For all we know, life could be able to live at thousands of degrees hot. You just don't know.
Sure we know. Life won't survive at thousands of degrees because organic molecules fall apart at those temperatures, unless it's based on some element we don't see in the periodic table. A few thousand degrees means a good part of an eV per particle. Most chemical bonds will break in such an environment. Other elements don't behave right for life- they either form little molecules with a dozen or so atoms, or long simple polymers like asbestos. At thousands of degrees you won't even see that. Oxygen and fluorine can produce stable compounds with high bond energies but even those will break, and ceramic-based life has generally been a non-starter. Carbon itself will for the most part only exist in a free state although carbon monoxide (surprisingly stable) appears in stellar spectra.
Of course the definition of "life" is abstract in a general sense and doesn't necessarily involve electron chemistry at all. But if there's life anywhere on the sun, it's the sort of life that college-age geeks imagine existing at some level in the cellular automata programs they write for homework.
As illustrated above the "compression" does not occur after the Roman characters to Chinese characters conversion but during the translation. IE "In the morning sun the big, hairy, dog ate a black cat." would "compress" down into possibly a couple of Chinese characters so instead of the sentence taking ~55 bytes it may only take ~6 bytes.
I see eight nontrivial words to encode {"morning", "sun", "big", "hairy", "dog", "ate", "black", "cat"} which is way more than "~6 bytes"; try ~16. A Chinese glyph is like a word, not a letter. It contains about two bytes. Not knowing Chinese, I can encode each English word with about 2 bytes of information as its ordinal position within an English dictionary (with a 65536 word vocabulary). That's about what Chinese does for you here. (The symbol table itself doesn't need to be included in the file if the 8 symbols are already included in prior knowledge of Chinese- but for files large enough to be compressed this won't matter too much.)
The resulting bytes from Chinese-level compression have much higher entropy (per byte) than raw English letters and don't compress as well because you've already resolved the alphabet to a 16-bit symbol table. It will compress down further to about the same number of bytes as compressed ordinary English. A single communicable idea ("sunny morning big hairy dog ate black cat") contains the same raw information regardless of language, unless it's an idiom or proverb or something like that.
I recently had this same fight with a guy at work who wanted to tokenize common patterns in URLs ("http", "javascript:", "img src" etc.) before we applied gzip encoding to some HTML. He wanted to implement JavaScript on the other end that would query the server for his goofy token table over AJAX after the browser decompressed the HTML "halfway" at its normal http compression layer.
Perhaps having a Chinese character represent a simple block of pre-compiled code that does one simple thing. Then the characters could be placed in two-dimensional order to form parallel threads. This would require a completely different approach to compiler development. But that would be OK because compilers are stuck in the 1970s anyway.
I see neither a connection between the choice of character set and parallel programming, nor anything in your post that is beyond trivial to do in ASCII:
- For vertical side-by-side alignment, check your editor prefs in your IDE). If it is important that the source code itself be laid out horizontally like drapes, two dimensional languages in ASCII have already been tried and you can look into what happened with those. - Typically many of these threads are running the same code, so a separate column for each thread is of dubious value. - Even single threaded code forks around way too much to be visually representable by a column of glyphs. - Why not just use English words? They exist in comparable numbers to Chinese characters. - Existing compilers already convert methods into compressed representations of code that are basically equivalent to anything you're suggesting. - What's this about the 1970s? Compilers have a lot of optimizations now including the ability to recognize code written by dumb or lazy coders. If you're complaining about language design that's not the fault of the compiler which is just doing its job for a given language.
Just getting away from the idea of having code based on a very limited set of alphanumeric characters strung together like beads on a string might help unlock a whole new era of innovative approaches to parallel program development strategies.
It reminds me of the time I was on here arguing with a guy who said files would be easier to compress if they were converted to Chinese characters first, because then the file would be shorter. Exploding the set of characters, and having individual characters represent chunks of pre-compiled code as you're suggesting, would basically be like having thousands of reserved words and global functions. It sounds like hell the more I think about it. The actual character encoding system with left-right top-bottom semantics doesn't really get in the way of anything at a fundamental level.
