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Shuttle was a corporate boondoggle - not an advancement.

Who reaped benefit? Not many. Tiny payload, infrequent launches, marginal utility, except as a transitional step that was never followed up in a quarter-century. DynaSoar Dinosaur.

The STS was a tax funnel to Rockwell, Martin (Lockheed), etc.

Reality disagrees with you. The user data portion of a sector is normally a power of two for convenience, being used on computers with power of two page sizes, but drives themselves are no more limited to power of two number of or size of sectors than your computer is limited to power of two size array or structure lengths, and this is readily confirmed by the existence of disks with 520 byte sectors (and somewhat different physical sizes) and an irritatingly diverse range of sector counts.

To be fair, a cable that is plugged in daily is a very different use case than one that is plugged in once and left plugged in until a component is replaced. The design tradeoffs are different if it gets a lot of plugging in/out action.

You mean...like USB Type A cables and thumb drives?

Yeah, maybe we should scrap the lot and go back to every developer using proprietary plugs to drive up peripheral sales. Works for me!

I didn't say that everyone would come up with the same decision as to the importance of "ease of pluggin in". Certainly the USB standards decided that the tradeoffs of having a reversible plug were not worth it. I don't know if they were right or not, but I have spent a measurable amount of time flipping USB plugs around to get them in the right way, on an almost daily basis. It is not a *big* deal, but it would be nice not to wast that time.

The advantages of having a plug standard should not be undervalued however, even when that standard is not perfect. I certainly prefer the "U" in USB over the non-universality of almost every other form.

To be fair, a cable that is plugged in daily is a very different use case than one that is plugged in once and left plugged in until a component is replaced. The design tradeoffs are different if it gets a lot of plugging in/out action.

You mean...like USB Type A cables and thumb drives?

Yeah, maybe we should scrap the lot and go back to every developer using proprietary plugs to drive up peripheral sales. Works for me!

Diego Garcia

Plane is now here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/DiegoGarcia1.png

Here's what pictures from satellites look like at 1:00 a.m. over water: Picture

Your law may not be properly upheld in practice but that does not change the situation of Germany being in the very small club of countries where the art of street photography is effectively illegal or at least very cumbersome.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

> it turns into a "my way or the highway" situation

Ah, I see, so THAT was the hidden message in the cover of the "Road Ahead" - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Thekohser, thanks for the reply, could you point me to the correct info? I only found http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... and that doc is not trivial, so any help explaining your position would greatly help. Where do 49+% go? Is it the same for all non-profits or non-profits in the same sector (if there is such a division). Thank you!

I think the real problem here is :
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

On which planet has the anti-tax movement won?

That would be this one.

Right. The value of gold is based on supply and intrensic industrial value. 95%+ of the value of gold is purely speculative. Just because it is shiny and limited does not make it safe. Anything used as a currency is going to have an artificial value far in excess of its tangible value. Hope you didn't buy in 1980, or you are still missing half of your money. http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Other than the 3D, sound and smell gimmicks, does going to Central Park do anything that a photo doesn't?

That site is really script heavy, here is a direct link to a clearer picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Or better yet, don't take images from Getty without paying for them. Need an image for free? There are plenty of sites you can use such as OpenClipArt.org, Morgue File, or Wikimedia Commons. You can also search Flickr for images with Creative Commons licenses that allow for the type of use you need. If you really, really, REALLY need an image on a stock photo site like Getty Images and no other free alternative will do, then why not actually pay for it?

Slightly better? For full color photographs, PNG is *much* bigger. Anyone that's serving up a lot of images to users cares because of bandwidth and storage costs.

I picked a random Wikipedia image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

The 1200x900 JPG is around 300KB. I converted to PNG with Gimp, and the resulting file was 1.7MB - almost 6 times larger. The Filesize after converting with Imagemagick was about the same.

For completeness, I took a 94MB full color 6496x4872 TIFF and converted it to PNG (compressionlevel=9) and got a 64MB file. Then compressed the same TIFF to JPG (Quality=90), and got a 7MB file.

Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.

I'm with the AC in the first post, I use PNG for 90% of my images, since it supports transparency. The file may be slightly bigger, but who cares.

Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.

I'm with the AC in the first post, I use PNG for 90% of my images, since it supports transparency. The file may be slightly bigger, but who cares.

Slightly better? For full color photographs, PNG is *much* bigger. Anyone that's serving up a lot of images to users cares because of bandwidth and storage costs.

I picked a random Wikipedia image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

The 1200x900 JPG is around 300KB. I converted to PNG with Gimp, and the resulting file was 1.7MB - almost 6 times larger. The Filesize after converting with Imagemagick was about the same.

