BTW an American plug can handle 15 amps easily; it's how I run my spare heater.
15 amps is good, the British plug (Type G, or BS 1363) is only rated for 13 amps. But wait -- the American plug is only good for up to 125 volts; the Brits are rated up to 240 volts.
That's up to 3120 watts, and it's why all American kettles suck ass.
The need for adult speech pathology seems massively overrated for most people in most professions if even news anchors can get away with having an impediment.
Tokenism, deliberate or not. Can you name any others?
The existence of one news anchor with a mild speech impediment does not prove or disprove the assertion that a speech impediment inhibits success in employment or other aspects of life. That some particularly talented or determined individuals can work around a particular handicap does not mean that they aren't handicapped.
Until we have money that is based on some real commodity money has no inherent value, it's just a points system ungrounded in reality.
How is it that there are so many people on a website populated by programmers and gamers (electronic and other) and readers of science fiction who can't wrap their heads around fiat currency?
There aren't any commodities that are present in adequate supply to back the currencies of the world's economies. Further, moving all those valuable commodities into storage deprives the economies of their use. Finally, it's not like the traditional backing commodities (I'm looking at you, gold) have shown any sort of sensible and consistent pattern or behaviour in their prices. It makes no obvious sense tie the value of a particular country's currency to the vagaries of one or more commodity prices.
No. Read the Constitution mister cop (you know, that thing you pledged to protect, but apparently never read). Carrying a flag, sign, or other item is considered "symbolic speech" according to the Supreme Court and therefore protected.
While under some circumstances openly carrying a weapon is constitutionally-protected symbolic speech, it isn't always.
This wasn't a guy who was trying to make a point about civil rights. The jackbooted thugs of the police department weren't trying to suppress his God-given rights to peaceful protest and free speech, and he wasn't bravely standing up to their fascist imperialist overlordship.
It's a guy who was moving a toy prop from point A to point B so that he could get his paycheque on Friday. The police advised the company to be a bit more discreet when moving their giant sniper rifles around, as it's disruptive and inconvenient for everyone involved otherwise. Call it being a good corporate neighbour.
There are a lot of things which are perfectly legal but of which we nevertheless tolerate (even encourage) a certain amount of government monitoring. Consider the sale of hot dogs; we expect hot dog vendors to be regularly inspected by health officials, as the irresponsible handling of food products could lead to serious injuries or death. Similarly, there is a certain public expectation that the government will pay at least some attention to individuals walking down city streets while carrying extremely large sniper rifles. While a responsible individual engaged in that activity may be fully within his legal rights and represent no great harm to others, it's not unreasonable for the police to express some curiosity and want to monitor the situation.
The police don't want to spend time tracking down reports of citizens armed with toys, Bungee doesn't want to alarm its neighbours, the employee in question doesn't want to frighten people on the street. Covering up the gun solves these problems.
and why do we think we can detect them this deep inside a Gravity well?
honestly, looking for something like that needs to be outside the gravity well of the sun.
There's a pebble on top of Mount Everest. Using my trusty ruler, I measure the pebble as being 1.3 inches tall.
"Aha!", says my colleague. "Now we know that the top of the pebble is exactly 6 miles, 1.3 inches high!"
"No, silly!", says my other colleague. "The only way that we can measure the height of the pebble precisely is by bringing it down to sea level! Being on a mountaintop confounds any precision measurement!"
Oddly enough, the pebble turns out to be 1.3 inches tall. A most remarkable coincidence, I'm sure.
And with essentially unlimited ability to maneuver, course-corrections aren't going to be an issue, really.
I agree with the posts which note that the relative magnitude of the navigational error is trivial (a million kilometers in 2500 AU is the same relative error as one kilometer on a trip to the Moon). I also fully agree that any expedition to the Oort would be a random crapshoot anyway.
I do have to quibble with the notion of 'essentially unlimited ability to maneuver', however. The amount of thrust available decreases with increasing distance from the sun. (Indeed, it falls off as the inverse square of the distance.) If our hypothetical sail starts off at 0.1 AU from the sun for maximum thrust, its acceleration will be down to 1% of its original value as it crosses the Earth's orbit, and less than 0.04% when it crosses Jupiter's orbit. At Pluto's orbit, the probe will be able to call on less than a hundred-thousandth the amount of sunlight it saw when it started. In other words, errors in course selection which take place early will accumulate for the longest, and will be most apparent when the least thrust is available for correction.
