Maybe it is, but until it's challenged in court, it doesn't matter. And it can't be challenged in court unless it's passed into law, and it's enforced, and and someone makes a big enough stink about it, and the judicial branch decides to care.
With dependencies like that, it's no surprise the system falls apart a good portion of the time.
Contrast that with how immigrants are treated in the USA these days... I understand there were huge anti-immigration rallies in the USA last week.
I just wanted to step in and clarify that this week's protests were by the immigrants, not against them. They were a repeat of last year's May Day Protests, but this time around they were much less popular as you didn't have the streets also full of people sympathetic to the cause (but of legal status). Where you may have gotten confused is that this time, at least here in Los Angeles, thingsgotugly.
Mal-2
We must never forget 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0! If this number is banned, the terrorists win!
So many discoveries end up being spinoffs of other discoveries. This fuel cell is a pleasant but unanticipated result of experiments to split the beer atom and put the bubbles back in beer. You may think I'm a yahoo, but no, I'm serious.
A friend of mine is an astrophysicist and participated in the great neutrino hunt a couple of decades ago in a mine shaft in Alaska during the winter. One of the colleagues died, but they were shut in until weather allowed for a helicopter pickup, so they ended up storing the colleague in the meat freezer.
This is also what is done if someone dies on a cruise ship -- the body is kept in a freezer until the next port. There is no morgue, and although there is a doctor's office, the freezer there is NOT big enough to keep a body (unless doctor's freezers have grown at the same rate as the ships themselves). And no they don't take out all the food first, there would be nowhere to put it. I'm sure they move what they can, if only to prevent the repeated opening of the freezer, but if you're keeping the body on ice it would be because you're a day or more from the next port, and that means your food stores are probably near capacity.
Accidental death and death by illness will happen no matter where you go, but you might be surprised how many people choose to off themselves during a cruise. It can be hard to tell after the fact if someone fell overboard because he was drunk, or if he got drunk to make the jump somewhat easier, or if he was pushed in some sort of drunken brawl, but I would suspect that the single leading cause of death on cruise ships (at least among passengers) is suicide, followed closely by misadventure.
There have been plenty of cases where someone fell overboard and survived. I witnessed the tail end of one such rescue. The man had fallen from a low-level balcony, probably 40 feet above waterline, and was plucked out of the water with little more than a broken nose. That broken nose was probably acquired after being picked up by a speedboat, as a little parting gift for his asshattery. But if you fall from the Lido deck without making an effort to position yourself (cross your legs, cross your arms, and pray you go in feet first and just break your ankles) you can expect to go SPLAT exactly the way you would if you hit concrete.
Throw them out the airlock -- with a tether. Let them float along with you, frozen solid, until you either figure out something worthwhile to do with the body, or encounter atmosphere. If you are worried about a chunk of dirty ice flapping around outside like a tetherball, then lash the body to the outside of the ship.
You toss a deader out of a lifeboat because it's a hazard to those still alive. If you can reasonably conclude that the body is not a hazard, you pretty much stash it out of the way -- for example, if you know rescue crews are on the way, you would likely just tolerate the dead body on board. You don't drag a body behind a lifeboat because it attracts sharks, squid, and other hungry sea creatures, but last I checked there are not many sharks or squid in space. Extra mass means greater fuel consumption to achieve the same acceleration, but you'd think the mission would be planned around the assumption that the crew would all make it. Dead or alive, that mass has already been accounted for.
Mal-2
Obligatory Key Inclusion: Remember the Alam09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
If you're doing anything other than "sitting and thinking", you're making enough commotion to be detected. The sensors just have to err on the side of caution and accept the false positives and longer lit times. It's still far better than nothing.
I've had the lights go out on me in several places in our office, but never the bathroom. The bathroom light is frequently off when I arrive in the morning though (and switches on when I open the door), so I know it has a sensor. With all the twists and deliberate obstructions in an office bathroom, it may even have multiple sensors to deal with blind spots. However it is done, it's good enough to turn off the lights when everyone goes home, but not shut down on someone unless they've stroked out like Elvis.
"The power in the Hawking radiation from a solar mass black hole turns out to be a minuscule 10^-28 watts. It is indeed an extremely good approximation to call such an object 'black'."
Not to mention that "really, really, really dark gray holes" just doesn't flow.
Are you sure? You might end up with KITT, and no way to strangle the damn thing when it annoys you! Or you could end up with Marvin and his "Genuine People Personality" repeatedly driving you into ditches. I'll settle for a car that's smart enough to get me where I'm going without too much intervention on my part, and maybe capable of placing phone calls or changing the radio station by voice command. Since the last part is already possible, I see no reason to rip it out.
