If you've got to dial 911, use the closest fucking phone you can find (and do *not* leave the victim unless it's absolutely necessary).
It's also an egregious abuse of the system for everyone in the room to dial 911 simultaneously. Think about the implications you might be causing...
I can't find a shred of evidence anywhere stating that the 911 system today will intentionally route calls differently based upon if they were placed via a landline or a mobile phone. Given that there may be more than one PSAP within an exchange, it's certainly possible that two nearby phones will get routed differently. However, it's both stupid and dangerous to suggest that based upon your one anecdotal experience, that there's a special low-priority 911 call center reserved for mobile phone users.
Thanks to E-911, you should hypothetically be routed to the call center nearest to the tower you're calling from. If the operator's got E-911 Phase II implemented, they'll even know your exact location. I've seen it in operation, and it's an absolutely fantastic system that has the very obvious potential to save many lives.
Given the spotty reliability of mobile phones in some buildings and rural areas, I'd agree that a landline is superior to a mobile phone if you have the two choices laid out directly in front of you. However, there's definitely no mobile-phone-punishment-queue at the 911 office.
(Another relevant tip that probably saved the life of a close friend: If you're traveling into the backcountry, make sure your party is carrying at least two phones. You get redundancy in case something happens to the guy carrying the phone, and the CDMA and GSM networks in the US often don't overlap in rural areas. Verizon/Sprint are CDMA, whilst AT&T, T-Mobile, and most of the rest are on GSM. You never know where you're going to get a signal, and carrying both types of phone will greatly increase your chances of finding one. This is also assuming you're not traveling alone, which is just plain reckless)
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I imagine that the cost of doing printing books the old-fashioned way in Africa isn't all that high (lots of trees, and lots of cheap labor). Sure, I won't argue that pressing a CD itself is going to be cheaper than printing a book under any circumstance, but you could buy a fairly large pile of textbooks for the price of an OLPC, and each of those books could simultaneously be used by a different student.
Also, where are these CDs and DVDs full of pirated textbooks? Do *THESE* even actually exist? Now that we've progressed into the territory of the blatantly illegal, I imagine that government support for these projects (especially *foreign* government support) is going to wane considerably.
I also sincerely doubt (though I'd love to be proven wrong) that the OLPC is going to be teaching anyone calculus. The target market (based upon the way the OS and bundled apps look) is clearly intended for primary education. In this area, the teacher is going to have far more influence over whether a class is successful or not than any laptop or textbook ever will.
I stand by my original statement. Make sure there are enough teachers. Send laptops to those teachers. For the students, send over a huge stack of printing presses, and work out an arrangement with the publishers that allows them to print the books at substantially reduced royalties (this is already done in India and other parts of the world, and has proven to be worthwhile for everybody involved).
For that matter, I've seen propiganda for every country and continent with a significant population or wielding significant world power (i.e. not Antarctica).
You'd better watch out... those penguins can be awfully crafty! Last I heard, they were recruiting hollywood big-names like Morgan Freeman to their cause.
Will the OLPCs actually ship with these mythical free textbooks and reference materials that people keep talking about?
For that matter, where can I get them, or where can my budget-starved school district get them? I'm pretty sick of shelling out $300 per semester for textbooks.
Apart from Wikipedia, the number of *GOOD* free textbooks to my knowledge is pretty close to zero. Reduce that number even further if you want them in a language other than English.
I agree with the Grandparent poster. We *should* be helping Africa out, and I loudly applaud efforts to do so. However, giving laptops to 8-year-olds isn't the best way to go about doing this. It was very clear from the start that the people behind the project were in it for their own egos.
Is multimedia really helpful for teaching basic reading and math? If it is indeed helpful, wouldn't it make more sense to give one laptop to every teacher instead? With the OLPC, children can um... paint... and share notes (and their paintings) via the mesh network. How is this useful again?
If you want to accuse anybody of ignorance, I'd go after the founders of the project, and the people who have been blindly cheering them on from the start. The fact that we haven't seen similar initiatives work in the US or Europe (where there is a considerably larger economic and technological base) should be pretty convincing evidence that this was a bad idea.
Privacy is our biggest issue with the Gmail for students pilot program. No ads, sure, but mail is still being bot-scanned and some of it is sensitive information which, by policy, is not to be allowed off the campus infrastructure. Those are the hurdles we're working around with Google.
Knowing the number of universities that have had rather high-profile data losses and hacks (and also knowing several of the Uni's IT staff) I'd be much more comfortable with Google reading my mail than my school's IT department.
Translation: "Nobody wants to build decent phones for our proprietary network, because we've completely destroyed our reputation among the manufacturers by intentionally crippling their phones."
Now Verizon wants smaller players to get in on the action, and hopefully fix their reputation by coming up with something innovative. I'd imagine that they're not only jealous of the iPhone, but also the amazing GSM phones that Europe's had for quite some time now. Let's face it -- the current selection of CDMA phones absolutely sucks.
