The court is on your side so far on this one. But isn't good that all the questions about it have been brought up. I for one do not know if starving to death is "peaceful" as you put it. They claim she does not feel pain but then why did the Hospice give her morphine? She left no living will and her family is even at odds over it. This is in no way a simple case.
It is an easy case. Living will law is in the books, and has been for many many years. In the absence of the living will, decision making power falls to the spouse. This is cut-and-dry, I don't even see where the leeway debating room is. I mean, sure there's alot of emotions and heartfelt feelings being thrown around, but in the letter of the law, the husband decides. This case is overblown and stupid...there's a REASON these people keep getting laughed out of court (and the executive/legislative branches should keep their damned noses out of the judicial system where they don't belong)
Please explain to me how the judicial system working CORRECTLY is not a simple case.
Living wills and abortion both get down to a very fundamental question: At what point do your rights, specifically the single most important right of survival, begin and end? When does a person become a person? When to they cease to be a person? Are we entitled to waive our own right to life under certain circumstances? These are big questions, and the minutae of how the answers are applied can impact millions of people.
You sir are totally missing the point. The "living will" issue I'm guessing is in regards to the Terry Schiavo case, which is flat-out sensationalism on the part of the media. It IS nothing more than "general public distraction" and the fact they've spend as much time or brainpower of any sort on this issue is horrendous. And you know why?
It's because we already HAVE a consensus on the issue...in the absence of a living will, the decision falls to the spouse. It's been this way for YEARS. Why is it all of a sudden a big deal? And why only this specific case? There's tons of people in very similar situations across the country. And the legal system is treating them exactly the same way (correctly) as Terry Schiavo. Namely "living will", then "spouse", then "family". I find it despicable we're wasting so much time debating this when a REAL debate over REAL problems could be going on.
If you don't like the law, fine...then you petition to have it changed...have living will arbitership fall to the parents instead of the husband. But do it in the political arena outside of a personal agenda. This latest case is nothing more than sensationalism run amuck, as most "news stories" in America are, and the judicial system has gotten it completely right and are not caving to the assinine pressure of the extreme pro-lifers (who could give a shit about what the actual law says)
Only after reading that horrid article did I see it was on a gamers website, so that makes sense why they focus so much time on tweaking XP, but even for the hard-core gamers I'm surprised they didn't talk about more hardware options.
Maybe there are some interesting things in the 4 pages of Windows XP stuff, but for me that article was pretty useless.
The Windows XP stuff was actually near dead-on for making Windows less suck. I've been doing alot of the same for years now. Contrary to popular opinion here, a Windows XP installation can be turned into a pretty clunk-free speedy implementation with the right modifications (akin to the way Redhat can become good if you take all the bloat out and tweak things)
The article should have been renamed "Windows XP Tweaking Guide" or some such thing. Though some of the hardware ideas were decent too.
The article shows it's roots in voodoo and urban myth with the statement about moving the swap file to a separate partition.
A separate partition is STILL THE SAME DRIVE. Same platters, same heads. The only benefit is that it's a little cleaner to look at.
If you need better swap performance, the ONLY way to get it is to move the swapfile to a seperate, hopefully faster, drive.
Incorrect. Spatial locality on the drive does matter in performance. If the swap is located in a more convenient location on the drive (such as in the middle of a platter), the head needs to move less to reach it, making seeks cheaper.
Now, whether or not these seek benefits are neglible or not is another story. But there's definitely advantages to spatial locality.
The only reference made to AMD is regarding their ingenious SOI technology. With the exception of that, the focus is maintained on Intel, (whom he calls the "#1 in the CPU market"). I find that somewhat absurd, since Intel is largely failing (stretching an obsolete architecture to extreme limits by extending the pipeline) where AMD is innovating and has already largely surpassed them.
AMD's CPU does a hell of alot more per clock cycle than Intel's. The AMD 64 bit chip is a marvel.
This just goes to show you that when television gets better, less people watch it.
Enterprise has been getting more and more interesting this season, and they choose now to can it.
Morons.
Actually, the problem probably is that many many fans such as myself were turned off BIGTIME in the beginning, and this is too little, too late. Had they listened to their fans in the first place instead of trying to rehash old plots and rely on T'Pol's looks to try to net an audience, maybe we wouldn't be where we are.
No, so why would you think that forcing a naive user to stumble hither and yon against arcane syntax is a good way of teaching programming concepts?
Why do you think that C/C++ are mired in syntax?
I think that "cout << data" and "printf(data)" is conisderably easier to grok and remember than "System.out.println.morelibraries.toomuchcrap.need lessderefence(data)"
Or is your argument that println is somehow more easier to understand than printf?
