"Speedbumps are designed to slow you down (making you lose energy) so why not reuse that energy for something else?"
Bzzzzt! Wrong! Speed bumps are designed to make you feel uncomfortable going faster. They can damage your car if you ignore them, and give your passengers a rough ride... if you ignore them.
Now if you are driving a Citroen with the suspension extended, you don't notice them quite so much....
Canada, with the possible exception of Ontario is a nation AFAIK. They don't seem to have the government redundancy that the EU carries over from the pre-EU period.
The UK is just weird. United in name only it seems.
"Suppose a majority of voters in a referendum vote that women shouldn't be allowed to be employed outside of their homes? Would it be right for government to enforce such a decision?
Referenda are more like mob-rules than representation. As we have seen in the past many bad laws and a few good laws are created via referendum. I recall a Referendum that was sold to Washingtonians as a reform for vehicle licensing that effectively gutted the State's transportation budget. The net effect of this law was to give the wealthy a hefty tax break on their luxury vehicles at the expense of the public roads and public transportation.
OTOH a referendum was very useful in forcing WA State to create an Insurance Commissioner. The law also gave that office a mandate to protect consumer interests, and the teeth to enforce it properly. This was not something that the generally spineless and self-serving Legislature could do, and if they had managed it would have been a paper tiger.
The balancing act there is that such law making can be challenged by the minority via the Judiciary where the law is tested against the Constitution.
"In fact, the grip upon the skin of a member of the opposite sex would seem far more immediately useful to a developing species"
Or a good firm grip on a prey animal. Our paws aren't really decked out to hold prey the way many most are, we lack hooked claws.... So having a firm, enclosing, grip seems like a really good trait to select for.
"Luxemburg, Spain, and came around much. And I know for sure, that not a single person i ever met would call himself an "European", when asked for his country."
When travelling, Americans reply to the question, "Where are you from?" with the state they live in or were born in, or some times the city if thy think it would be generally identifiable... Is this a new concept to Europeans? Give me a break.
What about "pommes frites" more commonly refered to as French Fries. Which in my experience, with French nationals visiting the US, drives them nuts, "Zeez are not French!!" As if it was a crime to be associated with diced potatoes cooked in hot oil.
No... actually they are originally from Belgium, and for some reason stuck to the French not long after they occupied Belgium. Seems like a fitting punishment for seizing the original house of pancakes and waffles. Rape the county, and get blamed for fired potatoes.... like it's some kind of STD....
The EU is a Federation... not a Nation. They have a common bond only in the regional sense, no common language and only recently a somewhat central authority.
I lived in Seattle for 12 years and during that time.... and every time I laid eyes on Mt. Rainier my hind brain went fraking ballistic.
something deep within me said, " Get the fuck out of here... You shouldn't be any where near that mountain!!!"
I can't explain that feeling. For most of my time living there I believed that volcano to be extinct. I never even looked into it. Much later I did and found that it is not extinct... or dormant or sleeping.... it's considered ACTIVE.... so is there something to it?
I don't live in flood plains.... I grew up in Earthquake regions and have been through some of the worst in the last 40+ years... and I am still here to tell those stories.
IMO: It is a form of ignorance that typical humans will move their families onto a flood plane and blindly trust that their personal relationship with God will protect them from their ignorance of nature's laws, facts to the contrary not withstanding.
OTOH: There is no safe places on this planet. Every possible substrate that is conducive to human well being has some form of devastating environmental feature that promises one might make an untimely exit at Nature's whim....
WTF does any of this UberMenslich bullshit have to do with 112 protons, a hand full of neutrons and an attendant cloud of electrons?
Discovering new atoms is a freaking crapshoot!
So what? It's not like there is enough of these Unobtainium, or Obscurium atoms lurking around to do anything useful. Not even enough atoms can be created to determine it's physical properties.
So some German physical scientists can tell their grandkids that they filled in a functionally useless record in the second-to-last row of the periodic table. So what?
Maybe they will get really lucky and some astrochemist will observe a puff of them in a super nova....
Not saying that it's totally useless, but geez, it's not all THAT and a bag of chips.
If I had mod points you'd get them, mono-spaced font not withstanding.
Every computational language has it's sweet spot.
Each one has a band of domains that it is well suited for.
As for TFA I don't agree. FORTRAN is not a good language for first year students that need to learn what a program is, and how to adapt ideas to code.
For that, I believe that ANSI C is a very good starting point. It presents a terse language that is close enough to the metal to deal with a vast number of 'first principles' concepts. It also exposes the student to a lot of the sharp edges that make software engineering such a challenge at times.
Easy is not a virtue when a student is in the process of trying to determine if CIS is right for them. Throwing the students into a language that requires them to struggle with notation AND first principles becomes a weeder. If you can hang with ANSI C you can hang with anything.
Computer languages, at the end of the day, facilitate and hinder the expression of computational concepts. Would a golfer putt with a Wood, or drive with a putter? Would one pinch-hit usefully with a wooden dowel, or play tennis with a golfball?
The vast majority of our physical activities require that the practitioner use the correct tool for the task at hand.
