But would you really want a device that can store 180MJ and release it pretty much instantaneously in case of a malfunction in your house?
Considering that I already have a small refridgerator-sized energy storage device just outside my house that stores 9.7 GJ and can release it... If not instantly, in well under a minute anyway... Yeah, I don't really have a problem with that.:)
A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time.
The sun always shines somewhere. The wind always blows somewhere. And the tides ebb and flow with the regularity of... Well, of the tides.
Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption.
So every household needs to make 5x as much as they use. Hey, there you have an opportunity for the utilities to stay relevant - Pay me to install more capacity than I need, and sell the excess to industry.
Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple.
'Fusion" counts as hard in the sense of "we don't quite know how to do it yet".
A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan amounts to a mere matter of logistics. We have a known solution. We know how to build that solution. Doing so would cost less than many of our foreign boondoggles. The only real "limitation" to doing so amounts to debates over NIMBY and profit sharing.
Pave Death Valley with solar panels. The rest amounts to political pissing contests.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world
I can find you "four prominent scientists" who believe that God created mankind, who roamed the planet concurrent with the dinosaurs, 6000 years ago. Argument from authority doesn't validate; and when the argument flies directly counter to what anyone can plainly see for themselves, that argument has a higher than normal burden of proof.
If you want to tell me the world doesn't have enough gallium to pave Death Valley with CIGS-based PV panels, we can work with that. "Dr. So-and-so said so!", however, doesn't amount to squat.
Have you looked into the varied ways to store the excess generated during the day to use at night?
Unfortunately, "grid tie" makes a lot of the cost savings in a modern solar or wind installation possible. No battery banks, no charge controllers, no dedicated solar/battery powered circuits with their own inverters, no backup generator if you go totally off-grid - With grid tie, you just feed all your solar into a single modestly-priced grid tie inverter with anti-islanding protection (or a hardwired cutover switch), and call it good.
Once you start getting into offline storage, the cost - And more importantly, the hassle - Goes up drastically. At least until we get affordable supercaps that hold somewhere on the order of 50KWH. That might make all these issues a moot point. Until then, grid tie at the mercy of the utilities sadly counts as the best option.
i think its like everything else, they want to make one huge machine to power an area rather than loads of smaller ones
This, this this, a thousand times this.
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
It absolutely amazes me that building codes haven't evolved to require incorporating one of those two technologies into every new building. The baseline residential load could become a net generator within a decade.
But, it then becomes hard for the utilities to justify charging people for power the people themselves produce. I don't want to suggest we have any sort of vast conspiracy here - More like hundreds of individual companies all actively dragging their feet and refusing to upgrade their infrastructure to make distributed generation practical.
"Funny" story - Five years ago, I started playing with a small plug-and-play solar installation at my house. During the day, with no one home, my old analog electric meter would actually spin backward and credit me for excess production. Two years ago, my local power company rolled out a forced upgrade to digital smartmeters (and when I say "forced", I mean we had actual protests and lengthy court cases trying to block the change). And whatd'ya know, the new meter doesn't go backward. I effectively give my extra power production to the grid for free.
Of course, I have the option of contracting with the utility for a second meter basically installed backward - For which they charge me to sell them electricity. Last time I checked the numbers, I'd realistically need to produce over a megawatt hour per month just to break even on their BS fees - And with my current toy 400W installation, that won't happen.
Remarkably, getting the license and the help of original River City creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto proved easy for the team, indie developers who were submitting game designs to Atari in crayon, aged six.
Uhhh... What???
I don't normally kibbitz over the typical low quality of our FP summaries suck, but I can't even parse that.
First, a disclaimer to prove I don't mean this as bragging - I sucked at gen chem. I found it painfully tedious - Basically 100% having humans do things that computers do much, much better.
But I aced Orgo with fairly little effort. It just makes sense, once you master those basic rules - You have your carbon skeletons, your functional groups, your resonances, then mix in chirality, spice it up with a few inorganic substitutions, and bam!, the rest becomes like a good, satisfying puzzle - Spin the structures around in your head, and see where the electrons "want" to go.
If Orgo has a reputation for being hard, it has that only by virtue of having boring ol' gen chem teachers trying to explain something outside their comfort zone. I consider myself lucky to have had something of a "reformed hippie" for a prof, with a godlike skill for getting us to see not what happens, but why.
Put another way - If you can't solve the problems without consulting lookup tables and using a calculator, you have no shot whatsoever at understanding something at an intuitive level. When you can memorize all the rules in your first month or two, the rest becomes just fun.
