For those not familiar with Rock,Paper,Scissors or as we called it when I was a kid in Hawaii "Junk ina Po", there are no ties. Rock loses to paper and beats scissors, paper loses to scissors (of course) and finally scissors loses to rock.
To tend toward or approach an intersecting point: lines that converge.
To come together from different directions; meet: The avenues converge at a central square.
To tend toward or achieve union or a common conclusion or result: In time, our views and our efforts converged.
Mathematics. To approach a limit.
So, according to that definition, if these two storms are about to collide, they have to be converging now. So the converging is in the present, the colliding in the fututre. Given what the words mean, there are no temporal issues.
The overloaded ship ruled the seas for all of a mile before she took on water through her too-low gun ports and promptly capsized.
Wow, that's incorrect. The ship wasn't overloaded and the gun ports weren't too low. The point of gravity was too high by design, causing the ship to tilt wildly even in very modest seas. Yes, it took on water through its gunports and capsized, but it did that because (a) the gunports were open and (b) the ship tilted to one side very badly in a gust, much more than would be expected. The root cause was the high center of gravity, not gunports or overloading
The article is about construction/design snafus, not operational snafus. Bhopal was a bad operational snafu, but the plant was designed sanely. The problem was that all safety-related features were inoperational due to bad maintenance or shut off on purpose to save money. The engineers who constructed the plant cannot be blamed for that.
Often, those settlements can be far greater than the value of the infringing technology: Recall the $612.5 million that Canada's Research in Motion forked over to patent-holding company NTP to avoid the shutting down of its popular BlackBerry service.
If the Blackberry service wasn't worth $612.5 million to RIM, they wouldn't have paid, but rather shut it down. So that actually is an example where the value of the technology was more than the settlement - it would have made no sense for RIM to agree to pay more than the technology was worth.
Note that I'm using "service" and "technology" interchangeably here: The value of an technology is no absolute, but the amount of value that can be generated by utilizing it.
'm really impressed with the latent homophobia in nearly every single 'aprilfools' post so far today. The 'gay' tag? Is that necessary? It's really not funny.
The line between Sci-Fi-Technobabbla and audiophile talk blurs. Who will be first to invent a gizmo that reverses the polarity of something, thereby creating a much richer and nuanced sound?
Some Laptops use their battery to iron out voltage fluctuations (desktop computers have large capacitors for that). If that's the case, leave it in, as taking it out might make your laptop unstable and perhaps more sensitive to voltage surges.
Perhaps somebody from the Euro area can explain this to me...
Gladly. First-off, this is not an EU project, it is a project by France and Germany. So, EU-bashing here is off-topic.
Regardless, it makes sense for governments to found these endeavours, as it generates local know-how. In order to use technologies, you have to have people who know how to use them (University doesn't help here), and that means having poeple who have done it. A lot of governments do stuff like that, the USA do this by extensive research funding by the DoD, France and Germany have in this particular project chosen this way. China is really big on re-inventing the wheel, too, so the Chinese engineers learn how to do whatever it is.
Why do the Europeans feel the need to reinvent the wheel everytime they do something?
Oh, you mean, like with the automobile? Or the Web? Or, more recently, the dual-stage ion engine? Seriously, at least read Slashdot...
These ideas have been floating around NASA and the defense industry for years.
Ion engines, yes. Dual-Stage ones? I was under the impression that they were new.
So why haven't these engines been put into use?
What are you talking about? Dual-Stage ion engines are just being developed, and conventional ion engines are/were in use both on NASA and ESA probes.
As a result the only projects suggested were either unmanned deep space probes
You seem to be implying that unmanned space exploration is useless. It is anything but. If at all, the presence of humans in space is of questionable scientific value.
they provide very little acceleartion
If you had RTFA, you'ld have seen that this new technology remedies exactly that problem and woud lend itself for Mars missions.
The OS should have registered actions for transports and datatypes. So each "scheme" (protocol) in a URL, like "http:", "ftp:", "mailto:", "rtsp:" (omitting the ":", to be exact) has a registered app or process for transporting in that protocol.
That sounds suspicously like the ages-old KDE KIO system (introduced back in KDE 2.0).
So a desktop context menu can offer a prioritized "Open with...". Apps can handle URLs for which they have transport and/or rendering facilities, or hand off to whichever app is registered. The only complexity is that the renderer might differ whether the data is to be "read", "edited" or "executed". The app ought to be able to differentiate the mode from the context in which the URL is requested, but the OS would have to register those modes. The key is that the facility resides in the OS (or its execution environment) so every app always has it available - it's IPC.
