Re:Oh, that's encouraging....
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BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
*Sigh* You're hopeless, aren't you? You're going to argue this until your blue in the face rather than displaying the self-reflective capacity to laugh along at the irony of what you said.
Go back and read your original post and see if any of what you just said can be reasonably inferred by an objective, third-party. It's people like you that give us Mac users a reputation for being humorless zealots.
Whatever. The situation's no longer funny. You've managed to kill the joke by being prickly and dense. Congratulations. I'm sure it's a real moral victory for you.
Oh, come on. Don't tell me that you can't see the inherent ironic humor in your post declaring that you won't play their top of the line FPS unless they port it to the Mac in the same sentence that you declare that you have 10 GB of games...
...that you are content with...
...that you didn't pay for (abandonware), and...
...that have such low graphics requirements that you can run them in DosBox.
I mean, wowwwww.... You're just their ideal customer, aren't you?
il they release a Mac version. In the meantime I have a 10GB abandonware archive that mostly runs fine under DosBox to amuse myself.
I'm sure that the developers are itching to port a modern FPS over to the Mac to pick up all those gamers who are satisfied by 10 year old abandonware.
I mean, good Lord, that's just a market that's itching for a modern FPS -- a market that demands rich graphics and is willing to pay to get it!
People driving more slowly, but less aggressively will have a higher traffic throughput than people trying to drive more quickly and aggressively in high traffic density situations.
People in Portland drive a little quicker on the freeways but keep at or under the speed limit on surface streets -- unlike Atlanta where it's whatever you can get away with. It takes some getting used to, and it's very frustrating when you're in a hurry and already worked up, but it's pretty comfortable if you're in a more chill mood. The homogeneity of speed also means less people getting frustrated at not being able to travel how fast they want to, and it provides less opportunities for rear-end collisions.
San Diego's a lot like Atlanta from what I hear. I'd seriously recommend living a month in a community with less aggressive traffic and trying to adapt to it. It'll give you a whole different perspective on what traffic is supposed to be like, especially if you take to heart the link I provided above.
We drive the speed limit on surface streets, but we do speed on freeways, traffic permitting. I-205 is posted 55mph, but the left lane normally does 65-70. I recently followed a cop doing 70 on 205.
Atlanta's highways are posted from 65 mph (outside of the metro-Atlanta area) to 55 mph within it. 55 mph is much more common in the areas most people would consider to be "Atlanta." When traffic isn't bumper to bumper, stop and go traffic, 65-70 mph is common in the slow lane there. Middle lanes average 70-75 mph, and the left lane is usually 75-85 mph. Do not get in one of the left two lanes unless you want to be tailgated at SOME point in your journey.
I've noticed people speeding in Portland, but it's noteworthy how much more timidly they do so. I haven't seen anyone drive about 65 mph except for me (until I notice how much I stick out and slow down).
The major sin of Portland drivers (in my mind) seems to be the slowness with with they turn (causing more people to be stuck at a red light when it cycles or to have to come to a stop in the road) and their willingness to turn onto the road close enough in front of you to force you have to slow down to avoid hitting them. I think that comes from the assumption that most people will just docilely slow down with no ill will. In Atlanta, you stand a good chance of getting tailgated and stalked for a few miles, angrily passed (with a quick cut-off in front), and/or flipped off. (Tailgating is the by far the most common aggressive response, though.)
I-5 between Vancouver and Wilsonville is pretty awful.
I've heard that, but isn't that starting to get out of the city, where you mix with drivers who don't have similar traffic control schema to train them? I haven't spent too much time in the northern half of the city.
Through downtown, traffic goes maybe 25mph tops if there aren't any accidents.
That's by design. Downtown traffic is supposed to flow more slowly due to the tightness of the streets and the sheer number of pedestrians there. Downtown traffic is slow even in Atlanta. I just has to be that way, especially with the sheer density of streets and traffic lights in Portland.
Side note: Portland pedestrians also seem to have a sense of entitlement even as far as out as the suburbs due to the city's walking and bike friendly nature. Atlanta pedestrians are only that way in downtown; elsewhere, a survival instinct makes them a little more wary. I find myself in humorous passive-aggressive confrontations because of this where my drilled in survival reflexes make me refuse to cross pedestrian crosswalks with cars present, and cars refuse to move on until I cross. Where I'm from, pedestrian crosswalks are (effectively) for excusing people who are already crossing them instead of for making drivers yield way. You don't presume to cross unless you don't see anybody coming. (Unless you live in downtown.)
