No, Delaware isn't the only state w/o a sales tax. In Alaska, various municipalities may institute a sales tax, but there isn't a state-wide sales tax. In Anchorage, no sales tax. Sixty miles to the southwest in Kenai, however, there is.
Makes me wonder what sales tax Borders.com wants to charge people like you and me when/if we were to go to their web site to order a book....
I'm not judging anyone who follows the law and obeys a National Security Letter--I'm not sure what I would do if I were on the receiving end of one--but did Martin Luther King, Jr. have children for whom he needed to provide? How about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, and the rest of the "Founding Fathers"? Did Mahatma Ghandi? I honestly don't know about most of these individuals but I'm pretty sure MLK did. And as I recall, Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect of "we study war so that our children may study math and science and so that their children may study music and art" which at least implies that he may have had children.
Part of providing for our children is providing for their freedom and their future. I would die inside if I elected to back down in the face of a tough choice and some day in the future, my daughter suffers because I didn't make a stand when I had a chance.
Perhaps, but only if you look at survivability of the individual rather than the species.
Consider the behaviour of bees as an example. If a bee stings you, generally it dies. But you soon learn to avoid bees, don't disturb beehives, etc., and therefore even though the individual bee(s) die(s), the species benefits from the sacrifice. This is GOOD in Darwinian terms.
I suggest you think about it yourself. Quit bitching about the situation, get off of your ass, and go do your work OUTSIDE OF YOUR OWN FUCKING ROOM! How is that for a concept?
Ummm...pretty lame, actually.
If I had a dollar for every time I *thought* I had gathered up all of the resources I need to go work at a remote location, only to find out that I had forgotten a critical piece of equipment, I wouldn't need a college degree. I'd retire right now. So how efficient is it to pack up everything you need for your research, get to the library, work for half an hour, pack up everything again, return to your room, grab the item you forgot, then go *back* to the library, repeat as needed.......?
Furthermore, I had a friend who grew up in New Delhi. As he described it, India after dark is not a nice place--it's more like an American inner city. You don't head out alone after dark, unless you want to be mugged, stabbed, shot, raped, etc. So, would *you* walk through the bad neighborhoods of Chicago, DC or L.A. between midnight and 6:00am? That's essentially what you are asking these college students to do.
Yes, there will be people who abuse Internet services. But there are also a lot of good reasons to have Internet access in the dorm rooms 24/7. If it were me, I'd find a college that *didn't* restrict my Internet access. Fortunately, I already have my degree, and I don't live in India, so it's not something I need to worry about.
Hmmm....there seem to be a lot of posts flaming Creative into oblivion.
I've used Creative sound cards for years, and I've always been relatively happy with them. While there are certainly better audiophile/musician audio interfaces available (M-Audio, Echo, MOTU, etc.), they are mostly geared towards WinXP/Mac OSX users. I'm an amateur musician using a Linux box to record my music. My rig currently consists of a a Behringer UB1204 mixer, an ART 351 Graphic EQ, an Aphex 204 Aural Exciter, and my speakers are M-Audio BX-8's. My soundcard? An SB-Live. My only gripe with the SB-Live is that the Linux ALSA drivers don't support the MIDI interface on the SB-Live (although the ALSA drivers work on the Creative/Ensoniq Audio PCI card that I used to use).
If I were more serious (read that: "making money with") about my music, I'd run OSX on an Intel Core Duo Mac with one of the high-end audio interfaces I mentioned above, but for what I'm doing right now, the SB-Live with ALSA drivers on a Slackware desktop is just fine.
Personally, I hope Creative continues to do well. They may not be the best, but for the money (and in my experience--YMMV) they've always done reasonably well.
This was mentioned in a previous thread, but it's something I've known for years, so I'll repeat it anyway. When you get a computer with Linux preinstalled, you get a chance to see what hardware is inside the case (lspci, lsusb) and you get a chance to see what kernel options/device drivers are being used with that hardware (less/usr/src/linux/.config and lsmod).
