Either you're miscalculating or your company is screwing you over, but I've never heard of $30k for an IT job here. My first job, right out of college, was with NTT--a company about as traditional as you can get--and I was stuck on the same pay scale as everybody else who'd just graduated: roughly $35k/year in salary, plus company-sponsored housing and transportation, so call it $45k/year. After a few years with virtually no raises, I changed jobs, and am now making $70k/year doing R&D.
(Are you possibly not counting the semiannual bonuses? Despite the terminology, those are considered part of your regular salary in Japan. Japanese seem to like getting a big bundle of money every once in a while to splurge with, hence the current system.)
I admit I haven't tried goo, but I have tried Yahoo a number of times, and I've always found that Google gives me better results (yes, in Japanese). Though I admit it's possible I'm subconsciously working around whatever limitations Google may have--come to think of it, ISTR it doesn't consider hiragana and katakana equivalent, which would certainly be a major drawback.
1) claimant doesn't state the specific infringements that occured. Umm, yes they did, it's only 6 files, but the RIAA respresentative said that those 6 were downloaded, and listened to, and confirmed that they were owned by the various companies
Actually, they don't. The only link between the files and the acts of infringement they make is in count 13 of (emphasis added):
13. Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendant [...] has used, and continues to use, an online media distribution system to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others.
See the problem? They only ever say "we think our rights were infringed". They never say why they think so. You have to have some sort of basis for believing that (and set it out in your complaint), whether it's packet captures, system logs (not likely on Windows boxes), or whatever. As the defense lawyers point out in their Revised Reply Memorandum of Law (see the bottom of page 2 / top of page 3), the mere presence of the files isn't sufficient--they could just as well have been legally obtained.
2) claimant didn't specify when the infringement occured. Umm, they sort of did.
As they say, "almost" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Certainly not in a court of law.
They said that the files were located on the computer on 11-4-04. The RIAA can't specifically say that other people copied files off on that specific day, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't have to be proved.
You bet it does. Unless you have a sworn statement from somebody who downloaded it from that computer, a dated packet capture is about the only way you can prove a file was actually transferred. Again, it's not sufficient to say "this person had these files available for sharing"--you have to identify actual instances of distribution or you don't have a claim.
Actually, it only means AOL has no way to take money from you anymore. That leaves them two options: give up on the lost month or two of charges and cancel your account, or take you to court. Which do you think is cheaper and easier? (Credit card companies, of course, would have a different point of view, so I really don't recommend trying to fool them like that.)
I don't know, I have no problem with Ctrl in the lower left corner. I mean, there's this gouge in the side of my left hand dripping blood, but no big deal, you know?
In Japan, the male population declined slightly last year, and the overall population is predicted to peak in 2006. The birth rate of 1.29 kids per couple is a pretty major factor. (And I sure wouldn't want to be that.29 of a kid...)
I prefer to think that those of us who do know better are also smart enough to figure out how to get past whatever disaster the rest of humanity uses to wipe itself out.
In Japan, if you're employed with a salary under 20 million yen (~$180k) and you don't have any other significant income--which covers a pretty large fraction of taxpayers--you don't even have to send in a tax return in the first place; your employer does it for you and you see the result on your December or January paycheck (we call it nenmatsu-chousei, end-of-year adjustment).
Good or bad? I dunno, but it's sure less of a pain than writing up a 1040 every year that says I don't owe the IRS any money because I earned it all abroad.
VMware is most definitely suitable for running multiple environments for general work. Like the parent, I use VMware on Linux to run a Windows environment, and I have no speed complaints whatsoever.
With all due respect, I think developing an entire programming language is already an order of magnitude or two more complex than most OSS out there. That's certainly something you want to design portability in for, but that doesn't mean the same amount of effort is appropriate for all OSS. It all depends on your target audience.
To inject a bit of personal experience into the discussion, another scenario that I suspect happens frequently is that a program never intended for general use finds its way out for one reason or another. When I started developing IRC Services, I had only intended to use it on my local network, and thus I didn't even think about things like BSD/Solaris or endianness, much less Windows. For various reasons, a year or two later I ended up putting it out for everybody to use, but all the assumptions were already in there, and even figuring out what they were (much less getting them out) hasn't been easy.
