'cause we all know blogs are reliable source of information. US Ambassador in Moscow must have been lying when he said that they've tried to dissuade Saakashvili till the last moment on August 7th when the attack was launched. Then Russia spent a precious day trying to get help through diplomatic channels. And only THEN they kicked the Georgians out and took away their toys.
One thing I've realized about Obama is, the guy will promise you ANYTHING to get elected. It became clear during his acceptance speech. In less than 30 minutes he promised to lower taxes, eliminate the dependency on foreign oil, improve the education and give health care to everyone for free. After that I stopped listening. Achieving one of those things would be a stretch goal, achieving them all is downright impossible, and he knows it (and if he doesn't - god help us all).
4 years from now Republicans will have a field day with this guy and the results won't be pretty.
That said, he's STILL a heck of a lot better than McCain, particularly now when McCains VP pick is known.
But even perl chokes badly on "invalid" chars, and there's no way that I could find to just replace them with question marks or just pass them around unchanged. I work with terabytes of text and this text comes from the web, blogs and other sources. It is pretty much guaranteed to have broken chars in it, and I don't want to throw away a line of text just because one character is not an "approved" Unicode code point.
Python is pretty busted - I gave up on it after trying to write a scraper in it (using BeautifulSoup). I'd need to fix _standard libraries_ to make it not crash every now and then, and I'm spoiled - I expect the libraries that come in the RPM to just work. Ruby doesn't even know what this Unicode thing is.
Here's what's wrong about scripting languages. Not a single one does Unicode properly. In fact, there are only two environments that got it somewhat right - Java and.NET. Seriously, guys, WTF? Why are single-byte chars even possible in this day and age in the context of a string?
I'm not an air conditioning expert, but is it really necessary to have it for the most part of the year? Why keep datacenters so cold? Most processors are rated for over 65 degrees celsius of operating temperature, most hard drives are rated at 55 degrees celsius or more. Wouldn't it be wise to design specifically for higher operating temperatures, and simply pump the air from the outside and release it through a giant chimney on the roof?
Take Apple iMac as an example of good thermal design. I took it apart and made some measurements and what I've discovered is that they won't even begin to cool the hard drive until it reaches 50 degrees celsius or so. I suspect it's even higher than that for the processor.
Compare this to a PCs geeks build by themselves - oversized power supply, biggest ass heatsink they can find so that the processor would run at room temperature. News flash folks, the processor can tolerate a lot more than room temperature without any adverse effects on performance or reliability. In fact, some mobile Intel processors can boil water and still work fine. Hard drives don't need room temperature either. In hardware world, if the manufacturer says the part works at 55 degrees, it fucking better work at 55 degrees, or someone will sue their ass. As the temperature increases, too, the thermal gradient gets steeper, so much smaller heatsinks are needed to transfer the heat away.
I do understand that it would be somewhat uncomfortable if data centers operated at 40 degrees celsius air temperature, but that could be solved with individual air conditioner jackets for the personnel or something.
It wouldn't hurt if hard drive manufacturers worked in the direction of raising their products' operating temperature, too.
IMO, fundamental research should be financed with tax money and be released in public domain. Big-ass corporate research labs patent everything and patenting fundamental research is about as evil as it gets as far as patents are concerned, because it's the cornerstone of entire fields of applied research and product development.
Applied research should probably become a part of product development, too. I.e. in a product team, you'd have a couple of researchers interested in the problem space who would suggest novel ways of doing things, with emphasis on practical aspects.
At Microsoft, you get 15 days to start with (although they've flirted with 10 days for new hires a few years back, but someone beat them with a cluestick after a couple of months of that), and you get 20 days after 6 years. To get 25 days you need 10 years with the company.
It is now huge (read, you have to play political games to get ahead), its share price is not going anywhere (read, there's no potential to get rich quick) and it is "blessed" with a workforce in which they have cultivated a sense of entitlement (read, once you take anything away, no matter how small the perk, the response will be swift, merciless and disproportionate).
Frankly, based on what I hear from ex-Googlers, if I wanted to work for a big company, I'd rather go to Microsoft instead. There's more structure there, wider variety of projects, and rules for promotion although not set in stone and not always followed, are better defined.
