One thing I find so amazing about Ubuntu is that initially, you can boot it live from the CD to at least see if it is compatible with your system. Then, it's just a simple matter of just initiating an install to the HD. This is a huge improvement over the sometimes hit-or-miss nature of some Windows installs.
Amen, brother. You know, I don't really get why there's so much consternation over Linux installs. We've already beaten the heck out of Windows. (I guess that Linux has to be easy to install because so few people actually install Windows?)
Anyway, not that long ago I was asked by a friend to help her upgrade. She had bought a new (Windows) PC, but didn't really want to mess around with re-config'ing it, so she wanted me to pull the drive from the old one, drop it in the new one. Okay, no problem -- they're both desktops, that's like maybe five minutes and a Phillips-head screwdriver, right? I've done that a dozen times on my Mac and Linux machines (actually on one of my Macs I've had continuity back to OS 9.1 or so, just duping the drive into new machines as I upgrade, and it works great). All right, I'll probably have to reactivate Windows' copy-protection scheme, but no worries there; both computers have valid serials.
So anyway, I pull the drive, stick it in the new machine, press the power button. And what to my wondering eyes does appear? A blue screen of death, of course.
Yeah, that's right. The damn thing wouldn't even boot. Not like the Windows CDs are really helpful here, either; supposedly there's some sort of "upgrade in place" mode, but it wasn't an option on the Install disc I had (which is in itself a huge bureaucratic process to obtain, since most manufacturers don't give you one -- it's probably easier just to bittorrent it).
So eventually I just gave up and told her it wasn't going to happen, and that I'd put both drives in there and she could copy her stuff over to the main hard drive if she wanted. So we booted from the OEM's Windows install, which of course was full of crapware. Since I had a Windows install disc around anyway, I figured, what the hell, I'll just hose it and put a fresh Windows install on it, blow out all the junk.
Which was a great plan, until I got the thing booted up on its fresh install, and the networking card wouldn't work. That's right, Windows didn't even come with the Ethernet drivers, for the bog-standard Intel chipset it had. I mean... WTF? When's the last time you've ever had to mess around with drivers for anything like that on a Linux install (barring exotic equipment or GigE with firmware)? Not since the days of my P133, at least.
Bottom line: Linux is absolutely painless to install compared to Windows. Mac OS is easier, but it gets a free pass because of the standardized hardware. I'll never try screwing around with another Windows system like that again; what should have been a fifteen-minute project took half a day, and for no good reason at all.
yeah but switching russia to standard would also simplify connections with china and europe as well.
Very true. However, I wonder if the Russians would see that as a benefit or a hazard. There are a lot of people in China, and a lot of empty land and resources in Siberia... mix in a little vodka and a few generals who want to make sure their military budgets stay secure, and I could see them getting a little paranoid.
Depending on who you ask, the reason the Russians are on broad gauge in the first place was to discourage the Germans. Didn't really do them a lot of good (although it did cause the Germans a certain amount of grief, I've read) but it might be hard to get them away from it.
The only problem I can forsee is setting up MythTV to work with my Radeon AIW. Either way it should make for a fun weekend project!
If by "fun weekend project," you mean "experience that will make you curse computers, question your own sanity, and shake your fist at God for not having struck you down with a well-placed lightning bolt before you set forth on this foolhardy endeavor," then yeah, sure, it might be a fun weekend project.
But seriously, if you want MythTV to work, and work well, get hardware that's well supported. Hauppauge PVR-x50 MPEG-2 encoder cards and Bt848 framebuffer cards [1] are your friends; all others your enemy. Low-end NVidia cards with S-Video out are also probably the best way to avoid wanting to kick the computer.
Unless you put a very, very low value on your time, the cost of the hardware will be insignificant compared to the effort involved in getting poorly-supported gear working with MythTV. I've been down that road. Six weeks worth of work later, I just tossed it all into the parts bin and went out and bought a PVR-150, a Streamzap, and a cheap eVGA NVidia card with S-Video out that was listed as being on the "A" list for Knoppmyth compatibility. With that, it was a weekend project.
[1] The HDHomeRun is pretty slick, too, if you want HD. It's the most painless way to get dual HD tuners.
Believe it or not, I've not only heard of it but actually ridden on it. Although damn cool, and definitely a fun trip if you're ever in Skagway, since it doesn't really connect to any other railroads, it's not exactly what I was thinking of as part of the "rail network" in the U.S. (And the line currently doesn't go all the way to Whitehorse, only to Carcoss, due to some sort of bureaucratic issue with the Canadians...you'd think the people in Whitehorse would be dying for the tourism, and when I was there back in '01 or '02 I heard some of the workers saying that they were ready to run trains there whenever, but apparently there's a lot of red tape involved. I think it became a political football after 9/11 with the border-security issues.) But for anyone interested in railroads the trip is a must-do, if only to see the old steel cantilever bridge along the route (WP says it's over "Dead Horse Gulch" and if you saw it you'd believe it).
For simple point-to-point transportation, you can certainly pick any gauge railroad (or any other form of transportation) that you please. There are functioning narrow-gauge railroads in certain niches both in the Americas and in certain parts of Eastern Europe (I saw a program on the BBC not too long ago about some honest-to-god steam narrow-gauge railways in Eastern Europe; they're more tourist attractions now, but used to be functioning parts of the timber industry), but they don't really help you when you're trying to import goods in a form that can be easily dispersed with a minimum of extra effort, if they're not the regional/national standard.
I think the best solution to the rail problem is to use containerized cargo, and then use the currently-available, COTS equipment [1] for moving cargo containers around to move it from wide-gauge rolling stock to standard gauge, and bring it into the U.S. that way.
[1] The sort of cranes that exist in every major container port in the world, for lifting and moving containers off of ships and onto trucks/trains. Example
I know some folks who took a rail trip across Europe about 20-30 years ago that included a portion on the Russian wide-gauge rails. They said that the cars are not adjusted as much as they are shifted from one set of "trucks" to another. (Not 'trucks' that drive down a street, the other kind.) It's certainly possible that there are cars which are convertible, though.
It seems like a solvable engineering problem; the question really is what approach is cheapest: (1) moving the cargo from one car to another, which is fairly easy using containerized cargo and standard equipment, (2) building special cars and perhaps special rail sections which can 'switch' from one gauge to another, and making sure that the rail gauge on the narrow size has clearances wide enough for the wider cars, or (3) either physically switching portions of the Wide Gauge rail network to standard, or portions of the Standard network to Wide. Although in the case of (3), one might first assume that it would be natural for the Russians to want to move their rail network to Standard, it's quite possible, given the shoddy state of the U.S. rail network, that there might be less work involved (and certainly work in less remote/challenging conditions) in building new track or swapping one line of a double-track right-of-way in the American/Canadian side to Wide Gauge.
Will that enable truck traffic all the way to say, LA?
I don't think that you'd really want to bother with a road in the tunnel. Like the Chunnel, you'd probably use trains. They're more efficient, and you don't have to worry about exhaust gases building up in the tunnel (they're electric), plus they just make a lot more sense for moving bulk goods over long distances.