Then again, a "friend" of mine did a lot of psychotropics back then. That might have helped.;)
I don't think you do, actually. I think your latest response explains the disconnect between our respective world-views.
You view the employee as basically a slave to the company, someone who should grovel at the feet of their great and noble benefactor in exchange for tossing them a few crusts and giving them something to keep them out of trouble during the day. The White Capitalist's Burden, more or less.
Now, make no mistake, I feel appreciative that I have a decent job in this economy, but also make no mistake,I command respect by virtue of the skills I bring to the table. Any second rate qwiky-mart can give me a paycheck. Not everyone can make a wide range of largely incompatible computer systems play well with each other.
When I said that respecting other peoples' time works both ways - I meant that. At the end of the day, yes, I need a paycheck, and Mr. Shirt can provide that to me. And while we may play the game of observing existing the existing corporate hierarchy on a day to day basis, put bluntly, Mr. Shirt needs me far more than I need him.
If that makes you want to get H1Bs... Good luck with that. I've worked at a company that loaded up with H1Bs, and trust me, you get what you pay for.
That's not efficient with respect to the marginal utility of an extra hour of light.
I don't really see how marginal utility has anything to do with this - Businesses simply wouldn't remain 9-to-5 if we decoupled 12pm from solar noon. They can open and close whenever they want.
At the marked point, we would "naturally" (if we left things as they were year round) get another hour of daylight in the morning
In the example you give, why not simply redefine 7am as local-dawn? Though personally, I feel that sunlight during the workday does me absolutely no good, and would much rather, if we really need a set point, that we redefine 9pm as "local sunset"? That would maximize the amount of useful sunset available to the most people, and as a safety perk, would mean that the evening commute wouldn't have the sun in anyone's eyes.
But more to the point, we just need to move past our societal obsession with time as a function of the sun's apparent position in the sky. Whether my local area considers the "workday" as from 9-to-5, or from 3-to-11, makes very little difference overall.
Show 5 smaller cups (shot-glass sized) filled with a dark liquid. Show a measuring cup with lines labelled 1-7, and filled to level 6 with a dark liquid.
I mean this with no disrespect, because I largely agree with your bigger point. But you've illustrated part of the problem with the original test - People designing tests for kids who don't understand how those kids perceive the world.
Until at least age 7 or 8, and usually later, kids have a very poor grasp of conservation of volumes. They will tend to linearize the problem, seeing the "full" smaller glasses as having the same volume as the marker with the same height on the larger measuring cup.
If the company is paying you, it cannot be wasted time as it is their time. Keeping you desk tidy and leaving your office for lunch break can be a waste too. It can be unproductive to a certain task but never a waste unless the people paying think so.
If I got paid by the hour, I would agree with you. I don't get paid by the hour. I get paid to write code, and to a lesser degree, support our in-house apps deployed. Some (a small minority) of meetings help me to understand the business and end-user needs for the code I write. Most of them mean nothing more than "sitting here not writing code" - Meaning, quite literally, an hour of my time wasted, which I'll need to make up somewhere else to get my actual work for the day done.
You raise an interesting point, though - This discussion has really focused on salaried employees; if instead we look at hourly workers, how does their experience with meetings differ from what most people have described as a useless waste of time? Personally, I suspect they will see it as night-and-day, since companies do value time they actually have to pay their hourly workers for.
Also, i don't see how it can be rude for your employer to expect you at meetings you don't think you neef to be at.
Respecting people's time works both ways, regardless of "station". When I have no input for a meeting, no takeaway tasks, and the meeting conveys no useful information me - Well, what can I say. You can force a dozen people to stare off into space and drool for an hour while you try to figure out how Powerpoint works... Again. Does that make you feel powerful? Really boost the ol' testosterone?
Perhaps that might change if you became more of a team player.
I've never quite understood that whole "team" myth. Why have one person do the job, when five can take twice as long and produce an inferior result! I mean, I suppose if you have the goal of employing as many people as possible, then hey, cool, very noble of you.
Unless talking about projects with a massive scale, teams in the workplace exist largely to diffuse blame for incompetence across a larger group. Me, I'd rather just get the job done than find excuses for why I can't.
If you don't give a crap what the clock says, why do you care about time zones and daylight savings time?
Primarily because my employer doesn't like me to start showing up an hour late all summer long.
I really don't care what the clock says - I care that we need to disrupt our sleep schedules twice a year. And why? We don't just lack a good reason for this nonsense; every year, a new crop of studies show that DST has the exact opposite of the intended effect.
