I agree, but my point was that helium is rare and expensive, while hydrogen is the second most common element on the planet (the most common, of course, being stupidity).
Then you just tell the cops "look for the guy who's going to be bright purple for the next few days - you can't miss him."
That, of course, presupposes that the police could give a fuck about you and your stuff. Remember, most burglary cases remain unsolved. Your suggestion (while interesting) and the comments in favour of cameras rely entirely on the assumption that your security precautions have already failed.
There are really only two options: (1) Make it hard (invonvenient, time-consuming or noisy) to get in, or (2) Be prepared to kill or maim the burglar.
Option 2 has its attractions, but leaves you with a mess to clean up and/or lengthy discussions with your local constabulary.
I doubt if electronic security systems are very effective. The only places in my street that ever get broken into are the places that have security systems.
You're probably better off taking steps to make sure your place is harder to break into easily. This is bearing in mind that most burglaries are opportunistic: so anything that makes the job take a long time, make a lot of noise or leave the burglar exposed and conspicuous in the course of his gainful employment will be effective at keeping your stuff safe.
Doors don't have to be steel-reinforced, but if made of solid timber will be hard to break. Similarly, there are types of glass available that can stand up to hammer attacks for some time. And use good locks. Those 5-pin tumbler (Yale or similar) locks are useless. Anyone can bump those in less than 5 seconds.
Bear in mind that you can't really defend against a sustained attack or a real professional without making your place look like Fort Knox (i.e. a big fat target saying "Burgle Me"). Living in a house with a scruffy front yard and junk on your porch sometimes helps - it looks like you won't have anything worth nicking.
In any case, there's nothing actually wrong with hydrogen, used with care. We've come a long way from the first age of airships, and materials and engineering are vastly more sophisticated.
It's common to trot out the example of the Hindenberg as to what can go wrong, but by comparison with the mess a 747 makes when it hits anything at 570mph, it's fair to say airships are pretty safe. In the Hindenberg disaster, 63% of the passengers survived. Whereas, if your plane crashes you can usually be pretty sure you're going to die, given the amount of fuel (of very high calorific value) that is always on board.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
Slow or otherwise, Google really didn't do a very good job of explaining succinctly what was so great about Wave. (I'm working on the assumption that there might have been something great, since the project did have a few enthusiasts.)
There were general expostulations of "Look at this! And this shiny bit!..." but without any very clear indication of what it was useful for, and why anybody should take time away from email, facebook or whatever to investigate Wave. When the project was launched, my initial reaction was to yawn. Apparently I wasn't entirely alone.
I'm not enough of an audiophile to suggest spending a fortune on a stereo...
I loathe that "audiophile" tag. I have a formally diagnosed "ski slope" hearing loss towards the upper frequencies, but I can still listen critically enough to hear obvious inadequacies in a recording or its reproduction, and I daresay most people can do likewise if they put their minds to it.
Because listening is as much an active experience as passive (especially with regard to classical music). That odious term "audiophile" is often applied to people with more money than sense, who are inclined to accept all sorts of voodoo without empirical evidence. The fortune I have spent on my stereo is just a small one (less than $AU10K), but it is also a carefully considered one. This is (I have to admit) partly because I am married, so there is the WAF to consider, but mostly a result of common sense in recognition of diminishing returns.
But away from home, a sensible level of compression on an mp3 player is just fine. I don't expect to hear the finest nuances of Bartok's sonata for unaccompanied violin over the noise from an 8-litre Cummins diesel.
Recovery is best done in the absence of Windows anyway. After all, if a machine has been rooted, for instance, most non-savvy users can't depend on having any worthwhile recovery afterwards, or any safe connection to the rest of the world.
Any Linux install disc can be used as a liveCD (or of course you can use something like Knoppix as a more intuitive alternative if you prefer). Then, having recovered your data, it makes sense to just continue the process: wipe your partitions, install Linux in whatever flavour you like and live happily ever after.
