And yes, Studios are scumbags; it's just another example of how fucked IP law is in this country, such that unrelated corporations reap all the rewards and profits and the actual creators of IP get jack.
It should be pointed out that the actual creator, in this case, has long since died. It's tough to know who to root for in this, the studio, who uses account schemes to hoard all the profit for themselves or the descendants of someone creative who's livelihood is basically paid for with residual income on works they had no part in creating. If I had to choose, I'd probably side with New Line since they did take a pretty substantial financial risk on a relatively-unproven director and producers (they'd done other movies, but nothing anywhere near the scale that LotR ended up being).
The possibility that they could have been pissing away $100m, however remote, deserves to be rewarded. Studios, in many cases, wouldn't take this kind of risk if they knew that their potential profits were capped at, say, 100% of the movie's budget. In a screwy (pun intended) kind of way, these accounting practices encourage the creation of content, which is the intent behind copyright law. And while I'm first in line to criticize the studios for releasing bland, formulaic drivel, the studios are still behind the vast majority of the limited amount of quality movies being made these days.
So yeah, this is a prime example of two ways the fucked-up IP laws in this country screw the creators of the content. In and ideal world, Peter Jackson, the actors and the crew would see the majority of the profit and New Line would see a substantial-but-reasonable return on their significant financing of the films. But I feel almost no sympathy with the descendants of JRR Tolkien. Boo-hoo, you aren't getting paid for the work your father/uncle/whatever, get a real job. Be happy that you had a pretty damn cool relative in the family who's intellect you got to experience first-hand.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 1
There's been some movement toward expanding the balance sheet to include factors other than profit, namely Triple Bottom Line. Somewhat related is the trend towards Corporate Social Responsibility with many companies devoting significant resources towards volunteer programs, grants and other means of giving back.
In many cases, this is just an attempt to get good PR or an attempt to attract employees and customers, but it's still an indication that there's been some movement away from the notion that profit is the sole motive for a corporation.
I know there are rules that make those domains special. But my point is that there's nothing about existing TLDs that makes them special other than the fact that ICANN has sanctioned them. They created so few originally because computers and internet connections were slow and making DNS monolithic made things work better technically. But computers are faster now and net connections are faster. There's no longer a technical reason why we can't have more TLDs.
Believe me, I know how DNS was supposed to work. I had an email address with 5 dots in it at one point (in college, I did admin on some of the CS department's boxes and we ran a mail server on one of them). But the reality is that the unwashed masses can't grok domain names as a hierarchy. The system was designed with those lofty goals, but the real world didn't realize why that design was important. But it but ran with it anyways, and now we're in our current mess. Unless you can convince cars.com, music.com, etc to become a registrars for all companies/enthusiasts/etc in that realm, you've got to look at how the situation can realistically be changed.
And we're left with two choices...a few TLDs where anything reasonable at the next level becomes extremely valuable or many TLDs to make reasonable second-level domains plentiful.
Well, when you are paying for a domain name, you aren't paying for the database entry - you are paying for the right to exclusively use that particular name, right?
Of course, the value of the domain is much greater than a database entry, but the cost to the registrar is the cost of a database entry (and your share of the maintenance of that database). I'm sure the $35/year the Microsoft pays Verisign is well worth the cost. But it doesn't change the fact that Verisign is probably making $34/year or more in profit.
If I am interested in purchasing an Audi, do I go to audi.com or audi.auto?
How is that different from the current situation? Sure, Audi got to their.com first, but let's say I wanted a Japanese car instead of a German one...do I go to nissan.com? With expanded TLDs, people would do what they currently do...open their browser, type what they're looking for into the Google search box and hit enter.
The thing to remember about the multiple TLDs is that it should make the part before the TLD much simpler. So instead of longasscomplicateddomain.com, you have short.something...it really wouldn't be that much more complex than our current system, if at all.
Rather than making domains prohibitively expensive (and artificially so...a database entry should not cost $100), what needs to happen is a drastic expansion of top-level domains. The shortage of domain names is entirely artificial. The problem is not that there are too many PPC sites. The problem is that these sites make those domain names unavailable for legitimate use. But if there were more top-level domains to choose from, the likelihood that legitimate users would have problems finding a suitable domain would be significantly less.
