Every time some (half) wit chimes in with that comparison, it pisses me off.
See, McDonnolds used to keep their coffee just below boiling. REALLY FUCKING HOT. No where near a temperature where you could actually drink it. This was policy. Their thinking was that people at the drive through were less likely to drink the coffee right away, so the hotter it was, the better.
Okay, but see, people tend to hold their drinks in their croches. I've done it. And when nearly boiling coffee is spilled on your pink parts it can do you serious, long term damage. Mr Happy doesn't like second and third degree burns.
So McDonnalds had already lost Many of these cases (no, I don't know how many). There was a legal precedent that had been set. Burn yourself, McDonnalds gives you some money.
The point of the price tag on that particlar lawsuit is that the only way to get McDonnalds to actually change their policy was to make it too expensive to keep things as they were.
So you jack the suit into the roof just to get the attention of this corporate monolith.
From what I heard (and it's just a rumor) the lady took most of the money and handed to some burn victim charity.
A little poking around revealed that some of what I read was right, some was not:
None of the linked pages say what happened to the money that was awarded, though the two I looked at agreed that the final sum was far less than the 2.7 million dollars of the original decision.
Potential 3rd degree burns on your crotch, as company policy. To hell with that.
Little fish feed the bigger fish. And when those fish stand out like a sore thumb at night, guess what happens to the little fish. Not many breeding oportunities there.
And they're sold sterile, otherwise just about anyone could grow and sell their own glowing fish. Can't have that.
Don't be a knee-jerk, ludite, alarmist, chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling wanker.
NOT the end of the world. It's all part of that whole "human knowledge will increase" thing. The end of the world comes later.;)
Is it more H looses an electron and drifts through the metal, or it just gets through on it's own?
I would imagine that a container with a positive charge would repell the positively charged hydrogen (ions? Chem isn't my field, by a long shot), resulting in less leakage.
Heck, just sticking the positive end of a bunch of magnets to the outside of a ferrous container would do the trick. The negative charge in the container walls would all gravitate toward the magnets, pushing the positive end into the center. In that scenario, any ion (is that the right term?) that made it past the positively charged inner wall might still stick around just because it would be attracted to the negative end of those magnets.
Hmmm.. maybe make the containers like a capacitor... negative charge in the middle to attract the
And I'm suprised I haven't seen this joke yet:
A hydrogen atom walks into a bar, aproaches the bartender and says: Hydrogen: "I think I've lost an electron..." Bartender: "Are you sure?" Hydrogen: "I'm positive!"
And you can thank Wil Wheaton for reminding me of that one in his blog today.
Okay, so Dynamix is forced to release T2 WAY before it was ready. A zillion patches later, the company that owns Dynamix (Vivendi?) closes the whole company... never mind that T2 (despite a too-early release) is quite successful.
Kinda reminds me of farscape. "Successful? Great! Close 'em down."
Unless they develop some new GC system that lets you give specific time slices for processing, you'll end up with the occasional random crater in your framerate.
I notice a second or two's pause while using IntelliJ's IDEA (a java IDE built in java), when the GC system wakes up and pokes around to free up memory. This is on a DUAL 2.6ghz machine, fer crying out loud. Nothing against the IDE, I love it... lots of cool little features to make life easier.
So even if you have the best 3d API in the world, sooner or later the GC is going to wake up and brutally maim your framerate. Nothing you can do. Most JVM's ignore explicit GC calls too (in my experience).
So until someone comes up with a GC system that can play nicely with others ("here's 50ms, go to town"), 3d games in java strike me as a lost cause.
I don' know... maybe someone could precache everything, and not release anything except between maps, so the GC never wakes up during actual game play. It still strikes me as a royal PITA, and an unnecessary memory hog.
I feel that Linux has reached a point where its stability and graphical speed can be a huge advantage over Windows
I was under the impression that Linux 3d speeds were still lagging behind win32's. Do you have any evidence to the contrary (some website's side-by-side comparison would be great)?
The way I see it, so long as NVidia and ATI are making most of their money on windows boxes, they'll continue to pour more of their efforts into windows drivers... and since they're not really big on sharing (last time I heard, which was at least a year ago) they don't open up their drivers.
Am I mistaken?
Re:If you think math textbooks are bad...
on
FDL Math Textbooks?