If farmers were allowed to grow industrial hemp, it could succeed or fail on its own merit.
What, you mean in the free market like all other crops in the US? If that were the case, then why exactly are we still talking about ethanol from corn?
After 15+ years what has been the result of these policies? Snarled traffic, increased traffic, traffic idling in slow speed stop and go driving, increased smog from more vehicles operating in the most inefficient speed and rpm range for the internal combustion engine.
Frankly, my friend, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about if you're so pampered as to think that Portland traffic is ever "snarled."
Try driving in Atlanta for a couple of years before complaining about traffic. Portland is paradise in comparison; I tell you this from experience. You don't know what snarled or stop and go driving are like until it takes you 45 minutes to go 10 miles on a 8- to 10-lane interstate every damned day.
I've been shocked by the total lack of aggression in drivers here. They usually drive at or below the speed limit (like the law requires) instead of tailgating and trying to run off the road anyone doing less than 10-15 over the speed limit like they do in Atlanta. People here are also a LOT friendlier about letting people over to merge. As much pooh-poohing as you do of traffic calming devices, I seriously suggest that you live in an area that doesn't have them before dismissing the idea that traffic engineering can modify the behaviors of drivers.
There is a VERY marked difference in aggression between Portland and Atlanta, and I suspect that difference in how traffic is engineered here has something to do with it.
Unless he built his own Tor node, joined the network, then captured his proxied traffic - which is something ANY Tor admin could do, in which case its STILL not particulary insightful, cool, or 31337.
That's exactly what he did. The entire point of him doing so was (he claims) to demonstrate that people using TOR are not protected from anyone reading traffic that comes out the exit nodes if they don't bother to encrypt the traffic they send into TOR.
If the website owner feels it is necessary to use ads to support the cost of being on the internet, then the least they can do is avoid the flash "Bonk the _____ and get a ______" ads. If they aren't willing to do that then whether they like it or not I'm blocking their ads.
I feel the same way. I'm okay with non-intrusive ads, and I do (admittedly rarely) click on them. However, a site full of pop-ups, flash ads, or (worse) flash ads with audio and video will NEVER earn an ad click from me. They'll usually never get a second visit from me.
Given that criteria for what I'll accept, I find that you don't really need AdBlock. NoScript works well enough. Every single obnoxious ad requires either JavaScript, Java, Flash, or some combination thereof. If you don't white-list ad sites, then you'll never see the kind of ads that everybody hates while still rewarding people who use less obnoxious advertising.
Animated GIF ads and interstitial ads can still be a problem, but 95%+ of bad actors are dealt with with NoScript. As a bonus, you keep yourself safe from JS and XSS attacks.
Vampires? Fantasy and vampire books do not belong in the Hugos.
Vampires have been given the science fiction treatment before. Read "I am Legend" (1954) by Richard Matheson sometime. It's a survival horror story about the last living human in a world filled with vampires in the wake of a nuclear war.
If you haven't read Matheson's work, you should. He's won practically ever non-mainstream fiction award there is from the Hugo to the Nebula to the Edgar to the Golden Spur.
If you're buying a new car, consider opting for the Xenon HID headlamps ("fake" HIDs are worthless, as they actually cut light output). The extra ~$1000 premium is completely worth it (my last two vehicles have had Xenon lights and I'll never buy another new car without them).
As someone who has driven dark country roads for years, I'd like to see you and everyone else who buys those blasted things fined. I've always thought they should be illegal.
I don't think you appreciate how blinding those things are to see coming the other way at night. I usually end up not really being able to see anything other than the lines on the road for a few seconds after passing (even when the owner manages to remember to turn off their brights). I've always worried that I'm going to get in an accident after passing someone using those things.
Additionally, they really hurt. Why exactly can't they make bright headlights that don't rely on providing all the illumination from a very small, intense point? Some diffusion would go along way towards not hurting other drivers.
Anyone who thinks that a Hollywood, live-action movie remake of an extremely long running cartoon show is somehow going to be more true to the original story than the American cartoon has never, ever, in their entire life watched any American movie based on a cartoon or video game.
Ever.
Posing the question is tantamount to trolling on the front page.
There are two reasons that geeks tend to be social liberals. First, they've generally experienced the short end of the stick with respect to the sort of social conformity that conservatives and populists like. Telling other people who to live their personal lives and what kinds of entertainment they should enjoy doesn't go over well with geeks. They also tend not to buy into the "pep rally" form of patriotism that social conservatives favor.
