They're not outsmarting google. They're screwing their customers.
This comes from a 23-month Verizon customer. My experiences dealing with Verizon have been far worse than past my encounters with AOL, Lawyers, the IRS, and the DMV combined.
They're really that bad, and it leaves me disheartened that they can legally get away with treating their customers like that.
Pumped storage dams tend to be located at very high altitudes, and have relatively small reservoirs (in terms of surface area).
In terms of environmental cost, this is probably the best-case scenario for a hydro project, given that there's very little wildlife being displaced.
There's a growing trend of pragmatic environmentalists coming up that will hopefully replace the last one, and encourage responsible forms of progress rather than opposing it altogether.
Even the founder of Greenpeace is disgusted with the monster that his organization turned into, and is now pushing for the responsible development of nuclear and hydroelectric power.
Modern Hydro (and Pumped-Storage) plants can actually respond within a minute.
In areas where it's geographically practical, Pumped Storage is also a fantastic way of dealing with the peak/off-peak usage problem, and could also potentially be used to provide "solar power at night," albeit at great expense.
In those six situations, would you have resorted to lethal force, had the taser not been available? What were your alternatives?
I'm by no means second-guessing you, and imagine that you made the right call in all of those situations. I'm sort of probing to see how officers define the hazy grey area between a target that requires the use of lethal force to be subdued, and a less harmful target that still might potentially have the capacity to harm the officer...
My own personal view is that cops should by all means be allowed to carry tasers, but also be subject to an in-depth investigation whenever one is used.
This *might* have been an issue when Windows NT 3.51 was new.
Modern servers can handle running a GUI layer on top of their other processes without breaking a sweat. How much CPU do you really think it takes Mac OS X to display a login window (which it ideally should be doing 99.9% of the time)?
The only way in which you'd see a performance hit would be if you were loading your servers at 100% 24/7, in which case there's something fundamentally wrong with the way you're managing your systems.
(This isn't true for supercomputing and massively parallel clusters, where you'd *want* your systems to be operating at 100% CPU all the time. In these cases, it makes sense to run a customized, ultra-minimalist Unix distribution for this, and a host of other reasons that I shouldn't need to dive into here)
He wants to make the West look like idiots. By starting a non-weaponized nuclear program, he's inviting all sorts of suspicion from the US, EU, and UN.
When it turns out that Iran doesn't actually have weaponized "nukes," the west are left looking like idiots and aggressors.
I don't think the GP was implying a "hybrid" in the sense of a vehicle that uses regenerative braking.
By definition, a hybrid vehicle simply uses more than one energy source to provide propulsion. The GP is suggesting adding some sort of solar or microwave power device to aircraft to augment the power of the jet engines (assuming that it would be insufficiently powerful to replace them altogether)
Could an innocuous non-weaponized nuclear program actually be more harmful to the west than the doomsday-device-building vision that the US is attempting to portray?
Ahmadinejad is no fool, and knows that any evidence of "actual" nuclear weapons would spell doom for his nation.
He's playing his cards, and seems to be coming out on top, and making his opponents look like absolute idiots...
Honestly, the whole thing felt like it was a gigantic ego trip on Negroponte's behalf from the start. Something just never quite felt right about the project.
No. You're talking about communists. Specifically, the borderline-insane ones who followed the ideology to a T, even when it made absolutely no sense to do so.
Socialists try to improve our current society by emphasizing the strength of the group as a whole in areas where it makes sense to do so.
RMS believes that software is one such area in which we can greatly benefit from having it as a free/public resource. The academic world certainly agrees, and given the widespread (nearly universal) proliferation of technology, I'd daresay that he's more or less got the right idea.
I hate to defend RMS, although his idealistic views on software do make sense to a degree. Unfortunately, his unwillingness to compromise also has hurt his own pet projects to a degree...
RMS warns against the dangers of non-free software?
I am shocked, I tell you. Shocked.
Just as sure as Microsoft will tell you to buy their software, RMS will warn you not to. Both are extremely biased parties, and need to be taken with an enormous grain of salt.
I stopped taking RMS seriously a long time ago. He's a headstrong idealist, which I suppose is necessary in the grand scheme of things, but at the same time, not somebody you should necessarily pay too much attention to when forming a business plan.
People talk about how they want ______, ______, and _____, but don't want to pay taxes.
Then they refuse to play any sort of participatory role in their government, but continue to bitch about how it's become corrupt.
And for the record, a big part of the fiscal shortfalls being faced by many states is due to the fact that sales tax revenues have fallen proportionally to the rise in internet sales.
