And just how would a person go about getting practice carrying Evian bottles full of nitroglycerine?
That many of those being found willing to do this, including those who partook in the Sept. 11 attacks, are middle-class and educated (Mohammed Atta was studying engineering) should tell you something. These aren't just a bunch of gullible yokels brainwashed into dying for the vision of some mullah.
so? go ahead and carry some through an airport. you won't get past the potholes in the highway on the way there in the taxi
The problem with that attitude is it immediately dismisses the fact these people are suicide bombers. With enough practice they could probably get away with a small bottle of it rolled up in a towel. It doesn't take a very large blast to open the fuselage of a pressurised jet.
I certainly *want* a flying laptop! And for a meager $100, too. I suppose the FAA, BAA and IATA are keeping these out of other hands around the world. Those lucky thai!
Scientists still hope it will find the edge of the solar system and get into interstellar space."
The alternative is for the Sun to pull it back.
To sail on a dream through eternal nighttime of space
To ride on the crest of a wild raging storm
To work in the service of life and the living
In search of the answers to questions unknown
To be part of the movement and part of the growing
Part of beginning to understand
Aye, Voyager, the places you've been to
The things that you've shown us
The stories you tell
Aye, Voyager, I sing to your spirit
The men who have served you
So long and so well
Seems what little kids really need is a simplified cell phone which can only have a few numbers programmed into it, e.g. home, mother's work, father's work.
An obvious idea, now watch some potlicker patent it.
Some stuff is crap, some stuff is good. The proportion doesn't really change as time goes on, but hindsight allows us to tell the difference between the two.
I seem to be finding more things today are engineered to be profitable, that is, to the minimum tolerances and material cost to do the job.
You can still find high grade things, but they're proving to be very, very expensive.
What would happen to NASA if they sourced components to a company which considers 30% failure rate, off the assembly line, to be "good enough"? The end customer doesn't often see the failures, because the parts are usually caught and dumped, but it can eventually show up, because the weaknesses in the manufacturing process which makes 30% failure possible will slip through within tolerances or when the part is intermittent. Rather, I imagine, like those O-Rings years ago.
So you can do mental math, fantastic. But generalising about school children is dangerous. You hang out on slashdot so it's fairly safe to assume you're some kind of nerd and use math in some way on a fairly regular basis.
I work in a school district. I develop interfaces between our database and external ones. I have to estimate several times, on average, each day. I've been involved in developing and improving student assessment. I can take a look at a table of numbers and quickly tell which are doing well and which aren't. I've worked with such large volumes of data and sums for years that with a bit of exposure I can quickly grasp trends, flow, patterns, etc. from samples. Testing everything is exhausting, but I can develop applications which look for things that don't "fit", as long as I have a general idea of what it is I'm looking for. Estimating is what makes my work possible.
"learning from past experience" - that has a nice ring to it.
What?!? And break with tradition?
Honestly, when I was a lot younger I thought only new stuff was good, decent quality, reliable, etc. Eventually I learned, after wasting a lot of money, some new stuff is utter crap and some things build in the distant past were done with real craftsmanship and quality.
On another note, there was this great show on Discovery or History Channel or sommat, some years back. Engineers had struggled to figure out how three large stone slabs and been lowered into place in a crypt. No trace of ropes left pinched by the massive slabs, no pole holes, no marks of any kind. How did the bronze age engineers do it, that engineers from the 20th century were left so puzzled by?
Eventually a team of japanese engineering students realised the crypt had been filled with sand and the slabs place upon the top and gently lowered into place as the sand was removed from below.
"NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives
so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time."
What they can find is what was done, but only with the old Apollo engineers can they get some insight into the minds that
worked out novel solutions where no obvious ones existed.
I've been hearing a few times over the past weeks how school children can't esitmate. Every mathematical problem has a definite
answer presented by a calculator. Ask me what's 250 * 7 and I don't sit down and do math, I figure the first four 250's are 1,000 and the rest are 750.
Ask me what's the square root of 27 and I'll say 5 and a bit, because the number squared closest I know is 5. Some kids today couldn't do that.
Can today's engineers think on their feet?
In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"
Uh. Don't mention steroids to Congress. They've already got the bee for baseball.
I think the phrase referred to in times past, when the design for a chip was literally made into masks for the photo-etching process by taping patterns onto plates.
Ah, like when we did photo-etching for printed circuit boards (PCB's!)