The Russians already have a well-developed rail infrastructure -- that's if they haven't torn it up for scrap metal lately -- and the Trans-Siberia Railway is all double-track and electrified (at no small expense, but hey, when you have a lot of peasants or comrades to employ, who cares?), so it would be dumb to transfer it all to trucks.
You can't run the same cars from Russia to the U.S., unfortunately they're like the only place in the world that doesn't use Standard Gauge tracks and rolling stock (they use 5-foot gauge instead of the standard 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches; oddly the latter actually works out more nicely in cm than the former), but if you did everything in shipping containers it wouldn't be that hard to build a yard somewhere and just shift them across to new cars. Probably do it on the Russian side since you'd want to save the space in the tunnels and go with the narrower gauge.
Russia, particularly Siberia, has a lot of natural resources. Timber, coal, mineral ores, and probably oil... lots of stuff that's good to ship in bulk via pipelines or via heavy rail.
Kinda makes you wonder how this social norm of licensing people to drive came about. I wonder if there is anywhere in the world where requiring people to have a license to drive is considered as absurd as americans find the idea of requiring people to have a license to watch tv.
I have a friend from Bangladesh; they have drivers licenses there, but if you had the right connections or enough money, it just wasn't worth getting one. If you got pulled over you just paid the bribe or showed the right person's card and you were set. The bureaucracy and bribes involved in actually procuring a license was supposedly worse than just violating the law and getting away with it after the fact. Sort of a "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" situation.
This was a while ago and I think they've done a lot of combat corruption there since then, so I'm not necessarily saying that's the case anymore, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were many places where rampant low-level corruption [1] exists where it's the case.
[1] I don't mean "low level" here to mean "not serious," I mean corruption on the actual 'street level,' among the people who actually enforce the law, as opposed to 'high level' corruption among the people who make the laws. Here in the U.S., we don't have that much corruption at low levels -- at least not compared to places like Bangladesh; you probably won't get out of a speeding ticket by slipping the cop a few bucks -- we seem to like our corruption at the upper echelons.
Isn't it sad that people can somehow rationalize that a weapon that was built specifically for killing humans should not be classified as an assault rifle. Even if it was designed to be used while assaulting an enemy. Yeah that's right, you don't need a 600 cyclic rounds per minute rifle to kill a deer. Not unless you are shitty shot or have mental problems where you get your jollies making hamburger while it is still on the hoof.
I'm not really sure what your point is. The original design purpose really isn't that big an issue. Consider: some types of bows (the kind used to fling arrows, not the ones on top of birthday presents) were at one point a fairly high-tech battlefield weapon. Today, some people still hunt with them, and many people use them for a completely abstract sporting event involving hitting a hay target on the other end of the field. The equipment has become completely detached from its original military purpose.
Likewise, the javelin was also originally a military weapon, and now it's purely a sporting event. There's no difference between that and something like the IPSC, which began with various practical shooting scenarios, and developed it into a completely abstract sport, with its own rules and equipment that are only tangentially related to the originals. This cycle repeats over and over: give someone a spear, a bow, a pistol, a rifle, a musket, or even a cannon, and they'll probably compete to see who can throw or shoot the furthest or most accurately. Let it go for a while, and suddenly the competition will become the main focus, and people will begin building equipment based on the competition, rather than the original martial activity.
There are far, far more "assault weapons" manufactured for purposes of sport and recreation than manufactured for actually shooting other people. Even if the design of a firearm was originally military, that doesn't mean the ones made today are. In fact, most civilians' "assault" rifles would be unsuited for military use because of deviations from the original specs in order to get additional accuracy. (I have a 'National Match' AR-15 which despite looking big, black, and scary, wouldn't be suited for use off of a shooting range, because it's been hand assembled to very close tolerances. Any amount of dirt or grime, and it would stop working. I don't mind, though, because essentially it's just a very long range hole-punch. It does the same thing as the $0.99 hole-punch on my desk, but costs $1300 and does it from 400 yards away. Sure, you could kill someone with it, but it's no more designed for that than a field athlete's javelin is.)
Only someone ignorant with how these devices are typically used would say that they're designed for killing people.
I agree with everything you're saying, but in addition I'd just like to make one point:
to be fair, the ak is 9.5lb to the m16's 7.8lb. not a massive difference, and the ak's shorter length compensates for its weight in fast-aim situations.
Very few actual combat troops, to my knowledge, are even using the M-16A2 with the 20" barrel -- most people I know, at least the ones actually doing patrols in Iraq, were issued one of the newer carbine-length varieties with a 14" barrel. Lots of muzzle flash, slightly reduced velocity, but a whole lot handier. There's nothing besides U.S. Army stubbornness (insisting that the next war would be a setpiece battle where soldiers would be shooting at each other's armored heads from 350 yards away) that said you had to put a barrel that long on the action.
Granted, most of this stuff about small-caliber ammunition and carbine-length weapons being really neat was figured out by the Germans (to basically no effect, but for unrelated reasons) 50 years ago, and in some ways I think the Russians caught on a lot quicker, but the AK as a weapon really isn't as superior to the AR-15/M16 variants as it has a reputation for being.
The AK47 is also heavier which is really nice when you get into hand-to-hand combat and you can just whack the other guy with it.
No, no it's not. Heavier = bad. An infantryman can only carry so much shit around, and we've pretty much hit that maximum right now. Any weight you add in a personal weapon is going to have to be cut somewhere else, or else you're going to affect the speed and mobility (not to mention comfort) of the soldier carrying it around.
You're going to make a trade-off somewhere. If you can make the rifle lighter, speaking as someone who has carried one (along with an additional 75 pounds of crap), make it lighter. If I wanted to beat someone in the head with something, I'd use an entrenching tool, or some other more appropriately club-shaped and -weighted object. They're not exactly in short supply.
And I don't have any statistics, but I'll bet that the number of times that rifles are used as clubs in modern combat is pretty low. I don't think it's really an important design criterion. I think most soldiers would rather have the additional weight in ammunition, rather than just in simple mass that's only useful if the enemy is a few feet away.
Hm. Wouldn't they only have to pay on the profit they made if/when they sold them?
I think this is really how the 'taxation' in online games is going to end up working. It's like stocks right now. If I go and buy stocks (with my post-tax income), I don't pay any taxes on the appreciated value of those stocks until I go to sell them. Then, the year I sell them, I have to go back and figure out what I paid for them, to establish the cost basis, and compute the capital gain.
I don't see why a +20 "Sword of Toestubbing" would be any different. Assuming you pay for it using a virtual currency that you bought using post-tax income, it's just like a stock. When you go and sell that, the income that you derive from the sale is taxable as capital gains, and if you want to avoid having 100% of the sale price taxed, then you need to go back and establish what the cost basis was of the investment.
IMO, the IRS doesn't seem to care too much about non-cash investments until you go to sell them. You can buy a stock, and that stock can split, reverse-split, do all sorts of stuff. It only becomes an issue (setting aside dividends) when you turn it back into greenbacks.
Any enforcement of the ratings on movies (or games for that matter) is currently on a voluntary. While some theaters or stores may have policies to restrict kids from buying/renting R or M material, the vast majority of them DO NOT.
