Is that figure just based on some arbitrary appraisal of the the machine's time or what?
This counts as a good question, why did it get modded out of existence?
$150k counts as a lot of electricity. Even at the current difficulty, I find it hard to believe someone could have used that much power to mine only $8k worth of BTC.
So how did they get that number? Prorated over the expected useful lifetime, so quite possibly one or two days of CPU time at 500 million dollars total depreciated over 18 months?
This doesn't change the shittyness of the crime, but let's not call a spade a "garden tool of mass destruction" here.
Aww man, now I need to upgrade my driveway's "vehicular denial" minefield to armor piercing? C'mon guys, that shit costs real money! Couldn't we stop the arms race at flechette mines?
Hey, if we live in a warzone, I have the right to protect myself. Hope none of you unarmored piggies try a no-knock...
If you insist that this level of detail has been widely available for decades outside of a few progressive areas, you are positively psychotic, living in a made up world.
Instead of calling me crazy, how about you point me to the mind-blowing success those few progressive areas have experienced directly as a result of their utopian panopticons?
The virtues are self-evident. And if they are not self-evident, you are not informed enough to have an opinion. The negatives are not self-evident, but parents have nevertheless found them.
I have to ask - How did you steel yourself against the death cries of the English language when you twisted "self evident" to mean something that requires an informed perspective, in the same breath that you would deny that phrase to the observations of the masses? Brilliant!
The focus in on individual outcomes.
Ah, and we get to one plausible non-Orwellian motivation here... The brightest kids, the ones that become the next Einstein or Fuller, already tend to self-serve in a deficient educational environment. Thus, your focus on "individual outcomes" means yet another way we can spend a quarter of a million per year per tod to teach them how to tie their shoes and wipe their own asses by grade 12. Thanks, but I'd take a marginally better educated general population over that any day.
Anyone who thought that the virtues of this scheme would be 'self-evident' must be a real pleasure to deal with.
In fairness, the virtues do sound self-evident - If you have the goal of implementing a totalitarian regime on the 50 year horizon. You can slowly figure out who supports you, who won't care, and who will actively mobilize against you... And then just find some pretense to lock the latter group up for the majority of their adult life.
Now, the stated goals? Not even realistic. Although aggregating at a larger scale might tease out a few hints, individual school districts and even whole states have already had that level of detail available for decades, and yet consistently deny the single most useful finding we have - Smaller class sizes mean better outcomes. If even remotely serious, this just means they have their fingers crossed that somehow, they'll find a way to prove that every student does best when we completely eliminate teachers and physical school buildings, and instead give out iPads that record everything that happens in the kids' homes.
I didn't read much of the article, so I don't know what it said about dividend paying stocks.
Actually, it says nothing about dividends... The GGP post mentioned them, but not the way I meant. I must have clicked through to another article off TFA and conflated the two into one source, mea culpa.:I
"Secondary markets" and "OTC" don't mean what you think they mean - Specifically, "OTC" doesn't mean "Pink Sheets". I suspect you've confused OTC for OTCBB. Both the NASDAQ and the NYSE count as secondary markets, and everything on the NASDAQ also counts as OTC, which really just means a "dealer" marker (which in turn has nothing to do with "dealers" as you might understand it, it just means direct sales between buyers and sellers, rather than an agent-mediated auction style market like the NYSE).
That said, I would have to say that the markets as a whole have become about as stable as the classic "pink sheets" markets. Prices have completely decoupled from reality, when a car bomb in Kabul can send the entire market down by over a percent, or an unusually clear message from Janet Y can send it on a three day rally. Companies don't make and lose (as an aggregate) hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of an hour, no matter what the markets say.
As for TFA's comment about dividend stocks... Yeah, they count as a pretty decent safe-haven in a bear market; but overall, they have a piss-poor return - Three to four percent sustained, at best. Beats (core) inflation, but not by much... Certainly not enough to retire on unless you literally sock away half of your paycheck for the next 40 years.
We appear unwaveringly headed for a securities market implosion, and not merely of the recession/depression kind, but something much, much worse.
Seriously, WTF, US government agencies? Did I miss the announcement of "opposite decade"?
