I would like all such warnings to disappear. I don't think there's any evidence that they save lives, maybe with exception of the plastic bag warning. What a waste of time...
The judge should dismiss the suit against Google only, and fine her. I presume the paragraph below applies:
UC 41-6a-1002 (1) (c) A pedestrian may not suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard.
Of course the car could have potentially been driven recklessly, but the whole thing is between her and the guy who hit her. There's nothing about Google in this whole brouhaha. She is claiming in essence, that Google should pay for her stupidity. Here's news for ya, lady: you only get paid for stupidity if you're high enough in petroleum business, media or a financial institution. Or if you're a politician. Obviously the lady has got a few more tries ahead of her. Go for office!
</sarcasm> The dark side of me wishes the lady would excuse herself from the gene pool. WTF?
TSK, TSK, you haven't listened to their multi-million-dollar ad campaign. You *should* know that B stands for Beyond.
Obviously the U.S. should dismantle BP's U.S. operations as they relate to petroleum only. According to what their marketing would like us to believe, this should be an inconsequential part of a company that's green and progressive and beyond petroleum and all that. Right?
Here in the UK, the retailer is liable for anything like this, and I'm pretty sure there's a European Directive to the same effect. I think manufacturers are liable for things like super bad business practices, but you can get the retailer for a much easier to prove breach of implied merchantability.
Ah yes, the standard European practice of assigning blame to any parties not actually at fault.
There is such a thing as negligence. If the retailers have a 'blink-blink-nod-nod' attitude towards unfair practices of the corporations whose products they resell, shouldn't they be held responsible, too? After all, surely Adobe would lose a chunk of revenue if suddenly they lost the brick-and-mortair retail?
With old MFM/RLL drives, you had to type in the bad sector list from the case of the drive. I have an old NEC drive somewhere that has a list of bad sectors on the label, and you then had to type it in when doing a high-level format. Brings back memories;)
You don't have to be a programmer. As a consumer, you have to be educated about those things too! Just so that you know when to write your congressman/senator, should there be a law in the works that limits your rights as a consumer.
In the U.S., you still cannot legally write your own DVD player software that could play encrypted discs (all commercial titles) -- no matter what the platform. You also cannot legally own such software, if it was written by someone who didn't go into licensing agreements with "teh DVD guys". So it does affect you as a consumer, you know! You may have legally purchased DVDs, but that doesn't entitle you to be able to play them using software/devices that are not "approved". This is as if the book publishers only allowed you to use certain brands of glasses to read their books with!
So "not being a programmer" is not an excuse at all. How on Earth do you have a 6 digit Slashdot id and are not aware of problems with DMCA et al?? Never mind that Pazhitnov's grandeur and takedown trolling is well known.
If you don't want to haggle over the price, then I presume the salesman's role is limited to saying "sign here on the dotted line". That's no different from buying a car online methinks?
I've got my current ride, and my wife's last two, on eBay, and I personally consider car dealerships to be necessary for keeping car companies in check. They are not good, IMHO, for anything besides new car sales. Used car purchases at dealerships of any sort are almost always a waste of money.
I don't see how the battleground of IT is IP. There's really nothing in most of the code that you would want to reverse engineer for reasons other than interoperability.
Besides, the "decompilation" you're talking about results in some intermediate language statements that are, by themselves, not any more useful than running IDA PRO or similar disassembler on the code.
Because most businesses have specialized in making money as their sole raison-d-etre. Everything else is outside of their "core competences", and is really a cost they would rather avoid. If they can get away with it, noone at the helm cares whether it's "nice" or not. They have customers while being an ass? They will just become a fatter ass.
There used to be time where big businesses would be good at something, and *that* was making them money. Then they started optimizing everything to make money, not on whatever the "something" was that used to be good. This happened everywhere.
Prime example: banks. Used to make boatloads of money from taking deposits and lending out part of that. Now the govt is trying to regulate some trading that become very profitable to the banks, and the banks scream bloody murder. Greedy optimization misses opportunities, but of course bankers are not computer scientists and wouldn't know that...
Some businesses shield you from their mediocricity: for example car companies. You really wouldn't want to be buying your car directly from Ford or GM. It'd be a horrible experience. The car dealers -- comparatively small enterprises -- are the customer's last line of defense in making car companies do a relatively good job.