Actually, this reminds me, I'd better make myself a new Arch Linux install disc. That rolling-release thingy means never having to reinstall, so my old boot disc is scratched to hell from being used as a coaster for years. Funny to remember that 15 years ago, I used to use the first floppy from that huge stack of Slackware discs. [Yorkshire accent:] Them were the days...
Amazon's great for CDs, but as a denizen of the world outside of the US, I find they usually don't offer the advertised downloads. You can click through the links, only to be told at the final stages of the transaction that you're out of luck.
But in practice, for classical music I only buy CDs anyway. Assuming they aren't badly recorded, they are pretty much always superior to the more common levels of audio compression. Classical music has a habit of exposing defects in compression much more than most "plugged-in" bands. There are some artists, however, such as Jacob Heringman who do offer their recordings as uncompressed.wav files that you can burn to CD or play directly.
That doesn't mean I don't use compressed file on my iPod, I just accept that the latter is used in conditions where sound reproduction doesn't matter as much.
I used to think of a CDC Cyber 700 as a "real computer", but it didn't fit in my pocket. Now I'm prepared to be a bit more flexible and just say something that runs some sort of *nix that hasn't had bits chopped out of it and that fulfils essentially the same functions as my laptop.
I'm sure glad I went to school in the 80's where I could choose to use my RPN calculator. If I was forced to use a TI it would have taken me twice as long to finish a test.
I only wish I could agree. I used to have an HP48G+, and I loved the nice clicky keys, the big fat "enter" button exactly where my index finger would fall, and of course RPN.
Trouble was, the damn thing kept throwing spack-attacks at inopportune moments. It was impossible to let anyone else touch it, since they would inevitably crash the machine. As my undergraduate course involved lots (and lots) of assessment, the unreliability issue got to be a problem, and the HP machine had to go.
I replaced it with a TI-89 which is much faster, and among other things, does symbolic calculus nicely. On the downside, the keypad is nowhere near as good as the HP48's.
Some people make an issue of the number of keystrokes used with RPN vs TI's algebraic system, but I personally think that's a load of horseshit. While I still like RPN, since the processes we use on the machine essentially mimic human thought processes, the difference in number of keystrokes used over the course of a given calculation is negligible. Hopefully most of us would spend more time bashing our brains than bashing keys.
I don't know anything about the nSpire, but my TI-89 has a few different ways of resetting it, some more pervasive than others. The most common key-sequence results in the appearance of a progress-bar thingy for a few seconds, and the UI reverts to the default, and programs, expressions or variables assigned to general memory are deleted. However, programs (user-generated or otherwise) assigned to so-called "archive" memory are not deleted, so a simple script to restore your favourite settings is easy enough to maintain.
what you don't seem to understand is that OSX and Windows 7 do not have interfaces designed for tablets.
Sure I understand it. Neither does X11. The point I'm trying to make is that I WANT a "real computer" in an easily portable format. If it continues to be non-viable for manufacturers to produce what I want, I'll simply continue to use a more "old-school" form of device.
...but opted for the touch-based-from-the-ground-up iOS. Smart decision, imho.
Smart from Apple's point of view, but the rationale is wrong for me as a user. I have never actually bought an Apple computer, but I own a MacBook. I would happily welcome a tablet-format box that fulfils the same functions, but it seems Apple has decided that such riches are not for the likes of me. Too bad. Someone else, no doubt, will fill the gap.
If inflating an iPod Touch (or iPhone for that matter) to the extent that the device no longer fits in your pocket is innovation, then I guess that's fine.
I'll wait as long as I have to to get a proper tablet computer that isn't just a media consumption device. My laptop isn't that heavy.
Trouble is, Ballmer is just as likely to bring on more of the same. I personally don't want a tablet with his jizz all over it, if it's all the same to you.