ICANN wants to keep this artificial scarcity since it enables them to propose fee increases that keep the registrars profits obscenely high. And, as evidenced by this discussion, even technophiles have bought into their BS. We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Why is there no '.music' TLD for bands and music enthusiasts? Why are there not thousands of other TLDs that are appropriate for other purposes?
Because ICANN says so. There's little to no technical reason why. And changing this makes a hell of a lot more sense than upping the registration fees. All increasing registration fees accomplishes, other than annoying PPC site operators (who will adapt, just as SPAMers adapt to every technical hurdle that is sent their way), is to funnel even more money to the registrars.
One thing I found interesting about the article is that the entertainment lawyer makes one good point while trying to make a point that is almost the opposite.
From the article:
But, as a technical legal matter, fair use is not a "right," a misconception and misstatement frequently made these days.
While his point is that fair use is more of a privilege than a right, I think there's a much different interpretation of what he's saying that is important to consider.
He's absolutely correct that fair use isn't a right, it's an exception. But it's an exception to the rights of the copyright holder. And this distinction is important because it underscores how entertainment companies misrepresent copyright. Rather than copyright defining the few excepted uses allowed to people/entities who don't hold the copyright, it actually defines the few rights granted exclusively to the copyright holder.
And this is an important observation about the intent of copyright. Namely, that anything not explicitly granted to the copyright holder is permissible rather than forbidden. The big content producers would like copyright to be a limited set of things that we (those not producing the content) are allowed to do with their content, which they believe they own. But when defending our rights, it's important to remember that copyright is actually a limited set of things that we're not allowed to do and that content cannot be owned, only protected. And this is the principle that should be applied whenever something falls outside of what is explicitly stated in the Copyright Act...that everything not covered is allowed rather than forbidden.
Our government is broken. The people aren't represented and our votes don't count. Special interests control public policy and this is the core of almost all problems we face today.
As your next president, I promise to do everything I can to change this. I plan to enact substantive campaign finance reforms. Namely, political campaigns will be funded by the government. No donations of any size will be allowed. The amount of money given each candidate will depend on the office being run for, but will be equal for all candidates no matter the party nor the incumbent status.
And I plan to propose a constitutional amendment to change how congress is elected. This amendment will end the winner-take-all system that has resulted in the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dummer parties holding all elected offices. In its stead, we will have a system of proportional representation, a system that has proven far superior in other democratic countries around the world.
It is my sincere belief that when mechanism for government has been reformed, those who follow me in holding this office and the offices in congress can affect real change. They will be able to represent the people who elect them and hold real principles that will guide their policy decisions.
To paraphrase from a certain masked man who's words ring true for me...The truth is that there is something seriously wrong with this government. And if you don't see this, I suggest you let the 4th of November pass unnoticed. Vote for whatever Republicrat you feel will actually make some difference. But if you see what I see and if you feel what I feel, then join me at the polls to reclaim our government for the people and together we'll give them a 4th of November to remember.
At some point someone is going to flood the market with artificial diamonds that cannot be distinguished from real ones and the market will collapse. Here's hoping.
Ummm...someone already has... De Beers has resorted to laser inscribing their diamonds so that jewelers can distinguish between mined diamonds (what they call genuine) and synthesized diamonds.
The market will no doubt come down, but it won't collapse, mostly because the lab-created diamonds are still pretty expensive, the retail mark-up on jewelry is quite high and the De Beers PR machine has been pretty successful at convincing people that they need "genuine" diamonds. Well, that and the fact that the major outlay of cash for the ring is half the reason for buying the thing in the first place.
I don't think its even about profits really, only economics. Obviously, once someone has cancer they're all for these expensive but effective treatments. And that's just another form of "after my profit is had, I'll help the village."
But what about before they get cancer? If everyone was given the opportunity to pay $500/month more in health insurance premiums, starting on their 18th birthday, knowing that in the 10-20 percent chance that they get cancer, all treatment options will be available to them, no matter the cost, how many people would take that opportunity?
Insurance carrier profits aren't really part of this issue. Yes, they do some slimy things, but in the end, all treatment costs money and, as the GP suggested, difficult decisions must be made over how that money should be best spent to maximize the benefit. Sure, if insurance companies took smaller profits, you could increase spending by some, but you'd still have to make those difficult decisions. It's just the same decision posed above only on a larger scale. It's a good exercise for people to think about whether spending $500/month would be a worthwhile expense if it meant eliminating one possible cause of death that there's only a relatively small chance that they'll get.
