I can't believe this is even an issue - if you are 100% obligated to do something for the company you work for then it is their obligation to pay you. Really.
I find it hard to bill for many things - say for instance I'm running benchmarking software. I spend a whopping 10 seconds starting the application and then I spend the next 3 hours doing something else and the next 0-2 hours looking from time to time to see if it is done. How to charge? Dunno - I spent most of that time playing a video game so I can't really charge for that yet my time isn't completely my own. So far it hasn't been an issue with anyplace I have worked - all were more generous with that time than I was so all was good.
I've also worked salary positions where you work more hours than you say. In all cases I have received "other" compensation - be it in equipment to play with (say a new gaming rig every so often at no cost to me), *really* flexible hours, or other perks. That's OK too - I made the decision that the benefits were worth the work.
But this idea? Crap. I mean really - I'm stuck doing something for the company and *only* for the company and they want to tell me to eat it? Give me some flex time in there, give me vacation equal to that time spent, really just allow me to make it worth my while for those 15 minutes a day. Heck let me eat lunch for free from a *decent* company owned cafeteria if I choose to not get payed.
I suspect that most would be happy with the above even if they couldn't post that 15 minutes to their hourly schedule. There are MANY ways to keep it all good and most of us are willing to work with someone who is willing to work with us back. Some will want something incredibly unrealistic, but then you probably do not want them as employees anyway - the same is true of any employer that requires something incredibly unrealistic too.
I agree that the OP was out of line, however I find you to be no better. Hyperbole is hyperbole.
I would say there are many pseudo Americans on this site that anything that touches the US is nearly a waste to read. I still do, but I almost always regret doing so (I waste too much time as I almost always find at least one post I have to respond too - though I know it will do no good, prejudices are just too strong).
Lets see:
"Shut down the FAA, let the airlines self regulate."
And how much change do you see going on there? I would guess very little. Costs will go down some, accidents up some - but not by much. People fly because it is fast, safe, and given those two things cheap. Screw any of that up and the industry dies.
Not that I particularly like the above scenario - but then who is calling for removal of the FAA? I sometimes participate in some fairly hard right wing groups and even some anarchists and that govt body isn't one that I've ever seen come up. I suppose a google search will find some nutjob out there that says so - but I think if we want to go that route then whatever political believe you adhere to will not look so good either (nutjobs are all over the place).
"Shut down welfare, turn all the streets into a ghetto."
Wow - that's a real doozy of a prediction there - care to back that one up with *any* evidence whatsoever? I mean - accuse someone of being a 14 year old with no ability to see what some action will produce and you use this as an example? Considering that we didn't have a welfare system before the Great Depression I would have to say if you believe that then you are a grade 'A' Idiot. Really, to say removal of *any* welfare system will make is all streets poor is about as stupid a statement as I have read in a while.
"Shut down medicare, let the disease spread."
Why would it remotely do so? The vast majority of seniors citizens in the US only use medicare as a supplement to their current health care plan. Those that can not do so are on medicaid.
Oh, you mean (once more) you are a dumb ass who doesn't know what they are talking about and mean medicaid? Well I sorta agree. Like the main article about the car pool thing - there is a real need for the system but the one chosen pretty much sucks.
"Shut down all these things because they cost me money. I don't see any benefit."
Of course not - when you have no idea whatsoever what the programs in question do then the likely hood of you being correct about an overhaul of them is pretty slim. Of course, I also agree that the person you are responding too is in the same boat, yet you are no better.
I hope (and somewhat assume from your post) that you are not an American. If you are then you are a main part of the problem why we can not get anything close to something sane passed. I suspect that Canada is in a similar situation with respect to this article.
"You actually have enough space to just say "fuck it" pack your shit together and live in the woods."
I rather suggest you look up "Randy Weaver" and "Branch Dividians" to see how well that one works out. Nutjobs trying to succeed from the US are treated as nutjobs.
"The reason Bush got in was because there are millions of people who think like he does."
Really - then why did nearly the same exact group of people just elect Obama (I thought his election was supposed to stop all this hate - so far doesn't seem to be working too well, I guess it will take some time for the love to spread)?
I do not know what country you are from - but if you are from the US then I shudder to think you may be voting on our leaders. If outside the US I guess I do not care so much - I would just wonder how well you would take such non-informed ranting on your own country.
Having worked for the Federal govt and private industry I saw exactly the opposite.
So, lets see. First off labor unions. In the private sector they are quite powerful, however there is only so much they can demand and power shifts around - there has to be a give and take and there are times that I think either side holds a little too much power. Not so in the govt - they have all the control (no politician is going to squash a teamsters union in any way shape form or fashion).
How does this work? Well - carpenters remove screws, electricians unplug electronics, teamsters move things, and the electricians have a special group for moving around specialized electronics (say a network cable instead of a power cord). You can only request one group at a time and they always send two - they have a minimum of 1hour per person charge to show up (so you pay two salaries). They normally have a lead time of 2-4 hours after your call before they show up. Not that they are that busy and all (it's not uncommon to see them stand around talking, smoking, or drinking coffee for 45 minutes in front of your building)
So - you have something fail on your computer and you need it fixed. You either have to pay someone to come and and "troubleshoot" the system (and keep in mind the following process if real troubleshooting is needed) or you hope your thoughts are correct and co-ordinate the thing yourself (but be careful here that you are not stepping on someone else's toes, some places have unionized tech support - more on that later)
You call the teamsters to move the box - two come out in a few hours and leave (50-75 dollars). You then call the electricians to unplug the network card and power cord - two separate groups so four people (though thankfully you can request both at the same time - 100-150 dollars). You then call the carpenters to take the screws out of your computer - two come out in a few hours and take the screws out. You then call the teamsters to move the case around so that someone can get at the insides - two come out in a few hours (50-75 dollars). Next you call the carpenters to remove the screws from the network card - two guys in a few hours come out and do so (50-75 dollars). Then the electricians come back and and replace the card (50-75 dollars). Then we just get to reverse the process - weee!!!!
Do any of that and get caught and you are immediately fired (true even of the research staff - of which I was one). See, you aren't one of those union people - were we unionized then we would have the same protections (it was always amusing to watch a teamster that removed a screw, or a carpenter that moved a box so they can stand easier and then got caught - they were not automatically fired being union and all, can't have that). Have a screw driver on you? Almost the same (your project gets fined but you get to keep your job). However what most of us did was come in very late at night, lock the doors, and fix the bloody thing our self - but some followed the rules.
Next, I started off as an intern (later full time staff) - I worked on 3 and 6 month contracts depending on what I was doing at school. The building I was in stored some plutonium in the basement so you had to have special training to be there (being a software engineer I avoided the whole thing anyway - it was just the free office at the time I started). At least two of my contracts I never had un-escorted access to my office because the secretary would wait until she had a minimum of ten of the things to sign - complain to her boss and then you really caught hell from her.
None of the branches communicate with each other. At least three times (with me being part of the last one) we would see the costs people decide that we are spending too much so not renew research staff contracts. At the very same moment the staffing group would note that the other labs had more researchers so they had to hire more. In both cases it didn't matter what the final tally was - just that people were let go and hired. The *only* thing
I wrote cluster administration software that scaled roughly into the 5000 node size per cluster (or homogeneous set of nodes - didn't really have to be a cluster).
Of course, any cluster administration software has a "parallel shell" (even back when I wrote such a thing).
When I gave tutorials I always used some form of "with great power comes great responsibility" (and that exact quote after the first Spiderman movie) slide and spent a few minutes talking about it. The very next slide simply said "cexec --all rm -rf ./" (--all ran on *all nodes* and *all clusters* in your configuration file - and keep in mind this was a DoE/DoD project so there literally were people with that many nodes).
You could always tell who the "real" sysadmins were - instant response and no need to talk much about the slide:)
If you ever want to try out some really big "oh shit" moments work in scalable cluster software administration - not only do you ruin one machine but now you do so with thousands and with efficient start up and execution times you can do so at roughly.00001 extra seconds per node! By the time you realize "oh shit" the command is run and you are dead in the water - yea!!! (rm was one that I pulled out for it's own functionality simply because of that - some people thought that silly until they accidentally did the above).
One of the main reasons I do not play most MMO's is that I find I am paying a company for *me* to produce content.
I also tend to note that, yes the world is huge, but it is the same 50 tile sets spread out over huge area with the same 50 creatures randomly placed in it. It may take me two full days real time to get from one of the continent to the other and you may see 2000 different enemies to fight, but after the first thirty to sixty minutes you've pretty much seen everything you are going to - the only thing that changes is now instead of level 5 wolves you are seeing level 20 dire wolves with red eyes.
Of course in any story driven game there will come a point where you have no more story. The so called "end game" has nothing, you are done with the story - for a game that depends on a monthly subscription fee that is bad. But then the people who want grind do not want the story bits at the front (after all, the only thing that counts is high end raids and such) and the people who want story do not care about raiding the same place over and over. So, most MMO's go the way of the grinder simply because that is where their revenue stream is.
