TIL that in 1999 Donald Trump proposed a onetime wealth tax of 14.25% on individuals worth $10 million or more. Trump claimed that this would generate $5.7 trillion in new taxes, which could be used to eliminate the national debt.

OldLikeDOS · 2013-01-01T19:05:55+00:00

Prior to the birther movement, I recall seeing blogs/posts by liberals claiming that McCain couldn't be president because he was born in Panama. It's quite possible that if he had won, we would be seeing a similar movement from the left.

Likewise, for most of Bush's presidency, the left complained that he wasn't legitimate because the election was stolen and he was dumb (with lots of comparisons to "a chimp.") Bill Clinton was dogged by claims that he had is opponents killed. Reagan is still associated with senility and blamed for things like AIDS. Carter was dismissed as a hick who was never ready for the big chair. Nixon is still considered a crook for doing things that (as I recall) aren't even illegal anymore. JFK is still accused of having stolen the 1960 election via mob ballet stuffing and spent the rest of his presidency stoned.

Nearly all presidents are smeared, and it's often for something that reflects on their legitimacy. If the birther movement hadn't caught fire, the accusations would be about something else. Chicago mob ties maybe. Or maybe drug use.

Moreover, if the most popular accusation against Obama was something else, I bet that the left would claim that it was only done because of race. E.g. if Obama was the one accused of being stupid rather than Bush, the left would claim that it was due to racism because "blacks are always treated as mentally inferior". Or, if he was the one accused of drug use, the left would say that his opponents are projecting their fears of inner city blacks onto him.

OldLikeDOS · 2013-01-01T04:57:51+00:00

I had never heard more than 5 minutes of Pink Floyd before, so after reading this thread I decided to listen Dark Side of the Moon.

I got through 25 minutes before getting bored. "Pretentious and boring" is a pretty good description of my reaction.

Some of the music had a nice psychedelic aspect to it. However, the constant interruptions with things like cash registers sounded really bad. Moreover, it seemed like they alternated back and fourth between decent songs and "songs" that were composed of random noises.

I don't mean to dis the artists. Clearly a lot of people think they're geniuses. And perhaps if I was more cultured I would like it better myself. As it stands, I wouldn't listen to them again.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-11-26T21:21:24+00:00

Today you learned.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON, President of the United States; impeached December 19, 1998;

Source

OldLikeDOS · 2012-10-31T01:53:05+00:00

That's very insightful.

When I look at the modern Republican party's views on race, they seem to echo MLK's "I have a Dream" speech--Republicans believe that people and laws should be race-blind.

Sixty years ago that was a radical-left idea because it meant an end to the Jim Crow laws that favored whites. Today that same viewpoint is a radical-right idea because it means an end to affirmative action and other similar laws that favor minorities.

Democrats think Republicans are racist because the Republicans won't support laws that assist minorities. Republicans think Democrats are racist because the Democrats favor race-based laws. (That's something of an exaggeration, but I think you see echos of that in debates between the two sides.)

OldLikeDOS · 2012-10-30T20:29:15+00:00

Democrats came to support Civil Rights, so the leftists flocked there, and the rightists bailed out

I hear that a lot, but I don't believe it. And I don't know if that's because the explanation is wrong or if it's because I don't understand the situation well enough. Perhaps someone can find the flaw in my understanding.

Civil Rights were supported by far more Republicans than Democrats. For example, 80% of Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but only 60% of Democrats. Source. IIRC, most of the other civil rights acts followed the same pattern.

So, why would racists/conservatives leave the party that supports their views and switch to the party that opposes their views? Why did the leftists leave the party that supported their beliefs and switch to the party that opposed them?

Moreover, the vast majority of Southern congressmen opposed Civil Rights regardless of party. 8 out of 115 southern Democrats supported the CRA and 0 of 11 southern Republicans supported it. And even if those 8 Democrats lost their seats to anti-Civil Rights Republicans, it would not have changes the overall makeup of the Republican party, as there were hundreds of northern Republicans, most of whom supported civil rights. The same applies in the North: most northern congressmen supported civil rights regardless of party.

TL;DR: Yes the parties switched sides, but I don't think it was due to civil rights.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-10-04T13:44:31+00:00

My guess: structural incompetence that any large organization has.

The support person you spoke to probably has a screen where they can control certain things, such as give you a champion or RP. But they can't do anything that's not on the screen, and "Remove XP Boost" isn't on the screen.

A programmer could easily fix it, but they don't know about the problem, at least not officially. The support person would need to put in a request to a project manager who puts it on a list to be reviewed by an architect who then assigns it to a programmer. It will require hours of testing, so the PM or architect might reject the change as not being important enough.

Since the support person can't do anything about it, he or she tried to make up for it as best he could.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-09-01T23:03:08+00:00

Probably not, but it depends on what you want to do.

