No, untrained humans handling guns are unpredictable. Guns are completely predictable, they only go bang when the trigger is pulled, and only shoot bullets in the direction they are pointed. If you have a problem with gun owners having insufficient training, then that's the argument to make. Don't blame an inanimate object, it's just a tool.
A petrol / diesel still eats up quite a lot of gas when idling...
Acutally, diesels idle at less than a 100:1 air/fuel ratio, and modern stratified charge gasoline engines also run incredibly lean at idle. Assuming you're not running the A/C and a bunch of electrical accessories, you car is barely sipping fuel at idle.
Older cars certainly waste a lot of fuel at idle though.
The main problem with nuclear energy is not the accidents, but the storage of the waste material, which remains extremely poisonous for a very long time. Maybe you didn't know that.
Only because of legislation. We could actually recycle and re-use the waste (as France is doing) if the politicians would just allow it. That, combined with new pebble-bed reactors that are virtually meltdown-proof, make nuclear pretty attractive.
Light, fuel efficient, and aerodynamic cars in Europe already exist and nobody seems to be complaining about them being death traps. They currently get in excess of 75MPG, so 100MPG isn't a stretch by any means -- a diesel-electric hybrid could probably do it without breaking a sweat.
Making gasoline 15% ethanol right now would work in nearly every existing car,
Maybe new cars. But there are millions of older cars on the road that will have problems with ethanol eating seals and hoses and causing leaks. Will the government pay billions to have them all upgraded?
That's not to mention the millions of motorcycles, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, snow blowers, pressure washers, and other power equipment that still have carburetors and can't automatically adjust to the different combustion properties of ethanol. They will run too lean, which can be deadly for an aircooled motor.
Ethanol is fine, thanks, just don't force me to use it in my older cars and power equipment. Same with biodiesel -- choice is good.
But ethanol is such a poor fuel compared to biodiesel I am amazed it gets the attention it does.
There's no technical reason for it.
Ah, but there *is* a technical reason. Crappy American passenger car diesels from the 70's gas crunch were unreliable, slow, noisy, and dirty. Americans have never really lost that image of small diesels, notwithstanding the slick and highly refined modern diesels made by VW and Mercedes today.
We can only hope that the new ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel) now required in the US will usher in a boom of popularity for diesel passenger cars now that emissions are less of an issue. The diesel Jeep Liberty is a step in the right direction -- we might even dream of someday buying an American passenger car with a diesel engine in it... I'm not holding my breath, though.
By the way, please skip the IE tab. If you are using Firefox, it is in your best interest to abandon sites that only support Internet Explorer.
Maybe that works for surfing pr0n in your mother's basement, but those of us living in the real world have to use IE for things like online learning, internal corporate websites, paying bills, etc. I'd love to be so self-righteous that I never use IE-only websites, but I'd kind of like to finish my degree, keep my job, and keep the lights on, thank you very much.
If anything, RAID should make your hard disk access a lot faster. That is, unless you go for software RAID, which will put a hit on your processor.
I've had pretty good luck with Linux software RAID improving performance without soaking the CPU. However, I have a RAID-0 (striped, no redundancy) software array on my Windows 2000 box that uses insane amounts of kernel CPU time. While disk access *is* pretty fast (10,000rpm SCSI), any kind of heavy disk activity (reading or writing) pretty much clobbers UI responsiveness. The CPU meter in Task Manager is mostly red, so I don't know what the heck Win2k's kernel is doing, but it ain't doing it well. Hopefully this has improved in XP/2003.
