Amtrak has been subsidized enough to barely stay alive for the entire length of its existance, and in its defense, they have done a fairly good job at cutting costs.
The problem with amtrak is that it's comparatively expensive. Every little bit of road travel is subsidized -- think of how many toll roads you travel on frequently. It probably isn't that many. Amtrak, on the other hand, is more or less encouraged to be self-sufficent, which it can't as long as we're subsidizing the highways and private airlines to high heaven. Methinks efficent train travel is more important to the vast majority of americans than air travel. Go look at Wikipedia's article on Amtrak. It's been flawed and doomed from the start.
Actually, two statistics in that blurb scare me all on their own:
Once you consider that there are approximately 300 million people in the United States, the fact that there are 200+ Million Guns is downright frightening all on its own.
I'll begrudgingly admit that the second ammendment is a necessary civil right, but 200 million guns in the US is outrageously excessive, especially when you consdier who, among the people who know, owns a gun. That's 2 guns for every 3 people! Once you subtract out the 0-18 age group, the ratio becomes closer to 1:1!
Oh, and if there really are that many guns floating around, encrypted ammunition isn't going to help in the least.
Many large cities are now using "intelligent" parking meters that are network-connected anyway so that cops can easily download a list of which spaces are supposed to be open, and which are supposed to be empty. There's usually one meter per block/street, and to pay, you walk to the meter, enter your parking spot number, and deposit the money. Some meters let you use a debit card as well. You also get a receipt, which is incredibly useful when fighting a parking fine for all parties involved.
In other words, adding functionality like this will most likely be a software-only investment, and thus, be reasonably inexpensive.
That said, I hate the 'intelligent' meters, as the ones I've used are terrible at reading bills, forcing you to use quarters, and even those it has trouble with. This becomes problematic for train stations that have a multi-dollar parking fee, and has been the cause of many missed trains for me.
The driving tests today are filled with political garbage. There's virtually nothing on them about actually driving an automobile, whilst the vast majority of the test is filled with questions regarding the dollar-amounts of the penalties for DWI, the maximum number of weeks you have to change your registration after you move, the (startlingly high) number of points you get on your license if you cut off an ice cream truck (no joke! this was on my test), etc.....
The first time I took the test was almost a full year before I ever sat behind the wheel of a car just because of the way the drivers ed system works in my home state. I got a 70 --- I re-memorized the dollar-amounts for penalties and the other absolutely useless trivia, and passed with flying colors. A year later, I completed the sate-mandated 6 hours of driving with an instructor, and couldn't help but think to myself how worthless the original test was, whilst the 6 hours were quite valuable.
The whole system is horrible, but then again.... what else do you expect from the DMV. IIRC, the cover of the driving manual (this was in 2003) showed two people driving a car that wasn't equipped with seatbelts.
Someday, I hope to have a job that allows me to commute entirely by bike or train. Cars just aren't worth the hassle, and I cringe to think of how much it must have cost to build super-highways like I-80 or I-95.
If road travel weren't so darn subsidized by the government, trains might actually be a viable form of transportation, and could be built up to the point where they were cheaper, more efficent, and faster than road travel. But for now, we have to live with the mess that is Amtrak.
Yes, but that's not the point. As the grandparent poster pointed out, excess water was what made the houses significantly more vulnerable to the winds.
If this thing is simulating anything, it's a tornado.
I'm also concerned about the fact that the house looks like it takes up just about the whole entire building. Air currents can do some funky things when given enough room and enough objects to bounce off of. Likewise, as another poster pointed out, the simulator doesn't consider the fact that there will be debris, trees, and cars all flying around in a severe hurricane. From my knowledge of physics, it would seem to me that the structural integrity of the house becomes significantly more vulnerable once the exterior is compromised.
I know that winds obviously play a significant role in hurricane damage, but it seems to me that these guys are missing the forest for the trees, and wasting a lot of time and money in the process.
Microsoft actually used to require their employees to telnet into a xenix box for their mail.... long after MS dumped Xenix (well into the early 90s). Imagine... Microsoft employees using vi. Scary.
And on that note, Microsoft hasn't had a PDF competitor until recently (and even now, it's arguable how much support they're going to throw behind it. Just about everyone can read PDF, but almost nobody can read Microsoft's proprietary format). Likewise, Photoshop is not a competitor of Paint. Nobody sits down and considers using one over the other.
