They are studying the case of some betting game with a fixed probability of winning p (with p>1/2) and a fixed 1:1 payout, using a discrete model of money, with no maximum bet, a minimum bet of $1, and all bets being constrained to a multiple of $1.
It is already known that if you enter with x dollars and you have a target amount of N, your best strategy is to always bet the minimum. Needless to say always betting the minimum can take forever, so even under this very unlikely set of circumstances, you would not want to actually follow that strategy.
So instead they introduce a round limit T, and introduce software that solves the relevant dynamic programming recurrence determine what you should bet given the probability p, your current balance x', your desired amount N, and the remaining number of rounds until the loan shark kills you T'.
Judges rule on Law, but Juries do not rule on facts in criminal cases. [1] If juries ruled on facts they would be required to give their verdicts like so:
We find that there is no reasonable doubt that the defendant physically caused the death of Jane Smith, that there is no reasonable doubt that the defendant intended to cause grievous bodily harm or death, and that there is reasonable doubt that the actions were premeditated. Therefore, in accordance with the law as outlined by the Judge, on the charge of first degree murder we find the defendant Not Guilty. In accordance with the law as outlined by the Judge, on the charge of Second Degree murder, we find the defendant Guilty.
We however do not require juries to state a verdict like that, which means that juries inherently rule on both law and facts, since there is nothing to prevent them from doing otherwise.
Footnote: [1] They do frequently do so in civil cases, since special jury verdict forms can be used, which require them to explicitly rule on individual facts.
I've been at my company just over 1 year (entry level position, doing exactly the same work the whole time), and have had 4 distinct de jure supervisors, while in terms of effective supervisors, I've had 3, one of which is not included among the 5 previously mentioned. At the company the hierarchy is supposed to be (Executives->VP->Director->Manager>Supervisor->Me), but at one point I technically reported directly to the VP (and I'm not talking for only an instant, but for a little over a week.)
That sort of thing only rarely shows up in the accounting books, and is usually vastly underestimated when it does, so the decision makers only see: Loss of one registration ($x per year) vs status quo.
ICANN cannot technically do that, since they don't actually control the content of the TLD. The Domain Registry (Verisign) could technically reverse the transfer, but are bound by ICANN policies that likely prevent them from doing anything. ICANN in conjunction with Verisign could get the transfer reverted, but since that requires two entities working in concert, I would not count on it happening.
Of course the Australian registry could determine that the transfer was fraudulent, and transfer it back to Go Daddy as a registrar (who is bound by contract to return it to the control of Chris Coyer), and provide information about the fraud to the police, but since that is not in their interests, they will never do that either.
That is not unlike a Rooted Motorola Droid 2, which gives you true root access, but the bootloader (and kernel) remain locked and unchangeable. The Andorid community stills considers that rooted, although it is limited compared to most other devices.
With a monarchy that devolved, such a law makes absolutely no sense. I assume it exists either because such a law has "always" been around, or as a way to prosecute political dissidents by the political arm of the government. I imagine that they could make many purely political arguments sound like criticism of the royal family, which would be reason enough to prosecute said dissidents.
If you want to be Canadian, you should have to renounce your citizenship to your former country or not become Canadian.
I'm not sure I agree with that, especially since people do not necessarily have only control over their citizenship in other countries. Some countries may not allow a citizen to renounce citizenship or that doing so may not be effective.
Consider that US law requires renouncing other citizenship to become a naturalized citizen. The US knows that is little more than a joke. The laws for relinquishing US citizenship require that an action (like renouncing) be taken with the intent to relinquish citizenship. Doing so only to satisfy a requirement of another country's naturalization process does not result in loss of US citizenship. That is settled law, and there is absolutely no ambiguity about it. So US citizens who became Canadian citizens under such a requirement would end up with dual citizenship, if they so desired. Similarly, citizens of any country with similar laws on relinquishing citizenship are not impacted by the US requirement to renounce other citizenship.
At the minimum, you shouldn't expect any help if you get into trouble outside of Canada, especially in your former country that you hold your dual citizenship in.
While a dual-citizen is in a third country, Canada should attempt to provide assistance if requested, but I fully agree that in the second country that the person has citizenship in, they should not expect any help, except in two cases:
They remained a citizen of this other country, not out of choice, but because they were unable to relinquish citizenship in this country, or that doing so would have involved jumping through excessive hoops.
