I recently switched from Sprint to Cingular to Verizon so I have some experience with all three. My only true data point is that in Albuquerque, NM I am able to get 120kbps using Verizon's 1X CDMA, and in Los Angeles I was able to get significantly faster (but I didn't benchmark it) using Verizon's EV-DO.
Here are some nominal numbers for the technology that's been around for the past few years:
Cingular GPRS: 32-48 kbps
Sprint 1X CDMA: 80-120 kbps
Verizon 1X CDMA: 80-120 kbps
Of the newer crop of technologies that are coming out:
Cingular EDGE: 80-200 kbps
Sprint EV-DO: 400-700 kbps
Verizon EV-DO: 400-700 kbps
Of course, "your mileage may vary"... Cingular's EDGE service is more accessible than the other "new technologies" at this point because it's a simpler technology that really just allows your wireless device to combine multiple channels at once for higher speeds. Make sure your wireless card supports EDGE and that EDGE is available in your area before going with Cingular. (Plus their customer service is awful, but that's another story...)
Sprint and Verizon's EV-DO technology is currently available in 30-40 major cities, which doesn't sound like it will help you any but it may get to your area eventually. In the mean time, their 1X CDMA gives you better than dialup, so if you can be happy with ~120 kbps, this might work for you.
Most cellular companies give you 15 days to cancel service without paying any penalties, so I'd ask about availability of EDGE and EV-DO in your area, then pick one and try it. (Or pick both and try them.) Run some broadband speed tests (http://www.dslreports.com/stest and others) at various times of day and see what kind of speeds you're getting. If it's too slow, return it and get your money back, though you'll probably lose your activation fee and have to pay a prorated monthly bill.
I'm glad this law didn't pass, I think it's good for municipalities to be able to provide their own WiFi if they decide it should be a public good.
It's interesting how prices vary so much for WiFi access. I'm sitting in a cafe right now that has free WiFi access, so evidently they're able to provide the service at so little cost to them that the benefit of extra customers makes it worthwhile. But sometimes I go to Starbucks, where they chage $10 a day or $30 a month for WiFi through T-Mobile. Also I travel a bit, and find it odd that the Albuquerque, NM airport (where I live) has free WiFi, but most other airports charge $10 for a short session while you're passing through the termial. Why/how the big discrepency?
My guess is that a lot of businesses are looking at charging for WiFi as a huge cash cow - it costs almost nothing to provide - just buy a few WiFi routers and pay for one internet connection - and they can charge big bucks for it. Private companies make exclusive deals with airports (usually government-run entities) to rule out any competition, and then they jointly soak the customers. Starbucks figures if you're dumb enough to pay $5 for coffee, then you're dumb enough to pay $10 for WiFi.
It all sounds nice, but your history is not quite accurate. The government did not invent electrical power or lay the first power lines. It was started in a lot of places independently by private companies arising to provide power. In some places local groups formed non-profit co-ops to provide power to its members. Eventually governments decided it was a good idea to take over the business so they could achieve a desired social good - providing power to everyone - not to spur an industry or replace batteries.
The first major power station in the United States was the Niagara Falls Power Company, which started generating power in the 1890s. They generated way more power than they could use or sell, so they funded prizes to develop long-distance transmission technology and eventually contracted with Westinghouse (another private company) to transmit the power to nearby Buffalo where it could be sold.
Eventually in the 1930s, someone decided that access to electrical power was a "unversal right" and the Rural Electrification Administration was created to provide power even to remote locations where it was not economically feasible.
There are two very good cases for government action - providing a good that cannot be practically provided by private industry because of the freeloader problem (if 10 people pay for a road, the rest might ride on it for free and not pay, so the original 10 won't want to pay either), or achieving some social goal such as universal access which is really not economical but is deemed to be good. Then there are a lot of bad cases for government action which are almost always wrong - that the government will spur technology and "profitably" or "economically" provide services that private companies won't. Let's just be clear about which argument we're using here. I oppose the Texas ban on municipalities providing WiFi because there may be cases where the city decides it's a unversal good and wants to do it anyway, or because the costs of charging for a service in a particular location outweight the cost of the service itself.
I will be very interested to find what the Italian forensics team turns up now that they've been given the car. Hopefully there's some way to establish from the bullet holes how fast the car was travelling when it was shot, but perhaps I'm hoping for scientific miracles.
Ms. Sgrena has no reason to lie or exaggerate because she is in no way at fault, but she was in the back seat talking at the time of the shooting, so she's not in a position to say much about the car's speed or the warning signs.
The 7 US military folks at the checkpoint could have some reason to lie or exaggerate since they could be disciplined if it is found that they acted incorrectly. However, the report notes that they had turned away 15-20 cars at this checkpoint without any incidents during the hour prior to the shooting, so why would they have fired at this one if it had not been speeding and ignored warning signs? You have to reach to conspiracy plus coverup theories to explain this...
Also to believe the Italian account, you'd also have to believe that Sergeant First Class Feliciano fabricated an account of a conversation he had with the driver (Mr. Carpani) right after the incident:
(U) Mr. Carpani told Sergeant First Class Feliciano who Ms. Sgrena was and that he was trying to get to the airport. He told Sergeant First Class Feliciano that he heard shots from somewhere, and that he panicked and started speeding, trying to get to the airport as quickly as possible. Mr. Carpani further told Sergeant First Class Feliciano that he continued to speed down the ramp, and that he was in a hurry to get to the airport. (Annexes 91C, 136C).
