"The study tested 122 of the devices and found that nearly 90% of green pointers and about 44% of red pointers tested were out of federal safety regulation compliance."
Yes, that's the story that's in the textbooks, at least.
The reality of the Civil War was a *lot* more complicated. Slavery was only the third or fourth most important issue until Lincoln turned it into the moral justification for the war. Which was a brilliant PR move on his part, since even a century later we're believing in it.
The #1 reason was the same sort of divisive party politics that continues to this day, with the same party names even. You know what the Republican fringe was saying about Obama during the last elections? That was pretty much what the Democrats were saying about Lincoln, except replace "socialism" with "abolitionism".
Then there was the whole movement from rural, agriculture-based societies to urban, industrial society. Always a cause for major upheaval. And guess what? East Virginia was mostly agricultural, and West Virginia was mostly coal mines (and thus economically aligned with the Northern cities they fueled).
Of course there was also the statehood issue. The states, at that time, still had quite a bit more independence than they do now. There had been a delicate balance for years over the slavery issue, trying to make sure that neither side had enough votes to force their own way. Lincoln's election proved that balance was gone - he wasn't even on the ballot in many Southern states.
Finally was the whole issue of the war. There was a lull between the initial round of secession and the war proper beginning, during which Virginia was still Union. Only when Lincoln began calling up the armies did the rest secede (and West Virginia re-secede, or de-secede or whatever the term is). Even then, some states tried to declare neutrality.
As for West Virginia, there was one more reason peculiar to them - geography. The two are separated by the Appalachian Mountains, which are a rather significant barrier. I think it's even easier for them to ship coal to New Orleans (via the Mississippi) than to Richmond. When you have such separation, it's somewhat natural for political divisions to occur.
Personally I think it is a great day for democracy. The people wanted this. They voted in a Government that did an independent enquiry and then actioned those recommendations. You can't get much more democratic than that.
Sure you can.
Get rid of those pesky representatives. Have people vote directly on issues. It's rather harder to bribe 50 million people than 500. And we have this technology called "The Internet" - perhaps you've heard of it? - which could make such voting possible.
Sure, we've seen what happens with mob rule and demagoguery (shall I preemptively Godwin my own debate?), but honestly, I'd rather a government take pages from Mad Max and Idiocracy than 1984 and Atlas Shrugged.
Well, they never specified which unit the nano- was prefixed to.
A nanoparsec would be about 30,000km, a nanolightyear around 10,000km, and a nano-AU would be around 150m. By any of those, the ESB would be "nano-scale" (or below).
Observers from the Ministry of Silly Walks have confirmed (to their disappointment) that their walk was one of the most serious ever recorded, and that they did not amble, dawdle, gambol, hustle, limp, meander, mosey, march, ramble, sashay, saunter, scamper, scurry, sidle, skulk, slink, slog, skip, stroll, stomp, strut, swagger, tiptoe, traipse. They did not even do a forward aerial half turn every alternate step with the left leg, which itself is hardly a silly walk at all.
I've given that a try, but classical music generally has a large dynamic range (ie. very quiet parts and very loud parts). It's distracting to have to keep adjusting the volume to a level that overpowers background noise, but isn't ear-breakingly loud.
Agreed. I'm still on my Droid (not Droid 2, not Droid X, the original Droid). I desperately need an update, and have needed one for several... years, I guess. The Galaxy S4 is now one of the options I'm looking at. But if I had just upgraded last year, I wouldn't bother.
Suggestion for music: video game soundtracks. It's generally designed to be undistracting, and something you can listen to over and over again.
Best place to start would probably be PS1/N64 games. Too limited for any significant vocals (out of the 993 songs I have from that generation, only five have vocals, and two of them are in Latin), but tends to be more cinematic and slow than the often fast-paced, baroque stuff of earlier consoles. Plus, if you're in a college dorm now, you likely grew up playing those games, so you get some nostalgia.
