The prospect of wave energy - which is far less intrusive than wind power - is very attractive
The upside of wave power is that water is relatively dense, and thus moving water carries a lot of energy in a small volume. The downside is maintenance costs... they don't call water the "universal solvent" for nothing, and salt water in particular tends to eat anything you leave in contact with it for very long.
So, I'm all for grow local, but when there's sun shining right outside - this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me... unless you are a company that sells grow lights.
Very true... it's hard to compete with a fertile field in a nice climate, if you have access to one. I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the obvious applications in locations where viable outdoor environments aren't available, though -- e.g. in space, or on Mars.
- Hey, how come I can't run Excel anymore? - Excel doesn't run under Linux, but here, you can use OpenOffice instead. - Screw that, I need to run Excel! Put Windows back on!
Ummm so what if they refuse service because their bigoted? I still occasionally, see stores with a "we reserve the right to refuse service for any reason". It's their right as a business owner.
I don't know which country you're posting from, but in the USA it is definitely illegal for a business to discriminate -- there are anti-discrimination laws explicitly saying as such. For example, if a black person walks in to your restaurant and you refuse to serve him because he's black, you can expect to get sued, and lose. The only thing new here is that the courts will probably now also side against you for turning away a gay customer as well; however the principle is well established.
They have dealers and showrooms and distribution already set up all over the planet. If the market takes off they are MUCH better positioned to get cars made and distributed and sold and supported than a company with basically no distribution network and no dealers.
Well, maybe. On the other hand, given how much people hate car dealerships, I'm not sure having a big network of dealerships (and forcing anyone who wants to buy your product to haggle with them) is necessarily such a big advantage anymore.
If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD.
While I'm all in favor of using SSDs, note that there is also another way to skin this cat -- install as many gigabytes of RAM as you can afford. Any additional RAM not needed by applications will be used to cache previously read data from the hard drive (and to cache updated file data that needs to be written to the hard drive), so with enough RAM (and assuming you don't reboot/power-cycle very often) you won't spend that much time waiting for your hard drive anyway, no matter how slow the drive is.
When I hear of group-programming styles like this, I always think of a network of modern multi-gigahertz computers, all linked together over a 1980's-style 10MB/sec Ethernet LAN.
Whatever benefit the additional CPU cycles might add is more than taken away by the low throughput and high latency of the communications medium. (What is the average throughput of a spoken conversation, anyway? Maybe 1200 baud on a good day?)
Well, its nice to have levitation (although it requires a very specific environment to work), but riding a hoverboard without thrust is as much fun as wind surfing without wind.
If I recall traditional skateboarding correctly, thrust is provided by pushing one foot backwards against the ground. (whether that is more or less fun that having the board itself provide the thrust depends on what you consider fun)
And if "another place to live" isn't within practical commuting distance of your job or of any employer hiring in the field for which you have trained, too bad.
The ones that do are mostly doing it because it's a legal way to keep the riff-raff from moving in and ruining your building's NPR-listening vibe with a bunch of twangy country or loud-ass hip-hop.
That's a bit uncharitable. Landlords do credit checks because if a tenant cannot (or does not) pay his rent, the landlord stands to lose thousands of dollars. It can take months to get a non-paying tenant evicted, during which time the landlord still has to make all mortgage payments, entirely out of his own pocket. Furthermore, serving a tenant with an eviction notice is no fun for either party, and a pissed-off tenant may well cause thousands of dollars of damage to the landlord's property before he leaves -- again, money that the landlord will have to pay out of his own pocket before he can put the unit back on the market.
So yes, there are really good reasons why a landlord would want to vet a potential tenant thoroughly before giving them the keys to the property. The landlord is taking a big risk every time he/she rents out a unit.
No, the transaction itself is not coerced, no matter how essential it may be to your survival.
Heh. The slave's labor is not coerced either, it's just that if he doesn't work, the overseer will beat him. Whether the slave prefers to work or to be beaten is totally up to him.:P
C++ does have this opportunity but never takes it. Instead it just heaps another layer of features on top of the old,
Correct, and that's an excellent example of why C++ is both popular and messy. If the C++ committee started "cleaning up the language" by removing backwards compatibility with old features, the language would split into two languages ("old C++" and "new C++"), neither of which would have the compatibility or the marketshare of the current C++.
so... apparently you dont know how capitalism works.
If you're suggesting that capitalism is always a zero-sum, winner-take-all game, where only a single company can survive in any given market, then perhaps it is you who doesn't know how capitalism works.
And that in a nutshell is what's wrong with C++. It has bloated and bloated over the years, never deprecated anything of note and now its this behemoth that few compilers implement in its entirety and few programmers now how to use including all the gotchas, weird semantics and vast complexity.
Much like the English language, which is also quite useful and therefore widely used. Being useful over a wide variety of scenarios and being bloated-and-complex are often two sides of the same coin.
If one wanted, one could design a scanner whose only data-output path was an audible tone. You could download a list of license numbers into it (using a unidirectional data transfer, e.g. via a serial port with the device's TX pin removed), and then it would beep if it saw one of the plates in the list, and that's all it would do.
