In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD
My dad, a mechanical engineer, would probably take exception to that statement.
Ever since I was a kid, he's hated that program. Apparently a lot of the way it works is still based on the old (e.g. Apple IIe-era) versions, which don't make sense anymore.
His company uses SolidWorks, and I know there are a lot of other CAD packages out there.
"Of course they're baffled. They won't let anybody competent explain it to them. These guys never studied plasma fluid dynamics in school, and they figure that now they're too old to learn it."
"The reason they insist it has to be something spinning is that they have studied almost no plasma fluid dynamics, so they can't understand something blasting out radio, light, and x-rays that doesn't have a star in the middle of it."
etc etc
He's not a cut and paste troll, but he's posted enough similar things in the past that I thought the same thing as the GP when I read this one.
Do you mean pulsars? Your description reminds me of the history I read of their discovery, although the one I read said that some scientists thought they were artificially-created "cosmic beacons" until they were better understood.
But the damage will be greatly reduced, won't it? You'll still have all the hard radiation, EMP, and the force of whatever mass in the weapon isn't converted to energy, obviously. But I would think that the lack of an atmosphere would prevent most of the heat damage (poor conductivity), and eliminate most of the shockwave.
In the footage I've seen of nuclear tests, it looks like most of the physical damage comes from the high-speed shockwave travelling through the air. It's even greater if the bomb is detonated under water. To me this implies that greater medium density leads to more damage, lower medium density leads to less. Therefore in a vacuum, nuclear weapons would work much less effectively. Relatively speaking, of course.
If you are predisposed to cancer, then you should pay more for health insurance covering cancer treatment.
This is kind of a nice idea, but totally impractical to implement fairly. Think about cataloguing every possible ailment that someone can be predisposed too. Then figure out how much each of those costs to treat. Only they won't cost the same for everyone, so you have to figure out how much it will cost a particular person based on all the other factors.
In the end, it would just be another excuse for insurance companies to fuck over the people on their plans, and for both them and the medical industry to make more money. Every single change I've seen to medical insurance in my life has been towards that goal.
I'm willing to accept the theory that what you are predisposed to and what I am predisposed to will generally even out once you look at everything, and pay the same as you. Every once in awhile there will be an Accutane baby who also has Down's syndrome and a genetic predisposition to spontaneous combustion. But I don't believe that the bureaucracy involved to make it "fair" for the vast majority of us who are closer to average would be worth it.
but when it's pointed out they have other choises like voting for Libertarians
I think the Libertarians would be more successful if they limited their scope to human freedom, as opposed to corporate freedom. I don't vote for them because I don't believe in a free market. Just like the government needs strict limitations on its size and power, I think corporations do too.
Obviously I only speak for myself here. I fully support the right of private citizens to own firearms, I've fired them a few times, and eventually I'll get around to owning one myself. But actually holding a real gun gives me a sense of dread about the possibility for misuse, and a strong sense of responsibility to stay as far away from those misuses as possible.
As much as I hate the direction my country is taking, it is so far removed from Thomas Jefferson time that the idea of raising arms against the government is lunacy.
It would almost be worth sacrificing a (remote-controlled) giant cargo plane to hear that. If it hit the ribbon edge-on, I'm imagining an effect like two bows on opposite sides of a violin string. Only, you know, incredibly huge, unbelievably loud, having much more "giant fireball" content than a stringed instrument generally does, and otherwise totally sweet/awesome.
If you have a space elevator you can't have any satellites at an altitude lower than or equal to the height of the elevator, since eventually they will run into the elevator with rather unpleasant results.
The Earth isn't making complete rotations on two axes. So while there's a moving spot satellites will have to avoid, they could still be positioned to never intersect it. If they aren't in geosynchronous orbit and need to be somewhere the elevator might pass, they can be programmed to avoid it. If NORAD can keep tabs on all the bolts in orbit, I'm sure they can make sure nobody runs into a space elevator. In a worst-case scenario where there's a "dead" object that against all odds will actually hit the tiny ribbon, the people running the elevator should have plenty of advance notice to send a robotic craft and move it out of the way.
False. From UTexas RRR (and many of the "forward" parts of his books):
The word 'robotics' was first used in Runaround, a short story published in 1942, by Isaac Asimov (born Jan. 2, 1920, died Apr. 6, 1992). I, Robot, a collection of several of these stories, was published in 1950.
Informative? Dear moderators: stop modding things "informative" just because someone linked to a website that you're too lazy to read.
From the very page you linked to:
"The acclaimed Czech playwright Karel Capek (1890-1938) made the first use of the word 'robot', from the Czech word for forced labor or serf. Capek was reportedly several times a candidate for the Nobel prize for his works and very influential and prolific as a writer and playwright.
