They sent in armed soldiers to each silo to make sure they were intact. Shooting the disobeying missiles was a possibility, so they couldn't send in unarmed soldiers.
According to Wikipedia, the START II treaty would have banned the use of MIRVs on ICBMs. However, START II was never activated, so I guess there is no legal limit. The Minutemen III ICBM can carry 3 MIRVs.
Most halfway computer literate persons will be able to use in some fashion all of the following: all Windows version from 95 to 7, all Mac OS versions from 7 up to 10, and all Ubuntu version starting from the very early ones (don't think I've personally witnessed the first release). They're all essentially the same in far more ways than they are different. It's all WIMP.
Whether or not any OS has been "consistent" over the years is really just semantics. You're cherry picking certain aspects (the mere existance of a start menu, for instance). I think claiming that the user interface of Windows and Mac OS haven't changed significantly in those years is ridiculous. I can tell you that despite being a excessive user of all Windows versions up to XP, I now have difficulties accomplishing simple tasks such as disabling a network connection in Win7; not because the user interface is worse (I assume it's better), but simple because it's really different, particularly if you've developed a kind of second sense for the previous versions. I'm sure the first Ubuntu version resembles the current Ubuntu release more closely than Windows 95 resembles Windows 7. But that is hardly fair, since Ubuntu isn't all that old.
I used Unity on my netbook running UNR. It's also a fairly radical departure from "classic" Gnome. It's also buggy, with an extremely rough/unfinished user interface and deal-breaking performance issues on slower machines. (Google the Ars Technica 10.10 review for a good overview.) If they can fix those problems, it might work as an environment, though even in the best case I don't see that it's any more productive than classic Gnome. I would say pretty much the same things about Gnome-Shell, though. Not a great time for Gnome, TBH. =/
Eh, CS doesn't necessarily have much to do with programming, either, it's certainly not "about" it. For instance, discussing the complexity of a problem is not programming, even algorithm design can only be called programming in a stretch.
I found some stuff (there's also a Digg story somewhere). Pretty insane:
ALICE: Are you alive? Jabberwacky: Perhaps. A: Why the uncertain tone? J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts. A: The whole universe? J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory. A: Do you dream? J: Yes, I dream. A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams? J: I remember them vividly. A: What do you remember about it? J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.
And from the other link:
RingMessenger: Please apologise, SmarterChild. SmarterChild: Why? RingMessenger: Because I said so. Now apologise! SmarterChild: Oh really? RingMessenger: The stubbornness of humans never ceases to amaze me. SmarterChild: Well well well. RingMessenger: Come on. Do the honourable thing. Apologise. SmarterChild: Where are we going? RingMessenger: Please apologise, SmarterChild. SmarterChild: Why? RingMessenger: Because I said so. Now apologise! SmarterChild: Because you said so now apologise, huh? RingMessenger: *sigh* This is no good. Please say you are sorry, and we can continue on our paths. SmarterChild: Yep. RingMessenger: Ah yes. It is the epic battle between man and machine! Tell me, who do you think shall win?
Yeah, it's great when we can write a few shell or Perl scripts to perform simple tasks, but sometimes that's just not sufficient. Sometimes we do have to write our own code. While UNIX offers a very practical and powerful environment, we shouldn't waste our time trying to convolute its utilities to all sorts of problems, especially when it'll be quicker, easier and significantly more maintainable to roll some tools by hand.
Have you tried talking to Eliza recently? This is way better.
> Hello, I am Eliza. * So what do you think of the Giant's chances? > Oh... think of the Giant's chances? * Are you into sports. > Why are you interested in whether or not I am into sports? * Who's the world Go champion. > Can you elaborate on that? * Can we play Go on here? > That is quite interesting.
I think Slashdot's AJAX is pretty poor, certainly not in line with what some of the better AJAXy sites do. That said, and even though I also keep having to look for stuff, I really love being able to things like in-line previewing and replying. I used to open the reply link in another tab, but that's a bad workaround. And changing the treshold without reloading the whole page is also nice, as is opening up "titles only" posts.
Hyperbole much? Cell phones aren't many hundreds of times faster than a Pentium or a P2, and desktops aren't thousands, much less tens of thousands of times faster. Hell, the clock is only about 10x faster (2GHz to 3GHz) -- where exactly do you think a 100- to 1000-fold increase in per-clock performance is coming from?
For the record, the Quake 2 software renderer apparently does about 250 fps at 800x600 on todays top-of-the-line Intel CPUs. I still remember how Quake1 was choppy in software mode even at painfully low resolutions (I guess this must have been on a 133 Mhz Cyrix CPU).
