Re:Instead...
on
Making Change
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· Score: 4, Informative
In Australia copper coins (1c & 2c) were taken out of circulation in 1991 (I think). So everything is rounded to a multiple of 5c. The rules for the rounding (set out by law) are:
For cash transactions: 1 & 2 cents -- rounded DOWN to the nearest 10 cents 3 & 4 cents -- rounded UP to the nearest 5 cents 6 & 7 cents -- rounded DOWN to the nearest 5 cents 8 & 9 cents -- rounded UP to the nearest 10 cents Rounding is on the total value of the bill. Individual items should never be rounded.
And where a consumer pays by cheque, credit card or EFTPOS (electronic transaction) there is no need to round at all.
So basically you win some and you lose some, but it evens out in the end. If you're really diligent, yes you can use it to your advantage, but most people have a life instead.
Or, even better ...
on
Making Change
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· Score: 2, Informative
Do what Australia did a while back and round everything to the nearest 5c and get rid of 1c and 2c coins entirely (so now Australian coins are 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1 and $2). I couldn't decide whether I liked it to start with, but after a little while you realise just how much shrapnel you carry around and have no intention of using except to empty it from your pocket/wallet at the end of every day. Every time I go to another country and have to again deal with 1/2 cent/euro cent/pence/etc I just appreciate this move even more.
It's interesting that you bring that up, because the simple fact is that all the fanboys and hardware junkies care about the 3DMark scores. I mean, let's face it - if nobody cared about 5784 3DMarks, then this wouldn't be news.
But it is news because all those hardware sites out there that have to publish every single number under the sun and then present them on graphs with cut axes so they can have the longest review and be the biggest and best hardware site and get early beta products that they can favourably review so they get more early products... sorry, I got on my soapbox for a minute there. I hope my cynicism of the online hardware review industry wasn't too obvious;)
Why not use time which is wasted on 3DMark benchmark for benchmarking real games?
I don't think FutureMARK would be very happy to hear you say that, but would it solve the fact that the drivers could be written to take shortcuts when the games are used for benchmarking? The number of games commonly used for benchmarking is a reasonably small subset. I'm not a programmer, but it would surely be no more difficult than what was done with the 3DMark benchmark?
no they're not - if they were incompresssible they could never be pressurised. It's why they're so useful in hydraulics. You can generate a high pressure by compressing the liquid by only a very small amount and that pressure is almost instantly transferred to all parts attached to the system. Lubrication also works precisely because liquids are compressible (that's simplifying it, but let's go with it for now).
Furthermore, if you made the probe a solid sphere, it'd also be pretty much indestructible.
That is also wrong - solids are also compressible, though in every day circumstances the pressures are never anywhere near high enough for this to be of any concern. However, when you're talking about the pressures at the centre of the earth, I'm pretty sure you've gone out of the realms of "every day circumstances".
I have to admit, it would be a very intriguing and interesting design problem.
My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.
Well, speaking from experience I can honestly say that grading a paper electronically is a right pain in the arse. It's almost downright impossible if it's mathematically heavy (as in lots of equations, something computers and word processors especiall are still not very good at).
When I grade/mark a paper I tend to make a lot of comments, not just read it and put a mark on it. I could do that electronically but I've always felt that unless I'm giving something a perfect mark I owe it to the student to give them helpful comments. Whether they take any notice of them of course, is another matter!
some of these blogs actually contain some pretty handy info from time to time [my emphasis]
yeh, that's true, but let's face it - the vast majority are complete and utter drivel and manage to make a cereal packet look like an interesting read.
Are politicians that DAFT to see what is going wrong?
I believe this is known as a rhetorical question... ??
Seriously though, although the answer is defintely yes, I think it is difficult to expect the politicians themselves to be deeply knowledgeable about this subject. Most of the IT/IP laws associated with the internet that have been passed in the last few years provide more than enough evidence that the people who make the decisions blatantly don't understand the situation. I think a lot of the blame lies with the advisors, the people who should know what they are talking about and who should see where this is going.
