In other news, I am losing millions of dollars by not winning the lottery every week.
You can't lose money you never had. Nintendo is missing out on potential income that they could be capitalizing on, but for various reasons have decided not to. That's not the same thing as losing money.
You pretty much need forcefields to protect you from air particles at that speed. The SR-71 expanded so much during flight due to frictional heating that even the fuel tanks needed to be built with expansion joints (so the fuel would leak out until it reached operating temperature at altitude). The fuselage would be about 300 degrees Celsius by the time it landed. Getting out of the plane was apparently a bit of a challenge.
Not most. Diesel is the fuel of choice for emergency power, always, end of story, full stop. Natural gas is nice because it doesn't run out, but for truly critical infrastructure you will find a diesel generator. Diesel, with a big tank, and a robust emergency delivery contract. Even if the contract fails you can take matters into your own hands and try to get some diesel there yourself. If the natural gas lines go down, you're completely out of options. You don't even have time to truck in a diesel generator because your batteries won't last that long. Natural gas generators are a very poor choice for disaster recovery. They're great for cheap and relatively maintenance free "always on" power, but that's not the same thing as disaster planning.
With diesel, no matter what the scale of the disaster is, you've got options, and you've got time. And diesel fuel is omnipresent and usually easy to find, even in a disaster. Farmers keep large stocks of it, usually.
Terminal velocity for something about the size and weight of a camera is probably around 200km/h. An object striking the ground at this speed would decelerate from 200km/h to 0 in milliseconds, the force applied to the object over that very short period of time while it's decelerating (read: shattering into little pieces) would be thousands or tens of thousands of G, depending on the exact way it absorbed those forces and the characteristics of the surface it hit (mud being preferable to concrete for example).
Of course they don't look before they change lanes. They don't have to, they know you'll get out of the way. They don't care, they have no reason to care. If they hit you, you die, they keep driving and maybe wonder what that little noise was.
More seriously though, my uncle was a trucker and you'd better believe they pay attention to signs. No professional trucker wants to get ticketed, ever. They operate on thin margins and the insurance hit alone would go a long way towards putting them out of business. They also respect signs for a more pragmatic reason, and one sign more than most: "Low bridge ahead". If you don't think truckers will turn around and find another road after seeing one of those signs, you're crazy.
If I wasn't afraid it would be held against me for 40 years, I'd send in one of those with every "yes" checked, just for kicks.
Maybe have a few written in with "all of the above".
Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities, or any other unlawful purpose? Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization as currently designated by the U.S. Secretary of State? Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany; or have you ever participated in genocide?
It's too low as it is --- there's enough air resistance that it has to be reboosted at intervals to keep it in orbit. (It has to be that low because otherwise the shuttles can't get there. They have lousy range.) Lowering the orbit any further would be very dangerous.
I think you missed a word, he said lower maintenance orbit, not lower orbit. Kind of counterintuitive that a lower maintenance orbit would be higher, I guess, but I'm pretty sure that's what he meant. Higher, less air, less boosting, less maintenance.
It makes restoring from backup difficult, for one thing, unless you use an exact image of the disk with a partition the exact same size. I don't, I use file-level backups. Or maybe I want to move qmail to a different disk or volume. I mean, on one hand, it's freaking email queue, who gives a damn. But it's the principle of the thing.
Qmail has great features and I'm sure it's secure, but I'm really not terribly keen on its implementation (last time I tried it, anyway). Its method of storing its database as raw inodes is... mildly frightening, to say the least.
I'll continue to use Postfix for the foreseeable future.
While public domain is perhaps the only way to ensure your code can be included in any kind of project...
As I understand it, the only project in which Modified-BSD code could not be included is a project where the author wanted to claim you recommend their project without your permission. So while it's technically true, I don't think it's fair to say that public domain is the only way to allow code to be used in any project, not realistically speaking anyway. Anyone who insists on falsely claiming I endorse or recommend their product because I wrote some code they yoinked is a charlatan and I don't think their project is legitimate.
It looks more palatable than a windfarm but its so damn tall that that the land area may be moot versus the "sight pollution".
Don't worry, no one will have to worry about sight pollution anymore once all the lights go out because everyone was busy pissing and moaning for selfish, ignorant, inconsequential reasons about alternative energy.
If they want to emphasize how safe it is, that's great, but renaming products to get rid of words people don't like is just dumb.
Yeah, no one would be silly enough to rename "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" (NMR) into "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI) despite referring to the nucleus of the cell not the nucleus of an atom, nevermind anything radioactive.
Konqueror is part of KDE's "kdebase" package. The HTML rendering engine khtml is together with all other needed KDE libraries contained in KDE's "kdelibs" package.
