Frankly, I don't see this bill getting much serious attention. As a rule, the military in this country prefers volunteer forces over a conscripted force. At this point, they want people who want to serve, rather than those who have been forced to. They have enough discipline troubles with volunteers, how bad would it be with those who have been forced to serve?
Also, if every male 18 to 22 has to serve one year, what will the financial cost be? What would these people do? How much of the military's time will be spent mothering a huge population of men, many of whom do not wish to serve? This sounds like a "nice" idea, but not one which will get serious attention.
I had a somewhat similar incident at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, of all places. I bought a $6 meal, handed them $20, and I got $4 in change.
Obviously, the math didn't add up here.
Anyway, I mentioned this to the cashier, who acknowledged the mistake. She couldn't reopen the till to give me my $10, and so she called over a manager. The manager immediately pulled the till, walked into another room out of sight, and returned claiming that I was owed no money. I contacted KFC's customer hotline, reported what had happened, and they said they would respond quickly. I have never heard from them, and I have contacted them several times. No action has occurred.
I don't buy Pepsi products at all now. They don't need any more of my money.
I can't comment about hiring an offshore firm, since my employer has not (yet) gotten that idea into their heads. However, I can speak from experience about dealing with offsite programming staff. We have a few here (most of us are in the main office, but some folks work remotely around the country), and it is a nightmare to deal with them. Most of them are out of contact with the rest of the company so they have little idea of what is going on, it is very difficult to go over bug fixes with them over the phone, and most of the time we have no idea if they are actually doing their work at all, until there is a sudden burst of productivity.
Basically, we've found that having offsite programmers incurs a signicant overhead. We have to spend a lot more time communicating decisions, be they corporate or technical, to them than with the rest of our staff. Some of this could be addressed by improved communications, but a lot has to do with the lack of daily, face to face, contact. Nevermind the troubles we have getting them trained on new technologies. I can't even imagine what it is like dealing with someone on another continent-at least here they're within 3 hours and (most) speak english.
File a contest of the patent with the PTO. That will probably cost about $8000, less than the cost of the fight against PanIP. Then countersue PanIP.
Either way, your lawyers should be quite capable at finding the prior art to stop this. I would strongly recommend that all of the companies being sued band together to kill the patents.
The trade federation is, I think, meant to be Chinese, not Japanese
Yes and no. Actually, they were supposed to be an homage to the monguls in the Flash Gordon serials (one of the major influences on Star Wars). That also is the reason why the view screens on their ships look, act, and sound like the view screens in the Flash Gordon serials.
I'm generally willing, without evidence to back up these accusations, to give Lucas the benefit of the doubt on the racism issue. Prejudice of any kind is a terrible and insulting thing to accuse someone of. Remember when the hyenas in Lion King were called racist, and one was played by Whoopy Goldberg? Not someone known for looking kindly on racism.
Perfectly Reasonable, but frivolous use
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Here's my frivolous use of time travel: Go back in time and recover all 109 lost episodes of Doctor Who. As an added bonus, get the original masters of the episodes, including the missing Pertwee era color masters.
Oh, and when are we going to figure out how to make something bigger on the inside than the outside?
I know I'm going to get hammered for this, but the greatest April Fools joke has got to be that people are actually paying the/. editors to put up this lame, uninspired, humor. If Taco and the rest want my hard earned cash, they need to at least find a way to not make April Fools day so boring.
This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
Wow. In one whole sentence this fellow managed to slap the face of just about every kernel developer since the 1.0 days. A vast amount of the effort over the past 7 years has been dedicated to making certain the kernel can run on as many architectures as possible. Apparently, Sun has decided to pigeon hole Linux as an intel only kernel.