The use of the word Robot was introduced into his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which opened in Prague in January 1921."
Asimov being the first guy to stick "ics" on the end may make him the "father of the word 'robotics,'" but not the field. Even if we're talking about fictional visions of robots as intelligent mechanisms, Metropolis came out a lot earlier than 1942.
Computers were in their infancy; nothing more than a novelty that would barely fir into a room, much less a human-sized head.
Wow, he predicted that a particular technology would get smaller over time. Is he also the "father of nuclear reactors" because someone in the Foundation novels has one the size of an acorn?
Just out of curiosity, how rich do you have to be in order to be "incredibly rich?"
Rich enough that you get bored with snorting cocaine through thousand dollar bills off the breasts of three call girls who are lying parallel on the bed in your personal zeppelin, which is floating far above a battlefield where armed men fight and die for your personal amusement.
Just to let you know, Seattle has an excellent bus system.
Excellent compared to nothing at all, maybe.
I live on Queen Anne. If I want to go to the U District, it takes an *hour* by bus, or ten minutes by car.
I work near REI in downtown. The bus to there only runs every 30 minutes, is frequently late, and is so slow that during rush-hour traffic it's actually faster for me to walk.
Years ago I dated a girl who lived in Bellevue, and it took me almost two hours to get there on the bus. TWO HOURS. I could be in CANADA if I drove for that long. The county made that even worse when they "decentralized" suburban routes, because now I couldn't even take a single bus there. It would be at least one, and possibly two transfers.
Which brings me to my next point - transferring buses is a nightmare. None of the schedules match up, so when I took the bus I'd end up waiting 10-20 minutes every time I'd transfer. The stupidest part is that the bus drivers REFUSE to wait for e.g. people getting off a ferry. So when I lived on Vashon Island, I would get off the ferry, see the #54 at the bus stop across the street, see it drive off, then wait half an hour for the next one. Conversely, ferries refuse to wait for buses (unless they're the special commuter buses that run during rush hour), so if the #54 going *to* the ferry had to let someone in a wheelchair off with the ludicrously slow and loud elevator, everybody on the bus would miss the ferry.
The worst part was when the entire system got cut back when one of Tim Eyman's initiaves passed. You used to be able to take most of the buses in the city 24 hours a day. When I was in high school, I used them at all hours to get around. Now, many of them stop running around midnight. If you want to go out on a Friday or Saturday, be ready to take a cab home thanks to that.
Finally, Seattle's buses are filthy. Any of them older than a few years smell like an unwashed homeless man, and if they're older than a decade they will probably smell like piss too. I ran a kleenex along one of the handrails in one years ago, and it turned black.
I got a car last year, and I've never looked back. It *is* possible to have good public transportation - Vancouver has it, and I had good experiences when I visited SF and Portland - but Seattle doesn't.
It seems that SOP for light rail systems is to put it up for a vote every year until it finally gets approved. I've never figured out who's behind it, but no matter how badly it gets trounced, it's always back on the ballot next time.
That's not the case here. It's been approved every time. I'm even paying something like $200 extra every year for my car license tabs to fund it, because I live in the city.
"Each time, the vote did not take into account at all whether it is actually feasible from a financial point of view".
Even a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy should have been able to build the monorail with the ridiculously high tax they put on car licenses for Seattle residents. And, of course, even if this project is dead somehow I doubt I will get those hundreds of dollars back.
I have to wonder one thing. Isn't it possible that SM really is abuse? I mean just because a person agrees to it does that stop it from being abusive? If so then a lot of battered spouses are not abused? The do not press charges and stay with the person battering them. Could it be that someone that likes being whipped has mental issues and their consent it not valid?
While I'm sure it sometimes qualifies as abuse, most of the people in that scene really do enjoy it. I am most definitely NOT a part of it, but I know people who are. This is the real world. You can't make it 100% safe for everybody, even if you take away the rights of the people who genuinely wanted to involved in it.
In America today, we don't force the majority view of what's "normal" on anyone unless they are actively in danger of killing themselves or someone else. I think maybe we've gone a little too far with that, because there are legitimate, serious psychological disorders out there where the symptoms include not wanting treatment until the person has actually been on it for awhile. But I also think it's better to err on the side of caution and not stifle people who *are* just "a little different."
Personally, I find BDSM, piss/shit fetishes, and so on incredibly vile. But it's not my business what consenting adults do to each other*, or if someone wants to jack off to pictures of them doing it.
