Why aren't there more women in construction?

Curious thing. It's my personal observation, but I've seen a lot more women in hi viz round London recently. Other funny thing is they behave much like the guys and wolf whistle. I suppose it's something to do with large scale construction not relying on physical strength nearly as much as the smaller scale things.

Touche my man, touche. Like so many of the most insightful posts it's hard to choose between funny and insightful.

As someone who ends up on the side of the pro-GG side of the argument more often than not,

Out of interest, why are you pro these people:
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/...

Or perhaps you'd like to wile away a few minutes watching "the sarkeesian" effect. I do notice that the gaters on Slashdot banging on about fraud have finally given up 12 months after literally no one asked for their money back from Sarkeesian.

much the same way that "MRA" is used and misused

I think you're confusing the men's movement with the men's rights movement. The latter is the one with return of kings, mgtow and so on and who's adherents are known as men's rights activists.

I guess the expected tsunami of techies eager for SJW articles never arrived

And yet here you are bringing it up. Funny how the people whining loudest about "SJW" and whatnot are tautologically the ones who make the biggest fuss about it.

How about you stick to the topic of the optimizer bug in .NET and not drag your hatred of bogeymen into it?

With my limited understanding of what this is, I am kind of surprised that they are not actively helping the project.

Basically, hardware companies are, on the whole totally mental. For some reason, they have all their expertise in hardware and produce hardware for a living and then throw a total shitfit over the software and believe that their super special awful crashy piece of shit software is really the important thing and wrap it up in all sorts of proprietary licensing "solutions" designed to make life as hard for the paying customer as possible, when what the customer really wants to do is make some cool shit with the hardware, and maybe sell a bunch of stuff based on it.

If you're thinking in terms of niches and markets and profit margins, you're thinking about it wrong because you're implicitly assuming that they're not off the wall mad.

People still use eBay?

Yes. As opposed to what?

I, for example, regularly buy cheap Chinese imported solder paste off eBay. It's about an order of magnitude cheaper than the "proper" stuff from Farnell/RS/etc and seems to work just fine. I think there's one or two amazon vendors selling it for a vastly inflated price, too.

And etc.

Ebay seems to be a great source of random bits and bobs, e.g. m3 studding cut to length with accompanying butterfly nuts, or a small hot air rework station. ebay seems to be by far the best source for such things.

Some of the companies selling through ebay are getting quite sizable. Many of them are Chinese, selling stuff made probably in Shenzen to the wider world. There's a few which have got big enough to stock warehouses in the UK to reduce delivery times and shipping costs.

eBay is like paradise for someone who likes making stuff.

We are way beyond extraordinary claims. Closer to batshit insane claims.

well... basically yes.

Right up there with about 80% of all perpetual motion machines.

Only 80%? Breaking the conservation of momentum and breaking the conservation of energy are about the same on the level of nuttiness.

To me, it's amazing that anyone here is giving this any credibility at all, I suspect a perpetual motion machine would get less credulity, though I suspect sadly not zero. I think it's a mix of hopeless optimizm in that wanting it to work (I want it to work too, but it doesn't) enough will somehow make it work and mindless contraryism in that going with the batshit insanity rather than the very well known and understood physics is somehow "sticking it to the man" or proving what a free-thinker one is.

Between all of the pointless social narcissism platforms and SJW Bs this is enlightening news. I am excited to see what discoveries will be made.

From my observation of the various participantsm, there's a distresingly large correlation between people who love the term "SJW" (who I've noted from, er, say, other threads) and people who seem to lack skepticism over this piece of obvious total bunk.

Seriously, this "engine" is either one of the greatest discoveries of modern physics (see the discussions around symmetry of laws and Noether's theorem), or it's bull. Given it was mathematically "proven" to work by the laws that have conservation of momentum baked in at a fundemental level, I'm inclined to say it's not right. When that maths was further shown to be wrong the exact same drive was "proven" to work not by magic (incorrect) relativity woo, but by magic (and I'm sure incorrect) virtual particle woo.

The maths is more complicated, and that will in time be demonstrated incorrect, if anyone bothers. In the mean time, it will continue to produce experimental results well under the noise floor.

Incidentily, that's exactly how the people above love to argue. Hammer loudly on a point until it's disproven, then at that stage, move on to the next, harder to disprove one, and keep hammering on that. So, it's not surprising that this argument appeals to those folks.

However, in physics, you can always set up the experiment again from scratch, so no matter how many dubious "proofs" are done, the experiemnts will never show this works.

Honest is a good start, but it isn't enough. The history of science is littered with honest mistakes. We are well into the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" territory.

How are we to know which of our theories are accurate?

You should read "the relativity of wrong". It explains this stuff well.

Newton's law is never going to be disproved, ever. It's been extended with relativity and will probably be extended again. It is never going to be proven wrong because it produces exceptionally accurate predictions is everything you personally can see (pretty much provided you're not a physicist or astronomer).

In order to be disproven, it will have to stop making accurate predictions.

