Yes - no idea when this will change, although Ireland recently changed all their road signs to Km/h.
ATM, schools teach metric fairly exclusively so everyone learns metric and are only really exposed to imprial measurements when using the roads (since they are still signed in miles).
Whoever made that site fails to remember that maybe one shouldn't be driving over the speed limit to begin with.
The problem with speed cameras is they disrupt traffic flow - everyone slams on the brakes as they see a camera which at worst case causes a pile-up, but usually just slows the traffic right down.
There are some speed cameras in a 50mph zone near me - everyone does about 50mph down the road and then slams on the brakes as they see the camera and slow down to about 25mph because they're not 100% sure they're still in a 50mph zone and haven't missed some 30mph signs or something. The situation could be greatly improved if they actually painted the speed limit on the camera itself so you knew that you're definately within the limit.
On my drive home from work there is a speed camera about 50 metres from my junction (in a 30mph limit). The speed camera causes such disruption, slowing the traffic down to about 20mph that everyone bunches up, increasing the risk of a pileup and meaning you can't change lane. Basically, if you didn't change into the left hand lane by about 700 metres before the junction you can forget anyone letting you change lane so you can make the turn - you'll be stuck on the road until the next junction 3 miles further on.
Another problem which I guess is slightly more contraversial is that there are some stretches of road where you can lose your licence within about 5 miles if you cruise down there slightly over the limit since you'll trigger several cameras on the road - made worse by the fact that forward facing cameras don't even flash so they won't draw your attention to the fact you just passed a camera.
I generally don't speed, but I still hate speed cameras coz of the disruption they cause. I also think there's a hell of a lot worse things to do than driving 5mph over the limit - like the drivers who I see every day who weave in and out of traffic cutting everyone up, or the idiots who blast down the motorway half a metre from the back of my car.
Swansea University Computer Science Department used to have a lab of Power Macintoshes. I am lead to believe the lab used to be an Amiga Lab. All the computers in that room were on a timeswitch which switched the power off for that room, I kid you not!
We also used to have the Sparc SLC lab - I don't recall them ever powering the machines down and of course you could never power off the monitors separately since the motherboard was built into the screens.
(Still have one of those SLCs in my cupboard after the Computer Society took a bunch of the SLCs off the Uni's hands and then chucked them out a couple of years later.)
Of course they upgraded the whole lab to Solaris x86 and then to Suse where they have nodoubt forgotten to turn on power management anyway.:)
people who don't know how to indent their code, and want you to help debug it!
So tell them to go away and come back when it's properly indented. Point them at the tools they need to automagically indent their badly indented code. They'll never learn if you don't tell them that they have an unreadable coding style and explain to them why intenting is a Good Thing.
Add ASSERT() like comments and ASSERT() or equivalent to your code
I _really_ hate ASSERT() in it's usual implementation - it's broken. Yes, asserting that values are what you expect is a good thing, but the usual method for handling assertion failures involves forcably bombing the application. In some cases this is a reasonable idea (since you know something's broken it prevents bad data getting back into data files, etc). But for most cases I believe this is a horrendously bad thing - I would prefer a small amount of bad data to be saved back to my data files (and me informed about it) rather than the common practice of just blowing away all the data incase there's something wrong with it.
Look at it this way - if you're in a fly-by-wire plane and the computer system reports an error, do you:
(a) want to try and continue anyway or
(b) shut down all the computers and engines:)
(And yes, I know that planes have plenty of backup systems, but I've lost count of the number of times I've lost important data as an application bombs with an ASSERT() failure...)
I'm reasonably strict with my commenting - At the top of each function I write a comment giving a brief description of what the function does, what parameters it's expecting and what it's going to return. I then put single line comments in the middle of the more hairy chunks of code explaining what's going on. Of course I also put in/* FIXME: foo */ comments at known bugs and missing features.
I _still_ look at my code and think "I must've been pissed when I wrote this", but I can actually work out what I was doing. I'm not sure *any* coder can claim to look at their own 2 year old code and immediately understand how it was implemented, nomatter how well documented it was. Comments just speed up the "relearning" process - i.e. the time taken to get back into a similar frame of mind to when you were writing the code originally.