You're right about it being voluntary, but I think you're wrong in saying "the vast majority do not." I can't think of any major theater chain in the U.S. that doesn't enforce the MPAA ratings on movies. If you can find one that doesn't, it's just because the employees are looking the other way, not because of any official policy. I mean, the theater owners have representatives in the MPAA -- they sit on the appeals boards for rating movies. (Go see "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" if you want to know names; it's basically a who's-who of theater ownership.)
Movie rental and sales may be a little more lax, because they're more focused on making a buck. However, the big chains all at least pay lip service to the MPAA ratings, and any difference between policy-as-written and policy-as-enforced (like being lax about the "R" rating, because it would hurt sales too much) is just going to get blamed on the employees.
It depends where you are. Every Canadian province has laws regarding film and video classification, with penalties for non-compliance (including exhibition, sale or rental of "unclassified" materials.)
I think we were talking about the U.S. here. On the whole, Canadians seem to accept a much higher degree of government interference than I think would be acceptable in the U.S. (This may or may not be due to a greater degree of trust in their government, but I'd argue anyone who trusts any government is a fool, since all governments are corrupt, some are just lacking in subtlety.)
Attempting to codify the MPAA rating system into U.S. law, in a way that's similar to Canada's, would probably run into substantial (and not at all unreasonable) First Amendment objections. Nobody has ever really realistically suggested that the government should be involved in censoring movies and other media, at least not recently. The MPAA likes to use it as a bogeyman, a sort of implied threat -- "hey, you may not like us, but we're better than having those monkeys in Congress do it" -- but I'm not sure if there's really any serious risk of it happening.
At best, without substantially changing the U.S. legal framework, you'd have to redefine "obscenity" to include violence and sexuality (and anything else you wanted to restrict), in order to carve out an excuse for government regulation. Or you might be able to threaten stores who sell such materials to minors with prosecution under one of the vague "injurious to the morals of a minor" statues, in order to 'encourage' "voluntary" compliance. (That's probably the most realistic scenario, and it sounds close to what Spitzer is trying for.) I'm still not sure how far it would fly in court though.
This whole thing is just a political football; Spitzer is dragging it out in order to make himself seem more appealing to conservatives, because he has an election coming up in 2010 and he needs to have some resume lines for it. Since he can't 'protect the fetuses' (he is, after all, a Democrat), 'protecting the children' is a pretty safe alternative that ought to buy him some soccer-mom votes both in the downstate (liberal) and upstate (moderate to conservative in some places) districts.
He could have done the taping from another state where it's legal. The guy sounds like he's not a complete retard, I'm sure he's aware of the taping laws in his own state. He could have driven over to Oregon or Idaho, depending on where he lives, to record the conversation, if he wanted to.
Also, I think there are lower barriers for admissibility of evidence in civil court than in criminal.
If you look, those numbers look the way they do because they include "re-exports" when computing the trade balance. I.e., if raw materials are imported and processed into something and re-exported as a more expensive good, it's considered a positive trade balance for the U.S. (which it is, economically -- that's a value added which should contribute to GDP), although there may actually be a negative or no movement of actual food materials. Even using the FDA's numbers, which we can almost certainly presume are being fudged to make the situation appear good, there's only a $5B surplus, down from $25B in 1996, so if the U.S. isn't a net importer now, it almost certainly will be in the next few years. Five billion bucks is a drop in the bucket -- it might as well be break-even.
But this is all tangential to the real issue; regardless of which way the numbers happen to lie based on who's doing the crunching (because, let's face it, you can make the numbers fall either way depending on what assumptions you put into the calculations) the point is that -- and I think we're in agreement here -- a whole lot more corn is being produced in the U.S. due to government subsidies than really ought to be if it was just left up to the market. A lot of it gets used domestically in lieu of cane sugar (all the high-fructose corn syrup), a lot goes into animal feed (corn-fed beef, mainly), and some gets exported. But if it weren't for the subsidies, a whole lot less would be grown in general, and very little would probably be exported.
So a strong new domestic demand for corn that reduced exports wouldn't really be doing anything more than correcting the longstanding interference that's the lingering result of a lot of ill-advised 1970s government programs. Ultimately, it might lead to a lessening of some of the political pressure that keeps "acreage diversion" and other "crop reduction" programs, which pay owners who keep arable land fallow in order to inflate food prices, around.
Fundamentally, I think this is all an academic point: the First World and the U.S. in particular needs fuel, and if corn works as a fuel and the price per BTU or Joule as a finished product drops below petroleum products, it'll get used, regardless of what it does to the food supply elsewhere, just like the U.S. currently consumes oil without a whole lot of regard for what it does to the geopolitical system elsewhere. At least with corn and other renewables, you have some hope of long-term sustainability, while with petroleum you categorically do not.
Which is not to say that I'm necessarily convinced that ethanol is really some sort of solution to our energy problems -- in fact I'm highly skeptical, because it seems to just fit into a lot of powerful people's political fantasies (principally the farming and agribusiness lobby) a bit too well. But I don't think there's really any reason to dismiss it out of hand, when most of the alternatives are just as bad or worse.
Unless you are told/informed/read other wise, a network is NOT public. It's no different than seeing an unlocked door. You wouldn't just walk in and look around would you?
Depending on the circumstances, going into someplace uninvited through an unlocked door would, at most, make you guilty of trespassing, and in many places there are rules specifying how the property, in the absence of other indicators (like a locked door or fence), has to be posted in order to establish reasonable cause for a person trespassing to know that they weren't supposed to be there. (In most places you're fine until either someone tells you to leave, or you should have known that you shouldn't be there by something a reasonable person would understand, e.g. a sign, fence, door, or gate.)
So even if the door analogy is close to being appropriate, which I'm not sure it is, it's hardly a cut-and-dried issue.
Ethanol is made from... food. So...let the rest of the world starve to death (corn is the staple food source for a lot of the world and there's only so much which can be grown) so you can burn ethanol in your automobile?
Because this is a lot different from our current situation, where we just kill them directly, or allow them to be killed for geopolitical reasons, in exchange for oil? You're still dead either way.
Furthermore, the U.S. is a net importer of food. The corn we grow here mostly doesn't go to the rest of the world; it's expensive to transport and it's just not worth that much. The stuff that's not used for food mostly ends up being used for animal feed, fertilizer, or in some cases waste. The government already subsidizes it heavily, so there's a lot of it grown -- we might as well do something useful with it. Besides which, corn really isn't the best feedstock for ethanol -- it's only being considered because we have a surplus of it in the U.S. (due to subsidies and a lot of farmers with political connections). If the price of corn went up, it would no longer be attractive for ethanol production, and other crops with higher ethanol/biomass yields (grass species, mostly) would be more attractive.
(Plus, I don't agree with direct food aid to foreign countries except for absolute short-term emergencies, and sometimes not even then; if you allow some third-world country's population to expand dramatically -- which is what a steady food supply will do -- you're creating millions of people in an untenable position whose entire lives are dependent on outside charity. When the first world economy tanks, and people's interest in charity evaporates, suddenly you have a far worse problem than you did originally. The only food aid worth doing are the programs that lead to self-sufficiency, or build domestic industry to a point where food can be sustainably imported at market price. Otherwise you're just creating slaves; if you control whether someone eats or not, you might as well just own them as chattel.)
