If voting only took 5 minutes, you'd have a point. Instead it takes gas money, wear and tear on your car, and a lot more than 5 minutes (sometimes hours). Making voting easier is a must, and is probably more useful than offering a cash prize to one voter.
I don't know what king of monkeys are running the elections in your precinct but the last time I voted it took me at most ten minutes, and it was probably closer to five. I stopped at the polling place on my way home from work, filled out my ballot and was on my way. If you ask me, that's pretty easy.
If you can't spare the time to show up in person request an absentee ballot. Fill it out at your liesure in the privacy of your own home and mail it in at your convenience. How much easier does it need to be?
The Carved Wooden seal given to the American embassy contained a microphone and a passive transciever. It operated by a principle similar to modern passive RFID tags. The Soviets would transmit high frequency radio waves at the antenna, which whould be modulated by the audio vibrations in the room, and then received by an antenna on the soviet end. Link for the skeptics
It was a very nice bit of spycraft, quite advanced for it's day, but involved no highly directional audio microphones, sorry.
...that the current system does not benefit the rich and the crooks??
If so, which rock have you been hiding under for the past century?
Your criticism, just like all the people whining about how the flat tax is regressive (not possible), and nit-picking about the definition of 'income' and the like fail to realize that the exact same problems exist in the current tax code, often with greater frequency.
And how many people died when the tires on their Ford Explorers delaminated on the highway? How many millions of cars have been recalled for safety-critical assembly or design flaws in the last 20 years, and how many people did they kill?
NASA isn't the only group experiencing problems like this, and when taken as a whole, they are one of the least heinous offenders. I personally would be worried about the companies dealing with millions of peoples lives and billions of dollars, not NASA' handful of people and millions of dollars.
I hope your not an automotive engineer.
Rest assured, IANAAE.
But I'll say something anyway. Sleepy/drunk driver detection systems (patent pending) are only effective if they can convince the sleepy/drunk person to stop driving. The only way to reliably do this is to somehow disable the vehicle (a softer version of the "slam on the brakes" solution), which is difficult to do in a reliable and prompt manner. Even if it was doable it would still be quite dangerous.
Those issues aside, there is no way such a system could reliably detect an impaired/distracted/etc. driver. False positives are annoying, if downright dangerous if they distract an otherwise alert driver, and false negatives are as bad as no system at all. To have a system be effective enough to be worthwhile it would be too over-reactionary to be tolerable. Overall the problem is just too hairy to tackle in realtime which is what the great-grandparent was proposing.
I for one will gladly pay the extra cash for a more secure car knowing that the cars around me also are more secure,
And my 'more secure' you mean 'at risk of being sponaneously shut down and screeching to a halt in the middle of traffic' because the onboard safety(TM) measures determined the driver was too sleepy to continue driving?'
we should be pursuing technologies that prevents all drunks from driving.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for the hypoallergenic safety bubble I was promised. And what about the technology that prevents people from lying, cheating, stealing and thinging 'bad thoughts' that I read so much about back in the 80's?
The only thing that case sensitivity buys you here is the ability to have all three at the same time
What case sensitivity buys you is choice. Exactly, you can use the MyVar myVar MYVAR scheme if you like, or the MyVarClass MyVarInstance, MyVarConstant, or MVc MVi MVc, or pretty much anything you wish. But I cannot imagine a useful situation where you would want or need THISVARIABLE to be equivalent to ThisVariable.
The only thing case insensitivity buys you here is just the slightest bit of idiot proofing (but let's be honest, the kind of people who confuse MyVar with MYVAR would also get Myvariableinstantiation and myvariableinitialization backwards).
If it were possible to do a blind A/B test between the two organs, I would wager more than half of a general population sample, even more if you only used musicians, could Identify which was the Real pipe organ and which was the Linux clone, even if the room was full of wheezing seniors.
This organ is nothing more than a (rather sophisticated) sample playback device with some rather nifty logic to choose it's samples well. This is the very reason it does an incomplete job of reproducting an actual organ sound, because it is incapable of recreating the full range of sounds accurately (emphasis on full).
While I grant that very slight differences in pitch (440/441 is actually differentiable for most people) and volume (10db is virtually inaudible) are difficult to discern, that's not the issue. It's the overall timbre of the sound that humans can very easily distinguish. A soprano singing on stage sounds very different from a recording of that soprano being played from a speaker in the same spot. The same goes for a violin/guitar/trumpet/basoon/etc. And doubly so for electronic versions of the same.
