registered users don't necessarily mean 'paying users'. A common industry trick I'm afraid. We're registered users on/., but we don't pay them after all.
The other thing is even if they were all paying users. Say you're 25 or 30 million bucks in debt for having made the game, set up servers, marketting etc. (maybe more maybe less but it's a good number for an MMO), at say 130k copies they made maybe 3 million back, because retailers etc. take a lot of your costs. Even if they made 6 million they're still very deep in the hole. Now, as you say, if they're all paying a monthly fee they should be able to eventually recover. That however, is not usually how it works. Of those lets presume 130k people who bought the game, what percent are sticking around? If they're leaving in droves and you've only got 20 or 30k actual paying customers you have a very serious problem, and no one is going to think you're able to pay your bills at that rate.
Presumably if they had money to provide refunds they wouldn't be shutting their doors.
If you bought it recently (like the last week or so) you should probably be able to return it to a retailer, if you bought it in early august or back in july, well, some games are short 8-20 hour affairs even at full price. This happens to be one of them.
It's not that the US has a different strategy. There is one giant world strategy. The US and japan will compete for the next reactor, because japan and france competed for this one, and france won. There are only so many nuclear physics researchers in the world and they swarm around whatever the best thing available is.
The article you link is only a handbook any only covers narcotics. Cargo is covered by a different set of TSA and FAA rules. Oh and it's a private site the official FAA site says the same thing, but is well, official.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL32022.pdf has a half decent, if somewhat long (and admittedly largely unnecessary discussion) about how cargo is to be carried.
Radioactive and hazardous goods, and goods in general need a TSO number from the FAA.
The TSA has a (very long and nearly impossible to read) breakdown of their rules http://www.tsa.gov/research/laws/regs/editorial_1786.shtm. Going back to february they were looking to extend existing rules to basically block all sorts of stuff from private use the way commercial use planes are. They have backed off much of that plan, but you don't extend rules that don't exist. In short, basically anything they class as hazardous in a plane of appropriate size they get to approve, or not.
Being neither an american nor a private plane owner I feel no compelling reason to try and hunt down hand weapons in their documentation, but if they don't like it, they have rules about it. That's what government is for I suppose.
Well except that he's in japan. What you can, or cannot do on your private plane in any other country has nothing to do with what you can, or should be allowed to do in Japan. If you want to fly in japan, you follow japans rules. And really, aren't most american planes private? They're owned by either leasing companies(GE) or the airlines, they have one set of rules of what you can, or cannot do on their planes, and the government has others, and you have to follow them all.
Also, I would think if you wanted to park a plane in your yard you can probably put whatever weapons on it you want, but if you want to be allowed to take off, well then the FAA might have a few things to say about it.
It depends a bit on the assignment, and I'm being somewhat glib. We have lots of ways we check for cheating, exams are part of that.
Generally, in courses where I'm the TA, I know if a student has cheated right away on an assignment. You know them, you know their level of competence, and if everything is inconsistent with that, you know something is fishy. But I don't have the money (ie people time) to police every line of code in every programming project. Even deleting the code and asking them to reproduce just means they figured it out after they were given a solution by someone else. The gap between knowing what to do, and knowing why it works can be pretty big. We're hopefully preparing people to know what to do, but it never quite works as planned.
right, and if you had 10 more years experience you'd have a 75K job as a web developer at a major university. That's not to say you did anything wrong up until this point. Maybe part of what makes the 75k a convenient bracket is that it's achievable, it makes all the rest of the expenses proportionally less, but isn't so much it's overwhelming what to do with it. Wouldn't it be nice to make 75K a year? Can you see yourself, with enough experience, in a position like that? Are there people around you who make 75k? (professors, cough). By the time you make 75K/year you might not have a mortgage, or at least, much of one, that makes life easier, but not so easy you wallow in self confusion.
It also probably depends heavily on where you live, since 75K means very different things in New York city, vs say, wyoming. It's a nice average, but probably one could do a better analysis for a more local breakdown.
a flat tax rate disadvantages people at the bottom, a lot. People who right now pay nothing would suddenly be paying say an income tax of 23% (in the US).
Most places that use income tax have graduated brackets. For interest sake, and because I have it in front of me, for 2008 in canada the federal tax brackets were 72k at 11.16. So if you make 150k, you pay about 21% on the first 36k, 31% on the chunk between 36 and 72, 37% on the bit from 72 to 123 and 40% on anything theraftere. You don't pay 40% on all your income, just the income over the bracket. I'm radically oversimplifying a several hundred line tax code into two lines. I haven't had to pay income taxes at all in 12 years because i'm a student, and even when I wasn't a student making real money in the 70k range I had tax credits from medical expenses and left over from school to not have to pay anything. One could simplify the tax code, everyone pays 27%. But then people who are really poor, say making 20k or less, that through tax credits etc manage to not have to pay anything would be taxed a lot and so on. One could (and I pick these numbers arbitrarily), add income tax brackets at 250K, 500k and 1 million dollars, of say 45, 50 and 55%.
