Oh I agree completely! A billion gallons of fuel is nothing to be taken lightly, especially since its, as you say, about as free as it could be. Im only disappointed that the number wasnt higher. 5% or 10% would be a Really Big Deal (tm). To replace 5% of the annual fuel consumption you would have to convert the entire area of the state of Massachusetts to exclusively growing switchgrass.... Wait, thats not a bad idea...
A great Fermi Question! So according to wikipedia the federal highway systems has 46,837 miles of highway. Lets say there are twice as many again state highways with medians and shoulders, so ~150,000 miles of road. Say 50' average median and 25' each side of shoulder. Thats (whips out calculator) very roughly 1 million acres. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchgrass#Biofuel we get 1000 gallons of ethanol per acre, so thats 1 billion gallons of ethanol. US consumption of gasoline is 360 million gallons per *day* (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Usage_and_pricing) so about 1%. So you are dead-nuts right with your first off-hand guess. Damn you.:-)
Time ran a good article (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html) that ethanol is killing the rain forest. Goes something like this... since corn is more profitable now, US soybean farmers switched to corn, driving soybean production to Brazil, where it became more profitable than grazing land, forcing cattle farmers to raze forests to create grazing land. The whole article is pretty damning of the whole biofuels initiative. For the global warming zealots, note that Time is CNN and tends to be center-left at best, so this isnt a vast right-wing disinformation campaign, just another study in unintended consequences that governments tend to be good at creating.
Its a good point, but if switchgrass is as easy and cheap to produce as everyone claims then market forces will make *sure* its not profitable to grow on prime land. How could farmland compete with, say, every median strip on every federal and state highway? If it could, then switchgrass isnt economical by definition.
Good question. The selection process was minimal. We had a pool of ~120, maybe 25 were excused on a technical basis (criminal record, hardship, etc). There were three trials that day and they randomly chose 3 groups of 18. None of the lawyers did much in the way of challenges in our group. I think 2 were dismissed.
My impression is that with a speeding ticket or misdemeanor, you get no jury and you're effed. Capital murder and celebrity high-profile, lawyer shenanigans gets all the attention. In the middle is where justice works as intended, normal people in juries, normal judges and working-class attorneys, and everyone pretty much trying to do the right thing. Its boring, anonymous, and no one pays any attention as the same thing happens thousands of time every day. I think good juries are common, but take my statistical sample of one for whatever you think its worth. I dont think I would have thought that before serving on one.
I dont know about "first and last time" but you sound fairly level and intelligent and I figure you had 10 other decent jurors. Did the lady come around or do you think her initial bias interfered with the decision of the group?
Thats the question I think. No one has no biases. I dont trust the police and more than your little old lady, and that might be a good thing to have a paranoid cynic in the deliberations. Sauce for the goose. When it has to be unanimous, no one person can skew the decision too much.
No its not easier. Its harder. If you have been on a jury you would understand. No question those people started deliberations knowing full well they disliked him and gave his ridiculous testimony more consideration than it deserved because of it. People are more self-aware than you give them credit for.
Not at all. But I think its uncommon. I think the high-profile cases generate a lot of public scrutiny that causes people to forget the thousands of cases a day where the outcome is generally fair and the system works pretty much as intended. Nothing is perfect but I think the jury system gets it right more often than not, and more often than it is given credit for.
Ah, you found spell-checker! Good for you!! So your point is that all jurors are stupid? You dont find that even a teensy-weensy bit elitist? Especially for a crappy little techie clicking the enter key when a paralegal tells him to? Grow up and grow some humility before you get canned from this job too.
You certainly dont work for that law firm based on your spelling, sentence structure, or ability to persuade. (Thats my wry little way of saying I think you're lying about the law firm bit by the way).
As a former juror, let me be the first to say "screw you". All 14 of us (dont forget alternates) worked really hard to get our decision right, even in the cruddy little case we saw. Two days agonizing over it, worrying that we were being swayed by personalities or facts, reviewing written testimony over and over again. Its really easy to spew here on Slashdot because ultimately its completely meaningless. I had to look someone in the eye and say 'guilty', and probably ruin their life, and it was really *really* hard.
