Nobody likes Police States unless they are on the same side of the Police, or better yet control them. He is no different than any other power hungry politician.
If you'd read his book you'd know that his foster father in Indonesia was on the police's side, and it did nothing to endear him to authoritarianism. I think the lesson of the story is that in the end no one was really on the government's side, everyone was always one-upping each other trying to prove they were loyal.
But if you think the Illinois state senator and constitutional lawyer is some kind of closet authoritarian, I dunno what to say. How many fascist heads-of-state started in the damn state senate with a law degree after a decade of community service?
The Democrats do not have a 2/3 majority of house seats.
Even if they did, why should a Democrat vote for something their constituency is against?
The animating issues of the '06 Democratic coalition is the War in Iraq; its objective is ending the War in Iraq. Why should it risk its majority and this objective on wedge issues designed by the Republicans to cast the Democrats as 'soft on terror'? I have no doubt that Steny and Nancy moved up the vote and brought it to a quick resolution to get it off the table before the Presidential election heats up, to deprive the Republicans of a "do-nothing congress that Endangers Your Life(tm)" talking point.
I can't read the Democratic leadership's mind, but I assume they see the choice like this:
Telecom Immunity.
Lose House seats in Security Mom districts, lose electoral votes in swing states where "security-conscious" independents hold sway. American in Iraq for the next hundred years! Oh, and by the way, Telecom Immunity.
If you choose (2), you stood up for what you believed in and got nowhere. Choosing (1) puts you in and your presidential candidate in a better position to end the war this decade. The war must be ended, because it distorts the entire political landscape and makes reasoned debate about terrorism and constitutional rights impossible.
They are in the opposition, it's normal that they do not control the Senate and the House, but that doesn't mean that they have to give up holding their ideals because that's why they were chosen and empowered by the people.
Even more confusing, the Democrats aren't in opposition, they are the majority legislative party. Under a parliamentary system, their majority would be enough to overrule the Government. But under a Presidential Republic, the President has the authority to veto laws.
They don't stand for their 'ideals' because the people who voted them into office don't particularly care either way. Americans, for better or worse, don't mind their international phone conversations being eavesdropped on.
Maybe it's because we normally have more than just 2 parties elected in our senante and congress
That's exactly why. If you're a libertarian and you're pissed off at your congressman in the US, you have nowhere to go, because the third parties are unable to summon more than a few percent support in any one district, and districts are winner-take-all. If the US Congress were proportional representation, something like 50 members of it would probably be Libertarians. They would probably be in the majority coalition, since the Democrats ran in '06 against things like the warrantless surveilliance program, and they would use their seats (and the threat of bringing down the majority coalition) to nip this deal in the bud.
But alas, little known fact: The United States of America is a Presidential Republic. It is not a Democracy.
Forgive me, I seem to have beat around the bush a little, allow me to put my point more plainly:
I fail to see how the GP will get his phone untapped by withholding his potential support from Barack Obama. It will not achieve his goal.
It's either going to be BHO or John McCain running the country on January 21st, and John is happy to tap your phone, and the Republican party base is quite happy to support him on that.
It's regrettable that we're seeing the same "Republicans and Democrats are all the same" Ralph Nader horseshit being spouted all over again. It's that soft thinking that put monkeyboy in the White House in '00 and got us into this mess in the first place.
The US Presidency is a first-past-the-post winner-take-all election. If you vote for a "protest" candidate in such an election, it is the equivalent of not voting at all.
"In questions of power...let no more be heard of confidence in
man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the
Constitution."
Jefferson's idealism and legalism show through. Bush has been chained by the Constitution for 7 years, and has shown that all he needs to do in order to break the law is not show up for hearings and stall for time. There's nothing anyone in the legislature can do to stop that, short of impeaching and then convicting him, and in the current climate that would be impossible, the Republicans simply have deep support on a variety of issues. And,, I might add at this juncture, their base doesn't get scared-off, slitting their throats in rage every time their leaders have to pander (at least they didn't until lately). They know where their leaders stand, and they support them because the ultimate goals, though far off and occasionally set back, are achieved only through perseverance.
