When they spend all that money on a TV, they expect it to do cool stuff, out of the box. If you tell them they need to buy something else, they're going to think you're trying to screw them over.
That's right. That's why televisions with integrated cable boxes, VHS, DVD, and CD players have always been such big sellers. Wait...
After all, Imperial (in the US flavor) is better for computing than metric since it's at least partially base 2.
Which would, potentially, be helpful and useful if the humans who program, enter data into, and use information from, those computers were also in the habit of working in base 2.
And I'm sorry, as long as there are 5280 feet in a mile - that's 2^5 * 3 * 5 * 11(!?) - I'm going to call bullshit on the computing usefulness of a "partially" base 2 system.
The simple solution here is to have the senior manager in the room WHILE he's interviewing the candidate if that was the case.
I don't see why you've jumped to the conclusion that a senior manager won't be in the room for some or even all of the process, or why you continue to suspect that senior management wouldn't make or be involved in the hiring decision. I get the impression that you haven't been involved in a lot of hiring or interviewing at this level.
That said, there are a lot of reasons why a senior manager wouldn't necessarily want or need to sit in on the entire interview. Depending on the size of the company and the responsibilities of the people involved, a senior manager might not have time to sit through an extended, specialized discussion. Some companies have an interview process that extends over several hours, and may even be spread over multiple rounds on separate days. Management may also want to get a sense of how the candidate performs in one-on-one situations, instead of when faced with an interrogation by the senior manager, the senior manager's assistant, the HR rep, and the technical subordinate all at once. For that matter, the senior manager may not want to make the subordinate nervous.
Let's think about this, if you're good enough to hire your own boss, you're good enough to be that guy, well betas excluded.
Let's think about this. The original question didn't say anything about hiring, just about interviewing.
I strongly suspect that the final hiring decision will come from a senior manager higher up the chain, based ultimately on that senior manager's own judgement. That decision will, however, be informed - in part - by the input he receives from the underlings who participated in the interview process.
And that's a Good Thing, for everyone involved. Senior management needs to know if prospective management candidates will be able to interact effectively with their technical and non-technical subordinates. One of the ways to assess this is to put them in a room together.
It's also possible that senior management recognizes their own limitations, and want to have someone who is able to assess or test the candidate's claims about his own technical abilities. It's not unusual for a company, when hiring, to carry out several rounds of interviews testing (explicitly or not) different aspects of the candidate's skills and knowledge, and introducing them to different parts of the company's structure and personnel, with each.
Isn't making the elevator go faster a job for an engineer? Does one really need to be a mathematician to know that a faster elevator moves people faster?
I suspect that the problem here is a failure on the part of the article writer. The author was probably just looking for any sort of answer to 'What's the most famous building you've ever done any work for?', rather than 'what's the most mathematically-interesting part of your job?'
It's also possible that there's a little bit of complexity being glossed over here. For the Empire State Building, visitors take up to three consecutive elevator rides to get to the observation decks: one to get up to the 80th floor, another from 80 to 86 and the main observation deck (though the hearty can take the stairs), and an optional, extra-charge trip from 86 up to the topmost observation area on 102. Visitors form queues for tickets, security, and each elevator ride (both up and down).
While speeding up any of the elevators might seem like a good thing, it runs the risk of causing crowding and bunching of passengers waiting for the now-overloaded next stage. Making one set of elevators faster could increase wear and tear on those elevators (and increase both energy use and passenger discomfort) without improving overall throughput; I can see how there might be some serious mathematical optimization going on there. As well, it's possible that our mathematician was involved in optimizing all of the building's elevator speeds and timings, and not just the elevators dedicated to observation deck service: a much more difficult optimization problem.
The way to prevent this kind of mistaken (or even malicious) trade is to stop protecting the trader by canceling the trade as soon as the mistake is realized. If you issue a trade order, you should be liable for paying for it. If you can't, normal bankruptcy laws should apply.
First of all, it's not clear exactly what the trade order even meant. At worst, an offer to buy -6 futures should have been interpreted as an offer to sell 6 futures at the stated price--not as an (underflow-generated) bid for 4 billion futures. Who, exactly, do you hold liable for failing to sanity-check their inputs--the trader, his company, the exchange, their various software subcontractors who themselves may have been bought, sold, and restructured long since...?
Second, insisting that the trade happened and then forcing the trader into bankruptcy (and associated bankruptcy protection) is likely to punish the 'innocent' participants in the market more than anyone else.
If you had read the motion (or even the summary) you would know the answers to your first question.