Some car companies used to be good at making cars. They slowly became banks, and make their money lending money. The car making part of the operation is often the loss leader.
The problem is that the business people's mentality, that gets implanted right there in the business schools, is that the money making aspect is the thing that should drive everything else. You get idiot business school grads who expect that they should be paid $100k/year for doing nothing much, with zero experience. Eventually the yes-sayers who are clueless but "problem-free" end up in middle management, and their ineptness drives the bad service, and eventually the upper management blames the poor results on "environmental" factors: competition, bad economic situation, societal changes in the neighborhoods, etc.
No one in cable company division management typically has any clue about the technical side of the business, and none of the decisions they make actually help with the quality of service. The "technical" people and their managers are disinterested, since the people higher up don't give shit. The contractors, who often provide the actual technical service, are directed by same money-, erm, results-oriented monkeys -- but of course the cable company thinks they are clever by offloading the "technicalities" that are not their "core competency". It's batshit insane.
It's this self-nurturing disease, and solid competition is the only way to fix it. Bad cable companies must be driven out of business, and their upper management should be publicly ridiculed for what they are: overpaid idiots who have zero clue.
Methinks big Japanese corporations are legally obligated to use a small part of their budget (say 1%?) for humanitarian purposes. Toyota may have many robotic divisions, but the one I'm familiar with is the Partner Robot Division, and there's an Assistance group there IIRC. It's what you think it is: assistance robots, to help in the care of elderly and disabled. The violin thing is just PR and probably was done by a couple guys who thought "hey, we can do *that*", and got green-lighted. It all comes from that same division.
Toyota has an annual one day employee festival at their combined ECU electronics/robotics plant -- a former site, IIRC, of a Denso plant. It's on the outskirts of Toyota-Shi. That's when they actually open the gates to the public. If you can figure out when the festival is, you can just go there and see the demo of the violin robot. The spot where they demo it used to be literally a hole in the plywood wall to their temporary robot development floor. Last year they moved the division to a big new building, and surely they give the demos there. The demo was a multi-channel motion playback preceded by running the alignment procedure. AFAICT, they did use some force-feedback controllers, but those were just that -- controllers being fed a pre-set motion reference. Not very high tech, although definitely they had very nicely done mechanicals.
Forgiveness makes us human. Infinite hatred is a human trait, but it does not define us, and it shouldn't. Having your kid raped is definitely a trying experience (I know such a parent), but if you can't forgive it the next morning, you have a real problem. She forgave, and to me she is quite high on my hero list.
Hating the perp doesn't make you a better person. I don't care what your political orientation is. Hatred does and will cloud your judgment -- moral and otherwise. Forgive and don't hate.
"A-level computer science students will no longer be taught C, C#, or PHP from next year following a decision to withdraw the languages by the largest UK exam board. Schools teaching the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance's (AQA) COMP1 syllabus have been asked to use one of its other approved languages — Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008. Pascal/Delphi is 'highly recommended' by the exam board because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem-solving."
This is really, really wrong and short-sighted.
I used to be an avid Pascal user, in the time between Turbo Pascal 3.0 for CP/M hit the shelves, and up to suspended animation period of Borland Pascal 7 (when Delphi 3 was already out). TP3 for DOS and Logo on TRS-80 were the first languages I could produce some non-trivial graphic output with.
Yet life moves on, and I can't imagine having my productivity limited by what Delphi offers. It is behind times, to say at least.
Even raw C++ feels somewhat kludgy these days. Qt's preprocessing lightens it up a bit, but it doesn't really go all that far in expressiveness.
I consider CLR, JVM and Python's VM to be the platforms where you can actually use and benefit from what are "modern" yet really decades-old concepts that were implemented on Lisp systems in early 80s. Closures, access to expression AST (C# LINQ!), type inference, code attributes/annotations + code generation -- all those things help out with productivity, and heighten the level of abstraction you can work with.
There is nothing "unstable" or somehow anti-"problem solving" or anti-"teaching" (their words!) in C#, or Java, or Python. Or C, or even PHP for that matter. The only difference between those languages is the availability of "modern" features and libraries. CLR (C#) and Java win the showoff hands-down in that regard, with PHP and Python being close contenders wrt. libraries. Methinks Python is somewhat higher, abstraction-level-wise, than Java, because generators come standard, and in Java you have to add rather niche libraries to get that. Popularity is good sometimes!
