Then you were failing at something that school is also supposed to teach you along with reading, writing, and 'rithmetic: Self-discipline.
The problem is that the tasks you're supposed to build self-discipline on in high school aren't just boring, they're a waste of your time. As it turns out, most students realize this within a few minutes. The smart kids are even faster. This teaches cynicism and most kids learn that they don't like "learning" as a result. Despite the fact that they are still information sponges and love informal learning. Any kind of formalized learning is quickly burned out by the uselessness of the public school cirriculum.
If there's one thing that school, both high school and college, taught me, it is that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do in order to be better off later on.
Absolutely true, there are tasks that are unpleasant and absolutely necessary. Anticipating and dealing with those tasks when they come along is an important ability. Doing worthless busywork in high school does not develop this ability. In my experience, anyway.
The US is not the best country in the world when it comes to some things.
No debate there. Just a little trip around Europe for a couple of weeks should eliminate that myth right quick. We have amazing wide open spaces. Mountains, deserts, lakes, shorelines, etc. We have an amazing economic engine. In most other respects that I find important, the US is outclassed by most/all of western Europe, several countries in east Asia, and a few other places scattered throughout the world (Australia, New Zealand, Canada).
Seriously did someone really need to do a whole study to determine this and then write an article telling the world?
If you need clustering, failover, remote backup, separation of indices from data, you make heavy use of materialized views, and you need to retrain your DBA's on a new database, there are a lot of people who still say that it will cost you more to use Postgres than Oracle. Don't even think about MySQL.
But if you're starting from scratch on a new project and your current projections don't indicate you'll need a lot of those features, now the PHB's will have finally heard that free databases should be considered. We deployed on SQL Server and Oracle after developing on Postgres (because Postgres was about twice as fast when running the test suite). Postgres scaled better than Oracle on any single box configuration, and customer data sets never required more than 100GB databases in the worst case.
We were forced to deploy on Oracle and SQL Server because none of our customers thought that Postgres was enterprise qualified. Now, some of them might.
Why do I see Joel constantly talking about how disturbing it is to "context switch", when sysadmins like myself are expected to handle a dozen or more tasks, most of them "surprise" stuff, daily? Don't tell me "oh, programming is complex"- so are networks.
But if most of the tasks are small service requests, then it's 100% appropriate to deal with plenty of context switches. If you're not context switching, you're not getting much done. That doesn't mean that context switches don't cost you attention and focus, only that when most of your tasks are less than an hour, the ability to get 10-15 valuable tasks done each day depends on your ability to context switch effectively.
On the other hand, if you have someone trying to design a new network rollout to handle a corporate merger or to install into a new facility, and you're distracting them with "How do I log into Word?" service requests, you're doing something very, very wrong. Because networks are complex beasts, and you really want someone able to focus on any large problem involving your corporate network. That person shouldn't have to context switch effectively, because every distraction is a significant impediment to getting his real job done.
I've often wondered this myself. What is the reward for developing open source software?
Expand your model for human behavior. Do you always take the biggest paycheck, no matter what the job is? (include jobs in other locations) Me neither. Are we crazy? Or is the economic model which states that humans act to maximize their own gain not accurate?
There are a number of current theories in evolutionary psychology which assert that humans most likely have four fundamental drives: acquisition, bonding, learning, and defense. Personally, I find these models much more likely than the standard economic model.
With an open source developer, I would suggest that the drives to bond and learn play a much larger role (networking, becoming an authority in a subject, a hobby, giving back to the community, improving your craft) than "normal" jobs and that acquisition is playing a distant fourth here.
Once you set aside the assumption that humans are always acquisitive (which simply doesn't make sense, as everyone's daily experience provides countless counter-examples), and start to look at more complete models of human motivation... open source development makes a lot of sense.
We use Calavista which queues up commits and only allows a commit to occur if it passes an acceptance script. Our acceptance script does a build and a run of the unit tests on a fast machine. You could also run a convention compliance/code quality analysis tool as well. With this system in place, it's pretty much impossible to "break the build".
I really prefer this system to a "you broke the build" notifier. It's certainly better to quickly know the build is broken instead of the next day, but other people are still stalled while it gets fixed.