I will *never* second-guess a jury after that. Even OJ! Unless you've sat through the trial and been in the jury room, you have absolutely no right to pass judgement on them or the burden they carry. So you with the laptop projector and the speech impediment calling me a "moron"? Bite me.
Lawyers cant get smart thoughtful people *off* a jury, because people somehow get really smart in groups of 12. Strangely it mostly works just like it should. I bet some of them even watch CSI and Judge Judy once or twice, and *still* managed to ask intelligent questions, make rational or impassioned arguments, and most of all be willing to take criticism from others and force yourself to re-examine your own position. I've never seen anything like it... it's like an anti-slashdot, if anyone here could imagine such a thing. Hell, someone even quit in the middle of deliberations and was mostly afraid that if they told us why they might influence us one way or another. People get it right most of the time. Even the people who aren't as smart as you are.
"Who in this day and age?" Well, a lot of people, and not just stupid ones.
OK, checking for malloc status is pretty much mandatory since it reflects a dynamic resource that is expected to change over time. However, the extraordinarily large percentage of library calls one makes can be expected to be consistent, and the checking takes time, and handling a failed code sanely is usually more work than a module's primary function.
Code that I consider 'good' uses asserts or other compile-time constructs to check all library returns, and after the code is run through fairly comprehensive testing, the checks and asserts are compiled out for the deliverable version. This is extremely common for OS, driver, and application code. I think calling it 'crappy' is a gross oversimplification.
What you seem to suggest is that all code should be written with the assumption and mindset that every function you call is malicious, and every function that calls yours is malicious. From an anti-hacking point of view thats all dandy. From a speed and code size point of view, its impractical. Like everything else coders need to strike a balance by understanding where the risks and vulnerabilities are, and thats not as simple as you make it sound.
Add to that the re-use of common code, where vulnerabilities change from implementation to implementation. Say I write code for a small embedded application, use asserts to test that crap out of it, and deliver it. Later the company takes my code and uses it somewhere else without really understanding the assumptions made when it was written, and it turns out there is an exploit in the new use case. I dont call that 'crappy'. It may be bad, it may be short-sighted, but laying the blame squarely on the original coder is pretty naive. No offense, but I hope you never write any code for me.
Well sure, but in terms of market growth then Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran lead the way http://www.gizmag.com/go/7438/. There, NOW we can twist this thread into something political!!:-)
I haven't seen anything like that with my new phone.
Then you havent been looking too hard! Sure you can set your own web bookmarks, but they're in a subfolder that is always closed, at the bottom of TMobile's huge list of 'standard' for-pay bookmarks that you cant change. And that default web search? All results are redirected through TMobile's servers, selective search results for pay, graciously replacing ads with their own, reformatting content, and generally messing with web operations for their own profit without telling you that they're doing it. And dont even start me about their automatic push-installs of desktop apps I dont want. I agree the Blackberry (at least the Pearl anyway) is way better than most, but TMobile cant resist a cheesy revenue stream any more than the next greedy telco. The $20 unlimited data *is* nice, and the bluetooth modem has been a lifesaver many times, but they throttle the rate to a fraction of what its capable of.
Well, yessss, but guard bands (in lower case) are necessary for TV stations and such not to bleed into each other. That doesnt mean an entirely different modulation scheme wouldnt be able to utilize the bandwidth without interfering with the broadcasts. The newer software radios can operate below the noise threshold, and I can't see how more traditional broadcast methods would be interfered with. Older analog broadcasts are hugely wasteful of the RF spectrum.
