So you replace subsidized corn with subsidized windmills and save a few millions in health care while pissing off the Saudis. Sounds like a great deal.
Not to mention that you can still use most of that land.
One only needs to look at a site like MacBB to see how much piracy there is on mac. (ie, a lot)
I don't doubt that. I just think that the situation's better than on the PC. Even if it's just because torrents for the Mac versions will be harder to come by.
Piracy rates on the PC are so bad that even slightly better rates on the Mac would make quite a difference. IIRC Paradox Interactive estimated from the number of people downloading patches and their statistics on how often the average registered user downloads a patch that more than 90% of the copies were illegal. And Europa Universalis's audience is probably less likely to pirate it than that of Close Range. (Although that's just a guess)
Cite your sources for those numbers. I can honestly say none of my dozens of hardcore gamer friends and acquaintances use a Mac. Not sure where this statistic of yours is coming from
What exactly are you doubting?
That the Mac's share now's bigger than 10 years ago? That there's more netbooks now than 10 years ago? That more than half of PCs ship with Intel integrated graphics?
Of course hardcore gamers don't use Macs. Where did I even imply that? But MS's busy killing the gaming market. It only makes sense that PC oriented developers like Valve would look for other options. Most Macs should be able to run the Source engine; it's scalable and Apple doesn't use Intel integrated crap across the board. The question's whether Mac people want games on their computers, but I'm sure Valve looked into that beforehand.
It's nice to see other game publishers figure out what Blizzard has known for a very long time.
I think you're gonna see a lot more of it for a number of reasons.
First, Microsoft fucked up the PC as a gaming platform. The lack of interest, investment, the Games for Windows fuck-up, MS execs admitting that they deliberately don't release games for the PC to prop up the Xbox. Blizzard complained publicly but others can see the writing on the wall, too.
Second, piracy is a real problem on the PC. Ubisoft did experiment with no DRM at all; that they came up with the total fubar they use now, should tell you how that experiment went. Apple users otoh are more likely to have more money than time.
Third, Apple's market share's been increasing while the share of PC's who can run games has been decreasing. Compared to ten years ago MS lost the top end to Apple, the bottom end to netbooks and most of the middle's running intel integrated crap.
Especially as there was no point to Ares I. It wasn't revolutionary like the VentureStar, it wasn't cheap and according to many not even especially safe.
Perhaps I'm naive but I always thought NASA should look into building a Orion+Escape System combination that can abort safely in just about any circumstances. That way you could just take any launcher with the necessary payload and a proven track record and put Orion on top of it without all the man-rating bruahaha.
Perhaps you did read it but you sure as hell didn't understand it. Neither did a lot of other slashtards judging by the flood of idiotic commentary further down.
The author talks about the benefits of high population density at all income levels. City dwellers use less resources than people in rural areas.
No one wants to live in a slum... except the millions of people moving from rural areas into slums every year. They're not all completely ignorant, it's just that the countryside around the city is even more of a hellhole than the slums. Thinking used to be that that wave of migration should be stopped at all costs but that has changed and in many country it's now policy to try and improve the situation in the slums instead. That's because planners have come to realize that by and large urban poverty's better than rural poverty. Education, sanitation, health, social mobility, environmental footprint, cities are superior to villages in almost every way.
I don't know where everyone got the idea that the author recommends that we turn regular cities into slums or that everyone should be poor. 90% of the upvoted comments are variations on "omg he sezs we should all live in slums. the author should try living in one, kthxbye." I haven't seen so many burning strawmen outside a Microsoft article in years.
P.S.: The only valid argument I could find in 10 pages was about transport costs but it still is wrong. Yes, transporting food costs energy. But it's not much. When people talk about local food in rich countries they aren't talking about growing vegetables on your roof. The problem is that vegetables from Virginia are shipped to Thailand for processing and then shipped back to Maryland.
Even worse, the camera was locked sometimes which made mouse+keyboard controls near-unplayable.