I'd also imagine that the FCC (or the Boston police department...) would have a few things to say about a breadboard phone:-P
Actually, just about every high-speed rail system uses normal standard gauge track. Of course, that track needs to generally be built to a much higher standard (ballast must be up to spec, concrete ties, no narrow curves, space between the tracks if the trains can tilt into curves, etc... one of the major design flaws of the Acela was that the tracks were placed several inches too close to each other, which severely speed of the trains)
This also allows for backward and forward compatibility. Old trains can use new track (usually allowing them to run at 100% speed for the length of the track), and new trains can slow down to the speed of conventional rail when riding on old track.
The differences between high-speed systems themselves are usually limited to the sort of signaling and switching equipment used. It's all normal standard gauge track
Apple's puck mouse was #6. Vista was #10 and Sony's rootkit was #9. I admit that the mouse was more form than function. But it didn't really cause harm unlike like Sony's rootkit and isn't the fiasco that is Vista. So why is it higher?
If you RTFA, you'll notice that the ordering of the items in the list seems arbitrary, and that the authors don't really refer to any sort of ranking within the list.
And yeah.... the puck mouse did suck, but it also wasn't horribly difficult to go out to buy a new mouse if you hated the thing. It was the first apple peripheral, after all, to use a universally standard interface. (Apple really led the pack with USB and Firewire. The PS/2 interface *still* shows up on many PCs! It's a bit sad, however, to see FireWire slowly dying out, as it was undoubtedly the technically superior interface for data transfers)
You can go upwind in just about *any* masted sail.*
The Maltese Falcon is more or less just a modern reinterpretation of a square sail rig, with the added advantage of being able to completely rotate the rig, allowing it to sail closer to wind.
I've heard quite a bit of debate from experienced sailors as to the comparative merits and drawbacks of this design. I'm no expert, but the one thing that is certain, is that it's astonishingly expensive (just like everything else about the boat). Not practical for commercial use.
That said, the "kite" isn't a sail in the traditional sense of the word, and is in effect a giant spinnaker, which is more or less only good for going downwind. On the other hand, there are advantages to the system, as it can safely sail in high or unstable winds, and it doesn't require a sizable or experienced crew to operate. The sail itself shouldn't be horribly expensive either.
If you could somehow figure out how to inexpensively sail a freighter with a traditional full rig, you'd have a very profitable business idea on your hands
Actually, it's fairly typical to rename things so they don't contain "scary" words. Like how Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) became Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Because people don't like things with the words "Nuclear" or "Reactor" anywhere close to them.
There's a slight difference here.
NMR is referring to the physical phenomena, whereas an MRI is one very particular and specific application of NMR. There are plenty of other applications of NMR that don't produce images.
NMRI would be an appropriate title, although the reason to drop the 'N' was probably a good one.
When the word 'Nuclear' is used in public without any additional context provided, one typically assumes that it's referring to fission, or some sort of other radioactive process. One needs to look no further than the 'NRC' (Nuclear Regulatory commission in the US) for evidence that this is the linguistic norm.
Because a medical MRI is often marketed as being safer than an X-Ray by virtue of the fact that it does not expose the patient to significant levels of ionizing radiation, it does make a good deal of sense to drop the 'N' from the name.
This nuclear battery, however is a bit of a different case. It contains radioactive fuel, and is undisputedly a fission reactor by any definition of the term. It might be a remarkably safe fission reactor that doesn't use dangerous isotopes, but that doesn't change the nature of what it is.
And even though I don't typically buy into the fearmongering regarding nuclear power, I can't say that I like the idea of a massive network of these things being put into place. Although they'd be fantastic for remote areas, I feel that safety and security practices would be far more effective at a large centralized plant for densely populated regions. Even if the operators of the porta-nuke are careful and diligent, and the device is inherently safe as designed, shit happens. Earthquakes, volcanoes, manufacturing errors, and stupid people could all potentially cause problems with such a design.
Although they do address many safety concerns right off the bat by burying it underground, the "no human operator" and "no moving parts" bits still scare me. What *if* something goes wrong? Will somebody notice it before it's too late, and is there actually the capability to turn it off and stop the reaction?
Nuclear power's a good thing, and as we've demonstrated with Three Mile Island, it can be reasonably safe even if *everything* goes wrong, as long as the basic design is sound. HOWEVER, we do need to remember that nuclear power is still fundamentally dangerous as hell. Any new or "revolutionary" design needs to be initially regarded with *EXTREME* skepticism, and be reviewed by many pairs of eyes before it gets put into production.
Sounds to me like your Mom didn't really know how to operate her PC either...
I might make one suggestion for allowing her to avoid using the finder. Even though QuickSilver is very much a "Power User's" sort of tool, it's also a pretty nice application launcher.
Still.... it doesn't sound much like she knew what she was doing to start out. If she knows how to use Windows Explorer, the Finder should hardly be a challenge.
Complaining about the lack of a start menu speaks more of an unwillingness to learn anything new at all. Clicking the finder pops up a window that has more or less the same exact things that you'd find in the start menu. Your documents folder, applications folder, and any drives that happen to be plugged in at the time. Although it's a tiny bit more cumbersome than the start menu, the level of complexity is more or less the exact same. It's really not that different.
