Taken to its absurd, but alas wholly logical conclusion, one waits for the day that ASCAP, SESAC & their idiotic ilk start hanging around schoolyards so they can bust kids for singing Itsy Bitsy Spider, Old MacDonald & Frere Jacques...
Many folks in Austin would welcome this news if it were true. AMD is in the midst of building a new FAB on top of the recharge zone for a sensitive aquifer, one that is the sole source of drinking water for several million people stretching south of Austin past (and including) San Antonio. They've already been caught dumping construction waste, which only helps further poison the water table every time it rains.
Austin itself gets its drinking water from the Colorado river, but due to rampant construction over the past 20+ years, those who rely on the aquifer are getting more and more thirsty.
Perhaps it's just fair turnabout that AMD is also getting more and more thirsty (for dollars)...
Parent: "I have no idea what my child's doing online so much. Can't someone help me?"
Child: "Just leave me alone, I'm playing here."
Predator: "It comes down to being in control."
Police: "You Must Conform!"
The problem is really none of the above. It's *all* of the above.
Parents want to protect their kids, but are themselves often overwhelmed just trying to get by.
Kids want to explore their own boundaries, and as sophisticated as we think they are these days, are still kids.
Predators are very confused, either by nurture or nature, and should not interact with kids lest they imprint their confusion upon others.
Police (aka our social structure) often lose track of individuals trying to protect the group.
The Parents can do more by taking the time to develop trust in their children.
The Children can do more by learning to trust their parents.
The Predators can do more by seeking - and more importantly, accepting - help.
The Police can do more by not acting like overwhelmed parents, instead treating individuals as just that - individuals, not groups. This may be the hardest task of all, as it asks them to take an active interest in each and every one of those whom they have sworn to serve, and protect.
It's not easy, but not much of the really worthwhile stuff is.
Ran into a buddy who was pulling gate duty. It's late afternoon, there's no light on in the shack. I reach over & flip the switch, but the lights don't come on. I mention this to my buddy... right about the time a whole mess of guys with rifles came roaring up. Seems I'd hit the silent alarm. OOPS!
I was stationed where the Air Force makes up all their software. We were testing what was to be the next generation of equipment the AF would purchase. One side Burroughs, the other Sperry (side note: One side won, the other didn't like losing, within a couple of years they'd morphed into UniSys. While that was going on, the Burroughs repair techs one day said they were going to have a company-wide naming contest for the new entity. I mashed the letters together & came up with Yurr's Burger Shop. The tech's loved the name, but apparently Corporate had a different idea...)
I'm on the Sperry side, a fancy new system that can actually boot off an 8" floppy instead of tape or paper like most of the stuff on our production floor. Way advanced. It's the graveyard shift, when a lot of testing gets done. One night we had to boot the system over a dozen times, just trying out different things.
Never did figure out *why* it was programmed this way, but there was this part of the boot process wherein if you happened to down the disk drives, the entire system would be hosed. You could not simply reboot, you'd have to do an entire system restore, something like 60 tapes. I'm running the console, all these people standing around me, it's 3AM, we're booting for the seventeenth time. To this day, I swear someone told me to do it. I shouldn't have, but I was busy paying attention to my superiors as they issued orders, my fingers went to work before my brain did.
I downed the disk drives.
Now I'm feeling very small. We're debating whether or not to wake the Base Commander. Loading 60 tapes times 20 minutes per, we're talking about being back online sometime in the wee hours. Tomorrow. No way we're going to make 7AM. I am so screwed.
Then, the last cup of coffee must have hit, because I proceeded to save my own ass. Wait a minute, I say, we have 10 tape drives, they can load concurrently. Why don't we just spin them up all at once?
They let me stay at the console to orchestrate, so I had guys way above my ranking furiously mounting & demounting volumes as we loaded the system back in as fast as possible. Around 6:45 it was done, and we got to mention the disaster to the day crew in the past tense, which is always the best way to mention disasters.
This also became the new way to do a system restore.
The only reason this idea would fly here in the US is if some contractor talked the government into it.
We already have an army of eyes in the form of various roadway, convenience store and other surveillance cameras in place; an army which will only grow larger over time.
