I wondered about that, especially since the title came from the (excellent) BBC TV series. I quite liked the game, too - it was a simple decision tree program, but it captured the humour of the series quite well. Its probably the only game on the list that I don't think could have been called anything else (although some of the other games were quite good, and had titles appropriate to their genre)
You should try out their admin tools - methinks they're pretty damned good The first screenshot looks suspiciously like PGAdmin III, available for free http://www.pgadmin.org/here. It is really nice to work with; handles all of our needs very nicely anyway.
Wow, Beebug brings back memories! Between Beebug, the old family Model B, and assisting at school with various computer problems - I don't think I'd have my current career if it weren't for the Beeb.
(Nostalgia ahead!)
My Dad worked at a 6th form college (17-18, pre-University for Americans), and brought home a Model B about the time they were released. It had a cassette drive, a black/white monitor, and the old Acorn 'Welcome' tape. He also purchased a subscription to Beebug magazine. At first (I was around 5), I just played games - Magic Mushrooms, Defender, and messed around in Logo. Noticing my interest, my father was kind enough to teach me some BASIC: the usual "What's your name? Hello TheBracket!" stuff, and then procedures/functions. I was producing my own text-adventure games by Middle School - as well as playing Elite, Chuckie Egg, a Donkey Kong clone, and a bunch of educational programs (I have fond memories of a program my father wrote to help me learn long division because I was struggling with it at school for no good reason). As I progressed through middle school, we picked up a mouse, I discovered the joys of Repton (Boulderdash type clone - seemed like the best game ever to me for years), and started typing in programs from the several volumes of Beebug archives we now had. I started tweaking games, learned a fair amount of 6502 assembler (as well as a lot of BASIC!). We picked up a floppy drive, a shadow RAM board (basically extra RAM chips that could be paged in/out; the Beeb had a great system whereby programs could be run from a ROM - or a shadow RAM chip loaded with a ROM image - leaving most of the 32k system memory available for data) - and I got my paws on a ROM image for the graphics extension system. Suddenly, sprites were easy! I came up with everything from simple platform games to soccer games; none of them were any good, but I had the programming bug - something that stayed with me for life. I also met some cool people when my father took me along to BBC Micro trade shows. It was a lot like the Linux community, in that everyone was helpful/encouraging (unless you didn't know what you were doing), and most people were willing to share their wisdom.
Later on, I learned Pascal and C, helped run a local political parties' accounts with a spreadsheet, and did all my school papers in Word Wise (with a LOUD dot-matrix printer). I even made some pocket money selling (locally) a floppy disk menu system that worked by directly querying disk catalogue information from RAM. We also picked up a 1200/75 or 300 baud modem - that was FUN. I remember being in a lot of trouble for the phone bill when I discovered Prestel (a BBS run by the telephone company) had MUDs!
When the Archimedes came along, I desperately wanted one - but my father was pretty sure it wasn't going to take off well (he'd seen some of the crashing Arthur demos given to schools - if Acorn had shipped the first Archy with a working OS, I think we might be running Risc OS today). Beebug became more and more Archy focused, but jealousy of the Archimedes inspired me to figure out various 3D landscape systems (although I never got a Zarch clone to work), and even a basic GUI.
The family's next purchase was a PC - an Amstrad 1640. It had GEM, Windows 2, and a fair number of (not very good) games. I still used to boot up the Beeb for most of my gaming needs (Exile, Codename: Droid, Stryker's Run - some of those were amazing. Exile with shadow RAM even had enemies with speech sounds - ok, it sounded terrible, but hearing "you shall die" coming out of the Beeb was exciting back then!). As soon as I found Turbo Pascal - I didn't really look back for anything else. A few years later, we picked up a 386 with a VGA card - and the poor old Beeb ended up in the attic.
(/nostalgia trip)
The funny thing is, when I fire up an emulator and look back - the Beeb holds up pretty well. It's a LONG way behind what we can do now, but I really don't think I'd be where I am today if I hadn't had all the low-level experience from back then. (I also really wish that RISC OS had taken off... I still find it more usable than Gnome or Windows in a lot of cases! ROXBOX is cool, but it's not enough for me...)
Likewise, I talked to Gary at a few Gen Cons. Even one of the UK ones (he was a special guest). Very friendly, funny guy, and amazingly open to discussing all things gaming (from the state of videogames - and what we dream of, to various things D&D).
Farewell, Gary. You did more than most people: you touched the hearts/minds of millions, and made the world a better place.
I'm not convinced nuclear terrorism really is a threat, a nuclear strike on US soil would result in a nuclear response by the US and even people as nutty as Osama know that whilst they've been able to hide from conventional forces they can't hide from a nuclear retaliation. That's an interesting question we discussed a lot, back in my defense studies classes. The US would no-doubt feel it had to respond in kind to a nuclear strike, but the question then becomes "targeted at whom?" A modern, non-state (or rather extra-state, since they typically roam) terrorist organization doesn't really have the type of targets for which nuclear weapons are optimal: big, static things to blow up. It's a more extreme version of the "where's Usama?" problem - in order to blow him up, we need to know where to drop the ordnance. It would take a lot of nuclear weapons to completely level the Pushtun region of Pakistan/Afghanistan - assuming he's even there.
