And how does that exactly relate to size? It just looks like a bunch of gibberish mixed with random numbers to my imperialist eyes.!!!
I want pounds and inches you insensitive clod!!!
You don't recognize the traditional Imperial unit of length, the Manchester mule? Defined in 1621 as the length of the Duke of Manchester's prize mule, Jebediah, and equal to exactly 29 handspans, it's the only unit of length a gentleman should use.
Now I should say that at 404mm long, and at a total of 1820 greasemonkeys in weight, that this Commodore 64 is quite the small electronic computer!
No, more like because in the commercial and industrial areas, people were far more aware of the bulbs, and the dangers they presented, and were more prepared for any potential problems.
Which turn out to be basically nothing, which is why there are florescent lights up everywhere in every office building and store you walk into and no HAZMAT teams on call to deal with broken bulbs. Yes, that's right, Wal-Mart is endangering you with the horrible danger of their dangerous lights with no regard for your safety! You should sue!:P
I, like many people, just want to have a choice and I am getting sick of being branded as some "earth murderer" because I'm not interested in having little mercury bombs all over the place.
Odds are that you have more mercury than 1000 CFLs in your face.
Anyway, "earth murderer" is indeed over the top. I'm sure you wish the earth no ill. "Uninformed reactionary" is a much better term. Relax. How often do you break lightbulbs? If you aren't doing it every single day, you're safe. Worried your kids or pets will knock over a table lamp on a regular basis? Use an incandescent there. Recessed can lights? Why on earth wouldn't you use a CFL there? Cus it might spontaneously explode and give you mercury-induced brain damage?
Modern windmills aren't that hazardous to birds. The ones with the single pole instead of a scaffold, and the three huge blades, where it turns out size is good both for efficiency and for birds being able to see it and avoid it. Though at the scales we're talking here -- they're basically talking about turning all open land into wind farms -- the rare death per windmill would add up big for sure. Big enough to seriously impact bird populations? Hard to say, probably some species. Which I feel could be the case with the impact on the rest of the environment.
I mean, the calculation seems pretty clearly to just be whether enough energy exists to be harvested where possible. It's just to say that there's a lot of potential for wind energy. To the extent that blanketing so much area with windmills and drawing power from the wind would have the chance to affect ecosystems, the economic factors they mention would also come into play to keep it from getting that far.
So I say build em as fast as you want. There's so much untapped potential right now, so much room for improvement, that it doesn't make sense not to. Long before we are worrying about 40x current global electricity usage all drawn from wind, the utility will peter out and so will windmill building.
That would be precedents. Very different thing than precedence.
But the question is: If you have both precedents and precedence, in what order should they be considered? And are there any authoritative decisions on this matter which we could look to for guidance?
Oh man, I can't wait till next week when I'll find out if the new kid shows up to work on time, and if he'll do more than a half-assed job of cleaning the bathroom! These cliffhangers always kill me...
"and which border agents can have total confidence in"
Replace 'border agents' with any group you want... and what they have confidence in does not matter.
Sure it matters! What they're really saying is that they have total confidence not in the robot ferret's contraband-finding ability, but in the robot ferret's border-agent-ass-covering ability. Check out these scenarios:
Border agent fails to detect contraband. Ass Exposure: Full Moon! You fucked up, son!
Drug-sniffing dog fails to detect contraband. Ass Exposure: Half Moon. Dog performance is partially dependent on the skill of the handler.
High-tech autonomous robot ferret fails to detect contraband. Ass Exposure: New Moon/Lunar Eclipse. Sure there's a sliver of a chance that if you ignored some obvious diagnostic error report or failed to send the machine in for scheduled maintenance that you'll be held accountable for its failure, but otherwise, hey if the robot didn't find it what could you do?!
See, it matters what you have confidence in. Having confidence in the actual efficacy of the robot is very different than having confidence in its ability to redirect blame.
You can make a similar comparison with regards to the banking industry and Federal Reserve -- confidence in its solidity, versus confidence in it being solid enough to let you cash in on your sketchy dealings and get the hell out of dodge before the chickens come home to roost. One is silly, the other quite rational.
I might poke around some more, or I might just not worry about it and just click stories from the front page. *shrug* At least one way I'll be reminded how fucked up slashcode is, and hey maybe i'll notice if they ever fix it.:P
I had to log out, restart Firefox, then log back in. Been in the classic mode ever since.
I did that, and the main page is in classic/simple mode, and the stories are if and only if I go to them via the front page. If I go to stories from my user page, or by clicking the link at the top of the page when I've browsed further into the comments, then it's back to grey rectangles and friend/foe icons everywhere.:/
But it's not like it's a technical specialty for which coding is a completely tangential topic. Still, it's true this reduces the number of applicants. I can't really say that's a problem in my eyes.
