My kids are now 7 and 8 years old. They've had PC's setup to watch cartoons on in bed via Windows Media Center since the age of 2. We bought some Xbox 360 Controllers for Windows and for games, the kids play the Lego games (star wars, harry potter,...) and my son as of late does a lot of surfing youtube for pokemon and video games stuff.
My wife wanted the kids to come in and cuddle a little before we woke up yesterday, but I asked her to give me a minute to get some underwear on since I think it's about time we start covering up at least a little more in the mornings. At least covering our lower privates. She agreed that it's getting a little odd. But in reality, the kids don't notice or care, in reality it's for our comfort as opposed to theirs now.
We still share showers and baths with the kids. It's no different then after swimming class when we're showering with the kids in the locker room. It's strictly a means of getting clean.
I am an American by birth and upbringing, but my entire adult life has been spent in Europe. So, in reality, I don't see myself as an American adult, though the fact that I still look away when a woman is breast feeding at a table at a coffee shop shows I'm not very European either. I'm really caught somewhere in-between.
Once I visited my parents in Florida and my sister and her kids were there, all the kids were between 2 and 5 years old. And when my mother suggested that my sister's daughter (age 3 at the time) was going to take a bath, I asked my son if he wanted to as well (he was 4) and immediately all the adults there (other than my wife and me) nearly panicked and stuttered out "Oh no. Not in this house!". So, my son had to wait his turn now that his hopes had been brought up that he'd get to play with the bubbles.
Well all that being said. I like the European way better. Kids don't think anything of nudity. They certainly don't understand sex, but generally they're not even concerned by it. If your kid Googles and ends up on a hardcore porn site, he/she will probably be on a different site in 10 seconds anyway. If they ask the question "what are they doing". Answer it responsibly with a "It's an odd thing big people do sometimes. Children aren't equipped for that". And gracefully move on. Don't show panic. Don't make it unnatural. If any damage were to come from this experience, it would be your behavior turning it into something more than it is.
As stuff for a 4 year old. Well, I'll say that things like Reader Rabbit are great. Learning games are fun for them. They seem lame to us, but games with songs and learning are great. For a bonus, if the Lego games will run on the netbook. I highly recommend them.
A massive number of stars in a given structure is a galaxy.
A massive number of... well everything from a single cosmic event is a universe.
I'm sick of gravitational theorists trying to suggest that while math says that a ray is a line drawn from a single point to an infinite distance in a single given direction. Though they say, when you reach the edge of the field of the universe, that no longer applies.
It seems logical that once you exceed the boundaries of our universe, there must be more space. In that space, our universe is just a speck of dust. I find it hard to believe that if 1 big bang occurred, there can't be an infinite number of other "big bangs" which have and ARE occurring. Given the scale of infinity, they can be happening multiple times a second. That's the great part of infinity, things are so damn big, that things like that are possible.
So, instead of talking about our universe like it's the only one out there, let's talk about other universes that ARE out there now. While I hate the abuse of Occam's Razor, I will misuse it now myself in the given context. The simpler theory to choke down is that in an infinite amount of space, it is likely that there is an infinite number of similar occurrences. In an infinite period of time, it is likely that there has been and will be an infinite number of similar occurrences within a given space.
Detailing the events during those other occurrences is likely impossible for the exact reason you mentioned which is the lack of ability to observe it.
P.P.S. If you really wanted to get nitric acid in, dilute some fertilizer, dip a pair of jeans in it. When they've dried, buy a plaid shirt and a pair of shit kickers. Head to the airport dressed like a farmer. It'll raise a flag, but they won't take your pants for it.
I apologize for overgeneralizing and respect I've been called for it.
I'll address the latter first. In this circumstance, the detonator is the device to detonate the explosives. It would be used to detonate an incendiary based on a remote or a timer. Not specifically in the respect of a high explosive. Simply, a method of causing a spark or flame to ignite the item without being present. Buy a remote control car, a watch, etc... headphone cables would be offer wires if needed.
Second, it is entirely legal and practical to purchase hydrogen peroxide in the pharmacy in the duty free area. If that is a "controlled substance" there are more than enough "first aid" products in the same store to provide a similar effect in lower concentration. As for obtaining oxidizing agents from within the traditional "duty free shop", I admit... I'm challenged to find one, but without digging to deep, I'd imagine that it's possible to find it in makeup removers, some toothpastes (in miniscule quantities), I have even seen personal coal/peroxide water filtering items to get modern day yuppies to be able to clean their bottled water with.
While I have not gone through the effort myself to actually try any of these devices. Nor have I seen the benefit in actually devising any one incendiary device based on the theory. But still, the products ARE there. It's a matter of finding them.
P.S. As for nitric acid... well yeh.. pretty sure you're going to have a hard time finding that. But thanks to the Googles I've done just looking for stuff now, I'm pretty sure I'm on a watch list now hehe.
Back before the 80's high school chemistry books often contained "fun kitchen chemistry" which would explain how to make explosives from items you could find in a kitchen or bathroom. Take a look sometime at the chemicals that are used to make perfumes and makeup. You'll find that you can make a large amount of low yield explosives quite easily using only what's found in duty free. A 2lb brick of low yield explosives is more than enough to breach the plane. But a detonator is still needed. That's no problem either, stop into the electronics store in duty free. You'll find everything you need right there.
If the security serves ANY purpose, that is to make the people who are likely to actually blow a plane up look nervous about it. The profiling kicks in. Of course, if the TSA is a big laughing joke, it'll be easier for these people to be calm and confident because unlike in the old days, when flight security was a little annoying but nothing really impeding, people didn't nitpick it on a global scale and make a joke of it.
What the TSA has done to their reputation has made it so that anyone who actually wants to bomb an airplane will simply walk through the scanners, head held high, buy what they need and bomb the plane they're targeting.
Like any short term contractor, a politician has to use at least part of the time while they're in their current position to line up their next position.
Once you get a contract which is paid a fixed rate no matter what your performance, it doesn't make too much difference what you do during that time. In a contractor position where your job is mostly about "networking" not networking, but "networking", in reality, as long as your talking with your friends and bitching about your enemies, you are in fact doing your job.
So, while you have this 2-6 year contract, you have the perfect opportunity to find what's next. Treat busting a teenager with coca chewing gum from Columbia as a major drug crime, advocate the need for coca chewing gum detectors in the airports and you can get an officer position at a security firm lined up with a limo and personal driver when you're done with your current job.
It makes no difference if you're democrat or republican. They're both so full of shit that they had to paint their offices brown so as not to worry about the splatter marks when they hit their desks in exclamation (while yelling at the inanimate object displaying the broadcast of a modern alternative to the Greek arenas).
The real bitch of it is, as the house grows, it becomes easier and easier for a politician to spend all their time on their next job because they can easily be lost in the crowd.
It's like saying I will only buy a car made in America by American labor, I'll buy a GM. You'd have been better off buying a Toyota. First mistake was saying American, that includes Canada, Mexico... hell the entire North and South American continents. But if you're looking for a car made in the U.S. by U.S. citizens, then you'd buy a Toyota, though if you wanted to play it real safe, you'd actually research it first and find out there are a handful for U.S. brands actually producing IN the U.S.. Otherwise you might end up with a car which is 95% manufactured in canada, mexico or china and the assembled in the U.S. by machines.
C# is a programming language. From a programmer with nearly 20 years of system level (meaning real code, none of this database and web stuff:)) programming experience, I can say that as a language C# is wonderful, I'd love to have a job programming in it if I could just find a company that isn't scared of it being a "microsoft language"..NET is another beast. It's big, it's nice, it's beautiful. I have written high bandwidth real-time video packetizers and even an H.261 CODEC in it using C#. I LOVE IT. It's fast as hell, it's efficient and it's just overall, a well written system.
There are of course two major problems with it.
1) It's made by Microsoft. I can live with this, there's mono and other environments.
2) Any piss-prick who can move a mouse and type their name can use it to pretend they're a programmer. Then they can go out and say "Hi I'm a.NET programmer" when in fact, they couldn't tell the difference between a linked list and a john deere tractor. There's a terrible reputation that builds when there's a programming language which anyone can use.
The fact is, a programmer doesn't need to know a specific language. He/She should find a job working for a good company with good people and a nice environment. The language shouldn't make much of a difference.