It does go without saying that Chinese programmers would have an incredible advantage in any new system of programming that is based on Chinese characters.
Aha- here we see the motive behind the evil subversive plan for global compilation dominance...
It may be possible that this subject is already a project under development in China.
Maybe someone is working on such a thing- who knows? Why even bother? There are more English speakers in China than in the U.S. And you don't have to know much of a natural language to just code in a programming language that draws on it for its symbols. It's not like asking for a taxi or interviewing for a job in that natural language. Ruby was invented in Japan and is ASCII based, and the Chinese have an easy time picking it up because they're already used to ASCII languages and there are no Hiragana characters in Ruby itself AFAIK, not even in variable names.
" I better hurry up and attempt to cuase as much doubt as possible over this before someone else looks it up, discovers something I havn't told them ans starts to belive the truth." "hope this works."
Translation: "I am Galileo Galilei being persecuted for my beliefs- and the Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity who sit in judgment against me, all have Slashdot accounts and attack me in the comment sections to keep the truth from getting out."
Re:But what happened to the...
on
MacGyver Physics
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· Score: 4, Funny
A chewing gum wrapper rotates the polarization of light that passes through it.
You can prove this with two polarizers at right angles if you crumple up a piece of chewing gum wrapper and stick it between them. When held up to a light source, only the light that goes through through the chewing gum wrapper makes it through the second polarizer- the rest is all dark. And since the rotation is frequency dependent, the chewing gum wrapper is glowing in multiple colors. Especially if you do a good job when you crumple it up. It would look great on TV.
Re:When will I be able to use it for my laptop?
on
Driving on Starch
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· Score: 1
My Powerbook has a port on the right side that looks like one of the video out ports but it has a different shape and says "STARCH" on it. Apple sells these adapters for $25 that you hook up to your starch tank with one of those little magnetic starch clasp tubes and once a week I go to the grocery store and buy a sack of potato starch to power my computing for the week. Kinda sucks for when you're on the road but I either just use batteries or an iFannypack since they've come down in price.
I still need to figure out which one of these other ports is the one for the stuff that comes out. I never happen to be looking when it happens and I end up with a discharge of warm H2O in my lap under high CPU load. It's so embarrassing. The fan is developing a "french fry" odor which is ok except I get the munchies whenever I'm at my computer. I wish Apple would fix that.
I don't see any other candidate vowing to get rid of the illegal IRS and Income tax, do you? No matter what your political agenta, I`m sure everybody in the U.S. would benefit from that.
I used to like Ron Paul because I have never heard him say anything stupid. I haven't been paying enough attention apparently!
The income tax is not illegal; there is a constitutional amendment for it and everything. The 16th Amendment was attacked as unconstitutional because President Taft introduced it in 1911 and he was born in Ohio in 1857. In 1953, before its sesquicentennial statehood anniversary, someone searched the records and found that Ohio had not been formally admitted to the Union in 1803. Things were more half-assed back then and nobody in 1803 actually filled out the paperwork. Ohio officially became a state in 1953 in a jovial celebration. They delivered a petition for statehood on horseback to Washington D.C., Eisenhower cracked a few Buckeye jokes, and then he signed a bill making Ohio retroactively a state back to 1803. BUT- the dominoes start falling here: on ex post facto grounds Ohio still wasn't a state when Taft was born in it in 1857- meaning he was not a natural-born citizen of the U.S.- rendering his entire presidency illegitimate- and his 16th Amendment illegal- so we can keep our taxes. It's my favorite anti-tax argument of all time, and if Ohio hadn't actually been a U.S. Territory in 1857 (rats!) I could have filed a 1040X for my refund.
Only a very elite few would benefit from abolishing the income tax. It wouldn't mean "no taxes let's party". It would be replaced with more taxes you won't like, such as higher sales taxes or higher consumption taxes. On an average per capita basis your tax burden would probably go up. Also everyone would be running around flush with dollars. Think gas would stay at $3 if that happened? We'd experience the sort of inflation that remains suppressed by the income tax, and those dollars would mostly flow into the hands of people who would no longer be paying income taxes. It sounds like a good strategy for creating a Latin American country.