Apple argues...that Samsung waived its juror bias argument by failing to make it
sooner, but Samsung could not reasonably have ascertained Mr. Hogan’s dishonesty before the jury’s
verdicts. As Samsung has made clear and Apple cannot dispute, Mr. Hogan made public statements
after the verdicts that so clearly favored Apple that the press speculated about their possible financial
ties.... Only by chance did Samsung discover the suit by Seagate against Mr. Hogan
while it was investigating these other potential bias issues reported post-verdict; and because the
court file no longer exists, it was even later that Samsung discovered Mr. Hogan’s lawsuit against
Seagate when Mr. Hogan himself disclosed it in an interview....
Nevertheless, Apple insists that Samsung waived because it “could have” and “should have”
discovered the dishonesty before it actually did so by ordering Mr. Hogan’s 1993 bankruptcy file
during voir dire.... Even apart from the impracticality of this suggestion (it took a week to
receive the file after it was ordered post-verdict[...]), the Court should reject Apple’s
untenable suggestion that trial counsel should engage, upon pain of waiver, in scorched-earth, extrajudicial
investigations into a sitting juror’s life, absent any reason to believe that they lied on voir dire
or otherwise warranted such an intrusion upon their privacy. See Dyer, 151 F.3d at 978 (“While
trial is ongoing, lawyers may not conduct the kind of aggressive investigation of jurors they would of
other witnesses.”); 6/29/12 Hearing Tr. 63:18-64:13 (Dkt. 1166) (“THE COURT: I’m not going to
give you the jury questionnaires that have been filled out long enough in advance for you all to
research all these folks.”). The Court asked Mr. Hogan about his prior lawsuits; Samsung was
entitled to rely on the truthfulness of his answers.
Samsung argues that when asked, the juror deliberately withheld key information about his own legal history.
It is no answer, as Apple suggests..., that Mr. Hogan revealed another, unrelated
lawsuit involving a former employee. To the contrary, a juror is presumptively biased where “she
told the part truth that was useless, and held back the other part that had significance and value.”
Clark, 289 U.S. at 10-11 (juror “counted off a few [past jobs] and checked herself at the very point
where the count, if completed, would be likely to bar her from the box”); see Dyer, 151 F.3d at 983.
My guess is, that despite the cut in GDP, and the long, painful period of high unemployment, the economy hasn't actually been that bad. And that most of us have not had to change our habits much to cope.
My guess is, that despite there being links to both the full journal article and to a lay summary right in the Slashdot blurb, you didn't bother to read either one. And that you instead preferred to offer us all your enlightened wisdom derived from your gut feelings instead of, you know, talking about real data.
I know, I know. This is Slashdot; reading articles is for newbs....
I live in a so-called "majority-minority" district which was considered a lock for a minority candidate since its creation. The incumbent has done such a poor job that he came fairly close to losing the election in 2010. The response? They adjusted the lines to pull extra minorities into his district to ensure that would never happen again.
Incumbents tend to enjoy advantages in terms of resources and name recognition that can make them inherently more difficult to beat, even in the absence of race politics.
A local challenger can be further hamstrung by platform elements adopted at the presidential, federal, or state level that are unpalatable within a district (or unpalatable to a significant group living within that district).
There's a further vicious circle at work where a party decides that a seat is unwinnable, and therefore doesn't put any resources into recruiting effective candidates or running more than a pro forma campaign, and therefore finds that the seat is unwinnable, and so doesn't put in any effort...
There are at least two routes around the problem. First, find a credible non-minority candidate who can demonstrate an ability to work with groups (majority and minority ethnicities) within the district. Not only does this require time and effort, but it may also require the candidate to butt heads with the state or federal party. Second, the cynical route is for your party to find a minority candidate of its own. You've just told me that the district has lots of them; can't you find any of them who want to represent the (Republican) party locally?
The downside of that second approach is that you can't go blaming race anymore when the party still loses; you might have to start looking at why your policies are so unappealing to the minority population.
I hope that your school system isn't requiring its students to buy expensive graphing calculators out of their own (or their parents' own) pockets, but that's another diatribe.
If you have more calculators than you need for your own lending program, and the other math teachers (if any) at your school are also adequately equipped, then share them with other schools in your area. There's probably a classroom not too far down the road - perhaps across the tracks? - where they don't have a large number of kids carelessly abandoning valuable electronics.
As opposed to what you get when your official policy is to reject the "invisible friend in the sky".
You seem to be playing some none-too-subtle semantic games.
A theocracy's official policies flow from whatever the government believes are (or can cynically represent as) the wishes of their invisible friend in the sky.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, simply stated their official position on invisibly sky friends - no one is allowed to worship them - and carried on with the business of governing however the hell they wanted.
