Jet engines and rocket engines work because they burn fuel, the fuel expands, and produces force agains the walls of the combustion chamber. It does so more on the front than on the back, because there is a hole in the back against which it obviously doesn't exercise any pressure.
Ehmm. Normal jet-engines need air for two things. One is to provide the oxigen to burn the fuel.
The fuel burns, expands and is expelled backwards. The efficiency of such a motor can be greatly enhanced by the second reason for air: Instead of thrusting out a little burnt fuel at enormous speeds, you use this power to drive a big fan, effectively thrusting out lots more air (about 10x the amount of hot, burnt fuel) at much slower speed.
Now what "jet engines" have to do with the Helios is beyond me: Helios is an electrically powered propellor aircraft, which definitively needs air to fly.... First for lift, and secondly for propulsion.
If I get my aerondynamics right, the amount of energy required to fly this thing is roughly the same at sealevel, as it is at 30km. However, with 20x lower airpressure, it will fly about 4.5 times as fast. Thus the propellors will have to be engineered to be efficient at both airspeeds!
Do people spend more money on Linux Distributions or on windows?
Let us assume that Red Hat has a market share of 50%. Then if the amounts spent on Linux were on the same order of magnitude as the amount of money spent on Windows, then Red Hat would earn about the same order of magnitude as Microsoft.
Red Hat however, earns around 0.1% of what Microsoft makes. Even if Red Hat has a 5% share instead of 50%, that makes "spenditure" on Microsoft about 100 times more popular than spenditure on Linux.
Simple math.
Roger.
(I checked the SEC filings for the gross income numbers $20 billion per year for MSFT, $100M for RHAT).
You don't lose useful information, only useless information. "success" type status messages will be removed
I'm sorry, but it's kind of useful to have the system print an inventory as it finds it. So for example, the fact that it finds a harddisk is something that is highly useful. The fact that it found 512Mb memory is useful.
Now, I agree with Linus that I don't need to know that every kernel since 4 years ago runs with "net-3".
My diskless workstations sometimes don't boot. The "found an RTL8139" message is then ESSENTIAL to determine wether or not I forgot to include the network card again.
The "found hda" message is useful when you're debugging a non-booting Linux system. Stuff like that. But again: Linus is right when he says that plain version information is not very useful.
Sometimes the messages can be condensed:
PIIX4: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
PIIX4: chipset revision 1
PIIX4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:DMA
hda: QUANTUM FIREBALLlct10 15, ATA DISK drive
hdd: CD-ROM 40X/AKU, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: 29336832 sectors (15020 MB) w/418KiB Cache, CHS=1826/255/63, UDMA(33)
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
How about:
PIIX4 rev 1 at 00/39(14/15): DMA/pio/pio/DMA
hda [hda1 hda2 hda3]: QUANTUM FIREBALLlct10 15: 15020 MB, w/418KiB Cache UDMA(33)
I can hear the difference between 1.75V and 1.40V.
If it's rated for 1.75V and runs at 1.4V, then you can probably run it at up to 1.4GHz or something like that at the rated voltage. Wow!
... just running there 1G PIII at 500MHZ or so since the CPU barely gets warm....
Remember that at 500MHz your CPU uses only half the power. SO if originally it used 20W, now it will still use 10W. If then however, you can tune your voltage down from say 1.75 to 1.40, you end up using only 64percent of the power. Thus only 6.4W, a third of the original.
Roger.
P.S. Stupid Slashdot won't allow me to post a percent sign.... Grrr.
I have an always on machine that is usually doing nothing. It doesn't have a harddisk. So the total powerconsumption measured at the wall-outlett is around 50W. My reasoning is that with a 300W powersupply in there, that thing should be able to run with a little less cooling than when at full blast.
So I opened the power supply, and measured the fan to have about 120 ohms and put two 240 ohms resistors in parallel, and that combination in series with the fan. Now the fan runs at about 25percent of it's rated speed (6V instead of 12V). VERY VERY quiet.
