I'm about 1/4 of the way through the NKS book and I find it absolutely fascinating. It "inspired" me to create some basic 2-color nearest-neighbor automata (you can get through university without studying this sort of thing, btw (!)) and I found the material very approachably written. I'm sure you could cover the material with far fewer pages if you expected the reader to have pencil/paper (or a debugger?), and didn't have so many pretty images, but i thought that the comparison of automata-generated shells to actual aquatic life was the most damning evidence that what wolfram was postulating was fundamentally worth thinking about.
That he may or may not be the first person to suggest anything in his book is not interesting to me; that his book was cheap enough (i got it about a year ago at a bargain table) and accessible enough (it's in my "bathroom reading" shelf) that I'm thinking and learning things I otherwise wouldn't be makes it sufficiently valuable IMO.
Efforts to cast the book as some renegade peice of science that "conventional academia" won't publish are mostly drama. The guy's writing style is a bit dramatic at times (i seem to recall him using the same linking phrase to go from "thing that sounds implausible" to "i think it's actually true" in nearly every section of every chapter.) but that doesn't get in the way of it being a read that makes me think about it for hours after i've put it down.
Why would you assume that quality isn't a self-selecting virtue in the marketplace?
While it may be that many customers might prefer lower quality products than what the guild members might provide, I don't see how that is intrinsically wrong.
Essentially the behavior of such a guild would be "we'd rather you not have this at all rather than you ahve a lesser quality version of it"
It's hard for me to see this line of thinking coming out of altruistic concern for the well being of the customer...
There are a wide number of price/quality trade-points that a market can sustain. But there are only a few price/quality trade-points that incumbent providers can sustain profitably.
Regulatory agencies in the US are always the same. I've never seen the victim of a shoddy plumber demanding that plumbers must be licensed and regulated (by other incumbent plumbers, of course). But I see plenty of plumbers, teachers, doctors, and so on suggesting legal means to limit who can or cannot engage in their chosen profession. I fully concede that plumbers probably have a good idea of who does or doesn't do a good job plumbing, but that doesn't adddress the inherent conflict of interest, and the reality that it is always the incumbents and rarely the "consumers" that ask for regulation.
is it me or has the country, government and bureaucracy turned from a tool to protect citizens against exploitative practices of companies into a tool ensuring that large companies won't have to worry about competition?
The government has done what it has always done -- it's allowed those who hold influence to manipulate the rules to the disadvantage of those that don't hold influence.
A problem in early mercantile europe was the establishment of craft/skill/trade guilds. Normally this sort of thing isn't a problem, except that the guild leaders got the governments of each town to back them, allowing them to enforce exclusivity rules, tariffs, and so on. This was great for the guild members and bad for the non-members. It protected the incumbents and shut out innovation. Generally this is bad for the population over-all (competition fosters progress and lowers prices, generally)
Businesses, in general, have more money to throw at politicians, and are more sensible "investors" in politicians.
It would be inaccurate to describe our government as "pro-business" or "pandering to business". The left hand taxes businesses with one of the highest business tax rates _in the world_. The legal climate here (massive settlements against companies), the "windfall profit" type laws, the backdoor legislation-via-regulation... all of these are ostensibly anti-business. But the more nefarious situations are anti-most-business, but pro-incumbent. So while on one hand, we make it pretty difficult to run a business in this country, on the other, we make it really easy for _certain_ businesses to get filthy rich via government manipulation in the market.
There is such an abundance of crappy customer service out there you would think that any company that provides outstanding (or even reasonable) customer service could steal the market.
You'd think that, but then you'd wake up and realize that the government red tape involved in running something like a cable company is of such epic proportions that there is no competition whatsoever, and no possible entry into the market.
Want to start a wireless TV service? Sorry -- the FCC -- bought and paid for by incumbent businesses -- says no thanks.
The cable, telco, and wireless co's in this country are so fucking awful because they have no real competition, due entirely to government favoritism and regulation.
We either need an overbearing accountable regulatory body, or we need none at all and a truly open market. What we have is the worst of both -- an over regulated UNACCOUNTABLE body, staffed by the hand chosen flunkies of whatever politician or company-man (who are usually one in the same) is working on getting somewhere on the backs of others.
Our government is the cause of essentially every problem we face societally, as it is the only instrument that limits ultimate choice -- by gunpoint if necessary.
My newegg order just showed up last nite. I wanted a machine that was as silent as possible, so I got an AMD BE2350 (the 45W TDP dual core Athlon @ 2.1ghz), an MSI k9 platinum (heatpipe cooling for the chipset), and a Gigabyte "silent-pipe" 8600 GT card.
For a power supply i got a seasonic 330w S12 (variable speed ballbearing fan).
My computer is entirely fanless except for the stock AMD CPU fan and the Seasonic power supply fan. There's not even a case fan. System and CPU temps seem to be stable around 40C.
My vista "index" is 5.0, with the 5.0 being the lowest number and coming from the CPU.