The headcount of the enterprise are given stock options at bargain rates. When the company tanks and headcount find themselves out on the street looking for a new job, the IRS swoops in and taxes the hell out of them on the bargain stock they purchased, which is now not worth the paper it's printed on.
Meanwhile, the oil companies are raking in huge profits, not hiring, not investing their huge returns and get every tax break from Washington. The lesson we in Silicon Valley learned about who really counts with the power in Washington was that it sure as heck wasn't us. It's like we were treated as upstart children, deserving a few raps across the knuckles. Two oilmen in the Whitehouse, what do you think?
Per TFA, "completion of the design". I was also confused by this phrase in the summary.
As I have been. What is this akin to? Taping out a body outline at a death scene? It's arcane jargon (which I as an old programmer heartily approve of on most occasions), perhaps it's time/. introduced a Jargon dictionary.
It's also not about how you define a planet, but when.
Now that we're much more enlightened about cosmology, we decide we need more boxes to sort things into. Such as Planet and Near Object, where Planet used to suffice. This isn't about Pluto, it's about redefining Planet and then seeing what doesn't fit the new rules.
I find the practice a bit ridiculous in the case. Pluto is in the family of planets because that's what is familiar with most educated people. Sedna and Xena are a bit of a push because most educated people haven't heard of them and our literature and other media isn't full of references to them.
The case must be made that, should they determind Pluto doesn't fit the new requirement, Pluto be "grandfathered in" as an honourary member. The alternative is for astronomers to be labeled a bunch of squabbling nuts, like those who argue Shakespeare or Bacon. Whatever is decided, Pluto will go on, because it already has years of tradition in the cultures.
I can't get past the notion that when the submissions came in to name Uranus some panel member who wasn't paying particularly close attention might've looked up with a gasp and said "You want to name it after my what?!"
The father of Cronos? The joke was funny when I was 10. It's passe now.
Aren't these people supposed to be deciding whether or not to boot Pluto out of the Planet club?
Seriously, I can't take that whole Pluto thing seriously - there must have been some knobs around back when we had 6 planets and they though Uranus and Neptune shouldn't be included.
The best product usually wins. The question is what constitutes "best" and the best in your mind isn't always best in the market. The world doesn't always want glitz.
Not often have I seen the best product win.
The hard lesson taught Sony by Matsushita was (slashdotters should love this) open your standard to adoption by the greatest number of manufacturers, shear numbers will win out. Sony had charged a high licence fee for Beta technology, so very few bit. Crappy VHS at one point was 8-1 in sales ratio, while the market was in it's first year. It didn't take long for those who sold machines, made tapes of films and initiated the vid-rental market to decide upon which side of the fence their fortunes would be best made.
My person experience with Personal Computers began with the Commodore Amiga. A truly fantastic system in 1985. Sadly mishandled by the Commodore marketing department (Ready. Fire! Aim.) Imagine the world of PC's today if Commodore had opened up the hardware to as many vendors as wished to get involved and focused upon developing the operating system. Could be a different picture today.
Apple tried something like this under Jean-Louis Gassée, but mishandled things so terribly they brought back Steve to save them.
History has shown that the best product doesn't always capture the greatest marketshare. BetaMax was far better quality then VHS, but look which survived. The original Mac beat Windows 3.1 hands down, but again look who has 95% of the desktop market? I think you really can get what you pay for, the paradox is people too often expect awesome for cheap, then buy cheap and expect awesome. If you want it, buy it.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. How many times have I heard of someone retiring and then kicking the bucket within a year? Seems to be a common thing.
Seems people lose their purpose in getting up the next morning or sommat. I think Alistair Cooke went something like this. He retired from his Letter From America and other duties and seemed to go in the blink of an eye.
Slashdot Mirror
but what about SNAKES on a plane, ever thought of that?
Or even Exploding Snakes on a Plane!!!
Hello Amtrack?
And just how would a person go about getting practice carrying Evian bottles full of nitroglycerine?
That many of those being found willing to do this, including those who partook in the Sept. 11 attacks, are middle-class and educated (Mohammed Atta was studying engineering) should tell you something. These aren't just a bunch of gullible yokels brainwashed into dying for the vision of some mullah.
Remember what happens when alkali metals hit water?
