I wrote an enormous script that takes two XML files as input, one describing data structures I want to encode and another that describes the binary format I want to encode it as (such as a starting byte, the number of bits to store for the length of the message, the type of CRC/checksum to use, etc.). It then creates all of the necessary C code to encode and decode these records bitwise with options for using simple compression algorithms as well. It also has options for generating C++ code wrappers and another independent Java implementation.
While it took a lot of code to accomplish this (even using the XML::Simple CPAN package) it now is a very handy tool for our purposes where we are encoding dozens of records over a very low bandwidth stream (satellite connection) and can change our record structure at will (with a great deal of flexibility) simply by editing a couple of simple XML files.
You're kidding, right? Here's an excerpt from a bash script generated by the auto tools:
# Parse our command line options once, thoroughly. Xsed="sed"' -e 1s/^X//' while test "$#" -gt 0 do
arg="$1"
shift
case $arg in
-*=*) optarg=`$echo "X$arg" | $Xsed -e 's/[-_a-zA-Z0-9]*=//'`;;
*) optarg=;;
esac done
Perl can be written in a way that's fairly C-style whereas that's not the case for bash. Bash is great for simple tasks but for more complicated ones it can be really difficult to grok (as can be made clear by reading just about any script generated by autoconf or libtool).
Why do you say that? I write Perl and PHP scripts all the time and don't see any advantage to using Perl for webforms over PHP, at least not the ones I write. It's trivially easy to access data from a database in either scripting language and you can perform Perl-style regular expressions in PHP. The nice thing about PHP is that it's specifically designed for web applications and has simpler syntax in some situations. The downside to PHP is learning all of these functions that don't have a consistent pattern to them but, once you know them, you can accomplish a lot of tasks efficiently.
Am I missing something or was that not the best choice by your manager/boss? Why use Perl with inline C (esp. back then) rather than just writing a C/C++ program to do the job other than being told you had to use Perl?
Do'. I think I've not posted AC when I meant to once.
There's a huge diversity of Jews, at least in America. I'm sure there are many that aren't opposed to learning German so try to resist grouping them all together just as all Germans weren't Nazi sympathizers (especially ones that moved to America rather than the reverse). From the Germans I know (native Germans) it seems that they have a different perspective on what proportion of the population was Nazi sympathizers back then or, at the very least, think they were ignorant of what was happening to the Jews in their own country and what atrocities their army was doing which I find difficult to believe. At best the population was willfuly ignorant and, considering the huge proportion of the population involved in the war effort, it simply wouldn't be possible to be ignorant of what was going on. Maybe 50 years from now that will change just as atrocities by the US army against Native Americans are now fully accepted here 100-150 years after it happened (and accept that the US population was indifferent, at best, to what the army was doing).
It's not just Jews that can put you into a group you had nothing to do with. In late 2003 I went on a trip to the UK and while walking down the street with some American friends in London some guy came up to us saying something to the effect that we Americans were a bunch of concentration camp sympathizing Nazis. There's stupid people everywhere in every ethnicity.
Also consider from their point of view that one of the largest populations of Jews in Europe before WWII was in Germany and they very nearly got completely wiped out (I've seen estimates that over 90% of German-born Jews died in WWII). So, taking the hint, they don't have a strong interest in learning the language of the people that were so intent on (and effective at) exterminating them just a few generations ago. To this day there are still very, very few Jews living permanently in Germany with no concentrated populations anywhere as far as I know.
This is a subject that can easily (perhaps most easily) spiral into a flame war. I think the grandparent poster was trying to be as inoffensive as possible but, of course, failed to not offend everyone. He wasn't defending what happened in Germany, just saying there are racists everywhere so there really isn't anything ironic about the post he was responding to.
I disagree with him though because the Germans weren't merely racist but wanted to build a 'master race' and genetics was a big part of it so yes, there is more irony that such a gene would be found there than in other countries.
I don't know if I would say 'better'. It's certainly a good complement though. Reading can open up new concepts and worlds to the reader. Art is a way for them to explore these ideas and come up with new ones.
As a kid I was a voracious reader, started programming in BASIC on a Tandy hooked up to the family TV when I was 6 and had a Nintendo as well. I would say I spent the most time reading followed by about a tie between programming and playing Tandy and Nintendo games (and yes, I went outside to bike to a nearby lake to swim--I was probably much less pasty then than I am now). They all compelement each other and I wouldn't say one is necessarily better than the other because you're using your brain in different ways in each activity.
She wasn't comparing playing games to watching TV but to reading books.
While there is problem solving and such playing games I find that I'm usually thinking more abstract concepts and higher order thoughts when reading interesting books so I can see her point.
