As someone who has taken the plunge and gotten an HDTV, it has been a really nice switch. The difference between SD and HD when it comes to satellite channels is pretty dramatic...to the point where I don't watch the SD channels anymore unless there's something I really want to watch which is only on an SD channel.
The problem with Blu-Ray is that the difference it offers from an upscaled DVD really isn't as dramatic as the difference between an SD channel and an HD channel. And that makes the price they're asking us to pay for both the players and the media way too high. Consumers are used to essentially getting technology progress for free...a Core 2 Duo costs roughly the same as a P4 did when it was top of the line. Yet Blu-Ray media is being sold for substantially more than DVD ever was. And when you consider just how many ways there are to get discounted DVDs, it makes the price comparison swing that much more in the favor of DVD.
The thing is, once you start using it, it is preferable. I use my PS3 to play Blu-Ray discs I get from Netflix and have so far been very happy with both the quality and the extras offered. But the key to my experience so far has been that Netflix sends me Blu-Ray discs at the exact same price as I would pay for the DVD version and I've purchased the least-expensive Blu-Ray player which is pretty much the only one that doesn't suck on a price-per-feature basis and is pretty much the only reasonably-priced one that will be reasonably forward-compatible with the rapidly-changing Blu-Ray spec. The spec has changed so often that most people that have bought stand-alone Blu-Ray players have been bit by the fact that discs using Blu-Ray profiles released after their players were released aren't entirely functional.
But expecting people to pay a hefty premium for a product that offers modest improvements isn't going to fly. If they stopped updating the Blu-Ray spec to allow player manufacturers a fixed target, it might enable them to drop the price of the players to the $200-$300 range and that, coupled with reducing the cost of discs to same price charged for the DVD version, would make Blu-Ray a lot more successful. But until they realize that their technology isn't worth the hefty premium they're attempting to charge for it, very few people will buy it.
A quick Google search turned up a number of avenues for filing complaints about how you're treated by the TSA--both official and unofficial.
On the official side, here's the necessary forms for filing a complaint as well as the applicable procedural information.
On the unofficial side, This site looks like they're collecting complaints to create an aggregate report which they will present to the TSA.
So perhaps protesting on the spot isn't the best option. Just take the names and possibly ID numbers of the screeners/manager that you deal with and lodge an official complaint. That way, you're not holding up other travelers and you give the TSA to handle the complaint reasonably. If the screener was being over-zealous or otherwise failing to follow TSA policy, it gives the TSA a chance to discipline and possibly dismiss the screener. It also gives the TSA the chance to change the policy based on feedback from travelers or offer a detailed explanation of exactly why the policy is what it is.
That said, however, if they give either give you an unsatisfactory explanation for the policy or are unresponsive to your complaint, then it is time to protest. The old saying about never attributing to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence is an apt one. We've seen no shortage of instances where our government has acted incompetently, so I see no reason to assume that all this TSA stuff is any different. It seems to me that we should make every effort to cooperatively improve the process since it's likely that the creating and implementing that policy don't really fully understand the problems they're trying to solve and, only when we've determined that the policy is malicious/pernicious, resort to more forceful protests.
Besides, ad-hoc protests on the spot are probably not the most effective. If all you do is protest, by yourself, at the time that you're first effected by the policy, it's easy enough to be completely ignored. Other travelers will be routed through other checkpoints and, despite agreeing with you, probably decide that their travel plans are more important than a show of solidarity.
But if you expend the effort to verify that there is an existing TSA policy that they're unwilling to change that you believe is unreasonable, you can find others that are willing to participate in the protest, buy cheaper tickets which you know you'll never use and coordinate your protests so that everyone gets stopped by the TSA at the same time. If your protest can effectively shut down most of the security checkpoints at a major airport, you will get news coverage and actually have a chance of making a difference.
Why have cell phones be different from any other electronic device. For instance, if you go to Dell's website, they'll quote you the price of an item but they also say "As low as $x/month." Why should buying a cell phone be any different?
The only reason that we can't do this now is because of cell phone contracts...why finance the phone when you still have to sign a contract? If there were no contracts, financing could offer those who choose that option the same experience they're getting now.
If your loved one breaks down crying several times a day because he or she can't tell where everyone is or where they are, if he goes into violent rages because he thinks he is being held against his will, if he lives in a constant state of fear because he knows something is wrong but he can't figure out what it is, if he tries day after day to go home but his captors refuse to [l]et him go, causing him to fear for his life... do you really want a drug that will keep him in that state, somewhat permanently?
I'm not sure if our case was atypical, but when my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she was nothing like you've described. The symptoms she had manifest to that point were all related to short-term memory and becoming easily confused when in public, but she was still living on her own and perfectly happy while at home. The initial response, which worked for a year and a half, was to have someone from her church come live with her. This worked well for everyone because the woman and her daughter were getting free room and board and my grandmother had someone to buy the food and take her on occasional walks to the beach (she lived 3 blocks away from the ocean).
It wasn't until 18 months after the diagnosis that she became too senile for this arrangement to work. From that point, my family had to endure the absolute hell of watching a loved one waste away from the inside out until what's left is a shell of a person who reminds you of your loved one but can't remember how to form sentences let alone tell you they've forgotten you (which had started happening shortly after she was moved to a medical facility). About 4 months ago, she stopped eating and finally died. This was almost a full 15 years after the initial diagnosis.
If we could have hit the pause button on her disease the day she was diagnosed, we would have had 15 years of visits where we got to see her face light up when she saw us, got to hear her stories that were still very much accessible in her long-term memory and gotten some measure of closure when whatever ailment finally took her life would have deprived us of someone we recognized. It's a bizarre form of loss to lose someone you love so much so little at a time. Until you've been through it, you don't realize how lucky people are to lose someone in a manner where one day you can talk to them and the next you can't. Those people get to grieve and move on. Families of Alzheimer's patients are robbed of that. And I can only imagine the fear and confusion of someone actually subjected to it as they lose themselves to the disease.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that your experience working in the facility you work in means that you're naturally being exposed to people who were diagnosed or had progressed further into the disease than others. Maybe for those patients it would make sense to wait until the disease had progressed to the point you mentioned. But there are patients who are diagnosed earlier on for whom this drug would be a godsend. And, since there's some indication that Alzheimer's is hereditary, if it could be determined to be safe enough for family members of people with diagnosed Alzheimer's to take to prevent themselves from ever reaching the point, that would be all the more useful.
Re:How can a culture that celebrates ignorance
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How Do You Fix Education?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In the 1960s, we used to have parades that celebrated astronauts. Let me say this again - we had PARADES... for... ROCKET SCIENTISTS
While I agree with the overall premise of your post, I think this is a flawed example to draw upon.
