[PHB] Heck, what's the difference? Journalism, programming, they both look like a load of typing to me! [/PHB]
"Just type faster" is what one of my bosses sometimes says.
Or: "Can't you just copy that from another project? That one has [feature X] too!" Yes, that's what I'm doing, but the other project is built in a very different way, and it takes time and thought to put everything together in a way that it actually works.
One programmer is better than two for the same reason that one woman in the kitchen is better than 2.
Actually, if your kitchen is big enough and you know how to work together, having an extra set of hands can be extremely useful. Besides, different people have different specialties. Same for software development.
TFA complains linux is not ready for the IT environment, but linux has been widely used in IT environments for ages. His complaint are not about IT issues, they're about management: exchanging Word files and setting appointments on Exchange. Those are management issues, and managers prefer Windows. IT stuff is generally much better at home on linux than on winodws, firstly because many programmers prefer it, and secondly because linux gives you much more reliable servers. I'll happily grant that linux is not ready for managers yet.
Calling the treatment of the prisoners at Gitmo torture (Webster: to punish or coerce by inflicting excruciating pain) is an abuse of the word that calls for a much stronger word to describe true torture. What's been done at Gitmo - if anything - is what's called "moderate physical pressure" and it's mostly annoying and not truly painful, not does it leave permanent physical physical damages. You cannot compare that to medival torture that featured cuts, burns and stretching that most definately resulted in permanent physical damage.
Would you like to be "moderately physically pressured"? You don't have to put someone in an iron maiden to count as torture. By all reasonably accounts, people have indeed been tortured in Gitmo. And not just there.
A completely different issue is whether the prisoners at Gitmo actually is entitled to human rights protection. One can argue that sufficient inhuman behaviour can result in the loss of ones human rights. Personally I feel that terrorism qualify for that as the terrorists certainly abuses everybody elses human rights grossly. If it was up to me, the punishment for terrorism should be death by prolonged torture (with medical support to extend the amount of survivable pain).
You really do like medieval justice, don't you? No need to prove anyone's guilt, just assume they're guilty and go torture them. You're a fine example of a human being, you.
If inhuman behaviour can result in the loss of ones human rights, then a decent number of American soldiers and CIA agents will be without those rights.
Even nazi camp guards had human rights. They were charged, had trials, and were convicted.
As to whether the prisoners are terrorists or not, it's mostly op to themselves to have that settled. Most are extremely uncooperative 24/7. It's a fact that most were captured in non-uniform clothing armed (and often engaging allied forces) in Iraq and Afghanistan and as that falls outside the Geneva conventions, they're either spies or terrorists and thus with absolutely no rights (according to that set of conventions).
They're spies for being armed inside their own country? You want to lock up most of the US in Gitmo too? Or is that different, because they're Americans? What would you do if some foreign nutcases started shooting at you?
Aren't these taxes easily avoided? The organiser could, instead of awarding him a $138000 pace flight, hire him as vastly underpaid astronaut for $2000. Taxes on that are easily paid.
Is Babel an arthouse movie? It's in the big cinemas over here (although still on a much smaller scale than blockbusters). The small arthouses show films like Tampopo, Mongolian Pingpong and brilliant gems like that.
Here's a country that's just learned to count, and it thinks it can go up against the most powerful country in the world, with a long history of mathematical excellence.
"Just learned to count"? I know the US educational system has a bad reputation, but isn't this a bit of an exaggeration?
I am not american. As a commerce student i'm not even going to bother to explain the theory and logic behind exactly how wrong you are, that would be to much of an insult.
"I disagree, but I have no facts to back up my opinion."
That's what "I'm not going to bother to explain" means to me.
The problem with Monopoly seems to be that every time my family sits down to play a game, it ends in someone flipping over the board and storming off. Mind you the youngest is in her mid-teens and the oldest is in her mid seventies.
Do people really still play Monopoly? I liked it when I was a kid and there was nothing better around, but the last 15 years have given us a multitude of far superior games. Monopoly and Risk are obsolete.
From what I can tell Russia has enough freedom of the press for people to have a basic idea of what's going on.
It doesn't. Almost all TV stations are state controlled or loyal to (or afraid of) Putin. Independent TV stations get harassed and threatened. I'm not sure how the situation is with news papers, but controlling TV is pretty powerful.
Putin has popular support and appears to have established a sustainable, balanced economy over there, speaking relatively, of course.
