Would you buy a vest that had been proven not to damage a dummy, but had never been tested on a human?
Body armor only expands the surface area of the bullet impact so it won't put a hole in you-- the ft/lbs are still there, and will usually break a rib or two at least. Subsequently, they don't test body armor on humans.
I mean, I've got a magic nose-breathing device that has been proven to allow a dummy to stay submerged in water for ten hours without any problem whatsoever. Want to buy that?
Moron. I won't even dignify that comparison with an analytical response.
I'm all for WiFi everywhere, but it sounds like a pretty big backdoor to me, I don't think I'd want to have a WiFi connection built onto my board that I couldn't disable with anything mroe then software.
RTFA-- no, wait-- just read the damn/. blurb, it's only a few lines long. There's no radio transceiver. It's just the chipset. If you don't plug in the add-on part with the radio, you've got nothing to worry about.
Mods, stop marking knee-jerk shrieks of "all intel mobos will have a wireless backdoor!" as "informative"
But if you enable a CPU to act as a wireless hub - or, eventually, if WiFi comes as a full onboard feature (rather like many motherboards now have onboard sound and graphics) - would that not open up your PC and network to security issues? My parents would not be best pleased if someone warchalked on the fence, but since they have little idea of technology or computer security, I think if they bought a new machine enabled with this kind of tech, every l33t hax0r in a two mile radius would be camping out to leech their access.
Cripes, man, you don't even have to RTFA to figure this out-- it's in the/. blurb:
"The chipset, however, will not include an actual Wi-Fi radio, so users will still need a wireless add-on card"
Can we end the insanity now? No one will be hax0ring your box through the wireless chipset if there's no freekin radio transceiver connected to it.
Whenever I need information about a product or application, I very much appreciate having access to a PDF version. I can take it with me on my laptop when I'm in the field or at a customer site, and I can archive it on CD in the event that the product is discontinued
HTML pages save to disk too. They just don't come out as a single file.
This I can't believe. How can a PDF ever be better than HTML for digital archiving? HTML was meant to be read on computer; PDF is intended to be printed out.
Apparently he can't deal with the idea of a document that isn't contained within a single file. That's about the only archival advantage PDF has over HTML. Personally, I prefer the HTML.
I'm about as big a Heinlein fan as you will find, but in the interests of historical accuracy I would have to say that I'd be very surprised if monocycles hadn't been "predicted" by half a dozen other sci-fi authors before his time. He has plenty of his own predictions, but I doubt he can take credit for that particular one. Let's just say science fiction predicted it, as it has predicted so many other things.
True enough. I was testing a theory, seeing if throwing in Heinlein's name gets more replies and points. I quoted Asimov regarding something a couple days ago and it got automagically up-rated too.
little errors don't just go away if you pick a bigger sample, and subsequently couldn't ignore the major flaw that is "psychohistory" and enjoy the books*.
Heh, my calculations showed you were going to post that.
Sad to say, I really am that predictable much of the time...
Looks like exactly what Heinlein called "tumblebugs" in "The Roads Must Roll". As he described it "...the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel." Personally, I think I'll hold out for the flying car.
And if you read the series, you discover that the Second Foundation is there exactly for this reason - to costantly nudge the chaos back in the right place.
Ugh. I did read the whole series. Despite the handwave at the 2nd Foundation, the ludicrous premise of the sham-science "psychohistory" kept coming back to irritate me. If it was all a clever ruse, why did we never get a wink-wink, nudge-nudge from Asimov that Seldon was pulling a fast one and just engineering the final outcome from the start? No, the whole way it was the same ridiculous "psychohistory predicts perfectly" line. I found the series amusing, but was never able to accept the impossible long enough to truly enjoy it.
Hmmm, guess all those multi-billion dollar Insurance and Advertising companies went broke years ago and nobody noticed. Chaos theory of course destroys ALL attempts at statistical analysis.
(shrug) It doesn't destroy all prediction, it just progrssively degrades the accuracy of the predictions the farther out you go. Predicting that most people with life insurance will probably live long enough to pay for those who don't is no amazing feat of prediction, and any unpredicted event that skews that enough to cause trouble-- well, then insurance is likely to be the least of anyone's worries then. What I'm talking about is the ludicrous premise of "psychohistory" specific to the Foundation series. I quote and paraphrase:
"Psychohistory...was the science of mobs in their billions." It could forecast reactions with the accuracy of predicting the "rebound of a billiard ball." Hari Seldon "foresaw the...fall of civilization and the gap of thirty thousand years that must elapse before a struggling new empire could emerge from the ruins."