While it's true that most of the original astronauts had degrees in some scientific area, what the country was celebrating was much more related to their backgrounds as test pilots and military aviators. There were no parades for the engineers who accepted Kennedy's ambitious challenge even though they were probably much more influential in succeeding at that challenge. The ones who got the parades were probably among the least educated of all non-clerical NASA employees (which isn't really a reflection on them but more a reflection on who the other people at NASA were).
And we weren't praising their ingenuity or intelligence, we were praising their bravery and the fact that they symbolically beat the Russians.
OTOH, if you want to look at another example of where we exalted someone who did use intelligence and ingenuity to also beat the Russians, the fame garnered by Bobby Fischer would probably be a good example. It's pretty unlikely that our current society would heap the kind of praise given to Bobby Fischer on someone who accomplished a similar intellectual feat. About the closest we've come that I can think of is Ken Jennings and it won't be long before people have mostly forgotten his name (if they haven't already).
Using rings to encode information is a pretty poor way to do it, since you've got no confirmation that the person sending the rings is actually the person you expect to call. The way to do it is to abuse the collect calling mechanism. When I was in middle school, I used a system where I called my parents collect when my soccer practice was over and they simply declined the charges. But since they knew that I had tried to call them, the knew to come pick me up.
The system pretty reliably deals with the situation where you try to send explicit messages when you're asked to record your name (that was the first thing I tried, but it would make me repeat my name until I said a real name and not something like, "I'm ready to be picked up"). But you can still send signals on the sly without them knowing. For instance, in your example (one ring for a boy, two for a girl), you'd just place the collect call using either the name "Bobby Smith" or "Jenny Smith" and the caller would ascertain the gender from the name used...you could even use this mechanism to send the full name you'd chosen for the newborn. With a large collection of pre-arranged fake names, you could pretty reliably send messages from pay phones or over long distance without paying a cent.
Of course the advent of cell phones and VoIP solutions make these tricks somewhat less relevant.
This is a contradiction. "Not knowing you have the desire" is the same as NOT HAVING the desire...
You missed a crucial word in what I said that makes a world of difference. "Not knowing you have the desire" and "Not knowing yet that you have the desire" are two entirely separate things.
The word yet implies a temporal comparison. The addition into that sentence signifies that, at some point in time, people would know that they would have the desire, but at a previous point in time they did not know that they had the desire. I'll admit that it could have been worded better, but that's just semantics.
The REAL innovation of MP3 was a codec that compressed audio to a large degree (80%+) without a substatantial loss of quality. Before that, "digital music" was unpopular because WAV files were too large to share using the link speeds at the time (9600 baud) and other codecs sounded like ass.
This was my point entirely. The mp3 boom came about because technology advanced to a certain threshold where its use became feasible. The CPU reached a certain point where the researchers at the Fraunhofer institute realized that a compression algorithm that would chop 90% of the file size off a raw audio sample could work. Then hard drives and bandwidth advanced to the point where the general public could use that compression algorithm to the desired effect.
What if CPU makers asked the question, "why make our CPUs faster...they can already do [insert cpu tasks done at the time]?" or had hard drive manufacturers ask, "why increase capacity for consumer drives since there's nothing that people need to store that is that large?" or had modem manufacturers asked, "why increase the speed of the modem when 9600 baud is fine for connecting to a BBS or telnet session?"
But they didn't. And others found things to do with those extra CPU cycles, Megabytes and kbps that would have been very difficult to predict ahead of time. And because they didn't ask those, my mom (an extreme example of a technophobe) has an iPod that she listens to every day. She would have never known to ask for it before others had shown it was possible. But once she was shown it was possible, she wanted it and it would now be a huge loss for her to not have that ability.
Proliferating the number of cores will have the same effect. It may require other technologies to also reach a certain threshold, but there will come a time when that advancement will play a part in enabling some use that we will consider to be essential in the future. We just don't know what that is yet.
...but other than that, what difference is it going to make?
This is, IMHO, the wrong question to be asking. Asking how current tasks will be optimized to take advantage of future hardware makes the fundamental flawed assumption that the current tasks will be what's considered important once we have this kind of hardware.
But the history of computers have shown that the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy applies to the tasks that people end up wanting to accomplish. It's been seen time and again that new abilities for using computers wait until we've hit a certain performance threshold, whether it CPU, memory, bandwidth, disk space, video resolution or whatever, and then become the things we need our computers to do.
Take, for instance, the huge success of mp3's. There was a time not so long ago when people were limited to playing music off a physical CD. This wasn't because there was no desire amongst computer users to listen to digital files that could be stored locally or streamed off the internet. It was because computer users did not know yet that they had the desire to do it. But technology advanced to the point where a) processors became fast enough to decode mp3's in real time without using the whole CPU and b) hard drives grew to the point where we had the capacity to store files that are 10% of the size of the size of the files on the CD.
Similarly, it's likely that when we reach the point where we have hundreds or thousands of cores, new tasks will emerge that take advantage of the new capabilities of the hardware. It may be that those tasks are limited in some other way by one of the other components we use or by the as yet non-existent status of some new component, but it's only important that multiple cores play a part in enabling the new task.
In the near term, you can imagine a whole host of applications that would become possible when you get to the point where the average computer can do real-time H.264 encoding without affecting overall system performance. I won't guess at what might be popular further down the road, but there will be people who will think of something to do with those extra cores. And, in hindsight, we'll see the proliferation of cores as enabling our current computer-using behavior.
The problem with the Java API at this point is that there's been such an effort made to ensure that each new release is backwards compatible with all other releases that it's become a jumbled mess. This is why Java is continually getting trashed as being bloated.
What needs to happen is some serious work into deprecating and then actually removing the stuff that's old or a result of some failed experiment. That Vector, Hashtable, StringBuffer and so many other old classes are still part of Java 1.7 is a crime. There's stuff all over the Java API that was deprecated in Java 1.1 and still has not been removed. And the minimum number of classes that Java has to load in order to run anything is still way too high. The beauty of Java's dynamic class loading is somewhat ruined when you have too many dependencies in the core classes that need to be loaded every time the JVM runs. Reducing those dependencies would result in faster start ups which would make Java feel less bloated.
And beyond the core API, many of the J2EE APIs have serious issues. For instance, the Servlet API is mostly good an easy to use. But it still uses things like Enumerators and StringBuffers that are considered obsolete. And there are still things that are wildly inconsistent...like HttpServletRequest#getRequestURI and #getRequestURL. One returns a String and the other returns a StringBuffer...how does that make any sense? Even if you were to update the API to use the newer StringBuilder, that API decision would still make no sense. And that's not an isolated case...that kind of stuff is strewn all over the J2EE APIs.
All this combines to give Java a very overwhelming and bloated feeling...especially to new users. That could all go away with some effort towards clean up and consistency throughout the API. There's an adage that a good finished design comes not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to remove. And that really embodies the philosophy that Java should adopt. If it means breaking backwards compatibility, then I think it's a necessary step. It wouldn't be that much more effort to maintain updates to the 1.6 branch to allow code written for ancient VMs to continue to run on an up-to-date JVM. But the gain from having an API that is consistent, intuitive and unburdened by the mountain of deprecated or otherwise ignored stuff that's currently in the API would be significant.
