Excerpted from RP2008, a discussion about charity, which in the limited usefulness of space exploration the space program is. I assume you could say it employs people, but those people would have no problem working other places as well.
If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give at all; and as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. 'No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity.'
"'Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this country as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have Thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week's pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life.'
There is a problem with this logic. Can the effectiveness of the camera be reduced to zero? Yes. Quite easily. A good disguise will completely render the camera useless. Anyone contemplating a crime will factor a disguise in. Be it a hooded sweat shirt which is discarded off-camera or a Nixon mask. With the identity sufficiently disguised, there is the issue of motion: Approach/exit vectors along with gait. Gait can be modified easily (try an added insert in or tack the shoe). Approach and exit vectors are seldom useful because of the limited area the camera can cover.
In the end, you get a really expensive system thwarted by 5 minutes of planning.
Fine, don't use 1984, but lets look at a list of grievances that were determined sufficient to start a war:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. - suspension of Habeus Corpus (sp?), citing Executive privilege at every turn
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. - Federal funding is threatened any time a State considers a law counter to the federal agenda
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. - Well the White house is not keeping the email records as ordered to by the Legislature and the Courts
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. - Not so much Judges this time, but attorneys int he office of the Attorney General.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. - he has appointed to offices incompetent people who were irresponsible, or shills for the administration.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has definitely deployed troops with out a declaration of war.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: while not murder, he has obstructed justice for his shill, Carl Rove?
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: - Gitmo
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: - well the opposite is true. Conspiring with other nations to arrest and detain citizens in order to prevent them from re-entering their country.
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
No, but the cameras can see you. And that is the problem. You seem to equate being bothersome in the scenery as being bothersome to civil liberties. Do not make that mistake. How many cameras a day do you think we are on? How many is that really?
Here in the Maryland in the US, there has been an explosion of cameras at street lights, in low pedestrian areas. What these cameras do, I do not know. And I think that is the worst part.
I was speaking from a functional perspective. Perhaps, I should have said GTK, where Qt and GTK are the toolkits that implement their respective desktop environments.
As someone who had to learn C++/CLI and writes code to allow legacy code to interop with C# at work, I have this to say.
If you are going to learn a new platform for a "modern" app or OS, then let it be one that allows you to target more than one platform. Seriously. Lets take a look at.NET: - Everything in the library is new. - You can only officially target one platform. (Mono not withstanding) - You have to learn a new language to use it effectively.
Now look at Qt: - New library - Build onto same C++ compiler you've always used - No messy COM, COM wrappers needed for introspection - You can target any platform with a modern C++ compiler (VS6 and higher on win32, gcc on all platforms) - Ground up C++, clean consistent API. - Active development with binary compatibility within major releases. - Python, ECMA scripting, (some C# support too!) - Java version - Meta-object compiler adds introspection. (no need to deal with COM) - ActiveX interop in the commercial version (You can use Qt widgets in Winforms and vice-versa)
I don't know as much about GNOME, but it shares a lot with Qt, so should not be excluded.
About the only thing you miss out on is the automatic garbage collector. Qt emulates this to some degree by allowing every QObject to have a parent. Then the only thing missing is the ability to defragment memory in the heap. I've only heard about this being caused by lots of small memory allocations, but Qt block allocates so this isn't a problem. Also, many types are implicitly shared, meaning they are more like handles to the objects, meaning that 1) they can cross thread boundaries 2) they are references until they are modified.
All in all I see you only lose out on the memory defrag. But you don't need to learn C++/CLI or C#. (My opinion of C# is that if you're going to go that far, you might as well take the goals of the language to completion, in which case you end up with Python, oh yeah, there is a Python wrapper for Qt too)
First, I would like to say that I a fan of Ben Stein. But this movie is blemish in what I think is an outstanding career. I will explain. I too have asked the same exact questions that your trailers ask. But I do have answers. I've followed the I.D. vs evolution debate, and I come down firmly on the evolution side. But that is not what you ask about...
Scientific inquiry first clashed with religion when a man innocently attempted to determine the motion of the heavenly bodies in an effort to determine God's intent. This man was Newton, but he started a long battle of God giving up ground to science. For as long as science is practiced, the domain of God has reduced. It is likely that at some time in the future that we have "God" reduced to the fundamental constants of the universe. (Only in terms of a mechanical sense, not spiritual) This can only be the case if scientific inquiry is allowed to continue.
