I have 3 20" monitors, and they're used entirely to display data.
And I just code. Seems perfectly reasonable that someone in charge of military planning might have a good use for lots of screen real estate - like battlefield maps, for example.
The military brass has a lot more stuff to get done on their flights than a family flying to Disney world.
The pods are not about comfort, they're about productivity. Although productivity does go up with comfort - I get a lot more work done in my office than I do on my laptop on a plane.
We're talking about high-level military executives here. Guys who have to make Really Big Decisions.
Now let's say you have one of these Generals in Washington, and they need to go to Iraq.
How do you get them there?
Do they fly commercial? Probably not very regular commercial service from DC to Baghdad.
So you fly them military.
Now, do you fly them in the jump seat of a cargo plane?
That might work for your average soldier, but do you really want the guy in command of all your forces arriving somewhere absolutely tired? Do you want to provide them with a work area for the 12-24 hours they're going to be in the air?
Regular troops have the luxary of not having to go straight from getting off the plane to directly into the battlefield. Generals are high-level decision-making executives who have to be effective all the time.
Capsules give those personnel a work-area where they can be productive on planes, and a sleep area so that when they do get wherever they're going, they're not running on a day of no or crappy sleep. There's a reason that in the commercial sector businesses pay thousands of dollars for business class seats that employees have a chance to sleep in isntead of hundreds of dollars on a coach seat. If they're flying their staff to someplace, it's important, and they don't want their staff operating on poor rest when they arrive.
So, what makes more sense: Spending millions of dollars on aircraft for moving around top military personnel, or spending tens or hundreds of thousands on some pods that can convert any standard-issue cargo plane into a flying office?
Give the guy in charge of keeping 150,000 people in Iraq alive a bed and a desk when he's got to spend 20 hours in the air. That's not a waste of money. And it sounds like building pods might actually be the least expensive way to provide those facilities.
5th amendment doesn't protect you there. It only prevents you from incriminating yourself - it doesn't prevent evidence from your GPS being used. Especially if you introduce evidence from your GPS unit as a defense.
...the #1 rule about creating an anonymous email account is don't use your real name. That's why I sign up for all of my anonymous email accounts using the name Edward Kramer.
Because the bill passed, while not a good bill, is STILL better than the present law. Obama, and others, tried to strip the immunity. It didn't work. So given the choice between maintaining the status quo (worse) or accepting that the telecom companies have bought out a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Obama voted for the bill so AT LEAST executive power is restrained a bit more.
Obama chose 'something' over 'nothing'.
The immunity is also not absolute, and if/when Obama is President, hopefully the issue can be revisited when a Bush veto doesn't have to be overcome (which is a mere 6 months from now).
There is no career/business reason for an American engineer to learn a foreign language, ESPECIALLY if you're already in college and don't know one. You would be far better off spending that time learning more engineering, or taking business classes.
Basically anyone you're going to run into in Engineering is going to know English better than you're going to know whatever it is you take for a few semesters in college.
Now, that's not to say learning a foreign language might not be fun, or a good way to balance out your college experience, or have some classes with real girls in them, but in terms of your engineering career, foreign language is going to have pretty much no payoff.
Caveat: If you are going to be a freshman and want to study a language seriously for four semesters, I would recommend picking one up and studying abroad for your junior year. I lived in Germany for a year after learning German in high school. An exchange program is one of the few opportunities you'll have to be outside the country for an extended period of time. And my German comes in very handy when going to Oktoberfest for vacation.
But, it's been utterly useless as far as the engineering career goes.
The Pros will still win, because the Pros have more information than the computer, if the computer is always playing optimally.
That's what makes the Pros pros. People who play mathematically optimum poker lose, because they are ignoring the information that is important: What cards does the opponent have?
In fact, I'd wager (hah!) that a computer playing mathematically optimum poker is at a disadvantage, as it makes it much easier for a Pro to determine what cards the computer has.
Agree, but this was about a media question. If you're going off-site, get two external drives, back up, put external drive at other location, then back up to the 2nd drive and switch them. Repeat as necessary.
That's like my car dealer charging me $25,000 for a bag of steaming shit. When I say I don't want a bag of steaming shit, he offers to sell me a bag of steaming shit and a new car for $25,500, because, after all, I do get the car AND the steaming shit.
Or, I can develop my own software, and maintain my competitive advantage over my competitor.
