Well, you see, Inkscape 0.42 is the ultimate answer, your problem is that you have not yet worked out what the question is. Once you know what the question is then I'm sure everythign will be apparent.
Hopefully the Inkscape team are working on finding the ultimate question as we speak.
The thing that annoys me about both Inkscape and the Gimp is that there are no floating palettes.
Um, isn't the usual complaint about GIMP that it is nothing but floating palettes? I mean really, in GIMP just about everything can be spawned as a palette, and you can dock them or leave them as separate windows (hence floating) however you like. Brushes, colors/palettes, tools, tool options, layers, channels, history, patterns, gradients, paths, font selections, selection editors, image navigators, image lists, even the error console can be made into floating (or docked however you wish) palettes/windows in GIMP. What exactly did you want in the way of more floating palettes?
MacOS X likes 512M of RAM to be run happily from what I'm told - that's why the latest Mac Mini upgrade is/was so popular. Yes it will run with 256M, it may even run with 128M for all I know - but people seem to be claiming that 512M is what is needed for decent performance. That would mean Windows Vista would simply be on par with MacOS X for memory requirements, which seems reasonable enough. If you want something that goes light on memory it's time to start looking at options with Linux or *BSD which offer some options about exactly how gussied up you want your interface: you lose functionality, but it'll definitely run on less RAM.
In India, there is an distinct absence of jock worship
If you're telling me that Sachin Tendulkar is not worshipped as practically a god, then I'm not sure where you're getting your ideas.
sports has not until recently been as commercialized as in the US. i.e., sports heroes typically didn't make a ton of dough in a career over there unlike here.
This one is (somewhat) true. Certainly cricketers aren't raking in the sort of cash that, ay, baseballers do in the US - but they certainly aren't short of cash from advertising and endorsement deals. And then there are the recurrign accusations of pay offs from Indian and Pakistani bookmakers for match fixing...
Say the DoJ actually grows a shrivel of integrity and stops Microsoft before they can obliterate Apple completely.
Presuming the DoJ was going to ignore MS then MS could obliterate Apple right now if they truly cared to.
Phase 1: Cancel Office for Mac and end support immediately.
Phase 2: Use some of thet $40 billion to buy Adobe. Cancel all Adobe products for Mac (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, the lot). Preferrably before Photoshop for MacTel gets released. End support immediately.
Phase 3: There is no phase 3, just sit and wait.
Apple might manage to keep kicking around under that scenario, but the heart of their core customer base would be ripped out, and Apple would be shifting into being an iPod company.
Of course this will never happen. That's partly what antitrust laws are for. Besides, I don't think Microsoft really cares about Apple. As these thins go they are irrelevant, and are likely going to remain largely irrelvant as far as MS is concerned.
By GDP per capita Luxembourg is way ahead of the US, and Sweden is pretty much tied. See here.
Of course those figures are a little out of date - the US dollar has fallen significantly against the Euro since then so the US may be even worse off by now.
America is hated largely because we are number one in terms of... freedom
Freedom,n. Exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half dozen of restraint's infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)
Almost a century later and just as accurate as ever.
god damnit,get it through your fucking skull that the current administration is not gonna destroy this country.
No, they probably won't. The steady progression of ever more image focussed, media savvy, policy devoid administrations provided by the increasingly similar two parties who have, via media, via regulation, and via casting each other as the devil that must be voted against, attained an effective monopoly on political power in the US, may well manage to destroy the country.
But don't worry, the two parties are, of course, incredibly different. I mean, they spend all their time screaming about how evil the other side is, and finding all manner of largely irrelavant issues to have significant disgreements over. The fact that they agree on far more issues than they differ over, the fact that many of their major contibutors contribute almost equally to both sides, the fact that they both only really seem to be interested in filling their own and their contributors pockets... well that's just a side show. The important thing is that liberals/neocons are evil and must be stopped at all costs.
