What would be best is a multi-role station. The power generated when "idle" could normally be beamed down to earth via microwave, etc (if that is even possible - I assume the station could not be geostationary because of the extra propulsion required to launch so much mass to that higher orbit).
Another use would be similar to the iss, where there are also modules for astronauts to do science in, as well as them being there to help maintain and assemble the station.
The power generated could also be beamed to long-distance probes that use an electrical ion type drive. Any extra energy they receive from the station simply allows them to accelerate faster. That may be more feasible than beaming the power down to earth.
I second this. I prefer playing the easier levels and speed-solving, which is solving without having to use pencil marks, etc. My average time is around 2 minutes at Easy level. Occasionally I can get under 60 seconds if the puzzle is conducive to the techniques I use to solve. One of my favorite implementations is Sudoku 10,000 for Android.
You can also play harder levels fairly fast by having the computer calculate the pencil marks for you.
It's rather addicting once you start figuring out the simple algorithms, but it can get a bit tedious at the really hard levels, where you have to use advanced algorithms to place a single number.
And when they batch process the withdrawals they are sorted from the largest transactions to the smallest, that way if you overdraw, there are many more individual transactions affected, and thus many more overdraft fees
Imagine if you have $500 in your account, and a $500 check for a car payment went through that day, and earlier in the day you used your debit card all over the place - a $1 drink from Sonic, got some gas, bought a few groceries, etc. If all the small transactions were processed first then only the car payment (you assumed wouldn't clear for another day or two) would have overdrawn, but instead, you get charged $35 for that $1 drink purchase, and your gas purchase, etc, etc.
I just fired it up on my Pi-B running Wheezy and my experience was the exact opposite. Running full screen it was very smooth, had to be 30 fps or higher. CPU usage was around 85-90%.
Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at "computers". Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways..
I'm very surprised he's still hung up on handwriting recognition. It is a DEAD END for human interfacing to a computer (with the sole exception of OCRing existing handwritten documents, and perhaps security as a form of credential). Think about it for one moment, the amount of muscle control, precision and time required to DRAW A SHAPE which is then interpreted as a single input glyph. It is a horribly slow and tedious method of input - I would rather (and literally have) key Morse Code into my android phone than write text.
It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric (which, IMO, was one of the reasons Window Mobile / Windows CE failed, was because it never completely shook the stylus-required-to-interact-with-tiny-widgets problem). Is a person really expected to draw on a modern touch screen with their finger to write letters for the device to recognize (and feel like a preschooler fingerpainting)? Or are we going to step back into having to keep track of a stylus?
Just found it odd he threw in handwriting in this day and age. It was beat to death with Palm starting a decade and a half ago. It's gone. Dead. Byebye.
The ozone "hole" expands and contracts with atmospheric temperature. The colder it is, the thinner the ozone, and thus the larger the hole. So the size of the hole is both seasonal, and coupled to polar temperatures. I believe the hole is the smallest ever because the temperature has been warmer, not necessarily because less ozone is destroyed by man made chemicals.
Never really noticed before, but you're right about ATM machines. The millions of POS terminals out there also match telephone keypads with 123 at the top. Guess it makes a little sense. You would enter your PIN into your phone when checking balance via a call to automated support, but you wouldn't ever type your PIN into a calculator. So at least you will always be entering your PIN on the same style keyboard (not counting computer keyboard numeric pads, but I really don't think the average person enters enough numbers to even bother using the numeric keypad on a computer - it would be interesting to see a study showing if the typical person even uses it at all).
Supposedly it is calculator keyboards that are upside down. Two reasons touch tone phones use the order they do:
Touch tone phones replaced rotary phones, which already had 123 at the top of the dial, and 789 at the bottom. So it made sense to keep the same order that millions of people were already used to, in order to make the transition easier.
Touch tone phones have the alphabet sharing the keys, starting with ABC on key 2. Thus the letters are alphabetic from top to bottom, which also properly follows reading order.
