So far, I haven't been getting much advice that is critical of our plans, except from one person: my very traditional mother, who is probably secretly horrified that my husband is going to stay at home.
I've got two kids and a third due in about 9 weeks. My best advice to parents-to-be is to ignore all the advice you'll get (small joke there.) Everyone you meet will think they know better than you what being a parent will be like, and that they know best how you should raise your child. Many of them will then offer that advice in strong terms, even when you clearly don't want/need it. Listen to them, nod politely, and go on doing it the way you think best.
... perhaps there's a chance that I'll become more maternal. I worry about it.
Annecdotal, but: We both became more maternal/paternal when our son was born. I had trouble bonding the first couple of weeks - they just cry, sleep and poop the first while, and nursing didn't go well (apparently the stats are that 50% of women have trouble with nursing for the first child. Ignore anyone that pressures you for or against nursing - it's your choice to try and for how long.) But taking time to just sit quietly and take care of him, hold him when he's sleeping, stuff like that helped us bond. Looking back now, I do wish I'd taken some videos of us having that quiet bonding time.
So, trust yourself and good luck - it's a hell of a ride, but totally worth it!
... or you use pumps to pressurize a bunch of salt water and use a membrane to filter out the salt. Again pressurizing the water consumes a lot of energy.
Couldn't you just drop a container into the ocean, one with only two openings - one with your membrane for salt water in, the other opening for desalinated water out? The deeper you put it, the more pressure outside the container that pushes the salt water through your membrane. Then you could use a low power pump to slowly remove the clean water through a hose attached to the other opening.
PAC is short for Political Action Committee and it is a way of buying politicians. What is boils down to is a way for many people to combine their political contributions into one entity. (sarc) If the PAC supports your issues then that's ok. (/sarc)
If you have enough money to buy politicians in lots of half a dozen, is it a 6-PAC?
If you can only afford a third of that, then it's a 2-Pac.
The summary says "From the Reuters article", but none of the links point to a story by Reuters. The links go to Nature, Wikipedia and UC Berkeley. The Berkeley article one doesn't mention Reuters; the Nature paper is paywalled, I can't check it's sources without forking over $32, but I would doubt it would rely on a news report as a source.
I guess it's back to old school photograhpy then. 100 years ago, photographs of landmarks didn't have people in then unless they were willing to stand perfectly still for 20 minutes or more. So just get a tripod, set up at your chosen landmark, and open the shutter. None of the people moving around will show up in your picture, and if you want to be in your own photo, just walk in front of the camera and strike a pose that you can hold for a half hour or so.
While I agree with others worried that a kill switch could be abused (by carriers / government / MPAA / RIAA / etc), I'm now wondering if it would be a handy way to counter (un)lawful search and seizure of a device by various authorities? Say you're transiting through the US and a TSA agent decides they want to confiscate (and presumably search) your smartphone. If the kill switch is easy to activate (maybe a number you call and enter a code, or via your laptop or friend's smartphone), you could wipe your device before they get the contents.
6,000,000 cubic kilometers of molten material - enough to cover the continental U.S. at a one mile depth.
I don't think the submitter understands math. One mile is about 1.6 km, so 6,000,000 km^3 of lava would cover an area of 3,750,000 km^2. Yet when I check Wikipedia (and Princeton, and the other top 5 Google results), they all say the Contiguous United States has an area of just over 8,000,000 km^2. That's an awfully big mistake. I hope the actual Stanford paper is of better quality than the Slashdot summary.
I'm on m.slashdot.org with my iPad, and there's no video. Not even a placeholder for a video (if they were using Flash or Silverlight.) So I also checked the CES Unveiled link in the summary, but it just goes to the schedule, no details. Not impressed guys...
I didn't see anything in the stories saying the pins were all exactly four digits. The examples of bad pins given in one story were four digits long, but most debit systems in North America accept larger pins. For the past 25 years, I've banked primarily with RBC (the largest bank in Canada), and I've always had a 6 digit pin. I have travelled a fair bit in that time, and the only place I had problems was at the ATMs for smaller banks in New Zealand, which had GUIs limiting pin input to 4 digits.
That summary is misleading. It's based on an NSA response to a FOI request, worded as follows:
A search for overly broad keywords such as "CNO" and "computer network attack" would be tantamount to conducting a manual search through thousands of folders and then reading each document in order to determine whether the document pertains to a contract.