I trust Linux enough that I was also willing to have a background process check the CPU temp and turn on the CPU fan if that was required. This was however not possible with the hardware in that machine. one day I may make the hardware to do that though....
Well, since v = I R, you can say either P = (v^2)/R or P = (I^2) R it's just the same...
Right.......... And wrong.
The "V" you need to take is the Voltage over the cable. This is not a nubmer that is easily user-accesible. Moreover, the "R" becoming 0 (superconduction!) means that we start dividing by 0. Fun formula to use in this case.
The right formula is:
P = I^2 * R
This shows that the current used is very important. By increasing the voltage on the long distance lines, the current is reduced, therefore the losses in those lines. In this case, the R is reduced to 0, so the loss should be 0 in the superconducting cable.
Power for cooling to keep the cable below -160 degrees celcius is expected to be about half the power loss of a traditional cable.
But in exchange for that, the failure modes are twice as spectacular!
If the cooling system goes out, the cable will become non-superconducing, start to produce heat, and quickly explode.
If the cable is overloaded, it won't just melt away, but at a certain point the superconductivity will stop to work (you can only carry that much current through a superconducting cable) and again, heat forms, and superconductivity stops alltogether really quickly.
So what I'd like to see would be like this: One unsolicited e-mail allowed from a business to one address.
The problem with this is that there are soooo very many "wannabe rich quick people". Or "small businesses". Whatever you want to call them.
And the hardcore spammers are the ones who will set up a new business to do a new run of that old database anyway.
So if you allow one spam per "from address", that would mean that there still is a very LARGE pool of people who can legitimately SPAM me.
The problem with spam is that it costs so little. Making a flyer and getting it distributed costs real money.
There would be no spam problem if sending a spam would cost 5 cents or so. If spamming were made legal, and the ISPs would be able to collect in bulk on those 5 cents, I wouldn't mind getting the occasional spam.
Actually, the fact that there was no "User Unknown" error returned by your mail server is enough proof to the spammer that they sent the spam to a valid email address...
A spammer has put my Email address in the envelope-from. I get all his "user-unknown" bounces.
Does anybody have any hints on how to report this guy for forgery? We have about 3 weeks until we stop being able to catch him red-handed.
After a few weeks in his class everyone knew that taking more than a few words from someone else was completely unacceptable and that he'd find the original author before he presented the grades on the paper.
You'd quote a passage from an obscure book which would fit in nicely in your paper (i.e. without the proper "quoted from... " around it), and he'd take the book along to class....
The machines have been left on for 24x7 and stuff just doesn't fail.
My PC-webserver "just doesn't fail". Manually rebooted after 461 days of uptime (85 days ago according to "uptime"). Before that: unplanned downtime: power loss for the whole city, and the expected planned downtime: installation of UPS....
As for the Chernobyl disaster, that was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. No containment dome, and no decent safety measures to minimize the possibility of an explosion and meltdown. Note that when Three Mile Island had its core meltdown just about all of its radioactivity was still safely confined inside the containment dome.
The problem with nuclear power is that it has so much..... power.
Thus if you have a slow meltdown, a containment dome will hold most of the mess inside. But if you have a nuclear explosion, there is no way any man-built structure will hold everything inside.
That's what happened at chernobyl. There was an explosion. Maybe a western containment dome would have been able to withstand the explosion. Maybe not.
Different incidents, different results.
Oh, and wasn't the root cause for both accidents the same? Operators doing exactly the wrong thing for something that should've remained a minor problem? (iirc, Chernobyl accidently shut down, and restarting it without the proper procedures is, well, dangerous. At 3 mile island a stuck meter caused them to think the pressure was high, leading the operator to reduce the pressure by venting the fluid. This eventually caused the pressure to go dangerously low. )
It is extremely hard to get such an effort off the ground.
If say 80% of the users would have such a monitor, it would be a possible decision to say: "f*ck those without HDCPS, we'll only release this movie with this enabled".
