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Case in point: the American tax payer has payed for about 4.5 years of my graduate CS education, which, according to my visa documents, exceeds $200,000 in total cost. I'd like to stay, (re-)pay taxes, and I already had a six-digit job offer from a well-known American company. Further, my home country's embassy submitted, in writing, that they have no objection to me staying in the US, even permanently. Nonetheless, I'm getting "kicked out" this summer within 30 days after I graduate.

I trust there must be good reasons on a global scale... but in my local view this makes only limited sense.

(Btw., this is the J-1 visa home residency rule, for those who care. I need to live in my home country for at least two years before I can apply for an H-1b. Two years at home is just long enough to settle in and make moving _again_ not very attractive.)

Thanks! I am not sure what reports to believe anymore...

Where are you getting the milli from? Kyodo reports 8000 micro sievert. So it's an ~5.5x increase from the previous high-water-mark of 1,500 microsievert.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78063.html

Oh, sure, Springer will also let you publish "open access" articles. However, the publishing fee goes up from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Now find me a prof that will actually sacrifice his precious grant dollars for that.

Not to forget that IEEE/ACM also take a big cut out of every conference budget. In fact, the cut is significant enough that budgets are fudged (frequently at that, I suspect).

This drives up attendance fees, which are of course reimbursed from tax payer money...

2. Hot war breaks out (precipitated by the DPRK or the South or the US), the North loses fairly quickly, there are catastrophic civilian casualties in the South and the North and perhaps elsewhere (e.g. the North launches a nuke or chemical weapons or what-have-you against Japan or the US, just 'cause it can), American military losses are comparatively minor in comparison to everything else. Ultimately, the industrial base and economy of the Korean peninsula is in shambles and is all the worse for having to deal with bringing the North into the 20th (let alone 21st) century, despite lots of foreign aid it's still a shitty situation for a lot of people for a long, long time.

Not so fast. The North has millions of trained, ready soldiers and nukes, and a single-minded determination to fight to the end. A full-blown war would cost millions of lives on all sides, and a win for us is not certain at all. It could easily end with a bloody stalemate and new truce after they've conquered most of the south and we lose the will to send >100,000 US soldiers to die. Just look at how it went the first time. The army of North Korea is quite formidable.

> I can only conclude that many scientists are not confident at all with their theories, or they are purportedly cheating.

That's really not an insightful conclusion. I think it's rather a question of pride and effort: the code probably needs to be cleaned up before release, and the reward for investing that time is very low (career-wise). Researchers are going to publish their source code when it becomes required by most major journals and conferences.

Besides being a door-opener for research jobs, pursuing a PhD is also a great chance for personal growth. You will be challenged on many, many levels and thus likely develop skills that you never knew you were lacking in the first place. In my view, the world becomes larger in grad school; you'll get to see so many hard questions and unknowns that your appreciation for existing knowledge will no doubt grow.

There may be jobs in industry that allow for similar growth, but they are certainly not the norm. It is easy to stay within one's comfort zone once one gets paid to do so.

In my (completely biased) opinion, doing a PhD is worth it for great and curious students that like to be challenged and that can afford 5 years, no matter what you plan to do afterwards (in fact, especially if you don't know what to do afterwards). You can always be a code monkey for 50 years after the PhD; it's hard to go the other way.

The '=' vs. '==' example actually nicely demonstrates the limits of automatic bug hunting. The variable 'rig' is NULL when it is being dereferenced, thus the program will segfault regardless of '=' or '==' being used. The "fix-it" tip is highly misleading.

http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html...

(This is probably a side effect of PR people preparing the website; there is no reason why LLVM should not be able to detect this particular kind of NULL-dereference.)

So according to their lawyers you can view their RSS feed as long as you haven't purchased the viewer?

No, you, the consumer, are not making commercial use of the NYTimes.com newsfeed.

The company producing the Pulse reader, however, is making commercial use of the NYT brand and content by featuring it prominently in the advertising material.

So, as mentioned by others, the easiest solution seems to be to remove all NYT references (and other unlicensed brands) and resubmit.

Not so ironic if you consider that Apple probably has a legal agreement with the NYT company to do so. Just look at how frequently the NYT is featured in Apple commercials and presentations; this doesn't happen just by accident.