I recently took "enterprisey" C# and Java courses at a big 10 CS department, where they stressed how the modern features and lots of libraries help with rapid development and prototyping.
I admit that there's a lot of niftiness there that is rather absent from Delphi. I'd say that the combined power of LINQ, extension methods, lambda expressions, and Enumerable give a lot of flexibility and aid IMHO in declunkifying the code. Same goes for Java's code generation in various ORM frameworks, yielder, etc. It's all about how easily you can express yourself in code.
Blindly sticking with C (they don't) or Delphi (they do) hides a lot of good, state-of-the art programming language features. I see absolutely no reason why those can't be taught even in introductory courses.
I have some rather passing exposure to Ocaml, and some more to Common Lisp, and I of course agree that all the hullaballoo about C#/Java is somewhat overblown in the sense that you could implement every feature of Java or C# in Lisp a good decade or two ago. What's missing from niche languages like Ocaml or Lisp, though, is decent, standard, widely-deployed libraries. There are of course plenty of libraries for C, but there's usually a few mutually incompatible "decent-enough" implementations of common things and that's rather unproductive to the end user -- how many string implementations do we really need? This also applies to C++...
If business sense and out-of-school applicability be damned, I'd be all for teaching Lisp and Logo.
If Lisp's flexibility be damned, one could argue for Ocaml and Logo, but then you can of course do F# and Logo, and that can all run on CLR so that can be taken directly to a.net shop and be applied. I presume that Python is a sane middle ground -- performs well enough
Finally someone who sees the numbers for what they are.
I keep saying that BP laughs all the way to the bank.
What they are doing right now with the dome and booms is just PR stalling. They know full well that drilling the relief is the only way to fix the problem, but the public would go apeshit if they "did nothing" for 3 months. Of course the fact that they are in fact, umm, drilling the relief well is quickly lost on mostly everyone.
The best thing we can do is buy up as much of their stock as we can. That way we can partake in their profits!
Let's not forget that any orbit changes require two burns. First burn will change a circular orbit into an elliptical one (a transfer orbit). The second one's timing is then critical, as it will determine how circular will the final orbit be.
If, somehow, a satellite that wants to move out to graveyard orbit succeeds at only one burn, or mis-executes the second burn, you end up with an elliptical orbit that potentially intersects the geostationary orbit.
I wonder how easy would it be to, instead, change the orbital plane while maintaining same altitude?
They can't carbon date stuff from Mars, because carbon dating has to be done on things that formerly were alive. Heck, it depends on the properties of our atmosphere -- the fact that the carbon there has a certain isotope makeup, and that we know how this makeup has been changing over history. The carbon dating calibration curves describe history of Earth's atmosphere, not some other random atmosphere.
They can date stuff from Mars using other isotopes that have longer half-lives, and are somehow related to the common history of the our solar system. That's the only way things from different planets can be depended upon to have certain isotopic makeups.
Trading of synthetic instruments is only part of the problem. There is a lot of trade in very physical things -- trade that only inflates the prices and serves no other purpose.
Take any good condominium project. Those typically come in phases -- say buildings A&B are phase 1, buildings C&D phase 2, and so on. They are sold in pre-construction. A project that has good prospects and sells out phase 1 within say 24-48 hours -- will usually be done by a developer who has a clue, and there will be lots of investors who know that developer and will snatch it up in pre-construction sale. Success of such sale in phase 1 usually implies that same investors will rinse and repeat in phase 2 and so on.
Now we're talking about a very physical thing: an ownership in a condominium. Yet the investors will, usually, just flip the units and resell them as fast as they can, for 10-20% in instant profit. People who do that sort of investing will make $100-$200k per unit that way -- just like that, for nothing -- just for the fact that they signed their name on a pre-construction contract. Their only risk is being out of, say 10% of the price if they decide to back out of the contract -- as the nonrefundable deposit is often just 10%.
This is just an example I'm familiar with, but there are *tons* of examples like that: trading, or, "investing" in very tangible things, for negligible risk, where the payout is relatively obscene, and there is zero added value by the investor.
What's wrong with people who somehow believe that freshman retention is meaningful at all? Or that it should, somehow, inexplicably, be high to be good? People who can't cope should drop out. Easy, cheezy, breezy. What's the problem with freshmen dropping out? Not everyone can finish college, that's all there is to it.
