There is nothing stupid about using javascript for financial calculations. More and more applications are moving to the web, and the more you can put in the client, the more responsive the application will be. Imagine a budgeting app like Quicken on the web, or a simple loan/savings calculator whose parameters can be dynamically adjusted, and a table/graph changes in response. While critical calculations (when actually posting a payment for example) should be (re)done on the server, it would not be good if your "quick-look" rounded differently then the final result.
And no, people should not be using floating point for currency, ever, and fixed-point calcualtions aren't hard. But there is more to it that "just put everything in cents"; for example, you often have to deal with rates that are given as fractions of a cent. A decimal type would make this more convenient.
Finally, I don't know if IBM's proposal is a good one. I haven't looked at it; I was just talking in generalities.
You are right, it is only a step beyond a driver's license database - which is a bad idea to begin with. When the US introduced a national driver's license database with the REAL ID Act, the reaction here was just as negative, so don't pretend that we are being hypocritical.
Speaking of which, starting January first I have to get a passport to travel within the US (by plane), because my state has not yet met the requirements of the REAL ID Act (and good for them even if it was for the wrong reasons). If the federal government is going to act like fascists I'd prefer they do it out in the open.
When you have strict regulatory rules about how rounding must be done, and your numerical system can't even represent 0.2 exactly, then it is most certainly a concern. There are other solutions, such as using base-10 fixed point calculations rather than floating point, but having decimal floating point is certainly more convenient, and having a hardware implementation is much more efficient.
The term "public performance" in the context of Copyright law isn't just about whether the property is public. It has to do with whether the audience is "the public". If you invite enough people (greater than a judge considers fair use) over to your house to watch a DVD, then you are infringing on the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder.
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or
We broke both of those rules frequently in college - yay projector night!.
Where are these third world countries getting the money to buy carbon offsets? And why would they since they don't have any laws mandating them? You have this completely backwards.
Carbon offsets are purchased by companies in first world countries which have laws setting CO2 quotas, or by rich yuppies who want to feel good about their energy-exorbitant house/car/jet. They do so because it is cheaper to buy bogus carbon offsets from third world countries than it is to actually lower their own CO2 generation.
I think you have this term confused with something else.
My understanding was that these devices will monitor for activity and not transmit if something is detected. So what is the database for? It certainly isn't adequate to replace this active detection. Does it black-list bands that cannot be transmitted on locally even if they appear to be empty? Does it white-list band that are candidates for transmission if they appear to be open?
Are these devices required to check with both the geolocation service (GPS?) and local database before they can operate? It makes sense, because if I move a device to a new area and turn it on, you wouldn't want it to just start transmitting on bands that were allowed in the previous location but not here. But getting a GPS fix can take a while, and it would be a pain to have to wait upto a minute before using the device each time you turn it on - I suppose they would have suspend mode that keeps GPS lock, but has everything else powered off, rather than completely shutting the unit down when you weren't using it.
Just pretend they never had the idea at all and nothing has changed.
Bullshit. That is assuming that no-one else would have had this idea if Google didn't. Considering that practically every major invention has been developed independently by several people, that is a ridiculous position to take.
Patents can absolutely create a situation that is worse off than if the "inventor" had never thought of the idea. Whether Google is "Evil" or not depends on how they choose to use the patent.
Except the only people that it helps are worthless middlemen that know how to game the system.
In my experience I would split the companies into a few groups. First there are the ones that provide services - printing PCBs, building custom cables, assembling and testing racks of equipment, etc. These folks do good work and we would use them regardless of the rules - custom jobs are best done my small companies and even if there were only chains/franchises doing this sort of stuff, we would still choose between them based on the aptitude of whoever was running the local branch, rather than brand. All the rules do is make more hoops for us to jump through, and add cost to the contracting process.
Next there are genuinely small shops/retailers that know their product well, and often offer better prices than the big box shops (like on standard computer cables etc). And of course there are inexpensive online retailers that we all know about. I would very much prefer to use the online sites when I have time to wait for shipping, and then these small local shops when I need something that day, or need to talk to someone.
