For $247.90, it looks you get a case, a power supply, a motherboard, CPU, heatsink, and some slow RAM. It has built-in graphics that, while useful, is probably nothing compared to what will be included with the PS3.
WTF am I supposed to do with that? That's not a gaming rig; that's a pile of parts.
Oh, I see. And I'm supposed to spend another $150 on a GPU. So now it's a $400 box with no storage, and no optical drive.
BD-ROM drives are, what, $70-ish?
Now it's $470.
Add storage, input devices, an operating system, and a game (launch bundles always seem to include a game), and...gosh, it doesn't seem like such a good deal after all, and it integrates poorly into my living room: PC gaming on a couch sucks. Double-suck if you want to play with a friend.
And when it's all said and done, I still have to administer the thing? My time isn't worth much, but I've got better things to do when I want to play a game than fuck around with drivers and tweak settings, like actually playing a game.
Nowhere in the USA that I've lived ever made the homeowner do anything with the sidewalk in front of their house. The city always paid for it. I have lived in DC, MD, VA, and CA.
Good for your anecdote!
In Findlay, Ohio, the landowner is responsible for the sidewalk.
If the landowner does not maintain the sidewalk properly, the City will take it upon themselves to fix it, and then bill the homeowner accordingly.
Regulations are nice and all, but in a free and competitive market (please note that these may be mutually-exclusive in some cases) it still sorts itself nicely:
Person A: "I need to find Internet for my new house. I'm not sure what to pick."
Person B: "Don't get $ISP. Netflix doesn't work very well with it. I've been using $competitor, and it works great."
Person A: "Ok, thanks!"
$ISP's subscriber base drops, $competitor gets more business, and $ISP is forced to change their ways or leave the party.
These rules you specify, even if they weren't related directly to RF, still would not apply: Purposefully fucking up servers != "accepting interference from other sources".
It is, and remains, illegal to intentionally interfere with communications. Or private property in general. In the US. Today. As we speak.
Otherwise, I still expect a law and/or a citeable court order specifically allowing such action, which may or may not involve foreign nationals and their belongings.
There are digital control technologies other than WiFi that are wireless. Most (!) of them are not even in the 2.4GHz range that common 802.11 occupies.
It's not just cost. If you formed a freeway support column from a solid block of steel having dimensions of 5x10x40 feet, it would be impossible to transport to the site or place into position, and even more impossible to join to anything comparably large. You simply couldn't get the middle part of the contact points hot enough to weld, without damaging the structural integrity of the remainder of the beam/column while doing it.
Yeah, and the pyramids were impossible to build, too. And thermite does not exist, and liquid nitrogen cannot keep things cold, and steel is a perfect conductor of heat so it would be impossible anyway. Right?
Sarcasm aside:
Why must it be 5x10x40 feet?
And why must it be welded, anyway? There are lots of other ways to join steel.
In the real world, steel beams have to be some variant of a tube, box, I-beam, or C-channel/stud to enable them to be placed.
Have to be? You sound mighty certain of yourself.
Rather, it's just that these shapes constitute tend a more efficient use (in terms of strength vs. weight) of material. Transportability is way down on the list: You can almost always get a bigger truck/crane/whatever.
In broader strokes, just because one thing is easier to transport or place, does not mean that some other thing is impossible to manage. (Give me a lever and a place to stand....)
And in one specific case: PiRod towers are made from solid (not tubular) round steel bars, with off-the-shelf self-supporting designs going up as high as 600 feet.
(And to be clear: Building big things out of solid steel is a often stupid idea. But being a stupid idea does not mean that it cannot be done: People do stupid, absurdly difficult things all of the time, sometimes even quite successfully.)
For this reason, the Hoover Dam has interior channels built into it to siphon the water away.
I'm not going to suggest that Portland cement-based concrete is not porous, because it plainly is, but:
Those aren't drains. Those are cooling pipes. The water in them is introduced intentionally to cool the concrete as it cures (which is a process that is still occurring today).
No, not really: Insteon (and X10) are dead silent unless commands are being sent. Meanwhile, WiFi devices are inherently somewhat chatty; they all spend a significant portion of their time broadcasting "Hey, here I am! I'm still here! I'm still here! I'm still here! Hey, everyone! I'm still here! Are you there? Good! Because I'm still here!"
