You really -don't- want to take a case to court, becuase, once in court, anything can happen. A judge can do whatever he or she wants, and those who want judges to really decide issues like this, would do well to imagine the consequences.
Let's assume that the GPL people win an initial round and the defendants takes it all the way up to the US Supreme Court on various appeals, countersuits, etc.
The question has to be asked : Does an admittedly left leaning GPL really want to ultimately be decided by the likes of Clarence Thomas? It seems to me that the GPL runs the risk of being arbitrarily declared so much commie crap by the SCOTUS, undermining the entire movement. A judge could make up anything, a Supreme Court, even more so, and they could declare the GPL to be in violation of anti-trust, unconstitutional because it is non-commercial, and any number of things. Once the Supreme Court rules, only Congress can effect the law at that point, by instructing the court, and the odds of anybody in the OSS movement having the clout to lobby congress, regardless of political party, seem to be about zero.
Is that, its important to note that Americans are actually manufacturing more than they ever have in their national history. It's just that, with the acceptance and refinement of more Japanese management methods, coupled with automation and customer driven product development, there's not as much of a need for workers.
The one thing that sucks, though, in the country, is the lack of work for low skilled workers getting decent jobs. Sure, it may be more efficient to send that work overseas to China, but, it also removes a leg in the ladder from poverty to the middle class and is ultimately what's helping to drive the growing gap between rich and poor and also shrink the middle class.
You see, Henry Ford got his start on a factory floor, and today's young Henry Ford, would have no job at all.
50 grand now is probably worth about 30 grand 20 years ago.
Not necessarily. The period from the 1980s through 2000 was called the "Commodities Depression", where, in real dollars, all the prices of all the commodities fell dramatically over time. Right now, obviously, things are a bit different, with rising world demand driving all the basics higher.
But, even today, real interest rates are actually lower.. back in 1980, specifically, inflation and interest rates were in double digits. Although, right now, there's some bad fundamentals... the USA seemed to think it could have a trade policy where it could buy everything the world makes, and well, it can't. So, we have a mountain of debt we have to deal with.
Much like Microsoft, it isn't so much that one particular set of alternate vendors from a particular nation are better but that ALL OF THEM ARE.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Linux is not better than Windows, it simply is an ok, and incomplete, alternative that is attractive because of its price and its ideology appeals to those with a leftist bent. But, from a technology perspective, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 remain on par with Linux for web development, lead, if you have Monad, even for scripting, exceeds it significantly for gaming (not from OpenGL versus DX, but for sound, joystick, etc). Linux has a better networking stack than Windows does..but I believe Vista fixed that, although some reports suggest that they broke sound to do it. Linux, gasp, has no native file sharing and network printing protocol.. having to ape Netbios... I still wonder why Novell won't bundle Netware with Linux and open source it.
Visual Studio, when working in C#, remains the premier development environment on any platform. Office is better than OpenOffice... Access remains the best desktop database, and SQL Server is really only answered by Oracle, which is, incidentally, another American company.
Screw the Japanese, XBOX360 is better than PS3 and iPod is better than walkman. I'm with Bill Gates and Microsoft and Steve Jobs and Apple over Sony ALL THE WAY. You see, I used to work for RCA, and Sony kicked our Ass, and I gleefully hope for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to plant the red white and blue back into consumer electronics.
Now, that's not to say that the USA is automatically the best in IT. It's not. Europeans are damned good programmers... I used to play French games on my Atari 800, and I still remember when I first played Beast on the Amiga, with its obviously intimate knowledge of hardware, thinking, oh christ, the Germans are coming. And so they have came. They are very good, and I would more worry about the Europeans blowing us away in the low level O/S type of stuff, than I would about Indians filling out forms.
Unionization just kept management from getting too far out of hand.