(emphasis mine)
That could be network folders (ie: directories) and Word documents, they never said anything was on "paper". The way I read that quote was that they've got heaps of contracts, stored in lots of directories, and even if they did a search they'd have to read each document returned to see if it was a contract pertaining to the FOI request. They're trying to say that's too burdensome, which in theory gives them a way of not supplying the information. In practice, a judge might decide they should be able to do the search in a reasonable amount of time, and force them to comply.
This update might be the death knell for the Java4K contest. That would be a real shame - lots of great developers have submitted games over the years, such as Markus Persson of Minecraft fame. But after the recent changes and now this red text warning, I'd bet most casual users will turn off Java in their browser (and who can blame them?) A contest with only developers can still be fun, but not as fun as having several hundred or thousand people play your game.
I've thought of this too every time I try to swat a fly that found its way into my house. Flies seem to be able to do aerial maneuvers in reaction to threats that you would think impossible given their tiny brains.
I thought it was because your hand creates a big buffer of air in front of it, like a bow wave. The fly is so small, it's easily buffeted ahead and aside, so any manoeuvring gets it out of the line of your hand. Even easier when your hand approaches a hard surface - then the air squishes out to the sides, and the fly goes out with it. This is probably easier to visualize in a body of water - float a cork or a small piece of plastic in your sink, put your hand in the water, then try to squish the item up against the side of the sink. It won't work most of the time, as the bow wave will push the item off to one side, and it only gets worse the faster your move your hand.
I expect that's why fly swatters are just a mesh - so the air can flow through without creating an air buffer.
Looks like a rehash of the story we saw here a couple of years ago. I've only read the first few paragraphs of this new article, but I haven't found anything different from the previous one. I'm not suggesting plagiarism, I'm just saying it looks like the author just took the information from previous stories and rewrote it in his own words, without adding anything new.
It's like the Humble Bundle but not humble and not a bundle!
It may not be humble, but the front page clearly lists nine indie game bundles (5 games in each), under a heading "Indie Bundles - 100% of sales to developers".
Telus is intending to buy Mobilicity, and Rogers is attempting to purchase the spectrum [michaelgeist.ca] originally allocated by the CRTC to new entrants to increase market competition.
Apparently Telus' deal to buy Mobilicity got blocked by the government yesterday. When Mobilicity won their spectrum block in 2009, it was on the condition that it not be sold to any of the existing wireless providers for at least five years. As you said, the intention was to bring in some competition for the big three. Mobilicity had been warned the sale would be blocked on that reason alone, but they went ahead and got approval from everyone else first (shareholders, regulatory approval, etc.) I guess they were hoping that the government would just rubber-stamp the sale if all other parties had approved it.
in the case of their free (or is that "free") alternatives, competition for dollars (which is all Larry cares about) probably doesn't really exist. Also, I think when people think about "Oracle" in the general sense of databases, they are thinking of the traditional, large, non-free versions...
Agreed on both points. I think the free Oracle offering is designed to encourage adoption and ease upgrade. So you start with the free Express edition, and build up a nice little business, but then performance or space becomes an issue and so the easiest course is to upgrade to Standard Edition for $$. And the developers working for you are all now familiar with Oracle and PL/SQL, so big business and government that run Enterprise edition for $$$$$ have plenty of developers to choose from.
MySQL and most of the other commercial databases have richer data types allowing for more a more modern feel.
I'm not sure what datatypes you're referring to. Enum and Set are kind of neat, but other than that both MySQL and Oracle seem to stick to the datatypes defined in the SQL standards.
Sort of like IBM assembler vs. Java. IBM assembler allows screaming fast apps, but at a cost, when that cost approaches the complexity of a modern language, the playing field levels, and suddenly you are better off writing in Java, since you can maintain the code.
Funny you should mention Java - were you aware that Oracle databases provide Java integration? It's kind of like MS SQL Server's dotNet integration. So you can do stuff like add your own Java libraries, or store Java objects directly in the database. I've never used it, but I suppose that would qualify as a "rich data type", right?
I would think the appropriate usage areas for MySQL and Oracle DBs overlap marginally
I am a DBA, and FYI there are multiple editions of Oracle. I'm not sure what use cases you were thinking of, but if you're looking for a free edition there's always Oracle Express Edition. Free to download, use and distribute, and allows databases up to 11GB. I've worked at companies that run bigger MySQL installations, but I would venture that they are less than 1% of the MySQL user base. The majority of MySQL installations are small ones to back websites, such as Wordpress installations. You could easily replace them with Oracle Express. For other use cases, there's Oracle's NoSQL database, or Oracle's In Memory database (called TimesTen for some obscure reason), and they used to market Oracle Database Lite for mobile apps.
