Its worth noting however, that in every state I've ever lived in, the ONLY time you're allowed to go faster than the speed limit is if you're passing on the left on a road where you pass in the lane of oncoming traffic. This exception does NOT typically apply if you have multiple lanes in one direction. Yes, usually if someone passes you on the right, you should be in a lane further to the right (though this isn't always true, sometimes it just means that they are driving recklessly.) But as a generalization, if someone is passing you to the right while speeding, they are committing a more serious offense than you are.
95% of the over $1k PCs? Really? Do you have a citation for that, 'cuz I find it really really hard to believe. While I grant that PCs have gotten cheaper, $1k isn't THAT expensive, even these days...
It is not possible for anyone other than the original authors to change the license on the original source code, and even they can't change it for those who have already licensed it under the current terms. However, the BSD license does not required that changes to source code be licensed under the same conditions as the original source code.
Nor does the GPL, provided the original authors are the ones who make the changes.
i am just wondering, how far modern materials science, lasers, telecommunications, computers, opto-electronics, radio communication, etc, would have gotten without quantum physics,... ?
Pretty far. I'm not sure if any of these, even today, really use quantum physics. Modern chips are just starting to get to the point where quantum effects matter. Most materials science is pretty empirical/statistical. Dunno if opto-electronics is on a scale where quantum effects matter (though I'd guess not.) Radio, certainly predates quantum mechanics, and is based on Maxwell.
The US is in Afghanistan for the plunder.. be it oil, pipes, women, whatever. It's no different than one gang of chimpanzees attacking another. The flowery language and 'morality' is pure BS
If there was anything to plunder in Afghanistan, this might actually be a valid argument.... but there's not, and pretty much never has been, which is why most invaders eventually give up.
Yes but a.) China already had another search engine that had a majority share; b.) china is a big market. c.) the chinese government provides a massive infrastructure for filtering out links they don't like. I think the italian taxpayer is unlikely to want to spend that kind of money to a.) roll their own search and b.) provide a massive search filter. A.) they might get a private company to do without taxpayer dollars, b.) is much less likely.
"Brewer says the proposal is a way to reward good behavior and raise awareness that certain conditions, including obesity, raise costs throughout the system."
Where's the reward? If you're on Medicaid and already fit, then the reward of the $50 is not a reward at all since you never received the punishment to begin with. Negative reinforcement only works if you're taking away something negative to begin with. Want to give me a reward, how about you tax the fatties more for FICA and give me a break since I won't be using as many services as Mr. BigMac-a-day who can't keep his hands out of anything deep fried and covered in Mayo.
Presumably the reward is not having to raise other fees on them. So, while I think a junk food tax is bad, this might actually not be a bad plan. This is when you go to the doctor, he says 'you have a serious health problem, do X to prevent it from getting worse' and you refuse, thus costing a lot more money. I'm not entirely certain I'm against penalties for that.
Really, though, HFCS is not much (if any) worse than refined white sugar. I agree, though, that going back to cane sugars like the drinks you mention is a strongly positive development. While refined sugar has its place (it is chemically different than brown/cane sugars, and quite necessary for baking some products) in liquids is not generally one of them.
You would always see everything. It isn't going to look 3-D unless they're providing images of the same object to both eyes. And yeah I agree with posters above, I can definitely see use cases for these things....
posting to undo bad mod. (Meant to mod insightful, modded 'offtopic' instead)
Since I'm posting anyway... GP is right in that the health insurance model is different from other models insofar as while most insurance plans are designed to manage and pay for individual risk, health insurance is designed to manage and pay for collective risk. This is partially for the reasons of charity/social justice (not because insurance companies care about these things, but because people do.) Mostly, of course, its about the purpose of health insurance as it exists in the US. The purpose of health insurance as it exists in the US is to maximize the efficiency of the work force. If one managed risk individually, then a significant percentage of the work force would have much lower efficiency than they do today due to unmanageable health costs. Accordingly companies manage risk collectively. For the most part this is good for everyone, especially given that, for example, a person with a weak immune system who isn't getting proper treatment can cause healthy people to get sick more often....
I have never run across any other language (that's actually used, please don't mention malboge and the like) where a programmer can so easily obfuscate his code WITHOUT INTENDING TO.
