"Yeah. I heard that someone also had a wiki to build an encyclopedia, but that's just as insane. It would just invite vandalism, and instead of leading to an informative and complete reference, it would waste money and manpower involved in maintanence and moderation."
I see you have used the wikipedia and attempted to pass it off as an authoritative source.
I would love to see many of those complaining be in the same situation.
I bet they would all, within a matter of seconds, use their vast powers of deduction to realize this is a MIT student that doesn't do mornings (so she didn't recognize that the question was aimed at her) wearing her favorite shirt and that the whole thing was a play on her name "Star". Further using their great powers of observation they will instantly realize there the breadboard didn't conceal explosives (since, as we all know, people in that position will be trained to sniff explosives out) and instantly recognize that the layout of the board was simply to make the light blink all from a single glance. Lastly, the proper form would be to compliment the lady on what a fine outstanding statement her shirt says.
*sigh* the same people would be ranting if she had concealed explosives behind the breadboard and security let her go through (after all, it would be obvious the breadboard was no danger) and she killed half a dozen people. Of course, I also apparently live in total fear so just ignore what I say.
The "problem" isn't Gcc's politics as much as GNU's. That is, the license is the issue.
I've said for a long time that Linux will not become mainstream until it decides too - it has tried to straddle both the commercial world and the political activist world and one can not really do both. There needed to be a decision and one has recently been made.
While what we call "Linux" still hasn't made such a decision, the tools it depends on has (GNU), and that is towards to political arena. That's fine, it is a valid choice and I can understand why people who donate their time would choose to do so (I know any donated stuff I do will). However things like Linux that depend on said tools now must also make the full choice which way to go - many want a more "BSD" type license that is much more commercial entity friendly.
It's unclear how all of this is going to work out. My guess is that either some distro will eventually come out that bypasses GPL3 or GPL3 will not do what it is intended to do. As of right now we see articles saying companies like IBM are both really happy with it and they hate it. In my opinion if they are happy with it then it isn't going to appease the ones going for a political solution and changes almost nothing (and then why make a new one?), if they are unhappy with it then the new stuff will fade into hobbyist only.
Eh - at least it is entertaining to watch:) At some point I believe something along the lines of Apple's OS (license wise) will win, it is just how many years and how much fighting it will take to get there.
And there are even more people that like the series and think you are a fucking idiot (for various different reasons). Until you become the God of Fiction I truly doubt your ability to declare a best seller as "crap" to be more than your opinion. Deal.
Agreed, however I would at least like to see the answer to a few questions that were supposed to be resolved. Closure (and not closure someone else made up - what he actually intended from notes) is better than no closure even if it is obvious where the new author picks up. If he was on schedule then he I would think that he should have had a good deal of it done (a 2009 release date is fairly soon, it's not like one typically writes a 1000+ page book and go through editing/printing in a year), though I have no idea if he was anywhere close to on schedule.
If it is just another author filling in the gaps and answering - me I'll read it at least for the parts that he wrote. However the other stuff I'll just pick my own conclusion and assume it is as much cannon as what is in the book. This is why I tend to not read large multi-volume stories until they are done, I have read some where they just end right in the middle.
It feels kinda crass to feel that sorta thing about some guys death, but if he is like any other artist I would bet he is happy that many people are disappointed that they didn't get to see the end of his works. Especially given the scope and amount of time he put into the series.
I'm skipping the TCP RST as I mostly agree with what you are saying, though I would say that comcast doing it is MUCH more irritating than myself doing it. I agree with many posters above that it should call into question their common carrier status if they are only doing it to file sharing protocols. You can't have it both ways.
"But ask yourself what would you do if you were in Comcast's position. There is no way in hell they could afford to provide the full advertised downstream and upstream bandwidth 24/7. That's why your cable modem costs a whole lot less than a bandwidth-guaranteed T1. And it's not just for consumers. Businesses who just want an internet connection are now able to get cable modems as well and it's a huge money saver over a T1 because it means you get to burst at much faster speeds and aren't paying for the full bandwidth all the way to an internet backbone which you aren't even using anyway."
Therein lies the problem - at least where I live Comcast runs tons of commercials showing people cheering about the money saved with no loss going with them. Were I in Comcast's shoes and I were not able to provide that I wouldn't advertise it as such - especially if it was something I was artificially throttling through TCP resets (MUCH harder to defend in a lawsuit). Had they sold their service under a different idea then yea, I would fully agree. But at is they heavily commercial one thing, have their service contract vaguely say something else, and finally do something totally different from both and hope people bend over and take it because "what else are they to do - it costs too much money".
There is no reason to quote the rest of your stuff as I agree - Bittorrent is a bandwidth hog and Comcast has WAY oversold what their bandwidth can service. But then, that is their fault for advertising things they can not hope to even come close to covering. There is no other consumer market where that is acceptable. Lets face it, if Denny's ran commercials with normal ingredients as caviar, swallows nest, sea bass, truffles, and other high end items, put a small note in the bottom "ingredients may differ", and then you got spam, American cheese, and old lettuce there would be a VERY strong legal case against them. No difference here - they shouldn't commercial what they will not give and the small print isn't going to save them. With them also heavily commercialing their home service for streaming videos this is only going to get worse.
That being said - I use Comcast and have had no real issues. In fact, I'm constantly surprised what I do doesn't get any note sent to me. This month I have over 70 gigs down and an unknown amount upstream and not a peep from them, this was not really a heavy or light month and I've been a customer for about 6 years now (and there have been months where I have gone WAY over that). I've had their service technicians be as courteous as can be expected (though since I generally knew what the issue was I just pretended to do what they wanted until I got to who I needed to talk too, I understand why the lower level people wouldn't just move me on and stayed very polite) and I even had my cable modem replaced at no charge or questions when I told them it "quit working" (I spilled a bottle of soda in it).
But, if I had the above happen to me I would be quite irritated - they sold me a service and I expect the service they advertised to be provided. I can pay the same price to the local DSL provider and have *none* of those issues though their advertised bandwidth is less you *do* actually get all of it (and it is greater than what many are reporting). That type of little finger to mouth rationalization doesn't work in almost any other field and I suspect it will not work if this type of thing goes to court. My guess is that I live in a fairly rural area and they do not have bandwidth issues so I get to hog all I want.
I see a lot of comments about allowing FOSS alternatives - but why even require a computer at all? Is there *anything* to gain that is remotely worth the cost of the poor students by this? It wasn't *that* many years since I was in high school and no one really cared what you used to write your term paper - you had a word count requirement for length and spelling/grammar was required for most anyway (the exceptions were for people like me, I'm dyslexic so *some* flexibility was granted there, but even then not a whole lot. Of course, that resulted in some not so high grades but then if I can not spell well why should I get a high mark?). For the few times a typed paper was required we used class time to learn to do it. Most schools have a computer lab now - teacher need to use them instead of requiring crap for the home.
Like it or not, there are still quite a few families in the US who can not afford a computer - to say you *must* use any version of Microsoft is like (with respect to ability to afford even the base equipment) requiring a minimum supercharger on everyones Ferrari. Yea, I can see why one would do so if one is looking to maximize speed, however elementary through high school is *required* of every single person in the US so requiring one purchase a Ferrari is crazy, let alone making sure everyone has one of the more expensive packages. Pointing out that you get just as much speed from a cheaper engine is irrelevant. At least you can get student loans for college - this isn't getting too far from needing them for K-12.
Heck, even for a computer science class pretty much everything can be done with paper and pencil. In fact, I find it *better* that the students learn to do it with no crutches to begin with - if you can write a good paper things like office only make it easier. If you have decent writing skills then a word processor only make things easier - learning Word (or whatever) has no bearing whatsoever on your ability to write, other than it automatically corrects some of your mistakes. Same thing goes for requiring a higher end calculator - lets learn how to do math instead of how to put a formula into a calculator.
The only exception I can think of is using a computer for basic research - that is pretty much required and the computer is an integral part of it now (learning to look things up in traditional methods has no real bearing on how a computer does it). While I am sure there are a few others, this should be handled in class and not requiring use of a home computer. Colleges have labs for this very reason.
What next - telling high school students they *have* need to spend 50 dollars a month on some high speed internet connection or they fail?
There *is* a difference between Canada and the US here.
