Yeah, it's pretty weird to read that the combination of caffeine and alcohol is not "generally recognized as safe". For how many centuries do you suppose people have been drinking Irish coffee?
Wow, that's a great list! I multiplied out all the options (under the assumption that all combinations are valid (*)) and got 2.8e40 possible languages that could be specified using this form. That's a lot more than Peter Landin's 700!
(*) Except that I noticed two options in the Collections category -- the fourth and the last -- that appear redundant; so I counted only one of them.
A good architect is someone with the experience to know when to cut corners and when to enforce rigid discipline.
Agreed. I have a guy on my staff who is constitutionally unable to cut corners. The upside is, when he says the feature he's working on is done, by god, it's done. I can't remember the last time we found a bug in his code. The downside is, it takes him a long time, and sometimes we would really like to have the first 80% of the functionality done quickly so that other people could start to build on it. Don't get me wrong, this guy is really good and I'm very glad to have him, but he would be even better if he cultivated a sense of what corners to cut when.
If you were buying an N810 specifically to read PDFs would you still be as happy? And if you could freely choose between say a netbook and an N800 to read on at any given time, which would you choose?
Agreed, if I had both with me at all times the netbook would, no doubt, be superior. But my N810 rides in a hip pouch, and I really do have it with me at all times; a netbook I would have to pick up and carry.
I think Nokia should update the N810. There's now a 45nm TI OMAP running at 720MHz -- almost twice as fast as the current chip -- and they could also double the DRAM and built-in flash, and change the flash slot from Mini-SDHC (a dying format) to Micro-SDHC. Then I would change the market positioning from "Internet Tablet" (what's that?) to "Pocket Netbook".
I read PDFs on my N810 sometimes, when I have some time to kill and don't have my laptop. Yes, turning pages is slow, but I think it works well enough.
Absolutely agreed. The fact is that if you count the price of maintaining a military presence in the Mideast, gasoline is massively subsidized by other taxes. This is nuts. The price at the pump should reflect the true price.
Also, a higher gas tax could provide a partial buffer for the economy against oil price spikes -- the tax could be temporarily reduced to soften short-term dislocations. But if oil prices stay high, the tax should, of course, gradually return to its former level.
The tax should be phased in slowly, so people have time to adjust. There might also be good reason to reduce it in rural areas, where not that many people live but those who do have to drive long distances.
And finally, the tax should be counterbalanced by a roughly equal reduction in the income tax. For one thing, that's the only way to get it through Congress. But more importantly, this isn't a proposal to raise taxes: it's a proposal to eliminate a distortion in the current tax system, that the price of gas at the pump doesn't reflect its true cost.
Yes, I think it's time to reopen the micropayment discussion.
Micropayment systems failed to gain traction in the early years of the Web and seem to have been somewhat forgotten. At that time, the Web was all about "eyeballs", and for a newspaper to charge anything at all would simply drive people away. It couldn't be done.
But now, not only are individual newspapers failing, the entire industry is in crisis. Instituting micropayments might be the only way to save it.
I would strongly encourage the entire newspaper industry to pick a micropayment vendor (maybe two or three vendors, but certainly no more than three) and put their unique content, whatever that is -- local news, most likely -- behind a micropayment paywall.
The only way I see to fix the system is with vouchers. This is the only way to have competition within a state-funded education system.
If a teacher's students' parents all transfer their kids to another school because the teacher is incompetent, there's no commission that can save that teacher's job: the school will have no money to pay him/her. That's the extreme case, but short of that, the schools that provide the best education will get the most students.
I realize there are some likely problems with vouchers, such as the money getting spent on religious education. That's a valid concern, but (a) I think it can be addressed to some extent and (b) compared to the ongoing train wreck we have now, I don't see it as so terrible.
Despite being a generally center-left voter, I have always thought vouchers were a stellar idea. (Think "single-payer education".) The ongoing antipathy the Democrats have to them just shows, to me, that they're in the unions' pockets. But why more parents don't demand them just mystifies me.
IMHO, the problem is not the risk; it's the coupling.
