Also how much of a payload can one missile really carry? Not much, good only for targeted strikes.
That depends on what your warhead/payload is. With a hypersonic missile to disperse it, how much territory could you effectively cover while dispersing, say, a hundred kilos of weaponized anthrax spores?
Advertising is a way to let people who may be interested in purchasing your product or using your service that you exist, nothing more, nothing less.
Bullshit. They are about stretching the truth to the point where a lawyer can't tell if your lying through your teeth to try to make your piece of crap look better than someone else's piece of crap while at the same time making damn sure you realize you simply cannot live without it.
From what I've seen, the vast majority of ads can be described as either "You are hideously careless with your health, nutrition, or hygeine if you do not use our product" or "You will become instantly more attractive to the opposite sex if you purchase/use our product", with the occasional "If you have enough money, you can avoid feeling as if you're just another sardine crammed into this aluminum cigar tube when you fly" ad, and the self-referential "Our retelling of this basic plot is better than the other 10,000 retellings of the same basic plot, because our retelling has better/more exposed skin/special effects/explosions/action/makeouts/big-name actors, whether or not any of that is relevant to the plot." ads to get you to watch movies or TV programs that themselves are vehicles to keep you in your seat to be exposed to more ads.
After five hundred years, the likelihood that any of the terrorist plots outlined in the Voynich Manuscript have either been carried out or abandoned approaches unity; there's nothing in it that would be useful for extending control over the current population.
I like how so many of these posts on slashdot make the CEO job look easy.
Well, of course it's easy -- look at what they're teaching in the Business Administration department in colleges: that it doesn't matter what a company does, or what it produces, or what any of the individual employees do in their jobs; someone trained in modern business management can walk in off the street and competently manage the people under them at any level from the work group all the way up to CEO.
I had to buy a HP 35S because my 50g wasn't allowed in some tests in my engineering school and I simply can't use a calculator that doesn't do RPN anymore.
More properly, using calculators that lie about being "algebraic" and use a bastard mix of algebraic and RPN are confusing to use. Why do I say this? Think about it. with an RPN calculator, dyadic functions are (number) (number) (function), while monadic functions are (number) (function). With so-called "algebraic" calculators, while dyadic functions are (number) (function) (number) (equals), monadic functions are (number) (function) -- which is RPN.
No problem -- Tolkien wrote these a long time ago, so all Jackson has to do is wait a few more years until the copyright lapses and they become public domain, then he can... oh, right.
First he's got to get past Disney lugging another shipping container full of money to Congress to further extend the Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Act... err... copyright duration.
Aren't all spellings "made up"? All languages evolve; English more than most. Certainly the English you speak today is markedly different from the English spoken a few hundred years ago. Go back just a bit further and the English spoken then would be nearly incomprehensible by you and me.
"Ye knowe ek that in forme of speeche is chaunge Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do; Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages, In sondry londes, sondry ben usages." -- Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Cressida
("You know also that in (the) form of speech (there) is change Within a thousand years, and words then That had value, now wonderfully curious and strange (To) us they seem, and yet they spoke them so, And succeeded as well in love as men now do; Also to win love in sundry ages, In sundry lands, (there) are many usages." -- Translation by Roger Lass in "Phonology and Morphology." A History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg and David Denison. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008)
Actually, if you are working off the premise that gasoline taxes go towards maintenance of the roads, to offset the damage caused by those vehicles, then there should be no taxes on gasoline.
Leaving aside issues of axle weight and the wear on the road infrastructure, every time I take my car in for its smog check, the mileage is recorded along with the VIN and engine number. That happens every other year, and averaging that distance across the interval since the last smog check would give an average miles per day, which produces an annual miles-driven value for a per-mile tax without any ability to track the location of the vehicle. And for the inevitable 'but this doesn't account for the car being driven out of state' objections, neither does the proposed mileage meters; you can't tell where the car is being driven without being able to track where the car is. And this data is already being collected; there is no additional recordkeeping involved.
