I've owned a Karma for about a year, and it definitely has its place in the world of HDD-based players.
Pros
Plays Ogg, FLAC, MP3 and WMA. Everything I own is in Ogg and FLAC (rip everything with EAC) and until recently, the Karma was the only HDD that supported both.
Gapless playback (important for mixes). I don't know of any other player that has it. iPod has very short gaps (
Long battery time. I routinely get 10-12 hours playing Ogg. MP3 and FLAC time are longer (less CPU intense).
Good community/developer support. The forums there have been great (recently, there's been a bit of a flame war regarding the next-gen Karma).
5-band parametric equalizer. The sound out of this thing is great, and the equalizer is very good.
Good firmware/user interface. It's very easy to edit playlists, select music, change equalizer settings, etc. There have been at least 4 firmware updates since release (one of them adding gapless support for Ogg).
Size. I like the square form factor - it's very pocketable. Wish it were a bit less thick.
Cons
Iffy build quality. Two big problems: HDD lockups and broken scroll wheels. I've had both (had to replace the unit on the scroll wheel, did the "thump on a desk" fix for the HDD lockup), but I also think the hardware issues have been somewhat overstated. I've had iPods die too - I think it's somewhat par for the course with first-generation HDD players. I expect the next-gen Karma to be a little tougher.
Scroll wheel. I don't like it. It's prone to breaking and it's a little awkward. You can mostly ignore it except for playlist editing. The nipple works fine for most day-to-day stuff.
Have to use Rio Taxi/Rio Music Manager to move music/files to and from the device. The latest version of Windows Media and WinAMP can see the Karma, but the Karma still suffers from a lack of MSC support. Historically, it's proprietary database format has made it a lot faster, but everyone is moving to MSC.
The biggest issue with the Karma right now is that Rio is rather obviously get ready to release its successor (the Chroma) but they are being incredibly secretive. The developers have dropped out of the Karma forums for the most part and no new firmware has been discussed for a while. I think most everyone expects that once the Chroma is delivered, its firmware will be backported to the Karma to add MSC support, but there is no guarantee. The developers mentioned MSC in upcoming Karma firmware, so it's pretty safe to assume it will eventually come. The Chroma will probably look much like the Carbon (good bye nipple, hello d-pad) and hopefully will have a slightly lower-profile and tougher scroll wheel like the Carbon.
I like the Karma a lot and am eagerly awaiting the Chroma. But I will compare it against the iAudio M5 and iRiver products. Right now, those come up a little short on the features I use the most, but they've been getting better each generation. If Rio doesn't come out with a next-gen soon, iRiver and iAudio will pass it by. iPod/iTunes is nice, but I don't want/need FairPlay/AAC or crappy MP3. I want my Ogg/FLAC!
I also like the fact that Stephenson is changing. Personally, I don't really like reading the same type of thing all the time. that is one reason why i can't read anymore asimov, heinlien, anthony, ect. After a while all the books start to be the same old same old. Dispite the fact that i really enjoy the way the author expresses himeself.
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion considering that the Baroque Cycle is essentially the same story (with the same characters!) as Cryptonomicon, only told with three times as many words.
I have a grudging respect for Stevenson, but I've never found him a particularly engaging author. I've probably read upwards of 10,000 novels. A lot of that has been absolute dreck that I plowed through for the sake of plowing through it. There are only two novels that I actually stopped reading and put back on the shelf - Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I bought Cryptonomicon the day it came out due to the pre-publicity buzz and gave up after the first 200 pages. Last year, due to the fact that lots of people I really respect simply raved about Cryptonomicon, I picked it up again and read it. There were parts that were really good, but it was a very flawed book (and the ending was horrible). That said, when finished, I was glad I read it and certainly enjoyed much of it. Stevenson has a real knack for the adventure passages - in fact, the more he moves away from the stuff he obviously loves (the long, didactic expositions on crypto or the calculus), the better he is. The man also simply cannot end a novel gracefully - it simply ends when he gets bored and the main plot line wraps up.
Same thing happened in Quicksilver. He's great when he's focused on Shaftoe and Waterhouse (the characters he obviously has the most affection for), but the Eliza passages were often tedious and the "explain the new 17th century tech" stuff was very dry. The Confusion is next on my list (got to finish the latest Peter Hamilton novel first - Stevenson could learn a lot about plotting a large novel from Hamilton) - I've heard its much better. We'll see.
I try to read a wide variety of political blogs, hitting all the major political angles, as none of the parties quite fit my weird political views. I mean, how many atheistic, anti-abortion libertarian libertine hawks can their possibly be?;)
Here's a sampling of the best I've found:
Vodkapundit. Stephen Green's blog. Probably the best match for my own political views. Hawkish libertarian and consumer of fine ethanol-based beverages.
Instapundit Glenn Reynold's blog. Another decent match for my own viewpoint. Glenn's more of a linker than a commentator, but he's one of the best about linking to all sides of the blogosphere. When he does extended bits (such as at his MSNBC site or his TCS columns), he's quite cogent. Has a lot of outside interests (electronic music, space policy, nano-tech, constitutional law) that dovetail into my own and make his site more interesting than the politics-only blogs. Frequently mentions Slashdot and links to relevant discussions.
Reason's Hit and Run Another libertarian blog, run by Reason magazine. Much more in tune to the Libertarian Party than the above.
Virginia Postrel YALB (Yet Another Libertarian Blog). Postrel is a former editor of Reason. More of a social commentator these days and has written some fascinating books recently. Seems to have become ever-so-slightly more hawkish since 9/11.
The Corner National Review's blog. Conservative and largely Catholic, it's best feature is Jonah Goldberg (the token non-Catholic), who has a pleasantly snarky, pop-cultural laden view of current events. Least pleasant on the blog in John Derbyshire, who is quite the math geek but is way out there on the borderline-racist right (quite pleasant in email, though).
