Loosing what was once a very mindless and lucrative demographic to a new generation that isn't conditioned too the rhythm of 30 or 60 min programming interruped by predictable slots of commercials.
Although, is it just me, or are children watching more TV then ever -- or maybe I'm just starting to talk like an old man:)
Right after the shuddle incident I remember reading something to the effect that the foam issue is politically charged. Basically, in an effort to be PC, administrators decided, against the wishes of engineers, to replace CFC based foam for a more environmentally friendly non-CFC based foam that wasn't as durable/performant.
Does anyone remember or know anything about this?
I can't verify the claims (or find the article for that matter), but it does seem odd that there were no known/published problems (AFAIK) with the foam for 2 decades...
According to my GnuCash expense report, about 30% of my income goes to taxes (medicare, ss, income taxes, etc). Besides this, I think our cost of living is held artificially high by self sustaining bureaucracies. Ever tried to purchase a home? Everyone wants (and gets) a cut of the pie. I know several people that are housing construction contractors, and its even worse for them -- I can't put a figure on it, but I wonder how much of our "living" expenses are people skimming off the top?
The bottom line is that the US must become lean-and-mean to compete in a global market, because its coming whether we like it or not and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
The two most important debugging tools I'm aware of can't be solved with software: a short break from the project to clear your train of thought, and another set of eyes which might better see what you've overlooked.
While this may be true for those few really nasty bugs that require knowledge about areas you aren't familliar with, these are rare. In general, having others look at your code and taking a break every time there's an error isn't productive. Simply looking at a stack trace and the state of stack frames (ie locals) and globals will find the problem 95% of the time. If you don't know how to do this, you should convince your boss that its in the company's best interest to get you some training (ie a class, time allocated for self learning, etc) -- or, if you're not employeed, I would start doing some self study on the topic ASAP.
Hate to burst your bubble, but have you ever actually look at MSFT's balance sheet?
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/m/msft_qb.html
Their current ratio is about 3.6. Which is high, but not unusual for a software company given the current market. More important, look at the numbers for current total assets. Only 5 billion is in cash, whereas 35 billion is invested in short term investments -- which is money going to work in the econimy.
I don't like MSFT (been using mostly Linux since 97 to get away from their crappy OSes), but this knee-jerk reaction against corporations seems unreasonable to me...
Corporations should pay taxes because they enjoy all of the protections private individuals do. So they should have the same
This implies that our protections are tied to the taxes we pay...which I think is a dangerous position. Does this mean the unemployed/homeless have no (or perhaps less in states will sales taxes) protections?
Employees pay taxes on the portion of the corporate earnings they get to keep, so why shouldn't corporations have to pay tax on the portion of earnings it gets to keep?
To state the obvious, a corporation, while an entity with protections, has no self interest in earning money. That is to say, since the corporation is not a real person, it has no interest in hording money. For example, a corporation would not save for a trip to Fiji whereas a real person may chose to do so. Further, as I mentioned in my previous post, it is bad practice for a company to hord lots of cash (in terms of opportunity cost) so corporations tend to spend the profits. Taxing earnings therefore reduces investiment or reduces income of employees. Think of it this way, if a corporation earns $1 million, it doesn't benifite anyone unless it is put to use. However, before it is even put to use, some % is taken for taxes, which effectively takes that money out of circulation (ie less hardware/software purchased, less funding of startups, etc).
And, it's not a double tax since each "person" in the equation is only paying tax on the portion of revenue they keep.
I disagree. Since no "real" person benifites from corporate assets, that money must eventually be paid out to real people inorder to become useful. If its payed out as bonuses or salary increases, these are taxed. If its invested in another company, that company's employees will be taxed on their income. if it is used to purchase equipment, the equipment is just another form of an assest that belongs to the corporation. Either way, the corprations earnings are eventually taxed if they in some way benifite real people. Otherwise, money that sits in a bank depreciates as do physical assets.
Its easy to expect corporations to bare societies burdens because they are "faceless" and people think "better the corporations pay than me!" assuming that this is free money that doesn't effect anyone. However, I say that corporate taxes take money from the econimy that would have otherwise been used to create jobs and/or product -- which in the end hurts everyone. I think its similar to the situation where renters will willingly pass property tax increases because they own no propery (thinking that the landlord will have to pay and they will reap the rewards in the form of better roads/schools/etc), only to discover that the land owners pass the cost on to the renter.
