Technically, you're not suppposed to do this. Components like this, along with things like batteries, aren't supposed to go to the normal dump. They're supposed to be hauled to a special sectioned off part of the dump, and the days during which you can do this are limited. This is true where I live, at least (Central Virginia).
Plus, my understanding is that outside of the States, regulations are even stricter. Of course, I've heard that in some countries, a recycling tax is added to items like computers, and the companies are thus responsible for the costs of safely disposing of/recycling the computers. Anyone who knows more about this care to share?
You will get paid what the market decides you are worth.
It's an employers market. Which means you will pretty much be paid crap if you quit. Employers know this; Congress knows this; the President knows this. In fact, it's pretty much the reason that all of this crap is able to happen: workers are far too busy working extra hours to keep from being canned to worry about being politically active. They have mortgages/rents to pay and kids (or at least themselves) to feed.
In the times to come, I predict that the worker will be increasingly squeezed. I mean, productivity has gone through the roof, but jobs have consistently been going down. What does this mean? It means that companies need to higher fewer people, which means that for each person working, they know that there are 10 people out there who want his/her job. So that person will work harder, won't ask for a raise, and certainly won't try to upset an employer by pointing out that s/he isn't being paid overtime.
In fact, we have a situation similar to the end of the 19th Century, with thousands of workers clamoring for factory jobs and being willing to stand for ungodly working conditions and low pay because the alternative was no job at all. The *only* thing keeping it from being that bad is *NOT* market forces, but rather a whole slew of governmental regulations that make sure a worker has acceptable working conditions. Those laws were passed as a result of political action by the labor movment. Tragically, the labor movement has now lost a great deal of it strength and credibility. We do need a similar movement however, to protect the rights of the workers and to re-assert the main goal of the United States: not to support the making of money and protections of corporations, but rather the livelihood and freedoms of its populace.
So what has to happen before the companies who write Tax Cut and TurboTax will do versions that least run under Wine, much less native Linux versions? What can we do to help make that happen?
The companies need to believe that they will make money if they release versions for Linux. Currently, there just aren't enough users who only use Linux to encourage tax program companies to devote resources to making compatible versions available.
Also, consider the Linux culture, which generally eschews proprietary software. It's pretty much impossible for a tax preparation sw company to release its source code, so you'd have to use binaries. That could lead to compatibility problems between different variants of Linux. The thing is, if you write an application for Windows, you mostly only have to worry about writing it for two flavors of Windows: 95/2000 and XP. It's a known quantity. At this point, most companies just have to change the rules from the previous years, and can keep most of the GUI and interfaces intact.
Right now, there are some 25 million Mac users (supposedly) in the US, and there's one (TurboTax) preparation software application available to them. I'm guessing there's far fewer than 100,000 users in the US who use Linux and a Linux-based desktop exclusively in their home, and a great many of these people use the Linux desktop because they don't want to spend any money on an OS. <joke>A good portion still live in their parent's basement, and don't have much of an income to speak of.</joke> All considered, 100,000 is a very low number.
If you have a file in AAC format, you got it through iTunes. And if you got it through iTunes, then you signed the User License, a legally binding agreement. Sure, you probably skimmed it because it's long, but that's expected, and it's legal. Part of the agreement no doubt said that you respect the DRM that exists in the files that you download.
So anyone using PlayFair to overcome the DRMs is essentially in breach of contract.
That all being said:
STOP COMPARING THIS TO MLK AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT!
Sorry for shouting, but this seriously has me PO'd. There's a huge difference from being banned from a restaurant because of the color of your skin, and being prevented from making unlimited copies of a song you like, or using that song wherever you want. I understand there are some usese of FairPlay that might fall under the traditional definition of Fair Use (perhaps!) but you all are kidding yourselves if you think that pissing and moaning about DRM is going to change anything.
If you want to effect real change, vote with your pocketbook. Stop buying new records especially at national chains. Go to local music stores and buy used CDs. Hell, buy vinyl. Only buy music that is made and distributed by independent labels.
And, while you're at it, take it upon yourself to do something good and worthwhile for the world -- help tutor someone, volunteer time at a soup kitchen, or even just talk to a friend who seems in the dumps. Surely there's something better to do than waste it arguing about whether or not Apple should be doing what it's doing.
Granted, any language can be misused to create horrible code, but with rapid development with template languages, you have to be careful not to let the ease and simplicity of the language lull you into poor programming.
In my experience, bad programming starts with the developer, not with the language. Languages that are more difficult to code in simply make the barrier to understanding a little higher, so they're *more likely* to be used by someone with good programming skills.
Remember: The main goal of programming is to ensure that the end result solves the problem presented. Elegant code that doesn't result in what you want is probably worse than slightly ugly looking code that actually works.
I've encountered plenty of programmers who are skilled at coding, but aren't good at paying attention to the needs of the project, so they spend time on the wrong elements, implement features that aren't needed, and omit features that are needed.
The advantage of more flexible coding (which is equally possible with ColdFusion as it is with a more complex language) is that it is faster to make changes to the system. If everything was hardcoded or overly-coupled, then changes will be difficult. However, for well coded ColdFusion applications, changes are very, very easy to make -- much easier than a similar implementation in a "real" language.
I've been coding in ColdFusion for a long time and I won't claim that I've never written bad code, but the language itself allows for applications that are very well written, robust, fast, and easy to update and change.
