You two should be careful about critcizing Bruce Schneier. His fists are tatooed with "Bob" and "Alice" and if you get on his bad side, he'll exchange keys all over your face.
What is the etymology of that practice? I mean, how in the world does the word "thousand" get abbreviated to the letter "m"? I don't care that it deviates from SI conventions, so does using "M" and "B" as abbreviations for "million" and "billion", but that's an obvious shorthand. Using "m" for thousands just seems needlessly opaque and confusing.
While I don't doubt this poll, I question the usefulness of most of these polls when trying to judge how Americans will go in an election.
This is true, but that's not really what I was going after. The parent said there was no chance that a woman or a black man could win the presidency, but a Morman could and I was just trying to refute this.
The reason is that roughly 1/3 of voters just pull the "Republican" lever and another 1/3 just pull the "Democrat" lever. The remaining 1/3 is what usually decides the election, and the poll does not necessarily reflect these people's opinion.
There have been some polls that have taken this into account by varying the way they asked the question. If you look at the source for the Wikipedia article (mostly Polling Report) they show the exact phrasing for the polls as well as some other polls that are not featured in the article, but are related. Example:
"If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be ________ (black, Morman, female, etc.) would you vote for that person?"
I know he's a mormon and all but there is not going to be a woman and certainly not a black guy in the whitehouse
Take another look at the many polls that have been done on this (look under "Other Polls"). They clearly show that Americans are significantly more prejudiced against Mormans than blacks or women when it comes to presidential Candidacy:
94% to 79% - Willing to vote for an African American 92% to 72% - Willing to vote for a woman 72% to 38% - Willing to vote for a Morman
The difference is that one may be considered an affront to human life whereas the other is more likely to be considered an affront to God.
While an affront to God may at first seem worse, you have to realize that there are more scientists who don't believe in God than there are who don't believe that they're human.
You can't equate patents with innovation. Sometimes it's just an indicator of how big their legal staff is. If you want to use the number of patents as an indicator for innovation, let me suggest this formula I just pulled out of my ass:
Tripp's Law of General Innovation
Innovation = (patents / lawyers) * engineers
This formula obviously doesn't apply to companies which don't employ lawyers, but I can assure you, such an innovative idea can only help their score.
They can't help it, they're the NCAA and as we all know on Slashdot, all organizations ending in "AA" are prone to shooting themselves in the foot by creating new rules/laws.
I think that it does have to be something made this year, but lucky for you that doesn't count out Super Mario 3 because it seems like nintendo is perpetually rereleasing it for various platforms in various new versions. So you can't vote for Super Mario 3, you'll have to vote for "Super Mario Advanced Grand Ultimate Collection DS, now with online multi-player and purchasable characters and music, only $5.99 per download".
It was a green laser pointer which are often brighter and (arguably) more dangerous to the human eye than the typical red laser pointers people have. That said, they are still low power enough that it probably didn't cause any real permanent damage to the pilot's eyes. What they did is still stupid though. Surely not $250,000/20-years-in-jail stupid, it was just a mistake and no real harm was done, but I'd hate to think what could happen if a pilot made a serious mistake while disoriented by one of these.
Unless you've got an LCD, in which case it looks fucked up if you run at anything other than native resolution (or equal divisions thereof). Now I know I still use a CRT and there are plenty of old CRTs floating around and a few people will always prefer them, but in general, most computers sold in the last couple years (i.e. most computers people are using) are going to have LCDs and as time goes on, CRTs are dying out faster and faster.
Awesome, so now if somebody installs a trojan on my PC they won't just be able to steal my bank account passwords and credit card numbers, but they'll be able to get my fingerprints too. Hopefully they can make this screen able to scan documents too, then I could help out identity thieves some more and send them a copy of my birth certificate, drivers license and passport as well.
Are you insane? Developers are developers and how they come together to work on an open source project means nothing, the point is that they're working on the project. If you really believe from reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" that ESR intended to kick out developers who don't totally fall in line with FSF ideals then you're crazy. In fact, I think you'd have to be crazier than ESR himself which is a truly amazing feat.