Perhaps Google engineers are just smarter than you are:-)
I think you misunderstand. I agree with you that ending the embargo would have probably ended Castro, and Im not suggesting it should be continued. Im trying to think why *other* people would like to see the embargo continue, and between what Ive heard and what I found poking around I cant find anybody with a vested interest in anything that would benefit from ending the embargo. Well, except the people of Cuba:-)
I see your point but I dont agree. I think the incremental idiots are driven by the fixed deadline. If they knew they had 15 minutes I think they wouldnt bid so stupidly. Maybe we could compromise (since you and I are deciding ebay's new policies:-)) so that if there is a 15-minute auto-extension, there is a 5 minute waiting period as well after any bid before you can bid again. But Im not sure I agree that the idiot buyers are jacking up your price due to incremental bidding, as opposed to them juts plain bidding. Presumably if they understood proxy bidding they'd bid that amount anyway and you'd pay the same. All those tiny bids are certainly annoying but I dont think theres any evidence it affects the final price. If you have any stats Id love to see them... I dont mind being wrong at all if I get to learn something!
I dont buy the shill accounts thing at all though. Why bother? Two shill accounts bidding something to a ridiculous value is just as disruptive now, and it still almost never happens. Never seen it happen in one of my auctions, either buying or selling. And besides, by suggestion was to let the seller choose which he'd like... fixed or extending. I think it would be a really interesting experiment though.
If nothing else think of it this way: if sellers had the option to list with a fixed end time (allowing sniping) or a variable end (disallowing sniping) tyhe seller would *invariably* choose the variable end. If buyers had the option, they would choose the variable end as well since you dont haver to over-bid to fend off a sniper and can take your time evaluating your next bid.
I dont see why ebay doesnt try it our as an added-fee option. Screwing sellers out of some fees is something they should jump at, so offer it as a service to end the auction only after 15 minutes of inactivity and charge a few bucks for it. Make some people happy and pocket some coin.
You have not seen British teenagers treeting Eastern Europeans. American are very tame civilised and cultured by comparison.
Ha ha! Glad to know we're not the worlds most obnoxious in at least one category!
Interesting data point about Eastern Europe and would probably apply to Cuba to some degree. But, strictly speaking, the original point was that the business people in the Caribbean and Central America didnt want the competition and Im just pointing out the political and monetary pressure they put on the US. Personally I'd love to sail Havana, but if I owned a few billion dollars of Hilton stock I'd probably play it as safe as possible with my investment. I bet if Cuba allowed a few major resort chains to build resorts, you'd see US policy markedly relaxed.
One note in Wikipedia's article on Cuba''s economy mentions that the increase in tourism dollars has the effect of widening the gap between poverty and prosperous. Possibly the Castro's believe that if that gap grows through significantly expanded tourism that it would become unmanageable. But Im slipping way into conjecture here.:-)
Thanks for the points on Eastern Europe and Id mod your reply up, but having posted on this topic I cant do both! (Anyone else got a mod point for Arivanov?)
Depends on what you mean by 'huge'. Pardon my figures below because I dont care enough to research them properly so its just the low hanging fruit from the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia but I think it gets the idea across:
Cuba - 1.6 million tourists, $1.9 billion revenue (300k from Germany)
For comparison:
Antigua - $375 million
Bahamas - $3.6 billion
Barbados - $383 million
USVI - $1.3 billion
Puerto Rico $1.8 billion
So Cuba's numbers arent bad, but not great compared to other islands, and they are terrible for either tourism income per square mile (its a big island), per shoreline mile (its big with a nice meandering shoreline), or tourism dollar per capita. Also, 80% of the other islands income are Americans.
So I dont know what your point is... what I said was if you add up all the other vacation destinations of Americans you get maybe $20 billion dollars, much of which would go to Cuba if it were opened. Considering a 10% drop in income would be devastating to an island like St Kitts or Trinidad, its in just about everyone's best interest to maintain the status quo. And if you've seen the way American teens treat locals in Cancun, the Cuban people themselves are probably better off without us.
Exactly. The only reason for the Castro brothers to outlive the fall of the iron curtain is the embargo.
