You're modded funny, but sometimes reality is unrealistic:
"The Engineers teamed up with more than 1,000 District of Columbia employees to clear the inaugural parade route. Luckily much equipment and some men had been pre-positioned and were ready to go. In the end the task force employed hundreds of dump trucks, front-end loaders, sanders, plows, rotaries, and flamethrowers to clear the way."
I'm not sure what we will do if another 12" falls.
As someone who grew up in an area that managed not to call 2 feet of snow a national emergency (which is about all it takes to create 5' piles), you take the new snow and throw it on top of the pile. Or, if necessary, you make the base of the pile bigger. If really and absolutely necessary, you pile the new snow into a sled and pull the sled into the middle of the lawn and dump it there. Sometimes the answer to a difficult problem really is just to work a bit harder. Sad but true.
Yes but the cost is sunk, which is something that I would hope the people in charge of budgets understand. We could throw another four trillion dollars at rocket technology and only get a 20% performance improvement for our money, or you could spend a fraction of that cost to investigate truly revolutionary launch technologies. As much as it pains me to say it, every new rocket, new capsule, new extension to one program or another just takes us farther down a road that does not lead to cheap, reliable human spaceflight.
Meanwhile other launch technologies are given token funding or less. Imagine if we really and truly decided to put funding towards one (or better yet, several) of the 'non-standard' launch technologies. The problem is that they all appear on the surface to be the realm of science fiction, while in fact could have been developed decades ago if the political will had been there. Nuclear powered rockets, ground based laser rockets, launch loops, sky hooks, and space elevators... the general public thinks these things are impossible, and maybe some of them are, but I for one would be willing to risk a few billion dollars of government spending to find out for sure.
Then run it as a god forsaken utility! First and foremost, there are plenty of rural areas stuck with zero broadband options. No cable, no DSL, no 3G coverage.
Secondly, utilities are highly, highly regulated. If the power company wants to increase your bill by $.02 per kWh, they have to go and ask the government's permission to do so.
They generally don't even own the distribution lines, they have to bid to offer services and the lowest bidder gets access. Imagine a world where the costs of starting an ISP exactly equal to the costs of installing a trunk line to your basement and the servers and software needed to operate. And unlike electricity or natural gas, there's no reason that the distribution lines couldn't be shared by multiple ISPs. Now, can you even begin to imagine how such a system would change the way ISPs operate?
I say hell yes, treat them exactly like a utility. The current system gets all of the public costs associated with utilities and practically none of the benefits.
On the other hand, they run on 1/100th the power, 1/10 the size, and no cooling equipment. If you want a high power device there's plenty of processors available, but that isn't what the ARM chips are designed for. It's like complaining that your new 60 mpg hybrid doesn't have as much power as a 40 year old Corvette.
Goes into detail at most every level, from Darwin to modern genetics, from vestigial traits to androgenous retro viruses, evolution of 'irreducibly complex' features the lab to real life speciation in the wild (yes, observed within a human lifetime).
And incidentally, he does it all without his usually anti-religious aggressiveness. It is basically a step by step rundown of every major piece of evidence that supports evolution, sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
Why not? He's doing something that may, or may not be illegal. Asking the court to knock it off until the status of his actions is quite reasonable. Now, IMO there isn't much question and what he's doing should be legal, but the court obviously thinks it isn't that obvious.
It's not as if Geohot makes his living hacking PS3s to run pirated games (which is all the restraining order prevents him doing). This is costing him his hobby, and only temporarily if what he's doing is determined to be legal.
Don't like it? Find a politician who will fight to have the law overturned or clarified. Can't find one? Then make one. The Tea party didn't exist 3 years ago. If that particular group of people can become a political force overnight I would hope the geeks of the nation could manage as well.
In the very few games of D&D that I've played the DM was less judge and more executioner. Finding new fun and exciting ways to kill off the party appeared to be his primary purpose, so I guess maybe inquisition age executioner would be even more accurate.
To be fair, it seems Fox News is the culprit this time (well, editors could have noticed the dupe but really that would be going a bit above what I've come to expect from them). The Fox News article is dated yesterday, Jan 26, 2011; the sources that they reference are dated Jan 26, 2010. So yeah, pretty much exactly a year old, probably someone searching for a topic entered the wrong date on their criteria and we end up with a year old dupe on the front page.
Any stereo 3d system pretty much by definition involves asking me to focus my eyes at one distance while converging my eyes at a different one. This is, for me at least, almost instantly uncomfortable and long term becomes very much so. I was able to get through Avatar without a screaming headache, but even so, it isn't the kind of thing I'd like to do on a regular basis.