A lot of your "missing" features of IPv6 are exactly what it was meant to eliminate! You absolutely can firewall IPv6 (just as you can firewall a regular routed IPv4 space; a default stateful "outbound only" IPv6 firewall is every bit as secure as a similar IPv4/NAT setup). OpenBSD's pf has supported firewalling IPv6 for years; I'm pretty sure ipfw on FreeBSD has it, too. Iptables on Linux also seems to support it.
NAT isn't something to be missed. The number of nasty kludges required to get protocols that require two peers each behind a NAT to communicate is ridiculous, and a lot of protocols (VOIP, P2P, most games, etc.) can be simplified quite a bit when you take out the various NAT-hole punch routines.
Juniper already ship IPv6 capable VPN kit, you can do it on various open source platforms with things like tinc, and Windows Server 2008 supports it.
In other words, IPv6 is taking a long time, but it's getting there - and support for essential features is developing decently well. I'd recommend getting familiar with it now; even if it never materializes in its current form, it's a good idea to play with lots of different setups and be ready for anything!
I have a 27" CRT that can do 1080i (picked it up for $200 in a sale). For normal viewing, I really can't tell the difference between 480p and 1080i - both look pretty good. Occasionally, HD content does look much better - mostly when watching televised sports (not something I do often!), but mostly I really have to look to see the difference. The only time 1080i really makes a difference is on my xbox 360, particularly for text rendering and small texture details on characters.
I wouldn't pay thousands more just to get better xbox text - but for $200, I can't really complain! I don't think a bigger TV would fit in my apartment anyway!
"Orange squash" is a bit like Sunny Delight, but even nastier. Basically, take some orange concentrate, boil it with sugar (or substitute) into a thick syrup, and sell the syrup. It is then diluted heavily before being drunk. Some squash vendors throw in vitamins, colourings, and various other oddities as well.
That's true to an extent. A belligerent attitude will quickly escalate an otherwise-avoidable incident into a fight; but there are times in which one party starts off violent and isn't likely to be talked down. In my old criminal defense days, I worked a few cases (mostly involving drugs such as PCP, violent drunks, or muggers who lacked the 'decency' to offer a peaceful 'hand over your wallet' before starting with the violence). It even happened to me once; walking home, a drunk fellow yelled some abuse (something about goths), demanded my wallet and swung at me in about the same breath. I wasn't even in a particularly bad neighbourhood, overly gothed-out, or doing more than walking quietly. I was lucky in that the miscreant in question was drunk enough to miss me completely - and I was able to push him back and run away (combat REALLY isn't my forte), but it was completely random. (Side note: I'm not at all sure that having a weapon would have helped me; it would have taken longer to arm myself than it did to step back, think "oh dear", and make a fast exit)
For 90% of cases, not escalating a situation is the way to go. For the remaining 10%, sadly the other party is already hell-bent on escalation - and there's not a lot that will talk them out of it.
That's one thing I loved about my old BBC Micro Model B - the manuals. The main manual came with a guide to BBC BASIC (an amazing BASIC for the time, it supported proper procedures/functions and inline assembly!), a complete list of OS calls. The extended manual (we may have paid extra for it, I don't remember) even included a wiring diagram for the board! When I found the 'beeb' in a box a couple of years ago, it was nonfunctional - but the extended manual helped me find a dead capacitor, and replacing it brought the thing back to life. I'm still impressed with the ease of 6502 programming, and the Beeb's old ROM system (drop in a 32k ROM containing a word processor, and most of the 32k of RAM is available for data) - especially once shadow RAM put loading whatever ROMs you wanted a *LOAD command away.
Here in Missouri, you can automatically appeal any small claims verdict with a trial de neuvo. Basically, you get a whole new small claims trial with a different (usually more senior) judge. I believe that's common in other states, too - and it's used quite a bit, since small claims judges tend not to be too concerned with more than making a verdict in a very tight timeframe. The small claims courts are always bogged down, and each trial tends to receive less than 15 minutes of attention.
I recently helped a friend on a small claims case (for non-payment by one of his clients) that went to a trial de neuvo after the original judge completely ignored the contract, and reasonable legal arguments - and zeroed in on my friend having a 15-year old felony conviction and stated that she was ruling against him on that basis alone. The judge in the trial de neuvo read the contract, asked the obvious "was the work performed? Was payment rendered?" questions - and ruled in my friend's favour in 5 minutes.
Small claims courts really aren't the pinnacle of judicial process; but the system recognizes this and has built-in safeguards (you can appeal to a real court if the de neuvo trial is equally silly, but that gets expensive).
Note: I do have a law degree, but I am not a lawyer - and this is not legal advice. The fact that I have to say that is not at all indicative of an old-boys club mentality in the legal profession, nor does it point towards an unfair closed-shop setup designed to protect the system more than any concepts of justice.;-)
> Sure c# is a standard, but it won't matter when Microsoft decides to switch to > Foo++ language and none of their tools support c# anymore.
