> I lived at home to save money and commuted to school.
Just to be clear, here are some tuition + obviously required fees (so not including books at all, nor possibly-required meal plans, etc; and yes, some schools require meal-plans even for non-dorm-residents nowadays) for this year for some public schools I just checked on:
U of MD: 8k in-state, 24k out-of-state. U of VA: 9.5k in-state, 30k out-of-state. U of WA: 7.7k in-state, 24k out-of-state. UCLA: 9k in-state, 31k out-of-state. U of IL: 8.5k in-state, 22.5k out-of-state. Rutgers: 11.8k in-state, 23k out-of-state.
So as soon as you go out-of-state (which I assume the poster did given his numbers and which one might want to do because the in-state school happens to not have a program in the field you want to be in), you're looking at 25-30k just for tuition. Room+board+so forth will add another 10-15k depending on school. That's all for public schools; private schools are more expensive.
If you're in-state, and you are lucky enough to have your parents living close enough to campus to commute sanely (live on the Eastern Shore of MD? sucks to be you!), then you can get away with ~10k a year not counting transportation costs, cost of textbooks, and whatever fees these schools aren't clearly listing on their website (and there are generally some). Another 1-3k per year is likely a good estimate for the above...
> In what universe is it acceptable for vendor A to modify vendor B's software on User C's > (i.e. my) computer?
This one. Various antivirus software hooks into Firefox and modifies its behavior (in Kaspersky's case by activating normally inactive codepaths that make DOM manipulation 100x slower or so in many case). Various software (Adobe, etc) drop binary plug-ins into both IE and Firefox (and anything else they can). Various software of dubious provenance throws various dlls into the Firefox process that do... something. Mostly crash a lot, given the lists of dlls and the crash correlations to those in the mozilla crash database....
I agree that this behavior sucks, but it seems to be the norm, at least on Windows.
I think we'd do better at not strengthening anti-vaccination shrillness if we didn't introduce things like varicella vaccinations and then push them as hard as we can on infants...
There's not lack of unreasonable behavior around vaccines in general, not just from the anti-vaccination crowd.
Another reason to not buy his software, fwiw, is that it injects DLLs into Firefox that slow down DOM manipulation by 100x or so. And those DLLs are injected even if the antivirus software is disabled, as long as it's installed.
Sure it is. If you carry huge front-page headlines about the number of people who died last year in plane crashes, all factual an all, but never once mention car accidents, that's bias right there: you're picking a particular issue and exaggerating its importance by writing lots about it and nothing about other (more important in any reasonable estimation) issues.
The above specific bias, by the way, is one of which every single Western news outlet I've dealt with is guilty, including the BBC.
Need other examples? How many articles are there on the dangers of eating red meat due to its slightly raising the risk of heart disease? How many are there on the dangers of food poisoning (of which a leading cause in the US is green leafy vegetables)? From what I've seen, the increased death toll from heart attacks due to eating "unhealthy" food is comparable, in the US, to that of food poisoning (within a factor of 2-3 of each other).
Similarly, how many articles are there on the dangers of diabetes (70k deaths per year in the US) vs tuberculosis (120k deaths per year)?
Any time you shine a light on something you're covering up everything else, de-facto. If someone were covering the Watergate burglaries to the exclusion of covering a war that we'd entered the same day, I'd sure call that bias, even though it's "shining a light on somthing".
While this is not a problem at MIT quite yet, the ratio of women to men in college was about 1.3 to 1 in 2006. That's about 56% female. In 2007 it was 58% female.
I'm having a hard time finding 2008 or 2009 data, but the trend shows no sign of reversing so far.
Thus if you're applying to college _right now_, being male is actually not that bad, especially once you get out of the top-tier schools. (And even in the top tier, Harvard is more than 50% female in its most recent entering classes; MIT in 2008-2009 had 1,885 female undergrads [http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/women_at_mit/index.shtml] out of a total population of 4,153 [http://web.mit.edu/facts/enrollment.html]. That's 45% female.)
Ok, sure. At this point we're getting into definitions of what exactly constitutes "memory use", which is a notoriously difficult issue with modern OSes no matter what.