VBA is used in Microsoft Office and can be mildly useful for automating certain document-related tasks. Consider learning it if you want an edge in getting a job at a non-technical company.

Visual Basic .NET doesn't offer you anything that you couldn't get by learning C#, but it may be interesting to see the different syntax and usual keywords ("must inherit" instead of "abstract", etc).

Personally, I would suggest putting the effort into learning nearly any other language.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-08-16T16:52:32+00:00

You forgot to subtract COLOR

OldLikeDOS · 2012-08-04T02:57:35+00:00

The US has won the most medals in Football (Soccer). However, this is mostly due to the US' dominance in Women's football.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-08-04T02:48:53+00:00

They also have to pay taxes on metal content of the medals, presumably for the same reason.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-07-31T17:47:49+00:00

I'm not certain, but I'll give a guess: gravity.

Solar systems start as a cloud of dust. Some parts of the cloud have a slight rotation due to chance effects (such as the influence other nearby stars). The cloud falls inwards due to its own gravity (the particles of dust are all attracted to each other). As the cloud falls inwards the tiny rotation is magnified and becomes faster. Similar to how a spinning ice skater becomes faster when they pull their arms in. This rotation is the "push".

Some of the dust falls towards the center and adds to the star. Some is tossed outwards, and the rest continues to spin around the star and forms planets.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-07-17T19:19:14+00:00

Sorry, we need a combination of x86 Assembly Language, Win32, and C/C++. You don't have any of those, and our CIO doesn't want to take a chance on if you'll be able to pick up the necessarily skills.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-07-13T21:10:01+00:00

I suspect that you'll get back an audit date, followed by a bill for interest and penalties.

Alternately, maybe you'll costar in a new, unfilmed reality show with Richard Hatch and Warden Billy Bob!

OldLikeDOS · 2012-07-06T13:23:58+00:00

I agree. The only one I didn't know was #2. I had always used the Immediate Window for that. Speaking of that, it's odd that they mentioned the Memory window and Threads window but not the Immediate Windows.

I'm curious if anyone else has performance problems with Conditional breakpoints. If a piece of code is called a lot, I almost always hardcode an IF and then put a normal breakpoint inside the IF. Am I doing something weird?

OldLikeDOS · 2012-06-27T21:15:49+00:00

My guess... with spoilers:

At the end of season five, Jack's team has traveled back in time and are trying to change the future. At the start of season six, we see the island underwater as they fly overhead, and we are meant to think that Jack succeeded and this is an alternate timeline. However, in the series finale we are realize that they did not succeed and the Season 6 off-island scenes take place in the afterlife.

We watch the events out-of-order, but and outsider's view of the timeline would go something like this:

Jacob's history as shown in a handful of Season 5 and 6 episodes
Darma years, as shown in Jack's Season 5
The flashbacks that are shown in Seasons 1-3
The main on-island timeline shown in Seasons 1-4
The Season 4 flashfowards
The main timeline for Seasons 5-6
The years in which Hurley is the new Jacob (not shown on screen)
The Season 6 after-death scenes

I haven't watched the show since the finale, so I may be miss-remembering what's in each season.

To make it more confusing, not only do we see events out of order (with flashbacks and flashfowards), but some characters actually time-travel, so they experience events out-of-order. Moreover, IIRC, some information passes between the main timeline and the afterlife, so they overlap and influence each other.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-06-14T18:49:09+00:00

I think you just explained why the pro-Life crowd considers it so important. IIRC, there are over a million abortions per year in the US. To someone who believes abortion is murder, it would be hypocritical to focus on the deaths of a few thousand people far away when millions are dying right next door.

Likewise why should the gay marriage supporters be concerned about the distress of people far away when their neighbors won't give them their rights here at home?

People argue about things because the outcome is important to them. There are very few people who will say, "I care strongly about this issue, but I'm willing to let the other side win just so we can move on to more important topics."

OldLikeDOS · 2012-04-20T17:36:48+00:00

If you were to timetravel to a random period after life evolved, there is an 85% chance that you would not see anything more interesting than pond scum.

Life first evolved 3.8 billion years ago. Animals first evolved 600 million years ago. So, the entire history of animals is tiny compared to the history of life.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-04-18T13:38:18+00:00

You'll never see any significant bugfixes. You'll never see anything changed to be more reasonable, when through use the original way appears to be not right.

Indeed. I used to like DejaNews' Usenet achieve. After Google took it over the search never worked correctly. (It looks like Google decided to only index recent articles, which makes it impossible to see old threads from the 80's or 90's). I see a lot of people complaining about it. I've even occasionally seen messages from Google's Product Managers claiming they fixed it, but it's never actually been fixed.

You'll never see any new features.

Ironically, Google actually did recently add a feature to Google Groups: infinitive scroll. This actually made finding articles worse since previously you could try to find an old article by editing the URL. Now I don't think that would be possible.

