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Comment Re:How do you think it works in the EU ? (Score 1) 507

Find the 9-digit rate table for sales tax in Georgia?
Georgia publishes a taxes-by-county table (soon-to-be-current one is at https://etax.dor.ga.gov/salestax/salestaxrates/LGS_2010_Jan_Rate_Chart_Moore.pdf )
I have no idea how to map that into zip+4.
Apple doesn't appear to know either; they just have an extra screen expressly to prompt me which county I live in.

Programming

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."

Comment Re:What? (Score 2, Informative) 486

Nope.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1103/p02s02-ussc.html
"We found dozens of breaches throughout the levee system," says Peter Nicholson, who leads the American Society of Civil Engineers' levee-assessment team."

ASCE senate testimony: http://www.ewrinstitute.org/files/pdf/katrinalevees.pdf
"Rather than a few breaches through the floodwalls in
the city caused largely by overtopping, we found literally dozens of breaches throughout
the many miles of levee system. A number of different failure mechanisms were
observed, including scour erosion caused by overtopping, seepage, soil failure, and
piping."

"Where the storm surge was most severe, causing massive overtopping, the levees
experienced a range of damage from complete obliteration to intact with no signs of
distress."

Two specific breaches were investigated and failed in the way you describe:
"Finally, three major breaches, and at least one significantly distressed levee-floodwall
section, were investigated at sites along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals
which, as explained before, were clearly not overtopped.
Obvious soil failures within the embankment or foundation soils at or below the bases of
the earthen levees had occurred at two of the breaches. At the distressed section,
seepage and piping were evident. These types of soil instabilities appear likely to have
been responsible for failure of these wall systems."

Because two breaches failed in the way you described doesn't mean there were only two breaches, or that the sewer company ruined everything for everyone. It's possible the root cause was the panels weren't sunk low enough in the first place. It's definitely the case that there were other failures with other failure reasons.

Wikipedia looks like a decent place to start for an overview, but as always you'll need to check their sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_levee_failures_in_Greater_New_Orleans

Comment 3-prong ground loop hum? (Score 1) 1174

Can somebody explain to me why 3-prong sockets can result in ground loop hum, and why the third prong is necessary? Shouldn't the ground part of a polarized connection be the same as the third prong, except without the potential ground loop problem due to having 2 grounds? I've read the 3rd prong is to ground a metal chassis to force a breaker trip in case of a problem, but couldn't you do that with the ground off a polarized connection instead of adding a new different ground? (Didn't learn anything about this until my PS3 started my sound system humming, have fixed the hum but still don't understand the principles involved.)

Also, why the polarized/unpolarized distinction? Why not just always polarize, even if it isn't required, since it is easy and doesn't hurt anything?

Comment Re:who's to blame. (Score 1) 815

Shouldn't the idea of "move these bits representing music from here to there" be a separate application from the idea of "turn these bits into sound coming out the computer's speakers"? Especially since in most cases the "move these bits" step won't be desired?

Comment Re:Experience from academia (Score 2, Insightful) 1259

No, the idea behind this argument is that inflation is measured against goods which can keep their costs down through productivity improvements, while college is not such a good, so it should see prices rise faster than inflation. I'm not sure I buy the argument, but it is indeed an argument that tuition prices should rise higher than the inflation rate.

We currently have good evidence that the inflation rate doesn't apply broadly to all types of goods - houses and cars are keeping it down while milk and bread are definitely going up more than the official inflation rate. No clue if college is more or less like milk and eggs, though, but it's pretty clear that you can't simply argue that everything should go up by the same inflation rate.

Comment ECC on a home system? (Score 4, Interesting) 333

I've always thought it would be a nice-to-have feature for my home system to have ECC - perhaps it might degrade over time and misbehave less if it could detect and fix some errors. But my normal sources don't seem to stock many choices. E.g. Newegg appears to have 2 motherboards to choose from, both for AMD CPUs, nothing for Intel. Frys appears to have one, same, AMD only. Is this just the way things are, or do I need to be looking somewhere else? Would picking one of these motherboards end up in not working out well for my gaming rig?

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