Now, I realise that as a European, my idea of left, right and centre are quite different from that of the US (the US left wing seems more like right wing from our perspective), but I'm fairly certain that it's the US right wing that try to ban gay marriage, and not the left wing.
They all seem to be Christian conservatives, and that sounds a lot more like right wing republicans than it does left wing.
Same with the homosexuals in the military, sex education and such - sounds more like the Christian conservatives than the left.
Granted, you may be using sarcasm and/or irony that I didn't pick up on.
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count
on
Ants That Can Count
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As a drummer, I can create and reproduce the same roll on the fly. But if you asked me how many times I hit the drum pad, only then I would have to count
Been quite a while since I played drums, but I still remember having to learn how to reproduce certain sequences, and that involved counting the number of repetitions.
I can't remember what it's called but the one where you emphasise every third hit (i.e. HIT, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit etc) came quite fast, and I can still do that one without even trying (including alternating between 2nd, 3rd and 4th). The one that has every fifth hit (HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit) is one I never got the hang of, and I remember spending a LOT of time trying to burn it into my muscle memory.
But the 3rd one, while easy, still required learning by counting "ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three" for quite a while.
My point is, when you get really really good at something, like drumming, you don't count at a concious level, but in order to get that good, you did need to count.
Like I said elsewhere, I suspect this is more a matter of spoken language using comma rather than point. Especially because no-one says "two period five" in English. They say "two POINT five". The period just looks like a point.
Whether you use a comma or a period is very unlikely to have anything to do with "logic", and more to do with language.
Two and a half in English: "Two point five"/2.5 Two and a half in Danish: "To komma fem"/2,5 Two and a half in Swedish: "Två komma fem"/2,5 Two and a half in German: "Zwei komma fünf"/2,5
My German is rather rusty, but I think it's correct.
My point is, that when the language uses comma, it makes no sense not using it for maths. People just need to know how to translate from different language. This last bit is an issue though. Especially when you're dealing with incredibly lazy journalists who don't know how to read numbers and just copy paste stuff.
It's always fun to see Danish newspapers report on the US federal budget.
Total: 2.979 trillion dollars (2,979 billion or 2,979,000,000,000). In Danish, however, that number (2.979 trillion) is a LOT bigger. In part because we use the . as a thousands separator, and in part because we use long numbers. In other words 2.979 trillion dollars in Danish is 2 979 000 000 000 000 000.
When you have these lazy reporters, things get interesting. They MIGHT stop and wonder a bit about that number, as it is huge. But a number like 2.979 million might just go through without being translated. Same with 2.979 billion.
Don't look at your eye in a mirror when putting the lenses in, look straight at the lens and move your finger closer to your eye until they're in.
Doesn't work for everyone. Personally I am 95% certain to vomit at least once when putting in contacts, if I did this.
The optician who did this for me the first time, was the first one to find out.
I have to use a mirror, and I 'deposit' the lens onto the eyeball rather than the iris, by looking sideways into the mirror, exposing as much of the whites as possible. Takes me about 3 minutes to put in lenses all total, including a thorough hand wash before starting.
Look at the 4850. When it was brand new, it cost $199, and it could run ANY game on the market at full resolution and detail with a smooth, sustained framerate
Pull the other one. It has got bells on it.
Define "full resolution".
If I have a very old 1280x1024 monitor, sure. If I have a new 1920x1200 monitor, not so much. If I have a dual 2560x1600 monitor setup, not in this life time.
Also, define "full detail". Is that at medium? High? Maximum? What level of anisotropic filtering? Anti aliasing?
But let's have a look at something a bit realistic and look at "any game", in this case Crysis.
Highest Playable Resolution: 1600x1200 No AA | 16x AF
Minimum FPS: 16 Maximum FPS: 42 Average FPS: 28.5
Considering that the Radeon 4870 and Geforce GTX 260 have their highest playable at 1920x1200, I'd say you're flat out wrong in your claim.
Now, you may claim that Crysis doesn't count as it's not "ANY game on the market", so let's use Age of Conan instead: Woops, that one seems to hit its limit at 1600x1200.
That was my rather convoluted way of saying "you're an idiot".
This is certainly true for some of the people in trouble.
But, when your bank decides that they want their money NOW, and you and your spouse still have your well paying jobs, and generally are able to lose one job and still make all the payments on time and have money for savings - you're going to be screwed over.