They are citizens of the country they are in by some automatic means (like birthright citizenship), and they have never utilized said citizenship in any way. It is entirely possible for somebody to be a citizen of multiple countries by birth, and it is unreasonable to require that they take any explicit action to relinquish said citizenship, especially since they may not even be aware that they are technically citizens of the country in question.
Sure. But how revered? Although King is generally not an elected position, what sort of approval rating would "widely revered" translate too? 85%? 75%? 51%? 25%? Any of those could be considered "widely revered", but there are major differences between them.
Let me go on the record as saying that it is generally not in the long term interests of any leader of a country to silence criticism. Any benevolent leader of a country has a vested interest in knowing how the public feels about their actions. No leader has perfect information, and such feedback is invaluable. Granted a benevolent leader will not always be entirely popular. Sometimes the actions best for the people are not popular. Even so, if something the leader though would be popular was not, or an action was unpopular for a reason other than the expected one, that provides valuable information.
A leader who is not benevolent had better at least appear benevolent, which means not silencing criticism for similar reasons. Leaders who do not at least pretend to have the interests of the people at heart generally get overthrown or removed by the people. It may take a while, but it usually happens.
A leader's best bet is to embrace criticism and occasionally make changes to satisfy critics. Whether the leader has the peoples interests at heart or his own, he can best accomplish things by remaining in power.
You most definitely can use a Google Experience or Google-apps-included Android operating system with no Google account, although your experience suffers, since you would have no usable app store until you sideloaded one, one broke down and added a Google account.
You can also disable syncing with virtually all of the services.
On Google-free android-devices it is even easier, since the Google apps are not present, so you lack the option to sync with Google services.
As for the dynamic range compression, I agree with you that it is a problem, but I was under the impression that record producers applied it to M4As from the iTunes Store and MP3s from Amazon MP3 just as much as to CDs.
I'd be surprised if the producers did not do exactly the same thing to both.
As for the 44.1 kHz sample rate, can you ABX the difference between a 96 kHz sample and the same 96 kHz sample with all frequencies over 20 kHz filtered out?
Keep in mind that the Nyquist Sampling Theorem only strictly applies to perfectly periodic signals. Second many people can hear frequencies somewhat above 20Khz. Third, the ear does not strictly separate audio by frequency, and actual waveform has some effect. Thus it is entirely possible to construct a waveform where the difference between 96 kHz sampling and 96kHz sampling with frequencies above 20Hz filtered do sound distinct. I'll admit though that for most audio the difference is not noticeable even by experts.
But CD audio is sill lossy relative to recording masters, and all recorded audio is strictly lossy relative to original sound waves. To make the mistake of believin otherwise is madness.
For the most part Burn Notice just remains vague about one or more of the important parts of an explosive. That allows them to be accurate without causing trouble. For that occurrence though, it made little sense, since they explicitly mentioned C4. Use of an explosive material that is not easily available to the untrained should have been enough to avoid liability, so the inaccuracy seemed jarring.
The show does definitely have some episodes that are worse than others. It probably has something to who with which writer was lead on that episode, but I've never bothered to try to track that.
One possibility though is that if B&N has made a properly first or second stage boot loader that does not check the signature for the next stage, then all we need to do is get our hands on it, and the device will be unlocked by the end of the day.
Otherwise kexec is the indeed the only option, but it is completely feasible. The system will load modified kernel modules, so we simply need to create a kexec module, and load it, then load a new kernel. Pretty simple, all things considered. The reason we do not do this on the the Motorola phones is that when we try the start-up sequence of the cellular modem driver ends up locking up the already initialized device, thus we phone capability. That would not be an issue on the Nook Tablet, so it is just a matter of time for some sufficiently motivated individual to do this.
And I assume you buy lossy music on CDs instead. (The abuse of dynamic range compression, plus the inherent limitations of the CD format[1], rate mean that CDs are definitely a lossy medium.)
[1] Mostly the 44.1kHz sample rate. Technically the 16 bit amplitude is a limitation, but not as much of one as the sampling rate. Music with very extreme variations in dynamic range could in theory benefit from going to 24 bit depth, but good luck not losing those quiet parts to noise in your amp.
On the other hand though, most other shows get this much much worse. For example, Burn Notice only had magical GPS "trackers" once or twice, while the average such show uses that in damn near every episode.