So who is going to be buying compatible cards and monitors? You can't do anything with them that you can't with a normal monitor.... So, we'll always keep a significant marketshare that makes the decision to copy-protect the movie very uneconomic.
They don't actually produce DRAM, they simply license their RDRAM technology to DRAM makers, and have recently started charging fees for SDRAM production as well, based on their questionable patents.
It is possible to have a brilliant idea, patent it, and have everybody use it a few years down the line, and have them pay royalties for the invention.
It is NOT possible to own dozens of patents in an area where you haven't produced anything yourself.
Say, Micron, being in the industry for a decade might own 5, 10, 20 or 100 patents in the area. They are in the field, and they have full-time experts trying to improve on what they already can. And they can test what they think up. Lots of brilliant ideas end up unusable because the drawbacks that you find if you actually try to use it weigh out the advantages.
Now when I first heard about rambus, it was a neat idea. That was a one-man effort. And it's possible that they got enough funding to put 20 or 100 experts in a room and tell them "now go and invent something". But without them actually designing and making the chips, it is doubtful that they would come up with anything patentable.
Maybe one or two, but certainly not a dozen or more.
I don't think so. They should've been ordered to pay much more.
If they pay $77.50 plus $200 for the lawyer to be present, they got off VERY cheap. Remember that only 1 in 10000 people will go to the courts.
If the court says: "how many people have you sent this to?", and they answer say "500", then the court can say: There is a $50 fine for every spam, so you pay for 10 spams to this little lady here, and I'm going to fine you $5000 for just 20% of the others that you bothered with your unsolicited Email.
(If they answer a rediculously small number ("Just her, honest"), they should be prosecuted for lying....)
So, this guy was already a Kozmo.com customer, and he's complaining about getting administrative email from them?
Yeah. But having ticked "no I don't want Emails from you", this gal had a "contract" with them which they broke.
I expect "small claims court" to "think along with the small guys" a bit. In this case the lady who got spammed.
The "anti-spam" law is meant to protect those not wanting junk-mail. What do you think the "I don't want mail from you" button does? It means that even if there is a business relationship, the "updates on products" are not requested by the customer.
So even though the law was formulated a bit sloppily (it may not catch this case), it was explained by this judge the way it was supposed to work. Good.
Here in Holland there is a club, (operated by spammers, I think) which claims that you have complete control over teh spam you recieve. You can tick your "interests" on their site. Well, wouldn't you know it: half a year later, they spam you. I could have sworn I ticked that they shouldn't spam me. In this case all I have is my statement that I ticked the button, while they have the database to prove that I wanted their spam. This time I know for sure I modified my settings that I don't want their spam. And hereby I'm on record on slashdot that I did so.
Next time I'll sue them.
A real (working) anti-spam law allows you to sue first-time offenders. If there isn't a special law you would have to resort to "please don't bother me", and then wait for them to repeat the offense. This normally doesn't happen, as they have enough people to Email...
two things. When a friend mentioned "mouse gestures" for B & W he just bought, I mentioned Mentor Graphics (dated 10 years ago!) immediately.
two: A good userinterface gives you different ways to accomplish an action. Clicking the "next" button, selecting "forward" from the "go" menu, pressing alt-right, or dragging right with button 2 all accomplish the same thing. Different people prefer different things. Different levels of users also trigger different interface requirements.
If the task you're currently doing happens to have a lot of keyboard based activity (e.g. filling out a web-form), then having to move your hands to the mouse to click on the next form-item is annoying. So you rather press 'tab' to go to the next item....
But if you're pointing and clicking with your hand on the mouse, it's annoying to have to go to the keyboard to press alt-right to navigate to the next page in your history. So you get both options. Having more options is better.
And a good interface will help the user find the "shorter" ways. For instance, emacs shows me the shortcut when I select something from the menu. If I select "forward" from the "go" menu in my netscape, netscape could flash the icon that's on my toolbar. The keystroke is already mentioned in the menu. The statusbar might mention "shortcut: drag mb2 right" when the menu is selected or the icon clicked.
