> Yes, but arguably fewer people don't know about the birth defects than about the not being able to drive part. How many people do you think really need to be told that drinking impairs their ability to drive?
Plenty of people think "yes, but I'm a better than average driver, and hold my drink better than average, so I'll be ok".
> Show me one and I will show you an ideal candidate for the Darwin awards.
In an ideal world they would only kill themselves.
> IMHO plasma isn;t going to be the flatscreen tech that succeeds, I reckon it'll be some variant on tft panel.
Longer term you may be right. But right now I could walk into a shop and buy a 42" or even 50" plasma screen which is thin and light enough to hang on the wall. (It wouldn't be sensible for me to spend that much money on a luxury right now, but I could put it on a credit card and pay it off slowly).
There is no way I could afford a 50" LCD, even if I could find someone who could make one for me. I can't buy a 50" (non-projection) CRT either.
Large screen plasma exists, works (though long term reliability is unknown), sells (in small numbers), and has been dropping in price. LCD has a long way to catch it, even though LCDs have been getting bigger and better and cheaper too. As a 22" screen the Apple cinema display is very nice, but I can buy a flat-front widescreen 36" CRT TV for the same price.
My old 28" 4:3 has developed a fault that goes away when taken to repair shops, so I've been looking at new TVs. There are still some 25" 4:3's, and plenty of smaller ones, but anything larger than that seems to be widescreen only.
(I'd decided if I was going to get a new set I'd get widescreen, so that isn't a problem. But prices still seem to be dropping fast enough I'll see if I can stick with the existing set for a while. What I _really_ want is a 42" plasma (or larger), but it's going to be a while before they drop enough. And at that size, HDTV would _really_ be nice, so maybe it will be standardized by the time I can afford one.)
Some crypto algorithms go a lot faster with a 64bit processor. Of course for a PVR that might not be an advantage for the user. (For a cellphone, on the other hand...)
(fx:googles) Oh. Ok, I take back what I said about it not being found naturally. (I suppose I could claim "naturally like diamond and corundum" is still true if it means "naturally in large enough pieces to make significant amounts of jewelry".)
> The (admittedly very hard) ceramics you mention are in the 7-9 range, to my knowledge
The ceramics I mentioned included (cubic) boron nitride, which your link says was previously the second hardest substance. Search for suppliers of those materials and you will find data sheets saying they are over 9. Maybe they are exaggerating.
The idea that francium beryllide could be harder than diamond is interesting though. Difficult to use something with a half-life of 22 minutes as an engineering material though.
> It is the second-most hardest substance known to man after the diamond (Vicker's scale 9 to diamond's 10)
You are thinking of the Mohs hardness scale, not Vickers. http://www.webelements.com/webelements/p roperties/ text/definitions/hardness-mineral.html
And just because corundum is second on the list doesn't mean there are no substances in the range between 9 and 10. Things like titanium carbide, silicon carbide, boron carbide, and boron nitride are (or can be). (However they aren't found naturally the way corundum and diamond are).
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/ele ments/aluminium/history.html says "the name alumium [...] change it to aluminum." which you have to admit is more convincing than "the name aluminum [...] change it to aluminum."
Re: Hardness and strength not the same thing.
on
Transparent Aluminium
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
> the original name of the element was 'Aluminum', but in England they felt it should follow most of the other elements and end in ium, so they changed it to allow a 2nd spelling
In English "aluminium" isn't just an allowable second spelling, it is the standard spelling. It's also the internationally agreed IUPAC spelling. (And yes "aluminum" was used before "aluminium". Full history at http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/ele ments/aluminium/history.html).
> So how is Movie88 a pirate site if it attempts to prevent downloading of the videos?
Because they hadn't paid for the videos they were streaming. They weren't a site for pirates to copy videos, but they were using pirate videos as the base of their business. That's the MPA's story anyway. Depends what you feel about the "loophole in Taiwan copyright law" (presumably related to Taiwan only relatively recently adopting laws acceptable to WTO - http://www.ladas.com/BULLETINS/1999/0399Bulletin/T aiwan_CopyrightLawRev.html)
Re: Hardness and strength not the same thing.
on
Transparent Aluminium
·
· Score: 5, Funny
P.S. Considering the number of people who are confused about the difference between silicon and silicone, it's not surprising some can't tell the difference between aluminium and alumina (aluminium oxide).
(Aluminum/aluminium is just US/international spelling. Looking at the original German article it uses "Aluminiumoxid" where the fish translation has alumina.)