Not saying I like the idea, but if one did want to keep tabs on a large geographical area, rather than spend a bunch of money on blimps & their operators, it would make a lot more sense to just network the resources we already have in place.
Switched with the aid of Mavis Beacon v5 back in '89, haven't looked back since. Splurged for a Northgate OmniKey Ultra with the extra set of keycaps, but once learning touch didn't need to look anymore, so these days use a plain old MS Natural. Have heard good things from other manufacturers (Kinesis, TypeMatrix, others), but do a lot of support at different sites so have learned to just use whatever POS keyboard is in front of me.
There's also a unit out of Austin called DAS keyboard which sounds intriguing - though I haven't actually laid hands on one - having no markings of any kind on the keycaps. Talk about an extra layer of security!
Admittedly a chicken & egg problem, one thing I do NOT like is that most login screens are set up for Qwerty, unless of course it's your own machine in which case you could have loaded it up to be Dvorak all the time.
On 'doze machines at sites I maintain, have it set up as another language (Swedish, as the tray icon "SV" is close to "DV", and trained staff that if they accidentally start seeing gibberish when they type, to try ALT-LEFT-SHIFT & look for "EN" instead.
Odd that these days Mavis will teach you Spanish, but not Dvorak. Have asked them a few times over the years, usually get some boilerplated response that indicates they don't care to have real discussion on the issue. V5 was the last time she taught Dvorak.
One of the stats from the old Mavis docs were that the average Qwerty typists fingers move sixteen miles a day, while with Dvorak it's just one. That really appealed to me back then, and now, going on 20 years later, I'm glad my hands aren't falling apart.
Back in the DOS days I'd use two batch files to toggle between Qwerty & Dvorak, one KB.bat, the other TX.bat. Reason for TX was it was the Dvorak representation of KB. Guess I could have also gone with VN (Qwerty letters which would spell out 'KB' for keyboard when in Dvorak mode), but back then was still thinking in Qwerty.
A good resource for Dvorak is altkeyboards over at Yahoo, and of course Marcus Brooks' page (mwbrooks.com)
Even if this *isn't* an April Fool's joke, Mr. Ignatiev is forgetting that the sun is not the only mass which exerts force on the earth.
Am by no means a physicist, but most likely this phenomena is simply explained by "upstream" forces such as the Milky Way itself, the universe beyond that, etc. My simplistic image is that of an underwater stream, causing ripples on the surface, whose effect you could override by swirling a stick. As soon as you stop swirling, the stream's inertia is again able to affect the water around it.
Just because one speaks fluent 'puter, does not mean they will automatically communicate well with other humans. Put another way, the personality type of the individual who easily groks the machine is often not that of the person who easily groks other people.
Personally, though fairly good at both, I find it easier to deal with the machine, as there's no emotion involved. If it's not working right, it's not because it's mad at you (anger often skews valid output), but simply because it either has a broken part (or code), or you're not speaking to it in a manner it can understand.
In the former case, it's my job to figure out what's broken and replace accordingly. In the latter, it's my job to keep yapping at it until it we're in sync.
Have already adjusted the mileage of my 2002 Prius, purchased about 6 months ago.
The on-board display routinely shows 45 - 50 average MPG, but every time I fill up, the pump & the odometer get together & tell me it's actually around 40.
So, either the odometer isn't working (unlikely), or the internal mileage calculator is a bit optomistic.
(Still, having put on over 18K miles in the past six months, the fuel savings are just about making the car payment, so it's a win-win. Plus, I have the satisfaction of knowing that even with all that driving I'm shoveling less sh*t into the sky...)
Really, not meaning to disrespect the poor, but how many will have money in the bank instead of their pockets?
I do agree that in general, some form of biometric verification is good when making financial transactions, just not sure if this is the ideal place for such a rollout.
The solution to MicroSoft's problems combating open-source vendors is simple.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. All they have to do is open-source *all* of their products, make all of the help files only available online (so they can run revenue-generating ads with them, alternatively, charging for downloadable help docs & embedding product activation within them to limit improper copying), and begin charging for any phone or human-reply(as opposed to knowledge base searches, etc.) email support.