Anyone who produces products has to decide what is more valuable - being able to use free software from the community, or being able to keep your software secret. If all you are going to add to the software is something that anyone else could create without much effort (i.e., software is not your key differentiator) then open source is the way to go.
But if you're going to make a massive improvement to whatever software you might take, something that is going to cost you a lot of money to develop (and would thus cost a competitor lots of money to develop), it makes the most sense to keep it to yourself.
Put more simply, a product that is 90% open source software from the community and 10% improvement is probably best released as open software - you get 90% for the cost of 10%. But a product that would be 10% software from the community and 90% software you develop yourself, it makes more sense to also redo the 10%. Trading away 90% for 10% would just be a bad business decision.
The number of times I acquire ring tones a day/week/year is pretty close to zero. I buy 2-3 ring tones for a phone. That's it. It's not worth the hassle getting the music on the phone from another source to save five bucks once every 2 years.
Actually, the earth is pretty big - you'd have only a 0.0246% of being within 200km of someone, counting water. Get rid of water and you get to around 0.075%.
but when you have to roll this for 200 cities, also chosen by a 1d6 roll, you have two dies being rolled 200 times, and you want to know how many times both dies have the same value
And you do realize that if you throw two dice, there are 6 results out of 36 possible where the dice come up with the same number...
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I have 3 20" monitors, and they're used entirely to display data.
And I just code. Seems perfectly reasonable that someone in charge of military planning might have a good use for lots of screen real estate - like battlefield maps, for example.
The military brass has a lot more stuff to get done on their flights than a family flying to Disney world.
The pods are not about comfort, they're about productivity. Although productivity does go up with comfort - I get a lot more work done in my office than I do on my laptop on a plane.
We're talking about high-level military executives here. Guys who have to make Really Big Decisions.
Now let's say you have one of these Generals in Washington, and they need to go to Iraq.
How do you get them there?
Do they fly commercial? Probably not very regular commercial service from DC to Baghdad.
So you fly them military.
Now, do you fly them in the jump seat of a cargo plane?
That might work for your average soldier, but do you really want the guy in command of all your forces arriving somewhere absolutely tired? Do you want to provide them with a work area for the 12-24 hours they're going to be in the air?
Regular troops have the luxary of not having to go straight from getting off the plane to directly into the battlefield. Generals are high-level decision-making executives who have to be effective all the time.
Capsules give those personnel a work-area where they can be productive on planes, and a sleep area so that when they do get wherever they're going, they're not running on a day of no or crappy sleep. There's a reason that in the commercial sector businesses pay thousands of dollars for business class seats that employees have a chance to sleep in isntead of hundreds of dollars on a coach seat. If they're flying their staff to someplace, it's important, and they don't want their staff operating on poor rest when they arrive.
So, what makes more sense: Spending millions of dollars on aircraft for moving around top military personnel, or spending tens or hundreds of thousands on some pods that can convert any standard-issue cargo plane into a flying office?
Give the guy in charge of keeping 150,000 people in Iraq alive a bed and a desk when he's got to spend 20 hours in the air. That's not a waste of money. And it sounds like building pods might actually be the least expensive way to provide those facilities.
By that logic, we should dramatically increase the budget of the Department of Window Breaking.
Or the Department of Hole Digging and Filling.
Money that gets spent locally - but for which we get no benefit.
5th amendment doesn't protect you there. It only prevents you from incriminating yourself - it doesn't prevent evidence from your GPS being used. Especially if you introduce evidence from your GPS unit as a defense.
...the #1 rule about creating an anonymous email account is don't use your real name. That's why I sign up for all of my anonymous email accounts using the name Edward Kramer.
Why not vote against it?
Because the bill passed, while not a good bill, is STILL better than the present law. Obama, and others, tried to strip the immunity. It didn't work. So given the choice between maintaining the status quo (worse) or accepting that the telecom companies have bought out a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Obama voted for the bill so AT LEAST executive power is restrained a bit more.
Obama chose 'something' over 'nothing'.
The immunity is also not absolute, and if/when Obama is President, hopefully the issue can be revisited when a Bush veto doesn't have to be overcome (which is a mere 6 months from now).
There is no career/business reason for an American engineer to learn a foreign language, ESPECIALLY if you're already in college and don't know one. You would be far better off spending that time learning more engineering, or taking business classes.
