Other than ignorance or pig-headdedness, what's their problem?
My bank supports all of the browsers I have tried, and I suspect they are at least as secure as Chase. In the last few years, I have used one or more versions of Chromium, Epiphany, Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera (on Ubuntu and/or PCLinuxOS). All were compatible with the banking interface.
"..Our thoughts and prayers are with Mrs. Brummund and her family."
Am I being overly sensitive, or is that just a bit odd?
It's somewhere between mindless PR pandering to the masses who believe, and mindless recitation of a plain dumb meme. There has never been a scientific study which revealed any statistically significant effect of prayer. However, there has been a scientific study which demonstrated a distinct lack of statistically significant effects from prayer. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html
"Pain that's too cheap to meter!"
Some such rubbish was spouted about civilian application of nuclear technology (which also started as a weapon).
Or more realistically, how about private & city lands covered in helpful signs like:
"Keep off the grass. Violators may experience discomfort or agony!"
"Keep out. Or else."
mandating a 6 week paid vacation for every employee is, in my opinion, going too far
Your opinion, in my opinion, sucks.
I only get 5 weeks paid vacation, but we are entitled to 1.5x salary during those vacations. However, I can trade up to get 7 weeks paid vacation by declining the vacation bonus pay (thus merely getting normal pay during vacations). I tend to do this almost every year. A trade of 2.5 weeks pre-tax pay for 2 weeks vacation is a winner, at least until the government starts confiscating a chunk of my vacation time as taxes.
7 weeks paid annual vacation is about right for work-life balance. That with 35 work hours per week is enough to get a 7-digit salary, if you keep the bullshit out of the workplace.
It was just a baby quake for Chrissake. The only way anybody *wouldn't* be fine is if they happened to have their head under a guillotine with a quick-release tied to a seismometer arm.
Exactly. Mountains and mole-hills. I experienced two "earthquakes" of similar magnitude when I lived in Toronto in the 1980s.
I slept through the magnitude 5 event in January 1986 (no, I had not been drinking, just an ordinary night's sleep). Some neighbors said they were woken by plates rattling or stuff falling off shelves. Apparently my stuff was positioned more securely, as it was all still in place the next morning, and I only learned of the tremor (let's not exaggerate it into being an earthquake) from others after I got to work.
I was at work in the top floor of a six floor office block for the magnitude 6 event in November 1988. I could not hit the keys reliably on my keyboard leading to many typing errors, but assumed the building shuddering repeatedly was because there was major work going on in one of the elevator shafts. Found out later from the TV news that it had been an earthquake.
It would be different at the epicenter, but earthquakes in Eastern Canada tend to be centered in sparsely inhabited areas.
Hulu is broken - it does not work in most of the world. If it did, there would probably be fewer of the illegal download sites.
The illegal download sites probably try to work fine just about everywhere. Maybe China's Great Firewall can block them, but might not bother (perhaps just the politically undesirable movies).
Wow, we have a liberal arts major among us!
At least, you left out the "approximately" from your assertion. A Julian year is 365.25 days, which led to a multi-day error after several centuries. The simple Gregorian year is 365.2425 days, and it's still wrong by almost half a minute. A year measured from the Earth's orbit around the Sun relative to the most distant visible stars is approximately 365.2422 days long. The adjusted Gregorian year is 365.24225 days (FYI, the centuries rule for leap years is inverted for millenial years: year 4000 and 8000 will not be leap years, but year 3000 and 5000 will be), which is only wrong by approximately 4 seconds. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1511/why-do-we-have-leap-years
Except that the summary links to the same press release from May 19th as the article the GP posted. And the press release states nothing about coming out of beta.
This is a side effect of relying on readers to do the firehose filtering.
Stuff like this gets through instead of being flagged as stale, just because it's not utter spam like the vast majority of firehose submissions. It's probably a small price to pay.