Was it Fred Brooks that said that developing for others is an order of magnitude harder than developing for yourself? One can hardly be surprised that people would avoid putting such effort into programs they don't intend to release anyway.
Actually, I think a much larger problem is just that: Many OSS developers don't even try to support Windows. Yes, I know you hate the OS and don't want to support Microsoft, etc., etc.. But, how can you complain about major software not supporting Linux when you're writing your own software that doesn't support Windows? Isn't that entirely hypocritical?
Not at all. For one thing, the "major software" people complain about is commercial software--people are being paid to design and write it--while most open source projects are simple free-time hobbies. Why should someone creating software for fun feel pressured to support a platform he doesn't want to?
For another thing, supporting Windows is in an entirely different class than supporting BSD/Solaris/m68k/x86-64/etc. For all their differences, BSD, Solaris, and all the other Unix-lookalikes share an overall operating paradigm with Linux--the "everything is a file" concept (device files, named pipes and the like), or the use of shells and pipelines, for example. Windows is very different, and supporting it properly (i.e., not using Cygwin or the like to immerse yourself in a Unixlike environment [*]) is something on a completely different scale than dealing with other flavors of Unix. Writing code to be that portable is an order of magnitude more work than writing it to work only with Unix-like systems.
I do agree that code which is intended to work on "any Unix-like environment" ought to be designed that way from the start, not relying on things like the size of an int or a particular filesystem layout. But "portablity at any expense", like every "X at any expense", is overdoing it.
[*] If being able to build on Cygwin is enough for you, then by all means add support for it, but I'm of the "if you're going to do something, do it right" belief.
. . . but no one will believe you, because everyone has had the experience of "deciding" (from a subjective point of view) on an action. It's a rare person, or a dedicated scientist, who will put aside his or her own experience for such an abstract idea.
What is "free will", anyway? From your wording, the only reasonable interpretation I can come up with is "some force not part of the brain which influences brain activity"--but most brain studies I've heard of assume there is no such thing. You can't prove the lack of free will if you assumed it in the first place!
I think a more reasonable explanation of "free will" would be chaos theory--if brains are even as chaotic as say, the weather, then we're a long way from being able to comprehend why they do what they do, if it's even possible to do so at all. Our behavior may be ruled by physical interactions, but if we can't know or predict what those interactions are, is that practically any different from having some invisible entity (a soul, maybe) pulling the brain's strings, at least to the extent we lack such knowledge or cannot make such predictions?
NHK (Japanese public TV) tried using a 3D weather map something like this--not spherical, but an angled view of the archipelago--on their nightly news program for about a year, then it disappeared. They didn't give any explanation, at least as far as I know, but from personal experience I assume it was because (1) it was harder to read/interpret than the regular 2D map and (2) the camera shook like crazy whenever they panned across it (it looked like they were panning across some sort of bluefield and putting the 3D images in through CGI).
As other posters say, a large part of it is because the companies are sitting on their asses while the government is actually doing something. But also keep in mind that this is local government, not national government. There is a difference--local governments are (in general) much more in tune with their constituents, simply because there are that many fewer people they need to listen to, and thus are usually more deserving of trust.
Read TFA carefully: "all Burlington residents will be able to pay just one bill each month". Not "have to", but "be able to". It'll still be up to the user who they get service from (granted, it depends on which companies agree to provide service over the network).
Personally, I still trust copper-wire POTS over VoIP, though the article doesn't say anything about whether they're going to leave POTS in place.
After all, you have to run the pumps to pump up the cold water. That's not a trivial amount of energy
Except that it is. IANAP, but imagine this:
You have a full tub of water, say 1 meter deep. You then take a relatively thin pipe 1m long and stick it in the tub, so that the bottom of the pipe is 10cm above the bottom of the tub. Result: water fills the pipe to the 90cm level.
You now take a cup and remove some water from the top of the tub. The water level in the tub falls to 100-x cm, and at the same time the water level in the pipe (relative to the bottom of the pipe) falls to 90-x cm--the levels are equal relative to the bottom of the tub.
