The really interesting question is why the Scandinavian countries (including the UK) are so much safer than the others (except Switzerland.) I wonder if this applies in the US too, with States with a lot of settlement from Scandinavia and the UK having lower fatality rates than, say, the Southern States?
Incidentally, on UK roads, although an accident may be more survivable in an SUV, you are more likely to have an accident involving a collision with an oncoming vehicle, owing to our narrow roads and many obstructions. Also, journey times in SUVs are longer because you are likely to be held up so much more often. The recession and the oil price spike has brought a sudden halt to the SUV-ification of the UK, and most new cars are either company cars or small ones. The result is that driving on my mixed urban/rural commute is getting noticeably easier. This trend may accelerate.
I went into management at 37, ran various sizes of engineering team, trained and developed a few engineers, ran a few software projects on the side, then got into process engineering, designed complete manufacturing plants and their workflows (including the logistics and fulfilment systems), became a general manager, went into consulting, and now as I wind down towards retirement I not only manage the team that provides the consulting software, but write a fair bit of code where systems modelling is needed.
The main difference at different phases of my career has been the way I relate to other people in order to get what I want and to try to get the best out of them. Working with manufacturing staff and sales people needs a different approach from working with engineers and PhDs. This is one of the things that keeps the job interesting.
Over the years I've moved from designing early embedded systems where it was hard to see where the hardware ended and the code started, to using mainly Java and SQL to build data models. If thirty years in the business post-education tells me anything, it's that you can't go far wrong if you use the latest and best tools with the most tried and tested languages and patterns. But that shouldn't limit creativity.
So: final advice. Do management while you can, and you have a real chance of a portfolio career where you always have employable skills.
You also need to understand the world view of the people who were writing it. Understanding NT Greek is a lot more than just a reading knowledge. It's the "lifetime study" category of things, which is why this document is of very little use to so many people. (And no, I know just enough to have an idea of the sheer amount I don't know.) It's a bit like putting the data from the LHC on line for anybody to look at; very few if any people who don't currently have access will be able to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.
I think you are writing megatons and mean kilotons. The effects you describe are those of tactical warheads, not strategic ones. And your ignorance of the effects of fallout, high atmospheric dust and the rest suggest that you are possibly not a very reliable source generally.
The flooding of New Orleans affected mainly low-lying and poorer areas. It had considerable human effect, but it really had no effect on the productive, organisational and so on capacity of the United States. Now imagine 12 warheads that hit 12 major cities, killing perhaps 30 million people over the next 6 months to a year. You've basically taken out most of the people who know how to organise things and keep them going at a high level. It might be a while before everything collapsed, but I suspect it would do so sooner or later. Modern society is just too dependent on organisation and logistics. You won't be driving nice cars for long because the spares and fuel infrastructure will break down quickly, and the food and fuel shortages will cause hoarding and panic.
Then there's the psychological effect. In historical war terms, 9/11 was a nonevent. 25000 people are believed to have been killed in one air raid on Dresden in WW2, maybe three times that in a short period at Hiroshima. Yet the psychological effect on the US was tremendous. If a tenth of the population died in an hour, and maybe another tenth over the next year, that shock would be multiplied many times over.
A judicial system that allows somebody to be completely destroyed (which is what enforcing the judgement would do in such a case, since effectively it would deprive her of more than her entire expected lifetime earnings) for what is evidently a trivial matter, is broken. If higher courts will not provide a remedy, then they have failed as courts of equity - which would suggest a defect in the US Constitution.
This could not happen in Europe because the UN declaration on Human Rights is built into legislation. Not surprisingly, British Conservatives want to get big business (and the US) on their side by derogating from it. This case is evidence of why we in the UK need to worry, not only about our present Government but the probable next one.