Given time, the electronics needed to measure where you're looking, the distance to it and adjusting the focus will be built in to the glasses.
That's right -- soon the automatic adjustment will be as fast, accurate, and effective as the autofocus on your camera. Meanwhile, the battery pack and image processing unit on my belt will only have to be recharged twice a day!
Also, anhydrous alcohol is very useful, it doesn't leave stains and washes dust easily.
Be cautious in using more aggressive solvents like anhydrous ethanol -- prolonged exposure or repeated use may damage or remove optical coatings from the lenses.
However 500BN of assets is not proportional to the size of the Icelandic real economy - it is not plausible that the citizens could have lost such amount.
The blog posting contains numbers on the order of 300 billion, not 500 billion -- and those are Icelandic crowns (ISK), not euros or dollars. That puts the total at about 2.3 billion U.S. dollars.
Given that Iceland's population is only about 320 thousand people that's still a pretty massive hit to their economy (call it 7000 USD per capita), but not totally implausible (particularly for a heavily leveraged state-controlled bank).
Is it customary nowadays for journals to charge $1900 to to publish an article?
Sometimes, yes. Open access journals generally charge page charges to offset their cost of operations. (The fee for PLoS Medicine is 2850 USD, for instance.)
Even the old-school journals often levy page or color charges (for color figures and for papers beyond a certain length). PNAS asks for 70 USD per page, plus 300 USD per color figure, plus 250 USD for publication of supporting information not part of the paper itself, plus an (optional) 1200 USD if you want PNAS to waive subscription or article charges and make your paper open access.
That's not to say that all journals charging publication fees are legitimate, only that such fees are not, by themselves, an indication of shenanigans.
Fingerprint and photograph, yes -- with a few exceptions. The big one is that (most) Canadian citizens are exempt. As well, individuals younger than 14 or older than 79 can skip the ten card and mugshot.
You get the invasion of privacy even if you're just passing through a U.S. airport to make a connection to another country.
The frightening thing about this is, a court of law just got to decide that a comic book doesn't have serious literary or artistic value.... If he's a "prolific collector", one can assume that his primary reason for collecting manga is precisely the literary and artistic value that the court just ruled it doesn't have.
Well, no. A court of law didn't decide anything here. As near as I can tell, no court ruled on anything, including the literary and artistic value (or lack thereof) of manga.
The individual involved pled guilty as part of a plea agreement. The case did not go before a judge or jury. While this may suggest certain flaws in the U.S. legal system, it doesn't support the assertion made by the parent poster. It's possible that had this case gone to trial, the individual might have been completely acquitted on the basis that manga is great art. It's also possible that a court could have locked him up and thrown away the key, determining that tentacle rape cartoons are dirty, dirty smut. We just don't know.
In some ways, that is the most troubling problem -- individuals with an interest in this genre currently don't have any way to know if their hobby is legal or not.
Why would the Wikipedia people permenantly erase a wiki page that seems legit?
Probably because someone was trying to use Wikipedia as a free webhost for their art project...? Pages that don't have anything to do with Wikipedia's mission - which is creating an encyclopedia, full stop - regularly get deleted.
The page in question wasn't an encyclopedia article, it was a "conceptual art work composed on Wikipedia". Some artist(s) had a clever idea that used Wikipedia's resources, Wikipedia decided that they weren't in the business of creating art, the art project got the boot.
If you're looking for the relevant Wikipedia policy, try
It ain't rocket science, and it doesn't need a conspiracy to explain. Since the operators of Wikipedia Art are running their own wiki using the same software, it's a tad disingenuous for them to 'play dumb' about where the page went.
Finally, it's not gone without a trace. Wikipedia 'administrators' (really more janitors than powerful functionaries) have access to most deleted pages, and anyone can see the entry in the page deletion log.
All you need is a vote counter to count it as whatever party they want to win, regardless of what's on the paper.