I'm done with giving Obama money. I want a return to constitutional governance, and supported him because I thought that's what he stood for.
He's only running for president, he ain't president yet, and it's out of his hands. If you're in his position, you've got the two options:
Oppose the bill, giving McCain talking points and opening a rift in the Democrats, on account of the fact that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and a majority of Democrats support the 'compromise.' Even with his opposition, the bill will still pass the Senate, and he will have handed the Republicans red meat for no gain whatsoever.
Support the bill and live to fight another day. Politics is the art of the possible and occasionally you can't win. You just have to listen to his argument on why he doesn't like it and if you think he's a liar, and he DOES secretly want to listen in on your phone calls, than you probably shouldn't vote for him either. I don't think this is the case; if you read "Dreams from My Father" on living in Suharto's Indonesia you get a visceral sense for how he really doesn't dig police states.
The simple fact of the matter is that Presidents, be they Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon or FDR, can and do routinely break the law and violate the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution, and the only thing that really brings that to a halt is getting them out of office. So worst case, you only have 4 years of tyranny.
Of course a lot of people don't seem to mind tyranny as long as gay people five states over are forbidden to marry, but that's a separate issue.
Of course, as others have pointed out, this law just formalizes Bush's arrangement for his successor, so who would you rather have running such an empowered Justice department? Neither is best, but no strong majority of Americans choose "neither," and no amount of righteous Jefferson-quoting seems to change that. The Democrats did the math and they don't lose as many votes over this as they'd lose if they handed Bush another veto, again accomplishing nothing. I don't question their commitment for a second, it's just impossible to get anything past a President without 2/3 majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate.
Just scanning the docs, it doesn't seem to REQUIRE ruby on the backend, it should be useable with Python or Perl (or ASP.NET for that matter). The framework is all Javascript and JSON.
As an original iPhone buyer, I'm not particularly sad, as:
The MobileMe service they're rolling out will give me everything I'd get with Exchange, like push email, OTA syncing, a great www interface to my calendars, but without having to have an Exchange server. Finally.mac is really a great proposition.
Every iPhone that sells makes the platform I've invested in a little more valuable. I develop for it too.
All in all, there's a ton of win in today's announcements for the early adopters. I paid more money, but then again, I've had an iPhone for a year.
But if you re-read my post, I'm sure you will realize that I am referring to a specific reason for objecting to Watchmen for which Gibbons has already crafted a straman dismissal--objecting on the grounds of lack of fidelity to the original story.
I dunno, it seems like it's a valid dismissal, as the opinions of comic book fans have about zero correlation with the quality of a motion picture. The last thing the world needs is a bunch of costumed vigilantes deciding what interpretation of "Watchmen" is permissible. Who watches the watchmen of "The Watchmen"? Alan Moore's disassociation with the project is more interesting, but that isn't what you were talking about.
Ironically, I thought that V for Vendetta was a fine movie in its own right, but significantly unfaithful to the original story in a few very fundamental ways.
You and my girlfriend and my parents; silly movie.
Don't think it captured the original story faithfully enough, or skillfully enough? You're obviously a "hardcore" fan with unrealistic expectations.
Well, yeah, but LXG and V for Vendetta didn't fail on account of being unfaithful to the book on a scene-by-scene basis; nor did Superman or Batman or Ironman or X-Men succeed on the basis of their adherence to the books --- in some cases, quite the opposite. LXG and V were just bad movies.
There are No Electrons: Electronics for Idiots is extremely basic, but its entertainment value is inestimable and it's really quite profound on the basics. You'll never feel like you understand the fundamentals better.
We can argue all we like about the meaning of the word deprecated, but that is what it amounts to.
"Deprecation" is a statement made explicitly by the vendor, stating a form of contract. If a symbol is deprecated, it's assured it will eventually fail. If a symbol isn't deprecated, it's assured it will work until it's deprecated.