If you want to look for someone who could be lying to save his hide, look no further than Mr. Carpani, the driver. He was admittedly driving fast and talking on his cell phone when the incident occurred. They're in a hurry and driving through dangerous territory, why didn't the Italians have Mr. Calipari, the Italian intelligence officer who was killed while in the back seat with Ms. Sgrena, talk on the phone to Italian headquarters to update their progress so the driver could focus on driving?
Just to be clear, if you read the report it isn't a whitewash. It clearly mentions a number of problems on the US side and proposes ways to alleviate them in the future (looking into non-lethal vehicle stopping technology, having one person man the spotlight and another man the gun instead of having one person do both, improving their communications technology so they would have known that the VIP had already left, etc.) It just doesn't recommend disciplinary action against any US personnel since they all followed procedures as they were supposed to.
According to Giuliana, they were not driving fast and the U.S. military had been informed of their presence.
From your linked interview with Ms. Sgrena:
GIULIANA SGRENA: Of course, I was there when they called. They called the Italian, because there is an official that is linked to the Americans. And this Italian general spoke to the Captain Green, that is the American one, telling him that we were on this road and that they were aware that we were on that road. And this happened at least 20-25 minutes before the shooting.
Yet from the report:
(U) At approximately 2030 hours, Major General Marioli approached Captain Green and asked him how he was doing and if Lieutenant Colonel Zarcone had told him what was going on. Captain Green said no, but that he suspected it had something to do with the Italian journalist. Major General Marioli said "Yes, but it is best if no one knows." Captain Green took this as an order from a General Officer not to pass that information on to anyone. (Annex 109C). Moreover, Major General Marioli did not intend for Captain Green to take any action whatsoever on that information. He only told Captain Green so that he would not be surprised when Ms. Sgrena arrived. (Annex 100C).
So just to be clear, Ms. Sgrena is surely telling the truth as she believes it and as she understood it, but her account is hearsay while Captain Green's account is first person. Ms. Sgrena doesn't know what conversation went on between Italian Major General Marioli and US Captain Green, and from Captain Green's testimony, he was being told very little because "it was an Italian national issue." It will be interesting to hear General Marioli's account of the conversation when the Italian report comes out.
But in any event, one company grade liason officer being given a wink about the "rescue" operation after it's basically over, and just 15 minutes before the awful shooting accident, does not equal coordinating with and informing the US military. Any coalitian military or intelligence operation should have been coordinated hours or days in advance, long before the operation was initiated.
Rather than just see words, I'd rather see real-life applications of these practices. For starters, here's typically how much I comment my code:
tmp = last_update;// tmp = last update time
last_update = SDL_GetTicks();// Set the last update time to now
tmp = last_update - tmp;// tmp = difference between now and last update
fps_timer += tmp;// Increase our fps millisecond timer
fps_counter++;// Increase our frame count
Programmers only have so many hours in a day, and over-emphasizing the importance of documenting a developer's code can lead to less time spent improving the code. I would rather stress writing code that is easy to understand without comments, and only require comments in those relatively rare places where the situation justified a non-straightforward implementation.
The above example shows way too much commenting, but in fact the excessive commenting hides the fact that (a) the code uses poor variable names, and (b) the algorithm is overly complicated.
As for (a) the variable names don't include units and the variable "tmp" is both an awful name and is used to mean two different things. A better version would be:
start_update_ticks = last_update_ticks;
last_update_ticks = SDL_GetTicks();
elapsed_milliseconds = last_update_ticks - start_update_ticks;
fps_timer_milliseconds += elapsed_milliseconds;
fps_frame_count++;
As for (b), quick analysis shows that every time this section of code is called, you'll simply subtract out the last_update_ticks that you added the last time and replace it with the current value. So a better version of the algorithm would be:
save_update_ticks = SDL_GetTicks();
fps_frame_count++;
That's all you need. Assuming the goal was to calculate frames per second, when you need it you calculate:
fps = fps_frame_count/(save_update_ticks - save_update_ticks_0);
If these three lines using clear variable names are wrapped inside of a short and clearly-named function like
double getFramesPerSecond() then it's all obvious and clear enough that it doesn't need a single comment.
As a freshman I had a professor who kept giving me shit about not having enough comments, so my next program looked something like this:... a=5;//assign integer variable 'a' a value of 5 b=2;//assign integer variable 'b' a value of 2 print(a+b);//print to the console the sum of integer variable 'a' and integer variable 'b'...
and so on, for about 200 lines. Worthless commenting? Sure, and childish too... but it was amusing and I never got docked for insufficient commenting again:)
Yes, it's worthless and childish. What would have been better? This:
numberOfApples=5;
numberOfOranges=2;
print(numberOfApples+numberOfOranges);
If code is well-written and uses good abstractions, good variable and function names, and short functions, it needs far fewer comments and is more understandable.
It also helps to be the right skin colour and accent, or at least not the "wrong" ones.
I get waved through all the time too. My cousin, on the other hand, has gotten his car ripped apart.
Exactly! Despite all the hand-wringing here, that's what this change is actually all about.
The formal rules for who can come and go haven't changed, what has changed is just the level of proof that a person has to supply in order to come into the country. Previously if a white, accent-free American went to Canada and upon returning said "I'm a citizen", he or she would be pretty much just let in. But if an arab-looking American with an accent went to Canada and upon returning said "I'm a U.S. citizen", do you think he or she would just waltz in? I doubt it. But do you think America really should let any person who says "I'm a U.S. citizen" waltz into the country with little or no proof?
This change "levels the field" by setting common, enforceable criteria for entering the country. If you have a valid U.S. passport or a foreign passport with an appropriate visa, you can come in, regardless of race, accent, or appearance. If you don't, well... I guess you'll be spending the afternoon at the U.S. consulate while they check you out more thoroughly.
