In high school I memorized the values of trig functions for 0, pi/3, pi/2 and pi. And in particular, I learned that pi/2 (90 degrees) is not in the domain of tan, which was one less value to memorize.
That's a big problem for people using the american weight and measure system, which does not have the notion of mass/weight difference. In the SI, mass is measured in kilograms, while "weight" is a force like any other and measured in Newtons (kg*m/s^2)
I personnaly don't mind, that sounds like a reasonnable way to enforce the rights of the content owner while giving all the freedom to the customer, to use its purchase as she wants to.
That's what makes Wikipedia a superior source, since experts can discuss a topic precisely and thouroughly without being dumbed down by editors that want to appeal to a large audience for commercial reasons. Space is infinite and hypertexting allows to preserve a reasonnable length for any given article while allowing more details on sub-topics.
I'm a huge hybrid sceptic. The promises of intelligent driving, hi-tech monitoring of the combustion engine operation, alternative fuels and all-electric systems make the idea of hauling the weight of two engines and the batteries sound stupid. Already, a modern European diesel engine does the same mileage as a hybrid, on a similar car category.
The US expects people seeking citizenship to know (a little bit of) English. From Sarkozy's official agenda, one can read that he wants to expect any person simply seeking a residence and work permit to know French. That would technically include people like relatives of immigrants, and executives relocated by multinational corporations. That sounds idiotic and undoable, and certainly very remote from the American model that Mr. Sarkozy otherwise claims to admire very much.
It's not very clear to me whether he's a physician or a physicist. It is a common mistake from French speakers to call a physicist, a "physician" since physicist translates as "physicien" in French. And the guy says he was working with doppler and ultrasound systems, which could be the case of either.
The TGV cannot cruise at 320 mph : this is only for a record-breaking setup, on a perfectly straight and level rail segment, with a modified train, using much more energy that would be commercially possible, and outside of the safety boundaries of normal traffic. Commercial TGV traffic actually cruises at around 200mph on the most favorable railway segments. So it's not competitive for coast-to-coast travel, not even mentionning having a dozen states or so coordinate the huge route planning and land appropriation process (which takes usually 10 to 15 years in centrally-administrated France).
However a San Diego - LA - San Francisco - Sacramento - Portland - Seattle line would be great. It would transform the life of business travellers and introduce a new form of commuting.
The magic number is actually about 3 hours. You can cover the same distance between two cities (including the airport-city transportation) in 3 hours by TGV or plane. If two cities are less than 3 hours flying from each other, then the train's gonna be faster. If it takes more than 3 hours to fly, then it's likely it would take more time by train (but still more comfortable)
But the drag on your "wings" might just ruin your effort towards efficiency. Also, the critical speed needed to generate the appropriate lift on the forementionned "wings" being quite higher than a train's speed, and the aerodynamic drag evolving with the square of the speed, you might definitely have a not so efficient means of transportation. Oh and you have to carry your own fuel too... not good.
I think that the model of digital distribution, that consists in having the consummer pay about as much for a data file as they would for a packaged physical support with the same content, is flawed at the core. You get at most the same experience as you would by paying for the physical object, and often much less : compare for example a TV show episode on iTunes : $35 for a whole season when a boxset can usually be had second hand for $25 on a C2C website. And then you have no widescreen, no subtitles, no chaptering, no extras, and much worse-than-DVD video quality. And you're very restricted in how you can play it : if in fifteen years you want to watch your show again, assuming the file is not lost to some harddrive crash or computer upgrade or bad backup discipline, you'll have to do it on some Apple hardware, and no other. By that time maybe another company will make much better products, you'll be restricted to using Apple hardware all of your life or you have to give up on your $35 show (and the rest of your collection). Imagine paying for the right to watch The A Team in the 80s and now if you want to watch it again, having to do so on an RCA TV set.
True. It should be a serious wake-up call when one CAD will be worth more than one USD. Until now, Americans without a degree in economics had the following understanding of the international currency system : when we cross over to Canada, they give us more dollars than we change. That was supposed to be the symbol of American economic predominance.
