ATTENTION MR. ALL CAPITAL BOLD TEXT.

YOU ARE SQUEALING LIKE A STUCK PIG BECAUSE THE ACCUSATION IS TRUE.

(In normal conversational "voice" mode.) Let's look at a real world example. I know this is painful for you, because the truth hurts. It hurts even more when you have to leave Republican fantasy land, which you almost never do.

Let's take the very powerful and influential lobbying group, the US Chamber of Commerce. This is what I found when I asked Mr. Google the search terms "US Chamber Republican Democrat".

http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/detail.php?cmte=US+Chamber+of+Commerce

Money Spent For or Against Candidates 2013-2014 Cycle

Total Independent Expenditures: $12,157,051

For Democrats: $0

Against Democrats: $1,412,500

For Republicans: $9,744,551

Against Republicans: $1,000,000

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/U.S._Chamber_of_Commerce

...the New York Times reported in October 2010 that half of the Chamber's $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 big-money donors, many of whom enlisted the Chamber's help to fight political and public opinion battles on their behalf (such as opposing financial or healthcare reforms, or other regulations). The Chamber is "dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries," according to James Carter, executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce.

...

The report, “The Gilded Chamber: Despite Claims of Representing Millions of Businesses, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Gets Most of Its Money From Just 64 Donors,” analyzes the 1,619 contributions listed by the Chamber and its affiliate working against consumer access to courts, the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), on their 2012 Form 990 tax returns. Just a tiny fraction of their donors account for most of their contributions, Public Citizen found.

The average reported contribution to the U.S. Chamber was $111,254, with the top 43 entities donating a combined $80.4 million.

“The U.S. Chamber is one of the largest conduits of dark money in the country, but it refuses to disclose its donors,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, where U.S. Chamber Watch is housed. “The American people deserve to know more about who’s influencing this powerful force in our politics. By looking at the size of the Chamber’s and ILR’s donations, we can learn a little more about what kinds of businesses they represent – seemingly, very large ones.”

So over here in the Real World big corporate interests are spending vast amounts of money to put "pro-business" (in reality pro-big business) politicians in office using untraceable money.

The Chamber is also a big players in the climate change denier network. (I'm tired of doing all this work for you, look it up yourself.)

So yes REPUBLICANS ARE WORKING FOR THE INTERESTS OF THE ULTRA RICH AND AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF EVERYONE ELSE. Glad I could explain that to you in your own language.

You don't understand the immense inertia of political pork. To put it in perspective, political pork has is the organizational equivalent of neutronium. One it comes into existence and starts moving, it is almost impossible to stop.

Remember that this was the turf of Alaska US Senator Ted Stevens. He was the longest serving Republican Senator in US history, being in the senate from 1978 to 2008. He died in a plane crash in 2010. He was also involved with the infamous freeway to nowhere.

That's why HAARP lasted so long. Even dieing is not sufficient grounds for ending a major pork event. A big time pork wrangler has to be gone and in the ground for a few years before anyone is willing to interfere with with the money flow. (Note: this is not a Republican vs. Democrat issue. The "Big Dig" in Boston was a monument to the pork prowess of Ted Kennedy.)

Historically, the Salon Sea in inland Southern California has long term wet and dry periods. When it is filled with water there tend to be earthquakes in the region of the San Andreas Fault that run through the Salton Sea area. When it is dry there tends to be a much longer period between major quake in this part of the fault.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea#Earthquake_geology

The Salton Sea and surrounding basin sits over the San Andreas Fault, San Jacinto Fault, Imperial Fault Zone, and a "stepover fault" shear zone system. Geologists have determined that previous flooding episodes from the Colorado River have been linked to earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault. Sonar and other instruments were used to map the Salton Sea's underwater faults during the study. During the period when the basin was filled by Lake Cahuilla, a much larger inland sea, earthquakes higher than magnitude 7 occurred roughly every 180 years, the last one occurring within decades of the year 1700. Computer models suggest the normal faults in the area are most vulnerable to deviatoric stress loading by filling in of water. Currently, a risk still exists for an earthquake of magnitude 7 or 8. Simulations also showed, in the Los Angeles area, shaking and thus damage would be more severe for a San Andreas earthquake that propagated along the fault from the south, rather than from the north. Such an earthquake also raises the risk for soil liquefaction in the Imperial Valley region.

After the last flood from the Colorado River into the Salton Sea after 1900, a series of dams were built to keep the river from flowing into California. Since then there are been no really large magnitude earthquakes from the San Andreas in Southern California.