Part of the problem, if you're trying to do wealth redistribution, is that rich people run out of things to spend money on after a couple of hundred K income a year. Sure they can buy a 300 million dollar yacht, but they can only really use 1. If you have an income of 300 million dollars a year you just cannot find sensible things to pay people to do. That's why the rich get richer so to speak. You can only spend so much money before you start getting little to no value for it. A 300 million dollar yacht isn't likely to provide a great deal more or less enjoyment than a 200 million or 400 million dollar yacht, but to someone poor a $10000 car and a $20000 can be very different. This is especially true for people who actually earned their money, if you work 40 hours a week you aren't exactly flying out to italy in the evening to sail around on your yacht. The US has, within itself, seen a rising income inequity on a gini index, since 1968, which peaked in 2006. But just tax policy isn't really an answer in and of itself. In canada we have oil in alberta, meaning suddenly a high school drop out who wants to fit pipe 1000km from the nearest city can make 100K+ a year, whereas a PhD in chemical engineering in toronto would be lucky to start around 100k/year. That creates income equality today, but is a disaster if the price of oil drops. The US has a structural problem of millions of workers trained to do (manufacturing) jobs which can be done equally well for less money somewhere else (china). In that case the issue is less income tax and more training. People at the bottom are really really bottom because they're oversupplied and scrounging for work, whereas people who are educated managers/leaders/innovators are undersupplied. Changing tax rates to help people who are poor today isn't going to create better jobs for them, if anything it's going to ship more money to china.
Fair is an interesting notion. Is it fair that today we have a different tax rate than we did 20 years ago? If we change it we are making the system more or less fair in one way, but less in another. A person born 5 years after I was, but in the same place had to do 1 less year of highschool than I did. That's one extra year of earning power for him. Is that fair? My step brother is 5 years older than I am, he had to go to a shitty highschool where I went to a good one, because they changed districts, is that fair? Is the opportunity we (as a society) provided people what determines fair? And should the people who benefited the most from that system be the ones who contribute the most ensuring it's future success. I don't think fair is just how we treat people this instant in time, it is how well we have empowered them to succeed. People born in the 1830's and 1950's had the highest chances for being b
The problem with a 90% tax rate is that it only works when other places do the same. For most decent to live places the top tax bracket is in the 50-60% range. All those rich people can, and will, just pack up and leave for somewhere else. In the 50's, heck even in the 70's and 80's there were places with top tax brackets in the 70-80% range, so rich people were basically stuck paying no matter where they went. The world is somewhat different now. For better or worse. But for 40% of my income, which, if I'm rich could equate to millions a year, I could be persuaded to live in france, switzerland, germany or the UK rather than the US. Up until the 80's switzerland was essentially a tax haven at about 50% top tax rate, plus their crazy pay once on a deal thing, compared to everyone around it in the 80's (because switzerland mostly dodged WW2 debt and reconstruction).
The other thing with the 90% tax bracket is that it was a holdover from WW2. The US (and everywhere else) ran up astronomical debt, and needed to pay it off. When I say astronomical, I mean, if the US had a debt of say 25 or 30 trillion dollars today sort of equivalent. Not the 13.5 or so it currently is (note I'm including intergovernmental debt, which other people may or may not count, total public debt in the us is about 9 trillion USD, which is ~60% of gdp, and about half of it's peak in the 1940's of 120% of gdp). That kind of debt both forces politicians to consider drastic action, and makes people much more willing to pay taxes to cover it. I don't think in 1947 anyone sane blamed the other political party for running up the debt unnecessarily the same way they would today. Today you have a conservative movement, which opposes a lot of government spending (and by extension its members don't want to pay taxes to fund it), and a liberal movement, who are bound by the fact that everywhere else has taxes not radically higher than yours, and both movements are drunk on cheap credit from china and scared investors who are buying government bonds rather than stocks.
I've done comp sci and physics, and 4-5 things in a class is about normal. I'm teaching a course this year that will be 4 assignments and a final. I'm not thrilled at having a final, but when the class is big enough that you don't really know the students the only way to know if a student actually did any of the work they claimed is to test them on it, in class. On the other hand I'm not going to ask 3D game engine code in class time. It's a tricky balance, since brilliant coders may not be any good at tests, but the difference between brilliant coder, and brilliant at paying someone else to code for them is hard to check for.
For all of it's faults, at least she posted on facebook, and she was caught. I'm sure lots of jurors over the centuries have made up their minds well before they should, anything that removes them from the process can't be all bad.
which goes to the question of whether or not some of these programs really count as user level. Is anti virus user level? Well it can be, but what about one that blocks rootkits? What about one that is trying do something crazy related to virtualization? What if HP just assumes you're either too stupid to use unbuntu on your computer or are smart enough to not use their terrible software anyway?
PC angel and HP protect conceivably live outside the OS level, well actually they do basically the same thing GRUB does, which is allow you to boot into another OS. They just aren't full blown OS's (PC angel is disk imaging, HP protect is I think aiming to be security before the OS layer). I don't think i've ever used adobe flex, but I can't see why a web creation suite is is writing outside a normal partition. Note: I'm guessing at how HP protect works, but some of their security solutions could conceivably live outside the OS, whether that's a good idea or not is another matter, but they might have a legitimate reason for doing it that way.
if it's a problem of everyone trying to solve the same problem in basically the same way (trying to stick bootloaders all in the same place) it might be a big political win for GRUB, to justifiably create some actual standards so all the OS guys use the same bootloader locations, with their boot info in a standard format so they can all work at once. Though adobe in this one looks like they deserve to be slapped around a bit, if the conjecture is accurate.