Never mind that it takes almost as much energy to make ethanol as you'd get from burning it, you have to burn more of it than gasoline to get the same energy return and it destroys your designed-for-gasoline engine all of which means more pollution and higher cost than burning gasoline.
Well depending on where you start the measurement, of course ethanol takes more energy to create than it does when you burn it. (Well, actually, the enthalpy change is exactly the same in either way, because it's conservative, but when you factor in inefficient systems it's not 100% reversible.) Petroleum takes a lot of energy to "make" too, which is why you don't see people going and churning it out; it's only made underground and it takes a while. Ethanol, on the other hand, gets made -- via plants -- pretty quickly. You grow something -- which converts sunlight, plus atmospheric gases and some soil minerals and nitrogen -- and then convert it to ethanol using microorganisms. Sure, you use up a lot of energy in order to convert the plant matter to ethanol, but you still come out ahead, and since the original energy source (sunlight) was basically free, that's all that matters. (You could avoid the biomass -> ethanol conversion loss by just burning the plant matter directly, but who wants to have a wood-pellet-fueled car?)
And the design changes you have to make to a gasoline engine to run it on ethanol are surprisingly minor. The biggest problem are the hoses and gaskets, but in most newer cars it's not that big a deal. It's not a very difficult problem in terms of engineering, they already do it in Brazil among other places, and Ford/GM/et al sell cars there.
Something that I've wondered about for a while is when the graphics card manufacturers will wake up and realize that there are more markets for GPUs out there besides gamers. Sure, that may be a big market, but I think they could make a bundle selling semi-specialized cards for other niche markets. In particular, it wouldn't take much to produce home-theater/video versions of cards: basically take a medium-range card with hardware MPEG-2/4 decompression, scaling, and deinterlace, and put some standard video outputs on it -- say HDMI, Component, and VGA (that way you could get to DVI easily using an HDMI adapter, and you can get to S-Video or Composite by combining the component signals).
I know HTPCs have been "this year! no, really, this year!" for a while now, but I think one of the things that's holding them back is the hardware configuration. If somebody made an inexpensive card specifically designed to go into a HTPC and interface easily with most people's televisions, and play back good-quality compressed video at a variety of resolutions, I think they'd be onto something.
make sure you notify your elected representatives that you know what bribes look like
And when they ask who you're going to vote for instead, you're going to say... who, exactly?
Oh, wait, nobody, because there aren't any candidates above the local level who haven't taken the filthy lucre of corporate cash in order to run campaigns. It's so ingrained into the system that unless you vote for yourself or a fringe candidate so far down the ladder that they won't affect the outcome of the election, there's no choice.
I'm sure there are lots of reasons for doing it, but most bulletin boards that require registration in order to read, at least in my experience, do it in order to limit traffic, not count it. It's a way of keeping costs down, albeit at the expense of making the board less useful as a resource to the general public.
Unfortunately the best board relating to Knoppmyth is like this; it was just too expensive for the maintainer to run openly; the traffic cost too much. By requiring registration to read, it cut down on traffic enough to make it affordable. Given the choice between a register-before-reading board and no board at all, I think the public is best served by the former.
Wouldn't shifting the emphasis away from programming skills in the CS program begin to crowd the MIS program?
People have modded this "Funny," but I think it deserves a lot of consideration. Many schools already have both CS, MIS, and in some cases CompE programs. They're related, but different in key areas; at least ideally, a MIS program prepares people to manage an IT department, while CS involves more high-level theory and software design. I've always assumed that in the idea, CompEs would do more with hardware and less with software, but I'm sure it has broad application as well.
In my experience, I think that there are a lot of women in MIS programs. Maybe not 50%, but certainly more than there are in CS programs. Rather than "watering down" (as perceived by the people already involved) CS programs to make them more interesting to women, we should look at the tech fields that are already appealing to women, like MIS, and emphasize them.
Changing a CS degree to contain elements of Fashion Design would achieve the same results. That does not mean it's a good idea. Watering down one degree for mass appeal inevitably reduces the proficiency of graduates in the specific areas targeted. Mass appeal is no indicator of quality.
IMO, and I know I'll probably offend some "real" CS people in saying this, but I think 'Computer Science' as a degree, at the undergraduate level anyway, has already suffered from this a lot.
At least from the local big state Uni -- and I won't say which, but I don't think it's atypical -- I've run into some CS grads who took the "light" curriculum (it apparently offers a wide range of courses you can take), and were basically incapable of doing anything other than messing around in WYSIWYG web-development tools and making web pages, and even then they weren't great at it. It goes without saying they had never even used or been exposed to anything besides Windows. If they did any software at all, it was a 100-level class in Visual Basic.
Now, I'm sure there are CS grads, even at those schools, who opted to take a lot of real programming and algorithm design and architecture classes, but the people taking what amounts to a graphic-design and web-design curriculum and calling it "Computer Science" are really hurting the value of the degree. I've known people involved in HR who, when they're looking for actual IT people, basically write off CS degrees in favor of CompE or SoftwareE. So the end result is just a lot of degree inflation, and at the top end of the spectrum, you get a lot of bitterness from "real" engineers (the ones with P.E. certs, not quite so much the ones who drive trains) at the people calling themselves 'engineers' in order to get some differentiation from the hacks.
Personally I think the problem is the lingering effects of the dot-com bubble and the associated feeling that a CS degree was a guarantee of easy money. If people in CS want to reclaim the discipline, they should emphasize that it's long hours, sometimes crappy pay, and packed full of nerds, because it's not doing anyone any good to have people who aren't really committed to the subject matter graduating.
You don't see (many) Physics departments compromising their curricula in order to siphon off students from Business school; at least not by reducing the amount of actual physics in their courses. (Making a course of study more interesting or applicable, by showing how useful it is to a wide range of jobs/problems/areas-of-interest; that's perfectly OK, and definitely desirable.) There's no reason why CS programs should.
And in the time I took to hit reply you've already got two other responses trying to change the subject rather than acknowledge the discrimination.
Uh, but the problem is that the GP (the post you responded to), was the one bringing up a non sequitur. Whether there's discrimination or not, TFA doesn't really get into it -- what they're talking about is changing the nature of the discipline in order to make it more attractive to (stereotypical) women.
Frankly I think there's a ton of borderline bigotry in that. It's not solving any real problems, just burying them and probably creating a lot of bad feelings in the process that are just going to fester and rear their head later on.
Not true; at least in the U.S., there are extant tax structures for things like marijuana, even though possessing it is illegal. They created a whole structure of tax stamps that you have to have on it, and I don't know if it was ever actually used before they just made all possession illegal. But the result is that if you get caught with a large quantity of marijuana, they could probably prosecute you for not having the correct tax stamps on it (since they're impossible to get, to my knowledge) in addition to the simple possession. They don't, because the penalties for possession are so draconian (did you know that drug possession in large quantities is a capital offense under Federal law?), but they could.
The IRS also requires that income from illegal activities be reported on your tax return; arresting people involved in organized crime for tax evasion (for not reporting their illegal income) is pretty standard.