First off, since it is the consumer loosing money the gas companies have a slightly different way of looking at things (and so should you). In our case it *is* expensive to do so.
So, it is costing you up to 6 cents a gallon? OK, how much per gallon is it going to *cost* to put it in (including full cost, not just how much does the physical probe cost - as far as TCO the physical material cost is usually the small part)? It may very well *increase* the price of gasoline to install and maintain them - it would also largely be based on where you live. My guess is that southern Texas would most likely be a plus for consumers but New York is worthless (and maybe even detrimental). In Canada 60 degrees Fahrenheit makes less sense as a good average as our "extreme" end of the cold (most northern) is their most southern area.
My general guess is that most of the US the 60 degree temperature is pretty decent for tank buried 10 feet underground encased in all the stuff the EPA requires, loose in the summer, gain in the winter, and usually by a very small amount. In the southernmost areas you start to find it helping, say southern Texas, Florida, and other southern coastal areas - in the more northern areas probably the opposite.
60 degrees Fahrenheit is a pretty good average for 10 feet underground encased in concrete for the vast vast majority of the US. It makes people feel better to get the "most" in the summer but the reality is that you usually make it up in the winter - even with gas generally being cheaper in the winter. Even should they not simply just pass any extra cost on to the consumer you will, at best, break even. Heck, if we assume that they are breaking even (and that is a fairly valid assumption) then adding this is simply extra cost for no benefit - on *either* side.
In short, they are still mostly around where the supply and demand curves meet (and taxes screw with that more than anything - go complain to your govt) so additional cost will simply be pushed onto the consumer. In fact, should we assume that the oil companies are evil and milking the people for everything that their greedy little minds can comprehend, this would only give them something else to artificially increase the price of gas. Yay - a real win for consumers!!!
Really, there is probably WAY more "cost" with not counting a gallon as a gallon than there is with this, even assuming the gas stations aren't being intentionally dishonest. Unless you live at the fairly extreme ends of the temperature world you are breaking even for the year and this can only increase cost, but that has never stopped the feel good get evenism crowd - lets stick it to the oil companies!!! They are Evil (TM) and we have to do something (even if that something is counter productive).
Oil companies definitely aren't the great neighbors of world, but this would only make things worse even assuming they are looking out for the consumers - lets look more towards getting rid of the oil dependency and reducing our consumption. But that doesn't make the Oil Company haters *or* the Oil Consumers happy.
I bet if they really wanted to make some money drop the following requirements:
"This camp is limited to 20 Junior and Senior high school students who are interested in enrolling at UMR and are at least 16 by the first day of camp."
I am sure there are quite a few people out there with lots of "disposable income" that would pay lots to do this. I know I had to take a look - maybe something worth a week or two of vacation time, especially seeing the 450 dollar price tag (not sure what my upper limit would be, depends on what stuff I get to play with). Alas, being 30+ pretty much puts me out of that class. There are "body guard" classes that take advantage of the same thing - it's neat to drive a car in that manner even if you live in an area that allows controlled live firearm courses.
Really, I know what I can and can not do and is why I do not play with real explosives, I like really big "booms" yet legally can not purchase them nor do I really know how to safely set them off. One would think there is *someplace* I can pay someone to let me make them, or at least blow some stuff up. I suppose there is too much liability, but I would have thought that with this type of thing even more so than allowing an older group to do so. I have no real excuse if I do something incredibly stupid, yet a 17 year old can get away with many things I can not - the 30+ year olds shouldn't have shown the 17 year olds how sparklers can explode if done wrong.
To note, I'm happy they have such and am not against it - almost anything the expands our abilities I am for. The previous is just a wish list for "older" people. In fact, I guess the older the more likely they would want too and be able to afford too set off some *big* explosives:)
No, Registration fees pays for licensing and roads, the gas tax pays for road usage - at least in the vast majority of the 50 US states. Not knowing where you live I can not say for sure.
In Tennessee gas tax goes towards the Department of Transportation and is distributed according to this website and you will note that it goes towards *roads*, in fact the DoT isn't involved at all with the licensing and registration of motor vehicles. According to the Department of Safety (the department that issues them), 87% of their funding goes into the highway fund (basically whatever is left over after operating costs), however that includes things such as Handgun Carry Permits, tuition fees from the law enforcement academy, and several other funding lines.
The DoS's entire budget is less than the revenue from the gas tax, so there is absolutely no way that they could afford to keep the highway running on it, let alone just registration which is only a part of the DoS's funding. I shudder to think what the yearly one time fee per vehicle would need to be to cover it, not only that but the gas tax places the burden on those that use the system the most. In fact, the DoT's yearly budget is over double the DoS's entire revenue stream.
Again, this is fairly common amongst the US states, though I am sure some work differently.
As to if an electric is bypassing the tax - my guess is that yes, it is. As to what municipalities will do about I dunno. You are not paying for what you use, my guess is that right now so few have electrics that they do not really care. However that *will* change if/when there is a move away from gasoline as the roads will have to be repaired and the money has to come from someplace. As the saying goes - there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I'm not a big fan of taxes, but in this case the roads have to be payed for, the state has to be responsible, and this system scales the taxes you pay by your usage - seems about as fair and necessary a tax as I can think of. It has nothing to do with the middle east, oil, or how you run your car - only that you have to pay the collective for what you (as an individual) consume. In fact, it is rather surprising that they even have the tax free gas, if they were simply tax hungry and wanting to tell you what to do there would be no option and most wouldn't know the difference anyway.
"If it said that, your comment would make sense. That would be something like... "We don't think Apple will fix it, so we won't wait before announcing it". I could see that (though not agree with it). But "We don't think Apple will fix it, so we won't even TELL them about it" is totally irresponsible. The only "rational" interpretation of that is he actively wants to make it harder to improve the security of Safari."
There is no concrete reason to think that the company in question has not contacted Apple many times and (due to being ignored) feels such a thing is worthless until/unless it is totally public - much the same as many here feel is the case with Microsoft. There is not reason to assume actively wanting Safari to be harder.
There is a large difference between actively trying to sabotage (IE, make it harder for) Safari and having had the corporate office ignore them. If I had reported such bugs in the past and been ignored until they are public then I would also ignore the official channels. I would assume that the corporate office wouldn't pay attention until the exploit was out in the wild.
Kinda how the great pioneers that do this to Microsoft are treated, though at least Apple does better in the long run - it is like saying I would rather get three limbs cut off instead of four. Well, yea sure, if those were my only choices..
"I would suggest that the problem is not with hard facts and statistics, but rather with a populace that is poorly educated in statistics and a media that is unwilling to actually analyze the statistics (and present that analysis) for fear of offending or boring an apathetic and relatively innumerate populace."
To some extent, but even then I do not think that we can do enough education to fix things.
The problem is more widespread that any one single thing. Even for those of us with enough education to figure out if the study is mostly OK or not (and it pretty much took a math minor to get what little that actually is - I see no way around that either) it is difficult to find the raw data for the study. Even then, for those that run such studies the field is mature enough that subtleties in just questions and what they base things one can give them basically the outcome they want (unless one side is so overwhelmingly correct there is no way to work it out).
Take the original articles points - one of the important parts is what year you base your study on. If I had just read one I would not have thought twice about either year being the control - yet look at how different that *one* thing forces the conclusion to be? Unless I am an expert on this already (and then why am I reading consumer level information) there is no way for me to know and that is a simple thing.
Add in how funding works and you get a real mess. It's not as simple as "Bush in charge == anti-global warming, Gore in charge == truth" (or insert whichever you think is real, this is more or less the Slashdot's crowd thinking). There is a hierarchy that you go through that does not change with administration, nor can they simply refuse or deny funding to someone sufficiently famous (see several Slashdot articles for Bush tenure, New Republic for Clinton tenure - if you think "your side" doesn't do it I have some ocean front property in Arizona on the cheap). It all adds up and decent portion of the "research" is more about how to get funding than to do good science (not that there isn't good science out there - just that it normally isn't that high profile).