The standard unit for quantifying productivity in IT is generally bottles/cans of Mountain Dew. This varies from "cups of coffee" the standard metric used in many other fields, but you can easily convert between the two, so it shouldn't be any trouble for your manager to share your productivity figures to his bosses in a manner they are more familiar with. To convert cans to cups of coffee, multiply by two fifths. To convert bottles to cups of coffee, multiply by two thirds.
the article says 39 milimiters cubed, I read that as 39 mm^3
I'm pretty sure they meant a cube that was 39mm on all sides, if they meant 39mm^3 they probably would have said "39 cubic millimeters". It's not 100% clear though, they could just be using imprecise language.
This battery can only output 50mW of power. A laptop could easily be consuming 50W when it's rather busy so to satisfy those requirements you would need a thousand of these cells. The article says that the cells are 39mm squared so that would take up a volume of over two cubic feet (somebody check my math on this). Similarly, the size you would need to power a car is also far too large.
Besides that though, the article makes no mention of how much power the battery actually holds, i.e. who cares if it can put out 50mW if it can only do it for two minutes.
I'm not surprised. I realized long ago that robotics engineers are experts at missing the awesome potential of their creations. For instance, we commonly see high-tech robot demonstrations in which a robot dances, but not one of these engineers thinks of making them dance the robot? Sure it's impressive to see a robot waltz smoothly, but it seems almost unconscionable to not end the demonstration by dropping a nice breakbeat and having the robot pop-lock it's way off-stage.
I never really understood what the phrase "Wall of Sound" meant until the first time I walked into a Best Buy. When I heard the ungodly cacophony of videogames, televisions, boomboxes, car stereos, computers, cellphones, appliances and more, the phrase was the first thing that leapt to my mind. It was a strong, oppressive force that felt like a physical barrier, despite only being sound.
Why is it that articles like this hardly ever include audio examples? Without audio examples, it's drastically more difficult for a casual reader to understand what they're talking about. As it stands, the article aims itself at the small group of people who know enough about sound to understand what they're talking about, but not enough to already be familiar with it. This problem seems to be pervasive amongst sound/music writers, they'll spend paragraphs trying to describe a sound in vain rather than just including an audio file and allowing the sound to speak for itself. This may be understandable in print publications, but on the web it's just ridiculous.
Trying to describe a sound is often difficult to the point of being futile. Don't bother, just let us listen to it and reserve the writing for describing other things about the sound. Let audio and print do what each does best.
I sincerely hope you were trying to be funny with that post.
No sir, I was being completely serious and furthermore, I take offense at your implication that I may have been joking about a matter as serious as credit card fraud.
Not only do you get to fund open source projects by using this credit card, but because it's a linux credit card, it's more secure, right? Personally, I'm holding out for the OpenBSD credit card, but this is a good start.
Slashdot Mirror
You two should be careful about critcizing Bruce Schneier. His fists are tatooed with "Bob" and "Alice" and if you get on his bad side, he'll exchange keys all over your face.
Way to repost a comment from the article page.
Nevermind, I answered my own question. The usage comes from the roman numeral for one thousand. Dumb.
What is the etymology of that practice? I mean, how in the world does the word "thousand" get abbreviated to the letter "m"? I don't care that it deviates from SI conventions, so does using "M" and "B" as abbreviations for "million" and "billion", but that's an obvious shorthand. Using "m" for thousands just seems needlessly opaque and confusing.
"If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be ________ (black, Morman, female, etc.) would you vote for that person?"
94% to 79% - Willing to vote for an African American
92% to 72% - Willing to vote for a woman
72% to 38% - Willing to vote for a Morman
The difference is that one may be considered an affront to human life whereas the other is more likely to be considered an affront to God.
While an affront to God may at first seem worse, you have to realize that there are more scientists who don't believe in God than there are who don't believe that they're human.
Why bother? He's clearly selling it as a parts car for people trying to repair their regular flying car.
