Linux can play a role in a HS physics class, but it's not here.
Where Linux (or any Unix) shines is collecting real time data over long periods of time. Windows, at least the most brain-dead versions, were actually better for collecting data over short periods of time since the data logging program could take over the system. But short of dedicated embedded OSes nothing can be Unix/Linux for low-profile systems that can log data for months without ever requiring a reboot, it can simultaneously run data collection, analysis and publication programs, etc. Windows (short of NT) has proven remarkably inept at this.
The problem is that there's not a whole lot you can do in a HS physics lab that requires collecting data over such long periods. The late "Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American had a lot of great ideas, but they are real science. At the HS level, you need trivial experiements that can be performed and understood by the average HS physics student. (I know, some of them could do the experiments mentioned, or better yet inspired, but that column. But only a small number of these students.)
They were/are chemists, and there are some subtle differences in the way that chemists and physicists conduct experiments. That's why many physicists initially jumped on them ("bad procedure") and why the results haven't been confirmed elsewhere (it really was bogus data due to bad procedure).
I have both math and physics BS degrees (actual separate degrees and diplomas, with separate winter and spring graduations), and did most of my graduate work in CS.
The bottom line is that the guy who actually interviews you will know that's not much difference between somebody who squeaked through a degree program with the absolute minimum number of courses, and one who fell one class short.
But the HR department, which increasingly sees itself as a roadblock to all but the most qualified candidates, doesn't have that nuanced grasp. You're either an MSIE, or you're not. Never mind how much experience you really have, or if it's just a paper cert. You're either an Oracle cert'd DBA or you're not.
If you're applying for a job that involves heavy math - or your prospective boss just understands that people with extensive math, science or engineering tend to be much better programmers than "pure CS" types - that second degree will be a certification that may be the difference between getting an interview, or never hearing back from the company.
That said, I wouldn't invest more than a single semester in a second degree, and in retrospect I feel that you're better off if your second major is well apart from your first (I was a double major because they kept changing the course catalog and I often found myself closer to finishing one degree than the other). But if you're wrapping things up now and only need a 3 classes (out of 9?) to get the degree, go for it.
Sorry, but it's unconstitional in many states (Colorado is one) to use any polling method that can be used to prove how an individual has voted.
This is a basic technique to prevent vote selling (or vote coercing, e.g., "vote for my candidate or you're fired/will lose the account/will never marry my daughter/whatever.") If you can prove how you voted, others may be tempted to "encourage" you to vote a particular way. If you can never prove it, you can lie.
That's a false statement, at least the way it's presented here.
The aggregate census data is available - that's things like the median family size, ages and income within some small area. (by ZIP code?) It gives you a good feel for the neighborhood, but tells you nothing about the individuals.
The personal data isn't released for something like 70 years, so the details of the 2000 census won't be available until 2070. That's the release that would worry people, but in 70 years most of us will be dead.
Have you ever looked at the hard numbers collected by university researchers? No offense, but your experience (and any other single person's experiences) really don't mean squat since there's too many unknowns - are you successful because you're still in your 20s and have high hormone levels, or perhaps you and your friends eat at a local restaurant that uses products with an unusually high selenium level. (Not that selenium actually helps, but it's been named as a possible micronutrient that helps weight loss.)
That's why I said that the macronutrient approach is bullshit. It might work for some people, but even a cursory glance at any public space will show you that it's missing something very important.
To be honest, the rate of obesity today reminds me (and others) of cigarette consumption in the 60s and 70s -- by then everyone knew that it was dangerous, everyone "knew" that all it took to quit was "will power," yet tobacco consumption remained high. Plenty of people tried to stop smoking, but the relapse rate was around 98%. Today we know that obesity is extremely dangerous, we all know "easy ways" of losing weight, yet something like 98% of all people who attempt to lose weight regain it (and usually more) within a year. At the same time, over half of the population is overweight or obese.
The peer-reviewed studies are unambiguous, even modest amounts of exercise have a profound effect on mortality rates.
As for your earlier attempt to run, ignore the assholes. Start by walking 30 minutes. Do that for a few weeks then try jogging for 30 seconds and walking for a few minutes. Over 6-8 weeks you'll slowly build up your muscles, tendons and cardiovascular system so you can run the entire distance. This isn't my idea, it's the plan developed by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, "father of aerobics," and adopted by the military for training their own people.
A variant of this is to start by walking, then shift to a stationary bike so you can have a constant load instead of the start-and-stop load from the run-walk approach. Again, after 6-8 weeks you can run it, but in this case you'll need to be careful about number of reps since you haven't strengthened the load-bearing tendons and such.
Finally, I do something like this when coming off of idle periods. I might spend a month on the stationary bike, but I'm developing the ability to work out continuously for an hour at a decent load, then can jump straight into ~7 mile runs on the treadmill.
> People fail on diets because they are weak and don't follow the diet plans.
Bullshit. The reductionists want to reduce diets to simple matters of protein, carbs and fats, but the explosion in obesity during the past decade proves just how fallious their arguments are.
Diets fail because they fly in the face of what humans (and other mammals) evolved to handle. E.g., as the recent Time magazine article mentioned, if you have a mixture of about the same protein, carbs and fat rats will eat a modest amount of each. If you go heavy on the carbs, e.g., as recommended by most diets (but not the Adkins, Zone and Carbohydrate haters' diets), the rats will stuff themselves. Do that enough, and you have very fat rats.
