It greatly upsets me that they view this as a question of optimization.
Seek speed is nice, but it's only one aspect of SSD technology. Heat is another, and for a large segment of us the noise generated is the dominant feature. The HD is the only piece of the machine standing in the way of silent operation, and unlike power use or speed that's something that can affect the owner all day long even when they're not actually using the machine.
Holding up silent drives because they aren't quite fast enough is just disheartening.:-( I'm guessing for others, holding up cooler drives is equally sad.
I read that Texas was the only state (smart enough) to negotiate the right to secede if it wants to in the future.
Interesting....
Interesting but untrue. Such a right doesn't exist (unless you're of the opinion that it's implicitly allowed of every state--but there's nothing specific to Texas there).
Texas did, however, negotiate control over mining rights up to 3 leagues (10+ miles) out to sea rather than the usual 3. That's come in handy with the off-shore oil. And they did hold on to almost all public land rather than ceding it to the federal government (again resulting in a lot of oil money for the state).
GPUs almost never have fans unless you're using very recent accelerated 3d cards--way overkill even for most video playback machines. If you put together gaming machines a lot, you'll think all GPUs have fans, but if you put together more general machines fans in the GPU are still pretty uncommon.
Likewise, most CPUs don't need fans unless you're going with very recent models.
Fanless PSUs are less common, but always fairly easily available.
I've been putting together quiet PCs for a decade now, and the HD is the only component that hasn't been easily silenced with cheap, common, off-the-shelf components until the recent availability of SSDs. Almost always, you can put together something that was nearly top-peak performance 2 years ago and have the hard drive as the only noisy component.
For me the selling points is noise. Most of the time whatever machines I'm near are plugged in, but having a nearly silent media pc in the living room, having a silent instant-on music player in the bedroom, and having a whir-less office would increase my happiness for many hours out of the day.
Power savings would be pretty nice, too, but much less often.
Amen. I have a WRT54G, and it's been rebooted whenever the power goes out and that's it in 3 years.
I'm not sure _why_ some people feel the need to reboot them more often--they may actually need to do so. But it's not an intrinsic thing that all users need to do.
FWIW our internal network is 2 Windows desktops (upgraded about 4 months ago), a Windows laptop, a Linux desktop (still running an ancient Redhat release from before Fedora existed) and an Ubuntu Gutsy laptop.
So would you mind if that company (your employer) asked 0 questions but also provided only one option for health care - buy it yourself?
The whole point of getting health care through work instead of on your own is to get group coverage; the point of that is to avoid singling out individuals and instead go on the aggregate risk. As a healthy individual you give up a small break on cost in exchange for more cost-stability going forward. If you're going to be asked the individual questions, just go ahead and get individual coverage.
The situation you outline would be okay for me, though of course it would depend on the other level of compensation (I've done it in the past, but stable and subsidized insurance has some value that has to be reflected in the pay scale).
Right now (and in the past) I'm at a place that does have employer-provided health insurance. They never asked any such questions. It would be highly unusual in my experience, and like I said would defeat the whole group-bloc point of getting insurance through the employer instead of on your own.
Any of this sound familiar in a survey from your insurance application or work orientation pack?
No. What kind of draconian company do you work at?
I don't use drugs, but I'd definitely view it as a major red flag if a company was so un-trusting of its companies as to require them to pee in a cup on a regular basis. Maybe if it's a heavy security-clearance position I could see it (though I certainly know people who have admitted to occasional marijuana use and still gotten government clearance), but in general it'd make me look elsewhere for work.
And work asking if you drink or smoke? Seriously? What legal activity I engage in on my own time is none of your business (barring unusual lines of work); in theory that would be an even bigger red flag, but in practice I've never seen any company with such a policy.
We've noticed this 'dumbing down' (thanks Idiocracy) for a while now at Uni. The newer mathematics students enrolling in first year are lacking some of the basic skills. Example: a couple of years ago, trigonometric functions and identities were completely removed from the high school syllabus. It goes back all the way to year one at school.
Huh.
I just double checked my old high school (a public school in a navy town in Maine, not a magnet school or anything), and they're still doing the same math curriculum as they were 10 years ago. In the academic (college-bound) track, thats:
9th: Algebra I 10th: Geometry 11th: Algebra II 12th: Pre-calculus
Accelerated students may be a year (or, rarely, 2 years) ahead of that and do calculus in 12th (or, rarely, in 11th and take courses at the local university in 12th).