Turns out that this was very good motivation for us to keep the unit tests speedy. When we first started using Calavista, the unit tests took twenty minutes to complete. It was quite painful to have to wait forty minutes for two other checkins to complete, so we decided to take an iteration and work on testing performance to make the unit tests faster. Two weeks later, a few obvious performance problems were solved and a better set of unit tests (more coverage) could be built and executed in under five minutes. The unit tests continued to grow from there, but we never let them get above ten minutes, and considered eight minutes to be the "danger" zone where we needed to take a look at test performance again. Now, we have 2500 unit+functional+integration tests (running against a live database) running in 7.5 minutes. Seems to be tolerable to wait 15 minutes to see if your commit worked (only very rarely does the queue get longer than 3 simultaneous commits, usually around the end of the day).
Bias warning: some good friends of mine are employees of Calavista and I do very occasional development for them on a consulting basis.
I have heard senior programmers recite the mantra that you can refactor your code as much as you like, because as long as it still passes the unit tests, you know you didn't break anything.
That's just foolish. The passing test suite just mean that whatever was tested is still working. If you have really good code coverage with your tests, you can have a high degree of confidence that a refactoring introduced a small number of bugs. If you have poor coverage, well... whatever is tested is still working. I was introduced to TDD with the philosophy, "You can only assume something is working if there's a test to verify it."
When the testing glass is half empty, your worry and attention tends to focus on what is missing instead of being confident about what is already there. That's the stuff you don't have to worry so much about.
IME the hard-core TDD advocates also have a false sense of security when it comes to design.
IME, there are plenty of coders who feel that testing can make up for their lack of design skill when they're ready to lunge in and refactor some code they don't like. Most TDD people I know (there's a selection bias there, so bear with me) have a healthy understanding of risk, bugs, and the various balances between high-level design, low-level design, coding, and testing.
Of course you can't plan everything up-front, but the whole "anything's OK as long as it passes our unit tests" approach is a recipe for endless headaches
Agreed. XP really shortchanged a lot of teams with the oversimplified observation, "The simplest thing that passes the tests is all that you need." It's actually, "The simplest thing that an expert designer would build knowing everything he does about the history and immediate future of the system that passes the tests is all that you need." When that person has two possible designs, choose the simpler one. Both options will probably include some extra complication to gracefully adapt to future changes.
I couldn't stand how slow paced and non-action oriented the game was.
I played the "training game" (grinding missions, etc.) for a while at the start, just to make sure I understood the game controls and could help in a fight. Then I joined a 0.0 corp and the action level went through the roof. Admittedly, the mining/ratting isn't overly exciting, but whenever I'm up against another person in a PvP fight, my heart starts thumping and I get my daily adrenaline fix in a hurry.
I found lots of things to interest me over the past year, and the game just keeps getting more interesting. I like how things get built in-game, so I've been playing the part-time industrialist for a few months here. In two more months, I'll be able to fly capital ships, and a whole new part of the game (installation assaults and defenses) will open up to my character.
But if you're looking for instant gratification, you're right. It won't be found in EVE.
If you thought the 90's were bad, you haven't seen anything yet.
Except for the ban on mean-looking guns, I thought the 90's were pretty damned good. Which part didn't you like? IMHO, Clinton was the best Republican president we've had in many, many years. (ahem)
I mostly just want decent snapshots of people[...]
Then it sounds like you've made the absolute best choice for your photography. I have delusions of artistic expression, so the DSLR seems to make sense for my photography. Sometimes I feel like I'm missing out the social aspects of an event, but most of the time I feel that I can find a balance between participation and being behind the camera.
For me, an SLR allows a different kind of photograph because of two main elements (mentioned in the article). First, the ability to get a good shot with a lot less available light (and no flash, which I'm just beginning to feel I can use effectively). Second, the dramatically improved ability to isolate a subject using a shallower depth of focus.
The only time you want a DSLR is if you want to take professional pics.
Actually, that doesn't have to be the case. I keep the DSLR in a small satchel near the door. If we think we're going to have an opportunity to take photos, it comes along. Otherwise, my wife has a DPAS (I like the term:) in her purse all the time.
I'm not a pro by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just an avid amateur. But the DSLR comes along on quite a few little trips now that I have a bag small enough and easy enough to "just bring". FYI, the bag is the Domke F-803 Satchel. Also makes a nice place to stash a bottle of water or a collapsable umbrella without being labelled a "man purse":)
Fantastic rhetoric! Very nicely done! Reads just like a propaganda poster from any fascist regime of the previous century. I'll respond as we go along.
