Re:"granting 2,000 wishes"
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I wish for a hundred million dollars.
INVALID
And world peace.
LATER
And a pony.
WONTFIX
And the year of Linux on the desktop.
WORKSFORME
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-
Why is that?
Xenophilia. I have seen it happening in various countries: in Italy, nicknames often end in "y", like giusy, francy, etc. where using "i" would be correct with respect to Italian orthography; in Norway, there are more and more Jacob's and fewer and fewer Jakob's; in the US, Staci instead of Stacey.
This also comes into advertisement, as using a foreign language seems exotic and acculturated. It is however quite comical to see how many spelling mistakes end up in such advertisement: as an Italian I could write an encyclopaedia of misspellings of Italian food ("Spaghetti carbonara", "Pizza casa di Mama", "Cambozola",...); similarly, good look to you English speakers figuring out what a "No Stir" shirt is supposed to be in Italy.
So, what's wrong with K you ask? There are already too many of them and it does not attract enough attention, that's what is wrong.
Can anyone explain what is a C in the US in the percentile range? Is this synonymous with miserable failure? What about the reputation of Monroe College?
If that is so, then why is it so insanely hard to keep the bicycle balanced while not driving?
Because, on a bike, your manipulated variable is the handlebar's position. When driving, you adjust the handlebar so that the bicycle moves to the side, compensating disturbances. The control action is proportional to handlebar setting angle times speed (roughly), so if speed comes to zero you have no control action available. This is actually gradual: notice how at low speed, you turn the handlebar much more to maintain equilibrium.
If the bike were actually significantly gyroscopically stabilised, you could bump into a driving biker and see him come back to upright position without him doing anything. In reality, any biker in such a condition will counteract manually using the handlebar.
Supertrapp uses pre-Fortran 90 syntax, meaning identifiers have 6 letter at maximum. This makes it sure that complex code will never be readable, because you can only use acronyms that are way too short to be clear. Point taken, however, that this is a fault of the implementation rather than the language's.
[Supertrapp] may be the worst code I've ever seen.
Ok, so maybe my judgement of Fortran was a bit too harsh, Supertrapp was the only larger project in Fortran I have ever looked into... until my eyes started bleeding, that is.
I bet there are people saying Haskell [...] it's tedious and will actually put them off, totally.
> repeat "I am God!"
In Haskell you can do it faster and on a single line, and the code actually looks like English. However, there is a lot of bad[ly written] books about Haskell, I'll grant you that. Especially when they try to explain monads. However, functions like map, fold and filter are easy to grasp and lots of fun to put into practice.
... and setting the cost for disposal arbitrarily high through legislation and regulation?
Here's the deal: your power plant leaked radioactivity. My potato field is glowing. You get it back in the condition it was before, and pay me the damages I suffered since I cannot harvest potatoes this year. Don't care how you fix it, nor how much it costs you. If you cannot deal with it, stay out of nuclear power.
Not sure about the details, and indeed they chose helium because it does not carry that much radioactivity around. However the Germans in Jülich did break the pipe, leaked helium, and radioactivity was leaked. Not sure whether that was due to impurities in the helium, or air that rushed to take helium's place in the circuit and then leaked out again.
1. Any explosion, or even just a deflagration, involving the primary coolant is going to leak radioactivity and will have consequences. Everybody I know knows very well nuclear power plants cannot explode, even my father who's pretty dim about anything related to technology. So stop painting opponents of nukes like luddites.
2. Whooosh. You kind of missed the point that the Titanic sunk and killed over a thousand people. Just because it cannot crash into a building it does not protect it from many other kinds of accidents.
3. Why would an engineering or physics journal be relevant? You did not even read the article, which was about the economics of nuclear power, not the technical implementation. I brought my source, if you have one contradicting it bring it on.