The thing is, every step along the way has potentially huge benefits, enough so that most of them will probably happen over the next century or so even Daedalus but a large scale, long term target would speed things up considerably.
You're not going to build Daedalus without a much cheaper way to get things into orbit, traditional rockets are never going to cut it. You need something more economical; whether that be a space elevator, a launch loop, laser powered rockets or whatever.
Even with a cheaper way to get to orbit, you're probably going to want to mine for materials and construct as much of the ship outside Earth's gravity well as possible. That means NEO's being landed on, mined, maybe even colonized. Of course, if you have mining colonies spread around the solar system you're going to need the engines and technology to transport people and material between them.
Done this way, you could move towards an interstellar probe step by step, with each step providing a tangible and immediate benefit to the population of the planet. Keep your eyes on the long term prize, but always keep your hands working on something that people can appreciate today.
It's not even a shutout from what I understand. The IPv6 request will timeout after a while and revert to IPv4, so while people will certainly experience slowdowns, I doubt anyone will be actually unable to access the site. Detect this and point people to resources to resolve the problem and things will take care of themselves. And by things taking care of themselves I mean that you will be asked to go fix the internet by your parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends, friends-who-are-only-friends-when-there's-a-computer-problem, and your grandma's bridge partner who you once installed a printer for.
Honestly, if it weren't for the army of computer geeks fixing most of the IT problems for friends and family I think the whole thing would collapse overnight.
It's hard to argue that he didn't do what he did, they're going to argue that what he did was legal. Like if I was accused of slander and responded with "Of course I called him an idiot, he is one!". I said what I said and stand by it, but that doesn't mean that what I did was slander.
Lots and lots of people have said that. You might not agree with them, but that doesn't change the fact that they exist. It's partially their over the top fear mongering that has caused so many, ehem, 'skeptics' to suddenly become skeptical.
Basically, I would say anything over 50 hours per week is a waste. More than that and you will get less done (through mistakes, extra breaks, loss of morale, and employees just plain leaving) than you would if you had stopped at 50. Maybe you could do a single week at more than that and get a bit more done, but I find it unlikely.
And even 50 hours per week is probably not sustainable for anything approaching long term, I've always found that after 3-4 weeks I'm totally burned out and the work starts to suffer. That's if people don't run for the hills the minute the words "mandatory, unpaid overtime" are out of the boss's mouth.
If I had to guess at a sustainable number, I'd probably pick 45. It's only 1 extra hour per day, most people will grumble about it but not start looking for another job. Note: people aren't going to be happy about it, and even at 'only' nine hour work days you better be ready to spend some money to keep morale up. Things like free meals and gift cards for exceptional work can go a long way towards making people feel like you actually appreciate the extra effort, but are no replacement for overtime pay.
Do people actually search like that? No wonder people complain about search engines, for one thing, half the search terms are just going to be removed by the search engine "How do you change the water filter on a frigidaire professional series" is going to become "change water filter frigidaire professional series". 'Change' is vague and is going to return lots of stuff you don't care about, replace or instal would be much better. "Water filter", should be in quotes, as should be "frigidaire professional series".
And... wow. Ok, well, either the information is simply not on the internet or the SEO people have finally outsmarted the engineers at Google and Bing. Even with a decent query and trying different keywords, I see no references to the information I would actually want. Rather, there are a ton of instances of people trying to sell me something and a site where you can go and ask questions and have others respond.
Watson only buzzes in when he is confident that he knows the answer, which is apparently about 50% of the time. Of the 50% that he does buzz in, he answers correctly 80-90% of the time. If how the measure the confidence is accurate (and doesn't produce a lot of false negatives) it's likely that Watson would end the game in the red if he just buzzed in every time before he was sure of the answer. And according to the article, Watson has to physically push the button on the buzzer to buzz in. That probably doesn't delay him by much, but you're already talking about man vs machine when it comes to answering the questions, you might as well say that the humans have an unfair advantage because they speak English fluently.
The humans also get the question as text, at the exact same moment Watson does. That's the way it's always worked on Jeopardy!. They see the question as text the same you do when you watch the show on TV. The best competitors read well a head of Trebek and have an answer ready the instant they're allowed to buzz in, which as after Trebek finishes reading the question. Watson has the exact same advantages and disadvantages as any contestant, except that he can read the text basically instantly.
Wow, I hope you don't have any friends or family that are Schizophrenic or Bi-polar or have other mental illnesses. They might be hurt by your insinuation that they have no control over their actions are are basically ticking time bombs waiting to explode and kill dozens of innocent people.