I'm not sure how American politics works, but in Australia, politicians move portfolios all the time, and there is no way any of them can become an expert in their area in just a few months.
It seems to me that politicians are making simple stuff complex.
That's because most politicians, advisers, speech writers and behind-the-scenes people in politics are lawyers, and making simple things unnecesarily complicated is what they do for a living. The law doesn't allow for common sense, and there is no room for it in politics either.
I know I have a very negative and apathetic view of politics and politicians, but until I see evidence to the contrary, I don't think I'm that far off the mark.
Give me text ads over those bloody annoying pop-over flash advertisements any day. Those things actually manage to annoy me so much that I go out of my way to make sure that I don't buy the product.
We should be giving them the bare minimum: a constitution, a bill of rights, and a system of government including a house and senate and the like, plus ways for them to write their own laws and get out.
This is not the bare minimum - the bare minimum is food, shelter, clothing, health, water, power, etc. An interim government would also be needed.
You (as in the USA, not you personally:) ) have absolutely no right whatsoever to impose a constitution, bill of rights or system of govt on the Iraqi people. They should be free to decide whether they want this themselves and then be allowed to set it up themselves. If they want [what you propose], then for sure you can advise them, but it is not for you to say that they should choose this way to live.
Of course, technically, the USA/coalition actually conquered Iraq, so there is nothing to stop them imposing anything they want on the Iraqi people. GWB, Blair et al have been at such pains to point out that this is not what the coalition want to that this would surely only bring more anti-american/british sentiment and smack of gross hypocrisy.
But perhaps I am just bitter because Rosen bothers me.
It's the least colonial activity we could possibly do that wasn't irresponsibly abrupt.
As other posters have pointed out, surely getting IP laws up and running in Iraq is not really a priority when basic services are needed. And surely IP laws don't come under "least colonial activity".
Remember: we conquered Iraq.
I'm sorry, but hasn't your president and administration spent the last few months painstakingly pointing out that the coalition liberated Iraq from it's evil ruler?
Anything created for the sense of a message is art.
I know several people who paint simply because they enjoy to paint. They don't paint for money or for praise or to make cheap presents. There is no poignant statement or message, just simply because they enjoy creating the act of painting.
Architecture is most certainly art.
See, I don't agree - which I guess was partly the point of your post! Most architecture has a definite purpose (holding up a roof; not exactly right, but I'm sure you get my meaning) which I don't think is part of "art". The architecture that is created more as an industrial sculpture I would call art, though some of that stuff is pretty stupid. That is of course just a personal opinion that you're free to disagree with, but I really feel that to truly be art the art must be created for no other purpose.
Take a look sometime at the architecture of Tadao Ando, a Japanese architect. His use of curves and natural light in his buildings are amazing.
hmmm... just did some googling and he has created some amazing buildings, and I agree that they are unique and beautiful, but I don't consider them "art". Just like car designs - they may well be beautiful and conjure up all sorts of emotions in people, but they are not art.
Something that has always fascinated me - can ayone provide a definition of "art". I mean the type of art that hangs in galleries and modern art museums and people argue endlessly about whether it really is art or is just plain stupid. The type of art that this is trying to classify HTML under?
The best one I've found is "the products of human creativity", but that still seems way too broad. Personally I feel that art should have no functional purpose, so something that has a purpose (a building say) can be beautiful, but I don't think it is art.
hmm... I'm a bit of an IMAX addict myself, but I have to say that the IMAX format most definitely does not suck. However, I'll also qualify that by saying that it works much better when the films are actually made with IMAX format in mind from the word go. The best films I've seen on IMAX have been more documentaries, rather than movies.
Some really cool IMAX films to check out are:
* Close encounters in the 3rd Dimension - yeh, it's a little bit "educational" (it's basically an intro to 3D, IMAX style), but it was also a bit of an attempt to "show off" the format, so there are some absolutely mind-blowing 3D sequences in it. I would really recommend this as a first IMAX movie.