Well, no. Unions blocked management from altering work rules from a taylor process into a lean process until it was way too late for most American manufacturing companies. Basically, in a classic union shop, you have a certain tool guy, and that is HIS job, and no one else can do it, and he can't be made to do something else. That's what was thought was efficient in 1930, but it turned out to be terrible in 1980, when the Japanese came up with work teams and a more holistic view of assembly. Those American companies that could adopt that technique survived and prospered, and those that couldn't died. Programmers, for example, operate under a management model, in a good shop, that was essentially how the japanese make cars. So we're the beneficiaries of a new understanding of flexible labor.
That's not to say management didn't make bad decisions. They made some doozies. GM's CEO of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a total disaster. But GM, even today, was always guided more about trying to fit existing plants into a production puzzle, rather than, looking at, what do they really need.
I have to say science journalists deserve a break. Consider the audience that they are writing for. The vast majority of readers, even with college education, most likely lack a good grasp of the modern math where science runs. We're way beyond describing things with the simple algebra... and really, some concepts just require more than a basic understanding of calculus and, surprisingly, probability and statistics. So, science writers not only struggle describing a new phenomonon, they struggle with trying to lay out in a paragraph what takes semesters to learn, and guess what, it is really hard to do that.
And, I don't think we should be asking scientists to try and dumb their communications down, either, as that really undermines the most important aspect of science - peer review. Publicly funded scientific communication begs for some sort of an open, publicly funded database that scientists can publish in. But, then, scientists depend on those publication moneys, so what to do?
Really, I wonder if the best course of action is for science journalists to up their level of math and science that they write to. Is it really so bad if a popular science magazine reminds its readers, that most of them do not know what they are talking about?
That's of course assuming that the only thing that matters is the price of the product and that little things like the actual characteristics of the product don't mean anything.
OTOH, people still buy crappy american cars...
It all goes together. If you are in favor of unions so much, then you should accept a potentially lower quality product you are getting in exchange for a greater social world, in your eyes. If you have to have the Japanese car, because they are "so much better", and really, they aren't, then, you really don't have any right to lament the death of the union, because you are the cause of their death. How somebody votes does not matter nearly so much to the UAW as what kind of car you buy.
You speak on and on about fear mongering but all you do not give a single rational argument against unions. All you do is try to associate a simple, healthy, life improving initiative that aims to protect worker's rights with evil, oppressive initiatives like the US's patriot act. If that wasn't enough to satisfy your trolling needs, you go on associating unions with organized crime and corruption.
Obviously, you didn't read, much less comprehend what I said. I guess that must be the hallmark of a union education. Teachers unions did great for you, I see!
Explain to me how unions work. You name me one company that could get unionized, such that, the customers of that company would not immediately flock somewhere else once that company's prices shot up.
Please, go right ahead. Your only answer to this, is that, everyone has to be unionized. So, the end game of your worker's rights is to make them slaves.
Yeah, man. The only people who deserve a pay increase are CEO's. God, everyone knows that
Did I say that? No, if you want more money, do something with some value to it. Don't be sitting there pretending that all you have to do is fork over some crap and get a ton of money because breathe. Be more entreprenuial, and don't blame your failings on someone else's success. It's a CEO's fault you're a loser.
There's not a spit of difference between guys selling the Union or the guys selling USA PATRIOT ACT. Both depend on this idea that we are completely powerless, so we need to get some goons to protect us, and furthermore, we should just give these jerks, in the form of dues or taxes, protection money. You know what a union is? It's a steward who just got a nice deck for his house, a president's kid's baseball team that got new uniforms, and any manner of theft.
The simple matter of the truth is, unions don't work. Unions don't work because, every time you give them what they claim to get, they either drive the parent company bankrupt, like GM and a cast of thousands, or the work goes overseas. The promise is a lie, and all a union really does is just place a tax based on a fear. Unions don't work because the customer doesn't care what happens to the people that produce a product.
How many of you, Americans, out there, lamenting the death of the Union, have bought an American car in the last decade? I bet a dang view... bunch of uber geeks saying how your Japanese or German car is better. Well, good for you, but don't be sitting their trying to square your social treason on the rest with your guilt trips about capitalism and unions. If you want American companies to succeed, then buy American products. It's that simple.