Re: Hardness and strength not the same thing.
on
Transparent Aluminium
·
· Score: 5, Informative
> this material is 3 times as strong as steal,
No, it says it is three times as _hard_ as hardened steel, which isn't the same thing (though they are related). Considering that corundum (i.e. ruby, sapphire) is made of aluminium oxide, that isn't that surprising.
Forming that hard material into tiles of unspecified but obviously reasonable toughness and strenth while keeping it transparent is the impressive bit.
> but, sending it to a bunch of students? they dont really expect to get any money from us do they?
That's one of the reasons spam is so irritating. It's cheaper for them to spam everyone they can that filter likely prospects, so that's what they do. The companies selling lists advertize the size of the list, not how selective it is.
> if the ship is to be say, the size of a small city, say 10^3.. 10^5 people (multi-generational teams cannot be too small...)
They can probably be smaller than that.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9 99 91936
"For a space trip of 200 years, perhaps eight to 10 generations, his calculations suggest a minimum number of 160 people are needed to maintain a stable population."
The AAAS are talking about similar numbers
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=120 31 1
"crew of about 200 men and women"
Re:Those opening paragraphs...
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 1
> > his (admittedly laudable) charitable works?
> I don't consider 20+ billion dollars in one shot 'admittedly laughable'.
"laudable" is _not_ a synonym for "laughable".
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?laudable
> Well, I can't even get a girlfriend in the first place, much less a wife. How did you manage to find one of each?:P
Luck. And long periods without either, so have patience. (And just to make it absolutely clear, the woman who isn't my wife is an _ex_-girlfriend, and was while my wife was my girlfriend, so I've only found one at a time (though the time I first got together with that girlfriend and split up with the previous one was kind of messy and confused)).
> Oh, and Christmas? Or do you mean V-day?
Yes. You see how difficult it is, I'm all confused and not thinking straight. Having a cold doesn't help. The "possible present ideas" list I have is titled Christmas, but the actual Christmas presents have already been deleted.
> Instead, I always have to spend all of February avoiding public places and changing the TV channel quickly when some V-day ad comes on.
The suckiest Valentine's day I ever had was after my ex-girlfriend told me around two o'clock in the morning that no, actually we weren't getting back together after all, this was just a one night thing. Next morning (Sunday 14th) I found someone had slashed two tires on my car (and most of the other cars in that car park). So I spent the morning waiting to be able to get new tires, with various of her friends calling round and saying "Oh, you two are back together for Valentine's day, isn't that sweet".
(We got back together much later, and split up again almost as badly. We're now both married (to different people, not each other). Amazingly, we are still friends.)
Which still leaves the question of what to get my wife for Christmas. She's said not roses - we have rose bushes in the garden (one's even flowering at the moment) and cut ones from a florist at this time of year generally don't last very long and have a massive price hike because of the demand. And she does need some new underwear.
> About 10 years ago my wife spilled some Coke (or Pepsi) into the dashboard
Allegedly the US spec for military aircraft instruments includes being able to resist Coke spillage.
> I filled the kitchen sink with cold, clean water and soaked everything, cassette player and all, for 1 hour. Drained the water, refilled the sink, and soaked for another 15 minutes (rinse cycle).
It can be worth using distilled/deionized water for the final rinse.
> rape or piracy. (The later of which used to result in a death penalty without trial. The only reason it still does not is because we've killed all the pirates.)
Many pirates were tried (and being killed in combat or lynched hardly counts as "a death penalty"), and there are still parts of the world where piracy is a problem.
> Google Contest Winner Offers Better Porn Searches
Actually I think the existing page ranking mechanism could be adapted for identifying porn sites. You can identify a few existing sites as porn, and/or full of porn links. From there we use the fact that most links to and from porn related sites are from or to other porn related sites (we can use keywords as well of course) to give rankings.
Add in measurements of "how many pictures and movies can we reach on this site without being asked for a credit card number", and maybe some analysis of the javascript to penalize pop-ups and onclose methods, use the existing indexing, classification, and image search stuff, and there you are.
> Patent the neat idea your code is based on, then make them licence the patents.
Ok, they thought of that one too. "you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry."
> > For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission.
> Ahh, but if you read the submission requirements, you have to submit your source, a Makefile, and use only GPL or other open source libraries, so they've covered their butt there.
Patent the neat idea your code is based on, then make them licence the patents. Given some of the rubbish that gets patented, patenting a really innovative idea shouldn't be that hard:-)
It's not as if you're forced to enter the contest - if you decide halfway through that your idea could be worth a lot of money, don't submit it. On the other hand, if you were going to GPL it anyway, this could be a nice bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes, but arguably fewer people don't know about the birth defects than about the not being able to drive part. How many people do you think really need to be told that drinking impairs their ability to drive?
