In other words, a bunch of do-gooders gave a bunch of computers to the noble savages who live in that neighborhood that they avoid on the way to work, assuming that these ignorant natives would use this wonderful new device to rise up out of the ghettos and become good middle-class liberals.
Wow... drop the 'tude. I would think conservative would be enthusiastic about education, because that gives one the skills to pull themselves up by the bootstraps instead of being another drain on welfare/police/prison system.
Regardless, I think that the new norm will become 10-12T for sats.
Just out of curiosity, any idea what all that weight is used for? I mean, I can see having a few hundred pounds for batteries, computers, spy cameras, solar panels, antenna/dish, hull and structural elements. I guess all the rest is used on rockets and fuel for station-keeping?? I wonder what percent of launch weigh is fuel (and other consumables, if there are any).
Youtube is infringing on copyrights and making money by not having to pay for that infringement. that's the same as me polluting and not having to pay the consequences.
Comparing copyright infringement to environmental pollutants... seriously?
Under your logic, everyone who moves a stream a bytes without checking for pirated goods is "infringing". That includes forums, wikis, game worlds, telecom providers, and every company with a router. At what point do you say... gee, the rights of websites to facilitate a community outweigh the demands of copyright holders? Because if your logic is extended to the real world... you know, physical spaces like churches and parks and shopping malls where random strangers can whisper copyrighted content into each other's ears, distribute copyrighted papers in the parking lot, and transmit copyrighted goods directly between handhelds... then all of these spaces and the communities they provide could be destroyed for the sake of people who play dress-up for a living.
It's not YouTube's fault if a user uploads copyrighted content. Their obligations should be limited to removing infringing content. Hollywood should be grateful that they do anything proactive at all.
Affirmative Action exists for a reason. If you think we don't need it, kindly explain to me why women working the same jobs as men make less money.
I know - you can't.
Some of it's gender discrimination. Some of it's the tendency for men to spend more time working on their career (and less time on personal health, childcare, and other familial obligations). Some of it is the tendency for men to take larger risks than women... leading to raises and promotions or outright failures (and when you get struck from the payrolls, I'm betting they don't factor your zero cents on the dollar into the pay equality metrics). Some of it may be men demanding more pay and women demanding more flexibility. Some of it may be other factors beyond an employer's control, such as a male salesman being perceived as more competent than a female one by biased customers. Some of it (when it comes to IT specifically) may be that men are more likely to be consummate loners who find themselves programming (and *cough* writing slashdot comments) at 4AM in the morning.
Affirmative action and equal pay laws seem like good solutions when the discrepancies are mainly a result of employer discrimination. They seem ill-suited when the discrepancies largely arise from personal choices, cultural upbringing, and biological tendencies that are beyond an employer's direct influence. If that's the case, then you're probably going to make society pay detrimentally more for goods and services in the long run by instituting policies that artificially equalize the numbers. Is that the case? I don't know. I've seen outright gender discrimination (a religious institution where "men are suppose to be the breadwinners for their families"), and then I've seen a very "progressive" company where hiring is done pretty much on a personality interview with no evaluation of merit... because evaluating on merit might accidentally be discriminatory. Neither philosophy seems moral to me, but--at the risk of sounding like a cultist of the free market--I'm skeptical that a policy approach will be cost-effective.
The worst google could do with the information is have a rogue employee use it to stalk people. The worst the government could do? Use your imagination.
So I find it funny that you encourage folks to use their imagination when apparently you haven't used your own imagination about what Google could do if it were profitable and politically feasible. Large-scale blackmail, extortion, fraud, vilification, incitement, etc., are all possibilities if the Goog were so inclined.
Sometimes I get this vibe from libertarians that governments must be strictly monitored and controlled while private parties outside of government should be able to function in any (lawful, non-violent) way they please, so long as they uphold the contracts they have agreed to. This is naive: freedom is threatened by any large disparity in power, not just that disparity which exists between the government and the governed.