The problem here is that the Pulse reader is (from the point of view of the NYT) trying to get a free ride on the NYT's brand name. This is really no different from ripping off any other brand name to advocate your product, e.g., you can't advertise your "high-performance shoe laces" by prominently featuring Nike shoes without obtaining prior approval.

The bandwidth overage fee for DataPro is a reasonable $10 for each extra gigabyte. Verizon and Sprint charge around $50 per extra gigabyte in overage fees. If you use more than 2 GB per month, you deserve to pay more than the rest of us who do not. Why is this hard to understand?

It's perfectly reasonable for heavy users to pay more than light users. But the same holds true for water, sewage, electricity, etc.

So why do we have such a complicated mess of data plan options? Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?

Setting off a massive explosion with the well at the center. Massive enough to move sufficient amount of material towards the well to essentially clamp it shut.

Of course, the oil would probably start leaking through the sand/rubble after a few days.

This could be trivially solved by applying nuclear explosives to weld everything shut, with the added benefit that local fishermen could stop to worry whether they'll have a job again soon. </sarcasm>

Regarding the IANAL aspect you can see here http://tinyurl.com/2bd45en where the #1 act in the world understand the stakes and where the true money is made.

Oh, I don't doubt that many artists would welcome your service if it leads to a broader, more international audience. Yet I somehow doubt that the labels and their lawyers are necessarily going to be of the same opinion.

Anyway, if I may digress, if you happen to be offering the reverse service at some point, I'd like to watch German RTL Formula One coverage from the US. RTL even offers an iPhone app for that, but they check the user's location and block viewers not residing in Germany... :-(

These arbitrary "market segmentations" are really annoying and not the least in the interest in the viewer (who, sadly, is not the customer...). Good luck toppling them, I'll root for you.

Bonus: Watch American TV on Hulu and Listen to music on Last.fm / Pandora even if you don't live in the US

From a user point of view, I think that's pretty cool. However, are you sure it's legal? I'd think it's greyish at best (but IANAL), and you might get a lot of unwanted attention from the big media companies for advertising this so openly. Are you sure you have the pockets to stand up to them in court even if you are sure that it's legal?

[...] said Chad McGimpsey, who moved to Boulder a month ago and is now a regular at the twice-a-month coffee club.

Wow, I wish I could recognize trends that quickly. At most two observations, and already a "regular."

The Simplest Java IDE

That would be notepad.exe. No, I'm not kidding. I learned Java using nothing but notepad.exe and javac on a Win98 box. Syntax highlighting seemed quite magical back then. ;-)

(Ok, ok, I know, editor != IDE…)

Fully agree. I gave up after four stories that I all disliked. Two were totally out of my area of interest (celebrities and horse racing, huh?), and two were tech stories that didn't cross the "marginal curiosity" threshold.

Could work, but you'd have to get me hooked more quickly.

In conclusion, given a traversal of an artificial graph with natural statistics, the graph database Neo4j is more optimal than the relational database MySQL.

I get what they mean, but "more optimal"? Please...

Maximal, minimal, optimal, and the corresponding verbs, require proof. Why not use "better", "improved", "shorter", "reduced", "faster" or "sped up" instead?

(AFAIK Gruber isn't a lawyer, so it's just an uneducated opinion)

That's a bit harsh; there's a large difference between an "uneducated opinion" and a "carefully researched assessment by a non-lawyer". Based on your criteria, no journalist could ever write about any topic but journalism.

I do not perceive a double standard here.

Gruber: I’m not offended by their decision to obtain this unit and publish everything they were able to ascertain regarding it. [...] Second, publishing the name, photographs, and personal information of the Apple engineer who lost the phone is irrelevant to the story. It was the dick move to end all dick moves.

It seems to me that he made it pretty clear that he does not take offense with reporting about the prototype per se. Rather, he condemns the way that Gizmodo chose to handle the whole affair.

Yeah, doesn't look that bad to me either (but I'm getting an iPad, absolutely no question for me since I'm already heavily invested in Apple tech).

What I find a lot more scary is this: http://www.engadget.com/photos/joojoo-unboxing/#2855956

Vents? Seriously? Does it have a fan? Is it going to be noisy? Just imagine all the crap that can fall in there, all the stuff that can get caught on it.

