Just last summer I took over a project with over 250,000 lines of code. It was a complete disaster of a codebase, a total Rube Goldberg machine... but somehow, after years of poking and prodding and band-aids and what-not, it WORKED...however, even the tinest code change too weeks to happen because the code was so badly written. The project had a ton of turnover through the years, and from the looks of it many of the coders use conventions from different languages they were familiar with, copy/paste all over the place, bad structure, fragile inheritance schemes, etc., etc.
So, I did the only thing that made sense. Started completely from scratch, picking out the parts that were usable as we went. We haven't finished yet, but I haven't looked back...
Yes, but there's also when you hire the new guy, fresh from college, and he sits down at his work station. After a few days of getting absolutely no work done, he comes to you and tells you he wants to rewrite the core 50K lines of tested, trusted company code because he thinks it's not written "by the book". To which, the only sane reply is "You touch that code, and I will set you on fire."
Perhaps that "tested, trusted company code" is a steaming mess of spaghetti code that's been cautiously poked, prodded, and duct-taped over the years into something that in the end works but is a maintainability nightmare?
My fine-tuned and carefully-tweaked Windows XP box that I use as my main PC currently has 18 days of uptime. Windows today is simply not as unstable as Windows of yesteryear.
Some planes do have in-seat power. The Airbus A330-300 which I've flown to Europe many many times has in-seat power in coach. In fact, Lufthansa (Germany's national airline) had free wifi last year on their transatlantic Boeing jets. Not sure what happened to that service, but it was great...only problem was THOSE jets didn't have power. Just bring extra batteries for your laptop I suppose:)
I have a Palm Treo 700p, which I bought about 3 months ago. It takes an SD card, and right now I have a 4gb card in there, but you can get as big as 8gb. I can play videos, read email, surf the web, play games, listen to mp3s, user AOL Instant Messenger, run Google Maps (with traffic!) and, with my $60 bluetooth GPS, I use TomTom Navigator for in-car driving directions.
It runs PalmOS, so I can download any Palm application and run it on my phone. There's and SDK for palm, and it even runs Java so I can write my own apps if I so desire.
I also paid $200 for the unit (with various rebates).
Understand this: the Apple iPhone doesn't allow you to do anything that Treo users (and probably other PDA phones) haven't been able to do for years! What you're paying for is a slick UI, period. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the iPhone's interface is VERY slick, but is it $600 slick?
I'm sure it's not what's intended, but consider the lyric from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Unfortunately the government has the wool over your eyes a bit: inflation is a way for the government to tax you in a hidden way. In fact, it is entirely possible for the government to stop taxing alltogether and simply fund itself through inflation. This was actually tried in Alabama a few hundred years ago, before states were prohibited from printing their own money. Since the Alamaba legislature could print as much money as it liked, there were no constraints on government spending, and the whole system collapsed within a few years.
As long as the government has the power to weaken the value of your dollar, it's JUST as bad as taxation.
So the question is, if taxing is so unpopular, why not just use inflation? Well, then, people would probably start to wonder where the money came from, in addition to the constraint of public spending problem stated above.
The 12% or whatever is called the Reserve ratio. In any case, it's actually much worse than you stated. Once a bank is fully loaned up (e.g. the currency to outstand loan value is only 12%), it's not done. To a bank, a loan is an asset - after all, it's earning interest. The bank can then turn around, and get a loan from the Federal Reserve at the discount window, using their existing loans as collateral. Then they loan the new (smaller) pot of money out to the public. Then, the bank turns around and gets a new smaller loan from the Federal Reserve using the new smaller pile of loans as collateral. This goes around and around until the bank is fully loaned up at a ratio that's something like 35:1.
If you want to read more about how this works, I suggest reading "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by Ed Griffin.
It's interesting you ask. Works created by federal government employees during the course of their official duties are not copyright-able. The same may or may not hold for state or local governments.
You still have the frame of reference problem...how does the vehicle know where to appear? Since there's no universal frame of reference it could appear anywhere in the universe it would seem.
