Agreed. I've often wondered why our puritanical society is quite happy to let kids see horrific violence, but practically craps itself if there's a wardrobe malfunction or somebody says one of the seven deadly words.
Because it's tradition. The legal system is all about precedents. That means it's really about perpetuating traditions rather than doing what's right. The precedents say that that sex is obscene while violence isn't, so the Supreme Court justices perpetuate that tradition.
Is this an engineering breakthrough or a scientific breakthrough?
Engineering breakthrough. They have a new technique for getting close to the theoretical limits without changing the theoretical limits. That's engineering.
Find out when the launch window opens and closes, and plan to be in Florida for the duration.
Book your hotel and car for the duration. If it launches before the last day, you can cancel the rest of the window. In most cases, you can cancel with 24 hours' notice with no fee. With less than 24 hours' notice, you pay for one day.
Watch the launch schedule on websites like spaceflightnow.com. If the schedule changes, prepare to change your plans ASAP.
If the launch is delayed while you are in Florida, there is plenty to do. The KSC visitor's center will take annual memberships for just a little more than the cost of a one-day visit, so you can go there multiple days. Or you can go to a public beach. Or go on a riverboat tour. Or go down to the Everglades. Or you can spend lots of money at one of the many theme parks in Orlando.
Unfortunately, sometimes the window closes after you get there, with no launch. This happened to us for STS-133. If you have the vacation and the funds, you can consider going back.
I feel your pain on Concorde. But the end of shuttle is not the end of manned spaceflight. Far from it. SpaceX/Dragon is a promising approach that may finally lower the costs of American manned space access.
If Microsoft really believes that the tablet market is a fad, their inaction makes perfect sense. They are a slow company. Their xbox products cost them many years and billions of dollars before it became successful. Windows, both consumer and NT, took years to be successful. SQL server took years to be successful. IE took years to be successful.
So if they really believe that the current incarnation of tablets is a fad, they'd be stupid to pursue the tablet. Unlike companies like Apple and Google, their development cycle is so long that, to their thinking, the market will collapse before they have a competitive product.
There's a minimum separation time between when one ship leaves ISS and another one docks, and if they had held fast to that schedule, it would have been delayed until Friday because of the late departure of... I think it was a Soyuz mission.
The launch that almost delayed STS-133 was ATV2. And it wasn't about separation between leaving and docking, it was separations between dockings. ATV2 was scheduled to launch Feb 15, but scrubbed to launch Feb 16. It was scheduled to dock on the same day as STS-133 was scheduled to launch. In the end the shuttle folks decided to launch anyway.
For the same reason a sales tax is percentage-based - it keeps the tax relative to the value. And it dates back to the classic church tithe (as in "give the church a tenth of what you make").
I would be thrilled to see a proper flat percentage, with the barest minimum of deductions for the poorest.
Tithing is older than the Church, which inherited it from Judaism. And funny thing -- the Jews had quite a few different required donations, not just the first tithe. Some of these include the first tithe, the second tithe, the tithe for the poor, the t'rumah, the t'rumah of the tithe, and the temple tax. The various tithes were indeed each a flat percentage. But the temple tax/census was a fixed *amount* (one half shekel, with a specific biblical requirement that the rich not pay more and the poor not pay less, since the tax was also used as a census). Meanwhile, the t'rumah does not have a biblical percentage but under rabbinical judaism, the rich paid a higher percentage than the poor. In other words, the Jews had three rates for religious taxes: flat rate, progressive, and fixed amount.
And another thing -- most of the above (except the temple tax/census) were only defined for *produce*. In other words, they were only paid by landowners. If you were a poor laborer who owned no land, or a middle-class blacksmith, the tithes were not applicable -- except the half-shekel temple tax. Only farmers had to give tithes. In the ancient world, as in America until not too long ago, wealth was associated with farm ownership. So tithing targeted the rich more than the poor or middle-class.
[NB: what with the separation of church and state, I don't think the above should be relevant. But the parent poster seems to argue for flat-rate taxes based on religious arguments. I don't think religious arguments should be relevant, but as per the above, I think the religious argument actually supports progressive taxes.]