Not that any treatment completely eliminates the risk of dying from cancer, but, hypothetically, would you have, on your 18th birthday, decided to spend $500/month for the rest of your life to know that should you get cancer, it would be cured? I know I wouldn't have.
In Windows, hold down the ALT key and type 0163 (then release the ALT key). For me, it only seems to work if I use the number keys at the right of my keyboard and not with the number keys above the qwerty row. The full character mapping can be found here.
...says the Mac user who, for work, had to learn the convoluted Windows method of doing something that OS X makes incredibly simple...
I think the one thing that makes parallel computing more difficult, and quite a bit more so than recursion, is the fact that it makes your program non-deterministic. With a single-threaded application, it's pretty obvious when you've made your application non-deterministic...you reference the time or some resource external to your application. And those kinds of non-deterministic behaviors are much easier to understand...they're mostly just data. But if your application is running on multiple processors using multiple threads, that's not the case. You can run your application multiple times and see different results depending on which threads execute the fastest. And in the worst-case scenario, you get dead locks that are a nightmare to debug.
It's often quite difficult to wrap your head around that unpredictability, especially since so much of the beginning computer science education teaches programmers to evaluate each instructions in their programs in source order as the computer is likely to end up doing when the program is run. This is made even worse by the fact that some languages (I know Java, but there may be others too) allow a compiler to re-order instructions to improve performance provided it doesn't alter that thread's behavior. This is fine for a single-threaded application, but can be quite confusing for a multi-threaded application when you can no longer assume source ordering of instructions from other threads.
It took a while before I got comfortable with essentially asking myself "What am I assuming and do I actually know that at this point or do I just think I know it at this point" with every line of code that I write that might execute in a multi-threaded environment. Even with that, I still run into occasions where it takes over an hour to debug a race condition when that error only happens a small percentage of the time.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why go through all the hassle of "random hard to guess string" which, if implemented improperly could be guessed? Plus, as others have pointed out, HTML is not a dynamic language. Your random, hard to guess string could be observed and used by an attacker.
...be a whole lot simpler? Just instruct the browser to make an additional request, but one in which it's expected to fully sandbox the content according to rules that you give it. This makes it much harder for application developers to screw up and a lot harder for malicious code to bypass the sandboxing mechanism.
But the thing about the XO is that they're not the ones making that choice. The XO gets given to children as a result of either a charitable donation from someone who has decided that the $200 is best spent in this fashion or as a result of a government deciding that the best use of its money is to spend $200 per XO for many of its children.
There are plenty of charities that people can give to if they want to help provide food or medicine to those who don't have it. The XO provides alternate means of giving. It's up to the person donating to determine what form their donation takes. If nothing else, the XO has created a gimmick that will prompt donations from those who would otherwise have never considered donating.
From reading the whole position paper, rather than just the one poorly-phrased sentence, it sounds like the poster is making a mountain out of a mole hill.
The actual quote that's being focused on is:
...including a W3C-lead standardization of a "free" codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg,..., by W3C...
If you look at what the intent of this sentence is likely to have been in the context of the statement as a whole rather than read it literally, it appears that that he's using Ogg as an example of 'a "free" codec or a proprietary technology'.
The reason for opposing Ogg, though, is best summed up by another sentence from the paper:
Compatibility with DRM. We understand that this could be a sore point in W3C, but from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though.
It seems to me that Nokia just wants a standardized way to deliver paid-for video to mobile devices. This kind of service is coming relatively soon and it will involve DRM. And while we like to bitch and moan about how horrible DRM is, the average wireless customer could care less. Nokia just wants the delivery mechanism to be somewhat standardized so that they don't have to have separate implementations for each wireless carrier.
Creating a robot that is as capable at general tasks as a human is pointless, at least from the economic standpoint
Toyota's plant in Toyota City produces one automobile every minute. And they have many more plants around the world. Much of the assembly line is already automated, but there's still a lot of steps that require humans. Any advances that Toyota makes that allow them to replace humans with robots that can do a more accurate/faster job will pay for itself when you consider the increased production capabilities and the decreased defect rate.