Awesome nick, by the way. The Thursday Next series rocks...
Your assumptions are ignorant of basic 20th century physics. Repeat after me:
Space is relative
That's right, there is no such thing as being "stationary" except with respect to another object. This, of course, brings an interesting dilemma to the time travel problem because space is shaped differently at different values of time, so a frame of reference at one time cannot even be described at a different time.
Say your time machine is sitting on the ground on, essentially, a bunch of molecules. Suppose that at the time you travel to, those same molecules of dirt have been blown around such that they're scattered amongst a 300-mile radius. Where does the time machine land?
Then, there's the conservation of mass problem. How do you account for the fact that a time machine would have to instantly displace a bunch of matter (even if it is mostly air) when it magically appears? Where does that matter go? Is it instantly pushed to a point outside of the time machine's physical space at the speed of light? If so, it would create a terrifying shock wave.
Yeah, you could say there's a number of physics problems with regards to time travel.
I work for the federal government as well, and when it came time to purchase a new desktop machine for myself, I was given a budget of $2,500... I looked at all the different vendors, and lo and behold - Dell was by far the best price. Of course, the fed gets a special rate...the government discount on Dell machines are substantial, and THAT is why we always end up buying dell.
If you'd read the books carefully, you would know that it is impossible to know both the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer for any given universe. Thus, since the Ultimate Answer is known (42), the Ultimate Question can never be known.
No, you moron, it's gallons per mile. That's why the quote is so ridiculous. A hogshead is a large volume...essentially it's a large wine cask. So, imagine only going 30 rods on a LARGE cask of gasoline. A rod also happens to be an impossibly short distance, at least in the sense of automobiles.
Now, it so turns out that the hogshead is a different volume depending on whether it's a wine hogshead or a beer hogshead. Further elaboration on this, as well as a calculation of the other possible conversion of 30 rods/hogshead, is left as an excersize to the reader.
Yup, and I helped. I personally can't stand ambulance chasers myself, so I did a Google search for "asbestos lawsuit" and clicked once on each Google ad.:-)
I'm a government employee. Most "Congressional Benefits" that you talk about apply not only to Congressmen, but to all government employees. The only exception is we play a portion of our health care. We also have a private government retirement account (the Thrift Savings Plan that Bush mentioned in his State of the Union). In fact, the government matches the first 5% of it.
It's a pretty sweet deal, I only wish the government would take care of its citizens as well as it takes care of its employees.
My wish is that Mozilla properly render Slashdot. What an embarassment! Someone even went so far as to make a Mozilla plugin that fixed the Slashdot rendering bug! I mean, c'mon people, you'd think that Mozilla would properly render Mozilla's biggest supporter.
I referee youth and high school soccer matches on the side. It's easy to get into, runs on the weekend generally, pays pretty well and as a super added bonus, you get plenty of excercise. Perfect for those that spend long hours behind a desk...
Actually, I read somewhere that the biblical translation is fuzzy in Genesis for what a "day" is. Apparently, the old hebrew term that was used could mean either "day" or "a period of time", and it's just be popularly translated to mean a 24-hour period
Those of us in small states (in my case, Rhode Island), already don't _really_ count. Nobody campaigns here because (1) we have few electoral votes, and even if we didn't (2) we always vote at least 60-40 in favor of the Democrat and (3) because of (1) and (2) no issues that concern us are ever discussed in an election
With a popular vote, voters in Providence matter just as much as those in Des Moines or Columbus or Palm Beach.
"Mock Election" is the student group that is sponsoring the debate. Maybe you should bother to take two seconds to RTFA, or for that matter, the first sentences of it.
Since I started at my first post-college job in September 2002, I've gotten about $13,000 in raises.
By the way, I work for the government as a computer engineer. Your tax dollars at work! I guess this is the only sector that doesn't rise and fall with the economy...spend spend spend...
