In other words, he will not automatically give you a pat on the back just because you use a Creative Commons license; he wants to know what the terms of the license are first.
No. Reread the article. If you use a Creative Commons license that might meet his standards, he still won't endorse it because the Creative Common "brand" allows licenses that he doesn't like. Instead, he thinks you should use his particular license (the GPL) for everything.
I'd respect him more (or have less disrespect for him) if he'd criticise the particular licenses he didn't like and give some praise for the ones he did like, but instead he says effectively, "Forget it. It's not worth the trouble. Use my license instead." Instead he takes the ideological "with us or against us" stance.
The guy is an idealogue. More power to him for practicing what he preaches, but his "my way or the highway" philosophy really marginalizes any arguments that he presents.
Exactly. One of my major reasons for disliking RMS is that he has a very black-and-white "you're all with us or you're all against us" philosophy. Since he has problems with a few of the Creative Commons compatible licenses, they must all be rejected in his mindset. It's just so him. Of course, he naturally suggests that the GPL be used instead because it's his solution and thus it's correct for everything.
This is the same sort of uncompromising attitude that fuels religious conflicts everywhere. "If you're not just like me, then you're evil." RMS is a dogmatist. It doesn't matter if you think he's right in his stance, his arrogant, dismissive attitude is inexcusable.
I had a good job with a good company with good hours and good coworkers. However, after 5 years of doing the same thing with it made very clear that there was no room for advancement, I quit and took a different job that a friend of mine was leaving. The new job paid 80% more than my old job, but I knew that it was miserable.
The job involves maintaining a horrible suite of interconnected billing applications that is completely undocumented. This in and of itself wouldn't be too bad, but there is horrible bureaucratic red tape choking everything you do. You don't have the ability to install better tools to do your work on your laptop or on the test servers. Getting logins needed to do your job can take weeks.
Fixing a bug requires a truly horrific number of impediments. First, you must get access to a test server (of which there are less than half the number of employees in my department), which can require over half a day to set up. Then, once you've identified the bug, you have to write up a design doc to fix it which has to be approved within the department. Then it has to be looked over by development (the very same reckless morons who created all the bugs I've looked at) and rubber stamped by at least three different people. Then, you have to stage the fixed executable as part of a weekly move into production which requires three more levels of approval (for a binary that they can't even scrutinize!) before it can go. Only then after verifying the code can you deliver changes into the production stream in the vile, hated, "everyone's workspace is a branch that has to be merged" tool that is ClearCase. This of course means that if someone else is changing the same program, they can't go into production in the same week. In spite of all of this, we are now expected to close all Critical tickets in 3 business days and all other tickets in 7 because "the business" is high on acid and the contractors who I work through are eager as puppies to please with impossible promises.
The job also requires 24-hour on-call every couple of weeks with weekend on-call every month or so. In addition, our department is storm drain of the city that is my company's billing system -- it all flows down here eventually. Any other system that screws up and feeds us bad data can result in weeks or months of horrible clean up. We are the department responsible for all fact-checking on erroneous bill items and the department responsible for fixing bills even if our software wasn't the source of the problem. In other words, on-call duty is usually a 12-16 hour affair with people constantly pestering you for updates.
To put it simply the job is extremely stressful and consumes large amounts of my free time. I have developed acid reflux as a result of the stress, and my sleep schedule is wrecked again after working so hard to fix it at my last job. My free time is wasted feeling burned out and not doing anything fun, and I don't have time to cook healthy food anymore.
Over half of your waking life (counting commuting and short lunch and dinner breaks) is spent consumed by your job. If you know that a job will not bring you joy, run -- do not walk -- in the other direction as far away as possible. The majority of your waking life should not be spent making yourself sick and unhappy for filthy lucre. Money is not freedom if you make yourself a slave to it. Early retirement shouldn't come at the cost of shortening the time you have remaining in exchange for your best years.
As for me, as soon as a year has passed at this job and my time here will not be too short to look good on a resume, then I'm out of here for a job with less pay and more reward. I took this job to get better paying jobs in the future, but I don't really think it was worth it at this point.
Silly British and their infrastructure-investing public utilities. Enlightened private firms realize that spending money on more efficient and tamper-proof monitoring of existing customers hurts the quarterly profit-line.
Just make a no-uploading rule or you'll find your pipe clogged in no time.
No cable: get utorrent and download shows.
I gotta chime in with the other guy here. You're not only advocating being a pirate, but you're also advocating being a leech. What's next, selling copies of the stuff you download and stealing Wi-Fi access from a neighbor?