They already tried reactors on cruisers, look at the USS Virginia and her sisters in the 70s/80s. They're hard at work scrapping those ships right now, because they proved to be impractical. One of my coworkers served on the VA during the mess in Lebanon (she was doing some shore bombardment before the New Jersey showed up and ended the need for pop guns), and there were a couple problems. First, roughly 2/3 of the crew was dedicated to maintaining the reactor. Second, if they got into a firefight, it was very likely that the reactor would shut down because they weren't able to handle the shock of a direct hit. They USN is going back to more stable gas turbine engines for the newer ships (except for carriers where the power is an absolute must) because they require a smaller crew to maintain and can take a lot more punishment.
There seems to be a lot of fear about the new budget killing off science and killing off the manned program. Think about what is being done here for a moment:
In the unmanned space programs, missions are being put on hold so that nuclear propulsion technologies can be dusted off and put to practical use. This would cut down on mission time, and in doing so allow us to get probes to their destinations faster, and possibly with more power when they get there. That would have the net result of 1) cutting down on the money spent monitoring the probes during their cruise phase and 2) potentially extending their time at their destination spent gathering science. If you look at it from a business perspective, this makes sense-you want to invest money in the project for a gain (in this case, knowledge).
Aside: would be nice to see them develop a general purpose class of probes that they could basically shotgun to the outer planets (and unlike the Voyager probes, orbit their destinations). That may be more practical with this propulsion and power system. Any thoughts? Probably not going to happen until NASA has enough cash and confidence from the White House. No time soon.
Now, on to the manned space program. The Shuttle and ISS costs are way, way out of line. Take a look at the findings from the commitee last year. They're expecting its going to cost many more billions of dollars to finish the ISS in the plan which was comitted to. This on a project that is already considerably over budget, and suffering from numerous technical, engineering, and managerial problems (eg incompatable water purification systems, maintenance panels with the procedure for replacing the panel on the inner side where it can't be read while you're reinstalling it, and so on). If those costs aren't brought under control, it could easily swallow up the more productive unmanned program. The shuttle program is very much in the same boat, since the shuttles cost a huge amount to launch, and are only just barely reusable (they have to rip out large parts of the propulstion system, and refurbish the shuttle between launches, at a huge cost). I would be much happier to see them put yet more funding into developing a next generation system, but first getting the current manned space program under control is important.
If the costs aren't brought under control, and new technology developed, it is very unlikely we will even have NASA in a decade. It is very hard pressed to keep the budget it has when there are other programs (such as fighting this little war thing we have right now) are getting the lions share of the money available. Like anything else, a little wise long term investment could reap huge benefits (such as a better unmanned program that allows us to have many more probes in operation, including the much needed additional communication equipment). It would be great to see some long term planning that results in a return to the Moon, or a solid plan to go to Mars. That will require that the NASA administration take the initiative and plan out a program that won't break the budget, and that NASA also earn the confidence of Congress that money invested won't become part of another horror story of misused funds. Its a hell of a challenge, particularly for a government program, and I would be interested to see NASA step up to it.
Re:The other way around?
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 1
First, computers will recognize voice commands. Well, there are already programs that do this like Dragon, so we're almost there anyway. The point now is that you are still giving keyword commands to a computer, and as it is refined, you'll better recognition of specific commands, and questions that can be filtered from within conversations. Giving commands to a computer is easier than open ended questions to the computer.
I may be mistaken here, but that wasn't what the previous poster was referring to. He was discussing the ability for the computer to be able to understand and act upon common, everyday speech in an intelligent manner. This is something we're not even close to. Right now, speech software allows us to give the computer commands ("Open word. New document. Dear Jack," and so on...), but we can't carry on a conversation with it on any level, and if you break from those commands you will quickly find the limits of the software's capability.
Some of this also lies with our knowledge of linquistics. To date, linguists have not been able to work out the exact rules of the English language, for example. They have most of it down, but not all. They have not been able to work out parsing rules for the language that will allow a computer to parse and understand everything said in this language-in part because it changes so often, but also because there are so few hard and fast rules in the language (this isn't C, folks). Until linguists figure that out, there are significant limits in place on how powerful speech interfaces will be.