While the average show portrays explosives as simple magic, this show has for the most part been relatively accurate in its descriptions of the components of an explosive, even if the actual explosion generated is not always that realistic. (Although one instance in which they described C4 being detonated simply by electric current still bugs me a bit, especially since in the application described, a blasting cap was simply out of the question.)
Additionally, RAID-1 can be abused to make live backups, by way of pulling one of the drives, and replacing it with a new drive. Because this is mirroring, the pulled drive is a perfect backup. You will suffer reduced performance while the RAID-1 is being rebuilt, but running a software backup program also hurts performance. In theory the RAID controller could be tuned to minimize the performance loss during rebuild.
Indeed. The upside is that all is not yet lost. Google bought Motorola Mobility, who also manufacture television set-top boxes. I happen to have one in my living room right now. I'm hoping that Google realizes this, and is willing to fund the creation of Motorola branded Google TV device, despite inevitably losing money on it overall, in order to ensure continued availability of the platform until it has enough time to catch on (at which point this new Logitech CEO will be summarily fired by the board for killing the Revue.)
Not dithering -- just cumulative addition. The more reflecting elements there are, the more color you get. So each pixel is a series of imod elements, arrays of R, G and B. Black is all off; dark color is just a few on... medium color is half of 'em on... bright color is all of 'em on.
That is the very definition of dithering. Imagine a version of the display with only red pixels (for simplicity). That is a display with a 1 bit color pallet. You either have bright red or black. You want something in between so you create a pattern where 50 percent of the pixel are red, and 50 percent are black. That is dithering, no different than the classic example of a checkerboard pattern of red and blue pixels to create the appearance of purple.
To maximize the advertised PPI of these displays I find it unlikely that they will actually pre-group a bunch of elements into hrdware pixels, which would avoid the need of inter-pixel dithering. Instead they will most likely expose a triad of elements as a hardware pixel, and let the software chose how to handle things. The software could group large arrays as a logical pixel, but at the cost of not appearing as sharp as the display allows, so instead most software will opt to controlling individual elements, which would allow sharper images at the cost of more work.
Based on that video, it appears that the display is a 3 bit display, relying on the miniscule sizes and dithering to create intermediate tones. If the interface treats a hundred or so elements as one logical pixel that may work fine. Otherwise... well lets just say as a developer it suck to have to either predither for display, or to accept that different colors have different minimum widths necessary to display correctly.
Google TV provides a version of android for the TV. It's most notable feature is the web browser. This is a version of Chrome for Linux, albeit with a different UI. It still uses the V8 JavaScript engine and includes the full Linux x86 flash player. This is enough to enable pretty much every streaming video service, which is the primary use. For example, Amazon video on demand works quite well on the device.
It also supports stand-alone apps, the most notable of which is currently the Netflix app, which works beautifully. The other notable app for the time being is the Pandora app.
GoogleTV supports a picture in picture mode, allowing you to jump on the net, and post a status update or whatever during a commercial break.
The primary interface of the system is a search box that magically appears when you start typing. Using this you can find websites, TV shows or movies (including when they will next air, where you can find them for legal streaming, etc). With DVR integration, one can schedule recording of a show directory from the search results, as well as see already recorded episodes as search results, supporting one click playback.
It currently does not have the android store available, but that has always been planned.
Here is what happened with Google TV. They decided they wanted to do it, and built it. They got two partners together for the initial release of the device. Then shortly after that, they were going to start work on making the system better, adding the android market, and working with manufacturers to get new devices. Instead, some Android phone makers put together some craptastic Android-compatible tablets, which were really going to hurt the Android brand. So Google put all Android related projects (including GoogleTV) on hold as they rushed to throw together the Honeycomb release.
It was only after Honeycomb that GoogleTV work was resumed. At that point the next release and next wave of GoogleTV projects should have been available, but instead that was closer to when they first started working on the next release.
There were still some distinctly visible remnants of tracking at my high school, most notably use of term "college track", but the differences came down to things like:
Whether you took for years of general science, or whether you took distinct Biology, and Chemistry (and optionally Anatomy and Physiology) Which Math courses you ended up taking Whether you ended up taking any foreign languages (i.e. Spanish or french (nothing else was offered))
For the rest of the courses, they were pretty much all the same, and even these "college prep" courses felt targeted at students headed to Community College, rather than a 4-year school. (With the distinct exception of the Biology and the Anatomy and Physiology courses, which were actually pretty darn rigorous thanks to the particular teacher who taught them).