I love urban legend as much as the next guy, but this isn't exactly true. These are cell phones not two-way radios. Phone A will be talking to a cell phone tower, whilst phone B is talking to a cell phone tower, whilst each cell phone tower is talking to the two phones respectively. There is no reason to think that you are forming some sort of ultra powerful death beam between the two phones by placing them in close proximity to one another.
Not so fast, yourself!
This might be an urban legend, but I sure hope that you don't think that cell phones talk to their towers with some sort of directional beam. Cell phones and cell towers radiate their energy in all directions with roughly the same power and would point just as much energy towards the egg as towards the tower (or any other direction).
The point of having two phones is so that you have control over the conversation and can run it at an arbitrary length without the other end hanging up. It also doubles the amount of power being broadcast at close proximity. The radio is there to keep the phone broadcasting.
I'd try this myself when I get home tonight, but I only have the one phone.
At least the AI doesn't suck - it's good enough to play the entire game for you! It looks like Square-Enix has finally gotten "interactive movie" down to an art.
You know, I really like the whole "interactive movie" aspect of some RPGs, but it never even dawned on me to not get right in there and fight in the FFXII demo. I guess it takes a different temperment to deliberately try not to get any enjoyment out of a game.
Anyway, it's better than the.hack games. The only way to beat the boss of the first game was to let your two AI controlled characters go at it against the boss while you stayed as far away as possible tossing potions. This is because that boss featured instant-death attacks, powerful area attacks, and attacks that inflicted all status ailments (preventing you from getting to your curative items or otherwise acting).
Apparently you're going to be "sky pirates." And, no matter how cute they may look in anime, "bunny girls" should never, ever, be rendered in 3-d. Plus, one of the races looks suspiciously like Jar-Jar Binks...
The bunny girls (Viera) and lizard men (Bangaa) are races from Ivalice, the setting of Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced for the GBA. I admit that they do look a little odd rendered in a realistic style compared to the whimsical 2D look for the GBA game.
However, you're dismissing the idea of playing sky pirates crusing around in airships? Turn in your geek card right now!
No, actually old school programmers are going to be able to squeeze a lot more power out of the Cell and Xenon architectures and are far better suited to understand the limits of in-order execution and the memory timings involved. They know what coding for the specific hardware means, and they're used to limitations not typically present in a PC.
Programming for a single-processor, general purpose machine with gobs of slow RAM gives you very little applicable expertise for these multiprocessor or massively parallel SIMD monsters with limited high-speed RAM. Honestly, Cell is NOTHING like a regular PC architecture. You'd be better off with a background in programming Crays than PCs.
The best thing that PC programming will prepare you for is working with the graphics hardware on both platforms, and even there most people are used to generalizing their code.
I work for a major US cell phone carrier, and we have the exact same problems. Pretty much all non-HTTP, FTP, or SSH traffic outside of the LAN is blocked. We don't have administrator rights to our laptops, and there is a huge bureaucratic lag on getting things installed that requires a lot of justification. Getting log-ins on machines we need access to do our jobs can take two weeks to get approval. Personally, I'm of the opinion after butting heads a few times that the job of our IT department is to prevent work from getting done.
(Our excuse du jour is "SOX compliance." What's yours?)
Oh please. I've been on 4-lane roads (that's 4 lanes on each side) in the US with a speed limit of 45!!!
I'm guessing that it was a downtown area with many stop lights and shops on either side of the road but with no 5th middle turn lane. This used to be very common where I live, though most have been expanded to 5-lane roads. Even so, 45 MPH is a very common speed limit inside city commercial zones where many cars enter and exit the road from multiple locations.
I forgot that the Japanese word for brown is "chairo" or "the color of tea."
Red is an obvious first word thanks to how much it jumps out at us and because of the natural significance of seeing the color of blood. Green and yellow seem natural to distinguish plants. Blue seems to me to be a natural next thing given its presence in the sky, sky reflecting water, eye colors, and veins. I'm a little surprised that brown comes before the various "flower colors" or orange, pink, and purple, but it is far more common than all three of those. Grey seems a natural last since all grey things are either lighter than usual (hair, fur, etc.) or darker than usual (clouds, etc.).
It seems to me to be a natural order, but maybe that because of my own language biases.
But he loves Jesus and thats all that matters. See, as long as you accept jesus into your heart,sinning is ok. In fact, the bigger the sin, the better! Isn't Jesus great?!
Please stop trying to support my argument. I'm a Christian, and while do I think the right-wing severely abuses the teaching of Jesus, I find your bigotry more offensive.