To me, the key is moderation, especially with playing video games.
This is a great way to try to understand a difficult code base. I once checked out a rather large program from CVS and made a branch for myself. After running Doxygen I was able to get an initial understanding of the organization of the code (which happened to be rather awful). I then went through the headers adding my own Doxygen comments where I understood their function. After a week or two of this I had a pretty good understanding of most of the functions in the program (at least, well enough that I knew where to look if something went wrong or needed modification). It was only about 60,000 lines of code, but it was almost 100% technical math/scientific code with no equations commented anywhere (written by scientists with apparently little understanding of object-oriented approaches to programming).
Hi Anubi. I just noticed that you left a journal entry for people to write back to you. However, you need to make a new journal entry from time to time because slashdot closes stale discussions (after a week or two I think).
2) Both Tiger Woods and Steven Spielberg have worked extremely hard for little or no pay at all before they reached the threshold needed to become international stars. Also, they have taken a great risk as they could well both have become under achievers in the field of sports and arts, which aren't exactly reliable income sources.
What a horrible example. Tiger Woods was born to a rich family. His father had custom clubs made for him so that he could start playing golf as soon as he could walk (I kid you not). He started making an income from golf before being old enough to go to college. In addition, he was a child prodigy. From his wikipedia article:
At age three, Woods shot a 48 over nine holes at the Navy Golf Club in Cypress, California, and at age five, he appeared in Golf Digest and on ABC's That's Incredible. In 1984 at the age of eight he won the 9-10 boys' event, the youngest age group available, at the Junior World Golf Championships.
He never lost growing up so I don't think there was much risk on his part in choosing golf as a career. If things didn't pan out (highly, highly unlikely), he could have always fallen back on his family's wealth.
Steven Spielberg was also born to a rich family. It's not as much risk to work for peanuts when your family can back you up if things don't work out. Hence the inherent advantage of being lucky and being born to a rich family versus a poor one. How many international sports stars in sports like tennis or golf were born to poor families? Very, very few.
As for your arguments about the free market, that's exactly what the US had before passing the sixteenth amendment. It got to the point that individuals such as Cornelius Vanderbilt were more powerful than much of the government and could even afford to control their own cities, enforcing poor working conditions with their own private police force. And if you thought Bill Gates was bad, he had nothing on these guys as far as crooked business practices are concerned.
The reason the 16th amendment was able to pass was because the public was fed up with the enormous income discrepancy between the majority of the population and the incredibly wealthy and perceived this tax as a way to redistribute the wealth (which it initially did and still does to this day to a much lesser extent). To get a feel for what it was like, try searching for 'sixteenth amendment' and similar on the New York Times archive. Any article before about 1930 (I think) is free to view in PDF format.
Why should the parent post by me be modded down? Because you disagree with me?
The original purpose of taxes at the federal level were to repay war debts from the Civil War. After these debts were paid the federal income tax was repealed, only to be reinstated a couple of decades later in 1894 (although this was blocked by the US Supreme Court until the 16th amendment was passed). The 16th amendment was specifically passed to redistribute wealth, with tax rates of 73% for the wealthiest shortly after the amendment was passed.
One thing I think people who always scream for lower taxes is that they are very much ignorant of the history of taxes (and of wealth distribution) in the US. According to this article by the New York Times in 1922:
The United States has levied higher income taxes than any other country in the world, and those taxes have probably been more completely paid than in any other country.
Despite this, the US experienced a remarkable decade of growth and prosperity until the crash of '29 (due to a public lack of confidence in banks and lack of regulation for seedy stock companies).
We now have the lowest tax rates among industrialized countries in the world and yet people still want them lower. I bet most have never lived in one of the other industrialized countries where tax rates are much higher or know anything about their economies. Countries such as the Netherlands have a much stronger economy than here with far superior public services and infrastructure. Their people are healthier than ones here as well.
Wrong the IRS only contributes a portion of the federal governments budget.
No, I am not wrong. I did not say that the IRS provides all of the federal income, just most of it. In fact, it provides nearly all of the federal budget and has done so continously since 1894 (although at that time I don't know if it funded the majority of the federal budget or not). For a summary of the federal income for 2007, see this page. For more references, see the links at the bottom of this article. If you really want to see the details, check out the offical 2008 budget which is online. I believe you meant to say that personal income taxes only provide 40% of the federal income, not the IRS. The IRS collects income from corporate sources as well, which is another 13%. I believe social insurance tax funels through the IRS as well which is another 32% of the federal income. The only money the federal government receives from other sources (such as tarifs and US Treasury securities to pay for the federal deficit) only adds up to 12% of the income.