We have the DoJ obstructing justice by intentionally destroying evidence;
we have the BATF running guns to Mexican cartels;
we have ICE taking captured illegals out of local police custody and setting them loose on the streets;
we have the NSA spying on the single target off limits to them, with a true patriot under asylum in fucking Russia for pointing that out...
And now we have the FBI coordinating cyberattacks on the government of another country?
Can we just stop pretending, and admit the government has absolutely no interest whatsoever in obeying the will of We The People?
an employee shall agree not to work for any other company full or part time except at hobbiest/training levels
I can understand wanting the full time so companies don't dick you around with 10 hours here and 15 hours there, but why the hell would you want to outlaw contracting on the side?
An awfully lot of people pay the bills with their 9-to-5, but pay for their beer and toys with odd jobs on the weekend.
We're not making shoes here. It's quite rare that "productivity per dollar of salary" really matters, at least not by a factor of 2. Predictably delivering high quality code on schedule as a team is what matters to me.
To you? No.
To your employee producing 2x the "good" output of everyone else? I can promise you, he knows his value. And as soon as a better offer comes along, you'll learn a whole new appreciation for what he brought (notice the "past tense") to the table.
Then months went by and i realized something: Windows 8 is not really that bad. I know how to find all the stuffs now.
If it takes an IT professional months to get used to the new interface - Yes, that counts as pretty fucking bad.
Hey, perhaps behind the scenes it makes coffee and help me seduce that cute secretary on the 4th floor. On the front end, you still have Quasimodo with flatulence.
"Idiot" or "dummy" misses the point, I think. Never confuse activity with productivity, or "who cares how fast you go if you're going the wrong way".
You describe two entirely different problems.
Yes, you have fast programmers who half-ass everything. And yes, you have slow programmers who carefully and methodically solve the problem correctly the first time.
Those fall on two orthogonal axes, however. You also have fast programmers who get it right the first time, and slow programmers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
Obviously, falling on the "get it right" half of the plane counts as the better option. But TFA doesn't ask that. TFA asks how you deal with someone consistently slow and wrong. Rephrasing the question to something more PC ("Dumb kids don't exist!") doesn't address the real issue.
Personally, I've found that village idiots come in two flavors - Those who know it, and those who don't. The ones who know it, you can give them nice safe tedious shitwork like data entry, and they can handle it and everyone goes away happy (though depending on pay structures at your company, you might somewhat resent making the same as the guy doing nothing more than copying numbers from paper to Excel). The ones that don't know it, however... There be dragons! At best, you can try to give them seemingly important but secretly completely inconsequential projects to work on, and hope they don't annoy too many people asking for help along the way. And at worst, you write a custom check-in script that alerts their babysitter about everything they did so it can be personally validated and (more often than not) rolled back ASAP.
Yes, Virginia, dumb kids exist. And some of them manage to fumble their way into working as dumb programmers (though thank Zeus, they tend to consider that "hard" and usually prefer PolySci).
It's a federal financial database, not state-run news agencies. Oh no! The government knows information that I already give other government agencies!
Actually, no, they won't. Other than name, address, and social security number, the federal government's various agencies have me listed as a hyperspace navigator, a sith lord, an ethnic Jawara (no, not a Star Wars reference), President of the United States, a polygamist, a football fan... The more outlandish, the better.
The US constitution authorizes one, and only one, official data-mining survey, which I dutifully fill out (omitting all questions not directly related to apportionment of representation, of course - including the entirety of the "American Family Survey"). Everything else, I treat as no more legitimate than JD Powers surveys (thanks for all those $fives, BTW - By all means, do not add me to your do-not-contact list!).
As for taxes, sadly yes, one government agency knows my real income. But they don't ask any particularly obnoxious questions, and I only tell them things they already know (which makes one wonder why we need to bother filing personal income tax returns in the first place, but, meh).
You are a professional...they don't pay you for a political opinion and they need some real technical insight.
First, "just do your job" counts as a piss-poor attitude. If you work as a minimum wage burger flipper, yeah, your employer has no expectation of you to actually think for yourself. If you work as a highly educated IT professional, your employer expects you to understand the current events in your profession, and have an informed opinion on the same.