Honestly, this is why debating politics with people who disagree with you is more fun than with people who do agree with you. People who disagree with you don't have the ability to embrass you and make your side look bad with their own bad reasons for agreeing with you.
It's not that bad -- it just takes a lot more conscious work when you get older to stop it. My Japanese professors in college were very good a pronouncing the difference. The big place where one of them failed to sound native was the pitch and rhythm of speaking in English, but they all had "L" & "R" down cold.
In my experience, the truly difficult thing to master about pronunciation is pitch and rhythm (which is mostly in the vowels), especially if you're trying to learn a tonal language like Mandarin when you didn't grow up with it. Don't get me wrong -- getting your throat and tongue to make sounds it doesn't naturally make in day to day speech is hard, but thinking in those sounds is really easy compared to changing the "music" of your speech.
I might one day learn Arabic with its unique phonemes (and sound stupid but understandable), but I'll never be able to learn Chinese. I've had friends in college try to teach me a little here and there, but I just can't pick up on the tonal differences at all (and I'm not tone deaf). I also can't pronounce the 4th tone.
I already know of two languages that doesn't follow this order -- Japanese and the language mentioned in the article, Tarahumara. Much like Tarahumara, Japanese has a word that covers both blue and green (aoi). However, Japanese also has a word that covers just green (midori).
However, Japanese has had words for brown, purple, and several different words for grey but not distinct words for orange and pink (I'm ignoring X-iro words which mean "color of X" like momoiro for the color of peaches or oranjiiro for the color of oranges). It is interesting though that (gosai) means "the five colors" -- black, white, red, yellow, and green/blue.
It is interesting to note that in my limited experience is seems that the more civilized and thus artistic a culture becomes, the more words for colors they invent or co-opt.
What do you call a person within the boarders of a country, not a citizen of the country, during the time of war, without any sort of uniform, receiving communication from the enemy?
A dangerous criminal. We have laws for dealing with them. These laws were created specifically to put checks and balances in place to ensure freedom and democracy stay alive. These laws ban the kind of things you see in dictatorships like indefinite imprisonment without charges, spying on citizens who oppose the government, torture of prisoners, and secret trials where the defendant is not allowed to have access to lawyers or to see and challenge all the evidence presented against them. These are all things that this administration has claimed the power to do (oh, but only against the bad guys, of course).
This is the type of person that 150 years ago would not be arrested by the police, and not tried by citizen courts.
Please justify this statement with historical examples.
If you look at things this way, it is very easy to see why the administration went to Congress and informed them on what they were doing, and nothing was done. It would also explain why the administration believes they are doing the right thing, within the law.
He only informed a very select few members of Congress, and we don't know how much he told them nor whether or not what he told them is true. After all, he's acted to prevent oversight that would allow fact checking. We do know however that he's presented tainted evidence to Congress before, and look where that got us. We also know that he's lied about wiretaps before.
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
Honestly, how can you trust this man anymore? There are no legitimate reasons to evade FISA. The only other reasons are to spy on people who shouldn't be spied on or to go on a fishing expedition through a wide sea of innocent people in the hopes of grabbing someone guilty. These are the acts of man who has no respect for rule of law.
Let me tell you two reasons to fear the side-stepping of FISA courts both dealing with the already scary nature of the secret courts. The first is that of about 19,000 applications for permission to wiretap from 1979-2004 only four have ever been rejected by the court. Obviously, in legitimate cases of security issues, the FISA court doesn't stand much in the way.
The second reason is that according to 50 U.S.C. Sec. 1805(f)(2), the Attorney General has up to 72 hours after starting wiretapping to get approval. If they get a legitimate hot tip, then they can start tapping immediately and get approval afterwards. If not approved, then the evidence can't be used in court but as mentioned above only 4 applications have ever been rejected.
Given that FISA extremely rarely rejects requests put before it and that you don't have to get permission before you can start, there are only two reasons possible why Bush doesn't want to go to the court.
They are spying on people unrelated to domestic security issues like political opponents and anti-war protesters.
They are going on automated fishing expeditions against "suspicious" people, the vast majority of which are probably innocent or who have so little evidence against them that even FISA wouldn't support it.
Lastly, the President was NOT authorized by Congress to do this under any legitimate interpretation. He was given authority to use force against terrorists. He was not given authority to wipe his rear end with the 4th and 6th Amendments like he claims he is. If it even were possible for Congress to authorize this, then there are effectively no limits on what powers he may assume.
Incidentally, regardless of your stance for or against abortion, the limits of executive power is the number one reason to give a damn about Judge Alito. The man is a fascist who does not accept any reasonable limits on executive power and police power. Just look at two of his rulings. (12) (But hey, we can always rely on the media to cover the important stuff like his equivocation on abortion and the padding of his resume with an elitist, racist group, right?)
