I do work that is interesting, challenging, and rewarding.
There are high barriers to entry in the legal profession (so that they can artifically inflate prices). The 3 years of easy, yet expensive, schooling do not pay off in the same way that a PhD in science can (in terms of the intangibles).
As for money, I already make as much as, if not more than, some lawyers (there are no lawyers my age anyway). If I left science and went into programming, I'd make even more, I have a standing offer of 3x my current salary (plus I collect patent royalties).
Now, that being said, I do not pay for lawyers. I never will, under any circumstances. As far as I'm concerned, they can not do anything better than I can.
I recently won a wrongful death suit, and have my accountant do my paperwork (a law firm would want as much as $7k to process all of it, I pay less than $500 total).
So, I have as much right, if not more than, the average person to complain about the state of the legal profession/system.
Actually, they did get censored, in a roundabout way.
Penny Arcade, while amusing, is small time. They can not handle a drawn out legal battle. The threat of litigation is enough to cause them to give up.
Right or wrong, American Greetings has the cash to keep Gabe & Tycho tied up in court for a very long time. Are you going to pay for that? I certainly know I won't be covering their legal costs.
The term (that I feel) applies here is "prior restraint", more or less. This basically means, in my usage and interpretation here, that their actions were restricted under just the threat of the possibility of legal action.
Didn't the Supreme Court already test the whole idea of doing a parody? If I remember correctly, it was Justice Scalia who wrote the ruling, but I may very well be talking out of my ass (and I'll admit that).
The most common place that the general public would've been exposed to this ruling would be in The People vs. Larry Flynt.
Is there something about this case that makes the ruling used for Flynt inapplicable?
<rant>
IANAL (I am not a lawyer).
Law is boring, unchallenging, and unrewarding. Useless greedy fucks become laywers... it is not a sign of intelligence (despite what the various bar associations try to make you believe). A JD is no better than an MBA or a PhD in a bullshit field (such as literature, various "ethnic" studies, and so on).
The really smart people (physicists, chemists, et al.) look down on lawyers. You should too.
It's funny how the people that wrote the rules, and created the pomp & circumstance surrounding the judicial system, are the exact same ones who benefit from it. We should move to a system that encourages people to represent themselves, and drop all this archaic bullshit meant to create a class of people who do nothing but argue the meaning(s) of poorly written rules.
If engineers wrote specifications like lawyers (politicians ~ lawyers) write laws the Internet would never fucking work.
I've been pleasantly surprised by all the attention the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA has gotten.
It got to be the Google logo. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories has been very active in celebrating this. Among a few other things, they've had a really nice lecture series to commemorate the event.
I'm a little bit closer to the whole thing since I've done some genetics work (mostly at the ColumbiaGenome Center). My current work involves some genetic manipulation, but that's not the main focus.
Also, I happen to personally know James Watson. I first met him when he spoke at my commencement. But, I shouldn't tell that story, because it has some racist (and very amusing) content... which would only get me modded as a troll. I've kind of worked with him a bit since then, and he's really a very nice, down to earth, intelligent guy. He hasn't really let this whole thing go to his head.
Anyway, it's very nice to see the general public taking a little bit of interest in science. Maybe this will help to turn some of the scientific illiterates into elites...
Unlike most people, I've been pretty immune to spam.
I've been using email regularly for 8-10 years (since somewhere in high school). I never recieved any spam throughout my undergraduate education (kind of before spam got really big). I haven't stuck with the same email account for more than 3 years, so far. I currently have three accounts that I use regularly.
I posted quite a bit to Usenet for a while as a teenager (enough to get banned from at least 1 ISP). Sometimes, but not always, using the defunct anonymous remailer. Maybe that was just too long ago to be much of a problem.
At my last job (first one out of college), despite being on a number of mailing lists (WAP Forum, IETF, etc), I never got 1 piece of spam in over 2 years.
