You clearly haven't used Ubuntu... To add/remove applications you choose "Add/Remove..." from the applications menu. And it works. Much easier than Windows with its 20000 incompatible installer programs.
I agree that the US freight rail is good (heck, rail is still used to deliver to lumber yards), but I disagree about the spending for decent passenger rail. Europeans spend 7% of their incomes on transport (including indirectly), Americans spend nearly 20%. Diesel electric is certainly an excellent starting point (getting up to 1000pmpg); just like buses are an excellent starting point for streetcars and subways. But in the long run you want 90mph light rail and 220mph AGVs powered by renewables. European passenger rail also makes a profit. The real problem is that for the last 50 years, the US gov't has been subsidizing (giving for free) road transport to the tune of $60B a year (in current money) and rather than spending any money on PT, they have only provided _loans_ of about $1B/year. Even though PT has a much higher return on investment. This is clearly going to result in poor system design and bankruptcy of PT companies.
Incidentally, when you consider the dense parts of the country, BosWash, the south-east and the west coast, the service area is actually roughly the same as Europe. They just made more sensible design decisions (using US money via the Marshal Plan too:). We fly to cities 300 miles away (50mpg), they catch the train (200mpg and powered by nukes).
Actually, sudo can be set to allow users to manage their own groups. Ubuntu's user-accounts control panel lets you do precisely this. In any case, Linux has had arbitrary file acls for nearly a decade now: man acl:
This manual page describes POSIX Access Control Lists, which are used to
define more fine-grained discretionary access rights for files and direc
tories.
In practice, groups are perfectly adequate for single user machines, and facls are at least as powerful as the windows model.
It's always possible to make a good idea fail. Or put another way, there are many more ways to do something wrong than right. Or put a third way, The existence of a single working model trumps a plethora of failed attempts and shows that the idea itself has merit.
History is scattered with the remains of people who didn't understand this: automation, flight, space, moon, personal computers, web search.
That is a good point! c / 5.8Ghz = 55mm, which is quite large compared to an LED. Perhaps there are Terahertz waves that absorb in argon... Thanks for your insight.
After they are powered off, you have to wait about 2 minutes before you can turn them back on again. This is because certain elements inside the bulbs (like sulfur) need to cool down, solidify, and redeposited themselves back onto the interior walls of the quartz bulb.
Why is this? Argon itself is a gas, and presumably where all the microwave energy is going, so what does it matter whether the sulphur is bouncing around or not?
c) It doesnt scale down well. It needs its power provided by microwaves, which is not efficiently possible in the lower power range.
We have plenty of high efficiency low power microwave sources - consider wifi. Rather than using a magnetron you simply point a suitable oscillator at the bulb. Indeed, you might improve efficiency by using some positive feedback to match the oscillator to the load. Magnetrons aren't particularly efficient, just tremendously robust.
However, I think that it might not scale down because heat losses are a surface phenomenon, which is increasing relative to the volume, and thus small lights cool down too fast (I think this is the same reason why fusion reactors are so ginormous).
Yes, I was puzzling over that too. It seems that you must have some other way to know where you are to distinguish those rrr and bbb cases. So the colours do not give an index, only a route that will eventually pass through the destination. Can it be fixed by adding more colours (obvious choice is to use the same encoding twice, but I can't see how to couch that in terms of single colours)?
Why do you think that VHS tapes do not store data? I can encode them completely to bits, and I can encode bits completely to VHS. Thus they are equivalent.
Thus, a 2 hour tape is equivalent to a 120GB disk. In practice the noise margins aren't that good, and the encoding is not very tight, so we can store more useful information in 5GB in practice using smarter compression (MPEG2 = DVD).
If space elevators are really $10/kg, then it would be plenty cheap to move everyone to space (total cost per person say $2k, so 14 trillion total - how much did the iraq war cost?). Once established in space, we have vast amounts of real estate from mars to the asteroids.
Whether it is a good idea to bank on such a future is a different question.
You haven't demonstrated this, merely made claims. The argument is that the number of migrants to the US has the same proportionality from Cuba, Mexico and Canada. Thus, using the number of migrants is clearly not telling you anything about the govt in question, unless you have further hard data to make your case.
You should not compare conditions with the US, which inherited much of its wealth from the winnings from WWII and other historical boons, and instead consider similar sized neighbours Haiti (life expectancy 55, GDP $4400) and Dominican Republic (75, $32000). By those measures it is not clear that Cubans are much worse off at all (sitting halfway between the two in welfare). Indeed, the figures for migration between the 3 would be very interesting.