Andrew Sullivan. Classical liberal, Oakeshott conservative. A very incisive and passionate writer, he has an infuriating habit of demonizing the opposition. Originally very pro-war (and spent much time fulminating against the "fifth columnist" element on the left), he's now got a new enemy (those opposed to gay marriage/gay rights), so all those who were the enemy last year (the Democrats/John Kerry) are friends, and all those who were friends last year (the Republicans/George Bush) are enemies who can now do no right. When his emotions are not ruling his thinking, though, he's very, very good.
Mickey Kaus Slate's resident blogger, Mickey is a DLC "New" Democrat. He's one of the more honest of the bloggers (zings his own side often, recognizes good arguments on the other side) and a good source of insider media stuff.
Josh Marshall Establishment Democrat. I found his stuff to be really good a few years back, but recently he's spending more time rooting for the team (DNC/Kerry) than being objective. Also, darkly hints at constant "breaking soon" scoops that either never appear or completely underwhelm. Very bright guy, though, and insightful when not attempting to spin too obviously.
Kevin Drum Another Establishment Democrat. Kevin tends to be more self-reflective than Josh, which stands him in good stead. Great place to capture the mood of the DNC political types.
New Republic They have a couple of blogs (&c. and Campaign Journal). &c. is by far the better of the two. Skews left, but a sort of rationalist left (understands that while America may suck at times, other places suck more).
I've always wanted to have one of those big, bakelite rotary phones on my desk, but I inevitably end up calling some place that has a voice mail system that doesn't have an operator default (wait for an operator). Keeping a second phone around for that purpose just seems nuts.
I've looked at the retro-styled phones (like you can find at Pottery Barn or whatnot), but they get the whole concept wrong (big surprise). I don't want a phone that has a keypad shaped like a rotary dial, I want a real rotary dial that has buttons beneath the dial (where the numbers are).
That way, I can retro-dial anywhere, but have the option of pressing a button when I have to. I'd make that "button" simply be touch-sensitive plastic that has a built-in delay (press and hold for a second). I'd be just as happy with a pure-rotary dial if I had some sort of switch that would allow the phone to send a touch-tone signal when I dialed a number ("Please dial '9' for more assistance.")
Actually, the US foreign-born population is just under 12 percent, with about half that number from Latin America.
Though I couldn't find any breakouts purely for foreign-born, Sweden's foreign-born and first generation immigrant mix is 20 percent. The majority of immigrants appear to be from other Nordic countries, with large numbers of refugess from the former Yugoslavia and a sizeable Iranian/Iraqi population.
Canada currently has the second largest percentage of foreign-born at 18.4 percent. The majority of these are from Asia (56%) and Europe (20%). If the US figures are a guide (and they may not be), Asian and European immigrants tend to have higher educational achievement levels than Latin Americans, which are the majority immigrant group in the US, and would thus tend to depress international standing less than in the US.
Once again, I am not arguing for or against such immigration. Latin American immigration has provided many benefits for the US, but it does have a negative effect on educational achivement levels as a percentage of population.
If you continue down to page 89 of that PDF, it has an interesting breakdown of education levels based on ethnicity and recency of migration to the US.
In the most recent survey (1996), foreign-born Hispanics (who comprise the majority of recent US immigrants) have a less than high school level of education approaching 50% (and for Mexicans, over 60%). In contrast, foreign-born blacks (presumably African and Caribbean immigrants) have around 14% at that low level, while Asian/Pacific Island immigrants are at 9.1%. As Yaztromo indicated in a previous post, Canadian immigration tends to skew toward Asians and Africans, who, at least in the US, tend to have higher educational achievement.
Note, however, that first generation Hispanics do much better than their parents, indicating that the children of immigrants have good access to education in the US, and are successful in using it - in fact, more so than later generation Hispanics. Immigrants of all types are a real boon to our country - some through the strong work ethic they bring, others for the skills they bring. We just need to recognize that as a group they temporarily have a small but measurable downside effect on our international rankings for educational achievement.
Actually, according to your own quote it is Canada that bests the United States at the highest level of competency:
Of the 11 other countries that participated in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS),
only Sweden exceeded the United States in the percentage of adults scoring at the highest levels of literacy in any of the three domains; the only exception was Canada, which had a greater proportion of adults scoring at or above level 4 on the document scale than did the United States.
But I can forgive you for this little reading error. After all, I'm Candaian, and you're (presumably) American...;).
Where is Candaia?;) In terms of reading comprehension, though, the above passage is clear that, although Canada did slightly outscore the US in one of three problem domains, only Sweden did so for all three. I did notice that one of the graphs seemed to indicate that Canada actually did better on two out of three, but the summary text didn't support that and I didn't want to muddy the waters of a short post.
I will happily grant that Canada does a superb job at educating its population. In terms of recent immigrants weighting the down the lowest literacy competency, I would guess this is also the case in Canada (as you note, it has a high level of immigration as well).
If you look under the heading Literacy Levels of the Second-language U.S. and Foreign-born Population at this site, it seems pretty clear that a large factor in the lowest quintile of literacy is the second-language foreign born. Only 14% of the native born US population scored in the lowest quintile (which would place us as third best behind Sweden and the Netherlands), while 63.7% of the second-language foreign born US population scored in the lowest quintile. This drives the total US population in the lowest quintile to 20.7%, which places us near the bottom of the category. Canada does much better, but I cannot find any documentation on how Canada's second-language foreign born affect Canada's figures. It's also unclear what differences in educational background among recent immigrants occur between Canada and the US (many African and Asian immigrants to the US have very high educational backgrounds, especially compared to other immigrants).
At least in terms of literacy, the US tends to fail on the lowest levels of competency, but excels at the highest level of competency. Only Sweden does better.
What this means is that we have a greater number of both low achievers (people who are functionally illiterate) and high achievers (people who can read highly technical and dense material). The US educational system has a much flatter distribution curve than the typical European country.
