The Saturn V is one of the greatest accomplishments of American Engineering. To shroud it like this is nothing short of disrespectful to those who built it, not to mention a pretty startling reflection of the current status of science in America.
That all said, anybody who would consider using a Saturn 5 rocket as any sort of weapon is absolutely insane. The Saturn rockets were huge, and designed to deliver massive payloads (all of Skylab was launched via a single Saturn booster). The capacity of a Saturn rocket is just shy of 118 times as massive as the largest nuclear device ever constructed.
Needless to say, it'd be pretty damn difficult for anybody to hide a rocket that big, along with that much nuclear material.
Smaller rockets are scarier, because bombs don't need to be particularly heavy in order to cause serious damage, and because they can be easily concealed and launched at sea.
I don't think that it's very easy/efficent to separate most of these things when they're all together in a sort of mish-mosh.
Likewise, despite being cheap, you've gotta make sure the lead is disposed of properly, along with the various other nasty material that goes into making CRTs and capacitors.
Silicon's so chemically inert that you may have trouble re-processing it efficiently.
The compatibility issue is something I've genuinely never experienced.
A few years ago, I had Office XP at home, 2000 at school, and 2003 at work. Taking files between the three was never a problem unless I had done something highly unusual to one of the files (ie. embedding something weird or non-standard into a PowerPoint). Even then, only that one bit would show up as a question mark, and the rest of the file would be fine.
Taking files from 2003 to 2000 and back to 2003 would usually even preserve any 2003-specific features that weren't in 2000 wherever it could.
Ditto for the bringing files between the mac and PC editions of Office.
I'm no huge fan of Microsoft, but until 2007, backward compatibility was never an issue at all, and as long as you save your files in 2007 as the 'old' format, it's still fine. It's also weird that I hear this argument most often from proponents of Microsoft...
On top of that, perhaps Dr. May's degree will help focus a little positive attention on science given that many in politics these days seem to have made us scientists out to be the boogey man/woman.
Right. Because the conservative right wing would be extremely compassionate toward the endeavors of the ">members of a band like Queen due to their rock star status.
Upon first reading that book, I couldn't help but keep thinking "Damn that's awesome." Looking back on it after a few years, I think it sort of made him look somewhat like an ass.
But then again, it would be hard for somebody like Richard Feynmann to write an autobiography without sounding just a bit arrogant.
All LCD screens get their light from a single backlight. When the display is on, the backlight is on. Always.
The LCD crystals in the screen act as tiny shutters, and can open or close to allow that light through, or keep it out. Although these shutters take a small amount of energy to open and close, it's insignificant compared to the amount of energy it takes to power the backlight.
A commenter in this thread commented that an Apple 17" display attached to a lab supply is measured as drawing 0.6W less when displaying a white screen than when displaying a black one.
CRT screens probably do draw less power when displaying a black screen, but on the whole they still draw considerably more power than an LCD under any circumstance. On the same note, CRT users may find that the white-on-black scheme is easier on their eyes -- I still have a CRT in my cube at work, and setting my editor to the white-on-black scheme is definitely more legible and less stressful on my eyes. (I still find it more legible on LCDs, although eye strain isn't an issue at all)
I don't get it... CowboyNeal should know better than this. Is he intentionally seeding flamebait?
The gold standard just never made that much sense to me once you started thinking about it. I remember reading back in my HS history class about an African king that took a trip to Europe, and brought a large amount of gold with him to pay for his expenses while abroad... the amount of gold he took was so great that it completely devastated the economies of the regions he visited.
Or you could just have a gold rush, which would be equally bad.
Re:They did not go up in price, the dollar went do
on
$60 Games Are Here To Stay
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Call me crazy, but the grandparent poster doesn't mention the gold standard once in his post.
He does mention that our economy is inflating somewhat rapidly, which can be very easily verified by taking a look at some graphs plotting the exchange rates for US dollars.
