Yes, but Emacs doesn't load modules you aren't using, so you never have to worry about the dangerous predators or the raw sewage unless you choose to deliberately activate them. (Does Emacs have dangerous predators and raw sewage? Probably. It has everything else.)
> Unfortunately, the radiation from Pu239 will keep > compromise any computational value of the device
Nothing a little depleted uranium shielding can't solve.
So yeah, between the depleted uranium and the plutonium and the C4 and the compressed hydrogen and the cobalt, what would otherwise be a handheld device is now approximately the size of a large hope chest. But that's a small price to pay for ensuring that your precious data cannot fall into enemy hands. So much more efficient than just encrypting everything.
No, actually, it uses AI to do a visual scan of the politician's face, in order to determine if they're lying. The main giveaway is that when politicians lie their lips move.
> Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes
It's called copyright law. The default state of affairs is that anything you write is protected, rights are reserved, and people need your permission to do certain things (mainly, to distribute copies, but making changes also qualifies).
If you want to _allow_ anyone to do those things, you either need to give them permission -- most commonly accomplished using a license -- or else go the full monty and voluntarily place your code in the public domain. Otherwise, the mere act of publishing your code e.g. on GitHub doesn't give anyone permission to do anything with it (other what is covered under fair-use doctrine). GitHub themselves, of course, presumably have implicit permission to do what you've asked of them in terms of publishing it on your behalf. But that doesn't transfer to anyone else.
> But when I can have a dozen xterms open on my screen > why on earth would I bother doing it all inside an editor?
You wouldn't, if the editor were just an editor.
However, when the other poster called Emacs "almost a complete work environment", that wasn't an exaggeration. If anything, that's an understatement. It's not for nothing that Emacs has been jokingly called an operating system. It has a good deal more functionality than some operating systems I've used. When an Emacs user says that Emacs is "almost complete", he doesn't mean that it's almost as complete as something else that exists. In the context of Emacs, "almost complete" means "I can think of one or two other features I might potentially want someday, but they're probably AI-complete."
Sure, you _could_ open a shell in an xterm, but it's much more convenient to open a shell inside the working environment that has all your working macros, all your custom commands, all your custom key bindings, sexp-based cursor navigation, automatic grouping-symbol matching, etc., ad infinitum.
Emacs is "an editor" in roughly the same sense that the Pacific Ocean is "a swimming pool". I mean, yes, people swim in the Pacific, and people use Emacs to edit text files. That's true, as far as it goes. It is not, however, a particularly good characterization of the thing.
It would be somewhat more accurate to say that Emacs is a highly customizable fully programmable interactive context-aware editing environment, but that's still a gross understatement, and it's not very succinct.
Emacs is Emacs. There isn't a name for the category it falls into, because it doesn't really have any competition (except for a handful of forks of Emacs itself, the most famous of which is XEmacs).
> The trouble here is that the U.S. is refusing to compensate > them for money lost on gambling, but the money is lost > because Americans can't really gamble online anymore
Wait, so have they _lost_ money, or are they merely no longer able to easily fleece stupid Americans for as much of _their_ money on an ongoing basis? There's a rather large difference. The $21 million figure would seem to point to the former, but your explanation the above quoted portion of your explanation would make more sense if it were the latter.
It's amazing. I expected it to make some difference, but it had MUCH more impact than I imagined possible. Apparently about 99.8% of page "load" time is actually not spent loading page content, but executing completely gratuitous client-side scripts, most of which you never even realized were there, because they don't do anything the user would ever notice much less care about.
Occasionally you will run into a site that actually doesn't work correctly with Javascript disabled, but this is the exception rather than the rule, and you can always tell NoScript to allow them on a case-by-case basis. *Most* of the javascript on the web, as near as I can tell, exists _purely_ for the purpose of increasing page load times. My tabset of pages that I load every morning before breakfast (including comics and some news sites) went from taking more than ten wallclock minutes to load down to more like five seconds with NoScript, and not a single one of those pages is missing any worthwhile content or meaningful functionality as a result, so near as I can tell.
Why stop with C4? Build the case out of Plutonium 239, surrounded by C4, surrounded in turn by compressed hydrogen, encased in a hard shell of cobalt. Five failed logins in a row triggers the detonator.
> I don't really understand why more manufacturers are not using flywheels instead, though...
That's logistically difficult within Earth's atmosphere. If you allow the flywheel chamber to have air in it, friction causes a rather major loss of potential energy (in the form of angular momentum) over time. You can get rid of air resistance by keeping the flywheel in (near) vacuum, which is what NASA does, but that would be rather annoying to maintain in a consumer product, particularly when you have to have a coupling mechanism that you use to extract energy from the flywheel, and that mechanism has to breach the chamber wall, and you want it to be as efficient as possible, but you don't want it to disrupt the vacuum.
The other thing is, to be efficient at all, the flywheel needs expensive super-low-friction bearings, which would add a nice chunk of change to the price of the vehicle. (In a household energy storage system you might be able to use a magnetic mounting, i.e., have the wheel not physically touch anything; but I can't imagine that working very well in a car, due to all the jostling and acceleration -- I mean turning and braking as well as speeding up.)
Consider also the impact the gyroscopic action of the flywheel would have on the driver's ability to steer.
Flywheel energy storage is great for satellites, but I'm not sure how well it would work in a car. My guess is, not nearly as well as in a satellite.