* There are some things that I would consider de facto evidence of a psychological disorder, like people who ask others to actually kill them, or amputate body parts, or whatever. I'm looking at you, Eunuch. I am ambivalent about this, because a law that says "adults can do whatever they want to each other barring permanent disfigurement or death" could include things like piercings and tattoos depending on who was interpreting it.
Though police could easily have determined that this guy wasn't a pirate, they were probably right for not taking a chance.
Pirates are easier to detect than witches. You just bring in a ninja, and see if they immediately try and annihilate each other in a burst of pure energy.
PS: The ghosts of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini are laughing at the ghost of Churchill.
Right or wrong, there is no doubt that "random selection" has become a euphemism for racial profiling.
My experience is that it's not necessarily racial profiling, so much as whoever-the-agent-thinks-looks-suspicious profiling. For some of them, that is race, but often it's just whoever looks unusual and/or poor. In my experience, this tends to randomize whether or not I'll get hassled at all pretty effectively.
I am a US citizen, but I went to university in Canada for three years, so I have a good chunk of experience going over the border.
Taking Greyhound is a good way to fall into the "poor" category, even if you're not. Every time my dad took Greyhound to visit me, they would do a bunch of extensive searches. I took the Amtrak bus instead (because it was cleaner, and maybe $5 more for a ticket), and I don't think I was ever searched - including the time I had a 4 foot long duffelbag full of hard cider clanking around in it on my back.
The only time I saw someone non-white get searched on Amtrak was a Chinese lady (as in a citizen of China) who not only didn't speak English and didn't have a travel visa, but her only piece of "ID" was a letter from the US government explicitly DENYING her permission to enter the country.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do they insist on using news.com.com
Probably so they can share cookies between all of the sites they own, since they're all tied to com.com.
Psst. The Smithsonian has an Enterprise model (from TOS) on display too.
In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD
My dad, a mechanical engineer, would probably take exception to that statement.
Ever since I was a kid, he's hated that program. Apparently a lot of the way it works is still based on the old (e.g. Apple IIe-era) versions, which don't make sense anymore.
His company uses SolidWorks, and I know there are a lot of other CAD packages out there.
You can take an AM radio receiver from Asia, move to Europe, and listen to AM radio there.
Are you sure about that?
When I visited Japan, my Walkman's radio was useless because the lowest channel it could tune to was above the highest used there.
However, don't hate on Nintendo because they're doing something new and different.
Personally I'm "hating on" Nintendo because they're doing something that's been tried for decades and has failed every single time.
Searching Google for phrases from that post didn't turn up ANY hits, so it doesn't seem to be a cut-and-paste troll.
Subject: Cracks me up (31 August 2005)
"Of course they're baffled. They won't let anybody competent explain it to them. These guys never studied plasma fluid dynamics in school, and they figure that now they're too old to learn it."
Subject: Re:Galaxies must be a lot more dynamic than I thou (3 September 2005)
"The reason they insist it has to be something spinning is that they have studied almost no plasma fluid dynamics, so they can't understand something blasting out radio, light, and x-rays that doesn't have a star in the middle of it."
etc etc
He's not a cut and paste troll, but he's posted enough similar things in the past that I thought the same thing as the GP when I read this one.
Do you mean pulsars? Your description reminds me of the history I read of their discovery, although the one I read said that some scientists thought they were artificially-created "cosmic beacons" until they were better understood.
Shouldn't that be "domizzy"?
Ah, you're right. For some reason I got it in my head that the idea under discussion was for the nuke to explode at the surface level.
Nuclear bombs will work fine in a vacuum.
But the damage will be greatly reduced, won't it? You'll still have all the hard radiation, EMP, and the force of whatever mass in the weapon isn't converted to energy, obviously. But I would think that the lack of an atmosphere would prevent most of the heat damage (poor conductivity), and eliminate most of the shockwave.
In the footage I've seen of nuclear tests, it looks like most of the physical damage comes from the high-speed shockwave travelling through the air. It's even greater if the bomb is detonated under water. To me this implies that greater medium density leads to more damage, lower medium density leads to less. Therefore in a vacuum, nuclear weapons would work much less effectively. Relatively speaking, of course.
My first instinct was to try to find a secret code in the capitalized letters, but that didn't work out.
Jam session.
But yes, that was my first instinct too.
If you are predisposed to cancer, then you should pay more for health insurance covering cancer treatment.
This is kind of a nice idea, but totally impractical to implement fairly. Think about cataloguing every possible ailment that someone can be predisposed too. Then figure out how much each of those costs to treat. Only they won't cost the same for everyone, so you have to figure out how much it will cost a particular person based on all the other factors.