In a theocracy, theism guides policy. In the former USSR, policy forbade theism, but their policies weren't a consequence of their religious beliefs.
I'm a little bit concerned that they might not be properly accounting for multiple comparisons. The test involves six fonts, and the correction that they suggest assumes that this means there are six comparisons. Is that really the correct approach?
There are actually fifteen pairwise comparisons possible (A-B, A-C, A-D, A-E, A-F; B-C, B-D, B-E, B-F; C-D, C-E, C-F; D-E, D-F; E-F). Using the - admittedly conservative - Bonferroni correction, the result is no longer significant.
I bought some to hold a 1 gallon gas can where I did not want the gas to possibly leak out and was hoping to prevent any gas fumes. It worked, the bags are completely air-tight.
This may be a workable short-term solution for you, but beware that plastic bags not explicitly designed for exposure to organic solvent (like gasoline) liquid and vapours may be prone to failure, sooner or later. Solvent exposure can do all kinds of aggravating things to plastics, including causing them to fog, to swell and weaken, to become rigid and brittle, or in the worst case to dissolve into sticky goo.
Um, carrying a shuttle on the back of a 747 is how it's typically transported. About as geektastic as a furniture shipment, by now.
I suspect that it was very seldom flown to New York City, however. Many millions of people would have had the opportunity to see such a flight for the first time.
And honestly, your smug dismissal of this event as being "as geektastic as a furniture shipment" marks you as being as wannabe-cool and faux-jaded as the hipster who won't listen to any band he's already heard of, because "they're so last week".
To tell the truth, I actually left the phrasing the way it was as a deliberate bit of pedant-bait. You know as well as I that the W/s was nonsensical in the context in which it was used. The fact that it is possible to combine SI units in virtually any way doesn't mean that it makes sense to do so in every situation. The original poster's comment was analogous to saying that "My bucket holds 5 liters per second." While L/s are perfectly valid if we want to talk about a flow rate, or even how fast one might use the bucket to bail out a sinking ship, it's a silly unit for talking about capacity. The fact that there exists conditions under which W/s wouldn't be nonsensical doesn't make it sensible in this particular situation.
So using that as a basis for comparison, seti@home is consuming 1,432,500 watts per second.
No, it isn't--a "watt per second" is a nonsensical unit. The watt is already a rate of energy consumption, equal to a joule per second.
Based on data provided by the EPA (http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/refs.html ) which reports carbon output as 6.8956 x 10-4 metric tons CO2 / kWh, seti is producing 3,556 metric tons of CO2 per second!
No, no, no. A kWh (kilowatt hour) is an amount of energy equivalent to drawing one kilowatt (one thousand watts) continuously for one hour: one thousand joules per second, times 3600 seconds per hour, gives 3.6 million joules per hour in one kWh. For comparison, one kilowatt is the amount of electricity drawn by roughly fifteen incandescent light bulbs, or by one smallish toaster. The average U.S. household uses on the order of 1000 kWh per month.
Using your estimate of 1,432,500 watts - 1432.5 kilowatts, trivially equivalent to 1432.5 kWh per hour - for the power draw for SETI@home, we get a consumption of 0.398 kWh per second. Using your figure of 6.89E-4 tons CO2 / kWh, that comes to 0.000274 tons per second, or about 274 grams (a little over half a pound -not three thousand tons - per second). In total it comes to about a ton of CO2 per day.
That's not a negligible amount of CO2. It comes out to the equivalent of the electricity use of about a thousand U.S. homes. (Note that that doesn't include household CO2 contributions from other sources, particularly fossil fuels burned for home heating, water heating, clothes drying, and transportation.) But it's also not an egregiously large amount of electricity--the U.S. has, what, a hundred million households?
That they are MORE STABLE than fiat currencies is not the same thing as them being static.
While I see your point and agree with the general thrust of your post, I'm willing to call 'bullshit' even on this milder assertion about gold.
Today, gold trades for about $1600 (USD) an ounce. Ten years ago, it traded for about $400 per ounce. I can't be bothered to look up the exact numbers, but inflation in the United States probably ran about 2% per year over the same period; the price of goods denominated in USD therefore increased by 15-30% over the same period.
As far as I know, nothing happened in the last decade to so dramatically increase the intrinsic value of gold as a metal. So the difference between the 30% increase we should have seen and the 300% increase we actually saw is down to speculation and volatility. Among the putatively unstable fiat currencies, which demonstrated a decade of 10%+ per annum deflation and thereby ruined their nation's economy? Certainly none of the major reserve currencies (USD, GBP, EUR, JPY) had such troubles.
You could have the tissue alive right until you chuck it on the grill. mmmm, tender meat.