Why should corporations pay taxes? Have you ever really thought about this? A corporation is a entity made up of assets, liabilitys, people, etc. The people working for the corporation are already paying taxes in the form of income taxes. The corporate employees that most people are suspitious about, the executives (CEO, etc) also technically pay income taxes (though with current tax laws, there are too many loopholes) and no one has direct access to the company assets -- for example, a CEO cannot just tap into the company savings to buy a house. So what do corporations do with profits if its employees cannot simply spend the profits? The profits are used for payraises or boneses (on which income taxes are payed), or the money is invested. A well run company tryies to maintain a current ratio (total current assets divided by total current liabilities) of 1-1.5. Lower than 1 and the corp is in danger of cash flow problems. Higher than this and the corp is bloated and has money wasting away in an account.
So taxing a corporation is actually a double tax.
If what you're concerned about is the very wealthy not paying their share of the tax burden by making use of loopholes, the real solution here is to simplify the tax laws by taxing all income and only taxing income (including all benifites such as stock options, etc) and remove all loopholes. Assets that get payed out to individuals still get taxed, but there is no dead-weight loss for investing profits, and more investing translates to more jobs, which also increases the tax base.
From http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/Life.html
All of biology is just a device for degrading energy available from chemical sources, and on the surface from the great temperature differential between the hot surface of the Sun and the cold of space. Perhaps biology is just a branch of thermodynamics, and there is no sudden beginning of life, but a gradual systematic development towards more and more efficient ways of degrading energy.
Of course, this implies that humans and our activities are a part of nature--which flys in the face of most modern day "environmentalists"
I read "Republican Nation" as not a Nation run by "The Republicans" but a Nation that is a Republic, as opposed to a Democracy, which of course we are. A Democracy is a country that is run by the people. We actually have a Republic which is run by people we elect because we are to stupid to pass our own laws.
No, we are not a Democracy, we are a Republic, and it was meant to be that way. Not because we are stupid, but who has the time to get informed about every issue in all strata of government (city, county, state, federal)? So we elect people to represent our needs at various levels. The fact that so many laws that we didn't directly vote for effect our lives is a sad comentary on how large the federal goverment is. It was not meant to be this way! Most of the laws that effect our lives should be at the state level, where people have more control (most states at least have props, people can easily move to another state). For example, if ill Californians want to smoke pot, they should be allowed to, but unfortunatly the will of folks in other states dictate otherwise. There are dozens of similar examples we could list...
The bottem line is that the federal gov is much too large (and Bush doesn't seem to be helping here). Citizens should really think of states as *their* goverment (ie paying most of their taxes to the state, not fed) and the US goverment as a union of smaller countries with minimal control over individuals. The more power goverment has (ie the fed) the more corrupt, the more distributed the power (ie the states) the less corruption. How nice would it be if lobbiests had to lobby 50 state goverments instead of one large fed gov?
"If I distribute code containing function calls that need to be resolved at link time, there is no way the license of my code can be governed by the license of libraries against which others may (or not) care to link it."
Not true. Say, for example, that Borland releases a GPL'd version (not LGPL'd) of a library, and you build an application with this GPL'd library. Besides the fact that your exe contains GPL'd headers, your program is still a derivative of this library (the LGPL gets around both of these). Even if did a clean-room reverse engineer the library (not even c libraries are binary compatible, for example, readline my actually be defined as _borland_readline, and there is also the problem of startup/init code), you still have the header problem. If you rewrite the headers too, you just rewrote the entire library, so what was the point!
What you say is true: the Kylix 3 compiler produces c++ object code that is incompatible with other c++ compilers (including gnu). Besides the name mangling problem, there is the problem with memory layout and calling conventions -- what is really needed is a standard c++ abi.
To answer you question about C support -- it is fully supported, including structured data layout and c calling conventions. In fact, much of the c library is glibc.
Just my $.02 that's likely to get lost in the/. noise:
First, just so everyone knows where I'm comming from, I was raised a creationist. And in the past I've been a devote creationist that would try to "debate" with others to promote my point of view -- thinking that if you believed in evolution you were an atheist. However, as I have matured (a little bit, not much), I can say that my own beliefs have evolved.
I don't understand anymore this animosity that Christians and Evolutionist have between each other -- this fierce compitition. When I read the Genesis account (first few chapters) and get all the imagery out of my head that I was raised with (the presuppositions so to speak) I see a very general story that is not intended to be a science text book. I think details are purposely omitted because the point of the book is not for us to know exactly how everything came into being, but to understand that a supernatural being created it and the relationship that we have to this being.
