Altair has demonstrated the use of their cells in cars and trucks, giving them 5 to 10 minute charges. It's similar to Toshiba's SCiB that was covered here a couple months ago. Of course, even some non-titanate chemistries can charge quite well. Phosphates and stabilized spinel packs can usually take a full charge in 15 to 20 minutes.
Those are some impressive technologies, but the poster above was talking about charging from home electrical sockets - where the limiting factor isn't the battery but the power supply.
Let's say you wanted to make a 100 mile round trip, driving for 2 hours at 50mph. Wikipedia tells me a car cruising at 50mph needs about 10 horsepower, or 7.5kw, to overcome drag. So, 7.5kw for 2 hours.
A socket providing 110 volts, 15 amps gives 1650 watts - so charging would take 2*7500/1650 = 9 hours. If that was a 240 volt 13 amp socket (like in the UK) you get 3120 watts - charge in 4.8 hours. The power switchboard for my house can take at most 100 amps at 240 volts - 24,000 watts, for a charging time of 37 minutes. A typical industrial socket might give 400 volts and 40 amps on each of 3 phases. That's 48,000 watts and you could charge in 18 minutes.
And that's one reason people talk about special electric car power infrastructure: A 400 volt 3 phase 40 amp supply to every house would need a major infrastructure upgrade. You can do clever things like only charging during periods of high supply/low demand, but that requires control infrastructure too.
And of course, the figures given above are for a 10 horse power car. And let's be honest here - even small cars like the Ford Ka have 50 horsepower engines.
They adopted (or will be adopting) a core principle of Wikia Search, and that is user generated content [...] However, user generated content needs a community (in this case mainly to prevent or revert spamming) - and google had many unsuccessful community projects in the past... I wonder if they are foolish enough to try it again.
Well, a community is one way to prevent spamming, but is it the only way?
I mean, Wikipedia goes for a very transparent structure. If Wikipedia added secret algorithms to selectively display only certain users' contributions, they would probably be criticised by people on Slashdot, and elements of the Wikipedia community.
On the other hand, Google already uses secret automated moderation techniques for search results, and they are also pretty good at filtering spam in gmail. Both with no need for a community of volunteers doing filtering manually.
Furthermore, Google has not committed to using this user-generated data at all, let alone in an unmoderated form.
Now, I agree with you that Google hasn't got a track record of building user communities like Wikipedia. However, I think they could make user-moderated search work without one.
Your freedom remains intact when someone derives your code and slaps an EULA on it, but not the user's or the code's (if you believe software has rights of it's own.)
Neither the GPL or the BSD license is there to save your ass, it's to protect the end user.
The end user retains the freedom to use the BSD code. The fact that someone has released a proprietary product based on the BSD code does not diminish the BSD code.
I have a new netbook with Intel's Atom chip in it (Lenovo Ideapad) and it isn't underpowered so much as just underfeatured. [...]It'd be nice to have a firewire port (I have a FW video camera and external drives) [...] Some people will want more CPU power for... games? Who knows... I think it's the same mentality that gets dual/quad CPUs in desktops that are used for spreadsheets and browsing.
I think you've just answered your own question by saying "What do people want additional CPU power for?" and saying "I'd rather have a firewire port to connect my video camera to".
I can see AMD's point, though; it does seem that, when ordering laptops by price, screen size goes 9", then 10", then 15", then back to 13".
I work for a small-ish university in Canada and we run our own mail systems. With the proper software and expertise it's not that difficult to do.
Is there some reason that you're looking at external vendors? Not enough staff? Not enough internal expertise with email? Cost? Something else?
During my time at a university with 16,000 the university replaced the ageing Groupwise student e-mail service with an open source system involving SquirrelMail.
The two key problems were (1) reliability - that is, downtime or the service becoming unusably slow at peak times was a regular occurrence; and (2) quota size - quotas were not big enough to store a year's e-mails.
Forwarding my e-mail to Gmail solved both those problems.
But uh, mind if I ask: exactly what kind of pictures are you planning on taking on your vacation?;-)
Most keen photographers - myself included - have a story or two about being hassled by security guards or police for photographing public buildings. Check out this article for examples. It's for security reasons, you see. I might be planning a terrorist attack.
You wouldn't want the TSA goons to decide that your photographs seem odd and to give you a full-body cavity search "just in case".