The visual studio thing is actually an interesting question. If, in the process of writing code you crash visual studio, or the whole OS and then send an error report to MS will it contain your source code? To some degree the same applies to any application, if you crash notepad++ and send a crash report to MS it would make sense that it contain well, whatever was being typed in notepad++. if you crash your copy of Mafia 2 does it send the savegame?
It's somewhat outside the scope of the article, but really, all those crash reports you can send to MS have to contain a lot of stuff for them to be useful.
Very true, some of it is politcal. You don't want people in the habit of wasting helium for the fun of it and then thinking it isn't worth anything.
It's much the same with water conservation, whether you use a low flow toilet or a low flow shower isn't actually going to change how much water you waste by much (waste I would consider evaporated and lost to the existing water system, relative the amount typically received from similar sources).
Helium use is broken down here: http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/helium-use.pdf
Which is the latest I found. Even wasting 4 or 5% is still, IMO a lot of waste if there's something it can be used for that's actually you know... useful.
All of this somewhat in contrast to oil and water, in that you can always get water, it's just more expensive. And most of what you do with oil can be done with other things, maybe not as efficiently but it can be done, and you can make oil, albeit in a lossy way. What you need helium for is very hard to replace with anything else (notably cooling), but it's prohibitively hard to actually make more of it (for the moment, and banking on the free market resolving the issue is not my idea of good planning).
Helium can be formed a couple of other ways. One is fusion of course. The other is radioactive decay. We have lots of that, even very low activity decay going on, it's a matter of bothering to trap the helium from it. Of course if you can find some way to induce alpha decay then you could produce helium (e.g. if you could neutron induce it like with fission or something else). Some alpha emitters have a fairly long decay chain where they will spit out several alpha particles before they stop, so it's not like you're taking thorium, and then getting radium and helium, you'd get potentially 6 heliums and lead (or stop somewhere else on the decay chain).
But overall, yes, the relative lack of helium in future could pose serious problems. Wasting it on party balloons is destroying a potentially very useful product.
ya, I mean, someone goes to the police and says they were raped by someone who could leave the country quickly. Assuming they have a passing level of believability the police are going to try and catch the accused quickly. That means a warrant, possibly news reports. That this became international is only because Mr Assange is an international figure, and it's a little ridiculous to say 'only swedish press in sweden can report this news!'. In north america we have amber alerts where we broadcast the licence plates (and vehicle descriptions) of suspected child kidnappers all over the news/radio/road signs. It's not like we're any different (I'm in canada).
You cannot on one hand spread information publicly, widely, and quickly, especially to try and catch a serious criminal, while at the same restrict who can report on, or know about that information. They are directly contradictory.
As to the assertion by Loteck that there could be something wrong with this system of justice.... well lets face it, most of the world doesn't have the ugly hybrid law system that exists in the US, or the common law system of most of the english speaking world. Different law systems are implemented very differently, with very different goals and rules. Innocent until proven guilty is most definitely not a universal concept, and, depending on the system, not even necessarily a good one. And different countries will, based largely on past experience, have very different responses to false allegations and warrants against someone. Even if they arrested Mr Assange and let him go the next day, what harm does that do to his reputation? Well maybe in the US a lot of people will be very angry about the whole thing and believe him guilty of rape, but most of the rest of us are going to go well, someone made some crap up, and let it go, and I bet most Americans will do the same. It happens, and it's part of the risk of being a public figure. One would hope of course that the person who made the (presumably false) accusation will be facing a very unhappy swedish prosecutor, but like anyone else who has delusions about celebrities they may just have.. shall we politely say.. mental problems. Or they're on the dole of the US government trying to discredit him. Either way.
Or at the very least an attempt to keep up with western technology, a month ago the UK unveiled the Corax for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Corax), the french have the Dassault nEuron (Dassault nEUROn) or any of the many other armed UAV's.
What a country like iran doing this is show us how easy it is to do half decent version of this technology, and if it comes to a shooting war, how easy they are to hack.
it's also websites that do not play nice with small screens or are (as in the case of many corporate apps) only functional with a very specific web browser and or configuration.
Sure, a website that doesn't play nice with a small screen is usually the developers fault, and yes, people still relying on IE6 should be, if not shot, at least replaced by competent people. But what matters when I buy a device is how well can it connect, now how well it should connect.
Last I checked, which admittedly was 3 or 4 years ago, apple had restrictions on what could go into the firmware on NVIDIA and ATI cards's in their machines. it's why you couldn't pull one of those graphics cards out and have it work on a windows box, or, somewhat more seriously, you couldn't replace your mac graphics card with a regular one and have it work properly under OSX (but it would work under windows).
I haven't tried lately however, not being a mac guy. I only knew of any of that (in somewhat more detail) from a former ATI employee I met at a conference who had worked on some of it.
I suspect the main thing this patent means, is that someone important at Apple had their iPhone stolen and suddenly the company is taking seriously that this is an issue. For years, really since early iPods apple should have been able to track and disable stolen iPods, or at least prevent them from updating or provide an IP address to police etc. But they never took it seriously, so despite them being rather expensive devices police treated a stolen iPod like a stolen childrens toy, and apple wasn't about to do anything else.
