Too many distractions, from games, TV, Internet, Slashdot, etc.
With the horrendous state of the US public school system, it's only because of TV, and the Internet that I didn't come out of high school as a drooling moron.
At a young age, that was mostly up to random shows on PBS... A few years later, that would be speed-up by access to cable TV and the extremely good shows The Discovery Channel was putting out at the time... Of course they've all turned to crap now, and their off-shoot channels all continue to decline in quality. A few years later again, access to the internet again dramatically improved my access to information.
Not being within walking distance of a library, and furthermore not being of the temperament to make good use of it much even if I had been, without these "distractions", I wouldn't be here, with an IQ sneaking up on 200, and a challenging job with a good 6-figure salary.
I wonder what all those people who got started with Linux due to the internet would say about it being a distraction... Or perhaps the astronomers at SETI, the researchers behind Folding@Home, the mathematicians working on cryptography, the Universities that first started sharing information over DARPAnet, etc., etc.
I suppose it depends on your definition of a distraction... Maybe indoor plumbing and electric lighting is a distraction too.
It's pretty ridiculous to expect one storage format to be viable for 'decades'.
Why? Decade and a half old USB devices continue to be compatible with practically all modern computers.
Data CD-ROMs were popular in the mid 1980s, and Audio CDs were around even before that... Yet nearly every computer today can continue to access them.
Even though optical drives are falling somewhat in popularity due to massive hard drives and USB Flash devices, I'd still bet very, very good money that CDs, and even DVDs, will be easy to access in a couple decades.
It's not at all true that the DA was depending on the DVD... In fact the defense just made an issue that the DA had evidence on the DVD that might point to a key witness changing her story. Since they couldn't turn over a copy of the evidence in a usable form, it became a real problem.
If the DVD didn't exist in the first place, the DA would have been better off.
In the winter I leave my computers on. I don't think I am "loosing" any energy that way since it's used to heat my house.
You aren't loosing anything, but you are losing significant energy. Look-up Power Factor. Or for a clue, note that UPSes list significantly higher VA than Watts.
1.42kw for the computer to run overnight has a cost of around 10 cents to the company.
You're completely ignoring the cost of the hours of extra wear and tear on fans, hdds, etc. Not to mention much higher energy rates in the most populous states in the country.
Waiting 5 minutes for your PC to boot at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour has a cost of around 55 cents to the company.
And now you're assuming people come into work, wait until the minute they're supposed to start working, then sit around staring at the screen and drooling, doing nothing else, as their computer boots, for a RIDICULOUSLY LONG period of 5 minutes... Even if you're generous, and say a boot-up time of 2 minutes, you're still talking about the employee in question doing other things for those two minutes.
They require thousands of miles of new power lines to be built.
WIND would require extensive infrastructure upgrades if it is to replace a substantial amount of electrical generation.
Solar, across the southern half of the US, has no such problem. Los Angeles could be completely solar powered in short order.
The wind doesn't blow all the time, nor does the sun shine all the time.
With wind, that is a problem only when you provide more than 15% of the overall electrical load. As long as the rest is supplied by solar, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, etc., it's not a problem.
In many parts of the world (the deserts) the sun DOES shine nearly all the time. Overnight, and even in extended periods of overcast skies, solar continues to provide power, just a bit less. This is due to the extremely high temperatures achieved with liquid sodium and to a lesser extent, other thermal-mass solar power systems. The DoE has been operating such a plant for years.
You can store it (which is equivalent to running a hydroelectric dam) or build gas powered plants to run during the evenings.
Pumped hydro storage isn't a bad option at all. It's actually rather efficient conversion, and costs next to nothing if you utilize existing dams.
Solar and wind are not as inexpensive as proponents claim.
Neither is coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, petroleum, etc., etc. They're all VERY expensive. Some you just pay more for in the form of mounting medical bills instead of on your electric bill.
Nuclear is the only power source with a virtually unlimited source of fuel and that can be brought online without a massive new power grid and is nearly as cheap as gas powered generation.
Nuclear is extremely expensive. The investment is HUGE, and the payback is very small, and only very slowly comes in. It's such a small return on investment that you can't get any private companies to invest in it.
Start building a nuclear power plant... At the same time, put the same amount of money in US Savings Bonds. When the reactor comes online, start pulling out the money, with interest, and compare how many solar power plants you could build (plus far lower operating costs) with that money. That's the real comparison.
