Some trucks are using something other than airbrakes now? I'm interested to see more about this. Off to the wiki!
Yeah, I first became aware of it when I was following a truck which had a sticker on the back which said something like: "Warning! This truck is equipped with brakes which allow it to stop much faster than a normal car! Maintain a safe distance!" According to the other respondant, it's called a Jake Brake, and it uses the engine to brake.
How on Earth would drafting cause the lead car's drag to increase? It makes no sense...
It's only really significant when the lead car is something that creates a powerful vortex behind it, like an 18-wheeler. The draft behind the truck can actually pull you along, and in this case it is the truck itself that is effectively towing you. I did this myself in a little Tercel through the mountains of Wyoming. When I was at the correct distance behind it, the truck would quite literally pull me pull me up hills that my car couldn't scale very fast itself. Of course the trucker probably didn't appreciate this, since I was in fact increasing his load.
If I had been able to go forward, that would mean I was at the front of the line at the light and thus would have been driving into the rush-hour traffic travelling perpendicular to me and would have gotten t-boned. Not my idea of a good way to reduce the impact of the accident.
Of course even if there was a safe place for me to go, there's the matter of reaction time. I'm not going to drive off the road onto the sidewalk, pedestrians or no, just because the guy behind me might not stop. By the time I know he isn't, it's often too late to do much other than remind yourself that drunks survive accidents because they're limber and not tensed up.
Actually according to the law of several states (MI, TX, and MD to my knowledge), the only APPROPRIATE speed is to go with the flow of traffic -- even if traffic is going over the speed limit! It is drastic deviations from the speed at which traffic is moving that cause the most problems. You should be going the speed limit, but if the limit is 65 and everyone else is going 90 you will only be making things worse by staying at 65. Actually, when I was in MD I travelled a stretch of highway where this was exactly the case. Nobody did less than 80 MPH, the middle lane was 90 and the left lane was for those who wanted to go fast. Sticking to the speed limit would have been insanely stupid, and any fool tootling along muttering "well I'm obeying the law" was, in fact, wrong. And dangerous.
Tailgating an 18-wheeler is one of the safer forms of tailgating. The truck can't stop faster than your car.
Actually, a lot of 18-wheelers can. Especially if they are not fully loaded. I don't remember what they call the brakes, but they are a different beast than on your car or air brakes like you see on a bus.
Even if the stop should catch you off guard and you impact, it won't likely throw the truck off the road (due to mass), or your car (due to being pinned under the trailer).
Yeah, people get killed because their car wedges itself under the trailer and cleaves the top off the passenger compartment. I think most trucks are supposed to have guards that are low enough to prevent this, specifically to prevent this from happening, but I don't think all do because I still hear about it happening from time to time.
As someone else pointed out, it's a form of drafting so it saves fuel.
It only saves fuel for the person behind. It costs the person in front more fuel. If you're a team, you can save fuel overall, but drafting to save yourself fuel at the cost of some stranger's is being an asshole, and a dangerous asshole to boot.
Plus, sometimes, if you're trying to help somebody out, you come at their bumper from an angle and then just a light tap and you slide into the lane. You spin the other guy out, and it he's any good, he can probably avoid hitting anything deadly.
WTF? "Helping" somebody out by making them spin out while on the road at speed so he can "probably avoid hitting anything deadly"? Seems like the best way to avoid that is to not tailgate so that nobody gets hit at all! Seriously, WTF.
It's a normal part of driving. If you can't handle it, you have no business on the road.
No, it is not normal other than that lots of idiots like to do it. There may be some exceptional cases in which you and somebody you know agree that it is best under particular circumstances, but there is never a good reason to tailgate a stranger. If you do it "normally", you have no business on the road you dangerous moron.
Yeah, I use it when necessary, but I don't like it since it drastically reduces the visibility of anything that isn't a blinding high-beam from a tail-gating SUV. For example the other idiot who only has his running lights on. What this means is that most of the time I'm using the normal mirror, and then suddenly some SUV comes charging up behind me and flashes his beams (or hits a bump in the road so their lights tilt across that perfect angle for maximum reflection into my eyes) and blinds me. I can then flick the switch, but those few seconds of searing eye pain can be more than enough to cause an accident.
If I assume the car behind me will not stop, I'd constantly be driving off the road or running red lights or doing other crazy stupid things that will get me a ticket.