In the end, it would just be another excuse for insurance companies to fuck over the people on their plans, and for both them and the medical industry to make more money. Every single change I've seen to medical insurance in my life has been towards that goal.
I'm willing to accept the theory that what you are predisposed to and what I am predisposed to will generally even out once you look at everything, and pay the same as you. Every once in awhile there will be an Accutane baby who also has Down's syndrome and a genetic predisposition to spontaneous combustion. But I don't believe that the bureaucracy involved to make it "fair" for the vast majority of us who are closer to average would be worth it.
but when it's pointed out they have other choises like voting for Libertarians
I think the Libertarians would be more successful if they limited their scope to human freedom, as opposed to corporate freedom. I don't vote for them because I don't believe in a free market. Just like the government needs strict limitations on its size and power, I think corporations do too.
Obviously I only speak for myself here. I fully support the right of private citizens to own firearms, I've fired them a few times, and eventually I'll get around to owning one myself. But actually holding a real gun gives me a sense of dread about the possibility for misuse, and a strong sense of responsibility to stay as far away from those misuses as possible.
As much as I hate the direction my country is taking, it is so far removed from Thomas Jefferson time that the idea of raising arms against the government is lunacy.
But the irony of the situation is that the most recent President like him is actually George Bush.
You are making baby Je^H^H^H^H^H^H^H one of the branches on my family tree cry. Um, bleed sap, I guess. Sad, sad sap of misery. Please stop.
It would almost be worth sacrificing a (remote-controlled) giant cargo plane to hear that. If it hit the ribbon edge-on, I'm imagining an effect like two bows on opposite sides of a violin string. Only, you know, incredibly huge, unbelievably loud, having much more "giant fireball" content than a stringed instrument generally does, and otherwise totally sweet/awesome.
If you have a space elevator you can't have any satellites at an altitude lower than or equal to the height of the elevator, since eventually they will run into the elevator with rather unpleasant results.
The Earth isn't making complete rotations on two axes. So while there's a moving spot satellites will have to avoid, they could still be positioned to never intersect it. If they aren't in geosynchronous orbit and need to be somewhere the elevator might pass, they can be programmed to avoid it. If NORAD can keep tabs on all the bolts in orbit, I'm sure they can make sure nobody runs into a space elevator. In a worst-case scenario where there's a "dead" object that against all odds will actually hit the tiny ribbon, the people running the elevator should have plenty of advance notice to send a robotic craft and move it out of the way.
False. From UTexas RRR (and many of the "forward" parts of his books):
The word 'robotics' was first used in Runaround, a short story published in 1942, by Isaac Asimov (born Jan. 2, 1920, died Apr. 6, 1992). I, Robot, a collection of several of these stories, was published in 1950.
Informative? Dear moderators: stop modding things "informative" just because someone linked to a website that you're too lazy to read.
From the very page you linked to:
"The acclaimed Czech playwright Karel Capek (1890-1938) made the first use of the word 'robot', from the Czech word for forced labor or serf. Capek was reportedly several times a candidate for the Nobel prize for his works and very influential and prolific as a writer and playwright.
The use of the word Robot was introduced into his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which opened in Prague in January 1921."
Asimov being the first guy to stick "ics" on the end may make him the "father of the word 'robotics,'" but not the field. Even if we're talking about fictional visions of robots as intelligent mechanisms, Metropolis came out a lot earlier than 1942.
Computers were in their infancy; nothing more than a novelty that would barely fir into a room, much less a human-sized head.
Wow, he predicted that a particular technology would get smaller over time. Is he also the "father of nuclear reactors" because someone in the Foundation novels has one the size of an acorn?
Just out of curiosity, how rich do you have to be in order to be "incredibly rich?"
Rich enough that you get bored with snorting cocaine through thousand dollar bills off the breasts of three call girls who are lying parallel on the bed in your personal zeppelin, which is floating far above a battlefield where armed men fight and die for your personal amusement.
Just to let you know, Seattle has an excellent bus system.
Excellent compared to nothing at all, maybe.
I live on Queen Anne. If I want to go to the U District, it takes an *hour* by bus, or ten minutes by car.
I work near REI in downtown. The bus to there only runs every 30 minutes, is frequently late, and is so slow that during rush-hour traffic it's actually faster for me to walk.
Years ago I dated a girl who lived in Bellevue, and it took me almost two hours to get there on the bus. TWO HOURS. I could be in CANADA if I drove for that long. The county made that even worse when they "decentralized" suburban routes, because now I couldn't even take a single bus there. It would be at least one, and possibly two transfers.