Bad analogy, demonstrating ignorance of the subject.
Laptops are not exposed to the elements, massive mechanical stresses, and only the HDD and fans face any mechanical wear and tear (and very, very little at that).
Does what's "supported" or not really matter? It's a fairly standard Linux system, to which you can add-remove anything you like.
and that there's not a package manager that can compete with yum/apt-get/ports.
That all depends on what you're looking for in your package manager. I certainly like Slackware's package manager more than any other, because you can very, very easily install any mixture of binary packages and code compiled from source that you want. No other system includes the (tiny) -dev headers necessary for compilation in their binary packages, nor do they reasonably easily allow you to ignore listed dependencies and handle it yourself with eg. a source package.
I also appreciate Slackware's init scripts... Just about every other Linux distro has at least 3 levels of indirection to their scripts, just making for needless hassle. On a similar note, never have I seen a note in an important config file on Slackware suggesting: "Do not edit this file. It will be automatically overwritten." But that's sadly common practice everywhere else.
I'm glad Slackware has pushed against Linux stupidity, and stayed away from the PAM mess. I just wish Patrick had been able to hold back the switch from OSS to the clunky mess that is ALSA as well. Oh well... Linux looks a little more like Windows every day. Luckily Slackware resists. But then there's always the BSDs... they all do just fine without PAM, ALSA, sysV, apt-get/yum, etc.
My point was that if Linux could get such an old machine on-line without any messing around (It Just Worked) it should be able to get a more recent machine going without any trouble,
It works exactly the opposite, actually. The older your machine, the more likely that your hardware has been fully fleshed out, and open source drivers are available and working reliably.
Do you really think that, somehow, the hardware in a laptop deteriorates and gets less reliable with age?
As for chewing coca leaves, it is not in any manner "worlds away from doing cocaine". It is, in fact, a way of doing cocaine. Perhaps not a common way, but nevertheless it is a way to do it.
Common or not has nothing to do with it. It's the difference between injecting something into your veins, versus eating it.
Drinking Apple Juice: Healthy IV Apple Juice: Unhealthy
(Don't bother mentioning "snorting" and the like. The issue is the same, it's just easier to stick with a single example here.)
Pouring cocaine in your eye is also a way to "do cocaine" if you're stretching the definition that thin... However, there it is considered highly medically beneficial, with next to no drawbacks. It is, however, as far different of a method as "doing cocaine" as there possibly can be.
I'm willing to bet more than 1 in 800,000 of those needles are `found by accident`, and most of them were used by people with a chronic disease.
The ratio of people being killed by a vaccine does not directly correspond to the ratio of needles found/not found.
That 1:800,000 vaccine mortality figure you are using is 'preliminary' at best, with the distinct possibility of a much higher mortality over a longer time period.
And what you are "willing to bet" is extremely weak evidence.
Finally, the likelihood that any one of those needles is contaminated with HPV is extremely slim, and transmission is far, far less likely still.
Still, none of which is relevant to the question asked: When a child dies, at least partially due to the vaccination, are the parents "murders", as they are when the child dies of NOT getting it? Why?
Your assertion seems to be that it's more likely to die of not getting the vaccine, versus complication due to getting. Of course even that is quite iffy, since there's no way of knowing if those who had been vaccinated, and died, would have been exposed to HPV during their lifetimes. But in any case, at what point does it become murder? 10001:10000? 2:1? 10:1? How good do the odds have to be before you become responsible for a freak accident, either way.
And on a similar note, how close do the odds have to be, before the cure is worse than the disease, and people who DO give such medication to their children are the murders?
The fact that Cocaine was used as an active ingredient in a popular fizzy drink would seem to speak otherwise.
It wasn't just a "drink" at the time, and wasn't particularly popular by modern standards... Sodas were considered a form of medicine, and used as such. Note names like Pepsi, derived from peptic. It's only today that we look at their mass-market appeal and misunderstand their origins.
And let's not forget that Cocaine is known because in its native region, the indigenous people used it constantly and they did alright.
Chewing coca leaves is worlds away from doing cocaine.
If your daughter steps on a used needle in the sand at the beach, and catches HPV, and dies of cervical cancer, what have you achieved? You are responsible for her death.
That is an extremely unlikely scenario.
