"Snack patrols" sound a lot like "death panels." Sounds like a scare-phrase cooked up by the media based around an isolated incident taken out of context.
My High School had a soda machine in the cafeteria when I went there. I returned to collect a transcript earlier this year, and noticed that the machines had been removed.
Apparently the administration was concerned about the students' health. Additionally (even dating back to my time), all students are required to take gym, including athletes. Gym class might be a bit of a joke, although the effort's clearly being made to get kids in shape. Things might be going differently in other parts of the country, but schools in the northeast appear to have at least nominally taken an interest in their students' health.
Personally, I find that my physical well-being is directly tied to my mental acuity. Although I've got the metabolism to tolerate the occasional unhealthy meal, I notice myself dramatically "slow down" if I pig out, or haven't been for a run or to the gym in a few days.
So you link to an article which confirms his claim, and label it "false"? In what universe does THAT make sense?
Howso? I linked to an article that notes quite clearly that GM marketed and sold all-electric cars from 1996 to 1999. Hybrids have never been of much interest to GM.
The economics of the EV-1 are hotly contested, given that it was an entirely new platform, and so few were produced. Although I can't confirm the theories that the program was cancelled for political reasons, the allegation is certainly plausible.
The fast-forward button actually turned the movie into a tolerable experience (and I'm willing to tolerate quite a lot when it comes to film -- however, after the first 20-minute sequence of no action in complete silence, I was quite comfortable with the fact that space is big, empty, and quiet. There was absolutely no need for Kubrick to do the same thing 5 more times)
Don't get me wrong. It's a great film, but it could have been just as great of a film at half the length. Kubrick is one of the most "brutal" directors I know of (although David Lynch certainly ranks up there with him)
At festivals, where there are thousands of people jammed together (like Jazz-Fest, Satchmo Fest, Shrimp and Petrol Fest, Strawberry Fest, Satsuma Fest, Fest Fest, Mardi Gras (don't even get me started on mardi gras), etc.) My phone might as well be a brick. No incoming, no outgoing, no texts, no service. AT&T obviously ran the numbers and installed EXACTLY the capacity they would need for day-to-day ope
Same thing happens in Colonial Williamsburg during big events and the tourist season.
We like to joke that it makes the experience more authentic, given that most other parts of "the experience" are completely fake. However, it's bloody annoying if you live nearby.
Said it once, and I'll say it again. CDMA is a dead end, the world is moving to LTE.
As far as I can tell, LTE is actually more similar to CDMA than it is to GSM. At the very least, backward-compatibility mechanisms are provided for working with CDMA network, rather than GSM.
It'll be nice to have all the major carriers on the same standard, even though this irritatingly seems to indicate that North America will be diverging from European and Asian technological standards.
Having recently purchased two phones from Verizon, I know that most of their models, both high-end and low-end, have multiple radios in the phone so that you can use CDMA here in the 'States, or switch to GSM/UMTS for roaming abroad if you choose. Roaming sucks, but it does under pretty much any carrier these days. The phone is still there, though, if you need to make the call.
Wait. WHAT? Unless something's changed in the past few months, I'm fairly certain this isn't the case.
Verizon phones can roam onto the occasional 3rd-party CDMA network, but that's about it as far as I know.
When ATT loses its contract with Apple, I'm dropping their POS network for a more reliable carrier with a better network and more helpful customer support.
Who would that be, might I ask?
Verizon's got a decent network, but their call centers are staffed exclusively by Vogons. Also expect to be grossly overbilled at least twice a year, and put on hold for several hours while attempting to fix it.
Also don't forget the various antics Verizon have pulled in the past to lock down their phones.
Problem is: today, all government investment is funneled through the private sector, which means that although NASA still gets their space shuttle, all of the useful science is locked up and stowed away by the contractor.
War funding is even worse. Virtually nothing escapes the military these days, thanks to national security.
When most of the government's business is conducted by huge conglomerates that solely exist to sell goods and services back to the government, none of the purported benefits of privatization apply.
Science funding is a Very Good Thing. However, the manner in which government-funded research is conducted and managed makes it a somewhat unattractive investment.