Now, the House is passing smaller, targeted spending bills that make the things this guy s talking about unnecessary.
Oh, yes; the Democrats should agree to doing it this way so that they can lose the fight over the Affordable Care Act without a chance to preserve it. If they let the House pass bills that fund the government on a program-by-program basis, then the House Republicans will slowly work their way through bills that fund every government program except the Affordable Care Act. And by the time this happens, the Democrats will have already conceded on every other funding issue, so they'll have nothing to use to bargain with the Republicans to preserve the President's signature program, and the Democrats will have allowed the Republicans to kill the Affordable Care Act by inches. And the last few funding bills will be over clearly niggling-cost but high-visibility programs, so that if the Democrats try to get up on their high horse and demand funding for the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans can point at them and laugh at how they're willing to hold up these minor programs in order to get this much bigger program funded, making them look ridiculous. The Democrats can't concede on an a la carte funding process.
Notice how now that Obama is president the climate change is not a big deal anymore?
“This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work.”
Hardly sounds as if Obama considers "climate change" to be a sideline. You just have to look at Obama's Climate Action Plan to see for yourself. In his speech on climate change in June, he declared that he would be invoking his executive authority to invoke a number of measures aimed at curbing climate change and 'preparing' America for its costly impacts. In that speech, with the quip "We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society", he summarily dismissed any possibility of considering that the holy doctrine of anthropogenic climate change might be wrong, despite the repeated failure of climate models to reproduce the global cooling of the last fifteen years.
-- "You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about anthropogenic global warming."
This also puts an odd spin on H. Beam Piper's "Paratime" stories, where humanity evolved on Mars and colonized Earth as the Martian environment became less and less hospitable, and the various 'bands' across the various timelines were categorized by how successful the colonization was -- First Level, where the colonization succeeded fully; Second Level, where there were collapses in civilization, but they retained their knowledge of their Martian origins; Third Level, where the colonization was mostly unsuccessful, with only a few shiploads of people reaching Earth and losing all memory of their origin; Fourth Level, where the colonization survivors lost all knowledge of their origins and believe that they evolved on Earth; and Fifth Level, where the colonization either failed or was never attempted.
If the effects prove out, they had better make sure that they test for side effects at absurd overdose levels, because regardless of how it's intended to be used, there will be thousands if not millions of people who assume that if 100mg a day is good, 1000mg a day will be better -- and knowing what the overdose effects are in advance will make it easier to recognize and treat them.
Not to mention coming up with a workable test to detect its use that the various sports anti-doping agencies will want to use...
Actually, at least at the hospital where I work (and, presumably, through the rest of the military health system, since it's a standard test), it's HgA1c; 'HbA1c' must be a variant usage.
Blocking third-party cookies doesn't stop companies from including advertisements on web pages. What it does is stop companies from being able to collect data that tells them "From our tracking cookies, you went to sites X, Y, and Z, so we should show you advertisements for this group of products because we think that you will be more likely to respond to them than advertisements from that group of products.
I think that there should be a comparable study looking at e-books. There is a phenomenon in publishing referred to as "compression of the midlist". This is characterized by the advances and print runs for "midlist" authors -- authors whose books sell steadily, but not quickly -- getting smaller as publishers look to maximize the return on their investment. A large print run of a book by, say, Steven King will be quickly shipped to retailers in box lots, while a smaller print run of a book by Spider Robinson will result in boxes of books sitting on a warehouse shelf for years and shipping out five or ten books at a time to retailers. The maintenance of warehouse space is an ongoing cost for publishers, and the longer a printed book sits in a warehouse before being sold, the less money the publisher makes on the book. Hence the compression of the midlist -- an author that a publisher knows will have 10,000 books from a 20,000-unit print run sitting in their warehouse for an average of five years before selling (i.e., it takes ten years to sell out the books that don't sell in the first rush) will be offered a smaller advance, with a print run of perhaps only 12,000 units. As a result, once the initial surge of sales for a newly-published book wanes, the number of copies that are available for sale is much smaller, so the availability of these titles will drop significantly a relatively short time after publication, falling into the purvue of the used-book dealers -- who are specifically excluded from this study.