Heck, a chunk of sodium in a small balloon inside a plastic bottle of 10M HCl
so? go ahead and carry some through an airport. you won't get past the potholes in the highway on the way there in the taxi
The problem with that attitude is it immediately dismisses the fact these people are suicide bombers. With enough practice they could probably get away with a small bottle of it rolled up in a towel. It doesn't take a very large blast to open the fuselage of a pressurised jet.
Nitro Glycerine is a liquid.
$100 Laptop Takes Flight in Thailand
I certainly *want* a flying laptop! And for a meager $100, too. I suppose the FAA, BAA and IATA are keeping these out of other hands around the world. Those lucky thai!
I for one welcome our new flying laptop overlords
Scientists still hope it will find the edge of the solar system and get into interstellar space."
The alternative is for the Sun to pull it back.
To sail on a dream through eternal nighttime of space To ride on the crest of a wild raging storm To work in the service of life and the living In search of the answers to questions unknown To be part of the movement and part of the growing Part of beginning to understand
Aye, Voyager, the places you've been to The things that you've shown us The stories you tell Aye, Voyager, I sing to your spirit The men who have served you So long and so well
a tip of the prop to the late John Denver
Seems what little kids really need is a simplified cell phone which can only have a few numbers programmed into it, e.g. home, mother's work, father's work.
An obvious idea, now watch some potlicker patent it.
Ceres is a planet. Again.
Some stuff is crap, some stuff is good. The proportion doesn't really change as time goes on, but hindsight allows us to tell the difference between the two.
I seem to be finding more things today are engineered to be profitable, that is, to the minimum tolerances and material cost to do the job.
You can still find high grade things, but they're proving to be very, very expensive.
What would happen to NASA if they sourced components to a company which considers 30% failure rate, off the assembly line, to be "good enough"? The end customer doesn't often see the failures, because the parts are usually caught and dumped, but it can eventually show up, because the weaknesses in the manufacturing process which makes 30% failure possible will slip through within tolerances or when the part is intermittent. Rather, I imagine, like those O-Rings years ago.
So you can do mental math, fantastic. But generalising about school children is dangerous. You hang out on slashdot so it's fairly safe to assume you're some kind of nerd and use math in some way on a fairly regular basis.
I work in a school district. I develop interfaces between our database and external ones. I have to estimate several times, on average, each day. I've been involved in developing and improving student assessment. I can take a look at a table of numbers and quickly tell which are doing well and which aren't. I've worked with such large volumes of data and sums for years that with a bit of exposure I can quickly grasp trends, flow, patterns, etc. from samples. Testing everything is exhausting, but I can develop applications which look for things that don't "fit", as long as I have a general idea of what it is I'm looking for. Estimating is what makes my work possible.
"learning from past experience" - that has a nice ring to it.
What?!? And break with tradition?
Honestly, when I was a lot younger I thought only new stuff was good, decent quality, reliable, etc. Eventually I learned, after wasting a lot of money, some new stuff is utter crap and some things build in the distant past were done with real craftsmanship and quality.
On another note, there was this great show on Discovery or History Channel or sommat, some years back. Engineers had struggled to figure out how three large stone slabs and been lowered into place in a crypt. No trace of ropes left pinched by the massive slabs, no pole holes, no marks of any kind. How did the bronze age engineers do it, that engineers from the 20th century were left so puzzled by?
Eventually a team of japanese engineering students realised the crypt had been filled with sand and the slabs place upon the top and gently lowered into place as the sand was removed from below.
"NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time."
What they can find is what was done, but only with the old Apollo engineers can they get some insight into the minds that worked out novel solutions where no obvious ones existed.
I've been hearing a few times over the past weeks how school children can't esitmate. Every mathematical problem has a definite answer presented by a calculator. Ask me what's 250 * 7 and I don't sit down and do math, I figure the first four 250's are 1,000 and the rest are 750. Ask me what's the square root of 27 and I'll say 5 and a bit, because the number squared closest I know is 5. Some kids today couldn't do that. Can today's engineers think on their feet?
In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"
Uh. Don't mention steroids to Congress. They've already got the bee for baseball.
I think the phrase referred to in times past, when the design for a chip was literally made into masks for the photo-etching process by taping patterns onto plates.
Ah, like when we did photo-etching for printed circuit boards (PCB's!)
How do you do wrong in the future?
Simple!
The headcount of the enterprise are given stock options at bargain rates. When the company tanks and headcount find themselves out on the street looking for a new job, the IRS swoops in and taxes the hell out of them on the bargain stock they purchased, which is now not worth the paper it's printed on.
