Engineers are from the most privileged class in the world - middle and upper class straight white males.
I guess most of the engineers I know are white males--except for the women--but I have no idea how many of them are straight, except that none of them ever hit on me. And there are alternate reasonable explanations for that phenomenon.
Have you carried out a lot of research on this? I would think surveys would be unlikely to give reliable results, at least it anyone remembers what happened to Turing.
I didn't notice anyone mention it, but the real reason he was caught was he told the truth to some bobbies (cops, that is), while reporting a theft. Oops.
Babbage's analytical engine takes the prize for first automatic calculating machine, however because there was no way of programming it and storing that program it does not take the prize for first computer.
Are you confusing the Analytical Engine with the Difference Engine? The AE definitely could be programmed. In fact, it was microcoded. There was a fantastic article in Transactions on the History of Computing on it back in the 1980's, but it isn't available on the web (except for members, which I'm not any more).
The fact it was never built is a much better reason for passing it over for First Computer honors.
If what you mean is that there was no way to modify the stored program, I don't think anyone claims that embedded processors that only use ROM for programs aren't computers--at least not seriously.
You may want to use a "controlled" browser. Ie, one with "parental" protections built in so the teens don't go porning up the church atmosphere too much.
Are you sure you want them to get to the internet at all? All those ideas, all that porn, all that freedom. Maybe you should just install a nice selection of differentbiblesoftware? Oops, the last one accidentally has a couple of non-Christian packages. See what I mean? Dat ol' debbil he hidin' in dat big ol' Internat.
I'm probably overly negative here, but why exactly is this "Stuff that matters"? Surely there must be more interesting things out there, like, say, ehmmm, about iTMS pending European launch?
After all, bad snapshots have been around for ages and will be around for many more ages.
Poorly-maintained computers have been around for (comparitive) ages, too.
Nerds, like normal mortals, have interests that range more widely than how to liquid-cool their overclocked cell phones. "What matters" is more about a focus on excellence than a focus on a small segment of technology, at least to me. I'd like to be able to take an excellent picture, just like I'd like to brew an excellent cup of coffee and make a excellent triple-gainer from the nine meter board.
Why do they call it Transit of Venus? Shouldn't they call it Eclipse of Venus or something like that?
Well, if Venus were larger it would be an eclipse of the sun. But, as another poster already noted, it isn't. Good thing, too, since it would have to be around a half million miles in diameter and would probably have already hurled us and Mercury into the Sun or out into interstellar space.
The police generally don't host a grand jury unless they have a reasonable expectation that they'll be able to charge the suspect with a crime.
Drawing on my many years watching The Rockford Files, I have to question this. I thought that attorneys general and their ilk convened grand juries. The police have nothing to do with it at all. Neh?
And as we see in this episode, grand juries are subject to abuse by prosecuters. I can't
believe there wasn't a link to this in the original article....
I'm normally a nice guy, but everytime I hear some @$$holes cellphone ring in the theater, I have this overwhelming urge to twist their head from their shoulders, and shove the phone in the newly-created bloody cavity.
. . . but being a Slashdot poster, you have to settle for sending them a ringtone that crashes their phone?
consider the cost of ownership of a ten passenger van versus the cost of ten segways. The segways win compared to the cost of a new van.
On my planet Kelly Blue Book price for a 2003 Econoline 12-passenger van with 0 miles is $23,000. Last I heard, the Segway was around $5,000. Even if you're paying a little more for this year's van (I couldn't figure out how to get a quote one one), you're off by a factor of around 2.
So, it isn't money, most likely. Also, insurance companies aren't used to writing Segway policies, so I'm betting your costs on that are much higher....
You are way below (US) average if 140 gallons a year gets you and three kids around (the planet must love you). My guess is that the current average is somewhere 400-600 gallons per car per year.
140 * (me + spouse + 3 kids) = 700. We put 15000 miles on a 40 mpg car, 10000 on a 24, and around 10000 on a 30. Which I see actually comes to 224 gallons/year/person. Guess I need a bigger envelope....
