With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.
For reference, the nearest star system, Alpha Centari, is 4.2LY away. With a ship or probe equipped with one of these drives, in theory it could go there and back in less than a year. The next closest system would take a year to get to.
The problem is that ergonomic mice or mice with more than just 3 buttons and a scroll wheel are designed for a right hand.
That's why I don't buy them. Most manufacturers have a whole line of ambidexterous mice. That includes gaming mice manufacturers. My current home mouse is a 9-button ambi gaming mouse from Logitec. It replaces a similar 9-button ambi mouse from Razer (for some reason my Razer mice have always been really flaky).
It is true that you can't get an ambi version of the new MMO mice. However, if you place the mouse on the left side of the keyboard, you don't need all those MMO buttons, or a special game pad, because you have full access to the numeric keypad and arrows with your other hand!
Its no nice they've now come up with a jargon term for brain-dead GUI design.
I'm not exactly a trained professional GUI designer, but even I know that the computer offers unique user-interface possibilities and challenges that are completely different that what you have with physical objects. If you don't take this into account, but just slavishly copy the physical object, you aren't even bothering to design. I don't think failure to design really merits a special name like this.
I once worked on a project that involved creating a kiosk-like system for USN destroyers to handle water valve switching within the ship. We had pictures of the old system, which was a kiosk with a subway-like map of the piping drawn on it, with pushbuttons placed in various locations in the drawing to allow opening and closing of the various valves. The obvious issue here is that the operator has to work out in their head what combination of valve states will case the water to flow in the pipes the way they want. It seemed to me to be a great idea that we were compterizing this, because we could give them something better.
The task of making the GUI was given to one of those guys on our team who is really productive, but doesn't do a lot of actual thinking (I'm actually kinda jealous of folks like that). He of course just drew the same map on the screen, using the same colors, with pushbuttons in the same places made to look as much like the original pushbuttons as possible.
The waste of the computer's potential in doing it this way actually annoyed me so much, I worked through several lunches to make an alternative. The system I came up with actually drew the network to look like cross-sections of pipe, and would fill in for you which pipes had water flowing through them (based on the condition of all the valves) by showing blue water in the pipe or not. The valves were drawn to look like simple valves, but with indications on them that the were active objects.
It turns out that (unbeknonst to me) we were in a backchannel political competition with another vendor for our project. When the project engineer saw this design, he got all excited and said "This is the kind of thing that will sell this system." I can't say for sure he was right, but I know we didn't end up losing the project. That isn't why I did it though. I just couldn't stand the idea of sticking our poor users (sailors) with that dumbass interface.
Actually, the ones who crack me up are the folks who sit there and cross their right arm over their left so that they can mouse with their right arm. It's like they'd rather play twister while using the computer than use that vestigal left hand they have.
IMHO mousing, like typing, is something inherently left-hand biased. I understand rather a lot of so-called professional gamers mouse lefty.
Anyway, malformed cries against the Electoral College are even more futile than some dude railing against astroturf in a sports bar after taking down a couple of pitchers. The EC is in the Constitution, and cannot be removed without an ammendment. That just does not happen without a large organized national movement and the enthusiastic backing of most of the country. Good luck with that.
What *can* be done without Constitutional change is to change how states pick their electors. That is left up to the states. There's no reason why it has to be "winner takes all", and in fact some states don't do that. For example, Obama actually managed to take one elector from Nebraska in 2008 because Nebraska gives each congressional district its own independent elector. If every state did that, it would go a long way towards making the election more direct.
The problem there is that this would probably cost the Democrats 19 electors from California every election, and Republicans 10 or so from Texas. That's not liable to make them very cooperative.
My understanding is that some of the Romney-backing 538's are still running ads in PA, but the national campaigns have quit throwing money away there. Also, you will still see some national ads. I see a few here in Oklahoma, which Nate gives Obama a big fat 0% chance of winning.
As for NC, if you go back and look you'll see that Obama won NC last time around. If Romney holds on to win it, it will represent a pickup over 2008.
The demographics in a lot of this country are changing. This should be presenting opportunities as well as problems, but the Republicans seem to be doing their darndest to alienate (sometimes literally) all the up-and-coming blocks. If they don't watch out, they may find themselves a party of the deep south and unpopulated central-tier states only.
...of course in most of the world, violation of a simple contractual agreement (eg: a license) not otherwise involving the Government is not considered a "crime" either.
FWIW: PA is emphatically not one of the swing states this time around. Obama is way ahead there, has been this whole season, and frankly the state has not voted for a Republican POTUS candidate this century. Romney and the Republicans gave up and pulled out all their ads from PA a couple of months ago. Its in the blue column.
