Does this mean that an Airbus is more likely to crash than a Boeing ?
Actually it probably does. Boeing has a lot of corporate history to draw on when it comes to making aircraft that can survive serious failures and still keep flying -- a lot of this came from analysis of flak damage to returning bombers during WW-II. Areas that were never damaged on returning aircraft indicated an area that was particularly vulnerable (if the plane got hit there, it didn't come back), and they'd design around whatever the weakness was (typically by adding another layer of redundancy). This leads to robustness against certain kinds of accidents (e.g. a DC-10 crash caused because a cargo door failure ripped up all three "redundant" hydraulic lines to the tail, as they passed through the same area. A similar class Boeing aircraft used four lines, with no one location containing all four. And yes, I know a DC-10 is not an Airbus.)
I'm certainly not aware of any Boeing crashes caused by software failure, which can't be said for Airbus.
That said, I've never changed a flight just because the designated equipment was an Airbus.
where all but one of the survivors from the tail section so far as been kidnapped or murdered.
And, strictly speaking, he wasn't a tail section passenger. His assigned seat was midsection, he just happened to be in a tailsection bathroom when the excitement started. (Although IIRC he had time to strap himself into a seat which ended up in a tree.)
(I just got Season 2 from the library and watched the whole thing in about three days. Probably fried some neural circuits.;-)
GPL'd software comes with so many contractual terms that they bind the users
So which is it, are you stupid or a liar? I suppose both is also possible.
The GPL isn't a contract -- nobody signs it -- it is a license.
It doesn't bind the user in any way at all. Anyone is free to use GPL'd software however they wish, within the limits of the laws of the society they live in.
It PERMITS copying and distribution where copyright law would not, if you agree to the license terms offered for such permission. Those terms are designed to ensure that whoever you provide copies to gets the same freedoms you were given when you received it.
I would also note that not all bosses, by any means, are of the "pointy haired" sort. However, it is generally (not exclusively) true that bosses by their own actions do not contribute directly to the company's bottom line, but rather indirectly through facilitating (one would hope) the actions of the employees that are actually producing the products or services that customers are willing to pay for. A bad manager with a good team (probably one he's inherited rather than built, although in a boom industry even a bad manager can build a team "good enough") can show a profit for a while, although that may be far below the potential profit that a good manager could show. And a bad manager with a good story can survive for quite a while even while showing a loss, especially if the company overall is big enough to absorb the losses.
That's why good senior level managers pay attention to more than just the bottom line profit/loss figures of a department, but compare them against industry averages and also pay attention to things like employee turnover within a department. A bad boss may show good numbers for a year or two by slave-driving his workers, until they all disappear.
Not that old canard again. Glass is an amorphous solid, it is not a liquid (at ordinary temperatures). (And no, thickness differences in medieval stained glass windows don't prove anything - the pieces were installed thick side down for stability, and they didn't have the technology for uniform-thickness glass).
They're talking about real liquids, spun to form a curved surface. Early liquid mirror experiments involved mercury.
It boggles the mind that anyone thinks that a body made up of the equivalent of pointy-haired bosses would know best.
How does it go? "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, enter politics." Something like that...
(And while there might, in some cases, be some bright people in gov't service who advise those politicians, when was the last time you knew a PHB to follow advice, especially advice he didn't understand?)
A shuttle launch is an amazing work of 30-year old technology.
Fixed that for you.
What's amazing (well, more sad really) is that they didn't replace the thing twenty years ago, post-Challenger. Instead they just added another layer of kludges.
I recall being told that Mac OS had support for multiple buttons since version 9
And I used to use a 3-button mouse on MacOS System 7 on a 68K-based Mac. Yeah, you had to install the Logitech driver that came with the mouse (BFD - insert floppy, wait a minute, done - remove autoejected floppy), but it worked fine.
but I don't see how fertilization is a miracle or blessing, any sperm can fertilize any egg.
Well, no, not quite, even assuming we're talking about same species here.
Sometimes sperm or eggs are just plain damaged or defective, and thus infertile. That's if the sperm even gets there; it's not unknown for a woman to have antibodies against sperm. Once fertilized, there's still a whole obstacle course to run before there's anything that might become a kid: it might not implant (pretty high odds against implantation, actually), it might implant and start to divide but never differentiate, or only develops an empty placenta but no embryo (known as a "blighted ovum", usually results in a miscarriage within a couple of months). And so on.
