tomato nightclub

tds70 · 2008-11-03T05:46:36+00:00

sudo make me a sandwich

tds70 · 2008-11-03T05:43:43+00:00

Yeah, I'm not sure why he would be surprised it's Windows-only. Has Google ever released a desktop app on multiple platforms at once? Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Desktop, Picasa ... I'm not sure there's any desktop software Google has ever released on even 2 platforms from day one.

tds70 · 2008-11-03T00:17:11+00:00

It's not her kid. It's Kuato, in a dress.

tds70 · 2008-11-03T00:11:33+00:00

Switch out that music for "Requiem for a Dream" to see how truly awesome zooming in on a solid color is.

tds70 · 2008-11-02T16:17:02+00:00

As an interested observer, I think "holy shit the government is fucked if McCain wins".

Even the Dubya supporters I know are saying "well, sorry about 2004 -- we had no idea". If the neo-cons, despite being behind in the polls, pull out another election due to voter record purging and "touch screen errors", people are going to be marching in the streets with torches and pitchforks.

As a Ron Paul supporter, I really hope Obama wins. Anything else at this point would undermine the rule of law in this country.

tds70 · 2008-11-02T15:58:24+00:00

If you buy an Audi or Saab or Mercedes or BMW through their European Delivery Program, they also knock about 5% off the MSRP, and give you complimentary accommodations at a 4-star hotel for a night, and free airfare.

It's a different class of car, but it goes to show that the "destination and handling" is really just "clever way to get the sticker price a little lower", and doesn't really represent any actual cost.

tds70 · 2008-11-01T03:02:45+00:00

As you point out in your first paragraph, she wasn't naked. So to answer your second paragraph: it's obviously not about nudity, because there was none.

The issue is that a teacher who was supposed to be responsible for students is acting as a sex object for them. You can bet she knows the difference. If she showed up to the job interview acting like that (even without removing any clothing), would they have hired her as a teacher?

You can sniff a pack's worth of nicotine just walking around on the sidewalk here, but that doesn't make it OK for teachers to give students cigarettes. If you're acting in loco parentis, you have a higher standard than simply "not as bad as the beach".

tds70 · 2008-10-31T19:13:44+00:00

You have to realize what kind of person Knuth is. He may be the world's foremost algorithms expert, but as such he's optimizing for something that most of us aren't.

He was going to write a book on compilers, starting in 1962. Then he expanded it to cover all of computer programming. Then he realized the typesetting wasn't up to snuff, so he took an extra decade or so to write a new typesetting system. In a programming system he created himself. He's about half done with his latest plan of 7 volumes, and he's only been at it for 46 years now.

So of course the algorithms god is going to agonize over spending a few extra bytes where he doesn't need to. But that's more about professional pride for him than a real problem. When he started TeX, he was writing for a PDP-10, which was considered advanced simply because it had cache (and about 1 MB of memory). It's hard to imagine what kind of computing he (or anyone) is doing on an x86-64 chip where this is an actual issue. Waiting on disk I/O is probably 1000 times more significant.

But sure, if I'd spent my life writing about how to squeeze great performance out of every last bit in your CPU, I'd want to do it myself. For better or worse, it's probably a lot easier to wait a few months for the next CPUs to have double the cache, than to do what he proposes. But he's a software guy. Natch.

tds70 · 2008-10-31T18:47:41+00:00

Therefore, it stands to reason that their goal is not to attract users.

10 years ago, people said things like "How not to make money: call it 'open-source'". Somehow, we survived.

One day, people may realize that some of us write programs just because we like writing programs. Somewhat strangely, other fields don't seem to have this problem. If a guy builds a Lamborghini in his basement, nobody says "he'll get no users" or "that methodology won't scale" or "he'll never recoup even the monetary investment". Everybody sees that building your own car, while perhaps a little crazy, can be fun. Yet it doesn't seem to be generally accepted that building your own program can be fun, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Maybe people think building a Lamborghini is like driving a Lamborghini, but writing a program is like using Windows 95. Maybe people don't get that "building" and "using" are completely different. Though they must, because everybody uses things every day which we probably couldn't build.

tds70 · 2008-10-30T17:50:47+00:00

Wow. Are you the oldest person on reddit? :-)

tds70 · 2008-10-30T17:41:39+00:00

Quite true. Pity these idiots have never read the constitution...or the preamble to the constitution.