It's worth remembering that too many comments can be just as bad as too few comments. Good programming practice says that functions should be reasonably short (hopefully short enough that each function can fit on your screen - most developers have pretty large high-res screens to increase the amount of code visibale and reduce the amount of scrolly action in the editor). If you add too many comments then the simplest function can get too big to fit in your brain all at once.:)
It's possible that poor old ladies can be convinced to buy a new HDTV and not raise a stink
Sorry, I'm confused - why do you need a $3000 HDTV to receive DVB-T signals in the US when a £20 set top box lets you receive DVB-T signals just fine here in the UK?
Digital TV requires a fraction of the "bandwidth" (wrong term, but you get the idea) that analogue does.
Actually, bandwidth is exactly the right term here. In it's purest form, bandwidth is simply the amount of space in the spectrum that the signal takes up, measured in Hz. (I.e. it is the highest frequency used minus the lowest frequency used). Since the data rate you can send using a specific modulation/encoding is directly related to this bandwidth, the term "bandwidth" has been adopted to describe data rates in digital media.
So, an analogue TV channel uses 8MHz of bandwidth (for PAL-I, as used in the UK). A digital multiplex is usually also 8MHz wide, but carries several channels (depending on what data rate and how much error correction data the broadcaster chooses to use).
The poor who watch TV should get off of their asses and work harder to make more money -- that's why they're poor, they don't have money.
I'm not being a bastard or anything here, but it's interesting to note that (certainly around the UK) the poorer people were some of the first to adopt satellite TV, cellphones, etc. It is really noticable at Christmas time that whilest most of the neighbourhoods around here have a few fairy lights in their windows, it was the poorer council houses who had the (reasonably expensive) animated / moving displays.
As a side note, some parts of Wales had their analogue signal turned off a few weeks ago and all the houses switched over to DVB-T. This was a trial to see how the public accepted the loss of analogue TV (which will happen in 2008). The press reported that the residents were very happy with it, however I think this "trial" was a complete waste of time since in this case the government bought DVB-T decoders for all the residents, which is something they won't be doing for the whole UK when the analogue signal is turned off nationally. If someone pays for your migration to a better format, of course you'll be very please - the arguement from people is that they don't _want_ to pay for it - maybe part of the licence fee should be used to pay for a DVB-T decoder for each household? (They retail at about 20ukp each for the basic decoders).
Does it ignore the broadcast flag (I am assuming we have such a thing on this side of the pond)?
I've never heard of us having a broadcast flag here in the UK - I don't think our government is stupid enough to implement it (however, President Blair has dropped his trousers and bent over for the US on every other issue so it wouldn't surprise me if he did again).
However, the problem I have is that I can't use a DVB-S card in my MythTV box because Sky refuse to release a CAM to decrypt their VideoGuard signals.:( (IMHO the governement should force their hand on that since it prevents free trade in satellite decoders).
These DVDs would allow to skip ads: how does this stands in terms of ethics?
Well, I pay money for a DVD - why should I be forced to sit through adverts every time I want to watch a movie I _paid for_? I don't see a problem with this.
I use ad-blocking in browsers
So do I. However, I have strict ethics about what I block. I block flashing animated ads, Flash ads and popups. These are all adverts that I find extremely annoying. On the other hand, I allow static (or not annoying) graphical banner ads, and text ads (google adsense, etc). I realise that the pages I'm reading are supported by adverts and I want to continue supporting these sites, but I won't put up with stuff designed specifically to annoy me. Hey, Google's ads are unobtrusive and _targetted_ so I leave them there - they're sometimes even useful.
if I had a TV (I don't:-), I would not feel bad about using Tivo
TV ads are another thing like web ads, except I can't be so selective. 10 years ago, a lot of the ads were funny and worth watching. I also don't remember them being repeated quite as frequently. These days most of the TV ads are designed to annoy people (yeah, it works - the name of the thing they're selling gets lodged firmly in my brain... sadly for them it gets lodged in the "never buy this crap" category). The TV ads are shown at a louder volume than the show I'm watching, they're really annoying and the same ads get repeated every break so there's no variety. If the majority of ads were entertaining instead of being extremely annoying and repetetive then I'd probably watch them, but as it is I just skip the lot using MythTV.
