"A media sentry? Does it transform into a mecha-soldier and forcibly defend my video games and DVDs from burglars?
YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY..."
1) It's a just a pun based on an alternative pronunciation of "centre." If you had never seen the word before, it's a somewhat plausible phonetic pronunciation of the letters. (The pun is a bit of a stretch, but the mental image of a giant console guarding the games is funny enough to excuse it.) 2) The post doesn't assume everyone speaks American instead of English, but the post probably isn't as funny to those used to English spellings instead of American spellings. Gasp! A poster made a joke online that was only funny to part of his audience! 3) The post didn't disparge English culture (or any non-American Anglophone culture). If anything, the joke is slightly self-deprecating because it requires feigning ignorance of the proper pronunciation of "centre." 4) Even if you insist on interpreting the post as making fun of English versus American spelling, so what? This upsets you enough to call him an ethnocentric prick? That's grossly out of proportion.
In summary, I thought the post was funny, you oversensitive clod.
Also, it's not "constantly necessary to remind Americans that people who might not live in the same country or speak/type in the same English form as you also post here on Slashdot." In fact, it would be best if you refrained from those remeinders if you can't give them with more class than in your post above.
I don't know what you are talking about "where the key number is stamped on the lock." Are you saying it is common for locks on desk drawers to have numbers on the lock so you can send to the manufacturer or perhaps a locksmith to get a replacement? If so, the simple solution would be to replace the lock. Even if not replaced, you have the following advantages by not putting it on the monitor: 1) Password availability is not as obvious, especially to casual visitors or maintenance staff. 2) Two trips are necessary (one to get the key number, the next to come back with the key, assuming there are too many key permutations to carry with a person) 3) If the saboteur does just pry open the desk drawer, it is known immediately. Also, if you don't have good physical security, extra IT security won't make up for it.
I personally like the fake Post-It note method, if some mnemonic method doesn't work better. I like the dummy password, but I wouldn't think one dummy password would occupy a hacker more five or ten minutes.
First of all, they could put their passwords on post-its in the locking drawers most desks have. Almost as convenient, but MUCH more secure.
Also, there are plenty of ways to have greater security than completely out-in-the-open Post-It notes with passwords. For guys, keeping the password list in a wallet, purse, or at least desk drawer that could be locked would at least add some physical security.
Actually, keeping the passwords on the monitor wouldn't be too bad if the passwords were obscured some way. For example, list the passwords incorrectly, but make the first letter of each incorrect password be the first password, the second letter of each in order the second password, etc. Reasonably easy to look up, but not obvious enough to be tempting. A slightly more complex scheme would probably be useful, perhaps hiding the password in seemingly legitimate post-it notes. Making the password the second letter of each word in a fake Post-It note would be better. This would allow routine password changes with just a little work, without being quite so blatant about having them out in the open.
Security, for most workers, needs to be balanced with usability. Truly random alphanumeric passwords are not reasonable to memorize. A better route would be to teach each user a mnemonic method of choosing a password (i.e. password from initial letters of words in chorus of song or famous quote -- if numbers are required convert every other one to numbers as if it were a phone number [ABC -> 2, DEF -> 3, etc., which is easy to convert in an office environment because everyone has a phone readily accessible]. If each person has a slightly different scheme, this can be a very easy way of getting hard to crack passwords that are very easily memorable.
As many people place an intake fan right outside the CPU to feed the CPU outside air (with a slot fan or normal case fan), so it is quite plausible that the CPU temp is under the average or representative case temperature. Especially since the exhaust from the CPU fan is usually directed into the case and further heated by hard drives, GPUs, etc.
Granted, the output air temp cannot be lower than the intake, but there is no reason to assume that the intake temp is the case temp. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some overclockers feeding an air conditioner output directly into their computers. Extreme, but less risky than homebrewed water cooling.
Thanks for the interesting reply, but break it up into paragraphs next time. Reading it was hard on the eyes.:)
We seem to differ most on level of cynicysm and whether to intervene internationally or let other people deal with their own problems. Cynicysm-wise, I assume that at least half of politicians mainly mean well, but are enamoured enough of power to make somewhat slimy compromises (i.e. stupid McCain-Feingold 1st amendment-violating bill, etc.). I suspect that about a quarter of politicians of any party are either borderline sociopaths that only care about themselves and harming their opponents, but I think they can generally be kept in check by the demands of the voting public and other politicians who either have better motivations or conflicting bad motivations. I would love for America to take a break and be isolationist for awhile except for trade, but I think the harm to the world of such a policy would be too great. I personally think we should intervene strongly, militarily if necessary, in both Zimbabwe and Sudan. The situations in both countries are so awful that I think it is immoral to stand idly by when we have the power to help; I don't want the US to be the world's policeman, but in the case of mass murder I think we should intervene when we are able. When the world said "Never again" after WWII did we just mean "never again" if accompanied with violations of another countries territory? Reasonable people certainly disagree with me on this point (I think my position is an extremely small minority.), but I'd like anyone reading to decide how bad a situation in another country would have to be until it would be a moral necessity to intervene if we were able. Think about it and then read about what is happening in Sudan regarding ethnic cleansing and slavery or what Mugabe has done to his opponents in Zimbabwe.
I tried to google for Kosovo ethnic cleansing postwar statistics, but I couldn't find any major site that I trust with good statistics. The media drive me nuts when they have tons of build-up reporting before anything is known and then little to no analysis after the fact. Can you point me to a reliable site giving stats on how many were were killed in Bosnia before the war? My results were clogged with geocities and other free hosting sites for which the credibility was hard to judge.
I've actually never before heard the argument that the war was about oil referring to both Democratic and Republican support. I've always heard it as an anti-Bush rallying cry. However, I think you misunderstood my point about the Oil-for-Food program; the US and US oil companies are now going to pay market price for any Iraqi oil, whereas they could have gotten steep discounts via the Oil For Food program. Or are you saying availability of oil is by far more important than price to the politicians in charge?
