We have encryption technology today that, unless it's flawed, would make works unbreakable by anything but quantum computers. And I mean unbreakable in the sense that the universe will grow old and die before the encryption is cracked.
I'm gonna go ahead and take advantage of the caveat at the beginning of your argument: DRM'd media's encryption scheme has to be fatally flawed for you to watch it. So cracking the whole system will usually be a fairly trivial exercise, especially when compared to trying to directly attack the cipher. In media distribution cryptosystems, the key is distributed along with the media, and the ability to extract the key is also as widely distributed as valid media players. Finally, the media must ultimately be presented to you in such a way that you can experience it.
Basically, there are many, many attack vectors into DRM'd media that are much easier than trying to directly determine the encryption key of the encrypted media stream. Even theoretically, DRM'd media doesn't meet many of the preconditions of a message that can be secured.
The first link in the post you're replying to is from 1994 and describes a 1024x768 monitor available from Computer Shopper for $340. The second link is from 1995, is a decent list of then-current monitors, and all of the 17" monitors listed are capable 1280x1024. None of us are suprised about spending $640 on a 17" monitor in 1995. It's finding one that can only display 800x600 that's truly and completely astonishing.
Personally, I suspect the monitor you bought in 1995 could display 1280x1024, but you used it at 800x600 for some reason. The mistaken statement that inspired my reply was to describe the monitor as an 800x600 monitor as part of an assertion that 800x600 was the state of the art, when the comsumer-grade monitors I owned at the same time were capable of much higher resolution. Can you help resolve the mistake now that I've pointed it out?
Went back and checked my old emails and took advantage of usenet as you suggested, and I did make three errors (not deliberately, I'll ask you to believe). The 15" monitor was a MAG DX15F (1) and cost me $325 used in 1993 (2). One year later, they were being sold new for $340.
The 17" monitor was a Viewsonic 17GS and in 1995 (3), cost me $350 + $50 shipping from an early auction site (that I can't remember the name of, it was similar to overstock.com in that they sold large quantities of items in mostly dutch auctions). In the email I was bragging to my roommate that I got quite a deal. I did find one online seller offering the 17GS for $770 in 1995, so my used (sight-unseen) monitor was about half price.
In 1997, there were a number of 19" monitors capable of 1600x1200. The only inexpensive Hitachi monitor that could do that was the 751, though I don't find it on the newsgroups for sale under $1000 in 1997 (mostly around $1100). Maybe if you're equipping a whole office you can get a discount...
An 800x600 monitor for $640? In 1995? I stand by my original statement. Anyone who bought that got ripped off.
In 1996 I bought a CTX 800x600 monitor for about $700.
I had a Viewsonic 17" flatscreen with excellent quality 1280x1024 resolution that I bought for $350 (used) in 1993. Before that, I had a Viewsonic 15" with excellent quality 1024x768 (and crappy 1280x1024) that cost me $300. In 1997, my office had 1600x1200 capable 19" trinitrons that didn't cost $1000 each (around $900, IIRC).
I think you may have gotten ripped off. Unless it was some sort of flat-panel (LCD), in which case, go you!
Because motorcycles are utterly impractical for anything other than joy riding in nice weather?
I commute on my motorcycle unless there's pouring down rain or ice on the streets. A forecast of rain won't stop me, though a forecast of thunderstorms might. A good suit (Aerostitch Roadcrafter) goes a long way to making a ride comfortable even when it's not that comfortable out.
Ultimately, I spend $4/week on gasoline and get to work in 15-20 minutes instead of $15/week and 30-40 minutes in the car. That's a lot of both time and money saved. People who only ride when the sun's out are poseurs. I still wave at them, but I'm laughing while I wave.
I've been looking at a lot of motorcycles. The vast majority get only 25mph from what I have seen. This includes Hondas and Harleys.
I call bullshit.
I've been riding motorcycles for 12 years and I've never owned or personally seen a motorcycle that got worse than 35mpg. Most bikes for the US market get somewhere in the range of 40-45mpg. So, either you're doing a horrible job of reading motorcycle specs or you're some sort of incompetent big-oil astroturfer. Your assertion might be true if you limit your search to highly modified huge touring cruisers or racebikes driven by ham-fisted idiots, but even then...
(numbers are from the manufacturer's website, motorcycle.com, or my own personal experience).
All Harley Davidson Sportster 883's are rated 50-55mpg. There are a lot of models in there. Sportster 1200's models are rated 40-50mpg depending on the exact model. Evolution engine models are rated right around 40mpg, a smooth hand on the throttle will keep you around 43mpg (personal experience). Most of the Buell line up (highly modified Sportster 1200 engine) is rated around 45mpg. 600cc Hondas will get better than 40mpg, up to 45mpg depending on how you ride (personal experience). This includes 600f4i, 600rr, and 599. The Honda Goldwing 1500 is rated at 42mpg. The one I personally know of routinely gets 45mpg. This is a huge luxury tourer. My wife's Honda Rebel 250 gets 60-65mpg depending on which roads she takes on her commute. The Suzuki DL-650 is rated at 55mpg and will get almost 60mpg (personal experience). Suzuki DL-1000 is rated at 45mpg. Suzuki Hayabusa 1300 is rated at 35mpg and is able to do 200+ mph off the showroom floor. This is the most ridiculously overpowered sportbike on the market.
