Not only is that misspelled It's only misspelled if you're American, which I stated I am not. In REAL English, there is a 'u' in humour.
The U.S. is a juggernaut that does not appear to be going away anytime soon. Unfortunately, you're correct. But it's still a joke. When the rest of the world thinks of Americans, we have a little laugh at those cute, mostly ignorant, self-important people, and then shudder in fear at the power they terrifyingly wield. Any country that still has some of its citizens travelling to Austria expecting kangaroos seriously shouldn't be thinking it is in any way above the rest of us.
I read a humourous article a few years ago talking about surprising survey results. Apparently over 1/3rd of Americans surveyed did not know that the Sun is a star. No offense Americans, but with that sort of quality education, well, you can understand why the rest of the world considers you to be a bit intellectually lacking.
Even back in WW2 days, my grandfather remembers being struck by how utterly daft some of the American troops were he encountered while in the Australian Army. A guy I know who was in the SAS until a couple of years ago has told me about how easy it was to defeat the US forces in wargames, due to their arrogance and reliance on their technology.
Now, I don't mean to be US-bashing, and I suspect the average American Slashdot reader will be a bit more intelligent and educated than the average American. But I think, as a populace, the American people need to get over their excessive patriotism, stop thinking they are automatically the greatest nation on Earth just because they are America, and realise that the rest of the world DOESN'T look up to them anymore, and that the whole country is kind of just a big joke now.
Reminds me of the time I got a free laser printer because a local business was closing. A friend of mine had worked there, and they gave it to him and said it didn't work. I found it sitting in the corner at his place a year or so later, and he hadn't touched it, so gave it to me to have a look at. When I plugged it in and turned it on, a red light came on.
I put some paper in it, the red light went off, and it's worked fine ever since.:D
Oh, come on, for God's sake, grow a sense of humour. This is an astounding driving achievement. And as the article points out, this guy has become known as a fast but SAFE driver. I would have no doubt that he poses far less of a risk to other drivers than all those 'normal people', as you put it. There is a difference between driving fast and driving dangerously.
And besides, as a road user, doesn't it just go with the territory that you accept the risk that another driver may hit you? I know I do. I know there are a few drivers out there who will sometimes drive well above safe speeds (which are not necessarily the same as the speed limits), and if one of them takes me out, well, it's just all part of the game of driving.
Can you imagine a Venus lander 'floating' on a super-dense gas/liquid? And why would a Venus lander need to do this? Last I heard Venus was no gas giant. The Russian probes all seemed to find a solid surface to land on.
science has had many leaps of faiths that have lead to logical foundation throughout its existence. Please give me an example. I can think of nothing in science that was based purely on faith, with no logical reasoning and/or mathematics to predict something before its observation. True, many things in science have been postulated and theorised about well before they were observed and proven, but only through scientific reasoning and logic, NOT faith.
AFAIK, fingerprints aren't fully formed at birth, so recording them would be useless. Footprints are recorded here in Australia (or at least they were when my sisters and I were born, and I haven't heard of them stopping), but certainly not fingerprints.
Ok, fair point - that wasn't a very well structured sentence. Let me rephrase to make the intent of that sentence clearer...
Show me some scientific evidence to the contrary, and I'll re-examine, but for now, without quantitative evidence to support some sort of divine being or influence, I'll believe in what science can tell me, and nothing more.
Then contest the fine in court. Prove your case - that it was impossible to stop in time, so you had to go through. That's what the amber light is for. Once it's in court, theoretically the burden of proof would then be with the prosecution (or equivalent depending on exactly which court system would be applicable) to show that you could have stopped.
Actually, 9 and 3, as it gives more control. Unless driving a manual, in which case it's usually left hand on gearstick, right hand at about 2. And here in Australia, we don't have anything as confusing as going through a red light, under any circumstances. If you can go, it'll be green. The equivalent of your right turn on red would be a left turn on red here, but instead, if you can turn, there's a green arrow that lights up while the main light is red.