Fusebox is the most popular programming methodology for ColdFusion, and they have versions of it for PHP as well now. I'm not sure how well it works with PHP, but I do know that it does a fantastic job with ColdFusion.
Since no one was willing to pay for a tie-in between the OCR program and the application I developed
Although it's fairly trivial to create a function to export documents to RTF, it's not that trivial to import them. Plus, the documents may have had different sections that needed to be imported into different fields of the database.
To develop this system would have taken additional time, which the hospital did not want to pay for.
If the project went the way most do, it was already behind schedule and over budget, because people basically want to pay nothing for an application that does everything they want yesterday.
So, it's possible that the programmer suggested budgeting some time and money to implement this feature and the hospital said, "No, we'll just use the chumps, thanks". The intern developers were being paid so little, no doubt, that they would cost less than the amount it would cost to automate the system.
Plus, they might have been important in the past, but the UK is really very, very tiny. Whereas the US is very big.
Granted, Russia is larger, it takes up more of the world's surface, so it makes up more of the world by percentage of land. But its population is really tiny, and it has no money.
The combination of the US's population, land mass, and wealth makes it the best option for moon ownership.
There's no way that UK guy is legitimate. Your moon deeds aren't worth the cool looking pieces of paper they're printed on.
I think that owning moon real estate is a very cool idea.
However, there is just one problem: Imminent domain.
You see, the government can always say that they need the land for the "public good", and then they can just take it.
Personally, I think that the US should own the moon because, come on, like some other country can afford it? We have Walmart, what does Canada have? Maple syrup and hockey. We're clearly superior.
So, once the US owns the moon, they will probably want people to do land management on it -- you know, drill and exploit the resources there, build roads, and dump all of our excess garbage there.
So, there's no way that the US will ever pay anyone for land on the moon, because c'mon, they can just take it away. What's the guy who sold moon real estate going to do, attack the US military? He will be killed in only a few seconds, probably. Although maybe they would just lock him up to prevent there being any innocent casualties.
So, instead, wait until the US issues its Moon Bonds for owning the moon -- you know, to pay for moon upkeep, utilities, things like that. That way, it'll be almost as if you're owning the moon, but really you just own a piece of paper that says you own part of the moon, so keep it safe.
For good real estate options, go to ebay. There are all of these cities that are practically empty now, and you can buy whole lots for just a couple of dollars. And even if the land never increases in value, you can always just tell your kid when he grows up, "Hey kid! You have to go live in a lot in Bumfart Illinois now, cuz that's all you're getting from me from now on." That's because you have to show your kids that you're the boss.
Well, I remember when Hurricane Whats-its-face swept through last fall. We lost power in the area of our office building for 1-2 days. We had battery backup, but only enough for 30 minutes or so.
I was feeling a lot of inadequacy around the fact that our servers couldn't be up during that whole time (We stayed with the servers during the work day [in mostly darkness] and then checked back every hour or so). And then I thought:
Okay, so people expect our clients' websites to be "open" 24 hours a day (unlike the company itself), and so now all of a sudden we're suppose to be up for hurricanes?!?
That made me feel better.
Of course, none of our servers run what I would call "mission critical" systems. If you're a financial company, or a health care company it might be another story. Of course, the hospital just down the road had to run on extreme emergency power (practically everything but life support turned off) because although it has a generator, and a second backup generator, they had been both placed at the exact same spot, and a tree hit them both (That also made me a feel a little less bad about our servers being down).
Some people do get paid quite a lot to keep servers up. I don't, and I still will go to the server room at off hours if the servers go down. It's called caring about your customers.
On the other hand, 99.9999% uptime isn't something that every hosting company can or should guarantee.
And remember: If you guarantee 99% uptime, that means your servers can be down for 3 full days each year!
It says that the rock is made out of ice, and ice, as most of you know, is little more than very cold water which has turned into a solid.
Water is the source of all life.
Therefore, there's a very, very good possibility of life on Sedna.
In 2012, I will turn 35, when I will be legally able to run for President of the United States. At that point, I will make it my platform to make a manned mission to Sedna to search for intelligent life.
Since Sedna is so cold, I will recommend that astronaut ice cream *not* be eaten on this trip, and instead my astronauts will be given hot cocoa, tea, coffe, and Lipton's instant chicken noodle soup.
Since Sedna is so far out and is right at the edge of our solar system, I think it might be cool if we put a big billboard that says "Now leaving Solar System. Next star 4.2 light years away. Please do not litter!" And on the other side of the sign, it says, "Welcome to the Solar System! Bad Aliens, please go away." See, that will keep us safe from bad aliens, but encourage the good Aliens to come to engage in tourism, which is ultimately the way we will have to support ourselves in the future, with alien tourism (because all the other work will probably be outsourced to aliens because they will work for cheaper).
The difference is that despite what some people here on Slashdot think, the important thing *isn't* your karma or the moderation -- it's the comments themselves. I think it does make sense that if no one has "acted on" a post, you can assume that changing it would not be that different from if the poster had simply hit the "Preview" button instead of the "Submit" button, edited the previewed message, and hit "Post". Once a message has been acted on in some way, however, *especially* if someone has responded to it, then changes should not be allowed. Why? Here's an example:
First Version:
Porn is for Losers! by Some_Jerkface on Friday March 12, @12:00 AM (#12343242) You are all wrong, porn has never been a source of innovation, only the growth of perverts! Anyone who has ever looked at porn should go to hell!