Considering that Cuba has been attacked both militarily and economically by the US it is surprising it does so well.
Interestingly enough, the percentage of Cuban refugees compared to the population of Cuba is roughly the same as the proportion of Mexican refugees compared to the population of Mexico and ditto Canada. I myself am an immigrant to the US. Could it be that a certain proportion of people simply move to a new country to make a living? I know that the reason I 'fled' to the US was economic, and the last customs official I spoke to (admittedly not an expert by any means) said that the vast majority of people who claimed political asylum were in fact economic refugees.
The majority of the fleeing Cubans, according to Wikipedia, are actually using fairly well trod routes (mostly by plane it seems), which suggests that their exodus isn't particularly a risky one.
Incidentally, I've never met a Cuban refugee, but plenty of American refugees (And indeed plenty of Somali and Afghan too). So I have no personal experience of their plight. I make no claims about whether Cubans are well off or not, other than what is reflected in the figures, which were the original point of contention. Paul Farmer seems to think they are okay though.
The CIA roughly agrees (80.9 vs 79.5). The point remains that despite being very poor they live a long life. And from people I know personally who have been there, they aren't that unhappy.
If you look at that link you gave, there are two lists. One is by the CIA and one is by the UN. The UN gives Cuba a greater average life expectancy than the US. Now admittedly not by much (they are consecutive), but it is impressive given the dramatic difference in say GDP(PPP)/capita.
Rank Country ave male female GDP (PPP)/person 37 Cuba 78.3 76.2 80.4 4,500 38 United States 78.2 75.6 80.8 45,594
Slashdot Mirror
No, only the edges.
You clearly haven't used Ubuntu... To add/remove applications you choose "Add/Remove..." from the applications menu. And it works. Much easier than Windows with its 20000 incompatible installer programs.
But by not spending that money, he is making your money worth more. Is that not a gift to society as a whole?
I agree that the US freight rail is good (heck, rail is still used to deliver to lumber yards), but I disagree about the spending for decent passenger rail. Europeans spend 7% of their incomes on transport (including indirectly), Americans spend nearly 20%. Diesel electric is certainly an excellent starting point (getting up to 1000pmpg); just like buses are an excellent starting point for streetcars and subways. But in the long run you want 90mph light rail and 220mph AGVs powered by renewables. European passenger rail also makes a profit. The real problem is that for the last 50 years, the US gov't has been subsidizing (giving for free) road transport to the tune of $60B a year (in current money) and rather than spending any money on PT, they have only provided _loans_ of about $1B/year. Even though PT has a much higher return on investment. This is clearly going to result in poor system design and bankruptcy of PT companies.
:). We fly to cities 300 miles away (50mpg), they catch the train (200mpg and powered by nukes).
Incidentally, when you consider the dense parts of the country, BosWash, the south-east and the west coast, the service area is actually roughly the same as Europe. They just made more sensible design decisions (using US money via the Marshal Plan too
Which is why you should install firefox 3. It's awesome bar none.
Drag power is v^3, Drag force is v^2, power is force distance / second = v^2 * v.
Actually, sudo can be set to allow users to manage their own groups. Ubuntu's user-accounts control panel lets you do precisely this. In any case, Linux has had arbitrary file acls for nearly a decade now: man acl:
This manual page describes POSIX Access Control Lists, which are used to
define more fine-grained discretionary access rights for files and direc
tories.
In practice, groups are perfectly adequate for single user machines, and facls are at least as powerful as the windows model.
It's always possible to make a good idea fail. Or put another way, there are many more ways to do something wrong than right. Or put a third way, The existence of a single working model trumps a plethora of failed attempts and shows that the idea itself has merit.
History is scattered with the remains of people who didn't understand this: automation, flight, space, moon, personal computers, web search.
That is a good point! c / 5.8Ghz = 55mm, which is quite large compared to an LED. Perhaps there are Terahertz waves that absorb in argon... Thanks for your insight.
After they are powered off, you have to wait about 2 minutes before you can turn them back on again. This is because certain elements inside the bulbs (like sulfur) need to cool down, solidify, and redeposited themselves back onto the interior walls of the quartz bulb.