There are only two types of people who want to replace the income tax with a sales tax or a consumption tax: - Haves who know they pay more income tax now than they would pay if sales taxes replaced them. - Have nots with the complete opposite situation, but who fall for disingenuous arguments about taxes involving too much paperwork. "They're too complicated!"
We saw the same thing with the inheritance tax. They really sold that one hard- a tax break for hardly anybody that would cost a lot of money- so you heard all about these mythical "family farms" being lost to the inheritance tax. Like WMDs, the fact that they did not exist didn't seem to matter. Right after Katrina, they were looking for dead millionaires floating around in the water whose estate would be subject to the tax. "Whether a millionaire gets to pass his wealth on to his heirs... doesn't play well in the face of black people floating face down dead in the water," said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political science professor. (The floating dead millionaires turned out not to exist either.) The inheritance tax has also been attacked as racist by Robert L. Johnson (founder of Black Entertainment Television) since only 59 African Americans are expected to pay it in 2008 and he is one of them.
Taxes are complicated because the government uses them to direct people's behavior, so the tax code is full of carrots and sticks. Not only do you have to avoid the sticks, you must grab every carrot, because generally you are expected to, and the money is reflected in the prices of things you pay. This is what happened with the first-home-buyer mortgage deduction. It started out as a nice thing meant to help people. In response, the price of a
.... It's like Al Gore, just give it a rest, we heard your story now move on. Same thing goes to you Lucas... Great sci-fi, like Tron, is totally underappreciated in favor of mass-marketed starwars'ish puke.
Your post has given me a rare opportunity to quote Dennis Miller, something I never realized I'd be doing when I woke up this morning.
"Al Gore... This guys a real visionary. His favorite movie is Tron for Christsake!" -- Dennis Miller
This is a huge crisis. If radiation keeps eating fungi at this rate we'll have no mushrooms left by 2040!
Take it from a Rational ClearCase customer
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A Cynic Rips Open Source
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I used to work at one of these companies (not Cisco or Novell- you figure it out) and know this for a fact: their opinion of enterprise software is worthless. Especially at the management/executive level where they make the incompetent IT decisions they don't have to live with. I probably shouldn't say this during trading hours, but they have a site-wide license for Rational ClearCase at that place. So they should just shut the hell up.
Dealing with ClearCase is a major part of everyone's job there. It was forced on everybody with a top-down executive decision- all version control is handled with ClearCase since they paid for the license. (The "benefit" is that a team in the bioinformatics division can have access to a repository maintained by, say, the oil exploration division.) Everyone who has to use ClearCase hates it. The processes are weird and the tools that you're forced to use are buggy. I've heard people cite ClearCase as a good reason to look for another job. The guy in the next cube had three weeks of work destroyed by a ClearCase update one morning. He smashed his keyboard into 101 pieces on the floor.
There are tiny version-control rebellions all the time- small teams set up little secret CVS repositories here and there- just known to a few guys who then have to keep them a secret from management. Once the top brass inevitably finds out about them, the phagocytosis begins: the team has to stop whatever it's doing and help migrate their entire CVS repository into ClearCase. This was always an abnormally large, painful undertaking for some reason. It was a real tragedy every time it happened- really demoralizing for everyone, even the people in the next row of cubicles just rubbernecking another version control disaster.
A cynic might suggest that the people writing open source software are the ones who are making their daytime living working for a proprietary-solutions vendor and spend their nights tearing down the very house they live in. And that if open source replaced proprietary solutions, these people would not be able to make a daytime living that supports their night time hobby.
A cynic would be right.
A cynic might suggest that the people breathing in oxygen are the ones who are exhaling carbon dioxide and destroying the very atmosphere they're breathing. And that if carbon dioxide completely replaced oxygen, these people would not be able to inhale the oxygen that turns into the carbon dioxide they exhale. A cynic would be right./snark
Who claimed that these technologies have made the police better at their jobs?
The police and the press.
And who claimed that "the public" tells the police what to do?
The police and the press.
Although you're photographed 300 times a day, the cameras will help catch a lone serial killer once every few years and that's all you'll ever hear about them.
