. Eventually the northern, industrialized portion of the party split off over issues like slavery and representation in congress, while the deep south Democrats consolidated their base.
You mean there was a Republican party that once stood up for civil rights and ended slavery?" And the Democrats had a strong hold in the southern states and were pro-slavery?
In the past decade, we have already seen Republican party deeply erode civil rights. And the Republicans are very strong in the southern states [Texas, Louisiana, etc].
I looked into it when the electrical code forced me to replace the illegally retrofitted three conductor grounded outlets in my house with ground-fault circuits. It didn't make any sense to me without a ground... but lo and behold, they do indeed work with no ground at all.
I think you caught the mouse but missed the 1000lb gorilla in the room.
Yes, GFCI protection will work without ground. But the ground wire was invented long before GFCI devices were used.
Imagine something goes wrong in your computer's power supply that causes the 120V wire to touch the side of the power supply case. The power supply case is touching the metal case your motherboard,etc are in. Imagine you touch the side of the case to turn the computer on.
Well, the power supply and case are connected to the ground plug on your electrical cord. Two possiblities happen: - Your ground wire is connected to neutral at the circuit breaker panel (and only there, no where else!). You do not get electrocuted. If you have a GFCI, it will trip. If you don't, the current will be fairly high (a few amps), and either the powersupply gets fried [and melts whatever is shorting] or the circuit breaker trips (not likely).
- Your ground wire is not connected at your outlet. YOU get fried. If you are lucky, the GFCI will trip *after* several milliamps are flowing through your body. [Hint, a few milliamps for a brief instant can be deadly]
Now you are probably thinking. Well if ground and neutral are connected at the circuit breaker panel, you can be lazy and connect the outlet's ground to the netural [and not run a separate ground wire]. That way you don't get fried. Except you will largely disable GFCI protection (to an extent). But even worse things than that happen. Imagine something causes a device's "hot" wire is connected but the "neutral" is not. Well, if device and outlet are grounded properly, its not so bad, the current will return through the ground wire and the case, etc will be at zero potential. But if someone wires the ground to the neutral and the fault occurs, then the case is immediately raised to 120V potential (whether it is a metallic lamp or a computer). YOU get fried.
There are probably other considerations. I'm an electrical enginner, not an electrican. I can tell you this: don't play games with grounding. It ain't worth it.
A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area.
This sounds like a resounding victory for Capitalism. Unfortunately the negotiated prices also apply to those without insurance.
I have seen a relative's cancer treatment bills amount to almost $500k, but the insurance company only had to pay $200k (and negotiated away the rest). What would have happened if the person didn't have insurance? Most of the extended family would have sell their own home and go homeless just to pay the bill.
Of course, what I show is an extreme case. Divide the amounts by a factor of 10 or 20 for something a bit more minor (injury from accident, heart attack, etc), and the conclusion is the same.
There are two main problems that I see:
1) Doctors & Hospitals only have to cater to insurance companies. The common man (without insurance) can no longer afford them.
2) Insurance companies cannot even put enough pressure on the doctors & hospitals because of the greed of the pharmacutical (sp.) industry. How can 1cc of anything be worth USD $10,000 ?! (only patents and other protections make this possible)
It is almost enough to make me feel sorry for the greedy insurance companies. They may make profits, but only by wrestling them from the even greedier doctors, hospitals, and drug companies.
The 19th century medicine was more civilized in some respects. People could go to their local doctor easily. They may have been drinking flavored rum as medicine, but at least it gave them hope with a cost that was expensive, but not prohibitive.
Thus, it's entirely correct to divide dollars of debt by the number of American households to give a debt per household figure.
Shazbot! I agree with your reasoning, but what can we do?
Perhaps we everyone in the US started multiplying like rabbits, we could become a source of cheap labor and other countries would relocate their labor-intensive tasks here. The extra trade income and the number of people would reduce the amount of debt per person.
(Of course, I write this with tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, someone will probably suggest this to Congress and it will be enacted.)
On other hand, if we find a way to divide the debt across the truly *American* households as opposed only the households in the *United States*, we might have a solution, a-la Madoff style.
