I'm possibly the only living entity in North America who doesn't have the slightest idea what Jersey Shore is (other than a town in central Pennsylvania a few kilometers South of Williamsport.) I hope to keep it that way.
Not that it's relevant, but there seem to be a lot of dialects of Chinese and apparently not all are mutually comprehensible. I assume that all the dialects can be expressed in the same written language -- which isn't phonetic in the way European languages are anyway. But I've more than once seen Chinese here in the US give up on trying to communicate in Chinese and switch to English even though neither spoke English all that well.
Great question. I used Ubuntu for a while and didn't much like it, but I think I'm one of a very small minority. Except for a few eccentrics like me, the only reason that I can think of for not using Ubuntu is that when malware starts seriously attacking Unix, it'll probably go after Ubuntu first.
You probably think you are kidding, but I personally loath vi and its evil, twisted spawn to the extent that I actually will use ed instead if ed is available.
What do I prefer to use for text editing? kwrite if the gui is available. jed if it isn't.
It's been a while, but one difference between C (e.g. Apple) and S corporations is that in C corporations profits go to the shareholders as dividends. In S corporations profits are passed through to the owner(s) as ordinary income. Both types of corporations have rules. As I recall, C corporations are required to distribute profits unless they can show a business reason for retaining them. Note that dividends are taxed twice, once at the corporate level and again at the individual level. ISTR that SMALL C corporations are warned not to avoid taxation of dividends by OVERPAYING their principles if the principles are also the only/major shareholders. That doesn't apply to large companies with many and diverse shareholders.
S corporations get the opposite warning. Don't underpay your principles to avoid payroll taxes. The actual requirement is -- as I recall -- a somewhat nebulous "reasonable salary".
It's a little hard to believe that a CPA wouldn't know that. It's not a state secret.
***I also predict that I will make the argument that open source really *isn't* always all it's cracked up to be--and be shouted down by many, many voices***
As it should be since your crystal ball apparently doesn't deliver up necessary modifiers such as 'often' or 'sometimes'. Then there is the dubious underlying assumption that closed source software actually is what it is cracked up to be.
Let's be real here. Microsoft marketing has bought itself another advertisement. I doubt anyone with a functioning brain actually believes "studies" like this any more than they believe that the proper selection of a new vehicle will instantly transport the buyer to some magically beautiful place along with at least one attractive member of the opposite sex and a picnic hamper full of great food and better beverages.
One also needs to consider the competition. George the Clueless, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Clintons (both of them!!). With about three exceptions you could distill all the moral courage, integrity, and good sense of the folks on that list into a droplet about the size of an undernourished bacteria.
Upon reviewing the list, I think there is only one conclusion. We're doomed.
I confess, I can't quite follow the discussion, but I think the issue might be something like this. You're in charge of water flow from an irrigation dam. A user orders up a million gallons of water. Said user can only accept 5000 gallons an hour. Between you and the user, there are three buffer dams, each of which can back up 10000 gallons.
You tell your highly sophisticated software to send a million gallons to user X. The HSS doesn't really know how much the user can accept every hour, so it sets off to figure out what the user can take. It starts off feeding 1000 gallons an hour. That works OK, so after 20 minutes or so, the rate is upped to 2000, then 3000... At 6000 gph, the buffers at the last dam start to fill, but no one tells you that the system is operating beyond the maximum sustainable rate. In a couple of hours, you are pumping... I dunno... maybe 20000 gal per hour.. and all of a sudden all the buffers are full and you have to cut your flow back to... well, you have absolutely no idea. So you guess and stumble and restart and... who knows. Probably your flow looks pretty weird for a while.
Not only that, but when we are discussing data, not water, we may care about how long it takes for data to go end to end (i.e. latency). It takes a long time for a tiny fish sucked in by the water flow to move all the way through the pipes and buffers to the user. Likewise bits on data paths. May not make a difference for downloading porn but it's likely to be a problem for VOIP.
Surprisingly, it looks like things like VOIP are likely to work better without all the buffers and high speed data flows.