Granted you need to pay attention, and always consider the possibility that every other driver on the road is a drunken suicidal idiot, but paying attention doesn't let you forsee the future. I was rear-ended by some kid while stopped at the end of a long rush-hour queue at a traffic light. I saw him and of course considered the possibility that he wouldn't stop, but he wasn't travelling that fast so it seemed like a normal, and as is typical in my town fairly late, stop. Now the stupid kid was the one not paying attention (or rather, he was paying attention to the flashy sports car in the lane next to him), but by the time I realized he was probably not going to stop, 1) it was too late and 2) there was nowhere for me to go.
Lots of accidents are avoidable by paying attention. Some aren't. Especially those that don't have easy visual feedback. It's very tough to tell if a car behind you is decelerating, and you have no indication as to whether they are applying the brake -- though maybe there should be.
Note: Again disclaimer: I don't pack heat or have any intentions of doing anything violent. Just trying to bring some reality to the discussion. As much as I like firing weapons too, I'm not crazy enough to carry in the name of defense.
Personally I consider it a rather selfish viewpoint to only consider whether it makes sense to carry a gun for self-defense. For the same reason I don't carry a CPR breathing barrier so I can try to resuscitate myself. As a former Boy Scout, many of the skills I know (rescue breathing, CPR, first aid, water rescue) do little to no good to me, but that's okay because the whole point of learning them is to help others.
Think about the situation not where you are being mugged or assaulted or kidnapped, but where someone else is. In this case the situation is more like the police entry, where you are entering a situation where you know a firearm may be required, rather than the case where you are being suddenly accousted. As you add detail to the hypothetical scenario you can easily see cases where it wouldn't make sense to pull a gun, and of course having someone call the police should be the first course of action. However in some cases it can be very useful to be able to pull a gun, and the whole 20ft/2 second thing doesn't apply.
Now I don't own a gun, but I do see the utility of doing so. Particularly since I live in a state which saw a decrease in violent and gun-related crime after passing a concealed carry law. Why? Well according to criminals themselves, it's because they were leary of pulling a gun on somebody in an alley when anyone walking past the alley could potentially be carrying a gun.
However if the first thing that comes to her/his mind is 'It's clear, she killed her sister in order to be at another funeral so she could meet the guy again' then there is higher possibility that there could be something wrong with the asked person.
What? Why? The story makes a point of the girl's infatuation with the guy, and in the next sentence directly states -- not merely accuses -- the girl of murdering her sister. The story is designed to imply the girl is a psychopath who murdered her sister to get in touch with the guy again, but saying so means that there's something wrong with you the listener? WTF?
So according to psychologists, deliberately pretending to be unable to understand a violent person's motivations is normal, which looking at cause-and-effect and drawing a logical conclusion means you are possibly dangerous. That's retarded.
It's as retarded as the mentality that forces people to say that terrorists are simply "crazy", or that they "hate freedom" or something similarly stupid and illogical, because drawing a logical conclusion from motivations to action is too much like approving of the terrorists actions. So we deliberately draw insane conclusions in order to appear sane. Which is, in fact, insane.
There are many things seriously wrong with the U.S., but none of them are easily solvable, nor are they trivial issues.
And, like you say, few people like to directly address these issues, these causes of crime if you will. Any attempt to solve crime by focusing on tools used in the commission of a crime rather than the reason why crime is committed will fail.
Also, people comparing some countries in Europe (no guns, low crime rate) to the U.S. (many guns, high crime rate) always seem to suffer from selection bias -- they only choose examples that reinforce their pre-conceived notion that crime rate is proportional to gun ownership rate. However there are also examples of countries which have high gun ownership but low crime rates. Clearly, guns by themselves are not the source of crime.
This is particularly true since there's no convincing evidence showing that disarming law abiding citizens would reduce crime; rather, logically we'd expect to see it increase.
In the United States, states that have passed comprehensive gun bans have seen a rise in violent crime, while states that have passed concealed carry laws have seen a drop in violent crime. Pretty much what one expects. This is, of course, only within the already existant conditions of the United States -- all the problems you list, plus a large amount of guns that don't magically disappear when they are banned, not to mention that nothing stops a criminal in a state with a gun ban from going to the next state over to get a gun.