It's cold (sometimes damn-cold) and dry in the winter, and hot (sometimes damn-hot) and always humid (usually 90-100%) in the summer, but the bugs stay small-ish due to the killing freeze. We have tremendous seasonal temperature swings here.
House? 5 bedrooms, used to have 3 baths (took some out; used to be a triplex), close to an acre of land. Within about 2.5 hours of three international airports, 1 hour of two regional airports, and several minutes (walking distance) to a small airport that will gladly ferry me to any of the others. There is a large grocery store, a carry-out, a dollar store, two banks, two florists, and a hospital within an easy walk.
Food? There is something like 1 restaurant per 100 heads in this county, but most of it isn't very unusual: Lots of burgers-n-fries, the ubiquitous Subways, some Thai, lots of Chinese.
Services? I haven't had to go far to find someone/someplace that will get me what I need, and they're plentiful enough to be competitive with eachother so the price always seems right.
Tools? We don't have a Harbor Freight or a Fry's or a Microcenter, but Amazon Prime does nicely (though two of three of these are driveable if one is in a hurry). (We do have a Sears and a couple of excellent hardware stores and a Lowes and a Menards and......, but I'm really dissatisfied with options here locally.)
Shopping? Nothing is further than a 15-minute drive, and whatever I need (be it DDR1 RAM at 7:30 at night or a PA system before noon).
Neighbors? I can have a proper bonfire with 40-foot flames, while making fireballs with black powder and set off mortars regularly, and the neighbors (I have seven of them, directly) don't bat an eye.
Wildlife? There are herds of beautiful deer within a few minutes' walk, and bunnies in the yard.
Theater? Meh. Local art? Yes. (One must have tradeoffs.)
Nightlife? We've got a couple of meat-markets that roll-out at 1:00AM. The local music scene keeps trying and failing to thrive, though there are certainly plenty of good musicians.
Organic food? Good luck -- better befriend a farmer. Local food? Plenty, in-season.
Good, fresh seafood? Good luck.
Public transportation? Not a chance.
Bike-friendly roadways or paths? Some of the latter, none of the former.
Regular cab service? Hah.
Friends with needless 4x4 SUVs who are willing to pull huge widowmakers down from your trees after a windstorm, just for the fun of it, and then chop it all up with their own chainsaw just so that the next bonfire can be a thing that actually happens? Easy.
*shrug*
Where are YOU at? Or is that the first rule of fight club?
You know what? I'm going to chime in here in this sea of ACs, even though I hate replying to ACs.
I "dropped out" of highschool (was there for a few days), was "homeschooled" after that (meh, I resisted that pretty well too -- it didn't last long). Eventually, I went on to have an easy time of getting excellent scores on a GED without any more prior study other than researching the most expedient way to take the test (which, it turns out, happens every Saturday in the state capitol. No appointment needed.).
How? I learn constantly. Always have. My hourly wage is far and beyond what most people my age make around here, irrespective of trade or education. And you know what? No meaningful employer has ever questioned my education: They hire me to do a job, I do it well and do it in short order, and then it's onto the next one.
That said, I'm not as busy as I might like at the moment. It would be good to have more work to accomplish on a daily basis, as that generally means more money. But I'm enjoying my time off in between little projects, and I know that I'll get more work from my clients in the future.
Last year was a bit different; I found myself being pulled thin, having lots of money, and little free time.
But nobody, anywhere, expects me to spend 8 (or 10 or 12 or 16) hours a day holding a desk down when things get slow. Nobody tells me what days I take off (if I want to go away for a week or two, I just don't schedule anything during that time). Nobody ever derisively says to me "We start work at 8:00AM here," when I pop in a few minutes late when my 40-minute commute turns into a 50-minute one day. And nobody ever kicks me out the door at 5, when I'm in the middle of a concentrated effort to get something done.
So even if my hourly wage is good, and my hours are limited: Fuck. I'm never going to go back to making 1/5th of what I make hourly, just to say I've put in 40 hours in a week.
It's not worth it. I'm happier now than I have been since I was a carefree teenager, though there were certainly times in the past where I was punching a clock and this wasn't the case.