Uh, and besides, why would it be irrelevant to study episodes of child maltreatment in Disney pictures over many decades? It seems to be a good way to gauge public attitude towards children. I have in any case seen much more unlikely titles for scientific articles.
There are periodically arguments of ideological integrity vs. pragmatism in all areas. I usually react by asking "which foot do you use to walk?" or "when you climb a mountain, to you look at the path to the summit or to your feet?". Both ideology and pragmatism are required. If you use only ideology, you will not get anything practical done; if you use only pragmatism, you get something done, but it may well be in the wrong direction.
This argument keeps surfacing, but coal plants do not concentrate these radioactive materials to dangerous levels. Remember that radioactivity is one of those problems where, if you spread the problem enough, the problem disappears.
Some numbers from Scientific American: people living around coal plants are exposed to 1.9 millirem of fly-ash radiation yearly, whereas the average person encounters 360 millirem a year. That's an increase of 0.5%, well within the uncertainty in the 360-millirem figure.
There was no nuclear explosion, all right, but explosions can be defined as "venting in a hurry".
You are basically saying that, since the Titanic cannot be used for a 9/11-style attack, the Titanic is safe.
Oh yes it is. Reactor downtime is a major killer of economic performance, and no one can afford to keep plants off the grid for a second more than strictly necessary. Given the poor economic performance of all nuclear reactors to date, reactor uptime has to be kept high for any future design. See also Paine, J. R. Will nuclear power pay for itself? The Social Science Journal, 1996, 33, 459-473 for a detailed study on the economics of nuclear power.
Modern reactors have both failsafe designs AND better containment [...] Reactors like (eg.) the Pebble Bed reactor have no unstable state.
You seem to forget something important in the design of PBRs. They have no containment, because the stability is achieved by contact between reactor vessel and environment air, which acts as emergency coolant if everything else fails. They may have a "containment building" built around them, but the doors are left open. That's by design and that's exactly how stability is achieved.
Also, PBRs are the first nuclear reactors ever to feature compressors in the primary loop (which uses helium instead of water). Compressors are much more complex than pumps (which work with liquids), and can surge, something pumps cannot. Since compressing gas is an energy-intensive business, producers will choose the most efficient compressors, which are the axial ones, which also happen to be the most sensitive to surges, and for which the highest efficiency is just before the surging line. Surges cause rapidly increasing temperatures, leading to leaks, metal melting and possibly explosions in a matter of seconds. I suppose you can imagine what happens when hot, radioactive helium flies out of an exploding compressor. Remember, no inherent containment is possible unless we sacrifice inherent stability—we have to trust someone to close the doors; however, if the primary circuit is interrupted and the passive cooling deactivated, heat will build up in the reactor.
Also, pebbles do have a tendency to get stuck when being moved around in the reactor, an operation necessary to maintain uniform conditions. That's what happened in Jülich, Germany, to the German PBR, an event that led to Germany shutting down the program as the technicians ended up releasing radioactive helium in the atmosphere while trying to unclog the pipes. Radioactivity levels were significant for the Jülich area, but were blamed on the Ruskies (the Chernobyl accident happened in the same days, IIRC).
I am an opponent of nuclear power, but I have no problem with anyone building power plants, on a simple conditions that Slashdot libertarians should like: no subsidies of any kind, only private capital. The day the subsidies end is the day fission power ends.
Of course full-disk encryption, as lots of people have already suggested, but since you want the thief's time to be wasted, remember to password-protect the BIOS and disallow booting from USB drives or external units. Same goes for GRUB if you were on Linux. That way the thief will not be able to resell the netbook.
Yes, the thief could remove the BIOS battery, but he would have to tear the case open. If he knew how to open a laptop without breaking it, he has more skill than I would associate with a petty thief.
Most of highways in (West) Germany are actually in a pretty sad state. That's due to old age basically, and the fact that cities grew around them impeding the addition of more lanes. Asphalt quality is also miserable, and sometimes they use concrete(!). So, basically, virtual speed limits are enforced by virtue of low road quality.
