You see those commercials, "do you or someone you know have $AILMENT,
if so then you could be entitled to a HUGE SETTLEMENT!!!"..
I wish I remembered which 60-minutes-style show this was on, but you have to be very careful if you win a settlement that you don't end up worse off than you were before.
The show had an example of a woman who won like $750,000 from some big company. I don't remember what the lawsuit was about but I seem to remember that $750,000 seemed just. Anyway, her lawyer's bill was something like $600,000 leaving her with approx $150,000, but she had to pay taxes on the full $750,000 which left her owing the IRS about $60,000. ( These numbers here are murkily-remembered *ballpark* values )
Does anyone know if you can have the court order that the defendant pay up in 2 seperate checks, one to the lawyer and one to the plaintiff so the plaintiff doesn't have to pay taxes on their lawyer's fees?
A good programmer doesn't need to be reassured that you will take the fact that they don't have an editor into account. They know they are good, and they know that if you are too stupid to take that into account, they don't WANT to be hired by you. Remember the job candidate, if they are worth hiring, is interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them.
A good programmer might or might not be in the habit of writing their braces before filling in their contents *with an editor*, but on paper, it seems more prudent to leave the closing brace out until it's needed. A good programmer *MAY* choose to add the closing brace, but if they be good, then it won't be too far down the page from their opening one since long blocks of code are hard to read. Whatever they do, their closing brace habits are insufficent information to draw conclusions about the way their mind works. A programmer that never creates inscrutably long blocks of code may not need a habit of adding closing braces before filling in code to remember to keep their braces matched and indented correctly.
Good programmers will use *sensible* variable names for loop indices. Sometimes, especially when the index is not used more than once in a loop, a long index name might be equivalent to a comment and just as readable as a short name. Sometimes, especially if they are doing something wierd, and if they doubt *your* intellegence or ability to follow their clever trick, they might use the long index variable name to make it blatently obvious to *you* what they are doing. Names like row and col, are short enough not to look noisy, and more descriptive than names like i and j if appropriate. You would have to know the motivations behind loop variable name choice to make any judgement, and since you are not a mindreader, you can't.
As far as ( 0==strlen(s) ) goes, it's less readable than (strlen(s) == 0). Making strlen(s) the main object of the sentence makes it stand out in one's mind, and since strlen(s) is liable to change ( whereas 0 is a constant ) that is the most readable way to write it. ( 0 == strlen(s) ) does have the advantage that ( 0 = strlen(s) ) will be caught by even stupid compilers, but that seems of marginal value. I wouldn't fault someone for writing it that way since they may have been forced to use a retarded compiler which has warped their mind over the years through no fault of their own.
Good programmers don't write linked lists. They use STL, or a language that provides that functionality for them. The first reaction of a good programmer might be to point that out to you. If forced to write one anyway, they might just whip it out since it's really not THAT complicated.
Um.. How is the parent post flamebait? It would seem to be the conventional view that that patents are precicely for the purpose of rewarding those who have put in research dollars.
Here's a question: If someone has a patent on nanotubes, but someone would like to research an improvement to nanotubes that would involve creating something similar enough to nanotubes that it infringes on a NEC patent, would that person need to purchase a NEC license to do research? For example suppose NEC has a patent on Nanotubes, but they can only make them in gram quantities, but I research and patent a method for making them by the ton out of horse manure, then can NEC sue me for making all those nanotubes during my research phase without permission?
If the DB owner wants to get all his customers to sign a non-disclosure/non-compete agreement and the customers agree then that should be sufficient. However, the bits and bytes of a database are no different than the letters on the page of a book. As long as I give credit to the source there should be no reason my database can't 'quote' yours.
I wonder if the reason collapsing bubbles can concentrate energy is the same as off a thread from sci.materials that I read recently.
Basically, if you put a golf ball on top of a softball on top of a basketball and drop the 3-stack of balls onto the floor, then the golf ball will be sent upwards with dangerous force. A collapsing bubble seems similar to this, but I can't see right off how...
I wonder if you could make a gun by stacking 6 or seven ball bearings of decreasing size on top of each other so that when you hit the largest of them with a hammer the smallest would be fired like a bullet... Why couldn't you just use a cone shaped piece of metal with a weakly attached tip?