P.S. Driver's licenses and birth certificates are essentially "no proof" as the former does not actually indicate citizenship or residency, the latter doesn't have a photo, neither has a standard format, and both are easy to fake.
First of all, this Citron guy is clearly an idiot, making comments like "Until a market becomes free and becomes developed, sometimes you may have to put in place government regulations that allow for the market to develop." I'm not sure I would ever agree with that statement, but especially in this case, the ISP / internet market is very well-developed and is only being hampered by more and more burdensome regulation (such as recent court decrees subjecting them to political speech-limiting laws.)
The free speech argument is clearly bogus. I guess we have to keep repeating this over and over, but freedom of speech is a constitutionally guaranteed prohibition against the government from banning or penalizing certain viewpoints or certain opinions. We need to defend true freedom of speech to the death, but freedom of speech does not obligate any company to carry any particular information or to espouse any particular viewpoint. Freedom of speech does not obligate newpapers to print stories that they disagree with, or obligate ISPs to carry traffic that they don't want to carry.
What's sad is that Citron could have used a slightly different argument to hurt the ISPs where it counts: liability. ISPs are given broad immunity to liability by being given "common carrier" status - as long as they don't discriminate between packets or content or exercise editorial control over what they cover, they can't be held liable in defamation cases, for damage caused by information sent over the internet, for copyright infringment posted by one person or another, etc. But now they are discriminating against certain types of messages by blocking VOIP, and those that do so should lose their "common carrier" status and thus be exposed to liability for anything that travels across their networks.
A court ruling affirming this would open up VOIP traffic faster than you could find a picture of Anna Kournikova on the internet.
Were you an asshole? God knows American tourists *do* have raging reputations for being amongst the worst tourists in the world.
I was. And I tried soooo hard not to be... Learning a little French, trying my hardest to be polite, etc.
So I'm in a Paris restaurant with this girl (Swiss French, actually) who has told me how much cigarette smoke bothers her. So we sit in the non-smoking section, even though it means we have to wait an extra 10-20 minutes to be seated. A few minutes into our dinner, this guy at the next table leans over and asks, in very good English, if I mind if he smokes. Somewhat confused because I had asked to be seated in the non-smoking section, I replied "I thought this was the non-smoking section?" He makes this face like I'm some sort of jerk and turns away and sneers. The girl I'm with appears all embarrassed too, even though I have saved her from having to breath cigarette smoke, and later implies that I should have let him smoke.
So I've just irritated two French (three if you count the guy's dinner companion) and confirmed their worst fears about Americans being rude jerks. What did I do wrong? There must be some sort of weird smoking-related cultural disconnect...
The reason to this situation (and reaction) is that the current american stereotype is that of a fat lazy uneducated (some would say stupid) person to most of the european population. This stereotype is the cause of the contempt "you" often mistake for arrogance...
Disclaimer: I know quite a few slim hard-working well-educated clever american people, I am just depicting a stereotype that my personal experience leads me to believe not to be too far from "the truth".
Ah, many Americans actually do sit around and complain about how stupid and fat we are becoming overall. We even have TV news articles all the time that show a bunch of fat asses walking around on the streets (faces greyed out), and news shows where they ask high school students to point to Washington DC on a map and they point to LA instead. Somehow our system allows the minority of smart and trim folks to rise to the top and keep the country from falling to pieces. We know we're fat and stupid, but we don't want foreigners pointing it out - that just raises our ire!
Disclaimer: I'm well-educated but actually I have packed on a few extra pounds lately - time for a trip to the gym, gotta go!
Look, I am American. I think we need to make more friends around the world, period. If you were a retired WWII vet, I can understand your hate for japanese, germans, french etc. Completely.
The editorial is certainly a bit overly alarmist, but I don't really interpret it as "bitching"; rather it's urging the French to get their butts in gear and digitize their own libraries, lest history be written by the Angle-Saxons and from the Anglo-Saxon point of view.
Sort of like how the U.S. was "bitching" about Japanese productivity about 10-15 years ago and how we were going to get economically buried by Japan. That too turned out to be a bit overly alarmist, but it did raise some valid concerns that we needed to take a look at productivity and keep an eye on foreign competition rather than resting on our achievements and being economically complacent.
So if the French want to digitize their libraries too, more power to them. Or if they want to wait for Google to get around to it, I'm sure they won't have to wait more than a few more years...
I'm a pretty big Qt fan and IANAL, but I think that TrollTech is slightly overreaching with the statement that you need a commercial license for "use in a commercial setting" on their web pages.
In reality, none of the wording on their web pages matters, all that really matters are the terms of the license. Once Qt-Windows is released under the GPL, then I'm confident that you would be free to use it for open source commercial development despite what they say on their web site - they would have no legal leg to stand on to try to further restrict your use of GPL'ed code. Just stay in compliance with the terms of the GPL and you can use it for whatever you want. One of the key provisions of the GPL is that you can't add additional restrictions on redistribution, so of course you can't complain if your customer gives your source code to a competitor and hires them to make additional modifications.
Of course, TrollTech's sales people will try to get you to buy the commercial version so you can get support.
The "Save Hubble!" cry is originating largely from a population that just loves those cool-looking pictures that they can use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers.
You mean astronomers?
Most decisions regarding funding for astronomical research are made quietly and with little fanfare or public interest. How many people call their congressmen to lobby for more funding for Keck or Chandra? The VLA gets special attention because it was the movie "Contact" and the Hubble gets enormous special attention because the general population loves it. That's what I meant by 'The "Save Hubble!" cry,' there aren't enough astronomers to constitute a 'cry' IMHO.