I just don't understand it when people say DVD is "good enough". You can see the compression artifacts! (and that's on a low resolution display)
The issue isn't that blu-ray doesn't look nice; it obviously does. The issue is there are more compelling uses for my finite disposable income than upgrading my TV.
I could spend the money on restaurant meals, holidays, travel to visit friends, a big computer monitor, an asus eee, an iPhone, a gym membership, an expensive bike, or a cheap car.
In other words, DVD being "good enough" doesn't mean DVD is perfect; it just means upgrading my TV is not a high priority compared to other things.
Why on earth should engineering majors study optics, when so few will work with optics?
Why should a computer science major study operating systems, when scant few of them will actually work on an operating system?
On Slashdot the common refrain seems to be that everything should be taught to everyone - that computer scientists should have an extensive education in math and theory, and data structures, and computer graphics, and processor design, and operating systems, obviously we need to teach about parallelism, and education is the answer to security bugs, people really need to know more about formal methods, don't forget digital signal processing... you get the picture. Then there are other posters saying everyone should be taught C because Java doesn't have pointers. And there's the person saying "I've seen college graduates who can't make a simple GUI in an IDE..."
Now, certainly it would be nice if every college could educate everyone both in depth and broadly, but it's all too easy to say 'yes' to every subject and end up with a set of demands it's impractical to fulfil.
When I was in university I was once reading up on Fourier transforms. The person sitting next to me was... a medical student. Studying Fourier analysis.
Should Fourier analysis be compulsory for medical students? I mean, some doctors end up using it, and they should at least know the basics, right? A doctor just relying on their machine to do it is like a programmer using Java's sorting functions without understanding how they work! Of course doctors should know how Fourier analysis works.
Anyway, here's my point: I agree it's preferable for doctors to know organic chemistry, but we should also be wary of loading people up with a hundred different compulsory requirements, because among the educated it is easier to call a subject important than to call it unimportant.
I walked into that section and she was absolutely relentless. [...] She asked what I do with the computer, and I told her I do some graphics and web design, and I was just checking out some NAS options. Then she starts pitching.Mac at me.
See, whenever someone asks me that question I tell that I use my computer in life support systems, for controlling airliners, and in the design, manufacture and production of rockets and missiles. The software license agreement allows me to do that, right?
someone is supposed to waste a lot of time and money for just a cheap drive and a piece of paper from some entity no one has ever heard of?
I know the dollar has declined in value a lot in recent years, but it's hyperbole to call $40 "a piece of paper from some entity no one has ever heard of"
A system combining a high precision GPS with high precision inertial measurement and an Omnistar subscription. Budget: $80,000 A Velodyne HD LIDAR - Budget $75,000 Five count SICK LMS-291 LIDARs - budget 5*$7000 = $35,000 38 motivated, intelligent engineers, programmers and administrators for 1 year. 38*$50,000 = $1,900,000
I'm sure in the computer programming world you can program the next big thing on your home computer with free tools. However, that does not generalise to everything. To develop some cutting edge technologies you also need money and competent people.
Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes.
It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph â" part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act â" is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it.
The paragraph is actually about clamping down on cheating. It says that an institution that offers an online program must prove that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work.
In other words the law says distance learning institutions must make an effort to verify work is done by the right person - and one technology those institutions are experimenting with is webcams.
It's typical slashdot to quote just enough of the article to give completely the wrong impression.
I don't see the appeal to having a humanoid robot.
Because we want them to operate in a world that (1) humans are well adapted to and (2) that has in places been adapted to be specifically human-compatible.
Functional designs like the roomba are all very well, but can they ascend stairs? Operate a door handle? Press buttons positioned for humans to use? Pick up a variety of objects without needing special manipulators?
And that's just what you'd need for a robot to go to the coffee machine and bring me a coffee, stopping off at the mail room to get my mail.
No doubt, if you want to travel fast wheels are better than legs. But to do human-like tasks in human-adapted buildings, you've got to expect to end up with some human-like design elements.
CSI type shows are partly to blame - the average citizen on the jury trusts scientific evidence on its own far too much instead of the old detective story trio of means, motive and opportunity (forensics cannot help at all with the second).
If a jury was told by an informed, impartial expert that DNA evidence indicated guilt with a false positive rate of only 1 in 113 billion, I'd be more worried if they didn't trust that evidence than if they did.