As a former red-blooded MS basher, I really cannot say that I've become a Microsoft fanboy either. I mostly don't care, and consider that PC OS technology has become a very boring field anyway. Here's a take at a list of things that have cooled me off :
Windows XP is a fairly stable operating system, with no serious architectural flaw for office use, software development, workstation or hobbyist use.
William H Gates III has stepped away from the company's spotlight and is leveraging his wealth in a remarkably, socially responsible way, making this accumulation truly beneficial to the world that has created it.
Desktop Operating System peculiarities are growing more irrelevant every year in most domains. The general indifference around the release of Vista is the best proof of this.
No true credible alternative OS has emerged after fifteen years of trying in each and every way : free software, commercial OS companies (Be), alternative OSs pushed by proprietary hardware vendors (Apple, Sun), etc.
In the domain of software development, MS's contributions with.NET and C# are objectively superior to most of their predecessors (I'm talking mainstream environments, not niche or academic ones like Scheme, Haskell or SmallTalk). These are probably the best contribution to mainstream application and system development environment, since Kernighan tried system programming in a high level language and made C. They also have some of the best advanced research in that domain.
By experience, I have found out that it is easier to tweak XP to behave as a Hobbyist's or developper's UNIX box, than it os to tweak Linux into doing properly all that XP does. Install Cygwin, a proper text editor, MS's free command line compiler suite, and learn how to configure the Terminal, and you're done.
At the base of the monetary systems, banknotes and coins are of a different nature : bank notes are titles of debt issued by a bank, which in the modern case is implicitely the federal reserve bank, and central banks of other countries, which are often somehow disjoint from the governments. Coins are the currency itself, minted by the sovereign (the government) of the country. So a one dollar bill supposedly means that you can walk into a branch of the federal reserve bank and ask for four quarters in exchange.
That explains why there are two different pieces of written law to protect one and the other.
Of course in modern economy the distinction is pointless, but lingers in some recent cases, for example with the euro which was introduced as a physical currency in 2002 : euro coins have a country-specific face, while banknotes are all the same. euro coins where minted by each nation where the euro is the currency, even the Vatican has their own coins. And before the euro, Monaco had their own French Franc coins. Both French and Monaco coins would be accepted in Monaco, but not in France. Only standard French banknotes were used in Monaco.
And after we have "destroyed", as you say (are you 13 years old or 12 ?), how exactly is it that we get our iPods/beamers/cheap clothes ? I mean to produce these things you need factories, a functionning society, shipping routes, etc... So we're back to what I've said : we get cheap imports willingly produced and shipped by foreign nations, not out of fear that we would misbehave, but out of conviction that we won't (or that we cannot)
If it was the US military credibility that was reflected in the value of the US dollar, then right now it would take a thousand bucks to buy you a can of peanut butter. There is no reality in a world where the US would use force to secure the supplies that it currently imports and pays for in dollars. Currently the US military is not even capable of holding together Iraq, a purveyor of a fraction of its oil needs. Talk about coercing all the nations that have a trade excedent vis-a-vis the US to continue supplying our way of life for free, or in exchange of notoriously worthless greenish pieces of paper. There is by the way no unipolarity in force when big nations' fundamental interests are threatened : there are 7 to 10 nuclear powers on this earth, and many others could happen in short notice, like Japan or Germany, who run huge trade surpluses with the US.
Quite the contrary : what holds the US dollar afloat is the vested interest of foreign nations in form of the value of the massive reserves of this currency that they hold. If the US dollar would be worthless, then these reserves would be worthless. If only the US political will would matter, then these reserves would be voided, since they constitue a huge IOU from the US to these nations that is going to be leveraged in the future. So it is the very sovereignty of these nations that gives value to the US currency.
Think about what happens when you buy your first house : you get a house even though you can pay only a fraction of its value. The very reason that this can happen is that the people who can make it happen know that they can take the house away from you if you don't make good on the contract that binds you at that moment (your mortgage). If they know that you own such an arsenal as to make it impossible to take the house back from you, they wouldn't give you the house in the first place.