Having spent many a miserable Christmas, Easter or other so-called "break" tied to a pager or (worse) a dumb terminal over a dialup line, I can only say a sysadmin's lot is not an 'appy one. (Apologies to W.S. Gilbert...) Let's see:
When a user's not engaged in his employment (his employment)
Or maturing his pathetic little plans (little plans)
His capacity for innocent enjoyment (-cent enjoyment)
Is just as great as any honest man's (honest man's)...
However, based on the fact that you write "cheque" and I write "check", I surmise that we are in different parts of the world, so your ability to use a cocktail napkin as a note to pay your bills may differ from mine.
Probably. I once knew a farmer who wrote a cheque on the side of a cow. Apparently the bank paid it, too.:-)
income level/political leaning/religion/language...
They just need to look at the website they are considering advertising on.
Hmmm. So they can assume by the fact that I am posting on Slashdot that I am an an anglophone. Big deal.
Income level? Not sure how anyone would get that, but at the moment, zero. Big deal.
Political leaning? Hmmm. An ancient leftie on a site populated by right-wingers. Does not compute...
Religion? Hmmm. An atheist posting on a site that according to its own FAQs is US-centric, and where 90% of Americans believe in God...
Just as well I'm not paying for that kind of tracking.
As a matter of interest, if you buy an ATM with an embedded Microsoft OS, do you have to pay again for the license to use it? It seems crazy to me that anyone would even consider a proprietary OS such as this when so many free, and arguably much more secure alternatives are available. (No, it doesn't have to be Linux - there are plenty of BSDs that would do just fine.)
Slashdot Mirror
Helium is good enough, and it is stable.
I agree, but my point was that helium is rare and expensive, while hydrogen is the second most common element on the planet (the most common, of course, being stupidity).
The U.S. doesn't have...lower rates of buglary
I'm pleased to hear that. A burglar who sodomises his victims as well as robbing them would just be a bit much.
...then douse himself with a concentrated mix of bleach, ammonia and drain cleaner."
Of course, having to bury your cats, dogs and goldfish afterwards wouldn't be much fun.
Then you just tell the cops "look for the guy who's going to be bright purple for the next few days - you can't miss him."
That, of course, presupposes that the police could give a fuck about you and your stuff. Remember, most burglary cases remain unsolved. Your suggestion (while interesting) and the comments in favour of cameras rely entirely on the assumption that your security precautions have already failed.
There are really only two options:
(1) Make it hard (invonvenient, time-consuming or noisy) to get in, or
(2) Be prepared to kill or maim the burglar.
Option 2 has its attractions, but leaves you with a mess to clean up and/or lengthy discussions with your local constabulary.
I doubt if electronic security systems are very effective. The only places in my street that ever get broken into are the places that have security systems.
You're probably better off taking steps to make sure your place is harder to break into easily. This is bearing in mind that most burglaries are opportunistic: so anything that makes the job take a long time, make a lot of noise or leave the burglar exposed and conspicuous in the course of his gainful employment will be effective at keeping your stuff safe.
Doors don't have to be steel-reinforced, but if made of solid timber will be hard to break. Similarly, there are types of glass available that can stand up to hammer attacks for some time. And use good locks. Those 5-pin tumbler (Yale or similar) locks are useless. Anyone can bump those in less than 5 seconds.
Bear in mind that you can't really defend against a sustained attack or a real professional without making your place look like Fort Knox (i.e. a big fat target saying "Burgle Me"). Living in a house with a scruffy front yard and junk on your porch sometimes helps - it looks like you won't have anything worth nicking.
In any case, there's nothing actually wrong with hydrogen, used with care. We've come a long way from the first age of airships, and materials and engineering are vastly more sophisticated.
It's common to trot out the example of the Hindenberg as to what can go wrong, but by comparison with the mess a 747 makes when it hits anything at 570mph, it's fair to say airships are pretty safe. In the Hindenberg disaster, 63% of the passengers survived. Whereas, if your plane crashes you can usually be pretty sure you're going to die, given the amount of fuel (of very high calorific value) that is always on board.