It's not quite multiple copies of the same library, since static linking only links in the symbols you actually use, not everything in the library. RAM footprint can certainly increase as a result... or for a big library that a few people all use small pieces of might actually decrease.
Now hold on. Iran happens to be a signatory to a treaty (the NPT) and by signing said treaty they agreed that they will not seek nuclear weapons and will allow IAEA inspections to assure this. Other NPT signatories (specifically the US, China, Russia, UK, France) have agreed that they will not provide nuclear weapons technology to any states that do not currently have nuclear weapons. These signatories have also indicated (though not incorporated into the treaty) that they will not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-armed party to the treaty except in response to nuclear attack, or attack in alliance with a nuclear-armed state (this is all more or less direct from wikipedia, fwiw).
Now the NPT doesn't prevent peaceful use of nuclear energy on Iran's part. It _does_, however, preclude them receiving any assistance in nuclear device manufacture. It _does_ prevent them from building actual nuclear weapons. It's not clear to me whether developing nuclear weapon designs in-house is a treaty violation. I already mentioned the UN inspections above; it's not clear to me (or anyone outside Iran) how much Iran has actually been cooperating with them.
Any nation that wants to build nuclear weapons has the option of withdrawing from the NPT, of course, with 3 months notice. North Korea has done so. I'm not sure that'll make our foreign policy much different, but at least it would then be clear that one is not just using membership in the NPT as a fig leaf to cover activity that is not ok under the NPT.
> I would make it my nation's highest priority to obtain it
That's fine; you just need to give 3 months notice and withdraw from the NPT. No one's stopping you.
How trains compare to air travel is really a function of distance traveled and how both are structured in terms of passenger interaction.
Some basic things that trains as they exist now have over airplanes as they exist now:
1) Comfort (more legroom, ability to get up and move around any time you want, can bring
your own food and drink if you want). 2) Power outlets (some airplanes in the US have these; most don't). 3) Not having to deal with the farce that is airport security, and the resulting ability
to show up 10 mins before your departure time, not an hour or more before. 4) Much quieter (for the passengers). 5) Terminals tend to be in more useful locations (compare getting somewhere in the DC
area from Union Station to doing the same from BWI or Dulles; National is one of the
few exceptions to this problem of airplanes). 6) System-wide delays are much less common (though as Amtrak exists delays on any given
trip are not that unlikely and can be horrendous).
On the NY to DC route, for example, a 100mph train that doesn't make too many stops should be able to make the trip in 2.5 hours without problems. An airplane requires about 45 minutes flight time plus whatever your taxi times are, plus boarding and deboarding times, plus dealing with security. In the end, the train is not much slower, if at all. So it really comes down to whether the above problems with airplanes are worth the cost of creating such a train (the Acela doesn't fit the 100mph bill; it's a 3.5 hr ride from NY to DC).
If we want to address the shortcomings airplanes have instead, great. But some of the above are pretty difficult to address without significant fare increases (e.g. comfort) and some are impossible to address for not-unreasonable safety reasons (e.g. the ability to get up and wander about anytime one wants). I'll grant that the fare issue is a big unknown for high-speed trains, of course.
All you'd get is special handling of a single HTML tag (for the canvas thing).
It leads to a bit more fragmentation for web authors, yes. It leads to less fragmentation for users. Users ought to be more important, though to Google web authors obviously are (it being a web author itself, for the most part).
The key there is "most of us". As in, users. The fact that web developers are worse off too (though at first blush they benefit the most from Chrome Frame) is less important than that users are worse off.
Or in other words, go read the actual blog post, not the random out-of-context quotes from it.
Chrome Frame makes the users' lives harder by not integrating very well into the IE UI (e.g. not hooking up the IE menus to its guts very well).
The user decides whether to install Chrome Frame at all, but then the web developer decides whether to use it on a particular site. Again, loss of user control.
Yep. But the user does deserve control of the browser, and that's the control Chrome Frame takes away.
I suggest reading Mitchell's actual blog post if you haven't to see some examples (little things like your menus not working right if the site is rendering in Chrome Frame).
There are some major differences, most importantly distance. Syria is pretty close to Israel. Iran is relatively far away. Depending on where you're flying to in Iran, one-way distance is somewhere in the 700-1400 mile range.
