If a programmer has prospered for 20 or 30 years in this business, they probably have adapted to multiple paradigm shifts.
For example, "CPU expensive, memory expensive, programmer cheap" is now "CPU cheap, memory cheap, programmer expensive" -- hence Java et al. (I am sometimes amazed when I casually allocate/free chunks of memory larger than all the combined memory of all the computers at my university - both in the labs and the administration/operational side - but what amazes me is that it doesn't amaze me!)
Actually some of the "old timers" may be a more comfortable with some issues of highly parallel programming than some of the "kids" (term used with respect, we were all kids once!) who have mostly had them masked from them by high level languages. Comparing "old timers" to "kids" doing enterprise server software, the kids seem much less likely to understand issues like memory coherence models of specific architectures, cache contention issues of specific implementations, etc.
Also, too often, the kids make assumptions about the source of performance/timing problems rather than gathering empirical evidence and acting on that evidence. This trait is particularly problematic because when dealing with concurrency and varying load conditions, intuition can be quite unreliable.
Really, it's not all that scary - the first paradigm shift is the hardest!
If this would work, it would probably need to be combined with one of the other ideas above -- either requiring additional verification or posting a bond to remove the filters from instances created under a verified/bonded account. Some users will have legitimate reasons to send emails (some a few, some many) but many probably don't.
Electric utility providers are likely to increasingly use "time of day" and/or demand based pricing at the consumer level (such schemes are common for industrial users). Electricity at a high demand time will cost more than at low demand times. Also, electric utility providers will/do provide a lower rate to those customers who agree to allow the utility to remotely "selectively blackout" their high draw appliances (like AC) at peak times. The only reason your electricity is not "shaped" today is that the technology isn't cheap to deploy. Packet shaping is fairly inexpensive so it's been widely deployed now.
Eventually ISP and consumer electricity utility pricing and "shaping" will look very similar. Both more complex, both more flexible, both allowing the consumer to make their own cost/benefit decisions.
Probably 95%+ of the customers would be happy with a very simple broadband plan - the "you buy, we shape, we cap at Xmb/sec -- all for $Y/month". This is pretty much what is commonly available now.
The other 5% will end up needing to decide if they want to pay a lot more per month in exchange for lesser degrees of time/load sensitive shaping. Plans that heavy P2P + VOIP users will find "best" for them will, however, be very expensive (like existing business class service) and most people who think they want them won't choose to buy them.
Of course, the ISPs should be clearer in their ads - but it's really hard to explain traffic shaping to the average consumer and even harder for them to figure out how it would affect their personal usage patterns.
Slightly off-topic... One thing that I ask people when Global Warming comes up is:
Assume, just for the sake of argument, that you were to become convinced by solid scientific evidence that without intervention by humans and due to natural processes unrelated to humans, the Earth will experience climate change at a rate that exceeds the rate at which humans can evolve to adapt. Further assume that we knew how to alter the environment, for example via some form of emissions, to halt (at least temporarily) this "natural" climate change. In this case, given the following to alternatives, which would you pick and why? (1) Do not intervene to halt the natural climate change - thereby resulting in earlier extinction of the human species. (2) Intervene to halt the natural climate change - thereby delaying the extinction of the human species.
The responses are sometimes interesting. Some people pick (1) on the belief that they are "green" and that this means minimizing human's impact on the planet. Some people pick (2) on the belief that the universe having humans around for longer is somehow better and therefore it's appropriate to alter the Earth's climate to accomplish this. For those that pick (2), I sometimes get interesting responses to the question:
Do you think that humans will ever become extinct? If so, when and why would you want to delay this event?
No, I don't have good answers or even know where I stand on these questions, but it gets people thinking about their priorities on Global Warming.
I hear little discussion about if perhaps human induced global warming may actually, over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, make the Earth more friendly to humans by forestalling or eliminating the next ice age. I don't have any reason to believe this is the case, I'm just surprised this doesn't come up more in the popular media/culture as it seems like a reasonable question.
However, I would say I'm surprised by how many people work on the assumption that humans will never become extinct.
A CEO easily has more than 10x or 100x the impact on the success of a large company as the "average" employee does. This is because the decisions a CEO routinely makes have much broader scope and include strategic decisions. The "average" employee in a large company may work their entire lives without ever making a useful strategic decision (and may never even make a strategic suggestion).
A CEO who consistently makes mediocre decisions can easily destroy a company. An "average" employee who consistently makes mediocre decisions will have virtually no impact on the bottom line of a large public company (the salary and contributions of the "average" employee in such a situation is a rounding error).
