Yeah. I had three wireless routers die in a row from heat or overuse (say when torrenting perfectly legal stuff at high data rates). Was really irritating having to constantly get up and reboot the damn things. Two Netgears and a Belkin, I think.
But that doesn't sound like that's the problem the OP is having, signal degradation.
>>Then yes, it's worth an extra buck-twenty. What good is a cheaper device that I can't do my work on? That's just a toy.
Yep. I'm looking to replace my laptop, and am mulling getting the x86 version of the Surface. (The RT / ARM version of it doesn't interest me in the slightest.)
Looking at two equivalent laptops from Sony, the Windows 8 version of a good desktop replacement laptop is $320 cheaper than an identical Win7 machine. But I think Win8 is ridiculous, and a friend of mine who works for MSR told me there's no reason to go Win8 unless you have a touch screen. So I've been looking at the surface. But $999 for the Pro - with no dedicated graphics and no Blu-Ray player - puts it at more expensive than a desktop replacement with less usability for me.
I don't need a great video card in a laptop (my desktop is for Skyrim and etc.), but I do need something that will entertain me, and games and Blu-Rays are my entertainment when I'm on the road for work.
>Looks great, much like I imagined studying Comp Sci ought to be.
This was actually what I got out of 4 years of Computer Science at my university (UC San Diego) - an understanding of everything that was going on from the moment I compiled my code and ran it, down to the transistor and logic gate level. We had to write our own compilers, create our own CPUs (including our own assembly language for it), and so forth. Very valuable stuff - at a certain point you realize all the grey areas about what is going on behind the scenes are being filled in.
The really amazing thing, to me, though, is that it all works.
>no traditional explosives (gunpowder, plastics, etc) involved. It is still an energetic discharge.
Yes, I realize. I had a friend that used to work on them. The problem he was working on was dealing with the residue that would build up on it, which would cause the railguns to basically explode after being fired a few times without cleaning.
>Very FEW products are approved by government agencies
They're subject to regulation by these agencies, and they can be yanked off shelves by consumer protection agencies (look at the zen magnet controversy) even if they have not been demonstrated to be dangerous or poorly made.
And for counterexamples to your claim, just look at your own post:
1) New chemicals need to be approved before they can be sold.
2) New food additives need to be approved before they can be sold.
3) New electronic devices need to be tested before they can be sold, and RF emitters need to be approved to be sold.
While I don't think all regulations are bad, we are erring too far on the safety side of things right now, in part due to our diseased legal system.
It's true that you don't need a license to drive on private roads or land, but here in California they're moving to fix that "loophole". Apparently, teens driving tractors on their parents' farm is exploitative child labor nowadays.
I have an accountant. You do an 1120S to calculate your income, then a K-1 to pass through the profits to the shareholders. You then report your K-1 income on your 1040, and pay personal taxes on it.
You don't pay corporate taxes, you pay personal taxes.
>However, the benefit of the S-Corp is that after you pay all employees a modest Salary (including the owner) You can pay out profits as capital gains to the share holders. (S-Corps have shares that can be bought/sold; but I assume most people on Slashdot will just be the sole owner of all their company shares.) The capital gains are then taxed at 15% which is usually much lower than your normal income tax bracket.
No, S-Corps are pass-through entities, which means that any profits in them at the end of the fiscal year flow through to the owners' personal taxes. They don't really make corporate profits, per se.
>Actually, no. Coding is all well and good, but a lot of what makes me (allegedly) superior comes from having read other people's code.
It does help. I TAed introductory computer science classes a number of times, and it really did help me not only be able to parse code quickly, but grading their assignments made me pretty good at finding bugs just by glancing at a block of code, too.
>Anyone worth their salt as a programmer who has a CS degree can MAKE THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE at ANY TIME! When you get home from your call center job, just put down the controller and write some software, and assuming you stick with it, 6 months later you'll have some experience.
This is the best advice you can give prospective CS students. Seriously, new CS people - follow this advice.
And even if you like games, there's still a lot of projects you can do that are relevant. Some AI code I wrote for a game got me hired at a defense contractor called Cyberdyne or something (I kid, I kid - it was a lot more fun than ending the world), and also wrote programs to calculate optimal tactics / AI for my favorite board games, and modded Quake extensively.