Build a few more missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, and Iran will quickly jump to state of the art. After all, they already have nuclear tech, the problem here is the rocket, and Russians have rocket tech out the wazoo.
Well, you can decimate the US pretty good by targeting only the big cities with just 30-50 ICBMs. Losses will be substantial enough to deter any "preemptive" non-nuclear attack, which is the goal (works for Kim Jong Il, even though his stuff can only reach Japan). "Destruction" doesn't have to mean "complete destruction" after all.
This is great. I also think it will be great if Iran gets ICBM capability. The US will think twice before occupying countries in the Middle East and spending $2B on military aid to Israel and other "allies" who could very well finance their military on their own. If you create tensions in the region, that's what you get in return - Mutually Assured Destruction as the only guarantee of peace. The only difference this time is that the other side is not afraid to die.
The only reason Iran is anywhere close to having nuclear technology is because the US installed a puppet government there back in the day. Understandably, this pissed the Muslims off real bad and quickly backfired. Time and time again the US shoots itself in the feet, but the attention span the politicians have is about equal to the length of the election campaign.
And polyandry (when one woman has multiple men) would be great, too. I don't believe in god, why the heck should I be bound by judeo-christian practice of monogamy?
GWB goes over there and raises a stink about "human rights", now this clown, too. You're not going to change anyone's mind over there. They're doing this on purpose, economic freedoms are given to the Chinese people first, political will follow. Compared to 4 year cycle of US politics, they think in a span of 50 years or so - way too long an attention span for an average US politician to be able to muster.
It's not like there are no problems here at home, either. Infrastructure is crumbling, economy is in the toilet, military budget is astronomical, high schools put out idiots who need remedial courses to even be able to study further, space program is lagging behind, middle class is being raped with taxes, etc, etc.
It sure as heck is much easier to just bash foreign governments for their perceived shortcomings. Fixing problems here would actually require a brain and quite a bit of work.
On December 22, 1800, Tsar Paul I of Russia, at the alleged request of the Georgian King George XII, signed the proclamation on the incorporation of Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) within the Russian Empire, which was finalized by a decree on January 8, 1801,[19][20] and confirmed by Tsar Alexander I on September 12, 1801.
Post-revolution "independence" doesn't really count. The Red Army just didn't get there in time because of more pressing concerns. Surely you don't think Stalin's homeland would go independent easily?
It's one thing when you flatten a country with rusty, antique weapons (Iraq) or with practically no weapons at all (Yugoslavia). It's quite another when you go against a country whose ballistic missiles take only 9 minutes to reach Washington DC, who has weapons roughly similar in capability to your own, and whose army would simply dwarf anything NATO will be willing to put forward as it is, and can be boosted to many times its size through conscription within a month or two.
A confrontation between NATO and Russia is simply not going to happen over something as insignificant as Georgia, if at all.
But Georgia was under Russian rule for well over 200 years. Then it was broken off by separatists and declared itself a separate country. It's kind of like separatists come to power in Texas and declare it a separate country - you wouldn't like it. There were people in Ossetia who didn't like it - after all, Georgia has about as much of a right to Ossetia as Russia, so Ossetians FOUGHT for independence from Georgia FOR YEARS, with a lot of lives lost. They even called that particular war a "patriotic" one. They are not Georgians, most of them speak Russian only and are Russian citizens, why the fuck should they just roll over and spread their butt cheeks to Georgians?
The sequence of events was like this: Georgia flattens a sleeping city, killing a bunch of Russian citizens among everybody else. Russia goes to the UN and asks to intervene. The UN gives it a middle finger. Russia says "fuck it, we'll pwn them then" and proceeds with pwning Georgia on its own.
Finally, there's no "invasion" of Georgia going on. There's bombing of the military bases (watch your tax dollars go up in smoke, US citizens!), to be sure, but there are no troops on the ground. If Russia wanted to, Tbilisi would already be in ruins. But it won't happen, because there are a TON of Russians living in Georgia too.
How THE FUCK is this "Russian aggression" I keep reading about in US media?
Almost no one realizes that R&D has only a tiny sliver of R of it, and the rest of it is D. And by Development, they mean everything - developer/tester/program manager salaries, computers, costs of running the buildings and datacenters, IT, etc. So it's not like they spend $7B just on Microsoft Research. Last I heard, MSR costs something like $300M a year. And stuff from there does end up in products every now and then.