Well, no, actually.
The tenderest beef has been dead for days or even weeks. As the cells within a cut of beef die, they release enzymes that slowly digest connective tissue (mostly collagen). "Live" steaks would contain intact, live cells that wouldn't have a chance to release any digestive enzymes before being cooked.
Other posters have already observed some of the obvious flaws in this scheme.
Satellites fail, for the most part, when their rechargeable batteries quit and/or their consumable manoeuvring fuel runs out. These are among the heavier components aboard many satellites, so our hypothetical 'repair and resupply' launch is already going to be costly and heavy before you add all that unique and highly flexible hypothetical manipulator hardware. From any sort of rational economic standpoint, if you're going to launch a heavy, expensive satellite, you might as well launch a replacement (with all-new hardware, up-to-date electronics, incorporating the lessons learned from the previous iteration, etc.) instead of trying to fix or cannibalize the dodgy one in orbit.
Trying to service multiple satellites with one launch of our Swiss-Army-knife repair droid gets even worse, because manoeuvring between orbits tends to be very costly in terms of fuel (prohibitively so if a significant change in inclination is contemplated) and therefore weight.
And how user-serviceable are most satellites? Anything that's already in space now (or that is likely to be launched in the next decade) hasn't been designed to be repaired, modified, or scavenged after launch. Are we really solving the 'space junk' problem if our repair droid is inadvertently leaving behind a cloud of dropped screws and broken hardware? One satellite is easy to track and avoid. A haze of screws and plastic chips is not--and will still put a hole right through the ISS.
The folks at DARPA are sometimes crazy, but they're not usually idiots. Presumably they've been able to come up with the same objections as Slashdotters, and they probably realized them faster than we did. So what's really going on?
1) A stripped-down version of this tool could be used to attach de-orbiting or manoeuvring thrusters to disabled satellites that happened to be occupying (or threatening) particularly high-value orbital real estate. The ISS has to be periodically repositioned to avoid the occasional bit of space junk. Further up, there's a limited amount of space in geostationary orbit, and a malfunctioning satellite could be trouble as either a source of physical or radio clutter. If the program fails to produce its rather pie-in-the-sky 'dream' goal, it could still develop this useful sideline.
2) The military would love to have the capability to selectively damage, disable, and/or capture 'enemy' space hardware. This program would complete nearly all the steps required to develop such a capability, but under the shiny, happy patina of putative civilian applications.
They've done this before. Like every year in the past decade.
So the answer to the Ask Slashdot question should be: "Just refer to the emergency evacuation plan you drafted years ago, and have regularly updated in the meantime."
Also blanking out prisons and women's shelters, doesn't make much sense to me. The Swiss government obviously didn't learn from the mistakes of other governments or Barbra Streisand. Experience has shown, that hiding information, which would normally be publicly accessible, only helps publicize that information even more and attract it undue attention.
The point, I think, is not to conceal the existence or location of these facilities (which can, after all, be readily established using a telephone book), but rather to more-thoroughly protect the privacy of the individuals visiting or making use of them. As Google has acknowledged that their face- and number-plate-blurring algorithm is only about 99% effective, the Swiss solution is to insist on specific exclusion of these particularly-privacy-sensitive locations. (It was deemed that "Oops, we're sorry that the battered woman in the window of the shelter was part of the 1% our algorithm missed" wasn't a sufficiently robust response.)
I use Street View for when I want to know what the View is from the Street. Another poster has mentioned shopping for real estate, but that's far from the only use. I use it for the utterly prosaic purpose of identifying landmarks and storefronts when I'm planning a vacation or shopping trip to an unfamiliar destination. The top of a building just doesn't look like the side of a building.
Grandparent: 5 random lower case characters + one upper case = 26^6 * 6 NOT 52 ^ 6
Parent: 5 random lower case characters + one upper case = 52^6. It would be 26^6 if and only if you knew exactly where the upper case letter was, which is an unreasonable assumption. Adding an upper case letter would eliminate a straight lower-case dictionary attack entirely and double the pool of possible characters from 26 to 52. There are 6 places, so 52^6.
The grandparent poster has done the calculation correctly, if it is assumed that the cracker knows that there is exactly one uppercase character.
We're all agreed that if there is a 6-letter all-lower-case password, there are 26^6 possible passwords (26 possible character choices in each of six positions), right? For five lower case letters and one upper case letter, we draw five lower case letters (26^5 possibilities) and one upper case letter (26^1 possibilities, because it can't be a lower case letter), and we have 6 choices as to where in the password we place the upper case letter: 26^5 * 26^1 * 6 = 26^6 * 6 possible passwords.