Anyway, that's what I sort of got out of the articles. If I'm not too far off, maybe someone can clean up my model or come up with a better one and make the issue(s) clearer
***Here's a rather contrarian viewpoint about plant diversity***
For most exotics, the argument is probably more or less correct. But there are things like kudzu or Eurasian millfoil that really are a monumental PITA due, we're told, to a lack of predators to control their expansion.
***Not saying that I trust Xinhua much either but it's nice to read strangely phrased news that isn't dowsed in patriotism (their own non-international news of course drips with National pride and should not be avoided)***
Try China Daily http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/. Their international news seems reasonable, and much of their domestic news is much more critical of things in China than I would have expected. I'm sure that there are subjects they avoid and others they distort, but overall, they read much like a reasonably good western news source. Compared to Fox News or Ria Novisti they seem sort of reputable.
Right. How in the world did they determine that? Most likely, they just made up a number.
All in all, I'd say the odds favor these guys being a bunch of card-carrying charlatans who couldn't catch a cheater if he had a "C" branded on his forehead. I'll bet that their road show has some nifty Power Point slides though.
Actually, the US has more nuclear power capability per capita than most countries. See http://timeforchange.org/nuclear-power-consumption-per-capita-by-country. There are a few countries that do better, but they are countries with virtually no alternate energy sources. Which is not to say that we don't need more. I expect we'll get more, but only about a decade after environmentalists discover that flipping on the light switch only works if you have a reasonable power generation infrastructure on the other end of the wire. There seems to be no more point in arguing with them than in arguing with the disciples of any other revealed religion. I think most folks who have looked into the issue think that the problem is not whether we need more nuclear power. It is how to provide it with minimal environmental problems and maximum safety.
***we can't just halt all progress forever more unless all new inventions can be deemed 100% safe from either ?***
This, however, is likely to be more motion than progress. How, exactly, do folks get to these pocket airports and from their destination airport to someplace else? If the answer is "public transportation", what advantage do the pocket airports have over current infrastructure? Why not just fly these remarkable fuel efficient craft out of existing small airports?
This doesn't look to be everyman's flying car.
And it probably doesn't really matter, because I very much doubt these things can be designed and built using current or forseeable technology.
***If you want your computer to do anything outside what Google had in mind, you're done. If Google gets hacked, your data gets hacked and you might never know about it***
Too Right. But if you expect this cloud concept to work, maybe it's how things are going to have to work. Realistically, I don't see how one can leave their personal and especially financial data on someone else's server without fullproof encryption and/or Operating Systems that are far more secure than Windows and Unix are or are ever likely to be.
I think the biggest problem would be a quake that took out a number of Mississippi or Missouri River bridges. Other than that even earthquake prone California and Japan have had few earthquake related agricultural problems.
I'm not much interested in geology, but I'm very interested in paleontology and you can't do much paleo without reading a lot of geological papers. I was not terribly pleased with the article which seemed kind of hazily optimistic to me. Even more so after checking recorded quakes and finding eight in California in the last century strong enough to do a major damage and in most cases result in fatalities. Using the article's own numbers (ten times as likely in California), it would appear that the chance of a significant earthquake (6.4 or greater) in the Middle West in any given year might be about 1 in 130 give or take a bit.
To my mind, that is sufficient risk to call for building to California earthquake codes -- and to worry a lot about how much unreinforced masonry construction might be siting around in the region... an accident waiting to happen as it were.
***They are all under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security whose core mission is to annoy, harass, and humiliate law-abiding citizens while letting the crooks slip through the cracks. ***
Very dubious. The DHS clownshow shows little sign of being competent enough to identify crooks well enough to let them through. Sleep well tonight, terrorists have exactly the same chance of being harassed by the DHS as anyone else.
Except that China already has the capacity to design and build modern aircraft -- acquired from the US, Europe and the Russians. And, no, it won't take them 10-15 years to come up to speed. It might take them 15 years to be regarded as a serious competitor worldwide, but their first sales will surely be domestic. COMAC is scheduled to deliver a Regional airliner ARJ21 in volume next year. The first three planes have already been flown.
