With my 70mm (2.75") telescope, I can see Saturn's rings more clearly than either of those photos, and 2 cloud bands on Jupiter. What'll influence how well you can see them more than the diameter of your lens is the focal lengths of your telescope and eyepiece and the quality of the lenses. My scope has a 600mm focal length, so with my 9mm eyepiece, I get about 67x magnification (600/9). I have a 2x barlow, which makes the image bigger, but it's not very good quality, so it blurs it so much that it's not worth using.
I'd recommend Jupiter, Saturn, the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades. They're all super easy to locate once you know where to look (you can see them all with the naked eye...just not very well!). Also, definitely get a good look at the moon. It's more interesting when it's not full, since that gives you more relief. Unless you have a filter, with a 4" main lens, the moon is going to be pretty bright.
I think it was a while before they were honored for having the best state government web portal in the US by the Center for Digital Government. Sure, Utah has some beautiful wilderness areas, including numerous well-known national parks like Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, part of Grand Canyon National Park, etc.; great rock climbing, skiing, and a lot more stuff like that, but there's plenty of high-tech there too -- perhaps you've heard of Novell, WordPerfect, Iomega, AuthorizeNet...?
Seriously, who's the dope who wasted their moderator points modding the parent post "funny"? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot.
Utah, which had joined the so-called "Streamlined Sales Tax Project" (ha!), was going to start collecting sales tax based on where an item was delivered even in-state rather than where it was sent from, but first repeatedly delayed and later scuttled plans to do so, along with, I believe, some other aspects of the Project. Even for in-state purchases, the complexity of tracking the rates for and reporting sales to so many jurisdictions was too great a burden on businesses.
The only way I can imagine something like this not being too burdensome is for the participating states to agree on a single tax rate that applies to ALL out-of-state sales between participating states.
I assume that as this is being written, Microsoft has coders in its skunk works tearing into OS X looking for deep flaws that it can exploit and publicize. Don't think otherwise. It only makes sense that they'd do this. Thus a cloud is rising over OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project.
Woe is me! Microsoft, that bastion of buglessness, that utopia of user-friendliness, that sanctum of security, is going to bring utter disgrace and ruin on Apple by finding bugs in OS X! Surely they will reveal deep flaws that will finally make me realize how horrible my experience on Mac OS X has been! When I realize how Apple has deceived me into thinking I enjoyed using a Mac OS X more than I would have enjoyed using Windows, when they tell me that a mere blow from a sledgehammer is enough to make all the pretty icons in this entire, fragile, hopeless excuse for an operating system disappear, I'll pick up the sledgehammer and do the deed myself. Only then can I be truly free!
Uh, yeah, right. Sure, if MS wants to find bugs in OS X, they will. If they want to publicize them, they will. Some people hearing about them will turn away from OS X. Somehow, I think more will just be glad that there aren't as many deep flaws in OS X as there are in Windows. "Oh crap! There's a bug in OS X.! Maybe I'd better start using... oh, wait. What the hell was I thinking!"
And where does the conclusion come from that only open sourcing OS X can save it from the cloud that hangs over it? The cloud? Why does that make me think of the assertion used to justify rounding up all the Japanese Americans during WWII--that the fact that there had been no acts of sabotage committed by Japanese Americans yet was PROOF that they would occur. Yeah, there's a horrible cloud hanging over Mac OS X. The fact that no horrible, deep flaws have been revealed yet is PROOF that Microsoft is going to find some, and then it's going to be doom, Doom, DOOM! for Apple.
But if they will give Mac OS X away, they'll do just fine. Uh. What was it they were going to use to replace their OS X and hardware revenue? Oh, the iPod. Uh. They're already selling plenty of iPods without open sourcing OS X.
Apple's goal isn't to destroy Microsoft by destroying the market for commercial OSs....It's to make Apple rich and powerful (yeah, they want it all too). Throwing away profits without compensation isn't the path to riches and power.