The refractive index is directly related to the speed of the EM waves in the material.
When the waves bend the other way, then the refractive index is less than one. The speed of the EM waves then is: C / r . where, C is the speed of light, and "r" is the refractive index.
With r < 1, You get faster-than-light transmission. This violates some pretty basic physics laws.
I'm not sure what negative r and speed would imply exactly.
Note that one of the preconditions to life is that there are various cycles.
waves 0.1s
waves 1s
waves 10s
tides ~ 0.5d
day/night 1.0d
moon 4w
summer/winter 1 y
Solar cycle ~ 11 y
ice ages 10k y
???? 23M y
All these cycles make sure that at least at one point in the cycle, the conditions are "good" to cause life to start. After that, the conditions are bound to be worse, and evolution is forced to adapt to the worsening conditions.
I speculate that life can only get started/continue going when there are several cycles interfering with each other at different frequencies.....
A nearly circular orbit, like earth, is bad for evolution. Some excentricity is good.
In other words, terminal velocity is reached when the pressure force exerted on your body by the air you're running into equals your weight.
Right. However, in different body positions there will be different speeds at which you move. If you move from one position that has a higher associated speed to another, there can be a rapid decelle- splat.
Slashdot Mirror
Releasing the details puts pressure on the companies to fix the damn thing.
It seems I'm getting old. I remember the days when reported bugs hadn't been fixed one or two years after they had been reported.
Full disclosure has changed that.
Roger.
Jet engines and rocket engines work because they burn fuel, the fuel expands, and produces force agains the walls of the combustion chamber. It does so more on the front than on the back, because there is a hole in the back against which it obviously doesn't exercise any pressure.
Ehmm. Normal jet-engines need air for two things. One is to provide the oxigen to burn the fuel.
The fuel burns, expands and is expelled backwards. The efficiency of such a motor can be greatly enhanced by the second reason for air: Instead of thrusting out a little burnt fuel at enormous speeds, you use this power to drive a big fan, effectively thrusting out lots more air (about 10x the amount of hot, burnt fuel) at much slower speed.
Now what "jet engines" have to do with the Helios is beyond me: Helios is an electrically powered propellor aircraft, which definitively needs air to fly.... First for lift, and secondly for propulsion.
If I get my aerondynamics right, the amount of energy required to fly this thing is roughly the same at sealevel, as it is at 30km. However, with 20x lower airpressure, it will fly about 4.5 times as fast. Thus the propellors will have to be engineered to be efficient at both airspeeds!
Roger.
Do people spend more money on Linux Distributions or on windows?
Let us assume that Red Hat has a market share of 50%. Then if the amounts spent on Linux were on the same order of magnitude as the amount of money spent on Windows, then Red Hat would earn about the same order of magnitude as Microsoft.
Red Hat however, earns around 0.1% of what Microsoft makes. Even if Red Hat has a 5% share instead of 50%, that makes "spenditure" on Microsoft about 100 times more popular than spenditure on Linux.
Simple math.
Roger.
(I checked the SEC filings for the gross income numbers $20 billion per year for MSFT, $100M for RHAT).
I can show many spams that have a counter in the subject.
Slashdot won't allow me to post the comment if I quote them.
You don't lose useful information, only useless information. "success" type status messages will be removed
I'm sorry, but it's kind of useful to have the system print an inventory as it finds it. So for example, the fact that it finds a harddisk is something that is highly useful. The fact that it found 512Mb memory is useful.
Now, I agree with Linus that I don't need to know that every kernel since 4 years ago runs with "net-3".
My diskless workstations sometimes don't boot. The "found an RTL8139" message is then ESSENTIAL to determine wether or not I forgot to include the network card again.
The "found hda" message is useful when you're debugging a non-booting Linux system. Stuff like that. But again: Linus is right when he says that plain version information is not very useful.
