Yeah, that's a weird statement for the GP to make, and I'm a Canadian. The government doesn't hold a monopoly on violence or means of violence, and nor should it, in a civilized society.
If the state has no fear of its populace then you end up with tyranny -- even if that government is democratically elected.
The US does a lot of weird things, but the 2nd amendment -- taken as a whole, not as the snippets bandied around -- is not one of them. (All of those amendments are excellent, by the way, and many governments -- mine included -- have used them as a framework for what should go into a Constitution.) One would, however, point out that things like handguns and rifles are ineffective against things like warships and long-range missiles, which ARE things the government has a monopoly on.
Interestingly enough, the city I'm from had a "near-shore" call centre. I'm Canadian, and we've got the Western Pacific accent here.
They were considered an excellent bargain because the staff spoke fluent, unaccented English. The customers loved it.
It messed up our local economy in a strange way -- West paid $10 / hour to start, which meant that every store in town, from KFC to the Dollar Store, had to pay at least that or they wouldn't get staff. West employed thousands of people, and had a voracious appetite. When you can get $8 frying burgers or $10 + bus passes + tuition bonuses + entry into car draws, we had stores "closed today due to lack of staff".
When our dollar reached parity last year, it became more expensive to run West than it was to just pay for Americans to do the job. They closed.
in government, when you can't be EFFECTIVE, yet you are asked 'what are you doing with your time' its shit like this that keeps the burrocrats (sic) 'busy'.
clearly, they don't want to touch any 3rd rails (real issues that need real attention yet will get them unelected next go-round). so they go for easy fruit.
pathetic.
I have zero respect for lawmakers, judges and those in the position of power. lately, all 'understandings' of things technical make me puke. legal guys are worse than children in how illogical they really are, once you look close enough.
So when was the last time you went to your rep's office and told them about yourself?
"Hello, I'm a constituent, and I'd like to talk to [ my rep ] about technical issues being proposed / in the news / reflecting the upcoming election.
"I represent a group that [ tech tech tech ], and I wanted to let you know about services we can provide for you. You're an expert on government and the law, and sometimes you'll hear about technical bills. Some things proposed may be impossible, or split very fine hairs on details that you don't have the time to devote to total research. If there are ever questions we can answer for you, we're here, for you, as a resource, to provide a high-level summary."
Since you're complaining on/., I'd say you're a slacktivist who has never done such a thing. Do you even know your rep's name?
An order of magnitude is 10x and ignores the base units.
For example, 34 is one order of magnitude greater than 7. 340 is two orders of magnitude greater than 7.
In the case of the Moon -> Mars change, 78M / 384k = ~203. 200x is two orders of magnitude. You can also check this by putting the values into SI and comparing the exponent: 7.8 x 10^7 vs. 3.84 x 10 ^ 5. Since 7 - 5 = 2, the order of magnitude is 2.
So, the answer to your question of "but what order of magnitude are you using?" is "the standard definition".
I have always admired the American response to hate speech. "It may be harmful, it may be spiteful and untrue, but you can say whatever the fuck you want to say."*
They've fucked that up in Canada, and it makes me sad.
Well, DUH, it HAS to be perfectly optimized for the hardware.
Battery management requires checking every single pin on your hardware and ensuring that you've set the i/o correctly for sleep mode.
If you have even one pin with a pull-up resistor set as an output, then you'll get lower battery life than the nominal case. If you have just random I/O on unused pins, then you're going to get greater drain than ideal.
I'll qualify that statement by saying I'm an Electrical Engineer with embedded experience. One of the products I worked on was a GPS / VHF tracker with a 12uA standby current. Another was a VHF tracker with an 8uA standby current. Slight modifications to the firmware would bring the standby current up to 50-100 mA. That's more than 1000x more standby current.
My experience dealing with Linux developers (and realistically, software developers in general) is that they're all terrible at determining the link between hardware and software. Look at the derision you get online towards C. Linux devs are worse -- if you're not running their exact hardware on a machine you bought in the last month, then it's your problem, not theirs. "Weird, it works here. Have you tried recompiling the drivers?"
It's fairly easy to map these pins, BTW. All you have to do is set everything to an output, set it to 0, and then turn everything to an input. Everything that's high has a pullup resistor. Do the same with 1 and everything that's low has a pull-down resistor. Now you know which pins must be inputs when you're not using them.