I wanted a really quiet machine. That meant eliminating fans. That meant buying energy efficient parts (the CPU and the Seasonic PS are both spendier than equivalent parts that don't stick to a tighter energy budget). But the machine _is_ quiet. I've got a kill-a-watt at home that I haven't tried out yet but I hope to see less than 100w of consumption. My old socket 754 machine is 5w sleep, ~100w booted but idle.
I'm also going to be consolidating my "always-on" applications (file serving, possibly BT) onto a Windows home server machine so that i can have my other boxes power-save as much as possible without any real service interruption. Having a few songs here, a few videos there, etc means that I can't keep the majority of machines sleeping the majority of the time (WOL is pretty spotty IMO.. if you configure WOL such that a machine "can" wake, it usually will stay awake from other network noise)
One of the other things i bought with this order was a new UPS. Sticking to a smaller power budget has other interesting effects -- like you can get away with a smaller (and cheaper) UPS to get the same amount of uptime.
You are absolutely spot on. Want to know something else?
What do Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela have in common? (besides being the subject of US animosity, chest-thumping, invasion, and a coup-attempt?)
They threatened to sell oil in Euros.
The reason Ron Paul is always talking about the Fed like he's some kind of nutcase is NOT because he's some kind of nutcase. It's because the Fed is the bouncer at "I want to run the planet" club. Want to go running all over the world invading countries? No problem when you can just print all the money you want with no accountability.
Once the dollar jumped off of the gold standard, the only thing propping up the dollar was the threat of military action by the US. That's very uncomfortable, so some folks wisely decided to use the world oil market as an intermediary. The dollar is supported by oil; oil is supported by military might. Any crack in US control of world oil is a crack in the dollar, and thus, the US economy.
The entire history of state-managed currency shows a steady trend of the ruling entity devaluing the currency to persue wars or other ambitions not generally related to the well being of society, with the obvious result that the citizenry become measurably worse off.
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
are you aware of any incidents involving colonists in 1776 blowing up markets full of children?
I'm pretty sure nothing of the sort happened, but i'm willing to hear evidence to the contrary.
Those were greatly less "evolved" times, and yet, my impression is that those at the forefront of political dissent were vastly more humane in spreading their message.
in the Microsoft platform that many people never see or think about. We end up making extensive use of them for automated testing, actually.
It turns out that the same sort of API that makes it easier to build accessible products, whereby you can ask any UI element about its current visibility, text, or whatever, is also good for writing test automation. When you couple that with the ability to send windows events or messages to an arbitrary control, now you've got something foundational for doing automated UI testing in a pretty robust way.
Internally we work pretty hard on accessibility features because they're great for enabling users with different adaptive needs, they're required to sell to many government offices, and because they're excellent for our internal testing efforts.
One of the things that "The Laughing Man" did in the GITS TV series was that he could hack video feeds in near-real-time. On one occasion he ghost-hacked someone's cybernetic eyes and became effectively invisible. More commonly, he would simultaneously hack all of the security cameras in a public place and overlay this funny "animated gif" over the top of his head to conceal his identity.
Nobody could figure out who he was because nobody had ever actually "seen" him.
Many video cameras now transmit mjpeg or mpeg-4 over http instead of an NTSC video signal down coax.
We keep getting closer to the level of pervasive internet connectivity and dependance that is the foundation of the GITS world. One could imagine a list of things required both technically and societally to get us from "here" to "there", and the list is always getting shorter a bit sooner than I'd expect.
Some network drivers had DPCs that took too long to run, leading to choppy playback while the network took more time than it should have.
You may have noticed that Windows machines do not have the luxury of bug free device drivers. The majority of bluescreens since NT4 have been caused by 3rd party kernel-mode code (video drivers, IFSs, etc). The push to go user-mode on as much of the 3rd party code as possible isn't accidental.
My understanding is that in Vista, this particular tradeoff was made to attempt to avoid something everyone would notice (a skip during audio playback) for something very few people would notice (slightly reduced network performance while listening to music).
Well, I think I've got a pretty good handle on the scientific method.
Where I come up blank, and why I posted in the first place, is figuring out how some people that seem NOT to (hint: they don't have reproducible experiments in many cases, they often don't share their data or their methods publicly, etc) seem to get a pass from the community at large, because somehow there is "consensus".
I'm speaking, of course, about the anthropomorphic global warming doomsday folks.
Wait -- I thought when there was scientific "consensus", continuing to do more research, investigation, and to continue question the prevailing assumptions was unnecessary and sign of an unhealthy "denialist"
Can someone help me understand which theories are sacrosanct and which ones are still open for discussion? It's getting hard for me to keep track..
Just like scientific advancements and knowledge in general are available to anyone, anywhere, so should be open source software. It's a principles thing.
Idealistically, I agree with you. However, in reality, principles can be expensive. If this weren't code for a UAV, and was instead design documents for some sort of easy-to-make breifcase sized nuke... I don't think I'd be singing the "there are no borders, just hugs" song.
The current government of Iran might make living some of the principles you hold dear extremely difficult. Want to be openly homosexual? What about the right to a fair trial if you are raped? Want to have some protections against being murdered by your male family members? What about the freedom to wear jeans in public?