Israel's bomber force largely consists of F-15Es and F-16s, mostly the latter.
F-15E has a max combat radius (get there and back) of about 800 miles. The ferry range (how far you can go if you replace all the weapons with fuel tanks is about 2700-3500 miles depending on whether you use conformal fuel tanks). The former is not really sufficient to strike targets in Iran in a reasonable way. Not sure how far you can get if you don't go the full way with fuel tanks...
F16 has a combat radius of 800 miles or so with some external tanks and a reduced ammunition load (with fewer tanks and bigger bombs you can get to 400 miles), and a ferry range of 2300 miles or so. It's probably not realistically capable of executing a strike against Iranian targets; the attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor was already a stretch.
All this is easy to forget when thinking about air force deployments if you're the US, because we have these nifty aircraft carrier things that let us get our planes pretty close to the targets...
Of course another reason the distance matters here is that the US controls the airspace over direct approaches to Iran, and indirect ones would be even longer. So Israel needs US cooperation (even if only limited to not attacking the strike force en route) to carry out an attack on Iran, as things stand... and even then could only use a small fraction of its air force for the task. It might be enough. It might not. Hard to tell from my armchair.
> It seems odd that there is hardly anything about any South American countries having > nuclear weapons ambitions.
Fundamentally, the situation is that the US views South America as its backyard and wouldn't tolerate such ambitions there. Others are not in much of a position to interfere (just like they weren't in Georgia recently). And most importantly, things have been that way for a long time (ever since the Monroe Doctrine, more or less, though at the time the British Empire _was_ in a position to interfere if it really wanted to).
If the US ever loses air and naval supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific all this may change, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
> I lived at home to save money and commuted to school.
Just to be clear, here are some tuition + obviously required fees (so not including books at all, nor possibly-required meal plans, etc; and yes, some schools require meal-plans even for non-dorm-residents nowadays) for this year for some public schools I just checked on:
U of MD: 8k in-state, 24k out-of-state.
U of VA: 9.5k in-state, 30k out-of-state.
U of WA: 7.7k in-state, 24k out-of-state.
UCLA: 9k in-state, 31k out-of-state.
U of IL: 8.5k in-state, 22.5k out-of-state.
Rutgers: 11.8k in-state, 23k out-of-state.
So as soon as you go out-of-state (which I assume the poster did given his numbers and which one might want to do because the in-state school happens to not have a program in the field you want to be in), you're looking at 25-30k just for tuition. Room+board+so forth will add another 10-15k depending on school. That's all for public schools; private schools are more expensive.
If you're in-state, and you are lucky enough to have your parents living close enough to campus to commute sanely (live on the Eastern Shore of MD? sucks to be you!), then you can get away with ~10k a year not counting transportation costs, cost of textbooks, and whatever fees these schools aren't clearly listing on their website (and there are generally some). Another 1-3k per year is likely a good estimate for the above...
It's installed on Mac when you install Flip4Mac, iirc. Completely silently, of course.
> In what universe is it acceptable for vendor A to modify vendor B's software on User C's
> (i.e. my) computer?
This one. Various antivirus software hooks into Firefox and modifies its behavior (in Kaspersky's case by activating normally inactive codepaths that make DOM manipulation 100x slower or so in many case). Various software (Adobe, etc) drop binary plug-ins into both IE and Firefox (and anything else they can). Various software of dubious provenance throws various dlls into the Firefox process that do ... something. Mostly crash a lot, given the lists of dlls and the crash correlations to those in the mozilla crash database....
I agree that this behavior sucks, but it seems to be the norm, at least on Windows.
I think we'd do better at not strengthening anti-vaccination shrillness if we didn't introduce things like varicella vaccinations and then push them as hard as we can on infants...
There's not lack of unreasonable behavior around vaccines in general, not just from the anti-vaccination crowd.
Another reason to not buy his software, fwiw, is that it injects DLLs into Firefox that slow down DOM manipulation by 100x or so. And those DLLs are injected even if the antivirus software is disabled, as long as it's installed.