For busy websites, an improvement of 2-6% better jpeg compression can save significant money without changing the user experience at all.

I used to save my camera images as loss-less TIFF's or RAW's, but as my camera megapixels grew, the image sizes did too, and now I have so many megapixels that I don't even care that I'm throwing away some image quality by only saving JPG's... and I found that I rarely go back to edit older photos, I just look at them, or sometimes reprint them. No need to store files in a huge lossless format for that.

this exceeds the excessive inaccuracy ratings for slashdot. It helps if you actually read the links you include in your article. this page: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Pacific_Northwest_River_System.png, linked in the article, shows there are 5 dams below the wanapum. apparently the change in color was too confusing for you? The Columbia is only free-flowing below the Bonneville dam which is just upriver from Portland/Vancouver.

Precedence is a bitch, the US set the precedent and now they are winging about what is happening in Crimea !!

Precedence only matters in law, in places that use common law. In other legal systems, precedence doesn't matter at all.

It matters diplomatically and in propaganda.

Precedence is a bitch, the US set the precedent and now they are winging about what is happening in Crimea !!

Precedence only matters in law, in places that use common law. In other legal systems, precedence doesn't matter at all.

Reactors are made out of steel. Ferrous alloys and titanium alloys have a distinct limit, an amplitude below which there appears to be no number of cycles that will cause failure.

For example https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Has been round for a good while.

The short version is that horizontal velocity of the surface of Earth at the equator is about 800 m/s. The horizontal velocity of GEO is 3000 m/s. The car has to gain that horizontal velocity as it climbs (and lose it as it falls), and it does so by stealing it from the cable, this causes that section of the cable to "lag" behind as it passes the loss to the ground (eventually stealing the energy from Earth's rotation). That creates the moving kink in the cable.

Sayeth the wikipedia...

There already exist 'stay put' batteries, so it's not an engineering problem, but rather one of design.

Most people have a very distorted view of how close the Earth and Moon are relative to their size. A picture of the two to scale makes it pretty obvious that the Moon can't really intercept or attract many objects which might hit the Earth.

Did you even fucking read what I wrote? We have plenty of desert. Look at a map.
Are you totally ignorant of the solar arrays being built all over the western states, and all over the world, that are in production today?
Do you realize it takes less than 2 years to put huge solar plants into production?

We have no technology to do what you are such and ardent fanboy of doing.
Its at least 100-200 years away. With a world wide emergency crash program, all nations, all in, we couldn't even get the factory equipment to the moon in 50 years.
In a 10th of that time the improvements in solar efficiency quickly make your moon based manufacturing facility obsolete.

Economics trumps science every time. If you can't afford it, it doesn't matter how cool it would be.

In the vast majority of cases, when you are using an encrypted connection it is because the information you are exchanging is a private matter between you and the other endpoint.

Even if the only private piece of information is the session cookie identifying the logged-in user to the site, that's still "a private matter between" the user and the site. Since the Firesheep tech demo became public, it has become common for some web sites to go all HTTPS all the time to prevent intruders from snooping and replaying session cookies. Facebook and Twitter do this, and Wikipedia turned it at the end of August of last year. The biggest historical obstacle to HTTPS implementation for any site on a VPS or bigger has been mixed content introduced by ad networks, but in September of last year, Google finally enabled HTTPS for AdSense.

Well said sir!

Also, for the most fun, we apparently need to indulge in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Racing-reliant-robins_mendips-raceway_2005-05-30.jpg

Want a cookie? Oh, wait you would probably prefer an e-cookie.

The current sea level has been rising for hundreds of years and shows no acceleration. See http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

No. As your link points out, sea level has been rising at 3mm/year since 1991. Earlier in the century it was rising at a much lower rate. Prior to that (for the last 4000 years) it was not rising at all: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi....

Listening to the american politicians talk, it sounds like they don't even consider "foreigners" human.

With notable exceptions:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

The earth is warming? Really?

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

http://news.ku.dk/all_news/201...

Can you please explain these then?

You mean if one were to send an email from Munich to Paris, it'd cross the Atlantic and come back?

NSA aside, that's a pretty sucky setup.

It's how the Internet works. To quote directly from the experts: A target's phone call, e-mail or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path.

Physical distance is not as important as congestion on the routes. So it might very well be that your data takes a much longer path that what you'd think, simply because it uses the fastest way, not the shortest.

Angela Merkel's approach is pretty idiotic, and it cannot fix the problems. First of all, most emails are routed through the US either because the sender or the recipient has an American email provider (Germans love Gmail, too). Secondly, even if that is not the case, can you be sure that the NSA doesn't spy on traffic in Frankfurt? It wouldn't surprise me.