The real live contested swing states at this time are (in rough order of closeness) Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina*, and Wisconsin.
* - This is the one state that Romney is ahead in. Mathematically, Romney has to win all of them, with the exception of one of Colorado, Iowa, or Wisconsin, in order to squeak out a win.
Say what you will about those states, but they are a fairly representative cross-section of the country. All you are really missing is the NE (New Hampshire almost made the list, but Republicans aren't contesting it)
Suppression won't do it either. There are only about 7 states legitimately in play right now, and Romney has to pretty much win all to get past the magic 270 electors requred. Obama is ahead in all but one of them (it was all but two, but thanks to nominating the anti-SS/Medicare/Medicaid guy for VP, the lead in FL has now switchted to Obama too).
The only possible path to victory for Romney/Ryan now is to somehow change the entire map in their favor. They need something big to change in the next two months. No amount of nibbling at the edges is going to do it for them.
If by "lie" you mean "nice central place to put the anti-pollution equipment, rather than having every single passenger vehicle dragging it around with them", then yes, you are exactly right.
The truly sad part about this is that if my PC gets a broken SATA cable, I can fix it for free myself in about 3 minutes, using the extra cables that come with motherboards and SATA devices I have lying around in my box-o-spare parts. The swap out doesn't even require tools, due to the design of my PC cases.
This is the kind of crap you let yourself in for when you buy closed systems.
I happened to be looking at this yesterday after hearing an NPR story. It turns out that T. gondii is actually a mind-altering parasite. It reproduces in the guts of rodents, and then in order to get back into its preferred cat hosts, has actually evolved to alter the brains of rodents to make them find the odor of cats sexually appealing. Yes, you heard that right.
It puts a whole new spin on all those Tom & Jerry cartoons, now doesn't it?
Of course your next question is if it does something similar to infected humans. Supposedly, it has been shown to cause a statistically significant increase in car accidents among the infected. Perhaps that study will be countered too though.
This just looks to me like he's rediscovered the old "Right Thing" vs. "Worse is Better" philosophies, as spelled out by Richard Grable in The Rise of Worse-is-Better 25 years ago. In a lot of ways, I think Dr. Grable's idea is probably even a better way of looking at it.
Overall though, I think its a very good contribution to the discussion of software engineering.
However, I do have some minor quibbles. Realise as I say this that I'm a big Ada fan, which makes me by his reckoning a "hardcore conservative". I can't really argue with that. However, as someone from that community, I take strong umbrage with him ascribing being a fan of premature optimization to us. Nothing can be further from the truth. Doing anything to pervert code from a good-maintainable design without proven need (derived from tests showing a measurable bottleneck in the affected place), is indeed considered evil.
The point of this is that I just gave a impassioned argument against something he called a "conservative" attitude using what is clearly a conservative argument. I didn't make it up myself though. This is the argument I usually hear against pre-optimization. So I have to conclude that pre-optimization is in fact not a feature of a "conservative" outlook. We would probably argue it belongs with the "liberals", but more likely it is just something only argued for by incompetents.:-)
Hell, even the aliens in Babylon-5 acted more human that the humans in Star Trek. Even the ones that were so far advanced from us that they were practically gods had petty little squabbles amongst themselves.
I don't think any author that I was forced to read in my High School English class counts as "underappreciated". Unless of course that is a new euphamisim for "hated". In that case, I certianly "underappreciated" The Left Hand of Darkness. Underappreciated the heck out of it.
You seem to be neglecting the inclinations of half the human race here...
...in my experience, the half that is already most interested in watching the Olympics too. Perhaps they'd actually do better by ditching female athletes entirely, and insisting the remaining competitors all wear speedos.
Given the large amount of the "action" that happens in a laundromat, I'm thinking laundry cleaning products would be good. They might even photoshop a product placement in there...
Perhaps. But under the circumstances I suspect one of the two scenarios is most likely:
He's a troll and is lying about everything. Taking him seriously just made him way happy.
He really is in the industry and, and most likely so was his wife. In this case, the "immature" responses are actually welcome, appropriate, and probably fufullable with a simple internet search.
Clearly you never saw the TV series from the 70's. Check it out on Netflix if you can find it. Pretty much every episode involved the (way stacked) star jiggling around in a circle to magically change into her skimpy outfit, then getting tied up with her own rope by some bad guy.
...or perhaps its just every episode I remember. (Hey, give me a break. I was a teenage boy. It's healthy.).
Yeah. Really funny how groups that are subjected to persistent demonization from a political party for naked political reasons for years don't tend to vote for that party. You'd think they'd be more forgiving.