2) the distancs involved are different. the average commute in north america is a journey so long you'd be passing through five european countries. you euros can ride bikes, we routinely have 100 mile commutes one way.
Commute times are long in this country because as a nation we have invested heavily in a massive automotive and highway infrastructure, relative to most countries in Europe, as if we intended for cars to be the primary means for getting around. Our cities loosened their belts and allowed themselves to sprawl out into the countryside as vast suburban wastelands. We even let our alternative transportation infrastructures fall victim to disrepair, disuse, or dismantlement. So once again, France will avoid the sort of trouble that we like to set ourselves up for.
It's not like the total area of the country being 10 times bigger means that your personal commute distance has to expand to sqrt(10) times what it would be in Europe, as if we're all inkspots on a giant rubber sheet. Try to move closer to work, find an employer closer to where you live, telecommute, or suck on it and wait for the Mad Max era to arrive.
Phonons are ultimately responsible for all conduction of sound and heat through solids. I should have said this for insulators- in conductors the electrons are responsible for most conductivity.
This business with polaritons in semiconductors sounds a lot like the way phonons in crystal lattices work.
A phonon is a sort of derived particle. It isn't a fundamental particle in itself but it represents a quantized mode of vibration in a lattice of more fundamental particles. But as a quasiparticle it exhibits the same types of behavior as other particles subject to quantum mechanics.
Their classical analogue would be standing waves in a crystal lattice. These lose part of their classical wave-like character and become more particle-like when the vibrational energy in the crystal decreases to near zero. The vibrational energy at extremely low temperatures takes the form of a few phonons bouncing around in the crystal like free particles in a hollow box. Phonons are ultimately responsible for all conduction of sound and heat through solids.
A polariton is apparently the coupling of a photon with one of these, and they're claiming to have gotten interesting collective behavior. I'm not sure if this is a "new state of matter" but we may get some cool toys out of it.
I think most hate comments are from users, not competitors. So posts by competitors are harder to identify.
I've never seen any competitor of any employer of my own on here. My Slashdot conflicts of interest are all of a more common type- I invest a few days of my life studying some technology which then suxxor rulez.
You know, I have to wonder on this site sometimes, when I see a headline "Tech Company X Snafu Causes Widespread IT Disaster" or "Tech Company X Announces Plans for Evil" posted on the front page, and then I open the comment threads, how many comments were actually posted by employees of X.
So what's wrong with that? If you ask me, people should say "ees-land" or "ayes-land" if they're spelling it that way. They were probably trying to make it not sound like "Iceland" back in medieval times when automated speech recognition wasn't as good or existent as it is today.
That's all great an all, but is anybody going to buy something from a link that has crazy ransom-note-like letters with random colors and digital noise all over the place?
Hey. You didn't post the link. How can I answer your question unless I know whether I'll actually buy the stuff!
Frankly this is all Marc Andreessen's fault. Remember how email used to work before that horrible Netscape Messenger back in the mid-90s? Tech support people used to laugh at old ladies who called worrying about catching computer viruses via email. That used to be hilarious. Now you get a weird email and have to worry that your preview pane might install a rootkit. I liked email better when it was all just sterile text. I think most people did. Hyperlinks are the only useful thing that HTML brings to email, and an email client can pick them out of ASCII and render them as linked text anyway.
Marketing people seem to have a weakness for pretty HTML- they keep insisting they need it, as if they don't experience email like all the rest of us do. Nicely presented and formatted HTML may have been impressive back in 1994, but after a decade of abuse it's become a powerful visual indicator of garbage that's a waste of your time to even move your eyes across. If you use the web for more than a week you quickly develop a revulsion for prettiness just from the banner ads. If I see anything more than the most simple HTML, I immediately assume I'm looking at an advertisement. I actually can't find important links I'm looking for sometimes, which are sitting right there, because they've been stupidly disguised to look like advertisements. And that's just on the web. For email, the visual cue is even more glaring. It takes me a few milliseconds to notice colors or photography in an email before I delete it without reading. I'd set up a filter if I weren't so lazy. If all mailservers were to suddenly start shitcanning HTML, it would solve a number of problems and nobody worth listening to would even notice.