Of course, since you taught yourself programming with Ruby on Rails, you know all this, right? It's not like you'd have to have some low-level knowledge of the hardware in order to effectively make a complete synergistic hardware and software package.~
"I didn't stab him. A guy came in wanting to stab someone, so I told him where to get a knife. He then put the knife on the counter so other people could go stabbing with the knife."
...why is another Windows PC considered Slashdot front page material?
More than 50% of the MS haters here still use Windows, after some kind of epic fail when installing ubuntu!
Yeah, things like "Flash won't work", "ATI isn't supported", and "Yamaha doesn't make sound cards" tend to make Ubuntu a pain in the ass.
MS, for all its flaws, does make a product that works, has hardware support, and does so with less work that with Ubuntu. (I have to set my screen resolution every 2-3 reboots, for example, and I don't have access to any of the 3d features, S-video, secondary port, or TV out on my card.)
Ubuntu works best if you're running the same hardware specs as one of the developers. If you've got something slightly older, you get the "buy a new computer LOL" response, and that comes with Windows anyway. The choices, therefore, are to either dick around with Ubuntu for hours to get it to work halfway OR to just use the MS product you've already got. At least that way you can run the software you want to run.
In most cases, it's the contractor who loses the drives.
Real Secret stuff, yeah, those drives get totally fucked over. (Most of the time, contractors work on "unclassified" documents.) You'd need magic or a time machine to get anything out of those. Usually, though, they just get stored forever and ever, amen.
Does the US still melt the bits after they go through the sieve or did they move to the "mix with concrete" method?
I think the best comparison comes from the Dune movie itself. One of the tracks is a remake of "Who Wants to Live Forever?".* It's all right on its own, but pales in comparison to Queen's version. It's "I've got a story to tell before I die" vs. "I like this song and get paid for singing it."
The damnable part about the Anderson-class Dune books is that they either didn't read them or didn't understand them. There were parts in the prequels and sequels that didn't make sense at all when you filter them through the original.
Frank Herbert left Easter Eggs in all his books; little things for you to figure out and discover without having it spoon-fed. You'd think about it for years afterwards. Where did Ix come from? How did Earth get destroyed? What price did humanity pay during the Jihad? That's all answered in the books, but only if you looked really hard.
If it makes you feel any better, Terry Pratchet's wife is under strict instructions: "When I die, destroy the computer and all my notes before you call the doctor."
*If I'm wrong, I haven't SEEN the movie -- it's what shows up on sky.fm when the song plays. I think Sarah Brightman is singing.
So by your logic... since you are not a first responder (Fire, EMS, etc..), those frequencies are also useless.. ok, just don't bitch when your house is on fire and no one can communicate and coordinate.
Have you seen the specs for p25 trunked radio? The no communication / no co-ordination part is basically in the spec.
And to bring it back to Star Wars, if Leia knew they were let go and that the escape was just too easy, why did she fly directly to the sekrit Rebel base instead of meeting at a safehouse somewhere? They still would have been tracked but R2 could have had the data offloaded and analyzed with a bit more peace and quiet. And the Rebels must have some mad hackers on their end to be able to look through a set of plans like the Death Star's and found that fatal flaw in twenty minutes. Microsoft wouldn't stand a chance.
I work with point clouds. A 10x10 room takes up about 2 Gigs.
The sheer volume of data in the Death Star plans would have been an untold number of Petabytes.
Also, they had more time than 20 minutes due to the relativistic effects of hyperspace. This always comes up when I'm at work and away from my d20 source books, but there's a significant time debt owed when you go through hyperspace.
The Falcon is exceedingly fast; with a good roll, you can get somewhere in a few days rather than a few years.
R2-D2
Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."
I believe his primary function is a flight droid so they were built to interface with ships. Not a lot else. John Scalzi seems to suffer from the "must have everything" school of thought and doesn't think the future will focus on minimalism and getting one thing right. Thank god he's not writing software and just another hot air blogger. I reject Episodes I, II & III so I don't know what he's talking about with the oil slick and jets.
R2 is a Sith Lord.
Think about it for a minute. 1. We know that damaged Sith get a mechanical exoskeleton. 2. People can understand R2. Canon states that requires The Force. 3. He's got lightning attacks. 4. He was present at the very beginning of the series. Used Force Persuade to prevent the shots from being fired. "Hold your fire; there are no life signs aboard." 5. His jets can't provide enough thrust to lift him. He can fly. We've seen him do it without using his thrusters. 6. Palpatine hid himself from the Jedi; it's a known trick. 7. In IV, he was able to stand outside the bar without getting picked up by the Stormtroopers who were looking for him. "I am not the droid you're looking for."
