As I said, I'm not a supporter of Ted Stevens or most other members of his party, but, his knowledge of law, and of congressional procedure, is quite thorough. He is a very literate and articulate person.
I would defer to him on questions of procedure or Senate protocol, and would not underestimate him on his ignorance about his technical comprehension in my own area of expertise.
"The Senator of Alaska did not agree. By proxy the people, but we don't have a direct democracy so you can't really say the people did not accurately."
I am not a resident of Alaska. I have never heard from anyone in Alaska that believes himself to be misrepresented in Congress or the Senate. I am not willing to make that judgement on their behalf.
What you call childish antics, may also be interpreted as being willing to take a bullet for the people that elected him to office, when the rest of the country was attempting to take money from non-wealthy people in his own state and give it to people, admittedly in great distress, in another state.
If his constituents believe themselves to be misrepresented, they need only wait until 2008 to end the Senator's 37 year tenure. It's that simple. I have no intention of moving to Alaska in order to be part of that movement.
But the fact that you used the buzzphrase "bridge to nowhere" indicates your bias, and I doubt I can persuade you.
"But the influx of new residents has artifically driven up prices due to scarcity of the product."
I refuse to acknowledge the laws of supply and demand as "artificial."
"There are investment companies in CA that buy a dozen homes at a time"
And there are realtors in your town perfectly willing to sell to them. If you were on the supply side of this equation, I'm sure you would defend your actions.
"The property tax alone on these sites is as much as an entire house payment so several high profile individuals have been forced to sell out and move because they cannot afford the taxes."
The city government is a rogue instrument that operates without the consent of the people it represents, or are its officials put into office via at-large elections?
"I just don't want people moving into my state from CA."
In my book, that just makes you a bigot. You could just as easily replace "CA" with a race, religion, or nationality, and it would express precisely the same sentiment.
"Turns out the refractive index of nose grease (i.e. wipe your finger down the OUTSIDE of your nose!) is approximately the same as celluloid."
I think old photographers must be a dying breed. The compatability of nose grease and celluloid has been well known for generations -- and was even suggested in books, in the area of spotting negatives. Lost art. I'm not joking.
>Its stomping around acting like a child demanding your state get that money. >Is this how we should expect senators to act?
I think you characterize Senator Steven's behavior according to your bias and imagination, and not by what he actually has done. I don't support the man's politics, but I can observe that the behavior you cite is based on reported spin, and not something you have actually observed. The man is actually quite articulate and direct in his dialog.
>but I think rebuilding Katrina damage should take a bit more priority over "connects a growing town with its airport".
Well, the people of Alaska did not agree. You would force them to agree with you? On what merits? On what grounds that would be constitutionally valid? Because your ethos requires it? That's not government, that's insisting on getting your way, and presuming that your way is correct. That's tyranny.
>Besides that...this is the same fool that described the internet as a system of pipes that get clogged with data.
As a network engineer with decades of experience, I fail to see how that metaphor is invalid:-)
You needed to go a little north, and discover Denton. Or way south, and discover Austin.
There are parts of Dallas that are way cool, different parts depending on what you think is cool, but you almost have to be from there to know about them.
It's a nice place to live, but I don't know why you'd visit there.
> I really need to check out all 50 states one of these years and clear up some of the stereotypes I hold.
Seeing for myself, has tended to reinforce many of my stereotypes.
For one thing, I didn't recognize racism or religious intolerance around me, until I got away from it. That took most of my life to do. I refuse to go back.
Even with the incidents you mentioned, try to keep in mind that you're still comparing *Boston* to Alabama. Boston has issues, but it's got a LONG way to sink before it can be compared to Alabama.
With all due respect to others who wouldn't consider being sent to Alabama a death sentence. (I practically would.)
>all those dam californians moving in a driving up real estate prices.
I can only imagine that there are Idahoans, born and raised there, playing their part in this phenomenon by selling their houses to Californians. And developers, with the full consent of the state and local government (presumably comprised of, and elected by, many natural born Idahoans) making it all possible too.
Do you not think that Idahoans share the responsiblity with Californians?
If high real estate prices are a problem, does that indicate that you neglected to buy a house when prices were low -- a house that I imagine you, a good honest Idahoan, would refuse to sell to a Californian at 300% appreciation?
