Determining whether a finite state system is in an inconsistent state is not equivalent to solving the halting problem. Consistency is defined by a set of invariants which must remain true at all times. If you evaluate the invariants after the change, and they're not true, you have to back out the change. Database systems do this routinely.
So what if database systems do this. The internal rules of database systems are many, many orders of magnitude fewer and simpler than the full software and hardware configuration of a modern desktop computer. You really believe it would be possible to create a ruleset to prevent inconsistencies arising from interdependencies of all software and hardware? You're either a troll or someone with no concept of the complixity of modern hardware and software.
So what are these mystery Windows video files that don't work?
Here's one example of Windows video playing annoyances...
The newest Windows Media Player (that comes with W2k, 7.0) outputs DV video (the kind that comes from almost every digital camcorder, not exactly uncommon) in half size (360x288), which looks like crap. If you try to double the size, it just scales the 360x288 frames and the quality still sucks ass. You have to run "mplayer2", which starts the older version (6.4) (why the hell is it called "mplayer2"?), and there you can configure the DV codec to output the full resolution. It still won't work on the newer player, though. Now, if you want to play an DV encoded AVI, you'll have to remember to select "Open with->Windows Media Player", not "Open with->Microsoft(R) Windows Media Player" (which is the newer player that doesn't work right).
This was on my laptop. On my desktop, DV audio codec has disappeared somewhere, dvd-compliant MPEG-2 files won't play (WMP goes looking for a suitable codec, doesn't find it), and DV avi files crash the WMP on exit, but this is just on my system, not a general issue. I'd just like to know what the hell broke these, and how to fix them. Currently I have to boot to Linux to play MPEG-2 files with mplayer...
To add to that, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't even be in Afganistan if Gore were president.
Huh? Clinton (and Gore as his VP) started a war against Serbia and sent US planes to bomb (among others) civilian targets, without UN approval, and without US being under a threat of any kind. How do you figure Gore wouldn't have gone to Afghanistan after 9/11? And do you even know how little actual troops US had and has in Afghanistan? Hint: it wasn't western forces that rolled into Kabul after defeating Taliban.
The individuals being held indefinitely without trial were apprehended while trying to kill American soldiers "because Allah told them to."
A great deal of them are being held because Afghans heard that Americans were paying cash for arabs, so they went and rounded up some arabs and sold them to Americans. Hell, if everyone trying to kill American soldiers was sent to Cuba, even a hundred Guantanamos wouldn't be enough. Not to mention that it wouldn't make much sense.
>>We have all but demolished any army that would justify the comanche
> Russia, Iran, China, France, Germany?
Large, industrialized countries that US can not defeat Iraq-style with minimal loss of life are never going to be US's enemies, no matter what kind of WMDs they field and how many dissidents they kill (witness US's warm relations with China, even while China's ICBM are pointed to US cities and talk of democracy is a ticket to re-education camp). US will happily pretend that they could defeat even all off those countries anytime, if they just wanted, though.
You have to be almost directly behind AND above an A10 to get a good IR sig... Not likely if you are on the ground.
It's been many years, true... modern SAMs have a better probability of kill when fired from the front (it's easier to meet than to chase). Of course, if the ancient tail-chasing crap is what you're going against, the A10 is just fine...
Actually, the bit about Soviets bankrupting themselves by increasing their military budgets to match US's increases happens to be made up. That didn't happen. They kept their military spending pretty much constant.
The new centrist party will easily capture 60% of most votes.
Isn't this pretty much what has happened in the UK? I'm not an expert on this, but I've gotten the impression that the Labour stepped closer to the middle and pressed the Conservatives into the margins. This won't make the people on the right edge happy, but at least they have a party unlike the people on the left edge...
If you think of the political spectrum of the voters as a gaussian curve (I wonder if this is accurate?) it's clear that in a two-party system the party that is closer to one extreme than the other party is going to lose, since the other will catch more voters from the middle, where the bulk of the are. So it's in the both parties' interests to stay close to the center. But if one of them moves closer to the center, and the other moves closer to the edge to differentiate itself... Maybe this is the way to break the two-party system?
On the other hand, the same applies to multiparty systems too, to an extent. Any party far from the center will find itself in the opposition time after time, while other parties closer to each other form coalition goverments.