Christians that are threatened by evolution don't have a true concept of the omnipotence of an all powerfull God (or Yahweh, Jehovah, Cosmic Spirit, or whatever name you attach). Think about it, if you had unlimited processing power and data, you could drop thousands of pieces of paper from a plane at 10K feet and know exactly where each paper would land. Moreover, now assume that you can control all of the variables (wind speed/direction, ordering of papers, turbulance, etc) -- then you would be able to cause each of these papers to land where you wish them to land. Now, back up to the Big Band (or whatever started the Universe). Assuming that all energy and matter that exists in the universe today was involved in the Big Bang (to my knowlege science has not found any exceptions to the law of conservation of energy and matter). Now lets assume there's an all powerful being that causes this Bang and sets up all the variables to Its liking. This being, in theory, could then foreordain the entire universe as we know it today in a single instance at the time of the Big Bang. To the Creationist, all of this appears to be the work of God, Its creation. However, to the Evolutionist, all of this appears to be the work of chance (just a question for thought, but is anything really random? Or do we just label events as random when they become too computationally complex?). Add to this that God is outside of time (exists in all of time at all instances at once) and you realize that there's more the the Genesis account than meets the eye! I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think that science and the Bible are mutually exclusive.
Now, on the flip side, I don't understand why some scientists are so bent on disproving the Bible and slamming Christians -- almost a fear of Judeo-Christian beliefs (well...maybe I do, there have been and still are some pretty crummy people that call themselves Christans). The Bible was written by over 40 authors from 3 continents and from various backgrounds (kings, prophets, common folk, political prisioners, etc) and it was written over a span of 1500 years! What a wealth of knowlege and wisdom it contains. Some claim that it contains a meta-narrative of a God trying to reconcile a relationship with mankind. If nothing else it contains history and 1500 years of culture and living experiance. How you choose to read it is where faith comes into the picture. It's just a shame that there are all of these debates about the Bible and Science, but very few people actually read the Bible (including Christians) even though it is classic literature and a great read once you understand the context/culture/timeline in which it was written.
I saw this on Slashdot 1-2 years ago -- in fact, the artical is almost word for word the same.
All that aside -- this guy's idea is a very bad idea. It's not that idea of evolutionary algorithms is bad, but rather, the idea of using the analog characteristics of digital circuits to do logical things is bad. Under all the layers of abstraction, digital circuits are actually analog, but they abstractly repressent logic within certian noise margins (ie 0-1.2v==logic low and 3.8-5v==logic high). The whole point in going from analog to digital is because it's deterministic (ie easier to maintain and possible to prove its behaviour), and, because of the noise margins, we can assume that a design for a specific family of chips will behave the same on all reasonable chip implementations. In other words, if you want an analog circuit, use analog components (BTW - analog circuits are faster and smaller by nature, but the amount of work required to design and prove that a design is correct is usually way more work. This is why most computer functionality is done in digital). If you want a logic circuit, use digital design.
Oh -- and one other thing. A *procedure* can only be called an algorithm if it can be proved that it stops at some point, and if it can be proved that it produces the correct result. If we don't know how an analog device works, we can't prove its behavior, therefore these people aren't making algorithms, they are just making devices that do stuff. If they really want to work on making evolutionary algorithms, they should concentrate on making self modifying logic (ie self modifying code in Lisp, Prolog, or self modifying digital designs, etc).
First of all, for those interested in labels, I consider myself a libertarian. I really dislike censorware; its inaccurate, ineffective, and it only benifits the companies that produce the censorware. I expect that in the near future, as some schools and libraries install "phony" products (lets say the product only censors 2 or 3 sites:) we will see the gov provide a list of supported censorware products.
But, getting back on subject, is anyone really suprised by this? When the US Supreme Court tells us that the 2nd amendment (getting ready for/. flames) is a collective right and not an individual right then why should anyone assume that the 1st amendment is an individual right? We started down the slippery slop of judicial activism long ago. When we first started, the left didn't mind (and was actually in favor of it) and the right was crying foul. The left didn't mind because gun control has always been part of the left's agenda (note: i'm not saying here that gun control is either good or bad). This upset the right because they viewed this as an attack on individual rights.