People who ingested caffeine in a controlled experiment had 21% higher blood sugar levels than people who took a placebo after eating breakfast (which is equivalent to amount reduced by diabetes-controlling drugs). They also did an experiment where they had a bunch of sedentary, obese men go on an exercise program to lose weight. At the end, those who were given caffeine saw none of the benefits to their blood sugar from exercise that those who didn't have caffeine received.
Still seem ridiculous for one game to have that big of an effect on profits? If it does badly, that represents a significant cultural shift for the country of Japan
Who said the game did poorly? Go back and reread the article & the blurb. While it sold 430,000 units in North America, it sold 3 million units in Japan in the first few days. Gee, I wonder why their income dropped almost in proportion with the difference in total sales of all games?
They're still profitable. Someday, I'm gonna see if there's a broker than I can buy their stock through.
Nintendo has always sold it consoles for a profit perhaps only losing slight amounts of money right around when it cut prices on the GameCube to $99. Selling at a loss is a recent thing, done by companies that can survive off of other products until revenue from game licenses kicks up. Nintendo, as a company that lives and dies by video games and consoles alone, has always had to sell the system itself at a small profit to stay in business.
And what in that article violates known physical facts? It's speculative, but theoretically possible in string theory, which is a physical theory.
Whoops. Looks like I pasted in the first link twice instead of the second link which has Michio Kaku apparently suspending all disbelief in the face of the magic of nanotech.
Read this article down to the bottom. I'll skip over his suggestions for how to open a wormhole because they're beyond my capability to comment on with my current understanding of physics, but I'll get right into the madness:
If the wormholes created in the previous steps are too small, too unstable, or the radiation effects too intense, then perhaps we could send only atom-sized particles through a wormhole. In this case, this civilisation may embark upon the ultimate solution: passing an atomic-sized "seed" through the wormhole capable of regenerating the civilisation on the other side. This process is commonly found in nature. The seed of an oak tree, for example, is compact, rugged and designed to survive a long journey and live off the land. It also contains all the genetic information needed to regenerate the tree.
An advanced civilisation might want to send enough information through the wormhole to create a "nanobot," a self-replicating atomic-sized machine, built with nanotechnology. It would be able to travel at near the speed of light because it would be only the size of a molecule. It would land on a barren moon, and then use the raw materials to create a chemical factory which could create millions of copies of itself. A horde of these robots would then travel to other moons in other solar systems and create new chemical factories. This whole process would be repeated over and over again, making millions upon millions of copies of the original robot. Starting from a single robot, there will be a sphere of trillions of such robot probes expanding at near the speed of light, colonising the entire galaxy.
[...Stuff about SF movies...]
Next, these robot probes would create huge biotechnology laboratories. The DNA sequences of the probes' creators would have been carefully recorded, and the robots would have been designed to inject this information into incubators, which would then clone the entire species. An advanced civilisation may also code the personalities and memories of its inhabitants and inject this into the clones, enabling the entire race to be reincarnated.
Wow! You can encode the DNA sequences, memories, and technology of an entire civilization into a single molecule! And that single molecule "machine" can take off at light speed with no external power source and manipulate matter to create more of itself without changing or losing any of its own properties and embedded information too! Oh, and apparently this molecule is really small too since that somehow has something to do with its mysterious ability to travel at light speed.
What a freaking flake. He seems to have drank the Dexlerian / Grey Goo Kool-Aid interpretation of the magical powers that nanotech will have to one day violate all known laws of physics.
Put yet another way, if string/M- theory is not falsifiable then it is not making any predictions about reality and hence it is useless as a model to tell us anything. That's hardly the case.
Other physicists rightly point out that if they theory can handle an almost uncountable number of alternate universes with alternate sets of forces and physical constants, then it doesn't actually predict anything useful since you can't figure out how to predict anything about our own specific single universe has and that its not falsifiable because any new observations we find can be retrofitted into the theory by playing with and changing the math as has happened numerous times since the theory's inception.
Of course, string theory may be right. The philosophical problem is that many of our best minds are spending all their time on a theory that can't be proven or disproven with current technology. Some of the experiments needed to confirm or deny string theory will take super-colliders capable of generating energy on a scale far beyond even a type I civilizaions' resources (the theoretical energy densities needed to tear matter down to its component strings).
Since its practioners frequently disdain the necessity of experimental verification, since it's useless as a predictive tool, and since it can be retrofitted for any information that conflicts with it that we'll be able to achieve in the forseeable future, string theory is for all practical purposes nothing more than a math-based religion.