Slashdot Mirror
With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.
For reference, the nearest star system, Alpha Centari, is 4.2LY away. With a ship or probe equipped with one of these drives, in theory it could go there and back in less than a year. The next closest system would take a year to get to.
The problem is that ergonomic mice or mice with more than just 3 buttons and a scroll wheel are designed for a right hand.
That's why I don't buy them. Most manufacturers have a whole line of ambidexterous mice. That includes gaming mice manufacturers. My current home mouse is a 9-button ambi gaming mouse from Logitec. It replaces a similar 9-button ambi mouse from Razer (for some reason my Razer mice have always been really flaky).
It is true that you can't get an ambi version of the new MMO mice. However, if you place the mouse on the left side of the keyboard, you don't need all those MMO buttons, or a special game pad, because you have full access to the numeric keypad and arrows with your other hand!
Yet another advantage to being a lefty. :-)
Its no nice they've now come up with a jargon term for brain-dead GUI design.
I'm not exactly a trained professional GUI designer, but even I know that the computer offers unique user-interface possibilities and challenges that are completely different that what you have with physical objects. If you don't take this into account, but just slavishly copy the physical object, you aren't even bothering to design. I don't think failure to design really merits a special name like this.
I once worked on a project that involved creating a kiosk-like system for USN destroyers to handle water valve switching within the ship. We had pictures of the old system, which was a kiosk with a subway-like map of the piping drawn on it, with pushbuttons placed in various locations in the drawing to allow opening and closing of the various valves. The obvious issue here is that the operator has to work out in their head what combination of valve states will case the water to flow in the pipes the way they want. It seemed to me to be a great idea that we were compterizing this, because we could give them something better.
The task of making the GUI was given to one of those guys on our team who is really productive, but doesn't do a lot of actual thinking (I'm actually kinda jealous of folks like that). He of course just drew the same map on the screen, using the same colors, with pushbuttons in the same places made to look as much like the original pushbuttons as possible.
The waste of the computer's potential in doing it this way actually annoyed me so much, I worked through several lunches to make an alternative. The system I came up with actually drew the network to look like cross-sections of pipe, and would fill in for you which pipes had water flowing through them (based on the condition of all the valves) by showing blue water in the pipe or not. The valves were drawn to look like simple valves, but with indications on them that the were active objects.
It turns out that (unbeknonst to me) we were in a backchannel political competition with another vendor for our project. When the project engineer saw this design, he got all excited and said "This is the kind of thing that will sell this system." I can't say for sure he was right, but I know we didn't end up losing the project. That isn't why I did it though. I just couldn't stand the idea of sticking our poor users (sailors) with that dumbass interface.
I'll let you in on a secret: The mouse can also be placed on the left side of the keyboard, if you so desire.
Shhhh! Don't tell anybody...
Actually, the ones who crack me up are the folks who sit there and cross their right arm over their left so that they can mouse with their right arm. It's like they'd rather play twister while using the computer than use that vestigal left hand they have.
IMHO mousing, like typing, is something inherently left-hand biased. I understand rather a lot of so-called professional gamers mouse lefty.
Anyway, malformed cries against the Electoral College are even more futile than some dude railing against astroturf in a sports bar after taking down a couple of pitchers. The EC is in the Constitution, and cannot be removed without an ammendment. That just does not happen without a large organized national movement and the enthusiastic backing of most of the country. Good luck with that.
What *can* be done without Constitutional change is to change how states pick their electors. That is left up to the states. There's no reason why it has to be "winner takes all", and in fact some states don't do that. For example, Obama actually managed to take one elector from Nebraska in 2008 because Nebraska gives each congressional district its own independent elector. If every state did that, it would go a long way towards making the election more direct.
The problem there is that this would probably cost the Democrats 19 electors from California every election, and Republicans 10 or so from Texas. That's not liable to make them very cooperative.
By that standard, falsetto isn't signing either.
My understanding is that some of the Romney-backing 538's are still running ads in PA, but the national campaigns have quit throwing money away there. Also, you will still see some national ads. I see a few here in Oklahoma, which Nate gives Obama a big fat 0% chance of winning.
As for NC, if you go back and look you'll see that Obama won NC last time around. If Romney holds on to win it, it will represent a pickup over 2008.
The demographics in a lot of this country are changing. This should be presenting opportunities as well as problems, but the Republicans seem to be doing their darndest to alienate (sometimes literally) all the up-and-coming blocks. If they don't watch out, they may find themselves a party of the deep south and unpopulated central-tier states only.
...of course in most of the world, violation of a simple contractual agreement (eg: a license) not otherwise involving the Government is not considered a "crime" either.
