Yes, the soldiers in body bags have lost a lot of the political cost in the recent Iraq/Afghanistan war. Gulf War I was remarkable for its low causalities. But I think it is wrong to attribute it to some post 9-11 change of mind of the American public. The earlier high political cost came in when the draft was in place and many solid middle class affluent families actually faced the law: all men are created equal. They had resources to dodge it, going to college, becoming a missionary, becoming a Rhodes Scholar etc etc. But now that draft is gone and the military has become one of the tickets out of poverty for the "lower" classes, the political costs have abated. Still almost all the politicians were very strung up about it. Look at the media ban Bush had about pictures of coffins being unloaded.
I think the political cost of images of dead soldiers is slightly, but just slightly, less in India than in USA. In both countries the martial middle class families get into the Officer Corps and not the enlisted ranks.
Very surprised. Though no country wants to risk the lives of their soldiers, only in the USA soldiers in body bags have such a heavy political price. India being a Democracy it too would pay a higher political price than, may be Pakistan and China. But still it is a highly populated country without draft. In fact, even in the USA, after the draft has been removed and it became an all volunteer armed forces, the political cost of returning body bags have dropped a lot. So why robots in the forward firing lines? May be it is posturing, goading Pakistan into spending its money on robots instead of supplying terrorists with cheap AK-47s.
Hi I am the head of IT of a midsize company and the management has called in this consultant. He is convinced my pointy haired bosses that my budget is twice the size and I an too naive and gullible and merely parrot my staff's opinions to the management. This consultant is so incompetent he is asking for advice in slashdot. How do I get him off my back, and demonstrate his incompetence to the PHBs?
The patent process has recently changed from "first to invent" to "first to file". What is means is people who can demonstrate they already have invented it and been using it could not be sued. But you should have enough documentation to prove it. Also only the original invention gets this protection, not any enhancements. Others, even if they are aware of the invention being already deployed and in use, even if it is really obvious and non-novel do not get any protection by the claims of prior-art. They need to go to the courts and prove it is obvious and non-novel. But also if it has been in the market for one year, it is prior art, even if the original inventor did not file and some one else files for it after one year. And in software patents, if the feature is in the shipping code/product, even if there is no way for the user to access it, the feature is considered a released product and the one year clock starts ticking. We are adviced to use very strict #ifdef "patent_pending" #endif to protect all the special codes from getting into production builds.
Caveat: This is the engineers understanding of the patent process as explained by the legal department. I won't bet even two cents on it being right.
He is a twelfth grader. This is one off code without any lasting value. Writing a generalized code for this purpose would be an over design. Next thing you will be complaining people doing mental arithmetic to figure out how much that shoe on sale is going to cost are not modularizing and reusing their mental faculties. Jeez. Give that boy a break.
The major revelation is there are certain totals nobody got. I mean, no one got 78 marks or 67 marks out of 100 in a subject. By itself it is not evidence of tampering. If all the questions had only even number of marks, then nobody would get odd number of marks in total. From what I recall from my high school final papers, there were a few one mark questions, some five marks and some 10 mark questions. But that was decades ago. Now with the rise in objective questions etc, it is possible the entire paper was so structured it is impossible to get some totals.
On the other hand, even if there are a sprinkling of one mark questions, the graph would be expected to be uniform. Anyway, good job of a twelfth grader to hack javascript at this level.
USB chargers are cheap. Leave one at work, one in car and one at home. I wish the smart phones will have a dumb phone mode that automatically shuts off everything other than the phone function when the remaining capacity falls below 3% or so and becomes a dumb phone. May be there is an app for this. But with touch screens there are no buttons and it is impossible to shut down the most energy consuming part of the smart phone, the screen.
Some Indian American teen won the intel science prize for charging a cell phone in 20 seconds. Let her loose on this technology and get that Tesla S model recharged in 5 minutes for 200 mile range! Now we are talking, baby!
But of course, all she had was just a super capacitor. It probably does not scale easily to vehicle sizes and anyway it is not an electro-chemical reaction based "battery."
Microsoft from day one has been making its data incompatible with everything else. It was a lean and hungry company back then (it is fat and hungry now), and it was compatible with every existing thing on the import side and incompatible with everything on export. It fought a mean campaign against Samba. It played dirty with Netscape and the web standards. Bugs in IE worked around in IIS and vice versa to make it very very hard to stick to a standard.
But power and pay check they go to the top honchos no matter what. The raison d`etendre of a modern corporation is to squeeze as much profit as possible, dodge as much tax as possible and send it all as pay, bonus and stock options for the top executives.
That's why the people with their own money on the line are buying up MSFT (stock went from $27 to $35 due to the last earnings report) instead of the air-headed armchair analysis that we see on here of 'lol my grandma ditched her PC and got an iPad so that means M$ is dying'.