On my email account for graduate school, I've gotten 2 pieces of spam. Both were from the same place, Britney Spears' resturaunt, Nyla.
My personal email account has never recieved any spam. Again, I'm on a few mailing lists (Optics Society of America, ISOC, etc). But, I do find newsletters to be a bit of a nuisance.
Now, at my latest job I'm getting regular spam. I have not made this email address public. I began recieving spam within the first two days of my account being active. The first one I recieved was clearly a dictionary attack (the same username at a bunch of different domains).
I must say, the IS/IT guys at my old company must've done some great filtering. They were generally good people, always knowledgeable and helpful, so I'm not too surprised.
My current university must also be doing a decent job, despite them not being very strong in computer science (note: I don't study computer science there).
Oddly, the bogus email account I use to register for things, gets surprisingly little spam. Mostly, it just gets the crap sent to me when I forget to check/uncheck the "I'm a gullible dumbass" box.
Y'see, doing this is likely to seriously piss off some very important people. Even if EMI & Universal manage to get through this without being hamstringed, it just brings them closer to the boundary they need to cross before that happens.
They're really taking this shit way too far. They seem to think that they're invulnerable (so far, they have good reason to believe that). The nice part about this is that big-time investors are close buddies with Washington. They're gonna be scared, not because they invested in Napster, but because of the precedent that this sets.
Tobacco and oil investors should be very afraid, and we all know what oil investors are capable of.
Hopefully, this will result in Hillary Rosen looking like the Goatse guy.
This is something that runs through my mind on and off. I doubt I'll actually get around to building it until I move (which depends on me finding somewhere to buy). Anyway, I was just looking at some projectors (on Ebay), but I don't know what's that good. Obviously I want over 1000 lumens (to watch it in a bright room) and keystone correction (for off-angle placement). Beyond that, things get a bit fuzzy. Any suggestions?
The idea if running a feedback voltage across a pair of thermistors coupled to some aluminum blocks, and slowing/removing the fan from the projector has come up too. This is only if the noise from it becomes a problem. I'd plan to use the projector in place of a tv, but still don't know what sort of usage I'd accrue. I haven't been watching much tv, but there's all the neat features to take advantage of on such a system.
I'm not familiar with dScaler at all.
For sound, I was thinking a SoundBlaster and maybe Klipsch speakers (not the best, but good enough for me). I'm not an audio/video-phile, so I don't need top of the line AV gear. I would just like a nice setup that works well.
Any knowledge of what sort of CPU and RAM requirements there are for this sort of use? Having 2 tuners (watch & record simultaneously) would be a plus. I'm not sure if I'd use this as a dedicated media system or not, yet. Anyway, it would probably only be doing one thing at a time anyway.
What OS do you use with all of that? Linux might be nice (some stability, plus it's scriptable), but the drivers could be a serious problem.
Just like the main article points out, controlling a satellite/cable descrambler is also a problem... unless there's some software out there to decrypt the signal...
The main reason I see to doing this myself would be to integrate everything.
I want an entire home theater system based around a PC. This means, no TV, no stereo reciever, no rack full of other shit. Instead, I want a PC, a nice set of speakers, a projector (and optionally a monitor too).
I want to be able to access all my media (movies, music, tv, radio, etc) from one interface. The big advantages to this are the convenience (assuming it works out okay), the space efficiency, the re-use/sharing of components (hence cost efficiency, maybe). This is quite possibly the best bang for the buck available (if it's really doable). Sure, there's also a geek factor to go along with it, but that's on top of the other benefits.
In my case, I don't care if it looks like typical home theater equipment. Afterall, it's not typical home theater equipment. A regular case is fine, it makes cooling much easier, and being able to put it somewhere to keep the noise to a minimum is nice too. A wireless keyboard/mouse/remote setup would be good for anyone who lives alone, because you could send the output to multiple devices (projector, regular tv, monitor, etc), but use one computer to control everything.
