Do you actually think that Nixon *created* the neocons? It's not like Pat Buchanan, George H.W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Weinberger, etc, were on the path to rightousness when they accidently got mixed up in the Nixon Administration. The seeds of the conservative agenda were planted by Goldwater more then a decade before Nixon took the oath of office.
I love it that you call opening china "self serving." If you mean "serving the intersts of the United States" then you're correct. He did manipulate China and the USSR. It was a brilliant move, maybe the most deft handling of cold war policy since the Cuban Missle Crisis.
As for the STS being underfunded, you should take that up with the people that actually write the budgets. Back in those days it was the democratically controlled congress.
And your understanding of what the Gold Standard did is not at all accurate. Congress was able to sell debt in 1970 in the same exact way it's able to sell debt today. Remaining on the gold standard would've done nothing but limit the growth of the economy and liquidity of the US currency over the past 30 years. Every country in the world has followed us off of the gold standard. The Free Trade we have today would've been severely impaired if this step hadn't been taken. Fiat currency allows for exchange rates to be set naturally based on the millions of things that affect it, rather then supporting it artifically.
Yes, Nixon did some very dirty things, like trying to steal democracy from the American people. But his administration did more good for the country then GWB has. Just a few of Nixons lasting accomplishments:
- Creation of the E.P.A. - Ending engagement in Vietnam - Opening China to diplomatic relations, including their induction as a UN member state - Singning of the SALT treaty and the ABM treaty with the soviets - Embracing and signing-off on the NASA STS program - Elimination of the "Gold Standard" of US Currency allowing more natural currency flux
No matter what, you can't seperate Nixon from Watergate. But he isn't anywhere near the worst president we've had. And in a way, watergate helped America. A healthy distrust for government is a good thing.
This world would've been a much better place today had RFK not been shot. He would've ate Nixons lunch in a general election and the course of history would've been changed. I'm a big blue-stater but I believe in giving credit where credit is due.
Saying that marijuana will ever be "legalized" is, at the very least, a misnomer. As if Congress will one day say "All these laws we have about weed, lets just throw 'em out!"
No, if it ever does happen, it will be more like this: "Lets throw out this ONE LAW restricting use & sale of weed, and replace it with DOZENS of other restrictions." No smoking and driving, no smoking within x feet of a school/restaurant/shopping mall, no selling without a license, no license without a huge license fee, no growing without a license, no growing license without another huge fee, no using it in public, no transporting over state lines, no importing from another country, no concealed carry of your bong, no water in a bong over 72hours old, no smoking near minors, no sale of papers/pipes/paraphalia without a tax stamp, upper bounds on THC concentration, lower bounds on price ("State Minimum"), on and on and on and on....
I've never had to spend more then 10 minutes on the phone with a Dell tech when a PC goes bad. I tell them, for example, that the Disk is bad, or the power supply. They ask a half-dozen questions to be sure that I know what I'm talking about, then they ship me a new one. Sometimes I send the broken part back on their dime, sometimes they just have me toss it out.
I've got nothing but good things to say about Dell support.
Their sales staff, however, leaves much to be desired.
I think you should check again, though. The only pointers in ActionScript (2.0 or 3.0) are MOUSE POINTERS. There is NEVER going to be pointers in ActionScript. We're talking about an interpreted language that uses Garbage Collection. Why would you ever want a pointer? You can implement a linked list with REFERENCES, you don't need pointers.
Do you understand that pointers (in C) address a block of memory? Why would you ever address a block of memory in a high-level language like ECMA Script? It just doesn't make sense.
Maybe you meant references, but pointers are way different then references.
>> Object oriented and powerful, Actionscript aint. Heck, it doesn't even have real pointers yet.
Wha? What do pointers have to do with OOP? I'll answer that: Nothing. Pointers have nothing to do with OOP.
More to the point (hehe), do you consider only languages with true pointers to be "real" languages? And what's with the "yet?" Do you think that ECMA Script will EVER contain pointers?
I could be wrong... but it seems like you're just throwing up a word salad from things you picked up on/.
"but.. but.. it doesn't even have [closures|pointers|aspects|garbage collection]"
Often it seems like people overlook an important aspect of Cost of Living: Durable Goods are still the same price!
