Miners will still receive the transaction fees for all the transactions included in the blocks they mine. There's a recommended transaction fee formula built into the clients, but you set any transaction fee you want. Set it too low and some miners may choose not to include your transaction in their block, causing your transaction to take longer to complete. Thus, there will be incentive to pay miners sufficient transaction fees to make it worthwhile to process your transactions.
How long does it take a check to clear or do an ACH transfer? Longer than 50 minutes? In reality, you don't have to wait 50 minutes to be reasonably certain a transaction will complete. You can see the transaction broadcasted to multiple peers within seconds. For small transactions, that's probably enough. Usually a transaction will make it into the blockchain in about 10 minutes. At that point, the only way to invalidate the transaction would be for a miner to fork the blockchain by computing an alternate longer chain. Since there are many competing miners, in practice this would be very difficult. After a few more blocks have been added to the chain, it would be virtually impossible to reverse the transaction.
For very large transactions involving thousands or millions of dollars, it probably makes sense to wait 50 minutes for multiple confirmations, but for smaller transactions it's definitely overkill.
I've interviewed lots of guys with 20+ years experience who have never really worked on anything very challenging and are basically at the same skill level as someone with 3-5 years of experience. Given a choice between a guy with 3 years experience and a guy with 20 years experience who are both at the same skill level, I'll prefer the guy with 3 years experience. Why? Because if after 20 years your skill level is the same as a guy with 3 years experience, your skill level isn't likely to improve. The guy with less experience is more likely to continue to grow and be more valuable in a few years.
Ebay should have waited until December to announce this. Every two years in the fall, there's a brief window of time when Congress actually listens to voters instead of corporations. Write your representatives and tell them what you think. It's election season. They just might give a damn.
While you're at it, let the DOJ know too:
Citizen Complaint Center
Antitrust Division
950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Room 3322
Washington, DC 20530
Most states have their own laws regarding unfair competition. If you're ambitious, Google it and find other agencies that will take your complaint.
If you can find one, try to get an antenna with part number 15-1880 from Radio Shack. They've been discontinued, but your local store might still have one in stock or you might be able to find one on ebay. It's a simple indoor amplified UHF antenna and passive VHF antenna. I used it in an apartment surrounded by trees about 45 miles away from the towers and was able to get all the HD channels except CBS. CBS used VHF, that's why I couldn't get it. People on AVS forum rave about the antenna, and they were right.
When I was in school, one of the labs had framed posters of the dies of various Intel processors. If I remember correctly, they were all older processors starting with 8088 and going up to maybe one of the 486 processors. I don't know where they got them or if they're still available, but they were awesome. It was especially cool to compare the posters and see how much the designs advanced between processor generations. Actually, if anyone knows where to buy posters like that, send me a link. I'd like to buy some for myself.
Maybe I'm misreading the intent of your post, but it sounds as if you think it's the government's responsibility to ensure you have access to broadcast TV. It's not. Should the government buy you a new TV if yours breaks? Should you be reimbursed for the electricity your TV requires? The answers, of course, are no. Why then should the government pay for your DTV receiver?
I do agree that the government should have a role in maintaining an educated public. I'm just not sure that providing free television equipment is an effective way to educate people. Though there is educational programming on broadcast TV, I tend to think most people would be better educated and informed if they stopped watching TV altogether.
Of all the things the government could spend money on for the betterment of the public, it chose to buy DTV receivers for people. It's not surprising. It's just sad.
Anybody know if the two systems can be made compatible without swapping receivers? I have XM built in to my car. I'd hate to have it stop working after the merger.
If you run Windows, go to task manager and enable the threads column in the process window. On my system, there are very few processes that only use one thread.
I've done a lot of work in embedded applications, and even there most products I worked on were heavily multi-threaded. Even in the simplest embedded applications
without an operating system, there is usually some parallelization via interrupts. This raises the question, if so much software both application and embedded is
multi-threaded, why do so many people on Slashdot feel that multi-threaded programming isn't useful / too difficult / etc? What kind of software are you guys writing?
There's another subtle joke if you look at the dates on the references. I almost missed it.