It's a much different flow from Google Reader (and every other RSS reader I've ever seen, actually), but I use Firefox Live Bookmarks exclusively.
I've tried switching away numerous times. Particularly during the entire Firefox 3.x series, which had a major bug where refreshing Live Bookmarks caused the whole browser to stop responding until it finished. With the 100+ blogs and webcomics I read, that meant every hour or so, it would freeze up for 2-3 minutes. I switched to Chrome for literally everything else, but I still kept Firefox for the Live Bookmarks. I just don't like how the others operate.
Assuming, that is, that North Korea is able to do so. I've seen some speculation by relatively-knowledgeable people about a Korean War that has South Korea winning it before the US even gets clearance from Washington to join in. I think that's a bit over-optimistic, but I don't doubt that if it were just South Korea versus just North Korea, the Korea with the main battle tanks, modern fighter jets and robotic sentry turrets will beat the Korea whose soldiers barely get a survival ration and whose rockets have a more consistent history of exploding than their warheads.
South Korea is no military weakling. Look at almost any list of countries by military strength - they'll be in the top ten or *maybe* twenty. They beat France and Italy *combined* for active military personnel. They beat the US for active + reserve. They tie Germany for tanks, and beat them for fighter aircraft. They're #9 in military spending. #8 in Global Militarization Index. They're not in a position to take on China single-handedly, but they'd give North Korea a thrashing, and they'd last long enough against China for the rest of the world to come to their aid.
Nobody ever said we had to pull out of Japan. In fact, that would be a great place for the 8th Army to "temporarily" rebase to, while "transitioning" back to the US (if some Japanese politician is making a campaign issue out of it, Australia would work just as well).
And I'm sure our ships will dock in Korean ports quite often for resupply. I mean, that's only natural. They're still allies, just without our troops pre-positioned in their country.
When the rules of the game prevent victory, youchange the rules.
In this case, you either give up on nuclear disarmament (personally I don't think nukes themselves are problematic, just the size and particularly number we have), or you give up on the North Korean people (personally I favor precision missile strikes against their leadership and military threats).
Or we find a new method - I would think negotiation would work better if we openly recognized that, without China propping them up, NK would have collapsed decades ago - so we need to figure out what China wants out of the deal. Simply put, they're worried about the big US army that's been stationed there, just as they were during the Korean War. So, oddly, negotiation could probably proceed without either of the Koreas at the table - just China and the US. Get the US to pull out the 8th Army in exchange for China dropping all support for NK, and we'd be getting somewhere. NK would then either quickly starve, or would start listening when we tell them to knock it off.
I'm all for that, as long as we have plenty of cameras rolling.
Someone call up Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich and James Cameron - they're about to save a couple million in CGI effects. And get Shatner ready to narrate a sequel to Trinity and Beyond.
The difference is that Chrome OS is a consumer-grade "thin client". It is aimed mainly at home and educational use, not the big corporate or government use most other thin clients aim for.
As such, yes, it makes sense to compare it to other consumer-grade operating systems. The results won't be quite comparable, as many duties normally handled by the OS are done remotely, in "the cloud", but it's still a worthwhile comparison.
Flash is roughly $1/GB. 8GB of flash costs about $8, which is in line with the ~$10 price increase of an SSHD over a similar pure hard drive. At 128GB, though, you're spending as much or more on just the flash than the SSHDs here cost.
Not to mention the physical size. 128GB SSDs take up quite a bit of the space available in a 2.5" disk. You aren't likely to see a 2TB hard drive and a 128GB SSD in a single enclosure anytime soon, simply because that won't fit into a single drive bay.
A good coder will write good code even in a bad language. A bad coder will write bad code even in a good language.
But let a good coder use a good language, and you'll get great code. Just don't let a bad coder use a bad language, else you get, well, 90% of the stuff in VB6.
Could be worse. There's a band named "The The", and another one named "The Band".