Today, all of these "workers" advocates are just in the business of helping themselves. They work by frightening people into giving them money for promises that they can't keep, and have no intention of keeping. It's just like the "people's lawyer", the guy that sues some company for a billion dollars - he gets millions, while his plaintiffs get coupons. Workers rights is a slogan for an industry based on extortion, and fear.
Didn't it ever crossed your brilliant mind that the real problem lied with you and your class never fighting for your own best interests and therefore being forced to earn less and having a crappy life?
See, what this is ultimately is, is fear mongering. There's not a spit of difference between guys selling the Union or the guys selling USA PATRIOT ACT. Both depend on this idea that we are completely powerless, so we need to get some goons to protect us, and furthermore, we should just give these jerks, in the form of dues or taxes, protection money. You know what a union is? It's a steward who just got a nice deck for his house, a president's kid's baseball team that got new uniforms, and any manner of theft.
The simple matter of the truth is, unions don't work. Unions don't work because, every time you give them what they claim to get, they either drive the parent company bankrupt, like GM and a cast of thousands, or the work goes overseas. The promise is a lie, and all a union really does is just place a tax based on a fear.
Really, all of these "workers" advocates are just in the business of helping themselves. A bunch of crooks, trying to frighten people into giving them money for promises that they can't keep, and have no intention of keeping. It's just like the "people's lawyer", the guy that sues some company for a billion dollars - he gets millions, while his plaintiffs get coupons. Workers rights is a slogan for an industry based on extortion, and fear.
Europe, for example, no longer fears invasion, and the Euro has made the US Dollar less important for the world economy.
Actually, it works well for the USA, as the strong dollar has been a subsidy of Europe for a long time. I'm hoping for $2 per Euro, and a ton of unemployed Germans, and a ton of manufacturing back in the USA. Let's see BMW let go 100k people for a change!
If you don't like the hours, don't get into the business. There are plenty of Indians that like to program too. The more we act like Detroit in the 1970s, the more we will be like Detroit in 2007.
now why would that be? oh right, we can't have backwards compatibility, that would allow competition. [just kidding] but really, what was the reason for changing the way excel evaluates a function? what did that change actually improve?
MS significantly jacked up the number of rows and columns in Excel, and they might have gone from a sparse matrix to a tree as an internal storage. That would entail a change in how the interpreter works.
I'm happy to live in a country where we don't ask god to bless us like snivelling minions, we TELL god to keep our land glorious and free
Yeah, and that's easy to do when the US Navy has 13 aircraft carriers, 25 assault carrier, a couple of retired battleships and a bunch of other stuff on your side. If, as my fellow conservatives would like, the USA learns from its lessons and withdraws from all of its military alliances, we'll see how all ye fair.
Would you like to take an over / under on how long it takes Poland to get the Bomb after the USA withdraws from NATO?
Mexico's literacy rate is 91% (CIA World Factbook). Their poverty rate is 40% (same source). 18% of Mexico's labor force is engaged in agriculture in Mexico.
Yep, and with a population of 108 million, that's about 11 million illiterate people, and, they are all in the USA!:-) Seriously, though, the language of the USA is english, if only, ever other immigrant class learned it, and so should mexicans.
ow now, just because they aren't fluent in English doesn't mean they can't read any written languages. You do know that there are other languages, right?
If they were really literate in Spanish, they most likely would not be picking fruit for a living, now would they? Mexico's per capita GDP, while lower than the USA, still supports a reasonable middle class. In other words, the REALLY smart Mexicans are still in Mexico, working for either the telecommunications or petro giants.
Oh no, Master Chief comes OUT!!! :-)
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
I consider it a great sign of progress that no one has actually made a lot of hay about the ending, whereas Master Chief confesses that he really likes the other Masters more than the Mistresses, particularly since you have to do a multi key set of moves to consumate your new found love....