1) They're a consumer-grade backup provider. Moreover, their service is very cheap compared to the competition. 2) To lower the price of their service, they have to cut costs somewhere. 3) Presumably, they have enough redundancy built into their software and network infrastructure to take several of these offline at a time. Even if a few customers backups go offline for an hour or so, the odds of anybody noticing seems incredibly slim. When you've got several dozen racks of these units, the prospect of taking one or two offline at a time doesn't seem so bad. 4) Small drives are very fast, but also offer rather low capacity, and cost a lot. An online backup service doesn't need blazing-fast IO speeds at the disk level. 5) Front hot-swap isn't really an option, given the number of drives, unless you wanted to completely eschew traditional rack design.
That all said, these servers would be much more attractive if they could be slid out on their rails (while powered up), and had the ability to pop drives in or out from the top while still powered up. Honestly, I think they're missing a huge business opportunity by not selling these machines. Even with all of their shortcomings, they could make a killing.
Since most modern commercial-grade HDs come with a 3-5 year or better warranty these days [1], it's easier just to cash those in when the drives go bad and build a new box around the newer-model drives they ship you in return.
A word of caution: I had an external Seagate enclosure fail on me earlier this year. Because I've seen plenty of enclosures fail (as opposed to the drives inside of them), I opened it up, and installed the drive internally. Alas, the drive was as dead as a doornail.
Return the drive to Seagate, wait two months, and finally receive the same exact drive back in the mail, because I'd voided my warranty by attempting to recover my data.
But you know that they were twiddling their thumbs. They had nothing to do. The shuttle was a craft looking for a mission. It was a mistake from the start. It never possessed the ability to go anywhere and so it merely soaked up all the dollars that should have been sent to the private sector so that NASA could do something interesting.
Why is the private sector some sort of magic bullet for NASA's problems? If you'll recall, the shuttle was built by a consortium of private contractors. If SpaceX is successful, they become the next Lockheed (or more likely, as with Scaled Composites, they'll be flat-out purchased by Lockheed or Boeing). Big whoop there.
I'm also more than a little bit troubled by the existence of enormous companies that exist solely to provide goods and services directly to the government. Seems to blur the line between public and private, while offering the advantages of neither.
In any event, rather than throwing money at private contractors, NASA could have funded more science missions. Instead of servicing the Hubble, couldn't we simply have built another?
Can we debunk this one once and for all? Parisians as a whole don't seem to be any more or less hostile to foreigners than the inhabitants of any other large city.
Granted, I grew up just outside of New York City, and accordingly have absolutely no expectation for total strangers to give me much more than the time of the day (especially in another language), but such is city life -- Paris gets an unfair rap, and really is a wonderful city. Every locale has its little quirks...
every tech/science story hit with a slew of +5ed comments questioning the basic underlying premise of the research and/or machinery
every story about a study tagged with "correlationisnotcausation"
etc.
Well, the second two are hallmarks of being a good scientist (the first one, not so much, given where The Money comes from, and the fact that private industry has a long track record of being poor scientific citizens)
I certainly don't doubt that many slashdotters overestimate their own intelligence and competencies, and often make sweeping claims outside the areas of their expertise. However, intense skepticism is necessary for the scientific process to work. A good scientist checks his work again, and again, and again â" and then designs another experiment to test the same theory.
Many important scientific discoveries have been made because "something about the results wasn't quite right."
So because they use a slimmed down PC to do the timeshifting instead of a VCR, they immediately get to tax everyone who wants the capability?
You're missing the point. It's not possible to timeshift on a VCR (with the exception of a fixed tape-delay of a few seconds)
TiVo actually seem to have had a novel idea. The underlying technology necessary for digital timeshifting had existed for at least a few years prior, although nobody seems to have capitalized on it before TiVo.
More companies should consider this, rather than designing their jobs to have a single pay rate with no possibility of advancement apart from leaving to work elsewhere.
This is exactly how government jobs are structured. It's no wonder so many people tend to hold a negative view of government workers as there really is no incentive to produce more.
That's almost completely wrong. Most jobs at the federal level have a very clearly defined path for advancement, often along the GS pay scale.
Most private sector employers are far less forthcoming about salaries and advancement opportunities. There are some problems with the current state of government employment (that can be fixed fairly easily), but this isn't one of them.
If Soyuz has a severe problem during landing, it ends up in another country.