I'm willing to bet the possibility of dying due to complications of the HPV immunization is a couple orders of magnitude MORE LIKELY to happen, statistically.
So, in your judgment, when a parent DOES get their child immunized, but they die due to medical complications, is the parent then also "responsible for her death", or does personal responsibility for unforeseen twists of fate only apply to those whose world view differs from your own?
I've worked professionally with a hammer and it was totally unusable.
You're actually not far wrong. Nail guns have by and large replaced hammers in construction. Of course there's always the odd bit of temporary framing (eg. for cement foundations, stairs, walkways, etc.) but they're 90% of their job goes to nail guns today.
Damned if I get modded flamebait for saying it, but do you really want to see NASA as it currently stands have nuclear engines in their ships?
It's not flamebait, it's plain old fashioned ignorance.
Hint: They already do... On a routine basis. RTGs are the only real alternative when solar power is not practical, and every mission (American or Russian) going out past Mars uses them extensively. The Apollo missions carried them onboard, and Apollo 13's RTG is currently chugging away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There have been dozens of other incidents as well (mostly Russian, but a few via NASA), and yet we all remain, shockingly, NOT-DEAD.
but we should be pouring a lot more of our money and time into finding better sources of energy and ways to harvest them. I mean, liquid fuel rockets are like whawt, 60-70 year old technology now? Nuclear technology....60 years roughly? All these advances happened at or near the end of World War II. Computers....oh wait...that was also about 60 some years ago. Sure every technology has been advanced, but when you look at the overall progress (transistors, notwithstanding) it has all been an evolution from these earlier examples, but nothing so revolutionary as they were in the first place.
Almost NOTHING is ever revolutionary, pulled out of a void into existence. It is all the meticulous and seemingly-small refinements that make existing inventions (with little or no practical purpose) into revolutionary products.
While Thomas Edison was busy "inventing" the light BULB
, the streets outside his offices were lit with electric lights (specifically, carbon ARC lamps). And truth be told, it wasn't the light bulb that brought electric light to the world, it was the slightly later development of the florescent lights that led to the artificial illumination of the vast majority of the world.
The steam engine was around for centuries before Watt was born, and thereafter made numerous improvements to become the most practical power source for most uses for the next couple centuries.
Nuclear power was indeed a revolution... but that revolution was humanity becoming able to harness a fundamental force of nature. No amount of R&D is going to come up with a new force of nature... So, unless you've got a "gravity power" plant in the works, or an easy source of antimatter up your sleeve, don't hold your breath for fundamental breakthroughs.
As far as internal combustion engines are concerned, the next step is obvious, and available right now... The same fossil fuels we burn right now can be directly converted to electricity at extremely high efficiency in a fuel cell, finally getting us past the fundamental Carnot heat exchange limit that has been the rule for the past 3 centuries.
As far as nuclear, everybody knows about fusion, and its potential to fundamentally change the modern world. What remains is for someone like Watt to come along and figure out how to make it practical. And before you ask, yes, plenty of funding has been going towards the development of fusion, but breakthroughs are not forthcoming, and it's not just a question of throwing more money at the problem.
Still, none of this has ANYTHING to do with rocket propulsion... They're already nearly at maximum theoretical efficiency, and technology isn't going to change the equation of getting 1g of material into orbit in a self-contained craft.
What CAN make waves, however, is the less glamorous changes in kind, rather than technology. The space shuttle, for instance, is already designed to piggy-back on a Jumbo Jet... Substantial fuel savings could be offered by launching a spacecraft from high in the atmosphere, already moving at supersonic speeds, by atmosphere-bound means.
Similarly, NASA most certainly is continally funding the development of fundamental improvements to space flight, such as the infamous "space elevator" and supersonic ramjets. Still, neither is a revolution, but an incremental improvement over what we already had for decades.
I just got a pay cut at work, I may even lose my job if things don't turn around,
Meanwhile, I just got a new job, paying quite a bit more than I was previously earning.
and my mortgage is now worth more than my house. Not really in a spending mood right now.
I thought it was painfully obviously that the housing market was running away uncontrolled, and vastly over-valued, and so sold my home for 3X what I'd paid for it about 10 years earlier, and moved into a cheap apartment for a while.