Now this is one issue that probably is worth picking on. There is much effort in modern education not to damage the self esteem of young people. The problem is the belief that self esteem is actually important for achievement is actually rather poorly founded. There was a very good article in Scientific American at the beginning of the year that did some analysis of how self esteem actually correlates with the things low self esteem is claimed to case - the results were that the correlation was relatively poor, and certainly other factors were much more highly correlated. The study is, of course, far from comprehensive, and the results don't suggest that self esteem is meaningless. They do, however, suggest it is time to consider how seriously we take self esteem. Exactly how damaging is it to young children that they never learn what it is to fail? IS that oughweighed by the benefits of increased self esteem? The answers have been taken for granted, but perhaps we should consier this a little more carefully.
As long as the culture in the US continues to denigrate academic achievement and to glorify ignorance, this country will continue to fall behind the rest of the world in research and invention.
There was an interesting Op-Ed piece in AMS Notices this month. Let me quote the relevant passage:
"For the next ten years of a now 28 year business career, I hid my mathematics background. It wasn't shame or embarassment that inspired my actions, as I am quite proud of my achievements in the discipline and feel strongly that mathematics is a major contributor to all of my business accomplishments. No it was the knowledge, based on experience, that talking about mathematics with those not steeped in the discipline would steer a business conversation away from business and onto an entirely different plane.
What was the conversation? I am sure you have had it. Person 1: Dr. Schaar, I appreciated your comment on education policy and the role that corporations can play in long-range programs. You seem to have a such a deep understanding of what educators want and need. What is your background? Schaar: I am a mathematician and taught at the university level for several years. Person 1: Oh, I was never any good at math. Hated the subject actually. I never could figure out how I would use it after school and didn't get along with my teacher...
I do not have to continue. But over the years I began to realise that there was somethign hidden in Person 1's remarks. There was an insinuation that Person 1's non-mastery of mathematics was a non-issue. She was a successful business person in spite of it. So there! Her lack of matery was validated by the business world, and also by her peers, who eagerly confessed their lack of mathematical savvy as if it invited entry into a secret club. These same leaders trumped their abilities in the business world, while downplaying the significance mathematics played in the equation"
From "Mathematics in Public" by Dr. Richard Schaar, AMS Notices August 2005.
I'm sure any other mathematicians here, especially those who have spent time working in the business world, will find that conversation entirely familiar and typical. People take pride in their failure to study and master mathematics. It is all too common. Yet as Dr. Schaar pints out later in the article, mathematics is increasingly necessary skill in the modern compter oriented business world. The skills of logical thought and deduction fostered even by basic mathematics are the foundations for a large amount of IT related tasks, let alone the more advanced mathematics that can be so very benficial in engineering and computer science. Dr. Schaar goes on to describe how he now continues such conversations:
Person 1: Oh, I was never any good at mathematics. Schaar: Well, that is too bad. Were you any good at reading?
His point is that being good at mathematics, and the logical thought it teaches is as vital in the modern business world as reading. We ought to e taking it far more seriously than we are. I agree.
I'd like to make a further point though, having had exactly such conversation many many times myself. Whenever I probe a little deeper it is almost always the case that the person liked and was good at mathematics at some point, usually very early primary/elementary school, but at some point along the ay they "had a bad teacher", or were given the impression that mathematics was hard, fell a little behind - and once behind the problems compounded at higher and higher levels and they quickly grew to hate the subject. The "bad teacher" is an all too common explanation.
Is it any wonder though? The people who most often go into primary/elementary school teaching are precisely thoe people who never liked and struggled with mathematics at high school. They lack the ability to provide a wealth of ways to look at the problem, and lack any interest or enthusiasm for mathemat
The number one fastest in what way? Revenues? Profits? Employees? Hype?
Slavishly devoted fanboys. Apple absolutely leads the commercial OS market in blandly devoted fanboys. Of course in the whole OS market they are a distant second to Gentoo, but their current growth rate in mindless followers is much better than Gentoo which peaked a while ago.
*(Not to knock Apple or OS X, they are a company that produces decent hardware and a fine OS, they just seem to have a side effect generating vocal mindless zombie followers as well as normal users).
They absolutely misobserved the experiment. Because whether at the Parthenon or somewhere else the same distance from the earth, all objects fall at about 9.8 m/s.
That is so very false that I am baffled. For starters I think you mean that acceleration due to gravity is about 9.8 merters per second squared. That's acceleration, not velocity.
