Most lines are welded now, so it doesn't happen any more.
Not the same way, or as often, but you still get the clack as you go over a rail joint; they're just expansion joints and less common. I recall a problem that I ran across in high school, that posited a one-mile continuous length of railroad track, and asked 'if the track expands by one inch, and buckles rigidly, so that it bends only at the middle, and is otherwise straight, how far off the ground is the rail at its midpoint?' The answer is, surprisingly, almost 15 feet (do the math: Pythagorean theorem, hypotenuse 1/2 mile + 1/2 inch, one side 1/2 mile, solve for third side). And you'll still get the rail clacking going over points and frogs in areas where you have switches.
There are absolutely no words that can justify the use of force.
You're missing one critical factor. There are absolutely no words that can justify the initiation of force. Using force to defend yourself once someone has used force against you is perfectly justified.
One problem for computer users is that -- especially for desktop uses, we often are reading at mid distances -- neither far focus nor book distances.
The other primary problem is that both bifocals and progressive lenses have the near-focus section of the lens at the bottom, where for most computer work you are looking at your screen through the middle and upper parts of the lens. This makes both bifocals and progressive lenses pretty much useless for computer work.
What I did was to visit a supermarket and use the display of reading glasses to determine what amount of additional correction gave me clear view at normal monitor distances, then order some clip-on reading glasses with that correction. The clip-ons are about $12 -- much less than another full pair of glasses with a different distance correction -- and just as easy to keep around. I look like more of a geek while wearing them, but they're less trouble than keeping track of which glasses I'm wearing.
"Absolutely and unambiguously make writing and publishing a zero-sum game" Um, no - the more readers, the more money. It's not zero sum at all from the writers' point of view.
Actually, it always was a zero-sum game within any given pool of readers. Each individual has some amount of money that they are willing to spend buying books, and if they buy one author's books, it reduces the available funds that can be used to buy another author's books. The subscription model that Amazon is adopting changes the model by paying authors , not when their work is purchased, but when it is read. This changes the way a book is valued by its author; previously, once the book was sold, the author has no direct interest in how many times the purchaser reads it. Under Amazon's model, readers no longer own their books; they effectively rent them anew each time they want to read them. And a book that would have been purchased, read once, and binned to go to a second-hand bookstore has less value to an author than a book that would have been re-read again and again over time. And there are two ways for authors to respond to this change -- they can produce works that are worth reading again and again, or they can produce more books for Amazon to 'charge' for. As Scalzi points out, we are seeing authors, resigned to the lack of quality and rereadability of their work, breaking books up into chunks so that each piece of the book can be counted as a separate publication for the purposes of receiving payments. It will work to the detriment of the 'story collection' books -- why should an author publish an e-book that collects a dozen of their stories, when they can get a dozen times the 'read count' by publishing each story individually? Other authors might break up books into chapters as individual publications to artificially boost their 'read count', or write shorter stories instead of novels. By treating all works as equal, regardless of size, the payment method encourages authors "gaming" the system to artificially inflate the number of times their works have been read.
Basically the USAF brass doesn't want to do air-ground missions...
As an illustration of this attitude, there was a slogan during the development of the F-15 Eagle -- "Not a pound for air-to-ground". And look at all of the upgrades and rework to make the Strike Eagle when it turned out that the Air Force didn't have the planes to conduct the CAS operations they had to do (because they continue to hoard non-Navy fixed-wing air assets to themselves, rather than letting the Army operate their own fixed-wing CAS units, even though the USAF doesn't want the CAS role), so they had to turn the F-15 into a mud mover.
And just think -- with the waste products from a fusion reactor, we can alleviate the increasing scarcity of helium.
However, we'll have to start dealing with all the environmentalists pitching a fit about people inhaling reactor waste products, or filling balloons with them and letting them float off across the countryside.
You still have a 60Hz grid? I'm waiting for the 0Hz grid.
There's still some DC power distribution by PG&E in San Francisco for elevators and the like, but Con Edison cut off the last DC supply in New York on Nov 14,2007.
