Not that narrow. The nomination is about delegates, and as of this morning the delegate count is Obama: 2156 (vs 2118 needed for victory), Hilary 1932. That's about a 10% lead for Obama, which in terms of general elections is considered to be a "landslide". By the delegate math Hilary hasn't had a serious chance for a long time - it's only the media that have been portraying it as a close race because they want to keep reporting on it.
I have to disagree that Hilary is in a strong postion for the VP slot. She ran too negative a campaign, and comes with too much baggage (Bill and their combined shady history) - she'd be a boat anhor on his presidency, and since she failed once to put together a national health plan when her own husband was president, I can't see she's more likely to succeed if she was #2 to Obama. Obama needs to pick a VP that not only complements himself in terms of experience and demographic appeal, but who also doesn't detract from his appeal of youth, vision and desire for change. I think John Edwards would make a great ticket (young energetic positive pair vs the crusty aging McCain), then fill the secretary of state and top defense positions with heavy hitters.
You can't use water or CO2 (reacts with sodium) on a sodium fire, but if you're messing with large quanties of liquid sodium you'd think they'd have done their homework and know what to use (as well as to inform the fire dept that it's a sodium fire they're being called for).
It's referring to the staggering success of Shenzhen - a centrally planned capitalist city (an ecomonic enclave within a communist state) that didn't even exist 30 years ago, and now, per the article, probably produces HALF of everything you own. It's hard to imagine the meandering forces of democracy or the free market coming up with something so successful - rather like an optimal designed solution vs an evolutionary sub-optimal one.
The two things are highly related - a run on the bank is only an issue (and is only likely to happen in the first place) if the bank doesn't have sufficient liquid assets to meet the demand. e.g. A bank whose assets were in government bonds would not have an issue selling them if necessary to meet withdrawals, but one who has to dump highly illiquid securities (e.g. low quality mortage derivatives) into a falling market is not going to be so lucky.
You could say that Google is taking advantage of the fact that hardware is unreliable to reduce cost.
With server farms the size of Google's, failures are going to occur daily regardless of how "fault-tolerant" your hardware is. Nothing is 100% failure free. Given that failures will occur, you need fault tolerance in your software, and if your software is fault tolerant, then why waste money on overpriced "fault-tolerant" hardware? If you can buy N cheapo servers for the price of 1 hardened one, then you'll typically have N times the CPU power available, and the software makes them both look as reliable.
US bank assets arn't any better. Bear Stearns had 3.5 x the assets of Bank of NY (350B vs 100B), and that did not stop them from all but disappearing literally overnight before the Fed stepped in to bail out the Bear stockholders with taxpayers money.
It's not just a matter of asset liquidity, but also of quality and mark-to-market value. Right now the issue is of toxic mortage securities that may be on the books at face value but in reality are worth who knows what. Thanks to the repeal of the Glas-Seagal act, there's nothing stopping commercial banks like Bank of NY from making the same stupid decisions as investment banks like Bear Sterns, and who wants to bet that the commercial banks know the markets any better than the investment banks (I'd have assumed the opposite).
There's plently else that the typical American doesn't know about the Soviet space program :
- they landed on Venus - they had robotic rovers (lunakhods) driving around the moon in the early 70's - they built a functioning shuttle that, unmanned, orbited the earth and landed flawlessly before being mothballed due to lack of funds
Before feeling too smug about our own better funding, let's note that we're about to enter a multi-year stretch after the shuttle retires where we have no way to put a man in space until a shuttle replacement eventually gets built. In the meantime we'll be begging the Russians (& maybe Europeans) for rides to the ISS.
If the cheapest PC you can buy has Windows pre-loaded, then buy it, reject the EULA (document the proces - maybe take photos - since you can expect a hassle) and claim a Windows refund from the vendor, then install Linux. Or, if like most people you still have occasional use for Windows, then accept the EULA and create a dual boot system.
1) Software costs a lot of money to design, write, document and support, and little money to reproduce, and the latter therefore plays little role in determining price, regardless of how much potential customers want to whine "but it costs you nothing to reproduce - it's an infinite resource"
2) Software is basically ideas encoded as 1's and 0's. The 1's and 0's may be an infinite resource, but the ideas are not. Some ideas are scarcer than others, or more expensive to turn into 1's and 0's, and you may expect to pay more for them according to this scarcity and conversion cost.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're losing track of how terrorism works. This is asymmetric warfare - terrorism isn't just a label, it's a strategy. It's ALL about getting publicity via acts of terror. There's a reason that al Q'aida have a media arm that produces videos - because these videos suit THEIR purpose of recruitment and terrorizing the population via threats of futher acts.