Kia and Ferrari both make cars. They're definitely not competitors.
So what he's really saying is that he just doesn't want to be bothered with it and that's fine, but he should SAY that, and eschew the dated rationalizations.
He DOES. Right on the same page. Directly below the text you quoted, in fact. Unless you're running at 640x480 (thus validating his point that a lot of people still use old equipment --- but I digress), it should have been plain in front of you.
# I am not a visual designer, so my graphics would look crummy anyway. Since this website is created by myself (and not by a multidisciplinary team as I always recommend for large sites) I didn't want to spend money to hire an artist.
Good enough for me! I might not agree with Nielsen on everything, but he's got some excellent points, and is worth listening to. No graphic design is lightyears better than *bad* graphic design.
Now, on the other hand, most of his (most famous) work dates back to before the days CSS was popular and adequately-supported, and indeed, since it's been adopted, usability on the net as a whole has gone up tremendously, and designs have (thankfully) started to veer toward 'tasteful' minimalism (ie. mostly-text-based sites with attractive visual styling. Flickr and del.icio.us both jump into mind). I can't stress enough how useful of a tool CSS can be for *easily* creating user-friendly and visually-consitent sites.
My education on these matters is sadly limited (for now), but I'm not quite so sure they're "almost there", or if they'll ever be "there" for that matter.
Any observation of a quantum particle requires some sort of interaction with that particle. Once you interact with the particle, the wave function collapses.
Unless I'm horribly mistaken, this breakthrough only allows us to observe particles with less interaction to them. Regardless of this fact, any observation imlies a collapse of the wave function. Einstein proved this IIRC.
From what I understand, until *any* given phenomena is observed, it is occupying all possible states of being. Once it is observed, the probability function collapses, and it settles on one state of being. This manifests itself particularly well in the double slit experiment, because, the particle has a 50% chance of hitting one slit or the other, and as long as you don't make any observations before the particle hits the slit(s), it seems to pass through *both*. Of course, the definition of "observation" is pretty broadly defined as any interaction with just about anything.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge can comment. (It's not like any of this is even relevant anymore anyhow..... Bistromathematics will soon replace quantum physics. )
no. the size of the sensor has nothing to do with noise. the grandparent poster was correct -- it's the DENSITY of the sensor that affects the amount noise you get.
DSLRs have the advantage, not because their sensors are necessarily larger, but because the pixels aren't packed so tightly together. You could hypothetically use the same processes they use to make those tiny 8MP compact-camera CCDs to make an APS-C sized CCD for a DSLR. You'd have tons of (hypothetical) resolution, but the noise would make it useless, and it'd be painfully expensive.
Film still wins in this arena. We're only approaching the point where huge large-format sensors like this one can challenge high-quality 35mm film. We need to get to the point where we can match 35mm resolution in a 35mm (or more likely, APS-C) sensor.
We're pretty close to conquering the noise issue, and even compact cameras are beginning to perform well at ISO 800 and 1600, whilst full-frame 35mm DSLRs can produce virtually noiseless prints at ISO 1600 and 3200. Improving dynamic range and pixel-density will be the next big technological hurdle to leap over.
Personally, the idea of a high dynamic range CCD excites me. Imagine the possibilities.....
From my point of view as an American, there are a few exceptional schools in Europe (Oxford and Cambridge coming to mind the most quickly), while the rest of the schools are equally excellent thanks to a unified education system.
As a whole Europe's education system is remarkably good, but very few schools stand out as being on top of all the others. In mind, this is a good thing, as America's perceptions of what the 'good' schools are is becoming increasingly distorted in my mind --- the Ivies accept far too many people based off of money and legacies, whilst the public education system produces graudates that every much as talented and experienced. Likewise, it creates a sort of social class system that is unhealthy for the country (think of the choices we had in the 2004 presidential election...)
I think this VERY MUCH varies by state. After all, state-run universities are run by the state. Not at the national level.
Case in point: The state school system in New Jersey where I live appears to be corrupt, underfunded, and overcrowded (as are the K-12 schools, which I can say for a FACT this is true after working at one of the "best" ones for two years). The state-run college I currently attend in Virginia completely lacks the same bueraucracy, is better funded (but still not enough), and is a reasonable size. As an added bonus, military servvice pretty much looks good on a resume anywhere in Virginia, given that the private sector in the state is composed mainly of ex-gov or ex-military, so chances are that so will be the person reading your resume.