It's always possible to just give them so much homework, that the exams can include only homework problems, without any ill effects. Then, the grading split between exams and homework is irrelevant. Can be 50-50 if that's what makes them feel good.
I took a grad course in applied numerical methods where there was no exam at all. Just ~20 hours of homework per week. IMHO entirely fair, and you couldn't really slack off. You still had to do at least 50% of assigned work to get a good grade, and that was a lot of work. The material was such that it would be next to impossible to have a meaningful exam: solving the problems required access to a computer, and often multiple references. Might as well do it in the comfort of one's home...
I had a friend TA, and he tracked attendance in a very simple way: he was a photography buff, and had a decent camera with decent optics. He'd snap a picture of the auditorium, from a tripod, thrice during every lecture. At the end of the quarter, he printed out those pictures on 11x17" format paper. Whenever someone came to complain about the grade, and my friend thought that attendance could have played a role, he'd aske the person to circle himself/herself on those pictures. Voila, you don't have to "take" attendance even if there are 120 people in the auditorium. Worked like a charm.
This doesn't matter much. All they have to implement is a bunch of alternatives for commonly done "big" matrix operations. That's be the first step. It doesn't require discarding any code, and it would help in a lot of common cases -- matrix algebra on big matrices is kinda popular. The could also do a bunch of signal processing stuff that way.
The real hard work will be to get matlab to compile the code to run on the gpu -- so that not just certain prepackaged algorithms will run fast, but also your own code. And that's really, really hard.
The problem with medical devices is that their safety is covered by a bunch of international standards. Those things are pretty disgusting reads, and I guess the engineers show their, um, lack of appreciation of the literary quality of the standards in the design of the devices.
The truth is, you can make beautiful medical devices, yes, even those that have embedded processing in them. I think, for example, that GE's patient monitors have some slick industrial design.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like all such warnings to disappear. I don't think there's any evidence that they save lives, maybe with exception of the plastic bag warning. What a waste of time...
The judge should dismiss the suit against Google only, and fine her. I presume the paragraph below applies:
UC 41-6a-1002 (1) (c) A pedestrian may not suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard.
Of course the car could have potentially been driven recklessly, but the whole thing is between her and the guy who hit her. There's nothing about Google in this whole brouhaha. She is claiming in essence, that Google should pay for her stupidity. Here's news for ya, lady: you only get paid for stupidity if you're high enough in petroleum business, media or a financial institution. Or if you're a politician. Obviously the lady has got a few more tries ahead of her. Go for office!
</sarcasm> The dark side of me wishes the lady would excuse herself from the gene pool. WTF?
TSK, TSK, you haven't listened to their multi-million-dollar ad campaign. You *should* know that B stands for Beyond.
Obviously the U.S. should dismantle BP's U.S. operations as they relate to petroleum only. According to what their marketing would like us to believe, this should be an inconsequential part of a company that's green and progressive and beyond petroleum and all that. Right?
Riiight.
Here in the UK, the retailer is liable for anything like this, and I'm pretty sure there's a European Directive to the same effect. I think manufacturers are liable for things like super bad business practices, but you can get the retailer for a much easier to prove breach of implied merchantability.
Ah yes, the standard European practice of assigning blame to any parties not actually at fault.
There is such a thing as negligence. If the retailers have a 'blink-blink-nod-nod' attitude towards unfair practices of the corporations whose products they resell, shouldn't they be held responsible, too? After all, surely Adobe would lose a chunk of revenue if suddenly they lost the brick-and-mortair retail?
With old MFM/RLL drives, you had to type in the bad sector list from the case of the drive. I have an old NEC drive somewhere that has a list of bad sectors on the label, and you then had to type it in when doing a high-level format. Brings back memories ;)
You don't have to be a programmer. As a consumer, you have to be educated about those things too! Just so that you know when to write your congressman/senator, should there be a law in the works that limits your rights as a consumer.
In the U.S., you still cannot legally write your own DVD player software that could play encrypted discs (all commercial titles) -- no matter what the platform. You also cannot legally own such software, if it was written by someone who didn't go into licensing agreements with "teh DVD guys". So it does affect you as a consumer, you know! You may have legally purchased DVDs, but that doesn't entitle you to be able to play them using software/devices that are not "approved". This is as if the book publishers only allowed you to use certain brands of glasses to read their books with!