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In other words, he will not automatically give you a pat on the back just because you use a Creative Commons license; he wants to know what the terms of the license are first.
No. Reread the article. If you use a Creative Commons license that might meet his standards, he still won't endorse it because the Creative Common "brand" allows licenses that he doesn't like. Instead, he thinks you should use his particular license (the GPL) for everything.
I'd respect him more (or have less disrespect for him) if he'd criticise the particular licenses he didn't like and give some praise for the ones he did like, but instead he says effectively, "Forget it. It's not worth the trouble. Use my license instead." Instead he takes the ideological "with us or against us" stance.
The guy is an idealogue. More power to him for practicing what he preaches, but his "my way or the highway" philosophy really marginalizes any arguments that he presents.
Exactly. One of my major reasons for disliking RMS is that he has a very black-and-white "you're all with us or you're all against us" philosophy. Since he has problems with a few of the Creative Commons compatible licenses, they must all be rejected in his mindset. It's just so him. Of course, he naturally suggests that the GPL be used instead because it's his solution and thus it's correct for everything.
This is the same sort of uncompromising attitude that fuels religious conflicts everywhere. "If you're not just like me, then you're evil." RMS is a dogmatist. It doesn't matter if you think he's right in his stance, his arrogant, dismissive attitude is inexcusable.
Trust me. It isn't worth it.
I had a good job with a good company with good hours and good coworkers. However, after 5 years of doing the same thing with it made very clear that there was no room for advancement, I quit and took a different job that a friend of mine was leaving. The new job paid 80% more than my old job, but I knew that it was miserable.
The job involves maintaining a horrible suite of interconnected billing applications that is completely undocumented. This in and of itself wouldn't be too bad, but there is horrible bureaucratic red tape choking everything you do. You don't have the ability to install better tools to do your work on your laptop or on the test servers. Getting logins needed to do your job can take weeks.
Fixing a bug requires a truly horrific number of impediments. First, you must get access to a test server (of which there are less than half the number of employees in my department), which can require over half a day to set up. Then, once you've identified the bug, you have to write up a design doc to fix it which has to be approved within the department. Then it has to be looked over by development (the very same reckless morons who created all the bugs I've looked at) and rubber stamped by at least three different people. Then, you have to stage the fixed executable as part of a weekly move into production which requires three more levels of approval (for a binary that they can't even scrutinize!) before it can go. Only then after verifying the code can you deliver changes into the production stream in the vile, hated, "everyone's workspace is a branch that has to be merged" tool that is ClearCase. This of course means that if someone else is changing the same program, they can't go into production in the same week. In spite of all of this, we are now expected to close all Critical tickets in 3 business days and all other tickets in 7 because "the business" is high on acid and the contractors who I work through are eager as puppies to please with impossible promises.
The job also requires 24-hour on-call every couple of weeks with weekend on-call every month or so. In addition, our department is storm drain of the city that is my company's billing system -- it all flows down here eventually. Any other system that screws up and feeds us bad data can result in weeks or months of horrible clean up. We are the department responsible for all fact-checking on erroneous bill items and the department responsible for fixing bills even if our software wasn't the source of the problem. In other words, on-call duty is usually a 12-16 hour affair with people constantly pestering you for updates.
To put it simply the job is extremely stressful and consumes large amounts of my free time. I have developed acid reflux as a result of the stress, and my sleep schedule is wrecked again after working so hard to fix it at my last job. My free time is wasted feeling burned out and not doing anything fun, and I don't have time to cook healthy food anymore.
Over half of your waking life (counting commuting and short lunch and dinner breaks) is spent consumed by your job. If you know that a job will not bring you joy, run -- do not walk -- in the other direction as far away as possible. The majority of your waking life should not be spent making yourself sick and unhappy for filthy lucre. Money is not freedom if you make yourself a slave to it. Early retirement shouldn't come at the cost of shortening the time you have remaining in exchange for your best years.
As for me, as soon as a year has passed at this job and my time here will not be too short to look good on a resume, then I'm out of here for a job with less pay and more reward. I took this job to get better paying jobs in the future, but I don't really think it was worth it at this point.
Silly British and their infrastructure-investing public utilities. Enlightened private firms realize that spending money on more efficient and tamper-proof monitoring of existing customers hurts the quarterly profit-line.
Just make a no-uploading rule or you'll find your pipe clogged in no time.
No cable: get utorrent and download shows.
I gotta chime in with the other guy here. You're not only advocating being a pirate, but you're also advocating being a leech. What's next, selling copies of the stuff you download and stealing Wi-Fi access from a neighbor?