And Sun should embrace the vibrant Java community and realize when others have solved a problem better than they have instead of the continual NIH syndrome they tend to have. If, instead of continuing to recommend their own substandard solutions, they were to advise that users use other solutions and then invest effort into improving those other projects and possibly incorporating them into core APIs (i.e. giving them either java.* or javax.*), they could provide users with a better experience and expend less developer effort in the process. The fact that I still have to fend off PHBs who think we should re-architect projects to use EJB is incredibly annoying (though not nearly as annoying as the ones that suggest rails, but I digress). EJB has been a total train wreck since its inception. And the re-designed EJB 3.0 is, while better, still a worse solution than any of a handful of open source projects geared towards solving the same problem. They should let it die already.
On somewhat of a tangent, AWT and Swing also need to crawl into a hole somewhere and die. They were interesting forays into a GUI framework, but SWT and JFace are better. If Sun has the balls to move to a Java 2 that breaks backwards compatibility, they should also have the insight to axe AWT and Swing and work with IBM to include SWT and JFace in core Java distribution. For one, it would allow Sun to offload a lot of the responsibility for maintaining a huge part of the distribution to someone else, which would no doubt save them a nice chunk of change. And it would also allow them to focus on the core Java language, performance and API.
But I make a very nice living off of being able to navigate through the whole mess, so who am I to complain?
What's the point of an SUV to drive through the city?
I own a smallish SUV (RAV4) and live in a major city (San Francisco). With the number of potholes and crap roads, having the suspension of an SUV is great. And being able to see over cars makes driving in the city a lot less stressful. It gets 20 MPG city and 26-27 highway, so it's not that bad. It's no longer than a civic, which makes it parkable.
And I can take it on camping trips to the desert and drive off road to find a camp site. And when I head to the sierras, I breeze right through chain control. I can toss a bicycle in the back seat to get to the various starting points for bike rides.
With my commute weighing in at a whopping 6 miles in each direction, I probably end up using less gas than most Prius owners...I only fill up about once a month if I don't take any trips out of the city. It currently costs about $55 to fill the tank. At $55 per month, that's less than the average cell phone plan.
I'm not saying that it's an absolute necessity, and if gas prices get insane, my life is structured such that I can ride my bicycle more places or even give it up entirely and join a car-sharing program, but right now it's a luxury that makes sense to me.
All that said, Americans don't know the first thing about expensive gasoline...I just returned from a business trip to Europe and saw gas selling for £1.19/L in the UK (£1.19/L == ~$9/gal). We'll get there eventually, so I'm well aware that my choice of vehicle may need to change and I may get very little resale value on my current vehicle, but for the time being, I think my current vehicle makes sense.
Nearly a dozen airlines have folded in the last few months, and even the largest carriers are getting panicky.
Not all the airlines are panicking. The large carriers with strong financial positions are mostly well-hedged against the rising cost of fuel. This allows them to have significantly lower operating expenses and will allow them to make even larger profits when their near-bankrupt competitors are forced to raise prices to avoid taking a loss flights. They also stand to make quite a bit by picking up profitable routes of the carriers that go belly up, or swooping in right before the bankruptcy to either purchase aircrafts for bargain rates or even acquiring them while the stock price is almost nil.
IIRC the article I read (which, somewhat ironically, was in the free Financial Times that they gave us on my most-recent flight), the big US carriers (American, United, Delta, etc) are mostly toast. They weren't on stable financial ground to begin with due mostly to ancient infrastructure and large pension commitments to retired employees. The newer airlines (Southwest, JetBlue, etc) are in a good position to capitalize, since they've got cash in reserve and are actually profitable. In Europe, the best positioned airline is Lufthansa with AirFrance-KLM a close second, though things probably won't be as bad there since many of the European carriers that represent individual countries (Austrian, Alitalia, etc) will likely be bailed out by their respective governments. They covered the rest of the world too, but the only three I remember them mentioning as being in good shape were Quantas, Singapore Air and Emirates.
If that article is to be believed, it doesn't seem like all the airlines are stressing over the rising fuel costs, just the ones who stand to be hit hardest. In the end, the extra cost will be passed on to passengers and the airlines that can either undercut their competitors or pocket more of the increased prices will come out of this period better off than they currently are.
So we have vast numbers of people engaging in behavior that is generally considered to be illegal, and companies are suing many people that have, by most accounts, done nothing wrong.
I think you've touched on something here that I'd like to expand upon. Namely, that the perceptions of the users sharing songs and the record companies suing those people are radically different.
Government, especially in a socialist country like Sweden, should have more responsibility than just passing laws and enforcing them. There is a huge opportunity for enlightened governments to impress upon their constituents the importance of copyright, why wholesale copyright violation is a bad thing and why people should think twice about their actions in this area. At the same time, there's a good opportunity for Government to impress upon the record labels the importance of not stifling creativity and recognizing the importance of fair use of their content.
The important thing is to decide on a copyright stance that is reasonable. Something like an automatic 14 years plus another 14 if you pay to have it extended. Then you can make policies based on that...stuff like adding a bit to the public school curriculum to teach high school students why copyright laws exist and what things they can and cannot do without violating the laws. Laws are just one aspect of public policy, and it's important to remember that.
If government can help restore the respect for the concept of copyright on both sides of the aisle (i.e. life of the creator + 70 years is no more respectful of copyright than ThePirateBay-style file sharing), there will be less need for draconian laws to punish people who violate copyright laws.
I think the sales numbers reflect both the lack of availability of the current model (as the article mentioned, you basically cannot get one from Apple, either retail or online) and the widely-held belief that there is a much cooler version that will be available in early June.
That means there will be a large number of people itching to buy the new model when it finally launches. You have not only the people specifically waiting for the new model (count me in this group), you also have the people who would have purchased the current model if they could find someone to sell it to them. And this doesn't even count people who may be won over by any new/innovative features of the new model. And then there's the bleeding-edge Apple zealots who buy everything Apple makes on top of all that. That could be a lot of people.
If the new iPhone does launch in early June, I see no reason why 10 million is out of the realm of possibility, especially if the launch is accompanied by the announcement of interesting software for the platform, which would be a distinct possibility considering the speculated launch would be at WWDC and the SDK has been out for long enough to allow developers to have come up with something cool.
You may be on to something, though I think the exercise bike would probably be more apropos since employees could sit on it while they work. It's actually possible to type and do computer work while pedaling.
Come to think of it, get rid of the electrical sockets in the wall and require IT staff to power their computers with the energy generated from pedaling (somewhat similar to linking the priority of processes...the faster you pedal and the more resistance you add, the more juice your computer gets giving you more CPU).
