Every GUI since the multi-button mouse was invented has functions to reassign dynamically the function of each button. Apple's problem is that they are still groping with the concept that a mouse can have more than one button.
Someone tell this guy about "noise" and "filters" and the like. On or off. That's a good one, lol.
All right. A digital signal can be thought of as an analog signal plus a "quantization noise" that's the equivalent of the difference between the digital and analog signals.
When you filter out the noise from the digital signal you have the analog signal back. The interesting part is that it you can shape the noise so that it can be perfectly filtered out of the digital signal.
In other words, that old "wisdom" that analog signals have infinite precision, while digital signals are limited by their resolution is not so true as it may seem. With correct digital signal processing, a digital signal can be just as exact as the equivalent analog signal.
Yes, it is. Electromagnetic compatibility is as sophisticated and advanced as it gets in engineering. I know because I have worked in aerospace for 25 years and have had training in this field.
I don't see how flight avionics, which also have to be hardened against increased cosmic radiation and RFI from operating closer to the ionosphere, are so sensitive to relatively low power transmitters.
Had you read the article, you would have seen this quote by Dr. Bill Strauss: "... Mr. Strauss said the deterioration of planes and devices over time had not been taken into account.'A plane is designed to the right specs, but nobody goes back and checks if it is still robust,' he said. 'Then there are the outliers - a cell phone thats been dropped and abused, or a battery that puts out more than its supposed to, and avionics that are more susceptible to interference because gaskets have failed. And boom, thats where you get interference. It would be a perfect storm that would combine to create an aviation accident.' "
I used to fly light single and multi-prop planes and used to use the phone during flight. Even made a few experiments about this and in no way I could induce any of these simple systems to misbehave by using the phone near them. Some of the planes I tried this on were 20some years old, so no new equipment either.
This means that the simple systems by themselves are not vulnerable.
I used to shoot at ducks and geese with a shotgun. I never hit any.
This means duck and geese are not vulnerable to gun shots. Right?
The precautions against electronic equipment on board do not mean every electronic gadget is dangerous in every circumstance. What they mean is that in some cases there could be some danger and the possible consequences of this could mean death for everyone aboard.
You must take into account the worst possible consequences of something in order to evaluate the needed precautions. That's why smart people wear safety belts and condoms.
There's those specialist industrial shredders designed just for disk drives that reduce them to a small heap of granules.
A cheaper alternative would be a flowerpot and some charcoal. Or they could send them to a commercial aluminium recycler to make it look more profesional.
In both cases it took a long search and rescue operation to find the remains. By your "radioactive stuff" theory it should have been trivial, just look where the sea shines from beneath.
So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house
What kind of country are we talking about here? One the size of China? One the size of the UK?
One that's proportional to the size of the house. There's more difference in house sizes than the difference between China and the UK.
Make it a severe offense to tailgate and you get the same solution
It would not be the same solution because the road would me more crowded overall.
Assume one person doing 55 starts passing another doing 54. In order to avoid tailgating altogether, everybody in a long stretch would have to slow down. If someone is driving slowly in front of you, you have to drive even slower until the space between your cars increase to a safe distance. The driver behind you would be forced to drive slower than you to get the same safe distance between you and him. And so on, the rest follows by induction.
Do the math and find how many drivers who are "safe" by the "tailgaters are evil" principle it takes for the traffic to stop completely.
The tailgaters and aggressive drivers are the ones who cause fatalities.
It takes two to tailgate, a tailgater and a tailgatee. As I said, accidents usually aren't caused by one single cause, in most cases if just one of a set of circumstances didn't happen there would be no accident.
The driver who starts a tailgating incident is the one who drives slowly on the left lane. If you want to blame only *one* person, blame the one who started it all.
I agree with what you said, but disagree about the ethics. I think it's wrong that so much money gets channeled into sports.
For one thing, sports get boring when there's so much competition by sports equipment manufacturers. Records get broken by milliseconds because one of the guys used a special polymer in his shoe or something like that. That's not an athletics competition, that's a competition on which corporation can rake in more money to invest in gear that will bring no benefits to anyone. What's the point in paying $300 extra for a pair of shoes that will let you shave a thousandth of a second from your 100 meter run?
Another problem with sports paying so much is that many young people become hypnotized with that and start believing sports could be a wise career choice. Millionaire athletes are a small minority, most professionals in sports struggle to find employment as coaches after their short career is over.
