No, the term for that collection of countries is "Nordic countries". Finland isn't culturally/linguistically Scandinavian, though it is Nordic. (Except for the small Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, which is linguistically Scandinavian.)
Really depends on your lifestyle. I've lived in the U.S. and Scandinavia, and my cost of living is lower in Scandinavia even in nominal dollar terms, despite the official cost-of-living calculators saying it should be higher. For other people I can imagine it'd be higher, for others even lower still.
Partly it's because CoL calculators look at like-for-like good prices. Those are typically more expensive in Scandinavia, but then people don't buy like-for-like goods. As an example, I had to have a car when I lived in California. I don't really like cars, and didn't enjoy having and maintaining one, but it was a necessity to get around, because the public transit was not very good. Now, I don't have a car. Not only do I like this situation better, but it's much much cheaper: I pay $50/mo for a transit pass, while I used to pay an amortized ~$200-300/mo for my car, once you add up car payment, gas, maintenance, insurance, etc. That's an annual $2k+ in extra disposable income for me.
Scandinavia is an even better deal if you have kids or are going to soon. You get paid maternity & paternity leave, subsidized childcare, and you don't have to save up to put them through college, because universities don't charge tuition.
I agree language is an issue, especially to learn it to a professional level (much harder than learning enough German to order in a restaurant). But in some countries you can get a job in English no problem. The UK, as you might guess, is such a country. Most engineering firms in Scandinavia are also happy to hire English-speakers.
Even here they don't seem to be claiming it was $3m in W2 income. Most likely scenario is that it's an early-ish Google employee who effectively makes $3m/yr as his old stock/option grants vest.
The jump to python 3.0 is a little tricky because some code is not compatible (which is why we still have 2.x) so there's lots of software that would break if people upgrade.
That much is true, but I read this post as just calling for support for pre-2.7 Python to be dropped, not all of 2.x. Upgrading to 2.7 doesn't introduce the kind of incompatibility that upgrading to 3.0 does.
Leaving aside the (also interesting) question of whether the law as written is a good or bad idea, the sanction doesn't seem to make any sense. Google changed its privacy policy in 2012, in a way that a French court finds doesn't comply with French law. As a result, they must 1) pay 150,000 euros; and 2) publicize a notice on google.fr for 48 hours. But after that, they can keep the offending policy? Seems like a strange law that you can just continue to ignore with a one-time sanction.
Trying to get them to follow any kind of IT policy is nearly futile as well. Many recognize the need for an IT policy in the abstract, and will be happy to sign off on something that the average worker has to follow, but they see themselves as a special case that needs more freedom to operate as they see fit.
One caveat to going this route: if the algorithm contains well-known operations as building blocks, you probably don't want to synthesize your own VHDL versions of those standard operations, since they already have highly optimized hardware implementations. For example, if one step of the algorithm is "compute an FFT", you probably want to use an existing FFT IP core to implements it, rather than translating some FFT C code to new VHDL.
At one extreme, where the algorithm is nothing but a chain of such cores (common in DSP applications), you could get a rough estimate just by looking up the gate counts for each operation and adding them up.
I don't think I've ever run across a person with extreme-left-wing politics in the U.S., oddly enough. I've met a few communists, but they're all Europeans.
That seems true of just about any general news website I've visited. Especially local newspapers (even in liberal areas!) seem to have comments dominated by rather extreme-conservative commenters.
It's a sign of movement in the right direction, but unfortunately Washington's law, as it currently stands, doesn't really target this problem. The only thing that was legalized in WA is possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. Possession of larger quantities, not to mention growing or sale of any quantity, is still illegal. With consumer-level possession legal but production, distribution, and sale illegal, that doesn't really do much to harm the drug smugglers' business. To undercut the Mexican smugglers, we have to make it legal to grow and sell domestically, so there is no reason to import it from Mexico.
No, if I release content into the public domain, a downstream user can still add proprietary extensions to it, and then sue reusers who use that fork without a icense. I'd like to license my software under a license that allows downstream users to do anything they want, except sue another downstream user.
I'd personally like something freer than both GPL and BSD: a license that lets you do anything you want, except sue a downstream user of the software for copyright infringement. GPL lets you sue someone if they don't comply with precise release semantics, and BSD lets you sue someone if they use your "proprietary extensions" without a license from you. A free license would ensure that downstream users cannot be sued. The only freedom that license would take away is the freedom to sue other people, which is not a freedom worth retaining.
From a technical perspective I like LLVM, but I don't get the appeal of your 2nd point. Why should I work for free on a project in order to enable companies to make proprietary extensions to it that they won't release back to the community? The GPL makes me more willing to contribute to projects, because it ensures that everyone plays fair, so to speak: I'm adding my contributions, and if you find the results valuable and extend my work, you should do likewise.