Sounds crazy? Sure, but no more than their current model. As things stand now, the consumer takes one big hit buying Windows, Office, etc. then gets free updates & help for the life of the product. Why not pay a little at a time, as need for assistance comes up? Sure, some will never need the help, but the average Joe is *not* technically oriented, and will be happy to plunk down $9.95 for the solution to "The Mail-Merge Hell", then another Hamilton for knowing "All About Icons", then again for "Secrets To The Mystery of Cut'n'Paste", and so on...
On the commercial side, they could give away SQL server, but charge for the config. What's that, you want to set it up yourself? Fine, but then down the road if you come back asking for help, there will be an extra fee for backing up your current data, fixing the problem, then restoring, so see, you should have just let us handle it from the start...
Becoming primarily a support organization as opposed to one geared just toward sales would also serve to make the products themselves better. The company would have better internal feedback on which features cause the most problems, and hey, if they just slack off on quality control and the entire line starts to suck (as a method to increase support calls), folks will simply switch to a competitor's product.
I'm assuming you still live at home. My suggestion would be to use this time to absorb as much as you can about current languages (those you'll probably use in the next several years), but also to spend some time discovering past, lesser-used systems (logic is logic, the words may change but the ideas remain constant).
Use the 'net, it is a fantastic research tool. Think of an app you'd like to see, and turn it into a reality, even if no one but your dog and your coffee cup ever sees it run.
I'm also assuming you don't have any scholarships lined up, or you wouldn't be asking this question. While things are certainly different today than 25 years ago when I enlisted, a hitch with the military is not out of the question. You'd have to check, but back when I went in you could decide what you were going to do, or where you wanted to be stationed. I ended up where they write all the code for the Air Force (in Alabama). Not at all saying that I would have been unwilling to pick up a gun if that's what was necessary, but as it turned out it was not. Depending on whether or not you passed the AFEES tests and got in as a programmer, there's a pretty solid chance you'd never get deployed overseas, and could serve your country while polishing your coding skills at the same time. You'd also be able to save a good chunk of money toward college if that's something you wanted to pursue later.
Lastly, programming, like any other profession, has a hierarchy. You would probably start out doing grunt work, coding designs that had already been decided on, with little chance to exhibit your own creative input. But if you're good, have faith in yourself and your abilities, and retain the passion for solving endless logic puzzles, you may find that a career in programming suits you.
If not, hopefully you'll figure out what you *really* want to do before you run out of days.:)
It's an elevator, for cripe's sake. We've had them since the 3rd century BC. They've been reasonably safe for over 100 years now.
No new technology is needed for the car itself.
There are two problems to solve: Suspending enough cable outside the gravity well so that it won't fall back to earth, and keeping it 'straight' as it's whirled round 'n round.
Neither of those two things can be tested by a model. At least, not here on Earth, as our own gravity would skew the results.
The car itself, along with the drive mechanism are both proven technology, used in every high-rise across the planet.
So, string the big cable (made of BuckyBalls, perhaps?), mount solar panels up top to take care of the electrical requirements, and off we go.
The really exciting thing here would be if it could actually be built soon enough for Arthur C. Clarke to actually ride in it, similar to the way he was able to use his home satellite dish in Sri Lanka to fax chapters of 2010 to his New York publisher...
Either a slow news day, or more likely some manager at the Globe just wanted to sell more copies by tying in with his recent Billboard top 10. (BTW, congrats, Al!)
Having been a long-time fan (first by listening to Dr. Demento in the 70's), I have very much liked all his albums...until this last one. Perhaps I'm growing disconnected from the modern music scene, perhaps his muse doesn't like to share, so being married is proving more a distraction than he'd like, perhaps it was just time for a dud; but on first listen, not even one song really grabbed me the way, say "Taco Grande", or "Jerry Springer", or "Hardware Store", or "Fat", or "I Lost On Jeapordy" (etc., etc., etc. There are so many!) did when I first heard them.
The new album, "Straight Outta Lynwood", is on a dual disc, CD one side, DVD with videos on the other. Production value is great; the insert also has some must-see gag photos (check out that monster Stingray he's sitting on, or Pimp Al and his "gals" in the dressing room. Yikes!)
This is the first one in awhile though that doesn't feature an image of his face on the disc itself, with his mouth conveniently where the CD hole would be. Truth to tell, though, the blank disc is probably a jab at burning pirated copies, so works as well.