Still doesn't hold up to "!!!", which is the only band I know of to require the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (the ! is an alveolar click, used in some African and Australian languages).
x86 is fine. The flaws of the architecture are mostly superficial, and even then, x86-64 cleans a lot of it up. And it's all hidden behind a compiler now anyways - and we have very good compilers.
ARM has an advantage in the ultra-low-power market because they've been designing for the ultra-low-power market. Intel has been focusing on the laptop/desktop/server market, and so their processors fit into that power bracket.
But guess what? As ARM is moving into higher-performance chips, they're sucking up more power (compare Cortex-A9 to Cortex-A15). And as Intel is moving into lower-power chips, they're losing performance (compare Atom to Core).
The ISA doesn't really affect power too much, as it turns out. It affects how easily compilers can use it, and how easily the chip can be designed, but not really power draw or thermal performance. Given the lead Intel has on fabrication, any slight disadvantage of the x86 architecture in that regard is made up for by the software library.
The original Crysis had some pretty brilliant sections, along with a lot of mediocre, boring or just plain terrible sections. I still haven't beaten the game, but I've played that one hostage-rescue mission a couple dozen times, along with a few of the other good parts. Seriously, if they had just stopped right when you enter the alien ship/base/whatever, it would have been a good (if a bit short) game. As it is, it's a game with levels you'll only play through once.
So, then, how good is Crysis 3 at its best? Does it get back to that wide, open-approach gameplay, where you can plan things out and approach it several different ways? Do you ever get that Predator feeling? Or is it terrible from beginning to end?
The review barely touches on this, mentioning one or two good vehicle sections, but FYI, don't bother with TFA. It's three pages full of no details. It's not a review, it's an executive summary of a review. I'll wait for better reviews and better benchmarks.
Slashdot Mirror
"The study tested 122 of the devices and found that nearly 90% of green pointers and about 44% of red pointers tested were out of federal safety regulation compliance."
So blue lasers are safe then?
Well, your stove hopefully isn't containing radioactive waste.
Yes, that's the story that's in the textbooks, at least.
The reality of the Civil War was a *lot* more complicated. Slavery was only the third or fourth most important issue until Lincoln turned it into the moral justification for the war. Which was a brilliant PR move on his part, since even a century later we're believing in it.
The #1 reason was the same sort of divisive party politics that continues to this day, with the same party names even. You know what the Republican fringe was saying about Obama during the last elections? That was pretty much what the Democrats were saying about Lincoln, except replace "socialism" with "abolitionism".
Then there was the whole movement from rural, agriculture-based societies to urban, industrial society. Always a cause for major upheaval. And guess what? East Virginia was mostly agricultural, and West Virginia was mostly coal mines (and thus economically aligned with the Northern cities they fueled).
Of course there was also the statehood issue. The states, at that time, still had quite a bit more independence than they do now. There had been a delicate balance for years over the slavery issue, trying to make sure that neither side had enough votes to force their own way. Lincoln's election proved that balance was gone - he wasn't even on the ballot in many Southern states.
Finally was the whole issue of the war. There was a lull between the initial round of secession and the war proper beginning, during which Virginia was still Union. Only when Lincoln began calling up the armies did the rest secede (and West Virginia re-secede, or de-secede or whatever the term is). Even then, some states tried to declare neutrality.
As for West Virginia, there was one more reason peculiar to them - geography. The two are separated by the Appalachian Mountains, which are a rather significant barrier. I think it's even easier for them to ship coal to New Orleans (via the Mississippi) than to Richmond. When you have such separation, it's somewhat natural for political divisions to occur.
Personally I think it is a great day for democracy. The people wanted this. They voted in a Government that did an independent enquiry and then actioned those recommendations. You can't get much more democratic than that.
Sure you can.
Get rid of those pesky representatives. Have people vote directly on issues. It's rather harder to bribe 50 million people than 500. And we have this technology called "The Internet" - perhaps you've heard of it? - which could make such voting possible.
Sure, we've seen what happens with mob rule and demagoguery (shall I preemptively Godwin my own debate?), but honestly, I'd rather a government take pages from Mad Max and Idiocracy than 1984 and Atlas Shrugged.
just take a look at your co-workers.