The problem I have, and as it seems schools (public and private), and government have as well with I.D. people being key in scientific discovery , is that it threatens further scientific discoveries. The threat is not intentional, or, at least I believe in most cases it is not intentional (but the Dover school district it was quite intentional). The reason why it threatens scientific discovery, was shown in the Dover court case. The cellular structure that was heralded as 'irreducible' was actually shown to be reducible. Once the researcher was content with the idea that the structure was irreducible, scientific inquiry ended. This is not acceptable. It is not acceptable in projects funded by public or private grants. I fear if I.D. was ever accepted as a viable answer, all sufficiently complicated systems would be described as I.D. and we'd throw our arms up and declare ourselves done. I could imagine a time when all things are attributed to I.D. and such a time scares me.
I do not think that all professors who suppose I.D. would be haphazard, but it is not a risk we do not have to take. The question is if there is room for I.D. and a mind that is willing to probe deeper. Can someone have reverence and probe deeper? Newton did, so it is possible, but I doubt all of the I.D. proponents could.
The biggest failure of I.D. is to factor in the value of processes. And really this is what it boils down to. With I.D. there is no process, and it is all design. With science it is all process and no design. For the past 400 years, we've had nearly every process that has been attributed to God be re-attributed to a process. The question then is God a process, or is God designed? If God is a process then there can be no irreducible complexity, and I.D. effectively eats itself. Processes happen in the domain of time, so the question then becomes what is the domain of time for life on earth. We see evolution happening here on earth, so when did that start? And then the question is what was the process for earth? Answering that question is a question of celestial processes arising in planet formation and going back to the beginning of the universe.
Given then that we are the result of processes, how relevant or prevalent is I.D.? Is there any I.D. still left? It would seem that if the I.D. of our creator was irreducible, then we could never replace any part of the design. This would mean we could only add-on to make alterations (adaptation) and this would create more complication from the base simplicity. The neat feature is that any design is completely mutable. You can bury the original design so deep it could not be discerned. What I am describing of course is DNA. However the smallest number of genes for an independent organism is 1500 genes. This would be a boon for I.D. as until there are 1500 genes, there is no way to evolve and combine 1500 genes at once. However, these genes do contain junk DNA, showing that they were created by a process. The only thing I can conclude, and indeed others should be able to conclude, is that we don't understand the process. This is where scientists who don'
I just realized a great example: Slashdot's RSS. Blind asks for the slashdot listings. Voice from computer reads the headlines. User can "skip" or "read" TFA by saying those words. He doesn't care about the ALT-tags.
The best web content is visual. It is what you can accomplish.
By distilling it down to a basic web service, or RSS feed, you get the core essence of the experience. Let me use any software for my banking. Let me sit down and say check balances (which hashes to the "CheckBalances" Web service function, which is a two step process "GetAccountList" which is then fed into "RetrieveBalance". The computer can then read the account name and balance to me. Or, if using a prowser or my own software, maybe GNUCash, it can present it on the screen. Here, the impared user and the non-impared user have accomplished the same thing with the same amount of work done for both to the financial institution. But the visual client had to add SOAP support to its visial client. Similarly, the impaired user could be using a verbal client which can make sense of speech to call macro functions which are tied together in software. Then you can offer an internet service for the blind, where you say " goto 'bank of america'" browser says: "I have the following options: 'information', 'login'" user says "login", provides login info, then "I have the following options: 'check balances', 'transfer funds', etc" and the user can go through this way.
The fact that all visual data is discarded in web services is a fantastic thing.
Is that the web is an enabling platform. I think the blind should have as much claim to being enabled as the non-visually impaired. However, the "Web Browser" is a visual paradigm. Its goal is not to be (as I put that in italics) the web, but to present an interface for empowering you to accomplish some task. Be it paying bills, reading the latest research. Arguing for accessibility is like saying the deaf should be able to enjoy and appreciate music by watching the visualization. It just don't make any sense.
Where do we go from here? Well I think web services should be exposed by all sites that allows a non-visual client to operate the service. The blind user is then left to find any kind of web services client (voice recognition, braille input, TTY) to operate that service. If we can enable blind people to be enriched in function, and not aesthetics, we've accomplished what we needed to do. All the effort of images, flash, etc. is for the non-visually impaired.
Tax Freedom Day, the day where our tax obligations would be met if the taxes were collected 100% until met is April 23rd of this year.
It is hard to beleive that since the inception of the Union, that the income tax rate has gone from 1% (with only 1 in 10 claiming any income) to everyone paying around 30% (Prior to 1913 taxing income was questionable.) What went from a measure enacted in 1913 to tax the rich has turned into a measure that taxes the poor better than it does the rich.
I have a super sense of smell. I can smell and identify an open can of V-8 in another room. But it's not all rosey at this extreme either (pun shamefully indulged in). As a result, some of our more volatile chemicals (like tar, household cleaners, etc) cause immediate headaches at just a wiff. Today there are tons of smells that just shouldn't be there. I'm not going to equate it to a mine field, but it's not great. But on occasion it is rewarding.