While yes, a decent Linux sys admin could almost certainly figure out how to build the computer without that information, if you've got the information available, why not use it? *
* Off-topic, but enlightening, nonetheless: my wife recently purchased an e-machines computer that came with XP installed. I despise the...ahem..."feature"...that MS rolled into XP that requires you to call MS for validation if you change too much of the hardware, so I removed XP and installed Win2K on the e-machines PC. However, in order to find out what hardware was installed (2K didn't recognize the audio or video cards), I had to boot from a Knoppix CD, run lspci, then boot back into 2K to download the appropriate drivers. I found that rather amusing:)
According to WIKI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_controls [wikipedia.org] the rudder controls yaw, not pitch or roll. So I am not sure how the rudder keeps the plane flying level. Can anyone help?
Yep. In most airplanes yaw and roll are somewhat coupled, the degree of coupling depending upon a number of aerodynamic factors. As zlite mentioned in response to your post, having the center of gravity below the wings in a high-wing design causes the airplane to roll a bit in response to yaw. Also, when you yaw an airplane, the outboard wing travels through a larger radius than the inboard wing, which means that the airspeed over the outboard wing is slightly greater than the airspeed over the inboard wing, which in turn means that the outboard wing generates more lift than the inboard wing. This extra lift means that the outboard wing will rise and the inboard wing will fall in response to a yaw. Consequently, while the rudder only directly controls yaw, the yaw tends to cause the airplane to roll as well.
Yaw isn't used to control roll in full size airplanes because it's sloppy--you feel pushed to the outside of a turn if you only use the rudder--and because a combination of ailerons and rudder is more effective in turning an airplane than rudder alone (it's the horizontal component of lift caused by banking the wings that ultimately causes an airplane to turn).
My wife just finished a four month process of getting a municipal license to open a small business in our town. I have never seen a business drag their heels as much as the local muni does. While you were discussing state government and I am discussing a municipal government, in general government is government, whether municipal, state or federal. The same bureaucratic principles apply.
If you want to approach the argument from a logical rather than anecdotal standpoint, consider this: while businesses must generally disclose financial reports to their stockholders quarterly, elected government officials generally have a terms measured in years in which to make their impact, unless they really screw something up badly.
Sorry...it seems to me that muni or state governments should theoretically have even more freedom to experiment with alternative IT infrastructures than businesses. However, since government is funded by tax dollars and business is funded by competition, they have less financial incentive to do so.
Paranoia is good when you are trying to be anonymous, but I think your concern about MAC addresses is perhaps a bit overrated.
I've worked at two different ISP's, and in neither case did we ever have any means of tracing or logging a customer's MAC address. Although we would get subpoenas requesting subscriber information (and they almost always *requested* a MAC address), we would reply that we didn't capture or log that information, and I never saw anyone push the issue after we informed them that we didn't log MAC addresses.
The only time that a MAC address could possibly bite you in the butt is when you are on a network, owned by someone else, who has enough savvy to trace the MAC back to a particular switch port. If you are leeching wireless from someone else, it might be enough to inform them--if they even notice that someone is leeching Internet access from them--that the same person keeps using their connection. However, if they are savvy enough to try to trace it back to you, then they are savvy enough to lock down their access point, and they are savvy enough to know why leaving their access point WFO is a Really Bad Idea, so you probably aren't surfing through their connection, anyway.
...and momentum and the ability of the human body to brace itself to absorb energy. The action and reaction effect will depend upon the mass of both bodies involved: p=mv, as I recall, where p is momentum, m is mass and v is the velocity of impact. Momentum, like energy is conserved, so however much energy I impart to the punching bag is balanced by an equal and opposite momentum imparted to me.
If you are significantly more massive than the punching bag, there will be very little velocity transferred to you because while the total momentum absorbed by you is equal to the total momentum absorbed by the punching bag, your mass is much greater than the mass of the bag, and therefore you will not accelerate very much. If, on the other hand, the mass of the bag is significantly greater than you, then your body will have to absorb a much greater velocity, and therefore, unless you are properly braced for the impact, you will either take a few steps backwards to maintain your balance or you will fall over.
While the parent post suggested roller skates to show the difference, you could also consider what happens if you are standing with your back turned to the punching bag and someone swings the bag into you without your knowledge. I suspect you would go flying then, because you were not proprely braced to dissipate the momentum of the bag.
No, that's only the soccer moms in their suburban assault vehicles. There are still some of us in the U.S. driving sticks -- automatics are against my religion:)
Is it just me, or is it possible to create perfectly legible code in Perl if you use good technique, just like in any other language?