Ubisoft are the masters of getting 90% of a game right and then fucking up the remaining 10% so badly that you can't in good conscience recommend their games. But that's not restricted to their PC games.
Youtube 1080p videos still require some buffering on my 5mb connection.
For me (and many other people, you among them apparently) Youtube videos always buffer slightly too slow. It only happens with Youtube and if I launch 3 videos at the same time, they all buffer at the same just-a-few-percent-too-slow speed.
The solution is to start buffering a few videos and while you watch them you keep buffering new ones in other tabs. Of course that's not what you'd call convenient and they periodically fsck up their client so you can't pause before the video's running. But until our friends at Youtube begin to leverage the advantages of being part of Google and use Google Maps to find their asses, that's the only thing you can do.
Would be hilariously funny if IE actually gains traction. I doubt it though, I don't think IE8 is bad at all but even I use Firefox.
Most people who know what a browser is and who have an interest in another browser have jumped ship by now. The rest's gonna choose IE because MS were the only ones with enough brains to put "Internet" in the browser name. Internet Explorer is self-explanatory, Mozilla Firefox isn't.
That said its impossible for IE to gain traction from a ballot screen that only appears for those who already have IE as default browser.
What's a quarter of something 3 ft long? Well, a foot are 12" so it's 3*3=9". That's not something outlandish and everyone's done something like that lots of times in their lives. It's not even an especially hard case for the imperial system because the numbers are nice and the foot to inch ratio is not braindead (how about a quarter of half a mile in yards?).
But the calculation is nevertheless clunky because we're not operating in a base-12 system no matter how much better than base-10 it would be.
A quarter of 3 meters is 75 cm. A lot nicer because it's base 10.
First off, I'm sorry my first reply was so aggressive. I shouldn't write comments in the middle of the night when I'm tired and you were the victim of me being a jerk. Sorry.
The single greatest failing in WWI was Germany's belief that they couldn't stop the plan once it started, you appear to be of that school, other school's don't agree and actually blame the significant human toll of the war on that view. It was not a given, it was not impossible to stop and the German view that it was is extremely scary.
You have to separate the different stages. Of course the Kaiser could have told the military to stop the western portion of the Schlieffen plan but it would have crippled Germany. Mobilization plans for 5 million or so soldiers are unbelievably complex. All the train schedules and marching orders would have had to be rewritten. The failing here was that there weren't any other plans for a major war, no Just-Russia plan.But that was already too late to change by that time.
It also wouldn't have made much of a difference, because as I wrote there was absolutely no way France would stay out of a Russio-German-Austrian war. And Russia wouldn't have stayed out of a Austrian-Serbian war so the real problem was that Germany didn't stop the Austrian DoW against Serbia.
If my story is improbable yours is revisionist. We don't know what France would have done because they were never given the chance, Germany mobilized and rolled armed forces into France before France was ever given the option to decide for itself what it would do.
We don't know but we can be pretty certain. France had spent the 40 years after 1870 planning to get even. They had spent considerable political and economic capital to cultivate their alliance with Russia and they had a huge investment in the Russian rail network to enable the Russian army to mobilize faster against Germany. Even if there had been no animosity between Germany and France, they still couldn't have allowed Germany to take out Russia if they wanted to stay an independent great power instead of becoming semi-dependent like Austria.
The UK is a more interesting case. As I said balance of power (on the continent; British dominance in the rest of the world =) was the overriding principle of British foreign police for a long, long time. They were in a naval arms race with Germany and scared enough of German dominance on the continent to enter the Entente which is not something they would've done 30 years earlier. OTOH public opinion would have strongly opposed an aggressive war against Germany so their entry was far from predetermined.
Regardless, what they would have done IF Germany hadn't invaded France is immaterial at best and utter speculation at worst.
On the contrary. you can't criticize the Schlieffen plan without looking at the alternatives. If I kill a guy I can get anything between a medal and a firing squad, it all depends on the situation.
I simply do not see a parallel, on one hand you have a devious evil manipulator and on the other an incompetent feudal ruler.