* Space Station 3D - absolutely stunning, enough said. The only thing wrong with this is Tom Cruise as the narrator.
* Everest - Just see this for the absolutely gorgeous nature scenery and ignore the attempts to turn it into a story. The helicopter ride up the Lukla (?) valley in Nepal is breathtaking, and the scenes filmed around the time of the Everest tragedy on May 10, 1996 put the whole thing in perspective.
* Shakleton's Antarctic Adventure - Go and see this for two reasons. Firstly, the amazing scenery, but most importantly, to see just what a bunch of hard bastards these guys were!
* Titanic: Ghosts of the Abyss - This is the footage that James Cameron filmed when he did the recon stuff for the Titanic movie.
Why people are still talking about running a car on vegetable oil when we can turn vegetables into real (petroleum) oil, I don't know...
Although I'm quoting the parent, my comment is not directly related.
All of these new fuel technologies - and I include hydrogen fuel, fuel cells, biodiesel, alcohol-based fuels, etc in this comment - are great, and some of them require little modification of the car (diesel engines are quite tolerant of different fuels, while petrol is not so good). Lots of people often wonder why these are not being adopted much more quickly, and why some of the major manufacturers are not already producing models that use these environment-friendly technologies.
One of the biggest factors that is holding back wide scale adoption of these technologies is the infrastructure that is already in place and supplies your car with fuel - the service/petrol stations [insert whatever you call them in your country!]. The cost involved in changing these over to, for example, hydrogen pumps, is absolutely staggering and far outweighs the cost of converting the cars themselves over. This is particularly true in countries like the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, etc. And, like we all know, money does all the talking so until a solution to this problem is found I can't see the situation changing much.
I've done a lot of high level maths myself, and perhaps [/sarcasm] was not the best word to use in my original post; I probably should have used [/joking] instead.
Maths seems to be one of the few things (especially at high levels such as this or when you move into R^n dimensions) that is extremely difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to put into plain english at all. How can you possibly describe, for example, a 5-dimensional object (or object in R5 space) - you can't make up an analogy or describe something more familiar in that case? Like some other posters have pointed out, I don't think this can be put into plain english - I was poking fun at the thought of someone even trying!
Loosely speaking, this means that every 3-dimensional object that has a set of sphere-like properties can be stretched or squeezed until it is a 3-sphere without breaking it. Note that a 3-sphere consists of all those points in 4-dimensional space R4 that have a distance of 1 from the origin.
Well why didn't you just say so in the first place. It's so simple when you put it in plain english... [/sarcasm]
... Or perhaps I'm just showing my age again...:-)
It's all right - I'll join you.:-)
I used to play computer games all the time when I was 15-21. I could actually pick up one of those rpg games and play the entire game the whole way through and discover everything there was to discover... all in a week (or less). Now, quite a few years later, I find I just don't have that sort of time to devote to games - either to learning the controls (I used to love my flight sims and micro-managing turn-based strategy games) or just in getting anywhere in the game.
I'm not trying to say gaming is not having a life, but I just can't fathom how people find the time to play these games that require a lot of time devoted to them. I spend most of my work day looking at a computer screen of some description or other - I can't think of anything worse than going home after work and sitting down in front of a computer. Much less spending my weekend doing it as well.
I (respectfully of course!) disagree - I don't think this is at all a touchy issue except from the point of view of the student. The age of student this seems to be talking about is well below age 18, which is when (generalising I know, but in most places) children become adults in the eyes of the law and no longer come under the "cover" of their parents. At this sort of age, the parents have every right to know their son/daughter(s) marks. Now, if this system was implemented at a university level, where the students are old enough that their parents no longer have a (legal anyway) right to this information, that would be a touchy issue.
How the parents choose to use this information is up to them - I agree that checking this every single day is going to harbour resentment, but that choice is for the parents to make.