>>There is a whole lot of research that shows replicable, reliable correlation between growing wealth and income disparity and growth in every single negative metric of human society, from disease, to violence, to mental illness and back again. Not one bit of research that shows a positive effect of growing disparity of income and wealth.
If everyone is equally poor, as in communism, they would benefit from rising income inequality by switching to capitalism.
Not that it matters. Income inequality is a meaningless metric.
Yep. In grad school my professor put it along the lines of, "A model that can only predict the past, even with perfect accuracy, is worthless." (Paraphrased.)
>>Yes, it cost the Roman treasury plenty of coin, much of that gained from taxes, but the alternative was riots and social disorder, which were much more costly.
Roman economic instability, in conjunction with a declining population, brought about the fall of the Western Empire.
California has a spending problem. This is a well known problem, and it has been around for a number of years. We have a balanced budget amendment here in California, but our legislature flagrantly ignores it by "projecting" tax revenues to balance whatever sort of batshit-crazy spending program they want to fund. It's so bad, that the *Democrat* State Controller called the Democrat-run legislature on their bullshit.
The reason spending is out of control in the state is because several powerful interest groups pour enough money into elections that they buy votes however they want, and if a legislator doesn't vote the way they want, they get them un-elected the next cycle. This isn't wild conspiracy stuff - you can watch a California Teacher's Union representative, *in our state legislature*, telling a representative that she put her into power, and could get her out, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I had three wireless routers die in a row from heat or overuse (say when torrenting perfectly legal stuff at high data rates). Was really irritating having to constantly get up and reboot the damn things. Two Netgears and a Belkin, I think.
But that doesn't sound like that's the problem the OP is having, signal degradation.
>>Then yes, it's worth an extra buck-twenty. What good is a cheaper device that I can't do my work on? That's just a toy.
Yep. I'm looking to replace my laptop, and am mulling getting the x86 version of the Surface. (The RT / ARM version of it doesn't interest me in the slightest.)
Looking at two equivalent laptops from Sony, the Windows 8 version of a good desktop replacement laptop is $320 cheaper than an identical Win7 machine. But I think Win8 is ridiculous, and a friend of mine who works for MSR told me there's no reason to go Win8 unless you have a touch screen. So I've been looking at the surface. But $999 for the Pro - with no dedicated graphics and no Blu-Ray player - puts it at more expensive than a desktop replacement with less usability for me.
I don't need a great video card in a laptop (my desktop is for Skyrim and etc.), but I do need something that will entertain me, and games and Blu-Rays are my entertainment when I'm on the road for work.
>Looks great, much like I imagined studying Comp Sci ought to be.
This was actually what I got out of 4 years of Computer Science at my university (UC San Diego) - an understanding of everything that was going on from the moment I compiled my code and ran it, down to the transistor and logic gate level. We had to write our own compilers, create our own CPUs (including our own assembly language for it), and so forth. Very valuable stuff - at a certain point you realize all the grey areas about what is going on behind the scenes are being filled in.
The really amazing thing, to me, though, is that it all works.
This reminds me of the push 10 years ago to reduce the hours inflicted on med school students and residents.
Hasn't seemed to have made a huge difference in their workload, though.
A local coach ran over a kid while drunk driving. He's going to jail.
Sandusky was a national icon. He's going to jail.
Bernie Madoff got 150 years.
Fuck off with the "1% gets away with it all" nonsense.
Actually, it still implies doctors are setting limits on alcohol for children. =)
>no traditional explosives (gunpowder, plastics, etc) involved. It is still an energetic discharge.
Yes, I realize. I had a friend that used to work on them. The problem he was working on was dealing with the residue that would build up on it, which would cause the railguns to basically explode after being fired a few times without cleaning.
""Imagine a warship weapon that can launch projectiles at Mach 10 without explosives..."
Well, that's not counting the railgun itself, I guess.
They tend to fail spectacularly.
>Very FEW products are approved by government agencies
They're subject to regulation by these agencies, and they can be yanked off shelves by consumer protection agencies (look at the zen magnet controversy) even if they have not been demonstrated to be dangerous or poorly made.
And for counterexamples to your claim, just look at your own post:
1) New chemicals need to be approved before they can be sold.
2) New food additives need to be approved before they can be sold.
3) New electronic devices need to be tested before they can be sold, and RF emitters need to be approved to be sold.
While I don't think all regulations are bad, we are erring too far on the safety side of things right now, in part due to our diseased legal system.