It is not the shell casings, it is the bullet or the shot inside shotgun shells. Birds that bottom feed eat the used shot on the bottom of lakes and waterways causing the lead to get into the (animal) food chain. It is not just waterfowl, scavengers such as the condor are also effected
Obviously, bullet manufacturers should immediately switch to depleted uranium instead. It would eliminate the lead poisoning issue completely.
Do you really believe that child porn is that pervasive? ...
Perhaps you're refering to the sliding notion of what constitutues child porn? The shift to include ever more under the umbrella?
Child porn is probably as rare as hen's teeth, if the definition involves sexual acts (or as common as hen's feathers, if the definition involves violent acts). But it begs the question: what counts as child porn? The answer is certainly regionally specific, and appears to change over time, always becoming more inclusive, as you noted.
For example, there is a photograph which was published in newspapers all over the world, shown on TV, and earned the United Press photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. It happens to be a full-frontal of a naked pre-teen girl. Nowadays, I suspect few news agencies would be brave enough to circulate it, and a photographer who did so might land in serious trouble.
It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time. -Churchill
This is true, in the same sense as the assertion that "Gonorrhea is the worst form of venereal disease, apart from all the others".
We should not blindly assume that the object of either sentence is something absolutely necessary or desirable in every aspect. In the case of venereal disease, it is clearly unwanted. In the case of government, it needs to be strictly limited, in ways which are not compatible with most implementations of "democracy" in the world today.
There is already a liquid mercury telescope at UBC in Canada - the Large Zenith Telescope. With a 6 meter diameter, it's one of the largest telescopes in the world. Of course, it's limited to viewing only a narrow range of angles near the zenith, due to gravitational constraints. Even so, it was stunningly cheap compared to other telescopes of its size, and provides decent value for money. http://www.astro.ubc.ca/lmt/lzt
If freezing the mercury would help, you can be sure they thought of it. It's not just freezing to provide a fixed surface, though. As others noted, the surface reflectivity of a metal changes on freezing, and there are too many geometric distortions associated with the phase change so that polishing would be required after freezing (just like for glass). Furthermore, metals have large thermal expansion coefficients, so a metal-based mirror (whether frozen mercury or frozen silver, etc.) would need extraordinarily good thermal management, which is difficult to provide in a structure which is necessarily open to the atmosphere. Glasses are used for telescope mirrors partly because they have much fewer thermal issues (many other advantages, also).
Forgot to account for latitude, but that shouldn't affect it normally by more that a factor of 1/sqrt(2)
I live in central Finland, you insensitive clod. The attenuation at 63 N barely exceeds 1/sqrt(2) at noon in midsummer. It's more like 1/20 in midwinter at noon, and the 24 hour average attenuation below 1/150 because the sun vanishes almost as soon as it appears. Solar power is missing here when it's most needed (winter).
Oh well, it looks like Adobe wants us 64bit Linux users to focus on H.264, which is really great with hardware acceleration in the graphics card. Uh, wait a minute...
I personally preferred the one description of 'a picture of a man stretching his anus to 'olympic' proportions'. Just calling it 'olympic' proportions is a bad mental image enough.
No one without a college education can vote, or perhaps require a high school diploma at the least.
Result: college diplomas (or whatever is sufficient for voting privileges) would be issued en masse to selected groups at the whim of politicians. For example, the "citizenship test" qualifying immigrants for citizenship might be classed as a suitable diploma, so that immigrants could vote.
Does anyone remember X11 running a 486-100mhz with 16Meg of memory?
No, but I ran X11 as a parallel desktop on a 20MHz 386 with 12MB of RAM.
XFree86's X11 could be installed and run as a full-screen application under OS/2, in parallel with the WPS/PM desktop. This was on a Toshiba T5200 "laptop" in the 1990s. Performance of both native OS/2 PM and X11 applications was quite snappy, even with the OS/2 NFS client+server running. In fact, I often ran a third desktop in parallel (full-screen WinOS2) for MS-Office applications.
My recollection of OS/2 (WPS+XFree86+WinOS2) on a 386 is quite pleasant. Thanks for reminding me!