And now, gas prices are the lowest they've been in 5+ years. Consumer spending is much lower (mainly due to completely intangible and borderline irrational reasons, like fear), and companies are scared to death of missing their sales forecasts, so prices are getting lower every day. Trucks/Vans/SUVs are available for next to nothing due to previously high gas prices. Several banks are desperate for cash, and offering stunningly high interest rates (relative to other banks--still historically *low* interest rates). Road traffic is the lightest it has been in perhaps 10 years. etc. etc.
I'd say it's a GREAT time for those of us who were even slightly smart, saved money, etc., etc.
And don't say you "couldn't have known." We all saw the same thing happen circa 2001 after the dot.com bust. And in any case, it's just simple rational decision making to be careful with money, rather than risking bankruptcy if the economy should go the wrong way (mortgages are quite a long-term proposition, after all).
And every little bit of extra cost adds up... And make no mistake, a DC datacenter costs a LOT.
and point of load DC-DC converters are quite efficient, thus do not generate much heat.
No they aren't. There's nothing magic about DC that makes it more efficient to convert. Why do so many people seem to think that when the input and output voltages are a bit closer together, it's more efficient? In fact the opposite is closer to accurate.
AC can be converted to DC trivially, with bare minimum losses. The same is true for the inverse. You're not going to possibly see more than 3% efficiency improvements along the whole chain, and yet, you'll need a huge investment to convert to all-DC.
But you still get stupid replies from others who don't understand what they read.
This system has all the benefits of Airside Economizing
A heat exchanger is NOT airside economizing. In fact, the two are polar opposites, though I suppose there could be some manufacturers out there that conflate the two in their ads.
But it is a fact that they need a higher clock speed, than they generally have now, to have competitive performance.
No. A higher clock speed doesn't improve performance.
so having multiple cores would help the ARM processors.
Possibly, but more likely very rarely helpful, with tremendous drawbacks. Multi-core is a buzzword.
I don't see anything worth responding to there.
You've refuted none of my other points, extensively detailing why you are utterly wrong. You continue to demonstrate pure ignorance of the subject.
Anyhow, the geeks around here have spoken with modpoints...
There are plenty of moderators that don't know the subject, and just mod up what sounds good. If a refutation had been more quickly forthcoming, bad moderation is often fixed in short order, but sadly often after most readers have already come and gone.
I've seen plenty of such questions on/. over the years, with plenty of commentators offering nuggets of job advice. Very rarely do I see particularly good and non-obvious advice come out of such discussions. So, for the first time, I'm going to jump in with what I have learned.
I strongly suggest you consider my advice very carefully...
When looking for good-paying jobs, your resume is incredibly important. And job experience is easily the single most important part.
If your resume lists NO experience in the industry, you'll have a hell of a time getting ANY job, college degree or no.
Interviewers will very rarely ask what you got paid at a job. They will never INSIST on knowing what you were paid if you opt to omit such information.
Interviewers practically never ask about your exact job title... ie. They don't care you were "Junior Intern Monkey" versus "Senior Super Dude", as long as you were in the field, and kept your position for a reasonable length of time.
If there are significant gaps in your work experience (several months when you weren't working), practically all recruiters ARE going to ask why, and "Nobody would pay me enough money" is the worst answer you could possibly give.
The moral of the story is, take whatever entry-level job you can get, and be happy that you're getting enough money to survive on. And when it's over, get a new job (reasonably quickly) that pays at least a bit more than the previous. Playing "hard ball" over salary is a good way to keep yourself from getting ANY salary for a long, long time, and will seriously set you back in your career.
Follow that advice... put together a solid work history, and craft it into good and professional-looking resume, and you'll at least get to the interview stage pretty easily.
PS. Menial jobs like "Fast Food Restaurant Manager" look TERRIBLE in the middle of your work experience (between career-related jobs) as it looks like you aren't good enough to get a job in your chosen profession... But if you don't have a long work history yet, it can be quite valuable at the beginning of your work history, showing that you are reliable enough to hold down a stable job.
AMD had the Geode out first, which prompted Intel to counter with Atom and VIA to follow suit.
Actually, Intel has been releasing ULV (ultra-low voltage) Pentiums for a very long time now. I imagine they pre-date National Semiconductor's Geode line all together, and I'm quite sure they pre-date AMD's acquisition of the Geode.
Buzzword combined with the MHz myth... I'm deducting 5 points from your geek card, and don't let it happen again, son.