And the current hostility toward immigration and the hoops that foreign grad students and postdocs have to jump through isn't helping, either.
It's not hostility to immigration. It's illegal immigration. I think you would find that a lot of right wingers on the forefront of the illegal immigration charge have a lot of H1-B employees with engineering degrees wondering why they have to jump through so many hoops to be a citizen when evidentally a bunch of illiterate crop pickers get to be citizens after sneaking across the border.
I do recall that Bush's immigration bill would have raised the H1-B limit, AND, changed the requirements for legal entry to be stacked more along an educational and professional background, rather than, how poor an immigrant is, or how much family there is, as is the case today.
Call the roll of the people who gave us our nuclear weapons. Sure, there were the Harold Ureys and E. O. Lawrences and Richard Feynmans, but a lot of it depended on foreign scientists escaping the European dictatorships. Postwar, the space race was a contest between "our German scientists and their German scientists."
Actually, as a point of historical fact, "German scientists" really didn't do all -that much- in the space race. Within the USA, Von Braun's Jupiter - C and Redstone were both ultimately failures as the ICBMs they were intended to be, soon supplanted by the solid fueled Minuteman. It was Convairs "Atlas" booster that delivered the first Americans into orbit. From there, really, he did some good work on the Saturn V, and it did get us to the moon, but, the really hard parts about the moon were the lunar orbit rendevous, the lander, and the apollo spacecraft itself, and all of those were done by American contracting companies.
On the Soviet side, the space race had scarcely no German help. It was Korolev that was the brain child of all of the early Soviet successes. Had he not died on the table during what should have been a routine operation, it is very likely the Soviets might have finished their own massive N-1, and, while they wouldn't have necessarly been able to put a man on the moon, they could have done some interesting things with it.
The problem is really simple. Because free markets worked so well for some things, free market processes have been misapplied. It became very much in vogue, during the 1980s and 1990s, to treat research as just another business process. Much as someone would put together an project plan and a bunch of Pertt and Gant charts for defining the development of a new car, we as a people came to believe that we should run all aspects of government in the same way, and you simply can't.
Business processes are about minimizing risks, and therefor unknowns, and research is about exploring the unknowns. You can't have a process that says, after we do ten things, we'll knock out this fusion problem and cure cancer as a milestone at step 72. You just don't know, and, in research, if you get to a point and find that you don't know something, like you thought you might have, you WANT to invest the time to find out that which you don't know. In business, you would want to think about an entirely different approach. The two are simply diametrically opposed.
I know it is in vogue to say that scientists should be accountable and we should be able to audit their productivity, but, really, you just can't. All you can really do is educate the hell out of them, ensure that it really means something to get a Phd, try and see if they are motivated, but once that is done, you just have to give them a bunch of money, lock them on a campus, and say, "let me know what you find out all along the way." Then, if we get jealous because it seems like they have a cushy job, which they do, we just have to say, well, you should have aced calculus in high school and college, because that's what they did.
All the witnesses have been silenced. The meteor has been taken away. The smoking man pauses, job well done. Arsenic. They'll believe that, before they believe the TRUTH.
The big concern that the managers of this project had, was that, they didn't want the third world to think they were getting a bad notebook because of bad reviews from Americans, so, in classic fascist fashion, they took steps to try and muzzle the Americans.
You wingnuts should form a comedy troop with Baghdad Bob, you are frikkin hilarious.
We righties have our problems, to be sure, but you lefties have a fundamental disconnect when you talk about freedom. At the end of the day, the effect of all of the great left wing amendments reads: "Congress shall have the power..."... And that's really what happens. You give the government power, and you take it away from the people. Sure, some of your causes are good, but they do make the majority of people less free. If you could just be honest enough to admit that you are not as in favor of freedom as you are about social harmony, then, that would be nice.