For whatever reason they've changed their minds and decided to put some thought into it. Whether it materializes into anything beyond the 'try and patent everything just in case' phase of development remains to be seen.
An atom is a collection of matter, which would be sort of a second step. Light is just energy, typically we are concerned with 'visible' light (or something close thereto) with Lasers and use the term Maser for microwaves for example, but the principles are the same. e=(gamma) m*c^2 and all that. Enough energy and you can make whatever sorts of matter you want. Normally with big colliders we are interested in producing some matter no one has seen before, so the more mondane making regular protons, electrons or the like doesn't get much attention. Also there's not a great deal of commercial application of producing stuff that's easier to just dig holes in the ground for, so what older accelerators *can* do doesn't get a lot of attention. Don't get me wrong, there are applications for smaller accelerators, just not for making relatively boring matter.
A terrorist is someone who uses terrorism, which is some combination of a strategy and tactic. Revolutionaries can be terrorists, or not, governments can be terrorists or not. Terrorism is just a a method, and not exclusive with other, more traditional methods. They grab guns and shoot at americans in iraq, that isn't terrorism, that's resistance,
Whether terrorism was justified (or perhaps in the case of WW2 accepted as something we did which, while not always the right choice was part of a broader strategy that was basically acceptable) or not may be written by the victors, but the losers still write their own books.
Al Qaeda is so interesting (and dangerous) because while it uses terrorism it doesn't ever intend to manifest itself as the entity to lead once it has it's goal(s). That's because it's an amalgam of many groups that want different things (usually the overthrow or removal of a government allied to the US or Russia, such as israel, saudi, egypt, to some degree pakistan, chechnya, dagestan, but sometimes they want a more 'conservative' muslim government in places such as the phillipines, indonesia, malaysia). Where before Al qaeda all these sub organizations existed, and were working against for example the aforementioned governments, al qaeda came along and said the real enemies are the Americans, and if you can terrorism them out of backing governments around the world, then the rest of them will fall to the local cells. It is, in it's own words, 'the base'. Whether that makes it a revolutionary is up for debate, but even they would acknowledge they're terrorists, they merely think it a necessary tool in their arsenal (along with all of the other things they have tried).
Well power reduction is a business desktop sort of problem. Most people are better served with a discrete GPU that will actually run the 3d crap in windows or starcraft than they are with a reduction of 100W of power consumption.
It's not that they're fundamentally bad chips, just that they're wrong for the market they're putting them in. No more than diesel engines in everyday cars. They have a place, and an important one, just not in the vehicle I drive to work everyday.
he's talking about 2011/2012 when intel and AMD start packaging CPU's and GPU's in a single die on a regular basis, right now it's part of arrandale (the 32 nm i5's). I'm presuming he's just misinformed that this doesn't happen now on everything. Or he's making a bad joke about how people don't know the difference between a CPU and the whole computer case.
For AMD this is part of their 'the future is fusion' marketing. I can't recall what Intel has called it. Basically rather than a processor core you get a GPU core. So an 8 core, or 4 core machine can really be a collection of CPU and GPU cores. In the short term this isn't likely to impact a lot of/. readers on their home systems, since you can power, and cool about 1200 mm^2 of chips, split between cpu and GPU but if you want cheap, or cool 'fusion' is a good strategy. It's not like most computer actually need or want a decent (hot) GPU anyway.
As a game development guy I'm strongly opposed to intel gpu's in home users machines. They buy crap and then don't know why stuff doesn't work. But the business desktop is a whole other matter.
Well this is why WW2 games are so popular. No one sane in germany is going to come out and say 'hey the nazi's were really the good guys!', and if they did their government would be all over them.
Modern warfare on any number of levels is much less clear cut. Even WW1 is much less clear cut, as are the interwar year. At;east those you can draw along nationalism lines.
Part of game design, or any entertainment is getting the audience/player to sympathize with a hero, or if you're making a distinctly anti-hero (think KOTOR/mass effect, infamous) the evil guy is constructed to see a different side of the story. I don't think you could make a game where the player is hitler trying to take over germany and have it be all that popular. Rooting for fictional bad guys is one thing (especially if it's done with humour, like overlord or if it's more of a gray area moral slant like mass effect), rooting for real ones is another.
But modern war, it's not really clear who the good guys are, if anyone, and there's certainly not much humour to be found in it. In Vietnam it's not like the americans were the bad guys and the communists good, they were both varying degrees of bad. French occupation of indochina, algeria etc, well france was definitely a bad guy (in contrast to a country trying to facilitate an orderly transition of power as part of decolonization), but it's not like we want to come out strongly in favour of militant muslims (algeria), who basically want(ed) pre-colonial islamic law, or the communists in indochina.
So given the rather messy nature of good and evil in modern war (note I use modern war in the french sense of most conflicts since Korea except the falklands, bosnia and the first gulf war), there's no good way to clarify who's good and who's bad. You could try and make a movie about a guy trying to eek out a living in this mess, s/he could certainly be a hero, have no deep seated ideological affiliation, but there's not much of a 'game' there. You don't want to split the market in half and have them supporting your depiction of one side, but not the other.