My father lost his sense of smell after a car accident. I never realized how important it is. One day his van smelled like gas, but he didn't know. He had a leaky gas line. He can't smell my mom's perfume or what's for dinner. What he does taste is a combination of the four basic flavors.
You're wrong. There was OS/2, which was more advanced than windows 95 when it came out, (either way you interpret that) because it has 32-bit support and pre-emptive multitasking. But MS reneged on that joint development effort.
Then there was Windows NT. "NT" is for "New Technology" and was a re-write from the grount up. DOS support was emulated.
Vista is an extreme bolt-on to XP, which was a bolt-on to 2000, which was a bolt-on to NT. Each time, Microsoft never added any real complexity or value. For instance, it only takes 3 DirectX DLLs that can be copied off a XP machine and placed on a W2k machine to run any:XP only" game.
Microsoft has also internally changed their stance on compatibility. When 95 was released a HUGE effort was made for backwards compatibility. Now no real effort is made because it hinders sales and complicates the engineering. But this simplification has failed to make Microsoft products or sales better. Sales are only better because computers are more ubiquitous.
So how often do you want to start from the ground up and do a redesign? The QA makes it nearly impossible, and it has to be done with vendor cooperation (ATI, NVidia, Creative!?!) But what could be so important that Microsoft would have to add that couldn't be bolted on, or done by a competitor with less effort?
I don't think bolting-on is a problem, its the nature of engineering, and software engineering is incremental in nature. But these are the same challenges that every other OS has (Apple, Linux).
Legacy code won't be MS's downfall. MS's downfall will be 1) that with windows 2000 the OS was stable enough 2) no new real value has been added since 3) Microsoft is playing catch-up, and doing it poorly.
With W2k, the OS rarely crashed. My computing usage/experience has not changed since Win2k. With XP, I turn off the blue title bar and red close button. I make it look like windows 2000. Drivers worked.
Everything since has been a forced upgrade. (Like the aforementioned "XP-only" game issue.) I don't have a reason to use XP over 2000, except for security updates. I'm only still using windows because of document compatibility, and Macs cost too much.
Microsoft's Vista, which came on this laptop was tried and removed. It frankly was too hard to use and too slow. I had to run my IDE as an administrator. The nag pop-ups were plentiful. Is that "value"? I can see MS tried to copy OSX, but because it wasn't their idea, it failed when it came to implementation. The Vista OS adds unneeded complexity. A new driver model, new explorer interface, all in the name of gloss, which is just a fad anyway.
Back in the 90s, MS was actually adding value to their products. But at some point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. That kicked in around 2000, and all these changes become negative value rather than a positive one.
At some point, the entire industry has to concede that the OS is not an area of competition. There are only so many ways to draw rectangles and operate hardware devices. This OS should be free, and just come with that hardware. It should be even below the value of a commodity. Apple will continue to ship and OS to run their hardware. Linux and Windows is left to compete for the remaining market space. MS is already conceding to Linux in the OLPC market. I expect this to continue to the point where MS will give their OS away like linux, to keep people on the platform so MS can exercise some control and make profits. By selling Office only on MS-platforms, plenty of people will still choose Windows (even if ODF/OOXML provides the level of interop. that is expected) but at this point competition isn't on the OS... It is on applications, and right where it should be. MS will give the OS away for free eventually because if they don't they have to ship Linux versions of all their products, but they won't do that because they are megalomaniacs who need to be in control of the kernel.
I dismiss on-line apps as not ready yet because global access is too limited, the average speed of all computer users (incl. disconnected ones) is less than 56K, and the connection costs are too high. An installed app will _always_ work.
As a FiOS user (and very satisfied, aside from the port 80 blocking) I don't really care, but as a former Comcast customer and for those of you that are locked into Comcast...
Comcast has their own "Comcastic!" word for describing the Comccast experience. Why not turn it into a sarcastic meme of "fantasic!". Better yet, with specific application to losing bits.
Examples: My Hard-drive crashed. Comcastic! We had a Comcastic terminator on this 10base-2 cable which was causing the problem. I sent they money, but western union got a bit Comcastic. Steven Hawking thinks black holes have Comcastic properties.