As for learning how to do programming for web back-ends on a specific platform, well that's a different story. It takes time and experience to learn how to do these things. You need to understand how the web works. But it's not rocket science. It's more important that he knows how to write good stored procedures, triggers, etc... glue languages (possible with the exception of Perl) are all the same. PHP is good language with the worst set of libraries ever. Perl is... bah... Python is just another language with a gazillion features... Ruby is well, it's a religion as opposed to a language, but it's ok for most things, C# and.NET is a very pleasing experience, but it's Microsoft. There's just no ideal solution.
The important thing though, is that ideals are great if you're looking to get a job like "Let's try and work at Red Cross so I can help suffering people around the world.", it's just sad and lame when it's like "I don't want to program for this bank because I'd be falling into a Microsoft trap".
Every Linux user will typically bitch about how now they have to open a Word doc... then... whether using OpenOffice, AbiWord, KWord, Google Docs, Office in VMWare, Office in Remote Desktop, office in Citrix application sharing, Office in Wine, doc2pdf etc... will simply open it.
If you're a Linux guy that's bought a motherboard and IS UPGRADING THE BIOS... then let's assume for the moment that you can figure out how to open up a Word document.
If you can't, then please pack the motherboard, return it to the store and go to Brookstones and buy a new toy to play with instead, like a 100Mhz, 64meg Android device.
It's like putting a state of the art lock on a glass door. It'll keep the "honest people" out during the hours which the store isn't open, but even if you were to put bars behind the glass, cameras in the shop, sharks in the moat, etc... the guy who wants to get in to take something when the store isn't closed will find another way. Digging a tunnel underground into the shop is more work, but all it really takes is a shovel.
CSS is cracked, AACS is cracked, BD-J is more or less cracked (it's sloppy though, a real crack shouldn't require evaluating and fixing for each new patch, but since you can simply disassemble the BD-J algorithm and make a patch in 10 minutes, it doesn't matter much), HDCP is cracked (though we don't have a proper device for it), Windows Media DRM is not cracked, but it's hacked. Apple DRM isn't even worth mentioning as Apple doesn't invest heavily in its development anymore. Flash DRM is still a challenge, but why would you bother with better streams available on other formats? Audible DRM is still in tact... more or less, but creative people can strip that pretty easily.
In short, DRM is entirely ineffective. All it's doing is making it a hair more inconvenient to pirate than to buy. The only practical option for the movie studios is to offer an easily downloadable version of their films in good enough quality to be competitive with Blu-Ray rips that can be reliable downloaded quickly. With only a little effort, they can add measures to make it inconvenient to simple give copies to other people.
I for one would purchase movies online (for a little less than a DVD in the store, as I wouldn't receive the disc and I'd know the middle man was cut out) if I could easily burn them to DVD and/or copy them to iPhone. Additionally, if I were to start doing this, then I can name 30 direct acquaintances who would do the same. This is because for a number of people, they don't adopt technology until the "smart computer guys" say that it's the way to go first.
Here in Norway, we still don't have Norwegian e-books. Well we do, but the selection is piss poor and the publishers here are being childish. For example, if you want to buy an audio book in Norwegian, you go to the store and instead of CDs you can purchase these "special media players" which are really cheap flash based MP3 players. You pay about $80-$150 a book and you can't even return the player when you're done. This is their way of offering with DRM. Sure, you still have the analog loophole, but since the device only plays back in real time, it can take 40 hours to copy a single book. So, we as consumers don't bother buying it and instead opt for the English version of the book from amazon, iTunes, etc...
You pointed out WinCE and Kin. Kin was a little special as it was sort-of a telephone entry. But Windows CE was never what I'd call an entry to the telephone market. It was a terrible disaster of what happens when you try and turn a PDA operating system into a phone operating system simply by adding a dialing application.
The WinCE thing was more of a misguided belief that what people really wanted was actually to be able to make calls from their PDA. They tried hundreds of ways to make it more telephony, but it was Apple who actually figured out that what users really wanted was a way to run computer programs on their phone.
Symbian was the same as WinCE, but they covered up so much of the PDA features that eventually all that was left was a phone with some games. The idea of adding applications was a "nice to have" kind of thing.
Palm... well I haven't even seen a Palm or a Blackberry in years. There's a huge store selling Blackberries out here in Oslo, but I've never seen anyone in there. I think it's mostly lawyer and other scary people who shop there. But either way, from what I've read and seen, Blackberry for most users is actually just an ideal SMS platform.
But, back to the initial point. Windows Phone 7 is the first time that Microsoft made a telephone offering. Everything up until now has been "Windows... With Phone" where this is "Windows Phone". Unfortunately for them, they spent all these years absolutely destroying their reputation as a phone company by doing it backwards. This time, they'll start off slow, build up buzz, work their way into the market, and do whatever they can to avoid getting creamed by the other two players (yes there's only two other players right now).
Microsoft's absolute biggest mistake during this release has been to place it as an iPhone/Android competitor. That's a huge mistake. They made all the buzz about it competing with platforms that have been shipping for years and have already build up market places. This will make whatever Microsoft comes to market with a huge disappointment.
IF Microsoft however takes their entire XBox development muscle and starts producing titles for the platform AND they build a strong applications unit, producing Microsoft titles and builds a strong Microsoft offering. Well, they'll be the ideal business phone for perfect integration with the Microsoft dominated office. They'll be the perfect platform for gamers (think Halo on the phone).
Fact is, if Microsoft does it right... and they damn well should be able to, (One trick is, don't let Steve Ballmer near marketing it, he's just not cool enough to sell cool) they can have the richest app store in no time. I don't mean the most populated, I mean the richest. They can have a higher average quality of content than anyone else.
I was leaning towards an evil military contractor launching a missile near the U.S. to scare the shit out of Californian's so they pressure the U.S. government to purchase more advanced missile detection and destruction systems.
I have heard of these Ad's and Ad-blockers, but I've never seen them.
When I buy a DVD or Blu-Ray, I put it in the computer, rip it to my server and then when it's done, I store the disc in a cold, dark place to keep it from getting destroyed. The ripper has this weird feature which basically just skips all that ad stuff and it usually works, but I just skip to over those annoying previews if it doesn't.
When I go to a web site, I read the article and if there's something annoying interfering with it, I simply read around it.
If there's some screen that pops up before getting to a web site, well, I just click the "click here to skip this junk" message.
I don't recall actually reading an ad (except sometimes when I get advertisements with nearly naked girls selling lingerie on facebook, but that's not really reading is it?) ever.
So... what's the big deal? I don't see why people are that offended by them. Really, ads target people with weak minds who are easily persuaded by the power of suggestion. And if you're one of them... I have a great deal for you.. just clic... wait ummm don't want to be part of the problem.
Leave the ads and let the republican voters living in their trailers keep paying for our internet and move on.
Frankly, as a former developer at Opera Software, I haven't personally used IE other than out of curiosity for years. My kids use it regularly though since their web games often don't run on anything else.
Frankly IE is still the browser targeted and tested by developers most often. Things are changing with the soon to come Web 2.0 (it's still not quite here) as people are coding less in EcmaScript directly and coding more in languages that actually compile to EcmaScript instead. Therefore the compilers/libraries/engines themselves are being altered to support all browsers as opposed to the developer needing to screw around to make it happen.
IE is still actively used because of many reasons. ActiveX being a huge one.
Browsers lack standardized support for:
- Sound (input and output)
- Video (input and output)
- 3D graphics
- focus control
- plug-ins that don't quash surrounding content.
- DRM for videos with content rights control
ActiveX while insecure as hell over the years was actually one of the best technologies ever introduced to the browser. Netscape plug-ins (and I personally added plug-in support to Opera for several platforms... and even MADE the NPAPI changes for them) was a dirty nasty hack. The only platform they weren't really trashy on was actually Mac Classic which didn't have OS level support for "windows". Developers simply had to draw to specific parts of a window, handle translation and clipping themselves. On other platforms we just instantiate a window and draw within it.
Interaction between the document model and the plugin was non-existant. Even now, it would be a massive improvement if plug-ins would be forced to simply execute by altering a canvas element, but there'd be no point to it as it wouldn't give you 3D or a high speed graphics context for raw video.
ActiveX resembled the Mac Classic model more closely and therefore ActiveX content became more "part of the page" and less "another application running in a section of a web page".