I do not discount statistics, however I do not base a whole lot on them. I try and group things into three classes - things I know, things I have an idea, things I know little/nothing. Things I know I usually know enough about to overcome the above issues. Things I have an idea I try and find as much as I can about and compare studies (in this particular case I'm underwhelmed by both sides - cherry picking data isn't going to convince me of either side). Things I know little/nothing about I still have opinions but tend to try and not act upon them. Unfortunately too many take the middle, and more often than not the latter, and assume that the side they choose is The Truth and go from there.
There are three basic "problems" and to some extent I think they are unsolvable.
First is debugging tools. People are used to having a nice neat step through debugger - press some key to execute the next statement. Because a large part of parallel processing does not conform to that process you have to add in your own debug code (even if using one of the parallel debuggers out there). I see no way around this one - you can not have a deterministic debugger on a non-deterministic system and I see no way for parallel systems to generally be deterministic in the sense of "press F8 to execute next line". This increases cost as you can not simply hire a cheap "code monkey" to do the job.
Second is just general complexity, things like file locks, critical sections, race conditions, etc. Even if you deal with them every single day and have been doing it for the last 20 years these are still complex issue when something fails. I also see no way around this one, though there have been some really nice advances in recent times and there is still a long way to go before I think we have mostly maxed out the tools. Somebody has to deal with this and a good deal will eventually be shoved off to the tools, but when that happens figuring out where the error is will be a real bitch (ask anyone who eventually found an esoteric bug in a standard library how much work *that* took). While quite solvable, this also increases cost.
Lastly you have Amdahl's law - basically you can not parallelize everything and performance degrades quickly the more serialization you have. I do not think that the real performance of SMP's or multi-core systems for the average user is going to come in single application performance - you just can not parallelize the typical applications that much. Where the performance comes in is allowing several things to go on at a time, basically that really large system tray many people run will be going across multiple processors or cores and not degrade performance that much. Though this really helps - I've ran two processor systems on my home systems for years and it is interesting how little processor power I need for games compared to the minimum specs even when I do not bother with paying attention to what is currently running.
So, in short, not really too hard, it's a level of complexity that many have done well with in the past and will continue to do so, but that the problem space doesn't map well to parallelization. There is some level of "too hard" when you are asking if VB only people who think that HTML should be listed as a programming language and can not survive without Microsoft's wizard (note that using VB isn't the bad part - lots and lots of really good programmers use it at work because that is what will sale), but competent programmers/software engineers are quite capable of using it. I do not think that the benefits within most single applications are worth the cost, though as an overall system it will help quite a bit.
At this point that explanation seems kinda strange - yea they were involved with Hitler but so was pretty much every single German company around then. It doesn't bother me a bit to take Bayer Aspirin even knowing what went on then - todays company has little to do with back then. Not only that, but a vehicle for every person was one of the good idea's that Nazi Germany had that much of the rest of the world followed - the US's interstates were a derivative of what they saw with the Autobahn and I bet pretty much every USian drives on them.
I could understand a reluctance to be a Decepticon - not only does the name suck from a marketing point of view but so does being the bad guy. However, for you car to be one of the freaking saviors of the world *ought* to be a good thing. Given what I have seen in the past from VW I could see a VERY successful campaign - then again given their current commercials I can also see why they felt it was bad to be one of the saviors of the world.
This was a fairly ignorant move on the part of VW. I have fairly happy memories of playing with the VW beetle transformer in my sandbox as a kid. They are missing out on a great opportunity here because of some idiotic notion that few people buy into.
Neither Gault or the pirate are the pinnacle of capitalism - the person down the street from you that runs a company is.
Capitalism works best when there is minimal govt interference, though it does require *some*. For the most part a limited copyright and limited patent process is quite good. For those types of things there needs to be a short period of time wherein you can recoup your R&D.
The pirate, due to not have to endure the cost of the research & development process, can *really* undercut everyone. For some industries that makes creating a new product near instant bankruptcy.
By far the best examples of this are medicines - it takes over a billion dollars to do the lab work required to produce one (if you factor in FDA protocols, most that do actually need to be there). No company is going to spend well over a billion to produce a drug and loose most of it - no company *can* do that no matter how much someone wants too.
Things like Music are on the very bottom end of "needed", the R&D cost are VERY minimal. In fact so minimal as to generally be irrelevant when pro-rated over the life of the music. The cost there is through advertising and distribution (something the pirate has to deal with as much as any one else). Of course, this is also why medicines are patents and songs are copyrights.
The line isn't exact or totally obvious and there will be (and should be) argument where to place it, but the original patents and copyrights worked quite well and I see no reason to have ever changed them. At best you only had something different, at worse - well you get where we are quickly heading.
However, we have moved to where many have realized that our system of govt can extend that artificial protection as far as they feel like - after all it is simply a piece of paper that can be written anyway one wants. Since few people seem to care unless they directly see it, money talks and gets passed. The advertising people are very sharp, they make it case of nice legal corporations vs anti-capitalism pirates. Unfortunately too many of those "pirates" do fit that bill or have such a narrow focus that they do not always go outside of that focus, it truly is a false dilemma that is too often presented. For the average person the anti-capitalism anti-corporation stance is crazy so the other must be true.
I hope not, McCarthy is only reviled in modern politics and was VERY successful during his day.
While the guy had absolutely none of the information and was a quack, more recently unclassified documents (such as the Venona papers) indicate that he was more correct than wrong - even if one discounts the disputed parts. While that is pure luck and does nothing to exonerate him (as an old saying goes "even a blind squirrel finds nut sometimes"), I do not want any part to be mostly true.
I would rather Microsoft be like SCO - just full of shit. I suspect they are - I suspect that they are reading patents overly broad and it will never see anything more than PR. It *may* go to a threat stage, but I doubt a real court case - they do not want patent to be ruled that broad either as they, too, would be in violation of hundreds of patents.
I do figure that there are some patents infringed - in both cases (Linux and Windows) there are so many patents and the software so large/broad that there is infringement *someplace*. But I do not think it will do either side good to push it - I doubt the OSS side will due to their views on patents and figure MS will not either. While MS very much lives in it's own world (for example, they still see themselves as the "underdog") this is to big a blunder to get a strong ruling on patents. Just talk to reporters, get some articles, spread some FUD and you do harm to OSS projects *only*.
Assuming that it even works perfectly, there are other problems besides the personal reduction in the ability to protect oneself.
One, I am unmarried and have no offspring - why should I have to go around and "protect" my house like I have kids? I do not put the little plastic things in electric sockets because I know better than to stick a fork in there (and if I do happen to feel like doing so, well I get what is coming to me). There are lots of people out there with no children living at home (even if they do happen to have offspring), there is no reason to treat everyone as if they are.
Two - how wide do we do restrict access? Narrow and they become worthless for protection, too wide and worthless for safety. What should be the largest market for this - police - hate them. They are MUCH more likely to have their guns stolen and used against them than anyone else: they have them on themselves at all times and everyone knows they have them. However, as often as they save them they also hurt them in that only *that person* could use that firearm. Does the whole family wear the ring or get imprinted (if so - what good does that do in stopping home accidents as they are billed to do)? Is the family only protected when the one person is home? You have similar questions with file permissions - pretty much any thing needed to be used by a group has no security and in this case a false negative means the inability to defend oneself from an agressor (read - more than likely death). You can not have wide usage that somehow in someway knows the user is up to nefarious acts and stops them.
And, lastly, something most slashdotters should know - it *will* be broken by the thieves. While it will prevent immediate use of someone that isn't authorized (incidental or single/casual theft), it will do *nothing* to prevent semi-to-organized theft (one of the things talked about). Even with the casual theft I would bet there will be a myriad internet articles on how to get around it.
This type of thing has been going on since at least the Oklahoma City bombing and I assume it wasn't new even then.
Back then I had given a friend that is interested in making primitive weapons a printout on how to make his own black powder. This was a day or two before the Oklahoma City bombing, he had another friend at work (on of the national labs) that did the same thing and brought it in to him - this was the day after the bombing. A co-worker saw it laying on his desk and decided he was getting ready to blow everything up, called the FBI, and started about a two month long investigation. Obviously it led nowhere.
A few years later someone in our college set off an "incendiary device" (the detectives later told me it was acid and aluminum foil in a plastic jug) and I was, once more, investigated for all sorts of nice things. Again, nothing came of it as there was nothing there. I do not recall now what they accused me of, I assume it would now be "terrorist" but back then there was some other hot-button label for it.