That's not a correct approach to the issue.
By claiming that some approaches to the issue are correct, the rest are incorrect, with no ground between for discussion. This is a fine example of "The fallacy of the excluded middle". Also, there's the problem of the deliberately vague word, "issue". From my perspective, you've ignored the real issue, "Should we put additional controls on our borders?" for the manipulative fear-based issue "How best to control our borders against terrorists?"
You should take a step backwards and check your assumptions, including the biggest one of all: why are you afraid of terrorists? You should be more afraid of driving an automobile (10000% greater risk (100x) of being killed or injured in car than by a terrorist attack in the US in this century, even larger risk in the previous century).
Is knowing who's going and leaving the country a good idea? yes.
Back the truck up. You're already knee-deep in the weeds. The real question is, "Is it the government's business to know if any particular US Citizen is inside or outside the country?" The answer is not just, "No." but, "Hell no!"
Is preventing the known terrorists from travelling a good idea? yes.
Ignoring the obvious difficulties using paperwork and no-fly lists to identify "known terrorists", how do you define "known terrorist"? Is that someone who participated in an attack against US civillians? How about civillians of other nationalities? What about someone who participated in an attack against the US military? What about other attacks on other militaries? Does it matter if that military is considered an occupation force by 90%+ of the local population? What about someone fighting in a civil war in another country? Does it matter if Bush claims there's no civil war there? What about people who donate money to charities that help the poor in Jordan? What about people who donate time and money to anti-war demonstrations here in the US?
How do you discriminate between terrorist, partisan, liberator, and patriotic civillian? Are they all distinct groups?
I suspect that your definition of "known terrorist" is whoever Bush or his cronies decides is a "known terrorist". Why that's such a spectacularly bad idea I leave as an exercise to the reader.
Is securely collecting all the data you can a good idea, so that when shit happens, you can figure out who caused it to happen, a good idea? you bet you.
You seem quite willing to eliminate the fourth and fifth amendments on the altar of being good for a potential police investigation. I've honestly never heard that particular argument raised by an American before. Most Americans were taught that this country is a constitutionally limited republic, limited because of the tremendous risks of having too much power in standing armies and the potential for tyranny in a strong police.
So, I'm curious. When did you lose your interest in protecting your Contitutionally protected rights? Because your post indicates that you've completely abdicated those rights to Bush's care, and to be honest, he hasn't done a very good job of protecting them for you.
You are either helping us, or you aren't.
Helping you do what, exactly? Eviscerate the Constitution? I'm not helping you. Strengthen the police without any additional checks and balances? I'm not helping you.
You are either with us, or you are against us.
Again, what are your goals? So far, nothing of what you've said appeals to me. How can I be with a group who appears to be only interested in destroying everything great about the United States of America? I'm against that. As long as that's your defacto
MapQuest still has the lion's share of online map users. Accuracy is notably better, directions have always been the best, and after the recent update, Google Maps has nothing on MapQuest for usability.
Actually, I have no idea why more people didn't move from MapQuest to Google Maps (or Yahoo Maps once they jumped on the usability bandwagon), but now that MapQuest is back in the game on all fronts, there's no reason for any departures at all...
Poor Google Maps. Since MapQuest's update, I just use it all the time. I do use Google Search, Gmail and Picasa though.
About 7% of the total federal tax revenues come from corporations. Most is from individual income taxes. You're right that 7% is still a lot of money. You're wrong that corporations are paying their fair share.
don't forget the Employment Taxes (i.e. Witholding) are also 50% paid by corporations
actually, it's only the social security witholding that's 50% paid by the employer. All other taxes are paid entirely by the employee. The employer simply helps the employee to make sure they're paid by collecting them for the government.
Lots of taxes are treated by Accounting rule as an expense which affects profit, and not on the line that says Income Tax Paid.
Many of these tax strategies get accountants and their clients jail time. You do not owe US taxes on income used to pay foreign taxes. There are other similar rules that may generate credits. Many of these rules are used by corporations to evade US taxes (foreign tax credit claims are the most common mechanism for multinationals). Sometimes they're caught (Enron, the oil companies in the article you mention, etc.).
And don't attack the higher earners either, the top 50% of taxpayers pay 96% of income tax.