Which brings me to my next point - transferring buses is a nightmare. None of the schedules match up, so when I took the bus I'd end up waiting 10-20 minutes every time I'd transfer. The stupidest part is that the bus drivers REFUSE to wait for e.g. people getting off a ferry. So when I lived on Vashon Island, I would get off the ferry, see the #54 at the bus stop across the street, see it drive off, then wait half an hour for the next one. Conversely, ferries refuse to wait for buses (unless they're the special commuter buses that run during rush hour), so if the #54 going *to* the ferry had to let someone in a wheelchair off with the ludicrously slow and loud elevator, everybody on the bus would miss the ferry.
The worst part was when the entire system got cut back when one of Tim Eyman's initiaves passed. You used to be able to take most of the buses in the city 24 hours a day. When I was in high school, I used them at all hours to get around. Now, many of them stop running around midnight. If you want to go out on a Friday or Saturday, be ready to take a cab home thanks to that.
Finally, Seattle's buses are filthy. Any of them older than a few years smell like an unwashed homeless man, and if they're older than a decade they will probably smell like piss too. I ran a kleenex along one of the handrails in one years ago, and it turned black.
I got a car last year, and I've never looked back. It *is* possible to have good public transportation - Vancouver has it, and I had good experiences when I visited SF and Portland - but Seattle doesn't.
It seems that SOP for light rail systems is to put it up for a vote every year until it finally gets approved. I've never figured out who's behind it, but no matter how badly it gets trounced, it's always back on the ballot next time.
That's not the case here. It's been approved every time. I'm even paying something like $200 extra every year for my car license tabs to fund it, because I live in the city.
"Each time, the vote did not take into account at all whether it is actually feasible from a financial point of view".
Even a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy should have been able to build the monorail with the ridiculously high tax they put on car licenses for Seattle residents. And, of course, even if this project is dead somehow I doubt I will get those hundreds of dollars back.
I have to wonder one thing. Isn't it possible that SM really is abuse? I mean just because a person agrees to it does that stop it from being abusive? If so then a lot of battered spouses are not abused? The do not press charges and stay with the person battering them. Could it be that someone that likes being whipped has mental issues and their consent it not valid?
While I'm sure it sometimes qualifies as abuse, most of the people in that scene really do enjoy it. I am most definitely NOT a part of it, but I know people who are. This is the real world. You can't make it 100% safe for everybody, even if you take away the rights of the people who genuinely wanted to involved in it.
In America today, we don't force the majority view of what's "normal" on anyone unless they are actively in danger of killing themselves or someone else. I think maybe we've gone a little too far with that, because there are legitimate, serious psychological disorders out there where the symptoms include not wanting treatment until the person has actually been on it for awhile. But I also think it's better to err on the side of caution and not stifle people who *are* just "a little different."
Personally, I find BDSM, piss/shit fetishes, and so on incredibly vile. But it's not my business what consenting adults do to each other*, or if someone wants to jack off to pictures of them doing it.
* There are some things that I would consider de facto evidence of a psychological disorder, like people who ask others to actually kill them, or amputate body parts, or whatever. I'm looking at you, Eunuch. I am ambivalent about this, because a law that says "adults can do whatever they want to each other barring permanent disfigurement or death" could include things like piercings and tattoos depending on who was interpreting it.
Though police could easily have determined that this guy wasn't a pirate, they were probably right for not taking a chance.
Pirates are easier to detect than witches. You just bring in a ninja, and see if they immediately try and annihilate each other in a burst of pure energy.
PS: The ghosts of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini are laughing at the ghost of Churchill.
Right or wrong, there is no doubt that "random selection" has become a euphemism for racial profiling.
My experience is that it's not necessarily racial profiling, so much as whoever-the-agent-thinks-looks-suspicious profiling. For some of them, that is race, but often it's just whoever looks unusual and/or poor. In my experience, this tends to randomize whether or not I'll get hassled at all pretty effectively.
I am a US citizen, but I went to university in Canada for three years, so I have a good chunk of experience going over the border.
Taking Greyhound is a good way to fall into the "poor" category, even if you're not. Every time my dad took Greyhound to visit me, they would do a bunch of extensive searches. I took the Amtrak bus instead (because it was cleaner, and maybe $5 more for a ticket), and I don't think I was ever searched - including the time I had a 4 foot long duffelbag full of hard cider clanking around in it on my back.
The only time I saw someone non-white get searched on Amtrak was a Chinese lady (as in a citizen of China) who not only didn't speak English and didn't have a travel visa, but her only piece of "ID" was a letter from the US government explicitly DENYING her permission to enter the country.