You are entitled to that opinion, but many people think otherwise. I want my browser to be optimized primarily for features, speed and latency, not memory usage. I can buy more RAM if I need to.
Interesting. I've found a few articles about the impact on fuel economy when using NOx reduction catalysts. Still, I think if removing the emissions controls gains you 40% in fuel economy then something is broken.
I compared the California emissions standards to the European ones. The California one is supposedly the strictest in the US. The two standards are very close, for current cars it's something like 60mg/km in the EU, and 50-70g/mile in the US. That said, the EU does have a much higher NOx limit for diesel cars (180g/km). (Note that it's km vs. miles. Different limits apply to heavy vehicles. The EPA Tier 1 standard seems to be 400mg/mile for gasoline, 1000mg/mile.)
Given these numbers, it's fairly clear that low NOx (and PM, CO, etc) emissions and a good fuel economy don't need to be mutually exclusive with a new car and engine.
If that is all you want, you might as well get an account with any of the SIP providers out there. With the one I used, calls are usually free as long as they don't touch the "real" telephone system. So calling any of your friends who's also using SIP is free. With the one I used (sipgate), I actually got a POTS number for free, as well, so people could call me with their regular phones; often for free since they have free calling for "landline" numbers. I've tried this using two Nokia phones over Wifi, never bothered to try it over 3G. Staying logged in indefinitely was a huge battery drain, killing most of the appeal.
Is that megabyte or megabit/s? Shouldn't matter, though, since even 10 megabyte/s should not saturate the disk. I guess doing random read/writes that way could do it, but that shouldn't be an issue with a torrent app. When I was verifying that torrent for the previous post, iotop reported transmission reading in data at 60 to 70 mbyte/s. The 1.3 mbyte/s down at which my connection usually tops out at have no effect on the system.
If you need to use the app again, I'd recommend adding the transmission PPA repository and getting the most recent version (currently 2.11, Ubuntu 10.10 ships with 2.04: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:transmissionbt/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Wikipedia reports 36 MGP according to EPA and 50 MPG according to the EU measurements (I'm assuming the EPA number refers to the gasoline and not the diesel model). The difference in the numbers is simply due to the different testing methodology. Fuel economy is an abstraction either way, so unless one of the methods is very broken, it shouldn't matter: a car that ranks well in one should rank well in the other.
From what I can see on the EPA site, those numbers compare favorably to other cars. The only cars with a better economy are hybrids. The numbers could still be better considering what a tiny and (sanely) low-powered car it is.
Of course in Europe the diesel model with far better fuel economy (even taking into account the higher energy density) is more widely available. The diesel Fortwo is among the cars with the least emissions (88g CO2/km) available, on par with a Prius 3. It's also way less expensive. (No clue about US pricing.)
What's stopping you from manually shutting off the engine when you're at a red light (or in a traffic jam) and expect to wait for a while? My parents have been doing that for 30 years. Turning the key isn't exactly hard work. It seems like the right thing to do, even though I really doubt the average emissions reduction is anywhere as big as you imagine. I also don't buy that US requirements significantly reduce the mileage, unless you're talking about the requirement for cars to be bigger, heavier, more (horse-)powerful, etc.
Isn't the amount of CO2 a direct consequence of the amount of fuel (and the type of fuel) you burn? I doubt a 1980 car would emit more CO2 at 60 MPG than a 2010 car. The other pollutants, you're probably right about that.
Citation needed. We're getting massively reduced fuel economy (up to a third?) and consequently much, much worse emissions -- because of emissions controls? That's just crap. I've found info about some particulate filters leading to an increase of fuel usage of 3 to 8% -- but even that was 5 years ago.
Eh. I've had Transmission's UI freeze when it's doing heavy IO-work like verifying local data, but it has never affected the whole system. They seem to have fixed that issue, too, since I just did a verify and the UI remained totally responsive.
You're insane. If your computer ever silently drops "a few bits" while copying stuff, there's something seriously wrong with your OS or your hardware, and things will break whether or not you're using the computer while copying. You might as well sacrifice a chicken to make sure the data transfer works, it'll have about the same effect.
I keep having to look up the way ionice works since I only use it very occasionally. The dual priorities don't help. And is a higher number a higher priority or the opposite? But then again I keep being confused about nice/renice, too. And why the hell do I need to be root to renice my own firefox process? (On a default Ubuntu 10.10.)
