The fact that most of the 'legal' stem cell lines were contaminated with animal products was well known back in 2001. Doonesbury even did a series of strips where Duke was selling a line that just happened not to have been contaminated in this way. I would link to the aforementioned strip, but Doonesbury seems to have changed its policy on viewing past strips to something I can't link to.
Thats a very good idea. Obviously, something has to be modified in the script used to add stories to the system that compares the stories to previously submitted articles. A link comparison is probably ythe best way of doing this. Of course, somethines linkes can be duplicated, especially if used a s a follow-up to a previous article.
but perhaps all this patenting may lead to some designers thinking out-of-the-box with their next UI/ Human Interface
doubtful. creating a better UI/HI has been researched for quite a while. The guy who came up with the design for the mouse at PARC (for the life of me, I can't remember his name, Keys or something) also created a piano type keybord that could be used one handed, and was considered vastly superior to the normal keybord by everyone who learned to use it. It just didn't catch on. If I recall correctly, PARC also experimented with trying to design the absolute worst pointing HI device that was usable (It consisted of a 10 pound weight attached to a light pen that you held in mid air!)
A whole series of 3d UI have been developed over the years as well, again, none of them caught on.
However, the major problem is with the patent system itself in the US, which allows applications based on work done by others, and concepts that are far to vague (even approaching ideas). The US legal system is also at fault for allowing enforcement of these bogus patents (I consider a lawyer showing up at my door with a notice saying 'you are infringing on my patented obvious_idea, pay me X millions or I sue' to be part of the legal system. By the time this gets to court, I would probably have already spent X millions on legal fees determining the patent was bogus)
So, for the love of God, would SOMEBODY write up an XBox version of this, I mean REALLY. Jesus fucking CHRIST this thing would make my life a heaven on Earth, and XBox Live would hook me up with umpteen million like minds around the web.
Your wish might be closer to coming true then you would believe. Mike Poundsmith, the guy behing Cyberpunk 2020 and 203X had to take a 'real job' a few years back because the revinue from his gaming company wasn't quite enough to live on. Last I heard, he was involved with Microsoft developing stuff for the X-Box. This is the reason that Cyberpunk 203X has taken so long to get out, its a part time job for Mike now. Lisa Poundsmith (Mike's wife I believe) joked to me one time that somebody should hurry up and create cyberware so they could hook Mike up to a computer and just download the stuff right from his brain.
I've never understood why the IT industry has been so adverse to Unions?
I think it has to do with the fact that IT people are (or more importantly, were) considered professionals (like engineers and architects), both by themselves and their employers. If I recall correctly, there is a legal definition of a 'professional' worker that relates to salary and exemptions from overtime because 'professionals' were deemed to be able to control their working hours. Unfortunately, workaholic managers now consider IT workers akin to technicians that they have a legal right to abuse.
I think you are getting a few things mixed up here
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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· Score: 1
For one thing, the speed of light is finite, and at GHz speeds, becomes really small; something close to 10cm at 3Ghz (meaning that light will travel just under 10cm in one clock cycle at 3Ghz, that's about 4 inches). When traveling through a medium other then a pure vacuum, electrons and photons will travel at a slower speed still. That means that if we ever got a chip or wire transferring data at 20Ghz, the information will only travel about 1cm in a clock cycle. An aside. It has recently been proven that although it may be possible to send a signal faster then the speed of light (using quantum mechanics under strict laboratory conditions), the transfer of meaningful information is limited by the speed of light.
Also, the idle time may be technically correct, however most modern processors use pipelining to overcome this. Pipelining is sort of like an assembly line for instructions in that instructions are queued in the processor. Say it takes 3 clock cycles to get the data for the instruction. A simple way to make the processor more efficient is to check what data an instruction needs when it enters the instruction queue, and hope that the data is loaded when the instruction gets executed a few cycles later. While that instruction is waiting, three or more instructions that are ahead in the same queue are executed. A pipeline stall occurs when something goes wrong with this process; either the data takes longer to load then was expected, or the queue empties.
There was an artile on the Ars Technica web site a while back that explained pipeling in detail and better then I can.
A few months back, I went to a IBM open house where they talked about UML2. Anyways, one of the things that was hinted at, but not mentioned, was how close IBM is to automatically generating working programs from just the UML documents. Now of course not all programs will be able to be created just from UML diagrams, but most business apps will probably be able to be created this way rather then written. To basterdise a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the design will be (is) the program.
