Paxil and Prozac are SSRIs, Wellbutrin is not. Wellbutrin targets norepinephrine which is why it can, in a slightly different formulation, treat smoking addiction (that formulation is sold under the name Zyban). And, just to be pedantic, it's "Selective Seratonin Reupdake Inhibitors"...
However none of these drugs, MDMA/MDA included, result in more seratonin, they only change the way your brain deals with the seratonin you have. If you want to have more seratonin, the dietary suppliment 5-HTP is your best shot. However, this will only work for people who's bodies aren't producing enough seratonin to begin with.
As to their addictiveness, yes, they have withdrawl symptoms, but those can be mitigated by titrating off the drug slowly. However, in the vast majority of the cases, they do not have any of the other properties of addiction that make it hard for the patient to stop using them. I'm not sure why so many people insist on demonizing the pharmaceutical companies that make anti-depressants. Are they perfect? Not even close. But have they helped people overall? I've met too many people who've basically reclaimed their lives because of these drugs. There's a lot that needs fixing in this country when it comes to both prescription and illgal drugs. But a one-sided view on either is just plain wrong. Both types of drugs, if used correctly can have very positive outcomes. And if the government would pull its head out of its ass for long enough to allow scientists to study the effect of MDMA on the human brain (and I mean real studies, not the Recaurte crap they currently fund), we might learn something about how our brain really uses all these neurotransmitters we have. For example, wouldn't it make sense to commission studies on why MDMA has the effect it does on Parkinsons' patients? (in case you don't want to look it up...the symptoms basically go away for the duration of the high).
We're at a critical juncture when it comes to learning about how the brain works. What we need now is a lot of unbiased research into how the brain works and reacts to these substances that we've come up with (and will come up with). Unfortunately, uninformed opinions (like the one espoused by the post I'm replying to), politics and huge pharmaceutical profits are and will continue to get in the way of this.
Why not find blogging software that can handle user-entered HTML snippets and use something like colorer (one of a few out there) to generate HTML from code. If the blogging package also gave you the ability to add an iframe in your story, you could also point that at a web CVS/SVN repository viewer that has syntax coloring (most do) for the cases where you're posting the code of a source file rather than a snippet.
This kind of solution is likely to be much cleaner and give you better results than looking for a blogging package that can handle code natively. Even if you were able to find such a package, it's unlikely it would be able to handle as many languanges as the packages that are dedicated to displaying code in an HTML format.
I know you mentioned it, but it should be hammered home that form factor is really what matters these days. HD plasma displays are more than good enough, but what's really driving their adoption is the amount of space they take up. CRTs and rear-projection TVs (like these new laser TVs) just take up too much space. People were willing to put up with it when there wasn't an affordable alternative, but now that plasma prices are dropping down into the $1k region, I think you'll start to size of the TV relative to the screen size becoming the must-have feature needed to compete in the (as you so aptly put) non-fringe market.
Thank you, that was very informative. That said, I have one question:
What are the legal rights of the third-parties that are issued court orders? Can they fight a court order to do something based on the original merits of the case? Could Tucows argue that their client had done nothing wrong?
If not, could they argue that complying with such an order would damage their ability to attract domain registrations, especially from entities in foreign countries? If so, would something like an online petition that promises to boycott Tucows' services if they de-list spamhause.org and is signed by 10k-15k slashdotters be admissible in court as proof of that claim?
From the rules, it looks like your submission isn't code, it's a processed dataset. It's only in the terms for winning are that you have to explain your method to them (so that they don't get bitten by a horribly obfuscated entry) and have to non-exclusively license your submission to Netflix (it looks like you retain copyright and can license it to others if you so choose).
But that seems pretty reasonable...you only have to hand over your code if you win, otherwise you're only submitting the results of your program.
Why not instead create a regulatory body that sets the maximum price at which gasoline can be sold? This is how we determine what PG&E can charge customers, how is gasoline different? We know the exact cost of a barrel of crude oil and how much it costs to refine it, why can't a price be set that gives the oil companies a modest profit, but protects Californians from paying the inflated prices we currently pay? Our market is large enough that companies would still sell here because even a modest profit per gallon is still a lot of money.
Once that is in place, funding for alternative energy programs (like what this bill is trying to achieve) can come from taxes on gas.
The problem with taxes like these is that the oil companies just leave California to avoid the tax and continue to bring in huge profits from their exorbitant prices. Then, not only do these programs get next to nothing in funding, but thousands of Californians lose their jobs or have to move out of the state.
We need alternative energy funding and we need consumer protections from the oil cartel, so I'll probably be voting yes on this despite my protests. But what we really need isn't what this bill provides.
The answer for Californians who want to decrease the number of SUVs in the state isn't to sue the automaker, it's to push for new laws that make it more difficult to own an SUV...perhaps requiring a class C license or requiring them to meet tougher emissions standards (or even the same emissions standards as normal cars). Make everything applicable to all vehicles purchased after the law was enacted so that no one has to sell a vehicle they already own.
You're not going to dissuade people from buying an SUV by appealing to their intellect, at least not on a scale large enough to make any difference. You will be able to dissuade them from doing something by making it an huge PITA. When in doubt, appeal to people's laziness.
Oh...and I like how the state is suing auto manufacturers over SUVs and yet the current Govern[at]or was the first private citizen to ever own a Hummer...