From a macronutrient perspective, this makes no sense. From an evolutionary perspective, this is obvious - it's behavior designed to take advantage of seasonal windfalls.
But as others have pointed out, this is a disaster in an age when water fountains have been removed from many offices, but free soda is readily available in the refrigerator.
Another good point that the Time article made is that milk isn't just fatty sugar water. The presence of calcium in milk affects the way your body processes sugar and fats (I don't recall the details), so if you switch from soda to low-fat milk you may have more calories and definitely more fat, but you'll lose weight because your body handles it differently than it does carbs alone.
So, if the best nutritionists in the country are admitting that they're having to revisit almost everything they think they knew, who the hell are you to pronounce everyone who's failed to lose weight on a diet a weak-willed loser?
This is funny - I just had a similar discussion with a coworker when I said that I was going home after catching myself making a really stupid mistake.
I explained that long, hard, bitter experience had shown that I still make plenty of mistakes, but my coding practices allow me to catch almost all of them immediately. But when I'm tired I'm much more likely to screw up on some subtle interaction that the compiler or testing framework can't catch, and it will take people weeks of hard work to find that mistake. Few projects can afford this type of tradeoff for long. (It's not that I'm so clever or they're so smart, but a reflection of the fact that anything that can be easily checked *is* easily checked, so by the time you need a person to figure out what went wrong it's gonna be nasty.)
Bottom line: I don't mind occasional long hours to meet a deadline, as long as I have the final say on whether I'm competent to work. If you make me continue working even when I know I'm making a lot of stupid errors due to fatigue or simply trying to do too much at once, you'll pay. You'll pay in ways you can't imagine. If you don't believe me, look at projects that Microsoft and others have had to abandon - ABANDON - because of runaway bug lists caused by trying to push their programmers too hard.
First, patents were orginally keyed to the length of your working life. You would spend decades becoming a master of your field, then a patent would protect you during the remainder of your working life. Meanwhile your apprentices would learn this new skill, then extend the art as they became masters.
That worked fine until Britain changed the length of patents to 100 years, to protect some key industries. The net result was that the British industry stalled while Germany (a nation of scofflaws that ignored British IP rights) went from an agarian society to an industrial one.
In this field, your working life is closer to 15 years, with maybe 5 years from your first paying job to when you're (usually) considered to be a fully competent journeyman capable of being "the master" at most reasonably complex shops. The high end is softer, but there's definitely a bias against older programmers. You start to notice it at 35, and it's a real problem at 40.
By this measure, a patent should last maybe 7-10 years, max. Long enough to drive a generation or two of your product, but not so long that a person who just started out when you got your patent can't build on it during their working lifetime.
But this brings up the second point - copyrights used to have a reasonable limit, but for all practical purposes they're now essentially eternal. Maybe the law won't extend the term of copyrights yet again, but I probably won't live long enough for anything written during my lifetime - or even substantially before it - to enter the public domain.
If this stands, I expect to see patent law soon follow. This might be tolerable if patents covered legitimate innovations, but not with the current Patent Office of approving virtually every patent that crosses their desk and letting the courts decide which ones are valid.
Actually, that's a standard optimization trick called "loop unrolling." Branches are expensive - it blows your pipeline and cache, and loops are even more so since you must explicitly check whether to continue iterating.
So compilers will often unroll a loop and add a jump to the correct starting point at the start. Even unrolling a loop once (duplicating the code once) can have a noticeable impact, and I think 4x and 8x are most common. 16x seems unusual, but it could be a high optimization level.
While it's true that GPS units can be used as a time standard, it's not the best solution to this problem. GPS uses satellites the power is very limited and you can't use them indoors.
A much better solution is to use a standard shortwave receiver that can pick up the digital time signal from WWV. That signal is much stronger and can probably be picked up inside most buildings (perhaps with a simple antenna) in most of the country. That's why this is the signal used by desktop "atomic clocks." You might be able to use one of them as a time source, but I would suggest checking the NTP documentation for recommendations for hardware that supports PPS signals. There's also some websites describing DIY radio receiver hardware.
The downside of this approach is that there's a propogation delay in the ground signal. GPS should give you the current time accurate to microseconds, while the radio delay may be in the milliseconds. (Ground waves are closer to a signal down a wire than a signal through free space, so the prop speed is well under 'c'.) This should not be an issue except for the most demanding uses.
I'm surprised they listened. Didn't Alchin, senior Microsoft executive, recently testify (in the anti-trust case, IIRC) that Microsoft software is so poorly designed and/or implemented that full disclosure of the API would inevitably result in the death of many Americans? (That is, after all, what "national security" ultimately comes down to.)
Maybe Microsoft has a point that the NSA's work with SELinux hurts the proprietary software manufacturers, but by Microsoft's own testimony it should be out of the running for all future contracts anyway. I don't care about certification, when a senior exec testifies in court that using his product poses a threat to national security I want the procurement officials to pay attention!
(On a related note, I WILL be asking the Congressional candidates this election cycle what they plan to do about the Federal software procurement cycle in light of senior Microsoft executives admitting that the quality is so poor that it threatens the national security. Microsoft has made it's values clear - $40 billion in the bank is more important than lives - and I want to make sure that my representatives make our values as a country clear. I don't want to force governments to only use OSS software, but I have no patience for excuses from companies sitting on cash reserves larger than the GDP of many nations!)
Okay, I'm 41 and change, still many years from 50, but I can provide a bit more specific advice than many others here.