Consider if you have two qualified candidates, call them "A" and "B", for a job. "A" is 5% less competent than "B" but can be hired for 1/2 the price. Do you hire "A" or "B"? It turns out the answer depends on the job... If the job is for the CEO position at GE, you would certainly higher "B" because one slightly better decision every year will more than cover the compensation difference. However, if the job is for an assembly line position, you would hire "A" because the impact of the minor difference in competence in what is largely a scripted job would not cover the increased compensation costs of hiring "B".
Voting Libertarian (esp. for U.S. President) is not a vote for the Libertarian candidate (after all, no Libertarian candidate for POTUS has any chance of being elected).
Instead, a vote for the Libertarian candidate is among the clearest messages one can send to the Dem/Rep parties of where there is a pool of voters they can actually attract if they adjust their approaches (or at least pretend to).
A libertarian voter should be realistic -- the best they can do now or in the near term is sway the views/actions of the mainstream candidates by voting for the Libertarian candidate.
Send a message to the losing party (Dem or Rep) in November by voting Libertarian. A vote for the Libertarian candidate is a vote for libertarian principles, not for whatever idiot the Libertarians picked this time around.
I tried to back up a Vista DVD to these gold DVD-Rs (of course using appropriate gold cabling) and was perplexed. When I booted with the copied "gold" DVD in the DVD drive, the screen had some crazy talk on it -- something about "Ubuntu" IIRC.
Guess I'll temporarily reinstall the old cables and try the backup again with less applications of the Golden Rule.
Be careful though... When burning these, it's critical that you only use gold [USB, SATA, PATA] cables to connect your burner to your computer. Otherwise the bits on the media will degrade quickly due to galvanic corrosion.
Medians and averages have little meaning on an individual basis.
One rationale for having a progressive tax system is that people should be taxed less on that portion of their income necessary to meet basic needs (like renting a two bedroom apartment) than on the optional "luxury" expenses (like golf club memberships). The problem is that the United States Federal Income Tax rates are not indexed by geographical cost of living. A family making $80K a year in a small, low cost, burg in Indiana can join a low end golf club while the same family living and working in San Mateo, CA will barely be able to rent an apartment, eat, and buy gas.
Note that Medicare benefits are already, to some extent, indexed geographically. The amount that the Feds will pay for taking out an appendix in Burg Town, IN is much less than they will pay in San Mateo, CA. Why not afford this to taxes as well?
IMHO, if we are going to have a progressive Federal income tax, the tax tables should be indexed by cost of living by geographical area. (Although, I'd rather just have a flat tax with no deductions for things like mortgage deductions).
Also, anything that raises an individual's taxes when not accompanied by an income increase is a tax increase. Allowing a long standing law to expire is no different than passing a new law that that reverts an existing law. Ethically and morally, they are identical as each lawmaker should make exactly the same decision in both cases regardless of if the tax increase is the result of failing to sponsor/vote for a bill to continue the "expiring" law X or actively sponsoring/voting for a bill to override X.
The U.S. could just make the minimum sentence life imprisonment in general population. A fellow inmate whose grandparents or parents were scammed by spammers or fraudsters would probably take care of the problem within a few months.
Email is a just a communication tool - nothing more, nothing less.
Before IM and text messaging were ubiquitous, email served these roles along with the role of communicating more complicated (and often less transient) information. The IM and text messaging roles are now partially (and often better) addressed by other tools now.
While I hate HTML email laden with gratuitous and distracting images and formatting, appropriate use of formatting and inclusion of images helps communicate information more quickly and accurately. For example, appropriate use of bold text can highlight exceptional information very nicely without adding additional verbiage to a message. Similarly, a graph can communicate information much more quickly than the data in raw text form (for example in an emailed "release bug status" report).
The problem, of course, is that anything can be abused and become less effective. People used to abuse ASCII email by trying to make graphs in ASCII and used tabs - these were inevitably screwed up during display (esp. when included in another message).
Email has evolved. Our connectivity has evolved (remember the days of 110 "baud" modems?). To say that email should be restricted to 20 year old technology (maybe even including the speed of transmission?) at the expense of effective communications makes as much sense as saying that manuals should still be restricted to printed copies from line printer output (in monospaced font!) -- and that updates should be done via regularly distributed change pages).
But what about unsolicited traffic directed towards my setup?