I think the only time HSQL would make sense is if you are using a persistance layer like Hibernate (where you can just change the dialect during the test). Otherwise, the differences in SQL parsing mean that queries that run fine against Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL will either cause an error or just not work properly under HSQL. MySQL is particularly bad about relying on MySQLisms to get things done, but the other ones have their quirks too. So there really isn't a substitute for running the actual database queries against a test database running the software you'll be using in production. The closest you can get to an in-memory approximation of the production behavior is to test that the DAO is generating and expected SQL statement.
That's why we use a MockDataSource (most of the mock solutions provide one). Most of our DAO tests use a mock data source to validate that the DAO is generating the correct SQL. The nice part about this is that it's all done with Spring's IoC container. So while the configuration that developers run the test with most often can be a mock the DataSource, the continuous integration server (we use Hudson) uses an actual DataSource pointing to one of a few test databases we have (one is basically empty for testing CRUD operations, one has a lot of test data and another runs on a server with the same hardware setup as production that has a nightly production dump loaded). All this is determined on a per-test basis in the spring config file.
So, as a developer, when I run our DAO TestSuite, the whole thing takes less than a minute. After that passes, I can check in and let that trigger the test using a real database and get an email if something fails. This also has the added benefit that we can run tests against a production snapshot without ever giving developers unfettered access to that data (for security/privacy purposes, developers aren't allowed to see customer data).
I remember hearing (and someone can verify this) that gas is significantly cheaper (around $1/gal) in oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia. There's no way that shipping it around the world triples the price. So there's really two "real" prices for gas...the actual cost to produce and transport it an turn a modest profit and the value of it as a commodity whose value is affected by it's scarcity. That, and gas has traditionally been an easy target for politicians that want to raise money...for the most part, it's not really an optional expenditure. Of the ~$3/gal cost, some of that is taxes. For example, here in California, we pay $0.184/gal to the federal government, $0.192/gal to the state government and sales tax on top of that.
So what's the "real" price of gas? Does it include taxes that get used for things completely unrelated to gasoline or driving? Does it include the incredible markup oil companies can charge simply because they know they can get away with it?
By the by, don't think that taxes will ever be raised to pay for all this debt we're racking up. Since no politician can win a race in America after having cut spending or raising taxes, the debt will be maintained by the only other factor we have...currency inflation. How do you make $9 trillion of debt more manageable? Make every dollar worth half as much by printing up a ton more money. Currency crisis, here we come!
Exactly...Microsoft knows better than anybody that individuals using Windows illegally actually helps Microsoft make more money. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is start filing lawsuits against individuals. They know that if they start filing suits against people, the ~20% (complete guess on my part) of users who pirate Windows will start looking for something else so as not to get sued. And once you have 1 in 5 computer users choosing something other than Microsoft, you'll start to see a lot more computers becoming available that don't have Windows pre-installed.
At that point, not only do those people who've switched away from Windows start buying those PCs, but people who run legitimate copies of Windows will buy those computers and simply run their existing copy of windows on the new computer. I know I personally have had to buy 3 copies of XP now simply because the computer I wanted at the time wouldn't come without it. Granted, two are XP Home versions which I've promptly replaced with my XP Pro version from my first XP PC, but I still have two perfectly valid product keys that are currently unused. I doubt I'm the only one in this situation.
Microsoft knows this and realizes that piracy actually helps their bottom line...so long as it helps to maintain their virtual lock on the OS market and enables them to strong-arm computer manufacturers into adding the windows tax onto the cost of a new computer. What they also realize is that Windows tax is vital to milking their cash cow. That's where these lawsuits come in. While individual computer users should not be detered from running pirated copies of windows, small computer manufacturers need to know that they will incur Microsoft's wrath if they don't help them collect the Windows tax.
The article addresses this point. Sony's cybershot cameras don't save the specific model number in the EXIF information, so whoever created this list wasn't able to separate them out into individual groups.
But this makes the observation about Sony's failure to get market penetration in this space even more astute since the combined grouping of all cybershot cameras still only placed 9th. It's therefore unlikely that any one of their cameras even cracked the top ten. I think this shows how important a history of camera making is when it comes to making a quality digital camera. Companies like Canon and Nikon who have 30+ years of experience making quality lenses for their SLR lines are thoroughly beating Sony and other companies like it that only have a history of making consumer electronics.
I'm just curious if the old addage about "Republicans have no heart, and Democrats have no brains" has any truth to it.
The way I've heard the adage is: "If you're not a Democrat when you're in your 20's, you have no heart. And if you're not a Republican when you're in your 40's you have no brain."
Though I would put it (with apologies for mixing adages): "If you're ever a Democrat or a Republican, you're one of those people who's doomed to repeat the mistakes of others."
Apparently just agreeing to take 27.5 million each isn't an option?
Though I'm not sure why a story such as this would make it onto slashdot, the article does address your point.
Aparently, in their squabble over his money, someone tipped off the government and when they looked into it, they discovered that his assets were far greater than what he could have leaglly earned while alive (as a church pastor and election official). So now the widows/family get nothing because the government got a seizure order for the whole thing. Oops...
Dude...what do you think caused the shortage in the first place???