But the procurement rules make it too much of a damn hassle to use either. Instead we have to use these middle-men who don't know jack-shit about their product, but they know procurement process. I don't consider them to be either small or local either. They have zero local inventory. They only have a couple employees in town, and that is all they need because their entire job is to take our order and then place it with the manufacturer, often screwing it up in the process. So they are small in the sense that they have few employees, but process a huge amount revenue each year. Their sole purpose in existing is to fill the role of a middle man for the government procurement in town - they have no business with anyone else.
These rules don't prevent/discourage anyone from buying from large companies, they just make you put a shim company in the middle when the best/only option is to purchase from big companies.
Government procurement is a bureaucratic mess, and a royal pain in the ass for both buyers and sellers. Because of this (and because of rules preferring "small" and "minority-owned" businesses), it is very common for government entities to buy though a middle man that knows how their procurement systems work, rather than getting product directly from a manufacturer, especially for low-cost COTS products.
Well since Chromium is basically the Chrome Browser running on Linux/X11, I see it as more like GEM or Windows 3.11, except it lacks tiled windows and has a fairly primitive API.
It is known that this update caused problems on these phones. If it was intentional it would (supposedly) be a violation of the law. Assuming the judge thinks that the plaintiff's case has merit, and Apple cannot provide any other sort of evidence to the contrary, then it seems perfectly reasonable for the him to require that code be submitted as evidence. That doesn't mean that it will be open to the world, just to those people involved in the case who need to see it.
You can argue whether the NPT caused (or contributed) to this, but I think that ending the arms race - the continued increase in capabilities by the US and Russia - was a very good thing.
Politician: How many of these nukes do we need to keep in our arsenal? Engineer: How long do they have to last? Politician: Forever. Engineer: All of them.
If we knew we were going to be designing/building a new nuke every 10-15 years, then we could decrease our stockpile to the number we need now (whatever we decide that is) without adding on a huge margin to account for obsolescence.
I think we could restart a nuclear program without restarting an arms race with existing nuclear powers provided it was talked out first in a treaty were we all agreed to keep yields (size of boom made by the bomb) the same and agreed to decrease our stockpile even more. As far as the emerging nuclear powers go, sure this would give them more reason to feel justified about building a bomb (and would happily wave that fact in everyone's faces), but I don't think it would change the rate of their development at all.
You are trying to install a Gnome application in a KDE-based distribution, so of course it has to install half the Gnome libraries, since they aren't on the system already. If you tried to install Krita in a Gnome-based distribution, you would get just as many KDE dependencies.
I is this bug, which is currently the fourth most hated bug in KDE. There were originally several problems with SSL in KDE, including shipping with CA Root Certificates that KDE/QT libraries reject as having invalid syntax. I think most distros have fixed this bug, but it cropped back up for a while again when 4.3 landed in Debian. This caused KDE apps to reject about 3/4 of the SSL sites on the internet as having bad certificates.
While that appears to be fixed now, I still haven't been able to load my own certificates for the website and email servers I run.
The problem isn't people watching the movie 2012, it is the viral advertising surrounding it. They ran ads that made the movie sound a dramatization of a real idea rather than complete fiction, ala the Day After Tomorrow, and encourage them to search the web for the "real truth". The studio created a fake website purposing to be a scientific institute predicting a collision with earth in 2012. On top of this loonies have been talking about a 2012 apocalypse of some sort since we first understood the Mayan calendar, and latter some of them latched onto the Nimbiru idea after the books came out, so the internet is full of websites giving "evidence" of this catastrophe, many of whom claim to be scientific websites themselves.
Yeah, people with a decent bullshit detector should be able to figure out that this is all crap, but it's not like they just watched a normal movie and thought it was read - the studio is trying to present it as though it were real, by making it a conspiracy that the mainstream is covering up.
I often have to pring select pages from long pdf documents, and for now, I can only do it one-by-one, can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges. That's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4.
That is strange. I am running KDE 4.3 on Debian Squeeze, and that option is there. I use it printing documents from Okular all the time. The printing does have many other issues though. It doesn't have even/odd page option so I can do manual duplexing, and setting page margins has me completely befuddled. When I print a document from Kwrite it doesn't have any margin settings of it's own - and the margin settings for the printer (which I am told are really there to define the unprintable areas for the printer) reset to the defaults each time I change them.
My biggest problem with KDE 4.3 is the fact that SSL is completely broken. I've stopped using Konqueror altogether because of this, and it causes annoyances in KMail as well. I can't believe they released with a bug that serious.