Are you seriously trying to compare a city with a population density of 12,649/sq mi with one of 981.9/sq mi?
Not only is Chicago almost 13 times as densely populated, it has 81 times the population.
I wonder if either of those could have a massive effect on crime levels.
Try comparing similar cities next time. Like maybe some 35k population city where private handguns are illegal. Or perhaps a city with the same population as Chicago but handguns are allowed?
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if you have less violent crime per capita, because Fairbanks is cold as fuck.
There WAS option c: Bail out the immediate issues, use large guillotines to publicly neuter all the whiny bitches demanding their insane bonuses despite causing the complete financial meltdown. Maybe do the Jon Stewart approach: Give money to the home-owners who were the ones in massive troubles no matter what was done to their bank (since the banks needed the money, they'd foreclose many of the homes), and then they could pay the banks. That way home-owners would get to keep their homes despite the mortgage doubling or tripling and the banks would get money again.
Also, I'm pretty sure the outrage would be less loud, if the people paying for this (the tax payers) were the ones who got something tangible out of it, instead of seeing 170,000,000 dollars going straight into the pockets of the very people who caused this mess AND seeing their mortgages sky rocketing.
Might need a different approach for the female whiners though.
Are you asking if your top range, two generation old graphics card is now having its performance matched by a low end, current generation graphics card?
I can't disagree, but in the case of the mother who was going to kill herself and her children, I can't help thinking that just being related to someone that stupid shouldn't be a capital offence...
Just tell her to do it in that exact order, and that if she screws up the order, God will send her to Hell.
One of the extra courses I could take was making our 32 bit MIPS design run on FPGAs. In that class the teachers would give us pre-designed modules for memory controller, IO (keyboard) and video to boot a very simple OS on them.
Quite a few have mentioned using a full HD tv and just throwing away the remote.
Why not go the distance and buy a full HD (or better) projector and just setting the screen size to something you like? Most of them can handle quite large angles when adjusting for keystone effect.
Re:How to turn your skilled employees into cogs
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
. Often times, managers walk through a room, and if they see a bunch of people typing away or debating some design issue, then they see that busyness as productivity.
Very true.
The biggest surprise I had in my professional life was when I was stuck on a particular problem. Completely stuck. So I tried doing other stuff in the mean time. Then I rand out of stuff to do. Posted on newsgroups and forums, but still no answers.
So I asked my boss if he had anything else I could do, while waiting. "Go play solitaire, read a book, go for a run. But not too far, and keep your cell on you if we need you."
He knew that some things cannot be forced. So I got paid to sit on my ass and read books for two days until the answer popped into my head. Sometimes the best way to be productive is to just sit back, relax and do nothing.
and produce enough documentation that they can fire me when I get too expensive and hire a homeless guy to replace me.
Or find someone who can quickly pick up the work, when you inevitably die horribly in a plane crash on New Years, when the commercial airliner experiences a catastrophic failure and both sets of stabilizers snap off, causing it to crash right into your living room.
It's terribly precise, I know, but hey - you were being overly paranoid.
In practice maybe 1 out of 5 people taught that way will know English well enough, say, a year after school, to actually read a random English text of moderate complexity.
And orbital speeds are high, sure, but the slab is also moving at orbital speeds, which will reduce the impact speed significantly as well. And while it may not stop a bolt or bigger item on its own, there is nothing stopping you from placing thick solid metal back-stoppers every after few meters of Aerogel.
Then you end up with a gelatinous cube effect with the stopping power of several meters of solid steel.
Only issue is bringing down something that size. Aerogel is VERY light, but it's also an extremely good insulator and unless it's torn apart by the sheer wind forces, I doubt the metal inside it would suffer on the way down - big problem if it lands anywhere near anyone.
I assure you, Jager and Redbull can come to no good end.
Though I don't think it's any business of the FDA.
I assure you, Jager and Rohypnol can come to no good end.
Though I don't think it's any business of the FDA.
Here's a minor hint as to why it's their busness. They are called the Food and Drug Administration. Jägermeister is an alcohol and thus counts as a drug. And caffeine is a food additive.
And by massive I mean square kilometres and tens of meters thick.
Aerogel has been shown to be able to pick up even the smallest flecks of material for the Stardust project.