I'm on the story end of the spectrum. For my self the best "MMO" I've played is Guild Wars. I put MMO in quotes because it is only loosely one - but then that is why I like it so much. It suffers badly from no end game - after all once you complete the story all you have is grind. It also doesn't depend on a subscription model - I got the content I payed for and now if the players create extra then great (sorta an odd take on Open Source - it would be the equivalent of requiring a normal fee for a piece of software - along with a mostly normal EULA - but getting the code and rights to change it along with that price).
It's not that I do not enjoy "end game grind" (I really wish GW did better on that end) and such - it's that I feel ripped off paying someone a monthly fee for me to make the game good.
"However, I rarely edit documents that are more than a few hundred pages long, "
If you are working with those documents MS Office sucks royally anyway - you are MUCH better off with real publishing software. At that size when two things equally suck the one you know better is the easier one (and you can always point to the features you "need").
For "small" (0-200 page documents) they are not that far off from each other. One does one thing better, the other something else. If you have spent years learning ones strengths and weaknesses and then try and switch it is *tough* to do because of that (and the larger the document the more true that is). When I was a "new" user of either one (around '01 to '02 with respect to writing commercial documentation) I tended to prefer OO. However since the world was MSOffice oriented and they didn't play well together then I only used office.
Since I now only use an office suite to fill out time sheets and write small documentation to send to the technical writers I just use OO. Heh, since I am sending things off to technical writers to do with whatever they want too I normally just use VI and text files now anyway - any formatting I apply is removed anyway. However, once I learned it in my previous job, for a paper of 10 pages or over (especially one that needs special formatting) Latex is so far superior to either one that it isn't even a contest - it also works well for really large documents to boot. There are even some really nice WYSIWYG editors out there for Latex too.
There is a large difference between the writing you observe and doing much typing - how many get TCS from writing on a pad of paper? You also do not see what his writing looked like - wanna bet it wasn't neat and controlled?
His injuries are fairly well documented and ones to his hands/fingers are part of them including improper settings of the bones and loss of dexterity.
He has also talked about not being able to type for, well, a long time. Well before he even started to run in primaries - in fact even early in his political career. I don't know how long he has wanted to be president so I can't say "even before he wanted to run, but I can say well before he knew he would.
That being said I agree on McCain being a liar - though I've always more referred to him as a media whore. One of the principle betrayers of the Contract with American that many of us (grassroot conservative workers) worked so hard to promote and get elected and all so he could be the darling of the media. No glowing endorsement from me - but the not typing thing is something that Obama pretty much recognized where that "attack" was going and dropped it.
If the Dems had picked Hillary I wouldn't have cared one way or another (and she wouldn't have made the mistake to bring up the typing). I've voted for Dems before and I hope to again someday outside of my governor - Phil Bredesen, one of the few governors I've really liked would get my vote in a heartbeat (and that is why he will most likely never make it - he is more or less a "DINO"). But no, they had to pick this moment to "go for it" and get a far left candidate. If the Dems loose it will be because they saw an inch and tried to take a mile.
What you write is true - however Blu-Ray's (and much of the HD content out there) goes further than that.
My aunt, who is *not* tech savvy in the slightest ("why does this TV show have black bars on the side of my tv?" when watching 4:3 disks on her widescreen TV) will no longer purchase them. She has had too many times that she called someone (me sometimes, sometimes where she purchased the equipment, and tried a third party) and the answer for why the picture was grainy or some error about "not authorized to play" was "DRM" and no way to fix it.
Copying the file over to the computer is irrelevant and the ability to "share" the movie is irrelevant. However refusing to play or severely downgrading the signal does. If there was an actual technical reason then many would cringe their teeth and endure it, however pretty much everyone knows *someone* who has enough knowledge of the matter to tell them it is something artificial put in to control when, how, and where you use the items.
If there is one thing few people like (and Americans in particular) it is being forced to do something. Many like to *tell* others what to do (and are confused that others do not like it when they try), but few like being told. Especially true when it comes to something like movies, TV, or music which we feel we have an inherent right to do with as we please. Even more true when someone charges you extra money to be told what to do.
I object to very litte of that (about the only quibble I have is the "Immoral" part in there describing the Iraq war).
But then that's what happens when you list things at a very high level - it is the details I highly disagree with. And then only sorta, since most of the people who are all gung ho over him do not care about how he is going to achieve those goals to look any deeper he hasn't really stated those details. In those cases I have to look to who he is pandering too and who is supplying him his money and I *greatly* dislike that.
Lets face it, a politician can get up there and say they are for improving the standard of living for the majority of Americans - that is all well and good and I doubt there are any American that says that is a Bad Thing. But then they can achieve that by killing a little less than 50% of the population and giving that wealth away - that absolutely 100% fulfills that campaign promise.
So, lets see:"Reducing the incidence and unfairness of the death penalty, while understanding that certain heinous crimes deserve the full outrage of the nation?". How? Dunno, he will not say. Does he take a significant amount of money from a specific group and attend/talk at their rallies and not others? Sure thing, so I have to assume that is who he prefers. If so then saying "I support quotas on Death Row and adjusting punishment based on race in order to equilize the demographics. Further People like Mumia ought to be set free" is fairly accurate and is - well, MUCH less liked than your sentance.
Then again, who knows - he hasn't actually said what he believes so one can argue that it is silly and he *obviously* doesn't mean that. That's the beauty of someone with little to no record and nearly every thing they say being mostly meaningless - you can project *any* belief system you want onto them and they become your perfect candidate. However at some point they have to make a decision and give some details, if Obama gets elected there are going to be some VERY surprised and unhappy people out there - too many of his supporters have diametrically opposed ideas of what he actually means by what he says.
There are several different types of "geeks" out there. Here two of the main ones are geeks who see a computer as a tool and those that see it as a venue to express themselves. Sure, as in any talk such as this there is some overlap, but for the most part the division is there.
For those that see it as a tool you pick the one that meets your specifications the best. Sometimes that is Limux, sometimes it is Windows, sometimes it is Mac, and sometimes it is some really obscure or niche product. In any case there is little other than technical merits to consider. Microsoft has had, and still has, some technically good products given the market segment they are looking at.
Then there is the ones that see it as an expression - for many the choice of their OS is more like their political party. Technical superiority is decided upon by things such as liscense and it's philosiphy.
Of course, as said, there is some overlap. There are cases where one really needs source from the ground up and - as such - the political end of "Open Source" is important.
In this case I've had less issues with Silverlight than any streaming video I can think of in the past and there are more of me than those that have issues. The only reason I do not like it is because of licensing, there is the same thing with gaming (little choice other than Microsoft). Sure there are Linux alternatives that sorta kinda work but, from an OS agnostic point of view, you are using the inferior technology.
I'm more the agnostic type here so I use mostly Windows for entertainment, for actual work Linux is almost always the better the choice. However Slashdot is more the political end of things so expect complaints about any Microsoft product "sucking" - it usually is for reasons other than how well it works but for issues of how well it works under Linux or what it's License is. And as long as that crowd is in charge of the game it will be hard to be truly mainstream as most people don't really care one way or another (and complaining that they are all sheople isn't going to help either).
"It could also be that anyone who has ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on professional demolition of large buildings has been led to believe that safely and completely collapsing such a building requires weeks of planning and absolutely precise placement and detonation of lots of explosives."
Actually, it does require that. It requires a vast amount of labor *and* highly specialized and complex physics/engineering.
Of course the operative word there is "safe" - it isn't uncommon for them to totally destroy a building and have a mostly glass front on the building next to it have *no* damage. It also takes removing a vast amount of the mass of the building beforehand.
It's not that hard to get a large structure to fall, especially *really* large ones. In fact it's probably harder to get them to stand up. It's just hard to get one to do so safely.
None of the WTC centers fell neatly or safely, the fell in an uncoordinated and dangerous way. The *did* topple over sideways to a large extent, they are just *really* large structures and the amount of sideways movement they can do before gravity becomes the dominate force and the pivot points gives isn't a very visible. They did significant damage to the structures around them (and, in fact, caused some to collapse also).
There is the occasional video of one of the (un)controlled demolitions going bad and the building "toppling" - it looks about like the WTC collapses too for the same reason. Gravity is a bitch when things go into free fall, it dominates pretty much all the other forces in play.
Heck, it isn't that hard to find where a fuel truck wrecked on a small to medium bridge and the resultant fire weaken the steel and caused a collapse (that went pretty much straight down). It wasn't *that* long that one such incident made the national news on a large bridge and a small one near my house had the same fate last year.
"Many see the temporary restraining order preventing three MIT undergrads from publicly discussing vulnerabilities they discovered in Boston's mass transit system as a violation of their First Amendment rights. Others, though, see the entire episode as yet another example of irresponsible, publicity-hungry security researchers trying to grab a few headlines."
Well, how about both? It can be a restriction of their first amendment rights *and* a publicity hungry "researcher" trying to grab headlines. They two things are not mutually exclusive.
Doing the Right Thing has not been in vogue for many years now, it is all about making some form of a statement.
It would be interesting to see the fingers being pointed if said system was attacked by terrorist and the only people killed were the family of the two sides. My guess is that the other sides point of view would become immediately obvious and they would both then point fingers at each other in an attempt to make themselves feel better.
However in this particular case I can see why the courts would give a gag order until the case is heard - that is not a violation of your first amendment rights. It has generally been established that whilst things are being litigated that the more restrictive side is somewhat enforced until the case is decided. That really only makes sense - otherwise why even have the courts have some type of decision in this case as one side is the de facto winner?