It seems extremely likely that human activity has altered the earthquake pattern. This means it is possible that removing large amounts of ground water from the San Joaquin Valley could measurably effect the height of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

I read the article, and it's clear that they are trading space for speed. At every step they create multiple versions of JavaScript code, each with a specific optimization goal. As far as I can tell, they are not garbage collected as long as the code is in use, because at any point they can switch from a more optimized version to a less optimized version.

Not only do they have many copies of the code around, they also keep a lot of information about how each version behaves as well as mapping structures so they can switch between the versions while they are running.

I infer that this means a lot of code bloat. I have no sense of how this memory usage compares to the memory used for DOM storage and the like. Does anyone know if code memory is a significant contributor to the overall memory footprint of a WebKit based browser?

Using FIrefox on the Mac, I experience an ever increasing memory footprint if I keep the browser running for a long period of time, i.e. over the course of a few days. This is partly laziness, but it also reflects how I use online references. Often I have multiple pages open at the same time for references, and I don't want to close them until I finish what I am working on (typically coding). After I have found a lot of relevant information online, I really don't want to end the browser session and then restore everything when I return two work.

So how will WebKit perform in this environment? How does it compare to Chrome and Firefox for memory usage? If something besides FF didn't suffer from memory bloat I might consider changing. Any experience or benchmarks would be interesting to hear about.

Nothing to Watch. Move Along.

Learn a language that is different then other languages that you know.

Chances are that all of the software you know is written in an imperative language that is derived from C. It's pretty much any language that uses curly brackets: {} Note that even Python and JavaScript share a lot of concepts with C.

Try a Lisp family language to get exposed to functional programming. Scheme has already been mentioned via SICP. Or go further with functional programming and do ML, Ocaml, Haskell, F#, Scala.

Prolog. Declarative instead of imperative programming.

If you've never done assembly get a microprocessor like Arduino and control something in the physical world. Combine C and assembler. Or try x86 assembly. I would do the AVR micro on the Arduino before x86n since it is much more regular and doesn't have all the legacy architectural issues.

Forth. Low level but not assembler.

Erlang. Lots of parallelism with a "shared nothing" Actor style of code.

MATLAB or OCTAVE. Start thinking in terms of vectors and arrays.

Don't worry about the language being "useful". The point is to expose yourself to a different way of thinking about how to program. It will make whatever you code better.

Just run the car into the nearest programmer.

Sorry Chucko. Wrong on ALL COUNTS.

I was a "rocket scientist". In fact, I worked for NASA at JPL. It's a modest little place in Pasadena, California. I doubt that you heard of it.

I also worked on MEG-4 decoding software, so I know something about digital video streams.

As for being a "kid", thanks for the complement. I know I look young for my age. I wrote my first program in 1968 on punch cards for an IBM 360. In PL/1.

Now I'm going to say it again more slowly:

The. Video. Stream. Was. Not. From. The. Rocket.

It. Was. From. An. Aircraft. Sent. Out. To. View. The. Splashdown.

It. Was. Not. A. Telemetry. Data. Stream.

Since. It. Was. Not. Telemetry. It. Was. Not. Recorded. In. Analog. Form.

The. Camera. System. Was. Not. Spacecraft. Grade.

It. Was. An. Off. The. Shelf. Piece. Of. Equipment.

I hope that this makes sense to you. I know it's Slashdot, so a lack of real applicable technical expertise is the way to get modded up. Unfortunately for me, I have this problem with facts: I try to stay factual, so I often get modded down. For some reason I still keep trying. I think it's a personality flaw.

I think you are living in the past. To the best of my knowledge nobody records analog data streams for digital video. There is very little analog hardware in the system. The analog signal pretty much goes through an A/D converter as soon as possible, and the error correction is digital.

Terrestrial broadcast HDTV in the US uses 8VSB encoding:

8VSB is an 8-level vestigial sideband modulation. In essence, it converts a binary stream into an octal representation by amplitude modulating a sinusoidal carrier to one of eight levels. 8VSB is capable of transmitting three bits (2^3=8) per symbol; in ATSC, each symbol includes two bits from the MPEG transport stream which are trellis modulated to produce a three-bit figure. The resulting signal is then band-pass filtered with a Nyquist filter to remove redundancies in the side lobes, and then shifted up to the broadcast frequency.

Somehow I doubt that "analog filters can be applied to that in an attempt to create a cleaner input signal to the demodulator stage". That part of the system is already highly optimal.

Additionally, it's not telemetry data in the first place.