Always know your fire exits. Both literally (when checking into a new hotel while on a trip), figuratively (e.g., always keep an eye open for trucks with loose cargo that can suddenly dump heavy trash in your lane) and in life. Some day your life will depend on it.
Plan for a rainy day. Hell, plan for a 100-year flood. And know how to recognize when you're in it. This should be automatic to anyone living through the current IT depression.
Always have a backup plan. Always play with the next move or three in mind.
Always keep some cash on hand. Liquid funds (before and separate from your "rainy day" funds) in the bank, even a kilobuck or two in a fire safe at home. Cash speaks in situations where nothing else will work.
Always keep your car in working condition. Nothing is more worthless than an untrustworthy car - you can't use it when you need it, but the upkeep is a constant drain on your resources.
Always keep a few days worth of emergency rations and water in your house. It will seem to be a wasted effort... until that crazy kid two blocks over blows up the substation and you're without power for a couple days.
Finally, the little stuff adds up. If you're a regular runner your knees will be beat up unless you always wear good shoes. If you don't workout, you will resemble Jabba the Hutt as you hit middle age.
As for career advice, it's buried in the advice mentioned above. You can (and should) sketch out a general career arc, but don't bother trying to make a detailed prediction 30 years out because too much will change. E.g., what happens to your plan if you're diagnosed with MS (or worse, ALS) in another few years? What if your kid dies tragically in a decade, and you think you can see a way to help others avoid the same cruel fate?
All you can do is ensure that you're never "checkmated" because you're stuck in a job you hate but can't afford to quit, with career skills that have become hopelessly outdated, that you aren't caught in an easily avoided layoff, etc.
It's not absolute - you don't get to keep misdelivered mail. (E.g., that guy who got a prototype X-box a while back.) That includes things like the mail going into the wrong box, being sent to the wrong "J Smith", etc.
But in these cases the sender has to cover the cost of pickup and re-delivery.
It is perfectly legal for somebody to send you something with the suggestion that you return money in exchange. In fact, that's protected by the First Amendment, which is why it's so hard to make some companies to take you off their mailing list.
But if they try to collect money from you in exchange for the goods (or demand you send it back at your expense) by claiming that a contract exists, that's unenforceable. There were some abusive practices in the 60s, and now this practice is explicitly named unenforceable.
Of course, back then I think the problem was charities counting on guilt as much as anything else. Now it's outright scam artists sending unsolicited toner, fax supplies, etc., with overpriced POs. A tightly run company will have a single vendor and can tell them to shove off, but many companies will automatically pay low-value POs for office supplies.
That's not a good analogy since many people felt that the "Windows" trademark should have never been granted in the first place (it's too close to a term of art, "graphical windowing system," and an existing product, "X Window System"(*), and confusion was inevitable.)
In contrast, Godzilla has only referred to a specific set of horror movies and they can legitimately claim a trademark on the name of their monsters. As others have pointed out, the claim on "-zilla" is too extreme and flies in the face of a decade or more of common usage.
(*) Before the MS astroturfers bother to "correct" me, Gates announced Windows 1.0 shortly before the first *commercial* release of X Windows. But X Windows had been in use in academia and elsewhere for years by this point, and you couldn't actually by the POS Windows 1.0 until about 2 years after the announcement (and it was close to a decade before the first practical and commercially successful version of Windows was released.)
It's not illegal to force somebody to sign a contract, but that contract is then unenforceable.
That's a huge difference. If you think that something is illegal, you have to convince a DA to file charges. If you don't (and your original statement is true), then you're stuck with that contract. But if you think it's unenforceable, you ignore it until they tell you to change your behavior, and then you can tell them "make me!" - only a court can force you to change your behavior.
But this specific situation is a different kettle of fish of another color. The EULA change isn't tied to a new product, it's tied to the vendor fixing a known security problem in their original product. There's no exchange of value (the vendor provides a patch, but the customer doesn't pay more money), so there's no contract to tie the new EULA to. Simply put, this EULA should be no more enforceable than the user unilaterally deciding that XP is only worth $10 per copy and attempting to get the rest of the purchase price back from Microsoft.
Of course, since this is ultimately a matter for the courts to decide some may decide to ignore both law and common sense. I recently read that pay for federal judges (with years of experience) has lagged inflation for so long that it's now common for first-year associates at major law firms to earn more than the judges who hear their cases. This is not a situation that will attract and retain the best and brightest legal minds.
I also live in Colorado, and as I recall the "make my day" law it does NOT give us the right to use lethal force to protect our property.
That said, the law does provide an affirmative defense if you kill anyone in your house - the state must prove that we shot them even though we knew they posed no personal threat to us or others; we do not have to prove that we perceived a credible threat before we can claim "self-defense."
In practice, this is an impossible burden in most cases (excluding cases where one resident kills another), so it's a de facto acceptance of lethal force to protect property... but it's not absolute. You certainly wouldn't want to make this statement to the cops who first show up on the scene and want to know why you have a dead guy in your living room, next to a displaced TV.
(IANAL, etc., but I am a gunowner so I follow this material.)
Nobody wants to outlaw legitimate replies. That's a red herring thrown out by spammers so the guillable will ignore the real issues.
What's at issue is the attempt to transfer advertising costs from the seller to the potential buyer. Note the key words "seller" and "buyer" - this particular issue only applies when somebody is trying to sell something to somebody else when there's no prior sign of interest. Today it's annoying, but without other economic brakes put on this process it will become a real burden on consumers. Already we're hearing of people who lose mail because the spammers have completely filled their 5- or 10-MB mailbox in a short time, and at the rate of increase I wouldn't be surprised to see many people essentially knocked off of email (due to the sheer volume of crap) within a few years.
