Well, I don't see too many US companies importing talent from most 'developed' nations. Seems like most people are coming from India, China, other asian countries, former USSR and eastern Europe.
You do realize that most of those countries actually have national healthcare systems?
Do you know anyone on Medicare or Medicaide? The amount of paperwork is RIDICULOUS.
That's because those programs are a hybrid where the government pays money into the current patchwork private system. It combines worst of both worlds, but it's not the only way to do it.
No, you are absolutely correct, but a government run system is a certain guarantee of a lack of economic prowess.
Unless you can show that no nation besides the USA and a few third-world countries are economically viable, your assertion is proveably false.
Actually it probably makes it worse, people like you and me would get hit hardest by taxes in a national healthcare system making us even less employable.
...conveniently ignoring the fact that just about every other developed nation on this planet (and many lesser-developed ones) already have a national healtcare system. Are they all unemployable?
Also ignoring that a huge fraction the money going into our current system is wasted on the costs of accounting related to shuffling payments between the multiple middlemen involved in each treatment. These piles of paperwork and layers of private bureaucracy are hugely wasteful, and therefore a drag on our competitiveness.
A privatized system is no guarantee of economic prowess. GM and Ford's credit ratings were recently downgraded to junk bond status, in good part due to their heavy benefits costs burdens.
Is there anyone out there, that say, saw 5 out of the 6 Star Wars movies and are not going to see the last one because of a review or vice versa, see the last movie because of a positive review?
Hmmm... I may see the movie regardless of the reviews, but I'm *definitely* not buying any Star Wars action figure value meals at Taco Bell unless most of the reviews are positive.
OK, so two neutron stars merged into an object that's not a technicaly a black hole, but looks and acts just like one from the outside. Same difference.
Maybe when they start putting listening devices or cameras in your private homes. Do you have any expectation of privacy in a public place such as on the streets?
In 1984, the surveillence cameras and microphones in public places caused almost as much stress as the ones in apartments and offices. They provided the claustrophobic atmosphere because they always knew exactly where you were no matter where you went. If you just removed the private surveillance, they could still always know exactly where you are and who you are with, and they would have a pretty good idea of exactly what you're doing.
Whether you can comprehend it or not, people do have an expection of privacy in public places: they expect that their movements and activities aren't being constantly recorded and logged into a database. If you can't see the difference between a few private eyes or government agents tracking a handful of select suspects at great effort and expense vs. a mass-spying system that tracks and records every activity by every person all the time, then you're a pretty dim bulb.
I agree, there are cases where the CLI works better, but there are also cases where GUIs work better too. Tell me how to select and manipulate 10 dissimiliarly named files at the same time in a directory with 100 files in, on the commandline?
There's always full-screen text console apps like Midnight Commander, which resides somewhere between a GUI and the CLI. I probably use bash to navigate files 70% of the time, a GUI file manager 20%, and Midnight Commander 10%. Each has its own uses: CLI when you're going to run commands on single files; GUI when you're going to lightly browse, run a default app, and and move a couple of things around (which is probably what non-geeks do most of the time), and Midnight Commander when you need to do some heavy-duty reorganizing. In my experience, MC is even better at picking out lots of files, probably because the selections are "stickier" and don't get lost by an accidental mouse click.
if our planet becomes uninhabitable for humans, it will be self-inflicted and there are far simpler ways of preventing that than space flight.
In fact, there is just about no conceivable way for our planet to become less inhabitable to humans than any alternative in our solar system. Even after an impact the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, you'd be much better off in a bunker on earth than trying to survive in a tin can on dry, oxygenless Mars.
If we are concerned about the survival of the species in face of these kinds of events, we should build a few Dr. Strangelove-style shelters deep underground. It would be easily doable with current technology, and it would be far cheaper than trying to establish colonies on lifeless planets.
The fact is, the vast majority of people need to be given an explicit set of instructions on how to use a program, and don't have the skills necessary to deviate from them
Perhaps learning to use different programs in schools at a young age will help to teach them how not to get stuck in that kind of rut.
Billy has invented his own number field with the following properties: 1 + 1 = 2 2 + 1 = 6 6 + 1 = 95 95 + 1 = 97 97 + 1 = 2000 2000 + 1 = XP XP + 1 = 2003
they would have to prove that the accused infringer is practicing EVERY ELEMENT of at least one of the claims. I will leave it to others to comment on how difficult that would be.