Having a central storage device, with the ability to backup to CD/DVD, is also a major plus. The upgradability and scalability are nice too. Let's not forget, the MPAA has no say about what features I might implement on such a system either.
What they really need in business is to find that all-elusive step, y'know they one right before "4) Profit!"
Anyway, regarding visualization software (let's not get into the buzzword aspects of this concept), do you really think CEOs will use it? Half of them don't even use email yet (I hear one or two are known for having their secretaries print out their emails for them). They're notoriously technologically illiterate. I assume they'll remain that way until the next generation or two succeed them (ie. people that have grown up being computer literate).
I don't think I've ever used a Tandy, but I remember using the high-tech Apple IIe when I was in school (around 5-6 years old, circa '84), which was the best computer there since it didn't need a tape drive.
FYI - The Ericsson 580 has both bluetooth and a speaker, although it is a bit large. I've used the speaker phone to do conference calls, and it's (surprisingly) damn good.
It can also run MMS, as the prototype MMS software was on the 580 (it was demonstrated at a few conferences - GSM World Congress in Cannes and CeBit). This was before the T68 was announced.
It will work fine on the T-Mobile, or any other GSM, network (I believe it's an 800/1800/1900, not that it matters, since it definitely works in America and Europe).
Hmmm... it seems a bit inadequate, in respect to educational links. It's missing what is clearly the most educational link around.
Whenever I show little kids this site, they're imaginations are immediately lit on fire (along with the rest of the interior of their skulls).
Also, in case your cousins are into puppies... and really, what kid isn't?
He may spell like a drunken 5 year old but he's right.
The translation, for those of us who've finished our "Hooked On Phonics" (only spelling corrections, grammar be damned):
Its that simple really...
Forget all the diets, just burn more than you eat.. you lose weight...
For the couch potatoes, exercise is how to use energy.. And dont eat a lot of garbage..
Just use some common sense. But then again, that wont sell books or diet foods will it...
Poor linguistic abilities aside, this fucker's right. The way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise.
Your goal (for men) should be to drop your body fat percentage to well under 10% (under 15% for women).
I've found a mix of something like 60% carbs, 30% protein, and 10% fat to be a good distribution for my food. Don't put much faith in those numbers (I change it as needed to gain/lose weight). I typically consume anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 calories/day (even a fat bastard would have an amazingly hard time taking in 10kcal/day, trust me on that!)
Fuck being skinny. Pack on some serious muscle too.
My lifting consists of 1-2 hours typically (depending on how focused I am), and I have a 6 day split (2 days on, 1 day off, all 6 to cover my whole body). I aim for at least 30 minutes of cardio per day, sometimes I do more sometimes I do less...
Aim for 1.5-2g of protein per pound of lean bodyweight. I'm currently using Phosphagen XT, which seems pretty damned good. I'm not a huge fan of creatine, but this seems decent (Cell Tech isn't bad either).
It'll only cost more to those who buy from outside the US, just the way it should. That's the point of the tax.
The Governemt Will Never Give Up This Tax (In 25 years great software may come from many nations, think about the future)
Hmmm... great software coming from another country. Let's think about that for a minute. I'm not a linux user (ie. zealot), but I suppose it's okay. That came from a geek in Europe. It was originated there and did not cost Americans their jobs. That's not so bad.
When a company pays an Indian (dots, not feathers) instead of paying an American, that's bad. Not to mention the fact that those filthy fuckers produce some seriously shitty quality code.
Sure, I'm a racist, and I hate them, but you can't really deny that those dirty bastards are pretty much incompetent.
Even Free Software May Be Subject to Tax or Fees
This is certainly possible, but rather unlikely, I think. Feel free to debate this amongst yourselves.