Maybe. An interesting thing I picked up traveling the Caribbean and talking to a lot of natives is how they want Cuba to stay on the embargo list. The last thing, say, Aruba wants is a huge island paradise thats almost within walking distance of Miami. Especially with airline fuel costing what it does. If Cuba were open again, tourism throughout the rest of the islands, and Mexico and Central America would take a huge hit. And that loss of income is politically destabilizing as well. There's more at work here than sheer stupidity.
As soon as they 'inspect' your (fully legal DRM compliant) MP3 library, the RIAA will nab them for listening to music without paying royalties! RIAA sues TSA, DMCA meets Patriot Act, everything annihilated in a puff of un-smoke.
Or, TSA pays the royalty, then we all hop back and forth over the Canadian or Mexico borders with millions of songs, bankrupting the TSA. Or TSA doesnt have to pay, and we *all* claim that running those MP3's through the player is simply a security inspection and not subject to DMCA.
They're ALL notorious for cutting corners, not just russians.
Thats not fair either... the Russians are famous for cutting costs even when they shouldnt. NASA is famous for not cutting costs even when they should. Both approaches have their benefits and their downfalls. But when it comes to decontaminating a interplanetary probe I'd have to trust NASA more on this one. Hey, if for no other reason than it *is* a pork barrel project.
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Oh I agree completely! A billion gallons of fuel is nothing to be taken lightly, especially since its, as you say, about as free as it could be. Im only disappointed that the number wasnt higher. 5% or 10% would be a Really Big Deal (tm). To replace 5% of the annual fuel consumption you would have to convert the entire area of the state of Massachusetts to exclusively growing switchgrass. ... Wait, thats not a bad idea...
A great Fermi Question! So according to wikipedia the federal highway systems has 46,837 miles of highway. Lets say there are twice as many again state highways with medians and shoulders, so ~150,000 miles of road. Say 50' average median and 25' each side of shoulder. Thats (whips out calculator) very roughly 1 million acres. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchgrass#Biofuel we get 1000 gallons of ethanol per acre, so thats 1 billion gallons of ethanol. US consumption of gasoline is 360 million gallons per *day* (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Usage_and_pricing) so about 1%. So you are dead-nuts right with your first off-hand guess. Damn you. :-)
Time ran a good article (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html) that ethanol is killing the rain forest. Goes something like this... since corn is more profitable now, US soybean farmers switched to corn, driving soybean production to Brazil, where it became more profitable than grazing land, forcing cattle farmers to raze forests to create grazing land. The whole article is pretty damning of the whole biofuels initiative. For the global warming zealots, note that Time is CNN and tends to be center-left at best, so this isnt a vast right-wing disinformation campaign, just another study in unintended consequences that governments tend to be good at creating.
Its a good point, but if switchgrass is as easy and cheap to produce as everyone claims then market forces will make *sure* its not profitable to grow on prime land. How could farmland compete with, say, every median strip on every federal and state highway? If it could, then switchgrass isnt economical by definition.
Good question. The selection process was minimal. We had a pool of ~120, maybe 25 were excused on a technical basis (criminal record, hardship, etc). There were three trials that day and they randomly chose 3 groups of 18. None of the lawyers did much in the way of challenges in our group. I think 2 were dismissed.
My impression is that with a speeding ticket or misdemeanor, you get no jury and you're effed. Capital murder and celebrity high-profile, lawyer shenanigans gets all the attention. In the middle is where justice works as intended, normal people in juries, normal judges and working-class attorneys, and everyone pretty much trying to do the right thing. Its boring, anonymous, and no one pays any attention as the same thing happens thousands of time every day. I think good juries are common, but take my statistical sample of one for whatever you think its worth. I dont think I would have thought that before serving on one.
Never wanted to mod up someone for flaming me before. That was tastefully done. Touche!
I dont know about "first and last time" but you sound fairly level and intelligent and I figure you had 10 other decent jurors. Did the lady come around or do you think her initial bias interfered with the decision of the group?
