You must never have worked for a large corporation. Exactly this kind of stuff goes on. And there, too, the activity does not need to be effective, it only needs to look effective--- clients, like voters, aren't very smart.
Usually, yes, though in scientific publishing it's getting more common to retain at least large chunks of your *TeX formatting. It's extremely expensive and error-prone to retype/retypeset technical manuscripts in a way that doesn't introduce errors, and many publishing houses are finding it easier to ask authors for TeX manuscripts than to pay quality technical typesetters. In mathematics in particular it's become more or less required for authors to provide TeX manuscripts, which are used as the basis for the final book, since publishers no longer retain much in the way of mathematical typesetting experts on staff. Same with figures--- you used to include data tables and a rough sketch of a proposed figure, and the publisher would hire a technical artist to produce the final graph. These days you're often expected to provide your own "camera-ready" figure in matplotlib or similar.
Judiciously putting in linebreaks (and properly aligning stuff after doing so) makes it easier to understand and analyze code imo, since it's easy to see what's grouped with what, instead of a giant series of chained and nested function calls on one line. Same reason, though to a lesser extent, that you use multiple lines in the first place, instead of writing your C code as:
int foo(int a, char b) { int temp = 2 * process(a); char bar = do_something(temp, b); return (b == bar) ? hmm(bar) : harumph(baz); }
I could buy that statements are often a natural place to break lines, especially in very statement-oriented languages like C, but sometimes it's useful to use additional linebreaks within a statement if it's particularly complex and has natural parts to break on.
There are actually quite a lot there anyway, though. One of the two main Amazon EC2 datacenters in the U.S. is in the Bay Area, for example (the other one is in Northern Virginia). There's a ton of other data centers in San Jose and Fremont as well.
There've been experimental uses of this kind of thing since the 1990s. The AutoLITT system mentioned in this mini-article, and Visualase are two commercial systems. There've been some preliminary clinical trials as well.
Time-of-day metering isn't available yet in the vast majority of the U.S., though rollouts are increasing. They're not always day-to-night types of programs, though. For example, the "critical peak pricing" program that PG&E is going to roll out in California (initially voluntarily) will let people get slightly cheaper normal usage in return for large surcharges during critical power shortage events. So there still wouldn't really be a day/night difference on normal days, because the main goal of the program is to push down peak demand on a few hot afternoons a year.
A pure commuter EV doesn't seem bad as a starting point. There are plenty of families with one small around-town car and one bigger one for trips; you could replace the around-town car with an EV.
How do you think the cops got 1,2 billion dollar Canadian to protect Toronto in June ?
It's possible they're genuinely worried, but I personally see it as more opportunist--- some stories about scary anarchists in black masks are great for funneling money to the security/contractor complex.
If you imagine watching him post in slow-motion in a stage production, then the part where he started typing "Shery..." was a scene with dramatic irony, because the audience knew he was about to complete a tragic error, whereas the character himself was unaware.
Electric space heaters aren't actually illegal though, even in the EU, though their use is restricted in some kinds of buildings due to fire-hazard concern.
That's what happens in a free market that allows exclusivity contracts. If entity A signs an exclusive contract with entity B, then you as entity C can no longer provide services covered by that contract to entity A, until the exclusive deal expires or is cancelled.
That was a SomethingAwful practice that 4chan later picked up, iirc. Possibly predates SA as well, but I think they popularized it on webforums, at least.
He now does commonsense-reasoning stuff at IBM Research using formal logic, but back in his grad-school days, Erik Mueller wrote a thesis on building a computational model of daydreaming.
Unless you're running a cost-free operation, with no employees, servers, or bandwidth, gross revenues are not equal to profit. Say that you have a low-cost operation and 70% of gross revenues are profit, though. That means that the recording industry wants a licensing fee of 2/3 of your profits? And even 70% is pretty good; it's not uncommon to be running profit margins that are 45% of revenues or less, in which case the recording industry would actually be taking all of your profit, plus possibly more.
The standard generalization is that conservatives like the 2nd Amendment, the restrictions-on-eminent-domain part of the 5th amendment, and sometimes the 1st; while liberals like the 4th amendment, the criminal-defendant-rights part of the 5th amendment, the 6th, 7th, and 8th, and sometimes the 1st.