For the record, there are an estimated 20 million people with schizophrenia in the world, and that is only one of the many diseases that will earn someone the moniker 'crazy'. You'd think if they were all an inch away from murder you would have heard about it by now.
There's more to this kind of case than "Did he shoot a bunch of people in broad daylight?", obviously he did. You can bet the defense is going to play the mental illness card. Communications over the past year with him talking lucidly of killing people goes a long way towards proving that his mental illness isn't the direct cause.
It's easy to see his actions and watch his videos and say "Dude's crazy and he killed some people because of it" and move on, but you need to remember that there are millions of schizophrenics in the world that don't go around shooting dozens of innocent people. It's up to the prosecution to prove that he was no different from any millions of people in the world that have violent impulses but keep them under control. So, if you can prove that the killings were calmly, rationally planned and premeditated and that he was aware of what he was doing, then it doesn't matter much that the motive is rooted in his mental illness.
Going on 6 years in and I, for one, haven't heard a peep out of anyone concerning a PS4. So assuming rumors lead product by 2 years or so there won't be a PS4 until at least 7, possibly a solid 8 years into the PS3 lifetime. 2-3 years of support on the PS3 would be totally and completely in line with the level of support the PS2 got. I mean, there were still some 20-30 games released last year for the PS2. I have little doubt that you will be able to buy quality games for the PS3 in 5 more years.
Well lets see, reportedly 48000 phones are being canceled, depending on if the government got a good deal or not that would be anywhere from $20-70 per phone per month. I'll be generous and assume it's on the high end of $70 per line. That means this measure has the potential to save the state $336k per month or $4 million per year. In other words, it is.02% of California's projected deficit or.004% of California's annual budget. While it's true that you have to cut the small expenses in addition to the big ones to lower spending, this is less than a drop in the bucket.
But real sex offenders have a disease that is not cured by jail time.
Which should kind of make you think that maybe we're not responding to their actions in the correct way. Imagine you have a dog that pisses in the house, and every time it does you lock it in it's crate for an hour but the dog's behavior doesn't change. Are you just going to keep locking the dog up every time it pisses inside or are you going to try something else to change the behavior?
Slashdot Mirror
You're modded funny, but sometimes reality is unrealistic:
"The Engineers teamed up with more than 1,000 District of Columbia employees to clear the inaugural parade route. Luckily much equipment and some men had been pre-positioned and were ready to go. In the end the task force employed hundreds of dump trucks, front-end loaders, sanders, plows, rotaries, and flamethrowers to clear the way."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2009/01/inauguration_weather_the_case.html
CT Homes have 4-5ft deep piles.
I'm not sure what we will do if another 12" falls.
As someone who grew up in an area that managed not to call 2 feet of snow a national emergency (which is about all it takes to create 5' piles), you take the new snow and throw it on top of the pile. Or, if necessary, you make the base of the pile bigger. If really and absolutely necessary, you pile the new snow into a sled and pull the sled into the middle of the lawn and dump it there. Sometimes the answer to a difficult problem really is just to work a bit harder. Sad but true.
Yes but the cost is sunk, which is something that I would hope the people in charge of budgets understand. We could throw another four trillion dollars at rocket technology and only get a 20% performance improvement for our money, or you could spend a fraction of that cost to investigate truly revolutionary launch technologies. As much as it pains me to say it, every new rocket, new capsule, new extension to one program or another just takes us farther down a road that does not lead to cheap, reliable human spaceflight.
Meanwhile other launch technologies are given token funding or less. Imagine if we really and truly decided to put funding towards one (or better yet, several) of the 'non-standard' launch technologies. The problem is that they all appear on the surface to be the realm of science fiction, while in fact could have been developed decades ago if the political will had been there. Nuclear powered rockets, ground based laser rockets, launch loops, sky hooks, and space elevators... the general public thinks these things are impossible, and maybe some of them are, but I for one would be willing to risk a few billion dollars of government spending to find out for sure.
Then run it as a god forsaken utility! First and foremost, there are plenty of rural areas stuck with zero broadband options. No cable, no DSL, no 3G coverage.
Secondly, utilities are highly, highly regulated. If the power company wants to increase your bill by $.02 per kWh, they have to go and ask the government's permission to do so.
They generally don't even own the distribution lines, they have to bid to offer services and the lowest bidder gets access. Imagine a world where the costs of starting an ISP exactly equal to the costs of installing a trunk line to your basement and the servers and software needed to operate. And unlike electricity or natural gas, there's no reason that the distribution lines couldn't be shared by multiple ISPs. Now, can you even begin to imagine how such a system would change the way ISPs operate?
I say hell yes, treat them exactly like a utility. The current system gets all of the public costs associated with utilities and practically none of the benefits.