It would be best to have the MPG meter visible on the dashboard all the time as part of the speedometer.
My 1986 Ford Taurus sedan had that. It could be switched between instantaneous fuel economy, and average since last reset (I typically reset each time I filled the tank). It was also switchable between US mpg and metric L/100km, perhaps because it was a Canadian model.
The instantaneous economy indicator helped me improve my driving style to get better fuel economy, and in every car I've had since then, my fuel usage has been better than the "official" figures. Note that it does NOT require slow acceleration from lights, unless the road ahead would require slowing again almost immediately. For best economy in uncrowded roads, accelerate briskly but not manically to the intended speed, and hold that speed (cruise control is your friend). In stop-go conditions, try to crawl at a steady speed instead, minimizing braking and accelerating. Keeping as steady a speed as conditions allow is the key to economy in all circumstances. In that 1986 Taurus, I averaged 8L/100km in mixed big-city/suburban/highway driving, and on long highway trips I could get 6L/100km. FWIW, it was the 3L V6 model with automatic, and I used A/C quite a lot.
The 1997 Taurus which replaced it did not have any fuel economy indication, which proved a greater annoyance than I had expected. Our 2003 Mercedes only provides an average economy figure, not an instantaneous one. However, in mixed urban/rural driving, I still beat the "official" fuel economy figures for these vehicles, and it does not depend upon driving slowly, or using sluggish acceleration.
IIRC diesel has a higher energy density and higher price than petrol
The energy densities (per liter or per kg) are not greatly different. Diesel engines are operated at higher compression ratios than petrol engines, which makes them more efficient in practice.
Also, diesel is cheaper at the pump than petrol, at least in Europe. This is mostly due to lower taxation, since their pre-tax prices are fairly similar. In both cases, the pre-tax price is dwarfed by the taxation component. Refineries may be optimized more towards one than the other, of course, which will affect the supply-demand component of pre-tax pricing in different regions.
Are you referring to diesel consumption? My car, with a small 1.4l petrol turbo engine, gets ~9 L/100km.
I was indeed referring primarily to diesel consumption. Petrol consumption would be worse, but not that much worse.
For example, our 1997 Taurus sedan (3 liter V6 petrol) got around 9L/100km in mixed city/rural driving. If your 1.4L petrol car has similar economy, then you must be driving mostly in traffic jams and similar stop-go urban conditions. Or there is a problem with the car and/or the style of driving. Or was your 9L/100km a typo?
Outside the US & UK, fuel consumption for cars, trucks, etc, is normally expressed as Liters per 100 kilometers. This completely avoids the non-issue that TFA is grumbling about, even for innumerate consumers, since the numbers represent fuel used in a trip of 100km.
10 miles per US gallon = 23.52 L/100km (mind-bogglingly bad)
20 miles per US gallon = 11.76 L/100km (very bad)
33 miles per US gallon = 7.13 L/100km (OK for SUV, not so good for a car)
50 miles per US gallon = 4.7 L/100km (good for medium or large car, not so good for compact car)
FWIW, my Mercedes diesel stationwagon uses about 5.5 L/100km for mixed city/rural driving, which is 42.8 mpg(US) or 51.4 mpg(UK).
You still have areas in the country side where the only company offering ADSL is the "old telco" of the area, but that's just because there really is no money to be made.
I live outside Hiltulanlahti, which is high-density rural, but lower density than US exurbs (residences along the road are 100-300 meters apart). We have a monopoly telco which stopped laying copper several years ago. Nowadays, it's fiber only for all new houses, carrying TV and telephone as well as internet. They seem to think there's enough money in it: we have 100/10 internet and IP TV for about 65euro/month.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than ignorance or pig-headdedness, what's their problem?
My bank supports all of the browsers I have tried, and I suspect they are at least as secure as Chase. In the last few years, I have used one or more versions of Chromium, Epiphany, Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera (on Ubuntu and/or PCLinuxOS). All were compatible with the banking interface.
"..Our thoughts and prayers are with Mrs. Brummund and her family."