So in summary, Oracle has a bunch of products that would compete with MySQL, and we can't understand why they don't just give MySQL away to Apache or some other foundation. Maybe they have support contracts that actually bring in some money.
Not sure why the link goes to the second page of the article, but on the first page they explain that blue crabs grow their shells faster in water with more carbon. (They note that bigger shells doesn't translate to more meat.) On the second page, they talk about the fact that mud crabs seem confused in water polluted with carbon, and that some mud crabs only ate half as much as in water with less carbon. Relevant quotes from the article:
Higher levels of carbon in the ocean are causing oysters to grow slower, and their predators — such as blue crabs — to grow faster
versus
Under conditions with lower levels of carbon, two mud crabs polished off 20 oysters in six hours. But in the aquariums with higher levels of carbon, the mud crabs seemed confused. They went over to the oysters, but they didn’t eat as many — sometimes fewer than half of what other crabs ate under normal conditions.
Voyager has no need for power to continue its journey; running out of power will have no effect on its velocity.
You're forgetting drag. Just like flying through air, flying through parts of the solar system results in drag from dust. The dust density is expected to increase when the probe reaches the inner Oort cloud, unless Voyager 1's path has angled enough above the ecliptic that it manages to miss it (I thought 35 degrees was high enough, my colleague disagrees.) If dust density increases, the drag will provide a small but continuous slowing effect. Once past the inner Oort cloud dust density will likely decrease, though no one I've worked with has a great guess of the dust density in the outer Oort cloud. It will still be non-zero though, and Voyager can't avoid the outer Oort. Added to the small but still present force of gravity from the sun (which is what keeps the Oort objects from drifting away), you have continuous drag on the craft.
We can't calculate the effect of that drag without knowing the dust density, and our estimates of the size of the Oort clouds are still rough (on the order of +-100AU last paper I read), which is why that NASA paper estimated crossing the outer edge of the Oort cloud in a range from 14K to 28K years. 14K if the Oort cloud is small and fairly dust-free, twice that long if our worst-case estimates of the density and size are correct.
Slashdot Mirror
So far, I haven't been getting much advice that is critical of our plans, except from one person: my very traditional mother, who is probably secretly horrified that my husband is going to stay at home.
I've got two kids and a third due in about 9 weeks. My best advice to parents-to-be is to ignore all the advice you'll get (small joke there.) Everyone you meet will think they know better than you what being a parent will be like, and that they know best how you should raise your child. Many of them will then offer that advice in strong terms, even when you clearly don't want/need it. Listen to them, nod politely, and go on doing it the way you think best.
... perhaps there's a chance that I'll become more maternal. I worry about it.
Annecdotal, but: We both became more maternal/paternal when our son was born. I had trouble bonding the first couple of weeks - they just cry, sleep and poop the first while, and nursing didn't go well (apparently the stats are that 50% of women have trouble with nursing for the first child. Ignore anyone that pressures you for or against nursing - it's your choice to try and for how long.) But taking time to just sit quietly and take care of him, hold him when he's sleeping, stuff like that helped us bond. Looking back now, I do wish I'd taken some videos of us having that quiet bonding time.
So, trust yourself and good luck - it's a hell of a ride, but totally worth it!
... or you use pumps to pressurize a bunch of salt water and use a membrane to filter out the salt. Again pressurizing the water consumes a lot of energy.
Couldn't you just drop a container into the ocean, one with only two openings - one with your membrane for salt water in, the other opening for desalinated water out? The deeper you put it, the more pressure outside the container that pushes the salt water through your membrane. Then you could use a low power pump to slowly remove the clean water through a hose attached to the other opening.
PAC is short for Political Action Committee and it is a way of buying politicians. What is boils down to is a way for many people to combine their political contributions into one entity. (sarc) If the PAC supports your issues then that's ok. (/sarc)
If you have enough money to buy politicians in lots of half a dozen, is it a 6-PAC?
If you can only afford a third of that, then it's a 2-Pac.
Also can be phoned in.
No, Telefile was discontinued last year.
The summary says "From the Reuters article", but none of the links point to a story by Reuters. The links go to Nature, Wikipedia and UC Berkeley. The Berkeley article one doesn't mention Reuters; the Nature paper is paywalled, I can't check it's sources without forking over $32, but I would doubt it would rely on a news report as a source.