The time constants of slashdotters discussing future of MSFT and the traders are vastly different. Slashdotter think 1 year is short term, 5 years is medium term and 10 years is long term. People buying MSFT @ 35 think 1 quarter as short term, 1 year as medium term and 3 years as long term. And the hedge fund honchos think 1 micro second as ultrashort term, 1 second as short term, and 1 minute as medium term and 1 hour as long term. And these hedge fund honchos will happily risk 1 trillion dollars for 1 micro second to pursue a possible profit of 25 dollars. And they will happily do it 1000 times a second. No wonder we are hosed.
People who strongly believe in gun rights, who believe it is fair for citizens to take up arms against the government when the government overreaches its powers, would agree with the SCOTUS and say it is quite fair to take DNA sample at the time of arrest.
And the people who strongly believe this is a government overreach, it is unreasonable and it threatens privacy and liberty, would not advocate taking up arms about this issue. They would argue no matter what, the only legitimate way to fight back is with the ballots and not the bullets.
The day you get rid of the government's police protection of the rich, the "rich guy" becomes a body in the gutter.
You will be the body in the gutter. Rich will always buy the thugs they need to protect themselves. There is some chance you could get police on your side, someday with enough political action. There is no chance in hell you will outgun the henchmen of the rich.
It is really dumb to limit the password to something so small as 8 or 10 char. Or disallowing non-alpha numberics like $ + - @ # %.
But one of the common vulnerabilities is buffer overrun. So they want to limit the read to some fixed number instead of looking for the trailing null, in an unlimited loop. So the right thing to do is set the limit to some moderately large number, like 128, allocate space, write nulls into it and then read the data into that buffer. Why it can't be really big like 1K or 2K? Well, it is possible to pack lots of instructions into a 1K or 2K buffer, and we dont want to provide that much of memory in a user writable space. Of course a well written authenticator will immediately clear every user written buffer as soon as they are done reading.
In reality some UI designer limits the amount of data to be entered limited to the space provided in the edit box in the GUI. By default most screen controls like buttons and edit boxes are sized by the string buffer allocated for it. It is always possible to change the size of the control explicitly, but there are many programmers who are lazy or incompetent and don't use it,
The day you shrink the government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, some rich guy will drown it. Then you will be subjugated by some private guy and you have no chance of ever getting back. It would take centuries to overthrow them and bring back democracy.
Yes, the rich people are using the power of the government and threaten you. What good is liberty if you have been looted completely and left without any means of using the liberty for in any meaningful way? The solution is not to weaken the government, but to reduce the influence of money on government. That is why the ruling "money is speech" should send chills down your spine. The top one percent have not more "speech" than the bottom 90%. It is our government, we need to take control of it, make it powerful, powerful enough to give the man on the street a fighting chance.
Heard of trust busting? Heard of the Sherman Act, monopoly and restrictive trade practices act?
After 100 years of hard fought victories of progressives and liberals, you are able to blow smoke imagining "collusion" can't be all that bad. But when collusion, cartel forming, monopolies were are legal, ordinary Americans eked out subsistence living, working in dangerous factories, living in shacks, breathing polluted air, drinking dirty water. That is the lot of White Americans who fared much much better than the blacks and Hispanics.
Dont imagine if those days are back you, (I assume you are white American) will get back the same level of social standing over the rest. Those days are gone. Rich people of all colors will collude together to subjugate poor people of all races. Which means, a substantial percentage of the subjugated, exploited population will be white.
Every one in your team needs to communicate with every one? What kind of nonsensical system is that? Do you write code that way too? Every source file depends on every include file? Every library depends on every other library?
People had the fruits of their labor stolen before 1912 too.
Slavery is the obvious point. Even if you ignore slavery, the minorities were exploited ruthlessly.
Would you care to look at how people other than Whites fared at that time? Chinese gold prospectors were systematically discriminated and driven out. Indian (from the Indian subcontinent) were denied property rights and the farms they owned were confiscated. US Supreme Court (Justice Sutherland) ruled that "yes, yes, Indians are caucasians, but they are not White, so not eligible for property rights."
Let us leave the racial minorities and focus on Whites alone. They too were systematically looted by the banks, the companies colluded to keep the wages low, and stole the fruits of their labor. They stole the farms through banks. Life for poor people was pretty hard, then the depression hit.
So your claim that people were living in some sort of golden age before the income tax is totally wrong.
You are delusional. Government is not the major threat to your liberty now. It is the corporations and rich guys who threaten your liberty. The rich will use any means to threaten your liberty. Right now they buy politicians, corrupt the government, run astro turf organizations, hire shills and liars to get you. Among all these instruments they use, democratic government is the only thing that you can use at some point to get the control back, get the country back. At some point enough people will pay enough attention to clean up the mess.