If the Shuttle has a severe problem during landing, it blows up. There is literally no room for error.
Do you see where I'm going here? There were likely some gross oversights that led to the incident you linked to -- however, by virtue of the fact that Soyuz is both simple and mature, the craft is able to survive the statistical fluke of a faulty explosive bolt.
Using the rails for power transmission would work well enough until the rails are shorted out by a large metal object (for instance, a train)
Of course, if you're talking about using the overhead catenary on an electrified railroad, yeah -- it's a fantastic idea. Of course, most of the long-distance freight railroads in the US are not electrified, although this provides a fantastic excuse to install electrification -- electric locomotives are currently the only economically-viable form of transportation that have the potential to be 100% carbon-neutral and renewable.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families was not under a duty to forbid the film
In other words, the film must be taught as an educational resource, rather than as a political instrument. I've had plenty of math books (even at the college level) with more than 9 errors in them. Even the famously-inscrutable series of CS books by Donald Knuth has a lengthy list of errata. Given that we're talking about a popular film about a politically-sensitive issue, I feel that 9 errors is more than forgivable.
It also certainly wouldn't hurt for children to be taught how to analyze a controversial issue from a scientific and logical perspective -- although it's still somewhat rare, this sort of "Theory of Knowledge" curriculum is slowly making its way into High Schools in the US and Europe, which I feel is a Very Good Thing.
Also don't forget that scientific consensus can and does change.
If they fire the Vogons in their customer service and billing departments, I might actually consider staying with them once my contract expires at the end of the year.
I've been egregiously overbilled and put on hold for two hours far too many times to seriously consider them doing business with them beyond the terms of my contract. (the first I considered it an annoyance, the second time I figured they were incompetent, and by the third time, I was convinced they're outright criminals)
Slashdot Mirror
"Snack patrols" sound a lot like "death panels." Sounds like a scare-phrase cooked up by the media based around an isolated incident taken out of context.
My High School had a soda machine in the cafeteria when I went there. I returned to collect a transcript earlier this year, and noticed that the machines had been removed.
Apparently the administration was concerned about the students' health. Additionally (even dating back to my time), all students are required to take gym, including athletes. Gym class might be a bit of a joke, although the effort's clearly being made to get kids in shape. Things might be going differently in other parts of the country, but schools in the northeast appear to have at least nominally taken an interest in their students' health.
Personally, I find that my physical well-being is directly tied to my mental acuity. Although I've got the metabolism to tolerate the occasional unhealthy meal, I notice myself dramatically "slow down" if I pig out, or haven't been for a run or to the gym in a few days.
So you link to an article which confirms his claim, and label it "false"? In what universe does THAT make sense?
Howso? I linked to an article that notes quite clearly that GM marketed and sold all-electric cars from 1996 to 1999. Hybrids have never been of much interest to GM.
The economics of the EV-1 are hotly contested, given that it was an entirely new platform, and so few were produced. Although I can't confirm the theories that the program was cancelled for political reasons, the allegation is certainly plausible.
I agree, 10 years ago no one was going to try and sell a all-electric car.
False.
A while back, I recorded 2001 on my TiVo.
The fast-forward button actually turned the movie into a tolerable experience (and I'm willing to tolerate quite a lot when it comes to film -- however, after the first 20-minute sequence of no action in complete silence, I was quite comfortable with the fact that space is big, empty, and quiet. There was absolutely no need for Kubrick to do the same thing 5 more times)
Don't get me wrong. It's a great film, but it could have been just as great of a film at half the length. Kubrick is one of the most "brutal" directors I know of (although David Lynch certainly ranks up there with him)
At festivals, where there are thousands of people jammed together (like Jazz-Fest, Satchmo Fest, Shrimp and Petrol Fest, Strawberry Fest, Satsuma Fest, Fest Fest, Mardi Gras (don't even get me started on mardi gras), etc.) My phone might as well be a brick. No incoming, no outgoing, no texts, no service. AT&T obviously ran the numbers and installed EXACTLY the capacity they would need for day-to-day ope
Same thing happens in Colonial Williamsburg during big events and the tourist season.
We like to joke that it makes the experience more authentic, given that most other parts of "the experience" are completely fake. However, it's bloody annoying if you live nearby.
Said it once, and I'll say it again. CDMA is a dead end, the world is moving to LTE.