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registered users don't necessarily mean 'paying users'. A common industry trick I'm afraid. We're registered users on /., but we don't pay them after all.
The other thing is even if they were all paying users. Say you're 25 or 30 million bucks in debt for having made the game, set up servers, marketting etc. (maybe more maybe less but it's a good number for an MMO), at say 130k copies they made maybe 3 million back, because retailers etc. take a lot of your costs. Even if they made 6 million they're still very deep in the hole. Now, as you say, if they're all paying a monthly fee they should be able to eventually recover. That however, is not usually how it works. Of those lets presume 130k people who bought the game, what percent are sticking around? If they're leaving in droves and you've only got 20 or 30k actual paying customers you have a very serious problem, and no one is going to think you're able to pay your bills at that rate.
Presumably if they had money to provide refunds they wouldn't be shutting their doors.
If you bought it recently (like the last week or so) you should probably be able to return it to a retailer, if you bought it in early august or back in july, well, some games are short 8-20 hour affairs even at full price. This happens to be one of them.
It's not that the US has a different strategy. There is one giant world strategy. The US and japan will compete for the next reactor, because japan and france competed for this one, and france won. There are only so many nuclear physics researchers in the world and they swarm around whatever the best thing available is.
The article you link is only a handbook any only covers narcotics. Cargo is covered by a different set of TSA and FAA rules. Oh and it's a private site the official FAA site says the same thing, but is well, official.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL32022.pdf has a half decent, if somewhat long (and admittedly largely unnecessary discussion) about how cargo is to be carried.
Radioactive and hazardous goods, and goods in general need a TSO number from the FAA.
The TSA has a (very long and nearly impossible to read) breakdown of their rules http://www.tsa.gov/research/laws/regs/editorial_1786.shtm. Going back to february they were looking to extend existing rules to basically block all sorts of stuff from private use the way commercial use planes are. They have backed off much of that plan, but you don't extend rules that don't exist. In short, basically anything they class as hazardous in a plane of appropriate size they get to approve, or not.
Being neither an american nor a private plane owner I feel no compelling reason to try and hunt down hand weapons in their documentation, but if they don't like it, they have rules about it. That's what government is for I suppose.
Well except that he's in japan. What you can, or cannot do on your private plane in any other country has nothing to do with what you can, or should be allowed to do in Japan. If you want to fly in japan, you follow japans rules. And really, aren't most american planes private? They're owned by either leasing companies(GE) or the airlines, they have one set of rules of what you can, or cannot do on their planes, and the government has others, and you have to follow them all.
Also, I would think if you wanted to park a plane in your yard you can probably put whatever weapons on it you want, but if you want to be allowed to take off, well then the FAA might have a few things to say about it.
It depends a bit on the assignment, and I'm being somewhat glib. We have lots of ways we check for cheating, exams are part of that.
Generally, in courses where I'm the TA, I know if a student has cheated right away on an assignment. You know them, you know their level of competence, and if everything is inconsistent with that, you know something is fishy. But I don't have the money (ie people time) to police every line of code in every programming project. Even deleting the code and asking them to reproduce just means they figured it out after they were given a solution by someone else. The gap between knowing what to do, and knowing why it works can be pretty big. We're hopefully preparing people to know what to do, but it never quite works as planned.
right, and if you had 10 more years experience you'd have a 75K job as a web developer at a major university. That's not to say you did anything wrong up until this point. Maybe part of what makes the 75k a convenient bracket is that it's achievable, it makes all the rest of the expenses proportionally less, but isn't so much it's overwhelming what to do with it. Wouldn't it be nice to make 75K a year? Can you see yourself, with enough experience, in a position like that? Are there people around you who make 75k? (professors, cough). By the time you make 75K/year you might not have a mortgage, or at least, much of one, that makes life easier, but not so easy you wallow in self confusion.
It also probably depends heavily on where you live, since 75K means very different things in New York city, vs say, wyoming. It's a nice average, but probably one could do a better analysis for a more local breakdown.
a flat tax rate disadvantages people at the bottom, a lot. People who right now pay nothing would suddenly be paying say an income tax of 23% (in the US).
Most places that use income tax have graduated brackets. For interest sake, and because I have it in front of me, for 2008 in canada the federal tax brackets were 72k at 11.16. So if you make 150k, you pay about 21% on the first 36k, 31% on the chunk between 36 and 72, 37% on the bit from 72 to 123 and 40% on anything theraftere. You don't pay 40% on all your income, just the income over the bracket. I'm radically oversimplifying a several hundred line tax code into two lines. I haven't had to pay income taxes at all in 12 years because i'm a student, and even when I wasn't a student making real money in the 70k range I had tax credits from medical expenses and left over from school to not have to pay anything. One could simplify the tax code, everyone pays 27%. But then people who are really poor, say making 20k or less, that through tax credits etc manage to not have to pay anything would be taxed a lot and so on. One could (and I pick these numbers arbitrarily), add income tax brackets at 250K, 500k and 1 million dollars, of say 45, 50 and 55%.
