The FBI inadvertently taps my phone and learns that someone at the company I work for has just invented something that will make the company a ton of money. Do you really think those agents aren't going to call up their stock-brokers and say, "BUY! BUY! BUY!"
Listen, I hate the concept of a police state and wiretapping as much as the next guy, but this is a dumb defense. The SEC investigates transactions like that for a reason. "Gee, these two FBI agents who've never bothered to invest more than $10,000 in any single company, suddenly bought $400,000 worth of shares of this company at the perfect time and made $15,000,000. They might've been ridiculously lucky. Or more likely they might've had insider information. Let's look a little closer, shall we?"
The stock market is like the world's biggest casino, and the SEC is certainly no less watchful and no less hesitant to break your legs if you try to cheat them.
Why do you want to review the inner workings of USB and graphic card drivers?
Uh. How about, "To ensure that the someone has not hidden code in the graphics drivers to rearrange the names of the candidates onscreen so the votes get tallied for the wrong person".
Why would you NOT want to review all the code? Blissful ignorance?
Ok, I only have some high-school level understanding of this topic, but I think it's pretty safe to say that Voltage and Amperage are DIRECTLY CORRELATED. So this is basically semantics. It's like saying "a 100 story fall doesn't kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end" Yes it's technically correct, but it's silly to say because they're not independent events.
Amps = Voltage / Resistance
Since we're talking about a wet human, resistance can basically be treated as a (large) constant. Therefore, amperage scales directly with voltage. 120V through a 1000 ohm human means 120mA, 240V through the same human is 240mA. 5V means 5mA.
From memory, 50mA-150mA is enough to be lethal. Since the resistance isn't changing, the only way you have of changing the amperage is by changing the voltage. So yes, higher voltages ARE more likely to kill you, and they are completely relevant to talk about in this context, since the resistance is fixed and the amperage is therefore entirely dependent on the voltage.
Same here, except I switched back to Seagate about three years ago now. Couldn't have been happier. I think Seagate has really taken up the torch for reliability lately. They used to be bargain basement except for their SCSI lines, but nowadays I think they're the most solid drive you can get. I'm staying far away from Maxtor and WD, both of whom I've had recent and ongoing bad experiences with.
Yes, and in the meantime I've spent $10 downloading their 1MB image-heavy piece of garbage webpage on my phone thinking it was actually a site usable on my phone because it had a '.mobi' domain.
Not only will I be not returning to that website, I will be cancelling my phone's data plan.
They want to prevent this from happening. I completely understand why.
You just need to look in the right place. Check a digital photography (or nowadays, simply photography) store, they always have long-term archival CDs, usually a wide variety of them.
I'm sorry, but BitTorrent sucks. If they take it and commercialize it until no one wants it anymore, fantastic. It works, but it's in no way well designed. Maybe someone else will come along and make something better, firewall friendly, something that's actually peer-to-peer...
If you disagree and think it is well designed, fine. Keep using it, by all means. So do I. But if you don't think there's a whole lot of room for improvement, you're not very imaginitive.
I dunno why everyone always says this. My microwave, which is maybe 20 feet from the access point, does not affect the signal strength, latency, or data speed in the slightest even when my laptop has direct line of sight with the microwave (but not with the AP). And yes, I'm talking about when it's running.
Maybe old or poorly shielded microwaves cause a problem, but mine which is fairly new has never caused a problem.
lbf is "pounds of force", not pound-feet, which would be typically be shown as lb-ft or lb*ft.
And yes, we are that backwards and stubborn. Jet and rocket engines are usually measured in pounds of thrust, not in newtons. Although they are the same class of unit (measures of force).
That's strange you got such a significant positive impact. Personally, most of my spam (a whopping 37%) comes from the USA, mostly from cable modems/DSL lines. Excluding Russia and Japan, the rest of asia combined only contributes a paltry 9% of the total. European countries make up most of the other 54%
Altitude is not the real problem in getting something into orbit. In fact it's not really the problem at all. It's the velocity that's the real pain in the ass. That's why the X-Prize contenders were all considered to be basically "toy" spacecraft. Getting to 100km above earth in a sharp parabola is one thing. Getting to an orbital velocity of 28,000 km/h or more is something else.