To install Konqueror please refer to the pages on how to install KDE.
In Ontario, the speed limit only applies while you have wheels on the ground. In the air, you have no speed limit.
But there is an altitude limit. Except when taking off from or landing at a Transportation Canada certified aerodrome (all highways in the vicinity must be marked for low flying aircraft) you must not fly lower than 1000ft AGL over a built up or urban area, which includes highways. And yes, they do enforce this with radar and altitude transponders.
There is effectively no way to breach that legal 1000 ft buffer zone between ground and sky unless you're at an airport.
The problem is electronic intelligence doesn't have the same innate growth characteristics that cellular life does. Even the simplest collection of organic molecules has a unique built-in ability to grow and reproduce. For an electronic intelligence to have the same capabilities to grow and reproduce, in my estimation, requires a much higher level of development. And that much higher level of development is correspondingly difficult to occur by pure chance.
Note though, that I didn't say it was impossible, only laughably implausible. If an electronic organism is not able to spread and grow and evolve until it reaches a fairly high level of sophistication, then it can't rely on evolution to achieve that high level of sophistication, it has to rely on something else. The only other alternatives I can see are artificial development (by another species) or by sheer chance, which as I said I consider to be highly unlikely.
Of course, I could be very wrong (I really hope I am, that would be exciting) I just think that electronic intelligence, unless it's developed by some mechanism that we haven't yet conceived of, is most likely to be something created by other intelligences, specifically us.
They're talking about profitability when they just laid out an ungodly amount of money to buy.... what, I don't know.
Regardless of how you feel about the sensibility of their purchase of Bioware, they've clearly decided that is the direction they want to go. Perhaps their reasoning for doing both things at once is something like this: They have a new, profitable studio in Edmonton that they've just invested a bunch of money in, and now that the dust has settled on that, they realize that it's a much better place to invest that $25 million they were just getting ready to budget for the Chicago studio next year.
Not to mention that profitability was apparently ok last year, when they were busy advertising.
Unprofitable companies and business units especially hire all the time! If you don't think it's entirely common to throw money at a financial problem, you haven't been in the business long enough.
I've read that article, it's good, but it is still "life not quite as we know it" rather than "life nothing like what we know". As a counterexample, what about an AI? An AI has basically no requirements as far as chemistry are concerned. While it's laughably implausible to imagine an electronic AI "evolving" out of nothingness the way biological organisms did it's still -- by my definition -- "life" and there's no reason we couldn't find it "living" on any planet on our solar system or indeed any we've discovered so far. I find it hard to believe that these are the only two types of life that are physically possible, so I imagine that there may yet be some interesting things to discover out there.
Except we have no idea what the requirements for supporting life are, really. Even "life as we know it" is becoming broader and broader every day. Maybe one day we'll be able to conclusively say "carbon-based DNA-based mitochondrial cellular life cannot exist in this environment because (x)" but we're a very, very long way from even there right now.
My company has a "vendor partner agreement" with Oracle. Which means basically that we whore ourselves for cheaper rates by agreeing to inflict Oracle on all our customers too. For the record, I despise Oracle, and if we weren't so in bed with them, I would be eagerly sticking Postgres everywhere whether they like it or not. But I don't really like where I'm working anyway, so, let them and their customers suffer as far as I'm concerned. Yay apathy!
I have a 1600x1200 LCD (for desktop purposes) and when I play games, I like to be able to play them at native resolution of the LCD as they can't scale down to resolutions the same way a CRT can. So for that, a fairly hefty video card is required. Other than that I agree with you, people take it to extremes.
All they have to do is just lose the dependency for silly windows libs, use OpenGL, its 10x better than directx in my opinion.
I'm writing a game right now (in OpenGL) and let me assure you that it isn't 10x better. It's really not better at all. DirectX is absolutely the 500 pound gorilla in this space. It has its own model formats, its own optimized texture formats, its own shader formats (which are automatically optimized for the major graphic card types) and its fixed-function pipeline absolutely blows OpenGL's FFP out of the water. It's not even in the same league.
With that said, yes, OpenGL is great and it has its advantages, but in order for OpenGL to approach the level of integration and rendering quality that you get for free in DirectX, relies on you to do all the heavy lifting. And there really is a lot of heavy lifting. OpenGL is great if you really, truly want unadulterated control over every aspect of rendering, but you can do that in DirectX too if you want with minimal fuss. On the other hand, if you are not a John Carmack and really would like to let the framework handle most of the hard work for you, DirectX offers that handily, while OpenGL is rather unsatisfactory.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, I am losing millions of dollars by not winning the lottery every week.