Anti-Christian paranoid ramblings aside, I would say the reason for this decision is actually valuing good science over politics - the public loves Hubble so the politically easy thing to do would be to save it, but the right scientific decision is to to build a newer and better one for the same or lower cost.
Exactly! The "Save Hubble!" cry is originating largely from a population that just loves those cool-looking pictures that they can use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers.
If you rationally look for the best way to spend a billion dollars to aid astronomical research, HOP is a much better bet - you get a slighly newer and more capable satellite made mostly with proven techology and which has a longer expected life-span than the aging Hubble. And you don't risk human lives by launching a space shuttle to an orbit from which "abort to ISS" is an impossibility.
Or save the billion dollars and just deorbit Hubble whenever it actually fails (could last 4 more years, could last 15 more years, we don't really know.) Between Chandra and James Webb we're already spending billions on new astronomical satellites, and investigating new IR and radio wavelengths is scientifically more valuable than just collecting more visible pictures like those from Hubble.
XML has definite value, but that value has just as definitely been overhyped.
I bet all of us have written code to save and restore configuration files or data files of some sort or another. You start with a flat file, if you're really dumb you store values implicitly by position, if you're a bit more clever perhaps you opt for using keyword/value pairs. Later you decide you want to allow newlines in the values and need to write special code for that, so you use double-quotes. Then you decide you need double-quotes in your values, and you invent an escaping mechanism. After some more development you realize that some subset of your keyword/value pairs has to be multiply-instanced, so you need some mechanism to have "objects" each with their own keyword/value pairs. And so on... Eventually someone on another project needs to read your file, and you have to explain all these idiosyncrocies to them so they can write some parsing code...
XML simplifies all that by defining a common syntax in which you can encode your information. It's easy to gradually expand your format by adding XML fields, and if you show the file to anyone else they instantly get a pretty good idea of what the information means; plus they have access to a bunch of libraries to parse it (SAX and DOM) and there are predefined ways to escape newlines, quotes, braces, and so forth.
Of course, XML is only a syntax. There are a billion other syntaxes that could probably accomplish the same things, but somehow XML became the standard; that in and of itself has value because everyone uses it and knows how to read and write it. But programs can't interoperate and read and write the same files until they agree on symantics, i.e. what tags will be where and what each field really means. I've encountered this several times, some customer says "write the data in XML format" and I have a hard time explaining to them that, yes, we can write it in XML, but that's not sufficient information to define the file format, that's really just the beginning.
Look, you'd have to be a moron to argue against the consensus of trained scientists. The scientific evidence clearly indicates that manmade atmospheric pollution blocking out the sun will cause a return to our trend of recent ice ages, thus causing "global cooling".
Oh wait, I thought this was the 1970s, when temperature measurements since the 1940s had showed a gradual cooling trend. Now I mean the scientific evidence clearly indicates that manmade atmospheric pollution will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, thus causing "global warming." Sorry about that. Well whichever is true, man is evil and so is economic production, so let's put a stop to it.
By the way, eat margarine. I mean butter. No, margarine. No wait, butter.
The studies are testing performance in educational areas that used to be considered important - reading, writing, arithmatic. So clearly if the kids spend a lot of time on the computer instead of studying math or reading literature, their performance in those areas will suffer.
But what about their performance in technology-related areas? What about their programming ability, their ability to think logically, their knowledge of and familiarity with computers? Those things will surely improve, unless they're just firing up Half-Life in which case their scores will plummet just as if they had a PlayStation or an XBox. Just because their performance suffers in the traditional areas doesn't mean computers are bad for them - they may in fact be better prepared for 21st century jobs than their schoolmates who get higher grades because their parents make them study the classics and ban them from using computers...
You do realize that some people are cursed with writing problems. I normally get "their" and "there" wright but sometimes I slip, I still after 27 years need to be conscious on what I am writing.
Near the end of high school, I recall seeing people make the "their" vs "there" vs "they're" mistake and others like it and thinking that they had to be absolute idiots.
Now 15 years and much computer usage later, I make the mistake myself sometimes. And when I see myself do it, I think I must be an absolute idiot.
Perhaps this is just all the more evidence that computers make you dumber? No, I think it just has to do with how much reading and writing you do. In school I was constantly reading and writing so I very thought of those as three clearly different concepts. Now I do a lot less reading and writing (email and Slashdot don't count!) and more conversing; in the spoken language the three are interchangeable, so the distinctions blur in my mind unless I stop to think consciously about it.
To a prude, if it's not acceptable for you to watch, then it's not acceptable for anybody else to watch either. They're not saying, "I watched this and found it objectionable," they're saying, "I find it objectionable that other people are able to watch this." They're main goal is to stop other people from doing things they wouldn't do themselves. I'm sure they'd like to complain about what other people watch, but they know that they can't really complain to the government about X-rated shows on pay-per-view cable, the strong R-rated shows on cable movie channels, the $10.99 adult movies in hotel rooms (remember, "movie titles do not appear on your hotel bill"), etc. Protests against these things have been tried and courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of free speech in those media.
These organizations complain about broadcast television only because our ancient telecommunications laws somehow treat broadcast media as so "different" from all other forms of media. Somehow the thought that pornographic or violent electromagnetic waves are flying through the atmosphere seems to bother folks, while as long as those electromagnetic waves are confined to a piece of copper or coax they seem much happier. Oh, satellite pr0n gets beamed too, evidently they aren't bothered by pornographic electromagnetic waves passing through their bodies as long as they are "encrypted".
