"The argument that the passphrase, itself, is the incriminating self-testimony seems really weak, both because the passphrase is not being required, and because the passphrase is not, in the end, what will incriminate her."
So if the encryption key itself is not evidence, and one never actually knows the encryption key, but only the pass-phrase that decrypts the key, then destroying the key is not destruction of evidence. The alleged evidence (the encrypted data itself) still exists. In principle the government could still decrypt it. So schemes for a burn password that overwrites the key or prevention of cloning the encrypted key held in flash, destroying it if tampering is detected - these cannot be prosecuted as destruction of evidence, since the key itself is not evidence. Right?
Yeah, it's about the same. Obama has been going after whistle-blowers more than Bush, and he has made it mandatory to buy expensive products from his campaign donors (the insurance companies), who cannot be sued for failing to deliver on their side of the bargain, even the bargain that you were forced to enter under duress. Bush at least gave a nod to the need for congressional approval for war, Obama has killed over a thousand adults and 140 children without even admitting that there are any hostilities, while financing religious fundamentalists who behead, torture, castrate and sodomize their opponents supporting the legitimate government of Libya.
But if you have not admitted that it is your laptop, or have not admitted that the encrypted file is yours or that you know the password, then they are asking you to divulge information - perhaps not the password itself, but the information that you know the password, that the data is yours. You cannot be forced to testify to any of these facts. This is why you should not say anything at all when asked questions by government officers, even if the questions seem harmless. (Don't lie, either - that is a crime in itself.)
By "local" I meant on-chip and within-node communication. The communication bandwidth does not drop off with locality as fast as you'd think - much if not most of the brain's volume is white matter devoted to long-distance communication.
"Hell, why not ask them to chip in at a *higher* rate than everyone else? Why not double? Why not triple? "
Good idea. The Social Security tax is highly regressive. If we adopt Reaganomics czar David Stockman's suggestion to immediately implement means-testing for SS payouts, it would come to the same thing philosophically - payouts would be decoupled from pay-ins. The difference is that removing the cap on income subject to the tax and making the rate progressive would generate far more revenue than means-testing. By recognizing the inherent pay-as-you-go nature of Social Security, eliminating the SS surplus, and having the current SS tax rates automatically indexed to SS payouts, we could starve the general fund of this easy embezzlement, assure that current benefit payment levels can continue, and reduce the tax burden on the working poor. This would simultaneously increase demand (the poor spend their money on needed goods) and decrease the malinvestment that came from the wealthy having too much free income compared to available productive investment opportunities (which is a primary root of asset bubbles and the absurd price inflation of education and status goods).
The CBO has been telling everyone for years that the poor aren't paying taxes, arriving at this conclusion by not counting the highly regressive SS taxes and subtracting SS benefits from their income tax contributions (along with the earned income tax credit and all other social programs). (Not to mention not counting the highly regressive excise taxes and the double taxation of income paid to Social Security or paid for state and local sales taxes.) In fact, counting all taxes, the poor pay a higher proportion of the income they make that is not spent on essentials than the rich do. On the other hand, the CBO does not offset the tax loopholes exploited by the rich (e.g. the low "carried interest" tax rate, which results in Warren Buffet's secretary paying a higher rate than her employer) nor the profit-padding in the government expenditures that primarily go to the wealthy, such as government contracts, nor the many and various forms of corporate welfare that end up lining the bank accounts of the master class.
If the rich don't like it, well, tough. With few exceptions, they didn't earn their money by working or creating, they extorted it by gaming the system, using bought laws to keep out competitors, recklessly risking other people's money, overcharging customers while underpaying those doing the real work, pocketing the difference, then shipping that productive work abroad. They've killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, the domestic market can't afford to buy things for itself anymore, certainly can't afford to buy the doctors, lawyers, bankers and executives all the nice things they had been arrogating to themselves as their due as protected guild members. They'll have to start paying the debt they ran up, they'll have to start paying to rebuild the society they destroyed, or they're going to end up having nothing at all.
