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Alan Dean Foster (who novelized the Animated Star Trek series), has a set of novels revolving around Philip Lynx (Flinx) and his minidrag - Pip. His lesser known series is more fantasy based - Spellsinger...
One thing I have learned is that while they have the right of first refusal, if they choose not to pursue the idea, I can ask to have it reassigned back to me and pursue on my own. That might be your only option, assuming what you're pursuing doesn't compete with your current employer.
The FCC chose to re-implement rules that were already struck down by federal courts. By re-implementing something that the courts have viewed as outside the power of the FCC, it could be argued that this is a power grab. The proposed law, promised to be vetoed, is Congress' attempt to define the role that the FCC has - and codify what was already ruled upon by the courts.
Why should the FCC have the power?
Problem: how to predict the water flow over different shaped nuclear fuel rods
Approach:
Solution: which approach gives the easiest way to tweek a shape?
Problem: Predicting weather
Approach:
Solution: refining the model used in b is easier as it is much more fine grain
Very few people work in pure Computer Science.
jerry
Maybe if he paid himself a salary commensurate with his income as opposed to the $100K annually he gets - he'd actually be impacted by what the president proposes. Instead, he collects his income from capital gains (taxed at 15%). Of course, if he paid himself a comparable salary, then he'd also have to pay SS+Medicare.
On the other hand, his company (Berkshire Hathaway), has been locked in a 10yr fight with the IRS as to how much money they should pay. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/obama-suporter-warren-buffetts-co-hasnt-paid-some-taxes-since-2002/
It all comes down to scale ultimately. It's rare in the computer science field to see code that runs x% slower than a more optimized version, at both very small and very large scales. Coders that don't know how the hardware and lower level software interfaces work tend not to write very scalable code because they have no ideas how the computers actually work, and even less of an idea of how a lot of them work.
I work in the HPC field where codes are constantly being ported from one OS/hw to another - it could be the same OS on different hw or a different OS on the same hw. Of course the weirdest port is when it's to a completely different OS and hw combination. Optimization in my case is efficient memory utilization along with fast performance - made even harder by hw constraints (32 bit v 64 bit) or the lack of Virtual Memory support in the OS - which constrains the application to the physical memory. Squeezing every "ounce" of performance is mission critical to the HPC application. Getting the right answer seconds/minutes/hours later than another platform makes slower platform non-competative. Hand optimization of certain codes may be able to get the "lost" performance back - but without understanding that compilers don't always generate the best code, and that scientists writing the code are generally not CompSci folks means that making an application run faster/better/more efficiently is generally possible, if the extra effort is applied.
Dealing with the problem of pure staff accumulation, all our researches ... point to an average increase of 5.75% per year. -- C.N. Parkinson