But saying that he doesn't always comment is not saying "never comment, commenting is bad", which is what the other poster somehow takes away from it.
I wasn't commenting on the other poster's interpretation of the article. I was commenting on your post, which claimed that the paragraph I quoted ("I sometimes comment. Almost exclusively, I use them...") was somehow equal to an encouragement to comment. It is not.
then giving examples of when he thinks commenting is helpful is most certainly encouraging commenting
The quoted paragraph never explicitly says that he thinks those are cases where commenting is helpful. He just says that's all he does when he comments. And forgive me for thinking that saying "I only sometimes comment, but when I do these are the only things I comment" isn't exactly an encouragement to comment.
If the original article (other than what was quoted) actually explicitly says that he thinks those are helpful cases, then ignore that. But I'm too lazy to go back and read it again now.
I'm not sure why I'm jumping into this conversation, given the ad hominem attacks, but here goes...
"Almost exclusively, I use them as an introduction to what follows. Examples: explaining the use of global variables and types (the one thing I always comment in large programs); as an introduction to an unusual or critical procedure; or to mark off sections of a large computation."
You left out the immediately preceding sentence: "But I do comment sometimes." The "Almost exclusively" means that WHEN he comments, which is "sometimes", he uses those comments "as an introduction to what follows", examples of which are listed. It does NOT mean that he always comments the examples he gives. Perhaps he MEANT to say he always comments the given examples, but that is NOT what he DID say.
Here is the temperature record for the oldest continually operating weather station in Australia:... Now that's global warming!
Congratulations, you just proved a lack of understanding about global warming. I see it all the time in blogs, somebody points out one place where the mean temperature has fallen over the last couple decades. Well who cares? No one ever said the mean temperature of every point on earth was rising.
Not to mention that when you add the numbers up and take into account water vapor, mankind is only responsible for--wait for it--0.27% of the so-called greenhouse gases.
And that 0.27% could be enough to alter the delicate balance that existed before we began adding our share. Don't think so? Check to see what the house edge on, say, blackjack or craps is. In a number of cases (it varies based on the exact rules the casino sets), less than 1%. Las Vegas keeps on growing though.
That said, I do agree that the headline is rather far-reaching.
What I'm getting at is, some moments happen in literally in the blink of an eye and they only happen once in a lifetime. So in that split second where you are trying to take a shot and have no time to double check, won't you be sorely disappointed if your ticket to a Pulitzer was ruined by the wrong f-stop setting? Or the wrong focus?
There are a lot more types of photography than just photojournalism. And yes, there are certainly cases in, say, wedding photography where if you mis-focus an important shot, things are going to be bad. But that's why wedding photographers actually look through the viewfinder before they shoot. It's also why you pay for an experienced wedding photographer who is very unlikely to screw up, rather than asking your Uncle Jimmy who just bought a new-fangled D-SLR to do it. My guess is that given the current resolution trade-offs, most pros would not go for this system. I sure wouldn't. The percentage of times I take a shot that's out-of-focus due to mis-focus is very small, and I'm sure pros take even less mis-focused shots than I do.
Heck even with today's memory capacities, if you had a camera that produced a 188mb RAW, it'd still be perfectly acceptable to any photographer, considering the possibilities for photography this new technology gives you.
Maybe... it depends on how fast it can actually write that 188MB of data to the card, or how big the memory buffer is so I can still take more shots while it's writing that data.
You have no idea how thankful I am that people with your understanding of legal rights hold no position in the legal system,
Ummm, have you never heard of a jury?
how happy I am that most judges are appointed, not elected (well, save the grand state of Texas, among other places) because it's idiots like you who erode the rights of your fellow citizens.
They're elected in New York state too. It's pretty frustrating, because they can't campaign on issues, so they just walk around and say "vote for me" (not that I want a judge, especially a trial court judge, to campaign on issues). So how the hell am I supposed to know who to vote for? I usually just go by who the bar association and other groups claim is "qualified", which is certainly not optimal.
Can you imagine if information Google gave the police led to the arrest of a murderer? Terrorist? The public would love them, it's a PR department's fantasy.