If she somehow managed to bork one of the settings, and made the finder's icons way too big, that can easily be changed via the View Menu -> Show View Options. Not something that she could have easily figured out on her own, but I can also think of plenty of examples of Windows incorrectly deciding my folders were full of photos, and providing my with a filmstrip view of a folder full of excel sheets.
Of course, one can resize any window by clicking and dragging on the bottom right hand corner. There's even the textured "handle" there to remind you that this is possible.
Although it won't maximize the window, the green dot should also restore the window to a "sane" size. Unfortunately, the exact behavior of the green dot is frustratingly inconsistent, so your mileage might vary.... However, as long as you accept the fact that there is no Maximize button, you'll come to love OS X a lot more quickly, and maybe actually realize the benefits of a windowed desktop.
This is true, and just underscores the silliness of the whole discussion.
The datacenter will be kept at a reasonably comfortable temperature. Some sort of heat exchanger will probably still be necessary to keep things consistent, although traditional air-conditioning shouldn't be necessary in the wintertime. (Mean outdoor temperature in February is -20C, -2.2F)
The difficult thing for subarctic climates, however, is the fact that (contrary to popular belief) the summers are actually quite pleasant. Irkutsk's mean temperature in July is a balmy 64F, 18C. To keep a large data center going at that high of an ambient temperature will require at least a modest amount of air-conditioning (or a whole lot of ventilation).
Although their cooling requirements are probably a bit less than a typical datacenter down south, ARSC in Fairbanks, Alaska does indeed maintain a large bank of air-conditioning equipment to cool its server room. (Fairbanks is colder in the winter, and warmer than the summer than Irkutsk, and claims the largest temperature "gap" on the planet).
9/11 was a big deal, mostly becuase it was blown way way out of proportion. It was like 20 people. Hardly a hoarde. Hardly even a blip in the mortality of the US. It was the media and opportunistic politicians that made 9/11.
9/11 was a big deal, because 20 guys made an opportunistic attack that leveled several city blocks of the most populous city in the US using nothing but box cutters. It was also the single largest attack aimed solely at American civilians ever to occur.
We knew that Al Qaeda existed, and that they hated our guts long before 9/11. In that regard, it wasn't a big deal at all. The fact that cockpit doors were kept unlocked is stupid, and we have only ourselves to blame for letting it happen.
After hiring a few locksmiths to fasten locks to the bloody doors, we should have stopped, and left it at that.
Instead, we had: "Gee. These people really don't like us. Let's invade their country" "Okay."
Most Windows to Mac converts I know of throw hissy fits over the lack of a 'Maximize' button.
Also, what exactly doesn't she like about it? Most older folks I know of who have switched to a Mac tend to have a tough time for the first week or two, and then generally fall into the swing of things. The biggest hump is realizing that MacOS and Windows are not 1:1 equivalents -- there are some Windows-y things that you wouldn't want to do in MacOS, and others that you wouldn't want to do in Windows...
But for the most part, the two OSes are EXTREMELY similar these days. Apple Mail more or less works the same as Outlook Express. Safari, IE, and Firefox are similar enough that anybody who's used one should be able to use all three. iTunes is a far more intuitive application than Windows Media Player, and iPhoto really couldn't be much more straightforward.
Where is this learning curve she's talking about? I just don't see it.
1) Siberia gets a lot colder than -10C. -10C is 14F. That's not cold at all -- a -10C winter day in Virginia wouldn't be considered all that odd.
2) As long as you don't get a frost buildup, solid-state electronics will generally work just fine in cold environments. Hard drives *might* have some mechanical difficulties if you take them really far below zero, and laptop batteries tend to have a tough time maintaining a charge in the cold. Apart from that, though, you could probably let it get that cold without worrying about the servers themselves. However, the admins running the servers might mutiny if you subject them those sorts of conditions;-)
Even though bits of GMail's interface are rather esoteric and a bit unintuitive, most non-technical users find that the learning curve is easily justified by GMail's message threading features. Until some other email client can come close to matching it (along with a few others, such as the best spam filters I've ever encountered, tons of storage, and free POP/IMAP access), I'm sticking with GMail.
I'd love if the interface were overhauled a bit, and the underlying code cleaned up to improve the speed (it's a bit sluggish on my mac, as are most AJAX and flash apps for some reason)
Emails are usually around three to five lines. Why should I have to open a new window or navigate to a new page for reading them?
Does the preview pane exist because e-mails are typically 3-5 lines? Or are corporate e-mails only 3-5 lines, because we know that nobody will ever read beyond what's in the Outlook preview pane?
If the first is true, then Microsoft did a good job of assessing hte situation, and implementing a solution.
If the second is true, we've got a rather bad situation on our hands for all the same reasons that PowerPoint is an absolutely terrible method of convening information. A single sheet of A4/Letter is a vastly superior means of communication than a PowerPoint slideshow in almost every case -- even though he comes across as a bit of a prick, Edward Tufte's got the right idea here. Likewise, a 3-sentence e-mail is potentially lacking some very vital information.