"First method goes through the disk, overwriting all data with garbage"
That's the WORSE possible way to "self destruct"
Not if you want to reuse the disk, e.g., clear off corporate data before donating and writing down old computer equipment.
Also, are we sure that the overcurrent will completely destroy the data on an SSD? I think of the 2001 incident where a U.S. spy plane was forced to land in China and did not have time to destroy all intelligence data in the 15-30 min. before they were forced off the plane at gunpoint. An overwrite followed by overcurrent seems like it'd be the best protection against a 3rd party with the resources needed to physically examine the drive.
The bad news is I assume you're transferring blueray dvd pr0n rips downloaded from u****t so thats gonna be about seven million pages at one QR per page.
It looks like you can fit about 20 such QR codes comfortably on an 8x11. That's 40kb per page.
What would really be interesting is to figure out a reasonable target resolution that's supported by widely available printers and scanners, and then design a protocol for printing 8x11 (or A1) pages with as much info as possible. You'd probably want to add header info (to support out-of-order scanning and other such niceties) and spread out the error-correction bits. A color mode would probably be uneconomical for home users, but very helpful for business or nation-states looking to archive or smuggle data via paper.
It seems that you could fit 648K (B&W) or 5191K (3-bit color) on an 8x11 paper with 1/4" margins, 300x300 DPI resolution, and 33% overhead for error correction, fixed patterns, etc. But that's making a lot of assumptions.
Let the little human pretend he's in control, but put those functions back on a CPU the moment he starts slipping up.
Seriously, if a task can be offloaded to a computer, that's where it belonged in the first place. [Outside some sort of educational/cultural endeavor for the brain in question.]
The more I look at this, the more confused I am at what Target supposedly did wrong.
Depends on who you ask... The father (IIRC) thought they were sending his daughters age-inappropriate ads. Extreme privacy advocates might argue that its wrong for merchants to track individuals. Most privacy advocates might not call it wrong per set but want to use the story as part of a larger argument for laws/precautions/etc.
This story works for such privacy advocates because it has salience. And I think the reason this story has salience is that a socially pertinent ("gossipy") piece of information was determined by an outside party before the family itself knew. You can talk about privacy issues in the abstract and people don't care, but when it comes to getting the scoop on who's engaged/pregnant/divorced/humiliated/dead things can get sensitive fast.
Don't put your bag on the belt until the previous person has cleared the detector.
I suspect this crime is less prevalent than it once is... are you really going to buy two plane tickets for the opportunity to steal laptops at a heavily staffed, heavily recorded TSA checkpoint? I'm sure it happens, but the opportunity is not as ripe as was in the eighties and nineties.
Also, the new TSA's checkpoints make it harder to wait, because (1) the nice-uniformed-federal-employees-with-the-power-to-ruin-your-vacation-and-possibly-fuckup-the-rest-of-your-life will object you to unnecessarily stalling the line and (2) the twenty/fifty/two hundred people in line behind you who just want to get thru this (and are possibly racing the clock to get to their flight) will all be wondering why you're taking longer than the senile/blind senior citizens who were in front of you.
So my adjustment of this advice for TSA checkpoints is... put the valuables toward the back, and possibly under things (books, shoes, etc.) to make a potential theft less promising.
That's the same in the US; they just don't call it an ASBO, and it isn't restricted to anti-social behavior.
You're focusing on the fact that judges have the power to issue orders (a power that is sometime used too flippantly if not outright abused).
ASBO's go one step further... if I'm reading Wikipedia right, anyone who has the right influence (or nagging skills) can get their local council or police chief to apply for an ASBO. It still has to be approved by a judge (to certain standards, in theory), but now your local neighborhood busybody can initiate and help formulate the order. Annoyed by the kid next door playing football in the street? Maybe you can criminalize it for just that one kid. Irritated by the couple in the upstairs apartment having loud sex? You can criminalize that too. Want to shut down the feed-the-homeless operation that occasionally serves soup in the town square? Sure.