This idea that government can say what goes out over the air "because of the children" or for any other reason is what really has to change. If you don't want to see it, don't tune in to it and don't let your children tune in to it. Buy them some Sponge Bob tapes instead.
How is the argument that the government should force money from the hands of those who work to the hands of those who don't, and that the government should dictate who should live and who should die through its centrally-controlled healthcare system, anything other than fascist contempt for those who produce the valuable goods and services of society?
Please confine your euro-socialist-fascist rants to politics.slashdot.org.
In addition to technology development, legal liability reform will probably be needed to make self-driving cars a reality. Even if self-driven cars reduce annual highways deaths from the current 40,000 to under 10,000, car manufacturers could be bankrupted by out-of-control jury awards for those 10,000 deaths.
While now most accidents are presumed to be one of the driver's faults, with self-driving cars they'd all pretty much be attributed to a failure of the car... "The software failed to account for boulders falling on the roadway? Negligence!"
I know this isn't a black-and-white issue, but I would think that once the manufacturers can show that their software is safer than most human drivers, they should be largely off the hook for liability, rather than requiring absolute perfection which will simply slow the adoption of this technology.
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I recently switched from Sprint to Cingular to Verizon so I have some experience with all three. My only true data point is that in Albuquerque, NM I am able to get 120kbps using Verizon's 1X CDMA, and in Los Angeles I was able to get significantly faster (but I didn't benchmark it) using Verizon's EV-DO.
Here are some nominal numbers for the technology that's been around for the past few years:
Cingular GPRS: 32-48 kbps
Sprint 1X CDMA: 80-120 kbps
Verizon 1X CDMA: 80-120 kbps
Of the newer crop of technologies that are coming out:
Cingular EDGE: 80-200 kbps
Sprint EV-DO: 400-700 kbps
Verizon EV-DO: 400-700 kbps
Of course, "your mileage may vary"... Cingular's EDGE service is more accessible than the other "new technologies" at this point because it's a simpler technology that really just allows your wireless device to combine multiple channels at once for higher speeds. Make sure your wireless card supports EDGE and that EDGE is available in your area before going with Cingular. (Plus their customer service is awful, but that's another story...)
Sprint and Verizon's EV-DO technology is currently available in 30-40 major cities, which doesn't sound like it will help you any but it may get to your area eventually. In the mean time, their 1X CDMA gives you better than dialup, so if you can be happy with ~120 kbps, this might work for you.
Most cellular companies give you 15 days to cancel service without paying any penalties, so I'd ask about availability of EDGE and EV-DO in your area, then pick one and try it. (Or pick both and try them.) Run some broadband speed tests (http://www.dslreports.com/stest and others) at various times of day and see what kind of speeds you're getting. If it's too slow, return it and get your money back, though you'll probably lose your activation fee and have to pay a prorated monthly bill.
I'm glad this law didn't pass, I think it's good for municipalities to be able to provide their own WiFi if they decide it should be a public good.
It's interesting how prices vary so much for WiFi access. I'm sitting in a cafe right now that has free WiFi access, so evidently they're able to provide the service at so little cost to them that the benefit of extra customers makes it worthwhile. But sometimes I go to Starbucks, where they chage $10 a day or $30 a month for WiFi through T-Mobile. Also I travel a bit, and find it odd that the Albuquerque, NM airport (where I live) has free WiFi, but most other airports charge $10 for a short session while you're passing through the termial. Why/how the big discrepency?
My guess is that a lot of businesses are looking at charging for WiFi as a huge cash cow - it costs almost nothing to provide - just buy a few WiFi routers and pay for one internet connection - and they can charge big bucks for it. Private companies make exclusive deals with airports (usually government-run entities) to rule out any competition, and then they jointly soak the customers. Starbucks figures if you're dumb enough to pay $5 for coffee, then you're dumb enough to pay $10 for WiFi.
It all sounds nice, but your history is not quite accurate. The government did not invent electrical power or lay the first power lines. It was started in a lot of places independently by private companies arising to provide power. In some places local groups formed non-profit co-ops to provide power to its members. Eventually governments decided it was a good idea to take over the business so they could achieve a desired social good - providing power to everyone - not to spur an industry or replace batteries.
The first major power station in the United States was the Niagara Falls Power Company, which started generating power in the 1890s. They generated way more power than they could use or sell, so they funded prizes to develop long-distance transmission technology and eventually contracted with Westinghouse (another private company) to transmit the power to nearby Buffalo where it could be sold.
Eventually in the 1930s, someone decided that access to electrical power was a "unversal right" and the Rural Electrification Administration was created to provide power even to remote locations where it was not economically feasible.
There are two very good cases for government action - providing a good that cannot be practically provided by private industry because of the freeloader problem (if 10 people pay for a road, the rest might ride on it for free and not pay, so the original 10 won't want to pay either), or achieving some social goal such as universal access which is really not economical but is deemed to be good. Then there are a lot of bad cases for government action which are almost always wrong - that the government will spur technology and "profitably" or "economically" provide services that private companies won't. Let's just be clear about which argument we're using here. I oppose the Texas ban on municipalities providing WiFi because there may be cases where the city decides it's a unversal good and wants to do it anyway, or because the costs of charging for a service in a particular location outweight the cost of the service itself.
Ms. Sgrena has no reason to lie or exaggerate because she is in no way at fault, but she was in the back seat talking at the time of the shooting, so she's not in a position to say much about the car's speed or the warning signs.