Wait, what? You're looking for basic coding and DB, but asking for candidates with a Master's in Information Science?
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders. There will be probably a few, but it's going to take a lot of effort to find them.
Yeah. For example my team looks for people with minimum Master's in EE/CE, who know the ins and outs and nuances of microprocessors. They also need to be able to program their way out of a paper bag, because the job entails coding, and we're not going to hire an "architect" who can't actually do anything but spout ideas and also hire a code monkey who can turn the ideas into useful work. This isn't exactly like civil engineering, where an architect's job is to make the blueprint which is a highly detailed specification, so if that's "all" they can do they're doing a hell of a lot. In computers, a spec as detailed as a blueprint is some kind of code, whether it's C or Verilog. So if you can't code, wtf use are you? None is the answer, btw.
And it's not like we (or the GP) are asking for a lot. We're not asking them to be expert software engineers. Basic programming skills like that should be trivial for anyone in CS/CE/IS/EE. Hell, I'd expect most ME and CE students to be able to do simple programming like that these days, especially if you didn't care about the language they did it in.
And you don't imagine thickness would in any way be related to size or weight? It's not like they're the same volume as any other laptop, just thinner and thus wider.:P
Besides, "ultra-thin" is just a marketing name for the sub-market.
Yes, yes, I know, Blu-ray is far superior, and if we'd only just buy a $2000 HDTV, adamantium plated HDMI cables, and view it while standing on our heads and licking a irate gecko, we'd see that the quality is obviously better than DVD.
Nobody has figured out how to "cut" the bureaucracy or regulations.
If you don't count Scaled Composites and SpaceX and similar ventures in other countries.
Governments change. The laws of physics don't (probably).
The "regulations" of orbital mechanics just aren't that strict. If cost to low Earth orbit (LEO) was solely a function of the chemical fuel and oxidizer required to get into space it'd be around $100 per kg of payload. If cost to LEO was solely a function of the energy required to get into space it'd be around $10 per kg.
But obviously it isn't, because that fuel and oxidizer is going to spontaneously change itself into kinetic energy directed towards orbit. Access to space wouldn't be anywhere near that cheap with zero government regulations, because it's the laws of physics that make rocket science rocket science.
Spaceship One cut through the red tape. It's nowhere near orbit. Go tell the people actually doing it that the LEO is easy and cheap if only the government weren't there. The only ones who'll agree and could actually save money are the ones eager to make unsafe and unreliable rockets.
I'm not talking about just the energy itself I'm also talking about the mechanism by which to impart that energy to the spacecraft. Rockets are not cheap ways to lift humans or large amounts of cargo. Going into space is a tough and still expensive problem even with no interference from the government.
I've never seen a shuttle launch (Busch Gardens is nice though:), but I once drove past the "Future Location of Spaceport America!". The highway in NM was raised up above the large flat valley with mountains on the other side. Anywhere in that valley they put the pads, you could park on the side of the highway and watch easily.
On the topic of shuttle launches, a friend of mine is going to Florida specifically to see a shuttle launch (since there won't be many more). This got me thinking about something I heard about the shuttle a long time ago. I checked the wiki page, and all I could see was that it said the calculated minimum safe distance for NASA personnel was 3 mi. What I had heard was that the pressure wave, i.e. the noise, of the launch was so intense it killed animals within a mile of the shuttle. I've can't find anything that verifies that specifically, so I kinda think it's a mound of turtle crap, but it's almost plausible too...
"Matter of the money" is exactly the problem. Sure we know how to get to orbit. Done it plenty of times. It's getting there economically that's the problem, and one that isn't going to go away because even as the FAA changes and starts licensing various privately funded space companies, the PE + KE needed to orbit the earth aren't going to change barring big chunks of the earth going missing.
Red Tape may seem like the "impossible" obstacle, but once you've cut it, once the system has changed, then the obstacle is gone. The "regulations" of orbital mechanics aren't going to change, and they say getting to space is expensive no matter what the government says.
That was excellently put. This is precisely why despite the fact that I strongly disagree with the ACLU's position on the 2nd Amendment, I nevertheless have a lot of respect for them and am glad they do the work they do. It's not like they fight against gun rights, and they've happily worked with the NRA before when both gun rights and the rights the ACLU cares about were involved, pooling their forces and saying "look we both oppose this" as it were.
So yeah, it kinda miffs me that they only care about "Some Liberties", but that's just a difference of opinion. To actually hate them, I can't see unless like you said I was against the things they were fighting for.
