You make $x, then you pay y% of it....no deductions, no loopholes, etc.
That way it would be fair, everyone would pay lower (for the most part), and taxation would be what it should be for, funding necessary govt. operations.
The problem with such a simple model is that current pay structures aren't set up for it; the transition period will hurt a sufficiently large number of people that it is "politically difficult" to make the change. Another problem is that a lot of people don't earn very much either; the cost of taxing them is likely to exceed the income received. A relatively simple variation on it is to use a basic banded taxation system. For example, allow everyone to make some minimum without being taxed (which is set fairly low) and then pay y% on everything earned over that. Yes, the formula in the spreadsheet is slightly more complex, but it's still damn close to trivial.
What's really complex though is when you have different rates for different types of income. Want to really do tax reform? Work on that and you'll get ordinary people on all sides of the spectrum on your side.
However, I would add, EVERY programmer should know how to or have at least once in their lifetime written atoi() and the corresponding dual itoa() aka, printf.
There's also the version for people who think they're smart: do the same for floating point numbers. (Experts only: use only the minimum number of digits when converting to a string.)
So just wait. Lisp might yet be the winner that replaces the rest of the bunch and XML as well.
People were saying almost the same thing 20 years ago (except not about XML; work on that started in 1996). How long do we have to wait? Is it just the case that Lisp is the programming language of the future, and will always remain so?
Lots of scientists do, especially where exact capture is required, capture equipment and workflows are long-established, and space isn't especially at a premium. (Astronomy doesn't though; they use much nastier formats for their stored primary data sources.)
Why would the server render images? That is a piece of client-side functionality.
At a guess, in order to compress them further so that the mobile device (which is always relatively short of bandwidth) doesn't run into problems if browsing a site with lots of large images. "Rendering" in this case doesn't have to mean displaying them on a screen, of course...
Just say no to Java in the browser. It's ugly, it's resource-hungry, it's insecure. Java's OK for implementing other types of applications, especially server-side, where the security exposure surface profile is rather different, but the browser plugin part has just been trouble for years. (I've had it disabled for years too, along with Flash, not as a security measure but rather to stop excessively annoying ads and other low-value embedded content.)
[Cloud computing is] pay as you go hosted clustered computing services.
With virtualization and a working business model. The virtualization is a critical part of what distinguishes cloud computing from what went immediately before, and the business model (essentially based on "very short term rents" though there's more to it than that; the virtualization isn't just at one level and that makes things much more complex) is what makes it more successful. The immediate predecessors were grid computing (which was largely a bust because of the lack of a good business model) and hosted computing (which was successful, but rather slow to spin up and down — order of months, not minutes — and so didn't challenge self-hosting in the same way).
Uh, I'd submit that Windows 7 doesn't resemble anything like Window 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups other than having a window and an X button to close it.
Do you really need that much more? Do you think most users see much more than that, leaving aside the fact that the colors have changed (which normal users spot very easily indeed by comparison with techies).
Thats is the point. It brings attention to the patent examiner that the solution is trivial. More patents will be rejected for obviousness.
Problem with that is that some patents are clever reimaginings of what is out there. While there are quite possibly other ways to achieve what they describe, the patent is in many ways a description of a piece of lateral thinking that looks at the problem space in a new way that leads to a significantly better solution. Thats very close to what patents are actually supposed to protect when you look at a lot of examples from history of physical inventions, and yet it tends to be "totally obvious" after the fact. Of course it's obvious *now*; you know that thinking in that particular lateral way is a good way to get a solution!
How to distinguish good patents from bad in the software area? I really don't know. Having the requirement that a software patent only be defensible if there is source code for a solution (in a form that could be used to make a running program, at least at the time of submission) would be a good thing though.
You get shoved in a room with 300 people and lectured to. Having somebody lecture to you about programming is of little use and somebody I know finished the degree without understanding what an array was. The only people who knew how to program were people who learned themselves, and anyone who relied on the university to teach them ended up know nothing.
It's a proper CS degree, not a "remedial Visual Basic hand-holding exercise". In a degree, you're supposed to do some background reading, some self-directed study. You're also supposed to ask questions if you're having problems. You know what? That's even encouraged. You won't be marked down for trying to understand things. You won't be penalized for not getting it immediately. It's higher education; it's full of stuff that you have to work at to grok properly.