When I was in my first fur, BASIC was my starting point, and I quickly found that it was inadequate beyond a rather limiting subset of first principles. My only other choice was 8-bit assembly language. It was painful to take that step since I had to learn a huge number of peripheral concepts just to be able execute a "Hello World" program.
While I am invalidating my argument a bit with my own personal journey, it is important to note that I didn't have access to a C compiler until I had 5 years of professional experience programming in BASIC and assembly. C at that point was a pain. Eventually I understood it, and found that I wished I had been able to learn it first.
The Author's Guild seems to have seen a way to turn a class action lawsuit into a gold mine, and Google saw it as a way to trump copyright law for fractions of a penny on the dollar.
It's truly disturbing that the judge involved in approving this foul marriage is actually allowed to practice law....
Ok... Now, and forever more Author's Guild and Google get to A$$Rape the down trodden, lost, and dead authors of the world, AND their heirs.
If I were an author working on a novel or any copyrightable written materi
As long as high energy collisions are still probable.... the system is definitely NOT stable. It seems to me that there is still quite a few large chunks of debris floating around in this system that have the potential to destabilize it.
If anything the simulation might be useful for predicting near term interactions of asteroids and comets as they are tracked.
Chasing the plots of planets that far in the future is just useless for anything except verifying that your simulation environment is stable enough to be useful.
As a more practical matter, that far in the future Sol will have gone into it's death throes, thus absorbing the inner two plants and turning the third one into a cinder.
Mars might actually be habitable for a few million years around that time.... if it has enough frozen gas left at the poles to loft a real atmosphere.
My dad worked in the flight simulator lab at Northrup. When I was a teen I had some fun in a RealFlightSim(tm) flying a 747. Before that I'd flown only cessnas and combat fighters (F14, F16, F-4, F4U, etc.) in simulation. (IANAP)
It took me a few attempts to even get the 747 off the ground. It was embarrassing to run off the end of SFO's E runway and land in the bay.
Once I figured out takeoff.... it was fun... kinda like dancing with a very large woman;) Ended up flying under the Golden Gate bridge and crashing into San Mateo... couldn't get enough height after clearing the bridge.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but those are elected officials :(
"Speedbumps are designed to slow you down (making you lose energy) so why not reuse that energy for something else?"
Bzzzzt! Wrong! Speed bumps are designed to make you feel uncomfortable going faster. They can damage your car if you ignore them, and give your passengers a rough ride... if you ignore them.
Now if you are driving a Citroen with the suspension extended, you don't notice them quite so much....
Canada, with the possible exception of Ontario is a nation AFAIK.
They don't seem to have the government redundancy that the EU carries over from the pre-EU period.
The UK is just weird. United in name only it seems.
"Suppose a majority of voters in a referendum vote that women shouldn't be allowed to be employed outside of their homes? Would it be right for government to enforce such a decision?
Referenda are more like mob-rules than representation. As we have seen in the past many bad laws and a few good laws are created via referendum. I recall a Referendum that was sold to Washingtonians as a reform for vehicle licensing that effectively gutted the State's transportation budget. The net effect of this law was to give the wealthy a hefty tax break on their luxury vehicles at the expense of the public roads and public transportation.
OTOH a referendum was very useful in forcing WA State to create an Insurance Commissioner. The law also gave that office a mandate to protect consumer interests, and the teeth to enforce it properly. This was not something that the generally spineless and self-serving Legislature could do, and if they had managed it would have been a paper tiger.
The balancing act there is that such law making can be challenged by the minority via the Judiciary where the law is tested against the Constitution.
"In fact, the grip upon the skin of a member of the opposite sex would seem far more immediately useful to a developing species"
Or a good firm grip on a prey animal. Our paws aren't really decked out to hold prey the way many most are, we lack hooked claws.... So having a firm, enclosing, grip seems like a really good trait to select for.
"Luxemburg, Spain, and came around much. And I know for sure, that not a single person i ever met would call himself an "European", when asked for his country."
When travelling, Americans reply to the question, "Where are you from?" with the state they live in or were born in, or some times the city if thy think it would be generally identifiable... Is this a new concept to Europeans? Give me a break.
I'll take Urinals in the Urals for $150, Bob.
What about "pommes frites" more commonly refered to as French Fries. Which in my experience, with French nationals visiting the US, drives them nuts, "Zeez are not French!!" As if it was a crime to be associated with diced potatoes cooked in hot oil.
No... actually they are originally from Belgium, and for some reason stuck to the French not long after they occupied Belgium. Seems like a fitting punishment for seizing the original house of pancakes and waffles. Rape the county, and get blamed for fired potatoes.... like it's some kind of STD....
*shakes head.... history is a very funny process.
The EU is a Federation... not a Nation.
They have a common bond only in the regional sense, no common language and only recently a somewhat central authority.
I lived in Seattle for 12 years and during that time.... and every time I laid eyes on Mt. Rainier my hind brain went fraking ballistic.
something deep within me said, " Get the fuck out of here... You shouldn't be any where near that mountain!!!"
I can't explain that feeling. For most of my time living there I believed that volcano to be extinct. I never even looked into it. Much later I did and found that it is not extinct... or dormant or sleeping.... it's considered ACTIVE.... so is there something to it?