There is a really simple way of determining whether or not someone has copied code for an assignment:
Remove all whitespace, and change all variable names to a standard name, and then compare the munged sources. Its a good way of figuring out whether anyone has copied code and then just reformatted it and changed the variable names. Sure, it won't catch folks who copy a routine here or there, but it is a quick and easy start, and if you get more sophisticated it can cut down on cheating considerably.
and there's already a lot of talk about "Survivor."
OK, um, first of all, why would someone in the middle of a war zone want to watch Survivor? OK, great, I'm going to watch a show about people manipulating, betraying, and starving after having been through 5 years of Taliban rule.
Next this guy will claim to have gotten to a modern website with a browser written in 1996 on a Commodore (lets hope its at least a very late model Amiga).
Meanwhile, he's especially eager to get his hands on the Apple iPod, and has been drooling over the Apple website site since he got back online.
Yep, there we are, going to the Apple website was one of the first things he did after being free of the Taliban. Right up there with getting all those movies he missed? Right. As an aside, this guy must have had some serious cash to have an Amiga system in that country.
Yet again, Mr. Katz has proven to be overzealous. Or very, very gullible.
Well, we've been in utter hell here at my employer. One of the middle tier objects in our products were hard coded with the expectation that the time would never go over 1 billion. The moment it did, all of our internet products at all of our client sites went bust. We're still picking up the pieces, and will be doing so for some time to come.
Yet again I have another reminder to point to of the necessity to design software, not just throw it together like the offending developer did.
Take a look at the asm output on the systems this is failing on. Bear in mind that all powers of 10 (10, 10^2, so on) can not be properly represented in floating point (why is better left up to a more confusing discussion). What this comes down to is in the integer conversion on the left hand operation-if you look at the asm output, you will likely see something like PUSH 9 instead of PUSH 10 like you would expect. Did you have a chance test this with the same compiler versions on FreeBSD and linux on intel hardware?
I've run a company, and I will tell you from bitter experience, a democratic company does not work. All decisions eventually do not come down to what is best for the company, but what everyone disagrees over the least. You can not run a company where everyone is voting the business or technical decisions and expect to do anything other than fail.
This is in the same category as paying everyone in the company the same. Sounds nice and idealistic, but when the folks are working 60 hours a week are getting the same pay as the guy who does 40, things break down real fast.
You have to bear a couple things in mind with the exit polls:
First, they're terribly inaccurate for close elections, to the point of being useless. We saw that last night (PA was not expected to be such a wide margin for Gore, and I was very surprised).
Second, you have to bear in mind where they took the exit polls. They may have chosen some of the more urban areas of Florida for the exit polls, and that would definitely skew their results. Exit polls are like any other poll you take: its statistically accurate for the region you take it in, but you're not guaranteed that it will be accurate for the whole region.
I have the feeling after all the dust is settled from this, its very likely that the press will have to take up the policy of not reporting poll results until all of the polls across the country have closed so they can't be accused of influencing the western vote with results in the east. It'll make the election night news cast a bit more boring (and very late), but I figure they make more money off of Friends anyway.
I come from a family of farmers (I didn't grow up on a farm, something unusual until my generation), and I've seen what the inheritence tax does to farmers & their families. To say that this does not have a harmful effect upon the families & their ability to continue farming the land is an absolute insult.
Many of the children have to spend a huge part of their lives saving money so they can pay the taxes. This is a huge amount of money to people who are already having a hard enough time affording the equipment, feed, and necessities for their families. Additionally, especially here in Chester County, PA (as well as my uncle's farm in Winchester, VA), land prices have risen dramatically, so that very few farms are worth less than a million dollars on the market. There have been more than a few cases here where the parents have passed on and the children suddenly discover the land they grew up on is worth millions of dollars because of the changes in the market in the last 10 or 20 years, and they don't have the money to pay the taxes. The result? Many of them have to sell their land to developers who build 400k houses on quarter acre lots, and the families have to find another way to earn a living after spending their lifetimes farming.