Hogwash. Bullcrap. Manure. All this on page 1 of the first book, the third-fourth paragraph of the prologue. The impossibility is explained away by saying that humans must be analyzed in groups "large enough", because smaller groups aren't predictable. Well, sorry Asimov, but you blew it there. Larger samples of chaotic systems don't get easier to predict. At best, they stay the same.
Standard amperage limits are based off acceptable voltage drops, not heating.
True. I was leaning more towards a point based on susceptibility to damage of cheaper cords; I've never seen a 12ga extension short out from being closed in a door. I have, however, seen cheap extension cords heat up enough soften the insulation. Stick it under a metal table leg and an extension cord with soft insulation doesn't HAVE to heat up to flashpoint to cause a fire. Besides, citing what the gauge of a cheap cord should be doesn't mean much if the conductors are undersizedfor theirstated rating. Optimal conditions are great for electrical theory, but in the field you sometimes can't even trust your wiggy or your multimeter.
Congrats. You've just illustrated that/. isn't a single entity, but rather a large group with varied, often conflicting beliefs. You may now proceed to the third grade.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The whole point of having a circuit breaker/fuse box is to limit the amount of current drawn on a particular circuit. If the current draw gets to be too big for the circuit to handle, then the breaker kicks in and power cuts off. I don't see where having multiple extensions would be any more of a fire hazard.
Max amp rating on a wall receptacle can be 20A. A cheap Wal-Mart extension cord is rated at 13A. Power 19A worth of load through a 13A cord plugged into a 20A receptacle and you can start a fire without tripping the breaker.
Tell me why high-school dropouts can be trusted to build houses, cars, wire complex buildings and run heavy equipment; and PhDs can't figure out how to change a simple wall outlet or check the oil in their car?
They fancy themselves "intelligent enough" to figure it out on their own and don't expect it to be at all complicated because, after all, uneducated folks do it. They then get stuck in this mindset and won't listen to explainations that sound "complicated" because they've already decided it should be easy. My father, an electrical engineer, was surprised when I showed him my electrician's reference book containing formulas for things like load balancing. He thought, for big jobs, electricians worked off pre-made plans drawn up by someone "educated" who did the calculations for them. I imagine many PhDs think carpenters don't know anything about structural engineering, or that auto mechanics are totally ignorant of mechanical engineering. Ivory-tower arrogance can sometimes work just like thick-headed stupidity.
Human factors cannot be reduced to mathematical equations.
(Sit down Hari Seldon)
Heh. I tried to read the Foundation series, but unfortunately I'd already read enough about Lorenz and Mandelbrot to know that little errors don't just go away if you pick a bigger sample, and subsequently couldn't ignore the major flaw that is "psychohistory" and enjoy the books*. But then again, people do love to think of life as predictable, because whether you sell toys or insurance, nothing is scarier than not knowing what's going to happen to you.:)
* Yeah, I know there are some who say Hari Seldon himself secretly didn't believe psychohistory in the stories, but then that forces you to accept that a bunch of otherwise intelligent fellows (the Foundation) knew nothing of basic chaos theory, etc.
I find it hard to take Umberto Eco seriously anymore. Eco, while a skilled writer, seems to get caught in the mental-masturbation trap of "philosophy as a hard science". What did ME in was this choice quote:
"the media have multiplied, but some of them act as media of media, or in other words, media squared" (The Multiplication of the Media)
Problem is, he bandies about mathematical terms as if they're meaningful in a non-mathematical context. The "media squared" crap is particularly illuminating because he speaks as though "media" has some obvious value greater than one, and multiplying it times itself causes some calculable exponential growth. I once had an Eco-head try to tell me it was a clearly reasoned analysis, until I posited that perhaps media has a value of less than one (as it only tells half the story, ha ha!) and subsequently gets SMALLER every time it gets squared. He said I "just don't get it", but couldn't tell me why I was wrong. Philosophers always annoy me.
Um, I sure hope you are Mr David himself, of The windows crash site as he is the only person I really said was allowed to use my picture of the drumscape crashing (took it on vacation while down at Ocean City, NJ).