I was never talking about how long a yellow light stays yellow - as soon as it changes, you should instantly know if you can stop or not in time - if you can, you do. If you can't, you don't. If you're caught stopped over the line, then you shouldn't have stopped, plain and simple.
If you hit the brakes to try and stop, and fail, then you've failed to correctly predict your car's braking distance - another basic skill of driving. You should have kept going, and it should just be a split-second reastion when you see a light go yellow up ahead. Driving should be instinctive. If it isn't, then you need to improve your skill and get more experience behind the wheel. When that light changes, you should KNOW if you have time to stop, without thinking.
Well, I'd like to think the average Slashdot reader has more than two brain cells. The whole concept of gods and life-after-death just seems totally insane to me. Show me some scientific evidence to the contrary, and I'll re-examine, but for now, with no evidence to support it, I'll believe in what science can tell me, and nothing more.
I've heard of people being 'caught' for simply being a foot past the stop line. As they should be. When stopping at an intersection, you have to stop without crossing the line. If you stop over the line, then you deserve the fine. If you can't even judge reasonably accurately where the nose of your vehicle is, then you should not be allowed on the roads. Judging the size of your vehicle is a basic road skill, and if you can't do it, you're a danger to yourself and others.
Scientology is bizarre and ridiculous, and yet how can one criticize it without casting doubt on all religions? Well, you can't, but all religions are just fictitious platitudes invented, and perpetuated, by people who can't deal with the notion that death is the end, and that they are just another insignificant creature on an insignificant planet orbiting an insignificant star in an insignificant galaxy. I think in this day and age it's about time people realised this and stopped fearing the inevitable and praying to made-up deities, but accepted that their time is limited, and then it's done. Over. Finito.
Just wait. I can almost guarantee that they've done this now to clear the way for something new of theirs. Something which will allow you to download updates for use and installation on multiple PC's at a later day. Yep, yet another MS 'innovation'.
You don't KNOW its going to end. And you don't KNOW that its going to end in lies. Yes you do - it's human nature. We're untrustworthy creatures at heart.
Seriously, this whole 'love' myth needs to be stopped. 'Love' is a just a biochemical reaction to physical contact with a member of the opposite sex, designed to keep a breeding pair together to keep offspring alive. No more, no less. Unfortunately, with couples not breeding these days as we evolved to do, relationships end once the 'love' chemical wears off, and people go looking for a new breeding partner.
2-3 years is how long most relationships last these days without offspring, due to the biological imperative to stop wasting time. If a couple doesn't break up first, one of the partners WILL cheat and bring the whole thing crashing down. It's inevitable. And anyone who has been in a relationship longer than that, with no kids, and thinks that their partner has been faithful, is kidding themselves. If you take the moral high ground and not cheat, then your partner will pick up on that as a biological weakness, and go astray, guaranteed.
Likewise, I remember as a kid when we watched a lunar eclipse, and the moon went a fairly vibrant red colour. It was interesting, but not really unsettling. However, when we watched the total solar eclipse here (Geraldton, Western Australia) back in 2000 (I think), when the gloom settled over everything, it was somehow just unnerving, despite knowing what was coming.
Honestly, I don't get why everyone loves Ubuntu so much. I've been a Gentoo user for about 4 years now, and I absolutely love the ease portage (and appropriate USE flags) provides for managing the system. Ubuntu, and Debian in general, always just seemed to make a mess and hose every system I've ever tried it on.
I recently set up a "simple" Ubuntu install on my sister's machine (she's sick of her boyfriend looking at porn and managing to infect Windows with every virus/trojan/spambot under the sun). It gave me nothing but trouble, and in the end, I had no idea of how the system was configured. When there was a problem with partitions becoming inaccessible, I couldn't begin to say what might be the problem. Eventually I tracked it down to/etc/fstab getting overwritten with bad mount options for some reason, after I'd already specified the correct ones.
How anyone ever manages to get an Ubuntu/Debian system up and running smoothly, and know what's going on in the guts of that system, is beyond me. Yet I've never had any trouble getting a Gentoo system up and running. And it's easy enough to keep up to date with a simple daily cron job, set to run at a time you won't be using the machine.