The interesting thing about UML that seperates it from previous attemts to "get rid of the programmers" (COBOL, Smalltalk, etc.) is that it is being marketed to the designers for internal use as a design tool, and not to managers as a product "so easy to use, you can fire your programmers now." Previous attempts to have endusers program themselves faled universally, and usually more programmers were needed. However, this time its different. Most of us have realised that most end users don't really know what they need, and even if they do, have a hard time articulating it in a form that can be used to create a program. This is where the Analysists and Designers/Architects are needed, to turn these fuzzy specifications into concrete designs that are then programmed. If and when this level of code generation becomes practical, then the end result will be the elimination of most of the code monkeys.
A good friend of mine, and fellow slashdotter (Viduliya (39839)) is currently in Sri Lanka getting married. If he's OK, I'll joke with him about his earth shaking honeymoon when he gets back.
Oh boy, you made the ultimate geek mistake, you confused Star Trek with Star Wars, considering this is Slashdot, I'll say it before anyone else does.
From the The Simpsons" Meet "Star Trek
"Marge vs. the Monorail"
Quimby: And now, I'd like to turn things over to our Grand Marshall, Mr. Leonard Nimoy.
Nimoy: I'd say this vessel could do at least Warp Five. [Crowd laughs.]
Quimby: And let me say, "May the Force Be With You!"
Nimoy: Do you even know who I am?
Wasn't there a story on Slashdot not to long ago about how most people cliked on pop-ups by mistake while trying to close them. I wonder how many of these clicks were not intentional, but were an attempt to get rid of something anoying.
Re:You sure about your example?
on
Offshoring IT
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· Score: 1
Do you have any idea how much the US dollar will have to devalue before offshoring becomes uneconomic? I have heard the figure 20% being bandied around for the amount the US dollar should be devalued by. Using the 6 Indian engineers figure used in article, that would mean after a 20% devaluation, you could still hire about 5 Indian Engineers for the same cost as a US engineer. Not that big of a difference. OK, lets keep going, and say the US dollar stabilizes somewhere around parity with the Mexican Peso. (Not that I think this is likey, but lets pretend) Well, there are some jobs being offshored from Mexico because it can be done even cheaper in India or China. Given the extremely low cost of living in India and China, as well as the lack of expectations of what a 'professional' job entails, I doubt the US can lower itself to the level needed to compete head on with some of these emerging economies.
Besides the point, wasn't there a Slashdot story not to long ago about how 80% of IT jobs would be made redundant by better tools and automation? I think that's a bigger concern then offshoring.
Here in Canada, the change to Celsius for measuring temperature was one of easiest changes of the switch to the metric system, mostly because 0 degrees C is when water freezes. This is very useful as listening for the minus sign when they report the weather on the radio tells you whether to expect snow or rain. Mind you, the weather reports before the changeover were still using negative numbers in the dead of winter.
Fun fact, -40 degrees F is equal to -40 degrees C. At these temperatures, the radio weather reports from the little town in northern Alberta where I lived use to include how many minutes it would be before exposed flesh froze (if there was a wind, the time dropped significantly, to under a minute in severe cases). Working outside at these temps is not fun. I'm just glad I didn't have to do survival training at -60C like some of my friends where were in the Military had to do.
In related news the value of 2 has been universally declared to be the whole number value immediately following 1. How this relates to the number 42 has not yet been determined.
Thanks for the great link. I fondly remember the Ladybird books from when I grew up. Anyways, I found this in the second link, and as it relates to the book being discussed, thought it approriate.
How it Works: The Computer was used by university lecturers to make sure that students started at the same level. Two hundred copies of this same book were ordered by the Ministry of Defence. The MOD wanted the books to be bound in plain brown covers and without any copyright information, to save embarrassing their trainees!
The main problem was that the work done by Turing (and many others) during the war on the Colossus machine (used to break the Enigma code) was classified for at least 30 years after the war. Hence we only started learning about these achievements in the mid 70's, after some of the influential "history of computing" texts had their first editition. Even after its declassification, the work done on Colossus was (and still is) not widely known.
The ther problem is the defition of Computer. Depending on how you define it, you can have many different 'first' computers, however, no matter how you define it, ENIAC was not the first computer.
Careful, you might cause a coding style preference flame war here;-)
That said, I agree with you. Putting the opening brace on its own line is the only coding style element that has a warning about errors that can be introduced by using said practice (that I know about).
The problem is that it is very easy to insert something between the condition and the opening brace when they are separated on different lines. The semi-colon is one example, another is adding a new statement or variable declaration outside the block but after the condition.