While ordinary judicial orders can put you at the mercy of the powerful, ASBO's sound like they can put you at the mercy of the petty.
Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine your brain and your DNA scanned into a computer. This is used to generate a simulated you. This simulated you is placed in a simulated room in which all the known laws of physics are simulated to a high degree of precision.
Pfftt.... the precision of reality simulators is wayyyyy overrated. A simple timing attack like virt-what is sufficient to show whether you've been instanced in a standard reality or a virtual one.:O
Ernie Ball was 12 years ago... are we still going to be trumpeting this one victory to our grandchildren long after F/OSS is a lost dream?
At any point in time,
most of the world is 6 months from Linux,
and Microsoft is 6 months from oblivion.
That may be true for a small business with the right know-how, but big companies are different: mine takes three times that long to upgrade from one version of Windows to the next, due to the shear amount of stuff we've got running on top of Windows. A true Linux-on-the-desktop conversion would take several years if we had strong industry/third-party support (which we don't).
My question is this - which one, the murderer that converts or the buddhist that does not acknowledge Christ as his Lord and Savior, ends up in heaven?
As you no doubt are aware, Christian doctrine states that the murder goes to heaven and the Buddhist goes to hell. Theologians explain this twisted outcome with an even more twisted presupposition: that both men "deserved" to be tortured for eternity the moment they were created. The Christian god does not look at the good and bad each person has done to "weigh souls", and he is under no obligation to provide his creation an "out" from this predicament... in fact (and here's where it gets really weird), mainstream theology says that it would go against Yahweh's very nature to simply forgive you for having the audacity to be born. So there's this complicated workaround by which he tortures his son/an incarnation of himself and does some internal bookkeeping that then allows him to forgive you.
So to recap, you owe a debt (that cannot be verified) for your bad behavior (that cannot have been avoided) to an all powerful entity (that cannot be seen). Repayment in kind (e.g. living a good life) won't work; it must be in the form of allegiance (to a particular religion, similar in character to thousands of others) for which you will be spared eternal torment and granted eternal bliss (that also cannot be verified) upon your death (at which point you cannot report your experiences to others). That's the "good news" of the Christian message.
Us analytic types might focus on the particular logic where the "repayment" coincides with joining and supporting a human institution, instead of directly addressing the "badness" that led to the "debt". It's almost as if this is exactly what a twisted cultist would come up with to exert control over a group instead of what one would expect an all-loving, all-wise being to do. How very convenient this philosophy is... and how convincing it is to the child that hears it from everyone he loves and respects in the community. Nothing sales heavenly fire insurance like a little bit of fear.
Let the free market decide. This country is great because of private business research. We haven't needed government funding till the socialist fascist democrats took over.
Parent is troll with little knowledge about the history of government-funded research. Mod down.
What self-indulgent drivel it is. Pages and pages of History lessons than don't advance the plot at all, or even serve to improve the historical context. It is a case of: Neal read something interesting in a history book, and so is going to jam the detail into his prose regardless of whether it is relevant or useful.
Wait til you get to book 3 (The System of the World) and you have to wade thru chapters of theology. It's way worse. It's worth reading book 2 (The Confusion) though, if you've gotten that far.
The real shame is that if he had cut the drivel and tightened the plot (book 3 in particular reads like a B-movie with pointless double-crosses), he could have had a good one-booker.
Before then, I was under the silly impression that the word âoeOlympicâ wasnâ(TM)t anyoneâ(TM)s property. They will come after you at night wearing togas and carrying torches.
Believe it or not, congress has written laws that directly grant the Olympics and the Red Cross special intellectual property protections. I don't know why they weren't just asked to register a trademark like everybody else. Both orgs have also asked ICANN for special treatment.
Repeat after me: "Attempting to make a stupid standard a standard instead of enforcing a smart moral".... Adding false noise is just another excuse to be lazy.