Second, there's a greater trend in the geek population away from the sort of religious belief. Few geeks have the religious motivation to be against abortion and gay marriage, the two social rallying flags of social conservatives today in America.
So, that pretty much only leaves the economic axis to worry about to differentiate the remaining geek populace into either liberals or libertarians. This is why this Slashdot poll did not surprise me in the least. While there was no populist/authoritarian option, conservative was the least picked choice of the mainstream political beliefs, and liberal and libertarian were the top two.
So, then the question fundamentally comes down to, "What do you fear the most?"
An inefficient government running roughshod over you (taxation, interference in property rights, tyranny of the majority, etc).
Powerful, unaccountable private entities running roughshod over you (monopolies, externalities, inequity of power, etc).
Of course, this is a bit of an oversimplification (as is the notion that most people fit into these little political boxes), but it mostly suffices. I find that most libertarian and most liberal points of view come down to concerns that their favorite bogeyman will ruin everything if left unchecked and powerless. More nuanced views come from realizing that they both are pretty bad and that you have to make a choice how to balance them (even if you tend to throw the balance almost entirely one way or the other). The crazy ideologues you see here on Slashdot and elsewhere are the people who seem to never acknowledge that the other side's feared enemy is a problem too.
Okay, then let's compare Pensions in Europe (the bastion of none free think socialism) and Chile. Better yet, I'll let you all look that one up.
If I were you, I wouldn't use Chile as an example of a private pension plan working. The average return for people who went into the private system is lower than that of those who stuck with the public system, and overhead costs in the private system (run by a few for-profit companies) are significantly larger than that in the public system. Look into Thatcher's system in Britain for another great example of private overhead costs eating away pension money contrasted to the 1% overhead in America's Social Security system.
Also, the entire reason for social security is to provide security in old age and not a system of haves and have-nots based on how well/lucky they invested -- like Chile's system did -- and to protect against elderly poverty -- like Chile's system didn't.
Anyone who knows the chemical definition can quite easily guess at the meaning of its use in normal speech, which is really quite elegant. How do you think new words are coined anyway? They're often borrowed from other languages or domains.
I'm aware. However, most dictionaries do not seem to list a non-specific use. Hence applying it is just about as useful to clear conversation to as applying computer-speech like "heuristic" to common everyday speech. People in your field will understand you, but the average layman would be better served by using words like "rule."
Basically, my main complaint is that once you've been in a position where you're no longer in your ivory tower and have to communicate with other people, you sound like a pompous ass for using words like "polyvalent." You don't impress people who don't know the word. You don't particularly impress people who do know the word either, unless they're still in the juvenile, high school stage of life where they're still trying to compare their vocabulary with others as a geeky proxy for penis size.
Language is meant to be used for clear communication. It's people like him who never got past trying to prove some sort of dominance over others through the use of obscure $3 words who make reading so many doctoral essays such a pain in the neck. Would it have killed him to say "multi-use" instead? No, but he had to instead go and use an obscure technical term that has next to no use outside of a couple of technical domains for no good reason. Frankly, people like that should be mocked at every single turn until they learn to talk like people do.
As for polyvalent, it so happens it's a very common word in french and it's meaning, even in english, is spot on to what I intended to convey.
Unfortunately, this is English, and you should probably look up words in your second language before assuming that they work in it. As for polyvalent, most dictionaries I've seen do not list a general purpose meaning for it, meaning that its use in that manner borders on the esoteric.
But don't worry. By the time you're finished with high school, you'll realize that using the most obscure words in your vocabulary doesn't impress anyone and that clear communication may be actually harder, but it's more worthwhile.
You're missing a key point: Boot Camp and the promise of multi-boot makes getting an Apple machine a polyvalent solution.
While I am curious whether you've been looking for an opportunity to use that word in a sentence your whole life, I'm pretty sure that "polyvalent" doesn't really work here. The word's got a pretty specific use in chemistry and another in microbiology, after all.
Well, the reason he says that "someone whom Democrats can support" is because the Republicans would support literally anyone Bush nominated as long. The only exception to this that I can think of is Harriet Myers, and that was mostly because she didn't have a solid record showing opposition to abortion. Bush could put up a green aide who had just finished law school (but had interned with the Heritage Foundation), and the Republicans would vote in lock-step to confirm him. All that matters for them is party loyalty.