If we could build electronic brains that are as smart as the average horse, or possibly even the average rat, that would be plenty. It doesn't take human-level intellect to navigate and avoid danger. For a flying car we might want to emulate a flying animal. It'd be a hoot and a holler if our fabulous flying car is run by something as smart as your average pigeon -- and it works anyhow. It just has to be trained not to take a crap every time it passes over another car.
This sounds amazingly like the premise of a Heinlein novel, The Number of the Beast, which supposes that there are three dimensions of time as well as three dimensions of space, and that travel is possible on the two axes we normally do not recognize. This allows visiting realities that can be subtly or vastly different from our own, weighted by probability.
It's not a bad concept, but it does get rather silly when the selected locations include Barsoom, Oz, and the "Future History" realms of Lazarus Long. A bit like the plot in Frank Zappa's "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary", it attempts so much that none of it really comes off right. The main difference is that Zappa intended it that way (and backed it up with interesting, non-repeating music) and I don't think Heinlein did. He did intend it to be campy, but it's way beyond that.
I am willing to bet he is neither the first nor the last to propose this, but at least I can point out "prior art" where I see it.
If this is the desired effect, you should take it a step further and either put the mouse on the left (with buttons reversed, naturally) or use an alternate pointing device -- something other than a mouse. Even a trackpad isn't much better as a lot of people get used to those. Maybe a trackball or a digitizer. As long as your computer is sufficiently "weird", people tend to leave it alone. (You can keep a mouse out of sight, if required.)
I am not a coder, but I made both the switch to Dvorak and the mouse move to the left for just one reason. I have had a couple incidents where I have almost but not quite broken my right wrist. I might have been better off in the long run if I had broken bone -- it would have taken longer, but it might have healed better. The mouse move is a lot easier than learning to write left-handed (though I can, it's just slow and sloppy) and does a fine job of balancing out the workload. Dvorak reduces the workload on my hands overall. For just about everything but mousing, throwing darts, and poker chip tricks, I remain either right-handed or again balance the load out.
The darts are for the same reason, as I didn't have much to do while out on disability with a soft cast on my arm, so I learned to throw darts left-handed. I put quite a few holes in the closet door working this one out. By the time the cast came off, I did that particular type of throw better with the left hand. I also do most of my poker chip tricks with the left hand, but can do all but one of them right-handed as well. Again this comes down to an accident -- while playing poker and doing chip tricks right-handed, I got cut on a broken chip, index finger right hand. Not really a big deal, I just wrapped it in a napkin and kept playing, but again I opted to switch hands rather than stop doing chip tricks. A few days later when it was comfortable enough to do that sort of prestidigitation with the injured finger, I found my skill to be roughly equal on both sides. Using the left hand is again just one way to help balance the load.
I don't throw anything heavy, or bowl, or golf left-handed. Strength-related activities do not seem to transfer so well. I try to bat from both sides, but the fact is I can't hit from either side worth a damn.
There aren't special "lefty" darts or poker chips or bats, but there are lefty mice. I don't use one. I just have to get one that isn't specifically designed for either hand. Having lefty golf clubs will certainly keep most people from wanting to borrow them though!
My point was that if I were attempting to guess what a person listens to, race and gender might factor in a little bit, but dress and demeanor (and to a certain extent, age) would factor in a lot more. If the situation does not lend itself to individuality in dress and demeanor, it's pointless to guess. I find I can tell a lot more just by looking at a person on "Casual Friday" than when they're wearing a suit, and that goes far beyond their taste in music.
I guess I'm saying that if you want to make assumptions about someone, it's a lot more valid to do so by observing their choices (which include dress, posture, hairstyle, makeup, how well kept they are, general demeanor, etc.) than by observing physical characteristics they did not choose. The next level down would be culturally acquired (but not consciously chosen) characteristics such as accent and mode of speech. "Hard wired" characteristics such as gender and race may have statistical correlation to some preferences, but these correlations are relatively weak compared to the first layer I mentioned.
A woman in full leathers with a helmet under her arm is probably into motorcycles, no matter how masculine you believe this pursuit to be. From this you could also draw a weaker correlation to what you think she might listen to, but since it is so much weaker, you're going to be wrong a large part of the time.
I absolutely would not rule this combination out. Not only is salsa quite popular in Korea (last I checked), and there is an all-female salsa band from Japan that is quite good, but I have played on gigs at many salsa clubs with many bandmates. The majority are, naturally, Hispanic males. But the regular rotation has also included Asian, Hispanic, and white women, and men of every race. (The one constant would be that if they don't speak Spanish, they won't be singing. Pretty simple.) The crowds have included people of every description, from gay gang-bangers to Jerry Buss. These tend to polarize based on the venue rather than the music.