Re:question for those that like Cloverfield
on
Cloverfield Discussion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I didn't really like Blair Witch, but I did like Cloverfield. This movie is really nothing like Blair Witch. The first 15-20 minutes of the movie is as boring as Blair Witch until the action starts. Then it doesn't let up. Even though it's filmed from the perspective of a guy with a camera, it's all scripted and directed and has really good special effects for the budget. You'd think it was a $100 million+ budget by watching it.
So then why do we see Cuban's risking their lives on makeshift rafts trying to reach Florida soil unnoticed so they can claim amnesty? They do this leaving all their possesions behind, knowing that if they succeed they will not be able to return, and if they don't succeed and are turned back at sea, they will likely be punished for their actions when they arrive back in Cuba. If things are so good in Cuba, why would anyone bother trying to escape to Florida? It can't just be the higher standard of living because they try to escape to Mexico too, only Mexico sends Cubans back when they find them. Maybe Cubans should build slightly better boats and head south to Venezuela. I hear they have a good health care system.
I've had my 360 replaced 3 times. It is not abused. I keep it in a well ventilated area, and I don't have issues with power problems damaging any of my other electronic equipment. I have a friend that has had his 360 replaced 5 times. His is kept in a well ventilated area and is actually plugged into a power conditioner. I also have other friends who have never had any issues with their 360.
I think the real problem lies in the return process. When your 360 breaks, you call Microsoft and they ship you a box to mail the 360 back to them in. You are not to ship the power supply, cables, controller, etc. When they recieve it, they ship you a different refurbished console. My guess is one of the following is happening:
1. They aren't doing a good job at repairing units. Either early revisions of the 360 have some defects in the hardware design that make them more prone to failure, or their repair process isn't catching all the defects, or both. Either way, these bad units just keep getting cycled through the return process.
2. Parts of the 360 that are not to be shipped back are defective and cause hardware failures in the console. For example, a problem with the external DC power supply could cause a hardware failure in the console. You ship the console back and they give you a repaired console. You then plug the refurbished console into the defective power brick and damage that one too.
I now have a stable console that has lasted several months, so I don't expect any more problems. My friend who just had his console replaced again about a month ago told me that Microsoft's new policy is to repair the console you send them and ship you back the same console. Once the same console has been repaired 3 times, they send you a new console. So obviously Microsoft is aware of the problem in their return process and is doing something to address it.
This is a terrible argument for a gun advocate to make. Comparing gun crime crime statistics for the UK vs. the U.S. greatly supports the notion that gun controls make you less likely to get shot. Of course there are still shootings in the UK, but they are a tiny, tiny fraction of what they are in the U.S. Essentially what is a common occurrence in the U.S. (tens and thousands of gun deaths each year) is a freak occurrence in the UK (negligible in number: 100s, for a country around a quarter of the size of the population of the U.S.).
You are correct. There are many more homicides committed with a gun in the US compared to the UK. However, there are also many more homicides committed without a gun in the US compared to the UK. So I don't think it's fair to just blame the guns for the high homicde rate. As far as I know, the UK does not restrict the purchase of kitchen knives and baseball bats.
In reality, I think you'll find that most areas in the US are relatively safe and homicides are quite rare. But a lot of cities have "bad neighborhoods" where homicides are commonplace. In many cases, the police really aren't equipped to effectively deal with the rampant crime and gang activity in these "bad neighborhoods", and since the crime is largely contained to these areas, there is little outcry from the public to increase resources to effectively deal with the problem. I think the US homicide rate could probably be brought in line with other countries without any changes to gun laws by substantially increasing law enforcement efforts in these neighborhoods and breaking up the street gangs and criminial enterprises that control these sections of cities.
I live in Naperville, Illinois -- a Chicago suburb with a population of 133,000. In the last 5 years there have been 4 homicides. That's actually lower than the UK average. But take a short drive into certain neighborhoods in the city of Chicago, and the homicide rate skyrockets. This, even though guns are not legal in the city of Chicago, but they are legal in Naperville.