Am I the only one out there that is getting a bit bored with the 24/7 coverage of this?
I mean...sure it is important...mostly to people on that side of the world, but man..enough is enough. Gotta be something new that's newsworthy...
Egypt is a regional power, and a significant US ally. It's literally undergoing a democratic revolution. The revolution has been mostly peaceful. The revolution has significant implications to long-term US interests. And the revolution has been extremely rapid.
There are plenty of other things going on. But for once, I'm with the news people: this is huge, this is newsworthy, and this is worth following.
I would love to hear all the reasons this is such a bad thing.
Why Nokia getting into bed with MSFT is bad:
Nokia owns one of the major Linux desktop components, qt. This potentially endangers that component, by removing some of Nokia's incentive to continue qt development.
Nokia owns one of the major open-source phone OSs, Symbian. This potentially endangers that OS.
Nokia is involved in another open-source, Linux-based phone OS, MeeGo. This potentially endangers that OS, too.
In a single stroke, three high-profile open-source components are potentially endangered. If you care about open-source, this is a bad thing.
+1. Many public-school science teachers are not even educated as scientists. Actual scientists can command salaries higher than what teachers are paid, so very few people who graduate with a science degree are willing to work in a public high school. This means many teachers are liberal arts folks who got a certificate in education. Many, perhaps even most of these folks still try to do a good job. But some fraction of them bring the same ignorance to bear as in the general population.
Is there a value to looking at "averages" over large areas?
I'm in Howard County, MD. On Comcast, I get about 8Mbps sustained after an initial 20Mbps. This is typical in my area. My neighbors using Verizon FiOS will typically see even higher throughput. However, this graph, presumably containing large parts of the US, has Verizon as slower than Comcast, and both are much lower than what I see. A person trying to make a decision on ISP service in my area would be misled.
Also, if reliability is an issue, a voting cluster of hundreds of small, cheap CPUs may be both cheaper and more reliable than a few expensive mil-spec CPUs...
Cheaper and more reliable maybe... but what about power consumption, heat dissipation, and volume? There's a lot of dimensions to that trade space.
Yes. And don't forget weight. Typical launch costs are well over $5000/pound. If a design with 100 "cheap" CPUs adds a few pounds of weight for the CPUs, boards, and electronics, the cheap CPUs aren't so cheap.
And power is a huge issue as well. Batteries and solar cells don't provide much power. That power is also needed by the spacecraft's instrument payloads. You can make the batteries and solar cells bigger, but then you have more weight, which again, increases launch costs.
A combined/pooled system gives you more functionality without taking anything away. Effectively it's a superset of the functionality of a traditional separate system. As GP said, you just need to manage it. When my former company went to a combined system, they added sick leave and vacation leave together and called that "PTO". Under the old system, I had one week of sick leave and 3 weeks of vacation; under the new system, I had 4 weeks of PTO. So I could just pretend that I still had 1 week of sick and 3 weeks of vacation, keep track of which I had used, and pretend the system never changed. Or I could decide that I didn't need a full week of sick leave and take some of that as vacation. Or I could decide that I was very sickly and use some of the vacation time as sick leave. The combined system gave more choice: continue the old way, or do your own thing. Choice is good.
I know it sometimes doesn't seem that way, but slashdot does have standards. The editors have written policies on how they do what they do, and they try to follow them. While slashdot editors often fail to live up to the standards that they strive for -- they tend to publish duplicate stories, press releases, trolls, advertisements, and blatant spelling errors -- they do tend to avoid the more egregious violations. The mistakes are more along the lines of sloppiness than malice. Presumably that's why we're all still here, no?
So kdawson couldn't post this FUD himself? He needed Soulskill to do it for him?
Considering that people cannot be objective about their own posts, I applaud kdawson for *not* posting this. Letting it go through someone else's editorial review is the right thing to do.
At a former job, my bosses hired someone to fill an opening just before a reorg. They were upfront with the new hire about the risks. The philosophy was that the group's work would most likely still be necessary after the reorg, so it was better for the group to be at full staff and responsive during the reorg, and the new hire would most likely keep his job. Sure enough, everyone in the group made it through the reorg OK, and the new hire stayed on for years.