The thing stopping non x86 platforms has always been software.
No. The thing stopping non-x86 platforms has been the endless march of both technological and manufacturing progress on x86 processors.
Many chips blew x86 away in the old days, but through the years, x86 has slowly acquired and adapted all superior technologies, without missing a beat. MMU, FPU, RISC, SIMD, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, multicore, supercomputer clustering, etc. x86 has continually met all challengers, and been competent and successful enough that its availability, low price, and continual progress made it an irresistible force.
Meanwhile, none of the other challengers, from long ago, have been able to hold on to their temporary technological lead.
Today, the embedded space has been further and further encroached on by AMD's Geode, and Intel's ULV Pentiums, and now ATOM. AMD is working on tightly integrating the GPU/ASIC with the x86 CPU, and Intel is working on using large numbers of parallel x86 CPUs as a complete GPU replacement. None of these active developments are sure things, but from a quick look at history, I wouldn't bet against them, and you can bet AMD/Intel wouldn't be trying so hard if they didn't see a good chance of success.
Slashdot Mirror
With the horrendous state of the US public school system, it's only because of TV, and the Internet that I didn't come out of high school as a drooling moron.
At a young age, that was mostly up to random shows on PBS... A few years later, that would be speed-up by access to cable TV and the extremely good shows The Discovery Channel was putting out at the time... Of course they've all turned to crap now, and their off-shoot channels all continue to decline in quality. A few years later again, access to the internet again dramatically improved my access to information.
Not being within walking distance of a library, and furthermore not being of the temperament to make good use of it much even if I had been, without these "distractions", I wouldn't be here, with an IQ sneaking up on 200, and a challenging job with a good 6-figure salary.
I wonder what all those people who got started with Linux due to the internet would say about it being a distraction... Or perhaps the astronomers at SETI, the researchers behind Folding@Home, the mathematicians working on cryptography, the Universities that first started sharing information over DARPAnet, etc., etc.
I suppose it depends on your definition of a distraction... Maybe indoor plumbing and electric lighting is a distraction too.
Why? Decade and a half old USB devices continue to be compatible with practically all modern computers.
Data CD-ROMs were popular in the mid 1980s, and Audio CDs were around even before that... Yet nearly every computer today can continue to access them.
Even though optical drives are falling somewhat in popularity due to massive hard drives and USB Flash devices, I'd still bet very, very good money that CDs, and even DVDs, will be easy to access in a couple decades.
It's not at all true that the DA was depending on the DVD... In fact the defense just made an issue that the DA had evidence on the DVD that might point to a key witness changing her story. Since they couldn't turn over a copy of the evidence in a usable form, it became a real problem.
If the DVD didn't exist in the first place, the DA would have been better off.
You aren't loosing anything, but you are losing significant energy. Look-up Power Factor. Or for a clue, note that UPSes list significantly higher VA than Watts.
You're completely ignoring the cost of the hours of extra wear and tear on fans, hdds, etc. Not to mention much higher energy rates in the most populous states in the country.
And now you're assuming people come into work, wait until the minute they're supposed to start working, then sit around staring at the screen and drooling, doing nothing else, as their computer boots, for a RIDICULOUSLY LONG period of 5 minutes... Even if you're generous, and say a boot-up time of 2 minutes, you're still talking about the employee in question doing other things for those two minutes.
WIND would require extensive infrastructure upgrades if it is to replace a substantial amount of electrical generation.
Solar, across the southern half of the US, has no such problem. Los Angeles could be completely solar powered in short order.
With wind, that is a problem only when you provide more than 15% of the overall electrical load. As long as the rest is supplied by solar, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, etc., it's not a problem.
In many parts of the world (the deserts) the sun DOES shine nearly all the time. Overnight, and even in extended periods of overcast skies, solar continues to provide power, just a bit less. This is due to the extremely high temperatures achieved with liquid sodium and to a lesser extent, other thermal-mass solar power systems. The DoE has been operating such a plant for years.
Pumped hydro storage isn't a bad option at all. It's actually rather efficient conversion, and costs next to nothing if you utilize existing dams.
Neither is coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, petroleum, etc., etc. They're all VERY expensive. Some you just pay more for in the form of mounting medical bills instead of on your electric bill.
