Aye-aye-aye! Name-calling — how sad... Given the government's wonderful successes in education, highway upkeep, and pensions — wanting it to also expand into healthcare — whose mental faculties are we supposed to question?
Anyone who has an "all-or-nothing" mentality. Anyone who points to a few government successes and concludes the government has a Midas touch for making things work is clearly an idiot. Anyone who points to a few government failures and concludes the government never does anything right is equally idiotic. Sane and rational people look at the specifics of a proposal and decide whether it's a good idea or not, rather than immediately conclude it's a good idea or a bad idea based on whether it involves government or not.
Yeah, the more advanced they get, the more sensitive they get. By the time we start building quantum computers, we'll be using cloud computing, because our quantum computers will need to stay buried in their mile deep bunkers.
Well, depending on what you think he thinks it means, you have to characterize him as either dishonest or stupid. When you say you'll give him the benefit of the doubt, I'm wondering which one of those you consider to be the benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of these moments with McCain. He's constantly saying things that make me think he's either trying to pull one over on people, or he's actually stupid enough to believe it himself. I don't know which is true, but it's really not good either way...
... Performance constraints on those little machines meant that p-code had special fast "short load" instructions. The net effect was that high level programmers abused this with folklore like "the first 16 local variables are faster".
Hehe. I still tend to order local variables based on usage-frequency, but in part it just always made sense to me to list them in order of importance, and obviously the most important one is the one you use most. The fact that this sometimes compiles a little smaller and runs a little more efficiently is just a side-benefit.
I wonder sometimes how many people have obscure little habits that used to make sense, but these days make no sense. Not actually harmful in anyway, but not helpful either. The one that I catch myself doing most is phrasing ifs such that I'm using either "<" or ">=", rather than "<=" or ">". E.g. if I can bump a constant by one so that I can use one of the the first two rather than the last two, I do. Why? I used to develop primarily for a platform where it took one instruction to do the former pair but two to do the latter (the first two just need a branch on the state of the C flag, the latter depend on the state of both C and E, and the processor in question had no instructions that took both into account). So I never write "if ( i > 7 )" when I can write "if ( i >= 8 )". It probably makes no difference at all on any machine I've used since the 80's, but it's harmless, so I do it anyway, because it just looks better to me. Old prejudices influence what looks better to this day.
If you haven't validated an HTML page, you can fairly safely assume it's not valid HTML. Just like if you type in a program and never run it through a compiler, it probably has a syntax error in it somewhere.
It might, but "probably" is stretching it. I usually catch syntax errors long before I try compiling. Which doesn't mean my code is error free, far from it, but actual syntax errors are pretty rare. They tend to catch my eye long before I save the source, much less attempt compiling it.
Oliver Sacks has anecdotes in his book Musicophilia about patients that have lost all interest in music, or even consider it irksome noise.
Hmm, that pretty much describes how I felt about music during the 90's. Whenever I heard the term "alternative music", I assumed they'd accidently left out the "to".
... So, adding automatic encryption raises the price back to where it was a decade ago.
*cough*bullshit*cough*
You either have no idea of the relative computational intensity of the problem vs. the other issues you mentioned, or you're imagining some bizarrely expensive algorithm be used that's far beyond what's generally used today in terms of time and memory required.
Modern solar power systems work at night just fine. However, they get in trouble if you get little sun for many days in a row, running the batteries down with little recharging.
I doubt the storm would have damaged the aircraft (part of the reason a wind seems to hit your car so hard is, being firmly planted on the ground, it can't move with the wind). OTOH, stormy weather often contributes to disorientation and loss of situational awareness. In mountainous areas, this can cause a pilot to fly into a "cumulogranite" cloud. Dollars to donuts this was a CFIT.
Don't they usually have the option of ejection and parachuting in modern planes?
No. This wasn't an F-16. And it looks like the kind of accident where the pilot's first sign that he was in trouble was approximately 0.2 seconds before impact.
If nothing was wrong with the plane, he probably flew it right into the side of the mountain under power, not realizing the mountain was right there until it was, well, right there. If something was wrong with the plane, he probably could have successfully glided it to a survivable impact. There's rarely any use for a parachute in a small, single-engine airplane. And in cases where it would be useful, they make them so you actually put the parachute on the plane itself, which is actually a lot more useful for a number of reasons related to both the safety of using it, and reducing damage to the plane itself.
Is it just me or does the wife seem really really indifferent. Here is the possbility her husband's remains have been found, and she's "monitoring the situation"? The hell? Its not a weather system! Then again, I can't begin to imagine what she went through, so maybe this is an attempt on her part to keep her hopes from getting too high. I dunno, but really, does anyone else get this vibe?