Alternatively, consider our six-letter all-lower-case password and its 26^6 possibilities. We have a dictionary that starts aaaaaa, aaaaab, aaaaac and ends with zzzzzz. If we add exactly one (no more, no fewer) capital letter, then each entry in our original dictionary is replaced by six new passwords, one with a single capital letter in each position: Aaaaaa, aAaaaa, aaAaaa, aaaAaa, aaaaAa, aaaaaA, then Aaaaab, aAaaab, aaAaab, aaaAab, aaaaAb, aaaaaB, and so forth--again giving us 26^6 * 6 possible passwords.
That said, it would be unusual for our hypothetical cracker to have access to that sort of specific information about a password. Why would he know that there was exactly one upper case letter? Far more likely would be some sort of rudimentary password screen that required our password to contain a mix of capital and lower case letters--that is, at least one upper case, and at least one lower case. In that more-likely scenario, the parent's calculation is closer to the mark. Each of six positions could have any one of 52 values (26 upper- and 26 lower-case letters), giving 52^6 possibilities, from which we subtract 2*26^6 options, representing the forbidden all-lower-case and all-caps passwords, leaving 52^6-2*26^6 possible choices.
Slashdot Mirror
When they spend all that money on a TV, they expect it to do cool stuff, out of the box. If you tell them they need to buy something else, they're going to think you're trying to screw them over.
That's right. That's why televisions with integrated cable boxes, VHS, DVD, and CD players have always been such big sellers. Wait...
After all, Imperial (in the US flavor) is better for computing than metric since it's at least partially base 2.
Which would, potentially, be helpful and useful if the humans who program, enter data into, and use information from, those computers were also in the habit of working in base 2.
And I'm sorry, as long as there are 5280 feet in a mile - that's 2^5 * 3 * 5 * 11(!?) - I'm going to call bullshit on the computing usefulness of a "partially" base 2 system.
I think the same about people who use "e-readers" instead of actual books. Sad on many different levels.
It is sad that you think that way, now that you mention it.
The simple solution here is to have the senior manager in the room WHILE he's interviewing the candidate if that was the case.
I don't see why you've jumped to the conclusion that a senior manager won't be in the room for some or even all of the process, or why you continue to suspect that senior management wouldn't make or be involved in the hiring decision. I get the impression that you haven't been involved in a lot of hiring or interviewing at this level.
That said, there are a lot of reasons why a senior manager wouldn't necessarily want or need to sit in on the entire interview. Depending on the size of the company and the responsibilities of the people involved, a senior manager might not have time to sit through an extended, specialized discussion. Some companies have an interview process that extends over several hours, and may even be spread over multiple rounds on separate days. Management may also want to get a sense of how the candidate performs in one-on-one situations, instead of when faced with an interrogation by the senior manager, the senior manager's assistant, the HR rep, and the technical subordinate all at once. For that matter, the senior manager may not want to make the subordinate nervous.
Let's think about this, if you're good enough to hire your own boss, you're good enough to be that guy, well betas excluded.
Let's think about this. The original question didn't say anything about hiring, just about interviewing.
I strongly suspect that the final hiring decision will come from a senior manager higher up the chain, based ultimately on that senior manager's own judgement. That decision will, however, be informed - in part - by the input he receives from the underlings who participated in the interview process.
And that's a Good Thing, for everyone involved. Senior management needs to know if prospective management candidates will be able to interact effectively with their technical and non-technical subordinates. One of the ways to assess this is to put them in a room together.
It's also possible that senior management recognizes their own limitations, and want to have someone who is able to assess or test the candidate's claims about his own technical abilities. It's not unusual for a company, when hiring, to carry out several rounds of interviews testing (explicitly or not) different aspects of the candidate's skills and knowledge, and introducing them to different parts of the company's structure and personnel, with each.
Isn't making the elevator go faster a job for an engineer? Does one really need to be a mathematician to know that a faster elevator moves people faster?
I suspect that the problem here is a failure on the part of the article writer. The author was probably just looking for any sort of answer to 'What's the most famous building you've ever done any work for?', rather than 'what's the most mathematically-interesting part of your job?'
It's also possible that there's a little bit of complexity being glossed over here. For the Empire State Building, visitors take up to three consecutive elevator rides to get to the observation decks: one to get up to the 80th floor, another from 80 to 86 and the main observation deck (though the hearty can take the stairs), and an optional, extra-charge trip from 86 up to the topmost observation area on 102. Visitors form queues for tickets, security, and each elevator ride (both up and down).