Well... by Some_Other_Jerkface on Friday March 12, @ 7:00 AM Well, as someone who frequently looks at these sorts of images, I can tell you that I don't necessarily consider myself a loser. The human body is a beautiful thing.;-)
After edit:
Concern over Child Pornography by Some_Jerkface on Friday March 12, @12:00 AM (#12343242) One thing that concerns me is the growth of child pornography over the Internet. Again, the porn industry (in this case, the child porn industry) is more techonologically advanced than the government that is trying to stop it. Ultimately, the only thing that will end child porn is if every loser that looks at these photos is sent to jail.
Well... by Some_Other_Jerkface on Friday March 12, @ 7:00 AM Well, as someone who frequently looks at these sorts of images, I can tell you that I don't necessarily consider myself a loser. The human body is a beautiful thing.:-)
Obviously, you can see the sort of confusion that could result from posting edits. Moderation is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you edit a comment, replies to it could make no sense, or have a completely different meaning!
If you post something and it has a goof in it, I'd just laugh it off.
Sorry, its not human nature. Its a social phenominum, largely driven by the US. I'm sure somebody will label me an "anti-semite", but part of this is because of the vocal minority of hard-line Jews who take a perverse pride in talking about how they've been oppressed and victimised for 5000 years. (I've got nothing against Jews, but whiners/whingers shit me).
I'd agree that victimization in general is a problem, but I'm not sure that Jews necessarily invented the idea.
Also, add to this the preponderance of evidence that many Jews, particularly Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, were quite adept economic bootstrappers and were able to take quite a lot of control over their own lives, and I think you'd be hard pressed to lay this concept solely at the foot of the Jews.
I think that there is an undercurrent of victimization in many minority groups [Ooooh! including the new "minority group" of white males in America, who often blame affirmative action or the influx of immigrants (legal or otherwise) into the US for their lack of success and wealth], some of which is based partly on very real oppression.
So, you hear all the time about conservatives bemoaning black's "victimization" issues, forgetting that only around 40 years ago, blacks weren't even able to go to a decent high school, drink from a standard water fountain, or enter a movie theater at the front of the building.
For Jews, losing 6,000,000 people, a vast majority of the population of Jews living in Europe, has put many of them on the defensive.
That being said, most of the most famously obscene lawsuits I've ever read about have been placed by WASPs. I'd say it's less an idea about genuine oppression or victimization, and rather the very real drive to make money and blame other people for their own problems. That's not victimization per se; that's a lack of discipline.
In the excellent Confederates In the Attic, Tony Horowitz writes that he has noticed that recently people are: a) more sensitive to the comments and actions of others (thin-skinned) and b) less sensitive to the feelings of others. This combination will inevitably lead to more litigation in general, as people are less able to just deal with each other in a civil manner.
I like to think that I'm more civil than most. For example, as a Jew, I was somewhat taken aback by your comment, but I feel I've responded in a rational, non-defensive manner (please let me know if I haven't). Someone less thick-skinned might have notified the ADL.:-)
I don't think there's ever going to be a truly light and fast database server that pleases everybody.
Why?
Because to please everyone, you have to...please every one. Which means to offer the features they need. And even if you're an ace programmer, I don't think it's all that easy to de-couple the code to the point that you can just flip a few compiler flags and add or remove features at will.
For instance, all you need is replication. What if someone else doesn't give flying rip about replication, but needs 100% Ansi SQL 99 compliance (something that very few database servers seem to have, oddly). In the stable releases of MySQL, subqueries aren't available. Subqueries! Don't tell me that you can always do the query some other way; I want my subqueries. So I opted for the heavier Postgres engine. When MySQL's stable version offers subqueries, I may switch to it, but at this point I'm fairly familiar with Postgres and don't necessarily want to risk having to rewrite thousands of lines of query code ("Standard" Query Language?!? *What* standard?)
Because there's no one group to please, I don't think anyone's ever going to "fill this niche" because there are a hundred other niches that need filling -- after all, for some people, internationalization and ISO Latin capabilities are crucial; for others, it's roughage.
Database development takes a while -- or at least, it takes a while to do well. There are a ton of MP3 players out there that actually work, but very few database servers that do. It requires a lot of mathematical, computational, and algorithmic knowledge, as well as being kept up to date on the latest in sorting methodolgies, matrices calculations and who knows what else (I sure don't!). So it's only really "profitable" to have one database project that offers all of the features people ask for, rather then 5 that cater to different preferences. Even "bulky" database servers like Postgres seem to run fine on what are today considered "obsolete" computers, so "fast" and "small" are not really the number one criteria anymore.
If you go to the Firebird Project website, you'll see they feature, quite respectfully, Mozilla's recent decision to change their name to Firefox. Remember that the Mozilla team has gone through a lot of name changes. Camino was changed to Chimera, and Phoenix was changed to the rather unfortunate "Firebird" which was already a project name. So it's not like the name "Firebird" was all that entrenched.
I think it's a symptom of Mozilla both try to brand, and being an Open Source project in which one monolithic product was split into various and sundry projects, each of which got bizarely named. I mean, there's nothing about any of the application titles that indicates its use or purpose.
I myself vote for MozillaMail and MozillaBrowser or something of that ilk instead of Thunderbird and Firefox. Then the package now called "Mozilla" could be renamed to MozillaComplete or something like that.