It could also be a PR department's nightmare. How many people would stop using google if they were holding onto users' search history in a personally-trackable way? Thanks, but I don't need the cops knocking on my door because I searched for something they consider suspicious. Sounds awfully big-brotherish to me. I imagine a lot of people would feel the same.
If you have enough evidence to convict someone, go ahead and do it - but you won't need their browser/search history.
Why avoid using a particular piece of evidence just because you feel you already have enough evidence to convict? When dealing with a murderer, prosecutors should build as rock-solid, slam-dunk a case as they possibly can, in order to avoid any chance that this person winds up going free. They only have one shot at it, after all, at least in the US. And search strings can help build that case. How would it look if a murderer was acquitted and the prosecutor said "well we had this other evidence, but we decided not to present it because we thought we had enough evidence already"?
As you point out, many people search for strange terms out of curiosity, just to see what comes up, and that is enough to ensure that you cannot extract any evidence with regard to any crime whatsoever from the fact that someone search for a certain string (unless of course the act of searching for a certain string itself would be a crime).
What a bunch of baloney. Fertilizer is generally used to assist in the growing of crops. That is enough to ensure that you cannot extract any evidence with regard to any crime whatsoever from the fact that someone bought fertilizer. So if a suspect accused of blowing up a building with a large fertilizer bomb had bought a truckful of fertilizer five days previously, we shouldn't be able to use that as evidence at all. Give me a break.
And it's not just "I'm gonna search for something strange out of curiosity" searches, either. In fact, I think it's important to distinguish between syntax and semantics in general; even if you know that someone searched for information on a certain topic, that does not mean you know why they did.
Likewise, we don't know why this guy bought fertilizer. Maybe he's an innocent farmer trying to grow some corn. Maybe he's a businessman whose wife has a garden where she grows prize-winning tomatoes. Maybe he's a stoner that grows pot in his backyard. Or maybe he's a bomber. It's up to a jury to decide.
Convicting someone because of a certain search history would be like convicting them because they said "we need a new government".
Both would be stupid. And I don't think either one is happening. I just don't understand why you seem to think this is the only evidence being used against this guy.
And you've got to admit, given the rest of the facts of the case, the searches this guy was typing into google look pretty bad. This wasn't just looking up how to kill someone. He was looking up "lake levels, water currents, boat ramps and access" about the lake where the body was dumped -- just a few days before the murder. Sure, he could have been fishing. Which is why, I'll say it one more time, the searches are used as part of the case, not the whole case.
You certainly made a lot of statements in that post while saying little to back them up.
and if you think people are happy about the employment situation that has resulted because of this failure to create wealth, I have some burning French suburbs to show you
There's a lot more to those riots than simple unemployment. Race, for one thing (and we all know the U.S. has never had a race riot before). Unemployment in France as a whole is around 10% (about double that of the U.S.). Unemployment in the "suburbs" (ghettos) where the riots took place is between 20% and 40%. By all accounts the immigrants living in these areas have had a difficult time assimilating with the rest of French society, primarily due to their African or Middle Eastern descent (immigrants of European descent have not had the same integration problems). Hence the astronomical unemployment rate, which is hardly representative of Europe as a whole. Immigration problems are not foreign to the United States, either.
However, when it comes to a crunch, America's MUCH larger economy will allow it to absorb shocks better.
As a whole (and since you seem to be lumping the entire continent into one unit, I will feel free to as well), Europe's economy is larger than that of the United States.
French wine should go be exported all over the continent duty free
Funny you mention wine in the context of free trade. Individual states in the U.S. do whatever they can to protect their own wine growers. For instance the laws against direct shipments from out-of-state wineries that were just struck down.
But more-so because its a true scam where people keep the totaled out car, repair it just enough to get them by, and then continue to drive it for years, while using the insurance payout to payoff the car or put in their pockets.
