LaRouche was jailed for 15 years for fraud and tax evasion in 1988. He has been out on parole since 1993. I guess that the sentence probably expired completely last year (parole can extend longer than the original sentence).
Isn't it interesting that if you commit a felony (which I assume that this is, as a 15 year sentence is nothing to sneeze at), you can still run for president, but in several states (PDF, sorry) can't vote for president, even after parolled. Kind of like how 21 year olds can buy beer, but 18 year olds can sell it.
You get to the last book of a dekalogy only to realize that the author sucks.
Fair enough.:-) In fact quite true. It's just that I thought the first few books were really good, and like a good junkie "first hit is free", felt that I had invested too much time to just give up, and hope that there may be some salvagable stuff. And to be fair, there are a few good moments in the later books. Last chapter in book 9 in particular. Dumai Wells, as someone else suggested, is another good point. It just seems as though Jordan thought "there are about 200 Aes Sedai in the tower, and I will not stop writing until I name them all." There are some web references (google Encyclopedia WOT) that name all the characters, and there are like 1500 NAMED characters in the book. It's hard to keep track.
I hate to say this, but the Crossroads of Twilight, the 10th Robert Jordan "Wheel of Time" book, really sucked. No major plot advancement has happened at all. Several pages are spent on one of the main characters taking a bath! It seems like in these books, time goes slower and slower. I think the series has gone downhill, since about the fifth book or so, but this one was really bad. I see no way for him to end the series in my life time, at this pace, with so many dangling plot threads, and a release cycle of one book every two years,
They are equivalent for the same reason. This sequence (ultimately) can be expressed in terms of the recurrence
Seq(n) = Seq(n-1) + single sequence value for ("n") + Seq(n-1).
Which is true both in the hanoi, and bit flip example
In the example of prime factorization let k=2^n, and l<k be an integer. If we factor l as l=2^m * p, with m<n and p odd, then we can "shift" the sequence generated with (1..k-1) to (1+(k), (k-1)+k) because if l = 2^m * p then k+l = 2^m * p + 2^n = 2^m (p + 2 ^(n-m)), with (p + 2 ^(n-m)) odd. Thus the sequence for n-1 repeats right after the nth term shows up.
The only difference between this sequence and the first two is that "single sequence value for "n" is actually n-1 instead of n.
One neat thing I discovered about the towers of hanoi is that the sequence of disks to move for a solution
1,2,1,3,1,2,1,4,1,2,1,3,1,2,1,5... is the exact same sequence that you get when you look at the number of bits flipped between consecutive binary numbers (i.e. 00000->00001 (1 flip), 00001->00010 (2 flips), 00010->00011 (1 flip), 00011->00100 (3 flips), 00100->00101 (1 flip), 00101->00110 (2 flips)
etc... (1,2,1,3,1,2,...)
The reason it works is because just like the towers of hanoi algorithm, when the general solution to move n disks is: Recursively solve the puzzle for n-1 disks Take the nth disk and move it to the goal Recursively solve the puzzle for n-1 disks.
The bit flipping goes like this: While the nth bit is 0, the solution works for the n-1 disk solution When we go from 011111 (n-1 1's) to 10000000 (n-1 0's) we flip n bits Then the nth bit stays 1 and we repeat the solution for the n-1 disks.
Chances are though that regulations would have loopholes, like this whole "DO NOT CALL" list. I still get plenty of phone calls from "non-profit" organizations trying to sell me something.
This would be the same FCC that voted for media consolidation? I think that the current makeup of the FCC favors corporations over individuals, and would probably not advocate creating a do-not-call list in the first place.
There may be several reasons that "hard" science-fiction is no longer in vogue, replaced with fantasy or space opera.
1) It is not as though "hard" science-fiction has always had mass appeal. It has always had a specialized genre feeling. What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space. More like futuristic action. This is what appeals to the movie-going audience. "Hard" science fiction is too "hard" (must think...hurts brain) and is probably not profitable.
2) Fantasy pops into the human need for myth. Mythology (not necessarily incorrect or unfactual) exists traditionally in historical and religious traditions, Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Christian, etc. creation myths and such, and with the modern push to explain everything scientifically, a major piece of how people function (i.e. mythology in life) disappears, thus a longing for mythos appears, which fantasy seems to fill better than analytical science fiction.
3) The idea of a "bright, happy, future" seems to be relegated to naivety and a cynical "dystopia" seems to have set in (thus apocalyptic movies, etc), and this view seems to be pushed by many media outlets (i.e. bad news sells). We apparantly will pollute ourselves to death in 50 years, the world will be completely controlled by corporations, etc.
4) Finally, the largest bastion of future hope for science, at least in the US, NASA, has gone from getting a man on the moon in 10 years, to losing orbiters in Mars, as one magazine article put it, on the 30th anniversary of Apollo (paraphrasing) "We want NASA to be a precursor to Starfleet, but they are more like a bad post office."