To illustrate, I hail from Northern Ohio. The CoL in Chicago is twice what it is where I grew up, and the salarys are nearly twice as high, but a new Honda doesn't cost twice as much in Chicago. Either does an xBox or Airline ticket or clothing at the local JCrew. Similarly, the higher the CoL the cheaper it becomes to take vacations.
Even though $47,000 a year in Arkansas might be better then $120,000 in San Jose but I'd still take the $120k.
While I didn't RTFA, I'm surprised that this is being discussed like it's a newfangled idea. "See, we just put these parallel lines on things, and the spacing between the lines represents a number...."
We don't need to invent new things to add bar codes to. There are already dozens of ways to use this system if it could interface with existing bar codes. If i'm at Borders I'd love to scan a barcode on a book and bring up its reviews, If I have a UPS label I'd love to be able to scan the barcode to view its shipping info, etc.
I understand that this is much more then a bar code, it's also a database and lookup system. Not easy to build, but neither is a cellphone-based barcode scanner.
$30bn (the orig. figure) divided by 500km = $60,000,000/km......thus: $60M / 3280 feet = $18,293 per linear foot.
Contrast that to my figures, which I googled, which detailed a 140-mile hiway in Indiana estimated to cost $1.4bn.
$1.4bn divided by 140mi = $13,571,428/mi......this: $13.6M / 5280 feet = $2,575 per linear foot.
The only thing i didn't include in my original post was the conversion between GBP and USD. While I'm not a mind reader, my guess is the 30bn figure was given in US Dollars, NOT pounds sterling. I came to this conclusion for 2 reasons:
1) 1 GBP is worth much more then USD. If that figure WAS in pounds, it makes the hiway nearly twice as expensive as my math shows it to be, which is just ludicrous. 2) The poster used "billions" as a Unit of Measure. I took this to mean 10^9, or "one thousand million" as it's commonly used in the US. In the UK, one billion is used to describe 10^12, or "one million million" which is the number we call "trillion" in the US. (and this goes on and on... a trillion in the UK describes 10^18 or what we call a quintillion in the US)
Either of these interpretations would push the values out of the range of good sense.
$30 BILLION for 500 miles of new highway? Where, exactly, are you getting your figures? That's about $18,500 per linear foot of highway. Contrast that to a recent proposal for building a "new" Interstate 69 in Indiana, which came in at $1.9B for 140 miles, or about $2600 per linear foot. Assuming your example highway was three times as wide as I69, where does the $11,000 per linear foot go?
I'm sorry if your post was inspired by some personal tragedy. It reads to me like maybe it was. You feel personally let-down by the pharm industry. Because your argument seems founded much more in emotion then it is in fact.
The fact is that over the last 50 years the pharmaceutical industry has made some incredible breakthroughs. And every single one of those drugs was, at some point, at this stage in development.
The truth is that developing new drugs is VERY capital-intensive. They NEED to keep investors primed-up. It could take 20 years of huge investments before seeing a single $1 in revenue.
The truth is that human chemistry is one of the most complicated problem-domains faced by large commercial enterprise. You don't see many announcements saying "We Cured X Disease!" because it's rarely that simple. A drug might cure a disease in one part of the population, have no effect in a second part, and actually make it WORSE for a third.
My point is that pharma companies have made tremendous breakthroughs. Look at AIDS for example. People contracting HIV today might NEVER be diagnosed with AIDS. In fact, a person contracting HIV today has almost an equal chance of dying of another, non-related illness then from an immunodeficiency-related illness. This is a disease that wasn't even diagnosed 30 years ago.
I'm sorry, but the idea that someone should be penalized for "false hopes" -- essentially conclusions that the reader might jump to--is just REDICULOUS. Perhaps if you read that a drug hasn't been tested on a human yet, you should refrain from feeling false hope? Can we not get an amen for a little personal responsibility?
EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS issues forward-looking statements. OF COURSE a phrama company is going to do the same.
I gotta stop, here. It would take me far too long to enumerate all of your asinine points. Let's all just reduce ourselves to/. drivel. M$ == BigPhrama == The DEVIL! Companies are EVIL and BAD! We should all quit out jobs and write OSS and live in a barter economy! Punish the big companies for making me think wrong thoughts!