To hack it to output a list of license plates it had scanned that day would both require hardware and software modifications -- not impossible, but inconvenient enough that it's unlikely most police departments would be capable of doing it.
Is making the hyper loop even faster considered desirable? Unless they can find a way to make the path of the track/pipe perfectly straight, the passengers will experience g-forces proportional to the velocity of the vehicle whenever they go around a curve. Too much speed could make the ride rather uncomfortable. (You can reduce that by making the track straiter, of course, but that reduces your flexibility in placing the track)
Beautiful, isn't it? Without even looking at this I know that my company can undercut the bid by at least 65% and still come out OK.
It's good that you're confident in your company's abilities; but in order to win the contract, you'd have to gain the confidence of the decision-makers in the school district as well. As any company involved in outsourcing over the last decade can tell you, a cheaper up-front quote is no bargain if the delivered product is screwed up.
Been there, done that. You're invisible if your stuff doesn't break. Nobody even knows your name. Tell someone what you did and they only see that you worked on outdated technology with no relevance to current systems.
This is why it's so critical to include scheduled malfunctions in your control logic. That way you'll get called in every 6-9 months to "fix" the system, which you'll be able to do very quickly since it is just a matter of resetting the timer for next time. You'll make a few hundred dollars each time, and everybody will recall you fondly as the indispensable genius who is the only person who knows just how to keep the system running. Just be sure to randomize the timeouts a bit so that nobody catches on;^)
(disclaimer: I'm joking; I don't really advocate doing this)
If the valves have to open in an emergency, and a single valve has a probability of failure of 1/10, three parallel valves bring the probability down to 1/1000.
All well and good, if the failures are in fact randomly distributed.
OTOH, if the failures are caused by particular entry conditions (aging/temperature/pressure/whatever) and all of the valves are experiencing those entry conditions simultaneously, then the likelihood of all valves failing simultaneously may be much higher.
Slashdot Mirror
The prospect of wave energy - which is far less intrusive than wind power - is very attractive
The upside of wave power is that water is relatively dense, and thus moving water carries a lot of energy in a small volume. The downside is maintenance costs... they don't call water the "universal solvent" for nothing, and salt water in particular tends to eat anything you leave in contact with it for very long.
So, I'm all for grow local, but when there's sun shining right outside - this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me... unless you are a company that sells grow lights.
Very true... it's hard to compete with a fertile field in a nice climate, if you have access to one. I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the obvious applications in locations where viable outdoor environments aren't available, though -- e.g. in space, or on Mars.
[... 5 minutes later...]
- Hey, how come I can't run Excel anymore?
- Excel doesn't run under Linux, but here, you can use OpenOffice instead.
- Screw that, I need to run Excel! Put Windows back on!
Ummm so what if they refuse service because their bigoted? I still occasionally, see stores with a "we reserve the right to refuse service for any reason". It's their right as a business owner.
I don't know which country you're posting from, but in the USA it is definitely illegal for a business to discriminate -- there are anti-discrimination laws explicitly saying as such. For example, if a black person walks in to your restaurant and you refuse to serve him because he's black, you can expect to get sued, and lose. The only thing new here is that the courts will probably now also side against you for turning away a gay customer as well; however the principle is well established.
The real Shakespeare could only pump out Shakespeare too.
... and the real Shakespeare was also the result of millions of generations of a genetic algorithm. It seems the experiment has already been done :)
Take the skin color from the nose and then see what parts of the body are skin colored in the photo. If there is lot of skin color shout NUDE!
So my collection of clown porn is still safely undetectable?
They have dealers and showrooms and distribution already set up all over the planet. If the market takes off they are MUCH better positioned to get cars made and distributed and sold and supported than a company with basically no distribution network and no dealers.
Well, maybe. On the other hand, given how much people hate car dealerships, I'm not sure having a big network of dealerships (and forcing anyone who wants to buy your product to haggle with them) is necessarily such a big advantage anymore.
The first company which can make a 10000$ electric car (and that is road-legal in all countries) will dominate the market.
The GEM car guys will be happy to know that their market domination is imminent :^)
If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD.
While I'm all in favor of using SSDs, note that there is also another way to skin this cat -- install as many gigabytes of RAM as you can afford. Any additional RAM not needed by applications will be used to cache previously read data from the hard drive (and to cache updated file data that needs to be written to the hard drive), so with enough RAM (and assuming you don't reboot/power-cycle very often) you won't spend that much time waiting for your hard drive anyway, no matter how slow the drive is.
When I hear of group-programming styles like this, I always think of a network of modern multi-gigahertz computers, all linked together over a 1980's-style 10MB/sec Ethernet LAN.
Whatever benefit the additional CPU cycles might add is more than taken away by the low throughput and high latency of the communications medium. (What is the average throughput of a spoken conversation, anyway? Maybe 1200 baud on a good day?)
Well, its nice to have levitation (although it requires a very specific environment to work), but riding a hoverboard without thrust is as much fun as wind surfing without wind.