Sir, I do not believe you have any conception of what is going on in this country. Family farmers have been devastated in the last half century due to low crop prices and inheritance taxes, and you have turned a blind eye and deaf ear to their concerns.
>Doesn't marrying a US citizen make you a citizen?
No, this is not the case (thanks to a number of abuses of the system by spouses for hire). Currently the system runs thus (if you are lucky):
1. At marriage you get a temporary green card. If you have a divorce, kiss that goodbye.
2. After 2 years of marriage, you should get your permanent green card.
3. After 5 years you should be able to get citizenship.
It keeps folks from marrying to get citizenship, but it leads to other abuses. There are numerous stories of women being abused by their "husbands" who marry them and continue to promise to put the paperwork through, but never do. If they divorce the scoundrel, they are deported.
The company I work at seems to thrive on H1Bs, its the only way we can attract talent, and the management seems intent upon screwing them over wholesale. It usually costs a H1B applicant a couple thousand to get all the paperwork take care of by a lawyer (and 2 months of tense waiting), and the company usually has to lay out a $500 expense to cover their application. My employer is so intent to screw them they attempt to force the visa applicant to pay the $500 in addition to their other fees-most thankfully refuse to pay the fee. Even so, my employer treats them so badly that they are leaving in droves for better jobs-that tells you something when it takes them 2 months and a couple thousand dollars to change jobs.
What burns me, and drives me to shame, is that these folks come here, work their hides off in the hopes of gaining access to the american dream, are productive members of society-and then after 6 years get booted out of here. This is NOT the way to treat people who can only add to our nation and give it growth. People who, may I add, have to pay the same taxes we do.
*sigh* I have the joy of working as a software developer in the financial industry. The company I work for developes software used by institutions for online banking, and we have a ton of fun dealing with screw ups at client sites due to all manner of problems, ranging from the "I broke it but I'll blame them for 3 weeks to keep my job" to "undocumented, unexpected behavior from IIS". To say the least, a number of our problems (typically either caused by inconsistency in NT or unusual, undocumented behavior in IIS) would be solved and removed if we were running a Unix/Apache solution instead. Then we'd be able to go in and fix a problem caused by unexpected & undocumented behavior in our client's servers, instead of having to spend hours or days working out how to code around them with the contanquerous black box that is IIS.
Of course, the big reason why we went for NT servers instead of Linux is because they're nice and graphical (look, don't ask, I wasn't here at the time and tech people did not make this decision, nor were they consulted). It makes things much nicer when you're doing a sales demonstration in front of our customers when you have flashy graphics.
When I met you at E3 in 1998 I had the chance to ask you about a followup Last Chance to See. At the time, you mentioned that you were hoping to produce a new radio series to follow up the original series and book. Have plans been firmed up since then? Has the situation for the species you discussed in your first book improved since the 80s? Thanks!
I'm posting this to remind folks of _why_ nvidia has no released their drivers under the GPL. It has almost nothing to do with their internal decisions, and everything to do with technology they licensed for their AGP interface. Because of this license, they can not release the core of their drivers-its a sad fact, and one that folks like Carmack have commented on more than once. No amount of boycotting and whining will change this one iota, because nvidia can't do much about it (they opensource, and promptly the guys the licensed the AGP tech from will sue them for loss of income). This was pointed out several weeks ago, but seems to have been forgotten.
This is a copyright issue at its heart. If you, as the sole copyright holder, have released your code under the GPL and decide to change it to BSD, or a closed source license (ahem), that is your right. Such a license change is not retroactive, however, to versions already released on the net-ie you can not just go and close all versions of the code if you want, if that violates the current license. It is because of that that id can release the Quake source under the GPL, but if you want to develop a closed source version you can negotiate with id for such a license.
One huge mystery that is the subject of debate right now in the anthropological community is whether or not modern man and neanderthal is related. Presently, it is unknown whether or not we interbred with the neanderthal (which may explain their disappearance) or not. That might settle some debates that are raging. Sadly, it won't settle the age old debate of why the neanderthal died out (disease? outcompeted? killed by man?).