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One thing I find so amazing about Ubuntu is that initially, you can boot it live from the CD to at least see if it is compatible with your system. Then, it's just a simple matter of just initiating an install to the HD. This is a huge improvement over the sometimes hit-or-miss nature of some Windows installs.
... WTF? When's the last time you've ever had to mess around with drivers for anything like that on a Linux install (barring exotic equipment or GigE with firmware)? Not since the days of my P133, at least.
Amen, brother. You know, I don't really get why there's so much consternation over Linux installs. We've already beaten the heck out of Windows. (I guess that Linux has to be easy to install because so few people actually install Windows?)
Anyway, not that long ago I was asked by a friend to help her upgrade. She had bought a new (Windows) PC, but didn't really want to mess around with re-config'ing it, so she wanted me to pull the drive from the old one, drop it in the new one. Okay, no problem -- they're both desktops, that's like maybe five minutes and a Phillips-head screwdriver, right? I've done that a dozen times on my Mac and Linux machines (actually on one of my Macs I've had continuity back to OS 9.1 or so, just duping the drive into new machines as I upgrade, and it works great). All right, I'll probably have to reactivate Windows' copy-protection scheme, but no worries there; both computers have valid serials.
So anyway, I pull the drive, stick it in the new machine, press the power button. And what to my wondering eyes does appear? A blue screen of death, of course.
Yeah, that's right. The damn thing wouldn't even boot. Not like the Windows CDs are really helpful here, either; supposedly there's some sort of "upgrade in place" mode, but it wasn't an option on the Install disc I had (which is in itself a huge bureaucratic process to obtain, since most manufacturers don't give you one -- it's probably easier just to bittorrent it).
So eventually I just gave up and told her it wasn't going to happen, and that I'd put both drives in there and she could copy her stuff over to the main hard drive if she wanted. So we booted from the OEM's Windows install, which of course was full of crapware. Since I had a Windows install disc around anyway, I figured, what the hell, I'll just hose it and put a fresh Windows install on it, blow out all the junk.
Which was a great plan, until I got the thing booted up on its fresh install, and the networking card wouldn't work. That's right, Windows didn't even come with the Ethernet drivers, for the bog-standard Intel chipset it had. I mean
Bottom line: Linux is absolutely painless to install compared to Windows. Mac OS is easier, but it gets a free pass because of the standardized hardware. I'll never try screwing around with another Windows system like that again; what should have been a fifteen-minute project took half a day, and for no good reason at all.
yeah but switching russia to standard would also simplify connections with china and europe as well.
... mix in a little vodka and a few generals who want to make sure their military budgets stay secure, and I could see them getting a little paranoid.
Very true. However, I wonder if the Russians would see that as a benefit or a hazard. There are a lot of people in China, and a lot of empty land and resources in Siberia
Depending on who you ask, the reason the Russians are on broad gauge in the first place was to discourage the Germans. Didn't really do them a lot of good (although it did cause the Germans a certain amount of grief, I've read) but it might be hard to get them away from it.
The only problem I can forsee is setting up MythTV to work with my Radeon AIW. Either way it should make for a fun weekend project!
If by "fun weekend project," you mean "experience that will make you curse computers, question your own sanity, and shake your fist at God for not having struck you down with a well-placed lightning bolt before you set forth on this foolhardy endeavor," then yeah, sure, it might be a fun weekend project.
But seriously, if you want MythTV to work, and work well, get hardware that's well supported. Hauppauge PVR-x50 MPEG-2 encoder cards and Bt848 framebuffer cards [1] are your friends; all others your enemy. Low-end NVidia cards with S-Video out are also probably the best way to avoid wanting to kick the computer.
Unless you put a very, very low value on your time, the cost of the hardware will be insignificant compared to the effort involved in getting poorly-supported gear working with MythTV. I've been down that road. Six weeks worth of work later, I just tossed it all into the parts bin and went out and bought a PVR-150, a Streamzap, and a cheap eVGA NVidia card with S-Video out that was listed as being on the "A" list for Knoppmyth compatibility. With that, it was a weekend project.
[1] The HDHomeRun is pretty slick, too, if you want HD. It's the most painless way to get dual HD tuners.
Believe it or not, I've not only heard of it but actually ridden on it. Although damn cool, and definitely a fun trip if you're ever in Skagway, since it doesn't really connect to any other railroads, it's not exactly what I was thinking of as part of the "rail network" in the U.S. (And the line currently doesn't go all the way to Whitehorse, only to Carcoss, due to some sort of bureaucratic issue with the Canadians...you'd think the people in Whitehorse would be dying for the tourism, and when I was there back in '01 or '02 I heard some of the workers saying that they were ready to run trains there whenever, but apparently there's a lot of red tape involved. I think it became a political football after 9/11 with the border-security issues.) But for anyone interested in railroads the trip is a must-do, if only to see the old steel cantilever bridge along the route (WP says it's over "Dead Horse Gulch" and if you saw it you'd believe it).
For simple point-to-point transportation, you can certainly pick any gauge railroad (or any other form of transportation) that you please. There are functioning narrow-gauge railroads in certain niches both in the Americas and in certain parts of Eastern Europe (I saw a program on the BBC not too long ago about some honest-to-god steam narrow-gauge railways in Eastern Europe; they're more tourist attractions now, but used to be functioning parts of the timber industry), but they don't really help you when you're trying to import goods in a form that can be easily dispersed with a minimum of extra effort, if they're not the regional/national standard.
I think the best solution to the rail problem is to use containerized cargo, and then use the currently-available, COTS equipment [1] for moving cargo containers around to move it from wide-gauge rolling stock to standard gauge, and bring it into the U.S. that way.
[1] The sort of cranes that exist in every major container port in the world, for lifting and moving containers off of ships and onto trucks/trains. Example
I know some folks who took a rail trip across Europe about 20-30 years ago that included a portion on the Russian wide-gauge rails. They said that the cars are not adjusted as much as they are shifted from one set of "trucks" to another. (Not 'trucks' that drive down a street, the other kind.) It's certainly possible that there are cars which are convertible, though.
It seems like a solvable engineering problem; the question really is what approach is cheapest: (1) moving the cargo from one car to another, which is fairly easy using containerized cargo and standard equipment, (2) building special cars and perhaps special rail sections which can 'switch' from one gauge to another, and making sure that the rail gauge on the narrow size has clearances wide enough for the wider cars, or (3) either physically switching portions of the Wide Gauge rail network to standard, or portions of the Standard network to Wide. Although in the case of (3), one might first assume that it would be natural for the Russians to want to move their rail network to Standard, it's quite possible, given the shoddy state of the U.S. rail network, that there might be less work involved (and certainly work in less remote/challenging conditions) in building new track or swapping one line of a double-track right-of-way in the American/Canadian side to Wide Gauge.
Will that enable truck traffic all the way to say, LA?
... lots of stuff that's good to ship in bulk via pipelines or via heavy rail.
I don't think that you'd really want to bother with a road in the tunnel. Like the Chunnel, you'd probably use trains. They're more efficient, and you don't have to worry about exhaust gases building up in the tunnel (they're electric), plus they just make a lot more sense for moving bulk goods over long distances.