Ah well, what do I know? It's worth our deaths to tell everything yet of we kept all flaws secret then all would be well. We can't do something reasonable like, say, not tell people bent on killing us how to do it and when we are informed of a problem fix said thing. Nope, too hard to do and it may show that we aren't the Saviors of the World we think we are. Heck we may even have to look at the other side as Not Crazy and wanting to live free and with little threat of death - how bad would that be?
"If they can settle [a complaint] for less than 100 percent of what they owe people [for overtime], they've gotten away with a good deal."
It always amazes me the number of companies that do things like that, especially in highly skilled professions. They never take into account things like how worker happiness works on the over all output picture
Say, for instance that they "save" 200k at a cost of 100k - sounds good right? Well by doing that they normally "loose" WAY more than that 100k (I use quotes for "save" and "loose" because in both cases you aren't really saving or loosing, it is greater than or less than what you might other wise make).
I suspect there is signifigantly more money "lost" (in the sense of not making as much as one could) due to loos in productivity for being a crappy workplace. A workplace doesn't have to be really happy (that can also have a certain amount of drawbacks and employees tend to take advantage of that as much as employers take advantage of this), but unhappy is generally bad.
I've worked places that do not pay overtime that I work many hours over 40 a week and never really thought about it. In return I had reasonable deadlines, could work *any* hours I chose (include randomly take a week off if I felt like it, go fishing every Wednesday morning, or whatever), and I took home lots of high dollar equipment to play with.
Since, being a geek, I like playing with high dollar equipment so much of it was activities I would be happy to do otherwise. Reasonable deadlines was also a big one - I knew that if strongly asked to work over time (I don't recall it ever being demanded, though had I refused I suppose it would have been) that it was really a need. It also helped that the bosses worked in the same way.
I spent many many extra hours making them money. I never once felt gipped all the time I was employed there. I knew that they cared about me and, as such, I cared about the organization. Unfortunately that only went so far up the chain, but that is another story.
*shrug* It seems to me that the more removed an individual becomes from the people they manage they more they do this. IMO it is because they become numbers, not people. It also seems to happen to those that think it never will, it is a VERY rare person that makes it high and still keeps those ideas. And no, I don't think that the upper management only promotes those that think of people as "human resources" (one of the worst ideas of our time, though there are a few good HR people out there the rest are drones). I think it is no more complex that as faces become numbers that the idea expressed in the original quote become "common sense" - in my experience if you know many upper management people you will find someone who got there through managing a group of people as people, not numbers. It is just once they get to the number stage they forget there are people there.
I mean really. what did you expect? Some communist utopia where everything is "free"? It doesn't exist. Never has and never will.
You are at what will be the nexus of one of the most lucrative industries in the world for the next few weeks (sports, especially summer ones) and you expect the main access to the outer world to be what, cheap?
You can also expect it to be craptacular in that there is no other game in town and you *have* to purchase it at outrageous prices. Not that capitalism would have helped either (though, as one can probably tell I think that system is better) simply because the short term focus is so high and out of the ordinary. It will be good enough to get the job done, but not really any better than it has to be (and, again, this is more due to it being a short term spike in usage).
No matter the system you have - communist or not - there is a finite resource and some will have and some will not. No way around that until/unless we make the world Start Trek exists in with replicators (and even in that make believe world not everything can be replicated and there were haves and have nots) and then all of our economic systems will be obsolete anyway. As such expect to pay through the nose to be the top.25% or better in the whole freaking world, especially in one where mostly the main cities are wired and the whole thing is governed by a single body.
At the very least there is realistically only so much bandwidth one can send through and there is only so much upgrading they can do for a few weeks of high usage, my bet is that ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, and other places can easily consume most of it *and* have a lot of money on the line (both to spend and make) - they will get preferential treatment through being the ones who hog all the bandwidth either through artificial govt controls (in that above mentioned communist utopia) or through price controls (which takes into account scarcity).
You will most likely never get a real picture of the scene - and even probably can not.
So, for instance lets take someplace being totally 100% honest (yea right) - how do you define "better"?
Ok, station one has 25 full time HD channels in the full sense of the word, all of them sports. Station two has all of three channels in full time HD - discover, history, and the science channel - which is the better deal? by your measurement the sports package, however I watch nearly 0 sports (until they typically broadcast archery or Judo I will watch as such) and those are some of the most watched channels on I have (cartoon network being #1 - but not really an HD content there). Yet for most people the first would be the deal.
Further I find most of the so called "HD" broadcast give me a head ache. They take a higher resolution 4x3 picture and stretch the edges as that isn't really what you are looking at. It is technically HD (and is definitely a higher resolution and bit depth for color) but I can't watch but about 15 or so minutes of it without a massive migraine. As such nearly all the "HD" stuff out there is unwatchable to me. So do we distinguish between 16x9 and 4x3 too? Then what about the things I (and others) and most do not see but others do (I'm certain my problem isn't the only one and I know enough with mine that most HD isn't an option as of right now).
Then we take into account what marketing actually is and we get the wholly muddled mess we have now. Unfortunately there is no really good defined standard out there. Were it up to me HD would be the higher resolution/bit depth along with *native* 16x9 aspect ratio. But many will think I'm crazy for that and I'm sure there are others out there that would like a stricter reference too.
Many of today's video codecs compress data by only storing the differences between frames. As such they do not lend themselves well to that type of splitting up. Each frame is not processed independent from the other. You can split it into those 25 minute chunks but if each thread has to wait on the last to finish then you actually lost.
Many introduce the idea of "keyframes" - basically frames that are stored in their whole in order to "reset" whatever drift has happened because of the compression. Older codecs tend to have them at specific places - say every X frames. However newer codecs do a statistical analysis as the video is compressed and only inset them when needed (they kill performance and compression ratios on the final product). This, again, stops one from chunking up the video into parts and then compressing.
From what I understand (not that I'm remotely in said field) for much of the professional world the above isn't so true - quality suffers somewhat from the compression and is noticeable at the theater. Therefore it is one of the so called "ridiculously parallel paradigms" - at the very least when learning parallel processing in other fields it was presented as such. That is each frame is processed identically and is totally independent of the one before it - that is more what you are thinking of.
Most consumer level video streams are nearly 100% dependent on the frame before it being fully processed (again - starting from keyframes that usually are not be set before processing). This means that the process is almost entirely serial as each frame has to be done in succession. While it isn't that simple and there is *some* parallelism can be made even in the ones that set keyframes when they are needed (instead of at set intervals), it generally isn't really worth the effort - more often than not the splitting takes more effort (in processor power) than gained by the additional parallelism.
If you are using an older codec then your mileage may vary, but then I find (as cheap as it is) storage to be a more expensive quantity than the encoding process. Not to mention that the extra processing power done once is *MUCH* more efficient than the extra done each time the video is watched.
This is the most "Earth like" atmosphere because it is around one atmosphere and just kinda cold? Sure, that whole sulfuric acid thing is fairly normal, more so any place else.
I mean we have *no* experience with heating buildings and having pressurized structures - none whatsoever floating around in space at all. However we have a number of decades with dealing with floating cities in sulfuric acid - yep, easy to do. Sure we wouldn't need pressurized suits to move around, that makes me feel so much better since I'm used to that sulfuric acid everywhere.
Does this even remotely qualify as Science? I mean really, this even sucks for non-reputable sources. I guess I can't be too surprised given the crap that supposedly reputable and refereed journals produce today, but wow this one is bad. Even though the source appears to be credentialed this one is crazy.
But then I note that Mr Landis (the source material for the articles author) is a SF writer, maybe he gets confused between fiction and non-fiction (been around Slashdot long enough to know our editors here do that on a regular basis so no real surprise there).
I find that much more true also - so did the Start Trek creators, the LCARS system. I'm sure others have done it also.
Shows like Star Trek have generally been one of the "better" predictors IMO simply because they have to be somewhat believable in actual use. The technology is a backdrop and pretty much has to be seamless and mostly intuitive (or at least look that way). It may be crap based on what the systems do and how configurable they are, but interface wise they are most likely some form of the "future".
Though as another poster said the lack of tactile feed back may hurt it - I've never really used a keyboard without it and am not sure how that would work. I would also say that hitting a hard surface with you fingers all day will be *really* bad on repetitive stress injuries - the surface will have to have some amount of give to it even if there is no tactile feedback.
I would *love* a keyboard that is a standard QWERTY whilst typing and then changes to s special program specific layout. If it was just a touch screen that was easy to type on the possibilities are quite nice with both input *and* output. Just for word processing I can see common tasks being placed on the "screen" of the keyboard and I can quite easily see some *really* nice things with Real Time Strategy games with controls on the left and interactive maps on the right (including the use of the mouse for on screen stuff).
But then I also do not think that will really replace keyboards until you can go purchased one for 19.95 at walmart and that is *many* years off.
What the designers expect from this will highly color my opinion on it. The article linked isn't exactly clear on this.
Do you want to track and try and predict disease breakouts in first world areas then probably decent, track world wide stuff then terrible. Outside of the obvious (self reporting) there is the whole issue of how much of the world is on the internet? While much of the first and even quite a bit of the second world countries are on the vast majority of the population doesn't have computers, let alone internet access.