A little from column "A", a little from column "B"....
Perl is kind of a strange language, in that it's a mish-mash of awk, sed, C, bash, and Larry Wall only knows what else. As a result, there are a number of ways of doing the same task in Perl. While this can be a good thing, it's also the biggest problem I have with Perl--the Perl code I write may not look anything like the Perl code someone else writes, and therefore it can be really hard to follow the logic in someone else's code.
The second biggest problem I have with Perl is all of the special symbols, and remembering when to use them. I can't count how many times I've used "@variable[$index]" instead of "$variable[$index]" and I always have to "man perlvar" to find out which special characters need to precede ARGV to pull parameters from the command line.
While good programming techniques can help make Perl more readable, it's definitely not the prettiest language. But, it's definitely a good, useful language. For now, it's my language of choice:)
Try banging the hell out of an off the shelf consumer drive 24/7/365 and see how long it holds up"
Umm....I do.
I run web, e-mail, Asterisk, MySQL, LDAP and DNS servers using consumer grade hardware and whatever hard drives I can scrounge. I blow PSU's all the time (what I get for buying whatever was last on sale at Crap^H^H^HompUSA) and I think I just cooked the mobo on the web and e-mail server (a K6-2/500, to give you some idea how old it is), but the hard drives have been phenomenally reliable. BUT, just to be safe, I rsync all the data from all of the machines to a new, large capacity hard drive on another machine. It's been a really good way to make sure I can return the servers to running status on those occasions when something does go horribly wrong, but I find that most of the restores I do are because someone borked something when updating a web page.
it's fairly hard to stay exactly on since, as others have said you never really play the same way twice.
I'm not a piano player, but I'm guitars/vocals in a band. Since the band I'm in plays live almost every week and frequently has only myself, a drummer and a bassist in the line-up, I have experimented with a number of electronic gadgets to augment our sound--MIDI sequencers, a Boss RC-20 Looper, etc.
Anyway, my point is that you are correct--staying synched with a recorded passage when playing live can be a challenge. However, while I try to avoid substituting electronics for human performance as much as possible (and I make enough mistakes to prove it, lol), it seems to me that the consequences of variations in timing are greatly reduced if *only* the canned music is piped into the sound system (think "air guitar" vs. live guitar mixed with pre-recorded guitar).
Unless the metronome is going of course:-)
Even if the metronome is going it's sometimes difficult! When using the sequencers live, I have a drum machine piped to my drummer's mix so she can keep us in time with the sequencer, and even then, I've had to kill the sequencer because we had drifted to far off tempo:)
Where I work, our official policy is that the computers are for work purposes, and unauthorized software is verboten. Our unofficial policy, however, is that if you don't cause the IT department more work and if you aren't causing a problem, then we (IT) don't really care...within reason. But, if something you installed hoses the network, or if you are sucking up so much bandwidth that it becomes a problem, then expect the IT manager to pay your manager a visit.
It's basically a tacit acknowledgment that it's impossible (or at least, not cost-effective) to micro-manage every users' use of their work computers. We won't get too uptight if you bend the rules a little, once in a while. But if you cause problems because you are goofing off at work, the rules are in place to allow IT, through management, to take action to keep the company productive.
Granted, it's probably a lot easier to lip synch than...er....umm...piano-synch?....whatever. The point is, yes, it's possible to fake a live performance.
No, it isn't alcohol. That's a symptom, not a cause.
It really happened because of two words, just like here in the U.S.: apathy and fear. I don't know how long this crap has been going on in the U.K., but this culture of fear really took off in the U.S. after 9/11. The government, of course, sensing a chance to greatly expand its powers by capitalizing on fear, jumped all over this golden opportunity. Unfortunately, people in this country have become so complacent--after all, the government is there to protect us, right? Anyone, anyone? Buehler, Buehler?--that they ignore the fact that freedom from tyranny is being taken away, little by little. And as long as they can still watch the latest reality TV show on the tube, and there's still plenty of beer in the fridge, it doesn't matter, right?
Wait, who's that knocking on my doo...............
Slashdot Mirror
...on a Saturday Night Live skit once?
