Perhaps the TSA has some qualified folks for this job...
to rank the attractiveness of people from either gay or straight perspective
Apparently, we don't need real live moderators to rank attractiveness.. On the gay vs straight issue, not sure this helps much in a bar scene (for example, from a straight perspective, maybe I find a lesbian very attractive... not gonna help me much). However, if perhaps there really is gaydar and they can figure out how to automate that...
then making tallies per gender per estimated age buckets (21-24, 25-28, 29-32, etc.)
That's what they are doing w/o the vetted moderators...
THEN you'd really have something.
I think privacy advocates already think there is something here...
??? Mr/Ms AC, I didn't change any examples, that was my first post. Perhaps you are refering to another poster?
I can't speak for anyone else, but my first statement of my post was "The 555 stuff isn't really that amazing" and I finished with "Sure it isn't rocket science..."
Do you have some issue with these statements?
Or are you (Mr/Ms AC) just so filled with Woz hate that you have to attack everyone that says anything even remotely positive about Mr Woz with a hair trigger post? Are you're pissed that he wasn't eliminated before your favorite Dancing with the stars celebrity? Fan of Holly Madison, or a GoGo's fan maybe? Is that why you are posting AC?;^);^)
Of course Mr Woz isn't god (despite what some OTHER posters may have gushed about), be he seems to have been a damn good engineer. However, sometimes the best role models for people are not the ones that are so beyond us that we can never aspire to be them (scientists or researchers that create a new paradigm), but maybe for some of us lowly engineers, someone that we hope we can hold a candle to on a good day and thus more relateable and a bar that we might be able to reach some day if the stars align...
Is it literally too hard for you to let people have their own heros instead foisting yours upon others? Something to think about Mr/Ms AC...
But to answer your question (if it was directed to me and not the other poster), what Woz did with the 55x timer is very vanilla and probably could be copied out of a fairchild or national app-note, but what Woz did with the disc controller was something that pretty much was wizardry. Basically he single handedly designed a amazingly cheap floppy disc controller (40 chips vs 5 chips) that not only was more advanced in storage capacity and access speed than any other in the industry at the time.
By doing so allowed Apple to sell a disc drive for under $500 with a BOM of $150 (eventually reduced to $80) enabling Apple to practically mint money with this product. In several interviews with Mr Jobs and other Apple and (some disbelieving) Shugart contemporaries, they credit this floppy disc controller design by Woz as the major growth driver at Apple and probably more important than the computer itself in launching the Apple IPO. Basically, Woz didn't have any background in floppy disc controller theory, he read some data sheets and figured it out and beat out the best in the industry at the time. He also layed out the controller circuit board to minimize the feedthroughs to help improve the reliability and manufacturability, basically a soup-to-nuts holistic designer. That's engineering wizardry (to me anyhow, as a lowly engineer)... something I might aspire to someday... But even the best designer needs to crank out a 55x-esque circuit sometimes. I'm sure all you your heroes had a few more pedestrian accomplishments along the way too.
The 555 stuff isn't really that amazing, but Woz did some fairly amazing things. For example...
Integrating the dram refresh with the video display on the original Apple ][ was pretty clever as with the 1/2 phase pixel shift to get cheap color w/o fancy sub-carrier modulation.
The original Apple ][ floppy drive subsystem using "raw" drive mechanims from Shugart and implementing the controller mechanism in 5 chips and some software (soft sectored avoiding the punch hole detector, no track0 detector, no head load solinoid, 5/3 software group-coder allowing 13-16 sectors/track instead of 10 when others were using MFM, etc.). This when other vendors at the time had quite inferior, yet more expensive floppy disk drives.
Sure it isn't rocket science, but it is still good engineering wizardry, not just "plugging resistors".
Is this the same country that sued scientists over not predicting natural disasters last year?
That's the sensationalist headline, but it's more a lesson on how scientist should present their theories. Say'n stuff like "no reason to suppose a sequence of small earthquakes could be the prelude to a strong event", probably should have instead been something more like: it's unlikely that small earthquakes are are prelude to a strong event... Sure it sounds weasly, but is probably more representative of how science really should be presenting information to make it more resistant to politician-telephone distortion into a statement like "the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy"...
Who gets sued if / when the Volcano erupts (regardless of the cause- natural or drilling)?
I don't know how the italian legal system works, but if it's like the USA legal system, anyone with enough money that might be forced to pay is a potential target of a law suit.
Sadly this is not a meme, it's a neologism. Basically, something that children do all the time: make up word that mean whatever they want them to mean...
A meme is a reduction of a cultural phenoma into a catch phrase, where culture (in this context) requires as a group much larger than 1 person.