Unfounded conspiracy theory: SCO v IBM goes to trial, SCO loses terribly, and the court rules that IBM and Linux do not in any way infringe upon SCO's property by copyright, contract, or any other method. Microsoft, seeing that the FUD engine that is SCO is losing steam fast and when fully dead will actually make IBM and Linux stronger, gets Novel to call back the attack dog, making it look like a friendly gesture but actually preventing the stronger precedent from being set.
More likely case, though similarly unfounded: Novel has their own case with SCO regarding their UNIX contracts, and much like IBM had to go through a lengthy process before they felt their case was strong enough to order summary dismissal of many of SCO's claims, so too Novel had to build a case so that when they present this motion before the judge, they feel it is likely to be accepted. If they do in fact have the contractual right to order SCO to stop litigating IBM, then they probably want to assert their authority and use it, rather than appear as though they are allowing SCO to continue.
But you're right, it isn't obvious to me (IASNAFL*) that this is what IBM wants. If they wanted a quick end to the case, they could have settled (with an obviously bad precedent). They seem very intent to crush SCO in their steely grasp and let the sand-like remains run between their fingers to be blown away by the wind.
We're talking about the potential and likelyhood of abuse.
Just because wiretapping is so easy that the President authorizes it without a warrant does not make that authorization legal.
And yet it occured anyway, and the President has not been censured in any way as a result. The precident is there, and more importantly there is no reason to think this abuse is not ongoing. We know that warrantless wiretaps have been performed, and we know that the President feels he is perfectly within his rights to order more. He doesn't think it's illegal, and yeah that doesn't make it legal, but does that matter when nobody is stopping him from doing it?
Your argument that physical access and high cost made tapping phone lines legal is just weird.
No, the poster was arguing that the physical access and high cost made illegal abuse of phone line tapping unlikely, or at least less common.
but in this case it's just the technology that has changed
Yes, so it's just the difference between agents having to go out to someones home and physically set up a listening device for every home they wish to spy on, and an agent sitting at his desk clicking a button to spy on whichever house he wants. Which is easier to get away with? Which leaves more evidence, a physical device or a log on an FBI computer? Which is more convenient for performing wiretaps on a massive scale? Which method is more friendly not only to systematic abuse like the President's program, but also to rogue agents wishing to abuse their power individually?
That's really why this is alarming. The fundamental process of requiring a Judge to issue a warrant on probable cause of a crime before law enforcement is allowed to wire tap is sound. The problem is that new technology has made it easier than ever to surreptitiously circumvent that process. Whether that motivates any changes to the law, I don't know, but it certainly motivates my concern!
I don't know, but I'm thinking he'd view his project as much more of a success if he simply re-defined it. Machine for carrying groceries up stairs? No! Automatic Staircase Destroyer? Hell yes!
I imagine they ran some profiling tools and found that they were spending a substantial amount of time in calls to sqrt(), and figured that the division was also time-consuming and for an operation that is performed on so many pixels, it was worthwhile to optimize this particular routine.
I've written enough 3D graphics code -- including a textured polygon rasterizer that would probably cry and try to delete itself if it saw something like Quake 3 -- to know that they didn't have to run a profiler to know that they'd be spending too much time doing 1/sqrt(x) if they didn't have a highly optimized routine for it. It's an inherent operation in so many 3D calculations it isn't funny, and while by the time Quake 3 came out hardware floating point units were pretty fast, FP divides and FP square roots were very lengthy operations that more importantly couldn't be pipelined.
But if you're just trying to, say, figure out which pixel to color, and you approximate the pixel to a few decimal places...I think you're good to go.
Yeah, pretty much. Back when I wrote my code (pentium days) you had an FP unit but it wasn't very good, so I used fixed point math (using integer instructions) which had sufficient precision for a 320x200 display. Getting enough performance out of the core algorithms was still hard enough that I had to take a lot of shortcuts, like instead of doing the right thing by using a divide every pixel to calculate which texel to use, I used a divide every 8 pixels and linearly interpolated in between. I'm sure that Quake (the contemporary 3D engine of the day which would also make my code cry) contained many more clever optimizations and approximations, because it wouldn't have been possible on the hardware of that day without them.
In fact, approximating FP values for 3D code is so common that the 3DNow and SSE instruction sets contain instructions that approximate the square root and inverse square root to about half of single-precision floating point. The non-approximation instruction uses a lookup table to get an initial guess, then uses a couple iterations of Newton's Method to refine the result. The short cut instructions simply return the value in the lookup table.
So yeah, basically the AC OP has no idea what he is talking about, and from that basis of ignorance is denigrating what is in reality a very clever and extremely useful hack.