If you take something stationary and drop it onto geosynchronous orbit distance.. it'll simply fall straight towards earth and burn up in the atmosphere. Even if you managed to get something into "space" using a balloon, you will still need a very-big-rocket to accelerate the payload to that speed. Altitude helps you in two ways: It reduces or removes the amount of work needed to overcome gravity, and it greatly reduces the drag caused by wind resistance. Both of these are very helpful things, but they're not the primary reason why you use a rocket. It's all about the velocity. That's also why most launch facilties strive to be as near to the equator as possible, so they get to start with as much of the added speed of earth's spin as possible.
Well, superior solutions don't mean a lot if they're sitting in your toolbox at home when your car breaks down and you need them. But enough with the analogy.
If we had regular shuttle launches (and I realize we don't), that swiss army knife would come in handy. We're fortunate enough that we haven't had any severe emergencies in orbit yet, but *when* we do, we'll be wishing we had a "swiss army knife" up there *right now*, or at least ready to go, rather than having to assemble, prep and launch a specialized rocket to tackle whatever situation -- a process that can take weeks even in the most dire of situations.
Yes, it's unfortunate that despite being reusable, the shuttle is not the cheapest to-orbit solution. But contrary to popular belief, that's fine. The shuttle does things no other single craft is capable of. And that counts for a lot. Despite the cost, there never was any shortage of cargo willing to pay for space aboard a shuttle launch, and generally for good reasons.
The shuttle is basically first generation technology for reusable spacecraft. There's no reason to believe that new designs couldn't drastically improve on the shuttle in every way. For example, take a look at Russia's Buran Shuttle which is also pretty dated these days. We could do even better than that.
That's ridiculous. NASA decided to stop using Freon voluntarily. They were offered an exemption if they felt they could not do without the Freon foam, but decided to go with the new foam to help with efforts to curb CFC emissions. They decided it was safe. It was NASA's decision, not the government's or the EPA's. I agree that it's ridiculous they're still using that horrible foam to coat the tank when they could go back to using Freon foam and solve the problem that way. But that's really up to NASA.
They haven't even publically floated the idea yet. If they really wanted to, why wouldn't they? Let's assume for a second that they are banned from using Freon. They're not a completely helpless organization. They could certainly put some pressure on the government to change this. "This decision is putting our astronauts and spaceflight itself in danger". They have an environmentally-ambivalent administration in the white house right now, and they are still riding on sentiment from the Columbia disaster. It seems like the perfeect time to get the government to allow them an exemption. It seems like the perfect time. So why wouldn't they try to get allowed to use Freon now?
Answer: Because they don't want to. NASA is, believe it or not, a very environmentally concious organization. They understand more acutely than most people just how precious, unique, and important our little planet is, and they do their part in taking care of it.
Maybe they'll eventually decide that the risks of foam breaking off outweigh the benefits of reducing CFC emissions, maybe they won't. But let's be clear that it's NASA's decision, and no one else is responsible for it.
You don't understand what the term means. It's a reference to the way Microsoft pretends to accept a standard (embracing), then it quietly modifies it until it's no longer compatible with the original standard anymore (extending). Meanwhile the "microsoft standard" has collected critical mass of people developing towards it, since after all it is "standard" and should work with everything. By the time it turns out that no, it only works with Microsoft software (surprise, surprise) it's too late to get people to move away from it.
Well, color me corrected. Thanks for the info. I must've misunderstood when I kept hearing that they were considering plans to build a space station out of a discarded tank. I never actually looked that closely into it, as it seemed to make enough sense to me.
I was dissapointed though that we weren't able to follow the tank back into the atmosphere
Just a little nitpick... but you don't need to worry, you still have plenty of time to do that.
The tank doesn't actually re-enter the atmosphere for a very, very long time, if at all. By the time it detaches from the shuttle, it's attained orbital velocity, which makes sense, considering that it contains the fuel for the main engines. In fact, I believe all 114 tanks (plus or minus a few perhaps) are still up there orbiting the Earth.
It's like they tried to copy Apple but it looks like a crappy knockoff.
It may seem like that. But Enlightenment was first. I was using Enlightenment well before OS X first came out (and I then bought a Mac with OS X and retired my Enlightenment machine, mind you).