Make it 2am at solar noon, for all it matters to me. Just leave it there year round.:)
I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.
Okay, fellow Bitcoin dev - Explain to me what happens when (not "if") someone can generate a given SHA256 hash, and why that doesn't let an attacker write arbitrary transactions into the block chain?
Not talking about actually cracking the ECDSA pair here (though that would certainly satisfy my claim, and it too will eventually become possible) - I just mean the ability to spoof the hash on the PaytoPubkeyHash transaction to match the provided PK. Bam, transaction validates, done.
Or do you base your assertion on merely trusting an NSA-designed hash to remain uncrackable forever? If so, I can't help but notice that not all in the BTC dev community share your optimism, judging by how often the topic "should we switch to SHA3 yet" comes up.
No real "source" required - If you can spoof an arbitrary SHA256 hash, you can "own" any Bitcoin block you want.
Over time, the need to future-proof the protocol against that possibility makes for an obvious upgrade path. But until someone moves "their"coins to a new wallet, the security of the original hash they used provides an upper limit to the CPU time needed to steal their coins.
With current CPUs and algorithms, that amounts to centuries or even millennia. Much like with MD5, however, if you don't think that will drop exponentially... Let me hold on to your BTC wallet for a decade or so.:)
Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors? Without the necessary passwords, what happens to the BitCoins? Are they removed from the system?
At present, every 5-10 years, the Bitcoin protocol will necessarily upgrade its encryption an d hashing routines to keep pace with processor (whether CPU or GPU or "other") speeds.
Dead people will, of course, not ever transfer their balances to the newest version, and as a result, after 10-20 years, their BTC will become trivially crackable.
You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks
Note as an aside, when you see block-0 spent, you can presume the NSA can easily read your old encrypted email.
So tired of people excusing our government's behavior just because others do it.
And what exactly makes you think I meant that in any way apologist?
Make no mistake, I fully damn my own government for its evils. I damn all governments for their assorted atrocities. And someday, I look forward to seeing them up against the wall.
They all do this shit, and you merely put them in the spotlight. The ones not yet caught have, of course, feigned indignation at the US, for doing what they all do. (Hmm, which ones have protested the loudest here?)
Make no mistake, though, if the US has done worse than any of its peers, it has done so only through having more opportunity, not more will or effort.
TLDR: They all want you dead for exposing the truth. Do you really think the "truth" you've exposed ends at the Canadian and Mexican borders?
If you have inmates writing code, there has to be a continual auditing process. Food in prison is a commodity. It’s currency.
Dear Warden:
These inmates have done your job better than you have. They have saved me, the taxpayer, your boss, money.
If these guys can streamline your own systems, I really don't give the least damn if they can live like kings (to the greatest extent possible while locked in a government cage). Fucking let them!.
Texting and msking calls shows you are paying attention to something other than the meeting and/or the contents of the meeting. Most people would consider that rude.
Most people also consider it rude to waste their time in meetings they have no need to attend.
Don't want people to ignore you at your precious meeting? Free hint - If you could accomplish your official goal with four CC's on an email and one or two rounds of responses - do so.
Upper management is on their crackberries for a reason other than "OMG!!! BOOOORRRing!" and it is also a power thing. They are upper management. Their time is more valuable than yours.
Bullshit. They may have the rest of the company convinced about that, but those of us who on occasion have reason to see their "important" emails know better. Their time has more value than mine only by virtue of the fact that they make more than I do, simple as that.
Free hint, guys - Your titles don't make your kinks any less sick. They just mean you won't get frog-marched down to HR for entertaining them on the job. And that little side job you do on the corporate network? Yeah, don't you dare talk to me about "loyalty", I do my job because I enjoy it (not as much as sleeping until noon, of course, but that doesn't pay as well). Make me keep liking it, Shirt.
Your time however is at their pleasure. Be rude to them and they can and will fire you.
The only accurate part of what you wrote. Kids, learn to fake paying attention WELL, if you value your job.
It actually says "The PS4 system supports 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p video standards via HDMI output."
Sorry, my bad - I didn't clip that quote to imply that it only supports 480p - Rather, just wondering why they even have support for something that low-end... The implication being that we'll have to suffer through yet another generation of console games that don't allow the devs to make full use of the resolution 90% of their audience has (aka "giant text everywhere, and fine detail only as an afterthought").
Someone else already answered that adequately, though, apparently AACS requires it as a baseline.