Java is an _awful_ language for beginners. You can't learn to code well without a basic understanding of how memory is laid out and how memory works (pointers, arrays, structures)...java abstracts all of this. It's like trying to learn how to build a house by hiring a bunch of subcontractors to do it for you. Sure, it'll get done (most likely with alot of corners cut), but you sure as hell won't know how to build it yourself (and you won't know what's going on under the "pretty exterior.")
Pointers/Arrays and control/loop structures should be the first thing you learn in any programming environment. When I was in school, they showed us STL (queues, lists, maps), and then they told us to implement the same...and the funny thing is that I remember being disgusted and appalled that I was being forced to write something that could be done with a single line of pre-existing library code (mindset of a "Java"-er). But looking back on it, man am I grateful. It was one of the greatest beginning programming lessons I ever undertook.
ou want to start --START-- with a language that has incredibly simple syntax. Like Lisp, Scheme, and the like
Are you on crack??? Lisp?? A majority of advanced programmers can't grok Lisp. I myself had to stop after like 3 weeks of class because it was like reading gibberish. Man, recognize that the people that like and understand that language and few and far between, not the norm. It's certainly not an ideal learning language (unless you're trying to turn people off to Comp Sci permanently)
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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I just think it's a bit sad to concentrate on someone's failures.
Oh man, I totally agree with you.
So anyways, did you hear what those Microsoft screwups did in Redmond today?
Did you know there's never been a communist economy in a democratic political system?
And did you know (as I posted elsewhere) that over 50% of all your money you give the government goes to borderline communistic "social" programs (ala welfare/SS)? That's dangerously close to a communistic economy to me (but hey, at least I get to spend the other 70% of my money as I choose).
Mini-PCs have been around for sometime now...just because Apple invented one that was more stylish than the ones on the market now doesn't mean they're "leading" any initiative.
I mean, even Dell offers the 4700C desktop, which is 60% smaller than their normal desktop, very slim and slightly more stylish. We've had them at work for nearly a year now. They even came with some sort of docking station that let you bolt the computer to the underside of a desk. Personally, I hated um and stuck with my old computer that I could rest my feet on and upgrade easily at will.
Mini-PCs are nothing new, Apple wasn't first.
Get off the high horse. It's a market that has existed before now and never caught on because it's not what people have wanted (especially since it normally meant paying more for the smaller design)
I don't see this Mini-PC really taking off. I mean, it has substandard parts in it in the first place....GeForce 9200 integrated?!? Man, that's like beyond obsolete these days. Why not just sell the box?
Right on. Every graduate admissions guru I've talked to from computer science to humanities to law says they prefer somebody with field experience as opposed to (exposing my personal bias here) a snot-nosed 22 year-old who thinks they're God's gift to the university. Arrogant people are very hard to teach.
Man, that sooooo goes both ways. Arrogant professors who think they're god's gift to academia and to the CS world are ridiculously impossible to learn from. Normally they're more concerned with looking good and hawking their reseach than actually being an effective teacher.
That's assuming you're measuring safe by "time to reach complete stop". Personally, I find it rather ridiculous that most people think the safest and most proper way to avoid an upcoming accident is to slam on the brakes and hope for the best.
Far Cry an original idea/concept?
That's sheer lunacy.
Far Cry was nothing more than your run-of-the-mill shooter with the latest-and-greatest graphics engine at the time.
There was nothing original about its plot or even the gameplay (barring maybe the oh-so-brief hang-glider addition).
I'm a longtime reader of WWDN and I know you're big into poker. Is there any chance of you making an appearance on Celebrity Poker on Bravo? It'd kick ass to see you on there in action;)
no the #1 cause of traffic Jams are tailgaiting and cutting people off.
If that's true, why do I frequently see a row of slow-going cars blocking all traffic with about a mile of open-road ahead of them? I don't see anybody swerving up there. I see one jackass doing 55 in the fast lane, obstructing traffic. Aka, OBSTRUCTION == "traffic jam".
If people would get the hell out of the way and let traffic flow, AND if people wouldn't frickin look at every god damn accident or piece of garbage on the side of the road, there would be no traffic jams.
Actually, it's a pain in the ass (if not impossible) to run a full-screen game on one monitor, and have the other available for other tasks in Windows.
If someone knows how to make this work, please lemme know. I've been on this quest for awhile.
Is it the car commercials that creates the race-car mentality in most people? Is it the long commutes to work? What?
