Fail! That would be a surface area expressed in cubic meters?! I'm not a huge fan of dimensional analysis, but here it could have given you a clue that something was not quite right. What's the formula for the volume of a sphere again? A tip if you're having trouble remembering the formulas for volume and surface area of a sphere: the latter is the derivative of the former. O, and unsurprisingly the ratio between two surface areas of an object does not change with uniform scaling. Most Hollywood monsters know this, of course. Now go ahead and apologize. Twice;-)
And since there are an infinite number of digits, pretty much completely randomly distributed as far as we know, every existing song is bound to be in there somewhere! Reminds me of the mattresses in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Why don't they just make a system with data communications between all airplanes, making a giant worldwide p2p network of distributed storage and transmission? Mandatory, just like black boxes are now, so the system will actually work. If an Air France plane crashed in the middle of the ocean, its flight recorder data could be retreived from the Lufthansa 50 miles behind him or the Delta 60 miles ahead. Encoded, of course. Or the data could just hop from plane to plane until it reaches Paris, where it is stored on Air France computers. Who needs satellites if you've got planes in the sky pretty much everywhere? And the system need only cost the price of the on board units, no need to pay for expensive data links with ground based or satellite receivers since the planes are creating the network between themselves. And apart from flight data recorder data, it could also be used for all sorts of other messages, weather data, etc... Pilots would love to have access to wind and turbulence readings from other aircraft along the route, for example. The possibilities are endless! Why on earth would anyone still rely on a metal box to store flight recorder data in the event of a crash? What century is this?
I guess the French are not used to bargaining. Normally, when you buy an airplane, you can usually get the sales person to throw in an extra memory card.
There was no such recommendation. In fact, when Air France asked the question (several months before the accident), Airbus officially confirmed that there was no reason to change the pitots. However, quite a few other companies dedided not to wait for an official recommendation and replaced the pitots on their own after a few incidents.
The fact that someone is already at 5 does not mean you cannot mod them up anymore. The displayed score includes a modifier: people with excellent karma get an extra +1 automatically. However, the "real" score is used to get achievements. So it becomes very hard to get a Comedian achievement (+5 funny) if everybody stops modding you up as soon as you reach 4+1, which is displayed as 5 but counted as 4. So please do mod up a +5. If he/she is already at a "real" 5, you will not lose the mod point.
I imagine it will stay inside our galaxy, so the expansion of the universe (galaxies flying away from each other) is not really a factor here. Still, even inside our galaxy, stars are pretty far away from each other so it will take a long, long time before it ever happens to get near one. The probe is now 16 light hours away while the closest star outside our solar system, alpha centauri, is about 2000 times as far. That gives a pretty good idea of how much emptiness is out there. And even if it were going straight for alpha centauri, which it isn't, it would still take a very long time before it got there. 30 years times 2000?
Several centuries? Like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which were originally expected to remain uninhabitable for centuries as well? I was in Nagasaki a few years ago, and if the place wasn't littered with monuments, you would never guess anything special ever happened there. That was an atomic bomb, not just some smoke from a reactor. Radioactivity doesn't remain as long as you think. For the rather small amounts that fell around Fukushima, you'll probably be close to normal background radiation in a year or so (as soon as the fallout from the plant stops, of course).
But if they keep pumping water in, and water keeps coming out with radioactive particles, won't the fuel rods eventually just erode away completely? That would take care of that...
In Belgium, the recipient cannot just see the account number, but also the name and address associated with it. And the optional message, of course. Belgian account numbers are standardized so you can tell which bank it's from. Between European countries, we use a slightly longer bank account code which has the bank encoded into it.
It's been that way for decades? I lived in the US for 6 months about 15 years ago, and I was totally dumbstruck when the phone company told me that I could not pay my phone bill via wire transfer because "they would have no way of knowing where the money came from", let alone which bill I was trying to pay with it. I know most utilities now seem to be offering some sort of electronic bill paying service, only you have to pay extra for the privilege of saving them the work of processing your checks. I'm not making this up, I was just reading it in this very thread. By the way, we don't need a routing number for transfers within the same country. Also, can you attach a message to the transfer? Does the recipient even know who sent the money, let alone what for? (And I don't mean any of the new e-systems that only work for one bank, I'm talking about plain and simple bank transfers).
So you haven't used any checks since sometime in the 90's?