Symbols must never pass from good standing to not working. If your code fails to compile one day on a deprecated symbol, it's your responsibility to fix. If it fails to compile one day on a not-deprecated symbol, it's the vendor's responsibility to fix it.
If you see my first clarification above, you'll see that I know people who used the Java-Cocoa bridges.
We all do, but it never really took off commercially. At a certain point it wasn't worth the man-hours to keep it working. 20 guys using it write kludgy web service dashboards (and the occasional Cyberduck) weren't enough to keep that fire burning.
You can also not tell me that you can get better performance with the Python or Ruby bridges
It IS slow as hell, but you're changing the subject.
I am sorta waiting to see if someone uses the scripting bridge (by which we're talking about the SB* classes now) and makes a Java bridge with it; the tech is not Ruby-Python only; there's a perl implementation as well as new languages like Nu or F-Script that use it.
Apple have stated that they will not develop it any further and it will not be ported to 64 bit. If that isn't deprecated, then I don't know what is.
My understanding of Deprecated in this context means "not to be used in new code," "end-of-lifed," "we plan that one day these symbols won't link on the platform." They've made no such declaration; by your definition, if an OS vendor ships libX 1.0 and libY 1.0 (an object-oriented version of libX 1.0) in their distribution, libX 1.0 is deprecated. Apple ships CoreAnimation alongside OpenGL; CA has a higher-level interface than OpenGL, so is OpenGL 'deprecated' (the underlying implementation of CA being hidden and thus irrelevant)? Windows uses Unicode strings, does that make WinANSI strings "deprecated?" They're all over the place, embedded in RIFF-container files, conf files, and more getting made every day. W3C has stopped developing XML 1.0 and will not be adding new features, does that mean when XML 2.0 comes out that XML 1.0 will be "deprecated"? That's not how it works, just ask the people that have 15 year old programs still running on Win32. Just because a vendor creates a new library doesn't mean automatically that the old one is no-go.
The fact that it hasn't been officially deprecated might...
Thank you for conceding the fact, but you can keep the modal verb phrase containing your guess.
I don't want to invoke conspiracy theories,
But you're only too happy to insinuate them every time you are confronted with the actual record of the matter:^]
As Apple became more comfortable with their position and had less fear of Developers being unwilling to move to the platform, the first dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings)
They had built in the bridge at great cost in the early years, and it was a major part of their developer push. You can imagine their frustration when no one used it; this is the Cocoa bridge, mind you, not the Java platform. People code in Java so they can write once and run anywhere, not so they can code platform-dependent GUI code. Apple thought having a Java bridge might drive people to write software that favored their platform, but Java devs just kept on using Swing and AWT, and generally ignoring the bridge, since it was platform-dependent.
I think the nail in the Java bridge's coffin was that you couldn't do key-value coding in Java, the way Apple implemented it, because you sorta need duck typing to make it work. Objective-C can do this, Java cannot (though the Java people hold this is a good thing.)
last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.
This is a tricky statement, as CoreAudio, the File Management APIs, OpenGL, QuickTime, Core Foundation, Core Services, and, hell, the Kernel API and BSD subsystem are all "C APIs" and a part of the OS X platform, and they are all continuously being refined and extended; though not all of them are 64 bit yet, this doesn't pose much of a limitation on OS X since you can call from 64 bit code into 32 and back "for free." The Carbon API, particularly the UI code, has not been rebuilt for 64 bit and may not ever, but it is not "unsupported" or "deprecated."
Your statement makes it appear that coding in C on OS X is somehow unsupported, or that ObjC is the only Kool-Aid in town, and this is a flagrant canard.
There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to Linux
They're probably in the same spot MS is, in that even they don't know how their code works any more, with the number of people they've had working on it over the years.
Interesting question, homeslice. I guess it depends on how much of the carbon cycle you're comfortable having floating around in the air. It's not like it was going to end up there anyways; carbon finds its way from organism to environment to organism in a lot of ways.
I haven't enough information to come to a conclusion on this.