Playing the violin is a nice demo, but attaching the door hinge to the car (and the like) will be what makes the R&D worth it.
Yes, playing the violin is a hard coded activity, but the important advance here is the new dexterity of this robot.
And an incremental one at that...Toyota has had a robot that plays the trumpet for quite some time now. And from what I saw at their corporate headquarters, the trumpet-playing robot is better when compared to human trumpet players than this robot is compared to human violin players.
Though this is no doubt due to the fact that the difficult part of playing the violin is the dexterity whereas the trumpet basically has three on/off finger positions and the rest is in how you blow on it.
Still...the trumpet-playing robot was the better dancer by far.
My Mac Mini, which was running Tiger, never totally crashed, but applications were incredibly unstable. But after upgrading that to Leopard, I haven't had one application crash on me, let alone the OS crashing.
Though to be fair, my Boot Camp install of XP hasn't had any issues (running with either Boot Camp or Parallels), though I don't really use that for much more than Netflix WatchNow and the various poker sites that don't support Macs.
When it comes to the current thinking on nutrition, there is a definite point to what he's saying.
But to say that Exercise has no effect on weight loss is just plain wrong. Exercise changes the way your body processes the food you put into it (or, more accurately, your body adapts to the amount of exercise that you get). Building muscle causes you to require more calories in your diet to support that muscle. And building stamina causes you to burn a lot of calories in the process. And if you want to venture into the unscientific realm, consistent exercise helps to stabilize your mood and makes you less prone to food cravings (the cravings for sugary foods and for fatty foods are based in imbalances in Serotonin and Dopamine levels).
There is a dire need to re-examine everything we know about a healthy diet. People get so worked up about things like trans fats while completely ignoring the elephant in the room (high-fructose corn syrup). Everyone I know who's given up corn syrup, to the extent that it's possible in the US, has lost a minimum of 10 lbs.
But to suggest that exercise isn't a vital part of a healthy lifestyle is wrong, and potentially very dangerous.
If you're convinced the stock will continue to go up, you can always sell the minimum number of shares you'll need to pay your taxes. You should probably add in the cost of an accountant you consult to arrive at that minimum number, since it's foolish to do your own taxes once you get beyond the fill-in-the-number-from-the-w2 stage of your life.
It's reasonable to have faith in your employer to the extent that you're willing to bet on them with your non-salary compensation. After all, if you believe that your employer's stock will make it to the 2-year mark at roughly the same price as it is at or before the 1-year mark, you could end up saving yourself quite a bit on taxes. And if you believe it will continue to go up, you could end up making quite a bit extra too. For Google employees, this seems like a reasonable stance...GOOG seems to be a pretty safe bet.
But not selling enough to cover your AMT is just reckless. I knew many people during the dotcom era who were left holding the tax bag when the bottom dropped out of their exercised options (I worked as a contractor for a prominent dotcom that had a bit of an accounting scandal that caused their stock price to fall from $176/share to $2/share). Of those people, most were able to settle with the IRS by basically wiping out their entire savings, a couple filed for bankruptcy and one moved back home to Canada. Only one person I knew actually sold stock to cover his AMT. He actually sold a bit more than he needed to and bought himself a new home theater and living room. Everyone laughed at him and told him he was throwing away a ton of money. Some of them had even borrowed money against their options (something I gather is illegal, but the financial planner that everyone went to found a way to make it happen).
It's too bad that so many of his friends got so devastated by the whole ordeal, or otherwise he'd have a nice "I told you so."
The other difference is that audiophiles can easily spend upwards of $100k on their setup whereas we're talking about a sub-$1k video card. Even the full gaming rig isn't likely to go over $3k. There are cables that audiophiles buy that cost more than that.
I don't know if anything has changed since I quit (1996), but back there was still a lot of skill back then.
Both type 2 tourneys and games/tourneys using a single starter pack and a few boosters were all about skill. My most successful type 2 deck (easily won 80-90 percent of the time) did not contain a single rare card.
I found type 1 boring, it didn't even take that much personal wealth to give yourself a chance of drawing the right hand for the first or second turn kill. I had all the cards I needed (my first magic cards were the alphas, so between selling alphas and betas and buying plenty of the unlimited packs, I had many multiples of the expensive rares), it just wasn't fun since the game play was so predictable and winning involved more luck. It was still fun to use the powerful cards (or, more accurately, well-marked photo copies of those cards once their resale value was realized) in concept decks that weren't meant for tournaments, but beyond that I never used those cards.