No, science is not the pursuit of Truth, that would be philosophy down the hall.
Actually, science is the pursuit of Truth. Unfortunately, what we get from that pursuit is not Truth, but a useful approximation that works well enough for practical use within the limits defined by the parameters of the experiments. When your use moves outside those limits, the approximations may or may not hold, and experimentation to discover why this happens let us extend those approximations further.
In multiplayer games you often need someone to lead to get good results. This in no way means that the other teammembers are less respectable, being in charge is simply "part of the job". A good leader gets the most out of each teammembers strengths while covering their weaknesses. This should make the game more fun for everyone.
There is a difference between playing up teammates' strengths and covering their weaknesses, and demanding precise-to-the-microsecond-and-millimeter performance from team members and denigrating them for not being robots when they aren't perfect. Most MMORPGs go the route of end bosses that do predictable things at predictable times, with predictable responses, so fairly quickly a 'recipe' for defeating the boss gets put together... and then gets carved in stone so that it must be adhered to without variation, and anyone who dares deviate from it in any way, no matter how small, is therefore entirely and solely responsible for any negative outcome (i.e., team wipe). Each player has to have precisely the right gear to maximize their effectiveness, and has to adhere slavishly to the rotation that's been tested to eke out an additional.00000017% extra DPS... And somewhere in all of the number-crunching, the people who fixate on this sort of 'efficiency' lose sight of the fact that you play an MMORPG to have fun, not to be a fungible asset shoehorned into one of the Tank/DPS/Heal categories of a 'holy trinity' that itself limits your ability to play the way you want.
Note that in TFA she was warning about "Orwellian" surveillance, which specifically tends to refer to a world where the government is spying on you, not just private citizens.
I think that the world described in the three stories in David Drake's Lacey and His Friends might be a better analogy -- a world where everyone is under constant surveillance from multiple angles and by different organizations, where buying 'privacy' pays for a room with only the single mandatory government camera, and the ability of the police to roll back surveillance footage to track the movements of a criminal result in the overwhelming majority of criminals captured within hours of their crime. I think it better describes the extreme end result of the expansion of technology allows capturing more and more actions and communications until, by law, everything anyone does must be recorded.
Exactly. The sludge that has entered the river and lake has not yet been converted into forms that permit ready uptake by plants (and from the plants to the fish and other animals in the lake and up the food chain from there). There's no assurance that it won't undergo that chemical change, and attempts to remove the sludge using current technologies are sloppy enough that, while they would remove most of the sludge, they'll spread the rest more widely.
The maximum takeoff weight of the Martin JRM-3 Mars is reported as 165,000 pounds, -- more than 80 tons, and Wikipedia's article has a photograph of the Hawaii Mars II and Phillippine Mars on their landing gear undergoing maintenance; to my knowledge, the H-4 Hercules was never equipped with landing gear, which excludes it from the 'amphibian' category.
A better and more sweeping example would be working for a "closely-held business" run by Christian Scientists, who could contend that they should be excused from having to cover any care except from a practitioner.
I think a tax on gasoline is far easier to implement than a tax on mileage, and makes a lot of sense. The government wants to give incentive to high mileage vehicles and electric vehicles, so unless you have a different rate category for the mileage tax it would effectively punish them.
Pardon? Every vehicle has a weight class, and it gets taxed by mileage based on the weight class; heavier vehicles impose more wear on the roadways. This has been successfully used for long-haul trucks for decades. If the taxes on gasoline are, say, $0.40 a gallon, and the car gets 20mpg, the owner is paying $0.02/mile into transportation funds. A pure-electric car is paying nothing. If they replace their 20mpg car with one that gets 40mpb, they're paying $0.01/mile into transportation funds. If the gasoline tax is raised to $0.60/gal, a 20mpg car is paying $0.03/mile into transportation funds, a 40mpg car is paying $0.015/mile into transportation funds... while the owner of the electric car is still paying nothing. If they're all driving 10,000 miles per year, the 20mpg car pays $300/year in taxes, the 40mpg car is paying $150/year in taxes, and the electric car is paying... nothing. For the same amount of use of public roads.
