Palin's current stance is that doesn't believe that creationism should be taught in school in addition to evolution, but that it should not be a prohibited topic.
If the issue involved whether or not to allow schools to teach the Phlogiston theory of fire as
valid science, no one would care, because no (otherwise) sane people would actually propose such a curriculum.
With creationism/ID, however, we have a comparably absurd underlying idea, with the slight difference that a terrifyingly large number of
people actually believe it enough that they would try to teach it in many schools.
If you're going to diss a candidate, at least don't act like a raving fool and use actual arguments and assessments.
If you want to diss a fellow Slashdotter, at least don't play dumb about what the Relidiotic Right means when they say they
support "allowing" schools to teach ID as science. They want to give schools a "choice" in the same way Palin's daughter
made a "choice" - complete and total freedom to pick any integer between "e" and "pi".
Your logical fallacy? Laziness, I guess. Or general failure to read the article.....
Er, no, you missed the GP's point. He referred to argumentum ad ignorantiam,
one of the classic logical fallacies: Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence (or feasibility).
In this case, it applies because the test has a one-sided bias... If someone accepted the challenge and succeeded, it would of
course prove the viability of recovering a wiped drive. IF, however (as has happened), no one succeeds at the challenge...
That doesn't prove the task as impossible.
I find it incredibly arrogant that people attribute symptoms that are several
levels removed from the "cause" to a model like global warming.
Not every natural system works as simply as "the weak die, the strong live to reproduce more". Sometimes,
complex interactions lead to unexpected or even paradoxical effects (ie, the interruption of the gulf
stream means that global warming will make the US Northeast colder rather than warmer).
eventually we got such [overwhelming] [empirical] information that the science of global warming was [supported].
FTFY.
and suddenly billions of tons of carbon disappear from the air in our models
And yet, the directly measureable (and indirectly inferrable, for historical data) atmospheric PPM
of CO2 has steadily risen since the industrial evolution.
Finding a new, unexpected, carbon sink helps us refine our models. It doesn't change the fact that
we still produce more than the Earth can buffer.
I think it's one of the surest signs ever of our arrogance as a species that we had ONE well studied theory predicting
temperature change
[...]
What if, although our carbon certainly doesn't help, most of this is due to cyclical sun output?
Whereever did you get a crazy idea like that? Solar output? No one has ever studied such an absurd
proposition as that! I certainly wouldn't consider it the primary alternative - dare I say "theory" -
to account for global warming. Because as you point out, no other theories exist and have received any attention.
Another way to find images for your web app is using Google Image Search. When
you search for an image and click on a result, you can also click on the "See full-size
image" link at the top of the page. This will take you directly to the image in your
browser, and you can copy the URL from the browser's location bar, and use that with
AppJet's image command.
So by the third page, they already have you stealing bandwidth by deep-linking images?
Cool site, but I really hope they have a section on netiquette somewhere in there...
Also, 380 MB for a multi-tab session would be about what I expect.
Firefox will happily use that much RAM.
Y'know, I hear that a lot, but have just never seen any version of
FireFox use all that much memory.
Right now, I have about 8 tabs open (after many hours of browsing without restarting
FF), including a flash game, a GIS on about the 20th page, and a Fark photoshopping
contest, and have 70MB working set (RSize), 125MB Virtual (VSize). And that looks
pretty much typical on my system for FireFox.
It is not possible for a significant fraction of the population to "put
enough of THEIR OWN money away" so that they can sit on their asses for 25
years while enjoying a middle class lifestyle.
Pretty much by definition, the poor cannot enjoy a middle class lifestyle,
regardless of retirement status.
At the end of the day, somebody has to produce the goods that
will be consumed each year.
True - But we don't have a fixed 300 million people all planning to
retire at once.
We have a pool of people constantly entering and leaving the working world.
You and I can (potentially) retire because our kids and grandkids will
take our place producing the goods we will still want to consume.
The only way to manage this is to delay the average retirement age
to maintain the overall ratio of workers vs. ass sitters.
1680 wants its work ethic back.
Thanks to the magic of automation, we need only a tiny fraction of the
workforce once required to manufacture core goods. Perhaps we can't realistically
all have handmade artisan-type goods, but we can have all the Ikea furniture we
could ever hope for, with minimal human labor required to produce it.
Minimum wage laws generally only result in layoffs and law-breaking.