If someone purchases a software (on CD), modifies a file, destroys the original CD, and gives someone the modified version (on CD), they have committed copyright infringment.
However, if I buy a paperback book, use an ink-pen to change the meaning of a few sentences, and then give the (modified) book to someone else, no crime has been committed.
What to make it more weird? Buy an e-book, modify the ebook file, move the file to a removable storage, and then give it to someone else. Won't lawyers scream copyright infringment by "derivative work"?
I would summarise that interview as "When builds leak they might be incomplete or old, and people may get a wrong impression of what the product will be like. This causes my phone to ring which is a pain in the ass"
No real surprises there.
Well I'm not surprised at all. He must actually like leaks, otherwise he wouldn't keep his phone shoved up his ass.
Are you aware that whole-disk encryption programs encypt a sector (or small group sectors) independently from each other? Plus, these programs are completely independent from file system structure. I would be more concerned about encryption software that worked on a file-by-file basis or was built into the filesystem than the traditional whole-disk encryption.
Meaning that if you write crap (or have a few bad sectors) to a small (encrypted) block, the rest of the disk is still perfectly readable (and decryptable). There is little difference between crap on an unencrypted disk and crap on an encrypted disk. In either case, crap that takes out the file allocation table will trash everything, otherwise it will only corrupt one or two files...
I use linux (full-disk) encryption for both my main disk as well as my backups... (There is little point in encrypting the server if the backup is plaintext!)
DMA wasn't intented in the 90s. Even low-speed serial ports *should* have been doing this kind of stuff in the 80s (and before).
I recall having a 386SX-16MHz that couldn't handle a screensaver and a file transfer at 2400bps dialup modem at the same time. [And that was a real "hardware" modem, not this soft-modem-crap that came out much later.] Not exactly the hardware's fault, but networking was not always about high-speed.
Ever consider that both solar and the burning of fossil fuels result in pollution that are both ongoing cost?
You manufacture a solar panel and then use it for X years to get as much energy as you can. When the solar panel is discarded, you effectively paid "z" pollution (during manufacturing) for the "X" years of energy.
Alternatively, if you had used a coal-burning power plant, the energy of those "X" years would have required the burning of coal and generating "y" amount of pollution.
If you want to have energy for "2X" years, then you need either two sets of solar panel (with "2z" pollution) or two loads of coal ("2y" pollution).
Your solar panel isn't going to last forever.
If you're an accountant or have a business degree, then for tax purposes, you may differentiate between "one-time-cost" and "ongoing cost".
However, in the end, they are really the same. Only good thing about solar is the pollution cost may be comparatively better than coal.
But don't kid yourself that there is only a one-time cost.
The "one-time cost" doesn't truly exist for anything in this world.
It seems to me that we are refining our understanding of reality, but the subset which we do understand, we understand fairly well. It has been a very long time since we've been truly and profoundly wrong -- and even then, we weren't.
Indeed. There are many things that we know to the true. There are some things that which we know we don't know. And there are a few things that we don't know that we don't know them.
I am also finding that there is a very high correlation between the multiverses where the LHC doesn't work and those in which I do not win the Lotto and become a billionaire.
While correlation is not causation, I have to wonder... Do I only win the Lotto in the multiverses where the LHC works correctly?
I also work with large amounts of assembly code for a living.
I've noticed that (mediocre) embedded compilers may generate poor code because many developers write code without thinking about how it would actually be assembled.
I've seen cheap compilers not handle the following type of code well:
for(i=0;i1000;++i) {
a[i] = b[i+1]; }
Although the processor may have instructions that perform an indirect read and auto-increment in a single cycle, a little arithemetic can fool the compiler into not using that instruction. This leaves the developer with two choices: (1) Rewrite the routine in assembly [and spend 1-2 days unrolling and pipelining loops by hand, etc]. (2) Be a bit more clever and help the compiler out:
b2 = &b[1]; for(i=0;i1000;++i) {
a[i] = b2[i]; }
The compiler may look at that loop and do the right thing (and use a single instruction that reads and auto-increments versus using several instructinon to read the array element, do arthmetic on the pointer (which can require several instructions on some architectures), and then update the pointer. With such code, the compiler will generate code no worse than a highly skilled person (with some extra time) would have done.