As far as I can tell, LTE is actually more similar to CDMA than it is to GSM. At the very least, backward-compatibility mechanisms are provided for working with CDMA network, rather than GSM.
It'll be nice to have all the major carriers on the same standard, even though this irritatingly seems to indicate that North America will be diverging from European and Asian technological standards.
Having recently purchased two phones from Verizon, I know that most of their models, both high-end and low-end, have multiple radios in the phone so that you can use CDMA here in the 'States, or switch to GSM/UMTS for roaming abroad if you choose. Roaming sucks, but it does under pretty much any carrier these days. The phone is still there, though, if you need to make the call.
Wait. WHAT? Unless something's changed in the past few months, I'm fairly certain this isn't the case.
Verizon phones can roam onto the occasional 3rd-party CDMA network, but that's about it as far as I know.
When ATT loses its contract with Apple, I'm dropping their POS network for a more reliable carrier with a better network and more helpful customer support.
Who would that be, might I ask?
Verizon's got a decent network, but their call centers are staffed exclusively by Vogons. Also expect to be grossly overbilled at least twice a year, and put on hold for several hours while attempting to fix it.
Also don't forget the various antics Verizon have pulled in the past to lock down their phones.
Problem is: today, all government investment is funneled through the private sector, which means that although NASA still gets their space shuttle, all of the useful science is locked up and stowed away by the contractor.
War funding is even worse. Virtually nothing escapes the military these days, thanks to national security.
When most of the government's business is conducted by huge conglomerates that solely exist to sell goods and services back to the government, none of the purported benefits of privatization apply.
Science funding is a Very Good Thing. However, the manner in which government-funded research is conducted and managed makes it a somewhat unattractive investment.
A few comments:
1) They're a consumer-grade backup provider. Moreover, their service is very cheap compared to the competition.
2) To lower the price of their service, they have to cut costs somewhere.
3) Presumably, they have enough redundancy built into their software and network infrastructure to take several of these offline at a time. Even if a few customers backups go offline for an hour or so, the odds of anybody noticing seems incredibly slim. When you've got several dozen racks of these units, the prospect of taking one or two offline at a time doesn't seem so bad.
4) Small drives are very fast, but also offer rather low capacity, and cost a lot. An online backup service doesn't need blazing-fast IO speeds at the disk level.
5) Front hot-swap isn't really an option, given the number of drives, unless you wanted to completely eschew traditional rack design.
That all said, these servers would be much more attractive if they could be slid out on their rails (while powered up), and had the ability to pop drives in or out from the top while still powered up. Honestly, I think they're missing a huge business opportunity by not selling these machines. Even with all of their shortcomings, they could make a killing.
Since most modern commercial-grade HDs come with a 3-5 year or better warranty these days [1], it's easier just to cash those in when the drives go bad and build a new box around the newer-model drives they ship you in return.
A word of caution: I had an external Seagate enclosure fail on me earlier this year. Because I've seen plenty of enclosures fail (as opposed to the drives inside of them), I opened it up, and installed the drive internally. Alas, the drive was as dead as a doornail.
Return the drive to Seagate, wait two months, and finally receive the same exact drive back in the mail, because I'd voided my warranty by attempting to recover my data.
The observatory's going to be fine according to some of the people who work there.
I guess there's no such thing as a 100% guarantee, but the observatory appears to be very well protected.
But you know that they were twiddling their thumbs. They had nothing to do. The shuttle was a craft looking for a mission. It was a mistake from the start. It never possessed the ability to go anywhere and so it merely soaked up all the dollars that should have been sent to the private sector so that NASA could do something interesting.
Why is the private sector some sort of magic bullet for NASA's problems? If you'll recall, the shuttle was built by a consortium of private contractors. If SpaceX is successful, they become the next Lockheed (or more likely, as with Scaled Composites, they'll be flat-out purchased by Lockheed or Boeing). Big whoop there.
I'm also more than a little bit troubled by the existence of enormous companies that exist solely to provide goods and services directly to the government. Seems to blur the line between public and private, while offering the advantages of neither.
In any event, rather than throwing money at private contractors, NASA could have funded more science missions. Instead of servicing the Hubble, couldn't we simply have built another?
