> They could have filed a claim with Airborne and reshipped
Actually, probably not. Many companies that have a reasonably high shipping volume have an arrangement with the shipper whereby they don't insure anything for loss in return for significantly lower prices. Part of the deal is, basically, 'unless we [Airborne] lose more than X amount of goods in a quarter, any of our losses are your problem'.
So I suspect that the person at Griffin was, well, we'll be charitable and call him/her confused. While it was clearly Airbourne's *fault*, it quite possibly wasn't their *responsibility*, depending on their contract.
-fred
PS: I've dealt with Griffin three or four times, including one where their package got lost on the way to me. They didn't have any more of the item (a monitor adaptor with sync-on-green support) in stock, so they refunded my money to my credit card. Three weeks later they sent me one gratis. (In the mean time I'd found one elsewhere, but that was still pretty nice.)
...require the government to tell how much time and money is spent supporting, servicing, and training people on computers. Plus, comparitive studies on the amount of work that is actually done on them.
But no: people don't want to know what the BEST solution is for a particular problem... they want to know the CHEAPEST solution, and the solution that does not require them to think before implementing it.
Or there would be more linux servers out there... and more MacOS X desktops.
If you say 'I have blue-green trucks' you are saying that you have trucks that are a color midway between blue and green.
If you say 'I have red-blue trucks' what you're saying is 'I don't know the word purple.'
If you say you have red and blue trucks, what you are saying is that your trucks are partly red and partly blue, not purple. It is an extension of the same thing that lets you say 'I have a red and blue truck.' That is perfectly acceptable English, not 'incorrect grammar' that 'is okay, because there is context pointing to the right meaning.'
As well, there is no support for your claim on the page you reference. In fact, there is not a single case of two adjectives with an 'and' between them on that entire page. There is one with hyphens, appended with "We use hyphens to connect words that work together to modify the noun" but there is no indication that this is the only way to do so, nor when it is appropriate to do so.
You *could* argue that 'I have red-and-blue trucks' is reasonable, but I would wonder why I have never ever seen it written that way, in my not-inconsiderable readings. Mind you, 'I have an eight-year-old sister' is correct, but it's becoming obsolete, so even this is a debatable point.
As for 'there are no "likely"'s', that's garbage too. 'Standard English' reference books disagree all the time, as many of them disagree on, for example, when it is appropriate to put an apostrophe s after a word ending in s and when it is just appropriate to put an apostrophe. If you have decided that one of the books of style is canon, that's fine, but that's not where the rest of the world is.
> Two adjectives conjoined before a noun distribute. "I have red and blue trucks" without context means "I have > red trucks and I have blue trucks" not "I have trucks which are both red and blue".
You are incorrect, according to the Harbrace College Handbook, and I *think* according to Strunk & White as well, though I seem to have misplaced my copy.
Of course, a moment's thought would also tell you that things aren't as clear-cut as you claim: 'I hate small-minded and self-important people' is less likely to mean that you hate all small-minded people and you hate all self-important people than that you hate all people who are both small-minded *and* self-important..
You are also incorrect about a host of other things, but they are less easily proven.
> Yea right people dissappear in the middle of the night in the USA and are never heard of again.
Well, actually, they do. But only legal and illegal immegrants, mostly, so it's all right. Though they don't have to be charged with anything and the government doesn't have to admit they have been taken.
> Torture is a regular and everyday occurance here in the USA too.
Must admit that, as far as I know, this one isn't true.
> No one is entitled to a lawyer in court in the USA either.
No, you're right, everyone is entitled to one except the poor. In Texas, for example, where the Texas Supreme Court ruled that just because your court-appointed lawyer slept through the entire case, LITERALLY, it didn't matter. You still had a lawyer, and that's all that mattered.
> Get a real job you UN fudge packer. Your idea of an effective UN is Rodesia.
And yours is the US saying, 'Do what we want or we invade! Might makes right! And if you disagree with us, for whatever reason, we hate you!' And you'll keep that lovely vision until some part of it causes pain and inconvenience to you, and then you'll suddenly change your mind. Selfishness isn't a uniquely American trait... it's just most pronounced here.