East German highways, instead, were built much more recently (20 years old or younger), so they are generally of much better quality. You can speed there.
Slashdot Mirror
And here is all I needed to know. Thanks!
INVALID
LATER
WONTFIX
WORKSFORME
Xenophilia. I have seen it happening in various countries: in Italy, nicknames often end in "y", like giusy, francy, etc. where using "i" would be correct with respect to Italian orthography; in Norway, there are more and more Jacob's and fewer and fewer Jakob's; in the US, Staci instead of Stacey.
This also comes into advertisement, as using a foreign language seems exotic and acculturated. It is however quite comical to see how many spelling mistakes end up in such advertisement: as an Italian I could write an encyclopaedia of misspellings of Italian food ("Spaghetti carbonara", "Pizza casa di Mama", "Cambozola", ...); similarly, good look to you English speakers figuring out what a "No Stir" shirt is supposed to be in Italy.
So, what's wrong with K you ask? There are already too many of them and it does not attract enough attention, that's what is wrong.
Can anyone explain what is a C in the US in the percentile range? Is this synonymous with miserable failure? What about the reputation of Monroe College?
Is she an average or plain-awful student?
Because, on a bike, your manipulated variable is the handlebar's position. When driving, you adjust the handlebar so that the bicycle moves to the side, compensating disturbances. The control action is proportional to handlebar setting angle times speed (roughly), so if speed comes to zero you have no control action available. This is actually gradual: notice how at low speed, you turn the handlebar much more to maintain equilibrium.
If the bike were actually significantly gyroscopically stabilised, you could bump into a driving biker and see him come back to upright position without him doing anything. In reality, any biker in such a condition will counteract manually using the handlebar.
Curiously, "von der Leyen" sounds surprisingly similar to "von den Laien", or "of the laymen". A trademark of incompetence!
That's 20 I suppose. Mendel died in 1884.
You wanted an argument? Oh, I'm sorry, but this is abuse. You want room 12A.
(Stupid git.)
Supertrapp uses pre-Fortran 90 syntax, meaning identifiers have 6 letter at maximum. This makes it sure that complex code will never be readable, because you can only use acronyms that are way too short to be clear. Point taken, however, that this is a fault of the implementation rather than the language's.
Ok, so maybe my judgement of Fortran was a bit too harsh, Supertrapp was the only larger project in Fortran I have ever looked into... until my eyes started bleeding, that is.
EGO LOQVOR LINGVAM LATINAM, TV INSENSIBILIS STVLTVS!
(I'm not yelling, Slashfilter, Latin is in all caps. I'm not yelling, Slashfilter, Latin is in all caps.)
In Haskell you can do it faster and on a single line, and the code actually looks like English. However, there is a lot of bad[ly written] books about Haskell, I'll grant you that. Especially when they try to explain monads. However, functions like map, fold and filter are easy to grasp and lots of fun to put into practice.
Here's the deal: your power plant leaked radioactivity. My potato field is glowing. You get it back in the condition it was before, and pay me the damages I suffered since I cannot harvest potatoes this year. Don't care how you fix it, nor how much it costs you. If you cannot deal with it, stay out of nuclear power.
Not sure about the details, and indeed they chose helium because it does not carry that much radioactivity around. However the Germans in Jülich did break the pipe, leaked helium, and radioactivity was leaked. Not sure whether that was due to impurities in the helium, or air that rushed to take helium's place in the circuit and then leaked out again.
1. Any explosion, or even just a deflagration, involving the primary coolant is going to leak radioactivity and will have consequences. Everybody I know knows very well nuclear power plants cannot explode, even my father who's pretty dim about anything related to technology. So stop painting opponents of nukes like luddites.
2. Whooosh. You kind of missed the point that the Titanic sunk and killed over a thousand people. Just because it cannot crash into a building it does not protect it from many other kinds of accidents.