HTML5 brings us the video tag... which frankly sucks for anything but youtube like video... WITHOUT DRM which means you'll still need to use plug-ins to view content which has viewing restrictions. That means ActiveX friendly browsers will work best because of the aforementioned reasons. Plug-ins will still suck and make every web page where a plug-in is used right below a HTML based drop down menu unusable.
The canvas object and 3D canvas will solve many problems. This means most kids games will be able to be modified to play 3D games... mostly.
Graphics require sound and sound even in HTML5 is rudimentary at best. There needs to be a sound canvas element which offers support for multi-channel sound, audio filters, time-lining, the ability to cancel or apply mixing filters in real time to sound which should be stopped based on some event etc...
That means, it'll still be better to write games for Flash or using custom made plug-ins like the Unity3D player for games.
Performance is a huge issue in browsers for fancy development as well. I promise you that within 5 more years, EcmaScript will be the fastest runtime platform for any language. I mean that EcmaScript (not including DOM interaction) will be faster for every task than even C and C++ or often hand coded assembler... with the exception of cases where vectorization will be useful. This is because Google, Firefox, Opera and IE are all working like made to make the fastest environments for "web 2.0" related things. Their compilers are gaining the fastest code generators for each platform and rapidly gaining the fastest garbage collectors possible (this really does count and is where C and C++ generally lose as all memory management must be handled immediately).
In fact, even now, it would be incredibly effective to implement distributed tasks like Seti and Folding @home in a browser environment... if all that mattered was CPU (as opposed to vectorized code w
First of all, probability at an elementary and high school level is generally a matter of motion for nearly all students which take exams on it. If you doubt this, check out the massive number of people gambling online. The fact is, people don't grasp even the slightest concepts of probability in relationship to mathematics. People get excited over statements like "a 500% better chance to win!", but first of all, they don't ask "better than what?" and "what were the original chances". That 500% better chance actually just made it so that they still would have a better chance of getting hit by lightning... in their shower... in a sealed underground bunker... with water provided by an underground storage reserve.
There are many people who use probability for the majority of their decisions all day, every day but couldn't calculate the number of possible outcomes from a roll of a pair of dice. They don't understand probability, but they do survive based on subconscious decisions such as "If I start walking across the street now, the car driving at me will have a chance to see me, then will manage to stop in time to not turn me into roadkill". This is a probability related gamble, but it's based on experience as opposed to pure probability logic.
This is a topic that we often call common sense (or lack-thereof). Even an uneducated coal miner will teach it to his children. It is often something we learn through experience. If we actually took the time to calculate out whether the car will have a chance to stop or not, we could just wait for the car to pass instead... and the 50 cars following it.
I personally prefer that we focus more on boolean logic and discrete math with kids at a young age. Let us force them to learn how to think past a single level. The average person has the ability to identify cause and result at a single level, but can not cope with any complexity introduced by conditions when calculating a second level. For example "If I go to school today, I'll see my friend Jesse" is easy to understand. "If I skip school today AND wait beside the building on 3rd, but NOT between 1pm and 2pm when the principal passes there on his way to and from lunch, the I can see Jesse AND NOT have to take my math exam OR eat a terrible cafeteria lunch" is far more complex.
Demorgan's theorem is one of the most useful topics in solving daily life problems. We often waste a tremendous amount of time waiting for condition A and condition B to be true when we could instead take a moment to verify that either condition A or condition B are not true.
I have personally spent ages waiting to go do something because the person I'd like to go do it with insists on waiting for either two positive or two negative conditions to be true. When you try to explain the simple laws of logic to the person who is forcing you to wait, you might end up losing a friend for making them feel stupid over their flawed logic.
So, forget probability which is hopeless to teach anyone anyway and focus instead on logic which should be taught side by side with addition and subtraction from the time a child can write their names.
Even though we'll never really teach it to the people who never learn it at any age, it will teach them to subconsciously think more intelligently. Beat logic into their heads from a young age and maybe when they're making plans or decisions, they'll actually think things through a bit better without even knowing it.
That being said, as a father of a 7 and an 8 year old, I talk with teachers in schools, teachers who are parents etc... quite often. Some of these are even math teachers and frankly, I find that most teachers are utterly incapable of teaching logic to anyone since they haven't learned it themselves. Such and insanely easy topic is incredibly complex for the majority of people out there.
Given the era and what appears to be clothing for a cold season, let us hypothesize for a moment that old methods of survival have been forgotten with the advent of newer technology.
I have personally sewn the coils of a battery powered electric blanket into the lining of one of my jackets to make winter in Norway a bit more tolerable. I even ran some of them into the hood of the jacket. This keeps me nice and warm so long as the batteries last all through winter. I have the ability to run it on AA batteries as well as a few different rechargeable batteries. Thus far, I have had great success in temperatures well below zero degrees (you choose C or F).
If I were to stay warm on a old day in the 20's, while acid cells were in existence, they we huge, expensive, and frankly, not very powerful. The fact is, the warmth they might provide you would probably be gained just from the exertion of carrying enough of them to run the blanket jacket for 10 minutes. Let's also point out that nichrome wire was not being produced as of yet. So, if you happened to have a means of generating heat, it most likely was through an extremely heavy, wire wound resister. Again, not likely useful for flexibility.
Let us instead suggest that a few enterprising people who wanted to escape the heat would use the technology available and common for the era.
In this case, I suggest the popular method of heating a stone, a nice smooth one if you could find one, a chunk of coal if you couldn't in a cloth until it's cooled down so much that it no longer holds enough heat to be felt through the cloth. Then after it has cooled, you might remove it from the cloth. Given the quality of the clothing on the person, I suspect that it was likely that they might even have a nicely polished stone, maybe even a lava rock for the purpose. Based on modern prices, I suspect she might have paid the equivalent of $5 U.S. 2010 currency.
What's best is, next time she passed a stove, oven, etc... she might ask whoever was there to reheat her stone for her.
If you've ever enjoyed being out on a cold day, then you probably know that holding something nice and warm against your face can make the whole rest of your body feel warm for a little while.... well until you start freezing everywhere else that is:)
If you were an extra on a film set... and you knew you'd be out in the cold for some time. Wouldn't you like to be a little warmer?
instead of a Texan... he'd be on here trying to identify where I live to hunt me down and teach me the finer points of the Texan language.. which requires props produced by some guys names Smith and Wesson.
But, you seem to be offended that we would try and take something away from your identity by removing the name of your nation from a language which I for certain don't speak.
Think of it this way... do we call Norwegian Danish just because for the most part it comes from there, and people who speak Norwegian still understand Danish (sometimes) and vise versa? The Norwegians even spell almost everything identical to the Danes with the exception of changing a letter or two... it's common that a word in Danish is the same as the Norwegian word except the Danes will use the letter G where the Norwegians will use the letter K. It's similar to how I prefer color vs. you who prefers colour.
We speak extremely similar languages you and I. In fact, my dialect has been heavily influenced by your language because I have lived here in Norway which until recently has preferred the English descendant of our common tongue. Thanks to American TV (which I don't watch... though I don't want TV at all), the Internet, and the fact that Microsoft Word uses American by default, it appears that the Norwegian spoken version of the common tongue has become more similar to American as of late.
Language is not an identity. It's a means of communication. The "English" identity for the language does in fact impede it's adoption by.. what's the English word for people who don't eat "bangers and mash" or "spotted dicks" or "butties" and other sexual or anatomical components we shouldn't insert in our mouths? Was it savages? barbarians? I can't ever get that right.
Identification of a dialect of the common tongue is beneficial so people may understand the slight differences which can be dangerously misinterpreted.
For example, if you were in England and you announced you were "Going to smoke a fag". Someone might join you and offer you a light.
In Texas, again, a republican might join you.. and he'll offer to let you use his gun.
Your version of English chooses to use a great deal more verbs as nouns. For example, instead of using a Lifter, you use a Lift. We use a device which alters our elevation called an elevator. We eat "mashed potatoes", you eat "mash".
Additionally, you order a Joe Baxi... we don't even know who the hell that is.
Of course, we torture the hell our of our language as well, and unfortunately you have the poor luck of adopting many of our disasters thanks often to the existence of MTV and adolescents. I apologize deeply from my heart for the 30% of my countrymen who are not only literate, but also intentionally read more that just hunting publications and sports pages, assuming they'll allow me to represent them in this cause.