Imho both had a very simple, black and white world view, a very simplistic view of power and the desire for their country to be "strong" in accordance with that view. They wanted freedom of action without "meddling" by the rest of the world no matter how valid their concerns were, a preference for the military and its clear hierarchy as well as a skewed view of patriotism. GWB wanted to prove that he wasn't the idiot child of the Bush clan while the Kaiser was self conscious about his deformed arm and wanted to step out of Bismarck's shadow. And they loved their military toys.
Yeah, Bush was probably hell bent on a new Iraq war while the Kaiser didn't want a Great War, but both could be ruthless because their country was right and it was their god given duty to see that the sinister forces of evil didn't thwart god's will.
If you knew anything about the French psyche and politics before WWI you'd know that there was no way in hell France would've stayed out of a war between Germany and Russia.
Even for the UK it's unlikely. Balance of Power had been their overriding principle for 200 years. They wouldn't have watched France and Russia lose.
You took some snippets that are true and then spun a rather improbable story with them. There was one major effect the detailed war plans, especially the Schliefen plan, had and that was to dramatically speed up the progress beyond the point of no return. As soon as Russia mobilized the rest was almost impossible to stop. The situation was out of control in a way none of the politicians, and probably none of the generals either, had ever intended.
Oh, and I don't think the mindset of the Kaiser and his minions are all that incomprehensible today. The parallels between Wilhelm II and George W Bush are downright scary. Fortunately geopolitics today are a lot more stable in no small part because a system with one hegemon is more stable than 5 Great Powers (not counting the US and Japan because this was mostly a European affair).
That's why I really don't like the US shooting itself in the foot; the current system's worked pretty well. The way you exported manufacturing to China certainly wasn't the most intelligent thing to do.
I'm lucky enough to live in Germany with its 300Km/h trains, which for journeys of 3-4 hours is now offering real competition.
Unfortunately that's just maximum speed. The average speed's generally ridiculously low because the trains crawl into and out of every little town along the route. The Shinkansen (and TGV, and AVE, and KTX and pretty much every other HSR) mostly has average speeds of about 200 km/h and more. In Germany, with very few exceptions, you're lucky to get more than 100.
And it's more expensive. And the seat pitch is worse. On time performance is atrocious, the reliability a disaster and there's no improvement in sight. Of all the HSR systems in the world Germany's is probably the worst.
I agree with most of what you said but I don't know where you got "and the lining up of the laser in this situation requires less precision than that of anti-missile systems that are around". That's definitely not true. Laser irradiation on a direct drive target for ignition requires exquisite precision.
I think you seriously underestimate the precision required for missile defense.
The airborne laser has to focus on a target 300km (600km for ICBMs but let's be conservative) away.
It has to hold that focus for 5s,
through the atmosphere
on a supersonic target
that is accelerating the whole time,
while being mounted on an airplane.
10 micrometer at a distance of 5m corresponds to about 60cm at 300km.
True the beam is 1.5m across as it leaves the mirror but due to atmospheric turbulence you can never be quite certain which parts of the laser are gonna hit the target so I'd say despite all those factors mentioned above it still achieves higher precision.
I'd really like some source for that. They've been eaten and cultivated since prehistoric times. It was a myth common in Britain and its colonies but the rest of the world knew better.
So someone will succeed in eating glass, and MAKING tasty spaghetti with it.
Produce tiny marbles and cover them in flavor syrup. McDonald's kids crap comes with "ketchup" made from apple puree. It tastes exactly like bad, real ketchup and it's so green you wonder if it's radioactive.
"Mr La Forge, how did you manage to disable the Borg Cube?" "Sir, it seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry."
Honestly, if Star Trek had fed me that as techno babble I would've called bullshit. I'm deeply impressed that it actually means something and works.
Why should the prices for points use better exchange rates than those for the goods themselves?
Just checked:
Amazon.de, 2100 points for 28EUR means 1.9ct per point.
