You fail at both funny and informative: it's enough to block the electromagnetic spectrum from 390 to 750 nm to render those inoperative. It can happen with fog, or be done with smoke or any material placed in the line of sight. Guess why IR communications are hardly used for anything except TV remote controls even though they've been around for decades...
Closely related to maps are satellite images, and they are in serious need of a cleanup as well. I was recently asked to find some images for a specific area in Antarctica and do specific processing on them. I'll pass on how hard it was to find images (for free or fee), the USGS was the best source but with other commercial satellites it was simply impossible to get samples. Not, the problem was in the format: basically every generation of satellite has its own data format and/or associated geolocation description file, and even 'standard' formats such as GeoTIFF (a TIFF file with embedded geolocation information) were hardly ever read by GIS softwares. I must have tried 10 packages and it's a nightmare, particularly if you want to do processing in addition to visualisation.
Photoshop/Gimp can open and enhance GeoTIFF files. Google Earth Pro can overlay them on the globe. But call one after the other and the geoloc info is lost. It's all like this. Last time I had to do this I ended up writing my own image processor in C, that was almost a decade ago. Nothing has changed. Of course big vendors tell you that their 10k$ software can do it, except that from my trials I have no faith in that, that's too expensive for processing 10 files, and it takes 3 months to get a handle on the software.
Police forces, for one thing, get an upfront budget instead of being asked to "police the country first and send us the bill later, we'll decide if we pay you back or not."
Yeah and the cops are pretty pissed right now: 2 days ago they caught a guy after 45 days on the run who did a casino heist next door to where I live. He and his partner slugged the cops with machine guns like in bad Hollywood movies (one dead). Today the guy's been freed 'temporarily' (there's no bail here). And they want to jail you for downloading some Johnny Halliday (an antique and lousy french rocker who happens to be best pal with the prez) ?!? Well, guess what, don't be surprised if nobody trusts the govt to enforce laws that pertains to a few private interests: FUCK THEM.
The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut
Looking for a culprit ? The guy who decided to sit on the movie for months while the marketing campaign was already on. When people want to see something and it is available, albeit illegally, they will.
The lack of a magnetosphere will always present an issue for human life
I could probably run the computation, but I don't feel like it right now, so, would it be possible to create a magnetosphere by laying down a (supraconducting) cable along the equator and running a current through it ? Or more simply two shorter cables circling the poles ?
Question: Is resistance to antibiotics energy-unfavourable for bacteria? Meaning, if antibiotics are not abundantly present to guide bacterial evolution, will bacterial strains revert to a 'simpler structure' and become susceptible to antibiotics again?
Yes. But it takes a long time. I know, citation needed, blah, blah...
You are wrong in attributing the drinkability of beer to alcohol: beer doesn't contain enough alcohol to kill most pathogens (2 to 8% in traditional beers). It does so thanks to competition with yeast. You have many germs in your brew when you start it, but if all goes well only yeast grows and eliminates the competition. Sometimes a brew can go bad where the yeast is eliminated by other germs, but then it's rather easy to tell: it doesn't smell, looks or taste like beer, so you don't drink it. With water you can't tell.
One of the many good things about android though is that it shows you what the app wants wants before installing
Yes, but without the ability to deny some of those rights, it's not very useful. Case in point: couple days ago I wanted to install a simple music app. It wanted GPS access and internet access. Fuck that, I didn't install the app but I'd much rather block those two things.
People that smart should be able to play the stock market if they wanted to, for instance
Stock market shouldn't be a game. It should be what it was originally designed to be: a way for company to raise money for their own development. Not a game, not a pile of cards of companies purchasing each others, not a lottery, etc...
One label proposes grades, ranging from an A-plus to a D. There are no failing grades, since vehicles need to comply with the Clean Air Act
So we start with cars with A rating. Then next year we get A+ or AA. And in 20 years we'll have, what, A++++ vs A++++++ like an eBay rating ? That's pretty dumb. If it was for me I'd give a Hummer a Z and a Prius a U or something, and then let them fight out to get better letters, A being a perpetual motion machine !
Same criteria as for volunteers for Antarctic winterovers: you have to be crazy enough to want to spend a winter in Antarctica, but sane enough to do productive work down there. Individualistic enough to not miss society at large, but social enough to not want to kill the rest of your group. Good luck with that. Been there done that.
I wouldn't call all all those super-hero comics 'adult oriented'. In 99% of the cases, their stories are so puerile that only children would want to read them. Or maybe brain-damaged adults. I've read about 10000 adult comics. By adult, I mean not porn or gore, but the same kind of 'adult' who enjoys a good drama movie that is clearly not intended for children. But those kind of comics, while thriving in other countries, are almost non-existent in the US.
So that's why English spelling is so damn easy. There is just one rule: "Just f#$ing remember how words are written and pronounced".
I'll give you that English is not too hard to spell, but as for being easy to pronounce, I beg to differ: although I've been using it daily for decades, my mouth starts to hurts after a few minutes of use. Particularly if there are vowel-less words like 'strength'...
because being able to spell words aloud is not actually a useful skill (except in the USA).