·
· Score: 1
You're accusing Mr. Beaty of making unsupported arguments?
"that guys is full of such crap"?
Pot, kettle? HELLO!
If you think math textbooks are bad...
on
FDL Math Textbooks?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...Try k-6 science books. YOW!
A guy by the name of Bill Beaty maintains a giant time-sucking vortex of a web page:
http://www.amasci.com
A portion of the site is devoted to correcting common misconceptions found in science textbooks, and about how these misconceptions hamper later learning:
...this sort of thing will lead to the current patent system getting a major overhaul.
I say we just throw in a coin-tosser. "Heads, granted!" It certainly would be more cost effictive! And it just might be an improvement. It would have a %50 chance of rejecting each and every software patent we at slashdot have come love so much.
In other news, several branches of the government don't function so well. What part of "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" did you miss? Oy vey.
Actually, I think the little gear-thingy is being rotated by gears, not the impact of the ramps... it's just timed to maintain a decent (though not perfect) seal.
As I recall, Ogging was a kamakazi attack designed to cause your ship to explode as close as possible to your opponent, causeing as much damage as possible.
And mass ogging was pretty much the only way to take out a starbase. Those things were TOUGH.
I read the annecdotal origin of the term online somewhere, many moons ago.
An even more team-based, even less popular variant was Netrek Hockey. Tractor/pressor beams controled the puck, and all the ships were dropped into a scaled hockey rink, complete with two-line passing and off-sides.
If this stuff turns out to be relatively easy to manufacture, I suppose they could create the masks with this new "negative-index-lense-thiny" already correctly attached (bonded, glued, stapled, whatever).
Not necessarily, but those 'look thru clothes' camera lenses should start giving better results...;)
That actually raises an interesting question: What ARE the uses for this sort of thing? Where is IR imaging used? I can think of cameras of various sorts, and perhaps night-scopes, but there's got to be more stuff out there.
Nice strawman. Comparing playing a game to building one. Wow. Building is harder. Thanks for the update, I never would have figured that one out on my own.
While Direct* almost certianly has more documentation/books/samples than any of the Open?L libraries mentioned above, the vast majority of them are open source. And just because you CAN build them yourself doesn't mean that you HAVE TO. You can get binaries at all the sites I checked.
So you can go play your game. Great. A DEVELOPER has to get the library to work, regardless of which library it is. And there is always a learning curve to climb, no getting around it.
A thatched roof is going to catch quite a few UV rays too. You're pretty much buggered either way on the whole "x-ray/gama-ray" end of things, but corrogated (SP?) aluminum isn't that hard to come by, even in some third world country. And I'd be suprised if there weren't some relatively common primitive building material that would work. Adobe maybe? You know, mud.
(or at least, "data *I* can't understand) can be found by following the "references" link at the bottome of the linked page.
It lead me to a nature.com, where, after registering with them (and opting out of EVERYTHING, which was easy), I read the Far More Technical nature article. It went way over my head.
WAY over:
" The mechanical properties of the layered composites were tested on a custom-made thin-film tensile strength tester (McAllister) recording the displacement and applied force by using pieces cut from ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)6 and ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)8 freestanding films. The tester was calibrated on similar pieces made from cellulose acetate membranes and nylon threads. ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)6 and ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)8 samples had an average thickness, measured by TEM, of 0.75 and 1.0 m respectively.Their typical stress ( ä) versus strain ( å) curves differed quite markedly from stretching curves seen previously for SWNT composites10 and for LBL films made solely from polyelectrolytes, (PEI/PAA)40, obtained by the same assembly procedure (Fig. 4b). They displayed a characteristic wave-like pattern,a gradual increase of the d ä/d åderivative, and the complete absence of the plateau region for high strains corresponding to plastic deformations (Fig. 4a).The latter correlates well with the enhanced connectivity of SWNT with the polymer matrix (Fig. 2). "
And that's the relatively clear stuff. I could actually follow some of it. Yow!
"150-Ton Magnet Pulls World Toward New Energy Source"
At several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Earth's own field, that title seems uncomfortably literal.
Yes yes, I know you can't actually move the planet that way, and yes yes, the field only exists inside the magnet. Lighten up.
Of course the earth's field's VOLUME is just a bit larger than the one this thing generates...