With the idea of a traveling office in mind, some basic elements are probably necessary. Chairs and table for work. Bed for sleep. The module should probably be sound proof/vibration proof as much as possible because these transports have no shielding from either. For communications, the module might need to be plugged into the airplanes communication or its own separate feed. The module probably requires some modest power for equipment. Everything should be bolted down for obvious reasons.
You can get a 40' shipping container for about $2000. Let's say $500 to carpet it and another $500 to plasterboard the walls and paint them. $500 should be more than enough for a 12v lighting system hooked up to the airplane's power system. Let's add in a $500 power inverter to give 110v for a laptop or whatever. I was in Ikea today, and you can get a nice sofa for about $700, $600 sets you up with a bed and mattress, a desk about $400, a leather office chair about $300, $200 for some shelves, $150 for linen and pillows. Shove in a $2000 macbook pro, $800 for a 27 inch Dell screen, so you'll be sorted for playing DVDs.
That totals $9150. Round it up to $10,000 for anything I've forgotten.
McMahon said the program has recently been downsized from 10 capsules to three, plus the four pallets fitted with swiveling leather chairs, [...] Because of the cutback in the number of capsules and pallets, the program is currently estimated to cost $7.6 million.
I can understand a certain increase in cost due to inefficient military procurement and some complexity getting power and data connections. But even if you slap a big premium on them, those three capsules are costing seventy-six times too much. If you want to know how the military and government get a reputation for wastefulness and inefficiency, this is it.
If racial profiling, or gender profiling, or sexual profiling, or any other type of profiling generates positive results, then why aren't we doing it?
Men are, on average, taller than women. Hence, if you had to divide a bunch of people up between male and female changing rooms at a sports event, and could to distribute them based on height - above height threshold, use male changing room, below height threshold, use female changing room.
This classification system would work better than random classification, but it would still have a comparatively high rate of misclassification. A better strategy would be to measure gender and assign males to the male changing room, females to the female changing room. This would have a substantially lower rate of misclassification, compared to the height based technique.
Racial profiling, gender profiling etc in science are the same. They might produce a better-than-random measurement of people's science ability, but it would be more reliable to directly measure ability, by means of standardised tests and suchlike.
Furthermore, there are often stories on Slashdot about the US not graduating enough scientists, engineers and mathematicians to be competitive with the India and China of tomorrow. Every student misclassified as not worth educating due to race or gender, subtracts from these numbers. And what better way to increase recruitment than to simply stop doing something ineffective and questionably ethical?
Of course, none of this can avoid from the fact that a woman on a computer science course might feel about as self conscious as a man in a ballet class - even if neither computer science nor ballet were doing anything deliberate to provoke this self-consciousness. Have you done any ballet?
According to a study [...] published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer, about 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Only 30 percent of travelers ever recover the lost devices. Nearly half of the travelers say their laptops contain customer data or confidential business information.
Let me see if I can convert that to units I can understand [...] how about 0.02 Wars on Terror
In discussions about US government programs I often hear Iraq war comparisons. It's understandable - there are a lot of exciting things we could have done with the $500 billion we've spent in Iraq.
However, we've spent that money; we can't un-spend it. So we don't have $500 billion sitting around waiting for an application. What we have is a toilet that's had $500 billion flushed down it, a budget deficit and $9,410 billion in national debt.
Maybe we never want to pay off that debt; that certainly seems to be the view of our politicians. But if we want to get the national debt under control we have to realise that, to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, ten billion here and ten billion there and pretty soon you're talking about serious money.
45 Mil for the environmental study for a already failed train route? I don't know if I should laugh or cry. You ain't seen nothing yet. This is a 250 mile train track - That's 400km - while the Japanese Linimo maglev cost $100 million per km (for 9km) while the Shanghai Maglev Train cost $1.33 billion for 30.5 km - $43 million per km.
The French LGV Est is 300 km and cost 4 billion euros - $6 billion. $21 million a mile.
Don't we already have the ability to process multi-resolution images in, for example, Google Maps? You know, zooming in and out images with large total resolution?
It would be impressive if the photo they demonstrated on was anything but a photoshop, but given that the 428x134 signature is 52x11 in the 350x237 statuette picture which is 29x26 in the 428x350 hard rock picture which is 87x87 in the 428x399 stamp picture, for the stamp to be real would require a 33 gigapixel stamp (which, at 1 inch square, would be printed at 33,000,000,000 DPI).