The Democrats aren't expecting someone with liberal or even terribly moderate views. They're just hoping for someone that isn't a total toady and that has some basic respect for civil rights and for government oversight. As much as their base would like them to go further, the people in office won't. To be honest, they probably don't even expect to get this much from Bush. He'll probably just give good enough of a candidate for the "let's get it over with" swing-vote crowd to rubber stamp, much like most of the rest of his nominees, or he'll try to slip someone in during a recess.
And if there's anyone who doesn't know which film based on a very long running and highly popular animated TV series the parent was paraphrasing, you're missing out and should find out and go watch it immediately.
Thanks. 'Cause we're sure to get the reference once we watch the film after getting the reference to know what to watch.
I'm not sure when this was written, but nowadays we have things like babelfish and google's language tools and Amikai (not a misspelling) that do instant translation fairly well.
Not well enough for Star Trek, and it never will. You don't even hear other people talking in their language -- only what the translation of what they say is. That's improbable enough, but there's another bigger problem -- the complete lack of lag and the ability to interrupt people mid-sentence.
If you interrupt someone in the middle of a sentence in different language, you may get completely different information. For example, in English you want to say something like "That man bought the watch I wore to work every day." Let's say that you were interrupted mid-sentence. Your listener would get the fact that "that man bought the watch..." Your listener would know that the watch was bought but not that you wore it to work every day.
Now let's say you were speaking Japanese instead. Due to a significant difference in word order, the sentence is best rendered as "[Every day] [to work] [wore] [watch] [that man] [bought]." If you were interrupted mid-sentence, your listener would only know that the watch was worn to work everyday and not that it was bought.
This is because Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb order instead of English's usual Subject-Verb-Object order and places all modifiers (including phrases and clauses) before the word they modify. Other languages present similar difficulties. Spanish places all modifiers after the word they modify (while English places adjectives & adverbs usually before and prepositions and clauses afterwards). Classical Arabic puts the verb first. Latin & Russian can have seemingly almost arbitrary word order.
Another complexity is the necessary context in a language. Many Japanese sentences would be considered sentence fragments in English. It's perfectly acceptable to simply use a verb without a subject or an object and to let the context (hopefully) explain what you're talking about. In English, you might say, "I bought it," but in Japanese you could just say "Bought." The ambiguity of the language can make translation exceptionally difficult, especially when a speaker has knowledge that a listener does not and is making no special effort to clarify. (This is more common in watching movies than in conversation, though.)
A Star Trek-style universal translator would have to be able to look into the future to see the entire context of a sentence to know how to render it properly or be able to read the minds of participants. This is technologically unlikely, and it doesn't seem supported by the other technology used in the setting.
Thus, it's pretty much wand-waving magic-tech meant to make the plots go smoother. Don't expect to see it anytime before we see replicators and the power supply systems required to transmit the energy needed to spontaneously create multiple GRAMS of matter (each of gram of which is roughly equivalent to the energy released in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) meant to wave away supply problems or before we see magical inertia-canceling technology meant to wave away realistic depictions of acceleration.
We're talking higher rez, multiple spectrums, and updated extremely often. Just a touch different from Google Maps.
Meh. There's a direct tradeoff between the number of bands of color that you can sense and the resolution you can resolve. Panchromatic satellites have significantly better resolution than multispectral satellites which have better resolution than hyperspectral satellites. This is why nearly every color satellite has different resolutions for black & white and color images that it can take.
And trust me when I say that the best hyperspectral satellites (the kinds that resolve enough different wavelengths of light per pixel to do the kind of spectral analysis needed to detect "traces left by chemical weapons") have absolutely terrible resolution. For example, AVIRIS, a 224 band sensor, gets a resolution of about 20 meters per pixel. The Orbview-4 (aka Warfighter-1) probe that was launched for the Air Force in 2001 was going to be one of the best with a 1m panchromatic resolution and an 8m hyperspectral resolution, but it was destroyed in a launch failure. If you want high-quality hyperspectral data, you take it from a plane.
So anyway, much of what they talk about in this article is fantastic scare-mongering.
My first programming job was with a company that made software to process satellite and aerial photography. This person knows what he's talking about. The kind of satellites that DHS is likely to allow civilian law enforcement to look at do not have that kind of resolution at all.
Now, I never worked with classified data, but I have serious doubts over what military satellites are capable of based on conversations with coworkers. Our parent company also made top of the line aerial sensors, and our best sensor got 5 cm resolution at an altitude of 3 km. I think the lowest satellite orbits are 160 km, and so figuring out what one of the best commercial sensors could do at an altitude over 50X as high is an exercise left to the reader ('cause I'm lazy).