But like I said, I have no idea if this situation has changed in the years since I quit.
About 6 years ago, I had CTS. I had just about the worst posture, hand position and everything else you could possibly imagine. And, as a programmer who spends at least 40 hours a week in front of a computer, it was starting to catch up with me. However, around that time, a friend of mine invited me to come rock climbing with him. I liked it so much that I started going to a local gym around 2-3 times a week. And a funny thing started happening...my CTS started to go away. About 3 months into my climbing habit (yes...it's an addiction), I was free of CTS pains entirely. I still have just about the worst ergonomics you could imagine, yet I have zero pain.
What I believe is going on is that CTS/RSI pain is not caused by doing one thing too often or putting your body in one position too often. Instead, it's caused by not doing other things often enough or putting your body in other positions often enough. I don't have any proof of that except for my own personal experience and the experiences of others that I've told, but those seem to indicate that bad posture/ergonomics can be counteracted by regular exercise of the affected area.
Because his college roommate broke into a super-secret NSA facility that housed a computer that stored every piece of information collected by the government and emailed the entire database to him encoded in a series of images.
Slashdot Mirror
The possibility that they could have been pissing away $100m, however remote, deserves to be rewarded. Studios, in many cases, wouldn't take this kind of risk if they knew that their potential profits were capped at, say, 100% of the movie's budget. In a screwy (pun intended) kind of way, these accounting practices encourage the creation of content, which is the intent behind copyright law. And while I'm first in line to criticize the studios for releasing bland, formulaic drivel, the studios are still behind the vast majority of the limited amount of quality movies being made these days.
So yeah, this is a prime example of two ways the fucked-up IP laws in this country screw the creators of the content. In and ideal world, Peter Jackson, the actors and the crew would see the majority of the profit and New Line would see a substantial-but-reasonable return on their significant financing of the films. But I feel almost no sympathy with the descendants of JRR Tolkien. Boo-hoo, you aren't getting paid for the work your father/uncle/whatever, get a real job. Be happy that you had a pretty damn cool relative in the family who's intellect you got to experience first-hand.
There's been some movement toward expanding the balance sheet to include factors other than profit, namely Triple Bottom Line. Somewhat related is the trend towards Corporate Social Responsibility with many companies devoting significant resources towards volunteer programs, grants and other means of giving back.
In many cases, this is just an attempt to get good PR or an attempt to attract employees and customers, but it's still an indication that there's been some movement away from the notion that profit is the sole motive for a corporation.
Believe me, I know how DNS was supposed to work. I had an email address with 5 dots in it at one point (in college, I did admin on some of the CS department's boxes and we ran a mail server on one of them). But the reality is that the unwashed masses can't grok domain names as a hierarchy. The system was designed with those lofty goals, but the real world didn't realize why that design was important. But it but ran with it anyways, and now we're in our current mess. Unless you can convince cars.com, music.com, etc to become a registrars for all companies/enthusiasts/etc in that realm, you've got to look at how the situation can realistically be changed.
And we're left with two choices...a few TLDs where anything reasonable at the next level becomes extremely valuable or many TLDs to make reasonable second-level domains plentiful.
The thing to remember about the multiple TLDs is that it should make the part before the TLD much simpler. So instead of longasscomplicateddomain.com, you have short.something...it really wouldn't be that much more complex than our current system, if at all.
Rather than making domains prohibitively expensive (and artificially so...a database entry should not cost $100), what needs to happen is a drastic expansion of top-level domains. The shortage of domain names is entirely artificial. The problem is not that there are too many PPC sites. The problem is that these sites make those domain names unavailable for legitimate use. But if there were more top-level domains to choose from, the likelihood that legitimate users would have problems finding a suitable domain would be significantly less.
ICANN wants to keep this artificial scarcity since it enables them to propose fee increases that keep the registrars profits obscenely high. And, as evidenced by this discussion, even technophiles have bought into their BS. We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Why is there no '.music' TLD for bands and music enthusiasts? Why are there not thousands of other TLDs that are appropriate for other purposes?