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't see this bill getting much serious attention. As a rule, the military in this country prefers volunteer forces over a conscripted force. At this point, they want people who want to serve, rather than those who have been forced to. They have enough discipline troubles with volunteers, how bad would it be with those who have been forced to serve?
Also, if every male 18 to 22 has to serve one year, what will the financial cost be? What would these people do? How much of the military's time will be spent mothering a huge population of men, many of whom do not wish to serve? This sounds like a "nice" idea, but not one which will get serious attention.
I had a somewhat similar incident at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, of all places. I bought a $6 meal, handed them $20, and I got $4 in change.
Obviously, the math didn't add up here.
Anyway, I mentioned this to the cashier, who acknowledged the mistake. She couldn't reopen the till to give me my $10, and so she called over a manager. The manager immediately pulled the till, walked into another room out of sight, and returned claiming that I was owed no money. I contacted KFC's customer hotline, reported what had happened, and they said they would respond quickly. I have never heard from them, and I have contacted them several times. No action has occurred.
I don't buy Pepsi products at all now. They don't need any more of my money.
I can't comment about hiring an offshore firm, since my employer has not (yet) gotten that idea into their heads. However, I can speak from experience about dealing with offsite programming staff. We have a few here (most of us are in the main office, but some folks work remotely around the country), and it is a nightmare to deal with them. Most of them are out of contact with the rest of the company so they have little idea of what is going on, it is very difficult to go over bug fixes with them over the phone, and most of the time we have no idea if they are actually doing their work at all, until there is a sudden burst of productivity.
Basically, we've found that having offsite programmers incurs a signicant overhead. We have to spend a lot more time communicating decisions, be they corporate or technical, to them than with the rest of our staff. Some of this could be addressed by improved communications, but a lot has to do with the lack of daily, face to face, contact. Nevermind the troubles we have getting them trained on new technologies. I can't even imagine what it is like dealing with someone on another continent-at least here they're within 3 hours and (most) speak english.
File a contest of the patent with the PTO. That will probably cost about $8000, less than the cost of the fight against PanIP. Then countersue PanIP.
Either way, your lawyers should be quite capable at finding the prior art to stop this. I would strongly recommend that all of the companies being sued band together to kill the patents.
The trade federation is, I think, meant to be Chinese, not Japanese
Yes and no. Actually, they were supposed to be an homage to the monguls in the Flash Gordon serials (one of the major influences on Star Wars). That also is the reason why the view screens on their ships look, act, and sound like the view screens in the Flash Gordon serials.
I'm generally willing, without evidence to back up these accusations, to give Lucas the benefit of the doubt on the racism issue. Prejudice of any kind is a terrible and insulting thing to accuse someone of. Remember when the hyenas in Lion King were called racist, and one was played by Whoopy Goldberg? Not someone known for looking kindly on racism.
Here's my frivolous use of time travel: Go back in time and recover all 109 lost episodes of Doctor Who. As an added bonus, get the original masters of the episodes, including the missing Pertwee era color masters.
Oh, and when are we going to figure out how to make something bigger on the inside than the outside?
I know I'm going to get hammered for this, but the greatest April Fools joke has got to be that people are actually paying the /. editors to put up this lame, uninspired, humor. If Taco and the rest want my hard earned cash, they need to at least find a way to not make April Fools day so boring.
This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
Wow. In one whole sentence this fellow managed to slap the face of just about every kernel developer since the 1.0 days. A vast amount of the effort over the past 7 years has been dedicated to making certain the kernel can run on as many architectures as possible. Apparently, Sun has decided to pigeon hole Linux as an intel only kernel.
They already tried reactors on cruisers, look at the USS Virginia and her sisters in the 70s/80s. They're hard at work scrapping those ships right now, because they proved to be impractical. One of my coworkers served on the VA during the mess in Lebanon (she was doing some shore bombardment before the New Jersey showed up and ended the need for pop guns), and there were a couple problems. First, roughly 2/3 of the crew was dedicated to maintaining the reactor. Second, if they got into a firefight, it was very likely that the reactor would shut down because they weren't able to handle the shock of a direct hit. They USN is going back to more stable gas turbine engines for the newer ships (except for carriers where the power is an absolute must) because they require a smaller crew to maintain and can take a lot more punishment.