This is a good point. The near-collapse of the banking system was not caused by an unpredictable, exogenous event; indeed, in hindsight, one can see that it was inevitable. Too many people had exposure to the same risks, without necessarily being aware of that. (Contrast what happened after 9/11; it certainly roiled the markets for a time, but the ultimate impact was far smaller.)
A naive approach to estimating the risks of a strategy tends to bury in the model assumptions that various risks are independent, when in fact they can under some circumstances become correlated. When everyone is counting on the market to keep going up so that borrowers can continue to service their mortgages, then what you might have thought were the independent risks of individual borrowers defaulting become, in fact, highly correlated.
There was a stretch where I was getting some spams whose subject lines were obviously being constructed: each consisted of a short phrase followed by a single unrelated (and clearly randomly selecte) word. One of them came out "Girl giving head crash". Ever since, I've had an image of a comely female sucking on a disc drive:-)
Okay, I looked the thing up. What I learned is that the radioisotopes in the waste have half-lives that are either less than 90 years or over 211,000 years, so that after 200 years the combination is about as radioactive as natural uranium ore. The latter, of course, is well above background level.
Actually the plants like LFR produce little waste and the wast they do ahve has a half life of about 90 years. Meaning in 200 years it is at background radiation level.
If the half-life is 90 years, the radiation level will have fallen by only a factor of 2^(200/90) or about 4.9 after 200 years. I'm sure the starting radiation level is much more than 4.9 times background.
I think it's easier than that. I think you could just do a Fourier transform or the like to look at spatial frequencies. I'm not a computer vision expert, but this looks really easy.
Word on the Net is that the 16GB cards do work, even though Nokia hasn't updated their Web site to mention them. See for example Internet Tablet Talk for confirmation.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to join the QA team.
I once wrote this line of code in a routine that was reading a config file:
if (line[0] == '#') continue; // comment
I thought a comment consisting entirely of the word "comment" was amusing, and in this case not uninformative.
Okay, .6, well, we can round that up to 1 :)
So in these 6 decades, has anyone even heard of a problematic interaction between caffeine and alcohol? I certainly haven't.
BTW I consume very little of either of these drugs, and don't think I've ever had them together.
Yeah, it's pretty weird to read that the combination of caffeine and alcohol is not "generally recognized as safe". For how many centuries do you suppose people have been drinking Irish coffee?
The exact number is 28038403036088069194064680177788518400000. This reminds me -- arbitrary-precision integers should be an option in your list!
Wow, that's a great list! I multiplied out all the options (under the assumption that all combinations are valid (*)) and got 2.8e40 possible languages that could be specified using this form. That's a lot more than Peter Landin's 700!
(*) Except that I noticed two options in the Collections category -- the fourth and the last -- that appear redundant; so I counted only one of them.
Agreed. I have a guy on my staff who is constitutionally unable to cut corners. The upside is, when he says the feature he's working on is done, by god, it's done. I can't remember the last time we found a bug in his code. The downside is, it takes him a long time, and sometimes we would really like to have the first 80% of the functionality done quickly so that other people could start to build on it. Don't get me wrong, this guy is really good and I'm very glad to have him, but he would be even better if he cultivated a sense of what corners to cut when.
... from my cold dead fingers.
If I were a billionaire, though, I wouldn't just be hacking visualization software -- I'd have an AI/quantum computing research lab.
Goes into more detail than the NYT article. Have a look.
Agreed, if I had both with me at all times the netbook would, no doubt, be superior. But my N810 rides in a hip pouch, and I really do have it with me at all times; a netbook I would have to pick up and carry.
I think Nokia should update the N810. There's now a 45nm TI OMAP running at 720MHz -- almost twice as fast as the current chip -- and they could also double the DRAM and built-in flash, and change the flash slot from Mini-SDHC (a dying format) to Micro-SDHC. Then I would change the market positioning from "Internet Tablet" (what's that?) to "Pocket Netbook".
I read PDFs on my N810 sometimes, when I have some time to kill and don't have my laptop. Yes, turning pages is slow, but I think it works well enough.
Writer's block and other kinds of creative blocks are very frequently rooted in the desire to make something perfect.
Give it up. No one has ever made something perfect, and you're not going to be the first.
No mod points at the moment, but this is +10 insightful.
I'm very happy with my N810 as well. I read PDFs on it all the time.
