Sip

I've always been fascinated that mathematically, you can have a room which can be filled with paint (finite volume), but whose walls cannot be fully covered with paint (infinite surface area)!!!

The only movie I have seen in the last 9 months was dumb and dumberer and it was worth EVERY penny.

The only Mac I like is a Big Mac and it usually comes with fries. Big to Tevanian!!!!

Tata?

Damn mos, sorry to hear about the foot Hope it's not too bad. Don't forget to post the pics! I love pics At least you have an excuse to get a new digital camera!!!!!

Ok, having said that, I think: 1) Thoth should get the award for best use of smilies in a post (a few posts above this). 2) Hmmm .. I forgot what I was going to say. Thought for today: I just can't understand what the type of people that call and leave a message like "Oh this is me, call me back" are thinking. WTF? Would it be tooo much trouble to spend 10 seconds and say WHY? What's this about? and how important is it? Damn that's one of the very few things that tick me off: inefficient communication.

http://zr2.cs.ucla.edu/Sip/rubi/rubicon/rubicon1.jpg http://zr2.cs.ucla.edu/Sip/rubi/rubicon/spider1_tn.jpg http://zr2.cs.ucla.edu/Sip/rubi/rubicon/spider2_tn.jpg http://zr2.cs.ucla.edu/Sip/rubi/rubicon/spider3_tn.jpg http://zr2.cs.ucla.edu/Sip/rubi/rubicon/spider4_tn.jpg (click to see larger versions) Just got back into town from running the Rubicon trail (near Lake Tahoe) with a group of Jeeps ... I have been driving for 13 hours straight today (3 hours technical/hard stuff) ... I'll post details later but for now, I just couldn't resist but to share some of these scenery pictures I took in the last three days. Fortunately, I didn't have too much damage although some others weren't as lucky (including a guy that rolled his jeep down a hill with the trailer but no one was injured ... fortunately he wasn't in the jeep at the time .. long story).

So which is it? Flirt or no flirt? Look or no look? It's like you want a sharp long straight wooden stick which is short and dull and has a few bends in it. Keep looking ... you may find it one day

Hmmmm sounds great! After thinking about it some more, I think I'm just going to leave the doors home. It's summer so who cares about getting wet ... it's only a 30% chance predicted for Friday and "stray" storms on Sat so it shouldn't be too bad.

You sure she meant that literally? I hate air conditioning ... never turn it on, especially in the car. I was looking forward to driving to Tahoe tomorrow in the 100 degree heat with the Jeep completely open. But they are forcasting thunder storms so I may end up having to take the doors with me. It would suck being stuck in the mountains with wet clothes, no place to sleep, and no doors/windows on the vehicle But heater is a different issue ... I've been known to have the heater going full blast while windows were rolled down all the way and sun roof open in the "winter". This other time when I had to put snow chains in a blizzard on my old blazer since it was REALLY bad in the mountains here ... I was really glad I had a heater since I was totally wet and it was freezing cold. The heat from the heater felt oh so good! And probably prevented me from catching pneumonia or worse

I disagree. I think most men know exactly what they want. Now how they go about getting it, if at all, is a different issue.

AMEN to that!

Sorry to add yet another "interestingly enough" ... I was trying to think about parallels in the hardware industry ... DRAM is made in South Korea and Taiwan ... a lot of silicon comes from those areas. But still, if you take a company like intel, they have fabs in the US (oregon for example) and produce CPUs locally in the US. So why doesn't intel move completely to Taiwan for example? --- [edit]: I think part of the answer is this ... as a rule of thumb, anything that is going to require "brains" (i.e. research capital and investment) will remain in the US. Anything that is purely labor, will move. Just coding and doing software development doesn't require the amount of resources and "brains" required to design and built the next generation CPU.