Yeah, that's true, though some of the European countries aren't as generous for the very poor as one might think. North Europe tends to have free-for-everyone type plans, but Spain, for example, doesn't: the national health plan is only open to those who are employed, because it's paid for out of a tax on the employer (or a tax on the individual for the self-employed). People who lose their jobs still get it for a while if they're on unemployment benefits, but long-term unemployed people, like the homeless, get only US-style health insurance: just enough in the emergency room to keep you from dying.
Sadly that 1-in-7 figure isn't actually that out of line for first-world countries. A handful have very low poverty rates, but quite a few are comparable to the U.S.: Canada is around 12% (though Stats Canada refuses to calculate an official poverty rate), Belgium is around 15%, Spain is around 20%, the UK is around 14%, Germany is around 13-15% (lower in former West Germany, higher in former East Germany), etc. It is true that Sweden, France, and Norway are considerably lower, due largely to generous cash transfer payments.
To expand a bit, a very interesting way of experiencing this: I'm an American, but I frequently travel with non-American friends and colleagues to third countries, to attend academic conferences. It's sometimes embarrassing how much more interest I get than my colleagues. People have all sorts of questions/comments about the US, have a relative there, want to know if I've been somewhere, want to know what I think about movie-X, want to know what Americans think about their country, etc. But they don't have anywhere near that level of interest or questions for my Argentinian or Indian friends, besides some awkward small talk ("ah yes, Argentina, you are neighbors with Chile, right?").
This isn't really true, in my experience, due to the US's superpower role and especially its cultural exports. Whether it's what people are discussing on a daily basis, or what you find in newspapers, the US has a large role in a lot of countries, and gets treated much differently than just another random country with 5% of the world's population. Ask someone in Greece or Egypt what they think about the US, and what they think about Indonesia, and you get a lot more opinions about the US.
That's a pretty decent idea imo--- if you provided an explicit outlet for people to express agreement/disagreement they might be less tempted to misuse the rating for that purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
You must never have worked for a large corporation. Exactly this kind of stuff goes on. And there, too, the activity does not need to be effective, it only needs to look effective--- clients, like voters, aren't very smart.
Usually, yes, though in scientific publishing it's getting more common to retain at least large chunks of your *TeX formatting. It's extremely expensive and error-prone to retype/retypeset technical manuscripts in a way that doesn't introduce errors, and many publishing houses are finding it easier to ask authors for TeX manuscripts than to pay quality technical typesetters. In mathematics in particular it's become more or less required for authors to provide TeX manuscripts, which are used as the basis for the final book, since publishers no longer retain much in the way of mathematical typesetting experts on staff. Same with figures--- you used to include data tables and a rough sketch of a proposed figure, and the publisher would hire a technical artist to produce the final graph. These days you're often expected to provide your own "camera-ready" figure in matplotlib or similar.
Judiciously putting in linebreaks (and properly aligning stuff after doing so) makes it easier to understand and analyze code imo, since it's easy to see what's grouped with what, instead of a giant series of chained and nested function calls on one line. Same reason, though to a lesser extent, that you use multiple lines in the first place, instead of writing your C code as:
int foo(int a, char b) { int temp = 2 * process(a); char bar = do_something(temp, b); return (b == bar) ? hmm(bar) : harumph(baz); }
I could buy that statements are often a natural place to break lines, especially in very statement-oriented languages like C, but sometimes it's useful to use additional linebreaks within a statement if it's particularly complex and has natural parts to break on.
There are actually quite a lot there anyway, though. One of the two main Amazon EC2 datacenters in the U.S. is in the Bay Area, for example (the other one is in Northern Virginia). There's a ton of other data centers in San Jose and Fremont as well.
There've been experimental uses of this kind of thing since the 1990s. The AutoLITT system mentioned in this mini-article, and Visualase are two commercial systems. There've been some preliminary clinical trials as well.
Time-of-day metering isn't available yet in the vast majority of the U.S., though rollouts are increasing. They're not always day-to-night types of programs, though. For example, the "critical peak pricing" program that PG&E is going to roll out in California (initially voluntarily) will let people get slightly cheaper normal usage in return for large surcharges during critical power shortage events. So there still wouldn't really be a day/night difference on normal days, because the main goal of the program is to push down peak demand on a few hot afternoons a year.
A pure commuter EV doesn't seem bad as a starting point. There are plenty of families with one small around-town car and one bigger one for trips; you could replace the around-town car with an EV.