Then there's the legal issues involved with spammers forging headers, often criminally impersonating third parties. Nobody has the right to impersonate a third party for commercial gain. These victims can sue, but it's difficult and costly and many courts still don't understand how much damage it can cause (e.g., by harming reputations, or having domains added to simple-minded RBLs).
If that's not enough, there's the fact that spammers often bounce their messages off of servers owned and maintained for the benefit of third parties. That's no different than somebody deciding to borrow your car to run some errands since you're not using it. Even if they return it, undamaged, before you need it again it's not acceptable behavior in our society.
Finally (on the commercial spam side), there's the fact that most of the spam is sent out with fradulent names, through hijacked mail relays, etc., since it's flat-out illegal. In an ideal world we could have the FDA go after the diet/baldness/penis + breast growth people, the SEC go after the "sure stock" people, etc., but in the real world they have other priorities and jurisdiction is often unclear. These anti-spammer laws are te best way to get the illegal crap off of the network fast.
As for the moral point that spammers have "the right to speak," you're absolutely right. But more importantly, I have the right to tell them to shut up. Every time I get a piece of mail with forged headers, fradulent subject lines, etc., all I see is some arrogant asshole saying that he's the center of the universe and I have no value other than being an easy mark. If somebody repeatedly knocks on my door, I can have the police arrest him for trespassing. If they repeatedly call me on the phone, I can have the state fine them many thousands of dollars for violating the DNC orders. Yet you would have me believe that I'm have no right to stop somebody from sending me, oh, an announcement of an exciting new insurance policy every single fucking day for close to six months now? Sure, I have the technical ability to filter that crap out (and I do), but because I don't run my own email servers I still have to absorb the bandwidth to get the damn message into the server *and* to get the damn message a second time from the server before it's deleted, unread.
The borders in this part of the country are almost precisely aligned with major lines of latitude and longitude. Which can be fun if you have a GPS and are on a road heading directly towards (or away) from a border.
But if you get a very large-scale map, you'll see that the lines aren't quite straight. There are small jogs, just enough to include a mining claim or spring or other natural resource. It makes you wonder what sort of backroom deals occured to make sure that property was in Utah instead of Colorado, etc.
I've replaced my floppies with internal (IDE) ZIP drives on almost all of my systems. They can fit into the same bay, but instead of booting a "rescue" disk they allow you to boot a fairly complete Linux installation with any modern BIOS. (Any that create a menu box when it sees multiple drives with "active" partitions would work.)
The main downsides are that some "artsy" cases only have a cutout large enough for a floppy, not a ZIP disk, and some tools really insist on using a floppy. That's why I'll usually keep the floppy drive around, but have it mounted internally. I rarely need to pop the case - less than once a year - so this isn't a burden.
Many of us don't have a problem with current H1B workers staying in the country... but we can't understand why additional workers are still being brought in while so many experienced programmers can't even get their resumes acknowledged.
This isn't even nationalistic - every damn time some idiot chirps up in one of the local user groups "Hi, I just moved to town and I'm looking for good places to find a job!" you can hear people grinding their teeth. Nothing can be done about that (esp. with Gov. Nero insisting that the state continues to be an IT powerhouse despite the collapse of both the IT and telco industries), but limiting immigration is one of the core elements of national soverignty.
We're seeing around 6% overall unemployment, but the unemployment rate among experienced developers is much higher than that. The government doesn't track unemployment on an industry-wide basis, but at every users group meeting during the past year a standard question has always been "how many people are unemployed," and the number is always 50% and up.
This survey doesn't mean a lot - the people who are working are often putting in very long hours and may not be able to attend these meetings, but it's a better datapoint than the state-wide statistics which didn't include me at all (since I was self-employed and ineligible for unemployment compensation), or friends who had exhausted their benefits, or other friends who accepted temporary jobs in grocery stores or department stores and are thus no longer "unemployed."
I've heard that the numbers in the metro Denver area may be around 25% in the "IT" sector, but that includes cable installers, telephone linemen, etc., in addition to the people who tend to read Slashdot. It's definitely high enough that a lot of good people have been unemployed for a very long time, and people who are working will be much more risk adverse than healthy for the industry.
Even if you don't have PKU, aspartame is bad news for a lot of people.
In my case, I can tolerate the equivalence of one diet soda per day. If I have more, I don't die... but it does trigger a mild bipolar mood swing. Within a week or so it will be enough that I need to take action... or start looking around for my prescription drugs. Since I *really* hate the side effects from them, it's a no-brainer - I'll do whatever it takes to eliminate the aspartame from my diet. Then, within days, I'm fine again.
I'm sure that most people wouldn't notice this connection - *I* only made the connection because of a nasty drug interaction between aspartame and one of my prescription drugs (which made a single diet soda hit me with an effect comparable to a six-pack of beer), but I'm sure I'm not the only problem with this sensitivity.
BTW, before somebody tries to challenge me without all of the facts, remember that aspartame breaks down into two amino acids and a methanol (wood alcohol) molecule. One of the amino acids can cross the blood-brain barrier, and that's what kills people with PKU. But even normal people will find that the sudden saturation of their bloodstream by one amino acid will essentially flood out all other amino acids for the limited B3 capacity. It should go without saying that anything that affects the B3 or relative concentration of amino acids in the brain has the potential to cause mental effects - mood swings, irregularities in hormone levels, etc.