Why is it a scam? If somebody hits me and causes damage to my vehicle, I expect to be compensated for that damage. Whether I use that compensation to repair the vehicle is my business. When I was in an accident a few years ago I had the option to not repair the vehicle and just take the money; the value of the vehicle as far as the insurance company was concerned would have been reduced by the amount of the payout, so that if I filed a future claim the potential payout would have been commensurately less. Presumably it would also be so noted so I couldn't attempt to file a second claim for the same damage.
If you only repair a totaled car enough to make it driveable, you've still lost the full value of the vehicle minus the amount you put into it to make it driveable. Which is exactly the same as the insurance money you'll have left after the repair. No one is profiting off of this. And as you mentioned, selling a previously-totaled car, no matter how much repair work has been done to it, is difficult because of the mark on the title.
When they totaled the car from that same accident, they towed it away and I had to sign the title over to get paid. They paid for it, they now own it.
Uhhh... what? They didn't pay for the car, they paid for the amount of damage caused by their insured. Which, in this case, happened to be the full value of the car. I've never heard of a requirement that they get the car in such a case. Sure, you probably don't really want it anyway, but I can't see how reimbursement of damage can be tied to you giving up possession of your vehicle.
You know how long it took a signal to get to the mars rover to operate it? The lag time was counted in *hours*.
Eh? At aphelion, Mars is about 1.67 AU from the Sun; Earth is 1.02 AU at aphelion. That means that the farthest apart Mars and Earth can EVER be is around 2.7 AU. With one AU being approximately 150,000,000km or 499 light-seconds, a radio signal would take about 22.5 minutes to get from Earth to Mars when they are the farthest possible distance apart -- 45 minutes round-trip. However, about a month ago Earth and Mars were 0.464 AU apart, so the radio signal then would have taken only about 8 minutes round-trip.
Perhaps the communications protocol required multiple round-trips, but the time it takes the signal to get there is hardly on the order of hours.
The results of applying smirch to the smirch module are... well they're impossible to get past the lameness filter, but I think it is safe to say that it is fairly obfuscated.
So... it looks like Perl?
Re:disappointed -- try the java cert exam
on
Java Puzzlers
·
· Score: 1
No... Integer.parseInt(String) is exactly the same as Integer.parseInt(String, 10). It's defined that way in the Javadoc, and the source code agrees.
Also, I don't know what code you're trying to show us in your example, but the thing that is supposedly printing out as 133 ('a') hasn't been declared or assigned to. And the thing that was supposed to prove your point that Integer.parseInt("0123") is treated as octal actually prints out as 123, whereas if it were treated as octal this would actually print out as 83.
In this example, String is a static class, so the variables declared in that class are also static. The class serves merely as a namespace. So I don't see what the mystery is here -- it will print "hello goodbye" because the s variable is shared between all "instances."
Ummm... no. You really need to look up what a static class means in Java. It simply means that the inner class can exist separate from any instance of the enclosing class. The inner class's members are not automatically all static. If you were to modify the given code so that it actually runs, you'll see "hello hello" printed out.
Sure you can "figure it out" but if you think I'm gonna turn you loose on my network with ADSIedit and isinteg you're on crack.
My point was that in my first year of an IT degree I had classes that taught me stuff like how to use Photoshop. Well that's all well and good until the next version of Photoshop comes out. I figured I could save $100,000 and read a few PS tutorials online. So I switched to CS where I learned concepts that are more enduring than a particular programming language or piece of software.
I went to DeVry and have been solidly employed for over 8 years... the IIT guy still hasn't landed a job after graduating this past summer, and the Harvard girl who graduated near the top of her class likewise can't find a job
It's harder to find a job in the tech industry now than it was 8 years ago. It'd be interesting to compare today's DeVry graduates with today's traditional schools' graduates. I went to Rochester Institute of Technology and had no trouble finding a job when I graduated two years ago, nor did a single one of my friends who went for a CS or CompE degree. IT was a different story.
Devry had too many classes like.. "this is how to use such-and-such software"
That's what RIT's IT degree was like, at least the first year of it back in 1998 before I switched to CS (because I wasn't learning anything I couldn't figure out for myself by playing around for a couple hours).