And indeed a feather and a stone will always accelerate at identical rates. Their maximal or terminal velocities may differ significantly however, as the maximum velocity that can attain is determined by the amount of resistance they recieve from the medium they are falling though. A feather receives far more resistance in air than a rock, and hence has a much lower terminal velocity and may reach the ground later. The acceleration is the same, but the velocity is different. For somethign different try changing the medium instead of the object: drop a stone in air, and for the same distance through water. The water provides more resistance so the stone will have a lower maximum velocity in water and hence will fall more slowly.
Minting pennies costs a lot of money, and after all these years inflation has made them more trouble than they're worth. Worse than worthless, really, as handling them is a burden on cash-handling facilities like banks and stores.
We should just round to the nearest nickel, as we currently do with half-cents.
New Zealand did this quite some time ago. It has caused very few issues, and has greatly reduced the amount of useless change people carry around. It would definitely be a good idea if the US could ever get around to it. Then again, that would imply change, and we all know how averse the US is to actual change. You still use paper for your notes for god's sake.
You must be discussing a different graph and study than the one I've seen on this, as it uses no extrapolation whatsoever - it uses proxy data to generate historical temperature records where measurements don't exist, and existing temperature records the rest of the way. There is no extrapolation in the graph, only smoothing (via moving average) of measured and proxy generated historical data.
I went here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=274#more-274/ and followed some links and read some papers (well skimmed). My understanding is that there is data missing, data that might go against the idea of global warming (something about R2....).
I've done some skimming too, and essentially the issue seems to revolve around how proxy data was used to infer temperatures - so for instance, how tree ring data was converted to temperature data. The issue with "R2" (which actually looks like its r^2 - the correlation coefficient squared) is how you measure correlation of generated data with actual measurements (you want to make sure your method correlates well with reality).
The "hockey stick graph" with a recent uptick in temperatures was discredited when peers demonstrated that feeding even white noise or parallel downward sloping lines into the researchers' plotting program as temperature data produced graphs with a large uptick at the end.
Could you cite a reference on that because I've never heard any such thing. Not even the current round of complaints about the paper are making such dramatic claims. Rather the current claims seem to be centering on how certain proxy data was generated for some of the more distanct historical periods.
For some other papers that found similar results try here which lists several in the references, as well as providing some charts giving and overview of how the different studies compare.
Micheal Mann, his co-authors and his Nature editors, have responded inappropriately to independent efforts to rigorously re-analyze the basis of his much heralded GW "hockey stick" paper. After incisive reviews, Mann's results are highly questionable and he has been holding out on crucial data and programs that might well show scientific recklessness and bias.
That would be news to me. As far as I'm aware there have been half a dozen or more independent efforts analyzing the same or similar data, all coming to the same or similar conclusions. There has been one paper by a mining engineer and an economist published in a non peer-reviewed journal which found discrepancies. All the data from Mann has been fully available, along with descriptions of the methodology (which is what the other studies that arrived at simlar results used). The specific source code wasn't released until recently, but given that other independent studies had got similar results I don't see why the source code is under such scrutiny.
I agree it would have been nice if the source code had been made available, but I hardly see that as damning, especially hen there have been a number of other studies essentially confirming the basic result. MOstly it looks like a lot of shit stirring by the people questioning the study rather than some conspiracy to hide fudged results.
I thought they just added some textures and models to a someone-elses/IDGames/Valve 3D engine , add in a movie franchise theme
Oddly enough I have a friend who works in game design and it was essentially doing that that helped break him into the field - way back when the original doom first came out he created the AliensTC mod for Doom by himself at home for fun. It had good enough artwork, level design and general atmosphere that it got him noticed in the gaming community. Since then he's gone on to various jobs in game design, including working for Valve on Half Life 2.
The article is right - the best way to get into the field is to just get out there and put in the hard work. If you're good enough and manage to prove yourself you can do well.
I don't know about most people, but if Time Warner went bankrupt tomorrow
Oh you would definitely notice. Do you have any idea how many publishers, movie studios, record laels, TV production companies, cable companies, etc. are "A Time Warner Company". Yes they all have varios different names so they can be marketed at different population segments in different ways, but they are all Time Warner.