If you have a short email, keep it short, and summarize the best as you can in the subject line. Otherwise, take the liberty to explain yourself as much as necessary in the body text of the message. Reading a 3-paragraph message doesn't take long at all, and skimming it for the important details hardly takes any longer than reading the aforementioned 3-5 line message.
I would be very weary of any scientist that says "That's Impossible!" when referring to a system as large, complicated, and chaotic as the ocean.
Simply put, although I'd peg rogue waves as being extremely improbable, I could easily see how all of the factors could hypothetically lead to several waves constructively interfering to create a single massive wave. I *am* surprised, however, to see that these rogue waves are observed as frequently as they are, however.
To be fair, scientists have also admitted that turbulence is a massive grey area in our current understanding of classical dynamics.
'UFOs' I'd imagine are the result of either hoaxes, or some atmospheric phenomena that doesn't occur frequently enough, or stick around long enough to be studied properly. If you described the Aurora to a scientist who had never seen or heard of it, he'd probably ask you to have your head examined.
What *does* need to happen in the short term is a freeze on the construction of new coal-fired plants, and for a lifespan to be set on the remaining ones in operation. 25-50 years is plenty of time for the coal industry to slowly wind down.
Operators of said plants must also be forced to "re-certify" their plants every few years to be up to current emissions standards. I remember reading about one power plant that had been running for 50+ years on essentially the same design as when it was built, and thanks to the fact that the operator never did a "major" overhaul, but instead a series of small repairs, the plant never had to be brought up to modern standards.
In the meantime, there's no reason not to start building Nuclear plants to fill in the gaps that can't be filled by solar, hydro, or wind until those technologies mature a bit further. I believe 3 permits have been issued so far by the NRC. Even ignoring global warming, and taking Chernobyl into account (along with every other nuclear accident that's ever occurred PLUS Hiroshima and Nagasaki) , coal is *FAR* more dangerous than Nuclear. (Which is why we need to be actively puressuring China to pursue alternate means of generation -- ash that can be traced to China and Japan is routinely collected on the West Coast in non-insignificant amounts)
B) Why, oh why, would anyone use this idea? Delaying the orders of non-longtime customers or customers that are not extremely active is the wrong way to do things. First impressions count, and one of the reasons that I am such a Newegg fanatic is because my first order came overnight via UPS ground, extremely well packaged to boot.
I think you've missed their intent here. Such a system would almost definitely prioritize new accounts, because of their "future potential".
The sort of account that would likely be penalized under this system would probably be a guy who places an order once a year for exactly $25.01 to take advantage of the free shipping. Alternatively, they might frown upon customers who routinely RMA items, or issue chargebacks, which is also rather understandable.
I'm surprised this got patented. Every business on the planet practices this in some way or another, and you'd be daft to believe otherwise. If you're going to boycott Amazon, do it for the patent, and not for the idea.
The difference here is that a police helicopter is extremely expensive, and is therefore reserved for only the most serious of crimes. There are understandably very few of them, and I'll agree that they're mostly a good thing.
However, if they truly can purchase a UAV for $30k, you'll see these things buzzing around EVERYWHERE. I don't doubt that if purchased and deployed in quantity, you could purchase and operate a UAV for the fraction of the cost of a patrol car.
Earlier in the year, I got to get up close with the UAV equipment operated by PFRR, and was extremely impressed by the simplicity and portability of the system. There's really not a whole lot to it, and UAVs do indeed have some pretty awesome potential applications (military recon is an obvious one -- I'm not too keen on the moral implications of sending in automated kill-bots, but that's another discussion....). I'm just not sure that police patrols should be one of them...
I'd love to see fewer highway patrols. However, I'd also love to see fewer assholes weaving through traffic 30mph+ over the speed of the "flow", avoiding arrest by using a radar detector. Those guys are dangerous, and the speed traps to catch them are dangerous.
Unfortunately, I fear that the police will simply use this as a cash cow, and use it to ticket the average Joe going 75-80mph on an empty straight highway, which is what most highway patrols tend to do. (If you've ever driven across Pennsylvania, you'll know what I'm talking about -- it's a vast expanse of nothing).
Oh, sure.... but my point was that it's MUCH more difficult to cause a catastrophic derailment of an articulated trainset than it is to derail a conventional train or crash a plane. Safety is emphasized so heavily on high-speed rail that the trains often end up being safer than their slower counterparts.
You'd also actually want the train to be as HEAVY as possible if you're inside. If the train derails, you'd want linear momentum to be on your side so that you plow through anything in your way. A lighter train is more apt to be pushed off of the railbed, or stopped by an obstacle in its way (sudden deceleration + deformation of the car = bad for you) If the train weighs more, it'll take proportionally more force to throw it off track (no pun intended).