It took a lot of persuading, pushing, cajoling, and other force from Melinda, Bill Sr. (and I believe they also mentioned his Mother, but I don't remember -- don't even know if she's still alive) to get Bill Jr. to agree to set up any kind of charity.... So at this point, unless someone here wants to research it, we dont' even know if Bill Jr. ever donated any more to his own Foundation than his initial grant for seed money.
First off, there's a difference between starting a charity and donating to charity. I haven't seen the speech by his father, but just because he didn't want to start his own foundation doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't actively donating to charitable causes, or that he isn't/wasn't charitable. I would bet that close to 100% of the people out there donating thousands of dollars per year don't have their own charities. Are they not charitable?
As for his contributions to his foundation, according to Wikipedia, the estimated current endowment of his foundation is $28 billion. It looks like the initial endowment was $5 billion, so from that I'd say he's been contributing. They also claim that Gates has given one-third of his lifetime income to charity. Sure, given the billions he has, there's room for more giving. But I'm hardly ready to call him a scrooge.
My parents know nothing about how a computer works, to the point of calling me and asking where the "on button" is located when the power goes out... sometimes deleting relavent messages simply because the sender didn't LOOK like someone they knew
Some would argue that that makes them just as much idiots as the people you are deriding.
People who are overly cautious can be just as frustrating as those who are overly zealous.
EMP or not... Why hasn't the government spent any of it money to destroy hurricanes while they are offshore; instead, they just sit back and watch the destruction.
The National Hurricane Center covers reasons why these attempts aren't made in their FAQ. Specifically, section C, Tropical Cyclone Modification and Myths. In short, as other posters mentioned, the government tried with Project Stormfury, which was determined to be a failure for a couple reasons. Given the size and energy of these storms, pretty much any other idea people have come up with just isn't feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
you don't just destroy the cancer, but also the patients.
Sounds a lot like chemo.
how to spell harrass
Not like that.
But saying that he doesn't always comment is not saying "never comment, commenting is bad", which is what the other poster somehow takes away from it.
...") was somehow equal to an encouragement to comment. It is not.
I wasn't commenting on the other poster's interpretation of the article. I was commenting on your post, which claimed that the paragraph I quoted ("I sometimes comment. Almost exclusively, I use them
then giving examples of when he thinks commenting is helpful is most certainly encouraging commenting
The quoted paragraph never explicitly says that he thinks those are cases where commenting is helpful. He just says that's all he does when he comments. And forgive me for thinking that saying "I only sometimes comment, but when I do these are the only things I comment" isn't exactly an encouragement to comment.
If the original article (other than what was quoted) actually explicitly says that he thinks those are helpful cases, then ignore that. But I'm too lazy to go back and read it again now.
I'm not sure why I'm jumping into this conversation, given the ad hominem attacks, but here goes...
"Almost exclusively, I use them as an introduction to what follows. Examples: explaining the use of global variables and types (the one thing I always comment in large programs); as an introduction to an unusual or critical procedure; or to mark off sections of a large computation."
You left out the immediately preceding sentence: "But I do comment sometimes." The "Almost exclusively" means that WHEN he comments, which is "sometimes", he uses those comments "as an introduction to what follows", examples of which are listed. It does NOT mean that he always comments the examples he gives. Perhaps he MEANT to say he always comments the given examples, but that is NOT what he DID say.
Here is the temperature record for the oldest continually operating weather station in Australia: ... Now that's global warming!
Congratulations, you just proved a lack of understanding about global warming. I see it all the time in blogs, somebody points out one place where the mean temperature has fallen over the last couple decades. Well who cares? No one ever said the mean temperature of every point on earth was rising.
Not to mention that when you add the numbers up and take into account water vapor, mankind is only responsible for--wait for it--0.27% of the so-called greenhouse gases.
And that 0.27% could be enough to alter the delicate balance that existed before we began adding our share. Don't think so? Check to see what the house edge on, say, blackjack or craps is. In a number of cases (it varies based on the exact rules the casino sets), less than 1%. Las Vegas keeps on growing though.
That said, I do agree that the headline is rather far-reaching.