I don't feel like nor have the time to debate the effectiviness of the FED here. If you want to see my side of the argument, read Alan Greenspan's book 'The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World'.
People always believe things are more efficient at the local level which, while usually true, is not always the case. For example, a ton of money was given by the federal government to Louisiana after Katrina. This money had almost no strings attached so the state and city of New Orleans could do with it as they wished. What happened? Due to lax oversight and local corruption the money went to various projects that had nothing to do with getting people back home or rebuilding the community.
One thing most people forget about the federal budget is that most of the 'pork' is in the form of earmarks distributed at the local level. Larger, federal programs have much stronger auditing and oversight that prevent spending irregularities. And Ron Paul was one of the biggest beneficiaries of earmarks, receiving millions of dollars over the years for his district (see his interview on Meet the Press for details).
One major problem with cutbacks to the federal budget is that spending oversight (by auditors) is usually cut in higher proportions than the federal budget. I have a friend that has worked as a contract auditor for the feds for 7 years or so. In those 7 years their workload has quadrupled due to downsizing. How can they possibly achieve the same level of oversight with such little manpower?
Then what? Do you think that by removing government that will automatically 'fix' everything?
Abolish the IRS
The IRS raises much of the money the Federal government uses to fund the military, subsidize farmers, scientific research, college education (in the form of grants to Universities and subsidized student loans), etc. So how do you go about solving all of the problems such a drastic measure would cause? Force the thousands of college graduates to double or triple the amount they have to spend on their monthly studen loan bill? Force thousands of others to not even go to college because they would not be able to secure loans without the federal Stafford program? Force millions of people to not have access to medical treatment or medication any longer? Leave thousands of troops and billions of dollars of equipment overseas because there would no longer be enough money to bring them home?
Abolish the Federal Reserve
What the heck would this accomplish? While they aren't great, they definitely serve the purpose for which it was designed--dampen market-driven cycles and try to minimize inflation. Do you wish for a return of runs on the market and severe depressions/recessions?
Abolish the Department of Education
All industralized nations in the world have some sort of mechanism of implementing national standards for education. There is a reason for this. While the current D of E could do a much, much better job, I don't see how removing them would fix the problem of low education standards in the US.
Abolish the FCC
And what would this solve? The FCC exists because, like water rights, the radio spectrum is a limited resource that cross state boundaries. How can anything other than a federal department regulate such a resource to prevent states from duking it out?
Abolish social security
What would you do to compensate the millions of workers who have invested a significant fraction of their income into the program?
Abolish medicare
How do you propose to give medical treatment to the poor? Leave it to the states? If it were up each state then richer states such as Massachusetts would surely be OK but others like Alabama and Mississippi would surely have little to no medical treatment for the poor due to the much higher portion of the population that is poor and due to having less tax money in order to pay for such a system. This would just cause poor states to get poorer while rich states would be able to keep some money that would have otherwise gone to the poorer ones to fund the program.
So in short, if a guy is 70, poor, living off of social security and live in Mississippi, he's screwed and that's fine with you, right? And if the guy was 60, approaching retirement he'd have no choice but to work until he died since there would be no possibility of retirement and living off of social security. In the US Declaration of Independence you will find the phrase: " All have right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". How the heck can one do this if they were unlucky enough to be born poor and have no hope of attending college to be eligible for better jobs and not be able to afford their own health care?
The government exists to solve problems people cannot solve on their own. Removing the current solutions provided by the government without offering any alternative seems ridiculous from my point of view. By abolishing all of the functions of government you mentioned you will surely 'fix' what ever problem created by these programs. However, each program was formed to solve other problems that will now need to be redressed and would surely cause additional problems due to the strong rippling effect it would have on the rest of government.
If you go to Disneyland and take pictures of Mickey and friends, that's not a problem - you create the photo, you own the copyright.
However, if you take that picture and slap it onto product (calendar, mug, tshirt, etc.) for SALE, then yes it violates Disney's TRADEMARK rights - they have the sole discretion to decide how they want to sell their brand.
Even though we may not like it, I'm pretty sure the parent post is correct. If a company owns a trademark for a product they have quite a bit of legal power to protect their product's likeness from being used for profit by other organizations. There are exceptions for parody and news but not too many others AFAIK.
Well, the author of the study was specifically referring to the house of representatives. The electoral college is only used when electing the president (duh) whereas the house is responsible for many other activities other than just determining how many electors each state gets. Also, the imbalance of the additional two senators is by design. The logic behind the electoral college was to allow small states to have a disproportionate part of the vote so that their voice wouldn't be drowned out by large states. So one part of the electoral college is supposed to proportionately represent the population which is the part the mathematician focuses on.