That's a very interesting way to divide things up:) Lump the 90% of the middle class (the actual taxpayers) in with the extremely wealthy to show that wealthy people pay their way... Were you by any chance a statistics major in college?
We don't have and never had an "empire"
You're fooling yourself with semantics. We don't have an empire in the same sense that the British or Spanish had an empire. We decided that was too much effort and that we had to differentiate ourselves from the USSR, which definitely was empire building. The US "empire" is a cultural and economic hegemony. We don't have to put a regent in power over you as long as your leader "plays ball" with the hegemon.
In summary, you're completely and utterly full of shit. But thanks for playing.
Before I go, I had to respond to your opener:
Typical liberal drivel without facts.
You should be aware that the facts have a pervasive and overwhelming liberal bias. It's a shame, but there it is.
In doing so, they are ignoring the fact that hate speech is a subset of thought crime.
Um, no. Thoughtcrime is the concept that considering a disloyal proposition constitutes a criminal act. Hate speech is the questionable assertion that hostile language which is xenophobic in nature is an action that should be punishable by society.
Both are a part of a larger set of possible laws that do not have unanimous support among democratic populations. The fact that thoughtcrime has near-zero support outside of US/UK neocons while hate speech has support in countries with near recently historical atrocities and less overwhelming support elsewhere might allow for some separation. But they do share that trait (less than unanimous support).
Any time Bush or the Republicans [or Clinton or the Democrats] makes a valid point, the Daily Show either ignores it, ridicules the point regardless, or make ad hominem attacks.
There you go. For a minute there, your post seemed to be selectively ignoring the complete scope of the content presented on The Daily Show. A show which gave Clinton no quarter with their jokes when he was in office. A show, whose sole purpose is to poke fun at topical, mostly political, events.
Fixed that for you. No need to thank me.
Now, if you're getting all heated about the fact that your boy produces so many statements that beg for satire and ridicule, take it up with your boy and his NeoCon keepers. BTW, I'm a registered Republican, and I voted against Clinton in 1992. IMNSHO, Bush Jr. is the worst president this country has had since Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and will be remembered in history with the same kind of embarassment that surrounds McCarthy's name today.
You probably pissed and moaned about the desert scenes in Star Wars too.:)
It's a story about people in the future. People have lots of desires, including the desire to not live in cans. So they give living on a mudball a shot. And it turns out to be a "Bad Plan(tm)". So now we have to get them off the mudball and back into some sort of fighting shape again. With the lessons learned, we can assume that they won't be satisfied until they reach earth (as a friday night special six months after the regular show gets cancelled).
Personally, I'm curious as to how they'll do it. I'm really enjoying the break in the action, as it were.
Actually, the cost is not very attractive, if you take into account the entire process. Problem is that the nuclear power companies haven't had to pay for the long-term disposal costs yet. If they actually had to pay the full costs, it would be quite expensive indeed.
Not if you're allowed to reprocess the fuel. Sitting in the "spent fuel" storage facilities of every US reactor is enough to run that reactor for another 100-200 years. As soon as fuel reprocessing becomes legal.
Fuel reprocessing more than pays for the extraction and concentration of the "other junk" that isn't fuel. Then all you need to do is to figure out how to get people to accept that they live in a world with non-zero risks* and the disposal of the gunk is no longer a problem.
Umm... this is a slightly different scale of power generation. Those ships and submarines which are nuclear powered have really small reactors. The power (and more importantly pressure) generated in a small Navy sub reactor is "small" compared to this beast. We're talking about TWO full scale reactors on a barge.
Actually, the reactors in question are 60MW reactors which are smaller than the reactors found on any current Russian nuke icebreaker (171MW, 135MW), carrier or submarine.
Research nuclear plants are usually in the range of 5-20MW. The floating nukes used on our Ohio class submarines and newer carriers are 500MW. Full-scale nuke plants are typically in the 200-2000MW range.
Rumsfeld is the only Bush cabinet official with single digit approval ratings. However, given complete control over the voting machines, stranger things have happened.
If it does and he is, my family and I are packing up and leaving. It's a beautiful place, but hasn't been the home of the free in some time now. If it doesn't start heading back that way, there are better places to be.
You can also google on "Mifare" for cheap contactless memory cards from Philips.