Now, you can say that this just encourages people to move to higher-mileage cars... and it will -- but in the process of doing so, it will also reduce the tax revenues taken in. Every person converting to an electric car effectively stops supporting road maintenance, because they're no longer buying gasoline, and therefore not paying the gasoline tax. This increases the problem that Corker and Murphy are attempting to solve by increasing the gasoline tax rate. Every person who replaces their car with one that gets better mileage, or that doesn't use gasoline, reduces the tax base -- and increasing the tax rate just makes it more attractive to get out from under it. In order to make up for the reduced revenue, they'll need to raise the tax again, and the cycle repeats itself, while anyone with an electric car is essentially freeloading their street use on the backs of everyone not driving an electric vehicle. Mileage-based taxes are more fairly distributed; you are paying on the basis of the amount of use you make of the roads, and it doesn't matter if you're powering your car with gasoline, propane, electricity, water gas, hydrogen, or happy thoughts.
Although, ideally, you'd just pay for a movie once to own it in the highest resolution available and then you'd be able to watch it in any quality that or less on any device.
That policy is anathema to the management of the Music And Film Industries Association of America; their goal is to be able to charge you per person and per performance for all of their product.
When the Constitution was ratified, it included provisions for the establishment of a standing army. Yet the Founders, having experienced firsthand the depredations that a standing army could inflict on a population, considered it necessary to explicitly spell out the principle that the government should not be permitted to take weapons out of the hands of citizens. _Despite_ the government being given the authority to raise an army, the individual citizens would still be allowed to arm themselves as they saw fit.
The reason for mirrors mounted that far forward, at least for Japanese cars, is that, until 1983, Japan had a law that required that the side mirrors be visible through glass that was swept by wipers to ensure that they would not be obscured by rain. They're still common for taxis, because they provide better visibility; taxi drivers also feel that by reducing how far they have to turn their head to the side to look in the mirrors, they don't create the appearance of trying to look in the back, which preserves their passengers' privacy.
Agreed. I might just go along with the corporations-as-people idea just as soon as the first corporation is executed for having policies tantamount to murder, or gross negligence with lethal consequences, such as seems to be the case here.
Unfortunately, applying criminal law evenly to corporate persons creates a fundamental inequity. While execution -- dissolution of the corporation -- can be applied evenly, incarceration -- a forcible suspension of all business operations -- can't. Nintendo, for example, could lose $250 million a year and not run out of reserves until 2050 or so, a smaller corporation subjected to, say, a ten-year suspension of its ability to operate might as well be a 'death sentence'. And this isn't considering the impact on the employees of a company that's dissolved or suspended.
I would expect that you'd need something like a large pottery vase or jar with a tapered hole in the bottom. You cut the length of sapwood, wrap one end with a fiber cord until you can push it down into the hole and have it fit tightly with the branch sticking out the bottom (a rubber gasket would be better, but may not be readily available), then pour your 'raw' water into the vase and hang it over another container to catch the water that passes through the branch. A higher-tech solution would use some sort of pump to raise the pressure on the source side to push water through the branch faster, but that would require a greater investment of material; pottery and fiber cord should be products available in even subtechnological cultures.
Marking their shell with the date of their harvest doesn't do you any good if you don't know how long it will be until the next time they moult; anything marking or attached to their shell will stay with the shell at moult, so if you harvest a crab, bleed it, mark the shell, and it moults a month later, you might pick up the same crab before it has a chance to recover.
Slashdot Mirror
That was mostly subsonic; you didn't hear it, you felt it.
Most lines are welded now, so it doesn't happen any more.
