NASA does not stand for "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
Re:In the gutter
on
The New Boom
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· Score: 3, Funny
I'd say it's more like one of those belches that brings up stuff from your stomach. When it bursts it doesn't disappear completely like the dot com bubble. It splatters stomach acid (offshoring) that stings your throat and the bile (downsizing) leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. There, can we all just agree on this metaphor?
First, yes, pound for pound $100 is very high compared to rice. And since these things will be sold at (or, more likely, below) cost, they may very well bring more than $100. And where I come from, money can be exchanged for food, clothing, munitions, and whatever else is on a warlord's shopping list. My point is, if you can't even distribute food in a certain country, you certainly won't be able to distribute shiney new laptops.
Since I'll probably get bashed however I put this, let me put it this way: There's no politics or democracy in the US, only corrupt government and manipulation of the public. There, I said it. I have karma to burn.
A recent study by the prestigious Research Institute of Me found that mentioning "karma" and some form of the verb "burn" in a post on/. will automatically get you an Insightful mod.
Saying "this marks one of the first times that Intel released a processor with known bugs" is pretty much the same as saying, "this is not the first time that Intel has released a processor with known bugs, but I want it to sound like alarmingly bad news for Apple."
No, it is just a different (and very common) way of saying, "this is one of the few times that...." You're just reading too much into it because you're caught in a Reality Distortion Field (TM).
I'm not surprised to see a comment like that by a./ editor. It's kind of like reading an article written by a former Tyco executive where he says, "I don't see it as embezzlement in the whole, just poor accounting practices."
I totally agree. Most online education programs are a HUGE scam right now. Like multi-billion-dollar scam. The worst part is that even respectable media are running ads for them. Acapella "University" runs ads on NPR constantly (yes, NPR's sponsors are advertisers). Out of curiosity, I looked into their tuition and it turned out to be much higher than my state college (which has a very good reputation).
Oh yeah? Go ahead and show me entropy decreasing in a closed system then, please.
Actually, "closed system" properly refers to a system which does not exchange matter but can exchange energy. So, a simple example is to place a sealed jar of water in the refrigerator. It's entropy decreases, but it doesn't exchange any matter. Now, decreasing entropy in a closed, adiabatic system (aka, an isolated sytem) would be hard to find.
The findings from a recent look by Itellevate, a firm that offers support services to intellectual property lawyers, claim that most of these errors are trivial but approximately 2 percent of the patents examined had errors that weakened the core claims of the patent itself.
It seems like it might be in this firm's interest to find the tiniest error in each patent. Even grammatical or typographical errors like the wrong number of spaces after a period or a sentence without a verb in it (like this one). Also, they could have chosen their sample to suit their needs (i.e., search for 98 patents with errors and 2 without and call it a random sample). Maybe I'm just too suspicious.
Only in puritanical societies is sex a family un-friendly thing. Sex is the reason we have families. Without it, there's no offspring, and no families. It's ironic that people will adopt such deep close-mindedness that the very thing that is reponsible for their existence is deemed dirty and unworthy of being discussed in a family.
I call bullshit. Unless you define "puritanical" in such a way that it applies to almost all societies on the planet, then you're just wrong. Sex is considered very private even in primitive tribal societies. It is not a appropriate topic to discuss at many occasians any more than defecation is. Would you throw a party for your grandfather because he had his first bowel movement in four days? The "puritanical" societies you refer to don't consider sex "family un-friendly[sic]", they consider it private.
Why they celebrate birthdays and not conception days (they're so adamant at trying to control non-believers definitions of "life").
Many ancient cultures didn't even have a concept of a "conception day". Even if they did realize that an embryo is created in one instant, they wouldn't necessarily know when that instant was. We don't always know that today. But your question is a straw man anyway; not everything Christians do has to be a religious ritual, and the Bible does not say we have to celebrate birthdays.
Why they believe one ascends to heaven immediately upon a man saying they are dead.
Again, where does it say this in the Bible? The precise time of death is a civil matter, not necessarily a religious one.
Why they believe that one who has no brain activity but body life might still be considered alive on this earth.
Answer me this: why would you consider someone in the deepest stage of sleep to be alive? They have no conscious brain activity. The answer is that you know that when they wake up, they will be very much alive (at least after they've had their first cup of coffee). As long as someone's body is still alive, there is perhaps a remote chance of them regaining consciousness and functioning semi-normally again. I'm not saying I believe in it, but that may be used as a justification for keeping someone's body alive as long as possible. Besides, not all Christians believe that brain dead patients should be kept alive.
Now I have a question for you. How can you consider yourself a Christian and yet acuse all other Christians of having the beliefs you mentioned? You do realize that there are many denominations of Christianity with quite different beliefs and interpretations of the scriptures, don't you?