Nuclear is extremely expensive. The investment is HUGE, and the payback is very small, and only very slowly comes in. It's such a small return on investment that you can't get any private companies to invest in it.
Start building a nuclear power plant... At the same time, put the same amount of money in US Savings Bonds. When the reactor comes online, start pulling out the money, with interest, and compare how many solar power plants you could build (plus far lower operating costs) with that money. That's the real comparison.
Bad analogy, demonstrating ignorance of the subject.
Laptops are not exposed to the elements, massive mechanical stresses, and only the HDD and fans face any mechanical wear and tear (and very, very little at that).
Does what's "supported" or not really matter? It's a fairly standard Linux system, to which you can add-remove anything you like.
That all depends on what you're looking for in your package manager. I certainly like Slackware's package manager more than any other, because you can very, very easily install any mixture of binary packages and code compiled from source that you want. No other system includes the (tiny) -dev headers necessary for compilation in their binary packages, nor do they reasonably easily allow you to ignore listed dependencies and handle it yourself with eg. a source package.
I also appreciate Slackware's init scripts... Just about every other Linux distro has at least 3 levels of indirection to their scripts, just making for needless hassle. On a similar note, never have I seen a note in an important config file on Slackware suggesting: "Do not edit this file. It will be automatically overwritten." But that's sadly common practice everywhere else.
I'm glad Slackware has pushed against Linux stupidity, and stayed away from the PAM mess. I just wish Patrick had been able to hold back the switch from OSS to the clunky mess that is ALSA as well. Oh well... Linux looks a little more like Windows every day. Luckily Slackware resists. But then there's always the BSDs... they all do just fine without PAM, ALSA, sysV, apt-get/yum, etc.
It works exactly the opposite, actually. The older your machine, the more likely that your hardware has been fully fleshed out, and open source drivers are available and working reliably.
Do you really think that, somehow, the hardware in a laptop deteriorates and gets less reliable with age?
Common or not has nothing to do with it. It's the difference between injecting something into your veins, versus eating it.
Drinking Apple Juice: Healthy
IV Apple Juice: Unhealthy
(Don't bother mentioning "snorting" and the like. The issue is the same, it's just easier to stick with a single example here.)
Pouring cocaine in your eye is also a way to "do cocaine" if you're stretching the definition that thin... However, there it is considered highly medically beneficial, with next to no drawbacks. It is, however, as far different of a method as "doing cocaine" as there possibly can be.
The ratio of people being killed by a vaccine does not directly correspond to the ratio of needles found/not found.
That 1:800,000 vaccine mortality figure you are using is 'preliminary' at best, with the distinct possibility of a much higher mortality over a longer time period.
And what you are "willing to bet" is extremely weak evidence.
Finally, the likelihood that any one of those needles is contaminated with HPV is extremely slim, and transmission is far, far less likely still.
Still, none of which is relevant to the question asked: When a child dies, at least partially due to the vaccination, are the parents "murders", as they are when the child dies of NOT getting it? Why?
Your assertion seems to be that it's more likely to die of not getting the vaccine, versus complication due to getting. Of course even that is quite iffy, since there's no way of knowing if those who had been vaccinated, and died, would have been exposed to HPV during their lifetimes. But in any case, at what point does it become murder? 10001:10000? 2:1? 10:1? How good do the odds have to be before you become responsible for a freak accident, either way.
And on a similar note, how close do the odds have to be, before the cure is worse than the disease, and people who DO give such medication to their children are the murders?
It wasn't just a "drink" at the time, and wasn't particularly popular by modern standards... Sodas were considered a form of medicine, and used as such. Note names like Pepsi, derived from peptic. It's only today that we look at their mass-market appeal and misunderstand their origins.
Chewing coca leaves is worlds away from doing cocaine.
Also, I would recommend some reading material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud#Cocaine
That is an extremely unlikely scenario.
I'm willing to bet the possibility of dying due to complications of the HPV immunization is a couple orders of magnitude MORE LIKELY to happen, statistically.
So, in your judgment, when a parent DOES get their child immunized, but they die due to medical complications, is the parent then also "responsible for her death", or does personal responsibility for unforeseen twists of fate only apply to those whose world view differs from your own?
You're actually not far wrong. Nail guns have by and large replaced hammers in construction. Of course there's always the odd bit of temporary framing (eg. for cement foundations, stairs, walkways, etc.) but they're 90% of their job goes to nail guns today.