FTA: "Does the PS4 system support analog video or audio output?" "No. the PS4 system's video and audio are transmitted using HDMI"
"What screen resolutions will PS4 support?" "The PS4 system supports 480p"
"In PAL Markets, the Vertical Stands for the PS4 system will retail for â19.99 / £16.99." [Damnit Slashdot, Unicode! Any year now!]
Seriously mixed messages here. First, I feel just fine with digital-only, though I expect that will piss off at least a few people. But why does it support 480p? Do HDMI displays actually exist that don't support at least 720p? Not to mention, pretty much anything less than 5 years old will support 1080p.
But that last line really cinches it... "In PAL markets". WTF? Seriously Sony, what the hell does PAL-vs-NTSC have to do with it, when you only have digital outputs? For that matter, does PAL-vs-NTSC even exist at all anymore? At least in the US, analog OTA has gone dark. Unless you also-vinyl-fans really want to keep using that 30 year old Betamax, that distinction has no more meaning than saying "in former Roman colonies".
It also surprises me to see them going with an 8 core x86 (I'll presume that means x64) - After pushing the awesome power of the Cell architecture soooo hard with the PS3, they have chosen to go back to basically commodity PC hardware? And not even cutting edge, that makes the PS4 slightly less powerful than my now-two-year-old home desktop PC. And though vague, they say 18CU with 1.84TF for graphics... Which puts it basically on par with the Radeon HD 5830. Consider me unimpressed.
On the bright side, I look forward to having a full-speed PS4 emulator for PC available about a week after launch. So hey, not all bad, right?
Prove it. I say it was ON. Who is correct? You don't know.
Of course we do - Google Glass logs everything. If she had it on, the state could subpoena its log and prove their case. And note the order to what I just said - The state could prove their case. In any sane legal system, she doesn't need to prove her innocence. If we really don't know - she fucking wins, get it?
Honestly, though, I've found some of the responses in this thread far more disturbing than the mere issuance of this ticket. Often, I consider government only barely better than useful, and about as sane as a hatter. Threads like this remind me that we have exactly the government we want and deserve. You people seriously disgust me. Grow a pair. Our forefathers revolted against the world's largest government largely over sales tax. And today, we honor them by letting the government issue capricious fines when they can't bother with that whole pesky ol' burden-of-proof thing. Sick, sick, sick.
The laws states the monitor cannot be visible while driving, regardless of the on/off condition of the display.
Again, how exactly does that work when almost every car today has a monitor visible, dead-center of the dash? This has absolutely nothing to do with distracted driving, so all you nannies can put away your swaddling clothes. When I described it as a matter of basic human rights, I meant it. And yet, somehow, the majority of you took that to mean I consider a cell phone a basic human right? You people have damage. This amounts to nothing more than an "offense whenever we need another $150 from you" tax, and that should disgust us all.
Just stop showing national borders entirely. They matter less and less in the modern world, and if the increasingly impotent old-guard of national governments wants to pretend they still have relevance, let them make their own smartphones showing whatever stupid place-names they want. Within 50 years, country names will amount to a historical curiosity.
Of course, personally, I would recommend taking the most antagonistic approach possible. Based on the GPS reading, show it as part of China while in Taiwan, as its own country while in China, and just black it out and write "don't go here until these clowns can figure out their own name" for the rest of the world.
Holding a phone while operating a motor vehicle is not a basic human right.
Quite right. How about "innocent until proven guilty"? That one do it for ya?
I have no interest whatsoever in defending some bink who can't bear to miss out of a whole five minutes of gossip while driving to the store. I do very much care when governments start skipping over all that pesky "proof" they normally need, just because obtaining that proof might require them to actually do a teensy bit of work every now and then.
Also, keep in mind this doesn't involve her making a phone call, or texting while driving, or anything of the sort - In fact, TFA says she had the damned thing turned off. But merely holding a phone (or wearing a silly-looking pair of overpriced glasses) doesn't prove a goddamned thing, simple as that. Maybe my hands got cold, cell phones tend to stay slightly on the warm side. Maybe It fell out of my pocket and I thought it would do everyone around me more good to put it in my lap than let it slide under the brake pedal. Maybe I do just want to cuddle with it. Doesn't matter.
Now, when Officer Friendly has a reasonable suspicion that Teen Queen needs a ticket for texting while driving - He can get a warrant for the cell tower log just like in any other investigation. Sorry if that actually takes someone doing their job.
Slashdot Mirror
But would you really want a device that can store 180MJ and release it pretty much instantaneously in case of a malfunction in your house?