This behavior is caused by the destination webserver serving different pages depending on the referer link specified, and has nothing to do with google.
This is easiest to demonstrate with wget. Get the same url twice, once with "--referer=http://google.com", once without and compare the results.
To see for yourself try this: -Fire up wget and grab the link above.
-try this again while specifying "--referer=http://google.com".
-compare the two files.
The switch is being done by bomberate.com's webserver depending on the referer address given, google has nothing to do with it.
it should also be pointed out that the "ebay" link does not in fact go to ebay, but rather a site on bomberate.com which lists e-bay auctions.
Right... but couldn't the same be said of any API? I mean, if the Apache plugin API changes, I'll need to rewrite my mod_foo module to use the new API.
It's a good thing for MS, because they will, for a time, have the only compliant implimentation of the standards every time they change. Every other implimentation will lag behind as they seek to impliment the new standard.
The main difference between these changes and the apachie API changes is that the apache people are not selling a closed source version of mod_foo which is included in completely update compatible form with each revision of the API.
The big three automakers would stop covering up the REVOLUTIONARY SUPER CARBURETOR that I read about in the back of Popular Science, we could get that number down to 1pptpm (Pre-historic Plant Ton per Mile)
The people want the system to work the way it's supposed to.
This is a piss poor way of guarding agains voter fraud. Design a voting system that guards against voter fraud, don't rely on the populace to police a system which is so open to abuse.
Yes, it can. In order for such a figure to be unable to fit through itself the minimum cross-section width of the figure must equal it's maximum cross-section width. If there is any difference between these two values simply alight the figure so it's minimum cross-section lines up with the holes maximum-section and it will pass through.
A circle is the only shape that has an equal minimum and maximum cross-section ( 1 to 1 ratio). An equilateral triangle however has a (sqrt(1/4) ~.86 to 1)
The timing belt/chain keeps the valves opening and closing in sync with the turning of the crankshaft. If that belt fails the valves will cease to move.
In some (most?) enginges the valves do not travel past the highest point of travel of the piston at any time. In this case, all that will happen is the engine will cease working and need to have the timing belt/chain replaces.
However if there is no clearance between the top of the piston's travel and the bottom of the valves travel (as in come higher performance engines) you will have catastrophic failure of some sort as the pistons collide with the valves. Repairs for this type of failure will be huge.
To return to the topic: Failure of the timing belt in this engine would be very nasty. The rotating "piston" would collide directly with the auxilliary wheel most likely fusing the two together if not ejecting the smaller wheel from the engine. Either way, it would be niether pretty or repairable.
This kind of conversation never goes anywhere it seems. Anyone challenging the status quo is part of the anti-establisment conspiracy, pushing their agenda. Anyone upholding the status quo is part of the nebulous "they" who don't want anyone to know the truth.
My bet is they are both politically motivated groups using science to furthertheir cause. Who is right? I leave that to the philosophers.
"I'd much rather have intelligent judges legislate from the bench (even if I disagree with them) than letting CEOs legislate from the board room."
Which Judges would those be? The one appointed by the "incredibly popular president" and approved by the "morally bankrup, corrupt congress".
Even on the state and local level judges are either appointed by elected officials or elected themselves. They are in no way removed from this whole political system, they may be the worst part of it.
Politicians can be voted out of office in 2, 4, 6 years, but judges stay around much longer. I would rather have the power in the hands of people who will be coming up for re-election than those who have no real chance of being removed.
Fuel cell vehicles, electric cars, etc. are not being produced because there is no demand for a vehicle with a large pricetag, limited range, and no fueling infrastructure. Oil, and consequently gasonline is very cheap to produce, and also easy to distribute compared to these hydrogen alternatives, and most people are not going to willingly surrender their money to purchase vehicles that make no economic sense.
until the price of driving my gasoline fueled car rises above the cost of driving an (fill-in-the-blank-alternative-fuel-vehicle) I'll go out and buy one, but not until then.
Slashdot Mirror
If voting only took 5 minutes, you'd have a point. Instead it takes gas money, wear and tear on your car, and a lot more than 5 minutes (sometimes hours). Making voting easier is a must, and is probably more useful than offering a cash prize to one voter.
I don't know what king of monkeys are running the elections in your precinct but the last time I voted it took me at most ten minutes, and it was probably closer to five. I stopped at the polling place on my way home from work, filled out my ballot and was on my way. If you ask me, that's pretty easy.If you can't spare the time to show up in person request an absentee ballot. Fill it out at your liesure in the privacy of your own home and mail it in at your convenience. How much easier does it need to be?