But Enlightenment was excellent way back when. There are some things I still miss, like the pagers (although Expose is cool as well).
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt to assume you're talking about OS X, and not talking about OS 9 or previous systems. Because they bear absolutely no resemblance at all to Enlightenment. So if that's what you're suggesting than you're not just wrong, you're insane.
DISCLAIMER: I am not really a Mac zealot (though I am happy with mine *shrug*), but this kind of logic bugs me.
First, being I can't run most of the software I use on anything but windows.
Well, this is certainly true. But unless you're talking about some highly, highly specialized software (which may be true for you specifically but isn't for *most* of those "most"), it's unlikely that there aren't equivalents on Mac. So these people need to consider that perhaps it's time for them to learn something new. Don't take the "you" I use from here on out personally, I'm not directing this explicitly at you, but rather at all the people who say this kind of thing.
I mean, it is like claiming that learning to drive with a manual transmission is absurd to most, because you only know how to drive an automatic. Yes, it's *true*. But it's only true because most don't *want* to. Which is your right, but at least admit it, and understand that yes it does make you look like a bit of a whiner when you complain about spyware. "Well, this sucks, but I don't want to change it."
You may in all actuality be able to get everything you want to do done on a Mac. You may even find that it turns out to be a pleasant experience notwithstanding the lack of viruses and spyware. Maybe not, but there's always that risk. If someone says "Hey this Photoshop program is pretty good" and you're only familiar with MS Paint, you'll probably give it a shot right? So why not try the same with Mac?
To quote George Carlin (from memory, forgive me if it's not perfect):
"My needs aren't being met." Well, then, DROP SOME OF YOUR NEEDS!
Slashdot Mirror
The FBI inadvertently taps my phone and learns that someone at the company I work for has just invented something that will make the company a ton of money. Do you really think those agents aren't going to call up their stock-brokers and say, "BUY! BUY! BUY!"
Listen, I hate the concept of a police state and wiretapping as much as the next guy, but this is a dumb defense. The SEC investigates transactions like that for a reason. "Gee, these two FBI agents who've never bothered to invest more than $10,000 in any single company, suddenly bought $400,000 worth of shares of this company at the perfect time and made $15,000,000. They might've been ridiculously lucky. Or more likely they might've had insider information. Let's look a little closer, shall we?"
The stock market is like the world's biggest casino, and the SEC is certainly no less watchful and no less hesitant to break your legs if you try to cheat them.
Why do you want to review the inner workings of USB and graphic card drivers?
Uh. How about, "To ensure that the someone has not hidden code in the graphics drivers to rearrange the names of the candidates onscreen so the votes get tallied for the wrong person".
Why would you NOT want to review all the code? Blissful ignorance?
It's not the Volts that kill you it's the Amps.
Ok, I only have some high-school level understanding of this topic, but I think it's pretty safe to say that Voltage and Amperage are DIRECTLY CORRELATED. So this is basically semantics. It's like saying "a 100 story fall doesn't kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end" Yes it's technically correct, but it's silly to say because they're not independent events.
Amps = Voltage / Resistance
Since we're talking about a wet human, resistance can basically be treated as a (large) constant. Therefore, amperage scales directly with voltage. 120V through a 1000 ohm human means 120mA, 240V through the same human is 240mA. 5V means 5mA.
From memory, 50mA-150mA is enough to be lethal. Since the resistance isn't changing, the only way you have of changing the amperage is by changing the voltage. So yes, higher voltages ARE more likely to kill you, and they are completely relevant to talk about in this context, since the resistance is fixed and the amperage is therefore entirely dependent on the voltage.
Sure you can. A fleet of supertankers full of HD platters would do nicely, for starters.
Same here, except I switched back to Seagate about three years ago now. Couldn't have been happier. I think Seagate has really taken up the torch for reliability lately. They used to be bargain basement except for their SCSI lines, but nowadays I think they're the most solid drive you can get. I'm staying far away from Maxtor and WD, both of whom I've had recent and ongoing bad experiences with.
Yes, and in the meantime I've spent $10 downloading their 1MB image-heavy piece of garbage webpage on my phone thinking it was actually a site usable on my phone because it had a '.mobi' domain.