I thought they were not using gas. I thought they were just using acetone who's hydrogen had been switched with deuterium... And ( from an earlier slashdot story on this ) wasn't the acetone used to minimise the amount of gas emitted into the bubbles so that the point they collaped onto was smaller and so more energy intense?
They must feel they have nothing to lose. Instead of suing random ppl, they sue their own customers. They must really not give a damn about any business they may have been trying to run before these suits.
My wife primarily uses windows. I think this is because she doesn't want to learn to configure her own user account on the family computer's linux partition. Also, she can play Zoo Tycoon & The Sims. She will browse the web or check email on the linux partition, if I happen to be logged in, but mostly she sticks to her Windows half of the computer and I stick to my Linux half. It works out well.
However, she hates Internet Explorer with a passion. It crashes all the time and lets in viruses. It can not be patched since the patch from Microsoft that would block such nonsence will not install correctly even with a freshly wiped/reinstalled from CD system. So I advised her to install Netscape 4.78 which she liked.
Recently she had to wipe/reinstall windows ( Windows insta llations have an expected live of about 3-6 months before they need to be redone I find. ) She did it herself, but installed the latest Netscape instead of the old 4.78.
Now I had advised her to install 4.78 because it was the last known version of Netscape that I'd tried that didn't suck. Every later version has been way too buggy to use - as bad or worse than Internet Explorer. But I was amazed when she fired this latest version up and it just came up in a flash, and worked beautifully. It seemed to download pages much faster than other browsers too.
Having written off Netscape as having turned permanently to crap ever since gecko/AOL, I was amazed to see it working so well. I had tried many versions of Netscape hoping it would improve only to be dissapointed, but now it seems they've finally gotten their act together.
So I downloaded Mozilla 1.6 and installed it on my Linux partition.
I have been using Konqueror as my main browser ever since Netscape began to suck. I like it alot, and upgraded to the latest version at work. But I happened to have a really old version of KDE installed at home on my linux partition with a really old version of Konqueror. I have been meaning to slog through the very time consuming process of downloading/installing the latest version of KDE over a 56K modem, but I've been putting off upgrading KDE when the only feature of the latest KDE that I actually want/need is the latest Konqueror with it's smart popup blocking. And I would be upgrading all of KDE just for the updated browser since I wouldn't want to mess around with sorting through all the dependencies. Yuck!
So to get a decent browser I installed Mozilla 1.6 It was really easy. I didn't have to download a ton of other stuff to get it. Just one item. It runs perfectly, and I love it. It is better than Netscape too since it allows you to use only pictures for the buttons which are MUCH smaller than either text or text and pictures. ( One of my main peeves about netscape is that it forces you to sacrifice 2.5 inches at the top of the screen to garish buttons.
I haven't used the email or news ( still use knode and kmail ) Those really should be seperate programs from the browser. I wouldn't have downloaded them if I wasn't forced to since I am satisfied with knode and kmail for now.
I haven't tried firefox yet. I see the file is about half the size of mozilla 1.6. Maybe that means it's sans-other-programs-like-news/mail.
Most plans for manned mission to mars call for sending a nuclear powered fuel factory to transform indigenous martian resources into rocket fuel. Any people going to mars would probably be anxious that the robotic factory that was supposed to be manufacturing their air supply and fuel for the return trip had been working correctly for the past year it took them to reach marz. You could just as easily send the fuel factory, and unmanned probes that would refuel on marz as send manned vehicles that would refuel on mars. And if the factory wasn't working after all, then you could send another one and the probe could wait happily for it's arrival.
I can forgive those who bought boxed sets of Star Wars IV, V, VI since the movies were all completed before ( at least I ) had access to one of those new fangled VCR things, and then buy the DVD boxed sets to get the advantages of the better format.
I can understand those who buy the Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III VHS/DVD/Whatever as they come out. ( Same goes for LOTR ). But what about these ppl that buy the videos as they come out and then turn around and buy the boxed set? That's just nuts.
Personally, on such items, I wait and get the boxed set in the best format available at the time, but not the first release. That release is inevitably chopped off at the edges to fit your TV. I wait for the letterboxed editions of movies, Directors Cut if possible, when buying boxed sets. As for Star Wars IV, V, VI, those are best in letterbox pre 'enhancement'.
Now that Wikipedia is superior in content and often better in quality to dead tree encyclopedias, Preskell no longer needs a set of them. Wouldn't it be nice if Preskell had Hawking, and Thorne author some physics articles for Wikipedia instead?
