But all that aside, I wasn't trying to argue that NYC is the most densely populated part of the world, but rather took issue with the anonymous poster's assertion that New Delhi and Beijing were moreso. The instruction to look at a map followed by a pair of examples that didn't support the argument he was making got to me
Yeah... look at #7 on the list I posted.:)
And size of population is an aside. The argument is about density, not raw numbers. It's also quite clear that the list is not talking about greater metropolitan areas, just the city proper. Many of the smaller (populations) listed are actually suburbs of larger cities, and the population numbers for many of those cities are much smaller than usually reported. Paris, for example, they report as having a population of only 2 million. The greater megalopolis of Paris is actually over 10 millioin. Delhi, similarly, is reported as 12 million, but is actually 21 million.
Most libertarians I've spoken to wax poetic about the beauty of abolishing government and taxation. I know one who believes that any gathering of more than 20 or so people is inherently evil and should be abolished, and every time I've had libertarianism explained to me, it's been about getting rid of government and letting the people live their lives without interference.
Please step in and correct me if I'm not understanding what they're saying.
But if there's no government, or no taxes to fund the government, then where does the jail come from? Or the police to arrest them in the first place? And if you accept that there needs to be taxation to pay for things like jail or police or public infrastructure, then are you really a libertarian? If, on the other hand, you think that the government should be small, and minimize its influence, but we still need a government, doesn't that make you a small C conservative instead?
Toronto is only one of the big cities in Canada... Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton are all much further north than the Twin Cities, and Edmonton is the smallest of those cities, with a population just over 800,000. Now, admittedly, there are suburbs of Toronto with populations larger than Edmonton, but it's a bit disingenuous to say that the majority of Canada's population lives south of the 49th, when the GTA/golden horseshoe only accounts for about 1/10th of the country's population.
Actually, one of the two majors in my undergraduate degree was Linguistics, and the other was Philosophy... I have, perhaps, a better understanding of language and what it's capable of than you seem to think.
My point still stands, however, that when the goal is clear communication using simple words is most effective. There's a time and a place for florid discourse, and asking for help on a public forum isn't it. Rule 2 is Know Your Audience. Having a back and forth among friends, or playing at puns, or even having an open discourse/argument is not the same as coming to a group of people you've never met, and asking for their help. If you can't distinguish between the different levels of language to be used in different social situations, then perhaps you're the one who doesn't appreciate language at the same level.:)
It's not at a conversational level. Heck, some of the words that were used wouldn't even show up in a 4th year or graduate-level philosophy paper. The first rule of effective communication is being understood, and while I didn't need to look anything up, a lot of people would. Words like "cognizant" do not show up in conversational English. If you're using words that would turn people away from what you're writing, you've failed the first rule: how can you be understood if they didn't even finish reading what you said? Coincidentally, it's a very good way to come off as an arrogant prick.
As a general rule, when a word with fewer syllables exists to convey the same thought, use it. You may think you're being precise, or avoiding obfuscation, but all you're doing is annoying people. Language should be simple and easy to understand: people don't like having to devote clock cycles to figuring out what the hell you're on about.
I believe Socrates observed this phenomenon even in his time, and commented on it. "Stop being such cocky pricks! You don't even appreciate how dumb a bunch of shits you are yet, you little fuckers!" he would tell his students (I paraphrase the Greek).
He did, actually... well, Plato did, through the character Socrates in Apology. "The first step to enlightenment was the realization that I knew nothing."
Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.
You probably won't produce enough fuel from those lawn clippings to make up for the cost of running the lawnmower in the first place.
You'd be better off replacing the grass with something like thyme, which requires less water, doesn't grow as high (doesn't need to be mowed as often, or at all, depending on whether your city has stupid laws), and which is resistant to weeds like dandelions (meaning you won't need the nasty herbicides people put in their lawns, either).
Doesn't Virgin offer unlimited 3G data, still? Turn wifi off entirely.... Can't remember the last time I used it on my cell phone, and it's plenty fast enough to handle everything I want to do with data.
Each channel is 20MHz wide, and you need to go 5 channels up to get one with no overlap at all. Do the math, that means the channels are at 4MHz intervals (they're actually 5MHz apart, for extra white space). Channels 1, 6, and 11 do not overlap with each other, channels 2, 7, channels 3, 8, etc.
If there's enough noise at 2412MHz (Channel 1) that it's essentially unusable, then switching to 2417MHz (Channel 2) will probably not make a difference at all... the frequency listed is the peak frequency, but channel 1 is actually 2402-2422MHz and channel 2 is actually 2407-2427. Going to a higher channel that's farther away, however, probably would make a decent difference.