I think you're dreaming if you think $140K in San Jose leads to a surplus that you can save. Realistically, that's gonna clear a little over $7 grand a month -- a good salary anywhere, but, one paycheck is going to that $2800 mortgage payment.
If you can manage to enter San Jose with real estate equity, you live in a different world anyway.
People who buy really fast processors, really high end video cards, and really fast bus mainboards, shouldn't skimp on RAM -- you throw away a lot of the gains you paid for, and in some cases you would have made better gains just with faster (and lower latency) RAM in the first place. People tend to not believe this, and I admit that my empirical evidence is limited to a few systems in the audio processing domain. But I still say that commodity RAM is no bargain if you're putting it in a system with a $500 CPU.
I'm still using the same IBM Model M keyboard since '93.
I have hardly anything at all from the 8088/86/286/386/486 or Pentium years (cleaned house).
I do still have my (fully working) Apple II, and I have a large amount of C64 stuff, mainly because I hardware hack audio circuits using SID chips, and also, I keep a Moog Song Producer working, because somebody has to. I gave away my Model I TRS-80, and all my Color Computers. No regrets there.
I've got a 9" monochrome monitor mounted in my rack. Got it from a dumpster longer ago than I can remember -- it's first-gen VGA, however old that is. I have a couple of ISA cards that I keep just because they were very expensive, like a Hayes ESP, a couple of custom made interface cards from an old job, that sort of thing.
I have never let go of a disk drive after using it. I have a lot of them, going back to MFM days.
If I looked on the shelves I'm sure I could find cards and old chips and things like that, but pretty much the oldest computer I actually use is my Toshiba laptop, bought in '04, and it seems *so* old. I'm just holding out for my boss to buy me a Macbook pro. Right.
"The computer industry has changed. A 5 year old computer now can still do most things the aging population of computer users wants to do - email, printing, downloading music."
Now they want to do audio and video production, and some want to be able to do production at broadcast quality. And they want to store *everything*. And even if they don't realize it, they want to store everything and have it automatically indexed.
"This isn't even a top-of-the-line system, but good (i.e., best customer-rated) memory is going to cost more than anything else. "
I have found that for certain applications, better quality RAM leads to more significant gains than incremental processor clock increases. This has been especially true in audio processing, where a faster CPU can be a liability (hotter CPU means more cooling noise, a huge problem in an audio environment).
Fast RAM, especially with short latency, is a big win for audio and video processing.
As to the other poster who claimed that frequent upgrades are excessive -- I agree they make for an expensive hobby, but, in audio processing I find myself in a time when the systems are just now becoming suitable to the task. For most applications, we reached a plateau around the mid 1990s. At some point, the bottleneck became network and storage IO speeds, video and game framerates reached the necessary human proportions, and storage capacities exceeded demand for most users.
But it's only just recently that the general purpose PC can serve as a good multitrack recording studio, an effects rack, and a collection of synthesizers.
Anyway, on topic, my only experience with RDRAM was a few years back when the standard server at work was a Compaq -- and we did without RAM rather than pay the $1800 bill for the upgrade... Apparently it was more acceptable to wait for some contract to expire and apply that money to other machines that used commodity RAM. (We ended up with IBM Blades!)
>>Regular expressions are only for regular languages.
>Not true - Perl is an awesome language.
No disagreement, but many perl "regular" expressions are not regular.
"'[R]egular expressions' [...] are only marginally related to real regular expressions. Nevertheless, the term has grown with the capabilities of our pattern matching engines, so I'm not going to try to fight linguistic necessity here. I will, however, generally call them "regexes" (or "regexen", when I'm in an Anglo-Saxon mood)."
Some of the places on this list could be fairly okay for an educated, liberal, free-thinker type. But a lot of those places are damn scary.
Also, it doesn't make sense that Richardson TX would draw less than half the salary of Plano TX. I mean seriously, these are both actually the same place for anyone who would be living in that part of the Dallas metro area, and for that matter, so is Carrollton. There may be a factor related to commuting on I-35 as opposed to Central Expressway, but come on... these are all the same damn place.
Also, pointing out Gilbert Arizona as if it's really distinct from Phoenix is pretty stupid too.
$226 for Scottsdale AZ (yes, it's a separate township, but snobs like to point out that it's *Scottsdale* to avoid saying they live in Phoenix)... That is a joke. Scottsdale median home price is in the $250's still, and most of the housing that a mid-career professional would be happy with are well over the $million mark.