:)
Considering that I already have a small refridgerator-sized energy storage device just outside my house that stores 9.7 GJ and can release it... If not instantly, in well under a minute anyway... Yeah, I don't really have a problem with that.
/ 100 gallon LPG tank, for those curious.
A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time.
The sun always shines somewhere. The wind always blows somewhere. And the tides ebb and flow with the regularity of... Well, of the tides.
Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption.
So every household needs to make 5x as much as they use. Hey, there you have an opportunity for the utilities to stay relevant - Pay me to install more capacity than I need, and sell the excess to industry.
Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple.
'Fusion" counts as hard in the sense of "we don't quite know how to do it yet".
A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan amounts to a mere matter of logistics. We have a known solution. We know how to build that solution. Doing so would cost less than many of our foreign boondoggles. The only real "limitation" to doing so amounts to debates over NIMBY and profit sharing.
Pave Death Valley with solar panels. The rest amounts to political pissing contests.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world
I can find you "four prominent scientists" who believe that God created mankind, who roamed the planet concurrent with the dinosaurs, 6000 years ago. Argument from authority doesn't validate; and when the argument flies directly counter to what anyone can plainly see for themselves, that argument has a higher than normal burden of proof.
If you want to tell me the world doesn't have enough gallium to pave Death Valley with CIGS-based PV panels, we can work with that. "Dr. So-and-so said so!", however, doesn't amount to squat.
Have you looked into the varied ways to store the excess generated during the day to use at night?
Unfortunately, "grid tie" makes a lot of the cost savings in a modern solar or wind installation possible. No battery banks, no charge controllers, no dedicated solar/battery powered circuits with their own inverters, no backup generator if you go totally off-grid - With grid tie, you just feed all your solar into a single modestly-priced grid tie inverter with anti-islanding protection (or a hardwired cutover switch), and call it good.
Once you start getting into offline storage, the cost - And more importantly, the hassle - Goes up drastically. At least until we get affordable supercaps that hold somewhere on the order of 50KWH. That might make all these issues a moot point. Until then, grid tie at the mercy of the utilities sadly counts as the best option.
i think its like everything else, they want to make one huge machine to power an area rather than loads of smaller ones
This, this this, a thousand times this.
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
It absolutely amazes me that building codes haven't evolved to require incorporating one of those two technologies into every new building. The baseline residential load could become a net generator within a decade.
But, it then becomes hard for the utilities to justify charging people for power the people themselves produce. I don't want to suggest we have any sort of vast conspiracy here - More like hundreds of individual companies all actively dragging their feet and refusing to upgrade their infrastructure to make distributed generation practical.
"Funny" story - Five years ago, I started playing with a small plug-and-play solar installation at my house. During the day, with no one home, my old analog electric meter would actually spin backward and credit me for excess production. Two years ago, my local power company rolled out a forced upgrade to digital smartmeters (and when I say "forced", I mean we had actual protests and lengthy court cases trying to block the change). And whatd'ya know, the new meter doesn't go backward. I effectively give my extra power production to the grid for free.
Of course, I have the option of contracting with the utility for a second meter basically installed backward - For which they charge me to sell them electricity. Last time I checked the numbers, I'd realistically need to produce over a megawatt hour per month just to break even on their BS fees - And with my current toy 400W installation, that won't happen.
Dude, calm down. You need to rotate your time cube 20-30 degrees coreward.
Remarkably, getting the license and the help of original River City creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto proved easy for the team, indie developers who were submitting game designs to Atari in crayon, aged six.
Uhhh... What???
I don't normally kibbitz over the typical low quality of our FP summaries suck, but I can't even parse that.
First, a disclaimer to prove I don't mean this as bragging - I sucked at gen chem. I found it painfully tedious - Basically 100% having humans do things that computers do much, much better.
;)
But I aced Orgo with fairly little effort. It just makes sense, once you master those basic rules - You have your carbon skeletons, your functional groups, your resonances, then mix in chirality, spice it up with a few inorganic substitutions, and bam!, the rest becomes like a good, satisfying puzzle - Spin the structures around in your head, and see where the electrons "want" to go.
If Orgo has a reputation for being hard, it has that only by virtue of having boring ol' gen chem teachers trying to explain something outside their comfort zone. I consider myself lucky to have had something of a "reformed hippie" for a prof, with a godlike skill for getting us to see not what happens, but why.
Put another way - If you can't solve the problems without consulting lookup tables and using a calculator, you have no shot whatsoever at understanding something at an intuitive level. When you can memorize all the rules in your first month or two, the rest becomes just fun.
