My secondary panel is model year 2003 and is 4:3. Really only HDTV uses 16:9; proper built-for-computer monitors are still available 16:10, and movies are shot 2.35:1.
Slack and Gentoo lasted for a couple years each, Ubuntu was a dual-boot with Win XP, and Mint I only ran for a short time before going to Win 7. The progression was basically towards what would mean less time used sustaining vs using the computer.
I personally know at least one person who voted underage through voter impersonation. If I, as someone totally removed from the "inside" of the politcal process run into it, I can assure you that there are many, many cases with much more malicious intent than a 16 year old who really really wanted to be able to say he voted for Kerry. If a fully naturalized citizen must present ID to board an airplane, buy alcohol, or even travel by car near the beach on a holiday weekend (hello, welcome to the checkpoint, papers please!), why is it suddenly "racist" to demand ID to vote? Are minorities somehow incapable of going to the DMV for their non-driver ID cards like everyone else?
In the "bricks and mortar" engineering world, you have to pass your PE exam to be able to sign off on designs and whatnot. Big projects that could conceivably cause a liability if they went awry thus employ one or more PEs to at least inspect and certify the design and implementation, and liability falls on those professionals should the engineering turn out to hurt people or destroy property. With computer code forming more and more of the "can blow the whole thing up" part of engineering, it might be time to pull computer engineers into the PE fold, and bring a similar legal structure to mission-critical code.
They are allowed extra powers, for the most part they refrain from using them, but if you are going to make their lives difficult, they will use their power to make yours difficult too.
Yes, I do seem to recall the reason behind empowering police and the justice system being to make life difficult for anyone who sticks their head up. It's time we lifted the burden of preserving public safety from these people; they clearly have enough abuse already!
The raspberry site suggests performance is in line with an old 900mhz Pentium 2 (plus a fancy graphics card), so it might not be too crazy to compare capabilities with your older machines. Weird glibc optimizations are no end of trouble in my experience; working out what pieces are missing and hacking applications around that to get them to build is a huge hurdle in bringing otherwise Linux compatible software to these devices.
The econobox I drive to work each day would be a technological marvel to the most wealthy of executives even 50 years ago. New things are expensive, so the rich get them first, but if we never dream of any thing new simply to spite those more fortunate, we spite only ourselves on the long term.
Acela faces the same problem most of Amtrak does: it travels far under rated speed for most of the route because it's on freight rail. The only time it's travelling faster than the regular Northeast Regional is certain areas before it enters CT (though both trains outpace free-flowing highway traffic in NJ). The principal improvement in travel time is that it stops only once per state, and I believe has a shorter-than-normal layover in NYC (Northeast Regional stops for a good 45min at NY Penn).
We live in an era where we shy back from the edge achieved in the past. Air transport speeds have stagnated around mach 0.9, the top speed at Indianapolis was recorded more than a decade ago, and the optimistic plan for a return to the moon has three times the development time of the original flight. Between tendencies to ensure that we don't do anything that could fail and to form a bureaucracy to hide behind if it does, this century's progress in the peak of human achievement will far lag that of the last.
Mentioning Parkour as a high-risk factor that should increase insurance premiums is a perfect example of why trying to work out a global heuristic for self-imposed health risk is nigh on impossible. Particularly interesting is the interaction between a lifestyle choice, freestyle walking, and a preexisting condition, such as an inner-ear problem, which makes that choice more dangerous to one person than another. I'm not sure that a single system can be used as blanket cover for any significantly large population and still equitably cover both those whose healthcare will be expensive no matter how they live, and those who insist on self-destructive choices.
The man had his reputation and property taken from him by the state. Presumably, the prosecutor has both property and a reputation. In Babylon they solved this by summarily executing the prosecutor and conferring their lands and titles to the falsely accused. As a society, we've evolved, and I think we could make do with just transferring the property and reputation and leaving the accuser in the gutter.
I would say that OOTS is a very good example of a Kickstarter project demonstrating transparency in the face of a lot of challenges. Rich has a vast number of obligations from the drive and will probably spend the better part of a year paying them off, but keeps the backers up to date with regular announcements. I would forward something like the Fifty Dollar Follow Focus (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2120229387/50-dollar-follow-focus) as an example of something that went through the whole process smoothly: People pledged, the goal was met, equipment was purchased, and the product was made and sent out.
Your cloak of anonymity and your refusal to enumerate your actual argument does you no favors, but I will attempt to clarify my point in any case:
It is obviously not a good thing that the plants ever melted down, and obviously there is some danger associated with the small releases that were made. However, given the choice between a radiation exposure that might lead to complication decades from now, or a tsunami that will definitely kill you and your family and destroy everything you know, is it really reasonable to have nuclear safety be the sole takeaway of the disaster?