Here's the thing, though - it doesn't really matter what language you are using, if you know how to program. I started out in BASIC on a 6502 (BBC Model B), and have since worked in many, many languages ranging from Fortran to C#, via Pascal, Java, Erlang (a little) and Perl. When I was starting out, BASIC to Pascal took some work. Pascal to C took a bit less work. C to the others has been relatively easy so far. Sure, it's a pain when one's existing code-base doesn't have an obvious forward-migration path - but it's not really a roadblock. Your existing copies of VB5/6 programs still run, your old tools still run (VB6 has better Vista compatibility than VS.NET!), so you have plenty of time to plan.
My experience of the old VB was that it really, really deserved to die. I just wish VBA would die with it!
If its any help, I have VS 2003 (and 2005) running on Vista (32-bit) at work. The biggest problems with VS 2k3 are that it pops a warning about compatibility when it starts, and it took a bit of work to get ASP.NET 1.1 stuff working again (I have some old.NET 1 projects I maintain, without customer budget for an upgrade).
I tried both on 64-bit Vista, and VS2k3 barely worked at all.
I would love to see Single Transferable Vote or Condorcet in the UK (my native land by birth), and over here in the USA (my new native land!). Unfortunately, I'd like it for precisely the reason you stated: it doesn't favour the incumbent, and it makes third (or fourth if you count the Lib Dems) parties significantly more viable.
Within the US, I think a compromise might be to go for a simple proportional system of electoral college votes per state. Then if a party gets 50% of the vote, they get 50% of that state's votes in the electoral college. It's fair, and it would mean that parties actually had to pay attention to the states they feel guaranteed to win - and likewise, it might be worth campaigning in Texas as a Democrat for one or two electoral college votes overall.
That's the funny thing about deterrence in general. The only way to prove that it worked is to prove a negative - there wasn't a nuclear war. It's pretty much impossible to prove a negative, so we can't be sure that the cold war didn't turn nuclear-hot because we deterred the soviets (and were in turn deterred by them). Do we really want to rely on the same unprovable approach in the new, multi-polar world (especially when Chinese leaders have in the past commented that China shouldn't fear nuclear war, because a few million deaths would still leave them with many million more people - I believe that was Mao, but Deng Zhaou Ping [spelling?] supposedly repeated it)?
There are broadly three ways to look at it (from a military/strategic point of view, since all this really does is support the political/diplomatic arena anyway); not mutually exclusive: - Rely on deterrence. It might be existential deterrence (that is, "we have nukes - they deter"), or it might include a genuine willingness to use the weapons if a certain line is crossed. If it isn't obvious that you will use them at a certain point, the deterrent loses credibility - and your influence is whittled down by a thousand papercuts (see below). Some deterrence theorists have stated that a nuclear-armed neighborhood is a polite neighborhood, although the jury is still out on that (certainly Israel, India and Pakistan have had no shortage of wars since becoming nuclear powers).
- Rely on might. In this case, you want to have a really effective nuclear force, the strongest defenses you can afford, and a doctrine that makes it obvious that you will escalate to the nuclear option if you need to.
- Rely on arms control. Basically attempt to keep the lid on the nuclear can of worms as much as possible, and try to agree upon arms levels with other countries. The only problem here is that it's really easy to agree arms control with countries you weren't really going to fight anyway, and rather hard to agree with countries with whom you are genuinely likely to have a shooting war.
I remember talking to some of Bush Senior's administration while I was in college, talking about their discussions of the nuclear option in Gulf War 1. A large part of the government wanted to rule it out altogether, regardless of chemical-biological threats. A committee did actually draft a strategy for using tactical nukes in the initial attack, but it was ruled out very fast - not because of long-term problems (a small tac-nuke isn't much worse for the environment than an FAE), but because it would have taken far too many tactical nukes to really make much difference militarily! In the end, the decision was made to formally "not rule anything out" if Hussein used chemical/biological weapons; a decision to not have a policy. Discussions were ongoing, but an answer was never forthcoming to "will we even consider using nukes?" - let alone "how badly do they have to hit us before we'll consider it?" I'm told that similar discussions occurred for various other small-medium regional contingencies over the years.
On the other hand, we've built up the word about deterrence so strongly (including the nuclear armed neighborhood statement!) that world leaders who might be invaded are all scrambling to get nuclear weapons. Even if they don't plan to use them (who knows?), it's a fair gamble that the big powers will be less willing to invade if it means a nuclear attack.
One day, there will be a small nuclear war with modern weapons. When the dust settles, and we discover that it was nothing like Armageddon, the can will be off the nuclear can of worms forever - and we'll be stuck having to come up with policies that rely on capability and actions, rather than an abstract, unprovable and arguably purely philosophical notion of deterrence.