Plenty of people think "yes, but I'm a better than average driver, and hold my drink better than average, so I'll be ok".
> Show me one and I will show you an ideal candidate for the Darwin awards.
In an ideal world they would only kill themselves.
> IMHO plasma isn;t going to be the flatscreen tech that succeeds, I reckon it'll be some variant on tft panel.
Longer term you may be right. But right now I could walk into a shop and buy a 42" or even 50" plasma screen which is thin and light enough to hang on the wall. (It wouldn't be sensible for me to spend that much money on a luxury right now, but I could put it on a credit card and pay it off slowly).
There is no way I could afford a 50" LCD, even if I could find someone who could make one for me. I can't buy a 50" (non-projection) CRT either.
Large screen plasma exists, works (though long term reliability is unknown), sells (in small numbers), and has been dropping in price. LCD has a long way to catch it, even though LCDs have been getting bigger and better and cheaper too.
As a 22" screen the Apple cinema display is very nice, but I can buy a flat-front widescreen 36" CRT TV for the same price.
> almost getting hard ot buy a new 4:3
My old 28" 4:3 has developed a fault that goes away when taken to repair shops, so I've been looking at new TVs. There are still some 25" 4:3's, and plenty of smaller ones, but anything larger than that seems to be widescreen only.
(I'd decided if I was going to get a new set I'd get widescreen, so that isn't a problem. But prices still seem to be dropping fast enough I'll see if I can stick with the existing set for a while. What I _really_ want is a 42" plasma (or larger), but it's going to be a while before they drop enough. And at that size, HDTV would _really_ be nice, so maybe it will be standardized by the time I can afford one.)
> PVR needs a 64-bit processor.
Some crypto algorithms go a lot faster with a 64bit processor. Of course for a PVR that might not be an advantage for the user.
(For a cellphone, on the other hand...)
> moissanite
(fx:googles) Oh. Ok, I take back what I said about it not being found naturally. (I suppose I could claim "naturally like diamond and corundum" is still true if it means "naturally in large enough pieces to make significant amounts of jewelry".)
> The (admittedly very hard) ceramics you mention are in the 7-9 range, to my knowledge
The ceramics I mentioned included (cubic) boron nitride, which your link says was previously the second hardest substance. Search for suppliers of those materials and you will find data sheets saying they are over 9. Maybe they are exaggerating.
The idea that francium beryllide could be harder than diamond is interesting though. Difficult to use something with a half-life of 22 minutes as an engineering material though.
> It is the second-most hardest substance known to man after the diamond (Vicker's scale 9 to diamond's 10)
p roperties/ text/definitions/hardness-mineral.html
You are thinking of the Mohs hardness scale, not Vickers.
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/
And just because corundum is second on the list doesn't mean there are no substances in the range between 9 and 10. Things like titanium carbide, silicon carbide, boron carbide, and boron nitride are (or can be).
(However they aren't found naturally the way corundum and diamond are).
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/ele ments/aluminium/history.html says "the name alumium [...] change it to aluminum." which you have to admit is more convincing than "the name aluminum [...] change it to aluminum."
> the original name of the element was 'Aluminum', but in England they felt it should follow most of the other elements and end in ium, so they changed it to allow a 2nd spelling
e ments/aluminium/history.html).
In English "aluminium" isn't just an allowable second spelling, it is the standard spelling. It's also the internationally agreed IUPAC spelling. (And yes "aluminum" was used before "aluminium". Full history at http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/el
> So how is Movie88 a pirate site if it attempts to prevent downloading of the videos?
T aiwan_CopyrightLawRev.html)
Because they hadn't paid for the videos they were streaming. They weren't a site for pirates to copy videos, but they were using pirate videos as the base of their business. That's the MPA's story anyway.
Depends what you feel about the "loophole in Taiwan copyright law" (presumably related to Taiwan only relatively recently adopting laws acceptable to WTO - http://www.ladas.com/BULLETINS/1999/0399Bulletin/
P.S. Considering the number of people who are confused about the difference between silicon and silicone, it's not surprising some can't tell the difference between aluminium and alumina (aluminium oxide).
(Aluminum/aluminium is just US/international spelling. Looking at the original German article it uses "Aluminiumoxid" where the fish translation has alumina.)
> this material is 3 times as strong as steal,
No, it says it is three times as _hard_ as hardened steel, which isn't the same thing (though they are related). Considering that corundum (i.e. ruby, sapphire) is made of aluminium oxide, that isn't that surprising.