Last time I checked absentee ballots were available to anyone who asks for one, and could be filled out and mailed in one's spare time.
No missed work, no problem.
The Carved Wooden seal given to the American embassy contained a microphone and a passive transciever. It operated by a principle similar to modern passive RFID tags. The Soviets would transmit high frequency radio waves at the antenna, which whould be modulated by the audio vibrations in the room, and then received by an antenna on the soviet end.
Link for the skeptics
It was a very nice bit of spycraft, quite advanced for it's day, but involved no highly directional audio microphones, sorry.
...that the current system does not benefit the rich and the crooks??
If so, which rock have you been hiding under for the past century?
Your criticism, just like all the people whining about how the flat tax is regressive (not possible), and nit-picking about the definition of 'income' and the like fail to realize that the exact same problems exist in the current tax code, often with greater frequency.
And how many people died when the tires on their Ford Explorers delaminated on the highway? How many millions of cars have been recalled for safety-critical assembly or design flaws in the last 20 years, and how many people did they kill?
NASA isn't the only group experiencing problems like this, and when taken as a whole, they are one of the least heinous offenders. I personally would be worried about the companies dealing with millions of peoples lives and billions of dollars, not NASA' handful of people and millions of dollars.
I hope your not an automotive engineer.
Rest assured, IANAAE.
But I'll say something anyway. Sleepy/drunk driver detection systems (patent pending) are only effective if they can convince the sleepy/drunk person to stop driving. The only way to reliably do this is to somehow disable the vehicle (a softer version of the "slam on the brakes" solution), which is difficult to do in a reliable and prompt manner. Even if it was doable it would still be quite dangerous.
Those issues aside, there is no way such a system could reliably detect an impaired/distracted/etc. driver. False positives are annoying, if downright dangerous if they distract an otherwise alert driver, and false negatives are as bad as no system at all. To have a system be effective enough to be worthwhile it would be too over-reactionary to be tolerable. Overall the problem is just too hairy to tackle in realtime which is what the great-grandparent was proposing.
I for one will gladly pay the extra cash for a more secure car knowing that the cars around me also are more secure,
And my 'more secure' you mean 'at risk of being sponaneously shut down and screeching to a halt in the middle of traffic' because the onboard safety(TM) measures determined the driver was too sleepy to continue driving?'
Sign me Up!
we should be pursuing technologies that prevents all drunks from driving.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for the hypoallergenic safety bubble I was promised. And what about the technology that prevents people from lying, cheating, stealing and thinging 'bad thoughts' that I read so much about back in the 80's?
And we call this progress, Sheesh!
The only thing that case sensitivity buys you here is the ability to have all three at the same time
What case sensitivity buys you is choice. Exactly, you can use the MyVar myVar MYVAR scheme if you like, or the MyVarClass MyVarInstance, MyVarConstant, or MVc MVi MVc, or pretty much anything you wish. But I cannot imagine a useful situation where you would want or need THISVARIABLE to be equivalent to ThisVariable.
The only thing case insensitivity buys you here is just the slightest bit of idiot proofing (but let's be honest, the kind of people who confuse MyVar with MYVAR would also get Myvariableinstantiation and myvariableinitialization backwards).
If it were possible to do a blind A/B test between the two organs, I would wager more than half of a general population sample, even more if you only used musicians, could Identify which was the Real pipe organ and which was the Linux clone, even if the room was full of wheezing seniors.
This organ is nothing more than a (rather sophisticated) sample playback device with some rather nifty logic to choose it's samples well. This is the very reason it does an incomplete job of reproducting an actual organ sound, because it is incapable of recreating the full range of sounds accurately (emphasis on full).
While I grant that very slight differences in pitch (440/441 is actually differentiable for most people) and volume (10db is virtually inaudible) are difficult to discern, that's not the issue. It's the overall timbre of the sound that humans can very easily distinguish. A soprano singing on stage sounds very different from a recording of that soprano being played from a speaker in the same spot. The same goes for a violin/guitar/trumpet/basoon/etc. And doubly so for electronic versions of the same.
This behavior is caused by the destination webserver serving different pages depending on the referer link specified, and has nothing to do with google.
This is easiest to demonstrate with wget. Get the same url twice, once with "--referer=http://google.com", once without and compare the results.
This is not google's trickery.
To see for yourself try this:
-Fire up wget and grab the link above.