Hmmm. This reference claims 100 gallons per acre, and I saw another than claimed 145. Also, "gas usage" != "Diesel usage," since Diesels are usually more efficient. However, 100*4.7e8 = 4.7e10. Divided by US population is around 160. Allowing for the fact that we need to eat something that's still only on the order of a tenth of the amount we're burning now.
Myself and my three kids use only around 140 gal/year per each even with three cars--I assume that the 1000 gallon figure includes heating, manufacturing, shipping, and so forth? I have no way of evaluating whether the correct figure is near 12 or 150 gal/acre.
I don't get that. A modern PC has gate times in the way sub-nanaosecond range, so how does a super-microsecond time equate to "speed of a modern PC" even if there are five channels going at once? I actually read the referenced article and it didn't say anything like that.
Maybe I should have searched for supplementary info.
Or maybe this was first posted in 1985. That would make this the oldest Slashdot dupe yet discovered....
I heard about a guy in Tucson that threatened to spank his kid, so the kid reported him to his school, who in turn reported the guy to CPS, and they took the kid away..... ridiculous?
I've heard similar stories. I evaluate them as B.S., or, if that's too direct, as urban legend. I'm not aware of a state that doesn't allow parents to spank their children. Bruising them is another issue, and might lead to trouble.
The same energy confined in a cartridge case, and released by firing it, produce
pressures over 50,000 psi and bullet velocities up to about Mach 6.
Mach 6? This reference shows a shit-hot load is around 3000 feet per second. Using my ferocious back-of-the-envelope skills and the fact that the speed of sound is around 1000 feet per second, that's Mach 3.
As for whether this fusion reactor could explode or not, I don't think that analogizing with a rifle cartridge is going to tell us. I thnk we'd need to consider the actual physics, and it doesn't sound like either of us has the information to do that.
There's lots of energy in a boiler, and sure enough, it can explode violently (though they don't much anymore due to good equipment and safety practices). There's a lot of energy in a big tree too, but they rarely explode (stage trees are an exception). Not sure which analogy is the right one in this case . . . probably neither.
They loved the DS9 episode with the tribbles, why wouldn't they want Kirk back?
Lackey #1: He's too old and fat, sir.
That gives me an idea. He comes back as a disembodied head! Of course, they couldn't get away with the whole Futurama floating-in-a-jar thing (which is a consistent theme of Dr. Fun, by the way), but surely they could work up some kind of thing where we find out he's the King Borg or something. It's not like consistency is a major concert in the franchise . . . they can always end up with it being a holodeck play or a dream or something.
Hey! Maybe we find out that Kirk's an autistic in a ward on Babylon 5 who just dreamed the whole thing!
At first I thought "Fleury" might be some kind of wacko term for a PR position, like "ombudsman".
"Ombudsman" is not a "wacko term" where I come from. However, an organization I'm associated with has an "ombuds office." Apparently the -man suffix was criminally sexist or something. I'd like to make a sarcastic comment, but the situation what I call pre-ridiculed--anything I said couldn't be as funny as the situation I'm commenting on.
This seems to occur frequently in politics. . . .
"Fleury" sounds like some kind of respiratory problem to me.
Yeah, right. It may be worth mentioning that the Greek version of democracy differs somewhat from ours. In Athens, only free men were allowed to vote. Women and slaves were not.
Technically in the United States, slaves are not allowed to vote either. Of course, the reason is that there aren't any, but I thought that this application of the Curse of Literal Meaning would satisfy some of the people complaining about lack of "geek content."
I think this is an infallible indicator of geekdom--you never hear non-geeks make comments like this, but it's a rare meeting where someone doesn't emit one of these, at least at my place.
There's a self-defeating statment if I've ever seen one. Regardless, a quick search reveals that many mechanic services do indeed bill for diagnostics. Those who don't either pay their technicians less or charge you a higher hourly rate. The general reason why diagnositc fees are either all or nothing is because it is common to spend differing amounts of time diagnosing the same symptoms. Even a doctor will tell you that (who do, in fact, charge for s/office visits/diagnostic fees/).
I guess I have no idea what self-defeating statement means, but . . . whatever.