The practice of putting the opening brace on the next line seems to be a left over from Pascal programming where a blank line was added after function declarations to enforce proper white space usage. When people started programming in C, the ones who had learned Pascal first kept the enforced white space by putting the opening brace on the next line. This style then got put into a few textbooks, and here we are arguing over it.
Yet another thing I've noticed is that this style seems to be preferred by some editors (vi for one). I recently watched a programmer who I was working with who used vim to make the prototypes for the project we were working on. It was easier for him to move the brace to the next line so he could copy the whole function declaration line for the prototype then to just hi-light the parts he needed to copy. Needless to say, he didn't undo his changes to the code, but just saved it as is instead. I then told him to stop, opened the next file in nedit, and used the 'create prototypes' option to the same thing in a few seconds without modifying the code.
I have also found that putting a comment at the end of a block is a useful practice to get into. It's sort of like the labels you see on pipes in large building (Steam->, Cold Water->, etc.) It helps identify which brace belongs to what. Technically, the// end if statement should contain the rest of the IF statement, but that can be difficult if the IF statement is complicated. Realistically, you only need enough detail to differentiate it from the other braces in the immediate vicinity.
One additional practice that I have learned the hard way to use is to always use braces with statement where they are optional. The IF statement is the most common of these, but the WHERE and FOR statements can have the same problem. The problem I had was I had commented out the statement immediately following the IF statement during testing without commenting out the IF statement itself. (yes that was dumb, I know) Anyway, what happened was the IF statement then conditionally executed the next line in the code. It took me over a week to find that this problem. Anyways, to make things worse, the guy I was working with found the problem, but thought I had made a mistake with spacing, and 'fixed' it for me (it was the vi guy I talked about above, and yes he reads Slashdot). This combined with the fact I had to add braces when adding printf statements for debugging made me always use braces when they are optional.
Sounds neat. What do you do if the person marks the ballot incorrectly
Any clear mark counts. A X, Check Mark, circle filled in completely, smiley face, etc. The point is that the voters intention is considered to be more important then the method. A ballot is spoiled if the Scruteneers cannot determine the voters intention, ie two or more names are marked somehow.
OK, some background on how a Canadian Federal Election is held. First of all, there is a fedral agency who handles all fedral voting in Canada, called Elections Canada. These guys take their political nutrality very seriously. Every riding is diveded into polling districts. There is a polling station for a max number of elegable voters in a geographic are (1000 I think, I dont think there is a minimum. I saw polls in the last election returning 6 votes)
Many times multiple polls share the same voting station. Upon entering the station, you are directed to the correct poll, where you show your elegable voter card (they mail this to you a few weeks before the election, I don't know why they don't ask for photo ID) and you name is marked off on the voter list. You then get the ballot. Its one issue per ballot, where the candidates are listed in alphabetical order, with party affiliation after the name. The ballots are printed on a brown construction paper with a ballot ID number printed twice, one on a tear off strip. There is a black bar vertically down the right side of the ballot with a blank circle next to each candidates name. After getting the ballot, you walk to a table in an isolated area with a white shield set up for privacy. You mark the ballot, and fold it up before returning to the poll. There the staff take the folded up ballot, rip off the tear off strip in sight of you, and hand it back to you (although I have seen places tear off the strip before giving you the ballot). You then put the ballot in the ballot box (white cardboard again) and the staff puts the strip in a seperate box. This keeps track of the ballots without identifying who cast it. This way if you spoil your ballot, you can ask for annother one with out them worrying about having extra ballots in the box. btw, the person who crossed you name off the voter list is never the person who gives you the ballot, so no one knows which vote you got, or who you voted for. Also, it allows the staff to determine if a bollot has gone missing. (There is a bizzar tradition of people eating their ballots as a form of political protest.)
Besides the poll staff, there are observers (usually from the political parties) These observers are called scruteneers. They observe the balot box is empty before the poll opens, and is not tampered with durring the course of the election. After the poll is closed, the ballot box is opened, and the counting begins. Technically, any scruteener can void any ballot by claiming it is spoiled, however this is rarely the case (Yes this can lead to vote tampering, as happened in the last Qubec referendum where the Yes side began declaring No votes to be spoiled, however the No side began spoiling an equal number of Yes votes to keep things equal, and reported the abuse afterward)
After the votes are counted, the ballots are put back in the box, and it is sealed again (in case a recount is necessary), and the numbers are reported to the riding (the area that a candidate will represent) level, usually by phone. I believe the repults from each polling station are suppost to bepublished somethere so the observers can double check the caounts, but I don't know how exactly this is done. Anyways, because there should only be a few hundred ballots to be counted in each polling area, the results are usually known in a few hours. A Federal judge can order a recount if a candidate shows just cause, and I believe an automatic recount is called if two candidates are within 100 votes of each other.