Puh-Leese. Companies in most industries would laugh you out of the room if you suggested risking BILLIONS in capital on a product that could take DECADES to develop and years longer to push thru a byzantine regulation process, and guess what: Even then it still might not ever produce a DIME in revenue, let alone break even.
So basically, a star that MIGHT be reaching the THEORETICAL size limit of a white dwarf that actually may have gone Nova over a THOUSAND YEARS AGO, MIGHT, MAYBE, IF WE'RE LUCKY, be visiable from earth sometime between TOMORROW AND ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW.
Wow. What incredible science. Did NewScientist buy the BBC over the weekend?
The Ctype_ first-order functions leave much to be desired. For example, in PHP 5.0, ctype_digit("123456") != ctype_digit(123456)... these issues led me to integrating my own validation code within my error handler classes. Just my $.02
For what it's worth, the $_SESSION array is only going to hold data that YOU put in there. Session data is stored on the server, not the client. It wouldn't be a horrible practice to run session data thru your normal "Cleaning" routine but it's not vital. If someone has the ability to stuff session variables then they're executing code on your server and you've got a lot more problems then injection attacks.
Despite the misleading summary and lede, inside the article it explains that you need CONTACT with this "tomato seed" to read its data. I can see this as solving some of the same problems as RFID, like the Passports, for example, that you don't want to be read at a distance. But for other problems, like determining how many widgets Acme Co. has in their warehosue, it's not much better then a bar code.
Except that you cannot compare "an advertisement" to an entire adwords campaign with a rotation of dozens of seperate adverts that are targeted to different keywords and demographics.
Besides, I said our CONVERSION rate has steadily dropped, not our click thru rate--which has grown, albeit slowly.
This is correct. In our case a bit more. And 95% goes to adwords. When you sell a service, the only cost is development, infrastructure, customer acqisition, and, of course, payroll and administrative expenses. And we're profitable.
Google creates novel applications like MapReduce and GFS all the time. And, as usual, Microsoft is right there to incorporate the best ideas from Google and Yahoo into their search product. If only we could get Microsoft to embrace Open Source like Google has......What's that? Googles search software is proprietary? MSN DOESNT RUN GFS? Map Reduce ISNT on source forge?
Those Bastards!
Who are they to spend millions of their own money to hire the best minds in the business and then not just GIVE IT ALL AWAY. You'd think they were actually tring to turn a PROFIT or something!
Are you kidding? My company has about 2MM in sales annually, and we spend almost $500,000 a year on Google Adwords. Over 90% of our sales come from Google. We're getting a conversion rate that is less then one percent and it's gotten worse over time. If it continues to drop we'll have no choice but reduce our adwords cost-per-click limit and take our advertising dollars elsewhere. No matter how you spell it, that means problems for the GOOG.
You'd be surprised how many industries I've consulted.
And I still contend that no large companies are running linux on a majority of their PCs. Not even banks, not even oil companies. A lot of modern teller-line software is windows based, and even if you consider that many banks are running old-school terminal software for their tellers, they're still running windows on PCs used by their Originators, Managers, Etc.
You have to be kidding me. We're talking TCO. You're saying walmart saves $80 per windows license. When you factor in the IT staff, cost of support, cost of repair, cost of just RUNNING THE PC for years, that $80 starts to look insignificant.
If you think you can sell linux by saying "you'll save $90 off each license" you'd be laughed out of the room. That is basically pennies for a business.
And my Walmart point was valid: If linux actually had a TCO edge on Windows, however insignificant, a place as big as Walmart would find huge gains by converting its army of desktop PCs. My argument is that if you can save $50 in TCO per PC by switching to linux it would hardly be worth it for a small biz to save $500. But if Walmart could save $50 per PC, that would save them MILLIONS. If it was possible, they would do it.
But the truth is, there is no TCO advantage by switching to linux. Every large company knows this. Which is why you can't find a single large company that runs linux on a majority of their PCs, except for the linux manufacturers.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you actually think that Nixon *created* the neocons? It's not like Pat Buchanan, George H.W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Weinberger, etc, were on the path to rightousness when they accidently got mixed up in the Nixon Administration. The seeds of the conservative agenda were planted by Goldwater more then a decade before Nixon took the oath of office.