Well, yes. I'm not saying much about the stuff inside the cases. G5s ran notoriously hot --- however, the case was very well designed in terms of cooling so that it would remain fairly quiet despite a rather hefty heat output. those huge 120mm+ fans don't have to spin fast to move a lot of air.
29 pages for five cases? You've got to be kidding!
I hate to be the token apple fanboy, but these cases are amazingly ugly. all of them are significantly uglier than anything apple's produced, dating all the way back to the blue and white G3s.
that's not to say that OEM PC cases have to be ugly. IBM's produced some slick-looking cases, and so has Dell (for their small-form factor business stuff at least).
Lian-li's cases are also reasonably attractive, even if they somewhat appear to be knockoffs of the G5.
Industrial design seems to be an art lost to many theese days, which is a real shame... the G5's case was beautiful, functional, and able to cool several ridiculously hot G5 processors silently.
That's a really odd choice for nintendo, given the fact that the gamecube is a fairly 'customized' piece of hardware (3 boards, funky controller ports, etc) crammed into a REALLY tight space.
I would have found it much more likely for them to have been put in some generic grey box or something like that for E3........
A pentium makes a shamefully inefficent heater. In addition to heating the room, the processor's also wasting away unused clock cycles.
Don't you people understand thermodynamics? Heating something is most efficently done by a device that does as little as possible apart from providing heat. Anything else is wasted energy.
Besides.... it stands to reason that the most efficent way to heat things is with a heater.
Slashdot Mirror
Amtrak has been subsidized enough to barely stay alive for the entire length of its existance, and in its defense, they have done a fairly good job at cutting costs.
The problem with amtrak is that it's comparatively expensive. Every little bit of road travel is subsidized -- think of how many toll roads you travel on frequently. It probably isn't that many. Amtrak, on the other hand, is more or less encouraged to be self-sufficent, which it can't as long as we're subsidizing the highways and private airlines to high heaven. Methinks efficent train travel is more important to the vast majority of americans than air travel. Go look at Wikipedia's article on Amtrak. It's been flawed and doomed from the start.
Actually, two statistics in that blurb scare me all on their own:
Once you consider that there are approximately 300 million people in the United States, the fact that there are 200+ Million Guns is downright frightening all on its own.
I'll begrudgingly admit that the second ammendment is a necessary civil right, but 200 million guns in the US is outrageously excessive, especially when you consdier who, among the people who know, owns a gun. That's 2 guns for every 3 people! Once you subtract out the 0-18 age group, the ratio becomes closer to 1:1!
Oh, and if there really are that many guns floating around, encrypted ammunition isn't going to help in the least.
Many large cities are now using "intelligent" parking meters that are network-connected anyway so that cops can easily download a list of which spaces are supposed to be open, and which are supposed to be empty. There's usually one meter per block/street, and to pay, you walk to the meter, enter your parking spot number, and deposit the money. Some meters let you use a debit card as well. You also get a receipt, which is incredibly useful when fighting a parking fine for all parties involved.
In other words, adding functionality like this will most likely be a software-only investment, and thus, be reasonably inexpensive.
That said, I hate the 'intelligent' meters, as the ones I've used are terrible at reading bills, forcing you to use quarters, and even those it has trouble with. This becomes problematic for train stations that have a multi-dollar parking fee, and has been the cause of many missed trains for me.
Not so.
The driving tests today are filled with political garbage. There's virtually nothing on them about actually driving an automobile, whilst the vast majority of the test is filled with questions regarding the dollar-amounts of the penalties for DWI, the maximum number of weeks you have to change your registration after you move, the (startlingly high) number of points you get on your license if you cut off an ice cream truck (no joke! this was on my test), etc.....
The first time I took the test was almost a full year before I ever sat behind the wheel of a car just because of the way the drivers ed system works in my home state. I got a 70 --- I re-memorized the dollar-amounts for penalties and the other absolutely useless trivia, and passed with flying colors. A year later, I completed the sate-mandated 6 hours of driving with an instructor, and couldn't help but think to myself how worthless the original test was, whilst the 6 hours were quite valuable.
The whole system is horrible, but then again.... what else do you expect from the DMV. IIRC, the cover of the driving manual (this was in 2003) showed two people driving a car that wasn't equipped with seatbelts.