The SR-71 Blackbird had a combination jet/ramjet engine, where the turbines were used at lower speeds, and then once it broke supersonic it became a ramjet using bypasses that directed the air (compressed by the cones on front of the engine) around the turbines which comprise most of the volume of the huge engine cylinders.
Not only is the SR-71 anything but an economical bird, it was also terribly complex to design, ridiculously inefficient while using the turbine (without even accounting for the fact that until air friction caused its panels to expand and seal it leaked fuel literally like a sieve), and very heavy. Tacking a rocket onto that kind of system to reach space sounds all kind of inefficient and uneconomical. I'm no aerospace engineer, but I wouldn't be surprised if designing the engine to seal off the front and use an internal oxidizer was infeasible and the rockets had to essentially be a whole separate system.
Frankly as far as hybrid systems go, I still like the Spaceship One/White Knight approach. A separate carrier vehicle can take the spacecraft up to high-ish altitudes, and then when the space craft takes ignites its rockets and takes off, it doesn't have to carry the carrier vehicle's jet engines with it. But who knows if that can be scaled up to something capable of carrying an orbit-capable vehicle plus a significant payload? Well, Burt Rutan I'd imagine.
Expressing support and best wishes for the protestors gives them a boost in spirit that they need if they are to succeed.
Yeah, and erodes their support among the people of Iran (and hell, various factions of protestors themselves) by linking them with America, and in particular with American meddling. Yes many Iranians want a more free and open government, yes many of them want better relations with the West in general and US in particular. But they do not want us meddling in their affairs. They have a very bad impression of our meddling.
Right now, the regime is demonstrating their brutality and oppression. Terrible as it is, this works in favor of the reformists. It builds sympathy and support (and practical proof of what they're saying about the government). But you can bet there are Iranians who think the protesters are getting exactly what they deserve, and you can bet that number will increase proportionally to the amount that the U.S. sticks their nose in and makes it sound like they are backing the protesters or are trying to influence them to overthrow the Iranian government. The entire country will solidify around the hard-liners if they see that as the case.
The best thing our government can do right now is keep their nose out of Iranian business.
Slashdot Mirror
That was simpler time full of Compute and Byte magazine and taking your best girl to see ET and WarGames.
"Best girl" I take it meaning the most complete and functional of your robot companions.
And how does that exactly relate to size? It just looks like a bunch of gibberish mixed with random numbers to my imperialist eyes.!!!
I want pounds and inches you insensitive clod!!!
You don't recognize the traditional Imperial unit of length, the Manchester mule? Defined in 1621 as the length of the Duke of Manchester's prize mule, Jebediah, and equal to exactly 29 handspans, it's the only unit of length a gentleman should use.
Now I should say that at 404mm long, and at a total of 1820 greasemonkeys in weight, that this Commodore 64 is quite the small electronic computer!
Keep thinking. It'll come to you eventually.
Exactly. ~5g per amalgam filling, versus ~5mg on the top-end for a CFL with "modern" ones down to 1-1.5mg.
No, more like because in the commercial and industrial areas, people were far more aware of the bulbs, and the dangers they presented, and were more prepared for any potential problems.
Which turn out to be basically nothing, which is why there are florescent lights up everywhere in every office building and store you walk into and no HAZMAT teams on call to deal with broken bulbs. Yes, that's right, Wal-Mart is endangering you with the horrible danger of their dangerous lights with no regard for your safety! You should sue! :P
I, like many people, just want to have a choice and I am getting sick of being branded as some "earth murderer" because I'm not interested in having little mercury bombs all over the place.
Odds are that you have more mercury than 1000 CFLs in your face.
Anyway, "earth murderer" is indeed over the top. I'm sure you wish the earth no ill. "Uninformed reactionary" is a much better term. Relax. How often do you break lightbulbs? If you aren't doing it every single day, you're safe. Worried your kids or pets will knock over a table lamp on a regular basis? Use an incandescent there. Recessed can lights? Why on earth wouldn't you use a CFL there? Cus it might spontaneously explode and give you mercury-induced brain damage?
Modern windmills aren't that hazardous to birds. The ones with the single pole instead of a scaffold, and the three huge blades, where it turns out size is good both for efficiency and for birds being able to see it and avoid it. Though at the scales we're talking here -- they're basically talking about turning all open land into wind farms -- the rare death per windmill would add up big for sure. Big enough to seriously impact bird populations? Hard to say, probably some species. Which I feel could be the case with the impact on the rest of the environment.
I mean, the calculation seems pretty clearly to just be whether enough energy exists to be harvested where possible. It's just to say that there's a lot of potential for wind energy. To the extent that blanketing so much area with windmills and drawing power from the wind would have the chance to affect ecosystems, the economic factors they mention would also come into play to keep it from getting that far.