You should also visit India or anywhere in southeast Asia, where the motorcycles are 80-150cc and the scooters are 50cc. Most of those motorcycles handily exceed 100mpg. The scooters approach 200mpg. In order to achieve these mileage numbers, keeping an average speed at or below 45km/h and shutting off the engine at stoplights becomes important.
The only motorcycle I've heard of that might do as badly as 25mpg is the Boss Hoss. But then they strapped a small-block chevy V8 into a motorcycle as some symbol of excess, so what do you expect.
Only two of three models that I have seen get 50mpg. I've heard this is due to the smaller engine being less efficient than that larger car engine.
Ummmm, yeah. That's why all of the new high-efficiency vehicles are using huge displacement V8's. Don't know what you're smoking, but (1) motorcycles get substantially better mileage than anything but non-diesel cars and (2) it's fundamentally due to the smaller quantity of air/fuel mixture burned per mile. Which directly equates to geared displacement. Small engines can be just as efficient per cc as large engines, and ultimately, having the smallest displacement ticking over per mile results in the highest efficiency.
The only actual efficency argument for cars and against motorcycles is that the aerodynamics of a well designed car can trounce the aerodynamics of the best designed motorcycles. So at high speeds, cars begin to catch up to bikes on the efficiency curve. However, for 99.9% of day-to-day driving, the speeds are low enough that the motorcycle mass advantage is much more important than the car's aerodynamic advantage (somewhere around 100-120mph a 600cc sportbike may have the same mileage as a sports car at the same speed). As a result of this reality, I spend about $4 a week on gasoline while being able to pull away from 95% of the cars on the road. My wife spends about $2.50 a week on gasoline and can pull away from 75% of the cars on the road.
Please choose to inform yourself before continuing this conversation.
What's funny isn't whether it's right or wrong, but that he used that statement to say: we don't know. Which goes back to the old composition rule: never use a large word when a diminutive one will do.
Um you've got something mixed up somewhere. U238 is an alpha emitter. However the byproducts are mostly beta emitters, so a sample of uranium ore will tend to emit more beta than alpha particles.
Alpha radiation is also less harmful than beta radiation. An alpha particle is a fully ionized helium nucleus, while a beta particle is a high-energy electron. Alpha radiation is stopped fully by a sheet of paper, an inch or two of air, the first few layers of dead cells in your skin. Beta radiation can penetrate into the human body quite some distance, and is possibly much more dangerous, depending on the energy of the specific beta particle.
Alpha emitters are only dangerous when powdered and consumed or made into a bioavailable form and taken up in tissues. The same cannot be said for beta emitters.
Ada was just picked by the university to ensure no student had an advantage from already knowning the language as it is rather obscure
This seems like a very strange goal for a university to have. Why would it choose to handicap people who already knew some of the subject material?
We decided to only teach the series form of differential equations because nobody really uses them in practice and someone who was already applying differential equations wouldn't have any advantage...
When Second Amendment advocates talk about the right to bear arms, they exclude the materials mentioned above from the category of acceptable small weaponry.
Here's another vote against that kind of nonsense. Either the amendment says what it does, or it doesn't. You want to change the 2nd amendment? We've got a process for doing exactly that. I'll be voting against, and I'll know it's time to really get worried if you win.
I have two specific counter-examples that may help you understand the founder's intentions: Many of ships of the early American navy were privately owned, with privately owned cannons capable of laying siege to forts and costal towns. We only got publically owned naval vessels when we started building dedicated warships Also, the cannon used by the early militias were kept and maintained by private individuals, many times in barns or dedicated armory buildings, because that was so enormously preferable to having them kept and held by a professional military. In both cases, the most powerful military weapons of the day were deliberately entrusted to private ownership instead of public ownership because private ownership was safer.
Like then, the biggest risk to American freedom today is a standing army and the industrial complex that comes along with it. IMHO, of course.
I can't recall the last time I coded for hours straight and then finally thought 'Hey I should compile and debug this application '.
In my normal development process: Alt-Tab to the shell, type "ant clean deploy test". Wait for results. Alt-Tab back to emacs and get back to design/coding/documentation. I only need the mouse to scroll back in the shell if there was something really interesting in the compile-test step.
I mostly do app-server/database work though, and I'm being pedantic. When I'm developing a web-app, there's an enormous amount of time spent testing and evaluating your work through the browser, usually lots of mouse and a lot less keyboard. Also, there are some tasks that I can do faster in Eclipse than in emacs (mostly refactorings). I also use Eclipse when I'm doing cvs forensics because it's cvs interface is simply the best out there. But, the more time I can spend with both hands on the home keys, the more work gets done.
Synthesis, creativity, analytical problem solving, etc. are very difficult to evaluate and measure anyway.