The inside of this planet is a solid core of vanilla ice cream at tremendous temperature and pressure. Although heated above its normal melting point, it is kept in a frozen solid state by the sheer mass of molten hot chocolate lying on top of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've since learned it is not an uncommon personality type. I think it has much in common with compulsive gambling and drug addiction.
A pre-emptive foreign policy also has a lot to do with it, although I guess that's just a special case of compulsive gambling.
For all we know, life could be able to live at thousands of degrees hot. You just don't know.
Sure we know. Life won't survive at thousands of degrees because organic molecules fall apart at those temperatures, unless it's based on some element we don't see in the periodic table. A few thousand degrees means a good part of an eV per particle. Most chemical bonds will break in such an environment. Other elements don't behave right for life- they either form little molecules with a dozen or so atoms, or long simple polymers like asbestos. At thousands of degrees you won't even see that. Oxygen and fluorine can produce stable compounds with high bond energies but even those will break, and ceramic-based life has generally been a non-starter. Carbon itself will for the most part only exist in a free state although carbon monoxide (surprisingly stable) appears in stellar spectra.
Of course the definition of "life" is abstract in a general sense and doesn't necessarily involve electron chemistry at all. But if there's life anywhere on the sun, it's the sort of life that college-age geeks imagine existing at some level in the cellular automata programs they write for homework.
As illustrated above the "compression" does not occur after the Roman characters to Chinese characters conversion but during the translation. IE "In the morning sun the big, hairy, dog ate a black cat." would "compress" down into possibly a couple of Chinese characters so instead of the sentence taking ~55 bytes it may only take ~6 bytes.
I see eight nontrivial words to encode {"morning", "sun", "big", "hairy", "dog", "ate", "black", "cat"} which is way more than "~6 bytes"; try ~16. A Chinese glyph is like a word, not a letter. It contains about two bytes. Not knowing Chinese, I can encode each English word with about 2 bytes of information as its ordinal position within an English dictionary (with a 65536 word vocabulary). That's about what Chinese does for you here. (The symbol table itself doesn't need to be included in the file if the 8 symbols are already included in prior knowledge of Chinese- but for files large enough to be compressed this won't matter too much.)
The resulting bytes from Chinese-level compression have much higher entropy (per byte) than raw English letters and don't compress as well because you've already resolved the alphabet to a 16-bit symbol table. It will compress down further to about the same number of bytes as compressed ordinary English. A single communicable idea ("sunny morning big hairy dog ate black cat") contains the same raw information regardless of language, unless it's an idiom or proverb or something like that.
I recently had this same fight with a guy at work who wanted to tokenize common patterns in URLs ("http", "javascript:", "img src" etc.) before we applied gzip encoding to some HTML. He wanted to implement JavaScript on the other end that would query the server for his goofy token table over AJAX after the browser decompressed the HTML "halfway" at its normal http compression layer.
Perhaps having a Chinese character represent a simple block of pre-compiled code that does one simple thing. Then the characters could be placed in two-dimensional order to form parallel threads. This would require a completely different approach to compiler development. But that would be OK because compilers are stuck in the 1970s anyway.
I see neither a connection between the choice of character set and parallel programming, nor anything in your post that is beyond trivial to do in ASCII:
- For vertical side-by-side alignment, check your editor prefs in your IDE). If it is important that the source code itself be laid out horizontally like drapes, two dimensional languages in ASCII have already been tried and you can look into what happened with those.
- Typically many of these threads are running the same code, so a separate column for each thread is of dubious value.
- Even single threaded code forks around way too much to be visually representable by a column of glyphs.
- Why not just use English words? They exist in comparable numbers to Chinese characters.
- Existing compilers already convert methods into compressed representations of code that are basically equivalent to anything you're suggesting.
- What's this about the 1970s? Compilers have a lot of optimizations now including the ability to recognize code written by dumb or lazy coders. If you're complaining about language design that's not the fault of the compiler which is just doing its job for a given language.
Just getting away from the idea of having code based on a very limited set of alphanumeric characters strung together like beads on a string might help unlock a whole new era of innovative approaches to parallel program development strategies.