Why is this? Argon itself is a gas, and presumably where all the microwave energy is going, so what does it matter whether the sulphur is bouncing around or not?
c) It doesnt scale down well. It needs its power provided by microwaves, which is not efficiently possible in the lower power range.
We have plenty of high efficiency low power microwave sources - consider wifi. Rather than using a magnetron you simply point a suitable oscillator at the bulb. Indeed, you might improve efficiency by using some positive feedback to match the oscillator to the load. Magnetrons aren't particularly efficient, just tremendously robust.
However, I think that it might not scale down because heat losses are a surface phenomenon, which is increasing relative to the volume, and thus small lights cool down too fast (I think this is the same reason why fusion reactors are so ginormous).
I don't understand:
Water Pumps
4800m3/hr@7bar (4 pumps)
6000m3/hr@8bar (3 pumps)
4800 < 6000, 7 < 8, 4 > 3
The four pump option delivers less output than the three pump option? Must be a typo I guess.
Yes, I was puzzling over that too. It seems that you must have some other way to know where you are to distinguish those rrr and bbb cases. So the colours do not give an index, only a route that will eventually pass through the destination. Can it be fixed by adding more colours (obvious choice is to use the same encoding twice, but I can't see how to couch that in terms of single colours)?
Why do you think that VHS tapes do not store data? I can encode them completely to bits, and I can encode bits completely to VHS. Thus they are equivalent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS says 3MHz bandwidth and 43dB S/N
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem says 129Mb/s or 16.25MB/s
Thus, a 2 hour tape is equivalent to a 120GB disk. In practice the noise margins aren't that good, and the encoding is not very tight, so we can store more useful information in 5GB in practice using smarter compression (MPEG2 = DVD).
If space elevators are really $10/kg, then it would be plenty cheap to move everyone to space (total cost per person say $2k, so 14 trillion total - how much did the iraq war cost?). Once established in space, we have vast amounts of real estate from mars to the asteroids.
Whether it is a good idea to bank on such a future is a different question.
Sure, but that is vanishingly unlikely.
"how many bits of information can be reliably recovered from a fingerprint?". I'm sure the answer is positive;
:)
I'm certain it's not negative
Do you drive a car?
Never worked in a post office, have you?
You haven't demonstrated this, merely made claims. The argument is that the number of migrants to the US has the same proportionality from Cuba, Mexico and Canada. Thus, using the number of migrants is clearly not telling you anything about the govt in question, unless you have further hard data to make your case.
You should not compare conditions with the US, which inherited much of its wealth from the winnings from WWII and other historical boons, and instead consider similar sized neighbours Haiti (life expectancy 55, GDP $4400) and Dominican Republic (75, $32000). By those measures it is not clear that Cubans are much worse off at all (sitting halfway between the two in welfare). Indeed, the figures for migration between the 3 would be very interesting.
Considering that Cuba has been attacked both militarily and economically by the US it is surprising it does so well.
Interestingly enough, the percentage of Cuban refugees compared to the population of Cuba is roughly the same as the proportion of Mexican refugees compared to the population of Mexico and ditto Canada. I myself am an immigrant to the US. Could it be that a certain proportion of people simply move to a new country to make a living? I know that the reason I 'fled' to the US was economic, and the last customs official I spoke to (admittedly not an expert by any means) said that the vast majority of people who claimed political asylum were in fact economic refugees.
The majority of the fleeing Cubans, according to Wikipedia, are actually using fairly well trod routes (mostly by plane it seems), which suggests that their exodus isn't particularly a risky one.
Incidentally, I've never met a Cuban refugee, but plenty of American refugees (And indeed plenty of Somali and Afghan too). So I have no personal experience of their plight. I make no claims about whether Cubans are well off or not, other than what is reflected in the figures, which were the original point of contention. Paul Farmer seems to think they are okay though.
The CIA roughly agrees (80.9 vs 79.5). The point remains that despite being very poor they live a long life. And from people I know personally who have been there, they aren't that unhappy.
If you look at that link you gave, there are two lists. One is by the CIA and one is by the UN. The UN gives Cuba a greater average life expectancy than the US. Now admittedly not by much (they are consecutive), but it is impressive given the dramatic difference in say GDP(PPP)/capita.
Rank Country ave male female GDP (PPP)/person
37 Cuba 78.3 76.2 80.4 4,500
38 United States 78.2 75.6 80.8 45,594
Actually, I think beryllium copper alloys are much better for arc damage resistance. Pity beryllium is so toxic.