Wired is an overrated collection of BS. I read it for a while during the bubble extasia, found it was crap, stopped reading it. I picked up an issue (that one with the atheists) a few weeks ago to see if it had matured : in my opinion it has not. People who write for Wired should get out and do something useful.
That's the outflow of an inherent problem with allowing operators to be overloaded. People will inevitable make them do different things on different types, making it impossible to know what an operator does without knowing something about the types of the arguments.
I don't thinnk it is : the point of operator overloading is that the operators would do the same "semantic" thing on abstract type as they do on built-in types. Typical example of this would be using '+' to add complex numbers, or '*' to dereference an iterator. So yes, overloading '' for I/O is an abuse, and by the way, the "flow operator" style not only does not prove very useful in practice, but has not been replicated in any other, later, serialization, pretty-printing or I/O interface of for example Java or.NET.
Many European health care systems, like France's, have nothing to do with the government telling anyone what to do. Actually, the government has hardly any leverage to tell patients and doctors what to do, much less than i.e. HMOs have. What they have in Europe is a single, mandatory insurance system. It is like all the employers being mandated to provide "benefits" consisting in subscribing to a regulated not-for-profit insurance organization. Self-employed people also have to subscribe. The benefits is massive risk dilution, non-discrimination of higher risk people, huge leverage in negociating with providers like big pharmas, implicit financial backing by the state (low financial risk premiums). Regulations do try to keep costs in check (preventing fraud, inefficient drugs and treatments, etc), but mostly it targets societal concerns, such as making the cost structure of the insurance family friendly, maintaining benefits to the unemployed, etc. Until very recently in France you didn't have to declare a primary care physician for ex, you could go see anyone you wanted, or several of them if you fancied so. There is only a very small penalty if you still do that now, or if you go see a specialist without a referral.
As a citizen of one of the following countries : USA, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel : Welcome you to our ever growing club. Enjoy the benefits, including much, much less of being invaded, and much less arm twisting by the schoolyard bullies.
Chemical weapons such as those that Iraq possessed and used in the 80s are not weapons of mass destruction. Similar weapons have been used over several years during WWI, as fast as they could be produced, with the same terrifying effects on their victims, yet, the total amount of both civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction in that war was largely inferior to those of WWII, during which chemicals weapons were almost not used at all : at least the Atlantic theatre was 100% "conventional" from the start to the finish of the war.
The article mentions that Sony cameras don't specify the exact model in the EXIF. Cyber-Shot is pretty vague since most digital cameras sold by Sony in the last five or six years is named like that.
On the other hand, in the top 10, there is both one entry for the Digital Rebel XT, and one entry for the 350D, which are actually the same camera, the first being the name under which it is sold in North America, the second the name under which it is sold in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
In high school I memorized the values of trig functions for 0, pi/3, pi/2 and pi. And in particular, I learned that pi/2 (90 degrees) is not in the domain of tan, which was one less value to memorize.
That's a big problem for people using the american weight and measure system, which does not have the notion of mass/weight difference. In the SI, mass is measured in kilograms, while "weight" is a force like any other and measured in Newtons (kg*m/s^2)
In godless, sexually liberated Europe, I don't see that happening anyway.
I personnaly don't mind, that sounds like a reasonnable way to enforce the rights of the content owner while giving all the freedom to the customer, to use its purchase as she wants to.
That's what makes Wikipedia a superior source, since experts can discuss a topic precisely and thouroughly without being dumbed down by editors that want to appeal to a large audience for commercial reasons. Space is infinite and hypertexting allows to preserve a reasonnable length for any given article while allowing more details on sub-topics.
I'm a huge hybrid sceptic. The promises of intelligent driving, hi-tech monitoring of the combustion engine operation, alternative fuels and all-electric systems make the idea of hauling the weight of two engines and the batteries sound stupid. Already, a modern European diesel engine does the same mileage as a hybrid, on a similar car category.
The US expects people seeking citizenship to know (a little bit of) English. From Sarkozy's official agenda, one can read that he wants to expect any person simply seeking a residence and work permit to know French. That would technically include people like relatives of immigrants, and executives relocated by multinational corporations. That sounds idiotic and undoable, and certainly very remote from the American model that Mr. Sarkozy otherwise claims to admire very much.