You can't equate patents with innovation. Sometimes it's just an indicator of how big their legal staff is. If you want to use the number of patents as an indicator for innovation, let me suggest this formula I just pulled out of my ass:
Tripp's Law of General Innovation
Innovation = (patents / lawyers) * engineers
This formula obviously doesn't apply to companies which don't employ lawyers, but I can assure you, such an innovative idea can only help their score.
I think that it does have to be something made this year, but lucky for you that doesn't count out Super Mario 3 because it seems like nintendo is perpetually rereleasing it for various platforms in various new versions. So you can't vote for Super Mario 3, you'll have to vote for "Super Mario Advanced Grand Ultimate Collection DS, now with online multi-player and purchasable characters and music, only $5.99 per download".
It was a green laser pointer which are often brighter and (arguably) more dangerous to the human eye than the typical red laser pointers people have. That said, they are still low power enough that it probably didn't cause any real permanent damage to the pilot's eyes. What they did is still stupid though. Surely not $250,000/20-years-in-jail stupid, it was just a mistake and no real harm was done, but I'd hate to think what could happen if a pilot made a serious mistake while disoriented by one of these.
Unless you've got an LCD, in which case it looks fucked up if you run at anything other than native resolution (or equal divisions thereof). Now I know I still use a CRT and there are plenty of old CRTs floating around and a few people will always prefer them, but in general, most computers sold in the last couple years (i.e. most computers people are using) are going to have LCDs and as time goes on, CRTs are dying out faster and faster.
Are you insane? Developers are developers and how they come together to work on an open source project means nothing, the point is that they're working on the project. If you really believe from reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" that ESR intended to kick out developers who don't totally fall in line with FSF ideals then you're crazy. In fact, I think you'd have to be crazier than ESR himself which is a truly amazing feat.
The standard unit for quantifying productivity in IT is generally bottles/cans of Mountain Dew. This varies from "cups of coffee" the standard metric used in many other fields, but you can easily convert between the two, so it shouldn't be any trouble for your manager to share your productivity figures to his bosses in a manner they are more familiar with. To convert cans to cups of coffee, multiply by two fifths. To convert bottles to cups of coffee, multiply by two thirds.
So you're saying that Japanese corporations are trying to steal our women?
This battery can only output 50mW of power. A laptop could easily be consuming 50W when it's rather busy so to satisfy those requirements you would need a thousand of these cells. The article says that the cells are 39mm squared so that would take up a volume of over two cubic feet (somebody check my math on this). Similarly, the size you would need to power a car is also far too large.
Besides that though, the article makes no mention of how much power the battery actually holds, i.e. who cares if it can put out 50mW if it can only do it for two minutes.
I'm not surprised. I realized long ago that robotics engineers are experts at missing the awesome potential of their creations. For instance, we commonly see high-tech robot demonstrations in which a robot dances, but not one of these engineers thinks of making them dance the robot? Sure it's impressive to see a robot waltz smoothly, but it seems almost unconscionable to not end the demonstration by dropping a nice breakbeat and having the robot pop-lock it's way off-stage.
I never really understood what the phrase "Wall of Sound" meant until the first time I walked into a Best Buy. When I heard the ungodly cacophony of videogames, televisions, boomboxes, car stereos, computers, cellphones, appliances and more, the phrase was the first thing that leapt to my mind. It was a strong, oppressive force that felt like a physical barrier, despite only being sound.
Why is it that articles like this hardly ever include audio examples? Without audio examples, it's drastically more difficult for a casual reader to understand what they're talking about. As it stands, the article aims itself at the small group of people who know enough about sound to understand what they're talking about, but not enough to already be familiar with it. This problem seems to be pervasive amongst sound/music writers, they'll spend paragraphs trying to describe a sound in vain rather than just including an audio file and allowing the sound to speak for itself. This may be understandable in print publications, but on the web it's just ridiculous.
Trying to describe a sound is often difficult to the point of being futile. Don't bother, just let us listen to it and reserve the writing for describing other things about the sound. Let audio and print do what each does best.
Not only do you get to fund open source projects by using this credit card, but because it's a linux credit card, it's more secure, right? Personally, I'm holding out for the OpenBSD credit card, but this is a good start.