Only true end-to-end encryption can be a solution. The government in Germany is currently pushing for DE-Mail, which relies on transport encryption only. So that means that your email provider can still snoop and so can the German government, which is probably the reason why they designed it like that in the first place. End-to-end encryption would have been possible, especially since the German government is spending much money rolling out their own PKI, with keys for every citizen right on their new national ID card.

There's a presentation about DE-Mail from last December's Chaos Communication Congress, it's worth watching (video also has an audio track with English translations).

IE, as of about version 9, is on par with other major browsers in terms of security. It only gets more publicity because, let's face it, it's IE, and still the most widely used browser.

It depends on who you ask.

http://gs.statcounter.com/ shows Chrome clearly in the lead.
http://www.w3counter.com/globa... also shows chrome leading.
Wikimedia says Chrome leads http://stats.wikimedia.org/wik...

Just because its common doesn't mean its used. And you don't see these stories about Firefox or Chrome, at least not many. And given the market share that Chrome enjoys you would expect to see many more stories.

You've fallen for the old Microsoft lie:
They insist We are attacked because we are popular.
The real story is they are attacked because they are easy targets.

I don't get your point. Brazil is one of the prime examples of countries that could rely completely on wind and solar (with a bit pumped storage ofc for load balancing) in a very short time frame.

At 7PM the german grid is still at high load, close to the peak actually.
This is an immage with typical load patterns in the winter for different days (Sunday/Saturday/Workday): http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Unfortunately a bit inaccurate, the author made a few mistakes by layering "official" load curves on top of each other, hence a "base line" indicating the true "base laod" would be helpfull (and was on that wikipage a few years ago). In the time from roughly 0:00 to 6:00 we still deliever about 40% of the peak power into the grid, to refill pumped storages, hence the "base line" and hence the name "base load". The picture however is accurate regarding demand from "customers".

In other web sites I saw that base load is now considered more at 50% or even 55% level ... the last picture I saw however was aboutn 40% (I mean graphic with load curve, where base load was explicitely marked). Now base load seems to be 40GW with a peak depending on time of the year at 75GW to 80GW.
Note: such load curves usualy picture 'demand' and not 'production', so you don't see the exported power on this particular graphic.
Here you have more infos, besides the missleading name all energy sources are covered and partly imports and exports: http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e...

Right now we don't use solar much in the evening (or in the morning for that matter), most installations (that means a really huge percentage of the current installations) is facing more or less south. However new installations are meanwhile often turned to a different heading to have the biggest capturing at a different time of day (ofc they are tilted according to the average hight of the sun at that angle).

As germany is quite far in the north (relatively speaking) the shortest day in winter is only slightly more than 8 hours. So you can "optimize" for the most output of your personal plant at different times of the year and day times. Which obviously means if you want to sell peak energy in summer at 7PM you will sell nothing at all in winter at that time of the day :D However such a thing would make perfect sense for a beer garden which uses most of its power itself (and out door activity of that beer garden is closed in winter).

The question how fast the wind needs to be depends on the turbines, they are designed for specific wind speeds.
If you have your wind average at 30km/h, you use turbines suiting that average, then they will produce 100% (not 60%) of their rated power at that speed. (Offshore wind parks of the company http://enbw.com/ in the Baltic Sea e.g. produce roughly 4000h/y at 'rated' level and a bit more than 4000h/y 'above rated' level and about 300h/y they don't produce because of maintanance or to much or to less wind. So the mythical 'capacity' factor of those plants is above 100% Search on their web site, the pdfs covering this should be public available.)

The lower the wind speed, the turbines accept, the more "time of the year" they produce power, but their peak production is less (IIRC).

BTW: it is easyer to use m/s instead of km/h because that is usually the unit for the nameplates and easier to google (especially if you want to buy a turbine or want to know the average wind speed at a certain place on the world).

This is a nice german/english publication, a bit to much markettroidish IMHO: http://www.dewi.de/dewi/filead...

But it gives a good overview about

Not true,

How is it not true? Laser guided missiles target where the laser is pointed. That's exactly how they work.

and an extra differential, and an extra transmission. You left the last two out of your last paragraph: Teslas have a single motor, plus a transmission (single-speed gearbox), plus a differential, plus CV joints/driveshafts.

No, the SUV Tesla X will have two motors and those angles are pretty flat compared to most cars let alone SUVs. Looking at this shot of the rear of the Model S you can just see the boot for the CV, and the shallow angle it has.

The Model X will be higher, but not that much. The frames look pretty comparable. If you were expecting ground clearance, you will be disappointed. This is definitely an on-street socker-mom's SUV.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pip... http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away.

1924 called, it wants its idea back. At least cars aren't getting their styling tweaked every year any more.