I love it that you call opening china "self serving." If you mean "serving the intersts of the United States" then you're correct. He did manipulate China and the USSR. It was a brilliant move, maybe the most deft handling of cold war policy since the Cuban Missle Crisis.
As for the STS being underfunded, you should take that up with the people that actually write the budgets. Back in those days it was the democratically controlled congress.
And your understanding of what the Gold Standard did is not at all accurate. Congress was able to sell debt in 1970 in the same exact way it's able to sell debt today. Remaining on the gold standard would've done nothing but limit the growth of the economy and liquidity of the US currency over the past 30 years. Every country in the world has followed us off of the gold standard. The Free Trade we have today would've been severely impaired if this step hadn't been taken. Fiat currency allows for exchange rates to be set naturally based on the millions of things that affect it, rather then supporting it artifically.
Yes, Nixon did some very dirty things, like trying to steal democracy from the American people. But his administration did more good for the country then GWB has. Just a few of Nixons lasting accomplishments:
- Creation of the E.P.A.
- Ending engagement in Vietnam
- Opening China to diplomatic relations, including their induction as a UN member state
- Singning of the SALT treaty and the ABM treaty with the soviets
- Embracing and signing-off on the NASA STS program
- Elimination of the "Gold Standard" of US Currency allowing more natural currency flux
No matter what, you can't seperate Nixon from Watergate. But he isn't anywhere near the worst president we've had. And in a way, watergate helped America. A healthy distrust for government is a good thing.
This world would've been a much better place today had RFK not been shot. He would've ate Nixons lunch in a general election and the course of history would've been changed. I'm a big blue-stater but I believe in giving credit where credit is due.
Saying that marijuana will ever be "legalized" is, at the very least, a misnomer. As if Congress will one day say "All these laws we have about weed, lets just throw 'em out!"
No, if it ever does happen, it will be more like this: "Lets throw out this ONE LAW restricting use & sale of weed, and replace it with DOZENS of other restrictions." No smoking and driving, no smoking within x feet of a school/restaurant/shopping mall, no selling without a license, no license without a huge license fee, no growing without a license, no growing license without another huge fee, no using it in public, no transporting over state lines, no importing from another country, no concealed carry of your bong, no water in a bong over 72hours old, no smoking near minors, no sale of papers/pipes/paraphalia without a tax stamp, upper bounds on THC concentration, lower bounds on price ("State Minimum"), on and on and on and on....
I've never had to spend more then 10 minutes on the phone with a Dell tech when a PC goes bad. I tell them, for example, that the Disk is bad, or the power supply. They ask a half-dozen questions to be sure that I know what I'm talking about, then they ship me a new one. Sometimes I send the broken part back on their dime, sometimes they just have me toss it out.
I've got nothing but good things to say about Dell support.
Their sales staff, however, leaves much to be desired.
Apple isn't having problems.
See, was that so hard?
Geez.
This is old, but I just read your reply.
I think you should check again, though. The only pointers in ActionScript (2.0 or 3.0) are MOUSE POINTERS. There is NEVER going to be pointers in ActionScript. We're talking about an interpreted language that uses Garbage Collection. Why would you ever want a pointer? You can implement a linked list with REFERENCES, you don't need pointers.
Do you understand that pointers (in C) address a block of memory? Why would you ever address a block of memory in a high-level language like ECMA Script? It just doesn't make sense.
Maybe you meant references, but pointers are way different then references.
How did you get my CD Key?
You... killed my son... you.... pirate bastard.
>> Object oriented and powerful, Actionscript aint. Heck, it doesn't even have real pointers yet.
/.
Wha? What do pointers have to do with OOP? I'll answer that: Nothing. Pointers have nothing to do with OOP.
More to the point (hehe), do you consider only languages with true pointers to be "real" languages? And what's with the "yet?" Do you think that ECMA Script will EVER contain pointers?
I could be wrong... but it seems like you're just throwing up a word salad from things you picked up on
"but.. but.. it doesn't even have [closures|pointers|aspects|garbage collection]"
Often it seems like people overlook an important aspect of Cost of Living: Durable Goods are still the same price!