That's also why lots of newer routers have a channel bonding 40MHz option... they transmit/receive on two channels at the same time, in the hopes of being able to get better bandwidth through the noise.
Most smart meters also use Power line communication, rather than wireless or cellular networks to report in. At least, in this country, they do. That shouldn't interfere with wireless in any way, unless you have dirty power and a poor quality router that can be affected by it.
My car has a speed limiter in it... it kicks in at 185km/h (112.5mph), mandated by the Japanese government as it was manufactured there. If you need to go that fast to pass somebody, maybe you shouldn't be passing them.
More likely scenario, you hit the rev limiter, in which case you change gears, you don't bitch at the limiter.
Where abs comes into play, which the gp seems to have missed, is panic breaking. A calm driver who knows what they are doing can stop faster without them, but a panicked driver who is thinking about the big thing he is about to hit will lock the brake
Besides, a good abs system won't trigger unless you lock the brakes. Only time I have triggered mine has been when I hit black ice while braking normally, and I have been glad of it then. Similarly, good traction control is only there when you need it, and can be turned off. The owners manual for my 2011 Subaru Impreza even lists when, for safety reasons, it should be turned off.
When did Apple change their API so you could no longer run POSIX applications with X-Windows? Most linux software that I use has been ported to Mac, incl-uding everything for software development. If money was no object and you just want to get work done, some would go for linux for ideological reasons but I would get the Mac.
greylisting stops a lot more spam than blacklisting, and has a zero false positive rate as long as the originating server follows the rfc detailing how smtp is supposed to work.
Screen's fine for watching Netflix, surfing the web, checking facebook, and playing Angry Birds or other light games. It's lower resolution than an iPad3, but you'd be surprised how little difference that actually makes when most of what you're consuming is text or low res sprites. It's just as bright and easy to see as any other tablet I've used, and no complaints on that front. It still supports multitouch and all of the gestures I'm accustomed to using on my phone.
Actually, the thing I think would draw the biggest complaint about it is battery life, because it's only good for about 5.5h, followed by the graphics acceleration, which isn't there (CPU doesn't have integrated GPU). But if all you want is to be able to surf the 'net, watch some videos, read an ebook or whatever, then it's a really good buy. Unless, of course, you'd like to spend 4x as much to increase the battery life by 1/3.
There are 10" tablets in that price range... if you are willing to put up with a resistive touch screen instead of capacitive, you can get otherwise respectable spec from it too. The tablet I am typing this on was $160 on sale ($190 reg) and has a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of flash, with a memory card slot to expand, a full size USB host, a second mini USB with an adapter so it can work as a host, and it is running Ice cream sandwich. The screen isn't awesome, but it does what most people want from a tablet at a fraction of the cost of an iPad.
There's a billion Muslims in the world today. Billion, with a B. If they were really as violent and fucked up as the average American seems to believe, we would have turned the planet into a glass-floored parking lot by now.
You are making a point about apostasy, which is fair enough, but most of the muslims have no problem with my not believing in Allah, because I am not and have never been a muslim. There is a line between not following a faith and leaving one.
Extremists are another ball game entirely, but why is it that when americans think of muslims they think of terrorists, but when they think of christians they don't immediately equate with David Koresh or Theodore Kaczynski?
And work requires you to walk all the way off property to smoke. So smokers have a little hike to get to the other side of the parking lot to take a smoke break and you're not allowed to sit in your car and smoke while in the work parking lot. You have to get off property. Must be nice to get all the fresh air on the way out and back:)
I would be thrilled if my work implemented something like that for one simple reason: elevators. Nothing is more annoying than stepping into an elevator with somebody who just took their last drag and hasn't finished exhaling all the smoke. Make them stand outside for a minute or two breathing fresh air before they get into the elevator, and it's better for everybody.
I'm also a coder; and responsible for a lot of product planning matters as well. I used to use my cigarette breaks as "unwinding" time. Now that I'm not smoking, I take fewer breaks (generally just one in the morning; one for lunch; and one in the afternoon) and the lack of "unwinding" is really causing problems for me. I tried increasing my breaks back to the same as when I smoked, but since it's still so soon after quitting, each break reminds me too much of wanting to light up and it really stresses me out more than letting me relax.
Why not find ways to unwind at your desk? Stand up, walk around, look out the window from time to time, or spend a few minutes reading tech news sites when you need to turn your brain off? If your boss has a problem with it, tell him it's take a few minutes to move around and get the blood flowing, or take a cigarette break, and that you were spending the same time on smoking as you are now.