Is it possible for people in one country to publish what's legal for them to publish while preventing people in countries where it's not legal to consume it from doing so? Blocking entire countries by IP address would be pretty onerous, but perhaps a solution sort of like robots.txt would be reasonable. It would place the onus for obeying the law on the people whose law it was--those importing the restricted data--rather than on those publishing it somewhere where it's legal. The publisher would just be reponsible for updating their robots.txt-like-file when they became aware of issues.
About 30% of my business (one man company selling software online) comes from outside of the US, so yes, it could be a heavy blow even for a very small business.
That allows my server to use the local copy of bind for recursive queries, but limits everyone else to queries for which my server is authoritative. Bandwidth usage went from practically off the chart to low enough not to cost me extra for bandwidth immediately, and soon the attacker stopped trying to abuse my server.
As I learned from the literature sent out by my auto insurance company years ago, you can eliminate your blind spots by readjusting your side mirrors. What you do is put your head right up to your side window and adjust the mirror so that you can just barely see the side of your car. Then put your head in the middle of the car (ie. to your right...or left depending on which part of the world you're in) and adjust the other mirror likewise. That way, you don't just duplicate your view of what's behind you with your rear view and side mirrors, and your side mirrors show what's in your blind spot. By the time you can't see a vehicle in your side mirrors, you'll be able to see the front of it right beside you. It takes a little getting used to (maybe a day or two) because, since you can no longer see the sides of your car in your side mirrors, you don't have a fixed point of reference to show you where things are, but as soon as you get used to it, you don't need that crutch anymore.
I only read part way through the comments that have been posted, but it looks like the typical Slashdot crowd that wants everything free are the one's talking. I noticed a few posts complaining that 'when you are a monopoly supplier (or a cartel) "the market" doesn't decide anything, the monopolist looks at the demand curve and sets a profit maximizing price' and the like. Those expressing such opinions are missing two important points:
1) There's more to "the market" than markets for identical commodities available from multiple suppliers. A monopolist that sets a profit maximizing price based on demand but doesn't use non-market forces like government regulation or subsidies is still operating in the market. Especially with non-essential items like songs, consumers have a lot of influence on prices--at least if the sellers have a clue about how to maximize their profits.
2) A monopoly on one song is not a monopoly on music. If Sting's latest songs cost $2.50 each, but U2's are going for $0.99, U2 is going to take some money away from Sting. This might prompt Sting (or whoever sets the prices for his songs) to lower their price. Hey, market forces just resulted in a price adjustment!
I have to say I agree with at least part of what Bronfman said--selling different songs for different prices is an appropriate market move. Of course, if his statement about wanting part of the iPod pie meant anything but that he felt that Apple was getting an unfair share of the benefit of the whole deal (because selling songs at below market prices helps them sell more iPods--which is probably a fair assessment), then I definitely disagree with him there.
bring: To carry, convey, lead, or cause to go along to another place
take: To get into one's possession by force, skill, or artifice
From the dictionary widget in MacOS X:
take: [2nd definition] to remove (someone or something) from a particular place
bring: [1st definition] come to a particular place with someone or something
Consider these phrases: "take away", "bring here", "take here", "bring away". The first two are common. The last two...I don't think so.
Yes, languages evolve, and the rules and meanings of words can change. But if in the process of evolution, we lessen our ability to express and understand our thoughts precisely, then that evolution is not progress.
"Grammar rules are unnecessarily complicated, and restrictive."
"Grammar goons is da suX0rs!"
These aren't equivalent statements at all. One is talking about grammar rules, and the other, I presume, about people who try to enforce grammar rules. One is an opinion regarding specific aspects of grammar rules, and the other a general opinion of grammer (or it's enforcers) as a whole. One attempts clarity, the other emotion. Something closer to the second might be stated in the language style of the first as "I hate grammar rules" or "I can't stand people who try to enforce grammar rules".
Which is more grammatically correct, and which conveys the writers meaning more aptly.
The first is more grammitically correct. Which conveys the writer's meaning more aptly? That depends on the writer's intended meaning. The two styles of expression certainly communicate different things about the personality of the writer, and if one wishes to include that aspect in their communication, then one should choose the style that best conveys it. So sure, correct standard grammer is not always the best way to express the totality of one's intended meaning, but that doesn't lessen the value of having a widely recognized set of standard gramatical rules.