The US has its own difficulties, but if you are talking about being principled and not getting stoned for it (or whatever barbaric shit they're doing), the US is probably a better bet than Iran.
I'm not asking you to buy the rhetoric of Bush or anybody else, but I am asking you to be realistic. There are a lot of foreign governments that wouldn't mind ousting the current presidency, legislature, and constitution, and replacing it with something you and I would find a whole lot less agreeable.
I'm glad the West got ahold of some of the top talent of Germany and _didn't_ openly share the scientific knowledge with Hitler. The result of idealistic openness and knowledge sharing in that situation would have been devastating to the course of human history.
I was going to make approximately this post just the other day on slashdot, as part of a completely different story.
Why did we bother winning the cold war? Was it so our own government could take 100% of the credit for destroying America instead of having to share it with a nuclear armed enemy?
Email and IM are the tools of choice at work. The crappy voip phones in our office use meridian mail, which I can only surmise was designed as an enormous practical joke on how to make someone quit their job merely over the tools instead of anything strictly job related... and which was accidentally shipped.
Our phones have this big red light on them when you have a voice mail waiting. Since somebody setup Meridian to ask you for a new voice mail password (one you've not used recently) every... what is it, 6 minutes?.. and since someone leaves me a voice mail once every 6 months.. invariably that light would come on and i'd have no way of getting it to shut off. Well, eventually I just unplugged my phone for a while and luckliy, when I moved desks and plugged it in, the light was gone. Now when people call me and try to leave voice mail, they get this horrible message saying this user hasn't setup their voice mail. Say it along with me in your best mortal combat announcer voice: "Flawless Victory!"
In any case, my phone is effectively a 1 way device. I use it to make non-work-related calls, or to dial into conference calls that aren't using pc/ip based audio streaming.
I'd like to dump the phone altogether and use a soft phone that integrates with an IM client. If I'm sitting at my laptop, we can communicate, and chances are, you'll try IM first.
BMW has been building hyrdrogen powered 7 series cars for over 20 years. This is just the latest generation. They're HCE (hydrogen combustion engine) cars.. not fuel cells, like most Hyrdrogen research. The engines are also duel fuel - gas OR hydrogen.
Given that the biggest challenge with hydrogen is keeping it cold, maybe they cars will do _great_ in our ND winters:) But even if they didn't, you can run them as a gasoline only engine. My experience is that german iron works much better here than american stuff even... my 20 year old Audi was parked outside all winter and doesn't have any kind of block heater.. it would start up in -30F temps. Most older american and japanese cars here have electrical plugs hanging out of the grille. People grew up using block heaters and with my older german cars its just unnecessary.
As I understand it, in most states, your primary residence can not be seized from you even if you declare bankruptcy.
One aspect that might make this sticky is if all your liquid capital is seized and you default on your mortgage. But then again, a mortgage default is always a risk anyhow.
Unless you're referring to a slow war of attrition against civil liberties and the constitution by CAIR and other pro-radical Islam agencies here in the US, then, no, I'd say nothing of the sort is happening.
I think you overstate Mill's interest in true freedom. As near as I can tell, free market and individual liberty are instruments for advanacing society, which is his ultimate purpose, and where those mechanisms are not sufficient or optimal, he is happy to dispense with them unceremoniously. Nevermind that by the time of his death, much of his position could be called outright socialism. While the quote he gets attention for (over ones self, the individual reigns supreme, roughly) is indeed a good one, obviously that's not the entirety of his message.
Mill himself was not publicly educated, and infact, given the hardship he endured from his child education, one wonders if he's got a bit of a reactinoary criticism of home school, which a the time, was the norm, while public education was something entirely less common.
Irrespective of Mill's opinion, the overwhelming body of evidence in the US is that homeschooling has nothing but significant advanatages for the students it produces.
Finally, on your point of indoctrination. Indoctrination by the state of the masses (i.e. public education) must necessarily be worse than indoctrination of an individual or two by one "errant" family members. I see no intrinsic value in limiting fundamentalist christians teaching their own children. That you assume public education would completely defeat fundamentalist indoctrination suggests that you have an irrational fear of Christians, as opposed to any real understanding of their concerns, and that you overstate the effectiveness of public education.
Your allusion to the 30 years war being a result of Christian fundamentalist home schooling is... curious. Public education was non-existant in much of the US until the early 1900s, and we certainly had more religious denominations intermigling here than centrla Europe did. Why was the US not destroyed by religiously motivated civil war?
In any case, it is precisely because I was publicly educated that I am adamant that I have legally protected alternatives for my own child. Not because I was shrouded in some sort of religious ignorance (far from it, infact).
A student of history is well advised to be fearful of religious fundamentalism and where it may lead. A wiser student of history is even better advised to be even more fearful of state fundamentalism and power, and where it ALWAYS leads.
Certainly Canada has some advantages... its not too far to visit relatives in the US, and unless you're dealing with quebec sepratists, there's not much of a language barrier.