A fancy name, but it seems to me that this mostly just a DSP textbook minimum phase filter. A minimum phase filter is just a causal filter which has minimal group delay means it can be made to sound more "analog" (since analog filters are usually mostly causal meaning there is no filter contribution from the "future"). This is of course basically tipping the hat to the sound those vinyl/tube-amp purists claim is the "best" sound (not that vinyl/tube-amp purists would actually like this as it is still an soul-less digital approximation, although perhaps listening through oxygen-free copper speaker wire might help ease them to this "approximation")...
I guess having "minimum" in the name isn't a good marketing technique thus "apodizing"...
1. You are assuming that US senators know what the current a law is. 2. You are assuming that the goal is to bar reentry to this person as some sort of "punishment"
As you say, this is all about grandstanding. Oh the evil 1%-ers. It's even better if they are "fur-i-nars".
It seems highly unlikely that this proposed law is going to affect Mr Saverin much. Since he's already renounced and as I understand it, the amount of his exit tax have effectively already been determined (fair market value of your unrealized capital gain on the day you renounce even if you didn't sell anything). It's unlikely that an expost-facto law (e.g. one with a 10 year lookback period starting today) will stand judicial scrutiny if challenged. Also, if you take his statements at face value, he wants more financial freedom and apparently there are many banks and financial insitutions that won't do business with US citizens because of US reporting requirements. If that is true, he's been planning to put at least some money in these types of institutions and probably now, unlikely now to put his money any institution that the US will likely be able to enforce getting this 30% yearly capital gains tax proposed by these Senators and given the reference "inadmisable alien" laws on the books today, I doubt he was planning on coming back to the US any time in the near future...
Considering that the Kepler mission was hoping to catch quite a few so-called "hot-jupiters" in transit and apparently none have seemingly appeared around stars that have superflares, perhaps something about the superflares are keeping hot-jupiters from migrating close to their central stars or maybe these potential hot-jupiters migrated a bit too close to these stars and all we are seeing are the superflare "burps" after the star fried (or ate) those potential "hot-jupiters"...
From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch.
Because 5 seconds make all the difference.
So instead of spending 5 second and some chump change to pay someone to write it, Google chose to copy it instead. Hmm, that's even more evil if you ask me as that shows an intent to copy...;^)
That's like arguing that if you shoplift some water from a vendor (i.e,, someone that is trying to sell said water), it's okay because it is was cheap and I could have gotten it cheaply at home if I really wanted to. The facts as I understand them in this case are you attempted to negociate to buy it, and did not come to terms, you didn't get it at home, and you did shoplift it. The main arguments you are likely to have are that water isn't really property at all (which is one common argument against copyrights in general), or if it could be considered property, somehow this specific water is in the public domain or your use of the water constituted fair use. Of course the loss that one incurs due to the misappropriation of property could be small, but in most cases, society generally makes punishment punitive to deter future transgressions. Unfortunatly in this area the law is likley against Oracle, as copyright damages are mostly statutory in nature, not punitive.
That's why they say if you owe the bank $1,000 the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank $1M, you own the bank. Of course the corollary to that old saying that somehow you find yourself owing the bank $500M, you own the government and the government owes the bank...;^)
Well, I wish the English language would evolve into a language that has less inconsistent rules and spelling for words. As it is now, it's as if it's a slut getting gang raped by every other language on the planet.
Funny, I think the predominant impression is that other languages are the ones being defiled by English (esp French, Chinese, Japanese, and German) or even murdered (e.g., Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, Manx, Navajo, Cherokee, Inuktituk, etc)...
Let me guess, you must be a "queen's english" speaker...
Contrary to popular belief, there is no death tax. It's an inheritance tax. With proper estate planning, if you give all of your assets when you die to a charitable trust instead of trying to give it to your heirs, there is essentially no tax to you (you are dead) and the charity gets the full benefit of your estate. There is effectively only a tax to give the money to someone who generally would owe income tax (say like your kids who are still alive or a company). Of course when you are alive, and you give a substantial amount of money (above the gift limit) to someone who owes tax they have to pay tax on that windfall (although the income tax rate they would pay would generally be lower than the 55% estate tax rate).
One rationale of an estate tax is to effectively "withhold" the taxes from the deceased (kinda like how a casino or lottery needs to withhold taxes from prizes even though technically they would otherwize be able to give all the money to the receipent as the recipent owes the taxes, not the payer of the prize), the government knows that the recipient may spend all the money and then not be able to pay the taxes and they can't get blood (taxes) out of a (broke) turnip...
The other rationale of estate tax is to prevent the creation of dynasties of wealth like royalty that never have to work.