Efficiency (as in the size/speed/amount of solar energy) is as important as cost. If it is efficient enough to pay for its own cost before a solar cell would do the same, then it is a better choice.
I'd be willing to bet that this compound can be used to break multiple water molecules, just like our hemoglobin can carry another oxygen molecule after it drops one off. The source of energy that allows continued hydrogen production is the sun.
In which case, the main question is the rate at which you can produce hydrogen. How much of the substance do you need, and how much solar energy, to produce how much hydrogen over what period of time? That is what will define whether or not this is a practical method of producing hydrogen. One obvious point of comparison would be an equal-sized photovoltaic solar cell and water electrolysis machine. If it doesn't do better than that, it's pretty worthless. On the other hand it might be a very efficient way to convert solar energy into hydrogen gas for fuel cells, which would be sweet.
Not to mention the other possibilities it opens up in biochemistry. These proteins are fascinating, as is the idea of swapping out the bound metal atom to get different effects.
Well since there is no mention of what is actually alleged to be the problem, I can't really say whether or not this investigation has any merit. Certainly neither company has a monopoly, so the only thing I can think of is that the DOJ suspects some kind of collusion (the 'trust' in 'anti-trust' refers to multiple organizations agreeing to lock out competitors, not just individual monopolies).
Frankly I'm not going to assume anything. Yeah, the graphics card market is competitive and NVidia and ATI have done a very nice job of leapfrogging each other over and over into the stratospheres of graphics performance, and I hope that doesn't change. However if they are using illegal business tactics to ensure it doesn't become a 3-way race, then that has to stop. Kinda like when Rambus (*spits*) turned around and sued the Dramurai, who it turned out were colluding to control prices and lock out Rambus (*spits*).
Of course I'd rather they spent their time worrying about all the other things, but I'm sure it's not an either-or proposition, and again we're operating under a dearth of facts. Though I'll admit that unlike anti-trust action against Microsoft and Intel, I'm not already aware of shady business practices on the part of these two companies that would warrant it.
And to further abuse -- I mean extend -- your analogy, it's as if traditionally everyone was making rhubarb pie, and trying to make better rhubarb pies to get more of the rhubarb pie eating market. Then Nintendo decided that maybe they should try making an apple pie and thus get people who might like a pie but don't find rhubarb appealing. And the other pie makers made fun of Nintendo because their apple pie wasn't as huge as their pies, and didn't have as finely textured a crust. But a lot of people don't care, they just want a pie they can sit down and eat and find tasty right off the bat without having to aquire a taste for rhubarb.
And something about how you used to have to hit buttons and levers in various sequences to get the rhubarb pie into your mouth, but Nintendo thought it'd be easier for people to be able to just move a fork through the air to get pie into their mouths.
Ooh, and Nintendo got this idea after their successfull experiment in an innovative new snack cake that came with two little fruit pies, one cherry-filled and the other not, along with a toothpick in one portable package. People thought that was a dumb idea too because everyone else was just making smaller rhubarb pies like they did for people's homes.
So, once you take the resolution into account, I'm pretty sure all 3 consoles are as powerful as the other
4x the required horsepower (used figuratively of course, there is no such thing as a unit of potential graphical rendering capability) in the pixel rasterization hardware is not the same as requiring 4x the horespower overall. All the other things that "need" to be better to look good on an HD screen -- geometry detail, texture resolution, number of shader passes, and all that jazz -- is enabled by the extra horsepower of the 360 and ps3. That still leaves those consoles as more powerful.
I hate to break it to you, but read the reviews and look at the screenshots: 360 and PS3 games look better than Wii games on a non-HD TV. Which is to be expected, because the 360/PS3 do have a major graphical horsepower advantage over the Wii. There's more to graphics than resolution, and while HD is nice, it isn't like the last-generation consoles reached the pinacle of what could be accomplished at a mere 480p.
I'll still be buying a Wii and avoiding the PS3 and xbox, so there you go.
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Some trucks are using something other than airbrakes now? I'm interested to see more about this. Off to the wiki!
Yeah, I first became aware of it when I was following a truck which had a sticker on the back which said something like: "Warning! This truck is equipped with brakes which allow it to stop much faster than a normal car! Maintain a safe distance!" According to the other respondant, it's called a Jake Brake, and it uses the engine to brake.