Amazon.com, 1600 points for $19.64, i.e. 1.2ct per point.
That's steam exchange rates. Also notice how you can't really buy equal amounts of points (at least I didn't see them on the first pages of results) to muddy the waters.
The fair way to handle the issue would be to set the price for one region then do, let's say weekly, automatic conversions into other currencies (with respective taxes, etc.).
All we need is some kind of electronic computation machine that can do it for us. Perhaps somebody could hack one together. Imho vacuum tubes look promising.
If they've finally fixed it two years (?) after the chipset's been released that's great. I'm gonna try it again some time next month to see if I have to buy Windows 7 when the forced shutdowns on the RC start and your post makes me hopeful.
I never had a problem with compiling the Nvidia kernel driver or their legacy drivers, their installer is heads and shoulders above any other 3rd party driver for Linux I've encountered (which aren't that many) and the biggest problem is that many distros no longer include a build system on the default installation (which is mostly a problem with my network card because it leads to a catch 22. But thank God they fit 3 different twitter apps on that CD...).
I don't have a problem with people preferring OSS drivers. I do have a problem when that preference becomes irrational and ignores glaring deficits of the OSS drivers out of a ideological hatred of binary drivers.
I'd like OSS'ed Nvidia drivers, too. It's not gonna happen. But in the meantime their existing drivers provide timely support of the full feature set of current graphics cards and are quite stable. That's two things I can't say about Intel's OSS'ed drivers.
When it came to building my HTPC I went with Intel Graphics because everyone on/. was touting their great OSS drivers and how much better they were than nVidia's binary blob.
The reality is that I should have dug deeper because then I'd have found out that the gloriously OSS G45 drivers didn't want to implement a "cheap hack" and instead wanted to "Do It Right"(TM) - I don't know if they're still doing it right or if they're done doing it right by now, but the bottom line was that using xv crashed the X server. So I had an HTPC that couldn't play videos. Great.
My HTPC now runs Windows 7 and my next PC's gonna be nVidia again because I prefer a Linux with cheap hacks to having to use Windows.
So could the true believers please cease their Maoist campaign for ideological purity? Linux doesn't need a great leap, lots of small steps work just fine, thank you.
In my experience that lack of "objective" checklist-quality (citations, NPOV, etc) in articles often helps.
On many topics the English entry is almost unintelligible because it's just one (correctly sourced) quote after the other. God forbid someone trying to turn it into a whole instead of a disjointed mess because that might be interpreted as original research.
Also many articles on scientific topics are used by scientists in the field for a virtual dick waving contest. So if you look up the article on the crackpointium effect (it's late and I don't have a good example handy. Sorry. I'll try to find one tomorrow) you'd expect something like
The crackpointium effect is (short definition). In layman's terms that means (car analogy).
In depth paragraph A
B
C
What you get is
It is possible to describe the crackpointium effect because of the groundbreaking paper on the crackpointium effect by B Lender at the UoB. A team at Asshole U discovered the connection between it and some topic you don't give a fuck about. One of the most important discoveries was discovered by A. Dickwad. Another really, really important discovery was by B. Retard.
Every single one of that sentences will be properly sourced (pimping their papers is the whole point after all) and any attempt to write a more useful article will be swiftly dealt with (because it would reduce the prominence of said papers) under the guise of some wiki policy or other.
That said the German wiki has more than its own share of problems. The notability nazis, the same turf wars as the English wiki, picturephobia (I think due to even stricter fair use constraints but I'm not sure) and a bunch of others I've forgotten.
At those speeds and that kind of track the difference is minimal.
And their point was absolutely true. If people stopped driving like their lives depended on getting to the next red light 3s sooner, overall, it would make a much bigger difference than going from a normal car to a Prius.
Actually, no, it isn't. In official bullshit-speak:
Inspiration for the symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon () - a reference to the cradle of European civilisation - and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to 'certify' the stability of the euro.