COMAC's Boeing-737/Airbus-320 entry the 919 is planned for 2016 delivery.
***Well, it was in a way, AV software is a braindead solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. Use only properly signed software from trusted sources in a secure platform, that's a real solution.***
Uh, Yeah.... Of Course.
Now that you have solved that problem for us, what are you going to tackle next? World Peace? Finding economists who understand economics? Keeping sociopaths out of political office?
You do understand that the trusted sources solution is utterly impractical once you allow access outside of a closed, rigidly controlled, local network, right?
***What do you suggest as an alternative? Remember, people have grown to expect real-time protection.***
Good question. In this case a disable network-virus scan-backup-re-enable network scheme without real-time protection might have worked better, but it is hardly bulletproof. It's a little late to point out that it would have been better to have alternating external backup drives -- more to protect against hardware failure than software issues. And that won't work if you don't know the backup drive has been trashed. You won't notice until both are trashed. And of course nothing protects against zero-day exploits.
I don't have an answer other than unplug the network cable. Or go back to 1980 and try again with a lot less clever and a LOT more secure so that viruses become impossible. Or both.
***Is Oracle trying to pull a SCO here? (i.e. it does something like what our code does, therefore it's ours).***
Lawsuits are written by lawyers. Being a lawyer means that you don't actually need to know what you are talking about, you just need to sound like you do.
I agree, that this stuff other than indenting, comments, layout probably is not copyrightable. My understanding is that basically, you can not copyright the only way to express something.
I'm in no way shape or form a lawyer. Does formulating this in the way they have give Oracle access to the Google code to see if the code was in fact copied byte for byte from Oracle rather than simply implementing the same externally interface?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm possibly the only living entity in North America who doesn't have the slightest idea what Jersey Shore is (other than a town in central Pennsylvania a few kilometers South of Williamsport.) I hope to keep it that way.
They are fossils OF a beach, not fossils ON a beach -- More specifically what appear to be fossil remains of microbes that lived in beach sand.
Not that it's relevant, but there seem to be a lot of dialects of Chinese and apparently not all are mutually comprehensible. I assume that all the dialects can be expressed in the same written language -- which isn't phonetic in the way European languages are anyway. But I've more than once seen Chinese here in the US give up on trying to communicate in Chinese and switch to English even though neither spoke English all that well.
***Since when is Ubuntu the 'bad linux'?***
Great question. I used Ubuntu for a while and didn't much like it, but I think I'm one of a very small minority. Except for a few eccentrics like me, the only reason that I can think of for not using Ubuntu is that when malware starts seriously attacking Unix, it'll probably go after Ubuntu first.
You probably think you are kidding, but I personally loath vi and its evil, twisted spawn to the extent that I actually will use ed instead if ed is available.
What do I prefer to use for text editing? kwrite if the gui is available. jed if it isn't.
It's been a while, but one difference between C (e.g. Apple) and S corporations is that in C corporations profits go to the shareholders as dividends. In S corporations profits are passed through to the owner(s) as ordinary income. Both types of corporations have rules. As I recall, C corporations are required to distribute profits unless they can show a business reason for retaining them. Note that dividends are taxed twice, once at the corporate level and again at the individual level. ISTR that SMALL C corporations are warned not to avoid taxation of dividends by OVERPAYING their principles if the principles are also the only/major shareholders. That doesn't apply to large companies with many and diverse shareholders.
S corporations get the opposite warning. Don't underpay your principles to avoid payroll taxes. The actual requirement is -- as I recall -- a somewhat nebulous "reasonable salary".
It's a little hard to believe that a CPA wouldn't know that. It's not a state secret.
Google Gilbert and Sullivan Pirates of Penzance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Major-General.27s_Song
***I also predict that I will make the argument that open source really *isn't* always all it's cracked up to be--and be shouted down by many, many voices***
As it should be since your crystal ball apparently doesn't deliver up necessary modifiers such as 'often' or 'sometimes'. Then there is the dubious underlying assumption that closed source software actually is what it is cracked up to be.