I would have no major problem with us leaving the UN, but I wonder whether sticking around and using our veto on just about everything wouldn't be better. If we leave, then the UN might become a de facto alliance of anti-US countries. While even an alliance of all our potential opponents is not a major security threat right now, wouldn't it be easier to pay our UN dues and then veto things we don't like. We don't have to actually pay any attention to the UN at all; just sit an intern in our UN seat with instructions to say "Nay" to all votes.:)
"I've seen no evidence it was so bad. He treated the Kurds about on par with how we treated Indian uprisings." First of all, previous bad acts on the part of the United States should not prevent the United States from preventing bad acts now. Had there been a country powerful enough and concerned enough in the 1800s to prevent US oppression of Native Americans, I think their intervention would have been a good thing. But you can't unring a bell; that happened long ago and I think trying to fix it now would very likely make more problems than it solve
No, the Security Council of the United Nations failed to decide what to do when their resolutions regarding Iraq were violated. That is very different than voting against the war.
There was never a vote on it because Russia and France expressed their intent to veto any resolution authorizing force against Iraq. Here is a nice summary of the order of the UN delibarations before the US invasion.
Note the proposed resolution points out that UN resolution 687 ended the Gulf War with a cease-fire contingent on Iraq's acceptance and compliance with the provisions of that resolution. Iraq was found in material breach of its obligations in resolution 1441. Thus, the cease-fire is voided by Iraq's noncompliance and Iraq put us back at war. It would have been nice to have the Security Council express its support for its own resolutions, but it was not necessary even to be technically legal under international law.
However, I really don't understand from where the myth has arisen that the UN has some sort moral credibility. Libya is the chairman of the UN Human Rights Committee, and Russia was a permanent member of the Security Council while Stalin killed millions. The United Nations can be useful as a forum for discussing grievances, but it's organization and composition prevent it from being trustworthy as a guide to action.
The US is in compliance with the democratic decisions of the Security Council (Given the makeup of the Security Council is determined by historical accident for the permanent members and election to non-concurrent terms from within the general assembly and that the permanent members each have a veto calling it democratic is a bit of a stretch. Pseudo-republicish maybe?) It simply did not agree that the threat of veto prevents it from acting.
Reasonable people may disagree about whether the invasion is technically a violation of international law (I've of course argued above it isn't), but the ultimate arbiter of whether it was illegal is what, the UN Security Council? This points out a fundamental weakness in the organization of the UN: any permanent member of the Security Council could do whatever they wanted, and no response would be "legitimate" without UN Security Council approval which would just be vetoed.
You stated, "[i]t seemed clear to the majority of the members of that council, that there are neither WMD nor that there is any connection to Al Quaida." That's false on both counts. Every serious intelligence service believed that Saddam still had WMDs. Also, there were Iraqi connections to al Qaeda. The preliminary report from the 9/11 commission that caused headlines said that there was no evidence that Saddam supported al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. Look up the text of the relevant section of the report yourself.
With my reading threshhold, I didn't see the anonymous coward you were replying to, but I thought I'd comment.
I really don't understand the "we went to war for oil" charge. It doesn't make economic sense. First of all, the war and subsequent reconstruction cost much more than all the oil Iraq will generate for many years. Second, it would have been much easier for the evil Republicans/neo-cons/(oil companies) to just make oil money from the already corrupt Oil for Food program run by the UN. A google news search for "oil food corruption UN" will let you choose the sources you find most credible, but I'm pretty sure they all say roughly the same things.
That said, though I supported and still support the war, I know there is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree about whether the US should have invaded Iraq. Much of the original intelligence leading to war was flawed; we expected to find stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and we haven't so far. This is disturbing both in the magnitude of our intelligence failures and the possibility that parts of these stockpiles were transferred to Syria or Iran. However, the information Saddam had regarding how to make WMDs was nearly as dangerous as the WMDs themselves, and Putin claims to have given Bush intelligence prior to the war that Saddam intended to commit terrorist attacks against the US. Of course, when "intelligence" is really just rumors it is easy for this sort of conversation to devolve into cherry-picking of sympathetic news reports, so I'll give my reasons for supporting the war.
1) The best prewar intelligence we had indicated that Iraq was a threat. Also, Saddam never cooperated with the inspections that were the condition for the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf War. 2) Saddam's regime was bad enough that whatever we leave in its place has a very good chance of at least being better. 3) The sanctions weren't sustainable because of the harm done to the Iraqi people, but sanctions couldn't be lifted until inspections were allowed. 4) By the time we knew for certain Saddam was again a threat, it would be too late to avoid major consequences.
There are some good arguments the other way, too: 1) Containment/sanctions were working. As far as WMD production goes, it looks like that's right. 2) The suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam is not the US's problem. We aren't invading Zimbabwe to oust Mugabe, why Iraq? 3) The confidence level of the prewar intelligence was overstated, and Congress and the people of the US should have been given a clearer picture of how certain we were about needing to go to war. Again, the intelligence failures are very disturbing. I think the intelligence was oversold, but it was genuinely believed credible by the Bush administration.
There are plenty of good arguments against the war. Unless you have evidence to the contraty, the "Bush invaded Iraq for oil" is just character assassination.
Huh? A mole is 6.022045E23. The rounding was fine. 6.02214199E23, according to this. That's a strange discrepancy. Oh well, I don't actually care that much.
a credit card. Whose do you think they'll use?;) You do have a good point: this could help greatly in investigating spam, but we need to keep in mind that spammers won't necessarily play by the rules.
I've no affiliation with Costco, but how many gallons it takes to fill up until the auto-shutoff is triggered is not necessarily a good indication of whether you are being short-changed. There could easily be a gallon difference in shutoff levels between two gas stations. While filling a gas tank higher does add some risk of it expanding (see other comments about gas expanding up to two percent for a reasonable temperature range) and overflowing, most people drive enough soon after filling up to make the spill risk from thermal expansion a nonissue.
However, mom and pop stores may have determined it was cheaper to give you more gas than it was to try and get the calibration closer and risk fines for dispensing too little. Sort of like bakers giving out 13 instead of a dozen to avoid serious penalties for shortchanging their customers.
An interesting sidenote, this article has encouraged me to buy gas in the morning while it is cool instead of afternoons and has given me another reason (the dispensed fuel is typically hotter than that in the tanks at the gas station) to not visit a gas station right after it has received more fuel from a tanker truck (the primary reason not to fill up at a station that just received more fuel is that sediment in the tank is stirred up).