The single-stroke $-sign OTOH might just as well be an 8:
That the dollar sign is derived from a slash through the numeral eight, denoting pieces of eight. The Oxford English Dictionary before 1963 held that this was the most probable explanation, though later editions have placed it in doubt.
according to wikipedia [citation needed].
If this was true it would herald a major crisis for derogatory spelling worldwide. I propose a conference to establish new and reliable standards (.) that provide sustainable ways to express our unstillable rage (..) and call attention to the seriousness of the offenses (...) committed by mega-corps (*gasping for air*) in one handy typographical sign.
I don't know what dimension you're hailing from but it certainly didn't work that way in this universe.
German industrial production peaked in '44 and was for the most part resource constrained. Allied bombers had often problems hitting the right city, any hits on actual production centers were mostly down to luck. (there were some surgical strikes but bomber losses for those were high and your standard bombing run was anything but surgical, especially British night attacks)
And Allied bombing attacks proved to be a gold mine for Nazi propaganda because they convinced the civilian population that surrender would be futile and therefore strengthened morale.
Modern attacks in Serbia and Iraq have been ridiculously more effective at annihilating enemy infrastructure within weeks and stealth bombers would enable the US to achieve that even against stronger opponents (in fact there's been some discussion on whether precision strikes against communication infrastructure in a hypothetical war against China would be so effective that the Chinese leadership might launch a nuclear first strike out of fear of being cut off from their nuclear forces).
In Afghanistan, of course, there is just about no infrastructure worth hitting.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money
Not to mention that you can still use most of that land.
I don't doubt that. I just think that the situation's better than on the PC. Even if it's just because torrents for the Mac versions will be harder to come by.
Piracy rates on the PC are so bad that even slightly better rates on the Mac would make quite a difference. IIRC Paradox Interactive estimated from the number of people downloading patches and their statistics on how often the average registered user downloads a patch that more than 90% of the copies were illegal. And Europa Universalis's audience is probably less likely to pirate it than that of Close Range. (Although that's just a guess)
What exactly are you doubting?
That the Mac's share now's bigger than 10 years ago? That there's more netbooks now than 10 years ago? That more than half of PCs ship with Intel integrated graphics?
Of course hardcore gamers don't use Macs. Where did I even imply that? But MS's busy killing the gaming market. It only makes sense that PC oriented developers like Valve would look for other options. Most Macs should be able to run the Source engine; it's scalable and Apple doesn't use Intel integrated crap across the board. The question's whether Mac people want games on their computers, but I'm sure Valve looked into that beforehand.
I think you're gonna see a lot more of it for a number of reasons.
First, Microsoft fucked up the PC as a gaming platform. The lack of interest, investment, the Games for Windows fuck-up, MS execs admitting that they deliberately don't release games for the PC to prop up the Xbox. Blizzard complained publicly but others can see the writing on the wall, too.
Second, piracy is a real problem on the PC. Ubisoft did experiment with no DRM at all; that they came up with the total fubar they use now, should tell you how that experiment went. Apple users otoh are more likely to have more money than time.
Third, Apple's market share's been increasing while the share of PC's who can run games has been decreasing. Compared to ten years ago MS lost the top end to Apple, the bottom end to netbooks and most of the middle's running intel integrated crap.
Perhaps I'm naive but I always thought NASA should look into building a Orion+Escape System combination that can abort safely in just about any circumstances. That way you could just take any launcher with the necessary payload and a proven track record and put Orion on top of it without all the man-rating bruahaha.
The author talks about the benefits of high population density at all income levels. City dwellers use less resources than people in rural areas.
No one wants to live in a slum... except the millions of people moving from rural areas into slums every year. They're not all completely ignorant, it's just that the countryside around the city is even more of a hellhole than the slums. Thinking used to be that that wave of migration should be stopped at all costs but that has changed and in many country it's now policy to try and improve the situation in the slums instead. That's because planners have come to realize that by and large urban poverty's better than rural poverty. Education, sanitation, health, social mobility, environmental footprint, cities are superior to villages in almost every way.