Absolutely agreed. The fact is that if you count the price of maintaining a military presence in the Mideast, gasoline is massively subsidized by other taxes. This is nuts. The price at the pump should reflect the true price.
Also, a higher gas tax could provide a partial buffer for the economy against oil price spikes -- the tax could be temporarily reduced to soften short-term dislocations. But if oil prices stay high, the tax should, of course, gradually return to its former level.
The tax should be phased in slowly, so people have time to adjust. There might also be good reason to reduce it in rural areas, where not that many people live but those who do have to drive long distances.
And finally, the tax should be counterbalanced by a roughly equal reduction in the income tax. For one thing, that's the only way to get it through Congress. But more importantly, this isn't a proposal to raise taxes: it's a proposal to eliminate a distortion in the current tax system, that the price of gas at the pump doesn't reflect its true cost.
... in fact, one of my favorites ever, said:
+ZEUS-
While it's not 100% clear, I've always read this as "powered by Zeus" (as if Zeus were a battery).
Yes, I think it's time to reopen the micropayment discussion.
Micropayment systems failed to gain traction in the early years of the Web and seem to have been somewhat forgotten. At that time, the Web was all about "eyeballs", and for a newspaper to charge anything at all would simply drive people away. It couldn't be done.
But now, not only are individual newspapers failing, the entire industry is in crisis. Instituting micropayments might be the only way to save it.
I would strongly encourage the entire newspaper industry to pick a micropayment vendor (maybe two or three vendors, but certainly no more than three) and put their unique content, whatever that is -- local news, most likely -- behind a micropayment paywall.
The only way I see to fix the system is with vouchers. This is the only way to have competition within a state-funded education system.
If a teacher's students' parents all transfer their kids to another school because the teacher is incompetent, there's no commission that can save that teacher's job: the school will have no money to pay him/her. That's the extreme case, but short of that, the schools that provide the best education will get the most students.
I realize there are some likely problems with vouchers, such as the money getting spent on religious education. That's a valid concern, but (a) I think it can be addressed to some extent and (b) compared to the ongoing train wreck we have now, I don't see it as so terrible.
Despite being a generally center-left voter, I have always thought vouchers were a stellar idea. (Think "single-payer education".) The ongoing antipathy the Democrats have to them just shows, to me, that they're in the unions' pockets. But why more parents don't demand them just mystifies me.
IMHO, the problem is not the risk; it's the coupling.
This is a good point. The near-collapse of the banking system was not caused by an unpredictable, exogenous event; indeed, in hindsight, one can see that it was inevitable. Too many people had exposure to the same risks, without necessarily being aware of that. (Contrast what happened after 9/11; it certainly roiled the markets for a time, but the ultimate impact was far smaller.)
A naive approach to estimating the risks of a strategy tends to bury in the model assumptions that various risks are independent, when in fact they can under some circumstances become correlated. When everyone is counting on the market to keep going up so that borrowers can continue to service their mortgages, then what you might have thought were the independent risks of individual borrowers defaulting become, in fact, highly correlated.
They look interesting. Have you tried them?
There was a stretch where I was getting some spams whose subject lines were obviously being constructed: each consisted of a short phrase followed by a single unrelated (and clearly randomly selecte) word. One of them came out "Girl giving head crash". Ever since, I've had an image of a comely female sucking on a disc drive :-)
Okay, I looked the thing up. What I learned is that the radioisotopes in the waste have half-lives that are either less than 90 years or over 211,000 years, so that after 200 years the combination is about as radioactive as natural uranium ore. The latter, of course, is well above background level.
Actually the plants like LFR produce little waste and the wast they do ahve has a half life of about 90 years. Meaning in 200 years it is at background radiation level.
If the half-life is 90 years, the radiation level will have fallen by only a factor of 2^(200/90) or about 4.9 after 200 years. I'm sure the starting radiation level is much more than 4.9 times background.
I think it's easier than that. I think you could just do a Fourier transform or the like to look at spatial frequencies. I'm not a computer vision expert, but this looks really easy.
Word on the Net is that the 16GB cards do work, even though Nokia hasn't updated their Web site to mention them. See for example Internet Tablet Talk for confirmation.