If she learned to fly at 10, she was presumably gifted a sizeable chunk of money.
Admiral Farragut joined the Navy at nine and was given command of a prize ship at twelve. The idea that anyone under twenty can't actually do much other than play with dolls and watch cartoons is a recent invention.
Coming soon to you on an easyjet/ryanair flight near you.
Passenger Ejection Capsule £500.00 per sector
Last time I flew business class I was pretty much in a little 'capsule' by myself. It probably could be turned into an ejection seat if they wanted to.
The problem is that it would add a significant amount of weight and the risk of losing a plane because of a fault in the ejection system is probably higher than the chance of saving lives when it's used. In particular, ejecting from an airliner at 30,000 feet over mid-Atlantic isn't likely to help much unless your capsule can become a heated lifeboat after it lands.
what did carpet bombing do in europe ? NOTHING. nothing. nothing other than razing entire cities and killing irrelevant civilians, whereas slave labor continued manufacturing tanks, warplanes in underground bunkers.
Indeed, from what I remember German war production increased until Allied soldiers began capturing the factories, mines and oil fields they relied on; near the end of the war new tanks were still being shipped en masse to the front lines, where they were destroyed by the German soldiers because they didn't have any fuel to operate them with.
We did not win WWII either so your concept that war is winnable without genocide is laughable.
Obviously you can win a war if you kill everyone on the other side.
The problem with Afghanistan is that no-one has ever been able to tell me what 'winning' there would mean. If you can't tell whether you've won, how can a war ever end?
To expand on your example of chips, they typically have a large amount of area devoted to self-test and tuning systems which get used exactly once, in the factory (okay, maybe a few times e.g. to make sure you didn't break anything during packaging), and then never touched again. Scan chains in particular can add a lot of transistors.
We used to use the scan chains for debugging when our chips hung; we could use them to dump out the contents of the internal memories/registers and some of the other internal state and then load that into a simulator to see what the heck was going on inside it.
On at least one occasion we also had to 'steal' transistors to repair part of a chip which had a design fault, which meant disabling one component of the chip and redesigning the metal layers to connect up some of the transistors that component used to use (AFAIR changing the metal layers cost around $50k whereas changing the silicon cost around $1M). So it's quite possible that there are some crufty transistors on otherwise working chips.
I don't get why people have a problem with UAC, I've found it to be only a bit more annoying that the Linux equivalent. It's not like with Vista where it would be asking for a click every 5 minutes or so.
It happens a lot because of poorly-designed old software (or poorly-designed new software). It regularly gets hidden when it pops up, so you don't realise that you've been waiting ten minutes for something to happen because UAC was waiting for you to do something. It displays meaningless gibberish like 'Do you want to allow program HappyKittyScreenSaver to Access local disk?' so even techies don't know whether they should allow it.
If an operating system marketed at users gives users a better interface, how exactly is this a bad thing?
If only Windows 7 did...
Instead we got a brain-dead reimplementation of the 'Start Menu', 'Libraries' that confuse the heck out of non-techies I know, the wacky new taskbar, shinier windows, and... UAC.
I would agree that UAC was a good idea, but the implementation is awful. The best part is when you start an application, switch to another application, sit there for ten minutes wondering why the first application didn't start up, and then eventually spot the hidden UAC window on the task bar so you can switch to it and click 'Yes, I do want to allow program WhoKnowsWhat to do random shit I don't understand'.
SOPA, PIPA, whatever will all fail, because by design, they're fatally flawed. When everyone gets their IP protected, it will be impossible to develop something new.
You seem to believe that's an unintended consequence. The current big players have no desire to see anyone 'develop something new' that might take away their business.
Obviously it will hasten America's decline into bankruptcy and irrelevance, but so long as they can rake in the money for a few more years they don't care.
The problem is that when you vote somebody out, all their garbage laws stay behind.
The problem is you can't vote somebody out, you can only vote somebody else in... and they're probably just as bad.
The only solution is to radically limit the power of government, which is what the Founders tried to do with the US Constitution. But that's tossed aside every time the government say 'national security' or 'think of the children'.
I used to be a big fan of Ubuntu, but it seems that all of this recent effort to make Ubuntu work on tablets/touchscreens has come at the cost of the stability and robustness of the desktop product.
To be fair, it started on netbooks, where Unity works quite well. But the Linux desktop is going to be screwed until they kick out the 'UI designers' who've messed it up so badly.