I seriously believe that implimenting a system such as this is the best way to get out of the Kang "Go ahead, throw your vote away." mentality about 3rd party candidates that America seems to have.
Maybe, but the power to turn the current two-party system into a multiparty-system rests in the hands of the two parties in power. Why on earth would they give any power away, ever? There's about as much chance of a two-party system going multiparty as a one-party system going two-party, i.e. none (barring revolution).
I take it that you have never tried to shoot down an RC airplane? (I have.) I wouldn't count on "easily" hitting anything that small with an M16, and tens, not hundreds of yards is more like the realistic range of hearing an electric model in most realistic environments.
Lots of people on/. seem to think that russia is still communist... Well they aren't!
Could be because only early last year we got news about the first russian city starting to charge people the real housing costs... They really didn't move away from communism (socialism really) quite so fast as some people think.
Russia today is as ultra capitalist as you can get (i.e the rich/powerful are in complete control).
Really? How come Khodorkovsky and his fellow oligarchs from Yukos and other companies are rotting in jail then?
The Russian rocket classes can handle somewhere between 550 kg to 950 kg, with proposed models that could have handled 4000 kg (into LEO only) scrapped for financial reasons.
Where did you pull these numbers from? Energia, which they used as their shuttle booster, could lift 95-100 tons to LEO. This flew for the first time in 1987 and they have at least one mothballed, even if there haven't been recent launches. The smaller Proton rockets, used for Soyuz launches, can lift 20 tons to LEO.
I suggest you get one of those electric mosquito killers. You know, the ones that look like small tennis rackets. Extremely satisfying devices. Just one minute in a swarm of mosquitoes with one of those is equivalent of more than a quarter of hour of gibbing people in an FPS. The only bad part is the smell made by the exploding mosquitoes.
Nevertheless, a sonic gun with an area effect would be sweet...
I've also been thinking of a small radar-directed laser system. I, too, really hate the little buggers...
Understatement of the day! The LEDs have very slowly been creeping past the lumens/watt rating of incandescent bulbs. The new fancy 5-watt LEDs are sold with a disclaimer saying approzimately "do not try to use without thorough understanding of required heatsink technology"...
There may not be one correct date format, but any
format in which the values are not in ascending or descending order is so wrong it ought to be taken behind the sauna and shot.
We've never lived in a Democracy. We've always lived in a Constitutional Republic.
...which is the same as Representational Democracy, which is a subclass of Democracy. The Direct Democracy being the other main subclass, which has been just a historical curiosity for centuries now.
Drum scans of 35mm film is often done at 4k resolution, so very closely matching the 4064x2704ish resolution of 11 megapixel cameras, but the film itself generally can't hold details that fine.
Well, that's wrong. 4000 dpi resolution scan of 35mm film is around 6k by 4k pixels, i.e. 24 megapixels, not 11. I agree that it's pretty hard to put more detail than that on a 35mm film frame, but 11 mpix can be beat with slow, high-resolution film, quality optics and a good tripod.
While the EU probably has the most convulted and bloated bureaucracy on the planet,
...right after just about every national government in existence... The member states pay about 1% of their GDP to EU, and about 5% of that goes to EU administration.
Did you know why they changed the smaller, divided back window on the Beetle into a larger one?
So that it would be easier to see the progress passing it by!
(badabing!)
How would I cut a decimetre-wide piece into centimetres?
Duh. Mark it in centimetre-wide intervals with a ruler and cut it. Remember to take the width of the cuts into account. You need inch-wide segments, and the saw cuts are 3/32 inch wide: how many segments do you get from a foot-wide board? Real easy, huh?
There are very easy ways to estimate a half or third quite accurately, but I am aware of none to estimate a fifth.
Divide by ten and then double. Now you know.
The standard system, used as it was for millennia, was optimised for use, for manipulation of concrete amounts. The French system was optimised for conversion between units. The one is needed daily
Now this is just nonsense. Dividing neat round measurements like 5 feet/meters or 3 gallons/liters in integer fractions is something I very, very rarely need. Whether I'm making a cake or a table, I have a recipe or a blueprint and set of raw ingredients. Of these ingredients I need to measure the parts needed for the finished product. Almost never have I needed to divide the raw materials with some integer fraction. Instead I measure and then cut. Units of measure not being related by a factor of ten is nothing but a nuisance here.