I wouldn't call it a miracle either, and whether it's a blessing depends on the wants and situation of the parents, but it's not exactly a sure thing either. Well, unless perhaps you're a couple of teenagers in the back seat of a car...
Genetic screening for embryos has been around for over a dozen years. They take a sample of amniotic fluid, which has some of the embryo's cells floating around in it, rather than from the embryo itself.
Now, back then they were just looking for things like Down's Syndrome and a few other things that were easily detected with then current technology (gender is pretty obvious, too). No doubt these days they can check for a lot more. But it's hardly new.
They may be trained at interpreting HiRISE images, but they've either had no experience with terrestrial aerial photographs, or they're afraid to say what they really think.
The talus slope on the east edge that "just stops" is a dead givaway.
Seriously, zoom in on the north (? top in the image) edge, there's a part where it's black at the bottom of the cliff, then a little ways out from that there's a rise with more material showing before the main body of "blackness".
An aerial photograph of a lake with dark water (or a lake of other dark fluid - magma? oil? vegemite?) looks exactly like this, around the edges you'll get the occasional off-shore rise.
I don't know what this really is on Mars, but that north edge is a little too weird for just a sinkhole, and overall the light just stops too abruptly -- just as though the crater, hole, pit, whatever were filled to just below the surface with a dark fluid. (The Blue Hole offshore Belize, which I've dived, looks a lot like this from above the surface too.)
Also, check the east rim, there looks like a landslide with a talus slope spreading out, stopping at the same "fluid level" as the rest.
Or maybe it's all just a badly-timed April Fool's joke. The thing looks more like a clever fake than anything likely to be found on Mars.
Yes, but 40 years ago there was an entire generation of college kids that thought [...] drugs [...] were free to be taken and shared, and now that generation [...] votes for George W. Bush.
If I'm going to pay, it must be more functional than the free version.
Amen. And instead companies are going in the opposite direction. I don't do cable or satellite (or much broadcast, for that matter) but routinely buy a season's worth of favorite TV shows when they come out on DVD. This works out well; no ads, watch when I want, and - since we typically watch in the evening after the kids' bedtimes - with subtitles so we can catch quiet dialog without the volume cranked up too high.
A year or so ago, after the usual cliff-hanger season ending episode of Smallville, I downloaded the next season's first episode (since it had already aired). No subtitles, but it was HD and looked great on the computer monitor.
So, fast forward a few months, the next season is released on DVD, and -- no English subtitles. WTF? One of the main value-adds for buying the DVD just went up in a cloud of corporate penny-pinching. (Not to mention disincentivising (hey, I'm a writer, I'm allowed to make up words) anyone hard of hearing to buy these.) I haven't downloaded any more eps -- I only just got finished watching the previous season -- but I have to think about why I'd spend the money on the now-inferior discs rather than doing so.
It can use all the RAM it likes (and has available) for all I care -- but when it starts swapping, that's disk, several orders of magnitude slower than RAM. The GP specifically said swapping, and with 1GB of RAM.
Or lose out on a crash. A year ago MSFT dropped from $28 to $23 in about a week. Most of your $22 to $31 gain was just recouping that loss. And it's still a long way to go from the $59+ of a few years ago.
Vista runs fine on one gig of ram. [...] not swapping excessively under normal usage.
With that much RAM it shouldn't swap at all under normal usage.
My Linux box with 1G, running browser, office, email, and a pile of other crap still has 500 MB free (or used for cache). My Windows XP laptop, with Outlook, Firefox, some in-house apps, etc is only using 485 MB. WTF is Vista swapping for if it's got a gig?
Thing is, it sounds like you've already lost a key liberty -- the right to defend yourself. Or perhaps the will.
Next thing you know, the populace is asking Big Brother to please keep an eye on everything, because they're too helpless themselves. Oh wait, you've already asked for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that an Airbus is more likely to crash than a Boeing ?
Actually it probably does. Boeing has a lot of corporate history to draw on when it comes to making aircraft that can survive serious failures and still keep flying -- a lot of this came from analysis of flak damage to returning bombers during WW-II. Areas that were never damaged on returning aircraft indicated an area that was particularly vulnerable (if the plane got hit there, it didn't come back), and they'd design around whatever the weakness was (typically by adding another layer of redundancy). This leads to robustness against certain kinds of accidents (e.g. a DC-10 crash caused because a cargo door failure ripped up all three "redundant" hydraulic lines to the tail, as they passed through the same area. A similar class Boeing aircraft used four lines, with no one location containing all four. And yes, I know a DC-10 is not an Airbus.)
