Sorry, Steve*, but the U.S. State Department isn't actually the final authority on what other countries are named. That's generally up to the governments of the countries in question (legitimately elected or not). Furthermore, the one external body that might be considered a legitimate arbiter of the question - the U.N. - accepts "Myanmar".
The question is, all the other units are "base" units, while the SI unit of mass has a (kilo) prefix; how come?
Because it was more convenient to create an object of 1kg mass than it would be to create one of 1g. Perhaps more importantly, a 1kg object was less likely to introduce error due to (literal) small sample size.
iPod "Halo" effect is causing some Windows switchers
I can confirm that anecdotally. Last night I got a call from my uncle and my cousin the college student. She has yet another broken Windows laptop (it'll cost several hundred bucks to fix it), and they wanted the family geek's advice on what kind of computer to get to replace it. Without me even having to suggest it, she (an iPod owner) had already been looking at Apples. So I just steered them toward the 12" iBook with AppleCare. Talking to her, I added that it'd match her iPod; to him, I explained that it was the best bang for the buck of the Apple line, and AppleCare would be cheaper than any repairs that might be needed.
This is precisely the sort of thing that the phrase "student employee" was coined for. You don't need to pay them much, because for the most part they'd be doing their homework, surfing porn, or whatever else they'd be doing during that time. So you get a cheap but intelligent "authentication and monitoring system", they get a few extra bucks for beer and pizza, the folks checking stuff out get more personal service than some goldbergian encrypted-keys-and-biometrics system... everybody wins.
Years ago, just out of college, I lived with a guy who wanted to put a cubicle in his part of the house. I assume that he's gotten over that by now.
Raised floors are - in some situations - a necessary evil. A home data center is not one of those situations.
Re:a solution in search of an application
on
Whereables?
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· Score: 1
Um... you didn't answer the question.
All you did was list some things that could be done with this technology. You failed to identify a single problem that it solved. For example, what is problematic about waiters maintaining eye contact long enough to listen to the customer and then writing on a pad of paper with a pen? (I've always been comfortable with that, and it's not beyond the ability of a competent waiter.) Unless you're starting with an identified problem, you're not offering a solution; you're offering... something else. That's the point of asking that specific question.
Why are they called rootkits in windows, when the superuser is called "administrator" and not "root"?
For the same reason trackpads, wireless pointing devices, and such are called "mice", even though they look nothing like a mouse.... why solid state storage devices are called "flash disks" or "flash drives", even though there's nothing flat and circular in them and no moving parts... why the stuff in the middle of pencils is called the "lead", even though it's mostly graphite... why magazines featuring stories told with sequential art are called "comic books", even though they're usually not humorous.
This is seeing an opportunity and using it, and they deserve a bit of success from that.
No, they do not.
Maybe they "deserve" a pat on the back for their ingenuity or whatever. But they deserve no "success"* for it.
*Apparently you're one of the people who uses the word "success" as a synonym for wealth. Some of us define "success" and "deserve" based on less... mercantile standards.
While this "broadcast flag" is a Bad Thing in principle, it isn't going to affect me personally in practise, so I'm doing... nothing. I'll keep pulling my analog lo-def signals off the air, recording them on my TiVo*, saving them until I've watched them... just like I do now. HDTV's nice, I'm sure, but "Lost" is entertaining enough in lo-def, and I've got better things to spend my time and money on.
*Or a MythTV box built from a spare CPU with an old NTSC tuner card if the TiVo box or TiVo the company dies.
a solution in search of an application
on
Whereables?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
A former boss of mine has an excellent question he always asks regarding requests to acquire new technology: "What's the problem for which this is the solution?" The lack of an answer to that question is the answer to the question posed by this thread.
You're missing the point: It isn't about which person gets elected. Whichever one wins, s/he owes too many favors to the companies that paid for the campaign (likely giving money to both sides). Money doesn't buy elections; it buys elected officials.
This is one of the few unfortunate examples of complete bipartisanship in congress.
"Monopartisanship" would be more accurate. The democratic caucus and the republican caucus of the Business Party are both voting the party line on this issue.
Are there any ISPs still putting any effort into dial-up?
Pretty much all of the small- to medium-sized ones, I'd think. At least here in the U.S., the broadband market is owned by a fairly small number of large companies, and local and regional ISPs small companies simply cannot get over the barriers to entry. Dial-up is all they have.
