No, I am spartacus.

+1 Ethically Questionable Business Tactic

Aw come on dude...child porn too? Gross.

Well how many roads must a man walk? What is 6 multiplied by 9?


I once got a fortune cookie where the back said (under the learn chinese part):

Lucky Numbers: 4, 2, 42, 84, 8

Yeah, THAT is the real issue with his idea.

I work for a not-for-profit (not a non-profit, there is a difference) as a Programmer Analyst in Research & Development.

My cube is about 7'x7', give or take. I had the option to have a door, coat rack, bookshelf, regular shelf, locking drawers, rolling locking cabinets, locking shelves, individual flourescent or incandescent lighting installed, and still can at my discretion.

I have to say that my company is somewhat awesome, they respect their workforce quite a bit. We all get a few hours of paid time off randomly throughout the year for different events and occasions, we actually can control the temperature of our environments (the CEO _ACTIVELY REFUSED_ to let the maintenance staff put locking covers on the thermostats) and we have mostly unfettered internet access. It's still logged, but there are no blacklists of sites that are blocked. Maybe facebook, myspace, et al...but I wouldn't know, I'd rather not browse those on the company intranet anyways. Purchase requests are handled in a sane way (I need a new chair // Okay! [instead of] I need a new chair // Why? Did something happen to the old one? Can you find room in the budget? Are there any metal folding chairs in the facilities room?)

While my cubicle may be small, I can eat at my desk...I can close my 'door,' I can chat over the walls of my cube with my neighbors and we all know each other very well. I have a direct PSTN phone number to my desk and I can enable Domain Admin rights for myself anytime I need them.

I can also listen to Pandora or any other internet radio/music service while I work.

It's a funny thing when your company trusts you. Our metrics here are meeting deadlines and milestones, not lines of code checked in to the repo.

Now, let your mind boggle when I tell you this is a financial institution. Thats right, a credit union. You'd never see a bank be this relaxed with their staff.

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation#Feynman.27s_interpretation

"In order to find the overall probability amplitude for a given process, then, one adds up, or integrates, the amplitude of postulate 3 over the space of all possible histories of the system in between the initial and final states, including histories that are absurd by classical standards."

So, for a photon that goes trough one or the other slit, you integrate over both, and you end up with the interference pattern in your calculation. Also, the same photon goes to the end of the universe, splits into a pair of two cars (one car, one anti-car) that merge back to a photon, then it goes back to your detector behind slits. However, this contributes very little to the end result. However you add all those probabilities.

But from photon's perspective, the universe is contracted to the length of zero in the direction it travels, so, it gets there in zero time, as if its starting point and end point are one and the same.

Can somebody smart connect those two views?

That's true. Many people went to DVDs because of functionality. However, even if resolution wasn't a factor in your decision to switch, you'd have to admit it would be pretty rough going back to VHS now that you're used to that resolution. Seriously, break out a VHS tape sometime. Picture quality is truly awful, and you don't get things like native widescreen.

That's the main thrust of my argument - you don't know what you want until you have experienced it. Like those early computers, where people were perfectly happy with 128k of memory - but today 4GB isn't even enough.

I don't mean to offend but this is an absurd usage of statistics. The entire problem with comparing the number of FOIA requests is that there is no inherent connection between the datasets. One year you could have 100 requests regarding factual information for NASA programs, the next you could have 100 requests for Dick Cheney's cell phone number. Obviously the statistics from the 2nd year would show an absurd increase in FOIA rejections, but that wouldn't actually mean the government was 'more closed' the second year.

    I can just see the headlines now. "1,000 dead as 1 mile of I-900 explodes into flames."

As a teller for a large credit union, (similar to a bank, but member oriented instead of shareholder. Not-for-profit version.) there are checks that do this. Some of them require you to call the number on the front of the check and verify both amount and serial #, then you write an 'authorization number' or some such on the front. Business accounts usually are offered an option of pre-authorized checks, and I've even seen some business banking brochures that specifically offer 3rd party accounting software ledger support...I would assume it uploads a list of checks you've written out, so your financial institution can only allow certain combinations?

The only AT&T phone I've ever had that wouldn't let me set the ringtone as an mp3 from bluetooth or usb was the iPhone. All the (6 to 8ish) other phones I had let me get a song on there some how and use it.

Xvid and divx (mpeg-4 part 2) are far less resource-intensive than h.264. I don't know if anyone's ever tried playing a reasonably sized h.264 encoded video on a PIII, but it usually doesn't work out so well. Avi and divx I'm not so sure about, but I don't see why they had to get rid of xvid. Maybe I'm behind the times, but most of the time when I decide to re-encode something it's because I need to play it on a slow budget box like the ones they have at school.

No, XP doesn't do bitmap scaling. It scales the fonts if their sizes are specified in points (but application can specify them in pixels). Also, a bunch of WinAPI UI functions (such as CreateDialog) use units that are derivatives of font size, so if you use those, then you get scaling layouts, too. The problem is that it's only a very limited set of functions, and there are many more which only work with pixels; those won't scale in XP, unless you compute pixel values from default UI font size yourself.

Just a note, the PS3s GPU isn't so powerful, based off the nvidia G70 and was, rumor has it, tacked on late in hardware development. The 8 Cell powerpc cpu core's with one dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and one is a spare to improve production yields. Leaving 6, is where the ps3 gets the bulk of it's processing power.