You can pursue both a design-based approach ("standards") and a blame-based approach ("moral?") simultaneously. Whether a benefit can be realized by legal threats, public service campaigns, or some other way of cajoling/guilting people into avoiding a particular behavior is not really relevant to the designer who sees an effective design tradeoff that will save lives in absolute terms, regardless of who's to blame.
Taking the mentality that you're going to avoid pragmatic solutions because people "should" avoid particular behaviors is dogmatic and ineffective. Evangelicals make the same mistake when they advocate abstinence-only sex ed. It's as if they'd preferred to "up the anty" on teens misbehaving rather than reduce teen pregnancy and abortions.
Don't worry, the LEDs will still have tens of thousands of hours left in them when a $.02 capacitor blows its guts out and terminates the driver board because a $.05 capacitor would have bloated the BOM too much...
Friending you for that comment, cause that's probably what will happen.
Hmm... digging around some more, I find this breathless press release that says the competition dictates a minimum three year warranty. Funny how they advertise 20 years but promise only 3. Keep that in mind when deciding to purchase.
Living in southern climes (N hemisphere), I personally look forward to cheaper LED bulbs, though I think the whoop-de-doo is overestimated for people who live in northern climes or for rarely used lights. This is one place where the Republicans were right... I want a 75-cent bulb for my coat closet, not a $3 one and certainly not a $25 subsidized one.
Files are not the best representation of code, just a convenient serialization.
Trivially true: files aren't the "best" representation of code because the definition of "best" depends on context and goals (which shift constantly during a work session). That's a sort of non-claim. Absolutely true: files are a convenient serialization of code.
Some folks will look at the trivially true claim and think "Boo files! Let's do away with files altogether!". Then they will go off and develop something that throws away the absolutely true part of the claim [I'm looking at you Squeak, Centura SQL/Windows, Visual Basic, etc.].
Some will be smarter (or rather, more well-funded) and develop something that lets you have your cake [store data in text files] and eat it too [work w/alternate representations]. Despite all its drawbacks, XML has been a major enabler of this, and it has the advantage of playing nice with version control and other file management tools.
Some folks will be even smarter yet and figure out different ways to exploit the absolute truth: for instance, static HTML operates quite successfully on file based representation. That economy let it win the hypertext wars before they even began. Or as another example, the D programming language strengthens the meaning of the "file" as the logical unit of management (for instance, a private member is visible to all code within the same file, regardless of whether it's in a different class or not).
So I guess what I'm saying is... consider fad-ish claims carefully and try to place them in a more holistic perspective.
This idea is just so incredibly stupid that it gives me a headache just trying to imagine the mentality of people who thought it was a good notion.
This may be difficult to follow, but I think the "mentality" is that adding a certain amount of road noise will um save lives. We currently have about 5000 pedestrian deaths/year due to vehicular collisions. That number will go up if all cars on the road go silent. No one knows what net increase will be, but it will be positive. If you assume the increase is going to be low (say one or two dozen deaths per year) and you want really silent cars, you might think this is all silly. If you think that number is going to be high (say one or two thousand deaths per year) and you're responsible for the overall safety characteristics of particular vehicle model for a major automotive manufacturer, you might think this is worth researching ahead of time.
(Incidentally, note that the article is talking about in-cabin noise, not exterior noise. The same mentality applies though... less cabin noise means faster driving means more deaths.)
there are more numbers between 1 and 3 than between 1 and 2
For every number n between 1 and 3, I can find exactly one (unique) number to match it between 1 and 2. (Specifically, let f(n) = (n - 1)/2 + 1.) If there were more, that would not be the case.
Really am surprised so many 'geeks' here get all up in arms about having a virtual environment to play around with that simulates a 16 bit cpu. Pretty sad actually.
You missed default luser's argument... that providing players with a 16-bit CPU seems like a poor design choice because you could give them a higher-level scripting language that puts them closer to accomplishing in-game goals while simultaneously broadening the audience for the game and letting everyone avoid the headaches of a community-supported IDE. To say he was "up in arms" is to miss the substance of his argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that Apple, et. al., are innocent by any means, but WTF has Technicolor contributed to humanity in the past twenty years??