Now, I know that someone is going to make the point the people can use guns to murder and that speech can't really hurt anyone. However, my argument is not about the merits of gun control -- in other words I'm not saying that guns and gun control are either good or bad. What I am saying is that the way we have tried to go about implementing gun control is all wrong and we are now reaping the consequences of this.
Instead of setting a precidence of questionable interpretation of the constitution (which will be used again to support censorware), the proper way to go about supporting gun control would have been to have congress amend the constitution and change the language of the 2nd amendment. I know this is very difficult to do, but its that way on purpose. If there is not overwelming support for revoking an individual right (free speech or gun ownership) then it should not be revoked (51% of the populace should not dicate the law).
To sum it all up, the general attitude of special intrest groups in the US is that the ends justify the means, and its only when these same means are used against these groups that they complain. However, by then its too late because precidence has already been set. If you want to say the everyone has the individual right to free speech then you must also say that everyone also has the individual right to own firearms. Otherwise, the constitution is bacially meaningless and we end up with no individual rights.
That's why you'd have to do some degree of carry lookahead for this to make any sense. But even then, you're right, you may not get any gain in speed because of transfer times. However, with other dynamic problems where you're working on very large 3 or 4-D tables (ie k(n)=2l(n-1)+(1/2)m(n-1), k(n)=2m(n-4)-l(n-1), m(n)=3k(n-2)+2m(n-2)) this makes much more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Try the Sony Ericsson T68i. I purchased one from ebay last year. Its an older phone, but has the "right" feature set for me.
It has bluetooth, no camera, *very* basic pda features -- calander, phonebook, alarms, color screen (not touch, which i prefer, t9 is great!)
I'm very happy with it.
What's more, it's tri-band (eg works in US, europe and most places in the world -- i actually purchased a SIM while in europe and had a "local" number) and it's network unlocked (eg my phone isn't locked to a network provider). I don't use my phone a bunch, so I just purchased a pay-as-you-go SIM from cingular and my average monthly cost is about US$15.
Search on ebay for "Sony Ericsson T68i unlocked"
I purchased mine for about US$100.
One warning however: check the GSM coverage, GSM fequencies, and plans of various providers before commiting to any phone.
I think most libertarian minded people would agree that artificial barriers to entry into segments in society are a BadThing (eg like the guilds of old). The idea that amateurs would be excluded from science, music, medicine, or any field just because they don't belong to a group goes against the grain of modern free society. So I agree with the author in spirit.
That said, however, I disagree with the author on most points because the article assumes that such artificial barriers exist across most of society. IMHO, for the most part, they do not. In the case of science and medicine -- these are *very* hard and critical professions -- the barriers to entering these professions are not artificial; they are nessecary. I for one don't want a doctor-on-the-weekends treatmenting me. Likewise, I don't think most people can train themselves to research and develope nano-technology. I'm not saying that most people can't go into such fields if they choose, it just requires a life-long commitment. Nor am I implying that one needs to pay huge $$$ to pursue such a career -- many of the state funded universities offer the same opportunies as the ivy leage schools.
PLEASE! What a load of crap.
Being a "smoker" is not a state of being, its a habit, an action. Therefore you are not being discriminated against as a person if you are not allowed to smoke in certian places -- it would be different if, say, the sign said "No Smokers Allowed" instead of "No Smoking" Its no different than laws preventing me from strutting around nude, or laws that require me to wear shoes when I go into a resturant.
As a Barefooter I'm Sooo discriminated against. Bitch Bitch.
Quick! contact your representative. We need new legislation to protect us from the evil coffee companies. Start a commission. Contact the lawyers. Better yet *tax* coffee (didn't WA attempt this?) -- a sin tax will help prevent addiction and will fund posh jobs for buddies of legislators and crappy public service announcements about the *dangers* of caffeine.
and live in Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz mountians just north of Santa Cruz). The driving is mixed (50% city, 50% highway). I, like many others (there are sites out there where people graph their milage) get about 46-47 mpg on average. The high epa rating was ~50 mpg, which puts me at 97%, and I don't drive like an old lady either.
My guess would be that either something is wrong with this guy's car, or (more likely), he drives way too fast. You aren't going to get anything near epa rating if you're driving 80mph, regardless of the car.