The SIP part of it can use a single port. RTP ports are dynamically allocated, but most phones will use a fixed port range or let you specify one. So basically, that means opening up port 5060 for SIP and lets say something like 8000 - 9000 for RTP. The alternative would be to have a stateful firewall as you suggest that parses the SDP out of the SIP invite to figure out which UDP ports to open for the RTP streams and then watch for the BYE packet to close them. I don't know of any home routers that can do this, though I'm sure there are commercial solutions. The advantage to using IPv6 is that a home user could open up the same ports for each PC and have a SIP phone running on each one (or multiple hardware SIP phones throughout the house). With a single NATed IPv4 address, most home users would be limited to running a single SIP phone. The only workaround for IPv4 I can think of would be for the user to run their own registrar behind the router.
You can have a firewall without using NAT. Being able to assign every device a routable address means that you can implement a stateless firewall instead of a stateful firewall. For most purposes, a simple firewall that filtered incomming TCP connection requests and UDP packets on all ports except those specifically allowed would suffice. This has the advantage that the firewall wouldn't need to track the state of TCP connections, and would eliminate problems like firewalls deciding a connection has been idle too long and closing it.
For the home user, being able to assign a routable IP to every PC has other advantages. Do you have multiple PCs with Remote Desktop running that you want to access remotely? NAT makes this difficult since all the PCs share the same IP address and need to listen for connection requests on the same port. Assigning every machine a routable address makes this problem go away. Don't like that example? The same applies to a web server, or SIP phone, or Bittorrent, or a myriad of other applications.
I think the conclusion is valid even if you exclude countries impacted by communism. Yes, some countries like Sweeden and Switzerland have higher life expectancies than the US, both at 80.51 years. Other countries like Denmark and Ireland are lower than the US at 77.79 and 77.56 respectively. But really, all of them fall within a very narrow range. Even compared to Switzerland -- the highest on your list, the difference is only two and a half years. That's a pretty small variation compared to other factors that are known to affect life expectancy like genetic differences between races. An intersting experiment would be to weight the numbers based on the ethnic makeup of each nation. I bet the order of the list would change considderably. At any rate, I think it's clear that differences in social policies among industrialized nations have little or no impact on life expectancy and claims to the contrary are greatly exaggerated.
From wikipedia, based on 2006 numbers, average life expectancy in the US is 77.85 years. Average life expectancy in the EU is 78.3 years. The difference is so small, they're basically equivalent. So why are those numbers virtually identical? Remember, the US has an inferior healthcare system that doesn't meet the needs of the poor and some middle class people. Then there's the fact that most Americans are fat slobs who crave fast food and abhor exercise. Plus the US has permissive gun laws compared to Europe so that should result in the deaths of many young people from shootings. And lets not forget about how much more environmentally friendly Europe is. All the extra pollution in the US by cars and lax environmental regulations must be shortening people's lives. Right?
So from this I conclude that all the above statements that are constantly trumpeted in the news are overblown. In reality, life in the US doesn't differ that much from western Europe. At least not in ways that affect how long a person lives. Either that or the US government has spread some toxin across Europe to lower life expectancy so that Europe won't defeat us in the life expectancy race. This is Slashdot, so option 2 may be more believable.
I swapped out all my outdoor lighting for CF bulbs last summer. It cost about $100, partly because I needed specially shaped bulbs to fit some of the fixtures, but I figured it would pay for itself in the long run. Everything worked great until January. When the temperature got close to freezing, the smaller CF bulbs refused to turn on. The larger ones worked down to about 10 degrees F, but in cold weather they took several minutes to reach full brightness and then the color of the light was strange. I live in central Indiana. It's not like I'm from Alaska or something. CF bulbs may be fine for outdoor lighting if you live somewhere where a cold winter day is 45 degrees. For everyone else, I'd say outdoor CF lighting isn't a good idea.
And while I'm ranting about CF bulbs, let me share some of my other issues with them. 1. The color and start up time on some bulbs is ok, but on many bulbs it sucks, and there's no way to know which you're getting until you've paid for it and try it out. 2. CF bulbs tend to be much larger than incandescents, especially bulbs with higher lumens. As a result, CF bulbs won't fit in many of my existing light fixtures. 3. CF bulbs are fine for fixtures where appearance doesn't matter, like in a lamp. But try putting them in a chandelier where the bulb itself is a decorative element. CF bulbs can make a $500 chandelier look like junk.