We also have a much more diverse population base than do most European countries (and Japan as well). We have a much higher "recent immigrant" population than Sweden or Japan do. Unsurprisingly, it tends to be these recent immiigrants who, understandably, fill the ranks of the lowest performers in literacy (and income as well).
Until these studies adjust for such large differences in population dynamics, we'll always tend to look like underachievers compared to the rest of the world. The surprising thing isn't how badly our schools educate our population, it's how well they do so given the amazingly diverse population they are serving.
None of the above should be construed to be a ringing endorsement of the US educational establishment. There are a lot of problems with US education. The education of gifted children in K-12 in most of the US is scandalous, and huge differences in per pupil spending is its own scandal. But nearly any school in the US will educate your child well enough to get into a good college as long as you show a modicum of interest in your child's education. Lack of parental involvement or interest is probably the biggest problem in US public education right now.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This is part of the Bill of Rights you mention. This particular amendment was a nod to the Federalists, who argued against a Bill of Rights, largely because they believed by enumerating specific rights, the government would seize upon the absence of an omitted right to assert that there was no such right. They preferred a construction that very specifically enumerated those things government was allowed to do, and presume that all else was off-limits.
Arabian mathematicians merely popularized the Indian use of zero. They did provide the shape of the zero character "0", as well as all the other Arabic numerals.
The oldest verified independent invention of zero was by the Babylonians in the third century BC. It was subsequently independently invented by the Mayans in the third century CE (AD), and lastly by the Indians in the fourth century AD (although there is some dispute that they may have simply held on to the concept since Babylonian times).
Alternate titles include "Island of the Mushroom Men" and "Attack of the Mushroom People".
It takes the genius of the man who created Godzilla (Ishiro Honda) to come up with this classic tale, which answers the age-old question "What would you get if Gilligan's Island was remade as a Japanese horror monster movie?"
Five passengers set out on short pleasure trip (a three hour tour?), the weather started getting rough, the tiny yacht was lost - and they end up lost on a deserted island. Fortunately, their lack of food is solved by the abundance of wild mushrooms on the island.
Soon, the Professor and the TV star find an abandoned ship - missing all its mirrors! (ooh...) The ship was a research vessel for studying the effects of radiation on local flora (atomic weapons having been tested near by). The crew is missing. An hour of suspenseless terror follows, as strange creatures begin to "terrorize" our hapless castaways. Eventually, they discover the horrible secret - the Mushroom Men! These terrible creatures use their incredible ZombieSpeed(tm) to chase the castaways around the island in slow motion.
Eventually, the remaining castaways patch up one of the boats and begin to sail away. Everything looks safe, when one of them looks into a mirror and recoils in horror at the face of a... Mushroom Man! The island mushrooms they ate change anyone into a Mushroom Man! The Mushroom Men on the island were actually the missing crew from the research boat! The horror, the horror...
For an alternate (positive) review of this movie, go here.
In the near future, the religious right have staged a coup and rule America under an iron fist of theocratic tyranny. One of their many edicts is that every couple can only have one child (but fruitless and don't multiply). A couple (Christopher Lambert and Female Actress #27) are fleeing the repressive USA for that shining city on a hill, that beacon of democracy and freedom - Mexico! As they try to slip across the border, we learn they are fleeing because the woman is pregnant with their second child - their first having died some tragic death before the movie. They must escape the US, or the evil Christian bible thumper will force her... to have an abortion! (Huh?)
They are caught and Lambert is sent to a high-tech prison dubbed "the Fortress". It is a large hole in the ground, with a central core that contains an elevator and a number of deadly lasers! Each prisoner also must swallow a device that will explode should they leave their slice of the prison cylinder.
Typical scenes of prison life ensue, including a talk with the crusty old-timer who informs Lmabert that he has been there for 35 years - there is no escape! Of course, given the stated timeline, this means that the prisoner has been there since 1979 - which, as we all know, is when Jerry Falwell completed the first of his death-laser dungeons built beneath Liberty University.
Without a doubt, the worst movie ever foisted upon me by my wife (who also hated it, though not with the same gut-searing passion that I did). I was sorely tempted to leave this movie several times - only the free popcorn refills kept me seated. Damn that evilly-delicious fake butter!
Meg Ryan plays an alcoholic. Andy Garcia is her sympathetic husband. When her life finally spirals completely out of control, he finds her the help she needs, takes care of the kids, supports her in every aspect of her recovery. In return, she divorces him, gets custody of the kids (of course) and learns that everything is
Well, according to e-matters, a series of 8 different buffer overflow bugs were disclosed to gaim developers on January 4, 2004. A new gaim client (0.75) was released on January 10, but this only fixed one of the overflows and introduced four new ones.
On January 15, gaim development was emailed patches for all 11 existing bugs. A patch was added to CVS that evening, but there was no 0.76 release and no public disclosure by gaim dev (at least on their Sourceforge page - there may have been something sent to the mailing list). On January 23, e-matters let gaim dev know that they would release the bug report on January 26. On January 25, gaim dev replies that there is no timeframe for a 0.76 or bug-fix release. On January 26, e-matters publishes the bug report.
On January 28, gaim dev responds with a note saying they are far from a 0.76 release and provides a link to the FreeBSD source patch. Not much use to your average teenage Windows IMer. There may have been an executable patch, but I can't find any evidence of one.
On April 1, gaim release 0.76, the first release with the bug fixes is released. This has taken so long because:
This is no slam on gaim - the devs have lives outside of gaim and I'm glad they're providing a great OSS client. But like anything, there are pros and cons to both OSS and commercially developed software. Assuming that OSS is always more responsive, more bugfree, and better in every other way is naive. There are tradeoffs involved in libre software - most are well worth it, but there can be downsides occassionally too.
He's been in a number of British TV shows since then (the longest running of which was Medics, a sort of Brit ER) and has recently joined the cast of "Monarch of the Glen", which is a fairly popular show set in Scotland (I think it's currently in its sixth season).