Am I being overly sensitive, or is that just a bit odd?
It's somewhere between mindless PR pandering to the masses who believe, and mindless recitation of a plain dumb meme. There has never been a scientific study which revealed any statistically significant effect of prayer. However, there has been a scientific study which demonstrated a distinct lack of statistically significant effects from prayer. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html
"Pain that's too cheap to meter!"
Some such rubbish was spouted about civilian application of nuclear technology (which also started as a weapon).
Or more realistically, how about private & city lands covered in helpful signs like:
"Keep off the grass. Violators may experience discomfort or agony!"
"Keep out. Or else."
mandating a 6 week paid vacation for every employee is, in my opinion, going too far
Your opinion, in my opinion, sucks.
I only get 5 weeks paid vacation, but we are entitled to 1.5x salary during those vacations. However, I can trade up to get 7 weeks paid vacation by declining the vacation bonus pay (thus merely getting normal pay during vacations). I tend to do this almost every year. A trade of 2.5 weeks pre-tax pay for 2 weeks vacation is a winner, at least until the government starts confiscating a chunk of my vacation time as taxes.
7 weeks paid annual vacation is about right for work-life balance. That with 35 work hours per week is enough to get a 7-digit salary, if you keep the bullshit out of the workplace.
It was just a baby quake for Chrissake. The only way anybody *wouldn't* be fine is if they happened to have their head under a guillotine with a quick-release tied to a seismometer arm.
Exactly. Mountains and mole-hills. I experienced two "earthquakes" of similar magnitude when I lived in Toronto in the 1980s.
I slept through the magnitude 5 event in January 1986 (no, I had not been drinking, just an ordinary night's sleep). Some neighbors said they were woken by plates rattling or stuff falling off shelves. Apparently my stuff was positioned more securely, as it was all still in place the next morning, and I only learned of the tremor (let's not exaggerate it into being an earthquake) from others after I got to work.
I was at work in the top floor of a six floor office block for the magnitude 6 event in November 1988. I could not hit the keys reliably on my keyboard leading to many typing errors, but assumed the building shuddering repeatedly was because there was major work going on in one of the elevator shafts. Found out later from the TV news that it had been an earthquake.
It would be different at the epicenter, but earthquakes in Eastern Canada tend to be centered in sparsely inhabited areas.
you mean like Hulu?
Hulu is broken - it does not work in most of the world. If it did, there would probably be fewer of the illegal download sites.
The illegal download sites probably try to work fine just about everywhere. Maybe China's Great Firewall can block them, but might not bother (perhaps just the politically undesirable movies).
And a year is 365.25 days.
Wow, we have a liberal arts major among us!
At least, you left out the "approximately" from your assertion. A Julian year is 365.25 days, which led to a multi-day error after several centuries. The simple Gregorian year is 365.2425 days, and it's still wrong by almost half a minute. A year measured from the Earth's orbit around the Sun relative to the most distant visible stars is approximately 365.2422 days long. The adjusted Gregorian year is 365.24225 days (FYI, the centuries rule for leap years is inverted for millenial years: year 4000 and 8000 will not be leap years, but year 3000 and 5000 will be), which is only wrong by approximately 4 seconds.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1511/why-do-we-have-leap-years
Except that the summary links to the same press release from May 19th as the article the GP posted. And the press release states nothing about coming out of beta.
This is a side effect of relying on readers to do the firehose filtering.
Stuff like this gets through instead of being flagged as stale, just because it's not utter spam like the vast majority of firehose submissions. It's probably a small price to pay.
Wow, California will put an Airbus on every license plate!
Or did I mis-read EAds?
It is not the shell casings, it is the bullet or the shot inside shotgun shells. Birds that bottom feed eat the used shot on the bottom of lakes and waterways causing the lead to get into the (animal) food chain. It is not just waterfowl, scavengers such as the condor are also effected
Obviously, bullet manufacturers should immediately switch to depleted uranium instead. It would eliminate the lead poisoning issue completely.