Better call your lawyer to start sending out the C&D letters then:
Domain Name:
piemaster.co.uk
Registrant:
Peter Turner
Not that I really mind, I just want photo credit where credit is due.
That's a nice sentiment, and perfectly within your legal rights as copyright holder; but it's not like the picture is going to end up on the cover of TIME magazine attributed to "piemaster.co.uk". It's just a funny vacation pic. Vigorously defending ownership of such a thing isn't really worth the effort.
Also, saying you hope the the guy who linked piemaster is Mr. David is kind of weird. The guy who posted the link is probably not the same guy who runs the BSOD gallery on piemaster.co.uk-- he's probably just a guy who posted a link.
Re:"2:30am this morning" ?
on
ISS Fender Bender
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I am sure an embedded spell checker for grammar inside the compiler would be extremely useful, so when you run your compiler it would also point out your spelling mistakes, but then that raises a whole other array of issues.
Yeah, I've been tempted to search-replace misspelled words used as variables in source code, but that's a pretty nasty can of worms.
However unpleasant, as long as I understand what they are trying to say I am fine with it. After all, I have people I work with which I cannot understand 40% of what they are saying
Yeeesh. Is it an ESL problem? I worked with one fellow who was Pashtun whose accent was so thick he often had to write out what he was trying to say. Fortunately he was very patient and also worth listening to. Wish I could say the same about some of my current co-workers.
Re:"2:30am this morning" ?
on
ISS Fender Bender
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
You know all languages? In some languages double negatives make a positive while in others, Russian for example, a double negative is still a negative. What I can tell you however is that there are no languages in which a double positive makes a negative.
Funny you should bring it up, as I was actually going to mention the multi-negative thing in Russian (I was a Russian linguist/translator in the army). The concept of "morning" isn't as frequently used as negation, so it's unlikely to exist in the form of a modifier to other words. "am" and "morning" here only affect the time, whereas negatives modify the entire clause. Whether or not negatives "stack", causing a true/false flip every time one happens (English), or whether EVERYTHING in the clause must be modified to be gramatically correct (Russian), is pretty low-level language mechanics. "Morning", being a noun and being non-integral to phrase constructing, is unlikely to have multiple forms in any language. The ante-meridiem and post-meridiem notation for time is used almost exclusively in the United States (24-hour time being the norm elsewhere), so English is really the only language that has the opportunity to form a doubled prepositional phrase sort of thingy with regard to "morning".
Re:"2:30am this morning" ?
on
ISS Fender Bender
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Dun, you must have some kind of spelling phobia. Dude, just relax. A more appropriate way could be: 2:30AM Today (or 2:30AM Thursday, or this morning at 2:30), but a lot of people do get confused when it comes to that. 2:30AM this morning is not that bad, it actually is easier to understand.
Yeah, but it's still WRONG!:) I realize that it is probably unreasonable to expect everyone to be perfect all the time; this one just gets to me because I hear it conversationally and read it in print all the freakin' time. I figured/. is probably the best place to vent about it because no one here will fire me for shouting like a lunatic about such an small thing.
Plus you have to understand that slashdot is a site run by geeks, and you know geeks are not the best when it comes to grammar. You have to forgive them sometimes
This is what boggles my mind the most. No geek would tolerate illogical source code like:
int number;
*(&number) = 5;
but they do tolerate illogical grammar! I mean, this one isn't even excusable by English as a second language, as the redundancy would be wrong in ANY language. Then again, the percentage of geeks nowadays who even do any programming isn't what it used to be, so the tendency to not have the "precision in language" trait has been on the decline.
Yeah, I'm just a nutcase. I should just get over it.
Um... 2:30am happens every day... "this morning" refers to the fact that it happened on the day of the posting.
You are correct, but it is still redundant. "this morning" means "today in the am hours". The proper way to say it would have been either: "2:30am today", or "2:30 this morning". If they were trying to say "today", they should have used the word.
[irritated pedant]
"2:30am this morning"? As opposed to, say, 2:30am in the evening? ARGH!!!! Either use "am", or "this morning". Not both. I may be the first person to notice this, but the [grammar/spelling/repost/factuality] checking of the is often very poor! Has anyone else noticed this?