In other words, a bunch of do-gooders gave a bunch of computers to the noble savages who live in that neighborhood that they avoid on the way to work, assuming that these ignorant natives would use this wonderful new device to rise up out of the ghettos and become good middle-class liberals.
Wow... drop the 'tude. I would think conservative would be enthusiastic about education, because that gives one the skills to pull themselves up by the bootstraps instead of being another drain on welfare/police/prison system.
Regardless, I think that the new norm will become 10-12T for sats.
Just out of curiosity, any idea what all that weight is used for? I mean, I can see having a few hundred pounds for batteries, computers, spy cameras, solar panels, antenna/dish, hull and structural elements. I guess all the rest is used on rockets and fuel for station-keeping?? I wonder what percent of launch weigh is fuel (and other consumables, if there are any).
Youtube is infringing on copyrights and making money by not having to pay for that infringement. that's the same as me polluting and not having to pay the consequences.
Comparing copyright infringement to environmental pollutants... seriously?
Under your logic, everyone who moves a stream a bytes without checking for pirated goods is "infringing". That includes forums, wikis, game worlds, telecom providers, and every company with a router. At what point do you say... gee, the rights of websites to facilitate a community outweigh the demands of copyright holders? Because if your logic is extended to the real world... you know, physical spaces like churches and parks and shopping malls where random strangers can whisper copyrighted content into each other's ears, distribute copyrighted papers in the parking lot, and transmit copyrighted goods directly between handhelds... then all of these spaces and the communities they provide could be destroyed for the sake of people who play dress-up for a living.
It's not YouTube's fault if a user uploads copyrighted content. Their obligations should be limited to removing infringing content. Hollywood should be grateful that they do anything proactive at all.
Affirmative Action exists for a reason. If you think we don't need it, kindly explain to me why women working the same jobs as men make less money. I know - you can't.
Some of it's gender discrimination. Some of it's the tendency for men to spend more time working on their career (and less time on personal health, childcare, and other familial obligations). Some of it is the tendency for men to take larger risks than women... leading to raises and promotions or outright failures (and when you get struck from the payrolls, I'm betting they don't factor your zero cents on the dollar into the pay equality metrics). Some of it may be men demanding more pay and women demanding more flexibility. Some of it may be other factors beyond an employer's control, such as a male salesman being perceived as more competent than a female one by biased customers. Some of it (when it comes to IT specifically) may be that men are more likely to be consummate loners who find themselves programming (and *cough* writing slashdot comments) at 4AM in the morning.
Affirmative action and equal pay laws seem like good solutions when the discrepancies are mainly a result of employer discrimination. They seem ill-suited when the discrepancies largely arise from personal choices, cultural upbringing, and biological tendencies that are beyond an employer's direct influence. If that's the case, then you're probably going to make society pay detrimentally more for goods and services in the long run by instituting policies that artificially equalize the numbers. Is that the case? I don't know. I've seen outright gender discrimination (a religious institution where "men are suppose to be the breadwinners for their families"), and then I've seen a very "progressive" company where hiring is done pretty much on a personality interview with no evaluation of merit... because evaluating on merit might accidentally be discriminatory. Neither philosophy seems moral to me, but--at the risk of sounding like a cultist of the free market--I'm skeptical that a policy approach will be cost-effective.
The worst google could do with the information is have a rogue employee use it to stalk people. The worst the government could do? Use your imagination.
So I find it funny that you encourage folks to use their imagination when apparently you haven't used your own imagination about what Google could do if it were profitable and politically feasible. Large-scale blackmail, extortion, fraud, vilification, incitement, etc., are all possibilities if the Goog were so inclined.
Sometimes I get this vibe from libertarians that governments must be strictly monitored and controlled while private parties outside of government should be able to function in any (lawful, non-violent) way they please, so long as they uphold the contracts they have agreed to. This is naive: freedom is threatened by any large disparity in power, not just that disparity which exists between the government and the governed.