E-books, however, do not have this ongoing storage overhead; tens of thousands of e-books can be stored on a single hard drive for years after publication, just as available for purchase ten years after publication as they were ten days after publication. Ideally, then, we should expect to see that the availability of e-book editions of titles to lack this drastic falloff of availability as they age, and it should be possible to compare the availability of e-books against the availability of printed books by the interval since publication, and determine whether -- and how much -- the desire to reduce the cost of unsold inventory, rather than copyright itself, is causing the severe decline in availability of non-public-domain works.
Back in college, a friend of mine and I wrote an 8080 simulator in MACRO-11. Because the 8080 opcodes weren't structured as cleanly as the PDP-11's, we ultimately wound up handling the step that read the 8080 opcode and passed execution to the interpreter function for that opcode as a 256-way branch -- ASL the 8080 opcode and use it as an offset into a jump table of pointers to the interpreter functions.
With the ever-increasing price of tickets, using revenue as a judge of "record-breaking" is grossly inaccurate, as it erroneously compares unequal ticket prices and ignores the effect of inflation over the years.
Also note the hedge "...biggest June opening weekend..." to avoid having to admit that it's only the sixth biggest opening weekend. And I fully expect to see future announcements of this type get down to absurdities like "...biggest first week of June opening weekend..." or "...biggest fourth week of July opening weekend among 17-21 year old males of Italian ancestry..." as the studios start scraping the bottom of the bowl in an attempt to find something, anything, positive that they can use to puff a movie and make it look like more of a blockbuster to attract people who otherwise wouldn't go to see it.
What games actually do this? The two I've played (WoW and SWTOR) didn't.
It's pretty easy to hit the "exhaustion zones" on Tatooine in SWTOR when you reach the edge of where Bioware wanted to let you go (head out of Anchorhead or Mos Ila along the route the speederbike taxi would take you, and you run into one fairly quickly, for example; this is done to prevent the other faction from getting into each side's starting area), but for the most part they just throw up some impassible obstacle, like an unclimbable slope/cliff (also used to force you to take a looping, extended route to get to a location literally only yards from you) or a chasm. The other geographic obstacle used to close off player movement is water; apparently, swimming is a lost art in the Old Republic, and you will drown if you go into deep-enough water -- although other games do this as well; in Aion, for example, your character will begin to drown if they get into water over their head.
City of Heroes had the 'War Walls' defining the limits of the zones in Paragon City that merely obstructed movement; when Praetoria was added in the Going Rogue expansion, the city was protected by Sonic Fence installations; approaching the zone limits defined by the Sonic Fence towers would cause your character to take damage until they left the area of the fence.
Based on this/. story, from a mere three weeks ago, this seems to be a reality which will be available for purchase within a couple of months.
Until they can demonstrate, with 100% reliability, that their smartgun will recognize my fingerprint through the cloth or leather glove on my hand, I -- and doubtless the vast majority of gun owners -- will regard this as just one more way to make your gun not work when you need it.
Seems we're suffering from a bit of Climate Change Fatigue... which suggests that the less than 1% of credible scientists who doubt AGW have managed to sow enough seeds of dramatic dissent for the rest of us to lose interest.
...and the media, seeing their advertising revenue flagging from the loss of interest in the continued "death, doom, and destruction from global warming due to rise in CO2 levels" news 'reporting' in the face of a 17-year stall in global temperature change (can't jack up the price of commercials if people yawn and change the channel when your newscasters announce another 'global warming' crisis), are starting to flock to a new crisis -- pollution causes global cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
Also how much of a payload can one missile really carry? Not much, good only for targeted strikes.
That depends on what your warhead/payload is. With a hypersonic missile to disperse it, how much territory could you effectively cover while dispersing, say, a hundred kilos of weaponized anthrax spores?