While speeding up any of the elevators might seem like a good thing, it runs the risk of causing crowding and bunching of passengers waiting for the now-overloaded next stage. Making one set of elevators faster could increase wear and tear on those elevators (and increase both energy use and passenger discomfort) without improving overall throughput; I can see how there might be some serious mathematical optimization going on there. As well, it's possible that our mathematician was involved in optimizing all of the building's elevator speeds and timings, and not just the elevators dedicated to observation deck service: a much more difficult optimization problem.
The way to prevent this kind of mistaken (or even malicious) trade is to stop protecting the trader by canceling the trade as soon as the mistake is realized. If you issue a trade order, you should be liable for paying for it. If you can't, normal bankruptcy laws should apply.
First of all, it's not clear exactly what the trade order even meant. At worst, an offer to buy -6 futures should have been interpreted as an offer to sell 6 futures at the stated price--not as an (underflow-generated) bid for 4 billion futures. Who, exactly, do you hold liable for failing to sanity-check their inputs--the trader, his company, the exchange, their various software subcontractors who themselves may have been bought, sold, and restructured long since...?
Second, insisting that the trade happened and then forcing the trader into bankruptcy (and associated bankruptcy protection) is likely to punish the 'innocent' participants in the market more than anyone else.
That depends--is anyone randomly lobbing unguided rockets into Gaza?
Samsung argues that when asked, the juror deliberately withheld key information about his own legal history.
My guess is, that despite the cut in GDP, and the long, painful period of high unemployment, the economy hasn't actually been that bad. And that most of us have not had to change our habits much to cope.
My guess is, that despite there being links to both the full journal article and to a lay summary right in the Slashdot blurb, you didn't bother to read either one. And that you instead preferred to offer us all your enlightened wisdom derived from your gut feelings instead of, you know, talking about real data.
I know, I know. This is Slashdot; reading articles is for newbs....
I live in a so-called "majority-minority" district which was considered a lock for a minority candidate since its creation. The incumbent has done such a poor job that he came fairly close to losing the election in 2010. The response? They adjusted the lines to pull extra minorities into his district to ensure that would never happen again.
Incumbents tend to enjoy advantages in terms of resources and name recognition that can make them inherently more difficult to beat, even in the absence of race politics.
A local challenger can be further hamstrung by platform elements adopted at the presidential, federal, or state level that are unpalatable within a district (or unpalatable to a significant group living within that district).
There's a further vicious circle at work where a party decides that a seat is unwinnable, and therefore doesn't put any resources into recruiting effective candidates or running more than a pro forma campaign, and therefore finds that the seat is unwinnable, and so doesn't put in any effort...
There are at least two routes around the problem. First, find a credible non-minority candidate who can demonstrate an ability to work with groups (majority and minority ethnicities) within the district. Not only does this require time and effort, but it may also require the candidate to butt heads with the state or federal party. Second, the cynical route is for your party to find a minority candidate of its own. You've just told me that the district has lots of them; can't you find any of them who want to represent the (Republican) party locally?
The downside of that second approach is that you can't go blaming race anymore when the party still loses; you might have to start looking at why your policies are so unappealing to the minority population.
If you have more calculators than you need for your own lending program, and the other math teachers (if any) at your school are also adequately equipped, then share them with other schools in your area. There's probably a classroom not too far down the road - perhaps across the tracks? - where they don't have a large number of kids carelessly abandoning valuable electronics.
As opposed to what you get when your official policy is to reject the "invisible friend in the sky".
You seem to be playing some none-too-subtle semantic games.
A theocracy's official policies flow from whatever the government believes are (or can cynically represent as) the wishes of their invisible friend in the sky.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, simply stated their official position on invisibly sky friends - no one is allowed to worship them - and carried on with the business of governing however the hell they wanted.
In a theocracy, theism guides policy. In the former USSR, policy forbade theism, but their policies weren't a consequence of their religious beliefs.
There are actually fifteen pairwise comparisons possible (A-B, A-C, A-D, A-E, A-F; B-C, B-D, B-E, B-F; C-D, C-E, C-F; D-E, D-F; E-F). Using the - admittedly conservative - Bonferroni correction, the result is no longer significant.
I bought some to hold a 1 gallon gas can where I did not want the gas to possibly leak out and was hoping to prevent any gas fumes. It worked, the bags are completely air-tight.
This may be a workable short-term solution for you, but beware that plastic bags not explicitly designed for exposure to organic solvent (like gasoline) liquid and vapours may be prone to failure, sooner or later. Solvent exposure can do all kinds of aggravating things to plastics, including causing them to fog, to swell and weaken, to become rigid and brittle, or in the worst case to dissolve into sticky goo.
Um, carrying a shuttle on the back of a 747 is how it's typically transported. About as geektastic as a furniture shipment, by now.