Ummm, I only see one representative listed for Wyoming on the official US House of Representatives website. The guy wasn't suggesting adding representatives to Wyoming, but to Montana and some other states. Montana had a population of 902,195 in the 2000 census and 1 representative. That works out to a voting power of 0.00011% per person in Montana. California had a population of 33,871,648 and has 53 representatives (0.000156% per person).
His model wasn't trying to be fair, just less unfair. To be fair Wyoming would either need a fractional vote or the size of the House would have to be increased until each person in the house represented about 500,000 people. Since this isn't possible from his model's point of view he does the next best thing (removing votes from large states that have fewer people per representative to smaller states that currently have more people per representative).
With that said, I agree that small states don't need more representation in the House. They are more than adequately compensated by having 2 votes in the Senate. To put in perspective how powerful that is, imagine that even if San Francisco had 2 senators the Wyoming senators would still be representing fewer people. San Francisco has a population of about 750,000 (4th largest in California) vs. the population of 500,000 for the entire state of Wyoming.
If you want a flying car, you should want a computer to run it. Unless you have been flying in commercial jets since before the early 70s you have always been flying in computer-controlled airplanes. Sure, the pilot can override the computer but he relies on it on every flight and interacting with the computer is a significant part of the training of any commercial pilot.
If people want to safely fly to work without many hours of costly training they will require computer-controlled flying vehicles. It's simply too complicated and dangerous for people to just 'pick it up'. Also, maintenance is a critical component to flying. If you have a mechanical failure in the air, you have a good chance of getting hurt or dying (much, much more so than when you are driving around). I'm glad flying isn't very common given how many idiots there are out there. I was just talking to some car mechanics today who told me about a woman who drove around with the oil light on for two weeks (until the engine burned itself out). And I'm sure anyone viewing this post can think of other things people have done to ruin perfectly good vehicles due to nothing but their own ignorance and/or stupidity. If they had similarly ruined their engine in flight they very well could have died.
I know about that car. That guy has been working on it for years (I first read about it years ago in Popular Science). As I said, I don't believe there will be a mass-produced flying car, not a flying car whatsoever. I've already seen a flying car in person on a couple of occasions (both had detachable wings). One was a really cool looking Lotus that had been modified but was still a perfectly working car. Some very rich family had it made for them and flew it to the Oshkosh air show back in 2002. I recall reading about that car you are referring to years even before that. The other flying car I saw was at a museum. It was a modified car with detachable wings that some guy made back in the 50s or 60s I think.
You don't say that the vehicle you are referring to gets 20mpg at 200mph and the link doesn't say at what speed it gets 20mpg. I think he's only ever made one or two of those cars at great cost and I strongly doubt that he could ever make these cost-effective enough or reliable enough for average people (4 engines=4 times as much maintenance not to mention initial cost, instability if one engine fails, etc.). If you're rich you can buy a flying car that is not as efficient at flying as a normal airplane nor a car that's as efficient on the road as other cars, but that's been the case for decades. The vehicle you refer to uses 4 turbine engines. Each engine costs more than most cars. Thus, the list price for the vehicle is nearly one million dollars. You don't mass-produce million-dollar private vehicles. It is a neat vehicle I'll admit, just way too expensive and complicated for the average person.
The technology not only exists for autonomous cars, but have been implemented in various forms already. California made a special HOV lane 10 years ago that allowed specially equipped cars to drive themselves in those lanes close to each other. The project was apparently abandoned due to political pressure, not due to technical reasons.
There will not be a mass-produced flying car though. That simply requires too much energy and we have a large enough energy problem as it is. Unless you want to use a derigible there is drag induced just by the act of flying which causes an additional amount of energy to be consumed as opposed to staying on the ground.
For the electronics part, start with Radio Shack. They have several simple books to get you started with hobby electronics. I once knew a very intelligent electrical engineer who first became enamored with electronics by doing exactly that and still recommended it as a good way of getting into electronics without getting overwhelmed. If you ever want to gain even more practical knowledge about electronics I would recommend the ARRL handbook (used by ham radio operators everywhere).
If I thought the hi-def format war was over and HD-DVD was the winner I would buy a HD-DVD add-on to my 360 immediately. But since the war doesn't seem over yet I've been holding off. It would be the most economical way of buying a hi-def player if I were so inclined since I already own the 360.
And don't forget cost. My company has a network of about 9 GPS stations and only one of them uses a choke ring due to the cost. We only used it there because it was on top of a flat, reflective roof and needed some help to mitigate multipath.