And the rich know it too. So they use all the resources they have to create a pathological irrational antipathy to all government and persuade you to reduce taxes and reduce it ability to enforce laws. Just remember this, if you actually manage to starve the government out of existence, there is nothing to stop you from being enslaved by the rich once again.
If you are not rich, the democracy is the only weapon you have, the only way to achieve liberty. Starving the beast is a snake oil sold by self serving rich people and the shills bought by them.
Differential equations are not advanced math. It is just basic calculus. Partial Differential Equations is where advanced math starts.
You think you love computers. But basically you love some parts of the computers that you are familiar with. But in real life, after getting your CS degree, the part of computing that puts food on the table and pays rent, is probably not going to be that part of computers that you love. It is going to be some pointy haired bosses, some nitwit IT department, some insane procedures instituted by some VP, and work, deadline, metrics, annual performance review..
Where does diff eqn figure in this? It is where you learn to do things that are not particularly interesting, whose purpose is not immediately evident, things that are hard, things that require hard work, long hours and perseverance to complete. In short these frustrating experiences prepare you for a career. Any fool can devote all his/her time to something he/she loves. I am not sure the job I am offering is going the what you are passionate about. I need workers who will complete tasks even if they are boring and appear to be pointless. I will hire people who have suffered through diff equations. In an earlier era I might have insisted on Latin too.
The mistake they did was, they did not launder enough money. If they have done may be 300 billion or more and insinuated themselves deep into many national economies, then they would have become too big to fail, too big to jail.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the political cost of images of dead soldiers is slightly, but just slightly, less in India than in USA. In both countries the martial middle class families get into the Officer Corps and not the enlisted ranks.
Holy shit, they're both right; It's incompetency all the way down!
It is bidirectional! It is incompetence all the way up as well as all the way down!
Very surprised. Though no country wants to risk the lives of their soldiers, only in the USA soldiers in body bags have such a heavy political price. India being a Democracy it too would pay a higher political price than, may be Pakistan and China. But still it is a highly populated country without draft. In fact, even in the USA, after the draft has been removed and it became an all volunteer armed forces, the political cost of returning body bags have dropped a lot. So why robots in the forward firing lines? May be it is posturing, goading Pakistan into spending its money on robots instead of supplying terrorists with cheap AK-47s.
Hi I am the head of IT of a midsize company and the management has called in this consultant. He is convinced my pointy haired bosses that my budget is twice the size and I an too naive and gullible and merely parrot my staff's opinions to the management. This consultant is so incompetent he is asking for advice in slashdot. How do I get him off my back, and demonstrate his incompetence to the PHBs?
What the hell? Govt already has all your tax data and can force you to reveal as much as it wants.
Caveat: This is the engineers understanding of the patent process as explained by the legal department. I won't bet even two cents on it being right.
Come on that is how they teach virtual machines in India. Using really really virtual machines.
He is a twelfth grader. This is one off code without any lasting value. Writing a generalized code for this purpose would be an over design. Next thing you will be complaining people doing mental arithmetic to figure out how much that shoe on sale is going to cost are not modularizing and reusing their mental faculties. Jeez. Give that boy a break.
That boy is good. He proved that all marks are attainable. There is massive award of "grace" marks.
On the other hand, even if there are a sprinkling of one mark questions, the graph would be expected to be uniform. Anyway, good job of a twelfth grader to hack javascript at this level.
USB chargers are cheap. Leave one at work, one in car and one at home. I wish the smart phones will have a dumb phone mode that automatically shuts off everything other than the phone function when the remaining capacity falls below 3% or so and becomes a dumb phone. May be there is an app for this. But with touch screens there are no buttons and it is impossible to shut down the most energy consuming part of the smart phone, the screen.
But of course, all she had was just a super capacitor. It probably does not scale easily to vehicle sizes and anyway it is not an electro-chemical reaction based "battery."
Microsoft from day one has been making its data incompatible with everything else. It was a lean and hungry company back then (it is fat and hungry now), and it was compatible with every existing thing on the import side and incompatible with everything on export. It fought a mean campaign against Samba. It played dirty with Netscape and the web standards. Bugs in IE worked around in IIS and vice versa to make it very very hard to stick to a standard.
But power and pay check they go to the top honchos no matter what. The raison d`etendre of a modern corporation is to squeeze as much profit as possible, dodge as much tax as possible and send it all as pay, bonus and stock options for the top executives.
That's why the people with their own money on the line are buying up MSFT (stock went from $27 to $35 due to the last earnings report) instead of the air-headed armchair analysis that we see on here of 'lol my grandma ditched her PC and got an iPad so that means M$ is dying'.
The time constants of slashdotters discussing future of MSFT and the traders are vastly different. Slashdotter think 1 year is short term, 5 years is medium term and 10 years is long term. People buying MSFT @ 35 think 1 quarter as short term, 1 year as medium term and 3 years as long term. And the hedge fund honchos think 1 micro second as ultrashort term, 1 second as short term, and 1 minute as medium term and 1 hour as long term. And these hedge fund honchos will happily risk 1 trillion dollars for 1 micro second to pursue a possible profit of 25 dollars. And they will happily do it 1000 times a second. No wonder we are hosed.
