The problem isn't unsolicited e-mail, it's unsolicited BULK or INDISCRIMINATE e-mail. Unless all your correspondence is with a small and static group of people, you'll never be able to anticipate everyone you might want to have on your whitelist.
If you run a business, for example, you'll frequently (if you're lucky) get queries from potential customers who want more information. You WANT those unsolicited e-mails. Or you might get e-mail from someone you worked with 10 years ago but never thought to add to your whitelist, perhaps because you don't even know his or her current e-mail address.
I have whitelists set up for my e-mail accounts, but I face both these issues on a regular basis. I can't afford to discard an e-mail from an unknown sender without first verifying that the sender really doesn't have something useful to say. Fortunately, most spammers use obviously retarded e-mail addresses or subject lines that make it relatively easy to skim and filter them out quickly (and of course I use a blacklist for known offenders as well).
(a) Light rail $14 million per mile? More like $200 million ($2.9 billion for 14 miles). (b) And downtown. (c) People like their cars, so I have to believe almost any new mass transit system here will get most of its riders from buses, not from cars, initially. My hope is that this is just the first phase of many, and that ultimately a larger system (and one not subject to traffic jams because it doesn't run at grade level) *would* ultimately get people out of their cars. (d) I don't follow. The monorail tax is based on the current value of your car, so if you're driving an old clunker you pay very little, and if you're driving a new SUV/Lexus/whatever you'll pay quite a bit more. (e) Light rail won't go to the airport either (at least not in the first phase), you know. (f) Heaven forbid cities and regions should take the initiative and spend the money to try to fix problems themselves instead of relying on the generosity of the Feds (or more precisely, the other 250 million-plus U.S. citizens who DON'T live in or near Seattle).
So it passed by 800 votes. Last time I checked, the state constitution didn't say anything about initiatives being any less valid because they got voted in with a slim majority. If I-776 (reducing license tabs, etc.) had only passed by an 800-vote majority, would you be as eager to decry it?
As for the fact that only 45% of people voted, as far as I'm concerned, the other 55% have no right to complain about the results.
Re:HP/lift: fanwing vs. cessna
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2
Standard fuel load in recent 172 models is 53 gallons.
The bottom line is that in a 172 you basically can't carry four normal-sized adults plus a full fuel load. Of course, there's always the 182 if you want more capacity and a constant-speed prop too.
The plane you're referring to is the Cirrus SR 22 (company site). Unfortunately IIRC the very first time a pilot tried to deploy the chute it didn't work properly, but he was still able to do a standard engine-out landing in safety.
I've never done a real engine-out landing -- just simulated ones -- but the fact that a normal plane simply glides when its engine is cut is definitely a plus. The glide ratio of the Cessna 172s I fly is 9:1, so if you're at 2,000 feet AGL and the engine fails you've got around 2 miles to find yourself a nice field, golf course, highway, beach, dry riverbed, etc. to put yourself down on. (That 2 miles is conservative and assumes you won't have the plane perfectly trimmed for best glide, that you've got some glide-distance loss due to unfavorable winds, etc. Incidentally, best glide is at just over 60 knots, so you've actually got a minute or two to troubleshoot and try to restart the engine, too.) Still, the parachute *is* an intriguing idea...
Did they build a road to the cabin? It wouldn't be that much more expensive to build railroad tracks.
Yeah, only an order of magnitude more expensive. Average cost per lane-mile to construct a road: about $500K (rounding up). [Ref] Call it $1 million per mile for a two-line road. Average cost to construct light rail: around $20 MILLION per mile. [Ref]
Sure, these are data sources are not directly comparable and obviously don't include things like maintenance and operating costs (which are probably higher for rail since you have to have paid operators, but that's beside the point). Of course, rail also has much more stringent restrictions as to climb grades, turn radii, and other things that make it far less suitable for many out-of-the-way environments than roads.
The air onboard is constantly being replenished with air outside, it's just pressurized (and heated) on its way into the cabin.