I love how the right wing pundits get upset about what comedians do and say. They go on and on about Air America Radio -- a comedy news show financed by comedian and producer Al Franken. Then they look at The Daily Show and Colbert Report as though these are genuine news outlets, when they are in fact comedy programs. I think the whole thing is hilarious.
>going the speed limit in the left lane is illegal if people are passing you on the right.
Fair enough. "Slower traffic keep right" is all over Oregon, California, Colorado, and especially anyplace with mountains.
The scenario I'm picturing with the original article is something like LBJ Freeway between Farmers Branch and Dallas, with six lanes of traffic at rush hour and people trying to intimidate cars in front of them by tailgating.
I once wired a momentary switch to my brake lights so that I could "stomp the brakes" for tailgaters while accelerating. It was pretty effective.
I didn't read the article, but I will. Cursors aren't evil. I'm an Oracle developer with more than a decade of experience, mind you, but I am no DBA. I'm also not willing to comment too much on this kind of speculative, hypothetical design.
"Couldn't you simply put it back into productions. I mean if its emitting all this excess radiation could you..... produce power with it????"
In France, Japan, and the UK, they do exactly this. Spent fuel rods are reprocessed. It's dangerous, and fission products remain a waste management problem. The problem ends up that separating various materials requires more energy to accomplish, than is obtained, at least in economic terms. The other problem, of course, is that the plants needed to do this kind of processing, is a weapons proliferation concern in the eyes of some people whose opinions seem to carry some weight in the current climate of global politics.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said, I'm not a supporter of Ted Stevens or most other members of his party, but,
his knowledge of law, and of congressional procedure, is quite thorough. He is a very
literate and articulate person.
I would defer to him on questions of procedure or Senate protocol, and would not underestimate him
on his ignorance about his technical comprehension in my own area of expertise.
"The Senator of Alaska did not agree. By proxy the people, but we don't have a direct democracy so you can't really say the people did not accurately."
I am not a resident of Alaska. I have never heard from anyone in Alaska that believes himself to be misrepresented in Congress or the Senate. I am not willing to make that judgement on their behalf.
What you call childish antics, may also be interpreted as being willing to take a bullet for the people that elected him to office, when the rest of the country was attempting to take money from non-wealthy people in his own state and give it to people, admittedly in great distress, in another state.
If his constituents believe themselves to be misrepresented, they need only wait until 2008 to end the Senator's 37 year tenure. It's that simple. I have no intention of moving to Alaska in order to be part of that movement.
But the fact that you used the buzzphrase "bridge to nowhere" indicates your bias, and I doubt I can persuade you.
"But the influx of new residents has artifically driven up prices due to scarcity of the product."
I refuse to acknowledge the laws of supply and demand as "artificial."
"There are investment companies in CA that buy a dozen homes at a time"
And there are realtors in your town perfectly willing to sell to them. If you were on the supply side of this equation, I'm sure you would defend your actions.
"The property tax alone on these sites is as much as an entire house payment so several high profile individuals have been forced to sell out and move because they cannot afford the taxes."
The city government is a rogue instrument that operates without the consent of the people it represents, or are its officials put into office via at-large elections?
"I just don't want people moving into my state from CA."
In my book, that just makes you a bigot. You could just as easily replace "CA" with a race, religion, or nationality, and it would express precisely the same sentiment.
"Turns out the refractive index of nose grease (i.e. wipe your finger down the OUTSIDE of your nose!) is approximately the same as celluloid."
I think old photographers must be a dying breed. The compatability of nose grease and celluloid has been well known for generations -- and was even suggested in books, in the area of spotting negatives. Lost art. I'm not joking.
http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/arch
>Its stomping around acting like a child demanding your state get that money.
:-)
>Is this how we should expect senators to act?
I think you characterize Senator Steven's behavior according to your bias and imagination, and not
by what he actually has done. I don't support the man's politics, but I can observe that the behavior you
cite is based on reported spin, and not something you have actually observed. The man is actually quite articulate
and direct in his dialog.
>but I think rebuilding Katrina damage should take a bit more priority over "connects a growing town with its airport".
Well, the people of Alaska did not agree. You would force them to agree with you? On what merits? On what grounds that would be constitutionally valid? Because your ethos requires it? That's not government, that's insisting on getting your way, and presuming that your way is correct. That's tyranny.