Although I have nothing against the swiss army knife as a manual subtractive 3d-printer for cellulosic media, this kind of 3d printing really doesn't work for situations where you need thin and flexible output. For that I've been looking into a new DIY additive 3d-printing device that is quite promising. The preliminary results are durable enough that they even stand up to extended daily usage in the wearable-technology vertical.
I'd also never heard of them, but it does appear to be legit. However the full effects of the chemicals don't seem to be known: the research I can dig up in a quick search suggests that cafestol, for example, elevates cholesterol but also might reduce cancer risk. How that nets out in terms of actual net impact on lifespan doesn't seem to be known.
It appears these compounds exist in anything except paper-filter coffee: Turkish coffee, espresso, French press, etc.
Some key features of "gold standard" clinical trials: 1) large enough sample size to draw statistically significant conclusions; 2) real illnesses, not a simulated laboratory setting; 3) a double-blind control group; and 4) long enough duration to measure real-world outcomes.
The programming-languages version would be to have teams randomly assigned to perform major (6+ month) programming projects in different languages, and then see their outcomes. For example, 40 game studios will continue to write their games in C++ as the control group, while you'll have the other 40 write them in Haskell. You probably want to iterate a few times as well to make sure that there's no first-game-in-a-new-language effect and to ensure that everyone is actually knowledgeable in the language being tested.
Oh, and it should be blind, so neither the teams nor the researchers know which language they're using.
I agree that the word "creative" is usually questionable, but in my mind procedural generation of game content (levels, characters, dialog, trees,...) versus procedural generation of game rules is an interesting difference. There is definitely some gray area between them, but I think they aren't identical either.
One practical difference is that doing rule-generation well seems harder. There are some very good level generators, but I have yet to see a truly impressive rule-generation system. There are a number of attempts, of which the most successful to date is probably Ludi, a system that successfully designed a board game that seems to be considered legit in the community of people that play that particular type of board game. But that's a far cry from full game design.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the term for that collection of countries is "Nordic countries". Finland isn't culturally/linguistically Scandinavian, though it is Nordic. (Except for the small Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, which is linguistically Scandinavian.)
Really depends on your lifestyle. I've lived in the U.S. and Scandinavia, and my cost of living is lower in Scandinavia even in nominal dollar terms, despite the official cost-of-living calculators saying it should be higher. For other people I can imagine it'd be higher, for others even lower still.
Partly it's because CoL calculators look at like-for-like good prices. Those are typically more expensive in Scandinavia, but then people don't buy like-for-like goods. As an example, I had to have a car when I lived in California. I don't really like cars, and didn't enjoy having and maintaining one, but it was a necessity to get around, because the public transit was not very good. Now, I don't have a car. Not only do I like this situation better, but it's much much cheaper: I pay $50/mo for a transit pass, while I used to pay an amortized ~$200-300/mo for my car, once you add up car payment, gas, maintenance, insurance, etc. That's an annual $2k+ in extra disposable income for me.
Scandinavia is an even better deal if you have kids or are going to soon. You get paid maternity & paternity leave, subsidized childcare, and you don't have to save up to put them through college, because universities don't charge tuition.
Finland isn't part of Scandinavia...
I agree language is an issue, especially to learn it to a professional level (much harder than learning enough German to order in a restaurant). But in some countries you can get a job in English no problem. The UK, as you might guess, is such a country. Most engineering firms in Scandinavia are also happy to hire English-speakers.
Even here they don't seem to be claiming it was $3m in W2 income. Most likely scenario is that it's an early-ish Google employee who effectively makes $3m/yr as his old stock/option grants vest.
Debian stable was on older Pythons until recently also, but Debian 7.0 (released May 2013) now has 2.7 default.
The jump to python 3.0 is a little tricky because some code is not compatible (which is why we still have 2.x) so there's lots of software that would break if people upgrade.
That much is true, but I read this post as just calling for support for pre-2.7 Python to be dropped, not all of 2.x. Upgrading to 2.7 doesn't introduce the kind of incompatibility that upgrading to 3.0 does.
Leaving aside the (also interesting) question of whether the law as written is a good or bad idea, the sanction doesn't seem to make any sense. Google changed its privacy policy in 2012, in a way that a French court finds doesn't comply with French law. As a result, they must 1) pay 150,000 euros; and 2) publicize a notice on google.fr for 48 hours. But after that, they can keep the offending policy? Seems like a strange law that you can just continue to ignore with a one-time sanction.
Trying to get them to follow any kind of IT policy is nearly futile as well. Many recognize the need for an IT policy in the abstract, and will be happy to sign off on something that the average worker has to follow, but they see themselves as a special case that needs more freedom to operate as they see fit.
