The last time I looked the bills say "federal reserve note" I.E. a private corporation, NOT United States Note....
You're getting your parts of the Federal Reserve System mixed up.
Federal Reserve Notes are issued solely at the discretion of the Federal Reserve System Board of Directors, which is a true public agency. Governors of the Board are appointed by the US president and confirmed by congress, and the Board reports to the House of Representatives.
The Board then distributes the notes through the Federal Reserve Banks. Those are part-public, part-private institutions. But they are merely used to distribute the notes; issuance is governed by the (truly governmental) Board.
Actually, those women aren't outliers at all (except possibly Ms. Leachman). They all started young, got their initial breaks in part on the basis of their looks and managed to weave their way through Hollywood and continue getting roles as they matured.
Cloris Leachman, too. She was Miss Chicago and her early roles are often credited as Dancing Girl, Nightclub Patron, etc. She played Agnes the prostitute in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
I would say helped create our industry. Both Jobs and Gates were instrumental in showing the world what was possible with computing. I sincerely doubt there would even be an Internet without them
They were influential, but let's not go overboard--the ARPANET went live in 1969, and by 1975 Vint Cerf had spec'd TCP and there was intercontinental Internet connectivity from Stanford to London.
I would say helped create our industry. Both Jobs and Gates were instrumental in showing the world what was possible with computing. I sincerely doubt there would even be an Internet without them.
Jobs and Gates did a lot, but let's not go overboard.
The ARPANET went online in 1969, many years before Jobs and Gates had an impact on computing, and Vint Cerf had written the TCP spec by 1974. Intercontinental Internet traffic from Stanford to London started in 1975.
People who are talking about the ridiculousness of fax has never had to deal with an email not arriving in its proper destination with rational cause.
People who talk about the ridiculous of nails obviously never tried to hammer in a screw--it's really hard to do and they pull out too easily after you manage it.
FTP predates even TCP, and precedes modern fax (group 3) by 9 years; HTTPS has been around 15+ years. Both of them are reliable unless the network is down between sender and recipient, in which case both will immediately let you know that the file failed to transfer properly (similar to, say, getting a busy signal when trying to send a fax).
There are other reasons fax hangs on (legal acceptance, 3rd party verification of message send/receive time, etc), but the fact that email sucks as a file transfer mechanism should be irrelevant.
The United States doesn't actually have 50 "states". In fact, there are - uhhhh - 46 states, I think, and 4 commonwealths. In practice, there is almost no difference between a state and a commonwealth. But, there are some subtle legal differences. Some of those differences come into play when discussing issues of "states rights".
No, belmolis is right--there are 50 states. Some of them refer to themselves as commonwealths, but that's purely an internal nomenclature. Under the US Constitution they're all states.
I say this as a former PA resident who's lived in VA for the last decade, so I know that many uneducated residents will often insist that they're not a state.
Out of curiosity, what does this mean? When I hear someone say they're a Commonwealth resident, I usually assume that means one of the former British Empire countries. But in the context of Bell Atlantic, I start thinking that maybe you mean one of the US states that calls themselves a commonwealth (e.g. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia); I've lived in a couple of those, though, and never heard that phrasing.
I think the idea is that if you work at company X who uses open source project Y, these agreements have a standard wording for contributing changes made back to project Y. It's to encourage corporations to contribute back--many places I've worked have been theoretically willing to do so, but didn't want to put in the legal time to figure out the details.
You as an employee are doing the same work in either case, though if you do get things accepted back upstream it may save you a little maintenance work. And you may build some modest reputation capital if you contribute meaningful code.
The question is, are code reviews really effective? I worked on a project where we did extensive code reviews and we rarely found any real bugs. Going through a program line by line and finding a non-obvious bug is very difficult. Also, a thorough code review is also very time consuming. It takes almost as much time to review code as it does to write it in the first place. When you have four or so people reviewing every line written, your productivity for the project goes way down. In my judgment, code reviews just were not cost effective for our project.
That's been my experience as well. We did regular code reviews for a while, but found we got more bang for the buck dedicating that time to pair programming and more developer time writing regression tests. It's not that code reviews were completely ineffectual, they're just (for most things) a very low return on the amount of time invested compared to alternatives.