Clearly there is an army of sharks (and few dolphins, for good measure) off the coast of California that are being fitted with the entire world's supply of blue lasers. We have to believe an attack is coming any day now. While our government has spent the past few months keeping people from bringing bottled water onto airplanes, they've completely ignored the possibility of an army of trained marine life using the latest advances in weaponry.
The other thing the submitter never considered (probably because he sees himself as superior to all those 20-somethings that were interviewing him) is that some of what he saw could have been done on purpose. I work for a small company with an engineering department of less than 10 people. We've learned the hard way that personality fit is just as important as technical aptitude. For that reason, when I interview someone, I usually take more than 2 hours and am observing not only how the applicant answers technical questions but how he/she reacts to subtle interpersonal dynamics.
For example, around 45 minutes into the interview, I will typically assert something I know to be incorrect and I'm relatively certain the applicant knows as well. You can tell a lot about someone based on their reaction to this situation. They can become defensive and unwilling to listen to your point of view. They can also become subserviant and agree with you even though they really don't. Or they can calmly present their argument for why they believe what they do and then listen to your response. While individual reactions will mostly vary somewhere in between these options, I'm looking for one closest to the calm, productive argument. This indicates that the person isn't all that prone to personal conflict based his/her ego. In a typical 2-3 hour interview, there's about 8-10 situations I'll create to test how an applicant's personality will interact with our team. IMHO, these kinds of interview techniques are especially important when interviewing technical candidates because there are so many of them with abrasive personalities who have never been forced to work on their interpersonal skills because they could always get by on their technical skills alone.
As an aside, I did have one interviewee actually call my on my techniques mid-way through the interview. I proposed an overly convoluted way of handling a problem he wasn't entirely sure about technically and his response was, "Why do I have the feeling you're not only testing my ability to notice when something can be done in a simpler manner but also how I'll react when something like this comes up?" We ended up hiring him despite the fact that he needed a bit of technical training to come up to speed and in retrospect it was absolutely the correct decision.
So basically the non-long-winded point of this rambling is that if you're interviewing, don't underestimate how important it is that an applicant can effectively fit in with the rest of the team and if you're the one being intervied, realize that it's not just your answers to the questions that count, it's also the way you answer those questions.
I would have no problem with it if it was implemented in an entirely technical way with no human interaction...
If domains were priced based on the number of times information about that domain was requested from the registrar in the prior year, it would make the popular domains cost more and the vast majority of domains cost less. There would have to be fraud measures put in place, of course...such as counting only requests from hosts with a valid reverse DNS entry and limiting the number of counted requests from any one host, etc.
But why shouldn't the domains that use more of the registrars resources be charged a higher rate? Why shouldn't Google pay $1000/year while onlyformyemailaddress.org costs a few bucks less?
However as soon as humans get involved in determining pricing on an individual basis, this becomes an awful idea.
Very well put, though you should probably qualify your statements to exclude lithium. I think it's technically categorized as an anti-depressant, but only because manic depressive disorder is a type of depression.
It seems to me, there's a huge difference between depression and clinical depression. The former has made its way into common speak as a synonym for sadness because it's the only emotion that healthy people can envision causing them to do the things that clinically depressed people do. But from my personal experience, a clinically depressed person isn't likely to be able to experience that kind of sadness. That was one of the most frustrating things about my depression was that I felt that if I could just feel true sadness, at least I could try to deal with that. But the complete lack of emotion made life all the more bleak. At least when you feel sad, you can conceive of what it feels like to be happy, or even what if feels like to be no longer sad. But the numbness of depression makes you lose the entire concept of happier than you currently are.
In my case, I'm not sure if anti-depressants literally saved my life (I didn't care enough about anything to consider killing myself), but they did save me from a lifetime of not living my life. So, like you, I feel lucky to have lived in an era where at least something can be done to help people like us.
The real reason this is a loss for consumers is that it's an absolute PITA for the cable/satellite box to be a separate unit from the DVR. It requires some IR or serial connection that makes switching channels quite time consuming. Anyone who has used both a regular TiVo and a DirecTiVo can attest to how much easier the DirecTiVo is to use, despite the shortage of many of TiVo's best features.
Now I pretty much agree that TiVo does DVR better than anyone else and their patents are probably, for the most part, valid. But there's not a chance in hell that the cable/satellite companies would ever license their decoding technology to TiVo to allow TiVo to create the all-in-one units, so basically the only chance we as consumers ever had for an all-in-one box was some half-assed DVR implementation from the cable/satellite provider that integrates with their digital decoding.
Now, it appears we'll never get that. And that sucks for us.
Electric surface level trains are an inherently poor terrorist target, if anyone hijacks one, just turn off the power and call SWAT.
Ahh, but the tracks make excellent targets. A well-placed explosive, in the best case scenario, means all travel is suspended. Worst case is obviously much worse.
Air travel means you only have to secure the airports. With rail, you have to secure thousands of miles of tracks.
There are lots of ways to lower your income while still reaping tangible benefits. Maxing out your 401(k) drops your income by $15k per year. Various homeownership expenses are tax-deductable, many of which add equity to the house. FSA accounts can pay for medication/treatment co-payments with pre-tax money. Commuting expenses can often be paid pre-tax.
All told, my $100k+ salary drops down to about $55k in taxable salary.