Forming that hard material into tiles of unspecified but obviously reasonable toughness and strenth while keeping it transparent is the impressive bit.
> but, sending it to a bunch of students? they dont really expect to get any money from us do they?
That's one of the reasons spam is so irritating. It's cheaper for them to spam everyone they can that filter likely prospects, so that's what they do. The companies selling lists advertize the size of the list, not how selective it is.
> if the ship is to be say, the size of a small city, say 10^3 .. 10^5 people (multi-generational teams cannot be too small ...)
9 99 91936
0 31 1
They can probably be smaller than that.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
"For a space trip of 200 years, perhaps eight to 10 generations, his calculations suggest a minimum number of 160 people are needed to maintain a stable population."
The AAAS are talking about similar numbers
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=12
"crew of about 200 men and women"
> > his (admittedly laudable) charitable works?
> I don't consider 20+ billion dollars in one shot 'admittedly laughable'.
"laudable" is _not_ a synonym for "laughable".
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?laudable
> Shouldn't this be a poll?
And when CowboyNeal wins?
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/
> Well, I can't even get a girlfriend in the first place, much less a wife. How did you manage to find one of each? :P
Luck. And long periods without either, so have patience. (And just to make it absolutely clear, the woman who isn't my wife is an _ex_-girlfriend, and was while my wife was my girlfriend, so I've only found one at a time (though the time I first got together with that girlfriend and split up with the previous one was kind of messy and confused)).
> Oh, and Christmas? Or do you mean V-day?
Yes. You see how difficult it is, I'm all confused and not thinking straight. Having a cold doesn't help. The "possible present ideas" list I have is titled Christmas, but the actual Christmas presents have already been deleted.
> Instead, I always have to spend all of February avoiding public places and changing the TV channel quickly when some V-day ad comes on.
The suckiest Valentine's day I ever had was after my ex-girlfriend told me around two o'clock in the morning that no, actually we weren't getting back together after all, this was just a one night thing. Next morning (Sunday 14th) I found someone had slashed two tires on my car (and most of the other cars in that car park). So I spent the morning waiting to be able to get new tires, with various of her friends calling round and saying "Oh, you two are back together for Valentine's day, isn't that sweet".
(We got back together much later, and split up again almost as badly. We're now both married (to different people, not each other). Amazingly, we are still friends.)
Which still leaves the question of what to get my wife for Christmas. She's said not roses - we have rose bushes in the garden (one's even flowering at the moment) and cut ones from a florist at this time of year generally don't last very long and have a massive price hike because of the demand. And she does need some new underwear.
> About 10 years ago my wife spilled some Coke (or Pepsi) into the dashboard
Allegedly the US spec for military aircraft instruments includes being able to resist Coke spillage.
> I filled the kitchen sink with cold, clean water and soaked everything, cassette player and all, for 1 hour. Drained the water, refilled the sink, and soaked for another 15 minutes (rinse cycle).
It can be worth using distilled/deionized water for the final rinse.
> rape or piracy. (The later of which used to result in a death penalty without trial. The only reason it still does not is because we've killed all the pirates.)
Many pirates were tried (and being killed in combat or lynched hardly counts as "a death penalty"), and there are still parts of the world where piracy is a problem.
> Google Contest Winner Offers Better Porn Searches
Actually I think the existing page ranking mechanism could be adapted for identifying porn sites. You can identify a few existing sites as porn, and/or full of porn links. From there we use the fact that most links to and from porn related sites are from or to other porn related sites (we can use keywords as well of course) to give rankings.
Add in measurements of "how many pictures and movies can we reach on this site without being asked for a credit card number", and maybe some analysis of the javascript to penalize pop-ups and onclose methods, use the existing indexing, classification, and image search stuff, and there you are.
> Patent the neat idea your code is based on, then make them licence the patents.
Ok, they thought of that one too. "you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry."
Allegedly the gyroscopic effect of disks in early Nimrod anti-submarine/SAR planes made a noticeable difference to their handling.
> > For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission.
:-)
> Ahh, but if you read the submission requirements, you have to submit your source, a Makefile, and use only GPL or other open source libraries, so they've covered their butt there.
Patent the neat idea your code is based on, then make them licence the patents. Given some of the rubbish that gets patented, patenting a really innovative idea shouldn't be that hard
It's not as if you're forced to enter the contest - if you decide halfway through that your idea could be worth a lot of money, don't submit it. On the other hand, if you were going to GPL it anyway, this could be a nice bonus.