Some vendors, such as Juniper, have transitioned at least some of their product lines from ASICs to FPGAs. A problem with ASICs is that you can't patch them for security issues. This is bad if, say, you sell firewall products.
The US announces launches of big rockets to the international space community. This community includes both our friends and (historically) our enemies, i.e. the USSR back in the cold war. There is a rather simple reason for this: to a missile defense system, a launch to orbit initially looks a lot like an ICBM launch. Our government doesn't want someone, especially an enemy, thinking we've just launched an ICBM. That could lead to nuclear war. So we loudly announce the launch of spy satellites.
The most important date for support is the last-ship date, not the first-ship date. It doesn't matter how long the product has been out, it matters how recently customers bought it.
And guess what? XP is still shipping -- the current end-of-sale date is October 22, 2010. OS X 10.3 stopped shipping years ago. MSFT's official policy is to support XP until 2014. Why doesn't this include IE9?
[I am about to lose a mod point I just spent. But I couldn't let this go. Bah.]
NASA has a number of Earth-observing satellites already in orbit that do formation flying as part of the so-called "A-Train". TFA mentions this, although it links to a PDF instead of HTML. See:
The Archos 70 (not expected to be available until October 2010) has an option for an internal HDD with 250GB of storage. My wife was looking for something in this form factor to be a high-capacity portable media player; getting a device with additional capabilities will be a bonus. http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_70it/specs.html?country=us&lang=en
Of course, since it's not available yet, we haven't played with it. Hopefully we'll buy one after giving them a little while to work out the bugs.
I found articles about IQ and race, IQ and sex, IQ and health, but not one dealing with age.
That's because, by definition, IQ controls for age. See the definition of IQ. The denominator in IQ is chronological age, and the point of IQ is to compare one's "mental" age with ones "chronological" age.
GP's comment is therefore nonsensical. Presumably GP meant to claim that one's intelligence declines as a function of age.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I've often wondered why our puritanical society is quite happy to let kids see horrific violence, but practically craps itself if there's a wardrobe malfunction or somebody says one of the seven deadly words.
Because it's tradition. The legal system is all about precedents. That means it's really about perpetuating traditions rather than doing what's right. The precedents say that that sex is obscene while violence isn't, so the Supreme Court justices perpetuate that tradition.
Is this an engineering breakthrough or a scientific breakthrough?
Engineering breakthrough. They have a new technique for getting close to the theoretical limits without changing the theoretical limits. That's engineering.
Fly Southwest. They do penalty-free rebooking.
Find out when the launch window opens and closes, and plan to be in Florida for the duration.
Book your hotel and car for the duration. If it launches before the last day, you can cancel the rest of the window. In most cases, you can cancel with 24 hours' notice with no fee. With less than 24 hours' notice, you pay for one day.
Watch the launch schedule on websites like spaceflightnow.com. If the schedule changes, prepare to change your plans ASAP.
If the launch is delayed while you are in Florida, there is plenty to do. The KSC visitor's center will take annual memberships for just a little more than the cost of a one-day visit, so you can go there multiple days. Or you can go to a public beach. Or go on a riverboat tour. Or go down to the Everglades. Or you can spend lots of money at one of the many theme parks in Orlando.
Unfortunately, sometimes the window closes after you get there, with no launch. This happened to us for STS-133. If you have the vacation and the funds, you can consider going back.
I feel your pain on Concorde. But the end of shuttle is not the end of manned spaceflight. Far from it. SpaceX/Dragon is a promising approach that may finally lower the costs of American manned space access.
If Microsoft really believes that the tablet market is a fad, their inaction makes perfect sense. They are a slow company. Their xbox products cost them many years and billions of dollars before it became successful. Windows, both consumer and NT, took years to be successful. SQL server took years to be successful. IE took years to be successful.
So if they really believe that the current incarnation of tablets is a fad, they'd be stupid to pursue the tablet. Unlike companies like Apple and Google, their development cycle is so long that, to their thinking, the market will collapse before they have a competitive product.
There's a minimum separation time between when one ship leaves ISS and another one docks, and if they had held fast to that schedule, it would have been delayed until Friday because of the late departure of... I think it was a Soyuz mission.