Great points. I'd like to note, however, that the SS trust fund is closer to $2.5 trillion than $3T, the bonds it holds are not T-bills but rather longer-term, special-issue, unmarketable Treasury notes and SS expenditures are (and always have been) less than receipts on a yearly basis, by over $68B in the last fiscal year.
Some people seem to think that we are always on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, but there is no evidence that this is the case now. The higher taxes of the Reagan and Clinton eras corresponded with higher tax collections as a % of GDP and more prosperity than we have today. If you want to cut, the place to do it is not in the area of the government that is more than paying for itself, but rather in the areas that have the most waste: military, intelligence, DHS, contractors (rather than employees), and expenditures (some hidden) on sectors that have vast lobbying power (finance, pharma, telecom and media being the top parasites.)
Real conservatives would want to end the foreign adventurism and war profiteering, the government-enabled anti-competitive corporate monopolies and oligopolies that destroy small business, the fiscally irresponsible federal borrowing (essentially none of which is due to social spending, essentially all of it due to war-profiteering and other corrupt corporate welfare) and the gross enrichment of the entirely non-productive and parasitic New York financial class. But most "conservatives" are nothing of the kind.
"Feel free to disagee, but if so, please tell me exactly how more money enters the general fund because securities exist that are both due to and payable by the same entity." Because the money will be paid back in inflated currency (interest on the SS bonds is less than the real rate of inflation). Because the government takes back part of what it pays in benefits (SS benefits are subject to income tax.) Because Congress can cut the benefits at any time, and it has long been assumed that it eventually will. Because Congress can effectively default on the bonds in the trust fund by any number of legislative and accounting measures without affecting its credit in the external bond market.
Your overall point is good, though - because of its size, SS cannot truly be anything but a pay-as-you-go system. This will break down within the next 20 years unless something changes. The SS surplus allows greater government spending, but this does not foster the wage base in the real economy needed to allow the program to continue indefinitely. Removing the ~$100K limit on income subject to SS taxes could easily solve the problem for decades, perhaps indefinitely if combined with a progressive tax schedule. Preventing dumping of labor products by China and other violators by assessing tariffs would also foster the US wage base and productive (manufacturing) sectors.
Nonsense. The military consumes a literally infinitely greater share of income tax receipts and borrowing. Social Security is funded by a separate, earmarked tax and has run a surplus every year since it began over 75 years ago. In the most recent fiscal year, expenditures were $712.5B, while income was $781.1B, with the difference $68.6B being taken by the general fund in exchange for non-marketable US bonds. (This system was a Reagan-era fraud. The Social Security Trust Fund is now the largest single creditor of the US Government, holding over $2.5 trillion in US bonds.) One could say that nearly a third of this 68 billion-dollar surplus went just to providing air-conditioning for the coddled invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan, or that about 5 times this surplus was consumed yearly by increases in military spending since 2000.
The military budget has expanded from about $390B to over $700B in level dollars since 2000, and that amount is drastically understated due to the vast increases in debt and obligations for support of veterans which we have undertaken due to the fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Social Security is just as it appears on the budget - but with all the expenditures liable to income tax, then most to sales tax, and virtually all staying in the domestic economy. It is paid for disproportionately by people who are not rich - no one pays any SS tax over about $100K in income. For those making under $10-12 dollars per hour, (more than half of all working-age people, when all the ~40% non-employed are taken into account) it is a bigger burden than income tax. The excess Social Security tax is appropriated by the general fund, then given to bankers who borrow for less than nothing (considering inflation) from the Fed and buy US bonds, pocketing the interest paid, and to parasitic war profiteers who feed on the "defense" budget.
Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, provides innovative private sector solutions to U.S. Government and non-U.S. Government clients. Founded in 1997, we were initially envisioned as a basic training facility to support the needs of local and regional law enforcement personnel. Today, we are capable of providing much more. Since our inception, we have expanded this corporate vision, empowering a talented collection of seasoned professionals from a wide range of disciplines, directing them to develop cost efficient and operationally effective solutions for the U.S. Government and other clientele. The company's ability to deliver custom solutions is made possible through the integration of its four core competencies: International Training, Logistics/Mobility, Innovative Technologies, and Professional resources.