Advertising is a way to let people who may be interested in purchasing your product or using your service that you exist, nothing more, nothing less.
Bullshit. They are about stretching the truth to the point where a lawyer can't tell if your lying through your teeth to try to make your piece of crap look better than someone else's piece of crap while at the same time making damn sure you realize you simply cannot live without it.
From what I've seen, the vast majority of ads can be described as either "You are hideously careless with your health, nutrition, or hygeine if you do not use our product" or "You will become instantly more attractive to the opposite sex if you purchase/use our product", with the occasional "If you have enough money, you can avoid feeling as if you're just another sardine crammed into this aluminum cigar tube when you fly" ad, and the self-referential "Our retelling of this basic plot is better than the other 10,000 retellings of the same basic plot, because our retelling has better/more exposed skin/special effects/explosions/action/makeouts/big-name actors, whether or not any of that is relevant to the plot." ads to get you to watch movies or TV programs that themselves are vehicles to keep you in your seat to be exposed to more ads.
After five hundred years, the likelihood that any of the terrorist plots outlined in the Voynich Manuscript have either been carried out or abandoned approaches unity; there's nothing in it that would be useful for extending control over the current population.
I like how so many of these posts on slashdot make the CEO job look easy.
Well, of course it's easy -- look at what they're teaching in the Business Administration department in colleges: that it doesn't matter what a company does, or what it produces, or what any of the individual employees do in their jobs; someone trained in modern business management can walk in off the street and competently manage the people under them at any level from the work group all the way up to CEO.
I had to buy a HP 35S because my 50g wasn't allowed in some tests in my engineering school and I simply can't use a calculator that doesn't do RPN anymore.
More properly, using calculators that lie about being "algebraic" and use a bastard mix of algebraic and RPN are confusing to use. Why do I say this? Think about it. with an RPN calculator, dyadic functions are (number) (number) (function), while monadic functions are (number) (function). With so-called "algebraic" calculators, while dyadic functions are (number) (function) (number) (equals), monadic functions are (number) (function) -- which is RPN.
Yet another reason not to opt-in to data collection...
No problem -- Tolkien wrote these a long time ago, so all Jackson has to do is wait a few more years until the copyright lapses and they become public domain, then he can... oh, right.
First he's got to get past Disney lugging another shipping container full of money to Congress to further extend the Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Act... err... copyright duration.
Aren't all spellings "made up"? All languages evolve; English more than most. Certainly the English you speak today is markedly different from the English spoken a few hundred years ago. Go back just a bit further and the English spoken then would be nearly incomprehensible by you and me.
"Ye knowe ek that in forme of speeche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages."
-- Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Cressida
("You know also that in (the) form of speech (there) is change
Within a thousand years, and words then
That had value, now wonderfully curious and strange
(To) us they seem, and yet they spoke them so,
And succeeded as well in love as men now do;
Also to win love in sundry ages,
In sundry lands, (there) are many usages."
-- Translation by Roger Lass in "Phonology and Morphology." A History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg and David Denison. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008)
Actually, if you are working off the premise that gasoline taxes go towards maintenance of the roads, to offset the damage caused by those vehicles, then there should be no taxes on gasoline.
Leaving aside issues of axle weight and the wear on the road infrastructure, every time I take my car in for its smog check, the mileage is recorded along with the VIN and engine number. That happens every other year, and averaging that distance across the interval since the last smog check would give an average miles per day, which produces an annual miles-driven value for a per-mile tax without any ability to track the location of the vehicle. And for the inevitable 'but this doesn't account for the car being driven out of state' objections, neither does the proposed mileage meters; you can't tell where the car is being driven without being able to track where the car is. And this data is already being collected; there is no additional recordkeeping involved.
Now, the House is passing smaller, targeted spending bills that make the things this guy s talking about unnecessary.