In the end, sports broadcasting is faced with two conflicting rights. On one hand there's the right of the owners to charge for the images of the event. On the other hand there's the right of people to transmit and watch events that interest them.
If sports broadcasting were free, there would be no "sport" bars, any bar could have a TV. Bars would have no need to charge extra for that TV, customers would benefit from that. The only losers would be team owners and their associations like the NFL. If the NFL isn't happy with not being millionaires, good for them. Let them find some other business to do and let less greedy people play football.
Usually, too much importance is given to the immediate cause of an accident. Most accidents don't happen due to a single cause, there's a number of circumstances that must exist together for an accident to happen.
In modern highways, the usual circumstance for most accidents is crowded lanes. The usual cause for crowded lanes is a few dumbasses of the i-hate-tailgaters-and-i-have-the-right-to-drive-at-any-speed-below-the-limit species.
Make it a severe offense, same penalties as drunken driving, to drive on the left lane with someone behind you and those "80% accidents" will go away.
What in the world will the climate change doomsayers have to say when CO2...A DANGEROUS GAS is used and taken out of the atmosphere...
I guess mostly they will complain about boring news. Nothing exciting happening, like hurricanes, floods, droughts. No sharks swimming down Main Street. There will be mild summers and winters, no extreme temperatures without the atmosphere receiving that extra energy kick from CO2.
My netbook came with Xandros installed, works flawlessly.
I've been considering installing Netbuntu for some time now, since Debian Etch, on which Xandros is based, is becoming quite old. There are a few apps for which I would like new versions, but what the hell, Xandros works so nicely in that small, cheap, machine...
One local example (I'm near Houston) was a guy being considered suspicious because he was walking down a long road that people rarely walk along, never mind there was a sidewalk there.
In some places people have always been considered suspicious if they have a flat nose, dark skin, and curly hair. 9/11 or no 9/11, that's against the constitution. A police officer cannot pull a car over if there is no probable cause for it. He cannot ask for your ID without probable cause.
The way police officers routinely act today in the USA is like Osama has won. He has terrorized a whole nation for ten years now. It's time to stop that bullshit. Th only problem is how. Any ideas?
don't matter if government controls the media or the "interest groups" control both media and government, in both cases the average public opinion will be whatever they say.
What you say is that democracy is impossible because people are so easy to manipulate. It doesn't matter which system you have, there will always be people who are better than others to manipulate opinions, you just have to live with that.
Democracy is not about the government doing what *I* think is right, but what the majority of the people think is right. Public opinion is volatile, that's correct, but this does not mean that everybody who manipulates public opinion is a dictator.
in neither of them you are truly free, and im not so sure which is the worst.
I'm truly free in a libertarian capitalistic system, one where the market is as free as possible. I'm free to do exactly as I want, but my actions might be constrained by other people.
For example, I run Linux in my computer. Microsoft does its best to have no computers in the world running Linux. They succeeded in eliminating Linux from netbooks. Was Microsoft's action against my interests? Certainly. Was Asus' action in eliminating Linux from their computers against my interests? Certainly. Was any of those actions undemocratic in any way? Certainly not.
I'm conscious that my opinion may be different from the majority and I'm ready to live with the consequences of that. It's in the best interest of any major corporation to cater mostly to what the majority of the people are willing to buy, no one is forced to produce something customized to my taste.
A truly free society is not one in which everyone has a different opinion on everything. A truly free society is one in which everyone *may* have a different opinion from anyone else on any topic.
In the end, you either have a legally free system, where everyone can do as they wish, even if they do exactly what everyone else is doing, or you have a legally contrained society, where everyone has to follow rules. In this case, there's an additional contraint in who makes the rules.
I have absolutely no doubt that the free system is infinitely better. You may feel in your smug superiority that the stupid masses are swayed this way or that by the clever manipulators, but in the end if you believe that you don't truly believe in democracy. You are just resentful that you aren't one of the manipulators.
Funny on that travel advice on Cuba... Cuba has one of the world's lowest crime rates.
Still trust your government to inform you about reasons you might not want to go to other countries?
So, let me get this straight: you do not believe what the US government says about Cuba, but you do believe what the Cuban government says about themselves?
At least, in the USA if the government says something and someone disagrees he can find a privtely funded paper to publish his version of the facts.
Cuba could have the highest or the lowest crime rate in the world, it doesn't matter since the only version that will be published there is the government's.