The Russians already have a well-developed rail infrastructure -- that's if they haven't torn it up for scrap metal lately -- and the Trans-Siberia Railway is all double-track and electrified (at no small expense, but hey, when you have a lot of peasants or comrades to employ, who cares?), so it would be dumb to transfer it all to trucks.
You can't run the same cars from Russia to the U.S., unfortunately they're like the only place in the world that doesn't use Standard Gauge tracks and rolling stock (they use 5-foot gauge instead of the standard 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches; oddly the latter actually works out more nicely in cm than the former), but if you did everything in shipping containers it wouldn't be that hard to build a yard somewhere and just shift them across to new cars. Probably do it on the Russian side since you'd want to save the space in the tunnels and go with the narrower gauge.
Russia, particularly Siberia, has a lot of natural resources. Timber, coal, mineral ores, and probably oil
Kinda makes you wonder how this social norm of licensing people to drive came about. I wonder if there is anywhere in the world where requiring people to have a license to drive is considered as absurd as americans find the idea of requiring people to have a license to watch tv.
I have a friend from Bangladesh; they have drivers licenses there, but if you had the right connections or enough money, it just wasn't worth getting one. If you got pulled over you just paid the bribe or showed the right person's card and you were set. The bureaucracy and bribes involved in actually procuring a license was supposedly worse than just violating the law and getting away with it after the fact. Sort of a "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" situation.
This was a while ago and I think they've done a lot of combat corruption there since then, so I'm not necessarily saying that's the case anymore, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were many places where rampant low-level corruption [1] exists where it's the case.
[1] I don't mean "low level" here to mean "not serious," I mean corruption on the actual 'street level,' among the people who actually enforce the law, as opposed to 'high level' corruption among the people who make the laws. Here in the U.S., we don't have that much corruption at low levels -- at least not compared to places like Bangladesh; you probably won't get out of a speeding ticket by slipping the cop a few bucks -- we seem to like our corruption at the upper echelons.
Isn't it sad that people can somehow rationalize that a weapon that was built specifically for killing humans should not be classified as an assault rifle. Even if it was designed to be used while assaulting an enemy. Yeah that's right, you don't need a 600 cyclic rounds per minute rifle to kill a deer. Not unless you are shitty shot or have mental problems where you get your jollies making hamburger while it is still on the hoof.
I'm not really sure what your point is. The original design purpose really isn't that big an issue. Consider: some types of bows (the kind used to fling arrows, not the ones on top of birthday presents) were at one point a fairly high-tech battlefield weapon. Today, some people still hunt with them, and many people use them for a completely abstract sporting event involving hitting a hay target on the other end of the field. The equipment has become completely detached from its original military purpose.
Likewise, the javelin was also originally a military weapon, and now it's purely a sporting event. There's no difference between that and something like the IPSC, which began with various practical shooting scenarios, and developed it into a completely abstract sport, with its own rules and equipment that are only tangentially related to the originals. This cycle repeats over and over: give someone a spear, a bow, a pistol, a rifle, a musket, or even a cannon, and they'll probably compete to see who can throw or shoot the furthest or most accurately. Let it go for a while, and suddenly the competition will become the main focus, and people will begin building equipment based on the competition, rather than the original martial activity.
There are far, far more "assault weapons" manufactured for purposes of sport and recreation than manufactured for actually shooting other people. Even if the design of a firearm was originally military, that doesn't mean the ones made today are. In fact, most civilians' "assault" rifles would be unsuited for military use because of deviations from the original specs in order to get additional accuracy. (I have a 'National Match' AR-15 which despite looking big, black, and scary, wouldn't be suited for use off of a shooting range, because it's been hand assembled to very close tolerances. Any amount of dirt or grime, and it would stop working. I don't mind, though, because essentially it's just a very long range hole-punch. It does the same thing as the $0.99 hole-punch on my desk, but costs $1300 and does it from 400 yards away. Sure, you could kill someone with it, but it's no more designed for that than a field athlete's javelin is.)
Only someone ignorant with how these devices are typically used would say that they're designed for killing people.
I agree with everything you're saying, but in addition I'd just like to make one point:
to be fair, the ak is 9.5lb to the m16's 7.8lb. not a massive difference, and the ak's shorter length compensates for its weight in fast-aim situations.
Very few actual combat troops, to my knowledge, are even using the M-16A2 with the 20" barrel -- most people I know, at least the ones actually doing patrols in Iraq, were issued one of the newer carbine-length varieties with a 14" barrel. Lots of muzzle flash, slightly reduced velocity, but a whole lot handier. There's nothing besides U.S. Army stubbornness (insisting that the next war would be a setpiece battle where soldiers would be shooting at each other's armored heads from 350 yards away) that said you had to put a barrel that long on the action.
Granted, most of this stuff about small-caliber ammunition and carbine-length weapons being really neat was figured out by the Germans (to basically no effect, but for unrelated reasons) 50 years ago, and in some ways I think the Russians caught on a lot quicker, but the AK as a weapon really isn't as superior to the AR-15/M16 variants as it has a reputation for being.
The AK47 is also heavier which is really nice when you get into hand-to-hand combat and you can just whack the other guy with it.
No, no it's not. Heavier = bad. An infantryman can only carry so much shit around, and we've pretty much hit that maximum right now. Any weight you add in a personal weapon is going to have to be cut somewhere else, or else you're going to affect the speed and mobility (not to mention comfort) of the soldier carrying it around.
You're going to make a trade-off somewhere. If you can make the rifle lighter, speaking as someone who has carried one (along with an additional 75 pounds of crap), make it lighter. If I wanted to beat someone in the head with something, I'd use an entrenching tool, or some other more appropriately club-shaped and -weighted object. They're not exactly in short supply.
And I don't have any statistics, but I'll bet that the number of times that rifles are used as clubs in modern combat is pretty low. I don't think it's really an important design criterion. I think most soldiers would rather have the additional weight in ammunition, rather than just in simple mass that's only useful if the enemy is a few feet away.
Hm. Wouldn't they only have to pay on the profit they made if/when they sold them?
I think this is really how the 'taxation' in online games is going to end up working. It's like stocks right now. If I go and buy stocks (with my post-tax income), I don't pay any taxes on the appreciated value of those stocks until I go to sell them. Then, the year I sell them, I have to go back and figure out what I paid for them, to establish the cost basis, and compute the capital gain.
I don't see why a +20 "Sword of Toestubbing" would be any different. Assuming you pay for it using a virtual currency that you bought using post-tax income, it's just like a stock. When you go and sell that, the income that you derive from the sale is taxable as capital gains, and if you want to avoid having 100% of the sale price taxed, then you need to go back and establish what the cost basis was of the investment.
IMO, the IRS doesn't seem to care too much about non-cash investments until you go to sell them. You can buy a stock, and that stock can split, reverse-split, do all sorts of stuff. It only becomes an issue (setting aside dividends) when you turn it back into greenbacks.
Any enforcement of the ratings on movies (or games for that matter) is currently on a voluntary. While some theaters or stores may have policies to restrict kids from buying/renting R or M material, the vast majority of them DO NOT.