No, Delaware isn't the only state w/o a sales tax. In Alaska, various municipalities may institute a sales tax, but there isn't a state-wide sales tax. In Anchorage, no sales tax. Sixty miles to the southwest in Kenai, however, there is.
Makes me wonder what sales tax Borders.com wants to charge people like you and me when/if we were to go to their web site to order a book....
I'm not judging anyone who follows the law and obeys a National Security Letter--I'm not sure what I would do if I were on the receiving end of one--but did Martin Luther King, Jr. have children for whom he needed to provide? How about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, and the rest of the "Founding Fathers"? Did Mahatma Ghandi? I honestly don't know about most of these individuals but I'm pretty sure MLK did. And as I recall, Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect of "we study war so that our children may study math and science and so that their children may study music and art" which at least implies that he may have had children.
Part of providing for our children is providing for their freedom and their future. I would die inside if I elected to back down in the face of a tough choice and some day in the future, my daughter suffers because I didn't make a stand when I had a chance.
Hmmmm....you mean kind of like what http://www.dslreports.com/ does? 8)
Perhaps, but only if you look at survivability of the individual rather than the species.
Consider the behaviour of bees as an example. If a bee stings you, generally it dies. But you soon learn to avoid bees, don't disturb beehives, etc., and therefore even though the individual bee(s) die(s), the species benefits from the sacrifice. This is GOOD in Darwinian terms.
Ummm...pretty lame, actually.
If I had a dollar for every time I *thought* I had gathered up all of the resources I need to go work at a remote location, only to find out that I had forgotten a critical piece of equipment, I wouldn't need a college degree. I'd retire right now. So how efficient is it to pack up everything you need for your research, get to the library, work for half an hour, pack up everything again, return to your room, grab the item you forgot, then go *back* to the library, repeat as needed.......?
Furthermore, I had a friend who grew up in New Delhi. As he described it, India after dark is not a nice place--it's more like an American inner city. You don't head out alone after dark, unless you want to be mugged, stabbed, shot, raped, etc. So, would *you* walk through the bad neighborhoods of Chicago, DC or L.A. between midnight and 6:00am? That's essentially what you are asking these college students to do.
Yes, there will be people who abuse Internet services. But there are also a lot of good reasons to have Internet access in the dorm rooms 24/7. If it were me, I'd find a college that *didn't* restrict my Internet access. Fortunately, I already have my degree, and I don't live in India, so it's not something I need to worry about.
Yeah, but I haven't added firewire to my desktop yet. Having said that, as I understand, M-Audio USB interfaces are pretty well supported in Linux.
Hmmm....there seem to be a lot of posts flaming Creative into oblivion.
I've used Creative sound cards for years, and I've always been relatively happy with them. While there are certainly better audiophile/musician audio interfaces available (M-Audio, Echo, MOTU, etc.), they are mostly geared towards WinXP/Mac OSX users. I'm an amateur musician using a Linux box to record my music. My rig currently consists of a a Behringer UB1204 mixer, an ART 351 Graphic EQ, an Aphex 204 Aural Exciter, and my speakers are M-Audio BX-8's. My soundcard? An SB-Live. My only gripe with the SB-Live is that the Linux ALSA drivers don't support the MIDI interface on the SB-Live (although the ALSA drivers work on the Creative/Ensoniq Audio PCI card that I used to use).
If I were more serious (read that: "making money with") about my music, I'd run OSX on an Intel Core Duo Mac with one of the high-end audio interfaces I mentioned above, but for what I'm doing right now, the SB-Live with ALSA drivers on a Slackware desktop is just fine.
Personally, I hope Creative continues to do well. They may not be the best, but for the money (and in my experience--YMMV) they've always done reasonably well.
...about that. I've never played GTA (in any of its incarnations), nor most other racing games since my C-64 days, and I still drive like an idiot :D
This was mentioned in a previous thread, but it's something I've known for years, so I'll repeat it anyway. When you get a computer with Linux preinstalled, you get a chance to see what hardware is inside the case (lspci, lsusb) and you get a chance to see what kernel options/device drivers are being used with that hardware (less /usr/src/linux/.config and lsmod).