Not the same way, or as often, but you still get the clack as you go over a rail joint; they're just expansion joints and less common. I recall a problem that I ran across in high school, that posited a one-mile continuous length of railroad track, and asked 'if the track expands by one inch, and buckles rigidly, so that it bends only at the middle, and is otherwise straight, how far off the ground is the rail at its midpoint?' The answer is, surprisingly, almost 15 feet (do the math: Pythagorean theorem, hypotenuse 1/2 mile + 1/2 inch, one side 1/2 mile, solve for third side). And you'll still get the rail clacking going over points and frogs in areas where you have switches.
There are absolutely no words that can justify the use of force.
You're missing one critical factor. There are absolutely no words that can justify the initiation of force. Using force to defend yourself once someone has used force against you is perfectly justified.
One problem for computer users is that -- especially for desktop uses, we often are reading at mid distances -- neither far focus nor book distances.
The other primary problem is that both bifocals and progressive lenses have the near-focus section of the lens at the bottom, where for most computer work you are looking at your screen through the middle and upper parts of the lens. This makes both bifocals and progressive lenses pretty much useless for computer work.
What I did was to visit a supermarket and use the display of reading glasses to determine what amount of additional correction gave me clear view at normal monitor distances, then order some clip-on reading glasses with that correction. The clip-ons are about $12 -- much less than another full pair of glasses with a different distance correction -- and just as easy to keep around. I look like more of a geek while wearing them, but they're less trouble than keeping track of which glasses I'm wearing.
"Absolutely and unambiguously make writing and publishing a zero-sum game"
Um, no - the more readers, the more money. It's not zero sum at all from the writers' point of view.
Actually, it always was a zero-sum game within any given pool of readers. Each individual has some amount of money that they are willing to spend buying books, and if they buy one author's books, it reduces the available funds that can be used to buy another author's books. The subscription model that Amazon is adopting changes the model by paying authors , not when their work is purchased, but when it is read. This changes the way a book is valued by its author; previously, once the book was sold, the author has no direct interest in how many times the purchaser reads it. Under Amazon's model, readers no longer own their books; they effectively rent them anew each time they want to read them. And a book that would have been purchased, read once, and binned to go to a second-hand bookstore has less value to an author than a book that would have been re-read again and again over time. And there are two ways for authors to respond to this change -- they can produce works that are worth reading again and again, or they can produce more books for Amazon to 'charge' for. As Scalzi points out, we are seeing authors, resigned to the lack of quality and rereadability of their work, breaking books up into chunks so that each piece of the book can be counted as a separate publication for the purposes of receiving payments. It will work to the detriment of the 'story collection' books -- why should an author publish an e-book that collects a dozen of their stories, when they can get a dozen times the 'read count' by publishing each story individually? Other authors might break up books into chapters as individual publications to artificially boost their 'read count', or write shorter stories instead of novels. By treating all works as equal, regardless of size, the payment method encourages authors "gaming" the system to artificially inflate the number of times their works have been read.
Basically the USAF brass doesn't want to do air-ground missions...
As an illustration of this attitude, there was a slogan during the development of the F-15 Eagle -- "Not a pound for air-to-ground". And look at all of the upgrades and rework to make the Strike Eagle when it turned out that the Air Force didn't have the planes to conduct the CAS operations they had to do (because they continue to hoard non-Navy fixed-wing air assets to themselves, rather than letting the Army operate their own fixed-wing CAS units, even though the USAF doesn't want the CAS role), so they had to turn the F-15 into a mud mover.
Or they could just kill themselves and everyone to save the planet.
I am reminded of the fortune-file entry "/earth is 98% full. Please delete anyone you can."
And just think -- with the waste products from a fusion reactor, we can alleviate the increasing scarcity of helium.
However, we'll have to start dealing with all the environmentalists pitching a fit about people inhaling reactor waste products, or filling balloons with them and letting them float off across the countryside.
Then why are they playing a video of what it will do instead of actually demonstrating the product?
"Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
-- James Klass
You still have a 60Hz grid? I'm waiting for the 0Hz grid.
There's still some DC power distribution by PG&E in San Francisco for elevators and the like, but Con Edison cut off the last DC supply in New York on Nov 14,2007.
No, science is not the pursuit of Truth, that would be philosophy down the hall.