If your definition of "every man woman and child on earth" encompasses only people living in the UK, then obviously you have no clue what the parent poster was talking about.
I'm not denying that it's a tax, only that 100% of payroll taxes are earmarked to be spent, and 100% of them should (and hopefully, usually are) spent on Social Security and Medicare. You can't ever get a refund on your payroll taxes, as far as I know payroll taxes aren't modified in any "tax cuts" that occur, etc. Plus, they're only levied on the first 65k of income.
Even if income tax were eliminated entirely, you would still pay payroll taxes. In a sense, payroll taxes act as an involuntary combination pension plan and health insurance plan.
Again, unless my understanding of this is skewed, the only social programs covered by payroll taxes are Social Security payments and Medicare/Medicaid payments.
It's revenues from income taxes, not payroll taxes, that go toward the pork barrel projects and social programs you don't like. And again, from the statistics I've looked at, most *income* tax goes towards military spending, not social programs, and not even those pork barrel projects. All of those occupy only a small part of budget spending.
Actually, the most unfair tax of all is sales tax, which puts an unusually high burden of tax on the poor. In Virginia, for example, the lowest 20% of income earners pay 6% of their income in sales and excise taxes, while the top 1% pay less than 1% of their income in sales tax. Even with a graduated income tax, the poorest residents in Virginia end up paying over 10% of their income on all state taxes, while the richest 1% spends only 5% of their total income on all state taxes.
I'd be interested in the source for this, because I looked for impartial data on this (i.e. not presented in the context of a special interest group rant).
I'm pretty sure that the percentages you cited include spending on Social Security and Medicare. Since the funding for these is taken by large part from payroll taxes and not income taxes, they don't really count (federal spending of payroll taxes isn't -- or at least, shouldn't be -- discretionary).
From what I've gathered, once you discount Social Security and Medicare, defense spending becomes a little over 50% of the national budget.
One thing I am sure of: aside from a few exceptions, the Bush administration has been consistently cutting funds from programs I would want my tax dollars to go towards and has increased military spending.
Okay, here's an article from the Guardian. In the article cited, seems like quite a few people could have been hurt by these avalanches.
The "friend" that I heard this from was someone not even really an aquaintance: one of the Green Party Candidates for President, Lorna Salzman, who has made global warming one of her key campaign issues. I don't agree with all of her issues, but I share much of her sentiment that drastic work to preserve the environment may be necessary.
I fear, however, that Americans will not be willing to make sacrifices until it is too late. The rise of popularity of the SUV, especially with some owners taking a "I won't take any crap from you holier-than-thou environmental wackos" stance, , and with environmental activists pasting demeaning bumper stickers on other people's SUVs, means that real growth on the issue just won't happen.
Wow, people complain when the US thinks its responsible for the entire world. And complain when it doesn't.
Actually, what I complain about, really, is *what* the US thinks it's responsible for, and for what it doesn't think it's responsible for.
That is, right now the Bush administration is spending billions of dollars of tax dollars, some of which came out of my pocket, in order to fund these wars which supposedly are for my security and protection. But how many future American deaths are being prevented by this growth in military might? Isn't it possible that there's a greater threat coming from possible future environmental catastrophes?
I've heard that one possible result of global warming might be that the alps, which are made mostly of permafrost, might actually melt, causing landslides all over Europe. If water levels keep rising, island nations or low-lying areas will become covered with water. I'd say this is a greater threat to our overall well being. And yet the Bush administration seems hell-bent on increasing the use of fossil fuels, promoting fake forms of alternative energy (particularly so-called "clean" hydrogen powered cars; sure the cars are clean -- it's just that using fossil fuels to make the hydrogen fuel cells is somewhat counterproductive), and undermining environmental regulations left and right.
In fact, the EPA actually removed references to global warming in a report issued last year in response to pressure from the Bush administration. Their reason? Global warming does not present a national threat.
If you do a Google search on bush and global warmiing, you'll see scores and scores of articles detailing how Bush has repeatedly ignored the real threat that global warming poses.
For a long time I was saving money by purchasing US Savings Bonds. I'd still like to do it; from a financial perspective it's very appealing: it offers a higher rate of return than banks' savings accounts, it's very liquid, and requires no minimum investment.
HOWEVER, the money that I put into those bonds is essentially lending money to the US government to cover its defecit that comes from reckless spending in directions that I disagree with: increased national "security" in the form of increased police presence and the use of the Patriot Act; military spending; and to faith-based charities.
If possible, I'm going to look into purchasing bonds elsewhere. If not, I'll probably just save in a CD or Savings Account.
Yup, it sure sounded to me like he was interested in the latest in research on VoIP technologies.
Oh, wait a tic. He wasn't.
He wanted human-readable information about what the relative costs and reliability of VoIP was; whether he could receive incoming calls to his current number; and what some of the "gotchas" might be in switching to VoIP.
None of which were addressed by the matches to your search.
The only possible question that might have been answered is what VoIP providers support Linux. I have a feeling that since he already pointed to Vonage, he has done *some* preliminary research on Google. No doubt he wants assurances from those who have actually tried VoIP, not just companies trying to sell it, that they actually support Linux.
If the most helpful comment you have is to tell someone to use Google, then keep quiet. Unless the slashdot is something along the lines of "What is the definition of blah-blah?" or "Where is a good place to buy computers?", the person has probably googled it, found that the results weren't useful, and turned to/. for help.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, you're not suppposed to do this. Components like this, along with things like batteries, aren't supposed to go to the normal dump. They're supposed to be hauled to a special sectioned off part of the dump, and the days during which you can do this are limited. This is true where I live, at least (Central Virginia).