Says who? I have no problem evaluating those qualities in my employees. I doubt you think you have any difficulty evaluating those qualities in your friends, or amongst potential employers.
This exchange really does represent the crux of the issue. What we've got here is a "straw man" because you changed arguments between your last posting (where you were talking about a test) and this post. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you deliberately misunderstood "difficult to evaluate and measure" as "impossible to discover" and then based your entire response on that straw man. If I assume that you're stupid enough to really misunderstand my point... well, I'll cover that at the end.
What you are now saying is easy is for people who spend a lot of time together to discover and understand often subtle strengths and weaknesses. I agree. Happens all the time.
What you were saying is easy is to discover those same strengths and weaknesses using a written test. Uninformed bullshit.
See the difference? Your original assertion about the utility of standardized testing does not stand up to the evidence, let alone basic common sense. Says who? For one, my wife, with her PhD on assessment in higher education. Says who else? Any study on the ability of standardized tests to evaluate skills (instead of knowledge). Says who else? Just about any skilled teacher or highly skilled school administrator. Including, I might add, the administration at your school. Find the person arguing for more standardized tests, and you'll find a frustrated burecrat looking for a way to justify their job.
Teachers give tests as a part of how they evaluate a student's knowledge and abilities. For any slightly qualified teacher, it's not the only data used to develop their own assessment of a student's knowledge and abilities.
The rest of your post is more of the same and fails to make any other arguments. Your entire argument for standardized tests is that your friends and family don't know any more about you than if you had handed them the answers to a multi-page exam of some sort. That's your argument (whether you think so or not), and it sounds stupid because it is completely and utterly idiotic.
At this point, it's clear to me that you simply don't think about knowledge, skills, or even education the same way that well-informed people do. Until you choose to educate yourself so that you can carry on a better-informed conversation, this thread is complete. My only purpose with this posting is to make sure that your nonsense doesn't appear to be unchallenged.
This is no joke. I can tell you a story from the inside. Once I tried to interest my faculty colleagues at a Large University That Will Not Be Named Here in setting up an exit exam for our degree program. A big comprehensive bugger that would "certify" our graduates in a measureable way and in particular specific skills. (This is in a scientific/technical field, by the way, so such skills are easy to define.)
I'm already skeptical of your claims. Written tests can only measure certain kinds of knowledge, usually the least useful kinds of student abilities. Synthesis, creativity, analytical problem solving, etc. are very difficult to evaluate and measure anyway. To do it on a written test? Let's just say I'm skeptical.
You can use that knowledge to study more efficiently during your four precious years.
And teachers to make sure that questions that will be on the exams are repeated frequently in class. Your test would have been yet another example of what's wrong with standardized tests: teachers teach to the test. Which leaves everything else a teacher could be teaching off the cirriculum.
What you can easily test doesn't matter at the college level.
I know this is Slashdot, but did you read the article? One of the huge problems with the Indian educational system is that they treat certifications as the equivalent of knowledge and skills. They aren't. The only thing a certification proves is that you knew the answers to the questions on the test. Teachers in India teach to tests pathalogically, and it shows in the quality of their graduates. Lots of certs, not a lot of abilities. I managed our Indian offshore team, including recruiting, and I do know what I'm talking about on this subject.
You sound like you're sympathetic to the position of the incompetent Indian teachers. Sheets of paper are nothing. Demonstrable skills (most of which can't be demonstrated on any written test) are all that matter.
Do you think this proposal went anywhere? If you shook your head cynically, you are right.
Your school made the right decision. Another test will only make existing problems worse.
Like most employers of highly-skilled people: you need to (1) hire great teachers (2) quickly fire bad teachers, and (3) trust them to teach. Most alternatives to this model are doomed to make any problems with (1) and (2) much worse by not even giving lip-service to (3).
No, it isn't they take a long time to design, plan and build.
You're quite simply misinformed.
There are turnkey nuclear reactor designs that can be built on mass-production lines, shipped to their installation site and dropped into place within a month. That's a faster deployment time than a natural gas turbine plant (currently the fastest type of fossil fuel generator to install). All that's required (as I said before) is the elimination of frivolous lawsuits to let the market appear and to allow these business plans to move forward.
Evidence?
What? You sound an awful lot like an ID proponent right there. That nuclear is not only good but very good is a position on an issue, not a conclusion.
But if you'd like to understand my logic: after serious consideration, no other proposal has any credible assertions to make. Wind is already close to maximum extraction in the US. Large scale solar is so expensive to install, it doesn't pay back the investment. Ever. Future solar tech will help make solar more practical in the small scale, but the non-fossil fuel story with the fewest problems that can actually replace fossil fuels is nuclear.
Assuming a 500% increase in power production, existing "used once" nuclear fuel can be reprocessed and reused for another 100 years. Reprocessing isn't without cost, but it doesn't require any more mineral extraction, supplies of "used once" fuel are already located close to existing industrial centers, the reprocessing equipment is markedly friendlier to the environment than new mining. Basically, we can make gold from a slurry of crap that we're currently not allowed to touch under laws written by fearful legislators in the 70's and 80's.