And, as others have said, when it comes time to retire, my 401(k) will be quite large and I'll have a boatload of interest in my house which I can extract a lot from by moving someplace further from good jobs.
Quoting Mark Twain: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
Ahh, but he said nothing about spring and fall...they're great! Add to this that winters are extremely mild and you'll see why people like the weather out here.
...the fun was in trading, not in collecting. There was an art in crafting trades which everyone was happy with, but I knew would help me grow the value of my collection. The game was somewhat fun, but it was governed by rules that were far too simplistic. Trading was its own sort of game, but one with rules that were far more subtle than the rules of the card game. Card values were constantly changing and their values differed immensly depending on where you were (in the test areas where WotC had released alpha/beta/limited, those cards were not as valuable as they were in places that were not part of the initial releases). I realize now that I grew my collection (from a $100 initial investment to about $15k when I sold everything off) primarily by exploiting the artificial scarcity of those initial releases, but at the time I had never taken any econ courses. I was just proud to have built up such a collection without anyone ever feeling I had ripped them off (people said that they enjoyed trading with me because I was one of the few people who ever said things like, "no...I need to give you more in order for this to be fair.")
Sure, I made decks and played with people, but that eventually became pretty mindless once you learned the mechanics of it. That part of the hobby was primarily about building a rapport with the other player so that they would be open to trading with me.
In the end, I feel lucky that the timing of my addiction was pretty much perfect. For one, I got into the game early, when the value of the cards I initially bought increased drastically because of their artificial scarcity. I was also lucky enough to live in a university town that gave shell accounts to people taking CS courses through their extension program. That allowed me to get on rec.games.trading-cards.magic (or whatever it was) to enable trading with people outside of my area. I did took a full-point hit to my GPA 2nd semester of my senior year, but that didn't hurt me since I had already been accepted to college. I was able to realize that I was addicted in time to save my college education and also used the proceeds from selling off my collection to avoid having to get a work study job in college. I also built up a network of friends, many of whom were college students a few years ahead of me, that I could draw on for help with a) school or b) obtaining various substances I wasn't allowed to buy directly. That, in turn, helped me build up a large network of friends during freshmen year which made college a lot easier.
Were the timing of my addiction off a bit, I might be looking back at my time playing the game a lot more negatively. But as it is, I think it made my life now a lot better than it would have been otherwise.
"Unfortunately, there isn't a good alternative yet." More unfortunately, there isn't likely to be.
However, if there's anyone that could pull it off, it'd be Google. If auction results were integrated into Froogle and/or AdSense, sellers would still see significant traffic to their auctions. And Google already has a payment option, search technology and expertise/resources necessary to build a legitimate competitor. They could also afford to run in the red for a while (ala Microsoft), so they could price it at a point where they felt it would eventually be profitable.
If nothing else, it would either force eBay to compete (price/features/ease of use) or make some sort of agreement with Google allowing the use of their payment system. Could be an interesting scenario to watch, if it plays out.
Only Sun's Java offerings are really stagnating. The real improvements are happening outside of Sun. If Sun were to give up control of Java by open-sourcing it, it would do wonders for Java, but it is by no means necessary.
You'd be surprised at how well accepted projects like Spring are among PHBs. Spring is quickly getting a reputation for allowing projects to deliver on time and budget (if not under). I was privileged enough to attend the Spring Experience conference last December and there were a number of really large companies (some of the biggest names from the financial, tech and retail sectors) that sent quite a few people there. Most of those I talked to said that those companies had basically dumped EJB and were using a Spring-style approach to new projects. Developing apps with Spring's IoC and AOP capabilities really does give you the faith that your application is rock-solid. And that kind of stability is something that, in my experience, management absolutely loves.
That's what's really missing from pieces like the linked article...any middlework framework for handling all layers of your application. Sure, that Smalltalk view framework might make creating intelligent components dead simple (doubtful, but possible). But how do you test them in isolation? How do you test the business layer below them in isolation? (and, of course, how do you test the data layer below that in isolation?). Spring offers a dead-simple way to do all of this. I've yet to see anything outside of the Java world come close.
The signs of rust have been showing since it started to get any kind of serious use. JSP is basically an abomination. It makes the simple stuff hard and the hard stuff require using scriptlets. And it makes it far too easy to put far too much application logic in JSP code. JSP 2.0 has helped a bit, but it's a bit like putting a prom dress on 600 lb hooker...she looks better, but only slightly.
But thankfully for Java programmers, there's a ton of other better alternatives that can be used. Freemarker, Velocity, Tapestry and Cocoon are all vastly superior options to JSP. Tapestry was a component-based view-layer framework long before Seaside or any other Smalltalk server-side framework. So comparing it to JSP is a bit like comparing apples to Ford Pintos.
Picking on JSP is like kicking a starving puppy...try picking on one of Java's guard dogs (listed above) and they'll put up a stronger fight.
Its easier to fix problems if you're working with the actual code that runs in the browser, not the "meta code".
Normally, yes. However, there's one key ability that GWT (and other such frameworks that generate the Javascript layer) give you that you just don't have with the "actual code". Namely, the ability to write unit tests. Javascript has some attempts at a unit testing framework, but everything I've seen falls way short of what you need to write comprehensive tests.