It's not flamebait, it's plain old fashioned ignorance.
Hint: They already do... On a routine basis. RTGs are the only real alternative when solar power is not practical, and every mission (American or Russian) going out past Mars uses them extensively. The Apollo missions carried them onboard, and Apollo 13's RTG is currently chugging away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There have been dozens of other incidents as well (mostly Russian, but a few via NASA), and yet we all remain, shockingly, NOT-DEAD.
Almost NOTHING is ever revolutionary, pulled out of a void into existence. It is all the meticulous and seemingly-small refinements that make existing inventions (with little or no practical purpose) into revolutionary products.
While Thomas Edison was busy "inventing" the light BULB
, the streets outside his offices were lit with electric lights (specifically, carbon ARC lamps). And truth be told, it wasn't the light bulb that brought electric light to the world, it was the slightly later development of the florescent lights that led to the artificial illumination of the vast majority of the world.
The steam engine was around for centuries before Watt was born, and thereafter made numerous improvements to become the most practical power source for most uses for the next couple centuries.
Nuclear power was indeed a revolution... but that revolution was humanity becoming able to harness a fundamental force of nature. No amount of R&D is going to come up with a new force of nature... So, unless you've got a "gravity power" plant in the works, or an easy source of antimatter up your sleeve, don't hold your breath for fundamental breakthroughs.
As far as internal combustion engines are concerned, the next step is obvious, and available right now... The same fossil fuels we burn right now can be directly converted to electricity at extremely high efficiency in a fuel cell, finally getting us past the fundamental Carnot heat exchange limit that has been the rule for the past 3 centuries.
As far as nuclear, everybody knows about fusion, and its potential to fundamentally change the modern world. What remains is for someone like Watt to come along and figure out how to make it practical. And before you ask, yes, plenty of funding has been going towards the development of fusion, but breakthroughs are not forthcoming, and it's not just a question of throwing more money at the problem.
Still, none of this has ANYTHING to do with rocket propulsion... They're already nearly at maximum theoretical efficiency, and technology isn't going to change the equation of getting 1g of material into orbit in a self-contained craft.
What CAN make waves, however, is the less glamorous changes in kind, rather than technology. The space shuttle, for instance, is already designed to piggy-back on a Jumbo Jet... Substantial fuel savings could be offered by launching a spacecraft from high in the atmosphere, already moving at supersonic speeds, by atmosphere-bound means.
Similarly, NASA most certainly is continally funding the development of fundamental improvements to space flight, such as the infamous "space elevator" and supersonic ramjets. Still, neither is a revolution, but an incremental improvement over what we already had for decades.
Meanwhile, I just got a new job, paying quite a bit more than I was previously earning.
I thought it was painfully obviously that the housing market was running away uncontrolled, and vastly over-valued, and so sold my home for 3X what I'd paid for it about 10 years earlier, and moved into a cheap apartment for a while.
And now, gas prices are the lowest they've been in 5+ years. Consumer spending is much lower (mainly due to completely intangible and borderline irrational reasons, like fear), and companies are scared to death of missing their sales forecasts, so prices are getting lower every day. Trucks/Vans/SUVs are available for next to nothing due to previously high gas prices. Several banks are desperate for cash, and offering stunningly high interest rates (relative to other banks--still historically *low* interest rates). Road traffic is the lightest it has been in perhaps 10 years. etc. etc.
I'd say it's a GREAT time for those of us who were even slightly smart, saved money, etc., etc.
And don't say you "couldn't have known." We all saw the same thing happen circa 2001 after the dot.com bust. And in any case, it's just simple rational decision making to be careful with money, rather than risking bankruptcy if the economy should go the wrong way (mortgages are quite a long-term proposition, after all).
You don't have to wait to shop until "Cyber" Monday. None the less, many people DO.
You don't have to work Monday through Friday, either, but most people do that, too.
It's a perfectly valid statistic... It's the 3rd biggest online shopping day of the year.
It has meaning to many people. The fact that it doesn't to YOU doesn't mean it's meaningless.
Christmas and Thanksgiving aren't meaningless holidays, even if you don't happen to be Christian and/or American.
UFS support is included by every major OS, except Windows (though at least one driver is available: ffsdrv.sf.net)
What's more, good implementations of UFS (eg. FreeBSD) currently outperform any FS out there on common workloads.