Like Sweden's. Better health care than in the US, better quality of life than in the US, etc, etc. They know what 'humane' means, whereas we'd rather have our poor just go off somewhere and die so we don't have to deal with them.
Did you know that the US has the highest infant mortality rate among first-world nations? But I'm sure you don't care about that, because they're only really POOR kids who die all the time.
> this guy realizes he wasted his life persuing things when life just passed him buy. [sic]
Perhaps doing something interesting like this, once, is less of a waste of time than, say, sitting around and griping illiterately about how only losers would do this.
Heck, I'd do it once, just to say I did it. For a really good movie, for the introduction of the iMac, for a live performance of a favorite artist... camping out for something is an experience. Doesn't so much matter what it is, as long as you're doing it with some friends.
Let's say that you are in a fixed position with respect to the sun, and you reach out and drop this solar sail thingie. Now we are all in the same frame of reference. There is no red shift to the photons with respect to the observer. THEREFORE there can be no acceleration. Right? Even though the photons are hitting the wings and everything, since there is no red shift, the photons aren't losing energy and therefore there can be no gain of energy by the sail.
(Now, you *could* say that the red shift is instead the result of the ACCELERATION of the object BY the light. But that's equally silly, and five minutes' thought could tell you why.)
AND, to carry this further, the FASTER the solar sail is moving away from the sun, the MORE energy it gets from the photons. Power your solar sail with a laser beam of very high energy and coherance, and you could, if this were true, approach the speed of light. After all, you gain mass in the rest frame of reference, but at the same time you're gaining more speed from each photon. If I had to guess, I would suspect a congruence here, though I haven't actually written anything out.
This is more than a little silly. Look elsewhere for your acceleration, but don't look at red shift, unless you care to explain this. Red shift is a result of relative velocities, and does not depend in any way upon acceleration.
A friend of mine came up with some additional bits of the theory of conservation of momentum a while back.
See, we were wondering what happens when, say, a car hits a snow bank. Car slows to a stop. Snow bank is, broadly speaking, immobile.
So he decided that it must be that the momentum was now stored up in the snow bank, as *potental* *momentum*. Unfortunately, before we could figure out how to harness this (or indeed where it went once the snow had melted), the pub closed.
You don't mind everyone in the world knowing everything about you. That's fine. But you saying that everyone else should feel that way, and that it will make everybody happier? That's where I draw the line. Don't you tell me what I want, what will make me happier. People not digging around in my business makes me happier.
And if an absolute lack of privacy about who I'm having sex with, or who I'm helping get through college, or what interesting sex toys I bought last week is what you would consider essential to a civil society, then I want no part of it. And if privacy has some costs, then I'm all for paying them.
If you have a perfectly open society, where everything can instantly be known about anyone with zero effort, then there might be this wonderful egalitarian explosion. But since perfection is impossible, the more transparent the society, the more control the people who are rich and powerful enough to keep their information secret will have over those whose information they can so easily gather.
Unless you're assuming that, somehow, magically, all the taboos of our society will just go away once there is no more privacy. Which, human nature being what it is, strikes me as less likely than George W. Bush's economic plan actually working as advertized. (As opposed to us finally having our cyclical recovery from recession, helped along by historically low interest rates, and him taking credit for it. Which has a probability approaching unity.)
Red shift is relative to the observer, and is an indication of how fast an observer is moving relative to the place that the radiation was, well, radiated.
Let's say you have a sun that we arbitrarily assume is fixed, and a smaller radiation source that is moving directly away from the sun. The radiation that this source emits is not red shifted with respect to it in any direction, as long as it doesn't accelerate.
Let's say, now, that it isn't a radiation source, it is a detector. The radiation FROM THE SUN is red-shifted, because the detector is moving with respect to the sun. That is what a red shift is.
Now it's a mirror. Someone in the same frame of reference as the sun looks at the light that has bounced off the mirror. It appears red-shifted to them, because the mirror that is the 'source' of it is moving away. In fact, it looks exactly as red-shifted as the light looked to the detector, since it is moving the same speed with respect to the sun as the sun is with respect to it.