According to the article, this magnet can generate 13 Teslas. Are Telsas a linear scale, or a logarithmic one?
PS: Somebody at Berkeley built a 14.7 tesla magnet (current world record) that weighed in at "several tons" (according to their press release). So this 150 behemoth is Really Powerful, but not the badest boy on the block.
I've had a single experience like this... sales was making promises, and then coming back to engineering and saying "is this possible? Whew! Cause it has to be done by X".
The VP of sales (co-owner) and the vp of engineering (not a co-owner) almost came to blows.
Adobe eventually bought us out and said VP was gone in a remarkably short amount of time.
No one missed him much.
Thats more a war-story than advice... advice... hmmm.
Try to get the sales guys and eng in a boxing match? Heh.
Seriously though. We actually managed to get the prez (the other owner) to read Rapid Development by Steve McConnell (though there are several books that cover similar territory, I personally swear by anything McConnell writes). Half the 'bad examples' in that book should sound Very Familiar to you and yours.
The problem has been identified. RD contains numerous suggestions on how to make fixes. Then it's "just" a matter of putting those processes into place.
If this whole article isn't a perfect straight line, I don't know what is.
We've got the scottish jokes, the 'black-girl's-butts' jokes, the goatsex-guy jokes, and who know's what else looming in the wings.
I actually pitty the poor lonely scottsman that first makes a pass at one of these things. I'm guessing they kick HARD! Probably jump relatively well too.
Did anyone catch that little tidbit at the end? Not a device for creating a material, not even a process, but the material itself?
I'm hoping this is just a jurnalistic fuck-up... But I'm having trouble imagining that these guys know how to actually make their new alloy, or have designed some gizmo to create it.
Quick, somebody patent neurons. You'll make a fortune, especially if you can get a "derivative works" clause into the license... everything everyone has ever thought of.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I don't know about you, but I'm not sure 2.7 million would be enough to cover 3rd degree burns to Mr. Happy.
Makes me cringe just thinking about it.
Every time some (half) wit chimes in with that comparison, it pisses me off.
& oe =UTF-8&q=coffee+spill+lawsuit+mcdonalds&spell= 1
See, McDonnolds used to keep their coffee just below boiling. REALLY FUCKING HOT. No where near a temperature where you could actually drink it. This was policy. Their thinking was that people at the drive through were less likely to drink the coffee right away, so the hotter it was, the better.
Okay, but see, people tend to hold their drinks in their croches. I've done it. And when nearly boiling coffee is spilled on your pink parts it can do you serious, long term damage. Mr Happy doesn't like second and third degree burns.
So McDonnalds had already lost Many of these cases (no, I don't know how many). There was a legal precedent that had been set. Burn yourself, McDonnalds gives you some money.
The point of the price tag on that particlar lawsuit is that the only way to get McDonnalds to actually change their policy was to make it too expensive to keep things as they were.
So you jack the suit into the roof just to get the attention of this corporate monolith.
From what I heard (and it's just a rumor) the lady took most of the money and handed to some burn victim charity.
A little poking around revealed that some of what I read was right, some was not:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8
None of the linked pages say what happened to the money that was awarded, though the two I looked at agreed that the final sum was far less than the 2.7 million dollars of the original decision.
Potential 3rd degree burns on your crotch, as company policy. To hell with that.
Little fish feed the bigger fish. And when those fish stand out like a sore thumb at night, guess what happens to the little fish. Not many breeding oportunities there.
;)
And they're sold sterile, otherwise just about anyone could grow and sell their own glowing fish. Can't have that.
Don't be a knee-jerk, ludite, alarmist, chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling wanker.
NOT the end of the world. It's all part of that whole "human knowledge will increase" thing. The end of the world comes later.
Is it more H looses an electron and drifts through the metal, or it just gets through on it's own?
I would imagine that a container with a positive charge would repell the positively charged hydrogen (ions? Chem isn't my field, by a long shot), resulting in less leakage.
Heck, just sticking the positive end of a bunch of magnets to the outside of a ferrous container would do the trick. The negative charge in the container walls would all gravitate toward the magnets, pushing the positive end into the center. In that scenario, any ion (is that the right term?) that made it past the positively charged inner wall might still stick around just because it would be attracted to the negative end of those magnets.