On driving too fast, it might be that he doesn't realize how fast he's going (I always had Fords, which are *loud* and when I got my Prius I was always speeding because the car is so quiet and smooth)
Why so much FUD about hybrids lately? I've noticed a knee-jerk recation from so many people when I tell them I own a hybrid ("oh, you have to plug it in" or "I heard they are really slow" -- all bull by the way). The Prius is just a very well engineered car and I've very happy with it.
"We're moving closer and closer to the disposable car," says Dan Bailey, an executive vice president at Carstar, the largest auto-body repair franchise in the United States.
well duh! of course the auto repair industry is unhappy about this. I'm sure they aren't happy about any loss of business, whether it be to dealers or just better quality cars that don't need as much maintinence. Good riddance I say. Doesn't anyone remember when you could only expect 100-150k miles out of a car? How about severe body rust after only a few years (I live near the coast). How about all the independant repair shops that just rip people off (seems to have gotten better since the 80s).
Also, so airbags are expensive? What's their point? Should we do away with them? I suppose it would be better if the teen didn't walk away from the accident -- yep, that would've been worth 30K. This reminds me of people that buy used or crappy 3rd world climbing equipment to save a few bucks.
No thank you. I'll take my *advanced* car that requires a specially trained tech to work on...even if it is more expensive, at least it'll be fixed correctly. The tech can at least run the diagnostics checks and has training on common problems, etc. The independent shops just take wild guesses and start replacing things.
We haven't had cable for ~2 years. We still have a small TV (by todays standards) and watch movies (netflix) and old simpsons episodes, but on average this ends up being 1 hr a day (one movie every couple days).
The the remaining free time I climb, brew beer, read, clean, etc.
Not trying to be self-righteous, but now that I think about it....how did I *ever* have the time to watch +3 hrs a day of TV?
Seriously, try disconnecting the cable for a year. Its hard for the first 6 months, but then you lose all interested in the current programming (I have no idea what's playing and don't care). Get your news on line or on the radio in the car.
My wife and I haven't had "TV" for 3 years. We fall into the 18-35 range. We gave it up because there where 200 chanels of pure crap and our time is worth way too much to watch 2+ hrs a day.
:)
Assuming that I can even find 2+ hours of programming that I actually enjoy, the cost in time for the commercials isn't worth it. I figure my time is worth about $50 an hour. A conservative guess of 5 min of commercials per 30 min * 4 (or 2hrs/day) = 20min/day of commercials * 7 = 2.3hrs/week * 4 = 9.2hrs/month = $460/month just in commercial time. No thanks!!!
Besides the value of my time just to watch commercials, my impression from occasioally viewing elsewhere is that the programming is getting worse: pseudo-science shows (please! how many mummie shows can Discovory air?), too many commercials (last time I watched MTV I swear there were more comercials than content), crappy reality shows, arrggg! I don't even like watching sports any more (would rather *go* and see it live).
Its a TV exec's worse nightmare: Loosing what was once a very mindless and lucrative demographic to a new generation that isn't conditioned too the rhythm of 30 or 60 min programming interruped by predictable slots of commercials.
Although, is it just me, or are children watching more TV then ever -- or maybe I'm just starting to talk like an old man
but more important, a link
Right after the shuddle incident I remember reading something to the effect that the foam issue is politically charged. Basically, in an effort to be PC, administrators decided, against the wishes of engineers, to replace CFC based foam for a more environmentally friendly non-CFC based foam that wasn't as durable/performant.
Does anyone remember or know anything about this?
I can't verify the claims (or find the article for that matter), but it does seem odd that there were no known/published problems (AFAIK) with the foam for 2 decades...
Right on.
According to my GnuCash expense report, about 30% of my income goes to taxes (medicare, ss, income taxes, etc). Besides this, I think our cost of living is held artificially high by self sustaining bureaucracies. Ever tried to purchase a home? Everyone wants (and gets) a cut of the pie. I know several people that are housing construction contractors, and its even worse for them -- I can't put a figure on it, but I wonder how much of our "living" expenses are people skimming off the top?
The bottom line is that the US must become lean-and-mean to compete in a global market, because its coming whether we like it or not and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
The two most important debugging tools I'm aware of can't be solved with software: a short break from the project to clear your train of thought, and another set of eyes which might better see what you've overlooked.
While this may be true for those few really nasty bugs that require knowledge about areas you aren't familliar with, these are rare. In general, having others look at your code and taking a break every time there's an error isn't productive. Simply looking at a stack trace and the state of stack frames (ie locals) and globals will find the problem 95% of the time. If you don't know how to do this, you should convince your boss that its in the company's best interest to get you some training (ie a class, time allocated for self learning, etc) -- or, if you're not employeed, I would start doing some self study on the topic ASAP.