Consider this--if there were no grammar rules and the two statements written above were both considered equal, would not the second one lose some of its flavor? And if there were 25 different ways of expressing that same idea ranging from the first to "Gram's da gurk!", and none of them was condsidered "correct standard language" which was taught to everyone, how much effort would be wasted learning a multiplicity of ways to express simple ideas at the expense of the ability to express (and comprehend) more complex ideas?
Before I finish, here's and example of my latest grammatical pet peeve: "The thing is is...". What's with the extra "is"? The funny thing about this one is that if you call people on it, they don't even realize (and even deny) that they're doing it.
Blogger publishes Atom 0.3--one of the early drafts which was never intended to be the final version that was widely implemented. Atom 1.0 is in the process of clearing the last hurdles to being officially defined by the IETF and is being implemented as we speak. "Not at all" is already out-of-date, though currently deployment is very narrow. That will change quickly.
The Fruit Growers Association of America giddily reported that 88% of Americans eat apples, so no one will care if oranges go away.
Analog TV can be delivered over the air or over cable. Same with digital. How many TVs hooked up to cable can handle digital TV? If this article isn't an intentional joke, it's still a joke.
Would be my idea of having 13 months of 28 days each (4 weeks), with one day tacked on to the end of the last month (two on leap year). Advantages of such a system:
1) Although every year shifts by a day or two, every month is the same throughout a given year (eg. the 14th would be the same day of the week in each month).
2) Calculating the number of days between days in different months would not be burdened by having to figure out how many days the intervening months have.
3) You don't have to figure out how to prorate things in "Newton" in those years when it pops up, nor whether to treat it like a separate month, or to bill or otherwise treat it like an extension to the previous or following month.
Haven't we been seeing patents being awarded left and right for the most mundane industry processes? Difficult to obtain, indeed.
1) No one would ever patent a program that they didn't think would recoup the cost of filing for the patent in a reasonably short amount of time. This would take IP protection from all small players.
2) Unless one came up with a patentably different way of doing something that others had already done, one would not be able to patent it. Indeed, if they weren't substantially different, they couldn't even distribute it, if someone had already patented the idea. Thus, once someone had patented email software, there'd be far, far less incentive for anyone else to make an email client. The same for web browsers. The same for RSS readers. The same for word processors. etc. Competition and choice would be severely eroded.
3) Even if software developers did manage to simultaneously think up great new features and work their ways around others' patents on similar software, interoperability would go out the window--a vendor would create software with a new feature, patent it, and nobody would be able to make software to interoperate with it. Goodbye to standards.
4) What about when one releases an upgrade version of their software--do they have to file for another patent, and pay another fee?
He was typing along happy as a clam, with 100% accuracy for 21 characters, and then the 30% error rate popped up and out came "rm -Rf/".
Oh well, no more pong.
Better than doing a HEAD first to see if the feed has been udpated is to use the If-Modified-Since and/or ETag headers. If the feed hasn't been updated, the server sends a very small response saying so (roughly the same size as the response to HEAD), and doesn't send the whole feed--that all happens in one request/response. Doing HEAD first, and then GET if the feed has been udpated requires two requests and two responses any time the feed has been updated.
Like some others who've rsponded, a lot of what you said hits close to home. A few things I've learned:
1) The people who say to work on discipline know what they're talking about. You don't have to force yourself to finish EVERY project you start, but you'd better learn to finish the important ones, and to do so without putting them off for too long.
2) Do something you love. If your life is devoid of things you love to do, you'll probably go crazy from boredom. But also do things you don't love so much (going back to poitn #1--develop the discipline to do the necessary boring parts).
3) Find exceptional people with different interests from yours and work with them. You do the parts of the job you love, they do the parts they love, and if there are things that need to be done that none of you love, you go back to point #1 and do them. If important parts of a task are left undone, it won't matter how well any of you did your parts. Just because a part of a project doesn't feel important to YOU, don't think that it's not important.