A telemeter is a device used to remotely measure any quantity. It consists of a sensor, a transmission path, and a display, recording, or control device. Telemeters are the physical devices used in telemetry. Electronic devices are widely used in telemetry and can be wireless or hard-wired, analog or digital.

It's not from the rocket stage, it's from an aircraft observing the splashdown. This is more remote sensing. I know that this is a quibble, but you seem to be confused about the nature of data sources and encoding.

Why was this modded down? If I had mod points I would mod it up.

All I can assume is that some anti-green ideological idiot wants to shoot down any thing that makes good sense and saves energy.

I assume that they are political conservatives, since it fits their typical behavior. I wonder if the Koch (pronounced COCK) brothers are somehow involved.

If you accept that the market system is a way of determining the value of securities, then what does HFT mean? How is it possible for real world value to change over the course of milliseconds?

When put this way, the only events that qualify are explosions and lightning. Even an earthquake takes seconds to minutes to "change value". Tornadoes take minutes and hurricanes take hours or days.

HFT is totally removed from real world phenomena. It is a completely fictional construct. Is it any surprise that it is used to fleece the suckers? It has no legitimate purpose because it is not a real world measure of anything.

A cockroach has about 1,000,000 neurons. A bee is about 960,000. Animals by Number of Neurons

I suspect that the chip is not as fast as physical system. There is also the matter of I/O. How do you get data in and out?

This looks good for research, but a lot of effort will be required to get beyond the lab. OTOH I expect that you could sell this to Wall Street HFT types even if it doesn't work...

Having worked on a BASIC interpreter for the Data General NOVA minicomputer, I can tell you that it was a cost effective solution for teaching programming. A computer with 32K words (64k bytes) and a disk could be purchased for under $30000. This was by far cheaper then any other machine on the market.

These machines had no memory protections support, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to multitask different programs. It could only be interactive running a single core image.

BASIC was ideal for this computing model. The BASIC interpreter could round robin between the interactive users. It was effectively a combined dedicated OS and language.

In the system I worked on the disk was used for swapping users and storing user programs and data. A single CPU could support up to 20 or so terminals. These systems were used for both teaching and simple business automation.

In contrast, even using an assembler was a multipass operation, and only one person could work at a time. Compiling anything more complex, like Fortran IV took a long time. Personally, I only saw people working in assembler since anything else quickly exhausted system resources like memory. Only a very small Fortran program could run in 32K words.

For the ethically challenged (I'm talking to you, Mr. "5000 annually") here's are two maps.

This shows the number of casualties as as per country as a circular area.

This shows maps the casualties to the relative size of the country. This makes it hard to figure out exactly which country is hurting the most, but it dramatically shows how bad some places have it compared to the rest of the world. Anyone who is not shocked by seeing this is a psychopathic personality type.

There's a vastly depressing humor in all of this: both sides are monopolistic scum, so the least you can do is enjoy watching the evil twins fight amongst themselves. It's a really grim joke.

The 30% "tax" that Apple charges at the App Store is immune to market forces. It makes no difference what sells or how much, Apple gets a phenomenal markup. It's all reward, no risk. When this happens at a large scale it means that capitalism is dead, and all the remains is monopoly.

And before the ideological right zombies start chanting "free market" in unison, remember that there is a duopoly: Android and IOS. Now that Blackberry is toast (pun intended), there is only a choice between a closed overly priced ecosystem and an anarchistic platform that is known to be insecure. I don't have the reference at hand, but someone at Google recently stated that security is not guaranteed for Android. Google washes their hands, and the phone providers (another tribe of monopolists) see no need to put any money into customer protection. The big cellular providers want it to be a felony to jailbreak your smartphone. They literally want to threaten users in jail for doing their own patches, so good luck on fixing that security breach on your own. Capitalism at it's best. A real "free market".

Amazon is also a real piece of work. Their business model is all about not paying any tax to anybody anywhere anytime. See post that proceeds this about them owing the French government $1 Billion.

The inequality between the taxation of brick and mortar stores and Amazon gives them a huge competitive advantage. The playing field is a level as a cliff. Amazon is at the top, their competitors are at the bottom and Amazon getd rocks for free to drop off the cliff.

Amazon also has the publishers in a headlock. They dictate how much the publishers can charge before the Amazon markup. They also demand, and get, exclusivity on Kindle over other platforms.

Both Amazon and Apple engage in the kind of "free market capitalism" that made the Soprano's famous: pay us or you won't be around very much longer. They have the same relationship with the market that a pig farmer has to his pigs. The pigs have very little say in the matter.