And blowing shit the fuck up. Five core competencies. No, wait - and killing innocent bystanders. Six. Six core competencies.
Write code as if the person who will be maintaining it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." Should be modded insightful. Consider the already precarious mental stability of someone choosing to work where you do. Then consider the potential destabilizing effects of maintaining some of your coworkers' code. Apply a bit of introspection, and you might well start thinking about how to locate the guilty and fantasizing about the most appropriate fate for that idiot who committed that 500-case switch statement...
Likely not. But if you want to simulate something complicated, matrix algebra is just about always the best place to start. You'll often end up there anyway, no matter where you start. You may find something better for some specialized or simplified bits, but it's seldom worth the extra effort - usually more difficult, less accurate and slower (the tridefecta).
Let's say it's simpler than most earlier estimates have said, say an average of 7 inputs and 1 output per neuron, each firing up to 100 times per second with about 3 bits of phase information encoded in each spike. So that's 300bps of bandwidth out and 2100bps in, so 300-2400bps/neuron depending on how it's implemented. Times 20-100 billion neurons that's still some serious bandwidth, (6 -240Tbps) even if it is nearly all local. Still, a lot of non-local communication takes place as shown by the "connectome" data and the emergent synchrony of firing across the brain, but it could be within the range of today's cluster interconnects - at most a few hundred 10gig Ethernet links
"It's not obvious to me that a brain simulating algorithm would be parallelizable enough to run effectively in chunks distributed over the internet. " It wouldn't. The timing of the spikes arrival at neurons is critical to within less than the usual jitter across large networks. General purpose CPUs just are not an efficient way to simulate neurons, and never will be.
This comment on TFA links to information on a much more technically advanced and likely to succeed method:
The DARPA SyNAPSE project looks much more promising. Rather than attempting to use general-purpose CPUs, they are creating special purpose neuromorphic hardware that will be much faster and more power-efficient than any conventional hardware. Funding for FY2010-2012 is over $75 million, phase I is complete, goals for 2012 include having a verified design and fab process for chips simulating ~10 billion synapses and ~1 million neurons in 1cm^2 with less than 1kW power consumption. These chips are planned to be prototyped by 2015. Given that between 20-100 billion neuron equivalents are needed for a human-scale simulation, that gives them plenty of time to hit their goal of 2019 for human emulation. See the article at NextBigFuture.
It's ridiculous to measure military spending as a percent of GDP. The necessary expenses do not scale with GDP. We aren't facing any real military threats; the BS "terrorism" scare was just a marketing campaign to keep the gravy train rolling. We don't need the expenditures of the cold war today, yet we're spending much more in level dollar terms. We could cut $200B out of the DoD budget tomorrow and still be spending more than in the late 90s or the 70s. The accumulated interest on old military expenditures and increase in the veterans affairs budget due to idiotic wars of choice almost doubles the official budget, to over $1.1trillion a year, even before counting DHS, State Dept., DoE, etc. We're borrowing all that money, including the interest payments. Social Security and Medicare, on the other hand, pay for themselves, and have money left over to lend to the rest of the government. They'd have more but the rich don't pay Social Security tax on most of their income, and Medicare is forbidden from negotiating volume discounts with the pharmaceutical companies.
We're going to spend $2.8 billion this year on the V-22 Osprey, which is a complete dog, unreliable, unmaintainable, dangerous. We're going to spend over $10 billion this year on idiotic, unworkable, destabilizing ballistic missile defense schemes. We're going to spend more on fucking air-conditioning for the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos than the entire NASA budget. And it's worse than completely useless- it soaks up engineering talent, manufacturing capacity and materials and produces nothing of value - it actually destroys value at home and abroad by killing and maiming people and destroying property. It's fucking psychotic.