To me zooming in and displaying a different image isn't really as exciting at the article author makes it sound? Maybe I'm missing something because the journalist sounds pretty damn excited about it.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't look to me like the 2006 question is necessarily any easier than the others The 1951 question struck me as harder because it involves several operations; recognising a non-obvious instance of a quadratic; multiplying through by (1+x^2); expanding brackets; rearranging into a quadratic; and solving a quadratic. It's of 'get a bit of paper' difficulty.
On the other hand, with the 2006 question I can say that a=8/2 and b=21-4^2 because I know that (x+a)^2 = x^2+2ax+a^2 - and finding the minimum value of (x+4)^2 + 5 is equally easy; it's 5 when x=-4. For me personally this question was of 'no paper required' difficulty.
I'm a bit rusty on my factorisation, so the 1970 question took me a bit of paper and several lines to work out - but I guess if you were taking the exam you would likely already know the formulas I had to derive.
I guess maybe the 2006 question seems easy to me because I know the simple way to solve it, while the 1970 question seems easy to you because you know the easy way to solve that?
doing the math is going to be easier, even if they didn't ask harder questions. I agree with you; sporting records are regularly improved upon, but no-one is complaining about sprinting becoming easier.
That said, in the linked PDF a 1951 question is stated as:
Solve the equation:
9 * (1-x^2)/(1+x^2) - 7 * 2x/(1+x^2) = 3 A 1970 question is:
Show that (x â" 3) is a factor of
x^3 - 5x^2 - 18x + 72
then find the three points where y = x^3 - 5x^2 - 18x + 72 meets the x axis While a 2006 question is:
Find a and b when
x^2 + 8x + 21 = (x + a)^2 + b
Use your answer to find the minimum value of
x^2 + 8x + 21. I can see why someone might say the 1951 question was harder than the 1970 question which was harder than the 2006 question.
Slashdot Mirror
While we're bitching about the format, why the hell are they connecting the points on the line graph?
Or, given that we're comparing price and performance, a scatter plot.
I decided to replot some of the graphs properly. Here are the results.
With this, the time it takes to charge a battery is non-trivial. Its not comparable to the five minutes it takes to fill your gas tank.
Oh really?
[...]
Altair has demonstrated the use of their cells in cars and trucks, giving them 5 to 10 minute charges. It's similar to Toshiba's SCiB that was covered here a couple months ago. Of course, even some non-titanate chemistries can charge quite well. Phosphates and stabilized spinel packs can usually take a full charge in 15 to 20 minutes.
Those are some impressive technologies, but the poster above was talking about charging from home electrical sockets - where the limiting factor isn't the battery but the power supply.
Let's say you wanted to make a 100 mile round trip, driving for 2 hours at 50mph. Wikipedia tells me a car cruising at 50mph needs about 10 horsepower, or 7.5kw, to overcome drag. So, 7.5kw for 2 hours.
A socket providing 110 volts, 15 amps gives 1650 watts - so charging would take 2*7500/1650 = 9 hours. If that was a 240 volt 13 amp socket (like in the UK) you get 3120 watts - charge in 4.8 hours. The power switchboard for my house can take at most 100 amps at 240 volts - 24,000 watts, for a charging time of 37 minutes. A typical industrial socket might give 400 volts and 40 amps on each of 3 phases. That's 48,000 watts and you could charge in 18 minutes.
And that's one reason people talk about special electric car power infrastructure: A 400 volt 3 phase 40 amp supply to every house would need a major infrastructure upgrade. You can do clever things like only charging during periods of high supply/low demand, but that requires control infrastructure too.
And of course, the figures given above are for a 10 horse power car. And let's be honest here - even small cars like the Ford Ka have 50 horsepower engines.
They adopted (or will be adopting) a core principle of Wikia Search, and that is user generated content [...] However, user generated content needs a community (in this case mainly to prevent or revert spamming) - and google had many unsuccessful community projects in the past... I wonder if they are foolish enough to try it again.
Well, a community is one way to prevent spamming, but is it the only way?
I mean, Wikipedia goes for a very transparent structure. If Wikipedia added secret algorithms to selectively display only certain users' contributions, they would probably be criticised by people on Slashdot, and elements of the Wikipedia community.