4) One thing I'd recommend to ANYONE in college--get involved in something socially worthwhile. I was involved in international student organizations and Blue Key, for example. At one of the schools I attended, I was involved in the honors program (yes, partly academic, but also very much social). These are the places where you will meet exceptional people who will broaden your horizons and help you keep life interesting and meaningful. I can't stress this enough--if there is ANY way that you can make the time to get involved in such things, you will benefit from them immensly, and contribute something valuable to society.
5) Try to find what you want to major in without switching TOO many times. I finished school in 7 years (1/2 a year off just to work, 1/2 a year with a light class load, a few major changes, and a school transfer all lengthened it out). In the end, I was planning a double major, but got totally sick of school. So I figured out which one I could graduate in fastest and dropped the other. I didn't really care (and I don't think it really mattered) which I graduated in--I just wanted out. (Had I had more time for things mentioned in #4, I probably could have taken it longer, but still not indefinitely). It was SO nice to get out of school and into a job, where I was able to continue learning a lot on the job.
6) Try not to let one set of interests drive others from your life. I used to read a lot of literature. During school and my first few years of work, I read so much technical material that I largely lost touch with literature--a terrible shame.
7) This partly goes back to what I was expressing in #4, but just to emphasize an important point: be friendly, be kind, give service. One of the best jobs I ever had was as a tutor--I probably had more fun helping people learn who needed help and weren't afraid to ask for it than at any other job I've ever had. If you (and I'm not saying I think you do--I have no idea) feel that it's beneath your intellect to help people with things that are simple to you, then I feel sorry for you, because you're missing some of the best parts of life.
Well, that's enough for now. I don't know how much of that will be useful, but those are some lessons from my experience.
A careful analysis of the study reveals that it was not authored by the The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, but actually cobbled together using words stolen from the English language.
Lucasfilms and OSDN have just iced a deal that will give Lucasfilms majority ownership of all OSDN properties and full editorial control over Slashdot.
How else can you explain Slashdot participating in hyping a new Darth Vader costume by linking to a news story that doesn't have a picture of it? Come on guys! Don't waste my time posting the story till they're showing us a photo!
I can't believe how far I had to scroll down the page before coming across someone who thought it was a good idea. Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Okay, I can believe it.
I can't believe their's an RFC for this! Somebody's trying to use the RFC name to add authority to their opinion.
I gave the RFC a quick read, and can't say that I found its arguments very convincing.
The slippery slope argument that creating one special TLD will lead to everything being required to reside in a specific TLD hardly seems likely. We could end up with a few more TLDs, but it's not going to go THAT far.
The argument that you can't keep people from pointing a domain name at you has a solution so simple that the argument means nothing at all. Just require.sex domains to be in virtual servers--don't allow them to be the default domain for a particular IP address. This is not an onerous technical burden.
The argument (was it in the RFC or someone's comment here?) that people aren't going to abandon their current domain names to move to.sex also has a simple solution. The old non-.sex domains can redirect to the.sex domains. The user, either by using DNS servers that claim all.sex domains don't exist (technically doable now, and best, because, for parents who want to keep their kids out of.sex, it's harder for the kids to hack), or by a browser setting, can avoid being redirected somewhere they don't want to go.
The argument about stigmatization doesn't particularly concern me, for one. I think pronography SHOULD be stigmatized. In fact, I think it already is--and that hasn't stopped people who want to view it from doing so. Next, people will be pushing for the acceptableness of pornography to be taught in schools.
The most difficult issue would be coming up with an objective standard that the whole world could live with. But I think that's a little less of a problem than some people think. After all, if everyone in France thinks porn is okay, then everyone in France can set their browsers to go ahead and display.sex sites. You just draw a line somewhere, and people who want to step over it can. Those who don't want to can use technology to protect themselves from stepping over it accidentally.
Free speech? Give me a break. There have always been limits on free speech. And again, this wouldn't stiffle speech, it would just empower those who don't want to hear certain "speech" to say "shut up".