I don't know where everyone got the idea that the author recommends that we turn regular cities into slums or that everyone should be poor. 90% of the upvoted comments are variations on "omg he sezs we should all live in slums. the author should try living in one, kthxbye." I haven't seen so many burning strawmen outside a Microsoft article in years.
P.S.: The only valid argument I could find in 10 pages was about transport costs but it still is wrong. Yes, transporting food costs energy. But it's not much. When people talk about local food in rich countries they aren't talking about growing vegetables on your roof. The problem is that vegetables from Virginia are shipped to Thailand for processing and then shipped back to Maryland.
Ubisoft are the masters of getting 90% of a game right and then fucking up the remaining 10% so badly that you can't in good conscience recommend their games. But that's not restricted to their PC games.
Youtube 1080p videos still require some buffering on my 5mb connection.
For me (and many other people, you among them apparently) Youtube videos always buffer slightly too slow. It only happens with Youtube and if I launch 3 videos at the same time, they all buffer at the same just-a-few-percent-too-slow speed.
The solution is to start buffering a few videos and while you watch them you keep buffering new ones in other tabs. Of course that's not what you'd call convenient and they periodically fsck up their client so you can't pause before the video's running. But until our friends at Youtube begin to leverage the advantages of being part of Google and use Google Maps to find their asses, that's the only thing you can do.
Most people who know what a browser is and who have an interest in another browser have jumped ship by now. The rest's gonna choose IE because MS were the only ones with enough brains to put "Internet" in the browser name. Internet Explorer is self-explanatory, Mozilla Firefox isn't.
That said its impossible for IE to gain traction from a ballot screen that only appears for those who already have IE as default browser.
But the calculation is nevertheless clunky because we're not operating in a base-12 system no matter how much better than base-10 it would be.
A quarter of 3 meters is 75 cm. A lot nicer because it's base 10.
The single greatest failing in WWI was Germany's belief that they couldn't stop the plan once it started, you appear to be of that school, other school's don't agree and actually blame the significant human toll of the war on that view. It was not a given, it was not impossible to stop and the German view that it was is extremely scary.
You have to separate the different stages. Of course the Kaiser could have told the military to stop the western portion of the Schlieffen plan but it would have crippled Germany. Mobilization plans for 5 million or so soldiers are unbelievably complex. All the train schedules and marching orders would have had to be rewritten. The failing here was that there weren't any other plans for a major war, no Just-Russia plan.But that was already too late to change by that time.
It also wouldn't have made much of a difference, because as I wrote there was absolutely no way France would stay out of a Russio-German-Austrian war. And Russia wouldn't have stayed out of a Austrian-Serbian war so the real problem was that Germany didn't stop the Austrian DoW against Serbia.
If my story is improbable yours is revisionist. We don't know what France would have done because they were never given the chance, Germany mobilized and rolled armed forces into France before France was ever given the option to decide for itself what it would do.
We don't know but we can be pretty certain. France had spent the 40 years after 1870 planning to get even. They had spent considerable political and economic capital to cultivate their alliance with Russia and they had a huge investment in the Russian rail network to enable the Russian army to mobilize faster against Germany. Even if there had been no animosity between Germany and France, they still couldn't have allowed Germany to take out Russia if they wanted to stay an independent great power instead of becoming semi-dependent like Austria.
The UK is a more interesting case. As I said balance of power (on the continent; British dominance in the rest of the world =) was the overriding principle of British foreign police for a long, long time. They were in a naval arms race with Germany and scared enough of German dominance on the continent to enter the Entente which is not something they would've done 30 years earlier. OTOH public opinion would have strongly opposed an aggressive war against Germany so their entry was far from predetermined.
Regardless, what they would have done IF Germany hadn't invaded France is immaterial at best and utter speculation at worst.
On the contrary. you can't criticize the Schlieffen plan without looking at the alternatives. If I kill a guy I can get anything between a medal and a firing squad, it all depends on the situation.