A friend of mine works for one of these, and they tried reselling DSL from SBC, but there was simply no money to be made that way. They were effectively doing marketing and front-line tech support for one of their biggest competitors! So instead they're clinging to dial-up customers, pushing stuff like "accelerated downloads" and caching proxies, and grasping at no-entrenched-monopoly technologies like satellite or wireless access, just to stay in business.
I've used a couple of those 3Com OfficeConnect boxes for putting small offices "online" via dial-up: a great, cheap solution, but still a little sluggish getting connected. 3Com also made an ISDN version which I used for my home data center before DSL was available here.
Assuming you can find an ISP who'll charge you what ISDN is really worth these days (rather than pricing data access over a single 64k channel as if it were "broadband"), it's not a bad option. As I recall from the days when I was running my web server over an ISDN line, the line itself isn't horribly more expensive than POTS. Even if you don't get "always on" service from your ISP, it's darn close to "instant on" (at least compared to V.whatever handshaking over POTS). Plus you get a second phone line out of it (e.g. for a fax machine, second answering machine).
There is nothing intrinsic in the number 2 and the number 5 that will tell you what they will equal when they are multiplied.
You seem to be saying that 2x5=10 is just some arbitrary convention rather than an intrinsic property of these integers. I disagree. There's something fundamental about the concepts of 2ness and 5ness that makes their product 10. Call me an old-school Platonist, but I'm sticking to that notion.
If you're talking about the numerals "2" and "5", that's something altogether different; those are arbitary. But if that's what you mean, why the hang-up with someone visualising them differently? Is your problem the fact that he has a way of visualising them that does (in some way) capture their essence?
The word processor or text editor (which I first encountered in college, yes I'm that old) has been a real aid to me in communicating, but in high school I had to learn to compose my thoughts (at least for papers) using a typewriter. Which, now that I think about it, may explain why my conversational skills have come to include these awkward pauses while I try to compose a paragraph in my head before commiting it to speech.
But there is some hope to be gained from others' examples. I have a friend with cerebral palsy whose pediatrician said he'd never be able to care for himself but is now a successful business owner and head of household, another friend with learning disabilities who's doing well handling repetitive tech-support calls, and a great aunt who was born cyanotic with multiple disabilities but has lived a rather full and rich life. My boyfriend, whose brain hemorrhage several years ago left him unable to care for himself (let alone hold down a job) has ended up as "a burden on the family", but they - and I - still value him for (to put it crudely) what's left of him. A step mother I expected nothing from turned out to be his greatest caregiver. (And I sure as hell didn't turn out like my family expected.)
My point I suppose is that things don't always turn out as badly as you fear they will, and you have to let every situation sort itself out as best as you can. There's no guarantee that everything will all work out, but then there's no guarantee that it won't. Work with that.
Slashdot Mirror
*That's what I've decided your name should be.
I used to, but stopped once I discovered I could get it on the web for free.
Because it was more convenient to create an object of 1kg mass than it would be to create one of 1g. Perhaps more importantly, a 1kg object was less likely to introduce error due to (literal) small sample size.
If he meant Burma, he really meant Myanmar (aka the country formerly known as Burma)
So I guess this means that my suggestion to have the kilogram redefined as (my body mass/90) has been rejected?
I can confirm that anecdotally. Last night I got a call from my uncle and my cousin the college student. She has yet another broken Windows laptop (it'll cost several hundred bucks to fix it), and they wanted the family geek's advice on what kind of computer to get to replace it. Without me even having to suggest it, she (an iPod owner) had already been looking at Apples. So I just steered them toward the 12" iBook with AppleCare. Talking to her, I added that it'd match her iPod; to him, I explained that it was the best bang for the buck of the Apple line, and AppleCare would be cheaper than any repairs that might be needed.
This is precisely the sort of thing that the phrase "student employee" was coined for. You don't need to pay them much, because for the most part they'd be doing their homework, surfing porn, or whatever else they'd be doing during that time. So you get a cheap but intelligent "authentication and monitoring system", they get a few extra bucks for beer and pizza, the folks checking stuff out get more personal service than some goldbergian encrypted-keys-and-biometrics system... everybody wins.
There are a few utilities that do that: MacOpener, MacDrive, TransMac, and (also for *n*x) TransferPro
Raised floors are - in some situations - a necessary evil. A home data center is not one of those situations.
All you did was list some things that could be done with this technology. You failed to identify a single problem that it solved. For example, what is problematic about waiters maintaining eye contact long enough to listen to the customer and then writing on a pad of paper with a pen? (I've always been comfortable with that, and it's not beyond the ability of a competent waiter.) Unless you're starting with an identified problem, you're not offering a solution; you're offering... something else. That's the point of asking that specific question.