I would be more inclined to judge someone's musical tastes on the way they dress (as this is an outward sign of their social group) and perhaps the language(s) they speak than on anything else. In a business setting, I don't even attempt to guess. It's much easier to just wait until I either hear what they choose, or see how they respond to music they didn't choose -- such as whatever I have playing.
Also bear in mind that some people really don't care all that much about music. I know that may seem unbelievable, but look at how many people on/. say "I don't watch TV" or "I don't care about movies". Same idea here. There are also people who judge music on how well they can dance to it, rather than how good the music is.
Finally, is it so hard to ask someone "what do you listen to?" It's a good way to engage in conversation without much risk of raising an uncomfortable topic, and possibly a way to expand your own horizons.
Here are two reasons why Imus getting fired is a Bad Thing:
1. He was canned less than halfway through the initial two week suspension. Now we will never know just how many -- and which -- advertisers were voting with their wallets.
2. As much as it pains me to hear it, this sort of thing needs to be on the air. Firing Imus isn't going to change his mind or his attitude, it's only going to reduce the number of people to whom he affirms his idiocy daily. He isn't hurting for money, and I get the impression he's really not an evil guy. The kind of discrimination that filters his worldview is better off out in the open where it can be discussed and dealt with. He may be a dog too old for new tricks, but not everyone who thinks similarly is a lost cause.
I am guessing he'll be on satellite radio in the near future, and that their subscriptions will go up, but only slightly.
I am inclined to agree, though sometimes what appears to be over-production is in fact the intent of the musicians. Radiohead "Kid A" for example. Still, I don't mind rough edges on the music sometimes -- I find Regina Spektor's sound (or sounds, she has many) highly refreshing. Incidentally it's about the only musically worthwhile discovery I've made by watching VH1 -- ever.
Hot, possibly crazy chick with a great voice, a piano, a drumstick, and songwriting chops. uNF.
Will the likes of Britney or Metallica be able to survive in a post-industrial music world? I doubt it. And the music stores which pander to this kind of rigid, unimaginitive pap? I doubt it.
Metallica wasn't always corporate pap, though they unquestionably mutated into exactly that. If they still care about what they are doing and not just going through the motions, then yes, I think they can survive. Can they make shitloads of money for mediocre work? Probably not, but they can at least continue to make a nice living if they care to put the effort into it. They certainly have the skills, which is more than I can say for Britney. But with the cost of production quality equipment continuing to fall to commodity prices, even "talents" like that can be Auto-tuned into some semblance of a melody at prices that are within reach. Even in a little basement studio, you really can "fix it in post".
If nobody on the ballot seems acceptable, write in someone who is. That could be yourself, if you are eligible to hold that office. Or arrange with a small group of like-minded people to use the same write-in protest candidate.
There's your CowboyNeal vote. Too bad it won't win, unlike on/.
I have an old USB 1.x hub that I use solely for charging, since I have six USB 2 ports (four in back, two in front) already. Were it not for this purpose, it would be gathering dust in a drawer.
If you are inclined to do a bit of wiring, re-purpose one of the USB connectors that came with your motherboard (since you are probably using those that came installed in your case) and run 5V power through the red and black lines. You now have a standalone charger.
Looking at the design of the port, it appears to add four more pins exclusively for power. So why the "one voltage" limitation? Even if you reserve one pin for a redundant ground -- the USB data cable and power cable may be connected to two different circuits on the device end -- you should still have enough connection ability to run three voltages in addition to the 5V in the USB data cable.
+12V seems like a no-brainer since the world is overrun with devices designed to operate at 12V. -12V also seems useful, especially if a circuit can use both to get a 24V rail-to-rail effect. Current PC power supplies are not designed to drive a whole lot on the -12V line, but at least the foundation is there.
The question would be what the best third choice would be. Would it cause interference issues to run, say, 90VAC at 400 Hz down the line? Devices that currently use inverters (such as scanners) would be able to drop them, while devices with high voltage demands would be able to use postage-stamp-size circuits to generate an arbitrary AC voltage. Power supplies already use intermediate stages on the way to the final +12, -12, +5, -5, +3.3 array we all know and love, maybe they can just be tapped directly at the intermediate stage.
I can understand the concerns about providing relatively high voltage AC over an easily accessible connector, but if it's properly designed it would be no more dangerous than wall outlets -- and there is generally one of those close to every stationary computer. Obviously laptops running on battery power would be ill-equipped to provide 90VAC, but mostly due to the high draw that would go along with it. When plugged in, their power bricks should be up to the task.