These several things go to explain the loss of interest in "Golden Age" science fiction
Doesn't it seem a bit strange that the Supreme Court basically upholds the right of a state to determine what it considers "obscene" right after they overturn a Texas sodomy law due to the "right to privacy"?
So if I point out the flaws in this voting machine do I go to jail (reverse engineering & circumvention) and forever lose my right to vote? (several states do not allow ex-felons to vote)
Is the RIAA going to pay for the legal fees the university incurred? Or the time they could have used to educate their students rather than going on a wild goose chase? I rather doubt it.
We already have an America without inhibitions.
on
Virtual Simerica
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· Score: 3, Funny
Some technical information about the atari 2600
on
Atari's 30th Anniversary
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· Score: 4, Informative
can be found at Warren Robinett's Adventure here. Arguably the coolest Atari game of all time, it was one of the first games with an easter egg, and a "Zelda" type interface. Dragons, castles, goblets, and a bat, and it all fit in 4K of memory. The most telling thing about this, they paid him $22,000 a year, and they sold 1 million copies of the game, at $20 a pop.
I remember an amusing story about how when you typed the keywords "dumb motherf---er" into google, how the first result you would get back would be a link to George W. Bush's campaign page. Now when you type it in, you get a link to a Wired article describing the phenomena. For this keyword, the search has become meta.
An iPod has jettisoned!!
on
iWarez
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· Score: 4, Funny
The author has brought up the point that since the CLR is being used that the functionality offered is essentially the same, regardless of the language, and that it is similar to the "skinnable" feature of windows XP. That is syntax from language to language is similar, but since they are running under the CLR, the functionality has to be the same.
Hello? How is this different than compiled languages? Ultimately, machine code gets executed, whether you are writing C++, C#, VB, whatever, and machine code has a fixed number of instructions. Any feature of a language is simply compiled/retranslated into machine code anyway. Thus the limiting feature set is what you can do with the machine code. Period. And it has ALWAYS been this way. How does using a CLR make this any different?
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LaRouche was jailed for 15 years for fraud and tax evasion in 1988. He has been out on parole since 1993. I guess that the sentence probably expired completely last year (parole can extend longer than the original sentence).
Isn't it interesting that if you commit a felony (which I assume that this is, as a 15 year sentence is nothing to sneeze at), you can still run for president, but in several states (PDF, sorry) can't vote for president, even after parolled. Kind of like how 21 year olds can buy beer, but 18 year olds can sell it.
You get to the last book of a dekalogy only to realize that the author sucks.
:-) In fact quite true. It's just that I thought the first few books were really good, and like a good junkie "first hit is free", felt that I had invested too much time to just give up, and hope that there may be some salvagable stuff. And to be fair, there are a few good moments in the later books. Last chapter in book 9 in particular. Dumai Wells, as someone else suggested, is another good point. It just seems as though Jordan thought "there are about 200 Aes Sedai in the tower, and I will not stop writing until I name them all." There are some web references (google Encyclopedia WOT) that name all the characters, and there are like 1500 NAMED characters in the book. It's hard to keep track.
Fair enough.
I hate to say this, but the Crossroads of Twilight, the 10th Robert Jordan "Wheel of Time" book, really sucked. No major plot advancement has happened at all. Several pages are spent on one of the main characters taking a bath! It seems like in these books, time goes slower and slower. I think the series has gone downhill, since about the fifth book or so, but this one was really bad. I see no way for him to end the series in my life time, at this pace, with so many dangling plot threads, and a release cycle of one book every two years,
They are equivalent for the same reason. This sequence (ultimately) can be expressed in terms of the recurrence
Seq(n) = Seq(n-1) + single sequence value for ("n") + Seq(n-1).
Which is true both in the hanoi, and bit flip example
In the example of prime factorization let k=2^n, and l<k be an integer. If we factor l as
l=2^m * p, with m<n and p odd, then we can "shift" the sequence generated with (1..k-1) to
(1+(k), (k-1)+k) because if l = 2^m * p then
k+l = 2^m * p + 2^n = 2^m (p + 2 ^(n-m)), with (p + 2 ^(n-m)) odd. Thus the sequence for n-1 repeats right after the nth term shows up.
The only difference between this sequence and the first two is that "single sequence value for "n" is actually n-1 instead of n.
One neat thing I discovered about the towers of hanoi is that the sequence of disks to move for a solution
1,2,1,3,1,2,1,4,1,2,1,3,1,2,1,5...
is the exact same sequence that you get when you look at the number of bits flipped between consecutive binary numbers (i.e.