Hate to burst your bubble, but have you ever actually look at MSFT's balance sheet?
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/m/msft_qb.html
Their current ratio is about 3.6. Which is high, but not unusual for a software company given the current market. More important, look at the numbers for current total assets. Only 5 billion is in cash, whereas 35 billion is invested in short term investments -- which is money going to work in the econimy.
I don't like MSFT (been using mostly Linux since 97 to get away from their crappy OSes), but this knee-jerk reaction against corporations seems unreasonable to me...
Corporations should pay taxes because they enjoy all of the protections private individuals do. So they should have the same
One more quick point I'll make by asking a question? Is the corporation as an entity alowed to vote? If not, why is it being taxed w/o representation?
Corporations should pay taxes because they enjoy all of the protections private individuals do. So they should have the same
This implies that our protections are tied to the taxes we pay...which I think is a dangerous position. Does this mean the unemployed/homeless have no (or perhaps less in states will sales taxes) protections?
Employees pay taxes on the portion of the corporate earnings they get to keep, so why shouldn't corporations have to pay tax on the portion of earnings it gets to keep?
To state the obvious, a corporation, while an entity with protections, has no self interest in earning money. That is to say, since the corporation is not a real person, it has no interest in hording money. For example, a corporation would not save for a trip to Fiji whereas a real person may chose to do so. Further, as I mentioned in my previous post, it is bad practice for a company to hord lots of cash (in terms of opportunity cost) so corporations tend to spend the profits. Taxing earnings therefore reduces investiment or reduces income of employees. Think of it this way, if a corporation earns $1 million, it doesn't benifite anyone unless it is put to use. However, before it is even put to use, some % is taken for taxes, which effectively takes that money out of circulation (ie less hardware/software purchased, less funding of startups, etc).
And, it's not a double tax since each "person" in the equation is only paying tax on the portion of revenue they keep.
I disagree. Since no "real" person benifites from corporate assets, that money must eventually be paid out to real people inorder to become useful. If its payed out as bonuses or salary increases, these are taxed. If its invested in another company, that company's employees will be taxed on their income. if it is used to purchase equipment, the equipment is just another form of an assest that belongs to the corporation. Either way, the corprations earnings are eventually taxed if they in some way benifite real people. Otherwise, money that sits in a bank depreciates as do physical assets.
Its easy to expect corporations to bare societies burdens because they are "faceless" and people think "better the corporations pay than me!" assuming that this is free money that doesn't effect anyone. However, I say that corporate taxes take money from the econimy that would have otherwise been used to create jobs and/or product -- which in the end hurts everyone. I think its similar to the situation where renters will willingly pass property tax increases because they own no propery (thinking that the landlord will have to pay and they will reap the rewards in the form of better roads/schools/etc), only to discover that the land owners pass the cost on to the renter.
while corporations don't pay shit in taxes
Why should corporations pay taxes? Have you ever really thought about this? A corporation is a entity made up of assets, liabilitys, people, etc. The people working for the corporation are already paying taxes in the form of income taxes. The corporate employees that most people are suspitious about, the executives (CEO, etc) also technically pay income taxes (though with current tax laws, there are too many loopholes) and no one has direct access to the company assets -- for example, a CEO cannot just tap into the company savings to buy a house. So what do corporations do with profits if its employees cannot simply spend the profits? The profits are used for payraises or boneses (on which income taxes are payed), or the money is invested. A well run company tryies to maintain a current ratio (total current assets divided by total current liabilities) of 1-1.5. Lower than 1 and the corp is in danger of cash flow problems. Higher than this and the corp is bloated and has money wasting away in an account.
So taxing a corporation is actually a double tax.
If what you're concerned about is the very wealthy not paying their share of the tax burden by making use of loopholes, the real solution here is to simplify the tax laws by taxing all income and only taxing income (including all benifites such as stock options, etc) and remove all loopholes. Assets that get payed out to individuals still get taxed, but there is no dead-weight loss for investing profits, and more investing translates to more jobs, which also increases the tax base.
From http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/Life.html
All of biology is just a device for degrading energy available from chemical sources, and on the surface from the great temperature differential between the hot surface of the Sun and the cold of space. Perhaps biology is just a branch of thermodynamics, and there is no sudden beginning of life, but a gradual systematic development towards more and more efficient ways of degrading energy.