The fact is, the English and American languages are as different as the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish languages, yet we still call them the same thing. You an I still understand each other and may even adopt more similar traits of each others languages now that communication is easier. But we've have 200 years to evolve our languages in different directions and to suggest that the American dialects are in fact still English is highly offensive to me.
If we were to start suggesting a language should be named based on the geography of its roots, then we can just call it Danish and be done with it.
I'm a yank and I speak American which is a descendant of English. Thanks to language reform, it IS a different language and we can NOT share a common dictionary with England.
I have been to different parts of England quite a few times. People from Manchester, York, London, New Castle etc... not to mention Ireland with places like Cork (Zeus help us all), I am convinced that the only one left who speaks Queen's English is in fact the Queen and some other stuffed suits.
British itself isn't a language since British would refer to a common tongue spoken by the masses of people contained within even the tiny little area including England, Whales, Scotland, Northern Ireland (sorry for including you guys, it's geographical).
English as a language simply refers to a language group. Just like Great Britain is a name that linger from the days when England was an empire, but has little meaning anymore. There's just a powerless Queen on a powerless throne, recognized by a few countries who don't have to do anything except print her face on some money which they'd have to print anyway, but would spend LOTS more money designing if they had to think of something else to put on it.
English is simply a name which stuck with the language. While English and Norse were once a common tongue, understandable with a little effort by both people, the evolved differently. We now call Norse Icelandic (hehe) and we call English.. well English.
It may sound painfully nerdy, but it might be time for a movement to start referring to English as "Common" instead of English as the geographic connotation is obviously no longer applicable. Common would simply refer to a group of languages that are understandable by people on an international level. The group would include:
- Most forms of American (Louisianan, Texan and other forms of Redneck is probably not included)
- Most forms of English (New Castle and Manchester is not included)
- Some forms of Irish (Cork... well let's not talk about them)
- Some forms of Scottish (Don't know if that's a geographical thing)
- Most forms of Australian
- Singlish (Singaporean national language)
- Chinglish (English spoken with the lack of ability to reproduce sounds due to their lack of existence in Chinese, there are now more who speak it than there are American's who speak American, or English who speak English).
- Kenyan (which is actually what I feel is the cleanest dialect currently.)
- Kiwi (That's an awesome language)
- South African (Try living in a country so far removed from the rest of the "western world" for so long without eventually having your own language)
- MANY other English dialects which have arisen since the English language group has become the common International tongue.
Take a tiny little country like Norway for example. There are 4.7 million people here. They have scores if not hundreds of different dialects. There are THREE different written languages. Yet, they refer to Norwegian as a top level grouping which includes the two main languages. Beneath that, they clearly differentiate the dialects. Oslo is kind of like "Queen's English", but there's formed a great diversity in it due to half a million people speaking it now. Trondisk which refers to a language similarly difficult to understand as Texan is to Americans. Bergen and Stavanger which actually apply entirely new sounds and some new spellings to some words and have even reformed the correct spellings of some of them to coincide. There's an entirely different language which instead of looking a lot like Danish looks a great deal more similar to Swedish called Nynorsk and a bastardized offspring of that called Nunorsk.
I can go on for ages about the Norwegian languages, but the point being that while we call them all Norwegian (except for Lapp), they are in fact many different dialects which in some cases can be (and
On a DSL technology, if you can provide 100% of X at distance Y. Then you can provide z% of X at distance z% of Y...
Well not precisely, the loss of speed is at least logarithmic if not exponential as distance increases. There are tons of reasons for that, but DSL is theoretically provide maximum bandwidth at a specific speed based on copper installed in the 50's.
If you're in a location where the wiring is cat-5 instead of cat-3 (or worse, from the 50's), then your SnR is much higher over longer distances and therefore you can receive closer to the potential bandwidth of the circuit at longer ranges. If your provider has installed Cat-6 STP (some places have it), then you can get almost potential speed at much longer ranges... well assuming the shield is grounded.
So, if they can deliver 1 gigabit at 400m, then they should be able to offer 30Mbit at 3-4km.... MAYBE. Either way, it has very little to do with specific distances as opposed to specific SnR introduced from environmental factors (sadly line capacitance is one of them, and therefore distance IS a measurable factor).
The 30 up exists simply because it doesn't cost them anything extra to provide it. The fact is, they can oversell the up by a factor of 10 and probably no one would ever notice it. It's because 90% of all fiber traffic is downstream. That's because while there are some people who are sharing their entire movie and music collections with the masses, most people are watching youtube, hulu, etc...
So, while you get 30 up, and when connecting to others on the same provider's network, you're getting 30 up, the provider is simply throttling the overall up at their data center where they host servers for other businesses.
Remember the provider isn't paying for 10 terabit up and 500 gigabit down. They have a large group of switched fibers. They still run much of it over OC-(insert big number here) networks as Sonet is for the time being a hell of a lot easier to load balance and provide redundancy on than using massive Ethernet load balanced trunks.
So, what are they going to do with 9.5 terabits of unused upstream anyway?
Also remember that with the exception of P2P traffic, upstream between providers is becoming less important since Akamai, Google, etc... are distributing content all over the Internet anyway. If you're a provider with so much as 4U of rack space to spare, Google or Akamai will gladly install a caching server that will offload insane amounts of traffic from you. So if you have 100,000 users all watching the same viral video on youtube, after the first time it's viewed on your ISP, the video is probably located on a server at your ISP.
VDSL2, VDSL was crap which is why half baked solutions like SHDSL came into existence. If Slashdot guys can't get this right, then who is it providing information to the masses that for years talked about 3 and a quarter inch disks and call the computer "the cpu"?
And VDSL2,3,... is the short term future. Any time there's a nasty hack like DSL to cope with delivering over existing lines, at some point, it becomes necessary to replace the old, aging cables with something that is capable of lower noise. When this happens, I hope for your sake that they either replace it with fiber or 8-pair cat-6 (or better). Electrically isolated Ethernet is also a hack, but at least it's a clean hack. There just is no substitute for running a clean, environmentally secure solution like fiber.
For outdoor data requirements, fiber is the ONLY solution. When you stop demanding it, the service providers will start thinking you're happy with their hold-me over hacks.
Don't get me wrong... rocket science isn't my area, but I'd like to pretend I'm at least logical.
The way I see it, one way to Mars takes a few steps :
1) Design an build a means of travel from orbit to Mars.
2) Get the components of the ship into space and assemble them.
3) Transport a human to the ship and perform final testing
4) Break orbit and shoot for mars.
Each component of the ship can be design to be self assembling using small thrusters on the units and mechanical arms. With enough cameras, it can be remotely controlled at all times.
Each component should be small enough to be launched using normal satellite launch equipment. I was under the impression that the chinese and/or the indian's were doing this for $100,000 a pop now.
The hardest part is transporting enough fuel and water for the flight. I'd imagine that SpaceX can deal with this. As they'll have a "heavy lifter" ready for this specific purpose soon and they're cheap.
The cost is engineering and testing. You might have to send up 5-10 of these things and lost a bunch before you find a successful way to produce a proper airlock by using means of unmanned assembly. The size of the ship will be limited strictly by costs of launching. You can send up enough modules to make a mansion if you wanted.
Somehow I always pictured it would look something like Capsula. Each module would be big enough for a human to rotate freely on all axises in. The units would connect and disconnect, creating and/or breaking an airlock when doing so.
The life sustaining equipment would probably need to come from NASA guys since you'd need good air recycling equipment. Water recycling, etc.
As for getting to Mars, I don't see any reason this needs to be one way. For a billion, you should be able to launch enough water and food to make the return trip. Though I'd imagine that would be purely and orbital flight. But when you got back, you can resupply and send up more capsules, possibly including a means of landing and relaunch.
I'd imagine that a much better idea would be to attempt to make an orbit or 10 around Mars, launch something to land, recover soil samples, relaunch, meet back at the craft and head home.
NASA knows how to do things big... but I bet you give a few guys like John Carmack half a billion to work with, he'll make something spectacular.
Slashdot Mirror
My kids are now 7 and 8 years old. They've had PC's setup to watch cartoons on in bed via Windows Media Center since the age of 2. We bought some Xbox 360 Controllers for Windows and for games, the kids play the Lego games (star wars, harry potter, ...) and my son as of late does a lot of surfing youtube for pokemon and video games stuff.