So now they're optional--occasionally when there's a particularly hairy piece of code or something the author will call for a review, and usually that makes them higher payoff.
But I loathe rotaries when there's a lot of traffic. You can sit there for a lot longer than you would at a red light.
I don't see why it would be any longer than a four-way stop.
That misses the point that you were responding to: a four-way stop is also much worse than a traffic light in heavy traffic. Washington, DC has lots of traffic circles. In medium traffic they work well, but in heavy traffic they're terrible. In lots of the big ones (e.g. Dupont Circle) they were so badly locked up by traffic that they've added multiple complex traffic lights around them to allow people in and out of the circle.
I learned how in the Netherlands. Keep your inside blinker on until you're ready to exit the intersection, then switch to other one when you're ready to exit. That way everyone can clearly see what your intentions are.
This only works in a one-lane roundabout, which are uncommon in the US--they're mostly multiple lanes. Having the inside blinker on indicates that you're planning to switch to an interior lane in the circle.
The Washington, DC area has tons of them that predate 1990 by a long time--Dupont Circle is one famous one built in the 1870s along with a bunch of others under L'enfant's original city plans. Lots of suburbs have newer ones (Chevy Chase circle was built in the 1930s on the DC/Maryland border, Holland Lane circle in Alexandria is another on the Virgina Side).
Many decades (or even over a century) ago, it wasn't like this. A kid finishing 8th grade (about 12-13 years old) had roughly the education of a typical high school graduate these days.
This is just wrong. In the area of math, you can look at studies like http://www.maa.org/features/faceofcalculus.html that show that the level of calculus education in high schools has tripled over the last 30 years, and has actually reached the point where a majority of incoming freshmen math students have already taken calc; in 1950, that was almost nonexistent at the high school level (let alone 8th grade). The state of science education in US middle schools and high schools was even more pathetic prior to the 1960s; a combination of Sputnik-inspired funding efforts and the legal demise of prohibitions on teaching of evolution and the like were among the key movers in stimulating science education. More generally, the AP program didn't even exist until the late 1950s.
One enlightening thing to do is to flip through math assessment tests like the American High School Math Exam from 1950 through present; the difference is pretty stark. In the 50s and 60s, the limit of difficulty is the kind of "a train leaves Chicago going X miles an hour while another leaves Los Angeles going Y miles an hour" questions that are more common for 7th graders (or even bright 5th graders) today.
A former colleague who had worked in some highly corrupt countries told me that the first time he filled in an expenses claim (for a visit to a country where he couldn't even get on the flight back without bribing the check-in clerk) he put down a claim for "Bribery and corruption". The accounts department bounced it and told him to put down "Payments as understood".
That's excellent. I've seen it billed as "Gratuities", too.
Rolling the transactions back is a huger blow to that interesting experiment, and basically undermines the attempt to get bitcoins accepted as a form of currency.
This is the largest market for bitcoin trades, but huge numbers of bitcoins aren't in this market--presumably, some people were using bitcoins to buy things in the real world or trading them on other markets during this time period. By rolling things back, you indicate that there actually is no market-determined value to bitcoins.
In fact, rolling this back is a great way to ensure that thieves can make off with a lot of money (a lot more than the $1000 limit on what you can pull out of the exchange), through arbitrage or worse. For instance, devalue the bitcoins in the exchange (which seems dumb since you hold tons of them), then offline sell a bunch of stuff to people at the devalued rate. Then when the market unwinds, all of a sudden the bitcoins you have are worth the original value, and you've made potentially much more than a thousand bucks.
Imagine this happening with the US dollar, or with stocks that can be traded on secondary markets. It's economic idiocy.
The right thing to do is suspend trading until you know that the security problem is fixed and then eat the pain of what's happened.
User-chosen passwords are unlikely to be secure. One proposed solution is to generate secure keys for each user (a la ssh); there is then a problem of key distribution and of how to remember/carry and enter a key, which is itself nontrivial (lots of 2-factor authentication systems at least partially address this problem).