I just hope that my actions of blocking stuff that's designed to be annoying will eventually make the advertisers realise that pissing people off is not the best way to sell stuff. However, with the introduction of popup blockers in browsers we've seen the advertisers finding new ways of creating annoying popups and with the introduction of spam filters we've seen the spammers attempting to circumvent them so it seems the message just isn't getting through.
The worst thing is that the only reason they're still using these advertising techniques is because they work - somewhere, some moron is buying products from popups, spam, direct marketting, etc. In my experience that person is often the same person who complains about the popups, spam and direct marketting in the first place.
That is only a problem if you insist on using mail-order shops.
I think the only PC shop aroung here is PC World. Lets see, half a gig of Corsair PC2700 memory is listed at 71.96ukp in PC World. Or I can mail order it from dabs.com for 39.18ukp. And it's not as if I have a lot of choice from PC World - they don't even do 1 gig or 2 gig DIMMs. Tell me again why buying from the local shop is better value than mail ordering?
I definitely prefer to go to shop, get the die, plug it in, run a test program for a few hours and have it replaced if I find any errors, than to pay some 80% extra for a sticker saying that some malaysian kid did it for me.
Yes, because waiting for my mail order RAM to turn up, finding it's buggered and then having to spend a month trying to convince the supplier to get their finger out doing their slow-as-treacle RMA procedure is such a good use of my time... (Not to mention the very real chanced that the replacement RAM will be just as screwed)
Eh? port 25 is for SMTP servers, a user has no need for this port unless they are running their own mail server. Checking your mail is done through POP3 and IMAP on ports 110 and 143, respectively.
Err.. yes... how exactly do you send mail if you don't use SMTP? Oh that's right, you use the email-over-telepathy protocol...
Disconecting it totally is a great way to handle the problem, because it forces the idiot to call customer services to find out why their connection no longer works
Even better is to block all access and redirect web requests to a server that explains what's going on and provides patches, etc. That way people (with more than one brain cell) don't _have_ to phone customer support.
NTL are one of the biggest ISPs in the UK and they do the same thing.
Hah, you're kidding right? NTL have one of the worst records when it comes to responding to abuse reports. Trust me - I've had to deal with them several times about abuse matters and frankly they don't care.
there is a marginal increase in 'reasonable' spam for products that do exist and might perhaps be interesting to a small percentage of the population.
Really? Most of mine is for m0rtgag3s, pen1s enlargement, h0t v1rg1n t33ns and an aweful lot of phishing mails.
Seriously, who would buy a mortgage off spam?
The other really stupid thing is the amount of spam that only applies to the US which arrives at my.ac.uk address. I mean, how hard is it for them to avoid mailing US-specific stuff to.uk addresses?
If you accelerated as 9.8 m/s^2......in space with an ion drive
Unfortunately current ion drives are *nowhere near* powerful enough to do this (Wikipedia mentions accellerations in the order of a milli-G). So the current ion drives are a really efficient way of moving stuff very slowly, but a lot of work needs to be done improving the amount of thrust they produce. Ion drives are certainly well worth thinking about for interstellar missions though since they are efficient enough to be run pretty much non-stop instead of chemical rockets which you fire at the start and the end of the trip and leave turned off for the rest of the time. (When you're talking about missions in the order of several years then leaving a milli-G thrust running non-stop would get you there faster than just a brief (but violent) accelleration.)
Use a nuclear fission engine (that the navy has years and years of experience running) to heat plasma and you'd have no problems completing the above scenario.
Nice in theory, but if you try and launch something the size of a submarine reactor into space and something goes wrong you could end up scattering an aweful lot of fissable material over a large area. I guess since the reactor will be brand new the vast majority will be Uranium (a lot less toxic than Plutonium) but it's still not a good thing.... Of course I have absolutely no idea how the amount of energy required to run a reasonably powerful ion drive would compare to the amount of energy required to run a submarine.
Using an electromagnetic plasma bubble it's possible to capture the solar wind to propel our craft.
I haven't been able to find any figures suggesting what kind of accellerations might be possible with this technology - how does it compare with (current) ion drives?
