It only take me a few milliseconds of glance to operate the center dash controls on my car by touch - volume, source select, temp, etc. Once my hand is in the right general area, the dash has a lot of tactile clues build in to guide my hand w/o looking and is safe to gently touch anywhere. I can fumble my way to the desired outcome quite reliably.
I used to have an Audi where all the dash controls were smooth and uniform - not a touch screen, just a stupid style decision. It was very distracting. To do anything required taking my eyes of the road for a few seconds. It never felt safe. An actual touch screen seems even worse - heck, if there are actual menus to navigate it would be a menace. I don't want to have to win the video game in order to change the climate controls!
Google and other high tech companies around there pay quite good wages, which is why housing prices in that area are so high. Raising the wage further would only push housing prices higher. That's how economies work.
Well said. Google (and the rest of the big 5) pay just under $100k for kids right out of college - about double the US median wage for a first job!
Housing will always seek a price that's a multiple of the average family income in the region. There are plenty on 2-tech-earner families in Silly Valley, with a family income north of $200k, so a $880k price on an unimpressive house is what you'd expect.
I just rented an apartment with a commute I could tolerate. It was only $1800 for a large 2-bedroom, including a garage, and it had gas heating so utilities were quite low (a shorter commute would have added $500 to that). A similar place in a cheaper city ran me ~$1200, so I came out way ahead. You don't have to buy a house.
A truck? That's nuts. If you want to save every penny (a good plan), just get an apartment that's close to work and get a roommate. If you're grossing ~$8000/mo, paying ~$1200 for rent is hardly a burden.
That's odd - bit of my post vanished. Let's try again.
And, that is the big hole in gun laws. You can buy every part but that one. You only need to find a single part without registering so the process is too brittle. Like guns, drones need to have all of the important parts controlled.
Most parts of a rifle can be made from a shovel. No joke - there's a great photo blog on making an AK-47 from a shovel. The barrel must be hardened steel, but that's very low tech and people would start machining them if needed. The part that's registered (lower receiver) was chosen wisely: it's where most of the complexity goes.
And even then, machining one with a CnC mill just isn't that hard.
Anyhow, little purpose is served in registering guns in the first place, unless your agenda is to seize them all somewhere down the road (which is, of course the agenda of many - good luck with that, there are more private gun owners than active US soldiers).
And, that is the big hole in gun laws. You can buy every part but that one. You only need to find a single part without registering so the process is too brittle. Like guns, drones need to have all of the important parts controlled.
Most parts of a rifle can be made from a shovel. No joke - there's a great photo blog on making an AK-47 from a shovel. The barrel must be hardened steel, but that's very low tech and people would start mach(lower receiver) was chosen wisely: it's where most of the complexity goes.
And even then, machining one with a CnC mill just isn't that hard.
Anyhow, little purpose is served in registering guns in the first place, unless your agenda is to seize them all somewhere down the road (which is, of course the agenda of many - good luck with that, there are more private gun owners than active US soldiers).
And so what? Pollution is only a problem when the local concentration is high enough to do some harm. If there's only 1 engine within 30 miles in any direction, it can be quite dirty and yet the emissions still be dilute enough not to matter (especially if it's moving continuously).
About 1/3rd of the air pollution in San Francisco was emitted in China. That' a real problem. About 0% of the air pollution in San Francisco was emitted by ships moving to and from China. That's not a problem.
. Come on, Amazon... I only want to hear the experiences of people who purchased the product because they needed / wanted it. I couldn't care less about the opinion of someone who received the product just because they're considered a good reviewer in general - what a dumb concept!
Almost every video game review I've watched has been this case. The game company sends a free copy to the reviewer, because people watch that reviewer. I don't see any problem with tis as long as it's disclosed (and disclosed boldly, in a way no viewer could miss, which seems to be the legal requirement).
The ABL project apparently solve this well enough for in-atmosphere to in-atmosphere as considerable distance, for the specific problem of focusing laser weaponry. Everything's classified of course so I can't say for sure.
A focusing lens in a vacuum for a mere 20km just isn't that hard of a problem. Other problems will dominate, including finding the target in the first place if it's a stealth military sat and not a telecom sat. I rather suspect you could build a ground-based laser to take out a telecom sat, but I think we'd know if anyone had, so that orbit seems reasonably safe for now, short of nukes (which of course would get used in a real war, rendering this whole discussion moot).