So "not being a programmer" is not an excuse at all. How on Earth do you have a 6 digit Slashdot id and are not aware of problems with DMCA et al?? Never mind that Pazhitnov's grandeur and takedown trolling is well known.
If you don't want to haggle over the price, then I presume the salesman's role is limited to saying "sign here on the dotted line".
That's no different from buying a car online methinks?
I've got my current ride, and my wife's last two, on eBay, and I personally consider car dealerships to be necessary for keeping car companies in check. They are not good, IMHO, for anything besides new car sales. Used car purchases at dealerships of any sort are almost always a waste of money.
I don't see how the battleground of IT is IP. There's really nothing in most of the code that you would want to reverse engineer for reasons other than interoperability.
Besides, the "decompilation" you're talking about results in some intermediate language statements that are, by themselves, not any more useful than running IDA PRO or similar disassembler on the code.
Because most businesses have specialized in making money as their sole raison-d-etre. Everything else is outside of their "core competences", and is really a cost they would rather avoid. If they can get away with it, noone at the helm cares whether it's "nice" or not. They have customers while being an ass? They will just become a fatter ass.
There used to be time where big businesses would be good at something, and *that* was making them money. Then they started optimizing everything to make money, not on whatever the "something" was that used to be good. This happened everywhere.
Prime example: banks. Used to make boatloads of money from taking deposits and lending out part of that. Now the govt is trying to regulate some trading that become very profitable to the banks, and the banks scream bloody murder. Greedy optimization misses opportunities, but of course bankers are not computer scientists and wouldn't know that...
Some businesses shield you from their mediocricity: for example car companies. You really wouldn't want to be buying your car directly from Ford or GM. It'd be a horrible experience. The car dealers -- comparatively small enterprises -- are the customer's last line of defense in making car companies do a relatively good job.
Some car companies used to be good at making cars. They slowly became banks, and make their money lending money. The car making part of the operation is often the loss leader.
The problem is that the business people's mentality, that gets implanted right there in the business schools, is that the money making aspect is the thing that should drive everything else. You get idiot business school grads who expect that they should be paid $100k/year for doing nothing much, with zero experience. Eventually the yes-sayers who are clueless but "problem-free" end up in middle management, and their ineptness drives the bad service, and eventually the upper management blames the poor results on "environmental" factors: competition, bad economic situation, societal changes in the neighborhoods, etc.
No one in cable company division management typically has any clue about the technical side of the business, and none of the decisions they make actually help with the quality of service. The "technical" people and their managers are disinterested, since the people higher up don't give shit. The contractors, who often provide the actual technical service, are directed by same money-, erm, results-oriented monkeys -- but of course the cable company thinks they are clever by offloading the "technicalities" that are not their "core competency". It's batshit insane.
It's this self-nurturing disease, and solid competition is the only way to fix it. Bad cable companies must be driven out of business, and their upper management should be publicly ridiculed for what they are: overpaid idiots who have zero clue.
WTF? You can get all that stuff on eBay. I don't think that there are any problems buying any freaking scale you want. And I've bought a few.
Methinks big Japanese corporations are legally obligated to use a small part of their budget (say 1%?) for humanitarian purposes. Toyota may have many robotic divisions, but the one I'm familiar with is the Partner Robot Division, and there's an Assistance group there IIRC. It's what you think it is: assistance robots, to help in the care of elderly and disabled. The violin thing is just PR and probably was done by a couple guys who thought "hey, we can do *that*", and got green-lighted. It all comes from that same division.
Toyota has an annual one day employee festival at their combined ECU electronics/robotics plant -- a former site, IIRC, of a Denso plant. It's on the outskirts of Toyota-Shi. That's when they actually open the gates to the public. If you can figure out when the festival is, you can just go there and see the demo of the violin robot. The spot where they demo it used to be literally a hole in the plywood wall to their temporary robot development floor. Last year they moved the division to a big new building, and surely they give the demos there. The demo was a multi-channel motion playback preceded by running the alignment procedure. AFAICT, they did use some force-feedback controllers, but those were just that -- controllers being fed a pre-set motion reference. Not very high tech, although definitely they had very nicely done mechanicals.