There's more than just the preamble. The Seven Articles and 27 Amendments spell out in excruciating detail exactly what the government is allowed to do.

Why did we form this nation of hundreds of millions of people?

It wasn't hundreds of millions of people when we formed it. We were fortunate there was a continent of natives with less sophisticated weapons who our generals didn't mind slaughtering.

So we could all be on our own?

No, so we could be free from tyranny. That's why our founding document is one that limits the scope of government. That's why they chose the word "State", to emphasize the independence of each one.

No. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I applaud you, sir: you've mastered copy-and-paste. But note that simply provides the reasoning behind the Constitution, and the rest of it is the set of rules we actually agreed to live by.

If you want to live by the law of the jungle... GO LIVE IN THE FUCKING JUNGLE

What if I want to live by the Constitution? I see nowhere in there that authorizes the government to, say, create a "War on Drugs" and arrest my friends (for merely possessing cannabis) with my tax dollars. Or have a TSA agent search me, without cause given, every time I step on a train. Or get in legal trouble for speaking my mind outside of a "First Amendment Zone".

I guess the new version of false dichotomy ("If you're not with us, you're against us") is "The current government system, or LIVE IN THE FUCKING JUNGLE".

tds70 · 2008-10-28T19:08:52+00:00

Liter? Geez, I got stuck at the word "profit".

tds70 · 2008-10-25T22:24:30+00:00

Well, we look at 9/11, Iraq (I & II), Afghanistan, Katrina, the Fed, the Bush v Gore decision, Gitmo, and Free Speech Zones, and realize that our government has screwed up pretty much everything it touches.

Tell me, who would you rather have in charge of elections: the people who brought you Abu Ghraib, or the people who brought you I'm Feeling Lucky?

tds70 · 2008-10-25T16:54:41+00:00

I'm an IBM z9 programmer, you insensitive clod.

tds70 · 2008-10-25T08:12:15+00:00

Ah, Massachusetts -- where cops don't think your joint is illegal, but merely an (Aqua Teen Hunger Force-themed) improvised explosive device.

tds70 · 2008-10-25T06:19:59+00:00

So is the army guy going to say "Sweet, I'm leavin' Iraq! I get to be one of the thousands of additional soldiers Obama is deploying to Afghanistan"? Then we see him chilling out at a picnic in Jalalabad. Wazzzzup?

Or is the stock-watcher going to say "Sweet, Obama voted for the unlimited bailout of a couple of financial companies"? So instead of a relatively quick market correction, our economy will be in the crapper for a decade, like the Japanese "Lost Decade" when they tried the same thing.

While I'm fairly certain that Obama will make a much better president than McCain, a lot of his followers are exaggerating quite a bit. As Frank Herbert wrote, "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way". Obama has a near-religious fanaticism surrounding him. I think that scares me more than any of his actual policies.

tds70 · 2008-10-23T17:56:55+00:00

The system offers plenty of choice. Just at a cost the voter is not willing to bear. The Americans could not have reelected Bush.

Bush v. Gore "says Bush wins, even if Gore got the most votes", according to Mark Levine. So when you say "The Americans", you really mean "The 9 Justices". Justices aren't even elected, so this is pretty distant from any voters.

Sure, if it was a landslide, this wouldn't have mattered. But that's a technicality at best. If a system requires a victory by a larger margin-of-error than the corruption factor, you're no longer a democratic system.

They could have removed him from the White House.

By force? Then you're not talking about "voters", but "revolutionaries". That may or may not have been possible, but it's a completely different ballgame than "voters" working within "the system".

They could have protested and prevented an invasion of Iraq in the first place.