Or does it look exactly the same because it bounced off the mirror, and is therefore faithfully reflected?
Or does it look TWICE as red-shifted, because the red-shifted light was reflected off the mirror, and now it's red-shifted even MORE because the mirror is receding?
Or is it no longer red-shifted at all, because we're back in the same frame of reference as the light originated?
The point is, just saying 'the light is redshifted' is utterly meaningless without a frame of reference.
> It does, because the important photons are those which are reflected. Hypothesize that the mirrore is perfect: 100% > of all photons are reflected, none absorbed, and the mirror does not heat up at all. The paper would assert that > the mirror therefore feels no force at all. And yet, on one side it is being battered by photons, whcih come in with a > momentum vector one way and leave with the vector reversed.
This is a beautifully classical way of looking at it, but it is taking a classical idea and extending it to relativity, which is always dangerous.
Even in a classical sense, though, how about this: if a rubber ball hits a wall and is reflected back with exactly the same momentum as it had before it hit, just in a different direction, it can't have imparted any energy to the wall, because it is carrying the same amount (relative to the wall) that it was before. So if your reflected photons are the same wavelength coming out as they are going in, you can't gain any energy from them.
Are they? I dunno.
That is a separate case from whether this is a carnot heat engine. I am not sure; however, it might be worth noting that solar cells do not, on the face of it, seem to be a carnot engine, but (at least on the web sites that I can find) it appears that they actually are. For example:
> Back then, every culture always used every weapon at its disposal. Holding back from using certain types of > weaponry is a 20th century innovation.
This is, broadly speaking, true as YOU mean it, and I find it telling just exactly how you mean it.
You see, back then, every culture didn't *ALWAYS* use every weapon at its disposal. They had these short periods of, uh, what did they call it? Oh, yeah... peace. That was the time when, typically, they weren't killing off their neighbors with every weapon at their disposal.
(Incidentally, there were certainly attempts before the 20th century to ban certain weapons as 'too awful to use'. They just weren't terribly effective, by and large.)
But, to get back to my point, people weren't killing Native Americans when they were in any kind of declared war (or even enmity) with them... they were killing them with gifts of 'friendship'. Which, in most of the tribes, would probably have been looked on with just as much loathing and disgust as it occasionally sparked in the eightteenth and nineteenth centuries back in Europe.
I will politely refrain from comparing you to anyone, ironically or not. But I will not politely refrain from wondering why I'm posting this history lesson in a thread dedicated to irony, when it has nothing whatever to do with irony.
...is pretty sweet, actually, though the software isn't built into the default OS install yet. I'd point you to the downloads, but I can't remember where they are. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
"Have you ever actually listened to Chomsky on politics?"
Translation: I heard him on NPR once, while I was flipping radio stations.
"He's a loon. A nutcase."
Translation: He deviates from Common Wisdom in a direction that I find highly disturbing.
"A textbook example of the fact that a person can be both a genius and an idiot simultaneously."
Translation: I wish he'd just go back to being inoffensive and leave my little world alone.
"Only the most superficial sort of moron would assume, because he is well educated in one area, that he is qualified to comment in another."
Corrolary: Being a techie (reading slashdot), you are clearly unqualified to comment on who is qualified to comment on a given subject.
> They could have filed a claim with Airborne and reshipped
Actually, probably not. Many companies that have a reasonably high shipping volume have an arrangement with the shipper whereby they don't insure anything for loss in return for significantly lower prices. Part of the deal is, basically, 'unless we [Airborne] lose more than X amount of goods in a quarter, any of our losses are your problem'.
So I suspect that the person at Griffin was, well, we'll be charitable and call him/her confused. While it was clearly Airbourne's *fault*, it quite possibly wasn't their *responsibility*, depending on their contract.
-fred
PS: I've dealt with Griffin three or four times, including one where their package got lost on the way to me. They didn't have any more of the item (a monitor adaptor with sync-on-green support) in stock, so they refunded my money to my credit card. Three weeks later they sent me one gratis. (In the mean time I'd found one elsewhere, but that was still pretty nice.)