I have to go with Bill Gates on this one. I am willing to pay for a better Desktop Environment (Windows or OS X) for non work applications.
Whenever I have to reboot from Linux to Windows to run Word or play a game that doesn't run in Wine, I remember what a horrible, clunky kludge the Windows interface was.
X has way too much overhead and features for low-power mobile devices.
I always find this argument funny, considering I first used X on a 32MHz CPU with 32MB of RAM.
I would agree that it's not ideal for a tablet that's mostly used for full-screen apps and media consumption, but 'overhead and features' are not the reason.
They don't want to pick between 57 different distros, 7 different package managers, and so on.
Unfortunately, geeks appear totally blind to how the real world works.
Phew, it's fortunate that there's only one version of Windows and people don't have to decide between Windows XP Pro 64 and Windows 8 Home Ultra Pro for ARM.
Blame that on John Major, breaking up the rail system and selling all the money-making parts off for pennies on the pound to private industry, then rolling up all the complex and expensive stuff into Railtrack.
Blame that on the EU, who told them they had to do it that way.
Touchscreens are awesome, and they are the future of a lot of human-computer interaction.
No, touchscreens suck ass. They're only good when you're doing very basic operations which don't require much control.
The only device I use on a regular basis which might not totally suck ass with a touchscreen is my e-book reader, and even there I'd much rather press a button to go to the next page than have to make some stupid gesture.
Slashdot Mirror
Throwing people in prison for longer and longer periods of time just doesn't seem to be working.
It's hard to steal power cables while you're in jail.
This is someone who was gifted at something.
If she learned to fly at 10, she was presumably gifted a sizeable chunk of money.
Admiral Farragut joined the Navy at nine and was given command of a prize ship at twelve. The idea that anyone under twenty can't actually do much other than play with dolls and watch cartoons is a recent invention.
Coming soon to you on an easyjet/ryanair flight near you.
Passenger Ejection Capsule £500.00 per sector
Last time I flew business class I was pretty much in a little 'capsule' by myself. It probably could be turned into an ejection seat if they wanted to.
The problem is that it would add a significant amount of weight and the risk of losing a plane because of a fault in the ejection system is probably higher than the chance of saving lives when it's used. In particular, ejecting from an airliner at 30,000 feet over mid-Atlantic isn't likely to help much unless your capsule can become a heated lifeboat after it lands.
No, nuclear-powered airships! The future will be here tomorrrow!
what did carpet bombing do in europe ? NOTHING. nothing. nothing other than razing entire cities and killing irrelevant civilians, whereas slave labor continued manufacturing tanks, warplanes in underground bunkers.
Indeed, from what I remember German war production increased until Allied soldiers began capturing the factories, mines and oil fields they relied on; near the end of the war new tanks were still being shipped en masse to the front lines, where they were destroyed by the German soldiers because they didn't have any fuel to operate them with.
We did not win WWII either so your concept that war is winnable without genocide is laughable.
Obviously you can win a war if you kill everyone on the other side.
The problem with Afghanistan is that no-one has ever been able to tell me what 'winning' there would mean. If you can't tell whether you've won, how can a war ever end?
To expand on your example of chips, they typically have a large amount of area devoted to self-test and tuning systems which get used exactly once, in the factory (okay, maybe a few times e.g. to make sure you didn't break anything during packaging), and then never touched again. Scan chains in particular can add a lot of transistors.
We used to use the scan chains for debugging when our chips hung; we could use them to dump out the contents of the internal memories/registers and some of the other internal state and then load that into a simulator to see what the heck was going on inside it.
On at least one occasion we also had to 'steal' transistors to repair part of a chip which had a design fault, which meant disabling one component of the chip and redesigning the metal layers to connect up some of the transistors that component used to use (AFAIR changing the metal layers cost around $50k whereas changing the silicon cost around $1M). So it's quite possible that there are some crufty transistors on otherwise working chips.
http://www.google.com/patents/US4429685
"This invention relates to a method of growing unicorns in a manner that enhances the overall development of the animal."
Then the vendors of that software need to be kicked in the ass hard.
LOL.. good luck with that.
What's the point of running Windows if you have to replace all your old software with new versions?
... and you phone gets malware and either stops working or starts calling phone sex lines in Butfukistan.
I don't get why people have a problem with UAC, I've found it to be only a bit more annoying that the Linux equivalent. It's not like with Vista where it would be asking for a click every 5 minutes or so.