On the other hand, they run on 1/100th the power, 1/10 the size, and no cooling equipment. If you want a high power device there's plenty of processors available, but that isn't what the ARM chips are designed for. It's like complaining that your new 60 mpg hybrid doesn't have as much power as a 40 year old Corvette.
"The Greatest Show on Earth" - Richard Dawkins
Goes into detail at most every level, from Darwin to modern genetics, from vestigial traits to androgenous retro viruses, evolution of 'irreducibly complex' features the lab to real life speciation in the wild (yes, observed within a human lifetime).
And incidentally, he does it all without his usually anti-religious aggressiveness. It is basically a step by step rundown of every major piece of evidence that supports evolution, sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
Why not? He's doing something that may, or may not be illegal. Asking the court to knock it off until the status of his actions is quite reasonable. Now, IMO there isn't much question and what he's doing should be legal, but the court obviously thinks it isn't that obvious.
It's not as if Geohot makes his living hacking PS3s to run pirated games (which is all the restraining order prevents him doing). This is costing him his hobby, and only temporarily if what he's doing is determined to be legal.
Don't like it? Find a politician who will fight to have the law overturned or clarified. Can't find one? Then make one. The Tea party didn't exist 3 years ago. If that particular group of people can become a political force overnight I would hope the geeks of the nation could manage as well.
Definitely not a trebuchet, this uses an elastic spring as the power source. A trebuchet uses a counterweight.
From the cited documents
"ARGUED SEPTEMBER 18, 2009â"DECIDED JANUARY 25, 2010"
http://abovethelaw.com/_old/2010/01/26/Singer%20v.%20Raemisch.pdf
In the very few games of D&D that I've played the DM was less judge and more executioner. Finding new fun and exciting ways to kill off the party appeared to be his primary purpose, so I guess maybe inquisition age executioner would be even more accurate.
To be fair, it seems Fox News is the culprit this time (well, editors could have noticed the dupe but really that would be going a bit above what I've come to expect from them). The Fox News article is dated yesterday, Jan 26, 2011; the sources that they reference are dated Jan 26, 2010. So yeah, pretty much exactly a year old, probably someone searching for a topic entered the wrong date on their criteria and we end up with a year old dupe on the front page.
Any stereo 3d system pretty much by definition involves asking me to focus my eyes at one distance while converging my eyes at a different one. This is, for me at least, almost instantly uncomfortable and long term becomes very much so. I was able to get through Avatar without a screaming headache, but even so, it isn't the kind of thing I'd like to do on a regular basis.
The thing is, every step along the way has potentially huge benefits, enough so that most of them will probably happen over the next century or so even Daedalus but a large scale, long term target would speed things up considerably.
You're not going to build Daedalus without a much cheaper way to get things into orbit, traditional rockets are never going to cut it. You need something more economical; whether that be a space elevator, a launch loop, laser powered rockets or whatever.
Even with a cheaper way to get to orbit, you're probably going to want to mine for materials and construct as much of the ship outside Earth's gravity well as possible. That means NEO's being landed on, mined, maybe even colonized. Of course, if you have mining colonies spread around the solar system you're going to need the engines and technology to transport people and material between them.
Done this way, you could move towards an interstellar probe step by step, with each step providing a tangible and immediate benefit to the population of the planet. Keep your eyes on the long term prize, but always keep your hands working on something that people can appreciate today.
It's not even a shutout from what I understand. The IPv6 request will timeout after a while and revert to IPv4, so while people will certainly experience slowdowns, I doubt anyone will be actually unable to access the site. Detect this and point people to resources to resolve the problem and things will take care of themselves. And by things taking care of themselves I mean that you will be asked to go fix the internet by your parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends, friends-who-are-only-friends-when-there's-a-computer-problem, and your grandma's bridge partner who you once installed a printer for.
Honestly, if it weren't for the army of computer geeks fixing most of the IT problems for friends and family I think the whole thing would collapse overnight.
It's hard to argue that he didn't do what he did, they're going to argue that what he did was legal. Like if I was accused of slander and responded with "Of course I called him an idiot, he is one!". I said what I said and stand by it, but that doesn't mean that what I did was slander.
Lots and lots of people have said that. You might not agree with them, but that doesn't change the fact that they exist. It's partially their over the top fear mongering that has caused so many, ehem, 'skeptics' to suddenly become skeptical.
Basically, I would say anything over 50 hours per week is a waste. More than that and you will get less done (through mistakes, extra breaks, loss of morale, and employees just plain leaving) than you would if you had stopped at 50. Maybe you could do a single week at more than that and get a bit more done, but I find it unlikely.