I can't stop someone from sending me UDP traffic - sure, my router will just drop it into the bit bucket, but from my ISP's standpoint it would still count as "download" bytes for the purposes of determining if I've exceeded my cap and cost me money.
Not sure how one would profit from screwing me this way... Perhaps just the same human trait that motivates random vandalism would be sufficient. Perhaps the fact that I followed the "hate Hillary" link in a troll post but didn't follow the "hate Obama" link in the same post would be sufficient.
If requested, sometimes tech support will tell you the ticket or incident number related to your call/incident. If I'm not real sure the problem has been fixed, I ask for the number and note it if they will give it.
When calling back on a repeat of the problem, sometimes I find giving the past incident numbers actually gets the tech to look them up. In many/most cases where this helps, it's pretty obvious to me that they could have looked the past incidents up themselves but don't bother to look at the history of tickets associated my customer id. However, when faced with me referring to specific prior tickets and asking about them, they are motivated to actually look at them.
Mostly, this just gets me moved out of L1 and L2 faster -- perhaps because L1 realizes they are facing a long call that will impact their metrics and I've given them enough supporting info to push my call up and get on to the next call.
Now, or in the near future, scientists and engineers may well be able to build an artificial limb with better performance characteristics than a natural limb. This is especially true in the case of a specialized application -- for example, sprinting in a straight line on a level surface for 100 meters as opposed to a somewhat more general application like basketball with more varied forces and requirements.
To determine if each such limb gives an "unfair" advantage to an athlete will move sports competition from the realm of the field almost entirely into the realm of the lab and courtroom. The decisions from such cases are not going to be widely accepted and will be very controversial. Neither of these will be "good" for the sport.
It's likely that some people can't imagine an amputee competing effectively with the current generation of performance enhancing limbs so are comfortable with this particular case. However, I suspect that the response would be somewhat different if/when artificial limb development matures to the point that all the world sprinting records are held by a handful of amputees who all use performance enhancing limbs. (Since this is/., I must bring up the vision of the patents for the design of the limbs being owned by IP firms who grant the right to use the limbs in exchange for large cut of the endorsement deals the "enhanced" athletes land.) Once someone with such limbs begins setting records, the protests will be loud and they will either be banned or a new category of records ("Unenhanced Athletes") for those without assists and no one will care about the "Enhanced Athlete" records -- which takes us back to where we are now with separate records for disabled vs. non-disabled athletes. This will be a cruel trick on those amputees who worked hard thinking they could aspire to "real" world records.
From an "fairness" standpoint, it seems unfair to allow artificial limbs in sports such as running. The unenhanced athlete can't swap from her "100 meter" legs to her "400 meter" legs between races. The unenhanced athlete can't simply swap in a new leg when she damages one. The unenhanced athlete can't pick the "cold weather" legs vs. the "warm weather" legs depending on the weather at the meet. The unenhanced athlete can't shed the parts of her natural legs which are not needed (and in the way) for short sprints but useful for everyday things like walking on sloped surfaces or climbing stairs.
Perhaps we will need a sort of "Turing Test" before accepting enhanced limbs in general competition -- they must be indistinguishable from natural limbs to a skilled tester.
1) They shouldn't have messed with the NON-BROKEN Source (which every other distro uses), without testing it better. In this case, it doesn't seem that traditional "testing" would have caught this problem - code review/examination (by people with the right skill/knowledge sets) is about the only way to catch something like this after the mistake has been made.
Certainly a black eye on Debian here - it's not the distro I use and it's a little less likely that it will be in the future because of this. (So many distros, so little time...)
Agreed, but fortunately, ComCast can't rely much on high internet pricing to drive their customers to stick with obsolete cable TV offerings. If ComCast makes their cable TV offerings too unattractive (due to content, quality, reliability, or pricing), those customers who have access to Dish (over 1/2 their cable TV customers?) are likely to switch.
Most of those who don't have access to Dish probably live in multifamily dwelling units without balconies/patios or they face "wrong" direction. This makes it hard for ComCast to target pricing to exploit those who don't have the Dish option. For example, if they canvassed unit-by-unit and priced their cable TV higher for units which faced the "wrong" direction, the political cost would be enormous and would almost certainly lead to regulation the likes of which ComCast can't even imagine in their worst nightmares.
(By way of example, in the complex I live in, probably 75% of those units which face the right direction to get Dish have a Dish antenna on their patio/balcony -- the rest of us are stuck with ComCast but still benefit from somewhat competitive pricing caused by the possibility I could get Dish reception).