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Linux can play a role in a HS physics class, but it's not here.
Where Linux (or any Unix) shines is collecting real time data over long periods of time. Windows, at least the most brain-dead versions, were actually better for collecting data over short periods of time since the data logging program could take over the system. But short of dedicated embedded OSes nothing can be Unix/Linux for low-profile systems that can log data for months without ever requiring a reboot, it can simultaneously run data collection, analysis and publication programs, etc. Windows (short of NT) has proven remarkably inept at this.
The problem is that there's not a whole lot you can do in a HS physics lab that requires collecting data over such long periods. The late "Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American had a lot of great ideas, but they are real science. At the HS level, you need trivial experiements that can be performed and understood by the average HS physics student. (I know, some of them could do the experiments mentioned, or better yet inspired, but that column. But only a small number of these students.)
They were/are chemists, and there are some subtle differences in the way that chemists and physicists conduct experiments. That's why many physicists initially jumped on them ("bad procedure") and why the results haven't been confirmed elsewhere (it really was bogus data due to bad procedure).
I have both math and physics BS degrees (actual separate degrees and diplomas, with separate winter and spring graduations), and did most of my graduate work in CS.
The bottom line is that the guy who actually interviews you will know that's not much difference between somebody who squeaked through a degree program with the absolute minimum number of courses, and one who fell one class short.
But the HR department, which increasingly sees itself as a roadblock to all but the most qualified candidates, doesn't have that nuanced grasp. You're either an MSIE, or you're not. Never mind how much experience you really have, or if it's just a paper cert. You're either an Oracle cert'd DBA or you're not.
If you're applying for a job that involves heavy math - or your prospective boss just understands that people with extensive math, science or engineering tend to be much better programmers than "pure CS" types - that second degree will be a certification that may be the difference between getting an interview, or never hearing back from the company.
That said, I wouldn't invest more than a single semester in a second degree, and in retrospect I feel that you're better off if your second major is well apart from your first (I was a double major because they kept changing the course catalog and I often found myself closer to finishing one degree than the other). But if you're wrapping things up now and only need a 3 classes (out of 9?) to get the degree, go for it.
Sorry, but it's unconstitional in many states (Colorado is one) to use any polling method that can be used to prove how an individual has voted.
This is a basic technique to prevent vote selling (or vote coercing, e.g., "vote for my candidate or you're fired/will lose the account/will never marry my daughter/whatever.") If you can prove how you voted, others may be tempted to "encourage" you to vote a particular way. If you can never prove it, you can lie.
That's a false statement, at least the way it's presented here.
The aggregate census data is available - that's things like the median family size, ages and income within some small area. (by ZIP code?) It gives you a good feel for the neighborhood, but tells you nothing about the individuals.
The personal data isn't released for something like 70 years, so the details of the 2000 census won't be available until 2070. That's the release that would worry people, but in 70 years most of us will be dead.
Have you ever looked at the hard numbers collected by university researchers? No offense, but your experience (and any other single person's experiences) really don't mean squat since there's too many unknowns - are you successful because you're still in your 20s and have high hormone levels, or perhaps you and your friends eat at a local restaurant that uses products with an unusually high selenium level. (Not that selenium actually helps, but it's been named as a possible micronutrient that helps weight loss.)
That's why I said that the macronutrient approach is bullshit. It might work for some people, but even a cursory glance at any public space will show you that it's missing something very important.
To be honest, the rate of obesity today reminds me (and others) of cigarette consumption in the 60s and 70s -- by then everyone knew that it was dangerous, everyone "knew" that all it took to quit was "will power," yet tobacco consumption remained high. Plenty of people tried to stop smoking, but the relapse rate was around 98%. Today we know that obesity is extremely dangerous, we all know "easy ways" of losing weight, yet something like 98% of all people who attempt to lose weight regain it (and usually more) within a year. At the same time, over half of the population is overweight or obese.
The peer-reviewed studies are unambiguous, even modest amounts of exercise have a profound effect on mortality rates.
As for your earlier attempt to run, ignore the assholes. Start by walking 30 minutes. Do that for a few weeks then try jogging for 30 seconds and walking for a few minutes. Over 6-8 weeks you'll slowly build up your muscles, tendons and cardiovascular system so you can run the entire distance. This isn't my idea, it's the plan developed by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, "father of aerobics," and adopted by the military for training their own people.
A variant of this is to start by walking, then shift to a stationary bike so you can have a constant load instead of the start-and-stop load from the run-walk approach. Again, after 6-8 weeks you can run it, but in this case you'll need to be careful about number of reps since you haven't strengthened the load-bearing tendons and such.
Finally, I do something like this when coming off of idle periods. I might spend a month on the stationary bike, but I'm developing the ability to work out continuously for an hour at a decent load, then can jump straight into ~7 mile runs on the treadmill.
> People fail on diets because they are weak and don't follow the diet plans.
Bullshit. The reductionists want to reduce diets to simple matters of protein, carbs and fats, but the explosion in obesity during the past decade proves just how fallious their arguments are.
Diets fail because they fly in the face of what humans (and other mammals) evolved to handle. E.g., as the recent Time magazine article mentioned, if you have a mixture of about the same protein, carbs and fat rats will eat a modest amount of each. If you go heavy on the carbs, e.g., as recommended by most diets (but not the Adkins, Zone and Carbohydrate haters' diets), the rats will stuff themselves. Do that enough, and you have very fat rats.