Watch the scene with the cave on Dagobah again when Yoda and R2 are judging Luke's performance.
Also, LCD and plasma look like hell. That's the reason I haven't replaced my CRT. At least that's the case on every single one I've ever seen, no matter what feed it's using.
Blue-Ray feed with HDMI cables on a 240Hz LCD still has ghosting and jitter.
Plasma is like watching a slideshow.
Seems like you missed the last 3 years in HDTV development.
In all fairness, I only know what I saw two weeks ago at the store.
Also, LCD and plasma look like hell. That's the reason I haven't replaced my CRT. At least that's the case on every single one I've ever seen, no matter what feed it's using.
Blue-Ray feed with HDMI cables on a 240Hz LCD still has ghosting and jitter.
-Boeing Museum in Seattle http://www.museumofflight.org/ Fairly small, but has a lot of early pioneer planes hanging there.
What?
The Boeing Factory tour in Everett is the biggest building in the world. It can hold Disneyland and still leave 12 acres for parking.
It is an absolute must-see tour if you have any interest at all in science or technology. They are assembling AIRPLANES in front of you and they are doing it on an assembly line. No stories I have ever seen or heard showed me the raw power of the United States like that tour. (I'm Canadian) I won't spoil it for you, though. You've got to fill in the blanks yourself.
The website you are looking for the the Future of Flight tour. The museum of flight is about 45 minutes to the south of the factory, and I'm sure it's very nice.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, because we only have the 2 colours, black and white.
Moderation.
Or have I just been dreaming the last 6 years in Iraq?
Sadly, no.
Yeah, that's a weird statement for the GP to make, and I'm a Canadian. The government doesn't hold a monopoly on violence or means of violence, and nor should it, in a civilized society.
If the state has no fear of its populace then you end up with tyranny -- even if that government is democratically elected.
The US does a lot of weird things, but the 2nd amendment -- taken as a whole, not as the snippets bandied around -- is not one of them. (All of those amendments are excellent, by the way, and many governments -- mine included -- have used them as a framework for what should go into a Constitution.) One would, however, point out that things like handguns and rifles are ineffective against things like warships and long-range missiles, which ARE things the government has a monopoly on.
I never worked at West.
I had aspirations to work in the building back when JDS built it, and then later with BCAS, but no, I was never a phone monkey.
Interestingly enough, the city I'm from had a "near-shore" call centre. I'm Canadian, and we've got the Western Pacific accent here.
They were considered an excellent bargain because the staff spoke fluent, unaccented English. The customers loved it.
It messed up our local economy in a strange way -- West paid $10 / hour to start, which meant that every store in town, from KFC to the Dollar Store, had to pay at least that or they wouldn't get staff. West employed thousands of people, and had a voracious appetite. When you can get $8 frying burgers or $10 + bus passes + tuition bonuses + entry into car draws, we had stores "closed today due to lack of staff".
When our dollar reached parity last year, it became more expensive to run West than it was to just pay for Americans to do the job. They closed.
in government, when you can't be EFFECTIVE, yet you are asked 'what are you doing with your time' its shit like this that keeps the burrocrats (sic) 'busy'.
clearly, they don't want to touch any 3rd rails (real issues that need real attention yet will get them unelected next go-round). so they go for easy fruit.
pathetic.
I have zero respect for lawmakers, judges and those in the position of power. lately, all 'understandings' of things technical make me puke. legal guys are worse than children in how illogical they really are, once you look close enough.
So when was the last time you went to your rep's office and told them about yourself?
"Hello, I'm a constituent, and I'd like to talk to [ my rep ] about technical issues being proposed / in the news / reflecting the upcoming election.
"I represent a group that [ tech tech tech ], and I wanted to let you know about services we can provide for you. You're an expert on government and the law, and sometimes you'll hear about technical bills. Some things proposed may be impossible, or split very fine hairs on details that you don't have the time to devote to total research. If there are ever questions we can answer for you, we're here, for you, as a resource, to provide a high-level summary."
Since you're complaining on /., I'd say you're a slacktivist who has never done such a thing. Do you even know your rep's name?
That style of bike is called a Penny-farthing.