...require the government to tell how much time and money is spent supporting, servicing, and training people on computers. Plus, comparitive studies on the amount of work that is actually done on them.
But no: people don't want to know what the BEST solution is for a particular problem... they want to know the CHEAPEST solution, and the solution that does not require them to think before implementing it.
Or there would be more linux servers out there... and more MacOS X desktops.
-fred
> Are you sure that these two things are related?
:-)
Well, they're correlated, anyway.
-fred
> I have red-blue trucks
If you say 'I have blue-green trucks' you are saying that you have trucks that are a color midway between blue and green.
If you say 'I have red-blue trucks' what you're saying is 'I don't know the word purple.'
If you say you have red and blue trucks, what you are saying is that your trucks are partly red and partly blue, not purple. It is an extension of the same thing that lets you say 'I have a red and blue truck.' That is perfectly acceptable English, not 'incorrect grammar' that 'is okay, because there is context pointing to the right meaning.'
As well, there is no support for your claim on the page you reference. In fact, there is not a single case of two adjectives with an 'and' between them on that entire page. There is one with hyphens, appended with "We use hyphens to connect words that work together to modify the noun" but there is no indication that this is the only way to do so, nor when it is appropriate to do so.
You *could* argue that 'I have red-and-blue trucks' is reasonable, but I would wonder why I have never ever seen it written that way, in my not-inconsiderable readings. Mind you, 'I have an eight-year-old sister' is correct, but it's becoming obsolete, so even this is a debatable point.
As for 'there are no "likely"'s', that's garbage too. 'Standard English' reference books disagree all the time, as many of them disagree on, for example, when it is appropriate to put an apostrophe s after a word ending in s and when it is just appropriate to put an apostrophe. If you have decided that one of the books of style is canon, that's fine, but that's not where the rest of the world is.
-fred
> Two adjectives conjoined before a noun distribute. "I have red and blue trucks" without context means "I have
> red trucks and I have blue trucks" not "I have trucks which are both red and blue".
You are incorrect, according to the Harbrace College Handbook, and I *think* according to Strunk & White as well, though I seem to have misplaced my copy.
Of course, a moment's thought would also tell you that things aren't as clear-cut as you claim: 'I hate small-minded and self-important people' is less likely to mean that you hate all small-minded people and you hate all self-important people than that you hate all people who are both small-minded *and* self-important..
You are also incorrect about a host of other things, but they are less easily proven.
Pity.
-fred
> Yea right people dissappear in the middle of the night in the USA and are never heard of again.
Well, actually, they do. But only legal and illegal immegrants, mostly, so it's all right. Though they don't have to be charged with anything and the government doesn't have to admit they have been taken.
> Torture is a regular and everyday occurance here in the USA too.
Must admit that, as far as I know, this one isn't true.
> No one is entitled to a lawyer in court in the USA either.
No, you're right, everyone is entitled to one except the poor. In Texas, for example, where the Texas Supreme Court ruled that just because your court-appointed lawyer slept through the entire case, LITERALLY, it didn't matter. You still had a lawyer, and that's all that mattered.
> Get a real job you UN fudge packer. Your idea of an effective UN is Rodesia.
And yours is the US saying, 'Do what we want or we invade! Might makes right! And if you disagree with us, for whatever reason, we hate you!' And you'll keep that lovely vision until some part of it causes pain and inconvenience to you, and then you'll suddenly change your mind. Selfishness isn't a uniquely American trait... it's just most pronounced here.
-fred
Like Sweden's. Better health care than in the US, better quality of life than in the US, etc, etc. They know what 'humane' means, whereas we'd rather have our poor just go off somewhere and die so we don't have to deal with them.
Did you know that the US has the highest infant mortality rate among first-world nations? But I'm sure you don't care about that, because they're only really POOR kids who die all the time.
-fred
> (BTW, I resent your usage of "you", since I'm merely playing devil's advocate)
If you are given to resenting being called stupid, you should learn not to play devil's advocate.