It reminds me of the time I was on here arguing with a guy who said files would be easier to compress if they were converted to Chinese characters first, because then the file would be shorter. Exploding the set of characters, and having individual characters represent chunks of pre-compiled code as you're suggesting, would basically be like having thousands of reserved words and global functions. It sounds like hell the more I think about it. The actual character encoding system with left-right top-bottom semantics doesn't really get in the way of anything at a fundamental level.
It does go without saying that Chinese programmers would have an incredible advantage in any new system of programming that is based on Chinese characters.
Aha- here we see the motive behind the evil subversive plan for global compilation dominance...
It may be possible that this subject is already a project under development in China.
Maybe someone is working on such a thing- who knows? Why even bother? There are more English speakers in China than in the U.S. And you don't have to know much of a natural language to just code in a programming language that draws on it for its symbols. It's not like asking for a taxi or interviewing for a job in that natural language. Ruby was invented in Japan and is ASCII based, and the Chinese have an easy time picking it up because they're already used to ASCII languages and there are no Hiragana characters in Ruby itself AFAIK, not even in variable names.
" I better hurry up and attempt to cuase as much doubt as possible over this before someone else looks it up, discovers something I havn't told them ans starts to belive the truth." "hope this works."
Translation: "I am Galileo Galilei being persecuted for my beliefs- and the Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity who sit in judgment against me, all have Slashdot accounts and attack me in the comment sections to keep the truth from getting out."
A chewing gum wrapper rotates the polarization of light that passes through it.
You can prove this with two polarizers at right angles if you crumple up a piece of chewing gum wrapper and stick it between them. When held up to a light source, only the light that goes through through the chewing gum wrapper makes it through the second polarizer- the rest is all dark. And since the rotation is frequency dependent, the chewing gum wrapper is glowing in multiple colors. Especially if you do a good job when you crumple it up. It would look great on TV.
My Powerbook has a port on the right side that looks like one of the video out ports but it has a different shape and says "STARCH" on it. Apple sells these adapters for $25 that you hook up to your starch tank with one of those little magnetic starch clasp tubes and once a week I go to the grocery store and buy a sack of potato starch to power my computing for the week. Kinda sucks for when you're on the road but I either just use batteries or an iFannypack since they've come down in price.
I still need to figure out which one of these other ports is the one for the stuff that comes out. I never happen to be looking when it happens and I end up with a discharge of warm H2O in my lap under high CPU load. It's so embarrassing. The fan is developing a "french fry" odor which is ok except I get the munchies whenever I'm at my computer. I wish Apple would fix that.
I don't see any other candidate vowing to get rid of the illegal IRS and Income tax, do you? No matter what your political agenta, I`m sure everybody in the U.S. would benefit from that.
... doesn't play well in the face of black people floating face down dead in the water," said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political science professor. (The floating dead millionaires turned out not to exist either.) The inheritance tax has also been attacked as racist by Robert L. Johnson (founder of Black Entertainment Television) since only 59 African Americans are expected to pay it in 2008 and he is one of them.
I used to like Ron Paul because I have never heard him say anything stupid. I haven't been paying enough attention apparently!
The income tax is not illegal; there is a constitutional amendment for it and everything. The 16th Amendment was attacked as unconstitutional because President Taft introduced it in 1911 and he was born in Ohio in 1857. In 1953, before its sesquicentennial statehood anniversary, someone searched the records and found that Ohio had not been formally admitted to the Union in 1803. Things were more half-assed back then and nobody in 1803 actually filled out the paperwork. Ohio officially became a state in 1953 in a jovial celebration. They delivered a petition for statehood on horseback to Washington D.C., Eisenhower cracked a few Buckeye jokes, and then he signed a bill making Ohio retroactively a state back to 1803. BUT- the dominoes start falling here: on ex post facto grounds Ohio still wasn't a state when Taft was born in it in 1857- meaning he was not a natural-born citizen of the U.S.- rendering his entire presidency illegitimate- and his 16th Amendment illegal- so we can keep our taxes. It's my favorite anti-tax argument of all time, and if Ohio hadn't actually been a U.S. Territory in 1857 (rats!) I could have filed a 1040X for my refund.