Plus, my understanding is that outside of the States, regulations are even stricter. Of course, I've heard that in some countries, a recycling tax is added to items like computers, and the companies are thus responsible for the costs of safely disposing of/recycling the computers. Anyone who knows more about this care to share?
You will get paid what the market decides you are worth.
It's an employers market. Which means you will pretty much be paid crap if you quit. Employers know this; Congress knows this; the President knows this. In fact, it's pretty much the reason that all of this crap is able to happen: workers are far too busy working extra hours to keep from being canned to worry about being politically active. They have mortgages/rents to pay and kids (or at least themselves) to feed.
In the times to come, I predict that the worker will be increasingly squeezed. I mean, productivity has gone through the roof, but jobs have consistently been going down. What does this mean? It means that companies need to higher fewer people, which means that for each person working, they know that there are 10 people out there who want his/her job. So that person will work harder, won't ask for a raise, and certainly won't try to upset an employer by pointing out that s/he isn't being paid overtime.
In fact, we have a situation similar to the end of the 19th Century, with thousands of workers clamoring for factory jobs and being willing to stand for ungodly working conditions and low pay because the alternative was no job at all. The *only* thing keeping it from being that bad is *NOT* market forces, but rather a whole slew of governmental regulations that make sure a worker has acceptable working conditions. Those laws were passed as a result of political action by the labor movment. Tragically, the labor movement has now lost a great deal of it strength and credibility. We do need a similar movement however, to protect the rights of the workers and to re-assert the main goal of the United States: not to support the making of money and protections of corporations, but rather the livelihood and freedoms of its populace.
So what has to happen before the companies who write Tax Cut and TurboTax will do versions that least run under Wine, much less native Linux versions? What can we do to help make that happen?
The companies need to believe that they will make money if they release versions for Linux. Currently, there just aren't enough users who only use Linux to encourage tax program companies to devote resources to making compatible versions available.
Also, consider the Linux culture, which generally eschews proprietary software. It's pretty much impossible for a tax preparation sw company to release its source code, so you'd have to use binaries. That could lead to compatibility problems between different variants of Linux. The thing is, if you write an application for Windows, you mostly only have to worry about writing it for two flavors of Windows: 95/2000 and XP. It's a known quantity. At this point, most companies just have to change the rules from the previous years, and can keep most of the GUI and interfaces intact.
Right now, there are some 25 million Mac users (supposedly) in the US, and there's one (TurboTax) preparation software application available to them. I'm guessing there's far fewer than 100,000 users in the US who use Linux and a Linux-based desktop exclusively in their home, and a great many of these people use the Linux desktop because they don't want to spend any money on an OS. <joke>A good portion still live in their parent's basement, and don't have much of an income to speak of.</joke> All considered, 100,000 is a very low number.
Okay, I think the point is this:
If you have a file in AAC format, you got it through iTunes. And if you got it through iTunes, then you signed the User License, a legally binding agreement. Sure, you probably skimmed it because it's long, but that's expected, and it's legal. Part of the agreement no doubt said that you respect the DRM that exists in the files that you download.
So anyone using PlayFair to overcome the DRMs is essentially in breach of contract.
That all being said:
STOP COMPARING THIS TO MLK AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT!
Sorry for shouting, but this seriously has me PO'd. There's a huge difference from being banned from a restaurant because of the color of your skin, and being prevented from making unlimited copies of a song you like, or using that song wherever you want. I understand there are some usese of FairPlay that might fall under the traditional definition of Fair Use (perhaps!) but you all are kidding yourselves if you think that pissing and moaning about DRM is going to change anything.
If you want to effect real change, vote with your pocketbook. Stop buying new records especially at national chains. Go to local music stores and buy used CDs. Hell, buy vinyl. Only buy music that is made and distributed by independent labels.
And, while you're at it, take it upon yourself to do something good and worthwhile for the world -- help tutor someone, volunteer time at a soup kitchen, or even just talk to a friend who seems in the dumps. Surely there's something better to do than waste it arguing about whether or not Apple should be doing what it's doing.
For the challenge in the year we took part, we had to construct (entirely from cardboard) a device that would travel forward under its own power
So, how'd you make it move on it's own power? I'm intrigued.
Granted, any language can be misused to create horrible code, but with rapid development with template languages, you have to be careful not to let the ease and simplicity of the language lull you into poor programming.
In my experience, bad programming starts with the developer, not with the language. Languages that are more difficult to code in simply make the barrier to understanding a little higher, so they're *more likely* to be used by someone with good programming skills.
Remember: The main goal of programming is to ensure that the end result solves the problem presented. Elegant code that doesn't result in what you want is probably worse than slightly ugly looking code that actually works.
I've encountered plenty of programmers who are skilled at coding, but aren't good at paying attention to the needs of the project, so they spend time on the wrong elements, implement features that aren't needed, and omit features that are needed.
The advantage of more flexible coding (which is equally possible with ColdFusion as it is with a more complex language) is that it is faster to make changes to the system. If everything was hardcoded or overly-coupled, then changes will be difficult. However, for well coded ColdFusion applications, changes are very, very easy to make -- much easier than a similar implementation in a "real" language.