The previous poster didn't say they didn't typically charge for diagnosis, he said they didn't charge for an estimate, didn't he? As for a flat rate, you must go to a lot different mechanics than me--I see an hourly rate for diagnostic work. In fact, I dropped a car off just this morning and the rate was $85/hour for work and $99/hour for diagnosis (since they use their top guy on that).
I always wondered how these places stay in business. Do you really think the vendor's actually put a lot of thought into finding the perfect tomatoes, freshest eggs and milk, and softest loaves of bread?
Or do they sell whatever the oldest crap they can get away with selling?
We've been getting groceries from Simon Delivers for a couple years and my wife loves them. If there's a quality problem (and there rarely is), the refund is immediate. The only drawback is that if they're out of an item there's no notification so you can choose something else.
The quality of meat and produce have been quite high--much higher than if they just shoveled in whatever was on top of the bin at the local SuperMartWiggly. I suspect that they either reject a lot of stuff or throw it away, which seems to be the secret of the high-end grocery stores, at least in Minnesota. A neighbor works at a warehouse and he says that the cheap places and the expensive places get the same shipments--the expensive ones just throw away the bad stuff (and mark up the remainder to make up for it).
than it does about the software, methinks. I imagine it gives helpful hints like the ones I always turn off in Microsoft Turd. Any construction that deviates from the norm in a boring business document apparently triggers the "grammotron" or whatever they call it. A human reader has some appreciation for style and may actually accept something a little different for the sake of variety and sparkle.
Not that there's anything in this post that serves as an example. I guess that's because I was graded by humans. Seriously, I don't recall getting any encouragement in writing back in the '70s in high school, and not much in college. I guess it wouldn't have been any worse if the Grade-O-Vac was inspecting my papers instead of my mostly-marginally-literate teachers. There were several exceptions, but they focused much more on reading than on writing. I suspect they had a lot greater effect that way--I know they had a great effect on me.
That's just big enough to hold a single ribosome. Any self-replicating cell of that size which required proteins would not be able to manufacture them on its own. And without proteins, you can't replicate DNA. The minimal self-contained set of molecules that is self-replicating is physically much larger than this small size.
Wouldn't it be more correct to say "the minimal known self-contained set of molecules that is self-replicating?" I'm not saying these gizmos exist or are a novel form of life, but there's no reason that a different, simpler self-replicating system couldn't exist. Well, I guess to be fair myself, I have to say we don't know of any reason....
So far all we know about are minor tweaks on the DNA/RNA/ribosome mechanism--it sure would be nifty to see how another system might work.
Annndd...wrong. They never say anything about "aging the bean" -- whoever told you that is just plain wrong. Yes, using beans as soon as they're roasted is a good thing, however, it's even more important to have a better bean and a better roast. So Starbucks has decided to make sure a better bean and roast are in place.
Ask them about how long their coffee can be roasted before it's brewed. I think you'll be suprised. The justification about "aging" has been offered to me on several occasions by various Starbucks counteristas to justify shipping coffee around instead of roasting on-site, which is how a real "gourmet" coffee shop operates (for instance, Dunn Brothers). I don't think it's their official party line, but I suspect it's at least "lore" amongst the workers. If the coffee is more than a few days roasted, it's stale. Even if it's vacuum packed, in my opinion. Many people have never had really excellent coffee, if they think Starbucks falls into that category. Ten years ago I thought it was great too....
Um, isn't this just a matter of taste? I *like* darker roasted coffee.
To some extent, yes. However, the good-quality beans are just wasted if you char the coffee to the extent Starbucks does. The darker the roast, the less of the flavors are . . . well, "visible" is clearly not what I mean--maybe "perceptible" is. Certainly I don't want to interfere with your coffee enjoyment, but all their beans are roasted till they scream--a good roaster roasts different beans differently to enhance their characteristics.
IFAIK Starbucks does some basic things to produce a consistently high quality product; they start with quality beans, roast them darker than is usual, grind them immediately before use, brew with more ground coffee (the thing that increases the caffeine content) and most importantly they DON'T let it sit around and get stale - they throw it out and brew fresh after an hour.