Um, what the heck? Were you expecting her to fly out there with a shovel or something?
If you are worth his kind of money, I think carrying $1,000 is a non-issue. He was, after all, staying at one of the Hilton's places, and depending on where he was going perhaps he preferred to pay for fuel in cash? I dunno, I used to carry $200 with me all the time and that was when I was earning $22K a year. If I was loaded I sure would carry $1k just on the occasion I needed it (10 x $100 bills is nothing, same in my pocket as $5 and 5 $1s)
Ditto, although it should be noted that back when I always made sure I had 2 $100 bills stashed in my wallet (not in the usual place -- it was for emergency use only and I'd have to dig it out of its hidden pocket to get it), this was before you could use debit cards anywhere. Nowadays there's no point -- it's been years since I've seen anyplace where I couldn't just swipe a card aside from gum ball machines. That said, Fossett was a lot older than me, he probably hung on to the habit of always having cash in his pocket after I finally accepted I didn't need it anymore.
Kudos to hiker that turned in what he found. I suspect many people would not have turned in the thousand dollars or so in cash had they made the discovery.
"If it's not yours, don't take it." Why do some people find basic ethics so hard?:(
Not to mention the questions that would come up when the wife says, "I wonder what happened to the $1000 he always kept in his pocket, just in case he needed some cash." (Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn't, but that's a big chance to take.)
I suppose you could take the cash and then not report the find at all, thus preventing anyone from even asking you that question, but gods -- the poor widow and all his friends and stuff -- you need to be more than just a bit greedy to do something like that. I think at that point you go beyond the average person's casual evil into the realm of real monsters. I don't know that there's really a lot of people who would go that far. I like to think not. Maybe I'm naive...
The bailout itself is a mandatory government program, not private enterprise. If you're upset about your hard-earned income being taxed away to prop up failed corporations -- and why shouldn't you be? --...
Perhaps because when the government has done this sort of thing with our money in the past, it has usually actually turned a profit? If the government invests $700 billion and makes back a trillion +, we end up better off in the long run. That sort of thing doesn't upset me. I'm more upset when you cut my taxes while you're running a deficit. I know damn well I'm going to have to pay for that spending anyhow, except now I'll have to pay for it, and pay interest too. That's a tax increase, not a tax cut. Reagan and W. have raised our taxes more than the most wildly liberal spender ever did. We could build enough bridges to nowhere to actually get somewhere with all the money we squander on paying the interest.
It is unconstitutional for the federal government to tax individuals. The fed can only tax the states. So you basically do not support the Constitution.
I'm guessing you're a time-traveler from the 18th or 19th century. You might want to read an updated copy of the constitution, paying particular attention to the 16th amendment.
(I'm assuming you're a time traveler, since otherwise it would follow from what you're saying that you do not support the Constitution, and you seem to be saying that's a bad thing.)
I'm thinking a five-year downtime for government run space launches is a wonderful idea. A lot of people seem to think private companies would do a much better job of it. I don't know that that's true, but let's see what happens. We may look back on the five-year NASA downtime as the best thing that ever happened to the US space industry...
Virgin Galactic has done successful manned space flights, albeit only sub-orbital. SpaceX has now successfully done orbital launches, albeit unmanned. Manned orbital spaceflight is within reach. The private sector isn't quite ready to service a satellite in orbit -- but it ain't that far off...
It appears to be a generic troll. Completely generic. Notice the complete lack of any context whatsoever. You could cut that text and paste it into any political discussion from 1980 until today -- "the current crisis" could mean anything, the "explanation" of the root cause in fact fails to in any way explain how the supposed cause is in any way causal to "the current crisis" (it can't do that, of course, since that would require actually justifying the assertion with details that would then make the post no longer completely generic). There is, in fact, no actual content to the message itself -- it like a Rorschach test -- if you thought that message actually said anything, look again at what it actually says, vs. what meaning you're actually inserting into it yourself by making assumptions about what the author is referring to. If in fact you think it said anything at all, you're making assumptions about what the author meant that he never actually said. "the current crsis", "the problem" "pretty much every area" -- the message contains many words, but it specifically says nothing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye-aye-aye! Name-calling — how sad... Given the government's wonderful successes in education, highway upkeep, and pensions — wanting it to also expand into healthcare — whose mental faculties are we supposed to question?
Anyone who has an "all-or-nothing" mentality. Anyone who points to a few government successes and concludes the government has a Midas touch for making things work is clearly an idiot. Anyone who points to a few government failures and concludes the government never does anything right is equally idiotic. Sane and rational people look at the specifics of a proposal and decide whether it's a good idea or not, rather than immediately conclude it's a good idea or a bad idea based on whether it involves government or not.