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You really -don't- want to take a case to court, becuase, once in court, anything can happen. A judge can do whatever he or she wants, and those who want judges to really decide issues like this, would do well to imagine the consequences.
Let's assume that the GPL people win an initial round and the defendants takes it all the way up to the US Supreme Court on various appeals, countersuits, etc.
The question has to be asked : Does an admittedly left leaning GPL really want to ultimately be decided by the likes of Clarence Thomas? It seems to me that the GPL runs the risk of being arbitrarily declared so much commie crap by the SCOTUS, undermining the entire movement. A judge could make up anything, a Supreme Court, even more so, and they could declare the GPL to be in violation of anti-trust, unconstitutional because it is non-commercial, and any number of things. Once the Supreme Court rules, only Congress can effect the law at that point, by instructing the court, and the odds of anybody in the OSS movement having the clout to lobby congress, regardless of political party, seem to be about zero.
Is that, its important to note that Americans are actually manufacturing more than they ever have in their national history. It's just that, with the acceptance and refinement of more Japanese management methods, coupled with automation and customer driven product development, there's not as much of a need for workers.
The one thing that sucks, though, in the country, is the lack of work for low skilled workers getting decent jobs. Sure, it may be more efficient to send that work overseas to China, but, it also removes a leg in the ladder from poverty to the middle class and is ultimately what's helping to drive the growing gap between rich and poor and also shrink the middle class.
You see, Henry Ford got his start on a factory floor, and today's young Henry Ford, would have no job at all.
50 grand now is probably worth about 30 grand 20 years ago.
Not necessarily. The period from the 1980s through 2000 was called the "Commodities Depression", where, in real dollars, all the prices of all the commodities fell dramatically over time. Right now, obviously, things are a bit different, with rising world demand driving all the basics higher.
But, even today, real interest rates are actually lower.. back in 1980, specifically, inflation and interest rates were in double digits. Although, right now, there's some bad fundamentals... the USA seemed to think it could have a trade policy where it could buy everything the world makes, and well, it can't. So, we have a mountain of debt we have to deal with.
Much like Microsoft, it isn't so much that one particular set of alternate vendors from a particular nation are better but that ALL OF THEM ARE.
.. having to ape Netbios... I still wonder why Novell won't bundle Netware with Linux and open source it.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Linux is not better than Windows, it simply is an ok, and incomplete, alternative that is attractive because of its price and its ideology appeals to those with a leftist bent. But, from a technology perspective, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 remain on par with Linux for web development, lead, if you have Monad, even for scripting, exceeds it significantly for gaming (not from OpenGL versus DX, but for sound, joystick, etc). Linux has a better networking stack than Windows does..but I believe Vista fixed that, although some reports suggest that they broke sound to do it. Linux, gasp, has no native file sharing and network printing protocol
Visual Studio, when working in C#, remains the premier development environment on any platform. Office is better than OpenOffice... Access remains the best desktop database, and SQL Server is really only answered by Oracle, which is, incidentally, another American company.
Screw the Japanese, XBOX360 is better than PS3 and iPod is better than walkman. I'm with Bill Gates and Microsoft and Steve Jobs and Apple over Sony ALL THE WAY. You see, I used to work for RCA, and Sony kicked our Ass, and I gleefully hope for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to plant the red white and blue back into consumer electronics.
Now, that's not to say that the USA is automatically the best in IT. It's not. Europeans are damned good programmers... I used to play French games on my Atari 800, and I still remember when I first played Beast on the Amiga, with its obviously intimate knowledge of hardware, thinking, oh christ, the Germans are coming. And so they have came. They are very good, and I would more worry about the Europeans blowing us away in the low level O/S type of stuff, than I would about Indians filling out forms.
Unionization just kept management from getting too far out of hand.