Standard steel is NOT about 10% nickel, which suggests that you too are not terribly au fait with basic metallurgy. It contains hardly any, which is why it is cheap. Stainless steel (inox) is about 18% nickel, and the nickel is in the form of metal with (obviously) a low corrosion rate. The Bugatti will most likely contain very little nickel; more likely plain steel, aluminum and titanium, none of which are toxic. The principle of operation of a battery is that the nickel is reacted chemically to cause the flow of electrons: therefore, a part of the nickel is always in either a compound with other substances, or a finely divided state, and therefore represents a toxic hazard if released into the environment since it will spread rapidly. You cannot dispose of them by the normal domestic route, and you would be prosecuted (rightly) if you tried. Lead is not much worse; long experience with the manufacture of lead acid batteries in volume, and knowledge about recycling, has resulted in very low releases of lead. The actual toxicity of lead is such that it is allowed for roof cladding in many parts of the world. Add to that that a typical car battery contains maybe 10kg of lead versus perhaps 3 times as much nickel in the Prius.
The problem with the Prius is that while they are rare, the nickel isn't a serious problem, but if they became as common as, say, Diesel cars in Europe, then the environmental implications of the amount of nickel used would indeed be horrendous. It's a technical dead end, which is why all the focus is on lithium batteries.
The "dust to dust" study was interesting and actually made some very good technical points which the hybrid supporters didn't like. It wasn't debunked; its assumptions were challenged. But its overall conclusion - that it is better for the environment to make very long lasting vehicles out of low cost materials and run them for very high mileages - remains absolutely correct.
I've run out of mod points, so I'll just congratulate you on saying what needed to be said. One thing: if I knew who the grandparent was, I'd certainly never get in a car with him. With anger management issues like those, he'd most like be a terrifying driver.
I won't try and improve on the comments above, almost all of which I agree with, but I will make one observation. The reason for mirroring is to protect against drive failure. The one time I had a drive failure, mirroring saved the day's data. The best way to protect against drive failure is to buy server grade SATA drives, which are designed for 24/7/365*5 operation, and not cheap PC drives which are designed for 10 hours per day for 3-4 years. Buy server grade SATA drives, mirror them using a hardware controller, back up daily, sleep at night.
Faced with a choice between the apparently miraculous (your friend is able to detect minute levels of RF) and the alternative (you know whether it is off or on and you give subtle visual clues) I will go for the latter every single time.
In Glastonbury, UK, people complained of headaches caused by a town center wireless station, but amazingly none of them were affected by their mobile phones. On the other hand, the leader of the complainers seems to be in the business of selling magic crystals that protect you from RF radiation. Strangely, where I live, in a different part of Somerset with a lot more industry and wireless networks all over the place, nobody seems to suffer.
US legislators appear to have forgotten that during the early phases of US growth, the US refused to acknowledge any foreign intellectual property - European books were copied and published in the US with no royalties whatsoever, and it was no less a person than Rudyard Kipling, all of whose works were stolen in this way, who described the US as a country of pirates. The US was one of the last developed countries to sign the Berne Convention, which it did not do till 1st March 1989. So you could say that the US only formally ceased to be a pirate itself 20 years ago.
American presidents go on and on about freedom and democracy, and then a case like this comes up and loads of kneejerk Slashdot posters start coming over like...brainwashed Iranians or Chinese. They gibber on and on with complete speculation about what he "must have known", quote the wrong Act, completely misrepresent the case and in passing show that they totally lack the slightest clue about what is or is not in the public domain in research. I think the best comment above is probably the one about, in effect, the crime being to let somebody know what information in the public domain might actually be workable, as if the Chinese and the Iranians wouldn't be able to find that out for themselves.
Discarding the possibility that the US security services have dedicated staff who immediately defend all their actions on every possible website, I can only conclude that mindless nationalism is a characteristic of the lowest lifeforms of all societies, and that the fact that I find this depressing when I find this on Slashdot shows I must be new here.