However, Canada has some strange things like a blank media tax, and some upsetting free speech concerns. Something comes to mind about it being a hate crime in Canada for a pastor to state that they think homosexuality is sinful/immoral. I don't tend to concern myself with the morality of other peoples sexuality, but I concern myself a lot with what the government says I can and cannot say. Although just this week a kid in the US has been charged with 2 felony hate crimes for flushing Qurans in the toilet of his college.. so apparently the US is just as bad now.
I have taken a trip to Montreal and the women are fantastic looking (although now that I'm married, that's not quite the draw it might have once been), and they have their own F1 GP there, which simply has to be a better experience than going to the US GP in Indianpolis, because Montreal is in all manners a less awful place than Indianpolis.
The canadians I've met have all had two things in common. 1) They're funny. 2) They're laid back. I could do with more of those sorts of people, honestly.
Problem is, I can't think of where I'd rather live, all things considered.
What's crazy is that everyone else thinks the US is too far to the "right", too "wild west", what with all our guns and remains of a laizee faire economy. Me? I'd like more guns, fewer laws, more open trade, no more tariffs or subsidies.
I certainly like that Germany makes the worlds finest cars, has excellent public transit, fantastic roads, beautiful architecture and countryside, and makes lots of smart people. But they're a step in the wrong direction in many of the freedoms I care about.
For instance, in Germany home schooling is illegal, so I can't very well live there because as much as I dislike the amount of school choice available to me here in the US, I get even less of it in Germany. Even if the choices might be quite a bit better than what I have here, the only choice that I really need ("No thanks, I'll indoctrinate my child MY way instead of letting you indoctrinate him YOUR way") is unavailable to me.
If there were somewhere that truly had more individual freedoms than the US, I'd think pretty carefully about moving there. Freedoms meaning "free from having to do things the way other people tell you to do them".
If I had any say in running the US, things would be different. I'd let as many brilliant people into my country as we had room for, (which would attract more brilliant people, who are good at making more room!). But, I don't have any say. Libertarians have no voice in American politics, and America is growing the hydra heads of big government that pushed many people away from Europe in the first place... and yet we're coming up with some of our own unique stupidity that makes the mix that much more sour.
So if you've got any suggestions on places to live that respect individual liberty, let me hear em. I'm happy to contribute my talents to whomever will unshackle me to do my best work and live my life to the fullset.
I'm a UNL CS/Math, class of 2000 grad.. one of the last years before the JDE program.
What I liked was how far everyones dollars went at UNL. UNL was very affordable for me, and as someone that worked on the ~3 person UNL CS IT team under Charles Daniel (is he still there?), we kept a lot of old/cheap stuff running and doing useful work for a very long time. UNL was great because you could get as good of an education as you were willing to work for, with excellent faculty and sufficient resources.
I know what some of the profs were making back at the time (I found a UNL salary PDF file) and it was big money for Lincoln, Nebraska. I can understand the need to subsidize those high costs with increased revenue from students. OTOH, why would you set it up so that scholarships weren't applicable?
Your comment about the cross-department collaboration and resource sharing is a real shame.
At the time I was a student, UNL had the largest alumni giving of any non-Ivy school in the US. I wonder if that's still true?
I can't verify the information, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if it were true.
I _love_ the Ribbon UI in 2007 and think its a huge step forward. I'm a casual user of all the office apps -- I write proposals in word, technical presentations in power point, and i do data analysis / visualization in excel. I don't do _any_ of these for my day in / day out work -- i'm in software engineering. If you were someone that worked in word day in, day out, every day, and you needed to be "Trained" on how to use word to acheive a specific function, well yeah, the ribbon re-arranges all of the things that felt comfortable to you. I can understand being mad about that, but come on.. we're human beings. Aren't we supposed to be adaptable?
In any case, I'll compare a few tasks that I do commonly between Word 2003 and the Ribbon UI
Word: I am starting a new section of a document, and want to make the section header a different font. (something like \subsection{Justification} in TeX/LaTeX) Ok, in Word 2003, i needed to highlight the text, and then pick the font / font size that i had used previously. Which one did i use previously? Hrmm.. let me click on one of the other sections i want this one to look like and see what hte font settings change to. Oh? is there a copy font on the right lick menu here? No? Hrmm, i'll have to remember it. Now i go back to the text i wanted t ochange, re-highlight it, and then set the font properly.
Word 2007: I've finished typing the section header. Now, I mouse over the styles in the "styles" box on the Home tab of the ribbon. As I mouse over each one, the text is dynamically updated to that font / style. When it looks like the one i want (assuming i dont remember that i liked "Header 2" and just click on it directly), I click.
The difference for me between these two experiences is night and day different. I spend less time screwing with formatting and fonts and other stupid shit, and just say "i want this to be a header 2" and it looks right (honestly, its a bit more like the TeX/LaTeX usage model that I grew up using and prefer)
Another one is in Excel. I want to make a 3 series line plot in a worksheet. Ok, i can highlight the 3 different sets of cells. In Excel 2003, i can go throught he chart wizard and try to remember which style is what, etc. Or in 2007, I just click on the chart style i want directly from the ribbon.