Why not suggest increasing the heighth of the taskbar to two, three, or even four lines? Doing that and dropping the quicklaunch and address toolbars let me fit 28 windows on the taskbar without any decrease in the amount of visible text. Adding many more would only slightly reduce the amount of text you could read on each one.
When he needs the space, he can push the taskbar back down to one line. (He may not want to get rid of the quicklaunch taskbar, but it takes up much less horizontal space when the taskbar is 4 lines tall.
Auto-hiding of the taskbar is good for people who focus on one task in one program until it is finished and then move on to something else. I don't work that way, though. I usually combine tools.
-My glass is dirty, and there's a fly in the water.;) -I'm an independent, you insensitive clod. -I choose the lesser of two weasels each election year. -You still think there's a real coin? -Yes, most definitely either good or bad.
Jokes aside, there's a major difference between leaning towards a particular viewpoint and actively and intentionally distorting the truth. I've had some great and very interesting political discussions with friends with very different viewpoints than mine and I would be more than happy to get all my news from people with strong opinions but who had a respect for the truth.
However, my main concern about news coverage is not political bias one way or the other but the bias towards telling the story that gets the best ratings combined with sheer incompetence. The coverage of Google's gmail is actually a good example. My local paper (Seattle Times) published an article saying it had a massive 100 MB of space and rehashing out-of-date information about privacy concerns (e-mail not being deleted immediately). I can understand a typo, but at that point the gigabyte of storage was the whole point. The more I know about a subject, the more I am amazed at how much complete garbage gets put out. I notice particularly with technical subjects, but I'm pretty sure the standards are pretty low everywhere. Another example of sheer incompetentness/laziness of journalism is the annoying political shows where people shout contradictory statistics at each other and then claim the other is lying. How hard is it for the host to do a five minute follow up on the next show and ridicule the guy who was wrong when it was verifiable he lied? They could do even do the corrections in post-production and flash a "He's lying or incompetent" sign beneath a guy when he makes a false claim. Mainly, I am just annoyed and venting. There are problems with this plan, of course, such as identifying honest mistakes, facts that are debatable but not verifiably wrong, etc. I think with some work, these could be worked out, though. Maybe fact-checkers from both sides giving a rating of their confidence for each point or something. I do think it could be entertaining, though.
I don't think a liberal or conservative leaning, even a strong one, necessarily damages someone's ability to cover the news. In fact, I think it makes it more interesting to read news from a reasonable person from the other side of the political spectrum. As long as the facts presented are accurate and not totally out of context, it's useful and will occassionly change my mind but if not will expose me to the best counterarguments and downsides to the approaches I support. I think the problem is that you have many students going into journalism to "make a difference." This is not an inherently bad thing, but too often changes to saying whatever is necessary for their side to win.
I think journalism schools need to start mandating much more statistics, a course on the use and pitfalls of epidemiology, and a good course on experiment design (useful for determining whether a valid statistic actually indicates what it seems at first glance, among other things).
I don't usually give gift certificates, either, but I do know of a few good examples where they make sense:
Introducing the recipient to a great restaurant. If given for a type of food the recipient likes, it shows thought and removes any possible guilt for "wasting" money. A restaurant recommendation is easy to forget or ignore because of uncertainty about cost; however, a gift card will very likely be used. This has the added benefit for the giver of increasing business to a restaurant they like. I think my family has done this a few times with great new restaurants that were struggling because of lack of exposure. Same general idea applies to other cool stores most people don't know about.
Gas/grocery cards. Good for people who are struggling financially because it eliminates (temporarily) the worries of whether there will be enough money to put gas in the car to get to work or whether food can be bought, respectively.
Restaurant certificates. Generally not a great idea, but good for people who would otherwise never spend money on themselves and don't need more stuff.
Kids who can't be trusted with money Also, you can encourage them to spend it on, say, books instead of candy (or drugs, or whatever, depending on the kid in question).
However, overall I don't like gift certificates or even mandatory gift giving. My family often either gives Christmas gifts months early because they would be appreciated then, or months later because a really good gift wasn't convenient at the time. I regularly postpone my "birthday dinner" to weeks or months later because right before Christmas is typically inconvenient for me and my family and friends. My family is a bit odd that way, though.
"you've framed the problem in such a way that there isn't one" Well, it's not like he came up with some contrived hypothetical, and, anyway, he framed the problem that way before your earlier comment that, "If you want to dissemenate information periodically, there are much more effective ways than email, more reliable, an overall better use of resources, easier to manage, and just plain the right way to do things." That was both rude and wrong. Why is the e-mail list he was using not the "right way to do things"? It was functional. I doubt it was very resource-intensive. (In fact, it could easily take less bandwidth than the average user consumes in the same period with web-browsing and the occasional online game. Quick math, a plain text e-mail is probably around 10KB. Multiply that by 208 and you've got what, around 2MB? Even multiplying by 28,000 is only about 273MB. And I assume that these are sent out weekly, monthly, or less often as need dictates.) Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it was MUCH less resource-intensive than hosting a webpage. The information is updated periodically, but infrequently, so many users would otherwise be downloading the same content repeatedly looking for updates. E-mail delivery might be slightly less reliable, technically, than a website, but the chances are much higher of club members forgetting to check the website than to check their e-mail, so the effective reliability of e-mail in this case is higher. Plus, he already knew how to use it, and so did most if not all of the club members.
In addition to the downsides of using a website to replace an e-mail newsletter, there are many more products that allow syncing of e-mail than easy syncing of websites. For example, I use a PDA to carry mail with me. Avantgo, or another web-clipping tool, could be used to make a copy of a web page with the schedule and whatnot if needed, but it requires more trouble on the users part and isn't nearly as slick.
Also, e-mail is easier for users to organize and flag.
As for scaling, 28,000 members is a lot of club members, so I doubt that will be a worry for many people in a similar position (organizer for a medium-small club or business). Moreover, is there any reason it shouldn't scale well, even to 28,000? After all, spammers do much larger e-mail runs all the time. As long as it's just a reasonably short text e-mail, the bandwidth usage isn't that high; also, if the newsletters are relatively infrequent, he might actually consume less bandwidth with the e-mail than from many members checking the website daily or weekly for updates. The main problem I forsee is the need to be very careful about the opt-in and opt-out policies and removing dead addresses.