Whether or not this is an explicitly bad thing is a subject of debate. From what I understand, inflation is generally considered to be a good thing in small amounts, and that the US is on the brink of passing the cusp of these "small amounts".
Take a look at what happened in Argentina. Their currency became worthless almost overnight due to poor economic practices (nothing to do with the gold standard).
The grandparent poster then draws a bunch of conclusions from the assumption that the dollar is inflating, all of which appear pretty sound in the context of other economic inferences. If the dollar's worth less, as in any economic disaster, the people with the least money are obviously going to be the most affected. Because people have to eat, wages will then hopefully rise to try and catch up.
But seriously... NYC's traffic is nowhere nearly as bad as LA's, and the figures of how many people use mass transit are staggering. 1.3 million people use the IRT Lexington Avenue line (the portion of the 4/5/6 that runs together through Manhattan) -- more than the combined ridership the systems systems in Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston combined. The entire subway system carries over 5 million people each day, not including traffic from NJTransit, PATH, LIRR, Amtrak, the city buses, and MetroNorth, all of which travel to/through NYC.
The city simply wouldn't function without mass transit. Yes, there are a lot of cars (they're working on greatly reducing that), but it's nothing compared to the number of people in the city. A study commissioned last year to determine the feasibility of NYC's new congestion pricing scheme calculated that if the rate of car ownership on Manhattan were the same as the rest of the country, you could literally cover the island in a layer of cars from the tip of the island up to somewhere in Harlem.
Exercise doesn't even necessarily mean going to the gym after work. Frankly, I hate the gym, and rarely go.
However, you can get plenty of exercise in all sorts of unexpected places. If you live close enough to your work to commute by bicycle, then do it! If you can take mass transportation to work, but have to walk the last mile or two, that's great too! How about using your bike as your primary mode of transportation around town? It's cheaper than a car, more efficient, and in places where parking's difficult, it can actually save you time.
Case in point: from visual inspection, very New Yorkers are fat or overweight compared to the rest of the count. Accordingly, virtually nobody in NYC drives. The places you see the most obesity tend to be the same places that are dominated by automobile transportation.
Most of the fat ones you see in urban environments are very obviously tourists -- after living in a southern tourist town for a few years, I can say that the vast majority of tourists match the stereotype of being rude, fat, and old -- doubly so if they're traveling in an RV, and add a dash of racism if they've got a southern accent. I could go into a whole tirade about this -- there are indeed some responsible tourists/travelers, but the ones that fit the description are ALWAYS tourists.
I'm no fan of Stevens, but his critics really need to find better reasons to hate him other than a poorly thought-out speech on Net Neutrality, and a public-works project that probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground.
Virtually every member of the senate has a mildly dishonorable past (the democrats included). Let's stop making personal attacks on the senators, and work out reasonable ways to hold them accountable.
How in the hell did that bit of hate speech get moderated as informative?
If you're going to criticize other posters for not supplying sufficient claims to back up their data, and then make a counter-claim of your own, you'd better sure as hell have some sort of evidence to back it up.
As far as the PLO goes, "the Jews did it" is more or less a crude but astute analysis of the past 100 years of their history. I don't think that any serious historian would argue otherwise than the fact that Palestine has been more or less constantly shit upon for the past century. Wouldn't you be pissed if you were driven off of your own land and persecuted? I can't say that they've been the most responsible, but at some point you have to resort to drastic measures to protect what's important to you.
While we're at it, how exactly do you determine who's a terrorist? Were the Nazis invading france terrorists? Were the American soldiers burning villages in Vietnam terrorists? Was the Israeli takeover of Palestine a terrorist act? How about the US bombing Afghan and Iraqi villages and homes purportedly containing 'terrorists', only to discover them full of women and children after the dust cleared? Does it really matter whether or not the crimes are committed at the hand and discretion of a government?
Are we forgetting about the IRA? Sure, they were white, and they never intentionally bothered the US, but you can't seriously argue that they weren't terrorists.