If I recall traditional skateboarding correctly, thrust is provided by pushing one foot backwards against the ground. (whether that is more or less fun that having the board itself provide the thrust depends on what you consider fun)
And if "another place to live" isn't within practical commuting distance of your job or of any employer hiring in the field for which you have trained, too bad.
Well, there's always the nuclear option...
The ones that do are mostly doing it because it's a legal way to keep the riff-raff from moving in and ruining your building's NPR-listening vibe with a bunch of twangy country or loud-ass hip-hop.
That's a bit uncharitable. Landlords do credit checks because if a tenant cannot (or does not) pay his rent, the landlord stands to lose thousands of dollars. It can take months to get a non-paying tenant evicted, during which time the landlord still has to make all mortgage payments, entirely out of his own pocket. Furthermore, serving a tenant with an eviction notice is no fun for either party, and a pissed-off tenant may well cause thousands of dollars of damage to the landlord's property before he leaves -- again, money that the landlord will have to pay out of his own pocket before he can put the unit back on the market.
So yes, there are really good reasons why a landlord would want to vet a potential tenant thoroughly before giving them the keys to the property. The landlord is taking a big risk every time he/she rents out a unit.
No, the transaction itself is not coerced, no matter how essential it may be to your survival.
Heh. The slave's labor is not coerced either, it's just that if he doesn't work, the overseer will beat him. Whether the slave prefers to work or to be beaten is totally up to him. :P
C++ does have this opportunity but never takes it. Instead it just heaps another layer of features on top of the old,
Correct, and that's an excellent example of why C++ is both popular and messy. If the C++ committee started "cleaning up the language" by removing backwards compatibility with old features, the language would split into two languages ("old C++" and "new C++"), neither of which would have the compatibility or the marketshare of the current C++.
Yeah, Sweden, fiberglass insulation will really do a lot to stop electromagnetic waves, no?
I doesn't have to stop the waves, it only has to convince the homeowner that the waves are being stopped.
Systems with hidden antennas (on a roof for example) give almost no complaints.
That must be the source of the selection pressure that is causing cell towers to evolve into pseudo-trees.
(One day I hope to come across one while it is bearing fruit -- I assume that is how new cell phone varieties are cultivated)
so... apparently you dont know how capitalism works.
If you're suggesting that capitalism is always a zero-sum, winner-take-all game, where only a single company can survive in any given market, then perhaps it is you who doesn't know how capitalism works.
And that in a nutshell is what's wrong with C++. It has bloated and bloated over the years, never deprecated anything of note and now its this behemoth that few compilers implement in its entirety and few programmers now how to use including all the gotchas, weird semantics and vast complexity.
Much like the English language, which is also quite useful and therefore widely used. Being useful over a wide variety of scenarios and being bloated-and-complex are often two sides of the same coin.
If one wanted, one could design a scanner whose only data-output path was an audible tone. You could download a list of license numbers into it (using a unidirectional data transfer, e.g. via a serial port with the device's TX pin removed), and then it would beep if it saw one of the plates in the list, and that's all it would do.
To hack it to output a list of license plates it had scanned that day would both require hardware and software modifications -- not impossible, but inconvenient enough that it's unlikely most police departments would be capable of doing it.
[...] Yet killing a chimp is not considered "murder".
Perhaps it should be?
Is making the hyper loop even faster considered desirable? Unless they can find a way to make the path of the track/pipe perfectly straight, the passengers will experience g-forces proportional to the velocity of the vehicle whenever they go around a curve. Too much speed could make the ride rather uncomfortable. (You can reduce that by making the track straiter, of course, but that reduces your flexibility in placing the track)
Beautiful, isn't it? Without even looking at this I know that my company can undercut the bid by at least 65% and still come out OK.
It's good that you're confident in your company's abilities; but in order to win the contract, you'd have to gain the confidence of the decision-makers in the school district as well. As any company involved in outsourcing over the last decade can tell you, a cheaper up-front quote is no bargain if the delivered product is screwed up.
Been there, done that. You're invisible if your stuff doesn't break. Nobody even knows your name. Tell someone what you did and they only see that you worked on outdated technology with no relevance to current systems.
This is why it's so critical to include scheduled malfunctions in your control logic. That way you'll get called in every 6-9 months to "fix" the system, which you'll be able to do very quickly since it is just a matter of resetting the timer for next time. You'll make a few hundred dollars each time, and everybody will recall you fondly as the indispensable genius who is the only person who knows just how to keep the system running. Just be sure to randomize the timeouts a bit so that nobody catches on ;^)
(disclaimer: I'm joking; I don't really advocate doing this)
If the valves have to open in an emergency, and a single valve has a probability of failure of 1/10, three parallel valves bring the probability down to 1/1000.
All well and good, if the failures are in fact randomly distributed.
OTOH, if the failures are caused by particular entry conditions (aging/temperature/pressure/whatever) and all of the valves are experiencing those entry conditions simultaneously, then the likelihood of all valves failing simultaneously may be much higher.