This is what I'm currently developing against. I'm finding that I'd like to store more on the card than the Mifare DESFire cards currently allow (partitioned 4k, when I'd like to store about 100-300kB), so your mention of contactless smart cards with encryption protected 2MB on board sounded really good.
The IBM JCOP card is one such smart card.
The JCOP cards are different from the Mifare in that all of them have contact pins (less durable) and the JCOP31bio cards have some very interesting capabilities but otherwise they're pretty darned similar for my purposes.
Ultimately, however, they don't have 2MB of memory on board. Darn.
Thanks for replying. I'll get by for now with the Mifare DESFire, but I'll keep looking too.
You wouldn't happen to have a link to a dev kit for a card like you describe, would you?
I've been looking for something like that for a while now, and apparently my Google skills suck, cause I can't find anything like what you mention that I can lay hands on.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely true, there are tasks that are unpleasant and absolutely necessary. Anticipating and dealing with those tasks when they come along is an important ability. Doing worthless busywork in high school does not develop this ability. In my experience, anyway.
No debate there. Just a little trip around Europe for a couple of weeks should eliminate that myth right quick. We have amazing wide open spaces. Mountains, deserts, lakes, shorelines, etc. We have an amazing economic engine. In most other respects that I find important, the US is outclassed by most/all of western Europe, several countries in east Asia, and a few other places scattered throughout the world (Australia, New Zealand, Canada).
Regards,
Ross
But if you're starting from scratch on a new project and your current projections don't indicate you'll need a lot of those features, now the PHB's will have finally heard that free databases should be considered. We deployed on SQL Server and Oracle after developing on Postgres (because Postgres was about twice as fast when running the test suite). Postgres scaled better than Oracle on any single box configuration, and customer data sets never required more than 100GB databases in the worst case.
We were forced to deploy on Oracle and SQL Server because none of our customers thought that Postgres was enterprise qualified. Now, some of them might.
Regards,
Ross
On the other hand, if you have someone trying to design a new network rollout to handle a corporate merger or to install into a new facility, and you're distracting them with "How do I log into Word?" service requests, you're doing something very, very wrong. Because networks are complex beasts, and you really want someone able to focus on any large problem involving your corporate network. That person shouldn't have to context switch effectively, because every distraction is a significant impediment to getting his real job done.
Regards,
Ross
There are a number of current theories in evolutionary psychology which assert that humans most likely have four fundamental drives: acquisition, bonding, learning, and defense. Personally, I find these models much more likely than the standard economic model.
With an open source developer, I would suggest that the drives to bond and learn play a much larger role (networking, becoming an authority in a subject, a hobby, giving back to the community, improving your craft) than "normal" jobs and that acquisition is playing a distant fourth here.
Once you set aside the assumption that humans are always acquisitive (which simply doesn't make sense, as everyone's daily experience provides countless counter-examples), and start to look at more complete models of human motivation... open source development makes a lot of sense.
Regards,
Ross
We use Calavista which queues up commits and only allows a commit to occur if it passes an acceptance script. Our acceptance script does a build and a run of the unit tests on a fast machine. You could also run a convention compliance/code quality analysis tool as well. With this system in place, it's pretty much impossible to "break the build".
I really prefer this system to a "you broke the build" notifier. It's certainly better to quickly know the build is broken instead of the next day, but other people are still stalled while it gets fixed.
Turns out that this was very good motivation for us to keep the unit tests speedy. When we first started using Calavista, the unit tests took twenty minutes to complete. It was quite painful to have to wait forty minutes for two other checkins to complete, so we decided to take an iteration and work on testing performance to make the unit tests faster. Two weeks later, a few obvious performance problems were solved and a better set of unit tests (more coverage) could be built and executed in under five minutes. The unit tests continued to grow from there, but we never let them get above ten minutes, and considered eight minutes to be the "danger" zone where we needed to take a look at test performance again. Now, we have 2500 unit+functional+integration tests (running against a live database) running in 7.5 minutes. Seems to be tolerable to wait 15 minutes to see if your commit worked (only very rarely does the queue get longer than 3 simultaneous commits, usually around the end of the day).
Bias warning: some good friends of mine are employees of Calavista and I do very occasional development for them on a consulting basis.
Regards,
Ross
When the testing glass is half empty, your worry and attention tends to focus on what is missing instead of being confident about what is already there. That's the stuff you don't have to worry so much about.