And every little bit of extra cost adds up... And make no mistake, a DC datacenter costs a LOT.
No they aren't. There's nothing magic about DC that makes it more efficient to convert. Why do so many people seem to think that when the input and output voltages are a bit closer together, it's more efficient? In fact the opposite is closer to accurate.
AC can be converted to DC trivially, with bare minimum losses. The same is true for the inverse. You're not going to possibly see more than 3% efficiency improvements along the whole chain, and yet, you'll need a huge investment to convert to all-DC.
Here we go... The cure for your ignorance: http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/SADE-5TNRLG_R5_EN.pdf Enjoy.
But you still get stupid replies from others who don't understand what they read.
A heat exchanger is NOT airside economizing. In fact, the two are polar opposites, though I suppose there could be some manufacturers out there that conflate the two in their ads.
No. A higher clock speed doesn't improve performance.
Possibly, but more likely very rarely helpful, with tremendous drawbacks. Multi-core is a buzzword.
You've refuted none of my other points, extensively detailing why you are utterly wrong. You continue to demonstrate pure ignorance of the subject.
There are plenty of moderators that don't know the subject, and just mod up what sounds good. If a refutation had been more quickly forthcoming, bad moderation is often fixed in short order, but sadly often after most readers have already come and gone.
I've seen plenty of such questions on /. over the years, with plenty of commentators offering nuggets of job advice. Very rarely do I see particularly good and non-obvious advice come out of such discussions. So, for the first time, I'm going to jump in with what I have learned.
I strongly suggest you consider my advice very carefully...
When looking for good-paying jobs, your resume is incredibly important. And job experience is easily the single most important part.
If your resume lists NO experience in the industry, you'll have a hell of a time getting ANY job, college degree or no.
Interviewers will very rarely ask what you got paid at a job. They will never INSIST on knowing what you were paid if you opt to omit such information.
Interviewers practically never ask about your exact job title... ie. They don't care you were "Junior Intern Monkey" versus "Senior Super Dude", as long as you were in the field, and kept your position for a reasonable length of time.
If there are significant gaps in your work experience (several months when you weren't working), practically all recruiters ARE going to ask why, and "Nobody would pay me enough money" is the worst answer you could possibly give.
The moral of the story is, take whatever entry-level job you can get, and be happy that you're getting enough money to survive on. And when it's over, get a new job (reasonably quickly) that pays at least a bit more than the previous. Playing "hard ball" over salary is a good way to keep yourself from getting ANY salary for a long, long time, and will seriously set you back in your career.
Follow that advice... put together a solid work history, and craft it into good and professional-looking resume, and you'll at least get to the interview stage pretty easily.
PS. Menial jobs like "Fast Food Restaurant Manager" look TERRIBLE in the middle of your work experience (between career-related jobs) as it looks like you aren't good enough to get a job in your chosen profession... But if you don't have a long work history yet, it can be quite valuable at the beginning of your work history, showing that you are reliable enough to hold down a stable job.
Actually, Intel has been releasing ULV (ultra-low voltage) Pentiums for a very long time now. I imagine they pre-date National Semiconductor's Geode line all together, and I'm quite sure they pre-date AMD's acquisition of the Geode.
Buzzword combined with the MHz myth... I'm deducting 5 points from your geek card, and don't let it happen again, son.
No. The thing stopping non-x86 platforms has been the endless march of both technological and manufacturing progress on x86 processors.
Many chips blew x86 away in the old days, but through the years, x86 has slowly acquired and adapted all superior technologies, without missing a beat. MMU, FPU, RISC, SIMD, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, multicore, supercomputer clustering, etc. x86 has continually met all challengers, and been competent and successful enough that its availability, low price, and continual progress made it an irresistible force.
Meanwhile, none of the other challengers, from long ago, have been able to hold on to their temporary technological lead.
Today, the embedded space has been further and further encroached on by AMD's Geode, and Intel's ULV Pentiums, and now ATOM. AMD is working on tightly integrating the GPU/ASIC with the x86 CPU, and Intel is working on using large numbers of parallel x86 CPUs as a complete GPU replacement. None of these active developments are sure things, but from a quick look at history, I wouldn't bet against them, and you can bet AMD/Intel wouldn't be trying so hard if they didn't see a good chance of success.