And you might as well have been whatever the most despicable thing you can think of if you were in a gun club during the mid-90's and the great crusade against "militias" (not to mention almost every single incident was somehow their fault). There was almost no one anywhere defending you then - you were an evil gun-toting maniac. It was MUCH more endemic than the current "terrorist" thing - and at least there *are* terrorist out there that want to do us harm even though we are over reacting.
After any event there are people that fly into a panic of stupid things, call someone, and it gets all blown out of proportion. Most law enforcement thinks it stupid and - like the Duke non-rape case - you will sometimes get a political position decide it is time to show the people they are "doing something" and you get to be the one screwed. If you are unlucky you get Nifong as the prosecutor, this is the local prosecutor being an ass.
Like other posters, I'm not a physicists - so take this as you will.
I really do not know - I would think that if the turbines are based off the wind generated from the moving cars that it would not increase drag - it is simply wind that that bleeds its energy off into the concrete wall anyway. I can not see how adding turbines to something other than the car can increase drag - though I also can not see how this is worth much, probably costs more to produce the system than it will ever generate. Though it may very well play well politically. If anything allowing the pressure wave to dissipate away from the path of the car will *reduce* drag.
Think of it like using the heat from braking your care to generate electricity - it takes no more energy to stop but what is bled off into the air as heat is retained in your batteries. Is it worth the added complexity and manufacturing? Dunno - I rather suspect almost no one actually knows even though many have their own ideas - those that are correct are correct more from luck than actual knowing. There is simply too much political and idealogical baggage for the non-expert to wade through, you can always find enough experts on any stance to be "correct" and enough experts to declare the "obvious consensus" to be whatever you want.
If you are moving energy that is normally just bled off into the surroundings into something useful and that is more energy (over the lifespan of the product) is greater than it's cost to create you have a plus. Anything else and the third law of thermodynamics is biting your ass in a big way. If it is truly waste and goes no where it most likely is a long term plus once the large scale manufacturing efficiencies kick in. This is also important as we look to "alternative" energy sources such as wind or tidal - if we remove the amount we need from those systems what happens?
It is a bad thing if your yearly budget assumes that you can spend very little, churn out part 23 of some title, and blow the sales charts away. If you are doing that then someone producing quality games at a fast enough rate that the gamer always has a quality title to blow their money on instead of your crap - even worse!
You will note that the article is written from the point of view of the people producing crappy games, not the consumer. In that sense what they said is accurate.
I seriously doubt consumers give a flip *who* the producer is as long as it is a good game. You may tend to feel that SquareEnix tends to make good games (or not - IMO they have gone downhill in the last few years) and look for those titles, however if EA happens to somehow create the greatest console RPG ever few will ignore because it has the EA stamp. I know I've always wanted to play "Zelda" and didn't really care that Nintendo made it - same with pretty much any other game.
It's kind of like asking your friend to give you a forged check from a rich person's account which he does, and then him getting busted for writing these forged checks. Since he's busted he wants to claim you as an accomplice, even though you never cashed that check.
Not legal or ethical. I see no reason to do anything different to Jobs because we like him - I do not know what the standard punishment is but he should get it. If it is to pay the money and fine - sounds good to me. If you or I would get 6 months in jail and a fine, then he should get six months in jail and a fine.
Rich people getting off because they can afford good lawyers or people like them are bad. Given the size of the company he is the CEO of I would say that cases like this are *vitally* important we prosecute - Ken Lay got as far as he did over this type of "good ole' boy" network.
I rather suspect that had Gates or the CEO of Diebold done this the reaction would be what it should be and quite possibly go too far into wanting prosecution. I don't want any specific punishment - in the grand scheme of things this seems rather minor and should get a hefty fine. I just want the punishment to be metered out the same regardless of how much money the guy has and how popular he is.
That it comes from crushed bugs doesn't bother me too much, after learning to cook many different things from the most basic materials I can find I had to either quit eating quite a few of my favorite foods or just not care. If I can eat snails or a Japanese soup with a fish head cleaved in half and floating in the middle of it (with it's nice cloudy steamed eyes) then I see no reason to balk over chemically processed crushed bugs. Heck, many cultures eat them covered in chocolate as a dessert.
We eat intestine, heart, lung, crushed/boiled bones, all sorts of not nice stuff labeled as "natural casings", "by products", "gelatin", and other things that do not sound bad (and some are not cheaper crap but are the more expensive, better tasting, more sought after product). I'm sure many premium suasage makers would MUCH rather list "natural casing" over "intestinal lining" even though the latter is better understood.
However, things like this possible change in chocolate is horrid. I may know what I'm eating when I read "natural casing" on sausage (though this tends to be one that many now know), but you can at least tell when you are getting it.
One can usually tell from the ingredients list what chocolate you are paying for - sometimes I do not mind, sometimes I do. The *only* people this will benefit is people trying to pass cheap crap off as high quality ingredients - you will at least have to purchase one bar before you know for sure. It will not help consumers choose better in anyway and in fact it will greatly hinder them. The people at the FDA are already well aware of this, I rather suspect they know which way something like this will go already and are following the forms that the law requires. Anything will either be ignored or shown as the reason they denied the application.
"Which isn't to say that the Shah was exactly a nice fellow that you'd want to invite over for dinner, but that GE and Westinghouse were working to sell nuclear-power stuff there isn't as untoward as it might sound."
The Shah himself wasn't that bad - at least compared to the normal rulers in that region (by our standards he sucked big time). I've never been that angry we supported him, more angry in how our support materialized. Enough to keep him in power with no opposition, but then dropping it at the first opportunity for a radical anti-western violent govt.
"I don't know if that was just the Carter administration being typically asleep at the switch, or if nobody suspected things were deteriorating that quickly,"
There is a little bit of all of that. Like most intelligence failures you can not blame it on one point and you can also point to people who "knew" what was going on (whether they actually knew or were just lucky is up to debate - same thing with Iraq's WMD program). Not a big fan of Carter presidency - in fact I think his handling of the hostages was horrid. However, the buildup to it - eh. Reasonable assumption, grossly incorrect. We will most likely never know exactly all the information he had (and the level of verifiability of it) so *really* difficult to answer the level of incompetence on his end.
"Ultimately, the critical mistake of U.S. policy during the latter part of the 20th century was to think that the enemy of our Enemy (and that's how we really seemed to think about it; Enemy with a capital 'E,' that's E that rhymes with C and that stands for Communism) was our friend."
You can not really call it "shortsighted" - that assumes too much. At the time it wasn't just communism or capitalism (depending on your side) but total annihilation due to a nuclear war. In that light the Islamic Fundamentalism we are seeing, while bad, is a candle to the flame - at least at this point. I can not say we necessarily made the wrong decisions, nor can I say we made the correct ones. I will say that though failure was much more extreme I think we also had a MUCH larger percentage chance of success - as one of the saying goes about counting on the fact that the Russian/Americans love their children as much as we do - the people we are currently fighting celebrate death. We hope that enough of them love their children as much as we do and can stop them - otherwise we are screwed regardless of what we do (short of genocide against radical Islam and if it comes to that that we see the difference between radical and non-radical).
"Maybe this is okay and/or legal in AU. Is this legal in the US? What about due process? What about overdue process?"
Those only apply to the govt - Comcast doesn't have to provide service to you at all (unless there is another regulation that requires them to, such as some of the "common carrier" stuff). Same thing with things like "freedom of speech" - it is *not* a violation of it for clear channel to self censor any group for whatever reason they want, it puts limits on the govt, not people or businesses.
However, in the US we have both a large enough group of providers to choose from and the legal ability to do so that pretty much any ISP doing this is going to die. ISP's are known to cut people off for less. Not having lived in Australia (so do not shoot me if I'm wrong, only repeating what I have heard some people who claim to be from Australia say) that much of the land doesn't have a large enough group of providers to choose from - getting cut off is final. In the US that *may* result in the service getting govt regulation, but I wouldn't count on it (Recording Industry has too much money and too good of lobbyist - I doubt you could get such a thing through either local or federal congress even if the governor or president would sign it). My guess is that Australia suffers from the same problem with it's lawmakers - I know of no system that is immune from laws being purchased even if it is only through a massive advertisement campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yeah. I heard that someone also had a wiki to build an encyclopedia, but that's just as insane. It would just invite vandalism, and instead of leading to an informative and complete reference, it would waste money and manpower involved in maintanence and moderation."