Well, no. Unions blocked management from altering work rules from a taylor process into a lean process until it was way too late for most American manufacturing companies. Basically, in a classic union shop, you have a certain tool guy, and that is HIS job, and no one else can do it, and he can't be made to do something else. That's what was thought was efficient in 1930, but it turned out to be terrible in 1980, when the Japanese came up with work teams and a more holistic view of assembly. Those American companies that could adopt that technique survived and prospered, and those that couldn't died. Programmers, for example, operate under a management model, in a good shop, that was essentially how the japanese make cars. So we're the beneficiaries of a new understanding of flexible labor.
That's not to say management didn't make bad decisions. They made some doozies. GM's CEO of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a total disaster. But GM, even today, was always guided more about trying to fit existing plants into a production puzzle, rather than, looking at, what do they really need.
I have to say science journalists deserve a break. Consider the audience that they are writing for. The vast majority of readers, even with college education, most likely lack a good grasp of the modern math where science runs. We're way beyond describing things with the simple algebra... and really, some concepts just require more than a basic understanding of calculus and, surprisingly, probability and statistics. So, science writers not only struggle describing a new phenomonon, they struggle with trying to lay out in a paragraph what takes semesters to learn, and guess what, it is really hard to do that.
And, I don't think we should be asking scientists to try and dumb their communications down, either, as that really undermines the most important aspect of science - peer review. Publicly funded scientific communication begs for some sort of an open, publicly funded database that scientists can publish in. But, then, scientists depend on those publication moneys, so what to do?
Really, I wonder if the best course of action is for science journalists to up their level of math and science that they write to. Is it really so bad if a popular science magazine reminds its readers, that most of them do not know what they are talking about?
That's of course assuming that the only thing that matters is the price of the product and that little things like the actual characteristics of the product don't mean anything.
OTOH, people still buy crappy american cars...
It all goes together. If you are in favor of unions so much, then you should accept a potentially lower quality product you are getting in exchange for a greater social world, in your eyes. If you have to have the Japanese car, because they are "so much better", and really, they aren't, then, you really don't have any right to lament the death of the union, because you are the cause of their death. How somebody votes does not matter nearly so much to the UAW as what kind of car you buy.
You speak on and on about fear mongering but all you do not give a single rational argument against unions. All you do is try to associate a simple, healthy, life improving initiative that aims to protect worker's rights with evil, oppressive initiatives like the US's patriot act. If that wasn't enough to satisfy your trolling needs, you go on associating unions with organized crime and corruption.
Obviously, you didn't read, much less comprehend what I said. I guess that must be the hallmark of a union education. Teachers unions did great for you, I see!
Explain to me how unions work. You name me one company that could get unionized, such that, the customers of that company would not immediately flock somewhere else once that company's prices shot up.
Please, go right ahead. Your only answer to this, is that, everyone has to be unionized. So, the end game of your worker's rights is to make them slaves.
idiot.
Yeah, man. The only people who deserve a pay increase are CEO's. God, everyone knows that
Did I say that? No, if you want more money, do something with some value to it. Don't be sitting there pretending that all you have to do is fork over some crap and get a ton of money because breathe. Be more entreprenuial, and don't blame your failings on someone else's success. It's a CEO's fault you're a loser.
There's not a spit of difference between guys selling the Union or the guys selling USA PATRIOT ACT. Both depend on this idea that we are completely powerless, so we need to get some goons to protect us, and furthermore, we should just give these jerks, in the form of dues or taxes, protection money. You know what a union is? It's a steward who just got a nice deck for his house, a president's kid's baseball team that got new uniforms, and any manner of theft.
The simple matter of the truth is, unions don't work. Unions don't work because, every time you give them what they claim to get, they either drive the parent company bankrupt, like GM and a cast of thousands, or the work goes overseas. The promise is a lie, and all a union really does is just place a tax based on a fear. Unions don't work because the customer doesn't care what happens to the people that produce a product.
How many of you, Americans, out there, lamenting the death of the Union, have bought an American car in the last decade? I bet a dang view... bunch of uber geeks saying how your Japanese or German car is better. Well, good for you, but don't be sitting their trying to square your social treason on the rest with your guilt trips about capitalism and unions. If you want American companies to succeed, then buy American products. It's that simple.