You can have a dictatorship with a capitalistic economic system, but no democracy has ever survived very long without capitalism. You cannot have an opposition when the government is the only supplier for everything. Try to publish a paper where you have to buy all your ink, paper, printing presses, everything, from the government.
Find a distribution that contains g77. Or compile g77 from source for your target platform.
A perfect example of the tail wagging the dog. So we now need to maintain ourselves a compiler just to support the old software?
gfortran goes out of its way to compile old g77 code.
But it doesn't have the -fvxt option.
Learn to use the tools properly instead of bitching about them. Modern Fortran gives you the facilities to replace almost all VAXisms.
I was talking about a 40 years old software, created at an aerospace company that ceased to exist long ago. AFAIK the history of this software, it ran in a PDP11/44 in the late 1970s when it was migrated to VAX. It's a bit too late now to complain about it being non-standard.
As for learning to use the tools, the big question is what are the best tools? In recent years I've been teaching all new engineers Python. SciPy is the best environment today for engineering and scientific software development.
And that's the reason why I think experience shouldn't be rewarded by itself. A young engineer who knows SciPy can run circles around an old Fortran guy developing new software. If you need faster execution speed, give the Python code to a programmer who will implement the kernel functions in C.
I was programming in Fortran long before you were born.
Since I was born before the first Fortran compiler was delivered, I doubt it.
Compliant F77 still compiles perfectly in an F90 compiler. Or, to put it more bluntly, it's no fault of Fortran that you've tried to bring bad code with you.
No, the fault of Fortran is that the standard needs so many extensions to work in the real world.
For engineering work in the 1980s, VAX-Fortran *was* the standard, it was what everybody used.
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consider what they'd be able to do if your mouse could reconfigure itself on the fly.
Like what? Grow new buttons?
Every GUI since the multi-button mouse was invented has functions to reassign dynamically the function of each button. Apple's problem is that they are still groping with the concept that a mouse can have more than one button.
Someone tell this guy about "noise" and "filters" and the like. On or off. That's a good one, lol.
All right. A digital signal can be thought of as an analog signal plus a "quantization noise" that's the equivalent of the difference between the digital and analog signals.
When you filter out the noise from the digital signal you have the analog signal back. The interesting part is that it you can shape the noise so that it can be perfectly filtered out of the digital signal.
In other words, that old "wisdom" that analog signals have infinite precision, while digital signals are limited by their resolution is not so true as it may seem. With correct digital signal processing, a digital signal can be just as exact as the equivalent analog signal.
Traditionally, the title assumed by the leader of China is Chairman, not President.
EMF/RFI shielding isn't rocket science
Yes, it is. Electromagnetic compatibility is as sophisticated and advanced as it gets in engineering. I know because I have worked in aerospace for 25 years and have had training in this field.
I don't see how flight avionics, which also have to be hardened against increased cosmic radiation and RFI from operating closer to the ionosphere, are so sensitive to relatively low power transmitters.
Had you read the article, you would have seen this quote by Dr. Bill Strauss:
"... Mr. Strauss said the deterioration of planes and devices over time had not been taken into account.'A plane is designed to the right specs, but nobody goes back and checks if it is still robust,' he said. 'Then there are the outliers - a cell phone thats been dropped and abused, or a battery that puts out more than its supposed to, and avionics that are more susceptible to interference because gaskets have failed. And boom, thats where you get interference. It would be a perfect storm that would combine to create an aviation accident.' "
I used to fly light single and multi-prop planes and used to use the phone during flight. Even made a few experiments about this and in no way I could induce any of these simple systems to misbehave by using the phone near them. Some of the planes I tried this on were 20some years old, so no new equipment either.
This means that the simple systems by themselves are not vulnerable.
I used to shoot at ducks and geese with a shotgun. I never hit any.
This means duck and geese are not vulnerable to gun shots. Right?
The precautions against electronic equipment on board do not mean every electronic gadget is dangerous in every circumstance. What they mean is that in some cases there could be some danger and the possible consequences of this could mean death for everyone aboard.
You must take into account the worst possible consequences of something in order to evaluate the needed precautions. That's why smart people wear safety belts and condoms.
There's those specialist industrial shredders designed just for disk drives that reduce them to a small heap of granules.
A cheaper alternative would be a flowerpot and some charcoal. Or they could send them to a commercial aluminium recycler to make it look more profesional.
In 1963 a nuclear submarine was lost and another in 1968.
In both cases it took a long search and rescue operation to find the remains. By your "radioactive stuff" theory it should have been trivial, just look where the sea shines from beneath.