No seriously. Here's a list of Time Warner holdings. Take some time to skim through it, then tell me again you wouldn't notice all of this disappearing.
The right of the US today is the left of the US 50 years ago.
So where does that leave the left of the rest of the world then?
It leaves them watching two ever more blandly populist parties, with an ever diminishing amount of meaningful policy, throw turds at each other in a pointless but desperate struggle for "the middle ground".
In another 50 years they'll probably have achieved they're goal of being nothing more than a well marketed image of two opposing points of view while both parties continue to expand upon their only remaining policy: Feeding at the public trough via an ever expanding Federal government. In the meantime I'm sure they'll continue to argue bitterly and promote divsion in every media form available so that no one will notice that it's mostly bluster without substance, and that enriching themselves and their contributors is about the only action they ever really take.
Which is to say, it will leave the left (and right) of the rest of the world looking on in a strange mix of amusement and fascinated horror.
With the yuan now floating in relation to a basket of currencies instead of pegged to the dollar, the impetus to continue buying dollars to manipulate the yuan is greatly weakened.
Actually it is the reverse - the impetus is strengthened: A lower yuan against the dollar continues to be to China's benefit, and buying up US T-bills is a way to keep the currency low relative to the dollar. With the yuan pegged buying T-bills was just to make the whole picture not look distorted. Wit the yuan floating buying T-bills is an active strategy to keep the yuan low.
Look at Japan - they also benefit from a low yen to dollar ratio. They are also the largest foreign holder of US debt. Despite the fact that the yen floats they have been buying T-bills like mad.
You are corrct though: this can only go on so long. The US current account deficit is huge, and growing - that simply isn't sustainable. Eventually it will have to reverse direction. That means a lower US dollar. If the US dollar drops significantly then all those T-bills are worth a whole lot less. The Japanese appetite for US debt has been slowing significantly of late because of this. China is beginning to look to go the same way. That could cause some interesting repurcussions.
it's a matter of the degree of the government intrusion into my life.
What state intrusion? They are staying out of the way rather than getting in your way with regard to contract enforcement. They are simply saying "We won't help your with these contracts" - the rest is up to you. The state is not intruding or forcing you to do anything. The state is simply saying they will do as little as possible with regard to contract enforcement, and "these contract clauses here" are the few that the state is willing to intrude on the situation for.
A natural right of contract? You have the right to force the people (the state courts, prisons etc.) to assist you in enforcing anything that you can get someone to sign? That doesn't sound like a natural inalienable right to me, it sounds like you are asking for the state to look after you. You have the right to ask the state to enforce whatever the state deems enforceable. You have the right to write whatever contract you see fit. You can try and enforce whatever the state doesn't care to help you with, so where is your lack of freedom? You lack the ability to tell the state what they have to deem enforceable? You agree to a democratic social contract when you accept citizenship and pay taxes. That contract says you will accept and abide by the laws as offered by the state - including which contracts they will enforce. If you want to reneg on that contract... well, that kind of makes your point rather moot.
And no one is forcing you to not write a non-compete clause, nor stopping you from expecting your employees to honour it. Just don't expect other people to be forced to help you enforce it if they don't want to help.
On a personal level I may not agree with the no-compete clause, but that doesn't mean that I want to force employers to never have that provision in the contract.
No one is saying that employers can't do that. All that is being said is that the state of California isn't going to use their courts and legal systems to help you hold someone to that promise. You can do whatever you like to enforce the contract as you see fit, just don't expect help from parties that choose not to help you, and expect consequences if your means of enforcement infringes on the rights of others.
You are free to write whatever contract you wish, and you are free to enforce it however you wish within the bounds of law. California is doing nothing to impinge on your freedoms, or stop you writing and enforcing your contracts. California is merely refusing to assist you if you write a contract they don't care for. Why should you be able to demand that the state help you if they don't choose to? You have your freedom, you are simply demanding work and resources from the state that it doesn't care to grant you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you see, Inkscape 0.42 is the ultimate answer, your problem is that you have not yet worked out what the question is. Once you know what the question is then I'm sure everythign will be apparent.
Hopefully the Inkscape team are working on finding the ultimate question as we speak.
Jedidiah.