Protons are subatomic phenomena. As such, they don't actually have macroscopic-style physical attributes like size, shape, color, texture, orientation, etc. -- at least, not in quite the way you think of them when you think of macroscopic objects having those attributes. When we speak of the "size" of a proton, we're actually just talking about the distance (possibly the mean distance, possibly the minimum observed distance) at which they participate in certain kinds of interactions. _Which_ interactions we're talking about depends on context.
For example, although a hydrogen nucleus is exactly the same thing as a proton, if we call it a hydrogen nucleus we're thinking of it in a certain way, and so we might speak of the "size" of a hydrogen nucleus in terms of the distance at which it participates in the kinds of interactions that a nucleus (as a whole) participates in, e.g., electromagnetic interactions with an electron. However, when we speak of the "size" of a proton we're usually talking about the much smaller distances at which closer-range interactions take place in which a lone proton might participate, e.g., the strong interaction. That's going to be a different number. How can the same thing have two different sizes? Has the thing changed? No, the definition of what we mean by "size" has changed, and it isn't necessarily true that one or the other definition is more correct than the other, because the thing doesn't _have_ size in the sense we usually think of it.
Size in the sense we usually think of it is an emergent property that macroscopic objects appear to have when viewed at macroscopic scales, because although the distance at which the electrons in all of their atoms interact electromagnetically to repel the electrons of other atoms is not constant as such (the force required to push them closer together is inversely proportional to IIRC the square of the distance between them), the scale on which it varies is proportional to the size (again, that word) of an atom, and so when viewed at macroscopic scale it appears not to have any flexibility to it at all.
Macroscopic objects that do have a flexible size have that property because their molecular configuration is not rigid. The electromagnetic interaction that keeps two objects from occupying the same space at the same time applies to a sponge in just the same way as to cast iron, based on the amount of force required to push the two objects closer together at any given distance, given the amount of electromagnetic repulsion that has to be overcome. Technically, if you had two pieces of perfectly flat iron -- to the extent that a perfectly flat object could exist -- and set them next to one another and pushed, if you could watch the junction between them at a subatomic scale you would see the distance between them shrink as more force is applied and increase again as the force falls off. But when you view them at macroscopic scale you can't see that, because the distances involved are way below your threshold of perception. All you see is that when you slide them together they reach a certain point, touch, and cannot be moved any closer together at all, because the edges of the two objects appear to be right up against one another. In fact they don't actually touch at a subatomic scale, but you can't see that with the naked eye. This is why macroscopic objects can appear to have a very rigid shape and size. All of our human experience with size is based on this inherently macroscopic phenomenon, and so we tend to try to think of the "size" of subatomic things in those terms, but that's a mistake. Subatomic things don't have hundreds of millions of electron shells all lined up to create an apparently hard surface. Only macroscopic objects are like that. Only macroscopic objects *can* be like that.
A lot of the terminology commonly used in particle physics can be misleading, because words that also exist in standard non-jargon English are used with a completely different and in many cases largely unrelated mean
Alcatel-Lucent is a real company that provides real services. Thus they are not a patent troll under the most narrow definition (a company that exists for no other purpose than to buy up stupid patents and file lawsuits based on them).
As for Bell Labs, that name is historically important, but "owning Bell Labs" at this point basically just means having bought up some leftover intellectual property that is no longer commercially viable. (The fact that the current owner is doing new R&D under the Bell Labs name has basically nothing to do with the old AT&T Bell Labs intellectual property portfolio, which has been effectively vacuous since the BSD verdict in the early nineties.)
The thing is, this ruling in Newegg's favor didn't just invalidate Soverain's $2.5 million case against Newegg. By going for the validity jugular and winning, they managed to invalidate Soverain's patents and cost them the hundreds of thousands in settlements they otherwise would have had from all the big retailers who wouldn't have taken it to court. The defendants in all the other pending cases can now point to this verdict. (In layman's terms, the argument goes along the lines of "Soverain is suing us because they say we violated their shopping cart patents, but now that those have been ruled invalid, nothing meaningful can be accomplished by allowing this suit to continue. By not withdrawing it, they are now just wasting the court's time.")
In other words, Newegg killed Soverain's entire business plan with fire.
They aren't going to have to do that a thousand times. If they can manage it two or three times, and get nice big public stories about it featured in the news, future patent trolls will conveniently forget to sue Newegg in favor of going after everyone else and collecting settlements that don't endanger their existence.
> According to this, the average person in the US watches 4 hours of TV per day.
I suspect that may be a low figure; in particular, the overwhelming majority of TV watchers, if you ask them, will significantly underestimate how much they watch.
Even if it's an accurate average, I'm pretty sure the standard deviation is high...
> First of all, the previous statistic averages in people who don't own TVs at all.
All three of us? I doubt we have very much impact on the average.
However, there are quite a few people who spend so much time away from home that they barely ever have time to watch TV because they're basically never in the house except to sleep -- especially during the warm months. They may catch a couple of hours of TV a week, except for weeks when they're busy, in which case they don't. I would estimate that these people are significantly more numerous than TV non-owners, and so I would say they are likely to have much more impact on the average.
> Second, sometimes people leave the TV on when they're not watching it.
True. People routinely walk out of the room and leave the TV on. In my experience, a lot of people pretty much only turn it off when they are not home and during power outages. (In fact, I know one family that *doesn't* turn it off during power outages, because the TV is the most important reason why they have a generator. Of course there are also some people who leave it on when they're not home on the theory that it will deter burglary, which seems unlikely but whatever.)
> Third, often the same TV gets watched by multiple people.
Indeed. When one person isn't watching it (e.g., because he's at work), somebody else plops down in front of the thing.