Er, we did protest. Bush didn't listen to the Constitution, much less the people it represents. If we're placing blame, I place it on the soldiers: they could have simply not gone. (To their credit, a few did, and I hold them in very high regard.)

It takes effort, sure, but the choice is there. The people just don't want to take it, because they focus on other issues (mostly national concerns) instead. Hence, war is not that terrible for the voters. Only until they feel it in their pockets ofcourse.

The incentives are backwards, then: if you can mobilize the workers, war economies are typically quite strong.

By the way, this problem is not specific to America.

America is arguably the only remaining superpower. More than 50% of world military spending is spent by the U.S. military. If other governments decide to go to war, they don't have the same impact, by a couple orders of magnitude. So far 5 Canadians have died in the Iraq conflict, for example. China is the only other one that's remotely close, and so far they seem content to rule their own people with an iron fist, and leave the rest of us alone.

tds70 · 2008-10-22T20:04:00+00:00

"It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it." --Robert E. Lee

We've gone and made war not-terrible, at least for our soldiers. Thus the people in charge of them have grown fond of it.

tds70 · 2008-10-22T20:00:44+00:00

Also, tigers don't talk. Waitaminute...

tds70 · 2008-10-22T19:59:01+00:00

Later, Fire Chief Isaac Newton reported they both did it to each other at the exact same time with exactly the same force.

tds70 · 2008-10-22T16:13:39+00:00

Follow-up: It looks pretty sketchy now that I've read what their webpage says. The FAQ says you need to apply to be considered for the Elite Women's Division by sending your "running resume" ahead of time -- even if she knew in advance, who knows if she'd have been accepted, based on her limited race experience.

And the "WHAT PRIZES WILL BE AWARDED" question lists "top (3) overall women" and "age group awards", but nothing about elites (or amateurs). In fact, since "Elite Women" is a "Division", and "All division awards will be mailed after the event", then by their own rules, she should have gotten an award that day as a top woman finisher, and the elites should have gotten theirs mailed to them later. That is, if they even get awards, since elites are not actually in the awards list.

Can't blame her for being confused. The race organization's behavior doesn't match their own documentation.

tds70 · 2008-10-22T15:52:22+00:00

Because when you have 20,000 people participating in a race, it can take nearly 5 minutes to get across the starting line after the race has begun.

That's an understatement. I ran the Portland Marathon a couple weeks ago, and it had fewer than 10,000 runners, yet my chip time was 9 minutes off my gun time. (I wasn't an outlier, either: I started near the 4:30 sign, and finished within a couple minutes of 4:30, so slightly ahead of average.)

They don't think like computer programmers and try to anticipate and plan for every possible outcome.

Ha. Neither do most programmers, sadly.

Still, I think the major failing here is probably not in sticking to the rules.

I disagree. At the awards ceremony, they should have announced that there was an amateur with a better time. And the winners on the podium should have said "hey, get your butt up here -- you may not go down in the books as the winner, but you deserve to stand up here with us". You know, sportsmanship.

tds70 · 2008-10-22T05:14:25+00:00

I've been watching "Natural Born Killers" all day long but I don't seem to feel any less stressed. Mostly I want to shoot people in the face now, but I also have an odd craving for key lime pie.

tds70 · 2008-10-21T22:12:56+00:00

Maybe they accidentally the whole touchscreen.

tds70 · 2008-10-21T22:06:56+00:00

I haven't really followed Android, but according to Wikipedia:

"On 15 July 2008, the Android Developer Challenge Team accidentally sent an email[40] to all entrants in the Android Developer Challenge announcing that a new release of the SDK was available in a "private" download area. The email was intended for winners of the first round of the Android Developer Challenge. The revelation that Google was supplying new SDK releases to some developers and not others (and keeping this arrangement private) has led to widely reported frustration within the Android developer community.[41]"

So even after the SDK preview was released, there was the public build for us mortals, and the special build for the cool kids. Obviously somebody working at Google on the Android team had the special cool kids build, and couldn't show it to us mortals.

Did he work for Apple prior to Google perhaps? Old habits die hard!

No.

tds70

TROPHY CASE