So while Ceres and Vesta live in the same castle, they are adopted from different families.
Since they probably were both "conceived" from matter from the same protoplanetary disc, it's might be considered more akin to Heteropaternal superfecundation, than adoption from different families (which might imply that one of them came from another star system and was "captured" in that orbit).
Um, the summary says it might have become a planet, but didn't.
So basically Vesta is Earth's aborted little sister.
Pluto on the other hand is a "dwarf planet" which is presumably something like the lazy uncle's helper monkey.
Well, Vesta is proably more like Ceres dwarf fraternal twin sister than Earth's (shared the same rough orbital distance or "womb" as Ceres, but didn't quite make it to planet status and became a dwarf twin to a dwarf planet). Basically one princess would have to kill the other princess to clear out the orbit/castle to become the queen of the orbit and become a planet. Unfortunatly, the chaotic life that they lead in the same castle (like prince charles and camilla) and the influence of a powerful royal in nearby castle (the king of the gods) will probably prevent either of them from ever ruling the their castle.
Pluto on the other hand is George O'Leary (or maybe in time Yahoo's Scott Thompson). Originally thought to have the required blood-line, but even after a successful career, new lines of inquiry revealed that the blood-line didn't exist and then was kicked out, but went on to live a prosperous life in as the king of the dwarfs instead of the dwarf of the kings...
People who manage school budgets are not unlike the people that manage home budgets: they don't get much credit for saving money, except for the credit they get is for how they spend the money that they have saved. There unfortunatly is a tendency to avoid splurge/waste all that money that was diligently saved. Example: look, I saved enough money to send us on a expensive vacation! Look what I bought with this stimulus money!
Also, schools (like many businesses), are prime targets for product and service slamming attack by unscrupulus vendors. Even in the best of times, purchasing groups for school districts and many businesses aren't really experts at what to buy, or even how to negotiate deals. They often aren't much better than the typical minimally-informed car buyer who goes into a car dealer and expects to buy a car and only does it once every 5-10 years. The car dealer gives them an over-inflated price, lets the purchaser negotiate it down so the potential purchaser can feel good, they buy the product and a few more marginally-valuable goodies that have super-high profit margins as add-ons at the last moment. If the purchaser doesn't play ball, they've wasted all the time and go to the next pre-qualified vendor that does the exact same thing to the purchaser, until eventually either the purchaser gets lucky and finds a honest vendor, or they just get tired and buy something that is sorta what they want/need.
Why does this happen more to businesses and schools than individuals? It probably doesn't, it just seem like that because of reporting. Joe-average (or Jane-average) consumer has this happen all the time to them (esp if they don't care too much about money, or maybe they didn't earn the money, but got it from their spouse), but you don't see it on the news. Many people buy stuff because it's "cool" or they got a free gift bag, money is often not a criteria. However many times, the motivation boils down to you can't show people the money you save/earn/found unless it makes a splash and if you feel the need to show the splash to show your worth (to your boss/spouse/friend), it's easy to fall into this trap and vendors know it and they have a product/price point for every amount of splash you want to make.
Jesus would probably just study for and take the test...
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's... If the law of the land is...... then that is what we must do. It is the law! We should however, work and pray extremely hard to change the law. The ideal situation would be to have the law abolished.
A few interesting data points about the Science 2011 8th grade test results... 112 Average score in Washington DC (lowest) 140 Average score in California 149 Average score in New York 151.7 Average "blue" state score 152.5 Average state score 153 Average score in Texas 153.2 Average "red" state score 161 Average DOD overseas school score 164 Average North Dakota school score (highest)
True, yellow journalism has been around for a long time. Just like most things it wasn't invented by the internet, but there were options in the past. Now it's pretty much all sources of news are generally un-researched journalism...
I'll submit that scientific publishing is getting to be this way as well. The bad science isn't new (n-rays?), but as the cost of entry goes down for scientific publishing, and the older journals become "too-big-to-fail", the desire for more "impact" the scientific publishing industry seem to be getting more "yellow"...
I think the real problem today, is that jounalists think they can be stars out of the gate. In the old days, you started out as a fact-checker, before you could get even get a word that you wrote published (usually anonymously at first). By the time you got a "by-line" you have come up through the trenches and seen all of the behind the scenes mistakes that the "star" writers made. Today you have a blog and no editor. Not only quality journalism goes out the window, but these new so-called journalists don't learn the consequences for some of their habits, because they haven't seen others make them (and haven't been motivated like a fact checker to find the problems).
Of course this "star-at-birth" issue isn't just problem with journalists, but many professions (e.g., scientists, chefs, programmers, etc)...