I love urban legend as much as the next guy, but this isn't exactly true. These are cell phones not two-way radios. Phone A will be talking to a cell phone tower, whilst phone B is talking to a cell phone tower, whilst each cell phone tower is talking to the two phones respectively. There is no reason to think that you are forming some sort of ultra powerful death beam between the two phones by placing them in close proximity to one another.
Not so fast, yourself!
This might be an urban legend, but I sure hope that you don't think that cell phones talk to their towers with some sort of directional beam. Cell phones and cell towers radiate their energy in all directions with roughly the same power and would point just as much energy towards the egg as towards the tower (or any other direction).
The point of having two phones is so that you have control over the conversation and can run it at an arbitrary length without the other end hanging up. It also doubles the amount of power being broadcast at close proximity. The radio is there to keep the phone broadcasting.
I'd try this myself when I get home tonight, but I only have the one phone.
It isn't being superficial...it is getting what I want. Life is way too short not to do and get what you want to make your life happy.
That sums up everything that is wrong about modern consumer society in two sentences.
Well of course. We all know that the larger of a footprint a game has the better the quality, right?
At least the AI doesn't suck - it's good enough to play the entire game for you! It looks like Square-Enix has finally gotten "interactive movie" down to an art.
.hack games. The only way to beat the boss of the first game was to let your two AI controlled characters go at it against the boss while you stayed as far away as possible tossing potions. This is because that boss featured instant-death attacks, powerful area attacks, and attacks that inflicted all status ailments (preventing you from getting to your curative items or otherwise acting).
You know, I really like the whole "interactive movie" aspect of some RPGs, but it never even dawned on me to not get right in there and fight in the FFXII demo. I guess it takes a different temperment to deliberately try not to get any enjoyment out of a game.
Anyway, it's better than the
Apparently you're going to be "sky pirates." And, no matter how cute they may look in anime, "bunny girls" should never, ever, be rendered in 3-d. Plus, one of the races looks suspiciously like Jar-Jar Binks...
The bunny girls (Viera) and lizard men (Bangaa) are races from Ivalice, the setting of Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced for the GBA. I admit that they do look a little odd rendered in a realistic style compared to the whimsical 2D look for the GBA game.
However, you're dismissing the idea of playing sky pirates crusing around in airships? Turn in your geek card right now!
Alright. I failed my obscure pop culture pop quiz.
Who are the characters in the exact middle and in the upper left corner?
No, actually old school programmers are going to be able to squeeze a lot more power out of the Cell and Xenon architectures and are far better suited to understand the limits of in-order execution and the memory timings involved. They know what coding for the specific hardware means, and they're used to limitations not typically present in a PC.
Programming for a single-processor, general purpose machine with gobs of slow RAM gives you very little applicable expertise for these multiprocessor or massively parallel SIMD monsters with limited high-speed RAM. Honestly, Cell is NOTHING like a regular PC architecture. You'd be better off with a background in programming Crays than PCs.
The best thing that PC programming will prepare you for is working with the graphics hardware on both platforms, and even there most people are used to generalizing their code.
I work for a major US cell phone carrier, and we have the exact same problems. Pretty much all non-HTTP, FTP, or SSH traffic outside of the LAN is blocked. We don't have administrator rights to our laptops, and there is a huge bureaucratic lag on getting things installed that requires a lot of justification. Getting log-ins on machines we need access to do our jobs can take two weeks to get approval. Personally, I'm of the opinion after butting heads a few times that the job of our IT department is to prevent work from getting done.
(Our excuse du jour is "SOX compliance." What's yours?)
Oh please. I've been on 4-lane roads (that's 4 lanes on each side) in the US with a speed limit of 45!!!
I'm guessing that it was a downtown area with many stop lights and shops on either side of the road but with no 5th middle turn lane. This used to be very common where I live, though most have been expanded to 5-lane roads. Even so, 45 MPH is a very common speed limit inside city commercial zones where many cars enter and exit the road from multiple locations.
Two-lane highways with speed limits of 55 MPH and above are also common because very few cars stop to turn. Note however, that more than half of the nation's fatal accidents happened on rural non-Interstate roads. This is in spite of carrying only 28% of the nation's traffic.
I forgot that the Japanese word for brown is "chairo" or "the color of tea."
Red is an obvious first word thanks to how much it jumps out at us and because of the natural significance of seeing the color of blood. Green and yellow seem natural to distinguish plants. Blue seems to me to be a natural next thing given its presence in the sky, sky reflecting water, eye colors, and veins. I'm a little surprised that brown comes before the various "flower colors" or orange, pink, and purple, but it is far more common than all three of those. Grey seems a natural last since all grey things are either lighter than usual (hair, fur, etc.) or darker than usual (clouds, etc.).