TVO in Finland just signed a deal to buy a nuclear power plant from french-german Framatom. It is scheduled to come online in 2009. If some countries aren't building them, it's not for fiscal or technical reasons. The reasons are political and social.
The red area is the spread of radiation from Chernobyl after the meltdown.
So? I live in a (western) country with one of the blackest areas of that picture, and what we had was something like temporary restrictions on eating wild mushrooms. Big deal.
Now you CANNOT say that something of that magnitude only caused a handful of deaths.
That picture tells you NOTHING about the "magnitude" of this event. Where's the scale of dosage vs. color? Where's the background radiation readings for comparison? Besides, it really looks like it came out of photoshop, not real data.
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So what if database systems do this. The internal rules of database systems are many, many orders of magnitude fewer and simpler than the full software and hardware configuration of a modern desktop computer. You really believe it would be possible to create a ruleset to prevent inconsistencies arising from interdependencies of all software and hardware? You're either a troll or someone with no concept of the complixity of modern hardware and software.
Here's one example of Windows video playing annoyances...
The newest Windows Media Player (that comes with W2k, 7.0) outputs DV video (the kind that comes from almost every digital camcorder, not exactly uncommon) in half size (360x288), which looks like crap. If you try to double the size, it just scales the 360x288 frames and the quality still sucks ass. You have to run "mplayer2", which starts the older version (6.4) (why the hell is it called "mplayer2"?), and there you can configure the DV codec to output the full resolution. It still won't work on the newer player, though. Now, if you want to play an DV encoded AVI, you'll have to remember to select "Open with->Windows Media Player", not "Open with->Microsoft(R) Windows Media Player" (which is the newer player that doesn't work right).
This was on my laptop. On my desktop, DV audio codec has disappeared somewhere, dvd-compliant MPEG-2 files won't play (WMP goes looking for a suitable codec, doesn't find it), and DV avi files crash the WMP on exit, but this is just on my system, not a general issue. I'd just like to know what the hell broke these, and how to fix them. Currently I have to boot to Linux to play MPEG-2 files with mplayer...
Huh? Clinton (and Gore as his VP) started a war against Serbia and sent US planes to bomb (among others) civilian targets, without UN approval, and without US being under a threat of any kind. How do you figure Gore wouldn't have gone to Afghanistan after 9/11? And do you even know how little actual troops US had and has in Afghanistan? Hint: it wasn't western forces that rolled into Kabul after defeating Taliban.
A great deal of them are being held because Afghans heard that Americans were paying cash for arabs, so they went and rounded up some arabs and sold them to Americans. Hell, if everyone trying to kill American soldiers was sent to Cuba, even a hundred Guantanamos wouldn't be enough. Not to mention that it wouldn't make much sense.
My god! You're right, it's a conspiracy! Naming military hardware after big furry animals is going to bring the Fourth Reich!
> Russia, Iran, China, France, Germany?
Large, industrialized countries that US can not defeat Iraq-style with minimal loss of life are never going to be US's enemies, no matter what kind of WMDs they field and how many dissidents they kill (witness US's warm relations with China, even while China's ICBM are pointed to US cities and talk of democracy is a ticket to re-education camp). US will happily pretend that they could defeat even all off those countries anytime, if they just wanted, though.
Fine, fine. But who the is US protecting the rest of the world from? Aliens?
You really think that if the rest of the world had more guns, US would then need less? Right...
It's been many years, true... modern SAMs have a better probability of kill when fired from the front (it's easier to meet than to chase). Of course, if the ancient tail-chasing crap is what you're going against, the A10 is just fine...
Actually, the bit about Soviets bankrupting themselves by increasing their military budgets to match US's increases happens to be made up. That didn't happen. They kept their military spending pretty much constant.
Isn't this pretty much what has happened in the UK? I'm not an expert on this, but I've gotten the impression that the Labour stepped closer to the middle and pressed the Conservatives into the margins. This won't make the people on the right edge happy, but at least they have a party unlike the people on the left edge...
If you think of the political spectrum of the voters as a gaussian curve (I wonder if this is accurate?) it's clear that in a two-party system the party that is closer to one extreme than the other party is going to lose, since the other will catch more voters from the middle, where the bulk of the are. So it's in the both parties' interests to stay close to the center. But if one of them moves closer to the center, and the other moves closer to the edge to differentiate itself... Maybe this is the way to break the two-party system?