Attempting to shame folks into not breaking the build by checking in new files w/o building the whole tree (> 1 hour endeavor for cmodel + rtl), someone put up a "leader board" with a gold star for every confirmed build break.
Unfortunatly, this lead to 2 common extreme behaviours. The first was some folks were so fearful of breaking the build, they always built the whole tree (rather than say just the cmodel) for even very minor check-ins wasting lots of their time (often waiting for a floating licence to compile the rtl). Other more reckless folks relishing in getting long chains of gold stars to show that they were being productive (and just occasionally breaking the build) and thus were probably more reckless than normal ultimatly wasting other people's time with broken (although easy-to-fix) builds. For most other folks, we just essentially ignored it. So basically other than a silly in-office entertainment diversion, the net effect on group productivity was likely near-zero.
I imagine that most attempts at gamification will end up this way. Net zero...
Yeah, it didn't make sense. After reading the article, it was clearly a typo, and should have said "from accessing information on any computer that isn't owned or controlled by an employer". Ie. employers can still demand you hand over passwords on *their* systems, which seems reasonable enough.
Of course that means you might still have a problem if you want to work for a social networking company that you actually use... Of course said company already has your data, but if you are part of the 99% that uses the same password everywhere, you are kinda screwed if you actually hand over your password.
You can ask these sorts of questions. The law does not prohibit asking. It prohibits using the information in making a hiring decision. Because it is VERY difficult to support the claim that although you asked about , but did not factor that into your decision-making, smart employers have a POLICY against asking such things - but it's not illegal.
IANAL, but as far as I know, although many of these "sorts" of questions are not strictly prohibited, there is a specific prohibition against asking any pre-employment questions about any disability (including pregnacy) including the nature of any obvious disabilitly unless it is essential to the qualifications of the job (aka BFOQ or bona fide occupational qualification) that cannot be accommodated. This exception was carved out by the American with Disabilities Act and made any of these types of questions illegal. The other types of potentially discrimantory questions are certainly unadvised to ask as well even if not illegal. Of course take this advice (as any other advice) with a grain of salt as you heard it on the internet.
Typically a "green" produced by GaN is fairly easy to manufacture and fairly efficient, but it is physically a very *hard* material. In contrast, the "blue-green" produced by InGaN (an alloy of a little bit of InN and base of GaN) isn't as efficient as it tends to have lots crystal defects and these defect cause brittle-ness and results in some electron-hole recombinations to be non-radiative (generating heat and not band-gap light emissions).
Regardless of this manufacturability issue, many white LEDs use an InGaN band-gap devices and create the "warmer" parts of the spectrum using phosphors. This makes most of the output light more blue-ish, but only the phosphor re-radiated (stoke's shifted) part in the warmer part of the spectrum where you pay the efficiency cost. For "cool" devices, less of the output is down-converted, so you have less efficiency loss. For "warmer" devices, more of the light is down converted and you pay for more conversion efficiency loss. Some warm devices actually have multiple LEDs (say a red, green, and blue), but color stability is generally hard to maintain over time and temperature, so these devices are generally less efficient and more expensive.
In any case, the effect that was described is that the currently "cheap" way of growing GaN base crystals for LEDs results in a polar orientation which is bad for high-current operation as it tends to generate a back field. This is described in more detail in this other site:
Most of the commercial GaN devices are grown along the [0001] direction, so-called “polar” or “c-plane” structures. However, there is an internal electric field perpendicular to the active regions in the c-plane devices as the c-axis is polar. This will result in band bending and a poor overlap of electron and hole wave-functions (the Quantum confined Stark effect, or QCSE), which reduces the radiative recombination efficiency and affects the device performance. In order to avoid (or reduce the effects of) the QCSE, GaN can be grown in “non-polar”, or “semi-polar”, orientations, in which there is no, or much less, internal polarization fields along the growth direction. In theory, this should increase the efficiency of light emitting structures. The high density of structural defects (such as basal plane stacking faults and partial dislocations) in heteroepitaxially grown non-polar and semi-polar GaN results in low internal quantum efficiency and output power of the devices, as reported in the literature.
Of course the answer is to just grow low-defect GaN in a non-polar or semi-polar orientation, but that's currently hard to do. These UCSB researchers aren't the only group working on this problem, but they apparently have done some cooperation with people doing actual manufacturing (Mitsubishi Chemical).