Part of the problem, if you're trying to do wealth redistribution, is that rich people run out of things to spend money on after a couple of hundred K income a year. Sure they can buy a 300 million dollar yacht, but they can only really use 1. If you have an income of 300 million dollars a year you just cannot find sensible things to pay people to do. That's why the rich get richer so to speak. You can only spend so much money before you start getting little to no value for it. A 300 million dollar yacht isn't likely to provide a great deal more or less enjoyment than a 200 million or 400 million dollar yacht, but to someone poor a $10000 car and a $20000 can be very different. This is especially true for people who actually earned their money, if you work 40 hours a week you aren't exactly flying out to italy in the evening to sail around on your yacht. The US has, within itself, seen a rising income inequity on a gini index, since 1968, which peaked in 2006. But just tax policy isn't really an answer in and of itself. In canada we have oil in alberta, meaning suddenly a high school drop out who wants to fit pipe 1000km from the nearest city can make 100K+ a year, whereas a PhD in chemical engineering in toronto would be lucky to start around 100k/year. That creates income equality today, but is a disaster if the price of oil drops. The US has a structural problem of millions of workers trained to do (manufacturing) jobs which can be done equally well for less money somewhere else (china). In that case the issue is less income tax and more training. People at the bottom are really really bottom because they're oversupplied and scrounging for work, whereas people who are educated managers/leaders/innovators are undersupplied. Changing tax rates to help people who are poor today isn't going to create better jobs for them, if anything it's going to ship more money to china.
Fair is an interesting notion. Is it fair that today we have a different tax rate than we did 20 years ago? If we change it we are making the system more or less fair in one way, but less in another. A person born 5 years after I was, but in the same place had to do 1 less year of highschool than I did. That's one extra year of earning power for him. Is that fair? My step brother is 5 years older than I am, he had to go to a shitty highschool where I went to a good one, because they changed districts, is that fair? Is the opportunity we (as a society) provided people what determines fair? And should the people who benefited the most from that system be the ones who contribute the most ensuring it's future success. I don't think fair is just how we treat people this instant in time, it is how well we have empowered them to succeed. People born in the 1830's and 1950's had the highest chances for being b
The problem with a 90% tax rate is that it only works when other places do the same. For most decent to live places the top tax bracket is in the 50-60% range. All those rich people can, and will, just pack up and leave for somewhere else. In the 50's, heck even in the 70's and 80's there were places with top tax brackets in the 70-80% range, so rich people were basically stuck paying no matter where they went. The world is somewhat different now. For better or worse. But for 40% of my income, which, if I'm rich could equate to millions a year, I could be persuaded to live in france, switzerland, germany or the UK rather than the US. Up until the 80's switzerland was essentially a tax haven at about 50% top tax rate, plus their crazy pay once on a deal thing, compared to everyone around it in the 80's (because switzerland mostly dodged WW2 debt and reconstruction).
The other thing with the 90% tax bracket is that it was a holdover from WW2. The US (and everywhere else) ran up astronomical debt, and needed to pay it off. When I say astronomical, I mean, if the US had a debt of say 25 or 30 trillion dollars today sort of equivalent. Not the 13.5 or so it currently is (note I'm including intergovernmental debt, which other people may or may not count, total public debt in the us is about 9 trillion USD, which is ~60% of gdp, and about half of it's peak in the 1940's of 120% of gdp). That kind of debt both forces politicians to consider drastic action, and makes people much more willing to pay taxes to cover it. I don't think in 1947 anyone sane blamed the other political party for running up the debt unnecessarily the same way they would today. Today you have a conservative movement, which opposes a lot of government spending (and by extension its members don't want to pay taxes to fund it), and a liberal movement, who are bound by the fact that everywhere else has taxes not radically higher than yours, and both movements are drunk on cheap credit from china and scared investors who are buying government bonds rather than stocks.
I've done comp sci and physics, and 4-5 things in a class is about normal. I'm teaching a course this year that will be 4 assignments and a final. I'm not thrilled at having a final, but when the class is big enough that you don't really know the students the only way to know if a student actually did any of the work they claimed is to test them on it, in class. On the other hand I'm not going to ask 3D game engine code in class time. It's a tricky balance, since brilliant coders may not be any good at tests, but the difference between brilliant coder, and brilliant at paying someone else to code for them is hard to check for.
For all of it's faults, at least she posted on facebook, and she was caught. I'm sure lots of jurors over the centuries have made up their minds well before they should, anything that removes them from the process can't be all bad.
which goes to the question of whether or not some of these programs really count as user level. Is anti virus user level? Well it can be, but what about one that blocks rootkits? What about one that is trying do something crazy related to virtualization? What if HP just assumes you're either too stupid to use unbuntu on your computer or are smart enough to not use their terrible software anyway?
PC angel and HP protect conceivably live outside the OS level, well actually they do basically the same thing GRUB does, which is allow you to boot into another OS. They just aren't full blown OS's (PC angel is disk imaging, HP protect is I think aiming to be security before the OS layer). I don't think i've ever used adobe flex, but I can't see why a web creation suite is is writing outside a normal partition. Note: I'm guessing at how HP protect works, but some of their security solutions could conceivably live outside the OS, whether that's a good idea or not is another matter, but they might have a legitimate reason for doing it that way.
if it's a problem of everyone trying to solve the same problem in basically the same way (trying to stick bootloaders all in the same place) it might be a big political win for GRUB, to justifiably create some actual standards so all the OS guys use the same bootloader locations, with their boot info in a standard format so they can all work at once. Though adobe in this one looks like they deserve to be slapped around a bit, if the conjecture is accurate.