Wikipedia is actually a great resource for learning if you'd like to read up on recent (last 15 years or so) developments in nuclear reactor design or fuel reprocessing. But then again, I also just recommend that more people get back into reading. Reading anything. The world just opens up when you develop a habit of broad and occasionally deep reading.
Seeing as new nuclear plants take so long to build, then shouldn't the priority be on energy sources which can make a difference more immediately, like wind and solar?
The only reason nuke plants take so long to build is NIMBY attitude. Wind and solar are no panacea. Wind plants are only economical in a few locations in the US, most of which already have wind generators running. Solar takes an enormous initial investment and has it's own problems given how remote the most economical locations are.
We can also cut consumption, which is by far the easiest way to manage our energy demands.
Easy, huh? Ever tried to change an industrial culture to consume less power? When gas prices rose dramatically this past year, people drove less, but we didn't do anything else less. If anything, overall consumption went up. Changing people's behaviors is infinitely harder than simply building twenty new nuclear plants, as long as there is political willpower is behind it (i.e. exemption from frivolous lawsuits).
Nuclear power is where this country's future is. Lots of nuclear power. If we don't decide to do that, there won't be nearly as much of a future. Maybe you think that's okay. I haven't made up my mind on that subject yet.
First, use an inductive cooking surface instead of a resistive heating coil. Changing the pan temperature with inductive cooking is even faster than with gas.
Second, improve your cooking skill. Yes, it is more fun to cook with gas than resistive electric. No, it is not impossible or even particularly difficult to cook with resistive electric.
I've heard of similar scopes, and that most definitely is a scope with a tritium illuminated reticle. That's a pretty special purpose scope. Very few hunters use AR-15's for hunting and that's about the only non-military gun you or I can easily own that can mount it.
The tritium sights from Ameriglo are much more common. Not to minimize your correct assertion that scopes with tritium components do actually exist:)
Hypocrisy is simultaneously advocating one thing and acting in a manner inconsistent with what you're advocating. A position changing over time is more likely a case of simply being incorrect and learning, not hypocrisy.
I like it when people learn, and stop making some set of incorrect assertions as a result. The ability to learn, and to change your mind as a result, is a cornerstone of maturity, and IMHO, should never be criticized.
Now, the fact that he had to learn that SCO was lying, instead of being able to clearly understand that from the beginning should be a little embarassing, but let's hope he uses that embarassment constructively, and isn't so quick to attach his name to a press release the next time the opportunity comes up...
Most night scopes are just IR LEDs coupled with a high-sensitivity CCD with significant gain feeding an LCD panel.
You might want to tell Ameriglo that.
Those aren't scopes. Those are sights. Scopes look like this and involve optics. Gun sights are significantly simpler.
I do like tritium sights though.
A level gauge (assuming you mean a bubble level) is just an air bubble in a liquid, which is usually colored ethanol (alcohol).
Level Gauges
His assumption is valid. When you use the term "level", without clarifying that you're talking about a hopper fill-level indicator, you're being deceptive. I'll wager that nobody who reads this post has ever seen a "hopper level gauge" in person. And since they are uncommon devices, then they don't suit the purpose of the original list, which was to show how radioactive substances are used in everyday items. Hopper level gauges aren't everyday items.
You're talking out of your ass again. The radiation sources sold by this company come from Oak Ridge, Tennessee where they are made to order in an NRC licensed reactor and shipped directly to the customer.
You should educate yourself before you speak again on this subject.
The only way you could get it to work would be to get the liberals, who watch liberal biased news [...]
Newsflash: the news is big corporation biased and lowest common denominator biased. The only people stupid enough to believe in a strong left or right bias are so far gone to the other extreme that the middle looks like a right/left bias. Based on your remark, I guess we know where you stand and your relative intelligence.
[...] to mentally equate the *IAA's with big, evil(TM) money grubbing business
Um, the **AA's are evil (TM) money grubbing businesses, and pretty much everyone I know acknowledges that. There's no need to be a liberal to understand that.
I get the impression you think that the political left in this country is responsible for the DMCA and the abuses of the common man that have arisen since then. The DMCA was passed in a Republican-dominated congress by unanimous vote, and signed into law by President Clinton, arguably the best Republican (ahem) president this country has had in decades. You did read the bit about unanimous?
Most of your senators and representatives, Democrat and Republican, are bought and paid for by corporate special interests. Those corporate special interests want to keep their income steady and have made sure that laws intended to prevent the internet from threatening those income streams has been quickly passed.
This is not a left/right issue. This is a corporation/rest of us issue. The fact that you think it's a left/right issue just means that you're believing the corporatist propaganda. Good luck getting any straight information from talk radio. They're far too distracted unraveling nonexistent conspiracies to actually inform anyone. But good luck anyway.
Ah. I didn't read his post that way. I thought he wanted a way to close the lid and use an external k/v/m without his laptop shutting down; which my instructions would help him to do.
XP does let you choose different behaviors when you're plugged in and when you're on the battery. Until this discussion, I'd never considered adding another dimension of whether or not there's an external keyboard attached.