The metric therefore *must* be a continuously differential, smooth, or real analytic function.
We don't have a good theory of quantum gravity. This is one of the problems with reconciling QM and GR that any such theory must explain. But current ideas include requiring entanglement between locations in space in order to have distance, or any positional relationship, and that makes some sense.
There is no *proven* physical significance to the Planck length. It is important in some models of quantum gravity
It's physical significance is that it's the minimum wavelength you can have without creating a black hole. Proven? Proof is for math, not science, but general relativity certainly seem solid.
Finally, 'Also, anything like that would have a grain that would be totally obvious' -- no. We know from observation that if spacetime is discretized the minimum length must be very small.
I'm not talking merely about "discretized", I'm talking about a "graph paper universe" with the discrete allowed loci lining up in neat rows and columns. Simple ideas about physics as cellular automata, or us being a simple VR simulation, require this. It's a bit of nonsense. and there are quite clever cellular automata models, and other "what is spacetime" models that don't require neat rows and columns, but rather irregular, spontaneously-formed, and somewhat random granularity.
There is nothing really *blocking* observations that would clearly distinguish between discreteness at the Planck scale and either discreteness at a smaller scale or even continuousness; we just don't have the observational tools to do that yet
Again, the whole "you can't make a wavelength that small without getting a black hole" thing is a solid blocker (the bigger issue is the energy density required in general for such fine-grained observations runs afoul of that limit). The Plank length is really quite small, after all - I'd be amazed if the universe isn't granular on some much larger scale. Plenty of room at the bottom.
Depends on how far "local" actually was, and how well maintained the "local" equipment vs the high-volume shippers. But, sure, if it's UPS either way, I don't see any difference. That itself is interesting, though, no?
My take-away is that driving to the store (vs package delivery) is the big mistake if you care about pollution, efficiency, and whatnot. The last mile dominates, and a shopping trip is an inefficient last mile.
Shipping by sea via large container ships is astonishingly efficient, which is the whole point here. (Plus, pollution at sea isn't a concern - it's already quite diluted, and there just aren't that many ships.) It seems reasonable that, per-pound, the ocean voyage take less energy than 100 miles on the road in a truck.
Wow, you found mathematically perfect lenses that do not have any surface imperfections?
Old tech, actually. Spy sat use lenses that change dynamically to compensate for the atmosphere, turbulence and all, in realtime. The same tech works fine for laser weaponry, and was part of the Airborne Laser plan. Merely being a good lens in a vacuum is easy by comparison. I suspect this isn't the limiting factor in hitting a satellite 20 km away with a laser - it's payload cost. I'd bet it's cheaper to get a payload to GEO than build a laser weapon capable of hitting a target like that with it's onboard guidance. The problems may all be solved, but's different from solved cheaply.
It still helps to have the high ground. Aircraft on the ground won't last long, but stealthy aircraft in the air are a hard target. Sats in low orbit, like spy sats, are easy to take down if you can find them. Medium orbit like GPS is more difficult - weapons that can reach them are in limited supply, high tech, and expensive. I'm not sure anyone but the US and Russia could take out GPS sats reliably in quantity (though many countries could now take out 1-2).
High orbit (GEO) sat are a different story. They take quite a bit of energy to reach, and taking them out is much like putting a sat in that orbit. How many GEO sats could we launch in a week? So far I haven't seen a "killer sat" designed for multiple targets (though I don't keep up with Jane's Fighting Spacecraft, or whatever it's called). You pretty much have to plan on a succession of orbital nukes to fry all the GEO sats, and now you have bigger problems.
"In the event that we had to go into a national emergency, we would probably have to shut the GPS down because it can be used by potential enemies," says retired Navy Capt. Terry Carraway.
Now granted, what you mention might be another reason to reteach celestial navigation. But you are flat wrong in your suggestion that they are not doing this in case they need to turn it off.
When the military discusses in public what they would do in times of enemy action, take it with a grain of salt, yes? It's not their job to accurate describe their plans to their enemies.
This post is a good example of what happens when someone thinks the current model is absolutely true. The map is the territory!