Let's be real here. Microsoft marketing has bought itself another advertisement. I doubt anyone with a functioning brain actually believes "studies" like this any more than they believe that the proper selection of a new vehicle will instantly transport the buyer to some magically beautiful place along with at least one attractive member of the opposite sex and a picnic hamper full of great food and better beverages.
One also needs to consider the competition. George the Clueless, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Clintons (both of them!!). With about three exceptions you could distill all the moral courage, integrity, and good sense of the folks on that list into a droplet about the size of an undernourished bacteria.
Upon reviewing the list, I think there is only one conclusion. We're doomed.
I confess, I can't quite follow the discussion, but I think the issue might be something like this. You're in charge of water flow from an irrigation dam. A user orders up a million gallons of water. Said user can only accept 5000 gallons an hour. Between you and the user, there are three buffer dams, each of which can back up 10000 gallons.
You tell your highly sophisticated software to send a million gallons to user X. The HSS doesn't really know how much the user can accept every hour, so it sets off to figure out what the user can take. It starts off feeding 1000 gallons an hour. That works OK, so after 20 minutes or so, the rate is upped to 2000, then 3000 ... At 6000 gph, the buffers at the last dam start to fill, but no one tells you that the system is operating beyond the maximum sustainable rate. In a couple of hours, you are pumping ... I dunno ... maybe 20000 gal per hour .. and all of a sudden all the buffers are full and you have to cut your flow back to ... well, you have absolutely no idea. So you guess and stumble and restart and ... who knows. Probably your flow looks pretty weird for a while.
Not only that, but when we are discussing data, not water, we may care about how long it takes for data to go end to end (i.e. latency). It takes a long time for a tiny fish sucked in by the water flow to move all the way through the pipes and buffers to the user. Likewise bits on data paths. May not make a difference for downloading porn but it's likely to be a problem for VOIP.
Surprisingly, it looks like things like VOIP are likely to work better without all the buffers and high speed data flows.
Anyway, that's what I sort of got out of the articles. If I'm not too far off, maybe someone can clean up my model or come up with a better one and make the issue(s) clearer
***Here's a rather contrarian viewpoint about plant diversity***
For most exotics, the argument is probably more or less correct. But there are things like kudzu or Eurasian millfoil that really are a monumental PITA due, we're told, to a lack of predators to control their expansion.
***Not saying that I trust Xinhua much either but it's nice to read strangely phrased news that isn't dowsed in patriotism (their own non-international news of course drips with National pride and should not be avoided)***
Try China Daily http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/. Their international news seems reasonable, and much of their domestic news is much more critical of things in China than I would have expected. I'm sure that there are subjects they avoid and others they distort, but overall, they read much like a reasonably good western news source. Compared to Fox News or Ria Novisti they seem sort of reputable.
***cheating has declined about 70 percent***
Right. How in the world did they determine that? Most likely, they just made up a number.
All in all, I'd say the odds favor these guys being a bunch of card-carrying charlatans who couldn't catch a cheater if he had a "C" branded on his forehead. I'll bet that their road show has some nifty Power Point slides though.
***Where are our nuclear power stations?***
Actually, the US has more nuclear power capability per capita than most countries. See http://timeforchange.org/nuclear-power-consumption-per-capita-by-country. There are a few countries that do better, but they are countries with virtually no alternate energy sources. Which is not to say that we don't need more. I expect we'll get more, but only about a decade after environmentalists discover that flipping on the light switch only works if you have a reasonable power generation infrastructure on the other end of the wire. There seems to be no more point in arguing with them than in arguing with the disciples of any other revealed religion. I think most folks who have looked into the issue think that the problem is not whether we need more nuclear power. It is how to provide it with minimal environmental problems and maximum safety.
***we can't just halt all progress forever more unless all new inventions can be deemed 100% safe from either ?***
This, however, is likely to be more motion than progress. How, exactly, do folks get to these pocket airports and from their destination airport to someplace else? If the answer is "public transportation", what advantage do the pocket airports have over current infrastructure? Why not just fly these remarkable fuel efficient craft out of existing small airports?