Now imagine that you took that water from the top of the pipe instead. Just as before, the water level in the tub will fall to 100-x cm, and the water level in the pipe will rise to 90-x cm to match. But where did the water that entered the pipe come from? Assuming the pipe's walls don't let any water through, it can only come from the bottom of the tub.
So if, for example, you took out 50cm of water from the pipe, you would have (looking from the top down) the remaining 40cm of water that was originally in the pipe followed by 50cm of water from the bottom of the tub. Obviously there would be some mixing involved, but if that bothers you just imagine taking out all 90cm at once.
Why does this happen? Because (if I remember my old physics lectures correctly) as you remove water from the pipe, there's suddenly less downward pressure on the water remaining in the pipe than there is on the water in the rest of the tub. This results in water entering the pipe in order to reduce the pressure differential.
Now, maybe things aren't that simple when you're talking about oceans and several thousand meters of distance, but you should only have to spend enough energy to get water off the top of the pipe--physics will take care of the rest.
(As an afterthought, how about this alternative experiment: Stick a straw down to the bottom of the ocean and drink--it shouldn't take any more effort than drinking from an ordinary cup.)
I also fail to see the point. We just don't need more energy, we need to be more energy efficient and halt population growth.
The point which you do not see is that, regardless of how much energy we do or do not need or use, this would (assuming the theory is correct) provide a clean, renewable energy source, which we can substitute for currently-used unclean or non-renewable energy sources. Unless you're planning to argue that we should reduce our energy use to what present clean/renewable sources can provide--an argument I don't think you'll find much support for--I assume you can see the reason for developing such an alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Either you're miscalculating or your company is screwing you over, but I've never heard of $30k for an IT job here. My first job, right out of college, was with NTT--a company about as traditional as you can get--and I was stuck on the same pay scale as everybody else who'd just graduated: roughly $35k/year in salary, plus company-sponsored housing and transportation, so call it $45k/year. After a few years with virtually no raises, I changed jobs, and am now making $70k/year doing R&D.
(Are you possibly not counting the semiannual bonuses? Despite the terminology, those are considered part of your regular salary in Japan. Japanese seem to like getting a big bundle of money every once in a while to splurge with, hence the current system.)
I admit I haven't tried goo, but I have tried Yahoo a number of times, and I've always found that Google gives me better results (yes, in Japanese). Though I admit it's possible I'm subconsciously working around whatever limitations Google may have--come to think of it, ISTR it doesn't consider hiragana and katakana equivalent, which would certainly be a major drawback.
1) claimant doesn't state the specific infringements that occured. Umm, yes they did, it's only 6 files, but the RIAA respresentative said that those 6 were downloaded, and listened to, and confirmed that they were owned by the various companies
Actually, they don't. The only link between the files and the acts of infringement they make is in count 13 of (emphasis added):
See the problem? They only ever say "we think our rights were infringed". They never say why they think so. You have to have some sort of basis for believing that (and set it out in your complaint), whether it's packet captures, system logs (not likely on Windows boxes), or whatever. As the defense lawyers point out in their Revised Reply Memorandum of Law (see the bottom of page 2 / top of page 3), the mere presence of the files isn't sufficient--they could just as well have been legally obtained.
2) claimant didn't specify when the infringement occured. Umm, they sort of did.
As they say, "almost" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Certainly not in a court of law.
They said that the files were located on the computer on 11-4-04. The RIAA can't specifically say that other people copied files off on that specific day, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't have to be proved.
You bet it does. Unless you have a sworn statement from somebody who downloaded it from that computer, a dated packet capture is about the only way you can prove a file was actually transferred. Again, it's not sufficient to say "this person had these files available for sharing"--you have to identify actual instances of distribution or you don't have a claim.
#include <stddisclaimer/ianal.h>
Really, just a massive airdrop of sponges over the city, et voila, your problem, she is solved!
So tell me, were you planning to be the one to go around and pick up all those sponges afterwards? Dripping with mud? By hand?