But the songs... "Trapped In The Drive-Through" in particular, sounded like a diary entry. Hopefully the original, an R. Kelly tune, is not as boring. (This may be the part where I'm growing disconnected from current pop music...)
I will say though that he puts on a great live show, and yes, will certainly continue buying his albums, and of course keep spinning this one in the hopes it grows on me.
Mike Judge would probably disagree with this assertion.
Anyone seen Idiocracy? In this, his latest film, he supposes that the "tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative" folk will lose out, simply because they were, ironically, too stupid to breed enough offspring to keep up with the "dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures".
(US Side): I'm picking up a lot of static... wait, that's better... Yes, sir, I'll inform the citizen he needs to move along because this is a restricted zone...
(Iraqi Side): What? What did you say? Can you repeat that? What, my grandmother is made of cheese? Death to the infidels!
Have not waded through all the verbiage of H.R.4954.EAS (and really, no, really, what does securing our ports have to do with web-based poker players, anyway?), but one must wonder why our beloved Legislators continue to prove their shortsightedness.
Surely, if the bill merely states that credit card companies are no longer allowed to act as the middleman for any wager, this will only create opportunities for non-U.S. companies to act as the moneychangers.
As it is estimated that 70% of online gambling comes from American shores, the problem is not how will it be stopped, but how will it be spent.
Slashdot Mirror
Taken to its absurd, but alas wholly logical conclusion, one waits for the day that ASCAP, SESAC & their idiotic ilk start hanging around schoolyards so they can bust kids for singing Itsy Bitsy Spider, Old MacDonald & Frere Jacques...
Many folks in Austin would welcome this news if it were true. AMD is in the midst of building a new FAB on top of the recharge zone for a sensitive aquifer, one that is the sole source of drinking water for several million people stretching south of Austin past (and including) San Antonio. They've already been caught dumping construction waste, which only helps further poison the water table every time it rains.
Austin itself gets its drinking water from the Colorado river, but due to rampant construction over the past 20+ years, those who rely on the aquifer are getting more and more thirsty.
Perhaps it's just fair turnabout that AMD is also getting more and more thirsty (for dollars)...
Parent: "I have no idea what my child's doing online so much. Can't someone help me?"
Child: "Just leave me alone, I'm playing here."
Predator: "It comes down to being in control."
Police: "You Must Conform!"
The problem is really none of the above. It's *all* of the above.
Parents want to protect their kids, but are themselves often overwhelmed just trying to get by.
Kids want to explore their own boundaries, and as sophisticated as we think they are these days, are still kids.
Predators are very confused, either by nurture or nature, and should not interact with kids lest they imprint their confusion upon others.
Police (aka our social structure) often lose track of individuals trying to protect the group.
The Parents can do more by taking the time to develop trust in their children.
The Children can do more by learning to trust their parents.
The Predators can do more by seeking - and more importantly, accepting - help.
The Police can do more by not acting like overwhelmed parents, instead treating individuals as just that - individuals, not groups. This may be the hardest task of all, as it asks them to take an active interest in each and every one of those whom they have sworn to serve, and protect.
It's not easy, but not much of the really worthwhile stuff is.
Two from my military days, early 80's...
... right about the time a whole mess of guys with rifles came roaring up. Seems I'd hit the silent alarm. OOPS!
Ran into a buddy who was pulling gate duty. It's late afternoon, there's no light on in the shack. I reach over & flip the switch, but the lights don't come on. I mention this to my buddy
I was stationed where the Air Force makes up all their software. We were testing what was to be the next generation of equipment the AF would purchase. One side Burroughs, the other Sperry (side note: One side won, the other didn't like losing, within a couple of years they'd morphed into UniSys. While that was going on, the Burroughs repair techs one day said they were going to have a company-wide naming contest for the new entity. I mashed the letters together & came up with Yurr's Burger Shop. The tech's loved the name, but apparently Corporate had a different idea...)
I'm on the Sperry side, a fancy new system that can actually boot off an 8" floppy instead of tape or paper like most of the stuff on our production floor. Way advanced. It's the graveyard shift, when a lot of testing gets done. One night we had to boot the system over a dozen times, just trying out different things.