The current model will be wrong in ways that are consistent with existing observations. That doesn't leave room for a "graph-paper universe", nor for energy densities above which a black hole forms.
The "anyone who wants to pay" part is the problem. As soon as people can choose whether to pay or not (be they subscribers or advertisers), the BBC has to start tailoring their product to match the people making the choice to pay or not. As soon as that happens they have motivation to bias their reporting.
They already bias their reporting, so no flaw there. Maybe they'd change to a bias less in sync with your own? The world would keep turning. As far as all other programming, the more they make it appealing to viewers, the better.
Just to be clear, Planck units have no physical significance
False. The Plank length is the smallest length that it could be possible to measure by any method. Classical ideas of size and distance likely fail many orders of magnitude above the Plank length, but it's certain that a distance or length shorter or more precise than Plank length is non-physical.
It's the smallest scale at which a metric (from which concepts like "distance" and "length" come) makes physical sense. And from relativity we know that the Plank time is the same - no concept of "duration" makes physical sense at finer granularity than Plank time.
The Plank mass is likely unimportant, however, unless those String theorists are actually right about something for once. Color me skeptical.
However, none of this should be taken as justifying a view that the universe has a "frame rate" or could be described in terms of voxels. We know from relativity that those ideas also make no physical sense. (Also, anything like that would have a grain that would be totally obvious. There's no "special" directions at right angles to one another, no preferred physical axes.)
No true Progressive eh? I think you'll find the movement has been taken over. I wish you luck in restoring it, however. Even on Slashdot, it has become nearly impossible to have a civil discussion about the neo-puritans without being modded to oblivion. (It's driving my off/., frankly - this used to be a site where we could talk about things.)
What part of "subscription" sounded like "advertising" to you? They should charge the same 145/year fee as the tax, to anyone worldwide who wants to pay. Bit more than Netflix, but perhaps better content.
And don't kid yourself that the BBC is unbiased - they're biased in the way they choose to be, which is different.
I doubt responsible RC flying will be affected. When you're already following incredibly liability-paranoid rules, you're doing what the lawmakers may eventually force on others: no safety hazard, no privacy concerns, and most importantly, no embarrassing videos of police.
I like tits, ass, and tacky, so I don't see the issue. Taste is subjective, no? I remember when you'd get in trouble with the FCC for even the slightest hint of sexual innuendo - those were not better days! I stand firmly against any puritans, new flavor or old, who want censorship of sexual innuendo.
Yes, because the original poster was obviously against fun and enjoyment.
"Did you hear the joke about the feminist?" "That's not funny!"
You know, when I was a teen, the conservative Christians around me were quick to assure me that they weren't against fun and enjoyment. They just happened to find something objectionable in every activity we found fun and enjoyable - pure coincidence, I'm sure. This new crowd of non-religious puritans seems about the same to me. I suspect they, too, lie awake in bed worrying that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time. Also, this.
I never thought I'd switch to an e-reader, until the day I started saying "when did these fonts get so small? I can barely read this". I have much less eyestrain now with tablet since I can switch to a bigger font. I'm sure I'll switch to glasses eventually, at which point maybe I'll go back to my books.
Books take up quite a bit of space.
Tell me about it, I have ~1000 in my library, mostly hardbacks, and it's getting hard to justify an entire room just for bookshelves. I mean, it's cool and all, but not so practical.
My point is that non-empty destructors are an error-prone, repetitive, boilerplate process that you can just stop doing (aside from a small bit of library code). Your code will, as a result, be shorter and more clear, and stop leaking resources, even when junior coders are involved.
I think the point is that it sexually objectifies the women.
Yes, that's the obvious progressive nonsense. Ignoring that nonsense is the only road to happiness. People should have fun, and focus on interpretations of unimportant things that contribute to joy. Everything about that ad, to me, is something to be (a little) joyful about. Sexy women, good food, humor, all good stuff.
The opposite approach simply makes you perpetually unhappy. Finding an interpretation of every insignificant thing that you can be outraged about, that you find #problematic, seems to be the essence of modern progressivism, and it's deeply psychologically unhealthy! Seek joy in life, not outrage. Save the outrage for the big stuff that materially harms you - in any case no one will ever care to hear about the 100th thing you're outraged about.
