I'm fortunate in that whenever my cat catches mice, she just gives it a couple of good hard whacks and eats it. None of this mummy cat try-to-show-the-kittens-how-to-hunt thing, just *thud* *munch munch munch*.
The climate models in use thirty years ago when I was at school told us that by now, up here around 56 degrees north we'd be buried under a mile of ice, and that equatorial Africa would have a climate similar to Central Europe.
The climate models in use twenty years ago when I was at university told us that by now, the Earth would be fried by intense UV because of the complete unstoppable destruction of the ozone layer, with arid deserts reaching from the Sahara to as far north as Denmark - where it wasn't all submerged under water from the melting icecaps.
The climate models in use ten years ago when I worked on data visualisation for - among other things - weather modelling told us that by now, we'd be experiencing unprecedented storms, hurricane-force winds all year round, and bitterly cold winters and blistering hot summers that kill off all the arable crops.
You'll have to forgive me if I don't entirely believe the climate predictions we hear today.
It takes nearly 17 hours for the data to get back from Voyager 1 to us. Now here on Earth we rarely run into significant delays in communications caused by the speed of light - geostationary satellites are one example, and moonbounce is another. But even bouncing signals off of the moon only delays them by about two and a half seconds, and you need to transmit hundreds of watts into a very high gain aerial array to catch the tiny sniff of a signal that bounces back from the moon, 236000 miles away.
Okay, car analogy. On a dark night out in the country, look at a distant piece of road and watch for a car. From a mile or two off, its 21W brake light bulb seems pretty tiny and faint. Voyager 1's microwave link puts out about 20W, too.
Now I want you to imagine looking for that brake light when it is 11.3 thousand million miles away.
It's right there in the summary, though. It's not an "ideological" thing, it's because it actually costs more money to support IE7 than not.
The web developers have to put in extra work to support a dead browser on a dead platform. This costs money. Why bother, if you're not getting paid for it?
16, because you'd use a straining post at either end instead of a normal fencepost. Otherwise, the tension in the wire will pull the bloody lot down. </farmer>
Hereâ(TM)s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)
Why on earth would you ever think that it was 10 cents for the ball and a dollar for the bat? You'd have to be stupid, or something.
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But thatâ(TM)s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.
What the fuck? Do I need to to take a dope test or something? Why the hell would you think I'd "take a shortcut" and divide the answer by two? Fuck's sake, the clue is right there! IT DOUBLES IN SIZE EVERY DAY! So it's twice as big today as it was yesterday, so if it fills the lake in 48 days it half-fills it in 47 days. Jeez, how the hell can you even think people would say 24 days? Is there something wrong with your brain?
Also, what the hell kind of lilies grow in your lake, that they crowd the whole damn thing out in a month and a half? Don't you ever rake them back and dredge it? Your fish are going to suffer from lack of light and oxygen with all that crap in there.
I don't really see how you get "privacy" in sections of the RF spectrum. In fact, the amateur radio bands are one of the bits that absolutely anybody is allowed to listen to without restriction.
I wouldn't give someone my bank details on S20, although you certainly hear a lot of the old farts discussing their medical problems up the top end of 80m.
Define "out in public". Because, to me, I have rights unless I give them up. And I don't give them up merely by walking somewhere which you have decided implies that I give them up. That's the tyrant's way.
Oh, I think I know you. Are you the guy that walks up and down the main street where I live screaming "STOP STARING AT ME!" to people, dogs, cats, lamp posts and pillar boxes?
How people like this sleep with the raging cognitive dissonance in their heads, I shall never know.
And yet you might well believe that building more wind turbines will keep the Magic Carbon Pixie away so he doesn't melt the ice and the polar bears don't die...
I broke tradition with/. and actually asked around - what happens is that the detected plate is logged with a timestamp to help roll back through the CCTV footage from the forecourt, and is checked against a "blacklist" of known drive-offs. If you're on the list, no fuel for you!