What's interesting about 'duck and cover' (and other civil defense campaigns from the era) is that it's nowhere near as useless as it sounds. The primary kill mechanism of a nuclear bomb (not 'neutron bomb', which really should be called 'reduced blast nuclear weapon'), so being in cover can help a lot. The secondary kill mechanism is prompt radiation, manifesting as the flash - likewise, if that doesn't hit you, then you have a much greater chance of survival. The tertiary mechanism is fallout, and it's one that a lot of systems are designed to minimize (who wants to conquer a highly radioactive landscape?); most fallout comes from the actual explosion cloud touching down, sucking in dirt particles that are rendered highly radioactive. Because of this, a lot of work was done to minimize the fireball radius - and also most warheads were designed to airburst high enough to avoid the problem. You can read about this in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and also in a number of discussions of the issue in various defense studies/international studies journals.
What's REALLY interesting is why we, in the West, abandoned civil defense. With the wholesale adoption of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) theory, it was considered a DOWNSIDE to be able to save one's population - so civil defense, missile defense, air defense, and shelters all vanished from the budget. The theory being that you want everyone to be as vulnerable as possible - because otherwise the cost of launching a nuclear strike may seem low enough to make a nuclear war palatable. It amazes me to this day that the US persuaded its allies to buy into that theory. Yes, nuclear war sucks - but it seems that maximizing the damage it would do to you in the name of avoiding one is rather shortsighted. That's especially true in the post-cold war multipolar world. It's hard to say 'MAD works' when suddenly you are trying to deter anyone capable of building a nuclear device - which overall, really isn't that hard to do.
It really depends upon where you draw the line for what defines a "country" - a nation, or a state (you still sometimes find countries referred to as nation-states). A nation is a grouping that qualifies as a country other than having an independent government. A state is a political entity governing one or more nations. So the UK is a state comprising of the fine nations of England, Wales, Scotland, and a few bits of other nations (such as Northern Ireland). The US was originally intended to be a state of many different nations, as opposed to a federalist's dream.
Not much of a data-point, but we use it for just about every project that needs an RDBMS. It's overkill for much of what we do, but it's very solid. I've also seen it embedded into a few commercially available systems, such as a wimax provisioning system, and a point-of-sale program. It's not as ubiquitous as MySQL, but it does get around.
Classical nuclear winter theory was discredited when it was shown that the original calculations required some really, really odd targeting decisions in a full nuclear exchange. We would have had to aim a huge number of warheads at the sparsely-populated forest regions of the old USSR, and in turn the Russians would have had to return the favor - aiming at large chunks of US forestry real-estate. That would, in theory, put enough particular matter into the atmosphere to precipitate a significant global temperature reduction.
You likely would get a small temperature reduction from hitting a city with a nuclear weapon, but the destructive capacity of even a thousand modern 30kT warheads is a fraction of the capacity of the volcanic eruption (the name escapes me right now) that lowered European temperatures by 2-3C for a year and sparked much of the nuclear winter debate.
I forgot all about the link in my sig when I posted; that was out of place, and if I could go back and edit the post to remove it I would. I apologize for that mistake.:-( To the grandparent poster, I wasn't karma-whoring; I hit the karma cap years and years ago, and frankly it wouldn't bother me over-much if it went all the way down to zero again. My most was a genuine response to the tragedy, born of an urge to try to offer sympathy for the grieving. My sentiments remain the same. Again, I'm sorry if I offended anyone, and I'm sorry I forgot to remove my sig before posting.
I'd like to second that. The thoughts and prayers of my whole family are with the families of the victims, the wounded, and everyone involved. Truly a tragedy.
We have a set of filters in place that scan every incoming message (for viruses, spam, etc.). It looks like in the last 24 hours or so we've blocked a few thousand of these. They seem to be coming from all over the place, with a variety of subject lines. We block any IP that sends us malicious messages more than twice in an hour (the block stays up for 24 hours, I think), so the 2-3,000 we've blocked could be a drop in the ocean - or may not be. That's still a lot more than we get for most incidents like this.
As has been pointed out, your former employer can sue for anything they feel like. Their chances of winning, however, are a different story entirely. Without a non-compete or other binding agreement, their chances are very slim (I am not a lawyer, but I do have a law degree; this isn't legal advice, blah blah blah); you should have a good chance of recovering your expenses defending the lawsuit, also (see a real lawyer about that).
Even if you did have an agreement not to quit, it would be on shaky ground. Most states ensure the freedom to change employer (not permitting it sounds a bit like slavery!), and in most cases that right cannot be signed away. I actually had a client ask me to sign a contract that should I quit my parent company, I would be liable for expenses incurred finding and training my replacement. I (politely) told them exactly where to stick it, but consulted an attorney anyway - who informed me what while signing it was a bad idea, it wouldn't be enforceable anyway because here in MO I have the right to quit any job, for any reason.
That's odd. I'm running TortoiseSVN on Vista here, with no issues. I pretty much always have to disable the recursive folder scanning, as it is just too slow on some of the huge codebases I'm responsible for maintaining - but otherwise, no issues (and that was an issue under XP, too).
