A much more likely problem than an asteroid hitting the earth is a "supervolcano" eruption. These happen WAY more frequently than giant asteroid hits, and they're just as bad. Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano that erupts about every 600,000 years. Guess how long since it's erupted? 640,000 years.
What do we do when there's no sun hitting the earth's surface for six months?
As someone who just had his Rio Karma die a sad, hard-drive clicky death, I don't think I'll be buying another hard drive based music player from Rio until they decide to up the warranty.
I had 3 Karmas die on me: the first after a month (under warranty; the power button stopped working). Then the replacement died after 2 weeks because an exposed wheel got knocked out of place while it was in my bag. It took over a month to get the third one back from RMA, and that one just died from hard drive failure, out of warranty. Overall, Rio had my karma in RMA longer than I had a working unit.
I've got most of my music as.ogg files, which is why I got the Karma in the first place. But if they can't produce something which lasts, I say don't bother. What were they thinking, putting exposed moving parts on something people will be putting in backpacks and pockets?
I second that. I had one power button failure and then one where the little wheel slipped out of place (if you read the forums, this is pretty common even if you take care of your karma).
I just got back my third karma today, and it had a sticker saying, "We will respect your initial warranty, but this unit does not come with an additional warranty." Of course, by this point they've had my karma longer than I have (it took 1.5 months to get the second replacement), and the original warranty has expired. Plus, I think it's illegal not to give a warranty on RMA'd products.
I like that the Karma supports oggs, and it's a fairly nice device, but it's pretty fragile (two external moving parts), and the RMA service is _horrible_!
I have a friend who had a job reviewing scripts for a fairly substantial movie company. He said most of the scripts that came by were terrible, and he offered his honest evaluation of them. Eventually they told him not to say anything negative in his evaluations of the scripts.
I didn't even go to UT Austin, and they won't leave me alone. I applied to UTA for grad school last year, got in, but decided not to go. But their registrar or someone left my email address in their file when they sold it to everyone. So I get spam from the Austin Jamba Juice, from people trying to rent houses in Austin, from the UTA ACM group, from the UTA book store etc. I can't tell who sold my address, so I can't get off of it. It's very targetted email; it's just wrongly targetted.
Makes me wonder if they have my SSN in there as well. When you apply to graduate schools, don't give UTA your real email address!
As someone who's into game theory, that part of the movie annoyed me. No one going for the blonde is NOT a Nash equilibrium. It's very far from it. If you know everyone is going for the brunnette, your best strategy is to go for the blonde. By definition, that's not a Nash equilibrium.
The correct Nash equilibrium for that situation is for each person to randomly choose between their own assigned brunette or the blonde (the probability they choose depends on the relative worth of getting the blonde over the brunnette).
And it just made me sad that no one got the blonde.
It's interesting to note that downloading music you already own is most likely perfectly legal,
Actually, that's not legal. You're allowed to copy what you physically have and exchange copies with members of your immediate family, but you can't take someone else's copy of something you already own a copy of (scratched or not). Copyright is a weird set of rules.
You can also find non-scifi books that "feel" a lot like scifi or fantasy, with their own fantasy components. In particular, I'd recommend The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Those are two of my favorite books, and you could certainly call them "fantasy" if you wanted, but they're kept in the "literature" section of the bookstore.
Even though S&H charges might not have any basis when it comes to actual shipping and handling, it either goes to the business (so its a cost of the product) or to the shipper (so its a cost of moving the product). In the former case, it's really just like the cost of the item has been raised, so it is a "real cost" in the way I meant it.
Not exactly, because you don't have to pay for shipping when you go down to Best Buy and buy a stereo.
So if there were no taxes at all, would you look at things and say, "Hey, Amazon is treated unfairly because you have to pay shipping. We should create some artificial charge against BestBuy so things are even!" Shipping is a real cost (and one you pay for a B&M store, though it's hidden and lower). Taxes are an artificial cost, and so they should be spread evenly.
You can be protective WITHOUT being predatory, and therein I think is where the confusion arises.
The difference is that when you are protecting your home by locking it, you are applying your rules to your own property, which is pretty hard to argue with. Protectionism as an economic concept does not work that way at all. It works by applying the preferences of a minority of the population (be they steel workers, programmers, apple farmers, whatever) to the rest of the population.