Hmmm.. maybe make the containers like a capacitor... negative charge in the middle to attract the
And I'm suprised I haven't seen this joke yet:
A hydrogen atom walks into a bar, aproaches the bartender and says:
Hydrogen: "I think I've lost an electron..."
Bartender: "Are you sure?"
Hydrogen: "I'm positive!"
And you can thank Wil Wheaton for reminding me of that one in his blog today.
Okay, so Dynamix is forced to release T2 WAY before it was ready. A zillion patches later, the company that owns Dynamix (Vivendi?) closes the whole company... never mind that T2 (despite a too-early release) is quite successful.
Kinda reminds me of farscape. "Successful? Great! Close 'em down."
...is garbage collection.
Unless they develop some new GC system that lets you give specific time slices for processing, you'll end up with the occasional random crater in your framerate.
I notice a second or two's pause while using IntelliJ's IDEA (a java IDE built in java), when the GC system wakes up and pokes around to free up memory. This is on a DUAL 2.6ghz machine, fer crying out loud. Nothing against the IDE, I love it... lots of cool little features to make life easier.
So even if you have the best 3d API in the world, sooner or later the GC is going to wake up and brutally maim your framerate. Nothing you can do. Most JVM's ignore explicit GC calls too (in my experience).
So until someone comes up with a GC system that can play nicely with others ("here's 50ms, go to town"), 3d games in java strike me as a lost cause.
I don' know... maybe someone could precache everything, and not release anything except between maps, so the GC never wakes up during actual game play. It still strikes me as a royal PITA, and an unnecessary memory hog.
I was under the impression that Linux 3d speeds were still lagging behind win32's. Do you have any evidence to the contrary (some website's side-by-side comparison would be great)?
The way I see it, so long as NVidia and ATI are making most of their money on windows boxes, they'll continue to pour more of their efforts into windows drivers... and since they're not really big on sharing (last time I heard, which was at least a year ago) they don't open up their drivers.
Am I mistaken?
You're accusing Mr. Beaty of making unsupported arguments?
"that guys is full of such crap"?
Pot, kettle? HELLO!
...Try k-6 science books. YOW!
A guy by the name of Bill Beaty maintains a giant time-sucking vortex of a web page:
http://www.amasci.com
A portion of the site is devoted to correcting common misconceptions found in science textbooks, and about how these misconceptions hamper later learning:
http://amasci.com/miscon/miscon.html
...this sort of thing will lead to the current patent system getting a major overhaul.
I say we just throw in a coin-tosser. "Heads, granted!" It certainly would be more cost effictive! And it just might be an improvement. It would have a %50 chance of rejecting each and every software patent we at slashdot have come love so much.
In other news, several branches of the government don't function so well. What part of "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" did you miss? Oy vey.
Actually, I think the little gear-thingy is being rotated by gears, not the impact of the ramps... it's just timed to maintain a decent (though not perfect) seal.
As I recall, Ogging was a kamakazi attack designed to cause your ship to explode as close as possible to your opponent, causeing as much damage as possible.
And mass ogging was pretty much the only way to take out a starbase. Those things were TOUGH.
I read the annecdotal origin of the term online somewhere, many moons ago.
That game rocked.
An even more team-based, even less popular variant was Netrek Hockey. Tractor/pressor beams controled the puck, and all the ships were dropped into a scaled hockey rink, complete with two-line passing and off-sides.
Great stuff. HUGE goals.
If this stuff turns out to be relatively easy to manufacture, I suppose they could create the masks with this new "negative-index-lense-thiny" already correctly attached (bonded, glued, stapled, whatever).
But I suspect that won't be an option.
Not necessarily, but those 'look thru clothes' camera lenses should start giving better results... ;)
That actually raises an interesting question: What ARE the uses for this sort of thing? Where is IR imaging used? I can think of cameras of various sorts, and perhaps night-scopes, but there's got to be more stuff out there.
Nice strawman. Comparing playing a game to building one. Wow. Building is harder. Thanks for the update, I never would have figured that one out on my own.
While Direct* almost certianly has more documentation/books/samples than any of the Open?L libraries mentioned above, the vast majority of them are open source. And just because you CAN build them yourself doesn't mean that you HAVE TO. You can get binaries at all the sites I checked.
