High fructose corn syrup vs. cane sugar? I almost spit out the first regular Coke I had in the USA after living abroad where they're made with real sugar. High fructose corn syrup tastes just plain nasty. In the USA I'll drink diet, unless I can get some of the sugar sweetened Mexican stuff in glass bottles. That's always a nice find.
Yeah, I discovered this the hard way. Here in Canada we use cane sugar (thank god), and during a recent trip to the US, I decided to buy a bottle of Coke. At the first taste, I thought I'd accidentally picked up root beer or something, but a double-check of the labelled confirmed that it was supposed "Coke", thought it certainly didn't taste like it. I never made that mistake again... *shudder*
What is it with people and this ridiculous belief that *one* solution is going to solve all of our power problems. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it ain't gonna happen that way. Migrating away from carbon is gonna involve multiple, complementary technologies, not some single magic bullet. Nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geotherm... all these technologies and more will be involved.
No, it has nothing to do with threading (or, if it does, only incidentally). As I understand it, on the IA-32, for the most part, instructions, memory accesses, etc, can be trapped by the hypervisor with the help of the CPU, which allows those instructions to be virtualized. However, there are certain CPU sensitive instructions (those which modify the system state in a way which must be virtualized) which are not properly virtualizable on old CPUs, as their execution cannot be trapped. Consequently, XEN takes the easy way out, placing restrictions on the instructions which may be executed, thus requiring modifications to the guest OS. See this page for a list of sensitive, non-virtualizable instructions on the IA-32.
What do you mean "even in Javascript"? Javascript is probably one of the most widely used mixed functional/OOP programming languages out there. Even more unusual, it's a prototype-based language (along the lines of Self), allowing you to do cool things like augment classes at run-time. It's actually remarkably powerful, and IMHO, a damn sight better than many of the more popular scripting languages out there (I'm looking at you, Python, with your crippled lexical closures). Pity few seem to understand this...
Isn't that just the normal form of democracy in a capitalist nation?
Not in my country, it ain't. 'course, I also happen to live in a nation where money != speech, institutionalized bribery (aka "lobbying") is largely outlawed, the government is not in charge of determining election boundaries, elections are controlled and monitored by a neutral third party and actually *work*...
The real shame, IMHO, is that so many Americans believe their government *must* run the way it does. As if that's the default state of a democracy, when so many other democratic nations have somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls the US has found itself in.
In Canada, it is often the local phone monopoly vs the local cable monopoly as well.
Actually, there may be more than that, but the smaller providers often don't advertise as well. In Canada, the telcos are required to lease their lines to competitors. Thus, you can often find smaller DSL providers in many municipalities.
As an aside, I have that exact same laptop model, and I'm incredibly happy with it. Unfortunately, getting Linux to work and support all the hardware on it was... well, challenging, to put it mildly. After enabling SATA legacy compatibility mode in the BIOS, I ended up installing Ubuntu Gusty using the alternate installer (the stock nv driver doesn't work with the nv140), along with a custom compiled wifi driver from intellinuxwireless.org, a bleeding edge snapshot of ALSA, and a build of the latest nVidia drivers, and it's more or less working now, though wireless is a bit flakey (specifically, WPA), sound only works partially (IIRC, the headphone output doesn't work), and (the most irritating to me) the screen brightness controls don't work. But other than all that, it works great!:)
You genuinely believe that the government, once it has control of your health care, won't abuse the power?
I believe that, if they abuse power, I have the ability to vote them out (trust me, people get very passionate when their healthcare program is threatened). Unfortunately, the same can't be said of a corporate oligopoly.
I do agree, health care in the U.S. is too expensive. De-regulate it to allow market forces to work.
It's a shame that, IMHO, they simply can't work. The barrier of entry, due to simple costs, basic level of government regulation to ensure public safety, etc, will ensure that only big corporations can really participate in the game. Further, because medicine is a service few can do without, there is little preventing corporations from colluding to screw the customer. See the disaster that is the insurance industry, or hell, Enron, for an example of how "free market" economics often works in such cases. The latter is a particularly excellent example, as, in the absence of regulation, a corporation in control of a necessary resource (in that case, energy) did it's best to screw the customer as efficiently as possible, all in the name of massive profits. <sarcasm>I know *I* would want those same people in charge of my health.</sarcasm>.
Honestly, I simply don't understand this blind faith in the "free market". You people are no different than communists. Complete blindness to the realities of humanity, instead favouring an idealism that is clearly at odds with reality. It's truly bizarre, IMHO.