I always found US spelling bees strange. Here we have 'dictation' contests: you hear something and you write it down. Whoever makes the fewer mistakes win. It's obvious why it's useful.
But spelling words without context ? Maybe it comes from all the hotline staffed by foreigners where you have to spell every single thing you tell them otherwise they write garbage on your file. But besides that...
Yes, I've been holding out for years on netbook/ebook reader because what I really want is a passive screen with COLORS so I can read ebooks and eComics. I don't need a keyboard for that purpose, I don't even really need a touchscreen (as a recent experiment with a Sony eBook proved), I don't want a backlit screen (consumes too much power and is unreadable sitting by the pool). For me that's the killer device. And for that purpose the OS doesn't matter.
If I want a Netbook, I don't want Windows (meh!) or Android (too locked down) but Linux so it can be used for work, but then it's just a less usable version of my work computer. I did try the interesting Asus T91 (rotating touchscreen that turns into a tablet), but it was buggy under Linux. So I'm still waiting...
Who still doesn't believe our government is being run by corporate power?
I don't. I do believe our entire society is powered by groups of people. That sounds like "corporate power" to me.
Bzzzt. A group of people doesn't exercise its power like a corporation. If you are an employee of a corporation or even a small shareholder, you don't have a say and you often don't even know what's going on during old boys golf outings. A 'group' of people may be more democratic, but you left out how that group is managed.
Funny that they cite HotOrNot as a reference. I just went there for a look after quite a few years. Everybody is now over 9, even the worse pukes. I remember this site at the very begining and it was fun the same way chatroulette was before it made front news. Now it's meh at best.
With the latest Alice/Free modems, everything is managed remotely and I don't even know what my credentials are. In the past I've always owned my own ADSL modems, but here I don't know how to configure it.
Slashdot Mirror
Flag semaphore remains highly resistant to electromagnetic interference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore.
You fail at both funny and informative: it's enough to block the electromagnetic spectrum from 390 to 750 nm to render those inoperative. It can happen with fog, or be done with smoke or any material placed in the line of sight. Guess why IR communications are hardly used for anything except TV remote controls even though they've been around for decades...
So important that these days "Internet" and "WWW" are used interchangably.
Only by the people who don't know what either of them really are.
Exactly. Which is 99% of them. So if you remove the WWW, the internet basically drops dead. What are you gonna do ? Use Gopher to find files to FTP ?
Closely related to maps are satellite images, and they are in serious need of a cleanup as well. I was recently asked to find some images for a specific area in Antarctica and do specific processing on them. I'll pass on how hard it was to find images (for free or fee), the USGS was the best source but with other commercial satellites it was simply impossible to get samples. Not, the problem was in the format: basically every generation of satellite has its own data format and/or associated geolocation description file, and even 'standard' formats such as GeoTIFF (a TIFF file with embedded geolocation information) were hardly ever read by GIS softwares. I must have tried 10 packages and it's a nightmare, particularly if you want to do processing in addition to visualisation.
Photoshop/Gimp can open and enhance GeoTIFF files. Google Earth Pro can overlay them on the globe. But call one after the other and the geoloc info is lost. It's all like this. Last time I had to do this I ended up writing my own image processor in C, that was almost a decade ago. Nothing has changed. Of course big vendors tell you that their 10k$ software can do it, except that from my trials I have no faith in that, that's too expensive for processing 10 files, and it takes 3 months to get a handle on the software.
Police forces, for one thing, get an upfront budget instead of being asked to "police the country first and send us the bill later, we'll decide if we pay you back or not."
Yeah and the cops are pretty pissed right now: 2 days ago they caught a guy after 45 days on the run who did a casino heist next door to where I live. He and his partner slugged the cops with machine guns like in bad Hollywood movies (one dead). Today the guy's been freed 'temporarily' (there's no bail here). And they want to jail you for downloading some Johnny Halliday (an antique and lousy french rocker who happens to be best pal with the prez) ?!? Well, guess what, don't be surprised if nobody trusts the govt to enforce laws that pertains to a few private interests: FUCK THEM.
The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut
Looking for a culprit ? The guy who decided to sit on the movie for months while the marketing campaign was already on. When people want to see something and it is available, albeit illegally, they will.
The lack of a magnetosphere will always present an issue for human life
I could probably run the computation, but I don't feel like it right now, so, would it be possible to create a magnetosphere by laying down a (supraconducting) cable along the equator and running a current through it ? Or more simply two shorter cables circling the poles ?
Right. I didn't want to get into too many details as I need to go bottle my latest brew...
Question: Is resistance to antibiotics energy-unfavourable for bacteria? Meaning, if antibiotics are not abundantly present to guide bacterial evolution, will bacterial strains revert to a 'simpler structure' and become susceptible to antibiotics again?
Yes. But it takes a long time. I know, citation needed, blah, blah...