Meanwhile, the oil companies are raking in huge profits, not hiring, not investing their huge returns and get every tax break from Washington. The lesson we in Silicon Valley learned about who really counts with the power in Washington was that it sure as heck wasn't us. It's like we were treated as upstart children, deserving a few raps across the knuckles. Two oilmen in the Whitehouse, what do you think?
'It's become a witch hunt. I think the government is looking to find some egregious examples [of wrongdoing] and to publicly hang people for them.
If they've done wrong, even in the past, shouldn't they have to answer for it?
Seems reasonable to me, should seem very reasonable to those who place their trust in and money at risk with the stock for these enterprises.
As always, those who have done nothing wrong and keep good records have nothing to fear.
Per TFA, "completion of the design". I was also confused by this phrase in the summary.
As I have been. What is this akin to? Taping out a body outline at a death scene? It's arcane jargon (which I as an old programmer heartily approve of on most occasions), perhaps it's time /. introduced a Jargon dictionary.
the fnord on this frobnitz is highly posnostic
It's about how you define a planet.
It's also not about how you define a planet, but when.
Now that we're much more enlightened about cosmology, we decide we need more boxes to sort things into. Such as Planet and Near Object, where Planet used to suffice. This isn't about Pluto, it's about redefining Planet and then seeing what doesn't fit the new rules.
I find the practice a bit ridiculous in the case. Pluto is in the family of planets because that's what is familiar with most educated people. Sedna and Xena are a bit of a push because most educated people haven't heard of them and our literature and other media isn't full of references to them.
The case must be made that, should they determind Pluto doesn't fit the new requirement, Pluto be "grandfathered in" as an honourary member. The alternative is for astronomers to be labeled a bunch of squabbling nuts, like those who argue Shakespeare or Bacon. Whatever is decided, Pluto will go on, because it already has years of tradition in the cultures.
I can't get past the notion that when the submissions came in to name Uranus some panel member who wasn't paying particularly close attention might've looked up with a gasp and said "You want to name it after my what?!"
The father of Cronos? The joke was funny when I was 10. It's passe now.
August 21 Eastern Time? Wow, great.
This is news to announce there will be news at a later date.
the future will be here, any day now
Aren't these people supposed to be deciding whether or not to boot Pluto out of the Planet club?
Seriously, I can't take that whole Pluto thing seriously - there must have been some knobs around back when we had 6 planets and they though Uranus and Neptune shouldn't be included.
6 planets should be enough for anybody
The best product usually wins. The question is what constitutes "best" and the best in your mind isn't always best in the market. The world doesn't always want glitz.
Not often have I seen the best product win.
The hard lesson taught Sony by Matsushita was (slashdotters should love this) open your standard to adoption by the greatest number of manufacturers, shear numbers will win out. Sony had charged a high licence fee for Beta technology, so very few bit. Crappy VHS at one point was 8-1 in sales ratio, while the market was in it's first year. It didn't take long for those who sold machines, made tapes of films and initiated the vid-rental market to decide upon which side of the fence their fortunes would be best made.
My person experience with Personal Computers began with the Commodore Amiga. A truly fantastic system in 1985. Sadly mishandled by the Commodore marketing department (Ready. Fire! Aim.) Imagine the world of PC's today if Commodore had opened up the hardware to as many vendors as wished to get involved and focused upon developing the operating system. Could be a different picture today.
Apple tried something like this under Jean-Louis Gassée, but mishandled things so terribly they brought back Steve to save them.
Now just deliver them for a price I want.
There's a paradox at work here
History has shown that the best product doesn't always capture the greatest marketshare. BetaMax was far better quality then VHS, but look which survived. The original Mac beat Windows 3.1 hands down, but again look who has 95% of the desktop market? I think you really can get what you pay for, the paradox is people too often expect awesome for cheap, then buy cheap and expect awesome. If you want it, buy it.
Ain't got scratch enough.
I must say, however I do like what I've seen. And I've spent enough years fighting with Windows, it only helps the Apple cause.
most secure operating system, ever! please stand by for 6,000 critical security flaw patches...
I was thinking exactly the same thing. How many times have I heard of someone retiring and then kicking the bucket within a year? Seems to be a common thing.
Seems people lose their purpose in getting up the next morning or sommat. I think Alistair Cooke went something like this. He retired from his Letter From America and other duties and seemed to go in the blink of an eye.