It is, but not for something as simple as a magazine.
There are actually companies that cater to making small-run molds. So between those guys, a 3D printer, and a CNC machine, you have a lot of useful small-scale manufacturing options. But magazines you might as well just machine yourself. (Incidentally, the tolerance on 3D printers is at least good enough for simple molds. A couple of the companies that 3D print objects for you provide some weird material choices by using the 3D printer to make a wax mold and using the mold, once, to make the object.)
In practice, you can't take it to too much of an extreme, because optimizers are not arbitrarily smart. Programmers also often don't bother to hint to the optimizer their assumptions and requirements.
Case statements can be optimized using jump tables.
Any semantically-equivalent code (that is, two instances of code that "does the same thing") can be optimized to the same set of instructions. It's just a matter of whether or not the optimizer can figure that out.
B: Mexico and Brazil have virtually no legal civilian gun ownership and their murder rates (including those with firearms) are orders of magnitude higher than ours.
A factor of 5 is not even one order of magnitude.
C: States and Cities in the US with strict gun control regimes are some of the most dangerous places to be in this country. The stats you are swallowing whole include suicides in them to make the rural areas look dangerous.
Surely you read Slashdot. What do people say about correlation and causation?
Oh please, the body is not some kind of magic entity that can ignore the laws of physics. Your body needs energy to function and the calories you consume are that energy. Your metabolism can slow down to some extent, but it's not as drastic as you say.
Your normal base metabolic rate is much higher than the amount of energy your body actually needs to function. Your metabolic rate can easily be cut in half if you limit your caloric intake enough.
Most RAW file formats (RAW isn't a file format itself, but a designation covering a number of different formats) already include lossless compression.
Even if they didn't, compressing would create a lot of unnecessary work, because they're mostly valuable in the form that can be manipulated by image editing and management software. Anything other than the actual RAW format is dramatically reduced in value. Again, though, that's a moot point, because RAW formats generally include lossless compression already.
You seem to be incorrectly thinking that "arbitrary" means "without reason or logic". It doesn't. It means that the choice is unrestricted. That is, a system of units works regardless of how big a "meter" happens to be. There's nothing fundamental or magical about the sizes of units. (There is something fundamental about the dimensions, but that's different.) You can pick any set of sizes for your unit scale and it is just as valid as any other set of sizes. It just might be less convenient.
For example, metric might be pretty convenient for people constantly working in decimal notation and dealing with a large range of scales. Some sort of bastardized pseudo-metric system where all of the conversion factors are conveniently powers of 2 might be most convenient for people working on, say, a system based on binary bits. A system where the only units are that a set of fundamental constants are set to 1 (dimensionless) might be very convenient for, say, relativity, but convenient for nobody else.
Swimming pools have some pretty serious regulations. A lot of places require fences around private swimming pools if they constitute an "attractive nuisance".
There's not really any accounting for it, except to note the fact that the difference exists. The people doing the study aren't magically in charge of how different countries compile their statistics and there's no access to the original data. Without the original data, you can't adjust numbers so that everyone uses the same method. You just have to live with the fact that the numbers aren't comparable.
US has about 35% more debt per person then Greece.
Right, and about 100% more GDP per person than Greece. (Also about 100% more income per person.) We can sustain more debt because we have a much bigger economy.
That's not to say that there's nothing wrong with the current level of debt or defecit. It's not just unprecedented by any reasonable measure.
#20 The U.S. has accumulated the biggest national debt that the world has ever seen
Only because we have such large economy. If you scale by GDP, we don't even have the biggest debt that we've ever seen -- and plenty of countries are currently worse-off.
It would be just as valid to say that the Eurozone has the biggest debt the world has ever seen.
Right now, U.S. government debt is expanding at a rate of $40,000 per second.
That's a completely meaningless figure. On the scale of first-world national economies, $40k is tiny. A second is also tiny. It's a less useful measurement than a light-nanosecond. Maybe as useful as a barn-parsec.
Likewise, 2' 4" x 6' 2" = (2' x 6') + (4" x 2") + (2' x 2") + (6' x 4") = 12 ft^2 + 8 in^2 + 48 in^2 + 2 ft^2 = 14 ft^2 + 56 in^2, which is about 14 1/3 ft^2. It's not something most people can easily do in their head, but it's possible if you have some practice or a piece of paper.
Well, I know how to work with fractions. Area in any useful everyday task requires ugly multiplication, regardless, unless your measurements fall on nice even boundaries. Sure, 2' 4" x 6' 2" is a pain, but so is 70 cm x 180 cm.