However, the security of this system from the outside world is what we should be focussing on, not the provision of information that parents have been seeking for quite some time (and, in my opinion, have every right to).
This is too technical to discuss in email, please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.
PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical? Perhaps they should answer more like: "I am far, far too stupid to respond to this in writing. My writing skills suck, and I don't communicate well but can at least manage to pull it off in a verbal conversation. Please call."
I'm going to strongly disagree with you here, but I suspect that my perspective/background on this has more to do with it. E-mail has a place in the communications "toolbox", but I have frequently come across situations where it can be a right major pain in the ass. Almost all of these situations have come because someone is too lazy to come and see me face-to-face when I could have explained a concept to them in 5 minutes by drawing some diagrams - something I could never have done in 100 emails. And, most of these cases are highly technical, something I don't think email is particularly suited to. Of course, my "technical" may differ to yours.
I'll be more specific - I did some amount of teaching (university) in mechanical engineering (all years). Ironically, one fo the things I taught was communication in engineering! It was quite frequent to get a student email me with a question about a lab, assignment, tutorial, etc. Often the explanations for this could be done in 5 minutes face-to-face where I could draw a graph/diagram, write out a long equation (something email is crap for - try writing out the equations for elastohydrodynamic lubrication in any kind of electronic format) and get the concept across. This would take 5 minutes of my time (and the student's time), whereas composing an email would take 30+.
I also frequently get aksed my opinion (and ask opinions of others) on a problem that someone may be having with a (for example) problem with their numerical model. A 15 minute conversation can go through a whole host of problems, thoughts and (possible) answers; email would have taken 3+ hours and at least 15 replies, wasting both our time.
Another situation where I think email has no place is for design brain-storming - you simply can't keep up with everyone's ideas and modifications and scratchings (drawings) over email. I'm talking about the kind of design brain storming you might do to solve a problem in mechanical engineering.
Or maybe, "We are dishonest and will be lying to you about our product. We don't want you to have our lies documented. Please call."
Sadly, the fact that the responses to this posting (the parent, not yours specifically) largely talk about blame and having to put things in writing, is a sad statement on the way society is headed - the I-can-get-some-money-so-I'm-gonna-sue mentality.
Don't get me wrong - email has a place if used properly (I can instantly email results to someone so that when I come and talk to them tomorrow they have already seen them and will have more idea what I'm talking about, for example), but I think that many people underestimate the value of face-to-face communication and the humble paper-and-pen. Of course, this assumes that travel time is not a problem.
I have no doubt that if nVidia, ATi, Matrox or whoever released a card that stank the place right up then these guys would write about it - what do you think they'd do, michael, fake benchmark results?
hmmm... not so sure I agree with you. I'm confident they don't fake benchmark results because there are far too many sites out there running numbers on all the latest hardware - it would be too easy to spot this kind of blatant bad reviewing.
But I'm not so sure that a bad product will get a negative review, particularly if the product manufacturer is a big player. Some of these review sites are big names (in the right circles; gaming for example) and their opinions count with consumers. But the sites themselves also depend on "breaking the news first" for their customers. A bad review might lead to a hardware company not being so willing to give out pre-production stuff in the future. I'm not saying that the reviewers are kissing manufacturer backsides, but I wouldn't be surprised if they temper their bad reviews.
Well, nickel-iron asteroids are about 80% solid metal. That doesn't need a whole lot of treating to separate.
(I think) You've missed the point of the original post - it still needs to be treated. The fact it is more concentrated makes the economic return greater, but it doesn't (usually) change the treatment process, or negate the need for it.
Still, it's got quite a bit of aluminum and iron, and they are very useful.
both of which need to be extracted from the base ore. In the case of aluminium (I'm not from the US so don't try and correct my spelling on that one!), extraction and purification requires a lot of water, which is something of a problem on the moon.
