Summer break is so you can plant, tend, and harvest the primary crops. However, since it's been over 100 years since we were a primarily agrarian economy, maybe it's time to move forward.
Interestingly, in Virginia, schools are no allowed to go back in session until after Labor day unless they have a weather hardship (mountainous areas can get quite a bit of snow here). Do you know why? It's called the Kings Dominion rule (or maybe Busch Gardens) - Those two theme parks rely on high school age labor to run the parks throughout the summer, and if they lose their workers early they lose money. And nobody else is willing to work for those wages (and speaks native English).
IMO, I would prefer a real quarter system with four 3 week breaks. That's enough for almost any "vacation," short of through hiking the App Trail or similar. It would be far better for the kids - regular vacations, less boredom, less loss of continuity.
(1) the music and lyrics may be public domain, but the performance probably isn't (2) Royalty free probably doesn't mean what you think it means. It means once you own a license for it (i.e. you paid the artist a licensing fee) you don't have to pay for every single instance which is re-transmitted. Mechanical and synchronization rights are just a crazy PITA.
That said, a simple response with your license should get it reinstated. In theory, if it was removed due to a DMCA request from the artist, you can sue in Civil court for a wrongful takedown request. Others have done so and won.
To follow up on #6, RAM mounts make great mobile laptop/tablet mounts. I had one for my pickup truck that bolted to the passenger seat base. I do work on remote sites, so there was often times that I was out in the field and waiting for stuff to happen, and having a mount made it possible to work efficiently. It also makes for an awesome GPS setup. It is very sturdy.
I've since swapped my old high end laptop for an iPad and ultrabook-sized unit. The iPad makes an even better GPS (get Navigon so you're not tied to the grid for maps), and functions as my cellular hotspot now. (I swapped the laptop caddy for the locking iPad mount using the same base hardware from RAM). The only negative is that the locking mount rattles annoyingly on some road surfaces.
He outfitted a van with all his computer and living gear. It might not be as useful as a how-to book 30 years later. Then again, it wasn't really a how-to book back then.... I actually can't believe that this is what I thought of when I saw the post, since I read it less than a year after it can out, when I was ~13. Weird how memory files odd stuff for later recall.
The article is nearly useless. Even bringing up scramjet testing in such an article is ridiculous namedropping, and anyone who has actually seen the X51 knows that is has nothing to do with this project except that neither will be flying in this planet in the current state of development.
There are so many questionable things about this concept, I can only assume that Mr. Zha has a second degree in grant writing or bullshittery to get and actual grant for research. And yet the linked presentation is, aside from some math simulation output data, poorer in content than at least half of the undergraduate senior projects in my Aero class back in the early 90s. One of the conclusions is "transition challenging, expected to be stable due to dual symmetric planform similar to flying Frisbee". Holy shit - that may very well be one of the most critical parts of the design. If you can't transition, you simply have a plane with the entire thrust force on a gimbal which can either be subsonic or supersonic. They other issue is the horrifically draggy airfoil shape required for subsonic flight due to the need to maintain symmetry in the supersonic mode. Their solution is either air injection into the flow and/or or slat deployment at speed to produce a proper lifting body - but that's an amazingly draggy way to accomplish such feat.
I wanted to like this - so much that I did read through the broken-english slides to see what novel concepts they discovered. Sadly, this is really a master's level, one or two semester examination of shock wave perceptibly reduction, and at some point somebody's non-technical room mate told them it looked more like an airplane if they flew it sideways.
(1) have the RHIC invade another country. It's the easiest way to spend several hundred million dollars "off the books"
(2) spread the management and construction out over the territory of no less than 51 Senators and/or 220 Reps. Why do you think NASA is scattered all over the country? It's not because there are prime launch sites in TX, OH, and MD, among others.
Careful individual financial management always bets on both sides. It limits your upside, but protects the downside. This was an admittedly creative way of ensuring financial stability for their families. A bit morbid, but I can't say that I wouldn't have done the same thing if it meant ensuring that - if I didn't make it back - my family was accounted for.
What is it about selecting the tapped frame when multiple are displayed, and zooming out when only a single frame is double tapped, is non-obvious?
If you are double tapping to zoom, and asked a typical, advanced/senior UI programmer what should occur in the context of browser - how does this not end up on a yellow pad in a brainstorming session??