Hmmm, that's odd. I would expect to see this behavior if the GPS was trying to resolve the integeter ambiguity of the phase measurement. Survey-quality receivers do this by using both GPS frequencies in combination with corrections from a reference GPS receiver at a previously surveyed position. Any GPS can trivially determine the fraction of the phase cycle between it and the satellite but must determine the number of cycles via statistical methods using good quality measurements and initial guesses. If this number is estimated correctly, the distance between the satellite and receiver is known to within a couple of centimeters instantaneously.
These integer ambiguities are solved for at least 4 satellites simultaneously. There are always several combination of cycle counts that will result in a good position. However, these candidates may be several meters apart. If the initial guess is wrong, it may be several minutes before a new candidate is chosen and then the switch is instantaneous (hence the jump you observed).
I didn't think a consumer single-frequency receiver could do this, even with WAAS. I would expect a single-frequency receiver to simply drift around the true position without any sudden jumps (assuming there are at least 5 satellites visible at any given point in time and there aren't any strong reflectors nearby--such as a tall building). I know consumer units take phase measurements, but all of the ones I've seen have had rather poor measurement quality due mainly to the cheap antennas they use (survey quality GPS antennas are at least 8 inches in diameter and cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars if they use a choke ring to mitigate multipath).
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote an enormous script that takes two XML files as input, one describing data structures I want to encode and another that describes the binary format I want to encode it as (such as a starting byte, the number of bits to store for the length of the message, the type of CRC/checksum to use, etc.). It then creates all of the necessary C code to encode and decode these records bitwise with options for using simple compression algorithms as well. It also has options for generating C++ code wrappers and another independent Java implementation.
While it took a lot of code to accomplish this (even using the XML::Simple CPAN package) it now is a very handy tool for our purposes where we are encoding dozens of records over a very low bandwidth stream (satellite connection) and can change our record structure at will (with a great deal of flexibility) simply by editing a couple of simple XML files.
Why do you say that? I write Perl and PHP scripts all the time and don't see any advantage to using Perl for webforms over PHP, at least not the ones I write. It's trivially easy to access data from a database in either scripting language and you can perform Perl-style regular expressions in PHP. The nice thing about PHP is that it's specifically designed for web applications and has simpler syntax in some situations. The downside to PHP is learning all of these functions that don't have a consistent pattern to them but, once you know them, you can accomplish a lot of tasks efficiently.
Am I missing something or was that not the best choice by your manager/boss? Why use Perl with inline C (esp. back then) rather than just writing a C/C++ program to do the job other than being told you had to use Perl?
Do'. I think I've not posted AC when I meant to once.
There's a huge diversity of Jews, at least in America. I'm sure there are many that aren't opposed to learning German so try to resist grouping them all together just as all Germans weren't Nazi sympathizers (especially ones that moved to America rather than the reverse). From the Germans I know (native Germans) it seems that they have a different perspective on what proportion of the population was Nazi sympathizers back then or, at the very least, think they were ignorant of what was happening to the Jews in their own country and what atrocities their army was doing which I find difficult to believe. At best the population was willfuly ignorant and, considering the huge proportion of the population involved in the war effort, it simply wouldn't be possible to be ignorant of what was going on. Maybe 50 years from now that will change just as atrocities by the US army against Native Americans are now fully accepted here 100-150 years after it happened (and accept that the US population was indifferent, at best, to what the army was doing).
It's not just Jews that can put you into a group you had nothing to do with. In late 2003 I went on a trip to the UK and while walking down the street with some American friends in London some guy came up to us saying something to the effect that we Americans were a bunch of concentration camp sympathizing Nazis. There's stupid people everywhere in every ethnicity.
Also consider from their point of view that one of the largest populations of Jews in Europe before WWII was in Germany and they very nearly got completely wiped out (I've seen estimates that over 90% of German-born Jews died in WWII). So, taking the hint, they don't have a strong interest in learning the language of the people that were so intent on (and effective at) exterminating them just a few generations ago. To this day there are still very, very few Jews living permanently in Germany with no concentrated populations anywhere as far as I know.
This is a subject that can easily (perhaps most easily) spiral into a flame war. I think the grandparent poster was trying to be as inoffensive as possible but, of course, failed to not offend everyone. He wasn't defending what happened in Germany, just saying there are racists everywhere so there really isn't anything ironic about the post he was responding to.
I disagree with him though because the Germans weren't merely racist but wanted to build a 'master race' and genetics was a big part of it so yes, there is more irony that such a gene would be found there than in other countries.
I don't know if I would say 'better'. It's certainly a good complement though. Reading can open up new concepts and worlds to the reader. Art is a way for them to explore these ideas and come up with new ones.