People need to understand that when Corporations are taxed they never loose money
First of all, learn to spell! The word is lose not loose (you made the same mistake twice, so you clearly think that's the way to spell it). Anyway, when a corporation is heavily taxed, that increases the cost to the consumer (which has a limit before the consumer decides not to bend over any farther). This basically ends up cutting into a corporation's margin. Do you really think they don't already charge you as much as possible just because there aren't any tariffs?
Like Filthy said, this movie wasn't as great as the geeks make it out to be. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it but it certainly wasn't the greatest movie around.
Gollum was way over the top (smells like Jar-Jar to me). There is little/no reason that really makes this worthy of an Oscar, besides just the coolness-factor of having a digital character win a major award.
For what it's worth, I am not a fan of the books. They come across as extremely juvenile, and I didn't get around to looking at them until I was in college. It was such a waste of time to read that shit. I don't care if you think they were influential/groundbreaking/important/etc. They still sucked, the technic was poor and the plots pitiful.
While I'm at it, I'd like to make a point that the Oscars don't mean much anyway. It's just another excuse for these worthless celebrity shells-of-humanity to get together and congratulate each other on how utterly important they really are.
Just like all software, this should be "the best tool for the job." It is often determined by arbitrary personal preferences and resource availabilities (using Matlab over Mathematica just because there are licenses laying around).
I've done some genetics work using combinations of Matlab, Perl and C. I used Matlab for the heavy algorithmic implementation, with the really intense bits in C, and Perl to do the pre/post-processing. I've also used the Simulink package in Matlab to do some chemical signal modelling.
I've used the above software on combinations of Intel/Windows and SPARC/Solaris platforms (my employer didn't mind if I burned CPUs over the weekend). In that case, taking advantage of all that hardware (a few million $s worth) influenced my choice of language/toolkit.
I know that a lot of quantitative analysts seem partial to C++. Many professors, especially the older crowd, use a lot of FORTRAN. One guy I know, doing high-energy work at CERN, uses Java.
Some students, when I was an undergrad (late 90s), used something called IDL (maybe it's "Interactive Data Language") to process some astronomical data.
As another poster mentioned, physicists (which is mainly the category I fall into) tend not to trust any off-the-shelf stuff (hardware or software) and will typically look to build things themselves (or at least understand what they've bought in intense detail). Although, I've never gotten involved in serious computational physics (other than typical post-processing and visualization on data I've collected).
One statistical mechanics grad student knew all the details of the least-squares and regression implementations in Excel. Actually, you'd be surprised how many people will use Excel for simple calculations and visualization. It's quick and easy, once you know what you're doing, so why mess around doing it with GNUPlot or something else (which is equally/more efficient, but is another tool to learn)?
In the end, whatever requires the least amount of the researcher's time is the best solution. A little extra computing time (in many, but not all, cases) is negligble when compared to the time spent coding. The UI doesn't need to be slick, the performance (probably) doesn't need to be great (except for detector software that's generally real-time). All that matters is that the results are correct/accurate (and hopefully repeatable).
I'm American, and only fluent in English, but I travel a bit, and end up using foreign keyboards for months at a time. I'm rather irritated by how these are all set up. For example, why make two keys (one for the character and one for its accented form), when a combination would be much more space efficient (and nicely compatible for a few different languages)? For a lot of the non-alphanumeric characters, foreign keyboards require the use of the 'Alt Gr' key.
With the migration to larger character sets/encodings (UTF8, UTF16, various Unicode schemes), keyboards should be better designed to access all the characters.
I happen to be using a French keyboard as I type this, and it's not even properly set up, so the mappings from keys into the character set is a big mess, and I need to do some trial and error to find the right keys.
Anyone ever try one of those "chord boards" where you only have 5 or so keys, on each of two hand held devices, and you type by pressing the keys in the right combinations? Those seem nice for mobile devices (I hate typing on laptops and cell phones).
Honestly, compared to the usual shit these two organizations pull, sending out recommended procedures is really not so bad. Of course, (not having read the memo) I'll assume they made some "threats" against those companies that don't implement said procedures (as per their 'usual shit').