I guess it's back to old school photograhpy then. 100 years ago, photographs of landmarks didn't have people in then unless they were willing to stand perfectly still for 20 minutes or more. So just get a tripod, set up at your chosen landmark, and open the shutter. None of the people moving around will show up in your picture, and if you want to be in your own photo, just walk in front of the camera and strike a pose that you can hold for a half hour or so.
"We can tune for performance after we're done implementing the required functionality."
While I agree with others worried that a kill switch could be abused (by carriers / government / MPAA / RIAA / etc), I'm now wondering if it would be a handy way to counter (un)lawful search and seizure of a device by various authorities? Say you're transiting through the US and a TSA agent decides they want to confiscate (and presumably search) your smartphone. If the kill switch is easy to activate (maybe a number you call and enter a code, or via your laptop or friend's smartphone), you could wipe your device before they get the contents.
6,000,000 cubic kilometers of molten material - enough to cover the continental U.S. at a one mile depth.
I don't think the submitter understands math. One mile is about 1.6 km, so 6,000,000 km^3 of lava would cover an area of 3,750,000 km^2. Yet when I check Wikipedia (and Princeton, and the other top 5 Google results), they all say the Contiguous United States has an area of just over 8,000,000 km^2. That's an awfully big mistake. I hope the actual Stanford paper is of better quality than the Slashdot summary.
I'm on m.slashdot.org with my iPad, and there's no video. Not even a placeholder for a video (if they were using Flash or Silverlight.) So I also checked the CES Unveiled link in the summary, but it just goes to the schedule, no details. Not impressed guys...
knowing that each pin is exactly 4 digits?
I didn't see anything in the stories saying the pins were all exactly four digits. The examples of bad pins given in one story were four digits long, but most debit systems in North America accept larger pins. For the past 25 years, I've banked primarily with RBC (the largest bank in Canada), and I've always had a 6 digit pin. I have travelled a fair bit in that time, and the only place I had problems was at the ATMs for smaller banks in New Zealand, which had GUIs limiting pin input to 4 digits.
A search for overly broad keywords such as "CNO" and "computer network attack" would be tantamount to conducting a manual search through thousands of folders and then reading each document in order to determine whether the document pertains to a contract.
(emphasis mine)
That could be network folders (ie: directories) and Word documents, they never said anything was on "paper". The way I read that quote was that they've got heaps of contracts, stored in lots of directories, and even if they did a search they'd have to read each document returned to see if it was a contract pertaining to the FOI request. They're trying to say that's too burdensome, which in theory gives them a way of not supplying the information. In practice, a judge might decide they should be able to do the search in a reasonable amount of time, and force them to comply.
This update might be the death knell for the Java4K contest. That would be a real shame - lots of great developers have submitted games over the years, such as Markus Persson of Minecraft fame. But after the recent changes and now this red text warning, I'd bet most casual users will turn off Java in their browser (and who can blame them?) A contest with only developers can still be fun, but not as fun as having several hundred or thousand people play your game.
I've thought of this too every time I try to swat a fly that found its way into my house. Flies seem to be able to do aerial maneuvers in reaction to threats that you would think impossible given their tiny brains.
I thought it was because your hand creates a big buffer of air in front of it, like a bow wave. The fly is so small, it's easily buffeted ahead and aside, so any manoeuvring gets it out of the line of your hand. Even easier when your hand approaches a hard surface - then the air squishes out to the sides, and the fly goes out with it. This is probably easier to visualize in a body of water - float a cork or a small piece of plastic in your sink, put your hand in the water, then try to squish the item up against the side of the sink. It won't work most of the time, as the bow wave will push the item off to one side, and it only gets worse the faster your move your hand.
I expect that's why fly swatters are just a mesh - so the air can flow through without creating an air buffer.
Looks like a rehash of the story we saw here a couple of years ago. I've only read the first few paragraphs of this new article, but I haven't found anything different from the previous one. I'm not suggesting plagiarism, I'm just saying it looks like the author just took the information from previous stories and rewrote it in his own words, without adding anything new.
A working link: http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2013/07/scienceshot-new-shrew-has-spine-steel.
It's like the Humble Bundle but not humble and not a bundle!
It may not be humble, but the front page clearly lists nine indie game bundles (5 games in each), under a heading "Indie Bundles - 100% of sales to developers".
Mobilicity (now telus) ...