There are other possible solutions as well, but but if you're really paranoid then you absolutely don't want user-chosen passwords in any super-secure application. A major problem, of course, is properly weighing the need for security against convenience and getting the job done (make things too tough on the user and they'll work outside the system or find ways of gaming it that make things less secure than they were to begin with).
You might have to dig a bit, but there's a trend towards avoiding the US entirely [wikitravel.org] while flying, for those of us who don't see the need to be groped by the country we didn't want to visit in the first place.
My last trip to the US was about five years ago (we arrived the night before The Bathroom Chemistry Incident), and while there are some reasons I'd like to travel there again in the future, none of them warrant the expected treatment we would endure (much less what *might* happen if we're unlucky and get a TSA agent with a chip on their shoulder)
When the US wants tourism again, they'll get their ducks in a row.
The "avoid the US entirely" trend is invisible in the grand scheme of things: tourism to the US is up over 30% from 2000 to 2010 (from about 45 million foreign tourists in 2000 to 59 million in 2010). It declined somewhat post-9/11 but has grown steadily for the past 6 years, and is currently at record levels even adjusted per-capita.
Until that trend changes there's no real economic pressure to rethink TSA rules.
No offense, but it's pretty convenient that you list all these supposed speeds and the great service you get, Without saying where you get it. I'm willing to bet for your one positive encounter, there are twenty people in that area who would say exactly the opposite. My problem with AT&T? Sure, out in the less populated areas, I'll get good speeds. Go anywhere where there's more than 5 people using a cell, and I'm basically back to dialup days. Switched to Verizon and guess what? No matter where I go, I get maximum, or near maximum speeds (never less than 80%.) I don't think Anyone can say this for AT&T. Oh, and the last time I had a dropped call, including a bomb-shelter type basement, on Verizon? Hmm, not once in the last 6 years I've been with them.
This is hugely dependent on exactly where you are. Our office recently moved about a mile up the road in the well-populated Washington, DC metro area (from northern Alexandria, VA just into the south end of Crystal City). In the old office, AT&T dropped signal in the elevators and was sketchy in the server room, while Verizon was rock solid everywhere. In the new building, Verizon drops calls all the time in bad weather while AT&T is rock solid even on the 3rd level of the below-ground parking garage. Both locations are in urban locations well within the coverage zone for both providers, and service is fine on both networks on the sidewalk right in front of the building.
Likewise there are dead zones for each around town--at least as of a year ago, there were a couple of notorious restaurant/bars in Alexandria. In Vermilion, AT&T works fine but Verizon is dead in the back half of the building. In Chadwick's, Verizon works fine but AT&T is dead in the back half of the building. Exactly how big those dead spots are varies with the weather, time of day, and seemingly at random.
Data's similar, though a couple of the worst problems were fixed in the past 3 months: coming out of Old Town Alexandria north on Rt 1 you used to hit an AT&T "deadish" spot where you'd drop back to Edge service, and around the 800 block of N. Fairfax St Verizon got no data service whatsoever. Both appear to be fixed now, but there are still some cool spots for both networks in less-trafficked areas.
Wow. That's pretty awesome, and after getting this year's page to load and seeing how crappy the entries are it's very awesome--only the first 2 of this year's entries were even mildly interesting, while last year's winner is fantastic.
Suppose you're writing a compiler, and you would like to warn the user that the program he wrote contains an infinite loop. This program is not Turing recognizable.
If I'm writing a compiler for an existing computer--or one that will ever exist--then it is, in fact, Turing recognizable. The Halting problem is theoretically decidable (and hence the infinite loop half is Turing recognizable) for all real-world computers. It's only undecidable for a theoretical Turing machine that has infinite space. See, for instance, Marvin Minsky, Computation, Finite and Infinite Machines (1967).
I believe that given the finite resources in the universe it is impossible to actually construct a computer for which the Halting problem is not decidable (though it may be practically intractable).
It has its roots in the decentrality others have mentioned, but it also makes a bit of sense given the scope of the country. Hawaii could easily have different needs from Alaska, and Texas different needs from Minnesota. Giving some of the powers of the purse to smaller entities (states in our case) allows for more flexibility to deal with local circumstances.
When the British Empire was still writ large, it was not uncommon for local taxes and laws to differ between widespread areas, either.
