In the article the question is raised: why has nobody created a free java platform?
I think the answer is that it's underspecified. In particular, the Swing GUI is pretty much defined only by its source code. There are reasonable free replacements for most everything except Swing.
Ahem - when is Java code perform at the same speed as native compiled C code? Java byte code
is nothing more than P-code. It's still at least 30 to 50% slower than native code.
It gets compiled to native code at runtime by the virtual machine. At that point, the VM has some context to work with, so it can often make better optimization decisions. On some numerical benchmarks and on some VMs, you will even see Java performing better than C. However, every VM has cases that it handles well and cases that it doesn't, so it's difficult to make blanket statements about relative performance.
Can NASA legally prevent someone internal who is given a copy of the software from taking the source and posting it online under the GPL (well anything that is GPL covered anyway)?
It's not a question of a civil action. If that person is subject to US jurisdiction, they could be prosecuted in federal criminal court. The current sentencing guidelines suggest 41 to 51 months in prison for ITAR violations.
That is to say, BSD has been tested already in just this type of bogus shenanigan, and BSD won.
Technically, nobody won, or rather everybody won: the case was settled. Versions of BSD from before the settlement were "illegal" and had to be rebuilt around the 4.4BSD-Lite code drop from Berkeley, which was blessed by AT&T's (or rather Unix Systems Laboratory's) lawyers.
Interesting...I was on a jury last week in a simple case (two day trial) involving back injuries following a car accident. One of the qualifying questions was "Do any among you not drive a motor vehicle?" and someone in the jury pool was indeed "thanked and excused" on that basis. I would imagine that they would be looking for people with ordinary familiarity with computers, but not special familiarity.
The point is that, for complex documents, you end up saving lots of time using a markup language like TeX. Yes, it takes training and practice, and you spend more time on simple documents in the beginning, but you never have those frustrating multi-hour sessions (so frequent with Word) fighting to get the formatting consistent throughout the document. This is especially true when you're dealing with merging pieces of the document written by different people, each of whom starts out formatting their contribution in a different style.
You've confused alpha and beta decay. An alpha particle is basically a helium-4 nucleus: two protons and two neutrons. A beta particle is an electron or positron.
What you say about electostatic repulsion is mostly true. The binding energy of the nucleus generally decreases as the number of protons differs more from the number of neutrons, since protons and neutrons are separately subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. That is, a proton and a neutron can share an energy/spin state, whereas two protons can't, forcing one of them up to a higher energy level. That's the primary effect in lighter nuclei, keeping the number of protons and neutrons nearly equal.
As the number of protons becomes larger, and the net charge becomes greater, electrostatic repulsion between the protons becomes more of an effect: it grows with the square of the number of protons. Adding extra neutrons increases the radius of the nucleus, spacing the protons farther apart from each other on average and therefore decreasing the electrostatic repulsion.
Heavy elements provide additional data points that let us test our understanding of nuclear structure and the interactions that hold the protons and neutrons together. The universe is basically powered by nuclear processes, so what we learn about nuclear structure is then related to astrophysics and cosmology.
Take the case of a neutron star--it's made of extremely dense nuclear matter. As elements get heavier and heavier, they become better approximations of the environment of a neutron star.
I don't know the details of their funding, but I would have assumed this was paid with Federal money (NSF perhaps), in which case it's being extracted from a larger set of pockets.:-)
If you refuse to give your SSN to employers, no employer in the United States will hire you. The IRS uses your SSN as a taxpayer ID, and employers need this in order to file tax paperwork.
Sure, but that's after they've agreed to hire you, not before. It sounds like AT&T wanted this person's SSN as a part of the job application process, which does seem kind of odd to me.
The worst nuclear accident, by far, was Chernobyl, 1986. There were a couple of other accidents of the same magnitude as Three Mile Island (1979); IIRC, one in Britain, and one in the American south.
Don't forget about the one at the Tokaimura fuel processing plant in Japan in 1999. It was an inadvertent criticality in which two workers were killed by radiation exposure and dose rates in the surrounding area were significantly elevated. As usual for nuclear accidents, it involved a lot of gross stupidity (unapproved modifications of procedures, bypassing safety systems).
The whole point of running fortran is the legacy code. For this, as you note, G77 rocks.
This isn't even close to true. g77 does a reasonable job of implementing the Fortran 77 standard, but most of the legacy code (at least the subset that I've come across) relies heavily on VAX extensions. The VAX extensions are supported by all of the proprietary compilers, but many of them are not in g77.
The tax form manual stated that if you are 22 or under, and you were going to college, your parents can claim you as a dependant...
This isn't entirely true. If either (a) you earned enough to pay for more than half your own expenses, or (b) were married filing a joint tax return, then your parents could not claim you as a dependent.