The sort of rhetoric I see being tossed around in this thread very closely mirrors that seen during the McCarthy trials.
There's passenger service between Anchorage and Fairbanks.
It's somewhat expensive, but it is, as far as I can tell, the cheapest way to travel between the two cities without a car. Likewise, it's a pretty nice trip.
I suppose that the price is forgivable when you consider what the line must cost to maintain, especially given their relatively low volume.
Sure, it's geared toward tourists in the summertime, but then again, there simply aren't that many Alaskans traveling between Anchorage and Fairbanks -- take a ride on the equivalent road route to see what I mean. (Also, on the road you'll notice almost no trucks. The cool bit is that, to save fuel, virtually all freight travels by rail)
I'd tend to agree, although my experiences with Amtrak have led me to be somewhat hesitant of this approach.
The long story is that, although the airlines probably did deserve some compensation for business lost over 9/11, like every other good-intentioned policy this administration has implemented, it got completely FUBAR'd, and the airlines used 9/11 as an excuse to rescue them from their already-existing financial woes.
(On the other hand, publicly-owned regional/commuter rail service in the US tends to be considerably better than Amtrak. New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Alaska all have fantastic state-owned railways that regrettably don't extend beyond their own borders. For some reason, though, our national rail system is expensive, slow, and outdated.)
I wouldn't exactly call Iran an "evil dictatorship".
Granted, things over there aren't exactly peachy, and their past dealings with the US have been less than ideal. However, there are far more corrupt governments closer to our own borders and elsewhere -- the North Korean government, on the other hand probably is completely psychotic.
Iran's foreign policy over the past few years, however, looks like a series of well-calculated moves. In all likelihood, their nuclear program IS designed for peaceful purposes, and exists only to makes the US look bad. They probably also knew the truth about Iraq.
I'm not saying that I support Ahmadinejad or his morals, but there's little doubt that he's a smart, charismatic, and shrewd leader.
Why do Harvard (and the other Ivies) receive so much more sympathy from the media and general public than these sort of anonymous, (and mostly small) state colleges?
Does this mean that the RIAA is deliberately avoiding chasing after those with money? Because, by avoiding the Ivies, that's exactly what they're doing. (GWU being the exception here -- their tuition is frightening)
Even so, given that we're talking about the RIAA, I'd love to see them try to target one of the more high-profile schools, and have their asses handed to them in court. What they're doing is nothing short of extortion and racketeering.
But then again, I guess this is becoming the status quo for the education and legal status in the US.
Well, I'm actually surprised it's camcorders instead of regular cameras.
If you'll remember, there were quite a few European camera manufacturers before they were completely decimated by competition from the East, mainly due to cost-cutting measures that could be taken in China and Japan, but not in Europe.
As a result, many of these companies, Zeiss and Leica among them, were decimated. Ask any seasoned photographer who made the better products, and you'll likely hear testaments to the quality of Leica and Zeiss products produced over half a century ago. Even simple 35 or 50mm lenses made by Zeiss decades ago sell for thousands of dollars on eBay today.
As long as the import tax is equal to the comparative difference in the standard of living between the two countries, competition will be preserved. Make the tax too low, and domestic businesses go belly-up -- make the tax too high, and the domestic businesses become complacent as a result of having no legitimate competition.
Slashdot Mirror
The Saturn V is one of the greatest accomplishments of American Engineering. To shroud it like this is nothing short of disrespectful to those who built it, not to mention a pretty startling reflection of the current status of science in America.
That all said, anybody who would consider using a Saturn 5 rocket as any sort of weapon is absolutely insane. The Saturn rockets were huge, and designed to deliver massive payloads (all of Skylab was launched via a single Saturn booster). The capacity of a Saturn rocket is just shy of 118 times as massive as the largest nuclear device ever constructed.
Needless to say, it'd be pretty damn difficult for anybody to hide a rocket that big, along with that much nuclear material.
