...the State Department decides this is considered a terrorist activity and finds a way to make it law/international treaty that this is abolished? Honestly, I can see the out-of-whack State security thugs deciding that this is an act of war.
Okay, stop and very slowly put down the crack pipe. What 'out-of-whack State security thugs'? The State wants to know when its encryption is broken; it's not knowing which is annoying. What I find curious is that the NSA hadn't broken it earlier and released that news--half of its job is helping American industry secure its communications.
Well, let's work out some numbers. According to http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml, the average household uses 8,900 kilowatt hours per year; that's an amount of energy equivalent to 32 tons of TNT. Now, the article implied that batteries/hydrogen/energy-storage-of-choice were required to hold a winter's worth of energy, so let's just divide that number by four: you'd need a flywheel capable of holding the energy in 8 tons of TNT. Now, I haven't been able to find a good equation for crater size vs. tons of TNT, but I did find that the Lochnagar crater was created with 24 metric tons of ammonal (which is weaker than TNT) and is 300 feet across and 90 feet deep; I also found reference to a rule-of-thumb that craters scale to the cube root of the energy involved. So, assuming ammonal is as strong as TNT (this will give a smaller crater than in reality), this means that the energy in that flywheel would be enough to create a 200'x60' crater, and throw debris almost 3,000 feet into the air.
Now, when this flywheel goes off its bearings it will have to release that energy into the soil around it, which will mean some form of crater of roughly the proportions I give above. Now consider that there will be homes nearby--well within 200 feet of the original flywheel--and when their flywheels are disrupted, they too will release their energy into their surroundings.
Now, I'll grant that all these calculations are extraordinarily rough, and fail to take into account most anything. Still, I'd be nervous having a physical storage device like a flywheel holding the energy equivalent of 8 metric tons of TNT; I'd be nervous with batteries holding that much energy, and they seem a lot more docile.
Yup, and compact fluorescent light bulbs once were too much money for not enough life and not enough light--now Wal-Mart is rolling them out all across the nation. In twenty years or so, maybe it'll make sense for a homeowner to replace his shingles with SolarShingles Plus, the handy-dandy energy-generating solution of the pros (or however the bargain-basement brand in 2027 bills itself). Right now, it makes no sense; given enough time and increasing economies of scale, it'll be great.
One thing Greens should recognise is that wasting money is an un-ecological act. Money is a token representing labour and resources; wasting it is as bad as wasting any other resource. And indeed, market forces can be very good at encouraging green behaviour (again, c.f. CFLs).
He asked the question. The problem is that he also tried to answer it. And his answer("Women aren't as good at men at math and science,") was offensive and incorrect, and rightly struck a blow to his reputation among the faculty.
Actually, he suggested several possible reasons that hadn't been sufficiently investigated. And as it happens, while the average man and women aren't very far apart in math & science ability, the distributions of ability vary rather remarkably: the average ability among the bottom 10% of women is significantly better than among the bottom 10% of men, and the average ability among the top 10% of women is significantly worse than among the top 10% of men (when I write 'significantly,' I mean in the statistical sense). There are more male eggheads than female, but also more male knuckleheads. That doesn't mean that there aren't some really incredibly skilled women, just that any organisation trying to get the best of the best is going to have fewer women than the population as a whole; any organisation which gets the worst of the worst will also have fewer women than the population as a whole (e.g. the prison system).
The question this women is asking is more like, "Given that there are no inherent disparities in aptitude between men and women, why aren't as many women appearing in engineering positions?"
That's like asking, 'Given that 2+2 = 5, why is five an odd number?' There are a lot of inherent differences in aptitude between men and women. The author of the piece doesn't deny this, actually; several her solutions tend to be to try to portray engineering as softer than it is (e.g. assigning social rather than math problems in CS education).
For my part, I don't really see the point. In engineering, we should be concerned with engineering excellence; all other concerns are at best secondary. If I want a car designed, I want the best god-damn car designer in the world; I don't really care if it's a guy or a gal. The reason that, as the author points out, HR folks want well-qualified female candidates is simply this: they no longer care solely for excellence; they have other priorities.
Those stories typically come from 18th and 19th century sources--hardly to be trusted (these are the same folks who talk about 30 or 40 pound swords!). They may have been caught up in the Enlightenment sense of superiority, or simply confused by looking at tournament armour, some of which is so heavy that getting up would be difficult. But tournaments were fought under high-safety rules, whereas battles were fought under rather different constraints (if you can't get up in a sport, you just lose the game--in a battle, you lose your life).