Forgiveness makes us human. Infinite hatred is a human trait, but it does not define us, and it shouldn't.
Having your kid raped is definitely a trying experience (I know such a parent), but if you can't forgive it the
next morning, you have a real problem. She forgave, and to me she is quite high on my hero list.
Hating the perp doesn't make you a better person. I don't care what your political orientation is.
Hatred does and will cloud your judgment -- moral and otherwise. Forgive and don't hate.
Just saying.
"A-level computer science students will no longer be taught C, C#, or PHP from next year following a decision to withdraw the languages by the largest UK exam board. Schools teaching the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance's (AQA) COMP1 syllabus have been asked to use one of its other approved languages — Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008. Pascal/Delphi is 'highly recommended' by the exam board because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem-solving."
This is really, really wrong and short-sighted.
I used to be an avid Pascal user, in the time between Turbo Pascal 3.0 for CP/M hit the shelves, and up to suspended animation period of Borland Pascal 7 (when Delphi 3 was already out). TP3 for DOS and Logo on TRS-80 were the first languages I could produce some non-trivial graphic output with.
Yet life moves on, and I can't imagine having my productivity limited by what Delphi offers. It is behind times, to say at least.
Even raw C++ feels somewhat kludgy these days. Qt's preprocessing lightens it up a bit, but it doesn't really go all that far in expressiveness.
I consider CLR, JVM and Python's VM to be the platforms where you can actually use and benefit from what are "modern" yet really decades-old concepts that were implemented on Lisp systems in early 80s. Closures, access to expression AST (C# LINQ!), type inference, code attributes/annotations + code generation -- all those things help out with productivity, and heighten the level of abstraction you can work with.
There is nothing "unstable" or somehow anti-"problem solving" or anti-"teaching" (their words!) in C#, or Java, or Python. Or C, or even PHP for that matter. The only difference between those languages is the availability of "modern" features and libraries. CLR (C#) and Java win the showoff hands-down in that regard, with PHP and Python being close contenders wrt. libraries. Methinks Python is somewhat higher, abstraction-level-wise, than Java, because generators come standard, and in Java you have to add rather niche libraries to get that. Popularity is good sometimes!
I recently took "enterprisey" C# and Java courses at a big 10 CS department, where they stressed how the modern features and lots of libraries help with rapid development and prototyping.
I admit that there's a lot of niftiness there that is rather absent from Delphi. I'd say that the combined power of LINQ, extension methods, lambda expressions, and Enumerable give a lot of flexibility and aid IMHO in declunkifying the code. Same goes for Java's code generation in various ORM frameworks, yielder, etc. It's all about how easily you can express yourself in code.
Blindly sticking with C (they don't) or Delphi (they do) hides a lot of good, state-of-the art programming language features. I see absolutely no reason why those
can't be taught even in introductory courses.
I have some rather passing exposure to Ocaml, and some more to Common Lisp, and I of course agree that all the hullaballoo about C#/Java is somewhat overblown in the sense that you could implement every feature of Java or C# in Lisp a good decade or two ago. What's missing from niche languages like Ocaml or Lisp, though, is decent, standard, widely-deployed libraries. There are of course plenty of libraries for C, but there's usually a few mutually incompatible "decent-enough" implementations of common things and that's rather unproductive to the end user -- how many string implementations do we really need? This also applies to C++...
If business sense and out-of-school applicability be damned, I'd be all for teaching Lisp and Logo.
If Lisp's flexibility be damned, one could argue for Ocaml and Logo, but then you can of course do F# and Logo, and that can all run on CLR so that can be taken directly to a .net shop and be applied. I presume that Python is a sane middle ground -- performs well enough
Finally someone who sees the numbers for what they are.
I keep saying that BP laughs all the way to the bank.
What they are doing right now with the dome and booms is just PR stalling. They know full well that drilling the relief is the only way to fix the problem, but the public would go apeshit if they "did nothing" for 3 months. Of course the fact that they are in fact, umm, drilling the relief well is quickly lost on mostly everyone.
The best thing we can do is buy up as much of their stock as we can. That way we can partake in their profits!
Let's not forget that any orbit changes require two burns. First burn will change a circular orbit into an elliptical one (a transfer orbit). The second one's timing is then critical, as it will determine how circular will the final orbit be.