That said, although Washington has done its best to make net neutrality into a political issue, it really doesn't have anything to do with politics. It has to do with routing around damage. Net Neutrality means nothing more and nothing less than letting the internet function properly. Violating that at the behest of the highest bidder breaks the proper functioning of the internet. Simple as that.
The FP author's problem comes entirely from how to explain the above to clueless PHBs who see nothing but dollar signs. And perhaps they do have a clue, and really want to know the downside to what superficially looks like a good idea.
So the right answer to your question, as others have said - Get them their numbers. Keep the tone factual. And take heart, you get to insert your expert opinions in the selection of appropriate hardware and in raising peripheral issues such as liability for not actually delivering what your renters pay for. Perhaps more than anyone else, you have the power to make this sound like a simple set of QOS rules, or a massive (and correspondingly expensive infrastructure upgrade).
It can just be a metal tube. Aluminum would be terrible for instance, and it would have to be rifled, to give the bullet spin so it doesn't tumble through the air.
Again, not talking about making a competition-grade firearm here... Just something compact and capable of firing without risk of blowing up in the user's face. Rifling doesn't much matter at 10ft.
That said, I mentioned you would just need the metal for the chamber and throat of the barrel. Pressure and heat drops fast after ignition; you could still print 2/3rds of the barrel with the rifling needed for at least basic on-axis stabilization.
Apart from pitch size, panel quality, color accuracy, setting fine-tuning and viewing angle size? Not really, no:)
On color, I have to agree with you. The Seiki 4k panels have horrible color (though as you also point out, that comes mostly from the lack of fine tuning capabilities). If you want a 4k display for doing graphic design work, yeah, you'll want to blow $3000+ on a it; for programming, not so big of a deal.
For the rest - At 4k, pitch size means almost nothing. Two feet away (my typical distance), you can't really make out individual pixels. The pixels themselves could count as mathematical point sources of light, effectively a pitch size of zero, and it would look identical. For quality, I don't know what to say, I've had zero problems with it, NO dead pixels, no crappy buttons or connectors snapping off... No frills, of course, but a reasonably well-built product. For viewing angle, "as close to 180 as matters". I can get far enough away from center that the foreshortening becomes unbearable before I exceed the viewing angle.:)
And I'm sick of gun people thinking of guns as a great equalizer that anyone can make without substantial engineering expertise. But somehow I suspect neither group is going to respect the results of this research.
Do you have access to a steel pipe with a reducing coupling, a spring, and a nail? Then yes, you can make something capable of more-or-less safely firing most lower pressure rounds. By "more or less", I mean I wouldn't touch one with a 10 foot firing pin, but it would work just fine 99 times out of 100.
For the 3d printed guns we hear the most about, keep in mind that they have the goal of a "pure" implementation, using just 3d printed parts. Your local street punks probably don't care about the "purity" of their finished product... So, remove that constraint and add a trivial metal part or two (a chamber and at least the throat of the barrel - just a plain ol' dumb metal tube, in essence - would single-handedly solve the "blows up on firing" problem), and even your local wannabe-thugs could manage to print and assemble a fairly effective DIY gun.
Note: that's not a monitor, technically, but a TV.
The distinction has become largely meaningless - The only real difference between the two, it has a TV tuner in it while a "monitor" would not. And as a bonus, it has halfway decent sound capabilities by default, which most (but not all) monitors do not.
You know, that subsidy doesn't mean you got a $600 phone for $100... it means you got a $600 phone for $1000, but get to pay in installments.
You know, the GP obviously meant to say "without"? Just this week, Amazon had a basic quad-core prepaid (ie, no contract or subsidy) Android 4.4 smartphone on sale for $69.
That said, royalties often use a percentage basis rather than a flat fee, so you can't necessarily take the existence of a sub-$120 smartphone as disproof of TFA.
I assume he's TRYING to describe what a rectangle would look like in a fisheye lens
He meant to describe angular foreshortening, which really does count as a problem when using a large (over 30ish inches) screen as a monitor, two feet away from it. Yes, our brains can "correct" the image and overall, it still looks like a rectangle; but at the same time, any content shown on the far sides of the panel look noticeably squished.