Hey, I'm all for manipulating dark matter and delving into the 11th dimension as the next guy...
But we can't even get operating systems to work as we want. And car gas mileage hasn't increased much in the past few decades. [No, I don't consider it to be an huge accomplishment that some tiny 1500lb car now gets ~33mpg on the highway when my 6 year old V6 Camry gets an actual 30mpg on the highway at 70mph. Should I be thrilled if you show me a car getting 40mpg? ].
I think we have much more pressing (easier) issues to solve before making a warp drive...
That said, given how people behave, it wouldn't quite surprise me if we have warp-drive spacecraft (including civilian inter-solar-system travel) before we have fuel-efficient transportation and decent operating systems.
I bet the parent poster felt safer as a pilot before seeing how software development takes place!
I've been in software developer for a while. While I have no question in my mind that computers can be made to do complex tasks perfectly well [some people doubt this], my faith in developer to do these things has been slightly declining. About 95% of code I see is flawless and a model of pure perfection. The other 5% makes me want to crawl, hide, and start sucking my thumb (well, aside from fixing it). It is not that it violates formatting standards -- it is often fundamentally flawed and shouldn't work.
I'm not in aviation software. In my area, most code is deemed good if it "works". Too many ways for "working" code to be highly flawed. Sometimes one flaw masks another... Sometimes code that is fundamentally flawed (e.g. violates first principles) "works" until minor modifications are applied. [Especially troublesome when it has been in use for 10-20 years in commercial systems!]
Signal Processing / Control Systems on embedded hardware are sometimes especially difficult to easily verify. (The open-loop frequency response of a control system could be measured, but this is meaningless if the basic filtering code is screwed up and/or a large complex chain of hardware is involved which is not easily tested). Its not that verification isn't possible, but it isn't often possible in a way that easily integrates into a finished product. [It becomes more of an manual (and one-time executed) engineering test and rather than an automated test-case. ]
I guess one man's porn is another man's religion....
There are well-known Indian temples that explicitly show (with genitalia) sexual acts involving men & women, women & women, women & dogs, etc... These are revered in a religious/philosophical sense.
So how in the world can pornography be legally banned?
Carving in stone in religious places is fine, but ordinary picture and video is not?
I can only guess that the law must be splitting hairs to differentiate the two. To me (as an outsider), this isn't a question of XXX-video versus medical training information... It is more like ancient XXX versus modern-day XXX.
Seems like one could ascribe the religious/philosophical meaning behind the ancient templates to the modern day blue films and claim that the blue-films are a religious tool and not obscene...
[But I am probably an idiot. Someone else may have a much different take on what I am describing].
I somewhat agree with your point, but I recommend caution about praising mainstream media too much...
A few days ago, a hurricane (cyclone) struct eastern India and the nearby region. Over 100 killed and millions strongly impacted. Being a highly agricultural region, this event will have long lasting effects for the farmers... [crops don't like salt!]
Try to find one mention of it in Yahoo news. You can't!!! Not even in the Asia section...
Yet, Yahoo faithfully reports that 6 people were killed in a South American earthquake... Yes, this is also tragic, but how did this get picked up and the other event not?
Yahoo pulls from many major news sources... They aren't the only game in town, but are pretty big nonetheless...
Slashdot Mirror
I just replay the music in my head. This helps avoid copyright infringement suits.
Nay, you only think you are...
I say you are guilty of illegally creating a derivative work based upon copyrighted material.
In the US we have a few (but very few) roundabouts. I can say that I am one of the few to actually have driven through one of these in the US.
I can't say I liked the roundabout intersection. I always found it to be rather indirect and well...roundabout.
. Eventually the northern, industrialized portion of the party split off over issues like slavery and representation in congress, while the deep south Democrats consolidated their base.
You mean there was a Republican party that once stood up for civil rights and ended slavery?"
And the Democrats had a strong hold in the southern states and were pro-slavery?
In the past decade, we have already seen Republican party deeply erode civil rights.
And the Republicans are very strong in the southern states [Texas, Louisiana, etc].
What the hell has happened?