The thing that annoys me about both Inkscape and the Gimp is that there are no floating palettes.
Um, isn't the usual complaint about GIMP that it is nothing but floating palettes? I mean really, in GIMP just about everything can be spawned as a palette, and you can dock them or leave them as separate windows (hence floating) however you like. Brushes, colors/palettes, tools, tool options, layers, channels, history, patterns, gradients, paths, font selections, selection editors, image navigators, image lists, even the error console can be made into floating (or docked however you wish) palettes/windows in GIMP. What exactly did you want in the way of more floating palettes?
Jedidiah.
MacOS X likes 512M of RAM to be run happily from what I'm told - that's why the latest Mac Mini upgrade is/was so popular. Yes it will run with 256M, it may even run with 128M for all I know - but people seem to be claiming that 512M is what is needed for decent performance. That would mean Windows Vista would simply be on par with MacOS X for memory requirements, which seems reasonable enough. If you want something that goes light on memory it's time to start looking at options with Linux or *BSD which offer some options about exactly how gussied up you want your interface: you lose functionality, but it'll definitely run on less RAM.
Jedidiah.
In India, there is an distinct absence of jock worship
If you're telling me that Sachin Tendulkar is not worshipped as practically a god, then I'm not sure where you're getting your ideas.
sports has not until recently been as commercialized as in the US. i.e., sports heroes typically didn't make a ton of dough in a career over there unlike here.
This one is (somewhat) true. Certainly cricketers aren't raking in the sort of cash that, ay, baseballers do in the US - but they certainly aren't short of cash from advertising and endorsement deals. And then there are the recurrign accusations of pay offs from Indian and Pakistani bookmakers for match fixing...
Jedidiah.
Say the DoJ actually grows a shrivel of integrity and stops Microsoft before they can obliterate Apple completely.
Presuming the DoJ was going to ignore MS then MS could obliterate Apple right now if they truly cared to.
Phase 1: Cancel Office for Mac and end support immediately.
Phase 2: Use some of thet $40 billion to buy Adobe. Cancel all Adobe products for Mac (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, the lot). Preferrably before Photoshop for MacTel gets released. End support immediately.
Phase 3: There is no phase 3, just sit and wait.
Apple might manage to keep kicking around under that scenario, but the heart of their core customer base would be ripped out, and Apple would be shifting into being an iPod company.
Of course this will never happen. That's partly what antitrust laws are for. Besides, I don't think Microsoft really cares about Apple. As these thins go they are irrelevant, and are likely going to remain largely irrelvant as far as MS is concerned.
Jedidiah.
By GDP per capita Luxembourg is way ahead of the US, and Sweden is pretty much tied. See here.
Of course those figures are a little out of date - the US dollar has fallen significantly against the Euro since then so the US may be even worse off by now.
Jedidiah.
America is hated largely because we are number one in terms of ... freedom
Freedom, n. Exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half dozen of restraint's infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)
Almost a century later and just as accurate as ever.
Jedidiah.
god damnit,get it through your fucking skull that the current administration is not gonna destroy this country.
No, they probably won't. The steady progression of ever more image focussed, media savvy, policy devoid administrations provided by the increasingly similar two parties who have, via media, via regulation, and via casting each other as the devil that must be voted against, attained an effective monopoly on political power in the US, may well manage to destroy the country.
But don't worry, the two parties are, of course, incredibly different. I mean, they spend all their time screaming about how evil the other side is, and finding all manner of largely irrelavant issues to have significant disgreements over. The fact that they agree on far more issues than they differ over, the fact that many of their major contibutors contribute almost equally to both sides, the fact that they both only really seem to be interested in filling their own and their contributors pockets... well that's just a side show. The important thing is that liberals/neocons are evil and must be stopped at all costs.
Jedidiah.
have shitloads of self-esteem
Now this is one issue that probably is worth picking on. There is much effort in modern education not to damage the self esteem of young people. The problem is the belief that self esteem is actually important for achievement is actually rather poorly founded. There was a very good article in Scientific American at the beginning of the year that did some analysis of how self esteem actually correlates with the things low self esteem is claimed to case - the results were that the correlation was relatively poor, and certainly other factors were much more highly correlated. The study is, of course, far from comprehensive, and the results don't suggest that self esteem is meaningless. They do, however, suggest it is time to consider how seriously we take self esteem. Exactly how damaging is it to young children that they never learn what it is to fail? IS that oughweighed by the benefits of increased self esteem? The answers have been taken for granted, but perhaps we should consier this a little more carefully.