And even 50 hours per week is probably not sustainable for anything approaching long term, I've always found that after 3-4 weeks I'm totally burned out and the work starts to suffer. That's if people don't run for the hills the minute the words "mandatory, unpaid overtime" are out of the boss's mouth.
If I had to guess at a sustainable number, I'd probably pick 45. It's only 1 extra hour per day, most people will grumble about it but not start looking for another job. Note: people aren't going to be happy about it, and even at 'only' nine hour work days you better be ready to spend some money to keep morale up. Things like free meals and gift cards for exceptional work can go a long way towards making people feel like you actually appreciate the extra effort, but are no replacement for overtime pay.
Do people actually search like that? No wonder people complain about search engines, for one thing, half the search terms are just going to be removed by the search engine "How do you change the water filter on a frigidaire professional series" is going to become "change water filter frigidaire professional series". 'Change' is vague and is going to return lots of stuff you don't care about, replace or instal would be much better. "Water filter", should be in quotes, as should be "frigidaire professional series".
And... wow. Ok, well, either the information is simply not on the internet or the SEO people have finally outsmarted the engineers at Google and Bing. Even with a decent query and trying different keywords, I see no references to the information I would actually want. Rather, there are a ton of instances of people trying to sell me something and a site where you can go and ask questions and have others respond.
Watson only buzzes in when he is confident that he knows the answer, which is apparently about 50% of the time. Of the 50% that he does buzz in, he answers correctly 80-90% of the time. If how the measure the confidence is accurate (and doesn't produce a lot of false negatives) it's likely that Watson would end the game in the red if he just buzzed in every time before he was sure of the answer. And according to the article, Watson has to physically push the button on the buzzer to buzz in. That probably doesn't delay him by much, but you're already talking about man vs machine when it comes to answering the questions, you might as well say that the humans have an unfair advantage because they speak English fluently.
The humans also get the question as text, at the exact same moment Watson does. That's the way it's always worked on Jeopardy!. They see the question as text the same you do when you watch the show on TV. The best competitors read well a head of Trebek and have an answer ready the instant they're allowed to buzz in, which as after Trebek finishes reading the question. Watson has the exact same advantages and disadvantages as any contestant, except that he can read the text basically instantly.
Wow, I hope you don't have any friends or family that are Schizophrenic or Bi-polar or have other mental illnesses. They might be hurt by your insinuation that they have no control over their actions are are basically ticking time bombs waiting to explode and kill dozens of innocent people.
For the record, there are an estimated 20 million people with schizophrenia in the world, and that is only one of the many diseases that will earn someone the moniker 'crazy'. You'd think if they were all an inch away from murder you would have heard about it by now.
There's more to this kind of case than "Did he shoot a bunch of people in broad daylight?", obviously he did. You can bet the defense is going to play the mental illness card. Communications over the past year with him talking lucidly of killing people goes a long way towards proving that his mental illness isn't the direct cause.
It's easy to see his actions and watch his videos and say "Dude's crazy and he killed some people because of it" and move on, but you need to remember that there are millions of schizophrenics in the world that don't go around shooting dozens of innocent people. It's up to the prosecution to prove that he was no different from any millions of people in the world that have violent impulses but keep them under control. So, if you can prove that the killings were calmly, rationally planned and premeditated and that he was aware of what he was doing, then it doesn't matter much that the motive is rooted in his mental illness.
Going on 6 years in and I, for one, haven't heard a peep out of anyone concerning a PS4. So assuming rumors lead product by 2 years or so there won't be a PS4 until at least 7, possibly a solid 8 years into the PS3 lifetime. 2-3 years of support on the PS3 would be totally and completely in line with the level of support the PS2 got. I mean, there were still some 20-30 games released last year for the PS2. I have little doubt that you will be able to buy quality games for the PS3 in 5 more years.
Well lets see, reportedly 48000 phones are being canceled, depending on if the government got a good deal or not that would be anywhere from $20-70 per phone per month. I'll be generous and assume it's on the high end of $70 per line. That means this measure has the potential to save the state $336k per month or $4 million per year. In other words, it is .02% of California's projected deficit or .004% of California's annual budget. While it's true that you have to cut the small expenses in addition to the big ones to lower spending, this is less than a drop in the bucket.
But real sex offenders have a disease that is not cured by jail time.
Which should kind of make you think that maybe we're not responding to their actions in the correct way. Imagine you have a dog that pisses in the house, and every time it does you lock it in it's crate for an hour but the dog's behavior doesn't change. Are you just going to keep locking the dog up every time it pisses inside or are you going to try something else to change the behavior?