I think your average SOHO and consumer-grade printer isn't too smart. But enterprise-class MFPs are smart because:
* Having a RTOS onboard means the MFP maker can use common development and debugging tools instead of spending time writing their own * It's easier and cheaper for the MFP maker to hire firmware developers for an RTOS platform than EEs who can program PICs * It's cheaper and easier for the maker to design or even integrate off-the-shelf MIPS or x86 PCBs and interconnects than it is to roll their own design from scratch * Makers can contract out parts of their MFP and easily integrate the resulting standardized hardware and code * Makers' products can be more modular; write a "copy" module once, deploy it on multiple product lines thanks to the RTOS performing the hardware abstraction * Makers' customers can purchase a license and write their own modules to be downloaded into the firmware. For example, a custom workflow dialog boxes for a law firm
Again, these MFPs are designed mainly for the enterprise or government that buys *hundreds* of $10,000 MFPs. Money talks, MFP makers listen. The little offices that have only an MFP or two are probably not going to appreciate why their MFP needs a gig of RAM and a multi-GHz CPU yet still takes 6 minutes to boot up.;)
Now, I'll be the first to agree that the more you complicate the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the works. But I'm not a bean-counter or high-level manager, so nobody listens to me.:)
then the 7.62 round they fire would go through the Kevlar as if it wasn't there.
Correct. However, class IV vests have thick steel trauma plates that can stop a 7.62 bullet. The plates are heavy and don't cover a lot of area though, so many people don't wear the plates all the time. Even if you do have the plates in, the rest of your body is covered only by Kevlar... which, as you say, any rifle bullet will penetrate easily.
The thing that always made Descent stand out was the ability to move in the Z axis and control roll. This made it far more challenging and interesting, IMHO. I wish there were more games that broke out of the strafe-jump mold like Descent.
even if you set aside the fact that even by the american statistics that people trying to defend their homes with guns are more likely to have their guns used against them than the other way around
Fact? Reference, please.
The burglar might be a criminal, but you can't be a judge and executioner in one person
On the contrary, there is plenty of law establishing and plenty of case law confirming the right to use deadly force in self defense (in the US).
I do this all the time when I want to save an image of a partition using Ghost in sector-copy mode. I have an equivalent utility I wrote in Batch for Windows. All those zeroes compress quite well.;)
Anyway, analysis of the remaining FAT may reveal some of your old filenames, but not the data in them.
Why aren't there any clean-running 2-cycle gasoline engines in service, then?
I wish there were. The technology certainly exists. A clean-burning 2-stroke gasoline engine just needs 3 major things, direct injection (which already exists) a supercharger (which also exists), and port valves (which are also possible). No major car manufacturer seems interested in selling such an engine, though. Perhaps it's the R&D investment (totally new engine block, cylinder head, and piston top design), or just the fact that 4-strokes are a mature and refined technology and they don't want to start over with something new. It's a slow-moving industry.
Displacement also sells cars, and a 2-stroke of a comparable power output will have about half the displacement so you have a consumer education curve as well. Prices for 2-strokes would also be higher until you make a lot of them and economies of scale start to take effect. Mazda's Wankel ("rotary") engine has the same problem.
...as long as their ad results are clearly distinguishable from the real results. I don't have a problem with the ads of a different background color at the top or side... it's the ad results injected into the middle of the real results with only a faint horizontal line to separate them, that I find objectionable. What's worse is Google doesn't do it all the time, so they tend to catch people off guard.
More than remember it, I have an S-VHS VCR. That's not why I bought it, though, and I've never seen an S-VHS cassette, either blank or at a video rental place.
It does have a nice feature called SVHS-ET though, which does wonders for picture quality -- even on a cheapie non-SVHS tape. SVHS-ET at EP speed looks at least as good as VHS at SP.
S-VHS might have gone somewhere if it had had more time before DVD came along and rendered it pointless.
Obviously we'd also need amendments to de-couple politics and money. Make lobbying, campaign donations etc, illegal. Any politician accepting so much as a gift card or flowers is automatically fired.
Letting a few laws expire from time to time is well worth the price of freedom. There will be a very very small number of laws so it's not like anything like murder or drunk driving will get lost in the shuffle or forgotten about, anyway.
is to see government compelled to introduce no more than 10 laws per year
Excellent. I would combine this with some form of mandatory sunset; no law* can stay on the books longer than 10 years unless passed all over again... with a supermajority.
* Except for constitutional amendments, and the number of those must also be limited.
As stable as XP, it wasn't as much of a resource hog. It would run quite nicely on 64mb of ram.
I agree it's stable and less of a hog (which is why I run it at work and at home), but 64MB is stretching things. We used to run 2k, some internal software, and an older version of Symantec AV in 96 or 128MB a couple years ago with no problems. However, once we started adding SP4, IE6, and installing newer AV software... suddenly things ground to a halt. 196MB seems to be the new sweet spot for Win2k.