Yeah, the more advanced they get, the more sensitive they get. By the time we start building quantum computers, we'll be using cloud computing, because our quantum computers will need to stay buried in their mile deep bunkers.
Must you idiots turn every fucking article into an anti-McCain or anti-Obama flamefest?
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot! :D
I'll give him the benefit of a doubt...
Well, depending on what you think he thinks it means, you have to characterize him as either dishonest or stupid. When you say you'll give him the benefit of the doubt, I'm wondering which one of those you consider to be the benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of these moments with McCain. He's constantly saying things that make me think he's either trying to pull one over on people, or he's actually stupid enough to believe it himself. I don't know which is true, but it's really not good either way...
Boy, you really know how to depress a guy... :(
... Performance constraints on those little machines meant that p-code had special fast "short load" instructions. The net effect was that high level programmers abused this with folklore like "the first 16 local variables are faster".
Hehe. I still tend to order local variables based on usage-frequency, but in part it just always made sense to me to list them in order of importance, and obviously the most important one is the one you use most. The fact that this sometimes compiles a little smaller and runs a little more efficiently is just a side-benefit.
I wonder sometimes how many people have obscure little habits that used to make sense, but these days make no sense. Not actually harmful in anyway, but not helpful either. The one that I catch myself doing most is phrasing ifs such that I'm using either "<" or ">=", rather than "<=" or ">". E.g. if I can bump a constant by one so that I can use one of the the first two rather than the last two, I do. Why? I used to develop primarily for a platform where it took one instruction to do the former pair but two to do the latter (the first two just need a branch on the state of the C flag, the latter depend on the state of both C and E, and the processor in question had no instructions that took both into account). So I never write "if ( i > 7 )" when I can write "if ( i >= 8 )". It probably makes no difference at all on any machine I've used since the 80's, but it's harmless, so I do it anyway, because it just looks better to me. Old prejudices influence what looks better to this day.
If you haven't validated an HTML page, you can fairly safely assume it's not valid HTML. Just like if you type in a program and never run it through a compiler, it probably has a syntax error in it somewhere.
It might, but "probably" is stretching it. I usually catch syntax errors long before I try compiling. Which doesn't mean my code is error free, far from it, but actual syntax errors are pretty rare. They tend to catch my eye long before I save the source, much less attempt compiling it.
Perhaps I have been replaced by a small shell script... ;)
The early worm deserves the bird...
Oliver Sacks has anecdotes in his book Musicophilia about patients that have lost all interest in music, or even consider it irksome noise.
Hmm, that pretty much describes how I felt about music during the 90's. Whenever I heard the term "alternative music", I assumed they'd accidently left out the "to".
Damn kids... :p
... So, adding automatic encryption raises the price back to where it was a decade ago.
*cough*bullshit*cough*
You either have no idea of the relative computational intensity of the problem vs. the other issues you mentioned, or you're imagining some bizarrely expensive algorithm be used that's far beyond what's generally used today in terms of time and memory required.
Modern solar power systems work at night just fine. However, they get in trouble if you get little sun for many days in a row, running the batteries down with little recharging.
I doubt the storm would have damaged the aircraft (part of the reason a wind seems to hit your car so hard is, being firmly planted on the ground, it can't move with the wind). OTOH, stormy weather often contributes to disorientation and loss of situational awareness. In mountainous areas, this can cause a pilot to fly into a "cumulogranite" cloud. Dollars to donuts this was a CFIT.
Don't they usually have the option of ejection and parachuting in modern planes?
No. This wasn't an F-16. And it looks like the kind of accident where the pilot's first sign that he was in trouble was approximately 0.2 seconds before impact.
If nothing was wrong with the plane, he probably flew it right into the side of the mountain under power, not realizing the mountain was right there until it was, well, right there. If something was wrong with the plane, he probably could have successfully glided it to a survivable impact. There's rarely any use for a parachute in a small, single-engine airplane. And in cases where it would be useful, they make them so you actually put the parachute on the plane itself, which is actually a lot more useful for a number of reasons related to both the safety of using it, and reducing damage to the plane itself.
Is it just me or does the wife seem really really indifferent. Here is the possbility her husband's remains have been found, and she's "monitoring the situation"? The hell? Its not a weather system! Then again, I can't begin to imagine what she went through, so maybe this is an attempt on her part to keep her hopes from getting too high. I dunno, but really, does anyone else get this vibe?