That way, you kill two birds with one stone...overweight IT staff and IT contributing to the energy crisis. Hell, you could probably use tax breaks for alternative fuels to buy the Twinkies, potato chips and Mountain Dew!
It would be kinda cool if GTA licensed the Guitar Hero engine and added optional missions that involved playing songs on the guitar. Something like having to infiltrate a rock band as a back-up guitarist in order to find out which dealer they buy from so you could go rob him (lame, I know, but they've had dumber plots than that before...).
Plus, then your character could also use the in-game guitar as a blunt object for beating people over the head.
Wouldn't it be great if the patient had at least SOME degree of control over what is prescribed? Obviously, lay persons should not prescribe drugs for themselves, but if there are three drugs A, B, and C which are all considered roughly equivalent, appropriate treatments for some condition, the patient should be able to decide for him/herself which of the drugs to use.
There's an one-word response to your idea...formularies.
The health insurance carriers hate the term, so it's often referred to as a preferred drug list or something similar. But the concept is the same. The idea is that, to take your example, if drugs A, B and C are all medically equivalent, the insurance carrier (or prescription benefits management provider, since some insurance carriers don't deal with drugs directly) can go to the manufacturers of each drug to try to get the cheapest price for a bulk order. The pitch is simple...if you give us the best price, all our customers will get your drug and if you don't, all of our customers get your competitors product. The net effect is lower drug prices and higher profits for the health insurance carrier. The drugs are usually still distributed through pharmacies, but the price paid by the carrier is different from what you or I would get if we walked in off the street. Though even this is changing somewhat with carriers/PBMs offering recurring prescriptions by mail.
So your idea fails because it limits the bargaining power of your health insurance carrier.
If you're paying entirely out-of-pocket, you can probably either ask your doctor to write a prescription for a specific drug or get your pharmacist to check with your doctor about filling that specific drug. They'll still check with your doctor because there's also the lesser issue that even drugs that are deemed "medically equivalent" will often have different interaction warnings (i.e. other prescriptions, vitamins, foods, etc that do bad things when combined with the drugs). So by filling the prescription for the drug prescribed by the doctor, it gives the doctor the chance to ensure that he's not prescribing something that would interact with other drugs you're taking. In my experience, pharmacists are much better at identifying drug interactions than doctors, but they'll usually check anyways, so two checks are better than one.
FWIW, I used to work for a Prescription Benefits Management (PBM) company writing software for their mail-order program which, among other things, checked drug interactions. I could go on at length about lessons learned from working there, but suffice it to say that I'd recommend people filling prescriptions, at a minimum, tell their pharmacist every other prescription they're taking. It's also a good idea to include non-standard vitamins/supplements and non-prescription drugs (which includes alcohol, nicotine in all its forms and any illicit drugs).
Oh...and we already see way too many ads for prescription drugs...if we instituted your idea and allowed patients to decide which specific drugs they were prescribed, we'd see that number go way up.
You might want to patent a protocol because you don't want a competitor using the same techniques in their own proprietary protocol.
For example, Diffie-Hellman key exchange was patented. It doesn't, by itself, comprise a protocol that you'd use that others could inter-operate with your application, but it can be used as part of any protocol that requires encryption where the two parties have not previously exchanged encryption keys.
If significant effort was put into devising that part of the protocol and subjecting it to the scrutiny necessary to determine that it was, in fact, secure, why shouldn't you patent it?
(Please note that I'm in no way endorsing any of the Microsoft protocols as being anywhere near as clever as Diffie-Hellman).
Additionally, you could heavily throttle connections from those ISPs and encourage as many other content providers to do the same. Make it clear that in the same way that content producers are using the ISPs' networks, the ISPs are using content providers' content.
An interstitial page explaining the complaint along with an explanation that all requests other than that of the interstitial page would be slow (I'd say a 33.6k or 56k modem speed would be sufficient to make the point and still have their sites be usable).
It's all well and good that there's new language features spec'd out, but JavaScript, at least its most common usage (web client-side) has the distinct disadvantage of lowest-common-denominator. Yes, you have JavaScript 2.0 in all it's less-horrbily-broken splendor, and you may even get Mozilla, Opera, Safari to implement it mostly correctly reasonably soon. Hell, you might even get Microsoft to include a halfway-compliant version in IE 8 or 9 (complete with a few proprietary extensions). But you'll still need to support IE 6 for a year or so and then IE 7 support will be necessary until at least 2012.
By the time JavaScript 2.0 is available in nearly all browsers you find in the wild, there will already be a JavaScipt 4.0 spec out and you'll be able to write this exact comment with the dates and browser versions updated.
The point being that client-side programming is a complete mess right now. Instead of new versions of scripting languages, we should be pushing browser makers to allow scripting to be installed via plug-ins rather than being native to the browser. That way, a website can trigger the user to update to the latest version of the language spec (ala the much-maligned-here flash plugin). That should also allow website authors to use any language, not just JavaScript. After all, if you're developing your site in RoR, wouldn't it be easier to use Ruby for the client-side scripting as well as the server-side? The same would go for Python, Perl, PHP (/me shudders) or even Java/Groovy.
But as long as we are beholden to the browser manufacturers to release updates of their browsers in a timely and compliant manner, we'll be stuck in this cycle where we can't use the latest-and-greatest features until they're no longer latest-and-greatest.
True, but with one caveat. The tobacco companies would *love* for marijuana to be legalized (beyond medical uses...regulated like tobacco cigarettes currently are). Think about it...they could bring marijuana cigarettes to market faster and more cheaply than anyone. They've got the factories to package the product and the distribution channels to get the product to retail outlets. They've even got years of research on growing techniques to increase the chemical content of plants, so they could easily produce the "best" product.
Combine this with all the bad PR and anti-smoking campaigns and a secondary revenue stream is very appealing. So, yes, they're against legalization of all drugs, but for the ones that they're in an ideal position to produce themselves, they support legalization efforts.
I see this as an argument for the JVM approach rather than against it. As we start seeing 4/8/16-core processors, one (or both) of two things will have to happen for us to get any benefit from the added cores. Either programmers are going to have to learn to parallelize their code and languages are going to have to make multi-threaded programming a lot easier or we're going to need an abstraction layer between the programmer and the hardware that's capable of parallelizing code written without the pervasively-multi-threaded mindset.
The first option isn't particularly likely since it seems, for whatever reason, many developers can't visualize multi-threaded execution reliably enough to write multi-threaded code that isn't buggy as all hell.
That leaves the second option, which can either be done at compile-time or at runtime. The JVM takes the runtime approach, which avoids issues of having to compile the code prior to knowing the exact hardware available. To a limited extent, the JVM is already capable of dynamically multi-threading code to take advantage of multiple processors/cores. The engineers at Sun will continue to improve the JVM's capabilities in this regard, and I think we'll eventually see the JVM start to become significantly faster than native code that isn't specifically written for parallel execution. Basically, if you take a Java program written with a single-threaded mindset and a C program written the same way and, provided the complexity is great enough to mitigate the startup of the JVM (i.e. not Hello, World!), the Java version will most likely benefit far more as the number of available cores increases.