If they kept themselves confined to asking companies to police themselves, and "enlightening" the public to the plight of their failing business model, I wouldn't really hate them. The problem is that they insist on buying laws and bullying other companies into proping up their fading legacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Law is boring, unchallenging, and unrewarding.
I do work that is interesting, challenging, and rewarding.
There are high barriers to entry in the legal profession (so that they can artifically inflate prices). The 3 years of easy, yet expensive, schooling do not pay off in the same way that a PhD in science can (in terms of the intangibles).
As for money, I already make as much as, if not more than, some lawyers (there are no lawyers my age anyway). If I left science and went into programming, I'd make even more, I have a standing offer of 3x my current salary (plus I collect patent royalties).
Now, that being said, I do not pay for lawyers. I never will, under any circumstances. As far as I'm concerned, they can not do anything better than I can.
I recently won a wrongful death suit, and have my accountant do my paperwork (a law firm would want as much as $7k to process all of it, I pay less than $500 total).
So, I have as much right, if not more than, the average person to complain about the state of the legal profession/system.
Actually, they did get censored, in a roundabout way.
Penny Arcade, while amusing, is small time. They can not handle a drawn out legal battle. The threat of litigation is enough to cause them to give up.
Right or wrong, American Greetings has the cash to keep Gabe & Tycho tied up in court for a very long time. Are you going to pay for that? I certainly know I won't be covering their legal costs.
The term (that I feel) applies here is "prior restraint", more or less. This basically means, in my usage and interpretation here, that their actions were restricted under just the threat of the possibility of legal action.
The most common place that the general public would've been exposed to this ruling would be in The People vs. Larry Flynt.
Is there something about this case that makes the ruling used for Flynt inapplicable?
<rant>
</rant>
Can you eat it?
I've been pleasantly surprised by all the attention the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA has gotten.
It got to be the Google logo. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories has been very active in celebrating this. Among a few other things, they've had a really nice lecture series to commemorate the event.
I'm a little bit closer to the whole thing since I've done some genetics work (mostly at the Columbia Genome Center). My current work involves some genetic manipulation, but that's not the main focus.
Also, I happen to personally know James Watson. I first met him when he spoke at my commencement. But, I shouldn't tell that story, because it has some racist (and very amusing) content... which would only get me modded as a troll. I've kind of worked with him a bit since then, and he's really a very nice, down to earth, intelligent guy. He hasn't really let this whole thing go to his head.
Anyway, it's very nice to see the general public taking a little bit of interest in science. Maybe this will help to turn some of the scientific illiterates into elites...
Unlike most people, I've been pretty immune to spam.
I've been using email regularly for 8-10 years (since somewhere in high school). I never recieved any spam throughout my undergraduate education (kind of before spam got really big). I haven't stuck with the same email account for more than 3 years, so far. I currently have three accounts that I use regularly.
I posted quite a bit to Usenet for a while as a teenager (enough to get banned from at least 1 ISP). Sometimes, but not always, using the defunct anonymous remailer. Maybe that was just too long ago to be much of a problem. At my last job (first one out of college), despite being on a number of mailing lists (WAP Forum, IETF, etc), I never got 1 piece of spam in over 2 years.
On my email account for graduate school, I've gotten 2 pieces of spam. Both were from the same place, Britney Spears' resturaunt, Nyla.
My personal email account has never recieved any spam. Again, I'm on a few mailing lists (Optics Society of America, ISOC, etc). But, I do find newsletters to be a bit of a nuisance. Now, at my latest job I'm getting regular spam. I have not made this email address public. I began recieving spam within the first two days of my account being active. The first one I recieved was clearly a dictionary attack (the same username at a bunch of different domains).
I must say, the IS/IT guys at my old company must've done some great filtering. They were generally good people, always knowledgeable and helpful, so I'm not too surprised.
My current university must also be doing a decent job, despite them not being very strong in computer science (note: I don't study computer science there).