Slashdot Mirror
just need some vetted moderators
Perhaps the TSA has some qualified folks for this job...
to rank the attractiveness of people from either gay or straight perspective
Apparently, we don't need real live moderators to rank attractiveness.. On the gay vs straight issue, not sure this helps much in a bar scene (for example, from a straight perspective, maybe I find a lesbian very attractive... not gonna help me much). However, if perhaps there really is gaydar and they can figure out how to automate that...
then making tallies per gender per estimated age buckets (21-24, 25-28, 29-32, etc.)
That's what they are doing w/o the vetted moderators...
THEN you'd really have something.
I think privacy advocates already think there is something here...
??? Mr/Ms AC, I didn't change any examples, that was my first post. Perhaps you are refering to another poster?
I can't speak for anyone else, but my first statement of my post was "The 555 stuff isn't really that amazing" and I finished with "Sure it isn't rocket science..."
Do you have some issue with these statements?
Or are you (Mr/Ms AC) just so filled with Woz hate that you have to attack everyone that says anything even remotely positive about Mr Woz with a hair trigger post? Are you're pissed that he wasn't eliminated before your favorite Dancing with the stars celebrity? Fan of Holly Madison, or a GoGo's fan maybe? Is that why you are posting AC? ;^) ;^)
Of course Mr Woz isn't god (despite what some OTHER posters may have gushed about), be he seems to have been a damn good engineer. However, sometimes the best role models for people are not the ones that are so beyond us that we can never aspire to be them (scientists or researchers that create a new paradigm), but maybe for some of us lowly engineers, someone that we hope we can hold a candle to on a good day and thus more relateable and a bar that we might be able to reach some day if the stars align...
Is it literally too hard for you to let people have their own heros instead foisting yours upon others? Something to think about Mr/Ms AC...
But to answer your question (if it was directed to me and not the other poster), what Woz did with the 55x timer is very vanilla and probably could be copied out of a fairchild or national app-note, but what Woz did with the disc controller was something that pretty much was wizardry. Basically he single handedly designed a amazingly cheap floppy disc controller (40 chips vs 5 chips) that not only was more advanced in storage capacity and access speed than any other in the industry at the time.
By doing so allowed Apple to sell a disc drive for under $500 with a BOM of $150 (eventually reduced to $80) enabling Apple to practically mint money with this product. In several interviews with Mr Jobs and other Apple and (some disbelieving) Shugart contemporaries, they credit this floppy disc controller design by Woz as the major growth driver at Apple and probably more important than the computer itself in launching the Apple IPO. Basically, Woz didn't have any background in floppy disc controller theory, he read some data sheets and figured it out and beat out the best in the industry at the time. He also layed out the controller circuit board to minimize the feedthroughs to help improve the reliability and manufacturability, basically a soup-to-nuts holistic designer. That's engineering wizardry (to me anyhow, as a lowly engineer)... something I might aspire to someday... But even the best designer needs to crank out a 55x-esque circuit sometimes. I'm sure all you your heroes had a few more pedestrian accomplishments along the way too.
The 555 stuff isn't really that amazing, but Woz did some fairly amazing things. For example...
Integrating the dram refresh with the video display on the original Apple ][ was pretty clever as with the 1/2 phase pixel shift to get cheap color w/o fancy sub-carrier modulation.
The original Apple ][ floppy drive subsystem using "raw" drive mechanims from Shugart and implementing the controller mechanism in 5 chips and some software (soft sectored avoiding the punch hole detector, no track0 detector, no head load solinoid, 5/3 software group-coder allowing 13-16 sectors/track instead of 10 when others were using MFM, etc.). This when other vendors at the time had quite inferior, yet more expensive floppy disk drives.
Sure it isn't rocket science, but it is still good engineering wizardry, not just "plugging resistors".
Is this the same country that sued scientists over not predicting natural disasters last year?
That's the sensationalist headline, but it's more a lesson on how scientist should present their theories. Say'n stuff like " no reason to suppose a sequence of small earthquakes could be the prelude to a strong event", probably should have instead been something more like: it's unlikely that small earthquakes are are prelude to a strong event... Sure it sounds weasly, but is probably more representative of how science really should be presenting information to make it more resistant to politician-telephone distortion into a statement like "the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy"...
Who gets sued if / when the Volcano erupts (regardless of the cause- natural or drilling)?
I don't know how the italian legal system works, but if it's like the USA legal system, anyone with enough money that might be forced to pay is a potential target of a law suit.
Sadly this is not a meme, it's a neologism. Basically, something that children do all the time: make up word that mean whatever they want them to mean...
A meme is a reduction of a cultural phenoma into a catch phrase, where culture (in this context) requires as a group much larger than 1 person.