Thats the question I think. No one has no biases. I dont trust the police and more than your little old lady, and that might be a good thing to have a paranoid cynic in the deliberations. Sauce for the goose. When it has to be unanimous, no one person can skew the decision too much.
No its not easier. Its harder. If you have been on a jury you would understand. No question those people started deliberations knowing full well they disliked him and gave his ridiculous testimony more consideration than it deserved because of it. People are more self-aware than you give them credit for.
Not at all. But I think its uncommon. I think the high-profile cases generate a lot of public scrutiny that causes people to forget the thousands of cases a day where the outcome is generally fair and the system works pretty much as intended. Nothing is perfect but I think the jury system gets it right more often than not, and more often than it is given credit for.
Ah, you found spell-checker! Good for you!! So your point is that all jurors are stupid? You dont find that even a teensy-weensy bit elitist? Especially for a crappy little techie clicking the enter key when a paralegal tells him to? Grow up and grow some humility before you get canned from this job too.
Er... you're welcome. Thanks for writing just about the only civil posting I ever read on /.
:-)
PS Liked your journal too
You certainly dont work for that law firm based on your spelling, sentence structure, or ability to persuade. (Thats my wry little way of saying I think you're lying about the law firm bit by the way).
As a former juror, let me be the first to say "screw you". All 14 of us (dont forget alternates) worked really hard to get our decision right, even in the cruddy little case we saw. Two days agonizing over it, worrying that we were being swayed by personalities or facts, reviewing written testimony over and over again. Its really easy to spew here on Slashdot because ultimately its completely meaningless. I had to look someone in the eye and say 'guilty', and probably ruin their life, and it was really *really* hard.
I will *never* second-guess a jury after that. Even OJ! Unless you've sat through the trial and been in the jury room, you have absolutely no right to pass judgement on them or the burden they carry. So you with the laptop projector and the speech impediment calling me a "moron"? Bite me.
Lawyers cant get smart thoughtful people *off* a jury, because people somehow get really smart in groups of 12. Strangely it mostly works just like it should. I bet some of them even watch CSI and Judge Judy once or twice, and *still* managed to ask intelligent questions, make rational or impassioned arguments, and most of all be willing to take criticism from others and force yourself to re-examine your own position. I've never seen anything like it... it's like an anti-slashdot, if anyone here could imagine such a thing. Hell, someone even quit in the middle of deliberations and was mostly afraid that if they told us why they might influence us one way or another. People get it right most of the time. Even the people who aren't as smart as you are.
...and this is precisely the self-laudatory flag-waving we-can-do-no-wrong nationalism that makes you dangerous.
OK, checking for malloc status is pretty much mandatory since it reflects a dynamic resource that is expected to change over time. However, the extraordinarily large percentage of library calls one makes can be expected to be consistent, and the checking takes time, and handling a failed code sanely is usually more work than a module's primary function.
Code that I consider 'good' uses asserts or other compile-time constructs to check all library returns, and after the code is run through fairly comprehensive testing, the checks and asserts are compiled out for the deliverable version. This is extremely common for OS, driver, and application code. I think calling it 'crappy' is a gross oversimplification.
What you seem to suggest is that all code should be written with the assumption and mindset that every function you call is malicious, and every function that calls yours is malicious. From an anti-hacking point of view thats all dandy. From a speed and code size point of view, its impractical. Like everything else coders need to strike a balance by understanding where the risks and vulnerabilities are, and thats not as simple as you make it sound.
Add to that the re-use of common code, where vulnerabilities change from implementation to implementation. Say I write code for a small embedded application, use asserts to test that crap out of it, and deliver it. Later the company takes my code and uses it somewhere else without really understanding the assumptions made when it was written, and it turns out there is an exploit in the new use case. I dont call that 'crappy'. It may be bad, it may be short-sighted, but laying the blame squarely on the original coder is pretty naive. No offense, but I hope you never write any code for me.