Oddly, the bogus email account I use to register for things, gets surprisingly little spam. Mostly, it just gets the crap sent to me when I forget to check/uncheck the "I'm a gullible dumbass" box.
Y'see, doing this is likely to seriously piss off some very important people. Even if EMI & Universal manage to get through this without being hamstringed, it just brings them closer to the boundary they need to cross before that happens.
They're really taking this shit way too far. They seem to think that they're invulnerable (so far, they have good reason to believe that). The nice part about this is that big-time investors are close buddies with Washington. They're gonna be scared, not because they invested in Napster, but because of the precedent that this sets.
Tobacco and oil investors should be very afraid, and we all know what oil investors are capable of. Hopefully, this will result in Hillary Rosen looking like the Goatse guy.
This is just not cool. That's all there is to it. It has some good points, but I feel, overall, it's bad.
Discuss amongst yourselves...
First post?
This is something that runs through my mind on and off. I doubt I'll actually get around to building it until I move (which depends on me finding somewhere to buy). Anyway, I was just looking at some projectors (on Ebay), but I don't know what's that good. Obviously I want over 1000 lumens (to watch it in a bright room) and keystone correction (for off-angle placement). Beyond that, things get a bit fuzzy. Any suggestions?
The idea if running a feedback voltage across a pair of thermistors coupled to some aluminum blocks, and slowing/removing the fan from the projector has come up too. This is only if the noise from it becomes a problem. I'd plan to use the projector in place of a tv, but still don't know what sort of usage I'd accrue. I haven't been watching much tv, but there's all the neat features to take advantage of on such a system. I'm not familiar with dScaler at all.
For sound, I was thinking a SoundBlaster and maybe Klipsch speakers (not the best, but good enough for me). I'm not an audio/video-phile, so I don't need top of the line AV gear. I would just like a nice setup that works well.
Any knowledge of what sort of CPU and RAM requirements there are for this sort of use? Having 2 tuners (watch & record simultaneously) would be a plus. I'm not sure if I'd use this as a dedicated media system or not, yet. Anyway, it would probably only be doing one thing at a time anyway.
What OS do you use with all of that? Linux might be nice (some stability, plus it's scriptable), but the drivers could be a serious problem.
Just like the main article points out, controlling a satellite/cable descrambler is also a problem... unless there's some software out there to decrypt the signal...
The main reason I see to doing this myself would be to integrate everything.
I want an entire home theater system based around a PC. This means, no TV, no stereo reciever, no rack full of other shit. Instead, I want a PC, a nice set of speakers, a projector (and optionally a monitor too).
I want to be able to access all my media (movies, music, tv, radio, etc) from one interface. The big advantages to this are the convenience (assuming it works out okay), the space efficiency, the re-use/sharing of components (hence cost efficiency, maybe). This is quite possibly the best bang for the buck available (if it's really doable). Sure, there's also a geek factor to go along with it, but that's on top of the other benefits.
In my case, I don't care if it looks like typical home theater equipment. Afterall, it's not typical home theater equipment. A regular case is fine, it makes cooling much easier, and being able to put it somewhere to keep the noise to a minimum is nice too. A wireless keyboard/mouse/remote setup would be good for anyone who lives alone, because you could send the output to multiple devices (projector, regular tv, monitor, etc), but use one computer to control everything.
Having a central storage device, with the ability to backup to CD/DVD, is also a major plus. The upgradability and scalability are nice too. Let's not forget, the MPAA has no say about what features I might implement on such a system either.
Hmm... the government made Iraq bend over and take it in the pooper. Now the RIAA got the US government to bend over... interesting.
Disclaimer: I think killing Iraqi's is good. I think the RIAA is bad.
Business intelligence is an oxymoron.
What they really need in business is to find that all-elusive step, y'know they one right before "4) Profit!"