Quite a few foreign shows ended up excellent, despite the budget of what seems to be what the producers pulled out of their couch. Red dwarf (uk)
And notably, Red Dwarf went significantly down hill as soon as the beeb started shovelling money at them. The tackyness was part of the comedy and they just completely lost that part of it (also didn't help that the writers split up causing the script to turn to crap).
Having said all this, I haven't seen a good piece of comedy come out of the Beeb since Red Dwarf VI, which is really sad... especially since I fund them through my licence fee.
how many times have you needed to get [pick anything here] to work and blown a whole Saturday afternoon?
Frequently... and admittedly I wouldn't have blown the whole Saturday afternoon if I was using windows instead... You know why? Coz under Linux I know that if I spend some time hacking at it I can likely get it do do whatever I want whereas with windows if it doesn't work out of the box I may as well give up there.
So at the end of the day, yeah, I've blown a saturday afternoon getting something to work under linux, but under windows I just wouldn't have got it to work at all.
These posts always surprise me, because I've been running Linux on an old IBM TP-600E for years, with never a problem at all.
I've been using Linux (of RedHat flavours) on my AST Ascentia M P166 laptop since I got it (1998?) with no major problems. Infact I'd say that in this case, Linux has actually got less friendly towards it in recent years since XFree86 4.x and Xorg nolonger support the Cirrus VGA chipset so I'm stuck using VESA drivers. (It's used prettymuch exclusively as a terminal for my living room these dyas, so nothing too stressful, but it still works).
Oh, and something in the 2.6 kernel seemed to break IRDA support which worked ok under 2.4...
The servers are the heat source and the cool room air it the cooling mechanism? Yes?
Alternatively you could water cool all the servers through a central water cooling system for the entire datacentre - Then use a central (set of) heat pumps to cool that heated water down again. Or take cues from the power stations and cool the water by evaporation in cooling towers. Sounds more efficient than cooling entire (probably badly insulated) rooms down anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it the signs are still labled in MPH then?
Yes - no idea when this will change, although Ireland recently changed all their road signs to Km/h.
ATM, schools teach metric fairly exclusively so everyone learns metric and are only really exposed to imprial measurements when using the roads (since they are still signed in miles).
Augh! Too much mixing of English and Metric units! :)
:)
Sorry
Most people here in the UK (under about 30 years old) tend to use MPH for road speeds but metres for short distances.
Whoever made that site fails to remember that maybe one shouldn't be driving over the speed limit to begin with.
The problem with speed cameras is they disrupt traffic flow - everyone slams on the brakes as they see a camera which at worst case causes a pile-up, but usually just slows the traffic right down.
There are some speed cameras in a 50mph zone near me - everyone does about 50mph down the road and then slams on the brakes as they see the camera and slow down to about 25mph because they're not 100% sure they're still in a 50mph zone and haven't missed some 30mph signs or something. The situation could be greatly improved if they actually painted the speed limit on the camera itself so you knew that you're definately within the limit.
On my drive home from work there is a speed camera about 50 metres from my junction (in a 30mph limit). The speed camera causes such disruption, slowing the traffic down to about 20mph that everyone bunches up, increasing the risk of a pileup and meaning you can't change lane. Basically, if you didn't change into the left hand lane by about 700 metres before the junction you can forget anyone letting you change lane so you can make the turn - you'll be stuck on the road until the next junction 3 miles further on.
Another problem which I guess is slightly more contraversial is that there are some stretches of road where you can lose your licence within about 5 miles if you cruise down there slightly over the limit since you'll trigger several cameras on the road - made worse by the fact that forward facing cameras don't even flash so they won't draw your attention to the fact you just passed a camera.
I generally don't speed, but I still hate speed cameras coz of the disruption they cause. I also think there's a hell of a lot worse things to do than driving 5mph over the limit - like the drivers who I see every day who weave in and out of traffic cutting everyone up, or the idiots who blast down the motorway half a metre from the back of my car.
Swansea University Computer Science Department used to have a lab of Power Macintoshes. I am lead to believe the lab used to be an Amiga Lab. All the computers in that room were on a timeswitch which switched the power off for that room, I kid you not!
:)
We also used to have the Sparc SLC lab - I don't recall them ever powering the machines down and of course you could never power off the monitors separately since the motherboard was built into the screens.