Someday, I hope to have a job that allows me to commute entirely by bike or train. Cars just aren't worth the hassle, and I cringe to think of how much it must have cost to build super-highways like I-80 or I-95.
If road travel weren't so darn subsidized by the government, trains might actually be a viable form of transportation, and could be built up to the point where they were cheaper, more efficent, and faster than road travel. But for now, we have to live with the mess that is Amtrak.
Yes, but that's not the point. As the grandparent poster pointed out, excess water was what made the houses significantly more vulnerable to the winds.
If this thing is simulating anything, it's a tornado.
I'm also concerned about the fact that the house looks like it takes up just about the whole entire building. Air currents can do some funky things when given enough room and enough objects to bounce off of. Likewise, as another poster pointed out, the simulator doesn't consider the fact that there will be debris, trees, and cars all flying around in a severe hurricane. From my knowledge of physics, it would seem to me that the structural integrity of the house becomes significantly more vulnerable once the exterior is compromised.
I know that winds obviously play a significant role in hurricane damage, but it seems to me that these guys are missing the forest for the trees, and wasting a lot of time and money in the process.
Voting in florida is easy, regardless of whether or not you're a US citizen, or even alive for that matter....
Microsoft actually used to require their employees to telnet into a xenix box for their mail.... long after MS dumped Xenix (well into the early 90s). Imagine... Microsoft employees using vi. Scary.
And on that note, Microsoft hasn't had a PDF competitor until recently (and even now, it's arguable how much support they're going to throw behind it. Just about everyone can read PDF, but almost nobody can read Microsoft's proprietary format). Likewise, Photoshop is not a competitor of Paint. Nobody sits down and considers using one over the other.
Kia and Ferrari both make cars. They're definitely not competitors.
He DOES. Right on the same page. Directly below the text you quoted, in fact. Unless you're running at 640x480 (thus validating his point that a lot of people still use old equipment --- but I digress), it should have been plain in front of you.
Good enough for me! I might not agree with Nielsen on everything, but he's got some excellent points, and is worth listening to. No graphic design is lightyears better than *bad* graphic design.
Now, on the other hand, most of his (most famous) work dates back to before the days CSS was popular and adequately-supported, and indeed, since it's been adopted, usability on the net as a whole has gone up tremendously, and designs have (thankfully) started to veer toward 'tasteful' minimalism (ie. mostly-text-based sites with attractive visual styling. Flickr and del.icio.us both jump into mind). I can't stress enough how useful of a tool CSS can be for *easily* creating user-friendly and visually-consitent sites.
My education on these matters is sadly limited (for now), but I'm not quite so sure they're "almost there", or if they'll ever be "there" for that matter.
Any observation of a quantum particle requires some sort of interaction with that particle. Once you interact with the particle, the wave function collapses.
Unless I'm horribly mistaken, this breakthrough only allows us to observe particles with less interaction to them. Regardless of this fact, any observation imlies a collapse of the wave function. Einstein proved this IIRC.
From what I understand, until *any* given phenomena is observed, it is occupying all possible states of being. Once it is observed, the probability function collapses, and it settles on one state of being. This manifests itself particularly well in the double slit experiment, because, the particle has a 50% chance of hitting one slit or the other, and as long as you don't make any observations before the particle hits the slit(s), it seems to pass through *both*. Of course, the definition of "observation" is pretty broadly defined as any interaction with just about anything.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge can comment. (It's not like any of this is even relevant anymore anyhow..... Bistromathematics will soon replace quantum physics. )
My doc used to be the same way, but purchased a new one a year or two ago.
The reason more docs don't have them? They're horrendously expensive (up to $50,000)
he gives the figure in kelvins, so I really don't see what all the fuss is about.
He's giving a figure that most americans will be able to at least somewhat relate to.
no. the size of the sensor has nothing to do with noise. the grandparent poster was correct -- it's the DENSITY of the sensor that affects the amount noise you get.
DSLRs have the advantage, not because their sensors are necessarily larger, but because the pixels aren't packed so tightly together. You could hypothetically use the same processes they use to make those tiny 8MP compact-camera CCDs to make an APS-C sized CCD for a DSLR. You'd have tons of (hypothetical) resolution, but the noise would make it useless, and it'd be painfully expensive.