"First method goes through the disk, overwriting all data with garbage"
That's the WORSE possible way to "self destruct"
Not if you want to reuse the disk, e.g., clear off corporate data before donating and writing down old computer equipment.
Also, are we sure that the overcurrent will completely destroy the data on an SSD? I think of the 2001 incident where a U.S. spy plane was forced to land in China and did not have time to destroy all intelligence data in the 15-30 min. before they were forced off the plane at gunpoint. An overwrite followed by overcurrent seems like it'd be the best protection against a 3rd party with the resources needed to physically examine the drive.
The bad news is I assume you're transferring blueray dvd pr0n rips downloaded from u****t so thats gonna be about seven million pages at one QR per page.
It looks like you can fit about 20 such QR codes comfortably on an 8x11. That's 40kb per page.
What would really be interesting is to figure out a reasonable target resolution that's supported by widely available printers and scanners, and then design a protocol for printing 8x11 (or A1) pages with as much info as possible. You'd probably want to add header info (to support out-of-order scanning and other such niceties) and spread out the error-correction bits. A color mode would probably be uneconomical for home users, but very helpful for business or nation-states looking to archive or smuggle data via paper.
It seems that you could fit 648K (B&W) or 5191K (3-bit color) on an 8x11 paper with 1/4" margins, 300x300 DPI resolution, and 33% overhead for error correction, fixed patterns, etc. But that's making a lot of assumptions.
Let the little human pretend he's in control, but put those functions back on a CPU the moment he starts slipping up.
Seriously, if a task can be offloaded to a computer, that's where it belonged in the first place. [Outside some sort of educational/cultural endeavor for the brain in question.]
The more I look at this, the more confused I am at what Target supposedly did wrong.
Depends on who you ask... The father (IIRC) thought they were sending his daughters age-inappropriate ads. Extreme privacy advocates might argue that its wrong for merchants to track individuals. Most privacy advocates might not call it wrong per set but want to use the story as part of a larger argument for laws/precautions/etc.
This story works for such privacy advocates because it has salience. And I think the reason this story has salience is that a socially pertinent ("gossipy") piece of information was determined by an outside party before the family itself knew. You can talk about privacy issues in the abstract and people don't care, but when it comes to getting the scoop on who's engaged/pregnant/divorced/humiliated/dead things can get sensitive fast.
Don't put your bag on the belt until the previous person has cleared the detector.
I suspect this crime is less prevalent than it once is... are you really going to buy two plane tickets for the opportunity to steal laptops at a heavily staffed, heavily recorded TSA checkpoint? I'm sure it happens, but the opportunity is not as ripe as was in the eighties and nineties.
Also, the new TSA's checkpoints make it harder to wait, because (1) the nice-uniformed-federal-employees-with-the-power-to-ruin-your-vacation-and-possibly-fuckup-the-rest-of-your-life will object you to unnecessarily stalling the line and (2) the twenty/fifty/two hundred people in line behind you who just want to get thru this (and are possibly racing the clock to get to their flight) will all be wondering why you're taking longer than the senile/blind senior citizens who were in front of you.
So my adjustment of this advice for TSA checkpoints is... put the valuables toward the back, and possibly under things (books, shoes, etc.) to make a potential theft less promising.
That's the same in the US; they just don't call it an ASBO, and it isn't restricted to anti-social behavior.
You're focusing on the fact that judges have the power to issue orders (a power that is sometime used too flippantly if not outright abused).
ASBO's go one step further... if I'm reading Wikipedia right, anyone who has the right influence (or nagging skills) can get their local council or police chief to apply for an ASBO. It still has to be approved by a judge (to certain standards, in theory), but now your local neighborhood busybody can initiate and help formulate the order. Annoyed by the kid next door playing football in the street? Maybe you can criminalize it for just that one kid. Irritated by the couple in the upstairs apartment having loud sex? You can criminalize that too. Want to shut down the feed-the-homeless operation that occasionally serves soup in the town square? Sure.