This doesn't look to be everyman's flying car.
And it probably doesn't really matter, because I very much doubt these things can be designed and built using current or forseeable technology.
***If you want your computer to do anything outside what Google had in mind, you're done. If Google gets hacked, your data gets hacked and you might never know about it***
Too Right. But if you expect this cloud concept to work, maybe it's how things are going to have to work. Realistically, I don't see how one can leave their personal and especially financial data on someone else's server without fullproof encryption and/or Operating Systems that are far more secure than Windows and Unix are or are ever likely to be.
I think the biggest problem would be a quake that took out a number of Mississippi or Missouri River bridges. Other than that even earthquake prone California and Japan have had few earthquake related agricultural problems.
Thanks. Sounds much more correct to me.
I'm not much interested in geology, but I'm very interested in paleontology and you can't do much paleo without reading a lot of geological papers. I was not terribly pleased with the article which seemed kind of hazily optimistic to me. Even more so after checking recorded quakes and finding eight in California in the last century strong enough to do a major damage and in most cases result in fatalities. Using the article's own numbers (ten times as likely in California), it would appear that the chance of a significant earthquake (6.4 or greater) in the Middle West in any given year might be about 1 in 130 give or take a bit.
To my mind, that is sufficient risk to call for building to California earthquake codes -- and to worry a lot about how much unreinforced masonry construction might be siting around in the region ... an accident waiting to happen as it were.
***Couldn't a complete lack of movement indicate the area is tightly locked up and it is going to break even more violently?***
Short answer: Yes
Twenty people? Talk to each and every one of them about what THEY need. Then, and only then, worry about IT infrastructure.
***They are all under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security whose core mission is to annoy, harass, and humiliate law-abiding citizens while letting the crooks slip through the cracks. ***
Very dubious. The DHS clownshow shows little sign of being competent enough to identify crooks well enough to let them through. Sleep well tonight, terrorists have exactly the same chance of being harassed by the DHS as anyone else.
Except that China already has the capacity to design and build modern aircraft -- acquired from the US, Europe and the Russians. And, no, it won't take them 10-15 years to come up to speed. It might take them 15 years to be regarded as a serious competitor worldwide, but their first sales will surely be domestic. COMAC is scheduled to deliver a Regional airliner ARJ21 in volume next year. The first three planes have already been flown.
COMAC's Boeing-737/Airbus-320 entry the 919 is planned for 2016 delivery.
http://www.flightglobal.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=167&tag=ARJ21&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=167
***Well, it was in a way, AV software is a braindead solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. Use only properly signed software from trusted sources in a secure platform, that's a real solution.***
Uh, Yeah. ... Of Course.
Now that you have solved that problem for us, what are you going to tackle next? World Peace? Finding economists who understand economics? Keeping sociopaths out of political office?
You do understand that the trusted sources solution is utterly impractical once you allow access outside of a closed, rigidly controlled, local network, right?
***What do you suggest as an alternative? Remember, people have grown to expect real-time protection.***
Good question. In this case a disable network-virus scan-backup-re-enable network scheme without real-time protection might have worked better, but it is hardly bulletproof. It's a little late to point out that it would have been better to have alternating external backup drives -- more to protect against hardware failure than software issues. And that won't work if you don't know the backup drive has been trashed. You won't notice until both are trashed. And of course nothing protects against zero-day exploits.
I don't have an answer other than unplug the network cable. Or go back to 1980 and try again with a lot less clever and a LOT more secure so that viruses become impossible. Or both.
***Is Oracle trying to pull a SCO here? (i.e. it does something like what our code does, therefore it's ours).***
Lawsuits are written by lawyers. Being a lawyer means that you don't actually need to know what you are talking about, you just need to sound like you do.
I agree, that this stuff other than indenting, comments, layout probably is not copyrightable. My understanding is that basically, you can not copyright the only way to express something.
I'm in no way shape or form a lawyer. Does formulating this in the way they have give Oracle access to the Google code to see if the code was in fact copied byte for byte from Oracle rather than simply implementing the same externally interface?