I hope ALL retailers end up doing it. The former practice -- of raising prices for everyone whether they use credit cards or not in order to cover the fees the credit card company charges -- never should have been legal in the first place. The credit card companies should not be allowed to charge the retailers anything. The customers who benefit from the credit card service -- i.e. the card holders -- should pay all the costs of the credit card system, on their monthly bill.
And yes, I realize credit cards wouldn't be as popular as they are if things had been done that way. That would be a good thing.
I don't know about _forever_, but it has lasted since we got it (in the seventies), does not require batteries at all, is very usable for making phone calls, does not have reception problems like almost all cellphones, and comfortably reaches all the way from beside the ear to in front of the mouth. Oh, and it works when the power is out.
Color e-ink (or e-paper, same difference) is under development and far enough along for working demos. Admittedly, you can't actually buy such a thing yet AFAIK.
> I'm guessing their assumption might be 2 hours/day.
That would be a bizarre assumption. I've never met ANYBODY who uses a TV 2 hours a day. 12 hours a day, yes. 16 hours a day, sure. (More than that generally means being unemployed.)
2 hours a day? That's like smoking two cigarettes a day.
There are, of course, a very few people who smoke only on rare occasions for social reasons but go days at a time without smoking, just as there are a few people who have a TV in a cabinet somewhere that they get out once in a while, but these are the few rare individuals whose unusual body chemistry allows them to partake without becoming addicted. The overwhelming majority of the population can't do that.
> First, I am fairly certain the new leader > knows about Macroeconomics as he > was educated in the West.
So was Obama. Sometimes ideology prevents people from understanding things. (It doesn't always have to, of course. Clinton was ideologically liberal but understood economics rather well. He signed NAFTA on purpose and actively fought Congress to balance the budget.)
Admittedly, I can't claim to know what the new leader in North Korea understands, because he's so new he hasn't really had time to do much yet. Time will tell. But I can tell you for sure the late previous leader of North Korea did not understand macroeconomics.
> In order to liberalize policies he has > to appear to be a hard liner militarily.
Ancient Vulcan proverb?
> First, you have to understand the North Koreans > really do hate the U.S. with a passion.
Yeah, I kind of got that, but it doesn't necessarily imply that they understand us.
> NK leadership has to know full well they > are no threat to anyone besides SK.
I'm not at all sure they understand this. Hubris often prevents realization of such things. Saddam Hussein clearly didn't get it, and his country wasn't nearly as isolationist as the DPRK, nor were they as close to having nuclear capability.
> So why would they want to alienate China.
They would prefer not to, obviously. Chinese aid is one of the Kim family's main sources of income. The question is, can they _accurately_ estimate how far they can push without significantly alienating China?
> Let's say... NK woke up... surrender to SK > reunify our people and start making a better > life... Well, so what does China do?
Realistically, there are only two ways that could happen in the near future. One way would be if the Kim family either chose to push for reunification (which _theoretically_ could happen, e.g. if as you assert the new leader understands socioeconomics MUCH better than his forbears did, and if he were a more or less benevolent despot, which is somewhat unusual but not unheard-of). The other way (which is even less likely) would be if someone close to the Kim family (e.g. a top military leader) turned traitor and assassinated them and then pushed for reunification. Either way, this scenario is unlikely in the near future.
(The more distant future is, of course, harder to predict with any accuracy. Among other things, politics in China are visibly shifting, so it's difficult to predict what relations between China and North Korea will look like in a couple more generations.)
As for what China would do, well, they'd likely stop providing aid, but that wouldn't matter anymore. In the event of reunification, South Korea and/or her allies would provide whatever was needed. China would *want* to do more than this, but the Chinese government (at this point, having got rid of Mao) is not dumb. Stubborn sometimes, but not dumb. International political pressure would not allow China to directly intervene military in a completely internal and peaceful purely Korean affair.
> So, who can NK really use its nuclear weapons on.
Depends how you define "use". Realistically, they can't deploy them in an active mushroom cloud of physical destruction. (Whether they quite _realize_ this, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe they do, in which case the situation is actually rather stable. If they don't, it's primarily the North Korean government that is in danger as a result.)
> NK is threatening us, because...
Also partly because it sends the right message to their own people. Remember, they have internal propaganda to maintain, as well as international saber-rattling.
> if NK wanted to be come closer (absorbed?) > into China maybe they could.
That would significantly improve the situation of _almost_ everyone in North Korea, with the Kim family being a notable exc
> Thailand and Japan. They're the only non-European countries > that spring to mind that haven't been colonized by Europeans.
I think also Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, Korea (both halves, IIRC), and some of the really poor island countries in the Pacific.
I'm not sure whether there might also be a couple in northern Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa was thoroughly colonized by Europeans during the age of exploration; Egypt was colonized under Alexander, the Ptolemies, and eventually Caesar; and I think Rome took over some of the former Phoenician colonies after finally taking out Carthage; but I'm not sure about the rest of northern Africa.
Back to topic, I did a couple of Google Image searches, for the sake of comparison. You can see a nice image of the Lego set in the article, here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/9820517/Lego-accused-of-racism-with-Star-Wars-set.html Pictures of Hagia Sophia are easy to find, but here's one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%B0stanbul-Ayasofya.JPG And there's a picture of Jabba's Palace, from the movie, here: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jabba's_Palace
All three of them do have a big dome and at least one tower, but that's extremely generic. Anybody who has had an architecture appreciation class can name you a dozen buildings that have a big dome and at least one tower. If the criteria get more specific, it seems to me that the Lego set, while not a perfect match for Jabba's Palace in the movie, looks a LOT more like that than it does like Hagia Sophia.