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In Australia copper coins (1c & 2c) were taken out of circulation in 1991 (I think). So everything is rounded to a multiple of 5c. The rules for the rounding (set out by law) are:
For cash transactions:
1 & 2 cents -- rounded DOWN to the nearest 10 cents
3 & 4 cents -- rounded UP to the nearest 5 cents
6 & 7 cents -- rounded DOWN to the nearest 5 cents
8 & 9 cents -- rounded UP to the nearest 10 cents
Rounding is on the total value of the bill. Individual items should never be rounded.
And where a consumer pays by cheque, credit card or EFTPOS (electronic transaction) there is no need to round at all.
So basically you win some and you lose some, but it evens out in the end. If you're really diligent, yes you can use it to your advantage, but most people have a life instead.
Do what Australia did a while back and round everything to the nearest 5c and get rid of 1c and 2c coins entirely (so now Australian coins are 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1 and $2). I couldn't decide whether I liked it to start with, but after a little while you realise just how much shrapnel you carry around and have no intention of using except to empty it from your pocket/wallet at the end of every day. Every time I go to another country and have to again deal with 1/2 cent/euro cent/pence/etc I just appreciate this move even more.
In addition, who really cares about 3DMark?
... sorry, I got on my soapbox for a minute there. I hope my cynicism of the online hardware review industry wasn't too obvious ;)
It's interesting that you bring that up, because the simple fact is that all the fanboys and hardware junkies care about the 3DMark scores. I mean, let's face it - if nobody cared about 5784 3DMarks, then this wouldn't be news.
But it is news because all those hardware sites out there that have to publish every single number under the sun and then present them on graphs with cut axes so they can have the longest review and be the biggest and best hardware site and get early beta products that they can favourably review so they get more early products
Why not use time which is wasted on 3DMark benchmark for benchmarking real games?
I don't think FutureMARK would be very happy to hear you say that, but would it solve the fact that the drivers could be written to take shortcuts when the games are used for benchmarking? The number of games commonly used for benchmarking is a reasonably small subset. I'm not a programmer, but it would surely be no more difficult than what was done with the 3DMark benchmark?
Liquids are incompressible.
no they're not - if they were incompresssible they could never be pressurised. It's why they're so useful in hydraulics. You can generate a high pressure by compressing the liquid by only a very small amount and that pressure is almost instantly transferred to all parts attached to the system. Lubrication also works precisely because liquids are compressible (that's simplifying it, but let's go with it for now).
Furthermore, if you made the probe a solid sphere, it'd also be pretty much indestructible.
That is also wrong - solids are also compressible, though in every day circumstances the pressures are never anywhere near high enough for this to be of any concern. However, when you're talking about the pressures at the centre of the earth, I'm pretty sure you've gone out of the realms of "every day circumstances".
I have to admit, it would be a very intriguing and interesting design problem.
My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.
Well, speaking from experience I can honestly say that grading a paper electronically is a right pain in the arse. It's almost downright impossible if it's mathematically heavy (as in lots of equations, something computers and word processors especiall are still not very good at).
When I grade/mark a paper I tend to make a lot of comments, not just read it and put a mark on it. I could do that electronically but I've always felt that unless I'm giving something a perfect mark I owe it to the student to give them helpful comments. Whether they take any notice of them of course, is another matter!
some of these blogs actually contain some pretty handy info from time to time [my emphasis]
yeh, that's true, but let's face it - the vast majority are complete and utter drivel and manage to make a cereal packet look like an interesting read.
and she supports Arsenal !! ;)
Are politicians that DAFT to see what is going wrong?
... ??
I believe this is known as a rhetorical question
Seriously though, although the answer is defintely yes, I think it is difficult to expect the politicians themselves to be deeply knowledgeable about this subject. Most of the IT/IP laws associated with the internet that have been passed in the last few years provide more than enough evidence that the people who make the decisions blatantly don't understand the situation. I think a lot of the blame lies with the advisors, the people who should know what they are talking about and who should see where this is going.
I'm not sure how American politics works, but in Australia, politicians move portfolios all the time, and there is no way any of them can become an expert in their area in just a few months.