"...about the only units that I convert between on a regular basis is... time, "
You might want to try Frink, which specializes in units conversion, including some very sophisticated time functions and unusual units. (Search in the latter link for "Astronomical time measurements"). It handles UTC, Dynamical Time, International Atomic Time (TAI), GPS time, leap seconds, can do correct date arithmetic even across the 1BC -1AD and Julian-Gregorian gaps, and can do time-zone conversions across the date line, e.g.: now[] AD 2011-06-28 PM 04:37:05.787 (Tue) Eastern Daylight Time
now[] -> Guam AD 2011-06-29 AM 06:37:14.543 (Wed) Chamorro Standard Time
What do you have to do to get mod points these days? I haven't gotten any in years. My karma has always been excellent - I thought it was because I had stopped commenting so often, but after a few months of commenting and getting modded up much more often than down,still no points. Yet some people seem to have points to burn - I've gotten modded down four times in the past few days, just out of spite, so far as I can tell. Each mod was as "overrated" even though I think only one post of the four had been previously modded up. Am I on some kind of no-mod-points blacklist, or what?
Well spending more time looking at and thinking about art could at least improve the ability to judge whether one's own work is sufficiently good for the purpose, or whether someone with more skill is needed, and to judge the portfolios of those who claim to have that skill. Really, though, in programming, most art history and fine arts classes have very little relevance to non-game, non-movie programming. Industrial design and computer graphic arts are more likely to be relevant. Knowing too much about the internals of a system often makes it difficult to do a proper interface design - one can't see things from the viewpoint of someone without that knowledge. Collaborating with a designer is a better idea, but even someone with little experience but good taste and a fresh set of eyes will often do better than someone who is too close to the implementation.
Off topic, but that reminds me of how much it pisses me off how Corel has neglected the best desktop and small business database there ever was: Paradox. I still miss ObjectPAL and QBE. By comparison, SQL and its offspring are like going back to stone tools, and Access...Access! bah! [spits].
Or at least something functional: Lisp, Haskell, Scheme, Scala, Erlang, or Clojure. The problem is that the ones that you can actually get to do something are a bitch to install and are beginner-unfriendly, and the ones that are designed for teaching are almost impossible to get to do anything interesting. Clojure is the most powerful of the lot, with good libraries and no OO cruft, but it isn't a great instructional language and the installation is not easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there some way we could use Brawndo, or maybe just electrolytes? Brawndo has electrolytes. 'Cause it's got electrolytes.
This is the exact kernel of the issue. Please mod +5 insightful.
"The argument that the passphrase, itself, is the incriminating self-testimony seems really weak, both because the passphrase is not being required, and because the passphrase is not, in the end, what will incriminate her."
So if the encryption key itself is not evidence, and one never actually knows the encryption key, but only the pass-phrase that decrypts the key, then destroying the key is not destruction of evidence. The alleged evidence (the encrypted data itself) still exists. In principle the government could still decrypt it. So schemes for a burn password that overwrites the key or prevention of cloning the encrypted key held in flash, destroying it if tampering is detected - these cannot be prosecuted as destruction of evidence, since the key itself is not evidence. Right?
Yeah, it's about the same. Obama has been going after whistle-blowers more than Bush, and he has made it mandatory to buy expensive products from his campaign donors (the insurance companies), who cannot be sued for failing to deliver on their side of the bargain, even the bargain that you were forced to enter under duress. Bush at least gave a nod to the need for congressional approval for war, Obama has killed over a thousand adults and 140 children without even admitting that there are any hostilities, while financing religious fundamentalists who behead, torture, castrate and sodomize their opponents supporting the legitimate government of Libya.
And yes, they totally are willing to break the law to nail you.
But if you have not admitted that it is your laptop, or have not admitted that the encrypted file is yours or that you know the password, then they are asking you to divulge information - perhaps not the password itself, but the information that you know the password, that the data is yours. You cannot be forced to testify to any of these facts. This is why you should not say anything at all when asked questions by government officers, even if the questions seem harmless. (Don't lie, either - that is a crime in itself.)