You're not saying "Well, I want to protect my job, so I won't buy from places that outsource!" That would be perfectly reasonable. You're saying, "I don't want the government to let other people outsource my job or jobs like it!" which is essentially asking the rest of the country to subsidize you. If we make these kinds of decisions, it will be good for a few pockets of the population, but the country as a whole will be worse off. There's several hundred years of economic thought and actual history to back this up.
The only economically legitimate use for "protectionism" is to prop up a vital industry that might otherwise be completely outsourced. This generally refers to food production or defense spending, not programming.
Of course, if there are bad tax breaks that artificially inflate the benefits of outsourcing (as you suggest, though I don't know of any really bogus ones), those are just as destructive in the other way and should be stopped as well.
You can get a copyright for editing (which means you can't just take that copy, type it over, and distribute it). I'd also be surprised if the Shakespeare collection didn't have footnotes, which are also copyrightable.
According to this article, Uzi Nissan was told to stop using his site to show car ads. That is a case of trademark dilution. If the guy's just selling computers, then I'm all for him keeping the domain. If he's trying to branch out into the auto business, then he's clearly abusing Nissan-the-car-company's trademark. So he gets to keep the domain, but not show car ads. Sounds like everything's good, right?
You'll feel a little frustrated at first, but for a week after you've mastered Dvorak, practice 50/50 Dvorak/QWERTY and after that you'll be set. I have a few seconds of confusion at a new keyboard, but other than that, it's fine.
The copyright-related use of piracy dates from at least the 1700s. People may be using it arbitrarily now, but by any lexicographical stretch of the imagination "violating copyright" is a fully accepted definition of the word "piracy". I would provide a link but it seems the OED site is now subscription only. Alas.
No, it's done clientside through javascript. Your options would be to change some internal javascript variables in Mozilla or to create your translation of their page that fakes you through far enough (evne that I'm not sure would work). It's easier to just drop the card than go through either of these.
Captial One _blocks_ anything but internet explorer or NS 4.x. Faking a user agent isn't enough, since it checks appversion. Konqueror can sufficiently fake its way through, but Mozilla/galeon/etc. cannot. They have been emailed by many irate customers but don't really offer anything hopeful (probably because they didn't do it in-house and no one knows how to fix it). I'm going to drop them as soon as I get another VISA card.
If you visit the login page with mozilla, it actually says that they won't let you log in because of security problems with Mozilla!
I did not have wood shop, and it shows:) It _is_ a really ugly desk, and I should have taken more time diagramming it, but I doubt that would have gotten me much.
Hollow-core doors are really cheap, and they use them as desks where I work, too (more out of style than cost). Plus, the way I constructed my desk was almost toolless (I used a jig saw, plus a little bit of drilling, but even that could have been skipped). And I do have pc case fans, but even 80mm fans weren't enough to cool the thing off (it takes a lot of force to move air through the turns). I spent about $70 and a weekend and a half on the whole thing (excluding fans). I suppose I could have learned woodworking and more about air flow, but it was just a cheap, silly project. I'll try to do it right next time, if there is one.
And so you can confirm how ugly it is, here's a picture of my computer desk.
I'm newly in the Real World, so I needed my own desk. My computer was also way too loud, and I'm cheap, so I made a box to put the computer in and turned it into a desk.
I made a wooden box that's made of particle board and painted fire engine red (cheap paint). It has a hinge and a door in the front. Inside is carpet padding and a computer. I took some more red particle board and made another stand of the same height. I bought a door from Home Depot, stained it, and laid it across the two.
It works great, except that the computer gets too hot. I thought I had planned for that appropriately, but apparently you need more air flow than I could create. So I cut out an interior floor of the box and installed a rectangular house fan. That works great, except it's now too loud again:( Plus, I have to open up the side of the case to turn the fan on and off. Anyone know a good way to get the fan to turn on and off when the computer's on and off? At least it still works well as a desk.
So, don't do like me. Make your case plenty wide/tall/deep, with lots of air flow and baffles everywhere.
The point of pie menus is that the menu waits to pop up on purpose so that you don't see it if you don't need it. The idea is that after using "back" two or three times, you've memorized where it is in the menu and don't need to see it anymore. The tradeoff is having to wait 1 second the first few times versus having to see the menu when you don't need it later.
I took the CS GRE in April of 2001. I got back my results, which were decent (low 90s, percentile-wise) but I thought I could do better. When I eventually didn't get into the grad schools I wanted, I figured I'd take it again, giving the bloodsuckers at ETS another ~$150. I admit that this probably wasn't necessary, but oh well.