Someone could say to me "I'll pay you ten times what you earn now, but you have to be at the office from 9 to 5, every day" and I'd tell them to get stuffed.
It doesn't matter how much money you earn in your particular subdivision or region vs. your peers. Happiness is key. Without it, there's no point in living -- let alone working.
I guess I don't care. In inflationary times, small denominations become increasingly worthless: Talks about eliminating the penny, stateside, seem to be more serious than they used to be.
In deflationary times, small denominations becomes increasingly useful: If the penny had enough meaningful value, we could simply go back to issuing half-cents and the like.
With inflation, my money in the bank gets smaller, but the decimal value of the stuff I own gets bigger. With deflation, the opposite occurs.
No big deal either way, IMHO. Either way it happens, the market will adjust: Wages (in dollars per hour) will go up or down accordingly, on average. So will food. And cars. And utilities. And. And. And.
And economist will surely disagree, but: I think money should be manufactured at approximately the same rate that it is either literally destroyed or literally lost. And by "approximate," I mean: As best as we can reckon*.
Later on, if a real change needs to be made, then make it -- much as Mexico has done with the Peso, or the Japanese might do well to do with the Yen. I think we'd all be better off of the Fed would stop nickle and diming the country by printing new money without a good (and goddamn specific) reason because all it does, in the end, is add artificial fluidity to pricing.
(That is, unless we keep issuing treasury bonds that we can't possibly cover without the Fed simply printing more money, which seems to be par for the course. But hey, who am I to say that Social Security is both expensive and worth paying for?)
*: It's no secret that both paper and metallic money wear out over time, or that money is sometimes literally lost. I scored a $20 that was drifting across a parking lot in the breeze earlier today, in fact: Had I, or someone else, not picked it up, that money would likely have been washed into a storm sewer and composted into dirt: Lost.
In my line of work, I find that churches and public schools do this the best (worst?).
And before I get modded down for slandering churches and public schools: I think the lesson here is that any type of organization is capable of being staffed and/or run by very broken people who are both appear successful at their assigned role, while simultaneously a complete failure at it.
And now, it's your fault. (Or at least it is if you get the job/contract/gig/sale/whatever.)
You're very naive to believe that the the super computers they publish articles about are actually the most powerful that exist.
And you're very naive to believe that the most powerful super computers that exist are actually a few orders of magnitude faster than those that have articles written about them.
We aren't in the ENIAC days; Commercial Off-The-Shelf is the order of the day.
That said: Can an organization like the NSA defeat AES-128? What about AES-256? Probably so, but not through brute force: Remember, AES (and DES) are both products of the US Government.
I own the ten-dollar bluetooth widget, and it works admirably with free software, but I don't have any vehicles that are ODB-II except for a Safari. And it doesn't care a bit what kind if gas I give it.
I have a old cat-less Firebird, and a nearby airport. Wish I could duplicate your effort, but the heads are off the engine for now. Otherwise I'd drive over there in the morning and put a few gallons of 100-octane avgas (including TEL) into it.
That said: My own research says that dollars-per-mile-efficiency is maximized at the lowest octane rating that an engine can tolerate under normal conditions without either detonation or knock sensor-initiated ignition retardation.
In terms of maximum power output, the research becomes murky: Some say it can't matter, others say it's worse with needlessly higher octane, others say that higher octane is better -- period.
In my daily-driven knock-sensor-equipped fuel-injected car, I can say there's a big difference between 87 and 93 octane, even though the car itself only "requires" 91. I don't have the computer-gear to show ignition advance, so it's an anecdote, but: Everything works better with 93 octane fuel. (The manual mentions that it's OK to run leaded gas, and I'd put avgas into it, but the manual also says it will poison the catalytic converter, and though I could get away without a cat indefinitely in this state, I don't want to spend the money on exhaust plumbing to bypass/gut it.)
And the difference between 87 and 93 is minimal compared to the difference between 87 and 100, so that's also a meaningful datapoint. (93-87=6 100-87=13.)
But then, I've also had other cars that don't care at all: They performed exactly the same on low-octane fuel as they did on higher-octane fuel, even under abusive situations. And my lawnmower doesn't seem to care, even when the grass is tall and wet.