Whatever options are chosen, they should be be based on readily available commodity hardware. This keeps costs down, allowing the spec to attain wide acceptance. Asking current computer owners to spring $20 for a stand-alone power supply looks reasonable if it knocks $10 off the price of every device they attach to it. With just two devices -- printer and scanner for example -- they break even. If they can run other devices off it that do not use USB for data transfer (like monitors), hitting the two-device break-even point would be easily achieved. Then when they move on to the next computer, it will allow them to get rid of the extra box, but still use the peripherals they already have. Nobody would be compelled to buy the "retrofit kit" unless/until they also bought a device that requires it.
The most obvious use would seem to be to supply one to Stephen Hawking. He's slowing down on the clicker he's used with the two fingers that still work (and boy must those fingers be magic, he managed to divorce and re-marry), all a device like this would have to do is let him "click" without having to move. Everything else is set up for him already, though there will probably be room for improvement over the existing system. Still, I bet even a return to "as good as it used to be" would be a real boon for him.
Hondas, Subarus, what have you, they are all designed (stock) as commuter vehicles. And if you have to turn 7k rpms to get your car off the line, it's not going to hold up to daily driving.
It may have been a different mindset in 1989, but I drive a Subaru XT6 (manual) daily. Sure in traffic I may never have to get above 3500 rpm, and certainly won't have to sustain it, but I am pretty much obligated to open it up and take it to 5000 in the first three gears to get up to highway speed from one of the damn onramp lights. Then once I'm merged in, 5th gear isn't all that much of an overdrive -- 80 mph is a sustained 3700 rpm. The car is insanely quick off the line (I surprise ricers on a regular basis) but it tops out pretty low. I would not be comfortable sustaining anything over 90 mph, the engine just whines -- and I just got this engine so I'd rather it stay in one piece. A 6th gear would be perfect, the engine produces plenty of power at 3500 rpm.
Sadly, it does suck on efficiency. It was rated 18/24 when it was new and I'm getting about 20.5 in mixed driving, even with those freeway launches four times a day, so it's not wear and tear. That's just how the car was designed. It's a rally car in an MR2's clothing.
It also takes three days to get parts, but I knew that would be the case going in. I've only seen three others on the road in the last two years, and they were all 4-cylinder turbos. One of them led to me having a "dude, where's my car" incident at Hollywood Park as I kept coming across this other XT repeatedly while searching for my car. The first time, I even tried to open the door and get in. It took me 40 minutes to find my car! Half the people who see it tell me "I always wanted one of those when they were new", but they weren't cheap then.
People will buy oil when the oil light comes on, and if they have excess consumption or a leak, they would be well advised to carry a spare bottle or two. Ethanol can be stocked alongside the oil, as it sounds like a quart will easily get you to the next city, let alone the next gas station. Just make sure the idiot light comes on early, and most people will be able to deal with this.
Besides, if you were to run out, couldn't the turbo back off until you fix the problem? It doesn't sound nearly as destructive as driving without enough oil or coolant, provided the engine isn't allowed to tear itself apart by preignition. I'm sure the decrease in power could be a problem in certain circumstances, but certainly no worse than a piston seizing up!
Many children see basketball players as role models. It's quite questionable if they should, but no question that they do.
Stephen Hawking was exceptionally lucky that his disability proved to be manageable, at least professionally. Others may be able to use this as inspiration to change to better-suited careers. One thing that absolutely cannot be disputed is his ability to roll with the punches, and fire back with a few of his own. Live life aggressively. If your only career path is to be a theoretical physicist, then be the best damn theoretical physicist you can.
A basketball player, on the other hand, sends the message that "if you're good enough, you could become rich and respected yourself." While this is true, the number of players that reach this elite status are few. Even the numbers that even make it to the NBA are relatively few, and just making it is no guarantee of celebrity. (Of course this is true of any profession where the money is mostly paid out to a few people at the top.) The ideal lesson would be "always have a backup plan" but usually it ends up being "you really can do anything!"
A parabola focuses more sharply than a spherical section, but loses gain rapidly as the signal drifts off axis. With a spherical reflector, the sweet spot is not as hot but it's much wider -- so much so that you can "aim" such an assembly several degrees by moving the pickup alone. This could be useful where it is not possible to get perfect aim, such as if you wanted to flush-mount the dish in a wall, or the wind insists on turning your parabolic dish just far enough to miss the signal entirely.
The radio telescope at Arecibo is spherical because it is a transit telescope. Since they can move the center pickup considerably, it gives the ability to track an object much longer than you could with a parabolic reflector. You have to know where the object will be and not wait for it to come into view, so you have to be both more selective and more aggressive in choosing targets for observation. That is the trade-off for building an enormous collector at a relatively low cost.