So I took the exam again April of 2002 and noticed that one of the questions had two correct answers. In fact, it was the only programming question on the exam and it was pretty trivial.
The test was on a Saturday. So I get ready to send a letter to ETS on Monday, when I find scores in my mailbox. "Man, a 2-day turnaround? When did they become efficient?" I thought. It turns out they were revised scores from the April 2001 test, which they had graded wrong. My score jumped to upper 90s without my doing anything. "Don't worry, we'll send new reports to all schools you sent your scores to", they said. Great, a lot of good that does me in April.
I sent in the letter, they admitted the question had two correct answers and wouldn't be scored, and I eventually got back scores, which were exactly the same as the revised 2001 results.
So, moral of the story -- don't take the test twice. Just take it once and assume that something will go wrong that's not your fault.
Re:I personally only care about sub $100 market
on
New MP3 Portables
·
· Score: 1
Does anyone know of a very thin CDRW/CDR/CD player which does VBRE MP3s and costs less than $100 which doesn't simply fall apart within a week of the warranty's end?
The lower end RioVolts can be had for about $70 (I got mine for less when they offered a rebate). They play CDs. The SP90 is not "very thin", but they're still a portable CD player form factor. "very thin" is the kind thing you pay a premium for. I don't know about breaking, but mine's still working after 5 months.
Well, they were originally from grep (general regular expression processor), which, AFAIK is equivalent to a finite autamaton. Perl/awk/sed adopted these, and then extended them. It would have been kind of awkward to start calling things which used to be regular expressions something else halfway through the evolution of a tool. But yes, if you want to be pedantic, Perl's "regular expressions" are too powerful to be called by that name.
A Perl "regular expression" is more powerful than a mathematical "regular expression." Perl's can do backtracking, which a finite automaton can't do. The Perl "RE" "(a+)b\1" will match aba and aaaabaaa, but not abaa or aaba.
Why not use a 128-bit or 196-bit cryptographic hash (MD5 or SHA)? You better be prepared to waste a lot of time if you want to create a file with a particular hash value.
Slashdot Mirror
A much more likely problem than an asteroid hitting the earth is a "supervolcano" eruption. These happen WAY more frequently than giant asteroid hits, and they're just as bad. Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano that erupts about every 600,000 years. Guess how long since it's erupted? 640,000 years.
What do we do when there's no sun hitting the earth's surface for six months?
As someone who just had his Rio Karma die a sad, hard-drive clicky death, I don't think I'll be buying another hard drive based music player from Rio until they decide to up the warranty.
.ogg files, which is why I got the Karma in the first place. But if they can't produce something which lasts, I say don't bother. What were they thinking, putting exposed moving parts on something people will be putting in backpacks and pockets?
I had 3 Karmas die on me: the first after a month (under warranty; the power button stopped working). Then the replacement died after 2 weeks because an exposed wheel got knocked out of place while it was in my bag. It took over a month to get the third one back from RMA, and that one just died from hard drive failure, out of warranty. Overall, Rio had my karma in RMA longer than I had a working unit.
I've got most of my music as
I second that. I had one power button failure and then one where the little wheel slipped out of place (if you read the forums, this is pretty common even if you take care of your karma).
I just got back my third karma today, and it had a sticker saying, "We will respect your initial warranty, but this unit does not come with an additional warranty." Of course, by this point they've had my karma longer than I have (it took 1.5 months to get the second replacement), and the original warranty has expired. Plus, I think it's illegal not to give a warranty on RMA'd products.
I like that the Karma supports oggs, and it's a fairly nice device, but it's pretty fragile (two external moving parts), and the RMA service is _horrible_!
I have a friend who had a job reviewing scripts for a fairly substantial movie company. He said most of the scripts that came by were terrible, and he offered his honest evaluation of them. Eventually they told him not to say anything negative in his evaluations of the scripts.
I didn't even go to UT Austin, and they won't leave me alone. I applied to UTA for grad school last year, got in, but decided not to go. But their registrar or someone left my email address in their file when they sold it to everyone. So I get spam from the Austin Jamba Juice, from people trying to rent houses in Austin, from the UTA ACM group, from the UTA book store etc. I can't tell who sold my address, so I can't get off of it. It's very targetted email; it's just wrongly targetted.