So you're paying AUD$47 a month, for only 6 hours a day of peak time, with a 20GB peak limit, and unlimited off-peak. Plus you only get slowed to 256kbps when you exceed your limit?? See - I told you it was a rip-off here in Oz.
If you want to download 100 gig's worth of stuff, you can just do it in the morning and no-one minds Actually, no you can't. There are generally limits to off-peak as well, although depending on the ISP and the deal, it's usually up to about twice the peak limit.
And just a price comparison, I'm paying about AUD$70 a month for 20GB peak (noon to 2am) and 40GB off-peak (2am to noon). And I get around 4Mbps speed. Once I hit my limits, I'm shaped down to 64kbps until the end of the month.
Hey, if you want to talk about infrastructure $$$'s spread over vast distances, come down to Australia sometime. We only have 20 million people, in a huge area. Especially in Western Australia where I am - we have 2 million people in a state nearly 4 times the size of Texas (for American readers to visualise). Broadband infrastructure is improving at a snail's pace - outside Perth, and a few of the larger country towns and cities, there is no broadband (except insanely priced wireless broadband via Telstra's NextG (HSDPA) phone network), and even in Perth, a lot of areas either still haven't had their exchanges upgraded for DSL, or they are full, and on a LONG waiting list for their capacity to be expanded. With most of the money for Telstra to do these upgrades coming from the Federal governement, and the majority of the country's population (and more importantly, politicians) being centred in Sydney and Melbourne, we don't get much of an allocation of funds over here.
Now obviously I have no qualifications in this area, and I can't say to be totally knowledgeable of hypersonic aerodynamic heating principles. But it occurs to me that some eddying could, depending on the exact airflow in the damaged area, help to lower temperature in the gouge. After all, if there was some eddying, it would mean airflow breaking down and circulating much more slowly within the damaged spot, so the friction would be less in that particular area.
Come on, you have to be kidding me. 2g for 25 seconds? That's hardly stressful at all. +2g in an aircraft is a LOT different to doing essentially -1.28g decelerating in a car. For starters, +ve g-forces are a lot easier for the body to tolerate than negative. Fighter pilots do up to about +10g for short periods, but only about -4g. I've done +5g for 30 seconds in an aerobatic spin, and ok, it does feel a bit heavy, but it's no problem. Even with Hawking's condition, 2g certainly shouldn't pose any threat.
And it's not as if the vomit comet suddenly goes from 0g to +2g - the climb-out from the parabolic arc is somewhat gradual, so the occupants settle to the floor fairly gently. Plus I guarantee he will be under someone's close scrutiny, and they'll be sure that he's close to the floor before the end of the ride.
Personally I think that they should have tracked down every one of those 80 complainants and removed their children from their care. If they feel that they are unable to prevent their kids from copying something like that off tv, then they are obviously not providing a safe environment in the home, and should not be allowed to continue raising their children.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. is a juggernaut that does not appear to be going away anytime soon. Unfortunately, you're correct. But it's still a joke. When the rest of the world thinks of Americans, we have a little laugh at those cute, mostly ignorant, self-important people, and then shudder in fear at the power they terrifyingly wield. Any country that still has some of its citizens travelling to Austria expecting kangaroos seriously shouldn't be thinking it is in any way above the rest of us.
Opening caveat: I am not American.
I read a humourous article a few years ago talking about surprising survey results. Apparently over 1/3rd of Americans surveyed did not know that the Sun is a star. No offense Americans, but with that sort of quality education, well, you can understand why the rest of the world considers you to be a bit intellectually lacking.
Even back in WW2 days, my grandfather remembers being struck by how utterly daft some of the American troops were he encountered while in the Australian Army. A guy I know who was in the SAS until a couple of years ago has told me about how easy it was to defeat the US forces in wargames, due to their arrogance and reliance on their technology.