Even the emergency oxygen supply that you'd use if the masks dropped down because of cabin depressurization is not carried onboard as such -- it's generated on demand by a chemical reaction. (At least for the passengers; there may in fact be actual bottled oxygen for the pilots. I'm not sure.)
Google doesn't match "*bayes*" (as one would think) when searching for "bayes",
Just curious: Why at all would anyone think that "bayes" would match "*bayes*"? Imagine if searching for "cars" also got you "scars", "Johnny Carson", and so on...
It might make sense for a search engine to do limited stemming (cars -> car, eating/eats/ate -> eat), but that's something completely different...
say to yourself, "Women don't like video games because they have vaginas" and realize how ridiculous that sounds.
Straw man. Women differ physiologically from men in plenty of ways besides their naughty bits. Most obviously, women have two X and no Y chromosomes, as well as differening levels (on average) of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen. Men and women have morphological differences in their brains as well, and you'd certainly expect that to result in some behavioral differences.
Some of this is covered in Stephen Pinker's new book The Blank Slate, pp346-350 in particular. Of course, if you disagree with the claims therein, I would love to see some counterarguments.
Where does it say that environment can only account for a certain amount of human, or sex, variation?
In general, the best evidence I've seen for this comes from twin studies, but it's admittedly been more than a decade since I really looked at any of this material so I'd be hard pressed to cite specific examples.
except that most AV software requires a paid subscription to download the defs. When the newest nastygram starts circulating via e-mail, it won't help a lot if you have a three-year-old never-updated copy of McAfee on your system.
I seem to recall there was an alternate theory for the apparent patterns in mass extinctions, having to do IIRC with the solar system's periodic crossing of the galactic plane (and the associated greater number of chunks of things big enough to cause climate-altering impacts, etc.).
As you say, terminal velocity *is* the same for all objects in the absence of friction. However, friction is a pretty important factor, and cannot be disregarded.
Uhhh, terminal velocity is TOTALLY dependent on friction. Without friction, the object would just keep accelerating until it reached relativistic velocities or (much more likely;-) impacted the surface of the attractor. F = ma = GmM/r^2 and all that...
OK, I can't speak definitively for fighter aircraft, but in the light aircraft that I fly, the fuel tanks are most definitely not sealed. If the fuel tanks were sealed, as you burned fuel, you'd be creating a vacuum in the tank that would make it increasingly difficult to feed fuel to the engine. The fuel tanks vent to the outside both to keep them pressurized and to allow for overflow due to thermal expansion.
By the way, jet fuel doesn't just burn "like" kerosene: Jet A is kerosene. (Though it's my understanding that certain military aircraft use a different fuel mixture than standard transport aircraft; and light aircraft generally use something like 100LL avgas, which is 100-octane low-lead fuel.)
Good response. Incidentally, has the Pope not also endorsed evolution as the official doctrine of the Catholic church, albeit with the caveat that God still endows humans with an individual soul?
...who doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's":
Why? Because it has become one word through it's use by many people as one word.
"It's" means "it is". "Its" (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of "it", just like "theirs" is the possessive form of "their".
Anyway, "alot" as a single word may be common, but it is not common in the usage of educated writers, and any dictionary or stylebook that you pick up will advise against it. While the English language certainly evolves over time, your writing will likely be judged by the prevailing standards of the day.
I don't care how much of a science geek you are - balls rolling down planes are NOT exciting.
I have to disagree: I found mechanics to be quite exciting (and no, I'm not a physics major either;-). I was frankly fascinated by the idea that a few simple principles would allow you to compute the position of any object from an accelerating car to a planet orbiting the sun (absent friction, relativistic effects, and other real-world complications, of course). That was cool.
Biology is an easy course to teach, because it deals with every day occurences.
Uh, what did your high-school biology courses teach? I recall mine spending large amounts of time on evolution, genetics, mechanisms of cell division, the ATP cycle, and so on. Those are only "everyday" things insofar as they provide the foundation for the macroscopic lifeforms that we observe -- but the same could be said for physics.