(PS: Our parent company was not American and had no reason to hold back technology for military use only, so put that conspiracy angle aside right now.)
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*Sigh* You're hopeless, aren't you? You're going to argue this until your blue in the face rather than displaying the self-reflective capacity to laugh along at the irony of what you said.
Go back and read your original post and see if any of what you just said can be reasonably inferred by an objective, third-party. It's people like you that give us Mac users a reputation for being humorless zealots.
Whatever. The situation's no longer funny. You've managed to kill the joke by being prickly and dense. Congratulations. I'm sure it's a real moral victory for you.
- ...that you are content with...
- ...that you didn't pay for (abandonware), and...
- ...that have such low graphics requirements that you can run them in DosBox.
I mean, wowwwww.... You're just their ideal customer, aren't you?il they release a Mac version. In the meantime I have a 10GB abandonware archive that mostly runs fine under DosBox to amuse myself.
I'm sure that the developers are itching to port a modern FPS over to the Mac to pick up all those gamers who are satisfied by 10 year old abandonware.
I mean, good Lord, that's just a market that's itching for a modern FPS -- a market that demands rich graphics and is willing to pay to get it!
Congratulations. You're part of the problem.
People driving more slowly, but less aggressively will have a higher traffic throughput than people trying to drive more quickly and aggressively in high traffic density situations.
People in Portland drive a little quicker on the freeways but keep at or under the speed limit on surface streets -- unlike Atlanta where it's whatever you can get away with. It takes some getting used to, and it's very frustrating when you're in a hurry and already worked up, but it's pretty comfortable if you're in a more chill mood. The homogeneity of speed also means less people getting frustrated at not being able to travel how fast they want to, and it provides less opportunities for rear-end collisions.
San Diego's a lot like Atlanta from what I hear. I'd seriously recommend living a month in a community with less aggressive traffic and trying to adapt to it. It'll give you a whole different perspective on what traffic is supposed to be like, especially if you take to heart the link I provided above.
We drive the speed limit on surface streets, but we do speed on freeways, traffic permitting. I-205 is posted 55mph, but the left lane normally does 65-70. I recently followed a cop doing 70 on 205.
Atlanta's highways are posted from 65 mph (outside of the metro-Atlanta area) to 55 mph within it. 55 mph is much more common in the areas most people would consider to be "Atlanta." When traffic isn't bumper to bumper, stop and go traffic, 65-70 mph is common in the slow lane there. Middle lanes average 70-75 mph, and the left lane is usually 75-85 mph. Do not get in one of the left two lanes unless you want to be tailgated at SOME point in your journey.
I've noticed people speeding in Portland, but it's noteworthy how much more timidly they do so. I haven't seen anyone drive about 65 mph except for me (until I notice how much I stick out and slow down).
The major sin of Portland drivers (in my mind) seems to be the slowness with with they turn (causing more people to be stuck at a red light when it cycles or to have to come to a stop in the road) and their willingness to turn onto the road close enough in front of you to force you have to slow down to avoid hitting them. I think that comes from the assumption that most people will just docilely slow down with no ill will. In Atlanta, you stand a good chance of getting tailgated and stalked for a few miles, angrily passed (with a quick cut-off in front), and/or flipped off. (Tailgating is the by far the most common aggressive response, though.)
I-5 between Vancouver and Wilsonville is pretty awful.
I've heard that, but isn't that starting to get out of the city, where you mix with drivers who don't have similar traffic control schema to train them? I haven't spent too much time in the northern half of the city.
Through downtown, traffic goes maybe 25mph tops if there aren't any accidents.
That's by design. Downtown traffic is supposed to flow more slowly due to the tightness of the streets and the sheer number of pedestrians there. Downtown traffic is slow even in Atlanta. I just has to be that way, especially with the sheer density of streets and traffic lights in Portland.
Side note: Portland pedestrians also seem to have a sense of entitlement even as far as out as the suburbs due to the city's walking and bike friendly nature. Atlanta pedestrians are only that way in downtown; elsewhere, a survival instinct makes them a little more wary. I find myself in humorous passive-aggressive confrontations because of this where my drilled in survival reflexes make me refuse to cross pedestrian crosswalks with cars present, and cars refuse to move on until I cross. Where I'm from, pedestrian crosswalks are (effectively) for excusing people who are already crossing them instead of for making drivers yield way. You don't presume to cross unless you don't see anybody coming. (Unless you live in downtown.)
