Why on earth does MySQL have a 24 bit integer datatype? On what platform does it even remotely make sense to use that in the first place? It's going to get cast to 32 bits for any arithmetic operations anyway, and on most platforms today alignment requirements are going to pad the extra byte in memory and disk, so you're not even saving any space. Why even give someone the option over choosing between 16 bit and 32 bit integers?
The Saturn 5 is going to incur development costs? Its already developed, its old dependable technology, and its relatively cheap.
No, it's not already developed. The blueprints and software have been lost, the tooling to build any of it no longer exists, and the original engineers and machinists are dead or well past retirement.
Not to mention several critical systems like the guidance computer used to weigh multiple tons. Modern units today could be built with orders of magnitude more functionality and safety for orders of magnitude less weight, which means either more useful payload or a lighter propulsion system. Even if you had the original Saturn V stack, the avionics took up so much weight and room, you'd have to do years of engineering and requalification to replace them with modern equivilents. You'd completely shift the weight and balance of the original design.
Overall, it'd take more time and effort to make a modern Saturn V stack fly today than to just engineer a completely new stack with modern engineering and the lessons learned from the last 50 years of manned space travel and avionics engineering.
What's with the headline? It's "MacBook Pro", not MacBook. They're separate products. And it's "Core 2 Duo". Would it have been that hard to identify the correct product being reviewed?
Except he hijacked airliners to do it. That pushes him a little bit above the level of common murdering felon, as well as pushes him well into the Feds jurisdiction. All aircraft (but certainly ones bound for somewhere outside NY) are the Federal Government's jurisdiction, and hijacking one is interefering with Interstate Commerce.
Both aircraft left from Massechusett and United 175 was actually hijacked over eastern Pennsylvania before turning back towards Manhattan. I'm as much of a Federalist as the next guy, but when a crime occurs in multiple states and on the national transportation infrastructure, I've got no problem letting the Feds take jurisdiction.
FedEx and UPS are not "alternatives." They provide separate services from the primary role of the post office (first class letter delivery), and are required *by statute* to charge significantly more for it.
I can't legally start delivering mail in the US tomorrow for 37 cents an envelope.
Only the USPS gets to carry normal mail. If you want express from someone else, it either costs (by statute) significantly more than the Post Office does, and/or you have to pay the post office what they would have gotten anyway by buying and canceling stamps in addition to the private postage.
Umm, wrong graph. That says 3% of our oil demand is for electrical production. A very, very small percentage of electricity in this country is made from oil. Most of it's coal and nuclear.
The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years.
It will the minute the US's demand for it doubles quicker than we can build new infrastucture.
In terms of raw energy consumption, the total amount of energy the US consumes as electricty from some source right now is within the same order of magnitude as the amount of energy we use burning gasoline in cars.
Switch to electric cars in any sort of accelerated timeframe, and watch electricity prices go up just as quick as oil is now.
We tried that once back when we believed the nation was a coalition of individual states bound together for a common good. It didn't go so well when the president declared the right of secession didn't exist, and statehood was a one way trip.
Carbon. Link 8 carbons or so in a chain, and populate the remaining bonds with Hydrogen. It forms a stable, energy dense, easily transportable liquid. As an added bonus, you don't need to do any additional processing to use it in that state, just burn it in your existing internal combustion engine.
You also get oxygen which can be pumped into the air or sold to hospitals and welders for less than they pay now.
The process to make medical and welding oxygen is well refined. You basically filter and compress air and cool it until it liquifies, and then do fractional distillation to separate the elements apart, and sell them seprately. It's actually quite cheap. Medical grade costs more mostly due to extra paperwork that comes along with it.
You'd have to do more or less the same process with the electrolosis byproducts. Even if you wrote all the energy cost for the first step into the price of the hydrogen and counted the oxygen as free, it'd still cost as much to process and sell as the way it's done today.
Slightly less than sending all those slightly less efficient but perfectly functioning power supplies to the junkyard + the environmental impact of building new ones?
As someone else said, the SA aquisition came later.
What's more important is that Cisco owns the entire backend technology for the system too. They sell the routers, the DSL and Cable headends, the media converters for IPTV, and the call manager hardware to do 300,000 subscriber VOIP and convert it to SS7 for the phone network. It all works together as one integrated technology for the service provider. Comcast, TWC, and Verizon buy all of the above by the truckload.