Apparently no real research was done in the choice of calculator keyboards having the numbers descending from 9 down. It just happened, and since calculator keyboard layout was more arbitrary (it had neither a predecessor like touch tone phones, nor the alphabet sharing the keys), it would have made sense for calculator designers to match the touch tone phone layout.
I don't know if any studies have been done, but I don't see any reason why one layout would be more intuitive than the other for pure numerical use to a human than the other. It's whatever you get used to. If calculators matched telephones from the beginning then today no one would feel something was inherently wrong with their calculator or that it is upside down from what it should have always been.
Some rather talented scientists evaluated this first hand:
Boeing's Phantom Works, which works on various classified projects and has been involved in space research, went as far as acquiring and testing the EmDrive, but say they are no longer working with Shawyer.
I'm sure if the drive was useful in any meaningful way it would have been utilized. So this does not bode well for the practicality of the drive for real-world applications.
Thing is, this doesn't make much sense. If people are looking for a bondsman or legal advice, why would they enter their own name in the search terms? Or am I misunderstanding what this researcher was trying to correlate?
The interesting part of this, to me, is the potential to have both a larger and more intricate physics simulation. Essentially you would be distributing the physics across many processors, then player interactions would be fed into that. Thus there would be a single physics simulation occurring for everyone, instead of the more typical method where each client is performing its own simulation on local objects and simply reporting back to the server the raw position of various affected entities.
Whether the actual rendering also takes place at the server level or not doesn't matter - the position of the objects would managed by the servers. This would allow vastly more realistic scenarios, especially for MMOs. You could get into things like erosion, plant growth, branches falling off of trees, etc. IMO, visually games are pretty good, and the problem is now the kinematics, nuances and ambiance of the virtual world itself, and not just the more superficial eye-candy (pixels).
They tried to frame Iran as having an active nuclear weapons program
Apparently Assange sat down with Ayatollah Khamenei and got his assurances that Iran is not seeking a nuclear weapon? Or perhaps he snuck in and examined their facilities? Shew, that's a relief. I think we can all rest easier now now the Jules has settled this matter for us.
Yeah, yeah, I know, that's totally ridiculous (although I did see things as bad and worse as a CS instructor's assistant whose job it was to grade Pascal students' programming assignments back in the day - that was very interesting to say the least).
On a side note, why can't > and < characters be used in a code element? Um, that's lame, especially for a site that discusses programming so much.
Switch statements are faster if there are enough cases, because a branch table can be used. For switches with only a few case statements, a good compiler should use conditional branches, resulting in the same code as an else if, because that is faster in that case. I presume a really good compiler would also be smart enough to use a branch table if enough else ifs are chained together too, but I haven't had to deal with writing that highly optimized code for a while to have been keeping tabs on compilers to that extent.
Suicide can only be blamed on the person that did it.
Really? Do you have children? If someone was holding a gun to your child's head and said they would blow their brains out if you didn't jump off of the 30 story building you were standing on, who would be blamed for that suicide? I doubt any suicide is as black and white as you make it out to be.
No, I am saying that they are exactly the same and capable of the same because they are *human beings*.
You are a deluded fool. Who wins all the worlds major marathons and why? If you think all human beings, or even races, are equal then you ignore the blatantly obvious. Further, human beings exist inside of a society and economy. Those constructs limit what they can and cannot do. I can only presume you do not know the difference between China and Japan, and only see them as blobs of generic people, so it is impossible to have a rational discussion with you on the matter.
The American car and electronics manufacturers were complacent and we nearly completely lost automobile manufacturing entirely *twice* - only to be bailed out with government loans.
Ford stayed strong throughout the economic recession, did not require any bailout, posted record profits, and produces the best selling car in the world. Two specific automakers were poorly managed and operated, and when the economy tanked, they couldn't survive. Perhaps they should have been allowed to fail so the stronger, better operated companies could have taken over their share. Regardless, the USA did not almost lose the entire automobile industry, as Ford is still a world leader.
We lost consumer electronics manufacturing entirely in the US.