I don't have to work with lb-force vs. lb-mass. Engineers get the short end of the stick on units. Scientists just use SI for real work (except, perhaps, when building things) and non-engineers rarely need to worry much about horsepower, btu, or pounds-mass. But pounds-mass, slugs, the gravity correction factor, and kilograms-force (seriously?) all need to die in a fire.
If you care what the value "100" means, sure. 100 isn't some magic number. In everyday use for temperature, you just internalize a set of values that are associated with particular things -- very cold, freezing, cold, room temperature, hot, body temperature. It doesn't really matter if any of these are approximately zero or 100.
Never mind that Americans seem to use yards for football and that's it, so you have to remember five thousand and some odd feet in a mile.
Sure, if you happen to care how many feet are in a mile. Outside of a classroom, you generally don't.
There are a lot more inconvenient ones that people don't come up with because when they go fishing for examples, they come up with the same tired ones. Confusion between volume and weight ounces is okay. Dry and Troy weight would be confusing, except nobody uses Troy weight. But try figuring out how big an acre is in any useful unit. (For that matter, though, most SI users don't know the size of a hectare offhand.)
1 litre ( liters for US) of water = 1 kilogram of water = 1,000 cubic centimetres
When on Earth do you actually use that?
Sure, it's convenient if you're a scientist or an engineer. Scientists also don't use Imperial units, regardless of whether they are, but that's no matter. Scientists and engineers have to deal with terribly inconvenient units all the time (like the SI units of pressure that are not Pascals), and they're pretty good at it. Regular people generally seem to remember that a liter is a cubic decimeter, because they learned it, but ask them to figure out how many liters of air a 8x8x3 m room holds and they'll have to get out some paper and do unit conversions.
Slashdot Mirror
...a government department that nobody ever heard of pre-9/11...
You're joking, right?
It is, but not for something as simple as a magazine.
There are actually companies that cater to making small-run molds. So between those guys, a 3D printer, and a CNC machine, you have a lot of useful small-scale manufacturing options. But magazines you might as well just machine yourself. (Incidentally, the tolerance on 3D printers is at least good enough for simple molds. A couple of the companies that 3D print objects for you provide some weird material choices by using the 3D printer to make a wax mold and using the mold, once, to make the object.)
In practice, you can't take it to too much of an extreme, because optimizers are not arbitrarily smart. Programmers also often don't bother to hint to the optimizer their assumptions and requirements.
Case statements can be optimized using jump tables.
Any semantically-equivalent code (that is, two instances of code that "does the same thing") can be optimized to the same set of instructions. It's just a matter of whether or not the optimizer can figure that out.
If you were going to that much trouble, you'd be able to make the damn thing yourself without a 3D printer.
B: Mexico and Brazil have virtually no legal civilian gun ownership and their murder rates (including those with firearms) are orders of magnitude higher than ours.
A factor of 5 is not even one order of magnitude.
C: States and Cities in the US with strict gun control regimes are some of the most dangerous places to be in this country. The stats you are swallowing whole include suicides in them to make the rural areas look dangerous.
Surely you read Slashdot. What do people say about correlation and causation?
Oh please, the body is not some kind of magic entity that can ignore the laws of physics. Your body needs energy to function and the calories you consume are that energy. Your metabolism can slow down to some extent, but it's not as drastic as you say.
Your normal base metabolic rate is much higher than the amount of energy your body actually needs to function. Your metabolic rate can easily be cut in half if you limit your caloric intake enough.
It would take about 13 weeks with 1 Mbit up, which is on the low end of readily-available broadband data.
Most RAW file formats (RAW isn't a file format itself, but a designation covering a number of different formats) already include lossless compression.
Even if they didn't, compressing would create a lot of unnecessary work, because they're mostly valuable in the form that can be manipulated by image editing and management software. Anything other than the actual RAW format is dramatically reduced in value. Again, though, that's a moot point, because RAW formats generally include lossless compression already.
1992 and 1991, apparently, though both were somewhat smaller-scale.
So you disagree with the reason for the debt, but that doesn't make it unprecedented.
Also, we have been or are in a couple of wars right now, and the debt spikes from wars in the past have gone down very slowly.
You seem to be incorrectly thinking that "arbitrary" means "without reason or logic". It doesn't. It means that the choice is unrestricted. That is, a system of units works regardless of how big a "meter" happens to be. There's nothing fundamental or magical about the sizes of units. (There is something fundamental about the dimensions, but that's different.) You can pick any set of sizes for your unit scale and it is just as valid as any other set of sizes. It just might be less convenient.