I can easily see many many great uses for this and I expect all of them to be explored at some point - I can also clearly see many not so great uses and I fully expect them to be used too. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
In fact we can already see the maps being posted and used by people who have little to no understanding (if we are generous, I'm sure some understand and use them to further their own aims) to say things the data *can not say* and it isn't even mainstream yet. *sigh* It's like many things we have today - the greater amount of good it can do the greater amount of abuse one can use it for too.
No, "nulla" is more properly translated as "no" or "none" - not zero. 0 has a *very* specific mathematical meaning and leads to our positional method of writing numbers. Just as you can usually replace "none" with the word "zero" in the looser sense of language you are correct, but in terms of numbers you are absolutely wrong. I can not say I have a two followed by a none because of that exacting mathematical value that zero holds. None is a concept, zero is a number.
Romans could not add nulla to something, subtract nulla from a number, multiply nulla by a number, or do *any* mathematical operation with it any more than we can with infinity - it was a concept and not a number. At best they could do like we do with infinity (which is also *only* a concept not a number - I assume you you actually know what I mean by that?) - note how some equations work when that concept is used and go from there. Since they understood the concept things worked out (just as it does for us with infinity) but that still doesn't mean they understood zero as a number (any more than we can give a number for infinity).
This is recorded fact too, not speculation. 0 is a very specific subset of null, none, no, or whatever other word you wish to pretend means zero. Infinity and null (or nulla) are *exactly* the same things from a mathematical point of view which is what we are talking about. We sometimes treat infinity as a number (that sideways 8 - it is no more or less a symbol than "8" is), but it isn't and doesn't follow the normal rules of our math - again Nulla is the same thing for the Romans.
There may also be one day a form of math around that has an actual number for infinity (and be able to express which cardinality we are talking to boot) and we will be looked upon as we do those that didn't know what "zero" was. At that point many people may argue that we also knew what that number was because we knew the concept, yet we do not have a number for it.
Null and 0 are not the same things - null is a concept and zero is a number. Null also has a greater scope than just numbers.
The Romans hand no concept of "zero" as a number, not because their numbering system didn't need it, their numbering system was made because they had no concept for it. Nor did the number 0 come about because a positional system requires it, the positional system came about because someone (too lazy to look up who/when and don't recall off the top of my head) came up with the concept of 0.
Null is the same thing as infinity - they are not real things. You can not go out a find a stack of 0 ears of corn any more than you can find an infinite amount of them. However you really need both concepts (especially null) and, yes, null just usually happens to be analogous to 0, however they are *not* the same thing. For example as a concept a pointer to NULL isn't something pointing to zero - zero is a real address (though in practice you have to choose some address to mean null it can be any the system designer chooses and that may or may not be 0).
So, the OP was right - the Romans had no representation for the number zero. However many take that to mean (and I can't tell if the OP thought so or not) that they didn't have the concept of "nothing" and that is wrong.
Do we create massive amount of sulfur in the air rapidly killing everything with large scale geothermal? Do we sterilize the oceans with tidal generators? Do we cause massive upheaval that likes of which the most radical Global Warming people do not even think of with massive wind farms? All of these are inherent in the system, coming up with different ways to get the energy will not solve them.
Then, of course, there are crazy radical things. For instance killing billions of living animals to reduce their carbon foot print. I am going to assume that you don't believe those ideas.
Solar isn't able to meet our energy needs so it's not an option - hopefully one day it will but that is still far off. As far as "other" goes this one is the most likely, I will also assume you have a better plan than "something will come up". Nuclear would do quite well but it politically is the hardest of them all to get, if you can get it then I would be happy. And lastly we can go back to living primitive which I will again assume you don't mean since you are using a computer and posting on a technology website.
You can list all the problems with CO2 and I agree, but outside of nuclear it is the smallest footprint out there that can meet our energy needs. Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods. Just caring about reducing CO2 is like stopping your Cocaine habit by taking Heroine - not only did you not actually solve anything but you made the whole situation worse.
As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Simply focusing on CO2 emissions is assuming there is a free lunch and it is called "reduce carbon!". It's not. At best we can try to use less energy but at this point (unless you are trying to hide a radical agenda that is a form of "move back to the stone age") that amount is irrelevant and goes back to that "make me feel good" thing.
We already know what large scale tidal power will do as it even has problems on a small scale.
You have to take the energy from something - be it heat, sound, movement, or whatever. In this case we take it from movement. Namely tidal generator slow to stop much of the necessary long shore and littoral currents that move nutrients around that feed life close to the shore.
So far we have no tidal farms that remove enough energy to have very bad effects, however the small scale generators in parts of western Europe (especially France) have had a minor to medium impact. It also tends to cause beach erosion in some places because there is a break in the sediment being moved around.
Tidal generators really only make sense if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions - they definitely are a carbon free source of energy. However I'm not terribly interested in that, I'm interested in having the smallest foot print that we can reasonably do on the planet. Right now nuclear is that way but fear mongering has made it all but near impossible.
Of the other viable methods out there fossil fuels is still has the over all least impact for major energy production. Hydroelectric has a relatively small footprint but can't be built anywhere, same is true for some types of geothermal (however some types also release massive amounts of sulfur which is worse than the carbon emissions). Solar may one day get there but not only is it too hard to produce a consistent large amount of electricity year round but the by products of creating the panels are harsh and so is the disposal of ones that break (this is arguably worse than those carbon emissions again).
The problem with wind, tidal, and many of the others isn't in how it is getting the energy it is that the energy is a must to stay in it's current form - no amount of technology is going to change that. They can work OK in small places but that is really only much good for show and, again, I'm not terribly interested in making gestures that do nothing to make myself feel better.
Unfortunately many so called "environmentalist" aren't really looking for some thing environmentally sound as much as they are into a political cause (say, reducing carbon emissions. They may be doing so because they don't know any better, it makes them feel good about themselves (many are this way - see the above about having small alternative generators for show), or have a radical agenda they are trying to get accepted through something less radical (say some of the people who feel we are a cancer on the earth and need to be destroyed). Many, if nor most, scientists do it for the funding.
As a software engineer who actually worked in parallel processing for a number of years I also wonder. We have what is known as Amdahl's Law.
Reality is that many problems just really can not be split up into small discrete operations. For those a single fast processor is the key. Most problems can be split into a few large discrete operations and multiple cores helps here. Very few can be broken up into many.
It isn't a matter of thinking about problems differently - there is a whole huge branch of Comp Sci that has been thinking about this for decades. The only computing technology I know of that may end up making an actually change in the way problems are approached is quantum computing, that is if it ever becomes reality as we see it now.
Many just think that if it is made then people will figure out how to do so - we already can see "machines" in the thousands of processors and there is little even in the scientific realm that can really use it.
The field itself is quite mature - reality is web browsing, music, word processors, spreadsheets, movies, and other normal user tasks don't even really benefit much from two cores dedicated to them (however they *do* benefit from allowing them to run on one core whilst OS tasks run on another so two core systems are still quite nice). There is no reason for anyone to spend the money needed to a large number of cores that will sit idle.
Outside of scientific research gaming is the only place I can see some of this. I can't really put a number on where you would need to stop. Even though I'm pretty much certain it is so I can't say that there is no case for 4-8 cores for environment and a core for each AI construct (I've played Quake on an SGI CAVE on MUCH less). That would be one heck of a modeling system and, lets face it, if you *really* needed that then gaming is so far from a general purpose machine that you aren't going to be using the same machine to surf the internet of run you word-processor.
I think it is more that women get women but don't get men, men do not get women or men. Thus we find that more people understand what a female is thinking. Women like to think they get men but really do not - they just "get" that many men want sex and do not go past there (and then proceed to live really shallow and fulfilling personal lives).
Dropping hints doesn't work - never has and never will. If you think they do I can assure you that you do understand the average male mind. Males almost never notice them (some do, but most do not) and while you are dropping said hints you aren't being yourself. If a male is to get them then chances are you have to be yourself. This is why the vast majority of female "hints" end up with something they don't remotely want - we are doing what you are overtly saying you want.
If you want to be understood by the vast majority of the people be forthright and honest - it rarely fails. Hints go awry even amongst the same peer group - "I hate you" rarely is misunderstood. Not very many do this be it male or female but then you don't need hints or to try and figure out the decoder ring for the other person. You have to accept you will get more people to dislike you this way (and is why few do it) and it can be for silly reasons (how dare he like chocolate and not understand why someone would prefer coconut! I hate them but will pretend I like them!), however the ones that would dislike you only like some false caricature of you they have built up because the didn't understand your hints females use or outright falsehood most males will project instead. Nor do you appear to be subservient to the other person (and I think this is a big one there), people in general do not seem to handle this very well.
See being fairly blunt is easy - I'm not too hard to understand. However I bet I tick a number of people off. Further I bet most that have some nice platitudes to offer believe most of the above but just will not say it or will try and put it "nicely", it still boils down to the same thing once you use the secret decoder ring. It is just I can fool myself into thinking a female that tells me I am "heavy" doesn't think I am fat if I really want too, however one that tells me I am fat leaves no wiggle room.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe this is even an issue - if you are 100% obligated to do something for the company you work for then it is their obligation to pay you. Really.