How would anybody know how difficult it would be? These vague claims say everything and nothing at the same time. They're almost meaningless.
If I interpret claim 16 a certain way,/. is infringing because the web page changes every time someone adds a new post, becoming a "second web page" where information from the old web page is presented. I'm sure that there are countless thousands of different systems out there already where information is entered on one web page and later shown with another web page. There is nothing in this claim that differentiates between any of those cases, or which shows how this patent adds anything unique.
It's just ridiculous. There used to be a time when a patent was supposed to actually describe something in particular.
Nuclear power plants generally cannot reheat process steam due to safety requirements for isolation from the reactor core. This limits their thermodynamic efficiency to the order of 34-36%. Subcritical fossil fuel power plants can achieve 36-38% efficiency. Super critical designs have efficiencies in the low to mid 40% range, with new "ultra critical" designs using pressures of 300 Bar and dual stage reheat reaching about 48% efficiency.
Throw in several percent generation and transmission loss and you typically end up at around 1/3 total efficency. IIRC, in addition to that quotation, high-tech "combined-cycle" plants which use a gas turbine whose exhaust is used to heat a boiler for a steam turbine can push 60% efficiency before electrical losses. However, that's not yet in widespread use.
At any rate, those efficiencies aren't really "incredibly low" given the constraints on heat engines dictated by the laws of thermodynamics. For example, typical automobile engines are a good deal worse than any of the above numbers.
For every watt of electrical energy delivered to your house, about two more watts go up the smokestack at the power plant or are lost in heating transformers and power lines.
Therefore, using gas heat is about 3X more efficient overall than using resistive electric heat. In most areas, energy prices reflect this. (Your CPU is effectively resistive electric heat.)
Heat pumps counteract the inefficiency of delivered electricity by extracting a couple of watts of heat energy from the outside air and moving it inside for every watt of electricity consumed. Therefore heat pumps can be competitive with gas heat (unless it gets too cold to effectively pump). CPUs are not heat pumps, however.
Bottom line: waste electrical heat is not a cost-effective way to heat your house vs. your furnace or a heat pump. In most areas it's cheaper to not create the waste heat in the first place and use your furnace to heat your house instead.
the resulting binary size is completely irrelevant as a compiler benchmark.
As the ratio of raw CPU MIPS to memory bandwidth and latency continues to increase, systems lean more and more on caches to compensate. Since larger code eats up more of the scarce cache resources to do the same job, small code can be more important than code with the lowest raw instruction clock count. This can be especially important in C++, where redundant code generated by templates can really get out of hand if not properly controlled.
The Not-In-My-Backyard people also are ignoring water towers, which are considerable more visible.
The funny thing is, I've noticed that the recent trend is to find those pleasingly shaped bulbous water towers and tack big ugly cellphone antennas all over them. Somehow that combo ends up more jarring and ugly than a dedicated antenna pole would be.
So make up your mind - are they bad for maintaining backward compatiblity that is less secure/less stable, or are they bad for tightening things up and thus breaking a few badly written 3rd party programs people rely on.
They're bad for cutting corners in the first place and getting to the top by creating a platform where "badly written" programs were the norm.
They're not stupid. They knew full well what the security requirements would be in a fully connected world. However, they also knew that their average customer had no clue what the issues were going to be, and they took advantage of that lock them in with file formats, user training and app compatibility barriers before most of their customers knew what was ultimately in store.
If they had taken the time to properly secure their products *before* they introduced them to the server and Internet marketplace, they wouldn't have this dilemma today. That was a calculated risk they took in their forced march to eliminate any competition. Now they hava a multi-year slip in their next OS schedule largely because they had to backport security into their previous release. It serves them right.
That's the part they should be bitching about because people could get mislead into thinking that it's the actual WalMart site. The URL should be changed.
I can't tell you how we ALL have known since the web was invented that you don't steal other peoples graphics. Sure, there may be some grey area with parodies, but its the same thing we knew when we were just getting into making HTML.
Every week Saturday Night Live uses the exact intro graphics and theme music from other shows that they are paodying. I guess nobody told them that they can't "steal" other peopls' graphics. That's probably because they actually *can* "steal" other peoples' graphics if it's a parody.