All good, but they let the coffee stale before they use it. We have a local chain where everything is used within three or four days of roasting. Starbucks, by contrast, will tell you that freshly-roasted coffee must "age" before being used. This in my opinion is bunk--nothing is better than freshly-roasted coffee. Well, nothing that you can consume in public, to forstall the jokesters.
Judging by the success of starbucks I'd say a lot of other people feel the same.
Judging by that standard, McDonald's coffee is a lot better than Starbucks, and the New Beetle is a better car than the M3 (if they still make one, that is). Starbux' success is more a triumph of marketing than of sheer coffee quality. I was going to link The Onion's article "New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks," but it isn't available any more. Dang.
Starbucks and friends use coffee that is derived from espresso.
Wrong. "Espresso" is a technique for producing a coffee beverage. It forces hot water under high pressure through tightly-packed grounds. Espresso *does* have more caffeine than brewed coffee, mostly since it is stronger. However, the article appears to be talking about ordinary brewed coffee.
I must agree that "Charbux" coffee is extremely over-roasted. When Cook's Illustrated did a coffee comparison, their tasters didn't like Starbucks. When they had some people that work blending coffees check them out, their opinion was that Starbux beans were higher quality than the others, but they were so burned that the result was just plain ol' nasty.
I'd give a reference to the article, but it's subscription-only. It is clearly the nerd's cooking magazine, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you carried out a lot of research on this? I would think surveys would be unlikely to give reliable results, at least it anyone remembers what happened to Turing.
I didn't notice anyone mention it, but the real reason he was caught was he told the truth to some bobbies (cops, that is), while reporting a theft. Oops.
The fact it was never built is a much better reason for passing it over for First Computer honors.
If what you mean is that there was no way to modify the stored program, I don't think anyone claims that embedded processors that only use ROM for programs aren't computers--at least not seriously.
Nerds, like normal mortals, have interests that range more widely than how to liquid-cool their overclocked cell phones. "What matters" is more about a focus on excellence than a focus on a small segment of technology, at least to me. I'd like to be able to take an excellent picture, just like I'd like to brew an excellent cup of coffee and make a excellent triple-gainer from the nine meter board.
The picture I might have a pretty good shot at.
At least we'd all get an article on Slashdot....
And as we see in this episode, grand juries are subject to abuse by prosecuters. I can't believe there wasn't a link to this in the original article....
This should come in handy to all the other costumed crime fighters in the Slashdot community, too!
So, it isn't money, most likely. Also, insurance companies aren't used to writing Segway policies, so I'm betting your costs on that are much higher....
Myself and my three kids use only around 140 gal/year per each even with three cars--I assume that the 1000 gallon figure includes heating, manufacturing, shipping, and so forth? I have no way of evaluating whether the correct figure is near 12 or 150 gal/acre.
Or maybe this was first posted in 1985. That would make this the oldest Slashdot dupe yet discovered....
As for whether this fusion reactor could explode or not, I don't think that analogizing with a rifle cartridge is going to tell us. I thnk we'd need to consider the actual physics, and it doesn't sound like either of us has the information to do that.
There's lots of energy in a boiler, and sure enough, it can explode violently (though they don't much anymore due to good equipment and safety practices). There's a lot of energy in a big tree too, but they rarely explode (stage trees are an exception). Not sure which analogy is the right one in this case . . . probably neither.
That gives me an idea. He comes back as a disembodied head! Of course, they couldn't get away with the whole Futurama floating-in-a-jar thing (which is a consistent theme of Dr. Fun, by the way), but surely they could work up some kind of thing where we find out he's the King Borg or something. It's not like consistency is a major concert in the franchise . . . they can always end up with it being a holodeck play or a dream or something.
Hey! Maybe we find out that Kirk's an autistic in a ward on Babylon 5 who just dreamed the whole thing!
"Ombudsman" is not a "wacko term" where I come from. However, an organization I'm associated with has an "ombuds office." Apparently the -man suffix was criminally sexist or something. I'd like to make a sarcastic comment, but the situation what I call pre-ridiculed--anything I said couldn't be as funny as the situation I'm commenting on.
This seems to occur frequently in politics. . . .
"Fleury" sounds like some kind of respiratory problem to me.