A fancy name, but it seems to me that this mostly just a DSP textbook minimum phase filter. A minimum phase filter is just a causal filter which has minimal group delay means it can be made to sound more "analog" (since analog filters are usually mostly causal meaning there is no filter contribution from the "future"). This is of course basically tipping the hat to the sound those vinyl/tube-amp purists claim is the "best" sound (not that vinyl/tube-amp purists would actually like this as it is still an soul-less digital approximation, although perhaps listening through oxygen-free copper speaker wire might help ease them to this "approximation")...
I guess having "minimum" in the name isn't a good marketing technique thus "apodizing"...
Two things.
1. You are assuming that US senators know what the current a law is.
2. You are assuming that the goal is to bar reentry to this person as some sort of "punishment"
As you say, this is all about grandstanding. Oh the evil 1%-ers. It's even better if they are "fur-i-nars".
It seems highly unlikely that this proposed law is going to affect Mr Saverin much. Since he's already renounced and as I understand it, the amount of his exit tax have effectively already been determined (fair market value of your unrealized capital gain on the day you renounce even if you didn't sell anything). It's unlikely that an expost-facto law (e.g. one with a 10 year lookback period starting today) will stand judicial scrutiny if challenged. Also, if you take his statements at face value, he wants more financial freedom and apparently there are many banks and financial insitutions that won't do business with US citizens because of US reporting requirements. If that is true, he's been planning to put at least some money in these types of institutions and probably now, unlikely now to put his money any institution that the US will likely be able to enforce getting this 30% yearly capital gains tax proposed by these Senators and given the reference "inadmisable alien" laws on the books today, I doubt he was planning on coming back to the US any time in the near future...
Considering that the Kepler mission was hoping to catch quite a few so-called "hot-jupiters" in transit and apparently none have seemingly appeared around stars that have superflares, perhaps something about the superflares are keeping hot-jupiters from migrating close to their central stars or maybe these potential hot-jupiters migrated a bit too close to these stars and all we are seeing are the superflare "burps" after the star fried (or ate) those potential "hot-jupiters"...
From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch.
Because 5 seconds make all the difference.
So instead of spending 5 second and some chump change to pay someone to write it, Google chose to copy it instead. Hmm, that's even more evil if you ask me as that shows an intent to copy... ;^)
That's like arguing that if you shoplift some water from a vendor (i.e,, someone that is trying to sell said water), it's okay because it is was cheap and I could have gotten it cheaply at home if I really wanted to. The facts as I understand them in this case are you attempted to negociate to buy it, and did not come to terms, you didn't get it at home, and you did shoplift it. The main arguments you are likely to have are that water isn't really property at all (which is one common argument against copyrights in general), or if it could be considered property, somehow this specific water is in the public domain or your use of the water constituted fair use. Of course the loss that one incurs due to the misappropriation of property could be small, but in most cases, society generally makes punishment punitive to deter future transgressions. Unfortunatly in this area the law is likley against Oracle, as copyright damages are mostly statutory in nature, not punitive.
That's why they say if you owe the bank $1,000 the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank $1M, you own the bank. ;^)
Of course the corollary to that old saying that somehow you find yourself owing the bank $500M, you own the government and the government owes the bank...
Languages are dynamic and evolving
Well, I wish the English language would evolve into a language that has less inconsistent rules and spelling for words. As it is now, it's as if it's a slut getting gang raped by every other language on the planet.
Funny, I think the predominant impression is that other languages are the ones being defiled by English (esp French, Chinese, Japanese, and German) or even murdered (e.g., Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, Manx, Navajo, Cherokee, Inuktituk, etc)...
Let me guess, you must be a "queen's english" speaker...
Contrary to popular belief, there is no death tax. It's an inheritance tax. With proper estate planning, if you give all of your assets when you die to a charitable trust instead of trying to give it to your heirs, there is essentially no tax to you (you are dead) and the charity gets the full benefit of your estate. There is effectively only a tax to give the money to someone who generally would owe income tax (say like your kids who are still alive or a company). Of course when you are alive, and you give a substantial amount of money (above the gift limit) to someone who owes tax they have to pay tax on that windfall (although the income tax rate they would pay would generally be lower than the 55% estate tax rate).
One rationale of an estate tax is to effectively "withhold" the taxes from the deceased (kinda like how a casino or lottery needs to withhold taxes from prizes even though technically they would otherwize be able to give all the money to the receipent as the recipent owes the taxes, not the payer of the prize), the government knows that the recipient may spend all the money and then not be able to pay the taxes and they can't get blood (taxes) out of a (broke) turnip...
The other rationale of estate tax is to prevent the creation of dynasties of wealth like royalty that never have to work.
So while Ceres and Vesta live in the same castle, they are adopted from different families.