Actually, it only means AOL has no way to take money from you anymore. That leaves them two options: give up on the lost month or two of charges and cancel your account, or take you to court. Which do you think is cheaper and easier? (Credit card companies, of course, would have a different point of view, so I really don't recommend trying to fool them like that.)
This is insane and something is fishy if x86 hardware is this demanding.
Well, I've got a VIA-based server sitting here that draws about 30 watts for the whole machine, so it's certainly not the x86 architecture itself.
Sure, I'll be compensating for my ice-cold burrito by running a microwave oven off the USB.
At the wattage those things pull, your burrito isn't the only thing you'll be cooking . . .
that x86 would never hit 100MHz!
And some of us wish it hadn't. 680x0 assembly was so beautiful . . .
I don't know, I have no problem with Ctrl in the lower left corner. I mean, there's this gouge in the side of my left hand dripping blood, but no big deal, you know?
In Japan, the male population declined slightly last year, and the overall population is predicted to peak in 2006. The birth rate of 1.29 kids per couple is a pretty major factor. (And I sure wouldn't want to be that .29 of a kid...)
I prefer to think that those of us who do know better are also smart enough to figure out how to get past whatever disaster the rest of humanity uses to wipe itself out.
When are we going to realize that humans infest this planet like mold infests cheese?
The difference, of course, is that mold isn't smart enough to know when it has to change its actions.
In Japan, if you're employed with a salary under 20 million yen (~$180k) and you don't have any other significant income--which covers a pretty large fraction of taxpayers--you don't even have to send in a tax return in the first place; your employer does it for you and you see the result on your December or January paycheck (we call it nenmatsu-chousei, end-of-year adjustment).
Good or bad? I dunno, but it's sure less of a pain than writing up a 1040 every year that says I don't owe the IRS any money because I earned it all abroad.
VMware is most definitely suitable for running multiple environments for general work. Like the parent, I use VMware on Linux to run a Windows environment, and I have no speed complaints whatsoever.
With all due respect, I think developing an entire programming language is already an order of magnitude or two more complex than most OSS out there. That's certainly something you want to design portability in for, but that doesn't mean the same amount of effort is appropriate for all OSS. It all depends on your target audience.
To inject a bit of personal experience into the discussion, another scenario that I suspect happens frequently is that a program never intended for general use finds its way out for one reason or another. When I started developing IRC Services, I had only intended to use it on my local network, and thus I didn't even think about things like BSD/Solaris or endianness, much less Windows. For various reasons, a year or two later I ended up putting it out for everybody to use, but all the assumptions were already in there, and even figuring out what they were (much less getting them out) hasn't been easy.
Was it Fred Brooks that said that developing for others is an order of magnitude harder than developing for yourself? One can hardly be surprised that people would avoid putting such effort into programs they don't intend to release anyway.
Actually, I think a much larger problem is just that: Many OSS developers don't even try to support Windows. Yes, I know you hate the OS and don't want to support Microsoft, etc., etc.. But, how can you complain about major software not supporting Linux when you're writing your own software that doesn't support Windows? Isn't that entirely hypocritical?
Not at all. For one thing, the "major software" people complain about is commercial software--people are being paid to design and write it--while most open source projects are simple free-time hobbies. Why should someone creating software for fun feel pressured to support a platform he doesn't want to?
For another thing, supporting Windows is in an entirely different class than supporting BSD/Solaris/m68k/x86-64/etc. For all their differences, BSD, Solaris, and all the other Unix-lookalikes share an overall operating paradigm with Linux--the "everything is a file" concept (device files, named pipes and the like), or the use of shells and pipelines, for example. Windows is very different, and supporting it properly (i.e., not using Cygwin or the like to immerse yourself in a Unixlike environment [*]) is something on a completely different scale than dealing with other flavors of Unix. Writing code to be that portable is an order of magnitude more work than writing it to work only with Unix-like systems.
I do agree that code which is intended to work on "any Unix-like environment" ought to be designed that way from the start, not relying on things like the size of an int or a particular filesystem layout. But "portablity at any expense", like every "X at any expense", is overdoing it.