It's not exactly a squabble. MS green-lighted the addon being blocked. See http://shaver.off.net/diary/2009/10/16/net-framework-assistant-blocked-to-disarm-security-vulnerability/
> By the way, reporting facts isn't being biased
Sure it is. If you carry huge front-page headlines about the number of people who died last year in plane crashes, all factual an all, but never once mention car accidents, that's bias right there: you're picking a particular issue and exaggerating its importance by writing lots about it and nothing about other (more important in any reasonable estimation) issues.
The above specific bias, by the way, is one of which every single Western news outlet I've dealt with is guilty, including the BBC.
Need other examples? How many articles are there on the dangers of eating red meat due to its slightly raising the risk of heart disease? How many are there on the dangers of food poisoning (of which a leading cause in the US is green leafy vegetables)? From what I've seen, the increased death toll from heart attacks due to eating "unhealthy" food is comparable, in the US, to that of food poisoning (within a factor of 2-3 of each other).
Similarly, how many articles are there on the dangers of diabetes (70k deaths per year in the US) vs tuberculosis (120k deaths per year)?
Any time you shine a light on something you're covering up everything else, de-facto. If someone were covering the Watergate burglaries to the exclusion of covering a war that we'd entered the same day, I'd sure call that bias, even though it's "shining a light on somthing".
While this is not a problem at MIT quite yet, the ratio of women to men in college was about 1.3 to 1 in 2006. That's about 56% female. In 2007 it was 58% female.
I'm having a hard time finding 2008 or 2009 data, but the trend shows no sign of reversing so far.
Thus if you're applying to college _right now_, being male is actually not that bad, especially once you get out of the top-tier schools. (And even in the top tier, Harvard is more than 50% female in its most recent entering classes; MIT in 2008-2009 had 1,885 female undergrads [http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/women_at_mit/index.shtml] out of a total population of 4,153 [http://web.mit.edu/facts/enrollment.html]. That's 45% female.)
Why, exactly? No problem calling said other people on their treaty violations, right?
Sure, but then they and their apologists shouldn't complain when they're called on their treaty violations.
Ok, sure. At this point we're getting into definitions of what exactly constitutes "memory use", which is a notoriously difficult issue with modern OSes no matter what.
I won't speak to "entire", but last I checked (and perhaps this has changed), ELF was loaded segment-at-a-time, not function-at-a-time.
> Only the used portion of a library is paged in from disk.
That very much depends on the exact dynamic library format and such, actually...
It's not quite multiple copies of the same library, since static linking only links in the symbols you actually use, not everything in the library. RAM footprint can certainly increase as a result... or for a big library that a few people all use small pieces of might actually decrease.
Now hold on. Iran happens to be a signatory to a treaty (the NPT) and by signing said treaty they agreed that they will not seek nuclear weapons and will allow IAEA inspections to assure this. Other NPT signatories (specifically the US, China, Russia, UK, France) have agreed that they will not provide nuclear weapons technology to any states that do not currently have nuclear weapons. These signatories have also indicated (though not incorporated into the treaty) that they will not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-armed party to the treaty except in response to nuclear attack, or attack in alliance with a nuclear-armed state (this is all more or less direct from wikipedia, fwiw).
Now the NPT doesn't prevent peaceful use of nuclear energy on Iran's part. It _does_, however, preclude them receiving any assistance in nuclear device manufacture. It _does_ prevent them from building actual nuclear weapons. It's not clear to me whether developing nuclear weapon designs in-house is a treaty violation. I already mentioned the UN inspections above; it's not clear to me (or anyone outside Iran) how much Iran has actually been cooperating with them.
Any nation that wants to build nuclear weapons has the option of withdrawing from the NPT, of course, with 3 months notice. North Korea has done so. I'm not sure that'll make our foreign policy much different, but at least it would then be clear that one is not just using membership in the NPT as a fig leaf to cover activity that is not ok under the NPT.
> I would make it my nation's highest priority to obtain it
That's fine; you just need to give 3 months notice and withdraw from the NPT. No one's stopping you.
How trains compare to air travel is really a function of distance traveled and how both are structured in terms of passenger interaction.
Some basic things that trains as they exist now have over airplanes as they exist now:
1) Comfort (more legroom, ability to get up and move around any time you want, can bring
your own food and drink if you want).
2) Power outlets (some airplanes in the US have these; most don't).
3) Not having to deal with the farce that is airport security, and the resulting ability
to show up 10 mins before your departure time, not an hour or more before.