On a lives-saved-per-dollar basis, it has to make more sense to address why people were living in a flood plain and why so many died and so much was lost to the water, rather than to hamstring the electrical network of an industrial nation and return to planet-destroying 19th century power generation.
The most important lesson here is one that goes out to all the nuclear fear-mongers: Absolutely everything could possibly go wrong did, and yet no one died. Western-plan nuclear plants have, in my view, been proven safe by this disaster. Compare the damage and loss of life from the far-overblown nuclear meltdown with the entire towns and tens of thousands of people who were washed away by the tsunami, and I think it should be apparent that nuclear reactors have far more business in tectonically active coastal regions than residential areas do.
For traditional insurance from a private firm, this is exactly how it works. The policy generally places certain conditions on insurability, but market forces prevent the conditions from becoming too draconian. When the government is the sole insurer, however, there is no check on what is deemed a threat to health. Additionally, since there is generally no "opt-out" option provided (ie, subscription to the national insurance is mandatory), these conditions aren't simply limits to insurability, but carry the coercive force of law. The number one argument against public insurance is that it enables "personal health" to become the new "terrorism" in invading people's lives.
I tried this move at one employer with a very vague and all-encompassing non-compete/IP contract, and while I did keep the job and didn't have the sign, the manager I was working with became extremely irate and basically left the table while we were working out which clauses of the contract I was at odds with. That particular firm was quite small and probably didn't relish the cost of recruiting and hiring a replacement, but at a larger firm where I was one of many new hires I don't doubt I would have been out on the street that afternoon, printed cube nameplate or not.
The feeling among engineers at my current place of employment is very similar (that the job is basically McDonald's but with much better pay and no customer interaction). While it is certainly something that an employer can encourage through policy (having salaried workers still punch an hourly clock, lack of input into future work...), I think that this attitude represents a lot of what's wrong with the modern intellectual workforce.
McDonald's pays people by the hour because there is a clear distinction between work and not-work, and they pay you to be in work mode for x hours. Work/life separation is more difficult with engineering work (eg, a short-order cook cannot work from the toilet, but an engineer may have a leap of insight there). I think that an effort is required from both sides to make the most of a worker's mind.
The first step is likely best taken from the employers' side; at all of the firms I know engineers at, they punch an hourly clock and are charged vacation time when they don't make 40 hours in week. A true salaried worker should be paid a fixed sum per week, staying late when a task is down to the wire, but at the same time leaving early (or for part of the day) when waiting on data or between projects. The hourly mindset leads to people sitting around waiting for an arbitrary time to arrive, or checking out before the job is done.
I fail to see where the MILC is going to produce subpar image compared to a MILC at the same product level. No, there's no MILC that will beat out a top-shelf full-frame DSLR (frankly once you build a body wide enough that the image circle can cover full frame, you might as well put in the mirror). On the other hand, a Sony Alpha or Canon Rebel isn't going to give you a better picture than a Sony NEX; it's exactly the same sensor. Yes, the glass is different, because the shorter flange height you get by omitting the obsolete mirror box allows you to rearrange things, but you can get an adapter ring to take your flange height out to any other system. For someone new to using a camera with manual settings, being set up to see in real-time the effect of those settings is far superior to having to guess what you're going to get while looking through an optical viewfinder (most SLRs lock the aperture open so you can actually see through the finder, and obviously there's no practical way to simulate shutter speed, white balance, or ISO configuration).
I was under the impression that employee compensation was set by individual companies, and that the extent of government involvement was to set the minimum wage as a level below which you can't hire someone. Is there some special law in this state directing who is allowed to be offered OT and who isn't? (or conversely, who must be given OT pay?)
My experience in NYC was that the "stand clear of the doors" message was live audio, getting progressively angrier as people failed to get out of the doors? That may have been a Metro North train though; I took a lot of trains that trip.
Reading the Wikipedia article on Metro, it doesn't even seem to be an actual UI library, but more of a specific UI design philosophy. I think as long as you emphasize text as the primary design element and break the screen into flat blocks, you could be developing in Scheme using Qt for all Microsoft cares.
The EZPass/FastLane system is a little more friendly. The rental car has an RFID transponder inside a metal box, which can be opened by the driver before a toll. They simply add the tolls to your bill, plus a daily charge for each day the transponder was used. The box lets you bring your own transponder and avoid the daily fee (by holding up your own and leaving the box closed).
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My secondary panel is model year 2003 and is 4:3. Really only HDTV uses 16:9; proper built-for-computer monitors are still available 16:10, and movies are shot 2.35:1.
Widescreen movies in a theater are actually 2.35:1. A proper DVD conversion will show black bars even on a 16:9 "widescreen" HDTV.