To sum up, the major difference between Canada and the US in voting is that there is a (non-partisan) Federal agency responsable for setting up and running the election, with standardised ballots. Provincial elections are run similarly to Federal ones, while Local ones have started using electronic vote counters, but using and keeping paper ballots.
Better Question, where in Canada is this playing?
Not in Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto as far as I can tell. There was a (single?) showing at the Toronto Film Festival but I couldn't make it.
Can anyone who knows please reply if and where this movie is suppost to be shown in Canada? I was looking forward to seeing it in a theatre. While I am asking, does anyone the the distribution of Steam Boy? I have a fealing it will be even more of 'limited release' then GitS:I is.
From what I remember from reading the optimization guidelines for a SGI O3400 box (a few years ago when it wa brand new), Fortran code is easier to automatically optimize then C code is. I believe it has something to do with the use of pointers in C.
The DVD will be released about the same time in Japan. Hence there will be DVD rips in a few weeks.
Its nice seeing the studio execs learning that its better (more profitable) to sell a product that consumers want when its hot instead of waiting two or three years and complaning about downloaders in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that most of the 'legal' stem cell lines were contaminated with animal products was well known back in 2001. Doonesbury even did a series of strips where Duke was selling a line that just happened not to have been contaminated in this way. I would link to the aforementioned strip, but Doonesbury seems to have changed its policy on viewing past strips to something I can't link to.
Thats a very good idea. Obviously, something has to be modified in the script used to add stories to the system that compares the stories to previously submitted articles. A link comparison is probably ythe best way of doing this. Of course, somethines linkes can be duplicated, especially if used a s a follow-up to a previous article.
It could have been a tattoo of OBFUSCATED PERL code!
doubtful. creating a better UI/HI has been researched for quite a while. The guy who came up with the design for the mouse at PARC (for the life of me, I can't remember his name, Keys or something) also created a piano type keybord that could be used one handed, and was considered vastly superior to the normal keybord by everyone who learned to use it. It just didn't catch on. If I recall correctly, PARC also experimented with trying to design the absolute worst pointing HI device that was usable (It consisted of a 10 pound weight attached to a light pen that you held in mid air!) A whole series of 3d UI have been developed over the years as well, again, none of them caught on.
However, the major problem is with the patent system itself in the US, which allows applications based on work done by others, and concepts that are far to vague (even approaching ideas). The US legal system is also at fault for allowing enforcement of these bogus patents (I consider a lawyer showing up at my door with a notice saying 'you are infringing on my patented obvious_idea, pay me X millions or I sue' to be part of the legal system. By the time this gets to court, I would probably have already spent X millions on legal fees determining the patent was bogus)
What, you didn't die in character creation?
Your wish might be closer to coming true then you would believe. Mike Poundsmith, the guy behing Cyberpunk 2020 and 203X had to take a 'real job' a few years back because the revinue from his gaming company wasn't quite enough to live on. Last I heard, he was involved with Microsoft developing stuff for the X-Box. This is the reason that Cyberpunk 203X has taken so long to get out, its a part time job for Mike now. Lisa Poundsmith (Mike's wife I believe) joked to me one time that somebody should hurry up and create cyberware so they could hook Mike up to a computer and just download the stuff right from his brain.
I think it has to do with the fact that IT people are (or more importantly, were) considered professionals (like engineers and architects), both by themselves and their employers. If I recall correctly, there is a legal definition of a 'professional' worker that relates to salary and exemptions from overtime because 'professionals' were deemed to be able to control their working hours. Unfortunately, workaholic managers now consider IT workers akin to technicians that they have a legal right to abuse.
Also, the idle time may be technically correct, however most modern processors use pipelining to overcome this. Pipelining is sort of like an assembly line for instructions in that instructions are queued in the processor. Say it takes 3 clock cycles to get the data for the instruction. A simple way to make the processor more efficient is to check what data an instruction needs when it enters the instruction queue, and hope that the data is loaded when the instruction gets executed a few cycles later. While that instruction is waiting, three or more instructions that are ahead in the same queue are executed. A pipeline stall occurs when something goes wrong with this process; either the data takes longer to load then was expected, or the queue empties. There was an artile on the Ars Technica web site a while back that explained pipeling in detail and better then I can.