Basically anyone you're going to run into in Engineering is going to know English better than you're going to know whatever it is you take for a few semesters in college.
Now, that's not to say learning a foreign language might not be fun, or a good way to balance out your college experience, or have some classes with real girls in them, but in terms of your engineering career, foreign language is going to have pretty much no payoff.
Caveat: If you are going to be a freshman and want to study a language seriously for four semesters, I would recommend picking one up and studying abroad for your junior year. I lived in Germany for a year after learning German in high school. An exchange program is one of the few opportunities you'll have to be outside the country for an extended period of time. And my German comes in very handy when going to Oktoberfest for vacation.
But, it's been utterly useless as far as the engineering career goes.
The Pros will still win, because the Pros have more information than the computer, if the computer is always playing optimally.
That's what makes the Pros pros. People who play mathematically optimum poker lose, because they are ignoring the information that is important: What cards does the opponent have?
In fact, I'd wager (hah!) that a computer playing mathematically optimum poker is at a disadvantage, as it makes it much easier for a Pro to determine what cards the computer has.
Actually, WiMax is intended for one kilometer
1 kilometer = 0.62 miles
That's a pretty big half mile.
You do realize that a half mile is pretty far, right?
And what is the comparative cost of putting up a tower that covers every house within a half mile and running wires to every house within a half mile?
WiMax infrastructure could very well be cheaper to provide than wired infrastructure.
The real problem WiMax has is that the wired infrastructure is already there. They're 10 years too late.
Agree, but this was about a media question. If you're going off-site, get two external drives, back up, put external drive at other location, then back up to the 2nd drive and switch them. Repeat as necessary.
Yes, it was the parent poster's assertion that it 'doesn't have to be complicated' I was objecting to. It *IS* complicated.
Here's the real solution:
Store it on your computer in RAID. When a disk in your RAID fails, upgrade it. When you get a new computer, copy the data over.
Since you'll be using these disks on a regular basis, you'll know as soon as one fails and can replace it.
Build a simple storage array with RAID from a barbones PC, your favorite Linux distro, configured for fault-tolerant RAID.
If you're not a Linux person, that *IS* complicated by default.
Not that it would really be less complicated with Windows, but only a Linux person wouldn't recognize the inherent complication of RAID.
s/Philip Fry/George W. Bush/g
Might not get any science done, but it sure would feel good!
That's like my car dealer charging me $25,000 for a bag of steaming shit. When I say I don't want a bag of steaming shit, he offers to sell me a bag of steaming shit and a new car for $25,500, because, after all, I do get the car AND the steaming shit.
Or, I can develop my own software, and maintain my competitive advantage over my competitor.
Anyone who produces products has to decide what is more valuable - being able to use free software from the community, or being able to keep your software secret. If all you are going to add to the software is something that anyone else could create without much effort (i.e., software is not your key differentiator) then open source is the way to go.
But if you're going to make a massive improvement to whatever software you might take, something that is going to cost you a lot of money to develop (and would thus cost a competitor lots of money to develop), it makes the most sense to keep it to yourself.
Put more simply, a product that is 90% open source software from the community and 10% improvement is probably best released as open software - you get 90% for the cost of 10%. But a product that would be 10% software from the community and 90% software you develop yourself, it makes more sense to also redo the 10%. Trading away 90% for 10% would just be a bad business decision.
I realize that, but GP was talking about random points on the globe.
The number of times I acquire ring tones a day/week/year is pretty close to zero. I buy 2-3 ring tones for a phone. That's it. It's not worth the hassle getting the music on the phone from another source to save five bucks once every 2 years.
One, it makes it easy to tell when its MY phone ringing and not someone else's phone.
Two, it makes it easy to tell when certain people are calling me without even having to get the phone out/to the phone to look.
That was much funnier before I started working out of my basement.
Actually, the earth is pretty big - you'd have only a 0.0246% of being within 200km of someone, counting water. Get rid of water and you get to around 0.075%.
The dice analogy is right-on.
The problem is he just doesn't seem to realize that the chances of throwing doubles are 16.66%.
but when you have to roll this for 200 cities, also chosen by a 1d6 roll, you have two dies being rolled 200 times, and you want to know how many times both dies have the same value
And you do realize that if you throw two dice, there are 6 results out of 36 possible where the dice come up with the same number...
Also known as ONE IN SIX!