While ordinary judicial orders can put you at the mercy of the powerful, ASBO's sound like they can put you at the mercy of the petty.
Imagine what a pain travel would be if they used their funding to full efficiency. :O
Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine your brain and your DNA scanned into a computer. This is used to generate a simulated you. This simulated you is placed in a simulated room in which all the known laws of physics are simulated to a high degree of precision.
Pfftt.... the precision of reality simulators is wayyyyy overrated. A simple timing attack like virt-what is sufficient to show whether you've been instanced in a standard reality or a virtual one. :O
At any point in time, most of the world is 6 months from Linux, and Microsoft is 6 months from oblivion.
That may be true for a small business with the right know-how, but big companies are different: mine takes three times that long to upgrade from one version of Windows to the next, due to the shear amount of stuff we've got running on top of Windows. A true Linux-on-the-desktop conversion would take several years if we had strong industry/third-party support (which we don't).
My question is this - which one, the murderer that converts or the buddhist that does not acknowledge Christ as his Lord and Savior, ends up in heaven?
As you no doubt are aware, Christian doctrine states that the murder goes to heaven and the Buddhist goes to hell. Theologians explain this twisted outcome with an even more twisted presupposition: that both men "deserved" to be tortured for eternity the moment they were created. The Christian god does not look at the good and bad each person has done to "weigh souls", and he is under no obligation to provide his creation an "out" from this predicament... in fact (and here's where it gets really weird), mainstream theology says that it would go against Yahweh's very nature to simply forgive you for having the audacity to be born. So there's this complicated workaround by which he tortures his son/an incarnation of himself and does some internal bookkeeping that then allows him to forgive you.
So to recap, you owe a debt (that cannot be verified) for your bad behavior (that cannot have been avoided) to an all powerful entity (that cannot be seen). Repayment in kind (e.g. living a good life) won't work; it must be in the form of allegiance (to a particular religion, similar in character to thousands of others) for which you will be spared eternal torment and granted eternal bliss (that also cannot be verified) upon your death (at which point you cannot report your experiences to others). That's the "good news" of the Christian message.
Us analytic types might focus on the particular logic where the "repayment" coincides with joining and supporting a human institution, instead of directly addressing the "badness" that led to the "debt". It's almost as if this is exactly what a twisted cultist would come up with to exert control over a group instead of what one would expect an all-loving, all-wise being to do. How very convenient this philosophy is... and how convincing it is to the child that hears it from everyone he loves and respects in the community. Nothing sales heavenly fire insurance like a little bit of fear.
Let the free market decide. This country is great because of private business research. We haven't needed government funding till the socialist fascist democrats took over.
Parent is troll with little knowledge about the history of government-funded research. Mod down.
I'm trying to read The Baroque Cycle.
What self-indulgent drivel it is. Pages and pages of History lessons than don't advance the plot at all, or even serve to improve the historical context. It is a case of: Neal read something interesting in a history book, and so is going to jam the detail into his prose regardless of whether it is relevant or useful.
Wait til you get to book 3 (The System of the World) and you have to wade thru chapters of theology. It's way worse. It's worth reading book 2 (The Confusion) though, if you've gotten that far.
The real shame is that if he had cut the drivel and tightened the plot (book 3 in particular reads like a B-movie with pointless double-crosses), he could have had a good one-booker.
Before then, I was under the silly impression that the word âoeOlympicâ wasnâ(TM)t anyoneâ(TM)s property. They will come after you at night wearing togas and carrying torches.
Believe it or not, congress has written laws that directly grant the Olympics and the Red Cross special intellectual property protections. I don't know why they weren't just asked to register a trademark like everybody else. Both orgs have also asked ICANN for special treatment.
Repeat after me: "Attempting to make a stupid standard a standard instead of enforcing a smart moral". ... Adding false noise is just another excuse to be lazy.