I find it hard to bill for many things - say for instance I'm running benchmarking software. I spend a whopping 10 seconds starting the application and then I spend the next 3 hours doing something else and the next 0-2 hours looking from time to time to see if it is done. How to charge? Dunno - I spent most of that time playing a video game so I can't really charge for that yet my time isn't completely my own. So far it hasn't been an issue with anyplace I have worked - all were more generous with that time than I was so all was good.
I've also worked salary positions where you work more hours than you say. In all cases I have received "other" compensation - be it in equipment to play with (say a new gaming rig every so often at no cost to me), *really* flexible hours, or other perks. That's OK too - I made the decision that the benefits were worth the work.
But this idea? Crap. I mean really - I'm stuck doing something for the company and *only* for the company and they want to tell me to eat it? Give me some flex time in there, give me vacation equal to that time spent, really just allow me to make it worth my while for those 15 minutes a day. Heck let me eat lunch for free from a *decent* company owned cafeteria if I choose to not get payed.
I suspect that most would be happy with the above even if they couldn't post that 15 minutes to their hourly schedule. There are MANY ways to keep it all good and most of us are willing to work with someone who is willing to work with us back. Some will want something incredibly unrealistic, but then you probably do not want them as employees anyway - the same is true of any employer that requires something incredibly unrealistic too.
I agree that the OP was out of line, however I find you to be no better. Hyperbole is hyperbole.
I would say there are many pseudo Americans on this site that anything that touches the US is nearly a waste to read. I still do, but I almost always regret doing so (I waste too much time as I almost always find at least one post I have to respond too - though I know it will do no good, prejudices are just too strong).
Lets see:
"Shut down the FAA, let the airlines self regulate."
And how much change do you see going on there? I would guess very little. Costs will go down some, accidents up some - but not by much. People fly because it is fast, safe, and given those two things cheap. Screw any of that up and the industry dies.
Not that I particularly like the above scenario - but then who is calling for removal of the FAA? I sometimes participate in some fairly hard right wing groups and even some anarchists and that govt body isn't one that I've ever seen come up. I suppose a google search will find some nutjob out there that says so - but I think if we want to go that route then whatever political believe you adhere to will not look so good either (nutjobs are all over the place).
"Shut down welfare, turn all the streets into a ghetto."
Wow - that's a real doozy of a prediction there - care to back that one up with *any* evidence whatsoever? I mean - accuse someone of being a 14 year old with no ability to see what some action will produce and you use this as an example? Considering that we didn't have a welfare system before the Great Depression I would have to say if you believe that then you are a grade 'A' Idiot. Really, to say removal of *any* welfare system will make is all streets poor is about as stupid a statement as I have read in a while.
"Shut down medicare, let the disease spread."
Why would it remotely do so? The vast majority of seniors citizens in the US only use medicare as a supplement to their current health care plan. Those that can not do so are on medicaid.
Oh, you mean (once more) you are a dumb ass who doesn't know what they are talking about and mean medicaid? Well I sorta agree. Like the main article about the car pool thing - there is a real need for the system but the one chosen pretty much sucks.
"Shut down all these things because they cost me money. I don't see any benefit."
Of course not - when you have no idea whatsoever what the programs in question do then the likely hood of you being correct about an overhaul of them is pretty slim. Of course, I also agree that the person you are responding too is in the same boat, yet you are no better.
I hope (and somewhat assume from your post) that you are not an American. If you are then you are a main part of the problem why we can not get anything close to something sane passed. I suspect that Canada is in a similar situation with respect to this article.
"You actually have enough space to just say "fuck it" pack your shit together and live in the woods."
I rather suggest you look up "Randy Weaver" and "Branch Dividians" to see how well that one works out. Nutjobs trying to succeed from the US are treated as nutjobs.
"The reason Bush got in was because there are millions of people who think like he does."
Really - then why did nearly the same exact group of people just elect Obama (I thought his election was supposed to stop all this hate - so far doesn't seem to be working too well, I guess it will take some time for the love to spread)?
I do not know what country you are from - but if you are from the US then I shudder to think you may be voting on our leaders. If outside the US I guess I do not care so much - I would just wonder how well you would take such non-informed ranting on your own country.
Having worked for the Federal govt and private industry I saw exactly the opposite.
So, lets see. First off labor unions. In the private sector they are quite powerful, however there is only so much they can demand and power shifts around - there has to be a give and take and there are times that I think either side holds a little too much power. Not so in the govt - they have all the control (no politician is going to squash a teamsters union in any way shape form or fashion).
How does this work? Well - carpenters remove screws, electricians unplug electronics, teamsters move things, and the electricians have a special group for moving around specialized electronics (say a network cable instead of a power cord). You can only request one group at a time and they always send two - they have a minimum of 1hour per person charge to show up (so you pay two salaries). They normally have a lead time of 2-4 hours after your call before they show up. Not that they are that busy and all (it's not uncommon to see them stand around talking, smoking, or drinking coffee for 45 minutes in front of your building)
So - you have something fail on your computer and you need it fixed. You either have to pay someone to come and and "troubleshoot" the system (and keep in mind the following process if real troubleshooting is needed) or you hope your thoughts are correct and co-ordinate the thing yourself (but be careful here that you are not stepping on someone else's toes, some places have unionized tech support - more on that later)
You call the teamsters to move the box - two come out in a few hours and leave (50-75 dollars). You then call the electricians to unplug the network card and power cord - two separate groups so four people (though thankfully you can request both at the same time - 100-150 dollars). You then call the carpenters to take the screws out of your computer - two come out in a few hours and take the screws out. You then call the teamsters to move the case around so that someone can get at the insides - two come out in a few hours (50-75 dollars). Next you call the carpenters to remove the screws from the network card - two guys in a few hours come out and do so (50-75 dollars). Then the electricians come back and and replace the card (50-75 dollars). Then we just get to reverse the process - weee!!!!
Do any of that and get caught and you are immediately fired (true even of the research staff - of which I was one). See, you aren't one of those union people - were we unionized then we would have the same protections (it was always amusing to watch a teamster that removed a screw, or a carpenter that moved a box so they can stand easier and then got caught - they were not automatically fired being union and all, can't have that). Have a screw driver on you? Almost the same (your project gets fined but you get to keep your job). However what most of us did was come in very late at night, lock the doors, and fix the bloody thing our self - but some followed the rules.
Next, I started off as an intern (later full time staff) - I worked on 3 and 6 month contracts depending on what I was doing at school. The building I was in stored some plutonium in the basement so you had to have special training to be there (being a software engineer I avoided the whole thing anyway - it was just the free office at the time I started). At least two of my contracts I never had un-escorted access to my office because the secretary would wait until she had a minimum of ten of the things to sign - complain to her boss and then you really caught hell from her.
None of the branches communicate with each other. At least three times (with me being part of the last one) we would see the costs people decide that we are spending too much so not renew research staff contracts. At the very same moment the staffing group would note that the other labs had more researchers so they had to hire more. In both cases it didn't matter what the final tally was - just that people were let go and hired. The *only* thing
I wrote cluster administration software that scaled roughly into the 5000 node size per cluster (or homogeneous set of nodes - didn't really have to be a cluster).
Of course, any cluster administration software has a "parallel shell" (even back when I wrote such a thing).
When I gave tutorials I always used some form of "with great power comes great responsibility" (and that exact quote after the first Spiderman movie) slide and spent a few minutes talking about it. The very next slide simply said "cexec --all rm -rf . /" (--all ran on *all nodes* and *all clusters* in your configuration file - and keep in mind this was a DoE/DoD project so there literally were people with that many nodes).
You could always tell who the "real" sysadmins were - instant response and no need to talk much about the slide :)
If you ever want to try out some really big "oh shit" moments work in scalable cluster software administration - not only do you ruin one machine but now you do so with thousands and with efficient start up and execution times you can do so at roughly .00001 extra seconds per node! By the time you realize "oh shit" the command is run and you are dead in the water - yea!!! (rm was one that I pulled out for it's own functionality simply because of that - some people thought that silly until they accidentally did the above).
One of the main reasons I do not play most MMO's is that I find I am paying a company for *me* to produce content.
I also tend to note that, yes the world is huge, but it is the same 50 tile sets spread out over huge area with the same 50 creatures randomly placed in it. It may take me two full days real time to get from one of the continent to the other and you may see 2000 different enemies to fight, but after the first thirty to sixty minutes you've pretty much seen everything you are going to - the only thing that changes is now instead of level 5 wolves you are seeing level 20 dire wolves with red eyes.
Of course in any story driven game there will come a point where you have no more story. The so called "end game" has nothing, you are done with the story - for a game that depends on a monthly subscription fee that is bad. But then the people who want grind do not want the story bits at the front (after all, the only thing that counts is high end raids and such) and the people who want story do not care about raiding the same place over and over. So, most MMO's go the way of the grinder simply because that is where their revenue stream is.
I'm on the story end of the spectrum. For my self the best "MMO" I've played is Guild Wars. I put MMO in quotes because it is only loosely one - but then that is why I like it so much. It suffers badly from no end game - after all once you complete the story all you have is grind. It also doesn't depend on a subscription model - I got the content I payed for and now if the players create extra then great (sorta an odd take on Open Source - it would be the equivalent of requiring a normal fee for a piece of software - along with a mostly normal EULA - but getting the code and rights to change it along with that price).