It is really not a death wish. Look at what is happening: Comcast is making the connection suck even more for p2p users, meaning that they will defect and become someone else's problem. This then puts strain on the other provider, and leaves Comcast with a light-duty network. Look, p2p users, Comcast doesn't want you. They don't want your business. I have a theory on why they are taking a hard-line (npi) approach... It is interesting to note that the shared trunk infrastructure used by Comcast is extremely sensitive to overloading, and the best example of this is p2p applications, because a few users can tie up the whole trunk. You are basically using a broadcast medium, rather than a switched medium. The numbers of non-p2p users at present (as estimated by Comcast's actions) would seem to suggest that it is much more valuable for them to have the offenders leave rather than be customers. There is probably a factor of 1 p2p user for every 10 users. If it takes 10 p2p users to tie up a trunk, then these p2p users are worth 9 subscribers each (100-10=90)
Kexi is a Free/Libre and Open-Source integrated data management application, a long awaited Open Source competitor for products like Microsoft Access. Kexi can be used for creating database schemas, inserting data, performing queries, and processing data. Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to your data. All database objects - tables, queries and forms - are stored in the relational database, making it easy to share data and design.
MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, technically speaking. By the time you enable all the atomicity, and PostgreSQL feature set, you arrive at worse-than PostgreSQL performance.
MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, legally speaking. PostgreSQL is BSD. MySQL is anything but. Sure, the community edition is free, but it cannot be used with commercial software. In fact, there's a special "open source exception" to the license. That's not really open source. Open Source would never make you pay server licensing fees for use in commercial software, it would only make you distribute your source at worst.
We hear oh, threads are good, but then I read this propagated by SQLite and written by someone at Berkley.
Then there is my own observation, If I have a mount of work (w) to do n times, then the product (w*n=p) is the total work. If I queue it then I approach total wall time being w*n as well. If I tackle it as multi-threaded, then I start n threads which each do w work. However, because the threads compete for scheduling, and the OS has at least n more context switches, we actually reduce the amount of work being done in any amount of time. In addition, the caches effectively become smaller because you have to share your cache space with other threads. And we've also just added a degree of complexity to the processing because you will likely need critical sections and mutexes.
Which leads me to to my general conclusion (in terms of most software written) that for general programs, the threading should be accomplished by a thread for each unique (in terms of algorithm) processing task. A GUI thread, a database thread, a static service thread. By separating these, you'd enforce a degree of abstraction and concurrency. And all that is needed are callbacks (to async. process the value from the DB and update the GUI). The non-general cases like executing a PHP script as part of a web server (where the algorithm depends on the script file itself), or a highly scalable large problem (i.e. sorting, dynamic programming).
Just my thoughts from an alleged pragmatic programmer.
The presence of a defect would be obvious once one of the implementation's results differed. Given a data set, any stable sorting routine, and comparison of the results from the sort on two independent platforms, you could identify the existence of a defect. Once you have three platforms, you can identify the defective implementation, and you can forward the results of the correct computation (define as winner of best 2 out of 3, aka "consensus") on to the next stage in the processing sequence.
These chip-based attacks could only look for particular instructions, or sets thereof, in certain combinations. Using two architectures would make implementing identical defects next to impossible because there is only a small overlap of instructions which are functionally identical. Combining it with a software virtual machine (that can be compiled and whose compiler output can digitally signed and verified) would also either break up or obfuscate any instruction sequence to the point of making instruction sequence-based attacks pointless.
Hardware is cheap, and there are always more than one way to skin a cat.
Just do the same algorithm on different hardware architenctures and at least one different virtual machine implementations. (Use a minimum of three implementations!) Take the answer that two agree on and forward that on to the next step in the pipeline. It would be difficult if not impossible to produce a counterfeit chip that could produce undetectable deviations in both software and hardware machines.
"Never set sail with only two compasses - use one or three."
Dr. Emmett Brown: Shhhhhh. Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing full of used pinball machine parts! Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload....back in 1955...
Dr. Emmett Brown: I'm sure in 1985 plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by.
It seems that in 2008, its still hard even for NASA.
If you ditch your current platform, you are ditching the implementation, not the feature set right? If that is true, then the right answer is to ditch your current platform AFTER you've written (and implemented) test cases against it. This will ensure that the existing functionality is preserved on the new platform.
The question is then what platform is are the test cases in? This should be answered as "the same as the proposed new platform." This provides a warm-up period for developers and creates a good playground to work out kinks before you even switch for real. (Leaving plenty of opportunity to back out!)
Be warned: implementing in a new platform is rarely worth it. What are you expecting to achieve in the new platform? If it is just ability to fill developer chairs, then it is most likely not worth it. If those developers are being required for product growth, then you might have something. But for maintenance, get a consultant. You'll have way less headaches.
Slashdot Mirror
Excerpted from RP2008, a discussion about charity, which in the limited usefulness of space exploration the space program is. I assume you could say it employs people, but those people would have no problem working other places as well.
If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give at all; and as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. 'No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity.'
"'Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this country as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have Thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week's pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life.'