The launch that almost delayed STS-133 was ATV2. And it wasn't about separation between leaving and docking, it was separations between dockings. ATV2 was scheduled to launch Feb 15, but scrubbed to launch Feb 16. It was scheduled to dock on the same day as STS-133 was scheduled to launch. In the end the shuttle folks decided to launch anyway.
http://spaceflightnow.com/tracking/launchlog.html
http://insideksc.com/content.php/250-STS-133-Launch-Preps-Move-Ahead-ATV-2-Aims-to-Launch-Today
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-133#Johannes_Kepler_ATV_rescheduled
I have a fair number of friends who I met via the Internet. I don't know their phone numbers. Voice chat rocks.
For the same reason a sales tax is percentage-based - it keeps the tax relative to the value. And it dates back to the classic church tithe (as in "give the church a tenth of what you make").
I would be thrilled to see a proper flat percentage, with the barest minimum of deductions for the poorest.
Tithing is older than the Church, which inherited it from Judaism. And funny thing -- the Jews had quite a few different required donations, not just the first tithe. Some of these include the first tithe, the second tithe, the tithe for the poor, the t'rumah, the t'rumah of the tithe, and the temple tax. The various tithes were indeed each a flat percentage. But the temple tax/census was a fixed *amount* (one half shekel, with a specific biblical requirement that the rich not pay more and the poor not pay less, since the tax was also used as a census). Meanwhile, the t'rumah does not have a biblical percentage but under rabbinical judaism, the rich paid a higher percentage than the poor. In other words, the Jews had three rates for religious taxes: flat rate, progressive, and fixed amount.
And another thing -- most of the above (except the temple tax/census) were only defined for *produce*. In other words, they were only paid by landowners. If you were a poor laborer who owned no land, or a middle-class blacksmith, the tithes were not applicable -- except the half-shekel temple tax. Only farmers had to give tithes. In the ancient world, as in America until not too long ago, wealth was associated with farm ownership. So tithing targeted the rich more than the poor or middle-class.
[NB: what with the separation of church and state, I don't think the above should be relevant. But the parent poster seems to argue for flat-rate taxes based on religious arguments. I don't think religious arguments should be relevant, but as per the above, I think the religious argument actually supports progressive taxes.]
Am I the only one out there that is getting a bit bored with the 24/7 coverage of this?
I mean...sure it is important...mostly to people on that side of the world, but man..enough is enough. Gotta be something new that's newsworthy...
Egypt is a regional power, and a significant US ally. It's literally undergoing a democratic revolution. The revolution has been mostly peaceful. The revolution has significant implications to long-term US interests. And the revolution has been extremely rapid.
There are plenty of other things going on. But for once, I'm with the news people: this is huge, this is newsworthy, and this is worth following.
I would love to hear all the reasons this is such a bad thing.
Why Nokia getting into bed with MSFT is bad:
In a single stroke, three high-profile open-source components are potentially endangered. If you care about open-source, this is a bad thing.
+1. Many public-school science teachers are not even educated as scientists. Actual scientists can command salaries higher than what teachers are paid, so very few people who graduate with a science degree are willing to work in a public high school. This means many teachers are liberal arts folks who got a certificate in education. Many, perhaps even most of these folks still try to do a good job. But some fraction of them bring the same ignorance to bear as in the general population.
Is there a value to looking at "averages" over large areas?
I'm in Howard County, MD. On Comcast, I get about 8Mbps sustained after an initial 20Mbps. This is typical in my area. My neighbors using Verizon FiOS will typically see even higher throughput. However, this graph, presumably containing large parts of the US, has Verizon as slower than Comcast, and both are much lower than what I see. A person trying to make a decision on ISP service in my area would be misled.
Cheaper and more reliable maybe... but what about power consumption, heat dissipation, and volume? There's a lot of dimensions to that trade space.
Yes. And don't forget weight. Typical launch costs are well over $5000/pound. If a design with 100 "cheap" CPUs adds a few pounds of weight for the CPUs, boards, and electronics, the cheap CPUs aren't so cheap.