Although a fast train might be a high-profile target, it isn't a particularly vulnerable one. America's still got this notion that terrorists are going to hatch some sort of plot worthy of a Bond film in order to "steal our freedom" . In reality, the easiest and most vulnerable target is selected. I shouldn't need to remind anybody that 9/11 was executed by a bunch of disillusioned 20-somethings with box cutters.
For that sort of scenario, you'd use the least amount of power if you cached the entire movie (or as much as you could fit) into memory in one fell swoop. Spin up, read the entire file, and spin down.
I seem to recall that one of the ways in which Apple tweaked the battery life of the iPod was to considerably increase the size of the RAM cache, and read as much of the playlist as possible into memory.
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Brilliant.
Let's send laptops to a region that can barely afford concrete blocks. It's foolproof!
If that's not FUD, I don't know what is.
If you've got to dial 911, use the closest fucking phone you can find (and do *not* leave the victim unless it's absolutely necessary).
It's also an egregious abuse of the system for everyone in the room to dial 911 simultaneously. Think about the implications you might be causing...
I can't find a shred of evidence anywhere stating that the 911 system today will intentionally route calls differently based upon if they were placed via a landline or a mobile phone. Given that there may be more than one PSAP within an exchange, it's certainly possible that two nearby phones will get routed differently. However, it's both stupid and dangerous to suggest that based upon your one anecdotal experience, that there's a special low-priority 911 call center reserved for mobile phone users.
Thanks to E-911, you should hypothetically be routed to the call center nearest to the tower you're calling from. If the operator's got E-911 Phase II implemented, they'll even know your exact location. I've seen it in operation, and it's an absolutely fantastic system that has the very obvious potential to save many lives.
Given the spotty reliability of mobile phones in some buildings and rural areas, I'd agree that a landline is superior to a mobile phone if you have the two choices laid out directly in front of you. However, there's definitely no mobile-phone-punishment-queue at the 911 office.
(Another relevant tip that probably saved the life of a close friend: If you're traveling into the backcountry, make sure your party is carrying at least two phones. You get redundancy in case something happens to the guy carrying the phone, and the CDMA and GSM networks in the US often don't overlap in rural areas. Verizon/Sprint are CDMA, whilst AT&T, T-Mobile, and most of the rest are on GSM. You never know where you're going to get a signal, and carrying both types of phone will greatly increase your chances of finding one. This is also assuming you're not traveling alone, which is just plain reckless)
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I imagine that the cost of doing printing books the old-fashioned way in Africa isn't all that high (lots of trees, and lots of cheap labor). Sure, I won't argue that pressing a CD itself is going to be cheaper than printing a book under any circumstance, but you could buy a fairly large pile of textbooks for the price of an OLPC, and each of those books could simultaneously be used by a different student.
Also, where are these CDs and DVDs full of pirated textbooks? Do *THESE* even actually exist? Now that we've progressed into the territory of the blatantly illegal, I imagine that government support for these projects (especially *foreign* government support) is going to wane considerably.
I also sincerely doubt (though I'd love to be proven wrong) that the OLPC is going to be teaching anyone calculus. The target market (based upon the way the OS and bundled apps look) is clearly intended for primary education. In this area, the teacher is going to have far more influence over whether a class is successful or not than any laptop or textbook ever will.
I stand by my original statement. Make sure there are enough teachers. Send laptops to those teachers. For the students, send over a huge stack of printing presses, and work out an arrangement with the publishers that allows them to print the books at substantially reduced royalties (this is already done in India and other parts of the world, and has proven to be worthwhile for everybody involved).
You'd better watch out... those penguins can be awfully crafty! Last I heard, they were recruiting hollywood big-names like Morgan Freeman to their cause.
Will the OLPCs actually ship with these mythical free textbooks and reference materials that people keep talking about?
For that matter, where can I get them, or where can my budget-starved school district get them? I'm pretty sick of shelling out $300 per semester for textbooks.
Apart from Wikipedia, the number of *GOOD* free textbooks to my knowledge is pretty close to zero. Reduce that number even further if you want them in a language other than English.
I agree with the Grandparent poster. We *should* be helping Africa out, and I loudly applaud efforts to do so. However, giving laptops to 8-year-olds isn't the best way to go about doing this. It was very clear from the start that the people behind the project were in it for their own egos.
Is multimedia really helpful for teaching basic reading and math? If it is indeed helpful, wouldn't it make more sense to give one laptop to every teacher instead? With the OLPC, children can um... paint... and share notes (and their paintings) via the mesh network. How is this useful again?
If you want to accuse anybody of ignorance, I'd go after the founders of the project, and the people who have been blindly cheering them on from the start. The fact that we haven't seen similar initiatives work in the US or Europe (where there is a considerably larger economic and technological base) should be pretty convincing evidence that this was a bad idea.
Knowing the number of universities that have had rather high-profile data losses and hacks (and also knowing several of the Uni's IT staff) I'd be much more comfortable with Google reading my mail than my school's IT department.
Translation:
:-P
"Nobody wants to build decent phones for our proprietary network, because we've completely destroyed our reputation among the manufacturers by intentionally crippling their phones."