A balanced, sustainable economy? I'm not an expert on Russian econoomics, but from what I understand, various foreign investors and corporations are basically being blackmailed by the Russian government. When you're buddies with Putin, you're well off, but if you're not, you can kiss your money goodbye.
He's a serious step back compared to people like Gorbachev or Yeltsin. A step back to the soviet era or even the tsars.
My old friend, Archimedes however actually said that the buoyant force on a submerged object is equal to the weight of the fluid that is displaced by the object.
Note the word "submerged" up there. An iceberg is not submerged. It floats. Floating objects displace water equal to their weight, submerged objects displace water equal to their volume. This is something that everybody should have learned in high school.
Apparently an object displaces exactly the same volume of water, as its volume is. Because the ice is less dense than water, for boyancy to be equal to the iceberg's weight, less water than its own volume needs to be displaced.
Exactly. It displaces water equal to its weight, not its volume.
That volume of water is approximately x% (i think x=60-70%, but not sure) of the volume of the iceberg which simply means that ice is less dense than water. If the ice melts it will produce water of around x% its volume. This water will occupy exactly as much volume as the submerged x% of the iceberg. Thus, the melting of the arctic ice should not raise the sea level substantially.
It won't raise the sea level at all.
Now there are some complications with sea water and salt and stuff, but i choose not to go into that.
Good. Those complications are negligible. Salt water is indeed heavier than fresh water, so if everything had the same temperature, the fresh water would float and still only displace salt water equal to its weight, which still hasn't changed. Now the freshly melted ice is actually going to be colder than the surrounding salt water, but if the surrounding salt water is around 4 degrees C, that still means the fresh water is less dense. If the salt water is warmer than that, it's possible that the fresh water will sink, at which time it will displace water equal to its volume, which is less than that of salt water, so the sea level might go down a tiny amount. But as soon as it warms up to the same temperature as the salt water, it should float again. Basically, the salinity doesn't matter nearly as much to the sea level as the temperature of the water does.
So assuming the ice is just submerged, the water will take less space and REDUCE the water level. But in reality ice floats so the the result is that the effect of the melting submerged ice cancels the effect of the increasing level caused by the ice above the water.
Why are you even assuming that the ice is submerged? It is not, exactly because it is less dense than water. Floating objects displace their own weight in water, and if the iceberg melts, it's turned into water and its weight doesn't change. Therefore displacement doesn't change, therefore water level doesn't change. The only reason why the water level could change, it if the iceberg contained solid material that sinks after the iceberg melts. The object would displace its weight in water while part of the floating iceberg, but it would displace only its volume in water after it sank.
your answer is right but the reason is wrong.
No, his answer is right for exactly the right reason.
Hydrogen conversion has its own inefficiency, so that's out.
No it's not. Everything has its own inefficiency, including traditional power plants. You have to accept some inefficiency, and hydrogen is definitely a strong candidate for storing energy.
In any case, I think that a 100% solar earth is unlikely:
* Much of the time it is night, and storing that much juice in batteries is impractical. Things like hydroelectric storage and thermal solar plants could help with this problem, but its a whole different research issue.
But storing energy is definitely doable. It's not a reason why 100% solar won't be feasible.
* In the event of, say, a major volcanic eruption or meteor impact, world power production would plummet. That could be the least of our worries.
It would be the least of our problems. Food production would plummet, and so would temperature across the world. I don't think any kind of large scale energy production can survive a catastrophe like that.
But you're right in one think: 100% solar won't happen. There are too many alternatives, like wind, hydro, biomass. If you look at that map, Europe doesn't receive a lot of sun shine, yet it consumes a lot of energy. It can buy its energy from the poor Sahara countries ofcourse, but with the amount of wind here, I expect we'll be making a lot of use of that.
Hate to tell you this but even if the icon says it's encrypted that only means the radio transmission is encrypted... it doesn't help that a wire tap is on the *wires* within the system. That part of the traffic is generally unencrypted.
Exactly. The only way to have really secure communication is by encrypting on your end, and decrypting on the receiving phone. Cryptophones do that. I know Rop Gongrijp (spokesman of the Dutch hacker community in the late '80s and early '90s, founder of XS4all, the first Dutch public internet provider) developed on of the first cryptophones, but a quick google proves that there's a lot of choice in that department now.
In any case, if you're really paranoid, controlling your encryption is really the only way. The only problem is that the receiver has to be able to decrypt it again.
Perhaps, but if citizens aren't allowed to defend themselves, then the rate of muggings goes through the roof (as it has in England) because there's no consequences for it.