I see you have used the wikipedia and attempted to pass it off as an authoritative source.
I would love to see many of those complaining be in the same situation.
I bet they would all, within a matter of seconds, use their vast powers of deduction to realize this is a MIT student that doesn't do mornings (so she didn't recognize that the question was aimed at her) wearing her favorite shirt and that the whole thing was a play on her name "Star". Further using their great powers of observation they will instantly realize there the breadboard didn't conceal explosives (since, as we all know, people in that position will be trained to sniff explosives out) and instantly recognize that the layout of the board was simply to make the light blink all from a single glance. Lastly, the proper form would be to compliment the lady on what a fine outstanding statement her shirt says.
*sigh* the same people would be ranting if she had concealed explosives behind the breadboard and security let her go through (after all, it would be obvious the breadboard was no danger) and she killed half a dozen people. Of course, I also apparently live in total fear so just ignore what I say.
The "problem" isn't Gcc's politics as much as GNU's. That is, the license is the issue.
:) At some point I believe something along the lines of Apple's OS (license wise) will win, it is just how many years and how much fighting it will take to get there.
I've said for a long time that Linux will not become mainstream until it decides too - it has tried to straddle both the commercial world and the political activist world and one can not really do both. There needed to be a decision and one has recently been made.
While what we call "Linux" still hasn't made such a decision, the tools it depends on has (GNU), and that is towards to political arena. That's fine, it is a valid choice and I can understand why people who donate their time would choose to do so (I know any donated stuff I do will). However things like Linux that depend on said tools now must also make the full choice which way to go - many want a more "BSD" type license that is much more commercial entity friendly.
It's unclear how all of this is going to work out. My guess is that either some distro will eventually come out that bypasses GPL3 or GPL3 will not do what it is intended to do. As of right now we see articles saying companies like IBM are both really happy with it and they hate it. In my opinion if they are happy with it then it isn't going to appease the ones going for a political solution and changes almost nothing (and then why make a new one?), if they are unhappy with it then the new stuff will fade into hobbyist only.
Eh - at least it is entertaining to watch
And there are even more people that like the series and think you are a fucking idiot (for various different reasons). Until you become the God of Fiction I truly doubt your ability to declare a best seller as "crap" to be more than your opinion. Deal.
Agreed, however I would at least like to see the answer to a few questions that were supposed to be resolved. Closure (and not closure someone else made up - what he actually intended from notes) is better than no closure even if it is obvious where the new author picks up. If he was on schedule then he I would think that he should have had a good deal of it done (a 2009 release date is fairly soon, it's not like one typically writes a 1000+ page book and go through editing/printing in a year), though I have no idea if he was anywhere close to on schedule.
If it is just another author filling in the gaps and answering - me I'll read it at least for the parts that he wrote. However the other stuff I'll just pick my own conclusion and assume it is as much cannon as what is in the book. This is why I tend to not read large multi-volume stories until they are done, I have read some where they just end right in the middle.
It feels kinda crass to feel that sorta thing about some guys death, but if he is like any other artist I would bet he is happy that many people are disappointed that they didn't get to see the end of his works. Especially given the scope and amount of time he put into the series.
I'm skipping the TCP RST as I mostly agree with what you are saying, though I would say that comcast doing it is MUCH more irritating than myself doing it. I agree with many posters above that it should call into question their common carrier status if they are only doing it to file sharing protocols. You can't have it both ways.
"But ask yourself what would you do if you were in Comcast's position. There is no way in hell they could afford to provide the full advertised downstream and upstream bandwidth 24/7. That's why your cable modem costs a whole lot less than a bandwidth-guaranteed T1. And it's not just for consumers. Businesses who just want an internet connection are now able to get cable modems as well and it's a huge money saver over a T1 because it means you get to burst at much faster speeds and aren't paying for the full bandwidth all the way to an internet backbone which you aren't even using anyway."
Therein lies the problem - at least where I live Comcast runs tons of commercials showing people cheering about the money saved with no loss going with them. Were I in Comcast's shoes and I were not able to provide that I wouldn't advertise it as such - especially if it was something I was artificially throttling through TCP resets (MUCH harder to defend in a lawsuit). Had they sold their service under a different idea then yea, I would fully agree. But at is they heavily commercial one thing, have their service contract vaguely say something else, and finally do something totally different from both and hope people bend over and take it because "what else are they to do - it costs too much money".
There is no reason to quote the rest of your stuff as I agree - Bittorrent is a bandwidth hog and Comcast has WAY oversold what their bandwidth can service. But then, that is their fault for advertising things they can not hope to even come close to covering. There is no other consumer market where that is acceptable. Lets face it, if Denny's ran commercials with normal ingredients as caviar, swallows nest, sea bass, truffles, and other high end items, put a small note in the bottom "ingredients may differ", and then you got spam, American cheese, and old lettuce there would be a VERY strong legal case against them. No difference here - they shouldn't commercial what they will not give and the small print isn't going to save them. With them also heavily commercialing their home service for streaming videos this is only going to get worse.
That being said - I use Comcast and have had no real issues. In fact, I'm constantly surprised what I do doesn't get any note sent to me. This month I have over 70 gigs down and an unknown amount upstream and not a peep from them, this was not really a heavy or light month and I've been a customer for about 6 years now (and there have been months where I have gone WAY over that). I've had their service technicians be as courteous as can be expected (though since I generally knew what the issue was I just pretended to do what they wanted until I got to who I needed to talk too, I understand why the lower level people wouldn't just move me on and stayed very polite) and I even had my cable modem replaced at no charge or questions when I told them it "quit working" (I spilled a bottle of soda in it).
But, if I had the above happen to me I would be quite irritated - they sold me a service and I expect the service they advertised to be provided. I can pay the same price to the local DSL provider and have *none* of those issues though their advertised bandwidth is less you *do* actually get all of it (and it is greater than what many are reporting). That type of little finger to mouth rationalization doesn't work in almost any other field and I suspect it will not work if this type of thing goes to court. My guess is that I live in a fairly rural area and they do not have bandwidth issues so I get to hog all I want.
I see a lot of comments about allowing FOSS alternatives - but why even require a computer at all? Is there *anything* to gain that is remotely worth the cost of the poor students by this? It wasn't *that* many years since I was in high school and no one really cared what you used to write your term paper - you had a word count requirement for length and spelling/grammar was required for most anyway (the exceptions were for people like me, I'm dyslexic so *some* flexibility was granted there, but even then not a whole lot. Of course, that resulted in some not so high grades but then if I can not spell well why should I get a high mark?). For the few times a typed paper was required we used class time to learn to do it. Most schools have a computer lab now - teacher need to use them instead of requiring crap for the home.
Like it or not, there are still quite a few families in the US who can not afford a computer - to say you *must* use any version of Microsoft is like (with respect to ability to afford even the base equipment) requiring a minimum supercharger on everyones Ferrari. Yea, I can see why one would do so if one is looking to maximize speed, however elementary through high school is *required* of every single person in the US so requiring one purchase a Ferrari is crazy, let alone making sure everyone has one of the more expensive packages. Pointing out that you get just as much speed from a cheaper engine is irrelevant. At least you can get student loans for college - this isn't getting too far from needing them for K-12.
Heck, even for a computer science class pretty much everything can be done with paper and pencil. In fact, I find it *better* that the students learn to do it with no crutches to begin with - if you can write a good paper things like office only make it easier. If you have decent writing skills then a word processor only make things easier - learning Word (or whatever) has no bearing whatsoever on your ability to write, other than it automatically corrects some of your mistakes. Same thing goes for requiring a higher end calculator - lets learn how to do math instead of how to put a formula into a calculator.
The only exception I can think of is using a computer for basic research - that is pretty much required and the computer is an integral part of it now (learning to look things up in traditional methods has no real bearing on how a computer does it). While I am sure there are a few others, this should be handled in class and not requiring use of a home computer. Colleges have labs for this very reason.
What next - telling high school students they *have* need to spend 50 dollars a month on some high speed internet connection or they fail?
There *is* a difference between Canada and the US here.