Of course, this implies that humans and our activities are a part of nature--which flys in the face of most modern day "environmentalists"
I read "Republican Nation" as not a Nation run by "The Republicans" but a Nation that is a Republic, as opposed to a Democracy, which of course we are. A Democracy is a country that is run by the people. We actually have a Republic which is run by people we elect because we are to stupid to pass our own laws.
No, we are not a Democracy, we are a Republic, and it was meant to be that way. Not because we are stupid, but who has the time to get informed about every issue in all strata of government (city, county, state, federal)? So we elect people to represent our needs at various levels. The fact that so many laws that we didn't directly vote for effect our lives is a sad comentary on how large the federal goverment is. It was not meant to be this way! Most of the laws that effect our lives should be at the state level, where people have more control (most states at least have props, people can easily move to another state). For example, if ill Californians want to smoke pot, they should be allowed to, but unfortunatly the will of folks in other states dictate otherwise. There are dozens of similar examples we could list...
The bottem line is that the federal gov is much too large (and Bush doesn't seem to be helping here). Citizens should really think of states as *their* goverment (ie paying most of their taxes to the state, not fed) and the US goverment as a union of smaller countries with minimal control over individuals. The more power goverment has (ie the fed) the more corrupt, the more distributed the power (ie the states) the less corruption. How nice would it be if lobbiests had to lobby 50 state goverments instead of one large fed gov?
"If I distribute code containing function calls that need to be resolved at link time, there is no way the license of my code can be governed by the license of libraries against which others may (or not) care to link it."
Not true. Say, for example, that Borland releases a GPL'd version (not LGPL'd) of a library, and you build an application with this GPL'd library. Besides the fact that your exe contains GPL'd headers, your program is still a derivative of this library (the LGPL gets around both of these). Even if did a clean-room reverse engineer the library (not even c libraries are binary compatible, for example, readline my actually be defined as _borland_readline, and there is also the problem of startup/init code), you still have the header problem. If you rewrite the headers too, you just rewrote the entire library, so what was the point!
What you say is true: the Kylix 3 compiler produces c++ object code that is incompatible with other c++ compilers (including gnu). Besides the name mangling problem, there is the problem with memory layout and calling conventions -- what is really needed is a standard c++ abi.
To answer you question about C support -- it is fully supported, including structured data layout and c calling conventions. In fact, much of the c library is glibc.
Just my $.02 that's likely to get lost in the /. noise:
First, just so everyone knows where I'm comming from, I was raised a creationist. And in the past I've been a devote creationist that would try to "debate" with others to promote my point of view -- thinking that if you believed in evolution you were an atheist. However, as I have matured (a little bit, not much), I can say that my own beliefs have evolved.
I don't understand anymore this animosity that Christians and Evolutionist have between each other -- this fierce compitition. When I read the Genesis account (first few chapters) and get all the imagery out of my head that I was raised with (the presuppositions so to speak) I see a very general story that is not intended to be a science text book. I think details are purposely omitted because the point of the book is not for us to know exactly how everything came into being, but to understand that a supernatural being created it and the relationship that we have to this being.
Christians that are threatened by evolution don't have a true concept of the omnipotence of an all powerfull God (or Yahweh, Jehovah, Cosmic Spirit, or whatever name you attach). Think about it, if you had unlimited processing power and data, you could drop thousands of pieces of paper from a plane at 10K feet and know exactly where each paper would land. Moreover, now assume that you can control all of the variables (wind speed/direction, ordering of papers, turbulance, etc) -- then you would be able to cause each of these papers to land where you wish them to land. Now, back up to the Big Band (or whatever started the Universe). Assuming that all energy and matter that exists in the universe today was involved in the Big Bang (to my knowlege science has not found any exceptions to the law of conservation of energy and matter). Now lets assume there's an all powerful being that causes this Bang and sets up all the variables to Its liking. This being, in theory, could then foreordain the entire universe as we know it today in a single instance at the time of the Big Bang. To the Creationist, all of this appears to be the work of God, Its creation. However, to the Evolutionist, all of this appears to be the work of chance (just a question for thought, but is anything really random? Or do we just label events as random when they become too computationally complex?). Add to this that God is outside of time (exists in all of time at all instances at once) and you realize that there's more the the Genesis account than meets the eye! I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think that science and the Bible are mutually exclusive.