Now Verizon wants smaller players to get in on the action, and hopefully fix their reputation by coming up with something innovative. I'd imagine that they're not only jealous of the iPhone, but also the amazing GSM phones that Europe's had for quite some time now. Let's face it -- the current selection of CDMA phones absolutely sucks.
I'd also imagine that the FCC (or the Boston police department...) would have a few things to say about a breadboard phone
Actually, just about every high-speed rail system uses normal standard gauge track. Of course, that track needs to generally be built to a much higher standard (ballast must be up to spec, concrete ties, no narrow curves, space between the tracks if the trains can tilt into curves, etc... one of the major design flaws of the Acela was that the tracks were placed several inches too close to each other, which severely speed of the trains)
This also allows for backward and forward compatibility. Old trains can use new track (usually allowing them to run at 100% speed for the length of the track), and new trains can slow down to the speed of conventional rail when riding on old track.
The differences between high-speed systems themselves are usually limited to the sort of signaling and switching equipment used. It's all normal standard gauge track
If you RTFA, you'll notice that the ordering of the items in the list seems arbitrary, and that the authors don't really refer to any sort of ranking within the list.
And yeah.... the puck mouse did suck, but it also wasn't horribly difficult to go out to buy a new mouse if you hated the thing. It was the first apple peripheral, after all, to use a universally standard interface. (Apple really led the pack with USB and Firewire. The PS/2 interface *still* shows up on many PCs! It's a bit sad, however, to see FireWire slowly dying out, as it was undoubtedly the technically superior interface for data transfers)
You can go upwind in just about *any* masted sail.*
The Maltese Falcon is more or less just a modern reinterpretation of a square sail rig, with the added advantage of being able to completely rotate the rig, allowing it to sail closer to wind.
I've heard quite a bit of debate from experienced sailors as to the comparative merits and drawbacks of this design. I'm no expert, but the one thing that is certain, is that it's astonishingly expensive (just like everything else about the boat). Not practical for commercial use.
That said, the "kite" isn't a sail in the traditional sense of the word, and is in effect a giant spinnaker, which is more or less only good for going downwind. On the other hand, there are advantages to the system, as it can safely sail in high or unstable winds, and it doesn't require a sizable or experienced crew to operate. The sail itself shouldn't be horribly expensive either.
If you could somehow figure out how to inexpensively sail a freighter with a traditional full rig, you'd have a very profitable business idea on your hands
There's a slight difference here.
NMR is referring to the physical phenomena, whereas an MRI is one very particular and specific application of NMR. There are plenty of other applications of NMR that don't produce images.
NMRI would be an appropriate title, although the reason to drop the 'N' was probably a good one.
When the word 'Nuclear' is used in public without any additional context provided, one typically assumes that it's referring to fission, or some sort of other radioactive process. One needs to look no further than the 'NRC' (Nuclear Regulatory commission in the US) for evidence that this is the linguistic norm.
Because a medical MRI is often marketed as being safer than an X-Ray by virtue of the fact that it does not expose the patient to significant levels of ionizing radiation, it does make a good deal of sense to drop the 'N' from the name.
This nuclear battery, however is a bit of a different case. It contains radioactive fuel, and is undisputedly a fission reactor by any definition of the term. It might be a remarkably safe fission reactor that doesn't use dangerous isotopes, but that doesn't change the nature of what it is.
And even though I don't typically buy into the fearmongering regarding nuclear power, I can't say that I like the idea of a massive network of these things being put into place. Although they'd be fantastic for remote areas, I feel that safety and security practices would be far more effective at a large centralized plant for densely populated regions. Even if the operators of the porta-nuke are careful and diligent, and the device is inherently safe as designed, shit happens. Earthquakes, volcanoes, manufacturing errors, and stupid people could all potentially cause problems with such a design.
Although they do address many safety concerns right off the bat by burying it underground, the "no human operator" and "no moving parts" bits still scare me. What *if* something goes wrong? Will somebody notice it before it's too late, and is there actually the capability to turn it off and stop the reaction?
Nuclear power's a good thing, and as we've demonstrated with Three Mile Island, it can be reasonably safe even if *everything* goes wrong, as long as the basic design is sound. HOWEVER, we do need to remember that nuclear power is still fundamentally dangerous as hell. Any new or "revolutionary" design needs to be initially regarded with *EXTREME* skepticism, and be reviewed by many pairs of eyes before it gets put into production.
Sounds to me like your Mom didn't really know how to operate her PC either...
I might make one suggestion for allowing her to avoid using the finder. Even though QuickSilver is very much a "Power User's" sort of tool, it's also a pretty nice application launcher.
Still.... it doesn't sound much like she knew what she was doing to start out. If she knows how to use Windows Explorer, the Finder should hardly be a challenge.
Complaining about the lack of a start menu speaks more of an unwillingness to learn anything new at all. Clicking the finder pops up a window that has more or less the same exact things that you'd find in the start menu. Your documents folder, applications folder, and any drives that happen to be plugged in at the time. Although it's a tiny bit more cumbersome than the start menu, the level of complexity is more or less the exact same. It's really not that different.