Sometimes the messages can be condensed:
PIIX4: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
PIIX4: chipset revision 1
PIIX4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:DMA
hda: QUANTUM FIREBALLlct10 15, ATA DISK drive
hdd: CD-ROM 40X/AKU, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: 29336832 sectors (15020 MB) w/418KiB Cache, CHS=1826/255/63, UDMA(33)
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
How about:
PIIX4 rev 1 at 00/39(14/15): DMA/pio/pio/DMA
hda [hda1 hda2 hda3]: QUANTUM FIREBALLlct10 15: 15020 MB, w/418KiB Cache UDMA(33)
just two lines with all the relevant info.
Roger.
the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels.
Hmm. I thought the hearing limit was 0 bels (0 decibels).
Of course working around loud fans for years will probably degrade your hearing to the mentioned level....
Roger.
I can hear the difference between 1.75V and 1.40V.
... just running there 1G PIII at 500MHZ or so since the CPU barely gets warm....
If it's rated for 1.75V and runs at 1.4V, then you can probably run it at up to 1.4GHz or something like that at the rated voltage. Wow!
Remember that at 500MHz your CPU uses only half the power. SO if originally it used 20W, now it will still use 10W. If then however, you can tune your voltage down from say 1.75 to 1.40, you end up using only 64percent of the power. Thus only 6.4W, a third of the original.
Roger.
P.S. Stupid Slashdot won't allow me to post a percent sign.... Grrr.
Hi,
I have an always on machine that is usually doing nothing. It doesn't have a harddisk. So the total powerconsumption measured at the wall-outlett is around 50W. My reasoning is that with a 300W powersupply in there, that thing should be able to run with a little less cooling than when at full blast.
So I opened the power supply, and measured the fan to have about 120 ohms and put two 240 ohms resistors in parallel, and that combination in series with the fan. Now the fan runs at about 25percent of it's rated speed (6V instead of 12V). VERY VERY quiet.
I trust Linux enough that I was also willing to have a background process check the CPU temp and turn on the CPU fan if that was required. This was however not possible with the hardware in that machine. one day I may make the hardware to do that though....
Roger.
Well, since v = I R, you can say either P = (v^2)/R or P = (I^2) R it's just the same...
Right.......... And wrong.
The "V" you need to take is the Voltage over the cable. This is not a nubmer that is easily user-accesible. Moreover, the "R" becoming 0 (superconduction!) means that we start dividing by 0. Fun formula to use in this case.
The right formula is:
P = I^2 * R
This shows that the current used is very important. By increasing the voltage on the long distance lines, the current is reduced, therefore the losses in those lines. In this case, the R is reduced to 0, so the loss should be 0 in the superconducting cable.
Roger.
Power for cooling to keep the cable below -160 degrees celcius is expected to be about half the power loss of a traditional cable.
But in exchange for that, the failure modes are twice as spectacular!
If the cooling system goes out, the cable will become non-superconducing, start to produce heat, and quickly explode.
If the cable is overloaded, it won't just melt away, but at a certain point the superconductivity will stop to work (you can only carry that much current through a superconducting cable) and again, heat forms, and superconductivity stops alltogether really quickly.
Roger.
So what I'd like to see would be like this: One unsolicited e-mail allowed from a business to one address.
The problem with this is that there are soooo very many "wannabe rich quick people". Or "small businesses". Whatever you want to call them.
And the hardcore spammers are the ones who will set up a new business to do a new run of that old database anyway.
So if you allow one spam per "from address", that would mean that there still is a very LARGE pool of people who can legitimately SPAM me.
The problem with spam is that it costs so little. Making a flyer and getting it distributed costs real money.
There would be no spam problem if sending a spam would cost 5 cents or so. If spamming were made legal, and the ISPs would be able to collect in bulk on those 5 cents, I wouldn't mind getting the occasional spam.
It would keep my internet costs down.
Roger.
Actually, the fact that there was no "User Unknown" error returned by your mail server is enough proof to the spammer that they sent the spam to a valid email address...