Your review is a bit breathless... but, yeah. I totally agree.
Torchlight 2 fucking rocks. =)
It's true that you don't need a license to drive on private roads or land, but here in California they're moving to fix that "loophole". Apparently, teens driving tractors on their parents' farm is exploitative child labor nowadays.
Assignment returns a logical true value in if() tests in many languages. Source of a lot of bugs, that one.
I tried playing through BG again a couple months again using the TOTO project, but the green water and lack of resolution really irked me.
I have an accountant. You do an 1120S to calculate your income, then a K-1 to pass through the profits to the shareholders. You then report your K-1 income on your 1040, and pay personal taxes on it.
You don't pay corporate taxes, you pay personal taxes.
>However, the benefit of the S-Corp is that after you pay all employees a modest Salary (including the owner) You can pay out profits as capital gains to the share holders. (S-Corps have shares that can be bought/sold; but I assume most people on Slashdot will just be the sole owner of all their company shares.) The capital gains are then taxed at 15% which is usually much lower than your normal income tax bracket.
No, S-Corps are pass-through entities, which means that any profits in them at the end of the fiscal year flow through to the owners' personal taxes. They don't really make corporate profits, per se.
>Actually, no. Coding is all well and good, but a lot of what makes me (allegedly) superior comes from having read other people's code.
It does help. I TAed introductory computer science classes a number of times, and it really did help me not only be able to parse code quickly, but grading their assignments made me pretty good at finding bugs just by glancing at a block of code, too.
>Of course, the fact that he had an awesome and EXTREMELY memorable last name didn't hurt matters either (name withheld for obvious reasons).
Tip of the Day: Legally change your name to Edsger Dijkstra Tanenbaum Knuth.
Junior.
>Anyone worth their salt as a programmer who has a CS degree can MAKE THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE at ANY TIME! When you get home from your call center job, just put down the controller and write some software, and assuming you stick with it, 6 months later you'll have some experience.
This is the best advice you can give prospective CS students. Seriously, new CS people - follow this advice.
And even if you like games, there's still a lot of projects you can do that are relevant. Some AI code I wrote for a game got me hired at a defense contractor called Cyberdyne or something (I kid, I kid - it was a lot more fun than ending the world), and also wrote programs to calculate optimal tactics / AI for my favorite board games, and modded Quake extensively.
>>There is a whole lot of research that shows replicable, reliable correlation between growing wealth and income disparity and growth in every single negative metric of human society, from disease, to violence, to mental illness and back again. Not one bit of research that shows a positive effect of growing disparity of income and wealth.
If everyone is equally poor, as in communism, they would benefit from rising income inequality by switching to capitalism.
Not that it matters. Income inequality is a meaningless metric.
Yep. In grad school my professor put it along the lines of, "A model that can only predict the past, even with perfect accuracy, is worthless." (Paraphrased.)
Only the forward predictive powers matter.
>>Yes, it cost the Roman treasury plenty of coin, much of that gained from taxes, but the alternative was riots and social disorder, which were much more costly.
Roman economic instability, in conjunction with a declining population, brought about the fall of the Western Empire.
>>Instead of being a lazy republitard, try and take responsibility and get involved, organize your community etc
Oh, yes, be a useless community organizer. *That's* a solution to our state overspending like mad.
I've done more work to improve our community than you ever have, you lazy fucker.
California has a spending problem. This is a well known problem, and it has been around for a number of years. We have a balanced budget amendment here in California, but our legislature flagrantly ignores it by "projecting" tax revenues to balance whatever sort of batshit-crazy spending program they want to fund. It's so bad, that the *Democrat* State Controller called the Democrat-run legislature on their bullshit.
The reason spending is out of control in the state is because several powerful interest groups pour enough money into elections that they buy votes however they want, and if a legislator doesn't vote the way they want, they get them un-elected the next cycle. This isn't wild conspiracy stuff - you can watch a California Teacher's Union representative, *in our state legislature*, telling a representative that she put her into power, and could get her out, too.
The entire system is corrupt.
>>So what has happened to drive the debt up?
>>Try TAX CUTS
No.
Spending has skyrocketed, whereas revenue has stayed mostly stable (though it took a hit during the last couple years by a couple points).
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_gov_spending_history_1902_2010.png
It's a spending problem, stupid.
Yep. If the history of the AMT is anything to go by, all Americans will be "rich" in a couple decades.