...And I suppose you think that MTBE is better? If the engine is operated properly, the amount of lead emitted is very minimal. Meanwhile, though TEL was an air pollutant, MTBE is water soluble. Many are drinking it now and we're not sure just what long term effects it will have.
MTBE is an oxygenator added to cause engines to run leaner by government mandate. TEL improves octane rating.
Just because thery're both fuel additives, does not mean that they are not: Two. Completely. Different. Things.
The heirarchical nature of DNS could only be used to allow manufacturers to run the IMEI blacklists.
Srsly. This prose is short-sighted, at very best.
That said: We need hierarchical structures for blacklists, because a flat-field database is unmanageable with this quantity of data and multiple points of data-entry.
DNS does this, already. Handily. Efficiently. Just because you can't realize this doesn't mean it can't work (or does not already provably work, as is the case of long-existing RBLs) does not mean that it is somehow impossible.
If I take what you just said quite literally, then it is as thus:
I don't live in Soviet Russia, and never will. I don't care what their mistakes cost them.
If anything, Chernobyl taught the rest of the world the following: YOU DO NOT DO RISKY EXPERIMENTS WITH A FULL-SCALE REACTOR, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT ISN'T FUCKING WORKING PROPERLY AND YOU FUCKING KNOW IT.
Which, you know, might mean a thing or two about why such an incident has never happened again.
Was it a monetarily-expensive lesson? Again, I don't give a shit: It wasn't any of my money that those fools burned up.
My "old" Android smartphone has 256MB of RAM, and would continue to work fine for me today if not for more-recent bloat: It's a far faster computer than my desktop of not-so-long ago.
Instead, it languishes on the corner of my desk. (I could sell it at the kiosk in the mall that eats cell phones and dispenses cash, but it's worth more to me as a paperweight than the $2 that they offer for such an "antiquated" device.)
Ultimately, the metric I care about most is getting the maximum use out of my dollars. Bloat always runs counter to that.
Slashdot Mirror
For $247.90, it looks you get a case, a power supply, a motherboard, CPU, heatsink, and some slow RAM. It has built-in graphics that, while useful, is probably nothing compared to what will be included with the PS3.
WTF am I supposed to do with that? That's not a gaming rig; that's a pile of parts.
Oh, I see. And I'm supposed to spend another $150 on a GPU. So now it's a $400 box with no storage, and no optical drive.
BD-ROM drives are, what, $70-ish?
Now it's $470.
Add storage, input devices, an operating system, and a game (launch bundles always seem to include a game), and...gosh, it doesn't seem like such a good deal after all, and it integrates poorly into my living room: PC gaming on a couch sucks. Double-suck if you want to play with a friend.
And when it's all said and done, I still have to administer the thing? My time isn't worth much, but I've got better things to do when I want to play a game than fuck around with drivers and tweak settings, like actually playing a game.
Newsflash: Bankruptcy is not the only process by which companies go out of business.
Good for your anecdote!
In Findlay, Ohio, the landowner is responsible for the sidewalk.
If the landowner does not maintain the sidewalk properly, the City will take it upon themselves to fix it, and then bill the homeowner accordingly.
Regulations are nice and all, but in a free and competitive market (please note that these may be mutually-exclusive in some cases) it still sorts itself nicely:
Person A: "I need to find Internet for my new house. I'm not sure what to pick."
Person B: "Don't get $ISP. Netflix doesn't work very well with it. I've been using $competitor, and it works great."
Person A: "Ok, thanks!"
$ISP's subscriber base drops, $competitor gets more business, and $ISP is forced to change their ways or leave the party.
These rules you specify, even if they weren't related directly to RF, still would not apply: Purposefully fucking up servers != "accepting interference from other sources".
It is, and remains, illegal to intentionally interfere with communications. Or private property in general. In the US. Today. As we speak.
Otherwise, I still expect a law and/or a citeable court order specifically allowing such action, which may or may not involve foreign nationals and their belongings.
There are digital control technologies other than WiFi that are wireless. Most (!) of them are not even in the 2.4GHz range that common 802.11 occupies.
Close. Wifi is noisy all by itself; Facebook is noisy due to (alleged) human interaction.
Yeah, and the pyramids were impossible to build, too. And thermite does not exist, and liquid nitrogen cannot keep things cold, and steel is a perfect conductor of heat so it would be impossible anyway. Right?