Oh, yes; the Democrats should agree to doing it this way so that they can lose the fight over the Affordable Care Act without a chance to preserve it. If they let the House pass bills that fund the government on a program-by-program basis, then the House Republicans will slowly work their way through bills that fund every government program except the Affordable Care Act. And by the time this happens, the Democrats will have already conceded on every other funding issue, so they'll have nothing to use to bargain with the Republicans to preserve the President's signature program, and the Democrats will have allowed the Republicans to kill the Affordable Care Act by inches. And the last few funding bills will be over clearly niggling-cost but high-visibility programs, so that if the Democrats try to get up on their high horse and demand funding for the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans can point at them and laugh at how they're willing to hold up these minor programs in order to get this much bigger program funded, making them look ridiculous. The Democrats can't concede on an a la carte funding process.
Ahh, so that's what they're called. I had a bag of these (wood) when I was a kid, and just called them my 'math blocks'.
Notice how now that Obama is president the climate change is not a big deal anymore?
“This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work.”
Hardly sounds as if Obama considers "climate change" to be a sideline. You just have to look at Obama's Climate Action Plan to see for yourself. In his speech on climate change in June, he declared that he would be invoking his executive authority to invoke a number of measures aimed at curbing climate change and 'preparing' America for its costly impacts. In that speech, with the quip "We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society", he summarily dismissed any possibility of considering that the holy doctrine of anthropogenic climate change might be wrong, despite the repeated failure of climate models to reproduce the global cooling of the last fifteen years.
--
"You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about anthropogenic global warming."
This also puts an odd spin on H. Beam Piper's "Paratime" stories, where humanity evolved on Mars and colonized Earth as the Martian environment became less and less hospitable, and the various 'bands' across the various timelines were categorized by how successful the colonization was -- First Level, where the colonization succeeded fully; Second Level, where there were collapses in civilization, but they retained their knowledge of their Martian origins; Third Level, where the colonization was mostly unsuccessful, with only a few shiploads of people reaching Earth and losing all memory of their origin; Fourth Level, where the colonization survivors lost all knowledge of their origins and believe that they evolved on Earth; and Fifth Level, where the colonization either failed or was never attempted.
Actually, the US-distribution release of "Quatermass and the Pit" was "Five Million Years to Earth".
If the effects prove out, they had better make sure that they test for side effects at absurd overdose levels, because regardless of how it's intended to be used, there will be thousands if not millions of people who assume that if 100mg a day is good, 1000mg a day will be better -- and knowing what the overdose effects are in advance will make it easier to recognize and treat them.
Not to mention coming up with a workable test to detect its use that the various sports anti-doping agencies will want to use...
Actually, at least at the hospital where I work (and, presumably, through the rest of the military health system, since it's a standard test), it's HgA1c; 'HbA1c' must be a variant usage.
Blocking third-party cookies doesn't stop companies from including advertisements on web pages. What it does is stop companies from being able to collect data that tells them "From our tracking cookies, you went to sites X, Y, and Z, so we should show you advertisements for this group of products because we think that you will be more likely to respond to them than advertisements from that group of products.
"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" has a long tradition in argument.
I think that there should be a comparable study looking at e-books. There is a phenomenon in publishing referred to as "compression of the midlist". This is characterized by the advances and print runs for "midlist" authors -- authors whose books sell steadily, but not quickly -- getting smaller as publishers look to maximize the return on their investment. A large print run of a book by, say, Steven King will be quickly shipped to retailers in box lots, while a smaller print run of a book by Spider Robinson will result in boxes of books sitting on a warehouse shelf for years and shipping out five or ten books at a time to retailers. The maintenance of warehouse space is an ongoing cost for publishers, and the longer a printed book sits in a warehouse before being sold, the less money the publisher makes on the book. Hence the compression of the midlist -- an author that a publisher knows will have 10,000 books from a 20,000-unit print run sitting in their warehouse for an average of five years before selling (i.e., it takes ten years to sell out the books that don't sell in the first rush) will be offered a smaller advance, with a print run of perhaps only 12,000 units. As a result, once the initial surge of sales for a newly-published book wanes, the number of copies that are available for sale is much smaller, so the availability of these titles will drop significantly a relatively short time after publication, falling into the purvue of the used-book dealers -- who are specifically excluded from this study.