Plugged/not plugged always seemed to be enough for me. However, a part of my personal analysis has to do with how flaky XP is when returning from suspend. If it was quicker and more reliable, I would definitely prefer it to standby whenever I closed the screen, unless it was docked.
Go to Control Panel -> Power Options. I don't have my laptop with me, but on one of the tabs, you should see a "When laptop screen is closed:" option. It's probably set to "Suspend". Change it to "Do nothing".
Go to the BIOS and become familiar with it. One of the top level selections has to do with power options. Go in there, find the suspend/hibernate settings in there. Change them to how you'd like the laptop to behave. These interact with linux better than they interact with windows, so if you're dual booting, make sure you're getting what you want in both OS's.
The simple fact of the matter is that IE 6 & 7, and Opera 9 do not suffer from memory leaks anywhere near as badly as Firefox.
Then why don't you point out one of these Firefox memory leaks?
The memory leaks in Firefox are fairly easy to reproduce, so I'll assume you're not asking him to do that and are instead asking him to find in code or actually fix the leaks.
The reason he doesn't point to the problematic line(s) of code: memory leaks are among the hardest kinds of problems to isolate, let alone debug, even for original authors of recent code with the proper tools. They're usually a symptom of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing (which one way of saying there was inadequate communication during design). Which tells me something important about Firefox.
I was working for a place were i could do 80% of the work at home. But the people I was working for did not like the idea.
Well, if you were the only person doing this work, then you were probably correct, and they didn't trust you (which is a common management failure). However, I suspect that you were on a team of people doing this work, and you are dramatically overestimating how effectively you can communicate via phone.
Savings for the company: one less workspace/office needed. In the end, the company went belly up because of cost overruns (office space, etc.). [Edited for sanity]
While office space certainly is part of a company's costs, the employee sitting in an office usually costs anywhere from twenty to a hundred times (or more) as much as the office. The office they might have "saved" with you at home wouldn't have "saved" the company anything. There are two much more likely reasons for the failure: (1) the company's products didn't meet a customer need and didn't sell and (2) they hired employees in anticipation of need and had too many employees for their actual budget.
I for one don't miss the 2 hour average drive to work and back home. Now I work nearby travel 10 minutes to work and do some part time repair work at home for a sound and lighting company. Making more money because im not burning up 160 dollars in gas a week and the car will last longer.
Um, yeah. I think you were rather dumb to have accepted a job that you have to drive two hours to get to. I would think, that with gas prices as high as they are near you, that distance would have been a major factor in accepting the job. In your defense, there are a huge number of people like that around me in Southern California. However, I think they're pretty dumb too.
When I looked at places to live during my last move, I considered the number of nearby potential employers (even though I was moving to accept a job). During my last job search, I didn't consider employers where I had to commute more than 30 minutes, and: there were plenty of employers within that radius, so there wasn't any reason to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, there are many, many attack vectors into DRM'd media that are much easier than trying to directly determine the encryption key of the encrypted media stream. Even theoretically, DRM'd media doesn't meet many of the preconditions of a message that can be secured.
Regards,
Ross
The first link in the post you're replying to is from 1994 and describes a 1024x768 monitor available from Computer Shopper for $340. The second link is from 1995, is a decent list of then-current monitors, and all of the 17" monitors listed are capable 1280x1024. None of us are suprised about spending $640 on a 17" monitor in 1995. It's finding one that can only display 800x600 that's truly and completely astonishing.
Personally, I suspect the monitor you bought in 1995 could display 1280x1024, but you used it at 800x600 for some reason. The mistaken statement that inspired my reply was to describe the monitor as an 800x600 monitor as part of an assertion that 800x600 was the state of the art, when the comsumer-grade monitors I owned at the same time were capable of much higher resolution. Can you help resolve the mistake now that I've pointed it out?
Regards,
Ross
Went back and checked my old emails and took advantage of usenet as you suggested, and I did make three errors (not deliberately, I'll ask you to believe). The 15" monitor was a MAG DX15F (1) and cost me $325 used in 1993 (2). One year later, they were being sold new for $340.
The 17" monitor was a Viewsonic 17GS and in 1995 (3), cost me $350 + $50 shipping from an early auction site (that I can't remember the name of, it was similar to overstock.com in that they sold large quantities of items in mostly dutch auctions). In the email I was bragging to my roommate that I got quite a deal. I did find one online seller offering the 17GS for $770 in 1995, so my used (sight-unseen) monitor was about half price.
In 1997, there were a number of 19" monitors capable of 1600x1200. The only inexpensive Hitachi monitor that could do that was the 751, though I don't find it on the newsgroups for sale under $1000 in 1997 (mostly around $1100). Maybe if you're equipping a whole office you can get a discount...
An 800x600 monitor for $640? In 1995? I stand by my original statement. Anyone who bought that got ripped off.
Ross
I think you may have gotten ripped off. Unless it was some sort of flat-panel (LCD), in which case, go you!