Sarcasm aside:
Why must it be 5x10x40 feet?
And why must it be welded, anyway? There are lots of other ways to join steel.
Have to be? You sound mighty certain of yourself.
Rather, it's just that these shapes constitute tend a more efficient use (in terms of strength vs. weight) of material. Transportability is way down on the list: You can almost always get a bigger truck/crane/whatever.
In broader strokes, just because one thing is easier to transport or place, does not mean that some other thing is impossible to manage. (Give me a lever and a place to stand....)
And in one specific case: PiRod towers are made from solid (not tubular) round steel bars, with off-the-shelf self-supporting designs going up as high as 600 feet.
(And to be clear: Building big things out of solid steel is a often stupid idea. But being a stupid idea does not mean that it cannot be done: People do stupid, absurdly difficult things all of the time, sometimes even quite successfully.)
I'm not going to suggest that Portland cement-based concrete is not porous, because it plainly is, but:
Those aren't drains. Those are cooling pipes. The water in them is introduced intentionally to cool the concrete as it cures (which is a process that is still occurring today).
More WiFi clients == less RF flying around?
No, not really: Insteon (and X10) are dead silent unless commands are being sent. Meanwhile, WiFi devices are inherently somewhat chatty; they all spend a significant portion of their time broadcasting "Hey, here I am! I'm still here! I'm still here! I'm still here! Hey, everyone! I'm still here! Are you there? Good! Because I'm still here!"
(I'm not the AC)
Northwest Ohio.
It's cold (sometimes damn-cold) and dry in the winter, and hot (sometimes damn-hot) and always humid (usually 90-100%) in the summer, but the bugs stay small-ish due to the killing freeze. We have tremendous seasonal temperature swings here.
House? 5 bedrooms, used to have 3 baths (took some out; used to be a triplex), close to an acre of land. Within about 2.5 hours of three international airports, 1 hour of two regional airports, and several minutes (walking distance) to a small airport that will gladly ferry me to any of the others. There is a large grocery store, a carry-out, a dollar store, two banks, two florists, and a hospital within an easy walk.
Food? There is something like 1 restaurant per 100 heads in this county, but most of it isn't very unusual: Lots of burgers-n-fries, the ubiquitous Subways, some Thai, lots of Chinese.
Services? I haven't had to go far to find someone/someplace that will get me what I need, and they're plentiful enough to be competitive with eachother so the price always seems right.
Tools? We don't have a Harbor Freight or a Fry's or a Microcenter, but Amazon Prime does nicely (though two of three of these are driveable if one is in a hurry). (We do have a Sears and a couple of excellent hardware stores and a Lowes and a Menards and......, but I'm really dissatisfied with options here locally.)
Shopping? Nothing is further than a 15-minute drive, and whatever I need (be it DDR1 RAM at 7:30 at night or a PA system before noon).
Neighbors? I can have a proper bonfire with 40-foot flames, while making fireballs with black powder and set off mortars regularly, and the neighbors (I have seven of them, directly) don't bat an eye.
Wildlife? There are herds of beautiful deer within a few minutes' walk, and bunnies in the yard.
Theater? Meh. Local art? Yes. (One must have tradeoffs.)
Nightlife? We've got a couple of meat-markets that roll-out at 1:00AM. The local music scene keeps trying and failing to thrive, though there are certainly plenty of good musicians.
Organic food? Good luck -- better befriend a farmer. Local food? Plenty, in-season.
Good, fresh seafood? Good luck.
Public transportation? Not a chance.
Bike-friendly roadways or paths? Some of the latter, none of the former.
Regular cab service? Hah.
Friends with needless 4x4 SUVs who are willing to pull huge widowmakers down from your trees after a windstorm, just for the fun of it, and then chop it all up with their own chainsaw just so that the next bonfire can be a thing that actually happens? Easy.
*shrug*
Where are YOU at? Or is that the first rule of fight club?
You know what? I'm going to chime in here in this sea of ACs, even though I hate replying to ACs.
I "dropped out" of highschool (was there for a few days), was "homeschooled" after that (meh, I resisted that pretty well too -- it didn't last long). Eventually, I went on to have an easy time of getting excellent scores on a GED without any more prior study other than researching the most expedient way to take the test (which, it turns out, happens every Saturday in the state capitol. No appointment needed.).