Because of this, an RSS feed (or similar technology) actually sounds like the best kind of solution for this kind of need, but the level of adoption is not yet high enough to switch to completely and most synchronization products don't have RSS support yet. In addition, this particular user wants to make some content only available to people paying a premium. I haven't read enough about RSS to know if there is any good way to provide access control to particular feeds.
-For example, some people want the forwarded e-mail of top blonde jokes from their friends and relatives and others don't. I wouldn't mark these annoying forwarded messages as spam because I wouldn't want to risk associating friends' e-mail addresses with spam in the filter and I don't get that many e-mails like that.
-Mailing lists. My bank sends me annoying newsletters, but I may need to note a change in their user policies. Right now I just delete these based on the subject lines.
BitTorrent is great for dealing with peak demand and for reducing demand on reasonably popular files. However, if the file has been out for a while, the chances of starting a download when no other BitTorrent users are downloading that file or have that window open is reasonably high. This keeps all the bandwidth burden on the original provider.
From what I read, it looks like WW is very similar to BitTorrent, but server-side WW proxies will cache any WW content that passes through them. This saves outside bandwidth because if the local server has a copy of the file fragment, it will be sent before resorting to the rest of the internet. Also, even if there are no other users downloading or sharing the file, the servers may still have a copy of the file. I would imagine this would be particularly beneficial for medium-sized files where bandwidth costs are still appreciable, but download times are not sufficient to make concurrent user downloads dependable.
Also, you significantly reduce the need for users to keep their clients open after downloading, because the info would often be cached on a server running WW.
Bouncing in a collision is BAD. The total impulse to a car in the collision is increased by whatever speed it gains in the opposite direction from what it was originally going. (If the car was going 100 mph north and bounces such that it is going 50 mph south, you've increased the impulse to the car and the passengers by 50%.) Also, the time of impact probably decreased considerably, too. This makes the peak force much higher with bouncing than without. You want cars to crumple gradually, extending the time of impact as much as possible and the force of impact over as much time as possible, leaving the cars stuck together like two lumps of clay colliding (with preserved passenger cages keeping the people from being crushed). Superstrong is good for the passenger cage, but not good for safety for all of the car.
By the way, neither the Brits nor us Yanks spell aluminum/aluminium "alumimin."
Another poster has already noted that diamond has other downsides as a building material for many applications. There is no one such thing. What you want is customizable properties.
Two things: We wouldn't starve, because we produce lots of meat. As any rabid environmentalist will tell you, to get 100 calories of meat you have to feed the animal many times that many calories of grain. You have a bad grain year, grain prices go up, sending meat prices higher to the point people don't buy as much meat, shifting part of the grain producing capacity from meat production to direct human consumption. Also, short-term food shortages can be alleviated by killing off more livestock. High meat consumption habits are actually very protective against famine (at least when livestock is grain-fed).
Second, many farming subsidies are in the form of paying farmers not to produce on a given tract of land, which also decreases the food supply, making the problem worse.
Granted, small farmers have a hard life, but maybe we need to go to large commercial farming because of economies of scale and the ability to absorb losses one year for profits another.
Finally, we have large surpluses of some things, like powdered milk stockpiled in warehouses. We wouldn't starve, we just wouldn't like the food choices very much.
It's France exporting flour to Canada that doesn't make sense, not Canada importing it. If France wants to make flour cheaper for Canadians by subsidizing French farmers, why shouldn't the Canadians buy it.
France exporting grain to Canada is not a consequence of just economics but of government subsidies. (Basically, all rich countries subsidize farmers, and THAT really doesn't make sense.)
Wouldn't you only print the absolute best pictures if you have them as digital?
As all of us are posting on slashdot, isn't it safe to assume we have computers?
$2 a CD? Why are you paying that much? I've gotten plenty of name-brand CDs for $0.20 each. Also, I recently picked up some 2.4X Memorex DVD+Rs for less than a buck each. That brings down costs for media to what, about $5? And that's assuming you don't keep the pictures on unused hard drive space.
Also, you could buy a printer and ink, or you could get them printed at a local developing shop. Costco charges either $0.19 or $0.14 per 4" by 6" print. Also, they only charge $1.99 for 8" by 10", and $2.99 for 12" by 18".
I just have a 2.0MP camera (Minolta Dimage X, nice little camera), but the ability to take 100s of pictures at an event without worrying about the cost has so improved the quality of my snapshots that I haven't taken my SLR out of its case in years. Landscape photography is a different issue, but the same freedom of experimentation without worrying about marginal cost is available while someone is learning.
I didn't say divisor; I said denominator. As in, the least common denominator is the least common multipleof the denominators of the fractions. I wouldn't say you necessarily need a refresher course; it's just terminology, right?;)
And I tutor SAT math and some junior high math students as well, and a surprising number of students just use the failsafe method of multiplying the denominators together if they don't immediately recognize a common multiple of the denominators. (Sorry, that was a bit wordy. Basically, they try Method 1 in their heads and then just multiply the denominators together if it doesn't work (the "multiplying across" method listed in the parent to my original post). While this works, it's a pain if you don't have a calculator handy.
Most of my calculators do have a Answer->Fraction button, and it reduces the fraction. However, it overflows a surprising amount of the time. Also, I don't like being reliant on my calculator. I always have a pen in my pocket and paper is usually available, but I often don't have my calculator on me.
Also, avoiding the chance of rounding errors by staying in reduced fractions is a good thing, especially when you are calculating a value that is the difference between two large numbers.
You can save a lot of time if you find the common denominator first, by prime factorizing both denominators and then finding the product of each prime factor the maximum number of times it occurs in either number.
For example,
prime factorization of 28: 2*2*7 prime factorization of 98: 2*7*7 common denominator: 2*2*7*7 = 196
This method also makes it easy to see what number to multiply the top and bottom of each fraction by (the product of the factors that occur in the common denominator but not the denominator of the particular fraction).
It also has the added advantage of being easily working for an arbitrary number of fractions.
Most of this process is probably what you were describing, but finding the common denominator first saves a good bit of pencil work.
Just to quibble: Helium is a noble gas, so it won't be diatomic above ~4K. (Diatomic gasses are gasses with molecules formed by two atoms joined by chemical bonds.)