Smaller rockets are scarier, because bombs don't need to be particularly heavy in order to cause serious damage, and because they can be easily concealed and launched at sea.
The weird bit is that, despite being a somewhat silly article, it launched one of the most intelligent discussions I've seen on /. in a while.
I don't think that it's very easy/efficent to separate most of these things when they're all together in a sort of mish-mosh.
Likewise, despite being cheap, you've gotta make sure the lead is disposed of properly, along with the various other nasty material that goes into making CRTs and capacitors.
Silicon's so chemically inert that you may have trouble re-processing it efficiently.
Seriously. I'm glad the judge spotted their very obvious abuse of the system.
Actually, the RIAA only has one of those....
The compatibility issue is something I've genuinely never experienced.
A few years ago, I had Office XP at home, 2000 at school, and 2003 at work. Taking files between the three was never a problem unless I had done something highly unusual to one of the files (ie. embedding something weird or non-standard into a PowerPoint). Even then, only that one bit would show up as a question mark, and the rest of the file would be fine.
Taking files from 2003 to 2000 and back to 2003 would usually even preserve any 2003-specific features that weren't in 2000 wherever it could.
Ditto for the bringing files between the mac and PC editions of Office.
I'm no huge fan of Microsoft, but until 2007, backward compatibility was never an issue at all, and as long as you save your files in 2007 as the 'old' format, it's still fine. It's also weird that I hear this argument most often from proponents of Microsoft...
Has anybody else noticed quite a bit of 'crossover' between British and American spellings ever since the advent of the Internet?
I for one find myself spelling things the British way occasionally, 'catalogue' and 'colour' being the two biggest examples.
Now I'm intrigued.
Apart from the apparent uselessness of such a device, does such a thing exist?
Gah markup.
Fixed link to Freddie Mercury's Wikipedia article.
Right. Because the conservative right wing would be extremely compassionate toward the endeavors of the ">members of a band like Queen due to their rock star status.
Oh, wait....
Upon first reading that book, I couldn't help but keep thinking "Damn that's awesome." Looking back on it after a few years, I think it sort of made him look somewhat like an ass.
But then again, it would be hard for somebody like Richard Feynmann to write an autobiography without sounding just a bit arrogant.
+5 Informative?
Come on guys... it's a joke!
That said, I can see Quinto doing a great job with the character. He's fantastic on Heroes (as is most of the cast, come to think of it...).
All LCD screens get their light from a single backlight. When the display is on, the backlight is on. Always.
The LCD crystals in the screen act as tiny shutters, and can open or close to allow that light through, or keep it out. Although these shutters take a small amount of energy to open and close, it's insignificant compared to the amount of energy it takes to power the backlight.
A commenter in this thread commented that an Apple 17" display attached to a lab supply is measured as drawing 0.6W less when displaying a white screen than when displaying a black one.
CRT screens probably do draw less power when displaying a black screen, but on the whole they still draw considerably more power than an LCD under any circumstance. On the same note, CRT users may find that the white-on-black scheme is easier on their eyes -- I still have a CRT in my cube at work, and setting my editor to the white-on-black scheme is definitely more legible and less stressful on my eyes. (I still find it more legible on LCDs, although eye strain isn't an issue at all)
I don't get it... CowboyNeal should know better than this. Is he intentionally seeding flamebait?
Ah. Got it.
The gold standard just never made that much sense to me once you started thinking about it. I remember reading back in my HS history class about an African king that took a trip to Europe, and brought a large amount of gold with him to pay for his expenses while abroad... the amount of gold he took was so great that it completely devastated the economies of the regions he visited.
Or you could just have a gold rush, which would be equally bad.
Call me crazy, but the grandparent poster doesn't mention the gold standard once in his post.
He does mention that our economy is inflating somewhat rapidly, which can be very easily verified by taking a look at some graphs plotting the exchange rates for US dollars.