It'd be one thing if news channels gave publicity to terrorist organizations by way of airing investigative reports (in addition to reporting acts of terrorism), but when al Q'aida hand over it's latest propaganda video and says "please air this for us", and the networks say "OK - thanks!", that is playing straight into their hands.
In case you don't think it makes a difference, consider how little we'd be hearing of al Q'aida on an ongoing basis if it weren't for these periodic (and usuaully strategically timed) videos they keep producing (and we keep airing)... they are absolutely a successful tool for them to keep themselves in the news. Consider on the other hand how the UK successfully beat the IRA by among other things denying them airtime to advance their propaganda.
I think you give the general population far too much credit for being analytical and reflective and not reacting in a visceral way to the constant threat of terrorism that al Q'aida in conjuction with Fox,CNN et al keep in the news, and also implicitly give the government too much credit for being able to ignore it and not feeling compelled to react in some highly visible and idiotic way to show they are taking care of the threat.
Depends what libaries you have available... At work I use my own XML "decode/encode" library that layers a C/C++ datastructure XML mapping layer over a lower level DOM-like library. Using this library you'd need precisely one line of code to read a file of arbitrarily complex XML records into an STL container (or C array if you chose) of some corresponding C/C++ struct/class, plus an initialized array - one line per struct member - to define the C/C++ XML mapping.
Of course not everyone has *my* library, but I sure hope most people arn't dealing with XML using a low level DOM/SAX parser like Xerces! I'm sure there are many higher level libraries available.
Another poster has mentioned it in context of cigarette filters, but it bears repeating that fiberglass poses a similar risk to asbestos and apparently nanotubes. As with asbestos, the risk is when it's in a fine fiber form that can float in the air and be inhaled. The type of fiberglass insulation that comes in thick rolls for loft/attic insulation is probably not too much risk (at least for breathing - you still want to wear gloves to stop the fibers from sticking into your skin and itching like hell), but loose blown fiberglass is likely another story. If in doubt, wear a mask.
My policy is to use people's CC lists against them - same principle as Aikido.
In that case I'd do a "Reply to all" telling Chief Roadblock that you thought a formal specification was what was wanted, and that you'd be happy to give him a quick primer on UML if he's not familiar with it, or alternatly if he preferred an informal specification you could do that too
Broadcasting terrorist videos isn't a matter of free speech - it's a matter of supporting terrorism. Of course the American TV networks do the same thing by eagerly broadcasting bin Laden's videos for him as fast as he provides them, but one might have expected a bit better from Google/YouTube.
Maybe Google doesn't consider supporting terrorism to be evil?
The other interesting thing to note is that Bush, despite all the constitutionally protected rights he's willing to trample over, still apparently thinks it's fine for the US TV networks to collaborate with al Q'aida in broadcasting their videos. One can only guess that having the US population terrorized is what Bush wants, since it playes to his agenda, despite his claims to the contrary.
The individual species (esp. large cuddly ones like Pandas) may be the poster children of species preservation, but really it's more a matter of habitat preservation and ecosystem preservation in general rather than whether any one given species makes a difference. Would it really matter if the Bamboo forests in Japan all disappeared and the Pandas with them?... maybe not in terms of Pandas and Bamboo, but who knows what the knock-on or unexpected effects of losing that would be, or of losing a large percentage of the amazonian jungle, etc. Do we care if global temperatures rise by a few degrees due to deforestatation or greenhouse gases? Maybe not on the level of temperatures, but what if that caused global fish stocks to crash, or fresh water supplies to disappear?
As far as the "poster children", I think there is still good reason to preserve them for their own sake. See how interested people are now in the Tasmanian Tiger which isn't even that different looking to other extant species... Don't you think it'd be a shame if the next generation of children grow up in a world where large species like Pandas, Rhinos, Elephants, Gorillas etc only exist as stuffed specimens in museums? In fact I'm sure we've already all but irrecoverably ensured the demise of that particular group. We're essentially at the stage where the Tasmanian Tiger was only known from a few examples in zoos and rumored sightings in the wild, until eventually all the zoo specimens had died too.