First off, since it is the consumer loosing money the gas companies have a slightly different way of looking at things (and so should you). In our case it *is* expensive to do so.
So, it is costing you up to 6 cents a gallon? OK, how much per gallon is it going to *cost* to put it in (including full cost, not just how much does the physical probe cost - as far as TCO the physical material cost is usually the small part)? It may very well *increase* the price of gasoline to install and maintain them - it would also largely be based on where you live. My guess is that southern Texas would most likely be a plus for consumers but New York is worthless (and maybe even detrimental). In Canada 60 degrees Fahrenheit makes less sense as a good average as our "extreme" end of the cold (most northern) is their most southern area.
My general guess is that most of the US the 60 degree temperature is pretty decent for tank buried 10 feet underground encased in all the stuff the EPA requires, loose in the summer, gain in the winter, and usually by a very small amount. In the southernmost areas you start to find it helping, say southern Texas, Florida, and other southern coastal areas - in the more northern areas probably the opposite.
60 degrees Fahrenheit is a pretty good average for 10 feet underground encased in concrete for the vast vast majority of the US. It makes people feel better to get the "most" in the summer but the reality is that you usually make it up in the winter - even with gas generally being cheaper in the winter. Even should they not simply just pass any extra cost on to the consumer you will, at best, break even. Heck, if we assume that they are breaking even (and that is a fairly valid assumption) then adding this is simply extra cost for no benefit - on *either* side.
In short, they are still mostly around where the supply and demand curves meet (and taxes screw with that more than anything - go complain to your govt) so additional cost will simply be pushed onto the consumer. In fact, should we assume that the oil companies are evil and milking the people for everything that their greedy little minds can comprehend, this would only give them something else to artificially increase the price of gas. Yay - a real win for consumers!!!
Really, there is probably WAY more "cost" with not counting a gallon as a gallon than there is with this, even assuming the gas stations aren't being intentionally dishonest. Unless you live at the fairly extreme ends of the temperature world you are breaking even for the year and this can only increase cost, but that has never stopped the feel good get evenism crowd - lets stick it to the oil companies!!! They are Evil (TM) and we have to do something (even if that something is counter productive).
Oil companies definitely aren't the great neighbors of world, but this would only make things worse even assuming they are looking out for the consumers - lets look more towards getting rid of the oil dependency and reducing our consumption. But that doesn't make the Oil Company haters *or* the Oil Consumers happy.
I bet if they really wanted to make some money drop the following requirements:
:)
"This camp is limited to 20 Junior and Senior high school students who are interested in enrolling at UMR and are at least 16 by the first day of camp."
I am sure there are quite a few people out there with lots of "disposable income" that would pay lots to do this. I know I had to take a look - maybe something worth a week or two of vacation time, especially seeing the 450 dollar price tag (not sure what my upper limit would be, depends on what stuff I get to play with). Alas, being 30+ pretty much puts me out of that class. There are "body guard" classes that take advantage of the same thing - it's neat to drive a car in that manner even if you live in an area that allows controlled live firearm courses.
Really, I know what I can and can not do and is why I do not play with real explosives, I like really big "booms" yet legally can not purchase them nor do I really know how to safely set them off. One would think there is *someplace* I can pay someone to let me make them, or at least blow some stuff up. I suppose there is too much liability, but I would have thought that with this type of thing even more so than allowing an older group to do so. I have no real excuse if I do something incredibly stupid, yet a 17 year old can get away with many things I can not - the 30+ year olds shouldn't have shown the 17 year olds how sparklers can explode if done wrong.
To note, I'm happy they have such and am not against it - almost anything the expands our abilities I am for. The previous is just a wish list for "older" people. In fact, I guess the older the more likely they would want too and be able to afford too set off some *big* explosives
No, Registration fees pays for licensing and roads, the gas tax pays for road usage - at least in the vast majority of the 50 US states. Not knowing where you live I can not say for sure.
In Tennessee gas tax goes towards the Department of Transportation and is distributed according to this website and you will note that it goes towards *roads*, in fact the DoT isn't involved at all with the licensing and registration of motor vehicles. According to the Department of Safety (the department that issues them), 87% of their funding goes into the highway fund (basically whatever is left over after operating costs), however that includes things such as Handgun Carry Permits, tuition fees from the law enforcement academy, and several other funding lines.
The DoS's entire budget is less than the revenue from the gas tax, so there is absolutely no way that they could afford to keep the highway running on it, let alone just registration which is only a part of the DoS's funding. I shudder to think what the yearly one time fee per vehicle would need to be to cover it, not only that but the gas tax places the burden on those that use the system the most. In fact, the DoT's yearly budget is over double the DoS's entire revenue stream.
Again, this is fairly common amongst the US states, though I am sure some work differently.
As to if an electric is bypassing the tax - my guess is that yes, it is. As to what municipalities will do about I dunno. You are not paying for what you use, my guess is that right now so few have electrics that they do not really care. However that *will* change if/when there is a move away from gasoline as the roads will have to be repaired and the money has to come from someplace. As the saying goes - there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I'm not a big fan of taxes, but in this case the roads have to be payed for, the state has to be responsible, and this system scales the taxes you pay by your usage - seems about as fair and necessary a tax as I can think of. It has nothing to do with the middle east, oil, or how you run your car - only that you have to pay the collective for what you (as an individual) consume. In fact, it is rather surprising that they even have the tax free gas, if they were simply tax hungry and wanting to tell you what to do there would be no option and most wouldn't know the difference anyway.
"If it said that, your comment would make sense. That would be something like ... "We don't think Apple will fix it, so we won't wait before announcing it". I could see that (though not agree with it). But "We don't think Apple will fix it, so we won't even TELL them about it" is totally irresponsible. The only "rational" interpretation of that is he actively wants to make it harder to improve the security of Safari."
There is no concrete reason to think that the company in question has not contacted Apple many times and (due to being ignored) feels such a thing is worthless until/unless it is totally public - much the same as many here feel is the case with Microsoft. There is not reason to assume actively wanting Safari to be harder.
There is a large difference between actively trying to sabotage (IE, make it harder for) Safari and having had the corporate office ignore them. If I had reported such bugs in the past and been ignored until they are public then I would also ignore the official channels. I would assume that the corporate office wouldn't pay attention until the exploit was out in the wild.
Kinda how the great pioneers that do this to Microsoft are treated, though at least Apple does better in the long run - it is like saying I would rather get three limbs cut off instead of four. Well, yea sure, if those were my only choices..
"I would suggest that the problem is not with hard facts and statistics, but rather with a populace that is poorly educated in statistics and a media that is unwilling to actually analyze the statistics (and present that analysis) for fear of offending or boring an apathetic and relatively innumerate populace."
To some extent, but even then I do not think that we can do enough education to fix things.
The problem is more widespread that any one single thing. Even for those of us with enough education to figure out if the study is mostly OK or not (and it pretty much took a math minor to get what little that actually is - I see no way around that either) it is difficult to find the raw data for the study. Even then, for those that run such studies the field is mature enough that subtleties in just questions and what they base things one can give them basically the outcome they want (unless one side is so overwhelmingly correct there is no way to work it out).
Take the original articles points - one of the important parts is what year you base your study on. If I had just read one I would not have thought twice about either year being the control - yet look at how different that *one* thing forces the conclusion to be? Unless I am an expert on this already (and then why am I reading consumer level information) there is no way for me to know and that is a simple thing.
Add in how funding works and you get a real mess. It's not as simple as "Bush in charge == anti-global warming, Gore in charge == truth" (or insert whichever you think is real, this is more or less the Slashdot's crowd thinking). There is a hierarchy that you go through that does not change with administration, nor can they simply refuse or deny funding to someone sufficiently famous (see several Slashdot articles for Bush tenure, New Republic for Clinton tenure - if you think "your side" doesn't do it I have some ocean front property in Arizona on the cheap). It all adds up and decent portion of the "research" is more about how to get funding than to do good science (not that there isn't good science out there - just that it normally isn't that high profile).
I do not discount statistics, however I do not base a whole lot on them. I try and group things into three classes - things I know, things I have an idea, things I know little/nothing. Things I know I usually know enough about to overcome the above issues. Things I have an idea I try and find as much as I can about and compare studies (in this particular case I'm underwhelmed by both sides - cherry picking data isn't going to convince me of either side). Things I know little/nothing about I still have opinions but tend to try and not act upon them. Unfortunately too many take the middle, and more often than not the latter, and assume that the side they choose is The Truth and go from there.