See my blog for more of my thoughts on the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
With my 70mm (2.75") telescope, I can see Saturn's rings more clearly than either of those photos, and 2 cloud bands on Jupiter. What'll influence how well you can see them more than the diameter of your lens is the focal lengths of your telescope and eyepiece and the quality of the lenses. My scope has a 600mm focal length, so with my 9mm eyepiece, I get about 67x magnification (600/9). I have a 2x barlow, which makes the image bigger, but it's not very good quality, so it blurs it so much that it's not worth using.
I'd recommend Jupiter, Saturn, the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades. They're all super easy to locate once you know where to look (you can see them all with the naked eye...just not very well!). Also, definitely get a good look at the moon. It's more interesting when it's not full, since that gives you more relief. Unless you have a filter, with a 4" main lens, the moon is going to be pretty bright.
Utah has the Internet? When did that happen... ;)
I think it was a while before they were honored for having the best state government web portal in the US by the Center for Digital Government. Sure, Utah has some beautiful wilderness areas, including numerous well-known national parks like Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, part of Grand Canyon National Park, etc.; great rock climbing, skiing, and a lot more stuff like that, but there's plenty of high-tech there too -- perhaps you've heard of Novell, WordPerfect, Iomega, AuthorizeNet...?
Seriously, who's the dope who wasted their moderator points modding the parent post "funny"? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot.
Utah, which had joined the so-called "Streamlined Sales Tax Project" (ha!), was going to start collecting sales tax based on where an item was delivered even in-state rather than where it was sent from, but first repeatedly delayed and later scuttled plans to do so, along with, I believe, some other aspects of the Project. Even for in-state purchases, the complexity of tracking the rates for and reporting sales to so many jurisdictions was too great a burden on businesses.
The only way I can imagine something like this not being too burdensome is for the participating states to agree on a single tax rate that applies to ALL out-of-state sales between participating states.
"There's a hum in the bottom of the sea.
There's a hum in the bottom of the sea.
There's a hum, there's a hum.
There's a hum in the bottom of the sea.
"There's a wave on the hum in the bottom of the sea..."
Woe is me! Microsoft, that bastion of buglessness, that utopia of user-friendliness, that sanctum of security, is going to bring utter disgrace and ruin on Apple by finding bugs in OS X! Surely they will reveal deep flaws that will finally make me realize how horrible my experience on Mac OS X has been! When I realize how Apple has deceived me into thinking I enjoyed using a Mac OS X more than I would have enjoyed using Windows, when they tell me that a mere blow from a sledgehammer is enough to make all the pretty icons in this entire, fragile, hopeless excuse for an operating system disappear, I'll pick up the sledgehammer and do the deed myself. Only then can I be truly free!
Uh, yeah, right. Sure, if MS wants to find bugs in OS X, they will. If they want to publicize them, they will. Some people hearing about them will turn away from OS X. Somehow, I think more will just be glad that there aren't as many deep flaws in OS X as there are in Windows. "Oh crap! There's a bug in OS X.! Maybe I'd better start using... oh, wait. What the hell was I thinking!"
And where does the conclusion come from that only open sourcing OS X can save it from the cloud that hangs over it? The cloud? Why does that make me think of the assertion used to justify rounding up all the Japanese Americans during WWII--that the fact that there had been no acts of sabotage committed by Japanese Americans yet was PROOF that they would occur. Yeah, there's a horrible cloud hanging over Mac OS X. The fact that no horrible, deep flaws have been revealed yet is PROOF that Microsoft is going to find some, and then it's going to be doom, Doom, DOOM! for Apple.
But if they will give Mac OS X away, they'll do just fine. Uh. What was it they were going to use to replace their OS X and hardware revenue? Oh, the iPod. Uh. They're already selling plenty of iPods without open sourcing OS X.
Apple's goal isn't to destroy Microsoft by destroying the market for commercial OSs. ...It's to make Apple rich and powerful (yeah, they want it all too). Throwing away profits without compensation isn't the path to riches and power.