Jedidiah.
As long as the culture in the US continues to denigrate academic achievement and to glorify ignorance, this country will continue to fall behind the rest of the world in research and invention.
There was an interesting Op-Ed piece in AMS Notices this month. Let me quote the relevant passage:
"For the next ten years of a now 28 year business career, I hid my mathematics background. It wasn't shame or embarassment that inspired my actions, as I am quite proud of my achievements in the discipline and feel strongly that mathematics is a major contributor to all of my business accomplishments. No it was the knowledge, based on experience, that talking about mathematics with those not steeped in the discipline would steer a business conversation away from business and onto an entirely different plane.
What was the conversation? I am sure you have had it.
Person 1: Dr. Schaar, I appreciated your comment on education policy and the role that corporations can play in long-range programs. You seem to have a such a deep understanding of what educators want and need. What is your background?
Schaar: I am a mathematician and taught at the university level for several years.
Person 1: Oh, I was never any good at math. Hated the subject actually. I never could figure out how I would use it after school and didn't get along with my teacher...
I do not have to continue. But over the years I began to realise that there was somethign hidden in Person 1's remarks. There was an insinuation that Person 1's non-mastery of mathematics was a non-issue. She was a successful business person in spite of it. So there! Her lack of matery was validated by the business world, and also by her peers, who eagerly confessed their lack of mathematical savvy as if it invited entry into a secret club. These same leaders trumped their abilities in the business world, while downplaying the significance mathematics played in the equation"
From "Mathematics in Public" by Dr. Richard Schaar, AMS Notices August 2005.
I'm sure any other mathematicians here, especially those who have spent time working in the business world, will find that conversation entirely familiar and typical. People take pride in their failure to study and master mathematics. It is all too common. Yet as Dr. Schaar pints out later in the article, mathematics is increasingly necessary skill in the modern compter oriented business world. The skills of logical thought and deduction fostered even by basic mathematics are the foundations for a large amount of IT related tasks, let alone the more advanced mathematics that can be so very benficial in engineering and computer science. Dr. Schaar goes on to describe how he now continues such conversations:
Person 1: Oh, I was never any good at mathematics.
Schaar: Well, that is too bad. Were you any good at reading?
His point is that being good at mathematics, and the logical thought it teaches is as vital in the modern business world as reading. We ought to e taking it far more seriously than we are. I agree.
I'd like to make a further point though, having had exactly such conversation many many times myself. Whenever I probe a little deeper it is almost always the case that the person liked and was good at mathematics at some point, usually very early primary/elementary school, but at some point along the ay they "had a bad teacher", or were given the impression that mathematics was hard, fell a little behind - and once behind the problems compounded at higher and higher levels and they quickly grew to hate the subject. The "bad teacher" is an all too common explanation.
Is it any wonder though? The people who most often go into primary/elementary school teaching are precisely thoe people who never liked and struggled with mathematics at high school. They lack the ability to provide a wealth of ways to look at the problem, and lack any interest or enthusiasm for mathemat
The number one fastest in what way? Revenues? Profits? Employees? Hype?
Slavishly devoted fanboys. Apple absolutely leads the commercial OS market in blandly devoted fanboys. Of course in the whole OS market they are a distant second to Gentoo, but their current growth rate in mindless followers is much better than Gentoo which peaked a while ago.
*(Not to knock Apple or OS X, they are a company that produces decent hardware and a fine OS, they just seem to have a side effect generating vocal mindless zombie followers as well as normal users).
They absolutely misobserved the experiment. Because whether at the Parthenon or somewhere else the same distance from the earth, all objects fall at about 9.8 m/s.
That is so very false that I am baffled. For starters I think you mean that acceleration due to gravity is about 9.8 merters per second squared. That's acceleration, not velocity.