IME, there are plenty of coders who feel that testing can make up for their lack of design skill when they're ready to lunge in and refactor some code they don't like. Most TDD people I know (there's a selection bias there, so bear with me) have a healthy understanding of risk, bugs, and the various balances between high-level design, low-level design, coding, and testing.
Agreed. XP really shortchanged a lot of teams with the oversimplified observation, "The simplest thing that passes the tests is all that you need." It's actually, "The simplest thing that an expert designer would build knowing everything he does about the history and immediate future of the system that passes the tests is all that you need." When that person has two possible designs, choose the simpler one. Both options will probably include some extra complication to gracefully adapt to future changes.
Regards,
Ross
I found lots of things to interest me over the past year, and the game just keeps getting more interesting. I like how things get built in-game, so I've been playing the part-time industrialist for a few months here. In two more months, I'll be able to fly capital ships, and a whole new part of the game (installation assaults and defenses) will open up to my character.
But if you're looking for instant gratification, you're right. It won't be found in EVE.
Regards,
Ross
Ross
Regards,
Ross
For me, an SLR allows a different kind of photograph because of two main elements (mentioned in the article). First, the ability to get a good shot with a lot less available light (and no flash, which I'm just beginning to feel I can use effectively). Second, the dramatically improved ability to isolate a subject using a shallower depth of focus.
Regards,
Ross
I'm not a pro by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just an avid amateur. But the DSLR comes along on quite a few little trips now that I have a bag small enough and easy enough to "just bring". FYI, the bag is the Domke F-803 Satchel. Also makes a nice place to stash a bottle of water or a collapsable umbrella without being labelled a "man purse"
Regards,
Ross
By claiming that some approaches to the issue are correct, the rest are incorrect, with no ground between for discussion. This is a fine example of "The fallacy of the excluded middle". Also, there's the problem of the deliberately vague word, "issue". From my perspective, you've ignored the real issue, "Should we put additional controls on our borders?" for the manipulative fear-based issue "How best to control our borders against terrorists?"
You should take a step backwards and check your assumptions, including the biggest one of all: why are you afraid of terrorists? You should be more afraid of driving an automobile (10000% greater risk (100x) of being killed or injured in car than by a terrorist attack in the US in this century, even larger risk in the previous century).
Back the truck up. You're already knee-deep in the weeds. The real question is, "Is it the government's business to know if any particular US Citizen is inside or outside the country?" The answer is not just, "No." but, "Hell no!"
Ignoring the obvious difficulties using paperwork and no-fly lists to identify "known terrorists", how do you define "known terrorist"? Is that someone who participated in an attack against US civillians? How about civillians of other nationalities? What about someone who participated in an attack against the US military? What about other attacks on other militaries? Does it matter if that military is considered an occupation force by 90%+ of the local population? What about someone fighting in a civil war in another country? Does it matter if Bush claims there's no civil war there? What about people who donate money to charities that help the poor in Jordan? What about people who donate time and money to anti-war demonstrations here in the US?
How do you discriminate between terrorist, partisan, liberator, and patriotic civillian? Are they all distinct groups?
I suspect that your definition of "known terrorist" is whoever Bush or his cronies decides is a "known terrorist". Why that's such a spectacularly bad idea I leave as an exercise to the reader.
You seem quite willing to eliminate the fourth and fifth amendments on the altar of being good for a potential police investigation. I've honestly never heard that particular argument raised by an American before. Most Americans were taught that this country is a constitutionally limited republic, limited because of the tremendous risks of having too much power in standing armies and the potential for tyranny in a strong police.
So, I'm curious. When did you lose your interest in protecting your Contitutionally protected rights? Because your post indicates that you've completely abdicated those rights to Bush's care, and to be honest, he hasn't done a very good job of protecting them for you.
Helping you do what, exactly? Eviscerate the Constitution? I'm not helping you. Strengthen the police without any additional checks and balances? I'm not helping you.
Again, what are your goals? So far, nothing of what you've said appeals to me. How can I be with a group who appears to be only interested in destroying everything great about the United States of America? I'm against that. As long as that's your defacto
MapQuest still has the lion's share of online map users. Accuracy is notably better, directions have always been the best, and after the recent update, Google Maps has nothing on MapQuest for usability.