Perl. And this is from someone who sees Perl as the first solution for everything (C/C++ as second).
I have blocked my few experiences of maintaining Perl code completely from my memory. *shivers*
Important note: I love C. I was just noting that I can easily understand how young programmers who had unfortunate experiences in their first legacy C++ code could be traumatized for life.
Not if you work for a large software company. Some idiot could use c++ to write incomprehensible code, then leave or be sacked. You get the job of maintaining the ever so clever rubbish he left behind.
For you guys that think C++ is hard or incomprehensible, please, for the good of mankind, change your line of work. You're not worthy of calling yourselves programmers.
You know, I have to say I've been a professional programmer for 15 years. And, in fact, C/C++ is in many ways my preferred language. That said, I have to agree with GP. While I love C/C++, I have never run across any other language (that's actually used, please don't mention malboge and the like) where a programmer can so easily obfuscate his code WITHOUT INTENDING TO. No, C++ is not hard or incomprehenisble, if used right. But there are coders out there who seem to have a knack for taking the beautifully powerful language and turning it into a terrible torture of agony for all people who ever have to maintain it.
Home routers, in theory, could possibly perform the function, however there would be wildly varying methods of reading and displaying the data. All older router firmwares would need to be updated, and the metering method used would need standardization.
So, I run dd-wrt, and MY router certainly has this function, and has for a long time. I can see little graphs of my usage back to when I first installed dd-wrt on it. (It makes it easy to tell when I get on a torrent kick 'cuz my upstream jumps through the roof) I don't remember whether my stock-firmware routers stored history or not, but I know that they all told me the in and out numbers since the connection started. Where it gets hard, though, is with the ISPs marking significant quantities of the input "free", and so the router would need to be programmed to learn about the different types of traffic.... which in the end, would probably mean that what I'd want is for the ISP to provide numbers of both "charged" and "free" data, and then for me to compare the totals against my router. (Just like my phone does today). An LCD display that does all this might be nice, but I'm pretty sure (not completely) that it has to be 'downstream' of the modem. And since most modems and routers are combined, the only thing the LCD display could really do is read what the router/modem says....
"Perhaps assembler is necessary to understand exactly how a processor works. But understanding exactly how a processor works is not necessary for development of most applications. Heck, understanding the underlying frameworks/libraries you are utilizing often isn't."
And then we are stuck with the endless bloat, endless patchwork with messy kludges that are in constant need of fixing....
1.) "Messy Kludges" -- I spent several years as a chief architect of a company in charge of maintaining and improving a 10 million line legacy codebase for a large organization. In my experience messy kludges result from people who ignore OO principles, not from people who ignore assembler ones.
2.) I agree there is basic value in understanding how a processor works, especially if you're writing RT or NRT apps. If you want to highly optimize a program, being able to visualize a bit about how many instructions you've put into the loop you're repeating a million times is a good thing... But honestly, IME most of the optimization is understanding how data is vectored onto the CPU, and how the L1 and L2 caches work, these days. Furthermore... I met one of Intel's top assembly writers once. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think he said something like he matched the compiler 85% of the time, the compiler beat him 10% of the time, and he beat the compiler 5% of the time....Increasingly the compilers optimize code so much better than humans could, that I really fail to see why actually knowing assembly well enough to write it is helpful.
IPv6 around the corner? It's been around the corner for what now, a decade? Do you see anyone use it? I don't. I'm not even certain most ISPs would route it correctly.
So two very wierd things happened in the last three months, which make me believe "this time is different":
1.) At a fairly high level meeting in a DoD acquisition project, for the very first time, I heard someone ask "Is the new version IPv6 compatible?" and get a specific list of incompatibilities back, no less. Not "what is our plan? or when are we implementing?" But "Is it compatible?" with an honest get-well plan, and an answer based on an actual test regime....
2.) I saw the IPv4 spec on a list of "retired standards" for a specific future deployment date.