Only a very elite few would benefit from abolishing the income tax. It wouldn't mean "no taxes let's party". It would be replaced with more taxes you won't like, such as higher sales taxes or higher consumption taxes. On an average per capita basis your tax burden would probably go up. Also everyone would be running around flush with dollars. Think gas would stay at $3 if that happened? We'd experience the sort of inflation that remains suppressed by the income tax, and those dollars would mostly flow into the hands of people who would no longer be paying income taxes. It sounds like a good strategy for creating a Latin American country.
There are only two types of people who want to replace the income tax with a sales tax or a consumption tax:
- Haves who know they pay more income tax now than they would pay if sales taxes replaced them.
- Have nots with the complete opposite situation, but who fall for disingenuous arguments about taxes involving too much paperwork. "They're too complicated!"
We saw the same thing with the inheritance tax. They really sold that one hard- a tax break for hardly anybody that would cost a lot of money- so you heard all about these mythical "family farms" being lost to the inheritance tax. Like WMDs, the fact that they did not exist didn't seem to matter. Right after Katrina, they were looking for dead millionaires floating around in the water whose estate would be subject to the tax. "Whether a millionaire gets to pass his wealth on to his heirs
Taxes are complicated because the government uses them to direct people's behavior, so the tax code is full of carrots and sticks. Not only do you have to avoid the sticks, you must grab every carrot, because generally you are expected to, and the money is reflected in the prices of things you pay. This is what happened with the first-home-buyer mortgage deduction. It started out as a nice thing meant to help people. In response, the price of a
"Al Gore... This guys a real visionary. His favorite movie is Tron for Christsake!" -- Dennis Miller
This is a huge crisis. If radiation keeps eating fungi at this rate we'll have no mushrooms left by 2040!
Dealing with ClearCase is a major part of everyone's job there. It was forced on everybody with a top-down executive decision- all version control is handled with ClearCase since they paid for the license. (The "benefit" is that a team in the bioinformatics division can have access to a repository maintained by, say, the oil exploration division.) Everyone who has to use ClearCase hates it. The processes are weird and the tools that you're forced to use are buggy. I've heard people cite ClearCase as a good reason to look for another job. The guy in the next cube had three weeks of work destroyed by a ClearCase update one morning. He smashed his keyboard into 101 pieces on the floor.
There are tiny version-control rebellions all the time- small teams set up little secret CVS repositories here and there- just known to a few guys who then have to keep them a secret from management. Once the top brass inevitably finds out about them, the phagocytosis begins: the team has to stop whatever it's doing and help migrate their entire CVS repository into ClearCase. This was always an abnormally large, painful undertaking for some reason. It was a real tragedy every time it happened- really demoralizing for everyone, even the people in the next row of cubicles just rubbernecking another version control disaster.A cynic might suggest that the people breathing in oxygen are the ones who are exhaling carbon dioxide and destroying the very atmosphere they're breathing. And that if carbon dioxide completely replaced oxygen, these people would not be able to inhale the oxygen that turns into the carbon dioxide they exhale. A cynic would be right.
Who claimed that these technologies have made the police better at their jobs?
The police and the press.
And who claimed that "the public" tells the police what to do?
The police and the press.
Although you're photographed 300 times a day, the cameras will help catch a lone serial killer once every few years and that's all you'll ever hear about them.
Are you suggesting that one could just change the channel and get quality commentary as good as that on the Colbert Report?
We're already empowered. For example, these other people can't shoot us with any guns they own, because they don't count as much as we.
2) the distancs involved are different. the average commute in north america is a journey so long you'd be passing through five european countries. you euros can ride bikes, we routinely have 100 mile commutes one way.
Commute times are long in this country because as a nation we have invested heavily in a massive automotive and highway infrastructure, relative to most countries in Europe, as if we intended for cars to be the primary means for getting around. Our cities loosened their belts and allowed themselves to sprawl out into the countryside as vast suburban wastelands. We even let our alternative transportation infrastructures fall victim to disrepair, disuse, or dismantlement. So once again, France will avoid the sort of trouble that we like to set ourselves up for.