And indeed a feather and a stone will always accelerate at identical rates. Their maximal or terminal velocities may differ significantly however, as the maximum velocity that can attain is determined by the amount of resistance they recieve from the medium they are falling though. A feather receives far more resistance in air than a rock, and hence has a much lower terminal velocity and may reach the ground later. The acceleration is the same, but the velocity is different. For somethign different try changing the medium instead of the object: drop a stone in air, and for the same distance through water. The water provides more resistance so the stone will have a lower maximum velocity in water and hence will fall more slowly.
HTH.
Jedidiah.
Minting pennies costs a lot of money, and after all these years inflation has made them more trouble than they're worth. Worse than worthless, really, as handling them is a burden on cash-handling facilities like banks and stores.
We should just round to the nearest nickel, as we currently do with half-cents.
New Zealand did this quite some time ago. It has caused very few issues, and has greatly reduced the amount of useless change people carry around. It would definitely be a good idea if the US could ever get around to it. Then again, that would imply change, and we all know how averse the US is to actual change. You still use paper for your notes for god's sake.
Jedidiah.
You must be discussing a different graph and study than the one I've seen on this, as it uses no extrapolation whatsoever - it uses proxy data to generate historical temperature records where measurements don't exist, and existing temperature records the rest of the way. There is no extrapolation in the graph, only smoothing (via moving average) of measured and proxy generated historical data.
Jedidiah.
I went here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=274#more-274/
and followed some links and read some papers (well skimmed).
My understanding is that there is data missing, data that might go against the idea of global warming (something about R2....).
I've done some skimming too, and essentially the issue seems to revolve around how proxy data was used to infer temperatures - so for instance, how tree ring data was converted to temperature data. The issue with "R2" (which actually looks like its r^2 - the correlation coefficient squared) is how you measure correlation of generated data with actual measurements (you want to make sure your method correlates well with reality).
HTH.
Jedidiah.
The "hockey stick graph" with a recent uptick in temperatures was discredited when peers demonstrated that feeding even white noise or parallel downward sloping lines into the researchers' plotting program as temperature data produced graphs with a large uptick at the end.
Could you cite a reference on that because I've never heard any such thing. Not even the current round of complaints about the paper are making such dramatic claims. Rather the current claims seem to be centering on how certain proxy data was generated for some of the more distanct historical periods.
For some other papers that found similar results try here which lists several in the references, as well as providing some charts giving and overview of how the different studies compare.
Jedidiah.
Micheal Mann, his co-authors and his Nature editors, have responded inappropriately to independent efforts to rigorously re-analyze the basis of his much heralded GW "hockey stick" paper. After incisive reviews, Mann's results are highly questionable and he has been holding out on crucial data and programs that might well show scientific recklessness and bias.
That would be news to me. As far as I'm aware there have been half a dozen or more independent efforts analyzing the same or similar data, all coming to the same or similar conclusions. There has been one paper by a mining engineer and an economist published in a non peer-reviewed journal which found discrepancies. All the data from Mann has been fully available, along with descriptions of the methodology (which is what the other studies that arrived at simlar results used). The specific source code wasn't released until recently, but given that other independent studies had got similar results I don't see why the source code is under such scrutiny.
I agree it would have been nice if the source code had been made available, but I hardly see that as damning, especially hen there have been a number of other studies essentially confirming the basic result. MOstly it looks like a lot of shit stirring by the people questioning the study rather than some conspiracy to hide fudged results.
Jedidiah.
I thought they just added some textures and models to a someone-elses/IDGames/Valve 3D engine , add in a movie franchise theme
Oddly enough I have a friend who works in game design and it was essentially doing that that helped break him into the field - way back when the original doom first came out he created the AliensTC mod for Doom by himself at home for fun. It had good enough artwork, level design and general atmosphere that it got him noticed in the gaming community. Since then he's gone on to various jobs in game design, including working for Valve on Half Life 2.
The article is right - the best way to get into the field is to just get out there and put in the hard work. If you're good enough and manage to prove yourself you can do well.
Jedidiah.
I don't know about most people, but if Time Warner went bankrupt tomorrow
Oh you would definitely notice. Do you have any idea how many publishers, movie studios, record laels, TV production companies, cable companies, etc. are "A Time Warner Company". Yes they all have varios different names so they can be marketed at different population segments in different ways, but they are all Time Warner.