It's not very clear to me whether he's a physician or a physicist. It is a common mistake from French speakers to call a physicist, a "physician" since physicist translates as "physicien" in French. And the guy says he was working with doppler and ultrasound systems, which could be the case of either.
The iPhone is geared up to be Apple's biggest flop since the Newton.
The TGV cannot cruise at 320 mph : this is only for a record-breaking setup, on a perfectly straight and level rail segment, with a modified train, using much more energy that would be commercially possible, and outside of the safety boundaries of normal traffic. Commercial TGV traffic actually cruises at around 200mph on the most favorable railway segments. So it's not competitive for coast-to-coast travel, not even mentionning having a dozen states or so coordinate the huge route planning and land appropriation process (which takes usually 10 to 15 years in centrally-administrated France).
However a San Diego - LA - San Francisco - Sacramento - Portland - Seattle line would be great. It would transform the life of business travellers and introduce a new form of commuting.
The magic number is actually about 3 hours. You can cover the same distance between two cities (including the airport-city transportation) in 3 hours by TGV or plane. If two cities are less than 3 hours flying from each other, then the train's gonna be faster. If it takes more than 3 hours to fly, then it's likely it would take more time by train (but still more comfortable)
But the drag on your "wings" might just ruin your effort towards efficiency. Also, the critical speed needed to generate the appropriate lift on the forementionned "wings" being quite higher than a train's speed, and the aerodynamic drag evolving with the square of the speed, you might definitely have a not so efficient means of transportation. Oh and you have to carry your own fuel too... not good.
I think that the model of digital distribution, that consists in having the consummer pay about as much for a data file as they would for a packaged physical support with the same content, is flawed at the core. You get at most the same experience as you would by paying for the physical object, and often much less : compare for example a TV show episode on iTunes : $35 for a whole season when a boxset can usually be had second hand for $25 on a C2C website. And then you have no widescreen, no subtitles, no chaptering, no extras, and much worse-than-DVD video quality. And you're very restricted in how you can play it : if in fifteen years you want to watch your show again, assuming the file is not lost to some harddrive crash or computer upgrade or bad backup discipline, you'll have to do it on some Apple hardware, and no other. By that time maybe another company will make much better products, you'll be restricted to using Apple hardware all of your life or you have to give up on your $35 show (and the rest of your collection). Imagine paying for the right to watch The A Team in the 80s and now if you want to watch it again, having to do so on an RCA TV set.
True. It should be a serious wake-up call when one CAD will be worth more than one USD. Until now, Americans without a degree in economics had the following understanding of the international currency system : when we cross over to Canada, they give us more dollars than we change. That was supposed to be the symbol of American economic predominance.
At the base of the monetary systems, banknotes and coins are of a different nature : bank notes are titles of debt issued by a bank, which in the modern case is implicitely the federal reserve bank, and central banks of other countries, which are often somehow disjoint from the governments. Coins are the currency itself, minted by the sovereign (the government) of the country. So a one dollar bill supposedly means that you can walk into a branch of the federal reserve bank and ask for four quarters in exchange.
That explains why there are two different pieces of written law to protect one and the other.
Of course in modern economy the distinction is pointless, but lingers in some recent cases, for example with the euro which was introduced as a physical currency in 2002 : euro coins have a country-specific face, while banknotes are all the same. euro coins where minted by each nation where the euro is the currency, even the Vatican has their own coins. And before the euro, Monaco had their own French Franc coins. Both French and Monaco coins would be accepted in Monaco, but not in France. Only standard French banknotes were used in Monaco.
And after we have "destroyed", as you say (are you 13 years old or 12 ?), how exactly is it that we get our iPods/beamers/cheap clothes ? I mean to produce these things you need factories, a functionning society, shipping routes, etc... So we're back to what I've said : we get cheap imports willingly produced and shipped by foreign nations, not out of fear that we would misbehave, but out of conviction that we won't (or that we cannot)
If it was the US military credibility that was reflected in the value of the US dollar, then right now it would take a thousand bucks to buy you a can of peanut butter. There is no reality in a world where the US would use force to secure the supplies that it currently imports and pays for in dollars. Currently the US military is not even capable of holding together Iraq, a purveyor of a fraction of its oil needs. Talk about coercing all the nations that have a trade excedent vis-a-vis the US to continue supplying our way of life for free, or in exchange of notoriously worthless greenish pieces of paper. There is by the way no unipolarity in force when big nations' fundamental interests are threatened : there are 7 to 10 nuclear powers on this earth, and many others could happen in short notice, like Japan or Germany, who run huge trade surpluses with the US.