That's easy - patent holder patent lawyer. There are lots of things which the average user of a law gets wrong. Do you think the average 50 year old person with a drivers license knows the exact legal definition of reckless driving, or what the speed limit is on an unmarked road. Of course not, but they drive the road every day - they know the basic rules, and if they have detailed questions or problems, they go get a lawyer.
Icons are more compact and more valuable to casual or new users, and significantly shorten the learning curve for software. In return for immediate efficiency gain with beginning users, the trade off is reduced efficiency for advanced users. Whether you are talking about AutoCAD or Photoshop or any other program, users who know the keyboard commands (and shortcuts) are far faster at manipulation of the software.
But anyone who remembers starting up WordPerfect in the early days (or, say, vi today) will understand how daunting a blank page with no prompts can be to a first time user.
Ignoring the whole innocent until proven guilty bit and right to privacy we in the US are so accustomed to, it's not entirely about the trustworthiness of the police. There will always be crooked cops - put 1,000 people in a room there will be a few bad apples. It's human nature.
More importantly, if the data exists then its security can be compromised. Data in the wild can be used for, well, anything. You may never plan on getting divorced, but if you do you probably don't want your soon-to-be ex-wife's legal council pulling up your whereabouts for the past 6 years. There are lots of scenarios - most of them outlying cases to be sure - where the data could be used against you for profit, or in a defamatory or misleading way.
To put it in computer terms, there's no need to back up your data on your PC because real failures that result in permanent, irrevocable data loss are actually very, very rare on a probabilistic basis given regular replacement of hardware. But smart people back up their data anyway - because nobody wants to be part of the statistically small group which lost all of their life's work in a lightning storm.
What you need are permissive gun laws and rednecks - all around the south of the US you see all sorts of signs with bullet holes in them. Drop a couple of good 'ol boys off with a case of beer and a couple of rifles and they'll use the cameras as "target practice."
Yeah, you should take that suicide mission to an NRA convention event in a state with liberal concealed carry laws. Now THAT would be a clusterfuck of epic proportion.
To quote MIB: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." It only takes a handful of marginal ones for all hell to break loose. I can pretty much guarantee you that the prime shooter won't get out alive, but it would be a crazy 7 minutes. Oh - for bonus points you need to convince two friends to go with you and attack from the other side of the hall.
Having reached my mid-40s, I've only begun to explore the things I'd like to do in my life. I find that I'm having to pare back all the interests I have because I just can't find the time for them all. I look at the time I have left and think, "shit, it's going to take me 2 years to complete this project, which means I'm going to be X old before I can even begin this next one."
I've started worrying less about the cost of my endeavors and more about the time commitment. I can always make more money, but damnit I've only got another 20 great years left, another 10 or 15 mediocre ones, and - if I'm lucky - maybe 10 more to do some low intensity stuff while I look for "young" people willing to hang with the "old dudes in the home."
It's a shame I can't buy 10 of the good years you have left, 'cause you sure aren't using them in any meaningful way, it seems.
I say the UAF should be to fund telecommunication. We don't need a separate fund. Urban markets pay less because they are cheaper to build and there are fewer feet of plant per customer and fewer people per customer for service and maintenance. There is no "subsidization" - rural markets don't make nearly the profit that the cities do. Nobody is going to spend $50M for a buildout of an 800 person town spread over 100 square miles when they can build out an urban, affluent suburb with 50 times that population for the same cost. That's why the UAF exists in the first place.
As for your friend, well, that's what I would have to pay for 25/5 in my city - but there is only one provided of service that fast, and they're reliability is poor. Instead, we pay 50% of that for 20% of the bandwidth but get reliable service. Even with 50,000 people in a dozen square miles, it's not cost effective to extend FTTH - and I'm less than a mile from a major backbone at a top research university.
As for paying for the land use, you'll find that either your friend - or the prior landowner - probably receives access to the services provided by the company who owns those lines. The standard easement for utilities states that you allow them to traverse your property and in return they'll provide you with service. If you don't want the latter, you may forego the former. Companies have regularly routed around such landowners. If the government then finds it is in the public interest to use your land they will take it and compensate you at a nominal market rate. Note that "market rate" is based not on how much the land is worth relative to the specific use (i.e. a $2B fiber optic line taking up 1 AC of land does not make the land appreciably more valuable than the $800/acre it was when used for crops or grazing).