I can say I haven't, except when dealing with American companies. Here in Belgium, electronic transfers are free, and we can even attach a message. Want to pay your friend $10 for next weekend's barbecue? Just ask for his account number, transfer the money and add "Looking forward to the barbecue, great idea!" as a message. No need to say it came from you, he'll get that information automatically. To pay bills, just add the bill number as a message. We've been able to do this since at least 40 years ago, first via the bank office itself, later via Phone Banking and then PC banking. As soon as you can, too (via regular bank accounts, not PayPal or similar services, and between different banks in different states), let me know. Then maybe I'll admit you've finally caught up with Europe (and that would be about time).
I'm simply amazed how you guys still keep sending bits of paper around with payment details written on them. Don't say it isn't true, just read this thread, with so many people still using checks for all kinds of things because it's the only simple or cheap way. Rent, utilities, gardeners,... Millions of silly little papers with payment details sent around like in the middle ages.
If you're going on a long space trip, what are you going to get sick from? If everyone on board is still healthy after a week or so, you're all set. Outer space contains far less microbes and viruses than the typical earthly supermarket, afaik.
What are those metal pipes they are tightening in the video? That's not a lego tower, it's a steel tower with some lego bricks around it! Hey, I can build a lego tower as high as the Eiffel tower if I can just attach the bricks to the actual Eiffel tower.
I keep telling that to hotel managers, but they don't seem to be interested.
O, and the dryness is not necessarily from recirculating air: most air conditioners take air from outside but take the moisture out of it by heating, cooling and condensing. It's even advertised as a feature sometimes:-(
If they are "controlling humidity levels", why does my skin start itching after a few days in the terribly dry "controlled" climate? They don't control anything, they just make the air so dry it becomes unhealthy. I much prefer the non-controlled, old-fashioned fresh air from outside. With some humidity, please!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is. See my reply to your other post ;-)
Fail! That would be a surface area expressed in cubic meters?! I'm not a huge fan of dimensional analysis, but here it could have given you a clue that something was not quite right. What's the formula for the volume of a sphere again? A tip if you're having trouble remembering the formulas for volume and surface area of a sphere: the latter is the derivative of the former. O, and unsurprisingly the ratio between two surface areas of an object does not change with uniform scaling. Most Hollywood monsters know this, of course. Now go ahead and apologize. Twice ;-)
And since there are an infinite number of digits, pretty much completely randomly distributed as far as we know, every existing song is bound to be in there somewhere! Reminds me of the mattresses in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Mod parent funny! (I hope...)
Why don't they just make a system with data communications between all airplanes, making a giant worldwide p2p network of distributed storage and transmission? Mandatory, just like black boxes are now, so the system will actually work. If an Air France plane crashed in the middle of the ocean, its flight recorder data could be retreived from the Lufthansa 50 miles behind him or the Delta 60 miles ahead. Encoded, of course. Or the data could just hop from plane to plane until it reaches Paris, where it is stored on Air France computers. Who needs satellites if you've got planes in the sky pretty much everywhere? And the system need only cost the price of the on board units, no need to pay for expensive data links with ground based or satellite receivers since the planes are creating the network between themselves. And apart from flight data recorder data, it could also be used for all sorts of other messages, weather data, etc... Pilots would love to have access to wind and turbulence readings from other aircraft along the route, for example. The possibilities are endless! Why on earth would anyone still rely on a metal box to store flight recorder data in the event of a crash? What century is this?
I guess the French are not used to bargaining. Normally, when you buy an airplane, you can usually get the sales person to throw in an extra memory card.
There was no such recommendation. In fact, when Air France asked the question (several months before the accident), Airbus officially confirmed that there was no reason to change the pitots. However, quite a few other companies dedided not to wait for an official recommendation and replaced the pitots on their own after a few incidents.
Breaking a window is faster than opening an unlocked door?
The fact that someone is already at 5 does not mean you cannot mod them up anymore. The displayed score includes a modifier: people with excellent karma get an extra +1 automatically. However, the "real" score is used to get achievements. So it becomes very hard to get a Comedian achievement (+5 funny) if everybody stops modding you up as soon as you reach 4+1, which is displayed as 5 but counted as 4. So please do mod up a +5. If he/she is already at a "real" 5, you will not lose the mod point.