Under the Canadian system, the two senior officials at each polling station are drawn from lists provided by the two parties which received the highest vote totals in the preceding election. One official comes from each party, and both verify the identities of voters and both verify that paper ballots are issued and collected properly. One official hands out ballots while the other maintains the list of names of people who voted; this gives two independent counts of the number of ballots that ought to be in the box.
In the unlikely event of a conspiracy between those two officials, any candidate from any party is permitted to send an observer (called a scrutineer) to monitor a polling place. Scrutineers can observe any part of the voting process (save for the actual marking of the ballot by the voter, of course), including end-of-day counting.
In my experience, the paper ballot is unfolded, someone reads the name of the candidate selected, the ballot is held so that everyone present can see the marking, and the unfolded ballot is piled face-up in the appropriate candidate's pile. The ballots are counted after sorting, and the sum of the counts is checked against the number of votes that ought to have been cast. The officials present sign off on the record, and - barring arithmetic errors - everyone is done a half hour after the polls close. No biggie.
There are however hundreds of other reasons why this won't work. One of the biggest being that as powerful as our nukes are, they aren't shit compared to the energy released in an earthquake of any size.
There are however hundreds of other reasons why a nuclear bomb won't work. One of the biggest being that as powerful as our batteries and pushbuttons are, they aren't shit compared to the energy released in a nuclear explosion of any size. Oh...wait....
There's no physical law that says releasing stored potential energy will require a comparable amount of activation energy. That's not to say that the activation energy required in this case will be small, nor is to say that it would be easy (or even possible) to predict where that activation energy should be applied. (I know I can prevent a hurricane in Florida by killing a butterfly in China -- but I'll be damned if I can figure out which butterly it is that I need to whack.) But an argument based solely on the relative amounts of energy involved in the two processes - nuke versus quake - doesn't hold water.
Today it is rare for a baby to die. 300 years ago it was assumed that most would die before the age of 5. The primary difference is vaccines.
Well, not so much.
I'm pleased by the decision, I think the court got it right, and I wish that anti-vaccination charlatans would stop taking advantage of gullible parents -- but the primary reducer of early-childhood mortality almost certainly isn't vaccines.
It's a whole spectrum of improved lifestyle and healthcare. Important changes include easy access to clean water, good perinatal and postnatal medical care, year-round nutritious diet, availability of antibiotics, and nearly-universal access to heated, reasonably comfortable shelter. I'd place the importance of those points in roughly that order, with vaccination fitting in somewhere around the last entries on the list.
Slashdot Mirror
15 amps is good, the British plug (Type G, or BS 1363) is only rated for 13 amps. But wait -- the American plug is only good for up to 125 volts; the Brits are rated up to 240 volts.
That's up to 3120 watts, and it's why all American kettles suck ass.
That's truly remarkable. Of the first twenty stories on the front page, this one has by far the most comments.
And here I've gone and added one more.
To a story about plugs.
I need a beer.
Tokenism, deliberate or not. Can you name any others?
The existence of one news anchor with a mild speech impediment does not prove or disprove the assertion that a speech impediment inhibits success in employment or other aspects of life. That some particularly talented or determined individuals can work around a particular handicap does not mean that they aren't handicapped.
...or short lifetimes.
The problem is that the effectiveness of placebos actually goes up when you increase their price: "Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy".
Oddly enough, the expensive sugar pills do work bette -- as long as the patients know the price.
How is it that there are so many people on a website populated by programmers and gamers (electronic and other) and readers of science fiction who can't wrap their heads around fiat currency?
There aren't any commodities that are present in adequate supply to back the currencies of the world's economies. Further, moving all those valuable commodities into storage deprives the economies of their use. Finally, it's not like the traditional backing commodities (I'm looking at you, gold) have shown any sort of sensible and consistent pattern or behaviour in their prices. It makes no obvious sense tie the value of a particular country's currency to the vagaries of one or more commodity prices.
You go first.
You crazy Yanks and your bizarre 'English' language. The correct UK spelling is B-U-D-W-E-I-S-E-R. And it comes in pints, not quarts.
You can expect that to change in an instant once Toronto's street gangs start staging pitched battles with black powder artillery.
While under some circumstances openly carrying a weapon is constitutionally-protected symbolic speech, it isn't always.