The ribbon UI is great. We've re-implemented something similar in the product I'm working on. It elegantly solves the problems of discoverability, cascading levels of importance, and toolbar/function overcrowding. It also looks shiny, which, when you get down to it, makes a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm about 1/4 of the way through the NKS book and I find it absolutely fascinating. It "inspired" me to create some basic 2-color nearest-neighbor automata (you can get through university without studying this sort of thing, btw (!)) and I found the material very approachably written. I'm sure you could cover the material with far fewer pages if you expected the reader to have pencil/paper (or a debugger?), and didn't have so many pretty images, but i thought that the comparison of automata-generated shells to actual aquatic life was the most damning evidence that what wolfram was postulating was fundamentally worth thinking about.
That he may or may not be the first person to suggest anything in his book is not interesting to me; that his book was cheap enough (i got it about a year ago at a bargain table) and accessible enough (it's in my "bathroom reading" shelf) that I'm thinking and learning things I otherwise wouldn't be makes it sufficiently valuable IMO.
Efforts to cast the book as some renegade peice of science that "conventional academia" won't publish are mostly drama. The guy's writing style is a bit dramatic at times (i seem to recall him using the same linking phrase to go from "thing that sounds implausible" to "i think it's actually true" in nearly every section of every chapter.) but that doesn't get in the way of it being a read that makes me think about it for hours after i've put it down.
Why would you assume that quality isn't a self-selecting virtue in the marketplace?
While it may be that many customers might prefer lower quality products than what the guild members might provide, I don't see how that is intrinsically wrong.
Essentially the behavior of such a guild would be "we'd rather you not have this at all rather than you ahve a lesser quality version of it"
It's hard for me to see this line of thinking coming out of altruistic concern for the well being of the customer...
There are a wide number of price/quality trade-points that a market can sustain. But there are only a few price/quality trade-points that incumbent providers can sustain profitably.
Regulatory agencies in the US are always the same. I've never seen the victim of a shoddy plumber demanding that plumbers must be licensed and regulated (by other incumbent plumbers, of course). But I see plenty of plumbers, teachers, doctors, and so on suggesting legal means to limit who can or cannot engage in their chosen profession. I fully concede that plumbers probably have a good idea of who does or doesn't do a good job plumbing, but that doesn't adddress the inherent conflict of interest, and the reality that it is always the incumbents and rarely the "consumers" that ask for regulation.
The government has done what it has always done -- it's allowed those who hold influence to manipulate the rules to the disadvantage of those that don't hold influence.
A problem in early mercantile europe was the establishment of craft/skill/trade guilds. Normally this sort of thing isn't a problem, except that the guild leaders got the governments of each town to back them, allowing them to enforce exclusivity rules, tariffs, and so on. This was great for the guild members and bad for the non-members. It protected the incumbents and shut out innovation. Generally this is bad for the population over-all (competition fosters progress and lowers prices, generally)
Businesses, in general, have more money to throw at politicians, and are more sensible "investors" in politicians.
It would be inaccurate to describe our government as "pro-business" or "pandering to business". The left hand taxes businesses with one of the highest business tax rates _in the world_. The legal climate here (massive settlements against companies), the "windfall profit" type laws, the backdoor legislation-via-regulation... all of these are ostensibly anti-business. But the more nefarious situations are anti-most-business, but pro-incumbent. So while on one hand, we make it pretty difficult to run a business in this country, on the other, we make it really easy for _certain_ businesses to get filthy rich via government manipulation in the market.
You'd think that, but then you'd wake up and realize that the government red tape involved in running something like a cable company is of such epic proportions that there is no competition whatsoever, and no possible entry into the market.
Want to start a wireless TV service? Sorry -- the FCC -- bought and paid for by incumbent businesses -- says no thanks.
The cable, telco, and wireless co's in this country are so fucking awful because they have no real competition, due entirely to government favoritism and regulation.
We either need an overbearing accountable regulatory body, or we need none at all and a truly open market. What we have is the worst of both -- an over regulated UNACCOUNTABLE body, staffed by the hand chosen flunkies of whatever politician or company-man (who are usually one in the same) is working on getting somewhere on the backs of others.
Our government is the cause of essentially every problem we face societally, as it is the only instrument that limits ultimate choice -- by gunpoint if necessary.
My newegg order just showed up last nite. I wanted a machine that was as silent as possible, so I got an AMD BE2350 (the 45W TDP dual core Athlon @ 2.1ghz), an MSI k9 platinum (heatpipe cooling for the chipset), and a Gigabyte "silent-pipe" 8600 GT card.
For a power supply i got a seasonic 330w S12 (variable speed ballbearing fan).
My computer is entirely fanless except for the stock AMD CPU fan and the Seasonic power supply fan. There's not even a case fan. System and CPU temps seem to be stable around 40C.
My vista "index" is 5.0, with the 5.0 being the lowest number and coming from the CPU.
I wanted a really quiet machine. That meant eliminating fans. That meant buying energy efficient parts (the CPU and the Seasonic PS are both spendier than equivalent parts that don't stick to a tighter energy budget). But the machine _is_ quiet. I've got a kill-a-watt at home that I haven't tried out yet but I hope to see less than 100w of consumption. My old socket 754 machine is 5w sleep, ~100w booted but idle.