My wife wanted the kids to come in and cuddle a little before we woke up yesterday, but I asked her to give me a minute to get some underwear on since I think it's about time we start covering up at least a little more in the mornings. At least covering our lower privates. She agreed that it's getting a little odd. But in reality, the kids don't notice or care, in reality it's for our comfort as opposed to theirs now.
We still share showers and baths with the kids. It's no different then after swimming class when we're showering with the kids in the locker room. It's strictly a means of getting clean.
I am an American by birth and upbringing, but my entire adult life has been spent in Europe. So, in reality, I don't see myself as an American adult, though the fact that I still look away when a woman is breast feeding at a table at a coffee shop shows I'm not very European either. I'm really caught somewhere in-between.
Once I visited my parents in Florida and my sister and her kids were there, all the kids were between 2 and 5 years old. And when my mother suggested that my sister's daughter (age 3 at the time) was going to take a bath, I asked my son if he wanted to as well (he was 4) and immediately all the adults there (other than my wife and me) nearly panicked and stuttered out "Oh no. Not in this house!". So, my son had to wait his turn now that his hopes had been brought up that he'd get to play with the bubbles.
Well all that being said. I like the European way better. Kids don't think anything of nudity. They certainly don't understand sex, but generally they're not even concerned by it. If your kid Googles and ends up on a hardcore porn site, he/she will probably be on a different site in 10 seconds anyway. If they ask the question "what are they doing". Answer it responsibly with a "It's an odd thing big people do sometimes. Children aren't equipped for that". And gracefully move on. Don't show panic. Don't make it unnatural. If any damage were to come from this experience, it would be your behavior turning it into something more than it is.
As stuff for a 4 year old. Well, I'll say that things like Reader Rabbit are great. Learning games are fun for them. They seem lame to us, but games with songs and learning are great. For a bonus, if the Lego games will run on the netbook. I highly recommend them.
A group of planets is a solar system
... well everything from a single cosmic event is a universe.
A massive number of stars in a given structure is a galaxy.
A massive number of
I'm sick of gravitational theorists trying to suggest that while math says that a ray is a line drawn from a single point to an infinite distance in a single given direction. Though they say, when you reach the edge of the field of the universe, that no longer applies.
It seems logical that once you exceed the boundaries of our universe, there must be more space. In that space, our universe is just a speck of dust. I find it hard to believe that if 1 big bang occurred, there can't be an infinite number of other "big bangs" which have and ARE occurring. Given the scale of infinity, they can be happening multiple times a second. That's the great part of infinity, things are so damn big, that things like that are possible.
So, instead of talking about our universe like it's the only one out there, let's talk about other universes that ARE out there now. While I hate the abuse of Occam's Razor, I will misuse it now myself in the given context. The simpler theory to choke down is that in an infinite amount of space, it is likely that there is an infinite number of similar occurrences. In an infinite period of time, it is likely that there has been and will be an infinite number of similar occurrences within a given space.
Detailing the events during those other occurrences is likely impossible for the exact reason you mentioned which is the lack of ability to observe it.
6000 "what" before cheese? Don't you know, there never was anything before cheese... well maybe misery!
A large company could distribute their new CA information via a login script. It sounds like this guy lacks that luxury.
P.P.S. If you really wanted to get nitric acid in, dilute some fertilizer, dip a pair of jeans in it. When they've dried, buy a plaid shirt and a pair of shit kickers. Head to the airport dressed like a farmer. It'll raise a flag, but they won't take your pants for it.
I apologize for overgeneralizing and respect I've been called for it.
I'll address the latter first. In this circumstance, the detonator is the device to detonate the explosives. It would be used to detonate an incendiary based on a remote or a timer. Not specifically in the respect of a high explosive. Simply, a method of causing a spark or flame to ignite the item without being present. Buy a remote control car, a watch, etc... headphone cables would be offer wires if needed.
Second, it is entirely legal and practical to purchase hydrogen peroxide in the pharmacy in the duty free area. If that is a "controlled substance" there are more than enough "first aid" products in the same store to provide a similar effect in lower concentration. As for obtaining oxidizing agents from within the traditional "duty free shop", I admit... I'm challenged to find one, but without digging to deep, I'd imagine that it's possible to find it in makeup removers, some toothpastes (in miniscule quantities), I have even seen personal coal/peroxide water filtering items to get modern day yuppies to be able to clean their bottled water with.
While I have not gone through the effort myself to actually try any of these devices. Nor have I seen the benefit in actually devising any one incendiary device based on the theory. But still, the products ARE there. It's a matter of finding them.
P.S. As for nitric acid... well yeh.. pretty sure you're going to have a hard time finding that. But thanks to the Googles I've done just looking for stuff now, I'm pretty sure I'm on a watch list now hehe.
Back before the 80's high school chemistry books often contained "fun kitchen chemistry" which would explain how to make explosives from items you could find in a kitchen or bathroom. Take a look sometime at the chemicals that are used to make perfumes and makeup. You'll find that you can make a large amount of low yield explosives quite easily using only what's found in duty free. A 2lb brick of low yield explosives is more than enough to breach the plane. But a detonator is still needed. That's no problem either, stop into the electronics store in duty free. You'll find everything you need right there.
If the security serves ANY purpose, that is to make the people who are likely to actually blow a plane up look nervous about it. The profiling kicks in. Of course, if the TSA is a big laughing joke, it'll be easier for these people to be calm and confident because unlike in the old days, when flight security was a little annoying but nothing really impeding, people didn't nitpick it on a global scale and make a joke of it.
What the TSA has done to their reputation has made it so that anyone who actually wants to bomb an airplane will simply walk through the scanners, head held high, buy what they need and bomb the plane they're targeting.
Like any short term contractor, a politician has to use at least part of the time while they're in their current position to line up their next position.
Once you get a contract which is paid a fixed rate no matter what your performance, it doesn't make too much difference what you do during that time. In a contractor position where your job is mostly about "networking" not networking, but "networking", in reality, as long as your talking with your friends and bitching about your enemies, you are in fact doing your job.
So, while you have this 2-6 year contract, you have the perfect opportunity to find what's next. Treat busting a teenager with coca chewing gum from Columbia as a major drug crime, advocate the need for coca chewing gum detectors in the airports and you can get an officer position at a security firm lined up with a limo and personal driver when you're done with your current job.
It makes no difference if you're democrat or republican. They're both so full of shit that they had to paint their offices brown so as not to worry about the splatter marks when they hit their desks in exclamation (while yelling at the inanimate object displaying the broadcast of a modern alternative to the Greek arenas).
The real bitch of it is, as the house grows, it becomes easier and easier for a politician to spend all their time on their next job because they can easily be lost in the crowd.
It's like saying I will only buy a car made in America by American labor, I'll buy a GM. You'd have been better off buying a Toyota. First mistake was saying American, that includes Canada, Mexico... hell the entire North and South American continents. But if you're looking for a car made in the U.S. by U.S. citizens, then you'd buy a Toyota, though if you wanted to play it real safe, you'd actually research it first and find out there are a handful for U.S. brands actually producing IN the U.S.. Otherwise you might end up with a car which is 95% manufactured in canada, mexico or china and the assembled in the U.S. by machines.
:)) programming experience, I can say that as a language C# is wonderful, I'd love to have a job programming in it if I could just find a company that isn't scared of it being a "microsoft language". .NET is another beast. It's big, it's nice, it's beautiful. I have written high bandwidth real-time video packetizers and even an H.261 CODEC in it using C#. I LOVE IT. It's fast as hell, it's efficient and it's just overall, a well written system.
.NET programmer" when in fact, they couldn't tell the difference between a linked list and a john deere tractor. There's a terrible reputation that builds when there's a programming language which anyone can use.
.NET is a very pleasing experience, but it's Microsoft. There's just no ideal solution.
C# is a programming language. From a programmer with nearly 20 years of system level (meaning real code, none of this database and web stuff
There are of course two major problems with it.
1) It's made by Microsoft.
I can live with this, there's mono and other environments.
2) Any piss-prick who can move a mouse and type their name can use it to pretend they're a programmer. Then they can go out and say "Hi I'm a
The fact is, a programmer doesn't need to know a specific language. He/She should find a job working for a good company with good people and a nice environment. The language shouldn't make much of a difference.