To illustrate, I hail from Northern Ohio. The CoL in Chicago is twice what it is where I grew up, and the salarys are nearly twice as high, but a new Honda doesn't cost twice as much in Chicago. Either does an xBox or Airline ticket or clothing at the local JCrew. Similarly, the higher the CoL the cheaper it becomes to take vacations.
Even though $47,000 a year in Arkansas might be better then $120,000 in San Jose but I'd still take the $120k.
While I didn't RTFA, I'm surprised that this is being discussed like it's a newfangled idea. "See, we just put these parallel lines on things, and the spacing between the lines represents a number...."
We don't need to invent new things to add bar codes to. There are already dozens of ways to use this system if it could interface with existing bar codes. If i'm at Borders I'd love to scan a barcode on a book and bring up its reviews, If I have a UPS label I'd love to be able to scan the barcode to view its shipping info, etc.
I understand that this is much more then a bar code, it's also a database and lookup system. Not easy to build, but neither is a cellphone-based barcode scanner.
This is old, but I thought I'd reply anyway:
...thus: $60M / 3280 feet = $18,293 per linear foot.
...this: $13.6M / 5280 feet = $2,575 per linear foot.
$18,500 per foot calculation is simply:
$30bn (the orig. figure) divided by 500km = $60,000,000/km...
Contrast that to my figures, which I googled, which detailed a 140-mile hiway in Indiana estimated to cost $1.4bn.
$1.4bn divided by 140mi = $13,571,428/mi...
The only thing i didn't include in my original post was the conversion between GBP and USD. While I'm not a mind reader, my guess is the 30bn figure was given in US Dollars, NOT pounds sterling. I came to this conclusion for 2 reasons:
1) 1 GBP is worth much more then USD. If that figure WAS in pounds, it makes the hiway nearly twice as expensive as my math shows it to be, which is just ludicrous.
2) The poster used "billions" as a Unit of Measure. I took this to mean 10^9, or "one thousand million" as it's commonly used in the US. In the UK, one billion is used to describe 10^12, or "one million million" which is the number we call "trillion" in the US. (and this goes on and on... a trillion in the UK describes 10^18 or what we call a quintillion in the US)
Either of these interpretations would push the values out of the range of good sense.
$30 BILLION for 500 miles of new highway? Where, exactly, are you getting your figures? That's about $18,500 per linear foot of highway. Contrast that to a recent proposal for building a "new" Interstate 69 in Indiana, which came in at $1.9B for 140 miles, or about $2600 per linear foot. Assuming your example highway was three times as wide as I69, where does the $11,000 per linear foot go?
You'll be able to find a lot more about this technique if you search google for the (quoted) term "shared nothing"
I'm sorry if your post was inspired by some personal tragedy. It reads to me like maybe it was. You feel personally let-down by the pharm industry. Because your argument seems founded much more in emotion then it is in fact.
/. drivel. M$ == BigPhrama == The DEVIL! Companies are EVIL and BAD! We should all quit out jobs and write OSS and live in a barter economy! Punish the big companies for making me think wrong thoughts!
The fact is that over the last 50 years the pharmaceutical industry has made some incredible breakthroughs. And every single one of those drugs was, at some point, at this stage in development.
The truth is that developing new drugs is VERY capital-intensive. They NEED to keep investors primed-up. It could take 20 years of huge investments before seeing a single $1 in revenue.
The truth is that human chemistry is one of the most complicated problem-domains faced by large commercial enterprise. You don't see many announcements saying "We Cured X Disease!" because it's rarely that simple. A drug might cure a disease in one part of the population, have no effect in a second part, and actually make it WORSE for a third.
My point is that pharma companies have made tremendous breakthroughs. Look at AIDS for example. People contracting HIV today might NEVER be diagnosed with AIDS. In fact, a person contracting HIV today has almost an equal chance of dying of another, non-related illness then from an immunodeficiency-related illness. This is a disease that wasn't even diagnosed 30 years ago.
I'm sorry, but the idea that someone should be penalized for "false hopes" -- essentially conclusions that the reader might jump to--is just REDICULOUS. Perhaps if you read that a drug hasn't been tested on a human yet, you should refrain from feeling false hope? Can we not get an amen for a little personal responsibility?
EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS issues forward-looking statements. OF COURSE a phrama company is going to do the same.