Actually, science is the pursuit of Truth. Unfortunately, what we get from that pursuit is not Truth, but a useful approximation that works well enough for practical use within the limits defined by the parameters of the experiments. When your use moves outside those limits, the approximations may or may not hold, and experimentation to discover why this happens let us extend those approximations further.
In multiplayer games you often need someone to lead to get good results. This in no way means that the other teammembers are less respectable, being in charge is simply "part of the job". A good leader gets the most out of each teammembers strengths while covering their weaknesses. This should make the game more fun for everyone.
There is a difference between playing up teammates' strengths and covering their weaknesses, and demanding precise-to-the-microsecond-and-millimeter performance from team members and denigrating them for not being robots when they aren't perfect. Most MMORPGs go the route of end bosses that do predictable things at predictable times, with predictable responses, so fairly quickly a 'recipe' for defeating the boss gets put together... and then gets carved in stone so that it must be adhered to without variation, and anyone who dares deviate from it in any way, no matter how small, is therefore entirely and solely responsible for any negative outcome (i.e., team wipe). Each player has to have precisely the right gear to maximize their effectiveness, and has to adhere slavishly to the rotation that's been tested to eke out an additional .00000017% extra DPS... And somewhere in all of the number-crunching, the people who fixate on this sort of 'efficiency' lose sight of the fact that you play an MMORPG to have fun, not to be a fungible asset shoehorned into one of the Tank/DPS/Heal categories of a 'holy trinity' that itself limits your ability to play the way you want.
Note that in TFA she was warning about "Orwellian" surveillance, which specifically tends to refer to a world where the government is spying on you, not just private citizens.
I think that the world described in the three stories in David Drake's Lacey and His Friends might be a better analogy -- a world where everyone is under constant surveillance from multiple angles and by different organizations, where buying 'privacy' pays for a room with only the single mandatory government camera, and the ability of the police to roll back surveillance footage to track the movements of a criminal result in the overwhelming majority of criminals captured within hours of their crime. I think it better describes the extreme end result of the expansion of technology allows capturing more and more actions and communications until, by law, everything anyone does must be recorded.
Exactly. The sludge that has entered the river and lake has not yet been converted into forms that permit ready uptake by plants (and from the plants to the fish and other animals in the lake and up the food chain from there). There's no assurance that it won't undergo that chemical change, and attempts to remove the sludge using current technologies are sloppy enough that, while they would remove most of the sludge, they'll spread the rest more widely.
The maximum takeoff weight of the Martin JRM-3 Mars is reported as 165,000 pounds, -- more than 80 tons, and Wikipedia's article has a photograph of the Hawaii Mars II and Phillippine Mars on their landing gear undergoing maintenance; to my knowledge, the H-4 Hercules was never equipped with landing gear, which excludes it from the 'amphibian' category.
A health insurance plan tuned for the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses would still pay for blood substitutes, iron supplements, and other expenses associated with bloodless surgery.
A better and more sweeping example would be working for a "closely-held business" run by Christian Scientists, who could contend that they should be excused from having to cover any care except from a practitioner.
So if they clone a human, the clone is not a distinct organism because it's DNA is not distinct from the original, and thus we can do away with it?
This premise would also make killing all but one of every set of identical twins/triplets/etc. legal.
I think a tax on gasoline is far easier to implement than a tax on mileage, and makes a lot of sense. The government wants to give incentive to high mileage vehicles and electric vehicles, so unless you have a different rate category for the mileage tax it would effectively punish them.
Pardon? Every vehicle has a weight class, and it gets taxed by mileage based on the weight class; heavier vehicles impose more wear on the roadways. This has been successfully used for long-haul trucks for decades. If the taxes on gasoline are, say, $0.40 a gallon, and the car gets 20mpg, the owner is paying $0.02/mile into transportation funds. A pure-electric car is paying nothing. If they replace their 20mpg car with one that gets 40mpb, they're paying $0.01/mile into transportation funds. If the gasoline tax is raised to $0.60/gal, a 20mpg car is paying $0.03/mile into transportation funds, a 40mpg car is paying $0.015/mile into transportation funds... while the owner of the electric car is still paying nothing. If they're all driving 10,000 miles per year, the 20mpg car pays $300/year in taxes, the 40mpg car is paying $150/year in taxes, and the electric car is paying... nothing. For the same amount of use of public roads.