I will make one observation for their enlightenment. Creative scientists and engineers frequently have trouble with the idiot regulations of security forces. That's because the people in those security forces are frequently literal minded anal retentives (the intelleigent ones would never end up in a dead end job trying to sheepherd scientists.) Let's just mention Richard Feynmann, Robert Oppenheimer and Alan Turing for starters. The US security services destroyed Oppenheimer and the UK security services destroyed Turing. Way to go, dickheads. Fortunately for Feynmann, his tendencies were more towards having fun with naked women than thinking about how society could be made better, and he was left alone.
"Browsing the web" also involves buying online. For this to be useful for many users, it needs a reasonably efficient means of basic text entry that is not some horrible onscreen keyboard. A small Bluetooth keypad/touchpad combo would be better.
GP was being rude about Slashdot people who moderate down anything they disagree with regardless of facts, he was approving your post.
Now a question, or rather two questions. I'm curious (and we use SQL Server 2005) What is the application layer for the NASDAQ system? I don't see that referenced in any of the articles? Is it.NET code or something else like C++? Am I right in thinking that one simple factor in the performance difference would be that the LSEX system ran on SQL Server 2000 rather than 2005?
Yes. Sea water is a lot more conductive than fresh water, so it blocks radio (except VLF...) more efficiently. Fresh water - well, put it like this, does your cell phone work when it's raining?
I want one. No, I want two. Not to lay cables through sewers, just to scare our local canoeists senseless, as a payback for all the times they've steered straight under my bow and scared the shit out of me.
Yes, and Java persistence systems (Hibernate) suck dreadfully; they are a solution for which there is no problem. By the time you've learned the mess that is Hibernate, you can have learned SQL and the Java Collections well enough to be able to knock up any persistence model you need in no time flat.
Derby 10.5, meanwhile, still has a tiny footprint, and can do most if not all of the SQL you will ever want for a typical Java application, along with features like the ability to do live backups, live table compaction from within the application while running, and now at last the ability to do cursoring in SELECT statements. Installation and configuration are simple.
I actually think that the actual problem is that we old C programmers actually learned programming and data structures, and as a result know a lot about the kind of problems for which SQL is well suited, while a lot of modern programmers learn a lot of theory about OO, but don't actually learn to program. Therefore, they have to try to reinvent wheels that were in fact designed in the 70s, and have no idea of what tools are available and how they map onto typical real-world application level problems.
The answer to your question is, because the way the planets arose is slowly getting elucidated and it is a lot more complicated than anybody used to think. One very important concept is the "snow line" - the distance from the Sun at which ice can form. A build up of icy objects around the snow line followed by gravitational disturbances could result in the transport of large amounts of ice in both directions - inwards and outwards. Then the gravity well of accumulating planetary masses does the rest.
This is a rapidly evolving field and I don't pretend to have more than a very casual reader's knowledge - but think of it like this. The Earth is, in cosmic terms, a small planet. Its water layer is a minute fraction of its mass. In terms of the solar system as a whole, the percentage of the available water on Earth is extremely small.
If your phone gets so hot that it is cooled by radiation rather than convection, you will soon learn what "burns a hole in your pocket" means. Electronics are cooled by conduction and convection, and for this to be efficient the surface needs to be conductive to get the surface temperature as close to the interior as possible, and ideally with a microstructure to increase the surface area to improve convection. The color is irrelevant at room temperatures.
Quim is a bit old world though - the last time I saw it was in a mid 20th century version of Chaucer's Miller's Tale, used to update the bit where hende Nicolas indicates his passionate feelings: "prively he caughte hire (the Carpenter's wife) by the queynte".
As a sign of how far backwards we've gone, when the Miller tells his story "everybody" laughs at it except the Carpenter - including a nun and her retinue, a monk and two church officials. Today, Rupert Murdoch won't allow "toilet talk" in his tabloids.
Look up Buddhism. Judaeo-based monotheism is not typical of the world's religions, in fact despite its important role in the development of Western civilisation, in some ways it's remarkably backward.
If you are working in epicycles, it makes little difference what you take as the frame of reference. Because Kupfernigk's (Copernicus) observational data were better than Ptolemy's, (not Plato's), he actually needed more, not fewer epicycles.