What a great pic. Isn't that an Imac in the foreground? and a devil dressed up in a Soviet uniform. So many memes, so little time.
The interesting thing about UML that seperates it from previous attemts to "get rid of the programmers" (COBOL, Smalltalk, etc.) is that it is being marketed to the designers for internal use as a design tool, and not to managers as a product "so easy to use, you can fire your programmers now." Previous attempts to have endusers program themselves faled universally, and usually more programmers were needed. However, this time its different. Most of us have realised that most end users don't really know what they need, and even if they do, have a hard time articulating it in a form that can be used to create a program. This is where the Analysists and Designers/Architects are needed, to turn these fuzzy specifications into concrete designs that are then programmed. If and when this level of code generation becomes practical, then the end result will be the elimination of most of the code monkeys.
A good friend of mine, and fellow slashdotter (Viduliya (39839)) is currently in Sri Lanka getting married. If he's OK, I'll joke with him about his earth shaking honeymoon when he gets back.
From the The Simpsons" Meet "Star Trek
"Marge vs. the Monorail"
Quimby: And now, I'd like to turn things over to our Grand Marshall, Mr. Leonard Nimoy.
Nimoy: I'd say this vessel could do at least Warp Five. [Crowd laughs.]
Quimby: And let me say, "May the Force Be With You!"
Nimoy: Do you even know who I am?
protagonist, Max Quick.
Seems to be a tribute to Tom Swift.
I wonder how many 'kids' will get that one.
Wasn't there a story on Slashdot not to long ago about how most people cliked on pop-ups by mistake while trying to close them. I wonder how many of these clicks were not intentional, but were an attempt to get rid of something anoying.
Besides the point, wasn't there a Slashdot story not to long ago about how 80% of IT jobs would be made redundant by better tools and automation? I think that's a bigger concern then offshoring.
Fun fact, -40 degrees F is equal to -40 degrees C. At these temperatures, the radio weather reports from the little town in northern Alberta where I lived use to include how many minutes it would be before exposed flesh froze (if there was a wind, the time dropped significantly, to under a minute in severe cases). Working outside at these temps is not fun. I'm just glad I didn't have to do survival training at -60C like some of my friends where were in the Military had to do.
2*2*2*2*2+2*2*2+2
OK, that's enough silliness for today.
How it Works: The Computer was used by university lecturers to make sure that students started at the same level. Two hundred copies of this same book were ordered by the Ministry of Defence. The MOD wanted the books to be bound in plain brown covers and without any copyright information, to save embarrassing their trainees!
The ther problem is the defition of Computer. Depending on how you define it, you can have many different 'first' computers, however, no matter how you define it, ENIAC was not the first computer.
That said, I agree with you. Putting the opening brace on its own line is the only coding style element that has a warning about errors that can be introduced by using said practice (that I know about).
The problem is that it is very easy to insert something between the condition and the opening brace when they are separated on different lines. The semi-colon is one example, another is adding a new statement or variable declaration outside the block but after the condition.
The practice of putting the opening brace on the next line seems to be a left over from Pascal programming where a blank line was added after function declarations to enforce proper white space usage. When people started programming in C, the ones who had learned Pascal first kept the enforced white space by putting the opening brace on the next line. This style then got put into a few textbooks, and here we are arguing over it.
Yet another thing I've noticed is that this style seems to be preferred by some editors (vi for one). I recently watched a programmer who I was working with who used vim to make the prototypes for the project we were working on. It was easier for him to move the brace to the next line so he could copy the whole function declaration line for the prototype then to just hi-light the parts he needed to copy. Needless to say, he didn't undo his changes to the code, but just saved it as is instead. I then told him to stop, opened the next file in nedit, and used the 'create prototypes' option to the same thing in a few seconds without modifying the code.
I have also found that putting a comment at the end of a block is a useful practice to get into. It's sort of like the labels you see on pipes in large building (Steam->, Cold Water->, etc.) It helps identify which brace belongs to what. Technically, the // end if statement should contain the rest of the IF statement, but that can be difficult if the IF statement is complicated. Realistically, you only need enough detail to differentiate it from the other braces in the immediate vicinity.