There is a problem with this logic. Can the effectiveness of the camera be reduced to zero? Yes. Quite easily. A good disguise will completely render the camera useless. Anyone contemplating a crime will factor a disguise in. Be it a hooded sweat shirt which is discarded off-camera or a Nixon mask. With the identity sufficiently disguised, there is the issue of motion: Approach/exit vectors along with gait. Gait can be modified easily (try an added insert in or tack the shoe). Approach and exit vectors are seldom useful because of the limited area the camera can cover.
In the end, you get a really expensive system thwarted by 5 minutes of planning.
Fine, don't use 1984, but lets look at a list of grievances that were determined sufficient to start a war:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. - suspension of Habeus Corpus (sp?), citing Executive privilege at every turn
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. - Federal funding is threatened any time a State considers a law counter to the federal agenda
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. - Well the White house is not keeping the email records as ordered to by the Legislature and the Courts
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. - Not so much Judges this time, but attorneys int he office of the Attorney General.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. - he has appointed to offices incompetent people who were irresponsible, or shills for the administration.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has definitely deployed troops with out a declaration of war.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: while not murder, he has obstructed justice for his shill, Carl Rove?
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: - Gitmo
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: - well the opposite is true. Conspiring with other nations to arrest and detain citizens in order to prevent them from re-entering their country.
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own L
Or the ones with the best view get seized by the government after an explosion at a 5-sided building and never get released to the public.
No, but the cameras can see you. And that is the problem. You seem to equate being bothersome in the scenery as being bothersome to civil liberties. Do not make that mistake. How many cameras a day do you think we are on? How many is that really?
Here in the Maryland in the US, there has been an explosion of cameras at street lights, in low pedestrian areas. What these cameras do, I do not know. And I think that is the worst part.
I was speaking from a functional perspective. Perhaps, I should have said GTK, where Qt and GTK are the toolkits that implement their respective desktop environments.
As someone who had to learn C++/CLI and writes code to allow legacy code to interop with C# at work, I have this to say.
.NET:
If you are going to learn a new platform for a "modern" app or OS, then let it be one that allows you to target more than one platform. Seriously. Lets take a look at
- Everything in the library is new.
- You can only officially target one platform. (Mono not withstanding)
- You have to learn a new language to use it effectively.
Now look at Qt:
- New library
- Build onto same C++ compiler you've always used
- No messy COM, COM wrappers needed for introspection
- You can target any platform with a modern C++ compiler (VS6 and higher on win32, gcc on all platforms)
- Ground up C++, clean consistent API.
- Active development with binary compatibility within major releases.
- Python, ECMA scripting, (some C# support too!)
- Java version
- Meta-object compiler adds introspection. (no need to deal with COM)
- ActiveX interop in the commercial version (You can use Qt widgets in Winforms and vice-versa)
I don't know as much about GNOME, but it shares a lot with Qt, so should not be excluded.
About the only thing you miss out on is the automatic garbage collector. Qt emulates this to some degree by allowing every QObject to have a parent. Then the only thing missing is the ability to defragment memory in the heap. I've only heard about this being caused by lots of small memory allocations, but Qt block allocates so this isn't a problem. Also, many types are implicitly shared, meaning they are more like handles to the objects, meaning that 1) they can cross thread boundaries 2) they are references until they are modified.
All in all I see you only lose out on the memory defrag. But you don't need to learn C++/CLI or C#. (My opinion of C# is that if you're going to go that far, you might as well take the goals of the language to completion, in which case you end up with Python, oh yeah, there is a Python wrapper for Qt too)
No, this is slashdot. Stick with what you know.
We don't need anyone getting hurt.
First, I would like to say that I a fan of Ben Stein. But this movie is blemish in what I think is an outstanding career. I will explain.
I too have asked the same exact questions that your trailers ask. But I do have answers. I've followed the I.D. vs evolution debate, and I come down firmly on the evolution side. But that is not what you ask about...
Scientific inquiry first clashed with religion when a man innocently attempted to determine the motion of the heavenly bodies in an effort to determine God's intent. This man was Newton, but he started a long battle of God giving up ground to science. For as long as science is practiced, the domain of God has reduced. It is likely that at some time in the future that we have "God" reduced to the fundamental constants of the universe. (Only in terms of a mechanical sense, not spiritual) This can only be the case if scientific inquiry is allowed to continue.