We're currently in the middle of what is probably the largest and quickest de-speciation "extinction event" the planet has ever known - something that makes the Permian extinction look like a non-event. From the timescale perspective of millions (or tens/hundreds of millions) of years this will only be an intersting point way back in history that our descendents (if our genetic lineagee survives that long) may ponder about, but on the human timescale of our own lifetime, and that of our children and grandchildren, it sure seems a shame to be taking such a giant shit in our own back yard.
I'm sure we'll eventually be able to bring some extinct animals back to life and/or recreate something close to dinosaurs.
First off, DNA degrades, but the most successful DNA sequencing technique (Craig Venter's) does not rely on having intact DNA - just enough snippets that can be reassembled.
Secondly, while it'd be nice to recreate a DNA-authentic T-Rex/whatever, I'm sure that most people would be plenty satisified to go to a monster park full of any flesh and blood beasts that looked close enough. Scientists have already been able to create a stork with teeth, and though similar understanding of what encodes what, it would be possible to start with something close enough, then "make it scaly", "make it bigger", "make it more muscular" (do a Google image search for "belgian blue"), "make the teeth bigger", "make it more aggressive" etc until one arrived at a neo-T-Rex.
I'm not sure if you're claiming to be paid 150 ARS (= $47 US) an hour or $150 US an hour, but both seem high, the latter unbelievably so.
It's hard to believe you make $47/hr (almost $100K/yr) in a country with such a cheap cost of living, since that would also be a decent salary in the US where a house might cost you $4-500K.
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Not that narrow. The nomination is about delegates, and as of this morning the delegate count is Obama: 2156 (vs 2118 needed for victory), Hilary 1932. That's about a 10% lead for Obama, which in terms of general elections is considered to be a "landslide". By the delegate math Hilary hasn't had a serious chance for a long time - it's only the media that have been portraying it as a close race because they want to keep reporting on it.
I have to disagree that Hilary is in a strong postion for the VP slot. She ran too negative a campaign, and comes with too much baggage (Bill and their combined shady history) - she'd be a boat anhor on his presidency, and since she failed once to put together a national health plan when her own husband was president, I can't see she's more likely to succeed if she was #2 to Obama. Obama needs to pick a VP that not only complements himself in terms of experience and demographic appeal, but who also doesn't detract from his appeal of youth, vision and desire for change. I think John Edwards would make a great ticket (young energetic positive pair vs the crusty aging McCain), then fill the secretary of state and top defense positions with heavy hitters.
If you search for "sodium lake" on Google video you can see how sodium reacts with a lake!
You can't use water or CO2 (reacts with sodium) on a sodium fire, but if you're messing with large quanties of liquid sodium you'd think they'd have done their homework and know what to use (as well as to inform the fire dept that it's a sodium fire they're being called for).
http://www.ilpi.com/safety/extinguishers.html#Picking
It's referring to the staggering success of Shenzhen - a centrally planned capitalist city (an ecomonic enclave within a communist state) that didn't even exist 30 years ago, and now, per the article, probably produces HALF of everything you own. It's hard to imagine the meandering forces of democracy or the free market coming up with something so successful - rather like an optimal designed solution vs an evolutionary sub-optimal one.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/18/1630208
The two things are highly related - a run on the bank is only an issue (and is only likely to happen in the first place) if the bank doesn't have sufficient liquid assets to meet the demand. e.g. A bank whose assets were in government bonds would not have an issue selling them if necessary to meet withdrawals, but one who has to dump highly illiquid securities (e.g. low quality mortage derivatives) into a falling market is not going to be so lucky.
You could say that Google is taking advantage of the fact that hardware is unreliable to reduce cost.
With server farms the size of Google's, failures are going to occur daily regardless of how "fault-tolerant" your hardware is. Nothing is 100% failure free. Given that failures will occur, you need fault tolerance in your software, and if your software is fault tolerant, then why waste money on overpriced "fault-tolerant" hardware? If you can buy N cheapo servers for the price of 1 hardened one, then you'll typically have N times the CPU power available, and the software makes them both look as reliable.