Do you really believe that child porn is that pervasive?
...
Perhaps you're refering to the sliding notion of what constitutues child porn? The shift to include ever more under the umbrella?
Child porn is probably as rare as hen's teeth, if the definition involves sexual acts (or as common as hen's feathers, if the definition involves violent acts). But it begs the question: what counts as child porn? The answer is certainly regionally specific, and appears to change over time, always becoming more inclusive, as you noted.
For example, there is a photograph which was published in newspapers all over the world, shown on TV, and earned the United Press photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. It happens to be a full-frontal of a naked pre-teen girl. Nowadays, I suspect few news agencies would be brave enough to circulate it, and a photographer who did so might land in serious trouble.
Here's a link: http://astripedarmchair.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/napalm_kim_phuc.jpg
Or just go to Google Images and search for Kim Phuc.
If this image (which featured on front pages less than 40 years ago) is not considered child porn today, just wait a few more years...
It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time. -Churchill
This is true, in the same sense as the assertion that "Gonorrhea is the worst form of venereal disease, apart from all the others".
We should not blindly assume that the object of either sentence is something absolutely necessary or desirable in every aspect. In the case of venereal disease, it is clearly unwanted. In the case of government, it needs to be strictly limited, in ways which are not compatible with most implementations of "democracy" in the world today.
And if slashdot is not blocked, the Thai net censors have been a little negligent.
There is already a liquid mercury telescope at UBC in Canada - the Large Zenith Telescope. With a 6 meter diameter, it's one of the largest telescopes in the world. Of course, it's limited to viewing only a narrow range of angles near the zenith, due to gravitational constraints. Even so, it was stunningly cheap compared to other telescopes of its size, and provides decent value for money.
http://www.astro.ubc.ca/lmt/lzt
If freezing the mercury would help, you can be sure they thought of it. It's not just freezing to provide a fixed surface, though. As others noted, the surface reflectivity of a metal changes on freezing, and there are too many geometric distortions associated with the phase change so that polishing would be required after freezing (just like for glass). Furthermore, metals have large thermal expansion coefficients, so a metal-based mirror (whether frozen mercury or frozen silver, etc.) would need extraordinarily good thermal management, which is difficult to provide in a structure which is necessarily open to the atmosphere. Glasses are used for telescope mirrors partly because they have much fewer thermal issues (many other advantages, also).
Penn & Teller taught a random woman who answered a Craig's List ad how to fake a polygraph response in less than 30 minutes.
I guess you refer to one of these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9NSXy176oA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bScv6kfxRyE
https://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1247844645
Forgot to account for latitude, but that shouldn't affect it normally by more that a factor of 1/sqrt(2)
I live in central Finland, you insensitive clod. The attenuation at 63 N barely exceeds 1/sqrt(2) at noon in midsummer. It's more like 1/20 in midwinter at noon, and the 24 hour average attenuation below 1/150 because the sun vanishes almost as soon as it appears. Solar power is missing here when it's most needed (winter).
Oh well, it looks like Adobe wants us 64bit Linux users to focus on H.264, which is really great with hardware acceleration in the graphics card. Uh, wait a minute...
I personally preferred the one description of 'a picture of a man stretching his anus to 'olympic' proportions'. Just calling it 'olympic' proportions is a bad mental image enough.
Now I know why I avoid watching the Olympics...
No one without a college education can vote, or perhaps require a high school diploma at the least.
Result: college diplomas (or whatever is sufficient for voting privileges) would be issued en masse to selected groups at the whim of politicians. For example, the "citizenship test" qualifying immigrants for citizenship might be classed as a suitable diploma, so that immigrants could vote.
Does anyone remember X11 running a 486-100mhz with 16Meg of memory?
No, but I ran X11 as a parallel desktop on a 20MHz 386 with 12MB of RAM.