>Besides that...this is the same fool that described the internet as a system of pipes that get clogged with data.
As a network engineer with decades of experience, I fail to see how that metaphor is invalid
>I'll translate: an atheist, unamerican, queer type
Would not be happy, and may well be in danger of life and limb in some of the places listed.
Your point?
LOL. You took a trip to Carrollton.
:-)
The band Ten Hands has a song about that
http://www.doomsday.com/john/10hands/jazz.html#2
You needed to go a little north, and discover Denton. Or way south, and discover Austin.
There are parts of Dallas that are way cool, different parts depending on what you think is cool,
but you almost have to be from there to know about them.
It's a nice place to live, but I don't know why you'd visit there.
> I really need to check out all 50 states one of these years and clear up some of the stereotypes I hold.
Seeing for myself, has tended to reinforce many of my stereotypes.
For one thing, I didn't recognize racism or religious intolerance around me, until I got away from it. That took most of my life to do. I refuse to go back.
>I'm betting (literally) that the housing market out there is headed for a major crash.
Invest in businesses that cater to renovaters, brokers, contractors, and title agencies.
A major crash in a housing market means a huge demand for the stuff the folks do with the houses
they buy for ten cents on the dollar.
Even with the incidents you mentioned, try to keep in mind that you're still comparing *Boston* to Alabama.
Boston has issues, but it's got a LONG way to sink before it can be compared to Alabama.
With all due respect to others who wouldn't consider being sent to Alabama a death sentence. (I practically would.)
Let's see -- college town in the middle of nowhere -- with college girls who are very, very bored --
I'm not sure that would be such a bad idea.
> I'm not entirely clear why I'm supposed to find this intolerable.
Chicago is a nice place to live. I don't know anybody who actually hates it.
It's a shitty place to be *poor*, but then, few places are good for that.
>all those dam californians moving in a driving up real estate prices.
I can only imagine that there are Idahoans, born and raised there, playing their part in this phenomenon by selling their houses to Californians. And developers, with the full consent of the state and local government (presumably comprised of, and elected by, many natural born Idahoans) making it all possible too.
Do you not think that Idahoans share the responsiblity with Californians?
If high real estate prices are a problem, does that indicate that you neglected to buy a house when prices were low -- a house that I imagine you, a good honest Idahoan, would refuse to sell to a Californian at 300% appreciation?
I think you're dreaming if you think $140K in San Jose leads to a surplus that you can save.
Realistically, that's gonna clear a little over $7 grand a month -- a good salary anywhere, but,
one paycheck is going to that $2800 mortgage payment.
If you can manage to enter San Jose with real estate equity, you live in a different world anyway.
People who buy really fast processors, really high end video cards, and really fast bus mainboards, shouldn't skimp on RAM -- you throw away a lot of the gains you paid for, and in some cases you would have made better gains just with faster (and lower latency) RAM in the first place. People tend to not believe this, and I admit that my empirical evidence is limited to a few systems in the audio processing domain. But I still say that commodity RAM is no bargain if you're putting it in a system with a $500 CPU.
I'm still using the same IBM Model M keyboard since '93.
I have hardly anything at all from the 8088/86/286/386/486 or Pentium years (cleaned house).
I do still have my (fully working) Apple II, and I have a large amount of C64 stuff, mainly because I hardware hack
audio circuits using SID chips, and also, I keep a Moog Song Producer working, because somebody has to. I gave away my Model I TRS-80, and all my Color Computers. No regrets there.
I've got a 9" monochrome monitor mounted in my rack. Got it from a dumpster longer ago than I can remember -- it's first-gen VGA, however old that is. I have a couple of ISA cards that I keep just because they were very expensive, like a Hayes ESP, a couple of custom made interface cards from an old job, that sort of thing.
I have never let go of a disk drive after using it. I have a lot of them, going back to MFM days.
If I looked on the shelves I'm sure I could find cards and old chips and things like that, but pretty much the oldest computer I actually use is my Toshiba laptop, bought in '04, and it seems *so* old. I'm just holding out for my boss to buy me a Macbook pro. Right.
"The computer industry has changed. A 5 year old computer now can still do most things the aging population of computer users wants to do - email, printing, downloading music."
Now they want to do audio and video production, and some want to be able to do production at broadcast quality. And they want to store *everything*. And even if they don't realize it, they want to store everything and have it automatically indexed.