You're right about it being voluntary, but I think you're wrong in saying "the vast majority do not." I can't think of any major theater chain in the U.S. that doesn't enforce the MPAA ratings on movies. If you can find one that doesn't, it's just because the employees are looking the other way, not because of any official policy. I mean, the theater owners have representatives in the MPAA -- they sit on the appeals boards for rating movies. (Go see "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" if you want to know names; it's basically a who's-who of theater ownership.)
Movie rental and sales may be a little more lax, because they're more focused on making a buck. However, the big chains all at least pay lip service to the MPAA ratings, and any difference between policy-as-written and policy-as-enforced (like being lax about the "R" rating, because it would hurt sales too much) is just going to get blamed on the employees.
It depends where you are. Every Canadian province has laws regarding film and video classification, with penalties for non-compliance (including exhibition, sale or rental of "unclassified" materials.)
I think we were talking about the U.S. here. On the whole, Canadians seem to accept a much higher degree of government interference than I think would be acceptable in the U.S. (This may or may not be due to a greater degree of trust in their government, but I'd argue anyone who trusts any government is a fool, since all governments are corrupt, some are just lacking in subtlety.)
Attempting to codify the MPAA rating system into U.S. law, in a way that's similar to Canada's, would probably run into substantial (and not at all unreasonable) First Amendment objections. Nobody has ever really realistically suggested that the government should be involved in censoring movies and other media, at least not recently. The MPAA likes to use it as a bogeyman, a sort of implied threat -- "hey, you may not like us, but we're better than having those monkeys in Congress do it" -- but I'm not sure if there's really any serious risk of it happening.
At best, without substantially changing the U.S. legal framework, you'd have to redefine "obscenity" to include violence and sexuality (and anything else you wanted to restrict), in order to carve out an excuse for government regulation. Or you might be able to threaten stores who sell such materials to minors with prosecution under one of the vague "injurious to the morals of a minor" statues, in order to 'encourage' "voluntary" compliance. (That's probably the most realistic scenario, and it sounds close to what Spitzer is trying for.) I'm still not sure how far it would fly in court though.
This whole thing is just a political football; Spitzer is dragging it out in order to make himself seem more appealing to conservatives, because he has an election coming up in 2010 and he needs to have some resume lines for it. Since he can't 'protect the fetuses' (he is, after all, a Democrat), 'protecting the children' is a pretty safe alternative that ought to buy him some soccer-mom votes both in the downstate (liberal) and upstate (moderate to conservative in some places) districts.
He could have done the taping from another state where it's legal. The guy sounds like he's not a complete retard, I'm sure he's aware of the taping laws in his own state. He could have driven over to Oregon or Idaho, depending on where he lives, to record the conversation, if he wanted to.
Also, I think there are lower barriers for admissibility of evidence in civil court than in criminal.
If you look, those numbers look the way they do because they include "re-exports" when computing the trade balance. I.e., if raw materials are imported and processed into something and re-exported as a more expensive good, it's considered a positive trade balance for the U.S. (which it is, economically -- that's a value added which should contribute to GDP), although there may actually be a negative or no movement of actual food materials. Even using the FDA's numbers, which we can almost certainly presume are being fudged to make the situation appear good, there's only a $5B surplus, down from $25B in 1996, so if the U.S. isn't a net importer now, it almost certainly will be in the next few years. Five billion bucks is a drop in the bucket -- it might as well be break-even.
But this is all tangential to the real issue; regardless of which way the numbers happen to lie based on who's doing the crunching (because, let's face it, you can make the numbers fall either way depending on what assumptions you put into the calculations) the point is that -- and I think we're in agreement here -- a whole lot more corn is being produced in the U.S. due to government subsidies than really ought to be if it was just left up to the market. A lot of it gets used domestically in lieu of cane sugar (all the high-fructose corn syrup), a lot goes into animal feed (corn-fed beef, mainly), and some gets exported. But if it weren't for the subsidies, a whole lot less would be grown in general, and very little would probably be exported.
So a strong new domestic demand for corn that reduced exports wouldn't really be doing anything more than correcting the longstanding interference that's the lingering result of a lot of ill-advised 1970s government programs. Ultimately, it might lead to a lessening of some of the political pressure that keeps "acreage diversion" and other "crop reduction" programs, which pay owners who keep arable land fallow in order to inflate food prices, around.
Fundamentally, I think this is all an academic point: the First World and the U.S. in particular needs fuel, and if corn works as a fuel and the price per BTU or Joule as a finished product drops below petroleum products, it'll get used, regardless of what it does to the food supply elsewhere, just like the U.S. currently consumes oil without a whole lot of regard for what it does to the geopolitical system elsewhere. At least with corn and other renewables, you have some hope of long-term sustainability, while with petroleum you categorically do not.
Which is not to say that I'm necessarily convinced that ethanol is really some sort of solution to our energy problems -- in fact I'm highly skeptical, because it seems to just fit into a lot of powerful people's political fantasies (principally the farming and agribusiness lobby) a bit too well. But I don't think there's really any reason to dismiss it out of hand, when most of the alternatives are just as bad or worse.
Unless you are told/informed/read other wise, a network is NOT public. It's no different than seeing an unlocked door. You wouldn't just walk in and look around would you?
Depending on the circumstances, going into someplace uninvited through an unlocked door would, at most, make you guilty of trespassing, and in many places there are rules specifying how the property, in the absence of other indicators (like a locked door or fence), has to be posted in order to establish reasonable cause for a person trespassing to know that they weren't supposed to be there. (In most places you're fine until either someone tells you to leave, or you should have known that you shouldn't be there by something a reasonable person would understand, e.g. a sign, fence, door, or gate.)
So even if the door analogy is close to being appropriate, which I'm not sure it is, it's hardly a cut-and-dried issue.
Ethanol is made from ... food. So...let the rest of the world starve to death (corn is the staple food source for a lot of the world and there's only so much which can be grown) so you can burn ethanol in your automobile?
Because this is a lot different from our current situation, where we just kill them directly, or allow them to be killed for geopolitical reasons, in exchange for oil? You're still dead either way.
Furthermore, the U.S. is a net importer of food. The corn we grow here mostly doesn't go to the rest of the world; it's expensive to transport and it's just not worth that much. The stuff that's not used for food mostly ends up being used for animal feed, fertilizer, or in some cases waste. The government already subsidizes it heavily, so there's a lot of it grown -- we might as well do something useful with it. Besides which, corn really isn't the best feedstock for ethanol -- it's only being considered because we have a surplus of it in the U.S. (due to subsidies and a lot of farmers with political connections). If the price of corn went up, it would no longer be attractive for ethanol production, and other crops with higher ethanol/biomass yields (grass species, mostly) would be more attractive.
(Plus, I don't agree with direct food aid to foreign countries except for absolute short-term emergencies, and sometimes not even then; if you allow some third-world country's population to expand dramatically -- which is what a steady food supply will do -- you're creating millions of people in an untenable position whose entire lives are dependent on outside charity. When the first world economy tanks, and people's interest in charity evaporates, suddenly you have a far worse problem than you did originally. The only food aid worth doing are the programs that lead to self-sufficiency, or build domestic industry to a point where food can be sustainably imported at market price. Otherwise you're just creating slaves; if you control whether someone eats or not, you might as well just own them as chattel.)