Can't really comment too much on the undergraduate education programme though; I've only ever dealt with postgraduates as the courses I've given have been a bit too tough without the experience. But I know the undergraduate teachers; they will help if you ask (or even if you just don't hide it from them instead of pretending to be the smartest guy in the room).
Something you could learn yourself in a short amount of time would be spread over months at university
Self-directed study is encouraged, and if you're doing it right then you're doing a great thing. If you really want to get good, borrow a copy of Knuth's tAoCP and do as many of the exercises as possible. (Harder version: don't use a computer!) Alternatively, tell your year tutor that you're getting bored by the teaching and want something a bit more challenging; you'll get to find out about the more interesting things that are going on (e.g., the postgraduate teaching or the research-grade stuff). Sitting on your hands and moping is dumb.
Yep, I've successfully run Skyrim and New Vegas, but NV is a bit slow and Skyrim is fine at first but quickly turns into a slideshow, as compared to my Win 7 partition where it's flawless:/
The engine used in both games isn't the greatest, and it tends to bog down on any system once you start to add in mods.
That sort of thing might well be amenable to scientific data, such as a survey of rapists to find out why they committed their crimes.
You'd also have to check if it is a predictor or just a correlate. "Breathing air turns men into rapists, because 100% of rapists were found in a survey to have previously been breathing air!" Now if there's an actual causal link, that's much more interesting and a sensible base for public policy.
Of course, what might actually be true is that doing something (using porn) makes a relatively rare occurrence (rape) some proportion more likely but still not likely, with the major causes being something else entirely; the percentage change might sound large, but the actual effect is still small. In that case, there's a tricky balance of whether doing something that won't make much actual difference balances out the general loss of freedom. Zealots tend to not like such nuances. (Good scientists and engineers ought to appreciate them though.)
"We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime"
Oh, I hate that rhetorical device! "$THING_X, which we all agree does $BAD_THING_Y and can do $DODGY_LINK_TO_Z, so we must $TAKE_ACTION." It always seems to be used to try and short-circuit real debate and stifle clear thinking. I hate it even in cases where I might otherwise agree with some of what is being said.
Damn politicians. Wherever you come across them, there's never enough tar and feathers to be found.
Besides, it's questionable whether the whole concept of determinism even makes sense.
Even without that, you've got a problem in that a person's mind is clearly a highly non-linear system (one with a very large number of internal states too) and the mathematics of non-linear systems tells us that they tend to be highly divergent; very small errors in measurement can lead over time to very different predicted outcomes. We don't need fundamental physical unmeasureability to get non-determinism; even cell-level models of the brain ought to be completely impossible to use for prediction despite a nigh-on perfect model (itself unlikely).
Is the universe deterministic? Maybe. Should we behave as if we have free will? For sure. It's either true, or a very useful simplifying assumption that might as well be true to the limit of anything we can sanely measure.
f=ma only in a vacuum with no other gravitational entity in play in the universe. Entropy and free will live on
F=ma (or rather its equivalent expressed in terms of momentum change) always applies, but you've got to properly account for all the forces and accelerations. Not our problem if you can't add up...
With all the features people want in this thing, the battery will probably have to be pretty big or you won't get much use out of it.
My (real) watch doesn't take batteries or need winding at all; it takes all its power from the motion of my arms (through a small weight, a little generator and a capacitor). It's also around 20 years old. It should be possible to make the smart watch need no explicit powering at all through appropriate parasitizing of environmental energy sources.
Or failing that, it should run Linux. Just because.
Slashdot Mirror
the N2 is harmless
Technically not, since you could suffocate in it when it is a pure stream. But mixing it back into the air is absolutely no problem at all.
Taxation should be VERY simple.
You make $x, then you pay y% of it....no deductions, no loopholes, etc.
That way it would be fair, everyone would pay lower (for the most part), and taxation would be what it should be for, funding necessary govt. operations.
The problem with such a simple model is that current pay structures aren't set up for it; the transition period will hurt a sufficiently large number of people that it is "politically difficult" to make the change. Another problem is that a lot of people don't earn very much either; the cost of taxing them is likely to exceed the income received. A relatively simple variation on it is to use a basic banded taxation system. For example, allow everyone to make some minimum without being taxed (which is set fairly low) and then pay y% on everything earned over that. Yes, the formula in the spreadsheet is slightly more complex, but it's still damn close to trivial.