Cost-per-capita is the typical metric used, and there's no question the US is the least efficient, when examined from that perspective. This is particularly true when you take into account quality and length of life metrics, not to mention percentage of individuals covered.
Sorry, but it's blatantly clear to anyone paying attention that the US is *not* the best system in the world. Does it have the most cutting edge technology? Sure. Is it great for those who can afford it? Absolutely. But if you're one of the 45 million Americans who have no coverage, well, tough shit. Meanwhile, countries with "socialized" medicine have longer average life spans and greater coverage overall.
The true irony, here, is that a large percentage people without coverage are the exact folks the conservatives, aka the big pushers of privatized medicine, espouse to support: families with kids. Typically, these people are making enough money not to qualify for healthcare subsidies, but not enough to actually afford healthcare on their own. The result is parents without coverage because they can only afford to insure their children (I personally know a number of families in this position). And it only gets worse if any of the parents or children have any kind of unusual conditions, as, assuming they can get coverage at all, it's exhorbitantly expensive.
Because all that does is deal with roll issues. You still have the sudden, massive decceleration as the airbag hits the ground, creating intense G forces that a rover might be able to withstand, while a human would be turned into a lovely meat paste.
Apparently this happens with random numbers pulled from real life.
No, it doesn't. To quote the article you linked to:
In a highly variable set of numbers such as those found in taxes, one would think that the leading digits would all be equally common. One would expect to find roughly the same amount of numbers starting with a 1 as, say, an 8. In a set of totally random numbers such as the lottery, that is exactly what one would discover; but when it comes to non-random real-life numbers, unless the data set is too constrained, a lot more numbers start with a one than any other digit.
Given that this device is intended to produce "totally random numbers", I'd say it's output most certainly *won't* follow Benford's Law.
Sorry, but 9-6 certainly is not good hours. 9-5 with a paid lunch break, that's sane. 9-6 is typical American-style overworking. But, then again, some people don't know any better...
I'm sure it does. It's even nicer when you're salaried and work a much more sane 9-5 with a paid lunch break. Then again, Americans do seem to enjoy being overworked, though I can't fathom why.
Actually, what's really interesting about this whole situation is that, from what I understand, they plan to go after terrestrial radio next. To quote:
Where webcasters and the recording industry do agree is on the unfairness of making tiny Web stations pay for performance rights while huge radio companies pay nothing. Congress decided that Web stations must pay royalties to the composers of each song and to the performers and record labels, even as traditional AM and FM broadcasters continue paying only the composers -- a quirk in the law that gives broadcast radio a huge advantage.
Simson agrees that "there's really no justification for broadcast radio not paying, and we're going to try to address that."
Simple answer, the Copyright Royalty Board gave SoundExchange a legal monopoly which prevents it, so I understand. The broadcasters, in order to avoid paying standard royalties to SoundExchange for some unsigned indie band or artist, must obtain an individual license from each band or artist.
Umm... you *do* realize that your second statement kinda contradicts your first, right? As you say yourself, nothing "prevents" a broadcaster from securing rights with a copyright holder. Yeah, it can be costly and time consuming, but it certainly can be done. And if SoundExchange comes after a broadcaster, just wave the license in their face... they have no legal authority to prosecute (that's up to the copyright holder, who's already agreed to a license), so I fail to see the risk, there.
As such, I'm not at all convinced that the independant artists couldn't form their own NPO to act as a licensing clearinghouse. The problem is it costs money, both in initial startup and long-term administration, and independant artists are, by definition, not what I would call rich.
If the artist and broadcaster doesn't file (hmm..filing fees?) a license, the broadcaster must pay standard royalty to SoundExchange, and the artist or band may collect it, *if* they pay a fee and join SoundExchange.
The price of storage is low enough that I can have my entire movie and video collection on my MythTV box, ready to watch with just a few presses of the remote.
Yeah, the problem is if you, like me, enjoy the interactive menus, add-on content, and so forth. In that case, the only option (AFAIK, please enlighten if I'm wrong), is a straight rip, which ends up being *huge*. And storing my entire movie collection as raw rips is currently infeasible without building a mass-storage server that's just a little out of my price range.
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High fructose corn syrup vs. cane sugar? I almost spit out the first regular Coke I had in the USA after living abroad where they're made with real sugar. High fructose corn syrup tastes just plain nasty. In the USA I'll drink diet, unless I can get some of the sugar sweetened Mexican stuff in glass bottles. That's always a nice find.