Geometry and pre-calc both cover trig.
The non-academic curriculum is pre-algebra/algebra I/logs and trig/algebra II. So even they get some exposure to trig.
No, cars with automatic transmissions are cheaper used than cars without, because no one wants a car with worse performance and worse fuel economy, when the only benefit is that you don't have to change gears. Cars with automatic transmissions are only for the stupid and lazy.
"Manual transmissions get better mileage than automatic transmissions" is one of those things that was absolutely true 20 years ago but requires more thought these days.
It depends entirely on the specifics of the transmission, vehicle, and driver. e.g. the 5-speed automatic in the Toyota Rav4 gets better mileage than the 5-speed manual, no matter how carefully you shift. But the 4-speed automatic gets worse mileage than a careful driver.
The Toyota FJ cruiser likewise gets better mileage in the automatic than the manual. I think the Mazda5 with the 5-speed auto is another.
Moreover, even in cars where the reverse is true studies show that most drivers don't optimize their shifting for fuel economy. Most people wind up getting better performance but worse fuel economy than most modern automatic transmissions (which are significantly more advanced than older versions).
Now, manuals do give more control (e.g. allowing better engine braking on snow/ice). And they almost always have better performance. You can pop-start them if the starter/battery dies. In many places they're cheaper. And if you're careful about driving for fuel economy, you can get better mileage in most models (but you'll lose the performance benefits then).
Really, they own that patent? Well then why in the last 15 years didn't they bother to enforce it? I'm sorry but lack of enforcement of a patent is grounds to dismiss that patent.
No, that's not true of patents, only trademarks/service marks.
There's a zillion examples of prior art everywhere in the world
Including monthly fees for the past 4 years, I've spent around $1000 total... on the other hand, if I'd gotten the lifetime subscription, I'd be at $827 with no monthly fees.
Yeah, which is a bit more than my $800 for a bit less capability but also a bit less time.
Basically my point is that if you're going for tons of extra functionality then maybe a MythTV box is worth it. If you want bare-bones DVR, Tivo's the way to go. In the middle, it's unclear--your use case is one of those "could go either way" scenarios, though it's likely close enough that the time isn't worth it unless the time is "fun hobby time that rewards me" rather than "tech time spent working on something". And that's up to the user.
I disagree. Think of a loop where a break condition depends on the validity of, say, Goldbach's conjecture.
That would be one of the absurd programs the GP was slamming. But a program where the break condition depends on, say, the user's input isn't amenable to static analysis and is perfectly reasonable and useful.
But you don't need to be perfect to be decent. A lot of static analysis can't tell what will happen, but can warn you if some code is unreachable, if no path will ever free memory, if a loop runs off the end of a memory allocation, etc.
The Linux kernel uses a lot of static checking tools to pretty great effect (sparse, for one, is extremely helpful, and the Stanford checker found a lot of problems too).
MythTV boxes are nice if you're going to do a ton of extra stuff.
E.g. mine is a surround sound decoder, mp3 server for the whole house, universal remote that saves state across battery failures (and will set up the speakers/TV/dvd player/etc all at one button press), emulator for old game consoles, has all my DVDs ripped so I don't have to hunt around for them, etc. I spent about $800 to get a nice-looking media case and fill it up, and avoided paying for Tivo/monthly charges, a surround decoder, and a really nice programmable multi-function remote. The other niceties made it worthwhile to me even after factoring in my time.
But if all you want is a DVR, it's probably not worth the expense (I'm hardly the type who has extra computers laying around to use for free, let alone tuner cards, large hard drives, IR receivers, etc) and time to set up vs. just getting a Tivo.
1. The defendant must have had a DUTY to the defendant (such as a duty to respect the copyrights of the plaintiff). 2. The defendant must be guilty of a BREACH of that duty (e.g., by participating in the unauthorized copying or distribution of a work under copyright). 3. CAUSATION: the breach must have been the proximate cause of some infringement of the plaintiff's rights. 4. The plaintiff must have suffered DAMAGES as a result. In civil law, the rule is: no harm, no foul.
Now, in some cases of copyright infringement, plaintiffs are able to rely on a statutory assessment of damages (element 4) instead of actual damages because the damage done to their copyright is (in theory) difficult to assess. This principle is pretty shaky, when you look at the theoretical underpinnings, but it's what the courts and legislature have allowed.