Because ICANN says so. There's little to no technical reason why. And changing this makes a hell of a lot more sense than upping the registration fees. All increasing registration fees accomplishes, other than annoying PPC site operators (who will adapt, just as SPAMers adapt to every technical hurdle that is sent their way), is to funnel even more money to the registrars.
I hereby grant you and anyone else who reads it a perpetual and unrestricted license to use the afore-mentioned work in whatever context you see fit.
:-)
(IANAL, but I think that's enough to CYA
From the article:While his point is that fair use is more of a privilege than a right, I think there's a much different interpretation of what he's saying that is important to consider.
He's absolutely correct that fair use isn't a right, it's an exception. But it's an exception to the rights of the copyright holder. And this distinction is important because it underscores how entertainment companies misrepresent copyright. Rather than copyright defining the few excepted uses allowed to people/entities who don't hold the copyright, it actually defines the few rights granted exclusively to the copyright holder.
And this is an important observation about the intent of copyright. Namely, that anything not explicitly granted to the copyright holder is permissible rather than forbidden. The big content producers would like copyright to be a limited set of things that we (those not producing the content) are allowed to do with their content, which they believe they own. But when defending our rights, it's important to remember that copyright is actually a limited set of things that we're not allowed to do and that content cannot be owned, only protected. And this is the principle that should be applied whenever something falls outside of what is explicitly stated in the Copyright Act...that everything not covered is allowed rather than forbidden.
Our government is broken. The people aren't represented and our votes don't count. Special interests control public policy and this is the core of almost all problems we face today.
As your next president, I promise to do everything I can to change this. I plan to enact substantive campaign finance reforms. Namely, political campaigns will be funded by the government. No donations of any size will be allowed. The amount of money given each candidate will depend on the office being run for, but will be equal for all candidates no matter the party nor the incumbent status.
And I plan to propose a constitutional amendment to change how congress is elected. This amendment will end the winner-take-all system that has resulted in the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dummer parties holding all elected offices. In its stead, we will have a system of proportional representation, a system that has proven far superior in other democratic countries around the world.
It is my sincere belief that when mechanism for government has been reformed, those who follow me in holding this office and the offices in congress can affect real change. They will be able to represent the people who elect them and hold real principles that will guide their policy decisions.
To paraphrase from a certain masked man who's words ring true for me...The truth is that there is something seriously wrong with this government. And if you don't see this, I suggest you let the 4th of November pass unnoticed. Vote for whatever Republicrat you feel will actually make some difference. But if you see what I see and if you feel what I feel, then join me at the polls to reclaim our government for the people and together we'll give them a 4th of November to remember.
The market will no doubt come down, but it won't collapse, mostly because the lab-created diamonds are still pretty expensive, the retail mark-up on jewelry is quite high and the De Beers PR machine has been pretty successful at convincing people that they need "genuine" diamonds. Well, that and the fact that the major outlay of cash for the ring is half the reason for buying the thing in the first place.
I don't think its even about profits really, only economics. Obviously, once someone has cancer they're all for these expensive but effective treatments. And that's just another form of "after my profit is had, I'll help the village."
But what about before they get cancer? If everyone was given the opportunity to pay $500/month more in health insurance premiums, starting on their 18th birthday, knowing that in the 10-20 percent chance that they get cancer, all treatment options will be available to them, no matter the cost, how many people would take that opportunity?
Insurance carrier profits aren't really part of this issue. Yes, they do some slimy things, but in the end, all treatment costs money and, as the GP suggested, difficult decisions must be made over how that money should be best spent to maximize the benefit. Sure, if insurance companies took smaller profits, you could increase spending by some, but you'd still have to make those difficult decisions. It's just the same decision posed above only on a larger scale. It's a good exercise for people to think about whether spending $500/month would be a worthwhile expense if it meant eliminating one possible cause of death that there's only a relatively small chance that they'll get.
Not that any treatment completely eliminates the risk of dying from cancer, but, hypothetically, would you have, on your 18th birthday, decided to spend $500/month for the rest of your life to know that should you get cancer, it would be cured? I know I wouldn't have.
In Windows, hold down the ALT key and type 0163 (then release the ALT key). For me, it only seems to work if I use the number keys at the right of my keyboard and not with the number keys above the qwerty row. The full character mapping can be found here.