This wasn't a guy who was trying to make a point about civil rights. The jackbooted thugs of the police department weren't trying to suppress his God-given rights to peaceful protest and free speech, and he wasn't bravely standing up to their fascist imperialist overlordship.
It's a guy who was moving a toy prop from point A to point B so that he could get his paycheque on Friday. The police advised the company to be a bit more discreet when moving their giant sniper rifles around, as it's disruptive and inconvenient for everyone involved otherwise. Call it being a good corporate neighbour.
There are a lot of things which are perfectly legal but of which we nevertheless tolerate (even encourage) a certain amount of government monitoring. Consider the sale of hot dogs; we expect hot dog vendors to be regularly inspected by health officials, as the irresponsible handling of food products could lead to serious injuries or death. Similarly, there is a certain public expectation that the government will pay at least some attention to individuals walking down city streets while carrying extremely large sniper rifles. While a responsible individual engaged in that activity may be fully within his legal rights and represent no great harm to others, it's not unreasonable for the police to express some curiosity and want to monitor the situation.
The police don't want to spend time tracking down reports of citizens armed with toys, Bungee doesn't want to alarm its neighbours, the employee in question doesn't want to frighten people on the street. Covering up the gun solves these problems.
and why do we think we can detect them this deep inside a Gravity well?
honestly, looking for something like that needs to be outside the gravity well of the sun.
There's a pebble on top of Mount Everest. Using my trusty ruler, I measure the pebble as being 1.3 inches tall.
"Aha!", says my colleague. "Now we know that the top of the pebble is exactly 6 miles, 1.3 inches high!"
"No, silly!", says my other colleague. "The only way that we can measure the height of the pebble precisely is by bringing it down to sea level! Being on a mountaintop confounds any precision measurement!"
Oddly enough, the pebble turns out to be 1.3 inches tall. A most remarkable coincidence, I'm sure.
I agree with the posts which note that the relative magnitude of the navigational error is trivial (a million kilometers in 2500 AU is the same relative error as one kilometer on a trip to the Moon). I also fully agree that any expedition to the Oort would be a random crapshoot anyway.
I do have to quibble with the notion of 'essentially unlimited ability to maneuver', however. The amount of thrust available decreases with increasing distance from the sun. (Indeed, it falls off as the inverse square of the distance.) If our hypothetical sail starts off at 0.1 AU from the sun for maximum thrust, its acceleration will be down to 1% of its original value as it crosses the Earth's orbit, and less than 0.04% when it crosses Jupiter's orbit. At Pluto's orbit, the probe will be able to call on less than a hundred-thousandth the amount of sunlight it saw when it started. In other words, errors in course selection which take place early will accumulate for the longest, and will be most apparent when the least thrust is available for correction.
That's right -- soon the automatic adjustment will be as fast, accurate, and effective as the autofocus on your camera. Meanwhile, the battery pack and image processing unit on my belt will only have to be recharged twice a day!
Oh. Erm.
I hope you're not planning on driving with these.
Be cautious in using more aggressive solvents like anhydrous ethanol -- prolonged exposure or repeated use may damage or remove optical coatings from the lenses.
The blog posting contains numbers on the order of 300 billion, not 500 billion -- and those are Icelandic crowns (ISK), not euros or dollars. That puts the total at about 2.3 billion U.S. dollars.
Given that Iceland's population is only about 320 thousand people that's still a pretty massive hit to their economy (call it 7000 USD per capita), but not totally implausible (particularly for a heavily leveraged state-controlled bank).
Ah, yes - here it is. The device already has a Wikipedia article: Perpetual motion machine.
You can't turn carbon dioxide back into fuel without putting in as much energy as you got out of it whenn you burnt it in the first place.
Sometimes, yes. Open access journals generally charge page charges to offset their cost of operations. (The fee for PLoS Medicine is 2850 USD, for instance.)
Even the old-school journals often levy page or color charges (for color figures and for papers beyond a certain length). PNAS asks for 70 USD per page, plus 300 USD per color figure, plus 250 USD for publication of supporting information not part of the paper itself, plus an (optional) 1200 USD if you want PNAS to waive subscription or article charges and make your paper open access.
That's not to say that all journals charging publication fees are legitimate, only that such fees are not, by themselves, an indication of shenanigans.