Makes me wonder if they have my SSN in there as well. When you apply to graduate schools, don't give UTA your real email address!
As someone who's into game theory, that part of the movie annoyed me. No one going for the blonde is NOT a Nash equilibrium. It's very far from it. If you know everyone is going for the brunnette, your best strategy is to go for the blonde. By definition, that's not a Nash equilibrium.
The correct Nash equilibrium for that situation is for each person to randomly choose between their own assigned brunette or the blonde (the probability they choose depends on the relative worth of getting the blonde over the brunnette).
And it just made me sad that no one got the blonde.
It's interesting to note that downloading music you already own is most likely perfectly legal,
Actually, that's not legal. You're allowed to copy what you physically have and exchange copies with members of your immediate family, but you can't take someone else's copy of something you already own a copy of (scratched or not). Copyright is a weird set of rules.
You can also find non-scifi books that "feel" a lot like scifi or fantasy, with their own fantasy components. In particular, I'd recommend The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Those are two of my favorite books, and you could certainly call them "fantasy" if you wanted, but they're kept in the "literature" section of the bookstore.
Sorry I jumped on you. My mistake.
Even though S&H charges might not have any basis when it comes to actual shipping and handling, it either goes to the business (so its a cost of the product) or to the shipper (so its a cost of moving the product). In the former case, it's really just like the cost of the item has been raised, so it is a "real cost" in the way I meant it.
Not exactly, because you don't have to pay for shipping when you go down to Best Buy and buy a stereo.
So if there were no taxes at all, would you look at things and say, "Hey, Amazon is treated unfairly because you have to pay shipping. We should create some artificial charge against BestBuy so things are even!" Shipping is a real cost (and one you pay for a B&M store, though it's hidden and lower). Taxes are an artificial cost, and so they should be spread evenly.
You can be protective WITHOUT being predatory, and therein I think is where the confusion arises.
The difference is that when you are protecting your home by locking it, you are applying your rules to your own property, which is pretty hard to argue with. Protectionism as an economic concept does not work that way at all. It works by applying the preferences of a minority of the population (be they steel workers, programmers, apple farmers, whatever) to the rest of the population.
You're not saying "Well, I want to protect my job, so I won't buy from places that outsource!" That would be perfectly reasonable. You're saying, "I don't want the government to let other people outsource my job or jobs like it!" which is essentially asking the rest of the country to subsidize you. If we make these kinds of decisions, it will be good for a few pockets of the population, but the country as a whole will be worse off. There's several hundred years of economic thought and actual history to back this up.
The only economically legitimate use for "protectionism" is to prop up a vital industry that might otherwise be completely outsourced. This generally refers to food production or defense spending, not programming.
Of course, if there are bad tax breaks that artificially inflate the benefits of outsourcing (as you suggest, though I don't know of any really bogus ones), those are just as destructive in the other way and should be stopped as well.
You can get a copyright for editing (which means you can't just take that copy, type it over, and distribute it). I'd also be surprised if the Shakespeare collection didn't have footnotes, which are also copyrightable.
According to this article, Uzi Nissan was told to stop using his site to show car ads. That is a case of trademark dilution. If the guy's just selling computers, then I'm all for him keeping the domain. If he's trying to branch out into the auto business, then he's clearly abusing Nissan-the-car-company's trademark. So he gets to keep the domain, but not show car ads. Sounds like everything's good, right?
You'll feel a little frustrated at first, but for a week after you've mastered Dvorak, practice 50/50 Dvorak/QWERTY and after that you'll be set. I have a few seconds of confusion at a new keyboard, but other than that, it's fine.
The copyright-related use of piracy dates from at least the 1700s. People may be using it arbitrarily now, but by any lexicographical stretch of the imagination "violating copyright" is a fully accepted definition of the word "piracy". I would provide a link but it seems the OED site is now subscription only. Alas.
No, it's done clientside through javascript. Your options would be to change some internal javascript variables in Mozilla or to create your translation of their page that fakes you through far enough (evne that I'm not sure would work). It's easier to just drop the card than go through either of these.
Captial One _blocks_ anything but internet explorer or NS 4.x. Faking a user agent isn't enough, since it checks appversion. Konqueror can sufficiently fake its way through, but Mozilla/galeon/etc. cannot. They have been emailed by many irate customers but don't really offer anything hopeful (probably because they didn't do it in-house and no one knows how to fix it). I'm going to drop them as soon as I get another VISA card.