You are aware that you are aware that you are basically describing what KDE has been doing for ages?
KDE has committed to implementing
KDE has had the functionality for a long time. I don't know about implementing the standard, but the functionality has been there since at least the 3.0 days.
Okay, the 4*20 is not an issue, because you simply say "quatre-vingts" instead of eighty, i.e. it's just a name, like eighty. And, concerning 10+7, 10+8, etc: It's the same in English with "thirteen (3+10), fourteen (4+10),...". The only difference in french is that they have non-intuitive* names between 11 and 16 instead of 11 and 12.
But this hole soixante-dix (60+1=70) and quatre-vingt-dix (80+10) busines does tend to confuse non-native-speakers. At least Belgium and the French Swiss have made improvemnts by intoducing "septante" (70) and "nonante" (90), the Swiss even go as far as replacing "quatre-vingt" with "ottante"
*) I stipulate here that intuitive means "ten-digit" + "digit", as in twenty-four = 20+4. "Eleven" and "twelve" make no sense at all, it should be one-teen, two-teen... - or, actually, to follow a single convention for all the numbers: tenty-one, tenty-two, tenty-three...
The only thing I can tell you is that, while I have never used RedHat or FC, and while early versions of KOffice had its fair share of problems, I have never experienced the problems you describe on Gentoo or SuSE (back when the u was still lower case).
Errors you notice vs. errors you don't notice
on
Bad Science in the Press
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There's one thing that has me kind of worried. Thanks to my education, I'm good at noticing factual errors in IT reporting, and somewhat decent when it comes to logic errors in general science reporting. The problem is, I don't need the major papers for news in these areas, I have specialized sources, but for the fields in which I don't have expertise, I need to rely on them - I do not have the time to read specialized journals for every possible field.
How in the world can I trust publications to accurately digest news for me in areas where I'm no expert if they obviously do such a bad job in the areas I can detect mistakes?
Slashdot Mirror
For those not familiar with Rock,Paper,Scissors or as we called it when I was a kid in Hawaii "Junk ina Po", there are no ties. Rock loses to paper and beats scissors, paper loses to scissors (of course) and finally scissors loses to rock.
Who wins when both parties choose the same hand?So, according to that definition, if these two storms are about to collide, they have to be converging now. So the converging is in the present, the colliding in the fututre. Given what the words mean, there are no temporal issues.
The overloaded ship ruled the seas for all of a mile before she took on water through her too-low gun ports and promptly capsized.
Wow, that's incorrect. The ship wasn't overloaded and the gun ports weren't too low. The point of gravity was too high by design, causing the ship to tilt wildly even in very modest seas. Yes, it took on water through its gunports and capsized, but it did that because (a) the gunports were open and (b) the ship tilted to one side very badly in a gust, much more than would be expected. The root cause was the high center of gravity, not gunports or overloading
The article is about construction/design snafus, not operational snafus. Bhopal was a bad operational snafu, but the plant was designed sanely. The problem was that all safety-related features were inoperational due to bad maintenance or shut off on purpose to save money. The engineers who constructed the plant cannot be blamed for that.
Often, those settlements can be far greater than the value of the infringing technology: Recall the $612.5 million that Canada's Research in Motion forked over to patent-holding company NTP to avoid the shutting down of its popular BlackBerry service.
If the Blackberry service wasn't worth $612.5 million to RIM, they wouldn't have paid, but rather shut it down. So that actually is an example where the value of the technology was more than the settlement - it would have made no sense for RIM to agree to pay more than the technology was worth.
Note that I'm using "service" and "technology" interchangeably here: The value of an technology is no absolute, but the amount of value that can be generated by utilizing it.
As the title says, Dell's marketshare declined, not its sales. They are growing slower than the market. What is so hard to understand about that?
The H2G2 reference there went right over your head.
'm really impressed with the latent homophobia in nearly every single 'aprilfools' post so far today. The 'gay' tag? Is that necessary? It's really not funny.
You're gay. Gaaaaaaaayyyyy! (scnr)
The line between Sci-Fi-Technobabbla and audiophile talk blurs. Who will be first to invent a gizmo that reverses the polarity of something, thereby creating a much richer and nuanced sound?
Some Laptops use their battery to iron out voltage fluctuations (desktop computers have large capacitors for that). If that's the case, leave it in, as taking it out might make your laptop unstable and perhaps more sensitive to voltage surges.
how did the 'L' in "would" become an O-umlaut? that's a hell of a typo
On a German keyboard, the ö is right next to the l.Thank you, that worked. Good idea.