"This isn't even a top-of-the-line system, but good (i.e., best customer-rated) memory is going to cost more than anything else. "
I have found that for certain applications, better quality RAM leads to more significant gains than incremental processor clock increases. This has been especially true in audio processing, where a faster CPU can be a liability (hotter CPU means more cooling noise, a huge problem in an audio environment).
Fast RAM, especially with short latency, is a big win for audio and video processing.
As to the other poster who claimed that frequent upgrades are excessive -- I agree they make for an expensive hobby, but, in audio processing I find myself in a time when the systems are just now becoming suitable to the task. For most applications, we reached a plateau around the mid 1990s. At some point, the bottleneck became network and storage IO speeds, video and game framerates reached the necessary human proportions, and storage capacities exceeded demand for most users.
But it's only just recently that the general purpose PC can serve as a good multitrack recording studio, an effects rack, and a collection of synthesizers.
Anyway, on topic, my only experience with RDRAM was a few years back when the standard server at work was a Compaq -- and we did without RAM rather than pay the $1800 bill for the upgrade... Apparently it was more acceptable to wait for some contract to expire and apply that money to other machines that used commodity RAM. (We ended up with IBM Blades!)
>>Regular expressions are only for regular languages.
>Not true - Perl is an awesome language.
No disagreement, but many perl "regular" expressions are not regular.
"'[R]egular expressions' [...] are only marginally related to real regular expressions. Nevertheless, the term has grown with the capabilities of our pattern matching engines, so I'm not going to try to fight linguistic necessity here. I will, however, generally call them "regexes" (or "regexen", when I'm in an Anglo-Saxon mood)."
- Larry Wall
Some of the places on this list could be fairly okay for an educated, liberal, free-thinker type.
But a lot of those places are damn scary.
Also, it doesn't make sense that Richardson TX would draw less than half the salary of Plano TX.
I mean seriously, these are both actually the same place for anyone who would be living in that part of the Dallas metro area, and for that matter, so is Carrollton. There may be a factor related to commuting on I-35 as opposed to Central Expressway, but come on... these are all the same damn place.
Also, pointing out Gilbert Arizona as if it's really distinct from Phoenix is pretty stupid too.
$226 for Scottsdale AZ (yes, it's a separate township, but snobs like to point out that it's *Scottsdale* to avoid saying they live in Phoenix)... That is a joke. Scottsdale median home price is in the $250's still, and most of the housing that a mid-career professional would be happy with are well over the $million mark.
I love how the right wing pundits get upset about what comedians do and say.
They go on and on about Air America Radio -- a comedy news show financed by comedian and producer Al Franken.
Then they look at The Daily Show and Colbert Report as though these are genuine news outlets, when they are in
fact comedy programs. I think the whole thing is hilarious.
>going the speed limit in the left lane is illegal if people are passing you on the right.
Fair enough. "Slower traffic keep right" is all over Oregon, California, Colorado, and especially anyplace with mountains.
The scenario I'm picturing with the original article is something like LBJ Freeway between Farmers Branch and Dallas, with six lanes of traffic at rush hour and people trying to intimidate cars in front of them by tailgating.
I once wired a momentary switch to my brake lights so that I could "stomp the brakes" for tailgaters while accelerating. It was pretty effective.
I didn't read the article, but I will. Cursors aren't evil. I'm an Oracle developer with more than a decade of experience, mind you, but I am no DBA. I'm also not willing to comment too much on this kind of speculative, hypothetical design.
>And why exactly is this bridge needed? There is already a ferry service that takes only 15 minutes for a crossing.
It connects a growing town with its airport.
What planned and budgeted civil project did your town give up to support Katrina relief?
"Couldn't you simply put it back into productions. I mean if its emitting all this excess radiation could you..... produce power with it????"
In France, Japan, and the UK, they do exactly this. Spent fuel rods are reprocessed. It's dangerous, and fission products remain a waste management problem. The problem ends up that separating various materials requires more energy to accomplish, than is obtained, at least in economic terms. The other problem, of course, is that the plants needed to do this kind of processing, is a weapons proliferation concern in the eyes of some people whose opinions seem to carry some weight in the current climate of global politics.
"There needs to be responsibility and accountability, to other drivers, and to the environment."
Make it so, Number One.