I've been coding in ColdFusion for a long time and I won't claim that I've never written bad code, but the language itself allows for applications that are very well written, robust, fast, and easy to update and change.
Fusebox is the most popular programming methodology for ColdFusion, and they have versions of it for PHP as well now. I'm not sure how well it works with PHP, but I do know that it does a fantastic job with ColdFusion.
From the parent:
Since no one was willing to pay for a tie-in between the OCR program and the application I developed
Although it's fairly trivial to create a function to export documents to RTF, it's not that trivial to import them. Plus, the documents may have had different sections that needed to be imported into different fields of the database.
To develop this system would have taken additional time, which the hospital did not want to pay for.
If the project went the way most do, it was already behind schedule and over budget, because people basically want to pay nothing for an application that does everything they want yesterday.
So, it's possible that the programmer suggested budgeting some time and money to implement this feature and the hospital said, "No, we'll just use the chumps, thanks". The intern developers were being paid so little, no doubt, that they would cost less than the amount it would cost to automate the system.
Did the UK ever land someone on the moon? Ever?!?
No.
So the UK has absolutely no claim to the moon.
Plus, they might have been important in the past, but the UK is really very, very tiny. Whereas the US is very big.
Granted, Russia is larger, it takes up more of the world's surface, so it makes up more of the world by percentage of land. But its population is really tiny, and it has no money.
The combination of the US's population, land mass, and wealth makes it the best option for moon ownership.
There's no way that UK guy is legitimate. Your moon deeds aren't worth the cool looking pieces of paper they're printed on.
Dear Sir,
I think that owning moon real estate is a very cool idea.
However, there is just one problem:
Imminent domain.
You see, the government can always say that they need the land for the "public good", and then they can just take it.
Personally, I think that the US should own the moon because, come on, like some other country can afford it? We have Walmart, what does Canada have? Maple syrup and hockey. We're clearly superior.
So, once the US owns the moon, they will probably want people to do land management on it -- you know, drill and exploit the resources there, build roads, and dump all of our excess garbage there.
So, there's no way that the US will ever pay anyone for land on the moon, because c'mon, they can just take it away. What's the guy who sold moon real estate going to do, attack the US military? He will be killed in only a few seconds, probably. Although maybe they would just lock him up to prevent there being any innocent casualties.
So, instead, wait until the US issues its Moon Bonds for owning the moon -- you know, to pay for moon upkeep, utilities, things like that. That way, it'll be almost as if you're owning the moon, but really you just own a piece of paper that says you own part of the moon, so keep it safe.
For good real estate options, go to ebay. There are all of these cities that are practically empty now, and you can buy whole lots for just a couple of dollars. And even if the land never increases in value, you can always just tell your kid when he grows up, "Hey kid! You have to go live in a lot in Bumfart Illinois now, cuz that's all you're getting from me from now on." That's because you have to show your kids that you're the boss.
Not them. You.
Well, I remember when Hurricane Whats-its-face swept through last fall. We lost power in the area of our office building for 1-2 days. We had battery backup, but only enough for 30 minutes or so.
I was feeling a lot of inadequacy around the fact that our servers couldn't be up during that whole time (We stayed with the servers during the work day [in mostly darkness] and then checked back every hour or so). And then I thought:
Okay, so people expect our clients' websites to be "open" 24 hours a day (unlike the company itself), and so now all of a sudden we're suppose to be up for hurricanes?!?
That made me feel better.
Of course, none of our servers run what I would call "mission critical" systems. If you're a financial company, or a health care company it might be another story. Of course, the hospital just down the road had to run on extreme emergency power (practically everything but life support turned off) because although it has a generator, and a second backup generator, they had been both placed at the exact same spot, and a tree hit them both (That also made me a feel a little less bad about our servers being down).
Some people do get paid quite a lot to keep servers up. I don't, and I still will go to the server room at off hours if the servers go down. It's called caring about your customers.
On the other hand, 99.9999% uptime isn't something that every hosting company can or should guarantee.
And remember:
If you guarantee 99% uptime, that means your servers can be down for 3 full days each year!
What all of us are wondering:
Is there life on Sedna.
It says that the rock is made out of ice, and ice, as most of you know, is little more than very cold water which has turned into a solid.
Water is the source of all life.
Therefore, there's a very, very good possibility of life on Sedna.
In 2012, I will turn 35, when I will be legally able to run for President of the United States. At that point, I will make it my platform to make a manned mission to Sedna to search for intelligent life.
Since Sedna is so cold, I will recommend that astronaut ice cream *not* be eaten on this trip, and instead my astronauts will be given hot cocoa, tea, coffe, and Lipton's instant chicken noodle soup.
Since Sedna is so far out and is right at the edge of our solar system, I think it might be cool if we put a big billboard that says "Now leaving Solar System. Next star 4.2 light years away. Please do not litter!" And on the other side of the sign, it says, "Welcome to the Solar System! Bad Aliens, please go away." See, that will keep us safe from bad aliens, but encourage the good Aliens to come to engage in tourism, which is ultimately the way we will have to support ourselves in the future, with alien tourism (because all the other work will probably be outsourced to aliens because they will work for cheaper).
And for those of you who like pretty pictures...