I see your point, though. Helium has a nucleus that is four times as heavy (two protons and two neutrons versus a lone proton for most hydrogen), and has another electron in its orbitals. These factors greatly reduce the diffusion rate. Diatomic gasses would have some added advantages of greater size per unit weight but would have some disadvantages such as pressure buildup upon decomposition and less buoyancy due to greater weight.
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jrieth50,
I assume you're referening to the post:
"A media sentry? Does it transform into a mecha-soldier and forcibly defend my video games and DVDs from burglars?
YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY..."
1) It's a just a pun based on an alternative pronunciation of "centre." If you had never seen the word before, it's a somewhat plausible phonetic pronunciation of the letters. (The pun is a bit of a stretch, but the mental image of a giant console guarding the games is funny enough to excuse it.)
2) The post doesn't assume everyone speaks American instead of English, but the post probably isn't as funny to those used to English spellings instead of American spellings. Gasp! A poster made a joke online that was only funny to part of his audience!
3) The post didn't disparge English culture (or any non-American Anglophone culture). If anything, the joke is slightly self-deprecating because it requires feigning ignorance of the proper pronunciation of "centre."
4) Even if you insist on interpreting the post as making fun of English versus American spelling, so what? This upsets you enough to call him an ethnocentric prick? That's grossly out of proportion.
In summary, I thought the post was funny, you oversensitive clod.
Also, it's not "constantly necessary to remind Americans that people who might not live in the same country or speak/type in the same English form as you also post here on Slashdot."
In fact, it would be best if you refrained from those remeinders if you can't give them with more class than in your post above.
I don't know what you are talking about "where the key number is stamped on the lock." Are you saying it is common for locks on desk drawers to have numbers on the lock so you can send to the manufacturer or perhaps a locksmith to get a replacement? If so, the simple solution would be to replace the lock. Even if not replaced, you have the following advantages by not putting it on the monitor:
1) Password availability is not as obvious, especially to casual visitors or maintenance staff.
2) Two trips are necessary (one to get the key number, the next to come back with the key, assuming there are too many key permutations to carry with a person)
3) If the saboteur does just pry open the desk drawer, it is known immediately. Also, if you don't have good physical security, extra IT security won't make up for it.
I personally like the fake Post-It note method, if some mnemonic method doesn't work better. I like the dummy password, but I wouldn't think one dummy password would occupy a hacker more five or ten minutes.
First of all, they could put their passwords on post-its in the locking drawers most desks have. Almost as convenient, but MUCH more secure.
Also, there are plenty of ways to have greater security than completely out-in-the-open Post-It notes with passwords. For guys, keeping the password list in a wallet, purse, or at least desk drawer that could be locked would at least add some physical security.
Actually, keeping the passwords on the monitor wouldn't be too bad if the passwords were obscured some way. For example, list the passwords incorrectly, but make the first letter of each incorrect password be the first password, the second letter of each in order the second password, etc. Reasonably easy to look up, but not obvious enough to be tempting. A slightly more complex scheme would probably be useful, perhaps hiding the password in seemingly legitimate post-it notes. Making the password the second letter of each word in a fake Post-It note would be better. This would allow routine password changes with just a little work, without being quite so blatant about having them out in the open.
Security, for most workers, needs to be balanced with usability. Truly random alphanumeric passwords are not reasonable to memorize. A better route would be to teach each user a mnemonic method of choosing a password (i.e. password from initial letters of words in chorus of song or famous quote -- if numbers are required convert every other one to numbers as if it were a phone number [ABC -> 2, DEF -> 3, etc., which is easy to convert in an office environment because everyone has a phone readily accessible]. If each person has a slightly different scheme, this can be a very easy way of getting hard to crack passwords that are very easily memorable.
You are assuming a homogenous case temp.
As many people place an intake fan right outside the CPU to feed the CPU outside air (with a slot fan or normal case fan), so it is quite plausible that the CPU temp is under the average or representative case temperature. Especially since the exhaust from the CPU fan is usually directed into the case and further heated by hard drives, GPUs, etc.
Granted, the output air temp cannot be lower than the intake, but there is no reason to assume that the intake temp is the case temp. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some overclockers feeding an air conditioner output directly into their computers. Extreme, but less risky than homebrewed water cooling.
Thanks for the interesting reply, but break it up into paragraphs next time. Reading it was hard on the eyes. :)
:)
We seem to differ most on level of cynicysm and whether to intervene internationally or let other people deal with their own problems.
Cynicysm-wise, I assume that at least half of politicians mainly mean well, but are enamoured enough of power to make somewhat slimy compromises (i.e. stupid McCain-Feingold 1st amendment-violating bill, etc.). I suspect that about a quarter of politicians of any party are either borderline sociopaths that only care about themselves and harming their opponents, but I think they can generally be kept in check by the demands of the voting public and other politicians who either have better motivations or conflicting bad motivations.
I would love for America to take a break and be isolationist for awhile except for trade, but I think the harm to the world of such a policy would be too great. I personally think we should intervene strongly, militarily if necessary, in both Zimbabwe and Sudan. The situations in both countries are so awful that I think it is immoral to stand idly by when we have the power to help; I don't want the US to be the world's policeman, but in the case of mass murder I think we should intervene when we are able. When the world said "Never again" after WWII did we just mean "never again" if accompanied with violations of another countries territory? Reasonable people certainly disagree with me on this point (I think my position is an extremely small minority.), but I'd like anyone reading to decide how bad a situation in another country would have to be until it would be a moral necessity to intervene if we were able. Think about it and then read about what is happening in Sudan regarding ethnic cleansing and slavery or what Mugabe has done to his opponents in Zimbabwe.
I tried to google for Kosovo ethnic cleansing postwar statistics, but I couldn't find any major site that I trust with good statistics. The media drive me nuts when they have tons of build-up reporting before anything is known and then little to no analysis after the fact. Can you point me to a reliable site giving stats on how many were were killed in Bosnia before the war? My results were clogged with geocities and other free hosting sites for which the credibility was hard to judge.
I've actually never before heard the argument that the war was about oil referring to both Democratic and Republican support. I've always heard it as an anti-Bush rallying cry. However, I think you misunderstood my point about the Oil-for-Food program; the US and US oil companies are now going to pay market price for any Iraqi oil, whereas they could have gotten steep discounts via the Oil For Food program. Or are you saying availability of oil is by far more important than price to the politicians in charge?