The 7 US military folks at the checkpoint could have some reason to lie or exaggerate since they could be disciplined if it is found that they acted incorrectly. However, the report notes that they had turned away 15-20 cars at this checkpoint without any incidents during the hour prior to the shooting, so why would they have fired at this one if it had not been speeding and ignored warning signs? You have to reach to conspiracy plus coverup theories to explain this...
Also to believe the Italian account, you'd also have to believe that Sergeant First Class Feliciano fabricated an account of a conversation he had with the driver (Mr. Carpani) right after the incident:If you want to look for someone who could be lying to save his hide, look no further than Mr. Carpani, the driver. He was admittedly driving fast and talking on his cell phone when the incident occurred. They're in a hurry and driving through dangerous territory, why didn't the Italians have Mr. Calipari, the Italian intelligence officer who was killed while in the back seat with Ms. Sgrena, talk on the phone to Italian headquarters to update their progress so the driver could focus on driving?
Just to be clear, if you read the report it isn't a whitewash. It clearly mentions a number of problems on the US side and proposes ways to alleviate them in the future (looking into non-lethal vehicle stopping technology, having one person man the spotlight and another man the gun instead of having one person do both, improving their communications technology so they would have known that the VIP had already left, etc.) It just doesn't recommend disciplinary action against any US personnel since they all followed procedures as they were supposed to.
So just to be clear, Ms. Sgrena is surely telling the truth as she believes it and as she understood it, but her account is hearsay while Captain Green's account is first person. Ms. Sgrena doesn't know what conversation went on between Italian Major General Marioli and US Captain Green, and from Captain Green's testimony, he was being told very little because "it was an Italian national issue." It will be interesting to hear General Marioli's account of the conversation when the Italian report comes out.
But in any event, one company grade liason officer being given a wink about the "rescue" operation after it's basically over, and just 15 minutes before the awful shooting accident, does not equal coordinating with and informing the US military. Any coalitian military or intelligence operation should have been coordinated hours or days in advance, long before the operation was initiated.
Programmers only have so many hours in a day, and over-emphasizing the importance of documenting a developer's code can lead to less time spent improving the code. I would rather stress writing code that is easy to understand without comments, and only require comments in those relatively rare places where the situation justified a non-straightforward implementation.
The above example shows way too much commenting, but in fact the excessive commenting hides the fact that (a) the code uses poor variable names, and (b) the algorithm is overly complicated.
As for (a) the variable names don't include units and the variable "tmp" is both an awful name and is used to mean two different things. A better version would be:
start_update_ticks = last_update_ticks;
last_update_ticks = SDL_GetTicks();
elapsed_milliseconds = last_update_ticks - start_update_ticks;
fps_timer_milliseconds += elapsed_milliseconds;
fps_frame_count++;
As for (b), quick analysis shows that every time this section of code is called, you'll simply subtract out the last_update_ticks that you added the last time and replace it with the current value. So a better version of the algorithm would be:
save_update_ticks = SDL_GetTicks();
fps_frame_count++;
That's all you need. Assuming the goal was to calculate frames per second, when you need it you calculate:
fps = fps_frame_count/(save_update_ticks - save_update_ticks_0);
If these three lines using clear variable names are wrapped inside of a short and clearly-named function like
double getFramesPerSecond()
then it's all obvious and clear enough that it doesn't need a single comment.
Yes, it's worthless and childish. What would have been better? This:
numberOfApples=5;
numberOfOranges=2;
print(numberOfApples+numberOfOranges);
If code is well-written and uses good abstractions, good variable and function names, and short functions, it needs far fewer comments and is more understandable.
It also helps to be the right skin colour and accent, or at least not the "wrong" ones.
I get waved through all the time too. My cousin, on the other hand, has gotten his car ripped apart.
Exactly! Despite all the hand-wringing here, that's what this change is actually all about.
The formal rules for who can come and go haven't changed, what has changed is just the level of proof that a person has to supply in order to come into the country. Previously if a white, accent-free American went to Canada and upon returning said "I'm a citizen", he or she would be pretty much just let in. But if an arab-looking American with an accent went to Canada and upon returning said "I'm a U.S. citizen", do you think he or she would just waltz in? I doubt it. But do you think America really should let any person who says "I'm a U.S. citizen" waltz into the country with little or no proof?
This change "levels the field" by setting common, enforceable criteria for entering the country. If you have a valid U.S. passport or a foreign passport with an appropriate visa, you can come in, regardless of race, accent, or appearance. If you don't, well... I guess you'll be spending the afternoon at the U.S. consulate while they check you out more thoroughly.
P.S. Driver's licenses and birth certificates are essentially "no proof" as the former does not actually indicate citizenship or residency, the latter doesn't have a photo, neither has a standard format, and both are easy to fake.
First of all, this Citron guy is clearly an idiot, making comments like "Until a market becomes free and becomes developed, sometimes you may have to put in place government regulations that allow for the market to develop." I'm not sure I would ever agree with that statement, but especially in this case, the ISP / internet market is very well-developed and is only being hampered by more and more burdensome regulation (such as recent court decrees subjecting them to political speech-limiting laws.)
The free speech argument is clearly bogus. I guess we have to keep repeating this over and over, but freedom of speech is a constitutionally guaranteed prohibition against the government from banning or penalizing certain viewpoints or certain opinions. We need to defend true freedom of speech to the death, but freedom of speech does not obligate any company to carry any particular information or to espouse any particular viewpoint. Freedom of speech does not obligate newpapers to print stories that they disagree with, or obligate ISPs to carry traffic that they don't want to carry.