00000->00001 (1 flip),
00001->00010 (2 flips),
00010->00011 (1 flip),
00011->00100 (3 flips),
00100->00101 (1 flip),
00101->00110 (2 flips)
etc... (1,2,1,3,1,2,...)
The reason it works is because just like the towers of hanoi algorithm, when the general solution to move n disks is:
Recursively solve the puzzle for n-1 disks
Take the nth disk and move it to the goal
Recursively solve the puzzle for n-1 disks.
The bit flipping goes like this:
While the nth bit is 0, the solution works for the n-1 disk solution
When we go from 011111 (n-1 1's) to 10000000 (n-1 0's) we flip n bits
Then the nth bit stays 1 and we repeat the solution for the n-1 disks.
Chances are though that regulations would have loopholes, like this whole "DO NOT CALL" list. I still get plenty of phone calls from "non-profit" organizations trying to sell me something.
We all know that simply rerouting the EPS conduit to emit a low level anti-tachyon beam will nullify any damage space junk will create.
That works if you also have a land line...No need for a landline anymore.
There is too a need for a land line -- to find your cell phone, as stated above.
This would be the same FCC that voted for media consolidation? I think that the current makeup of the FCC favors corporations over individuals, and would probably not advocate creating a do-not-call list in the first place.
Arnold was not born in the US, he can therefore never be President, barring a constitutional amendment.
Pay the Russians, go to space.
There may be several reasons that "hard" science-fiction is no longer in vogue, replaced with fantasy or space opera.
1) It is not as though "hard" science-fiction has always had mass appeal. It has always had a specialized genre feeling. What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space. More like futuristic action. This is what appeals to the movie-going audience. "Hard" science fiction is too "hard" (must think...hurts brain) and is probably not profitable.
2) Fantasy pops into the human need for myth. Mythology (not necessarily incorrect or unfactual) exists traditionally in historical and religious traditions, Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Christian, etc. creation myths and such, and with the modern push to explain everything scientifically, a major piece of how people function (i.e. mythology in life) disappears, thus a longing for mythos appears, which fantasy seems to fill better than analytical science fiction.
3) The idea of a "bright, happy, future" seems to be relegated to naivety and a cynical "dystopia" seems to have set in (thus apocalyptic movies, etc), and this view seems to be pushed by many media outlets (i.e. bad news sells). We apparantly will pollute ourselves to death in 50 years, the world will be completely controlled by corporations, etc.
4) Finally, the largest bastion of future hope for science, at least in the US, NASA, has gone from getting a man on the moon in 10 years, to losing orbiters in Mars, as one magazine article put it, on the 30th anniversary of Apollo (paraphrasing) "We want NASA to be a precursor to Starfleet, but they are more like a bad post office."
These several things go to explain the loss of interest in "Golden Age" science fiction
Doesn't it seem a bit strange that the Supreme Court
basically upholds the right of a state to determine what it considers "obscene" right after they overturn a Texas sodomy law due to the "right to privacy"?
extort (v) - to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power
So if I point out the flaws in this voting machine do I go to jail (reverse engineering & circumvention) and forever lose my right to vote? (several states do not allow ex-felons to vote)
Let me get this straight. SCO is suing IBM about AIX and OSI is involved. The GPL should be ok though. Too many TLA's. I'm so confused.
Is the RIAA going to pay for the legal fees the university incurred? Or the time they could have used to educate their students rather than going on a wild goose chase? I rather doubt it.
It's called Los Angeles.
POKE 65497,0 was more fun though.
On region 1, if you do that trick with the first disc, you get an MTV "Counsel of Elrond" parody. On disc 2 you get the trailer.
Senator Hollings? Is that you?
can be found at Warren Robinett's Adventure here. Arguably the coolest Atari game of all time, it was one of the first games with an easter egg, and a "Zelda" type interface. Dragons, castles, goblets, and a bat, and it all fit in 4K of memory. The most telling thing about this, they paid him $22,000 a year, and they sold 1 million copies of the game, at $20 a pop.
I remember an amusing story about how when you typed the keywords "dumb motherf---er" into google, how the first result you would get back would be a link to George W. Bush's campaign page. Now when you type it in, you get a link to a Wired article describing the phenomena. For this keyword, the search has become meta.
Don't worry...there are no life forms aboard...
The author has brought up the point that since the CLR is being used that the functionality offered is essentially the same, regardless of the language, and that it is similar to the "skinnable" feature of windows XP. That is syntax from language to language is similar, but since they are running under the CLR, the functionality has to be the same.
Hello? How is this different than compiled languages? Ultimately, machine code gets executed, whether you are writing C++, C#, VB, whatever, and machine code has a fixed number of instructions. Any feature of a language is simply compiled/retranslated into machine code anyway. Thus the limiting feature set is what you can do with the machine code. Period. And it has ALWAYS been this way. How does using a CLR make this any different?