Whether or not this is an explicitly bad thing is a subject of debate. From what I understand, inflation is generally considered to be a good thing in small amounts, and that the US is on the brink of passing the cusp of these "small amounts".
Take a look at what happened in Argentina. Their currency became worthless almost overnight due to poor economic practices (nothing to do with the gold standard).
The grandparent poster then draws a bunch of conclusions from the assumption that the dollar is inflating, all of which appear pretty sound in the context of other economic inferences. If the dollar's worth less, as in any economic disaster, the people with the least money are obviously going to be the most affected. Because people have to eat, wages will then hopefully rise to try and catch up.
Like I said, tourists! :-)
But seriously... NYC's traffic is nowhere nearly as bad as LA's, and the figures of how many people use mass transit are staggering. 1.3 million people use the IRT Lexington Avenue line (the portion of the 4/5/6 that runs together through Manhattan) -- more than the combined ridership the systems systems in Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston combined. The entire subway system carries over 5 million people each day, not including traffic from NJTransit, PATH, LIRR, Amtrak, the city buses, and MetroNorth, all of which travel to/through NYC.
The city simply wouldn't function without mass transit. Yes, there are a lot of cars (they're working on greatly reducing that), but it's nothing compared to the number of people in the city. A study commissioned last year to determine the feasibility of NYC's new congestion pricing scheme calculated that if the rate of car ownership on Manhattan were the same as the rest of the country, you could literally cover the island in a layer of cars from the tip of the island up to somewhere in Harlem.
Amen to the exercise bit.
Exercise doesn't even necessarily mean going to the gym after work. Frankly, I hate the gym, and rarely go.
However, you can get plenty of exercise in all sorts of unexpected places. If you live close enough to your work to commute by bicycle, then do it! If you can take mass transportation to work, but have to walk the last mile or two, that's great too! How about using your bike as your primary mode of transportation around town? It's cheaper than a car, more efficient, and in places where parking's difficult, it can actually save you time.
Case in point: from visual inspection, very New Yorkers are fat or overweight compared to the rest of the count. Accordingly, virtually nobody in NYC drives. The places you see the most obesity tend to be the same places that are dominated by automobile transportation.
Most of the fat ones you see in urban environments are very obviously tourists -- after living in a southern tourist town for a few years, I can say that the vast majority of tourists match the stereotype of being rude, fat, and old -- doubly so if they're traveling in an RV, and add a dash of racism if they've got a southern accent. I could go into a whole tirade about this -- there are indeed some responsible tourists/travelers, but the ones that fit the description are ALWAYS tourists.
I'm no fan of Stevens, but his critics really need to find better reasons to hate him other than a poorly thought-out speech on Net Neutrality, and a public-works project that probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground.
Virtually every member of the senate has a mildly dishonorable past (the democrats included). Let's stop making personal attacks on the senators, and work out reasonable ways to hold them accountable.
How in the hell did that bit of hate speech get moderated as informative?
If you're going to criticize other posters for not supplying sufficient claims to back up their data, and then make a counter-claim of your own, you'd better sure as hell have some sort of evidence to back it up.
As far as the PLO goes, "the Jews did it" is more or less a crude but astute analysis of the past 100 years of their history. I don't think that any serious historian would argue otherwise than the fact that Palestine has been more or less constantly shit upon for the past century. Wouldn't you be pissed if you were driven off of your own land and persecuted? I can't say that they've been the most responsible, but at some point you have to resort to drastic measures to protect what's important to you.
While we're at it, how exactly do you determine who's a terrorist? Were the Nazis invading france terrorists? Were the American soldiers burning villages in Vietnam terrorists? Was the Israeli takeover of Palestine a terrorist act? How about the US bombing Afghan and Iraqi villages and homes purportedly containing 'terrorists', only to discover them full of women and children after the dust cleared? Does it really matter whether or not the crimes are committed at the hand and discretion of a government?