No, we sent it away on purpose. It was cheaper to have other countries manufacture those products, so Americans can buy them cheaper. One thing people tend to overlook - a lot of the jobs people lament us having lost are jobs that most Americans would never want to have. What will happen next is that robotics will become even cheaper than Asian labor, and as the jobs were not in the USA to begin with, we won't see unions fighting robotic factories, as they will not cause Americans to lose their jobs. Thus I predict a great deal of manufacturing will return to the USA in the form of robotic assembly lines soon, especially when artificially maintained bubbles, like the Chinese currency, the Chinese production of cheap rare earths, and the Chinese people's willingness to produce products they could never afford to buy, all begin to burst.
And now we have idiots replying to this story saying that the Chinese will never make higher quality goods, as if the Chinese are somehow inherently inferior. This smacks of denial and racism, frankly, the same kind of denial and racism that we used against the Japanese and Koreans, before the Japanese and Koreans kicked our asses in manufacturing.
And you are being a Bigot in assuming that the Japanese and Chinese are exactly the same and capable of the same accomplishments because they all look Asian. However, that's entirely beside the point. The Japanese flourished for a number of reasons, one of which is because of their style of government and economy. It fostered creativity, engineering, and improving on others' designs. It is yet to be seen if China's Communist government can achieve the same level accomplishment just because the party dictated that the workers should do it. There is a tremendous amount of corruption in that government which leads to inefficiencies and a constant skimming-off-the-top at every level. So no, it is not a given that the Chinese can become the next Japan or South Korea. Take a close look at the governments of Japan, South Korea, the USA and China, and see if you can find any pattern there associated with the country's technical innovations and breakthroughs.
Throughout all this discussion no one has talked about what the flu vaccine is. It is not the same as other vaccinations. Influenza strains change from year to year. Each year the drug companies try to predict what existing strains and / or new strains will be dominant several months in the future when "flu season" strikes. They then manufacture many millions of doses before they have any evidence of what the reality of the season will actually be (because the manufacturing process is time consuming and somewhat risky production wise). Some seasons they do better than others, depending on how well they prognosticated that season ahead of time.
Thus the flu vaccine is a bit of a shotgun approach for the masses. I'm sure many of you know of people who had the annual flu vaccination and yet became sick that season and tested positive for influenza (there were reports in the local paper about this already, as the flu season has hit early he). Obviously the effectiveness is quite low, but probably the overall mass advantage does prevent some infections from incurring, again simply due to the massive scale involved. It's is a billion dollar industry which I have some degree of inside information about due to local marketing and distribution of the flu vaccine which involved family members.
Does the overall effectiveness of the annual flu vaccine warrant the tremendous amount of money spent on it? Maybe. I do know that billions of dollars are involved in this industry, and any time that much money is involved there are also significant amounts of money spent protecting the industry and providing justification that it is necessary. So take that with a grain of salt.
It was one of the two large lithium ion battery packs the power the plane when the engines are off. The FCC and pilots were already concerned about the use of lithium ion batteries for this purpose (apparently it's a first), and they issued special regulations just for this plane.
Also the only person on board when this happened was a mechanic (which is probably a good thing at least someone was able to spot the smoke right away).
This article only discusses some of the investment money and where it came from. Nothing about technical or software issues, or anything about what the company was actually doing or what went wrong. That would have been the only part of interest to me. Also don't bother going to the second page of the story to read one final sentence. I swear that's done on purpose for more ad exposure or more page hits.
On a side note, entering HTML tags with the stock iPad keyboard is a major pain.
Slashdot Mirror
All they have to do is rename it The Elder Scrolls VI and they have themselves a finished game.
What would be best is a multi-role station. The power generated when "idle" could normally be beamed down to earth via microwave, etc (if that is even possible - I assume the station could not be geostationary because of the extra propulsion required to launch so much mass to that higher orbit).
Another use would be similar to the iss, where there are also modules for astronauts to do science in, as well as them being there to help maintain and assemble the station.