It seems to me to be a natural order, but maybe that because of my own language biases.
But he loves Jesus and thats all that matters. See, as long as you accept jesus into your heart,sinning is ok. In fact, the bigger the sin, the better! Isn't Jesus great?!
Please stop trying to support my argument. I'm a Christian, and while do I think the right-wing severely abuses the teaching of Jesus, I find your bigotry more offensive.
Honestly, this is why debating politics with people who disagree with you is more fun than with people who do agree with you. People who disagree with you don't have the ability to embrass you and make your side look bad with their own bad reasons for agreeing with you.
It's not that bad -- it just takes a lot more conscious work when you get older to stop it. My Japanese professors in college were very good a pronouncing the difference. The big place where one of them failed to sound native was the pitch and rhythm of speaking in English, but they all had "L" & "R" down cold.
In my experience, the truly difficult thing to master about pronunciation is pitch and rhythm (which is mostly in the vowels), especially if you're trying to learn a tonal language like Mandarin when you didn't grow up with it. Don't get me wrong -- getting your throat and tongue to make sounds it doesn't naturally make in day to day speech is hard, but thinking in those sounds is really easy compared to changing the "music" of your speech.
I might one day learn Arabic with its unique phonemes (and sound stupid but understandable), but I'll never be able to learn Chinese. I've had friends in college try to teach me a little here and there, but I just can't pick up on the tonal differences at all (and I'm not tone deaf). I also can't pronounce the 4th tone.
I already know of two languages that doesn't follow this order -- Japanese and the language mentioned in the article, Tarahumara. Much like Tarahumara, Japanese has a word that covers both blue and green (aoi). However, Japanese also has a word that covers just green (midori).
However, Japanese has had words for brown, purple, and several different words for grey but not distinct words for orange and pink (I'm ignoring X-iro words which mean "color of X" like momoiro for the color of peaches or oranjiiro for the color of oranges). It is interesting though that (gosai) means "the five colors" -- black, white, red, yellow, and green/blue.
It is interesting to note that in my limited experience is seems that the more civilized and thus artistic a culture becomes, the more words for colors they invent or co-opt.
This has been covered twice on Slashdot already. Twice.
July 12th, 2004
November 26th, 2005
As for decent games: All I ask for is an RPG! A nice RPG!
What do you call a person within the boarders of a country, not a citizen of the country, during the time of war, without any sort of uniform, receiving communication from the enemy?
A dangerous criminal. We have laws for dealing with them. These laws were created specifically to put checks and balances in place to ensure freedom and democracy stay alive. These laws ban the kind of things you see in dictatorships like indefinite imprisonment without charges, spying on citizens who oppose the government, torture of prisoners, and secret trials where the defendant is not allowed to have access to lawyers or to see and challenge all the evidence presented against them. These are all things that this administration has claimed the power to do (oh, but only against the bad guys, of course).
This is the type of person that 150 years ago would not be arrested by the police, and not tried by citizen courts.
Please justify this statement with historical examples.
If you look at things this way, it is very easy to see why the administration went to Congress and informed them on what they were doing, and nothing was done. It would also explain why the administration believes they are doing the right thing, within the law.
He only informed a very select few members of Congress, and we don't know how much he told them nor whether or not what he told them is true. After all, he's acted to prevent oversight that would allow fact checking. We do know however that he's presented tainted evidence to Congress before, and look where that got us. We also know that he's lied about wiretaps before.
--George W. Bush, during a 2004 campaign speech
Honestly, how can you trust this man anymore? There are no legitimate reasons to evade FISA. The only other reasons are to spy on people who shouldn't be spied on or to go on a fishing expedition through a wide sea of innocent people in the hopes of grabbing someone guilty. These are the acts of man who has no respect for rule of law.
Let me tell you two reasons to fear the side-stepping of FISA courts both dealing with the already scary nature of the secret courts. The first is that of about 19,000 applications for permission to wiretap from 1979-2004 only four have ever been rejected by the court. Obviously, in legitimate cases of security issues, the FISA court doesn't stand much in the way.
The second reason is that according to 50 U.S.C. Sec. 1805(f)(2), the Attorney General has up to 72 hours after starting wiretapping to get approval. If they get a legitimate hot tip, then they can start tapping immediately and get approval afterwards. If not approved, then the evidence can't be used in court but as mentioned above only 4 applications have ever been rejected.