Anyway, I'm dying to ask. Is "Chris" a girls name or a boys name?
Your loneliness saddens me.
How on Earth would drafting cause the lead car's drag to increase? It makes no sense...
It's only really significant when the lead car is something that creates a powerful vortex behind it, like an 18-wheeler. The draft behind the truck can actually pull you along, and in this case it is the truck itself that is effectively towing you. I did this myself in a little Tercel through the mountains of Wyoming. When I was at the correct distance behind it, the truck would quite literally pull me pull me up hills that my car couldn't scale very fast itself. Of course the trucker probably didn't appreciate this, since I was in fact increasing his load.
If I had been able to go forward, that would mean I was at the front of the line at the light and thus would have been driving into the rush-hour traffic travelling perpendicular to me and would have gotten t-boned. Not my idea of a good way to reduce the impact of the accident.
Of course even if there was a safe place for me to go, there's the matter of reaction time. I'm not going to drive off the road onto the sidewalk, pedestrians or no, just because the guy behind me might not stop. By the time I know he isn't, it's often too late to do much other than remind yourself that drunks survive accidents because they're limber and not tensed up.
*shakes fist* Slow down, you crazy kids!
Actually according to the law of several states (MI, TX, and MD to my knowledge), the only APPROPRIATE speed is to go with the flow of traffic -- even if traffic is going over the speed limit! It is drastic deviations from the speed at which traffic is moving that cause the most problems. You should be going the speed limit, but if the limit is 65 and everyone else is going 90 you will only be making things worse by staying at 65. Actually, when I was in MD I travelled a stretch of highway where this was exactly the case. Nobody did less than 80 MPH, the middle lane was 90 and the left lane was for those who wanted to go fast. Sticking to the speed limit would have been insanely stupid, and any fool tootling along muttering "well I'm obeying the law" was, in fact, wrong. And dangerous.
Tailgating an 18-wheeler is one of the safer forms of tailgating. The truck can't stop faster than your car.
Actually, a lot of 18-wheelers can. Especially if they are not fully loaded. I don't remember what they call the brakes, but they are a different beast than on your car or air brakes like you see on a bus.
Even if the stop should catch you off guard and you impact, it won't likely throw the truck off the road (due to mass), or your car (due to being pinned under the trailer).
Yeah, people get killed because their car wedges itself under the trailer and cleaves the top off the passenger compartment. I think most trucks are supposed to have guards that are low enough to prevent this, specifically to prevent this from happening, but I don't think all do because I still hear about it happening from time to time.
As someone else pointed out, it's a form of drafting so it saves fuel.
It only saves fuel for the person behind. It costs the person in front more fuel. If you're a team, you can save fuel overall, but drafting to save yourself fuel at the cost of some stranger's is being an asshole, and a dangerous asshole to boot.
Plus, sometimes, if you're trying to help somebody out, you come at their bumper from an angle and then just a light tap and you slide into the lane. You spin the other guy out, and it he's any good, he can probably avoid hitting anything deadly.
WTF? "Helping" somebody out by making them spin out while on the road at speed so he can "probably avoid hitting anything deadly"? Seems like the best way to avoid that is to not tailgate so that nobody gets hit at all! Seriously, WTF.
It's a normal part of driving. If you can't handle it, you have no business on the road.
No, it is not normal other than that lots of idiots like to do it. There may be some exceptional cases in which you and somebody you know agree that it is best under particular circumstances, but there is never a good reason to tailgate a stranger. If you do it "normally", you have no business on the road you dangerous moron.
Yeah, I use it when necessary, but I don't like it since it drastically reduces the visibility of anything that isn't a blinding high-beam from a tail-gating SUV. For example the other idiot who only has his running lights on. What this means is that most of the time I'm using the normal mirror, and then suddenly some SUV comes charging up behind me and flashes his beams (or hits a bump in the road so their lights tilt across that perfect angle for maximum reflection into my eyes) and blinds me. I can then flick the switch, but those few seconds of searing eye pain can be more than enough to cause an accident.
If I assume the car behind me will not stop, I'd constantly be driving off the road or running red lights or doing other crazy stupid things that will get me a ticket.