What's sad is that Citron could have used a slightly different argument to hurt the ISPs where it counts: liability. ISPs are given broad immunity to liability by being given "common carrier" status - as long as they don't discriminate between packets or content or exercise editorial control over what they cover, they can't be held liable in defamation cases, for damage caused by information sent over the internet, for copyright infringment posted by one person or another, etc. But now they are discriminating against certain types of messages by blocking VOIP, and those that do so should lose their "common carrier" status and thus be exposed to liability for anything that travels across their networks.
A court ruling affirming this would open up VOIP traffic faster than you could find a picture of Anna Kournikova on the internet.
Were you an asshole? God knows American tourists *do* have raging reputations for being amongst the worst tourists in the world.
I was. And I tried soooo hard not to be... Learning a little French, trying my hardest to be polite, etc.
So I'm in a Paris restaurant with this girl (Swiss French, actually) who has told me how much cigarette smoke bothers her. So we sit in the non-smoking section, even though it means we have to wait an extra 10-20 minutes to be seated. A few minutes into our dinner, this guy at the next table leans over and asks, in very good English, if I mind if he smokes. Somewhat confused because I had asked to be seated in the non-smoking section, I replied "I thought this was the non-smoking section?" He makes this face like I'm some sort of jerk and turns away and sneers. The girl I'm with appears all embarrassed too, even though I have saved her from having to breath cigarette smoke, and later implies that I should have let him smoke.
So I've just irritated two French (three if you count the guy's dinner companion) and confirmed their worst fears about Americans being rude jerks. What did I do wrong? There must be some sort of weird smoking-related cultural disconnect...
The reason to this situation (and reaction) is that the current american stereotype is that of a fat lazy uneducated (some would say stupid) person to most of the european population. This stereotype is the cause of the contempt "you" often mistake for arrogance...
Disclaimer: I know quite a few slim hard-working well-educated clever american people, I am just depicting a stereotype that my personal experience leads me to believe not to be too far from "the truth".
Ah, many Americans actually do sit around and complain about how stupid and fat we are becoming overall. We even have TV news articles all the time that show a bunch of fat asses walking around on the streets (faces greyed out), and news shows where they ask high school students to point to Washington DC on a map and they point to LA instead. Somehow our system allows the minority of smart and trim folks to rise to the top and keep the country from falling to pieces. We know we're fat and stupid, but we don't want foreigners pointing it out - that just raises our ire!
Disclaimer: I'm well-educated but actually I have packed on a few extra pounds lately - time for a trip to the gym, gotta go!
Look, I am American. I think we need to make more friends around the world, period. If you were a retired WWII vet, I can understand your hate for japanese, germans, french etc. Completely.
Uhm, one of those three is not like the others...
The editorial is certainly a bit overly alarmist, but I don't really interpret it as "bitching"; rather it's urging the French to get their butts in gear and digitize their own libraries, lest history be written by the Angle-Saxons and from the Anglo-Saxon point of view.
Sort of like how the U.S. was "bitching" about Japanese productivity about 10-15 years ago and how we were going to get economically buried by Japan. That too turned out to be a bit overly alarmist, but it did raise some valid concerns that we needed to take a look at productivity and keep an eye on foreign competition rather than resting on our achievements and being economically complacent.
So if the French want to digitize their libraries too, more power to them. Or if they want to wait for Google to get around to it, I'm sure they won't have to wait more than a few more years...
free (as in beer) as long as you release any software that you develop with it under the GPL
... under the GPL" equals "free as in speech."
I suppose the answer is yes, but actually "free as in beer" plus "release
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I'm a pretty big Qt fan and IANAL, but I think that TrollTech is slightly overreaching with the statement that you need a commercial license for "use in a commercial setting" on their web pages.
In reality, none of the wording on their web pages matters, all that really matters are the terms of the license. Once Qt-Windows is released under the GPL, then I'm confident that you would be free to use it for open source commercial development despite what they say on their web site - they would have no legal leg to stand on to try to further restrict your use of GPL'ed code. Just stay in compliance with the terms of the GPL and you can use it for whatever you want. One of the key provisions of the GPL is that you can't add additional restrictions on redistribution, so of course you can't complain if your customer gives your source code to a competitor and hires them to make additional modifications.
Of course, TrollTech's sales people will try to get you to buy the commercial version so you can get support.
Most decisions regarding funding for astronomical research are made quietly and with little fanfare or public interest. How many people call their congressmen to lobby for more funding for Keck or Chandra? The VLA gets special attention because it was the movie "Contact" and the Hubble gets enormous special attention because the general population loves it. That's what I meant by 'The "Save Hubble!" cry,' there aren't enough astronomers to constitute a 'cry' IMHO.
Anti-Christian paranoid ramblings aside, I would say the reason for this decision is actually valuing good science over politics - the public loves Hubble so the politically easy thing to do would be to save it, but the right scientific decision is to to build a newer and better one for the same or lower cost.
Exactly! The "Save Hubble!" cry is originating largely from a population that just loves those cool-looking pictures that they can use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers.
If you rationally look for the best way to spend a billion dollars to aid astronomical research, HOP is a much better bet - you get a slighly newer and more capable satellite made mostly with proven techology and which has a longer expected life-span than the aging Hubble. And you don't risk human lives by launching a space shuttle to an orbit from which "abort to ISS" is an impossibility.
Or save the billion dollars and just deorbit Hubble whenever it actually fails (could last 4 more years, could last 15 more years, we don't really know.) Between Chandra and James Webb we're already spending billions on new astronomical satellites, and investigating new IR and radio wavelengths is scientifically more valuable than just collecting more visible pictures like those from Hubble.
Thank you very much, I think you've just proven my point better than I ever could have!
XML has definite value, but that value has just as definitely been overhyped.