Slow or otherwise, Google really didn't do a very good job of explaining succinctly what was so great about Wave. (I'm working on the assumption that there might have been something great, since the project did have a few enthusiasts.)
There were general expostulations of "Look at this! And this shiny bit!..." but without any very clear indication of what it was useful for, and why anybody should take time away from email, facebook or whatever to investigate Wave. When the project was launched, my initial reaction was to yawn. Apparently I wasn't entirely alone.
I'm not enough of an audiophile to suggest spending a fortune on a stereo...
I loathe that "audiophile" tag. I have a formally diagnosed "ski slope" hearing loss towards the upper frequencies, but I can still listen critically enough to hear obvious inadequacies in a recording or its reproduction, and I daresay most people can do likewise if they put their minds to it.
Because listening is as much an active experience as passive (especially with regard to classical music). That odious term "audiophile" is often applied to people with more money than sense, who are inclined to accept all sorts of voodoo without empirical evidence. The fortune I have spent on my stereo is just a small one (less than $AU10K), but it is also a carefully considered one. This is (I have to admit) partly because I am married, so there is the WAF to consider, but mostly a result of common sense in recognition of diminishing returns.
But away from home, a sensible level of compression on an mp3 player is just fine. I don't expect to hear the finest nuances of Bartok's sonata for unaccompanied violin over the noise from an 8-litre Cummins diesel.
You must be old here.
;-D
That's right. He should have recognised that "US" and "intelligence" can't coexist in the same sentence.
*Ducks*
government^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H protective spying...
Unless your Emacs is broken, you should be able to use ^W to achieve the same effect.
HTH.
Recovery is best done in the absence of Windows anyway. After all, if a machine has been rooted, for instance, most non-savvy users can't depend on having any worthwhile recovery afterwards, or any safe connection to the rest of the world.
Any Linux install disc can be used as a liveCD (or of course you can use something like Knoppix as a more intuitive alternative if you prefer). Then, having recovered your data, it makes sense to just continue the process: wipe your partitions, install Linux in whatever flavour you like and live happily ever after.
Actually, this reminds me, I'd better make myself a new Arch Linux install disc. That rolling-release thingy means never having to reinstall, so my old boot disc is scratched to hell from being used as a coaster for years. Funny to remember that 15 years ago, I used to use the first floppy from that huge stack of Slackware discs. [Yorkshire accent:] Them were the days...
Amazon's great for CDs, but as a denizen of the world outside of the US, I find they usually don't offer the advertised downloads. You can click through the links, only to be told at the final stages of the transaction that you're out of luck.
.wav files that you can burn to CD or play directly.
But in practice, for classical music I only buy CDs anyway. Assuming they aren't badly recorded, they are pretty much always superior to the more common levels of audio compression. Classical music has a habit of exposing defects in compression much more than most "plugged-in" bands. There are some artists, however, such as Jacob Heringman who do offer their recordings as uncompressed
That doesn't mean I don't use compressed file on my iPod, I just accept that the latter is used in conditions where sound reproduction doesn't matter as much.
I used to think of a CDC Cyber 700 as a "real computer", but it didn't fit in my pocket. Now I'm prepared to be a bit more flexible and just say something that runs some sort of *nix that hasn't had bits chopped out of it and that fulfils essentially the same functions as my laptop.
I'm sure glad I went to school in the 80's where I could choose to use my RPN calculator. If I was forced to use a TI it would have taken me twice as long to finish a test.
I only wish I could agree. I used to have an HP48G+, and I loved the nice clicky keys, the big fat "enter" button exactly where my index finger would fall, and of course RPN.
Trouble was, the damn thing kept throwing spack-attacks at inopportune moments. It was impossible to let anyone else touch it, since they would inevitably crash the machine. As my undergraduate course involved lots (and lots) of assessment, the unreliability issue got to be a problem, and the HP machine had to go.