3) I purchased an EEE PC thinking it would be great, I could use it everywhere, and for anything. Turns out, it's sitting in a drawer because I have no use for a limited PC that's too small and hard to type on to do anything of value. You CANNOT tell me that typing on the iPad will be better. Typing on my iPhone is already the worst typing experience imaginable. I used to email all the time from my blackberry, now I don't even bother.

This is where we differ---the whole reason to get excited about the iPad is because it promises to make typing (and mouse wiggling, one of the most unnatural things to do ever!) a whole lot less relevant. That's something to be excited about, IMO.

This is not a "black and white" issue with one true answer. You have to see this in the historic context.

One of the reasons why the first German democracy (1918-1933) failed (and gave rise to Hitler) is because the German society was very much compartmentalized and split into "subcultures" at the time. In fact, large parts of the military chose to continue as "para-military" units after the end of WWI. These violent groups that saw themselves as above the law played a significant part in Hitler's ascent to power.

When the current Germany was designed after WWII, many safeguards were built into the system to ensure that there would be no more "parallel" societies. Two obvious examples are 1) the universal draft (flow all parts of society through the military to prevent the military from isolating itself) and 2) no home schooling (the public schools serve to promote democracy and western values; the public school system is designed to be the "melting pot" that integrates immigrants and fringe groups).

How would you feel about this case if the home schooling did not involve Christians (Note: I'm not religious myself.), but radical Moslems? What if it were about Nazis indoctrinating their kids with hate? What if it were about a sect that raises their kids to prepare for a collective suicide?

The German (mainstream) belief is that the government has to step in in these cases. It has to protect the kids from their own parents.

The family that was granted asylum may very well be fine parents and teachers (I don't know them), but for obvious reasons you can't have an effective law that says "you may only homeschool kids for Christian reasons, but other choices are not ok".

So, the German society, under consideration of its history, chooses to err on the safe side: no homeschooling. Period.

Of course, the particular circumstances may very much differ for other societies, so that other societies may reasonably come up with different rules (e.g., the US). But that does not invalidate the reasoning behind the German laws.

5. Any type of bit twiddling sucks. Take the time to do it in C and make the extension.

I recently had to do something like this and ended up using SWIG to generate the glue code. However, I noticed that my code had to spent considerable time (many iterations) in the C++ library to reduce overall execution time (but then it did by a factor of 20x-40x).

Do you happen to have some advice on how much speedup could be gained by replacing SWIG with handwritten wrappers?

"Complete" my key research goals and write a draft of my dissertation.

Systems research is easy to criticize, but much harder to do right.

For starters, systems research deals with the real world. The real world is messy. How would you comprehensively represent every interesting workload in an analytical model? How would you derive it from real world applications? It is impossible in the general case (halting problem), and really, really hard to do even in specialized cases. If you think otherwise, the field of worst-case execution time analysis awaits your contribution eagerly (try modeling L1 and L2 instruction and data cache interactions in a multicore CPU).

Thus, in many cases evaluating different interesting workloads empirically is unavoidable. In such cases, 100 pages of setup, methodology, and analysis are a feature, and not necessarily a sign of mediocrity. There is a great danger of overlooking substantial flaws in brief descriptions.

So, yes, mediocrity can lead to inflated sections, but a good PhD committee will not led that slide. In your page cache example, I would absolutely expect to see significant experiments and analysis; I would probably not be convinced by just a few selected benchmarks. Presenting benchmarks well requires many more pages than a succinct proof might.

What kind of development process leads to such variety of sliders? Don't they have one GUI library team? Did they buy all the components from other companies that happened to have their own slider implementation?

I mean, sure, some specialized implementations are useful (e.g., picking a color/hue), but this is a bit excessive. Somebody must have written all these implementations. Somebody needs to maintain them. This costs real money... why would you want to do that?

Indeed. Saying 'QNX is sucks as a desktop OS' is like saying 'Windows 7 sucks because it doesn't run on my toaster'. Well, d'uh!

It's a classical case of wrong expectations. The author criticizes QNX for not automatically installing a SMP kernel. That is actually a good thing as multiprocessor real-time systems are very much different from uniprocessor real-time systems. People building real-time systems should consciously choose to allow SMP; the OS shouldn't do it behind the scenes in a dot update.

True, but that's true for any feature if you use it just for the feature's sake. You can use animations for so much more than that. For example, it can be very illustrative to animate a data structure manipulation.