I don't live in flood plains.... I grew up in Earthquake regions and have been through some of the worst in the last 40+ years... and I am still here to tell those stories.
IMO: It is a form of ignorance that typical humans will move their families onto a flood plane and blindly trust that their personal relationship with God will protect them from their ignorance of nature's laws, facts to the contrary not withstanding.
OTOH: There is no safe places on this planet. Every possible substrate that is conducive to human well being has some form of devastating environmental feature that promises one might make an untimely exit at Nature's whim....
*shrug
There is no free lunch.
Stupidium.
Worthlessium,
Patheticium,
Prematureium,
Stillbornium,
Fartainium
Rantium,
twinkleinium,
Noseeinium,
Dontcareium.
How about....
Pedantium?
Or
Uselessinium?
you missed a beat:
Yumyumium?
Ohhh
How about
Sarcasium?
That has some potential...
How about....
Rushnium?
Not bad....
I had momentarily considered Danzigium and the provocative 'Nazium'
How about....
Hasselhoffnium?
More to the point Hofmannium..... And he was Swiss not German
WTF does any of this UberMenslich bullshit have to do with 112 protons, a hand full of neutrons and an attendant cloud of electrons?
Discovering new atoms is a freaking crapshoot!
So what? It's not like there is enough of these Unobtainium, or Obscurium atoms lurking around to do anything useful. Not even enough atoms can be created to determine it's physical properties.
So some German physical scientists can tell their grandkids that they filled in a functionally useless record in the second-to-last row of the periodic table. So what?
Maybe they will get really lucky and some astrochemist will observe a puff of them in a super nova....
Not saying that it's totally useless, but geez, it's not all THAT and a bag of chips.
If I had mod points you'd get them, mono-spaced font not withstanding.
Every computational language has it's sweet spot.
Each one has a band of domains that it is well suited for.
As for TFA I don't agree. FORTRAN is not a good language for first year students that need to learn what a program is, and how to adapt ideas to code.
For that, I believe that ANSI C is a very good starting point. It presents a terse language that is close enough to the metal to deal with a vast number of 'first principles' concepts. It also exposes the student to a lot of the sharp edges that make software engineering such a challenge at times.
Easy is not a virtue when a student is in the process of trying to determine if CIS is right for them. Throwing the students into a language that requires them to struggle with notation AND first principles becomes a weeder. If you can hang with ANSI C you can hang with anything.
Computer languages, at the end of the day, facilitate and hinder the expression of computational concepts. Would a golfer putt with a Wood, or drive with a putter? Would one pinch-hit usefully with a wooden dowel, or play tennis with a golfball?
The vast majority of our physical activities require that the practitioner use the correct tool for the task at hand.
When I was in my first fur, BASIC was my starting point, and I quickly found that it was inadequate beyond a rather limiting subset of first principles. My only other choice was 8-bit assembly language. It was painful to take that step since I had to learn a huge number of peripheral concepts just to be able execute a "Hello World" program.
While I am invalidating my argument a bit with my own personal journey, it is important to note that I didn't have access to a C compiler until I had 5 years of professional experience programming in BASIC and assembly. C at that point was a pain. Eventually I understood it, and found that I wished I had been able to learn it first.
if the DoJ doesn't shit-can this whole deal.
The Author's Guild seems to have seen a way to turn a class action lawsuit into a gold mine, and Google saw it as a way to trump copyright law for fractions of a penny on the dollar.
It's truly disturbing that the judge involved in approving this foul marriage is actually allowed to practice law....
Ok... Now, and forever more Author's Guild and Google get to A$$Rape the down trodden, lost, and dead authors of the world, AND their heirs.
If I were an author working on a novel or any copyrightable written materi
Floating Point my ass.... one would probably get better results using very large integers a few thousand bits in the MAC ought to do it.
As long as high energy collisions are still probable.... the system is definitely NOT stable. It seems to me that there is still quite a few large chunks of debris floating around in this system that have the potential to destabilize it.
Poincare be damned.
If anything the simulation might be useful for predicting near term interactions of asteroids and comets as they are tracked.
Chasing the plots of planets that far in the future is just useless for anything except verifying that your simulation environment is stable enough to be useful.
As a more practical matter, that far in the future Sol will have gone into it's death throes, thus absorbing the inner two plants and turning the third one into a cinder.
Mars might actually be habitable for a few million years around that time.... if it has enough frozen gas left at the poles to loft a real atmosphere.
Landing my ass. That's called a Ditch! And it was flawless.
My dad worked in the flight simulator lab at Northrup. When I was a teen I had some fun in a RealFlightSim(tm) flying a 747. Before that I'd flown only cessnas and combat fighters (F14, F16, F-4, F4U, etc.) in simulation. (IANAP)
It took me a few attempts to even get the 747 off the ground. It was embarrassing to run off the end of SFO's E runway and land in the bay.
Once I figured out takeoff.... it was fun... kinda like dancing with a very large woman ;) Ended up flying under the Golden Gate bridge and crashing into San Mateo... couldn't get enough height after clearing the bridge.
OTOH: IRL: I should never be a pilot.