Ok, you mean *Golden* dollars. That's true, they probably had to put out ads to avoid riots by the reactionary US money-using public. I thought you were talking about those ads for "Gold Dollar" coins issued by organizations like "Billy Bob's Mint".
At any rate, NASA has an entire cable channel of its own. They're not skimping on the TV coverage, it's like a full-time infomercial.
I also tried mounting a fan to my hard drive with an angle bracket. I found out that you need to be really careful about how deep you drill and tap the mounting holes into the drive.
I used 1/2-inch deep holes, and the drive wouldn't even fire up when I tried to boot. It turned out that the drive had really flimsy construction, and they had moving parts right under the surface that were immobilized by the screws. The cheap POS wouldn't even work after I took the screws back out.
If you plan to do this, I'd recommend using very short screws; probably no more than 1/8-inch.
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You do realize that most of those countries actually have national healthcare systems?
Do you know anyone on Medicare or Medicaide? The amount of paperwork is RIDICULOUS.
That's because those programs are a hybrid where the government pays money into the current patchwork private system. It combines worst of both worlds, but it's not the only way to do it.
No, you are absolutely correct, but a government run system is a certain guarantee of a lack of economic prowess.
Unless you can show that no nation besides the USA and a few third-world countries are economically viable, your assertion is proveably false.
Also ignoring that a huge fraction the money going into our current system is wasted on the costs of accounting related to shuffling payments between the multiple middlemen involved in each treatment. These piles of paperwork and layers of private bureaucracy are hugely wasteful, and therefore a drag on our competitiveness.
A privatized system is no guarantee of economic prowess. GM and Ford's credit ratings were recently downgraded to junk bond status, in good part due to their heavy benefits costs burdens.
Hmmm... I may see the movie regardless of the reviews, but I'm *definitely* not buying any Star Wars action figure value meals at Taco Bell unless most of the reviews are positive.
OK, so two neutron stars merged into an object that's not a technicaly a black hole, but looks and acts just like one from the outside. Same difference.
They were working for the government, therefore they were the government.
In 1984, the surveillence cameras and microphones in public places caused almost as much stress as the ones in apartments and offices. They provided the claustrophobic atmosphere because they always knew exactly where you were no matter where you went. If you just removed the private surveillance, they could still always know exactly where you are and who you are with, and they would have a pretty good idea of exactly what you're doing.
Whether you can comprehend it or not, people do have an expection of privacy in public places: they expect that their movements and activities aren't being constantly recorded and logged into a database. If you can't see the difference between a few private eyes or government agents tracking a handful of select suspects at great effort and expense vs. a mass-spying system that tracks and records every activity by every person all the time, then you're a pretty dim bulb.
There's always full-screen text console apps like Midnight Commander, which resides somewhere between a GUI and the CLI. I probably use bash to navigate files 70% of the time, a GUI file manager 20%, and Midnight Commander 10%. Each has its own uses: CLI when you're going to run commands on single files; GUI when you're going to lightly browse, run a default app, and and move a couple of things around (which is probably what non-geeks do most of the time), and Midnight Commander when you need to do some heavy-duty reorganizing. In my experience, MC is even better at picking out lots of files, probably because the selections are "stickier" and don't get lost by an accidental mouse click.
In fact, there is just about no conceivable way for our planet to become less inhabitable to humans than any alternative in our solar system. Even after an impact the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, you'd be much better off in a bunker on earth than trying to survive in a tin can on dry, oxygenless Mars.
If we are concerned about the survival of the species in face of these kinds of events, we should build a few Dr. Strangelove-style shelters deep underground. It would be easily doable with current technology, and it would be far cheaper than trying to establish colonies on lifeless planets.
Perhaps learning to use different programs in schools at a young age will help to teach them how not to get stuck in that kind of rut.
That's not so bad; it's a kickass site. Lightning fast, too.
How would anybody know how difficult it would be? These vague claims say everything and nothing at the same time. They're almost meaningless.
If I interpret claim 16 a certain way, /. is infringing because the web page changes every time someone adds a new post, becoming a "second web page" where information from the old web page is presented. I'm sure that there are countless thousands of different systems out there already where information is entered on one web page and later shown with another web page. There is nothing in this claim that differentiates between any of those cases, or which shows how this patent adds anything unique.