You can pursue both a design-based approach ("standards") and a blame-based approach ("moral?") simultaneously. Whether a benefit can be realized by legal threats, public service campaigns, or some other way of cajoling/guilting people into avoiding a particular behavior is not really relevant to the designer who sees an effective design tradeoff that will save lives in absolute terms, regardless of who's to blame.
Taking the mentality that you're going to avoid pragmatic solutions because people "should" avoid particular behaviors is dogmatic and ineffective. Evangelicals make the same mistake when they advocate abstinence-only sex ed. It's as if they'd preferred to "up the anty" on teens misbehaving rather than reduce teen pregnancy and abortions.
Don't worry, the LEDs will still have tens of thousands of hours left in them when a $.02 capacitor blows its guts out and terminates the driver board because a $.05 capacitor would have bloated the BOM too much...
Friending you for that comment, cause that's probably what will happen.
Hmm... digging around some more, I find this breathless press release that says the competition dictates a minimum three year warranty. Funny how they advertise 20 years but promise only 3. Keep that in mind when deciding to purchase.
Living in southern climes (N hemisphere), I personally look forward to cheaper LED bulbs, though I think the whoop-de-doo is overestimated for people who live in northern climes or for rarely used lights. This is one place where the Republicans were right... I want a 75-cent bulb for my coat closet, not a $3 one and certainly not a $25 subsidized one.
From the article:
Files are not the best representation of code, just a convenient serialization.
Trivially true: files aren't the "best" representation of code because the definition of "best" depends on context and goals (which shift constantly during a work session). That's a sort of non-claim. Absolutely true: files are a convenient serialization of code.
Some folks will look at the trivially true claim and think "Boo files! Let's do away with files altogether!". Then they will go off and develop something that throws away the absolutely true part of the claim [I'm looking at you Squeak, Centura SQL/Windows, Visual Basic, etc.].
Some will be smarter (or rather, more well-funded) and develop something that lets you have your cake [store data in text files] and eat it too [work w/alternate representations]. Despite all its drawbacks, XML has been a major enabler of this, and it has the advantage of playing nice with version control and other file management tools.
Some folks will be even smarter yet and figure out different ways to exploit the absolute truth: for instance, static HTML operates quite successfully on file based representation. That economy let it win the hypertext wars before they even began. Or as another example, the D programming language strengthens the meaning of the "file" as the logical unit of management (for instance, a private member is visible to all code within the same file, regardless of whether it's in a different class or not).
So I guess what I'm saying is... consider fad-ish claims carefully and try to place them in a more holistic perspective.
This idea is just so incredibly stupid that it gives me a headache just trying to imagine the mentality of people who thought it was a good notion.
This may be difficult to follow, but I think the "mentality" is that adding a certain amount of road noise will um save lives. We currently have about 5000 pedestrian deaths/year due to vehicular collisions. That number will go up if all cars on the road go silent. No one knows what net increase will be, but it will be positive. If you assume the increase is going to be low (say one or two dozen deaths per year) and you want really silent cars, you might think this is all silly. If you think that number is going to be high (say one or two thousand deaths per year) and you're responsible for the overall safety characteristics of particular vehicle model for a major automotive manufacturer, you might think this is worth researching ahead of time.
(Incidentally, note that the article is talking about in-cabin noise, not exterior noise. The same mentality applies though... less cabin noise means faster driving means more deaths.)
there are more numbers between 1 and 3 than between 1 and 2
For every number n between 1 and 3, I can find exactly one (unique) number to match it between 1 and 2. (Specifically, let f(n) = (n - 1)/2 + 1.) If there were more, that would not be the case.
Really am surprised so many 'geeks' here get all up in arms about having a virtual environment to play around with that simulates a 16 bit cpu. Pretty sad actually.
You missed default luser's argument... that providing players with a 16-bit CPU seems like a poor design choice because you could give them a higher-level scripting language that puts them closer to accomplishing in-game goals while simultaneously broadening the audience for the game and letting everyone avoid the headaches of a community-supported IDE. To say he was "up in arms" is to miss the substance of his argument.