He's also does the voiceover work for Little Britain (hilarious), has written a number of books (The Boy Who Kicked Pigs), done theater work and been in some truly awful movies (Dungeons and Dragons).
It sounds like Bounce is something akin to a "tektite". When a large enough meteor impact occurs, the energy release causes some of the planetary material to fuse (trapping gasses in the process) and be ejected into space. When these rain back down on the planet in question, they're called "tektites".
They usually have a glassy composition similar to obsidian, except they have all these bubbles of trapped gas in them (some are more rocky with a fused outer layer).
The assumption here is that you have a big impact event, Martian planetary material melts, fuses and is ejected into space, some of it falling back to Mars (Bounce) and some of it scattering throughout the solar system. One would assume the vast majority would fall back to Mars (you need a lot of velocity or a lot of luck to escape that planetary gravity well), so finding a bunch of Shergotty-like rocks on Mars shouldn't be a surprise.
And just as Earth-originated tektites aren't exactly super-rare (I bought one for $5 at a local observatory's gift shop) but are not stumbled on every day, the fact that Bounce doesn't look like other Martian rocks we're used to doesn't mean it must be material from the meteor (non-Martian). The tektite I have looks a lot like obsidian, but it sure doesn't look like any other kind of rock around these parts.
My wife's uncle is the Chief of Police for Chicago. We chat informally at family gatherings and such, and the impression I get from him is that the computer system is a big help (I believe one of my wife's cousins works on the system as well), but it's the change in tactics that it has helped facilitate that is the biggest change. More police are assigned to hotspots and certain patterns of crime have become more obvious.
Since becoming chief, he's also been really pushing for more cops in the streets instead of at the station - every member of the force (including himself) has to work a patrol at least occassionally. Additionally, there is a strong emphasis on gang-related violence, which is why the statistics for violent crime have gone down so much more dramatically than those of property crime.
The Rio Karma comes with a Java app (RMML - Rio Music Manager Lite) that can be run on any OS that has a JRE. The developer of the RMML application is in constant contact with the devlopers of the standard Win32 RMM app, and is also active on the Riovolution message boards.
I haven't used it myself (I rip everything with EAC, so I tend to use my Windows box for storing my FLACs/Oggs), but it gets glowing reviews by Linux users in the Riovolution forums.
While the "Commercial Advance" feature is somewhat shrouded in corporate mystery, the basic concept is well-understood.
While a DVR is recording (a VCR with the feature typically has to scan the program after taping to mark the commercials), it looks for a pattern of "fade-to-blacks". Just before each commercial, and just before the program resumes, there is typically a 1/10-3/10ths of a second black fade that "frames" each commercial (you'll notice it readily once you know to look for it). The DVR will look for a pattern of such fade-to-blacks that last 30 seconds (or 15 or 60) and come in groups. Unless it sees 2-3 of these fades hitting on 15/30/60 second boundaries, it will assume this is just a part of the program. Once it's decided that the pattern has been found, it simply marks the beginning and end of the pattern and skips over that material during playback.
You can screw up the feature by showing odd-lengthed commercials (23 seconds), but at the moment the inertia of selling commercials in 30-second blocks is stronger than the need to prevent the 1% of the viewing public that has Commercial Advance from being able to use the feature. Occassionally, your local station will screw up the feature because they try to jam a quick news promo or local commercial into the network feed and botch the process by a few seconds. That's when you'll see the process screw up the commercial end by 10-15 seconds either way.
Maybe I'm missing a thread in here somewhere, but as the father of two kids under 5, the thing about the switch to 11 digit dialing that's the major PITA is getting the kids to remember an 11 digit number.
Now, I've never had one of my kids get lost (they're good about sticking around dad, and I'm pretty good at keeping one eye on them at all times), but it's still something you want the kids to know in case they ever do get lost.
Name, address, phone number. My three year old had no problem memorizing the 7 digit number, but when the Chicago suburbs moved to 11 digits, he had trouble reciting the whole 10-digit stream without transposing at least one number (we just ignored the 1 at the beginning).
I suppose your solution is to get them a cell phone...
Re:You misunderstand completely
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E ~ mc^2
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Isaac Asimov had a book on just this topic called the Relativity of Wrong. He wrote a brief essay on the subject that can be found all over, but here's one spot.
Basically, while theories are often supplanted by new ones that handle a broader or deeper set of conditions, the equations and values generated by the "old" theory are generally still valid on the original condition set (e.g., the equations for Newtonian mechanics still work quite well for day-to-day engineering). The old theory is wrong, but much less wrong than the preceding theory, and even less wrong than the one before that. I would tend to use the term "model" instead of theory, as the theory can indeed be very, very wrong (I'm thinking epicycles in astonomy), yet the "model" is quite predictive.
One of the leading constitutional scholars on Second Amendment issues, Eugene Volokh of UCLA, runs his own weblog (http://volokh.blogspot.com).
He's pretty strongly in favor of the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, but he's intellectually honest enough to point out the other side of the issue in his posts.
If you search thru his blog archives, you'll find quite a bit of info on gun control, includingly lots of links to various statistics and legal analysis.
In a recent letter to a seventh grader asking essentially the same question you asked (he posted a copy of the response to his blog), he suggested checking out the following URL:
http://guntruths.com/Resource/facts_you_can_use.ht m
He made it very clear that it was from an anti-gun control perspective (and encouraged the kid to check out pro-gun control groups), but seemed to think the info was pretty accurate.
Hey, a/. subject I can actually intelligently contribute to... what a novelty. >=-)
For 9 years (from 91-2000), I was the lead developer of the Chicago Board of Trade's Order Routing System, which allows clerks in the phone booths ringing the trading floor to send orders into the pit (and for pit clerks to send fill information back out) via pen-based interfaces. COMET (the booth device) and Electronic Clerk (the pit device) both have used various incarnations of the Microsoft Windows For Pen Computing platform.