Slashdot Mirror
It only take me a few milliseconds of glance to operate the center dash controls on my car by touch - volume, source select, temp, etc. Once my hand is in the right general area, the dash has a lot of tactile clues build in to guide my hand w/o looking and is safe to gently touch anywhere. I can fumble my way to the desired outcome quite reliably.
I used to have an Audi where all the dash controls were smooth and uniform - not a touch screen, just a stupid style decision. It was very distracting. To do anything required taking my eyes of the road for a few seconds. It never felt safe. An actual touch screen seems even worse - heck, if there are actual menus to navigate it would be a menace. I don't want to have to win the video game in order to change the climate controls!
Google and other high tech companies around there pay quite good wages, which is why housing prices in that area are so high. Raising the wage further would only push housing prices higher. That's how economies work.
Well said. Google (and the rest of the big 5) pay just under $100k for kids right out of college - about double the US median wage for a first job!
Housing will always seek a price that's a multiple of the average family income in the region. There are plenty on 2-tech-earner families in Silly Valley, with a family income north of $200k, so a $880k price on an unimpressive house is what you'd expect.
I just rented an apartment with a commute I could tolerate. It was only $1800 for a large 2-bedroom, including a garage, and it had gas heating so utilities were quite low (a shorter commute would have added $500 to that). A similar place in a cheaper city ran me ~$1200, so I came out way ahead. You don't have to buy a house.
A truck? That's nuts. If you want to save every penny (a good plan), just get an apartment that's close to work and get a roommate. If you're grossing ~$8000/mo, paying ~$1200 for rent is hardly a burden.
That's odd - bit of my post vanished. Let's try again.
And, that is the big hole in gun laws. You can buy every part but that one. You only need to find a single part without registering so the process is too brittle. Like guns, drones need to have all of the important parts controlled.
Most parts of a rifle can be made from a shovel. No joke - there's a great photo blog on making an AK-47 from a shovel. The barrel must be hardened steel, but that's very low tech and people would start machining them if needed. The part that's registered (lower receiver) was chosen wisely: it's where most of the complexity goes.
And even then, machining one with a CnC mill just isn't that hard.
Anyhow, little purpose is served in registering guns in the first place, unless your agenda is to seize them all somewhere down the road (which is, of course the agenda of many - good luck with that, there are more private gun owners than active US soldiers).
And, that is the big hole in gun laws. You can buy every part but that one. You only need to find a single part without registering so the process is too brittle. Like guns, drones need to have all of the important parts controlled.
Most parts of a rifle can be made from a shovel. No joke - there's a great photo blog on making an AK-47 from a shovel. The barrel must be hardened steel, but that's very low tech and people would start mach(lower receiver) was chosen wisely: it's where most of the complexity goes.
And even then, machining one with a CnC mill just isn't that hard.
Anyhow, little purpose is served in registering guns in the first place, unless your agenda is to seize them all somewhere down the road (which is, of course the agenda of many - good luck with that, there are more private gun owners than active US soldiers).
And so what? Pollution is only a problem when the local concentration is high enough to do some harm. If there's only 1 engine within 30 miles in any direction, it can be quite dirty and yet the emissions still be dilute enough not to matter (especially if it's moving continuously).
About 1/3rd of the air pollution in San Francisco was emitted in China. That' a real problem. About 0% of the air pollution in San Francisco was emitted by ships moving to and from China. That's not a problem.
. Come on, Amazon... I only want to hear the experiences of people who purchased the product because they needed / wanted it. I couldn't care less about the opinion of someone who received the product just because they're considered a good reviewer in general - what a dumb concept!
Almost every video game review I've watched has been this case. The game company sends a free copy to the reviewer, because people watch that reviewer. I don't see any problem with tis as long as it's disclosed (and disclosed boldly, in a way no viewer could miss, which seems to be the legal requirement).
The ABL project apparently solve this well enough for in-atmosphere to in-atmosphere as considerable distance, for the specific problem of focusing laser weaponry. Everything's classified of course so I can't say for sure.
A focusing lens in a vacuum for a mere 20km just isn't that hard of a problem. Other problems will dominate, including finding the target in the first place if it's a stealth military sat and not a telecom sat. I rather suspect you could build a ground-based laser to take out a telecom sat, but I think we'd know if anyone had, so that orbit seems reasonably safe for now, short of nukes (which of course would get used in a real war, rendering this whole discussion moot).