Good thing they have that intent to defraud clause in there! I wouldn't want to go to jail for passing $7.00 bills ( a five glued to a one glued to another one ) or my $3.00 bill ( a $2.00 bill glued to a $1.00 bill or a $2.00 bill glued to 4 quarters )
But there is an easier way of knowing there are no rfid tags in 20 dollar bills. Basically it is that if there *were* rfid tags in $20 bills, then we would already know about it. I'm sure $20.00 bills have been completely disected with a microscope/metal-detector/mass-spectrometer-to-det ermine-ink-composition/whathaveyou by entrepreneurial money hackers ( aka counterfeiters ), and if they found anything this nasty, we'd know.
Why mess with fiber optics? Just have a phone jack outside the safe. Only the wires lead into the safe. The lock is in the safe. Then only the correct signal sent through the telephone line will unlock the safe.
Yeah, or if there was a ferrous pendulum, use an electromagnet to wave it back and forth. If it is a springwheel, then temperature might have an effect (freezing/heating)
There is always the possibility that the cable could snap.
I think I'd stay at or below the midpoint. Below the midpoint of the cable, you could fall to earth in your space capsule ( you DID bring a space capsule didn't you?? ) Past the midpoint, you would fly off into space I think ( would you fly off into space or just orbit forever? My vote is fly off into space... ). And that would suck....
So, how many sides does an attogram have? No, not a parralellogram, an attogram. No, I don't know what a perpendicugram is, but it sounds disgusting.
How much would an attogram cost to send at Western Union? How many letters in an attogram anyway? Can I write normally or should I abbreviate with alotta yotta-yotta-yottas?
Are attograhams good with marshmallows and chocolate?
Releasing a summary, picking out the important bits and posting them after only one day sounds pointless.. The raw data at least is more honest. For example, Seismometer X recorded a 9.5 richter scale tremor on the slope of a volcano in the north west US. Releasing that is not tantamount to predicting an eruption since it very well could be a grizzley bear scratching his ass against the instrument. Then again, if there were two other seismometers on that mountain that picked up nothing, then the anomalous 9.5 might be written off, but if it were picked up independently by an amateur volcanologist in the vacinity, then a local phenomenon that would otherwise have been missed is confirmed.
Of course individual people have the right to privacy, and to keep their pet asteroid secret, but not publicly funded researchers especially when the primary public interest in asteroid watching is public safety.
What is pointless, is keeping raw data private. If amateurs can help find the orbits of suprise asteroids quicker then they should be able to view the data. We won't get much warning from asteroids between the sun and us. We probably won't see really small ones ( like tungaska sized ) until they are a day away from us. Speed is of the essence for these lil' ones ( and lil ones are the only ones worth monitoring anyway since they are the only ones for which an evacuation would be helpful )
Slashdot Mirror
use Fluffy Fuzzy Bunnies. They keep going and going and going...
I wish I remembered which 60-minutes-style show this was on, but you have to be very careful if you win a settlement that you don't end up worse off than you were before.
The show had an example of a woman who won like $750,000 from some big company. I don't remember what the lawsuit was about but I seem to remember that $750,000 seemed just. Anyway, her lawyer's bill was something like $600,000 leaving her with approx $150,000, but she had to pay taxes on the full $750,000 which left her owing the IRS about $60,000. ( These numbers here are murkily-remembered *ballpark* values )
Does anyone know if you can have the court order that the defendant pay up in 2 seperate checks, one to the lawyer and one to the plaintiff so the plaintiff doesn't have to pay taxes on their lawyer's fees?
But I wanna evolve into a Morlok....
A good programmer doesn't need to be reassured that you will take the fact that they don't have an editor into account. They know they are good, and they know that if you are too stupid to take that into account, they don't WANT to be hired by you. Remember the job candidate, if they are worth hiring, is interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them.
A good programmer might or might not be in the habit of writing their braces before filling in their contents *with an editor*, but on paper, it seems more prudent to leave the closing brace out until it's needed. A good programmer *MAY* choose to add the closing brace, but if they be good, then it won't be too far down the page from their opening one since long blocks of code are hard to read. Whatever they do, their closing brace habits are insufficent information to draw conclusions about the way their mind works. A programmer that never creates inscrutably long blocks of code may not need a habit of adding closing braces before filling in code to remember to keep their braces matched and indented correctly.