Fingerprint and photograph, yes -- with a few exceptions. The big one is that (most) Canadian citizens are exempt. As well, individuals younger than 14 or older than 79 can skip the ten card and mugshot.
You get the invasion of privacy even if you're just passing through a U.S. airport to make a connection to another country.
Well, no. A court of law didn't decide anything here. As near as I can tell, no court ruled on anything, including the literary and artistic value (or lack thereof) of manga.
The individual involved pled guilty as part of a plea agreement. The case did not go before a judge or jury. While this may suggest certain flaws in the U.S. legal system, it doesn't support the assertion made by the parent poster. It's possible that had this case gone to trial, the individual might have been completely acquitted on the basis that manga is great art. It's also possible that a court could have locked him up and thrown away the key, determining that tentacle rape cartoons are dirty, dirty smut. We just don't know.
In some ways, that is the most troubling problem -- individuals with an interest in this genre currently don't have any way to know if their hobby is legal or not.
Probably because someone was trying to use Wikipedia as a free webhost for their art project...? Pages that don't have anything to do with Wikipedia's mission - which is creating an encyclopedia, full stop - regularly get deleted.
The page in question wasn't an encyclopedia article, it was a "conceptual art work composed on Wikipedia". Some artist(s) had a clever idea that used Wikipedia's resources, Wikipedia decided that they weren't in the business of creating art, the art project got the boot.
If you're looking for the relevant Wikipedia policy, try
Deletion policy
Criteria for speedy deletion
What Wikipedia is not
It ain't rocket science, and it doesn't need a conspiracy to explain. Since the operators of Wikipedia Art are running their own wiki using the same software, it's a tad disingenuous for them to 'play dumb' about where the page went.
Finally, it's not gone without a trace. Wikipedia 'administrators' (really more janitors than powerful functionaries) have access to most deleted pages, and anyone can see the entry in the page deletion log.
There's a reason why Layer 1 of the OSI model is the Physical Layer.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
I'm presuming that Marx's comment was a prescient perspective on the future of in-animal data storage and presentation.
Under the Canadian system, the two senior officials at each polling station are drawn from lists provided by the two parties which received the highest vote totals in the preceding election. One official comes from each party, and both verify the identities of voters and both verify that paper ballots are issued and collected properly. One official hands out ballots while the other maintains the list of names of people who voted; this gives two independent counts of the number of ballots that ought to be in the box.
In the unlikely event of a conspiracy between those two officials, any candidate from any party is permitted to send an observer (called a scrutineer) to monitor a polling place. Scrutineers can observe any part of the voting process (save for the actual marking of the ballot by the voter, of course), including end-of-day counting.
In my experience, the paper ballot is unfolded, someone reads the name of the candidate selected, the ballot is held so that everyone present can see the marking, and the unfolded ballot is piled face-up in the appropriate candidate's pile. The ballots are counted after sorting, and the sum of the counts is checked against the number of votes that ought to have been cast. The officials present sign off on the record, and - barring arithmetic errors - everyone is done a half hour after the polls close. No biggie.
There are however hundreds of other reasons why a nuclear bomb won't work. One of the biggest being that as powerful as our batteries and pushbuttons are, they aren't shit compared to the energy released in a nuclear explosion of any size. Oh...wait....
There's no physical law that says releasing stored potential energy will require a comparable amount of activation energy. That's not to say that the activation energy required in this case will be small, nor is to say that it would be easy (or even possible) to predict where that activation energy should be applied. (I know I can prevent a hurricane in Florida by killing a butterfly in China -- but I'll be damned if I can figure out which butterly it is that I need to whack.) But an argument based solely on the relative amounts of energy involved in the two processes - nuke versus quake - doesn't hold water.
Well, not so much.
I'm pleased by the decision, I think the court got it right, and I wish that anti-vaccination charlatans would stop taking advantage of gullible parents -- but the primary reducer of early-childhood mortality almost certainly isn't vaccines.
It's a whole spectrum of improved lifestyle and healthcare. Important changes include easy access to clean water, good perinatal and postnatal medical care, year-round nutritious diet, availability of antibiotics, and nearly-universal access to heated, reasonably comfortable shelter. I'd place the importance of those points in roughly that order, with vaccination fitting in somewhere around the last entries on the list.