This is their play to keep Juniper, Nortel, and Tekelec away from an integrated service provider solution.
We need to keep gym class in the schools so kids get and learn the value of regular exercise.
I don't know about where you went to school, but gym class in grade school doesn't teach the value of squat. In every school I went to, gym was extra practice for the jocks, except they got to use everyone who wasn't as fast or skilled as them as target practice. You want to turn someone off from physical activity, there's no quicker way to do it than making them play football against the varsity team, or run laps with the track team.
Except in alot of booming areas, your choices are either buy an older house if you can find one with all the issues that entails, buy a modern structure in an HOA development, or live in an apartment. You can't find new housing or an empty lot that isn't in an HOA.
I think alot of the problem is lot size. Build 3000sf homes on 1/10th acre lots, and your neighbor can impact property values quite a bit. After all, they're 30 feet away.
Stop building McMansions on postage stamp lots. Who cares what color my neighbor's house is if I'm on a 3 acre lot, his house is 300 feet away and I can't see it through the trees on the property line?
In a lot of cities, taxis are extremely regulated with standard fares and aren't allowed to discriminate carriage. Why? Well, for one, medallions are a significant source of revenue for the city. But also, they're making money by being granted a limited monopoly in the market, and in the case of places like NYC, use of extremely limited and expensive resources like streets.
If a utility exists by virtue of having negotiated conditions above and beyond what a normal citizen can reasonably get from the local government, the government has some right to ensure the resources it supplied are being used for the benefit of the people it represents. I can't claim a right-of-way across my neighbor's yard, dig a trench on his property, and install cable to reach across town. The phone company can, and my neighbor has a right to make sure the property rights he had to give up are compensated somehow, whether it's $$$ from the telco for the right of way, or equal and fair access to telecommunications services.
Since the summary doesn't mention it and nobody reads the articles, I want to point out that the charge against the owners of the company is that they were selling materials commonly used in fireworks. It doesn't sound to me like there is even any evidence that the material had been used for that purpose.
Even if they were, so what? There's no federal law against it, and the state laws vary (and other than "don't be stupid and do it where you've got enough land to not blow up your neighbor's house, don't damage other people's property, etc," they're excessive). The BATFE regulates some of the really nasty stuff you can make, but that's about it.
The CPSC has gone past it's initial intent of protecting consumers from excessive risks from normal consumer items, to a nanny-state agency bent on protecting everyone from anything. Fireworks are, by definition, dangerous items. There's very little "excessive risk" involved, but a whole lot of expected and necessary risk if you're going to use them. If I'm willing to accept that risk, no idiot in Washington DC ought to protect me from myself.
The CPSC is very likely out of their jurisdiction on this one, and certainly well out of their initial intent and charter. Sadly, I doubt they'll get reigned back in.
You are going to have to tell me how a tax system is going to work without smoething like an SS number.
Simple. You get rid of the idiotic notion that the Federal Government 1500 miles away (on average) is the best person to manage your personal retirement fund. Moving to a completely anonymous sales tax is even better, but not strictly required.
As long as you don't have the concept that money I pay in today needs to be accounted for the next 40 years so I can get 50% of it back, there's no need for a SSN.
Why shouldnt items purchased via web be taxed? Its no different than calling a retailer in a different state to make a purchase. Sales tax is due in that transaction - so why not via http?
Because the theory behind sales taxes is you're paying the government's costs for making that transaction posible. Courts, roads, infrastructure, etc.
When I buy something out of state and have it shipped or downloaded, my state government HASN'T DONE ANYTHING to support that sale. Why should they get a cut? At most they get a cut via taxes on my ISP bill, and (in the case of something shipped) fuel and business taxes on the shipper. There's a reason the Constitution prohibits interstate taxation of commerce, and this "use tax" bullshit needs to be called what it really is and struck down. If anyone deserves the sales tax on a sale, it's the state the seller is incorporated in (Which is currently prohibited, but there's better ways to get that revenue from the seller than a line-item sales tax)
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth does MySQL have a 24 bit integer datatype? On what platform does it even remotely make sense to use that in the first place? It's going to get cast to 32 bits for any arithmetic operations anyway, and on most platforms today alignment requirements are going to pad the extra byte in memory and disk, so you're not even saving any space. Why even give someone the option over choosing between 16 bit and 32 bit integers?