:)
While yes, a decent Linux sys admin could almost certainly figure out how to build the computer without that information, if you've got the information available, why not use it? *
* Off-topic, but enlightening, nonetheless: my wife recently purchased an e-machines computer that came with XP installed. I despise the...ahem..."feature"...that MS rolled into XP that requires you to call MS for validation if you change too much of the hardware, so I removed XP and installed Win2K on the e-machines PC. However, in order to find out what hardware was installed (2K didn't recognize the audio or video cards), I had to boot from a Knoppix CD, run lspci, then boot back into 2K to download the appropriate drivers. I found that rather amusing
Personally, I have always been a fan of http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txtRFC 1149: implementing TCP/IP via carrier pigeon :P
Yep. In most airplanes yaw and roll are somewhat coupled, the degree of coupling depending upon a number of aerodynamic factors. As zlite mentioned in response to your post, having the center of gravity below the wings in a high-wing design causes the airplane to roll a bit in response to yaw. Also, when you yaw an airplane, the outboard wing travels through a larger radius than the inboard wing, which means that the airspeed over the outboard wing is slightly greater than the airspeed over the inboard wing, which in turn means that the outboard wing generates more lift than the inboard wing. This extra lift means that the outboard wing will rise and the inboard wing will fall in response to a yaw. Consequently, while the rudder only directly controls yaw, the yaw tends to cause the airplane to roll as well.
Yaw isn't used to control roll in full size airplanes because it's sloppy--you feel pushed to the outside of a turn if you only use the rudder--and because a combination of ailerons and rudder is more effective in turning an airplane than rudder alone (it's the horizontal component of lift caused by banking the wings that ultimately causes an airplane to turn).
Dude, what planet are you from ???
My wife just finished a four month process of getting a municipal license to open a small business in our town. I have never seen a business drag their heels as much as the local muni does. While you were discussing state government and I am discussing a municipal government, in general government is government, whether municipal, state or federal. The same bureaucratic principles apply.
If you want to approach the argument from a logical rather than anecdotal standpoint, consider this: while businesses must generally disclose financial reports to their stockholders quarterly, elected government officials generally have a terms measured in years in which to make their impact, unless they really screw something up badly.
Sorry...it seems to me that muni or state governments should theoretically have even more freedom to experiment with alternative IT infrastructures than businesses. However, since government is funded by tax dollars and business is funded by competition, they have less financial incentive to do so.
Paranoia is good when you are trying to be anonymous, but I think your concern about MAC addresses is perhaps a bit overrated.
I've worked at two different ISP's, and in neither case did we ever have any means of tracing or logging a customer's MAC address. Although we would get subpoenas requesting subscriber information (and they almost always *requested* a MAC address), we would reply that we didn't capture or log that information, and I never saw anyone push the issue after we informed them that we didn't log MAC addresses.
The only time that a MAC address could possibly bite you in the butt is when you are on a network, owned by someone else, who has enough savvy to trace the MAC back to a particular switch port. If you are leeching wireless from someone else, it might be enough to inform them--if they even notice that someone is leeching Internet access from them--that the same person keeps using their connection. However, if they are savvy enough to try to trace it back to you, then they are savvy enough to lock down their access point, and they are savvy enough to know why leaving their access point WFO is a Really Bad Idea, so you probably aren't surfing through their connection, anyway.
mmmm.....cheese :)
...and momentum and the ability of the human body to brace itself to absorb energy. The action and reaction effect will depend upon the mass of both bodies involved: p=mv, as I recall, where p is momentum, m is mass and v is the velocity of impact. Momentum, like energy is conserved, so however much energy I impart to the punching bag is balanced by an equal and opposite momentum imparted to me.
If you are significantly more massive than the punching bag, there will be very little velocity transferred to you because while the total momentum absorbed by you is equal to the total momentum absorbed by the punching bag, your mass is much greater than the mass of the bag, and therefore you will not accelerate very much. If, on the other hand, the mass of the bag is significantly greater than you, then your body will have to absorb a much greater velocity, and therefore, unless you are properly braced for the impact, you will either take a few steps backwards to maintain your balance or you will fall over.
While the parent post suggested roller skates to show the difference, you could also consider what happens if you are standing with your back turned to the punching bag and someone swings the bag into you without your knowledge. I suspect you would go flying then, because you were not proprely braced to dissipate the momentum of the bag.