OTOH, there have been survivors from high-altitude plane explosions--Vesna Vulovi, for instance, was in a plane that blew up at over 33,000 feet and survived the decompression and the fall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87 We know that the fall from terminal impact is better than 99% lethal; if the decompression were as bad as claimed, there wouldn't be even the small handful of survivors from accidents at that height that there are.
Indeed, at 30,000 feet the pressure is about.3 atmosphere. Oddly enough, that's almost exactly the same pressure that NASA's EVA suits are pressurized to; astronauts go from 1 atmosphere to.3 atmospheres all the time with no problems and get straight to work. The difference in a plane would be less, since they're not pressurized to a full atmo to begin with. The Byford Dolphin drilling rig suffered a much more traumatic 8 atmosphere decompression in 1983 and one of the 6 workers survived.
I'll buy that the combination of decompression, thin air, and cold is likely to have most people unconscious and maybe kill a few, but I seriously doubt most people are dead before impact.
The original example is to be sucked out of a plane at 30k feet, traveling at about 500mph. That's like saying you should try to hold your breath when you're tossed off a boat with concrete boots. You can want it as much as you like, you are not going to survive.
Tell that to Vesna Vulovi, who survived exactly such a fall:
On 26 January 1972, a JAT DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb and Belgrade exploded 33,000 feet over Srbska-Kamenice in Czechoslovakia. Ustashe, otherwise known as the Croatian National Movement, later admitted their responsibility for the bombing that should have killed all 29 passengers and crew. Miraculously, however, there was a survivor.
The STS-type hydraulic reactive systems are discussed briefly in the article:
While active suspension is nothing new (at least, not for cars), it has previously mainly been integrated into hydraulic systems. According to the Eindhoven researchers, however, hydraulics can't react as quickly as their electromagnetic system, and therefore can't match the smoothness of its ride.
but if I had a hybrid/electric car I'm pretty sure I would rather that electricity go to turning the wheels, not keeping my chassis away from them.
According to TFA, the system actually draws less power than hydraulic shock systems: With a peak consumption of 500 watts, the suspension uses about a quarter of the power of hydraulic systems. It also stretches its battery life by using road vibrations to generate electricity. The designers believe that with refinements, the suspension's energy-efficiency could be improved even further.
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The last time I looked the bills say "federal reserve note" I.E. a private corporation, NOT United States Note....
You're getting your parts of the Federal Reserve System mixed up.
Federal Reserve Notes are issued solely at the discretion of the Federal Reserve System Board of Directors, which is a true public agency. Governors of the Board are appointed by the US president and confirmed by congress, and the Board reports to the House of Representatives.
The Board then distributes the notes through the Federal Reserve Banks. Those are part-public, part-private institutions. But they are merely used to distribute the notes; issuance is governed by the (truly governmental) Board.
Actually, those women aren't outliers at all (except possibly Ms. Leachman). They all started young, got their initial breaks in part on the basis of their looks and managed to weave their way through Hollywood and continue getting roles as they matured.
Cloris Leachman, too. She was Miss Chicago and her early roles are often credited as Dancing Girl, Nightclub Patron, etc. She played Agnes the prostitute in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
I would say helped create our industry. Both Jobs and Gates were instrumental in showing the world what was possible with computing. I sincerely doubt there would even be an Internet without them
They were influential, but let's not go overboard--the ARPANET went live in 1969, and by 1975 Vint Cerf had spec'd TCP and there was intercontinental Internet connectivity from Stanford to London.
I would say helped create our industry. Both Jobs and Gates were instrumental in showing the world what was possible with computing. I sincerely doubt there would even be an Internet without them.
Jobs and Gates did a lot, but let's not go overboard.
The ARPANET went online in 1969, many years before Jobs and Gates had an impact on computing, and Vint Cerf had written the TCP spec by 1974. Intercontinental Internet traffic from Stanford to London started in 1975.
So where on google.com does it say "by the way, we're going to store what you search for, which links you click on, etc"?
Here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/ads/ mainly in the "What information does Google use to serve me ads?" section.