C is only particularly dangerous when inexperienced developers just jump in and start writing code without having more experienced developers review what they wrote. The inexperienced developers have not yet developed good practices to ensure they don't overflow a buffer. Similarly they don't understand ownership of allocated memory, so they end up either freeing memory owned by other code, or failing to free memory when ownership is passed to their code.
If experienced developers carefully reviewed the code, these sorts of problems would be noticed and corrected, and things are fine. Unfortunately, real code review is somewhat rare in the business world, as are static analyzers that would also tend to catch many of these same mistakes. If you properly implement safeguards C can be a fine language, (although admittedly I'm a bit partial to C++ myself as a "low-level" language, despite its many, many flaws).
For a high level statically typed language, I actually prefer C# as a language over Java, although C#'s strong ties to Microsoft are admittedly a negative. They are rather similar languages, each with their own flaws, but I like that C# sometimes adds some syntactic shortcuts for common patterns, while Java absolutely refuses to even consider many syntax-only changes, and when they do add one, like anonymous classes, they feel half-baked.[1]
[1] Anonymous classes must be inner classes, they do not provide the option of being static nested classes which I find to be far more useful than inner classes. They are also not full closures, which are (were?) planned for java 7, which would (will?) end up making anonymous classes feel largely obsolete. (Although in Java's Defense, I'll admit that C# made a similar mistake with the anonymous methods, which really are entirely obsoleted by the newer lambda expressions. On the other hand, C#'s anonymous methods were in fact full blown closures.)
Odd, Intro to EE is usually a fairly simple course that covers solving DC lumped parameter circuits, along with some minimal transient analysis, and possibly some very basic steady state AC analysis using phasors.
I'm guessing that either that course was strangely designed and did not cover those topics, or it was poorly taught, because anybody who can handle other mechanical engineering courses should be able to handle the version of Intro to EE that I took.
The fact that he currently does fluid dynamics is proof of this, since DC steady state circuits are exactly equivalent to a model of pressure and flow in a closed loop system involving an incompressible fluid which involves only linear relationships between pressure and flow.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. The title of the paper is a bit misleading.
They are studying the case of some betting game with a fixed probability of winning p (with p>1/2) and a fixed 1:1 payout, using a discrete model of money, with no maximum bet, a minimum bet of $1, and all bets being constrained to a multiple of $1.
It is already known that if you enter with x dollars and you have a target amount of N, your best strategy is to always bet the minimum. Needless to say always betting the minimum can take forever, so even under this very unlikely set of circumstances, you would not want to actually follow that strategy.
So instead they introduce a round limit T, and introduce software that solves the relevant dynamic programming recurrence determine what you should bet given the probability p, your current balance x', your desired amount N, and the remaining number of rounds until the loan shark kills you T'.
And you just got the question wrong. B is a true statement, It is D that ensures that both halves of the diagonal are equal to each other.
Judges rule on Law, but Juries do not rule on facts in criminal cases. [1] If juries ruled on facts they would be required to give their verdicts like so:
We find that there is no reasonable doubt that the defendant physically caused the death of Jane Smith, that there is no reasonable doubt that the defendant intended to cause grievous bodily harm or death, and that there is reasonable doubt that the actions were premeditated. Therefore, in accordance with the law as outlined by the Judge, on the charge of first degree murder we find the defendant Not Guilty. In accordance with the law as outlined by the Judge, on the charge of Second Degree murder, we find the defendant Guilty.
We however do not require juries to state a verdict like that, which means that juries inherently rule on both law and facts, since there is nothing to prevent them from doing otherwise.
Footnote:
[1] They do frequently do so in civil cases, since special jury verdict forms can be used, which require them to explicitly rule on individual facts.
I've been at my company just over 1 year (entry level position, doing exactly the same work the whole time), and have had 4 distinct de jure supervisors, while in terms of effective supervisors, I've had 3, one of which is not included among the 5 previously mentioned. At the company the hierarchy is supposed to be (Executives->VP->Director->Manager>Supervisor->Me), but at one point I technically reported directly to the VP (and I'm not talking for only an instant, but for a little over a week.)