From a macronutrient perspective, this makes no sense. From an evolutionary perspective, this is obvious - it's behavior designed to take advantage of seasonal windfalls.
But as others have pointed out, this is a disaster in an age when water fountains have been removed from many offices, but free soda is readily available in the refrigerator.
Another good point that the Time article made is that milk isn't just fatty sugar water. The presence of calcium in milk affects the way your body processes sugar and fats (I don't recall the details), so if you switch from soda to low-fat milk you may have more calories and definitely more fat, but you'll lose weight because your body handles it differently than it does carbs alone.
So, if the best nutritionists in the country are admitting that they're having to revisit almost everything they think they knew, who the hell are you to pronounce everyone who's failed to lose weight on a diet a weak-willed loser?
This is funny - I just had a similar discussion with a coworker when I said that I was going home after catching myself making a really stupid mistake.
I explained that long, hard, bitter experience had shown that I still make plenty of mistakes, but my coding practices allow me to catch almost all of them immediately. But when I'm tired I'm much more likely to screw up on some subtle interaction that the compiler or testing framework can't catch, and it will take people weeks of hard work to find that mistake. Few projects can afford this type of tradeoff for long. (It's not that I'm so clever or they're so smart, but a reflection of the fact that anything that can be easily checked *is* easily checked, so by the time you need a person to figure out what went wrong it's gonna be nasty.)
Bottom line: I don't mind occasional long hours to meet a deadline, as long as I have the final say on whether I'm competent to work. If you make me continue working even when I know I'm making a lot of stupid errors due to fatigue or simply trying to do too much at once, you'll pay. You'll pay in ways you can't imagine. If you don't believe me, look at projects that Microsoft and others have had to abandon - ABANDON - because of runaway bug lists caused by trying to push their programmers too hard.
There's two small problems with this idea.
First, patents were orginally keyed to the length of your working life. You would spend decades becoming a master of your field, then a patent would protect you during the remainder of your working life. Meanwhile your apprentices would learn this new skill, then extend the art as they became masters.
That worked fine until Britain changed the length of patents to 100 years, to protect some key industries. The net result was that the British industry stalled while Germany (a nation of scofflaws that ignored British IP rights) went from an agarian society to an industrial one.
In this field, your working life is closer to 15 years, with maybe 5 years from your first paying job to when you're (usually) considered to be a fully competent journeyman capable of being "the master" at most reasonably complex shops. The high end is softer, but there's definitely a bias against older programmers. You start to notice it at 35, and it's a real problem at 40.
By this measure, a patent should last maybe 7-10 years, max. Long enough to drive a generation or two of your product, but not so long that a person who just started out when you got your patent can't build on it during their working lifetime.
But this brings up the second point - copyrights used to have a reasonable limit, but for all practical purposes they're now essentially eternal. Maybe the law won't extend the term of copyrights yet again, but I probably won't live long enough for anything written during my lifetime - or even substantially before it - to enter the public domain.
If this stands, I expect to see patent law soon follow. This might be tolerable if patents covered legitimate innovations, but not with the current Patent Office of approving virtually every patent that crosses their desk and letting the courts decide which ones are valid.
Actually, that's a standard optimization trick called "loop unrolling." Branches are expensive - it blows your pipeline and cache, and loops are even more so since you must explicitly check whether to continue iterating.
So compilers will often unroll a loop and add a jump to the correct starting point at the start. Even unrolling a loop once (duplicating the code once) can have a noticeable impact, and I think 4x and 8x are most common. 16x seems unusual, but it could be a high optimization level.
While it's true that GPS units can be used as a time standard, it's not the best solution to this problem. GPS uses satellites the power is very limited and you can't use them indoors.
A much better solution is to use a standard shortwave receiver that can pick up the digital time signal from WWV. That signal is much stronger and can probably be picked up inside most buildings (perhaps with a simple antenna) in most of the country. That's why this is the signal used by desktop "atomic clocks." You might be able to use one of them as a time source, but I would suggest checking the NTP documentation for recommendations for hardware that supports PPS signals. There's also some websites describing DIY radio receiver hardware.
The downside of this approach is that there's a propogation delay in the ground signal. GPS should give you the current time accurate to microseconds, while the radio delay may be in the milliseconds. (Ground waves are closer to a signal down a wire than a signal through free space, so the prop speed is well under 'c'.) This should not be an issue except for the most demanding uses.
I'm not surprised Microsoft lobbied the NSA....
I'm surprised they listened. Didn't Alchin, senior Microsoft executive, recently testify (in the anti-trust case, IIRC) that Microsoft software is so poorly designed and/or implemented that full disclosure of the API would inevitably result in the death of many Americans? (That is, after all, what "national security" ultimately comes down to.)
Maybe Microsoft has a point that the NSA's work with SELinux hurts the proprietary software manufacturers, but by Microsoft's own testimony it should be out of the running for all future contracts anyway. I don't care about certification, when a senior exec testifies in court that using his product poses a threat to national security I want the procurement officials to pay attention!
(On a related note, I WILL be asking the Congressional candidates this election cycle what they plan to do about the Federal software procurement cycle in light of senior Microsoft executives admitting that the quality is so poor that it threatens the national security. Microsoft has made it's values clear - $40 billion in the bank is more important than lives - and I want to make sure that my representatives make our values as a country clear. I don't want to force governments to only use OSS software, but I have no patience for excuses from companies sitting on cash reserves larger than the GDP of many nations!)