There's actually a pretty good rationale for saying the last word of an acronym...it makes what you're saying unambiguous.
For example, without those trailing words, you could have been talking about an encryption technology (Secure Sockets Layer) illuminating a network layer (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) connecting to a branch of the Vietnamese military (Vietnam People's Navy).
Sure the last one is a bit of a stretch, but there are a ton of acronyms that get re-used that can end up being ambiguous. If I say SOA architecture or SOA authority, it's clear whether I'm using marketing-speak or whether I'm talking about configuring a DNS system (which itself, without the trailing "system" could have been referring to a computational fluid dynamics simulation).
You can only really leave off the trailing word when there is either no other possible meaning for the acronym (e.g. SCUBA) or when the context in which you're speaking precludes any other meaning (context being both the people you're speaking with and the rest of what you're saying).
FWIW, Witch can handle unminimizing a window. It's also quite useful in its own right when you've got many windows of a certain application open and want to switch to a specific one. Having been a convert from Windows 2000 (work) and Linux (home), Witch was perfect for me since it replicated the Windows ALT+TAB paradigm that had become so natural to me. The Mac CMD+TAB behavior was a nice add-on ability that has since become natural as well.
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As someone who has taken the plunge and gotten an HDTV, it has been a really nice switch. The difference between SD and HD when it comes to satellite channels is pretty dramatic...to the point where I don't watch the SD channels anymore unless there's something I really want to watch which is only on an SD channel.
The problem with Blu-Ray is that the difference it offers from an upscaled DVD really isn't as dramatic as the difference between an SD channel and an HD channel. And that makes the price they're asking us to pay for both the players and the media way too high. Consumers are used to essentially getting technology progress for free...a Core 2 Duo costs roughly the same as a P4 did when it was top of the line. Yet Blu-Ray media is being sold for substantially more than DVD ever was. And when you consider just how many ways there are to get discounted DVDs, it makes the price comparison swing that much more in the favor of DVD.
The thing is, once you start using it, it is preferable. I use my PS3 to play Blu-Ray discs I get from Netflix and have so far been very happy with both the quality and the extras offered. But the key to my experience so far has been that Netflix sends me Blu-Ray discs at the exact same price as I would pay for the DVD version and I've purchased the least-expensive Blu-Ray player which is pretty much the only one that doesn't suck on a price-per-feature basis and is pretty much the only reasonably-priced one that will be reasonably forward-compatible with the rapidly-changing Blu-Ray spec. The spec has changed so often that most people that have bought stand-alone Blu-Ray players have been bit by the fact that discs using Blu-Ray profiles released after their players were released aren't entirely functional.
But expecting people to pay a hefty premium for a product that offers modest improvements isn't going to fly. If they stopped updating the Blu-Ray spec to allow player manufacturers a fixed target, it might enable them to drop the price of the players to the $200-$300 range and that, coupled with reducing the cost of discs to same price charged for the DVD version, would make Blu-Ray a lot more successful. But until they realize that their technology isn't worth the hefty premium they're attempting to charge for it, very few people will buy it.
A quick Google search turned up a number of avenues for filing complaints about how you're treated by the TSA--both official and unofficial.
On the official side, here's the necessary forms for filing a complaint as well as the applicable procedural information.
On the unofficial side, This site looks like they're collecting complaints to create an aggregate report which they will present to the TSA.
So perhaps protesting on the spot isn't the best option. Just take the names and possibly ID numbers of the screeners/manager that you deal with and lodge an official complaint. That way, you're not holding up other travelers and you give the TSA to handle the complaint reasonably. If the screener was being over-zealous or otherwise failing to follow TSA policy, it gives the TSA a chance to discipline and possibly dismiss the screener. It also gives the TSA the chance to change the policy based on feedback from travelers or offer a detailed explanation of exactly why the policy is what it is.
That said, however, if they give either give you an unsatisfactory explanation for the policy or are unresponsive to your complaint, then it is time to protest. The old saying about never attributing to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence is an apt one. We've seen no shortage of instances where our government has acted incompetently, so I see no reason to assume that all this TSA stuff is any different. It seems to me that we should make every effort to cooperatively improve the process since it's likely that the creating and implementing that policy don't really fully understand the problems they're trying to solve and, only when we've determined that the policy is malicious/pernicious, resort to more forceful protests.
Besides, ad-hoc protests on the spot are probably not the most effective. If all you do is protest, by yourself, at the time that you're first effected by the policy, it's easy enough to be completely ignored. Other travelers will be routed through other checkpoints and, despite agreeing with you, probably decide that their travel plans are more important than a show of solidarity.
But if you expend the effort to verify that there is an existing TSA policy that they're unwilling to change that you believe is unreasonable, you can find others that are willing to participate in the protest, buy cheaper tickets which you know you'll never use and coordinate your protests so that everyone gets stopped by the TSA at the same time. If your protest can effectively shut down most of the security checkpoints at a major airport, you will get news coverage and actually have a chance of making a difference.
Why have cell phones be different from any other electronic device. For instance, if you go to Dell's website, they'll quote you the price of an item but they also say "As low as $x/month." Why should buying a cell phone be any different?
The only reason that we can't do this now is because of cell phone contracts...why finance the phone when you still have to sign a contract? If there were no contracts, financing could offer those who choose that option the same experience they're getting now.
I'm not sure if our case was atypical, but when my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she was nothing like you've described. The symptoms she had manifest to that point were all related to short-term memory and becoming easily confused when in public, but she was still living on her own and perfectly happy while at home. The initial response, which worked for a year and a half, was to have someone from her church come live with her. This worked well for everyone because the woman and her daughter were getting free room and board and my grandmother had someone to buy the food and take her on occasional walks to the beach (she lived 3 blocks away from the ocean).
It wasn't until 18 months after the diagnosis that she became too senile for this arrangement to work. From that point, my family had to endure the absolute hell of watching a loved one waste away from the inside out until what's left is a shell of a person who reminds you of your loved one but can't remember how to form sentences let alone tell you they've forgotten you (which had started happening shortly after she was moved to a medical facility). About 4 months ago, she stopped eating and finally died. This was almost a full 15 years after the initial diagnosis.