Ross
Ultimately, I spend $4/week on gasoline and get to work in 15-20 minutes instead of $15/week and 30-40 minutes in the car. That's a lot of both time and money saved. People who only ride when the sun's out are poseurs. I still wave at them, but I'm laughing while I wave.
Regards,
Ross
I've been riding motorcycles for 12 years and I've never owned or personally seen a motorcycle that got worse than 35mpg. Most bikes for the US market get somewhere in the range of 40-45mpg. So, either you're doing a horrible job of reading motorcycle specs or you're some sort of incompetent big-oil astroturfer. Your assertion might be true if you limit your search to highly modified huge touring cruisers or racebikes driven by ham-fisted idiots, but even then...
(numbers are from the manufacturer's website, motorcycle.com, or my own personal experience).
All Harley Davidson Sportster 883's are rated 50-55mpg. There are a lot of models in there.
Sportster 1200's models are rated 40-50mpg depending on the exact model.
Evolution engine models are rated right around 40mpg, a smooth hand on the throttle will keep you around 43mpg (personal experience).
Most of the Buell line up (highly modified Sportster 1200 engine) is rated around 45mpg.
600cc Hondas will get better than 40mpg, up to 45mpg depending on how you ride (personal experience). This includes 600f4i, 600rr, and 599.
The Honda Goldwing 1500 is rated at 42mpg. The one I personally know of routinely gets 45mpg. This is a huge luxury tourer.
My wife's Honda Rebel 250 gets 60-65mpg depending on which roads she takes on her commute.
The Suzuki DL-650 is rated at 55mpg and will get almost 60mpg (personal experience).
Suzuki DL-1000 is rated at 45mpg.
Suzuki Hayabusa 1300 is rated at 35mpg and is able to do 200+ mph off the showroom floor. This is the most ridiculously overpowered sportbike on the market.
You should also visit India or anywhere in southeast Asia, where the motorcycles are 80-150cc and the scooters are 50cc. Most of those motorcycles handily exceed 100mpg. The scooters approach 200mpg. In order to achieve these mileage numbers, keeping an average speed at or below 45km/h and shutting off the engine at stoplights becomes important.
The only motorcycle I've heard of that might do as badly as 25mpg is the Boss Hoss. But then they strapped a small-block chevy V8 into a motorcycle as some symbol of excess, so what do you expect.
Ummmm, yeah. That's why all of the new high-efficiency vehicles are using huge displacement V8's. Don't know what you're smoking, but (1) motorcycles get substantially better mileage than anything but non-diesel cars and (2) it's fundamentally due to the smaller quantity of air/fuel mixture burned per mile. Which directly equates to geared displacement. Small engines can be just as efficient per cc as large engines, and ultimately, having the smallest displacement ticking over per mile results in the highest efficiency.
The only actual efficency argument for cars and against motorcycles is that the aerodynamics of a well designed car can trounce the aerodynamics of the best designed motorcycles. So at high speeds, cars begin to catch up to bikes on the efficiency curve. However, for 99.9% of day-to-day driving, the speeds are low enough that the motorcycle mass advantage is much more important than the car's aerodynamic advantage (somewhere around 100-120mph a 600cc sportbike may have the same mileage as a sports car at the same speed). As a result of this reality, I spend about $4 a week on gasoline while being able to pull away from 95% of the cars on the road. My wife spends about $2.50 a week on gasoline and can pull away from 75% of the cars on the road.
Please choose to inform yourself before continuing this conversation.
Ross
What's funny isn't whether it's right or wrong, but that he used that statement to say: we don't know. Which goes back to the old composition rule: never use a large word when a diminutive one will do.
Ross
Um you've got something mixed up somewhere. U238 is an alpha emitter. However the byproducts are mostly beta emitters, so a sample of uranium ore will tend to emit more beta than alpha particles.
Alpha radiation is also less harmful than beta radiation. An alpha particle is a fully ionized helium nucleus, while a beta particle is a high-energy electron. Alpha radiation is stopped fully by a sheet of paper, an inch or two of air, the first few layers of dead cells in your skin. Beta radiation can penetrate into the human body quite some distance, and is possibly much more dangerous, depending on the energy of the specific beta particle.
Alpha emitters are only dangerous when powdered and consumed or made into a bioavailable form and taken up in tissues. The same cannot be said for beta emitters.
Ross
We decided to only teach the series form of differential equations because nobody really uses them in practice and someone who was already applying differential equations wouldn't have any advantage...
Strange.
Ross
I have two specific counter-examples that may help you understand the founder's intentions: Many of ships of the early American navy were privately owned, with privately owned cannons capable of laying siege to forts and costal towns. We only got publically owned naval vessels when we started building dedicated warships Also, the cannon used by the early militias were kept and maintained by private individuals, many times in barns or dedicated armory buildings, because that was so enormously preferable to having them kept and held by a professional military. In both cases, the most powerful military weapons of the day were deliberately entrusted to private ownership instead of public ownership because private ownership was safer.
Like then, the biggest risk to American freedom today is a standing army and the industrial complex that comes along with it. IMHO, of course.