It's not like we use steam for cutting-edge tech like nuclear power plants or anything.
An order of magnitude is 10x and ignores the base units.
For example, 34 is one order of magnitude greater than 7. 340 is two orders of magnitude greater than 7.
In the case of the Moon -> Mars change, 78M / 384k = ~203. 200x is two orders of magnitude. You can also check this by putting the values into SI and comparing the exponent: 7.8 x 10^7 vs. 3.84 x 10 ^ 5. Since 7 - 5 = 2, the order of magnitude is 2.
So, the answer to your question of "but what order of magnitude are you using?" is "the standard definition".
I have always admired the American response to hate speech. "It may be harmful, it may be spiteful and untrue, but you can say whatever the fuck you want to say."*
They've fucked that up in Canada, and it makes me sad.
*except on TV.
Hey, I'm working on the "Hot Flames" achievement here by getting a "+5 Flamebait".
Well, DUH, it HAS to be perfectly optimized for the hardware.
Battery management requires checking every single pin on your hardware and ensuring that you've set the i/o correctly for sleep mode.
If you have even one pin with a pull-up resistor set as an output, then you'll get lower battery life than the nominal case. If you have just random I/O on unused pins, then you're going to get greater drain than ideal.
I'll qualify that statement by saying I'm an Electrical Engineer with embedded experience. One of the products I worked on was a GPS / VHF tracker with a 12uA standby current. Another was a VHF tracker with an 8uA standby current. Slight modifications to the firmware would bring the standby current up to 50-100 mA. That's more than 1000x more standby current.
My experience dealing with Linux developers (and realistically, software developers in general) is that they're all terrible at determining the link between hardware and software. Look at the derision you get online towards C. Linux devs are worse -- if you're not running their exact hardware on a machine you bought in the last month, then it's your problem, not theirs. "Weird, it works here. Have you tried recompiling the drivers?"
It's fairly easy to map these pins, BTW. All you have to do is set everything to an output, set it to 0, and then turn everything to an input. Everything that's high has a pullup resistor. Do the same with 1 and everything that's low has a pull-down resistor. Now you know which pins must be inputs when you're not using them.
Of course, since you taught yourself programming with Ruby on Rails, you know all this, right? It's not like you'd have to have some low-level knowledge of the hardware in order to effectively make a complete synergistic hardware and software package.~
I'd say it's more like this:
"I didn't stab him. A guy came in wanting to stab someone, so I told him where to get a knife. He then put the knife on the counter so other people could go stabbing with the knife."
...why is another Windows PC considered Slashdot front page material?
More than 50% of the MS haters here still use Windows, after some kind of epic fail when installing ubuntu!
Yeah, things like "Flash won't work", "ATI isn't supported", and "Yamaha doesn't make sound cards" tend to make Ubuntu a pain in the ass.
MS, for all its flaws, does make a product that works, has hardware support, and does so with less work that with Ubuntu. (I have to set my screen resolution every 2-3 reboots, for example, and I don't have access to any of the 3d features, S-video, secondary port, or TV out on my card.)
Ubuntu works best if you're running the same hardware specs as one of the developers. If you've got something slightly older, you get the "buy a new computer LOL" response, and that comes with Windows anyway. The choices, therefore, are to either dick around with Ubuntu for hours to get it to work halfway OR to just use the MS product you've already got. At least that way you can run the software you want to run.
In most cases, it's the contractor who loses the drives.
Real Secret stuff, yeah, those drives get totally fucked over. (Most of the time, contractors work on "unclassified" documents.) You'd need magic or a time machine to get anything out of those. Usually, though, they just get stored forever and ever, amen.
Does the US still melt the bits after they go through the sieve or did they move to the "mix with concrete" method?
I think the best comparison comes from the Dune movie itself. One of the tracks is a remake of "Who Wants to Live Forever?".* It's all right on its own, but pales in comparison to Queen's version. It's "I've got a story to tell before I die" vs. "I like this song and get paid for singing it."
The damnable part about the Anderson-class Dune books is that they either didn't read them or didn't understand them. There were parts in the prequels and sequels that didn't make sense at all when you filter them through the original.
Frank Herbert left Easter Eggs in all his books; little things for you to figure out and discover without having it spoon-fed. You'd think about it for years afterwards. Where did Ix come from? How did Earth get destroyed? What price did humanity pay during the Jihad? That's all answered in the books, but only if you looked really hard.