- Always know your fire exits. Both literally (when checking into a new hotel while on a trip), figuratively (e.g., always keep an eye open for trucks with loose cargo that can suddenly dump heavy trash in your lane) and in life. Some day your life will depend on it.
- Plan for a rainy day. Hell, plan for a 100-year flood. And know how to recognize when you're in it. This should be automatic to anyone living through the current IT depression.
- Always have a backup plan. Always play with the next move or three in mind.
- Always keep some cash on hand. Liquid funds (before and separate from your "rainy day" funds) in the bank, even a kilobuck or two in a fire safe at home. Cash speaks in situations where nothing else will work.
- Always keep your car in working condition. Nothing is more worthless than an untrustworthy car - you can't use it when you need it, but the upkeep is a constant drain on your resources.
- Always keep a few days worth of emergency rations and water in your house. It will seem to be a wasted effort... until that crazy kid two blocks over blows up the substation and you're without power for a couple days.
- Finally, the little stuff adds up. If you're a regular runner your knees will be beat up unless you always wear good shoes. If you don't workout, you will resemble Jabba the Hutt as you hit middle age.
As for career advice, it's buried in the advice mentioned above. You can (and should) sketch out a general career arc, but don't bother trying to make a detailed prediction 30 years out because too much will change. E.g., what happens to your plan if you're diagnosed with MS (or worse, ALS) in another few years? What if your kid dies tragically in a decade, and you think you can see a way to help others avoid the same cruel fate?All you can do is ensure that you're never "checkmated" because you're stuck in a job you hate but can't afford to quit, with career skills that have become hopelessly outdated, that you aren't caught in an easily avoided layoff, etc.
It's not absolute - you don't get to keep misdelivered mail. (E.g., that guy who got a prototype X-box a while back.) That includes things like the mail going into the wrong box, being sent to the wrong "J Smith", etc.
But in these cases the sender has to cover the cost of pickup and re-delivery.
It is perfectly legal for somebody to send you something with the suggestion that you return money in exchange. In fact, that's protected by the First Amendment, which is why it's so hard to make some companies to take you off their mailing list.
But if they try to collect money from you in exchange for the goods (or demand you send it back at your expense) by claiming that a contract exists, that's unenforceable. There were some abusive practices in the 60s, and now this practice is explicitly named unenforceable.
Of course, back then I think the problem was charities counting on guilt as much as anything else. Now it's outright scam artists sending unsolicited toner, fax supplies, etc., with overpriced POs. A tightly run company will have a single vendor and can tell them to shove off, but many companies will automatically pay low-value POs for office supplies.
That's not a good analogy since many people felt that the "Windows" trademark should have never been granted in the first place (it's too close to a term of art, "graphical windowing system," and an existing product, "X Window System"(*), and confusion was inevitable.)
In contrast, Godzilla has only referred to a specific set of horror movies and they can legitimately claim a trademark on the name of their monsters. As others have pointed out, the claim on "-zilla" is too extreme and flies in the face of a decade or more of common usage.
(*) Before the MS astroturfers bother to "correct" me, Gates announced Windows 1.0 shortly before the first *commercial* release of X Windows. But X Windows had been in use in academia and elsewhere for years by this point, and you couldn't actually by the POS Windows 1.0 until about 2 years after the announcement (and it was close to a decade before the first practical and commercially successful version of Windows was released.)
It's not illegal to force somebody to sign a contract, but that contract is then unenforceable.
That's a huge difference. If you think that something is illegal, you have to convince a DA to file charges. If you don't (and your original statement is true), then you're stuck with that contract. But if you think it's unenforceable, you ignore it until they tell you to change your behavior, and then you can tell them "make me!" - only a court can force you to change your behavior.
But this specific situation is a different kettle of fish of another color. The EULA change isn't tied to a new product, it's tied to the vendor fixing a known security problem in their original product. There's no exchange of value (the vendor provides a patch, but the customer doesn't pay more money), so there's no contract to tie the new EULA to. Simply put, this EULA should be no more enforceable than the user unilaterally deciding that XP is only worth $10 per copy and attempting to get the rest of the purchase price back from Microsoft.
Of course, since this is ultimately a matter for the courts to decide some may decide to ignore both law and common sense. I recently read that pay for federal judges (with years of experience) has lagged inflation for so long that it's now common for first-year associates at major law firms to earn more than the judges who hear their cases. This is not a situation that will attract and retain the best and brightest legal minds.
I also live in Colorado, and as I recall the "make my day" law it does NOT give us the right to use lethal force to protect our property.
That said, the law does provide an affirmative defense if you kill anyone in your house - the state must prove that we shot them even though we knew they posed no personal threat to us or others; we do not have to prove that we perceived a credible threat before we can claim "self-defense."
In practice, this is an impossible burden in most cases (excluding cases where one resident kills another), so it's a de facto acceptance of lethal force to protect property... but it's not absolute. You certainly wouldn't want to make this statement to the cops who first show up on the scene and want to know why you have a dead guy in your living room, next to a displaced TV.
(IANAL, etc., but I am a gunowner so I follow this material.)
Nobody wants to outlaw legitimate replies. That's a red herring thrown out by spammers so the guillable will ignore the real issues.
What's at issue is the attempt to transfer advertising costs from the seller to the potential buyer. Note the key words "seller" and "buyer" - this particular issue only applies when somebody is trying to sell something to somebody else when there's no prior sign of interest. Today it's annoying, but without other economic brakes put on this process it will become a real burden on consumers. Already we're hearing of people who lose mail because the spammers have completely filled their 5- or 10-MB mailbox in a short time, and at the rate of increase I wouldn't be surprised to see many people essentially knocked off of email (due to the sheer volume of crap) within a few years.