"Stars with degenerate neutron cores", Astrophysical Journal, 1977.
Courtesy of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, an open-access digital library that other fields could do well to emulate...
One caveat to going this route: if the algorithm contains well-known operations as building blocks, you probably don't want to synthesize your own VHDL versions of those standard operations, since they already have highly optimized hardware implementations. For example, if one step of the algorithm is "compute an FFT", you probably want to use an existing FFT IP core to implements it, rather than translating some FFT C code to new VHDL.
At one extreme, where the algorithm is nothing but a chain of such cores (common in DSP applications), you could get a rough estimate just by looking up the gate counts for each operation and adding them up.
Recent measurements estimate that 10 +/- 20 asteroids may be commercially viable to mine!
I don't think I've ever run across a person with extreme-left-wing politics in the U.S., oddly enough. I've met a few communists, but they're all Europeans.
That seems true of just about any general news website I've visited. Especially local newspapers (even in liberal areas!) seem to have comments dominated by rather extreme-conservative commenters.
It's a sign of movement in the right direction, but unfortunately Washington's law, as it currently stands, doesn't really target this problem. The only thing that was legalized in WA is possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. Possession of larger quantities, not to mention growing or sale of any quantity, is still illegal. With consumer-level possession legal but production, distribution, and sale illegal, that doesn't really do much to harm the drug smugglers' business. To undercut the Mexican smugglers, we have to make it legal to grow and sell domestically, so there is no reason to import it from Mexico.
No, if I release content into the public domain, a downstream user can still add proprietary extensions to it, and then sue reusers who use that fork without a icense. I'd like to license my software under a license that allows downstream users to do anything they want, except sue another downstream user.
I'd personally like something freer than both GPL and BSD: a license that lets you do anything you want, except sue a downstream user of the software for copyright infringement. GPL lets you sue someone if they don't comply with precise release semantics, and BSD lets you sue someone if they use your "proprietary extensions" without a license from you. A free license would ensure that downstream users cannot be sued. The only freedom that license would take away is the freedom to sue other people, which is not a freedom worth retaining.
From a technical perspective I like LLVM, but I don't get the appeal of your 2nd point. Why should I work for free on a project in order to enable companies to make proprietary extensions to it that they won't release back to the community? The GPL makes me more willing to contribute to projects, because it ensures that everyone plays fair, so to speak: I'm adding my contributions, and if you find the results valuable and extend my work, you should do likewise.
Does that make it the first compiler with full draft C++14 support? GCC is making progress but not there yet.
Although I have nothing against the swiss army knife as a manual subtractive 3d-printer for cellulosic media, this kind of 3d printing really doesn't work for situations where you need thin and flexible output. For that I've been looking into a new DIY additive 3d-printing device that is quite promising. The preliminary results are durable enough that they even stand up to extended daily usage in the wearable-technology vertical.
I'd also never heard of them, but it does appear to be legit. However the full effects of the chemicals don't seem to be known: the research I can dig up in a quick search suggests that cafestol, for example, elevates cholesterol but also might reduce cancer risk. How that nets out in terms of actual net impact on lifespan doesn't seem to be known.
It appears these compounds exist in anything except paper-filter coffee: Turkish coffee, espresso, French press, etc.
Some key features of "gold standard" clinical trials: 1) large enough sample size to draw statistically significant conclusions; 2) real illnesses, not a simulated laboratory setting; 3) a double-blind control group; and 4) long enough duration to measure real-world outcomes.
The programming-languages version would be to have teams randomly assigned to perform major (6+ month) programming projects in different languages, and then see their outcomes. For example, 40 game studios will continue to write their games in C++ as the control group, while you'll have the other 40 write them in Haskell. You probably want to iterate a few times as well to make sure that there's no first-game-in-a-new-language effect and to ensure that everyone is actually knowledgeable in the language being tested.
Oh, and it should be blind, so neither the teams nor the researchers know which language they're using.
I agree that the word "creative" is usually questionable, but in my mind procedural generation of game content (levels, characters, dialog, trees, ...) versus procedural generation of game rules is an interesting difference. There is definitely some gray area between them, but I think they aren't identical either.
One practical difference is that doing rule-generation well seems harder. There are some very good level generators, but I have yet to see a truly impressive rule-generation system. There are a number of attempts, of which the most successful to date is probably Ludi, a system that successfully designed a board game that seems to be considered legit in the community of people that play that particular type of board game. But that's a far cry from full game design.
we really have no idea
Surely what giraffe meat tastes like is still known to mankind; it's not like they're extinct or anything...
I guess calling it "socialist competition" is no longer fashionable...