There seems to be a lot of fear about the new budget killing off science and killing off the manned program. Think about what is being done here for a moment:
In the unmanned space programs, missions are being put on hold so that nuclear propulsion technologies can be dusted off and put to practical use. This would cut down on mission time, and in doing so allow us to get probes to their destinations faster, and possibly with more power when they get there. That would have the net result of 1) cutting down on the money spent monitoring the probes during their cruise phase and 2) potentially extending their time at their destination spent gathering science. If you look at it from a business perspective, this makes sense-you want to invest money in the project for a gain (in this case, knowledge).
Aside: would be nice to see them develop a general purpose class of probes that they could basically shotgun to the outer planets (and unlike the Voyager probes, orbit their destinations). That may be more practical with this propulsion and power system. Any thoughts? Probably not going to happen until NASA has enough cash and confidence from the White House. No time soon.
Now, on to the manned space program. The Shuttle and ISS costs are way, way out of line. Take a look at the findings from the commitee last year. They're expecting its going to cost many more billions of dollars to finish the ISS in the plan which was comitted to. This on a project that is already considerably over budget, and suffering from numerous technical, engineering, and managerial problems (eg incompatable water purification systems, maintenance panels with the procedure for replacing the panel on the inner side where it can't be read while you're reinstalling it, and so on). If those costs aren't brought under control, it could easily swallow up the more productive unmanned program. The shuttle program is very much in the same boat, since the shuttles cost a huge amount to launch, and are only just barely reusable (they have to rip out large parts of the propulstion system, and refurbish the shuttle between launches, at a huge cost). I would be much happier to see them put yet more funding into developing a next generation system, but first getting the current manned space program under control is important.
If the costs aren't brought under control, and new technology developed, it is very unlikely we will even have NASA in a decade. It is very hard pressed to keep the budget it has when there are other programs (such as fighting this little war thing we have right now) are getting the lions share of the money available. Like anything else, a little wise long term investment could reap huge benefits (such as a better unmanned program that allows us to have many more probes in operation, including the much needed additional communication equipment). It would be great to see some long term planning that results in a return to the Moon, or a solid plan to go to Mars. That will require that the NASA administration take the initiative and plan out a program that won't break the budget, and that NASA also earn the confidence of Congress that money invested won't become part of another horror story of misused funds. Its a hell of a challenge, particularly for a government program, and I would be interested to see NASA step up to it.
First, computers will recognize voice commands. Well, there are already programs that do this like Dragon, so we're almost there anyway. The point now is that you are still giving keyword commands to a computer, and as it is refined, you'll better recognition of specific commands, and questions that can be filtered from within conversations. Giving commands to a computer is easier than open ended questions to the computer.
I may be mistaken here, but that wasn't what the previous poster was referring to. He was discussing the ability for the computer to be able to understand and act upon common, everyday speech in an intelligent manner. This is something we're not even close to. Right now, speech software allows us to give the computer commands ("Open word. New document. Dear Jack," and so on...), but we can't carry on a conversation with it on any level, and if you break from those commands you will quickly find the limits of the software's capability.
Some of this also lies with our knowledge of linquistics. To date, linguists have not been able to work out the exact rules of the English language, for example. They have most of it down, but not all. They have not been able to work out parsing rules for the language that will allow a computer to parse and understand everything said in this language-in part because it changes so often, but also because there are so few hard and fast rules in the language (this isn't C, folks). Until linguists figure that out, there are significant limits in place on how powerful speech interfaces will be.