The problem I have, and as it seems schools (public and private), and government have as well with I.D. people being key in scientific discovery , is that it threatens further scientific discoveries. The threat is not intentional, or, at least I believe in most cases it is not intentional (but the Dover school district it was quite intentional). The reason why it threatens scientific discovery, was shown in the Dover court case. The cellular structure that was heralded as 'irreducible' was actually shown to be reducible. Once the researcher was content with the idea that the structure was irreducible, scientific inquiry ended. This is not acceptable. It is not acceptable in projects funded by public or private grants. I fear if I.D. was ever accepted as a viable answer, all sufficiently complicated systems would be described as I.D. and we'd throw our arms up and declare ourselves done. I could imagine a time when all things are attributed to I.D. and such a time scares me.
I do not think that all professors who suppose I.D. would be haphazard, but it is not a risk we do not have to take. The question is if there is room for I.D. and a mind that is willing to probe deeper. Can someone have reverence and probe deeper? Newton did, so it is possible, but I doubt all of the I.D. proponents could.
The biggest failure of I.D. is to factor in the value of processes. And really this is what it boils down to. With I.D. there is no process, and it is all design. With science it is all process and no design. For the past 400 years, we've had nearly every process that has been attributed to God be re-attributed to a process. The question then is God a process, or is God designed? If God is a process then there can be no irreducible complexity, and I.D. effectively eats itself. Processes happen in the domain of time, so the question then becomes what is the domain of time for life on earth. We see evolution happening here on earth, so when did that start? And then the question is what was the process for earth? Answering that question is a question of celestial processes arising in planet formation and going back to the beginning of the universe.
Given then that we are the result of processes, how relevant or prevalent is I.D.? Is there any I.D. still left? It would seem that if the I.D. of our creator was irreducible, then we could never replace any part of the design. This would mean we could only add-on to make alterations (adaptation) and this would create more complication from the base simplicity. The neat feature is that any design is completely mutable. You can bury the original design so deep it could not be discerned. What I am describing of course is DNA. However the smallest number of genes for an independent organism is 1500 genes. This would be a boon for I.D. as until there are 1500 genes, there is no way to evolve and combine 1500 genes at once. However, these genes do contain junk DNA, showing that they were created by a process. The only thing I can conclude, and indeed others should be able to conclude, is that we don't understand the process. This is where scientists who don'
I just realized a great example: Slashdot's RSS.
Blind asks for the slashdot listings. Voice from computer reads the headlines. User can "skip" or "read" TFA by saying those words. He doesn't care about the ALT-tags.
The best web content is visual. It is what you can accomplish.
By distilling it down to a basic web service, or RSS feed, you get the core essence of the experience. Let me use any software for my banking. Let me sit down and say check balances (which hashes to the "CheckBalances" Web service function, which is a two step process "GetAccountList" which is then fed into "RetrieveBalance". The computer can then read the account name and balance to me. Or, if using a prowser or my own software, maybe GNUCash, it can present it on the screen. Here, the impared user and the non-impared user have accomplished the same thing with the same amount of work done for both to the financial institution. But the visual client had to add SOAP support to its visial client. Similarly, the impaired user could be using a verbal client which can make sense of speech to call macro functions which are tied together in software. Then you can offer an internet service for the blind, where you say " goto 'bank of america'" browser says: "I have the following options: 'information', 'login'" user says "login", provides login info, then "I have the following options: 'check balances', 'transfer funds', etc" and the user can go through this way.
The fact that all visual data is discarded in web services is a fantastic thing.
Is that the web is an enabling platform. I think the blind should have as much claim to being enabled as the non-visually impaired. However, the "Web Browser" is a visual paradigm. Its goal is not to be (as I put that in italics) the web, but to present an interface for empowering you to accomplish some task. Be it paying bills, reading the latest research. Arguing for accessibility is like saying the deaf should be able to enjoy and appreciate music by watching the visualization. It just don't make any sense.
Where do we go from here? Well I think web services should be exposed by all sites that allows a non-visual client to operate the service. The blind user is then left to find any kind of web services client (voice recognition, braille input, TTY) to operate that service. If we can enable blind people to be enriched in function, and not aesthetics, we've accomplished what we needed to do. All the effort of images, flash, etc. is for the non-visually impaired.
Tax Freedom Day, the day where our tax obligations would be met if the taxes were collected 100% until met is April 23rd of this year.
It is hard to beleive that since the inception of the Union, that the income tax rate has gone from 1% (with only 1 in 10 claiming any income) to everyone paying around 30% (Prior to 1913 taxing income was questionable.) What went from a measure enacted in 1913 to tax the rich has turned into a measure that taxes the poor better than it does the rich.
I have a super sense of smell. I can smell and identify an open can of V-8 in another room. But it's not all rosey at this extreme either (pun shamefully indulged in). As a result, some of our more volatile chemicals (like tar, household cleaners, etc) cause immediate headaches at just a wiff. Today there are tons of smells that just shouldn't be there. I'm not going to equate it to a mine field, but it's not great. But on occasion it is rewarding.