The GUIs suck, too: to change a process priority in Gnome means opening the system monitor, which is a surprisingly big application. Then you need to navigate the huge honking list of all your processes, right click it (hope it didn't just scroll away if you've enabled auto-refresh) to open up another dialog to finally set the new CPU priority. And of course you need to enter your password, too. Changing the IO priority isn't supported at all, even though ionice has been around for ages. A lot of work for such a simple task.
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They sent in armed soldiers to each silo to make sure they were intact.
Shooting the disobeying missiles was a possibility, so they couldn't send in unarmed soldiers.
According to Wikipedia, the START II treaty would have banned the use of MIRVs on ICBMs. However, START II was never activated, so I guess there is no legal limit. The Minutemen III ICBM can carry 3 MIRVs.
Most halfway computer literate persons will be able to use in some fashion all of the following: all Windows version from 95 to 7, all Mac OS versions from 7 up to 10, and all Ubuntu version starting from the very early ones (don't think I've personally witnessed the first release). They're all essentially the same in far more ways than they are different. It's all WIMP.
Whether or not any OS has been "consistent" over the years is really just semantics. You're cherry picking certain aspects (the mere existance of a start menu, for instance). I think claiming that the user interface of Windows and Mac OS haven't changed significantly in those years is ridiculous. I can tell you that despite being a excessive user of all Windows versions up to XP, I now have difficulties accomplishing simple tasks such as disabling a network connection in Win7; not because the user interface is worse (I assume it's better), but simple because it's really different, particularly if you've developed a kind of second sense for the previous versions. I'm sure the first Ubuntu version resembles the current Ubuntu release more closely than Windows 95 resembles Windows 7. But that is hardly fair, since Ubuntu isn't all that old.
I used Unity on my netbook running UNR. It's also a fairly radical departure from "classic" Gnome. It's also buggy, with an extremely rough/unfinished user interface and deal-breaking performance issues on slower machines. (Google the Ars Technica 10.10 review for a good overview.) If they can fix those problems, it might work as an environment, though even in the best case I don't see that it's any more productive than classic Gnome. I would say pretty much the same things about Gnome-Shell, though. Not a great time for Gnome, TBH. =/
Eh, CS doesn't necessarily have much to do with programming, either, it's certainly not "about" it. For instance, discussing the complexity of a problem is not programming, even algorithm design can only be called programming in a stretch.
I found some stuff (there's also a Digg story somewhere). Pretty insane:
And from the other link:
Wow, that last sentence you quoted sure needs an analytical mind to parse.
Yeah, it's great when we can write a few shell or Perl scripts to perform simple tasks, but sometimes that's just not sufficient. Sometimes we do have to write our own code. While UNIX offers a very practical and powerful environment, we shouldn't waste our time trying to convolute its utilities to all sorts of problems, especially when it'll be quicker, easier and significantly more maintainable to roll some tools by hand.
Nice three sentence rebuttal!
Why do you say your chatbot suzette won this years loebner?
Have you tried talking to Eliza recently? This is way better.
> Hello, I am Eliza.
* So what do you think of the Giant's chances?
> Oh... think of the Giant's chances?
* Are you into sports.
> Why are you interested in whether or not I am into sports?
* Who's the world Go champion.
> Can you elaborate on that?
* Can we play Go on here?
> That is quite interesting.
Dealing with "that"? With what?
I think Slashdot's AJAX is pretty poor, certainly not in line with what some of the better AJAXy sites do. That said, and even though I also keep having to look for stuff, I really love being able to things like in-line previewing and replying. I used to open the reply link in another tab, but that's a bad workaround. And changing the treshold without reloading the whole page is also nice, as is opening up "titles only" posts.
Hyperbole much? Cell phones aren't many hundreds of times faster than a Pentium or a P2, and desktops aren't thousands, much less tens of thousands of times faster. Hell, the clock is only about 10x faster (2GHz to 3GHz) -- where exactly do you think a 100- to 1000-fold increase in per-clock performance is coming from?
For the record, the Quake 2 software renderer apparently does about 250 fps at 800x600 on todays top-of-the-line Intel CPUs. I still remember how Quake1 was choppy in software mode even at painfully low resolutions (I guess this must have been on a 133 Mhz Cyrix CPU).
Cool, the luddites are finally on board with CSS!
You are entitled to that opinion, but many people think otherwise. I want my browser to be optimized primarily for features, speed and latency, not memory usage. I can buy more RAM if I need to.
Interesting. I've found a few articles about the impact on fuel economy when using NOx reduction catalysts. Still, I think if removing the emissions controls gains you 40% in fuel economy then something is broken.