Its happening slowly, and painfully, but IPv6 is, finally, no shit, happening.
oddly enough, under US law, this is sometimes legal. The anti-bribery law has a specific exception for (foreign) places where a bribe is required to make a public official do their actual jobs. I.e. bribing a police officer to let you off a ticket is illegal. Bribing a police officer to investigate and arrest the guys vandalizing your warehouse every night may not be, depending on the circumstances.
The problem is, there's money in keeping it. Most people will go shopping after work, but not before. So having more daylight hours after working hours benefits retailers, and retailers lobby in favor if it. The disruption actually costs a good bit of money, all told, but the retailers and manufacturers/importers see a benefit.
So keep it on summer time all year round. Anecdotally, nobody I know does anything with the morning light we get in winter, and it'd be great to be able to have daylight after work for longer in the year.
Yeah, but dawn has to happen too. Especially on the western ends of time zones, if you don't switch back, dawn gets very very late indeed. I remember in ohio the last week before the DST switch dawn was awfully close to 0800....
Seriously, is it common (in the states) to "own" your employees even when they are not at work?
You would be surprised, but yes it is very common for companies to claim IP over things created even when an employee is doing them on their own free time. Companies argue that exposure to their policies arguably enabled the person to create the product, service or technology... which is wrong in my opinion but it still happens. I think that if you work for a company and there aren't explicit agreements in place you are protected in most states but you should definitely check first before starting up something awesome.
This is bad for all of us because it slows down the invention of new things to the angular flow rate of cold molasses.
To be fair, most employment contracts I've read are a little more specific than that. Specifically they own any IP on anything related to the work you do for them, fairly broadly defined. This tends to mean that, if you work at microsoft, any software you wrote would be covered. But if you wrote a novel, that would not be covered. Actually, the way I read the ones I've signed, they're more on the order of noncompete agreements than the company making any claims as to why you were able to do it. They don't care why, as part of your employment you agree not to compete with their products. The best way to PREVENT you from competing with them is that, if you do, they own it anyway. Likewise I'm forbidden from providing consulting services to competitors etc.
It's a negative feedback loop - if it's run down and uncool, people don't go there. If people don't go there, it becomes more run down and uncool.
It would probably be out of business if not for the laser tag (can't replicate that with consoles) and the ice rinks (hockey = $$$).
I just feel obliged to note that this is a positive feedback loop, not a negative one. Negative feedback loops dampen variations, positive feedback loops amplify the effect. What you described is an amplification of "becoming uncool"./pedantic
English is a stupid language full of exceptions. It took me years to get the apostrophe out of, "its," when used possessively. If we referred to it as, "Google's mobile operating system," it'd be correct. When we use the pronoun we remove the apostrophe while it's possessive, because, "it's," is already a contraction of, "it is."
Ummmm. Actually we don't 'remove the apostrophe' its is the third person gender neutral possessive pronoun like 'his'..... it's its own word.
I swear I read 250 the first time I read the article. I must be getting blind as well as old. My apologies. (Although I grant, one would have hoped the editors would take the trouble to read the article and catch it.)
So I have an interesting alternative take on this all. Mainly: I use google _AT WORK_ where porn and illegal file sharing are both a problem. I absolutely, 100% don't want autocomplete/instant search for porn, because it could get me in trouble, if I type in 'pen' and got 'penis' instead of 'pending' and someone happened to be looking at my screen who was offended.... Even illegal file sharing.... Yes there are plenty of legitimate terms, but this is an easy algorithm to prevent illegitimate uses (from the corporate acceptable use policy's perspective) from showing up on my screen. So yes, I view this as protecting me.
My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side. Bill Gates, through his foundation, is generously giving grants to many organizations doing promising research. I didn't realize that Microsoft was directly involved in the research side of things. Did they buy assignment rights to this research (and potential patent)? Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me — not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.
I can't find a good reference (read: I am lazy), but I know the MS Basic Research Lab had been doing various bio/genetics stuff at one point. The MS Basic Research lab is (or at least was when I followed it more closely) basically the only true basic research lab left in the country, and one with enormously broad interests.
I really don't see what the problem with the seller charging their own price for it. It's normal business practice to anyone who's ever shopped, online or otherwise.
It isn't normal practice for them to effectively set the wholesale price as well (70% of retail in this case).