I simply do not see a parallel, on one hand you have a devious evil manipulator and on the other an incompetent feudal ruler.
Imho both had a very simple, black and white world view, a very simplistic view of power and the desire for their country to be "strong" in accordance with that view. They wanted freedom of action without "meddling" by the rest of the world no matter how valid their concerns were, a preference for the military and its clear hierarchy as well as a skewed view of patriotism. GWB wanted to prove that he wasn't the idiot child of the Bush clan while the Kaiser was self conscious about his deformed arm and wanted to step out of Bismarck's shadow. And they loved their military toys.
Yeah, Bush was probably hell bent on a new Iraq war while the Kaiser didn't want a Great War, but both could be ruthless because their country was right and it was their god given duty to see that the sinister forces of evil didn't thwart god's will.
Germany wanted
Even for the UK it's unlikely. Balance of Power had been their overriding principle for 200 years. They wouldn't have watched France and Russia lose.
You took some snippets that are true and then spun a rather improbable story with them. There was one major effect the detailed war plans, especially the Schliefen plan, had and that was to dramatically speed up the progress beyond the point of no return. As soon as Russia mobilized the rest was almost impossible to stop. The situation was out of control in a way none of the politicians, and probably none of the generals either, had ever intended.
Oh, and I don't think the mindset of the Kaiser and his minions are all that incomprehensible today. The parallels between Wilhelm II and George W Bush are downright scary. Fortunately geopolitics today are a lot more stable in no small part because a system with one hegemon is more stable than 5 Great Powers (not counting the US and Japan because this was mostly a European affair).
That's why I really don't like the US shooting itself in the foot; the current system's worked pretty well. The way you exported manufacturing to China certainly wasn't the most intelligent thing to do.
Unfortunately that's just maximum speed. The average speed's generally ridiculously low because the trains crawl into and out of every little town along the route. The Shinkansen (and TGV, and AVE, and KTX and pretty much every other HSR) mostly has average speeds of about 200 km/h and more. In Germany, with very few exceptions, you're lucky to get more than 100.
And it's more expensive. And the seat pitch is worse. On time performance is atrocious, the reliability a disaster and there's no improvement in sight. Of all the HSR systems in the world Germany's is probably the worst.
I agree with most of what you said but I don't know where you got "and the lining up of the laser in this situation requires less precision than that of anti-missile systems that are around". That's definitely not true. Laser irradiation on a direct drive target for ignition requires exquisite precision.
I think you seriously underestimate the precision required for missile defense.
10 micrometer at a distance of 5m corresponds to about 60cm at 300km.
True the beam is 1.5m across as it leaves the mirror but due to atmospheric turbulence you can never be quite certain which parts of the laser are gonna hit the target so I'd say despite all those factors mentioned above it still achieves higher precision.
I'd really like some source for that. They've been eaten and cultivated since prehistoric times. It was a myth common in Britain and its colonies but the rest of the world knew better.
So someone will succeed in eating glass, and MAKING tasty spaghetti with it.
Produce tiny marbles and cover them in flavor syrup. McDonald's kids crap comes with "ketchup" made from apple puree. It tastes exactly like bad, real ketchup and it's so green you wonder if it's radioactive.
"Mr La Forge, how did you manage to disable the Borg Cube?"
"Sir, it seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry."
Honestly, if Star Trek had fed me that as techno babble I would've called bullshit. I'm deeply impressed that it actually means something and works.
Just checked:
That's steam exchange rates. Also notice how you can't really buy equal amounts of points (at least I didn't see them on the first pages of results) to muddy the waters.
The fair way to handle the issue would be to set the price for one region then do, let's say weekly, automatic conversions into other currencies (with respective taxes, etc.).
All we need is some kind of electronic computation machine that can do it for us. Perhaps somebody could hack one together. Imho vacuum tubes look promising.
I never had a problem with compiling the Nvidia kernel driver or their legacy drivers, their installer is heads and shoulders above any other 3rd party driver for Linux I've encountered (which aren't that many) and the biggest problem is that many distros no longer include a build system on the default installation (which is mostly a problem with my network card because it leads to a catch 22. But thank God they fit 3 different twitter apps on that CD...).