It sounds like you are equating biology with about something more like "life sciences", which I agree is an important foundational course, perhaps at the middle-school level. And I think it's absurd to assert that physics can't answer the same kind of macro-level questions: mechanics, electricity, magnetism, and optics are all things that we exploit on an everyday basis.
The worst mistake we ever make in school is the old "this isn't english class, so you can't deduct marks for spelling mistakes".
I agree and was lucky to have teachers who took exactly the opposite approach. My physics teacher would absolutely mark you off if you had misspellings or grammatical errors in your lab reports.
when it's worth using LWP and HTML parsers
on
Perl & LWP
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· Score: 2
Can anyone discuss if it's worth it to learn this module and convert HTML the "right" way?
Yes, it's worth it to learn this, even if you still end up using the quick-and-dirty approach most of the time. The abstraction and indirection is pretty much like *any* abstraction and indirection -- it's more work for small, one-off tasks, but it pays off in cases where reusability, volume, robustness, and similar factors are important. If you end up having to parse pages where the HTML is nasty, or really large volumes of pages where quality control by inspection is impractical, or more session-oriented sites, the LWP-plus-HTML-parser-solution can be really valuable.
Frankly, if you're familiar with the principles of screen scraping (and you obviously are), learning the LWP-plus-parser solution is pretty simple (and I suspect you know a big chunk of what this book would try to tell you anyway). You can just about cut and paste from the POD for the modules and have a basic working solution to play with in a few minutes, then adapt or extend that in cases where you really need it.
There's a big difference between saying "not allowed to make *any* policies" and "*must* adhere to *this* specific policy". I see no reason why the government couldn't specify the need to switch vendors for support and development if that is a critical requirement for a given application.
The government's role (idealistically, at least) is to serve the people, and IT is a set of tools that helps achieve that end. The government should be using the set of tools that best allows it to do that. Certainly free software has a lot going for it, in terms of both cost and the availability of source code, but there may be cases where for one reason or another proprietary software is simply the best solution.
To take a hypothetical example, what if defense contractors were unwilling to open-source missile-targeting software because it considers that information part of its proprietary competitive advantage? Do we want to put the government in the position of saying no, we can't use the best targeting package, we have to use whatever open-source option is available? That seems hugely irresponsible.
O'Reilly is right that open-source options should always be among the products considered for procurement, but to require them is a mistake. It ignores the fact that IT decisions (engineering decisions in general) entail tradeoffs -- between functionality, cost, usability, training difficulty, support, compatibility, performance, and many other factors -- and that mandating open-source solutions may require unacceptable levels of compromise on other dimensions that might be more important in a given situation.
meaning the total mass of this thing that reaches to geosynchronous orbit is not much greater than two 747s waiting for takeoff on parallel runways at your favorite airport. (I don't remember the exact number, but the max takeoff weight for a 747-400 is around 850,000 pounds.) That frankly strikes me as a stunningly *small* amount of mass...
For that matter, it's probably vastly less massive than a transpacific communication cable, which is somewhat shorter but must have much more shielding, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If you run a business, for example, you'll frequently (if you're lucky) get queries from potential customers who want more information. You WANT those unsolicited e-mails. Or you might get e-mail from someone you worked with 10 years ago but never thought to add to your whitelist, perhaps because you don't even know his or her current e-mail address.
I have whitelists set up for my e-mail accounts, but I face both these issues on a regular basis. I can't afford to discard an e-mail from an unknown sender without first verifying that the sender really doesn't have something useful to say. Fortunately, most spammers use obviously retarded e-mail addresses or subject lines that make it relatively easy to skim and filter them out quickly (and of course I use a blacklist for known offenders as well).
(b) And downtown.
(c) People like their cars, so I have to believe almost any new mass transit system here will get most of its riders from buses, not from cars, initially. My hope is that this is just the first phase of many, and that ultimately a larger system (and one not subject to traffic jams because it doesn't run at grade level) *would* ultimately get people out of their cars.
(d) I don't follow. The monorail tax is based on the current value of your car, so if you're driving an old clunker you pay very little, and if you're driving a new SUV/Lexus/whatever you'll pay quite a bit more.
(e) Light rail won't go to the airport either (at least not in the first phase), you know.