A spammer has put my Email address in the envelope-from. I get all his "user-unknown" bounces.
Does anybody have any hints on how to report this guy for forgery? We have about 3 weeks until we stop being able to catch him red-handed.
Roger.
... Did all this in his head.
After a few weeks in his class everyone knew that taking more than a few words from someone else was completely unacceptable and that he'd find the original author before he presented the grades on the paper.
You'd quote a passage from an obscure book which would fit in nicely in your paper (i.e. without the proper "quoted from... " around it), and he'd take the book along to class....
This was 1985.
Roger.
The machines have been left on for 24x7 and stuff just doesn't fail.
My PC-webserver "just doesn't fail". Manually rebooted after 461 days of uptime (85 days ago according to "uptime"). Before that: unplanned downtime: power loss for the whole city, and the expected planned downtime: installation of UPS....
Roger.
As for the Chernobyl disaster, that was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. No containment dome, and no decent safety measures to minimize the possibility of an explosion and meltdown. Note that when Three Mile Island had its core meltdown just about all of its radioactivity was still safely confined inside the containment dome.
..... power.
The problem with nuclear power is that it has so much
Thus if you have a slow meltdown, a containment dome will hold most of the mess inside. But if you have a nuclear explosion, there is no way any man-built structure will hold everything inside.
That's what happened at chernobyl. There was an explosion. Maybe a western containment dome would have been able to withstand the explosion. Maybe not.
Different incidents, different results.
Oh, and wasn't the root cause for both accidents the same? Operators doing exactly the wrong thing for something that should've remained a minor problem? (iirc, Chernobyl accidently shut down, and restarting it without the proper procedures is, well, dangerous. At 3 mile island a stuck meter caused them to think the pressure was high, leading the operator to reduce the pressure by venting the fluid. This eventually caused the pressure to go dangerously low. )
Roger.
It is extremely hard to get such an effort off the ground.
If say 80% of the users would have such a monitor, it would be a possible decision to say: "f*ck those without HDCPS, we'll only release this movie with this enabled".
So who is going to be buying compatible cards and monitors? You can't do anything with them that you can't with a normal monitor.... So, we'll always keep a significant marketshare that makes the decision to copy-protect the movie very uneconomic.
Roger.
Rambus is an Intellectual Property (IP) company.
They don't actually produce DRAM, they simply license their RDRAM technology to DRAM makers, and have recently started charging fees for SDRAM production as well, based on their questionable patents.
It is possible to have a brilliant idea, patent it, and have everybody use it a few years down the line, and have them pay royalties for the invention.
It is NOT possible to own dozens of patents in an area where you haven't produced anything yourself.
Say, Micron, being in the industry for a decade might own 5, 10, 20 or 100 patents in the area. They are in the field, and they have full-time experts trying to improve on what they already can. And they can test what they think up. Lots of brilliant ideas end up unusable because the drawbacks that you find if you actually try to use it weigh out the advantages.
Now when I first heard about rambus, it was a neat idea. That was a one-man effort. And it's possible that they got enough funding to put 20 or 100 experts in a room and tell them "now go and invent something". But without them actually designing and making the chips, it is doubtful that they would come up with anything patentable.
Maybe one or two, but certainly not a dozen or more.
Anyway, that's what I think.
Roger.
You ask me, they deserved what they got.
I don't think so. They should've been ordered to pay much more.
If they pay $77.50 plus $200 for the lawyer to be present, they got off VERY cheap. Remember that only 1 in 10000 people will go to the courts.
If the court says: "how many people have you sent this to?", and they answer say "500", then the court can say: There is a $50 fine for every spam, so you pay for 10 spams to this little lady here, and I'm going to fine you $5000 for just 20% of the others that you bothered with your unsolicited Email.
(If they answer a rediculously small number ("Just her, honest"), they should be prosecuted for lying....)
Roger.
Until then, I have my good friend, the "delete" key. Takes a second, gets rid of my problem. It's not THAT difficult.