So if people get their way and incandescents are banned, I'll have to spend lots of money throwing away perfectly good light fixtures and I'll have to do without outdoor lighting in the winter. Here's a better idea. Why not replace a few fossil fuel fired power plants with nuclear ones (or solar, wind, etc.) and let me keep my bulbs. I bet replacing a handful of plants would give a bigger net reduction in CO2 than banning incandescent bulbs. I know most of my power consumption doesn't come from light bulbs. Most of it is used by the air conditioner, water heater, clothes dryer, and various electronics that have nothing to do with lighting.
I too have used Coverity, but I wasn't as impressed with it. Especially considdering the price. It is better than lint, but it's not that much better. Expect to get a lot of false positives.
We used it once on a large set of code from a company we acquired. Since none of us were very familiar with the code, and the code had a lot of stability problems, the thought was that it might help us find some of the more elusive bugs and improve the stability of the software.
Coverity did find a lot of "problems". But most of those problems weren't bugs. It mainly found things like indexing into an array without explicitly checking the range of the index or variables that could be left uninitialized depending on the sequence of the code. About 90% of the time, we'd look at the code and quickly see what it was complaining about and also realize that what it was complaining about could never actually happen. That said, I don't think it's any worse than any other static code analysis tool I've ever used.
The one tool I found that was actually very useful in tracking down bugs is Rational Purify. It's not a static code analysis tool, but depending on what you want to do, it might meet your needs better. It puts a ton of runtime checks in your executable. If you're able to generate test cases that exercise most paths in your code, it will let you hone in in the real problems more quickly than a static code analysis tool. I've found it's great for those kinds of bugs where something corrupts something in memory which then causes a failure much later. It does use a lot of CPU time, though, so if your application is very CPU intensive, it might be too slow to be useful.
Different people require different levels of organization to be productive. Unless a person spends a lot of time searching for misplaced documents, forcing them to be organized isn't going to make them more productive. Likewise, if a person needs to maintain strict order to be able to find things, then they aren't going to become more productive by being disorganized.
I have a really good memory. I rarely take notes and I seldom need to reference old documents as I am able to pull information out of my head even if it's months or years old. As a result, spending a lot of time maintaining organization doesn't make sense for me. At the same time, I realize that some people need to keep detailed notes to remember things and need to frequently reference old documents. People like that need to be organized to be productive.
Heat pumps don't work well in very cold climates. Their efficiency drops as the temperature outside drops. As the temperature approaches 0 degrees F, most heat pumps aren't any more efficient than pure resistive heating.
Comparing resistive heating to burning fossil fuels is even more difficult since the energy sources could be different. Is heating your home with natural gas better than resistive heating if your electricity comes from wind turbines or a hydroelectric plant? What about nuclear?
But all this aside, the larger issue here is that California's government thinks it's their duty to restrict people from making purchases it deems unwise. I don't subscribe to the belief that my government knows what's best for me and should be making my decisions. I prefer personal freedom. If companies continue to improve CF bulbs and eventually make them more desirable than incandescents, then incandescent sales will falter without governement intervention. But if the government outlaws incandescents, there will be less motivation for companies to make CF bulbs cheaper and smaller with a more pleasing spectral output. You won't be able to legally buy anything else, so why bother improving them.
Or more generally, for a tax rate of R and a prize value of P, you would need to award RP/(1-R) in cash to cover the taxes on both the prize and the cash.
I haven't even subscribed to their HDTV offerings yet. ... DirecTV's over compressed offerings can't come close to the visual quality of an OTA signal.
FPGAs are not microcontrollers. They are programmable logic devices. You can use an FPGA to implement a microcontroller, a microprocessor, or any other logic device.
You probably wouldn't be able to put the latest Xeon processor on an FPGA, but to say that they are far slower and smaller than modern processors is incaccurate. There are plenty of FPGAs that can handle signals in excess of 1GHz, and a 22,000 transistor FPGA is a VERY small FPGA.