Slashdot Mirror
But all that aside, I wasn't trying to argue that NYC is the most densely populated part of the world, but rather took issue with the anonymous poster's assertion that New Delhi and Beijing were moreso. The instruction to look at a map followed by a pair of examples that didn't support the argument he was making got to me
Yeah... look at #7 on the list I posted. :)
And size of population is an aside. The argument is about density, not raw numbers. It's also quite clear that the list is not talking about greater metropolitan areas, just the city proper. Many of the smaller (populations) listed are actually suburbs of larger cities, and the population numbers for many of those cities are much smaller than usually reported. Paris, for example, they report as having a population of only 2 million. The greater megalopolis of Paris is actually over 10 millioin. Delhi, similarly, is reported as 12 million, but is actually 21 million.
the minimum standard was changed following 9/11. too bad the nimby folks haven't allowed new reactors to be built to that standard...
New York City isn't even in the top 50 by population density: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density
And.. *gasp*... look at which country makes up 7 of the top 10 densest populations in the world...
Yes, fortunately Celine Dion has been residing in Las Vegas for quite some time now. With any luck, she'll stay there.
Most libertarians I've spoken to wax poetic about the beauty of abolishing government and taxation. I know one who believes that any gathering of more than 20 or so people is inherently evil and should be abolished, and every time I've had libertarianism explained to me, it's been about getting rid of government and letting the people live their lives without interference.
Please step in and correct me if I'm not understanding what they're saying.
But if there's no government, or no taxes to fund the government, then where does the jail come from? Or the police to arrest them in the first place? And if you accept that there needs to be taxation to pay for things like jail or police or public infrastructure, then are you really a libertarian? If, on the other hand, you think that the government should be small, and minimize its influence, but we still need a government, doesn't that make you a small C conservative instead?
Toronto is only one of the big cities in Canada... Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton are all much further north than the Twin Cities, and Edmonton is the smallest of those cities, with a population just over 800,000. Now, admittedly, there are suburbs of Toronto with populations larger than Edmonton, but it's a bit disingenuous to say that the majority of Canada's population lives south of the 49th, when the GTA/golden horseshoe only accounts for about 1/10th of the country's population.
Actually, one of the two majors in my undergraduate degree was Linguistics, and the other was Philosophy... I have, perhaps, a better understanding of language and what it's capable of than you seem to think.
My point still stands, however, that when the goal is clear communication using simple words is most effective. There's a time and a place for florid discourse, and asking for help on a public forum isn't it. Rule 2 is Know Your Audience. Having a back and forth among friends, or playing at puns, or even having an open discourse/argument is not the same as coming to a group of people you've never met, and asking for their help. If you can't distinguish between the different levels of language to be used in different social situations, then perhaps you're the one who doesn't appreciate language at the same level. :)
It's not at a conversational level. Heck, some of the words that were used wouldn't even show up in a 4th year or graduate-level philosophy paper. The first rule of effective communication is being understood, and while I didn't need to look anything up, a lot of people would. Words like "cognizant" do not show up in conversational English. If you're using words that would turn people away from what you're writing, you've failed the first rule: how can you be understood if they didn't even finish reading what you said? Coincidentally, it's a very good way to come off as an arrogant prick.
As a general rule, when a word with fewer syllables exists to convey the same thought, use it. You may think you're being precise, or avoiding obfuscation, but all you're doing is annoying people. Language should be simple and easy to understand: people don't like having to devote clock cycles to figuring out what the hell you're on about.
I believe Socrates observed this phenomenon even in his time, and commented on it. "Stop being such cocky pricks! You don't even appreciate how dumb a bunch of shits you are yet, you little fuckers!" he would tell his students (I paraphrase the Greek).
He did, actually... well, Plato did, through the character Socrates in Apology. "The first step to enlightenment was the realization that I knew nothing."
Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.
You probably won't produce enough fuel from those lawn clippings to make up for the cost of running the lawnmower in the first place.
You'd be better off replacing the grass with something like thyme, which requires less water, doesn't grow as high (doesn't need to be mowed as often, or at all, depending on whether your city has stupid laws), and which is resistant to weeds like dandelions (meaning you won't need the nasty herbicides people put in their lawns, either).
Doesn't Virgin offer unlimited 3G data, still? Turn wifi off entirely.... Can't remember the last time I used it on my cell phone, and it's plenty fast enough to handle everything I want to do with data.
Each channel is 20MHz wide, and you need to go 5 channels up to get one with no overlap at all. Do the math, that means the channels are at 4MHz intervals (they're actually 5MHz apart, for extra white space). Channels 1, 6, and 11 do not overlap with each other, channels 2, 7, channels 3, 8, etc.
If there's enough noise at 2412MHz (Channel 1) that it's essentially unusable, then switching to 2417MHz (Channel 2) will probably not make a difference at all... the frequency listed is the peak frequency, but channel 1 is actually 2402-2422MHz and channel 2 is actually 2407-2427. Going to a higher channel that's farther away, however, probably would make a decent difference.