So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house
What kind of country are we talking about here? One the size of China? One the size of the UK?
One that's proportional to the size of the house. There's more difference in house sizes than the difference between China and the UK.
I don't think this will work for naming a planet.
Minnie was fucking Goofy, but it was Pluto who got the planet name, and now it's not even a planet anymore.
Or give the cars away for free but charge for service :)
Last time I tried that they threw the DMCA at me, so I had to go back to selling cars and charging for non-existent service.
Formerly Uranus, astronomers renamed this planet in 2620 "to end that stupid joke once and for all.
The joke will never end as long as there are assholes who enjoy it. After all, that god's name was pronounced "oorahnoos".
I INTENTIONALLY slow down when someone is tailgating me
Someday you'll meet "pam" (first comment on the link).
I hope you die alone and don't hurt anyone else.
there is no recursive slow down for the entire road.
That's only by your faulty reasoning, since you don't care about anything you see in the rearview mirror.
Try googling traffic waves to find out how much and how long your braking affects the drivers behind you.
A. They will track me anyway if they have any reason to.
B. They aint got shit on me.
If they keep tracking you, they will have pretty soon.
Make it a severe offense to tailgate and you get the same solution
It would not be the same solution because the road would me more crowded overall.
Assume one person doing 55 starts passing another doing 54. In order to avoid tailgating altogether, everybody in a long stretch would have to slow down. If someone is driving slowly in front of you, you have to drive even slower until the space between your cars increase to a safe distance. The driver behind you would be forced to drive slower than you to get the same safe distance between you and him. And so on, the rest follows by induction.
Do the math and find how many drivers who are "safe" by the "tailgaters are evil" principle it takes for the traffic to stop completely.
The tailgaters and aggressive drivers are the ones who cause fatalities.
It takes two to tailgate, a tailgater and a tailgatee. As I said, accidents usually aren't caused by one single cause, in most cases if just one of a set of circumstances didn't happen there would be no accident.
The driver who starts a tailgating incident is the one who drives slowly on the left lane. If you want to blame only *one* person, blame the one who started it all.
I agree with what you said, but disagree about the ethics. I think it's wrong that so much money gets channeled into sports.
For one thing, sports get boring when there's so much competition by sports equipment manufacturers. Records get broken by milliseconds because one of the guys used a special polymer in his shoe or something like that. That's not an athletics competition, that's a competition on which corporation can rake in more money to invest in gear that will bring no benefits to anyone. What's the point in paying $300 extra for a pair of shoes that will let you shave a thousandth of a second from your 100 meter run?
Another problem with sports paying so much is that many young people become hypnotized with that and start believing sports could be a wise career choice. Millionaire athletes are a small minority, most professionals in sports struggle to find employment as coaches after their short career is over.
In the end, sports broadcasting is faced with two conflicting rights. On one hand there's the right of the owners to charge for the images of the event. On the other hand there's the right of people to transmit and watch events that interest them.
If sports broadcasting were free, there would be no "sport" bars, any bar could have a TV. Bars would have no need to charge extra for that TV, customers would benefit from that. The only losers would be team owners and their associations like the NFL. If the NFL isn't happy with not being millionaires, good for them. Let them find some other business to do and let less greedy people play football.
Usually, too much importance is given to the immediate cause of an accident. Most accidents don't happen due to a single cause, there's a number of circumstances that must exist together for an accident to happen.
In modern highways, the usual circumstance for most accidents is crowded lanes. The usual cause for crowded lanes is a few dumbasses of the i-hate-tailgaters-and-i-have-the-right-to-drive-at-any-speed-below-the-limit species.
Make it a severe offense, same penalties as drunken driving, to drive on the left lane with someone behind you and those "80% accidents" will go away.
Playboy is of the opinion that nothing resides below the female waste.
That's true, if they flush after they are done, there'll be nothing there.
What in the world will the climate change doomsayers have to say when CO2...A DANGEROUS GAS is used and taken out of the atmosphere...
I guess mostly they will complain about boring news. Nothing exciting happening, like hurricanes, floods, droughts. No sharks swimming down Main Street. There will be mild summers and winters, no extreme temperatures without the atmosphere receiving that extra energy kick from CO2.
My netbook came with Xandros installed, works flawlessly.
I've been considering installing Netbuntu for some time now, since Debian Etch, on which Xandros is based, is becoming quite old. There are a few apps for which I would like new versions, but what the hell, Xandros works so nicely in that small, cheap, machine...