Although I can't disagree that you can't break laws that don't exist, could you substantiate your claim of layoffs
(as in, real, permanant decrease in number of jobs, not WallyWorld meeting the next quarter's numbers by
attrition)?
Because if you look at the historical unemployment rate in the US, minimum wage laws have no long-term
effects thereupon.
You're going to get grief on the "broodmare" comment, which is a shame, cause that was a great line. I'd mod you up if I had 'em.
Heh, thanks for the thought.
Oddly enough, I seem to have taken more heat for stating the plain fact that Downs counts as a genetic defect, than in pointing
out that no rational person would choose to have five kids in the modern overpopulated world. Go figure.
I think, though, I've figured out my mistake in posting that comment - The Nannies (D) take issue with suggesting
anything against weak or unpopular groups (in this case, genetically defective babies), while the Zealots (R) can't
stand the thought of some woman they've never met having a parasitic growth removed. So it really doesn't matter who
modded, I managed to piss off both major groups.
Yes, Obama actually used that metaphor in his nomination acceptance speech, August 28th 2008.
Ouch... Looks like we get to choose between a police-state and a nanny-state once again.
Obama didn't even have the courtesy to vet Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-president, ouch.
Why would he have? With the exception of her rabid feminist supporters (who wouldn't vote Republican even
if they had Gloria Steinem as their VP candidate), most Hillary fans like Obama nearly as much...
Issues-wise, they pretty much sounded identical, and they incontrovertibly both break the trend of "old
white guy" as president.
Palin's 5th child, in the womb, was diagnosed with Downs Syndrome, but she kept him anyway.
Fifth child, defective, and she kept it anyway? Daaaaaaaamn. That alone would keep me from voting
from McCain - I prefer sensible, intelligent leaders, not broodmares.
What ever happened to sysadmins being known for having strong/good morals and ethics?
And they do - Those morals and ethics just don't overlap 100% with "corporate policy"
(or for that matter, "the law").
And I don't mean that as a joke... IT pros have a rather unusual role in the history of
humanity, in that without trying, we become aware of far more details of peoples
lives than they realize. Even priests in the confessional don't have the insight we do - People
can lie to their priest. They can't lie about logfiles.
People, as a whole, count as (by their own standards) hypocritical perverted criminals. They all
(and I mean that deliberately as an unqualified universal quantifier) do things they would themselves describe
as disgusting and/or reprehensible if asked in a neutral context. They all steal, they all lie, they all cheat,
they all put #1 ahead of everything else unless pretending to do otherwise will result in a self-preferable
outcome.. And you expect those of us who know (rather than merely suspect)
this to have a traditional world-view when it comes to right and wrong?
I think the survey should have asked a slightly different question, to make it more meaningful...
"Do you already have memorized enough info about the company to bring it to its knees if
you decide they've really screwed you over"? And I'll bet you'd get a similarly high percentage
answering "yes".
I haven't been able to find any of decent quality for less than 4-5 hundred. $233 sounds like a steal.
The WallyWorld specials usually go in the $100-$150 range, up another hundred for their "high end" garbage.
Not exactly something I'd trust my server room to, but they do work for a year or two (and can't argue that
three separate unitsoffers some degree of redundancy).
I'm pretty sure that means there's something wrong with your installation of Windows.
I've seen that behavior on just about every XP installation I've ever used, not just my own... It will have
absolutely nothing going on, and the desktop becomes completely unresponsive for 15-30s while flogging the
disk. Some days it happens once all day, some days it happens twice an hour. I also find it much more
pronounced on slower single-drive systems (aka "notebooks"), while it appears as merely a 3-5s hiccough
on a system with a pair of 7200RPM drives.
I suspect it as something pagefile-related, because if you completely turn off the pagefile, that problem
vanishes instantly... Of course, XP does not like having the pagefile turned off, and a number of
other things break (as well as a scarily large percentage of 3rd-party software that allocates huge amounts of
of RAM it will never use and counts on paging to keep the working set manageable).
6) Boot sequence and shutdown sequence get 5 minutes added on to them. Hey MS, don't forget to make sure you cause the
hard drive light LED to flicker a lot while the users wait around so they think it's something going on. While you're at
it, randomly flicker that HD LED every few minutes for 20 seconds at a time.