There is a really simple way of determining whether or not someone has copied code for an assignment:
Remove all whitespace, and change all variable names to a standard name, and then compare the munged sources. Its a good way of figuring out whether anyone has copied code and then just reformatted it and changed the variable names. Sure, it won't catch folks who copy a routine here or there, but it is a quick and easy start, and if you get more sophisticated it can cut down on cheating considerably.
OK, um, first of all, why would someone in the middle of a war zone want to watch Survivor? OK, great, I'm going to watch a show about people manipulating, betraying, and starving after having been through 5 years of Taliban rule.
Next this guy will claim to have gotten to a modern website with a browser written in 1996 on a Commodore (lets hope its at least a very late model Amiga).
Meanwhile, he's especially eager to get his hands on the Apple iPod, and has been drooling over the Apple website site since he got back online.Yep, there we are, going to the Apple website was one of the first things he did after being free of the Taliban. Right up there with getting all those movies he missed? Right. As an aside, this guy must have had some serious cash to have an Amiga system in that country.
Yet again, Mr. Katz has proven to be overzealous. Or very, very gullible.
Well, we've been in utter hell here at my employer. One of the middle tier objects in our products were hard coded with the expectation that the time would never go over 1 billion. The moment it did, all of our internet products at all of our client sites went bust. We're still picking up the pieces, and will be doing so for some time to come. Yet again I have another reminder to point to of the necessity to design software, not just throw it together like the offending developer did.
Take a look at the asm output on the systems this is failing on. Bear in mind that all powers of 10 (10, 10^2, so on) can not be properly represented in floating point (why is better left up to a more confusing discussion). What this comes down to is in the integer conversion on the left hand operation-if you look at the asm output, you will likely see something like PUSH 9 instead of PUSH 10 like you would expect. Did you have a chance test this with the same compiler versions on FreeBSD and linux on intel hardware?
I've run a company, and I will tell you from bitter experience, a democratic company does not work. All decisions eventually do not come down to what is best for the company, but what everyone disagrees over the least. You can not run a company where everyone is voting the business or technical decisions and expect to do anything other than fail.
This is in the same category as paying everyone in the company the same. Sounds nice and idealistic, but when the folks are working 60 hours a week are getting the same pay as the guy who does 40, things break down real fast.
You have to bear a couple things in mind with the exit polls:
First, they're terribly inaccurate for close elections, to the point of being useless. We saw that last night (PA was not expected to be such a wide margin for Gore, and I was very surprised).
Second, you have to bear in mind where they took the exit polls. They may have chosen some of the more urban areas of Florida for the exit polls, and that would definitely skew their results. Exit polls are like any other poll you take: its statistically accurate for the region you take it in, but you're not guaranteed that it will be accurate for the whole region.
I have the feeling after all the dust is settled from this, its very likely that the press will have to take up the policy of not reporting poll results until all of the polls across the country have closed so they can't be accused of influencing the western vote with results in the east. It'll make the election night news cast a bit more boring (and very late), but I figure they make more money off of Friends anyway.
I come from a family of farmers (I didn't grow up on a farm, something unusual until my generation), and I've seen what the inheritence tax does to farmers & their families. To say that this does not have a harmful effect upon the families & their ability to continue farming the land is an absolute insult.
Many of the children have to spend a huge part of their lives saving money so they can pay the taxes. This is a huge amount of money to people who are already having a hard enough time affording the equipment, feed, and necessities for their families. Additionally, especially here in Chester County, PA (as well as my uncle's farm in Winchester, VA), land prices have risen dramatically, so that very few farms are worth less than a million dollars on the market. There have been more than a few cases here where the parents have passed on and the children suddenly discover the land they grew up on is worth millions of dollars because of the changes in the market in the last 10 or 20 years, and they don't have the money to pay the taxes. The result? Many of them have to sell their land to developers who build 400k houses on quarter acre lots, and the families have to find another way to earn a living after spending their lifetimes farming.
Sir, I do not believe you have any conception of what is going on in this country. Family farmers have been devastated in the last half century due to low crop prices and inheritance taxes, and you have turned a blind eye and deaf ear to their concerns.
>Doesn't marrying a US citizen make you a citizen?