Many custom chips including custom processors are first developed and tested on FPGAs before they become ASICs. In fact, you can give your FPGA design files to an IBM or a TI, and they'll gladly turn it into an ASIC for you -- for a fee. Often times, FPGAs are used in designs without ever going to an ASIC. Generally, the only reason you build an ASIC is because the per chip cost is much cheaper. Heat and performance are usually secondary considderations. There is, however, a big up front cost to doing an ASIC, so for low volume parts or designs that might need to be upgraded or fixed later, FPGAs are generally the better option.
There's also a middle ground -- so called "hard copy" FPGAs. This is when you give your design files to Xilinx or Altera with a big check, and they sell you special FPGAs that are guaranteed to work with your design (but not necessarily other designs). In exchange, you get the chips a lot cheaper and they can also disable parts of the chip your design doesn't use to reduce power consumption. The FPGA manufacturers benefit by being able to sell chips that would otherwise be defective but are suitable for certain designs.
Slashdot Mirror
Miners will still receive the transaction fees for all the transactions included in the blocks they mine. There's a recommended transaction fee formula built into the clients, but you set any transaction fee you want. Set it too low and some miners may choose not to include your transaction in their block, causing your transaction to take longer to complete. Thus, there will be incentive to pay miners sufficient transaction fees to make it worthwhile to process your transactions.
How long does it take a check to clear or do an ACH transfer? Longer than 50 minutes? In reality, you don't have to wait 50 minutes to be reasonably certain a transaction will complete. You can see the transaction broadcasted to multiple peers within seconds. For small transactions, that's probably enough. Usually a transaction will make it into the blockchain in about 10 minutes. At that point, the only way to invalidate the transaction would be for a miner to fork the blockchain by computing an alternate longer chain. Since there are many competing miners, in practice this would be very difficult. After a few more blocks have been added to the chain, it would be virtually impossible to reverse the transaction. For very large transactions involving thousands or millions of dollars, it probably makes sense to wait 50 minutes for multiple confirmations, but for smaller transactions it's definitely overkill.
I've interviewed lots of guys with 20+ years experience who have never really worked on anything very challenging and are basically at the same skill level as someone with 3-5 years of experience. Given a choice between a guy with 3 years experience and a guy with 20 years experience who are both at the same skill level, I'll prefer the guy with 3 years experience. Why? Because if after 20 years your skill level is the same as a guy with 3 years experience, your skill level isn't likely to improve. The guy with less experience is more likely to continue to grow and be more valuable in a few years.
Ebay should have waited until December to announce this. Every two years in the fall, there's a brief window of time when Congress actually listens to voters instead of corporations. Write your representatives and tell them what you think. It's election season. They just might give a damn.
While you're at it, let the DOJ know too:
Citizen Complaint Center
Antitrust Division
950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Room 3322
Washington, DC 20530
Most states have their own laws regarding unfair competition. If you're ambitious, Google it and find other agencies that will take your complaint.
If you can find one, try to get an antenna with part number 15-1880 from Radio Shack. They've been discontinued, but your local store might still have one in stock or you might be able to find one on ebay. It's a simple indoor amplified UHF antenna and passive VHF antenna. I used it in an apartment surrounded by trees about 45 miles away from the towers and was able to get all the HD channels except CBS. CBS used VHF, that's why I couldn't get it. People on AVS forum rave about the antenna, and they were right.
When I was in school, one of the labs had framed posters of the dies of various Intel processors. If I remember correctly, they were all older processors starting with 8088 and going up to maybe one of the 486 processors. I don't know where they got them or if they're still available, but they were awesome. It was especially cool to compare the posters and see how much the designs advanced between processor generations. Actually, if anyone knows where to buy posters like that, send me a link. I'd like to buy some for myself.
I do agree that the government should have a role in maintaining an educated public. I'm just not sure that providing free television equipment is an effective way to educate people. Though there is educational programming on broadcast TV, I tend to think most people would be better educated and informed if they stopped watching TV altogether.
Of all the things the government could spend money on for the betterment of the public, it chose to buy DTV receivers for people. It's not surprising. It's just sad.
Anybody know if the two systems can be made compatible without swapping receivers? I have XM built in to my car. I'd hate to have it stop working after the merger.