Granted you need to pay attention, and always consider the possibility that every other driver on the road is a drunken suicidal idiot, but paying attention doesn't let you forsee the future. I was rear-ended by some kid while stopped at the end of a long rush-hour queue at a traffic light. I saw him and of course considered the possibility that he wouldn't stop, but he wasn't travelling that fast so it seemed like a normal, and as is typical in my town fairly late, stop. Now the stupid kid was the one not paying attention (or rather, he was paying attention to the flashy sports car in the lane next to him), but by the time I realized he was probably not going to stop, 1) it was too late and 2) there was nowhere for me to go.
Lots of accidents are avoidable by paying attention. Some aren't. Especially those that don't have easy visual feedback. It's very tough to tell if a car behind you is decelerating, and you have no indication as to whether they are applying the brake -- though maybe there should be.
Note: Again disclaimer: I don't pack heat or have any intentions of doing anything violent. Just trying to bring some reality to the discussion. As much as I like firing weapons too, I'm not crazy enough to carry in the name of defense.
Personally I consider it a rather selfish viewpoint to only consider whether it makes sense to carry a gun for self-defense. For the same reason I don't carry a CPR breathing barrier so I can try to resuscitate myself. As a former Boy Scout, many of the skills I know (rescue breathing, CPR, first aid, water rescue) do little to no good to me, but that's okay because the whole point of learning them is to help others.
Think about the situation not where you are being mugged or assaulted or kidnapped, but where someone else is. In this case the situation is more like the police entry, where you are entering a situation where you know a firearm may be required, rather than the case where you are being suddenly accousted. As you add detail to the hypothetical scenario you can easily see cases where it wouldn't make sense to pull a gun, and of course having someone call the police should be the first course of action. However in some cases it can be very useful to be able to pull a gun, and the whole 20ft/2 second thing doesn't apply.
Now I don't own a gun, but I do see the utility of doing so. Particularly since I live in a state which saw a decrease in violent and gun-related crime after passing a concealed carry law. Why? Well according to criminals themselves, it's because they were leary of pulling a gun on somebody in an alley when anyone walking past the alley could potentially be carrying a gun.
However if the first thing that comes to her/his mind is 'It's clear, she killed her sister in order to be at another funeral so she could meet the guy again' then there is higher possibility that there could be something wrong with the asked person.
What? Why? The story makes a point of the girl's infatuation with the guy, and in the next sentence directly states -- not merely accuses -- the girl of murdering her sister. The story is designed to imply the girl is a psychopath who murdered her sister to get in touch with the guy again, but saying so means that there's something wrong with you the listener? WTF?
So according to psychologists, deliberately pretending to be unable to understand a violent person's motivations is normal, which looking at cause-and-effect and drawing a logical conclusion means you are possibly dangerous. That's retarded.
It's as retarded as the mentality that forces people to say that terrorists are simply "crazy", or that they "hate freedom" or something similarly stupid and illogical, because drawing a logical conclusion from motivations to action is too much like approving of the terrorists actions. So we deliberately draw insane conclusions in order to appear sane. Which is, in fact, insane.
There are many things seriously wrong with the U.S., but none of them are easily solvable, nor are they trivial issues.
And, like you say, few people like to directly address these issues, these causes of crime if you will. Any attempt to solve crime by focusing on tools used in the commission of a crime rather than the reason why crime is committed will fail.
Also, people comparing some countries in Europe (no guns, low crime rate) to the U.S. (many guns, high crime rate) always seem to suffer from selection bias -- they only choose examples that reinforce their pre-conceived notion that crime rate is proportional to gun ownership rate. However there are also examples of countries which have high gun ownership but low crime rates. Clearly, guns by themselves are not the source of crime.
This is particularly true since there's no convincing evidence showing that disarming law abiding citizens would reduce crime; rather, logically we'd expect to see it increase.
In the United States, states that have passed comprehensive gun bans have seen a rise in violent crime, while states that have passed concealed carry laws have seen a drop in violent crime. Pretty much what one expects. This is, of course, only within the already existant conditions of the United States -- all the problems you list, plus a large amount of guns that don't magically disappear when they are banned, not to mention that nothing stops a criminal in a state with a gun ban from going to the next state over to get a gun.
"I mean you're not helping! Why is that, Leon?"
I've always wanted to be given a Voight-Kampf (sp?) test, just so I could respond to this question with "Because I fuckin' hate turtles!"
Unfounded conspiracy theory: SCO v IBM goes to trial, SCO loses terribly, and the court rules that IBM and Linux do not in any way infringe upon SCO's property by copyright, contract, or any other method. Microsoft, seeing that the FUD engine that is SCO is losing steam fast and when fully dead will actually make IBM and Linux stronger, gets Novel to call back the attack dog, making it look like a friendly gesture but actually preventing the stronger precedent from being set.