Nobody uses them anymore - they're way too busy with transactions to do anything useful about customer service. (wish there were a:rolleyes: smilie, just this once)
I understand that - if you have the right contacts - there is a group of loosely associated, mini-nation states in one part of the world where they have permanent bazaars/markets where the shelves are lined with all kinds of ammunition. They'll even sell you the gear to make your own. You just walk up, prove that any one of those mini-nations has authorized you to drive a car, and off you go with as much ammo as you can afford, or with up to 25 pounds of black powder. On occasion, several of these nations hold temporary bazaars in large warehouse-like buildings where you can go in and trade the local currency for all sorts of weapons - no questions asked.
Just be careful if you go there; there's a lot of crazy shit that goes on.
Guess it depends on how close you like to sit from your TV. An 8k TV which is 20' (Completely filling a 9' tall x 18' long wall from floor to ceiling) viewed from 18 feet away - as large or larger than most living rooms - would be at the same "retina" level as the iPhone's retina screen.
But hey - progress is progress. If history holds, the US will decide that an interlaced format would be best for this new technology.
"I broke my hand a year ago... coding (in Fortran, baby!)"
Breaking your had must have been like a breath of fresh air. I can't imagine the pain and torture of having to code in Fortran. I still have blank spots in memory from my college years when I was forced to learn/use it. Or maybe that was the rum.
We need it to produce electricity; we already have enough fissile material to blow up whomever we want.
And the countries we would prefer to turn into a flat landscape of radioactive glass (I liked the idea of calling it New Iowa, myself), have oil but no fresh water.
Most of us don't need more fresh water, provided we manage to keep our "economic engine" from screwing up the supplies we have and quit having more children. Those last two are not advice the politicians on the right side of the aisle endorse, though.
I once had a discussion with a director of engineering about being fired for screwing up a design (in jest; a hypothetical "I hope this does't fail" comment). He quickly came back with, "Oh, I wouldn't fire you. Far worse - I'd make you stay on and fix it."
Smart engineers who have made some rookie mistakes are probably some of the first people you want on a review team. When everything goes perfectly, you don't know how much of your design was genius and how much was luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Summer break is so you can plant, tend, and harvest the primary crops. However, since it's been over 100 years since we were a primarily agrarian economy, maybe it's time to move forward.
Interestingly, in Virginia, schools are no allowed to go back in session until after Labor day unless they have a weather hardship (mountainous areas can get quite a bit of snow here). Do you know why? It's called the Kings Dominion rule (or maybe Busch Gardens) - Those two theme parks rely on high school age labor to run the parks throughout the summer, and if they lose their workers early they lose money. And nobody else is willing to work for those wages (and speaks native English).
IMO, I would prefer a real quarter system with four 3 week breaks. That's enough for almost any "vacation," short of through hiking the App Trail or similar. It would be far better for the kids - regular vacations, less boredom, less loss of continuity.
(1) the music and lyrics may be public domain, but the performance probably isn't
(2) Royalty free probably doesn't mean what you think it means. It means once you own a license for it (i.e. you paid the artist a licensing fee) you don't have to pay for every single instance which is re-transmitted. Mechanical and synchronization rights are just a crazy PITA.
That said, a simple response with your license should get it reinstated. In theory, if it was removed due to a DMCA request from the artist, you can sue in Civil court for a wrongful takedown request. Others have done so and won.
To follow up on #6, RAM mounts make great mobile laptop/tablet mounts. I had one for my pickup truck that bolted to the passenger seat base. I do work on remote sites, so there was often times that I was out in the field and waiting for stuff to happen, and having a mount made it possible to work efficiently. It also makes for an awesome GPS setup. It is very sturdy.
I've since swapped my old high end laptop for an iPad and ultrabook-sized unit. The iPad makes an even better GPS (get Navigon so you're not tied to the grid for maps), and functions as my cellular hotspot now. (I swapped the laptop caddy for the locking iPad mount using the same base hardware from RAM). The only negative is that the locking mount rattles annoyingly on some road surfaces.
He outfitted a van with all his computer and living gear. It might not be as useful as a how-to book 30 years later. Then again, it wasn't really a how-to book back then. ... I actually can't believe that this is what I thought of when I saw the post, since I read it less than a year after it can out, when I was ~13. Weird how memory files odd stuff for later recall.
The article is nearly useless. Even bringing up scramjet testing in such an article is ridiculous namedropping, and anyone who has actually seen the X51 knows that is has nothing to do with this project except that neither will be flying in this planet in the current state of development.