Not only will I be not returning to that website, I will be cancelling my phone's data plan.
They want to prevent this from happening. I completely understand why.
You just need to look in the right place. Check a digital photography (or nowadays, simply photography) store, they always have long-term archival CDs, usually a wide variety of them.
I'm sorry, but BitTorrent sucks. If they take it and commercialize it until no one wants it anymore, fantastic. It works, but it's in no way well designed. Maybe someone else will come along and make something better, firewall friendly, something that's actually peer-to-peer...
If you disagree and think it is well designed, fine. Keep using it, by all means. So do I. But if you don't think there's a whole lot of room for improvement, you're not very imaginitive.
You're close. "Aurora" is the name of the Neverwinter Nights (3D) engine. "Infinity" is the name of the 2D engine used for Baldur's Gate et al.
Unfortunately, I tried this. Religiously. Then someone who I had sent email to before had their address book stolen by a virus. Now I get spam.
You're right, actually.
"Sodding". As in, "Those sodding bastards".
That would make perfect sense in Calgary. They've got a cartesian grid of streets (x) and avenues (y).
So that would be 2nd Street and 4th Ave. (in the Northeast quadrant I guess, assuming they're both intended to be positive)
I dunno why everyone always says this. My microwave, which is maybe 20 feet from the access point, does not affect the signal strength, latency, or data speed in the slightest even when my laptop has direct line of sight with the microwave (but not with the AP). And yes, I'm talking about when it's running.
Maybe old or poorly shielded microwaves cause a problem, but mine which is fairly new has never caused a problem.
lbf is "pounds of force", not pound-feet, which would be typically be shown as lb-ft or lb*ft.
And yes, we are that backwards and stubborn. Jet and rocket engines are usually measured in pounds of thrust, not in newtons. Although they are the same class of unit (measures of force).
That's strange you got such a significant positive impact. Personally, most of my spam (a whopping 37%) comes from the USA, mostly from cable modems/DSL lines. Excluding Russia and Japan, the rest of asia combined only contributes a paltry 9% of the total. European countries make up most of the other 54%
Altitude is not the real problem in getting something into orbit. In fact it's not really the problem at all. It's the velocity that's the real pain in the ass. That's why the X-Prize contenders were all considered to be basically "toy" spacecraft. Getting to 100km above earth in a sharp parabola is one thing. Getting to an orbital velocity of 28,000 km/h or more is something else.
If you take something stationary and drop it onto geosynchronous orbit distance.. it'll simply fall straight towards earth and burn up in the atmosphere. Even if you managed to get something into "space" using a balloon, you will still need a very-big-rocket to accelerate the payload to that speed. Altitude helps you in two ways: It reduces or removes the amount of work needed to overcome gravity, and it greatly reduces the drag caused by wind resistance. Both of these are very helpful things, but they're not the primary reason why you use a rocket. It's all about the velocity. That's also why most launch facilties strive to be as near to the equator as possible, so they get to start with as much of the added speed of earth's spin as possible.
Well, superior solutions don't mean a lot if they're sitting in your toolbox at home when your car breaks down and you need them. But enough with the analogy.
If we had regular shuttle launches (and I realize we don't), that swiss army knife would come in handy. We're fortunate enough that we haven't had any severe emergencies in orbit yet, but *when* we do, we'll be wishing we had a "swiss army knife" up there *right now*, or at least ready to go, rather than having to assemble, prep and launch a specialized rocket to tackle whatever situation -- a process that can take weeks even in the most dire of situations.
Yes, it's unfortunate that despite being reusable, the shuttle is not the cheapest to-orbit solution. But contrary to popular belief, that's fine. The shuttle does things no other single craft is capable of. And that counts for a lot. Despite the cost, there never was any shortage of cargo willing to pay for space aboard a shuttle launch, and generally for good reasons.
The shuttle is basically first generation technology for reusable spacecraft. There's no reason to believe that new designs couldn't drastically improve on the shuttle in every way. For example, take a look at Russia's Buran Shuttle which is also pretty dated these days. We could do even better than that.