You can't lose money you never had. Nintendo is missing out on potential income that they could be capitalizing on, but for various reasons have decided not to. That's not the same thing as losing money.
You pretty much need forcefields to protect you from air particles at that speed. The SR-71 expanded so much during flight due to frictional heating that even the fuel tanks needed to be built with expansion joints (so the fuel would leak out until it reached operating temperature at altitude). The fuselage would be about 300 degrees Celsius by the time it landed. Getting out of the plane was apparently a bit of a challenge.
Not most. Diesel is the fuel of choice for emergency power, always, end of story, full stop. Natural gas is nice because it doesn't run out, but for truly critical infrastructure you will find a diesel generator. Diesel, with a big tank, and a robust emergency delivery contract. Even if the contract fails you can take matters into your own hands and try to get some diesel there yourself. If the natural gas lines go down, you're completely out of options. You don't even have time to truck in a diesel generator because your batteries won't last that long. Natural gas generators are a very poor choice for disaster recovery. They're great for cheap and relatively maintenance free "always on" power, but that's not the same thing as disaster planning.
With diesel, no matter what the scale of the disaster is, you've got options, and you've got time. And diesel fuel is omnipresent and usually easy to find, even in a disaster. Farmers keep large stocks of it, usually.
Terminal velocity for something about the size and weight of a camera is probably around 200km/h. An object striking the ground at this speed would decelerate from 200km/h to 0 in milliseconds, the force applied to the object over that very short period of time while it's decelerating (read: shattering into little pieces) would be thousands or tens of thousands of G, depending on the exact way it absorbed those forces and the characteristics of the surface it hit (mud being preferable to concrete for example).
Of course they don't look before they change lanes. They don't have to, they know you'll get out of the way. They don't care, they have no reason to care. If they hit you, you die, they keep driving and maybe wonder what that little noise was.
More seriously though, my uncle was a trucker and you'd better believe they pay attention to signs. No professional trucker wants to get ticketed, ever. They operate on thin margins and the insurance hit alone would go a long way towards putting them out of business. They also respect signs for a more pragmatic reason, and one sign more than most: "Low bridge ahead". If you don't think truckers will turn around and find another road after seeing one of those signs, you're crazy.
If I wasn't afraid it would be held against me for 40 years, I'd send in one of those with every "yes" checked, just for kicks.
Maybe have a few written in with "all of the above".
Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities, or any other unlawful purpose? Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization as currently designated by the U.S. Secretary of State? Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany; or have you ever participated in genocide?
Oh, that's certainly all of the above.
It's too low as it is --- there's enough air resistance that it has to be reboosted at intervals to keep it in orbit. (It has to be that low because otherwise the shuttles can't get there. They have lousy range.) Lowering the orbit any further would be very dangerous.
I think you missed a word, he said lower maintenance orbit, not lower orbit. Kind of counterintuitive that a lower maintenance orbit would be higher, I guess, but I'm pretty sure that's what he meant. Higher, less air, less boosting, less maintenance.
It makes restoring from backup difficult, for one thing, unless you use an exact image of the disk with a partition the exact same size. I don't, I use file-level backups. Or maybe I want to move qmail to a different disk or volume. I mean, on one hand, it's freaking email queue, who gives a damn. But it's the principle of the thing.
Qmail has great features and I'm sure it's secure, but I'm really not terribly keen on its implementation (last time I tried it, anyway). Its method of storing its database as raw inodes is... mildly frightening, to say the least.
I'll continue to use Postfix for the foreseeable future.
While public domain is perhaps the only way to ensure your code can be included in any kind of project...
As I understand it, the only project in which Modified-BSD code could not be included is a project where the author wanted to claim you recommend their project without your permission. So while it's technically true, I don't think it's fair to say that public domain is the only way to allow code to be used in any project, not realistically speaking anyway. Anyone who insists on falsely claiming I endorse or recommend their product because I wrote some code they yoinked is a charlatan and I don't think their project is legitimate.
Canada's mobile phone providers suck ass
It looks more palatable than a windfarm but its so damn tall that that the land area may be moot versus the "sight pollution".
Don't worry, no one will have to worry about sight pollution anymore once all the lights go out because everyone was busy pissing and moaning for selfish, ignorant, inconsequential reasons about alternative energy.
If they want to emphasize how safe it is, that's great, but renaming products to get rid of words people don't like is just dumb.
Yeah, no one would be silly enough to rename "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" (NMR) into "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI) despite referring to the nucleus of the cell not the nucleus of an atom, nevermind anything radioactive.
Or perhaps by ending the Iraq war 3 hours earlier than planned?
That's not cross-platform.
In Ontario, the speed limit only applies while you have wheels on the ground. In the air, you have no speed limit.