Now, I don't mean to be US-bashing, and I suspect the average American Slashdot reader will be a bit more intelligent and educated than the average American. But I think, as a populace, the American people need to get over their excessive patriotism, stop thinking they are automatically the greatest nation on Earth just because they are America, and realise that the rest of the world DOESN'T look up to them anymore, and that the whole country is kind of just a big joke now.
Reminds me of the time I got a free laser printer because a local business was closing. A friend of mine had worked there, and they gave it to him and said it didn't work. I found it sitting in the corner at his place a year or so later, and he hadn't touched it, so gave it to me to have a look at. When I plugged it in and turned it on, a red light came on.
:D
I put some paper in it, the red light went off, and it's worked fine ever since.
Oh, come on, for God's sake, grow a sense of humour. This is an astounding driving achievement. And as the article points out, this guy has become known as a fast but SAFE driver. I would have no doubt that he poses far less of a risk to other drivers than all those 'normal people', as you put it. There is a difference between driving fast and driving dangerously.
And besides, as a road user, doesn't it just go with the territory that you accept the risk that another driver may hit you? I know I do. I know there are a few drivers out there who will sometimes drive well above safe speeds (which are not necessarily the same as the speed limits), and if one of them takes me out, well, it's just all part of the game of driving.
AFAIK, fingerprints aren't fully formed at birth, so recording them would be useless. Footprints are recorded here in Australia (or at least they were when my sisters and I were born, and I haven't heard of them stopping), but certainly not fingerprints.
Ok, fair point - that wasn't a very well structured sentence. Let me rephrase to make the intent of that sentence clearer...
Show me some scientific evidence to the contrary, and I'll re-examine, but for now, without quantitative evidence to support some sort of divine being or influence, I'll believe in what science can tell me, and nothing more.
Then contest the fine in court. Prove your case - that it was impossible to stop in time, so you had to go through. That's what the amber light is for. Once it's in court, theoretically the burden of proof would then be with the prosecution (or equivalent depending on exactly which court system would be applicable) to show that you could have stopped.
Actually, 9 and 3, as it gives more control. Unless driving a manual, in which case it's usually left hand on gearstick, right hand at about 2. And here in Australia, we don't have anything as confusing as going through a red light, under any circumstances. If you can go, it'll be green. The equivalent of your right turn on red would be a left turn on red here, but instead, if you can turn, there's a green arrow that lights up while the main light is red.
I was never talking about how long a yellow light stays yellow - as soon as it changes, you should instantly know if you can stop or not in time - if you can, you do. If you can't, you don't. If you're caught stopped over the line, then you shouldn't have stopped, plain and simple.
If you hit the brakes to try and stop, and fail, then you've failed to correctly predict your car's braking distance - another basic skill of driving. You should have kept going, and it should just be a split-second reastion when you see a light go yellow up ahead. Driving should be instinctive. If it isn't, then you need to improve your skill and get more experience behind the wheel. When that light changes, you should KNOW if you have time to stop, without thinking.
Well, I'd like to think the average Slashdot reader has more than two brain cells. The whole concept of gods and life-after-death just seems totally insane to me. Show me some scientific evidence to the contrary, and I'll re-examine, but for now, with no evidence to support it, I'll believe in what science can tell me, and nothing more.
Just wait. I can almost guarantee that they've done this now to clear the way for something new of theirs. Something which will allow you to download updates for use and installation on multiple PC's at a later day. Yep, yet another MS 'innovation'.
Seriously, this whole 'love' myth needs to be stopped. 'Love' is a just a biochemical reaction to physical contact with a member of the opposite sex, designed to keep a breeding pair together to keep offspring alive. No more, no less. Unfortunately, with couples not breeding these days as we evolved to do, relationships end once the 'love' chemical wears off, and people go looking for a new breeding partner.
2-3 years is how long most relationships last these days without offspring, due to the biological imperative to stop wasting time. If a couple doesn't break up first, one of the partners WILL cheat and bring the whole thing crashing down. It's inevitable. And anyone who has been in a relationship longer than that, with no kids, and thinks that their partner has been faithful, is kidding themselves. If you take the moral high ground and not cheat, then your partner will pick up on that as a biological weakness, and go astray, guaranteed.