Then again, a "friend" of mine did a lot of psychotropics back then. That might have helped.
I can understand why you do not understand.
I don't think you do, actually. I think your latest response explains the disconnect between our respective world-views.
You view the employee as basically a slave to the company, someone who should grovel at the feet of their great and noble benefactor in exchange for tossing them a few crusts and giving them something to keep them out of trouble during the day. The White Capitalist's Burden, more or less.
Now, make no mistake, I feel appreciative that I have a decent job in this economy, but also make no mistake,I command respect by virtue of the skills I bring to the table. Any second rate qwiky-mart can give me a paycheck. Not everyone can make a wide range of largely incompatible computer systems play well with each other.
When I said that respecting other peoples' time works both ways - I meant that. At the end of the day, yes, I need a paycheck, and Mr. Shirt can provide that to me. And while we may play the game of observing existing the existing corporate hierarchy on a day to day basis, put bluntly, Mr. Shirt needs me far more than I need him.
If that makes you want to get H1Bs... Good luck with that. I've worked at a company that loaded up with H1Bs, and trust me, you get what you pay for.
That's not efficient with respect to the marginal utility of an extra hour of light.
I don't really see how marginal utility has anything to do with this - Businesses simply wouldn't remain 9-to-5 if we decoupled 12pm from solar noon. They can open and close whenever they want.
At the marked point, we would "naturally" (if we left things as they were year round) get another hour of daylight in the morning
In the example you give, why not simply redefine 7am as local-dawn? Though personally, I feel that sunlight during the workday does me absolutely no good, and would much rather, if we really need a set point, that we redefine 9pm as "local sunset"? That would maximize the amount of useful sunset available to the most people, and as a safety perk, would mean that the evening commute wouldn't have the sun in anyone's eyes.
But more to the point, we just need to move past our societal obsession with time as a function of the sun's apparent position in the sky. Whether my local area considers the "workday" as from 9-to-5, or from 3-to-11, makes very little difference overall.
Show 5 smaller cups (shot-glass sized) filled with a dark liquid. Show a measuring cup with lines labelled 1-7, and filled to level 6 with a dark liquid.
I mean this with no disrespect, because I largely agree with your bigger point. But you've illustrated part of the problem with the original test - People designing tests for kids who don't understand how those kids perceive the world.
Until at least age 7 or 8, and usually later, kids have a very poor grasp of conservation of volumes. They will tend to linearize the problem, seeing the "full" smaller glasses as having the same volume as the marker with the same height on the larger measuring cup.
If the company is paying you, it cannot be wasted time as it is their time. Keeping you desk tidy and leaving your office for lunch break can be a waste too. It can be unproductive to a certain task but never a waste unless the people paying think so.
If I got paid by the hour, I would agree with you. I don't get paid by the hour. I get paid to write code, and to a lesser degree, support our in-house apps deployed. Some (a small minority) of meetings help me to understand the business and end-user needs for the code I write. Most of them mean nothing more than "sitting here not writing code" - Meaning, quite literally, an hour of my time wasted, which I'll need to make up somewhere else to get my actual work for the day done.
You raise an interesting point, though - This discussion has really focused on salaried employees; if instead we look at hourly workers, how does their experience with meetings differ from what most people have described as a useless waste of time? Personally, I suspect they will see it as night-and-day, since companies do value time they actually have to pay their hourly workers for.
Also, i don't see how it can be rude for your employer to expect you at meetings you don't think you neef to be at.
Respecting people's time works both ways, regardless of "station". When I have no input for a meeting, no takeaway tasks, and the meeting conveys no useful information me - Well, what can I say. You can force a dozen people to stare off into space and drool for an hour while you try to figure out how Powerpoint works... Again. Does that make you feel powerful? Really boost the ol' testosterone?
Perhaps that might change if you became more of a team player.
I've never quite understood that whole "team" myth. Why have one person do the job, when five can take twice as long and produce an inferior result! I mean, I suppose if you have the goal of employing as many people as possible, then hey, cool, very noble of you.
Unless talking about projects with a massive scale, teams in the workplace exist largely to diffuse blame for incompetence across a larger group. Me, I'd rather just get the job done than find excuses for why I can't.
If you don't give a crap what the clock says, why do you care about time zones and daylight savings time?
:)
Primarily because my employer doesn't like me to start showing up an hour late all summer long.
I really don't care what the clock says - I care that we need to disrupt our sleep schedules twice a year. And why? We don't just lack a good reason for this nonsense; every year, a new crop of studies show that DST has the exact opposite of the intended effect.