If you run Windows, go to task manager and enable the threads column in the process window. On my system, there are very few processes that only use one thread. I've done a lot of work in embedded applications, and even there most products I worked on were heavily multi-threaded. Even in the simplest embedded applications without an operating system, there is usually some parallelization via interrupts. This raises the question, if so much software both application and embedded is multi-threaded, why do so many people on Slashdot feel that multi-threaded programming isn't useful / too difficult / etc? What kind of software are you guys writing?
There's another subtle joke if you look at the dates on the references. I almost missed it.
I didn't really like Blair Witch, but I did like Cloverfield. This movie is really nothing like Blair Witch. The first 15-20 minutes of the movie is as boring as Blair Witch until the action starts. Then it doesn't let up. Even though it's filmed from the perspective of a guy with a camera, it's all scripted and directed and has really good special effects for the budget. You'd think it was a $100 million+ budget by watching it.
So then why do we see Cuban's risking their lives on makeshift rafts trying to reach Florida soil unnoticed so they can claim amnesty? They do this leaving all their possesions behind, knowing that if they succeed they will not be able to return, and if they don't succeed and are turned back at sea, they will likely be punished for their actions when they arrive back in Cuba. If things are so good in Cuba, why would anyone bother trying to escape to Florida? It can't just be the higher standard of living because they try to escape to Mexico too, only Mexico sends Cubans back when they find them. Maybe Cubans should build slightly better boats and head south to Venezuela. I hear they have a good health care system.
I've had my 360 replaced 3 times. It is not abused. I keep it in a well ventilated area, and I don't have issues with power problems damaging any of my other electronic equipment. I have a friend that has had his 360 replaced 5 times. His is kept in a well ventilated area and is actually plugged into a power conditioner. I also have other friends who have never had any issues with their 360. I think the real problem lies in the return process. When your 360 breaks, you call Microsoft and they ship you a box to mail the 360 back to them in. You are not to ship the power supply, cables, controller, etc. When they recieve it, they ship you a different refurbished console. My guess is one of the following is happening: 1. They aren't doing a good job at repairing units. Either early revisions of the 360 have some defects in the hardware design that make them more prone to failure, or their repair process isn't catching all the defects, or both. Either way, these bad units just keep getting cycled through the return process. 2. Parts of the 360 that are not to be shipped back are defective and cause hardware failures in the console. For example, a problem with the external DC power supply could cause a hardware failure in the console. You ship the console back and they give you a repaired console. You then plug the refurbished console into the defective power brick and damage that one too. I now have a stable console that has lasted several months, so I don't expect any more problems. My friend who just had his console replaced again about a month ago told me that Microsoft's new policy is to repair the console you send them and ship you back the same console. Once the same console has been repaired 3 times, they send you a new console. So obviously Microsoft is aware of the problem in their return process and is doing something to address it.
In reality, I think you'll find that most areas in the US are relatively safe and homicides are quite rare. But a lot of cities have "bad neighborhoods" where homicides are commonplace. In many cases, the police really aren't equipped to effectively deal with the rampant crime and gang activity in these "bad neighborhoods", and since the crime is largely contained to these areas, there is little outcry from the public to increase resources to effectively deal with the problem. I think the US homicide rate could probably be brought in line with other countries without any changes to gun laws by substantially increasing law enforcement efforts in these neighborhoods and breaking up the street gangs and criminial enterprises that control these sections of cities.
I live in Naperville, Illinois -- a Chicago suburb with a population of 133,000. In the last 5 years there have been 4 homicides. That's actually lower than the UK average. But take a short drive into certain neighborhoods in the city of Chicago, and the homicide rate skyrockets. This, even though guns are not legal in the city of Chicago, but they are legal in Naperville.
The SIP part of it can use a single port. RTP ports are dynamically allocated, but most phones will use a fixed port range or let you specify one. So basically, that means opening up port 5060 for SIP and lets say something like 8000 - 9000 for RTP. The alternative would be to have a stateful firewall as you suggest that parses the SDP out of the SIP invite to figure out which UDP ports to open for the RTP streams and then watch for the BYE packet to close them. I don't know of any home routers that can do this, though I'm sure there are commercial solutions. The advantage to using IPv6 is that a home user could open up the same ports for each PC and have a SIP phone running on each one (or multiple hardware SIP phones throughout the house). With a single NATed IPv4 address, most home users would be limited to running a single SIP phone. The only workaround for IPv4 I can think of would be for the user to run their own registrar behind the router.