All that said, the wok is probably somewhere in between parabolic and spherical, if it's anything like the $10 woks I'm familiar with. Cheap mass-produced woks seem to have true curves, but hand-hammered woks are going to be dimpled and somewhat asymmetric. Good for food, bad for radio waves.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it is, but until it's challenged in court, it doesn't matter. And it can't be challenged in court unless it's passed into law, and it's enforced, and and someone makes a big enough stink about it, and the judicial branch decides to care.
With dependencies like that, it's no surprise the system falls apart a good portion of the time.
Mal-2
I just wanted to step in and clarify that this week's protests were by the immigrants, not against them. They were a repeat of last year's May Day Protests, but this time around they were much less popular as you didn't have the streets also full of people sympathetic to the cause (but of legal status). Where you may have gotten confused is that this time, at least here in Los Angeles, things got ugly.
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We must never forget 09F 911 029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0! If this number is banned, the terrorists win!
So many discoveries end up being spinoffs of other discoveries. This fuel cell is a pleasant but unanticipated result of experiments to split the beer atom and put the bubbles back in beer. You may think I'm a yahoo, but no, I'm serious.
Mal-2
This is also what is done if someone dies on a cruise ship -- the body is kept in a freezer until the next port. There is no morgue, and although there is a doctor's office, the freezer there is NOT big enough to keep a body (unless doctor's freezers have grown at the same rate as the ships themselves). And no they don't take out all the food first, there would be nowhere to put it. I'm sure they move what they can, if only to prevent the repeated opening of the freezer, but if you're keeping the body on ice it would be because you're a day or more from the next port, and that means your food stores are probably near capacity.
Accidental death and death by illness will happen no matter where you go, but you might be surprised how many people choose to off themselves during a cruise. It can be hard to tell after the fact if someone fell overboard because he was drunk, or if he got drunk to make the jump somewhat easier, or if he was pushed in some sort of drunken brawl, but I would suspect that the single leading cause of death on cruise ships (at least among passengers) is suicide, followed closely by misadventure.
There have been plenty of cases where someone fell overboard and survived. I witnessed the tail end of one such rescue. The man had fallen from a low-level balcony, probably 40 feet above waterline, and was plucked out of the water with little more than a broken nose. That broken nose was probably acquired after being picked up by a speedboat, as a little parting gift for his asshattery. But if you fall from the Lido deck without making an effort to position yourself (cross your legs, cross your arms, and pray you go in feet first and just break your ankles) you can expect to go SPLAT exactly the way you would if you hit concrete.
Mal-2
Throw them out the airlock -- with a tether. Let them float along with you, frozen solid, until you either figure out something worthwhile to do with the body, or encounter atmosphere. If you are worried about a chunk of dirty ice flapping around outside like a tetherball, then lash the body to the outside of the ship.
You toss a deader out of a lifeboat because it's a hazard to those still alive. If you can reasonably conclude that the body is not a hazard, you pretty much stash it out of the way -- for example, if you know rescue crews are on the way, you would likely just tolerate the dead body on board. You don't drag a body behind a lifeboat because it attracts sharks, squid, and other hungry sea creatures, but last I checked there are not many sharks or squid in space. Extra mass means greater fuel consumption to achieve the same acceleration, but you'd think the mission would be planned around the assumption that the crew would all make it. Dead or alive, that mass has already been accounted for.
Mal-2
Obligatory Key Inclusion: Remember the Alam09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
I think it would be more appropriate to say Digg put in an Own Goal on itself while /. merely stood and watched.
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If you're doing anything other than "sitting and thinking", you're making enough commotion to be detected. The sensors just have to err on the side of caution and accept the false positives and longer lit times. It's still far better than nothing.
I've had the lights go out on me in several places in our office, but never the bathroom. The bathroom light is frequently off when I arrive in the morning though (and switches on when I open the door), so I know it has a sensor. With all the twists and deliberate obstructions in an office bathroom, it may even have multiple sensors to deal with blind spots. However it is done, it's good enough to turn off the lights when everyone goes home, but not shut down on someone unless they've stroked out like Elvis.
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Not to mention that "really, really, really dark gray holes" just doesn't flow.
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Are you sure? You might end up with KITT, and no way to strangle the damn thing when it annoys you! Or you could end up with Marvin and his "Genuine People Personality" repeatedly driving you into ditches. I'll settle for a car that's smart enough to get me where I'm going without too much intervention on my part, and maybe capable of placing phone calls or changing the radio station by voice command. Since the last part is already possible, I see no reason to rip it out.
If we could build electronic brains that are as smart as the average horse, or possibly even the average rat, that would be plenty. It doesn't take human-level intellect to navigate and avoid danger. For a flying car we might want to emulate a flying animal. It'd be a hoot and a holler if our fabulous flying car is run by something as smart as your average pigeon -- and it works anyhow. It just has to be trained not to take a crap every time it passes over another car.