I would have no major problem with us leaving the UN, but I wonder whether sticking around and using our veto on just about everything wouldn't be better. If we leave, then the UN might become a de facto alliance of anti-US countries. While even an alliance of all our potential opponents is not a major security threat right now, wouldn't it be easier to pay our UN dues and then veto things we don't like. We don't have to actually pay any attention to the UN at all; just sit an intern in our UN seat with instructions to say "Nay" to all votes.
"I've seen no evidence it was so bad. He treated the Kurds about on par with how we treated Indian uprisings." First of all, previous bad acts on the part of the United States should not prevent the United States from preventing bad acts now. Had there been a country powerful enough and concerned enough in the 1800s to prevent US oppression of Native Americans, I think their intervention would have been a good thing. But you can't unring a bell; that happened long ago and I think trying to fix it now would very likely make more problems than it solve
No, the Security Council of the United Nations failed to decide what to do when their resolutions regarding Iraq were violated. That is very different than voting against the war.
There was never a vote on it because Russia and France expressed their intent to veto any resolution authorizing force against Iraq. Here is a nice summary of the order of the UN delibarations before the US invasion.
Note the proposed resolution points out that UN resolution 687 ended the Gulf War with a cease-fire contingent on Iraq's acceptance and compliance with the provisions of that resolution. Iraq was found in material breach of its obligations in resolution 1441. Thus, the cease-fire is voided by Iraq's noncompliance and Iraq put us back at war. It would have been nice to have the Security Council express its support for its own resolutions, but it was not necessary even to be technically legal under international law.
However, I really don't understand from where the myth has arisen that the UN has some sort moral credibility. Libya is the chairman of the UN Human Rights Committee, and Russia was a permanent member of the Security Council while Stalin killed millions. The United Nations can be useful as a forum for discussing grievances, but it's organization and composition prevent it from being trustworthy as a guide to action.
The US is in compliance with the democratic decisions of the Security Council (Given the makeup of the Security Council is determined by historical accident for the permanent members and election to non-concurrent terms from within the general assembly and that the permanent members each have a veto calling it democratic is a bit of a stretch. Pseudo-republicish maybe?) It simply did not agree that the threat of veto prevents it from acting.
Reasonable people may disagree about whether the invasion is technically a violation of international law (I've of course argued above it isn't), but the ultimate arbiter of whether it was illegal is what, the UN Security Council? This points out a fundamental weakness in the organization of the UN: any permanent member of the Security Council could do whatever they wanted, and no response would be "legitimate" without UN Security Council approval which would just be vetoed.
You stated, "[i]t seemed clear to the majority of the members of that council, that there are neither WMD nor that there is any connection to Al Quaida."
That's false on both counts. Every serious intelligence service believed that Saddam still had WMDs. Also, there were Iraqi connections to al Qaeda. The preliminary report from the 9/11 commission that caused headlines said that there was no evidence that Saddam supported al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. Look up the text of the relevant section of the report yourself.
With my reading threshhold, I didn't see the anonymous coward you were replying to, but I thought I'd comment.
I really don't understand the "we went to war for oil" charge. It doesn't make economic sense. First of all, the war and subsequent reconstruction cost much more than all the oil Iraq will generate for many years. Second, it would have been much easier for the evil Republicans/neo-cons/(oil companies) to just make oil money from the already corrupt Oil for Food program run by the UN.
A google news search for "oil food corruption UN" will let you choose the sources you find most credible, but I'm pretty sure they all say roughly the same things.
That said, though I supported and still support the war, I know there is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree about whether the US should have invaded Iraq. Much of the original intelligence leading to war was flawed; we expected to find stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and we haven't so far. This is disturbing both in the magnitude of our intelligence failures and the possibility that parts of these stockpiles were transferred to Syria or Iran. However, the information Saddam had regarding how to make WMDs was nearly as dangerous as the WMDs themselves, and Putin claims to have given Bush intelligence prior to the war that Saddam intended to commit terrorist attacks against the US. Of course, when "intelligence" is really just rumors it is easy for this sort of conversation to devolve into cherry-picking of sympathetic news reports, so I'll give my reasons for supporting the war.
1) The best prewar intelligence we had indicated that Iraq was a threat. Also, Saddam never cooperated with the inspections that were the condition for the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf War.
2) Saddam's regime was bad enough that whatever we leave in its place has a very good chance of at least being better.
3) The sanctions weren't sustainable because of the harm done to the Iraqi people, but sanctions couldn't be lifted until inspections were allowed.
4) By the time we knew for certain Saddam was again a threat, it would be too late to avoid major consequences.
There are some good arguments the other way, too:
1) Containment/sanctions were working. As far as WMD production goes, it looks like that's right.
2) The suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam is not the US's problem. We aren't invading Zimbabwe to oust Mugabe, why Iraq?
3) The confidence level of the prewar intelligence was overstated, and Congress and the people of the US should have been given a clearer picture of how certain we were about needing to go to war. Again, the intelligence failures are very disturbing. I think the intelligence was oversold, but it was genuinely believed credible by the Bush administration.
There are plenty of good arguments against the war. Unless you have evidence to the contraty, the "Bush invaded Iraq for oil" is just character assassination.
Huh? A mole is 6.022045E23. The rounding was fine.
6.02214199E23, according to this. That's a strange discrepancy. Oh well, I don't actually care that much.
"With a credit card."
;) You do have a good point: this could help greatly in investigating spam, but we need to keep in mind that spammers won't necessarily play by the rules.
a credit card. Whose do you think they'll use?
You're right. I had overlooked the moderating effect on the temperature from the gas tanks being underground.
I've no affiliation with Costco, but how many gallons it takes to fill up until the auto-shutoff is triggered is not necessarily a good indication of whether you are being short-changed. There could easily be a gallon difference in shutoff levels between two gas stations. While filling a gas tank higher does add some risk of it expanding (see other comments about gas expanding up to two percent for a reasonable temperature range) and overflowing, most people drive enough soon after filling up to make the spill risk from thermal expansion a nonissue.
However, mom and pop stores may have determined it was cheaper to give you more gas than it was to try and get the calibration closer and risk fines for dispensing too little. Sort of like bakers giving out 13 instead of a dozen to avoid serious penalties for shortchanging their customers.