There are so many questionable things about this concept, I can only assume that Mr. Zha has a second degree in grant writing or bullshittery to get and actual grant for research. And yet the linked presentation is, aside from some math simulation output data, poorer in content than at least half of the undergraduate senior projects in my Aero class back in the early 90s. One of the conclusions is "transition challenging, expected to be stable due to dual symmetric planform similar to flying Frisbee". Holy shit - that may very well be one of the most critical parts of the design. If you can't transition, you simply have a plane with the entire thrust force on a gimbal which can either be subsonic or supersonic. They other issue is the horrifically draggy airfoil shape required for subsonic flight due to the need to maintain symmetry in the supersonic mode. Their solution is either air injection into the flow and/or or slat deployment at speed to produce a proper lifting body - but that's an amazingly draggy way to accomplish such feat.
I wanted to like this - so much that I did read through the broken-english slides to see what novel concepts they discovered. Sadly, this is really a master's level, one or two semester examination of shock wave perceptibly reduction, and at some point somebody's non-technical room mate told them it looked more like an airplane if they flew it sideways.
(1) have the RHIC invade another country. It's the easiest way to spend several hundred million dollars "off the books"
(2) spread the management and construction out over the territory of no less than 51 Senators and/or 220 Reps. Why do you think NASA is scattered all over the country? It's not because there are prime launch sites in TX, OH, and MD, among others.
Mod +1: Colbert
Careful individual financial management always bets on both sides. It limits your upside, but protects the downside. This was an admittedly creative way of ensuring financial stability for their families. A bit morbid, but I can't say that I wouldn't have done the same thing if it meant ensuring that - if I didn't make it back - my family was accounted for.
What is it about selecting the tapped frame when multiple are displayed, and zooming out when only a single frame is double tapped, is non-obvious?
If you are double tapping to zoom, and asked a typical, advanced/senior UI programmer what should occur in the context of browser - how does this not end up on a yellow pad in a brainstorming session??
That's easy - patent holder patent lawyer. There are lots of things which the average user of a law gets wrong. Do you think the average 50 year old person with a drivers license knows the exact legal definition of reckless driving, or what the speed limit is on an unmarked road. Of course not, but they drive the road every day - they know the basic rules, and if they have detailed questions or problems, they go get a lawyer.
Icons are more compact and more valuable to casual or new users, and significantly shorten the learning curve for software. In return for immediate efficiency gain with beginning users, the trade off is reduced efficiency for advanced users. Whether you are talking about AutoCAD or Photoshop or any other program, users who know the keyboard commands (and shortcuts) are far faster at manipulation of the software.
But anyone who remembers starting up WordPerfect in the early days (or, say, vi today) will understand how daunting a blank page with no prompts can be to a first time user.
Ignoring the whole innocent until proven guilty bit and right to privacy we in the US are so accustomed to, it's not entirely about the trustworthiness of the police. There will always be crooked cops - put 1,000 people in a room there will be a few bad apples. It's human nature.
More importantly, if the data exists then its security can be compromised. Data in the wild can be used for, well, anything. You may never plan on getting divorced, but if you do you probably don't want your soon-to-be ex-wife's legal council pulling up your whereabouts for the past 6 years. There are lots of scenarios - most of them outlying cases to be sure - where the data could be used against you for profit, or in a defamatory or misleading way.
To put it in computer terms, there's no need to back up your data on your PC because real failures that result in permanent, irrevocable data loss are actually very, very rare on a probabilistic basis given regular replacement of hardware. But smart people back up their data anyway - because nobody wants to be part of the statistically small group which lost all of their life's work in a lightning storm.
What you need are permissive gun laws and rednecks - all around the south of the US you see all sorts of signs with bullet holes in them. Drop a couple of good 'ol boys off with a case of beer and a couple of rifles and they'll use the cameras as "target practice."
Yeah, you should take that suicide mission to an NRA convention event in a state with liberal concealed carry laws. Now THAT would be a clusterfuck of epic proportion.
To quote MIB: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." It only takes a handful of marginal ones for all hell to break loose. I can pretty much guarantee you that the prime shooter won't get out alive, but it would be a crazy 7 minutes. Oh - for bonus points you need to convince two friends to go with you and attack from the other side of the hall.
"Do you want to live in a society of really old people enslaving the youth in Hunger Games?"
Don't tease me like that.
YOU, sir, need a hobby or three. Badly.