How much good do you think your gun will be when the mugger has one too? He already has his gun pointed at you. What do you think he'll do when you reach for your gun? If muggers think their victims might carry guns, you're only raising the stakes, and he's more likely to actually shoot you. A better way to stop muggings is to have actual cops on the street, and to track down muggers instead of ignoring them.
And in the process, I understand UK hospitals are seeing lots of horrible knife wounds coming into the ERs. If random citizens might be concealing guns, muggers will think twice about trying anything. Just check out Switzerland's crime rate.
But violent deaths due to ordinary citizens snapping and shooting someone are higher in Switzerland than in surrounding countries, and some people are already calling for stronger restrictions on weapons.
Sounds like England. Guns are fairly rare there, yet people are being maimed and killed left and right by muggers and other criminals using knives and other non-gun weapons in what has become a crime epidemic.
I thought the number of violent deaths in the UK was still a lot lower than in the US.
In any case, in Netherland it's mostly the criminals themselves who get shot. By rival criminals. Ordinary citizens aren mostly left alone. Ofcourse there are muggers, but they generally just threaten you with a knife, which isn't nearly as lethal as a nervous guy with a gun.
It must be nice to have a lifestyle, gender, social class, job location, and residential neighborhood such that you don't need a gun. Do you suppose that the rest of us enjoy the same oversafe status?
It is indeed nice to live in a place where not every nutcase or estranged teenager has access to a gun. I think it would be nice if more people could enjoy such safety.
Actually 1-2ppm defects is a common goal and easily obtainable with proper controls. 18ppm would be unacceptable in some regulated industries and considered an out-of-control process.
But are those regulated industries making toys?
I suspect they're either making business critical stuff, or stuff that could threaten lives if broken. For a toy maker, 18 ppm sounds pretty impressive.
I only use my credit card for online transactions. I wouldn't even know how too use it for everything else (and very few shops even accept them over here). I pay almost everything by pin, which is pretty universally accepted, but there are a few vending machines and that only accept chip cards (as did the cafeteria at a bank I worked a couple of months ago), and banks are pushing chip cards on us, so now I have one of those too.
So does European money. 5 euro notes are really tiny, and color is enough to identify the value of the note. It was the same with Dutch money before the introduction of the Euro. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch money had some of the first brightly colored bank notes in the world; I've heard stories about banks in Africa not accepting them because they though it was Monopoly money.
But back to the topic at hand, both European and Dutch money also have bumps and ridges that make them easy to identify by blind people. And Dutch money used to have a lot of other security features that weren't included in the Euro notes because French money printers couldn't handle them.
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"Just type faster" is what one of my bosses sometimes says.
Or: "Can't you just copy that from another project? That one has [feature X] too!" Yes, that's what I'm doing, but the other project is built in a very different way, and it takes time and thought to put everything together in a way that it actually works.
Actually, if your kitchen is big enough and you know how to work together, having an extra set of hands can be extremely useful. Besides, different people have different specialties. Same for software development.
TFA complains linux is not ready for the IT environment, but linux has been widely used in IT environments for ages. His complaint are not about IT issues, they're about management: exchanging Word files and setting appointments on Exchange. Those are management issues, and managers prefer Windows. IT stuff is generally much better at home on linux than on winodws, firstly because many programmers prefer it, and secondly because linux gives you much more reliable servers. I'll happily grant that linux is not ready for managers yet.
Aren't these taxes easily avoided? The organiser could, instead of awarding him a $138000 pace flight, hire him as vastly underpaid astronaut for $2000. Taxes on that are easily paid.
Life still sucks more when you don't.
I'm afraid the speed of fart is not a fundamental constant of our space-time continuum.
Is Babel an arthouse movie? It's in the big cinemas over here (although still on a much smaller scale than blockbusters). The small arthouses show films like Tampopo, Mongolian Pingpong and brilliant gems like that.
"Just learned to count"? I know the US educational system has a bad reputation, but isn't this a bit of an exaggeration?
"I disagree, but I have no facts to back up my opinion."
That's what "I'm not going to bother to explain" means to me.
They were 20 years ago, but not anymore. They suck in comparison to just about any game that has been released since.
Do people really still play Monopoly? I liked it when I was a kid and there was nothing better around, but the last 15 years have given us a multitude of far superior games. Monopoly and Risk are obsolete.