What I'm getting at is, some moments happen in literally in the blink of an eye and they only happen once in a lifetime. So in that split second where you are trying to take a shot and have no time to double check, won't you be sorely disappointed if your ticket to a Pulitzer was ruined by the wrong f-stop setting? Or the wrong focus?
There are a lot more types of photography than just photojournalism. And yes, there are certainly cases in, say, wedding photography where if you mis-focus an important shot, things are going to be bad. But that's why wedding photographers actually look through the viewfinder before they shoot. It's also why you pay for an experienced wedding photographer who is very unlikely to screw up, rather than asking your Uncle Jimmy who just bought a new-fangled D-SLR to do it. My guess is that given the current resolution trade-offs, most pros would not go for this system. I sure wouldn't. The percentage of times I take a shot that's out-of-focus due to mis-focus is very small, and I'm sure pros take even less mis-focused shots than I do.
Heck even with today's memory capacities, if you had a camera that produced a 188mb RAW, it'd still be perfectly acceptable to any photographer, considering the possibilities for photography this new technology gives you.
Maybe... it depends on how fast it can actually write that 188MB of data to the card, or how big the memory buffer is so I can still take more shots while it's writing that data.
You have no idea how thankful I am that people with your understanding of legal rights hold no position in the legal system,
Ummm, have you never heard of a jury?
how happy I am that most judges are appointed, not elected (well, save the grand state of Texas, among other places) because it's idiots like you who erode the rights of your fellow citizens.
They're elected in New York state too. It's pretty frustrating, because they can't campaign on issues, so they just walk around and say "vote for me" (not that I want a judge, especially a trial court judge, to campaign on issues). So how the hell am I supposed to know who to vote for? I usually just go by who the bar association and other groups claim is "qualified", which is certainly not optimal.
Can you imagine if information Google gave the police led to the arrest of a murderer? Terrorist? The public would love them, it's a PR department's fantasy.
It could also be a PR department's nightmare. How many people would stop using google if they were holding onto users' search history in a personally-trackable way? Thanks, but I don't need the cops knocking on my door because I searched for something they consider suspicious. Sounds awfully big-brotherish to me. I imagine a lot of people would feel the same.
If you have enough evidence to convict someone, go ahead and do it - but you won't need their browser/search history.
Why avoid using a particular piece of evidence just because you feel you already have enough evidence to convict? When dealing with a murderer, prosecutors should build as rock-solid, slam-dunk a case as they possibly can, in order to avoid any chance that this person winds up going free. They only have one shot at it, after all, at least in the US. And search strings can help build that case. How would it look if a murderer was acquitted and the prosecutor said "well we had this other evidence, but we decided not to present it because we thought we had enough evidence already"?
As you point out, many people search for strange terms out of curiosity, just to see what comes up, and that is enough to ensure that you cannot extract any evidence with regard to any crime whatsoever from the fact that someone search for a certain string (unless of course the act of searching for a certain string itself would be a crime).
What a bunch of baloney. Fertilizer is generally used to assist in the growing of crops. That is enough to ensure that you cannot extract any evidence with regard to any crime whatsoever from the fact that someone bought fertilizer. So if a suspect accused of blowing up a building with a large fertilizer bomb had bought a truckful of fertilizer five days previously, we shouldn't be able to use that as evidence at all. Give me a break.
And it's not just "I'm gonna search for something strange out of curiosity" searches, either. In fact, I think it's important to distinguish between syntax and semantics in general; even if you know that someone searched for information on a certain topic, that does not mean you know why they did.
Likewise, we don't know why this guy bought fertilizer. Maybe he's an innocent farmer trying to grow some corn. Maybe he's a businessman whose wife has a garden where she grows prize-winning tomatoes. Maybe he's a stoner that grows pot in his backyard. Or maybe he's a bomber. It's up to a jury to decide.
Convicting someone because of a certain search history would be like convicting them because they said "we need a new government".
Both would be stupid. And I don't think either one is happening. I just don't understand why you seem to think this is the only evidence being used against this guy.