Then there's the legal issues involved with spammers forging headers, often criminally impersonating third parties. Nobody has the right to impersonate a third party for commercial gain. These victims can sue, but it's difficult and costly and many courts still don't understand how much damage it can cause (e.g., by harming reputations, or having domains added to simple-minded RBLs).
If that's not enough, there's the fact that spammers often bounce their messages off of servers owned and maintained for the benefit of third parties. That's no different than somebody deciding to borrow your car to run some errands since you're not using it. Even if they return it, undamaged, before you need it again it's not acceptable behavior in our society.
Finally (on the commercial spam side), there's the fact that most of the spam is sent out with fradulent names, through hijacked mail relays, etc., since it's flat-out illegal. In an ideal world we could have the FDA go after the diet/baldness/penis + breast growth people, the SEC go after the "sure stock" people, etc., but in the real world they have other priorities and jurisdiction is often unclear. These anti-spammer laws are te best way to get the illegal crap off of the network fast.
As for the moral point that spammers have "the right to speak," you're absolutely right. But more importantly, I have the right to tell them to shut up. Every time I get a piece of mail with forged headers, fradulent subject lines, etc., all I see is some arrogant asshole saying that he's the center of the universe and I have no value other than being an easy mark. If somebody repeatedly knocks on my door, I can have the police arrest him for trespassing. If they repeatedly call me on the phone, I can have the state fine them many thousands of dollars for violating the DNC orders. Yet you would have me believe that I'm have no right to stop somebody from sending me, oh, an announcement of an exciting new insurance policy every single fucking day for close to six months now? Sure, I have the technical ability to filter that crap out (and I do), but because I don't run my own email servers I still have to absorb the bandwidth to get the damn message into the server *and* to get the damn message a second time from the server before it's deleted, unread.
The borders in this part of the country are almost precisely aligned with major lines of latitude and longitude. Which can be fun if you have a GPS and are on a road heading directly towards (or away) from a border.
But if you get a very large-scale map, you'll see that the lines aren't quite straight. There are small jogs, just enough to include a mining claim or spring or other natural resource. It makes you wonder what sort of backroom deals occured to make sure that property was in Utah instead of Colorado, etc.
I've replaced my floppies with internal (IDE) ZIP drives on almost all of my systems. They can fit into the same bay, but instead of booting a "rescue" disk they allow you to boot a fairly complete Linux installation with any modern BIOS. (Any that create a menu box when it sees multiple drives with "active" partitions would work.)
The main downsides are that some "artsy" cases only have a cutout large enough for a floppy, not a ZIP disk, and some tools really insist on using a floppy. That's why I'll usually keep the floppy drive around, but have it mounted internally. I rarely need to pop the case - less than once a year - so this isn't a burden.
Many of us don't have a problem with current H1B workers staying in the country... but we can't understand why additional workers are still being brought in while so many experienced programmers can't even get their resumes acknowledged.
This isn't even nationalistic - every damn time some idiot chirps up in one of the local user groups "Hi, I just moved to town and I'm looking for good places to find a job!" you can hear people grinding their teeth. Nothing can be done about that (esp. with Gov. Nero insisting that the state continues to be an IT powerhouse despite the collapse of both the IT and telco industries), but limiting immigration is one of the core elements of national soverignty.
We're seeing around 6% overall unemployment, but the unemployment rate among experienced developers is much higher than that. The government doesn't track unemployment on an industry-wide basis, but at every users group meeting during the past year a standard question has always been "how many people are unemployed," and the number is always 50% and up.
This survey doesn't mean a lot - the people who are working are often putting in very long hours and may not be able to attend these meetings, but it's a better datapoint than the state-wide statistics which didn't include me at all (since I was self-employed and ineligible for unemployment compensation), or friends who had exhausted their benefits, or other friends who accepted temporary jobs in grocery stores or department stores and are thus no longer "unemployed."
I've heard that the numbers in the metro Denver area may be around 25% in the "IT" sector, but that includes cable installers, telephone linemen, etc., in addition to the people who tend to read Slashdot. It's definitely high enough that a lot of good people have been unemployed for a very long time, and people who are working will be much more risk adverse than healthy for the industry.
Even if you don't have PKU, aspartame is bad news for a lot of people.
In my case, I can tolerate the equivalence of one diet soda per day. If I have more, I don't die... but it does trigger a mild bipolar mood swing. Within a week or so it will be enough that I need to take action... or start looking around for my prescription drugs. Since I *really* hate the side effects from them, it's a no-brainer - I'll do whatever it takes to eliminate the aspartame from my diet. Then, within days, I'm fine again.
I'm sure that most people wouldn't notice this connection - *I* only made the connection because of a nasty drug interaction between aspartame and one of my prescription drugs (which made a single diet soda hit me with an effect comparable to a six-pack of beer), but I'm sure I'm not the only problem with this sensitivity.
BTW, before somebody tries to challenge me without all of the facts, remember that aspartame breaks down into two amino acids and a methanol (wood alcohol) molecule. One of the amino acids can cross the blood-brain barrier, and that's what kills people with PKU. But even normal people will find that the sudden saturation of their bloodstream by one amino acid will essentially flood out all other amino acids for the limited B3 capacity. It should go without saying that anything that affects the B3 or relative concentration of amino acids in the brain has the potential to cause mental effects - mood swings, irregularities in hormone levels, etc.