People who are talking about the ridiculousness of fax has never had to deal with an email not arriving in its proper destination with rational cause.
People who talk about the ridiculous of nails obviously never tried to hammer in a screw--it's really hard to do and they pull out too easily after you manage it.
FTP predates even TCP, and precedes modern fax (group 3) by 9 years; HTTPS has been around 15+ years. Both of them are reliable unless the network is down between sender and recipient, in which case both will immediately let you know that the file failed to transfer properly (similar to, say, getting a busy signal when trying to send a fax).
There are other reasons fax hangs on (legal acceptance, 3rd party verification of message send/receive time, etc), but the fact that email sucks as a file transfer mechanism should be irrelevant.
The United States doesn't actually have 50 "states". In fact, there are - uhhhh - 46 states, I think, and 4 commonwealths. In practice, there is almost no difference between a state and a commonwealth. But, there are some subtle legal differences. Some of those differences come into play when discussing issues of "states rights".
No, belmolis is right--there are 50 states. Some of them refer to themselves as commonwealths, but that's purely an internal nomenclature. Under the US Constitution they're all states.
I say this as a former PA resident who's lived in VA for the last decade, so I know that many uneducated residents will often insist that they're not a state.
Yep. I'm an 'ol Commonwealth resident
Out of curiosity, what does this mean? When I hear someone say they're a Commonwealth resident, I usually assume that means one of the former British Empire countries. But in the context of Bell Atlantic, I start thinking that maybe you mean one of the US states that calls themselves a commonwealth (e.g. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia); I've lived in a couple of those, though, and never heard that phrasing.
I think the idea is that if you work at company X who uses open source project Y, these agreements have a standard wording for contributing changes made back to project Y. It's to encourage corporations to contribute back--many places I've worked have been theoretically willing to do so, but didn't want to put in the legal time to figure out the details.
You as an employee are doing the same work in either case, though if you do get things accepted back upstream it may save you a little maintenance work. And you may build some modest reputation capital if you contribute meaningful code.
The question is, are code reviews really effective? I worked on a project where we did extensive code reviews and we rarely found any real bugs. Going through a program line by line and finding a non-obvious bug is very difficult. Also, a thorough code review is also very time consuming. It takes almost as much time to review code as it does to write it in the first place. When you have four or so people reviewing every line written, your productivity for the project goes way down. In my judgment, code reviews just were not cost effective for our project.
That's been my experience as well. We did regular code reviews for a while, but found we got more bang for the buck dedicating that time to pair programming and more developer time writing regression tests. It's not that code reviews were completely ineffectual, they're just (for most things) a very low return on the amount of time invested compared to alternatives.
So now they're optional--occasionally when there's a particularly hairy piece of code or something the author will call for a review, and usually that makes them higher payoff.
That misses the point that you were responding to: a four-way stop is also much worse than a traffic light in heavy traffic. Washington, DC has lots of traffic circles. In medium traffic they work well, but in heavy traffic they're terrible. In lots of the big ones (e.g. Dupont Circle) they were so badly locked up by traffic that they've added multiple complex traffic lights around them to allow people in and out of the circle.
I learned how in the Netherlands. Keep your inside blinker on until you're ready to exit the intersection, then switch to other one when you're ready to exit. That way everyone can clearly see what your intentions are.
This only works in a one-lane roundabout, which are uncommon in the US--they're mostly multiple lanes. Having the inside blinker on indicates that you're planning to switch to an interior lane in the circle.
The Washington, DC area has tons of them that predate 1990 by a long time--Dupont Circle is one famous one built in the 1870s along with a bunch of others under L'enfant's original city plans. Lots of suburbs have newer ones (Chevy Chase circle was built in the 1930s on the DC/Maryland border, Holland Lane circle in Alexandria is another on the Virgina Side).
Many decades (or even over a century) ago, it wasn't like this. A kid finishing 8th grade (about 12-13 years old) had roughly the education of a typical high school graduate these days.