One local example (I'm near Houston) was a guy being considered suspicious because he was walking down a long road that people rarely walk along, never mind there was a sidewalk there.
In some places people have always been considered suspicious if they have a flat nose, dark skin, and curly hair. 9/11 or no 9/11, that's against the constitution. A police officer cannot pull a car over if there is no probable cause for it. He cannot ask for your ID without probable cause.
The way police officers routinely act today in the USA is like Osama has won. He has terrorized a whole nation for ten years now. It's time to stop that bullshit. Th only problem is how. Any ideas?
don't matter if government controls the media or the "interest groups" control both media and government, in both cases the average public opinion will be whatever they say.
What you say is that democracy is impossible because people are so easy to manipulate. It doesn't matter which system you have, there will always be people who are better than others to manipulate opinions, you just have to live with that.
Democracy is not about the government doing what *I* think is right, but what the majority of the people think is right. Public opinion is volatile, that's correct, but this does not mean that everybody who manipulates public opinion is a dictator.
in neither of them you are truly free, and im not so sure which is the worst.
I'm truly free in a libertarian capitalistic system, one where the market is as free as possible. I'm free to do exactly as I want, but my actions might be constrained by other people.
For example, I run Linux in my computer. Microsoft does its best to have no computers in the world running Linux. They succeeded in eliminating Linux from netbooks. Was Microsoft's action against my interests? Certainly. Was Asus' action in eliminating Linux from their computers against my interests? Certainly. Was any of those actions undemocratic in any way? Certainly not.
I'm conscious that my opinion may be different from the majority and I'm ready to live with the consequences of that. It's in the best interest of any major corporation to cater mostly to what the majority of the people are willing to buy, no one is forced to produce something customized to my taste.
A truly free society is not one in which everyone has a different opinion on everything. A truly free society is one in which everyone *may* have a different opinion from anyone else on any topic.
In the end, you either have a legally free system, where everyone can do as they wish, even if they do exactly what everyone else is doing, or you have a legally contrained society, where everyone has to follow rules. In this case, there's an additional contraint in who makes the rules.
I have absolutely no doubt that the free system is infinitely better. You may feel in your smug superiority that the stupid masses are swayed this way or that by the clever manipulators, but in the end if you believe that you don't truly believe in democracy. You are just resentful that you aren't one of the manipulators.
Funny on that travel advice on Cuba... Cuba has one of the world's lowest crime rates.
Still trust your government to inform you about reasons you might not want to go to other countries?
So, let me get this straight: you do not believe what the US government says about Cuba, but you do believe what the Cuban government says about themselves?
At least, in the USA if the government says something and someone disagrees he can find a privtely funded paper to publish his version of the facts.
Cuba could have the highest or the lowest crime rate in the world, it doesn't matter since the only version that will be published there is the government's.
You can have a dictatorship with a capitalistic economic system, but no democracy has ever survived very long without capitalism. You cannot have an opposition when the government is the only supplier for everything. Try to publish a paper where you have to buy all your ink, paper, printing presses, everything, from the government.
Find a distribution that contains g77. Or compile g77 from source for your target platform.
A perfect example of the tail wagging the dog. So we now need to maintain ourselves a compiler just to support the old software?
gfortran goes out of its way to compile old g77 code.
But it doesn't have the -fvxt option.
Learn to use the tools properly instead of bitching about them. Modern Fortran gives you the facilities to replace almost all VAXisms.
I was talking about a 40 years old software, created at an aerospace company that ceased to exist long ago. AFAIK the history of this software, it ran in a PDP11/44 in the late 1970s when it was migrated to VAX. It's a bit too late now to complain about it being non-standard.
As for learning to use the tools, the big question is what are the best tools? In recent years I've been teaching all new engineers Python. SciPy is the best environment today for engineering and scientific software development.
And that's the reason why I think experience shouldn't be rewarded by itself. A young engineer who knows SciPy can run circles around an old Fortran guy developing new software. If you need faster execution speed, give the Python code to a programmer who will implement the kernel functions in C.
I was programming in Fortran long before you were born.
Since I was born before the first Fortran compiler was delivered, I doubt it.
Compliant F77 still compiles perfectly in an F90 compiler. Or, to put it more bluntly, it's no fault of Fortran that you've tried to bring bad code with you.
No, the fault of Fortran is that the standard needs so many extensions to work in the real world.
For engineering work in the 1980s, VAX-Fortran *was* the standard, it was what everybody used.