I gotta stop, here. It would take me far too long to enumerate all of your asinine points. Let's all just reduce ourselves to
Puh-Leese. Companies in most industries would laugh you out of the room if you suggested risking BILLIONS in capital on a product that could take DECADES to develop and years longer to push thru a byzantine regulation process, and guess what: Even then it still might not ever produce a DIME in revenue, let alone break even.
So basically, a star that MIGHT be reaching the THEORETICAL size limit of a white dwarf that actually may have gone Nova over a THOUSAND YEARS AGO, MIGHT, MAYBE, IF WE'RE LUCKY, be visiable from earth sometime between TOMORROW AND ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW.
Wow. What incredible science. Did NewScientist buy the BBC over the weekend?
The Ctype_ first-order functions leave much to be desired. For example, in PHP 5.0, ctype_digit("123456") != ctype_digit(123456) ... these issues led me to integrating my own validation code within my error handler classes. Just my $.02
FTFA: Information transfer requires actual physical connection to the Memory Spot and Taub says they designed it that way.
For what it's worth, the $_SESSION array is only going to hold data that YOU put in there. Session data is stored on the server, not the client. It wouldn't be a horrible practice to run session data thru your normal "Cleaning" routine but it's not vital. If someone has the ability to stuff session variables then they're executing code on your server and you've got a lot more problems then injection attacks.
Despite the misleading summary and lede, inside the article it explains that you need CONTACT with this "tomato seed" to read its data. I can see this as solving some of the same problems as RFID, like the Passports, for example, that you don't want to be read at a distance. But for other problems, like determining how many widgets Acme Co. has in their warehosue, it's not much better then a bar code.
Except that you cannot compare "an advertisement" to an entire adwords campaign with a rotation of dozens of seperate adverts that are targeted to different keywords and demographics.
Besides, I said our CONVERSION rate has steadily dropped, not our click thru rate--which has grown, albeit slowly.
This is correct. In our case a bit more. And 95% goes to adwords. When you sell a service, the only cost is development, infrastructure, customer acqisition, and, of course, payroll and administrative expenses. And we're profitable.
That's just typical Microsoft.
.....What's that? Googles search software is proprietary? MSN DOESNT RUN GFS? Map Reduce ISNT on source forge?
Google creates novel applications like MapReduce and GFS all the time. And, as usual, Microsoft is right there to incorporate the best ideas from Google and Yahoo into their search product. If only we could get Microsoft to embrace Open Source like Google has.
Those Bastards!
Who are they to spend millions of their own money to hire the best minds in the business and then not just GIVE IT ALL AWAY. You'd think they were actually tring to turn a PROFIT or something!
Are you kidding? My company has about 2MM in sales annually, and we spend almost $500,000 a year on Google Adwords. Over 90% of our sales come from Google. We're getting a conversion rate that is less then one percent and it's gotten worse over time. If it continues to drop we'll have no choice but reduce our adwords cost-per-click limit and take our advertising dollars elsewhere. No matter how you spell it, that means problems for the GOOG.
You'd be surprised how many industries I've consulted.
And I still contend that no large companies are running linux on a majority of their PCs. Not even banks, not even oil companies. A lot of modern teller-line software is windows based, and even if you consider that many banks are running old-school terminal software for their tellers, they're still running windows on PCs used by their Originators, Managers, Etc.
You have to be kidding me. We're talking TCO. You're saying walmart saves $80 per windows license. When you factor in the IT staff, cost of support, cost of repair, cost of just RUNNING THE PC for years, that $80 starts to look insignificant.
If you think you can sell linux by saying "you'll save $90 off each license" you'd be laughed out of the room. That is basically pennies for a business.
And my Walmart point was valid: If linux actually had a TCO edge on Windows, however insignificant, a place as big as Walmart would find huge gains by converting its army of desktop PCs. My argument is that if you can save $50 in TCO per PC by switching to linux it would hardly be worth it for a small biz to save $500. But if Walmart could save $50 per PC, that would save them MILLIONS. If it was possible, they would do it.
But the truth is, there is no TCO advantage by switching to linux. Every large company knows this. Which is why you can't find a single large company that runs linux on a majority of their PCs, except for the linux manufacturers.