For the same reason trackpads, wireless pointing devices, and such are called "mice", even though they look nothing like a mouse.... why solid state storage devices are called "flash disks" or "flash drives", even though there's nothing flat and circular in them and no moving parts... why the stuff in the middle of pencils is called the "lead", even though it's mostly graphite... why magazines featuring stories told with sequential art are called "comic books", even though they're usually not humorous.
No, they do not.
Maybe they "deserve" a pat on the back for their ingenuity or whatever. But they deserve no "success"* for it.
*Apparently you're one of the people who uses the word "success" as a synonym for wealth. Some of us define "success" and "deserve" based on less... mercantile standards.
*Or a MythTV box built from a spare CPU with an old NTSC tuner card if the TiVo box or TiVo the company dies.
A former boss of mine has an excellent question he always asks regarding requests to acquire new technology: "What's the problem for which this is the solution?" The lack of an answer to that question is the answer to the question posed by this thread.
You're missing the point: It isn't about which person gets elected. Whichever one wins, s/he owes too many favors to the companies that paid for the campaign (likely giving money to both sides). Money doesn't buy elections; it buys elected officials.
"Monopartisanship" would be more accurate. The democratic caucus and the republican caucus of the Business Party are both voting the party line on this issue.
The U.S. is a Represenative Plutocracy (one dollar, one vote), and it's Capitalism - not Socialism - that's pushing this particular threat to freedom.
The word that applies here is "unlawful", generally used to refer to activities which are violations of civil (rather than criminal) law.
Pretty much all of the small- to medium-sized ones, I'd think. At least here in the U.S., the broadband market is owned by a fairly small number of large companies, and local and regional ISPs small companies simply cannot get over the barriers to entry. Dial-up is all they have.
A friend of mine works for one of these, and they tried reselling DSL from SBC, but there was simply no money to be made that way. They were effectively doing marketing and front-line tech support for one of their biggest competitors! So instead they're clinging to dial-up customers, pushing stuff like "accelerated downloads" and caching proxies, and grasping at no-entrenched-monopoly technologies like satellite or wireless access, just to stay in business.
I've used a couple of those 3Com OfficeConnect boxes for putting small offices "online" via dial-up: a great, cheap solution, but still a little sluggish getting connected. 3Com also made an ISDN version which I used for my home data center before DSL was available here.
Assuming you can find an ISP who'll charge you what ISDN is really worth these days (rather than pricing data access over a single 64k channel as if it were "broadband"), it's not a bad option. As I recall from the days when I was running my web server over an ISDN line, the line itself isn't horribly more expensive than POTS. Even if you don't get "always on" service from your ISP, it's darn close to "instant on" (at least compared to V.whatever handshaking over POTS). Plus you get a second phone line out of it (e.g. for a fax machine, second answering machine).
Don't get too upset; most ISPs won't even consider providing broadband service to the homeless.
You seem to be saying that 2x5=10 is just some arbitrary convention rather than an intrinsic property of these integers. I disagree. There's something fundamental about the concepts of 2ness and 5ness that makes their product 10. Call me an old-school Platonist, but I'm sticking to that notion.
If you're talking about the numerals "2" and "5", that's something altogether different; those are arbitary. But if that's what you mean, why the hang-up with someone visualising them differently? Is your problem the fact that he has a way of visualising them that does (in some way) capture their essence?
The word processor or text editor (which I first encountered in college, yes I'm that old) has been a real aid to me in communicating, but in high school I had to learn to compose my thoughts (at least for papers) using a typewriter. Which, now that I think about it, may explain why my conversational skills have come to include these awkward pauses while I try to compose a paragraph in my head before commiting it to speech.
But there is some hope to be gained from others' examples. I have a friend with cerebral palsy whose pediatrician said he'd never be able to care for himself but is now a successful business owner and head of household, another friend with learning disabilities who's doing well handling repetitive tech-support calls, and a great aunt who was born cyanotic with multiple disabilities but has lived a rather full and rich life. My boyfriend, whose brain hemorrhage several years ago left him unable to care for himself (let alone hold down a job) has ended up as "a burden on the family", but they - and I - still value him for (to put it crudely) what's left of him. A step mother I expected nothing from turned out to be his greatest caregiver. (And I sure as hell didn't turn out like my family expected.)
My point I suppose is that things don't always turn out as badly as you fear they will, and you have to let every situation sort itself out as best as you can. There's no guarantee that everything will all work out, but then there's no guarantee that it won't. Work with that.