As a kid I was a voracious reader, started programming in BASIC on a Tandy hooked up to the family TV when I was 6 and had a Nintendo as well. I would say I spent the most time reading followed by about a tie between programming and playing Tandy and Nintendo games (and yes, I went outside to bike to a nearby lake to swim--I was probably much less pasty then than I am now). They all compelement each other and I wouldn't say one is necessarily better than the other because you're using your brain in different ways in each activity.
She wasn't comparing playing games to watching TV but to reading books.
While there is problem solving and such playing games I find that I'm usually thinking more abstract concepts and higher order thoughts when reading interesting books so I can see her point.
To me, the key is moderation, especially with playing video games.
This is a great way to try to understand a difficult code base. I once checked out a rather large program from CVS and made a branch for myself. After running Doxygen I was able to get an initial understanding of the organization of the code (which happened to be rather awful). I then went through the headers adding my own Doxygen comments where I understood their function. After a week or two of this I had a pretty good understanding of most of the functions in the program (at least, well enough that I knew where to look if something went wrong or needed modification). It was only about 60,000 lines of code, but it was almost 100% technical math/scientific code with no equations commented anywhere (written by scientists with apparently little understanding of object-oriented approaches to programming).
Hi Anubi. I just noticed that you left a journal entry for people to write back to you. However, you need to make a new journal entry from time to time because slashdot closes stale discussions (after a week or two I think).
2) Both Tiger Woods and Steven Spielberg have worked extremely hard for little or no pay at all before they reached the threshold needed to become international stars. Also, they have taken a great risk as they could well both have become under achievers in the field of sports and arts, which aren't exactly reliable income sources.
What a horrible example. Tiger Woods was born to a rich family. His father had custom clubs made for him so that he could start playing golf as soon as he could walk (I kid you not). He started making an income from golf before being old enough to go to college. In addition, he was a child prodigy. From his wikipedia article:
At age three, Woods shot a 48 over nine holes at the Navy Golf Club in Cypress, California, and at age five, he appeared in Golf Digest and on ABC's That's Incredible. In 1984 at the age of eight he won the 9-10 boys' event, the youngest age group available, at the Junior World Golf Championships.He never lost growing up so I don't think there was much risk on his part in choosing golf as a career. If things didn't pan out (highly, highly unlikely), he could have always fallen back on his family's wealth.
Steven Spielberg was also born to a rich family. It's not as much risk to work for peanuts when your family can back you up if things don't work out. Hence the inherent advantage of being lucky and being born to a rich family versus a poor one. How many international sports stars in sports like tennis or golf were born to poor families? Very, very few.
As for your arguments about the free market, that's exactly what the US had before passing the sixteenth amendment. It got to the point that individuals such as Cornelius Vanderbilt were more powerful than much of the government and could even afford to control their own cities, enforcing poor working conditions with their own private police force. And if you thought Bill Gates was bad, he had nothing on these guys as far as crooked business practices are concerned.
The reason the 16th amendment was able to pass was because the public was fed up with the enormous income discrepancy between the majority of the population and the incredibly wealthy and perceived this tax as a way to redistribute the wealth (which it initially did and still does to this day to a much lesser extent). To get a feel for what it was like, try searching for 'sixteenth amendment' and similar on the New York Times archive. Any article before about 1930 (I think) is free to view in PDF format.Why should the parent post by me be modded down? Because you disagree with me?
The original purpose of taxes at the federal level were to repay war debts from the Civil War. After these debts were paid the federal income tax was repealed, only to be reinstated a couple of decades later in 1894 (although this was blocked by the US Supreme Court until the 16th amendment was passed). The 16th amendment was specifically passed to redistribute wealth, with tax rates of 73% for the wealthiest shortly after the amendment was passed.
One thing I think people who always scream for lower taxes is that they are very much ignorant of the history of taxes (and of wealth distribution) in the US. According to this article by the New York Times in 1922:
The United States has levied higher income taxes than any other country in the world, and those taxes have probably been more completely paid than in any other country.Despite this, the US experienced a remarkable decade of growth and prosperity until the crash of '29 (due to a public lack of confidence in banks and lack of regulation for seedy stock companies).
We now have the lowest tax rates among industrialized countries in the world and yet people still want them lower. I bet most have never lived in one of the other industrialized countries where tax rates are much higher or know anything about their economies. Countries such as the Netherlands have a much stronger economy than here with far superior public services and infrastructure. Their people are healthier than ones here as well.
Wrong the IRS only contributes a portion of the federal governments budget.