It doesn't. Almost all TV stations are state controlled or loyal to (or afraid of) Putin. Independent TV stations get harassed and threatened. I'm not sure how the situation is with news papers, but controlling TV is pretty powerful.
A balanced, sustainable economy? I'm not an expert on Russian econoomics, but from what I understand, various foreign investors and corporations are basically being blackmailed by the Russian government. When you're buddies with Putin, you're well off, but if you're not, you can kiss your money goodbye.
He's a serious step back compared to people like Gorbachev or Yeltsin. A step back to the soviet era or even the tsars.
Note the word "submerged" up there. An iceberg is not submerged. It floats. Floating objects displace water equal to their weight, submerged objects displace water equal to their volume. This is something that everybody should have learned in high school.
Exactly. It displaces water equal to its weight, not its volume.
It won't raise the sea level at all.
Why are you even assuming that the ice is submerged? It is not, exactly because it is less dense than water. Floating objects displace their own weight in water, and if the iceberg melts, it's turned into water and its weight doesn't change. Therefore displacement doesn't change, therefore water level doesn't change. The only reason why the water level could change, it if the iceberg contained solid material that sinks after the iceberg melts. The object would displace its weight in water while part of the floating iceberg, but it would displace only its volume in water after it sank.
No, his answer is right for exactly the right reason.
No it's not. Everything has its own inefficiency, including traditional power plants. You have to accept some inefficiency, and hydrogen is definitely a strong candidate for storing energy.
But storing energy is definitely doable. It's not a reason why 100% solar won't be feasible.
It would be the least of our problems. Food production would plummet, and so would temperature across the world. I don't think any kind of large scale energy production can survive a catastrophe like that.
But you're right in one think: 100% solar won't happen. There are too many alternatives, like wind, hydro, biomass. If you look at that map, Europe doesn't receive a lot of sun shine, yet it consumes a lot of energy. It can buy its energy from the poor Sahara countries ofcourse, but with the amount of wind here, I expect we'll be making a lot of use of that.
Exactly. The only way to have really secure communication is by encrypting on your end, and decrypting on the receiving phone. Cryptophones do that. I know Rop Gongrijp (spokesman of the Dutch hacker community in the late '80s and early '90s, founder of XS4all, the first Dutch public internet provider) developed on of the first cryptophones, but a quick google proves that there's a lot of choice in that department now.
In any case, if you're really paranoid, controlling your encryption is really the only way. The only problem is that the receiver has to be able to decrypt it again.
How much good do you think your gun will be when the mugger has one too? He already has his gun pointed at you. What do you think he'll do when you reach for your gun? If muggers think their victims might carry guns, you're only raising the stakes, and he's more likely to actually shoot you. A better way to stop muggings is to have actual cops on the street, and to track down muggers instead of ignoring them.
But violent deaths due to ordinary citizens snapping and shooting someone are higher in Switzerland than in surrounding countries, and some people are already calling for stronger restrictions on weapons.
Nintendo can sell twice as much as Sony and still be 3rd in revenue. But whatever they sell, they'll be first in profit for quite some time.
I thought the number of violent deaths in the UK was still a lot lower than in the US.
In any case, in Netherland it's mostly the criminals themselves who get shot. By rival criminals. Ordinary citizens aren mostly left alone. Ofcourse there are muggers, but they generally just threaten you with a knife, which isn't nearly as lethal as a nervous guy with a gun.
It is indeed nice to live in a place where not every nutcase or estranged teenager has access to a gun. I think it would be nice if more people could enjoy such safety.
But are those regulated industries making toys?
I suspect they're either making business critical stuff, or stuff that could threaten lives if broken. For a toy maker, 18 ppm sounds pretty impressive.
I only use my credit card for online transactions. I wouldn't even know how too use it for everything else (and very few shops even accept them over here). I pay almost everything by pin, which is pretty universally accepted, but there are a few vending machines and that only accept chip cards (as did the cafeteria at a bank I worked a couple of months ago), and banks are pushing chip cards on us, so now I have one of those too.
Anyway, I hardly need cash at all, nowadays.
So does European money. 5 euro notes are really tiny, and color is enough to identify the value of the note. It was the same with Dutch money before the introduction of the Euro. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch money had some of the first brightly colored bank notes in the world; I've heard stories about banks in Africa not accepting them because they though it was Monopoly money. But back to the topic at hand, both European and Dutch money also have bumps and ridges that make them easy to identify by blind people. And Dutch money used to have a lot of other security features that weren't included in the Euro notes because French money printers couldn't handle them.