Regards,
Ross
I mostly do app-server/database work though, and I'm being pedantic. When I'm developing a web-app, there's an enormous amount of time spent testing and evaluating your work through the browser, usually lots of mouse and a lot less keyboard. Also, there are some tasks that I can do faster in Eclipse than in emacs (mostly refactorings). I also use Eclipse when I'm doing cvs forensics because it's cvs interface is simply the best out there. But, the more time I can spend with both hands on the home keys, the more work gets done.
Regards,
Ross
What you are now saying is easy is for people who spend a lot of time together to discover and understand often subtle strengths and weaknesses. I agree. Happens all the time.
What you were saying is easy is to discover those same strengths and weaknesses using a written test. Uninformed bullshit.
See the difference? Your original assertion about the utility of standardized testing does not stand up to the evidence, let alone basic common sense. Says who? For one, my wife, with her PhD on assessment in higher education. Says who else? Any study on the ability of standardized tests to evaluate skills (instead of knowledge). Says who else? Just about any skilled teacher or highly skilled school administrator. Including, I might add, the administration at your school. Find the person arguing for more standardized tests, and you'll find a frustrated burecrat looking for a way to justify their job.
Teachers give tests as a part of how they evaluate a student's knowledge and abilities. For any slightly qualified teacher, it's not the only data used to develop their own assessment of a student's knowledge and abilities.
The rest of your post is more of the same and fails to make any other arguments. Your entire argument for standardized tests is that your friends and family don't know any more about you than if you had handed them the answers to a multi-page exam of some sort. That's your argument (whether you think so or not), and it sounds stupid because it is completely and utterly idiotic.
At this point, it's clear to me that you simply don't think about knowledge, skills, or even education the same way that well-informed people do. Until you choose to educate yourself so that you can carry on a better-informed conversation, this thread is complete. My only purpose with this posting is to make sure that your nonsense doesn't appear to be unchallenged.
Ross
And teachers to make sure that questions that will be on the exams are repeated frequently in class. Your test would have been yet another example of what's wrong with standardized tests: teachers teach to the test. Which leaves everything else a teacher could be teaching off the cirriculum.
What you can easily test doesn't matter at the college level.
I know this is Slashdot, but did you read the article? One of the huge problems with the Indian educational system is that they treat certifications as the equivalent of knowledge and skills. They aren't. The only thing a certification proves is that you knew the answers to the questions on the test. Teachers in India teach to tests pathalogically, and it shows in the quality of their graduates. Lots of certs, not a lot of abilities. I managed our Indian offshore team, including recruiting, and I do know what I'm talking about on this subject.
You sound like you're sympathetic to the position of the incompetent Indian teachers. Sheets of paper are nothing. Demonstrable skills (most of which can't be demonstrated on any written test) are all that matter.
Your school made the right decision. Another test will only make existing problems worse.
Like most employers of highly-skilled people: you need to (1) hire great teachers (2) quickly fire bad teachers, and (3) trust them to teach. Most alternatives to this model are doomed to make any problems with (1) and (2) much worse by not even giving lip-service to (3).
Regards,
Ross
There are turnkey nuclear reactor designs that can be built on mass-production lines, shipped to their installation site and dropped into place within a month. That's a faster deployment time than a natural gas turbine plant (currently the fastest type of fossil fuel generator to install). All that's required (as I said before) is the elimination of frivolous lawsuits to let the market appear and to allow these business plans to move forward.
What? You sound an awful lot like an ID proponent right there. That nuclear is not only good but very good is a position on an issue, not a conclusion.
But if you'd like to understand my logic: after serious consideration, no other proposal has any credible assertions to make. Wind is already close to maximum extraction in the US. Large scale solar is so expensive to install, it doesn't pay back the investment. Ever. Future solar tech will help make solar more practical in the small scale, but the non-fossil fuel story with the fewest problems that can actually replace fossil fuels is nuclear.
Assuming a 500% increase in power production, existing "used once" nuclear fuel can be reprocessed and reused for another 100 years. Reprocessing isn't without cost, but it doesn't require any more mineral extraction, supplies of "used once" fuel are already located close to existing industrial centers, the reprocessing equipment is markedly friendlier to the environment than new mining. Basically, we can make gold from a slurry of crap that we're currently not allowed to touch under laws written by fearful legislators in the 70's and 80's.
Wikipedia is actually a great resource for learning if you'd like to read up on recent (last 15 years or so) developments in nuclear reactor design or fuel reprocessing. But then again, I also just recommend that more people get back into reading. Reading anything. The world just opens up when you develop a habit of broad and occasionally deep reading.
Regards,
Ross
Easy, huh? Ever tried to change an industrial culture to consume less power? When gas prices rose dramatically this past year, people drove less, but we didn't do anything else less. If anything, overall consumption went up. Changing people's behaviors is infinitely harder than simply building twenty new nuclear plants, as long as there is political willpower is behind it (i.e. exemption from frivolous lawsuits).