...says the Mac user who, for work, had to learn the convoluted Windows method of doing something that OS X makes incredibly simple...
I think the one thing that makes parallel computing more difficult, and quite a bit more so than recursion, is the fact that it makes your program non-deterministic. With a single-threaded application, it's pretty obvious when you've made your application non-deterministic...you reference the time or some resource external to your application. And those kinds of non-deterministic behaviors are much easier to understand...they're mostly just data. But if your application is running on multiple processors using multiple threads, that's not the case. You can run your application multiple times and see different results depending on which threads execute the fastest. And in the worst-case scenario, you get dead locks that are a nightmare to debug.
It's often quite difficult to wrap your head around that unpredictability, especially since so much of the beginning computer science education teaches programmers to evaluate each instructions in their programs in source order as the computer is likely to end up doing when the program is run. This is made even worse by the fact that some languages (I know Java, but there may be others too) allow a compiler to re-order instructions to improve performance provided it doesn't alter that thread's behavior. This is fine for a single-threaded application, but can be quite confusing for a multi-threaded application when you can no longer assume source ordering of instructions from other threads.
It took a while before I got comfortable with essentially asking myself "What am I assuming and do I actually know that at this point or do I just think I know it at this point" with every line of code that I write that might execute in a multi-threaded environment. Even with that, I still run into occasions where it takes over an hour to debug a race condition when that error only happens a small percentage of the time.
Why go through all the hassle of "random hard to guess string" which, if implemented improperly could be guessed? Plus, as others have pointed out, HTML is not a dynamic language. Your random, hard to guess string could be observed and used by an attacker.
...be a whole lot simpler? Just instruct the browser to make an additional request, but one in which it's expected to fully sandbox the content according to rules that you give it. This makes it much harder for application developers to screw up and a lot harder for malicious code to bypass the sandboxing mechanism.
Wouldn't something like:
<sandbox src="restrictedContent.html" allow="html,css" deny="javascript,cookies"/>
But the thing about the XO is that they're not the ones making that choice. The XO gets given to children as a result of either a charitable donation from someone who has decided that the $200 is best spent in this fashion or as a result of a government deciding that the best use of its money is to spend $200 per XO for many of its children.
There are plenty of charities that people can give to if they want to help provide food or medicine to those who don't have it. The XO provides alternate means of giving. It's up to the person donating to determine what form their donation takes. If nothing else, the XO has created a gimmick that will prompt donations from those who would otherwise have never considered donating.
The actual quote that's being focused on is:If you look at what the intent of this sentence is likely to have been in the context of the statement as a whole rather than read it literally, it appears that that he's using Ogg as an example of 'a "free" codec or a proprietary technology'.
The reason for opposing Ogg, though, is best summed up by another sentence from the paper:It seems to me that Nokia just wants a standardized way to deliver paid-for video to mobile devices. This kind of service is coming relatively soon and it will involve DRM. And while we like to bitch and moan about how horrible DRM is, the average wireless customer could care less. Nokia just wants the delivery mechanism to be somewhat standardized so that they don't have to have separate implementations for each wireless carrier.
Playing the violin is a nice demo, but attaching the door hinge to the car (and the like) will be what makes the R&D worth it.
Though this is no doubt due to the fact that the difficult part of playing the violin is the dexterity whereas the trumpet basically has three on/off finger positions and the rest is in how you blow on it.
Still...the trumpet-playing robot was the better dancer by far.
Ditto here. My new MBP hasn't had one crash yet.
My Mac Mini, which was running Tiger, never totally crashed, but applications were incredibly unstable. But after upgrading that to Leopard, I haven't had one application crash on me, let alone the OS crashing.
Though to be fair, my Boot Camp install of XP hasn't had any issues (running with either Boot Camp or Parallels), though I don't really use that for much more than Netflix WatchNow and the various poker sites that don't support Macs.
When it comes to the current thinking on nutrition, there is a definite point to what he's saying.
But to say that Exercise has no effect on weight loss is just plain wrong. Exercise changes the way your body processes the food you put into it (or, more accurately, your body adapts to the amount of exercise that you get). Building muscle causes you to require more calories in your diet to support that muscle. And building stamina causes you to burn a lot of calories in the process. And if you want to venture into the unscientific realm, consistent exercise helps to stabilize your mood and makes you less prone to food cravings (the cravings for sugary foods and for fatty foods are based in imbalances in Serotonin and Dopamine levels).