That sort of thing only rarely shows up in the accounting books, and is usually vastly underestimated when it does, so the decision makers only see: Loss of one registration ($x per year) vs status quo.
Which will they decide is in their interests?
What about Verizon wireless? Or did you exclude them for other reasons?
ICANN cannot technically do that, since they don't actually control the content of the TLD. The Domain Registry (Verisign) could technically reverse the transfer, but are bound by ICANN policies that likely prevent them from doing anything. ICANN in conjunction with Verisign could get the transfer reverted, but since that requires two entities working in concert, I would not count on it happening.
Of course the Australian registry could determine that the transfer was fraudulent, and transfer it back to Go Daddy as a registrar (who is bound by contract to return it to the control of Chris Coyer), and provide information about the fraud to the police, but since that is not in their interests, they will never do that either.
That is not unlike a Rooted Motorola Droid 2, which gives you true root access, but the bootloader (and kernel) remain locked and unchangeable. The Andorid community stills considers that rooted, although it is limited compared to most other devices.
With a monarchy that devolved, such a law makes absolutely no sense. I assume it exists either because such a law has "always" been around, or as a way to prosecute political dissidents by the political arm of the government. I imagine that they could make many purely political arguments sound like criticism of the royal family, which would be reason enough to prosecute said dissidents.
If you want to be Canadian, you should have to renounce your citizenship to your former country or not become Canadian.
I'm not sure I agree with that, especially since people do not necessarily have only control over their citizenship in other countries. Some countries may not allow a citizen to renounce citizenship or that doing so may not be effective.
Consider that US law requires renouncing other citizenship to become a naturalized citizen. The US knows that is little more than a joke. The laws for relinquishing US citizenship require that an action (like renouncing) be taken with the intent to relinquish citizenship. Doing so only to satisfy a requirement of another country's naturalization process does not result in loss of US citizenship. That is settled law, and there is absolutely no ambiguity about it. So US citizens who became Canadian citizens under such a requirement would end up with dual citizenship, if they so desired. Similarly, citizens of any country with similar laws on relinquishing citizenship are not impacted by the US requirement to renounce other citizenship.
At the minimum, you shouldn't expect any help if you get into trouble outside of Canada, especially in your former country that you hold your dual citizenship in.
While a dual-citizen is in a third country, Canada should attempt to provide assistance if requested, but I fully agree that in the second country that the person has citizenship in, they should not expect any help, except in two cases:
Sure. But how revered? Although King is generally not an elected position, what sort of approval rating would "widely revered" translate too? 85%? 75%? 51%? 25%?
Any of those could be considered "widely revered", but there are major differences between them.
Let me go on the record as saying that it is generally not in the long term interests of any leader of a country to silence criticism. Any benevolent leader of a country has a vested interest in knowing how the public feels about their actions. No leader has perfect information, and such feedback is invaluable. Granted a benevolent leader will not always be entirely popular. Sometimes the actions best for the people are not popular. Even so, if something the leader though would be popular was not, or an action was unpopular for a reason other than the expected one, that provides valuable information.
A leader who is not benevolent had better at least appear benevolent, which means not silencing criticism for similar reasons. Leaders who do not at least pretend to have the interests of the people at heart generally get overthrown or removed by the people. It may take a while, but it usually happens.
A leader's best bet is to embrace criticism and occasionally make changes to satisfy critics. Whether the leader has the peoples interests at heart or his own, he can best accomplish things by remaining in power.
You most definitely can use a Google Experience or Google-apps-included Android operating system with no Google account, although your experience suffers, since you would have no usable app store until you sideloaded one, one broke down and added a Google account.
You can also disable syncing with virtually all of the services.
On Google-free android-devices it is even easier, since the Google apps are not present, so you lack the option to sync with Google services.
As for the dynamic range compression, I agree with you that it is a problem, but I was under the impression that record producers applied it to M4As from the iTunes Store and MP3s from Amazon MP3 just as much as to CDs.
I'd be surprised if the producers did not do exactly the same thing to both.
As for the 44.1 kHz sample rate, can you ABX the difference between a 96 kHz sample and the same 96 kHz sample with all frequencies over 20 kHz filtered out?