The metric therefore *must* be a continuously differential, smooth, or real analytic function.
We don't have a good theory of quantum gravity. This is one of the problems with reconciling QM and GR that any such theory must explain. But current ideas include requiring entanglement between locations in space in order to have distance, or any positional relationship, and that makes some sense.
There is no *proven* physical significance to the Planck length. It is important in some models of quantum gravity
It's physical significance is that it's the minimum wavelength you can have without creating a black hole. Proven? Proof is for math, not science, but general relativity certainly seem solid.
Finally, 'Also, anything like that would have a grain that would be totally obvious' -- no. We know from observation that if spacetime is discretized the minimum length must be very small.
I'm not talking merely about "discretized", I'm talking about a "graph paper universe" with the discrete allowed loci lining up in neat rows and columns. Simple ideas about physics as cellular automata, or us being a simple VR simulation, require this. It's a bit of nonsense. and there are quite clever cellular automata models, and other "what is spacetime" models that don't require neat rows and columns, but rather irregular, spontaneously-formed, and somewhat random granularity.
There is nothing really *blocking* observations that would clearly distinguish between discreteness at the Planck scale and either discreteness at a smaller scale or even continuousness; we just don't have the observational tools to do that yet
Again, the whole "you can't make a wavelength that small without getting a black hole" thing is a solid blocker (the bigger issue is the energy density required in general for such fine-grained observations runs afoul of that limit). The Plank length is really quite small, after all - I'd be amazed if the universe isn't granular on some much larger scale. Plenty of room at the bottom.
Depends on how far "local" actually was, and how well maintained the "local" equipment vs the high-volume shippers. But, sure, if it's UPS either way, I don't see any difference. That itself is interesting, though, no?
My take-away is that driving to the store (vs package delivery) is the big mistake if you care about pollution, efficiency, and whatnot. The last mile dominates, and a shopping trip is an inefficient last mile.
Shipping by sea via large container ships is astonishingly efficient, which is the whole point here. (Plus, pollution at sea isn't a concern - it's already quite diluted, and there just aren't that many ships.) It seems reasonable that, per-pound, the ocean voyage take less energy than 100 miles on the road in a truck.
Wow, you found mathematically perfect lenses that do not have any surface imperfections?
Old tech, actually. Spy sat use lenses that change dynamically to compensate for the atmosphere, turbulence and all, in realtime. The same tech works fine for laser weaponry, and was part of the Airborne Laser plan. Merely being a good lens in a vacuum is easy by comparison. I suspect this isn't the limiting factor in hitting a satellite 20 km away with a laser - it's payload cost. I'd bet it's cheaper to get a payload to GEO than build a laser weapon capable of hitting a target like that with it's onboard guidance. The problems may all be solved, but's different from solved cheaply.
It still helps to have the high ground. Aircraft on the ground won't last long, but stealthy aircraft in the air are a hard target. Sats in low orbit, like spy sats, are easy to take down if you can find them. Medium orbit like GPS is more difficult - weapons that can reach them are in limited supply, high tech, and expensive. I'm not sure anyone but the US and Russia could take out GPS sats reliably in quantity (though many countries could now take out 1-2).
High orbit (GEO) sat are a different story. They take quite a bit of energy to reach, and taking them out is much like putting a sat in that orbit. How many GEO sats could we launch in a week? So far I haven't seen a "killer sat" designed for multiple targets (though I don't keep up with Jane's Fighting Spacecraft, or whatever it's called). You pretty much have to plan on a succession of orbital nukes to fry all the GEO sats, and now you have bigger problems.
"In the event that we had to go into a national emergency, we would probably have to shut the GPS down because it can be used by potential enemies," says retired Navy Capt. Terry Carraway.
Now granted, what you mention might be another reason to reteach celestial navigation. But you are flat wrong in your suggestion that they are not doing this in case they need to turn it off.
When the military discusses in public what they would do in times of enemy action, take it with a grain of salt, yes? It's not their job to accurate describe their plans to their enemies.
This post is a good example of what happens when someone thinks the current model is absolutely true. The map is the territory!
The current model will be wrong in ways that are consistent with existing observations. That doesn't leave room for a "graph-paper universe", nor for energy densities above which a black hole forms.