This is just wrong. In the area of math, you can look at studies like http://www.maa.org/features/faceofcalculus.html that show that the level of calculus education in high schools has tripled over the last 30 years, and has actually reached the point where a majority of incoming freshmen math students have already taken calc; in 1950, that was almost nonexistent at the high school level (let alone 8th grade). The state of science education in US middle schools and high schools was even more pathetic prior to the 1960s; a combination of Sputnik-inspired funding efforts and the legal demise of prohibitions on teaching of evolution and the like were among the key movers in stimulating science education. More generally, the AP program didn't even exist until the late 1950s.
One enlightening thing to do is to flip through math assessment tests like the American High School Math Exam from 1950 through present; the difference is pretty stark. In the 50s and 60s, the limit of difficulty is the kind of "a train leaves Chicago going X miles an hour while another leaves Los Angeles going Y miles an hour" questions that are more common for 7th graders (or even bright 5th graders) today.
And that's ignoring the fact that in 1960 over 60% of the population didn't even make it to high school graduation, compared with about 20% today; see for instance http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_12.html
A former colleague who had worked in some highly corrupt countries told me that the first time he filled in an expenses claim (for a visit to a country where he couldn't even get on the flight back without bribing the check-in clerk) he put down a claim for "Bribery and corruption". The accounts department bounced it and told him to put down "Payments as understood".
That's excellent. I've seen it billed as "Gratuities", too.
Rolling the transactions back is a huger blow to that interesting experiment, and basically undermines the attempt to get bitcoins accepted as a form of currency.
This is the largest market for bitcoin trades, but huge numbers of bitcoins aren't in this market--presumably, some people were using bitcoins to buy things in the real world or trading them on other markets during this time period. By rolling things back, you indicate that there actually is no market-determined value to bitcoins.
In fact, rolling this back is a great way to ensure that thieves can make off with a lot of money (a lot more than the $1000 limit on what you can pull out of the exchange), through arbitrage or worse. For instance, devalue the bitcoins in the exchange (which seems dumb since you hold tons of them), then offline sell a bunch of stuff to people at the devalued rate. Then when the market unwinds, all of a sudden the bitcoins you have are worth the original value, and you've made potentially much more than a thousand bucks.
Imagine this happening with the US dollar, or with stocks that can be traded on secondary markets. It's economic idiocy.
The right thing to do is suspend trading until you know that the security problem is fixed and then eat the pain of what's happened.
User-chosen passwords are unlikely to be secure. One proposed solution is to generate secure keys for each user (a la ssh); there is then a problem of key distribution and of how to remember/carry and enter a key, which is itself nontrivial (lots of 2-factor authentication systems at least partially address this problem).
There are other possible solutions as well, but but if you're really paranoid then you absolutely don't want user-chosen passwords in any super-secure application. A major problem, of course, is properly weighing the need for security against convenience and getting the job done (make things too tough on the user and they'll work outside the system or find ways of gaming it that make things less secure than they were to begin with).
The "avoid the US entirely" trend is invisible in the grand scheme of things: tourism to the US is up over 30% from 2000 to 2010 (from about 45 million foreign tourists in 2000 to 59 million in 2010). It declined somewhat post-9/11 but has grown steadily for the past 6 years, and is currently at record levels even adjusted per-capita.
Until that trend changes there's no real economic pressure to rethink TSA rules.
No offense, but it's pretty convenient that you list all these supposed speeds and the great service you get, Without saying where you get it. I'm willing to bet for your one positive encounter, there are twenty people in that area who would say exactly the opposite. My problem with AT&T? Sure, out in the less populated areas, I'll get good speeds. Go anywhere where there's more than 5 people using a cell, and I'm basically back to dialup days. Switched to Verizon and guess what? No matter where I go, I get maximum, or near maximum speeds (never less than 80%.) I don't think Anyone can say this for AT&T. Oh, and the last time I had a dropped call, including a bomb-shelter type basement, on Verizon? Hmm, not once in the last 6 years I've been with them.
This is hugely dependent on exactly where you are. Our office recently moved about a mile up the road in the well-populated Washington, DC metro area (from northern Alexandria, VA just into the south end of Crystal City). In the old office, AT&T dropped signal in the elevators and was sketchy in the server room, while Verizon was rock solid everywhere. In the new building, Verizon drops calls all the time in bad weather while AT&T is rock solid even on the 3rd level of the below-ground parking garage. Both locations are in urban locations well within the coverage zone for both providers, and service is fine on both networks on the sidewalk right in front of the building.