Keep in mind that the Nyquist Sampling Theorem only strictly applies to perfectly periodic signals. Second many people can hear frequencies somewhat above 20Khz. Third, the ear does not strictly separate audio by frequency, and actual waveform has some effect. Thus it is entirely possible to construct a waveform where the difference between 96 kHz sampling and 96kHz sampling with frequencies above 20Hz filtered do sound distinct. I'll admit though that for most audio the difference is not noticeable even by experts.
But CD audio is sill lossy relative to recording masters, and all recorded audio is strictly lossy relative to original sound waves. To make the mistake of believin otherwise is madness.
For the most part Burn Notice just remains vague about one or more of the important parts of an explosive. That allows them to be accurate without causing trouble. For that occurrence though, it made little sense, since they explicitly mentioned C4. Use of an explosive material that is not easily available to the untrained should have been enough to avoid liability, so the inaccuracy seemed jarring.
The show does definitely have some episodes that are worse than others. It probably has something to who with which writer was lead on that episode, but I've never bothered to try to track that.
One possibility though is that if B&N has made a properly first or second stage boot loader that does not check the signature for the next stage, then all we need to do is get our hands on it, and the device will be unlocked by the end of the day.
Otherwise kexec is the indeed the only option, but it is completely feasible. The system will load modified kernel modules, so we simply need to create a kexec module, and load it, then load a new kernel. Pretty simple, all things considered. The reason we do not do this on the the Motorola phones is that when we try the start-up sequence of the cellular modem driver ends up locking up the already initialized device, thus we phone capability. That would not be an issue on the Nook Tablet, so it is just a matter of time for some sufficiently motivated individual to do this.
And I assume you buy lossy music on CDs instead. (The abuse of dynamic range compression, plus the inherent limitations of the CD format[1], rate mean that CDs are definitely a lossy medium.)
[1] Mostly the 44.1kHz sample rate. Technically the 16 bit amplitude is a limitation, but not as much of one as the sampling rate. Music with very extreme variations in dynamic range could in theory benefit from going to 24 bit depth, but good luck not losing those quiet parts to noise in your amp.
On the other hand though, most other shows get this much much worse. For example, Burn Notice only had magical GPS "trackers" once or twice, while the average such show uses that in damn near every episode.
While the average show portrays explosives as simple magic, this show has for the most part been relatively accurate in its descriptions of the components of an explosive, even if the actual explosion generated is not always that realistic. (Although one instance in which they described C4 being detonated simply by electric current still bugs me a bit, especially since in the application described, a blasting cap was simply out of the question.)
Additionally, RAID-1 can be abused to make live backups, by way of pulling one of the drives, and replacing it with a new drive. Because this is mirroring, the pulled drive is a perfect backup. You will suffer reduced performance while the RAID-1 is being rebuilt, but running a software backup program also hurts performance. In theory the RAID controller could be tuned to minimize the performance loss during rebuild.
Indeed. The upside is that all is not yet lost. Google bought Motorola Mobility, who also manufacture television set-top boxes. I happen to have one in my living room right now. I'm hoping that Google realizes this, and is willing to fund the creation of Motorola branded Google TV device, despite inevitably losing money on it overall, in order to ensure continued availability of the platform until it has enough time to catch on (at which point this new Logitech CEO will be summarily fired by the board for killing the Revue.)
Not dithering -- just cumulative addition. The more reflecting elements there are, the more color you get. So each pixel is a series of imod elements, arrays of R, G and B. Black is all off; dark color is just a few on... medium color is half of 'em on... bright color is all of 'em on.
That is the very definition of dithering. Imagine a version of the display with only red pixels (for simplicity). That is a display with a 1 bit color pallet. You either have bright red or black. You want something in between so you create a pattern where 50 percent of the pixel are red, and 50 percent are black. That is dithering, no different than the classic example of a checkerboard pattern of red and blue pixels to create the appearance of purple.
To maximize the advertised PPI of these displays I find it unlikely that they will actually pre-group a bunch of elements into hrdware pixels, which would avoid the need of inter-pixel dithering. Instead they will most likely expose a triad of elements as a hardware pixel, and let the software chose how to handle things. The software could group large arrays as a logical pixel, but at the cost of not appearing as sharp as the display allows, so instead most software will opt to controlling individual elements, which would allow sharper images at the cost of more work.