That's just the point of them -- that they *don't* share the durability of LiCoO2 cells. That's the primary reason that they get rid of the LiCoO2 cathode and replace it with a more stable one that has lower energy density. LiP is to LiCoO2 as nickel-iron was to lead-acid at the turn of the century (nickel-iron "Edison cells" being what powered the Detroit Electrics -- Jay Leno's 1909 electric car still runs on its original nickel-iron cells). Citations please? Everything I've been able to find about LiP cells has been written by (or sourced from) somebody trying to sell them, apart from this IOP article, which only tests the cells through 100 charge cycles, and also notes some strange behavior with regard to the internal impedance of the cells after just 30 charge cycles.
Please explain what's unsafe about a composite shell (several times stronger than steel), an F1-style roll cage that comprises a good chunk of the vehicle's total weight, a 45" crumple zone, a deflection system designed to make the car ride up and over in an accident, double the NTSB standard roof crush strength, double the NTSB standard door crush strength, and the most advanced airbags available. While you're at it, explain how it will roll over with a 7" wheelbase, a low CG, and downforce from the shape. The company refuses to release crash-test data, despite claiming to have done several, and to have more or less finalized their design.
However, they have released "computer simulated crash tests," which indicate how they'd like their car to perform under perfectly ideal circumstances. Somehow, that doesn't inspire confidence.
There's also maintenance, but when you consider that a good lithium phosphate pack should last the life of the car, and even if you had to replace it, by the time you had to replace it, LiP should cost under $0.20/kWh I'm generally supportive of the idea, but this bit jumped out as being potentially "not so great"
I could be completely wrong here, but apart from the OLPC, LiP cells have never entered into commercial use, and not very much is known about their longetivity, or how well the economics of scale will apply to their production if/when they become popular.
Assuming that LiP cells share the same time durability as "traditional" LiCoO2 cells, 24 months seems like a better timeframe.
Similarly, although potentially not a big deal for you, the lack of storage space could be a big issue to some people, as the "econoboxes" tend to offer a fairly decent amount of cargo space (and at least 4 seats). Most of the "cheap" manufacturers are also attempting to woo customers by offering extensive warranties on their vehicles.
Used cars are also another option. A nice used vehicle can be had for under $10,000, which causes them to win virtually every cost-benefit analysis you can think of, even when considering the reduced lifespan and lower gas mileage.
The Aptera also doesn't look particularly safe. In fact, I'd be hesitant to go anywhere near a highway in one. It looks about as safe as a motorcycle (eg. not at all).
Non-traditionally-designed vehicles are pretty sweet, and I'd encourage their development. However, the first few generations (at least) aren't going to be at all economical.
The rest of GTA seems rather far and removed from reality, whilst drunk driving seems like something that "mere mortals" can do and get away with.
Of course, I haven't seen how it's portrayed in the game, so I shouldn't really comment either. This could be very well be like all those people who claimed that Trainspotting glorified heroin use.
This one took quite a bit of thinking, although this wikipedia article summarizes it best.
A transistor may be approximated as a variable current source. Similarly, many applications of transistors are as "active" devices, which supply external power to the circuit being considered.
A diode is effectively nothing more than a voltage-controlled switch. In a DC circuit, it simply passes current through (with a small voltage drop that can be approximated by an inline negative voltage source).
Likewise, all transistors can be abstractly considered as networks of diodes. This is why they are inherently binary devices, and why computers "think" in binary.
The classical circuit elements (Resistor, Capacitor, Inductor) each fundamentally affect the electromagnetic properties of the electrons flowing through said circuit.
Resistors impede the flow of current; a capacitor is a current "bucket" that also blocks DC signals in AC circuits; and an inductor builds up a sort of inertia for the flow of current, through the creation of a magnetic field.
The distinction is hazy, but I think I can see it where it comes from.... when a diode/transistor does something, it affects of the "layout" of the circuit, rather than directly affecting the electrons flowing through it.
The memristor is extremely interesting, as it blurs the line between analogue components and solid-state devices, and provides exciting possibilities for the development of analogue computing and data storage.
Even more exciting is that they can already be made smaller than transistors, and two can be combined to create a device that functions analogous to a transistor.
Considering that we're quickly approaching the limits of Silicon-based technology, this invention may very well offer the key to the true "next generation" of electronic devices, and may very well be as significant to our generation as the transistor was to the previous. This is Nobel Prize-worthy stuff we're talking about.