(f) Heaven forbid cities and regions should take the initiative and spend the money to try to fix problems themselves instead of relying on the generosity of the Feds (or more precisely, the other 250 million-plus U.S. citizens who DON'T live in or near Seattle).
So it passed by 800 votes. Last time I checked, the state constitution didn't say anything about initiatives being any less valid because they got voted in with a slim majority. If I-776 (reducing license tabs, etc.) had only passed by an 800-vote majority, would you be as eager to decry it?
As for the fact that only 45% of people voted, as far as I'm concerned, the other 55% have no right to complain about the results.
The bottom line is that in a 172 you basically can't carry four normal-sized adults plus a full fuel load. Of course, there's always the 182 if you want more capacity and a constant-speed prop too.
I've never done a real engine-out landing -- just simulated ones -- but the fact that a normal plane simply glides when its engine is cut is definitely a plus. The glide ratio of the Cessna 172s I fly is 9:1, so if you're at 2,000 feet AGL and the engine fails you've got around 2 miles to find yourself a nice field, golf course, highway, beach, dry riverbed, etc. to put yourself down on. (That 2 miles is conservative and assumes you won't have the plane perfectly trimmed for best glide, that you've got some glide-distance loss due to unfavorable winds, etc. Incidentally, best glide is at just over 60 knots, so you've actually got a minute or two to troubleshoot and try to restart the engine, too.) Still, the parachute *is* an intriguing idea...
Yeah, only an order of magnitude more expensive. Average cost per lane-mile to construct a road: about $500K (rounding up). [Ref] Call it $1 million per mile for a two-line road. Average cost to construct light rail: around $20 MILLION per mile. [Ref]
Sure, these are data sources are not directly comparable and obviously don't include things like maintenance and operating costs (which are probably higher for rail since you have to have paid operators, but that's beside the point). Of course, rail also has much more stringent restrictions as to climb grades, turn radii, and other things that make it far less suitable for many out-of-the-way environments than roads.
Even the emergency oxygen supply that you'd use if the masks dropped down because of cabin depressurization is not carried onboard as such -- it's generated on demand by a chemical reaction. (At least for the passengers; there may in fact be actual bottled oxygen for the pilots. I'm not sure.)
Just curious: Why at all would anyone think that "bayes" would match "*bayes*"? Imagine if searching for "cars" also got you "scars", "Johnny Carson", and so on...
It might make sense for a search engine to do limited stemming (cars -> car, eating/eats/ate -> eat), but that's something completely different...
Straw man. Women differ physiologically from men in plenty of ways besides their naughty bits. Most obviously, women have two X and no Y chromosomes, as well as differening levels (on average) of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen. Men and women have morphological differences in their brains as well, and you'd certainly expect that to result in some behavioral differences.
Some of this is covered in Stephen Pinker's new book The Blank Slate, pp346-350 in particular. Of course, if you disagree with the claims therein, I would love to see some counterarguments.
Where does it say that environment can only account for a certain amount of human, or sex, variation?
In general, the best evidence I've seen for this comes from twin studies, but it's admittedly been more than a decade since I really looked at any of this material so I'd be hard pressed to cite specific examples.
except that most AV software requires a paid subscription to download the defs. When the newest nastygram starts circulating via e-mail, it won't help a lot if you have a three-year-old never-updated copy of McAfee on your system.
I seem to recall there was an alternate theory for the apparent patterns in mass extinctions, having to do IIRC with the solar system's periodic crossing of the galactic plane (and the associated greater number of chunks of things big enough to cause climate-altering impacts, etc.).
Some asteroids are now known to have satellites of their own...
Uhhh, terminal velocity is TOTALLY dependent on friction. Without friction, the object would just keep accelerating until it reached relativistic velocities or (much more likely ;-) impacted the surface of the attractor. F = ma = GmM/r^2 and all that...
...is not the question as much as the answer: not right now ;-)
By the way, jet fuel doesn't just burn "like" kerosene: Jet A is kerosene. (Though it's my understanding that certain military aircraft use a different fuel mixture than standard transport aircraft; and light aircraft generally use something like 100LL avgas, which is 100-octane low-lead fuel.)