Well for the short response: I guess 'Helicopter' isn't a proper word then? It's not in there.
The second edition of the OED does indeed include "helicopter" (An aircraft which derives its lift and propulsive power principally from the action of one or more lifting screws or rotor-blades...).
The way I have been getting by is working as a consultant for remote clients. I also did it for a couple years before I moved away from California. Now, it's more difficult than holding a regular job, and it's not secure, but it has many advantages, one of which is that you can live in a nice place - for example, Not In Silicon Valley.
I just moved to the Bay area; I guess everybody has to do California once in their life. Seriously, though, your money will go almost twice as far anywhere else in the US. If you're living in California having trouble making ends meet, moving to the midwest might reduce your stress level considerably. In Champaign, Illinois, where I was before, grad students making $15K/year
could easily qualify for a mortgage to buy a decent house for $50K to $75K. I've seen similar places in Berkeley listed for $400K to $500K.
True, it's an outpost in the middle of the cornfields, but the cost of living is extremely reasonable.
Actually, anything that gets me away the Internet
tends to increase my productivity substantially. I'm probably not unique in my lack of self-discipline, either.:-)
There's an erroneous comparison to be made between imprisoning people for drugs (a criminal violation currently) and for violating copyright (a civil violation). You cannot be imprisoned for violation of civil law, only criminal law.
Until a few years ago, you were right about this.
However, with the advent of the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, copyright violation is under many circumstances a criminal act as well.
Is that born-again Christianity group really a Korean thing?
I lost white friends to super-fundamentalist Christian (InterVarsity and Campus Crusade) groups in college this way here in the USA, too. I don't think this situation is unique to Korea by any means.
Photographic style dosimeters (a piece of film shielded by different layers of metal) are very common.
Actually, the old "film badges" have largely been replaced by devices called thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs). They are made of a material which, when struck by radiation, goes into a metastable excited state. The badge is processed
by heating it up, causing the molecules that had been excited to drop back to the ground state. In the process, a photon is emitted, which is detected by a photomultiplier tube. Your radiation dose is proportional to the number of photons counted. The advantages of a TLD over a film badge are that it tends to more precise for very small doses, it can be processed faster if you have the equipment on-site, and it's reusable.
Re:Around for Years - Pharmacist STILL required
on
Robot Pharmacists
·
· Score: 2
in other words, with 7 automated checks, you shouldn't really have any errors. what can we conclude? the automation sucks a lot.
Alternative conclusion: the 7 checks aren't
uncorrelated, as your calculation assumes. Each check could have a 99.9 percent efficiency, but that same 0.1 percent could get past all 7. If they're all basically asking variations on the theme of "is this a little yellow pill?" then this scenario isn't unlikely.
Well the insurance should still cover the accident, unless you caused it on purpose. Accidents are what insurance covers anyway, not deliberate crashes.
A few years ago, I was involved in an incident where the other driver was high on PCP and was deliberately ramming other vehicles. There were five collisions before his car got stuck over a median. At that point, he stripped off all his clothes because he thought it would make him invisible.
His insurance company (State Farm) paid the claim.
Tell the people who run Geraldi's - as well as the owners of other local stores - to get into the local music scene in your city, and to buy the CDs of unsigned local musicians. Tell them to talk with the musicians and get their approval and blessing to play their music in those local stores and restaurants.
To add to this advice: remember that the ASCAP and BMI licenses are in principle for the songwriters, not the performers. You'll have to be very careful not to play anything that's even remotely close to a cover of a copyrighted song.
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I think the answer is that it's underspecified. In particular, the Swing GUI is pretty much defined only by its source code. There are reasonable free replacements for most everything except Swing.
Not all science, of course. People go into physics to avoid that crap...
It gets compiled to native code at runtime by the virtual machine. At that point, the VM has some context to work with, so it can often make better optimization decisions. On some numerical benchmarks and on some VMs, you will even see Java performing better than C. However, every VM has cases that it handles well and cases that it doesn't, so it's difficult to make blanket statements about relative performance.
It's not a question of a civil action. If that person is subject to US jurisdiction, they could be prosecuted in federal criminal court. The current sentencing guidelines suggest 41 to 51 months in prison for ITAR violations.
Technically, nobody won, or rather everybody won: the case was settled. Versions of BSD from before the settlement were "illegal" and had to be rebuilt around the 4.4BSD-Lite code drop from Berkeley, which was blessed by AT&T's (or rather Unix Systems Laboratory's) lawyers.
Interesting...I was on a jury last week in a simple case (two day trial) involving back injuries following a car accident. One of the qualifying questions was "Do any among you not drive a motor vehicle?" and someone in the jury pool was indeed "thanked and excused" on that basis. I would imagine that they would be looking for people with ordinary familiarity with computers, but not special familiarity.