True. But for my electricity, water, and natural gas, the cost per unit drops as I use more. For residential users in PG&E land in California, the inverse is true -- the incremental cost of the first kwh consumed in a month is never more expensive than that of the last kwh consumed in a month and the last one is usually significantly more expensive than the first (there are several tiers based on usage). This appears to have been motivated by two factors, our government's desire that poor folk shouldn't pay the full cost of the resources they consume (hence the low tier) and the desire (government and utility) to reduce the usage (thereby reducing infrastructure upgrade costs and reducing environmental impact associated with power generation).
The "reduce infrastructure upgrade costs" seems to be the motivation for what Comcast is considering - and is effectively a two tier system with a lot of cheap bandwidth for most users and much more expensive bandwidth for high usage users. It would be refreshing to actually have well articulated rules and limits and it will encourage people like myself (and at least one person upthread) to actually look around on their local drives to see if they had already downloaded the Linux distribution before downloading it again.
bandwidth has no significant incremnetal cost once certain fixed capital has been invested
Capital costs (including installation and equipment), along with debit service on that sum, must be recovered over the useful life of the asset for a business to be viable. Given the pace of technology and the demand for new capabilities, the asset life can be fairly short. This debt service manifests itself as a continuing incremental cost over the life of the asset.
For the obligatory car analogy... If you bought a car using a 48 month loan (I've never financed a car, but I assume that may be a typical duration nowadays), by the time the loan is paid off, the value of the car is substantially reduced (perhaps down to your down payment depending on how many miles it was driven) and you paid both the principle and the interest over the primary useful life of the car.
Of course, ongoing maintenance (labor of repair and administration as well as cost of replacement parts) and operational costs such as power, cooling, insurance, also must be recovered. For example, it really does cost more to run 2N routers than to run N routers.
And one can also get insightful wisdom from this page such as:
01 April 2008 (McCain cites Osama bin Laden)
McCain cites Osama bin Laden to justify the continued occupation of Iraq.
Since 2001 there has been a persistent pattern in the "bin Laden" tapes: they say just the thing to help Bush and his associates domestically. It suggests that whoever makes these tapes -- whether it is Osama bin Laden or someone else -- is in cahoots with Bush.
That fits in with the theory that Bush either set up the 9/11 attacks or arranged to prevent them from being stopped.
RMS is obviously an insightful genius who understands logic and analysis very well...
He also offsets the flights he takes by paying for tree planting for every flight.
This is not going to help much in the mid/long term. To effectively "offset" the CO2 released into the atmosphere by his flights (and related activities such as the CO2 emitted during the extraction, refining, and transportation of the jet fuel to the airplane and so on), the trees planted would have to sequester the carbon for as long as the crude oil would have been sequestered underground had it been left undisturbed (for deep deposits, probably typically millions of years). Most trees die (of "old age", disease, drought, infestation, fire, etc.) in a few decades or, at the outside, in a couple centuries. After a tree dies, its carbon ends up being released back into the atmosphere fairly quickly (in the case of death by fire, much is released immediately; in the case of decay after death of other causes, it takes longer depending on the environment).
Gore isn't effectively offsetting his carbon footprint unless he is buying up property that is able to support trees without continuing human intervention but for some odd reason will never be naturally populated with trees, planting trees, and then putting the land in a perpetual trust to ensure that it stays in its new "forested state", Even if he does this, it's not nearly as reliable as just leaving the carbon sequestered underground in oil deposits as governmental and legal changes may render the trust ineffective or natural climate change may render the newly forested land unable to naturally sustain its forested state. Even if the land remained forested forever, there's only so much land on the Earth so every acre devoted to artificial forestation by Gore to "offset" the carbon footprint of his flight means that eventually someone else will be unable to do so.
Being able to say with any reasonable degree of confidence that a particular bug is encountered "once every 1,000 uses" implies that it's been encountered multiple times and hence is repeatable - just not yet reliably repeatable on a single test run. If only 1000 test iterations are run and one fails due to "a bug", it's really not possible to say much useful about the odds of the bug being encountered - with some degree of confidence perhaps one could say that it's probably encountered less often than one in every 20 uses, but it's also quite likely that it only occurs once every 50,000 uses.
If one has the knowledge to say with a a significant degree of confidence that a test fails due to a particular bug once every xxx test runs, they have some information. When combined with a good understanding of the code and test environment, this can be often used to make an educated guess as to how long it will likely take to identify the bug (and, perhaps, to fix it - although, until isolated and understood, this is more speculative). This information includes how many times the problem can be recreated in a given time period and the cost of that activity (assuming that recreation of the problem is necessary to gather more information) and the understanding of the code gives some reasonable professional insight into what additional diagnostics can be enabled or added and what the odds of those diagnostics perturbing the execution such that the problem is fully or partially masked.