Technically in the United States, slaves are not allowed to vote either. Of course, the reason is that there aren't any, but I thought that this application of the Curse of Literal Meaning would satisfy some of the people complaining about lack of "geek content."
I think this is an infallible indicator of geekdom--you never hear non-geeks make comments like this, but it's a rare meeting where someone doesn't emit one of these, at least at my place.
The previous poster didn't say they didn't typically charge for diagnosis, he said they didn't charge for an estimate, didn't he? As for a flat rate, you must go to a lot different mechanics than me--I see an hourly rate for diagnostic work. In fact, I dropped a car off just this morning and the rate was $85/hour for work and $99/hour for diagnosis (since they use their top guy on that).
The quality of meat and produce have been quite high--much higher than if they just shoveled in whatever was on top of the bin at the local SuperMartWiggly. I suspect that they either reject a lot of stuff or throw it away, which seems to be the secret of the high-end grocery stores, at least in Minnesota. A neighbor works at a warehouse and he says that the cheap places and the expensive places get the same shipments--the expensive ones just throw away the bad stuff (and mark up the remainder to make up for it).
Not that there's anything in this post that serves as an example. I guess that's because I was graded by humans. Seriously, I don't recall getting any encouragement in writing back in the '70s in high school, and not much in college. I guess it wouldn't have been any worse if the Grade-O-Vac was inspecting my papers instead of my mostly-marginally-literate teachers. There were several exceptions, but they focused much more on reading than on writing. I suspect they had a lot greater effect that way--I know they had a great effect on me.
Wouldn't it be more correct to say "the minimal known self-contained set of molecules that is self-replicating?" I'm not saying these gizmos exist or are a novel form of life, but there's no reason that a different, simpler self-replicating system couldn't exist. Well, I guess to be fair myself, I have to say we don't know of any reason....
So far all we know about are minor tweaks on the DNA/RNA/ribosome mechanism--it sure would be nifty to see how another system might work.
Ask them about how long their coffee can be roasted before it's brewed. I think you'll be suprised. The justification about "aging" has been offered to me on several occasions by various Starbucks counteristas to justify shipping coffee around instead of roasting on-site, which is how a real "gourmet" coffee shop operates (for instance, Dunn Brothers). I don't think it's their official party line, but I suspect it's at least "lore" amongst the workers. If the coffee is more than a few days roasted, it's stale. Even if it's vacuum packed, in my opinion. Many people have never had really excellent coffee, if they think Starbucks falls into that category. Ten years ago I thought it was great too....
To some extent, yes. However, the good-quality beans are just wasted if you char the coffee to the extent Starbucks does. The darker the roast, the less of the flavors are . . . well, "visible" is clearly not what I mean--maybe "perceptible" is. Certainly I don't want to interfere with your coffee enjoyment, but all their beans are roasted till they scream--a good roaster roasts different beans differently to enhance their characteristics.
All good, but they let the coffee stale before they use it. We have a local chain where everything is used within three or four days of roasting. Starbucks, by contrast, will tell you that freshly-roasted coffee must "age" before being used. This in my opinion is bunk--nothing is better than freshly-roasted coffee. Well, nothing that you can consume in public, to forstall the jokesters.
Judging by that standard, McDonald's coffee is a lot better than Starbucks, and the New Beetle is a better car than the M3 (if they still make one, that is). Starbux' success is more a triumph of marketing than of sheer coffee quality. I was going to link The Onion's article "New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks," but it isn't available any more. Dang.Wrong. "Espresso" is a technique for producing a coffee beverage. It forces hot water under high pressure through tightly-packed grounds. Espresso *does* have more caffeine than brewed coffee, mostly since it is stronger. However, the article appears to be talking about ordinary brewed coffee.
I must agree that "Charbux" coffee is extremely over-roasted. When Cook's Illustrated did a coffee comparison, their tasters didn't like Starbucks. When they had some people that work blending coffees check them out, their opinion was that Starbux beans were higher quality than the others, but they were so burned that the result was just plain ol' nasty. I'd give a reference to the article, but it's subscription-only. It is clearly the nerd's cooking magazine, though.