And you've got to admit, given the rest of the facts of the case, the searches this guy was typing into google look pretty bad. This wasn't just looking up how to kill someone. He was looking up "lake levels, water currents, boat ramps and access" about the lake where the body was dumped -- just a few days before the murder. Sure, he could have been fishing. Which is why, I'll say it one more time, the searches are used as part of the case, not the whole case.
You certainly made a lot of statements in that post while saying little to back them up.
and if you think people are happy about the employment situation that has resulted because of this failure to create wealth, I have some burning French suburbs to show you
There's a lot more to those riots than simple unemployment. Race, for one thing (and we all know the U.S. has never had a race riot before). Unemployment in France as a whole is around 10% (about double that of the U.S.). Unemployment in the "suburbs" (ghettos) where the riots took place is between 20% and 40%. By all accounts the immigrants living in these areas have had a difficult time assimilating with the rest of French society, primarily due to their African or Middle Eastern descent (immigrants of European descent have not had the same integration problems). Hence the astronomical unemployment rate, which is hardly representative of Europe as a whole. Immigration problems are not foreign to the United States, either.
However, when it comes to a crunch, America's MUCH larger economy will allow it to absorb shocks better.
As a whole (and since you seem to be lumping the entire continent into one unit, I will feel free to as well), Europe's economy is larger than that of the United States.
French wine should go be exported all over the continent duty free
Funny you mention wine in the context of free trade. Individual states in the U.S. do whatever they can to protect their own wine growers. For instance the laws against direct shipments from out-of-state wineries that were just struck down.
But more-so because its a true scam where people keep the totaled out car, repair it just enough to get them by, and then continue to drive it for years, while using the insurance payout to payoff the car or put in their pockets.
Why is it a scam? If somebody hits me and causes damage to my vehicle, I expect to be compensated for that damage. Whether I use that compensation to repair the vehicle is my business. When I was in an accident a few years ago I had the option to not repair the vehicle and just take the money; the value of the vehicle as far as the insurance company was concerned would have been reduced by the amount of the payout, so that if I filed a future claim the potential payout would have been commensurately less. Presumably it would also be so noted so I couldn't attempt to file a second claim for the same damage.
If you only repair a totaled car enough to make it driveable, you've still lost the full value of the vehicle minus the amount you put into it to make it driveable. Which is exactly the same as the insurance money you'll have left after the repair. No one is profiting off of this. And as you mentioned, selling a previously-totaled car, no matter how much repair work has been done to it, is difficult because of the mark on the title.
When they totaled the car from that same accident, they towed it away and I had to sign the title over to get paid. They paid for it, they now own it.
Uhhh... what? They didn't pay for the car, they paid for the amount of damage caused by their insured. Which, in this case, happened to be the full value of the car. I've never heard of a requirement that they get the car in such a case. Sure, you probably don't really want it anyway, but I can't see how reimbursement of damage can be tied to you giving up possession of your vehicle.
They are already too expensive
Exactly... you know what I find really pathetic? When I can buy a DVD for less money than the CD of the same movie's soundtrack.
"So I can get the soundtrack... or for less money, I can get the movie AND the soundtrack. Hmm..."
You know how long it took a signal to get to the mars rover to operate it? The lag time was counted in *hours*.
Eh? At aphelion, Mars is about 1.67 AU from the Sun; Earth is 1.02 AU at aphelion. That means that the farthest apart Mars and Earth can EVER be is around 2.7 AU. With one AU being approximately 150,000,000km or 499 light-seconds, a radio signal would take about 22.5 minutes to get from Earth to Mars when they are the farthest possible distance apart -- 45 minutes round-trip. However, about a month ago Earth and Mars were 0.464 AU apart, so the radio signal then would have taken only about 8 minutes round-trip.
Perhaps the communications protocol required multiple round-trips, but the time it takes the signal to get there is hardly on the order of hours.
The results of applying smirch to the smirch module are... well they're impossible to get past the lameness filter, but I think it is safe to say that it is fairly obfuscated.
So... it looks like Perl?
No... Integer.parseInt(String) is exactly the same as Integer.parseInt(String, 10). It's defined that way in the Javadoc, and the source code agrees.