The visual studio thing is actually an interesting question. If, in the process of writing code you crash visual studio, or the whole OS and then send an error report to MS will it contain your source code? To some degree the same applies to any application, if you crash notepad++ and send a crash report to MS it would make sense that it contain well, whatever was being typed in notepad++. if you crash your copy of Mafia 2 does it send the savegame?
It's somewhat outside the scope of the article, but really, all those crash reports you can send to MS have to contain a lot of stuff for them to be useful.
Very true, some of it is politcal. You don't want people in the habit of wasting helium for the fun of it and then thinking it isn't worth anything.
It's much the same with water conservation, whether you use a low flow toilet or a low flow shower isn't actually going to change how much water you waste by much (waste I would consider evaporated and lost to the existing water system, relative the amount typically received from similar sources).
Helium use is broken down here: http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/helium-use.pdf
Which is the latest I found. Even wasting 4 or 5% is still, IMO a lot of waste if there's something it can be used for that's actually you know... useful.
All of this somewhat in contrast to oil and water, in that you can always get water, it's just more expensive. And most of what you do with oil can be done with other things, maybe not as efficiently but it can be done, and you can make oil, albeit in a lossy way. What you need helium for is very hard to replace with anything else (notably cooling), but it's prohibitively hard to actually make more of it (for the moment, and banking on the free market resolving the issue is not my idea of good planning).
Helium can be formed a couple of other ways. One is fusion of course. The other is radioactive decay. We have lots of that, even very low activity decay going on, it's a matter of bothering to trap the helium from it. Of course if you can find some way to induce alpha decay then you could produce helium (e.g. if you could neutron induce it like with fission or something else). Some alpha emitters have a fairly long decay chain where they will spit out several alpha particles before they stop, so it's not like you're taking thorium, and then getting radium and helium, you'd get potentially 6 heliums and lead (or stop somewhere else on the decay chain).
But overall, yes, the relative lack of helium in future could pose serious problems. Wasting it on party balloons is destroying a potentially very useful product.
ya, I mean, someone goes to the police and says they were raped by someone who could leave the country quickly. Assuming they have a passing level of believability the police are going to try and catch the accused quickly. That means a warrant, possibly news reports. That this became international is only because Mr Assange is an international figure, and it's a little ridiculous to say 'only swedish press in sweden can report this news!'. In north america we have amber alerts where we broadcast the licence plates (and vehicle descriptions) of suspected child kidnappers all over the news/radio/road signs. It's not like we're any different (I'm in canada).
You cannot on one hand spread information publicly, widely, and quickly, especially to try and catch a serious criminal, while at the same restrict who can report on, or know about that information. They are directly contradictory.
As to the assertion by Loteck that there could be something wrong with this system of justice.... well lets face it, most of the world doesn't have the ugly hybrid law system that exists in the US, or the common law system of most of the english speaking world. Different law systems are implemented very differently, with very different goals and rules. Innocent until proven guilty is most definitely not a universal concept, and, depending on the system, not even necessarily a good one. And different countries will, based largely on past experience, have very different responses to false allegations and warrants against someone. Even if they arrested Mr Assange and let him go the next day, what harm does that do to his reputation? Well maybe in the US a lot of people will be very angry about the whole thing and believe him guilty of rape, but most of the rest of us are going to go well, someone made some crap up, and let it go, and I bet most Americans will do the same. It happens, and it's part of the risk of being a public figure. One would hope of course that the person who made the (presumably false) accusation will be facing a very unhappy swedish prosecutor, but like anyone else who has delusions about celebrities they may just have.. shall we politely say.. mental problems. Or they're on the dole of the US government trying to discredit him. Either way.
Or at the very least an attempt to keep up with western technology, a month ago the UK unveiled the Corax for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Corax), the french have the Dassault nEuron (Dassault nEUROn) or any of the many other armed UAV's.
What a country like iran doing this is show us how easy it is to do half decent version of this technology, and if it comes to a shooting war, how easy they are to hack.
it's also websites that do not play nice with small screens or are (as in the case of many corporate apps) only functional with a very specific web browser and or configuration.
Sure, a website that doesn't play nice with a small screen is usually the developers fault, and yes, people still relying on IE6 should be, if not shot, at least replaced by competent people. But what matters when I buy a device is how well can it connect, now how well it should connect.
Last I checked, which admittedly was 3 or 4 years ago, apple had restrictions on what could go into the firmware on NVIDIA and ATI cards's in their machines. it's why you couldn't pull one of those graphics cards out and have it work on a windows box, or, somewhat more seriously, you couldn't replace your mac graphics card with a regular one and have it work properly under OSX (but it would work under windows).
I haven't tried lately however, not being a mac guy. I only knew of any of that (in somewhat more detail) from a former ATI employee I met at a conference who had worked on some of it.
I suspect the main thing this patent means, is that someone important at Apple had their iPhone stolen and suddenly the company is taking seriously that this is an issue. For years, really since early iPods apple should have been able to track and disable stolen iPods, or at least prevent them from updating or provide an IP address to police etc. But they never took it seriously, so despite them being rather expensive devices police treated a stolen iPod like a stolen childrens toy, and apple wasn't about to do anything else.