Well sure, but in terms of market growth then Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran lead the way http://www.gizmag.com/go/7438/. There, NOW we can twist this thread into something political!! :-)
Then you havent been looking too hard! Sure you can set your own web bookmarks, but they're in a subfolder that is always closed, at the bottom of TMobile's huge list of 'standard' for-pay bookmarks that you cant change. And that default web search? All results are redirected through TMobile's servers, selective search results for pay, graciously replacing ads with their own, reformatting content, and generally messing with web operations for their own profit without telling you that they're doing it. And dont even start me about their automatic push-installs of desktop apps I dont want. I agree the Blackberry (at least the Pearl anyway) is way better than most, but TMobile cant resist a cheesy revenue stream any more than the next greedy telco. The $20 unlimited data *is* nice, and the bluetooth modem has been a lifesaver many times, but they throttle the rate to a fraction of what its capable of.
Perhaps Google engineers are just smarter than you are :-)
I think you misunderstand. I agree with you that ending the embargo would have probably ended Castro, and Im not suggesting it should be continued. Im trying to think why *other* people would like to see the embargo continue, and between what Ive heard and what I found poking around I cant find anybody with a vested interest in anything that would benefit from ending the embargo. Well, except the people of Cuba :-)
I dont buy the shill accounts thing at all though. Why bother? Two shill accounts bidding something to a ridiculous value is just as disruptive now, and it still almost never happens. Never seen it happen in one of my auctions, either buying or selling. And besides, by suggestion was to let the seller choose which he'd like... fixed or extending. I think it would be a really interesting experiment though.
I dont see why ebay doesnt try it our as an added-fee option. Screwing sellers out of some fees is something they should jump at, so offer it as a service to end the auction only after 15 minutes of inactivity and charge a few bucks for it. Make some people happy and pocket some coin.
Interesting data point about Eastern Europe and would probably apply to Cuba to some degree. But, strictly speaking, the original point was that the business people in the Caribbean and Central America didnt want the competition and Im just pointing out the political and monetary pressure they put on the US. Personally I'd love to sail Havana, but if I owned a few billion dollars of Hilton stock I'd probably play it as safe as possible with my investment. I bet if Cuba allowed a few major resort chains to build resorts, you'd see US policy markedly relaxed.
One note in Wikipedia's article on Cuba''s economy mentions that the increase in tourism dollars has the effect of widening the gap between poverty and prosperous. Possibly the Castro's believe that if that gap grows through significantly expanded tourism that it would become unmanageable. But Im slipping way into conjecture here. :-)
Thanks for the points on Eastern Europe and Id mod your reply up, but having posted on this topic I cant do both! (Anyone else got a mod point for Arivanov?)
Cuba - 1.6 million tourists, $1.9 billion revenue (300k from Germany)
For comparison:
Antigua - $375 million
Bahamas - $3.6 billion
Barbados - $383 million
USVI - $1.3 billion
Puerto Rico $1.8 billion
So Cuba's numbers arent bad, but not great compared to other islands, and they are terrible for either tourism income per square mile (its a big island), per shoreline mile (its big with a nice meandering shoreline), or tourism dollar per capita. Also, 80% of the other islands income are Americans.
So I dont know what your point is... what I said was if you add up all the other vacation destinations of Americans you get maybe $20 billion dollars, much of which would go to Cuba if it were opened. Considering a 10% drop in income would be devastating to an island like St Kitts or Trinidad, its in just about everyone's best interest to maintain the status quo. And if you've seen the way American teens treat locals in Cancun, the Cuban people themselves are probably better off without us.
As soon as they 'inspect' your (fully legal DRM compliant) MP3 library, the RIAA will nab them for listening to music without paying royalties! RIAA sues TSA, DMCA meets Patriot Act, everything annihilated in a puff of un-smoke.
Or, TSA pays the royalty, then we all hop back and forth over the Canadian or Mexico borders with millions of songs, bankrupting the TSA. Or TSA doesnt have to pay, and we *all* claim that running those MP3's through the player is simply a security inspection and not subject to DMCA.
HA HA HA ITS FLAWLESS!!!!!!