Make it 2am at solar noon, for all it matters to me. Just leave it there year round.
I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.
Okay, fellow Bitcoin dev - Explain to me what happens when (not "if") someone can generate a given SHA256 hash, and why that doesn't let an attacker write arbitrary transactions into the block chain?
Not talking about actually cracking the ECDSA pair here (though that would certainly satisfy my claim, and it too will eventually become possible) - I just mean the ability to spoof the hash on the PaytoPubkeyHash transaction to match the provided PK. Bam, transaction validates, done.
Or do you base your assertion on merely trusting an NSA-designed hash to remain uncrackable forever? If so, I can't help but notice that not all in the BTC dev community share your optimism, judging by how often the topic "should we switch to SHA3 yet" comes up.
I've never heard of this. Source?
:)
No real "source" required - If you can spoof an arbitrary SHA256 hash, you can "own" any Bitcoin block you want.
Over time, the need to future-proof the protocol against that possibility makes for an obvious upgrade path. But until someone moves "their"coins to a new wallet, the security of the original hash they used provides an upper limit to the CPU time needed to steal their coins.
With current CPUs and algorithms, that amounts to centuries or even millennia. Much like with MD5, however, if you don't think that will drop exponentially... Let me hold on to your BTC wallet for a decade or so.
Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors? Without the necessary passwords, what happens to the BitCoins? Are they removed from the system?
At present, every 5-10 years, the Bitcoin protocol will necessarily upgrade its encryption an d hashing routines to keep pace with processor (whether CPU or GPU or "other") speeds.
Dead people will, of course, not ever transfer their balances to the newest version, and as a result, after 10-20 years, their BTC will become trivially crackable.
You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks
Note as an aside, when you see block-0 spent, you can presume the NSA can easily read your old encrypted email.
So tired of people excusing our government's behavior just because others do it.
And what exactly makes you think I meant that in any way apologist?
Make no mistake, I fully damn my own government for its evils. I damn all governments for their assorted atrocities. And someday, I look forward to seeing them up against the wall.
Today... Sadly, not that day.
Don't you get it?
They all do this shit, and you merely put them in the spotlight. The ones not yet caught have, of course, feigned indignation at the US, for doing what they all do. (Hmm, which ones have protested the loudest here?)
Make no mistake, though, if the US has done worse than any of its peers, it has done so only through having more opportunity, not more will or effort.
TLDR: They all want you dead for exposing the truth. Do you really think the "truth" you've exposed ends at the Canadian and Mexican borders?
If you have inmates writing code, there has to be a continual auditing process. Food in prison is a commodity. It’s currency.
Dear Warden:
These inmates have done your job better than you have. They have saved me, the taxpayer, your boss, money.
If these guys can streamline your own systems, I really don't give the least damn if they can live like kings (to the greatest extent possible while locked in a government cage). Fucking let them!.
Texting and msking calls shows you are paying attention to something other than the meeting and/or the contents of the meeting. Most people would consider that rude.
Most people also consider it rude to waste their time in meetings they have no need to attend.
Don't want people to ignore you at your precious meeting? Free hint - If you could accomplish your official goal with four CC's on an email and one or two rounds of responses - do so.
Upper management is on their crackberries for a reason other than "OMG!!! BOOOORRRing!" and it is also a power thing. They are upper management. Their time is more valuable than yours.
Bullshit. They may have the rest of the company convinced about that, but those of us who on occasion have reason to see their "important" emails know better. Their time has more value than mine only by virtue of the fact that they make more than I do, simple as that.
Free hint, guys - Your titles don't make your kinks any less sick. They just mean you won't get frog-marched down to HR for entertaining them on the job. And that little side job you do on the corporate network? Yeah, don't you dare talk to me about "loyalty", I do my job because I enjoy it (not as much as sleeping until noon, of course, but that doesn't pay as well). Make me keep liking it, Shirt.
Your time however is at their pleasure. Be rude to them and they can and will fire you.
The only accurate part of what you wrote. Kids, learn to fake paying attention WELL, if you value your job.
It actually says "The PS4 system supports 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p video standards via HDMI output."
Sorry, my bad - I didn't clip that quote to imply that it only supports 480p - Rather, just wondering why they even have support for something that low-end... The implication being that we'll have to suffer through yet another generation of console games that don't allow the devs to make full use of the resolution 90% of their audience has (aka "giant text everywhere, and fine detail only as an afterthought").