I'm also going to be consolidating my "always-on" applications (file serving, possibly BT) onto a Windows home server machine so that i can have my other boxes power-save as much as possible without any real service interruption. Having a few songs here, a few videos there, etc means that I can't keep the majority of machines sleeping the majority of the time (WOL is pretty spotty IMO.. if you configure WOL such that a machine "can" wake, it usually will stay awake from other network noise)
One of the other things i bought with this order was a new UPS. Sticking to a smaller power budget has other interesting effects -- like you can get away with a smaller (and cheaper) UPS to get the same amount of uptime.
You are absolutely spot on. Want to know something else?
What do Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela have in common? (besides being the subject of US animosity, chest-thumping, invasion, and a coup-attempt?)
They threatened to sell oil in Euros.
The reason Ron Paul is always talking about the Fed like he's some kind of nutcase is NOT because he's some kind of nutcase. It's because the Fed is the bouncer at "I want to run the planet" club. Want to go running all over the world invading countries? No problem when you can just print all the money you want with no accountability.
Once the dollar jumped off of the gold standard, the only thing propping up the dollar was the threat of military action by the US. That's very uncomfortable, so some folks wisely decided to use the world oil market as an intermediary. The dollar is supported by oil; oil is supported by military might. Any crack in US control of world oil is a crack in the dollar, and thus, the US economy.
The entire history of state-managed currency shows a steady trend of the ruling entity devaluing the currency to persue wars or other ambitions not generally related to the well being of society, with the obvious result that the citizenry become measurably worse off.
Really?
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
Has this been tested in court?
are you aware of any incidents involving colonists in 1776 blowing up markets full of children?
I'm pretty sure nothing of the sort happened, but i'm willing to hear evidence to the contrary.
Those were greatly less "evolved" times, and yet, my impression is that those at the forefront of political dissent were vastly more humane in spreading their message.
in the Microsoft platform that many people never see or think about. We end up making extensive use of them for automated testing, actually.
It turns out that the same sort of API that makes it easier to build accessible products, whereby you can ask any UI element about its current visibility, text, or whatever, is also good for writing test automation. When you couple that with the ability to send windows events or messages to an arbitrary control, now you've got something foundational for doing automated UI testing in a pretty robust way.
Internally we work pretty hard on accessibility features because they're great for enabling users with different adaptive needs, they're required to sell to many government offices, and because they're excellent for our internal testing efforts.
One of the things that "The Laughing Man" did in the GITS TV series was that he could hack video feeds in near-real-time. On one occasion he ghost-hacked someone's cybernetic eyes and became effectively invisible. More commonly, he would simultaneously hack all of the security cameras in a public place and overlay this funny "animated gif" over the top of his head to conceal his identity.
Nobody could figure out who he was because nobody had ever actually "seen" him.
Many video cameras now transmit mjpeg or mpeg-4 over http instead of an NTSC video signal down coax.
We keep getting closer to the level of pervasive internet connectivity and dependance that is the foundation of the GITS world. One could imagine a list of things required both technically and societally to get us from "here" to "there", and the list is always getting shorter a bit sooner than I'd expect.
_You_ never had the problem.
Some network drivers had DPCs that took too long to run, leading to choppy playback while the network took more time than it should have.
You may have noticed that Windows machines do not have the luxury of bug free device drivers. The majority of bluescreens since NT4 have been caused by 3rd party kernel-mode code (video drivers, IFSs, etc). The push to go user-mode on as much of the 3rd party code as possible isn't accidental.
My understanding is that in Vista, this particular tradeoff was made to attempt to avoid something everyone would notice (a skip during audio playback) for something very few people would notice (slightly reduced network performance while listening to music).
Well, I think I've got a pretty good handle on the scientific method.
Where I come up blank, and why I posted in the first place, is figuring out how some people that seem NOT to (hint: they don't have reproducible experiments in many cases, they often don't share their data or their methods publicly, etc) seem to get a pass from the community at large, because somehow there is "consensus".
I'm speaking, of course, about the anthropomorphic global warming doomsday folks.
Wait -- I thought when there was scientific "consensus", continuing to do more research, investigation, and to continue question the prevailing assumptions was unnecessary and sign of an unhealthy "denialist"
Can someone help me understand which theories are sacrosanct and which ones are still open for discussion? It's getting hard for me to keep track..
Idealistically, I agree with you. However, in reality, principles can be expensive. If this weren't code for a UAV, and was instead design documents for some sort of easy-to-make breifcase sized nuke... I don't think I'd be singing the "there are no borders, just hugs" song.
The current government of Iran might make living some of the principles you hold dear extremely difficult. Want to be openly homosexual? What about the right to a fair trial if you are raped? Want to have some protections against being murdered by your male family members? What about the freedom to wear jeans in public?
The US has its own difficulties, but if you are talking about being principled and not getting stoned for it (or whatever barbaric shit they're doing), the US is probably a better bet than Iran.