Anyway, regarding visualization software (let's not get into the buzzword aspects of this concept), do you really think CEOs will use it? Half of them don't even use email yet (I hear one or two are known for having their secretaries print out their emails for them). They're notoriously technologically illiterate. I assume they'll remain that way until the next generation or two succeed them (ie. people that have grown up being computer literate).
I don't think I've ever used a Tandy, but I remember using the high-tech Apple IIe when I was in school (around 5-6 years old, circa '84), which was the best computer there since it didn't need a tape drive.
First post?
FYI - The Ericsson 580 has both bluetooth and a speaker, although it is a bit large. I've used the speaker phone to do conference calls, and it's (surprisingly) damn good.
It can also run MMS, as the prototype MMS software was on the 580 (it was demonstrated at a few conferences - GSM World Congress in Cannes and CeBit). This was before the T68 was announced.
It will work fine on the T-Mobile, or any other GSM, network (I believe it's an 800/1800/1900, not that it matters, since it definitely works in America and Europe).
Anyone want to take bets on what the result would be if you did a `grep -i "goatse.cx" | wc -l` on all the comments for this article?
Hell, it was so tempting, I even added one myself.
Hmmm... it seems a bit inadequate, in respect to educational links. It's missing what is clearly the most educational link around.
Whenever I show little kids this site, they're imaginations are immediately lit on fire (along with the rest of the interior of their skulls). Also, in case your cousins are into puppies... and really, what kid isn't?
Check it out, it's rather cool (still pretty geeky though).
The Flasline Mars Arctic Research Station
The Mars Desert Research Station
If you get a chance to go to one of these, take it.
The translation, for those of us who've finished our "Hooked On Phonics" (only spelling corrections, grammar be damned):
Poor linguistic abilities aside, this fucker's right. The way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise.
Your goal (for men) should be to drop your body fat percentage to well under 10% (under 15% for women).
I've found a mix of something like 60% carbs, 30% protein, and 10% fat to be a good distribution for my food. Don't put much faith in those numbers (I change it as needed to gain/lose weight). I typically consume anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 calories/day (even a fat bastard would have an amazingly hard time taking in 10kcal/day, trust me on that!)
Fuck being skinny. Pack on some serious muscle too.
My lifting consists of 1-2 hours typically (depending on how focused I am), and I have a 6 day split (2 days on, 1 day off, all 6 to cover my whole body). I aim for at least 30 minutes of cardio per day, sometimes I do more sometimes I do less...
Aim for 1.5-2g of protein per pound of lean bodyweight. I'm currently using Phosphagen XT, which seems pretty damned good. I'm not a huge fan of creatine, but this seems decent (Cell Tech isn't bad either).
It'll only cost more to those who buy from outside the US, just the way it should. That's the point of the tax.
Hmmm... great software coming from another country. Let's think about that for a minute. I'm not a linux user (ie. zealot), but I suppose it's okay. That came from a geek in Europe. It was originated there and did not cost Americans their jobs. That's not so bad.
When a company pays an Indian (dots, not feathers) instead of paying an American, that's bad. Not to mention the fact that those filthy fuckers produce some seriously shitty quality code.
Sure, I'm a racist, and I hate them, but you can't really deny that those dirty bastards are pretty much incompetent.
This is certainly possible, but rather unlikely, I think. Feel free to debate this amongst yourselves.
First of all, learn to spell! The word is lose not loose (you made the same mistake twice, so you clearly think that's the way to spell it). Anyway, when a corporation is heavily taxed, that increases the cost to the consumer (which has a limit before the consumer decides not to bend over any farther). This basically ends up cutting into a corporation's margin. Do you really think they don't already charge you as much as possible just because there aren't any tariffs?
No wonder you don't know shit...
Like Filthy said, this movie wasn't as great as the geeks make it out to be. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it but it certainly wasn't the greatest movie around.