You are wrong in attributing the drinkability of beer to alcohol: beer doesn't contain enough alcohol to kill most pathogens (2 to 8% in traditional beers). It does so thanks to competition with yeast. You have many germs in your brew when you start it, but if all goes well only yeast grows and eliminates the competition. Sometimes a brew can go bad where the yeast is eliminated by other germs, but then it's rather easy to tell: it doesn't smell, looks or taste like beer, so you don't drink it. With water you can't tell.
One of the many good things about android though is that it shows you what the app wants wants before installing
Yes, but without the ability to deny some of those rights, it's not very useful. Case in point: couple days ago I wanted to install a simple music app. It wanted GPS access and internet access. Fuck that, I didn't install the app but I'd much rather block those two things.
People that smart should be able to play the stock market if they wanted to, for instance
Stock market shouldn't be a game. It should be what it was originally designed to be: a way for company to raise money for their own development. Not a game, not a pile of cards of companies purchasing each others, not a lottery, etc...
One label proposes grades, ranging from an A-plus to a D. There are no failing grades, since vehicles need to comply with the Clean Air Act
So we start with cars with A rating. Then next year we get A+ or AA. And in 20 years we'll have, what, A++++ vs A++++++ like an eBay rating ? That's pretty dumb. If it was for me I'd give a Hummer a Z and a Prius a U or something, and then let them fight out to get better letters, A being a perpetual motion machine !
Same criteria as for volunteers for Antarctic winterovers: you have to be crazy enough to want to spend a winter in Antarctica, but sane enough to do productive work down there. Individualistic enough to not miss society at large, but social enough to not want to kill the rest of your group. Good luck with that. Been there done that.
As I understand Norm Matloff, the H1B was originally created to drive down salaries of US scientists.
So why aren't there H1Bs for traders to drive down their salaries ? Those guys don't even need to know kindergarden arithmetics !
I wouldn't call all all those super-hero comics 'adult oriented'. In 99% of the cases, their stories are so puerile that only children would want to read them. Or maybe brain-damaged adults. I've read about 10000 adult comics. By adult, I mean not porn or gore, but the same kind of 'adult' who enjoys a good drama movie that is clearly not intended for children. But those kind of comics, while thriving in other countries, are almost non-existent in the US.
Do you have a bank account?
Most likely the back office operations are using Java in one way or another.
Yeah, and also the client-side app... which contains very interesting passwords if you decompile it. Like database passwords.
So that's why English spelling is so damn easy. There is just one rule: "Just f#$ing remember how words are written and pronounced".
I'll give you that English is not too hard to spell, but as for being easy to pronounce, I beg to differ: although I've been using it daily for decades, my mouth starts to hurts after a few minutes of use. Particularly if there are vowel-less words like 'strength'...
because being able to spell words aloud is not actually a useful skill (except in the USA).
I always found US spelling bees strange. Here we have 'dictation' contests: you hear something and you write it down. Whoever makes the fewer mistakes win. It's obvious why it's useful. But spelling words without context ? Maybe it comes from all the hotline staffed by foreigners where you have to spell every single thing you tell them otherwise they write garbage on your file. But besides that...
Putting a tiny mirror on the handlebar and/or helmet can help, you know...
It's mostly there for historical reasons anyways, most people are used to right-clicking on a disk to eject it now
Come on now and you will be telling me that Macs have TWO buttons now ?!? Where is the world going.
If you're reading CBR/CBZ you'll want color too.
Yes, I've been holding out for years on netbook/ebook reader because what I really want is a passive screen with COLORS so I can read ebooks and eComics. I don't need a keyboard for that purpose, I don't even really need a touchscreen (as a recent experiment with a Sony eBook proved), I don't want a backlit screen (consumes too much power and is unreadable sitting by the pool). For me that's the killer device. And for that purpose the OS doesn't matter.
If I want a Netbook, I don't want Windows (meh!) or Android (too locked down) but Linux so it can be used for work, but then it's just a less usable version of my work computer. I did try the interesting Asus T91 (rotating touchscreen that turns into a tablet), but it was buggy under Linux. So I'm still waiting...
Who still doesn't believe our government is being run by corporate power?
I don't. I do believe our entire society is powered by groups of people. That sounds like "corporate power" to me.
Bzzzt. A group of people doesn't exercise its power like a corporation. If you are an employee of a corporation or even a small shareholder, you don't have a say and you often don't even know what's going on during old boys golf outings. A 'group' of people may be more democratic, but you left out how that group is managed.
Too bad they will never do it... For very obvious reasons.
Yeah, right. Troll.
Funny that they cite HotOrNot as a reference. I just went there for a look after quite a few years. Everybody is now over 9, even the worse pukes. I remember this site at the very begining and it was fun the same way chatroulette was before it made front news. Now it's meh at best.
With the latest Alice/Free modems, everything is managed remotely and I don't even know what my credentials are. In the past I've always owned my own ADSL modems, but here I don't know how to configure it.