Quite the contrary : what holds the US dollar afloat is the vested interest of foreign nations in form of the value of the massive reserves of this currency that they hold. If the US dollar would be worthless, then these reserves would be worthless. If only the US political will would matter, then these reserves would be voided, since they constitue a huge IOU from the US to these nations that is going to be leveraged in the future. So it is the very sovereignty of these nations that gives value to the US currency.
Think about what happens when you buy your first house : you get a house even though you can pay only a fraction of its value. The very reason that this can happen is that the people who can make it happen know that they can take the house away from you if you don't make good on the contract that binds you at that moment (your mortgage). If they know that you own such an arsenal as to make it impossible to take the house back from you, they wouldn't give you the house in the first place.
Isn't it an urban myth that Tang was born out of the space program ?
When I read the description of the game in the article, I told myself "I cannot believe it". So you can imagine where I stand on the issue of faith...
Wired is an overrated collection of BS. I read it for a while during the bubble extasia, found it was crap, stopped reading it. I picked up an issue (that one with the atheists) a few weeks ago to see if it had matured : in my opinion it has not. People who write for Wired should get out and do something useful.
That's the outflow of an inherent problem with allowing operators to be overloaded. People will inevitable make them do different things on different types, making it impossible to know what an operator does without knowing something about the types of the arguments.
I don't thinnk it is : the point of operator overloading is that the operators would do the same "semantic" thing on abstract type as they do on built-in types. Typical example of this would be using '+' to add complex numbers, or '*' to dereference an iterator. So yes, overloading '' for I/O is an abuse, and by the way, the "flow operator" style not only does not prove very useful in practice, but has not been replicated in any other, later, serialization, pretty-printing or I/O interface of for example Java or
Many European health care systems, like France's, have nothing to do with the government telling anyone what to do. Actually, the government has hardly any leverage to tell patients and doctors what to do, much less than i.e. HMOs have. What they have in Europe is a single, mandatory insurance system. It is like all the employers being mandated to provide "benefits" consisting in subscribing to a regulated not-for-profit insurance organization. Self-employed people also have to subscribe. The benefits is massive risk dilution, non-discrimination of higher risk people, huge leverage in negociating with providers like big pharmas, implicit financial backing by the state (low financial risk premiums). Regulations do try to keep costs in check (preventing fraud, inefficient drugs and treatments, etc), but mostly it targets societal concerns, such as making the cost structure of the insurance family friendly, maintaining benefits to the unemployed, etc. Until very recently in France you didn't have to declare a primary care physician for ex, you could go see anyone you wanted, or several of them if you fancied so. There is only a very small penalty if you still do that now, or if you go see a specialist without a referral.
As a citizen of one of the following countries : USA, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel : Welcome you to our ever growing club. Enjoy the benefits, including much, much less of being invaded, and much less arm twisting by the schoolyard bullies.
Chemical weapons such as those that Iraq possessed and used in the 80s are not weapons of mass destruction. Similar weapons have been used over several years during WWI, as fast as they could be produced, with the same terrifying effects on their victims, yet, the total amount of both civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction in that war was largely inferior to those of WWII, during which chemicals weapons were almost not used at all : at least the Atlantic theatre was 100% "conventional" from the start to the finish of the war.
The article mentions that Sony cameras don't specify the exact model in the EXIF. Cyber-Shot is pretty vague since most digital cameras sold by Sony in the last five or six years is named like that.
On the other hand, in the top 10, there is both one entry for the Digital Rebel XT, and one entry for the 350D, which are actually the same camera, the first being the name under which it is sold in North America, the second the name under which it is sold in Europe.