Since they probably were both "conceived" from matter from the same protoplanetary disc, it's might be considered more akin to Heteropaternal superfecundation, than adoption from different families (which might imply that one of them came from another star system and was "captured" in that orbit).
Um, the summary says it might have become a planet, but didn't.
So basically Vesta is Earth's aborted little sister.
Pluto on the other hand is a "dwarf planet" which is presumably something like the lazy uncle's helper monkey.
Well, Vesta is proably more like Ceres dwarf fraternal twin sister than Earth's (shared the same rough orbital distance or "womb" as Ceres, but didn't quite make it to planet status and became a dwarf twin to a dwarf planet). Basically one princess would have to kill the other princess to clear out the orbit/castle to become the queen of the orbit and become a planet. Unfortunatly, the chaotic life that they lead in the same castle (like prince charles and camilla) and the influence of a powerful royal in nearby castle (the king of the gods) will probably prevent either of them from ever ruling the their castle.
Pluto on the other hand is George O'Leary (or maybe in time Yahoo's Scott Thompson). Originally thought to have the required blood-line, but even after a successful career, new lines of inquiry revealed that the blood-line didn't exist and then was kicked out, but went on to live a prosperous life in as the king of the dwarfs instead of the dwarf of the kings...
People who manage school budgets are not unlike the people that manage home budgets: they don't get much credit for saving money, except for the credit they get is for how they spend the money that they have saved. There unfortunatly is a tendency to avoid splurge/waste all that money that was diligently saved. Example: look, I saved enough money to send us on a expensive vacation! Look what I bought with this stimulus money!
Also, schools (like many businesses), are prime targets for product and service slamming attack by unscrupulus vendors. Even in the best of times, purchasing groups for school districts and many businesses aren't really experts at what to buy, or even how to negotiate deals. They often aren't much better than the typical minimally-informed car buyer who goes into a car dealer and expects to buy a car and only does it once every 5-10 years. The car dealer gives them an over-inflated price, lets the purchaser negotiate it down so the potential purchaser can feel good, they buy the product and a few more marginally-valuable goodies that have super-high profit margins as add-ons at the last moment. If the purchaser doesn't play ball, they've wasted all the time and go to the next pre-qualified vendor that does the exact same thing to the purchaser, until eventually either the purchaser gets lucky and finds a honest vendor, or they just get tired and buy something that is sorta what they want/need.
Why does this happen more to businesses and schools than individuals? It probably doesn't, it just seem like that because of reporting. Joe-average (or Jane-average) consumer has this happen all the time to them (esp if they don't care too much about money, or maybe they didn't earn the money, but got it from their spouse), but you don't see it on the news. Many people buy stuff because it's "cool" or they got a free gift bag, money is often not a criteria. However many times, the motivation boils down to you can't show people the money you save/earn/found unless it makes a splash and if you feel the need to show the splash to show your worth (to your boss/spouse/friend), it's easy to fall into this trap and vendors know it and they have a product/price point for every amount of splash you want to make.
Jesus would probably just study for and take the test...
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's... If the law of the land is ...... then that is what we must do. It is the law! We should however, work and pray extremely hard to change the law. The ideal situation would be to have the law abolished.
A few interesting data points about the Science 2011 8th grade test results...
112 Average score in Washington DC (lowest)
140 Average score in California
149 Average score in New York
151.7 Average "blue" state score
152.5 Average state score
153 Average score in Texas
153.2 Average "red" state score
161 Average DOD overseas school score
164 Average North Dakota school score (highest)
Bad "journalism" started WAY before blogs.
True, yellow journalism has been around for a long time. Just like most things it wasn't invented by the internet, but there were options in the past. Now it's pretty much all sources of news are generally un-researched journalism...
I'll submit that scientific publishing is getting to be this way as well. The bad science isn't new (n-rays?), but as the cost of entry goes down for scientific publishing, and the older journals become "too-big-to-fail", the desire for more "impact" the scientific publishing industry seem to be getting more "yellow"...
I think the real problem today, is that jounalists think they can be stars out of the gate. In the old days, you started out as a fact-checker, before you could get even get a word that you wrote published (usually anonymously at first). By the time you got a "by-line" you have come up through the trenches and seen all of the behind the scenes mistakes that the "star" writers made. Today you have a blog and no editor. Not only quality journalism goes out the window, but these new so-called journalists don't learn the consequences for some of their habits, because they haven't seen others make them (and haven't been motivated like a fact checker to find the problems).
Of course this "star-at-birth" issue isn't just problem with journalists, but many professions (e.g., scientists, chefs, programmers, etc)...