Non-profit just means that you don't allow shareholders. That means it is harder to raise capital to expand your business, but it also means that you don't owe any of your revenue to shareholders. There is no "profit" because you feed all the earnings back into the company expenses which included salaries, bonuses, and whatever else the people running the non-profit think they deserve. And on top of this you don't pay any taxes.
Non-profit corporations are fine structures for running scams, in addition to being good for legitimate charities.
They may have overtaken Palm by a large margin, but they never even caught up with RIM let alone "dominated" the market as a whole which included other players like Nokia and Samsung as well.
To add to the AC, the games that children play exhibit behavior that mimic the normal cultural roles of males and females (sometimes exaggeratedly). Boy games tend to be more active and violent, girl's are more social. This segmentation between hunters/homemakers has existed long enough to be consistent with the idea of evolved biological differences between males and females being at least a major contributing factor.
And before the PC folks chime in, yes these are generalizations and as such do not apply to individuals, but are seen in a statistical sense.
One of the main reasons that we participate in cultural activities is to fit in with the group. If chemical-induced hormones made boys more likely to associate/relate with girls then they would be more likely to participate in girl activities - however culture defines them.
That said, it does seem like a bit of a leap to me - too many factors to control for to get meaningful results. I'd be more convinced by separate studies that showed that exposure to certain chemicals increased certain hormone levels, and people with those hormone levels were more likely to have feminine behavior than to jump straight between the two like the summary implies.
I don't get what you are saying. I've gotten tickets in Texas - they hand you ticket when they issue it, and you have to pay it by mail or go to court depending on the offense, just like any other state.
So I guess, you thought that the ticket just went away on its own? Or perhaps, you were hoping that the ticket just went away on its own.
He didn't do nothing - he sent the ticket in like he was supposed to and assumed that was that. The problem was that due to a clerical error, they didn't record that the ticket had been paid, and sent all notices of such to the wrong address.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing stupid about using javascript for financial calculations. More and more applications are moving to the web, and the more you can put in the client, the more responsive the application will be. Imagine a budgeting app like Quicken on the web, or a simple loan/savings calculator whose parameters can be dynamically adjusted, and a table/graph changes in response. While critical calculations (when actually posting a payment for example) should be (re)done on the server, it would not be good if your "quick-look" rounded differently then the final result.
And no, people should not be using floating point for currency, ever, and fixed-point calcualtions aren't hard. But there is more to it that "just put everything in cents"; for example, you often have to deal with rates that are given as fractions of a cent. A decimal type would make this more convenient.
Finally, I don't know if IBM's proposal is a good one. I haven't looked at it; I was just talking in generalities.
You are right, it is only a step beyond a driver's license database - which is a bad idea to begin with. When the US introduced a national driver's license database with the REAL ID Act, the reaction here was just as negative, so don't pretend that we are being hypocritical.
Speaking of which, starting January first I have to get a passport to travel within the US (by plane), because my state has not yet met the requirements of the REAL ID Act (and good for them even if it was for the wrong reasons). If the federal government is going to act like fascists I'd prefer they do it out in the open.
When you have strict regulatory rules about how rounding must be done, and your numerical system can't even represent 0.2 exactly, then it is most certainly a concern. There are other solutions, such as using base-10 fixed point calculations rather than floating point, but having decimal floating point is certainly more convenient, and having a hardware implementation is much more efficient.
The term "public performance" in the context of Copyright law isn't just about whether the property is public. It has to do with whether the audience is "the public". If you invite enough people (greater than a judge considers fair use) over to your house to watch a DVD, then you are infringing on the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder.
From 17 USC 101
To perform or display a work “publicly” means —
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or
We broke both of those rules frequently in college - yay projector night!.
Where are these third world countries getting the money to buy carbon offsets? And why would they since they don't have any laws mandating them? You have this completely backwards.
Carbon offsets are purchased by companies in first world countries which have laws setting CO2 quotas, or by rich yuppies who want to feel good about their energy-exorbitant house/car/jet. They do so because it is cheaper to buy bogus carbon offsets from third world countries than it is to actually lower their own CO2 generation.
I think you have this term confused with something else.