Good luck catching race conditions with that.
There are three basic "problems" and to some extent I think they are unsolvable.
First is debugging tools. People are used to having a nice neat step through debugger - press some key to execute the next statement. Because a large part of parallel processing does not conform to that process you have to add in your own debug code (even if using one of the parallel debuggers out there). I see no way around this one - you can not have a deterministic debugger on a non-deterministic system and I see no way for parallel systems to generally be deterministic in the sense of "press F8 to execute next line". This increases cost as you can not simply hire a cheap "code monkey" to do the job.
Second is just general complexity, things like file locks, critical sections, race conditions, etc. Even if you deal with them every single day and have been doing it for the last 20 years these are still complex issue when something fails. I also see no way around this one, though there have been some really nice advances in recent times and there is still a long way to go before I think we have mostly maxed out the tools. Somebody has to deal with this and a good deal will eventually be shoved off to the tools, but when that happens figuring out where the error is will be a real bitch (ask anyone who eventually found an esoteric bug in a standard library how much work *that* took). While quite solvable, this also increases cost.
Lastly you have Amdahl's law - basically you can not parallelize everything and performance degrades quickly the more serialization you have. I do not think that the real performance of SMP's or multi-core systems for the average user is going to come in single application performance - you just can not parallelize the typical applications that much. Where the performance comes in is allowing several things to go on at a time, basically that really large system tray many people run will be going across multiple processors or cores and not degrade performance that much. Though this really helps - I've ran two processor systems on my home systems for years and it is interesting how little processor power I need for games compared to the minimum specs even when I do not bother with paying attention to what is currently running.
So, in short, not really too hard, it's a level of complexity that many have done well with in the past and will continue to do so, but that the problem space doesn't map well to parallelization. There is some level of "too hard" when you are asking if VB only people who think that HTML should be listed as a programming language and can not survive without Microsoft's wizard (note that using VB isn't the bad part - lots and lots of really good programmers use it at work because that is what will sale), but competent programmers/software engineers are quite capable of using it. I do not think that the benefits within most single applications are worth the cost, though as an overall system it will help quite a bit.
At this point that explanation seems kinda strange - yea they were involved with Hitler but so was pretty much every single German company around then. It doesn't bother me a bit to take Bayer Aspirin even knowing what went on then - todays company has little to do with back then. Not only that, but a vehicle for every person was one of the good idea's that Nazi Germany had that much of the rest of the world followed - the US's interstates were a derivative of what they saw with the Autobahn and I bet pretty much every USian drives on them.
I could understand a reluctance to be a Decepticon - not only does the name suck from a marketing point of view but so does being the bad guy. However, for you car to be one of the freaking saviors of the world *ought* to be a good thing. Given what I have seen in the past from VW I could see a VERY successful campaign - then again given their current commercials I can also see why they felt it was bad to be one of the saviors of the world.
This was a fairly ignorant move on the part of VW. I have fairly happy memories of playing with the VW beetle transformer in my sandbox as a kid. They are missing out on a great opportunity here because of some idiotic notion that few people buy into.
Neither Gault or the pirate are the pinnacle of capitalism - the person down the street from you that runs a company is.
Capitalism works best when there is minimal govt interference, though it does require *some*. For the most part a limited copyright and limited patent process is quite good. For those types of things there needs to be a short period of time wherein you can recoup your R&D.
The pirate, due to not have to endure the cost of the research & development process, can *really* undercut everyone. For some industries that makes creating a new product near instant bankruptcy.
By far the best examples of this are medicines - it takes over a billion dollars to do the lab work required to produce one (if you factor in FDA protocols, most that do actually need to be there). No company is going to spend well over a billion to produce a drug and loose most of it - no company *can* do that no matter how much someone wants too.
Things like Music are on the very bottom end of "needed", the R&D cost are VERY minimal. In fact so minimal as to generally be irrelevant when pro-rated over the life of the music. The cost there is through advertising and distribution (something the pirate has to deal with as much as any one else). Of course, this is also why medicines are patents and songs are copyrights.
The line isn't exact or totally obvious and there will be (and should be) argument where to place it, but the original patents and copyrights worked quite well and I see no reason to have ever changed them. At best you only had something different, at worse - well you get where we are quickly heading.
However, we have moved to where many have realized that our system of govt can extend that artificial protection as far as they feel like - after all it is simply a piece of paper that can be written anyway one wants. Since few people seem to care unless they directly see it, money talks and gets passed. The advertising people are very sharp, they make it case of nice legal corporations vs anti-capitalism pirates. Unfortunately too many of those "pirates" do fit that bill or have such a narrow focus that they do not always go outside of that focus, it truly is a false dilemma that is too often presented. For the average person the anti-capitalism anti-corporation stance is crazy so the other must be true.
I hope not, McCarthy is only reviled in modern politics and was VERY successful during his day.
While the guy had absolutely none of the information and was a quack, more recently unclassified documents (such as the Venona papers) indicate that he was more correct than wrong - even if one discounts the disputed parts. While that is pure luck and does nothing to exonerate him (as an old saying goes "even a blind squirrel finds nut sometimes"), I do not want any part to be mostly true.
I would rather Microsoft be like SCO - just full of shit. I suspect they are - I suspect that they are reading patents overly broad and it will never see anything more than PR. It *may* go to a threat stage, but I doubt a real court case - they do not want patent to be ruled that broad either as they, too, would be in violation of hundreds of patents.
I do figure that there are some patents infringed - in both cases (Linux and Windows) there are so many patents and the software so large/broad that there is infringement *someplace*. But I do not think it will do either side good to push it - I doubt the OSS side will due to their views on patents and figure MS will not either. While MS very much lives in it's own world (for example, they still see themselves as the "underdog") this is to big a blunder to get a strong ruling on patents. Just talk to reporters, get some articles, spread some FUD and you do harm to OSS projects *only*.
Assuming that it even works perfectly, there are other problems besides the personal reduction in the ability to protect oneself.
One, I am unmarried and have no offspring - why should I have to go around and "protect" my house like I have kids? I do not put the little plastic things in electric sockets because I know better than to stick a fork in there (and if I do happen to feel like doing so, well I get what is coming to me). There are lots of people out there with no children living at home (even if they do happen to have offspring), there is no reason to treat everyone as if they are.
Two - how wide do we do restrict access? Narrow and they become worthless for protection, too wide and worthless for safety. What should be the largest market for this - police - hate them. They are MUCH more likely to have their guns stolen and used against them than anyone else: they have them on themselves at all times and everyone knows they have them. However, as often as they save them they also hurt them in that only *that person* could use that firearm. Does the whole family wear the ring or get imprinted (if so - what good does that do in stopping home accidents as they are billed to do)? Is the family only protected when the one person is home? You have similar questions with file permissions - pretty much any thing needed to be used by a group has no security and in this case a false negative means the inability to defend oneself from an agressor (read - more than likely death). You can not have wide usage that somehow in someway knows the user is up to nefarious acts and stops them.
And, lastly, something most slashdotters should know - it *will* be broken by the thieves. While it will prevent immediate use of someone that isn't authorized (incidental or single/casual theft), it will do *nothing* to prevent semi-to-organized theft (one of the things talked about). Even with the casual theft I would bet there will be a myriad internet articles on how to get around it.
This type of thing has been going on since at least the Oklahoma City bombing and I assume it wasn't new even then.
Back then I had given a friend that is interested in making primitive weapons a printout on how to make his own black powder. This was a day or two before the Oklahoma City bombing, he had another friend at work (on of the national labs) that did the same thing and brought it in to him - this was the day after the bombing. A co-worker saw it laying on his desk and decided he was getting ready to blow everything up, called the FBI, and started about a two month long investigation. Obviously it led nowhere.
A few years later someone in our college set off an "incendiary device" (the detectives later told me it was acid and aluminum foil in a plastic jug) and I was, once more, investigated for all sorts of nice things. Again, nothing came of it as there was nothing there. I do not recall now what they accused me of, I assume it would now be "terrorist" but back then there was some other hot-button label for it.