I suspect that it was very seldom flown to New York City, however. Many millions of people would have had the opportunity to see such a flight for the first time.
And honestly, your smug dismissal of this event as being "as geektastic as a furniture shipment" marks you as being as wannabe-cool and faux-jaded as the hipster who won't listen to any band he's already heard of, because "they're so last week".
To tell the truth, I actually left the phrasing the way it was as a deliberate bit of pedant-bait. You know as well as I that the W/s was nonsensical in the context in which it was used. The fact that it is possible to combine SI units in virtually any way doesn't mean that it makes sense to do so in every situation. The original poster's comment was analogous to saying that "My bucket holds 5 liters per second." While L/s are perfectly valid if we want to talk about a flow rate, or even how fast one might use the bucket to bail out a sinking ship, it's a silly unit for talking about capacity. The fact that there exists conditions under which W/s wouldn't be nonsensical doesn't make it sensible in this particular situation.
So using that as a basis for comparison, seti@home is consuming 1,432,500 watts per second.
No, it isn't--a "watt per second" is a nonsensical unit. The watt is already a rate of energy consumption, equal to a joule per second.
Based on data provided by the EPA (http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/refs.html ) which reports carbon output as 6.8956 x 10-4 metric tons CO2 / kWh, seti is producing 3,556 metric tons of CO2 per second!
No, no, no. A kWh (kilowatt hour) is an amount of energy equivalent to drawing one kilowatt (one thousand watts) continuously for one hour: one thousand joules per second, times 3600 seconds per hour, gives 3.6 million joules per hour in one kWh. For comparison, one kilowatt is the amount of electricity drawn by roughly fifteen incandescent light bulbs, or by one smallish toaster. The average U.S. household uses on the order of 1000 kWh per month.
Using your estimate of 1,432,500 watts - 1432.5 kilowatts, trivially equivalent to 1432.5 kWh per hour - for the power draw for SETI@home, we get a consumption of 0.398 kWh per second. Using your figure of 6.89E-4 tons CO2 / kWh, that comes to 0.000274 tons per second, or about 274 grams (a little over half a pound -not three thousand tons - per second). In total it comes to about a ton of CO2 per day.
That's not a negligible amount of CO2. It comes out to the equivalent of the electricity use of about a thousand U.S. homes. (Note that that doesn't include household CO2 contributions from other sources, particularly fossil fuels burned for home heating, water heating, clothes drying, and transportation.) But it's also not an egregiously large amount of electricity--the U.S. has, what, a hundred million households?
That they are MORE STABLE than fiat currencies is not the same thing as them being static.
While I see your point and agree with the general thrust of your post, I'm willing to call 'bullshit' even on this milder assertion about gold.
Today, gold trades for about $1600 (USD) an ounce. Ten years ago, it traded for about $400 per ounce. I can't be bothered to look up the exact numbers, but inflation in the United States probably ran about 2% per year over the same period; the price of goods denominated in USD therefore increased by 15-30% over the same period.
As far as I know, nothing happened in the last decade to so dramatically increase the intrinsic value of gold as a metal. So the difference between the 30% increase we should have seen and the 300% increase we actually saw is down to speculation and volatility. Among the putatively unstable fiat currencies, which demonstrated a decade of 10%+ per annum deflation and thereby ruined their nation's economy? Certainly none of the major reserve currencies (USD, GBP, EUR, JPY) had such troubles.
You could have the tissue alive right until you chuck it on the grill. mmmm, tender meat.
Well, no, actually.
The tenderest beef has been dead for days or even weeks. As the cells within a cut of beef die, they release enzymes that slowly digest connective tissue (mostly collagen). "Live" steaks would contain intact, live cells that wouldn't have a chance to release any digestive enzymes before being cooked.
Satellites fail, for the most part, when their rechargeable batteries quit and/or their consumable manoeuvring fuel runs out. These are among the heavier components aboard many satellites, so our hypothetical 'repair and resupply' launch is already going to be costly and heavy before you add all that unique and highly flexible hypothetical manipulator hardware. From any sort of rational economic standpoint, if you're going to launch a heavy, expensive satellite, you might as well launch a replacement (with all-new hardware, up-to-date electronics, incorporating the lessons learned from the previous iteration, etc.) instead of trying to fix or cannibalize the dodgy one in orbit.
Trying to service multiple satellites with one launch of our Swiss-Army-knife repair droid gets even worse, because manoeuvring between orbits tends to be very costly in terms of fuel (prohibitively so if a significant change in inclination is contemplated) and therefore weight.