[/irritated pedant]
Slashdot Mirror
Body armor only expands the surface area of the bullet impact so it won't put a hole in you-- the ft/lbs are still there, and will usually break a rib or two at least. Subsequently, they don't test body armor on humans.
I mean, I've got a magic nose-breathing device that has been proven to allow a dummy to stay submerged in water for ten hours without any problem whatsoever. Want to buy that?
Moron. I won't even dignify that comparison with an analytical response.
RTFA-- no, wait-- just read the damn /. blurb, it's only a few lines long. There's no radio transceiver. It's just the chipset. If you don't plug in the add-on part with the radio, you've got nothing to worry about.
Mods, stop marking knee-jerk shrieks of "all intel mobos will have a wireless backdoor!" as "informative"
Cripes, man, you don't even have to RTFA to figure this out-- it's in the /. blurb:
Can we end the insanity now? No one will be hax0ring your box through the wireless chipset if there's no freekin radio transceiver connected to it.Anyone shooting at themselves to test a bulletproof vest is hanging it on a dummy!
HTML pages save to disk too. They just don't come out as a single file.
Apparently he can't deal with the idea of a document that isn't contained within a single file. That's about the only archival advantage PDF has over HTML. Personally, I prefer the HTML.
True enough. I was testing a theory, seeing if throwing in Heinlein's name gets more replies and points. I quoted Asimov regarding something a couple days ago and it got automagically up-rated too.
Yeah, that was was kinda my point. This magic unicycle has the look of vaporware too.
Heh, my calculations showed you were going to post that.
Sad to say, I really am that predictable much of the time...
Looks like exactly what Heinlein called "tumblebugs" in "The Roads Must Roll". As he described it "...the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel." Personally, I think I'll hold out for the flying car.
Ugh. I did read the whole series. Despite the handwave at the 2nd Foundation, the ludicrous premise of the sham-science "psychohistory" kept coming back to irritate me. If it was all a clever ruse, why did we never get a wink-wink, nudge-nudge from Asimov that Seldon was pulling a fast one and just engineering the final outcome from the start? No, the whole way it was the same ridiculous "psychohistory predicts perfectly" line. I found the series amusing, but was never able to accept the impossible long enough to truly enjoy it.
(shrug) It doesn't destroy all prediction, it just progrssively degrades the accuracy of the predictions the farther out you go. Predicting that most people with life insurance will probably live long enough to pay for those who don't is no amazing feat of prediction, and any unpredicted event that skews that enough to cause trouble-- well, then insurance is likely to be the least of anyone's worries then. What I'm talking about is the ludicrous premise of "psychohistory" specific to the Foundation series. I quote and paraphrase:
Hogwash. Bullcrap. Manure. All this on page 1 of the first book, the third-fourth paragraph of the prologue. The impossibility is explained away by saying that humans must be analyzed in groups "large enough", because smaller groups aren't predictable. Well, sorry Asimov, but you blew it there. Larger samples of chaotic systems don't get easier to predict. At best, they stay the same.True. I was leaning more towards a point based on susceptibility to damage of cheaper cords; I've never seen a 12ga extension short out from being closed in a door. I have, however, seen cheap extension cords heat up enough soften the insulation. Stick it under a metal table leg and an extension cord with soft insulation doesn't HAVE to heat up to flashpoint to cause a fire. Besides, citing what the gauge of a cheap cord should be doesn't mean much if the conductors are undersized for their stated rating. Optimal conditions are great for electrical theory, but in the field you sometimes can't even trust your wiggy or your multimeter.
Congrats. You've just illustrated that /. isn't a single entity, but rather a large group with varied, often conflicting beliefs. You may now proceed to the third grade.
Max amp rating on a wall receptacle can be 20A. A cheap Wal-Mart extension cord is rated at 13A. Power 19A worth of load through a 13A cord plugged into a 20A receptacle and you can start a fire without tripping the breaker.
They fancy themselves "intelligent enough" to figure it out on their own and don't expect it to be at all complicated because, after all, uneducated folks do it. They then get stuck in this mindset and won't listen to explainations that sound "complicated" because they've already decided it should be easy. My father, an electrical engineer, was surprised when I showed him my electrician's reference book containing formulas for things like load balancing. He thought, for big jobs, electricians worked off pre-made plans drawn up by someone "educated" who did the calculations for them. I imagine many PhDs think carpenters don't know anything about structural engineering, or that auto mechanics are totally ignorant of mechanical engineering. Ivory-tower arrogance can sometimes work just like thick-headed stupidity.