You had me up until that one... How would users tell the difference if MS decided to use #6? Windows already
randomly waits a few minutes for no apparent reason on startup and shutdown...
And the 20s HDD bursts happen all the time, not just at "special" times. Out of the blue, Windows decides to
flog the disk, while the user gets to wait. I think it has something to do with the pagefile, but of course,
Windows doesn't provide any meaningful information about why it has decided to stop responding for 15-30s at
a time.
My Linux ad - "If you have enough memory, you can turn off swap."
so everyone who is disgusted by mcguire, everyone who is disgusted
with baseball for that... this is fictional? the feelings of disgust
they have is a mirage?
Actually, I would honestly answer that with a firm "yes", for the most part.
I have yet to meet a real live baseball fan that gives a damn about McGuire or Bonds,
other than the "controversy" over how to categorize their accomplishments for the
stats books - And don't think Aaron held the previous record as a straightedge... Those
old-school players might not have had synthetic crap like "the clear", but why exactly
do you think they took "natural" preparations such a dessicated bull testes? Same
basic drug, just no stigma (except the "yuck" factor) attached.
Now, I certainly can't deny that reporters and politicians have expressed enough
mock-outrage to make up for the rest of us not caring... But to say most fans
really give a damn? No.
BUT NO ONE CONSIDERS THAT A REAL SPORT. it's a joke, a one act play
get it?
And both sports make oodles of money with a hugely loyal fan-base, regardless
of (or perhaps because of) the controversy-of-the-week. Get it?
any sport that openly accept drug enhancement is a sport that will
see its ratings drop.
Tell that to Baseball for the last half century... Everyone knew they
all took a variety of stimulants to give them an edge. Only when that
shifted to steroids did we suddenly have some fictional national crisis
over drug use in pro sports.
No one really cares how they do it - We just want "our" team to win
at any cost, and if they hit more homers on the way, all the better.
The submitter or editor could have at least typed the number into the summary.
I know you meant that as a joke, but the submitter actually could have done so.
Mersenne primes have a rather convenient property (as defining characteristic of
Mersenne numbers) - You can express them as a power of two, minus one. So for
example, to express the 44th, you can simply write "2^32,582,657-1".
Two major problems with printing them, for all the Luddites that have replied so far...
First, a single CD will hold 500-1000 images, stored as reasonably high-quality JPEGs. A similar stack
of printouts on photo-quality paper would measure up to a foot thick (1000 pictures on 12mil paper).
Second, and perhaps more important if volume doesn't matter, a sheet of paper will break down far faster than a polycarbonate disc
when subjected to a moist environment.
Simple solution? Burn a dozen copies of a CD using something like PAR2 redundancy to allow complete recovery if even a tenth of the
content remains readable on each CD. Include simple extraction instructions in a more durable form (a note sealed in an acrylic block?
an etched nickel tablet? Something like that - Small and to the point). For the naysayers, this involves 25 years, not 2500. We'll
still have CD reading drives available then, whether museum pieces or simple due to never-ending backward compatibility in newer
optical drives.
There usually pretty straight forward. The only point
that can be confusing is when to pay.
"Straightforward" does not mean "constitutionally allowed".
The states can say whatever they want, as plainly or obscurely as they
like, but that doesn't mean they can just do whatever they please.
When I call it "convoluted", I refer to the interaction with federal
limitations on what the states can actually tax (though of course, IANAL).
With interstate commerce, states absolutely cannot apply an
import tariff for products brought in from another state - Yet, the
entire concept of a "use" tax effectively amounts to exactly that,
wearing glasses and a fake mustache.
Lightly compressing RAM to make it appear larger hardly counts as a new idea... I ran a program
back on Windows 3.11 that did exactly that - And while it did indeed allow running more things
at once without suffering a massive slowdown, It came at the cost of making everything
run noticeably (though not unusably, as with swap/pagefile use) slower.
Memory compression had one major drawback, aside from CPU use (which I suspect we would
notice less today, with massively more powerful CPUs which tend to sit at 5-10% load the
vast majority of the time)... It makes paging (in the 4k sense, not referring to the pagefile)
into an absolute nightmare, and memory fragmentation goes from an intellectual
nuissance that only CS majors care about, to a real practical bottleneck in performance.
Consider the behavior of a typical program - Allocate a few megs on startup and zero it
out - That compresses down to nothing. Now start filling in that space, and your compression
drops from 99.9% down to potentially 0%.