It's just ridiculous. There used to be a time when a patent was supposed to actually describe something in particular.
From here:
Throw in several percent generation and transmission loss and you typically end up at around 1/3 total efficency. IIRC, in addition to that quotation, high-tech "combined-cycle" plants which use a gas turbine whose exhaust is used to heat a boiler for a steam turbine can push 60% efficiency before electrical losses. However, that's not yet in widespread use.At any rate, those efficiencies aren't really "incredibly low" given the constraints on heat engines dictated by the laws of thermodynamics. For example, typical automobile engines are a good deal worse than any of the above numbers.
Therefore, using gas heat is about 3X more efficient overall than using resistive electric heat. In most areas, energy prices reflect this. (Your CPU is effectively resistive electric heat.)
Heat pumps counteract the inefficiency of delivered electricity by extracting a couple of watts of heat energy from the outside air and moving it inside for every watt of electricity consumed. Therefore heat pumps can be competitive with gas heat (unless it gets too cold to effectively pump). CPUs are not heat pumps, however.
Bottom line: waste electrical heat is not a cost-effective way to heat your house vs. your furnace or a heat pump. In most areas it's cheaper to not create the waste heat in the first place and use your furnace to heat your house instead.
All of this obeys all rules of thermodynamics.
As the ratio of raw CPU MIPS to memory bandwidth and latency continues to increase, systems lean more and more on caches to compensate. Since larger code eats up more of the scarce cache resources to do the same job, small code can be more important than code with the lowest raw instruction clock count. This can be especially important in C++, where redundant code generated by templates can really get out of hand if not properly controlled.
The funny thing is, I've noticed that the recent trend is to find those pleasingly shaped bulbous water towers and tack big ugly cellphone antennas all over them. Somehow that combo ends up more jarring and ugly than a dedicated antenna pole would be.
You can get dirt cheap inkjet printers and razor handles too.
They're bad for cutting corners in the first place and getting to the top by creating a platform where "badly written" programs were the norm.
They're not stupid. They knew full well what the security requirements would be in a fully connected world. However, they also knew that their average customer had no clue what the issues were going to be, and they took advantage of that lock them in with file formats, user training and app compatibility barriers before most of their customers knew what was ultimately in store.
If they had taken the time to properly secure their products *before* they introduced them to the server and Internet marketplace, they wouldn't have this dilemma today. That was a calculated risk they took in their forced march to eliminate any competition. Now they hava a multi-year slip in their next OS schedule largely because they had to backport security into their previous release. It serves them right.
Parody Site: www.walmart-foundation.org
Walmart is NOT bitching about this.
That's the part they should be bitching about because people could get mislead into thinking that it's the actual WalMart site. The URL should be changed.
I can't tell you how we ALL have known since the web was invented that you don't steal other peoples graphics. Sure, there may be some grey area with parodies, but its the same thing we knew when we were just getting into making HTML.
Every week Saturday Night Live uses the exact intro graphics and theme music from other shows that they are paodying. I guess nobody told them that they can't "steal" other peopls' graphics. That's probably because they actually *can* "steal" other peoples' graphics if it's a parody.
Deuterium is hardly specialized. The hydrogen in sea water is 1/6000 D. It is easily separated, and it's readily available by the truckload.
Any practical fusion process is likely to use deuterium rather than ordinary hydrogen because it's plentiful and far easier to fuse.
At any rate, NASA has an entire cable channel of its own. They're not skimping on the TV coverage, it's like a full-time infomercial.
"Remember, folks: The next time you choose a space agency, choose NASA!
"Don't forget, it's still Mars Madness Month. The blowout deals end April 30! Hurry!"
I can still remember when the US Mint was advertising the gold dollar coins...
Are you sure that was the actual US Mint? There seem to be a lot "Mints" out there these days.
I used 1/2-inch deep holes, and the drive wouldn't even fire up when I tried to boot. It turned out that the drive had really flimsy construction, and they had moving parts right under the surface that were immobilized by the screws. The cheap POS wouldn't even work after I took the screws back out.
If you plan to do this, I'd recommend using very short screws; probably no more than 1/8-inch.
It's not all that different: The government has computers that will work reliably in outer space. The regular people don't.