Since it's the smallest things that are the trickiest (huge bits are easily tracked), we need something that will not only absorb the energy of the impact, but also keep the debris in place. Thus, Aerogel is a good fit.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I realise that as a European, my idea of left, right and centre are quite different from that of the US (the US left wing seems more like right wing from our perspective), but I'm fairly certain that it's the US right wing that try to ban gay marriage, and not the left wing.
They all seem to be Christian conservatives, and that sounds a lot more like right wing republicans than it does left wing.
Same with the homosexuals in the military, sex education and such - sounds more like the Christian conservatives than the left.
Granted, you may be using sarcasm and/or irony that I didn't pick up on.
Been quite a while since I played drums, but I still remember having to learn how to reproduce certain sequences, and that involved counting the number of repetitions.
I can't remember what it's called but the one where you emphasise every third hit (i.e. HIT, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit etc) came quite fast, and I can still do that one without even trying (including alternating between 2nd, 3rd and 4th). The one that has every fifth hit (HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit) is one I never got the hang of, and I remember spending a LOT of time trying to burn it into my muscle memory.
But the 3rd one, while easy, still required learning by counting "ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three" for quite a while.
My point is, when you get really really good at something, like drumming, you don't count at a concious level, but in order to get that good, you did need to count.
Like I said elsewhere, I suspect this is more a matter of spoken language using comma rather than point. Especially because no-one says "two period five" in English. They say "two POINT five". The period just looks like a point.
Whether you use a comma or a period is very unlikely to have anything to do with "logic", and more to do with language.
Two and a half in English: "Two point five"/2.5
Two and a half in Danish: "To komma fem"/2,5
Two and a half in Swedish: "Två komma fem"/2,5
Two and a half in German: "Zwei komma fünf"/2,5
My German is rather rusty, but I think it's correct.
My point is, that when the language uses comma, it makes no sense not using it for maths. People just need to know how to translate from different language. This last bit is an issue though. Especially when you're dealing with incredibly lazy journalists who don't know how to read numbers and just copy paste stuff.
It's always fun to see Danish newspapers report on the US federal budget.
Total: 2.979 trillion dollars (2,979 billion or 2,979,000,000,000). In Danish, however, that number (2.979 trillion) is a LOT bigger. In part because we use the . as a thousands separator, and in part because we use long numbers. In other words 2.979 trillion dollars in Danish is 2 979 000 000 000 000 000.
When you have these lazy reporters, things get interesting. They MIGHT stop and wonder a bit about that number, as it is huge. But a number like 2.979 million might just go through without being translated. Same with 2.979 billion.
Doesn't work for everyone. Personally I am 95% certain to vomit at least once when putting in contacts, if I did this.
The optician who did this for me the first time, was the first one to find out.
I have to use a mirror, and I 'deposit' the lens onto the eyeball rather than the iris, by looking sideways into the mirror, exposing as much of the whites as possible. Takes me about 3 minutes to put in lenses all total, including a thorough hand wash before starting.
Pull the other one. It has got bells on it.
Define "full resolution".
If I have a very old 1280x1024 monitor, sure.
If I have a new 1920x1200 monitor, not so much.
If I have a dual 2560x1600 monitor setup, not in this life time.
Also, define "full detail". Is that at medium? High? Maximum? What level of anisotropic filtering? Anti aliasing?
But let's have a look at something a bit realistic and look at "any game", in this case Crysis.
From [H]ard|OCP's review of the 4850 from June 25th, 2008:
Considering that the Radeon 4870 and Geforce GTX 260 have their highest playable at 1920x1200, I'd say you're flat out wrong in your claim.
Now, you may claim that Crysis doesn't count as it's not "ANY game on the market", so let's use Age of Conan instead:
Woops, that one seems to hit its limit at 1600x1200.
That was my rather convoluted way of saying "you're an idiot".
True. No one has ever had a need for good and precise gearing for anything other than time keeping, which is completely useless as it is.
No one has ever needed gearing in their motors. Or for tuning string instruments.
And which nasty bacteria, exactly, are in second hand smoke, that aren't in second hand breathing?
Now you're just being an idiot for the sake of being one.
He clearly stated "2 AM". Unless your washer is insanely worn and old, there's no way it will still be running by the time you get around to daytime.
This is certainly true for some of the people in trouble.