Gollum was way over the top (smells like Jar-Jar to me). There is little/no reason that really makes this worthy of an Oscar, besides just the coolness-factor of having a digital character win a major award.
For what it's worth, I am not a fan of the books. They come across as extremely juvenile, and I didn't get around to looking at them until I was in college. It was such a waste of time to read that shit. I don't care if you think they were influential/groundbreaking/important/etc. They still sucked, the technic was poor and the plots pitiful. While I'm at it, I'd like to make a point that the Oscars don't mean much anyway. It's just another excuse for these worthless celebrity shells-of-humanity to get together and congratulate each other on how utterly important they really are.
May the streets run red with Arab blood today!!!
Microsoft. I thought you already knew that...
This seems to be the business model /.ers have been yelling at the RIAA to adopt. Let's see if it's actually viable...
Just like all software, this should be "the best tool for the job." It is often determined by arbitrary personal preferences and resource availabilities (using Matlab over Mathematica just because there are licenses laying around).
I've done some genetics work using combinations of Matlab, Perl and C. I used Matlab for the heavy algorithmic implementation, with the really intense bits in C, and Perl to do the pre/post-processing. I've also used the Simulink package in Matlab to do some chemical signal modelling.
I've used the above software on combinations of Intel/Windows and SPARC/Solaris platforms (my employer didn't mind if I burned CPUs over the weekend). In that case, taking advantage of all that hardware (a few million $s worth) influenced my choice of language/toolkit. I know that a lot of quantitative analysts seem partial to C++. Many professors, especially the older crowd, use a lot of FORTRAN. One guy I know, doing high-energy work at CERN, uses Java. Some students, when I was an undergrad (late 90s), used something called IDL (maybe it's "Interactive Data Language") to process some astronomical data.
As another poster mentioned, physicists (which is mainly the category I fall into) tend not to trust any off-the-shelf stuff (hardware or software) and will typically look to build things themselves (or at least understand what they've bought in intense detail). Although, I've never gotten involved in serious computational physics (other than typical post-processing and visualization on data I've collected).
One statistical mechanics grad student knew all the details of the least-squares and regression implementations in Excel. Actually, you'd be surprised how many people will use Excel for simple calculations and visualization. It's quick and easy, once you know what you're doing, so why mess around doing it with GNUPlot or something else (which is equally/more efficient, but is another tool to learn)?
In the end, whatever requires the least amount of the researcher's time is the best solution. A little extra computing time (in many, but not all, cases) is negligble when compared to the time spent coding. The UI doesn't need to be slick, the performance (probably) doesn't need to be great (except for detector software that's generally real-time). All that matters is that the results are correct/accurate (and hopefully repeatable).
I'm American, and only fluent in English, but I travel a bit, and end up using foreign keyboards for months at a time. I'm rather irritated by how these are all set up. For example, why make two keys (one for the character and one for its accented form), when a combination would be much more space efficient (and nicely compatible for a few different languages)? For a lot of the non-alphanumeric characters, foreign keyboards require the use of the 'Alt Gr' key.
With the migration to larger character sets/encodings (UTF8, UTF16, various Unicode schemes), keyboards should be better designed to access all the characters.
I happen to be using a French keyboard as I type this, and it's not even properly set up, so the mappings from keys into the character set is a big mess, and I need to do some trial and error to find the right keys.
Anyone ever try one of those "chord boards" where you only have 5 or so keys, on each of two hand held devices, and you type by pressing the keys in the right combinations? Those seem nice for mobile devices (I hate typing on laptops and cell phones).
Honestly, compared to the usual shit these two organizations pull, sending out recommended procedures is really not so bad. Of course, (not having read the memo) I'll assume they made some "threats" against those companies that don't implement said procedures (as per their 'usual shit').
If they kept themselves confined to asking companies to police themselves, and "enlightening" the public to the plight of their failing business model, I wouldn't really hate them. The problem is that they insist on buying laws and bullying other companies into proping up their fading legacy.