I second the desire for 16:10 monitors; that little bit of extra vertical space really makes all the difference!
The modern trend in legislation is to grant police the power to bypass oversight, usually with the excuse that the courts "take too long".
Slackware (9.something) -> Gentoo (2003.0) -> Ubuntu (08.04) -> Mint (12)
Slack and Gentoo lasted for a couple years each, Ubuntu was a dual-boot with Win XP, and Mint I only ran for a short time before going to Win 7. The progression was basically towards what would mean less time used sustaining vs using the computer.
I personally know at least one person who voted underage through voter impersonation. If I, as someone totally removed from the "inside" of the politcal process run into it, I can assure you that there are many, many cases with much more malicious intent than a 16 year old who really really wanted to be able to say he voted for Kerry. If a fully naturalized citizen must present ID to board an airplane, buy alcohol, or even travel by car near the beach on a holiday weekend (hello, welcome to the checkpoint, papers please!), why is it suddenly "racist" to demand ID to vote? Are minorities somehow incapable of going to the DMV for their non-driver ID cards like everyone else?
In the "bricks and mortar" engineering world, you have to pass your PE exam to be able to sign off on designs and whatnot. Big projects that could conceivably cause a liability if they went awry thus employ one or more PEs to at least inspect and certify the design and implementation, and liability falls on those professionals should the engineering turn out to hurt people or destroy property. With computer code forming more and more of the "can blow the whole thing up" part of engineering, it might be time to pull computer engineers into the PE fold, and bring a similar legal structure to mission-critical code.
They are allowed extra powers, for the most part they refrain from using them, but if you are going to make their lives difficult, they will use their power to make yours difficult too.
Yes, I do seem to recall the reason behind empowering police and the justice system being to make life difficult for anyone who sticks their head up. It's time we lifted the burden of preserving public safety from these people; they clearly have enough abuse already!
and let Visa/Mastercard's coldblooded lawbeasts fight it out with paypal
Wait ... two wrongs CAN make a right!
The raspberry site suggests performance is in line with an old 900mhz Pentium 2 (plus a fancy graphics card), so it might not be too crazy to compare capabilities with your older machines. Weird glibc optimizations are no end of trouble in my experience; working out what pieces are missing and hacking applications around that to get them to build is a huge hurdle in bringing otherwise Linux compatible software to these devices.
The econobox I drive to work each day would be a technological marvel to the most wealthy of executives even 50 years ago. New things are expensive, so the rich get them first, but if we never dream of any thing new simply to spite those more fortunate, we spite only ourselves on the long term.
Acela faces the same problem most of Amtrak does: it travels far under rated speed for most of the route because it's on freight rail. The only time it's travelling faster than the regular Northeast Regional is certain areas before it enters CT (though both trains outpace free-flowing highway traffic in NJ). The principal improvement in travel time is that it stops only once per state, and I believe has a shorter-than-normal layover in NYC (Northeast Regional stops for a good 45min at NY Penn).
We live in an era where we shy back from the edge achieved in the past. Air transport speeds have stagnated around mach 0.9, the top speed at Indianapolis was recorded more than a decade ago, and the optimistic plan for a return to the moon has three times the development time of the original flight. Between tendencies to ensure that we don't do anything that could fail and to form a bureaucracy to hide behind if it does, this century's progress in the peak of human achievement will far lag that of the last.
Mentioning Parkour as a high-risk factor that should increase insurance premiums is a perfect example of why trying to work out a global heuristic for self-imposed health risk is nigh on impossible. Particularly interesting is the interaction between a lifestyle choice, freestyle walking, and a preexisting condition, such as an inner-ear problem, which makes that choice more dangerous to one person than another. I'm not sure that a single system can be used as blanket cover for any significantly large population and still equitably cover both those whose healthcare will be expensive no matter how they live, and those who insist on self-destructive choices.
The man had his reputation and property taken from him by the state. Presumably, the prosecutor has both property and a reputation. In Babylon they solved this by summarily executing the prosecutor and conferring their lands and titles to the falsely accused. As a society, we've evolved, and I think we could make do with just transferring the property and reputation and leaving the accuser in the gutter.
I would say that OOTS is a very good example of a Kickstarter project demonstrating transparency in the face of a lot of challenges. Rich has a vast number of obligations from the drive and will probably spend the better part of a year paying them off, but keeps the backers up to date with regular announcements. I would forward something like the Fifty Dollar Follow Focus (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2120229387/50-dollar-follow-focus) as an example of something that went through the whole process smoothly: People pledged, the goal was met, equipment was purchased, and the product was made and sent out.