Add to that that the Broadsword frequently weighed in at 5-10#
Do you have a source for that statement? According to What Did Historical Swords Weigh?, the average weight of normal swords was between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 pounds, and even the massive examples were only about 4 1/2 pounds. Moreover, I hardly think that carrying 10 pounds of weapon would make qualify one for 'truly awesome physical condition.'
Regarding your assertion that French knights has to scale two walls arms' length apart, do you have any source for that? It wouldn't surprise me if they were able to (armour's only about 70 pounds, and evenly distributed across the body isn't a great inconvenience to movement), but the notion of national standards for knighthood in the mediaeval period sounds extremely iffy to me. If anything, it sounds like the sort of thing one might hear at an SCA event--possibly based on some true story (e.g. a knight climbing a couple of walls to show off), heard third- or fourth-hand. I'm in the SCA, and enjoy it; there are a lot of folks therein who really know their stuff--and rather more who don't.
or the weight could make it harder for the officer to get up when he's knocked over.
I don't think that'd be a problem--mediaeval suits of armour weighed 70 pounds or so and one can do acrobatics in them. The key is weight distribution: sure, 70 pounds on your right shoulder will throw you off, but a few pounds on one shoulder, a few on the other, a few on your lower back, a few on your head, a few on your arms, a few on your thighs, a few on your calves &c. are no problem.
I agree that it would be nice to change the definitions of volumes and such. Imperial units were actually based on cylindrical volume--that is, a cylinder X inches high and Y inches in diameter would have a volume of Z gallons, and the weight system is based off of the volume system. The standard system was abused over history (e.g. Charles II decreased the size of a legal barrel in order to raise the tax on beer without appearing to raise taxes--the tax was still 2 shillings/barrel or whateverl it's just that the barrel was smaller!), and fixing those abuses would be a good idea.
But your example's not really that great. The issues with volume & area really aren't a big deal; you're already multiplying by a chunk of constants (energy per fuel volume, for example), so you'd just tack on another constant. Unit conversions are pretty rare in most everyday work (engineers use them, of course), but quantity conversions are fairly common. As an example, I brew beer. When formulating a recipe, I work in various units: pounds of grain, gallons of water, ounces of hops. Because bitterness is measured in French units, I have to apply a conversion factor to my bitterness calculations, but that's simply multiplication by a constant--hardly a big deal.
But when I'm actually brewing, I often need to do things like take a quart and get cups, which is easy (halve and halve again), or take a pint and get a gallon (double three times)--the older system works very well for this. If I were trying to convert litres to decilitres, it would be impossible to eyeball like that (halve, then eyeball into fifths?!?).
Most everyone in the world used some variant of what are now called English or imperial units; the problem is that an English foot wasn't the same as a German foot--both had 12 inches, and three of each were a yard.
The French system has been standardised, but the older system is also standardised. I call them 'standard units' to emphasise that they were standard across the civilised world for over a millennium.
The French system is severely broken, and yet we are asked to convert to it simply because the rest of the world uses it. If everyone else leapt off of a bridge, should we?
Why exactly would we convert to using French units? What advantage do they offer other than easy conversion between units on paper? How is that advantage more important than what standard units offer (easier physical manipulation)?
My hope is that we continue to use standard units and that eventually the rest of the world comes around to our way of thinking.
Exactly. The GPL being about freedom, it states that a user is free to distribute code under the current license, or a future GPL license. MySQL hasn't preserved any option, but has instead taken away an option. Corporate doublespeak at its finest.
You don't have to keep to using GPLv2. And if your contributors submitted using the standard verbiage, then they explicitly allow you to use later versions of the GPL at your option. That's what the standard verbiage does: it allows anyone to apply the current version of the GPL, or a later one if said person wishes.
Unix hosts use UTC internally, but dates are displayed according to the process's time zone setting--hence the need for Unix patches (and the problems since older version of Solaris, AIX & HP-UX are still in use just about everywhere). The OS will still run along quite happily, but cron, at and anything else which cares about time will still behave oddly. It won't necessarily cause major issues, but it will be a chore.
I can't recall off the top of my head if time zone data are stored as text information or not on the older OSes; if so, then fixing it even without a patch is pretty straightforward. If not...
Data centres don't use central air conditioning--I imagine that it's too inefficient for the sort of cooling. They all use in-room air conditioning units (generally Lieberts, for some reason or other). And data centre floors aren't raised a mere 3-6 inches--more like a full foot or more (hence the term 'raised floor'); the underfloor area is used for cable runs and such.