That's ridiculous. NASA decided to stop using Freon voluntarily. They were offered an exemption if they felt they could not do without the Freon foam, but decided to go with the new foam to help with efforts to curb CFC emissions. They decided it was safe. It was NASA's decision, not the government's or the EPA's. I agree that it's ridiculous they're still using that horrible foam to coat the tank when they could go back to using Freon foam and solve the problem that way. But that's really up to NASA.
They haven't even publically floated the idea yet. If they really wanted to, why wouldn't they? Let's assume for a second that they are banned from using Freon. They're not a completely helpless organization. They could certainly put some pressure on the government to change this. "This decision is putting our astronauts and spaceflight itself in danger". They have an environmentally-ambivalent administration in the white house right now, and they are still riding on sentiment from the Columbia disaster. It seems like the perfeect time to get the government to allow them an exemption. It seems like the perfect time. So why wouldn't they try to get allowed to use Freon now?
Answer: Because they don't want to. NASA is, believe it or not, a very environmentally concious organization. They understand more acutely than most people just how precious, unique, and important our little planet is, and they do their part in taking care of it.
Maybe they'll eventually decide that the risks of foam breaking off outweigh the benefits of reducing CFC emissions, maybe they won't. But let's be clear that it's NASA's decision, and no one else is responsible for it.
You don't understand what the term means. It's a reference to the way Microsoft pretends to accept a standard (embracing), then it quietly modifies it until it's no longer compatible with the original standard anymore (extending). Meanwhile the "microsoft standard" has collected critical mass of people developing towards it, since after all it is "standard" and should work with everything. By the time it turns out that no, it only works with Microsoft software (surprise, surprise) it's too late to get people to move away from it.
Well, color me corrected. Thanks for the info. I must've misunderstood when I kept hearing that they were considering plans to build a space station out of a discarded tank. I never actually looked that closely into it, as it seemed to make enough sense to me.
I was dissapointed though that we weren't able to follow the tank back into the atmosphere
Just a little nitpick... but you don't need to worry, you still have plenty of time to do that.
The tank doesn't actually re-enter the atmosphere for a very, very long time, if at all. By the time it detaches from the shuttle, it's attained orbital velocity, which makes sense, considering that it contains the fuel for the main engines. In fact, I believe all 114 tanks (plus or minus a few perhaps) are still up there orbiting the Earth.
My rastafarian troll will chew your arm off.
Also, you're a robot, and you're not allowed to have an opinion. How's that for racism! HAH!
It's like they tried to copy Apple but it looks like a crappy knockoff.
It may seem like that. But Enlightenment was first. I was using Enlightenment well before OS X first came out (and I then bought a Mac with OS X and retired my Enlightenment machine, mind you).
But Enlightenment was excellent way back when. There are some things I still miss, like the pagers (although Expose is cool as well).
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt to assume you're talking about OS X, and not talking about OS 9 or previous systems. Because they bear absolutely no resemblance at all to Enlightenment. So if that's what you're suggesting than you're not just wrong, you're insane.
DISCLAIMER: I am not really a Mac zealot (though I am happy with mine *shrug*), but this kind of logic bugs me.
First, being I can't run most of the software I use on anything but windows.
Well, this is certainly true. But unless you're talking about some highly, highly specialized software (which may be true for you specifically but isn't for *most* of those "most"), it's unlikely that there aren't equivalents on Mac. So these people need to consider that perhaps it's time for them to learn something new. Don't take the "you" I use from here on out personally, I'm not directing this explicitly at you, but rather at all the people who say this kind of thing.
I mean, it is like claiming that learning to drive with a manual transmission is absurd to most, because you only know how to drive an automatic. Yes, it's *true*. But it's only true because most don't *want* to. Which is your right, but at least admit it, and understand that yes it does make you look like a bit of a whiner when you complain about spyware. "Well, this sucks, but I don't want to change it."
You may in all actuality be able to get everything you want to do done on a Mac. You may even find that it turns out to be a pleasant experience notwithstanding the lack of viruses and spyware. Maybe not, but there's always that risk. If someone says "Hey this Photoshop program is pretty good" and you're only familiar with MS Paint, you'll probably give it a shot right? So why not try the same with Mac?
To quote George Carlin (from memory, forgive me if it's not perfect):
"My needs aren't being met." Well, then, DROP SOME OF YOUR NEEDS!