Except the dev can put a minimum on this with the 20% of MSRP piece of it, if they're really concerned. Honestly I greatly prefer this to the model they were forced into by the book sellers... note that when publishers started being able to set the price, prices went UP for ebooks.
Slashdot Mirror
Its worth noting however, that in every state I've ever lived in, the ONLY time you're allowed to go faster than the speed limit is if you're passing on the left on a road where you pass in the lane of oncoming traffic. This exception does NOT typically apply if you have multiple lanes in one direction. Yes, usually if someone passes you on the right, you should be in a lane further to the right (though this isn't always true, sometimes it just means that they are driving recklessly.) But as a generalization, if someone is passing you to the right while speeding, they are committing a more serious offense than you are.
95% of the over $1k PCs? Really? Do you have a citation for that, 'cuz I find it really really hard to believe. While I grant that PCs have gotten cheaper, $1k isn't THAT expensive, even these days...
It is not possible for anyone other than the original authors to change the license on the original source code, and even they can't change it for those who have already licensed it under the current terms. However, the BSD license does not required that changes to source code be licensed under the same conditions as the original source code.
Nor does the GPL, provided the original authors are the ones who make the changes.
i am just wondering, how far modern materials science, lasers, telecommunications, computers, opto-electronics, radio communication, etc, would have gotten without quantum physics, ... ?
Pretty far. I'm not sure if any of these, even today, really use quantum physics. Modern chips are just starting to get to the point where quantum effects matter. Most materials science is pretty empirical/statistical. Dunno if opto-electronics is on a scale where quantum effects matter (though I'd guess not.) Radio, certainly predates quantum mechanics, and is based on Maxwell.
finger slip, posting to undo mod. Thought this was funny and somehow slipped to 'overrated'.
The US is in Afghanistan for the plunder.. be it oil, pipes, women, whatever. It's no different than one gang of chimpanzees attacking another. The flowery language and 'morality' is pure BS
If there was anything to plunder in Afghanistan, this might actually be a valid argument.... but there's not, and pretty much never has been, which is why most invaders eventually give up.
Yes but a.) China already had another search engine that had a majority share; b.) china is a big market. c.) the chinese government provides a massive infrastructure for filtering out links they don't like. I think the italian taxpayer is unlikely to want to spend that kind of money to a.) roll their own search and b.) provide a massive search filter. A.) they might get a private company to do without taxpayer dollars, b.) is much less likely.
"Brewer says the proposal is a way to reward good behavior and raise awareness that certain conditions, including obesity, raise costs throughout the system."
Where's the reward? If you're on Medicaid and already fit, then the reward of the $50 is not a reward at all since you never received the punishment to begin with. Negative reinforcement only works if you're taking away something negative to begin with. Want to give me a reward, how about you tax the fatties more for FICA and give me a break since I won't be using as many services as Mr. BigMac-a-day who can't keep his hands out of anything deep fried and covered in Mayo.
Presumably the reward is not having to raise other fees on them. So, while I think a junk food tax is bad, this might actually not be a bad plan. This is when you go to the doctor, he says 'you have a serious health problem, do X to prevent it from getting worse' and you refuse, thus costing a lot more money. I'm not entirely certain I'm against penalties for that.
Really, though, HFCS is not much (if any) worse than refined white sugar. I agree, though, that going back to cane sugars like the drinks you mention is a strongly positive development. While refined sugar has its place (it is chemically different than brown/cane sugars, and quite necessary for baking some products) in liquids is not generally one of them.
You would always see everything. It isn't going to look 3-D unless they're providing images of the same object to both eyes. And yeah I agree with posters above, I can definitely see use cases for these things....
Since I'm posting anyway... GP is right in that the health insurance model is different from other models insofar as while most insurance plans are designed to manage and pay for individual risk, health insurance is designed to manage and pay for collective risk. This is partially for the reasons of charity/social justice (not because insurance companies care about these things, but because people do.) Mostly, of course, its about the purpose of health insurance as it exists in the US. The purpose of health insurance as it exists in the US is to maximize the efficiency of the work force. If one managed risk individually, then a significant percentage of the work force would have much lower efficiency than they do today due to unmanageable health costs. Accordingly companies manage risk collectively. For the most part this is good for everyone, especially given that, for example, a person with a weak immune system who isn't getting proper treatment can cause healthy people to get sick more often....