Good programmers will use *sensible* variable names for loop indices. Sometimes, especially when the index is not used more than once in a loop, a long index name might be equivalent to a comment and just as readable as a short name. Sometimes, especially if they are doing something wierd, and if they doubt *your* intellegence or ability to follow their clever trick, they might use the long index variable name to make it blatently obvious to *you* what they are doing. Names like row and col, are short enough not to look noisy, and more descriptive than names like i and j if appropriate. You would have to know the motivations behind loop variable name choice to make any judgement, and since you are not a mindreader, you can't.
As far as ( 0==strlen(s) ) goes, it's less readable than (strlen(s) == 0). Making strlen(s) the main object of the sentence makes it stand out in one's mind, and since strlen(s) is liable to change ( whereas 0 is a constant ) that is the most readable way to write it. ( 0 == strlen(s) ) does have the advantage that ( 0 = strlen(s) ) will be caught by even stupid compilers, but that seems of marginal value. I wouldn't fault someone for writing it that way since they may have been forced to use a retarded compiler which has warped their mind over the years through no fault of their own.
Good programmers don't write linked lists. They use STL, or a language that provides that functionality for them. The first reaction of a good programmer might be to point that out to you. If forced to write one anyway, they might just whip it out since it's really not THAT complicated.
Here's a question: If someone has a patent on nanotubes, but someone would like to research an improvement to nanotubes that would involve creating something similar enough to nanotubes that it infringes on a NEC patent, would that person need to purchase a NEC license to do research? For example suppose NEC has a patent on Nanotubes, but they can only make them in gram quantities, but I research and patent a method for making them by the ton out of horse manure, then can NEC sue me for making all those nanotubes during my research phase without permission?
If the DB owner wants to get all his customers to sign a non-disclosure/non-compete agreement and the customers agree then that should be sufficient. However, the bits and bytes of a database are no different than the letters on the page of a book. As long as I give credit to the source there should be no reason my database can't 'quote' yours.
Basically, if you put a golf ball on top of a softball on top of a basketball and drop the 3-stack of balls onto the floor, then the golf ball will be sent upwards with dangerous force. A collapsing bubble seems similar to this, but I can't see right off how...
I wonder if you could make a gun by stacking 6 or seven ball bearings of decreasing size on top of each other so that when you hit the largest of them with a hammer the smallest would be fired like a bullet... Why couldn't you just use a cone shaped piece of metal with a weakly attached tip?
Free energy will only give 'Da Man' more resources with which to oppress 'De Odda Man'
I thought they were not using gas. I thought they were just using acetone who's hydrogen had been switched with deuterium... And ( from an earlier slashdot story on this ) wasn't the acetone used to minimise the amount of gas emitted into the bubbles so that the point they collaped onto was smaller and so more energy intense?
They must feel they have nothing to lose. Instead of suing random ppl, they sue their own customers. They must really not give a damn about any business they may have been trying to run before these suits.
However, she hates Internet Explorer with a passion. It crashes all the time and lets in viruses. It can not be patched since the patch from Microsoft that would block such nonsence will not install correctly even with a freshly wiped/reinstalled from CD system. So I advised her to install Netscape 4.78 which she liked.
Recently she had to wipe/reinstall windows ( Windows insta llations have an expected live of about 3-6 months before they need to be redone I find. ) She did it herself, but installed the latest Netscape instead of the old 4.78.
Now I had advised her to install 4.78 because it was the last known version of Netscape that I'd tried that didn't suck. Every later version has been way too buggy to use - as bad or worse than Internet Explorer. But I was amazed when she fired this latest version up and it just came up in a flash, and worked beautifully. It seemed to download pages much faster than other browsers too.
Having written off Netscape as having turned permanently to crap ever since gecko/AOL, I was amazed to see it working so well. I had tried many versions of Netscape hoping it would improve only to be dissapointed, but now it seems they've finally gotten their act together.
So I downloaded Mozilla 1.6 and installed it on my Linux partition.
I have been using Konqueror as my main browser ever since Netscape began to suck. I like it alot, and upgraded to the latest version at work. But I happened to have a really old version of KDE installed at home on my linux partition with a really old version of Konqueror. I have been meaning to slog through the very time consuming process of downloading/installing the latest version of KDE over a 56K modem, but I've been putting off upgrading KDE when the only feature of the latest KDE that I actually want/need is the latest Konqueror with it's smart popup blocking. And I would be upgrading all of KDE just for the updated browser since I wouldn't want to mess around with sorting through all the dependencies. Yuck!