When using it as a TV from 10+ feet away, however, it makes very little difference whether you correct for angle or not.
A few months ago I started using a 4k panel as my primary monitor. Wonderful, I absolutely love it, with one* slight annoyance - At a distance of 2ish feet (rather than TV-viewing distances of 10+ feet), the edges have enough of an angle that the foreshortening becomes distractingly noticeable.
If we could get a decently priced panel (c'mon, Big Names, Seiki has proven you can do it, quit trying to get $2500 for the same thing they list for $499!) with a slight curve to it, it would significantly improve the experience when used as a monitor. For TV, maybe not so much; but monitors, yes.
* Well, no, the biggest problem comes from the fact that in 2014, Windows still can't sanely handle displays over 96dpi. But I can't blame the display itself for that.
Not quite. The only difference seen is with people driving cars to purchase the dvd.
This - THANK you, someone on Slashdot knows how to read! Hell, you don't even need to read, just look at the pretty chart.
Physically dragging yourself to the store, just for the purpose of buying or renting a single DVD comes out to more energy used. Every other scenario comes out to less energy, including buying it and having it mailed to you. And if you ignore the salmon-colored portion of each bar (the part that goes toward driving) because, for example, you bought a DVD while out and already at the store getting other stuff... Store-bought would actually come out as the most efficient.
More suspiciously, I find it odd that they dropped the "client device operation" energy consumption by over half for streaming. I don't know about you, but my USB-powered DVD drive draws under 2.5W; My TV draws 80-90W. I'd love to ask the authors what part of streaming magically makes my TV 20x more energy efficient.
"This info-tisement brought to you by Netflix and Blockbuster, who really wish you'd quit insisting we stock all these damned physical discs; and by the MPAA, who would like to remind you that you only license the contents of your DVDs, they can still revoke that license any time they want."
We won't be operating D9 bulldozers on other planets.
Why would we? It makes no sense to think in terms of Earth-style construction; instead, just pick a small shallow crater and give it a transparent airtight roof (think partial geodesic dome, sort of a buried Quonset hut assembled on-site), preferably but not necessarily using local minerals to form the bulk of the concrete used to anchor it to the crater. Bam, you have "Habitat 1.0", good for a few weeks with canned air until the plants start growing.
Mostly, though, we need to figure out a way to work with what Mars has, rather than figuring out a way to get hundreds of tons of heavy equipment there and keep it operating. So in that regard, I agree with you. I just take that as a design constraint, however, not a showstopper.
The 'Dragon V2' is an upgraded, man rated version of the unmanned spaceship that has made several successful cargo trips to the International Space Station.
The Dragon V2: Strong enough for a man, gyroscopically balanced for a woman!
"Getting them the shots they need would reduce the risk of anyone on the list getting sick, and would also reduce the threat of an outbreak in the community in which they live or travel to [and] from."
One major problem with that... The morons not currently vaccinated didn't just somehow accidentally slip through the cracks and missed out on getting their MMR - They actively don't want vaccinations.
In implementing this seemingly reasonable service, does the government plan to round people up, hold them down, and vaccinate them by force against their will? Hey, I might actually agree with that, because these fools endanger me by reducing the overall population's overall "herd immunity" - But let's call a spade a spade, and not pretend this will come down to anything less than forced vaccinations at the wrong end of Government Guns.
And in that regard, I don't support this plan, because the very fact that the government would gloss over the only possible outcome makes me seriously question their real motivation. We can all see the obvious slippery slope, so which angle haven't we checked yet? Hmm, we have effective vaccines against opiates, they have ones for cannabis, cocaine, and tobacco well under way (and yet we can't cure cancer yet, really great use of resources, guys!). Why fight a war on drugs when you can just make the entire population incapable of getting high? Or how about the biological threat of the week, whether that means anthrax or smallpox or ebola or what-have-you?
So just no, thank you. The government that declares it has the right to force me to modify the conditions inside my own body against my will, becomes my mortal enemy and should expect a level of "cooperation" appropriate to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that figure just based on some arbitrary appraisal of the the machine's time or what?
This counts as a good question, why did it get modded out of existence?