Perl. And this is from someone who sees Perl as the first solution for everything (C/C++ as second).
I have blocked my few experiences of maintaining Perl code completely from my memory. *shivers*
Important note: I love C. I was just noting that I can easily understand how young programmers who had unfortunate experiences in their first legacy C++ code could be traumatized for life.
Not if you work for a large software company. Some idiot could use c++ to write incomprehensible code, then leave or be sacked. You get the job of maintaining the ever so clever rubbish he left behind.
For you guys that think C++ is hard or incomprehensible, please, for the good of mankind, change your line of work. You're not worthy of calling yourselves programmers.
You know, I have to say I've been a professional programmer for 15 years. And, in fact, C/C++ is in many ways my preferred language. That said, I have to agree with GP. While I love C/C++, I have never run across any other language (that's actually used, please don't mention malboge and the like) where a programmer can so easily obfuscate his code WITHOUT INTENDING TO. No, C++ is not hard or incomprehenisble, if used right. But there are coders out there who seem to have a knack for taking the beautifully powerful language and turning it into a terrible torture of agony for all people who ever have to maintain it.
Home routers, in theory, could possibly perform the function, however there would be wildly varying methods of reading and displaying the data. All older router firmwares would need to be updated, and the metering method used would need standardization.
So, I run dd-wrt, and MY router certainly has this function, and has for a long time. I can see little graphs of my usage back to when I first installed dd-wrt on it. (It makes it easy to tell when I get on a torrent kick 'cuz my upstream jumps through the roof) I don't remember whether my stock-firmware routers stored history or not, but I know that they all told me the in and out numbers since the connection started. Where it gets hard, though, is with the ISPs marking significant quantities of the input "free", and so the router would need to be programmed to learn about the different types of traffic.... which in the end, would probably mean that what I'd want is for the ISP to provide numbers of both "charged" and "free" data, and then for me to compare the totals against my router. (Just like my phone does today). An LCD display that does all this might be nice, but I'm pretty sure (not completely) that it has to be 'downstream' of the modem. And since most modems and routers are combined, the only thing the LCD display could really do is read what the router/modem says....
"Perhaps assembler is necessary to understand exactly how a processor works. But understanding exactly how a processor works is not necessary for development of most applications. Heck, understanding the underlying frameworks/libraries you are utilizing often isn't."
And then we are stuck with the endless bloat, endless patchwork with messy kludges that are in constant need of fixing....
1.) "Messy Kludges" -- I spent several years as a chief architect of a company in charge of maintaining and improving a 10 million line legacy codebase for a large organization. In my experience messy kludges result from people who ignore OO principles, not from people who ignore assembler ones.
2.) I agree there is basic value in understanding how a processor works, especially if you're writing RT or NRT apps. If you want to highly optimize a program, being able to visualize a bit about how many instructions you've put into the loop you're repeating a million times is a good thing... But honestly, IME most of the optimization is understanding how data is vectored onto the CPU, and how the L1 and L2 caches work, these days. Furthermore... I met one of Intel's top assembly writers once. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think he said something like he matched the compiler 85% of the time, the compiler beat him 10% of the time, and he beat the compiler 5% of the time....Increasingly the compilers optimize code so much better than humans could, that I really fail to see why actually knowing assembly well enough to write it is helpful.
IPv6 around the corner? It's been around the corner for what now, a decade? Do you see anyone use it? I don't. I'm not even certain most ISPs would route it correctly.
So two very wierd things happened in the last three months, which make me believe "this time is different":
1.) At a fairly high level meeting in a DoD acquisition project, for the very first time, I heard someone ask "Is the new version IPv6 compatible?" and get a specific list of incompatibilities back, no less. Not "what is our plan? or when are we implementing?" But "Is it compatible?" with an honest get-well plan, and an answer based on an actual test regime....
2.) I saw the IPv4 spec on a list of "retired standards" for a specific future deployment date.