Telus is intending to buy Mobilicity, and Rogers is attempting to purchase the spectrum [michaelgeist.ca] originally allocated by the CRTC to new entrants to increase market competition.
Apparently Telus' deal to buy Mobilicity got blocked by the government yesterday. When Mobilicity won their spectrum block in 2009, it was on the condition that it not be sold to any of the existing wireless providers for at least five years. As you said, the intention was to bring in some competition for the big three. Mobilicity had been warned the sale would be blocked on that reason alone, but they went ahead and got approval from everyone else first (shareholders, regulatory approval, etc.) I guess they were hoping that the government would just rubber-stamp the sale if all other parties had approved it.
I expect Rogers will get the same response.
in the case of their free (or is that "free") alternatives, competition for dollars (which is all Larry cares about) probably doesn't really exist. Also, I think when people think about "Oracle" in the general sense of databases, they are thinking of the traditional, large, non-free versions...
Agreed on both points. I think the free Oracle offering is designed to encourage adoption and ease upgrade. So you start with the free Express edition, and build up a nice little business, but then performance or space becomes an issue and so the easiest course is to upgrade to Standard Edition for $$. And the developers working for you are all now familiar with Oracle and PL/SQL, so big business and government that run Enterprise edition for $$$$$ have plenty of developers to choose from.
MySQL and most of the other commercial databases have richer data types allowing for more a more modern feel.
I'm not sure what datatypes you're referring to. Enum and Set are kind of neat, but other than that both MySQL and Oracle seem to stick to the datatypes defined in the SQL standards.
Sort of like IBM assembler vs. Java. IBM assembler allows screaming fast apps, but at a cost, when that cost approaches the complexity of a modern language, the playing field levels, and suddenly you are better off writing in Java, since you can maintain the code.
Funny you should mention Java - were you aware that Oracle databases provide Java integration? It's kind of like MS SQL Server's dotNet integration. So you can do stuff like add your own Java libraries, or store Java objects directly in the database. I've never used it, but I suppose that would qualify as a "rich data type", right?
I would think the appropriate usage areas for MySQL and Oracle DBs overlap marginally
I am a DBA, and FYI there are multiple editions of Oracle. I'm not sure what use cases you were thinking of, but if you're looking for a free edition there's always Oracle Express Edition. Free to download, use and distribute, and allows databases up to 11GB. I've worked at companies that run bigger MySQL installations, but I would venture that they are less than 1% of the MySQL user base. The majority of MySQL installations are small ones to back websites, such as Wordpress installations. You could easily replace them with Oracle Express. For other use cases, there's Oracle's NoSQL database, or Oracle's In Memory database (called TimesTen for some obscure reason), and they used to market Oracle Database Lite for mobile apps.
So in summary, Oracle has a bunch of products that would compete with MySQL, and we can't understand why they don't just give MySQL away to Apache or some other foundation. Maybe they have support contracts that actually bring in some money.
All I could think of was Value Added Reseller. I agree, the asker should have spelled it out at least once.
Higher levels of carbon in the ocean are causing oysters to grow slower, and their predators — such as blue crabs — to grow faster
versus
Under conditions with lower levels of carbon, two mud crabs polished off 20 oysters in six hours. But in the aquariums with higher levels of carbon, the mud crabs seemed confused. They went over to the oysters, but they didn’t eat as many — sometimes fewer than half of what other crabs ate under normal conditions.
Voyager has no need for power to continue its journey; running out of power will have no effect on its velocity.
You're forgetting drag. Just like flying through air, flying through parts of the solar system results in drag from dust. The dust density is expected to increase when the probe reaches the inner Oort cloud, unless Voyager 1's path has angled enough above the ecliptic that it manages to miss it (I thought 35 degrees was high enough, my colleague disagrees.) If dust density increases, the drag will provide a small but continuous slowing effect. Once past the inner Oort cloud dust density will likely decrease, though no one I've worked with has a great guess of the dust density in the outer Oort cloud. It will still be non-zero though, and Voyager can't avoid the outer Oort. Added to the small but still present force of gravity from the sun (which is what keeps the Oort objects from drifting away), you have continuous drag on the craft.
We can't calculate the effect of that drag without knowing the dust density, and our estimates of the size of the Oort clouds are still rough (on the order of +-100AU last paper I read), which is why that NASA paper estimated crossing the outer edge of the Oort cloud in a range from 14K to 28K years. 14K if the Oort cloud is small and fairly dust-free, twice that long if our worst-case estimates of the density and size are correct.