Guns are precision-crafted machines. Done right they can be beautiful. Idiots wielding them to cause mayhem -- now _that's_ obscene.
Nuclear weapons are precision-crafted machines.
Done right, they can be beautiful.
Idiots wielding them to cause mayhem -- now that's obscene.
Sorry, but their purposes (to intimidate, coerce, wound, or kill)
greatly overshadow whatever engineering aesthetics they might have.
There are many other outlets for artists and engineers to express beauty
without their creations having said purposes.
Out of curiosity, if the theory about how Mars lost most of its atmosphere is because it's a smaller planet, therefore its core cooled faster, therefore its dynamo stopped, therefore its magnetic field stopped which allowed the solar wind to strip the atmosphere away, then why does Venus, which, according to Wikipedia also has no magnetic field, still have such a dense atmosphere? Why hasn't the solar wind also stripped it away?
What most people know about nuclear energy is that it's "bad" and can release radiation in the case of a melt-down. Most people don't know that there are two flavors of reaction. They also don't know that it's impossible for fusion induced by laser ignition to chain-react on the macro scale and cause a melt-down.
That's a very narrow definition of self-sustained and would be counter-intuitive for most people. Compare this with a self-sustained fission reaction where it really does sustain itself with no input of energy whatsoever after the initial neutron bombardment.
By definition, when they achieve ignition - there will be a self sustained, fusion reaction - the fusion reaction will sustain itself until its fuel is exhausted.
AFAIK, this method of fusion is not nor will ever be self-sustained -- it simply doesn't work that way. You have to repeatedly fire the laser, once per fuel pellet. Once the pellet ignites, energy is released. After it's released, the pellet is exhausted. To release more energy, you have to insert a new pellet and repeat. It's not like there's a lot of fuel at the focus of the lasers that just needs one firing to ignite the fuel and it will chain-react. The only way to have a chain-reaction sustain itself with no input of energy would be to have the fuel at the high pressure and high temperature that's found at the core of a star. The laser temporarily creates a tiny spot of such pressure and temperature, but there's no way the reaction can sustain itself without repeated firing of the lasers.
No, extraordinary claims require simple proof like anything else.
The OP misquoted Carl Sagan who said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I agree that the word "proof" doesn't make sense with an adjective (either something is proof -- in the mathematical sense -- or it isn't); however, saying "extraordinary evidence" makes sense.
I am pissed that they flipped all us PPC hardware owners the bird. Not all of us Apple users have buckets of money laying around.
There's no compelling reason for the average user to upgrade to Snow Leopard: it adds little to Leopard. Leopard still runs on PPC and will be a great OS for years to come. Is there something that your current PPC/Leopard Mac doesn't do for you?
Also, PPC owners have known about the transition (and eventual abandonment) since 2005. They've had nearly half a decade to save up some money. If you started saving the price of a cup of a daily cup of coffee back then, you'd have more than enough to buy a shiny new Intel Mac now.
Do you think Apple should still support Mac OS 9? What about the Apple ][? Everything gets abandoned eventually.
Maybe once SP2 happened, but the fact that the phrase "blue screen of death" is known by just about everybody is because XP started out as a crappy OS. XP also doesn't have things that other OSs have had for years, e.g., application-binary caching, symbolic links, the default user not having administrator privileges.
XP released in 2001, is still going strong and will be for quite some time.
It's still going strong not because XP is a great OS, but because there was nothing to replace it with until Windows 7 came along. If you wanted to run Windows, you had to run XP -- you had no choice.
Contrast that with Apple that's had several major OS upgrades since OS X came out.
How about leaving the word byte alone and using another, distinct group of letter [sic] to do the job?
The original definition of "byte" was the number of bits used to encode a character of text and is the basic memory-addressable element in a computer. It never originally meant "8 bits".
I would call not having to fork over a trillion dollars a year for foreign oil a pretty major side effect.
Except all the cars, trucks, and homes that run on gasoline/oil aren't going to be converted to run on electricity over night.
Plus the US gets most of its electricity from coal, not oil.
Lawyers tend not to do that, or at least explain it. They're fully aware that jurors aren't lawyers. But, if a juror is confused for any reason, s/he is supposed to submit written questions to the judge. I did exactly that when I served on a jury.
... we were getting charged like $70 for unlimited long distance...
So just change that to per-minute long distance. I pay AT&T $2/month (yes, two dollars a month) for a $0.10/minute plan (which I almost never use, but I keep "just in case").
[A]re we to believe that someone posting a tweet from SMS first went to a URL shortener on their mobile device, got a shortened URL, and tweeted that?
No, but I never made that claim.
URL shortening + SMS = a ridiculous combination.
I don't think so. Presumably, the reason URL shorteners exist is because there are some things that can't handle long URLs well. As I stated elsewhere, broken e-mail clients that wrap long URLs funny was the raison d'etre for URL-shorteners. However, since SMS also can't handle long URLs, it would seem a legitimate reason to use a URL-shortener for SMS.
While nobody would send an SMS message containing a shortened URL from a mobile device, those who choose to receive SMS messages to a mobile device can benefit from shortened URLs. A trivial example would be links to news stories from a Google-Alert-type service.
50.0001% of people can't vote to oppress the other 49.9999%.
Except it did happen in California with the passage of Proposition 8.
(The actual percentages were 52.3% to 47.7%, granted; but it would still have passed even if the percentages were closer.)
California is fairly screwed-up politically: you can limit the freedoms of people by a simple voter majority,
but you can't pass a budget unless you have a two-thirds majority of the legislature!
Google has built an innovative platform for distributed computing, that solves quite a few problems, vastly superior to the state of the art in distributed computing, but they basically keep the filesystem and clustering implementations completely to themselves, it would seem.