This is not a slur... I play devil's advocate all the time, and I get called stupid all the time. But then, I have a thick skin.
-fred
> this guy realizes he wasted his life persuing things when life just passed him buy. [sic]
Perhaps doing something interesting like this, once, is less of a waste of time than, say, sitting around and griping illiterately about how only losers would do this.
Heck, I'd do it once, just to say I did it. For a really good movie, for the introduction of the iMac, for a live performance of a favorite artist... camping out for something is an experience. Doesn't so much matter what it is, as long as you're doing it with some friends.
-fred
> Besides, she's got "It".
>
>The best way to avoid MSTDs, like STDs, is abstinence.
Does anyone else find this juxtaposition humerous?
-fred
Wow! Anonymous Coward broke the story of the Music Store last December, and YOU'RE ANONYMOUS COWARD!
It MUST be you!
Sheesh.
-fred
So, let's extend this logic:
Let's say that you are in a fixed position with respect to the sun, and you reach out and drop this solar sail thingie. Now we are all in the same frame of reference. There is no red shift to the photons with respect to the observer. THEREFORE there can be no acceleration. Right? Even though the photons are hitting the wings and everything, since there is no red shift, the photons aren't losing energy and therefore there can be no gain of energy by the sail.
(Now, you *could* say that the red shift is instead the result of the ACCELERATION of the object BY the light. But that's equally silly, and five minutes' thought could tell you why.)
AND, to carry this further, the FASTER the solar sail is moving away from the sun, the MORE energy it gets from the photons. Power your solar sail with a laser beam of very high energy and coherance, and you could, if this were true, approach the speed of light. After all, you gain mass in the rest frame of reference, but at the same time you're gaining more speed from each photon. If I had to guess, I would suspect a congruence here, though I haven't actually written anything out.
This is more than a little silly. Look elsewhere for your acceleration, but don't look at red shift, unless you care to explain this. Red shift is a result of relative velocities, and does not depend in any way upon acceleration.
-fred
A friend of mine came up with some additional bits of the theory of conservation of momentum a while back.
See, we were wondering what happens when, say, a car hits a snow bank. Car slows to a stop. Snow bank is, broadly speaking, immobile.
So he decided that it must be that the momentum was now stored up in the snow bank, as *potental* *momentum*. Unfortunately, before we could figure out how to harness this (or indeed where it went once the snow had melted), the pub closed.
-fred
The part I found scary was the "things you wouldn't want to hide unless you were a criminal?" part. Which, it turns out, was sarcastic.
-fred
You don't mind everyone in the world knowing everything about you. That's fine. But you saying that everyone else should feel that way, and that it will make everybody happier? That's where I draw the line. Don't you tell me what I want, what will make me happier. People not digging around in my business makes me happier.
And if an absolute lack of privacy about who I'm having sex with, or who I'm helping get through college, or what interesting sex toys I bought last week is what you would consider essential to a civil society, then I want no part of it. And if privacy has some costs, then I'm all for paying them.
If you have a perfectly open society, where everything can instantly be known about anyone with zero effort, then there might be this wonderful egalitarian explosion. But since perfection is impossible, the more transparent the society, the more control the people who are rich and powerful enough to keep their information secret will have over those whose information they can so easily gather.
Unless you're assuming that, somehow, magically, all the taboos of our society will just go away once there is no more privacy. Which, human nature being what it is, strikes me as less likely than George W. Bush's economic plan actually working as advertized. (As opposed to us finally having our cyclical recovery from recession, helped along by historically low interest rates, and him taking credit for it. Which has a probability approaching unity.)
-fred
...was that serious, or sarcastic?
It was pretty straighfaced, if it was sarcastic. But if it was serious, it was just plain scary.
-fred
Red shift is relative to the observer, and is an indication of how fast an observer is moving relative to the place that the radiation was, well, radiated.
Let's say you have a sun that we arbitrarily assume is fixed, and a smaller radiation source that is moving directly away from the sun. The radiation that this source emits is not red shifted with respect to it in any direction, as long as it doesn't accelerate.