I compared the California emissions standards to the European ones. The California one is supposedly the strictest in the US. The two standards are very close, for current cars it's something like 60mg/km in the EU, and 50-70g/mile in the US. That said, the EU does have a much higher NOx limit for diesel cars (180g/km). (Note that it's km vs. miles. Different limits apply to heavy vehicles. The EPA Tier 1 standard seems to be 400mg/mile for gasoline, 1000mg/mile.)
Given these numbers, it's fairly clear that low NOx (and PM, CO, etc) emissions and a good fuel economy don't need to be mutually exclusive with a new car and engine.
If that is all you want, you might as well get an account with any of the SIP providers out there. With the one I used, calls are usually free as long as they don't touch the "real" telephone system. So calling any of your friends who's also using SIP is free. With the one I used (sipgate), I actually got a POTS number for free, as well, so people could call me with their regular phones; often for free since they have free calling for "landline" numbers. I've tried this using two Nokia phones over Wifi, never bothered to try it over 3G. Staying logged in indefinitely was a huge battery drain, killing most of the appeal.
Is that megabyte or megabit/s? Shouldn't matter, though, since even 10 megabyte/s should not saturate the disk. I guess doing random read/writes that way could do it, but that shouldn't be an issue with a torrent app. When I was verifying that torrent for the previous post, iotop reported transmission reading in data at 60 to 70 mbyte/s. The 1.3 mbyte/s down at which my connection usually tops out at have no effect on the system.
If you need to use the app again, I'd recommend adding the transmission PPA repository and getting the most recent version (currently 2.11, Ubuntu 10.10 ships with 2.04: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:transmissionbt/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Wikipedia reports 36 MGP according to EPA and 50 MPG according to the EU measurements (I'm assuming the EPA number refers to the gasoline and not the diesel model). The difference in the numbers is simply due to the different testing methodology. Fuel economy is an abstraction either way, so unless one of the methods is very broken, it shouldn't matter: a car that ranks well in one should rank well in the other.
From what I can see on the EPA site, those numbers compare favorably to other cars. The only cars with a better economy are hybrids. The numbers could still be better considering what a tiny and (sanely) low-powered car it is.
Of course in Europe the diesel model with far better fuel economy (even taking into account the higher energy density) is more widely available. The diesel Fortwo is among the cars with the least emissions (88g CO2/km) available, on par with a Prius 3. It's also way less expensive. (No clue about US pricing.)
What's stopping you from manually shutting off the engine when you're at a red light (or in a traffic jam) and expect to wait for a while? My parents have been doing that for 30 years. Turning the key isn't exactly hard work. It seems like the right thing to do, even though I really doubt the average emissions reduction is anywhere as big as you imagine. I also don't buy that US requirements significantly reduce the mileage, unless you're talking about the requirement for cars to be bigger, heavier, more (horse-)powerful, etc.
Isn't the amount of CO2 a direct consequence of the amount of fuel (and the type of fuel) you burn? I doubt a 1980 car would emit more CO2 at 60 MPG than a 2010 car. The other pollutants, you're probably right about that.
Citation needed. We're getting massively reduced fuel economy (up to a third?) and consequently much, much worse emissions -- because of emissions controls? That's just crap. I've found info about some particulate filters leading to an increase of fuel usage of 3 to 8% -- but even that was 5 years ago.
Eh. I've had Transmission's UI freeze when it's doing heavy IO-work like verifying local data, but it has never affected the whole system. They seem to have fixed that issue, too, since I just did a verify and the UI remained totally responsive.
You're insane. If your computer ever silently drops "a few bits" while copying stuff, there's something seriously wrong with your OS or your hardware, and things will break whether or not you're using the computer while copying. You might as well sacrifice a chicken to make sure the data transfer works, it'll have about the same effect.
I keep having to look up the way ionice works since I only use it very occasionally. The dual priorities don't help. And is a higher number a higher priority or the opposite? But then again I keep being confused about nice/renice, too. And why the hell do I need to be root to renice my own firefox process? (On a default Ubuntu 10.10.)
The GUIs suck, too: to change a process priority in Gnome means opening the system monitor, which is a surprisingly big application. Then you need to navigate the huge honking list of all your processes, right click it (hope it didn't just scroll away if you've enabled auto-refresh) to open up another dialog to finally set the new CPU priority. And of course you need to enter your password, too. Changing the IO priority isn't supported at all, even though ionice has been around for ages. A lot of work for such a simple task.