An interesting sidenote, this article has encouraged me to buy gas in the morning while it is cool instead of afternoons and has given me another reason (the dispensed fuel is typically hotter than that in the tanks at the gas station) to not visit a gas station right after it has received more fuel from a tanker truck (the primary reason not to fill up at a station that just received more fuel is that sediment in the tank is stirred up).
Why not suggest increasing the heighth of the taskbar to two, three, or even four lines? Doing that and dropping the quicklaunch and address toolbars let me fit 28 windows on the taskbar without any decrease in the amount of visible text. Adding many more would only slightly reduce the amount of text you could read on each one.
When he needs the space, he can push the taskbar back down to one line. (He may not want to get rid of the quicklaunch taskbar, but it takes up much less horizontal space when the taskbar is 4 lines tall.
Auto-hiding of the taskbar is good for people who focus on one task in one program until it is finished and then move on to something else. I don't work that way, though. I usually combine tools.
-My glass is dirty, and there's a fly in the water. ;)
-I'm an independent, you insensitive clod.
-I choose the lesser of two weasels each election year.
-You still think there's a real coin?
-Yes, most definitely either good or bad.
Jokes aside, there's a major difference between leaning towards a particular viewpoint and actively and intentionally distorting the truth. I've had some great and very interesting political discussions with friends with very different viewpoints than mine and I would be more than happy to get all my news from people with strong opinions but who had a respect for the truth.
However, my main concern about news coverage is not political bias one way or the other but the bias towards telling the story that gets the best ratings combined with sheer incompetence. The coverage of Google's gmail is actually a good example. My local paper (Seattle Times) published an article saying it had a massive 100 MB of space and rehashing out-of-date information about privacy concerns (e-mail not being deleted immediately). I can understand a typo, but at that point the gigabyte of storage was the whole point. The more I know about a subject, the more I am amazed at how much complete garbage gets put out. I notice particularly with technical subjects, but I'm pretty sure the standards are pretty low everywhere. Another example of sheer incompetentness/laziness of journalism is the annoying political shows where people shout contradictory statistics at each other and then claim the other is lying. How hard is it for the host to do a five minute follow up on the next show and ridicule the guy who was wrong when it was verifiable he lied? They could do even do the corrections in post-production and flash a "He's lying or incompetent" sign beneath a guy when he makes a false claim. Mainly, I am just annoyed and venting. There are problems with this plan, of course, such as identifying honest mistakes, facts that are debatable but not verifiably wrong, etc. I think with some work, these could be worked out, though. Maybe fact-checkers from both sides giving a rating of their confidence for each point or something. I do think it could be entertaining, though.
I don't think a liberal or conservative leaning, even a strong one, necessarily damages someone's ability to cover the news. In fact, I think it makes it more interesting to read news from a reasonable person from the other side of the political spectrum. As long as the facts presented are accurate and not totally out of context, it's useful and will occassionly change my mind but if not will expose me to the best counterarguments and downsides to the approaches I support. I think the problem is that you have many students going into journalism to "make a difference." This is not an inherently bad thing, but too often changes to saying whatever is necessary for their side to win.
I think journalism schools need to start mandating much more statistics, a course on the use and pitfalls of epidemiology, and a good course on experiment design (useful for determining whether a valid statistic actually indicates what it seems at first glance, among other things).
However, overall I don't like gift certificates or even mandatory gift giving. My family often either gives Christmas gifts months early because they would be appreciated then, or months later because a really good gift wasn't convenient at the time. I regularly postpone my "birthday dinner" to weeks or months later because right before Christmas is typically inconvenient for me and my family and friends. My family is a bit odd that way, though.
"you've framed the problem in such a way that there isn't one"
Well, it's not like he came up with some contrived hypothetical, and, anyway, he framed the problem that way before your earlier comment that, "If you want to dissemenate information periodically, there are much more effective ways than email, more reliable, an overall better use of resources, easier to manage, and just plain the right way to do things."
That was both rude and wrong. Why is the e-mail list he was using not the "right way to do things"? It was functional. I doubt it was very resource-intensive. (In fact, it could easily take less bandwidth than the average user consumes in the same period with web-browsing and the occasional online game. Quick math, a plain text e-mail is probably around 10KB. Multiply that by 208 and you've got what, around 2MB? Even multiplying by 28,000 is only about 273MB. And I assume that these are sent out weekly, monthly, or less often as need dictates.) Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it was MUCH less resource-intensive than hosting a webpage. The information is updated periodically, but infrequently, so many users would otherwise be downloading the same content repeatedly looking for updates. E-mail delivery might be slightly less reliable, technically, than a website, but the chances are much higher of club members forgetting to check the website than to check their e-mail, so the effective reliability of e-mail in this case is higher. Plus, he already knew how to use it, and so did most if not all of the club members.
In addition to the downsides of using a website to replace an e-mail newsletter, there are many more products that allow syncing of e-mail than easy syncing of websites. For example, I use a PDA to carry mail with me. Avantgo, or another web-clipping tool, could be used to make a copy of a web page with the schedule and whatnot if needed, but it requires more trouble on the users part and isn't nearly as slick.
Also, e-mail is easier for users to organize and flag.
As for scaling, 28,000 members is a lot of club members, so I doubt that will be a worry for many people in a similar position (organizer for a medium-small club or business). Moreover, is there any reason it shouldn't scale well, even to 28,000? After all, spammers do much larger e-mail runs all the time. As long as it's just a reasonably short text e-mail, the bandwidth usage isn't that high; also, if the newsletters are relatively infrequent, he might actually consume less bandwidth with the e-mail than from many members checking the website daily or weekly for updates. The main problem I forsee is the need to be very careful about the opt-in and opt-out policies and removing dead addresses.
Because of this, an RSS feed (or similar technology) actually sounds like the best kind of solution for this kind of need, but the level of adoption is not yet high enough to switch to completely and most synchronization products don't have RSS support yet. In addition, this particular user wants to make some content only available to people paying a premium. I haven't read enough about RSS to know if there is any good way to provide access control to particular feeds.
Many users use e-mail differently than you might.