GWT solves this by moving your code into an environment which can be thoroughly unit tested. When you reach a certain level of complexity, unit tests become the only practical way to fix bugs while still being sure that you haven't inadvertantly caused others.
This does beg the question of whether the framework itself is stable and well-tested enough to rely upon, but Google are in a great position to have their code used by a lot of developers who will uncover a lot of the bugs in the framework. As a developer, it's incredibly difficult to find minor platform-specific bugs on platforms other than the ones we develop on. However GWT gets developers from all sorts of platforms working with it. It's much more likely that they will run into platform-specific GWT bugs on their platform than for a developer to uncover platform-specific bugs on a platform other than his/her normal platform.
Creating a single application platform that is easily testible and burying all the platform-dependent web-development hell below that platform, you can create a better developer experience that is more likely to work on every platform available rather than just the 2 or 3 major ones that a web developer or company has time/money to invest in.
Slashdot Mirror
Paxil and Prozac are SSRIs, Wellbutrin is not. Wellbutrin targets norepinephrine which is why it can, in a slightly different formulation, treat smoking addiction (that formulation is sold under the name Zyban). And, just to be pedantic, it's "Selective Seratonin Reupdake Inhibitors"...
However none of these drugs, MDMA/MDA included, result in more seratonin, they only change the way your brain deals with the seratonin you have. If you want to have more seratonin, the dietary suppliment 5-HTP is your best shot. However, this will only work for people who's bodies aren't producing enough seratonin to begin with.
As to their addictiveness, yes, they have withdrawl symptoms, but those can be mitigated by titrating off the drug slowly. However, in the vast majority of the cases, they do not have any of the other properties of addiction that make it hard for the patient to stop using them. I'm not sure why so many people insist on demonizing the pharmaceutical companies that make anti-depressants. Are they perfect? Not even close. But have they helped people overall? I've met too many people who've basically reclaimed their lives because of these drugs. There's a lot that needs fixing in this country when it comes to both prescription and illgal drugs. But a one-sided view on either is just plain wrong. Both types of drugs, if used correctly can have very positive outcomes. And if the government would pull its head out of its ass for long enough to allow scientists to study the effect of MDMA on the human brain (and I mean real studies, not the Recaurte crap they currently fund), we might learn something about how our brain really uses all these neurotransmitters we have. For example, wouldn't it make sense to commission studies on why MDMA has the effect it does on Parkinsons' patients? (in case you don't want to look it up...the symptoms basically go away for the duration of the high).
We're at a critical juncture when it comes to learning about how the brain works. What we need now is a lot of unbiased research into how the brain works and reacts to these substances that we've come up with (and will come up with). Unfortunately, uninformed opinions (like the one espoused by the post I'm replying to), politics and huge pharmaceutical profits are and will continue to get in the way of this.
Why not find blogging software that can handle user-entered HTML snippets and use something like colorer (one of a few out there) to generate HTML from code. If the blogging package also gave you the ability to add an iframe in your story, you could also point that at a web CVS/SVN repository viewer that has syntax coloring (most do) for the cases where you're posting the code of a source file rather than a snippet.
This kind of solution is likely to be much cleaner and give you better results than looking for a blogging package that can handle code natively. Even if you were able to find such a package, it's unlikely it would be able to handle as many languanges as the packages that are dedicated to displaying code in an HTML format.
I know you mentioned it, but it should be hammered home that form factor is really what matters these days. HD plasma displays are more than good enough, but what's really driving their adoption is the amount of space they take up. CRTs and rear-projection TVs (like these new laser TVs) just take up too much space. People were willing to put up with it when there wasn't an affordable alternative, but now that plasma prices are dropping down into the $1k region, I think you'll start to size of the TV relative to the screen size becoming the must-have feature needed to compete in the (as you so aptly put) non-fringe market.
Thank you, that was very informative. That said, I have one question:
What are the legal rights of the third-parties that are issued court orders? Can they fight a court order to do something based on the original merits of the case? Could Tucows argue that their client had done nothing wrong?
If not, could they argue that complying with such an order would damage their ability to attract domain registrations, especially from entities in foreign countries? If so, would something like an online petition that promises to boycott Tucows' services if they de-list spamhause.org and is signed by 10k-15k slashdotters be admissible in court as proof of that claim?
From the rules, it looks like your submission isn't code, it's a processed dataset. It's only in the terms for winning are that you have to explain your method to them (so that they don't get bitten by a horribly obfuscated entry) and have to non-exclusively license your submission to Netflix (it looks like you retain copyright and can license it to others if you so choose).
But that seems pretty reasonable...you only have to hand over your code if you win, otherwise you're only submitting the results of your program.
Why not instead create a regulatory body that sets the maximum price at which gasoline can be sold? This is how we determine what PG&E can charge customers, how is gasoline different? We know the exact cost of a barrel of crude oil and how much it costs to refine it, why can't a price be set that gives the oil companies a modest profit, but protects Californians from paying the inflated prices we currently pay? Our market is large enough that companies would still sell here because even a modest profit per gallon is still a lot of money.
Once that is in place, funding for alternative energy programs (like what this bill is trying to achieve) can come from taxes on gas.
The problem with taxes like these is that the oil companies just leave California to avoid the tax and continue to bring in huge profits from their exorbitant prices. Then, not only do these programs get next to nothing in funding, but thousands of Californians lose their jobs or have to move out of the state.