XFree86's X11 could be installed and run as a full-screen application under OS/2, in parallel with the WPS/PM desktop. This was on a Toshiba T5200 "laptop" in the 1990s. Performance of both native OS/2 PM and X11 applications was quite snappy, even with the OS/2 NFS client+server running. In fact, I often ran a third desktop in parallel (full-screen WinOS2) for MS-Office applications.
My recollection of OS/2 (WPS+XFree86+WinOS2) on a 386 is quite pleasant. Thanks for reminding me!
It would be best to have the MPG meter visible on the dashboard all the time as part of the speedometer.
My 1986 Ford Taurus sedan had that. It could be switched between instantaneous fuel economy, and average since last reset (I typically reset each time I filled the tank). It was also switchable between US mpg and metric L/100km, perhaps because it was a Canadian model.
The instantaneous economy indicator helped me improve my driving style to get better fuel economy, and in every car I've had since then, my fuel usage has been better than the "official" figures. Note that it does NOT require slow acceleration from lights, unless the road ahead would require slowing again almost immediately. For best economy in uncrowded roads, accelerate briskly but not manically to the intended speed, and hold that speed (cruise control is your friend). In stop-go conditions, try to crawl at a steady speed instead, minimizing braking and accelerating. Keeping as steady a speed as conditions allow is the key to economy in all circumstances. In that 1986 Taurus, I averaged 8L/100km in mixed big-city/suburban/highway driving, and on long highway trips I could get 6L/100km. FWIW, it was the 3L V6 model with automatic, and I used A/C quite a lot.
The 1997 Taurus which replaced it did not have any fuel economy indication, which proved a greater annoyance than I had expected. Our 2003 Mercedes only provides an average economy figure, not an instantaneous one. However, in mixed urban/rural driving, I still beat the "official" fuel economy figures for these vehicles, and it does not depend upon driving slowly, or using sluggish acceleration.
IIRC diesel has a higher energy density and higher price than petrol
The energy densities (per liter or per kg) are not greatly different. Diesel engines are operated at higher compression ratios than petrol engines, which makes them more efficient in practice.
Also, diesel is cheaper at the pump than petrol, at least in Europe. This is mostly due to lower taxation, since their pre-tax prices are fairly similar. In both cases, the pre-tax price is dwarfed by the taxation component. Refineries may be optimized more towards one than the other, of course, which will affect the supply-demand component of pre-tax pricing in different regions.
Are you referring to diesel consumption? My car, with a small 1.4l petrol turbo engine, gets ~9 L/100km.
I was indeed referring primarily to diesel consumption. Petrol consumption would be worse, but not that much worse.
For example, our 1997 Taurus sedan (3 liter V6 petrol) got around 9L/100km in mixed city/rural driving. If your 1.4L petrol car has similar economy, then you must be driving mostly in traffic jams and similar stop-go urban conditions. Or there is a problem with the car and/or the style of driving. Or was your 9L/100km a typo?
Outside the US & UK, fuel consumption for cars, trucks, etc, is normally expressed as Liters per 100 kilometers. This completely avoids the non-issue that TFA is grumbling about, even for innumerate consumers, since the numbers represent fuel used in a trip of 100km.
10 miles per US gallon = 23.52 L/100km (mind-bogglingly bad)
20 miles per US gallon = 11.76 L/100km (very bad)
33 miles per US gallon = 7.13 L/100km (OK for SUV, not so good for a car)
50 miles per US gallon = 4.7 L/100km (good for medium or large car, not so good for compact car)
FWIW, my Mercedes diesel stationwagon uses about 5.5 L/100km for mixed city/rural driving, which is 42.8 mpg(US) or 51.4 mpg(UK).
You still have areas in the country side where the only company offering ADSL is the "old telco" of the area, but that's just because there really is no money to be made.
I live outside Hiltulanlahti, which is high-density rural, but lower density than US exurbs (residences along the road are 100-300 meters apart). We have a monopoly telco which stopped laying copper several years ago. Nowadays, it's fiber only for all new houses, carrying TV and telephone as well as internet. They seem to think there's enough money in it: we have 100/10 internet and IP TV for about 65euro/month.