Apologies for the OT comment, but look at my nick and you will understand.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what we need. A built in comfy chair working environment that just works.
Incidentally, on UK roads, although an accident may be more survivable in an SUV, you are more likely to have an accident involving a collision with an oncoming vehicle, owing to our narrow roads and many obstructions. Also, journey times in SUVs are longer because you are likely to be held up so much more often. The recession and the oil price spike has brought a sudden halt to the SUV-ification of the UK, and most new cars are either company cars or small ones. The result is that driving on my mixed urban/rural commute is getting noticeably easier. This trend may accelerate.
The main difference at different phases of my career has been the way I relate to other people in order to get what I want and to try to get the best out of them. Working with manufacturing staff and sales people needs a different approach from working with engineers and PhDs. This is one of the things that keeps the job interesting.
Over the years I've moved from designing early embedded systems where it was hard to see where the hardware ended and the code started, to using mainly Java and SQL to build data models. If thirty years in the business post-education tells me anything, it's that you can't go far wrong if you use the latest and best tools with the most tried and tested languages and patterns. But that shouldn't limit creativity.
So: final advice. Do management while you can, and you have a real chance of a portfolio career where you always have employable skills.
You also need to understand the world view of the people who were writing it. Understanding NT Greek is a lot more than just a reading knowledge. It's the "lifetime study" category of things, which is why this document is of very little use to so many people. (And no, I know just enough to have an idea of the sheer amount I don't know.) It's a bit like putting the data from the LHC on line for anybody to look at; very few if any people who don't currently have access will be able to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.
I think you are writing megatons and mean kilotons. The effects you describe are those of tactical warheads, not strategic ones. And your ignorance of the effects of fallout, high atmospheric dust and the rest suggest that you are possibly not a very reliable source generally.
Then there's the psychological effect. In historical war terms, 9/11 was a nonevent. 25000 people are believed to have been killed in one air raid on Dresden in WW2, maybe three times that in a short period at Hiroshima. Yet the psychological effect on the US was tremendous. If a tenth of the population died in an hour, and maybe another tenth over the next year, that shock would be multiplied many times over.
This could not happen in Europe because the UN declaration on Human Rights is built into legislation. Not surprisingly, British Conservatives want to get big business (and the US) on their side by derogating from it. This case is evidence of why we in the UK need to worry, not only about our present Government but the probable next one.
The problem with the Prius is that while they are rare, the nickel isn't a serious problem, but if they became as common as, say, Diesel cars in Europe, then the environmental implications of the amount of nickel used would indeed be horrendous. It's a technical dead end, which is why all the focus is on lithium batteries.
The "dust to dust" study was interesting and actually made some very good technical points which the hybrid supporters didn't like. It wasn't debunked; its assumptions were challenged. But its overall conclusion - that it is better for the environment to make very long lasting vehicles out of low cost materials and run them for very high mileages - remains absolutely correct.
I've run out of mod points, so I'll just congratulate you on saying what needed to be said. One thing: if I knew who the grandparent was, I'd certainly never get in a car with him. With anger management issues like those, he'd most like be a terrifying driver.
I won't try and improve on the comments above, almost all of which I agree with, but I will make one observation. The reason for mirroring is to protect against drive failure. The one time I had a drive failure, mirroring saved the day's data. The best way to protect against drive failure is to buy server grade SATA drives, which are designed for 24/7/365*5 operation, and not cheap PC drives which are designed for 10 hours per day for 3-4 years. Buy server grade SATA drives, mirror them using a hardware controller, back up daily, sleep at night.
In Glastonbury, UK, people complained of headaches caused by a town center wireless station, but amazingly none of them were affected by their mobile phones. On the other hand, the leader of the complainers seems to be in the business of selling magic crystals that protect you from RF radiation. Strangely, where I live, in a different part of Somerset with a lot more industry and wireless networks all over the place, nobody seems to suffer.