I looked into it when the electrical code forced me to replace the illegally retrofitted three conductor grounded outlets in my house with ground-fault circuits. It didn't make any sense to me without a ground... but lo and behold, they do indeed work with no ground at all.
I think you caught the mouse but missed the 1000lb gorilla in the room.
Yes, GFCI protection will work without ground. But the ground wire was invented long before GFCI devices were used.
Imagine something goes wrong in your computer's power supply that causes the 120V wire to touch the side of the power supply case. The power supply case is touching the metal case your motherboard,etc are in. Imagine you touch the side of the case to turn the computer on.
Well, the power supply and case are connected to the ground plug on your electrical cord. Two possiblities happen:
- Your ground wire is connected to neutral at the circuit breaker panel (and only there, no where else!). You do not get electrocuted. If you have a GFCI, it will trip. If you don't, the current will be fairly high (a few amps), and either the powersupply gets fried [and melts whatever is shorting] or the circuit breaker trips (not likely).
- Your ground wire is not connected at your outlet. YOU get fried. If you are lucky, the GFCI will trip *after* several milliamps are flowing through your body. [Hint, a few milliamps for a brief instant can be deadly]
Now you are probably thinking. Well if ground and neutral are connected at the circuit breaker panel, you can be lazy and connect the outlet's ground to the netural [and not run a separate ground wire]. That way you don't get fried. Except you will largely disable GFCI protection (to an extent). But even worse things than that happen. Imagine something causes a device's "hot" wire is connected but the "neutral" is not. Well, if device and outlet are grounded properly, its not so bad, the current will return through the ground wire and the case, etc will be at zero potential. But if someone wires the ground to the neutral and the fault occurs, then the case is immediately raised to 120V potential (whether it is a metallic lamp or a computer). YOU get fried.
There are probably other considerations. I'm an electrical enginner, not an electrican. I can tell you this: don't play games with grounding. It ain't worth it.
A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area.
This sounds like a resounding victory for Capitalism. Unfortunately the negotiated prices also apply to those without insurance.
I have seen a relative's cancer treatment bills amount to almost $500k, but the insurance company only had to pay $200k (and negotiated away the rest). What would have happened if the person didn't have insurance? Most of the extended family would have sell their own home and go homeless just to pay the bill.
Of course, what I show is an extreme case. Divide the amounts by a factor of 10 or 20 for something a bit more minor (injury from accident, heart attack, etc), and the conclusion is the same.
There are two main problems that I see:
1) Doctors & Hospitals only have to cater to insurance companies. The common man (without insurance) can no longer afford them.
2) Insurance companies cannot even put enough pressure on the doctors & hospitals because of the greed of the pharmacutical (sp.) industry. How can 1cc of anything be worth USD $10,000 ?! (only patents and other protections make this possible)
It is almost enough to make me feel sorry for the greedy insurance companies. They may make profits, but only by wrestling them from the even greedier doctors, hospitals, and drug companies.
The 19th century medicine was more civilized in some respects. People could go to their local doctor easily. They may have been drinking flavored rum as medicine, but at least it gave them hope with a cost that was expensive, but not prohibitive.
Thus, it's entirely correct to divide dollars of debt by the number of American households to give a debt per household figure.
Shazbot! I agree with your reasoning, but what can we do?
Perhaps we everyone in the US started multiplying like rabbits, we could become a source of cheap labor and other countries would relocate their labor-intensive tasks here. The extra trade income and the number of people would reduce the amount of debt per person.
(Of course, I write this with tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, someone will probably suggest this to Congress and it will be enacted.)
On other hand, if we find a way to divide the debt across the truly *American* households as opposed only the households in the *United States*, we might have a solution, a-la Madoff style.
Here's one for ya.
If someone purchases a software (on CD), modifies a file, destroys the original CD, and gives someone the modified version (on CD), they have committed copyright infringment.
However, if I buy a paperback book, use an ink-pen to change the meaning of a few sentences, and then give the (modified) book to someone else, no crime has been committed.
What to make it more weird? Buy an e-book, modify the ebook file, move the file to a removable storage, and then give it to someone else. Won't lawyers scream copyright infringment by "derivative work"?