And the people who strongly believe this is a government overreach, it is unreasonable and it threatens privacy and liberty, would not advocate taking up arms about this issue. They would argue no matter what, the only legitimate way to fight back is with the ballots and not the bullets.
The day you get rid of the government's police protection of the rich, the "rich guy" becomes a body in the gutter.
You will be the body in the gutter. Rich will always buy the thugs they need to protect themselves. There is some chance you could get police on your side, someday with enough political action. There is no chance in hell you will outgun the henchmen of the rich.
But one of the common vulnerabilities is buffer overrun. So they want to limit the read to some fixed number instead of looking for the trailing null, in an unlimited loop. So the right thing to do is set the limit to some moderately large number, like 128, allocate space, write nulls into it and then read the data into that buffer. Why it can't be really big like 1K or 2K? Well, it is possible to pack lots of instructions into a 1K or 2K buffer, and we dont want to provide that much of memory in a user writable space. Of course a well written authenticator will immediately clear every user written buffer as soon as they are done reading.
In reality some UI designer limits the amount of data to be entered limited to the space provided in the edit box in the GUI. By default most screen controls like buttons and edit boxes are sized by the string buffer allocated for it. It is always possible to change the size of the control explicitly, but there are many programmers who are lazy or incompetent and don't use it,
Yes, the rich people are using the power of the government and threaten you. What good is liberty if you have been looted completely and left without any means of using the liberty for in any meaningful way? The solution is not to weaken the government, but to reduce the influence of money on government. That is why the ruling "money is speech" should send chills down your spine. The top one percent have not more "speech" than the bottom 90%. It is our government, we need to take control of it, make it powerful, powerful enough to give the man on the street a fighting chance.
After 100 years of hard fought victories of progressives and liberals, you are able to blow smoke imagining "collusion" can't be all that bad. But when collusion, cartel forming, monopolies were are legal, ordinary Americans eked out subsistence living, working in dangerous factories, living in shacks, breathing polluted air, drinking dirty water. That is the lot of White Americans who fared much much better than the blacks and Hispanics.
Dont imagine if those days are back you, (I assume you are white American) will get back the same level of social standing over the rest. Those days are gone. Rich people of all colors will collude together to subjugate poor people of all races. Which means, a substantial percentage of the subjugated, exploited population will be white.
Every one in your team needs to communicate with every one? What kind of nonsensical system is that? Do you write code that way too? Every source file depends on every include file? Every library depends on every other library?
Slavery is the obvious point. Even if you ignore slavery, the minorities were exploited ruthlessly. Would you care to look at how people other than Whites fared at that time? Chinese gold prospectors were systematically discriminated and driven out. Indian (from the Indian subcontinent) were denied property rights and the farms they owned were confiscated. US Supreme Court (Justice Sutherland) ruled that "yes, yes, Indians are caucasians, but they are not White, so not eligible for property rights."
Let us leave the racial minorities and focus on Whites alone. They too were systematically looted by the banks, the companies colluded to keep the wages low, and stole the fruits of their labor. They stole the farms through banks. Life for poor people was pretty hard, then the depression hit.
So your claim that people were living in some sort of golden age before the income tax is totally wrong.
And the rich know it too. So they use all the resources they have to create a pathological irrational antipathy to all government and persuade you to reduce taxes and reduce it ability to enforce laws. Just remember this, if you actually manage to starve the government out of existence, there is nothing to stop you from being enslaved by the rich once again.
If you are not rich, the democracy is the only weapon you have, the only way to achieve liberty. Starving the beast is a snake oil sold by self serving rich people and the shills bought by them.
You think you love computers. But basically you love some parts of the computers that you are familiar with. But in real life, after getting your CS degree, the part of computing that puts food on the table and pays rent, is probably not going to be that part of computers that you love. It is going to be some pointy haired bosses, some nitwit IT department, some insane procedures instituted by some VP, and work, deadline, metrics, annual performance review ..
Where does diff eqn figure in this? It is where you learn to do things that are not particularly interesting, whose purpose is not immediately evident, things that are hard, things that require hard work, long hours and perseverance to complete. In short these frustrating experiences prepare you for a career. Any fool can devote all his/her time to something he/she loves. I am not sure the job I am offering is going the what you are passionate about. I need workers who will complete tasks even if they are boring and appear to be pointless. I will hire people who have suffered through diff equations. In an earlier era I might have insisted on Latin too.
The mistake they did was, they did not launder enough money. If they have done may be 300 billion or more and insinuated themselves deep into many national economies, then they would have become too big to fail, too big to jail.