Or am I missing something here.
Yes.
The Saturn 5 is going to incur development costs? Its already developed, its old dependable technology, and its relatively cheap.
No, it's not already developed. The blueprints and software have been lost, the tooling to build any of it no longer exists, and the original engineers and machinists are dead or well past retirement.
Not to mention several critical systems like the guidance computer used to weigh multiple tons. Modern units today could be built with orders of magnitude more functionality and safety for orders of magnitude less weight, which means either more useful payload or a lighter propulsion system. Even if you had the original Saturn V stack, the avionics took up so much weight and room, you'd have to do years of engineering and requalification to replace them with modern equivilents. You'd completely shift the weight and balance of the original design.
Overall, it'd take more time and effort to make a modern Saturn V stack fly today than to just engineer a completely new stack with modern engineering and the lessons learned from the last 50 years of manned space travel and avionics engineering.
No, what I'm saying is they reviewed the MPB C2D, not a MacBook that doesn't exist. The headline's just wrong.
What's with the headline? It's "MacBook Pro", not MacBook. They're separate products. And it's "Core 2 Duo". Would it have been that hard to identify the correct product being reviewed?
Except he hijacked airliners to do it. That pushes him a little bit above the level of common murdering felon, as well as pushes him well into the Feds jurisdiction. All aircraft (but certainly ones bound for somewhere outside NY) are the Federal Government's jurisdiction, and hijacking one is interefering with Interstate Commerce.
Both aircraft left from Massechusett and United 175 was actually hijacked over eastern Pennsylvania before turning back towards Manhattan. I'm as much of a Federalist as the next guy, but when a crime occurs in multiple states and on the national transportation infrastructure, I've got no problem letting the Feds take jurisdiction.
FedEx and UPS are not "alternatives." They provide separate services from the primary role of the post office (first class letter delivery), and are required *by statute* to charge significantly more for it.
I can't legally start delivering mail in the US tomorrow for 37 cents an envelope.
Sure, they're called the Private Express Statutes.
Only the USPS gets to carry normal mail. If you want express from someone else, it either costs (by statute) significantly more than the Post Office does, and/or you have to pay the post office what they would have gotten anyway by buying and canceling stamps in addition to the private postage.
Sorry, cite for the gasoline consumption here
Umm, wrong graph. That says 3% of our oil demand is for electrical production. A very, very small percentage of electricity in this country is made from oil. Most of it's coal and nuclear.
In 2005, we produced 4000 billion KWH (4 Million Gigawatt hours of electricity).
At the same time, we bought 384.7 Million gallons of gas / day in 2005. 131 MJ / gallon * 365 days = 5 Million Gigawatt hours.
The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years.
It will the minute the US's demand for it doubles quicker than we can build new infrastucture.
In terms of raw energy consumption, the total amount of energy the US consumes as electricty from some source right now is within the same order of magnitude as the amount of energy we use burning gasoline in cars.
Switch to electric cars in any sort of accelerated timeframe, and watch electricity prices go up just as quick as oil is now.
I don't see Americans willing to leave America
We tried that once back when we believed the nation was a coalition of individual states bound together for a common good. It didn't go so well when the president declared the right of secession didn't exist, and statehood was a one way trip.
You know what makes a good hydrogen carrier?
Carbon. Link 8 carbons or so in a chain, and populate the remaining bonds with Hydrogen. It forms a stable, energy dense, easily transportable liquid. As an added bonus, you don't need to do any additional processing to use it in that state, just burn it in your existing internal combustion engine.
You also get oxygen which can be pumped into the air or sold to hospitals and welders for less than they pay now.
The process to make medical and welding oxygen is well refined. You basically filter and compress air and cool it until it liquifies, and then do fractional distillation to separate the elements apart, and sell them seprately. It's actually quite cheap. Medical grade costs more mostly due to extra paperwork that comes along with it.
You'd have to do more or less the same process with the electrolosis byproducts. Even if you wrote all the energy cost for the first step into the price of the hydrogen and counted the oxygen as free, it'd still cost as much to process and sell as the way it's done today.
Slightly less than sending all those slightly less efficient but perfectly functioning power supplies to the junkyard + the environmental impact of building new ones?