E-books, however, do not have this ongoing storage overhead; tens of thousands of e-books can be stored on a single hard drive for years after publication, just as available for purchase ten years after publication as they were ten days after publication. Ideally, then, we should expect to see that the availability of e-book editions of titles to lack this drastic falloff of availability as they age, and it should be possible to compare the availability of e-books against the availability of printed books by the interval since publication, and determine whether -- and how much -- the desire to reduce the cost of unsold inventory, rather than copyright itself, is causing the severe decline in availability of non-public-domain works.
Back in college, a friend of mine and I wrote an 8080 simulator in MACRO-11. Because the 8080 opcodes weren't structured as cleanly as the PDP-11's, we ultimately wound up handling the step that read the 8080 opcode and passed execution to the interpreter function for that opcode as a 256-way branch -- ASL the 8080 opcode and use it as an offset into a jump table of pointers to the interpreter functions.
What happens if this bacteria grows really good at it and starts munching away at everyday items on land?
You get something like Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters .
...a whopping $125.1 million....
With the ever-increasing price of tickets, using revenue as a judge of "record-breaking" is grossly inaccurate, as it erroneously compares unequal ticket prices and ignores the effect of inflation over the years.
Also note the hedge "...biggest June opening weekend..." to avoid having to admit that it's only the sixth biggest opening weekend. And I fully expect to see future announcements of this type get down to absurdities like "...biggest first week of June opening weekend..." or "...biggest fourth week of July opening weekend among 17-21 year old males of Italian ancestry..." as the studios start scraping the bottom of the bowl in an attempt to find something, anything, positive that they can use to puff a movie and make it look like more of a blockbuster to attract people who otherwise wouldn't go to see it.
What games actually do this? The two I've played (WoW and SWTOR) didn't.
It's pretty easy to hit the "exhaustion zones" on Tatooine in SWTOR when you reach the edge of where Bioware wanted to let you go (head out of Anchorhead or Mos Ila along the route the speederbike taxi would take you, and you run into one fairly quickly, for example; this is done to prevent the other faction from getting into each side's starting area), but for the most part they just throw up some impassible obstacle, like an unclimbable slope/cliff (also used to force you to take a looping, extended route to get to a location literally only yards from you) or a chasm. The other geographic obstacle used to close off player movement is water; apparently, swimming is a lost art in the Old Republic, and you will drown if you go into deep-enough water -- although other games do this as well; in Aion, for example, your character will begin to drown if they get into water over their head.
City of Heroes had the 'War Walls' defining the limits of the zones in Paragon City that merely obstructed movement; when Praetoria was added in the Going Rogue expansion, the city was protected by Sonic Fence installations; approaching the zone limits defined by the Sonic Fence towers would cause your character to take damage until they left the area of the fence.
Based on this /. story, from a mere three weeks ago, this seems to be a reality which will be available for purchase within a couple of months.
Until they can demonstrate, with 100% reliability, that their smartgun will recognize my fingerprint through the cloth or leather glove on my hand, I -- and doubtless the vast majority of gun owners -- will regard this as just one more way to make your gun not work when you need it.
Seems we're suffering from a bit of Climate Change Fatigue... which suggests that the less than 1% of credible scientists who doubt AGW have managed to sow enough seeds of dramatic dissent for the rest of us to lose interest.
...and the media, seeing their advertising revenue flagging from the loss of interest in the continued "death, doom, and destruction from global warming due to rise in CO2 levels" news 'reporting' in the face of a 17-year stall in global temperature change (can't jack up the price of commercials if people yawn and change the channel when your newscasters announce another 'global warming' crisis), are starting to flock to a new crisis -- pollution causes global cooling .