Mal-2
This sounds amazingly like the premise of a Heinlein novel, The Number of the Beast, which supposes that there are three dimensions of time as well as three dimensions of space, and that travel is possible on the two axes we normally do not recognize. This allows visiting realities that can be subtly or vastly different from our own, weighted by probability.
It's not a bad concept, but it does get rather silly when the selected locations include Barsoom, Oz, and the "Future History" realms of Lazarus Long. A bit like the plot in Frank Zappa's "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary", it attempts so much that none of it really comes off right. The main difference is that Zappa intended it that way (and backed it up with interesting, non-repeating music) and I don't think Heinlein did. He did intend it to be campy, but it's way beyond that.
I am willing to bet he is neither the first nor the last to propose this, but at least I can point out "prior art" where I see it.
Mal-2
If this is the desired effect, you should take it a step further and either put the mouse on the left (with buttons reversed, naturally) or use an alternate pointing device -- something other than a mouse. Even a trackpad isn't much better as a lot of people get used to those. Maybe a trackball or a digitizer. As long as your computer is sufficiently "weird", people tend to leave it alone. (You can keep a mouse out of sight, if required.)
I am not a coder, but I made both the switch to Dvorak and the mouse move to the left for just one reason. I have had a couple incidents where I have almost but not quite broken my right wrist. I might have been better off in the long run if I had broken bone -- it would have taken longer, but it might have healed better. The mouse move is a lot easier than learning to write left-handed (though I can, it's just slow and sloppy) and does a fine job of balancing out the workload. Dvorak reduces the workload on my hands overall. For just about everything but mousing, throwing darts, and poker chip tricks, I remain either right-handed or again balance the load out.
The darts are for the same reason, as I didn't have much to do while out on disability with a soft cast on my arm, so I learned to throw darts left-handed. I put quite a few holes in the closet door working this one out. By the time the cast came off, I did that particular type of throw better with the left hand. I also do most of my poker chip tricks with the left hand, but can do all but one of them right-handed as well. Again this comes down to an accident -- while playing poker and doing chip tricks right-handed, I got cut on a broken chip, index finger right hand. Not really a big deal, I just wrapped it in a napkin and kept playing, but again I opted to switch hands rather than stop doing chip tricks. A few days later when it was comfortable enough to do that sort of prestidigitation with the injured finger, I found my skill to be roughly equal on both sides. Using the left hand is again just one way to help balance the load.
I don't throw anything heavy, or bowl, or golf left-handed. Strength-related activities do not seem to transfer so well. I try to bat from both sides, but the fact is I can't hit from either side worth a damn.
There aren't special "lefty" darts or poker chips or bats, but there are lefty mice. I don't use one. I just have to get one that isn't specifically designed for either hand. Having lefty golf clubs will certainly keep most people from wanting to borrow them though!
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My point was that if I were attempting to guess what a person listens to, race and gender might factor in a little bit, but dress and demeanor (and to a certain extent, age) would factor in a lot more. If the situation does not lend itself to individuality in dress and demeanor, it's pointless to guess. I find I can tell a lot more just by looking at a person on "Casual Friday" than when they're wearing a suit, and that goes far beyond their taste in music.
I guess I'm saying that if you want to make assumptions about someone, it's a lot more valid to do so by observing their choices (which include dress, posture, hairstyle, makeup, how well kept they are, general demeanor, etc.) than by observing physical characteristics they did not choose. The next level down would be culturally acquired (but not consciously chosen) characteristics such as accent and mode of speech. "Hard wired" characteristics such as gender and race may have statistical correlation to some preferences, but these correlations are relatively weak compared to the first layer I mentioned.
A woman in full leathers with a helmet under her arm is probably into motorcycles, no matter how masculine you believe this pursuit to be. From this you could also draw a weaker correlation to what you think she might listen to, but since it is so much weaker, you're going to be wrong a large part of the time.
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I absolutely would not rule this combination out. Not only is salsa quite popular in Korea (last I checked), and there is an all-female salsa band from Japan that is quite good, but I have played on gigs at many salsa clubs with many bandmates. The majority are, naturally, Hispanic males. But the regular rotation has also included Asian, Hispanic, and white women, and men of every race. (The one constant would be that if they don't speak Spanish, they won't be singing. Pretty simple.) The crowds have included people of every description, from gay gang-bangers to Jerry Buss. These tend to polarize based on the venue rather than the music.
/. say "I don't watch TV" or "I don't care about movies". Same idea here. There are also people who judge music on how well they can dance to it, rather than how good the music is.