That's a very important point, and one I wish more people considered. I'm an immigrant (from the UK - some say that doesn't count; others go on xenophobic rants about all immigrants including me, and believe me when I say that it isn't pleasant to be on the receiving end!), and I run my own business, pay my way*, and generally contribute to the economy. I haven't done anything blisteringly successful (yet, I hope!), but I'm definitely not a drain on society.
* - Did you know that part of applying for a Green Card includes a promise not to ask for any sort of benefits for several years? I couldn't claim any benefits including unemployment, disability, or any of the various health-related benefits if I wanted to!
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I wondered about that, especially since the title came from the (excellent) BBC TV series. I quite liked the game, too - it was a simple decision tree program, but it captured the humour of the series quite well. Its probably the only game on the list that I don't think could have been called anything else (although some of the other games were quite good, and had titles appropriate to their genre)
Wow, Beebug brings back memories! Between Beebug, the old family Model B, and assisting at school with various computer problems - I don't think I'd have my current career if it weren't for the Beeb.
(Nostalgia ahead!)
My Dad worked at a 6th form college (17-18, pre-University for Americans), and brought home a Model B about the time they were released. It had a cassette drive, a black/white monitor, and the old Acorn 'Welcome' tape. He also purchased a subscription to Beebug magazine. At first (I was around 5), I just played games - Magic Mushrooms, Defender, and messed around in Logo. Noticing my interest, my father was kind enough to teach me some BASIC: the usual "What's your name? Hello TheBracket!" stuff, and then procedures/functions. I was producing my own text-adventure games by Middle School - as well as playing Elite, Chuckie Egg, a Donkey Kong clone, and a bunch of educational programs (I have fond memories of a program my father wrote to help me learn long division because I was struggling with it at school for no good reason). As I progressed through middle school, we picked up a mouse, I discovered the joys of Repton (Boulderdash type clone - seemed like the best game ever to me for years), and started typing in programs from the several volumes of Beebug archives we now had. I started tweaking games, learned a fair amount of 6502 assembler (as well as a lot of BASIC!). We picked up a floppy drive, a shadow RAM board (basically extra RAM chips that could be paged in/out; the Beeb had a great system whereby programs could be run from a ROM - or a shadow RAM chip loaded with a ROM image - leaving most of the 32k system memory available for data) - and I got my paws on a ROM image for the graphics extension system. Suddenly, sprites were easy! I came up with everything from simple platform games to soccer games; none of them were any good, but I had the programming bug - something that stayed with me for life. I also met some cool people when my father took me along to BBC Micro trade shows. It was a lot like the Linux community, in that everyone was helpful/encouraging (unless you didn't know what you were doing), and most people were willing to share their wisdom.
Later on, I learned Pascal and C, helped run a local political parties' accounts with a spreadsheet, and did all my school papers in Word Wise (with a LOUD dot-matrix printer). I even made some pocket money selling (locally) a floppy disk menu system that worked by directly querying disk catalogue information from RAM. We also picked up a 1200/75 or 300 baud modem - that was FUN. I remember being in a lot of trouble for the phone bill when I discovered Prestel (a BBS run by the telephone company) had MUDs!
When the Archimedes came along, I desperately wanted one - but my father was pretty sure it wasn't going to take off well (he'd seen some of the crashing Arthur demos given to schools - if Acorn had shipped the first Archy with a working OS, I think we might be running Risc OS today). Beebug became more and more Archy focused, but jealousy of the Archimedes inspired me to figure out various 3D landscape systems (although I never got a Zarch clone to work), and even a basic GUI.
The family's next purchase was a PC - an Amstrad 1640. It had GEM, Windows 2, and a fair number of (not very good) games. I still used to boot up the Beeb for most of my gaming needs (Exile, Codename: Droid, Stryker's Run - some of those were amazing. Exile with shadow RAM even had enemies with speech sounds - ok, it sounded terrible, but hearing "you shall die" coming out of the Beeb was exciting back then!). As soon as I found Turbo Pascal - I didn't really look back for anything else. A few years later, we picked up a 386 with a VGA card - and the poor old Beeb ended up in the attic.
(/nostalgia trip)
The funny thing is, when I fire up an emulator and look back - the Beeb holds up pretty well. It's a LONG way behind what we can do now, but I really don't think I'd be where I am today if I hadn't had all the low-level experience from back then. (I also really wish that RISC OS had taken off... I still find it more usable than Gnome or Windows in a lot of cases! ROXBOX is cool, but it's not enough for me...)
Likewise, I talked to Gary at a few Gen Cons. Even one of the UK ones (he was a special guest). Very friendly, funny guy, and amazingly open to discussing all things gaming (from the state of videogames - and what we dream of, to various things D&D).
Farewell, Gary. You did more than most people: you touched the hearts/minds of millions, and made the world a better place.
A lot of your "missing" features of IPv6 are exactly what it was meant to eliminate! You absolutely can firewall IPv6 (just as you can firewall a regular routed IPv4 space; a default stateful "outbound only" IPv6 firewall is every bit as secure as a similar IPv4/NAT setup). OpenBSD's pf has supported firewalling IPv6 for years; I'm pretty sure ipfw on FreeBSD has it, too. Iptables on Linux also seems to support it.