Let's say, now, that it isn't a radiation source, it is a detector. The radiation FROM THE SUN is red-shifted, because the detector is moving with respect to the sun. That is what a red shift is.
Now it's a mirror. Someone in the same frame of reference as the sun looks at the light that has bounced off the mirror. It appears red-shifted to them, because the mirror that is the 'source' of it is moving away. In fact, it looks exactly as red-shifted as the light looked to the detector, since it is moving the same speed with respect to the sun as the sun is with respect to it.
Or does it look exactly the same because it bounced off the mirror, and is therefore faithfully reflected?
Or does it look TWICE as red-shifted, because the red-shifted light was reflected off the mirror, and now it's red-shifted even MORE because the mirror is receding?
Or is it no longer red-shifted at all, because we're back in the same frame of reference as the light originated?
The point is, just saying 'the light is redshifted' is utterly meaningless without a frame of reference.
-fred
> It does, because the important photons are those which are reflected. Hypothesize that the mirrore is perfect: 100%
e ct s/springer.html
> of all photons are reflected, none absorbed, and the mirror does not heat up at all. The paper would assert that
> the mirror therefore feels no force at all. And yet, on one side it is being battered by photons, whcih come in with a
> momentum vector one way and leave with the vector reversed.
This is a beautifully classical way of looking at it, but it is taking a classical idea and extending it to relativity, which is always dangerous.
Even in a classical sense, though, how about this: if a rubber ball hits a wall and is reflected back with exactly the same momentum as it had before it hit, just in a different direction, it can't have imparted any energy to the wall, because it is carrying the same amount (relative to the wall) that it was before. So if your reflected photons are the same wavelength coming out as they are going in, you can't gain any energy from them.
Are they? I dunno.
That is a separate case from whether this is a carnot heat engine. I am not sure; however, it might be worth noting that solar cells do not, on the face of it, seem to be a carnot engine, but (at least on the web sites that I can find) it appears that they actually are. For example:
http://www.elis.rug.ac.be/ELISgroups/solar/proj
-fred
...but I thought that was lumberjacks.
:-)
I must admit I'm curious what these people do when/if they shave their pubic hair.
(Is there a -1 Tasteless karma option?
-fred
My lover was a logger
There's none like him today
If you poured whiskey on it
He would eat a bale of hay
He never shaved his whiskers
off of his horny hide
He'd drive them in with a hammer
And bite them off inside.
From 'The Logger', anonymous
And neither do rich people.
The people who actually create wealth are the ones who turn raw materials into useful, valuable finished products.
For an actual, rational value of the word 'wealth', of course.
-fred
> Now it's used for anyone who can strum a chord on a guitar or melt wax.
In this case I'm assuming you're referring to ear wax...
-fred
> Back then, every culture always used every weapon at its disposal. Holding back from using certain types of
> weaponry is a 20th century innovation.
This is, broadly speaking, true as YOU mean it, and I find it telling just exactly how you mean it.
You see, back then, every culture didn't *ALWAYS* use every weapon at its disposal. They had these short periods of, uh, what did they call it? Oh, yeah... peace. That was the time when, typically, they weren't killing off their neighbors with every weapon at their disposal.
(Incidentally, there were certainly attempts before the 20th century to ban certain weapons as 'too awful to use'. They just weren't terribly effective, by and large.)
But, to get back to my point, people weren't killing Native Americans when they were in any kind of declared war (or even enmity) with them... they were killing them with gifts of 'friendship'. Which, in most of the tribes, would probably have been looked on with just as much loathing and disgust as it occasionally sparked in the eightteenth and nineteenth centuries back in Europe.
I will politely refrain from comparing you to anyone, ironically or not. But I will not politely refrain from wondering why I'm posting this history lesson in a thread dedicated to irony, when it has nothing whatever to do with irony.
No, that's not ironic.
No, that's not either.
Oh, go to hell.
-fred
I'm not sure whether that's thrifty but sad or just sad.
-fred
...is pretty sweet, actually, though the software isn't built into the default OS install yet. I'd point you to the downloads, but I can't remember where they are. Sorry.
-fred