Also, I don't know what code you're trying to show us in your example, but the thing that is supposedly printing out as 133 ('a') hasn't been declared or assigned to. And the thing that was supposed to prove your point that Integer.parseInt("0123") is treated as octal actually prints out as 123, whereas if it were treated as octal this would actually print out as 83.
In this example, String is a static class, so the variables declared in that class are also static. The class serves merely as a namespace. So I don't see what the mystery is here -- it will print "hello goodbye" because the s variable is shared between all "instances."
Ummm... no. You really need to look up what a static class means in Java. It simply means that the inner class can exist separate from any instance of the enclosing class. The inner class's members are not automatically all static. If you were to modify the given code so that it actually runs, you'll see "hello hello" printed out.
Sure you can "figure it out" but if you think I'm gonna turn you loose on my network with ADSIedit and isinteg you're on crack.
My point was that in my first year of an IT degree I had classes that taught me stuff like how to use Photoshop. Well that's all well and good until the next version of Photoshop comes out. I figured I could save $100,000 and read a few PS tutorials online. So I switched to CS where I learned concepts that are more enduring than a particular programming language or piece of software.
BS = Bull shit
;-)
MS = More shit
Ph.D = Piled higher and deeper.
It just doesn't work if it's abbreviated B.Sc
(That said, I've always seen bachelor of science abbreviated as BS, not B.Sc., though I did happen to also go to RIT).
I went to DeVry and have been solidly employed for over 8 years ... the IIT guy still hasn't landed a job after graduating this past summer, and the Harvard girl who graduated near the top of her class likewise can't find a job
It's harder to find a job in the tech industry now than it was 8 years ago. It'd be interesting to compare today's DeVry graduates with today's traditional schools' graduates. I went to Rochester Institute of Technology and had no trouble finding a job when I graduated two years ago, nor did a single one of my friends who went for a CS or CompE degree. IT was a different story.
Devry had too many classes like.. "this is how to use such-and-such software"
That's what RIT's IT degree was like, at least the first year of it back in 1998 before I switched to CS (because I wasn't learning anything I couldn't figure out for myself by playing around for a couple hours).
It took a lot of persuading, pushing, cajoling, and other force from Melinda, Bill Sr. (and I believe they also mentioned his Mother, but I don't remember -- don't even know if she's still alive) to get Bill Jr. to agree to set up any kind of charity. ... So at this point, unless someone here wants to research it, we dont' even know if Bill Jr. ever donated any more to his own Foundation than his initial grant for seed money.
First off, there's a difference between starting a charity and donating to charity. I haven't seen the speech by his father, but just because he didn't want to start his own foundation doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't actively donating to charitable causes, or that he isn't/wasn't charitable. I would bet that close to 100% of the people out there donating thousands of dollars per year don't have their own charities. Are they not charitable?
As for his contributions to his foundation, according to Wikipedia, the estimated current endowment of his foundation is $28 billion. It looks like the initial endowment was $5 billion, so from that I'd say he's been contributing. They also claim that Gates has given one-third of his lifetime income to charity. Sure, given the billions he has, there's room for more giving. But I'm hardly ready to call him a scrooge.
My parents know nothing about how a computer works, to the point of calling me and asking where the "on button" is located when the power goes out ... sometimes deleting relavent messages simply because the sender didn't LOOK like someone they knew
Some would argue that that makes them just as much idiots as the people you are deriding.
People who are overly cautious can be just as frustrating as those who are overly zealous.
EMP or not... Why hasn't the government spent any of it money to destroy hurricanes while they are offshore; instead, they just sit back and watch the destruction.
The National Hurricane Center covers reasons why these attempts aren't made in their FAQ. Specifically, section C, Tropical Cyclone Modification and Myths. In short, as other posters mentioned, the government tried with Project Stormfury, which was determined to be a failure for a couple reasons. Given the size and energy of these storms, pretty much any other idea people have come up with just isn't feasible.
On D-Day, Canada landed over 14,000 troops on the beaches of Normandy amid a hail of bullets.
You're right, I forgot the U.S. didn't participate in the D-Day invasions.