This is definitely an environment that needs pen-based input. The booths and pits are UNBELIEVABLE space constrained, and adding PCs with keyboards was just not an option. At the beginning of the project, there wasn't any handheld hardware to speak of (although the CBOT had partnered up with Sharp(?) for some custom handheld tech for another project), and the first wave of tablets were just coming out. Given the severe amount of jostling going on in these trading pits, handhelds had some big downsides as well. We ended up mounting devices to the railings of the pits (or flush mounted them into the desktops for the booth clerks). We evaluated both PenWindows and Go (I liked Go, but we knew they were going to fail in the marketplace) and used a whole bunch of different devices. Dauphin (sweet tech, lousy company), GRiDs, NEC VersaPads, Amitys and others in the beginning, eventually migrating to Fujitsu Stylistics (best of a bad bunch). We got to learn all sorts of things about digitizers (like the active digitizers with battery-powered pens would interfere with each other if mounted too closely, while tethered pens put out enough juice that if you held one in your left hand, you could use your right index finger as an input device).
Like many (most?) Microsoft products, the initial version of PenWindows was rushed out to kill a competitor, and then they sat on the tech for years before killing it. The last "release" of PenWindows was on Win95 (we eventually ended up just copying the Pen DLLs to Win98 when Win95 hardware stopped being produced). The functionality of PenWindows was crap - I ended up writing a number of custom controls that wrapped the basic BEDIT controls so we could have good-looking displays.
When they finally pulled the plug on Pen development altogether, CBOT started migrating to CIC's PenX controls for Win2000. (I left around this time - but they've dragged me back for some part-time consulting to help with the latest release). They've spent 1 1/2 years migrating to Win2000 + PenX, only to see Microsoft obsolete them just weeks before the big new release.
All that said, given an appropriately pen-centric application (minimizing data entry and screen movement are really important in pen-app design), a well-written pen app is amazingly productive. A booth clerk who has used the COMET app for a while can easily enter orders in under 2 seconds, while a pit clerk can manage thousands of orders from dozens of sources very easily. I was always amazed at how fast these guys worked - I was probably the only developer who could approach their speed, and they'd clean my clock anyday. Nothing like having responsibility for orders worth tens of millions of dollars to help focus the mind...
Yeah, but if they called it GeForce 5, they'd've had to pay royalties to Sandy Frank or Ted Turner, and probably would've had to name the 7th generatation card the 7-Zark-7...
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Pros
Cons The biggest issue with the Karma right now is that Rio is rather obviously get ready to release its successor (the Chroma) but they are being incredibly secretive. The developers have dropped out of the Karma forums for the most part and no new firmware has been discussed for a while. I think most everyone expects that once the Chroma is delivered, its firmware will be backported to the Karma to add MSC support, but there is no guarantee. The developers mentioned MSC in upcoming Karma firmware, so it's pretty safe to assume it will eventually come. The Chroma will probably look much like the Carbon (good bye nipple, hello d-pad) and hopefully will have a slightly lower-profile and tougher scroll wheel like the Carbon.I like the Karma a lot and am eagerly awaiting the Chroma. But I will compare it against the iAudio M5 and iRiver products. Right now, those come up a little short on the features I use the most, but they've been getting better each generation. If Rio doesn't come out with a next-gen soon, iRiver and iAudio will pass it by. iPod/iTunes is nice, but I don't want/need FairPlay/AAC or crappy MP3. I want my Ogg/FLAC!
I have a grudging respect for Stevenson, but I've never found him a particularly engaging author. I've probably read upwards of 10,000 novels. A lot of that has been absolute dreck that I plowed through for the sake of plowing through it. There are only two novels that I actually stopped reading and put back on the shelf - Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I bought Cryptonomicon the day it came out due to the pre-publicity buzz and gave up after the first 200 pages. Last year, due to the fact that lots of people I really respect simply raved about Cryptonomicon, I picked it up again and read it. There were parts that were really good, but it was a very flawed book (and the ending was horrible). That said, when finished, I was glad I read it and certainly enjoyed much of it. Stevenson has a real knack for the adventure passages - in fact, the more he moves away from the stuff he obviously loves (the long, didactic expositions on crypto or the calculus), the better he is. The man also simply cannot end a novel gracefully - it simply ends when he gets bored and the main plot line wraps up.
Same thing happened in Quicksilver. He's great when he's focused on Shaftoe and Waterhouse (the characters he obviously has the most affection for), but the Eliza passages were often tedious and the "explain the new 17th century tech" stuff was very dry. The Confusion is next on my list (got to finish the latest Peter Hamilton novel first - Stevenson could learn a lot about plotting a large novel from Hamilton) - I've heard its much better. We'll see.
Here's a sampling of the best I've found:
Vodkapundit. Stephen Green's blog. Probably the best match for my own political views. Hawkish libertarian and consumer of fine ethanol-based beverages.
Instapundit Glenn Reynold's blog. Another decent match for my own viewpoint. Glenn's more of a linker than a commentator, but he's one of the best about linking to all sides of the blogosphere. When he does extended bits (such as at his MSNBC site or his TCS columns), he's quite cogent. Has a lot of outside interests (electronic music, space policy, nano-tech, constitutional law) that dovetail into my own and make his site more interesting than the politics-only blogs. Frequently mentions Slashdot and links to relevant discussions.
Reason's Hit and Run Another libertarian blog, run by Reason magazine. Much more in tune to the Libertarian Party than the above.
Virginia Postrel YALB (Yet Another Libertarian Blog). Postrel is a former editor of Reason. More of a social commentator these days and has written some fascinating books recently. Seems to have become ever-so-slightly more hawkish since 9/11.