Never mind that it takes almost as much energy to make ethanol as you'd get from burning it, you have to burn more of it than gasoline to get the same energy return and it destroys your designed-for-gasoline engine all of which means more pollution and higher cost than burning gasoline.
Well depending on where you start the measurement, of course ethanol takes more energy to create than it does when you burn it. (Well, actually, the enthalpy change is exactly the same in either way, because it's conservative, but when you factor in inefficient systems it's not 100% reversible.) Petroleum takes a lot of energy to "make" too, which is why you don't see people going and churning it out; it's only made underground and it takes a while. Ethanol, on the other hand, gets made -- via plants -- pretty quickly. You grow something -- which converts sunlight, plus atmospheric gases and some soil minerals and nitrogen -- and then convert it to ethanol using microorganisms. Sure, you use up a lot of energy in order to convert the plant matter to ethanol, but you still come out ahead, and since the original energy source (sunlight) was basically free, that's all that matters. (You could avoid the biomass -> ethanol conversion loss by just burning the plant matter directly, but who wants to have a wood-pellet-fueled car?)
And the design changes you have to make to a gasoline engine to run it on ethanol are surprisingly minor. The biggest problem are the hoses and gaskets, but in most newer cars it's not that big a deal. It's not a very difficult problem in terms of engineering, they already do it in Brazil among other places, and Ford/GM/et al sell cars there.
Something that I've wondered about for a while is when the graphics card manufacturers will wake up and realize that there are more markets for GPUs out there besides gamers. Sure, that may be a big market, but I think they could make a bundle selling semi-specialized cards for other niche markets. In particular, it wouldn't take much to produce home-theater/video versions of cards: basically take a medium-range card with hardware MPEG-2/4 decompression, scaling, and deinterlace, and put some standard video outputs on it -- say HDMI, Component, and VGA (that way you could get to DVI easily using an HDMI adapter, and you can get to S-Video or Composite by combining the component signals).
I know HTPCs have been "this year! no, really, this year!" for a while now, but I think one of the things that's holding them back is the hardware configuration. If somebody made an inexpensive card specifically designed to go into a HTPC and interface easily with most people's televisions, and play back good-quality compressed video at a variety of resolutions, I think they'd be onto something.
make sure you notify your elected representatives that you know what bribes look like
... who, exactly?
And when they ask who you're going to vote for instead, you're going to say
Oh, wait, nobody, because there aren't any candidates above the local level who haven't taken the filthy lucre of corporate cash in order to run campaigns. It's so ingrained into the system that unless you vote for yourself or a fringe candidate so far down the ladder that they won't affect the outcome of the election, there's no choice.
I'm sure there are lots of reasons for doing it, but most bulletin boards that require registration in order to read, at least in my experience, do it in order to limit traffic, not count it. It's a way of keeping costs down, albeit at the expense of making the board less useful as a resource to the general public.
Unfortunately the best board relating to Knoppmyth is like this; it was just too expensive for the maintainer to run openly; the traffic cost too much. By requiring registration to read, it cut down on traffic enough to make it affordable. Given the choice between a register-before-reading board and no board at all, I think the public is best served by the former.
Wouldn't shifting the emphasis away from programming skills in the CS program begin to crowd the MIS program?
People have modded this "Funny," but I think it deserves a lot of consideration. Many schools already have both CS, MIS, and in some cases CompE programs. They're related, but different in key areas; at least ideally, a MIS program prepares people to manage an IT department, while CS involves more high-level theory and software design. I've always assumed that in the idea, CompEs would do more with hardware and less with software, but I'm sure it has broad application as well.
In my experience, I think that there are a lot of women in MIS programs. Maybe not 50%, but certainly more than there are in CS programs. Rather than "watering down" (as perceived by the people already involved) CS programs to make them more interesting to women, we should look at the tech fields that are already appealing to women, like MIS, and emphasize them.
Changing a CS degree to contain elements of Fashion Design would achieve the same results. That does not mean it's a good idea. Watering down one degree for mass appeal inevitably reduces the proficiency of graduates in the specific areas targeted. Mass appeal is no indicator of quality.
IMO, and I know I'll probably offend some "real" CS people in saying this, but I think 'Computer Science' as a degree, at the undergraduate level anyway, has already suffered from this a lot.
At least from the local big state Uni -- and I won't say which, but I don't think it's atypical -- I've run into some CS grads who took the "light" curriculum (it apparently offers a wide range of courses you can take), and were basically incapable of doing anything other than messing around in WYSIWYG web-development tools and making web pages, and even then they weren't great at it. It goes without saying they had never even used or been exposed to anything besides Windows. If they did any software at all, it was a 100-level class in Visual Basic.
Now, I'm sure there are CS grads, even at those schools, who opted to take a lot of real programming and algorithm design and architecture classes, but the people taking what amounts to a graphic-design and web-design curriculum and calling it "Computer Science" are really hurting the value of the degree. I've known people involved in HR who, when they're looking for actual IT people, basically write off CS degrees in favor of CompE or SoftwareE. So the end result is just a lot of degree inflation, and at the top end of the spectrum, you get a lot of bitterness from "real" engineers (the ones with P.E. certs, not quite so much the ones who drive trains) at the people calling themselves 'engineers' in order to get some differentiation from the hacks.
Personally I think the problem is the lingering effects of the dot-com bubble and the associated feeling that a CS degree was a guarantee of easy money. If people in CS want to reclaim the discipline, they should emphasize that it's long hours, sometimes crappy pay, and packed full of nerds, because it's not doing anyone any good to have people who aren't really committed to the subject matter graduating.
You don't see (many) Physics departments compromising their curricula in order to siphon off students from Business school; at least not by reducing the amount of actual physics in their courses. (Making a course of study more interesting or applicable, by showing how useful it is to a wide range of jobs/problems/areas-of-interest; that's perfectly OK, and definitely desirable.) There's no reason why CS programs should.
And in the time I took to hit reply you've already got two other responses trying to change the subject rather than acknowledge the discrimination.
Uh, but the problem is that the GP (the post you responded to), was the one bringing up a non sequitur. Whether there's discrimination or not, TFA doesn't really get into it -- what they're talking about is changing the nature of the discipline in order to make it more attractive to (stereotypical) women.
Frankly I think there's a ton of borderline bigotry in that. It's not solving any real problems, just burying them and probably creating a lot of bad feelings in the process that are just going to fester and rear their head later on.
taxing illegal activities is illegal itself
Not true; at least in the U.S., there are extant tax structures for things like marijuana, even though possessing it is illegal. They created a whole structure of tax stamps that you have to have on it, and I don't know if it was ever actually used before they just made all possession illegal. But the result is that if you get caught with a large quantity of marijuana, they could probably prosecute you for not having the correct tax stamps on it (since they're impossible to get, to my knowledge) in addition to the simple possession. They don't, because the penalties for possession are so draconian (did you know that drug possession in large quantities is a capital offense under Federal law?), but they could.
The IRS also requires that income from illegal activities be reported on your tax return; arresting people involved in organized crime for tax evasion (for not reporting their illegal income) is pretty standard.
IE, we are fully capable of building robots that control themselves in order to carry out this task.
I'm pretty sure IE did it by making people want to stab themselves in the face. Brilliantly simple, really.