NAT isn't something to be missed. The number of nasty kludges required to get protocols that require two peers each behind a NAT to communicate is ridiculous, and a lot of protocols (VOIP, P2P, most games, etc.) can be simplified quite a bit when you take out the various NAT-hole punch routines.
Juniper already ship IPv6 capable VPN kit, you can do it on various open source platforms with things like tinc, and Windows Server 2008 supports it.
In other words, IPv6 is taking a long time, but it's getting there - and support for essential features is developing decently well. I'd recommend getting familiar with it now; even if it never materializes in its current form, it's a good idea to play with lots of different setups and be ready for anything!
I have a 27" CRT that can do 1080i (picked it up for $200 in a sale). For normal viewing, I really can't tell the difference between 480p and 1080i - both look pretty good. Occasionally, HD content does look much better - mostly when watching televised sports (not something I do often!), but mostly I really have to look to see the difference. The only time 1080i really makes a difference is on my xbox 360, particularly for text rendering and small texture details on characters.
I wouldn't pay thousands more just to get better xbox text - but for $200, I can't really complain! I don't think a bigger TV would fit in my apartment anyway!
"Orange squash" is a bit like Sunny Delight, but even nastier. Basically, take some orange concentrate, boil it with sugar (or substitute) into a thick syrup, and sell the syrup. It is then diluted heavily before being drunk. Some squash vendors throw in vitamins, colourings, and various other oddities as well.
That's true to an extent. A belligerent attitude will quickly escalate an otherwise-avoidable incident into a fight; but there are times in which one party starts off violent and isn't likely to be talked down. In my old criminal defense days, I worked a few cases (mostly involving drugs such as PCP, violent drunks, or muggers who lacked the 'decency' to offer a peaceful 'hand over your wallet' before starting with the violence). It even happened to me once; walking home, a drunk fellow yelled some abuse (something about goths), demanded my wallet and swung at me in about the same breath. I wasn't even in a particularly bad neighbourhood, overly gothed-out, or doing more than walking quietly. I was lucky in that the miscreant in question was drunk enough to miss me completely - and I was able to push him back and run away (combat REALLY isn't my forte), but it was completely random. (Side note: I'm not at all sure that having a weapon would have helped me; it would have taken longer to arm myself than it did to step back, think "oh dear", and make a fast exit)
For 90% of cases, not escalating a situation is the way to go. For the remaining 10%, sadly the other party is already hell-bent on escalation - and there's not a lot that will talk them out of it.
That's one thing I loved about my old BBC Micro Model B - the manuals. The main manual came with a guide to BBC BASIC (an amazing BASIC for the time, it supported proper procedures/functions and inline assembly!), a complete list of OS calls. The extended manual (we may have paid extra for it, I don't remember) even included a wiring diagram for the board! When I found the 'beeb' in a box a couple of years ago, it was nonfunctional - but the extended manual helped me find a dead capacitor, and replacing it brought the thing back to life.
I'm still impressed with the ease of 6502 programming, and the Beeb's old ROM system (drop in a 32k ROM containing a word processor, and most of the 32k of RAM is available for data) - especially once shadow RAM put loading whatever ROMs you wanted a *LOAD command away.
Here in Missouri, you can automatically appeal any small claims verdict with a trial de neuvo. Basically, you get a whole new small claims trial with a different (usually more senior) judge. I believe that's common in other states, too - and it's used quite a bit, since small claims judges tend not to be too concerned with more than making a verdict in a very tight timeframe. The small claims courts are always bogged down, and each trial tends to receive less than 15 minutes of attention.
;-)
I recently helped a friend on a small claims case (for non-payment by one of his clients) that went to a trial de neuvo after the original judge completely ignored the contract, and reasonable legal arguments - and zeroed in on my friend having a 15-year old felony conviction and stated that she was ruling against him on that basis alone. The judge in the trial de neuvo read the contract, asked the obvious "was the work performed? Was payment rendered?" questions - and ruled in my friend's favour in 5 minutes.
Small claims courts really aren't the pinnacle of judicial process; but the system recognizes this and has built-in safeguards (you can appeal to a real court if the de neuvo trial is equally silly, but that gets expensive).
Note: I do have a law degree, but I am not a lawyer - and this is not legal advice. The fact that I have to say that is not at all indicative of an old-boys club mentality in the legal profession, nor does it point towards an unfair closed-shop setup designed to protect the system more than any concepts of justice.
> Sure c# is a standard, but it won't matter when Microsoft decides to switch to
> Foo++ language and none of their tools support c# anymore.
Here's the thing, though - it doesn't really matter what language you are using, if you know how to program. I started out in BASIC on a 6502 (BBC Model B), and have since worked in many, many languages ranging from Fortran to C#, via Pascal, Java, Erlang (a little) and Perl. When I was starting out, BASIC to Pascal took some work. Pascal to C took a bit less work. C to the others has been relatively easy so far.