No, I am not wrong. I did not say that the IRS provides all of the federal income, just most of it. In fact, it provides nearly all of the federal budget and has done so continously since 1894 (although at that time I don't know if it funded the majority of the federal budget or not). For a summary of the federal income for 2007, see this page. For more references, see the links at the bottom of this article. If you really want to see the details, check out the offical 2008 budget which is online. I believe you meant to say that personal income taxes only provide 40% of the federal income, not the IRS. The IRS collects income from corporate sources as well, which is another 13%. I believe social insurance tax funels through the IRS as well which is another 32% of the federal income. The only money the federal government receives from other sources (such as tarifs and US Treasury securities to pay for the federal deficit) only adds up to 12% of the income.
I don't feel like nor have the time to debate the effectiviness of the FED here. If you want to see my side of the argument, read Alan Greenspan's book 'The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World'.
People always believe things are more efficient at the local level which, while usually true, is not always the case. For example, a ton of money was given by the federal government to Louisiana after Katrina. This money had almost no strings attached so the state and city of New Orleans could do with it as they wished. What happened? Due to lax oversight and local corruption the money went to various projects that had nothing to do with getting people back home or rebuilding the community.
One thing most people forget about the federal budget is that most of the 'pork' is in the form of earmarks distributed at the local level. Larger, federal programs have much stronger auditing and oversight that prevent spending irregularities. And Ron Paul was one of the biggest beneficiaries of earmarks, receiving millions of dollars over the years for his district (see his interview on Meet the Press for details).
One major problem with cutbacks to the federal budget is that spending oversight (by auditors) is usually cut in higher proportions than the federal budget. I have a friend that has worked as a contract auditor for the feds for 7 years or so. In those 7 years their workload has quadrupled due to downsizing. How can they possibly achieve the same level of oversight with such little manpower?
Then what? Do you think that by removing government that will automatically 'fix' everything?
So in short, if a guy is 70, poor, living off of social security and live in Mississippi, he's screwed and that's fine with you, right? And if the guy was 60, approaching retirement he'd have no choice but to work until he died since there would be no possibility of retirement and living off of social security. In the US Declaration of Independence you will find the phrase: " All have right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". How the heck can one do this if they were unlucky enough to be born poor and have no hope of attending college to be eligible for better jobs and not be able to afford their own health care?
The government exists to solve problems people cannot solve on their own. Removing the current solutions provided by the government without offering any alternative seems ridiculous from my point of view. By abolishing all of the functions of government you mentioned you will surely 'fix' what ever problem created by these programs. However, each program was formed to solve other problems that will now need to be redressed and would surely cause additional problems due to the strong rippling effect it would have on the rest of government.
If you go to Disneyland and take pictures of Mickey and friends, that's not a problem - you create the photo, you own the copyright.
However, if you take that picture and slap it onto product (calendar, mug, tshirt, etc.) for SALE, then yes it violates Disney's TRADEMARK rights - they have the sole discretion to decide how they want to sell their brand.
Even though we may not like it, I'm pretty sure the parent post is correct. If a company owns a trademark for a product they have quite a bit of legal power to protect their product's likeness from being used for profit by other organizations. There are exceptions for parody and news but not too many others AFAIK.
Well, the author of the study was specifically referring to the house of representatives. The electoral college is only used when electing the president (duh) whereas the house is responsible for many other activities other than just determining how many electors each state gets. Also, the imbalance of the additional two senators is by design. The logic behind the electoral college was to allow small states to have a disproportionate part of the vote so that their voice wouldn't be drowned out by large states. So one part of the electoral college is supposed to proportionately represent the population which is the part the mathematician focuses on.
Ummm, I only see one representative listed for Wyoming on the official US House of Representatives website. The guy wasn't suggesting adding representatives to Wyoming, but to Montana and some other states. Montana had a population of 902,195 in the 2000 census and 1 representative. That works out to a voting power of 0.00011% per person in Montana. California had a population of 33,871,648 and has 53 representatives (0.000156% per person).
His model wasn't trying to be fair, just less unfair. To be fair Wyoming would either need a fractional vote or the size of the House would have to be increased until each person in the house represented about 500,000 people. Since this isn't possible from his model's point of view he does the next best thing (removing votes from large states that have fewer people per representative to smaller states that currently have more people per representative).
With that said, I agree that small states don't need more representation in the House. They are more than adequately compensated by having 2 votes in the Senate. To put in perspective how powerful that is, imagine that even if San Francisco had 2 senators the Wyoming senators would still be representing fewer people. San Francisco has a population of about 750,000 (4th largest in California) vs. the population of 500,000 for the entire state of Wyoming.
Sorry, it was moderated informative and I often forget about things like sarcasm :).