Kudos to HP for supporting "true" R&D. They most definitely will be reaping the benefits of this one for years to come.
The other alternative is that we simply haven't waited long enough. Relativity can be a bitch.
The universe is estimated to be at least 93 billion light years across.
Assuming that special relativity* is mostly correct, if a civilization evolves at the opposite end of the universe, it will take us at least 93 billion years to find out.
*Special relativity: Nothing travels faster than light in a vacuum. No exceptions.
As a point of comparison, the Earth is about 3.9 billion years old, with the oldest meteorites in the solar system being 4.6 billion years old. Within 3.5 billion years from now, the sun will have grown hot enough to give Earth surface conditions similar to Venus, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
By the time the distant reaches of the universe are able to visually observe the very existence of earth, we'll have been obliterated billions of years earlier by the expansion of the sun.
The reverse is equally true. By the time we receive a signal or visual evidence of a distant civilization, it's not unlikely that they'll have died out or moved elsewhere billions of years prior.
Depending upon which theories you subscribe to, all matter will have decayed within 10^40 years. Although this is a very long time, it's fairly probable that many civilizations will evolve, and not discover each other in spite of attempts to do so.
To discover/be discovered, you've got to be in exactly right place at exactly the right time. Considering just how %*$#ing big the universe is, the odds of this actually occurring are slim-to-none.
The Fermi paradox is interesting to consider, although there are far too many exceptions or alternative explanations to take it seriously.
The BBC doesn't seem all that bad. I'd trust them a good bit more than the independent American media (who answer to their sponsors, rather than to the people).
FORTRAN seems to be a bit of an "insular" language these days, now that it's fallen out of widespread mainstream use.
Industries and disciplines that use it (and many do) use it extensively, often nearly-exclusively. In places where it's not used extensively, it isn't used at all (and its name is never uttered).
For better or for worse, FORTRAN is not a language one "switches to".
On the other hand, a C++ shop will very easily concede to using Java or C# in cases where it's appropriate, Java shops will use Python where it's appropriate, etc.... However, FORTRAN never seems to be one of the alternatives.
Idealism is fantastic, but you've got to draw the line between ideology and pragmatism somewhere, and focus on supporting your existing users (and paying the bills).
This is why slashdot was so reluctant to use.PNGs on the homepage for years. (The topic icons are still.GIF, although I believe that's simply due to the.GIF patent expiring around the same time that it became "safe" to use.PNGs as a design element)
That all said, IPv6 wouldn't break compatibility with existing IPv4 users, and would be a fantastic gesture to the internet community at large. Of course, if IPv6 support would cost a mint to implement, or force them into a "less desirable" data centre, it wouldn't be practical.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not outsmarting google. They're screwing their customers.
This comes from a 23-month Verizon customer. My experiences dealing with Verizon have been far worse than past my encounters with AOL, Lawyers, the IRS, and the DMV combined.
They're really that bad, and it leaves me disheartened that they can legally get away with treating their customers like that.
Pumped storage dams tend to be located at very high altitudes, and have relatively small reservoirs (in terms of surface area).
In terms of environmental cost, this is probably the best-case scenario for a hydro project, given that there's very little wildlife being displaced.
There's a growing trend of pragmatic environmentalists coming up that will hopefully replace the last one, and encourage responsible forms of progress rather than opposing it altogether.
Even the founder of Greenpeace is disgusted with the monster that his organization turned into, and is now pushing for the responsible development of nuclear and hydroelectric power.
Modern Hydro (and Pumped-Storage) plants can actually respond within a minute.
In areas where it's geographically practical, Pumped Storage is also a fantastic way of dealing with the peak/off-peak usage problem, and could also potentially be used to provide "solar power at night," albeit at great expense.
Alternatively, set up a hotkey or a "Hot Corner" to activate the screen saver.
In those six situations, would you have resorted to lethal force, had the taser not been available? What were your alternatives?
I'm by no means second-guessing you, and imagine that you made the right call in all of those situations. I'm sort of probing to see how officers define the hazy grey area between a target that requires the use of lethal force to be subdued, and a less harmful target that still might potentially have the capacity to harm the officer...
My own personal view is that cops should by all means be allowed to carry tasers, but also be subject to an in-depth investigation whenever one is used.
Oh, come on.
This *might* have been an issue when Windows NT 3.51 was new.
Modern servers can handle running a GUI layer on top of their other processes without breaking a sweat. How much CPU do you really think it takes Mac OS X to display a login window (which it ideally should be doing 99.9% of the time)?