This is what the police did when my sister's car was stolen - since it's flagged as a stolen vehicle on the blacklist DB it would pop up if the thief ever went in for fuel. As it happens, they didn't, so they weren't caught that way. When the car eventually showed up the number was removed from the list.
it seems like this means it's a measurement of how much of the 110 volts my body would receive in the time frame of a shock.
It doesn't quite work that way. What people often don't seem to understand is that the amount of current a source can provide isn't necessarily the amount of current that a load will draw. For example, if you have a wireless router that takes 500mA at 9V, it's perfectly okay to hook it up to a 5A 9V supply - it will still only draw 500mA. The power supply won't somehow force 5A through the device. A good practical demonstration of this is when you get in your car and start the engine - the battery provides a couple of hundred amps to the starter motor, but the interior light coming on when you open the door only draws a few milliamps.
While it's true that a relatively low current can harm you, your body will only pass a certain amount of current. You can measure the resistance across your hands with an ordinary multimeter. If you actually *do* get a serious electric shock then things become complicated because you're not a particularly linear resistance and if you get a burn on your skin at one of the points of contact the resistance will go down, increasing the current, making the burn worse and... yeah, you see how that works.
It's still a good idea to stay away from bare power lines, whatever else you do. I notice that in the US with the low voltage supplies over there you seem toh ave a lot more pole transformers than we do. Presumably it's because the voltage drop at 110V is more of a problem on long runs.
It's not even that. If the NTSB or the FAA investigate this accident, and do so entirely dispassionately and fairly, there will still be *someone* - probably on slashdot, at that - who will go "ZOMG WTF CONSPIRACY THEY ARE COVERING UP THE TRUTH! THE PLANE WAS WIRED WITH EXPLOSIVES! THE JEWS/MUSLIMS/PETA/MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR DID IT!".
In the UK pretty much all pumps are self-service. Some of them have card-readers so you can pay at the pump, but they don't accept my fuel bunker card so I just pay at the counter. You don't pay up front though, that's a stupid idea. What would happen if you paid for 80 litres of fuel but you only needed 70 to brim the tank?
The cameras aren't usually directly connected to the fuel pump systems, and in any case all fuel pumps can only be activated by the operator behind the desk.
I know people were gibbering on about how the UK was turning into a police state because of ANPR cameras locking out petrol pumps a while back - I got banned from boingboing because I pointed out the Cory Doctorow presenting pure conjecture as fact in this - but the simple fact of the matter is that the pumps are *not* controlled by ANPR cameras.
How complex would a system need to be to detect, record and validate not just every UK number plate, but every other international plate too? Or are tourists supposed to be able to travel around the UK on a single tank of fuel? What about vehicles that have no number plates?
In all the petrol stations I've been in, none of the ANPR cameras have ever detected my numberplate correctly, or even at all. It's a perfectly valid legal number plate, but it seems to confuse the image recognition stuff entirely.
The amount of electricity up there is astoundingly deadly. It's also not protected in all of the same ways your home is.
If the stuff on the pole is 110V drops to the surrounding houses, it's not going to be any more deadly than the wiring in your house. The "amps" have nothing to do with it.
I always felt the whole communism thing was bullshit, the irony is how the government tried to then dictate what you as a citizen could be allowed to talk about or act upon, only if you followed there "guidelines", and this idea is totally not related to some of the ideas behind communism?
No, not in the slightest. That's some of the ideas behind totalitarianism. Communism doesn't necessarily imply totalitarianism, but it's a convenient excuse for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fortunate in that whenever my cat catches mice, she just gives it a couple of good hard whacks and eats it. None of this mummy cat try-to-show-the-kittens-how-to-hunt thing, just *thud* *munch munch munch*.
Why the hell did he think it was a good idea to try to get the dead mouse away from the cat in the first place?
The climate models in use thirty years ago when I was at school told us that by now, up here around 56 degrees north we'd be buried under a mile of ice, and that equatorial Africa would have a climate similar to Central Europe.