Why is it that because someone can drive safely at a higher speed than you, you consider it a "race-car mentality." You wouldn't become irate if you'll walking somewhere and you come across someone walking about half your "comfortable" pace who refused to move? For some people, there is damn near physiological pain caused by being forced to move that slow. How would you feel if you were forced to drive with your e-brake engaged? Or travel everywhere by foot with alot of heavy weights strapped on you? Simple fact is that we're each comfortable with a different level of mobility. If something or someone slows that mobility (for whatever reason), it will irritate us. This is why the simplest and more sensible thing to do is simply to allow faster traffic to pass.
Its amazing how irate people can become when you do "only" 5 mph over the speed limit. Or when you slow down on a curvy road so that your stopping distance is less then your field of vision.
People become irate when others feel they have a right to force others to go their own speed by obstructing traffic. No one would care what speed you did if you did it out of the fast lane, or if you occasionally moved to the shoulder on a 1-lane road to allow faster traffic to pass. Nothing disgusts me more than when I see a huge traffic jam on the highway, with 4 lanes of open road ahead of a single dickhead in the passing lane matching the speed of the lane beside him (or a single person in a one-lane road with a stack of like 15 cars behind them that won't move over and let traffic pass)
of stopping distance, its amazing how many people think that a 20 year old pickup, fully loaded, with trailer, will stop as quickly as a compact car. At least, that's what I'm assume they are thinking, why else would they pull out right in front of me?
Similarly, why does the 20 year old fully loaded pickup have no problem jumping in front of me in a hurry while it can see me flying down the road behind it, only to barely move afterwards?
Quite frankly it is ridiculous to think that a bot with perfect play can clean out any table. Good poker play results in a slow accumulation of profit at a faster rate than losses. A perfect bot will certainly not be playing more than 1 in 5 hands to begin with, and not win more than one in 3 of those. Good players can't just make the right cards appear, no matter what you saw in Maverick. They get the same crappy cards as everyone else, it's how they play them that differs.
You assume that a bot would be doing straight statistical odds calculations for all hands, not reading player betting history at all. A bot can easily be made to track whether plays are tight or loose or unpredictable. Bots can be made to bluff occasionally and raise and lower bets slightly to throw players off. Everything a player does strategically can be simulated by a bot in online play. Don't fool yourself. A computer can read players, and without facial expressions, I'd argue a computer could do it better.
Therefore a player's skill depends strongly on his ability to "read" and bluff other players. Which is why poker bots will probably remain useless for a very long time. Probably until we reach hard AI.
Not true at all.
I'd trust a computer's ability to judge past betting patterns long before I'd trust a human's. In online poker, you can't actually SEE the person, and thus the only "tells" you get are from analyzing past play. Comps definitely can do that. It's just statistics.
Uhm... I'm not an automobile engineer, but somebody got to explain this to me. Is the *average* American car really in the 200HP range? I mean, I have a 225HP car, and that's considered "a lot" in Europe. Is there anybody that can explain this to me?
That's probably abour right. I drive a Maxima, which is technically considered "sports sedan" and get 255 HP, but it's also a fairly heavy vehicle. As SUVs are really popular here as well, those weights require the need for greater horsepower. The average 4 cylinder around here probably runs in the 150-200 range. 200 seems like a sensible overall average.
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Please explain to me how the judicial system working CORRECTLY is not a simple case.
It's because we already HAVE a consensus on the issue...in the absence of a living will, the decision falls to the spouse. It's been this way for YEARS. Why is it all of a sudden a big deal? And why only this specific case? There's tons of people in very similar situations across the country. And the legal system is treating them exactly the same way (correctly) as Terry Schiavo. Namely "living will", then "spouse", then "family". I find it despicable we're wasting so much time debating this when a REAL debate over REAL problems could be going on.
If you don't like the law, fine...then you petition to have it changed...have living will arbitership fall to the parents instead of the husband. But do it in the political arena outside of a personal agenda. This latest case is nothing more than sensationalism run amuck, as most "news stories" in America are, and the judicial system has gotten it completely right and are not caving to the assinine pressure of the extreme pro-lifers (who could give a shit about what the actual law says)
The article should have been renamed "Windows XP Tweaking Guide" or some such thing. Though some of the hardware ideas were decent too.
Now, whether or not these seek benefits are neglible or not is another story. But there's definitely advantages to spatial locality.
Hehe, it's just like Galaxy Quest.
Never give up, never surrender :)
The only reference made to AMD is regarding their ingenious SOI technology. With the exception of that, the focus is maintained on Intel, (whom he calls the "#1 in the CPU market"). I find that somewhat absurd, since Intel is largely failing (stretching an obsolete architecture to extreme limits by extending the pipeline) where AMD is innovating and has already largely surpassed them.