Today, all of these "workers" advocates are just in the business of helping themselves. They work by frightening people into giving them money for promises that they can't keep, and have no intention of keeping. It's just like the "people's lawyer", the guy that sues some company for a billion dollars - he gets millions, while his plaintiffs get coupons. Workers rights is a slogan for an industry based on extortion, and fear.
I am not afraid.
Didn't it ever crossed your brilliant mind that the real problem lied with you and your class never fighting for your own best interests and therefore being forced to earn less and having a crappy life?
See, what this is ultimately is, is fear mongering. There's not a spit of difference between guys selling the Union or the guys selling USA PATRIOT ACT. Both depend on this idea that we are completely powerless, so we need to get some goons to protect us, and furthermore, we should just give these jerks, in the form of dues or taxes, protection money. You know what a union is? It's a steward who just got a nice deck for his house, a president's kid's baseball team that got new uniforms, and any manner of theft.
The simple matter of the truth is, unions don't work. Unions don't work because, every time you give them what they claim to get, they either drive the parent company bankrupt, like GM and a cast of thousands, or the work goes overseas. The promise is a lie, and all a union really does is just place a tax based on a fear.
Really, all of these "workers" advocates are just in the business of helping themselves. A bunch of crooks, trying to frighten people into giving them money for promises that they can't keep, and have no intention of keeping. It's just like the "people's lawyer", the guy that sues some company for a billion dollars - he gets millions, while his plaintiffs get coupons. Workers rights is a slogan for an industry based on extortion, and fear.
Europe, for example, no longer fears invasion, and the Euro has made the US Dollar less important for the world economy.
Actually, it works well for the USA, as the strong dollar has been a subsidy of Europe for a long time. I'm hoping for $2 per Euro, and a ton of unemployed Germans, and a ton of manufacturing back in the USA. Let's see BMW let go 100k people for a change!
If you don't like the hours, don't get into the business. There are plenty of Indians that like to program too. The more we act like Detroit in the 1970s, the more we will be like Detroit in 2007.
now why would that be? oh right, we can't have backwards compatibility, that would allow competition. [just kidding] but really, what was the reason for changing the way excel evaluates a function? what did that change actually improve?
MS significantly jacked up the number of rows and columns in Excel, and they might have gone from a sparse matrix to a tree as an internal storage. That would entail a change in how the interpreter works.
Just for the heck of it. There's always an offbeat chance that the multiply bug is in the CPU, not Excel....
I'm happy to live in a country where we don't ask god to bless us like snivelling minions, we TELL god to keep our land glorious and free
Yeah, and that's easy to do when the US Navy has 13 aircraft carriers, 25 assault carrier, a couple of retired battleships and a bunch of other stuff on your side. If, as my fellow conservatives would like, the USA learns from its lessons and withdraws from all of its military alliances, we'll see how all ye fair.
Would you like to take an over / under on how long it takes Poland to get the Bomb after the USA withdraws from NATO?
Mexico's literacy rate is 91% (CIA World Factbook). Their poverty rate is 40% (same source). 18% of Mexico's labor force is engaged in agriculture in Mexico.
:-) Seriously, though, the language of the USA is english, if only, ever other immigrant class learned it, and so should mexicans.
Yep, and with a population of 108 million, that's about 11 million illiterate people, and, they are all in the USA!
ow now, just because they aren't fluent in English doesn't mean they can't read any written languages. You do know that there are other languages, right?
If they were really literate in Spanish, they most likely would not be picking fruit for a living, now would they? Mexico's per capita GDP, while lower than the USA, still supports a reasonable middle class. In other words, the REALLY smart Mexicans are still in Mexico, working for either the telecommunications or petro giants.
I consider it a great sign of progress that no one has actually made a lot of hay about the ending, whereas Master Chief confesses that he really likes the other Masters more than the Mistresses, particularly since you have to do a multi key set of moves to consumate your new found love....