"What the legislature allowed" is key here and gives statutory damages their theoretical weight. The legislature, by definition, is allowed to rewrite the statutes and override common law.
If those 4 points were in the Constitution, then (theoretically) statutes couldn't override them (and courts of law regularly and properly make that point; it's conservative and proper, not "activist judging", to force Congress to follow the Constitution). But they're not, so statutory damages have fine theoretical legal underpinnings.
My point is that it isn't the place of the government to tell people that their views are wrong.
Precisely. The government shouldn't be defining marriage at all--they shouldn't be banning it, nor allowing it. It's not a government question. Let the individuals and religions involved define what marriage means in their religion or to them.
Why do Americans say "I could care less" instead of couldn't? "couldn't" is correct (and more common) here in the US, too. "could" is an (unfortunately common) incorrect form.
From the alt.usage.english FAQ:
The idiom "couldn't care less", meaning "doesn't care at all" (the meaning in full is "cares so little that he couldn't possibly care less"), originated in Britain around 1940. "Could care less", which is used with the same meaning, developed in the U.S. around 1960. We get disputes about whether the latter was originally a mis-hearing of the former; whether it was originally ironic; or whether it arose from uses where the negative element was separated from "could" ("None of these writers could care less..."). Henry Churchyard believes that this sentence by Jane Austen may be pertinent: "You know nothing and you care less, as people say." (Mansfield Park (1815), Chapter 29) Meaning-saving elaborations have also been suggested: "As if I could care less!"; "I could care less, but I'd have to try"; "If I cared even one iota -- which I don't --, then I could care less."
Recently encountered has been "could give a damn", used in the sense "couldn't give a damn".
An earlier transition in which "not" was dropped was the one that gave us "but" in the sense of "only". "I will not say but one word", where "but" meant "(anything) except", became "I will say but one word.
There's definitely an ethical component to "we don't want the poor/elderly/sick/children dying on the streets", but there's also a fair bit of "it's in our interests to stabilize things and disincentivize crime".
Lots of money gets spent (from police and defense to welfare and education) to try to stop unethical behavior in the first place and make society on the whole less dangerous, more economically sound, etc.
If you think that welfare is only motivated by trying to do good for all the needy, you're deluded; that's a part of it, for sure, but only a part.
It is, however, different from the extortion scenario you outline. If we decide to fund police to stop crime, that's a lot different from people coming to us and saying they'll commit crime unless we pay them for protection. And I don't think many people have said "fund welfare or I'm going to come loot your house"--society decided that a minimum stable safety net was good for lowering crime, without flagging that Tom and John were going to attack us if we didn't pay them.
Not all of us look at marriage as some prize that can be won on a reality show, or some tool that should be manipulated to pursue an agenda. That's true. Most people look at it as a private commitment between two individuals or as a religious commitment in front of God. In the former case, the individuals should be the ones deciding what it means. In the latter case, the religion should be free to define what marriage is without being controlled by the government. In neither case does the government have a compelling public interest.
Now, if we were discussing adoption rules, parenting obligations, or other situations where a minor is involved then there very well may be a compelling public interest, but the so-called "defense of marriage" laws apply based on the standing between two individuals (without children or with), and don't apply to individuals who have children but don't marry.
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It greatly upsets me that they view this as a question of optimization.
Seek speed is nice, but it's only one aspect of SSD technology. Heat is another, and for a large segment of us the noise generated is the dominant feature. The HD is the only piece of the machine standing in the way of silent operation, and unlike power use or speed that's something that can affect the owner all day long even when they're not actually using the machine.
Holding up silent drives because they aren't quite fast enough is just disheartening. :-( I'm guessing for others, holding up cooler drives is equally sad.
Interesting but untrue. Such a right doesn't exist (unless you're of the opinion that it's implicitly allowed of every state--but there's nothing specific to Texas there).
Texas did, however, negotiate control over mining rights up to 3 leagues (10+ miles) out to sea rather than the usual 3. That's come in handy with the off-shore oil. And they did hold on to almost all public land rather than ceding it to the federal government (again resulting in a lot of oil money for the state).
GPUs almost never have fans unless you're using very recent accelerated 3d cards--way overkill even for most video playback machines. If you put together gaming machines a lot, you'll think all
GPUs have fans, but if you put together more general machines fans in the GPU are still pretty uncommon.