Is it possible for people in one country to publish what's legal for them to publish while preventing people in countries where it's not legal to consume it from doing so? Blocking entire countries by IP address would be pretty onerous, but perhaps a solution sort of like robots.txt would be reasonable. It would place the onus for obeying the law on the people whose law it was--those importing the restricted data--rather than on those publishing it somewhere where it's legal. The publisher would just be reponsible for updating their robots.txt-like-file when they became aware of issues.
About 30% of my business (one man company selling software online) comes from outside of the US, so yes, it could be a heavy blow even for a very small business.
I tightened up my DNS configuration when it was being abused for one of these attacks last October by adding the following to named.conf:
options {
allow-recursion { 127.0.0.1/32; };
};
That allows my server to use the local copy of bind for recursive queries, but limits everyone else to queries for which my server is authoritative. Bandwidth usage went from practically off the chart to low enough not to cost me extra for bandwidth immediately, and soon the attacker stopped trying to abuse my server.
As I learned from the literature sent out by my auto insurance company years ago, you can eliminate your blind spots by readjusting your side mirrors. What you do is put your head right up to your side window and adjust the mirror so that you can just barely see the side of your car. Then put your head in the middle of the car (ie. to your right...or left depending on which part of the world you're in) and adjust the other mirror likewise. That way, you don't just duplicate your view of what's behind you with your rear view and side mirrors, and your side mirrors show what's in your blind spot. By the time you can't see a vehicle in your side mirrors, you'll be able to see the front of it right beside you. It takes a little getting used to (maybe a day or two) because, since you can no longer see the sides of your car in your side mirrors, you don't have a fixed point of reference to show you where things are, but as soon as you get used to it, you don't need that crutch anymore.
I only read part way through the comments that have been posted, but it looks like the typical Slashdot crowd that wants everything free are the one's talking. I noticed a few posts complaining that 'when you are a monopoly supplier (or a cartel) "the market" doesn't decide anything, the monopolist looks at the demand curve and sets a profit maximizing price' and the like. Those expressing such opinions are missing two important points:
1) There's more to "the market" than markets for identical commodities available from multiple suppliers. A monopolist that sets a profit maximizing price based on demand but doesn't use non-market forces like government regulation or subsidies is still operating in the market. Especially with non-essential items like songs, consumers have a lot of influence on prices--at least if the sellers have a clue about how to maximize their profits.
2) A monopoly on one song is not a monopoly on music. If Sting's latest songs cost $2.50 each, but U2's are going for $0.99, U2 is going to take some money away from Sting. This might prompt Sting (or whoever sets the prices for his songs) to lower their price. Hey, market forces just resulted in a price adjustment!
I have to say I agree with at least part of what Bronfman said--selling different songs for different prices is an appropriate market move. Of course, if his statement about wanting part of the iPod pie meant anything but that he felt that Apple was getting an unfair share of the benefit of the whole deal (because selling songs at below market prices helps them sell more iPods--which is probably a fair assessment), then I definitely disagree with him there.
From answers.com:
...". What's with the extra "is"? The funny thing about this one is that if you call people on it, they don't even realize (and even deny) that they're doing it.
bring: To carry, convey, lead, or cause to go along to another place
take: To get into one's possession by force, skill, or artifice
From the dictionary widget in MacOS X:
take: [2nd definition] to remove (someone or something) from a particular place
bring: [1st definition] come to a particular place with someone or something
Consider these phrases: "take away", "bring here", "take here", "bring away". The first two are common. The last two...I don't think so.
Yes, languages evolve, and the rules and meanings of words can change. But if in the process of evolution, we lessen our ability to express and understand our thoughts precisely, then that evolution is not progress.
"Grammar rules are unnecessarily complicated, and restrictive."
"Grammar goons is da suX0rs!"
These aren't equivalent statements at all. One is talking about grammar rules, and the other, I presume, about people who try to enforce grammar rules. One is an opinion regarding specific aspects of grammar rules, and the other a general opinion of grammer (or it's enforcers) as a whole. One attempts clarity, the other emotion. Something closer to the second might be stated in the language style of the first as "I hate grammar rules" or "I can't stand people who try to enforce grammar rules".
Which is more grammatically correct, and which conveys the writers meaning more aptly.