The climate models in use twenty years ago when I was at university told us that by now, the Earth would be fried by intense UV because of the complete unstoppable destruction of the ozone layer, with arid deserts reaching from the Sahara to as far north as Denmark - where it wasn't all submerged under water from the melting icecaps.
The climate models in use ten years ago when I worked on data visualisation for - among other things - weather modelling told us that by now, we'd be experiencing unprecedented storms, hurricane-force winds all year round, and bitterly cold winters and blistering hot summers that kill off all the arable crops.
You'll have to forgive me if I don't entirely believe the climate predictions we hear today.
It takes nearly 17 hours for the data to get back from Voyager 1 to us. Now here on Earth we rarely run into significant delays in communications caused by the speed of light - geostationary satellites are one example, and moonbounce is another. But even bouncing signals off of the moon only delays them by about two and a half seconds, and you need to transmit hundreds of watts into a very high gain aerial array to catch the tiny sniff of a signal that bounces back from the moon, 236000 miles away.
Okay, car analogy. On a dark night out in the country, look at a distant piece of road and watch for a car. From a mile or two off, its 21W brake light bulb seems pretty tiny and faint. Voyager 1's microwave link puts out about 20W, too.
Now I want you to imagine looking for that brake light when it is 11.3 thousand million miles away.
More UK-bashing from timothy again, I see.
It's not "from now on". The proposal has been published. It is not a law, and is unlikely to ever become one.
Do you hate us because we're free, timothy? Is that what it is?
It's right there in the summary, though. It's not an "ideological" thing, it's because it actually costs more money to support IE7 than not.
The web developers have to put in extra work to support a dead browser on a dead platform. This costs money. Why bother, if you're not getting paid for it?
16, because you'd use a straining post at either end instead of a normal fencepost. Otherwise, the tension in the wire will pull the bloody lot down.
</farmer>
s/to to/you to/
This article made me so irritable I started mistyping things and didn't even preview.
Hereâ(TM)s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)
Why on earth would you ever think that it was 10 cents for the ball and a dollar for the bat? You'd have to be stupid, or something.
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But thatâ(TM)s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.
What the fuck? Do I need to to take a dope test or something? Why the hell would you think I'd "take a shortcut" and divide the answer by two? Fuck's sake, the clue is right there! IT DOUBLES IN SIZE EVERY DAY! So it's twice as big today as it was yesterday, so if it fills the lake in 48 days it half-fills it in 47 days. Jeez, how the hell can you even think people would say 24 days? Is there something wrong with your brain?
Also, what the hell kind of lilies grow in your lake, that they crowd the whole damn thing out in a month and a half? Don't you ever rake them back and dredge it? Your fish are going to suffer from lack of light and oxygen with all that crap in there.
Ghod pop-psychologists make my piss boil.
... it's not as good as Linux and you have to pay for it?
I wonder how the PPC port of Haiku is doing?
Aha, so you're using a synonym out of context to make quite a clever point.
It's a shame it doesn't come down to the laws of physics, because it would make preventing interference from unlicensed operators easier.
I don't really see how you get "privacy" in sections of the RF spectrum. In fact, the amateur radio bands are one of the bits that absolutely anybody is allowed to listen to without restriction.
I wouldn't give someone my bank details on S20, although you certainly hear a lot of the old farts discussing their medical problems up the top end of 80m.
Where does privacy come into it?
Define "out in public". Because, to me, I have rights unless I give them up. And I don't give them up merely by walking somewhere which you have decided implies that I give them up. That's the tyrant's way.
Oh, I think I know you. Are you the guy that walks up and down the main street where I live screaming "STOP STARING AT ME!" to people, dogs, cats, lamp posts and pillar boxes?
Chick? Transit? Ring? I'll just leave this here...
I'll just leave this here...
(note for US readers - the Transit you have is the Focus-based Transit Connect. An EMEA Transit is much larger, like the van in the video.
How people like this sleep with the raging cognitive dissonance in their heads, I shall never know.
And yet you might well believe that building more wind turbines will keep the Magic Carbon Pixie away so he doesn't melt the ice and the polar bears don't die...