It happens a lot because of poorly-designed old software (or poorly-designed new software).
It regularly gets hidden when it pops up, so you don't realise that you've been waiting ten minutes for something to happen because UAC was waiting for you to do something.
It displays meaningless gibberish like 'Do you want to allow program HappyKittyScreenSaver to Access local disk?' so even techies don't know whether they should allow it.
If an operating system marketed at users gives users a better interface, how exactly is this a bad thing?
If only Windows 7 did...
Instead we got a brain-dead reimplementation of the 'Start Menu', 'Libraries' that confuse the heck out of non-techies I know, the wacky new taskbar, shinier windows, and... UAC.
I would agree that UAC was a good idea, but the implementation is awful. The best part is when you start an application, switch to another application, sit there for ten minutes wondering why the first application didn't start up, and then eventually spot the hidden UAC window on the task bar so you can switch to it and click 'Yes, I do want to allow program WhoKnowsWhat to do random shit I don't understand'.
SOPA, PIPA, whatever will all fail, because by design, they're fatally flawed. When everyone gets their IP protected, it will be impossible to develop something new.
You seem to believe that's an unintended consequence. The current big players have no desire to see anyone 'develop something new' that might take away their business.
Obviously it will hasten America's decline into bankruptcy and irrelevance, but so long as they can rake in the money for a few more years they don't care.
The problem is that when you vote somebody out, all their garbage laws stay behind.
The problem is you can't vote somebody out, you can only vote somebody else in... and they're probably just as bad.
The only solution is to radically limit the power of government, which is what the Founders tried to do with the US Constitution. But that's tossed aside every time the government say 'national security' or 'think of the children'.
Figuring out how to do stuff requires googling because no one they know (besides me) would have any ideas.
I know Gnome 3 is bad, but surely it's not _that_ bad.
And my girlfriend has no problem using Gnome 2 or Unity.
I used to be a big fan of Ubuntu, but it seems that all of this recent effort to make Ubuntu work on tablets/touchscreens has come at the cost of the stability and robustness of the desktop product.
To be fair, it started on netbooks, where Unity works quite well. But the Linux desktop is going to be screwed until they kick out the 'UI designers' who've messed it up so badly.
I have to go with Bill Gates on this one. I am willing to pay for a better Desktop Environment (Windows or OS X) for non work applications.
Whenever I have to reboot from Linux to Windows to run Word or play a game that doesn't run in Wine, I remember what a horrible, clunky kludge the Windows interface was.
X has way too much overhead and features for low-power mobile devices.
I always find this argument funny, considering I first used X on a 32MHz CPU with 32MB of RAM.
I would agree that it's not ideal for a tablet that's mostly used for full-screen apps and media consumption, but 'overhead and features' are not the reason.
They don't want to pick between 57 different distros, 7 different package managers, and so on.
Unfortunately, geeks appear totally blind to how the real world works.
Phew, it's fortunate that there's only one version of Windows and people don't have to decide between Windows XP Pro 64 and Windows 8 Home Ultra Pro for ARM.
Well, Kinect is pretty damn amazing.
Didn't Microsoft buy the company that created it?
Microsoft Research seems to be the place where they put all the smart people they don't want to lose to competitors, then ignore everything they do.
Finally, the year of linux on the TV is here !
I believe my TV already runs Linux, from the licensing info in the manual. Would be cool if I could install Xbmc on it.
Now I only buy cheap LG, I'd rather have a cheap TV that I have to replace every 3-4 than a "high end" piece of crap that does not last any longer.
If you're buying LG, I presume you mean every 3-4 months? That's the longest any LG product I've owned has lasted.
Blame that on John Major, breaking up the rail system and selling all the money-making parts off for pennies on the pound to private industry, then rolling up all the complex and expensive stuff into Railtrack.
Blame that on the EU, who told them they had to do it that way.
Touchscreens are awesome, and they are the future of a lot of human-computer interaction.
No, touchscreens suck ass. They're only good when you're doing very basic operations which don't require much control.
The only device I use on a regular basis which might not totally suck ass with a touchscreen is my e-book reader, and even there I'd much rather press a button to go to the next page than have to make some stupid gesture.
Because you can get something like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer with a real OS to run real apps,
Exactly. Why would you install Windows when you can run a real OS and you'll have to replace all your old software anyway?