We need alternative energy funding and we need consumer protections from the oil cartel, so I'll probably be voting yes on this despite my protests. But what we really need isn't what this bill provides.
The answer for Californians who want to decrease the number of SUVs in the state isn't to sue the automaker, it's to push for new laws that make it more difficult to own an SUV...perhaps requiring a class C license or requiring them to meet tougher emissions standards (or even the same emissions standards as normal cars). Make everything applicable to all vehicles purchased after the law was enacted so that no one has to sell a vehicle they already own.
You're not going to dissuade people from buying an SUV by appealing to their intellect, at least not on a scale large enough to make any difference. You will be able to dissuade them from doing something by making it an huge PITA. When in doubt, appeal to people's laziness.
Oh...and I like how the state is suing auto manufacturers over SUVs and yet the current Govern[at]or was the first private citizen to ever own a Hummer...
I think the only time HSQL would make sense is if you are using a persistance layer like Hibernate (where you can just change the dialect during the test). Otherwise, the differences in SQL parsing mean that queries that run fine against Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL will either cause an error or just not work properly under HSQL. MySQL is particularly bad about relying on MySQLisms to get things done, but the other ones have their quirks too. So there really isn't a substitute for running the actual database queries against a test database running the software you'll be using in production. The closest you can get to an in-memory approximation of the production behavior is to test that the DAO is generating and expected SQL statement.
That's why we use a MockDataSource (most of the mock solutions provide one). Most of our DAO tests use a mock data source to validate that the DAO is generating the correct SQL. The nice part about this is that it's all done with Spring's IoC container. So while the configuration that developers run the test with most often can be a mock the DataSource, the continuous integration server (we use Hudson) uses an actual DataSource pointing to one of a few test databases we have (one is basically empty for testing CRUD operations, one has a lot of test data and another runs on a server with the same hardware setup as production that has a nightly production dump loaded). All this is determined on a per-test basis in the spring config file.
So, as a developer, when I run our DAO TestSuite, the whole thing takes less than a minute. After that passes, I can check in and let that trigger the test using a real database and get an email if something fails. This also has the added benefit that we can run tests against a production snapshot without ever giving developers unfettered access to that data (for security/privacy purposes, developers aren't allowed to see customer data).
I remember hearing (and someone can verify this) that gas is significantly cheaper (around $1/gal) in oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia. There's no way that shipping it around the world triples the price. So there's really two "real" prices for gas...the actual cost to produce and transport it an turn a modest profit and the value of it as a commodity whose value is affected by it's scarcity. That, and gas has traditionally been an easy target for politicians that want to raise money...for the most part, it's not really an optional expenditure. Of the ~$3/gal cost, some of that is taxes. For example, here in California, we pay $0.184/gal to the federal government, $0.192/gal to the state government and sales tax on top of that.
So what's the "real" price of gas? Does it include taxes that get used for things completely unrelated to gasoline or driving? Does it include the incredible markup oil companies can charge simply because they know they can get away with it?
By the by, don't think that taxes will ever be raised to pay for all this debt we're racking up. Since no politician can win a race in America after having cut spending or raising taxes, the debt will be maintained by the only other factor we have...currency inflation. How do you make $9 trillion of debt more manageable? Make every dollar worth half as much by printing up a ton more money. Currency crisis, here we come!
Exactly...Microsoft knows better than anybody that individuals using Windows illegally actually helps Microsoft make more money. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is start filing lawsuits against individuals. They know that if they start filing suits against people, the ~20% (complete guess on my part) of users who pirate Windows will start looking for something else so as not to get sued. And once you have 1 in 5 computer users choosing something other than Microsoft, you'll start to see a lot more computers becoming available that don't have Windows pre-installed.
At that point, not only do those people who've switched away from Windows start buying those PCs, but people who run legitimate copies of Windows will buy those computers and simply run their existing copy of windows on the new computer. I know I personally have had to buy 3 copies of XP now simply because the computer I wanted at the time wouldn't come without it. Granted, two are XP Home versions which I've promptly replaced with my XP Pro version from my first XP PC, but I still have two perfectly valid product keys that are currently unused. I doubt I'm the only one in this situation.
Microsoft knows this and realizes that piracy actually helps their bottom line...so long as it helps to maintain their virtual lock on the OS market and enables them to strong-arm computer manufacturers into adding the windows tax onto the cost of a new computer. What they also realize is that Windows tax is vital to milking their cash cow. That's where these lawsuits come in. While individual computer users should not be detered from running pirated copies of windows, small computer manufacturers need to know that they will incur Microsoft's wrath if they don't help them collect the Windows tax.
But this makes the observation about Sony's failure to get market penetration in this space even more astute since the combined grouping of all cybershot cameras still only placed 9th. It's therefore unlikely that any one of their cameras even cracked the top ten. I think this shows how important a history of camera making is when it comes to making a quality digital camera. Companies like Canon and Nikon who have 30+ years of experience making quality lenses for their SLR lines are thoroughly beating Sony and other companies like it that only have a history of making consumer electronics.
"If you're not a Democrat when you're in your 20's, you have no heart. And if you're not a Republican when you're in your 40's you have no brain."