I imagine it will stay inside our galaxy, so the expansion of the universe (galaxies flying away from each other) is not really a factor here. Still, even inside our galaxy, stars are pretty far away from each other so it will take a long, long time before it ever happens to get near one. The probe is now 16 light hours away while the closest star outside our solar system, alpha centauri, is about 2000 times as far. That gives a pretty good idea of how much emptiness is out there. And even if it were going straight for alpha centauri, which it isn't, it would still take a very long time before it got there. 30 years times 2000?
Hadn't that anomaly been solved fairly recently? Something to do with light reflecting differently from different surfaces, creating a slight push.
It's a bit like those incessant stories about weather balloons taking pictures from outer space.
I bet the RIAA is looking forward to the day aliens find the probes and start illegally copying the sound track.
So you agree that the aging reactors should be replaced with more modern ones? Because paradoxically, nuclear fear has kept that from happening.
Several centuries? Like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which were originally expected to remain uninhabitable for centuries as well? I was in Nagasaki a few years ago, and if the place wasn't littered with monuments, you would never guess anything special ever happened there. That was an atomic bomb, not just some smoke from a reactor. Radioactivity doesn't remain as long as you think. For the rather small amounts that fell around Fukushima, you'll probably be close to normal background radiation in a year or so (as soon as the fallout from the plant stops, of course).
A slender young woman is about a hundred
While an American woman is about a hundred kilograms
But if they keep pumping water in, and water keeps coming out with radioactive particles, won't the fuel rods eventually just erode away completely? That would take care of that...
In Belgium, the recipient cannot just see the account number, but also the name and address associated with it. And the optional message, of course. Belgian account numbers are standardized so you can tell which bank it's from. Between European countries, we use a slightly longer bank account code which has the bank encoded into it.
It's been that way for decades? I lived in the US for 6 months about 15 years ago, and I was totally dumbstruck when the phone company told me that I could not pay my phone bill via wire transfer because "they would have no way of knowing where the money came from", let alone which bill I was trying to pay with it. I know most utilities now seem to be offering some sort of electronic bill paying service, only you have to pay extra for the privilege of saving them the work of processing your checks. I'm not making this up, I was just reading it in this very thread. By the way, we don't need a routing number for transfers within the same country. Also, can you attach a message to the transfer? Does the recipient even know who sent the money, let alone what for? (And I don't mean any of the new e-systems that only work for one bank, I'm talking about plain and simple bank transfers).
So you haven't used any checks since sometime in the 90's?
I can say I haven't, except when dealing with American companies. Here in Belgium, electronic transfers are free, and we can even attach a message. Want to pay your friend $10 for next weekend's barbecue? Just ask for his account number, transfer the money and add "Looking forward to the barbecue, great idea!" as a message. No need to say it came from you, he'll get that information automatically. To pay bills, just add the bill number as a message. We've been able to do this since at least 40 years ago, first via the bank office itself, later via Phone Banking and then PC banking. As soon as you can, too (via regular bank accounts, not PayPal or similar services, and between different banks in different states), let me know. Then maybe I'll admit you've finally caught up with Europe (and that would be about time).
I'm simply amazed how you guys still keep sending bits of paper around with payment details written on them. Don't say it isn't true, just read this thread, with so many people still using checks for all kinds of things because it's the only simple or cheap way. Rent, utilities, gardeners,... Millions of silly little papers with payment details sent around like in the middle ages.
If you're going on a long space trip, what are you going to get sick from? If everyone on board is still healthy after a week or so, you're all set. Outer space contains far less microbes and viruses than the typical earthly supermarket, afaik.
What are those metal pipes they are tightening in the video? That's not a lego tower, it's a steel tower with some lego bricks around it! Hey, I can build a lego tower as high as the Eiffel tower if I can just attach the bricks to the actual Eiffel tower.
And you divorced her because...?
Not being nosy, just puzzled.
I keep telling that to hotel managers, but they don't seem to be interested.
O, and the dryness is not necessarily from recirculating air: most air conditioners take air from outside but take the moisture out of it by heating, cooling and condensing. It's even advertised as a feature sometimes :-(
If they are "controlling humidity levels", why does my skin start itching after a few days in the terribly dry "controlled" climate? They don't control anything, they just make the air so dry it becomes unhealthy. I much prefer the non-controlled, old-fashioned fresh air from outside. With some humidity, please!