I'm certainly not aware of any Boeing crashes caused by software failure, which can't be said for Airbus.
That said, I've never changed a flight just because the designated equipment was an Airbus.
where all but one of the survivors from the tail section so far as been kidnapped or murdered.
;-)
And, strictly speaking, he wasn't a tail section passenger. His assigned seat was midsection, he just happened to be in a tailsection bathroom when the excitement started. (Although IIRC he had time to strap himself into a seat which ended up in a tree.)
(I just got Season 2 from the library and watched the whole thing in about three days. Probably fried some neural circuits.
GPL'd software comes with so many contractual terms that they bind the users
So which is it, are you stupid or a liar? I suppose both is also possible.
The GPL isn't a contract -- nobody signs it -- it is a license.
It doesn't bind the user in any way at all. Anyone is free to use GPL'd software however they wish, within the limits of the laws of the society they live in.
It PERMITS copying and distribution where copyright law would not, if you agree to the license terms offered for such permission. Those terms are designed to ensure that whoever you provide copies to gets the same freedoms you were given when you received it.
The points you raise are certainly good ones.
I would also note that not all bosses, by any means, are of the "pointy haired" sort. However, it is generally (not exclusively) true that bosses by their own actions do not contribute directly to the company's bottom line, but rather indirectly through facilitating (one would hope) the actions of the employees that are actually producing the products or services that customers are willing to pay for. A bad manager with a good team (probably one he's inherited rather than built, although in a boom industry even a bad manager can build a team "good enough") can show a profit for a while, although that may be far below the potential profit that a good manager could show. And a bad manager with a good story can survive for quite a while even while showing a loss, especially if the company overall is big enough to absorb the losses.
That's why good senior level managers pay attention to more than just the bottom line profit/loss figures of a department, but compare them against industry averages and also pay attention to things like employee turnover within a department. A bad boss may show good numbers for a year or two by slave-driving his workers, until they all disappear.
Not that old canard again. Glass is an amorphous solid, it is not a liquid (at ordinary temperatures). (And no, thickness differences in medieval stained glass windows don't prove anything - the pieces were installed thick side down for stability, and they didn't have the technology for uniform-thickness glass).
They're talking about real liquids, spun to form a curved surface. Early liquid mirror experiments involved mercury.
It boggles the mind that anyone thinks that a body made up of the equivalent of pointy-haired bosses would know best.
How does it go? "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, enter politics." Something like that...
(And while there might, in some cases, be some bright people in gov't service who advise those politicians, when was the last time you knew a PHB to follow advice, especially advice he didn't understand?)
That sounds so, so...eighties.
Or is it memory that can only be used by TurboPascal?
A shuttle launch is an amazing work of 30-year old technology.
Fixed that for you.
What's amazing (well, more sad really) is that they didn't replace the thing twenty years ago, post-Challenger. Instead they just added another layer of kludges.
I recall being told that Mac OS had support for multiple buttons since version 9
And I used to use a 3-button mouse on MacOS System 7 on a 68K-based Mac. Yeah, you had to install the Logitech driver that came with the mouse (BFD - insert floppy, wait a minute, done - remove autoejected floppy), but it worked fine.
but I don't see how fertilization is a miracle or blessing, any sperm can fertilize any egg.
Well, no, not quite, even assuming we're talking about same species here.
Sometimes sperm or eggs are just plain damaged or defective, and thus infertile. That's if the sperm even gets there; it's not unknown for a woman to have antibodies against sperm. Once fertilized, there's still a whole obstacle course to run before there's anything that might become a kid: it might not implant (pretty high odds against implantation, actually), it might implant and start to divide but never differentiate, or only develops an empty placenta but no embryo (known as a "blighted ovum", usually results in a miscarriage within a couple of months). And so on.
I wouldn't call it a miracle either, and whether it's a blessing depends on the wants and situation of the parents, but it's not exactly a sure thing either. Well, unless perhaps you're a couple of teenagers in the back seat of a car...
Genetic screening for embryos has been around for over a dozen years. They take a sample of amniotic fluid, which has some of the embryo's cells floating around in it, rather than from the embryo itself.