Personally, I think it could work as an optional (to programs) OS-level
alternative to memory allocation... The programmer can choose to use slightly slower
compressed memory where appropriate (loading 200MB of textual customer data, for example),
or full-speed uncompressed memory by default (stack frames, hash tables, digital photos,
etc).
With a mandated sales tax, it means YOU don't have to keep records for
paying end-of-year taxes.
No, it means we can't ignore use taxes as an unconstitutional violation
of interstate commerce. Pay if you want, but few do - And suggesting
we make it "painless" by having the merchants handle the tax completely
misses (and actually hides) the point that we shouldn't pay such taxes
in the first place.
End this moronic madness now
And there, we agree (in word if not in spirit) - Let's entirely do away with
the single most regressive taxes we have. Personally, I think we should
also do away with "withholding" as well, and make everyone actually cough up
$10-30k every April 15th - Watch how fast we get serious tax reform when
people realize how much they actually pay, rather than merely bitching about
it as a mostly-meaningless "rate" they don't really feel thanks to the government
slowly boiling the frog.
Could someone explain, isn't it required by (most) states' laws that
individuals pay sales tax on goods purchased?
Yes, but when you purchase something from out of state, the normally-unintelligible
mess of tax laws become even more convoluted.
Many states have a "use" tax, which applies to items purchased from out-of-state
by state residents. The burden of paying it rests on the individual, however, not
the merchant (and very, very few people actually pay it except on items they
can't avoid reporting, such as cars and boats).
The real issue here involves what constitutes a "presence" in a given state, as well
as where the transaction actually occurs. Most states would like to claim the
transaction occurs at the location of the buyer, but so far the federal government hasn't
let them get away with that. More commonly, states limit their attempts to collect to
vendors who have some physical presence in that state - Meaning they have some power
to make life miserable for noncomplying vendors.
So then the question changes to "what constitutes a physical presence?". The largest
online merchants such as Amazon have warehouses all over the country, but don't ever
actually sell anything on-site, they just ship from there. So does that count as a
retail presence, or not?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! I am behind on my Ubuntu distro then. I am still on the J
Trust me, you'll love the new features in "Kleptomaniac Koala".
I heard the new AMD/ATI and VIA drivers won't make it in until "Lascivious Lemming", though, so you might want to hold off another few months.
Palin's current stance is that doesn't believe that creationism should be taught in school in addition to evolution, but that it should not be a prohibited topic.
If the issue involved whether or not to allow schools to teach the Phlogiston theory of fire as valid science, no one would care, because no (otherwise) sane people would actually propose such a curriculum.
With creationism/ID, however, we have a comparably absurd underlying idea, with the slight difference that a terrifyingly large number of people actually believe it enough that they would try to teach it in many schools.
If you're going to diss a candidate, at least don't act like a raving fool and use actual arguments and assessments.
If you want to diss a fellow Slashdotter, at least don't play dumb about what the Relidiotic Right means when they say they support "allowing" schools to teach ID as science. They want to give schools a "choice" in the same way Palin's daughter made a "choice" - complete and total freedom to pick any integer between "e" and "pi".
Your logical fallacy? Laziness, I guess. Or general failure to read the article.....
Er, no, you missed the GP's point. He referred to argumentum ad ignorantiam , one of the classic logical fallacies: Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence (or feasibility).
In this case, it applies because the test has a one-sided bias... If someone accepted the challenge and succeeded, it would of course prove the viability of recovering a wiped drive. IF, however (as has happened), no one succeeds at the challenge... That doesn't prove the task as impossible.
I find it incredibly arrogant that people attribute symptoms that are several levels removed from the "cause" to a model like global warming.
Not every natural system works as simply as "the weak die, the strong live to reproduce more". Sometimes, complex interactions lead to unexpected or even paradoxical effects (ie, the interruption of the gulf stream means that global warming will make the US Northeast colder rather than warmer).
eventually we got such [overwhelming] [empirical] information that the science of global warming was [supported].
FTFY.
and suddenly billions of tons of carbon disappear from the air in our models
And yet, the directly measureable (and indirectly inferrable, for historical data) atmospheric PPM of CO2 has steadily risen since the industrial evolution.
Finding a new, unexpected, carbon sink helps us refine our models. It doesn't change the fact that we still produce more than the Earth can buffer.