What's really complex though is when you have different rates for different types of income. Want to really do tax reform? Work on that and you'll get ordinary people on all sides of the spectrum on your side.
However, I would add, EVERY programmer should know how to or have at least once in their lifetime written atoi() and the corresponding dual itoa() aka, printf.
There's also the version for people who think they're smart: do the same for floating point numbers. (Experts only: use only the minimum number of digits when converting to a string.)
So just wait. Lisp might yet be the winner that replaces the rest of the bunch and XML as well.
People were saying almost the same thing 20 years ago (except not about XML; work on that started in 1996). How long do we have to wait? Is it just the case that Lisp is the programming language of the future, and will always remain so?
Who on earth uses Tiff anymore?
Lots of scientists do, especially where exact capture is required, capture equipment and workflows are long-established, and space isn't especially at a premium. (Astronomy doesn't though; they use much nastier formats for their stored primary data sources.)
Why would the server render images? That is a piece of client-side functionality.
At a guess, in order to compress them further so that the mobile device (which is always relatively short of bandwidth) doesn't run into problems if browsing a site with lots of large images. "Rendering" in this case doesn't have to mean displaying them on a screen, of course...
The owner of the patent if I remember correctly was suing a nonprofit.
"Nonprofit" just refers to what happens to the profits and how ownership is arranged, not to the sort of business that is being conducted.
Just say NO to Java.
Just say no to Java in the browser. It's ugly, it's resource-hungry, it's insecure. Java's OK for implementing other types of applications, especially server-side, where the security exposure surface profile is rather different, but the browser plugin part has just been trouble for years. (I've had it disabled for years too, along with Flash, not as a security measure but rather to stop excessively annoying ads and other low-value embedded content.)
Some places, you won't see a cloud at all for most of the year.
I'll trade. Round here, we get clouds most of the year and way too little sunshine. A bit more non-cloud would be great...
[Cloud computing is] pay as you go hosted clustered computing services.
With virtualization and a working business model. The virtualization is a critical part of what distinguishes cloud computing from what went immediately before, and the business model (essentially based on "very short term rents" though there's more to it than that; the virtualization isn't just at one level and that makes things much more complex) is what makes it more successful. The immediate predecessors were grid computing (which was largely a bust because of the lack of a good business model) and hosted computing (which was successful, but rather slow to spin up and down — order of months, not minutes — and so didn't challenge self-hosting in the same way).
Uh, I'd submit that Windows 7 doesn't resemble anything like Window 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups other than having a window and an X button to close it.
Do you really need that much more? Do you think most users see much more than that, leaving aside the fact that the colors have changed (which normal users spot very easily indeed by comparison with techies).
objective statition
What were you trying to say here? "Objective station"? That makes no sense! Why would lawyers need horse orienteering markers when finding patterns?
Perhaps a statistician would help me figure this out...
Thats is the point. It brings attention to the patent examiner that the solution is trivial. More patents will be rejected for obviousness.
Problem with that is that some patents are clever reimaginings of what is out there. While there are quite possibly other ways to achieve what they describe, the patent is in many ways a description of a piece of lateral thinking that looks at the problem space in a new way that leads to a significantly better solution. Thats very close to what patents are actually supposed to protect when you look at a lot of examples from history of physical inventions, and yet it tends to be "totally obvious" after the fact. Of course it's obvious *now*; you know that thinking in that particular lateral way is a good way to get a solution!
How to distinguish good patents from bad in the software area? I really don't know. Having the requirement that a software patent only be defensible if there is source code for a solution (in a form that could be used to make a running program, at least at the time of submission) would be a good thing though.
I once had an English professor tell me that using "one" as a pronoun was not proper and should be avoided.
That's OK. It's hardly your fault that your English professor was wrong.
You get shoved in a room with 300 people and lectured to. Having somebody lecture to you about programming is of little use and somebody I know finished the degree without understanding what an array was. The only people who knew how to program were people who learned themselves, and anyone who relied on the university to teach them ended up know nothing.
It's a proper CS degree, not a "remedial Visual Basic hand-holding exercise". In a degree, you're supposed to do some background reading, some self-directed study. You're also supposed to ask questions if you're having problems. You know what? That's even encouraged. You won't be marked down for trying to understand things. You won't be penalized for not getting it immediately. It's higher education; it's full of stuff that you have to work at to grok properly.