Never did figure out *why* it was programmed this way, but there was this part of the boot process wherein if you happened to down the disk drives, the entire system would be hosed. You could not simply reboot, you'd have to do an entire system restore, something like 60 tapes. I'm running the console, all these people standing around me, it's 3AM, we're booting for the seventeenth time. To this day, I swear someone told me to do it. I shouldn't have, but I was busy paying attention to my superiors as they issued orders, my fingers went to work before my brain did.
I downed the disk drives.
Now I'm feeling very small. We're debating whether or not to wake the Base Commander. Loading 60 tapes times 20 minutes per, we're talking about being back online sometime in the wee hours. Tomorrow. No way we're going to make 7AM. I am so screwed.
Then, the last cup of coffee must have hit, because I proceeded to save my own ass. Wait a minute, I say, we have 10 tape drives, they can load concurrently. Why don't we just spin them up all at once?
They let me stay at the console to orchestrate, so I had guys way above my ranking furiously mounting & demounting volumes as we loaded the system back in as fast as possible. Around 6:45 it was done, and we got to mention the disaster to the day crew in the past tense, which is always the best way to mention disasters.
This also became the new way to do a system restore.
The Internet is just like TV, only you have a lot more channels.
The Internet is just like a telephone, because sometimes you can talk back.
The Internet is just like a grocery store that offers delivery.
The Internet is just like a neighborhood graffiti wall, available to all who care to use it.
In short, the Internet is a way to interact with the world, without leaving your house.
The only reason this idea would fly here in the US is if some contractor talked the government into it.
We already have an army of eyes in the form of various roadway, convenience store and other surveillance cameras in place; an army which will only grow larger over time.
Not saying I like the idea, but if one did want to keep tabs on a large geographical area, rather than spend a bunch of money on blimps & their operators, it would make a lot more sense to just network the resources we already have in place.
Switched with the aid of Mavis Beacon v5 back in '89, haven't looked back since. Splurged for a Northgate OmniKey Ultra with the extra set of keycaps, but once learning touch didn't need to look anymore, so these days use a plain old MS Natural. Have heard good things from other manufacturers (Kinesis, TypeMatrix, others), but do a lot of support at different sites so have learned to just use whatever POS keyboard is in front of me.
There's also a unit out of Austin called DAS keyboard which sounds intriguing - though I haven't actually laid hands on one - having no markings of any kind on the keycaps. Talk about an extra layer of security!
Admittedly a chicken & egg problem, one thing I do NOT like is that most login screens are set up for Qwerty, unless of course it's your own machine in which case you could have loaded it up to be Dvorak all the time. On 'doze machines at sites I maintain, have it set up as another language (Swedish, as the tray icon "SV" is close to "DV", and trained staff that if they accidentally start seeing gibberish when they type, to try ALT-LEFT-SHIFT & look for "EN" instead.
Odd that these days Mavis will teach you Spanish, but not Dvorak. Have asked them a few times over the years, usually get some boilerplated response that indicates they don't care to have real discussion on the issue. V5 was the last time she taught Dvorak.
One of the stats from the old Mavis docs were that the average Qwerty typists fingers move sixteen miles a day, while with Dvorak it's just one. That really appealed to me back then, and now, going on 20 years later, I'm glad my hands aren't falling apart.
Back in the DOS days I'd use two batch files to toggle between Qwerty & Dvorak, one KB.bat, the other TX.bat. Reason for TX was it was the Dvorak representation of KB. Guess I could have also gone with VN (Qwerty letters which would spell out 'KB' for keyboard when in Dvorak mode), but back then was still thinking in Qwerty.
A good resource for Dvorak is altkeyboards over at Yahoo, and of course Marcus Brooks' page (mwbrooks.com)
Happy typing!
Even if this *isn't* an April Fool's joke, Mr. Ignatiev is forgetting that the sun is not the only mass which exerts force on the earth.
Am by no means a physicist, but most likely this phenomena is simply explained by "upstream" forces such as the Milky Way itself, the universe beyond that, etc. My simplistic image is that of an underwater stream, causing ripples on the surface, whose effect you could override by swirling a stick. As soon as you stop swirling, the stream's inertia is again able to affect the water around it.
I'm sure these are all nice offerings, but at the moment will offer no serious competition to the gold standard, Photoshop.