Nuclear power is where this country's future is. Lots of nuclear power. If we don't decide to do that, there won't be nearly as much of a future. Maybe you think that's okay. I haven't made up my mind on that subject yet.
Regards,
Ross
First, use an inductive cooking surface instead of a resistive heating coil. Changing the pan temperature with inductive cooking is even faster than with gas.
Second, improve your cooking skill. Yes, it is more fun to cook with gas than resistive electric. No, it is not impossible or even particularly difficult to cook with resistive electric.
Ross
I've heard of similar scopes, and that most definitely is a scope with a tritium illuminated reticle. That's a pretty special purpose scope. Very few hunters use AR-15's for hunting and that's about the only non-military gun you or I can easily own that can mount it.
:)
The tritium sights from Ameriglo are much more common. Not to minimize your correct assertion that scopes with tritium components do actually exist
Regards,
Ross
Hypocrisy is simultaneously advocating one thing and acting in a manner inconsistent with what you're advocating. A position changing over time is more likely a case of simply being incorrect and learning, not hypocrisy.
I like it when people learn, and stop making some set of incorrect assertions as a result. The ability to learn, and to change your mind as a result, is a cornerstone of maturity, and IMHO, should never be criticized.
Now, the fact that he had to learn that SCO was lying, instead of being able to clearly understand that from the beginning should be a little embarassing, but let's hope he uses that embarassment constructively, and isn't so quick to attach his name to a press release the next time the opportunity comes up...
Regards,
Ross
I do like tritium sights though.
His assumption is valid. When you use the term "level", without clarifying that you're talking about a hopper fill-level indicator, you're being deceptive. I'll wager that nobody who reads this post has ever seen a "hopper level gauge" in person. And since they are uncommon devices, then they don't suit the purpose of the original list, which was to show how radioactive substances are used in everyday items. Hopper level gauges aren't everyday items.
Regards,
Ross
You should educate yourself before you speak again on this subject.
Ross
Um, the **AA's are evil (TM) money grubbing businesses, and pretty much everyone I know acknowledges that. There's no need to be a liberal to understand that.
I get the impression you think that the political left in this country is responsible for the DMCA and the abuses of the common man that have arisen since then. The DMCA was passed in a Republican-dominated congress by unanimous vote, and signed into law by President Clinton, arguably the best Republican (ahem) president this country has had in decades. You did read the bit about unanimous?
Most of your senators and representatives, Democrat and Republican, are bought and paid for by corporate special interests. Those corporate special interests want to keep their income steady and have made sure that laws intended to prevent the internet from threatening those income streams has been quickly passed.
This is not a left/right issue. This is a corporation/rest of us issue. The fact that you think it's a left/right issue just means that you're believing the corporatist propaganda. Good luck getting any straight information from talk radio. They're far too distracted unraveling nonexistent conspiracies to actually inform anyone. But good luck anyway.
Regards,
Ross
Ah. I didn't read his post that way. I thought he wanted a way to close the lid and use an external k/v/m without his laptop shutting down; which my instructions would help him to do.
XP does let you choose different behaviors when you're plugged in and when you're on the battery. Until this discussion, I'd never considered adding another dimension of whether or not there's an external keyboard attached.
Plugged/not plugged always seemed to be enough for me. However, a part of my personal analysis has to do with how flaky XP is when returning from suspend. If it was quicker and more reliable, I would definitely prefer it to standby whenever I closed the screen, unless it was docked.
Regards,
Ross
Go to Control Panel -> Power Options. I don't have my laptop with me, but on one of the tabs, you should see a "When laptop screen is closed:" option. It's probably set to "Suspend". Change it to "Do nothing".
Go to the BIOS and become familiar with it. One of the top level selections has to do with power options. Go in there, find the suspend/hibernate settings in there. Change them to how you'd like the laptop to behave. These interact with linux better than they interact with windows, so if you're dual booting, make sure you're getting what you want in both OS's.
Regards,
Ross
The reason he doesn't point to the problematic line(s) of code: memory leaks are among the hardest kinds of problems to isolate, let alone debug, even for original authors of recent code with the proper tools. They're usually a symptom of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing (which one way of saying there was inadequate communication during design). Which tells me something important about Firefox.
Regards,
Ross
While office space certainly is part of a company's costs, the employee sitting in an office usually costs anywhere from twenty to a hundred times (or more) as much as the office. The office they might have "saved" with you at home wouldn't have "saved" the company anything. There are two much more likely reasons for the failure: (1) the company's products didn't meet a customer need and didn't sell and (2) they hired employees in anticipation of need and had too many employees for their actual budget.
Um, yeah. I think you were rather dumb to have accepted a job that you have to drive two hours to get to. I would think, that with gas prices as high as they are near you, that distance would have been a major factor in accepting the job. In your defense, there are a huge number of people like that around me in Southern California. However, I think they're pretty dumb too.
When I looked at places to live during my last move, I considered the number of nearby potential employers (even though I was moving to accept a job). During my last job search, I didn't consider employers where I had to commute more than 30 minutes, and: there were plenty of employers within that radius, so there wasn't any reason to do so.
Regards,
Ross