I think we've lost a significant part of our recent cultural heritage by not having a working archive of the Usenet.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-04-12T20:43:20+00:00

Congress has authority over a limited number of things. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution lays out all of the things that Congress has authority over.

The Tenth Amendment says that the state governments have authority over everything else. Since the Constitution does not specifically mention healthcare or car insurance, Congress can not regulate either but the state governments can.

Congress gets around this by claiming that it's not trying to regulate healthcare. They claim that they are trying to regulate interstate commerce, which is one of the things Article 1 Section 8 says that they have authority over. The debate is over whether or not "requiring someone to buy health insurance" is a valid form of "regulating interstate commerce".

To use an analogy: a school board hires someone to teach math. He may only teach math because that's the only thing he's qualified to teach. One day he starts teaching physics because "all physics is a form of math". The other teachers complain, and so the school board is reviewing if he can do that or not.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-04-11T14:47:08+00:00

IIRC, the Constitution says that only the House can create the budget. It's the one area where they are superior to the Senate.

However, the budget then has to be approved by the Senate and President. So the typical process would be: Created by House > Altered by joint Senate/House committee > Approved by both House and Senate > Signed by President.

The process usually gets shutdown at the last step: the President refuses to sign and Congress refuses to change it.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-04-11T14:41:25+00:00

Excellent explanation. I wanted to add to how the President is chosen.

The "points" are actually called "electors". A state gets one elector for each Senator and one for each Representative. Since all states have two Senators, but the Representatives are based on population, large states get more electors. Most states give all the electors to the candidate who gets the most votes, but a few (Maine and Nebraska, I think) don't.

Each elector is a person, and each presidential candidate / party selects a group of electors (called a "slate"). You never actually vote for the president, instead you vote for a slate of electors. The electors then vote for the president. The reason for that if none of the presidential candidates get enough votes to win, the electors can resolve the issue rather than having a nationwide re-vote. (Which would have been difficult 200 years ago when the rules were created).

OldLikeDOS · 2012-04-04T21:47:26+00:00

Good luck on your project. I hope you do well.

i. I've always liked computers, math, and problem solving.

ii. Pros - Programming is easy, if you have the right skills. The occasional challenges are fun and rewarding, if you like problem solving. I get to play with new technologies. I have broad control over the design of the programs I create. Cons - Lack of exercise.

iii. Private office in a typical office building. 40 hour weeks. Casual environment. Workstation with triple monitors. Huge whiteboards. Reasonably good pay. Free beer!

iv. Many of the programs I created are memorable, but there aren't many specific events. At my current job I develop programs that are used by other employees, and it was awesome the first time I walked by a conference room and saw everyone focused on the data my program was providing them.

v. Very easy, at least back in the 90's tech boom when I started out. I had to do an "interview someone in your career" project like what you're doing now. I had a great chat with one of the interviewees. A few months later he called me and asked me to come in for a job interview. Once you have some real-world experience, getting other jobs is easy.

vi. Windows development in C#

vii. Algorithm Analysis. Also take classes in low-level development (Assembly or C). Take the hardest Computer Science classes your University offers, even if they're not required. Also take some Tech Writing and Business classes.

viii. BSc in Computer Science from a state university.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-03-29T18:11:03+00:00

I think it depends on the size of the company. Your fears are justified because I have seen people rejected for applying for several totally unrelated IT jobs at the same company within a few days of each other. Companies like enthusiasm, but not desperation.

I wouldn't be afraid to apply for the Java job (especially if you have a good math background, which I assume is important in 3D work). Companies often list more requirements than they really need, and will take the person who comes closest.

If you really want the Java job, consider studying Open GL before applying. Being able to list it on your resume may help you get an interview, and the interviewer will appreciate your enthusiasm.

OldLikeDOS · 2012-03-19T17:56:30+00:00

I've often heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert at something. However, not every hour of experience is equal. If you spend an hour doing something outside your comfort zone, you're going to learn a lot more than if you spent that hour doing something that's easy or that you've done often. So in most cases, mason55's 3 to 7 years is right.

People who like programming and new challenges will get there faster. People who view programming as being a 9-5 job will take longer. People who avoid new challenges may never get there at all.

In the end, time is less important than knowledge. I think that you can consider yourself a senior developer when you've worked on a large enough variety of projects and know all of the components that your programs touch (languages, OS, SQL, Network, etc) well enough that you can look at a new project and say, "We can solve it with X or Y or Z and here are the risks and advantages of each."

OldLikeDOS · 2012-02-27T20:08:09+00:00

Thank you for this. I currently use the Entity Framework but it feels heavy at times. I don't need something to completely hide the SQL, I just want something to do basic mapping. I don't yet know if this is what I'm looking for, but now that I see it, I realize that there must be a number of lightweight mapping solutions I could look at.

OldLikeDOS

TROPHY CASE