AMD's CPU does a hell of alot more per clock cycle than Intel's. The AMD 64 bit chip is a marvel.
Had they listened to their fans in the first place instead of trying to rehash old plots and rely on T'Pol's looks to try to net an audience, maybe we wouldn't be where we are.
Why do you think that C/C++ are mired in syntax?d lessderefence(data)"
Or is your argument that println is somehow more easier to understand than printf?
I think that "cout << data" and "printf(data)" is conisderably easier to grok and remember than "System.out.println.morelibraries.toomuchcrap.nee
Java is an _awful_ language for beginners. You can't learn to code well without a basic understanding of how memory is laid out and how memory works (pointers, arrays, structures)...java abstracts all of this. It's like trying to learn how to build a house by hiring a bunch of subcontractors to do it for you. Sure, it'll get done (most likely with alot of corners cut), but you sure as hell won't know how to build it yourself (and you won't know what's going on under the "pretty exterior.")
Pointers/Arrays and control/loop structures should be the first thing you learn in any programming environment. When I was in school, they showed us STL (queues, lists, maps), and then they told us to implement the same...and the funny thing is that I remember being disgusted and appalled that I was being forced to write something that could be done with a single line of pre-existing library code (mindset of a "Java"-er). But looking back on it, man am I grateful. It was one of the greatest beginning programming lessons I ever undertook.
ou want to start --START-- with a language that has incredibly simple syntax. Like Lisp, Scheme, and the like
Are you on crack??? Lisp?? A majority of advanced programmers can't grok Lisp. I myself had to stop after like 3 weeks of class because it was like reading gibberish. Man, recognize that the people that like and understand that language and few and far between, not the norm. It's certainly not an ideal learning language (unless you're trying to turn people off to Comp Sci permanently)
Oh man, I totally agree with you.
So anyways, did you hear what those Microsoft screwups did in Redmond today?
And did you know (as I posted elsewhere) that over 50% of all your money you give the government goes to borderline communistic "social" programs (ala welfare/SS)? That's dangerously close to a communistic economy to me (but hey, at least I get to spend the other 70% of my money as I choose).
I mean, even Dell offers the 4700C desktop, which is 60% smaller than their normal desktop, very slim and slightly more stylish. We've had them at work for nearly a year now. They even came with some sort of docking station that let you bolt the computer to the underside of a desk. Personally, I hated um and stuck with my old computer that I could rest my feet on and upgrade easily at will.
Mini-PCs are nothing new, Apple wasn't first. Get off the high horse. It's a market that has existed before now and never caught on because it's not what people have wanted (especially since it normally meant paying more for the smaller design)
I don't see this Mini-PC really taking off. I mean, it has substandard parts in it in the first place....GeForce 9200 integrated?!? Man, that's like beyond obsolete these days. Why not just sell the box?
Vee vere invited!
Punch vas served!
That's assuming you're measuring safe by "time to reach complete stop".
Personally, I find it rather ridiculous that most people think the safest and most proper way to avoid an upcoming accident is to slam on the brakes and hope for the best.
Far Cry an original idea/concept?
That's sheer lunacy.
Far Cry was nothing more than your run-of-the-mill shooter with the latest-and-greatest graphics engine at the time.
There was nothing original about its plot or even the gameplay (barring maybe the oh-so-brief hang-glider addition).
Does Google in Australia guess "beer" whenever you type "coffee"? :)
I'm a longtime reader of WWDN and I know you're big into poker. ;)
Is there any chance of you making an appearance on Celebrity Poker on Bravo?
It'd kick ass to see you on there in action
You'll learn that you can code for 3 months straight (weekends too), live without sleep or a social life, and be miserable doing it all at once.
If that's true, why do I frequently see a row of slow-going cars blocking all traffic with about a mile of open-road ahead of them? I don't see anybody swerving up there. I see one jackass doing 55 in the fast lane, obstructing traffic. Aka, OBSTRUCTION == "traffic jam".
If people would get the hell out of the way and let traffic flow, AND if people wouldn't frickin look at every god damn accident or piece of garbage on the side of the road, there would be no traffic jams.
Do you have any idea how complicated your circulatory system is?
If someone knows how to make this work, please lemme know. I've been on this quest for awhile.
Don't be a jackass.
I'd trust a computer's ability to judge past betting patterns long before I'd trust a human's. In online poker, you can't actually SEE the person, and thus the only "tells" you get are from analyzing past play. Comps definitely can do that. It's just statistics.