Sure, it's a pain when one's existing code-base doesn't have an obvious forward-migration path - but it's not really a roadblock. Your existing copies of VB5/6 programs still run, your old tools still run (VB6 has better Vista compatibility than VS.NET!), so you have plenty of time to plan.
My experience of the old VB was that it really, really deserved to die. I just wish VBA would die with it!
If its any help, I have VS 2003 (and 2005) running on Vista (32-bit) at work. The biggest problems with VS 2k3 are that it pops a warning about compatibility when it starts, and it took a bit of work to get ASP.NET 1.1 stuff working again (I have some old .NET 1 projects I maintain, without customer budget for an upgrade).
I tried both on 64-bit Vista, and VS2k3 barely worked at all.
I would love to see Single Transferable Vote or Condorcet in the UK (my native land by birth), and over here in the USA (my new native land!). Unfortunately, I'd like it for precisely the reason you stated: it doesn't favour the incumbent, and it makes third (or fourth if you count the Lib Dems) parties significantly more viable.
Within the US, I think a compromise might be to go for a simple proportional system of electoral college votes per state. Then if a party gets 50% of the vote, they get 50% of that state's votes in the electoral college. It's fair, and it would mean that parties actually had to pay attention to the states they feel guaranteed to win - and likewise, it might be worth campaigning in Texas as a Democrat for one or two electoral college votes overall.
That's the funny thing about deterrence in general. The only way to prove that it worked is to prove a negative - there wasn't a nuclear war. It's pretty much impossible to prove a negative, so we can't be sure that the cold war didn't turn nuclear-hot because we deterred the soviets (and were in turn deterred by them). Do we really want to rely on the same unprovable approach in the new, multi-polar world (especially when Chinese leaders have in the past commented that China shouldn't fear nuclear war, because a few million deaths would still leave them with many million more people - I believe that was Mao, but Deng Zhaou Ping [spelling?] supposedly repeated it)?
There are broadly three ways to look at it (from a military/strategic point of view, since all this really does is support the political/diplomatic arena anyway); not mutually exclusive:
- Rely on deterrence. It might be existential deterrence (that is, "we have nukes - they deter"), or it might include a genuine willingness to use the weapons if a certain line is crossed. If it isn't obvious that you will use them at a certain point, the deterrent loses credibility - and your influence is whittled down by a thousand papercuts (see below). Some deterrence theorists have stated that a nuclear-armed neighborhood is a polite neighborhood, although the jury is still out on that (certainly Israel, India and Pakistan have had no shortage of wars since becoming nuclear powers).
- Rely on might. In this case, you want to have a really effective nuclear force, the strongest defenses you can afford, and a doctrine that makes it obvious that you will escalate to the nuclear option if you need to.
- Rely on arms control. Basically attempt to keep the lid on the nuclear can of worms as much as possible, and try to agree upon arms levels with other countries. The only problem here is that it's really easy to agree arms control with countries you weren't really going to fight anyway, and rather hard to agree with countries with whom you are genuinely likely to have a shooting war.
I remember talking to some of Bush Senior's administration while I was in college, talking about their discussions of the nuclear option in Gulf War 1. A large part of the government wanted to rule it out altogether, regardless of chemical-biological threats. A committee did actually draft a strategy for using tactical nukes in the initial attack, but it was ruled out very fast - not because of long-term problems (a small tac-nuke isn't much worse for the environment than an FAE), but because it would have taken far too many tactical nukes to really make much difference militarily! In the end, the decision was made to formally "not rule anything out" if Hussein used chemical/biological weapons; a decision to not have a policy. Discussions were ongoing, but an answer was never forthcoming to "will we even consider using nukes?" - let alone "how badly do they have to hit us before we'll consider it?" I'm told that similar discussions occurred for various other small-medium regional contingencies over the years.
On the other hand, we've built up the word about deterrence so strongly (including the nuclear armed neighborhood statement!) that world leaders who might be invaded are all scrambling to get nuclear weapons. Even if they don't plan to use them (who knows?), it's a fair gamble that the big powers will be less willing to invade if it means a nuclear attack.
One day, there will be a small nuclear war with modern weapons. When the dust settles, and we discover that it was nothing like Armageddon, the can will be off the nuclear can of worms forever - and we'll be stuck having to come up with policies that rely on capability and actions, rather than an abstract, unprovable and arguably purely philosophical notion of deterrence.
What's interesting about 'duck and cover' (and other civil defense campaigns from the era) is that it's nowhere near as useless as it sounds. The primary kill mechanism of a nuclear bomb (not 'neutron bomb', which really should be called 'reduced blast nuclear weapon'), so being in cover can help a lot. The secondary kill mechanism is prompt radiation, manifesting as the flash - likewise, if that doesn't hit you, then you have a much greater chance of survival. The tertiary mechanism is fallout, and it's one that a lot of systems are designed to minimize (who wants to conquer a highly radioactive landscape?); most fallout comes from the actual explosion cloud touching down, sucking in dirt particles that are rendered highly radioactive. Because of this, a lot of work was done to minimize the fireball radius - and also most warheads were designed to airburst high enough to avoid the problem. You can read about this in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and also in a number of discussions of the issue in various defense studies/international studies journals.