For example, if a bug is encountered "randomly" every 1000 test runs, but a test run takes 100ms on a developer laptop, I'd expect that someone familiar with all the involved code would usually be able to identify the source of the problem in a fairly short time (usually well less than 1/2 a day). If, on the other hand, a test run takes 1 day on the only machine that's been built yet, the problem will probably need to be found by code inspection or by honing the tests to expose the problem much more frequently -- and this process is much more difficult to predict.
Perhaps you need to find a new boss - one that understands these things:)
but when was the last Software update for anything Apple, or Firefox, that got you stuck in a reboot loop Apple has the advantage of supporting a much less diverse set of HW configs (and SW applications as well) which makes it much easier to test. Firefox is just an application, it would be hard for an update to it to cause a reboot loop.
Comparing these to Windows OS in this context is ridiculous -- oh, wait, this is/.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy might be prosecuted under cruelty or abuse of animals statutes. Or, perhaps bestiality laws that might still be enforceable.
Of course, if the guy is successful in his suicide attempt, I don't suppose what crime he could have been charged with is very important.
If a programmer has prospered for 20 or 30 years in this business, they probably have adapted to multiple paradigm shifts.
For example, "CPU expensive, memory expensive, programmer cheap" is now "CPU cheap, memory cheap, programmer expensive" -- hence Java et al. (I am sometimes amazed when I casually allocate/free chunks of memory larger than all the combined memory of all the computers at my university - both in the labs and the administration/operational side - but what amazes me is that it doesn't amaze me!)
Actually some of the "old timers" may be a more comfortable with some issues of highly parallel programming than some of the "kids" (term used with respect, we were all kids once!) who have mostly had them masked from them by high level languages. Comparing "old timers" to "kids" doing enterprise server software, the kids seem much less likely to understand issues like memory coherence models of specific architectures, cache contention issues of specific implementations, etc.
Also, too often, the kids make assumptions about the source of performance/timing problems rather than gathering empirical evidence and acting on that evidence. This trait is particularly problematic because when dealing with concurrency and varying load conditions, intuition can be quite unreliable.
Really, it's not all that scary - the first paradigm shift is the hardest!
And, the amazing thing is that TFA (yes, I admit to breaking the cardinal rule and did RTFA) got it right while the /. summary got it wrong.
Well, okay, it's not amazing - cut/paste is such an advanced feature.
If this would work, it would probably need to be combined with one of the other ideas above -- either requiring additional verification or posting a bond to remove the filters from instances created under a verified/bonded account. Some users will have legitimate reasons to send emails (some a few, some many) but many probably don't.
Electric utility providers are likely to increasingly use "time of day" and/or demand based pricing at the consumer level (such schemes are common for industrial users). Electricity at a high demand time will cost more than at low demand times. Also, electric utility providers will/do provide a lower rate to those customers who agree to allow the utility to remotely "selectively blackout" their high draw appliances (like AC) at peak times. The only reason your electricity is not "shaped" today is that the technology isn't cheap to deploy. Packet shaping is fairly inexpensive so it's been widely deployed now.
Eventually ISP and consumer electricity utility pricing and "shaping" will look very similar. Both more complex, both more flexible, both allowing the consumer to make their own cost/benefit decisions.
Probably 95%+ of the customers would be happy with a very simple broadband plan - the "you buy, we shape, we cap at Xmb/sec -- all for $Y/month". This is pretty much what is commonly available now.
The other 5% will end up needing to decide if they want to pay a lot more per month in exchange for lesser degrees of time/load sensitive shaping. Plans that heavy P2P + VOIP users will find "best" for them will, however, be very expensive (like existing business class service) and most people who think they want them won't choose to buy them.
Of course, the ISPs should be clearer in their ads - but it's really hard to explain traffic shaping to the average consumer and even harder for them to figure out how it would affect their personal usage patterns.
Slightly off-topic... One thing that I ask people when Global Warming comes up is:
Assume, just for the sake of argument, that you were to become convinced by solid scientific evidence that without intervention by humans and due to natural processes unrelated to humans, the Earth will experience climate change at a rate that exceeds the rate at which humans can evolve to adapt. Further assume that we knew how to alter the environment, for example via some form of emissions, to halt (at least temporarily) this "natural" climate change. In this case, given the following to alternatives, which would you pick and why? (1) Do not intervene to halt the natural climate change - thereby resulting in earlier extinction of the human species. (2) Intervene to halt the natural climate change - thereby delaying the extinction of the human species.