Someone else already answered that adequately, though, apparently AACS requires it as a baseline.
FTA: "Does the PS4 system support analog video or audio output?" "No. the PS4 system's video and audio are transmitted using HDMI"
"What screen resolutions will PS4 support?" "The PS4 system supports 480p"
"In PAL Markets, the Vertical Stands for the PS4 system will retail for â19.99 / £16.99." [Damnit Slashdot, Unicode! Any year now!]
Seriously mixed messages here. First, I feel just fine with digital-only, though I expect that will piss off at least a few people. But why does it support 480p? Do HDMI displays actually exist that don't support at least 720p? Not to mention, pretty much anything less than 5 years old will support 1080p.
But that last line really cinches it... "In PAL markets". WTF? Seriously Sony, what the hell does PAL-vs-NTSC have to do with it, when you only have digital outputs? For that matter, does PAL-vs-NTSC even exist at all anymore? At least in the US, analog OTA has gone dark. Unless you also-vinyl-fans really want to keep using that 30 year old Betamax, that distinction has no more meaning than saying "in former Roman colonies".
It also surprises me to see them going with an 8 core x86 (I'll presume that means x64) - After pushing the awesome power of the Cell architecture soooo hard with the PS3, they have chosen to go back to basically commodity PC hardware? And not even cutting edge, that makes the PS4 slightly less powerful than my now-two-year-old home desktop PC. And though vague, they say 18CU with 1.84TF for graphics... Which puts it basically on par with the Radeon HD 5830. Consider me unimpressed.
On the bright side, I look forward to having a full-speed PS4 emulator for PC available about a week after launch. So hey, not all bad, right?
Prove it. I say it was ON. Who is correct? You don't know.
Of course we do - Google Glass logs everything. If she had it on, the state could subpoena its log and prove their case. And note the order to what I just said - The state could prove their case. In any sane legal system, she doesn't need to prove her innocence. If we really don't know - she fucking wins, get it?
Honestly, though, I've found some of the responses in this thread far more disturbing than the mere issuance of this ticket. Often, I consider government only barely better than useful, and about as sane as a hatter. Threads like this remind me that we have exactly the government we want and deserve. You people seriously disgust me. Grow a pair. Our forefathers revolted against the world's largest government largely over sales tax. And today, we honor them by letting the government issue capricious fines when they can't bother with that whole pesky ol' burden-of-proof thing. Sick, sick, sick.
The laws states the monitor cannot be visible while driving, regardless of the on/off condition of the display.
Again, how exactly does that work when almost every car today has a monitor visible, dead-center of the dash? This has absolutely nothing to do with distracted driving, so all you nannies can put away your swaddling clothes. When I described it as a matter of basic human rights, I meant it. And yet, somehow, the majority of you took that to mean I consider a cell phone a basic human right? You people have damage. This amounts to nothing more than an "offense whenever we need another $150 from you" tax, and that should disgust us all.
I have a simple solution to this problem.
Just stop showing national borders entirely. They matter less and less in the modern world, and if the increasingly impotent old-guard of national governments wants to pretend they still have relevance, let them make their own smartphones showing whatever stupid place-names they want. Within 50 years, country names will amount to a historical curiosity.
Of course, personally, I would recommend taking the most antagonistic approach possible. Based on the GPS reading, show it as part of China while in Taiwan, as its own country while in China, and just black it out and write "don't go here until these clowns can figure out their own name" for the rest of the world.
Holding a phone while operating a motor vehicle is not a basic human right.
Quite right. How about "innocent until proven guilty"? That one do it for ya?
I have no interest whatsoever in defending some bink who can't bear to miss out of a whole five minutes of gossip while driving to the store. I do very much care when governments start skipping over all that pesky "proof" they normally need, just because obtaining that proof might require them to actually do a teensy bit of work every now and then.
Also, keep in mind this doesn't involve her making a phone call, or texting while driving, or anything of the sort - In fact, TFA says she had the damned thing turned off. But merely holding a phone (or wearing a silly-looking pair of overpriced glasses) doesn't prove a goddamned thing, simple as that. Maybe my hands got cold, cell phones tend to stay slightly on the warm side. Maybe It fell out of my pocket and I thought it would do everyone around me more good to put it in my lap than let it slide under the brake pedal. Maybe I do just want to cuddle with it. Doesn't matter.
Now, when Officer Friendly has a reasonable suspicion that Teen Queen needs a ticket for texting while driving - He can get a warrant for the cell tower log just like in any other investigation. Sorry if that actually takes someone doing their job.