Having reached my mid-40s, I've only begun to explore the things I'd like to do in my life. I find that I'm having to pare back all the interests I have because I just can't find the time for them all. I look at the time I have left and think, "shit, it's going to take me 2 years to complete this project, which means I'm going to be X old before I can even begin this next one."
I've started worrying less about the cost of my endeavors and more about the time commitment. I can always make more money, but damnit I've only got another 20 great years left, another 10 or 15 mediocre ones, and - if I'm lucky - maybe 10 more to do some low intensity stuff while I look for "young" people willing to hang with the "old dudes in the home."
It's a shame I can't buy 10 of the good years you have left, 'cause you sure aren't using them in any meaningful way, it seems.
I say the UAF should be to fund telecommunication. We don't need a separate fund. Urban markets pay less because they are cheaper to build and there are fewer feet of plant per customer and fewer people per customer for service and maintenance. There is no "subsidization" - rural markets don't make nearly the profit that the cities do. Nobody is going to spend $50M for a buildout of an 800 person town spread over 100 square miles when they can build out an urban, affluent suburb with 50 times that population for the same cost. That's why the UAF exists in the first place.
As for your friend, well, that's what I would have to pay for 25/5 in my city - but there is only one provided of service that fast, and they're reliability is poor. Instead, we pay 50% of that for 20% of the bandwidth but get reliable service. Even with 50,000 people in a dozen square miles, it's not cost effective to extend FTTH - and I'm less than a mile from a major backbone at a top research university.
As for paying for the land use, you'll find that either your friend - or the prior landowner - probably receives access to the services provided by the company who owns those lines. The standard easement for utilities states that you allow them to traverse your property and in return they'll provide you with service. If you don't want the latter, you may forego the former. Companies have regularly routed around such landowners. If the government then finds it is in the public interest to use your land they will take it and compensate you at a nominal market rate. Note that "market rate" is based not on how much the land is worth relative to the specific use (i.e. a $2B fiber optic line taking up 1 AC of land does not make the land appreciably more valuable than the $800/acre it was when used for crops or grazing).
Governments understand the consequences of war, just as corporations do. The difference is that corporations don't give a shit about anyone else.
We don't need to wonder if Apple, Samsung, and the rest lover their children too.
Nobody uses them anymore - they're way too busy with transactions to do anything useful about customer service. (wish there were a :rolleyes: smilie, just this once)
I understand that - if you have the right contacts - there is a group of loosely associated, mini-nation states in one part of the world where they have permanent bazaars/markets where the shelves are lined with all kinds of ammunition. They'll even sell you the gear to make your own. You just walk up, prove that any one of those mini-nations has authorized you to drive a car, and off you go with as much ammo as you can afford, or with up to 25 pounds of black powder. On occasion, several of these nations hold temporary bazaars in large warehouse-like buildings where you can go in and trade the local currency for all sorts of weapons - no questions asked.
Just be careful if you go there; there's a lot of crazy shit that goes on.
Guess it depends on how close you like to sit from your TV. An 8k TV which is 20' (Completely filling a 9' tall x 18' long wall from floor to ceiling) viewed from 18 feet away - as large or larger than most living rooms - would be at the same "retina" level as the iPhone's retina screen.
But hey - progress is progress. If history holds, the US will decide that an interlaced format would be best for this new technology.
"I broke my hand a year ago ... coding (in Fortran, baby!)"
Breaking your had must have been like a breath of fresh air. I can't imagine the pain and torture of having to code in Fortran. I still have blank spots in memory from my college years when I was forced to learn/use it. Or maybe that was the rum.
We need it to produce electricity; we already have enough fissile material to blow up whomever we want.
And the countries we would prefer to turn into a flat landscape of radioactive glass (I liked the idea of calling it New Iowa, myself), have oil but no fresh water.
Most of us don't need more fresh water, provided we manage to keep our "economic engine" from screwing up the supplies we have and quit having more children. Those last two are not advice the politicians on the right side of the aisle endorse, though.
I once had a discussion with a director of engineering about being fired for screwing up a design (in jest; a hypothetical "I hope this does't fail" comment). He quickly came back with, "Oh, I wouldn't fire you. Far worse - I'd make you stay on and fix it."
Smart engineers who have made some rookie mistakes are probably some of the first people you want on a review team. When everything goes perfectly, you don't know how much of your design was genius and how much was luck.
Don't forget to clean your optics, first.