Slashdot Mirror
Older cars certainly waste a lot of fuel at idle though.
Here's one article: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4891
The Breeder reactor article on Wiki is also informative.
Yes, yes, YES!
Now, take that one step further and eliminate time zones, and we've created heaven on Earth.
Light, fuel efficient, and aerodynamic cars in Europe already exist and nobody seems to be complaining about them being death traps. They currently get in excess of 75MPG, so 100MPG isn't a stretch by any means -- a diesel-electric hybrid could probably do it without breaking a sweat.
That's not to mention the millions of motorcycles, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, snow blowers, pressure washers, and other power equipment that still have carburetors and can't automatically adjust to the different combustion properties of ethanol. They will run too lean, which can be deadly for an aircooled motor.
Ethanol is fine, thanks, just don't force me to use it in my older cars and power equipment. Same with biodiesel -- choice is good.
We can only hope that the new ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel) now required in the US will usher in a boom of popularity for diesel passenger cars now that emissions are less of an issue. The diesel Jeep Liberty is a step in the right direction -- we might even dream of someday buying an American passenger car with a diesel engine in it... I'm not holding my breath, though.
* Having a RTOS onboard means the MFP maker can use common development and debugging tools instead of spending time writing their own
* It's easier and cheaper for the MFP maker to hire firmware developers for an RTOS platform than EEs who can program PICs
* It's cheaper and easier for the maker to design or even integrate off-the-shelf MIPS or x86 PCBs and interconnects than it is to roll their own design from scratch
* Makers can contract out parts of their MFP and easily integrate the resulting standardized hardware and code
* Makers' products can be more modular; write a "copy" module once, deploy it on multiple product lines thanks to the RTOS performing the hardware abstraction
* Makers' customers can purchase a license and write their own modules to be downloaded into the firmware. For example, a custom workflow dialog boxes for a law firm
Again, these MFPs are designed mainly for the enterprise or government that buys *hundreds* of $10,000 MFPs. Money talks, MFP makers listen. The little offices that have only an MFP or two are probably not going to appreciate why their MFP needs a gig of RAM and a multi-GHz CPU yet still takes 6 minutes to boot up.
Now, I'll be the first to agree that the more you complicate the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the works. But I'm not a bean-counter or high-level manager, so nobody listens to me.
The thing that always made Descent stand out was the ability to move in the Z axis and control roll. This made it far more challenging and interesting, IMHO. I wish there were more games that broke out of the strafe-jump mold like Descent.
I bet his neighbor was upset.
On the contrary, there is plenty of law establishing and plenty of case law confirming the right to use deadly force in self defense (in the US).
Where are the diesel/electric hybrids? Why are we still dealing with gasoline?
Anyway, analysis of the remaining FAT may reveal some of your old filenames, but not the data in them.
Displacement also sells cars, and a 2-stroke of a comparable power output will have about half the displacement so you have a consumer education curve as well. Prices for 2-strokes would also be higher until you make a lot of them and economies of scale start to take effect. Mazda's Wankel ("rotary") engine has the same problem.
...as long as their ad results are clearly distinguishable from the real results. I don't have a problem with the ads of a different background color at the top or side... it's the ad results injected into the middle of the real results with only a faint horizontal line to separate them, that I find objectionable. What's worse is Google doesn't do it all the time, so they tend to catch people off guard.
It does have a nice feature called SVHS-ET though, which does wonders for picture quality -- even on a cheapie non-SVHS tape. SVHS-ET at EP speed looks at least as good as VHS at SP.
S-VHS might have gone somewhere if it had had more time before DVD came along and rendered it pointless.
Obviously we'd also need amendments to de-couple politics and money. Make lobbying, campaign donations etc, illegal. Any politician accepting so much as a gift card or flowers is automatically fired.
Letting a few laws expire from time to time is well worth the price of freedom. There will be a very very small number of laws so it's not like anything like murder or drunk driving will get lost in the shuffle or forgotten about, anyway.
* Except for constitutional amendments, and the number of those must also be limited.