And how user-serviceable are most satellites? Anything that's already in space now (or that is likely to be launched in the next decade) hasn't been designed to be repaired, modified, or scavenged after launch. Are we really solving the 'space junk' problem if our repair droid is inadvertently leaving behind a cloud of dropped screws and broken hardware? One satellite is easy to track and avoid. A haze of screws and plastic chips is not--and will still put a hole right through the ISS.
The folks at DARPA are sometimes crazy, but they're not usually idiots. Presumably they've been able to come up with the same objections as Slashdotters, and they probably realized them faster than we did. So what's really going on?
1) A stripped-down version of this tool could be used to attach de-orbiting or manoeuvring thrusters to disabled satellites that happened to be occupying (or threatening) particularly high-value orbital real estate. The ISS has to be periodically repositioned to avoid the occasional bit of space junk. Further up, there's a limited amount of space in geostationary orbit, and a malfunctioning satellite could be trouble as either a source of physical or radio clutter. If the program fails to produce its rather pie-in-the-sky 'dream' goal, it could still develop this useful sideline.
2) The military would love to have the capability to selectively damage, disable, and/or capture 'enemy' space hardware. This program would complete nearly all the steps required to develop such a capability, but under the shiny, happy patina of putative civilian applications.
They've done this before. Like every year in the past decade.
So the answer to the Ask Slashdot question should be: "Just refer to the emergency evacuation plan you drafted years ago, and have regularly updated in the meantime."
And if that isn't the answer, why the hell not?
Also blanking out prisons and women's shelters, doesn't make much sense to me. The Swiss government obviously didn't learn from the mistakes of other governments or Barbra Streisand. Experience has shown, that hiding information, which would normally be publicly accessible, only helps publicize that information even more and attract it undue attention.
The point, I think, is not to conceal the existence or location of these facilities (which can, after all, be readily established using a telephone book), but rather to more-thoroughly protect the privacy of the individuals visiting or making use of them. As Google has acknowledged that their face- and number-plate-blurring algorithm is only about 99% effective, the Swiss solution is to insist on specific exclusion of these particularly-privacy-sensitive locations. (It was deemed that "Oops, we're sorry that the battered woman in the window of the shelter was part of the 1% our algorithm missed" wasn't a sufficiently robust response.)
I use Street View for when I want to know what the View is from the Street. Another poster has mentioned shopping for real estate, but that's far from the only use. I use it for the utterly prosaic purpose of identifying landmarks and storefronts when I'm planning a vacation or shopping trip to an unfamiliar destination. The top of a building just doesn't look like the side of a building.
Grandparent: 5 random lower case characters + one upper case = 26^6 * 6 NOT 52 ^ 6
Parent: 5 random lower case characters + one upper case = 52^6. It would be 26^6 if and only if you knew exactly where the upper case letter was, which is an unreasonable assumption. Adding an upper case letter would eliminate a straight lower-case dictionary attack entirely and double the pool of possible characters from 26 to 52. There are 6 places, so 52^6.
The grandparent poster has done the calculation correctly, if it is assumed that the cracker knows that there is exactly one uppercase character.
We're all agreed that if there is a 6-letter all-lower-case password, there are 26^6 possible passwords (26 possible character choices in each of six positions), right? For five lower case letters and one upper case letter, we draw five lower case letters (26^5 possibilities) and one upper case letter (26^1 possibilities, because it can't be a lower case letter), and we have 6 choices as to where in the password we place the upper case letter: 26^5 * 26^1 * 6 = 26^6 * 6 possible passwords.
Alternatively, consider our six-letter all-lower-case password and its 26^6 possibilities. We have a dictionary that starts aaaaaa, aaaaab, aaaaac and ends with zzzzzz. If we add exactly one (no more, no fewer) capital letter, then each entry in our original dictionary is replaced by six new passwords, one with a single capital letter in each position: Aaaaaa, aAaaaa, aaAaaa, aaaAaa, aaaaAa, aaaaaA, then Aaaaab, aAaaab, aaAaab, aaaAab, aaaaAb, aaaaaB, and so forth--again giving us 26^6 * 6 possible passwords.
That said, it would be unusual for our hypothetical cracker to have access to that sort of specific information about a password. Why would he know that there was exactly one upper case letter? Far more likely would be some sort of rudimentary password screen that required our password to contain a mix of capital and lower case letters--that is, at least one upper case, and at least one lower case. In that more-likely scenario, the parent's calculation is closer to the mark. Each of six positions could have any one of 52 values (26 upper- and 26 lower-case letters), giving 52^6 possibilities, from which we subtract 2*26^6 options, representing the forbidden all-lower-case and all-caps passwords, leaving 52^6-2*26^6 possible choices.