Likewise, most CPUs don't need fans unless you're going with very recent models.
Fanless PSUs are less common, but always fairly easily available.
I've been putting together quiet PCs for a decade now, and the HD is the only component that hasn't been easily silenced with cheap, common, off-the-shelf components until the recent availability of SSDs. Almost always, you can put together something that was nearly top-peak performance 2 years ago and have the hard drive as the only noisy component.
For me the selling points is noise. Most of the time whatever machines I'm near are plugged in, but having a nearly silent media pc in the living room, having a silent instant-on music player in the bedroom, and having a whir-less office would increase my happiness for many hours out of the day.
Power savings would be pretty nice, too, but much less often.
Amen. I have a WRT54G, and it's been rebooted whenever the power goes out and that's it in 3 years.
I'm not sure _why_ some people feel the need to reboot them more often--they may actually need to do so. But it's not an intrinsic thing that all users need to do.
FWIW our internal network is 2 Windows desktops (upgraded about 4 months ago), a Windows laptop, a Linux desktop (still running an ancient Redhat release from before Fedora existed) and an Ubuntu Gutsy laptop.
I'm not ok with drug testing before taking the job, either. I'm not sure where you got the impression that I was. I don't do drugs, either.
So would you mind if that company (your employer) asked 0 questions but also provided only one option for health care - buy it yourself?
The whole point of getting health care through work instead of on your own is to get group coverage; the point of that is to avoid singling out individuals and instead go on the aggregate risk. As a healthy individual you give up a small break on cost in exchange for more cost-stability going forward. If you're going to be asked the individual questions, just go ahead and get individual coverage.
The situation you outline would be okay for me, though of course it would depend on the other level of compensation (I've done it in the past, but stable and subsidized insurance has some value that has to be reflected in the pay scale).
Right now (and in the past) I'm at a place that does have employer-provided health insurance. They never asked any such questions. It would be highly unusual in my experience, and like I said would defeat the whole group-bloc point of getting insurance through the employer instead of on your own.
Whoa.
The _average_ height for adult Japanese males is just over 5' 7".
No. What kind of draconian company do you work at?
I don't use drugs, but I'd definitely view it as a major red flag if a company was so un-trusting of its companies as to require them to pee in a cup on a regular basis. Maybe if it's a heavy security-clearance position I could see it (though I certainly know people who have admitted to occasional marijuana use and still gotten government clearance), but in general it'd make me look elsewhere for work.
And work asking if you drink or smoke? Seriously? What legal activity I engage in on my own time is none of your business (barring unusual lines of work); in theory that would be an even bigger red flag, but in practice I've never seen any company with such a policy.
We've noticed this 'dumbing down' (thanks Idiocracy) for a while now at Uni. The newer mathematics students enrolling in first year are lacking some of the basic skills. Example: a couple of years ago, trigonometric functions and identities were completely removed from the high school syllabus. It goes back all the way to year one at school.
Huh.
I just double checked my old high school (a public school in a navy town in Maine, not a magnet school or anything), and they're still doing the same math curriculum as they were 10 years ago. In the academic (college-bound) track, thats:
9th: Algebra I
10th: Geometry
11th: Algebra II
12th: Pre-calculus
Accelerated students may be a year (or, rarely, 2 years) ahead of that and do calculus in 12th (or, rarely, in 11th and take courses at the local university in 12th).
Geometry and pre-calc both cover trig.
The non-academic curriculum is pre-algebra/algebra I/logs and trig/algebra II. So even they get some exposure to trig.
Maybe you weren't eating the right ones. e.g. red bananas certainly have a different flavor from yellow Cavendishes.
"Manual transmissions get better mileage than automatic transmissions" is one of those things that was absolutely true 20 years ago but requires more thought these days.
It depends entirely on the specifics of the transmission, vehicle, and driver. e.g. the 5-speed automatic in the Toyota Rav4 gets better mileage than the 5-speed manual, no matter how carefully you shift. But the 4-speed automatic gets worse mileage than a careful driver.
The Toyota FJ cruiser likewise gets better mileage in the automatic than the manual. I think the Mazda5 with the 5-speed auto is another.
Moreover, even in cars where the reverse is true studies show that most drivers don't optimize their shifting for fuel economy. Most people wind up getting better performance but worse fuel economy than most modern automatic transmissions (which are significantly more advanced than older versions).