Here's an interesting question for the/. crowd: would you rather that Google keep GFS proprietary (as they are doing), or patent it (which requires disclosure as the "preferred embodiment" in the patent itself)? The latter would allow anyone to know how GFS works and perhaps even come up with better ideas sparked by GFS.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear weapons are precision-crafted machines. Done right, they can be beautiful. Idiots wielding them to cause mayhem -- now that's obscene.
Sorry, but their purposes (to intimidate, coerce, wound, or kill) greatly overshadow whatever engineering aesthetics they might have. There are many other outlets for artists and engineers to express beauty without their creations having said purposes.
And Microsoft doesn't?
What does that have to do with the solar wind stripping away the atmosphere?
Out of curiosity, if the theory about how Mars lost most of its atmosphere is because it's a smaller planet, therefore its core cooled faster, therefore its dynamo stopped, therefore its magnetic field stopped which allowed the solar wind to strip the atmosphere away, then why does Venus, which, according to Wikipedia also has no magnetic field, still have such a dense atmosphere? Why hasn't the solar wind also stripped it away?
The iPad's iBook Store's books are all in ODF.
What most people know about nuclear energy is that it's "bad" and can release radiation in the case of a melt-down. Most people don't know that there are two flavors of reaction. They also don't know that it's impossible for fusion induced by laser ignition to chain-react on the macro scale and cause a melt-down.
That's a very narrow definition of self-sustained and would be counter-intuitive for most people. Compare this with a self-sustained fission reaction where it really does sustain itself with no input of energy whatsoever after the initial neutron bombardment.
AFAIK, this method of fusion is not nor will ever be self-sustained -- it simply doesn't work that way. You have to repeatedly fire the laser, once per fuel pellet. Once the pellet ignites, energy is released. After it's released, the pellet is exhausted. To release more energy, you have to insert a new pellet and repeat. It's not like there's a lot of fuel at the focus of the lasers that just needs one firing to ignite the fuel and it will chain-react. The only way to have a chain-reaction sustain itself with no input of energy would be to have the fuel at the high pressure and high temperature that's found at the core of a star. The laser temporarily creates a tiny spot of such pressure and temperature, but there's no way the reaction can sustain itself without repeated firing of the lasers.
The OP misquoted Carl Sagan who said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I agree that the word "proof" doesn't make sense with an adjective (either something is proof -- in the mathematical sense -- or it isn't); however, saying "extraordinary evidence" makes sense.
There's no compelling reason for the average user to upgrade to Snow Leopard: it adds little to Leopard. Leopard still runs on PPC and will be a great OS for years to come. Is there something that your current PPC/Leopard Mac doesn't do for you?
Also, PPC owners have known about the transition (and eventual abandonment) since 2005. They've had nearly half a decade to save up some money. If you started saving the price of a cup of a daily cup of coffee back then, you'd have more than enough to buy a shiny new Intel Mac now.
Do you think Apple should still support Mac OS 9? What about the Apple ][? Everything gets abandoned eventually.
Maybe once SP2 happened, but the fact that the phrase "blue screen of death" is known by just about everybody is because XP started out as a crappy OS. XP also doesn't have things that other OSs have had for years, e.g., application-binary caching, symbolic links, the default user not having administrator privileges.
It's still going strong not because XP is a great OS, but because there was nothing to replace it with until Windows 7 came along. If you wanted to run Windows, you had to run XP -- you had no choice.
Contrast that with Apple that's had several major OS upgrades since OS X came out.
The original definition of "byte" was the number of bits used to encode a character of text and is the basic memory-addressable element in a computer. It never originally meant "8 bits".
The FDA has nothing to do with restaurant inspections. That's handled by county-level health departments.
Trust me.
Two of my peeves are "12 noon" and "12 midnight."
Except all the cars, trucks, and homes that run on gasoline/oil aren't going to be converted to run on electricity over night. Plus the US gets most of its electricity from coal, not oil.
Lawyers tend not to do that, or at least explain it. They're fully aware that jurors aren't lawyers. But, if a juror is confused for any reason, s/he is supposed to submit written questions to the judge. I did exactly that when I served on a jury.
So just change that to per-minute long distance. I pay AT&T $2/month (yes, two dollars a month) for a $0.10/minute plan (which I almost never use, but I keep "just in case").
No, but I never made that claim.
I don't think so. Presumably, the reason URL shorteners exist is because there are some things that can't handle long URLs well. As I stated elsewhere, broken e-mail clients that wrap long URLs funny was the raison d'etre for URL-shorteners. However, since SMS also can't handle long URLs, it would seem a legitimate reason to use a URL-shortener for SMS.
While nobody would send an SMS message containing a shortened URL from a mobile device, those who choose to receive SMS messages to a mobile device can benefit from shortened URLs. A trivial example would be links to news stories from a Google-Alert-type service.
I only use them to distribute long URLs by e-mail since some popular e-mail/web-mail clients (still!) break long URLs by wrapping them funny.
Twitter restricts its message size because SMS messages limit their message size to 140 characters. So it is restricted for a reason.
Except it did happen in California with the passage of Proposition 8. (The actual percentages were 52.3% to 47.7%, granted; but it would still have passed even if the percentages were closer.) California is fairly screwed-up politically: you can limit the freedoms of people by a simple voter majority, but you can't pass a budget unless you have a two-thirds majority of the legislature!
Here's an interesting question for the /. crowd: would you rather that Google keep GFS proprietary (as they are doing), or patent it (which requires disclosure as the "preferred embodiment" in the patent itself)? The latter would allow anyone to know how GFS works and perhaps even come up with better ideas sparked by GFS.
It's a deservedly common theme because the world is fed up with their BS (and has been for a long time).