On the other hand, Google already uses secret automated moderation techniques for search results, and they are also pretty good at filtering spam in gmail. Both with no need for a community of volunteers doing filtering manually.
Furthermore, Google has not committed to using this user-generated data at all, let alone in an unmoderated form.
Now, I agree with you that Google hasn't got a track record of building user communities like Wikipedia. However, I think they could make user-moderated search work without one.
Your freedom remains intact when someone derives your code and slaps an EULA on it, but not the user's or the code's (if you believe software has rights of it's own.)
Neither the GPL or the BSD license is there to save your ass, it's to protect the end user.
The end user retains the freedom to use the BSD code. The fact that someone has released a proprietary product based on the BSD code does not diminish the BSD code.
I have a new netbook with Intel's Atom chip in it (Lenovo Ideapad) and it isn't underpowered so much as just underfeatured. [...]It'd be nice to have a firewire port (I have a FW video camera and external drives) [...] Some people will want more CPU power for ... games? Who knows... I think it's the same mentality that gets dual/quad CPUs in desktops that are used for spreadsheets and browsing.
I think you've just answered your own question by saying "What do people want additional CPU power for?" and saying "I'd rather have a firewire port to connect my video camera to".
I can see AMD's point, though; it does seem that, when ordering laptops by price, screen size goes 9", then 10", then 15", then back to 13".
I work for a small-ish university in Canada and we run our own mail systems. With the proper software and expertise it's not that difficult to do.
Is there some reason that you're looking at external vendors? Not enough staff? Not enough internal expertise with email? Cost? Something else?
During my time at a university with 16,000 the university replaced the ageing Groupwise student e-mail service with an open source system involving SquirrelMail.
The two key problems were (1) reliability - that is, downtime or the service becoming unusably slow at peak times was a regular occurrence; and (2) quota size - quotas were not big enough to store a year's e-mails.
Forwarding my e-mail to Gmail solved both those problems.
But uh, mind if I ask: exactly what kind of pictures are you planning on taking on your vacation? ;-)
Most keen photographers - myself included - have a story or two about being hassled by security guards or police for photographing public buildings. Check out this article for examples. It's for security reasons, you see. I might be planning a terrorist attack.
You wouldn't want the TSA goons to decide that your photographs seem odd and to give you a full-body cavity search "just in case".
I think the most important question, the one we all want to hear the answer to, is: How do I patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?
I just don't understand it when people say DVD is "good enough". You can see the compression artifacts! (and that's on a low resolution display)
The issue isn't that blu-ray doesn't look nice; it obviously does. The issue is there are more compelling uses for my finite disposable income than upgrading my TV.
I could spend the money on restaurant meals, holidays, travel to visit friends, a big computer monitor, an asus eee, an iPhone, a gym membership, an expensive bike, or a cheap car.
In other words, DVD being "good enough" doesn't mean DVD is perfect; it just means upgrading my TV is not a high priority compared to other things.
Why on earth should engineering majors study optics, when so few will work with optics?
Why should a computer science major study operating systems, when scant few of them will actually work on an operating system?
On Slashdot the common refrain seems to be that everything should be taught to everyone - that computer scientists should have an extensive education in math and theory, and data structures, and computer graphics, and processor design, and operating systems, obviously we need to teach about parallelism, and education is the answer to security bugs, people really need to know more about formal methods, don't forget digital signal processing... you get the picture. Then there are other posters saying everyone should be taught C because Java doesn't have pointers. And there's the person saying "I've seen college graduates who can't make a simple GUI in an IDE..."
Now, certainly it would be nice if every college could educate everyone both in depth and broadly, but it's all too easy to say 'yes' to every subject and end up with a set of demands it's impractical to fulfil.
When I was in university I was once reading up on Fourier transforms. The person sitting next to me was... a medical student. Studying Fourier analysis.
Should Fourier analysis be compulsory for medical students? I mean, some doctors end up using it, and they should at least know the basics, right? A doctor just relying on their machine to do it is like a programmer using Java's sorting functions without understanding how they work! Of course doctors should know how Fourier analysis works.
Anyway, here's my point: I agree it's preferable for doctors to know organic chemistry, but we should also be wary of loading people up with a hundred different compulsory requirements, because among the educated it is easier to call a subject important than to call it unimportant.