I would be more inclined to judge someone's musical tastes on the way they dress (as this is an outward sign of their social group) and perhaps the language(s) they speak than on anything else. In a business setting, I don't even attempt to guess. It's much easier to just wait until I either hear what they choose, or see how they respond to music they didn't choose -- such as whatever I have playing.
Also bear in mind that some people really don't care all that much about music. I know that may seem unbelievable, but look at how many people on
Finally, is it so hard to ask someone "what do you listen to?" It's a good way to engage in conversation without much risk of raising an uncomfortable topic, and possibly a way to expand your own horizons.
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Here are two reasons why Imus getting fired is a Bad Thing:
1. He was canned less than halfway through the initial two week suspension. Now we will never know just how many -- and which -- advertisers were voting with their wallets.
2. As much as it pains me to hear it, this sort of thing needs to be on the air. Firing Imus isn't going to change his mind or his attitude, it's only going to reduce the number of people to whom he affirms his idiocy daily. He isn't hurting for money, and I get the impression he's really not an evil guy. The kind of discrimination that filters his worldview is better off out in the open where it can be discussed and dealt with. He may be a dog too old for new tricks, but not everyone who thinks similarly is a lost cause.
I am guessing he'll be on satellite radio in the near future, and that their subscriptions will go up, but only slightly.
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I am inclined to agree, though sometimes what appears to be over-production is in fact the intent of the musicians. Radiohead "Kid A" for example. Still, I don't mind rough edges on the music sometimes -- I find Regina Spektor's sound (or sounds, she has many) highly refreshing. Incidentally it's about the only musically worthwhile discovery I've made by watching VH1 -- ever.
Hot, possibly crazy chick with a great voice, a piano, a drumstick, and songwriting chops. uNF.
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Metallica wasn't always corporate pap, though they unquestionably mutated into exactly that. If they still care about what they are doing and not just going through the motions, then yes, I think they can survive. Can they make shitloads of money for mediocre work? Probably not, but they can at least continue to make a nice living if they care to put the effort into it. They certainly have the skills, which is more than I can say for Britney. But with the cost of production quality equipment continuing to fall to commodity prices, even "talents" like that can be Auto-tuned into some semblance of a melody at prices that are within reach. Even in a little basement studio, you really can "fix it in post".
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If nobody on the ballot seems acceptable, write in someone who is. That could be yourself, if you are eligible to hold that office. Or arrange with a small group of like-minded people to use the same write-in protest candidate.
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There's your CowboyNeal vote. Too bad it won't win, unlike on
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I have an old USB 1.x hub that I use solely for charging, since I have six USB 2 ports (four in back, two in front) already. Were it not for this purpose, it would be gathering dust in a drawer.
If you are inclined to do a bit of wiring, re-purpose one of the USB connectors that came with your motherboard (since you are probably using those that came installed in your case) and run 5V power through the red and black lines. You now have a standalone charger.
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Looking at the design of the port, it appears to add four more pins exclusively for power. So why the "one voltage" limitation? Even if you reserve one pin for a redundant ground -- the USB data cable and power cable may be connected to two different circuits on the device end -- you should still have enough connection ability to run three voltages in addition to the 5V in the USB data cable.
+12V seems like a no-brainer since the world is overrun with devices designed to operate at 12V. -12V also seems useful, especially if a circuit can use both to get a 24V rail-to-rail effect. Current PC power supplies are not designed to drive a whole lot on the -12V line, but at least the foundation is there.
The question would be what the best third choice would be. Would it cause interference issues to run, say, 90VAC at 400 Hz down the line? Devices that currently use inverters (such as scanners) would be able to drop them, while devices with high voltage demands would be able to use postage-stamp-size circuits to generate an arbitrary AC voltage. Power supplies already use intermediate stages on the way to the final +12, -12, +5, -5, +3.3 array we all know and love, maybe they can just be tapped directly at the intermediate stage.
I can understand the concerns about providing relatively high voltage AC over an easily accessible connector, but if it's properly designed it would be no more dangerous than wall outlets -- and there is generally one of those close to every stationary computer. Obviously laptops running on battery power would be ill-equipped to provide 90VAC, but mostly due to the high draw that would go along with it. When plugged in, their power bricks should be up to the task.
Whatever options are chosen, they should be be based on readily available commodity hardware. This keeps costs down, allowing the spec to attain wide acceptance. Asking current computer owners to spring $20 for a stand-alone power supply looks reasonable if it knocks $10 off the price of every device they attach to it. With just two devices -- printer and scanner for example -- they break even. If they can run other devices off it that do not use USB for data transfer (like monitors), hitting the two-device break-even point would be easily achieved. Then when they move on to the next computer, it will allow them to get rid of the extra box, but still use the peripherals they already have. Nobody would be compelled to buy the "retrofit kit" unless/until they also bought a device that requires it.