The review of Expelled in Scientific American did a lot to debunk many of the claims of "firing" he makes in the film. Many times he'll claim someone was fired when in fact their grant merely ran out, only to be renewed the next week. In one case he claims a teacher who "criticized Darwinism" was fired, but he never actually gets around to repeating what she said, so you can't really decide if the example fits into his argument of "criticizing evolution." In fact the movie never really finds anyone that was fired or demoted for making any scientific claim regarding Evolution.
Chaos: The Making of a New Science. Tells the entire story of Lorentz's discovery, in gory detail, down to the fact that he used a Royal McBee computer to do his original weather simulation, the same computer in the famous hacker "Story of Mel".
A point the reviewers make that I didn't very clearly is that it does have a bunch of statistics, but it also has neural networks, and a bunch of other stuff that are more along the lines of "machine learning." One of the reviewers said it was the "best book on machine learning ever written," which may be true, but if and only if you're not a theorist or academic computer scientist.
I was at the Borders and was looking for something to pass the weekend, and I'd been doing some sound effects library work, so I took a look at this.
It has a lot of statistics; it's essentially a statistics-in-use book , with code examples in Python of all of the algorithms. That said, it makes all of the topics very accessible, and proposes many different ways of solving different wisdom-of-crowds type problems, and gives you enough knowledge so you'd be able to hear someone pitch you their dataset, and you'd be able to say "Oh, you wanna do full-text relevance ranking" or "You need decision tree for that" or "you just want the correlation." The book very much has a sort of statistics-as-swiss-army-knife approach.
Also, I'm not Pythonic, but I was able to translate all of the algorithms into Ruby as I went, even turning the list comprehensions into the Rubyish block/yield equivalents, so his style is not too idiomatic.
Also, I would wonder if the shielding matters more or less to digital speakers.
If they're 'digital' speakers, like they have an AES, SPDIF, Firewire or a TOSLINK input on the back, then the shielding is about as important as it is for any serial computer cable, which is to say it'll probably sound awesome until you get just enough noise for the error detection in the speaker inputs to cut the signal off; digital gear tends to play the audio either perfectly, or not at all -- it's designed to fail in a graceful but obvious way, so you KNOW you have a problem. I would note that AES and SPDIF don't have any redundancy data, they only do send a parity bit so the receiver can tell what it's getting is good, not necessarily correct it.
For analogue audio, shielding is important, but using balanced lines is generally considered obligatory for any professional applications, at microphones and even line level voltages. Of course, RCA connectors and just about everything you buy for the home is unbalanced:P
It's remarkable how people can sell cables on performance merits that far exceed the performance of any known form of audio recording, let alone any known audio transduction system including all manufactured monitors and human perception.
Of course, if you dropped $10K on Klipsches, which are themselves quite the boondoggle, "good sound" begins to take on a meaning quite apart from things like equal-loudness contours, effective bit depths and THD+N.
I would suggest getting all of your cables from Blue Jeans Cable from now on. I know I will; Their prices for HDMI cables are almost as low as monoprice's.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd read his book you'd know that his foster father in Indonesia was on the police's side, and it did nothing to endear him to authoritarianism. I think the lesson of the story is that in the end no one was really on the government's side, everyone was always one-upping each other trying to prove they were loyal.
But if you think the Illinois state senator and constitutional lawyer is some kind of closet authoritarian, I dunno what to say. How many fascist heads-of-state started in the damn state senate with a law degree after a decade of community service?
2 points:
The animating issues of the '06 Democratic coalition is the War in Iraq; its objective is ending the War in Iraq. Why should it risk its majority and this objective on wedge issues designed by the Republicans to cast the Democrats as 'soft on terror'? I have no doubt that Steny and Nancy moved up the vote and brought it to a quick resolution to get it off the table before the Presidential election heats up, to deprive the Republicans of a "do-nothing congress that Endangers Your Life(tm)" talking point.