If she somehow managed to bork one of the settings, and made the finder's icons way too big, that can easily be changed via the View Menu -> Show View Options. Not something that she could have easily figured out on her own, but I can also think of plenty of examples of Windows incorrectly deciding my folders were full of photos, and providing my with a filmstrip view of a folder full of excel sheets.
Of course, one can resize any window by clicking and dragging on the bottom right hand corner. There's even the textured "handle" there to remind you that this is possible.
Although it won't maximize the window, the green dot should also restore the window to a "sane" size. Unfortunately, the exact behavior of the green dot is frustratingly inconsistent, so your mileage might vary.... However, as long as you accept the fact that there is no Maximize button, you'll come to love OS X a lot more quickly, and maybe actually realize the benefits of a windowed desktop.
This is true, and just underscores the silliness of the whole discussion.
The datacenter will be kept at a reasonably comfortable temperature. Some sort of heat exchanger will probably still be necessary to keep things consistent, although traditional air-conditioning shouldn't be necessary in the wintertime. (Mean outdoor temperature in February is -20C, -2.2F)
The difficult thing for subarctic climates, however, is the fact that (contrary to popular belief) the summers are actually quite pleasant. Irkutsk's mean temperature in July is a balmy 64F, 18C. To keep a large data center going at that high of an ambient temperature will require at least a modest amount of air-conditioning (or a whole lot of ventilation).
Although their cooling requirements are probably a bit less than a typical datacenter down south, ARSC in Fairbanks, Alaska does indeed maintain a large bank of air-conditioning equipment to cool its server room. (Fairbanks is colder in the winter, and warmer than the summer than Irkutsk, and claims the largest temperature "gap" on the planet).
9/11 was a big deal, because 20 guys made an opportunistic attack that leveled several city blocks of the most populous city in the US using nothing but box cutters. It was also the single largest attack aimed solely at American civilians ever to occur.
We knew that Al Qaeda existed, and that they hated our guts long before 9/11. In that regard, it wasn't a big deal at all. The fact that cockpit doors were kept unlocked is stupid, and we have only ourselves to blame for letting it happen.
After hiring a few locksmiths to fasten locks to the bloody doors, we should have stopped, and left it at that.
Instead, we had:
"Gee. These people really don't like us. Let's invade their country"
"Okay."
Most Windows to Mac converts I know of throw hissy fits over the lack of a 'Maximize' button.
Also, what exactly doesn't she like about it? Most older folks I know of who have switched to a Mac tend to have a tough time for the first week or two, and then generally fall into the swing of things. The biggest hump is realizing that MacOS and Windows are not 1:1 equivalents -- there are some Windows-y things that you wouldn't want to do in MacOS, and others that you wouldn't want to do in Windows...
But for the most part, the two OSes are EXTREMELY similar these days. Apple Mail more or less works the same as Outlook Express. Safari, IE, and Firefox are similar enough that anybody who's used one should be able to use all three. iTunes is a far more intuitive application than Windows Media Player, and iPhoto really couldn't be much more straightforward.
Where is this learning curve she's talking about? I just don't see it.
1) Siberia gets a lot colder than -10C. -10C is 14F. That's not cold at all -- a -10C winter day in Virginia wouldn't be considered all that odd.
;-)
2) As long as you don't get a frost buildup, solid-state electronics will generally work just fine in cold environments. Hard drives *might* have some mechanical difficulties if you take them really far below zero, and laptop batteries tend to have a tough time maintaining a charge in the cold. Apart from that, though, you could probably let it get that cold without worrying about the servers themselves. However, the admins running the servers might mutiny if you subject them those sorts of conditions
3) The servers aren't going to be outdoors. Duh.
Agreed.
Even though bits of GMail's interface are rather esoteric and a bit unintuitive, most non-technical users find that the learning curve is easily justified by GMail's message threading features. Until some other email client can come close to matching it (along with a few others, such as the best spam filters I've ever encountered, tons of storage, and free POP/IMAP access), I'm sticking with GMail.
I'd love if the interface were overhauled a bit, and the underlying code cleaned up to improve the speed (it's a bit sluggish on my mac, as are most AJAX and flash apps for some reason)
Does the preview pane exist because e-mails are typically 3-5 lines? Or are corporate e-mails only 3-5 lines, because we know that nobody will ever read beyond what's in the Outlook preview pane?
If the first is true, then Microsoft did a good job of assessing hte situation, and implementing a solution.
If the second is true, we've got a rather bad situation on our hands for all the same reasons that PowerPoint is an absolutely terrible method of convening information. A single sheet of A4/Letter is a vastly superior means of communication than a PowerPoint slideshow in almost every case -- even though he comes across as a bit of a prick, Edward Tufte's got the right idea here. Likewise, a 3-sentence e-mail is potentially lacking some very vital information.
If you have a short email, keep it short, and summarize the best as you can in the subject line. Otherwise, take the liberty to explain yourself as much as necessary in the body text of the message. Reading a 3-paragraph message doesn't take long at all, and skimming it for the important details hardly takes any longer than reading the aforementioned 3-5 line message.