As for learning how to do programming for web back-ends on a specific platform, well that's a different story. It takes time and experience to learn how to do these things. You need to understand how the web works. But it's not rocket science. It's more important that he knows how to write good stored procedures, triggers, etc... glue languages (possible with the exception of Perl) are all the same. PHP is good language with the worst set of libraries ever. Perl is... bah... Python is just another language with a gazillion features... Ruby is well, it's a religion as opposed to a language, but it's ok for most things, C# and
The important thing though, is that ideals are great if you're looking to get a job like "Let's try and work at Red Cross so I can help suffering people around the world.", it's just sad and lame when it's like "I don't want to program for this bank because I'd be falling into a Microsoft trap".
Get real. Get a life.
Every Linux user will typically bitch about how now they have to open a Word doc... then... whether using OpenOffice, AbiWord, KWord, Google Docs, Office in VMWare, Office in Remote Desktop, office in Citrix application sharing, Office in Wine, doc2pdf etc... will simply open it.
If you're a Linux guy that's bought a motherboard and IS UPGRADING THE BIOS... then let's assume for the moment that you can figure out how to open up a Word document.
If you can't, then please pack the motherboard, return it to the store and go to Brookstones and buy a new toy to play with instead, like a 100Mhz, 64meg Android device.
It's like putting a state of the art lock on a glass door. It'll keep the "honest people" out during the hours which the store isn't open, but even if you were to put bars behind the glass, cameras in the shop, sharks in the moat, etc... the guy who wants to get in to take something when the store isn't closed will find another way. Digging a tunnel underground into the shop is more work, but all it really takes is a shovel.
CSS is cracked, AACS is cracked, BD-J is more or less cracked (it's sloppy though, a real crack shouldn't require evaluating and fixing for each new patch, but since you can simply disassemble the BD-J algorithm and make a patch in 10 minutes, it doesn't matter much), HDCP is cracked (though we don't have a proper device for it), Windows Media DRM is not cracked, but it's hacked. Apple DRM isn't even worth mentioning as Apple doesn't invest heavily in its development anymore. Flash DRM is still a challenge, but why would you bother with better streams available on other formats? Audible DRM is still in tact... more or less, but creative people can strip that pretty easily.
In short, DRM is entirely ineffective. All it's doing is making it a hair more inconvenient to pirate than to buy. The only practical option for the movie studios is to offer an easily downloadable version of their films in good enough quality to be competitive with Blu-Ray rips that can be reliable downloaded quickly. With only a little effort, they can add measures to make it inconvenient to simple give copies to other people.
I for one would purchase movies online (for a little less than a DVD in the store, as I wouldn't receive the disc and I'd know the middle man was cut out) if I could easily burn them to DVD and/or copy them to iPhone. Additionally, if I were to start doing this, then I can name 30 direct acquaintances who would do the same. This is because for a number of people, they don't adopt technology until the "smart computer guys" say that it's the way to go first.
Here in Norway, we still don't have Norwegian e-books. Well we do, but the selection is piss poor and the publishers here are being childish. For example, if you want to buy an audio book in Norwegian, you go to the store and instead of CDs you can purchase these "special media players" which are really cheap flash based MP3 players. You pay about $80-$150 a book and you can't even return the player when you're done. This is their way of offering with DRM. Sure, you still have the analog loophole, but since the device only plays back in real time, it can take 40 hours to copy a single book. So, we as consumers don't bother buying it and instead opt for the English version of the book from amazon, iTunes, etc...
You pointed out WinCE and Kin. Kin was a little special as it was sort-of a telephone entry. But Windows CE was never what I'd call an entry to the telephone market. It was a terrible disaster of what happens when you try and turn a PDA operating system into a phone operating system simply by adding a dialing application.
The WinCE thing was more of a misguided belief that what people really wanted was actually to be able to make calls from their PDA. They tried hundreds of ways to make it more telephony, but it was Apple who actually figured out that what users really wanted was a way to run computer programs on their phone.
Symbian was the same as WinCE, but they covered up so much of the PDA features that eventually all that was left was a phone with some games. The idea of adding applications was a "nice to have" kind of thing.
Palm... well I haven't even seen a Palm or a Blackberry in years. There's a huge store selling Blackberries out here in Oslo, but I've never seen anyone in there. I think it's mostly lawyer and other scary people who shop there. But either way, from what I've read and seen, Blackberry for most users is actually just an ideal SMS platform.
But, back to the initial point. Windows Phone 7 is the first time that Microsoft made a telephone offering. Everything up until now has been "Windows... With Phone" where this is "Windows Phone". Unfortunately for them, they spent all these years absolutely destroying their reputation as a phone company by doing it backwards. This time, they'll start off slow, build up buzz, work their way into the market, and do whatever they can to avoid getting creamed by the other two players (yes there's only two other players right now).
Microsoft's absolute biggest mistake during this release has been to place it as an iPhone/Android competitor. That's a huge mistake. They made all the buzz about it competing with platforms that have been shipping for years and have already build up market places. This will make whatever Microsoft comes to market with a huge disappointment.
IF Microsoft however takes their entire XBox development muscle and starts producing titles for the platform AND they build a strong applications unit, producing Microsoft titles and builds a strong Microsoft offering. Well, they'll be the ideal business phone for perfect integration with the Microsoft dominated office. They'll be the perfect platform for gamers (think Halo on the phone).
Fact is, if Microsoft does it right... and they damn well should be able to, (One trick is, don't let Steve Ballmer near marketing it, he's just not cool enough to sell cool) they can have the richest app store in no time. I don't mean the most populated, I mean the richest. They can have a higher average quality of content than anyone else.
I was leaning towards an evil military contractor launching a missile near the U.S. to scare the shit out of Californian's so they pressure the U.S. government to purchase more advanced missile detection and destruction systems.
Had to say it... after all if Jesus was immaculately conceived, maybe Mary was actually a boa constrictor!
I have heard of these Ad's and Ad-blockers, but I've never seen them.
When I buy a DVD or Blu-Ray, I put it in the computer, rip it to my server and then when it's done, I store the disc in a cold, dark place to keep it from getting destroyed. The ripper has this weird feature which basically just skips all that ad stuff and it usually works, but I just skip to over those annoying previews if it doesn't.
When I go to a web site, I read the article and if there's something annoying interfering with it, I simply read around it.
If there's some screen that pops up before getting to a web site, well, I just click the "click here to skip this junk" message.
I don't recall actually reading an ad (except sometimes when I get advertisements with nearly naked girls selling lingerie on facebook, but that's not really reading is it?) ever.
So... what's the big deal? I don't see why people are that offended by them. Really, ads target people with weak minds who are easily persuaded by the power of suggestion. And if you're one of them... I have a great deal for you.. just clic... wait ummm don't want to be part of the problem.
Leave the ads and let the republican voters living in their trailers keep paying for our internet and move on.
Frankly, as a former developer at Opera Software, I haven't personally used IE other than out of curiosity for years. My kids use it regularly though since their web games often don't run on anything else.
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Frankly IE is still the browser targeted and tested by developers most often. Things are changing with the soon to come Web 2.0 (it's still not quite here) as people are coding less in EcmaScript directly and coding more in languages that actually compile to EcmaScript instead. Therefore the compilers/libraries/engines themselves are being altered to support all browsers as opposed to the developer needing to screw around to make it happen.
IE is still actively used because of many reasons. ActiveX being a huge one.
Browsers lack standardized support for
- Sound (input and output)
- Video (input and output)
- 3D graphics
- focus control
- plug-ins that don't quash surrounding content.
- DRM for videos with content rights control
ActiveX while insecure as hell over the years was actually one of the best technologies ever introduced to the browser. Netscape plug-ins (and I personally added plug-in support to Opera for several platforms... and even MADE the NPAPI changes for them) was a dirty nasty hack. The only platform they weren't really trashy on was actually Mac Classic which didn't have OS level support for "windows". Developers simply had to draw to specific parts of a window, handle translation and clipping themselves. On other platforms we just instantiate a window and draw within it.
Interaction between the document model and the plugin was non-existant. Even now, it would be a massive improvement if plug-ins would be forced to simply execute by altering a canvas element, but there'd be no point to it as it wouldn't give you 3D or a high speed graphics context for raw video.