If, somehow, a satellite that wants to move out to graveyard orbit succeeds at only one burn, or mis-executes the second burn, you end up with an elliptical orbit that potentially intersects the geostationary orbit.
I wonder how easy would it be to, instead, change the orbital plane while maintaining same altitude?
They can't carbon date stuff from Mars, because carbon dating has to be done on things that formerly were alive. Heck, it depends on the properties of our atmosphere -- the fact that the carbon there has a certain isotope makeup, and that we know how this makeup has been changing over history. The carbon dating calibration curves describe history of Earth's atmosphere, not some other random atmosphere.
They can date stuff from Mars using other isotopes that have longer half-lives, and are somehow related to the common history of the our solar system. That's the only way things from different planets can be depended upon to have certain isotopic makeups.
Trading of synthetic instruments is only part of the problem. There is a lot of trade in very physical things -- trade that only inflates the prices and serves no other purpose.
Take any good condominium project. Those typically come in phases -- say buildings A&B are phase 1, buildings C&D phase 2, and so on. They are sold in pre-construction. A project that has good prospects and sells out phase 1 within say 24-48 hours -- will usually be done by a developer who has a clue, and there will be lots of investors who know that developer and will snatch it up in pre-construction sale. Success of such sale in phase 1 usually implies that same investors will rinse and repeat in phase 2 and so on.
Now we're talking about a very physical thing: an ownership in a condominium. Yet the investors will, usually, just flip the units and resell them as fast as they can, for 10-20% in instant profit. People who do that sort of investing will make $100-$200k per unit that way -- just like that, for nothing -- just for the fact that they signed their name on a pre-construction contract. Their only risk is being out of, say 10% of the price if they decide to back out of the contract -- as the nonrefundable deposit is often just 10%.
This is just an example I'm familiar with, but there are *tons* of examples like that: trading, or, "investing" in very tangible things, for negligible risk, where the payout is relatively obscene, and there is zero added value by the investor.
If BP were forced to shoulder the entire cost of this mistake, they would go bankrupt.
Umm, have you looked at their financials? They are laughing all the way to the bank.
What's wrong with people who somehow believe that freshman retention is meaningful at all? Or that it should, somehow, inexplicably, be high to be good? People who can't cope should drop out. Easy, cheezy, breezy. What's the problem with freshmen dropping out? Not everyone can finish college, that's all there is to it.
It's always possible to just give them so much homework, that the exams can include only homework problems, without any ill effects. Then, the grading split between exams and homework is irrelevant. Can be 50-50 if that's what makes them feel good.
I took a grad course in applied numerical methods where there was no exam at all. Just ~20 hours of homework per week. IMHO entirely fair, and you couldn't really slack off. You still had to do at least 50% of assigned work to get a good grade, and that was a lot of work. The material was such that it would be next to impossible to have a meaningful exam: solving the problems required access to a computer, and often multiple references. Might as well do it in the comfort of one's home...
I had a friend TA, and he tracked attendance in a very simple way: he was a photography buff, and had a decent camera with decent optics. He'd snap a picture of the auditorium, from a tripod, thrice during every lecture. At the end of the quarter, he printed out those pictures on 11x17" format paper. Whenever someone came to complain about the grade, and my friend thought that attendance could have played a role, he'd aske the person to circle himself/herself on those pictures. Voila, you don't have to "take" attendance even if there are 120 people in the auditorium. Worked like a charm.
I'm sure the herring would not appreciate that!
Not too little, but definitely too late. SVG should have been supported since IE7. Same goes for quirk-less CSS2.1 support.
This doesn't matter much. All they have to implement is a bunch of alternatives for commonly done "big" matrix operations. That's be the first step. It doesn't require discarding any code, and it would help in a lot of common cases -- matrix algebra on big matrices is kinda popular. The could also do a bunch of signal processing stuff that way.
The real hard work will be to get matlab to compile the code to run on the gpu -- so that not just certain prepackaged algorithms will run fast, but also your own code. And that's really, really hard.
The problem with medical devices is that their safety is covered by a bunch of international standards. Those things are pretty disgusting reads, and I guess the engineers show their, um, lack of appreciation of the literary quality of the standards in the design of the devices.
The truth is, you can make beautiful medical devices, yes, even those that have embedded processing in them. I think, for example, that GE's patient monitors have some slick industrial design.