And the current hostility toward immigration and the hoops that foreign grad students and postdocs have to jump through isn't helping, either.
It's not hostility to immigration. It's illegal immigration. I think you would find that a lot of right wingers on the forefront of the illegal immigration charge have a lot of H1-B employees with engineering degrees wondering why they have to jump through so many hoops to be a citizen when evidentally a bunch of illiterate crop pickers get to be citizens after sneaking across the border.
I do recall that Bush's immigration bill would have raised the H1-B limit, AND, changed the requirements for legal entry to be stacked more along an educational and professional background, rather than, how poor an immigrant is, or how much family there is, as is the case today.
Call the roll of the people who gave us our nuclear weapons. Sure, there were the Harold Ureys and E. O. Lawrences and Richard Feynmans, but a lot of it depended on foreign scientists escaping the European dictatorships. Postwar, the space race was a contest between "our German scientists and their German scientists."
Actually, as a point of historical fact, "German scientists" really didn't do all -that much- in the space race. Within the USA, Von Braun's Jupiter - C and Redstone were both ultimately failures as the ICBMs they were intended to be, soon supplanted by the solid fueled Minuteman. It was Convairs "Atlas" booster that delivered the first Americans into orbit. From there, really, he did some good work on the Saturn V, and it did get us to the moon, but, the really hard parts about the moon were the lunar orbit rendevous, the lander, and the apollo spacecraft itself, and all of those were done by American contracting companies.
On the Soviet side, the space race had scarcely no German help. It was Korolev that was the brain child of all of the early Soviet successes. Had he not died on the table during what should have been a routine operation, it is very likely the Soviets might have finished their own massive N-1, and, while they wouldn't have necessarly been able to put a man on the moon, they could have done some interesting things with it.
The problem is really simple. Because free markets worked so well for some things, free market processes have been misapplied. It became very much in vogue, during the 1980s and 1990s, to treat research as just another business process. Much as someone would put together an project plan and a bunch of Pertt and Gant charts for defining the development of a new car, we as a people came to believe that we should run all aspects of government in the same way, and you simply can't.
Business processes are about minimizing risks, and therefor unknowns, and research is about exploring the unknowns. You can't have a process that says, after we do ten things, we'll knock out this fusion problem and cure cancer as a milestone at step 72. You just don't know, and, in research, if you get to a point and find that you don't know something, like you thought you might have, you WANT to invest the time to find out that which you don't know. In business, you would want to think about an entirely different approach. The two are simply diametrically opposed.
I know it is in vogue to say that scientists should be accountable and we should be able to audit their productivity, but, really, you just can't. All you can really do is educate the hell out of them, ensure that it really means something to get a Phd, try and see if they are motivated, but once that is done, you just have to give them a bunch of money, lock them on a campus, and say, "let me know what you find out all along the way." Then, if we get jealous because it seems like they have a cushy job, which they do, we just have to say, well, you should have aced calculus in high school and college, because that's what they did.
All the witnesses have been silenced. The meteor has been taken away. The smoking man pauses, job well done. Arsenic. They'll believe that, before they believe the TRUTH.
The big concern that the managers of this project had, was that, they didn't want the third world to think they were getting a bad notebook because of bad reviews from Americans, so, in classic fascist fashion, they took steps to try and muzzle the Americans.
But THAT'S ok because its for a good cause...
what a bunch of crap.
You wingnuts should form a comedy troop with Baghdad Bob, you are frikkin hilarious.
We righties have our problems, to be sure, but you lefties have a fundamental disconnect when you talk about freedom. At the end of the day, the effect of all of the great left wing amendments reads: "Congress shall have the power..."... And that's really what happens. You give the government power, and you take it away from the people. Sure, some of your causes are good, but they do make the majority of people less free. If you could just be honest enough to admit that you are not as in favor of freedom as you are about social harmony, then, that would be nice.