I can't read the Democratic leadership's mind, but I assume they see the choice like this:
If you choose (2), you stood up for what you believed in and got nowhere. Choosing (1) puts you in and your presidential candidate in a better position to end the war this decade. The war must be ended, because it distorts the entire political landscape and makes reasoned debate about terrorism and constitutional rights impossible.
Even more confusing, the Democrats aren't in opposition, they are the majority legislative party. Under a parliamentary system, their majority would be enough to overrule the Government. But under a Presidential Republic, the President has the authority to veto laws.
They don't stand for their 'ideals' because the people who voted them into office don't particularly care either way. Americans, for better or worse, don't mind their international phone conversations being eavesdropped on.
That's exactly why. If you're a libertarian and you're pissed off at your congressman in the US, you have nowhere to go, because the third parties are unable to summon more than a few percent support in any one district, and districts are winner-take-all. If the US Congress were proportional representation, something like 50 members of it would probably be Libertarians. They would probably be in the majority coalition, since the Democrats ran in '06 against things like the warrantless surveilliance program, and they would use their seats (and the threat of bringing down the majority coalition) to nip this deal in the bud.
But alas, little known fact: The United States of America is a Presidential Republic. It is not a Democracy.
Forgive me, I seem to have beat around the bush a little, allow me to put my point more plainly:
I fail to see how the GP will get his phone untapped by withholding his potential support from Barack Obama. It will not achieve his goal.
It's either going to be BHO or John McCain running the country on January 21st, and John is happy to tap your phone, and the Republican party base is quite happy to support him on that.
It's regrettable that we're seeing the same "Republicans and Democrats are all the same" Ralph Nader horseshit being spouted all over again. It's that soft thinking that put monkeyboy in the White House in '00 and got us into this mess in the first place.
The US Presidency is a first-past-the-post winner-take-all election. If you vote for a "protest" candidate in such an election, it is the equivalent of not voting at all.
Jefferson's idealism and legalism show through. Bush has been chained by the Constitution for 7 years, and has shown that all he needs to do in order to break the law is not show up for hearings and stall for time. There's nothing anyone in the legislature can do to stop that, short of impeaching and then convicting him, and in the current climate that would be impossible, the Republicans simply have deep support on a variety of issues. And,, I might add at this juncture, their base doesn't get scared-off, slitting their throats in rage every time their leaders have to pander (at least they didn't until lately). They know where their leaders stand, and they support them because the ultimate goals, though far off and occasionally set back, are achieved only through perseverance.
I'm done with giving Obama money. I want a return to constitutional governance, and supported him because I thought that's what he stood for.
He's only running for president, he ain't president yet, and it's out of his hands. If you're in his position, you've got the two options:
The simple fact of the matter is that Presidents, be they Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon or FDR, can and do routinely break the law and violate the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution, and the only thing that really brings that to a halt is getting them out of office. So worst case, you only have 4 years of tyranny.
Of course a lot of people don't seem to mind tyranny as long as gay people five states over are forbidden to marry, but that's a separate issue.
Of course, as others have pointed out, this law just formalizes Bush's arrangement for his successor, so who would you rather have running such an empowered Justice department? Neither is best, but no strong majority of Americans choose "neither," and no amount of righteous Jefferson-quoting seems to change that. The Democrats did the math and they don't lose as many votes over this as they'd lose if they handed Bush another veto, again accomplishing nothing. I don't question their commitment for a second, it's just impossible to get anything past a President without 2/3 majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate.
Just scanning the docs, it doesn't seem to REQUIRE ruby on the backend, it should be useable with Python or Perl (or ASP.NET for that matter). The framework is all Javascript and JSON.
As an original iPhone buyer, I'm not particularly sad, as:
All in all, there's a ton of win in today's announcements for the early adopters. I paid more money, but then again, I've had an iPhone for a year.
And I for one welcome our new self-replicating shell process overlords.
I dunno, it seems like it's a valid dismissal, as the opinions of comic book fans have about zero correlation with the quality of a motion picture. The last thing the world needs is a bunch of costumed vigilantes deciding what interpretation of "Watchmen" is permissible. Who watches the watchmen of "The Watchmen"? Alan Moore's disassociation with the project is more interesting, but that isn't what you were talking about.