The Corner National Review's blog. Conservative and largely Catholic, it's best feature is Jonah Goldberg (the token non-Catholic), who has a pleasantly snarky, pop-cultural laden view of current events. Least pleasant on the blog in John Derbyshire, who is quite the math geek but is way out there on the borderline-racist right (quite pleasant in email, though).
Andrew Sullivan. Classical liberal, Oakeshott conservative. A very incisive and passionate writer, he has an infuriating habit of demonizing the opposition. Originally very pro-war (and spent much time fulminating against the "fifth columnist" element on the left), he's now got a new enemy (those opposed to gay marriage/gay rights), so all those who were the enemy last year (the Democrats/John Kerry) are friends, and all those who were friends last year (the Republicans/George Bush) are enemies who can now do no right. When his emotions are not ruling his thinking, though, he's very, very good.
Mickey Kaus Slate's resident blogger, Mickey is a DLC "New" Democrat. He's one of the more honest of the bloggers (zings his own side often, recognizes good arguments on the other side) and a good source of insider media stuff.
Josh Marshall Establishment Democrat. I found his stuff to be really good a few years back, but recently he's spending more time rooting for the team (DNC/Kerry) than being objective. Also, darkly hints at constant "breaking soon" scoops that either never appear or completely underwhelm. Very bright guy, though, and insightful when not attempting to spin too obviously.
Kevin Drum Another Establishment Democrat. Kevin tends to be more self-reflective than Josh, which stands him in good stead. Great place to capture the mood of the DNC political types.
New Republic They have a couple of blogs (&c. and Campaign Journal). &c. is by far the better of the two. Skews left, but a sort of rationalist left (understands that while America may suck at times, other places suck more).
Tapped This used to be a great blog back in the
I've looked at the retro-styled phones (like you can find at Pottery Barn or whatnot), but they get the whole concept wrong (big surprise). I don't want a phone that has a keypad shaped like a rotary dial, I want a real rotary dial that has buttons beneath the dial (where the numbers are).
That way, I can retro-dial anywhere, but have the option of pressing a button when I have to. I'd make that "button" simply be touch-sensitive plastic that has a built-in delay (press and hold for a second). I'd be just as happy with a pure-rotary dial if I had some sort of switch that would allow the phone to send a touch-tone signal when I dialed a number ("Please dial '9' for more assistance.")
Though I couldn't find any breakouts purely for foreign-born, Sweden's foreign-born and first generation immigrant mix is 20 percent. The majority of immigrants appear to be from other Nordic countries, with large numbers of refugess from the former Yugoslavia and a sizeable Iranian/Iraqi population.
Canada currently has the second largest percentage of foreign-born at 18.4 percent. The majority of these are from Asia (56%) and Europe (20%). If the US figures are a guide (and they may not be), Asian and European immigrants tend to have higher educational achievement levels than Latin Americans, which are the majority immigrant group in the US, and would thus tend to depress international standing less than in the US.
Once again, I am not arguing for or against such immigration. Latin American immigration has provided many benefits for the US, but it does have a negative effect on educational achivement levels as a percentage of population.
In the most recent survey (1996), foreign-born Hispanics (who comprise the majority of recent US immigrants) have a less than high school level of education approaching 50% (and for Mexicans, over 60%). In contrast, foreign-born blacks (presumably African and Caribbean immigrants) have around 14% at that low level, while Asian/Pacific Island immigrants are at 9.1%. As Yaztromo indicated in a previous post, Canadian immigration tends to skew toward Asians and Africans, who, at least in the US, tend to have higher educational achievement.
Note, however, that first generation Hispanics do much better than their parents, indicating that the children of immigrants have good access to education in the US, and are successful in using it - in fact, more so than later generation Hispanics. Immigrants of all types are a real boon to our country - some through the strong work ethic they bring, others for the skills they bring. We just need to recognize that as a group they temporarily have a small but measurable downside effect on our international rankings for educational achievement.
Where is Candaia? ;) In terms of reading comprehension, though, the above passage is clear that, although Canada did slightly outscore the US in one of three problem domains, only Sweden did so for all three. I did notice that one of the graphs seemed to indicate that Canada actually did better on two out of three, but the summary text didn't support that and I didn't want to muddy the waters of a short post.
I will happily grant that Canada does a superb job at educating its population. In terms of recent immigrants weighting the down the lowest literacy competency, I would guess this is also the case in Canada (as you note, it has a high level of immigration as well).
If you look under the heading Literacy Levels of the Second-language U.S. and Foreign-born Population at this site, it seems pretty clear that a large factor in the lowest quintile of literacy is the second-language foreign born. Only 14% of the native born US population scored in the lowest quintile (which would place us as third best behind Sweden and the Netherlands), while 63.7% of the second-language foreign born US population scored in the lowest quintile. This drives the total US population in the lowest quintile to 20.7%, which places us near the bottom of the category. Canada does much better, but I cannot find any documentation on how Canada's second-language foreign born affect Canada's figures. It's also unclear what differences in educational background among recent immigrants occur between Canada and the US (many African and Asian immigrants to the US have very high educational backgrounds, especially compared to other immigrants).
What this means is that we have a greater number of both low achievers (people who are functionally illiterate) and high achievers (people who can read highly technical and dense material). The US educational system has a much flatter distribution curve than the typical European country.
We also have a much more diverse population base than do most European countries (and Japan as well). We have a much higher "recent immigrant" population than Sweden or Japan do. Unsurprisingly, it tends to be these recent immiigrants who, understandably, fill the ranks of the lowest performers in literacy (and income as well).
Until these studies adjust for such large differences in population dynamics, we'll always tend to look like underachievers compared to the rest of the world. The surprising thing isn't how badly our schools educate our population, it's how well they do so given the amazingly diverse population they are serving.
None of the above should be construed to be a ringing endorsement of the US educational establishment. There are a lot of problems with US education. The education of gifted children in K-12 in most of the US is scandalous, and huge differences in per pupil spending is its own scandal. But nearly any school in the US will educate your child well enough to get into a good college as long as you show a modicum of interest in your child's education. Lack of parental involvement or interest is probably the biggest problem in US public education right now.