The only way in which you'd see a performance hit would be if you were loading your servers at 100% 24/7, in which case there's something fundamentally wrong with the way you're managing your systems.
(This isn't true for supercomputing and massively parallel clusters, where you'd *want* your systems to be operating at 100% CPU all the time. In these cases, it makes sense to run a customized, ultra-minimalist Unix distribution for this, and a host of other reasons that I shouldn't need to dive into here)
It's fairly easy to see why
He wants to make the West look like idiots. By starting a non-weaponized nuclear program, he's inviting all sorts of suspicion from the US, EU, and UN.
When it turns out that Iran doesn't actually have weaponized "nukes," the west are left looking like idiots and aggressors.
I don't think the GP was implying a "hybrid" in the sense of a vehicle that uses regenerative braking.
By definition, a hybrid vehicle simply uses more than one energy source to provide propulsion. The GP is suggesting adding some sort of solar or microwave power device to aircraft to augment the power of the jet engines (assuming that it would be insufficiently powerful to replace them altogether)
Could an innocuous non-weaponized nuclear program actually be more harmful to the west than the doomsday-device-building vision that the US is attempting to portray?
Ahmadinejad is no fool, and knows that any evidence of "actual" nuclear weapons would spell doom for his nation.
He's playing his cards, and seems to be coming out on top, and making his opponents look like absolute idiots...
Honestly, the whole thing felt like it was a gigantic ego trip on Negroponte's behalf from the start. Something just never quite felt right about the project.
It also always felt far too..... "colonial"
No. You're talking about communists. Specifically, the borderline-insane ones who followed the ideology to a T, even when it made absolutely no sense to do so.
Socialists try to improve our current society by emphasizing the strength of the group as a whole in areas where it makes sense to do so.
RMS believes that software is one such area in which we can greatly benefit from having it as a free/public resource. The academic world certainly agrees, and given the widespread (nearly universal) proliferation of technology, I'd daresay that he's more or less got the right idea.
I hate to defend RMS, although his idealistic views on software do make sense to a degree. Unfortunately, his unwillingness to compromise also has hurt his own pet projects to a degree...
RMS warns against the dangers of non-free software?
I am shocked, I tell you. Shocked.
Just as sure as Microsoft will tell you to buy their software, RMS will warn you not to. Both are extremely biased parties, and need to be taken with an enormous grain of salt.
I stopped taking RMS seriously a long time ago. He's a headstrong idealist, which I suppose is necessary in the grand scheme of things, but at the same time, not somebody you should necessarily pay too much attention to when forming a business plan.
That's completely irrelevant to this argument.
People talk about how they want ______, ______, and _____, but don't want to pay taxes.
Then they refuse to play any sort of participatory role in their government, but continue to bitch about how it's become corrupt.
And for the record, a big part of the fiscal shortfalls being faced by many states is due to the fact that sales tax revenues have fallen proportionally to the rise in internet sales.
However, they have released "computer simulated crash tests," which indicate how they'd like their car to perform under perfectly ideal circumstances. Somehow, that doesn't inspire confidence.
I could be completely wrong here, but apart from the OLPC, LiP cells have never entered into commercial use, and not very much is known about their longetivity, or how well the economics of scale will apply to their production if/when they become popular.
Assuming that LiP cells share the same time durability as "traditional" LiCoO2 cells, 24 months seems like a better timeframe.
Similarly, although potentially not a big deal for you, the lack of storage space could be a big issue to some people, as the "econoboxes" tend to offer a fairly decent amount of cargo space (and at least 4 seats). Most of the "cheap" manufacturers are also attempting to woo customers by offering extensive warranties on their vehicles.
Used cars are also another option. A nice used vehicle can be had for under $10,000, which causes them to win virtually every cost-benefit analysis you can think of, even when considering the reduced lifespan and lower gas mileage.
The Aptera also doesn't look particularly safe. In fact, I'd be hesitant to go anywhere near a highway in one. It looks about as safe as a motorcycle (eg. not at all).
Non-traditionally-designed vehicles are pretty sweet, and I'd encourage their development. However, the first few generations (at least) aren't going to be at all economical.
That's exactly what I thought...
The rest of GTA seems rather far and removed from reality, whilst drunk driving seems like something that "mere mortals" can do and get away with.
Of course, I haven't seen how it's portrayed in the game, so I shouldn't really comment either. This could be very well be like all those people who claimed that Trainspotting glorified heroin use.
Ugh. You're right.
I'm a physicist who seriously needs to catch up on sleep and brush up on electronic theory.