The responses are sometimes interesting. Some people pick (1) on the belief that they are "green" and that this means minimizing human's impact on the planet. Some people pick (2) on the belief that the universe having humans around for longer is somehow better and therefore it's appropriate to alter the Earth's climate to accomplish this. For those that pick (2), I sometimes get interesting responses to the question:
Do you think that humans will ever become extinct? If so, when and why would you want to delay this event?
No, I don't have good answers or even know where I stand on these questions, but it gets people thinking about their priorities on Global Warming.
I hear little discussion about if perhaps human induced global warming may actually, over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, make the Earth more friendly to humans by forestalling or eliminating the next ice age. I don't have any reason to believe this is the case, I'm just surprised this doesn't come up more in the popular media/culture as it seems like a reasonable question.
However, I would say I'm surprised by how many people work on the assumption that humans will never become extinct.
A CEO easily has more than 10x or 100x the impact on the success of a large company as the "average" employee does. This is because the decisions a CEO routinely makes have much broader scope and include strategic decisions. The "average" employee in a large company may work their entire lives without ever making a useful strategic decision (and may never even make a strategic suggestion).
A CEO who consistently makes mediocre decisions can easily destroy a company. An "average" employee who consistently makes mediocre decisions will have virtually no impact on the bottom line of a large public company (the salary and contributions of the "average" employee in such a situation is a rounding error).
Consider if you have two qualified candidates, call them "A" and "B", for a job. "A" is 5% less competent than "B" but can be hired for 1/2 the price. Do you hire "A" or "B"? It turns out the answer depends on the job... If the job is for the CEO position at GE, you would certainly higher "B" because one slightly better decision every year will more than cover the compensation difference. However, if the job is for an assembly line position, you would hire "A" because the impact of the minor difference in competence in what is largely a scripted job would not cover the increased compensation costs of hiring "B".
Voting Libertarian (esp. for U.S. President) is not a vote for the Libertarian candidate (after all, no Libertarian candidate for POTUS has any chance of being elected).
Instead, a vote for the Libertarian candidate is among the clearest messages one can send to the Dem/Rep parties of where there is a pool of voters they can actually attract if they adjust their approaches (or at least pretend to).
A libertarian voter should be realistic -- the best they can do now or in the near term is sway the views/actions of the mainstream candidates by voting for the Libertarian candidate.
Send a message to the losing party (Dem or Rep) in November by voting Libertarian. A vote for the Libertarian candidate is a vote for libertarian principles, not for whatever idiot the Libertarians picked this time around.
Ahh, that explains a problem I was having...
I tried to back up a Vista DVD to these gold DVD-Rs (of course using appropriate gold cabling) and was perplexed. When I booted with the copied "gold" DVD in the DVD drive, the screen had some crazy talk on it -- something about "Ubuntu" IIRC.
Guess I'll temporarily reinstall the old cables and try the backup again with less applications of the Golden Rule.
Be careful though... When burning these, it's critical that you only use gold [USB, SATA, PATA] cables to connect your burner to your computer. Otherwise the bits on the media will degrade quickly due to galvanic corrosion.
Medians and averages have little meaning on an individual basis.
One rationale for having a progressive tax system is that people should be taxed less on that portion of their income necessary to meet basic needs (like renting a two bedroom apartment) than on the optional "luxury" expenses (like golf club memberships). The problem is that the United States Federal Income Tax rates are not indexed by geographical cost of living. A family making $80K a year in a small, low cost, burg in Indiana can join a low end golf club while the same family living and working in San Mateo, CA will barely be able to rent an apartment, eat, and buy gas.
Note that Medicare benefits are already, to some extent, indexed geographically. The amount that the Feds will pay for taking out an appendix in Burg Town, IN is much less than they will pay in San Mateo, CA. Why not afford this to taxes as well?
IMHO, if we are going to have a progressive Federal income tax, the tax tables should be indexed by cost of living by geographical area. (Although, I'd rather just have a flat tax with no deductions for things like mortgage deductions).
Also, anything that raises an individual's taxes when not accompanied by an income increase is a tax increase. Allowing a long standing law to expire is no different than passing a new law that that reverts an existing law. Ethically and morally, they are identical as each lawmaker should make exactly the same decision in both cases regardless of if the tax increase is the result of failing to sponsor/vote for a bill to continue the "expiring" law X or actively sponsoring/voting for a bill to override X.