Good response. Incidentally, has the Pope not also endorsed evolution as the official doctrine of the Catholic church, albeit with the caveat that God still endows humans with an individual soul?
My sentiments exactly!
Why? Because it has become one word through it's use by many people as one word.
"It's" means "it is". "Its" (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of "it", just like "theirs" is the possessive form of "their".
Anyway, "alot" as a single word may be common, but it is not common in the usage of educated writers, and any dictionary or stylebook that you pick up will advise against it. While the English language certainly evolves over time, your writing will likely be judged by the prevailing standards of the day.
I have to disagree: I found mechanics to be quite exciting (and no, I'm not a physics major either ;-). I was frankly fascinated by the idea that a few simple principles would allow you to compute the position of any object from an accelerating car to a planet orbiting the sun (absent friction, relativistic effects, and other real-world complications, of course). That was cool.
Biology is an easy course to teach, because it deals with every day occurences.
Uh, what did your high-school biology courses teach? I recall mine spending large amounts of time on evolution, genetics, mechanisms of cell division, the ATP cycle, and so on. Those are only "everyday" things insofar as they provide the foundation for the macroscopic lifeforms that we observe -- but the same could be said for physics.
It sounds like you are equating biology with about something more like "life sciences", which I agree is an important foundational course, perhaps at the middle-school level. And I think it's absurd to assert that physics can't answer the same kind of macro-level questions: mechanics, electricity, magnetism, and optics are all things that we exploit on an everyday basis.
The worst mistake we ever make in school is the old "this isn't english class, so you can't deduct marks for spelling mistakes".
I agree and was lucky to have teachers who took exactly the opposite approach. My physics teacher would absolutely mark you off if you had misspellings or grammatical errors in your lab reports.
Yes, it's worth it to learn this, even if you still end up using the quick-and-dirty approach most of the time. The abstraction and indirection is pretty much like *any* abstraction and indirection -- it's more work for small, one-off tasks, but it pays off in cases where reusability, volume, robustness, and similar factors are important. If you end up having to parse pages where the HTML is nasty, or really large volumes of pages where quality control by inspection is impractical, or more session-oriented sites, the LWP-plus-HTML-parser-solution can be really valuable.
Frankly, if you're familiar with the principles of screen scraping (and you obviously are), learning the LWP-plus-parser solution is pretty simple (and I suspect you know a big chunk of what this book would try to tell you anyway). You can just about cut and paste from the POD for the modules and have a basic working solution to play with in a few minutes, then adapt or extend that in cases where you really need it.
To flaunt means to exhibit ostentaiously. It's something Slashdot geeks might do with a hot new cell phone, or with their knowledge of grep syntax.
The correct word here would be flout, to scorn, to treat with contempuous disregard.
Perfect, everything the identity thief needs to impersonate me, mess with my bank and credit-card accounts over the phone, and so on.
I'm generally not a paranoid privacy freak, but come on, this is just obviously stupid!
There's a big difference between saying "not allowed to make *any* policies" and "*must* adhere to *this* specific policy". I see no reason why the government couldn't specify the need to switch vendors for support and development if that is a critical requirement for a given application.
To take a hypothetical example, what if defense contractors were unwilling to open-source missile-targeting software because it considers that information part of its proprietary competitive advantage? Do we want to put the government in the position of saying no, we can't use the best targeting package, we have to use whatever open-source option is available? That seems hugely irresponsible.
O'Reilly is right that open-source options should always be among the products considered for procurement, but to require them is a mistake. It ignores the fact that IT decisions (engineering decisions in general) entail tradeoffs -- between functionality, cost, usability, training difficulty, support, compatibility, performance, and many other factors -- and that mandating open-source solutions may require unacceptable levels of compromise on other dimensions that might be more important in a given situation.
For that matter, it's probably vastly less massive than a transpacific communication cable, which is somewhat shorter but must have much more shielding, etc.
It talks about wind load, oscillation, and lightning...