Of course the downfall of all this is going to be the ever dropping price of bandwidth. It may soon be cheap to actually transfer data to India, process, and store there, as opposed to doing anything local here!!!! Hard to believe but optical fiber is SO cheap and SO plentiful, that may end up happening. I doubt it ... but it could! Imagine ... entire companies existing on a rack in Bangladesh with only a few thousand dumb-terminals here in the states communicating remotely through the net! That is a scary thought

Azat, let me make a distinction between software/hardware developers and "IT" industry. The software development industry does seem to be moving to India! It makes perfect sense ... they are cheap But in terms of "IT", as in information technology, I don't think it is as bad as you make it sound. At the end of the day, the work force is going to be needed HERE to physically install, manage, update, train, and hand-hold the normal users. I don't think technology is any where near the point where all things can be done remotely. Thus, although "development" may be done in far away "cheap" places, deployment, management, and usage will still be done locally here in the states. What does this mean? This means that there is going to be demand for IT consultants, high-tech consulting-based firms and companies, and people that can get the ever expanding complex systems running and operational. Of course right now things are horrible. After the .com crash, the silicon valley crash, and basically the fall of the high-tech boom, IT was hit very hard. But it will undoubtedly rebound. Computers aren't going to go away. Secretaries and bosses aren't going to become geeks over night. There is going to be a need for IT people (CIS, MIS, etc) for YEARS to come. I mean come on ... some companies are still running on VAX VMS and using things written in COBOL!!!!

ROFLMAO! Good one Fa-D

I would say McFarti is a good one but since there's a matter of practicallity, I sugest you stick to people currently in LA ... that leaves Movses and Azat and maybe Garo. I don't think you want to kick the admin ... that will not be a good idea. That leaves mos and Azat ... Movses is a bit too big for you so I think that only leaves ONE choice for now But if you are willing to wait till Wed, you could try to kick my ass since I'll be back in LA but I doubt you would be too sucessful unless you somehow put on a hundred pounds and a foot in hight by then .... but keep in mind I'll be leaving again on Thursday for a few days. So I suggest you just go with Azat. I don't think he'll hit back either ... he's tooo nice.

I still would prefer to punch you though Just for fun!!! I think I understood what you are tying to say ... you were using an example from animation in flash but that is a form of compression (also coding theory). Basically in other words, the "next" state depends on (i.e. is a function of) the current state. If you take an mpeg movie for example, you have an I-frame which is a FULL frame ... but then the rest of the frames can come as B-frames which are basically the "difference" between the current frame and the previous frame ... meaning incremental changes. This type of compression works great for movies with little action ... like when the scene is fairly still and only small parts change. The other example is from arithmetic coding (like Huffman coding) or dictionary based compressions (lempel ziv etc). But I think in this case, those "mathematical" functions which you are talking about which relate one state to the next are very well defined ... they are the PHYSICAL LAWS that we observe! So now the question that arises is that ... is there any free will or is everything deterministic? In other words, is the next state of the universe (for example tomorrow) going to be the same no matter what, or does it depend on what we "choose". That, I think is a VERY hard question to answer.

Ok dear McFarti, let me put it in terms I think you will understand. Suppose I am going to PUNCH you tomorrow. Suppose I buy a ticket tomorrow and fly out to where you are. Suppose that then, I punch you really hard. Given fact: When I PUNCH you, you will know it immediately. That's when it will be tomorrow. Proof: Do you really want me to fly out to punch you? I already owe you another punch to check to see if you exist (from the other thread) This by the way, is called "proof by intimidation" and it usually works great. Much better than "proof by guestimation", "proof by approximation", and "proof by assumption". -QED

My problem with Genesis is that if God created man in his own image, then how do you explain ugly people?

offset=!offset ! is the logical NOT operation ... if offset is non-zero, !offset will become 0. If offset is 0, !offset should be 1 I think. So it really only depends if offset is zero or not.

I still think God created the egg first ... it's much easier. As far as humans, on the same token, I also believe god created the sperm and the egg first since they are much much much easier to create. Then throw them together and violla ... you got humans!!!! At least that's what a smart god would have done (notice I didn't say lazy ... I also think a trully lazy person must be very smart since it's not easy being really lazy ... you have to be fairly creative to be really lazy).

But do you realize, today is yesterday's tomorrow and will be tomorrow's yesterday? So I think if you ask our dear member Domino McFarti (not sure what his name is today), he will be able to prove to you that any day is history, mistery, and a gift all at the same time!!!! Now how about dem apples? Welcome to the board by the way.

Ever wonder why there's a caps-lock key on the keyboard? What the hell were they thinking? And it takes up soooo much space. I can safely say that I have NEVER felt the need to use caps lock, except to turn it off when I accidently hit it when trying to type 'a' or something ... I think it's the most useless thing on a keyboard.

Dumb and Dumberer - 9.5 It will change you.