How? I learn constantly. Always have. My hourly wage is far and beyond what most people my age make around here, irrespective of trade or education. And you know what? No meaningful employer has ever questioned my education: They hire me to do a job, I do it well and do it in short order, and then it's onto the next one.
That said, I'm not as busy as I might like at the moment. It would be good to have more work to accomplish on a daily basis, as that generally means more money. But I'm enjoying my time off in between little projects, and I know that I'll get more work from my clients in the future.
Last year was a bit different; I found myself being pulled thin, having lots of money, and little free time.
But nobody, anywhere, expects me to spend 8 (or 10 or 12 or 16) hours a day holding a desk down when things get slow. Nobody tells me what days I take off (if I want to go away for a week or two, I just don't schedule anything during that time). Nobody ever derisively says to me "We start work at 8:00AM here," when I pop in a few minutes late when my 40-minute commute turns into a 50-minute one day. And nobody ever kicks me out the door at 5, when I'm in the middle of a concentrated effort to get something done.
So even if my hourly wage is good, and my hours are limited: Fuck. I'm never going to go back to making 1/5th of what I make hourly, just to say I've put in 40 hours in a week.
It's not worth it. I'm happier now than I have been since I was a carefree teenager, though there were certainly times in the past where I was punching a clock and this wasn't the case.
Someone could say to me "I'll pay you ten times what you earn now, but you have to be at the office from 9 to 5, every day" and I'd tell them to get stuffed.
It doesn't matter how much money you earn in your particular subdivision or region vs. your peers. Happiness is key. Without it, there's no point in living -- let alone working.
How much money should there be?
I guess I don't care. In inflationary times, small denominations become increasingly worthless: Talks about eliminating the penny, stateside, seem to be more serious than they used to be.
In deflationary times, small denominations becomes increasingly useful: If the penny had enough meaningful value, we could simply go back to issuing half-cents and the like.
With inflation, my money in the bank gets smaller, but the decimal value of the stuff I own gets bigger. With deflation, the opposite occurs.
No big deal either way, IMHO. Either way it happens, the market will adjust: Wages (in dollars per hour) will go up or down accordingly, on average. So will food. And cars. And utilities. And. And. And.
And economist will surely disagree, but: I think money should be manufactured at approximately the same rate that it is either literally destroyed or literally lost. And by "approximate," I mean: As best as we can reckon*.
Later on, if a real change needs to be made, then make it -- much as Mexico has done with the Peso, or the Japanese might do well to do with the Yen. I think we'd all be better off of the Fed would stop nickle and diming the country by printing new money without a good (and goddamn specific) reason because all it does, in the end, is add artificial fluidity to pricing.
(That is, unless we keep issuing treasury bonds that we can't possibly cover without the Fed simply printing more money, which seems to be par for the course. But hey, who am I to say that Social Security is both expensive and worth paying for?)
*: It's no secret that both paper and metallic money wear out over time, or that money is sometimes literally lost. I scored a $20 that was drifting across a parking lot in the breeze earlier today, in fact: Had I, or someone else, not picked it up, that money would likely have been washed into a storm sewer and composted into dirt: Lost.
In my line of work, I find that churches and public schools do this the best (worst?).
And before I get modded down for slandering churches and public schools: I think the lesson here is that any type of organization is capable of being staffed and/or run by very broken people who are both appear successful at their assigned role, while simultaneously a complete failure at it.
And now, it's your fault. (Or at least it is if you get the job/contract/gig/sale/whatever.)
*shrug*
And you're very naive to believe that the most powerful super computers that exist are actually a few orders of magnitude faster than those that have articles written about them.
We aren't in the ENIAC days; Commercial Off-The-Shelf is the order of the day.
That said: Can an organization like the NSA defeat AES-128? What about AES-256? Probably so, but not through brute force: Remember, AES (and DES) are both products of the US Government.
*ahem*
I own the ten-dollar bluetooth widget, and it works admirably with free software, but I don't have any vehicles that are ODB-II except for a Safari. And it doesn't care a bit what kind if gas I give it.