There is a dire need to re-examine everything we know about a healthy diet. People get so worked up about things like trans fats while completely ignoring the elephant in the room (high-fructose corn syrup). Everyone I know who's given up corn syrup, to the extent that it's possible in the US, has lost a minimum of 10 lbs.
But to suggest that exercise isn't a vital part of a healthy lifestyle is wrong, and potentially very dangerous.
If you're convinced the stock will continue to go up, you can always sell the minimum number of shares you'll need to pay your taxes. You should probably add in the cost of an accountant you consult to arrive at that minimum number, since it's foolish to do your own taxes once you get beyond the fill-in-the-number-from-the-w2 stage of your life.
It's reasonable to have faith in your employer to the extent that you're willing to bet on them with your non-salary compensation. After all, if you believe that your employer's stock will make it to the 2-year mark at roughly the same price as it is at or before the 1-year mark, you could end up saving yourself quite a bit on taxes. And if you believe it will continue to go up, you could end up making quite a bit extra too. For Google employees, this seems like a reasonable stance...GOOG seems to be a pretty safe bet.
But not selling enough to cover your AMT is just reckless. I knew many people during the dotcom era who were left holding the tax bag when the bottom dropped out of their exercised options (I worked as a contractor for a prominent dotcom that had a bit of an accounting scandal that caused their stock price to fall from $176/share to $2/share). Of those people, most were able to settle with the IRS by basically wiping out their entire savings, a couple filed for bankruptcy and one moved back home to Canada. Only one person I knew actually sold stock to cover his AMT. He actually sold a bit more than he needed to and bought himself a new home theater and living room. Everyone laughed at him and told him he was throwing away a ton of money. Some of them had even borrowed money against their options (something I gather is illegal, but the financial planner that everyone went to found a way to make it happen).
It's too bad that so many of his friends got so devastated by the whole ordeal, or otherwise he'd have a nice "I told you so."
http://www.corwin.ca/gridlock/...
Would be addictive if there were more than 40 levels.
The other difference is that audiophiles can easily spend upwards of $100k on their setup whereas we're talking about a sub-$1k video card. Even the full gaming rig isn't likely to go over $3k. There are cables that audiophiles buy that cost more than that.
I don't know if anything has changed since I quit (1996), but back there was still a lot of skill back then.
Both type 2 tourneys and games/tourneys using a single starter pack and a few boosters were all about skill. My most successful type 2 deck (easily won 80-90 percent of the time) did not contain a single rare card.
I found type 1 boring, it didn't even take that much personal wealth to give yourself a chance of drawing the right hand for the first or second turn kill. I had all the cards I needed (my first magic cards were the alphas, so between selling alphas and betas and buying plenty of the unlimited packs, I had many multiples of the expensive rares), it just wasn't fun since the game play was so predictable and winning involved more luck. It was still fun to use the powerful cards (or, more accurately, well-marked photo copies of those cards once their resale value was realized) in concept decks that weren't meant for tournaments, but beyond that I never used those cards.
But like I said, I have no idea if this situation has changed in the years since I quit.
About 6 years ago, I had CTS. I had just about the worst posture, hand position and everything else you could possibly imagine. And, as a programmer who spends at least 40 hours a week in front of a computer, it was starting to catch up with me. However, around that time, a friend of mine invited me to come rock climbing with him. I liked it so much that I started going to a local gym around 2-3 times a week. And a funny thing started happening...my CTS started to go away. About 3 months into my climbing habit (yes...it's an addiction), I was free of CTS pains entirely. I still have just about the worst ergonomics you could imagine, yet I have zero pain.
What I believe is going on is that CTS/RSI pain is not caused by doing one thing too often or putting your body in one position too often. Instead, it's caused by not doing other things often enough or putting your body in other positions often enough. I don't have any proof of that except for my own personal experience and the experiences of others that I've told, but those seem to indicate that bad posture/ergonomics can be counteracted by regular exercise of the affected area.
Because his college roommate broke into a super-secret NSA facility that housed a computer that stored every piece of information collected by the government and emailed the entire database to him encoded in a series of images.