Recall is. All of us have vast, insane amounts of memory, but we can't always recall the things that are stored there. And then there are cases when you don't remember something and then it all comes to you in vivid, minute detail.
That said, their style based formatting is as broken as ever. For short papers, however, there's no reason not to use Word 2007 anymore. It's equation editor is pretty much a complete rewrite, and a successful one at that.
Well, it's working. According to CIA facts book, the population growth rate is 0.625% and birth rate is 13 births per 1000 people, which is fairly low for a third world country with booming economy. As the country gets more industrialized and children get more expensive to raise, the number will cross into the negative territory. Compare that to India with its 1.578% and 22 births per 1000 people.
I would advocate that folks in Africa should stop fucking like rabbits, too. There's not enough food there as it is, and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
If you make parts that are currently unlivable livable, then guess what, people will breed and fill them to the point where they're unlivable again. If anything, this planet needs birth control, Chinese style.
Disclaimer - I've spent substantial time in Russia and seen things first hand. Now, the flaws: 1. Space programs are cheap compared to social programs. $65M is nothing. 2. If you don't pay the engineers, they will leave and they can't be easily replaced. In other words you have to keep them occupied, or someone else will. 3. This money doesn't just "disappear". It gets paid to the folks who, as you astutely put it, "live in poverty" by US standards. 4. A lot of the folks who live in poverty would not try to improve their situation if there was a fire under their ass. This is a Russian phenomenon - I've never seen it anywhere else. Back in perestroika days, people would continue to go to work despite not being paid for months. If you don't want to live better, it's naive to expect that the Big Brother will help you out. And that's exactly what a lot of those folks are expecting. 5. American standard of living is not universal. Some people just need less to be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
'cause we all know blogs are reliable source of information. US Ambassador in Moscow must have been lying when he said that they've tried to dissuade Saakashvili till the last moment on August 7th when the attack was launched. Then Russia spent a precious day trying to get help through diplomatic channels. And only THEN they kicked the Georgians out and took away their toys.
One thing I've realized about Obama is, the guy will promise you ANYTHING to get elected. It became clear during his acceptance speech. In less than 30 minutes he promised to lower taxes, eliminate the dependency on foreign oil, improve the education and give health care to everyone for free. After that I stopped listening. Achieving one of those things would be a stretch goal, achieving them all is downright impossible, and he knows it (and if he doesn't - god help us all).
4 years from now Republicans will have a field day with this guy and the results won't be pretty.
That said, he's STILL a heck of a lot better than McCain, particularly now when McCains VP pick is known.
But even perl chokes badly on "invalid" chars, and there's no way that I could find to just replace them with question marks or just pass them around unchanged. I work with terabytes of text and this text comes from the web, blogs and other sources. It is pretty much guaranteed to have broken chars in it, and I don't want to throw away a line of text just because one character is not an "approved" Unicode code point.
Python is pretty busted - I gave up on it after trying to write a scraper in it (using BeautifulSoup). I'd need to fix _standard libraries_ to make it not crash every now and then, and I'm spoiled - I expect the libraries that come in the RPM to just work. Ruby doesn't even know what this Unicode thing is.
Here's what's wrong about scripting languages. Not a single one does Unicode properly. In fact, there are only two environments that got it somewhat right - Java and .NET. Seriously, guys, WTF? Why are single-byte chars even possible in this day and age in the context of a string?
Publish it, get peer reviews and THEN post on Slashdot if reviewers don't tear it apart completely.
I'm not an air conditioning expert, but is it really necessary to have it for the most part of the year? Why keep datacenters so cold? Most processors are rated for over 65 degrees celsius of operating temperature, most hard drives are rated at 55 degrees celsius or more. Wouldn't it be wise to design specifically for higher operating temperatures, and simply pump the air from the outside and release it through a giant chimney on the roof?
Take Apple iMac as an example of good thermal design. I took it apart and made some measurements and what I've discovered is that they won't even begin to cool the hard drive until it reaches 50 degrees celsius or so. I suspect it's even higher than that for the processor.