And power is a huge issue as well. Batteries and solar cells don't provide much power. That power is also needed by the spacecraft's instrument payloads. You can make the batteries and solar cells bigger, but then you have more weight, which again, increases launch costs.
A combined/pooled system gives you more functionality without taking anything away. Effectively it's a superset of the functionality of a traditional separate system. As GP said, you just need to manage it. When my former company went to a combined system, they added sick leave and vacation leave together and called that "PTO". Under the old system, I had one week of sick leave and 3 weeks of vacation; under the new system, I had 4 weeks of PTO. So I could just pretend that I still had 1 week of sick and 3 weeks of vacation, keep track of which I had used, and pretend the system never changed. Or I could decide that I didn't need a full week of sick leave and take some of that as vacation. Or I could decide that I was very sickly and use some of the vacation time as sick leave. The combined system gave more choice: continue the old way, or do your own thing. Choice is good.
I know it sometimes doesn't seem that way, but slashdot does have standards. The editors have written policies on how they do what they do, and they try to follow them. While slashdot editors often fail to live up to the standards that they strive for -- they tend to publish duplicate stories, press releases, trolls, advertisements, and blatant spelling errors -- they do tend to avoid the more egregious violations. The mistakes are more along the lines of sloppiness than malice. Presumably that's why we're all still here, no?
So kdawson couldn't post this FUD himself? He needed Soulskill to do it for him?
Considering that people cannot be objective about their own posts, I applaud kdawson for *not* posting this. Letting it go through someone else's editorial review is the right thing to do.
At a former job, my bosses hired someone to fill an opening just before a reorg. They were upfront with the new hire about the risks. The philosophy was that the group's work would most likely still be necessary after the reorg, so it was better for the group to be at full staff and responsive during the reorg, and the new hire would most likely keep his job. Sure enough, everyone in the group made it through the reorg OK, and the new hire stayed on for years.
Some vendors, such as Juniper, have transitioned at least some of their product lines from ASICs to FPGAs. A problem with ASICs is that you can't patch them for security issues. This is bad if, say, you sell firewall products.
The US announces launches of big rockets to the international space community. This community includes both our friends and (historically) our enemies, i.e. the USSR back in the cold war. There is a rather simple reason for this: to a missile defense system, a launch to orbit initially looks a lot like an ICBM launch. Our government doesn't want someone, especially an enemy, thinking we've just launched an ICBM. That could lead to nuclear war. So we loudly announce the launch of spy satellites.
The most important date for support is the last-ship date, not the first-ship date. It doesn't matter how long the product has been out, it matters how recently customers bought it.
And guess what? XP is still shipping -- the current end-of-sale date is October 22, 2010. OS X 10.3 stopped shipping years ago. MSFT's official policy is to support XP until 2014. Why doesn't this include IE9?
[I am about to lose a mod point I just spent. But I couldn't let this go. Bah.]
NASA has a number of Earth-observing satellites already in orbit that do formation flying as part of the so-called "A-Train". TFA mentions this, although it links to a PDF instead of HTML. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-train_(satellite_constellation)
if it's during a lunar eclipse, then the sun is between the earth and the moon, so it's closer.
In a lunar eclipse, the Earth is between the moon and the Sun. http://www.mreclipse.com/Special/LEprimer.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse
The Archos 70 (not expected to be available until October 2010) has an option for an internal HDD with 250GB of storage. My wife was looking for something in this form factor to be a high-capacity portable media player; getting a device with additional capabilities will be a bonus. http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_70it/specs.html?country=us&lang=en
Of course, since it's not available yet, we haven't played with it. Hopefully we'll buy one after giving them a little while to work out the bugs.
Hell, Dottie Lamor isn't even showing up on IMDB, so apparently she isn't significant enough for you to remember how to spell her name.
Try Dorothy Lamour.
The average person's IQ declines with age.
[Citation needed]
I found articles about IQ and race, IQ and sex, IQ and health, but not one dealing with age.
That's because, by definition, IQ controls for age. See the definition of IQ. The denominator in IQ is chronological age, and the point of IQ is to compare one's "mental" age with ones "chronological" age.
GP's comment is therefore nonsensical. Presumably GP meant to claim that one's intelligence declines as a function of age.