Ironically, I thought that V for Vendetta was a fine movie in its own right, but significantly unfaithful to the original story in a few very fundamental ways.You and my girlfriend and my parents; silly movie.
Well, yeah, but LXG and V for Vendetta didn't fail on account of being unfaithful to the book on a scene-by-scene basis; nor did Superman or Batman or Ironman or X-Men succeed on the basis of their adherence to the books --- in some cases, quite the opposite. LXG and V were just bad movies.
Ask Spolsky, he invented the thing :)
Yeah I got the title wrong, but it's kindof a non-sequitur anyways.
There are No Electrons: Electronics for Idiots is extremely basic, but its entertainment value is inestimable and it's really quite profound on the basics. You'll never feel like you understand the fundamentals better.
"Deprecation" is a statement made explicitly by the vendor, stating a form of contract. If a symbol is deprecated, it's assured it will eventually fail. If a symbol isn't deprecated, it's assured it will work until it's deprecated.
Symbols must never pass from good standing to not working. If your code fails to compile one day on a deprecated symbol, it's your responsibility to fix. If it fails to compile one day on a not-deprecated symbol, it's the vendor's responsibility to fix it.
We all do, but it never really took off commercially. At a certain point it wasn't worth the man-hours to keep it working. 20 guys using it write kludgy web service dashboards (and the occasional Cyberduck) weren't enough to keep that fire burning.
You can also not tell me that you can get better performance with the Python or Ruby bridgesIt IS slow as hell, but you're changing the subject.
I am sorta waiting to see if someone uses the scripting bridge (by which we're talking about the SB* classes now) and makes a Java bridge with it; the tech is not Ruby-Python only; there's a perl implementation as well as new languages like Nu or F-Script that use it.
Apple have stated that they will not develop it any further and it will not be ported to 64 bit. If that isn't deprecated, then I don't know what is.My understanding of Deprecated in this context means "not to be used in new code," "end-of-lifed," "we plan that one day these symbols won't link on the platform." They've made no such declaration; by your definition, if an OS vendor ships libX 1.0 and libY 1.0 (an object-oriented version of libX 1.0) in their distribution, libX 1.0 is deprecated. Apple ships CoreAnimation alongside OpenGL; CA has a higher-level interface than OpenGL, so is OpenGL 'deprecated' (the underlying implementation of CA being hidden and thus irrelevant)? Windows uses Unicode strings, does that make WinANSI strings "deprecated?" They're all over the place, embedded in RIFF-container files, conf files, and more getting made every day. W3C has stopped developing XML 1.0 and will not be adding new features, does that mean when XML 2.0 comes out that XML 1.0 will be "deprecated"? That's not how it works, just ask the people that have 15 year old programs still running on Win32. Just because a vendor creates a new library doesn't mean automatically that the old one is no-go.
The fact that it hasn't been officially deprecated might...Thank you for conceding the fact, but you can keep the modal verb phrase containing your guess.
I don't want to invoke conspiracy theories,But you're only too happy to insinuate them every time you are confronted with the actual record of the matter :^]
They had built in the bridge at great cost in the early years, and it was a major part of their developer push. You can imagine their frustration when no one used it; this is the Cocoa bridge, mind you, not the Java platform. People code in Java so they can write once and run anywhere, not so they can code platform-dependent GUI code. Apple thought having a Java bridge might drive people to write software that favored their platform, but Java devs just kept on using Swing and AWT, and generally ignoring the bridge, since it was platform-dependent.
I think the nail in the Java bridge's coffin was that you couldn't do key-value coding in Java, the way Apple implemented it, because you sorta need duck typing to make it work. Objective-C can do this, Java cannot (though the Java people hold this is a good thing.)
last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.This is a tricky statement, as CoreAudio, the File Management APIs, OpenGL, QuickTime, Core Foundation, Core Services, and, hell, the Kernel API and BSD subsystem are all "C APIs" and a part of the OS X platform, and they are all continuously being refined and extended; though not all of them are 64 bit yet, this doesn't pose much of a limitation on OS X since you can call from 64 bit code into 32 and back "for free." The Carbon API, particularly the UI code, has not been rebuilt for 64 bit and may not ever, but it is not "unsupported" or "deprecated."