My father lost his sense of smell after a car accident. I never realized how important it is. One day his van smelled like gas, but he didn't know. He had a leaky gas line. He can't smell my mom's perfume or what's for dinner. What he does taste is a combination of the four basic flavors.
Smell is probably our most underrated sense.
You're wrong. There was OS/2, which was more advanced than windows 95 when it came out, (either way you interpret that) because it has 32-bit support and pre-emptive multitasking. But MS reneged on that joint development effort.
:XP only" game.
Then there was Windows NT. "NT" is for "New Technology" and was a re-write from the grount up. DOS support was emulated.
Vista is an extreme bolt-on to XP, which was a bolt-on to 2000, which was a bolt-on to NT. Each time, Microsoft never added any real complexity or value. For instance, it only takes 3 DirectX DLLs that can be copied off a XP machine and placed on a W2k machine to run any
Microsoft has also internally changed their stance on compatibility. When 95 was released a HUGE effort was made for backwards compatibility. Now no real effort is made because it hinders sales and complicates the engineering. But this simplification has failed to make Microsoft products or sales better. Sales are only better because computers are more ubiquitous.
So how often do you want to start from the ground up and do a redesign? The QA makes it nearly impossible, and it has to be done with vendor cooperation (ATI, NVidia, Creative!?!) But what could be so important that Microsoft would have to add that couldn't be bolted on, or done by a competitor with less effort?
I don't think bolting-on is a problem, its the nature of engineering, and software engineering is incremental in nature. But these are the same challenges that every other OS has (Apple, Linux).
Legacy code won't be MS's downfall. MS's downfall will be 1) that with windows 2000 the OS was stable enough 2) no new real value has been added since 3) Microsoft is playing catch-up, and doing it poorly.
With W2k, the OS rarely crashed. My computing usage/experience has not changed since Win2k. With XP, I turn off the blue title bar and red close button. I make it look like windows 2000.
Drivers worked.
Everything since has been a forced upgrade. (Like the aforementioned "XP-only" game issue.) I don't have a reason to use XP over 2000, except for security updates. I'm only still using windows because of document compatibility, and Macs cost too much.
Microsoft's Vista, which came on this laptop was tried and removed. It frankly was too hard to use and too slow. I had to run my IDE as an administrator. The nag pop-ups were plentiful. Is that "value"? I can see MS tried to copy OSX, but because it wasn't their idea, it failed when it came to implementation. The Vista OS adds unneeded complexity. A new driver model, new explorer interface, all in the name of gloss, which is just a fad anyway.
Back in the 90s, MS was actually adding value to their products. But at some point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. That kicked in around 2000, and all these changes become negative value rather than a positive one.
At some point, the entire industry has to concede that the OS is not an area of competition. There are only so many ways to draw rectangles and operate hardware devices. This OS should be free, and just come with that hardware. It should be even below the value of a commodity. Apple will continue to ship and OS to run their hardware. Linux and Windows is left to compete for the remaining market space. MS is already conceding to Linux in the OLPC market. I expect this to continue to the point where MS will give their OS away like linux, to keep people on the platform so MS can exercise some control and make profits. By selling Office only on MS-platforms, plenty of people will still choose Windows (even if ODF/OOXML provides the level of interop. that is expected) but at this point competition isn't on the OS... It is on applications, and right where it should be. MS will give the OS away for free eventually because if they don't they have to ship Linux versions of all their products, but they won't do that because they are megalomaniacs who need to be in control of the kernel.
I dismiss on-line apps as not ready yet because global access is too limited, the average speed of all computer users (incl. disconnected ones) is less than 56K, and the connection costs are too high. An installed app will _always_ work.
As a FiOS user (and very satisfied, aside from the port 80 blocking) I don't really care, but as a former Comcast customer and for those of you that are locked into Comcast...
Comcast has their own "Comcastic!" word for describing the Comccast experience. Why not turn it into a sarcastic meme of "fantasic!". Better yet, with specific application to losing bits.
Examples:
My Hard-drive crashed. Comcastic!
We had a Comcastic terminator on this 10base-2 cable which was causing the problem.
I sent they money, but western union got a bit Comcastic.
Steven Hawking thinks black holes have Comcastic properties.
It is really not a death wish. Look at what is happening: Comcast is making the connection suck even more for p2p users, meaning that they will defect and become someone else's problem. This then puts strain on the other provider, and leaves Comcast with a light-duty network. Look, p2p users, Comcast doesn't want you. They don't want your business. I have a theory on why they are taking a hard-line (npi) approach... It is interesting to note that the shared trunk infrastructure used by Comcast is extremely sensitive to overloading, and the best example of this is p2p applications, because a few users can tie up the whole trunk. You are basically using a broadcast medium, rather than a switched medium. The numbers of non-p2p users at present (as estimated by Comcast's actions) would seem to suggest that it is much more valuable for them to have the offenders leave rather than be customers. There is probably a factor of 1 p2p user for every 10 users. If it takes 10 p2p users to tie up a trunk, then these p2p users are worth 9 subscribers each (100-10=90)
It makes sense to me.