If farmers were allowed to grow industrial hemp, it could succeed or fail on its own merit.
What, you mean in the free market like all other crops in the US?
If that were the case, then why exactly are we still talking about ethanol from corn?
What time of the day? I'll have to check it out to compare fairly.
After 15+ years what has been the result of these policies? Snarled traffic, increased traffic, traffic idling in slow speed stop and go driving, increased smog from more vehicles operating in the most inefficient speed and rpm range for the internal combustion engine.
Frankly, my friend, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about if you're so pampered as to think that Portland traffic is ever "snarled."
Try driving in Atlanta for a couple of years before complaining about traffic. Portland is paradise in comparison; I tell you this from experience. You don't know what snarled or stop and go driving are like until it takes you 45 minutes to go 10 miles on a 8- to 10-lane interstate every damned day.
I've been shocked by the total lack of aggression in drivers here. They usually drive at or below the speed limit (like the law requires) instead of tailgating and trying to run off the road anyone doing less than 10-15 over the speed limit like they do in Atlanta. People here are also a LOT friendlier about letting people over to merge. As much pooh-poohing as you do of traffic calming devices, I seriously suggest that you live in an area that doesn't have them before dismissing the idea that traffic engineering can modify the behaviors of drivers.
There is a VERY marked difference in aggression between Portland and Atlanta, and I suspect that difference in how traffic is engineered here has something to do with it.
Unless he built his own Tor node, joined the network, then captured his proxied traffic - which is something ANY Tor admin could do, in which case its STILL not particulary insightful, cool, or 31337.
That's exactly what he did. The entire point of him doing so was (he claims) to demonstrate that people using TOR are not protected from anyone reading traffic that comes out the exit nodes if they don't bother to encrypt the traffic they send into TOR.
If the website owner feels it is necessary to use ads to support the cost of being on the internet, then the least they can do is avoid the flash "Bonk the _____ and get a ______" ads. If they aren't willing to do that then whether they like it or not I'm blocking their ads.
I feel the same way. I'm okay with non-intrusive ads, and I do (admittedly rarely) click on them. However, a site full of pop-ups, flash ads, or (worse) flash ads with audio and video will NEVER earn an ad click from me. They'll usually never get a second visit from me.
Given that criteria for what I'll accept, I find that you don't really need AdBlock. NoScript works well enough. Every single obnoxious ad requires either JavaScript, Java, Flash, or some combination thereof. If you don't white-list ad sites, then you'll never see the kind of ads that everybody hates while still rewarding people who use less obnoxious advertising.
Animated GIF ads and interstitial ads can still be a problem, but 95%+ of bad actors are dealt with with NoScript. As a bonus, you keep yourself safe from JS and XSS attacks.
Success isn't really about schooling, it's about intelligence.
Explain our President, then.
Vampires? Fantasy and vampire books do not belong in the Hugos.
Vampires have been given the science fiction treatment before. Read "I am Legend" (1954) by Richard Matheson sometime. It's a survival horror story about the last living human in a world filled with vampires in the wake of a nuclear war.
If you haven't read Matheson's work, you should. He's won practically ever non-mainstream fiction award there is from the Hugo to the Nebula to the Edgar to the Golden Spur.
If you're buying a new car, consider opting for the Xenon HID headlamps ("fake" HIDs are worthless, as they actually cut light output). The extra ~$1000 premium is completely worth it (my last two vehicles have had Xenon lights and I'll never buy another new car without them).
As someone who has driven dark country roads for years, I'd like to see you and everyone else who buys those blasted things fined. I've always thought they should be illegal.
I don't think you appreciate how blinding those things are to see coming the other way at night. I usually end up not really being able to see anything other than the lines on the road for a few seconds after passing (even when the owner manages to remember to turn off their brights). I've always worried that I'm going to get in an accident after passing someone using those things.
Additionally, they really hurt. Why exactly can't they make bright headlights that don't rely on providing all the illumination from a very small, intense point? Some diffusion would go along way towards not hurting other drivers.
Anyone who thinks that a Hollywood, live-action movie remake of an extremely long running cartoon show is somehow going to be more true to the original story than the American cartoon has never, ever, in their entire life watched any American movie based on a cartoon or video game.
Ever.
Posing the question is tantamount to trolling on the front page.
Second, there's a greater trend in the geek population away from the sort of religious belief. Few geeks have the religious motivation to be against abortion and gay marriage, the two social rallying flags of social conservatives today in America.