For example, metric might be pretty convenient for people constantly working in decimal notation and dealing with a large range of scales. Some sort of bastardized pseudo-metric system where all of the conversion factors are conveniently powers of 2 might be most convenient for people working on, say, a system based on binary bits. A system where the only units are that a set of fundamental constants are set to 1 (dimensionless) might be very convenient for, say, relativity, but convenient for nobody else.
Swimming pools have some pretty serious regulations. A lot of places require fences around private swimming pools if they constitute an "attractive nuisance".
There's not really any accounting for it, except to note the fact that the difference exists. The people doing the study aren't magically in charge of how different countries compile their statistics and there's no access to the original data. Without the original data, you can't adjust numbers so that everyone uses the same method. You just have to live with the fact that the numbers aren't comparable.
So, if you scale by the relative populations of Switzerland and the US, you'd expect one mass shooting per 20 years in Switzerland.
Incidentally, there was such an incident in Switzerland in 2001.
US has about 35% more debt per person then Greece.
Right, and about 100% more GDP per person than Greece. (Also about 100% more income per person.) We can sustain more debt because we have a much bigger economy.
That's not to say that there's nothing wrong with the current level of debt or defecit. It's not just unprecedented by any reasonable measure.
#20 The U.S. has accumulated the biggest national debt that the world has ever seen
Only because we have such large economy. If you scale by GDP, we don't even have the biggest debt that we've ever seen -- and plenty of countries are currently worse-off.
It would be just as valid to say that the Eurozone has the biggest debt the world has ever seen.
Right now, U.S. government debt is expanding at a rate of $40,000 per second.
That's a completely meaningless figure. On the scale of first-world national economies, $40k is tiny. A second is also tiny. It's a less useful measurement than a light-nanosecond. Maybe as useful as a barn-parsec.
Fahrenheit's only finer-grained than Celsius by a factor of 2, and in most everyday circumstances you don't have that level of precision anyway.
There are plenty of baseball fans that would argue that there's no problem saying it's .29 out.
Do you have an intuitive sense of how far 150m is?
They're units. They can be measured in any other unit of the same dimensions.
An acre is an integer number of square yards, but it's currently defined by its metric conversion, like all other US Imperial units.
Likewise, 2' 4" x 6' 2" = (2' x 6') + (4" x 2") + (2' x 2") + (6' x 4") = 12 ft^2 + 8 in^2 + 48 in^2 + 2 ft^2 = 14 ft^2 + 56 in^2, which is about 14 1/3 ft^2. It's not something most people can easily do in their head, but it's possible if you have some practice or a piece of paper.
Well, I know how to work with fractions. Area in any useful everyday task requires ugly multiplication, regardless, unless your measurements fall on nice even boundaries. Sure, 2' 4" x 6' 2" is a pain, but so is 70 cm x 180 cm.
I don't have to work with lb-force vs. lb-mass. Engineers get the short end of the stick on units. Scientists just use SI for real work (except, perhaps, when building things) and non-engineers rarely need to worry much about horsepower, btu, or pounds-mass. But pounds-mass, slugs, the gravity correction factor, and kilograms-force (seriously?) all need to die in a fire.
If you care what the value "100" means, sure. 100 isn't some magic number. In everyday use for temperature, you just internalize a set of values that are associated with particular things -- very cold, freezing, cold, room temperature, hot, body temperature. It doesn't really matter if any of these are approximately zero or 100.
Never mind that Americans seem to use yards for football and that's it, so you have to remember five thousand and some odd feet in a mile.
Sure, if you happen to care how many feet are in a mile. Outside of a classroom, you generally don't.
There are a lot more inconvenient ones that people don't come up with because when they go fishing for examples, they come up with the same tired ones. Confusion between volume and weight ounces is okay. Dry and Troy weight would be confusing, except nobody uses Troy weight. But try figuring out how big an acre is in any useful unit. (For that matter, though, most SI users don't know the size of a hectare offhand.)
1 litre ( liters for US) of water = 1 kilogram of water = 1,000 cubic centimetres
When on Earth do you actually use that?
Sure, it's convenient if you're a scientist or an engineer. Scientists also don't use Imperial units, regardless of whether they are, but that's no matter. Scientists and engineers have to deal with terribly inconvenient units all the time (like the SI units of pressure that are not Pascals), and they're pretty good at it. Regular people generally seem to remember that a liter is a cubic decimeter, because they learned it, but ask them to figure out how many liters of air a 8x8x3 m room holds and they'll have to get out some paper and do unit conversions.