$150k counts as a lot of electricity. Even at the current difficulty, I find it hard to believe someone could have used that much power to mine only $8k worth of BTC.
So how did they get that number? Prorated over the expected useful lifetime, so quite possibly one or two days of CPU time at 500 million dollars total depreciated over 18 months?
This doesn't change the shittyness of the crime, but let's not call a spade a "garden tool of mass destruction" here.
Aww man, now I need to upgrade my driveway's "vehicular denial" minefield to armor piercing? C'mon guys, that shit costs real money! Couldn't we stop the arms race at flechette mines?
Hey, if we live in a warzone, I have the right to protect myself. Hope none of you unarmored piggies try a no-knock...
If you insist that this level of detail has been widely available for decades outside of a few progressive areas, you are positively psychotic, living in a made up world.
Instead of calling me crazy, how about you point me to the mind-blowing success those few progressive areas have experienced directly as a result of their utopian panopticons?
The virtues are self-evident. And if they are not self-evident, you are not informed enough to have an opinion. The negatives are not self-evident, but parents have nevertheless found them.
I have to ask - How did you steel yourself against the death cries of the English language when you twisted "self evident" to mean something that requires an informed perspective, in the same breath that you would deny that phrase to the observations of the masses? Brilliant!
The focus in on individual outcomes.
Ah, and we get to one plausible non-Orwellian motivation here... The brightest kids, the ones that become the next Einstein or Fuller, already tend to self-serve in a deficient educational environment. Thus, your focus on "individual outcomes" means yet another way we can spend a quarter of a million per year per tod to teach them how to tie their shoes and wipe their own asses by grade 12. Thanks, but I'd take a marginally better educated general population over that any day.
Anyone who thought that the virtues of this scheme would be 'self-evident' must be a real pleasure to deal with.
In fairness, the virtues do sound self-evident - If you have the goal of implementing a totalitarian regime on the 50 year horizon. You can slowly figure out who supports you, who won't care, and who will actively mobilize against you... And then just find some pretense to lock the latter group up for the majority of their adult life.
Now, the stated goals? Not even realistic. Although aggregating at a larger scale might tease out a few hints, individual school districts and even whole states have already had that level of detail available for decades, and yet consistently deny the single most useful finding we have - Smaller class sizes mean better outcomes. If even remotely serious, this just means they have their fingers crossed that somehow, they'll find a way to prove that every student does best when we completely eliminate teachers and physical school buildings, and instead give out iPads that record everything that happens in the kids' homes.
I didn't read much of the article, so I don't know what it said about dividend paying stocks.
:I
Actually, it says nothing about dividends... The GGP post mentioned them, but not the way I meant. I must have clicked through to another article off TFA and conflated the two into one source, mea culpa.
Those are the OTC and pink markets.
"Secondary markets" and "OTC" don't mean what you think they mean - Specifically, "OTC" doesn't mean "Pink Sheets". I suspect you've confused OTC for OTCBB. Both the NASDAQ and the NYSE count as secondary markets, and everything on the NASDAQ also counts as OTC, which really just means a "dealer" marker (which in turn has nothing to do with "dealers" as you might understand it, it just means direct sales between buyers and sellers, rather than an agent-mediated auction style market like the NYSE).
That said, I would have to say that the markets as a whole have become about as stable as the classic "pink sheets" markets. Prices have completely decoupled from reality, when a car bomb in Kabul can send the entire market down by over a percent, or an unusually clear message from Janet Y can send it on a three day rally. Companies don't make and lose (as an aggregate) hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of an hour, no matter what the markets say.
As for TFA's comment about dividend stocks... Yeah, they count as a pretty decent safe-haven in a bear market; but overall, they have a piss-poor return - Three to four percent sustained, at best. Beats (core) inflation, but not by much... Certainly not enough to retire on unless you literally sock away half of your paycheck for the next 40 years.
We appear unwaveringly headed for a securities market implosion, and not merely of the recession/depression kind, but something much, much worse.
Seriously, WTF, US government agencies? Did I miss the announcement of "opposite decade"?