Or /. editors...
Well, they never specified which unit the nano- was prefixed to.
A nanoparsec would be about 30,000km, a nanolightyear around 10,000km, and a nano-AU would be around 150m. By any of those, the ESB would be "nano-scale" (or below).
Observers from the Ministry of Silly Walks have confirmed (to their disappointment) that their walk was one of the most serious ever recorded, and that they did not amble, dawdle, gambol, hustle, limp, meander, mosey, march, ramble, sashay, saunter, scamper, scurry, sidle, skulk, slink, slog, skip, stroll, stomp, strut, swagger, tiptoe, traipse. They did not even do a forward aerial half turn every alternate step with the left leg, which itself is hardly a silly walk at all.
I've given that a try, but classical music generally has a large dynamic range (ie. very quiet parts and very loud parts). It's distracting to have to keep adjusting the volume to a level that overpowers background noise, but isn't ear-breakingly loud.
It's fine for just general listening, though.
Agreed. I'm still on my Droid (not Droid 2, not Droid X, the original Droid). I desperately need an update, and have needed one for several... years, I guess. The Galaxy S4 is now one of the options I'm looking at. But if I had just upgraded last year, I wouldn't bother.
Suggestion for music: video game soundtracks. It's generally designed to be undistracting, and something you can listen to over and over again.
Best place to start would probably be PS1/N64 games. Too limited for any significant vocals (out of the 993 songs I have from that generation, only five have vocals, and two of them are in Latin), but tends to be more cinematic and slow than the often fast-paced, baroque stuff of earlier consoles. Plus, if you're in a college dorm now, you likely grew up playing those games, so you get some nostalgia.
It's a much different flow from Google Reader (and every other RSS reader I've ever seen, actually), but I use Firefox Live Bookmarks exclusively.
I've tried switching away numerous times. Particularly during the entire Firefox 3.x series, which had a major bug where refreshing Live Bookmarks caused the whole browser to stop responding until it finished. With the 100+ blogs and webcomics I read, that meant every hour or so, it would freeze up for 2-3 minutes. I switched to Chrome for literally everything else, but I still kept Firefox for the Live Bookmarks. I just don't like how the others operate.
Assuming, that is, that North Korea is able to do so. I've seen some speculation by relatively-knowledgeable people about a Korean War that has South Korea winning it before the US even gets clearance from Washington to join in. I think that's a bit over-optimistic, but I don't doubt that if it were just South Korea versus just North Korea, the Korea with the main battle tanks, modern fighter jets and robotic sentry turrets will beat the Korea whose soldiers barely get a survival ration and whose rockets have a more consistent history of exploding than their warheads.
South Korea is no military weakling. Look at almost any list of countries by military strength - they'll be in the top ten or *maybe* twenty. They beat France and Italy *combined* for active military personnel. They beat the US for active + reserve. They tie Germany for tanks, and beat them for fighter aircraft. They're #9 in military spending. #8 in Global Militarization Index. They're not in a position to take on China single-handedly, but they'd give North Korea a thrashing, and they'd last long enough against China for the rest of the world to come to their aid.
Nobody ever said we had to pull out of Japan. In fact, that would be a great place for the 8th Army to "temporarily" rebase to, while "transitioning" back to the US (if some Japanese politician is making a campaign issue out of it, Australia would work just as well).
And I'm sure our ships will dock in Korean ports quite often for resupply. I mean, that's only natural. They're still allies, just without our troops pre-positioned in their country.
When the rules of the game prevent victory, youchange the rules.
In this case, you either give up on nuclear disarmament (personally I don't think nukes themselves are problematic, just the size and particularly number we have), or you give up on the North Korean people (personally I favor precision missile strikes against their leadership and military threats).