Given that FISA extremely rarely rejects requests put before it and that you don't have to get permission before you can start, there are only two reasons possible why Bush doesn't want to go to the court.
Lastly, the President was NOT authorized by Congress to do this under any legitimate interpretation. He was given authority to use force against terrorists. He was not given authority to wipe his rear end with the 4th and 6th Amendments like he claims he is. If it even were possible for Congress to authorize this, then there are effectively no limits on what powers he may assume.
Incidentally, regardless of your stance for or against abortion, the limits of executive power is the number one reason to give a damn about Judge Alito. The man is a fascist who does not accept any reasonable limits on executive power and police power. Just look at two of his rulings. (1 2) (But hey, we can always rely on the media to cover the important stuff like his equivocation on abortion and the padding of his resume with an elitist, racist group, right?)
Actually, if you're worried about type II diabetes, you might really want to lay off the caffeine.
People who ingested caffeine in a controlled experiment had 21% higher blood sugar levels than people who took a placebo after eating breakfast (which is equivalent to amount reduced by diabetes-controlling drugs). They also did an experiment where they had a bunch of sedentary, obese men go on an exercise program to lose weight. At the end, those who were given caffeine saw none of the benefits to their blood sugar from exercise that those who didn't have caffeine received.
Still seem ridiculous for one game to have that big of an effect on profits? If it does badly, that represents a significant cultural shift for the country of Japan
Who said the game did poorly? Go back and reread the article & the blurb. While it sold 430,000 units in North America, it sold 3 million units in Japan in the first few days. Gee, I wonder why their income dropped almost in proportion with the difference in total sales of all games?
They're still profitable. Someday, I'm gonna see if there's a broker than I can buy their stock through.
Nintendo has always sold it consoles for a profit perhaps only losing slight amounts of money right around when it cut prices on the GameCube to $99. Selling at a loss is a recent thing, done by companies that can survive off of other products until revenue from game licenses kicks up. Nintendo, as a company that lives and dies by video games and consoles alone, has always had to sell the system itself at a small profit to stay in business.
And what in that article violates known physical facts? It's speculative, but theoretically possible in string theory, which is a physical theory.
Whoops. Looks like I pasted in the first link twice instead of the second link which has Michio Kaku apparently suspending all disbelief in the face of the magic of nanotech.
Read this article down to the bottom. I'll skip over his suggestions for how to open a wormhole because they're beyond my capability to comment on with my current understanding of physics, but I'll get right into the madness:
Wow! You can encode the DNA sequences, memories, and technology of an entire civilization into a single molecule! And that single molecule "machine" can take off at light speed with no external power source and manipulate matter to create more of itself without changing or losing any of its own properties and embedded information too! Oh, and apparently this molecule is really small too since that somehow has something to do with its mysterious ability to travel at light speed.
What a freaking flake. He seems to have drank the Dexlerian / Grey Goo Kool-Aid interpretation of the magical powers that nanotech will have to one day violate all known laws of physics.
Put yet another way, if string/M- theory is not falsifiable then it is not making any predictions about reality and hence it is useless as a model to tell us anything. That's hardly the case.
No, that really IS the case from a lot of physicists' POVs.
One problem with the theory is that according one physicist's paper, string theory offers 10 to 500th power different universes all with different physical properties and with many different kinds of forces. String theory practioners -- dare I say worshippers -- use this to say that our universe is merely one out of 10 to the 500th power different possible universes. Some flakes, like Michio Kaku, think we can colonize a new universe through a wormhole with light-speed traveling single-atom nanobots containing the technological and cultural seeds of a new civilization to avoid the heat death of our own universe. (This article is why I'll never respect Michio Kaku's words ever again. How did this man ever get a reputation for understanding physics?)
Other physicists rightly point out that if they theory can handle an almost uncountable number of alternate universes with alternate sets of forces and physical constants, then it doesn't actually predict anything useful since you can't figure out how to predict anything about our own specific single universe has and that its not falsifiable because any new observations we find can be retrofitted into the theory by playing with and changing the math as has happened numerous times since the theory's inception.
Of course, string theory may be right. The philosophical problem is that many of our best minds are spending all their time on a theory that can't be proven or disproven with current technology. Some of the experiments needed to confirm or deny string theory will take super-colliders capable of generating energy on a scale far beyond even a type I civilizaions' resources (the theoretical energy densities needed to tear matter down to its component strings).
Since its practioners frequently disdain the necessity of experimental verification, since it's useless as a predictive tool, and since it can be retrofitted for any information that conflicts with it that we'll be able to achieve in the forseeable future, string theory is for all practical purposes nothing more than a math-based religion.