The U.S. could just make the minimum sentence life imprisonment in general population. A fellow inmate whose grandparents or parents were scammed by spammers or fraudsters would probably take care of the problem within a few months.
Email is a just a communication tool - nothing more, nothing less.
Before IM and text messaging were ubiquitous, email served these roles along with the role of communicating more complicated (and often less transient) information. The IM and text messaging roles are now partially (and often better) addressed by other tools now.
While I hate HTML email laden with gratuitous and distracting images and formatting, appropriate use of formatting and inclusion of images helps communicate information more quickly and accurately. For example, appropriate use of bold text can highlight exceptional information very nicely without adding additional verbiage to a message. Similarly, a graph can communicate information much more quickly than the data in raw text form (for example in an emailed "release bug status" report).
The problem, of course, is that anything can be abused and become less effective. People used to abuse ASCII email by trying to make graphs in ASCII and used tabs - these were inevitably screwed up during display (esp. when included in another message).
Email has evolved. Our connectivity has evolved (remember the days of 110 "baud" modems?). To say that email should be restricted to 20 year old technology (maybe even including the speed of transmission?) at the expense of effective communications makes as much sense as saying that manuals should still be restricted to printed copies from line printer output (in monospaced font!) -- and that updates should be done via regularly distributed change pages).
But what about unsolicited traffic directed towards my setup?
I can't stop someone from sending me UDP traffic - sure, my router will just drop it into the bit bucket, but from my ISP's standpoint it would still count as "download" bytes for the purposes of determining if I've exceeded my cap and cost me money.
Not sure how one would profit from screwing me this way... Perhaps just the same human trait that motivates random vandalism would be sufficient. Perhaps the fact that I followed the "hate Hillary" link in a troll post but didn't follow the "hate Obama" link in the same post would be sufficient.
If requested, sometimes tech support will tell you the ticket or incident number related to your call/incident. If I'm not real sure the problem has been fixed, I ask for the number and note it if they will give it.
When calling back on a repeat of the problem, sometimes I find giving the past incident numbers actually gets the tech to look them up. In many/most cases where this helps, it's pretty obvious to me that they could have looked the past incidents up themselves but don't bother to look at the history of tickets associated my customer id. However, when faced with me referring to specific prior tickets and asking about them, they are motivated to actually look at them.
Mostly, this just gets me moved out of L1 and L2 faster -- perhaps because L1 realizes they are facing a long call that will impact their metrics and I've given them enough supporting info to push my call up and get on to the next call.
This seems like a very bad precedent.
/., I must bring up the vision of the patents for the design of the limbs being owned by IP firms who grant the right to use the limbs in exchange for large cut of the endorsement deals the "enhanced" athletes land.) Once someone with such limbs begins setting records, the protests will be loud and they will either be banned or a new category of records ("Unenhanced Athletes") for those without assists and no one will care about the "Enhanced Athlete" records -- which takes us back to where we are now with separate records for disabled vs. non-disabled athletes. This will be a cruel trick on those amputees who worked hard thinking they could aspire to "real" world records.
Now, or in the near future, scientists and engineers may well be able to build an artificial limb with better performance characteristics than a natural limb. This is especially true in the case of a specialized application -- for example, sprinting in a straight line on a level surface for 100 meters as opposed to a somewhat more general application like basketball with more varied forces and requirements.
To determine if each such limb gives an "unfair" advantage to an athlete will move sports competition from the realm of the field almost entirely into the realm of the lab and courtroom. The decisions from such cases are not going to be widely accepted and will be very controversial. Neither of these will be "good" for the sport.
It's likely that some people can't imagine an amputee competing effectively with the current generation of performance enhancing limbs so are comfortable with this particular case. However, I suspect that the response would be somewhat different if/when artificial limb development matures to the point that all the world sprinting records are held by a handful of amputees who all use performance enhancing limbs. (Since this is
From an "fairness" standpoint, it seems unfair to allow artificial limbs in sports such as running. The unenhanced athlete can't swap from her "100 meter" legs to her "400 meter" legs between races. The unenhanced athlete can't simply swap in a new leg when she damages one. The unenhanced athlete can't pick the "cold weather" legs vs. the "warm weather" legs depending on the weather at the meet. The unenhanced athlete can't shed the parts of her natural legs which are not needed (and in the way) for short sprints but useful for everyday things like walking on sloped surfaces or climbing stairs.