Or we find a new method - I would think negotiation would work better if we openly recognized that, without China propping them up, NK would have collapsed decades ago - so we need to figure out what China wants out of the deal. Simply put, they're worried about the big US army that's been stationed there, just as they were during the Korean War. So, oddly, negotiation could probably proceed without either of the Koreas at the table - just China and the US. Get the US to pull out the 8th Army in exchange for China dropping all support for NK, and we'd be getting somewhere. NK would then either quickly starve, or would start listening when we tell them to knock it off.
I'm all for that, as long as we have plenty of cameras rolling.
Someone call up Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich and James Cameron - they're about to save a couple million in CGI effects. And get Shatner ready to narrate a sequel to Trinity and Beyond.
So obviously what we need is some way to distinguish commercial use of the name "Amazon" from the Brazilian or organizational use of the name.
It is truly a shame that there is absolutely nothing like this.
The difference is that Chrome OS is a consumer-grade "thin client". It is aimed mainly at home and educational use, not the big corporate or government use most other thin clients aim for.
As such, yes, it makes sense to compare it to other consumer-grade operating systems. The results won't be quite comparable, as many duties normally handled by the OS are done remotely, in "the cloud", but it's still a worthwhile comparison.
Don't worry, just ask them nicely and I'm sure they'll apologize and give them right back.
But pay attention to the price.
Flash is roughly $1/GB. 8GB of flash costs about $8, which is in line with the ~$10 price increase of an SSHD over a similar pure hard drive. At 128GB, though, you're spending as much or more on just the flash than the SSHDs here cost.
Not to mention the physical size. 128GB SSDs take up quite a bit of the space available in a 2.5" disk. You aren't likely to see a 2TB hard drive and a 128GB SSD in a single enclosure anytime soon, simply because that won't fit into a single drive bay.
A good coder will write good code even in a bad language. A bad coder will write bad code even in a good language.
But let a good coder use a good language, and you'll get great code. Just don't let a bad coder use a bad language, else you get, well, 90% of the stuff in VB6.
Could be worse. There's a band named "The The", and another one named "The Band".
Still doesn't hold up to "!!!", which is the only band I know of to require the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (the ! is an alveolar click, used in some African and Australian languages).
These articles are constantly missing the point.
x86 is fine. The flaws of the architecture are mostly superficial, and even then, x86-64 cleans a lot of it up. And it's all hidden behind a compiler now anyways - and we have very good compilers.
ARM has an advantage in the ultra-low-power market because they've been designing for the ultra-low-power market. Intel has been focusing on the laptop/desktop/server market, and so their processors fit into that power bracket.
But guess what? As ARM is moving into higher-performance chips, they're sucking up more power (compare Cortex-A9 to Cortex-A15). And as Intel is moving into lower-power chips, they're losing performance (compare Atom to Core).
The ISA doesn't really affect power too much, as it turns out. It affects how easily compilers can use it, and how easily the chip can be designed, but not really power draw or thermal performance. Given the lead Intel has on fabrication, any slight disadvantage of the x86 architecture in that regard is made up for by the software library.
I think he was talking about it happening in other fields.
I, for one, would like to see a "golden age of interplanetary exploration", since that's a logical next step.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Not a bad showing for Linux, all things considered. The top variant of Linux is nearly tied with Windows 8.
The original Crysis had some pretty brilliant sections, along with a lot of mediocre, boring or just plain terrible sections. I still haven't beaten the game, but I've played that one hostage-rescue mission a couple dozen times, along with a few of the other good parts. Seriously, if they had just stopped right when you enter the alien ship/base/whatever, it would have been a good (if a bit short) game. As it is, it's a game with levels you'll only play through once.
So, then, how good is Crysis 3 at its best? Does it get back to that wide, open-approach gameplay, where you can plan things out and approach it several different ways? Do you ever get that Predator feeling? Or is it terrible from beginning to end?
The review barely touches on this, mentioning one or two good vehicle sections, but FYI, don't bother with TFA. It's three pages full of no details. It's not a review, it's an executive summary of a review. I'll wait for better reviews and better benchmarks.