CPU/GPU integration is for farmers, to paraphrase Seymour Cray.

CPU/GPU integration has much lower latency than discrete a GPU. The HSA based AMD chips pass data from the fast, single threaded, fast branching core to the massive array of relatively slow FPU units in a few nanoseconds.

Which is why HSA benchmarks seem to work so well

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...
http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri...

If you want fast comptuting, low latency comms is where it's at :)

Here's a way that the government could be even less involved: don't DO that. Let people who want to show programs to a large audience find their own way to fund the production and dissemination of that material.

The courts, i.e. the gouvernment still has to enforce copyright in order for that to work. IOW, the government is always involved.

Say, by selling ads or attracting sponsors, etc.

Now you're under much more direct influence from the advertisers and sponsors. I'd argue strongly that under the current system the government has less influence over the BBC than advertisers and sponsors do on commercial channels.

Why should someone who doesn't want to fund a given program be forced to, under penalty of being dragged through court? I have zero interest in watching our many all-sports programming options (ESPN, etc).

Because we as a country thing that's the best trade-off. I've yet to see evidence that we're wrong. As a taxpayer, you have to fund all sorts of things you're not interested in. If you don't want to watch anything live, then you don't have to pay the live broadcast fee. You still get to enjoy the entire back catalogue via iPlayer, and in fact all the other channels offering on demant stuff.

You think the "best system we have" is for the government to be the enforcer in an arrangement where I'm forced to give them money anyway?

Yes.

And (I'm guessing you're American), but American TV does not exactly convince me otherwise. Sure you have some great shows (much better on the whole), but your TV services are woefully uncritical of the government, unless it's along very strictly partisan lines. I have never, ever seen anything like this on American TV:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI

If you don't watch it, that's an interviewer on BBC news in the biggest time slot giving a very senior serving politican a very hard time indeed. The politician keeps weaselling out aswers and the interviewer simply does not accept. After being asked the same question again and again and again, the politician runs out of weasel words and finally admits what he did.

And this is not like the partisan screeching you get on Fox News. That is what a good news service ought to be doing.

The argument "tax is bad" is not enough to convince me of your arguments. Taxes are the price of civilisation, after all.

Ah, so in Britain the government isn't involved in tax collection and enforcement.

What's that got to do with the BBC? You have to buy a licese if you wish to receive live broadcasts.

The BBC gets to collect the fees, which they outsource to Crapita. If crapita find you are doing unlicensed things, and can collect evidence, they can then send that evidence on to the CPS. If you're dumb enough to (a) watch live TV without a license and (b) let the Crapita people in to collect evidence then you'll get prosecuted. If you tell them to eff-off, there's nothing they can do.

or have any say, whatsoever, over how that money is allocated.

Nope. The BBC keeps the money (actually, Crapita keep the money, and they pay the BBC a fixed fee), and get to do whatever they like with it. Of course there's a corporate charter etc. The only lever the government have is to change the license fee which essentially controls how much the BBC gets. The BBC, like the NHS is a rather sensitive topic, so this is not something they do lightly.

TL;DR you are mistaken. The BBC is not allocated funds out of the general budget. The mechanism for collecting of funds is purposefully kept separate from general taxation precisely do the government has little control over the BBC.

That is an interesting system indeed! Who handles all of that, if not the government?

Now you know: the money isn't allocated from taxes, so the government doesn't handle it. And yes it is a good system. It's not perfect but it's the best we have. It's freer from government influence than other funding mechanisms and also free from corporate influences, e.g. Sith Murdoch.

What kind of video editing tools out there support ogg vorbis

Well, given that very many games use ogg/vorbis for audio precisely because it's royalty free, I imagine there's a good commercial tools to deal with it. Fewer games use theora, but it's not nonzero and includes large ones like Diablo III.

But anyway what? Don't people edit in lossless then transcode to a lossy format at the end anyway?

She paid twice as much total for her Macbook as I paid for my Asus Zenbook

I'm curious about that. Last time I (well, my SO actually) bought a Zenbook (UX21 as it happens), it was very similar to the equivalent 11 inch macbook air. It was I think it was slightly cheaper but had a larger drive. The outer dimensions, and critically the weight were pretty much the same.

The main driving factor in spec/price seemed to be driven by who has most recently released a new model, the new models always being slightly better value than the old ones from other manufactuers as they seem to not alter the price over the life.

I know you mentioned training, but that's something of an optional extra. For anyone here buying for themselves, Apple laptops are a similar price to other PCs of a simialar spec. And by spec, I mean the full spec including weight, screen quality and build quality, not just the MHz :)

The UX21 however at the time ran Linux much more smoothly which was what sealed the deal and as a bonus had a superior range of ports, including native VGA which is actually really useful on the conference circuit as most projectors still seem to be VGA---and when there are options the VGA ones seem to be more reliable. Digressing, I think that's because they're wired in and VGA has a much longer cable throw and the projectors are expensive and old, so have worse support for the newer standards.