(Still have one of those SLCs in my cupboard after the Computer Society took a bunch of the SLCs off the Uni's hands and then chucked them out a couple of years later.)
Of course they upgraded the whole lab to Solaris x86 and then to Suse where they have nodoubt forgotten to turn on power management anyway.
people who don't know how to indent their code, and want you to help debug it!
So tell them to go away and come back when it's properly indented. Point them at the tools they need to automagically indent their badly indented code. They'll never learn if you don't tell them that they have an unreadable coding style and explain to them why intenting is a Good Thing.
Add ASSERT() like comments and ASSERT() or equivalent to your code
:)
I _really_ hate ASSERT() in it's usual implementation - it's broken. Yes, asserting that values are what you expect is a good thing, but the usual method for handling assertion failures involves forcably bombing the application. In some cases this is a reasonable idea (since you know something's broken it prevents bad data getting back into data files, etc). But for most cases I believe this is a horrendously bad thing - I would prefer a small amount of bad data to be saved back to my data files (and me informed about it) rather than the common practice of just blowing away all the data incase there's something wrong with it.
Look at it this way - if you're in a fly-by-wire plane and the computer system reports an error, do you:
(a) want to try and continue anyway
or
(b) shut down all the computers and engines
(And yes, I know that planes have plenty of backup systems, but I've lost count of the number of times I've lost important data as an application bombs with an ASSERT() failure...)
I'm reasonably strict with my commenting - At the top of each function I write a comment giving a brief description of what the function does, what parameters it's expecting and what it's going to return. I then put single line comments in the middle of the more hairy chunks of code explaining what's going on. Of course I also put in /* FIXME: foo */ comments at known bugs and missing features.
:)
I _still_ look at my code and think "I must've been pissed when I wrote this", but I can actually work out what I was doing. I'm not sure *any* coder can claim to look at their own 2 year old code and immediately understand how it was implemented, nomatter how well documented it was. Comments just speed up the "relearning" process - i.e. the time taken to get back into a similar frame of mind to when you were writing the code originally.
It's worth remembering that too many comments can be just as bad as too few comments. Good programming practice says that functions should be reasonably short (hopefully short enough that each function can fit on your screen - most developers have pretty large high-res screens to increase the amount of code visibale and reduce the amount of scrolly action in the editor). If you add too many comments then the simplest function can get too big to fit in your brain all at once.
It's possible that poor old ladies can be convinced to buy a new HDTV and not raise a stink
Sorry, I'm confused - why do you need a $3000 HDTV to receive DVB-T signals in the US when a £20 set top box lets you receive DVB-T signals just fine here in the UK?
Digital TV requires a fraction of the "bandwidth" (wrong term, but you get the idea) that analogue does.
Actually, bandwidth is exactly the right term here. In it's purest form, bandwidth is simply the amount of space in the spectrum that the signal takes up, measured in Hz. (I.e. it is the highest frequency used minus the lowest frequency used). Since the data rate you can send using a specific modulation/encoding is directly related to this bandwidth, the term "bandwidth" has been adopted to describe data rates in digital media.
So, an analogue TV channel uses 8MHz of bandwidth (for PAL-I, as used in the UK). A digital multiplex is usually also 8MHz wide, but carries several channels (depending on what data rate and how much error correction data the broadcaster chooses to use).
The poor who watch TV should get off of their asses and work harder to make more money -- that's why they're poor, they don't have money.
I'm not being a bastard or anything here, but it's interesting to note that (certainly around the UK) the poorer people were some of the first to adopt satellite TV, cellphones, etc. It is really noticable at Christmas time that whilest most of the neighbourhoods around here have a few fairy lights in their windows, it was the poorer council houses who had the (reasonably expensive) animated / moving displays.
As a side note, some parts of Wales had their analogue signal turned off a few weeks ago and all the houses switched over to DVB-T. This was a trial to see how the public accepted the loss of analogue TV (which will happen in 2008). The press reported that the residents were very happy with it, however I think this "trial" was a complete waste of time since in this case the government bought DVB-T decoders for all the residents, which is something they won't be doing for the whole UK when the analogue signal is turned off nationally. If someone pays for your migration to a better format, of course you'll be very please - the arguement from people is that they don't _want_ to pay for it - maybe part of the licence fee should be used to pay for a DVB-T decoder for each household? (They retail at about 20ukp each for the basic decoders).