Also, when did Hagia Sophia get converted into an Islamic mosque? I always thought it was an Eastern Orthodox building. (Cathedral? Worship Center? What does the Eastern Orthodox church call their buildings, anyway?)
> Losing China makes me all the more nervous of > the nature of the DPRK's behavior in the future.
If the point comes where there is an imminent danger that a nuclear weapon is about to be lobbed into a populated area and detonated, the US will stop playing politics and take preemptive military action.
> likely to switch from a temper tantruming baby, > to an animal backed into a corner.
It's possible to handle an animal that's backed into a corner without sustaining injury, if you have the right equipment and know what you are doing.
> If they launched something... at San Francisco,... > the Chinese, would tell them "you're on your own."
Very likely, yes.
If they launched a *Nuke* at San Francisco, China would actively participate in dismantling the DPRK.
> They have to know they wouldn't last 3 weeks > against a U.S. military onslaught.
I'm not sure exactly what the Kim family knows. If they had even a basic grasp of macroeconomics, for instance, they wouldn't be running the country the way they are. And economic differences are the main reason why they wouldn't have a prayer, militarily speaking, against a first-world power.
Isolationism always leads to economic stagnation, and people who grow up under it usually are not fully aware of the extent to which the world is passing them by. When we think of the development of nuclear weapons, we think of the WWII era, which for us in the first world seems like a very long time ago, technologically; but that's because we've lived all our lives around modern technology. living in isolation, you don't necessarily *notice* all the changes taking place in the rest of the world. Time slows down, and the WWII era doesn't seem so different from today. Yes, the Kim family knows about some advances that have been made. They know about the internet, for example, and they have at least a passing awareness that cell phones exist; but those are just specific examples of a much larger trend, a trend they very well might not be aware of at all. Like I said, if they did understand this stuff, it's unlikely that they would be running the country the way they are. I would lay odds ten to one that Kim does *not* realize that low-income six-year-olds around with hand-me-down cellphones over here, and even if he did find out this fact, he would not understand its socioeconomic significance.
Bring it around to warfare, we're so far beyond Hiroshima that we consider that kind of weapon primitive, and I would bet money that Kim doesn't understand this. Even as nukes go it was primitive (we developed H-bombs just a few years later, then submarine-launched nukes, and so on and so forth), and even the most advanced nuclear weapons have been thoroughly obsolete (as an indicator of real military power) for about a quarter of a century now. If we actually thought North Korea was considering launching a nuke at us, we would not respond with nukes of our own, because that would be clumsy and ineffective and old-fashioned and politically unpopular and have unnecessary civilian casualties, among other things. No, we would respond with much more precise and effective methods of warfare that have been developed in the intervening decades. We wouldn't do Shock and Awe the way we did in Iraq, obviously, because that was ten years ago, and limiting yourself to ten-year-old military technology isn't how you get to be the most powerful military on the planet. To you as a first-world citizen this is so obvious it probably wouldn't have occurred to you to even mention it; but to think that way you have to have a feel for how fast technology can develop, and you don't really get a feel for that when you live as a hermit, never leave your house, and barely ever receive any visitors.
> You'd be amazed how many people code depending > on the fact that sizeof(long) == sizeof(int)
C programmers, gah.
Unless you are writing something _inherently_ very low-level, like a device driver or boot loader or kernel, there is NO legitimate excuse for starting a new programming project in C at this point. (Maintaining old code is legitimate, of course. Sometimes you have to work with what you've got. Eventually it'll all have to be rewritten, of course, but that takes time, and it can't all be done immediately. When I say there's no legitimate excuse for using C for anything high level, I'm talking about starting entirely new codebases.)
In any decent, modern language, it does not matter how many bytes an integer is. You program under the assumption that you don't know or care whether an integer is four bytes or forty bytes. It's however many bytes it needs to be, based on considerations that are unknowable when you write the code, because they'll be determined at run time. What operating system will the program be running on? Who knows? Could be anything. Could well be something that isn't even written yet. What processor family is the program going to be run on? Who cares? Not me. If somebody wants to run the software on an ARM system, why should that bother me? I only care about the software. What will the display resolution be? Hah. Could be anything from a 120x120px wristwatch up to a 3200x1200 triple-monitor setup. The user will make the window whatever size they want it to be, and if it needs a scrollbar it'll have one. How much memory will be available? Impossible to say. If it starts running low, the user will hopefully get a warning from the OS, but that's none of the application's business. How big will the number that you're representing be? If you knew that when you wrote the software, you'd have used a constant instead of a variable. (Okay, yeah, enum types have knowable size at compile time. That's a special case. Most data types don't fit that mold.) How big does this buffer need to be, to hold what the user is going to type? Are you kidding me? The only reasonable answer for questions like that is "I don't know, and I don't care."
It was different back in the stone age, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men wore clothes made out of bear skins and drive sizes were measured in kilobytes or possibly megabytes and a system with one such drive was used by many people, all of whom were technical professionals and could reasonably be expected to read a manual. Back then, you could slip a sentence like "The foobaz string can be up to 255 characters long, including the terminating null character," and the people using the software might actually read that and know what it meant, at least potentially. But those days are gone, and they are not coming back.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but Emacs doesn't load modules you aren't using, so you never have to worry about the dangerous predators or the raw sewage unless you choose to deliberately activate them. (Does Emacs have dangerous predators and raw sewage? Probably. It has everything else.)