By "local" I meant on-chip and within-node communication. The communication bandwidth does not drop off with locality as fast as you'd think - much if not most of the brain's volume is white matter devoted to long-distance communication.
"Hell, why not ask them to chip in at a *higher* rate than everyone else? Why not double? Why not triple? "
Good idea. The Social Security tax is highly regressive. If we adopt Reaganomics czar David Stockman's suggestion to immediately implement means-testing for SS payouts, it would come to the same thing philosophically - payouts would be decoupled from pay-ins. The difference is that removing the cap on income subject to the tax and making the rate progressive would generate far more revenue than means-testing. By recognizing the inherent pay-as-you-go nature of Social Security, eliminating the SS surplus, and having the current SS tax rates automatically indexed to SS payouts, we could starve the general fund of this easy embezzlement, assure that current benefit payment levels can continue, and reduce the tax burden on the working poor. This would simultaneously increase demand (the poor spend their money on needed goods) and decrease the malinvestment that came from the wealthy having too much free income compared to available productive investment opportunities (which is a primary root of asset bubbles and the absurd price inflation of education and status goods).
The CBO has been telling everyone for years that the poor aren't paying taxes, arriving at this conclusion by not counting the highly regressive SS taxes and subtracting SS benefits from their income tax contributions (along with the earned income tax credit and all other social programs). (Not to mention not counting the highly regressive excise taxes and the double taxation of income paid to Social Security or paid for state and local sales taxes.) In fact, counting all taxes, the poor pay a higher proportion of the income they make that is not spent on essentials than the rich do. On the other hand, the CBO does not offset the tax loopholes exploited by the rich (e.g. the low "carried interest" tax rate, which results in Warren Buffet's secretary paying a higher rate than her employer) nor the profit-padding in the government expenditures that primarily go to the wealthy, such as government contracts, nor the many and various forms of corporate welfare that end up lining the bank accounts of the master class.
If the rich don't like it, well, tough. With few exceptions, they didn't earn their money by working or creating, they extorted it by gaming the system, using bought laws to keep out competitors, recklessly risking other people's money, overcharging customers while underpaying those doing the real work, pocketing the difference, then shipping that productive work abroad. They've killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, the domestic market can't afford to buy things for itself anymore, certainly can't afford to buy the doctors, lawyers, bankers and executives all the nice things they had been arrogating to themselves as their due as protected guild members. They'll have to start paying the debt they ran up, they'll have to start paying to rebuild the society they destroyed, or they're going to end up having nothing at all.
Great points. I'd like to note, however, that the SS trust fund is closer to $2.5 trillion than $3T, the bonds it holds are not T-bills but rather longer-term, special-issue, unmarketable Treasury notes and SS expenditures are (and always have been) less than receipts on a yearly basis, by over $68B in the last fiscal year.
Some people seem to think that we are always on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, but there is no evidence that this is the case now. The higher taxes of the Reagan and Clinton eras corresponded with higher tax collections as a % of GDP and more prosperity than we have today. If you want to cut, the place to do it is not in the area of the government that is more than paying for itself, but rather in the areas that have the most waste: military, intelligence, DHS, contractors (rather than employees), and expenditures (some hidden) on sectors that have vast lobbying power (finance, pharma, telecom and media being the top parasites.)
Real conservatives would want to end the foreign adventurism and war profiteering, the government-enabled anti-competitive corporate monopolies and oligopolies that destroy small business, the fiscally irresponsible federal borrowing (essentially none of which is due to social spending, essentially all of it due to war-profiteering and other corrupt corporate welfare) and the gross enrichment of the entirely non-productive and parasitic New York financial class. But most "conservatives" are nothing of the kind.
"Given that they are spending out more than they take in..."
No. Social Security has always run a yearly surplus, over $68 billion last year.
"they took in $40 billion less than they paid out last year"
False. The SS surplus was over $68 billion last year.