Its happening slowly, and painfully, but IPv6 is, finally, no shit, happening.
oddly enough, under US law, this is sometimes legal. The anti-bribery law has a specific exception for (foreign) places where a bribe is required to make a public official do their actual jobs. I.e. bribing a police officer to let you off a ticket is illegal. Bribing a police officer to investigate and arrest the guys vandalizing your warehouse every night may not be, depending on the circumstances.
The problem is, there's money in keeping it. Most people will go shopping after work, but not before. So having more daylight hours after working hours benefits retailers, and retailers lobby in favor if it. The disruption actually costs a good bit of money, all told, but the retailers and manufacturers/importers see a benefit.
So keep it on summer time all year round. Anecdotally, nobody I know does anything with the morning light we get in winter, and it'd be great to be able to have daylight after work for longer in the year.
Yeah, but dawn has to happen too. Especially on the western ends of time zones, if you don't switch back, dawn gets very very late indeed. I remember in ohio the last week before the DST switch dawn was awfully close to 0800....
You would be surprised, but yes it is very common for companies to claim IP over things created even when an employee is doing them on their own free time. Companies argue that exposure to their policies arguably enabled the person to create the product, service or technology... which is wrong in my opinion but it still happens. I think that if you work for a company and there aren't explicit agreements in place you are protected in most states but you should definitely check first before starting up something awesome.
This is bad for all of us because it slows down the invention of new things to the angular flow rate of cold molasses.
To be fair, most employment contracts I've read are a little more specific than that. Specifically they own any IP on anything related to the work you do for them, fairly broadly defined. This tends to mean that, if you work at microsoft, any software you wrote would be covered. But if you wrote a novel, that would not be covered. Actually, the way I read the ones I've signed, they're more on the order of noncompete agreements than the company making any claims as to why you were able to do it. They don't care why, as part of your employment you agree not to compete with their products. The best way to PREVENT you from competing with them is that, if you do, they own it anyway. Likewise I'm forbidden from providing consulting services to competitors etc.
It's a negative feedback loop - if it's run down and uncool, people don't go there. If people don't go there, it becomes more run down and uncool.
It would probably be out of business if not for the laser tag (can't replicate that with consoles) and the ice rinks (hockey = $$$).
I just feel obliged to note that this is a positive feedback loop, not a negative one. Negative feedback loops dampen variations, positive feedback loops amplify the effect. What you described is an amplification of "becoming uncool". /pedantic
English is a stupid language full of exceptions. It took me years to get the apostrophe out of, "its," when used possessively. If we referred to it as, "Google's mobile operating system," it'd be correct. When we use the pronoun we remove the apostrophe while it's possessive, because, "it's," is already a contraction of, "it is."
Ummmm. Actually we don't 'remove the apostrophe' its is the third person gender neutral possessive pronoun like 'his'..... it's its own word.
I swear I read 250 the first time I read the article. I must be getting blind as well as old. My apologies. (Although I grant, one would have hoped the editors would take the trouble to read the article and catch it.)
So I have an interesting alternative take on this all. Mainly: I use google _AT WORK_ where porn and illegal file sharing are both a problem. I absolutely, 100% don't want autocomplete/instant search for porn, because it could get me in trouble, if I type in 'pen' and got 'penis' instead of 'pending' and someone happened to be looking at my screen who was offended.... Even illegal file sharing.... Yes there are plenty of legitimate terms, but this is an easy algorithm to prevent illegitimate uses (from the corporate acceptable use policy's perspective) from showing up on my screen. So yes, I view this as protecting me.
My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side. Bill Gates, through his foundation, is generously giving grants to many organizations doing promising research. I didn't realize that Microsoft was directly involved in the research side of things. Did they buy assignment rights to this research (and potential patent)? Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me — not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.
I can't find a good reference (read: I am lazy), but I know the MS Basic Research Lab had been doing various bio/genetics stuff at one point. The MS Basic Research lab is (or at least was when I followed it more closely) basically the only true basic research lab left in the country, and one with enormously broad interests.
It isn't normal practice for them to effectively set the wholesale price as well (70% of retail in this case).
Except the dev can put a minimum on this with the 20% of MSRP piece of it, if they're really concerned. Honestly I greatly prefer this to the model they were forced into by the book sellers... note that when publishers started being able to set the price, prices went UP for ebooks.