What's REALLY interesting is why we, in the West, abandoned civil defense. With the wholesale adoption of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) theory, it was considered a DOWNSIDE to be able to save one's population - so civil defense, missile defense, air defense, and shelters all vanished from the budget. The theory being that you want everyone to be as vulnerable as possible - because otherwise the cost of launching a nuclear strike may seem low enough to make a nuclear war palatable. It amazes me to this day that the US persuaded its allies to buy into that theory. Yes, nuclear war sucks - but it seems that maximizing the damage it would do to you in the name of avoiding one is rather shortsighted. That's especially true in the post-cold war multipolar world. It's hard to say 'MAD works' when suddenly you are trying to deter anyone capable of building a nuclear device - which overall, really isn't that hard to do.
It really depends upon where you draw the line for what defines a "country" - a nation, or a state (you still sometimes find countries referred to as nation-states). A nation is a grouping that qualifies as a country other than having an independent government. A state is a political entity governing one or more nations. So the UK is a state comprising of the fine nations of England, Wales, Scotland, and a few bits of other nations (such as Northern Ireland).
The US was originally intended to be a state of many different nations, as opposed to a federalist's dream.
Not much of a data-point, but we use it for just about every project that needs an RDBMS. It's overkill for much of what we do, but it's very solid. I've also seen it embedded into a few commercially available systems, such as a wimax provisioning system, and a point-of-sale program. It's not as ubiquitous as MySQL, but it does get around.
Classical nuclear winter theory was discredited when it was shown that the original calculations required some really, really odd targeting decisions in a full nuclear exchange. We would have had to aim a huge number of warheads at the sparsely-populated forest regions of the old USSR, and in turn the Russians would have had to return the favor - aiming at large chunks of US forestry real-estate. That would, in theory, put enough particular matter into the atmosphere to precipitate a significant global temperature reduction.
You likely would get a small temperature reduction from hitting a city with a nuclear weapon, but the destructive capacity of even a thousand modern 30kT warheads is a fraction of the capacity of the volcanic eruption (the name escapes me right now) that lowered European temperatures by 2-3C for a year and sparked much of the nuclear winter debate.
I forgot all about the link in my sig when I posted; that was out of place, and if I could go back and edit the post to remove it I would. I apologize for that mistake. :-( To the grandparent poster, I wasn't karma-whoring; I hit the karma cap years and years ago, and frankly it wouldn't bother me over-much if it went all the way down to zero again. My most was a genuine response to the tragedy, born of an urge to try to offer sympathy for the grieving. My sentiments remain the same. Again, I'm sorry if I offended anyone, and I'm sorry I forgot to remove my sig before posting.
I'd like to second that. The thoughts and prayers of my whole family are with the families of the victims, the wounded, and everyone involved. Truly a tragedy.
We have a set of filters in place that scan every incoming message (for viruses, spam, etc.). It looks like in the last 24 hours or so we've blocked a few thousand of these. They seem to be coming from all over the place, with a variety of subject lines. We block any IP that sends us malicious messages more than twice in an hour (the block stays up for 24 hours, I think), so the 2-3,000 we've blocked could be a drop in the ocean - or may not be. That's still a lot more than we get for most incidents like this.
As has been pointed out, your former employer can sue for anything they feel like. Their chances of winning, however, are a different story entirely. Without a non-compete or other binding agreement, their chances are very slim (I am not a lawyer, but I do have a law degree; this isn't legal advice, blah blah blah); you should have a good chance of recovering your expenses defending the lawsuit, also (see a real lawyer about that).
Even if you did have an agreement not to quit, it would be on shaky ground. Most states ensure the freedom to change employer (not permitting it sounds a bit like slavery!), and in most cases that right cannot be signed away. I actually had a client ask me to sign a contract that should I quit my parent company, I would be liable for expenses incurred finding and training my replacement. I (politely) told them exactly where to stick it, but consulted an attorney anyway - who informed me what while signing it was a bad idea, it wouldn't be enforceable anyway because here in MO I have the right to quit any job, for any reason.
That's odd. I'm running TortoiseSVN on Vista here, with no issues. I pretty much always have to disable the recursive folder scanning, as it is just too slow on some of the huge codebases I'm responsible for maintaining - but otherwise, no issues (and that was an issue under XP, too).
That's a very important point, and one I wish more people considered. I'm an immigrant (from the UK - some say that doesn't count; others go on xenophobic rants about all immigrants including me, and believe me when I say that it isn't pleasant to be on the receiving end!), and I run my own business, pay my way*, and generally contribute to the economy. I haven't done anything blisteringly successful (yet, I hope!), but I'm definitely not a drain on society.
* - Did you know that part of applying for a Green Card includes a promise not to ask for any sort of benefits for several years? I couldn't claim any benefits including unemployment, disability, or any of the various health-related benefits if I wanted to!