We have the DoJ obstructing justice by intentionally destroying evidence;
we have the BATF running guns to Mexican cartels;
we have ICE taking captured illegals out of local police custody and setting them loose on the streets;
we have the NSA spying on the single target off limits to them, with a true patriot under asylum in fucking Russia for pointing that out...
And now we have the FBI coordinating cyberattacks on the government of another country?
Can we just stop pretending, and admit the government has absolutely no interest whatsoever in obeying the will of We The People?
an employee shall agree not to work for any other company full or part time except at hobbiest/training levels
I can understand wanting the full time so companies don't dick you around with 10 hours here and 15 hours there, but why the hell would you want to outlaw contracting on the side?
An awfully lot of people pay the bills with their 9-to-5, but pay for their beer and toys with odd jobs on the weekend.
We're not making shoes here. It's quite rare that "productivity per dollar of salary" really matters, at least not by a factor of 2. Predictably delivering high quality code on schedule as a team is what matters to me.
To you? No.
To your employee producing 2x the "good" output of everyone else? I can promise you, he knows his value. And as soon as a better offer comes along, you'll learn a whole new appreciation for what he brought (notice the "past tense") to the table.
Then months went by and i realized something: Windows 8 is not really that bad. I know how to find all the stuffs now.
If it takes an IT professional months to get used to the new interface - Yes, that counts as pretty fucking bad.
Hey, perhaps behind the scenes it makes coffee and help me seduce that cute secretary on the 4th floor. On the front end, you still have Quasimodo with flatulence.
"Idiot" or "dummy" misses the point, I think. Never confuse activity with productivity, or "who cares how fast you go if you're going the wrong way".
You describe two entirely different problems.
Yes, you have fast programmers who half-ass everything. And yes, you have slow programmers who carefully and methodically solve the problem correctly the first time.
Those fall on two orthogonal axes, however. You also have fast programmers who get it right the first time, and slow programmers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
Obviously, falling on the "get it right" half of the plane counts as the better option. But TFA doesn't ask that. TFA asks how you deal with someone consistently slow and wrong. Rephrasing the question to something more PC ("Dumb kids don't exist!") doesn't address the real issue.
Personally, I've found that village idiots come in two flavors - Those who know it, and those who don't. The ones who know it, you can give them nice safe tedious shitwork like data entry, and they can handle it and everyone goes away happy (though depending on pay structures at your company, you might somewhat resent making the same as the guy doing nothing more than copying numbers from paper to Excel). The ones that don't know it, however... There be dragons! At best, you can try to give them seemingly important but secretly completely inconsequential projects to work on, and hope they don't annoy too many people asking for help along the way. And at worst, you write a custom check-in script that alerts their babysitter about everything they did so it can be personally validated and (more often than not) rolled back ASAP.
Yes, Virginia, dumb kids exist. And some of them manage to fumble their way into working as dumb programmers (though thank Zeus, they tend to consider that "hard" and usually prefer PolySci).
It's a federal financial database, not state-run news agencies. Oh no! The government knows information that I already give other government agencies!
Actually, no, they won't. Other than name, address, and social security number, the federal government's various agencies have me listed as a hyperspace navigator, a sith lord, an ethnic Jawara (no, not a Star Wars reference), President of the United States, a polygamist, a football fan... The more outlandish, the better.
The US constitution authorizes one, and only one, official data-mining survey, which I dutifully fill out (omitting all questions not directly related to apportionment of representation, of course - including the entirety of the "American Family Survey"). Everything else, I treat as no more legitimate than JD Powers surveys (thanks for all those $fives, BTW - By all means, do not add me to your do-not-contact list!).
As for taxes, sadly yes, one government agency knows my real income. But they don't ask any particularly obnoxious questions, and I only tell them things they already know (which makes one wonder why we need to bother filing personal income tax returns in the first place, but, meh).
You are a professional...they don't pay you for a political opinion and they need some real technical insight.
First, "just do your job" counts as a piss-poor attitude. If you work as a minimum wage burger flipper, yeah, your employer has no expectation of you to actually think for yourself. If you work as a highly educated IT professional, your employer expects you to understand the current events in your profession, and have an informed opinion on the same.