It seems to me that politicians are making simple stuff complex.
That's because most politicians, advisers, speech writers and behind-the-scenes people in politics are lawyers, and making simple things unnecesarily complicated is what they do for a living. The law doesn't allow for common sense, and there is no room for it in politics either.
I know I have a very negative and apathetic view of politics and politicians, but until I see evidence to the contrary, I don't think I'm that far off the mark.
It could well explain why much of the stuff being pumped out by the music industry today is complete and utter crap.
Give me text ads over those bloody annoying pop-over flash advertisements any day. Those things actually manage to annoy me so much that I go out of my way to make sure that I don't buy the product.
We should be giving them the bare minimum: a constitution, a bill of rights, and a system of government including a house and senate and the like, plus ways for them to write their own laws and get out.
:) ) have absolutely no right whatsoever to impose a constitution, bill of rights or system of govt on the Iraqi people. They should be free to decide whether they want this themselves and then be allowed to set it up themselves. If they want [what you propose], then for sure you can advise them, but it is not for you to say that they should choose this way to live.
:)
This is not the bare minimum - the bare minimum is food, shelter, clothing, health, water, power, etc. An interim government would also be needed.
You (as in the USA, not you personally
Of course, technically, the USA/coalition actually conquered Iraq, so there is nothing to stop them imposing anything they want on the Iraqi people. GWB, Blair et al have been at such pains to point out that this is not what the coalition want to that this would surely only bring more anti-american/british sentiment and smack of gross hypocrisy.
But perhaps I am just bitter because Rosen bothers me.
aren't we all
Gonna get modded to shit, but what the hell ...
It's the least colonial activity we could possibly do that wasn't irresponsibly abrupt.
As other posters have pointed out, surely getting IP laws up and running in Iraq is not really a priority when basic services are needed. And surely IP laws don't come under "least colonial activity".
Remember: we conquered Iraq.
I'm sorry, but hasn't your president and administration spent the last few months painstakingly pointing out that the coalition liberated Iraq from it's evil ruler?
Anything created for the sense of a message is art.
... just did some googling and he has created some amazing buildings, and I agree that they are unique and beautiful, but I don't consider them "art". Just like car designs - they may well be beautiful and conjure up all sorts of emotions in people, but they are not art.
I know several people who paint simply because they enjoy to paint. They don't paint for money or for praise or to make cheap presents. There is no poignant statement or message, just simply because they enjoy creating the act of painting.
Architecture is most certainly art.
See, I don't agree - which I guess was partly the point of your post! Most architecture has a definite purpose (holding up a roof; not exactly right, but I'm sure you get my meaning) which I don't think is part of "art". The architecture that is created more as an industrial sculpture I would call art, though some of that stuff is pretty stupid. That is of course just a personal opinion that you're free to disagree with, but I really feel that to truly be art the art must be created for no other purpose.
Take a look sometime at the architecture of Tadao Ando, a Japanese architect. His use of curves and natural light in his buildings are amazing.
hmmm
Something that has always fascinated me - can ayone provide a definition of "art". I mean the type of art that hangs in galleries and modern art museums and people argue endlessly about whether it really is art or is just plain stupid. The type of art that this is trying to classify HTML under?
The best one I've found is "the products of human creativity", but that still seems way too broad. Personally I feel that art should have no functional purpose, so something that has a purpose (a building say) can be beautiful, but I don't think it is art.
Is that all IMAX really is? Do I just suck?
... I'm a bit of an IMAX addict myself, but I have to say that the IMAX format most definitely does not suck. However, I'll also qualify that by saying that it works much better when the films are actually made with IMAX format in mind from the word go. The best films I've seen on IMAX have been more documentaries, rather than movies.
hmm
Some really cool IMAX films to check out are:
* Close encounters in the 3rd Dimension - yeh, it's a little bit "educational" (it's basically an intro to 3D, IMAX style), but it was also a bit of an attempt to "show off" the format, so there are some absolutely mind-blowing 3D sequences in it. I would really recommend this as a first IMAX movie.