The power generated could also be beamed to long-distance probes that use an electrical ion type drive. Any extra energy they receive from the station simply allows them to accelerate faster. That may be more feasible than beaming the power down to earth.
503 Service Unavailable
No server is available to handle this request.
At least they still have servers available to tell us that they don't have servers available.
I second this. I prefer playing the easier levels and speed-solving, which is solving without having to use pencil marks, etc. My average time is around 2 minutes at Easy level. Occasionally I can get under 60 seconds if the puzzle is conducive to the techniques I use to solve. One of my favorite implementations is Sudoku 10,000 for Android.
You can also play harder levels fairly fast by having the computer calculate the pencil marks for you.
It's rather addicting once you start figuring out the simple algorithms, but it can get a bit tedious at the really hard levels, where you have to use advanced algorithms to place a single number.
"80s Ice Pirates documentary", and this was modded interesting? Obviously this one went right over a few people's heads.
And when they batch process the withdrawals they are sorted from the largest transactions to the smallest, that way if you overdraw, there are many more individual transactions affected, and thus many more overdraft fees
Imagine if you have $500 in your account, and a $500 check for a car payment went through that day, and earlier in the day you used your debit card all over the place - a $1 drink from Sonic, got some gas, bought a few groceries, etc. If all the small transactions were processed first then only the car payment (you assumed wouldn't clear for another day or two) would have overdrawn, but instead, you get charged $35 for that $1 drink purchase, and your gas purchase, etc, etc.
I just fired it up on my Pi-B running Wheezy and my experience was the exact opposite. Running full screen it was very smooth, had to be 30 fps or higher. CPU usage was around 85-90%.
Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at "computers". Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways..
I'm very surprised he's still hung up on handwriting recognition. It is a DEAD END for human interfacing to a computer (with the sole exception of OCRing existing handwritten documents, and perhaps security as a form of credential). Think about it for one moment, the amount of muscle control, precision and time required to DRAW A SHAPE which is then interpreted as a single input glyph. It is a horribly slow and tedious method of input - I would rather (and literally have) key Morse Code into my android phone than write text.
It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric (which, IMO, was one of the reasons Window Mobile / Windows CE failed, was because it never completely shook the stylus-required-to-interact-with-tiny-widgets problem). Is a person really expected to draw on a modern touch screen with their finger to write letters for the device to recognize (and feel like a preschooler fingerpainting)? Or are we going to step back into having to keep track of a stylus?
Just found it odd he threw in handwriting in this day and age. It was beat to death with Palm starting a decade and a half ago. It's gone. Dead. Byebye.
The ozone "hole" expands and contracts with atmospheric temperature. The colder it is, the thinner the ozone, and thus the larger the hole. So the size of the hole is both seasonal, and coupled to polar temperatures. I believe the hole is the smallest ever because the temperature has been warmer, not necessarily because less ozone is destroyed by man made chemicals.
Never really noticed before, but you're right about ATM machines. The millions of POS terminals out there also match telephone keypads with 123 at the top. Guess it makes a little sense. You would enter your PIN into your phone when checking balance via a call to automated support, but you wouldn't ever type your PIN into a calculator. So at least you will always be entering your PIN on the same style keyboard (not counting computer keyboard numeric pads, but I really don't think the average person enters enough numbers to even bother using the numeric keypad on a computer - it would be interesting to see a study showing if the typical person even uses it at all).
Supposedly it is calculator keyboards that are upside down. Two reasons touch tone phones use the order they do:
Touch tone phones replaced rotary phones, which already had 123 at the top of the dial, and 789 at the bottom. So it made sense to keep the same order that millions of people were already used to, in order to make the transition easier.
Touch tone phones have the alphabet sharing the keys, starting with ABC on key 2. Thus the letters are alphabetic from top to bottom, which also properly follows reading order.