I walked into that section and she was absolutely relentless. [...] She asked what I do with the computer, and I told her I do some graphics and web design, and I was just checking out some NAS options. Then she starts pitching .Mac at me.
See, whenever someone asks me that question I tell that I use my computer in life support systems, for controlling airliners, and in the design, manufacture and production of rockets and missiles. The software license agreement allows me to do that, right?
someone is supposed to waste a lot of time and money for just a cheap drive and a piece of paper from some entity no one has ever heard of?
I know the dollar has declined in value a lot in recent years, but it's hyperbole to call $40 "a piece of paper from some entity no one has ever heard of"
What you do, is build stuff and fuck the rest of them.
It's that simple.
In the GP's example of the DARPA grand challenge, I'm not sure it's quite that simple.
I mean, if you're competing in the DARPA urban challenge, you need several things.
A system combining a high precision GPS with high precision inertial measurement and an Omnistar subscription. Budget: $80,000
A Velodyne HD LIDAR - Budget $75,000
Five count SICK LMS-291 LIDARs - budget 5*$7000 = $35,000
38 motivated, intelligent engineers, programmers and administrators for 1 year. 38*$50,000 = $1,900,000
I'm sure in the computer programming world you can program the next big thing on your home computer with free tools. However, that does not generalise to everything. To develop some cutting edge technologies you also need money and competent people.
You're right - If you read TFA it says:
Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes.
It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph â" part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act â" is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it.
The paragraph is actually about clamping down on cheating. It says that an institution that offers an online program must prove that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work.
In other words the law says distance learning institutions must make an effort to verify work is done by the right person - and one technology those institutions are experimenting with is webcams.
It's typical slashdot to quote just enough of the article to give completely the wrong impression.
I don't see the appeal to having a humanoid robot.
Because we want them to operate in a world that (1) humans are well adapted to and (2) that has in places been adapted to be specifically human-compatible.
Functional designs like the roomba are all very well, but can they ascend stairs? Operate a door handle? Press buttons positioned for humans to use? Pick up a variety of objects without needing special manipulators?
And that's just what you'd need for a robot to go to the coffee machine and bring me a coffee, stopping off at the mail room to get my mail.
No doubt, if you want to travel fast wheels are better than legs. But to do human-like tasks in human-adapted buildings, you've got to expect to end up with some human-like design elements.
CSI type shows are partly to blame - the average citizen on the jury trusts scientific evidence on its own far too much instead of the old detective story trio of means, motive and opportunity (forensics cannot help at all with the second).
If a jury was told by an informed, impartial expert that DNA evidence indicated guilt with a false positive rate of only 1 in 113 billion, I'd be more worried if they didn't trust that evidence than if they did.
With the idea of a traveling office in mind, some basic elements are probably necessary. Chairs and table for work. Bed for sleep. The module should probably be sound proof/vibration proof as much as possible because these transports have no shielding from either. For communications, the module might need to be plugged into the airplanes communication or its own separate feed. The module probably requires some modest power for equipment. Everything should be bolted down for obvious reasons.
You can get a 40' shipping container for about $2000. Let's say $500 to carpet it and another $500 to plasterboard the walls and paint them. $500 should be more than enough for a 12v lighting system hooked up to the airplane's power system. Let's add in a $500 power inverter to give 110v for a laptop or whatever. I was in Ikea today, and you can get a nice sofa for about $700, $600 sets you up with a bed and mattress, a desk about $400, a leather office chair about $300, $200 for some shelves, $150 for linen and pillows. Shove in a $2000 macbook pro, $800 for a 27 inch Dell screen, so you'll be sorted for playing DVDs.
That totals $9150. Round it up to $10,000 for anything I've forgotten.
McMahon said the program has recently been downsized from 10 capsules to three, plus the four pallets fitted with swiveling leather chairs, [...] Because of the cutback in the number of capsules and pallets, the program is currently estimated to cost $7.6 million.
I can understand a certain increase in cost due to inefficient military procurement and some complexity getting power and data connections. But even if you slap a big premium on them, those three capsules are costing seventy-six times too much. If you want to know how the military and government get a reputation for wastefulness and inefficiency, this is it.
If racial profiling, or gender profiling, or sexual profiling, or any other type of profiling generates positive results, then why aren't we doing it?