Based on that video, it appears that the display is a 3 bit display, relying on the miniscule sizes and dithering to create intermediate tones. If the interface treats a hundred or so elements as one logical pixel that may work fine. Otherwise... well lets just say as a developer it suck to have to either predither for display, or to accept that different colors have different minimum widths necessary to display correctly.
Google TV provides a version of android for the TV. It's most notable feature is the web browser. This is a version of Chrome for Linux, albeit with a different UI. It still uses the V8 JavaScript engine and includes the full Linux x86 flash player. This is enough to enable pretty much every streaming video service, which is the primary use. For example, Amazon video on demand works quite well on the device.
It also supports stand-alone apps, the most notable of which is currently the Netflix app, which works beautifully. The other notable app for the time being is the Pandora app.
GoogleTV supports a picture in picture mode, allowing you to jump on the net, and post a status update or whatever during a commercial break.
The primary interface of the system is a search box that magically appears when you start typing. Using this you can find websites, TV shows or movies (including when they will next air, where you can find them for legal streaming, etc). With DVR integration, one can schedule recording of a show directory from the search results, as well as see already recorded episodes as search results, supporting one click playback.
It currently does not have the android store available, but that has always been planned.
Here is what happened with Google TV. They decided they wanted to do it, and built it. They got two partners together for the initial release of the device. Then shortly after that, they were going to start work on making the system better, adding the android market, and working with manufacturers to get new devices. Instead, some Android phone makers put together some craptastic Android-compatible tablets, which were really going to hurt the Android brand. So Google put all Android related projects (including GoogleTV) on hold as they rushed to throw together the Honeycomb release.
It was only after Honeycomb that GoogleTV work was resumed. At that point the next release and next wave of GoogleTV projects should have been available, but instead that was closer to when they first started working on the next release.
There were still some distinctly visible remnants of tracking at my high school, most notably use of term "college track", but the differences came down to things like:
Whether you took for years of general science, or whether you took distinct Biology, and Chemistry (and optionally Anatomy and Physiology)
Which Math courses you ended up taking
Whether you ended up taking any foreign languages (i.e. Spanish or french (nothing else was offered))
For the rest of the courses, they were pretty much all the same, and even these "college prep" courses felt targeted at students headed to Community College, rather than a 4-year school. (With the distinct exception of the Biology and the Anatomy and Physiology courses, which were actually pretty darn rigorous thanks to the particular teacher who taught them).
C is only particularly dangerous when inexperienced developers just jump in and start writing code without having more experienced developers review what they wrote. The inexperienced developers have not yet developed good practices to ensure they don't overflow a buffer. Similarly they don't understand ownership of allocated memory, so they end up either freeing memory owned by other code, or failing to free memory when ownership is passed to their code.
If experienced developers carefully reviewed the code, these sorts of problems would be noticed and corrected, and things are fine. Unfortunately, real code review is somewhat rare in the business world, as are static analyzers that would also tend to catch many of these same mistakes. If you properly implement safeguards C can be a fine language, (although admittedly I'm a bit partial to C++ myself as a "low-level" language, despite its many, many flaws).
For a high level statically typed language, I actually prefer C# as a language over Java, although C#'s strong ties to Microsoft are admittedly a negative. They are rather similar languages, each with their own flaws, but I like that C# sometimes adds some syntactic shortcuts for common patterns, while Java absolutely refuses to even consider many syntax-only changes, and when they do add one, like anonymous classes, they feel half-baked.[1]
[1] Anonymous classes must be inner classes, they do not provide the option of being static nested classes which I find to be far more useful than inner classes. They are also not full closures, which are (were?) planned for java 7, which would (will?) end up making anonymous classes feel largely obsolete. (Although in Java's Defense, I'll admit that C# made a similar mistake with the anonymous methods, which really are entirely obsoleted by the newer lambda expressions. On the other hand, C#'s anonymous methods were in fact full blown closures.)
Odd, Intro to EE is usually a fairly simple course that covers solving DC lumped parameter circuits, along with some minimal transient analysis, and possibly some very basic steady state AC analysis using phasors.
I'm guessing that either that course was strangely designed and did not cover those topics, or it was poorly taught, because anybody who can handle other mechanical engineering courses should be able to handle the version of Intro to EE that I took.
The fact that he currently does fluid dynamics is proof of this, since DC steady state circuits are exactly equivalent to a model of pressure and flow in a closed loop system involving an incompressible fluid which involves only linear relationships between pressure and flow.