Your cloak of anonymity and your refusal to enumerate your actual argument does you no favors, but I will attempt to clarify my point in any case:
It is obviously not a good thing that the plants ever melted down, and obviously there is some danger associated with the small releases that were made. However, given the choice between a radiation exposure that might lead to complication decades from now, or a tsunami that will definitely kill you and your family and destroy everything you know, is it really reasonable to have nuclear safety be the sole takeaway of the disaster?
On a lives-saved-per-dollar basis, it has to make more sense to address why people were living in a flood plain and why so many died and so much was lost to the water, rather than to hamstring the electrical network of an industrial nation and return to planet-destroying 19th century power generation.
The most important lesson here is one that goes out to all the nuclear fear-mongers: Absolutely everything could possibly go wrong did, and yet no one died. Western-plan nuclear plants have, in my view, been proven safe by this disaster. Compare the damage and loss of life from the far-overblown nuclear meltdown with the entire towns and tens of thousands of people who were washed away by the tsunami, and I think it should be apparent that nuclear reactors have far more business in tectonically active coastal regions than residential areas do.
For traditional insurance from a private firm, this is exactly how it works. The policy generally places certain conditions on insurability, but market forces prevent the conditions from becoming too draconian. When the government is the sole insurer, however, there is no check on what is deemed a threat to health. Additionally, since there is generally no "opt-out" option provided (ie, subscription to the national insurance is mandatory), these conditions aren't simply limits to insurability, but carry the coercive force of law. The number one argument against public insurance is that it enables "personal health" to become the new "terrorism" in invading people's lives.
I tried this move at one employer with a very vague and all-encompassing non-compete/IP contract, and while I did keep the job and didn't have the sign, the manager I was working with became extremely irate and basically left the table while we were working out which clauses of the contract I was at odds with. That particular firm was quite small and probably didn't relish the cost of recruiting and hiring a replacement, but at a larger firm where I was one of many new hires I don't doubt I would have been out on the street that afternoon, printed cube nameplate or not.
The feeling among engineers at my current place of employment is very similar (that the job is basically McDonald's but with much better pay and no customer interaction). While it is certainly something that an employer can encourage through policy (having salaried workers still punch an hourly clock, lack of input into future work ...), I think that this attitude represents a lot of what's wrong with the modern intellectual workforce.
McDonald's pays people by the hour because there is a clear distinction between work and not-work, and they pay you to be in work mode for x hours. Work/life separation is more difficult with engineering work (eg, a short-order cook cannot work from the toilet, but an engineer may have a leap of insight there). I think that an effort is required from both sides to make the most of a worker's mind.
The first step is likely best taken from the employers' side; at all of the firms I know engineers at, they punch an hourly clock and are charged vacation time when they don't make 40 hours in week. A true salaried worker should be paid a fixed sum per week, staying late when a task is down to the wire, but at the same time leaving early (or for part of the day) when waiting on data or between projects. The hourly mindset leads to people sitting around waiting for an arbitrary time to arrive, or checking out before the job is done.
I fail to see where the MILC is going to produce subpar image compared to a MILC at the same product level. No, there's no MILC that will beat out a top-shelf full-frame DSLR (frankly once you build a body wide enough that the image circle can cover full frame, you might as well put in the mirror). On the other hand, a Sony Alpha or Canon Rebel isn't going to give you a better picture than a Sony NEX; it's exactly the same sensor. Yes, the glass is different, because the shorter flange height you get by omitting the obsolete mirror box allows you to rearrange things, but you can get an adapter ring to take your flange height out to any other system. For someone new to using a camera with manual settings, being set up to see in real-time the effect of those settings is far superior to having to guess what you're going to get while looking through an optical viewfinder (most SLRs lock the aperture open so you can actually see through the finder, and obviously there's no practical way to simulate shutter speed, white balance, or ISO configuration).
I was under the impression that employee compensation was set by individual companies, and that the extent of government involvement was to set the minimum wage as a level below which you can't hire someone. Is there some special law in this state directing who is allowed to be offered OT and who isn't? (or conversely, who must be given OT pay?)
My experience in NYC was that the "stand clear of the doors" message was live audio, getting progressively angrier as people failed to get out of the doors? That may have been a Metro North train though; I took a lot of trains that trip.
Reading the Wikipedia article on Metro, it doesn't even seem to be an actual UI library, but more of a specific UI design philosophy. I think as long as you emphasize text as the primary design element and break the screen into flat blocks, you could be developing in Scheme using Qt for all Microsoft cares.
The EZPass/FastLane system is a little more friendly. The rental car has an RFID transponder inside a metal box, which can be opened by the driver before a toll. They simply add the tolls to your bill, plus a daily charge for each day the transponder was used. The box lets you bring your own transponder and avoid the daily fee (by holding up your own and leaving the box closed).