If it makes you feel any better, Terry Pratchet's wife is under strict instructions: "When I die, destroy the computer and all my notes before you call the doctor."
*If I'm wrong, I haven't SEEN the movie -- it's what shows up on sky.fm when the song plays. I think Sarah Brightman is singing.
So by your logic... since you are not a first responder (Fire, EMS, etc..), those frequencies are also useless.. ok, just don't bitch when your house is on fire and no one can communicate and coordinate.
Have you seen the specs for p25 trunked radio? The no communication / no co-ordination part is basically in the spec.
And to bring it back to Star Wars, if Leia knew they were let go and that the escape was just too easy, why did she fly directly to the sekrit Rebel base instead of meeting at a safehouse somewhere? They still would have been tracked but R2 could have had the data offloaded and analyzed with a bit more peace and quiet. And the Rebels must have some mad hackers on their end to be able to look through a set of plans like the Death Star's and found that fatal flaw in twenty minutes. Microsoft wouldn't stand a chance.
I work with point clouds. A 10x10 room takes up about 2 Gigs.
The sheer volume of data in the Death Star plans would have been an untold number of Petabytes.
Also, they had more time than 20 minutes due to the relativistic effects of hyperspace. This always comes up when I'm at work and away from my d20 source books, but there's a significant time debt owed when you go through hyperspace.
The Falcon is exceedingly fast; with a good roll, you can get somewhere in a few days rather than a few years.
R2-D2
Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."
I believe his primary function is a flight droid so they were built to interface with ships. Not a lot else. John Scalzi seems to suffer from the "must have everything" school of thought and doesn't think the future will focus on minimalism and getting one thing right. Thank god he's not writing software and just another hot air blogger. I reject Episodes I, II & III so I don't know what he's talking about with the oil slick and jets.
R2 is a Sith Lord.
Think about it for a minute.
1. We know that damaged Sith get a mechanical exoskeleton.
2. People can understand R2. Canon states that requires The Force.
3. He's got lightning attacks.
4. He was present at the very beginning of the series. Used Force Persuade to prevent the shots from being fired. "Hold your fire; there are no life signs aboard."
5. His jets can't provide enough thrust to lift him. He can fly. We've seen him do it without using his thrusters.
6. Palpatine hid himself from the Jedi; it's a known trick.
7. In IV, he was able to stand outside the bar without getting picked up by the Stormtroopers who were looking for him. "I am not the droid you're looking for."
Watch the scene with the cave on Dagobah again when Yoda and R2 are judging Luke's performance.
Sith.
Also, LCD and plasma look like hell. That's the reason I haven't replaced my CRT. At least that's the case on every single one I've ever seen, no matter what feed it's using.
Blue-Ray feed with HDMI cables on a 240Hz LCD still has ghosting and jitter.
Plasma is like watching a slideshow.
Seems like you missed the last 3 years in HDTV development.
In all fairness, I only know what I saw two weeks ago at the store.
Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?
Also, LCD and plasma look like hell. That's the reason I haven't replaced my CRT. At least that's the case on every single one I've ever seen, no matter what feed it's using.
Blue-Ray feed with HDMI cables on a 240Hz LCD still has ghosting and jitter.
Plasma is like watching a slideshow.
If only there was some kind of map program that was portable and allowed you to look at the places you were and where you could go.
I think there'd be a market for that.
How does it work in the US?
I'm Canadian and my education is heavily subsidized by the government.
Foreign students do not get the subsidy and pay the university approximately 10x the amount I pay.
Does it work the same down there -- do foreign students pay more tuition? That would be important info w.r.t. their motivation.
Fantastic museum, and almost worth the airfare. I did not get nearly enough time there.
-Boeing Museum in Seattle http://www.museumofflight.org/
Fairly small, but has a lot of early pioneer planes hanging there.
What?
The Boeing Factory tour in Everett is the biggest building in the world. It can hold Disneyland and still leave 12 acres for parking.
It is an absolute must-see tour if you have any interest at all in science or technology. They are assembling AIRPLANES in front of you and they are doing it on an assembly line. No stories I have ever seen or heard showed me the raw power of the United States like that tour. (I'm Canadian) I won't spoil it for you, though. You've got to fill in the blanks yourself.
The website you are looking for the the Future of Flight tour. The museum of flight is about 45 minutes to the south of the factory, and I'm sure it's very nice.