So to get a decent browser I installed Mozilla 1.6 It was really easy. I didn't have to download a ton of other stuff to get it. Just one item. It runs perfectly, and I love it. It is better than Netscape too since it allows you to use only pictures for the buttons which are MUCH smaller than either text or text and pictures. ( One of my main peeves about netscape is that it forces you to sacrifice 2.5 inches at the top of the screen to garish buttons.
I haven't used the email or news ( still use knode and kmail ) Those really should be seperate programs from the browser. I wouldn't have downloaded them if I wasn't forced to since I am satisfied with knode and kmail for now.
I haven't tried firefox yet. I see the file is about half the size of mozilla 1.6. Maybe that means it's sans-other-programs-like-news/mail.
Option 3, definately. If logic worked people would be much smarter after so many years of natural selection.
Most plans for manned mission to mars call for sending a nuclear powered fuel factory to transform indigenous martian resources into rocket fuel. Any people going to mars would probably be anxious that the robotic factory that was supposed to be manufacturing their air supply and fuel for the return trip had been working correctly for the past year it took them to reach marz. You could just as easily send the fuel factory, and unmanned probes that would refuel on marz as send manned vehicles that would refuel on mars. And if the factory wasn't working after all, then you could send another one and the probe could wait happily for it's arrival.
I can understand those who buy the Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III VHS/DVD/Whatever as they come out. ( Same goes for LOTR ). But what about these ppl that buy the videos as they come out and then turn around and buy the boxed set? That's just nuts.
Personally, on such items, I wait and get the boxed set in the best format available at the time, but not the first release. That release is inevitably chopped off at the edges to fit your TV. I wait for the letterboxed editions of movies, Directors Cut if possible, when buying boxed sets. As for Star Wars IV, V, VI, those are best in letterbox pre 'enhancement'.
Now that Wikipedia is superior in content and often better in quality to dead tree encyclopedias, Preskell no longer needs a set of them. Wouldn't it be nice if Preskell had Hawking, and Thorne author some physics articles for Wikipedia instead?
Good thing they have that intent to defraud clause in there! I wouldn't want to go to jail for passing $7.00 bills ( a five glued to a one glued to another one ) or my $3.00 bill ( a $2.00 bill glued to a $1.00 bill or a $2.00 bill glued to 4 quarters )
In Soviet Russia, the Federal Reserve Bank owns YOU!
/me breaks out his 'I grew hemp' stamp and starts defacing all his $1.00 bills.
But there is an easier way of knowing there are no rfid tags in 20 dollar bills. Basically it is that if there *were* rfid tags in $20 bills, then we would already know about it. I'm sure $20.00 bills have been completely disected with a microscope/metal-detector/mass-spectrometer-to-det ermine-ink-composition/whathaveyou by entrepreneurial money hackers ( aka counterfeiters ), and if they found anything this nasty, we'd know.
Why mess with fiber optics? Just have a phone jack outside the safe. Only the wires lead into the safe. The lock is in the safe. Then only the correct signal sent through the telephone line will unlock the safe.
Yeah, or if there was a ferrous pendulum, use an electromagnet to wave it back and forth. If it is a springwheel, then temperature might have an effect (freezing/heating)
I think I'd stay at or below the midpoint. Below the midpoint of the cable, you could fall to earth in your space capsule ( you DID bring a space capsule didn't you?? ) Past the midpoint, you would fly off into space I think ( would you fly off into space or just orbit forever? My vote is fly off into space... ). And that would suck....
How much would an attogram cost to send at Western Union? How many letters in an attogram anyway? Can I write normally or should I abbreviate with alotta yotta-yotta-yottas?
Are attograhams good with marshmallows and chocolate?
Tadum pum!
Of course individual people have the right to privacy, and to keep their pet asteroid secret, but not publicly funded researchers especially when the primary public interest in asteroid watching is public safety.
What is pointless, is keeping raw data private. If amateurs can help find the orbits of suprise asteroids quicker then they should be able to view the data. We won't get much warning from asteroids between the sun and us. We probably won't see really small ones ( like tungaska sized ) until they are a day away from us. Speed is of the essence for these lil' ones ( and lil ones are the only ones worth monitoring anyway since they are the only ones for which an evacuation would be helpful )