If you visit the login page with mozilla, it actually says that they won't let you log in because of security problems with Mozilla!
I did not have wood shop, and it shows :) It _is_ a really ugly desk, and I should have taken more time diagramming it, but I doubt that would have gotten me much.
Hollow-core doors are really cheap, and they use them as desks where I work, too (more out of style than cost). Plus, the way I constructed my desk was almost toolless (I used a jig saw, plus a little bit of drilling, but even that could have been skipped). And I do have pc case fans, but even 80mm fans weren't enough to cool the thing off (it takes a lot of force to move air through the turns). I spent about $70 and a weekend and a half on the whole thing (excluding fans). I suppose I could have learned woodworking and more about air flow, but it was just a cheap, silly project. I'll try to do it right next time, if there is one.
And so you can confirm how ugly it is, here's a picture of my computer desk.
I'm newly in the Real World, so I needed my own desk. My computer was also way too loud, and I'm cheap, so I made a box to put the computer in and turned it into a desk.
:( Plus, I have to open up the side of the case to turn the fan on and off. Anyone know a good way to get the fan to turn on and off when the computer's on and off? At least it still works well as a desk.
I made a wooden box that's made of particle board and painted fire engine red (cheap paint). It has a hinge and a door in the front. Inside is carpet padding and a computer. I took some more red particle board and made another stand of the same height. I bought a door from Home Depot, stained it, and laid it across the two.
It works great, except that the computer gets too hot. I thought I had planned for that appropriately, but apparently you need more air flow than I could create. So I cut out an interior floor of the box and installed a rectangular house fan. That works great, except it's now too loud again
So, don't do like me. Make your case plenty wide/tall/deep, with lots of air flow and baffles everywhere.
The point of pie menus is that the menu waits to pop up on purpose so that you don't see it if you don't need it. The idea is that after using "back" two or three times, you've memorized where it is in the menu and don't need to see it anymore. The tradeoff is having to wait 1 second the first few times versus having to see the menu when you don't need it later.
I took the CS GRE in April of 2001. I got back my results, which were decent (low 90s, percentile-wise) but I thought I could do better. When I eventually didn't get into the grad schools I wanted, I figured I'd take it again, giving the bloodsuckers at ETS another ~$150. I admit that this probably wasn't necessary, but oh well.
So I took the exam again April of 2002 and noticed that one of the questions had two correct answers. In fact, it was the only programming question on the exam and it was pretty trivial.
The test was on a Saturday. So I get ready to send a letter to ETS on Monday, when I find scores in my mailbox. "Man, a 2-day turnaround? When did they become efficient?" I thought. It turns out they were revised scores from the April 2001 test, which they had graded wrong. My score jumped to upper 90s without my doing anything. "Don't worry, we'll send new reports to all schools you sent your scores to", they said. Great, a lot of good that does me in April.
I sent in the letter, they admitted the question had two correct answers and wouldn't be scored, and I eventually got back scores, which were exactly the same as the revised 2001 results.
So, moral of the story -- don't take the test twice. Just take it once and assume that something will go wrong that's not your fault.
Does anyone know of a very thin CDRW/CDR/CD player which does VBRE MP3s and costs less than $100 which doesn't simply fall apart within a week of the warranty's end?
The lower end RioVolts can be had for about $70 (I got mine for less when they offered a rebate). They play CDs. The SP90 is not "very thin", but they're still a portable CD player form factor. "very thin" is the kind thing you pay a premium for. I don't know about breaking, but mine's still working after 5 months.
Well, they were originally from grep (general regular expression processor), which, AFAIK is equivalent to a finite autamaton. Perl/awk/sed adopted these, and then extended them. It would have been kind of awkward to start calling things which used to be regular expressions something else halfway through the evolution of a tool. But yes, if you want to be pedantic, Perl's "regular expressions" are too powerful to be called by that name.
A Perl "regular expression" is more powerful than a mathematical "regular expression." Perl's can do backtracking, which a finite automaton can't do.
The Perl "RE" "(a+)b\1" will match aba and aaaabaaa, but not abaa or aaba.
Why not use a 128-bit or 196-bit cryptographic hash (MD5 or SHA)? You better be prepared to waste a lot of time if you want to create a file with a particular hash value.