So, that pretty much only leaves the economic axis to worry about to differentiate the remaining geek populace into either liberals or libertarians. This is why this Slashdot poll did not surprise me in the least. While there was no populist/authoritarian option, conservative was the least picked choice of the mainstream political beliefs, and liberal and libertarian were the top two.
So, then the question fundamentally comes down to, "What do you fear the most?"
- An inefficient government running roughshod over you (taxation, interference in property rights, tyranny of the majority, etc).
- Powerful, unaccountable private entities running roughshod over you (monopolies, externalities, inequity of power, etc).
Of course, this is a bit of an oversimplification (as is the notion that most people fit into these little political boxes), but it mostly suffices. I find that most libertarian and most liberal points of view come down to concerns that their favorite bogeyman will ruin everything if left unchecked and powerless. More nuanced views come from realizing that they both are pretty bad and that you have to make a choice how to balance them (even if you tend to throw the balance almost entirely one way or the other). The crazy ideologues you see here on Slashdot and elsewhere are the people who seem to never acknowledge that the other side's feared enemy is a problem too.Okay, then let's compare Pensions in Europe (the bastion of none free think socialism) and Chile. Better yet, I'll let you all look that one up.
If I were you, I wouldn't use Chile as an example of a private pension plan working. The average return for people who went into the private system is lower than that of those who stuck with the public system, and overhead costs in the private system (run by a few for-profit companies) are significantly larger than that in the public system. Look into Thatcher's system in Britain for another great example of private overhead costs eating away pension money contrasted to the 1% overhead in America's Social Security system.
Also, the entire reason for social security is to provide security in old age and not a system of haves and have-nots based on how well/lucky they invested -- like Chile's system did -- and to protect against elderly poverty -- like Chile's system didn't.
Anyone who knows the chemical definition can quite easily guess at the meaning of its use in normal speech, which is really quite elegant. How do you think new words are coined anyway? They're often borrowed from other languages or domains.
I'm aware. However, most dictionaries do not seem to list a non-specific use. Hence applying it is just about as useful to clear conversation to as applying computer-speech like "heuristic" to common everyday speech. People in your field will understand you, but the average layman would be better served by using words like "rule."
Basically, my main complaint is that once you've been in a position where you're no longer in your ivory tower and have to communicate with other people, you sound like a pompous ass for using words like "polyvalent." You don't impress people who don't know the word. You don't particularly impress people who do know the word either, unless they're still in the juvenile, high school stage of life where they're still trying to compare their vocabulary with others as a geeky proxy for penis size.
Language is meant to be used for clear communication. It's people like him who never got past trying to prove some sort of dominance over others through the use of obscure $3 words who make reading so many doctoral essays such a pain in the neck. Would it have killed him to say "multi-use" instead? No, but he had to instead go and use an obscure technical term that has next to no use outside of a couple of technical domains for no good reason. Frankly, people like that should be mocked at every single turn until they learn to talk like people do.
As for polyvalent, it so happens it's a very common word in french and it's meaning, even in english, is spot on to what I intended to convey.
Unfortunately, this is English, and you should probably look up words in your second language before assuming that they work in it. As for polyvalent, most dictionaries I've seen do not list a general purpose meaning for it, meaning that its use in that manner borders on the esoteric.
But don't worry. By the time you're finished with high school, you'll realize that using the most obscure words in your vocabulary doesn't impress anyone and that clear communication may be actually harder, but it's more worthwhile.
You're missing a key point: Boot Camp and the promise of multi-boot makes getting an Apple machine a polyvalent solution.
While I am curious whether you've been looking for an opportunity to use that word in a sentence your whole life, I'm pretty sure that "polyvalent" doesn't really work here. The word's got a pretty specific use in chemistry and another in microbiology, after all.
Well, the reason he says that "someone whom Democrats can support" is because the Republicans would support literally anyone Bush nominated as long. The only exception to this that I can think of is Harriet Myers, and that was mostly because she didn't have a solid record showing opposition to abortion. Bush could put up a green aide who had just finished law school (but had interned with the Heritage Foundation), and the Republicans would vote in lock-step to confirm him. All that matters for them is party loyalty.
The Democrats aren't expecting someone with liberal or even terribly moderate views. They're just hoping for someone that isn't a total toady and that has some basic respect for civil rights and for government oversight. As much as their base would like them to go further, the people in office won't. To be honest, they probably don't even expect to get this much from Bush. He'll probably just give good enough of a candidate for the "let's get it over with" swing-vote crowd to rubber stamp, much like most of the rest of his nominees, or he'll try to slip someone in during a recess.