But, when your bank decides that they want their money NOW, and you and your spouse still have your well paying jobs, and generally are able to lose one job and still make all the payments on time and have money for savings - you're going to be screwed over.
Are you seriously trying to compare a city with a population density of 12,649/sq mi with one of 981.9/sq mi?
Not only is Chicago almost 13 times as densely populated, it has 81 times the population.
I wonder if either of those could have a massive effect on crime levels.
Try comparing similar cities next time. Like maybe some 35k population city where private handguns are illegal. Or perhaps a city with the same population as Chicago but handguns are allowed?
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if you have less violent crime per capita, because Fairbanks is cold as fuck.
There WAS option c:
Bail out the immediate issues, use large guillotines to publicly neuter all the whiny bitches demanding their insane bonuses despite causing the complete financial meltdown. Maybe do the Jon Stewart approach: Give money to the home-owners who were the ones in massive troubles no matter what was done to their bank (since the banks needed the money, they'd foreclose many of the homes), and then they could pay the banks. That way home-owners would get to keep their homes despite the mortgage doubling or tripling and the banks would get money again.
Also, I'm pretty sure the outrage would be less loud, if the people paying for this (the tax payers) were the ones who got something tangible out of it, instead of seeing 170,000,000 dollars going straight into the pockets of the very people who caused this mess AND seeing their mortgages sky rocketing.
Might need a different approach for the female whiners though.
You should have linked to that particular revision:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nick_Xenophon&oldid=326486984#As_federal_senator
That way the rest of us can enjoy the joke as well :)
Boiled Soup of Dehydration.
Are you asking if your top range, two generation old graphics card is now having its performance matched by a low end, current generation graphics card?
Let's see ... what gives you a quicker human response?
a) Pick up the phone and get the operator to put you through to NASA's reception
b) Get on the internet and search for the answer
Just tell her to do it in that exact order, and that if she screws up the order, God will send her to Hell.
Very true
One of the extra courses I could take was making our 32 bit MIPS design run on FPGAs. In that class the teachers would give us pre-designed modules for memory controller, IO (keyboard) and video to boot a very simple OS on them.
Didn't take that course though.
Quite a few have mentioned using a full HD tv and just throwing away the remote.
Why not go the distance and buy a full HD (or better) projector and just setting the screen size to something you like? Most of them can handle quite large angles when adjusting for keystone effect.
Very true.
The biggest surprise I had in my professional life was when I was stuck on a particular problem. Completely stuck. So I tried doing other stuff in the mean time. Then I rand out of stuff to do. Posted on newsgroups and forums, but still no answers.
So I asked my boss if he had anything else I could do, while waiting. "Go play solitaire, read a book, go for a run. But not too far, and keep your cell on you if we need you."
He knew that some things cannot be forced. So I got paid to sit on my ass and read books for two days until the answer popped into my head. Sometimes the best way to be productive is to just sit back, relax and do nothing.
Or find someone who can quickly pick up the work, when you inevitably die horribly in a plane crash on New Years, when the commercial airliner experiences a catastrophic failure and both sets of stabilizers snap off, causing it to crash right into your living room.
It's terribly precise, I know, but hey - you were being overly paranoid.
So ... about on par with the US?
But through some unspoken magic a net can?
And orbital speeds are high, sure, but the slab is also moving at orbital speeds, which will reduce the impact speed significantly as well. And while it may not stop a bolt or bigger item on its own, there is nothing stopping you from placing thick solid metal back-stoppers every after few meters of Aerogel.
Then you end up with a gelatinous cube effect with the stopping power of several meters of solid steel.
Only issue is bringing down something that size. Aerogel is VERY light, but it's also an extremely good insulator and unless it's torn apart by the sheer wind forces, I doubt the metal inside it would suffer on the way down - big problem if it lands anywhere near anyone.
I assure you, Jager and Rohypnol can come to no good end.
Though I don't think it's any business of the FDA.
Here's a minor hint as to why it's their busness. They are called the Food and Drug Administration. Jägermeister is an alcohol and thus counts as a drug. And caffeine is a food additive.
And by massive I mean square kilometres and tens of meters thick.
Aerogel has been shown to be able to pick up even the smallest flecks of material for the Stardust project.
Since it's the smallest things that are the trickiest (huge bits are easily tracked), we need something that will not only absorb the energy of the impact, but also keep the debris in place. Thus, Aerogel is a good fit.