It's not that I do not enjoy "end game grind" (I really wish GW did better on that end) and such - it's that I feel ripped off paying someone a monthly fee for me to make the game good.
"However, I rarely edit documents that are more than a few hundred pages long, "
If you are working with those documents MS Office sucks royally anyway - you are MUCH better off with real publishing software. At that size when two things equally suck the one you know better is the easier one (and you can always point to the features you "need").
For "small" (0-200 page documents) they are not that far off from each other. One does one thing better, the other something else. If you have spent years learning ones strengths and weaknesses and then try and switch it is *tough* to do because of that (and the larger the document the more true that is). When I was a "new" user of either one (around '01 to '02 with respect to writing commercial documentation) I tended to prefer OO. However since the world was MSOffice oriented and they didn't play well together then I only used office.
Since I now only use an office suite to fill out time sheets and write small documentation to send to the technical writers I just use OO. Heh, since I am sending things off to technical writers to do with whatever they want too I normally just use VI and text files now anyway - any formatting I apply is removed anyway. However, once I learned it in my previous job, for a paper of 10 pages or over (especially one that needs special formatting) Latex is so far superior to either one that it isn't even a contest - it also works well for really large documents to boot. There are even some really nice WYSIWYG editors out there for Latex too.
There is a large difference between the writing you observe and doing much typing - how many get TCS from writing on a pad of paper? You also do not see what his writing looked like - wanna bet it wasn't neat and controlled?
His injuries are fairly well documented and ones to his hands/fingers are part of them including improper settings of the bones and loss of dexterity.
He has also talked about not being able to type for, well, a long time. Well before he even started to run in primaries - in fact even early in his political career. I don't know how long he has wanted to be president so I can't say "even before he wanted to run, but I can say well before he knew he would.
That being said I agree on McCain being a liar - though I've always more referred to him as a media whore. One of the principle betrayers of the Contract with American that many of us (grassroot conservative workers) worked so hard to promote and get elected and all so he could be the darling of the media. No glowing endorsement from me - but the not typing thing is something that Obama pretty much recognized where that "attack" was going and dropped it.
If the Dems had picked Hillary I wouldn't have cared one way or another (and she wouldn't have made the mistake to bring up the typing). I've voted for Dems before and I hope to again someday outside of my governor - Phil Bredesen, one of the few governors I've really liked would get my vote in a heartbeat (and that is why he will most likely never make it - he is more or less a "DINO"). But no, they had to pick this moment to "go for it" and get a far left candidate. If the Dems loose it will be because they saw an inch and tried to take a mile.
What you write is true - however Blu-Ray's (and much of the HD content out there) goes further than that.
My aunt, who is *not* tech savvy in the slightest ("why does this TV show have black bars on the side of my tv?" when watching 4:3 disks on her widescreen TV) will no longer purchase them. She has had too many times that she called someone (me sometimes, sometimes where she purchased the equipment, and tried a third party) and the answer for why the picture was grainy or some error about "not authorized to play" was "DRM" and no way to fix it.
Copying the file over to the computer is irrelevant and the ability to "share" the movie is irrelevant. However refusing to play or severely downgrading the signal does. If there was an actual technical reason then many would cringe their teeth and endure it, however pretty much everyone knows *someone* who has enough knowledge of the matter to tell them it is something artificial put in to control when, how, and where you use the items.
If there is one thing few people like (and Americans in particular) it is being forced to do something. Many like to *tell* others what to do (and are confused that others do not like it when they try), but few like being told. Especially true when it comes to something like movies, TV, or music which we feel we have an inherent right to do with as we please. Even more true when someone charges you extra money to be told what to do.
I object to very litte of that (about the only quibble I have is the "Immoral" part in there describing the Iraq war).
But then that's what happens when you list things at a very high level - it is the details I highly disagree with. And then only sorta, since most of the people who are all gung ho over him do not care about how he is going to achieve those goals to look any deeper he hasn't really stated those details. In those cases I have to look to who he is pandering too and who is supplying him his money and I *greatly* dislike that.
Lets face it, a politician can get up there and say they are for improving the standard of living for the majority of Americans - that is all well and good and I doubt there are any American that says that is a Bad Thing. But then they can achieve that by killing a little less than 50% of the population and giving that wealth away - that absolutely 100% fulfills that campaign promise.
So, lets see :"Reducing the incidence and unfairness of the death penalty, while understanding that certain heinous crimes deserve the full outrage of the nation?". How? Dunno, he will not say. Does he take a significant amount of money from a specific group and attend/talk at their rallies and not others? Sure thing, so I have to assume that is who he prefers. If so then saying "I support quotas on Death Row and adjusting punishment based on race in order to equilize the demographics. Further People like Mumia ought to be set free" is fairly accurate and is - well, MUCH less liked than your sentance.
Then again, who knows - he hasn't actually said what he believes so one can argue that it is silly and he *obviously* doesn't mean that. That's the beauty of someone with little to no record and nearly every thing they say being mostly meaningless - you can project *any* belief system you want onto them and they become your perfect candidate. However at some point they have to make a decision and give some details, if Obama gets elected there are going to be some VERY surprised and unhappy people out there - too many of his supporters have diametrically opposed ideas of what he actually means by what he says.
There are several different types of "geeks" out there. Here two of the main ones are geeks who see a computer as a tool and those that see it as a venue to express themselves. Sure, as in any talk such as this there is some overlap, but for the most part the division is there.
For those that see it as a tool you pick the one that meets your specifications the best. Sometimes that is Limux, sometimes it is Windows, sometimes it is Mac, and sometimes it is some really obscure or niche product. In any case there is little other than technical merits to consider. Microsoft has had, and still has, some technically good products given the market segment they are looking at.
Then there is the ones that see it as an expression - for many the choice of their OS is more like their political party. Technical superiority is decided upon by things such as liscense and it's philosiphy.
Of course, as said, there is some overlap. There are cases where one really needs source from the ground up and - as such - the political end of "Open Source" is important.
In this case I've had less issues with Silverlight than any streaming video I can think of in the past and there are more of me than those that have issues. The only reason I do not like it is because of licensing, there is the same thing with gaming (little choice other than Microsoft). Sure there are Linux alternatives that sorta kinda work but, from an OS agnostic point of view, you are using the inferior technology.
I'm more the agnostic type here so I use mostly Windows for entertainment, for actual work Linux is almost always the better the choice. However Slashdot is more the political end of things so expect complaints about any Microsoft product "sucking" - it usually is for reasons other than how well it works but for issues of how well it works under Linux or what it's License is. And as long as that crowd is in charge of the game it will be hard to be truly mainstream as most people don't really care one way or another (and complaining that they are all sheople isn't going to help either).
"It could also be that anyone who has ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on professional demolition of large buildings has been led to believe that safely and completely collapsing such a building requires weeks of planning and absolutely precise placement and detonation of lots of explosives."
Actually, it does require that. It requires a vast amount of labor *and* highly specialized and complex physics/engineering.
Of course the operative word there is "safe" - it isn't uncommon for them to totally destroy a building and have a mostly glass front on the building next to it have *no* damage. It also takes removing a vast amount of the mass of the building beforehand.
It's not that hard to get a large structure to fall, especially *really* large ones. In fact it's probably harder to get them to stand up. It's just hard to get one to do so safely.
None of the WTC centers fell neatly or safely, the fell in an uncoordinated and dangerous way. The *did* topple over sideways to a large extent, they are just *really* large structures and the amount of sideways movement they can do before gravity becomes the dominate force and the pivot points gives isn't a very visible. They did significant damage to the structures around them (and, in fact, caused some to collapse also).
There is the occasional video of one of the (un)controlled demolitions going bad and the building "toppling" - it looks about like the WTC collapses too for the same reason. Gravity is a bitch when things go into free fall, it dominates pretty much all the other forces in play.
Heck, it isn't that hard to find where a fuel truck wrecked on a small to medium bridge and the resultant fire weaken the steel and caused a collapse (that went pretty much straight down). It wasn't *that* long that one such incident made the national news on a large bridge and a small one near my house had the same fate last year.
"Many see the temporary restraining order preventing three MIT undergrads from publicly discussing vulnerabilities they discovered in Boston's mass transit system as a violation of their First Amendment rights. Others, though, see the entire episode as yet another example of irresponsible, publicity-hungry security researchers trying to grab a few headlines."
Well, how about both? It can be a restriction of their first amendment rights *and* a publicity hungry "researcher" trying to grab headlines. They two things are not mutually exclusive.
Doing the Right Thing has not been in vogue for many years now, it is all about making some form of a statement.
It would be interesting to see the fingers being pointed if said system was attacked by terrorist and the only people killed were the family of the two sides. My guess is that the other sides point of view would become immediately obvious and they would both then point fingers at each other in an attempt to make themselves feel better.
However in this particular case I can see why the courts would give a gag order until the case is heard - that is not a violation of your first amendment rights. It has generally been established that whilst things are being litigated that the more restrictive side is somewhat enforced until the case is decided. That really only makes sense - otherwise why even have the courts have some type of decision in this case as one side is the de facto winner?