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The most obvious use would seem to be to supply one to Stephen Hawking. He's slowing down on the clicker he's used with the two fingers that still work (and boy must those fingers be magic, he managed to divorce and re-marry), all a device like this would have to do is let him "click" without having to move. Everything else is set up for him already, though there will probably be room for improvement over the existing system. Still, I bet even a return to "as good as it used to be" would be a real boon for him.
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Hondas, Subarus, what have you, they are all designed (stock) as commuter vehicles. And if you have to turn 7k rpms to get your car off the line, it's not going to hold up to daily driving.
It may have been a different mindset in 1989, but I drive a Subaru XT6 (manual) daily. Sure in traffic I may never have to get above 3500 rpm, and certainly won't have to sustain it, but I am pretty much obligated to open it up and take it to 5000 in the first three gears to get up to highway speed from one of the damn onramp lights. Then once I'm merged in, 5th gear isn't all that much of an overdrive -- 80 mph is a sustained 3700 rpm. The car is insanely quick off the line (I surprise ricers on a regular basis) but it tops out pretty low. I would not be comfortable sustaining anything over 90 mph, the engine just whines -- and I just got this engine so I'd rather it stay in one piece. A 6th gear would be perfect, the engine produces plenty of power at 3500 rpm.
Sadly, it does suck on efficiency. It was rated 18/24 when it was new and I'm getting about 20.5 in mixed driving, even with those freeway launches four times a day, so it's not wear and tear. That's just how the car was designed. It's a rally car in an MR2's clothing.
It also takes three days to get parts, but I knew that would be the case going in. I've only seen three others on the road in the last two years, and they were all 4-cylinder turbos. One of them led to me having a "dude, where's my car" incident at Hollywood Park as I kept coming across this other XT repeatedly while searching for my car. The first time, I even tried to open the door and get in. It took me 40 minutes to find my car! Half the people who see it tell me "I always wanted one of those when they were new", but they weren't cheap then.
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People will buy oil when the oil light comes on, and if they have excess consumption or a leak, they would be well advised to carry a spare bottle or two. Ethanol can be stocked alongside the oil, as it sounds like a quart will easily get you to the next city, let alone the next gas station. Just make sure the idiot light comes on early, and most people will be able to deal with this.
Besides, if you were to run out, couldn't the turbo back off until you fix the problem? It doesn't sound nearly as destructive as driving without enough oil or coolant, provided the engine isn't allowed to tear itself apart by preignition. I'm sure the decrease in power could be a problem in certain circumstances, but certainly no worse than a piston seizing up!
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It looks amazing like an old programmable calculator with a real keyboard hacked onto it.
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Many children see basketball players as role models. It's quite questionable if they should, but no question that they do.
Stephen Hawking was exceptionally lucky that his disability proved to be manageable, at least professionally. Others may be able to use this as inspiration to change to better-suited careers. One thing that absolutely cannot be disputed is his ability to roll with the punches, and fire back with a few of his own. Live life aggressively. If your only career path is to be a theoretical physicist, then be the best damn theoretical physicist you can.
A basketball player, on the other hand, sends the message that "if you're good enough, you could become rich and respected yourself." While this is true, the number of players that reach this elite status are few. Even the numbers that even make it to the NBA are relatively few, and just making it is no guarantee of celebrity. (Of course this is true of any profession where the money is mostly paid out to a few people at the top.) The ideal lesson would be "always have a backup plan" but usually it ends up being "you really can do anything!"
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A parabola focuses more sharply than a spherical section, but loses gain rapidly as the signal drifts off axis. With a spherical reflector, the sweet spot is not as hot but it's much wider -- so much so that you can "aim" such an assembly several degrees by moving the pickup alone. This could be useful where it is not possible to get perfect aim, such as if you wanted to flush-mount the dish in a wall, or the wind insists on turning your parabolic dish just far enough to miss the signal entirely.
The radio telescope at Arecibo is spherical because it is a transit telescope. Since they can move the center pickup considerably, it gives the ability to track an object much longer than you could with a parabolic reflector. You have to know where the object will be and not wait for it to come into view, so you have to be both more selective and more aggressive in choosing targets for observation. That is the trade-off for building an enormous collector at a relatively low cost.
All that said, the wok is probably somewhere in between parabolic and spherical, if it's anything like the $10 woks I'm familiar with. Cheap mass-produced woks seem to have true curves, but hand-hammered woks are going to be dimpled and somewhat asymmetric. Good for food, bad for radio waves.
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