The "anyone who wants to pay" part is the problem. As soon as people can choose whether to pay or not (be they subscribers or advertisers), the BBC has to start tailoring their product to match the people making the choice to pay or not. As soon as that happens they have motivation to bias their reporting.
They already bias their reporting, so no flaw there. Maybe they'd change to a bias less in sync with your own? The world would keep turning. As far as all other programming, the more they make it appealing to viewers, the better.
They tried that before, but some terrible fans^W pirates restored almost everything they broadcast.
Just to be clear, Planck units have no physical significance
False. The Plank length is the smallest length that it could be possible to measure by any method. Classical ideas of size and distance likely fail many orders of magnitude above the Plank length, but it's certain that a distance or length shorter or more precise than Plank length is non-physical.
It's the smallest scale at which a metric (from which concepts like "distance" and "length" come) makes physical sense. And from relativity we know that the Plank time is the same - no concept of "duration" makes physical sense at finer granularity than Plank time.
The Plank mass is likely unimportant, however, unless those String theorists are actually right about something for once. Color me skeptical.
However, none of this should be taken as justifying a view that the universe has a "frame rate" or could be described in terms of voxels. We know from relativity that those ideas also make no physical sense. (Also, anything like that would have a grain that would be totally obvious. There's no "special" directions at right angles to one another, no preferred physical axes.)
Progressive's strongly support free speech
No true Progressive eh? I think you'll find the movement has been taken over. I wish you luck in restoring it, however. Even on Slashdot, it has become nearly impossible to have a civil discussion about the neo-puritans without being modded to oblivion. (It's driving my off /., frankly - this used to be a site where we could talk about things.)
What part of "subscription" sounded like "advertising" to you? They should charge the same 145/year fee as the tax, to anyone worldwide who wants to pay. Bit more than Netflix, but perhaps better content.
And don't kid yourself that the BBC is unbiased - they're biased in the way they choose to be, which is different.
I doubt responsible RC flying will be affected. When you're already following incredibly liability-paranoid rules, you're doing what the lawmakers may eventually force on others: no safety hazard, no privacy concerns, and most importantly, no embarrassing videos of police.
I like tits, ass, and tacky, so I don't see the issue. Taste is subjective, no? I remember when you'd get in trouble with the FCC for even the slightest hint of sexual innuendo - those were not better days! I stand firmly against any puritans, new flavor or old, who want censorship of sexual innuendo.
Yes, because the original poster was obviously against fun and enjoyment.
"Did you hear the joke about the feminist?"
"That's not funny!"
You know, when I was a teen, the conservative Christians around me were quick to assure me that they weren't against fun and enjoyment. They just happened to find something objectionable in every activity we found fun and enjoyable - pure coincidence, I'm sure. This new crowd of non-religious puritans seems about the same to me. I suspect they, too, lie awake in bed worrying that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time. Also, this.
I never thought I'd switch to an e-reader, until the day I started saying "when did these fonts get so small? I can barely read this". I have much less eyestrain now with tablet since I can switch to a bigger font. I'm sure I'll switch to glasses eventually, at which point maybe I'll go back to my books.
Books take up quite a bit of space.
Tell me about it, I have ~1000 in my library, mostly hardbacks, and it's getting hard to justify an entire room just for bookshelves. I mean, it's cool and all, but not so practical.
You've seem to have missed my point.
My point is that non-empty destructors are an error-prone, repetitive, boilerplate process that you can just stop doing (aside from a small bit of library code). Your code will, as a result, be shorter and more clear, and stop leaking resources, even when junior coders are involved.
I think the point is that it sexually objectifies the women.
Yes, that's the obvious progressive nonsense. Ignoring that nonsense is the only road to happiness. People should have fun, and focus on interpretations of unimportant things that contribute to joy. Everything about that ad, to me, is something to be (a little) joyful about. Sexy women, good food, humor, all good stuff.
The opposite approach simply makes you perpetually unhappy. Finding an interpretation of every insignificant thing that you can be outraged about, that you find #problematic, seems to be the essence of modern progressivism, and it's deeply psychologically unhealthy! Seek joy in life, not outrage. Save the outrage for the big stuff that materially harms you - in any case no one will ever care to hear about the 100th thing you're outraged about.