On the other hand, the same applies to multiparty systems too, to an extent. Any party far from the center will find itself in the opposition time after time, while other parties closer to each other form coalition goverments.
Maybe, but the power to turn the current two-party system into a multiparty-system rests in the hands of the two parties in power. Why on earth would they give any power away, ever? There's about as much chance of a two-party system going multiparty as a one-party system going two-party, i.e. none (barring revolution).
I take it that you have never tried to shoot down an RC airplane? (I have.) I wouldn't count on "easily" hitting anything that small with an M16, and tens, not hundreds of yards is more like the realistic range of hearing an electric model in most realistic environments.
Could be because only early last year we got news about the first russian city starting to charge people the real housing costs... They really didn't move away from communism (socialism really) quite so fast as some people think.
Russia today is as ultra capitalist as you can get (i.e the rich/powerful are in complete control).
Really? How come Khodorkovsky and his fellow oligarchs from Yukos and other companies are rotting in jail then?
Where did you pull these numbers from? Energia, which they used as their shuttle booster, could lift 95-100 tons to LEO. This flew for the first time in 1987 and they have at least one mothballed, even if there haven't been recent launches. The smaller Proton rockets, used for Soyuz launches, can lift 20 tons to LEO.
I suggest you get one of those electric mosquito killers. You know, the ones that look like small tennis rackets. Extremely satisfying devices. Just one minute in a swarm of mosquitoes with one of those is equivalent of more than a quarter of hour of gibbing people in an FPS. The only bad part is the smell made by the exploding mosquitoes.
Nevertheless, a sonic gun with an area effect would be sweet...
I've also been thinking of a small radar-directed laser system. I, too, really hate the little buggers...
Understatement of the day! The LEDs have very slowly been creeping past the lumens/watt rating of incandescent bulbs. The new fancy 5-watt LEDs are sold with a disclaimer saying approzimately "do not try to use without thorough understanding of required heatsink technology"...
There may not be one correct date format, but any format in which the values are not in ascending or descending order is so wrong it ought to be taken behind the sauna and shot.
My vote will be for the version where Han shoots first.
Watch him not care.
Well, that's wrong. 4000 dpi resolution scan of 35mm film is around 6k by 4k pixels, i.e. 24 megapixels, not 11. I agree that it's pretty hard to put more detail than that on a 35mm film frame, but 11 mpix can be beat with slow, high-resolution film, quality optics and a good tripod.
Did you know why they changed the smaller, divided back window on the Beetle into a larger one?
So that it would be easier to see the progress passing it by!
(badabing!)
Duh. Mark it in centimetre-wide intervals with a ruler and cut it. Remember to take the width of the cuts into account. You need inch-wide segments, and the saw cuts are 3/32 inch wide: how many segments do you get from a foot-wide board? Real easy, huh?
There are very easy ways to estimate a half or third quite accurately, but I am aware of none to estimate a fifth.
Divide by ten and then double. Now you know.
The standard system, used as it was for millennia, was optimised for use, for manipulation of concrete amounts. The French system was optimised for conversion between units. The one is needed daily
Now this is just nonsense. Dividing neat round measurements like 5 feet/meters or 3 gallons/liters in integer fractions is something I very, very rarely need. Whether I'm making a cake or a table, I have a recipe or a blueprint and set of raw ingredients. Of these ingredients I need to measure the parts needed for the finished product. Almost never have I needed to divide the raw materials with some integer fraction. Instead I measure and then cut. Units of measure not being related by a factor of ten is nothing but a nuisance here.
TVO in Finland just signed a deal to buy a nuclear power plant from french-german Framatom. It is scheduled to come online in 2009. If some countries aren't building them, it's not for fiscal or technical reasons. The reasons are political and social.
So? I live in a (western) country with one of the blackest areas of that picture, and what we had was something like temporary restrictions on eating wild mushrooms. Big deal.
Now you CANNOT say that something of that magnitude only caused a handful of deaths.
That picture tells you NOTHING about the "magnitude" of this event. Where's the scale of dosage vs. color? Where's the background radiation readings for comparison? Besides, it really looks like it came out of photoshop, not real data.