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Comment What are the complainer's conclusions? (Score 1) 541

Each of the people whose research the book used came up with their own interpretation of the data they collected. In each case, their conclusions are based upon what data they collected, and not what others collected.

An interesting comparison would be for those same people to review the SUM of the data Wade used (since they have access to it), and publish THEIR conclusions. Don't just say, "My research does not support that!", because you might not have been looking at N factors that other researchers looked at.

Comment Re: You're welcome to them. (Score 1) 402

>

And one final point: the fact that you can apply any standard UNIX command to a range of lines in vi is just amazing. Look it up if you don't already know it, but are interested.

BINGO!

Reading this thread, SOMEBODY had to mention this. I use the "use buffer (can be range) as stdin to command and replace with results" feature of vim EVERY SINGLE DAY. It is one of the most amazing and productive features I can't believe it isn't more well known.

And once you've started getting nice snippets of "buffer code", the power grows by typing <CTL-f> at the colon ":" prompt and finding recently used commands. Amazing and powerful stuff. (Set your remembered vim commands to >1000 for long term buffer-command goodness!)

I don't know of any other editors that do this

Comment Revisionist history. (Score 1) 282

Nokia had some issues but was still profitable as Tomi Ahonen clearly documents in this long post. tl;dr? A couple of short quotes and links to graphs:

This is how bad it was under previous CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Nokia had seen revenues decline from its peak in 2008. Nokia had seen profits decline severely from its peak also in 2008. Nokia had reported its first quarterly loss (although the full year was still profitable) - that loss was driven by Nokia's troubled Networking division, not its handsets units which were both highly profitable. ...

So to be clear, Nokia had reported one QUARTER of a loss, but in annual terms, Nokia was a profitable company. Its big revenue growth had turned into decline but that decline was actually halted around the time the Nokia Board decided to seek a replacement to Kallasvuo, and Nokia revenues had returned to growth by the time Elop joined Nokia.

Let me repeat. Nokia did NOT have a problem in its handsets business. Its issues were in its Networking business line.

Now the graphs:

Nokia profits by business line Note: Elop took over Sept. 21, 2010.

Which company had the strongest handset business?

Which company saw their handset business tank and when?

Smartphone marketshare

Comment Re:No (Score 2) 261

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Yep, those damn plutocrats sure did their best that the rest of us would never have a leg up. /sarcasm

I suggest that you take some time to read the Federalist Papers. I think you'll discover things aren't quite as black and white as you believe.

Comment Re:Freedom of Expression... (Score 2, Informative) 424

Not necessarily, or if it does, it'll take a very long time. Remember, the US states' cultures were all mostly from Britain, and everyone spoke English with a few exceptions (like the Pennsylvania Dutch). Early on, there were settlements by the French, Dutch, Spanish, etc, but the British settlers pushed everyone out (the French only survived in Quebec, which isn't part of the US).

Wow, this is sooo wrong. Just about the only commonality that the U.S. population started out with was that we are all, every single one (including American Indians and Eskimos), immigrants from somewhere else. The U.S. has seen waves of immigration from all over the world.

As a personal example, I'll cite my great-grandfather. He helped settle Chisholm, a small town in northern Minnesota in the first decade of the last century. He was a Serbian peasant whose family had spent about 250 years in Croatia but still considered themselves Serb, not Croatian. Still used the Cyrillic alphabet attended the Serbian Orthodox services at somebody's house rather than attend the local Catholic church. Then he gets to the U.S. and everything changed for him.

His new neighbors were Welsh, Italian, Jewish, Slovenian, Russian, German, Norwegian, Finnish, and FSM knows what else. All of those families were founded by peasants right off the boat who had come to work in the iron mines or in the logging industry.

The Welsh were coal miners who got jobs as mine foremen because they were typically the only ones underground who spoke English, which in turn meant that they were the only ones who could talk to the mine management. The rest just showed up at the mine for their shift and got by with a lot of hand waving.

Eventually, they all learned English, took night classes to earn their citizenships, made sure their kids were brought up speaking English, and generally became members of the American culture. But every last one of those families is still fiercely proud of their own distinct heritage and celebrates their differences as well as our shared commonalities.

In the past several decades, Minnesota has seen large influxes of Hmong, Vietnamese, Somali, Afghani, and a couple of other refugee groups. We've even got Mexicans who have chosen to settle here instead of following the crops. Those families have all followed similar paths. We've got a huge Cinco de Mayo celebration in the state capital every year.

(As an aside, why on earth are so many people from the tropics so happy to move to the nation's icebox? :-D)

(As another aside, the far right's screaming about illegal immigration is one of the dumber things that I've ever seen in my life. After all, compared to the Indians and Eskimos we're all newbies.)

The point to remember is that America has never really been a melting pot. We're more of a stew, where each new immigrant population adds its own distinctive flavor.

When I look at the history of Europe since about 1970, I see the same thing happening. It's slower because the national boundaries tend to contain each distinctive national flavor, but trust me. There is already far more commonality across Europe today than there was 40 years ago. It may be hard to see from the inside, but it's there.

Comment Or maybe ... (Score 3, Interesting) 230

... the college education included acquiring the desire to move to such places?

Personally, I don't consider places like NYC or SF to be desirable places to live. "Clean air"? "Low crime?" "Better schools?" Certainly, compared to other "cities of size". But, to me, the choice isn't limited to which "big city" to live in. And those criteria work to exclude larger cities, in my opinion.

GNOME

The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money 693

An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME Foundation is running out of money. The foundation no longer has any cash reserves so they have voted to freeze non-essential funding for running the foundation. They are also hunting down sponsors and unpaid invoices to regain some delayed revenue. Those wishing to support the GNOME Foundation can become a friend of GNOME."

Comment Regulations prohibit, not allow (Score 3, Insightful) 218

It is a fundamental principle in the United States that, unless something is illegal, it is legal. Regulations, therefore, should enumerate what makes something illegal, not what makes it legal. To do otherwise prohibits the possibility of inventing better ways to do something, until/unless the regulations are modified to allow it.

The problem within the FAA is that they have regulations that work both ways. In most cases, they tell you what you CANNOT do to remain legal, in others, they tell you what you MUST DO to remain legal.

Comment Re:I grew up in Atlanta... (Score 1) 723

While it may be counterintuitive, my experience has been that using engine braking is generally more forgiving than the traditional brakes. For me, it's a lot easier to manage the friction coefficient with the engine than the brakes because braking force tends to be much more binary in nature. When slippery conditions exist, you're either on the brake pedal or you're not (although ABS helps here).

In fact, one reason that I really like a manual transmission is that manipulating the clutch and engine RPMs in combination with the transmission goes a long way toward getting just the right balance to slow down without losing traction. Newer computerized automatic trannies and engines do the same thing. So far, though, I haven't found a combination in a mass produced vehicle that does a very good job of it. Maybe we'll see some additional improvement in this space in the future.

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