If we could have hit the pause button on her disease the day she was diagnosed, we would have had 15 years of visits where we got to see her face light up when she saw us, got to hear her stories that were still very much accessible in her long-term memory and gotten some measure of closure when whatever ailment finally took her life would have deprived us of someone we recognized. It's a bizarre form of loss to lose someone you love so much so little at a time. Until you've been through it, you don't realize how lucky people are to lose someone in a manner where one day you can talk to them and the next you can't. Those people get to grieve and move on. Families of Alzheimer's patients are robbed of that. And I can only imagine the fear and confusion of someone actually subjected to it as they lose themselves to the disease.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that your experience working in the facility you work in means that you're naturally being exposed to people who were diagnosed or had progressed further into the disease than others. Maybe for those patients it would make sense to wait until the disease had progressed to the point you mentioned. But there are patients who are diagnosed earlier on for whom this drug would be a godsend. And, since there's some indication that Alzheimer's is hereditary, if it could be determined to be safe enough for family members of people with diagnosed Alzheimer's to take to prevent themselves from ever reaching the point, that would be all the more useful.
While I agree with the overall premise of your post, I think this is a flawed example to draw upon.
While it's true that most of the original astronauts had degrees in some scientific area, what the country was celebrating was much more related to their backgrounds as test pilots and military aviators. There were no parades for the engineers who accepted Kennedy's ambitious challenge even though they were probably much more influential in succeeding at that challenge. The ones who got the parades were probably among the least educated of all non-clerical NASA employees (which isn't really a reflection on them but more a reflection on who the other people at NASA were).
And we weren't praising their ingenuity or intelligence, we were praising their bravery and the fact that they symbolically beat the Russians.
OTOH, if you want to look at another example of where we exalted someone who did use intelligence and ingenuity to also beat the Russians, the fame garnered by Bobby Fischer would probably be a good example. It's pretty unlikely that our current society would heap the kind of praise given to Bobby Fischer on someone who accomplished a similar intellectual feat. About the closest we've come that I can think of is Ken Jennings and it won't be long before people have mostly forgotten his name (if they haven't already).
Using rings to encode information is a pretty poor way to do it, since you've got no confirmation that the person sending the rings is actually the person you expect to call. The way to do it is to abuse the collect calling mechanism. When I was in middle school, I used a system where I called my parents collect when my soccer practice was over and they simply declined the charges. But since they knew that I had tried to call them, the knew to come pick me up.
The system pretty reliably deals with the situation where you try to send explicit messages when you're asked to record your name (that was the first thing I tried, but it would make me repeat my name until I said a real name and not something like, "I'm ready to be picked up"). But you can still send signals on the sly without them knowing. For instance, in your example (one ring for a boy, two for a girl), you'd just place the collect call using either the name "Bobby Smith" or "Jenny Smith" and the caller would ascertain the gender from the name used...you could even use this mechanism to send the full name you'd chosen for the newborn. With a large collection of pre-arranged fake names, you could pretty reliably send messages from pay phones or over long distance without paying a cent.
Of course the advent of cell phones and VoIP solutions make these tricks somewhat less relevant.
You missed a crucial word in what I said that makes a world of difference. "Not knowing you have the desire" and "Not knowing yet that you have the desire" are two entirely separate things.
The word yet implies a temporal comparison. The addition into that sentence signifies that, at some point in time, people would know that they would have the desire, but at a previous point in time they did not know that they had the desire. I'll admit that it could have been worded better, but that's just semantics.
This was my point entirely. The mp3 boom came about because technology advanced to a certain threshold where its use became feasible. The CPU reached a certain point where the researchers at the Fraunhofer institute realized that a compression algorithm that would chop 90% of the file size off a raw audio sample could work. Then hard drives and bandwidth advanced to the point where the general public could use that compression algorithm to the desired effect.
What if CPU makers asked the question, "why make our CPUs faster...they can already do [insert cpu tasks done at the time]?" or had hard drive manufacturers ask, "why increase capacity for consumer drives since there's nothing that people need to store that is that large?" or had modem manufacturers asked, "why increase the speed of the modem when 9600 baud is fine for connecting to a BBS or telnet session?"
But they didn't. And others found things to do with those extra CPU cycles, Megabytes and kbps that would have been very difficult to predict ahead of time. And because they didn't ask those, my mom (an extreme example of a technophobe) has an iPod that she listens to every day. She would have never known to ask for it before others had shown it was possible. But once she was shown it was possible, she wanted it and it would now be a huge loss for her to not have that ability.
Proliferating the number of cores will have the same effect. It may require other technologies to also reach a certain threshold, but there will come a time when that advancement will play a part in enabling some use that we will consider to be essential in the future. We just don't know what that is yet .
This is, IMHO, the wrong question to be asking. Asking how current tasks will be optimized to take advantage of future hardware makes the fundamental flawed assumption that the current tasks will be what's considered important once we have this kind of hardware.
But the history of computers have shown that the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy applies to the tasks that people end up wanting to accomplish. It's been seen time and again that new abilities for using computers wait until we've hit a certain performance threshold, whether it CPU, memory, bandwidth, disk space, video resolution or whatever, and then become the things we need our computers to do.
Take, for instance, the huge success of mp3's. There was a time not so long ago when people were limited to playing music off a physical CD. This wasn't because there was no desire amongst computer users to listen to digital files that could be stored locally or streamed off the internet. It was because computer users did not know yet that they had the desire to do it. But technology advanced to the point where a) processors became fast enough to decode mp3's in real time without using the whole CPU and b) hard drives grew to the point where we had the capacity to store files that are 10% of the size of the size of the files on the CD.
Similarly, it's likely that when we reach the point where we have hundreds or thousands of cores, new tasks will emerge that take advantage of the new capabilities of the hardware. It may be that those tasks are limited in some other way by one of the other components we use or by the as yet non-existent status of some new component, but it's only important that multiple cores play a part in enabling the new task.
In the near term, you can imagine a whole host of applications that would become possible when you get to the point where the average computer can do real-time H.264 encoding without affecting overall system performance. I won't guess at what might be popular further down the road, but there will be people who will think of something to do with those extra cores. And, in hindsight, we'll see the proliferation of cores as enabling our current computer-using behavior.
Nor Salmon P Chase, for that matter...though I doubt anyone reading this would have ever seen a $10,000 bill.
The problem with the Java API at this point is that there's been such an effort made to ensure that each new release is backwards compatible with all other releases that it's become a jumbled mess. This is why Java is continually getting trashed as being bloated.
What needs to happen is some serious work into deprecating and then actually removing the stuff that's old or a result of some failed experiment. That Vector, Hashtable, StringBuffer and so many other old classes are still part of Java 1.7 is a crime. There's stuff all over the Java API that was deprecated in Java 1.1 and still has not been removed. And the minimum number of classes that Java has to load in order to run anything is still way too high. The beauty of Java's dynamic class loading is somewhat ruined when you have too many dependencies in the core classes that need to be loaded every time the JVM runs. Reducing those dependencies would result in faster start ups which would make Java feel less bloated.
And beyond the core API, many of the J2EE APIs have serious issues. For instance, the Servlet API is mostly good an easy to use. But it still uses things like Enumerators and StringBuffers that are considered obsolete. And there are still things that are wildly inconsistent...like HttpServletRequest#getRequestURI and #getRequestURL. One returns a String and the other returns a StringBuffer...how does that make any sense? Even if you were to update the API to use the newer StringBuilder, that API decision would still make no sense. And that's not an isolated case...that kind of stuff is strewn all over the J2EE APIs.