10kV and down is LV. I'm surprised you've got 19kV running that close to residential properties - even out here in the sticks it's normally only 6kV.
Yes, but it's still all low-voltage stuff and unlikely to be particularly dangerous.
I broke tradition with /. and actually asked around - what happens is that the detected plate is logged with a timestamp to help roll back through the CCTV footage from the forecourt, and is checked against a "blacklist" of known drive-offs. If you're on the list, no fuel for you!
This is what the police did when my sister's car was stolen - since it's flagged as a stolen vehicle on the blacklist DB it would pop up if the thief ever went in for fuel. As it happens, they didn't, so they weren't caught that way. When the car eventually showed up the number was removed from the list.
it seems like this means it's a measurement of how much of the 110 volts my body would receive in the time frame of a shock.
It doesn't quite work that way. What people often don't seem to understand is that the amount of current a source can provide isn't necessarily the amount of current that a load will draw. For example, if you have a wireless router that takes 500mA at 9V, it's perfectly okay to hook it up to a 5A 9V supply - it will still only draw 500mA. The power supply won't somehow force 5A through the device. A good practical demonstration of this is when you get in your car and start the engine - the battery provides a couple of hundred amps to the starter motor, but the interior light coming on when you open the door only draws a few milliamps.
While it's true that a relatively low current can harm you, your body will only pass a certain amount of current. You can measure the resistance across your hands with an ordinary multimeter. If you actually *do* get a serious electric shock then things become complicated because you're not a particularly linear resistance and if you get a burn on your skin at one of the points of contact the resistance will go down, increasing the current, making the burn worse and... yeah, you see how that works.
It's still a good idea to stay away from bare power lines, whatever else you do. I notice that in the US with the low voltage supplies over there you seem toh ave a lot more pole transformers than we do. Presumably it's because the voltage drop at 110V is more of a problem on long runs.
It's not even that. If the NTSB or the FAA investigate this accident, and do so entirely dispassionately and fairly, there will still be *someone* - probably on slashdot, at that - who will go "ZOMG WTF CONSPIRACY THEY ARE COVERING UP THE TRUTH! THE PLANE WAS WIRED WITH EXPLOSIVES! THE JEWS/MUSLIMS/PETA/MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR DID IT!".
In the UK pretty much all pumps are self-service. Some of them have card-readers so you can pay at the pump, but they don't accept my fuel bunker card so I just pay at the counter. You don't pay up front though, that's a stupid idea. What would happen if you paid for 80 litres of fuel but you only needed 70 to brim the tank?
The cameras aren't usually directly connected to the fuel pump systems, and in any case all fuel pumps can only be activated by the operator behind the desk.
I know people were gibbering on about how the UK was turning into a police state because of ANPR cameras locking out petrol pumps a while back - I got banned from boingboing because I pointed out the Cory Doctorow presenting pure conjecture as fact in this - but the simple fact of the matter is that the pumps are *not* controlled by ANPR cameras.
How complex would a system need to be to detect, record and validate not just every UK number plate, but every other international plate too? Or are tourists supposed to be able to travel around the UK on a single tank of fuel? What about vehicles that have no number plates?
In all the petrol stations I've been in, none of the ANPR cameras have ever detected my numberplate correctly, or even at all. It's a perfectly valid legal number plate, but it seems to confuse the image recognition stuff entirely.
The amount of electricity up there is astoundingly deadly. It's also not protected in all of the same ways your home is.
If the stuff on the pole is 110V drops to the surrounding houses, it's not going to be any more deadly than the wiring in your house. The "amps" have nothing to do with it.
I always felt the whole communism thing was bullshit, the irony is how the government tried to then dictate what you as a citizen could be allowed to talk about or act upon, only if you followed there "guidelines", and this idea is totally not related to some of the ideas behind communism?
No, not in the slightest. That's some of the ideas behind totalitarianism. Communism doesn't necessarily imply totalitarianism, but it's a convenient excuse for it.
Yeah, and don't forget that the only successful terrorist attacks in country were carried out by Christian fanatics.