Though I would put it (with apologies for mixing adages):
"If you're ever a Democrat or a Republican, you're one of those people who's doomed to repeat the mistakes of others."
Apparently just agreeing to take 27.5 million each isn't an option?
Though I'm not sure why a story such as this would make it onto slashdot, the article does address your point.
Aparently, in their squabble over his money, someone tipped off the government and when they looked into it, they discovered that his assets were far greater than what he could have leaglly earned while alive (as a church pastor and election official). So now the widows/family get nothing because the government got a seizure order for the whole thing. Oops...
Dude...what do you think caused the shortage in the first place???
Clearly there is an army of sharks (and few dolphins, for good measure) off the coast of California that are being fitted with the entire world's supply of blue lasers. We have to believe an attack is coming any day now. While our government has spent the past few months keeping people from bringing bottled water onto airplanes, they've completely ignored the possibility of an army of trained marine life using the latest advances in weaponry.
The other thing the submitter never considered (probably because he sees himself as superior to all those 20-somethings that were interviewing him) is that some of what he saw could have been done on purpose. I work for a small company with an engineering department of less than 10 people. We've learned the hard way that personality fit is just as important as technical aptitude. For that reason, when I interview someone, I usually take more than 2 hours and am observing not only how the applicant answers technical questions but how he/she reacts to subtle interpersonal dynamics.
For example, around 45 minutes into the interview, I will typically assert something I know to be incorrect and I'm relatively certain the applicant knows as well. You can tell a lot about someone based on their reaction to this situation. They can become defensive and unwilling to listen to your point of view. They can also become subserviant and agree with you even though they really don't. Or they can calmly present their argument for why they believe what they do and then listen to your response. While individual reactions will mostly vary somewhere in between these options, I'm looking for one closest to the calm, productive argument. This indicates that the person isn't all that prone to personal conflict based his/her ego. In a typical 2-3 hour interview, there's about 8-10 situations I'll create to test how an applicant's personality will interact with our team. IMHO, these kinds of interview techniques are especially important when interviewing technical candidates because there are so many of them with abrasive personalities who have never been forced to work on their interpersonal skills because they could always get by on their technical skills alone.
As an aside, I did have one interviewee actually call my on my techniques mid-way through the interview. I proposed an overly convoluted way of handling a problem he wasn't entirely sure about technically and his response was, "Why do I have the feeling you're not only testing my ability to notice when something can be done in a simpler manner but also how I'll react when something like this comes up?" We ended up hiring him despite the fact that he needed a bit of technical training to come up to speed and in retrospect it was absolutely the correct decision.
So basically the non-long-winded point of this rambling is that if you're interviewing, don't underestimate how important it is that an applicant can effectively fit in with the rest of the team and if you're the one being intervied, realize that it's not just your answers to the questions that count, it's also the way you answer those questions.
I would have no problem with it if it was implemented in an entirely technical way with no human interaction...
If domains were priced based on the number of times information about that domain was requested from the registrar in the prior year, it would make the popular domains cost more and the vast majority of domains cost less. There would have to be fraud measures put in place, of course...such as counting only requests from hosts with a valid reverse DNS entry and limiting the number of counted requests from any one host, etc.
But why shouldn't the domains that use more of the registrars resources be charged a higher rate? Why shouldn't Google pay $1000/year while onlyformyemailaddress.org costs a few bucks less?
However as soon as humans get involved in determining pricing on an individual basis, this becomes an awful idea.
Very well put, though you should probably qualify your statements to exclude lithium. I think it's technically categorized as an anti-depressant, but only because manic depressive disorder is a type of depression.
It seems to me, there's a huge difference between depression and clinical depression. The former has made its way into common speak as a synonym for sadness because it's the only emotion that healthy people can envision causing them to do the things that clinically depressed people do. But from my personal experience, a clinically depressed person isn't likely to be able to experience that kind of sadness. That was one of the most frustrating things about my depression was that I felt that if I could just feel true sadness, at least I could try to deal with that. But the complete lack of emotion made life all the more bleak. At least when you feel sad, you can conceive of what it feels like to be happy, or even what if feels like to be no longer sad. But the numbness of depression makes you lose the entire concept of happier than you currently are.
In my case, I'm not sure if anti-depressants literally saved my life (I didn't care enough about anything to consider killing myself), but they did save me from a lifetime of not living my life. So, like you, I feel lucky to have lived in an era where at least something can be done to help people like us.
The real reason this is a loss for consumers is that it's an absolute PITA for the cable/satellite box to be a separate unit from the DVR. It requires some IR or serial connection that makes switching channels quite time consuming. Anyone who has used both a regular TiVo and a DirecTiVo can attest to how much easier the DirecTiVo is to use, despite the shortage of many of TiVo's best features.
Now I pretty much agree that TiVo does DVR better than anyone else and their patents are probably, for the most part, valid. But there's not a chance in hell that the cable/satellite companies would ever license their decoding technology to TiVo to allow TiVo to create the all-in-one units, so basically the only chance we as consumers ever had for an all-in-one box was some half-assed DVR implementation from the cable/satellite provider that integrates with their digital decoding.
Now, it appears we'll never get that. And that sucks for us.
Air travel means you only have to secure the airports. With rail, you have to secure thousands of miles of tracks.
All told, my $100k+ salary drops down to about $55k in taxable salary.