Now, manuals do give more control (e.g. allowing better engine braking on snow/ice). And they almost always have better performance. You can pop-start them if the starter/battery dies. In many places they're cheaper. And if you're careful about driving for fuel economy, you can get better mileage in most models (but you'll lose the performance benefits then).
Really, they own that patent? Well then why in the last 15 years didn't they bother to enforce it? I'm sorry but lack of enforcement of a patent is grounds to dismiss that patent.
No, that's not true of patents, only trademarks/service marks.
There's a zillion examples of prior art everywhere in the world
Exactly.
There's no logic to it. That was sort of the point.
Very clever, but it's turtles all the way down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
I'm not sure what version our clients are using, but it definitely eats the data for some of them.
We have even worst problems; it'll turn
Smith,John,703-555-5555
into
Smith,John,-5407
The latter being 703 minus 555 minus 5555.
when importing a CSV file. No joke. There are ways around it, but the default is pretty braindead.
Yeah, which is a bit more than my $800 for a bit less capability but also a bit less time.
Basically my point is that if you're going for tons of extra functionality then maybe a MythTV box is worth it. If you want bare-bones DVR, Tivo's the way to go. In the middle, it's unclear--your use case is one of those "could go either way" scenarios, though it's likely close enough that the time isn't worth it unless the time is "fun hobby time that rewards me" rather than "tech time spent working on something". And that's up to the user.
That would be one of the absurd programs the GP was slamming. But a program where the break condition depends on, say, the user's input isn't amenable to static analysis and is perfectly reasonable and useful.
But you don't need to be perfect to be decent. A lot of static analysis can't tell what will happen, but can warn you if some code is unreachable, if no path will ever free memory, if a loop runs off the end of a memory allocation, etc.
The Linux kernel uses a lot of static checking tools to pretty great effect (sparse, for one, is extremely helpful, and the Stanford checker found a lot of problems too).
MythTV boxes are nice if you're going to do a ton of extra stuff.
E.g. mine is a surround sound decoder, mp3 server for the whole house, universal remote that saves state across battery failures (and will set up the speakers/TV/dvd player/etc all at one button press), emulator for old game consoles, has all my DVDs ripped so I don't have to hunt around for them, etc. I spent about $800 to get a nice-looking media case and fill it up, and avoided paying for Tivo/monthly charges, a surround decoder, and a really nice programmable multi-function remote. The other niceties made it worthwhile to me even after factoring in my time.
But if all you want is a DVR, it's probably not worth the expense (I'm hardly the type who has extra computers laying around to use for free, let alone tuner cards, large hard drives, IR receivers, etc) and time to set up vs. just getting a Tivo.
"What the legislature allowed" is key here and gives statutory damages their theoretical weight. The legislature, by definition, is allowed to rewrite the statutes and override common law.
If those 4 points were in the Constitution, then (theoretically) statutes couldn't override them (and courts of law regularly and properly make that point; it's conservative and proper, not "activist judging", to force Congress to follow the Constitution). But they're not, so statutory damages have fine theoretical legal underpinnings.
My point is that it isn't the place of the government to tell people that their views are wrong.
Precisely. The government shouldn't be defining marriage at all--they shouldn't be banning it, nor allowing it. It's not a government question. Let the individuals and religions involved define what marriage means in their religion or to them.
From the alt.usage.english FAQ:
There's definitely an ethical component to "we don't want the poor/elderly/sick/children dying on the streets", but there's also a fair bit of "it's in our interests to stabilize things and disincentivize crime".
Lots of money gets spent (from police and defense to welfare and education) to try to stop unethical behavior in the first place and make society on the whole less dangerous, more economically sound, etc.
If you think that welfare is only motivated by trying to do good for all the needy, you're deluded; that's a part of it, for sure, but only a part.
It is, however, different from the extortion scenario you outline. If we decide to fund police to stop crime, that's a lot different from people coming to us and saying they'll commit crime unless we pay them for protection. And I don't think many people have said "fund welfare or I'm going to come loot your house"--society decided that a minimum stable safety net was good for lowering crime, without flagging that Tom and John were going to attack us if we didn't pay them.
Now, if we were discussing adoption rules, parenting obligations, or other situations where a minor is involved then there very well may be a compelling public interest, but the so-called "defense of marriage" laws apply based on the standing between two individuals (without children or with), and don't apply to individuals who have children but don't marry.