I don't have television or kids, so it's not particularly helpful.
Could you spell it out?
And if there's anyone who doesn't know which film based on a very long running and highly popular animated TV series the parent was paraphrasing, you're missing out and should find out and go watch it immediately.
Thanks. 'Cause we're sure to get the reference once we watch the film after getting the reference to know what to watch.
I'm not sure when this was written, but nowadays we have things like babelfish and google's language tools and Amikai (not a misspelling) that do instant translation fairly well.
Not well enough for Star Trek, and it never will. You don't even hear other people talking in their language -- only what the translation of what they say is. That's improbable enough, but there's another bigger problem -- the complete lack of lag and the ability to interrupt people mid-sentence.
If you interrupt someone in the middle of a sentence in different language, you may get completely different information. For example, in English you want to say something like "That man bought the watch I wore to work every day." Let's say that you were interrupted mid-sentence. Your listener would get the fact that "that man bought the watch..." Your listener would know that the watch was bought but not that you wore it to work every day.
Now let's say you were speaking Japanese instead. Due to a significant difference in word order, the sentence is best rendered as "[Every day] [to work] [wore] [watch] [that man] [bought]." If you were interrupted mid-sentence, your listener would only know that the watch was worn to work everyday and not that it was bought.
This is because Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb order instead of English's usual Subject-Verb-Object order and places all modifiers (including phrases and clauses) before the word they modify. Other languages present similar difficulties. Spanish places all modifiers after the word they modify (while English places adjectives & adverbs usually before and prepositions and clauses afterwards). Classical Arabic puts the verb first. Latin & Russian can have seemingly almost arbitrary word order.
Another complexity is the necessary context in a language. Many Japanese sentences would be considered sentence fragments in English. It's perfectly acceptable to simply use a verb without a subject or an object and to let the context (hopefully) explain what you're talking about. In English, you might say, "I bought it," but in Japanese you could just say "Bought." The ambiguity of the language can make translation exceptionally difficult, especially when a speaker has knowledge that a listener does not and is making no special effort to clarify. (This is more common in watching movies than in conversation, though.)
A Star Trek-style universal translator would have to be able to look into the future to see the entire context of a sentence to know how to render it properly or be able to read the minds of participants. This is technologically unlikely, and it doesn't seem supported by the other technology used in the setting.
Thus, it's pretty much wand-waving magic-tech meant to make the plots go smoother. Don't expect to see it anytime before we see replicators and the power supply systems required to transmit the energy needed to spontaneously create multiple GRAMS of matter (each of gram of which is roughly equivalent to the energy released in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) meant to wave away supply problems or before we see magical inertia-canceling technology meant to wave away realistic depictions of acceleration.
We're talking higher rez, multiple spectrums, and updated extremely often. Just a touch different from Google Maps.
Meh. There's a direct tradeoff between the number of bands of color that you can sense and the resolution you can resolve. Panchromatic satellites have significantly better resolution than multispectral satellites which have better resolution than hyperspectral satellites. This is why nearly every color satellite has different resolutions for black & white and color images that it can take.
And trust me when I say that the best hyperspectral satellites (the kinds that resolve enough different wavelengths of light per pixel to do the kind of spectral analysis needed to detect "traces left by chemical weapons") have absolutely terrible resolution. For example, AVIRIS, a 224 band sensor, gets a resolution of about 20 meters per pixel. The Orbview-4 (aka Warfighter-1) probe that was launched for the Air Force in 2001 was going to be one of the best with a 1m panchromatic resolution and an 8m hyperspectral resolution, but it was destroyed in a launch failure. If you want high-quality hyperspectral data, you take it from a plane.
So anyway, much of what they talk about in this article is fantastic scare-mongering.
My first programming job was with a company that made software to process satellite and aerial photography. This person knows what he's talking about. The kind of satellites that DHS is likely to allow civilian law enforcement to look at do not have that kind of resolution at all.
Now, I never worked with classified data, but I have serious doubts over what military satellites are capable of based on conversations with coworkers. Our parent company also made top of the line aerial sensors, and our best sensor got 5 cm resolution at an altitude of 3 km. I think the lowest satellite orbits are 160 km, and so figuring out what one of the best commercial sensors could do at an altitude over 50X as high is an exercise left to the reader ('cause I'm lazy).
(PS: Our parent company was not American and had no reason to hold back technology for military use only, so put that conspiracy angle aside right now.)