Compare this to a PCs geeks build by themselves - oversized power supply, biggest ass heatsink they can find so that the processor would run at room temperature. News flash folks, the processor can tolerate a lot more than room temperature without any adverse effects on performance or reliability. In fact, some mobile Intel processors can boil water and still work fine. Hard drives don't need room temperature either. In hardware world, if the manufacturer says the part works at 55 degrees, it fucking better work at 55 degrees, or someone will sue their ass. As the temperature increases, too, the thermal gradient gets steeper, so much smaller heatsinks are needed to transfer the heat away.
I do understand that it would be somewhat uncomfortable if data centers operated at 40 degrees celsius air temperature, but that could be solved with individual air conditioner jackets for the personnel or something.
It wouldn't hurt if hard drive manufacturers worked in the direction of raising their products' operating temperature, too.
IMO, fundamental research should be financed with tax money and be released in public domain. Big-ass corporate research labs patent everything and patenting fundamental research is about as evil as it gets as far as patents are concerned, because it's the cornerstone of entire fields of applied research and product development.
Applied research should probably become a part of product development, too. I.e. in a product team, you'd have a couple of researchers interested in the problem space who would suggest novel ways of doing things, with emphasis on practical aspects.
At Microsoft, you get 15 days to start with (although they've flirted with 10 days for new hires a few years back, but someone beat them with a cluestick after a couple of months of that), and you get 20 days after 6 years. To get 25 days you need 10 years with the company.
It is now huge (read, you have to play political games to get ahead), its share price is not going anywhere (read, there's no potential to get rich quick) and it is "blessed" with a workforce in which they have cultivated a sense of entitlement (read, once you take anything away, no matter how small the perk, the response will be swift, merciless and disproportionate).
Frankly, based on what I hear from ex-Googlers, if I wanted to work for a big company, I'd rather go to Microsoft instead. There's more structure there, wider variety of projects, and rules for promotion although not set in stone and not always followed, are better defined.
Build a few more missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, and Iran will quickly jump to state of the art. After all, they already have nuclear tech, the problem here is the rocket, and Russians have rocket tech out the wazoo.
Well, you can decimate the US pretty good by targeting only the big cities with just 30-50 ICBMs. Losses will be substantial enough to deter any "preemptive" non-nuclear attack, which is the goal (works for Kim Jong Il, even though his stuff can only reach Japan). "Destruction" doesn't have to mean "complete destruction" after all.
This is great. I also think it will be great if Iran gets ICBM capability. The US will think twice before occupying countries in the Middle East and spending $2B on military aid to Israel and other "allies" who could very well finance their military on their own. If you create tensions in the region, that's what you get in return - Mutually Assured Destruction as the only guarantee of peace. The only difference this time is that the other side is not afraid to die.
The only reason Iran is anywhere close to having nuclear technology is because the US installed a puppet government there back in the day. Understandably, this pissed the Muslims off real bad and quickly backfired. Time and time again the US shoots itself in the feet, but the attention span the politicians have is about equal to the length of the election campaign.
Surely you don't think that our current state of affairs is in any way related to prehistoric times or Ancient Greece?
And polyandry (when one woman has multiple men) would be great, too. I don't believe in god, why the heck should I be bound by judeo-christian practice of monogamy?
GWB goes over there and raises a stink about "human rights", now this clown, too. You're not going to change anyone's mind over there. They're doing this on purpose, economic freedoms are given to the Chinese people first, political will follow. Compared to 4 year cycle of US politics, they think in a span of 50 years or so - way too long an attention span for an average US politician to be able to muster.
It's not like there are no problems here at home, either. Infrastructure is crumbling, economy is in the toilet, military budget is astronomical, high schools put out idiots who need remedial courses to even be able to study further, space program is lagging behind, middle class is being raped with taxes, etc, etc.
It sure as heck is much easier to just bash foreign governments for their perceived shortcomings. Fixing problems here would actually require a brain and quite a bit of work.
From Wiki:
On December 22, 1800, Tsar Paul I of Russia, at the alleged request of the Georgian King George XII, signed the proclamation on the incorporation of Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) within the Russian Empire, which was finalized by a decree on January 8, 1801,[19][20] and confirmed by Tsar Alexander I on September 12, 1801.