In fact, even an online version of Photoshop will not be competition to its current incarnation.
The reason? Browser color management. Currently, only Safari, OmniWeb, & MacIE support it, and any serious Photoshop user soft proofs before printing.
Their only current solution would be to bypass the browser display engine, but if they do that, they're in effect back to having a stand-alone app.
The article asks "What do you think Wikimedia should do to shore up the financial situation of the Wikipedia?"
Simple. Just make an entry saying they're flush with cash.
Everyone knows the Wiki contains nothing but absolute truth.
The Assemblyman must not have any dimmer switches in his house.
Personally, I like the CFL's, and use them wherever possible.
Alas, until they work with a dimmer switch, they'll never be universally adopted.
Just because one speaks fluent 'puter, does not mean they will automatically communicate well with other humans. Put another way, the personality type of the individual who easily groks the machine is often not that of the person who easily groks other people.
Personally, though fairly good at both, I find it easier to deal with the machine, as there's no emotion involved. If it's not working right, it's not because it's mad at you (anger often skews valid output), but simply because it either has a broken part (or code), or you're not speaking to it in a manner it can understand.
In the former case, it's my job to figure out what's broken and replace accordingly. In the latter, it's my job to keep yapping at it until it we're in sync.
OSS? Not hardly. Switching to SUSE simply means switching from one department of M$ to another.
Have already adjusted the mileage of my 2002 Prius, purchased about 6 months ago.
The on-board display routinely shows 45 - 50 average MPG, but every time I fill up, the pump & the odometer get together & tell me it's actually around 40.
So, either the odometer isn't working (unlikely), or the internal mileage calculator is a bit optomistic.
(Still, having put on over 18K miles in the past six months, the fuel savings are just about making the car payment, so it's a win-win. Plus, I have the satisfaction of knowing that even with all that driving I'm shoveling less sh*t into the sky...)
Really, not meaning to disrespect the poor, but how many will have money in the bank instead of their pockets?
I do agree that in general, some form of biometric verification is good when making financial transactions, just not sure if this is the ideal place for such a rollout.
The solution to MicroSoft's problems combating open-source vendors is simple.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. All they have to do is open-source *all* of their products, make all of the help files only available online (so they can run revenue-generating ads with them, alternatively, charging for downloadable help docs & embedding product activation within them to limit improper copying), and begin charging for any phone or human-reply(as opposed to knowledge base searches, etc.) email support.
Sounds crazy? Sure, but no more than their current model. As things stand now, the consumer takes one big hit buying Windows, Office, etc. then gets free updates & help for the life of the product. Why not pay a little at a time, as need for assistance comes up? Sure, some will never need the help, but the average Joe is *not* technically oriented, and will be happy to plunk down $9.95 for the solution to "The Mail-Merge Hell", then another Hamilton for knowing "All About Icons", then again for "Secrets To The Mystery of Cut'n'Paste", and so on...
On the commercial side, they could give away SQL server, but charge for the config. What's that, you want to set it up yourself? Fine, but then down the road if you come back asking for help, there will be an extra fee for backing up your current data, fixing the problem, then restoring, so see, you should have just let us handle it from the start...
Becoming primarily a support organization as opposed to one geared just toward sales would also serve to make the products themselves better. The company would have better internal feedback on which features cause the most problems, and hey, if they just slack off on quality control and the entire line starts to suck (as a method to increase support calls), folks will simply switch to a competitor's product.
Sounds like this would be a good fit with the Solar Tower.
I'm assuming you still live at home. My suggestion would be to use this time to absorb as much as you can about current languages (those you'll probably use in the next several years), but also to spend some time discovering past, lesser-used systems (logic is logic, the words may change but the ideas remain constant).
:)
Use the 'net, it is a fantastic research tool. Think of an app you'd like to see, and turn it into a reality, even if no one but your dog and your coffee cup ever sees it run.