Sheesh. Stop banging everything with your big Anthropomorphism Stick. Equations modeling some behavior are not 'understood' or 'solved' by whatever exhibits that behavior; the equations are just a model. Living being climbing steps or whatever are using highly-evolved real-time feedback mechanisms, not solving anything.
Yeah, birds, acorns, and water (especially water) hate being anthropomorphized.
Yes, I do think of that. Actually, I just forgot to mention Linux. I have a dual-boot box with Fedora Core 4, and I use cross-platform tools whenever possible (gcc, FLTK, STL, etc.) so it's not that hard to support Linux. However, Linux is, last time I checked, in third place among home users. Unless the software is aimed at the geek/professional market, it's often not profitable enough to even bother.
BTW, I'm currently a grad student, so the commercial software I write is just stuff for very small businesses that I do part time. I usually make a few hundred on each job, so it's just to help ends meet, and I can't afford additional computers and commercial software. I develop for Mac by using PearPC, so it's a major PITA to do.
Are they suggesting that there may be a nearby star that astronomers have just failed to see for the past few millenia that we've been studying the sky? I thought the nearest star was light years away. Is it a very dim star? I don't get it!
Unfortunately, that decision isn't always up to the programmer. I've recently had a customer ask for Windows 95 support on software that requires a computer with about 128 MB of ram. Chances are, if they are still running 95, they won't know how to upgrade their RAM and will have 32 MB and a 1.5 GB hard drive. I couldn't find my old copy of 95 and I couldn't find an iso to download anywhere. I just didn't support it. It's not like they have a way to test it anyway.;)
Also, I give lower priority to supporting things which the user can easily upgrade for free (like browsers).
For what it's worth, here's what I generally support when it's up to me: Windows 98 IE 5.0 Firefox (most recent version)
If I need to support Mac, I support OS X 10.3 and the version of Safari that came with it.
"While they had expected mostly microscopic samples, the researchers said, a surprising number of the particles were large enough to be seen with the naked eye...
... just Jobs thumbing his nose at MS? Why would Apple try to help MS, and, for that matter, why would MS take advice from a competitor? I didn't hear the original invitation, but it doesn't seem like it was meant to be taken seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA does not stand for "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
I'd say it's more like one of those belches that brings up stuff from your stomach. When it bursts it doesn't disappear completely like the dot com bubble. It splatters stomach acid (offshoring) that stings your throat and the bile (downsizing) leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. There, can we all just agree on this metaphor?
...and I'm sure your dream job will find you. At least that's what I heard.
First, yes, pound for pound $100 is very high compared to rice. And since these things will be sold at (or, more likely, below) cost, they may very well bring more than $100. And where I come from, money can be exchanged for food, clothing, munitions, and whatever else is on a warlord's shopping list. My point is, if you can't even distribute food in a certain country, you certainly won't be able to distribute shiney new laptops.
More often than not they will end up in the hands of warlords or destroyed.
So if bags of rice end up in the hands of warlords, what will happen to laptops (which have a high resale value?)
It would be interesting to see if they are more pedestrian tastes or trendy.
I'll fill you in: Toyota Prius, Smirnoff Ice, Maxim (XY) or Cosmo (XX), anything on E!.
Hidden Markov Model?
Since I'll probably get bashed however I put this, let me put it this way: There's no politics or democracy in the US, only corrupt government and manipulation of the public. There, I said it. I have karma to burn.
/. will automatically get you an Insightful mod.
A recent study by the prestigious Research Institute of Me found that mentioning "karma" and some form of the verb "burn" in a post on
Saying "this marks one of the first times that Intel released a processor with known bugs" is pretty much the same as saying, "this is not the first time that Intel has released a processor with known bugs, but I want it to sound like alarmingly bad news for Apple."
No, it is just a different (and very common) way of saying, "this is one of the few times that...." You're just reading too much into it because you're caught in a Reality Distortion Field (TM).
So how does the eating of pudding factor in?
I'm not surprised to see a comment like that by a ./ editor. It's kind of like reading an article written by a former Tyco executive where he says, "I don't see it as embezzlement in the whole, just poor accounting practices."
I totally agree. Most online education programs are a HUGE scam right now. Like multi-billion-dollar scam. The worst part is that even respectable media are running ads for them. Acapella "University" runs ads on NPR constantly (yes, NPR's sponsors are advertisers). Out of curiosity, I looked into their tuition and it turned out to be much higher than my state college (which has a very good reputation).
I should have went to a US college. I probably could have graduated there.
As long as you didn't major in English. ("... should have gone...")
Oh yeah? Go ahead and show me entropy decreasing in a closed system then, please.
Actually, "closed system" properly refers to a system which does not exchange matter but can exchange energy. So, a simple example is to place a sealed jar of water in the refrigerator. It's entropy decreases, but it doesn't exchange any matter. Now, decreasing entropy in a closed, adiabatic system (aka, an isolated sytem) would be hard to find.