Yeah, I discovered this the hard way. Here in Canada we use cane sugar (thank god), and during a recent trip to the US, I decided to buy a bottle of Coke. At the first taste, I thought I'd accidentally picked up root beer or something, but a double-check of the labelled confirmed that it was supposed "Coke", thought it certainly didn't taste like it. I never made that mistake again... *shudder*
What is it with people and this ridiculous belief that *one* solution is going to solve all of our power problems. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it ain't gonna happen that way. Migrating away from carbon is gonna involve multiple, complementary technologies, not some single magic bullet. Nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geotherm... all these technologies and more will be involved.
No, it has nothing to do with threading (or, if it does, only incidentally). As I understand it, on the IA-32, for the most part, instructions, memory accesses, etc, can be trapped by the hypervisor with the help of the CPU, which allows those instructions to be virtualized. However, there are certain CPU sensitive instructions (those which modify the system state in a way which must be virtualized) which are not properly virtualizable on old CPUs, as their execution cannot be trapped. Consequently, XEN takes the easy way out, placing restrictions on the instructions which may be executed, thus requiring modifications to the guest OS. See this page for a list of sensitive, non-virtualizable instructions on the IA-32.
What do you mean "even in Javascript"? Javascript is probably one of the most widely used mixed functional/OOP programming languages out there. Even more unusual, it's a prototype-based language (along the lines of Self), allowing you to do cool things like augment classes at run-time. It's actually remarkably powerful, and IMHO, a damn sight better than many of the more popular scripting languages out there (I'm looking at you, Python, with your crippled lexical closures). Pity few seem to understand this...
Isn't that just the normal form of democracy in a capitalist nation?
Not in my country, it ain't. 'course, I also happen to live in a nation where money != speech, institutionalized bribery (aka "lobbying") is largely outlawed, the government is not in charge of determining election boundaries, elections are controlled and monitored by a neutral third party and actually *work*...
The real shame, IMHO, is that so many Americans believe their government *must* run the way it does. As if that's the default state of a democracy, when so many other democratic nations have somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls the US has found itself in.
In Canada, it is often the local phone monopoly vs the local cable monopoly as well.
Actually, there may be more than that, but the smaller providers often don't advertise as well. In Canada, the telcos are required to lease their lines to competitors. Thus, you can often find smaller DSL providers in many municipalities.
As an aside, I have that exact same laptop model, and I'm incredibly happy with it. Unfortunately, getting Linux to work and support all the hardware on it was... well, challenging, to put it mildly. After enabling SATA legacy compatibility mode in the BIOS, I ended up installing Ubuntu Gusty using the alternate installer (the stock nv driver doesn't work with the nv140), along with a custom compiled wifi driver from intellinuxwireless.org, a bleeding edge snapshot of ALSA, and a build of the latest nVidia drivers, and it's more or less working now, though wireless is a bit flakey (specifically, WPA), sound only works partially (IIRC, the headphone output doesn't work), and (the most irritating to me) the screen brightness controls don't work. But other than all that, it works great! :)
You genuinely believe that the government, once it has control of your health care, won't abuse the power?
I believe that, if they abuse power, I have the ability to vote them out (trust me, people get very passionate when their healthcare program is threatened). Unfortunately, the same can't be said of a corporate oligopoly.
I do agree, health care in the U.S. is too expensive. De-regulate it to allow market forces to work.
It's a shame that, IMHO, they simply can't work. The barrier of entry, due to simple costs, basic level of government regulation to ensure public safety, etc, will ensure that only big corporations can really participate in the game. Further, because medicine is a service few can do without, there is little preventing corporations from colluding to screw the customer. See the disaster that is the insurance industry, or hell, Enron, for an example of how "free market" economics often works in such cases. The latter is a particularly excellent example, as, in the absence of regulation, a corporation in control of a necessary resource (in that case, energy) did it's best to screw the customer as efficiently as possible, all in the name of massive profits. <sarcasm>I know *I* would want those same people in charge of my health.</sarcasm>.
Honestly, I simply don't understand this blind faith in the "free market". You people are no different than communists. Complete blindness to the realities of humanity, instead favouring an idealism that is clearly at odds with reality. It's truly bizarre, IMHO.
Cost-per-capita is the typical metric used, and there's no question the US is the least efficient, when examined from that perspective. This is particularly true when you take into account quality and length of life metrics, not to mention percentage of individuals covered.