All this combines to give Java a very overwhelming and bloated feeling...especially to new users. That could all go away with some effort towards clean up and consistency throughout the API. There's an adage that a good finished design comes not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to remove. And that really embodies the philosophy that Java should adopt. If it means breaking backwards compatibility, then I think it's a necessary step. It wouldn't be that much more effort to maintain updates to the 1.6 branch to allow code written for ancient VMs to continue to run on an up-to-date JVM. But the gain from having an API that is consistent, intuitive and unburdened by the mountain of deprecated or otherwise ignored stuff that's currently in the API would be significant.
And Sun should embrace the vibrant Java community and realize when others have solved a problem better than they have instead of the continual NIH syndrome they tend to have. If, instead of continuing to recommend their own substandard solutions, they were to advise that users use other solutions and then invest effort into improving those other projects and possibly incorporating them into core APIs (i.e. giving them either java.* or javax.*), they could provide users with a better experience and expend less developer effort in the process. The fact that I still have to fend off PHBs who think we should re-architect projects to use EJB is incredibly annoying (though not nearly as annoying as the ones that suggest rails, but I digress). EJB has been a total train wreck since its inception. And the re-designed EJB 3.0 is, while better, still a worse solution than any of a handful of open source projects geared towards solving the same problem. They should let it die already.
On somewhat of a tangent, AWT and Swing also need to crawl into a hole somewhere and die. They were interesting forays into a GUI framework, but SWT and JFace are better. If Sun has the balls to move to a Java 2 that breaks backwards compatibility, they should also have the insight to axe AWT and Swing and work with IBM to include SWT and JFace in core Java distribution. For one, it would allow Sun to offload a lot of the responsibility for maintaining a huge part of the distribution to someone else, which would no doubt save them a nice chunk of change. And it would also allow them to focus on the core Java language, performance and API.
But I make a very nice living off of being able to navigate through the whole mess, so who am I to complain?
And I can take it on camping trips to the desert and drive off road to find a camp site. And when I head to the sierras, I breeze right through chain control. I can toss a bicycle in the back seat to get to the various starting points for bike rides.
With my commute weighing in at a whopping 6 miles in each direction, I probably end up using less gas than most Prius owners...I only fill up about once a month if I don't take any trips out of the city. It currently costs about $55 to fill the tank. At $55 per month, that's less than the average cell phone plan.
I'm not saying that it's an absolute necessity, and if gas prices get insane, my life is structured such that I can ride my bicycle more places or even give it up entirely and join a car-sharing program, but right now it's a luxury that makes sense to me.
All that said, Americans don't know the first thing about expensive gasoline...I just returned from a business trip to Europe and saw gas selling for £1.19/L in the UK (£1.19/L == ~$9/gal). We'll get there eventually, so I'm well aware that my choice of vehicle may need to change and I may get very little resale value on my current vehicle, but for the time being, I think my current vehicle makes sense.
IIRC the article I read (which, somewhat ironically, was in the free Financial Times that they gave us on my most-recent flight), the big US carriers (American, United, Delta, etc) are mostly toast. They weren't on stable financial ground to begin with due mostly to ancient infrastructure and large pension commitments to retired employees. The newer airlines (Southwest, JetBlue, etc) are in a good position to capitalize, since they've got cash in reserve and are actually profitable. In Europe, the best positioned airline is Lufthansa with AirFrance-KLM a close second, though things probably won't be as bad there since many of the European carriers that represent individual countries (Austrian, Alitalia, etc) will likely be bailed out by their respective governments. They covered the rest of the world too, but the only three I remember them mentioning as being in good shape were Quantas, Singapore Air and Emirates.
If that article is to be believed, it doesn't seem like all the airlines are stressing over the rising fuel costs, just the ones who stand to be hit hardest. In the end, the extra cost will be passed on to passengers and the airlines that can either undercut their competitors or pocket more of the increased prices will come out of this period better off than they currently are.
Government, especially in a socialist country like Sweden, should have more responsibility than just passing laws and enforcing them. There is a huge opportunity for enlightened governments to impress upon their constituents the importance of copyright, why wholesale copyright violation is a bad thing and why people should think twice about their actions in this area. At the same time, there's a good opportunity for Government to impress upon the record labels the importance of not stifling creativity and recognizing the importance of fair use of their content.
The important thing is to decide on a copyright stance that is reasonable. Something like an automatic 14 years plus another 14 if you pay to have it extended. Then you can make policies based on that...stuff like adding a bit to the public school curriculum to teach high school students why copyright laws exist and what things they can and cannot do without violating the laws. Laws are just one aspect of public policy, and it's important to remember that.
If government can help restore the respect for the concept of copyright on both sides of the aisle (i.e. life of the creator + 70 years is no more respectful of copyright than ThePirateBay-style file sharing), there will be less need for draconian laws to punish people who violate copyright laws.
That means there will be a large number of people itching to buy the new model when it finally launches. You have not only the people specifically waiting for the new model (count me in this group), you also have the people who would have purchased the current model if they could find someone to sell it to them. And this doesn't even count people who may be won over by any new/innovative features of the new model. And then there's the bleeding-edge Apple zealots who buy everything Apple makes on top of all that. That could be a lot of people.
If the new iPhone does launch in early June, I see no reason why 10 million is out of the realm of possibility, especially if the launch is accompanied by the announcement of interesting software for the platform, which would be a distinct possibility considering the speculated launch would be at WWDC and the SDK has been out for long enough to allow developers to have come up with something cool.
You may be on to something, though I think the exercise bike would probably be more apropos since employees could sit on it while they work. It's actually possible to type and do computer work while pedaling.
Come to think of it, get rid of the electrical sockets in the wall and require IT staff to power their computers with the energy generated from pedaling (somewhat similar to linking the priority of processes...the faster you pedal and the more resistance you add, the more juice your computer gets giving you more CPU).
That way, you kill two birds with one stone...overweight IT staff and IT contributing to the energy crisis. Hell, you could probably use tax breaks for alternative fuels to buy the Twinkies, potato chips and Mountain Dew!
Would that be GTAr Hero?
It would be kinda cool if GTA licensed the Guitar Hero engine and added optional missions that involved playing songs on the guitar. Something like having to infiltrate a rock band as a back-up guitarist in order to find out which dealer they buy from so you could go rob him (lame, I know, but they've had dumber plots than that before...).
Plus, then your character could also use the in-game guitar as a blunt object for beating people over the head.