The findings from a recent look by Itellevate, a firm that offers support services to intellectual property lawyers, claim that most of these errors are trivial but approximately 2 percent of the patents examined had errors that weakened the core claims of the patent itself.
It seems like it might be in this firm's interest to find the tiniest error in each patent. Even grammatical or typographical errors like the wrong number of spaces after a period or a sentence without a verb in it (like this one). Also, they could have chosen their sample to suit their needs (i.e., search for 98 patents with errors and 2 without and call it a random sample). Maybe I'm just too suspicious.
Most of the mistakes are going to be spelling errors, an omitted punctuation, et cetra.
Good example: you misspelled cetera.
Only in puritanical societies is sex a family un-friendly thing. Sex is the reason we have families. Without it, there's no offspring, and no families. It's ironic that people will adopt such deep close-mindedness that the very thing that is reponsible for their existence is deemed dirty and unworthy of being discussed in a family. I call bullshit. Unless you define "puritanical" in such a way that it applies to almost all societies on the planet, then you're just wrong. Sex is considered very private even in primitive tribal societies. It is not a appropriate topic to discuss at many occasians any more than defecation is. Would you throw a party for your grandfather because he had his first bowel movement in four days? The "puritanical" societies you refer to don't consider sex "family un-friendly[sic]", they consider it private.
I like to ask other Christians:
Why they celebrate birthdays and not conception days (they're so adamant at trying to control non-believers definitions of "life").
Many ancient cultures didn't even have a concept of a "conception day". Even if they did realize that an embryo is created in one instant, they wouldn't necessarily know when that instant was. We don't always know that today. But your question is a straw man anyway; not everything Christians do has to be a religious ritual, and the Bible does not say we have to celebrate birthdays.
Why they believe one ascends to heaven immediately upon a man saying they are dead.
Again, where does it say this in the Bible? The precise time of death is a civil matter, not necessarily a religious one.
Why they believe that one who has no brain activity but body life might still be considered alive on this earth.
Answer me this: why would you consider someone in the deepest stage of sleep to be alive? They have no conscious brain activity. The answer is that you know that when they wake up, they will be very much alive (at least after they've had their first cup of coffee). As long as someone's body is still alive, there is perhaps a remote chance of them regaining consciousness and functioning semi-normally again. I'm not saying I believe in it, but that may be used as a justification for keeping someone's body alive as long as possible. Besides, not all Christians believe that brain dead patients should be kept alive.
Now I have a question for you. How can you consider yourself a Christian and yet acuse all other Christians of having the beliefs you mentioned? You do realize that there are many denominations of Christianity with quite different beliefs and interpretations of the scriptures, don't you?
Sheesh. Stop banging everything with your big Anthropomorphism Stick. Equations modeling some behavior are not 'understood' or 'solved' by whatever exhibits that behavior; the equations are just a model. Living being climbing steps or whatever are using highly-evolved real-time feedback mechanisms, not solving anything.
Yeah, birds, acorns, and water (especially water) hate being anthropomorphized.
Yes, I do think of that. Actually, I just forgot to mention Linux. I have a dual-boot box with Fedora Core 4, and I use cross-platform tools whenever possible (gcc, FLTK, STL, etc.) so it's not that hard to support Linux. However, Linux is, last time I checked, in third place among home users. Unless the software is aimed at the geek/professional market, it's often not profitable enough to even bother. BTW, I'm currently a grad student, so the commercial software I write is just stuff for very small businesses that I do part time. I usually make a few hundred on each job, so it's just to help ends meet, and I can't afford additional computers and commercial software. I develop for Mac by using PearPC, so it's a major PITA to do.
Are they suggesting that there may be a nearby star that astronomers have just failed to see for the past few millenia that we've been studying the sky? I thought the nearest star was light years away. Is it a very dim star? I don't get it!
Actually, according to this graph, Safari and Opera are about equal. It would appear many Mac users don't use Safari.
Unfortunately, that decision isn't always up to the programmer. I've recently had a customer ask for Windows 95 support on software that requires a computer with about 128 MB of ram. Chances are, if they are still running 95, they won't know how to upgrade their RAM and will have 32 MB and a 1.5 GB hard drive. I couldn't find my old copy of 95 and I couldn't find an iso to download anywhere. I just didn't support it. It's not like they have a way to test it anyway. ;)
Also, I give lower priority to supporting things which the user can easily upgrade for free (like browsers).
For what it's worth, here's what I generally support when it's up to me:
Windows 98
IE 5.0
Firefox (most recent version)
If I need to support Mac, I support OS X 10.3 and the version of Safari that came with it.
"While they had expected mostly microscopic samples, the researchers said, a surprising number of the particles were large enough to be seen with the naked eye...
That'll really increase their value on ebay.
... just Jobs thumbing his nose at MS? Why would Apple try to help MS, and, for that matter, why would MS take advice from a competitor? I didn't hear the original invitation, but it doesn't seem like it was meant to be taken seriously.