How do you think the cops got 1,2 billion dollar Canadian to protect Toronto in June ?
It's possible they're genuinely worried, but I personally see it as more opportunist--- some stories about scary anarchists in black masks are great for funneling money to the security/contractor complex.
Which revolution did those protests successfully pull off? Did the 1999 protests in Seattle even meaningfully slow down the WTO, much less kill it?
If you imagine watching him post in slow-motion in a stage production, then the part where he started typing "Shery..." was a scene with dramatic irony, because the audience knew he was about to complete a tragic error, whereas the character himself was unaware.
Electric space heaters aren't actually illegal though, even in the EU, though their use is restricted in some kinds of buildings due to fire-hazard concern.
That's what happens in a free market that allows exclusivity contracts. If entity A signs an exclusive contract with entity B, then you as entity C can no longer provide services covered by that contract to entity A, until the exclusive deal expires or is cancelled.
That was a SomethingAwful practice that 4chan later picked up, iirc. Possibly predates SA as well, but I think they popularized it on webforums, at least.
Yeah, 70% is pretty absurd, but you can definitely beat 10%, especially in tech. Google makes about 30-35% of revenues as profit, for example.
He now does commonsense-reasoning stuff at IBM Research using formal logic, but back in his grad-school days, Erik Mueller wrote a thesis on building a computational model of daydreaming.
Unless you're running a cost-free operation, with no employees, servers, or bandwidth, gross revenues are not equal to profit. Say that you have a low-cost operation and 70% of gross revenues are profit, though. That means that the recording industry wants a licensing fee of 2/3 of your profits? And even 70% is pretty good; it's not uncommon to be running profit margins that are 45% of revenues or less, in which case the recording industry would actually be taking all of your profit, plus possibly more.
The standard generalization is that conservatives like the 2nd Amendment, the restrictions-on-eminent-domain part of the 5th amendment, and sometimes the 1st; while liberals like the 4th amendment, the criminal-defendant-rights part of the 5th amendment, the 6th, 7th, and 8th, and sometimes the 1st.
Yeah, that's true, though some of the European countries aren't as generous for the very poor as one might think. North Europe tends to have free-for-everyone type plans, but Spain, for example, doesn't: the national health plan is only open to those who are employed, because it's paid for out of a tax on the employer (or a tax on the individual for the self-employed). People who lose their jobs still get it for a while if they're on unemployment benefits, but long-term unemployed people, like the homeless, get only US-style health insurance: just enough in the emergency room to keep you from dying.
I particularly like its creative take on counting unread messages...
Wasn't it only the G5, at the end of Apple's PPC run, that was based on the POWER platform? My understanding is that the G3/G4 weren't POWER-based.
Sadly that 1-in-7 figure isn't actually that out of line for first-world countries. A handful have very low poverty rates, but quite a few are comparable to the U.S.: Canada is around 12% (though Stats Canada refuses to calculate an official poverty rate), Belgium is around 15%, Spain is around 20%, the UK is around 14%, Germany is around 13-15% (lower in former West Germany, higher in former East Germany), etc. It is true that Sweden, France, and Norway are considerably lower, due largely to generous cash transfer payments.
To expand a bit, a very interesting way of experiencing this: I'm an American, but I frequently travel with non-American friends and colleagues to third countries, to attend academic conferences. It's sometimes embarrassing how much more interest I get than my colleagues. People have all sorts of questions/comments about the US, have a relative there, want to know if I've been somewhere, want to know what I think about movie-X, want to know what Americans think about their country, etc. But they don't have anywhere near that level of interest or questions for my Argentinian or Indian friends, besides some awkward small talk ("ah yes, Argentina, you are neighbors with Chile, right?").
This isn't really true, in my experience, due to the US's superpower role and especially its cultural exports. Whether it's what people are discussing on a daily basis, or what you find in newspapers, the US has a large role in a lot of countries, and gets treated much differently than just another random country with 5% of the world's population. Ask someone in Greece or Egypt what they think about the US, and what they think about Indonesia, and you get a lot more opinions about the US.
The doom and gloom prophecies for fish-stock collapses, at least, are pretty much already halfway through panning out.
That's a pretty decent idea imo--- if you provided an explicit outlet for people to express agreement/disagreement they might be less tempted to misuse the rating for that purpose.