That said, although Washington has done its best to make net neutrality into a political issue, it really doesn't have anything to do with politics. It has to do with routing around damage. Net Neutrality means nothing more and nothing less than letting the internet function properly. Violating that at the behest of the highest bidder breaks the proper functioning of the internet. Simple as that.
The FP author's problem comes entirely from how to explain the above to clueless PHBs who see nothing but dollar signs. And perhaps they do have a clue, and really want to know the downside to what superficially looks like a good idea.
So the right answer to your question, as others have said - Get them their numbers. Keep the tone factual. And take heart, you get to insert your expert opinions in the selection of appropriate hardware and in raising peripheral issues such as liability for not actually delivering what your renters pay for. Perhaps more than anyone else, you have the power to make this sound like a simple set of QOS rules, or a massive (and correspondingly expensive infrastructure upgrade).
It can just be a metal tube. Aluminum would be terrible for instance, and it would have to be rifled, to give the bullet spin so it doesn't tumble through the air.
Again, not talking about making a competition-grade firearm here... Just something compact and capable of firing without risk of blowing up in the user's face. Rifling doesn't much matter at 10ft.
That said, I mentioned you would just need the metal for the chamber and throat of the barrel. Pressure and heat drops fast after ignition; you could still print 2/3rds of the barrel with the rifling needed for at least basic on-axis stabilization.
Although they only do 30hz at 4k, the Seiki panels can handle true 120hz at 1080p; accordingly, they have a G2G of 6.5ms (~150 hz).
For gaming, they Seikis actually look pretty good as long as you drop the resolution to 1080p.
Apart from pitch size, panel quality, color accuracy, setting fine-tuning and viewing angle size? Not really, no :)
:)
On color, I have to agree with you. The Seiki 4k panels have horrible color (though as you also point out, that comes mostly from the lack of fine tuning capabilities). If you want a 4k display for doing graphic design work, yeah, you'll want to blow $3000+ on a it; for programming, not so big of a deal.
For the rest - At 4k, pitch size means almost nothing. Two feet away (my typical distance), you can't really make out individual pixels. The pixels themselves could count as mathematical point sources of light, effectively a pitch size of zero, and it would look identical. For quality, I don't know what to say, I've had zero problems with it, NO dead pixels, no crappy buttons or connectors snapping off... No frills, of course, but a reasonably well-built product. For viewing angle, "as close to 180 as matters". I can get far enough away from center that the foreshortening becomes unbearable before I exceed the viewing angle.
And I'm sick of gun people thinking of guns as a great equalizer that anyone can make without substantial engineering expertise. But somehow I suspect neither group is going to respect the results of this research.
Do you have access to a steel pipe with a reducing coupling, a spring, and a nail? Then yes, you can make something capable of more-or-less safely firing most lower pressure rounds. By "more or less", I mean I wouldn't touch one with a 10 foot firing pin, but it would work just fine 99 times out of 100.
For the 3d printed guns we hear the most about, keep in mind that they have the goal of a "pure" implementation, using just 3d printed parts. Your local street punks probably don't care about the "purity" of their finished product... So, remove that constraint and add a trivial metal part or two (a chamber and at least the throat of the barrel - just a plain ol' dumb metal tube, in essence - would single-handedly solve the "blows up on firing" problem), and even your local wannabe-thugs could manage to print and assemble a fairly effective DIY gun.
Note: that's not a monitor, technically, but a TV.
The distinction has become largely meaningless - The only real difference between the two, it has a TV tuner in it while a "monitor" would not. And as a bonus, it has halfway decent sound capabilities by default, which most (but not all) monitors do not.
You know, that subsidy doesn't mean you got a $600 phone for $100... it means you got a $600 phone for $1000, but get to pay in installments.
You know, the GP obviously meant to say "without"? Just this week, Amazon had a basic quad-core prepaid (ie, no contract or subsidy) Android 4.4 smartphone on sale for $69.
That said, royalties often use a percentage basis rather than a flat fee, so you can't necessarily take the existence of a sub-$120 smartphone as disproof of TFA.
I assume he's TRYING to describe what a rectangle would look like in a fisheye lens
He meant to describe angular foreshortening, which really does count as a problem when using a large (over 30ish inches) screen as a monitor, two feet away from it. Yes, our brains can "correct" the image and overall, it still looks like a rectangle; but at the same time, any content shown on the far sides of the panel look noticeably squished.