Apparently no real research was done in the choice of calculator keyboards having the numbers descending from 9 down. It just happened, and since calculator keyboard layout was more arbitrary (it had neither a predecessor like touch tone phones, nor the alphabet sharing the keys), it would have made sense for calculator designers to match the touch tone phone layout.
I don't know if any studies have been done, but I don't see any reason why one layout would be more intuitive than the other for pure numerical use to a human than the other. It's whatever you get used to. If calculators matched telephones from the beginning then today no one would feel something was inherently wrong with their calculator or that it is upside down from what it should have always been.
Streisand effect for the win.
Some rather talented scientists evaluated this first hand:
Boeing's Phantom Works, which works on various classified projects and has been involved in space research, went as far as acquiring and testing the EmDrive, but say they are no longer working with Shawyer.
I'm sure if the drive was useful in any meaningful way it would have been utilized. So this does not bode well for the practicality of the drive for real-world applications.
Thing is, this doesn't make much sense. If people are looking for a bondsman or legal advice, why would they enter their own name in the search terms? Or am I misunderstanding what this researcher was trying to correlate?
The interesting part of this, to me, is the potential to have both a larger and more intricate physics simulation. Essentially you would be distributing the physics across many processors, then player interactions would be fed into that. Thus there would be a single physics simulation occurring for everyone, instead of the more typical method where each client is performing its own simulation on local objects and simply reporting back to the server the raw position of various affected entities.
Whether the actual rendering also takes place at the server level or not doesn't matter - the position of the objects would managed by the servers. This would allow vastly more realistic scenarios, especially for MMOs. You could get into things like erosion, plant growth, branches falling off of trees, etc. IMO, visually games are pretty good, and the problem is now the kinematics, nuances and ambiance of the virtual world itself, and not just the more superficial eye-candy (pixels).
They tried to frame Iran as having an active nuclear weapons program
Apparently Assange sat down with Ayatollah Khamenei and got his assurances that Iran is not seeking a nuclear weapon? Or perhaps he snuck in and examined their facilities? Shew, that's a relief. I think we can all rest easier now now the Jules has settled this matter for us.
Nokia SUCKS! (sometimes I am known to say the exact opposite of what I mean)
How do you represent that as a case statement in C++? Come on, I'm waiting. Oh, that's right. You can't.
switch (dot < -LIGHT_CLIP_EPSILON ? 1 : dot > LIGHT_CLIP_EPSILON ? 2 : 0) {
case 1:
sides[i] = SIDE_BACK;
break;
case 2:
sides[i] = SIDE_FRONT;
break;
default:
sides[i] = SIDE_ON;
}
Yeah, yeah, I know, that's totally ridiculous (although I did see things as bad and worse as a CS instructor's assistant whose job it was to grade Pascal students' programming assignments back in the day - that was very interesting to say the least).
On a side note, why can't > and < characters be used in a code element? Um, that's lame, especially for a site that discusses programming so much.
Switch statements are faster if there are enough cases, because a branch table can be used. For switches with only a few case statements, a good compiler should use conditional branches, resulting in the same code as an else if, because that is faster in that case. I presume a really good compiler would also be smart enough to use a branch table if enough else ifs are chained together too, but I haven't had to deal with writing that highly optimized code for a while to have been keeping tabs on compilers to that extent.
Suicide can only be blamed on the person that did it.
Really? Do you have children? If someone was holding a gun to your child's head and said they would blow their brains out if you didn't jump off of the 30 story building you were standing on, who would be blamed for that suicide? I doubt any suicide is as black and white as you make it out to be.
No, I am saying that they are exactly the same and capable of the same because they are *human beings*.
You are a deluded fool. Who wins all the worlds major marathons and why? If you think all human beings, or even races, are equal then you ignore the blatantly obvious. Further, human beings exist inside of a society and economy. Those constructs limit what they can and cannot do. I can only presume you do not know the difference between China and Japan, and only see them as blobs of generic people, so it is impossible to have a rational discussion with you on the matter.
The American car and electronics manufacturers were complacent and we nearly completely lost automobile manufacturing entirely *twice* - only to be bailed out with government loans.