US legislators appear to have forgotten that during the early phases of US growth, the US refused to acknowledge any foreign intellectual property - European books were copied and published in the US with no royalties whatsoever, and it was no less a person than Rudyard Kipling, all of whose works were stolen in this way, who described the US as a country of pirates. The US was one of the last developed countries to sign the Berne Convention, which it did not do till 1st March 1989. So you could say that the US only formally ceased to be a pirate itself 20 years ago.
Discarding the possibility that the US security services have dedicated staff who immediately defend all their actions on every possible website, I can only conclude that mindless nationalism is a characteristic of the lowest lifeforms of all societies, and that the fact that I find this depressing when I find this on Slashdot shows I must be new here.
I will make one observation for their enlightenment. Creative scientists and engineers frequently have trouble with the idiot regulations of security forces. That's because the people in those security forces are frequently literal minded anal retentives (the intelleigent ones would never end up in a dead end job trying to sheepherd scientists.) Let's just mention Richard Feynmann, Robert Oppenheimer and Alan Turing for starters. The US security services destroyed Oppenheimer and the UK security services destroyed Turing. Way to go, dickheads. Fortunately for Feynmann, his tendencies were more towards having fun with naked women than thinking about how society could be made better, and he was left alone.
"Browsing the web" also involves buying online. For this to be useful for many users, it needs a reasonably efficient means of basic text entry that is not some horrible onscreen keyboard. A small Bluetooth keypad/touchpad combo would be better.
Now a question, or rather two questions. I'm curious (and we use SQL Server 2005) .NET code or something else like C++?
What is the application layer for the NASDAQ system? I don't see that referenced in any of the articles? Is it
Am I right in thinking that one simple factor in the performance difference would be that the LSEX system ran on SQL Server 2000 rather than 2005?
Yes. Sea water is a lot more conductive than fresh water, so it blocks radio (except VLF...) more efficiently. Fresh water - well, put it like this, does your cell phone work when it's raining?
I want one. No, I want two. Not to lay cables through sewers, just to scare our local canoeists senseless, as a payback for all the times they've steered straight under my bow and scared the shit out of me.
Derby 10.5, meanwhile, still has a tiny footprint, and can do most if not all of the SQL you will ever want for a typical Java application, along with features like the ability to do live backups, live table compaction from within the application while running, and now at last the ability to do cursoring in SELECT statements. Installation and configuration are simple.
I actually think that the actual problem is that we old C programmers actually learned programming and data structures, and as a result know a lot about the kind of problems for which SQL is well suited, while a lot of modern programmers learn a lot of theory about OO, but don't actually learn to program. Therefore, they have to try to reinvent wheels that were in fact designed in the 70s, and have no idea of what tools are available and how they map onto typical real-world application level problems.
This is a rapidly evolving field and I don't pretend to have more than a very casual reader's knowledge - but think of it like this. The Earth is, in cosmic terms, a small planet. Its water layer is a minute fraction of its mass. In terms of the solar system as a whole, the percentage of the available water on Earth is extremely small.
If your phone gets so hot that it is cooled by radiation rather than convection, you will soon learn what "burns a hole in your pocket" means. Electronics are cooled by conduction and convection, and for this to be efficient the surface needs to be conductive to get the surface temperature as close to the interior as possible, and ideally with a microstructure to increase the surface area to improve convection. The color is irrelevant at room temperatures.
As a sign of how far backwards we've gone, when the Miller tells his story "everybody" laughs at it except the Carpenter - including a nun and her retinue, a monk and two church officials. Today, Rupert Murdoch won't allow "toilet talk" in his tabloids.
The British, by the way, imagine Japanese to be a language full of double meanings and potential minefields.
Look up Buddhism. Judaeo-based monotheism is not typical of the world's religions, in fact despite its important role in the development of Western civilisation, in some ways it's remarkably backward.
...I think you need to elucidate.
Apologies for the OT comment, but look at my nick and you will understand.