Bullshit. The main reason for doing this is to force 70 million americans to go out and buy some $100+ part to allow them to keep on getting TV.
Wow, your DVB-T decoders are $100? You really have overpriced electronics over in the states then. They cost about 20ukp here in the UK.
Does it ignore the broadcast flag (I am assuming we have such a thing on this side of the pond)?
:(
I've never heard of us having a broadcast flag here in the UK - I don't think our government is stupid enough to implement it (however, President Blair has dropped his trousers and bent over for the US on every other issue so it wouldn't surprise me if he did again).
However, the problem I have is that I can't use a DVB-S card in my MythTV box because Sky refuse to release a CAM to decrypt their VideoGuard signals.
(IMHO the governement should force their hand on that since it prevents free trade in satellite decoders).
These DVDs would allow to skip ads: how does this stands in terms of ethics?
:-), I would not feel bad about using Tivo
Well, I pay money for a DVD - why should I be forced to sit through adverts every time I want to watch a movie I _paid for_? I don't see a problem with this.
I use ad-blocking in browsers
So do I. However, I have strict ethics about what I block. I block flashing animated ads, Flash ads and popups. These are all adverts that I find extremely annoying. On the other hand, I allow static (or not annoying) graphical banner ads, and text ads (google adsense, etc).
I realise that the pages I'm reading are supported by adverts and I want to continue supporting these sites, but I won't put up with stuff designed specifically to annoy me. Hey, Google's ads are unobtrusive and _targetted_ so I leave them there - they're sometimes even useful.
if I had a TV (I don't
TV ads are another thing like web ads, except I can't be so selective. 10 years ago, a lot of the ads were funny and worth watching. I also don't remember them being repeated quite as frequently. These days most of the TV ads are designed to annoy people (yeah, it works - the name of the thing they're selling gets lodged firmly in my brain... sadly for them it gets lodged in the "never buy this crap" category). The TV ads are shown at a louder volume than the show I'm watching, they're really annoying and the same ads get repeated every break so there's no variety. If the majority of ads were entertaining instead of being extremely annoying and repetetive then I'd probably watch them, but as it is I just skip the lot using MythTV.
I just hope that my actions of blocking stuff that's designed to be annoying will eventually make the advertisers realise that pissing people off is not the best way to sell stuff. However, with the introduction of popup blockers in browsers we've seen the advertisers finding new ways of creating annoying popups and with the introduction of spam filters we've seen the spammers attempting to circumvent them so it seems the message just isn't getting through.
The worst thing is that the only reason they're still using these advertising techniques is because they work - somewhere, some moron is buying products from popups, spam, direct marketting, etc. In my experience that person is often the same person who complains about the popups, spam and direct marketting in the first place.
That is only a problem if you insist on using mail-order shops.
I think the only PC shop aroung here is PC World. Lets see, half a gig of Corsair PC2700 memory is listed at 71.96ukp in PC World. Or I can mail order it from dabs.com for 39.18ukp. And it's not as if I have a lot of choice from PC World - they don't even do 1 gig or 2 gig DIMMs. Tell me again why buying from the local shop is better value than mail ordering?
I definitely prefer to go to shop, get the die, plug it in, run a test program for a few hours and have it replaced if I find any errors, than to pay some 80% extra for a sticker saying that some malaysian kid did it for me.
Yes, because waiting for my mail order RAM to turn up, finding it's buggered and then having to spend a month trying to convince the supplier to get their finger out doing their slow-as-treacle RMA procedure is such a good use of my time... (Not to mention the very real chanced that the replacement RAM will be just as screwed)
Eh? port 25 is for SMTP servers, a user has no need for this port unless they are running their own mail server. Checking your mail is done through POP3 and IMAP on ports 110 and 143, respectively.
Err.. yes... how exactly do you send mail if you don't use SMTP? Oh that's right, you use the email-over-telepathy protocol...
Disconecting it totally is a great way to handle the problem, because it forces the idiot to call customer services to find out why their connection no longer works
Even better is to block all access and redirect web requests to a server that explains what's going on and provides patches, etc. That way people (with more than one brain cell) don't _have_ to phone customer support.