The health insurance carriers hate the term, so it's often referred to as a preferred drug list or something similar. But the concept is the same. The idea is that, to take your example, if drugs A, B and C are all medically equivalent, the insurance carrier (or prescription benefits management provider, since some insurance carriers don't deal with drugs directly) can go to the manufacturers of each drug to try to get the cheapest price for a bulk order. The pitch is simple...if you give us the best price, all our customers will get your drug and if you don't, all of our customers get your competitors product. The net effect is lower drug prices and higher profits for the health insurance carrier. The drugs are usually still distributed through pharmacies, but the price paid by the carrier is different from what you or I would get if we walked in off the street. Though even this is changing somewhat with carriers/PBMs offering recurring prescriptions by mail.
So your idea fails because it limits the bargaining power of your health insurance carrier.
If you're paying entirely out-of-pocket, you can probably either ask your doctor to write a prescription for a specific drug or get your pharmacist to check with your doctor about filling that specific drug. They'll still check with your doctor because there's also the lesser issue that even drugs that are deemed "medically equivalent" will often have different interaction warnings (i.e. other prescriptions, vitamins, foods, etc that do bad things when combined with the drugs). So by filling the prescription for the drug prescribed by the doctor, it gives the doctor the chance to ensure that he's not prescribing something that would interact with other drugs you're taking. In my experience, pharmacists are much better at identifying drug interactions than doctors, but they'll usually check anyways, so two checks are better than one.
FWIW, I used to work for a Prescription Benefits Management (PBM) company writing software for their mail-order program which, among other things, checked drug interactions. I could go on at length about lessons learned from working there, but suffice it to say that I'd recommend people filling prescriptions, at a minimum, tell their pharmacist every other prescription they're taking. It's also a good idea to include non-standard vitamins/supplements and non-prescription drugs (which includes alcohol, nicotine in all its forms and any illicit drugs).
Oh...and we already see way too many ads for prescription drugs...if we instituted your idea and allowed patients to decide which specific drugs they were prescribed, we'd see that number go way up.
You might want to patent a protocol because you don't want a competitor using the same techniques in their own proprietary protocol.
For example, Diffie-Hellman key exchange was patented. It doesn't, by itself, comprise a protocol that you'd use that others could inter-operate with your application, but it can be used as part of any protocol that requires encryption where the two parties have not previously exchanged encryption keys.
If significant effort was put into devising that part of the protocol and subjecting it to the scrutiny necessary to determine that it was, in fact, secure, why shouldn't you patent it?
(Please note that I'm in no way endorsing any of the Microsoft protocols as being anywhere near as clever as Diffie-Hellman).
Additionally, you could heavily throttle connections from those ISPs and encourage as many other content providers to do the same. Make it clear that in the same way that content producers are using the ISPs' networks, the ISPs are using content providers' content.
An interstitial page explaining the complaint along with an explanation that all requests other than that of the interstitial page would be slow (I'd say a 33.6k or 56k modem speed would be sufficient to make the point and still have their sites be usable).
It's all well and good that there's new language features spec'd out, but JavaScript, at least its most common usage (web client-side) has the distinct disadvantage of lowest-common-denominator. Yes, you have JavaScript 2.0 in all it's less-horrbily-broken splendor, and you may even get Mozilla, Opera, Safari to implement it mostly correctly reasonably soon. Hell, you might even get Microsoft to include a halfway-compliant version in IE 8 or 9 (complete with a few proprietary extensions). But you'll still need to support IE 6 for a year or so and then IE 7 support will be necessary until at least 2012.
By the time JavaScript 2.0 is available in nearly all browsers you find in the wild, there will already be a JavaScipt 4.0 spec out and you'll be able to write this exact comment with the dates and browser versions updated.
The point being that client-side programming is a complete mess right now. Instead of new versions of scripting languages, we should be pushing browser makers to allow scripting to be installed via plug-ins rather than being native to the browser. That way, a website can trigger the user to update to the latest version of the language spec (ala the much-maligned-here flash plugin). That should also allow website authors to use any language, not just JavaScript. After all, if you're developing your site in RoR, wouldn't it be easier to use Ruby for the client-side scripting as well as the server-side? The same would go for Python, Perl, PHP (/me shudders) or even Java/Groovy.
But as long as we are beholden to the browser manufacturers to release updates of their browsers in a timely and compliant manner, we'll be stuck in this cycle where we can't use the latest-and-greatest features until they're no longer latest-and-greatest.
True, but with one caveat. The tobacco companies would *love* for marijuana to be legalized (beyond medical uses...regulated like tobacco cigarettes currently are). Think about it...they could bring marijuana cigarettes to market faster and more cheaply than anyone. They've got the factories to package the product and the distribution channels to get the product to retail outlets. They've even got years of research on growing techniques to increase the chemical content of plants, so they could easily produce the "best" product.
Combine this with all the bad PR and anti-smoking campaigns and a secondary revenue stream is very appealing. So, yes, they're against legalization of all drugs, but for the ones that they're in an ideal position to produce themselves, they support legalization efforts.
The first option isn't particularly likely since it seems, for whatever reason, many developers can't visualize multi-threaded execution reliably enough to write multi-threaded code that isn't buggy as all hell.
That leaves the second option, which can either be done at compile-time or at runtime. The JVM takes the runtime approach, which avoids issues of having to compile the code prior to knowing the exact hardware available. To a limited extent, the JVM is already capable of dynamically multi-threading code to take advantage of multiple processors/cores. The engineers at Sun will continue to improve the JVM's capabilities in this regard, and I think we'll eventually see the JVM start to become significantly faster than native code that isn't specifically written for parallel execution. Basically, if you take a Java program written with a single-threaded mindset and a C program written the same way and, provided the complexity is great enough to mitigate the startup of the JVM (i.e. not Hello, World!), the Java version will most likely benefit far more as the number of available cores increases.
On the plus side, you get at least twice as many customers per customer as you do with sane customers.
There's actually a pretty good rationale for saying the last word of an acronym...it makes what you're saying unambiguous.
For example, without those trailing words, you could have been talking about an encryption technology (Secure Sockets Layer) illuminating a network layer (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) connecting to a branch of the Vietnamese military (Vietnam People's Navy).
Sure the last one is a bit of a stretch, but there are a ton of acronyms that get re-used that can end up being ambiguous. If I say SOA architecture or SOA authority, it's clear whether I'm using marketing-speak or whether I'm talking about configuring a DNS system (which itself, without the trailing "system" could have been referring to a computational fluid dynamics simulation).
You can only really leave off the trailing word when there is either no other possible meaning for the acronym (e.g. SCUBA) or when the context in which you're speaking precludes any other meaning (context being both the people you're speaking with and the rest of what you're saying).
FWIW, Witch can handle unminimizing a window. It's also quite useful in its own right when you've got many windows of a certain application open and want to switch to a specific one. Having been a convert from Windows 2000 (work) and Linux (home), Witch was perfect for me since it replicated the Windows ALT+TAB paradigm that had become so natural to me. The Mac CMD+TAB behavior was a nice add-on ability that has since become natural as well.