3. Why would an engineering or physics journal be relevant? You did not even read the article, which was about the economics of nuclear power, not the technical implementation. I brought my source, if you have one contradicting it bring it on.
Uh, and besides, why would it be irrelevant to study episodes of child maltreatment in Disney pictures over many decades? It seems to be a good way to gauge public attitude towards children. I have in any case seen much more unlikely titles for scientific articles.
There are periodically arguments of ideological integrity vs. pragmatism in all areas. I usually react by asking "which foot do you use to walk?" or "when you climb a mountain, to you look at the path to the summit or to your feet?". Both ideology and pragmatism are required. If you use only ideology, you will not get anything practical done; if you use only pragmatism, you get something done, but it may well be in the wrong direction.
This argument keeps surfacing, but coal plants do not concentrate these radioactive materials to dangerous levels. Remember that radioactivity is one of those problems where, if you spread the problem enough, the problem disappears.
Some numbers from Scientific American: people living around coal plants are exposed to 1.9 millirem of fly-ash radiation yearly, whereas the average person encounters 360 millirem a year. That's an increase of 0.5%, well within the uncertainty in the 360-millirem figure.
You seem to forget something important in the design of PBRs. They have no containment, because the stability is achieved by contact between reactor vessel and environment air, which acts as emergency coolant if everything else fails. They may have a "containment building" built around them, but the doors are left open. That's by design and that's exactly how stability is achieved.
Also, PBRs are the first nuclear reactors ever to feature compressors in the primary loop (which uses helium instead of water). Compressors are much more complex than pumps (which work with liquids), and can surge, something pumps cannot. Since compressing gas is an energy-intensive business, producers will choose the most efficient compressors, which are the axial ones, which also happen to be the most sensitive to surges, and for which the highest efficiency is just before the surging line. Surges cause rapidly increasing temperatures, leading to leaks, metal melting and possibly explosions in a matter of seconds. I suppose you can imagine what happens when hot, radioactive helium flies out of an exploding compressor. Remember, no inherent containment is possible unless we sacrifice inherent stability—we have to trust someone to close the doors; however, if the primary circuit is interrupted and the passive cooling deactivated, heat will build up in the reactor.
Also, pebbles do have a tendency to get stuck when being moved around in the reactor, an operation necessary to maintain uniform conditions. That's what happened in Jülich, Germany, to the German PBR, an event that led to Germany shutting down the program as the technicians ended up releasing radioactive helium in the atmosphere while trying to unclog the pipes. Radioactivity levels were significant for the Jülich area, but were blamed on the Ruskies (the Chernobyl accident happened in the same days, IIRC).
I am an opponent of nuclear power, but I have no problem with anyone building power plants, on a simple conditions that Slashdot libertarians should like: no subsidies of any kind, only private capital. The day the subsidies end is the day fission power ends.
That single crime would take 50% of all US prison capacity.
Of course full-disk encryption, as lots of people have already suggested, but since you want the thief's time to be wasted, remember to password-protect the BIOS and disallow booting from USB drives or external units. Same goes for GRUB if you were on Linux. That way the thief will not be able to resell the netbook.
Yes, the thief could remove the BIOS battery, but he would have to tear the case open. If he knew how to open a laptop without breaking it, he has more skill than I would associate with a petty thief.
You might also consider Adeona.
... Which is why you did not install a Firefox spell-checker, I presume?
Most of highways in (West) Germany are actually in a pretty sad state. That's due to old age basically, and the fact that cities grew around them impeding the addition of more lanes. Asphalt quality is also miserable, and sometimes they use concrete(!). So, basically, virtual speed limits are enforced by virtue of low road quality.
East German highways, instead, were built much more recently (20 years old or younger), so they are generally of much better quality. You can speed there.
That gives "penal system" a whole new meaning.
Some people in meatspace can actually receive calls, in which case it is convenient to be available always at the same number.