I think it's one of the surest signs ever of our arrogance as a species that we had ONE well studied theory predicting temperature change
[...]
What if, although our carbon certainly doesn't help, most of this is due to cyclical sun output?
Whereever did you get a crazy idea like that? Solar output? No one has ever studied such an absurd proposition as that! I certainly wouldn't consider it the primary alternative - dare I say "theory" - to account for global warming. Because as you point out, no other theories exist and have received any attention.
D'oh! Okay, before you all smack me down, they do indeed mention that as unkosher. Somehow I completely missed that paragraph on my first read.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...
So by the third page, they already have you stealing bandwidth by deep-linking images?
Cool site, but I really hope they have a section on netiquette somewhere in there...
Also, 380 MB for a multi-tab session would be about what I expect. Firefox will happily use that much RAM.
Y'know, I hear that a lot, but have just never seen any version of FireFox use all that much memory.
Right now, I have about 8 tabs open (after many hours of browsing without restarting FF), including a flash game, a GIS on about the 20th page, and a Fark photoshopping contest, and have 70MB working set (RSize), 125MB Virtual (VSize). And that looks pretty much typical on my system for FireFox.
It is not possible for a significant fraction of the population to "put enough of THEIR OWN money away" so that they can sit on their asses for 25 years while enjoying a middle class lifestyle.
Pretty much by definition, the poor cannot enjoy a middle class lifestyle, regardless of retirement status.
At the end of the day, somebody has to produce the goods that will be consumed each year.
True - But we don't have a fixed 300 million people all planning to retire at once.
We have a pool of people constantly entering and leaving the working world. You and I can (potentially) retire because our kids and grandkids will take our place producing the goods we will still want to consume.
The only way to manage this is to delay the average retirement age to maintain the overall ratio of workers vs. ass sitters.
1680 wants its work ethic back.
Thanks to the magic of automation, we need only a tiny fraction of the workforce once required to manufacture core goods. Perhaps we can't realistically all have handmade artisan-type goods, but we can have all the Ikea furniture we could ever hope for, with minimal human labor required to produce it.
Minimum wage laws generally only result in layoffs and law-breaking.
Although I can't disagree that you can't break laws that don't exist, could you substantiate your claim of layoffs (as in, real, permanant decrease in number of jobs, not WallyWorld meeting the next quarter's numbers by attrition)?
Because if you look at the historical unemployment rate in the US, minimum wage laws have no long-term effects thereupon.
I see only one solution: federally-mandated DRM on all cash-registers.
Of course, merchants still have every right to use hand-written sales slips and only accept cash, making the whole issue moot.
Judges are lawyers and that is forced by law. You can't be one without being a lawyer.
What country do you live in?
Because your statement does not hold true, at least in the US.
You're going to get grief on the "broodmare" comment, which is a shame, cause that was a great line. I'd mod you up if I had 'em.
:)
Heh, thanks for the thought.
Oddly enough, I seem to have taken more heat for stating the plain fact that Downs counts as a genetic defect, than in pointing out that no rational person would choose to have five kids in the modern overpopulated world. Go figure.
I think, though, I've figured out my mistake in posting that comment - The Nannies (D) take issue with suggesting anything against weak or unpopular groups (in this case, genetically defective babies), while the Zealots (R) can't stand the thought of some woman they've never met having a parasitic growth removed. So it really doesn't matter who modded, I managed to piss off both major groups.
So it goes, my karma can take the hit.
Yes, Obama actually used that metaphor in his nomination acceptance speech, August 28th 2008.
Ouch... Looks like we get to choose between a police-state and a nanny-state once again.
Obama didn't even have the courtesy to vet Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-president, ouch.
Why would he have? With the exception of her rabid feminist supporters (who wouldn't vote Republican even if they had Gloria Steinem as their VP candidate), most Hillary fans like Obama nearly as much... Issues-wise, they pretty much sounded identical, and they incontrovertibly both break the trend of "old white guy" as president.
Palin's 5th child, in the womb, was diagnosed with Downs Syndrome, but she kept him anyway.
Fifth child, defective, and she kept it anyway? Daaaaaaaamn. That alone would keep me from voting from McCain - I prefer sensible, intelligent leaders, not broodmares.
What ever happened to sysadmins being known for having strong/good morals and ethics?