Likewise there are dead zones for each around town--at least as of a year ago, there were a couple of notorious restaurant/bars in Alexandria. In Vermilion, AT&T works fine but Verizon is dead in the back half of the building. In Chadwick's, Verizon works fine but AT&T is dead in the back half of the building. Exactly how big those dead spots are varies with the weather, time of day, and seemingly at random.
Data's similar, though a couple of the worst problems were fixed in the past 3 months: coming out of Old Town Alexandria north on Rt 1 you used to hit an AT&T "deadish" spot where you'd drop back to Edge service, and around the 800 block of N. Fairfax St Verizon got no data service whatsoever. Both appear to be fixed now, but there are still some cool spots for both networks in less-trafficked areas.
Wow. That's pretty awesome, and after getting this year's page to load and seeing how crappy the entries are it's very awesome--only the first 2 of this year's entries were even mildly interesting, while last year's winner is fantastic.
If I'm writing a compiler for an existing computer--or one that will ever exist--then it is, in fact, Turing recognizable. The Halting problem is theoretically decidable (and hence the infinite loop half is Turing recognizable) for all real-world computers. It's only undecidable for a theoretical Turing machine that has infinite space. See, for instance, Marvin Minsky, Computation, Finite and Infinite Machines (1967).
I believe that given the finite resources in the universe it is impossible to actually construct a computer for which the Halting problem is not decidable (though it may be practically intractable).
It has its roots in the decentrality others have mentioned, but it also makes a bit of sense given the scope of the country. Hawaii could easily have different needs from Alaska, and Texas different needs from Minnesota. Giving some of the powers of the purse to smaller entities (states in our case) allows for more flexibility to deal with local circumstances.
When the British Empire was still writ large, it was not uncommon for local taxes and laws to differ between widespread areas, either.
OTOH, there have been survivors from high-altitude plane explosions--Vesna Vulovi, for instance, was in a plane that blew up at over 33,000 feet and survived the decompression and the fall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87 We know that the fall from terminal impact is better than 99% lethal; if the decompression were as bad as claimed, there wouldn't be even the small handful of survivors from accidents at that height that there are.
Indeed, at 30,000 feet the pressure is about .3 atmosphere. Oddly enough, that's almost exactly the same pressure that NASA's EVA suits are pressurized to; astronauts go from 1 atmosphere to .3 atmospheres all the time with no problems and get straight to work. The difference in a plane would be less, since they're not pressurized to a full atmo to begin with. The Byford Dolphin drilling rig suffered a much more traumatic 8 atmosphere decompression in 1983 and one of the 6 workers survived.
I'll buy that the combination of decompression, thin air, and cold is likely to have most people unconscious and maybe kill a few, but I seriously doubt most people are dead before impact.
The original example is to be sucked out of a plane at 30k feet, traveling at about 500mph. That's like saying you should try to hold your breath when you're tossed off a boat with concrete boots. You can want it as much as you like, you are not going to survive.
Tell that to Vesna Vulovi, who survived exactly such a fall:
On 26 January 1972, a JAT DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb and Belgrade exploded 33,000 feet over Srbska-Kamenice in Czechoslovakia. Ustashe, otherwise known as the Croatian National Movement, later admitted their responsibility for the bombing that should have killed all 29 passengers and crew. Miraculously, however, there was a survivor.
http://www.avsec.com/interviews/vesna-vulovic.htm
magneto-rheological fluid-based actuators
The STS-type hydraulic reactive systems are discussed briefly in the article:
While active suspension is nothing new (at least, not for cars), it has previously mainly been integrated into hydraulic systems. According to the Eindhoven researchers, however, hydraulics can't react as quickly as their electromagnetic system, and therefore can't match the smoothness of its ride.
According to TFA, the system actually draws less power than hydraulic shock systems:
With a peak consumption of 500 watts, the suspension uses about a quarter of the power of hydraulic systems. It also stretches its battery life by using road vibrations to generate electricity. The designers believe that with refinements, the suspension's energy-efficiency could be improved even further.