Um, what the heck? Were you expecting her to fly out there with a shovel or something?
If you are worth his kind of money, I think carrying $1,000 is a non-issue. He was, after all, staying at one of the Hilton's places, and depending on where he was going perhaps he preferred to pay for fuel in cash? I dunno, I used to carry $200 with me all the time and that was when I was earning $22K a year. If I was loaded I sure would carry $1k just on the occasion I needed it (10 x $100 bills is nothing, same in my pocket as $5 and 5 $1s)
Ditto, although it should be noted that back when I always made sure I had 2 $100 bills stashed in my wallet (not in the usual place -- it was for emergency use only and I'd have to dig it out of its hidden pocket to get it), this was before you could use debit cards anywhere. Nowadays there's no point -- it's been years since I've seen anyplace where I couldn't just swipe a card aside from gum ball machines. That said, Fossett was a lot older than me, he probably hung on to the habit of always having cash in his pocket after I finally accepted I didn't need it anymore.
Kudos to hiker that turned in what he found. I suspect many people would not have turned in the thousand dollars or so in cash had they made the discovery.
"If it's not yours, don't take it." Why do some people find basic ethics so hard? :(
Not to mention the questions that would come up when the wife says, "I wonder what happened to the $1000 he always kept in his pocket, just in case he needed some cash." (Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn't, but that's a big chance to take.)
I suppose you could take the cash and then not report the find at all, thus preventing anyone from even asking you that question, but gods -- the poor widow and all his friends and stuff -- you need to be more than just a bit greedy to do something like that. I think at that point you go beyond the average person's casual evil into the realm of real monsters. I don't know that there's really a lot of people who would go that far. I like to think not. Maybe I'm naive...
The bailout itself is a mandatory government program, not private enterprise. If you're upset about your hard-earned income being taxed away to prop up failed corporations -- and why shouldn't you be? -- ...
Perhaps because when the government has done this sort of thing with our money in the past, it has usually actually turned a profit? If the government invests $700 billion and makes back a trillion +, we end up better off in the long run. That sort of thing doesn't upset me. I'm more upset when you cut my taxes while you're running a deficit. I know damn well I'm going to have to pay for that spending anyhow, except now I'll have to pay for it, and pay interest too. That's a tax increase, not a tax cut. Reagan and W. have raised our taxes more than the most wildly liberal spender ever did. We could build enough bridges to nowhere to actually get somewhere with all the money we squander on paying the interest.
It is unconstitutional for the federal government to tax individuals. The fed can only tax the states. So you basically do not support the Constitution.
I'm guessing you're a time-traveler from the 18th or 19th century. You might want to read an updated copy of the constitution, paying particular attention to the 16th amendment.
(I'm assuming you're a time traveler, since otherwise it would follow from what you're saying that you do not support the Constitution, and you seem to be saying that's a bad thing.)
Makes me wonder about that near-future 5-year gap where the US will have no way to get up there and repair our assets in space (like the Hubble)??...
Virgin Galatic? SpaceX?
I'm thinking a five-year downtime for government run space launches is a wonderful idea. A lot of people seem to think private companies would do a much better job of it. I don't know that that's true, but let's see what happens. We may look back on the five-year NASA downtime as the best thing that ever happened to the US space industry...
Virgin Galactic has done successful manned space flights, albeit only sub-orbital. SpaceX has now successfully done orbital launches, albeit unmanned. Manned orbital spaceflight is within reach. The private sector isn't quite ready to service a satellite in orbit -- but it ain't that far off...
It appears to be a generic troll. Completely generic. Notice the complete lack of any context whatsoever. You could cut that text and paste it into any political discussion from 1980 until today -- "the current crisis" could mean anything, the "explanation" of the root cause in fact fails to in any way explain how the supposed cause is in any way causal to "the current crisis" (it can't do that, of course, since that would require actually justifying the assertion with details that would then make the post no longer completely generic). There is, in fact, no actual content to the message itself -- it like a Rorschach test -- if you thought that message actually said anything, look again at what it actually says, vs. what meaning you're actually inserting into it yourself by making assumptions about what the author is referring to. If in fact you think it said anything at all, you're making assumptions about what the author meant that he never actually said. "the current crsis", "the problem" "pretty much every area" -- the message contains many words, but it specifically says nothing at all.
Still though one wonders how someone can be running an ISP with 78% hostile traffic and not realize something is up.
If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say. ;)
The president is there from its predecessors...
Bush is gonna be in the game? That makes a kind of sense...
free as in beer but not free as in speech
What of free from fear Of corporate over-reach?
Where's the +1 Poetic mod when you need it? *sigh*