US bank assets arn't any better. Bear Stearns had 3.5 x the assets of Bank of NY (350B vs 100B), and that did not stop them from all but disappearing literally overnight before the Fed stepped in to bail out the Bear stockholders with taxpayers money.
It's not just a matter of asset liquidity, but also of quality and mark-to-market value. Right now the issue is of toxic mortage securities that may be on the books at face value but in reality are worth who knows what. Thanks to the repeal of the Glas-Seagal act, there's nothing stopping commercial banks like Bank of NY from making the same stupid decisions as investment banks like Bear Sterns, and who wants to bet that the commercial banks know the markets any better than the investment banks (I'd have assumed the opposite).
Regulations were put in place... and have since been undone. The Glass-Seagal act was repealed in 1999.
There's plently else that the typical American doesn't know about the Soviet space program :
- they landed on Venus
- they had robotic rovers (lunakhods) driving around the moon in the early 70's
- they built a functioning shuttle that, unmanned, orbited the earth and landed flawlessly before being mothballed due to lack of funds
Before feeling too smug about our own better funding, let's note that we're about to enter a multi-year stretch after the shuttle retires where we have no way to put a man in space until a shuttle replacement eventually gets built. In the meantime we'll be begging the Russians (& maybe Europeans) for rides to the ISS.
If the cheapest PC you can buy has Windows pre-loaded, then buy it, reject the EULA (document the proces - maybe take photos - since you can expect a hassle) and claim a Windows refund from the vendor, then install Linux. Or, if like most people you still have occasional use for Windows, then accept the EULA and create a dual boot system.
In the real world:
1) Software costs a lot of money to design, write, document and support, and little money to reproduce, and the latter therefore plays little role in determining price, regardless of how much potential customers want to whine "but it costs you nothing to reproduce - it's an infinite resource"
2) Software is basically ideas encoded as 1's and 0's. The 1's and 0's may be an infinite resource, but the ideas are not. Some ideas are scarcer than others, or more expensive to turn into 1's and 0's, and you may expect to pay more for them according to this scarcity and conversion cost.
No - the furniture is mostly wood. Some spill-proof little kids furniture in plastic though.
They just started to make people pay for plastic bags to discourage one-time use, and successfully did so by over 90%!
If they've stopped you from working then don't work.
In fact, I'd ask them if it's OK if you stay at home or telecommute for the next four weeks, seeing as they've removed your ability to work.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're losing track of how terrorism works. This is asymmetric warfare - terrorism isn't just a label, it's a strategy. It's ALL about getting publicity via acts of terror. There's a reason that al Q'aida have a media arm that produces videos - because these videos suit THEIR purpose of recruitment and terrorizing the population via threats of futher acts.
It'd be one thing if news channels gave publicity to terrorist organizations by way of airing investigative reports (in addition to reporting acts of terrorism), but when al Q'aida hand over it's latest propaganda video and says "please air this for us", and the networks say "OK - thanks!", that is playing straight into their hands.
In case you don't think it makes a difference, consider how little we'd be hearing of al Q'aida on an ongoing basis if it weren't for these periodic (and usuaully strategically timed) videos they keep producing (and we keep airing)... they are absolutely a successful tool for them to keep themselves in the news. Consider on the other hand how the UK successfully beat the IRA by among other things denying them airtime to advance their propaganda.
I think you give the general population far too much credit for being analytical and reflective and not reacting in a visceral way to the constant threat of terrorism that al Q'aida in conjuction with Fox,CNN et al keep in the news, and also implicitly give the government too much credit for being able to ignore it and not feeling compelled to react in some highly visible and idiotic way to show they are taking care of the threat.
Puts me at a distinct disadvantage to play this game - would be very hard to move the "game controller" quickly, intertia being what it is. :-|
Depends what libaries you have available... At work I use my own XML "decode/encode" library that layers a C/C++ datastructure XML mapping layer over a lower level DOM-like library. Using this library you'd need precisely one line of code to read a file of arbitrarily complex XML records into an STL container (or C array if you chose) of some corresponding C/C++ struct/class, plus an initialized array - one line per struct member - to define the C/C++ XML mapping.
Of course not everyone has *my* library, but I sure hope most people arn't dealing with XML using a low level DOM/SAX parser like Xerces! I'm sure there are many higher level libraries available.