I'm also assuming you don't have any scholarships lined up, or you wouldn't be asking this question. While things are certainly different today than 25 years ago when I enlisted, a hitch with the military is not out of the question. You'd have to check, but back when I went in you could decide what you were going to do, or where you wanted to be stationed. I ended up where they write all the code for the Air Force (in Alabama). Not at all saying that I would have been unwilling to pick up a gun if that's what was necessary, but as it turned out it was not. Depending on whether or not you passed the AFEES tests and got in as a programmer, there's a pretty solid chance you'd never get deployed overseas, and could serve your country while polishing your coding skills at the same time. You'd also be able to save a good chunk of money toward college if that's something you wanted to pursue later.
Lastly, programming, like any other profession, has a hierarchy. You would probably start out doing grunt work, coding designs that had already been decided on, with little chance to exhibit your own creative input. But if you're good, have faith in yourself and your abilities, and retain the passion for solving endless logic puzzles, you may find that a career in programming suits you.
If not, hopefully you'll figure out what you *really* want to do before you run out of days.
Whatever you decide, good luck!
It's an elevator, for cripe's sake. We've had them since the 3rd century BC. They've been reasonably safe for over 100 years now.
No new technology is needed for the car itself.
There are two problems to solve: Suspending enough cable outside the gravity well so that it won't fall back to earth, and keeping it 'straight' as it's whirled round 'n round.
Neither of those two things can be tested by a model. At least, not here on Earth, as our own gravity would skew the results.
The car itself, along with the drive mechanism are both proven technology, used in every high-rise across the planet.
So, string the big cable (made of BuckyBalls, perhaps?), mount solar panels up top to take care of the electrical requirements, and off we go.
The really exciting thing here would be if it could actually be built soon enough for Arthur C. Clarke to actually ride in it, similar to the way he was able to use his home satellite dish in Sri Lanka to fax chapters of 2010 to his New York publisher...
Either a slow news day, or more likely some manager at the Globe just wanted to sell more copies by tying in with his recent Billboard top 10. (BTW, congrats, Al!)
Having been a long-time fan (first by listening to Dr. Demento in the 70's), I have very much liked all his albums...until this last one. Perhaps I'm growing disconnected from the modern music scene, perhaps his muse doesn't like to share, so being married is proving more a distraction than he'd like, perhaps it was just time for a dud; but on first listen, not even one song really grabbed me the way, say "Taco Grande", or "Jerry Springer", or "Hardware Store", or "Fat", or "I Lost On Jeapordy" (etc., etc., etc. There are so many!) did when I first heard them.
The new album, "Straight Outta Lynwood", is on a dual disc, CD one side, DVD with videos on the other. Production value is great; the insert also has some must-see gag photos (check out that monster Stingray he's sitting on, or Pimp Al and his "gals" in the dressing room. Yikes!)
This is the first one in awhile though that doesn't feature an image of his face on the disc itself, with his mouth conveniently where the CD hole would be. Truth to tell, though, the blank disc is probably a jab at burning pirated copies, so works as well.
But the songs... "Trapped In The Drive-Through" in particular, sounded like a diary entry. Hopefully the original, an R. Kelly tune, is not as boring. (This may be the part where I'm growing disconnected from current pop music...)
I will say though that he puts on a great live show, and yes, will certainly continue buying his albums, and of course keep spinning this one in the hopes it grows on me.
It's really quite simple. Iran (the country, not the people) needs the bandwidth for research.
How else will they simulate all those nuclear "energy producing devices" they're building?
Mike Judge would probably disagree with this assertion.
Anyone seen Idiocracy? In this, his latest film, he supposes that the "tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative" folk will lose out, simply because they were, ironically, too stupid to breed enough offspring to keep up with the "dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures".
Yikes!
(US Side): I'm picking up a lot of static ... wait, that's better ... Yes, sir, I'll inform the citizen he needs to move along because this is a restricted zone...
(Iraqi Side): What? What did you say? Can you repeat that? What, my grandmother is made of cheese? Death to the infidels!
So, now they *are* going to fix the Hubble?
Have not waded through all the verbiage of H.R.4954.EAS (and really, no, really, what does securing our ports have to do with web-based poker players, anyway?), but one must wonder why our beloved Legislators continue to prove their shortsightedness.
Surely, if the bill merely states that credit card companies are no longer allowed to act as the middleman for any wager, this will only create opportunities for non-U.S. companies to act as the moneychangers.
As it is estimated that 70% of online gambling comes from American shores, the problem is not how will it be stopped, but how will it be spent.