Post-revolution "independence" doesn't really count. The Red Army just didn't get there in time because of more pressing concerns. Surely you don't think Stalin's homeland would go independent easily?
But no, you wouldn't like it if the state where most of your oil is located (yup, Texas) decided to become a separate country, believe me.
http://geology.usgs.gov/connections/blm/energy/o&g_assess.htm
Let alone if it was to become a separate Spanish-speaking country and tell the English speaking US citizens to get the fuck out.
>> would have to be responded by all of NATO
It's one thing when you flatten a country with rusty, antique weapons (Iraq) or with practically no weapons at all (Yugoslavia). It's quite another when you go against a country whose ballistic missiles take only 9 minutes to reach Washington DC, who has weapons roughly similar in capability to your own, and whose army would simply dwarf anything NATO will be willing to put forward as it is, and can be boosted to many times its size through conscription within a month or two.
A confrontation between NATO and Russia is simply not going to happen over something as insignificant as Georgia, if at all.
But Georgia was under Russian rule for well over 200 years. Then it was broken off by separatists and declared itself a separate country. It's kind of like separatists come to power in Texas and declare it a separate country - you wouldn't like it. There were people in Ossetia who didn't like it - after all, Georgia has about as much of a right to Ossetia as Russia, so Ossetians FOUGHT for independence from Georgia FOR YEARS, with a lot of lives lost. They even called that particular war a "patriotic" one. They are not Georgians, most of them speak Russian only and are Russian citizens, why the fuck should they just roll over and spread their butt cheeks to Georgians?
The sequence of events was like this: Georgia flattens a sleeping city, killing a bunch of Russian citizens among everybody else. Russia goes to the UN and asks to intervene. The UN gives it a middle finger. Russia says "fuck it, we'll pwn them then" and proceeds with pwning Georgia on its own.
Finally, there's no "invasion" of Georgia going on. There's bombing of the military bases (watch your tax dollars go up in smoke, US citizens!), to be sure, but there are no troops on the ground. If Russia wanted to, Tbilisi would already be in ruins. But it won't happen, because there are a TON of Russians living in Georgia too.
How THE FUCK is this "Russian aggression" I keep reading about in US media?
Almost no one realizes that R&D has only a tiny sliver of R of it, and the rest of it is D. And by Development, they mean everything - developer/tester/program manager salaries, computers, costs of running the buildings and datacenters, IT, etc. So it's not like they spend $7B just on Microsoft Research. Last I heard, MSR costs something like $300M a year. And stuff from there does end up in products every now and then.
Recall is. All of us have vast, insane amounts of memory, but we can't always recall the things that are stored there. And then there are cases when you don't remember something and then it all comes to you in vivid, minute detail.
That said, their style based formatting is as broken as ever. For short papers, however, there's no reason not to use Word 2007 anymore. It's equation editor is pretty much a complete rewrite, and a successful one at that.
Well, it's working. According to CIA facts book, the population growth rate is 0.625% and birth rate is 13 births per 1000 people, which is fairly low for a third world country with booming economy. As the country gets more industrialized and children get more expensive to raise, the number will cross into the negative territory. Compare that to India with its 1.578% and 22 births per 1000 people.
I would advocate that folks in Africa should stop fucking like rabbits, too. There's not enough food there as it is, and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
If you make parts that are currently unlivable livable, then guess what, people will breed and fill them to the point where they're unlivable again. If anything, this planet needs birth control, Chinese style.
Disclaimer - I've spent substantial time in Russia and seen things first hand. Now, the flaws:
1. Space programs are cheap compared to social programs. $65M is nothing.
2. If you don't pay the engineers, they will leave and they can't be easily replaced. In other words you have to keep them occupied, or someone else will.
3. This money doesn't just "disappear". It gets paid to the folks who, as you astutely put it, "live in poverty" by US standards.
4. A lot of the folks who live in poverty would not try to improve their situation if there was a fire under their ass. This is a Russian phenomenon - I've never seen it anywhere else. Back in perestroika days, people would continue to go to work despite not being paid for months. If you don't want to live better, it's naive to expect that the Big Brother will help you out. And that's exactly what a lot of those folks are expecting.
5. American standard of living is not universal. Some people just need less to be happy.