Another poster has mentioned it in context of cigarette filters, but it bears repeating that fiberglass poses a similar risk to asbestos and apparently nanotubes. As with asbestos, the risk is when it's in a fine fiber form that can float in the air and be inhaled. The type of fiberglass insulation that comes in thick rolls for loft/attic insulation is probably not too much risk (at least for breathing - you still want to wear gloves to stop the fibers from sticking into your skin and itching like hell), but loose blown fiberglass is likely another story. If in doubt, wear a mask.
My policy is to use people's CC lists against them - same principle as Aikido.
In that case I'd do a "Reply to all" telling Chief Roadblock that you thought a formal specification was what was wanted, and that you'd be happy to give him a quick primer on UML if he's not familiar with it, or alternatly if he preferred an informal specification you could do that too
i.e. A polite kick in the balls
A database seems overkill.
Read the XML records into an STL container for easy access.
Broadcasting terrorist videos isn't a matter of free speech - it's a matter of supporting terrorism. Of course the American TV networks do the same thing by eagerly broadcasting bin Laden's videos for him as fast as he provides them, but one might have expected a bit better from Google/YouTube.
Maybe Google doesn't consider supporting terrorism to be evil?
The other interesting thing to note is that Bush, despite all the constitutionally protected rights he's willing to trample over, still apparently thinks it's fine for the US TV networks to collaborate with al Q'aida in broadcasting their videos. One can only guess that having the US population terrorized is what Bush wants, since it playes to his agenda, despite his claims to the contrary.
bah - nitpicker! ;-)
The individual species (esp. large cuddly ones like Pandas) may be the poster children of species preservation, but really it's more a matter of habitat preservation and ecosystem preservation in general rather than whether any one given species makes a difference. Would it really matter if the Bamboo forests in Japan all disappeared and the Pandas with them? ... maybe not in terms of Pandas and Bamboo, but who knows what the knock-on or unexpected effects of losing that would be, or of losing a large percentage of the amazonian jungle, etc. Do we care if global temperatures rise by a few degrees due to deforestatation or greenhouse gases? Maybe not on the level of temperatures, but what if that caused global fish stocks to crash, or fresh water supplies to disappear?
As far as the "poster children", I think there is still good reason to preserve them for their own sake. See how interested people are now in the Tasmanian Tiger which isn't even that different looking to other extant species... Don't you think it'd be a shame if the next generation of children grow up in a world where large species like Pandas, Rhinos, Elephants, Gorillas etc only exist as stuffed specimens in museums? In fact I'm sure we've already all but irrecoverably ensured the demise of that particular group. We're essentially at the stage where the Tasmanian Tiger was only known from a few examples in zoos and rumored sightings in the wild, until eventually all the zoo specimens had died too.
We're currently in the middle of what is probably the largest and quickest de-speciation "extinction event" the planet has ever known - something that makes the Permian extinction look like a non-event. From the timescale perspective of millions (or tens/hundreds of millions) of years this will only be an intersting point way back in history that our descendents (if our genetic lineagee survives that long) may ponder about, but on the human timescale of our own lifetime, and that of our children and grandchildren, it sure seems a shame to be taking such a giant shit in our own back yard.
I'm sure we'll eventually be able to bring some extinct animals back to life and/or recreate something close to dinosaurs.
First off, DNA degrades, but the most successful DNA sequencing technique (Craig Venter's) does not rely on having intact DNA - just enough snippets that can be reassembled.
Secondly, while it'd be nice to recreate a DNA-authentic T-Rex/whatever, I'm sure that most people would be plenty satisified to go to a monster park full of any flesh and blood beasts that looked close enough. Scientists have already been able to create a stork with teeth, and though similar understanding of what encodes what, it would be possible to start with something close enough, then "make it scaly", "make it bigger", "make it more muscular" (do a Google image search for "belgian blue"), "make the teeth bigger", "make it more aggressive" etc until one arrived at a neo-T-Rex.
I'm not sure if you're claiming to be paid 150 ARS (= $47 US) an hour or $150 US an hour, but both seem high, the latter unbelievably so.
It's hard to believe you make $47/hr (almost $100K/yr) in a country with such a cheap cost of living, since that would also be a decent salary in the US where a house might cost you $4-500K.