(Sit down Hari Seldon)
Heh. I tried to read the Foundation series, but unfortunately I'd already read enough about Lorenz and Mandelbrot to know that little errors don't just go away if you pick a bigger sample, and subsequently couldn't ignore the major flaw that is "psychohistory" and enjoy the books*. But then again, people do love to think of life as predictable, because whether you sell toys or insurance, nothing is scarier than not knowing what's going to happen to you. :)
* Yeah, I know there are some who say Hari Seldon himself secretly didn't believe psychohistory in the stories, but then that forces you to accept that a bunch of otherwise intelligent fellows (the Foundation) knew nothing of basic chaos theory, etc.
Better call your lawyer to start sending out the C&D letters then:
Domain Name:
piemaster.co.uk
Registrant:
Peter Turner
Not that I really mind, I just want photo credit where credit is due.
That's a nice sentiment, and perfectly within your legal rights as copyright holder; but it's not like the picture is going to end up on the cover of TIME magazine attributed to "piemaster.co.uk". It's just a funny vacation pic. Vigorously defending ownership of such a thing isn't really worth the effort.
Also, saying you hope the the guy who linked piemaster is Mr. David is kind of weird. The guy who posted the link is probably not the same guy who runs the BSOD gallery on piemaster.co.uk-- he's probably just a guy who posted a link.
Yeah, I've been tempted to search-replace misspelled words used as variables in source code, but that's a pretty nasty can of worms.
However unpleasant, as long as I understand what they are trying to say I am fine with it. After all, I have people I work with which I cannot understand 40% of what they are saying
Yeeesh. Is it an ESL problem? I worked with one fellow who was Pashtun whose accent was so thick he often had to write out what he was trying to say. Fortunately he was very patient and also worth listening to. Wish I could say the same about some of my current co-workers.
so compared to this little *mistake* it's a by far a much bigger problem.AM This morning at Google
You're trying to drive me mad, aren't you
Funny you should bring it up, as I was actually going to mention the multi-negative thing in Russian (I was a Russian linguist/translator in the army). The concept of "morning" isn't as frequently used as negation, so it's unlikely to exist in the form of a modifier to other words. "am" and "morning" here only affect the time, whereas negatives modify the entire clause. Whether or not negatives "stack", causing a true/false flip every time one happens (English), or whether EVERYTHING in the clause must be modified to be gramatically correct (Russian), is pretty low-level language mechanics. "Morning", being a noun and being non-integral to phrase constructing, is unlikely to have multiple forms in any language. The ante-meridiem and post-meridiem notation for time is used almost exclusively in the United States (24-hour time being the norm elsewhere), so English is really the only language that has the opportunity to form a doubled prepositional phrase sort of thingy with regard to "morning".
Yeah, but it's still WRONG! :) I realize that it is probably unreasonable to expect everyone to be perfect all the time; this one just gets to me because I hear it conversationally and read it in print all the freakin' time. I figured /. is probably the best place to vent about it because no one here will fire me for shouting like a lunatic about such an small thing.
Plus you have to understand that slashdot is a site run by geeks, and you know geeks are not the best when it comes to grammar. You have to forgive them sometimes
This is what boggles my mind the most. No geek would tolerate illogical source code like:
int number;
*(&number) = 5;
but they do tolerate illogical grammar! I mean, this one isn't even excusable by English as a second language, as the redundancy would be wrong in ANY language. Then again, the percentage of geeks nowadays who even do any programming isn't what it used to be, so the tendency to not have the "precision in language" trait has been on the decline.
Yeah, I'm just a nutcase. I should just get over it.
You are correct, but it is still redundant. "this morning" means "today in the am hours". The proper way to say it would have been either: "2:30am today", or "2:30 this morning". If they were trying to say "today", they should have used the word.
[irritated pedant]
"2:30am this morning"? As opposed to, say, 2:30am in the evening? ARGH!!!! Either use "am", or "this morning". Not both. I may be the first person to notice this, but the [grammar/spelling/repost/factuality] checking of the is often very poor! Has anyone else noticed this?
[/irritated pedant]
I can't wait for the first flashable Linux-on-BIOS distro. Of course, the DRM system probably won't allow it.