* Space Station 3D - absolutely stunning, enough said. The only thing wrong with this is Tom Cruise as the narrator.
* Everest - Just see this for the absolutely gorgeous nature scenery and ignore the attempts to turn it into a story. The helicopter ride up the Lukla (?) valley in Nepal is breathtaking, and the scenes filmed around the time of the Everest tragedy on May 10, 1996 put the whole thing in perspective.
* Shakleton's Antarctic Adventure - Go and see this for two reasons. Firstly, the amazing scenery, but most importantly, to see just what a bunch of hard bastards these guys were!
* Titanic: Ghosts of the Abyss - This is the footage that James Cameron filmed when he did the recon stuff for the Titanic movie.
I reckon it's more likely to do with "ease of manufacture" and being able to place the cover over the hole without worrying orientation.
Health & safety would probably have a field day with manhole covers being rolled around site!
Why people are still talking about running a car on vegetable oil when we can turn vegetables into real (petroleum) oil, I don't know...
Although I'm quoting the parent, my comment is not directly related.
All of these new fuel technologies - and I include hydrogen fuel, fuel cells, biodiesel, alcohol-based fuels, etc in this comment - are great, and some of them require little modification of the car (diesel engines are quite tolerant of different fuels, while petrol is not so good). Lots of people often wonder why these are not being adopted much more quickly, and why some of the major manufacturers are not already producing models that use these environment-friendly technologies.
One of the biggest factors that is holding back wide scale adoption of these technologies is the infrastructure that is already in place and supplies your car with fuel - the service/petrol stations [insert whatever you call them in your country!]. The cost involved in changing these over to, for example, hydrogen pumps, is absolutely staggering and far outweighs the cost of converting the cars themselves over. This is particularly true in countries like the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, etc. And, like we all know, money does all the talking so until a solution to this problem is found I can't see the situation changing much.
I've done a lot of high level maths myself, and perhaps [/sarcasm] was not the best word to use in my original post; I probably should have used [/joking] instead.
Maths seems to be one of the few things (especially at high levels such as this or when you move into R^n dimensions) that is extremely difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to put into plain english at all. How can you possibly describe, for example, a 5-dimensional object (or object in R5 space) - you can't make up an analogy or describe something more familiar in that case? Like some other posters have pointed out, I don't think this can be put into plain english - I was poking fun at the thought of someone even trying!
Loosely speaking, this means that every 3-dimensional object that has a set of sphere-like properties can be stretched or squeezed until it is a 3-sphere without breaking it. Note that a 3-sphere consists of all those points in 4-dimensional space R4 that have a distance of 1 from the origin.
...
Well why didn't you just say so in the first place. It's so simple when you put it in plain english
[/sarcasm]
Furthermore, has anyone explained to us WHY we're going to Mars?
.sig for details.
Why should we go to Mars? I'll tell you why - it's called dreaming. see my
It's all right - I'll join you.
I used to play computer games all the time when I was 15-21. I could actually pick up one of those rpg games and play the entire game the whole way through and discover everything there was to discover
I'm not trying to say gaming is not having a life, but I just can't fathom how people find the time to play these games that require a lot of time devoted to them. I spend most of my work day looking at a computer screen of some description or other - I can't think of anything worse than going home after work and sitting down in front of a computer. Much less spending my weekend doing it as well.
yeh, I think I'm just getting old
Very touchy issue indeed.
I (respectfully of course!) disagree - I don't think this is at all a touchy issue except from the point of view of the student. The age of student this seems to be talking about is well below age 18, which is when (generalising I know, but in most places) children become adults in the eyes of the law and no longer come under the "cover" of their parents. At this sort of age, the parents have every right to know their son/daughter(s) marks. Now, if this system was implemented at a university level, where the students are old enough that their parents no longer have a (legal anyway) right to this information, that would be a touchy issue.