Your statement makes it appear that coding in C on OS X is somehow unsupported, or that ObjC is the only Kool-Aid in town, and this is a flagrant canard.
There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to LinuxThey're probably in the same spot MS is, in that even they don't know how their code works any more, with the number of people they've had working on it over the years.
Interesting question, homeslice. I guess it depends on how much of the carbon cycle you're comfortable having floating around in the air. It's not like it was going to end up there anyways; carbon finds its way from organism to environment to organism in a lot of ways.
I haven't enough information to come to a conclusion on this.
Cheap Gas -> More CO2
Cheap Gas -> Happy Americans
More CO2 -> Unhappy Americans
The review of Expelled in Scientific American did a lot to debunk many of the claims of "firing" he makes in the film. Many times he'll claim someone was fired when in fact their grant merely ran out, only to be renewed the next week. In one case he claims a teacher who "criticized Darwinism" was fired, but he never actually gets around to repeating what she said, so you can't really decide if the example fits into his argument of "criticizing evolution." In fact the movie never really finds anyone that was fired or demoted for making any scientific claim regarding Evolution.
Chaos: The Making of a New Science. Tells the entire story of Lorentz's discovery, in gory detail, down to the fact that he used a Royal McBee computer to do his original weather simulation, the same computer in the famous hacker "Story of Mel".
Yeah, good reviews there.
A point the reviewers make that I didn't very clearly is that it does have a bunch of statistics, but it also has neural networks, and a bunch of other stuff that are more along the lines of "machine learning." One of the reviewers said it was the "best book on machine learning ever written," which may be true, but if and only if you're not a theorist or academic computer scientist.
I was at the Borders and was looking for something to pass the weekend, and I'd been doing some sound effects library work, so I took a look at this.
It has a lot of statistics; it's essentially a statistics-in-use book , with code examples in Python of all of the algorithms. That said, it makes all of the topics very accessible, and proposes many different ways of solving different wisdom-of-crowds type problems, and gives you enough knowledge so you'd be able to hear someone pitch you their dataset, and you'd be able to say "Oh, you wanna do full-text relevance ranking" or "You need decision tree for that" or "you just want the correlation." The book very much has a sort of statistics-as-swiss-army-knife approach.
Also, I'm not Pythonic, but I was able to translate all of the algorithms into Ruby as I went, even turning the list comprehensions into the Rubyish block/yield equivalents, so his style is not too idiomatic.
If they're 'digital' speakers, like they have an AES, SPDIF, Firewire or a TOSLINK input on the back, then the shielding is about as important as it is for any serial computer cable, which is to say it'll probably sound awesome until you get just enough noise for the error detection in the speaker inputs to cut the signal off; digital gear tends to play the audio either perfectly, or not at all -- it's designed to fail in a graceful but obvious way, so you KNOW you have a problem. I would note that AES and SPDIF don't have any redundancy data, they only do send a parity bit so the receiver can tell what it's getting is good, not necessarily correct it.
For analogue audio, shielding is important, but using balanced lines is generally considered obligatory for any professional applications, at microphones and even line level voltages. Of course, RCA connectors and just about everything you buy for the home is unbalanced :P
It's remarkable how people can sell cables on performance merits that far exceed the performance of any known form of audio recording, let alone any known audio transduction system including all manufactured monitors and human perception.
Of course, if you dropped $10K on Klipsches, which are themselves quite the boondoggle, "good sound" begins to take on a meaning quite apart from things like equal-loudness contours, effective bit depths and THD+N.
I would suggest getting all of your cables from Blue Jeans Cable from now on. I know I will; Their prices for HDMI cables are almost as low as monoprice's.