When using it as a TV from 10+ feet away, however, it makes very little difference whether you correct for angle or not.
A few months ago I started using a 4k panel as my primary monitor. Wonderful, I absolutely love it, with one* slight annoyance - At a distance of 2ish feet (rather than TV-viewing distances of 10+ feet), the edges have enough of an angle that the foreshortening becomes distractingly noticeable.
If we could get a decently priced panel (c'mon, Big Names, Seiki has proven you can do it, quit trying to get $2500 for the same thing they list for $499!) with a slight curve to it, it would significantly improve the experience when used as a monitor. For TV, maybe not so much; but monitors, yes.
* Well, no, the biggest problem comes from the fact that in 2014, Windows still can't sanely handle displays over 96dpi. But I can't blame the display itself for that.
Not quite. The only difference seen is with people driving cars to purchase the dvd.
This - THANK you, someone on Slashdot knows how to read! Hell, you don't even need to read, just look at the pretty chart.
Physically dragging yourself to the store, just for the purpose of buying or renting a single DVD comes out to more energy used. Every other scenario comes out to less energy, including buying it and having it mailed to you. And if you ignore the salmon-colored portion of each bar (the part that goes toward driving) because, for example, you bought a DVD while out and already at the store getting other stuff... Store-bought would actually come out as the most efficient.
More suspiciously, I find it odd that they dropped the "client device operation" energy consumption by over half for streaming. I don't know about you, but my USB-powered DVD drive draws under 2.5W; My TV draws 80-90W. I'd love to ask the authors what part of streaming magically makes my TV 20x more energy efficient.
"This info-tisement brought to you by Netflix and Blockbuster, who really wish you'd quit insisting we stock all these damned physical discs; and by the MPAA, who would like to remind you that you only license the contents of your DVDs, they can still revoke that license any time they want."
We won't be operating D9 bulldozers on other planets.
Why would we? It makes no sense to think in terms of Earth-style construction; instead, just pick a small shallow crater and give it a transparent airtight roof (think partial geodesic dome, sort of a buried Quonset hut assembled on-site), preferably but not necessarily using local minerals to form the bulk of the concrete used to anchor it to the crater. Bam, you have "Habitat 1.0", good for a few weeks with canned air until the plants start growing.
Mostly, though, we need to figure out a way to work with what Mars has, rather than figuring out a way to get hundreds of tons of heavy equipment there and keep it operating. So in that regard, I agree with you. I just take that as a design constraint, however, not a showstopper.
The 'Dragon V2' is an upgraded, man rated version of the unmanned spaceship that has made several successful cargo trips to the International Space Station.
The Dragon V2: Strong enough for a man, gyroscopically balanced for a woman!
"Getting them the shots they need would reduce the risk of anyone on the list getting sick, and would also reduce the threat of an outbreak in the community in which they live or travel to [and] from."
One major problem with that... The morons not currently vaccinated didn't just somehow accidentally slip through the cracks and missed out on getting their MMR - They actively don't want vaccinations.
In implementing this seemingly reasonable service, does the government plan to round people up, hold them down, and vaccinate them by force against their will? Hey, I might actually agree with that, because these fools endanger me by reducing the overall population's overall "herd immunity" - But let's call a spade a spade, and not pretend this will come down to anything less than forced vaccinations at the wrong end of Government Guns.
And in that regard, I don't support this plan, because the very fact that the government would gloss over the only possible outcome makes me seriously question their real motivation. We can all see the obvious slippery slope, so which angle haven't we checked yet? Hmm, we have effective vaccines against opiates, they have ones for cannabis, cocaine, and tobacco well under way (and yet we can't cure cancer yet, really great use of resources, guys!). Why fight a war on drugs when you can just make the entire population incapable of getting high? Or how about the biological threat of the week, whether that means anthrax or smallpox or ebola or what-have-you?
So just no, thank you. The government that declares it has the right to force me to modify the conditions inside my own body against my will, becomes my mortal enemy and should expect a level of "cooperation" appropriate to that.