-try this again while specifying "--referer=http://google.com".
-compare the two files.
The switch is being done by bomberate.com's webserver depending on the referer address given, google has nothing to do with it.
it should also be pointed out that the "ebay" link does not in fact go to ebay, but rather a site on bomberate.com which lists e-bay auctions.
Right... but couldn't the same be said of any API? I mean, if the Apache plugin API changes, I'll need to rewrite my mod_foo module to use the new API.
It's a good thing for MS, because they will, for a time, have the only compliant implimentation of the standards every time they change. Every other implimentation will lag behind as they seek to impliment the new standard.
The main difference between these changes and the apachie API changes is that the apache people are not selling a closed source version of mod_foo which is included in completely update compatible form with each revision of the API.
In any civilised country a car doing 25 mpg would be taken for a service,
You mean Like the BMW 525? (20 city, 28 highway)
Or the Saab 9-5? (20/29)
Or the Volvo V70? (20/26)
It appears that european cars "sooo suck" as well.
Hmmmmm...
1200 lbs, 20 horsepower
vs.
2400 lbs, 200 horsepower, power steering, A/C, Automatic Transmission, etc.
Yeah, I'd say we've gone nowhere in the last hundred years.
The big three automakers would stop covering up the REVOLUTIONARY SUPER CARBURETOR that I read about in the back of Popular Science, we could get that number down to 1pptpm (Pre-historic Plant Ton per Mile)
The first annual Mongomery Burns award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence??
The people want the system to work the way it's supposed to.
This is a piss poor way of guarding agains voter fraud. Design a voting system that guards against voter fraud, don't rely on the populace to police a system which is so open to abuse.
Yes, it can. In order for such a figure to be unable to fit through itself the minimum cross-section width of the figure must equal it's maximum cross-section width. If there is any difference between these two values simply alight the figure so it's minimum cross-section lines up with the holes maximum-section and it will pass through.
A circle is the only shape that has an equal minimum and maximum cross-section ( 1 to 1 ratio). An equilateral triangle however has a (sqrt(1/4) ~.86 to 1)
But what happens if that timing belt goes?
It depends....
The timing belt/chain keeps the valves opening and closing in sync with the turning of the crankshaft. If that belt fails the valves will cease to move.
In some (most?) enginges the valves do not travel past the highest point of travel of the piston at any time. In this case, all that will happen is the engine will cease working and need to have the timing belt/chain replaces.
However if there is no clearance between the top of the piston's travel and the bottom of the valves travel (as in come higher performance engines) you will have catastrophic failure of some sort as the pistons collide with the valves. Repairs for this type of failure will be huge.
To return to the topic: Failure of the timing belt in this engine would be very nasty. The rotating "piston" would collide directly with the auxilliary wheel most likely fusing the two together if not ejecting the smaller wheel from the engine. Either way, it would be niether pretty or repairable.
This kind of conversation never goes anywhere it seems. Anyone challenging the status quo is part of the anti-establisment conspiracy, pushing their agenda. Anyone upholding the status quo is part of the nebulous "they" who don't want anyone to know the truth.
My bet is they are both politically motivated groups using science to furthertheir cause. Who is right? I leave that to the philosophers.
The answer is simple.
How is success measured?
Karma
How do you achieve it?
Post insightful comments on Slashdot
Or if you prefer, the answer is 42.
"I'd much rather have intelligent judges legislate from the bench (even if I disagree with them) than letting CEOs legislate from the board room."
Which Judges would those be? The one appointed by the "incredibly popular president" and approved by the "morally bankrup, corrupt congress".
Even on the state and local level judges are either appointed by elected officials or elected themselves. They are in no way removed from this whole political system, they may be the worst part of it.
Politicians can be voted out of office in 2, 4, 6 years, but judges stay around much longer. I would rather have the power in the hands of people who will be coming up for re-election than those who have no real chance of being removed.
Run your laptop on Nuclear energy....
"Nucular, it's pronounced Nucular" - Homer
Fuel cell vehicles, electric cars, etc. are not being produced because there is no demand for a vehicle with a large pricetag, limited range, and no fueling infrastructure. Oil, and consequently gasonline is very cheap to produce, and also easy to distribute compared to these hydrogen alternatives, and most people are not going to willingly surrender their money to purchase vehicles that make no economic sense.
until the price of driving my gasoline fueled car rises above the cost of driving an (fill-in-the-blank-alternative-fuel-vehicle) I'll go out and buy one, but not until then.