4) Much quieter (for the passengers).
5) Terminals tend to be in more useful locations (compare getting somewhere in the DC
area from Union Station to doing the same from BWI or Dulles; National is one of the
few exceptions to this problem of airplanes).
6) System-wide delays are much less common (though as Amtrak exists delays on any given
trip are not that unlikely and can be horrendous).
On the NY to DC route, for example, a 100mph train that doesn't make too many stops should be able to make the trip in 2.5 hours without problems. An airplane requires about 45 minutes flight time plus whatever your taxi times are, plus boarding and deboarding times, plus dealing with security. In the end, the train is not much slower, if at all. So it really comes down to whether the above problems with airplanes are worth the cost of creating such a train (the Acela doesn't fit the 100mph bill; it's a 3.5 hr ride from NY to DC).
If we want to address the shortcomings airplanes have instead, great. But some of the above are pretty difficult to address without significant fare increases (e.g. comfort) and some are impossible to address for not-unreasonable safety reasons (e.g. the ability to get up and wander about anytime one wants). I'll grant that the fare issue is a big unknown for high-speed trains, of course.
All you'd get is special handling of a single HTML tag (for the canvas thing).
It leads to a bit more fragmentation for web authors, yes. It leads to less fragmentation for users. Users ought to be more important, though to Google web authors obviously are (it being a web author itself, for the most part).
Neither of those things broke the way IE's menus work, last I checked...
Not the same thing at all. Much less invasive, much less in-the-user's face.
The key there is "most of us". As in, users. The fact that web developers are worse off too (though at first blush they benefit the most from Chrome Frame) is less important than that users are worse off.
Or in other words, go read the actual blog post, not the random out-of-context quotes from it.
Control should be with the users.
Chrome Frame makes the users' lives harder by not integrating very well into the IE UI (e.g. not hooking up the IE menus to its guts very well).
The user decides whether to install Chrome Frame at all, but then the web developer decides whether to use it on a particular site. Again, loss of user control.
It's not hypocritical to criticize the real problems one of the approaches has. That's called a technical discussion, usually.
> I don't deserve control of your browser.
Yep. But the user does deserve control of the browser, and that's the control Chrome Frame takes away.
I suggest reading Mitchell's actual blog post if you haven't to see some examples (little things like your menus not working right if the site is rendering in Chrome Frame).
There are some major differences, most importantly distance. Syria is pretty close to Israel. Iran is relatively far away. Depending on where you're flying to in Iran, one-way distance is somewhere in the 700-1400 mile range.
Israel's bomber force largely consists of F-15Es and F-16s, mostly the latter.
F-15E has a max combat radius (get there and back) of about 800 miles. The ferry range (how far you can go if you replace all the weapons with fuel tanks is about 2700-3500 miles depending on whether you use conformal fuel tanks). The former is not really sufficient to strike targets in Iran in a reasonable way. Not sure how far you can get if you don't go the full way with fuel tanks...
F16 has a combat radius of 800 miles or so with some external tanks and a reduced ammunition load (with fewer tanks and bigger bombs you can get to 400 miles), and a ferry range of 2300 miles or so. It's probably not realistically capable of executing a strike against Iranian targets; the attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor was already a stretch.
All this is easy to forget when thinking about air force deployments if you're the US, because we have these nifty aircraft carrier things that let us get our planes pretty close to the targets...
Of course another reason the distance matters here is that the US controls the airspace over direct approaches to Iran, and indirect ones would be even longer. So Israel needs US cooperation (even if only limited to not attacking the strike force en route) to carry out an attack on Iran, as things stand... and even then could only use a small fraction of its air force for the task. It might be enough. It might not. Hard to tell from my armchair.
> It seems odd that there is hardly anything about any South American countries having
> nuclear weapons ambitions.
Fundamentally, the situation is that the US views South America as its backyard and wouldn't tolerate such ambitions there. Others are not in much of a position to interfere (just like they weren't in Georgia recently). And most importantly, things have been that way for a long time (ever since the Monroe Doctrine, more or less, though at the time the British Empire _was_ in a position to interfere if it really wanted to).
If the US ever loses air and naval supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific all this may change, of course.