First Version:
Porn is for Losers!
by Some_Jerkface on Friday March 12, @12:00 AM (#12343242)
You are all wrong, porn has never been a source of innovation, only the growth of perverts! Anyone who has ever looked at porn should go to hell!After edit:
Concern over Child Pornography
by Some_Jerkface on Friday March 12, @12:00 AM (#12343242)
One thing that concerns me is the growth of child pornography over the Internet. Again, the porn industry (in this case, the child porn industry) is more techonologically advanced than the government that is trying to stop it. Ultimately, the only thing that will end child porn is if every loser that looks at these photos is sent to jail.Obviously, you can see the sort of confusion that could result from posting edits. Moderation is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you edit a comment, replies to it could make no sense, or have a completely different meaning!
If you post something and it has a goof in it, I'd just laugh it off.
Sorry, its not human nature. Its a social phenominum, largely driven by the US. I'm sure somebody will label me an "anti-semite", but part of this is because of the vocal minority of hard-line Jews who take a perverse pride in talking about how they've been oppressed and victimised for 5000 years. (I've got nothing against Jews, but whiners/whingers shit me).
I'd agree that victimization in general is a problem, but I'm not sure that Jews necessarily invented the idea.
Also, add to this the preponderance of evidence that many Jews, particularly Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, were quite adept economic bootstrappers and were able to take quite a lot of control over their own lives, and I think you'd be hard pressed to lay this concept solely at the foot of the Jews.
I think that there is an undercurrent of victimization in many minority groups [Ooooh! including the new "minority group" of white males in America, who often blame affirmative action or the influx of immigrants (legal or otherwise) into the US for their lack of success and wealth], some of which is based partly on very real oppression.
So, you hear all the time about conservatives bemoaning black's "victimization" issues, forgetting that only around 40 years ago, blacks weren't even able to go to a decent high school, drink from a standard water fountain, or enter a movie theater at the front of the building.
For Jews, losing 6,000,000 people, a vast majority of the population of Jews living in Europe, has put many of them on the defensive.
That being said, most of the most famously obscene lawsuits I've ever read about have been placed by WASPs. I'd say it's less an idea about genuine oppression or victimization, and rather the very real drive to make money and blame other people for their own problems. That's not victimization per se; that's a lack of discipline.
In the excellent Confederates In the Attic, Tony Horowitz writes that he has noticed that recently people are: a) more sensitive to the comments and actions of others (thin-skinned) and b) less sensitive to the feelings of others. This combination will inevitably lead to more litigation in general, as people are less able to just deal with each other in a civil manner.
I like to think that I'm more civil than most. For example, as a Jew, I was somewhat taken aback by your comment, but I feel I've responded in a rational, non-defensive manner (please let me know if I haven't). Someone less thick-skinned might have notified the ADL.
Can you even prove he was in the room at the time it was brought up?
Hmm...let's see. Let's look at your parent, shall we?
since the fact that he voted for it is a matter of public record
And here's the record.
Unless there's something seriously wrong the Congressional Record, it looks like people did vote for this one.
Still, it's No wonder that I was confused.
I don't think there's ever going to be a truly light and fast database server that pleases everybody.
Why?
Because to please everyone, you have to...please every one. Which means to offer the features they need. And even if you're an ace programmer, I don't think it's all that easy to de-couple the code to the point that you can just flip a few compiler flags and add or remove features at will.
For instance, all you need is replication. What if someone else doesn't give flying rip about replication, but needs 100% Ansi SQL 99 compliance (something that very few database servers seem to have, oddly). In the stable releases of MySQL, subqueries aren't available. Subqueries! Don't tell me that you can always do the query some other way; I want my subqueries. So I opted for the heavier Postgres engine. When MySQL's stable version offers subqueries, I may switch to it, but at this point I'm fairly familiar with Postgres and don't necessarily want to risk having to rewrite thousands of lines of query code ("Standard" Query Language?!? *What* standard?)
Because there's no one group to please, I don't think anyone's ever going to "fill this niche" because there are a hundred other niches that need filling -- after all, for some people, internationalization and ISO Latin capabilities are crucial; for others, it's roughage.
Database development takes a while -- or at least, it takes a while to do well. There are a ton of MP3 players out there that actually work, but very few database servers that do. It requires a lot of mathematical, computational, and algorithmic knowledge, as well as being kept up to date on the latest in sorting methodolgies, matrices calculations and who knows what else (I sure don't!). So it's only really "profitable" to have one database project that offers all of the features people ask for, rather then 5 that cater to different preferences. Even "bulky" database servers like Postgres seem to run fine on what are today considered "obsolete" computers, so "fast" and "small" are not really the number one criteria anymore.
If you go to the Firebird Project website, you'll see they feature, quite respectfully, Mozilla's recent decision to change their name to Firefox. Remember that the Mozilla team has gone through a lot of name changes. Camino was changed to Chimera, and Phoenix was changed to the rather unfortunate "Firebird" which was already a project name. So it's not like the name "Firebird" was all that entrenched.
I think it's a symptom of Mozilla both try to brand, and being an Open Source project in which one monolithic product was split into various and sundry projects, each of which got bizarely named. I mean, there's nothing about any of the application titles that indicates its use or purpose.
I myself vote for MozillaMail and MozillaBrowser or something of that ilk instead of Thunderbird and Firefox. Then the package now called "Mozilla" could be renamed to MozillaComplete or something like that.
If your definition of "every man woman and child on earth" encompasses only people living in the UK, then obviously you have no clue what the parent poster was talking about.