Likewise, I remember as a kid when we watched a lunar eclipse, and the moon went a fairly vibrant red colour. It was interesting, but not really unsettling. However, when we watched the total solar eclipse here (Geraldton, Western Australia) back in 2000 (I think), when the gloom settled over everything, it was somehow just unnerving, despite knowing what was coming.
And the different 'kinds' of sharks are different species of shark. Chimps, gorillas, humans - we're all different species of primate.
Honestly, I don't get why everyone loves Ubuntu so much. I've been a Gentoo user for about 4 years now, and I absolutely love the ease portage (and appropriate USE flags) provides for managing the system. Ubuntu, and Debian in general, always just seemed to make a mess and hose every system I've ever tried it on.
/etc/fstab getting overwritten with bad mount options for some reason, after I'd already specified the correct ones.
I recently set up a "simple" Ubuntu install on my sister's machine (she's sick of her boyfriend looking at porn and managing to infect Windows with every virus/trojan/spambot under the sun). It gave me nothing but trouble, and in the end, I had no idea of how the system was configured. When there was a problem with partitions becoming inaccessible, I couldn't begin to say what might be the problem. Eventually I tracked it down to
How anyone ever manages to get an Ubuntu/Debian system up and running smoothly, and know what's going on in the guts of that system, is beyond me. Yet I've never had any trouble getting a Gentoo system up and running. And it's easy enough to keep up to date with a simple daily cron job, set to run at a time you won't be using the machine.
So you're paying AUD$47 a month, for only 6 hours a day of peak time, with a 20GB peak limit, and unlimited off-peak. Plus you only get slowed to 256kbps when you exceed your limit?? See - I told you it was a rip-off here in Oz.
Hey, if you want to talk about infrastructure $$$'s spread over vast distances, come down to Australia sometime. We only have 20 million people, in a huge area. Especially in Western Australia where I am - we have 2 million people in a state nearly 4 times the size of Texas (for American readers to visualise). Broadband infrastructure is improving at a snail's pace - outside Perth, and a few of the larger country towns and cities, there is no broadband (except insanely priced wireless broadband via Telstra's NextG (HSDPA) phone network), and even in Perth, a lot of areas either still haven't had their exchanges upgraded for DSL, or they are full, and on a LONG waiting list for their capacity to be expanded. With most of the money for Telstra to do these upgrades coming from the Federal governement, and the majority of the country's population (and more importantly, politicians) being centred in Sydney and Melbourne, we don't get much of an allocation of funds over here.
Now obviously I have no qualifications in this area, and I can't say to be totally knowledgeable of hypersonic aerodynamic heating principles. But it occurs to me that some eddying could, depending on the exact airflow in the damaged area, help to lower temperature in the gouge. After all, if there was some eddying, it would mean airflow breaking down and circulating much more slowly within the damaged spot, so the friction would be less in that particular area.
Come on, you have to be kidding me. 2g for 25 seconds? That's hardly stressful at all. +2g in an aircraft is a LOT different to doing essentially -1.28g decelerating in a car. For starters, +ve g-forces are a lot easier for the body to tolerate than negative. Fighter pilots do up to about +10g for short periods, but only about -4g. I've done +5g for 30 seconds in an aerobatic spin, and ok, it does feel a bit heavy, but it's no problem. Even with Hawking's condition, 2g certainly shouldn't pose any threat.
And it's not as if the vomit comet suddenly goes from 0g to +2g - the climb-out from the parabolic arc is somewhat gradual, so the occupants settle to the floor fairly gently. Plus I guarantee he will be under someone's close scrutiny, and they'll be sure that he's close to the floor before the end of the ride.
Personally I think that they should have tracked down every one of those 80 complainants and removed their children from their care. If they feel that they are unable to prevent their kids from copying something like that off tv, then they are obviously not providing a safe environment in the home, and should not be allowed to continue raising their children.