"Feel free to disagee, but if so, please tell me exactly how more money enters the general fund because securities exist that are both due to and payable by the same entity."
Because the money will be paid back in inflated currency (interest on the SS bonds is less than the real rate of inflation).
Because the government takes back part of what it pays in benefits (SS benefits are subject to income tax.)
Because Congress can cut the benefits at any time, and it has long been assumed that it eventually will.
Because Congress can effectively default on the bonds in the trust fund by any number of legislative and accounting measures without affecting its credit in the external bond market.
Your overall point is good, though - because of its size, SS cannot truly be anything but a pay-as-you-go system. This will break down within the next 20 years unless something changes. The SS surplus allows greater government spending, but this does not foster the wage base in the real economy needed to allow the program to continue indefinitely. Removing the ~$100K limit on income subject to SS taxes could easily solve the problem for decades, perhaps indefinitely if combined with a progressive tax schedule. Preventing dumping of labor products by China and other violators by assessing tariffs would also foster the US wage base and productive (manufacturing) sectors.
Nonsense. The military consumes a literally infinitely greater share of income tax receipts and borrowing. Social Security is funded by a separate, earmarked tax and has run a surplus every year since it began over 75 years ago. In the most recent fiscal year, expenditures were $712.5B, while income was $781.1B, with the difference $68.6B being taken by the general fund in exchange for non-marketable US bonds. (This system was a Reagan-era fraud. The Social Security Trust Fund is now the largest single creditor of the US Government, holding over $2.5 trillion in US bonds.) One could say that nearly a third of this 68 billion-dollar surplus went just to providing air-conditioning for the coddled invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan, or that about 5 times this surplus was consumed yearly by increases in military spending since 2000.
The military budget has expanded from about $390B to over $700B in level dollars since 2000, and that amount is drastically understated due to the vast increases in debt and obligations for support of veterans which we have undertaken due to the fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Social Security is just as it appears on the budget - but with all the expenditures liable to income tax, then most to sales tax, and virtually all staying in the domestic economy. It is paid for disproportionately by people who are not rich - no one pays any SS tax over about $100K in income. For those making under $10-12 dollars per hour, (more than half of all working-age people, when all the ~40% non-employed are taken into account) it is a bigger burden than income tax. The excess Social Security tax is appropriated by the general fund, then given to bankers who borrow for less than nothing (considering inflation) from the Fed and buy US bonds, pocketing the interest paid, and to parasitic war profiteers who feed on the "defense" budget.
And blowing shit the fuck up. Five core competencies. No, wait - and killing innocent bystanders. Six. Six core competencies.
Write code as if the person who will be maintaining it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
Should be modded insightful. Consider the already precarious mental stability of someone choosing to work where you do. Then consider the potential destabilizing effects of maintaining some of your coworkers' code. Apply a bit of introspection, and you might well start thinking about how to locate the guilty and fantasizing about the most appropriate fate for that idiot who committed that 500-case switch statement...
Likely not. But if you want to simulate something complicated, matrix algebra is just about always the best place to start. You'll often end up there anyway, no matter where you start. You may find something better for some specialized or simplified bits, but it's seldom worth the extra effort - usually more difficult, less accurate and slower (the tridefecta).
Let's say it's simpler than most earlier estimates have said, say an average of 7 inputs and 1 output per neuron, each firing up to 100 times per second with about 3 bits of phase information encoded in each spike. So that's 300bps of bandwidth out and 2100bps in, so 300-2400bps/neuron depending on how it's implemented. Times 20-100 billion neurons that's still some serious bandwidth, (6 -240Tbps) even if it is nearly all local. Still, a lot of non-local communication takes place as shown by the "connectome" data and the emergent synchrony of firing across the brain, but it could be within the range of today's cluster interconnects - at most a few hundred 10gig Ethernet links
"It's not obvious to me that a brain simulating algorithm would be parallelizable enough to run effectively in chunks distributed over the internet. "
It wouldn't. The timing of the spikes arrival at neurons is critical to within less than the usual jitter across large networks. General purpose CPUs just are not an efficient way to simulate neurons, and never will be.