(Beta is, to be fair, not the utter complete piece of shit that, say, the current version of nbcnews.com is; I sincerely hope everybody responsible for that either learns a lesson from this or never finds employment in anything even vaguely related to website design again. But that's setting the bar spectacularly low.)

The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away.

1924 called, it wants its idea back. At least cars aren't getting their styling tweaked every year any more.

(Beta is, to be fair, not the utter complete piece of shit that, say, the current version of nbcnews.com is; I sincerely hope everybody responsible for that either learns a lesson from this or never finds employment in anything even vaguely related to website design again. But that's setting the bar spectacularly low.)

The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away.

1924 called, it wants its idea back. At least cars aren't getting their styling tweaked every year any more.

(Beta is, to be fair, not the utter complete piece of shit that, say, the current version of nbcnews.com is; I sincerely hope everybody responsible for that either learns a lesson from this or never finds employment in anything even vaguely related to website design again. But that's setting the bar spectacularly low.)

Why should it rise? They use mostly dirt-cheap coal and nuclear for most of the baseline: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Informative? Seriously?

LynnwoodRooster seems to have been betting that by stating a lie while providing a couple of links (that refute the lie) most people will assume that that the links actually support it.

If you follow the GINI link you will find that the both the pre-tax and after-tax GINI DID NOT INCREASE AT ALL during the Clinton years! The rise under Reagan went flat, then resumed its rise again under Bush.

Also actually look at that median HOUSEHOLD (not individual) curve LR links to. By the end of the Reagan-Bush era it was down to $48K (from 45.5K at the start), a far less impressive 5.5% over 12 years, and the whole reason for the rise was due to the second adult in the household going to work - since actual wages were flat.

10 years of service when built to last 90 days.

Thank the Martian winds. The wind blows the dust off of the rovers solar collectors, that wasn't expected.

It could do with another scrub though... them Martian dust devils are getting lazy!!. I'm amazed any solar energy actually gets through all that stuff.

[raises glass to the continued awesomeness of Opportunity rover]

I would have thought the same, but unlike W3Schools, I believe Wikimedia represents a general draw: I do not believe that their data is skewed by any particular group and that they represent a fair cut across all internet users (on average). Thus, I was surprised to view some of their statistics.

Of note: over _all_ page requests, regardless of platform, MSIE (all versions) apparently represents 10.16% of their pages served in December, 2013.

I find that absolutely incredible.

A flat place does not exist in the ATL. As a matter of fact, right at the outside edge of the downtown area (everything inside the I285 loop), they have their own mini-Mt Rushmore.

12% at wikipedia, which is probably pretty representative. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm

Did you try to discuss the point with "people", the situation reminds me an old caricature about the "Dreyfus Scandal" end of the 19th century.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
(caption reads: A family Diner: "First of all let's not speak about the affair!" / "They did speak about it !" ...)

A fair few spacecraft are nuclear powered... Spirit and Opportunity were solar; but Curiosity is rocking an MMRTG around the Martian surface as we speak.

I don't know why the Chinese decided to go solar, possibly weight, possibly difficulty in sourcing RTG fuel; but certainly neither the US nor the Russians have been squeamish about nuclear power in space when the mission called for it.

Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.

I wonder what these jobs are for then?
Data Scientist - Ads - 858668 Job
Data Scientist - Marketing - Data and Analytics - 849750 Job

Yahoo was doing user & ad analytics before Google existed.

And remember everyone, only one company was on the original PRISM slide, so the NSA definitely can't get to you at Microsoft(2007) Yahoo(2008) or Apple(2012). Since it isn't listed, DuckDuckGo will be impervious to NSA attacks; with all of its employees you can be sure at least one of them works on security and can outsmart the NSA's ability to install hardware backdoors and hack air-gapped computers.

MS refers to Windows as Windows across its website, I can't find an instance of Microsoft and Windows combined. Google searches return "Microsoft Windows", but that is clarifying the company name (in case one is searching for house windows). My operating system is "Windows 7 Home Premium" with a Microsoft copyright notice below the name.

I believe the name was shortened to just "Windows" over time. Going back to the same Wikipedia page as last time, another image shows a disk with "Microsoft Windows" clearly on the label. That goes back to 1985. This article says they didn't even apply for Windows until 1990. It's obvious they started out with a company name + generic name as the product name, and then later on tried to appropriate the generic name.

Did you use 123, Lotus 123, or just Lotus?

I never used it, though the name "Lotus" was familiar. Whether it was fully titled "123" or "Lotus 123" is besides the point, as "123" was a novel use for accounting software (to my knowledge). "Windows" was completely generic in the software industry by the time Microsoft came out with their OS.