Ah well, what do I know? It's worth our deaths to tell everything yet of we kept all flaws secret then all would be well. We can't do something reasonable like, say, not tell people bent on killing us how to do it and when we are informed of a problem fix said thing. Nope, too hard to do and it may show that we aren't the Saviors of the World we think we are. Heck we may even have to look at the other side as Not Crazy and wanting to live free and with little threat of death - how bad would that be?
"If they can settle [a complaint] for less than 100 percent of what they owe people [for overtime], they've gotten away with a good deal."
It always amazes me the number of companies that do things like that, especially in highly skilled professions. They never take into account things like how worker happiness works on the over all output picture
Say, for instance that they "save" 200k at a cost of 100k - sounds good right? Well by doing that they normally "loose" WAY more than that 100k (I use quotes for "save" and "loose" because in both cases you aren't really saving or loosing, it is greater than or less than what you might other wise make).
I suspect there is signifigantly more money "lost" (in the sense of not making as much as one could) due to loos in productivity for being a crappy workplace. A workplace doesn't have to be really happy (that can also have a certain amount of drawbacks and employees tend to take advantage of that as much as employers take advantage of this), but unhappy is generally bad.
I've worked places that do not pay overtime that I work many hours over 40 a week and never really thought about it. In return I had reasonable deadlines, could work *any* hours I chose (include randomly take a week off if I felt like it, go fishing every Wednesday morning, or whatever), and I took home lots of high dollar equipment to play with.
Since, being a geek, I like playing with high dollar equipment so much of it was activities I would be happy to do otherwise. Reasonable deadlines was also a big one - I knew that if strongly asked to work over time (I don't recall it ever being demanded, though had I refused I suppose it would have been) that it was really a need. It also helped that the bosses worked in the same way.
I spent many many extra hours making them money. I never once felt gipped all the time I was employed there. I knew that they cared about me and, as such, I cared about the organization. Unfortunately that only went so far up the chain, but that is another story.
*shrug* It seems to me that the more removed an individual becomes from the people they manage they more they do this. IMO it is because they become numbers, not people. It also seems to happen to those that think it never will, it is a VERY rare person that makes it high and still keeps those ideas. And no, I don't think that the upper management only promotes those that think of people as "human resources" (one of the worst ideas of our time, though there are a few good HR people out there the rest are drones). I think it is no more complex that as faces become numbers that the idea expressed in the original quote become "common sense" - in my experience if you know many upper management people you will find someone who got there through managing a group of people as people, not numbers. It is just once they get to the number stage they forget there are people there.
I mean really. what did you expect? Some communist utopia where everything is "free"? It doesn't exist. Never has and never will.
You are at what will be the nexus of one of the most lucrative industries in the world for the next few weeks (sports, especially summer ones) and you expect the main access to the outer world to be what, cheap?
You can also expect it to be craptacular in that there is no other game in town and you *have* to purchase it at outrageous prices. Not that capitalism would have helped either (though, as one can probably tell I think that system is better) simply because the short term focus is so high and out of the ordinary. It will be good enough to get the job done, but not really any better than it has to be (and, again, this is more due to it being a short term spike in usage).
No matter the system you have - communist or not - there is a finite resource and some will have and some will not. No way around that until/unless we make the world Start Trek exists in with replicators (and even in that make believe world not everything can be replicated and there were haves and have nots) and then all of our economic systems will be obsolete anyway. As such expect to pay through the nose to be the top .25% or better in the whole freaking world, especially in one where mostly the main cities are wired and the whole thing is governed by a single body.
At the very least there is realistically only so much bandwidth one can send through and there is only so much upgrading they can do for a few weeks of high usage, my bet is that ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, and other places can easily consume most of it *and* have a lot of money on the line (both to spend and make) - they will get preferential treatment through being the ones who hog all the bandwidth either through artificial govt controls (in that above mentioned communist utopia) or through price controls (which takes into account scarcity).
In any case you loose.
You will most likely never get a real picture of the scene - and even probably can not.
So, for instance lets take someplace being totally 100% honest (yea right) - how do you define "better"?
Ok, station one has 25 full time HD channels in the full sense of the word, all of them sports. Station two has all of three channels in full time HD - discover, history, and the science channel - which is the better deal? by your measurement the sports package, however I watch nearly 0 sports (until they typically broadcast archery or Judo I will watch as such) and those are some of the most watched channels on I have (cartoon network being #1 - but not really an HD content there). Yet for most people the first would be the deal.
Further I find most of the so called "HD" broadcast give me a head ache. They take a higher resolution 4x3 picture and stretch the edges as that isn't really what you are looking at. It is technically HD (and is definitely a higher resolution and bit depth for color) but I can't watch but about 15 or so minutes of it without a massive migraine. As such nearly all the "HD" stuff out there is unwatchable to me. So do we distinguish between 16x9 and 4x3 too? Then what about the things I (and others) and most do not see but others do (I'm certain my problem isn't the only one and I know enough with mine that most HD isn't an option as of right now).
Then we take into account what marketing actually is and we get the wholly muddled mess we have now. Unfortunately there is no really good defined standard out there. Were it up to me HD would be the higher resolution/bit depth along with *native* 16x9 aspect ratio. But many will think I'm crazy for that and I'm sure there are others out there that would like a stricter reference too.
Many of today's video codecs compress data by only storing the differences between frames. As such they do not lend themselves well to that type of splitting up. Each frame is not processed independent from the other. You can split it into those 25 minute chunks but if each thread has to wait on the last to finish then you actually lost.
Many introduce the idea of "keyframes" - basically frames that are stored in their whole in order to "reset" whatever drift has happened because of the compression. Older codecs tend to have them at specific places - say every X frames. However newer codecs do a statistical analysis as the video is compressed and only inset them when needed (they kill performance and compression ratios on the final product). This, again, stops one from chunking up the video into parts and then compressing.
From what I understand (not that I'm remotely in said field) for much of the professional world the above isn't so true - quality suffers somewhat from the compression and is noticeable at the theater. Therefore it is one of the so called "ridiculously parallel paradigms" - at the very least when learning parallel processing in other fields it was presented as such. That is each frame is processed identically and is totally independent of the one before it - that is more what you are thinking of.
Most consumer level video streams are nearly 100% dependent on the frame before it being fully processed (again - starting from keyframes that usually are not be set before processing). This means that the process is almost entirely serial as each frame has to be done in succession. While it isn't that simple and there is *some* parallelism can be made even in the ones that set keyframes when they are needed (instead of at set intervals), it generally isn't really worth the effort - more often than not the splitting takes more effort (in processor power) than gained by the additional parallelism.
If you are using an older codec then your mileage may vary, but then I find (as cheap as it is) storage to be a more expensive quantity than the encoding process. Not to mention that the extra processing power done once is *MUCH* more efficient than the extra done each time the video is watched.
This is the most "Earth like" atmosphere because it is around one atmosphere and just kinda cold? Sure, that whole sulfuric acid thing is fairly normal, more so any place else.
I mean we have *no* experience with heating buildings and having pressurized structures - none whatsoever floating around in space at all. However we have a number of decades with dealing with floating cities in sulfuric acid - yep, easy to do. Sure we wouldn't need pressurized suits to move around, that makes me feel so much better since I'm used to that sulfuric acid everywhere.
Does this even remotely qualify as Science? I mean really, this even sucks for non-reputable sources. I guess I can't be too surprised given the crap that supposedly reputable and refereed journals produce today, but wow this one is bad. Even though the source appears to be credentialed this one is crazy.
But then I note that Mr Landis (the source material for the articles author) is a SF writer, maybe he gets confused between fiction and non-fiction (been around Slashdot long enough to know our editors here do that on a regular basis so no real surprise there).
I find that much more true also - so did the Start Trek creators, the LCARS system. I'm sure others have done it also.
Shows like Star Trek have generally been one of the "better" predictors IMO simply because they have to be somewhat believable in actual use. The technology is a backdrop and pretty much has to be seamless and mostly intuitive (or at least look that way). It may be crap based on what the systems do and how configurable they are, but interface wise they are most likely some form of the "future".
Though as another poster said the lack of tactile feed back may hurt it - I've never really used a keyboard without it and am not sure how that would work. I would also say that hitting a hard surface with you fingers all day will be *really* bad on repetitive stress injuries - the surface will have to have some amount of give to it even if there is no tactile feedback.
I would *love* a keyboard that is a standard QWERTY whilst typing and then changes to s special program specific layout. If it was just a touch screen that was easy to type on the possibilities are quite nice with both input *and* output. Just for word processing I can see common tasks being placed on the "screen" of the keyboard and I can quite easily see some *really* nice things with Real Time Strategy games with controls on the left and interactive maps on the right (including the use of the mouse for on screen stuff).
But then I also do not think that will really replace keyboards until you can go purchased one for 19.95 at walmart and that is *many* years off.
What the designers expect from this will highly color my opinion on it. The article linked isn't exactly clear on this.
Do you want to track and try and predict disease breakouts in first world areas then probably decent, track world wide stuff then terrible. Outside of the obvious (self reporting) there is the whole issue of how much of the world is on the internet? While much of the first and even quite a bit of the second world countries are on the vast majority of the population doesn't have computers, let alone internet access.