Sorry, but it's blatantly clear to anyone paying attention that the US is *not* the best system in the world. Does it have the most cutting edge technology? Sure. Is it great for those who can afford it? Absolutely. But if you're one of the 45 million Americans who have no coverage, well, tough shit. Meanwhile, countries with "socialized" medicine have longer average life spans and greater coverage overall.
The true irony, here, is that a large percentage people without coverage are the exact folks the conservatives, aka the big pushers of privatized medicine, espouse to support: families with kids. Typically, these people are making enough money not to qualify for healthcare subsidies, but not enough to actually afford healthcare on their own. The result is parents without coverage because they can only afford to insure their children (I personally know a number of families in this position). And it only gets worse if any of the parents or children have any kind of unusual conditions, as, assuming they can get coverage at all, it's exhorbitantly expensive.
Because all that does is deal with roll issues. You still have the sudden, massive decceleration as the airbag hits the ground, creating intense G forces that a rover might be able to withstand, while a human would be turned into a lovely meat paste.
Given the imminent demise of free programing data for MythTV,
Huh? MythTV had guide data before Zap2It Labs came along, what makes you think it'll suddenly die when it disappears?
Ahh yes, the old "TV sucks" argument... always worthy of that Insightful mod. Thank you so very much for sharing your thought-provoking comments.
No, it doesn't. To quote the article you linked to:
Given that this device is intended to produce "totally random numbers", I'd say it's output most certainly *won't* follow Benford's Law.
Or, in English, billions. You've mistaken thousand millions for billions, even though in the non-US world everyone calls them thousand millions.
Umm... huh? According to this wikipedia article, the following countries use the short scale:
United States
Canada
Ireland
Australia
New Zealand
and, of course... United Kingdom - albeit with some residual usage of the long-scale
Ironically, of the nations which use the long scale, none of them are traditionally considered "English" countries.
Oddly, this is one of the few bits of science ST:TNG got right, in an episode entitled Disaster.
I highly suspect you're the exception, here. Most people, if they have that many passwords to manage, do one of two things:
1) write them down
2) stick them in a password manager, protected by a single master password
I happen to be in the latter camp, but I know many people who are in the former.
Sorry, but 9-6 certainly is not good hours. 9-5 with a paid lunch break, that's sane. 9-6 is typical American-style overworking. But, then again, some people don't know any better...
I'm sure it does. It's even nicer when you're salaried and work a much more sane 9-5 with a paid lunch break. Then again, Americans do seem to enjoy being overworked, though I can't fathom why.
Are you seriously telling me you don't get paid breaks? Wow, you Americans really do get screwed, don't you?
9-6?? Good lord, what's it like being a wage slave?
You *are* aware that the US is one of the few governmental systems to allow insanity like that, right?
Yeah... they really are that crazy.
Simple answer, the Copyright Royalty Board gave SoundExchange a legal monopoly which prevents it, so I understand. The broadcasters, in order to avoid paying standard royalties to SoundExchange for some unsigned indie band or artist, must obtain an individual license from each band or artist.
Umm... you *do* realize that your second statement kinda contradicts your first, right? As you say yourself, nothing "prevents" a broadcaster from securing rights with a copyright holder. Yeah, it can be costly and time consuming, but it certainly can be done. And if SoundExchange comes after a broadcaster, just wave the license in their face... they have no legal authority to prosecute (that's up to the copyright holder, who's already agreed to a license), so I fail to see the risk, there.
As such, I'm not at all convinced that the independant artists couldn't form their own NPO to act as a licensing clearinghouse. The problem is it costs money, both in initial startup and long-term administration, and independant artists are, by definition, not what I would call rich.
If the artist and broadcaster doesn't file (hmm..filing fees?) a license, the broadcaster must pay standard royalty to SoundExchange, and the artist or band may collect it, *if* they pay a fee and join SoundExchange.
Umm, no... membership to SoundExchange is free and open to all **sound recording copyright owners (SRCOs) and featured recording artists." Honestly, where the hell is this misinformation coming from? I keep seeing it parotted over and over, but the truth lies a mere Google search away. Are people just that fucking lazy?
The price of storage is low enough that I can have my entire movie and video collection on my MythTV box, ready to watch with just a few presses of the remote.
Yeah, the problem is if you, like me, enjoy the interactive menus, add-on content, and so forth. In that case, the only option (AFAIK, please enlighten if I'm wrong), is a straight rip, which ends up being *huge*. And storing my entire movie collection as raw rips is currently infeasible without building a mass-storage server that's just a little out of my price range.