From your apparent ignorance of data centre design, I wonder if you've ever actually examined, or even been in, an industrial-quality centre. Managing thousands of hosts is not the same thing as keeping a box or two running at the local Snack & Shop...
We had exactly this problem at one of my previousd accounts--the water would evaporate and suddenly our nice data centre smelled like a bog. 'Twas most unpleasant.
Ummm...for first degree murder he'll likely get death. I don't know how things are in Europe or in Massachusetts, but most of the United States take a very dim view of wife-murdering.
He may get life for first degree murder; if it's second degree murder he'll get the same. From what's been reported, things look very, very bad for him.
Actually, I'd welcome realistic food prices. I even mentioned it in my original post. Things should cost what the market will pay for them--subsidising some types of food just makes them more affordable than they would otherwise be.
Why should my fuel cost me $10/gallon when yours only costs you $2/gallon?
Ummm...'cause that's the fair market price, perhaps? If it's more expensive to live in a rural area, then raise prices on the goods you sell to urban areas (e.g. food). Subsidies lead to inefficiencies.
The problem is not that typographers/graphic designers are ignorant--quite the opposite, actually: the problem is that they are too learned in outdated technology. They learnt their skills on the printed page, which has something like 1200-2400 dpi resolution and a fixed (or at least controllable) page size. What makes sense for books doesn't necessarily make sense on-screen; in fact, sometimes it's the worst possible thing.
Now, the very best typographers and graphic designers are the ones who will seperate the universal principles of design from their particular applications with regard to the static page, and apply them to the dynamic, computer-displayed web page.
However, there are many lesser talents whose influence now is positively dangerous--you know the sorts I mean: the ones who assume a specific screen size (a web page should look as good when the browser is 100 pixels wide as when it's 1,024), or specific fonts, or what-have-you.
Actually, normal rounding rules are biased to round up and so on average they do result in a slight increase, which is why in accounting a value of.5 used to be rounded to the nearest odd number (or even, depending on whose system you're using); over time this averages out.
At bars one just runs a tab--hand over the card, then at the end of the evening pay up. I found it rather annoying when in London none of the pubs would let me run a tab, so by the end of the night I'd piles of change.
And I bet a) Rickover would gladly tell him and b) Rickover would have him leave. I've a feeling that he wanted an officer with the honesty and introspection to tell why he didn't do as well as he could have, not one who'd play childish games like 'I know you are but what am I?'
So, it's not just Terrorists (TM) anymore, it's the "disaffected" they're after.
Well, considering that Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and Andrew Kehoe were all disaffected folks who committed acts of terrorism, it seems to me that keeping an eye on the disaffected is an excellent idea. There's nothing illegal about being disaffected; neither is there anything illegal about speaking freely about drugs. But I'd expect the Federal Bureau of Investigation to keep tabs on the disaffected just as much as it has a subscription to High Times and keeps an eye on them.
There is one difference, if course: the war on drugs is an idiot waste of money, while the war on terrorism may or may not be. On the one hand, our current struggle is not against 'terrorism,' but rather against radical Islamism; on the other hand, modern technology makes it possible for an individual or small group of individuals to wreak massive havoc--c.f. McVeigh et al. How do we as a society address this issue without impinging on our rights and liberties? I don't think that we've seriously considered it, to be frank. Right now we're still busy hand-wringing and applying sticking-plasters to sucking chest wounds.
In the Renascence Dante could portray Mohammed in Hell and an ignorant goat-herd in Turkey would never know about it, nor would he be able to do anything about it even he he did know. But nowadays, with modern communication and modern travel, he'll hear about it tomorrow, be on a plane the next day and be murdering a nun in Somalia or Jews in Seattle the day after. How do we prudently protect against a single madman without unduly inconveniencing thousands or millions of innocents?
Bullshit. Revocation of various rights for felons has a long history in Anglo-Saxon law (particularly because felonies were once those crimes which carried capital sentences). A man's titles or lands would be revoked and returned to the crown (this led, of course, to abuses). Felons have been denied the right to vote throughout the entire United States (not just formerly slave-owning states) throughout our history.
I won't deny that Southern states may have invented felonies (like, say, felony drug possession) in order to deprive a disproportionate number of blacks of their right to vote; a similar case has been made for sentencing guidelines for crack vs. cocaine. But I will strongly argue in favour of the fundamental principle that one who is a felon should lose his right to vote along with various other rights (e.g. for violent felonies, the right to bear arms).