I'm not denying that it's a tax, only that 100% of payroll taxes are earmarked to be spent, and 100% of them should (and hopefully, usually are) spent on Social Security and Medicare. You can't ever get a refund on your payroll taxes, as far as I know payroll taxes aren't modified in any "tax cuts" that occur, etc. Plus, they're only levied on the first 65k of income.
Even if income tax were eliminated entirely, you would still pay payroll taxes. In a sense, payroll taxes act as an involuntary combination pension plan and health insurance plan.
Again, unless my understanding of this is skewed, the only social programs covered by payroll taxes are Social Security payments and Medicare/Medicaid payments.
It's revenues from income taxes, not payroll taxes, that go toward the pork barrel projects and social programs you don't like. And again, from the statistics I've looked at, most *income* tax goes towards military spending, not social programs, and not even those pork barrel projects. All of those occupy only a small part of budget spending.
Actually, the most unfair tax of all is sales tax, which puts an unusually high burden of tax on the poor. In Virginia, for example, the lowest 20% of income earners pay 6% of their income in sales and excise taxes, while the top 1% pay less than 1% of their income in sales tax. Even with a graduated income tax, the poorest residents in Virginia end up paying over 10% of their income on all state taxes, while the richest 1% spends only 5% of their total income on all state taxes.
Oh and btw the US spending breakdown is:
I'd be interested in the source for this, because I looked for impartial data on this (i.e. not presented in the context of a special interest group rant).
I'm pretty sure that the percentages you cited include spending on Social Security and Medicare. Since the funding for these is taken by large part from payroll taxes and not income taxes, they don't really count (federal spending of payroll taxes isn't -- or at least, shouldn't be -- discretionary).
From what I've gathered, once you discount Social Security and Medicare, defense spending becomes a little over 50% of the national budget.
One thing I am sure of: aside from a few exceptions, the Bush administration has been consistently cutting funds from programs I would want my tax dollars to go towards and has increased military spending.
Or, so I heard from a friend of my cousin...
Okay, here's an article from the Guardian. In the article cited, seems like quite a few people could have been hurt by these avalanches.
The "friend" that I heard this from was someone not even really an aquaintance: one of the Green Party Candidates for President, Lorna Salzman, who has made global warming one of her key campaign issues. I don't agree with all of her issues, but I share much of her sentiment that drastic work to preserve the environment may be necessary.
I fear, however, that Americans will not be willing to make sacrifices until it is too late. The rise of popularity of the SUV, especially with some owners taking a "I won't take any crap from you holier-than-thou environmental wackos" stance, , and with environmental activists pasting demeaning bumper stickers on other people's SUVs, means that real growth on the issue just won't happen.
Wow, people complain when the US thinks its responsible for the entire world. And complain when it doesn't.
Actually, what I complain about, really, is *what* the US thinks it's responsible for, and for what it doesn't think it's responsible for.
That is, right now the Bush administration is spending billions of dollars of tax dollars, some of which came out of my pocket, in order to fund these wars which supposedly are for my security and protection. But how many future American deaths are being prevented by this growth in military might? Isn't it possible that there's a greater threat coming from possible future environmental catastrophes?
I've heard that one possible result of global warming might be that the alps, which are made mostly of permafrost, might actually melt, causing landslides all over Europe. If water levels keep rising, island nations or low-lying areas will become covered with water. I'd say this is a greater threat to our overall well being. And yet the Bush administration seems hell-bent on increasing the use of fossil fuels, promoting fake forms of alternative energy (particularly so-called "clean" hydrogen powered cars; sure the cars are clean -- it's just that using fossil fuels to make the hydrogen fuel cells is somewhat counterproductive), and undermining environmental regulations left and right.
In fact, the EPA actually removed references to global warming in a report issued last year in response to pressure from the Bush administration. Their reason? Global warming does not present a national threat.
If you do a Google search on bush and global warmiing, you'll see scores and scores of articles detailing how Bush has repeatedly ignored the real threat that global warming poses.
For a long time I was saving money by purchasing US Savings Bonds. I'd still like to do it; from a financial perspective it's very appealing: it offers a higher rate of return than banks' savings accounts, it's very liquid, and requires no minimum investment.
HOWEVER, the money that I put into those bonds is essentially lending money to the US government to cover its defecit that comes from reckless spending in directions that I disagree with: increased national "security" in the form of increased police presence and the use of the Patriot Act; military spending; and to faith-based charities.
If possible, I'm going to look into purchasing bonds elsewhere. If not, I'll probably just save in a CD or Savings Account.
Well, I, for one, am so glad that finally the Bush administration is doing something about this.
...You mean they're not?!?
Yup, it sure sounded to me like he was interested in the latest in research on VoIP technologies.
/. for help.
Oh, wait a tic. He wasn't.
He wanted human-readable information about what the relative costs and reliability of VoIP was; whether he could receive incoming calls to his current number; and what some of the "gotchas" might be in switching to VoIP.
None of which were addressed by the matches to your search.
The only possible question that might have been answered is what VoIP providers support Linux. I have a feeling that since he already pointed to Vonage, he has done *some* preliminary research on Google. No doubt he wants assurances from those who have actually tried VoIP, not just companies trying to sell it, that they actually support Linux.
If the most helpful comment you have is to tell someone to use Google, then keep quiet. Unless the slashdot is something along the lines of "What is the definition of blah-blah?" or "Where is a good place to buy computers?", the person has probably googled it, found that the results weren't useful, and turned to