This comment on TFA links to information on a much more technically advanced and likely to succeed method:
It's ridiculous to measure military spending as a percent of GDP. The necessary expenses do not scale with GDP. We aren't facing any real military threats; the BS "terrorism" scare was just a marketing campaign to keep the gravy train rolling. We don't need the expenditures of the cold war today, yet we're spending much more in level dollar terms. We could cut $200B out of the DoD budget tomorrow and still be spending more than in the late 90s or the 70s. The accumulated interest on old military expenditures and increase in the veterans affairs budget due to idiotic wars of choice almost doubles the official budget, to over $1.1trillion a year, even before counting DHS, State Dept., DoE, etc. We're borrowing all that money, including the interest payments. Social Security and Medicare, on the other hand, pay for themselves, and have money left over to lend to the rest of the government. They'd have more but the rich don't pay Social Security tax on most of their income, and Medicare is forbidden from negotiating volume discounts with the pharmaceutical companies.
We're going to spend $2.8 billion this year on the V-22 Osprey, which is a complete dog, unreliable, unmaintainable, dangerous. We're going to spend over $10 billion this year on idiotic, unworkable, destabilizing ballistic missile defense schemes. We're going to spend more on fucking air-conditioning for the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos than the entire NASA budget. And it's worse than completely useless- it soaks up engineering talent, manufacturing capacity and materials and produces nothing of value - it actually destroys value at home and abroad by killing and maiming people and destroying property. It's fucking psychotic.
"...about the only units that I convert between on a regular basis is ... time, "
You might want to try Frink, which specializes in units conversion, including some very sophisticated time functions and unusual units. (Search in the latter link for "Astronomical time measurements"). It handles UTC, Dynamical Time, International Atomic Time (TAI), GPS time, leap seconds, can do correct date arithmetic even across the 1BC -1AD and Julian-Gregorian gaps, and can do time-zone conversions across the date line, e.g.:
now[]
AD 2011-06-28 PM 04:37:05.787 (Tue) Eastern Daylight Time
now[] -> Guam
AD 2011-06-29 AM 06:37:14.543 (Wed) Chamorro Standard Time
What do you have to do to get mod points these days? I haven't gotten any in years. My karma has always been excellent - I thought it was because I had stopped commenting so often, but after a few months of commenting and getting modded up much more often than down,still no points. Yet some people seem to have points to burn - I've gotten modded down four times in the past few days, just out of spite, so far as I can tell. Each mod was as "overrated" even though I think only one post of the four had been previously modded up. Am I on some kind of no-mod-points blacklist, or what?
Well spending more time looking at and thinking about art could at least improve the ability to judge whether one's own work is sufficiently good for the purpose, or whether someone with more skill is needed, and to judge the portfolios of those who claim to have that skill. Really, though, in programming, most art history and fine arts classes have very little relevance to non-game, non-movie programming. Industrial design and computer graphic arts are more likely to be relevant. Knowing too much about the internals of a system often makes it difficult to do a proper interface design - one can't see things from the viewpoint of someone without that knowledge. Collaborating with a designer is a better idea, but even someone with little experience but good taste and a fresh set of eyes will often do better than someone who is too close to the implementation.
Off topic, but that reminds me of how much it pisses me off how Corel has neglected the best desktop and small business database there ever was: Paradox. I still miss ObjectPAL and QBE. By comparison, SQL and its offspring are like going back to stone tools, and Access...Access! bah! [spits].
Or at least something functional: Lisp, Haskell, Scheme, Scala, Erlang, or Clojure.
The problem is that the ones that you can actually get to do something are a bitch to install and are beginner-unfriendly, and the ones that are designed for teaching are almost impossible to get to do anything interesting. Clojure is the most powerful of the lot, with good libraries and no OO cruft, but it isn't a great instructional language and the installation is not easy.