Now, on the flip side, I don't understand why some scientists are so bent on disproving the Bible and slamming Christians -- almost a fear of Judeo-Christian beliefs (well...maybe I do, there have been and still are some pretty crummy people that call themselves Christans). The Bible was written by over 40 authors from 3 continents and from various backgrounds (kings, prophets, common folk, political prisioners, etc) and it was written over a span of 1500 years! What a wealth of knowlege and wisdom it contains. Some claim that it contains a meta-narrative of a God trying to reconcile a relationship with mankind. If nothing else it contains history and 1500 years of culture and living experiance. How you choose to read it is where faith comes into the picture. It's just a shame that there are all of these debates about the Bible and Science, but very few people actually read the Bible (including Christians) even though it is classic literature and a great read once you understand the context/culture/timeline in which it was written.
I saw this on Slashdot 1-2 years ago -- in fact, the artical is almost word for word the same.
All that aside -- this guy's idea is a very bad idea. It's not that idea of evolutionary algorithms is bad, but rather, the idea of using the analog characteristics of digital circuits to do logical things is bad. Under all the layers of abstraction, digital circuits are actually analog, but they abstractly repressent logic within certian noise margins (ie 0-1.2v==logic low and 3.8-5v==logic high). The whole point in going from analog to digital is because it's deterministic (ie easier to maintain and possible to prove its behaviour), and, because of the noise margins, we can assume that a design for a specific family of chips will behave the same on all reasonable chip implementations. In other words, if you want an analog circuit, use analog components (BTW - analog circuits are faster and smaller by nature, but the amount of work required to design and prove that a design is correct is usually way more work. This is why most computer functionality is done in digital). If you want a logic circuit, use digital design.
Oh -- and one other thing. A *procedure* can only be called an algorithm if it can be proved that it stops at some point, and if it can be proved that it produces the correct result. If we don't know how an analog device works, we can't prove its behavior, therefore these people aren't making algorithms, they are just making devices that do stuff. If they really want to work on making evolutionary algorithms, they should concentrate on making self modifying logic (ie self modifying code in Lisp, Prolog, or self modifying digital designs, etc).
First of all, for those interested in labels, I consider myself a libertarian. I really dislike censorware; its inaccurate, ineffective, and it only benifits the companies that produce the censorware. I expect that in the near future, as some schools and libraries install "phony" products (lets say the product only censors 2 or 3 sites :) we will see the gov provide a list of supported censorware products.
/. flames) is a collective right and not an individual right then why should anyone assume that the 1st amendment is an individual right? We started down the slippery slop of judicial activism long ago. When we first started, the left didn't mind (and was actually in favor of it) and the right was crying foul. The left didn't mind because gun control has always been part of the left's agenda (note: i'm not saying here that gun control is either good or bad). This upset the right because they viewed this as an attack on individual rights.
But, getting back on subject, is anyone really suprised by this? When the US Supreme Court tells us that the 2nd amendment (getting ready for
Now, I know that someone is going to make the point the people can use guns to murder and that speech can't really hurt anyone. However, my argument is not about the merits of gun control -- in other words I'm not saying that guns and gun control are either good or bad. What I am saying is that the way we have tried to go about implementing gun control is all wrong and we are now reaping the consequences of this.
Instead of setting a precidence of questionable interpretation of the constitution (which will be used again to support censorware), the proper way to go about supporting gun control would have been to have congress amend the constitution and change the language of the 2nd amendment. I know this is very difficult to do, but its that way on purpose. If there is not overwelming support for revoking an individual right (free speech or gun ownership) then it should not be revoked (51% of the populace should not dicate the law).
To sum it all up, the general attitude of special intrest groups in the US is that the ends justify the means, and its only when these same means are used against these groups that they complain. However, by then its too late because precidence has already been set. If you want to say the everyone has the individual right to free speech then you must also say that everyone also has the individual right to own firearms. Otherwise, the constitution is bacially meaningless and we end up with no individual rights.
That's why you'd have to do some degree of carry lookahead for this to make any sense. But even then, you're right, you may not get any gain in speed because of transfer times. However, with other dynamic problems where you're working on very large 3 or 4-D tables (ie k(n)=2l(n-1)+(1/2)m(n-1), k(n)=2m(n-4)-l(n-1), m(n)=3k(n-2)+2m(n-2)) this makes much more sense.