So I say build em as fast as you want. There's so much untapped potential right now, so much room for improvement, that it doesn't make sense not to. Long before we are worrying about 40x current global electricity usage all drawn from wind, the utility will peter out and so will windmill building.
That would be precedents. Very different thing than precedence.
But the question is: If you have both precedents and precedence, in what order should they be considered? And are there any authoritative decisions on this matter which we could look to for guidance?
Oh man, I can't wait till next week when I'll find out if the new kid shows up to work on time, and if he'll do more than a half-assed job of cleaning the bathroom! These cliffhangers always kill me...
The question is "is that space debris? is that a commercial satellite? is that even WORKING?"
Well it's no moon!
...they are hiding the Transformer invasion from us.
God damn studio NDAs. Everything has to be a perfectly coordinated media campaign with those bastards.
"and which border agents can have total confidence in"
Replace 'border agents' with any group you want... and what they have confidence in does not matter.
Sure it matters! What they're really saying is that they have total confidence not in the robot ferret's contraband-finding ability, but in the robot ferret's border-agent-ass-covering ability. Check out these scenarios:
See, it matters what you have confidence in. Having confidence in the actual efficacy of the robot is very different than having confidence in its ability to redirect blame.
You can make a similar comparison with regards to the banking industry and Federal Reserve -- confidence in its solidity, versus confidence in it being solid enough to let you cash in on your sketchy dealings and get the hell out of dodge before the chickens come home to roost. One is silly, the other quite rational.
I might poke around some more, or I might just not worry about it and just click stories from the front page. *shrug* At least one way I'll be reminded how fucked up slashcode is, and hey maybe i'll notice if they ever fix it. :P
I had to log out, restart Firefox, then log back in. Been in the classic mode ever since.
I did that, and the main page is in classic/simple mode, and the stories are if and only if I go to them via the front page. If I go to stories from my user page, or by clicking the link at the top of the page when I've browsed further into the comments, then it's back to grey rectangles and friend/foe icons everywhere. :/
But it's not like it's a technical specialty for which coding is a completely tangential topic. Still, it's true this reduces the number of applicants. I can't really say that's a problem in my eyes.
Wait, what? You're looking for basic coding and DB, but asking for candidates with a Master's in Information Science?
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders. There will be probably a few, but it's going to take a lot of effort to find them.
Yeah. For example my team looks for people with minimum Master's in EE/CE, who know the ins and outs and nuances of microprocessors. They also need to be able to program their way out of a paper bag, because the job entails coding, and we're not going to hire an "architect" who can't actually do anything but spout ideas and also hire a code monkey who can turn the ideas into useful work. This isn't exactly like civil engineering, where an architect's job is to make the blueprint which is a highly detailed specification, so if that's "all" they can do they're doing a hell of a lot. In computers, a spec as detailed as a blueprint is some kind of code, whether it's C or Verilog. So if you can't code, wtf use are you? None is the answer, btw.
And it's not like we (or the GP) are asking for a lot. We're not asking them to be expert software engineers. Basic programming skills like that should be trivial for anyone in CS/CE/IS/EE. Hell, I'd expect most ME and CE students to be able to do simple programming like that these days, especially if you didn't care about the language they did it in.
And you don't imagine thickness would in any way be related to size or weight? It's not like they're the same volume as any other laptop, just thinner and thus wider. :P
Besides, "ultra-thin" is just a marketing name for the sub-market.
Yes, yes, I know, Blu-ray is far superior, and if we'd only just buy a $2000 HDTV, adamantium plated HDMI cables, and view it while standing on our heads and licking a irate gecko, we'd see that the quality is obviously better than DVD.
Just an FYI, but you're licking your gecko wrong.
Nobody has figured out how to "cut" the bureaucracy or regulations.
If you don't count Scaled Composites and SpaceX and similar ventures in other countries.
Governments change. The laws of physics don't (probably).
The "regulations" of orbital mechanics just aren't that strict. If cost to low Earth orbit (LEO) was solely a function of the chemical fuel and oxidizer required to get into space it'd be around $100 per kg of payload. If cost to LEO was solely a function of the energy required to get into space it'd be around $10 per kg.
But obviously it isn't, because that fuel and oxidizer is going to spontaneously change itself into kinetic energy directed towards orbit. Access to space wouldn't be anywhere near that cheap with zero government regulations, because it's the laws of physics that make rocket science rocket science.
Spaceship One cut through the red tape. It's nowhere near orbit. Go tell the people actually doing it that the LEO is easy and cheap if only the government weren't there. The only ones who'll agree and could actually save money are the ones eager to make unsafe and unreliable rockets.