Film still wins in this arena. We're only approaching the point where huge large-format sensors like this one can challenge high-quality 35mm film. We need to get to the point where we can match 35mm resolution in a 35mm (or more likely, APS-C) sensor.
We're pretty close to conquering the noise issue, and even compact cameras are beginning to perform well at ISO 800 and 1600, whilst full-frame 35mm DSLRs can produce virtually noiseless prints at ISO 1600 and 3200. Improving dynamic range and pixel-density will be the next big technological hurdle to leap over.
Personally, the idea of a high dynamic range CCD excites me. Imagine the possibilities.....
Not necessarily.
From my point of view as an American, there are a few exceptional schools in Europe (Oxford and Cambridge coming to mind the most quickly), while the rest of the schools are equally excellent thanks to a unified education system.
As a whole Europe's education system is remarkably good, but very few schools stand out as being on top of all the others. In mind, this is a good thing, as America's perceptions of what the 'good' schools are is becoming increasingly distorted in my mind --- the Ivies accept far too many people based off of money and legacies, whilst the public education system produces graudates that every much as talented and experienced. Likewise, it creates a sort of social class system that is unhealthy for the country (think of the choices we had in the 2004 presidential election...)
I think this VERY MUCH varies by state. After all, state-run universities are run by the state. Not at the national level.
Case in point: The state school system in New Jersey where I live appears to be corrupt, underfunded, and overcrowded (as are the K-12 schools, which I can say for a FACT this is true after working at one of the "best" ones for two years). The state-run college I currently attend in Virginia completely lacks the same bueraucracy, is better funded (but still not enough), and is a reasonable size. As an added bonus, military servvice pretty much looks good on a resume anywhere in Virginia, given that the private sector in the state is composed mainly of ex-gov or ex-military, so chances are that so will be the person reading your resume.
I believe that in extreme emergencies, an MRI can be powered down almost immediately (heavily damaging the machine, albeit)
looks like we've got a new meme on our hands....
Such messages also appear to be manifesting themselves as blog comment spam.
The numbers are always in 5 digit blocks too, just like the ones that another poster observed occuring here on slashdot.
This is either genuinely weird, or just someone playing an elaborate prank.
I for one am intrigued, as I've seen the link-free spam messages crop up in all sorts of weird places...
If such a merger would finally kill Intel Intergrated Graphics, I'd be all for it no matter what the other implications would be.
That said, I think an AMD/NVidia merger would far more likely if such a thing ever were to occur, as they seem to function in a similar manner.
Well, yes. I'm not saying much about the stuff inside the cases. G5s ran notoriously hot --- however, the case was very well designed in terms of cooling so that it would remain fairly quiet despite a rather hefty heat output. those huge 120mm+ fans don't have to spin fast to move a lot of air.
29 pages for five cases? You've got to be kidding!
I hate to be the token apple fanboy, but these cases are amazingly ugly. all of them are significantly uglier than anything apple's produced, dating all the way back to the blue and white G3s.
that's not to say that OEM PC cases have to be ugly. IBM's produced some slick-looking cases, and so has Dell (for their small-form factor business stuff at least).
Lian-li's cases are also reasonably attractive, even if they somewhat appear to be knockoffs of the G5.
Industrial design seems to be an art lost to many theese days, which is a real shame... the G5's case was beautiful, functional, and able to cool several ridiculously hot G5 processors silently.
Thank god someone with half a brain responded.
We've been sailing for thousands of years. I would think we've figured out how to do it safely by now, or else we'd have stopped a long time ago.
A boat covered in solar panels should sound like a terrible idea to anybody who's ever sailed in their lifetime (because it is!)
inescapable installs of pole dancers
I'm confused, how on earth could this be a bad thing?
it's steve ballmer
That's a really odd choice for nintendo, given the fact that the gamecube is a fairly 'customized' piece of hardware (3 boards, funky controller ports, etc) crammed into a REALLY tight space.
I would have found it much more likely for them to have been put in some generic grey box or something like that for E3........
Wouldn't it be cheaper, faster, and more efficent to just use a sailboat instead of a solar-powered craft?
A pentium makes a shamefully inefficent heater. In addition to heating the room, the processor's also wasting away unused clock cycles.
Don't you people understand thermodynamics? Heating something is most efficently done by a device that does as little as possible apart from providing heat. Anything else is wasted energy.
Besides.... it stands to reason that the most efficent way to heat things is with a heater.