One additional practice that I have learned the hard way to use is to always use braces with statement where they are optional. The IF statement is the most common of these, but the WHERE and FOR statements can have the same problem. The problem I had was I had commented out the statement immediately following the IF statement during testing without commenting out the IF statement itself. (yes that was dumb, I know) Anyway, what happened was the IF statement then conditionally executed the next line in the code. It took me over a week to find that this problem. Anyways, to make things worse, the guy I was working with found the problem, but thought I had made a mistake with spacing, and 'fixed' it for me (it was the vi guy I talked about above, and yes he reads Slashdot). This combined with the fact I had to add braces when adding printf statements for debugging made me always use braces when they are optional.
Due to the slashdot bug in Firefox, the second line of the summary reads
eating the Earth Simulator
The b was hidden under the dark green of the sections field on the upper left.
Now thats an impressive feat of computing power.
Any clear mark counts. A X, Check Mark, circle filled in completely, smiley face, etc. The point is that the voters intention is considered to be more important then the method. A ballot is spoiled if the Scruteneers cannot determine the voters intention, ie two or more names are marked somehow.
OK, some background on how a Canadian Federal Election is held. First of all, there is a fedral agency who handles all fedral voting in Canada, called Elections Canada. These guys take their political nutrality very seriously. Every riding is diveded into polling districts. There is a polling station for a max number of elegable voters in a geographic are (1000 I think, I dont think there is a minimum. I saw polls in the last election returning 6 votes)
Many times multiple polls share the same voting station. Upon entering the station, you are directed to the correct poll, where you show your elegable voter card (they mail this to you a few weeks before the election, I don't know why they don't ask for photo ID) and you name is marked off on the voter list. You then get the ballot. Its one issue per ballot, where the candidates are listed in alphabetical order, with party affiliation after the name. The ballots are printed on a brown construction paper with a ballot ID number printed twice, one on a tear off strip. There is a black bar vertically down the right side of the ballot with a blank circle next to each candidates name. After getting the ballot, you walk to a table in an isolated area with a white shield set up for privacy. You mark the ballot, and fold it up before returning to the poll. There the staff take the folded up ballot, rip off the tear off strip in sight of you, and hand it back to you (although I have seen places tear off the strip before giving you the ballot). You then put the ballot in the ballot box (white cardboard again) and the staff puts the strip in a seperate box. This keeps track of the ballots without identifying who cast it. This way if you spoil your ballot, you can ask for annother one with out them worrying about having extra ballots in the box. btw, the person who crossed you name off the voter list is never the person who gives you the ballot, so no one knows which vote you got, or who you voted for. Also, it allows the staff to determine if a bollot has gone missing. (There is a bizzar tradition of people eating their ballots as a form of political protest.)
Besides the poll staff, there are observers (usually from the political parties) These observers are called scruteneers. They observe the balot box is empty before the poll opens, and is not tampered with durring the course of the election. After the poll is closed, the ballot box is opened, and the counting begins. Technically, any scruteener can void any ballot by claiming it is spoiled, however this is rarely the case (Yes this can lead to vote tampering, as happened in the last Qubec referendum where the Yes side began declaring No votes to be spoiled, however the No side began spoiling an equal number of Yes votes to keep things equal, and reported the abuse afterward)
After the votes are counted, the ballots are put back in the box, and it is sealed again (in case a recount is necessary), and the numbers are reported to the riding (the area that a candidate will represent) level, usually by phone. I believe the repults from each polling station are suppost to bepublished somethere so the observers can double check the caounts, but I don't know how exactly this is done. Anyways, because there should only be a few hundred ballots to be counted in each polling area, the results are usually known in a few hours. A Federal judge can order a recount if a candidate shows just cause, and I believe an automatic recount is called if two candidates are within 100 votes of each other.
To sum up, the major difference between Canada and the US in voting is that there is a (non-partisan) Federal agency responsable for setting up and running the election, with standardised ballots. Provincial elections are run similarly to Federal ones, while Local ones have started using electronic vote counters, but using and keeping paper ballots.
Not in Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto as far as I can tell. There was a (single?) showing at the Toronto Film Festival but I couldn't make it.
Can anyone who knows please reply if and where this movie is suppost to be shown in Canada? I was looking forward to seeing it in a theatre. While I am asking, does anyone the the distribution of Steam Boy? I have a fealing it will be even more of 'limited release' then GitS:I is.
From what I remember from reading the optimization guidelines for a SGI O3400 box (a few years ago when it wa brand new), Fortran code is easier to automatically optimize then C code is. I believe it has something to do with the use of pointers in C.
Its nice seeing the studio execs learning that its better (more profitable) to sell a product that consumers want when its hot instead of waiting two or three years and complaning about downloaders in the meantime.