I'm not asking you to buy the rhetoric of Bush or anybody else, but I am asking you to be realistic. There are a lot of foreign governments that wouldn't mind ousting the current presidency, legislature, and constitution, and replacing it with something you and I would find a whole lot less agreeable.
I'm glad the West got ahold of some of the top talent of Germany and _didn't_ openly share the scientific knowledge with Hitler. The result of idealistic openness and knowledge sharing in that situation would have been devastating to the course of human history.
I was going to make approximately this post just the other day on slashdot, as part of a completely different story.
Why did we bother winning the cold war? Was it so our own government could take 100% of the credit for destroying America instead of having to share it with a nuclear armed enemy?
Email and IM are the tools of choice at work. The crappy voip phones in our office use meridian mail, which I can only surmise was designed as an enormous practical joke on how to make someone quit their job merely over the tools instead of anything strictly job related... and which was accidentally shipped.
Our phones have this big red light on them when you have a voice mail waiting. Since somebody setup Meridian to ask you for a new voice mail password (one you've not used recently) every... what is it, 6 minutes?.. and since someone leaves me a voice mail once every 6 months.. invariably that light would come on and i'd have no way of getting it to shut off. Well, eventually I just unplugged my phone for a while and luckliy, when I moved desks and plugged it in, the light was gone. Now when people call me and try to leave voice mail, they get this horrible message saying this user hasn't setup their voice mail. Say it along with me in your best mortal combat announcer voice: "Flawless Victory!"
In any case, my phone is effectively a 1 way device. I use it to make non-work-related calls, or to dial into conference calls that aren't using pc/ip based audio streaming.
I'd like to dump the phone altogether and use a soft phone that integrates with an IM client. If I'm sitting at my laptop, we can communicate, and chances are, you'll try IM first.
BMW has been building hyrdrogen powered 7 series cars for over 20 years. This is just the latest generation. They're HCE (hydrogen combustion engine) cars.. not fuel cells, like most Hyrdrogen research. The engines are also duel fuel - gas OR hydrogen.
:) But even if they didn't, you can run them as a gasoline only engine. My experience is that german iron works much better here than american stuff even... my 20 year old Audi was parked outside all winter and doesn't have any kind of block heater.. it would start up in -30F temps. Most older american and japanese cars here have electrical plugs hanging out of the grille. People grew up using block heaters and with my older german cars its just unnecessary.
Given that the biggest challenge with hydrogen is keeping it cold, maybe they cars will do _great_ in our ND winters
As I understand it, in most states, your primary residence can not be seized from you even if you declare bankruptcy.
One aspect that might make this sticky is if all your liquid capital is seized and you default on your mortgage. But then again, a mortgage default is always a risk anyhow.
Unless you're referring to a slow war of attrition against civil liberties and the constitution by CAIR and other pro-radical Islam agencies here in the US, then, no, I'd say nothing of the sort is happening.
Winnipeg is a 3hr drive for me. What should I check out if I come to visit for an afternoon?
I think you overstate Mill's interest in true freedom. As near as I can tell, free market and individual liberty are instruments for advanacing society, which is his ultimate purpose, and where those mechanisms are not sufficient or optimal, he is happy to dispense with them unceremoniously. Nevermind that by the time of his death, much of his position could be called outright socialism. While the quote he gets attention for (over ones self, the individual reigns supreme, roughly) is indeed a good one, obviously that's not the entirety of his message.
Mill himself was not publicly educated, and infact, given the hardship he endured from his child education, one wonders if he's got a bit of a reactinoary criticism of home school, which a the time, was the norm, while public education was something entirely less common.
Irrespective of Mill's opinion, the overwhelming body of evidence in the US is that homeschooling has nothing but significant advanatages for the students it produces.
Finally, on your point of indoctrination. Indoctrination by the state of the masses (i.e. public education) must necessarily be worse than indoctrination of an individual or two by one "errant" family members. I see no intrinsic value in limiting fundamentalist christians teaching their own children. That you assume public education would completely defeat fundamentalist indoctrination suggests that you have an irrational fear of Christians, as opposed to any real understanding of their concerns, and that you overstate the effectiveness of public education.
Your allusion to the 30 years war being a result of Christian fundamentalist home schooling is... curious. Public education was non-existant in much of the US until the early 1900s, and we certainly had more religious denominations intermigling here than centrla Europe did. Why was the US not destroyed by religiously motivated civil war?
In any case, it is precisely because I was publicly educated that I am adamant that I have legally protected alternatives for my own child. Not because I was shrouded in some sort of religious ignorance (far from it, infact).
A student of history is well advised to be fearful of religious fundamentalism and where it may lead. A wiser student of history is even better advised to be even more fearful of state fundamentalism and power, and where it ALWAYS leads.
Certainly Canada has some advantages... its not too far to visit relatives in the US, and unless you're dealing with quebec sepratists, there's not much of a language barrier.
However, Canada has some strange things like a blank media tax, and some upsetting free speech concerns. Something comes to mind about it being a hate crime in Canada for a pastor to state that they think homosexuality is sinful/immoral. I don't tend to concern myself with the morality of other peoples sexuality, but I concern myself a lot with what the government says I can and cannot say. Although just this week a kid in the US has been charged with 2 felony hate crimes for flushing Qurans in the toilet of his college.. so apparently the US is just as bad now.