I would be very weary of any scientist that says "That's Impossible!" when referring to a system as large, complicated, and chaotic as the ocean.
Simply put, although I'd peg rogue waves as being extremely improbable, I could easily see how all of the factors could hypothetically lead to several waves constructively interfering to create a single massive wave. I *am* surprised, however, to see that these rogue waves are observed as frequently as they are, however.
To be fair, scientists have also admitted that turbulence is a massive grey area in our current understanding of classical dynamics.
'UFOs' I'd imagine are the result of either hoaxes, or some atmospheric phenomena that doesn't occur frequently enough, or stick around long enough to be studied properly. If you described the Aurora to a scientist who had never seen or heard of it, he'd probably ask you to have your head examined.
If you're British, that comment is at least twice as disturbing.
Agreed.
What *does* need to happen in the short term is a freeze on the construction of new coal-fired plants, and for a lifespan to be set on the remaining ones in operation. 25-50 years is plenty of time for the coal industry to slowly wind down.
Operators of said plants must also be forced to "re-certify" their plants every few years to be up to current emissions standards. I remember reading about one power plant that had been running for 50+ years on essentially the same design as when it was built, and thanks to the fact that the operator never did a "major" overhaul, but instead a series of small repairs, the plant never had to be brought up to modern standards.
In the meantime, there's no reason not to start building Nuclear plants to fill in the gaps that can't be filled by solar, hydro, or wind until those technologies mature a bit further. I believe 3 permits have been issued so far by the NRC. Even ignoring global warming, and taking Chernobyl into account (along with every other nuclear accident that's ever occurred PLUS Hiroshima and Nagasaki) , coal is *FAR* more dangerous than Nuclear. (Which is why we need to be actively puressuring China to pursue alternate means of generation -- ash that can be traced to China and Japan is routinely collected on the West Coast in non-insignificant amounts)
I think you've missed their intent here. Such a system would almost definitely prioritize new accounts, because of their "future potential".
The sort of account that would likely be penalized under this system would probably be a guy who places an order once a year for exactly $25.01 to take advantage of the free shipping. Alternatively, they might frown upon customers who routinely RMA items, or issue chargebacks, which is also rather understandable.
I'm surprised this got patented. Every business on the planet practices this in some way or another, and you'd be daft to believe otherwise. If you're going to boycott Amazon, do it for the patent, and not for the idea.
The difference here is that a police helicopter is extremely expensive, and is therefore reserved for only the most serious of crimes. There are understandably very few of them, and I'll agree that they're mostly a good thing.
However, if they truly can purchase a UAV for $30k, you'll see these things buzzing around EVERYWHERE. I don't doubt that if purchased and deployed in quantity, you could purchase and operate a UAV for the fraction of the cost of a patrol car.
Earlier in the year, I got to get up close with the UAV equipment operated by PFRR, and was extremely impressed by the simplicity and portability of the system. There's really not a whole lot to it, and UAVs do indeed have some pretty awesome potential applications (military recon is an obvious one -- I'm not too keen on the moral implications of sending in automated kill-bots, but that's another discussion....). I'm just not sure that police patrols should be one of them...
I'd love to see fewer highway patrols. However, I'd also love to see fewer assholes weaving through traffic 30mph+ over the speed of the "flow", avoiding arrest by using a radar detector. Those guys are dangerous, and the speed traps to catch them are dangerous.
Unfortunately, I fear that the police will simply use this as a cash cow, and use it to ticket the average Joe going 75-80mph on an empty straight highway, which is what most highway patrols tend to do. (If you've ever driven across Pennsylvania, you'll know what I'm talking about -- it's a vast expanse of nothing).
Oh, sure.... but my point was that it's MUCH more difficult to cause a catastrophic derailment of an articulated trainset than it is to derail a conventional train or crash a plane. Safety is emphasized so heavily on high-speed rail that the trains often end up being safer than their slower counterparts.
You'd also actually want the train to be as HEAVY as possible if you're inside. If the train derails, you'd want linear momentum to be on your side so that you plow through anything in your way. A lighter train is more apt to be pushed off of the railbed, or stopped by an obstacle in its way (sudden deceleration + deformation of the car = bad for you) If the train weighs more, it'll take proportionally more force to throw it off track (no pun intended).
Although a fast train might be a high-profile target, it isn't a particularly vulnerable one. America's still got this notion that terrorists are going to hatch some sort of plot worthy of a Bond film in order to "steal our freedom" . In reality, the easiest and most vulnerable target is selected. I shouldn't need to remind anybody that 9/11 was executed by a bunch of disillusioned 20-somethings with box cutters.
For that sort of scenario, you'd use the least amount of power if you cached the entire movie (or as much as you could fit) into memory in one fell swoop. Spin up, read the entire file, and spin down.
I seem to recall that one of the ways in which Apple tweaked the battery life of the iPod was to considerably increase the size of the RAM cache, and read as much of the playlist as possible into memory.