Actually, I have no idea why more people didn't move from MapQuest to Google Maps (or Yahoo Maps once they jumped on the usability bandwagon), but now that MapQuest is back in the game on all fronts, there's no reason for any departures at all...
Poor Google Maps. Since MapQuest's update, I just use it all the time. I do use Google Search, Gmail and Picasa though.
Regards,
Ross
actually, it's only the social security witholding that's 50% paid by the employer. All other taxes are paid entirely by the employee. The employer simply helps the employee to make sure they're paid by collecting them for the government.
Many of these tax strategies get accountants and their clients jail time. You do not owe US taxes on income used to pay foreign taxes. There are other similar rules that may generate credits. Many of these rules are used by corporations to evade US taxes (foreign tax credit claims are the most common mechanism for multinationals). Sometimes they're caught (Enron, the oil companies in the article you mention, etc.).
That's a very interesting way to divide things up
You're fooling yourself with semantics. We don't have an empire in the same sense that the British or Spanish had an empire. We decided that was too much effort and that we had to differentiate ourselves from the USSR, which definitely was empire building. The US "empire" is a cultural and economic hegemony. We don't have to put a regent in power over you as long as your leader "plays ball" with the hegemon.
In summary, you're completely and utterly full of shit. But thanks for playing.
Before I go, I had to respond to your opener:
You should be aware that the facts have a pervasive and overwhelming liberal bias. It's a shame, but there it is.
Regards,
Ross
No, actually, the addiction rate would decrease. See the Netherlands for examples.
Regards,
Ross
Regards,
Ross
Both are a part of a larger set of possible laws that do not have unanimous support among democratic populations. The fact that thoughtcrime has near-zero support outside of US/UK neocons while hate speech has support in countries with near recently historical atrocities and less overwhelming support elsewhere might allow for some separation. But they do share that trait (less than unanimous support).
Regards,
Ross
You're pretty much stuck with the "evil liberal" label until something big changes.
Regards,
Ross
Fixed that for you. No need to thank me.
Now, if you're getting all heated about the fact that your boy produces so many statements that beg for satire and ridicule, take it up with your boy and his NeoCon keepers. BTW, I'm a registered Republican, and I voted against Clinton in 1992. IMNSHO, Bush Jr. is the worst president this country has had since Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and will be remembered in history with the same kind of embarassment that surrounds McCarthy's name today.
Regards,
Ross
You probably pissed and moaned about the desert scenes in Star Wars too. :)
It's a story about people in the future. People have lots of desires, including the desire to not live in cans. So they give living on a mudball a shot. And it turns out to be a "Bad Plan(tm)". So now we have to get them off the mudball and back into some sort of fighting shape again. With the lessons learned, we can assume that they won't be satisfied until they reach earth (as a friday night special six months after the regular show gets cancelled).
Personally, I'm curious as to how they'll do it. I'm really enjoying the break in the action, as it were.
Regards,
Ross
Fuel reprocessing more than pays for the extraction and concentration of the "other junk" that isn't fuel. Then all you need to do is to figure out how to get people to accept that they live in a world with non-zero risks* and the disposal of the gunk is no longer a problem.
Regards,
Ross
* This is a hard problem.
Research nuclear plants are usually in the range of 5-20MW. The floating nukes used on our Ohio class submarines and newer carriers are 500MW. Full-scale nuke plants are typically in the 200-2000MW range.
These really are tiny in comparison.
Regards,
Ross
Rumsfeld is the only Bush cabinet official with single digit approval ratings. However, given complete control over the voting machines, stranger things have happened.
If it does and he is, my family and I are packing up and leaving. It's a beautiful place, but hasn't been the home of the free in some time now. If it doesn't start heading back that way, there are better places to be.
Regards,
Ross
The JCOP cards are different from the Mifare in that all of them have contact pins (less durable) and the JCOP31bio cards have some very interesting capabilities but otherwise they're pretty darned similar for my purposes.
Ultimately, however, they don't have 2MB of memory on board. Darn.
Thanks for replying. I'll get by for now with the Mifare DESFire, but I'll keep looking too.
Regards,
Ross
You wouldn't happen to have a link to a dev kit for a card like you describe, would you?
I've been looking for something like that for a while now, and apparently my Google skills suck, cause I can't find anything like what you mention that I can lay hands on.
Regards,
Ross