You can have a firewall without using NAT. Being able to assign every device a routable address means that you can implement a stateless firewall instead of a stateful firewall. For most purposes, a simple firewall that filtered incomming TCP connection requests and UDP packets on all ports except those specifically allowed would suffice. This has the advantage that the firewall wouldn't need to track the state of TCP connections, and would eliminate problems like firewalls deciding a connection has been idle too long and closing it.
For the home user, being able to assign a routable IP to every PC has other advantages. Do you have multiple PCs with Remote Desktop running that you want to access remotely? NAT makes this difficult since all the PCs share the same IP address and need to listen for connection requests on the same port. Assigning every machine a routable address makes this problem go away. Don't like that example? The same applies to a web server, or SIP phone, or Bittorrent, or a myriad of other applications.
I think the conclusion is valid even if you exclude countries impacted by communism. Yes, some countries like Sweeden and Switzerland have higher life expectancies than the US, both at 80.51 years. Other countries like Denmark and Ireland are lower than the US at 77.79 and 77.56 respectively. But really, all of them fall within a very narrow range. Even compared to Switzerland -- the highest on your list, the difference is only two and a half years. That's a pretty small variation compared to other factors that are known to affect life expectancy like genetic differences between races. An intersting experiment would be to weight the numbers based on the ethnic makeup of each nation. I bet the order of the list would change considderably. At any rate, I think it's clear that differences in social policies among industrialized nations have little or no impact on life expectancy and claims to the contrary are greatly exaggerated.
From wikipedia, based on 2006 numbers, average life expectancy in the US is 77.85 years. Average life expectancy in the EU is 78.3 years. The difference is so small, they're basically equivalent. So why are those numbers virtually identical? Remember, the US has an inferior healthcare system that doesn't meet the needs of the poor and some middle class people. Then there's the fact that most Americans are fat slobs who crave fast food and abhor exercise. Plus the US has permissive gun laws compared to Europe so that should result in the deaths of many young people from shootings. And lets not forget about how much more environmentally friendly Europe is. All the extra pollution in the US by cars and lax environmental regulations must be shortening people's lives. Right?
So from this I conclude that all the above statements that are constantly trumpeted in the news are overblown. In reality, life in the US doesn't differ that much from western Europe. At least not in ways that affect how long a person lives. Either that or the US government has spread some toxin across Europe to lower life expectancy so that Europe won't defeat us in the life expectancy race. This is Slashdot, so option 2 may be more believable.
I swapped out all my outdoor lighting for CF bulbs last summer. It cost about $100, partly because I needed specially shaped bulbs to fit some of the fixtures, but I figured it would pay for itself in the long run. Everything worked great until January. When the temperature got close to freezing, the smaller CF bulbs refused to turn on. The larger ones worked down to about 10 degrees F, but in cold weather they took several minutes to reach full brightness and then the color of the light was strange. I live in central Indiana. It's not like I'm from Alaska or something. CF bulbs may be fine for outdoor lighting if you live somewhere where a cold winter day is 45 degrees. For everyone else, I'd say outdoor CF lighting isn't a good idea.
And while I'm ranting about CF bulbs, let me share some of my other issues with them.
1. The color and start up time on some bulbs is ok, but on many bulbs it sucks, and there's no way to know which you're getting until you've paid for it and try it out.
2. CF bulbs tend to be much larger than incandescents, especially bulbs with higher lumens. As a result, CF bulbs won't fit in many of my existing light fixtures.
3. CF bulbs are fine for fixtures where appearance doesn't matter, like in a lamp. But try putting them in a chandelier where the bulb itself is a decorative element. CF bulbs can make a $500 chandelier look like junk.
So if people get their way and incandescents are banned, I'll have to spend lots of money throwing away perfectly good light fixtures and I'll have to do without outdoor lighting in the winter. Here's a better idea. Why not replace a few fossil fuel fired power plants with nuclear ones (or solar, wind, etc.) and let me keep my bulbs. I bet replacing a handful of plants would give a bigger net reduction in CO2 than banning incandescent bulbs. I know most of my power consumption doesn't come from light bulbs. Most of it is used by the air conditioner, water heater, clothes dryer, and various electronics that have nothing to do with lighting.