I can easily see many many great uses for this and I expect all of them to be explored at some point - I can also clearly see many not so great uses and I fully expect them to be used too. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
In fact we can already see the maps being posted and used by people who have little to no understanding (if we are generous, I'm sure some understand and use them to further their own aims) to say things the data *can not say* and it isn't even mainstream yet. *sigh* It's like many things we have today - the greater amount of good it can do the greater amount of abuse one can use it for too.
No, "nulla" is more properly translated as "no" or "none" - not zero. 0 has a *very* specific mathematical meaning and leads to our positional method of writing numbers. Just as you can usually replace "none" with the word "zero" in the looser sense of language you are correct, but in terms of numbers you are absolutely wrong. I can not say I have a two followed by a none because of that exacting mathematical value that zero holds. None is a concept, zero is a number.
Romans could not add nulla to something, subtract nulla from a number, multiply nulla by a number, or do *any* mathematical operation with it any more than we can with infinity - it was a concept and not a number. At best they could do like we do with infinity (which is also *only* a concept not a number - I assume you you actually know what I mean by that?) - note how some equations work when that concept is used and go from there. Since they understood the concept things worked out (just as it does for us with infinity) but that still doesn't mean they understood zero as a number (any more than we can give a number for infinity).
This is recorded fact too, not speculation. 0 is a very specific subset of null, none, no, or whatever other word you wish to pretend means zero. Infinity and null (or nulla) are *exactly* the same things from a mathematical point of view which is what we are talking about. We sometimes treat infinity as a number (that sideways 8 - it is no more or less a symbol than "8" is), but it isn't and doesn't follow the normal rules of our math - again Nulla is the same thing for the Romans.
There may also be one day a form of math around that has an actual number for infinity (and be able to express which cardinality we are talking to boot) and we will be looked upon as we do those that didn't know what "zero" was. At that point many people may argue that we also knew what that number was because we knew the concept, yet we do not have a number for it.
Null and 0 are not the same things - null is a concept and zero is a number. Null also has a greater scope than just numbers.
The Romans hand no concept of "zero" as a number, not because their numbering system didn't need it, their numbering system was made because they had no concept for it. Nor did the number 0 come about because a positional system requires it, the positional system came about because someone (too lazy to look up who/when and don't recall off the top of my head) came up with the concept of 0.
Null is the same thing as infinity - they are not real things. You can not go out a find a stack of 0 ears of corn any more than you can find an infinite amount of them. However you really need both concepts (especially null) and, yes, null just usually happens to be analogous to 0, however they are *not* the same thing. For example as a concept a pointer to NULL isn't something pointing to zero - zero is a real address (though in practice you have to choose some address to mean null it can be any the system designer chooses and that may or may not be 0).
So, the OP was right - the Romans had no representation for the number zero. However many take that to mean (and I can't tell if the OP thought so or not) that they didn't have the concept of "nothing" and that is wrong.
So, what do you suggest?
Do we create massive amount of sulfur in the air rapidly killing everything with large scale geothermal? Do we sterilize the oceans with tidal generators? Do we cause massive upheaval that likes of which the most radical Global Warming people do not even think of with massive wind farms? All of these are inherent in the system, coming up with different ways to get the energy will not solve them.
Then, of course, there are crazy radical things. For instance killing billions of living animals to reduce their carbon foot print. I am going to assume that you don't believe those ideas.
Solar isn't able to meet our energy needs so it's not an option - hopefully one day it will but that is still far off. As far as "other" goes this one is the most likely, I will also assume you have a better plan than "something will come up". Nuclear would do quite well but it politically is the hardest of them all to get, if you can get it then I would be happy. And lastly we can go back to living primitive which I will again assume you don't mean since you are using a computer and posting on a technology website.
You can list all the problems with CO2 and I agree, but outside of nuclear it is the smallest footprint out there that can meet our energy needs. Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods. Just caring about reducing CO2 is like stopping your Cocaine habit by taking Heroine - not only did you not actually solve anything but you made the whole situation worse.
As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Simply focusing on CO2 emissions is assuming there is a free lunch and it is called "reduce carbon!". It's not. At best we can try to use less energy but at this point (unless you are trying to hide a radical agenda that is a form of "move back to the stone age") that amount is irrelevant and goes back to that "make me feel good" thing.
We already know what large scale tidal power will do as it even has problems on a small scale.
You have to take the energy from something - be it heat, sound, movement, or whatever. In this case we take it from movement. Namely tidal generator slow to stop much of the necessary long shore and littoral currents that move nutrients around that feed life close to the shore.
So far we have no tidal farms that remove enough energy to have very bad effects, however the small scale generators in parts of western Europe (especially France) have had a minor to medium impact. It also tends to cause beach erosion in some places because there is a break in the sediment being moved around.
Tidal generators really only make sense if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions - they definitely are a carbon free source of energy. However I'm not terribly interested in that, I'm interested in having the smallest foot print that we can reasonably do on the planet. Right now nuclear is that way but fear mongering has made it all but near impossible.
Of the other viable methods out there fossil fuels is still has the over all least impact for major energy production. Hydroelectric has a relatively small footprint but can't be built anywhere, same is true for some types of geothermal (however some types also release massive amounts of sulfur which is worse than the carbon emissions). Solar may one day get there but not only is it too hard to produce a consistent large amount of electricity year round but the by products of creating the panels are harsh and so is the disposal of ones that break (this is arguably worse than those carbon emissions again).
The problem with wind, tidal, and many of the others isn't in how it is getting the energy it is that the energy is a must to stay in it's current form - no amount of technology is going to change that. They can work OK in small places but that is really only much good for show and, again, I'm not terribly interested in making gestures that do nothing to make myself feel better.
Unfortunately many so called "environmentalist" aren't really looking for some thing environmentally sound as much as they are into a political cause (say, reducing carbon emissions. They may be doing so because they don't know any better, it makes them feel good about themselves (many are this way - see the above about having small alternative generators for show), or have a radical agenda they are trying to get accepted through something less radical (say some of the people who feel we are a cancer on the earth and need to be destroyed). Many, if nor most, scientists do it for the funding.
As a software engineer who actually worked in parallel processing for a number of years I also wonder. We have what is known as Amdahl's Law.
Reality is that many problems just really can not be split up into small discrete operations. For those a single fast processor is the key. Most problems can be split into a few large discrete operations and multiple cores helps here. Very few can be broken up into many.
It isn't a matter of thinking about problems differently - there is a whole huge branch of Comp Sci that has been thinking about this for decades. The only computing technology I know of that may end up making an actually change in the way problems are approached is quantum computing, that is if it ever becomes reality as we see it now.
Many just think that if it is made then people will figure out how to do so - we already can see "machines" in the thousands of processors and there is little even in the scientific realm that can really use it.
The field itself is quite mature - reality is web browsing, music, word processors, spreadsheets, movies, and other normal user tasks don't even really benefit much from two cores dedicated to them (however they *do* benefit from allowing them to run on one core whilst OS tasks run on another so two core systems are still quite nice). There is no reason for anyone to spend the money needed to a large number of cores that will sit idle.
Outside of scientific research gaming is the only place I can see some of this. I can't really put a number on where you would need to stop. Even though I'm pretty much certain it is so I can't say that there is no case for 4-8 cores for environment and a core for each AI construct (I've played Quake on an SGI CAVE on MUCH less). That would be one heck of a modeling system and, lets face it, if you *really* needed that then gaming is so far from a general purpose machine that you aren't going to be using the same machine to surf the internet of run you word-processor.
I think it is more that women get women but don't get men, men do not get women or men. Thus we find that more people understand what a female is thinking. Women like to think they get men but really do not - they just "get" that many men want sex and do not go past there (and then proceed to live really shallow and fulfilling personal lives).
Dropping hints doesn't work - never has and never will. If you think they do I can assure you that you do understand the average male mind. Males almost never notice them (some do, but most do not) and while you are dropping said hints you aren't being yourself. If a male is to get them then chances are you have to be yourself. This is why the vast majority of female "hints" end up with something they don't remotely want - we are doing what you are overtly saying you want.
If you want to be understood by the vast majority of the people be forthright and honest - it rarely fails. Hints go awry even amongst the same peer group - "I hate you" rarely is misunderstood. Not very many do this be it male or female but then you don't need hints or to try and figure out the decoder ring for the other person. You have to accept you will get more people to dislike you this way (and is why few do it) and it can be for silly reasons (how dare he like chocolate and not understand why someone would prefer coconut! I hate them but will pretend I like them!), however the ones that would dislike you only like some false caricature of you they have built up because the didn't understand your hints females use or outright falsehood most males will project instead. Nor do you appear to be subservient to the other person (and I think this is a big one there), people in general do not seem to handle this very well.
See being fairly blunt is easy - I'm not too hard to understand. However I bet I tick a number of people off. Further I bet most that have some nice platitudes to offer believe most of the above but just will not say it or will try and put it "nicely", it still boils down to the same thing once you use the secret decoder ring. It is just I can fool myself into thinking a female that tells me I am "heavy" doesn't think I am fat if I really want too, however one that tells me I am fat leaves no wiggle room.