Slashdot Mirror
Just last summer I took over a project with over 250,000 lines of code. It was a complete disaster of a codebase, a total Rube Goldberg machine... but somehow, after years of poking and prodding and band-aids and what-not, it WORKED...however, even the tinest code change too weeks to happen because the code was so badly written. The project had a ton of turnover through the years, and from the looks of it many of the coders use conventions from different languages they were familiar with, copy/paste all over the place, bad structure, fragile inheritance schemes, etc., etc.
So, I did the only thing that made sense. Started completely from scratch, picking out the parts that were usable as we went. We haven't finished yet, but I haven't looked back...
Yes, but there's also when you hire the new guy, fresh from college, and he sits down at his work station. After a few days of getting absolutely no work done, he comes to you and tells you he wants to rewrite the core 50K lines of tested, trusted company code because he thinks it's not written "by the book". To which, the only sane reply is "You touch that code, and I will set you on fire."
Perhaps that "tested, trusted company code" is a steaming mess of spaghetti code that's been cautiously poked, prodded, and duct-taped over the years into something that in the end works but is a maintainability nightmare?
My fine-tuned and carefully-tweaked Windows XP box that I use as my main PC currently has 18 days of uptime. Windows today is simply not as unstable as Windows of yesteryear.
Some planes do have in-seat power. The Airbus A330-300 which I've flown to Europe many many times has in-seat power in coach. In fact, Lufthansa (Germany's national airline) had free wifi last year on their transatlantic Boeing jets. Not sure what happened to that service, but it was great...only problem was THOSE jets didn't have power. Just bring extra batteries for your laptop I suppose :)
I have a Palm Treo 700p, which I bought about 3 months ago. It takes an SD card, and right now I have a 4gb card in there, but you can get as big as 8gb. I can play videos, read email, surf the web, play games, listen to mp3s, user AOL Instant Messenger, run Google Maps (with traffic!) and, with my $60 bluetooth GPS, I use TomTom Navigator for in-car driving directions.
It runs PalmOS, so I can download any Palm application and run it on my phone. There's and SDK for palm, and it even runs Java so I can write my own apps if I so desire.
I also paid $200 for the unit (with various rebates).
Understand this: the Apple iPhone doesn't allow you to do anything that Treo users (and probably other PDA phones) haven't been able to do for years! What you're paying for is a slick UI, period. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the iPhone's interface is VERY slick, but is it $600 slick?
Well hey...maybe Steve Jobs is waiting for the music industry to unleash thunderbolts of DRM...er...oops :)
Unfortunately the government has the wool over your eyes a bit: inflation is a way for the government to tax you in a hidden way. In fact, it is entirely possible for the government to stop taxing alltogether and simply fund itself through inflation. This was actually tried in Alabama a few hundred years ago, before states were prohibited from printing their own money. Since the Alamaba legislature could print as much money as it liked, there were no constraints on government spending, and the whole system collapsed within a few years.
As long as the government has the power to weaken the value of your dollar, it's JUST as bad as taxation.
So the question is, if taxing is so unpopular, why not just use inflation? Well, then, people would probably start to wonder where the money came from, in addition to the constraint of public spending problem stated above.
The 12% or whatever is called the Reserve ratio. In any case, it's actually much worse than you stated. Once a bank is fully loaned up (e.g. the currency to outstand loan value is only 12%), it's not done. To a bank, a loan is an asset - after all, it's earning interest. The bank can then turn around, and get a loan from the Federal Reserve at the discount window, using their existing loans as collateral. Then they loan the new (smaller) pot of money out to the public. Then, the bank turns around and gets a new smaller loan from the Federal Reserve using the new smaller pile of loans as collateral. This goes around and around until the bank is fully loaned up at a ratio that's something like 35:1.
If you want to read more about how this works, I suggest reading "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by Ed Griffin.
It's interesting you ask. Works created by federal government employees during the course of their official duties are not copyright-able. The same may or may not hold for state or local governments.
You still have the frame of reference problem...how does the vehicle know where to appear? Since there's no universal frame of reference it could appear anywhere in the universe it would seem.