-For example, some people want the forwarded e-mail of top blonde jokes from their friends and relatives and others don't. I wouldn't mark these annoying forwarded messages as spam because I wouldn't want to risk associating friends' e-mail addresses with spam in the filter and I don't get that many e-mails like that.
-Mailing lists. My bank sends me annoying newsletters, but I may need to note a change in their user policies. Right now I just delete these based on the subject lines.
- Useful e-mails from friends citing good deals.
BitTorrent is great for dealing with peak demand and for reducing demand on reasonably popular files. However, if the file has been out for a while, the chances of starting a download when no other BitTorrent users are downloading that file or have that window open is reasonably high. This keeps all the bandwidth burden on the original provider.
From what I read, it looks like WW is very similar to BitTorrent, but server-side WW proxies will cache any WW content that passes through them. This saves outside bandwidth because if the local server has a copy of the file fragment, it will be sent before resorting to the rest of the internet. Also, even if there are no other users downloading or sharing the file, the servers may still have a copy of the file. I would imagine this would be particularly beneficial for medium-sized files where bandwidth costs are still appreciable, but download times are not sufficient to make concurrent user downloads dependable.
Also, you significantly reduce the need for users to keep their clients open after downloading, because the info would often be cached on a server running WW.
Bouncing in a collision is BAD. The total impulse to a car in the collision is increased by whatever speed it gains in the opposite direction from what it was originally going. (If the car was going 100 mph north and bounces such that it is going 50 mph south, you've increased the impulse to the car and the passengers by 50%.) Also, the time of impact probably decreased considerably, too. This makes the peak force much higher with bouncing than without. You want cars to crumple gradually, extending the time of impact as much as possible and the force of impact over as much time as possible, leaving the cars stuck together like two lumps of clay colliding (with preserved passenger cages keeping the people from being crushed). Superstrong is good for the passenger cage, but not good for safety for all of the car.
By the way, neither the Brits nor us Yanks spell aluminum/aluminium "alumimin."
Another poster has already noted that diamond has other downsides as a building material for many applications. There is no one such thing. What you want is customizable properties.
Two things:
We wouldn't starve, because we produce lots of meat. As any rabid environmentalist will tell you, to get 100 calories of meat you have to feed the animal many times that many calories of grain. You have a bad grain year, grain prices go up, sending meat prices higher to the point people don't buy as much meat, shifting part of the grain producing capacity from meat production to direct human consumption. Also, short-term food shortages can be alleviated by killing off more livestock.
High meat consumption habits are actually very protective against famine (at least when livestock is grain-fed).
Second, many farming subsidies are in the form of paying farmers not to produce on a given tract of land, which also decreases the food supply, making the problem worse.
Granted, small farmers have a hard life, but maybe we need to go to large commercial farming because of economies of scale and the ability to absorb losses one year for profits another.
Finally, we have large surpluses of some things, like powdered milk stockpiled in warehouses. We wouldn't starve, we just wouldn't like the food choices very much.
Most judges and congressmen don't get past "Congress shall make."
It's France exporting flour to Canada that doesn't make sense, not Canada importing it. If France wants to make flour cheaper for Canadians by subsidizing French farmers, why shouldn't the Canadians buy it.
France exporting grain to Canada is not a consequence of just economics but of government subsidies. (Basically, all rich countries subsidize farmers, and THAT really doesn't make sense.)
Wouldn't you only print the absolute best pictures if you have them as digital?
As all of us are posting on slashdot, isn't it safe to assume we have computers?
$2 a CD? Why are you paying that much? I've gotten plenty of name-brand CDs for $0.20 each. Also, I recently picked up some 2.4X Memorex DVD+Rs for less than a buck each. That brings down costs for media to what, about $5? And that's assuming you don't keep the pictures on unused hard drive space.
Also, you could buy a printer and ink, or you could get them printed at a local developing shop. Costco charges either $0.19 or $0.14 per 4" by 6" print. Also, they only charge $1.99 for 8" by 10", and $2.99 for 12" by 18".
I just have a 2.0MP camera (Minolta Dimage X, nice little camera), but the ability to take 100s of pictures at an event without worrying about the cost has so improved the quality of my snapshots that I haven't taken my SLR out of its case in years. Landscape photography is a different issue, but the same freedom of experimentation without worrying about marginal cost is available while someone is learning.
I didn't say divisor; I said denominator. As in, the least common denominator is the least common multiple of the denominators of the fractions. I wouldn't say you necessarily need a refresher course; it's just terminology, right? ;)
And I tutor SAT math and some junior high math students as well, and a surprising number of students just use the failsafe method of multiplying the denominators together if they don't immediately recognize a common multiple of the denominators. (Sorry, that was a bit wordy. Basically, they try Method 1 in their heads and then just multiply the denominators together if it doesn't work (the "multiplying across" method listed in the parent to my original post). While this works, it's a pain if you don't have a calculator handy.
Most of my calculators do have a Answer->Fraction button, and it reduces the fraction. However, it overflows a surprising amount of the time. Also, I don't like being reliant on my calculator. I always have a pen in my pocket and paper is usually available, but I often don't have my calculator on me.
Also, avoiding the chance of rounding errors by staying in reduced fractions is a good thing, especially when you are calculating a value that is the difference between two large numbers.
You can save a lot of time if you find the common denominator first, by prime factorizing both denominators and then finding the product of each prime factor the maximum number of times it occurs in either number.
For example,
prime factorization of 28: 2*2*7
prime factorization of 98: 2*7*7
common denominator: 2*2*7*7 = 196
This method also makes it easy to see what number to multiply the top and bottom of each fraction by (the product of the factors that occur in the common denominator but not the denominator of the particular fraction).
It also has the added advantage of being easily working for an arbitrary number of fractions.
Most of this process is probably what you were describing, but finding the common denominator first saves a good bit of pencil work.
Just to quibble: Helium is a noble gas, so it won't be diatomic above ~4K. (Diatomic gasses are gasses with molecules formed by two atoms joined by chemical bonds.)
I see your point, though. Helium has a nucleus that is four times as heavy (two protons and two neutrons versus a lone proton for most hydrogen), and has another electron in its orbitals. These factors greatly reduce the diffusion rate. Diatomic gasses would have some added advantages of greater size per unit weight but would have some disadvantages such as pressure buildup upon decomposition and less buoyancy due to greater weight.