More likely case, though similarly unfounded: Novel has their own case with SCO regarding their UNIX contracts, and much like IBM had to go through a lengthy process before they felt their case was strong enough to order summary dismissal of many of SCO's claims, so too Novel had to build a case so that when they present this motion before the judge, they feel it is likely to be accepted. If they do in fact have the contractual right to order SCO to stop litigating IBM, then they probably want to assert their authority and use it, rather than appear as though they are allowing SCO to continue.
But you're right, it isn't obvious to me (IASNAFL*) that this is what IBM wants. If they wanted a quick end to the case, they could have settled (with an obviously bad precedent). They seem very intent to crush SCO in their steely grasp and let the sand-like remains run between their fingers to be blown away by the wind.
* S = So, F = Fornicating
We're talking about the potential and likelyhood of abuse.
Just because wiretapping is so easy that the President authorizes it without a warrant does not make that authorization legal.
And yet it occured anyway, and the President has not been censured in any way as a result. The precident is there, and more importantly there is no reason to think this abuse is not ongoing. We know that warrantless wiretaps have been performed, and we know that the President feels he is perfectly within his rights to order more. He doesn't think it's illegal, and yeah that doesn't make it legal, but does that matter when nobody is stopping him from doing it?
Your argument that physical access and high cost made tapping phone lines legal is just weird.
No, the poster was arguing that the physical access and high cost made illegal abuse of phone line tapping unlikely, or at least less common.
but in this case it's just the technology that has changed
Yes, so it's just the difference between agents having to go out to someones home and physically set up a listening device for every home they wish to spy on, and an agent sitting at his desk clicking a button to spy on whichever house he wants. Which is easier to get away with? Which leaves more evidence, a physical device or a log on an FBI computer? Which is more convenient for performing wiretaps on a massive scale? Which method is more friendly not only to systematic abuse like the President's program, but also to rogue agents wishing to abuse their power individually?
That's really why this is alarming. The fundamental process of requiring a Judge to issue a warrant on probable cause of a crime before law enforcement is allowed to wire tap is sound. The problem is that new technology has made it easier than ever to surreptitiously circumvent that process. Whether that motivates any changes to the law, I don't know, but it certainly motivates my concern!
I don't know, but I'm thinking he'd view his project as much more of a success if he simply re-defined it. Machine for carrying groceries up stairs? No! Automatic Staircase Destroyer? Hell yes!
It's code like that that makes people whip out their katanas and scream "die, die"!
And the resulting binaries seem to have the same effect on people!
I imagine they ran some profiling tools and found that they were spending a substantial amount of time in calls to sqrt(), and figured that the division was also time-consuming and for an operation that is performed on so many pixels, it was worthwhile to optimize this particular routine.
I've written enough 3D graphics code -- including a textured polygon rasterizer that would probably cry and try to delete itself if it saw something like Quake 3 -- to know that they didn't have to run a profiler to know that they'd be spending too much time doing 1/sqrt(x) if they didn't have a highly optimized routine for it. It's an inherent operation in so many 3D calculations it isn't funny, and while by the time Quake 3 came out hardware floating point units were pretty fast, FP divides and FP square roots were very lengthy operations that more importantly couldn't be pipelined.
But if you're just trying to, say, figure out which pixel to color, and you approximate the pixel to a few decimal places...I think you're good to go.
Yeah, pretty much. Back when I wrote my code (pentium days) you had an FP unit but it wasn't very good, so I used fixed point math (using integer instructions) which had sufficient precision for a 320x200 display. Getting enough performance out of the core algorithms was still hard enough that I had to take a lot of shortcuts, like instead of doing the right thing by using a divide every pixel to calculate which texel to use, I used a divide every 8 pixels and linearly interpolated in between. I'm sure that Quake (the contemporary 3D engine of the day which would also make my code cry) contained many more clever optimizations and approximations, because it wouldn't have been possible on the hardware of that day without them.
In fact, approximating FP values for 3D code is so common that the 3DNow and SSE instruction sets contain instructions that approximate the square root and inverse square root to about half of single-precision floating point. The non-approximation instruction uses a lookup table to get an initial guess, then uses a couple iterations of Newton's Method to refine the result. The short cut instructions simply return the value in the lookup table.