Awesome nick, by the way. The Thursday Next series rocks...
Your assumptions are ignorant of basic 20th century physics. Repeat after me:
Space is relative
That's right, there is no such thing as being "stationary" except with respect to another object. This, of course, brings an interesting dilemma to the time travel problem because space is shaped differently at different values of time, so a frame of reference at one time cannot even be described at a different time.
Say your time machine is sitting on the ground on, essentially, a bunch of molecules. Suppose that at the time you travel to, those same molecules of dirt have been blown around such that they're scattered amongst a 300-mile radius. Where does the time machine land?
Then, there's the conservation of mass problem. How do you account for the fact that a time machine would have to instantly displace a bunch of matter (even if it is mostly air) when it magically appears? Where does that matter go? Is it instantly pushed to a point outside of the time machine's physical space at the speed of light? If so, it would create a terrifying shock wave.
Yeah, you could say there's a number of physics problems with regards to time travel.
I work for the federal government as well, and when it came time to purchase a new desktop machine for myself, I was given a budget of $2,500... I looked at all the different vendors, and lo and behold - Dell was by far the best price. Of course, the fed gets a special rate...the government discount on Dell machines are substantial, and THAT is why we always end up buying dell.
If you'd read the books carefully, you would know that it is impossible to know both the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer for any given universe. Thus, since the Ultimate Answer is known (42), the Ultimate Question can never be known.
No, you moron, it's gallons per mile. That's why the quote is so ridiculous. A hogshead is a large volume...essentially it's a large wine cask. So, imagine only going 30 rods on a LARGE cask of gasoline. A rod also happens to be an impossibly short distance, at least in the sense of automobiles.
Now, it so turns out that the hogshead is a different volume depending on whether it's a wine hogshead or a beer hogshead. Further elaboration on this, as well as a calculation of the other possible conversion of 30 rods/hogshead, is left as an excersize to the reader.
Yup, and I helped. I personally can't stand ambulance chasers myself, so I did a Google search for "asbestos lawsuit" and clicked once on each Google ad. :-)
I'm a government employee. Most "Congressional Benefits" that you talk about apply not only to Congressmen, but to all government employees. The only exception is we play a portion of our health care. We also have a private government retirement account (the Thrift Savings Plan that Bush mentioned in his State of the Union). In fact, the government matches the first 5% of it.
It's a pretty sweet deal, I only wish the government would take care of its citizens as well as it takes care of its employees.
My wish is that Mozilla properly render Slashdot. What an embarassment! Someone even went so far as to make a Mozilla plugin that fixed the Slashdot rendering bug! I mean, c'mon people, you'd think that Mozilla would properly render Mozilla's biggest supporter.
I referee youth and high school soccer matches on the side. It's easy to get into, runs on the weekend generally, pays pretty well and as a super added bonus, you get plenty of excercise. Perfect for those that spend long hours behind a desk...
Actually, I read somewhere that the biblical translation is fuzzy in Genesis for what a "day" is. Apparently, the old hebrew term that was used could mean either "day" or "a period of time", and it's just be popularly translated to mean a 24-hour period
No, we don't have a voice...
we are ignored because the result in my state is never in question.
Those of us in small states (in my case, Rhode Island), already don't _really_ count. Nobody campaigns here because (1) we have few electoral votes, and even if we didn't (2) we always vote at least 60-40 in favor of the Democrat and (3) because of (1) and (2) no issues that concern us are ever discussed in an election
With a popular vote, voters in Providence matter just as much as those in Des Moines or Columbus or Palm Beach.
In fact, that system would be perfectly legal under the Constitution...
"Mock Election" is the student group that is sponsoring the debate. Maybe you should bother to take two seconds to RTFA, or for that matter, the first sentences of it.
Since I started at my first post-college job in September 2002, I've gotten about $13,000 in raises.
By the way, I work for the government as a computer engineer. Your tax dollars at work! I guess this is the only sector that doesn't rise and fall with the economy...spend spend spend...