During the year 2000, I received approximately 3500 spams, worth about 23Mb total disk storage.
It's just a few seconds of your time every time. But it adds up, doesn't it?
Roger.
So, this guy was already a Kozmo.com customer, and he's complaining about getting administrative email from them?
Yeah. But having ticked "no I don't want Emails from you", this gal had a "contract" with them which they broke.
I expect "small claims court" to "think along with the small guys" a bit. In this case the lady who got spammed.
The "anti-spam" law is meant to protect those not wanting junk-mail. What do you think the "I don't want mail from you" button does? It means that even if there is a business relationship, the "updates on products" are not requested by the customer.
So even though the law was formulated a bit sloppily (it may not catch this case), it was explained by this judge the way it was supposed to work. Good.
Here in Holland there is a club, (operated by spammers, I think) which claims that you have complete control over teh spam you recieve. You can tick your "interests" on their site. Well, wouldn't you know it: half a year later, they spam you. I could have sworn I ticked that they shouldn't spam me. In this case all I have is my statement that I ticked the button, while they have the database to prove that I wanted their spam. This time I know for sure I modified my settings that I don't want their spam. And hereby I'm on record on slashdot that I did so.
Next time I'll sue them.
A real (working) anti-spam law allows you to sue first-time offenders. If there isn't a special law you would have to resort to "please don't bother me", and then wait for them to repeat the offense. This normally doesn't happen, as they have enough people to Email...
Roger.
two things. When a friend mentioned "mouse gestures" for B & W he just bought, I mentioned Mentor Graphics (dated 10 years ago!) immediately.
two: A good userinterface gives you different ways to accomplish an action. Clicking the "next" button, selecting "forward" from the "go" menu, pressing alt-right, or dragging right with button 2 all accomplish the same thing. Different people prefer different things. Different levels of users also trigger different interface requirements.
If the task you're currently doing happens to have a lot of keyboard based activity (e.g. filling out a web-form), then having to move your hands to the mouse to click on the next form-item is annoying. So you rather press 'tab' to go to the next item....
But if you're pointing and clicking with your hand on the mouse, it's annoying to have to go to the keyboard to press alt-right to navigate to the next page in your history. So you get both options. Having more options is better.
And a good interface will help the user find the "shorter" ways. For instance, emacs shows me the shortcut when I select something from the menu. If I select "forward" from the "go" menu in my netscape, netscape could flash the icon that's on my toolbar. The keystroke is already mentioned in the menu. The statusbar might mention "shortcut: drag mb2 right" when the menu is selected or the icon clicked.
The refractive index is directly related to the speed of the EM waves in the material.
When the waves bend the other way, then the refractive index is less than one. The speed of the EM waves then is: C / r . where, C is the speed of light, and "r" is the refractive index.
With r < 1, You get faster-than-light transmission. This violates some pretty basic physics laws.
I'm not sure what negative r and speed would imply exactly.
Roger.
Note that one of the preconditions to life is that there are various cycles.
waves 0.1s
waves 1s
waves 10s
tides ~ 0.5d
day/night 1.0d
moon 4w
summer/winter 1 y
Solar cycle ~ 11 y
ice ages 10k y
???? 23M y
All these cycles make sure that at least at one point in the cycle, the conditions are "good" to cause life to start. After that, the conditions are bound to be worse, and evolution is forced to adapt to the worsening conditions.
I speculate that life can only get started/continue going when there are several cycles interfering with each other at different frequencies.....
A nearly circular orbit, like earth, is bad for evolution. Some excentricity is good.
Roger.
In other words, terminal velocity is reached when the pressure force exerted on your body by the air you're running into equals your weight.
Right. However, in different body positions there will be different speeds at which you move. If you move from one position that has a higher associated speed to another, there can be a rapid decelle- splat.
Roger.
If you make a promise, you had better deliver. If I'm promised 128k upload, I expect it.
Ehmm. Don't they usually say "up to 128k upload"?
(If not they are stupid.)
Roger.