And they do - Those morals and ethics just don't overlap 100% with "corporate policy" (or for that matter, "the law").
And I don't mean that as a joke... IT pros have a rather unusual role in the history of humanity, in that without trying, we become aware of far more details of peoples lives than they realize. Even priests in the confessional don't have the insight we do - People can lie to their priest. They can't lie about logfiles.
People, as a whole, count as (by their own standards) hypocritical perverted criminals. They all (and I mean that deliberately as an unqualified universal quantifier) do things they would themselves describe as disgusting and/or reprehensible if asked in a neutral context. They all steal, they all lie, they all cheat, they all put #1 ahead of everything else unless pretending to do otherwise will result in a self-preferable outcome.. And you expect those of us who know (rather than merely suspect) this to have a traditional world-view when it comes to right and wrong?
I think the survey should have asked a slightly different question, to make it more meaningful... "Do you already have memorized enough info about the company to bring it to its knees if you decide they've really screwed you over"? And I'll bet you'd get a similarly high percentage answering "yes".
I haven't been able to find any of decent quality for less than 4-5 hundred. $233 sounds like a steal.
The WallyWorld specials usually go in the $100-$150 range, up another hundred for their "high end" garbage.
Not exactly something I'd trust my server room to, but they do work for a year or two (and can't argue that three separate unitsoffers some degree of redundancy).
I'm pretty sure that means there's something wrong with your installation of Windows.
I've seen that behavior on just about every XP installation I've ever used, not just my own... It will have absolutely nothing going on, and the desktop becomes completely unresponsive for 15-30s while flogging the disk. Some days it happens once all day, some days it happens twice an hour. I also find it much more pronounced on slower single-drive systems (aka "notebooks"), while it appears as merely a 3-5s hiccough on a system with a pair of 7200RPM drives.
I suspect it as something pagefile-related, because if you completely turn off the pagefile, that problem vanishes instantly... Of course, XP does not like having the pagefile turned off, and a number of other things break (as well as a scarily large percentage of 3rd-party software that allocates huge amounts of of RAM it will never use and counts on paging to keep the working set manageable).
6) Boot sequence and shutdown sequence get 5 minutes added on to them. Hey MS, don't forget to make sure you cause the hard drive light LED to flicker a lot while the users wait around so they think it's something going on. While you're at it, randomly flicker that HD LED every few minutes for 20 seconds at a time.
You had me up until that one... How would users tell the difference if MS decided to use #6? Windows already randomly waits a few minutes for no apparent reason on startup and shutdown...
And the 20s HDD bursts happen all the time, not just at "special" times. Out of the blue, Windows decides to flog the disk, while the user gets to wait. I think it has something to do with the pagefile, but of course, Windows doesn't provide any meaningful information about why it has decided to stop responding for 15-30s at a time.
My Linux ad - "If you have enough memory, you can turn off swap."
so everyone who is disgusted by mcguire, everyone who is disgusted with baseball for that... this is fictional? the feelings of disgust they have is a mirage?
Actually, I would honestly answer that with a firm "yes", for the most part.
I have yet to meet a real live baseball fan that gives a damn about McGuire or Bonds, other than the "controversy" over how to categorize their accomplishments for the stats books - And don't think Aaron held the previous record as a straightedge... Those old-school players might not have had synthetic crap like "the clear", but why exactly do you think they took "natural" preparations such a dessicated bull testes? Same basic drug, just no stigma (except the "yuck" factor) attached.
Now, I certainly can't deny that reporters and politicians have expressed enough mock-outrage to make up for the rest of us not caring... But to say most fans really give a damn? No.
BUT NO ONE CONSIDERS THAT A REAL SPORT. it's a joke, a one act play
get it?
And both sports make oodles of money with a hugely loyal fan-base, regardless of (or perhaps because of) the controversy-of-the-week. Get it?
any sport that openly accept drug enhancement is a sport that will see its ratings drop.
Tell that to Baseball for the last half century... Everyone knew they all took a variety of stimulants to give them an edge. Only when that shifted to steroids did we suddenly have some fictional national crisis over drug use in pro sports.
No one really cares how they do it - We just want "our" team to win at any cost, and if they hit more homers on the way, all the better.
The submitter or editor could have at least typed the number into the summary.
I know you meant that as a joke, but the submitter actually could have done so.