I replaced it with a TI-89 which is much faster, and among other things, does symbolic calculus nicely. On the downside, the keypad is nowhere near as good as the HP48's.
Some people make an issue of the number of keystrokes used with RPN vs TI's algebraic system, but I personally think that's a load of horseshit. While I still like RPN, since the processes we use on the machine essentially mimic human thought processes, the difference in number of keystrokes used over the course of a given calculation is negligible. Hopefully most of us would spend more time bashing our brains than bashing keys.
The whole educator/TI thing smacks of monopolistic endeavor anyway.
You might be right, if only the majority of students didn't buy Casio calculators, since they're that much cheaper than TI.
I don't know anything about the nSpire, but my TI-89 has a few different ways of resetting it, some more pervasive than others. The most common key-sequence results in the appearance of a progress-bar thingy for a few seconds, and the UI reverts to the default, and programs, expressions or variables assigned to general memory are deleted. However, programs (user-generated or otherwise) assigned to so-called "archive" memory are not deleted, so a simple script to restore your favourite settings is easy enough to maintain.
what you don't seem to understand is that OSX and Windows 7 do not have interfaces designed for tablets.
Sure I understand it. Neither does X11. The point I'm trying to make is that I WANT a "real computer" in an easily portable format. If it continues to be non-viable for manufacturers to produce what I want, I'll simply continue to use a more "old-school" form of device.
...but opted for the touch-based-from-the-ground-up iOS. Smart decision, imho.
Smart from Apple's point of view, but the rationale is wrong for me as a user. I have never actually bought an Apple computer, but I own a MacBook. I would happily welcome a tablet-format box that fulfils the same functions, but it seems Apple has decided that such riches are not for the likes of me. Too bad. Someone else, no doubt, will fill the gap.
If inflating an iPod Touch (or iPhone for that matter) to the extent that the device no longer fits in your pocket is innovation, then I guess that's fine.
I'll wait as long as I have to to get a proper tablet computer that isn't just a media consumption device. My laptop isn't that heavy.
Well fucking said.
Trouble is, Ballmer is just as likely to bring on more of the same. I personally don't want a tablet with his jizz all over it, if it's all the same to you.
Having spent many a miserable Christmas, Easter or other so-called "break" tied to a pager or (worse) a dumb terminal over a dialup line, I can only say a sysadmin's lot is not an 'appy one. (Apologies to W.S. Gilbert...) Let's see:
When a user's not engaged in his employment (his employment)
Or maturing his pathetic little plans (little plans)
His capacity for innocent enjoyment (-cent enjoyment)
Is just as great as any honest man's (honest man's)...
However, based on the fact that you write "cheque" and I write "check", I surmise that we are in different parts of the world, so your ability to use a cocktail napkin as a note to pay your bills may differ from mine.
:-)
Probably. I once knew a farmer who wrote a cheque on the side of a cow. Apparently the bank paid it, too.
income level/political leaning/religion/language...
They just need to look at the website they are considering advertising on.
Hmmm. So they can assume by the fact that I am posting on Slashdot that I am an an anglophone. Big deal.
Income level? Not sure how anyone would get that, but at the moment, zero. Big deal.
Political leaning? Hmmm. An ancient leftie on a site populated by right-wingers. Does not compute...
Religion? Hmmm. An atheist posting on a site that according to its own FAQs is US-centric, and where 90% of Americans believe in God...
Just as well I'm not paying for that kind of tracking.
As a matter of interest, if you buy an ATM with an embedded Microsoft OS, do you have to pay again for the license to use it? It seems crazy to me that anyone would even consider a proprietary OS such as this when so many free, and arguably much more secure alternatives are available. (No, it doesn't have to be Linux - there are plenty of BSDs that would do just fine.)
Heh. I hadn't seen that xkcd before. Good one... ;-)