I have a old cat-less Firebird, and a nearby airport. Wish I could duplicate your effort, but the heads are off the engine for now. Otherwise I'd drive over there in the morning and put a few gallons of 100-octane avgas (including TEL) into it.
That said: My own research says that dollars-per-mile-efficiency is maximized at the lowest octane rating that an engine can tolerate under normal conditions without either detonation or knock sensor-initiated ignition retardation.
In terms of maximum power output, the research becomes murky: Some say it can't matter, others say it's worse with needlessly higher octane, others say that higher octane is better -- period.
In my daily-driven knock-sensor-equipped fuel-injected car, I can say there's a big difference between 87 and 93 octane, even though the car itself only "requires" 91. I don't have the computer-gear to show ignition advance, so it's an anecdote, but: Everything works better with 93 octane fuel. (The manual mentions that it's OK to run leaded gas, and I'd put avgas into it, but the manual also says it will poison the catalytic converter, and though I could get away without a cat indefinitely in this state, I don't want to spend the money on exhaust plumbing to bypass/gut it.)
And the difference between 87 and 93 is minimal compared to the difference between 87 and 100, so that's also a meaningful datapoint. (93-87=6 100-87=13.)
But then, I've also had other cars that don't care at all: They performed exactly the same on low-octane fuel as they did on higher-octane fuel, even under abusive situations. And my lawnmower doesn't seem to care, even when the grass is tall and wet.
MTBE is an oxygenator added to cause engines to run leaner by government mandate. TEL improves octane rating.
Just because thery're both fuel additives, does not mean that they are not: Two. Completely. Different. Things.
And I'm here to tell you that I don't give a shit about corporate tax games. Money wasted is still wasted.
According to TFA, it seldom actually happens at all. The advantage of my off-hand proposal is that it's simple to implement and, you know, use.
I'll take a slow, open, and accessible database over a closed one that doesn't (or can't) get used any day of the week.
When?
on Friday June 07, 2013 @04:14AM
Srsly. This prose is short-sighted, at very best.
That said: We need hierarchical structures for blacklists, because a flat-field database is unmanageable with this quantity of data and multiple points of data-entry.
DNS does this, already. Handily. Efficiently. Just because you can't realize this doesn't mean it can't work (or does not already provably work, as is the case of long-existing RBLs) does not mean that it is somehow impossible.
If I take what you just said quite literally, then it is as thus:
$manufacturer.whatever.the.fuck.random.number.emei-blacklist.eff.org
Or reverse it: number.random.fuck.the.whatever.$manufacturer.emei-blacklist.eff.org
Or .verizon.com Or .att.com.
Or whatever.
It's just a fucking normalized database.
I didn't bother talking about my 4-megabyte Linux forays because I thought it might sound cheeky. (I didn't graduate to X11 until I had 8MB.)
And I'm here to tell you that sloppy programming costs billions of real-live dollars in hardware annually.
And everyone cares about their own pocketbook.
Put that in your rapid-development pipe and smoke it.
Why bother with this line of discussion?
I don't live in Soviet Russia, and never will. I don't care what their mistakes cost them.
If anything, Chernobyl taught the rest of the world the following: YOU DO NOT DO RISKY EXPERIMENTS WITH A FULL-SCALE REACTOR, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT ISN'T FUCKING WORKING PROPERLY AND YOU FUCKING KNOW IT.
Which, you know, might mean a thing or two about why such an incident has never happened again.
Was it a monetarily-expensive lesson? Again, I don't give a shit: It wasn't any of my money that those fools burned up.
*shrug*
British Foreign Secretary on Surveillance Worries: '"Law Abiding Citizens Have N
What is N? Where can I get rid of N? Can I buy more N at the store? Should I be worried if I have N?
FFS, editors. FFS.
*head in hands*
My "old" Android smartphone has 256MB of RAM, and would continue to work fine for me today if not for more-recent bloat: It's a far faster computer than my desktop of not-so-long ago.
Instead, it languishes on the corner of my desk. (I could sell it at the kiosk in the mall that eats cell phones and dispenses cash, but it's worth more to me as a paperweight than the $2 that they offer for such an "antiquated" device.)
Ultimately, the metric I care about most is getting the maximum use out of my dollars. Bloat always runs counter to that.