This is part of the Bill of Rights you mention. This particular amendment was a nod to the Federalists, who argued against a Bill of Rights, largely because they believed by enumerating specific rights, the government would seize upon the absence of an omitted right to assert that there was no such right. They preferred a construction that very specifically enumerated those things government was allowed to do, and presume that all else was off-limits.
The oldest verified independent invention of zero was by the Babylonians in the third century BC. It was subsequently independently invented by the Mayans in the third century CE (AD), and lastly by the Indians in the fourth century AD (although there is some dispute that they may have simply held on to the concept since Babylonian times).
Great, concise overview here.
Matango, The Fungus of Terror
Alternate titles include "Island of the Mushroom Men" and "Attack of the Mushroom People".
It takes the genius of the man who created Godzilla (Ishiro Honda) to come up with this classic tale, which answers the age-old question "What would you get if Gilligan's Island was remade as a Japanese horror monster movie?"
Five passengers set out on short pleasure trip (a three hour tour?), the weather started getting rough, the tiny yacht was lost - and they end up lost on a deserted island. Fortunately, their lack of food is solved by the abundance of wild mushrooms on the island.
Soon, the Professor and the TV star find an abandoned ship - missing all its mirrors! (ooh...) The ship was a research vessel for studying the effects of radiation on local flora (atomic weapons having been tested near by). The crew is missing. An hour of suspenseless terror follows, as strange creatures begin to "terrorize" our hapless castaways. Eventually, they discover the horrible secret - the Mushroom Men! These terrible creatures use their incredible ZombieSpeed(tm) to chase the castaways around the island in slow motion.
Eventually, the remaining castaways patch up one of the boats and begin to sail away. Everything looks safe, when one of them looks into a mirror and recoils in horror at the face of a... Mushroom Man! The island mushrooms they ate change anyone into a Mushroom Man! The Mushroom Men on the island were actually the missing crew from the research boat! The horror, the horror...
For an alternate (positive) review of this movie, go here.
Science Fiction
Fortress
In the near future, the religious right have staged a coup and rule America under an iron fist of theocratic tyranny. One of their many edicts is that every couple can only have one child (but fruitless and don't multiply). A couple (Christopher Lambert and Female Actress #27) are fleeing the repressive USA for that shining city on a hill, that beacon of democracy and freedom - Mexico! As they try to slip across the border, we learn they are fleeing because the woman is pregnant with their second child - their first having died some tragic death before the movie. They must escape the US, or the evil Christian bible thumper will force her... to have an abortion! (Huh?)
They are caught and Lambert is sent to a high-tech prison dubbed "the Fortress". It is a large hole in the ground, with a central core that contains an elevator and a number of deadly lasers! Each prisoner also must swallow a device that will explode should they leave their slice of the prison cylinder.
Typical scenes of prison life ensue, including a talk with the crusty old-timer who informs Lmabert that he has been there for 35 years - there is no escape! Of course, given the stated timeline, this means that the prisoner has been there since 1979 - which, as we all know, is when Jerry Falwell completed the first of his death-laser dungeons built beneath Liberty University.
It only gets worse from there, folks...
Chick Flick
When a Man Loves a Woman
Without a doubt, the worst movie ever foisted upon me by my wife (who also hated it, though not with the same gut-searing passion that I did). I was sorely tempted to leave this movie several times - only the free popcorn refills kept me seated. Damn that evilly-delicious fake butter!
Meg Ryan plays an alcoholic. Andy Garcia is her sympathetic husband. When her life finally spirals completely out of control, he finds her the help she needs, takes care of the kids, supports her in every aspect of her recovery. In return, she divorces him, gets custody of the kids (of course) and learns that everything is
On January 15, gaim development was emailed patches for all 11 existing bugs. A patch was added to CVS that evening, but there was no 0.76 release and no public disclosure by gaim dev (at least on their Sourceforge page - there may have been something sent to the mailing list). On January 23, e-matters let gaim dev know that they would release the bug report on January 26. On January 25, gaim dev replies that there is no timeframe for a 0.76 or bug-fix release. On January 26, e-matters publishes the bug report.
On January 28, gaim dev responds with a note saying they are far from a 0.76 release and provides a link to the FreeBSD source patch. Not much use to your average teenage Windows IMer. There may have been an executable patch, but I can't find any evidence of one.
On April 1, gaim release 0.76, the first release with the bug fixes is released. This has taken so long because:
This is no slam on gaim - the devs have lives outside of gaim and I'm glad they're providing a great OSS client. But like anything, there are pros and cons to both OSS and commercially developed software. Assuming that OSS is always more responsive, more bugfree, and better in every other way is naive. There are tradeoffs involved in libre software - most are well worth it, but there can be downsides occassionally too.
We can all sleep better now.
He's also does the voiceover work for Little Britain (hilarious), has written a number of books (The Boy Who Kicked Pigs), done theater work and been in some truly awful movies (Dungeons and Dragons).
You could always check out his official website.
They usually have a glassy composition similar to obsidian, except they have all these bubbles of trapped gas in them (some are more rocky with a fused outer layer).
The assumption here is that you have a big impact event, Martian planetary material melts, fuses and is ejected into space, some of it falling back to Mars (Bounce) and some of it scattering throughout the solar system. One would assume the vast majority would fall back to Mars (you need a lot of velocity or a lot of luck to escape that planetary gravity well), so finding a bunch of Shergotty-like rocks on Mars shouldn't be a surprise.
And just as Earth-originated tektites aren't exactly super-rare (I bought one for $5 at a local observatory's gift shop) but are not stumbled on every day, the fact that Bounce doesn't look like other Martian rocks we're used to doesn't mean it must be material from the meteor (non-Martian). The tektite I have looks a lot like obsidian, but it sure doesn't look like any other kind of rock around these parts.