For whatever reason they've changed their minds and decided to put some thought into it. Whether it materializes into anything beyond the 'try and patent everything just in case' phase of development remains to be seen.
An atom is a collection of matter, which would be sort of a second step. Light is just energy, typically we are concerned with 'visible' light (or something close thereto) with Lasers and use the term Maser for microwaves for example, but the principles are the same. e=(gamma) m*c^2 and all that. Enough energy and you can make whatever sorts of matter you want. Normally with big colliders we are interested in producing some matter no one has seen before, so the more mondane making regular protons, electrons or the like doesn't get much attention. Also there's not a great deal of commercial application of producing stuff that's easier to just dig holes in the ground for, so what older accelerators *can* do doesn't get a lot of attention. Don't get me wrong, there are applications for smaller accelerators, just not for making relatively boring matter.
A terrorist is someone who uses terrorism, which is some combination of a strategy and tactic. Revolutionaries can be terrorists, or not, governments can be terrorists or not. Terrorism is just a a method, and not exclusive with other, more traditional methods. They grab guns and shoot at americans in iraq, that isn't terrorism, that's resistance,
Whether terrorism was justified (or perhaps in the case of WW2 accepted as something we did which, while not always the right choice was part of a broader strategy that was basically acceptable) or not may be written by the victors, but the losers still write their own books.
Al Qaeda is so interesting (and dangerous) because while it uses terrorism it doesn't ever intend to manifest itself as the entity to lead once it has it's goal(s). That's because it's an amalgam of many groups that want different things (usually the overthrow or removal of a government allied to the US or Russia, such as israel, saudi, egypt, to some degree pakistan, chechnya, dagestan, but sometimes they want a more 'conservative' muslim government in places such as the phillipines, indonesia, malaysia). Where before Al qaeda all these sub organizations existed, and were working against for example the aforementioned governments, al qaeda came along and said the real enemies are the Americans, and if you can terrorism them out of backing governments around the world, then the rest of them will fall to the local cells. It is, in it's own words, 'the base'. Whether that makes it a revolutionary is up for debate, but even they would acknowledge they're terrorists, they merely think it a necessary tool in their arsenal (along with all of the other things they have tried).
Well power reduction is a business desktop sort of problem. Most people are better served with a discrete GPU that will actually run the 3d crap in windows or starcraft than they are with a reduction of 100W of power consumption.
It's not that they're fundamentally bad chips, just that they're wrong for the market they're putting them in. No more than diesel engines in everyday cars. They have a place, and an important one, just not in the vehicle I drive to work everyday.
he's talking about 2011/2012 when intel and AMD start packaging CPU's and GPU's in a single die on a regular basis, right now it's part of arrandale (the 32 nm i5's). I'm presuming he's just misinformed that this doesn't happen now on everything. Or he's making a bad joke about how people don't know the difference between a CPU and the whole computer case.
For AMD this is part of their 'the future is fusion' marketing. I can't recall what Intel has called it. Basically rather than a processor core you get a GPU core. So an 8 core, or 4 core machine can really be a collection of CPU and GPU cores. In the short term this isn't likely to impact a lot of /. readers on their home systems, since you can power, and cool about 1200 mm^2 of chips, split between cpu and GPU but if you want cheap, or cool 'fusion' is a good strategy. It's not like most computer actually need or want a decent (hot) GPU anyway.
As a game development guy I'm strongly opposed to intel gpu's in home users machines. They buy crap and then don't know why stuff doesn't work. But the business desktop is a whole other matter.
Well this is why WW2 games are so popular. No one sane in germany is going to come out and say 'hey the nazi's were really the good guys!', and if they did their government would be all over them.
Modern warfare on any number of levels is much less clear cut. Even WW1 is much less clear cut, as are the interwar year. At ;east those you can draw along nationalism lines.
Part of game design, or any entertainment is getting the audience/player to sympathize with a hero, or if you're making a distinctly anti-hero (think KOTOR/mass effect, infamous) the evil guy is constructed to see a different side of the story. I don't think you could make a game where the player is hitler trying to take over germany and have it be all that popular. Rooting for fictional bad guys is one thing (especially if it's done with humour, like overlord or if it's more of a gray area moral slant like mass effect), rooting for real ones is another.
But modern war, it's not really clear who the good guys are, if anyone, and there's certainly not much humour to be found in it. In Vietnam it's not like the americans were the bad guys and the communists good, they were both varying degrees of bad. French occupation of indochina, algeria etc, well france was definitely a bad guy (in contrast to a country trying to facilitate an orderly transition of power as part of decolonization), but it's not like we want to come out strongly in favour of militant muslims (algeria), who basically want(ed) pre-colonial islamic law, or the communists in indochina.
So given the rather messy nature of good and evil in modern war (note I use modern war in the french sense of most conflicts since Korea except the falklands, bosnia and the first gulf war), there's no good way to clarify who's good and who's bad. You could try and make a movie about a guy trying to eek out a living in this mess, s/he could certainly be a hero, have no deep seated ideological affiliation, but there's not much of a 'game' there. You don't want to split the market in half and have them supporting your depiction of one side, but not the other.