No, this is not the case (thanks to a number of abuses of the system by spouses for hire). Currently the system runs thus (if you are lucky):
1. At marriage you get a temporary green card. If you have a divorce, kiss that goodbye.
2. After 2 years of marriage, you should get your permanent green card.
3. After 5 years you should be able to get citizenship.
It keeps folks from marrying to get citizenship, but it leads to other abuses. There are numerous stories of women being abused by their "husbands" who marry them and continue to promise to put the paperwork through, but never do. If they divorce the scoundrel, they are deported.
The company I work at seems to thrive on H1Bs, its the only way we can attract talent, and the management seems intent upon screwing them over wholesale. It usually costs a H1B applicant a couple thousand to get all the paperwork take care of by a lawyer (and 2 months of tense waiting), and the company usually has to lay out a $500 expense to cover their application. My employer is so intent to screw them they attempt to force the visa applicant to pay the $500 in addition to their other fees-most thankfully refuse to pay the fee. Even so, my employer treats them so badly that they are leaving in droves for better jobs-that tells you something when it takes them 2 months and a couple thousand dollars to change jobs.
What burns me, and drives me to shame, is that these folks come here, work their hides off in the hopes of gaining access to the american dream, are productive members of society-and then after 6 years get booted out of here. This is NOT the way to treat people who can only add to our nation and give it growth. People who, may I add, have to pay the same taxes we do.
Its an utter embarassment.
*sigh* I have the joy of working as a software developer in the financial industry. The company I work for developes software used by institutions for online banking, and we have a ton of fun dealing with screw ups at client sites due to all manner of problems, ranging from the "I broke it but I'll blame them for 3 weeks to keep my job" to "undocumented, unexpected behavior from IIS". To say the least, a number of our problems (typically either caused by inconsistency in NT or unusual, undocumented behavior in IIS) would be solved and removed if we were running a Unix/Apache solution instead. Then we'd be able to go in and fix a problem caused by unexpected & undocumented behavior in our client's servers, instead of having to spend hours or days working out how to code around them with the contanquerous black box that is IIS.
Of course, the big reason why we went for NT servers instead of Linux is because they're nice and graphical (look, don't ask, I wasn't here at the time and tech people did not make this decision, nor were they consulted). It makes things much nicer when you're doing a sales demonstration in front of our customers when you have flashy graphics.
When I met you at E3 in 1998 I had the chance to ask you about a followup Last Chance to See. At the time, you mentioned that you were hoping to produce a new radio series to follow up the original series and book. Have plans been firmed up since then? Has the situation for the species you discussed in your first book improved since the 80s? Thanks!
Matt
MattKeller@_Spam_Off_.users.com
remove the fiddly bit to email me...
I'm posting this to remind folks of _why_ nvidia has no released their drivers under the GPL. It has almost nothing to do with their internal decisions, and everything to do with technology they licensed for their AGP interface. Because of this license, they can not release the core of their drivers-its a sad fact, and one that folks like Carmack have commented on more than once. No amount of boycotting and whining will change this one iota, because nvidia can't do much about it (they opensource, and promptly the guys the licensed the AGP tech from will sue them for loss of income). This was pointed out several weeks ago, but seems to have been forgotten.
This is a copyright issue at its heart. If you, as the sole copyright holder, have released your code under the GPL and decide to change it to BSD, or a closed source license (ahem), that is your right. Such a license change is not retroactive, however, to versions already released on the net-ie you can not just go and close all versions of the code if you want, if that violates the current license. It is because of that that id can release the Quake source under the GPL, but if you want to develop a closed source version you can negotiate with id for such a license.
Matt
One huge mystery that is the subject of debate right now in the anthropological community is whether or not modern man and neanderthal is related. Presently, it is unknown whether or not we interbred with the neanderthal (which may explain their disappearance) or not. That might settle some debates that are raging. Sadly, it won't settle the age old debate of why the neanderthal died out (disease? outcompeted? killed by man?).