I would summarise that interview as "When builds leak they might be incomplete or old, and people may get a wrong impression of what the product will be like. This causes my phone to ring which is a pain in the ass"
No real surprises there.
Well I'm not surprised at all. He must actually like leaks, otherwise he wouldn't keep his phone shoved up his ass.
Are you aware that whole-disk encryption programs encypt a sector (or small group sectors) independently from each other? Plus, these programs are completely independent from file system structure. I would be more concerned about encryption software that worked on a file-by-file basis or was built into the filesystem than the traditional whole-disk encryption.
Meaning that if you write crap (or have a few bad sectors) to a small (encrypted) block, the rest of the disk is still perfectly readable (and decryptable). There is little difference between crap on an unencrypted disk and crap on an encrypted disk. In either case, crap that takes out the file allocation table will trash everything, otherwise it will only corrupt one or two files...
I use linux (full-disk) encryption for both my main disk as well as my backups... (There is little point in encrypting the server if the backup is plaintext!)
I used to leave near New Orleans.
My bet is "this guy's house in Belleville, IL"
I would hope you're right...
DMA wasn't intented in the 90s. Even low-speed serial ports *should* have been doing this kind of stuff in the 80s (and before).
I recall having a 386SX-16MHz that couldn't handle a screensaver and a file transfer at 2400bps dialup modem at the same time. [And that was a real "hardware" modem, not this soft-modem-crap that came out much later.] Not exactly the hardware's fault, but networking was not always about high-speed.
The only unintended consequence is that some activists are unhappy that they're being associated with the movement they support.
Yes.. The "rainbow" people are unhappy that the "sunshine" laws are giving them visibility.
Would they prefer a more "cloudy" and obtuse government?
The final result is that out product line is a mess of modules built with incompatible tool chains, and our actual code is a mess of short term hacks.
This sounds strikingly familiar...
Mike, is that you?
Ever consider that both solar and the burning of fossil fuels result in pollution that are both ongoing cost?
You manufacture a solar panel and then use it for X years to get as much energy as you can. When the solar panel is discarded, you effectively paid "z" pollution (during manufacturing) for the "X" years of energy.
Alternatively, if you had used a coal-burning power plant, the energy of those "X" years would have required the burning of coal and generating "y" amount of pollution.
If you want to have energy for "2X" years, then you need either two sets of solar panel (with "2z" pollution) or two loads of coal ("2y" pollution).
Your solar panel isn't going to last forever.
If you're an accountant or have a business degree, then for tax purposes, you may differentiate between "one-time-cost" and "ongoing cost".
However, in the end, they are really the same. Only good thing about solar is the pollution cost may be comparatively better than coal.
But don't kid yourself that there is only a one-time cost.
The "one-time cost" doesn't truly exist for anything in this world.
I've worked for one tiny company (200 employees) and a few big ones (10000s of employees).
Although there were fewer levels of management, there was proportionately much more crap going on in the small company.
It seems to me that we are refining our understanding of reality, but the subset which we do understand, we understand fairly well. It has been a very long time since we've been truly and profoundly wrong -- and even then, we weren't.
Indeed. There are many things that we know to the true. There are some things that which we know we don't know. And there are a few things that we don't know that we don't know them.
I am also finding that there is a very high correlation between the multiverses where the LHC doesn't work and those in which I do not win the Lotto and become a billionaire.
While correlation is not causation, I have to wonder... Do I only win the Lotto in the multiverses where the LHC works correctly?
like the difference between being hit by a car going 1mph and one going 300'000'000mph?
That square root sure makes all the difference. A difference of 17 orders of magnitude was just difficult to handle.
But now, the difference between a car going 1mph and ~1.5x the speed of light isn't so bad at all.
I feel much better!
Are they reinventing HAM radio?
HAMs (amateur radio operators) invented the mobile ad-hoc network about 50 to 75 years ago [at least].
I also work with large amounts of assembly code for a living.
I've noticed that (mediocre) embedded compilers may generate poor code because many developers write code without thinking about how it would actually be assembled.