But there is an altitude limit. Except when taking off from or landing at a Transportation Canada certified aerodrome (all highways in the vicinity must be marked for low flying aircraft) you must not fly lower than 1000ft AGL over a built up or urban area, which includes highways. And yes, they do enforce this with radar and altitude transponders.
There is effectively no way to breach that legal 1000 ft buffer zone between ground and sky unless you're at an airport.
The problem is electronic intelligence doesn't have the same innate growth characteristics that cellular life does. Even the simplest collection of organic molecules has a unique built-in ability to grow and reproduce. For an electronic intelligence to have the same capabilities to grow and reproduce, in my estimation, requires a much higher level of development. And that much higher level of development is correspondingly difficult to occur by pure chance.
Note though, that I didn't say it was impossible, only laughably implausible. If an electronic organism is not able to spread and grow and evolve until it reaches a fairly high level of sophistication, then it can't rely on evolution to achieve that high level of sophistication, it has to rely on something else. The only other alternatives I can see are artificial development (by another species) or by sheer chance, which as I said I consider to be highly unlikely.
Of course, I could be very wrong (I really hope I am, that would be exciting) I just think that electronic intelligence, unless it's developed by some mechanism that we haven't yet conceived of, is most likely to be something created by other intelligences, specifically us.
Not to mention routing air traffic around signal stations.
Yeah because that's difficult. Just add it to the already-long list of "fly within 5 miles of this building and you will be shot down by F-16s"
Or, you know, maybe it was just Time Machine that is ripping off Dirvish, which I've been using to do backups on my fileserver for years.
They're talking about profitability when they just laid out an ungodly amount of money to buy.... what, I don't know.
Regardless of how you feel about the sensibility of their purchase of Bioware, they've clearly decided that is the direction they want to go. Perhaps their reasoning for doing both things at once is something like this: They have a new, profitable studio in Edmonton that they've just invested a bunch of money in, and now that the dust has settled on that, they realize that it's a much better place to invest that $25 million they were just getting ready to budget for the Chicago studio next year.
Not to mention that profitability was apparently ok last year, when they were busy advertising.
Unprofitable companies and business units especially hire all the time! If you don't think it's entirely common to throw money at a financial problem, you haven't been in the business long enough.
I've read that article, it's good, but it is still "life not quite as we know it" rather than "life nothing like what we know". As a counterexample, what about an AI? An AI has basically no requirements as far as chemistry are concerned. While it's laughably implausible to imagine an electronic AI "evolving" out of nothingness the way biological organisms did it's still -- by my definition -- "life" and there's no reason we couldn't find it "living" on any planet on our solar system or indeed any we've discovered so far. I find it hard to believe that these are the only two types of life that are physically possible, so I imagine that there may yet be some interesting things to discover out there.
Except we have no idea what the requirements for supporting life are, really. Even "life as we know it" is becoming broader and broader every day. Maybe one day we'll be able to conclusively say "carbon-based DNA-based mitochondrial cellular life cannot exist in this environment because (x)" but we're a very, very long way from even there right now.
My company has a "vendor partner agreement" with Oracle. Which means basically that we whore ourselves for cheaper rates by agreeing to inflict Oracle on all our customers too. For the record, I despise Oracle, and if we weren't so in bed with them, I would be eagerly sticking Postgres everywhere whether they like it or not. But I don't really like where I'm working anyway, so, let them and their customers suffer as far as I'm concerned. Yay apathy!
I have a 1600x1200 LCD (for desktop purposes) and when I play games, I like to be able to play them at native resolution of the LCD as they can't scale down to resolutions the same way a CRT can. So for that, a fairly hefty video card is required. Other than that I agree with you, people take it to extremes.
All they have to do is just lose the dependency for silly windows libs, use OpenGL, its 10x better than directx in my opinion.
I'm writing a game right now (in OpenGL) and let me assure you that it isn't 10x better. It's really not better at all. DirectX is absolutely the 500 pound gorilla in this space. It has its own model formats, its own optimized texture formats, its own shader formats (which are automatically optimized for the major graphic card types) and its fixed-function pipeline absolutely blows OpenGL's FFP out of the water. It's not even in the same league.
With that said, yes, OpenGL is great and it has its advantages, but in order for OpenGL to approach the level of integration and rendering quality that you get for free in DirectX, relies on you to do all the heavy lifting. And there really is a lot of heavy lifting. OpenGL is great if you really, truly want unadulterated control over every aspect of rendering, but you can do that in DirectX too if you want with minimal fuss. On the other hand, if you are not a John Carmack and really would like to let the framework handle most of the hard work for you, DirectX offers that handily, while OpenGL is rather unsatisfactory.