Hi! Wouöd a US-based /.-er be so kind as to set up a mirror? Google Video currently doesn't work outside the US.
Perhaps somebody from the Euro area can explain this to me...
Gladly. First-off, this is not an EU project, it is a project by France and Germany. So, EU-bashing here is off-topic.
Regardless, it makes sense for governments to found these endeavours, as it generates local know-how. In order to use technologies, you have to have people who know how to use them (University doesn't help here), and that means having poeple who have done it. A lot of governments do stuff like that, the USA do this by extensive research funding by the DoD, France and Germany have in this particular project chosen this way. China is really big on re-inventing the wheel, too, so the Chinese engineers learn how to do whatever it is.
Why do the Europeans feel the need to reinvent the wheel everytime they do something?
Oh, you mean, like with the automobile? Or the Web? Or, more recently, the dual-stage ion engine? Seriously, at least read Slashdot...
These ideas have been floating around NASA and the defense industry for years.
Ion engines, yes. Dual-Stage ones? I was under the impression that they were new.So why haven't these engines been put into use?
What are you talking about? Dual-Stage ion engines are just being developed, and conventional ion engines are/were in use both on NASA and ESA probes.As a result the only projects suggested were either unmanned deep space probes
You seem to be implying that unmanned space exploration is useless. It is anything but. If at all, the presence of humans in space is of questionable scientific value.they provide very little acceleartion
If you had RTFA, you'ld have seen that this new technology remedies exactly that problem and woud lend itself for Mars missions.The OS should have registered actions for transports and datatypes. So each "scheme" (protocol) in a URL, like "http:", "ftp:", "mailto:", "rtsp:" (omitting the ":", to be exact) has a registered app or process for transporting in that protocol.
That sounds suspicously like the ages-old KDE KIO system (introduced back in KDE 2.0).
So a desktop context menu can offer a prioritized "Open with...". Apps can handle URLs for which they have transport and/or rendering facilities, or hand off to whichever app is registered. The only complexity is that the renderer might differ whether the data is to be "read", "edited" or "executed". The app ought to be able to differentiate the mode from the context in which the URL is requested, but the OS would have to register those modes. The key is that the facility resides in the OS (or its execution environment) so every app always has it available - it's IPC.
You are aware that you are aware that you are basically describing what KDE has been doing for ages?
KDE has committed to implementing
KDE has had the functionality for a long time. I don't know about implementing the standard, but the functionality has been there since at least the 3.0 days.
Why such low utilization ?
Any other industry would scrap 80% of that equipment to save costs and power.
And if you would have read the next sentence instead of knee-jerk posting, you would have learned that they are doing exactly that.
Okay, the 4*20 is not an issue, because you simply say "quatre-vingts" instead of eighty, i.e. it's just a name, like eighty. And, concerning 10+7, 10+8, etc: It's the same in English with "thirteen (3+10), fourteen (4+10), ...". The only difference in french is that they have non-intuitive* names between 11 and 16 instead of 11 and 12.
But this hole soixante-dix (60+1=70) and quatre-vingt-dix (80+10) busines does tend to confuse non-native-speakers. At least Belgium and the French Swiss have made improvemnts by intoducing "septante" (70) and "nonante" (90), the Swiss even go as far as replacing "quatre-vingt" with "ottante"
*) I stipulate here that intuitive means "ten-digit" + "digit", as in twenty-four = 20+4. "Eleven" and "twelve" make no sense at all, it should be one-teen, two-teen... - or, actually, to follow a single convention for all the numbers: tenty-one, tenty-two, tenty-three...
Thank you
Oh Slashdot, what have you become?
Who the hell is Jack Thompson? And why should I care?
They include the length of the "ramps" to and from the actual suspension bridge.
Just checked. Definately not the case with KWord 1.4.1 on Gentoo.
The only thing I can tell you is that, while I have never used RedHat or FC, and while early versions of KOffice had its fair share of problems, I have never experienced the problems you describe on Gentoo or SuSE (back when the u was still lower case).
There's one thing that has me kind of worried. Thanks to my education, I'm good at noticing factual errors in IT reporting, and somewhat decent when it comes to logic errors in general science reporting. The problem is, I don't need the major papers for news in these areas, I have specialized sources, but for the fields in which I don't have expertise, I need to rely on them - I do not have the time to read specialized journals for every possible field.
How in the world can I trust publications to accurately digest news for me in areas where I'm no expert if they obviously do such a bad job in the areas I can detect mistakes?