I've seen cheap compilers not handle the following type of code well:
for(i=0;i1000;++i)
{
a[i] = b[i+1];
}
Although the processor may have instructions that perform an indirect read and auto-increment in a single cycle, a little arithemetic can fool the compiler into not using that instruction. This leaves the developer with two choices: (1) Rewrite the routine in assembly [and spend 1-2 days unrolling and pipelining loops by hand, etc]. (2) Be a bit more clever and help the compiler out:
b2 = &b[1];
for(i=0;i1000;++i)
{
a[i] = b2[i];
}
The compiler may look at that loop and do the right thing (and use a single instruction that reads and auto-increments versus using several instructinon to read the array element, do arthmetic on the pointer (which can require several instructions on some architectures), and then update the pointer. With such code, the compiler will generate code no worse than a highly skilled person (with some extra time) would have done.
Hey, I'm all for manipulating dark matter and delving into the 11th dimension as the next guy...
But we can't even get operating systems to work as we want. And car gas mileage hasn't increased much in the past few decades. [No, I don't consider it to be an huge accomplishment that some tiny 1500lb car now gets ~33mpg on the highway when my 6 year old V6 Camry gets an actual 30mpg on the highway at 70mph. Should I be thrilled if you show me a car getting 40mpg? ].
I think we have much more pressing (easier) issues to solve before making a warp drive...
That said, given how people behave, it wouldn't quite surprise me if we have warp-drive spacecraft (including civilian inter-solar-system travel) before we have fuel-efficient transportation and decent operating systems.
I bet the parent poster felt safer as a pilot before seeing how software development takes place!
I've been in software developer for a while. While I have no question in my mind that computers can be made to do complex tasks perfectly well [some people doubt this], my faith in developer to do these things has been slightly declining. About 95% of code I see is flawless and a model of pure perfection. The other 5% makes me want to crawl, hide, and start sucking my thumb (well, aside from fixing it). It is not that it violates formatting standards -- it is often fundamentally flawed and shouldn't work.
I'm not in aviation software. In my area, most code is deemed good if it "works". Too many ways for "working" code to be highly flawed. Sometimes one flaw masks another... Sometimes code that is fundamentally flawed (e.g. violates first principles) "works" until minor modifications are applied. [Especially troublesome when it has been in use for 10-20 years in commercial systems!]
Signal Processing / Control Systems on embedded hardware are sometimes especially difficult to easily verify. (The open-loop frequency response of a control system could be measured, but this is meaningless if the basic filtering code is screwed up and/or a large complex chain of hardware is involved which is not easily tested). Its not that verification isn't possible, but it isn't often possible in a way that easily integrates into a finished product. [It becomes more of an manual (and one-time executed) engineering test and rather than an automated test-case. ]
I guess one man's porn is another man's religion....
There are well-known Indian temples that explicitly show (with genitalia) sexual acts involving men & women, women & women, women & dogs, etc... These are revered in a religious/philosophical sense.
So how in the world can pornography be legally banned?
Carving in stone in religious places is fine, but ordinary picture and video is not?
I can only guess that the law must be splitting hairs to differentiate the two. To me (as an outsider), this isn't a question of XXX-video versus medical training information... It is more like ancient XXX versus modern-day XXX.
Seems like one could ascribe the religious/philosophical meaning behind the ancient templates to the modern day blue films and claim that the blue-films are a religious tool and not obscene...
[But I am probably an idiot. Someone else may have a much different take on what I am describing].
And it actually isn't that bad -- start your spacecraft near Sol
Well, sure, but not TOO NEAR!!!!
(Sol is a bit warm!)
What about gravitational effects bending the light waves?
I somewhat agree with your point, but I recommend caution about praising mainstream media too much...
A few days ago, a hurricane (cyclone) struct eastern India and the nearby region. Over 100 killed and millions strongly impacted. Being a highly agricultural region, this event will have long lasting effects for the farmers... [crops don't like salt!]
Try to find one mention of it in Yahoo news. You can't!!! Not even in the Asia section...
Yet, Yahoo faithfully reports that 6 people were killed in a South American earthquake... Yes, this is also tragic, but how did this get picked up and the other event not?
Yahoo pulls from many major news sources... They aren't the only game in town, but are pretty big nonetheless...