And you might as well have been whatever the most despicable thing you can think of if you were in a gun club during the mid-90's and the great crusade against "militias" (not to mention almost every single incident was somehow their fault). There was almost no one anywhere defending you then - you were an evil gun-toting maniac. It was MUCH more endemic than the current "terrorist" thing - and at least there *are* terrorist out there that want to do us harm even though we are over reacting.
After any event there are people that fly into a panic of stupid things, call someone, and it gets all blown out of proportion. Most law enforcement thinks it stupid and - like the Duke non-rape case - you will sometimes get a political position decide it is time to show the people they are "doing something" and you get to be the one screwed. If you are unlucky you get Nifong as the prosecutor, this is the local prosecutor being an ass.
Like other posters, I'm not a physicists - so take this as you will.
I really do not know - I would think that if the turbines are based off the wind generated from the moving cars that it would not increase drag - it is simply wind that that bleeds its energy off into the concrete wall anyway. I can not see how adding turbines to something other than the car can increase drag - though I also can not see how this is worth much, probably costs more to produce the system than it will ever generate. Though it may very well play well politically. If anything allowing the pressure wave to dissipate away from the path of the car will *reduce* drag.
Think of it like using the heat from braking your care to generate electricity - it takes no more energy to stop but what is bled off into the air as heat is retained in your batteries. Is it worth the added complexity and manufacturing? Dunno - I rather suspect almost no one actually knows even though many have their own ideas - those that are correct are correct more from luck than actual knowing. There is simply too much political and idealogical baggage for the non-expert to wade through, you can always find enough experts on any stance to be "correct" and enough experts to declare the "obvious consensus" to be whatever you want.
If you are moving energy that is normally just bled off into the surroundings into something useful and that is more energy (over the lifespan of the product) is greater than it's cost to create you have a plus. Anything else and the third law of thermodynamics is biting your ass in a big way. If it is truly waste and goes no where it most likely is a long term plus once the large scale manufacturing efficiencies kick in. This is also important as we look to "alternative" energy sources such as wind or tidal - if we remove the amount we need from those systems what happens?
It is a bad thing if your yearly budget assumes that you can spend very little, churn out part 23 of some title, and blow the sales charts away. If you are doing that then someone producing quality games at a fast enough rate that the gamer always has a quality title to blow their money on instead of your crap - even worse!
You will note that the article is written from the point of view of the people producing crappy games, not the consumer. In that sense what they said is accurate.
I seriously doubt consumers give a flip *who* the producer is as long as it is a good game. You may tend to feel that SquareEnix tends to make good games (or not - IMO they have gone downhill in the last few years) and look for those titles, however if EA happens to somehow create the greatest console RPG ever few will ignore because it has the EA stamp. I know I've always wanted to play "Zelda" and didn't really care that Nintendo made it - same with pretty much any other game.
More accurately:
It's kind of like asking your friend to give you a forged check from a rich person's account which he does, and then him getting busted for writing these forged checks. Since he's busted he wants to claim you as an accomplice, even though you never cashed that check.
Not legal or ethical. I see no reason to do anything different to Jobs because we like him - I do not know what the standard punishment is but he should get it. If it is to pay the money and fine - sounds good to me. If you or I would get 6 months in jail and a fine, then he should get six months in jail and a fine.
Rich people getting off because they can afford good lawyers or people like them are bad. Given the size of the company he is the CEO of I would say that cases like this are *vitally* important we prosecute - Ken Lay got as far as he did over this type of "good ole' boy" network.
I rather suspect that had Gates or the CEO of Diebold done this the reaction would be what it should be and quite possibly go too far into wanting prosecution. I don't want any specific punishment - in the grand scheme of things this seems rather minor and should get a hefty fine. I just want the punishment to be metered out the same regardless of how much money the guy has and how popular he is.
That it comes from crushed bugs doesn't bother me too much, after learning to cook many different things from the most basic materials I can find I had to either quit eating quite a few of my favorite foods or just not care. If I can eat snails or a Japanese soup with a fish head cleaved in half and floating in the middle of it (with it's nice cloudy steamed eyes) then I see no reason to balk over chemically processed crushed bugs. Heck, many cultures eat them covered in chocolate as a dessert.
We eat intestine, heart, lung, crushed/boiled bones, all sorts of not nice stuff labeled as "natural casings", "by products", "gelatin", and other things that do not sound bad (and some are not cheaper crap but are the more expensive, better tasting, more sought after product). I'm sure many premium suasage makers would MUCH rather list "natural casing" over "intestinal lining" even though the latter is better understood.
However, things like this possible change in chocolate is horrid. I may know what I'm eating when I read "natural casing" on sausage (though this tends to be one that many now know), but you can at least tell when you are getting it.
One can usually tell from the ingredients list what chocolate you are paying for - sometimes I do not mind, sometimes I do. The *only* people this will benefit is people trying to pass cheap crap off as high quality ingredients - you will at least have to purchase one bar before you know for sure. It will not help consumers choose better in anyway and in fact it will greatly hinder them. The people at the FDA are already well aware of this, I rather suspect they know which way something like this will go already and are following the forms that the law requires. Anything will either be ignored or shown as the reason they denied the application.
"Which isn't to say that the Shah was exactly a nice fellow that you'd want to invite over for dinner, but that GE and Westinghouse were working to sell nuclear-power stuff there isn't as untoward as it might sound."
The Shah himself wasn't that bad - at least compared to the normal rulers in that region (by our standards he sucked big time). I've never been that angry we supported him, more angry in how our support materialized. Enough to keep him in power with no opposition, but then dropping it at the first opportunity for a radical anti-western violent govt.
"I don't know if that was just the Carter administration being typically asleep at the switch, or if nobody suspected things were deteriorating that quickly,"
There is a little bit of all of that. Like most intelligence failures you can not blame it on one point and you can also point to people who "knew" what was going on (whether they actually knew or were just lucky is up to debate - same thing with Iraq's WMD program). Not a big fan of Carter presidency - in fact I think his handling of the hostages was horrid. However, the buildup to it - eh. Reasonable assumption, grossly incorrect. We will most likely never know exactly all the information he had (and the level of verifiability of it) so *really* difficult to answer the level of incompetence on his end.
"Ultimately, the critical mistake of U.S. policy during the latter part of the 20th century was to think that the enemy of our Enemy (and that's how we really seemed to think about it; Enemy with a capital 'E,' that's E that rhymes with C and that stands for Communism) was our friend."
You can not really call it "shortsighted" - that assumes too much. At the time it wasn't just communism or capitalism (depending on your side) but total annihilation due to a nuclear war. In that light the Islamic Fundamentalism we are seeing, while bad, is a candle to the flame - at least at this point. I can not say we necessarily made the wrong decisions, nor can I say we made the correct ones. I will say that though failure was much more extreme I think we also had a MUCH larger percentage chance of success - as one of the saying goes about counting on the fact that the Russian/Americans love their children as much as we do - the people we are currently fighting celebrate death. We hope that enough of them love their children as much as we do and can stop them - otherwise we are screwed regardless of what we do (short of genocide against radical Islam and if it comes to that that we see the difference between radical and non-radical).
"Maybe this is okay and/or legal in AU. Is this legal in the US? What about due process? What about overdue process?"
Those only apply to the govt - Comcast doesn't have to provide service to you at all (unless there is another regulation that requires them to, such as some of the "common carrier" stuff). Same thing with things like "freedom of speech" - it is *not* a violation of it for clear channel to self censor any group for whatever reason they want, it puts limits on the govt, not people or businesses.
However, in the US we have both a large enough group of providers to choose from and the legal ability to do so that pretty much any ISP doing this is going to die. ISP's are known to cut people off for less. Not having lived in Australia (so do not shoot me if I'm wrong, only repeating what I have heard some people who claim to be from Australia say) that much of the land doesn't have a large enough group of providers to choose from - getting cut off is final. In the US that *may* result in the service getting govt regulation, but I wouldn't count on it (Recording Industry has too much money and too good of lobbyist - I doubt you could get such a thing through either local or federal congress even if the governor or president would sign it). My guess is that Australia suffers from the same problem with it's lawmakers - I know of no system that is immune from laws being purchased even if it is only through a massive advertisement campaign.