So you can go play your game. Great. A DEVELOPER has to get the library to work, regardless of which library it is. And there is always a learning curve to climb, no getting around it.
So LOL right back at ya.
Neener neener.
A thatched roof is going to catch quite a few UV rays too. You're pretty much buggered either way on the whole "x-ray/gama-ray" end of things, but corrogated (SP?) aluminum isn't that hard to come by, even in some third world country. And I'd be suprised if there weren't some relatively common primitive building material that would work. Adobe maybe? You know, mud.
"The world's first trans-atlantic handshake was immediately follwed by the world's first trans-atlantic handjob."
I'm guessing the comments on this article are going to get a little... colorful.
(or at least, "data *I* can't understand) can be found by following the "references" link at the bottome of the linked page.
It lead me to a nature.com, where, after registering with them (and opting out of EVERYTHING, which was easy), I read the Far More Technical nature article. It went way over my head.
WAY over:
"
The mechanical properties of the layered composites were tested on a custom-made thin-film tensile strength tester (McAllister) recording the displacement and applied force by using pieces cut from ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)6 and ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)8 freestanding films. The tester was calibrated on similar pieces made from cellulose acetate membranes and nylon threads. ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)6 and ((PEI/PAA)(PEI/SWNT)5)8 samples had an average thickness, measured by TEM, of 0.75 and 1.0 m respectively.Their typical stress ( ä) versus strain ( å) curves differed quite markedly from stretching curves seen previously for SWNT composites10 and for LBL films made solely from polyelectrolytes, (PEI/PAA)40, obtained by the same assembly procedure (Fig. 4b). They displayed a characteristic wave-like pattern,a gradual increase of the d ä/d åderivative, and the complete absence of the plateau region for high strains corresponding to plastic deformations (Fig. 4a).The latter correlates well with the enhanced connectivity of SWNT with the polymer matrix (Fig. 2).
"
And that's the relatively clear stuff. I could actually follow some of it. Yow!
"150-Ton Magnet Pulls World Toward New Energy Source"
At several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Earth's own field, that title seems uncomfortably literal.
Yes yes, I know you can't actually move the planet that way, and yes yes, the field only exists inside the magnet. Lighten up.
Of course the earth's field's VOLUME is just a bit larger than the one this thing generates...
According to the article, this magnet can generate 13 Teslas. Are Telsas a linear scale, or a logarithmic one?
PS: Somebody at Berkeley built a 14.7 tesla magnet (current world record) that weighed in at "several tons" (according to their press release). So this 150 behemoth is Really Powerful, but not the badest boy on the block.
I've had a single experience like this... sales was making promises, and then coming back to engineering and saying "is this possible? Whew! Cause it has to be done by X".
The VP of sales (co-owner) and the vp of engineering (not a co-owner) almost came to blows.
Adobe eventually bought us out and said VP was gone in a remarkably short amount of time.
No one missed him much.
Thats more a war-story than advice... advice... hmmm.
Try to get the sales guys and eng in a boxing match? Heh.
Seriously though. We actually managed to get the prez (the other owner) to read Rapid Development by Steve McConnell (though there are several books that cover similar territory, I personally swear by anything McConnell writes). Half the 'bad examples' in that book should sound Very Familiar to you and yours.
The problem has been identified. RD contains numerous suggestions on how to make fixes. Then it's "just" a matter of putting those processes into place.
Heh.
If this whole article isn't a perfect straight line, I don't know what is.
We've got the scottish jokes, the 'black-girl's-butts' jokes, the goatsex-guy jokes, and who know's what else looming in the wings.
I actually pitty the poor lonely scottsman that first makes a pass at one of these things. I'm guessing they kick HARD! Probably jump relatively well too.
Did anyone catch that little tidbit at the end? Not a device for creating a material, not even a process, but the material itself?
I'm hoping this is just a jurnalistic fuck-up... But I'm having trouble imagining that these guys know how to actually make their new alloy, or have designed some gizmo to create it.
Quick, somebody patent neurons. You'll make a fortune, especially if you can get a "derivative works" clause into the license... everything everyone has ever thought of.
Shoot me now.
You left out "Scarecrow and Mrs. King".
And no one will hold it against you. Did anyone actually LIKE that show?
>Who knows what could happen?
And this is why we have animal testing. Sucks for the animal, pisses off PETA, and saves Many Lives.