I have taken a trip to Montreal and the women are fantastic looking (although now that I'm married, that's not quite the draw it might have once been), and they have their own F1 GP there, which simply has to be a better experience than going to the US GP in Indianpolis, because Montreal is in all manners a less awful place than Indianpolis.
The canadians I've met have all had two things in common. 1) They're funny. 2) They're laid back. I could do with more of those sorts of people, honestly.
Problem is, I can't think of where I'd rather live, all things considered.
What's crazy is that everyone else thinks the US is too far to the "right", too "wild west", what with all our guns and remains of a laizee faire economy. Me? I'd like more guns, fewer laws, more open trade, no more tariffs or subsidies.
I certainly like that Germany makes the worlds finest cars, has excellent public transit, fantastic roads, beautiful architecture and countryside, and makes lots of smart people. But they're a step in the wrong direction in many of the freedoms I care about.
For instance, in Germany home schooling is illegal, so I can't very well live there because as much as I dislike the amount of school choice available to me here in the US, I get even less of it in Germany. Even if the choices might be quite a bit better than what I have here, the only choice that I really need ("No thanks, I'll indoctrinate my child MY way instead of letting you indoctrinate him YOUR way") is unavailable to me.
If there were somewhere that truly had more individual freedoms than the US, I'd think pretty carefully about moving there. Freedoms meaning "free from having to do things the way other people tell you to do them".
If I had any say in running the US, things would be different. I'd let as many brilliant people into my country as we had room for, (which would attract more brilliant people, who are good at making more room!). But, I don't have any say. Libertarians have no voice in American politics, and America is growing the hydra heads of big government that pushed many people away from Europe in the first place... and yet we're coming up with some of our own unique stupidity that makes the mix that much more sour.
So if you've got any suggestions on places to live that respect individual liberty, let me hear em. I'm happy to contribute my talents to whomever will unshackle me to do my best work and live my life to the fullset.
I'm a UNL CS/Math, class of 2000 grad.. one of the last years before the JDE program.
What I liked was how far everyones dollars went at UNL. UNL was very affordable for me, and as someone that worked on the ~3 person UNL CS IT team under Charles Daniel (is he still there?), we kept a lot of old/cheap stuff running and doing useful work for a very long time. UNL was great because you could get as good of an education as you were willing to work for, with excellent faculty and sufficient resources.
I know what some of the profs were making back at the time (I found a UNL salary PDF file) and it was big money for Lincoln, Nebraska. I can understand the need to subsidize those high costs with increased revenue from students. OTOH, why would you set it up so that scholarships weren't applicable?
Your comment about the cross-department collaboration and resource sharing is a real shame.
At the time I was a student, UNL had the largest alumni giving of any non-Ivy school in the US. I wonder if that's still true?
I can't verify the information, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if it were true.
I _love_ the Ribbon UI in 2007 and think its a huge step forward. I'm a casual user of all the office apps -- I write proposals in word, technical presentations in power point, and i do data analysis / visualization in excel. I don't do _any_ of these for my day in / day out work -- i'm in software engineering. If you were someone that worked in word day in, day out, every day, and you needed to be "Trained" on how to use word to acheive a specific function, well yeah, the ribbon re-arranges all of the things that felt comfortable to you. I can understand being mad about that, but come on.. we're human beings. Aren't we supposed to be adaptable?
In any case, I'll compare a few tasks that I do commonly between Word 2003 and the Ribbon UI
Word: I am starting a new section of a document, and want to make the section header a different font. (something like \subsection{Justification} in TeX/LaTeX)
Ok, in Word 2003, i needed to highlight the text, and then pick the font / font size that i had used previously. Which one did i use previously? Hrmm.. let me click on one of the other sections i want this one to look like and see what hte font settings change to. Oh? is there a copy font on the right lick menu here? No? Hrmm, i'll have to remember it. Now i go back to the text i wanted t ochange, re-highlight it, and then set the font properly.
Word 2007: I've finished typing the section header. Now, I mouse over the styles in the "styles" box on the Home tab of the ribbon. As I mouse over each one, the text is dynamically updated to that font / style. When it looks like the one i want (assuming i dont remember that i liked "Header 2" and just click on it directly), I click.
The difference for me between these two experiences is night and day different. I spend less time screwing with formatting and fonts and other stupid shit, and just say "i want this to be a header 2" and it looks right (honestly, its a bit more like the TeX/LaTeX usage model that I grew up using and prefer)
Another one is in Excel. I want to make a 3 series line plot in a worksheet. Ok, i can highlight the 3 different sets of cells. In Excel 2003, i can go throught he chart wizard and try to remember which style is what, etc. Or in 2007, I just click on the chart style i want directly from the ribbon.
The ribbon UI is great. We've re-implemented something similar in the product I'm working on. It elegantly solves the problems of discoverability, cascading levels of importance, and toolbar/function overcrowding. It also looks shiny, which, when you get down to it, makes a difference.