If you want a flying car, you should want a computer to run it. Unless you have been flying in commercial jets since before the early 70s you have always been flying in computer-controlled airplanes. Sure, the pilot can override the computer but he relies on it on every flight and interacting with the computer is a significant part of the training of any commercial pilot.
If people want to safely fly to work without many hours of costly training they will require computer-controlled flying vehicles. It's simply too complicated and dangerous for people to just 'pick it up'. Also, maintenance is a critical component to flying. If you have a mechanical failure in the air, you have a good chance of getting hurt or dying (much, much more so than when you are driving around). I'm glad flying isn't very common given how many idiots there are out there. I was just talking to some car mechanics today who told me about a woman who drove around with the oil light on for two weeks (until the engine burned itself out). And I'm sure anyone viewing this post can think of other things people have done to ruin perfectly good vehicles due to nothing but their own ignorance and/or stupidity. If they had similarly ruined their engine in flight they very well could have died.
I know about that car. That guy has been working on it for years (I first read about it years ago in Popular Science). As I said, I don't believe there will be a mass-produced flying car, not a flying car whatsoever. I've already seen a flying car in person on a couple of occasions (both had detachable wings). One was a really cool looking Lotus that had been modified but was still a perfectly working car. Some very rich family had it made for them and flew it to the Oshkosh air show back in 2002. I recall reading about that car you are referring to years even before that. The other flying car I saw was at a museum. It was a modified car with detachable wings that some guy made back in the 50s or 60s I think.
You don't say that the vehicle you are referring to gets 20mpg at 200mph and the link doesn't say at what speed it gets 20mpg. I think he's only ever made one or two of those cars at great cost and I strongly doubt that he could ever make these cost-effective enough or reliable enough for average people (4 engines=4 times as much maintenance not to mention initial cost, instability if one engine fails, etc.). If you're rich you can buy a flying car that is not as efficient at flying as a normal airplane nor a car that's as efficient on the road as other cars, but that's been the case for decades. The vehicle you refer to uses 4 turbine engines. Each engine costs more than most cars. Thus, the list price for the vehicle is nearly one million dollars. You don't mass-produce million-dollar private vehicles. It is a neat vehicle I'll admit, just way too expensive and complicated for the average person.
The technology not only exists for autonomous cars, but have been implemented in various forms already. California made a special HOV lane 10 years ago that allowed specially equipped cars to drive themselves in those lanes close to each other. The project was apparently abandoned due to political pressure, not due to technical reasons.
There will not be a mass-produced flying car though. That simply requires too much energy and we have a large enough energy problem as it is. Unless you want to use a derigible there is drag induced just by the act of flying which causes an additional amount of energy to be consumed as opposed to staying on the ground.
For the electronics part, start with Radio Shack. They have several simple books to get you started with hobby electronics. I once knew a very intelligent electrical engineer who first became enamored with electronics by doing exactly that and still recommended it as a good way of getting into electronics without getting overwhelmed. If you ever want to gain even more practical knowledge about electronics I would recommend the ARRL handbook (used by ham radio operators everywhere).
If I thought the hi-def format war was over and HD-DVD was the winner I would buy a HD-DVD add-on to my 360 immediately. But since the war doesn't seem over yet I've been holding off. It would be the most economical way of buying a hi-def player if I were so inclined since I already own the 360.
And don't forget cost. My company has a network of about 9 GPS stations and only one of them uses a choke ring due to the cost. We only used it there because it was on top of a flat, reflective roof and needed some help to mitigate multipath.
Hmmm, that's odd. I would expect to see this behavior if the GPS was trying to resolve the integeter ambiguity of the phase measurement. Survey-quality receivers do this by using both GPS frequencies in combination with corrections from a reference GPS receiver at a previously surveyed position. Any GPS can trivially determine the fraction of the phase cycle between it and the satellite but must determine the number of cycles via statistical methods using good quality measurements and initial guesses. If this number is estimated correctly, the distance between the satellite and receiver is known to within a couple of centimeters instantaneously.
These integer ambiguities are solved for at least 4 satellites simultaneously. There are always several combination of cycle counts that will result in a good position. However, these candidates may be several meters apart. If the initial guess is wrong, it may be several minutes before a new candidate is chosen and then the switch is instantaneous (hence the jump you observed).
I didn't think a consumer single-frequency receiver could do this, even with WAAS. I would expect a single-frequency receiver to simply drift around the true position without any sudden jumps (assuming there are at least 5 satellites visible at any given point in time and there aren't any strong reflectors nearby--such as a tall building). I know consumer units take phase measurements, but all of the ones I've seen have had rather poor measurement quality due mainly to the cheap antennas they use (survey quality GPS antennas are at least 8 inches in diameter and cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars if they use a choke ring to mitigate multipath).