Since becoming chief, he's also been really pushing for more cops in the streets instead of at the station - every member of the force (including himself) has to work a patrol at least occassionally. Additionally, there is a strong emphasis on gang-related violence, which is why the statistics for violent crime have gone down so much more dramatically than those of property crime.
I haven't used it myself (I rip everything with EAC, so I tend to use my Windows box for storing my FLACs/Oggs), but it gets glowing reviews by Linux users in the Riovolution forums.
While a DVR is recording (a VCR with the feature typically has to scan the program after taping to mark the commercials), it looks for a pattern of "fade-to-blacks". Just before each commercial, and just before the program resumes, there is typically a 1/10-3/10ths of a second black fade that "frames" each commercial (you'll notice it readily once you know to look for it). The DVR will look for a pattern of such fade-to-blacks that last 30 seconds (or 15 or 60) and come in groups. Unless it sees 2-3 of these fades hitting on 15/30/60 second boundaries, it will assume this is just a part of the program. Once it's decided that the pattern has been found, it simply marks the beginning and end of the pattern and skips over that material during playback. You can screw up the feature by showing odd-lengthed commercials (23 seconds), but at the moment the inertia of selling commercials in 30-second blocks is stronger than the need to prevent the 1% of the viewing public that has Commercial Advance from being able to use the feature. Occassionally, your local station will screw up the feature because they try to jam a quick news promo or local commercial into the network feed and botch the process by a few seconds. That's when you'll see the process screw up the commercial end by 10-15 seconds either way.
Now, I've never had one of my kids get lost (they're good about sticking around dad, and I'm pretty good at keeping one eye on them at all times), but it's still something you want the kids to know in case they ever do get lost.
Name, address, phone number. My three year old had no problem memorizing the 7 digit number, but when the Chicago suburbs moved to 11 digits, he had trouble reciting the whole 10-digit stream without transposing at least one number (we just ignored the 1 at the beginning).
I suppose your solution is to get them a cell phone...
Basically, while theories are often supplanted by new ones that handle a broader or deeper set of conditions, the equations and values generated by the "old" theory are generally still valid on the original condition set (e.g., the equations for Newtonian mechanics still work quite well for day-to-day engineering). The old theory is wrong, but much less wrong than the preceding theory, and even less wrong than the one before that. I would tend to use the term "model" instead of theory, as the theory can indeed be very, very wrong (I'm thinking epicycles in astonomy), yet the "model" is quite predictive.
And it's not as though it would be hard to find an image of a gold ring somewhere...
He's pretty strongly in favor of the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, but he's intellectually honest enough to point out the other side of the issue in his posts.
If you search thru his blog archives, you'll find quite a bit of info on gun control, includingly lots of links to various statistics and legal analysis.
In a recent letter to a seventh grader asking essentially the same question you asked (he posted a copy of the response to his blog), he suggested checking out the following URL:
http://guntruths.com/Resource/facts_you_can_use.ht m
He made it very clear that it was from an anti-gun control perspective (and encouraged the kid to check out pro-gun control groups), but seemed to think the info was pretty accurate.
For 9 years (from 91-2000), I was the lead developer of the Chicago Board of Trade's Order Routing System, which allows clerks in the phone booths ringing the trading floor to send orders into the pit (and for pit clerks to send fill information back out) via pen-based interfaces. COMET (the booth device) and Electronic Clerk (the pit device) both have used various incarnations of the Microsoft Windows For Pen Computing platform.
This is definitely an environment that needs pen-based input. The booths and pits are UNBELIEVABLE space constrained, and adding PCs with keyboards was just not an option. At the beginning of the project, there wasn't any handheld hardware to speak of (although the CBOT had partnered up with Sharp(?) for some custom handheld tech for another project), and the first wave of tablets were just coming out. Given the severe amount of jostling going on in these trading pits, handhelds had some big downsides as well. We ended up mounting devices to the railings of the pits (or flush mounted them into the desktops for the booth clerks). We evaluated both PenWindows and Go (I liked Go, but we knew they were going to fail in the marketplace) and used a whole bunch of different devices. Dauphin (sweet tech, lousy company), GRiDs, NEC VersaPads, Amitys and others in the beginning, eventually migrating to Fujitsu Stylistics (best of a bad bunch). We got to learn all sorts of things about digitizers (like the active digitizers with battery-powered pens would interfere with each other if mounted too closely, while tethered pens put out enough juice that if you held one in your left hand, you could use your right index finger as an input device).
Like many (most?) Microsoft products, the initial version of PenWindows was rushed out to kill a competitor, and then they sat on the tech for years before killing it. The last "release" of PenWindows was on Win95 (we eventually ended up just copying the Pen DLLs to Win98 when Win95 hardware stopped being produced). The functionality of PenWindows was crap - I ended up writing a number of custom controls that wrapped the basic BEDIT controls so we could have good-looking displays.
When they finally pulled the plug on Pen development altogether, CBOT started migrating to CIC's PenX controls for Win2000. (I left around this time - but they've dragged me back for some part-time consulting to help with the latest release). They've spent 1 1/2 years migrating to Win2000 + PenX, only to see Microsoft obsolete them just weeks before the big new release.
All that said, given an appropriately pen-centric application (minimizing data entry and screen movement are really important in pen-app design), a well-written pen app is amazingly productive. A booth clerk who has used the COMET app for a while can easily enter orders in under 2 seconds, while a pit clerk can manage thousands of orders from dozens of sources very easily. I was always amazed at how fast these guys worked - I was probably the only developer who could approach their speed, and they'd clean my clock anyday. Nothing like having responsibility for orders worth tens of millions of dollars to help focus the mind...
Yeah, but if they called it GeForce 5, they'd've had to pay royalties to Sandy Frank or Ted Turner, and probably would've had to name the 7th generatation card the 7-Zark-7...