I'm not talking about just the energy itself I'm also talking about the mechanism by which to impart that energy to the spacecraft. Rockets are not cheap ways to lift humans or large amounts of cargo. Going into space is a tough and still expensive problem even with no interference from the government.
Good lord! What kind of future-doctor forgets they live in the future?! That doctor should be investigated; they might be on the sauce.
Oh, and ultra-reliable is not good enough. I have platinum card club member insurance -- get my daughter the Ludicrous-Reliable robot heart!
And laser eyes. I know insurance doesn't cover it, I've got the cash. Better for both of us if Uncle Sam doesn't know, capiche?
I've never seen a shuttle launch (Busch Gardens is nice though :), but I once drove past the "Future Location of Spaceport America!". The highway in NM was raised up above the large flat valley with mountains on the other side. Anywhere in that valley they put the pads, you could park on the side of the highway and watch easily.
On the topic of shuttle launches, a friend of mine is going to Florida specifically to see a shuttle launch (since there won't be many more). This got me thinking about something I heard about the shuttle a long time ago. I checked the wiki page, and all I could see was that it said the calculated minimum safe distance for NASA personnel was 3 mi. What I had heard was that the pressure wave, i.e. the noise, of the launch was so intense it killed animals within a mile of the shuttle. I've can't find anything that verifies that specifically, so I kinda think it's a mound of turtle crap, but it's almost plausible too...
"Matter of the money" is exactly the problem. Sure we know how to get to orbit. Done it plenty of times. It's getting there economically that's the problem, and one that isn't going to go away because even as the FAA changes and starts licensing various privately funded space companies, the PE + KE needed to orbit the earth aren't going to change barring big chunks of the earth going missing.
Red Tape may seem like the "impossible" obstacle, but once you've cut it, once the system has changed, then the obstacle is gone. The "regulations" of orbital mechanics aren't going to change, and they say getting to space is expensive no matter what the government says.
That was excellently put. This is precisely why despite the fact that I strongly disagree with the ACLU's position on the 2nd Amendment, I nevertheless have a lot of respect for them and am glad they do the work they do. It's not like they fight against gun rights, and they've happily worked with the NRA before when both gun rights and the rights the ACLU cares about were involved, pooling their forces and saying "look we both oppose this" as it were.
So yeah, it kinda miffs me that they only care about "Some Liberties", but that's just a difference of opinion. To actually hate them, I can't see unless like you said I was against the things they were fighting for.
The SR-71 Blackbird had a combination jet/ramjet engine, where the turbines were used at lower speeds, and then once it broke supersonic it became a ramjet using bypasses that directed the air (compressed by the cones on front of the engine) around the turbines which comprise most of the volume of the huge engine cylinders.
Not only is the SR-71 anything but an economical bird, it was also terribly complex to design, ridiculously inefficient while using the turbine (without even accounting for the fact that until air friction caused its panels to expand and seal it leaked fuel literally like a sieve), and very heavy. Tacking a rocket onto that kind of system to reach space sounds all kind of inefficient and uneconomical. I'm no aerospace engineer, but I wouldn't be surprised if designing the engine to seal off the front and use an internal oxidizer was infeasible and the rockets had to essentially be a whole separate system.
Frankly as far as hybrid systems go, I still like the Spaceship One/White Knight approach. A separate carrier vehicle can take the spacecraft up to high-ish altitudes, and then when the space craft takes ignites its rockets and takes off, it doesn't have to carry the carrier vehicle's jet engines with it. But who knows if that can be scaled up to something capable of carrying an orbit-capable vehicle plus a significant payload? Well, Burt Rutan I'd imagine.
Expressing support and best wishes for the protestors gives them a boost in spirit that they need if they are to succeed.
Yeah, and erodes their support among the people of Iran (and hell, various factions of protestors themselves) by linking them with America, and in particular with American meddling. Yes many Iranians want a more free and open government, yes many of them want better relations with the West in general and US in particular. But they do not want us meddling in their affairs. They have a very bad impression of our meddling.
Right now, the regime is demonstrating their brutality and oppression. Terrible as it is, this works in favor of the reformists. It builds sympathy and support (and practical proof of what they're saying about the government). But you can bet there are Iranians who think the protesters are getting exactly what they deserve, and you can bet that number will increase proportionally to the amount that the U.S. sticks their nose in and makes it sound like they are backing the protesters or are trying to influence them to overthrow the Iranian government. The entire country will solidify around the hard-liners if they see that as the case.
The best thing our government can do right now is keep their nose out of Iranian business.