Nap time would be good... So would milk and cookies... Didn't a bunch of dot-coms try this strategy?
Attempting to shame folks into not breaking the build by checking in new files w/o building the whole tree (> 1 hour endeavor for cmodel + rtl), someone put up a "leader board" with a gold star for every confirmed build break.
Unfortunatly, this lead to 2 common extreme behaviours. The first was some folks were so fearful of breaking the build, they always built the whole tree (rather than say just the cmodel) for even very minor check-ins wasting lots of their time (often waiting for a floating licence to compile the rtl). Other more reckless folks relishing in getting long chains of gold stars to show that they were being productive (and just occasionally breaking the build) and thus were probably more reckless than normal ultimatly wasting other people's time with broken (although easy-to-fix) builds. For most other folks, we just essentially ignored it. So basically other than a silly in-office entertainment diversion, the net effect on group productivity was likely near-zero.
I imagine that most attempts at gamification will end up this way. Net zero...
That's what the ribbon rack with slide-on ribbons are for....
After you read about this stuff, it's hard to be surprised by moving dirt...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_Playa
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/05/08/0110259/scientists-solve-mystery-of-irelands-moving-boulders
Yeah, it didn't make sense. After reading the article, it was clearly a typo, and should have said "from accessing information on any computer that isn't owned or controlled by an employer". Ie. employers can still demand you hand over passwords on *their* systems, which seems reasonable enough.
Of course that means you might still have a problem if you want to work for a social networking company that you actually use... Of course said company already has your data, but if you are part of the 99% that uses the same password everywhere, you are kinda screwed if you actually hand over your password.
You can ask these sorts of questions. The law does not prohibit asking. It prohibits using the information in making a hiring decision. Because it is VERY difficult to support the claim that although you asked about , but did not factor that into your decision-making, smart employers have a POLICY against asking such things - but it's not illegal.
IANAL, but as far as I know, although many of these "sorts" of questions are not strictly prohibited, there is a specific prohibition against asking any pre-employment questions about any disability (including pregnacy) including the nature of any obvious disabilitly unless it is essential to the qualifications of the job (aka BFOQ or bona fide occupational qualification) that cannot be accommodated. This exception was carved out by the American with Disabilities Act and made any of these types of questions illegal. The other types of potentially discrimantory questions are certainly unadvised to ask as well even if not illegal. Of course take this advice (as any other advice) with a grain of salt as you heard it on the internet.
Typically a "green" produced by GaN is fairly easy to manufacture and fairly efficient, but it is physically a very *hard* material. In contrast, the "blue-green" produced by InGaN (an alloy of a little bit of InN and base of GaN) isn't as efficient as it tends to have lots crystal defects and these defect cause brittle-ness and results in some electron-hole recombinations to be non-radiative (generating heat and not band-gap light emissions).
Regardless of this manufacturability issue, many white LEDs use an InGaN band-gap devices and create the "warmer" parts of the spectrum using phosphors. This makes most of the output light more blue-ish, but only the phosphor re-radiated (stoke's shifted) part in the warmer part of the spectrum where you pay the efficiency cost. For "cool" devices, less of the output is down-converted, so you have less efficiency loss. For "warmer" devices, more of the light is down converted and you pay for more conversion efficiency loss. Some warm devices actually have multiple LEDs (say a red, green, and blue), but color stability is generally hard to maintain over time and temperature, so these devices are generally less efficient and more expensive.
In any case, the effect that was described is that the currently "cheap" way of growing GaN base crystals for LEDs results in a polar orientation which is bad for high-current operation as it tends to generate a back field. This is described in more detail in this other site:
Most of the commercial GaN devices are grown along the [0001] direction, so-called “polar” or “c-plane” structures. However, there is an internal electric field perpendicular to the active regions in the c-plane devices as the c-axis is polar. This will result in band bending and a poor overlap of electron and hole wave-functions (the Quantum confined Stark effect, or QCSE), which reduces the radiative recombination efficiency and affects the device performance. In order to avoid (or reduce the effects of) the QCSE, GaN can be grown in “non-polar”, or “semi-polar”, orientations, in which there is no, or much less, internal polarization fields along the growth direction. In theory, this should increase the efficiency of light emitting structures. The high density of structural defects (such as basal plane stacking faults and partial dislocations) in heteroepitaxially grown non-polar and semi-polar GaN results in low internal quantum efficiency and output power of the devices, as reported in the literature.
Of course the answer is to just grow low-defect GaN in a non-polar or semi-polar orientation, but that's currently hard to do. These UCSB researchers aren't the only group working on this problem, but they apparently have done some cooperation with people doing actual manufacturing (Mitsubishi Chemical).