The fact that the Democrats are so eager for felons to vote, and so angry over ballots which are not at all difficult to understand, reveals something: apparently they believe that criminals and cretins vote disproportionately Democratic...
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Okay, stop and very slowly put down the crack pipe. What 'out-of-whack State security thugs'? The State wants to know when its encryption is broken; it's not knowing which is annoying. What I find curious is that the NSA hadn't broken it earlier and released that news--half of its job is helping American industry secure its communications.
Now, when this flywheel goes off its bearings it will have to release that energy into the soil around it, which will mean some form of crater of roughly the proportions I give above. Now consider that there will be homes nearby--well within 200 feet of the original flywheel--and when their flywheels are disrupted, they too will release their energy into their surroundings.
Now, I'll grant that all these calculations are extraordinarily rough, and fail to take into account most anything. Still, I'd be nervous having a physical storage device like a flywheel holding the energy equivalent of 8 metric tons of TNT; I'd be nervous with batteries holding that much energy, and they seem a lot more docile.
One thing Greens should recognise is that wasting money is an un-ecological act. Money is a token representing labour and resources; wasting it is as bad as wasting any other resource. And indeed, market forces can be very good at encouraging green behaviour (again, c.f. CFLs).
Actually, he suggested several possible reasons that hadn't been sufficiently investigated. And as it happens, while the average man and women aren't very far apart in math & science ability, the distributions of ability vary rather remarkably: the average ability among the bottom 10% of women is significantly better than among the bottom 10% of men, and the average ability among the top 10% of women is significantly worse than among the top 10% of men (when I write 'significantly,' I mean in the statistical sense). There are more male eggheads than female, but also more male knuckleheads. That doesn't mean that there aren't some really incredibly skilled women, just that any organisation trying to get the best of the best is going to have fewer women than the population as a whole; any organisation which gets the worst of the worst will also have fewer women than the population as a whole (e.g. the prison system).
That's like asking, 'Given that 2+2 = 5, why is five an odd number?' There are a lot of inherent differences in aptitude between men and women. The author of the piece doesn't deny this, actually; several her solutions tend to be to try to portray engineering as softer than it is (e.g. assigning social rather than math problems in CS education).For my part, I don't really see the point. In engineering, we should be concerned with engineering excellence; all other concerns are at best secondary. If I want a car designed, I want the best god-damn car designer in the world; I don't really care if it's a guy or a gal. The reason that, as the author points out, HR folks want well-qualified female candidates is simply this: they no longer care solely for excellence; they have other priorities.
Those stories typically come from 18th and 19th century sources--hardly to be trusted (these are the same folks who talk about 30 or 40 pound swords!). They may have been caught up in the Enlightenment sense of superiority, or simply confused by looking at tournament armour, some of which is so heavy that getting up would be difficult. But tournaments were fought under high-safety rules, whereas battles were fought under rather different constraints (if you can't get up in a sport, you just lose the game--in a battle, you lose your life).
Do you have a source for that statement? According to What Did Historical Swords Weigh?, the average weight of normal swords was between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 pounds, and even the massive examples were only about 4 1/2 pounds. Moreover, I hardly think that carrying 10 pounds of weapon would make qualify one for 'truly awesome physical condition.'
Regarding your assertion that French knights has to scale two walls arms' length apart, do you have any source for that? It wouldn't surprise me if they were able to (armour's only about 70 pounds, and evenly distributed across the body isn't a great inconvenience to movement), but the notion of national standards for knighthood in the mediaeval period sounds extremely iffy to me. If anything, it sounds like the sort of thing one might hear at an SCA event--possibly based on some true story (e.g. a knight climbing a couple of walls to show off), heard third- or fourth-hand. I'm in the SCA, and enjoy it; there are a lot of folks therein who really know their stuff--and rather more who don't.
But your example's not really that great. The issues with volume & area really aren't a big deal; you're already multiplying by a chunk of constants (energy per fuel volume, for example), so you'd just tack on another constant. Unit conversions are pretty rare in most everyday work (engineers use them, of course), but quantity conversions are fairly common. As an example, I brew beer. When formulating a recipe, I work in various units: pounds of grain, gallons of water, ounces of hops. Because bitterness is measured in French units, I have to apply a conversion factor to my bitterness calculations, but that's simply multiplication by a constant--hardly a big deal.
But when I'm actually brewing, I often need to do things like take a quart and get cups, which is easy (halve and halve again), or take a pint and get a gallon (double three times)--the older system works very well for this. If I were trying to convert litres to decilitres, it would be impossible to eyeball like that (halve, then eyeball into fifths?!?).