> Unfortunately, the radiation from Pu239 will keep
> compromise any computational value of the device
Nothing a little depleted uranium shielding can't solve.
So yeah, between the depleted uranium and the plutonium and the C4 and the compressed hydrogen and the cobalt, what would otherwise be a handheld device is now approximately the size of a large hope chest. But that's a small price to pay for ensuring that your precious data cannot fall into enemy hands. So much more efficient than just encrypting everything.
No, actually, it uses AI to do a visual scan of the politician's face, in order to determine if they're lying. The main giveaway is that when politicians lie their lips move.
> Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes
It's called copyright law. The default state of affairs is that anything you write is protected, rights are reserved, and people need your permission to do certain things (mainly, to distribute copies, but making changes also qualifies).
If you want to _allow_ anyone to do those things, you either need to give them permission -- most commonly accomplished using a license -- or else go the full monty and voluntarily place your code in the public domain. Otherwise, the mere act of publishing your code e.g. on GitHub doesn't give anyone permission to do anything with it (other what is covered under fair-use doctrine). GitHub themselves, of course, presumably have implicit permission to do what you've asked of them in terms of publishing it on your behalf. But that doesn't transfer to anyone else.
> As a vim user I naturally don't have to talk to a community
You should upgrade to vigor:
http://vigor.sourceforge.net/
It's a much more vigorous version of vi than vim. Pun intended.
> But when I can have a dozen xterms open on my screen
> why on earth would I bother doing it all inside an editor?
You wouldn't, if the editor were just an editor.
However, when the other poster called Emacs "almost a complete work environment", that wasn't an exaggeration. If anything, that's an understatement. It's not for nothing that Emacs has been jokingly called an operating system. It has a good deal more functionality than some operating systems I've used. When an Emacs user says that Emacs is "almost complete", he doesn't mean that it's almost as complete as something else that exists. In the context of Emacs, "almost complete" means "I can think of one or two other features I might potentially want someday, but they're probably AI-complete."
Sure, you _could_ open a shell in an xterm, but it's much more convenient to open a shell inside the working environment that has all your working macros, all your custom commands, all your custom key bindings, sexp-based cursor navigation, automatic grouping-symbol matching, etc., ad infinitum.
Emacs is "an editor" in roughly the same sense that the Pacific Ocean is "a swimming pool". I mean, yes, people swim in the Pacific, and people use Emacs to edit text files. That's true, as far as it goes. It is not, however, a particularly good characterization of the thing.
It would be somewhat more accurate to say that Emacs is a highly customizable fully programmable interactive context-aware editing environment, but that's still a gross understatement, and it's not very succinct.
Emacs is Emacs. There isn't a name for the category it falls into, because it doesn't really have any competition (except for a handful of forks of Emacs itself, the most famous of which is XEmacs).
> The trouble here is that the U.S. is refusing to compensate
> them for money lost on gambling, but the money is lost
> because Americans can't really gamble online anymore
Wait, so have they _lost_ money, or are they merely no longer able to easily fleece stupid Americans for as much of _their_ money on an ongoing basis? There's a rather large difference. The $21 million figure would seem to point to the former, but your explanation the above quoted portion of your explanation would make more sense if it were the latter.
> Hopefully this speeds up Firefox considerably.
You know what speeds up Firefox considerably?
Noscript.
It's amazing. I expected it to make some difference, but it had MUCH more impact than I imagined possible. Apparently about 99.8% of page "load" time is actually not spent loading page content, but executing completely gratuitous client-side scripts, most of which you never even realized were there, because they don't do anything the user would ever notice much less care about.
Occasionally you will run into a site that actually doesn't work correctly with Javascript disabled, but this is the exception rather than the rule, and you can always tell NoScript to allow them on a case-by-case basis. *Most* of the javascript on the web, as near as I can tell, exists _purely_ for the purpose of increasing page load times. My tabset of pages that I load every morning before breakfast (including comics and some news sites) went from taking more than ten wallclock minutes to load down to more like five seconds with NoScript, and not a single one of those pages is missing any worthwhile content or meaningful functionality as a result, so near as I can tell.
Why stop with C4? Build the case out of Plutonium 239, surrounded by C4, surrounded in turn by compressed hydrogen, encased in a hard shell of cobalt. Five failed logins in a row triggers the detonator.
> I don't really understand why more manufacturers are not using flywheels instead, though...
That's logistically difficult within Earth's atmosphere. If you allow the flywheel chamber to have air in it, friction causes a rather major loss of potential energy (in the form of angular momentum) over time. You can get rid of air resistance by keeping the flywheel in (near) vacuum, which is what NASA does, but that would be rather annoying to maintain in a consumer product, particularly when you have to have a coupling mechanism that you use to extract energy from the flywheel, and that mechanism has to breach the chamber wall, and you want it to be as efficient as possible, but you don't want it to disrupt the vacuum.
The other thing is, to be efficient at all, the flywheel needs expensive super-low-friction bearings, which would add a nice chunk of change to the price of the vehicle. (In a household energy storage system you might be able to use a magnetic mounting, i.e., have the wheel not physically touch anything; but I can't imagine that working very well in a car, due to all the jostling and acceleration -- I mean turning and braking as well as speeding up.)
Consider also the impact the gyroscopic action of the flywheel would have on the driver's ability to steer.
Flywheel energy storage is great for satellites, but I'm not sure how well it would work in a car. My guess is, not nearly as well as in a satellite.