The point is that, for complex documents, you end up saving lots of time using a markup language like TeX. Yes, it takes training and practice, and you spend more time on simple documents in the beginning, but you never have those frustrating multi-hour sessions (so frequent with Word) fighting to get the formatting consistent throughout the document. This is especially true when you're dealing with merging pieces of the document written by different people, each of whom starts out formatting their contribution in a different style.
What you say about electostatic repulsion is mostly true. The binding energy of the nucleus generally decreases as the number of protons differs more from the number of neutrons, since protons and neutrons are separately subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. That is, a proton and a neutron can share an energy/spin state, whereas two protons can't, forcing one of them up to a higher energy level. That's the primary effect in lighter nuclei, keeping the number of protons and neutrons nearly equal.
As the number of protons becomes larger, and the net charge becomes greater, electrostatic repulsion between the protons becomes more of an effect: it grows with the square of the number of protons. Adding extra neutrons increases the radius of the nucleus, spacing the protons farther apart from each other on average and therefore decreasing the electrostatic repulsion.
Actually, the experiment was done at Dubna, which is in Russia. Try again. :-)
Take the case of a neutron star--it's made of extremely dense nuclear matter. As elements get heavier and heavier, they become better approximations of the environment of a neutron star.
I don't know the details of their funding, but I would have assumed this was paid with Federal money (NSF perhaps), in which case it's being extracted from a larger set of pockets. :-)
Sure, but that's after they've agreed to hire you, not before. It sounds like AT&T wanted this person's SSN as a part of the job application process, which does seem kind of odd to me.
Don't forget about the one at the Tokaimura fuel processing plant in Japan in 1999. It was an inadvertent criticality in which two workers were killed by radiation exposure and dose rates in the surrounding area were significantly elevated. As usual for nuclear accidents, it involved a lot of gross stupidity (unapproved modifications of procedures, bypassing safety systems).
This isn't even close to true. g77 does a reasonable job of implementing the Fortran 77 standard, but most of the legacy code (at least the subset that I've come across) relies heavily on VAX extensions. The VAX extensions are supported by all of the proprietary compilers, but many of them are not in g77.
This isn't entirely true. If either (a) you earned enough to pay for more than half your own expenses, or (b) were married filing a joint tax return, then your parents could not claim you as a dependent.
The second edition of the OED does indeed include "helicopter" (An aircraft which derives its lift and propulsive power principally from the action of one or more lifting screws or rotor-blades...).
I just moved to the Bay area; I guess everybody has to do California once in their life. Seriously, though, your money will go almost twice as far anywhere else in the US. If you're living in California having trouble making ends meet, moving to the midwest might reduce your stress level considerably. In Champaign, Illinois, where I was before, grad students making $15K/year could easily qualify for a mortgage to buy a decent house for $50K to $75K. I've seen similar places in Berkeley listed for $400K to $500K. True, it's an outpost in the middle of the cornfields, but the cost of living is extremely reasonable.
Actually, anything that gets me away the Internet tends to increase my productivity substantially. I'm probably not unique in my lack of self-discipline, either. :-)
Until a few years ago, you were right about this. However, with the advent of the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, copyright violation is under many circumstances a criminal act as well.
I lost white friends to super-fundamentalist Christian (InterVarsity and Campus Crusade) groups in college this way here in the USA, too. I don't think this situation is unique to Korea by any means.
Actually, the old "film badges" have largely been replaced by devices called thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs). They are made of a material which, when struck by radiation, goes into a metastable excited state. The badge is processed by heating it up, causing the molecules that had been excited to drop back to the ground state. In the process, a photon is emitted, which is detected by a photomultiplier tube. Your radiation dose is proportional to the number of photons counted. The advantages of a TLD over a film badge are that it tends to more precise for very small doses, it can be processed faster if you have the equipment on-site, and it's reusable.
Alternative conclusion: the 7 checks aren't uncorrelated, as your calculation assumes. Each check could have a 99.9 percent efficiency, but that same 0.1 percent could get past all 7. If they're all basically asking variations on the theme of "is this a little yellow pill?" then this scenario isn't unlikely.
A few years ago, I was involved in an incident where the other driver was high on PCP and was deliberately ramming other vehicles. There were five collisions before his car got stuck over a median. At that point, he stripped off all his clothes because he thought it would make him invisible.
His insurance company (State Farm) paid the claim.
Apart from that, it's a civil matter. (Standard IANAL disclaimer applies, though...)
To add to this advice: remember that the ASCAP and BMI licenses are in principle for the songwriters, not the performers. You'll have to be very careful not to play anything that's even remotely close to a cover of a copyrighted song.