The French system has been standardised, but the older system is also standardised. I call them 'standard units' to emphasise that they were standard across the civilised world for over a millennium.
The French system is severely broken, and yet we are asked to convert to it simply because the rest of the world uses it. If everyone else leapt off of a bridge, should we?
My hope is that we continue to use standard units and that eventually the rest of the world comes around to our way of thinking.
Exactly. The GPL being about freedom, it states that a user is free to distribute code under the current license, or a future GPL license. MySQL hasn't preserved any option, but has instead taken away an option. Corporate doublespeak at its finest.
You don't have to keep to using GPLv2. And if your contributors submitted using the standard verbiage, then they explicitly allow you to use later versions of the GPL at your option. That's what the standard verbiage does: it allows anyone to apply the current version of the GPL, or a later one if said person wishes.
I can't recall off the top of my head if time zone data are stored as text information or not on the older OSes; if so, then fixing it even without a patch is pretty straightforward. If not...
From your apparent ignorance of data centre design, I wonder if you've ever actually examined, or even been in, an industrial-quality centre. Managing thousands of hosts is not the same thing as keeping a box or two running at the local Snack & Shop...
We had exactly this problem at one of my previousd accounts--the water would evaporate and suddenly our nice data centre smelled like a bog. 'Twas most unpleasant.
He may get life for first degree murder; if it's second degree murder he'll get the same. From what's been reported, things look very, very bad for him.
Actually, I'd welcome realistic food prices. I even mentioned it in my original post. Things should cost what the market will pay for them--subsidising some types of food just makes them more affordable than they would otherwise be.
Now, the very best typographers and graphic designers are the ones who will seperate the universal principles of design from their particular applications with regard to the static page, and apply them to the dynamic, computer-displayed web page.
However, there are many lesser talents whose influence now is positively dangerous--you know the sorts I mean: the ones who assume a specific screen size (a web page should look as good when the browser is 100 pixels wide as when it's 1,024), or specific fonts, or what-have-you.
Actually, normal rounding rules are biased to round up and so on average they do result in a slight increase, which is why in accounting a value of .5 used to be rounded to the nearest odd number (or even, depending on whose system you're using); over time this averages out.
At bars one just runs a tab--hand over the card, then at the end of the evening pay up. I found it rather annoying when in London none of the pubs would let me run a tab, so by the end of the night I'd piles of change.
Now, Fred... Has Amy Acker done much other work?
And I bet a) Rickover would gladly tell him and b) Rickover would have him leave. I've a feeling that he wanted an officer with the honesty and introspection to tell why he didn't do as well as he could have, not one who'd play childish games like 'I know you are but what am I?'
Well, considering that Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and Andrew Kehoe were all disaffected folks who committed acts of terrorism, it seems to me that keeping an eye on the disaffected is an excellent idea. There's nothing illegal about being disaffected; neither is there anything illegal about speaking freely about drugs. But I'd expect the Federal Bureau of Investigation to keep tabs on the disaffected just as much as it has a subscription to High Times and keeps an eye on them.
There is one difference, if course: the war on drugs is an idiot waste of money, while the war on terrorism may or may not be. On the one hand, our current struggle is not against 'terrorism,' but rather against radical Islamism; on the other hand, modern technology makes it possible for an individual or small group of individuals to wreak massive havoc--c.f. McVeigh et al. How do we as a society address this issue without impinging on our rights and liberties? I don't think that we've seriously considered it, to be frank. Right now we're still busy hand-wringing and applying sticking-plasters to sucking chest wounds.
In the Renascence Dante could portray Mohammed in Hell and an ignorant goat-herd in Turkey would never know about it, nor would he be able to do anything about it even he he did know. But nowadays, with modern communication and modern travel, he'll hear about it tomorrow, be on a plane the next day and be murdering a nun in Somalia or Jews in Seattle the day after. How do we prudently protect against a single madman without unduly inconveniencing thousands or millions of innocents?
I won't deny that Southern states may have invented felonies (like, say, felony drug possession) in order to deprive a disproportionate number of blacks of their right to vote; a similar case has been made for sentencing guidelines for crack vs. cocaine. But I will strongly argue in favour of the fundamental principle that one who is a felon should lose his right to vote along with various other rights (e.g. for violent felonies, the right to bear arms).
The fact that the Democrats are so eager for felons to vote, and so angry over ballots which are not at all difficult to understand, reveals something: apparently they believe that criminals and cretins vote disproportionately Democratic...