I bet all of us have written code to save and restore configuration files or data files of some sort or another. You start with a flat file, if you're really dumb you store values implicitly by position, if you're a bit more clever perhaps you opt for using keyword/value pairs. Later you decide you want to allow newlines in the values and need to write special code for that, so you use double-quotes. Then you decide you need double-quotes in your values, and you invent an escaping mechanism. After some more development you realize that some subset of your keyword/value pairs has to be multiply-instanced, so you need some mechanism to have "objects" each with their own keyword/value pairs. And so on... Eventually someone on another project needs to read your file, and you have to explain all these idiosyncrocies to them so they can write some parsing code...
XML simplifies all that by defining a common syntax in which you can encode your information. It's easy to gradually expand your format by adding XML fields, and if you show the file to anyone else they instantly get a pretty good idea of what the information means; plus they have access to a bunch of libraries to parse it (SAX and DOM) and there are predefined ways to escape newlines, quotes, braces, and so forth.
Of course, XML is only a syntax. There are a billion other syntaxes that could probably accomplish the same things, but somehow XML became the standard; that in and of itself has value because everyone uses it and knows how to read and write it. But programs can't interoperate and read and write the same files until they agree on symantics, i.e. what tags will be where and what each field really means. I've encountered this several times, some customer says "write the data in XML format" and I have a hard time explaining to them that, yes, we can write it in XML, but that's not sufficient information to define the file format, that's really just the beginning.
Look, you'd have to be a moron to argue against the consensus of trained scientists. The scientific evidence clearly indicates that manmade atmospheric pollution blocking out the sun will cause a return to our trend of recent ice ages, thus causing "global cooling".
Oh wait, I thought this was the 1970s, when temperature measurements since the 1940s had showed a gradual cooling trend. Now I mean the scientific evidence clearly indicates that manmade atmospheric pollution will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, thus causing "global warming." Sorry about that. Well whichever is true, man is evil and so is economic production, so let's put a stop to it.
By the way, eat margarine. I mean butter. No, margarine. No wait, butter.
The studies are testing performance in educational areas that used to be considered important - reading, writing, arithmatic. So clearly if the kids spend a lot of time on the computer instead of studying math or reading literature, their performance in those areas will suffer.
But what about their performance in technology-related areas? What about their programming ability, their ability to think logically, their knowledge of and familiarity with computers? Those things will surely improve, unless they're just firing up Half-Life in which case their scores will plummet just as if they had a PlayStation or an XBox. Just because their performance suffers in the traditional areas doesn't mean computers are bad for them - they may in fact be better prepared for 21st century jobs than their schoolmates who get higher grades because their parents make them study the classics and ban them from using computers...
You do realize that some people are cursed with writing problems. I normally get "their" and "there" wright but sometimes I slip, I still after 27 years need to be conscious on what I am writing.
Near the end of high school, I recall seeing people make the "their" vs "there" vs "they're" mistake and others like it and thinking that they had to be absolute idiots.
Now 15 years and much computer usage later, I make the mistake myself sometimes. And when I see myself do it, I think I must be an absolute idiot.
Perhaps this is just all the more evidence that computers make you dumber? No, I think it just has to do with how much reading and writing you do. In school I was constantly reading and writing so I very thought of those as three clearly different concepts. Now I do a lot less reading and writing (email and Slashdot don't count!) and more conversing; in the spoken language the three are interchangeable, so the distinctions blur in my mind unless I stop to think consciously about it.
To a prude, if it's not acceptable for you to watch, then it's not acceptable for anybody else to watch either. They're not saying, "I watched this and found it objectionable," they're saying, "I find it objectionable that other people are able to watch this." They're main goal is to stop other people from doing things they wouldn't do themselves.
I'm sure they'd like to complain about what other people watch, but they know that they can't really complain to the government about X-rated shows on pay-per-view cable, the strong R-rated shows on cable movie channels, the $10.99 adult movies in hotel rooms (remember, "movie titles do not appear on your hotel bill"), etc. Protests against these things have been tried and courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of free speech in those media.
These organizations complain about broadcast television only because our ancient telecommunications laws somehow treat broadcast media as so "different" from all other forms of media. Somehow the thought that pornographic or violent electromagnetic waves are flying through the atmosphere seems to bother folks, while as long as those electromagnetic waves are confined to a piece of copper or coax they seem much happier. Oh, satellite pr0n gets beamed too, evidently they aren't bothered by pornographic electromagnetic waves passing through their bodies as long as they are "encrypted".
This idea that government can say what goes out over the air "because of the children" or for any other reason is what really has to change. If you don't want to see it, don't tune in to it and don't let your children tune in to it. Buy them some Sponge Bob tapes instead.
How is the argument that the government should force money from the hands of those who work to the hands of those who don't, and that the government should dictate who should live and who should die through its centrally-controlled healthcare system, anything other than fascist contempt for those who produce the valuable goods and services of society?
Please confine your euro-socialist-fascist rants to politics.slashdot.org.
In addition to technology development, legal liability reform will probably be needed to make self-driving cars a reality. Even if self-driven cars reduce annual highways deaths from the current 40,000 to under 10,000, car manufacturers could be bankrupted by out-of-control jury awards for those 10,000 deaths.
While now most accidents are presumed to be one of the driver's faults, with self-driving cars they'd all pretty much be attributed to a failure of the car... "The software failed to account for boulders falling on the roadway? Negligence!"
I know this isn't a black-and-white issue, but I would think that once the manufacturers can show that their software is safer than most human drivers, they should be largely off the hook for liability, rather than requiring absolute perfection which will simply slow the adoption of this technology.