[*] If being able to build on Cygwin is enough for you, then by all means add support for it, but I'm of the "if you're going to do something, do it right" belief.
What is "free will", anyway? From your wording, the only reasonable interpretation I can come up with is "some force not part of the brain which influences brain activity"--but most brain studies I've heard of assume there is no such thing. You can't prove the lack of free will if you assumed it in the first place!
I think a more reasonable explanation of "free will" would be chaos theory--if brains are even as chaotic as say, the weather, then we're a long way from being able to comprehend why they do what they do, if it's even possible to do so at all. Our behavior may be ruled by physical interactions, but if we can't know or predict what those interactions are, is that practically any different from having some invisible entity (a soul, maybe) pulling the brain's strings, at least to the extent we lack such knowledge or cannot make such predictions?
NHK (Japanese public TV) tried using a 3D weather map something like this--not spherical, but an angled view of the archipelago--on their nightly news program for about a year, then it disappeared. They didn't give any explanation, at least as far as I know, but from personal experience I assume it was because (1) it was harder to read/interpret than the regular 2D map and (2) the camera shook like crazy whenever they panned across it (it looked like they were panning across some sort of bluefield and putting the 3D images in through CGI).
As other posters say, a large part of it is because the companies are sitting on their asses while the government is actually doing something. But also keep in mind that this is local government, not national government. There is a difference--local governments are (in general) much more in tune with their constituents, simply because there are that many fewer people they need to listen to, and thus are usually more deserving of trust.
Read TFA carefully: "all Burlington residents will be able to pay just one bill each month". Not "have to", but "be able to". It'll still be up to the user who they get service from (granted, it depends on which companies agree to provide service over the network).
Personally, I still trust copper-wire POTS over VoIP, though the article doesn't say anything about whether they're going to leave POTS in place.
Reminder to self--don't feed the trolls . . .
How about the posts saying "some people need to lighten up"?
After all, you have to run the pumps to pump up the cold water. That's not a trivial amount of energy
Except that it is. IANAP, but imagine this:
You have a full tub of water, say 1 meter deep. You then take a relatively thin pipe 1m long and stick it in the tub, so that the bottom of the pipe is 10cm above the bottom of the tub. Result: water fills the pipe to the 90cm level.
You now take a cup and remove some water from the top of the tub. The water level in the tub falls to 100-x cm, and at the same time the water level in the pipe (relative to the bottom of the pipe) falls to 90-x cm--the levels are equal relative to the bottom of the tub.
Now imagine that you took that water from the top of the pipe instead. Just as before, the water level in the tub will fall to 100-x cm, and the water level in the pipe will rise to 90-x cm to match. But where did the water that entered the pipe come from? Assuming the pipe's walls don't let any water through, it can only come from the bottom of the tub.
So if, for example, you took out 50cm of water from the pipe, you would have (looking from the top down) the remaining 40cm of water that was originally in the pipe followed by 50cm of water from the bottom of the tub. Obviously there would be some mixing involved, but if that bothers you just imagine taking out all 90cm at once.
Why does this happen? Because (if I remember my old physics lectures correctly) as you remove water from the pipe, there's suddenly less downward pressure on the water remaining in the pipe than there is on the water in the rest of the tub. This results in water entering the pipe in order to reduce the pressure differential.
Now, maybe things aren't that simple when you're talking about oceans and several thousand meters of distance, but you should only have to spend enough energy to get water off the top of the pipe--physics will take care of the rest.
(As an afterthought, how about this alternative experiment: Stick a straw down to the bottom of the ocean and drink--it shouldn't take any more effort than drinking from an ordinary cup.)
I also fail to see the point. We just don't need more energy, we need to be more energy efficient and halt population growth.
The point which you do not see is that, regardless of how much energy we do or do not need or use, this would (assuming the theory is correct) provide a clean, renewable energy source, which we can substitute for currently-used unclean or non-renewable energy sources. Unless you're planning to argue that we should reduce our energy use to what present clean/renewable sources can provide--an argument I don't think you'll find much support for--I assume you can see the reason for developing such an alternative.
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."