NTL are one of the biggest ISPs in the UK and they do the same thing.
Hah, you're kidding right? NTL have one of the worst records when it comes to responding to abuse reports. Trust me - I've had to deal with them several times about abuse matters and frankly they don't care.
there is a marginal increase in 'reasonable' spam for products that do exist and might perhaps be interesting to a small percentage of the population.
.ac.uk address. I mean, how hard is it for them to avoid mailing US-specific stuff to .uk addresses?
Really? Most of mine is for m0rtgag3s, pen1s enlargement, h0t v1rg1n t33ns and an aweful lot of phishing mails.
Seriously, who would buy a mortgage off spam?
The other really stupid thing is the amount of spam that only applies to the US which arrives at my
If you accelerated as 9.8 m/s^2... ...in space with an ion drive
Unfortunately current ion drives are *nowhere near* powerful enough to do this (Wikipedia mentions accellerations in the order of a milli-G). So the current ion drives are a really efficient way of moving stuff very slowly, but a lot of work needs to be done improving the amount of thrust they produce. Ion drives are certainly well worth thinking about for interstellar missions though since they are efficient enough to be run pretty much non-stop instead of chemical rockets which you fire at the start and the end of the trip and leave turned off for the rest of the time. (When you're talking about missions in the order of several years then leaving a milli-G thrust running non-stop would get you there faster than just a brief (but violent) accelleration.)
Use a nuclear fission engine (that the navy has years and years of experience running) to heat plasma and you'd have no problems completing the above scenario.
Nice in theory, but if you try and launch something the size of a submarine reactor into space and something goes wrong you could end up scattering an aweful lot of fissable material over a large area. I guess since the reactor will be brand new the vast majority will be Uranium (a lot less toxic than Plutonium) but it's still not a good thing.... Of course I have absolutely no idea how the amount of energy required to run a reasonably powerful ion drive would compare to the amount of energy required to run a submarine.
Using an electromagnetic plasma bubble it's possible to capture the solar wind to propel our craft.
I haven't been able to find any figures suggesting what kind of accellerations might be possible with this technology - how does it compare with (current) ion drives?
Quite a few foreign shows ended up excellent, despite the budget of what seems to be what the producers pulled out of their couch. Red dwarf (uk)
And notably, Red Dwarf went significantly down hill as soon as the beeb started shovelling money at them. The tackyness was part of the comedy and they just completely lost that part of it (also didn't help that the writers split up causing the script to turn to crap).
Having said all this, I haven't seen a good piece of comedy come out of the Beeb since Red Dwarf VI, which is really sad... especially since I fund them through my licence fee.
how many times have you needed to get [pick anything here] to work and blown a whole Saturday afternoon?
Frequently... and admittedly I wouldn't have blown the whole Saturday afternoon if I was using windows instead... You know why? Coz under Linux I know that if I spend some time hacking at it I can likely get it do do whatever I want whereas with windows if it doesn't work out of the box I may as well give up there.
So at the end of the day, yeah, I've blown a saturday afternoon getting something to work under linux, but under windows I just wouldn't have got it to work at all.
These posts always surprise me, because I've been running Linux on an old IBM TP-600E for years, with never a problem at all.
I've been using Linux (of RedHat flavours) on my AST Ascentia M P166 laptop since I got it (1998?) with no major problems. Infact I'd say that in this case, Linux has actually got less friendly towards it in recent years since XFree86 4.x and Xorg nolonger support the Cirrus VGA chipset so I'm stuck using VESA drivers. (It's used prettymuch exclusively as a terminal for my living room these dyas, so nothing too stressful, but it still works).
Oh, and something in the 2.6 kernel seemed to break IRDA support which worked ok under 2.4...
Infertility is also a side-effect of, well, being dead because of cancer.
Isn't infertility a side effect of the current treatments such as chemo anyway?
The servers are the heat source and the cool room air it the cooling mechanism? Yes?
Alternatively you could water cool all the servers through a central water cooling system for the entire datacentre - Then use a central (set of) heat pumps to cool that heated water down again. Or take cues from the power stations and cool the water by evaporation in cooling towers. Sounds more efficient than cooling entire (probably badly insulated) rooms down anyway.