Can't really comment too much on the undergraduate education programme though; I've only ever dealt with postgraduates as the courses I've given have been a bit too tough without the experience. But I know the undergraduate teachers; they will help if you ask (or even if you just don't hide it from them instead of pretending to be the smartest guy in the room).
Something you could learn yourself in a short amount of time would be spread over months at university
Self-directed study is encouraged, and if you're doing it right then you're doing a great thing. If you really want to get good, borrow a copy of Knuth's tAoCP and do as many of the exercises as possible. (Harder version: don't use a computer!) Alternatively, tell your year tutor that you're getting bored by the teaching and want something a bit more challenging; you'll get to find out about the more interesting things that are going on (e.g., the postgraduate teaching or the research-grade stuff). Sitting on your hands and moping is dumb.
The sandpeople sniping pod racers was the best part of the whole movie.
No it wasn't; they missed too often.
Another apartment I lived at the drive home was between 45 minutes and 1 hours 15 minutes and it was like 7 miles.
Did you ever suspect you were perhaps using the wrong technology to do the commute?
Yep, I've successfully run Skyrim and New Vegas, but NV is a bit slow and Skyrim is fine at first but quickly turns into a slideshow, as compared to my Win 7 partition where it's flawless :/
The engine used in both games isn't the greatest, and it tends to bog down on any system once you start to add in mods.
That sort of thing might well be amenable to scientific data, such as a survey of rapists to find out why they committed their crimes.
You'd also have to check if it is a predictor or just a correlate. "Breathing air turns men into rapists, because 100% of rapists were found in a survey to have previously been breathing air!" Now if there's an actual causal link, that's much more interesting and a sensible base for public policy.
Of course, what might actually be true is that doing something (using porn) makes a relatively rare occurrence (rape) some proportion more likely but still not likely, with the major causes being something else entirely; the percentage change might sound large, but the actual effect is still small. In that case, there's a tricky balance of whether doing something that won't make much actual difference balances out the general loss of freedom. Zealots tend to not like such nuances. (Good scientists and engineers ought to appreciate them though.)
"We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime"
Oh, I hate that rhetorical device! "$THING_X, which we all agree does $BAD_THING_Y and can do $DODGY_LINK_TO_Z, so we must $TAKE_ACTION." It always seems to be used to try and short-circuit real debate and stifle clear thinking. I hate it even in cases where I might otherwise agree with some of what is being said.
Damn politicians. Wherever you come across them, there's never enough tar and feathers to be found.
Besides, it's questionable whether the whole concept of determinism even makes sense.
Even without that, you've got a problem in that a person's mind is clearly a highly non-linear system (one with a very large number of internal states too) and the mathematics of non-linear systems tells us that they tend to be highly divergent; very small errors in measurement can lead over time to very different predicted outcomes. We don't need fundamental physical unmeasureability to get non-determinism; even cell-level models of the brain ought to be completely impossible to use for prediction despite a nigh-on perfect model (itself unlikely).
Is the universe deterministic? Maybe. Should we behave as if we have free will? For sure. It's either true, or a very useful simplifying assumption that might as well be true to the limit of anything we can sanely measure.
f=ma only in a vacuum with no other gravitational entity in play in the universe. Entropy and free will live on
F=ma (or rather its equivalent expressed in terms of momentum change) always applies, but you've got to properly account for all the forces and accelerations. Not our problem if you can't add up...
Fie on thy archaic five gee, we have forsooth already commenced work on six AND seven gee devices!
I think we're going to have to work on the name though; 7G sounds too boring. I propose "G-Whizz" to indicate its immense speed...
To get any character zero or more times you need .* (period asterix). To get the solution to anything with more than one line you need [\s\S]*.
That depends on the RE dialect; some treat newline as an ordinary whitespace character by default.
With all the features people want in this thing, the battery will probably have to be pretty big or you won't get much use out of it.
My (real) watch doesn't take batteries or need winding at all; it takes all its power from the motion of my arms (through a small weight, a little generator and a capacitor). It's also around 20 years old. It should be possible to make the smart watch need no explicit powering at all through appropriate parasitizing of environmental energy sources.
Or failing that, it should run Linux. Just because.