Protons are subatomic phenomena. As such, they don't actually have macroscopic-style physical attributes like size, shape, color, texture, orientation, etc. -- at least, not in quite the way you think of them when you think of macroscopic objects having those attributes. When we speak of the "size" of a proton, we're actually just talking about the distance (possibly the mean distance, possibly the minimum observed distance) at which they participate in certain kinds of interactions. _Which_ interactions we're talking about depends on context.
For example, although a hydrogen nucleus is exactly the same thing as a proton, if we call it a hydrogen nucleus we're thinking of it in a certain way, and so we might speak of the "size" of a hydrogen nucleus in terms of the distance at which it participates in the kinds of interactions that a nucleus (as a whole) participates in, e.g., electromagnetic interactions with an electron. However, when we speak of the "size" of a proton we're usually talking about the much smaller distances at which closer-range interactions take place in which a lone proton might participate, e.g., the strong interaction. That's going to be a different number. How can the same thing have two different sizes? Has the thing changed? No, the definition of what we mean by "size" has changed, and it isn't necessarily true that one or the other definition is more correct than the other, because the thing doesn't _have_ size in the sense we usually think of it.
Size in the sense we usually think of it is an emergent property that macroscopic objects appear to have when viewed at macroscopic scales, because although the distance at which the electrons in all of their atoms interact electromagnetically to repel the electrons of other atoms is not constant as such (the force required to push them closer together is inversely proportional to IIRC the square of the distance between them), the scale on which it varies is proportional to the size (again, that word) of an atom, and so when viewed at macroscopic scale it appears not to have any flexibility to it at all.
Macroscopic objects that do have a flexible size have that property because their molecular configuration is not rigid. The electromagnetic interaction that keeps two objects from occupying the same space at the same time applies to a sponge in just the same way as to cast iron, based on the amount of force required to push the two objects closer together at any given distance, given the amount of electromagnetic repulsion that has to be overcome. Technically, if you had two pieces of perfectly flat iron -- to the extent that a perfectly flat object could exist -- and set them next to one another and pushed, if you could watch the junction between them at a subatomic scale you would see the distance between them shrink as more force is applied and increase again as the force falls off. But when you view them at macroscopic scale you can't see that, because the distances involved are way below your threshold of perception. All you see is that when you slide them together they reach a certain point, touch, and cannot be moved any closer together at all, because the edges of the two objects appear to be right up against one another. In fact they don't actually touch at a subatomic scale, but you can't see that with the naked eye. This is why macroscopic objects can appear to have a very rigid shape and size. All of our human experience with size is based on this inherently macroscopic phenomenon, and so we tend to try to think of the "size" of subatomic things in those terms, but that's a mistake. Subatomic things don't have hundreds of millions of electron shells all lined up to create an apparently hard surface. Only macroscopic objects are like that. Only macroscopic objects *can* be like that.
A lot of the terminology commonly used in particle physics can be misleading, because words that also exist in standard non-jargon English are used with a completely different and in many cases largely unrelated mean
Alcatel-Lucent is a real company that provides real services. Thus they are not a patent troll under the most narrow definition (a company that exists for no other purpose than to buy up stupid patents and file lawsuits based on them).
As for Bell Labs, that name is historically important, but "owning Bell Labs" at this point basically just means having bought up some leftover intellectual property that is no longer commercially viable. (The fact that the current owner is doing new R&D under the Bell Labs name has basically nothing to do with the old AT&T Bell Labs intellectual property portfolio, which has been effectively vacuous since the BSD verdict in the early nineties.)
The thing is, this ruling in Newegg's favor didn't just invalidate Soverain's $2.5 million case against Newegg. By going for the validity jugular and winning, they managed to invalidate Soverain's patents and cost them the hundreds of thousands in settlements they otherwise would have had from all the big retailers who wouldn't have taken it to court. The defendants in all the other pending cases can now point to this verdict. (In layman's terms, the argument goes along the lines of "Soverain is suing us because they say we violated their shopping cart patents, but now that those have been ruled invalid, nothing meaningful can be accomplished by allowing this suit to continue. By not withdrawing it, they are now just wasting the court's time.")
In other words, Newegg killed Soverain's entire business plan with fire.
They aren't going to have to do that a thousand times. If they can manage it two or three times, and get nice big public stories about it featured in the news, future patent trolls will conveniently forget to sue Newegg in favor of going after everyone else and collecting settlements that don't endanger their existence.
> According to this, the average person in the US watches 4 hours of TV per day.
I suspect that may be a low figure; in particular, the overwhelming majority of TV watchers, if you ask them, will significantly underestimate how much they watch.
Even if it's an accurate average, I'm pretty sure the standard deviation is high...
> First of all, the previous statistic averages in people who don't own TVs at all.
All three of us? I doubt we have very much impact on the average.
However, there are quite a few people who spend so much time away from home that they barely ever have time to watch TV because they're basically never in the house except to sleep -- especially during the warm months. They may catch a couple of hours of TV a week, except for weeks when they're busy, in which case they don't. I would estimate that these people are significantly more numerous than TV non-owners, and so I would say they are likely to have much more impact on the average.
> Second, sometimes people leave the TV on when they're not watching it.
True. People routinely walk out of the room and leave the TV on. In my experience, a lot of people pretty much only turn it off when they are not home and during power outages. (In fact, I know one family that *doesn't* turn it off during power outages, because the TV is the most important reason why they have a generator. Of course there are also some people who leave it on when they're not home on the theory that it will deter burglary, which seems unlikely but whatever.)
> Third, often the same TV gets watched by multiple people.
Indeed. When one person isn't watching it (e.g., because he's at work), somebody else plops down in front of the thing.