So yeah, basically the AC OP has no idea what he is talking about, and from that basis of ignorance is denigrating what is in reality a very clever and extremely useful hack.
Efficiency (as in the size/speed/amount of solar energy) is as important as cost. If it is efficient enough to pay for its own cost before a solar cell would do the same, then it is a better choice.
I'd be willing to bet that this compound can be used to break multiple water molecules, just like our hemoglobin can carry another oxygen molecule after it drops one off. The source of energy that allows continued hydrogen production is the sun.
In which case, the main question is the rate at which you can produce hydrogen. How much of the substance do you need, and how much solar energy, to produce how much hydrogen over what period of time? That is what will define whether or not this is a practical method of producing hydrogen. One obvious point of comparison would be an equal-sized photovoltaic solar cell and water electrolysis machine. If it doesn't do better than that, it's pretty worthless. On the other hand it might be a very efficient way to convert solar energy into hydrogen gas for fuel cells, which would be sweet.
Not to mention the other possibilities it opens up in biochemistry. These proteins are fascinating, as is the idea of swapping out the bound metal atom to get different effects.
Well since there is no mention of what is actually alleged to be the problem, I can't really say whether or not this investigation has any merit. Certainly neither company has a monopoly, so the only thing I can think of is that the DOJ suspects some kind of collusion (the 'trust' in 'anti-trust' refers to multiple organizations agreeing to lock out competitors, not just individual monopolies).
Frankly I'm not going to assume anything. Yeah, the graphics card market is competitive and NVidia and ATI have done a very nice job of leapfrogging each other over and over into the stratospheres of graphics performance, and I hope that doesn't change. However if they are using illegal business tactics to ensure it doesn't become a 3-way race, then that has to stop. Kinda like when Rambus (*spits*) turned around and sued the Dramurai, who it turned out were colluding to control prices and lock out Rambus (*spits*).
Of course I'd rather they spent their time worrying about all the other things, but I'm sure it's not an either-or proposition, and again we're operating under a dearth of facts. Though I'll admit that unlike anti-trust action against Microsoft and Intel, I'm not already aware of shady business practices on the part of these two companies that would warrant it.
He calls every function that. Have you seen his code? Freaking unreadable.
int MakeYouMyBitch7 () {
int my_bitch = MakeYouMyBitch() * MakeYouMyBitch2();
return MakeYouMyBitch36(my_bitch);
}
Just terrible.
And to further abuse -- I mean extend -- your analogy, it's as if traditionally everyone was making rhubarb pie, and trying to make better rhubarb pies to get more of the rhubarb pie eating market. Then Nintendo decided that maybe they should try making an apple pie and thus get people who might like a pie but don't find rhubarb appealing. And the other pie makers made fun of Nintendo because their apple pie wasn't as huge as their pies, and didn't have as finely textured a crust. But a lot of people don't care, they just want a pie they can sit down and eat and find tasty right off the bat without having to aquire a taste for rhubarb.
And something about how you used to have to hit buttons and levers in various sequences to get the rhubarb pie into your mouth, but Nintendo thought it'd be easier for people to be able to just move a fork through the air to get pie into their mouths.
Ooh, and Nintendo got this idea after their successfull experiment in an innovative new snack cake that came with two little fruit pies, one cherry-filled and the other not, along with a toothpick in one portable package. People thought that was a dumb idea too because everyone else was just making smaller rhubarb pies like they did for people's homes.
Okay I'm done.
So, once you take the resolution into account, I'm pretty sure all 3 consoles are as powerful as the other
4x the required horsepower (used figuratively of course, there is no such thing as a unit of potential graphical rendering capability) in the pixel rasterization hardware is not the same as requiring 4x the horespower overall. All the other things that "need" to be better to look good on an HD screen -- geometry detail, texture resolution, number of shader passes, and all that jazz -- is enabled by the extra horsepower of the 360 and ps3. That still leaves those consoles as more powerful.
I hate to break it to you, but read the reviews and look at the screenshots: 360 and PS3 games look better than Wii games on a non-HD TV. Which is to be expected, because the 360/PS3 do have a major graphical horsepower advantage over the Wii. There's more to graphics than resolution, and while HD is nice, it isn't like the last-generation consoles reached the pinacle of what could be accomplished at a mere 480p.
I'll still be buying a Wii and avoiding the PS3 and xbox, so there you go.