I can see the moon from my front porch. I can't see Paris. So, which is closer?
It's a trick question: they're the same.
Can we debunk this one once and for all? Parisians as a whole don't seem to be any more or less hostile to foreigners than the inhabitants of any other large city.
Granted, I grew up just outside of New York City, and accordingly have absolutely no expectation for total strangers to give me much more than the time of the day (especially in another language), but such is city life -- Paris gets an unfair rap, and really is a wonderful city. Every locale has its little quirks...
Well, the second two are hallmarks of being a good scientist (the first one, not so much, given where The Money comes from, and the fact that private industry has a long track record of being poor scientific citizens)
I certainly don't doubt that many slashdotters overestimate their own intelligence and competencies, and often make sweeping claims outside the areas of their expertise. However, intense skepticism is necessary for the scientific process to work. A good scientist checks his work again, and again, and again â" and then designs another experiment to test the same theory.
Many important scientific discoveries have been made because "something about the results wasn't quite right."
So because they use a slimmed down PC to do the timeshifting instead of a VCR, they immediately get to tax everyone who wants the capability?
You're missing the point. It's not possible to timeshift on a VCR (with the exception of a fixed tape-delay of a few seconds)
TiVo actually seem to have had a novel idea. The underlying technology necessary for digital timeshifting had existed for at least a few years prior, although nobody seems to have capitalized on it before TiVo.
More companies should consider this, rather than designing their jobs to have a single pay rate with no possibility of advancement apart from leaving to work elsewhere.
This is exactly how government jobs are structured. It's no wonder so many people tend to hold a negative view of government workers as there really is no incentive to produce more.
That's almost completely wrong. Most jobs at the federal level have a very clearly defined path for advancement, often along the GS pay scale.
Most private sector employers are far less forthcoming about salaries and advancement opportunities. There are some problems with the current state of government employment (that can be fixed fairly easily), but this isn't one of them.
If Soyuz has a severe problem during landing, it ends up in another country.
If the Shuttle has a severe problem during landing, it blows up. There is literally no room for error.
Do you see where I'm going here? There were likely some gross oversights that led to the incident you linked to -- however, by virtue of the fact that Soyuz is both simple and mature, the craft is able to survive the statistical fluke of a faulty explosive bolt.
Using the rails for power transmission would work well enough until the rails are shorted out by a large metal object (for instance, a train)
Of course, if you're talking about using the overhead catenary on an electrified railroad, yeah -- it's a fantastic idea. Of course, most of the long-distance freight railroads in the US are not electrified, although this provides a fantastic excuse to install electrification -- electric locomotives are currently the only economically-viable form of transportation that have the potential to be 100% carbon-neutral and renewable.
Here's one anyway, regarding the banning of the film from viewing in British schools: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7037671.stm
Liar.
Straight from the article:
In other words, the film must be taught as an educational resource, rather than as a political instrument. I've had plenty of math books (even at the college level) with more than 9 errors in them. Even the famously-inscrutable series of CS books by Donald Knuth has a lengthy list of errata. Given that we're talking about a popular film about a politically-sensitive issue, I feel that 9 errors is more than forgivable.
It also certainly wouldn't hurt for children to be taught how to analyze a controversial issue from a scientific and logical perspective -- although it's still somewhat rare, this sort of "Theory of Knowledge" curriculum is slowly making its way into High Schools in the US and Europe, which I feel is a Very Good Thing.
Also don't forget that scientific consensus can and does change.
Well, the radium and phosphorus would certainly ensure that the rocket stays "green" (even in the dark)
Isn't that what Uncyclopedia already is? A fork of Wikipedia for people who like to vandalise?
<sarcasm>I thought that was what Conservapedia was for</sarcasm>
(and no. I'm not going to provide a hyperlink. those trolls don't deserve the pageviews)
I briefly used an Android phone a few weeks ago. The UI reminded me quite a bit of GNOME circa 2002.
Take that as you may.
If they fire the Vogons in their customer service and billing departments, I might actually consider staying with them once my contract expires at the end of the year.
I've been egregiously overbilled and put on hold for two hours far too many times to seriously consider them doing business with them beyond the terms of my contract. (the first I considered it an annoyance, the second time I figured they were incompetent, and by the third time, I was convinced they're outright criminals)