ActiveX resembled the Mac Classic model more closely and therefore ActiveX content became more "part of the page" and less "another application running in a section of a web page".
HTML5 brings us the video tag... which frankly sucks for anything but youtube like video... WITHOUT DRM which means you'll still need to use plug-ins to view content which has viewing restrictions. That means ActiveX friendly browsers will work best because of the aforementioned reasons. Plug-ins will still suck and make every web page where a plug-in is used right below a HTML based drop down menu unusable.
The canvas object and 3D canvas will solve many problems. This means most kids games will be able to be modified to play 3D games... mostly.
Graphics require sound and sound even in HTML5 is rudimentary at best. There needs to be a sound canvas element which offers support for multi-channel sound, audio filters, time-lining, the ability to cancel or apply mixing filters in real time to sound which should be stopped based on some event etc...
That means, it'll still be better to write games for Flash or using custom made plug-ins like the Unity3D player for games.
Performance is a huge issue in browsers for fancy development as well. I promise you that within 5 more years, EcmaScript will be the fastest runtime platform for any language. I mean that EcmaScript (not including DOM interaction) will be faster for every task than even C and C++ or often hand coded assembler... with the exception of cases where vectorization will be useful. This is because Google, Firefox, Opera and IE are all working like made to make the fastest environments for "web 2.0" related things. Their compilers are gaining the fastest code generators for each platform and rapidly gaining the fastest garbage collectors possible (this really does count and is where C and C++ generally lose as all memory management must be handled immediately).
In fact, even now, it would be incredibly effective to implement distributed tasks like Seti and Folding @home in a browser environment... if all that mattered was CPU (as opposed to vectorized code w
First of all, probability at an elementary and high school level is generally a matter of motion for nearly all students which take exams on it. If you doubt this, check out the massive number of people gambling online. The fact is, people don't grasp even the slightest concepts of probability in relationship to mathematics. People get excited over statements like "a 500% better chance to win!", but first of all, they don't ask "better than what?" and "what were the original chances". That 500% better chance actually just made it so that they still would have a better chance of getting hit by lightning... in their shower... in a sealed underground bunker... with water provided by an underground storage reserve.
There are many people who use probability for the majority of their decisions all day, every day but couldn't calculate the number of possible outcomes from a roll of a pair of dice. They don't understand probability, but they do survive based on subconscious decisions such as "If I start walking across the street now, the car driving at me will have a chance to see me, then will manage to stop in time to not turn me into roadkill". This is a probability related gamble, but it's based on experience as opposed to pure probability logic.
This is a topic that we often call common sense (or lack-thereof). Even an uneducated coal miner will teach it to his children. It is often something we learn through experience. If we actually took the time to calculate out whether the car will have a chance to stop or not, we could just wait for the car to pass instead... and the 50 cars following it.
I personally prefer that we focus more on boolean logic and discrete math with kids at a young age. Let us force them to learn how to think past a single level. The average person has the ability to identify cause and result at a single level, but can not cope with any complexity introduced by conditions when calculating a second level. For example "If I go to school today, I'll see my friend Jesse" is easy to understand. "If I skip school today AND wait beside the building on 3rd, but NOT between 1pm and 2pm when the principal passes there on his way to and from lunch, the I can see Jesse AND NOT have to take my math exam OR eat a terrible cafeteria lunch" is far more complex.
Demorgan's theorem is one of the most useful topics in solving daily life problems. We often waste a tremendous amount of time waiting for condition A and condition B to be true when we could instead take a moment to verify that either condition A or condition B are not true.
I have personally spent ages waiting to go do something because the person I'd like to go do it with insists on waiting for either two positive or two negative conditions to be true. When you try to explain the simple laws of logic to the person who is forcing you to wait, you might end up losing a friend for making them feel stupid over their flawed logic.
So, forget probability which is hopeless to teach anyone anyway and focus instead on logic which should be taught side by side with addition and subtraction from the time a child can write their names.
Even though we'll never really teach it to the people who never learn it at any age, it will teach them to subconsciously think more intelligently. Beat logic into their heads from a young age and maybe when they're making plans or decisions, they'll actually think things through a bit better without even knowing it.
That being said, as a father of a 7 and an 8 year old, I talk with teachers in schools, teachers who are parents etc... quite often. Some of these are even math teachers and frankly, I find that most teachers are utterly incapable of teaching logic to anyone since they haven't learned it themselves. Such and insanely easy topic is incredibly complex for the majority of people out there.
Given the era and what appears to be clothing for a cold season, let us hypothesize for a moment that old methods of survival have been forgotten with the advent of newer technology.
:)
I have personally sewn the coils of a battery powered electric blanket into the lining of one of my jackets to make winter in Norway a bit more tolerable. I even ran some of them into the hood of the jacket. This keeps me nice and warm so long as the batteries last all through winter. I have the ability to run it on AA batteries as well as a few different rechargeable batteries. Thus far, I have had great success in temperatures well below zero degrees (you choose C or F).
If I were to stay warm on a old day in the 20's, while acid cells were in existence, they we huge, expensive, and frankly, not very powerful. The fact is, the warmth they might provide you would probably be gained just from the exertion of carrying enough of them to run the blanket jacket for 10 minutes. Let's also point out that nichrome wire was not being produced as of yet. So, if you happened to have a means of generating heat, it most likely was through an extremely heavy, wire wound resister. Again, not likely useful for flexibility.
Let us instead suggest that a few enterprising people who wanted to escape the heat would use the technology available and common for the era.
In this case, I suggest the popular method of heating a stone, a nice smooth one if you could find one, a chunk of coal if you couldn't in a cloth until it's cooled down so much that it no longer holds enough heat to be felt through the cloth. Then after it has cooled, you might remove it from the cloth. Given the quality of the clothing on the person, I suspect that it was likely that they might even have a nicely polished stone, maybe even a lava rock for the purpose. Based on modern prices, I suspect she might have paid the equivalent of $5 U.S. 2010 currency.
What's best is, next time she passed a stove, oven, etc... she might ask whoever was there to reheat her stone for her.
If you've ever enjoyed being out on a cold day, then you probably know that holding something nice and warm against your face can make the whole rest of your body feel warm for a little while.... well until you start freezing everywhere else that is
If you were an extra on a film set... and you knew you'd be out in the cold for some time. Wouldn't you like to be a little warmer?
Thanks to people like Hillary Clinton, I'm convinced that there are at least several percent of the women in the U.S. with cocks to punch.
(btw... I actually like her)
instead of a Texan... he'd be on here trying to identify where I live to hunt me down and teach me the finer points of the Texan language.. which requires props produced by some guys names Smith and Wesson.
But, you seem to be offended that we would try and take something away from your identity by removing the name of your nation from a language which I for certain don't speak.
Think of it this way... do we call Norwegian Danish just because for the most part it comes from there, and people who speak Norwegian still understand Danish (sometimes) and vise versa? The Norwegians even spell almost everything identical to the Danes with the exception of changing a letter or two... it's common that a word in Danish is the same as the Norwegian word except the Danes will use the letter G where the Norwegians will use the letter K. It's similar to how I prefer color vs. you who prefers colour.
We speak extremely similar languages you and I. In fact, my dialect has been heavily influenced by your language because I have lived here in Norway which until recently has preferred the English descendant of our common tongue. Thanks to American TV (which I don't watch... though I don't want TV at all), the Internet, and the fact that Microsoft Word uses American by default, it appears that the Norwegian spoken version of the common tongue has become more similar to American as of late.
Language is not an identity. It's a means of communication. The "English" identity for the language does in fact impede it's adoption by.. what's the English word for people who don't eat "bangers and mash" or "spotted dicks" or "butties" and other sexual or anatomical components we shouldn't insert in our mouths? Was it savages? barbarians? I can't ever get that right.
Identification of a dialect of the common tongue is beneficial so people may understand the slight differences which can be dangerously misinterpreted.
For example, if you were in England and you announced you were "Going to smoke a fag". Someone might join you and offer you a light.
In Texas, again, a republican might join you.. and he'll offer to let you use his gun.
Your version of English chooses to use a great deal more verbs as nouns. For example, instead of using a Lifter, you use a Lift. We use a device which alters our elevation called an elevator. We eat "mashed potatoes", you eat "mash".
Additionally, you order a Joe Baxi... we don't even know who the hell that is.