I completely ignored FETs in that vomitous output of incoherent thoughts.
NPNs and PNPs still sort of fit my original description though....
Mods --- feel free to send my original post into oblivion. It's flat-out wrong.
What happens when you place the paper in direct sunlight (which, too, contains UV wavelengths)?
This one took quite a bit of thinking, although this wikipedia article summarizes it best.
A transistor may be approximated as a variable current source. Similarly, many applications of transistors are as "active" devices, which supply external power to the circuit being considered.
A diode is effectively nothing more than a voltage-controlled switch. In a DC circuit, it simply passes current through (with a small voltage drop that can be approximated by an inline negative voltage source).
Likewise, all transistors can be abstractly considered as networks of diodes. This is why they are inherently binary devices, and why computers "think" in binary.
The classical circuit elements (Resistor, Capacitor, Inductor) each fundamentally affect the electromagnetic properties of the electrons flowing through said circuit.
Resistors impede the flow of current; a capacitor is a current "bucket" that also blocks DC signals in AC circuits; and an inductor builds up a sort of inertia for the flow of current, through the creation of a magnetic field.
The distinction is hazy, but I think I can see it where it comes from.... when a diode/transistor does something, it affects of the "layout" of the circuit, rather than directly affecting the electrons flowing through it.
The memristor is extremely interesting, as it blurs the line between analogue components and solid-state devices, and provides exciting possibilities for the development of analogue computing and data storage.
Even more exciting is that they can already be made smaller than transistors, and two can be combined to create a device that functions analogous to a transistor.
Considering that we're quickly approaching the limits of Silicon-based technology, this invention may very well offer the key to the true "next generation" of electronic devices, and may very well be as significant to our generation as the transistor was to the previous. This is Nobel Prize-worthy stuff we're talking about.
Kudos to HP for supporting "true" R&D. They most definitely will be reaping the benefits of this one for years to come.
The other alternative is that we simply haven't waited long enough. Relativity can be a bitch.
The universe is estimated to be at least 93 billion light years across.
Assuming that special relativity* is mostly correct, if a civilization evolves at the opposite end of the universe, it will take us at least 93 billion years to find out.
*Special relativity: Nothing travels faster than light in a vacuum. No exceptions.
As a point of comparison, the Earth is about 3.9 billion years old, with the oldest meteorites in the solar system being 4.6 billion years old. Within 3.5 billion years from now, the sun will have grown hot enough to give Earth surface conditions similar to Venus, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
By the time the distant reaches of the universe are able to visually observe the very existence of earth, we'll have been obliterated billions of years earlier by the expansion of the sun.
The reverse is equally true. By the time we receive a signal or visual evidence of a distant civilization, it's not unlikely that they'll have died out or moved elsewhere billions of years prior.
Depending upon which theories you subscribe to, all matter will have decayed within 10^40 years. Although this is a very long time, it's fairly probable that many civilizations will evolve, and not discover each other in spite of attempts to do so.
To discover/be discovered, you've got to be in exactly right place at exactly the right time. Considering just how %*$#ing big the universe is, the odds of this actually occurring are slim-to-none.
The Fermi paradox is interesting to consider, although there are far too many exceptions or alternative explanations to take it seriously.
The BBC doesn't seem all that bad. I'd trust them a good bit more than the independent American media (who answer to their sponsors, rather than to the people).
If the government were set up in this way, we would have nuked Iraq on September 12th. Repeatedly.
FORTRAN seems to be a bit of an "insular" language these days, now that it's fallen out of widespread mainstream use.
Industries and disciplines that use it (and many do) use it extensively, often nearly-exclusively. In places where it's not used extensively, it isn't used at all (and its name is never uttered).
For better or for worse, FORTRAN is not a language one "switches to".
On the other hand, a C++ shop will very easily concede to using Java or C# in cases where it's appropriate, Java shops will use Python where it's appropriate, etc.... However, FORTRAN never seems to be one of the alternatives.
Idealism is fantastic, but you've got to draw the line between ideology and pragmatism somewhere, and focus on supporting your existing users (and paying the bills).
.PNGs on the homepage for years. (The topic icons are still .GIF, although I believe that's simply due to the .GIF patent expiring around the same time that it became "safe" to use .PNGs as a design element)
This is why slashdot was so reluctant to use
That all said, IPv6 wouldn't break compatibility with existing IPv4 users, and would be a fantastic gesture to the internet community at large. Of course, if IPv6 support would cost a mint to implement, or force them into a "less desirable" data centre, it wouldn't be practical.