Perhaps we will need a sort of "Turing Test" before accepting enhanced limbs in general competition -- they must be indistinguishable from natural limbs to a skilled tester.
Certainly a black eye on Debian here - it's not the distro I use and it's a little less likely that it will be in the future because of this. (So many distros, so little time...)
Agreed, but fortunately, ComCast can't rely much on high internet pricing to drive their customers to stick with obsolete cable TV offerings. If ComCast makes their cable TV offerings too unattractive (due to content, quality, reliability, or pricing), those customers who have access to Dish (over 1/2 their cable TV customers?) are likely to switch.
Most of those who don't have access to Dish probably live in multifamily dwelling units without balconies/patios or they face "wrong" direction. This makes it hard for ComCast to target pricing to exploit those who don't have the Dish option. For example, if they canvassed unit-by-unit and priced their cable TV higher for units which faced the "wrong" direction, the political cost would be enormous and would almost certainly lead to regulation the likes of which ComCast can't even imagine in their worst nightmares.
(By way of example, in the complex I live in, probably 75% of those units which face the right direction to get Dish have a Dish antenna on their patio/balcony -- the rest of us are stuck with ComCast but still benefit from somewhat competitive pricing caused by the possibility I could get Dish reception).
The "reduce infrastructure upgrade costs" seems to be the motivation for what Comcast is considering - and is effectively a two tier system with a lot of cheap bandwidth for most users and much more expensive bandwidth for high usage users. It would be refreshing to actually have well articulated rules and limits and it will encourage people like myself (and at least one person upthread) to actually look around on their local drives to see if they had already downloaded the Linux distribution before downloading it again.
For the obligatory car analogy... If you bought a car using a 48 month loan (I've never financed a car, but I assume that may be a typical duration nowadays), by the time the loan is paid off, the value of the car is substantially reduced (perhaps down to your down payment depending on how many miles it was driven) and you paid both the principle and the interest over the primary useful life of the car.
Of course, ongoing maintenance (labor of repair and administration as well as cost of replacement parts) and operational costs such as power, cooling, insurance, also must be recovered. For example, it really does cost more to run 2N routers than to run N routers.
Gore isn't effectively offsetting his carbon footprint unless he is buying up property that is able to support trees without continuing human intervention but for some odd reason will never be naturally populated with trees, planting trees, and then putting the land in a perpetual trust to ensure that it stays in its new "forested state", Even if he does this, it's not nearly as reliable as just leaving the carbon sequestered underground in oil deposits as governmental and legal changes may render the trust ineffective or natural climate change may render the newly forested land unable to naturally sustain its forested state. Even if the land remained forested forever, there's only so much land on the Earth so every acre devoted to artificial forestation by Gore to "offset" the carbon footprint of his flight means that eventually someone else will be unable to do so.
Being able to say with any reasonable degree of confidence that a particular bug is encountered "once every 1,000 uses" implies that it's been encountered multiple times and hence is repeatable - just not yet reliably repeatable on a single test run. If only 1000 test iterations are run and one fails due to "a bug", it's really not possible to say much useful about the odds of the bug being encountered - with some degree of confidence perhaps one could say that it's probably encountered less often than one in every 20 uses, but it's also quite likely that it only occurs once every 50,000 uses.
:)
If one has the knowledge to say with a a significant degree of confidence that a test fails due to a particular bug once every xxx test runs, they have some information. When combined with a good understanding of the code and test environment, this can be often used to make an educated guess as to how long it will likely take to identify the bug (and, perhaps, to fix it - although, until isolated and understood, this is more speculative). This information includes how many times the problem can be recreated in a given time period and the cost of that activity (assuming that recreation of the problem is necessary to gather more information) and the understanding of the code gives some reasonable professional insight into what additional diagnostics can be enabled or added and what the odds of those diagnostics perturbing the execution such that the problem is fully or partially masked.
For example, if a bug is encountered "randomly" every 1000 test runs, but a test run takes 100ms on a developer laptop, I'd expect that someone familiar with all the involved code would usually be able to identify the source of the problem in a fairly short time (usually well less than 1/2 a day). If, on the other hand, a test run takes 1 day on the only machine that's been built yet, the problem will probably need to be found by code inspection or by honing the tests to expose the problem much more frequently -- and this process is much more difficult to predict.
Perhaps you need to find a new boss - one that understands these things
Comparing these to Windows OS in this context is ridiculous -- oh, wait, this is