And, as others have said, when it comes time to retire, my 401(k) will be quite large and I'll have a boatload of interest in my house which I can extract a lot from by moving someplace further from good jobs.
Ahh, but he said nothing about spring and fall...they're great! Add to this that winters are extremely mild and you'll see why people like the weather out here.
...the fun was in trading, not in collecting. There was an art in crafting trades which everyone was happy with, but I knew would help me grow the value of my collection. The game was somewhat fun, but it was governed by rules that were far too simplistic. Trading was its own sort of game, but one with rules that were far more subtle than the rules of the card game. Card values were constantly changing and their values differed immensly depending on where you were (in the test areas where WotC had released alpha/beta/limited, those cards were not as valuable as they were in places that were not part of the initial releases). I realize now that I grew my collection (from a $100 initial investment to about $15k when I sold everything off) primarily by exploiting the artificial scarcity of those initial releases, but at the time I had never taken any econ courses. I was just proud to have built up such a collection without anyone ever feeling I had ripped them off (people said that they enjoyed trading with me because I was one of the few people who ever said things like, "no...I need to give you more in order for this to be fair.")
Sure, I made decks and played with people, but that eventually became pretty mindless once you learned the mechanics of it. That part of the hobby was primarily about building a rapport with the other player so that they would be open to trading with me.
In the end, I feel lucky that the timing of my addiction was pretty much perfect. For one, I got into the game early, when the value of the cards I initially bought increased drastically because of their artificial scarcity. I was also lucky enough to live in a university town that gave shell accounts to people taking CS courses through their extension program. That allowed me to get on rec.games.trading-cards.magic (or whatever it was) to enable trading with people outside of my area. I did took a full-point hit to my GPA 2nd semester of my senior year, but that didn't hurt me since I had already been accepted to college. I was able to realize that I was addicted in time to save my college education and also used the proceeds from selling off my collection to avoid having to get a work study job in college. I also built up a network of friends, many of whom were college students a few years ahead of me, that I could draw on for help with a) school or b) obtaining various substances I wasn't allowed to buy directly. That, in turn, helped me build up a large network of friends during freshmen year which made college a lot easier.
Were the timing of my addiction off a bit, I might be looking back at my time playing the game a lot more negatively. But as it is, I think it made my life now a lot better than it would have been otherwise.
If nothing else, it would either force eBay to compete (price/features/ease of use) or make some sort of agreement with Google allowing the use of their payment system. Could be an interesting scenario to watch, if it plays out.
Only Sun's Java offerings are really stagnating. The real improvements are happening outside of Sun. If Sun were to give up control of Java by open-sourcing it, it would do wonders for Java, but it is by no means necessary.
You'd be surprised at how well accepted projects like Spring are among PHBs. Spring is quickly getting a reputation for allowing projects to deliver on time and budget (if not under). I was privileged enough to attend the Spring Experience conference last December and there were a number of really large companies (some of the biggest names from the financial, tech and retail sectors) that sent quite a few people there. Most of those I talked to said that those companies had basically dumped EJB and were using a Spring-style approach to new projects. Developing apps with Spring's IoC and AOP capabilities really does give you the faith that your application is rock-solid. And that kind of stability is something that, in my experience, management absolutely loves.
That's what's really missing from pieces like the linked article...any middlework framework for handling all layers of your application. Sure, that Smalltalk view framework might make creating intelligent components dead simple (doubtful, but possible). But how do you test them in isolation? How do you test the business layer below them in isolation? (and, of course, how do you test the data layer below that in isolation?). Spring offers a dead-simple way to do all of this. I've yet to see anything outside of the Java world come close.
The signs of rust have been showing since it started to get any kind of serious use. JSP is basically an abomination. It makes the simple stuff hard and the hard stuff require using scriptlets. And it makes it far too easy to put far too much application logic in JSP code. JSP 2.0 has helped a bit, but it's a bit like putting a prom dress on 600 lb hooker...she looks better, but only slightly.
But thankfully for Java programmers, there's a ton of other better alternatives that can be used. Freemarker, Velocity, Tapestry and Cocoon are all vastly superior options to JSP. Tapestry was a component-based view-layer framework long before Seaside or any other Smalltalk server-side framework. So comparing it to JSP is a bit like comparing apples to Ford Pintos.
Picking on JSP is like kicking a starving puppy...try picking on one of Java's guard dogs (listed above) and they'll put up a stronger fight.
GWT solves this by moving your code into an environment which can be thoroughly unit tested. When you reach a certain level of complexity, unit tests become the only practical way to fix bugs while still being sure that you haven't inadvertantly caused others.
This does beg the question of whether the framework itself is stable and well-tested enough to rely upon, but Google are in a great position to have their code used by a lot of developers who will uncover a lot of the bugs in the framework. As a developer, it's incredibly difficult to find minor platform-specific bugs on platforms other than the ones we develop on. However GWT gets developers from all sorts of platforms working with it. It's much more likely that they will run into platform-specific GWT bugs on their platform than for a developer to uncover platform-specific bugs on a platform other than his/her normal platform.
Creating a single application platform that is easily testible and burying all the platform-dependent web-development hell below that platform, you can create a better developer experience that is more likely to work on every platform available rather than just the 2 or 3 major ones that a web developer or company has time/money to invest in.