Ford stayed strong throughout the economic recession, did not require any bailout, posted record profits, and produces the best selling car in the world. Two specific automakers were poorly managed and operated, and when the economy tanked, they couldn't survive. Perhaps they should have been allowed to fail so the stronger, better operated companies could have taken over their share. Regardless, the USA did not almost lose the entire automobile industry, as Ford is still a world leader.
We lost consumer electronics manufacturing entirely in the US.
No, we sent it away on purpose. It was cheaper to have other countries manufacture those products, so Americans can buy them cheaper. One thing people tend to overlook - a lot of the jobs people lament us having lost are jobs that most Americans would never want to have. What will happen next is that robotics will become even cheaper than Asian labor, and as the jobs were not in the USA to begin with, we won't see unions fighting robotic factories, as they will not cause Americans to lose their jobs. Thus I predict a great deal of manufacturing will return to the USA in the form of robotic assembly lines soon, especially when artificially maintained bubbles, like the Chinese currency, the Chinese production of cheap rare earths, and the Chinese people's willingness to produce products they could never afford to buy, all begin to burst.
And now we have idiots replying to this story saying that the Chinese will never make higher quality goods, as if the Chinese are somehow inherently inferior. This smacks of denial and racism, frankly, the same kind of denial and racism that we used against the Japanese and Koreans, before the Japanese and Koreans kicked our asses in manufacturing.
And you are being a Bigot in assuming that the Japanese and Chinese are exactly the same and capable of the same accomplishments because they all look Asian. However, that's entirely beside the point. The Japanese flourished for a number of reasons, one of which is because of their style of government and economy. It fostered creativity, engineering, and improving on others' designs. It is yet to be seen if China's Communist government can achieve the same level accomplishment just because the party dictated that the workers should do it. There is a tremendous amount of corruption in that government which leads to inefficiencies and a constant skimming-off-the-top at every level. So no, it is not a given that the Chinese can become the next Japan or South Korea. Take a close look at the governments of Japan, South Korea, the USA and China, and see if you can find any pattern there associated with the country's technical innovations and breakthroughs.
Throughout all this discussion no one has talked about what the flu vaccine is. It is not the same as other vaccinations. Influenza strains change from year to year. Each year the drug companies try to predict what existing strains and / or new strains will be dominant several months in the future when "flu season" strikes. They then manufacture many millions of doses before they have any evidence of what the reality of the season will actually be (because the manufacturing process is time consuming and somewhat risky production wise). Some seasons they do better than others, depending on how well they prognosticated that season ahead of time.
Thus the flu vaccine is a bit of a shotgun approach for the masses. I'm sure many of you know of people who had the annual flu vaccination and yet became sick that season and tested positive for influenza (there were reports in the local paper about this already, as the flu season has hit early he). Obviously the effectiveness is quite low, but probably the overall mass advantage does prevent some infections from incurring, again simply due to the massive scale involved. It's is a billion dollar industry which I have some degree of inside information about due to local marketing and distribution of the flu vaccine which involved family members.
Does the overall effectiveness of the annual flu vaccine warrant the tremendous amount of money spent on it? Maybe. I do know that billions of dollars are involved in this industry, and any time that much money is involved there are also significant amounts of money spent protecting the industry and providing justification that it is necessary. So take that with a grain of salt.
It was one of the two large lithium ion battery packs the power the plane when the engines are off. The FCC and pilots were already concerned about the use of lithium ion batteries for this purpose (apparently it's a first), and they issued special regulations just for this plane.
Also the only person on board when this happened was a mechanic (which is probably a good thing at least someone was able to spot the smoke right away).
This article only discusses some of the investment money and where it came from. Nothing about technical or software issues, or anything about what the company was actually doing or what went wrong. That would have been the only part of interest to me. Also don't bother going to the second page of the story to read one final sentence. I swear that's done on purpose for more ad exposure or more page hits.
On a side note, entering HTML tags with the stock iPad keyboard is a major pain.