Now, you can say that this just encourages people to move to higher-mileage cars... and it will -- but in the process of doing so, it will also reduce the tax revenues taken in. Every person converting to an electric car effectively stops supporting road maintenance, because they're no longer buying gasoline, and therefore not paying the gasoline tax. This increases the problem that Corker and Murphy are attempting to solve by increasing the gasoline tax rate. Every person who replaces their car with one that gets better mileage, or that doesn't use gasoline, reduces the tax base -- and increasing the tax rate just makes it more attractive to get out from under it. In order to make up for the reduced revenue, they'll need to raise the tax again, and the cycle repeats itself, while anyone with an electric car is essentially freeloading their street use on the backs of everyone not driving an electric vehicle. Mileage-based taxes are more fairly distributed; you are paying on the basis of the amount of use you make of the roads, and it doesn't matter if you're powering your car with gasoline, propane, electricity, water gas, hydrogen, or happy thoughts.
Although, ideally, you'd just pay for a movie once to own it in the highest resolution available and then you'd be able to watch it in any quality that or less on any device.
That policy is anathema to the management of the Music And Film Industries Association of America; their goal is to be able to charge you per person and per performance for all of their product.
"Nal komerex, khesterex".
--- John M. Ford, The Final Reflection
When the Constitution was ratified, it included provisions for the establishment of a standing army. Yet the Founders, having experienced firsthand the depredations that a standing army could inflict on a population, considered it necessary to explicitly spell out the principle that the government should not be permitted to take weapons out of the hands of citizens. _Despite_ the government being given the authority to raise an army, the individual citizens would still be allowed to arm themselves as they saw fit.
There was a fad for a while to move the mirrors as far forward as possible such as http://images.johnnycupcakes.c...
The reason for mirrors mounted that far forward, at least for Japanese cars, is that, until 1983, Japan had a law that required that the side mirrors be visible through glass that was swept by wipers to ensure that they would not be obscured by rain. They're still common for taxis, because they provide better visibility; taxi drivers also feel that by reducing how far they have to turn their head to the side to look in the mirrors, they don't create the appearance of trying to look in the back, which preserves their passengers' privacy.
Agreed. I might just go along with the corporations-as-people idea just as soon as the first corporation is executed for having policies tantamount to murder, or gross negligence with lethal consequences, such as seems to be the case here.
Unfortunately, applying criminal law evenly to corporate persons creates a fundamental inequity. While execution -- dissolution of the corporation -- can be applied evenly, incarceration -- a forcible suspension of all business operations -- can't. Nintendo, for example, could lose $250 million a year and not run out of reserves until 2050 or so, a smaller corporation subjected to, say, a ten-year suspension of its ability to operate might as well be a 'death sentence'. And this isn't considering the impact on the employees of a company that's dissolved or suspended.
I would expect that you'd need something like a large pottery vase or jar with a tapered hole in the bottom. You cut the length of sapwood, wrap one end with a fiber cord until you can push it down into the hole and have it fit tightly with the branch sticking out the bottom (a rubber gasket would be better, but may not be readily available), then pour your 'raw' water into the vase and hang it over another container to catch the water that passes through the branch. A higher-tech solution would use some sort of pump to raise the pressure on the source side to push water through the branch faster, but that would require a greater investment of material; pottery and fiber cord should be products available in even subtechnological cultures.
Marking their shell with the date of their harvest doesn't do you any good if you don't know how long it will be until the next time they moult; anything marking or attached to their shell will stay with the shell at moult, so if you harvest a crab, bleed it, mark the shell, and it moults a month later, you might pick up the same crab before it has a chance to recover.