That's also why lots of newer routers have a channel bonding 40MHz option... they transmit/receive on two channels at the same time, in the hopes of being able to get better bandwidth through the noise.
Most smart meters also use Power line communication, rather than wireless or cellular networks to report in. At least, in this country, they do. That shouldn't interfere with wireless in any way, unless you have dirty power and a poor quality router that can be affected by it.
Because the DMCA has force in Finland, does it?
My car has a speed limiter in it... it kicks in at 185km/h (112.5mph), mandated by the Japanese government as it was manufactured there. If you need to go that fast to pass somebody, maybe you shouldn't be passing them.
More likely scenario, you hit the rev limiter, in which case you change gears, you don't bitch at the limiter.
Where abs comes into play, which the gp seems to have missed, is panic breaking. A calm driver who knows what they are doing can stop faster without them, but a panicked driver who is thinking about the big thing he is about to hit will lock the brake
Besides, a good abs system won't trigger unless you lock the brakes. Only time I have triggered mine has been when I hit black ice while braking normally, and I have been glad of it then. Similarly, good traction control is only there when you need it, and can be turned off. The owners manual for my 2011 Subaru Impreza even lists when, for safety reasons, it should be turned off.
I'll bite...
When did Apple change their API so you could no longer run POSIX applications with X-Windows? Most linux software that I use has been ported to Mac, incl-uding everything for software development. If money was no object and you just want to get work done, some would go for linux for ideological reasons but I would get the Mac.
greylisting stops a lot more spam than blacklisting, and has a zero false positive rate as long as the originating server follows the rfc detailing how smtp is supposed to work.
Screen's fine for watching Netflix, surfing the web, checking facebook, and playing Angry Birds or other light games. It's lower resolution than an iPad3, but you'd be surprised how little difference that actually makes when most of what you're consuming is text or low res sprites. It's just as bright and easy to see as any other tablet I've used, and no complaints on that front. It still supports multitouch and all of the gestures I'm accustomed to using on my phone.
Actually, the thing I think would draw the biggest complaint about it is battery life, because it's only good for about 5.5h, followed by the graphics acceleration, which isn't there (CPU doesn't have integrated GPU). But if all you want is to be able to surf the 'net, watch some videos, read an ebook or whatever, then it's a really good buy. Unless, of course, you'd like to spend 4x as much to increase the battery life by 1/3.
There are 10" tablets in that price range... if you are willing to put up with a resistive touch screen instead of capacitive, you can get otherwise respectable spec from it too. The tablet I am typing this on was $160 on sale ($190 reg) and has a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of flash, with a memory card slot to expand, a full size USB host, a second mini USB with an adapter so it can work as a host, and it is running Ice cream sandwich. The screen isn't awesome, but it does what most people want from a tablet at a fraction of the cost of an iPad.
A fool-proof containment unit for radium wouldn't heat the house...
There's a billion Muslims in the world today. Billion, with a B. If they were really as violent and fucked up as the average American seems to believe, we would have turned the planet into a glass-floored parking lot by now.
You are making a point about apostasy, which is fair enough, but most of the muslims have no problem with my not believing in Allah, because I am not and have never been a muslim. There is a line between not following a faith and leaving one.
Extremists are another ball game entirely, but why is it that when americans think of muslims they think of terrorists, but when they think of christians they don't immediately equate with David Koresh or Theodore Kaczynski?
And work requires you to walk all the way off property to smoke. So smokers have a little hike to get to the other side of the parking lot to take a smoke break and you're not allowed to sit in your car and smoke while in the work parking lot. You have to get off property. Must be nice to get all the fresh air on the way out and back :)
I would be thrilled if my work implemented something like that for one simple reason: elevators. Nothing is more annoying than stepping into an elevator with somebody who just took their last drag and hasn't finished exhaling all the smoke. Make them stand outside for a minute or two breathing fresh air before they get into the elevator, and it's better for everybody.
I'm also a coder; and responsible for a lot of product planning matters as well. I used to use my cigarette breaks as "unwinding" time. Now that I'm not smoking, I take fewer breaks (generally just one in the morning; one for lunch; and one in the afternoon) and the lack of "unwinding" is really causing problems for me. I tried increasing my breaks back to the same as when I smoked, but since it's still so soon after quitting, each break reminds me too much of wanting to light up and it really stresses me out more than letting me relax.
Why not find ways to unwind at your desk? Stand up, walk around, look out the window from time to time, or spend a few minutes reading tech news sites when you need to turn your brain off? If your boss has a problem with it, tell him it's take a few minutes to move around and get the blood flowing, or take a cigarette break, and that you were spending the same time on smoking as you are now.