Mersenne primes have a rather convenient property (as defining characteristic of Mersenne numbers) - You can express them as a power of two, minus one. So for example, to express the 44th, you can simply write "2^32,582,657-1".
Two major problems with printing them, for all the Luddites that have replied so far...
First, a single CD will hold 500-1000 images, stored as reasonably high-quality JPEGs. A similar stack of printouts on photo-quality paper would measure up to a foot thick (1000 pictures on 12mil paper).
Second, and perhaps more important if volume doesn't matter, a sheet of paper will break down far faster than a polycarbonate disc when subjected to a moist environment.
Simple solution? Burn a dozen copies of a CD using something like PAR2 redundancy to allow complete recovery if even a tenth of the content remains readable on each CD. Include simple extraction instructions in a more durable form (a note sealed in an acrylic block? an etched nickel tablet? Something like that - Small and to the point). For the naysayers, this involves 25 years, not 2500. We'll still have CD reading drives available then, whether museum pieces or simple due to never-ending backward compatibility in newer optical drives.
There usually pretty straight forward. The only point that can be confusing is when to pay.
"Straightforward" does not mean "constitutionally allowed".
The states can say whatever they want, as plainly or obscurely as they like, but that doesn't mean they can just do whatever they please. When I call it "convoluted", I refer to the interaction with federal limitations on what the states can actually tax (though of course, IANAL).
With interstate commerce, states absolutely cannot apply an import tariff for products brought in from another state - Yet, the entire concept of a "use" tax effectively amounts to exactly that, wearing glasses and a fake mustache.
Lightly compressing RAM to make it appear larger hardly counts as a new idea... I ran a program back on Windows 3.11 that did exactly that - And while it did indeed allow running more things at once without suffering a massive slowdown, It came at the cost of making everything run noticeably (though not unusably, as with swap/pagefile use) slower.
Memory compression had one major drawback, aside from CPU use (which I suspect we would notice less today, with massively more powerful CPUs which tend to sit at 5-10% load the vast majority of the time)... It makes paging (in the 4k sense, not referring to the pagefile) into an absolute nightmare, and memory fragmentation goes from an intellectual nuissance that only CS majors care about, to a real practical bottleneck in performance. Consider the behavior of a typical program - Allocate a few megs on startup and zero it out - That compresses down to nothing. Now start filling in that space, and your compression drops from 99.9% down to potentially 0%.
Personally, I think it could work as an optional (to programs) OS-level alternative to memory allocation... The programmer can choose to use slightly slower compressed memory where appropriate (loading 200MB of textual customer data, for example), or full-speed uncompressed memory by default (stack frames, hash tables, digital photos, etc).
With a mandated sales tax, it means YOU don't have to keep records for paying end-of-year taxes.
No, it means we can't ignore use taxes as an unconstitutional violation of interstate commerce. Pay if you want, but few do - And suggesting we make it "painless" by having the merchants handle the tax completely misses (and actually hides) the point that we shouldn't pay such taxes in the first place.
End this moronic madness now
And there, we agree (in word if not in spirit) - Let's entirely do away with the single most regressive taxes we have. Personally, I think we should also do away with "withholding" as well, and make everyone actually cough up $10-30k every April 15th - Watch how fast we get serious tax reform when people realize how much they actually pay, rather than merely bitching about it as a mostly-meaningless "rate" they don't really feel thanks to the government slowly boiling the frog.
Could someone explain, isn't it required by (most) states' laws that individuals pay sales tax on goods purchased?
Yes, but when you purchase something from out of state, the normally-unintelligible mess of tax laws become even more convoluted.
Many states have a "use" tax, which applies to items purchased from out-of-state by state residents. The burden of paying it rests on the individual, however, not the merchant (and very, very few people actually pay it except on items they can't avoid reporting, such as cars and boats).
The real issue here involves what constitutes a "presence" in a given state, as well as where the transaction actually occurs. Most states would like to claim the transaction occurs at the location of the buyer, but so far the federal government hasn't let them get away with that. More commonly, states limit their attempts to collect to vendors who have some physical presence in that state - Meaning they have some power to make life miserable for noncomplying vendors.
So then the question changes to "what constitutes a physical presence?". The largest online merchants such as Amazon have warehouses all over the country, but don't ever actually sell anything on-site, they just ship from there. So does that count as a retail presence, or not?