Now, back then they were just looking for things like Down's Syndrome and a few other things that were easily detected with then current technology (gender is pretty obvious, too). No doubt these days they can check for a lot more. But it's hardly new.
According to one source, they've estimated that the hole is about 130 meters deep.
What source? How did they estimate that? From the given scale, it's about 130 meters in diameter, perhaps you're confused?
If it were that shallow (and not filled with anything that soaked up light), we'd be able to see more detail.
They may be trained at interpreting HiRISE images, but they've either had no experience with terrestrial aerial photographs, or they're afraid to say what they really think.
The talus slope on the east edge that "just stops" is a dead givaway.
Seriously, zoom in on the north (? top in the image) edge, there's a part where it's black at the bottom of the cliff, then a little ways out from that there's a rise with more material showing before the main body of "blackness".
An aerial photograph of a lake with dark water (or a lake of other dark fluid - magma? oil? vegemite?) looks exactly like this, around the edges you'll get the occasional off-shore rise.
I don't know what this really is on Mars, but that north edge is a little too weird for just a sinkhole, and overall the light just stops too abruptly -- just as though the crater, hole, pit, whatever were filled to just below the surface with a dark fluid. (The Blue Hole offshore Belize, which I've dived, looks a lot like this from above the surface too.)
Also, check the east rim, there looks like a landslide with a talus slope spreading out, stopping at the same "fluid level" as the rest.
Or maybe it's all just a badly-timed April Fool's joke. The thing looks more like a clever fake than anything likely to be found on Mars.
Yes, but 40 years ago there was an entire generation of college kids that thought [...] drugs [...] were free to be taken and shared, and now that generation [...] votes for George W. Bush.
Guess that explains something.
If I'm going to pay, it must be more functional than the free version.
Amen. And instead companies are going in the opposite direction. I don't do cable or satellite (or much broadcast, for that matter) but routinely buy a season's worth of favorite TV shows when they come out on DVD. This works out well; no ads, watch when I want, and - since we typically watch in the evening after the kids' bedtimes - with subtitles so we can catch quiet dialog without the volume cranked up too high.
A year or so ago, after the usual cliff-hanger season ending episode of Smallville, I downloaded the next season's first episode (since it had already aired). No subtitles, but it was HD and looked great on the computer monitor.
So, fast forward a few months, the next season is released on DVD, and -- no English subtitles. WTF? One of the main value-adds for buying the DVD just went up in a cloud of corporate penny-pinching. (Not to mention disincentivising (hey, I'm a writer, I'm allowed to make up words) anyone hard of hearing to buy these.) I haven't downloaded any more eps -- I only just got finished watching the previous season -- but I have to think about why I'd spend the money on the now-inferior discs rather than doing so.
It can use all the RAM it likes (and has available) for all I care -- but when it starts swapping, that's disk, several orders of magnitude slower than RAM. The GP specifically said swapping, and with 1GB of RAM.
I wonder how many people in Paris are actually using Fahrenheit these days
The display doesn't mention the temperature scale at all, why do you think it's Fahrenheit? It could just be a severe example of global warming...
Anyone can luck out on a short term gain.
Or lose out on a crash. A year ago MSFT dropped from $28 to $23 in about a week. Most of your $22 to $31 gain was just recouping that loss. And it's still a long way to go from the $59+ of a few years ago.
As soon as i hit the desktop in Vista
You mean after the half-hour to boot up and preload all that crap, right?
Server core has been publically demonstrated and is intended to support headless servers. They have introduced a quite elegant command line tool
So in other words, they're still chasing Unix/Linux's taillights?
Vista runs fine on one gig of ram. [...] not swapping excessively under normal usage.
With that much RAM it shouldn't swap at all under normal usage.
My Linux box with 1G, running browser, office, email, and a pile of other crap still has 500 MB free (or used for cache). My Windows XP laptop, with Outlook, Firefox, some in-house apps, etc is only using 485 MB. WTF is Vista swapping for if it's got a gig?
There's no shortage sunlight, true...but there's a shortage on space.
;-)
Two words: Dyson Sphere.
Thing is, it sounds like you've already lost a key liberty -- the right to defend yourself. Or perhaps the will.
Next thing you know, the populace is asking Big Brother to please keep an eye on everything, because they're too helpless themselves. Oh wait, you've already asked for that.
TFA says "it uses just two wires". So how come the bottom picture shows four? (Red, yellow and two black.) Decoration?