As someone else said, the SA aquisition came later.
What's more important is that Cisco owns the entire backend technology for the system too. They sell the routers, the DSL and Cable headends, the media converters for IPTV, and the call manager hardware to do 300,000 subscriber VOIP and convert it to SS7 for the phone network. It all works together as one integrated technology for the service provider. Comcast, TWC, and Verizon buy all of the above by the truckload.
This is their play to keep Juniper, Nortel, and Tekelec away from an integrated service provider solution.
We need to keep gym class in the schools so kids get and learn the value of regular exercise.
I don't know about where you went to school, but gym class in grade school doesn't teach the value of squat. In every school I went to, gym was extra practice for the jocks, except they got to use everyone who wasn't as fast or skilled as them as target practice. You want to turn someone off from physical activity, there's no quicker way to do it than making them play football against the varsity team, or run laps with the track team.
Except in alot of booming areas, your choices are either buy an older house if you can find one with all the issues that entails, buy a modern structure in an HOA development, or live in an apartment. You can't find new housing or an empty lot that isn't in an HOA.
I think alot of the problem is lot size. Build 3000sf homes on 1/10th acre lots, and your neighbor can impact property values quite a bit. After all, they're 30 feet away.
Stop building McMansions on postage stamp lots. Who cares what color my neighbor's house is if I'm on a 3 acre lot, his house is 300 feet away and I can't see it through the trees on the property line?
They also know when to use linebreaks.
Dear god man.
Bad analogy.
In a lot of cities, taxis are extremely regulated with standard fares and aren't allowed to discriminate carriage. Why? Well, for one, medallions are a significant source of revenue for the city. But also, they're making money by being granted a limited monopoly in the market, and in the case of places like NYC, use of extremely limited and expensive resources like streets.
If a utility exists by virtue of having negotiated conditions above and beyond what a normal citizen can reasonably get from the local government, the government has some right to ensure the resources it supplied are being used for the benefit of the people it represents. I can't claim a right-of-way across my neighbor's yard, dig a trench on his property, and install cable to reach across town. The phone company can, and my neighbor has a right to make sure the property rights he had to give up are compensated somehow, whether it's $$$ from the telco for the right of way, or equal and fair access to telecommunications services.
Even if they were, so what? There's no federal law against it, and the state laws vary (and other than "don't be stupid and do it where you've got enough land to not blow up your neighbor's house, don't damage other people's property, etc," they're excessive). The BATFE regulates some of the really nasty stuff you can make, but that's about it.
The CPSC has gone past it's initial intent of protecting consumers from excessive risks from normal consumer items, to a nanny-state agency bent on protecting everyone from anything. Fireworks are, by definition, dangerous items. There's very little "excessive risk" involved, but a whole lot of expected and necessary risk if you're going to use them. If I'm willing to accept that risk, no idiot in Washington DC ought to protect me from myself.
The CPSC is very likely out of their jurisdiction on this one, and certainly well out of their initial intent and charter. Sadly, I doubt they'll get reigned back in.
You are going to have to tell me how a tax system is going to work without smoething like an SS number. Simple. You get rid of the idiotic notion that the Federal Government 1500 miles away (on average) is the best person to manage your personal retirement fund. Moving to a completely anonymous sales tax is even better, but not strictly required. As long as you don't have the concept that money I pay in today needs to be accounted for the next 40 years so I can get 50% of it back, there's no need for a SSN.
What, and get banished to Staten Island for a decade?
There are some fates worse than death my friend.
Why shouldnt items purchased via web be taxed? Its no different than calling a retailer in a different state to make a purchase. Sales tax is due in that transaction - so why not via http?
Because the theory behind sales taxes is you're paying the government's costs for making that transaction posible. Courts, roads, infrastructure, etc.
When I buy something out of state and have it shipped or downloaded, my state government HASN'T DONE ANYTHING to support that sale. Why should they get a cut? At most they get a cut via taxes on my ISP bill, and (in the case of something shipped) fuel and business taxes on the shipper. There's a reason the Constitution prohibits interstate taxation of commerce, and this "use tax" bullshit needs to be called what it really is and struck down. If anyone deserves the sales tax on a sale, it's the state the seller is incorporated in (Which is currently prohibited, but there's better ways to get that revenue from the seller than a line-item sales tax)