I hope ALL retailers end up doing it. The former practice -- of raising prices for everyone whether they use credit cards or not in order to cover the fees the credit card company charges -- never should have been legal in the first place. The credit card companies should not be allowed to charge the retailers anything. The customers who benefit from the credit card service -- i.e. the card holders -- should pay all the costs of the credit card system, on their monthly bill.
And yes, I realize credit cards wouldn't be as popular as they are if things had been done that way. That would be a good thing.
We've got a beige wall-mounted rotary phone.
I don't know about _forever_, but it has lasted since we got it (in the seventies), does not require batteries at all, is very usable for making phone calls, does not have reception problems like almost all cellphones, and comfortably reaches all the way from beside the ear to in front of the mouth. Oh, and it works when the power is out.
Color e-ink (or e-paper, same difference) is under development and far enough along for working demos. Admittedly, you can't actually buy such a thing yet AFAIK.
> I'm guessing their assumption might be 2 hours/day.
That would be a bizarre assumption. I've never met ANYBODY who uses a TV 2 hours a day. 12 hours a day, yes. 16 hours a day, sure. (More than that generally means being unemployed.)
2 hours a day? That's like smoking two cigarettes a day.
There are, of course, a very few people who smoke only on rare occasions for social reasons but go days at a time without smoking, just as there are a few people who have a TV in a cabinet somewhere that they get out once in a while, but these are the few rare individuals whose unusual body chemistry allows them to partake without becoming addicted. The overwhelming majority of the population can't do that.
> First, I am fairly certain the new leader
... NK woke up ... surrender to SK ... Well, so what does China do?
> knows about Macroeconomics as he
> was educated in the West.
So was Obama. Sometimes ideology prevents people from understanding things. (It doesn't always have to, of course. Clinton was ideologically liberal but understood economics rather well. He signed NAFTA on purpose and actively fought Congress to balance the budget.)
Admittedly, I can't claim to know what the new leader in North Korea understands, because he's so new he hasn't really had time to do much yet. Time will tell. But I can tell you for sure the late previous leader of North Korea did not understand macroeconomics.
> In order to liberalize policies he has
> to appear to be a hard liner militarily.
Ancient Vulcan proverb?
> First, you have to understand the North Koreans
> really do hate the U.S. with a passion.
Yeah, I kind of got that, but it doesn't necessarily imply that they understand us.
> NK leadership has to know full well they
> are no threat to anyone besides SK.
I'm not at all sure they understand this. Hubris often prevents realization of such things. Saddam Hussein clearly didn't get it, and his country wasn't nearly as isolationist as the DPRK, nor were they as close to having nuclear capability.
> So why would they want to alienate China.
They would prefer not to, obviously. Chinese aid is one of the Kim family's main sources of income. The question is, can they _accurately_ estimate how far they can push without significantly alienating China?
> Let's say
> reunify our people and start making a better
> life
Realistically, there are only two ways that could happen in the near future. One way would be if the Kim family either chose to push for reunification (which _theoretically_ could happen, e.g. if as you assert the new leader understands socioeconomics MUCH better than his forbears did, and if he were a more or less benevolent despot, which is somewhat unusual but not unheard-of). The other way (which is even less likely) would be if someone close to the Kim family (e.g. a top military leader) turned traitor and assassinated them and then pushed for reunification. Either way, this scenario is unlikely in the near future.
(The more distant future is, of course, harder to predict with any accuracy. Among other things, politics in China are visibly shifting, so it's difficult to predict what relations between China and North Korea will look like in a couple more generations.)
As for what China would do, well, they'd likely stop providing aid, but that wouldn't matter anymore. In the event of reunification, South Korea and/or her allies would provide whatever was needed. China would *want* to do more than this, but the Chinese government (at this point, having got rid of Mao) is not dumb. Stubborn sometimes, but not dumb. International political pressure would not allow China to directly intervene military in a completely internal and peaceful purely Korean affair.
> So, who can NK really use its nuclear weapons on.
Depends how you define "use". Realistically, they can't deploy them in an active mushroom cloud of physical destruction. (Whether they quite _realize_ this, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe they do, in which case the situation is actually rather stable. If they don't, it's primarily the North Korean government that is in danger as a result.)
> NK is threatening us, because...
Also partly because it sends the right message to their own people. Remember, they have internal propaganda to maintain, as well as international saber-rattling.
> if NK wanted to be come closer (absorbed?)
> into China maybe they could.
That would significantly improve the situation of _almost_ everyone in North Korea, with the Kim family being a notable exc
> Thailand and Japan. They're the only non-European countries
> that spring to mind that haven't been colonized by Europeans.
I think also Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, Korea (both halves, IIRC), and some of the really poor island countries in the Pacific.
I'm not sure whether there might also be a couple in northern Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa was thoroughly colonized by Europeans during the age of exploration; Egypt was colonized under Alexander, the Ptolemies, and eventually Caesar; and I think Rome took over some of the former Phoenician colonies after finally taking out Carthage; but I'm not sure about the rest of northern Africa.
Back to topic, I did a couple of Google Image searches, for the sake of comparison. You can see a nice image of the Lego set in the article, here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/9820517/Lego-accused-of-racism-with-Star-Wars-set.html
Pictures of Hagia Sophia are easy to find, but here's one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%B0stanbul-Ayasofya.JPG
And there's a picture of Jabba's Palace, from the movie, here:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jabba's_Palace
All three of them do have a big dome and at least one tower, but that's extremely generic. Anybody who has had an architecture appreciation class can name you a dozen buildings that have a big dome and at least one tower. If the criteria get more specific, it seems to me that the Lego set, while not a perfect match for Jabba's Palace in the movie, looks a LOT more like that than it does like Hagia Sophia.