Anyone got a pic to illustrate this? I can't really believe a star to be that visibly large.
Check out KDE's Kexi
Kexi is a Free/Libre and Open-Source integrated data management application, a long awaited Open Source competitor for products like Microsoft Access. Kexi can be used for creating database schemas, inserting data, performing queries, and processing data. Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to your data. All database objects - tables, queries and forms - are stored in the relational database, making it easy to share data and design.
I also like the (commercial) Maestro tools
Now there's an oxymoron!
MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, technically speaking. By the time you enable all the atomicity, and PostgreSQL feature set, you arrive at worse-than PostgreSQL performance.
MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, legally speaking. PostgreSQL is BSD. MySQL is anything but. Sure, the community edition is free, but it cannot be used with commercial software. In fact, there's a special "open source exception" to the license. That's not really open source. Open Source would never make you pay server licensing fees for use in commercial software, it would only make you distribute your source at worst.
We hear oh, threads are good, but then I read this propagated by SQLite and written by someone at Berkley.
Then there is my own observation, If I have a mount of work (w) to do n times, then the product (w*n=p) is the total work. If I queue it then I approach total wall time being w*n as well. If I tackle it as multi-threaded, then I start n threads which each do w work. However, because the threads compete for scheduling, and the OS has at least n more context switches, we actually reduce the amount of work being done in any amount of time. In addition, the caches effectively become smaller because you have to share your cache space with other threads. And we've also just added a degree of complexity to the processing because you will likely need critical sections and mutexes.
Which leads me to to my general conclusion (in terms of most software written) that for general programs, the threading should be accomplished by a thread for each unique (in terms of algorithm) processing task. A GUI thread, a database thread, a static service thread. By separating these, you'd enforce a degree of abstraction and concurrency. And all that is needed are callbacks (to async. process the value from the DB and update the GUI). The non-general cases like executing a PHP script as part of a web server (where the algorithm depends on the script file itself), or a highly scalable large problem (i.e. sorting, dynamic programming).
Just my thoughts from an alleged pragmatic programmer.
You failed to understand it.
The presence of a defect would be obvious once one of the implementation's results differed. Given a data set, any stable sorting routine, and comparison of the results from the sort on two independent platforms, you could identify the existence of a defect. Once you have three platforms, you can identify the defective implementation, and you can forward the results of the correct computation (define as winner of best 2 out of 3, aka "consensus") on to the next stage in the processing sequence.
These chip-based attacks could only look for particular instructions, or sets thereof, in certain combinations. Using two architectures would make implementing identical defects next to impossible because there is only a small overlap of instructions which are functionally identical. Combining it with a software virtual machine (that can be compiled and whose compiler output can digitally signed and verified) would also either break up or obfuscate any instruction sequence to the point of making instruction sequence-based attacks pointless.
Q: Please g3ve u5 r00t to m133ile l3nche5!
A; No.
Everyone knows it is CPE1704TKS
Hardware is cheap, and there are always more than one way to skin a cat.
Just do the same algorithm on different hardware architenctures and at least one different virtual machine implementations. (Use a minimum of three implementations!) Take the answer that two agree on and forward that on to the next step in the pipeline. It would be difficult if not impossible to produce a counterfeit chip that could produce undetectable deviations in both software and hardware machines.
"Never set sail with only two compasses - use one or three."
Dr. Emmett Brown: Shhhhhh. Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing full of used pinball machine parts! Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload. ...back in 1955...
Dr. Emmett Brown: I'm sure in 1985 plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by.
It seems that in 2008, its still hard even for NASA.
If you ditch your current platform, you are ditching the implementation, not the feature set right? If that is true, then the right answer is to ditch your current platform AFTER you've written (and implemented) test cases against it. This will ensure that the existing functionality is preserved on the new platform.
The question is then what platform is are the test cases in? This should be answered as "the same as the proposed new platform." This provides a warm-up period for developers and creates a good playground to work out kinks before you even switch for real. (Leaving plenty of opportunity to back out!)
Be warned: implementing in a new platform is rarely worth it. What are you expecting to achieve in the new platform? If it is just ability to fill developer chairs, then it is most likely not worth it. If those developers are being required for product growth, then you might have something. But for maintenance, get a consultant. You'll have way less headaches.