It's not like the total area of the country being 10 times bigger means that your personal commute distance has to expand to sqrt(10) times what it would be in Europe, as if we're all inkspots on a giant rubber sheet. Try to move closer to work, find an employer closer to where you live, telecommute, or suck on it and wait for the Mad Max era to arrive.
Phonons are ultimately responsible for all conduction of sound and heat through solids.
I should have said this for insulators- in conductors the electrons are responsible for most conductivity.
This business with polaritons in semiconductors sounds a lot like the way phonons in crystal lattices work.
A phonon is a sort of derived particle. It isn't a fundamental particle in itself but it represents a quantized mode of vibration in a lattice of more fundamental particles. But as a quasiparticle it exhibits the same types of behavior as other particles subject to quantum mechanics.
Their classical analogue would be standing waves in a crystal lattice. These lose part of their classical wave-like character and become more particle-like when the vibrational energy in the crystal decreases to near zero. The vibrational energy at extremely low temperatures takes the form of a few phonons bouncing around in the crystal like free particles in a hollow box. Phonons are ultimately responsible for all conduction of sound and heat through solids.
A polariton is apparently the coupling of a photon with one of these, and they're claiming to have gotten interesting collective behavior. I'm not sure if this is a "new state of matter" but we may get some cool toys out of it.
I think most hate comments are from users, not competitors. So posts by competitors are harder to identify.
I've never seen any competitor of any employer of my own on here. My Slashdot conflicts of interest are all of a more common type- I invest a few days of my life studying some technology which then suxxor rulez.
You know, I have to wonder on this site sometimes, when I see a headline "Tech Company X Snafu Causes Widespread IT Disaster" or "Tech Company X Announces Plans for Evil" posted on the front page, and then I open the comment threads, how many comments were actually posted by employees of X.
If my laptop has a spin-based CPU and I flip it upside down do all the white pixels turn black and vice versa?
This is completely not an issue with a charge-based CPU.
So what's wrong with that? If you ask me, people should say "ees-land" or "ayes-land" if they're spelling it that way. They were probably trying to make it not sound like "Iceland" back in medieval times when automated speech recognition wasn't as good or existent as it is today.
That is far too many... the 40M was some lower number like 35.6M rounded up.
The denominator (235) has been rounded up too so it still works out to 170212.766.
That's all great an all, but is anybody going to buy something from a link that has crazy ransom-note-like letters with random colors and digital noise all over the place?
Hey. You didn't post the link. How can I answer your question unless I know whether I'll actually buy the stuff!
Frankly this is all Marc Andreessen's fault. Remember how email used to work before that horrible Netscape Messenger back in the mid-90s? Tech support people used to laugh at old ladies who called worrying about catching computer viruses via email. That used to be hilarious. Now you get a weird email and have to worry that your preview pane might install a rootkit. I liked email better when it was all just sterile text. I think most people did. Hyperlinks are the only useful thing that HTML brings to email, and an email client can pick them out of ASCII and render them as linked text anyway.
Marketing people seem to have a weakness for pretty HTML- they keep insisting they need it, as if they don't experience email like all the rest of us do. Nicely presented and formatted HTML may have been impressive back in 1994, but after a decade of abuse it's become a powerful visual indicator of garbage that's a waste of your time to even move your eyes across. If you use the web for more than a week you quickly develop a revulsion for prettiness just from the banner ads. If I see anything more than the most simple HTML, I immediately assume I'm looking at an advertisement. I actually can't find important links I'm looking for sometimes, which are sitting right there, because they've been stupidly disguised to look like advertisements. And that's just on the web. For email, the visual cue is even more glaring. It takes me a few milliseconds to notice colors or photography in an email before I delete it without reading. I'd set up a filter if I weren't so lazy. If all mailservers were to suddenly start shitcanning HTML, it would solve a number of problems and nobody worth listening to would even notice.
>TMI.
No, only one single bit of information actually. Both males and females get circulatory problems from those seats.
The inside of this planet is a solid core of vanilla ice cream at tremendous temperature and pressure. Although heated above its normal melting point, it is kept in a frozen solid state by the sheer mass of molten hot chocolate lying on top of it.