I don't have a problem with people preferring OSS drivers. I do have a problem when that preference becomes irrational and ignores glaring deficits of the OSS drivers out of a ideological hatred of binary drivers.
I'd like OSS'ed Nvidia drivers, too. It's not gonna happen. But in the meantime their existing drivers provide timely support of the full feature set of current graphics cards and are quite stable. That's two things I can't say about Intel's OSS'ed drivers.
When it came to building my HTPC I went with Intel Graphics because everyone on /. was touting their great OSS drivers and how much better they were than nVidia's binary blob.
The reality is that I should have dug deeper because then I'd have found out that the gloriously OSS G45 drivers didn't want to implement a "cheap hack" and instead wanted to "Do It Right"(TM) - I don't know if they're still doing it right or if they're done doing it right by now, but the bottom line was that using xv crashed the X server. So I had an HTPC that couldn't play videos. Great.
My HTPC now runs Windows 7 and my next PC's gonna be nVidia again because I prefer a Linux with cheap hacks to having to use Windows.
So could the true believers please cease their Maoist campaign for ideological purity? Linux doesn't need a great leap, lots of small steps work just fine, thank you.
On many topics the English entry is almost unintelligible because it's just one (correctly sourced) quote after the other. God forbid someone trying to turn it into a whole instead of a disjointed mess because that might be interpreted as original research.
Also many articles on scientific topics are used by scientists in the field for a virtual dick waving contest. So if you look up the article on the crackpointium effect (it's late and I don't have a good example handy. Sorry. I'll try to find one tomorrow) you'd expect something like
What you get is
Every single one of that sentences will be properly sourced (pimping their papers is the whole point after all) and any attempt to write a more useful article will be swiftly dealt with (because it would reduce the prominence of said papers) under the guise of some wiki policy or other.
That said the German wiki has more than its own share of problems. The notability nazis, the same turf wars as the English wiki, picturephobia (I think due to even stricter fair use constraints but I'm not sure) and a bunch of others I've forgotten.
And their point was absolutely true. If people stopped driving like their lives depended on getting to the next red light 3s sooner, overall, it would make a much bigger difference than going from a normal car to a Prius.
Inspiration for the symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon () - a reference to the cradle of European civilisation - and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to 'certify' the stability of the euro.
Straight from the horse's mouth.
The single-stroke $-sign OTOH might just as well be an 8:
That the dollar sign is derived from a slash through the numeral eight, denoting pieces of eight. The Oxford English Dictionary before 1963 held that this was the most probable explanation, though later editions have placed it in doubt.
according to wikipedia [citation needed].
If this was true it would herald a major crisis for derogatory spelling worldwide. I propose a conference to establish new and reliable standards (.) that provide sustainable ways to express our unstillable rage (..) and call attention to the seriousness of the offenses (...) committed by mega-corps (*gasping for air*) in one handy typographical sign.
German industrial production peaked in '44 and was for the most part resource constrained. Allied bombers had often problems hitting the right city, any hits on actual production centers were mostly down to luck. (there were some surgical strikes but bomber losses for those were high and your standard bombing run was anything but surgical, especially British night attacks)
And Allied bombing attacks proved to be a gold mine for Nazi propaganda because they convinced the civilian population that surrender would be futile and therefore strengthened morale.
Modern attacks in Serbia and Iraq have been ridiculously more effective at annihilating enemy infrastructure within weeks and stealth bombers would enable the US to achieve that even against stronger opponents (in fact there's been some discussion on whether precision strikes against communication infrastructure in a hypothetical war against China would be so effective that the Chinese leadership might launch a nuclear first strike out of fear of being cut off from their nuclear forces).
In Afghanistan, of course, there is just about no infrastructure worth hitting.
Because if it appears likely that they'll do so again they shouldn't be out in the first place.