The first is more grammitically correct. Which conveys the writer's meaning more aptly? That depends on the writer's intended meaning. The two styles of expression certainly communicate different things about the personality of the writer, and if one wishes to include that aspect in their communication, then one should choose the style that best conveys it. So sure, correct standard grammer is not always the best way to express the totality of one's intended meaning, but that doesn't lessen the value of having a widely recognized set of standard gramatical rules.
Consider this--if there were no grammar rules and the two statements written above were both considered equal, would not the second one lose some of its flavor? And if there were 25 different ways of expressing that same idea ranging from the first to "Gram's da gurk!", and none of them was condsidered "correct standard language" which was taught to everyone, how much effort would be wasted learning a multiplicity of ways to express simple ideas at the expense of the ability to express (and comprehend) more complex ideas?
Before I finish, here's and example of my latest grammatical pet peeve: "The thing is is
Blogger publishes Atom 0.3--one of the early drafts which was never intended to be the final version that was widely implemented. Atom 1.0 is in the process of clearing the last hurdles to being officially defined by the IETF and is being implemented as we speak. "Not at all" is already out-of-date, though currently deployment is very narrow. That will change quickly.
If they want high voter turnout, they need to put an ammendment on the ballot to ban gay packages.
Would be my idea of having 13 months of 28 days each (4 weeks), with one day tacked on to the end of the last month (two on leap year). Advantages of such a system:
1) Although every year shifts by a day or two, every month is the same throughout a given year (eg. the 14th would be the same day of the week in each month).
2) Calculating the number of days between days in different months would not be burdened by having to figure out how many days the intervening months have.
3) You don't have to figure out how to prorate things in "Newton" in those years when it pops up, nor whether to treat it like a separate month, or to bill or otherwise treat it like an extension to the previous or following month.
and so on.
1) No one would ever patent a program that they didn't think would recoup the cost of filing for the patent in a reasonably short amount of time. This would take IP protection from all small players.
2) Unless one came up with a patentably different way of doing something that others had already done, one would not be able to patent it. Indeed, if they weren't substantially different, they couldn't even distribute it, if someone had already patented the idea. Thus, once someone had patented email software, there'd be far, far less incentive for anyone else to make an email client. The same for web browsers. The same for RSS readers. The same for word processors. etc. Competition and choice would be severely eroded.
3) Even if software developers did manage to simultaneously think up great new features and work their ways around others' patents on similar software, interoperability would go out the window--a vendor would create software with a new feature, patent it, and nobody would be able to make software to interoperate with it. Goodbye to standards.
4) What about when one releases an upgrade version of their software--do they have to file for another patent, and pay another fee?
This is a pathetically stupid idea.
He was typing along happy as a clam, with 100% accuracy for 21 characters, and then the 30% error rate popped up and out came "rm -Rf /".
Oh well, no more pong.
Next thing you know, they'll be putting ginko biloba into beer so that you can get drunk, do something stupid, and remember it in the morning.
Better than doing a HEAD first to see if the feed has been udpated is to use the If-Modified-Since and/or ETag headers. If the feed hasn't been updated, the server sends a very small response saying so (roughly the same size as the response to HEAD), and doesn't send the whole feed--that all happens in one request/response. Doing HEAD first, and then GET if the feed has been udpated requires two requests and two responses any time the feed has been updated.
Like some others who've rsponded, a lot of what you said hits close to home. A few things I've learned:
1) The people who say to work on discipline know what they're talking about. You don't have to force yourself to finish EVERY project you start, but you'd better learn to finish the important ones, and to do so without putting them off for too long.
2) Do something you love. If your life is devoid of things you love to do, you'll probably go crazy from boredom. But also do things you don't love so much (going back to poitn #1--develop the discipline to do the necessary boring parts).
3) Find exceptional people with different interests from yours and work with them. You do the parts of the job you love, they do the parts they love, and if there are things that need to be done that none of you love, you go back to point #1 and do them. If important parts of a task are left undone, it won't matter how well any of you did your parts. Just because a part of a project doesn't feel important to YOU, don't think that it's not important.