I too have used Coverity, but I wasn't as impressed with it. Especially considdering the price. It is better than lint, but it's not that much better. Expect to get a lot of false positives.
We used it once on a large set of code from a company we acquired. Since none of us were very familiar with the code, and the code had a lot of stability problems, the thought was that it might help us find some of the more elusive bugs and improve the stability of the software.
Coverity did find a lot of "problems". But most of those problems weren't bugs. It mainly found things like indexing into an array without explicitly checking the range of the index or variables that could be left uninitialized depending on the sequence of the code. About 90% of the time, we'd look at the code and quickly see what it was complaining about and also realize that what it was complaining about could never actually happen. That said, I don't think it's any worse than any other static code analysis tool I've ever used.
The one tool I found that was actually very useful in tracking down bugs is Rational Purify. It's not a static code analysis tool, but depending on what you want to do, it might meet your needs better. It puts a ton of runtime checks in your executable. If you're able to generate test cases that exercise most paths in your code, it will let you hone in in the real problems more quickly than a static code analysis tool. I've found it's great for those kinds of bugs where something corrupts something in memory which then causes a failure much later. It does use a lot of CPU time, though, so if your application is very CPU intensive, it might be too slow to be useful.
I have a really good memory. I rarely take notes and I seldom need to reference old documents as I am able to pull information out of my head even if it's months or years old. As a result, spending a lot of time maintaining organization doesn't make sense for me. At the same time, I realize that some people need to keep detailed notes to remember things and need to frequently reference old documents. People like that need to be organized to be productive.
Comparing resistive heating to burning fossil fuels is even more difficult since the energy sources could be different. Is heating your home with natural gas better than resistive heating if your electricity comes from wind turbines or a hydroelectric plant? What about nuclear?
But all this aside, the larger issue here is that California's government thinks it's their duty to restrict people from making purchases it deems unwise. I don't subscribe to the belief that my government knows what's best for me and should be making my decisions. I prefer personal freedom. If companies continue to improve CF bulbs and eventually make them more desirable than incandescents, then incandescent sales will falter without governement intervention. But if the government outlaws incandescents, there will be less motivation for companies to make CF bulbs cheaper and smaller with a more pleasing spectral output. You won't be able to legally buy anything else, so why bother improving them.
Or more generally, for a tax rate of R and a prize value of P, you would need to award RP/(1-R) in cash to cover the taxes on both the prize and the cash.
DirecTV's over compressed offerings can't come close to the visual quality of an OTA signal.
So what are you basing this on? Wishful thinking?
FPGAs are not microcontrollers. They are programmable logic devices. You can use an FPGA to implement a microcontroller, a microprocessor, or any other logic device.
You probably wouldn't be able to put the latest Xeon processor on an FPGA, but to say that they are far slower and smaller than modern processors is incaccurate. There are plenty of FPGAs that can handle signals in excess of 1GHz, and a 22,000 transistor FPGA is a VERY small FPGA.
Many custom chips including custom processors are first developed and tested on FPGAs before they become ASICs. In fact, you can give your FPGA design files to an IBM or a TI, and they'll gladly turn it into an ASIC for you -- for a fee. Often times, FPGAs are used in designs without ever going to an ASIC. Generally, the only reason you build an ASIC is because the per chip cost is much cheaper. Heat and performance are usually secondary considderations. There is, however, a big up front cost to doing an ASIC, so for low volume parts or designs that might need to be upgraded or fixed later, FPGAs are generally the better option.
There's also a middle ground -- so called "hard copy" FPGAs. This is when you give your design files to Xilinx or Altera with a big check, and they sell you special FPGAs that are guaranteed to work with your design (but not necessarily other designs). In exchange, you get the chips a lot cheaper and they can also disable parts of the chip your design doesn't use to reduce power consumption. The FPGA manufacturers benefit by being able to sell chips that would otherwise be defective but are suitable for certain designs.