How the parents choose to use this information is up to them - I agree that checking this every single day is going to harbour resentment, but that choice is for the parents to make.
However, the security of this system from the outside world is what we should be focussing on, not the provision of information that parents have been seeking for quite some time (and, in my opinion, have every right to).
This is too technical to discuss in email, please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.
PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical? Perhaps they should answer more like: "I am far, far too stupid to respond to this in writing. My writing skills suck, and I don't communicate well but can at least manage to pull it off in a verbal conversation. Please call."
I'm going to strongly disagree with you here, but I suspect that my perspective/background on this has more to do with it. E-mail has a place in the communications "toolbox", but I have frequently come across situations where it can be a right major pain in the ass. Almost all of these situations have come because someone is too lazy to come and see me face-to-face when I could have explained a concept to them in 5 minutes by drawing some diagrams - something I could never have done in 100 emails. And, most of these cases are highly technical, something I don't think email is particularly suited to. Of course, my "technical" may differ to yours.
I'll be more specific - I did some amount of teaching (university) in mechanical engineering (all years). Ironically, one fo the things I taught was communication in engineering! It was quite frequent to get a student email me with a question about a lab, assignment, tutorial, etc. Often the explanations for this could be done in 5 minutes face-to-face where I could draw a graph/diagram, write out a long equation (something email is crap for - try writing out the equations for elastohydrodynamic lubrication in any kind of electronic format) and get the concept across. This would take 5 minutes of my time (and the student's time), whereas composing an email would take 30+.
I also frequently get aksed my opinion (and ask opinions of others) on a problem that someone may be having with a (for example) problem with their numerical model. A 15 minute conversation can go through a whole host of problems, thoughts and (possible) answers; email would have taken 3+ hours and at least 15 replies, wasting both our time.
Another situation where I think email has no place is for design brain-storming - you simply can't keep up with everyone's ideas and modifications and scratchings (drawings) over email. I'm talking about the kind of design brain storming you might do to solve a problem in mechanical engineering.
Or maybe, "We are dishonest and will be lying to you about our product. We don't want you to have our lies documented. Please call."
Sadly, the fact that the responses to this posting (the parent, not yours specifically) largely talk about blame and having to put things in writing, is a sad statement on the way society is headed - the I-can-get-some-money-so-I'm-gonna-sue mentality.
Don't get me wrong - email has a place if used properly (I can instantly email results to someone so that when I come and talk to them tomorrow they have already seen them and will have more idea what I'm talking about, for example), but I think that many people underestimate the value of face-to-face communication and the humble paper-and-pen. Of course, this assumes that travel time is not a problem.
I have no doubt that if nVidia, ATi, Matrox or whoever released a card that stank the place right up then these guys would write about it - what do you think they'd do, michael, fake benchmark results?
... not so sure I agree with you. I'm confident they don't fake benchmark results because there are far too many sites out there running numbers on all the latest hardware - it would be too easy to spot this kind of blatant bad reviewing.
...
hmmm
But I'm not so sure that a bad product will get a negative review, particularly if the product manufacturer is a big player. Some of these review sites are big names (in the right circles; gaming for example) and their opinions count with consumers. But the sites themselves also depend on "breaking the news first" for their customers. A bad review might lead to a hardware company not being so willing to give out pre-production stuff in the future. I'm not saying that the reviewers are kissing manufacturer backsides, but I wouldn't be surprised if they temper their bad reviews.
just a thought
Well, nickel-iron asteroids are about 80% solid metal. That doesn't need a whole lot of treating to separate.
(I think) You've missed the point of the original post - it still needs to be treated. The fact it is more concentrated makes the economic return greater, but it doesn't (usually) change the treatment process, or negate the need for it.
Still, it's got quite a bit of aluminum and iron, and they are very useful.
both of which need to be extracted from the base ore. In the case of aluminium (I'm not from the US so don't try and correct my spelling on that one!), extraction and purification requires a lot of water, which is something of a problem on the moon.