No seriously. Here's a list of Time Warner holdings. Take some time to skim through it, then tell me again you wouldn't notice all of this disappearing.
Jedidiah.
The right of the US today is the left of the US 50 years ago.
So where does that leave the left of the rest of the world then?
It leaves them watching two ever more blandly populist parties, with an ever diminishing amount of meaningful policy, throw turds at each other in a pointless but desperate struggle for "the middle ground".
In another 50 years they'll probably have achieved they're goal of being nothing more than a well marketed image of two opposing points of view while both parties continue to expand upon their only remaining policy: Feeding at the public trough via an ever expanding Federal government. In the meantime I'm sure they'll continue to argue bitterly and promote divsion in every media form available so that no one will notice that it's mostly bluster without substance, and that enriching themselves and their contributors is about the only action they ever really take.
Which is to say, it will leave the left (and right) of the rest of the world looking on in a strange mix of amusement and fascinated horror.
Jedidiah.
With the yuan now floating in relation to a basket of currencies instead of pegged to the dollar, the impetus to continue buying dollars to manipulate the yuan is greatly weakened.
Actually it is the reverse - the impetus is strengthened: A lower yuan against the dollar continues to be to China's benefit, and buying up US T-bills is a way to keep the currency low relative to the dollar. With the yuan pegged buying T-bills was just to make the whole picture not look distorted. Wit the yuan floating buying T-bills is an active strategy to keep the yuan low.
Look at Japan - they also benefit from a low yen to dollar ratio. They are also the largest foreign holder of US debt. Despite the fact that the yen floats they have been buying T-bills like mad.
You are corrct though: this can only go on so long. The US current account deficit is huge, and growing - that simply isn't sustainable. Eventually it will have to reverse direction. That means a lower US dollar. If the US dollar drops significantly then all those T-bills are worth a whole lot less. The Japanese appetite for US debt has been slowing significantly of late because of this. China is beginning to look to go the same way. That could cause some interesting repurcussions.
Jedidiah.
it's a matter of the degree of the government intrusion into my life.
What state intrusion? They are staying out of the way rather than getting in your way with regard to contract enforcement. They are simply saying "We won't help your with these contracts" - the rest is up to you. The state is not intruding or forcing you to do anything. The state is simply saying they will do as little as possible with regard to contract enforcement, and "these contract clauses here" are the few that the state is willing to intrude on the situation for.
Jedidiah.
A natural right of contract? You have the right to force the people (the state courts, prisons etc.) to assist you in enforcing anything that you can get someone to sign? That doesn't sound like a natural inalienable right to me, it sounds like you are asking for the state to look after you. You have the right to ask the state to enforce whatever the state deems enforceable. You have the right to write whatever contract you see fit. You can try and enforce whatever the state doesn't care to help you with, so where is your lack of freedom? You lack the ability to tell the state what they have to deem enforceable? You agree to a democratic social contract when you accept citizenship and pay taxes. That contract says you will accept and abide by the laws as offered by the state - including which contracts they will enforce. If you want to reneg on that contract... well, that kind of makes your point rather moot.
Jedidiah.
And no one is forcing you to not write a non-compete clause, nor stopping you from expecting your employees to honour it. Just don't expect other people to be forced to help you enforce it if they don't want to help.
Jedidiah.
On a personal level I may not agree with the no-compete clause, but that doesn't mean that I want to force employers to never have that provision in the contract.
No one is saying that employers can't do that. All that is being said is that the state of California isn't going to use their courts and legal systems to help you hold someone to that promise. You can do whatever you like to enforce the contract as you see fit, just don't expect help from parties that choose not to help you, and expect consequences if your means of enforcement infringes on the rights of others.
You are free to write whatever contract you wish, and you are free to enforce it however you wish within the bounds of law. California is doing nothing to impinge on your freedoms, or stop you writing and enforcing your contracts. California is merely refusing to assist you if you write a contract they don't care for. Why should you be able to demand that the state help you if they don't choose to? You have your freedom, you are simply demanding work and resources from the state that it doesn't care to grant you.
Jedidiah.