4) One thing I'd recommend to ANYONE in college--get involved in something socially worthwhile. I was involved in international student organizations and Blue Key, for example. At one of the schools I attended, I was involved in the honors program (yes, partly academic, but also very much social). These are the places where you will meet exceptional people who will broaden your horizons and help you keep life interesting and meaningful. I can't stress this enough--if there is ANY way that you can make the time to get involved in such things, you will benefit from them immensly, and contribute something valuable to society.
5) Try to find what you want to major in without switching TOO many times. I finished school in 7 years (1/2 a year off just to work, 1/2 a year with a light class load, a few major changes, and a school transfer all lengthened it out). In the end, I was planning a double major, but got totally sick of school. So I figured out which one I could graduate in fastest and dropped the other. I didn't really care (and I don't think it really mattered) which I graduated in--I just wanted out. (Had I had more time for things mentioned in #4, I probably could have taken it longer, but still not indefinitely). It was SO nice to get out of school and into a job, where I was able to continue learning a lot on the job.
6) Try not to let one set of interests drive others from your life. I used to read a lot of literature. During school and my first few years of work, I read so much technical material that I largely lost touch with literature--a terrible shame.
7) This partly goes back to what I was expressing in #4, but just to emphasize an important point: be friendly, be kind, give service. One of the best jobs I ever had was as a tutor--I probably had more fun helping people learn who needed help and weren't afraid to ask for it than at any other job I've ever had. If you (and I'm not saying I think you do--I have no idea) feel that it's beneath your intellect to help people with things that are simple to you, then I feel sorry for you, because you're missing some of the best parts of life.
Well, that's enough for now. I don't know how much of that will be useful, but those are some lessons from my experience.
A careful analysis of the study reveals that it was not authored by the The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, but actually cobbled together using words stolen from the English language.
How else can you explain Slashdot participating in hyping a new Darth Vader costume by linking to a news story that doesn't have a picture of it? Come on guys! Don't waste my time posting the story till they're showing us a photo!
2003:
10,000 people surveyed (note: I'm making up numbers to make a point)
4,000 currently on dialup
2,400 don't care to switch to broadband
2004:
10,000 people surveyed
1,000 currently on dialup
600 don't care to switch
"Last year, 60%, this year 60%" doesn't mean much without know whether a lot of the people who didn't care to switch a year ago have already switched.
I can't believe their's an RFC for this! Somebody's trying to use the RFC name to add authority to their opinion.
I gave the RFC a quick read, and can't say that I found its arguments very convincing.
The slippery slope argument that creating one special TLD will lead to everything being required to reside in a specific TLD hardly seems likely. We could end up with a few more TLDs, but it's not going to go THAT far.
The argument that you can't keep people from pointing a domain name at you has a solution so simple that the argument means nothing at all. Just require .sex domains to be in virtual servers--don't allow them to be the default domain for a particular IP address. This is not an onerous technical burden.
The argument (was it in the RFC or someone's comment here?) that people aren't going to abandon their current domain names to move to .sex also has a simple solution. The old non-.sex domains can redirect to the .sex domains. The user, either by using DNS servers that claim all .sex domains don't exist (technically doable now, and best, because, for parents who want to keep their kids out of .sex, it's harder for the kids to hack), or by a browser setting, can avoid being redirected somewhere they don't want to go.
The argument about stigmatization doesn't particularly concern me, for one. I think pronography SHOULD be stigmatized. In fact, I think it already is--and that hasn't stopped people who want to view it from doing so. Next, people will be pushing for the acceptableness of pornography to be taught in schools.
The most difficult issue would be coming up with an objective standard that the whole world could live with. But I think that's a little less of a problem than some people think. After all, if everyone in France thinks porn is okay, then everyone in France can set their browsers to go ahead and display .sex sites. You just draw a line somewhere, and people who want to step over it can. Those who don't want to can use technology to protect themselves from stepping over it accidentally.
Free speech? Give me a break. There have always been limits on free speech. And again, this wouldn't stiffle speech, it would just empower those who don't want to hear certain "speech" to say "shut up".
See my blog for more of my thoughts on the subject.
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