Men are, on average, taller than women. Hence, if you had to divide a bunch of people up between male and female changing rooms at a sports event, and could to distribute them based on height - above height threshold, use male changing room, below height threshold, use female changing room.
This classification system would work better than random classification, but it would still have a comparatively high rate of misclassification. A better strategy would be to measure gender and assign males to the male changing room, females to the female changing room. This would have a substantially lower rate of misclassification, compared to the height based technique.
Racial profiling, gender profiling etc in science are the same. They might produce a better-than-random measurement of people's science ability, but it would be more reliable to directly measure ability, by means of standardised tests and suchlike.
Furthermore, there are often stories on Slashdot about the US not graduating enough scientists, engineers and mathematicians to be competitive with the India and China of tomorrow. Every student misclassified as not worth educating due to race or gender, subtracts from these numbers. And what better way to increase recruitment than to simply stop doing something ineffective and questionably ethical?
Of course, none of this can avoid from the fact that a woman on a computer science course might feel about as self conscious as a man in a ballet class - even if neither computer science nor ballet were doing anything deliberate to provoke this self-consciousness. Have you done any ballet?
According to a study [...] published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer, about 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Only 30 percent of travelers ever recover the lost devices. Nearly half of the travelers say their laptops contain customer data or confidential business information.
In what I'm sure is completely unrelated news, the release of this report coincides with Dell releasing a new service - Dell Mobility Services Aim To Protect Notebook Data, and New Dell Services Help Users Hunt Down Missing Laptops.
Let me see if I can convert that to units I can understand [...] how about 0.02 Wars on Terror
In discussions about US government programs I often hear Iraq war comparisons. It's understandable - there are a lot of exciting things we could have done with the $500 billion we've spent in Iraq.
However, we've spent that money; we can't un-spend it. So we don't have $500 billion sitting around waiting for an application. What we have is a toilet that's had $500 billion flushed down it, a budget deficit and $9,410 billion in national debt.
Maybe we never want to pay off that debt; that certainly seems to be the view of our politicians. But if we want to get the national debt under control we have to realise that, to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, ten billion here and ten billion there and pretty soon you're talking about serious money.
The French LGV Est is 300 km and cost 4 billion euros - $6 billion. $21 million a mile.
Or if you look at the British London-to-channel-tunnel rail link, it cost £5.2 billion ($10 billion) for 108 km - $100 million a mile.
Even if economies of scale get the price down to $10 million per km the cost will be $4 billion.
Don't we already have the ability to process multi-resolution images in, for example, Google Maps? You know, zooming in and out images with large total resolution?
It would be impressive if the photo they demonstrated on was anything but a photoshop, but given that the 428x134 signature is 52x11 in the 350x237 statuette picture which is 29x26 in the 428x350 hard rock picture which is 87x87 in the 428x399 stamp picture, for the stamp to be real would require a 33 gigapixel stamp (which, at 1 inch square, would be printed at 33,000,000,000 DPI).
To me zooming in and displaying a different image isn't really as exciting at the article author makes it sound? Maybe I'm missing something because the journalist sounds pretty damn excited about it.
On the other hand, with the 2006 question I can say that a=8/2 and b=21-4^2 because I know that (x+a)^2 = x^2+2ax+a^2 - and finding the minimum value of (x+4)^2 + 5 is equally easy; it's 5 when x=-4. For me personally this question was of 'no paper required' difficulty.
I'm a bit rusty on my factorisation, so the 1970 question took me a bit of paper and several lines to work out - but I guess if you were taking the exam you would likely already know the formulas I had to derive.
I guess maybe the 2006 question seems easy to me because I know the simple way to solve it, while the 1970 question seems easy to you because you know the easy way to solve that?
Just my $0.02
That said, in the linked PDF a 1951 question is stated as: Solve the equation:
9 * (1-x^2)/(1+x^2) - 7 * 2x/(1+x^2) = 3 A 1970 question is: Show that (x â" 3) is a factor of
x^3 - 5x^2 - 18x + 72
then find the three points where y = x^3 - 5x^2 - 18x + 72 meets the x axis While a 2006 question is: Find a and b when
x^2 + 8x + 21 = (x + a)^2 + b
Use your answer to find the minimum value of
x^2 + 8x + 21. I can see why someone might say the 1951 question was harder than the 1970 question which was harder than the 2006 question.