My understanding was that these devices will monitor for activity and not transmit if something is detected. So what is the database for? It certainly isn't adequate to replace this active detection. Does it black-list bands that cannot be transmitted on locally even if they appear to be empty? Does it white-list band that are candidates for transmission if they appear to be open?
Are these devices required to check with both the geolocation service (GPS?) and local database before they can operate? It makes sense, because if I move a device to a new area and turn it on, you wouldn't want it to just start transmitting on bands that were allowed in the previous location but not here. But getting a GPS fix can take a while, and it would be a pain to have to wait upto a minute before using the device each time you turn it on - I suppose they would have suspend mode that keeps GPS lock, but has everything else powered off, rather than completely shutting the unit down when you weren't using it.
Just pretend they never had the idea at all and nothing has changed.
Bullshit. That is assuming that no-one else would have had this idea if Google didn't. Considering that practically every major invention has been developed independently by several people, that is a ridiculous position to take.
Patents can absolutely create a situation that is worse off than if the "inventor" had never thought of the idea. Whether Google is "Evil" or not depends on how they choose to use the patent.
Except the only people that it helps are worthless middlemen that know how to game the system.
In my experience I would split the companies into a few groups. First there are the ones that provide services - printing PCBs, building custom cables, assembling and testing racks of equipment, etc. These folks do good work and we would use them regardless of the rules - custom jobs are best done my small companies and even if there were only chains/franchises doing this sort of stuff, we would still choose between them based on the aptitude of whoever was running the local branch, rather than brand. All the rules do is make more hoops for us to jump through, and add cost to the contracting process.
Next there are genuinely small shops/retailers that know their product well, and often offer better prices than the big box shops (like on standard computer cables etc). And of course there are inexpensive online retailers that we all know about. I would very much prefer to use the online sites when I have time to wait for shipping, and then these small local shops when I need something that day, or need to talk to someone.
But the procurement rules make it too much of a damn hassle to use either. Instead we have to use these middle-men who don't know jack-shit about their product, but they know procurement process. I don't consider them to be either small or local either. They have zero local inventory. They only have a couple employees in town, and that is all they need because their entire job is to take our order and then place it with the manufacturer, often screwing it up in the process. So they are small in the sense that they have few employees, but process a huge amount revenue each year. Their sole purpose in existing is to fill the role of a middle man for the government procurement in town - they have no business with anyone else.
These rules don't prevent/discourage anyone from buying from large companies, they just make you put a shim company in the middle when the best/only option is to purchase from big companies.
Government procurement is a bureaucratic mess, and a royal pain in the ass for both buyers and sellers. Because of this (and because of rules preferring "small" and "minority-owned" businesses), it is very common for government entities to buy though a middle man that knows how their procurement systems work, rather than getting product directly from a manufacturer, especially for low-cost COTS products.
Well since Chromium is basically the Chrome Browser running on Linux/X11, I see it as more like GEM or Windows 3.11, except it lacks tiled windows and has a fairly primitive API.
It is known that this update caused problems on these phones. If it was intentional it would (supposedly) be a violation of the law. Assuming the judge thinks that the plaintiff's case has merit, and Apple cannot provide any other sort of evidence to the contrary, then it seems perfectly reasonable for the him to require that code be submitted as evidence. That doesn't mean that it will be open to the world, just to those people involved in the case who need to see it.
You can argue whether the NPT caused (or contributed) to this, but I think that ending the arms race - the continued increase in capabilities by the US and Russia - was a very good thing.
Then the ostrich who takes it's head out of the sand first wins, and everyone else loses.
Politician: How many of these nukes do we need to keep in our arsenal?
Engineer: How long do they have to last?
Politician: Forever.
Engineer: All of them.
If we knew we were going to be designing/building a new nuke every 10-15 years, then we could decrease our stockpile to the number we need now (whatever we decide that is) without adding on a huge margin to account for obsolescence.
I think we could restart a nuclear program without restarting an arms race with existing nuclear powers provided it was talked out first in a treaty were we all agreed to keep yields (size of boom made by the bomb) the same and agreed to decrease our stockpile even more. As far as the emerging nuclear powers go, sure this would give them more reason to feel justified about building a bomb (and would happily wave that fact in everyone's faces), but I don't think it would change the rate of their development at all.
You are trying to install a Gnome application in a KDE-based distribution, so of course it has to install half the Gnome libraries, since they aren't on the system already. If you tried to install Krita in a Gnome-based distribution, you would get just as many KDE dependencies.