Of course, we torture the hell our of our language as well, and unfortunately you have the poor luck of adopting many of our disasters thanks often to the existence of MTV and adolescents. I apologize deeply from my heart for the 30% of my countrymen who are not only literate, but also intentionally read more that just hunting publications and sports pages, assuming they'll allow me to represent them in this cause.
The fact is, the English and American languages are as different as the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish languages, yet we still call them the same thing. You an I still understand each other and may even adopt more similar traits of each others languages now that communication is easier. But we've have 200 years to evolve our languages in different directions and to suggest that the American dialects are in fact still English is highly offensive to me.
If we were to start suggesting a language should be named based on the geography of its roots, then we can just call it Danish and be done with it.
Well, I don't know what the hell he asked.
:
I'm a yank and I speak American which is a descendant of English. Thanks to language reform, it IS a different language and we can NOT share a common dictionary with England.
I have been to different parts of England quite a few times. People from Manchester, York, London, New Castle etc... not to mention Ireland with places like Cork (Zeus help us all), I am convinced that the only one left who speaks Queen's English is in fact the Queen and some other stuffed suits.
British itself isn't a language since British would refer to a common tongue spoken by the masses of people contained within even the tiny little area including England, Whales, Scotland, Northern Ireland (sorry for including you guys, it's geographical).
English as a language simply refers to a language group. Just like Great Britain is a name that linger from the days when England was an empire, but has little meaning anymore. There's just a powerless Queen on a powerless throne, recognized by a few countries who don't have to do anything except print her face on some money which they'd have to print anyway, but would spend LOTS more money designing if they had to think of something else to put on it.
English is simply a name which stuck with the language. While English and Norse were once a common tongue, understandable with a little effort by both people, the evolved differently. We now call Norse Icelandic (hehe) and we call English.. well English.
It may sound painfully nerdy, but it might be time for a movement to start referring to English as "Common" instead of English as the geographic connotation is obviously no longer applicable. Common would simply refer to a group of languages that are understandable by people on an international level. The group would include
- Most forms of American (Louisianan, Texan and other forms of Redneck is probably not included)
- Most forms of English (New Castle and Manchester is not included)
- Some forms of Irish (Cork... well let's not talk about them)
- Some forms of Scottish (Don't know if that's a geographical thing)
- Most forms of Australian
- Singlish (Singaporean national language)
- Chinglish (English spoken with the lack of ability to reproduce sounds due to their lack of existence in Chinese, there are now more who speak it than there are American's who speak American, or English who speak English).
- Kenyan (which is actually what I feel is the cleanest dialect currently.)
- Kiwi (That's an awesome language)
- South African (Try living in a country so far removed from the rest of the "western world" for so long without eventually having your own language)
- MANY other English dialects which have arisen since the English language group has become the common International tongue.
Take a tiny little country like Norway for example. There are 4.7 million people here. They have scores if not hundreds of different dialects. There are THREE different written languages. Yet, they refer to Norwegian as a top level grouping which includes the two main languages. Beneath that, they clearly differentiate the dialects. Oslo is kind of like "Queen's English", but there's formed a great diversity in it due to half a million people speaking it now. Trondisk which refers to a language similarly difficult to understand as Texan is to Americans. Bergen and Stavanger which actually apply entirely new sounds and some new spellings to some words and have even reformed the correct spellings of some of them to coincide. There's an entirely different language which instead of looking a lot like Danish looks a great deal more similar to Swedish called Nynorsk and a bastardized offspring of that called Nunorsk.
I can go on for ages about the Norwegian languages, but the point being that while we call them all Norwegian (except for Lapp), they are in fact many different dialects which in some cases can be (and
On a DSL technology, if you can provide 100% of X at distance Y. Then you can provide z% of X at distance z% of Y...
Well not precisely, the loss of speed is at least logarithmic if not exponential as distance increases. There are tons of reasons for that, but DSL is theoretically provide maximum bandwidth at a specific speed based on copper installed in the 50's.
If you're in a location where the wiring is cat-5 instead of cat-3 (or worse, from the 50's), then your SnR is much higher over longer distances and therefore you can receive closer to the potential bandwidth of the circuit at longer ranges. If your provider has installed Cat-6 STP (some places have it), then you can get almost potential speed at much longer ranges... well assuming the shield is grounded.
So, if they can deliver 1 gigabit at 400m, then they should be able to offer 30Mbit at 3-4km.... MAYBE. Either way, it has very little to do with specific distances as opposed to specific SnR introduced from environmental factors (sadly line capacitance is one of them, and therefore distance IS a measurable factor).
The 30 up exists simply because it doesn't cost them anything extra to provide it. The fact is, they can oversell the up by a factor of 10 and probably no one would ever notice it. It's because 90% of all fiber traffic is downstream. That's because while there are some people who are sharing their entire movie and music collections with the masses, most people are watching youtube, hulu, etc...
So, while you get 30 up, and when connecting to others on the same provider's network, you're getting 30 up, the provider is simply throttling the overall up at their data center where they host servers for other businesses.
Remember the provider isn't paying for 10 terabit up and 500 gigabit down. They have a large group of switched fibers. They still run much of it over OC-(insert big number here) networks as Sonet is for the time being a hell of a lot easier to load balance and provide redundancy on than using massive Ethernet load balanced trunks.
So, what are they going to do with 9.5 terabits of unused upstream anyway?
Also remember that with the exception of P2P traffic, upstream between providers is becoming less important since Akamai, Google, etc... are distributing content all over the Internet anyway. If you're a provider with so much as 4U of rack space to spare, Google or Akamai will gladly install a caching server that will offload insane amounts of traffic from you. So if you have 100,000 users all watching the same viral video on youtube, after the first time it's viewed on your ISP, the video is probably located on a server at your ISP.
VDSL2, VDSL was crap which is why half baked solutions like SHDSL came into existence. If Slashdot guys can't get this right, then who is it providing information to the masses that for years talked about 3 and a quarter inch disks and call the computer "the cpu"?
And VDSL2,3,... is the short term future. Any time there's a nasty hack like DSL to cope with delivering over existing lines, at some point, it becomes necessary to replace the old, aging cables with something that is capable of lower noise. When this happens, I hope for your sake that they either replace it with fiber or 8-pair cat-6 (or better). Electrically isolated Ethernet is also a hack, but at least it's a clean hack. There just is no substitute for running a clean, environmentally secure solution like fiber.
For outdoor data requirements, fiber is the ONLY solution. When you stop demanding it, the service providers will start thinking you're happy with their hold-me over hacks.
Don't get me wrong... rocket science isn't my area, but I'd like to pretend I'm at least logical.
The way I see it, one way to Mars takes a few steps :
1) Design an build a means of travel from orbit to Mars.
2) Get the components of the ship into space and assemble them.
3) Transport a human to the ship and perform final testing
4) Break orbit and shoot for mars.
Each component of the ship can be design to be self assembling using small thrusters on the units and mechanical arms. With enough cameras, it can be remotely controlled at all times.
Each component should be small enough to be launched using normal satellite launch equipment. I was under the impression that the chinese and/or the indian's were doing this for $100,000 a pop now.
The hardest part is transporting enough fuel and water for the flight. I'd imagine that SpaceX can deal with this. As they'll have a "heavy lifter" ready for this specific purpose soon and they're cheap.
The cost is engineering and testing. You might have to send up 5-10 of these things and lost a bunch before you find a successful way to produce a proper airlock by using means of unmanned assembly. The size of the ship will be limited strictly by costs of launching. You can send up enough modules to make a mansion if you wanted.
Somehow I always pictured it would look something like Capsula. Each module would be big enough for a human to rotate freely on all axises in. The units would connect and disconnect, creating and/or breaking an airlock when doing so.
The life sustaining equipment would probably need to come from NASA guys since you'd need good air recycling equipment. Water recycling, etc.
As for getting to Mars, I don't see any reason this needs to be one way. For a billion, you should be able to launch enough water and food to make the return trip. Though I'd imagine that would be purely and orbital flight. But when you got back, you can resupply and send up more capsules, possibly including a means of landing and relaunch.
I'd imagine that a much better idea would be to attempt to make an orbit or 10 around Mars, launch something to land, recover soil samples, relaunch, meet back at the craft and head home.
NASA knows how to do things big... but I bet you give a few guys like John Carmack half a billion to work with, he'll make something spectacular.