Also, when did Hagia Sophia get converted into an Islamic mosque? I always thought it was an Eastern Orthodox building. (Cathedral? Worship Center? What does the Eastern Orthodox church call their buildings, anyway?)
You might have missed that the word "half" means something much more specific than "part". (Anatolia is MUCH larger than Thrace.)
> Losing China makes me all the more nervous of
> the nature of the DPRK's behavior in the future.
If the point comes where there is an imminent danger that a nuclear weapon is about to be lobbed into a populated area and detonated, the US will stop playing politics and take preemptive military action.
> likely to switch from a temper tantruming baby,
> to an animal backed into a corner.
It's possible to handle an animal that's backed into a corner without sustaining injury, if you have the right equipment and know what you are doing.
> If they launched something... at San Francisco, ...
> the Chinese, would tell them "you're on your own."
Very likely, yes.
If they launched a *Nuke* at San Francisco, China would actively participate in dismantling the DPRK.
> They have to know they wouldn't last 3 weeks
> against a U.S. military onslaught.
I'm not sure exactly what the Kim family knows. If they had even a basic grasp of macroeconomics, for instance, they wouldn't be running the country the way they are. And economic differences are the main reason why they wouldn't have a prayer, militarily speaking, against a first-world power.
Isolationism always leads to economic stagnation, and people who grow up under it usually are not fully aware of the extent to which the world is passing them by. When we think of the development of nuclear weapons, we think of the WWII era, which for us in the first world seems like a very long time ago, technologically; but that's because we've lived all our lives around modern technology. living in isolation, you don't necessarily *notice* all the changes taking place in the rest of the world. Time slows down, and the WWII era doesn't seem so different from today. Yes, the Kim family knows about some advances that have been made. They know about the internet, for example, and they have at least a passing awareness that cell phones exist; but those are just specific examples of a much larger trend, a trend they very well might not be aware of at all. Like I said, if they did understand this stuff, it's unlikely that they would be running the country the way they are. I would lay odds ten to one that Kim does *not* realize that low-income six-year-olds around with hand-me-down cellphones over here, and even if he did find out this fact, he would not understand its socioeconomic significance.
Bring it around to warfare, we're so far beyond Hiroshima that we consider that kind of weapon primitive, and I would bet money that Kim doesn't understand this. Even as nukes go it was primitive (we developed H-bombs just a few years later, then submarine-launched nukes, and so on and so forth), and even the most advanced nuclear weapons have been thoroughly obsolete (as an indicator of real military power) for about a quarter of a century now. If we actually thought North Korea was considering launching a nuke at us, we would not respond with nukes of our own, because that would be clumsy and ineffective and old-fashioned and politically unpopular and have unnecessary civilian casualties, among other things. No, we would respond with much more precise and effective methods of warfare that have been developed in the intervening decades. We wouldn't do Shock and Awe the way we did in Iraq, obviously, because that was ten years ago, and limiting yourself to ten-year-old military technology isn't how you get to be the most powerful military on the planet. To you as a first-world citizen this is so obvious it probably wouldn't have occurred to you to even mention it; but to think that way you have to have a feel for how fast technology can develop, and you don't really get a feel for that when you live as a hermit, never leave your house, and barely ever receive any visitors.
> You'd be amazed how many people code depending
> on the fact that sizeof(long) == sizeof(int)
C programmers, gah.
Unless you are writing something _inherently_ very low-level, like a device driver or boot loader or kernel, there is NO legitimate excuse for starting a new programming project in C at this point. (Maintaining old code is legitimate, of course. Sometimes you have to work with what you've got. Eventually it'll all have to be rewritten, of course, but that takes time, and it can't all be done immediately. When I say there's no legitimate excuse for using C for anything high level, I'm talking about starting entirely new codebases.)
In any decent, modern language, it does not matter how many bytes an integer is. You program under the assumption that you don't know or care whether an integer is four bytes or forty bytes. It's however many bytes it needs to be, based on considerations that are unknowable when you write the code, because they'll be determined at run time. What operating system will the program be running on? Who knows? Could be anything. Could well be something that isn't even written yet. What processor family is the program going to be run on? Who cares? Not me. If somebody wants to run the software on an ARM system, why should that bother me? I only care about the software. What will the display resolution be? Hah. Could be anything from a 120x120px wristwatch up to a 3200x1200 triple-monitor setup. The user will make the window whatever size they want it to be, and if it needs a scrollbar it'll have one. How much memory will be available? Impossible to say. If it starts running low, the user will hopefully get a warning from the OS, but that's none of the application's business. How big will the number that you're representing be? If you knew that when you wrote the software, you'd have used a constant instead of a variable. (Okay, yeah, enum types have knowable size at compile time. That's a special case. Most data types don't fit that mold.) How big does this buffer need to be, to hold what the user is going to type? Are you kidding me? The only reasonable answer for questions like that is "I don't know, and I don't care."
It was different back in the stone age, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men wore clothes made out of bear skins and drive sizes were measured in kilobytes or possibly megabytes and a system with one such drive was used by many people, all of whom were technical professionals and could reasonably be expected to read a manual. Back then, you could slip a sentence like "The foobaz string can be up to 255 characters long, including the terminating null character," and the people using the software might actually read that and know what it meant, at least potentially. But those days are gone, and they are not coming back.