The real live contested swing states at this time are (in rough order of closeness) Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina*, and Wisconsin.
* - This is the one state that Romney is ahead in. Mathematically, Romney has to win all of them, with the exception of one of Colorado, Iowa, or Wisconsin, in order to squeak out a win.
Say what you will about those states, but they are a fairly representative cross-section of the country. All you are really missing is the NE (New Hampshire almost made the list, but Republicans aren't contesting it)
Suppression won't do it either. There are only about 7 states legitimately in play right now, and Romney has to pretty much win all to get past the magic 270 electors requred. Obama is ahead in all but one of them (it was all but two, but thanks to nominating the anti-SS/Medicare/Medicaid guy for VP, the lead in FL has now switchted to Obama too).
The only possible path to victory for Romney/Ryan now is to somehow change the entire map in their favor. They need something big to change in the next two months. No amount of nibbling at the edges is going to do it for them.
If by "lie" you mean "nice central place to put the anti-pollution equipment, rather than having every single passenger vehicle dragging it around with them", then yes, you are exactly right.
The truly sad part about this is that if my PC gets a broken SATA cable, I can fix it for free myself in about 3 minutes, using the extra cables that come with motherboards and SATA devices I have lying around in my box-o-spare parts. The swap out doesn't even require tools, due to the design of my PC cases.
This is the kind of crap you let yourself in for when you buy closed systems.
I happened to be looking at this yesterday after hearing an NPR story. It turns out that T. gondii is actually a mind-altering parasite. It reproduces in the guts of rodents, and then in order to get back into its preferred cat hosts, has actually evolved to alter the brains of rodents to make them find the odor of cats sexually appealing. Yes, you heard that right.
It puts a whole new spin on all those Tom & Jerry cartoons, now doesn't it?
Of course your next question is if it does something similar to infected humans. Supposedly, it has been shown to cause a statistically significant increase in car accidents among the infected. Perhaps that study will be countered too though.
This just looks to me like he's rediscovered the old "Right Thing" vs. "Worse is Better" philosophies, as spelled out by Richard Grable in The Rise of Worse-is-Better 25 years ago. In a lot of ways, I think Dr. Grable's idea is probably even a better way of looking at it.
Overall though, I think its a very good contribution to the discussion of software engineering.
However, I do have some minor quibbles. Realise as I say this that I'm a big Ada fan, which makes me by his reckoning a "hardcore conservative". I can't really argue with that. However, as someone from that community, I take strong umbrage with him ascribing being a fan of premature optimization to us. Nothing can be further from the truth. Doing anything to pervert code from a good-maintainable design without proven need (derived from tests showing a measurable bottleneck in the affected place), is indeed considered evil.
The point of this is that I just gave a impassioned argument against something he called a "conservative" attitude using what is clearly a conservative argument. I didn't make it up myself though. This is the argument I usually hear against pre-optimization. So I have to conclude that pre-optimization is in fact not a feature of a "conservative" outlook. We would probably argue it belongs with the "liberals", but more likely it is just something only argued for by incompetents. :-)
It's been 28 years, but you give me hope. :-)
JMS (writer/producer of Babylon-5) certianly agrees. He named a rather prominent character (the head of Psy-Corps) after him.
Hell, even the aliens in Babylon-5 acted more human that the humans in Star Trek. Even the ones that were so far advanced from us that they were practically gods had petty little squabbles amongst themselves.
I don't think any author that I was forced to read in my High School English class counts as "underappreciated". Unless of course that is a new euphamisim for "hated". In that case, I certianly "underappreciated" The Left Hand of Darkness. Underappreciated the heck out of it.
You seem to be neglecting the inclinations of half the human race here...
...in my experience, the half that is already most interested in watching the Olympics too. Perhaps they'd actually do better by ditching female athletes entirely, and insisting the remaining competitors all wear speedos.
Given the large amount of the "action" that happens in a laundromat, I'm thinking laundry cleaning products would be good. They might even photoshop a product placement in there...
Perhaps. But under the circumstances I suspect one of the two scenarios is most likely:
I'm honestly quite touched to see you rushing to defend the honor of the wife of "Adult film producer (866485)"
Clearly you never saw the TV series from the 70's. Check it out on Netflix if you can find it. Pretty much every episode involved the (way stacked) star jiggling around in a circle to magically change into her skimpy outfit, then getting tied up with her own rope by some bad guy.
...or perhaps its just every episode I remember. (Hey, give me a break. I was a teenage boy. It's healthy.).
Yeah. Really funny how groups that are subjected to persistent demonization from a political party for naked political reasons for years don't tend to vote for that party. You'd think they'd be more forgiving.