No, that's only the soccer moms in their suburban assault vehicles. There are still some of us in the U.S. driving sticks -- automatics are against my religion :)
Am I the only person who thought the parent was referring to a particular open-source developer rather than a cartoon character?
A little from column "A", a little from column "B"....
Perl is kind of a strange language, in that it's a mish-mash of awk, sed, C, bash, and Larry Wall only knows what else. As a result, there are a number of ways of doing the same task in Perl. While this can be a good thing, it's also the biggest problem I have with Perl--the Perl code I write may not look anything like the Perl code someone else writes, and therefore it can be really hard to follow the logic in someone else's code.
The second biggest problem I have with Perl is all of the special symbols, and remembering when to use them. I can't count how many times I've used "@variable[$index]" instead of "$variable[$index]" and I always have to "man perlvar" to find out which special characters need to precede ARGV to pull parameters from the command line.
While good programming techniques can help make Perl more readable, it's definitely not the prettiest language. But, it's definitely a good, useful language. For now, it's my language of choice
Umm....I do.
I run web, e-mail, Asterisk, MySQL, LDAP and DNS servers using consumer grade hardware and whatever hard drives I can scrounge. I blow PSU's all the time (what I get for buying whatever was last on sale at Crap^H^H^HompUSA) and I think I just cooked the mobo on the web and e-mail server (a K6-2/500, to give you some idea how old it is), but the hard drives have been phenomenally reliable. BUT, just to be safe, I rsync all the data from all of the machines to a new, large capacity hard drive on another machine. It's been a really good way to make sure I can return the servers to running status on those occasions when something does go horribly wrong, but I find that most of the restores I do are because someone borked something when updating a web page.
I'm not a piano player, but I'm guitars/vocals in a band. Since the band I'm in plays live almost every week and frequently has only myself, a drummer and a bassist in the line-up, I have experimented with a number of electronic gadgets to augment our sound--MIDI sequencers, a Boss RC-20 Looper, etc.
Anyway, my point is that you are correct--staying synched with a recorded passage when playing live can be a challenge. However, while I try to avoid substituting electronics for human performance as much as possible (and I make enough mistakes to prove it, lol), it seems to me that the consequences of variations in timing are greatly reduced if *only* the canned music is piped into the sound system (think "air guitar" vs. live guitar mixed with pre-recorded guitar).
Even if the metronome is going it's sometimes difficult! When using the sequencers live, I have a drum machine piped to my drummer's mix so she can keep us in time with the sequencer, and even then, I've had to kill the sequencer because we had drifted to far off tempo
Where I work, our official policy is that the computers are for work purposes, and unauthorized software is verboten. Our unofficial policy, however, is that if you don't cause the IT department more work and if you aren't causing a problem, then we (IT) don't really care...within reason. But, if something you installed hoses the network, or if you are sucking up so much bandwidth that it becomes a problem, then expect the IT manager to pay your manager a visit.
It's basically a tacit acknowledgment that it's impossible (or at least, not cost-effective) to micro-manage every users' use of their work computers. We won't get too uptight if you bend the rules a little, once in a while. But if you cause problems because you are goofing off at work, the rules are in place to allow IT, through management, to take action to keep the company productive.
Yeah, d00d--I've overclocked mine to 120Hz, added water-cooling to it, some nifty glowing LED's...oh, wait. Wrong thread. Sorry!
Can you say "Milli Vanilli?"
Granted, it's probably a lot easier to lip synch than...er....umm...piano-synch?....whatever. The point is, yes, it's possible to fake a live performance.
No, it isn't alcohol. That's a symptom, not a cause.
It really happened because of two words, just like here in the U.S.: apathy and fear. I don't know how long this crap has been going on in the U.K., but this culture of fear really took off in the U.S. after 9/11. The government, of course, sensing a chance to greatly expand its powers by capitalizing on fear, jumped all over this golden opportunity. Unfortunately, people in this country have become so complacent--after all, the government is there to protect us, right? Anyone, anyone? Buehler, Buehler?--that they ignore the fact that freedom from tyranny is being taken away, little by little. And as long as they can still watch the latest reality TV show on the tube, and there's still plenty of beer in the fridge, it doesn't matter, right?
Wait, who's that knocking on my doo...............