I is this bug, which is currently the fourth most hated bug in KDE. There were originally several problems with SSL in KDE, including shipping with CA Root Certificates that KDE/QT libraries reject as having invalid syntax. I think most distros have fixed this bug, but it cropped back up for a while again when 4.3 landed in Debian. This caused KDE apps to reject about 3/4 of the SSL sites on the internet as having bad certificates.
While that appears to be fixed now, I still haven't been able to load my own certificates for the website and email servers I run.
The problem isn't people watching the movie 2012, it is the viral advertising surrounding it. They ran ads that made the movie sound a dramatization of a real idea rather than complete fiction, ala the Day After Tomorrow, and encourage them to search the web for the "real truth". The studio created a fake website purposing to be a scientific institute predicting a collision with earth in 2012. On top of this loonies have been talking about a 2012 apocalypse of some sort since we first understood the Mayan calendar, and latter some of them latched onto the Nimbiru idea after the books came out, so the internet is full of websites giving "evidence" of this catastrophe, many of whom claim to be scientific websites themselves.
Yeah, people with a decent bullshit detector should be able to figure out that this is all crap, but it's not like they just watched a normal movie and thought it was read - the studio is trying to present it as though it were real, by making it a conspiracy that the mainstream is covering up.
I often have to pring select pages from long pdf documents, and for now, I can only do it one-by-one, can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges. That's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4.
That is strange. I am running KDE 4.3 on Debian Squeeze, and that option is there. I use it printing documents from Okular all the time. The printing does have many other issues though. It doesn't have even/odd page option so I can do manual duplexing, and setting page margins has me completely befuddled. When I print a document from Kwrite it doesn't have any margin settings of it's own - and the margin settings for the printer (which I am told are really there to define the unprintable areas for the printer) reset to the defaults each time I change them.
My biggest problem with KDE 4.3 is the fact that SSL is completely broken. I've stopped using Konqueror altogether because of this, and it causes annoyances in KMail as well. I can't believe they released with a bug that serious.
Non-profit just means that you don't allow shareholders. That means it is harder to raise capital to expand your business, but it also means that you don't owe any of your revenue to shareholders. There is no "profit" because you feed all the earnings back into the company expenses which included salaries, bonuses, and whatever else the people running the non-profit think they deserve. And on top of this you don't pay any taxes.
Non-profit corporations are fine structures for running scams, in addition to being good for legitimate charities.
The non-rhetorical answer:
10M Fluent english speakers in China (0.77%) vs
2M Fluent chinese speakers in the US (0.57%)
However, an additional 300M Chinese (~23%) are learning english. That is an awful lot of young impressionable students.
They may have overtaken Palm by a large margin, but they never even caught up with RIM let alone "dominated" the market as a whole which included other players like Nokia and Samsung as well.
Naw, dense would imply large amounts of muscle mass and little fat, so they can't be American :P
To add to the AC, the games that children play exhibit behavior that mimic the normal cultural roles of males and females (sometimes exaggeratedly). Boy games tend to be more active and violent, girl's are more social. This segmentation between hunters/homemakers has existed long enough to be consistent with the idea of evolved biological differences between males and females being at least a major contributing factor.
And before the PC folks chime in, yes these are generalizations and as such do not apply to individuals, but are seen in a statistical sense.
One of the main reasons that we participate in cultural activities is to fit in with the group. If chemical-induced hormones made boys more likely to associate/relate with girls then they would be more likely to participate in girl activities - however culture defines them.
That said, it does seem like a bit of a leap to me - too many factors to control for to get meaningful results. I'd be more convinced by separate studies that showed that exposure to certain chemicals increased certain hormone levels, and people with those hormone levels were more likely to have feminine behavior than to jump straight between the two like the summary implies.
I don't get what you are saying.
I've gotten tickets in Texas - they hand you ticket when they issue it, and you have to pay it by mail or go to court depending on the offense, just like any other state.
So I guess, you thought that the ticket just went away on its own? Or perhaps, you were hoping that the ticket just went away on its own.
He didn't do nothing - he sent the ticket in like he was supposed to and assumed that was that. The problem was that due to a clerical error, they didn't record that the ticket had been paid, and sent all notices of such to the wrong address.