Are we forgetting about the IRA? Sure, they were white, and they never intentionally bothered the US, but you can't seriously argue that they weren't terrorists.
The sort of rhetoric I see being tossed around in this thread very closely mirrors that seen during the McCarthy trials.
There's passenger service between Anchorage and Fairbanks.
It's somewhat expensive, but it is, as far as I can tell, the cheapest way to travel between the two cities without a car. Likewise, it's a pretty nice trip.
I suppose that the price is forgivable when you consider what the line must cost to maintain, especially given their relatively low volume.
Sure, it's geared toward tourists in the summertime, but then again, there simply aren't that many Alaskans traveling between Anchorage and Fairbanks -- take a ride on the equivalent road route to see what I mean. (Also, on the road you'll notice almost no trucks. The cool bit is that, to save fuel, virtually all freight travels by rail)
I'd tend to agree, although my experiences with Amtrak have led me to be somewhat hesitant of this approach.
The long story is that, although the airlines probably did deserve some compensation for business lost over 9/11, like every other good-intentioned policy this administration has implemented, it got completely FUBAR'd, and the airlines used 9/11 as an excuse to rescue them from their already-existing financial woes.
(On the other hand, publicly-owned regional/commuter rail service in the US tends to be considerably better than Amtrak. New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Alaska all have fantastic state-owned railways that regrettably don't extend beyond their own borders. For some reason, though, our national rail system is expensive, slow, and outdated.)
I wouldn't exactly call Iran an "evil dictatorship".
Granted, things over there aren't exactly peachy, and their past dealings with the US have been less than ideal. However, there are far more corrupt governments closer to our own borders and elsewhere -- the North Korean government, on the other hand probably is completely psychotic.
Iran's foreign policy over the past few years, however, looks like a series of well-calculated moves. In all likelihood, their nuclear program IS designed for peaceful purposes, and exists only to makes the US look bad. They probably also knew the truth about Iraq.
I'm not saying that I support Ahmadinejad or his morals, but there's little doubt that he's a smart, charismatic, and shrewd leader.
The similarity to the Mac User Groups isn't exactly surprising, given that the LUGs were conceptually spawned from the old Mac User Groups (MUGs).
I too never really saw the whole purpose of either group... I mean, we have this whole "Internet" thing for a reason, right?
I'm curious:
How did the RIAA get the identities of your students?
If your college's IT people gave the RIAA access to your students identities without a proper subpoena, you guys are every bit as much to blame.
From what I understand, the subpoena bypasses the extortion letters, and sends the case straight to court where it belongs.
Sigh....
Why do Harvard (and the other Ivies) receive so much more sympathy from the media and general public than these sort of anonymous, (and mostly small) state colleges?
Does this mean that the RIAA is deliberately avoiding chasing after those with money? Because, by avoiding the Ivies, that's exactly what they're doing. (GWU being the exception here -- their tuition is frightening)
Even so, given that we're talking about the RIAA, I'd love to see them try to target one of the more high-profile schools, and have their asses handed to them in court. What they're doing is nothing short of extortion and racketeering.
But then again, I guess this is becoming the status quo for the education and legal status in the US.
Well, I'm actually surprised it's camcorders instead of regular cameras.
If you'll remember, there were quite a few European camera manufacturers before they were completely decimated by competition from the East, mainly due to cost-cutting measures that could be taken in China and Japan, but not in Europe.
As a result, many of these companies, Zeiss and Leica among them, were decimated. Ask any seasoned photographer who made the better products, and you'll likely hear testaments to the quality of Leica and Zeiss products produced over half a century ago. Even simple 35 or 50mm lenses made by Zeiss decades ago sell for thousands of dollars on eBay today.
As long as the import tax is equal to the comparative difference in the standard of living between the two countries, competition will be preserved. Make the tax too low, and domestic businesses go belly-up -- make the tax too high, and the domestic businesses become complacent as a result of having no legitimate competition.